Video of Civil War veterans
This is one of those extraordinary videos of old films, giving us a glimpse of a generation long gone:
Too bad there’s no sound.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
This is one of those extraordinary videos of old films, giving us a glimpse of a generation long gone:
Too bad there’s no sound.
How long before the progressive-left Stalinists begin efforts to erase any evidence of the Civil War?
After all, it was conducted by white males and this certainly must be offensive to lesbians, blacks, hispanics, women, gays, transgender and of course all those who are members of the democratic (i.e., Stalinist) party.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
George Orwell
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
George Orwell’s “1984” was just about 35 years too early and his description of thought and speech control is already here.
Americans who stood their ground when God, nation, People, Posterity, and human rights demanded their service.
Here’s an interview of a Confederate veteran made in 1947 when he was 101:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL0jeC9K9qA
And here’s a long (90 minute) documentary that contains 1930s (?) era (talking) film of veterans of that war:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg85tI0gxmQ
This afternoon I took my 97 year old WWII veteran father to the VA for a walker. While there, he met another 97 yr old veteran who was a bomber pilot in the Battle of Midway. That was noteworthy for me, as historians consider that the turning point in the war in the Pacific.
Dad’s spirit is still strong but physically I can see the decline accelerating. In ten more years, there will be few if any left of “the greatest generation”.
Given the appalling ignorance of our young, that may be even more impactful than the passing of the Civil War generation.
I have a lecture on Civil War medicine that I give once in a while. It uses many of those photos. I originally put if together for the Royal Army Medical Corps so the title is “the Medical and Surgical History of the American Civil War”. If anyone is interested it starts a series of posts here.
Oh, you meant the LAST civil war…
The Civil War was not fought exclusively by white males. If you stop the video Neo posted at about 2:52, there’s a black veteran with a woman who is probably his daughter. I assume this veteran fought in one of the regiments of the USCT (United States Colored Troops) that were present at Gettysburg. There are photos of several USCT soldiers at the Gettysburg visitors center. Brief history of the USCT here: https://www.afroamcivilwar.org/about-us/usct-history.html
Another video that shows black veterans at Gettysburg reunions is this one, which includes clips of the 50th reunion in 1913 as well as the 75th in 1938.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVjD2DaB4bY&ab_channel=William
One particularly sobering aspect of this 6-minute film is the statistics at the end, which compare the American death tolls of World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam with the butcher’s bill for the Civil War (some historians estimate the number of Civil War dead even higher, at about 800,000).
My Great Grandfather fought in the Civil War, as did his 3 brothers. Only two came back. They worn the Butternut Grey.
I am a totally blended American, many greats in Concord Ma. before 1650, more in Virginia in early 1700’s owning slaves making barrels, coopers, between Madison and Jefferson, slave owners and my dads family Scots-Irish coming though Baltimore in 1740 marrying an American woman. Great grand dads fought on both sides and it left scars, my dad’s mom had her father come home from the Civil War never smiling agin, dad had an uncle who was never quite right who had a piece of shrapnel in his head that rattled enough for people to hear it.
I am old enough that my older brother was the same age as the man in this wonderful movie and we are still around. We need to cherish our history and we fought a bloody war and killed ourselves to settle the question about slavery. Now it is time to let it rest and move on, we are a blended nation of fantastic people who can, if allowed, love each other, worship as we will, and move forward, we have been trying to to that since 1865.
That will be all…………..
PA Cat on May 2, 2019 at 9:22 pm at 9:22 pm said:
The Civil War was not fought exclusively by white males.
* * *
When my mother was in her seventies, she put together a little article on women serving secretly in the armed forces (she and about 10 HS buddies kept a study club going for 50 years, taking turns writing what would today be blog posts for each other). There were quite a number of “Johnnies” in the Civil War who were really “Janes.”
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1993/spring/women-in-the-civil-war-1.html
Thank you all for the links you posted, and thank you, Neo, for setting them off. It is sad and not a little scary that so many are trying to erase our history. That makes these posts and links especially important.
How fortunate you are to have your Dad with you still, Geoff.
I thought I was lucky to have mine to 91. Though he probably could have gone on for years had we simply put my mother in a nursing home these last 4 years. Even with around the clock help in the house, the incessant stress was a slow and gradually debilitating killer.
A nursing home for her, might have kept him alive. But it would of course have sent her into a steeper decline, and killed her two years earlier. But he, like so many men of his generation would not have it. He made a vow. And he kept it.
The interesting bit about US Civil War 1 that has been scrubbed from US history text books is that the conflict began decades before 1861. Northern Abolitionists in the North, speaking about ending slavery, were getting lynched, killed, and harassed by bounty hunters even in the 1830s. They were bounty hunters, not Northern lynch mobs out for “justice”. Some rich plantation Demoncrats had put a bounty on them. In the South, everything was quiet and peaceful. The dissenting whites were eliminated much the same way KKK hanged black and whites together that started fraternizing.
Compare this to AntiFa and Leftist harassment over the years.
Had an ancestor who was in the Civil War. He spent time in a POW camp, the name of which which was passed down in family lore and records.
I called the park and asked if they had a record of him.
