Allen County in the Civil War

by Tom Castaldi

The Civil War Memorial in Lawton Park on Spy Run was dedicated on October 10, 1894.  Its inscription reads: “Tribute for patriotic citizens of Allen County who fell in defense of the Union 1861 – 1865 – Chickamauga, Vicksburg, Gettysburg.”

Civil War Monument in Lawton Park

Its installation was accompanied by a parade from downtown to the present-day Lawton Park led by the principal donors, Louis and Charles Centlivere.  A presentation was made by Robert Bell a prominent attorney of the day who had served in the Eighth Indiana Regiment of Volunteers during the Civil War.  A state senator, Bell was a close friend of the perennial Democratic nominee for the presidency, William Jennings Bryan, who visited the Bell home and once gave a speech from Bell’s front porch on the virtues of the silver standard.

Allen County participated in strong numbers in the Civil War, sending over 5,000 men into service.  Out of a county population of nearly 30,000, there were 489 who lost their lives. They fought mostly in the western theatres of the war, from Shiloh to Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Land for Lawton Park was originally purchased in 1864 and in 1865 it was the site of the only Indiana State Fair to be held in Fort Wayne.

Henry Lawton, a genuine hero of the nineteenth century, was born in Toledo, Ohio, and raised in Fort Wayne.  When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he joined the first Indiana regiment formed when President Lincoln called for volunteers to save the Union, and he soon was in the first engagements against the Confederacy.  In the Atlanta campaign he won the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first Fort Wayne native to have done so.

By the end of the war, Lawton, was a colonel and soon joined the regular army to fight in the Indian Wars.  He campaigned against the Sioux in 1876 - the same year Custer was defeated - and against the Utes in 1879.

In 1886 and 1887, Lawton participated in the campaigns against the Apache chief Geronimo, chasing him through Arizona and into Mexico.  When they finally caught up with Geronimo, it was an officer in Lawton’s command who finally convinced the great chief to surrender.

Statue of Lawton in Lakeside Park

Later in 1899, Lawton was placed in charge of the American forces assigned to put down the Philippine rebellion after the Spanish-American War.  During a campaign in the Luzon mountains, Lawton was killed by a sniper on December 19, 1899.  Ironically, the guerilla soldier who shot Lawton was named Geronimo.

In 1899 North Side Park was renamed Lawton Park as a tribute paid to the fallen soldier by his hometown.  A statue of the General by sculptor Frederick C. Hibbard stands in Lakeside Park at Lake and Crescent avenues.

Originally published in Fort Wayne Magazine 

 “Along the Heritage Trail with Tom Castaldi” – April 2007 No. 31

Allen County Historian Tom Castaldi is author of the Wabash & Erie Canal Notebook series; hosts “On the Heritage Trail,” which is broadcast at 6:35 a.m., 8:35 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Mondays on WBOI, 89.1 FM; and “Historia Nostra” heard on WLYV-1450 AM and WRRO 89.9 FM. Enjoy his previously published columns on the History Center’s blog, “Our Stories,” at history centerfw.blogspot.com.

 

One Lucky Volunteer

by Mark Meyer

On a cold day in late spring I found myself in the lobby of the History Center inquiring about volunteer opportunities. A chance encounter with Nancy McCammon-Hansen (History Center Marketing Coordinator),  who had also found herself in the aforementioned lobby,  led to an offer to contribute entries to the History Center blog. But, more importantly, the meeting also resulted in a referral to the Allen County Public Library. It is there where I had the good fortune to stumble into an opportunity at the ACPL Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection where, thanks to my favorite Lincoln librarians, I had the further good fortune to meet Mr Isaac Bevier and Mr John E. Wilkins.

Technically, I have not really met Bevier and Wilkins. Both men, long since dead, were veterans of The War of the Rebellion, now known as the Civil War. They never met. They grew up in separate states and served in regiments that never crossed paths. But they had one thing in common: a written record. For Bevier it was a series of letters home to his parents; for Wilkins, a collection of documents including a diary and several notebooks. For the past few months I’ve had the good fortune to transform the longhand script to the digitally accessible print of a Word document. At the same time, the words of Bevier and Wilkins have transformed me. Their entries have led to a voracious need to learn more of their world, their battlefield experiences, and the greatness of others whose paths they crossed.

