The Chicago Civil War Round Table Monthly Meetings

Jonathan Sebastian on Loyal to a Man: The Civil War in our Backyards For More Info: WWW.ChicagoCWRT.ORG In the minds of many, including those who study history, there exists a divide. That is, while history happens everywhere, the real history happens somewhere else. The Civil War is thought of as having been fought in the South and, to an extent this is true. Most of the battles were fought in that region, however all parts of the country were directly impacted by this war. Illinois and even more specifically, the Chicago metropolitan area was no different. Just two hundred years ago, this area would have been unrecognizable to those familiar with all the Chicagoland area has to offer today. What was once an area of prairie with a handful of small towns was transformed dramatically during the 1860s. The people of the Prairie State played a significant role in the war and were themselves directly impacted by that war. So, how did Illinoisans, and more specifically those of Chicago and the DuPage County area, respond to such momentous issues as emancipation and the draft (among other issues) in the context of a national civil war? This presentation will explore this rich local history (some of it is still here in a tangible way!) and its connection to a most significant moment in the development of the United States. A former president of the Chicago CWRT, Jonathan Sebastian earned his B.A. in history from Judson College (now University) and his M.A. in Public History from Loyola University Chicago. He has been an adjunct professor of history at Judson University teaching World History 1500 to the Present and U.S. history. More recently, he was a social studies teacher at Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart. He was a tour guide at Jubilee College State Historic site outside of Peoria, Illinois, a project-based researcher at the Pritzker Military Library, and was the curator of the Fischer Farm historic site in Bensenville, Illinois. Currently, he is an experience facilitator at the Arlington Heights Historical Museum and the education and programs assistant at the Elmhurst History Museum. He is also the author of Bensenville, a volume of the Arcadia Press Series, Images of America.

October 2024 Meeting of the Chicago Civil War Round Table: Larry Hewitt on "Port Hudson and the Birth of Combat Photography" For more info: WWW.ChicagoCWRT.ORG Larry Hewitt will present the who, what, where, when, why, and how the firm of McPherson & Oliver made photographic history. Between June 14 and July 9, 1863, the final 25 days of the 48- day siege of Port Hudson, McPherson & Oliver moved about the battlefield memorializing soldiers in action--and in combat! In the process of making this visual record of opposing armies actively engaged, an image of Union soldiers sharpshooting opposite the Priest Cap was not these two artists only claim to photographic fame. Other images include one taken at midnight (the first ever taken in the dark), one converted into a composite print (created by combining portions of two negatives), the Confederate army at the surrender ceremony, and examples of time-lapse photography. McPherson & Oliver also produced the most widely circulated cartes-de-visite of the Civil War, three different views of "Whipped Peter." But the duo seldom receives credit for these images of an abused slave. Other studios, including Matthew Brady's, published them as their own work. As with the battlefield they immortalized, McPherson and Oliver deserve better. 2 A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Lawrence Lee Hewitt received his B.A. (1974) from the University of Kentucky and his M.A. (1977) and Ph.D. (1984) from Louisiana State University. He was the manager of the Port Hudson (1978- 1982) and Camp Moore (1982-1986) Historic Sites in Louisiana and taught at Southeastern Louisiana University (1985-1996). He was a tenured full professor when he resigned to marry a native of Chicago, where he currently resides. The 1991 recipient of SLU's President's Award for Excellence in Research, the 1991 Charles L. Dufour Award, the 2011 Dr. Arthur W. Bergeron, Jr. Award, and the 2013 Nevins-Freeman Award, he is a past president of the Baton Rouge Civil War Round Table. Hewitt's publications include Port Hudson, Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi (1987). Andrew J. Wagenhoffer's blog Civil War Books and Authors named Hewitt's Port Hudson: The Most Significant Battlefield Photographs of the Civil War 2021 Book of the Year.