They assured me that they did have records of some men, and asked me if I knew his full name and rank and state. They could then try and look it up. I gave his name, the army he was in, his state, and what I thought might have been his modest rank, based on what the “old ladies” had said.
“Well, there were no officers held there” was his reply.
“You must get a lot of that” I said.
“Oh, yeah!” he said laughing.
And I had not even tried to inflate him into a “Kentucky Colonel”
The staff could not find a record of him at that time. But an image of a prisoner list with his name on it turned up online some years later.
This ancestor turned out to be a bigger deal (in a small way) later in life than in the army, having the little town he platted out on land he owned, named after him; by the post office of all things.
That’s one way to become “famous”. But speaking of character, I have found nothing anywhere to indicate that he ever made any kind of inflated claims whatsoever. Nor was there anything found in the old news clippings to indicate that anything false was publicly attributed to him.
I guess it was just great-aunt talk about a grandfather they didn’t really know all that well, themselves, back in the “mists of time”.
“I guess it was just great-aunt talk about a grandfather they didn’t really know all that well, themselves, back in the “mists of time”.” – DNW
I don’t have a family story like yours, but some of my close friends are professional genealogists, and they are always having to disappoint clients who are absolutely sure that they are descended from kings.
AesopFan: “…and they are always having to disappoint clients who are absolutely sure that they are descended from kings.”
Nobody claims descent from Cleopatra’s maid. My brother and I have been chasing invisible ancestors for years. They were mostly farmers who rented farms so they don’t show up in tax records, only in church records and the census every ten years.
The people that can trace ancestors back to the Middle Ages are to be envied.
AesopFan, a buddy of mine is heavy into genealogy and said that a large percentage of western civ Caucasians can trace themselves back to Charlemagne.
Not all legitimately, though.
AesopFan–
I found out about the existence of Joanie Rebs and Billie Yanks some time in the ’90s, when the Smithsonian ran an article about women who fought in the Civil War. IIRC, research in this field got started when the woman who wrote the article in your link (DeeAnn Blanton) wanted to be a Civil War reenactor (as a soldier) and was told she couldn’t because there were (supposedly) no women in either army. So she headed off to the National Archives, started digging, and came across some records of pensions paid to female veterans, including some who served in the CSA as well as the Union Army. As I understand it, it was possible for women to pass themselves off as men in that era because 1) puberty came later for both men and women in those days and it was not uncommon for boys of 17 or 18 to not need to shave, so a beardless soldier was not unusual; 2) men as well as women were brought up to be more modest about undressing in front of others, so a soldier who went off by herself to wash or bathe would not have attracted a lot of notice; 3) induction physicals were superficial and did not require the volunteer or draftee to undress. The doc checked your eyes, teeth, lungs, and heart rate, and that was about it.
Anyway, thank you for the reminder of women’s military service in the Civil War. And while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget Mary Walker, M.D., the only woman to have been awarded the Medal of Honor, who served as the 52nd Ohio Infantry’s battle surgeon. She was honored as “Badass of the Week” on the Army’s birthday last year.
https://www.military.com/army-birthday/badass-of-the-week-mary-e-walker.html
Borepatch provided a video of a 101 year old Confederate veteran, which needs some logging in to access, as it is labeled “age-restricted.” Here is the same veteran being interviewed, but with open access.Confederate “General” Julius Howell Recalls the 1860s
I found his southeastern Virginia accent rather similar to another old-timey accent- the Down East Maine accent, at least as Bert and I spoke it.
(2/2) “Bert & I… And Other Stories from Down East” by Robert Bryan and Marshall Dodge (Side B).
Hahaha. Boy, don’t you know it.
So not to go into too much embarrassing detail, but one of the old “genealogies” patched together by amateur sleuths in the 1950’s and spread around the family, spoke of this great-great grandfather prisoner of war, as being descended from a famous “states man”, speaker of the house, and eventually Senator of the same last name as if it was somehow self evident.
Having myself done a paper on this famous “states man” college and read his biographies, I knew that not only did the first names of the children, not match up, but that the generations of descent didn’t line up in parallel, that is mine and his, as they ought to have done as if this nonsense were true. And the states of residence in the 1820’s – 50’s were not correct either.
Turns out the famous guy merely had a grandfather who was my guy’s great grandfather.
So much for waving a pedigree around and basking in the glow of the wonderfulness of whatever. I always wondered where my share of a ginormous Kentucky manor and estate went.
“I always wondered where my share of a ginormous Kentucky manor and estate went.” – DNW
That’s okay; the tax man probably has all of the assets by now anyway.
The people that can trace ancestors back to the Middle Ages are to be envied.
Too much of an energy handicap.
DNW has a different emotional matrix reading between the lines, when he is talking about genealogy vs defending his Catholic upbringing or traditional culture. I notice humans have these trigger points that they get angry about when people get near it, even though consciously they may not be aware of it and think it is the guy online making them angry.
Great, great, video, Neo. I hope to visit Gettysburg this summer, with my family.
“You can’t change history”
So true.
Yet — what history means, today, is always in flux.
And of course, what history “really was like” can be argued about, and lied about.
And it seems that socialist despots do that. Finding too many gullible young folk who believe the lies and half truths, especially after years of
“it’s not important anyway, not relevant to today”.