It began with Isaac Bevier’s letters home to his parents in the Hudson Valley of New York.  In August of 1861 Bevier mustered into the service as a member of the 44th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, also known as Ellsworth’s Avengers, named in honor of the first officer killed in the Civil War. His letters home provided a glimpse of the slow deliberate move of the early Union forces when incessant drilling and training was the rule of the day. His original letters, some on stationery imprinted with his new home, Camp Butterfield, talked of living conditions, daily routines, the excitement for future battle, and always, the weather. Often the letters contained requests for supplies of clothing and foodstuffs as well as a plea for correspondence. Bevier introduced me to the “sutlers”, the opportunistic vendors who followed the encampments offering goods that were often in short supply. Their offerings of basic foodstuffs, paper, and stamps came at a highly inflated price. Bevier recalled a near riot when a greedy sutler sold a penny stamp for 15 cents!

From late summer of 1861 into the spring of ’62 Isaac’s letters take on the sameness of the daily routines of camp life and the repeated requests for items from home. But on one occasion he noted assisting Thaddeus Lowe in the launch of “The Intrepid”, a helium balloon that could be regarded the first U.S. airship. The letters often contained reference to the Rebels nearby and impending battles that failed to materialize. The reference to battles always contained excited anticipation of the real opportunity for personal glory and the chance to do one’s state proud. When Bevier finally found himself in action in the Peninsula Campaign, it was brief. He described the capture of a Rebel fortification that had used logs rubbed in tar to create the illusion of heavy cannon, thereby stalling the Union advance. But, his next letter was from a hospital. He had been wounded in the Battle of Hanover Court House, taking a ball in his right ankle. A long convalescence followed in a series of hospitals in Washington D.C. Bevier wrote of the city, often of visits with acquaintances, relatives, and other injured friends from the 44th. As he recovered, his regiment was active in The Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. In a letter dated July 2, 1863 he wrote home of the boredom of hospital guard duty, unaware that members of his regiment were fighting for their lives on the crest of Little Round Top in the Battle of Gettysburg. Shortly thereafter he wrote of a detail to the battlefield of Bull Run where he found himself taking lunch in a landscape of countless graves so shallow bones and skulls protruded from the ground.

As I transcribed I read books in hopes of better understanding references Bevier made in his letters. I read of the Civil War campaigns on the Peninsula in 1862, the state of Washington, DC in wartime, the seeds of the Emancipation Proclamation, Antietam, and the history of the 44th New York. In May I found myself on Little Round Top tracing the name of Isaac Bevier on the brass plaque in the 44th Infantry’s castle-like memorial on the Gettysburg battlefield. I was hooked, but little did I know I was about to meet someone far more fascinating…

John E. Wilkins was a Hoosier, born in 1836 in Vigo County. Wilkins was a bit older and more experienced than Isaac Bevier. Unlike the eastern bred Bevier, he grew up in a time and space not far removed from the days of the pioneers. He was an outdoorsman who hunted the still-plentiful game of the area and was a keen observer of his community. His father was a county official, John his assistant. Wilkins also spent time with the local volunteer fire company manning the engine Terre Haute had purchased from a Philadelphia company.  When war broke out, Wilkins was one of the first to respond to Major Lew Wallace’s initial call for volunteers to fill the request made of the state by President Lincoln. At the time, officials over-optimistically saw a short duration for the war and requested 3-month enlistments. Wilkins found himself in the Indiana 11th Volunteer Infantry on its way to the eastern theater, and fortunately, he committed to record his exploits in a near-daily diary. In its short three month existence, the Eleventh Indiana Volunteers saw action at the Battle of Romney, an initial Union success, and a deployment in Maryland near Fredericksburg. Wilkins’ detachment did not see action but that all would change quickly. The 3-month enlistment time period ended and the 11th  was sent home to Indiana where it quickly re-formed with a 3-year enlistment span.