Benjamin Grierson's Union cavalry thrust through Mississippi is one of the most well-known operations of the Civil War. There were other simultaneous operations to distract Confederate attention from the real threat to Vicksburg posed by U. S. Grant's Army of the Tennessee, but Grierson's operation, mainly conducted with two Illinois cavalry regiments, has become the most famous, and for good reason. For 16 days (April 17 to May 2) Grierson led Confederate pursuers on a high-stakes chase through the entire state of Mississippi, entering the northern border with Tennessee and exiting its southern border with Louisiana. The daily rides were long, the rest stops short, and the tension high. Ironically, the man who led the raid was a former music teacher who some say disliked horses. Throughout, he displayed outstanding leadership and cunning, destroyed railroad tracks, burned trestles and bridges, freed slaves, and created as much damage and chaos as possible. Grierson's Raid broke a vital Confederate rail line at Newton Station that supplied Vicksburg and, perhaps most importantly, consumed the attention of the Confederate high command. While Confederate Lt. Gen. John Pemberton at Vicksburg and other Southern leaders looked in the wrong directions, Grant moved his entire Army of the Tennessee across the Mississippi River below Vicksburg, spelling the doom of that city, the Confederate chances of holding the river, and perhaps the Confederacy itself. Novelists have attempted to capture the large-than-life cavalry raid in the popular imagination, and Hollywood reproduced the daring cavalry action in The Horse Soldiers, a 1959 major motion picture starring John Wayne and William Holden. Although the film replicates the raid's drama and high-stakes gamble, cinematic license chipped away at its accuracy. Based upon years of research and presented in gripping, fast-paced prose, Timothy B. Smith's The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson's Epic 1863 Civil War Raid through Mississippi captures the high drama and tension of the 1863 horse soldiers in a modern, comprehensive, academic study. This talk, based on the book, will bring you along for the ride. Timothy B. Smith (Ph.D. Mississippi State University, 2001) is a veteran of the National Park Service and currently teaches history at the University of Tennessee at Martin. In addition to numerous articles and essays, he is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than twenty books with several university and commercial presses. His books have won numerous book awards, his trilogy on the American Civil War's Tennessee River campaign (Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, and Corinth) winning a total of nine book awards. He is currently finishing a five-volume study of the Vicksburg Campaign for the University Press of Kansas and a new study of Albert Sidney Johnston for LSU Press. He lives with his wife Kelly and daughters Mary Kate and Leah Grace in Adamsville, Tennessee. In 1974, The Civil War Round Table of Chicago established the Nevins-Freeman Award, and bestows it annually on an individual whose advancement of American Civil War scholarship and support for the Round Table movement warrant special recognition. The award itself is designed as a generous financial donation to a historical preservation project chosen by the recipient. This award is named for two men whose legacies have come to be synonymous with the Civil War era: Historians Allan Nevins and Douglas Southall Freeman. A list of the awardees can be viewed on the Chicago CWRT website, at https://chicagocwrt.org/anfa.html.\ The Nevins-Freeman Award

CWRT Feb 2024 For more info : WWW.ChicagoCWRT.Org Often small individual encounters in history, experienced by common people like us, caught in the maelstrom of events, hold larger truths. Sometimes these experiences have meaning—not only for those who experience them, but for us in today’s world. This program follows twelve members of the 17th Connecticut Regiment through the three-day Battle of Gettysburg and beyond in July 1863. It focuses on the stories of the wounded, the caregivers, and the honored dead. These men fought for their lives, lost friends, and suffered themselves at Gettysburg. Their sacrifices are still with us today and from them we inherited great social and medical advances. Because of their sacrifices we began to understand the hidden costs of war, and that not all wounds are visible. The stories of these twelve citizen soldiers highlight the meaning that their lives and experiences have for our generation today: socially, medically, and psychologically. These are their stories. Carolyn Ivanoff is a retired high school administrator and independent historian. She writes and speaks frequently on American history at local, state, and national venues. In 2003, Carolyn was named Civil War Trust’s Teacher of the Year. We Fought at 2 Gettysburg is her first book. It follows the 17th Connecticut Regiment through the Gettysburg Campaign and beyond in June and July of 1863.

For more info: WWW.ChicagoCWRT.Org Patrick Brennan, a long-time student of the Civil War and published author, has teamed up with his technology-astute daughter Dylan Brennan to bring the largest Civil War battle to life in the remarkable 2-volume study: Gettysburg in Color. Volume 1 covers Brandy Station to the Peach Orchard, and Volume 2 covers The Wheatfield to Falling Waters. Rather than guess or dabble with the colors, the Brennans used an artificial intelligence-based computerized color identifier to determine the precise color of uniforms, flesh, hair, equipment, terrain, houses, and much more. The result is a monumental full-color study of the important three-day battle that brings the men, the landscape, and the action into the 21st Century. The deep colorization of battle-related woodcuts, for example, reveals a plethora of details that have passed generations of eyes unseen. The photos of the soldiers and their officers look as if they were taken yesterday. 2 The use of this modern technology shines a light on one Gettysburg photographic mystery in particular. Colorizing some of the battle's "death" images revealed the presence of Union and Confederate dead that may help determine the previously unknown location of the photographs. That may also be a "first" when it comes to Civil War photography. Pat Brennan is the author of Secessionville: Assault on Charleston (1996), To Die Game: General J. E. B. Stuart, CSA (1998), and more than twenty articles for a variety of Civil War magazines and journals. Pat is on the Editorial Advisory Board for The Civil War Monitor and his work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune. He has lectured around the country on the Civil War and Bob Dylan. Dylan Brennan works on the broadcast video production team at Tasty Trade, a real time, online financial network based in Chicago.