The 11th  became a part of a Division led by Lew Wallace who had since been promoted to the rank of Major General. In a short time Wilkins found himself a Lieutenant in the Army of the West where he experienced the victories of Fort Henry and Fort Donnelson, narrowly missed the slaughter of Shiloh, walked the streets of Vicksburg the day of its surrender, transitioned to Mounted Infantry in the Red River campaign  and finished his days in the occupation of New Orleans. Throughout, Wilkins maintained his diary. Sometimes no more than a weather reference was entered but even those entries give insight to the conditions that led Wilkins to so often write, "…the boys suffered greatly”. His entries on the battles of Fort Donnelson on the banks of the Cumberland River, the battles leading to the siege and victory at Vicksburg, and the many skirmishes during his final campaign in the bayou country of Louisiana are particularly moving. The content of his entries was aided by the fact he acted as his regiment’s Adjunct from the end of the Vicksburg campaign until he mustered out in 1865. As Adjunct, he filed the daily and monthly reports required by the Department of War. This role would provide him unique access to the accurate facts pertaining to his regiment.

The transcription to a Word document was aided by Wilkins’ own efforts to accurately chronicle the war as he lived it. The original field diaries he maintained, excepting one, are not to be found. At one point he referenced destroying them, perhaps to protect the reputation of others whom he criticized. In any event, as he neared the end of his life in 1911 he transcribed the diaries to a series of paper notebooks, titled “Recollections” and numbered 1 through 4. Notebooks 1 and 4 contain recalled stories and diary entries while 2 and 3 are exclusively diary entries. These diary entries were then duplicated in a beautifully bound and labeled hardback ledger with slipcover. The Word document transcriptions of the diary and notebooks 2-4 are complete and are planned to be a part of the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection’s online archive (Notebook number 1 is not a part of the collection but was surprisingly located online. I’m currently transcribing to a Word document).

As with the Bevier letters, the writings of Wilkins led to a flurry of reading. His entries on the Western campaign opened the doors to much I did not know. Soon I found myself reading about the Navy’s role on inland rivers, the Red River Campaign of Louisiana and Arkansas, the assassination of Lincoln and subsequent search for JW Booth, the trial and conviction of conspirators, and most recently, the incredible, magical life of General Lew Wallace.

But, of most interest to me in my association with Mr. Bevier and Mr. Wilkins, is my opportunity to help Mr. Wilkins share his story. To date no record of how or when the Wilkins documents came to the Lincoln Financial Collection have been determined. Nor is there any record of the material being accessed. It is likely that Wilkins' painstaking effort to preserve his diaries will be rewarded for the first time when the document scans and transcriptions are posted online. Hopefully his observations will shed new light on one of the most dramatic times in our history’s past and he’ll be remembered warmly for his efforts to record history. In the meantime I’ll be happy to be remembered as that one lucky volunteer.  

The Civil War and Civil Rights

by Nancy McCammon-Hansen

In the July 19, 2013 edition of The Week magazine, an article appeared entitled “Glorifying the Civil War”. The work originally appeared in The Atlantic Magazine.

But the “glory” in the title is a misnomer as historians are increasingly looking at the negative impact the Civil War had on our nation. Historian David Goldfield goes so far as to say it was “America’s greatest failure”. Goldfield blames polarization around the issue of slavery as the downfall of our nation. The guilty parties in his eyes are politicians, extremists and evangelical Christians who created an atmosphere where compromise and reasoned debate became an impossibility.

“Unlike the revisionists of old,” states the article, “Goldfield sees slavery as the bedrock of the Southern cause and abolition as the war’s great achievement. But he argues that white supremacy was so entrenched, North and South, that war and Reconstruction could never deliver true racial justice to freed slaves, who soon became subject to economic peonage, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and rampant lynching.

“Nor did the war knit the nation back together. Instead, the South became a stagnant backwater, a resentful region that lagged and resisted the nation’s progress. It would take a century and the civil rights struggle for blacks to achieve legal equality, and for the South to emerge from poverty and isolation. ‘Emancipation and reunion, the two great results of this war, were badly compromised,’ Goldfield says. Given these equivocal gains, and the immense toll in blood and treasure, he asks: ‘Was the war worth it? No.’”.

Not all historians agree with Goldfield but views of the war are starting to change. Gary Gallagher says we have over-emphasized slavery and liberation in our views on Civil War era thinking. “There’s an Appomattox syndrome—we look at Northern victory and emancipation and read the evidence backward.”. In Gallagher’s view, most Northerners were fighting for the Union, not the end of slavery, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a measure of desperation designed to undermine the South.