Ernest Dollar on “Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War” For More Info: WWW.ChicagoCWRT.ORG In the popular memory of the Civil War, its end came with handshakes between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia. But the war was not over. There was a larger, and arguably, more important surrender yet to take place in North Carolina. Yet this story occupies little space in the vast annals of Civil War literature. Reexamining the war's final days through the lens of modern science reveals why. This final campaign of the Civil War began on April 10, 1865, a day after the surrender at Appomattox Court House. Over 120,000 Union and Confederate soldiers cut across North Carolina's heartland bringing war with them. It was the final march of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's effort to destroy Southern ability and moral stamina to make war. His unstoppable Union army faced the demoralized, but still dangerous, Confederate Army of Tennessee under Maj. Gen. Joseph E. Johnston. Adding to the chaos of the campaign were thousands of distraught and desperate paroled Rebels streaming south from Virginia. The collision of these groups formed a perfect storm for grief-stricken civilians caught in the middle, struggling to survive amidst their collapsing worlds. Ernest Dollar will explore the psychological experience of these soldiers and civilians caught this chaotic time that's captured in his new book, Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War's Final Campaign in North Carolina. Using an extensive collection of letters, diaries, and accounts, Dollar demonstrates the depths to which war hurt people by the spring of 1865. Hearts Torn Asunder recounts their experience through a modern understanding of trauma injuries. Durham, North Carolina native Ernest A. Dollar Jr. graduated from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro with B.A. in History and B.F.A. in Design in 1993 and M.A. in Public History from North Carolina State in 2006. He served in the U.S. Army Reserve/North Carolina National Guard from 1993-1999. Ernest has worked in several historic parks in both North and South Carolina, including as executive director of the Orange County Historical Museum, Preservation Chapel Hill. He currently serves as the director of the City of Raleigh Museum and Dr. M. T. Pope House Museum.

Dwight Hughes on “Unlike Anything That Ever Floated: The USS Monitor and the Battle of Hampton Roads”  For more info: WWW.ChicagoCWRT.ORG   The USS Monitor was an ingenious but hurried response to both the imminent threat of the Confederate ironclad, CSS Virginia (ex USS Merrimack), and to the growing prospect of international intervention backed by powerful British or French seagoing ironclads. The United States had no defenses against either menace. This presentation takes Monitor from her inception in the mind of her brilliant inventor through the dramatic first clash of ironclads at Hampton Roads. Dwight Hughes is a public historian, author, and speaker in Civil War naval history. Dwight graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1967 with a major in History and Government. He served twenty years as a Navy surface warfare officer on most of the world's oceans in ships ranging from destroyer to aircraft carrier and with river forces in Vietnam (Bronze Star for Meritorious Service, Purple Heart). Dwight is a contributing author at the Emerging Civil War blog and author of: A Confederate Biography: The Cruise of the CSS Shenandoah (Naval Institute Press, 2015), and Unlike Anything That Ever Floated: The Monitor and Virginia and the Battle Hampton Roads, March 8-9, 1862 (Savas Beatie, 2021) for the award-winning Emerging Civil War series. His new book as editor and contributor, The Civil War on the Water: Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War (Savas Beatie), is due out in April 2023.

Robert Girardi on “Union Prisoners of War at Camp Douglas” For More info: WWW.ChicagoCWRT.ORG  Douglas, located on the south side of Chicago, was Illinois' largest Civil War training camp. More than 40,000 volunteers mustered here. In February 1862, the camp was converted to accommodate Confederate Prisoners of war. About 24,000 Confederates were held there during the war, of which 6,000 died. Their story is well-told. Yet lesser known is the story of the thousands of Union POWs who were held in the camp while awaiting exchange. After the surrender of Harpers Ferry in September 1862, the captured Union soldiers were interred in parole camps. More than 8,000 of these were sent to Camp Douglas. These soldiers occupied barracks recently vacated by Confederate prisoners and were subjected to the same poor sanitary conditions and privations. Their uncertain future and lack of understanding 2 of their status led to a breakdown in discipline. This is an account of their troublesome experiences in Chicago. Robert I. Girardi has a Masters Degree in Public History from Loyola University. He is a lifelong student of the American Civil War and has studied all aspects of the conflict. He is a past president of the Chicago CWRT and is the author or editor of nine books, and numerous articles and book reviews. He was a board member of the Illinois State Historical Society and was guest editor for the 2011-2014 Sesquicentennial of the Civil War issues of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. His most recent article, "Reconsidering Major General Gouverneur K. Warren," appeared in the July 2020 issue of North and South Magazine. He is currently working on a military biography of Warren.