The South came closer to winning the war, far closer than we are taught in most history classes, and “for the South, a tie was as good as a win”. The South “needed to inflict enough pain to convince a divided Northern public that defeating the South wasn’t worth the cost.”

Civil War casualties are the worst this nation has ever suffered. Soldiers didn’t wear dog tags, burial sites were sometimes unknown and casualty records sketchy or lost. The toll of 618,000, which has been the casualty figure for so long, is now being upped to 750,000. Civil War scholars agree with this figure determined by J. David Hacker, a demographic historian. A comparable war today would cost 7.5 million lives.

This figure also does not take into account soldiers who were disabled by amputation, ongoing disease, PTSD and other afflictions. Veterans did not speak of this and historians did not investigate. But Drew Gilpin Faust published in 2008 a work entitled The Republic of Suffering, citing the female view of the war.

“‘Civil War history has traditionally had a masculine view. It’s all about generals and statesmen and glory.’ From reading the letters of women during the war, though, she sensed the depth of Americans’ fear, grief, and despair. Writing her book amid ‘the daily drumbeat of loss’ in coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, Faust’s focus on the horrors of this earlier war was reinforced.

“‘When we go to war, we ought to understand the costs,’ she says. ‘Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to forget that. Americans went into the Civil War imaging glorious battle, not gruesome disease and dismemberment.’”

Lincoln and others advocated for an approach to slavery that had been used in the British West Indies, whereby there would be a gradual and compensated emancipation of slaves. Brazil and Cuba would later use this approach.

“Economists have calculated that the cost of the Civil War, estimated at over $10 billion in 1860 dollars, would have been more than enough to buy the freedom of every slave, purchase them land, and even pay reparations. But Lincoln’s proposals for compensated emancipation fell on deaf ears.

“Nor is there much credible evidence that the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ would have peacefully waned on its own. Slave-grown cotton was booming in 1860, and slaves in non-cotton states like Virginia were being sold to Deep South planters at record prices, or put to work on railroads and in factories.

“Most historians believe that without the Civil War, slavery would have endured for decades, possibly generations. Though emancipation was a by-product of the war, not its aim, and white Americans clearly failed during Reconstruction to protect and guarantee the rights of freed slaves, the post-war amendments enshrined the promise of full citizenship and equality in the Constitution for later generations to fulfill.”

Southerners were able to capitalize on a “war weary” North where the attitude about black equality was “ambivalent about, if not hostile to, black equality”.

At Gettysburg in November 1863, Lincoln delivered his famous address. In it he urged “us the living” to dedicate ourselves to finishing the work of the Civil War. That’s where the Civil Rights Movement comes into play.

 

The lecturn King used when speaking in Fort Wayne.

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the nation on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, delivering his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech. This event was remembered across our nation and locally at the University of St. Francis auditorium downtown.

Audience members viewed the speech in its entirety and then a panel composed of Hanna Stith, Edward Smith and Larry Lee answered questions from Andrew Prall, Ph.D., Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Saint Francis.

Prall, Lee, Stith and Smith speak about the Civil Rights era in Fort Wayne.

Mrs. Stith is well-known around Fort Wayne for her role in the founding of the African/African-American Historical Society and for being one of the first black teachers in Fort Wayne. You can learn more about her at http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/hana-stith-39.

Smith founded Frost Illustrated and was relatively new to Fort Wayne in 1963. Learn more about him at http://www.thehistorymakers.com/sites/production/files/Story%20for%20Ink%20Newspapers%207-30-02.pdf.

Larry Lee was 19 in 1963 and was unable to attend the March on Washington because he needed his job and his construction foreman indicated time away would result in a job loss. He is now president of Leepoxy Plastics and has been a civil and human rights activist, participating in marches and demonstrations, including Rallies for Justice in Meridian and Philadelphia, MS. He also initiated the grass-roots movement to rename Clinton Street “Martin Luther King Boulevard” and has served the Fort Wayne Urban League, United Hispanic Americans and Martin Luther King Club boards. http://www.ipfw.edu/microsites/uc2/events/fw-civil-rights.html

In King’s speech, the Civil Rights leader said he “refused to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt” and that “now is the time to make justice a reality”. He warned against violence and said blacks must “meet physical violence with soul force”.

“We must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.”

Prall asked the panel where they were on August 28, 1963.

Smith did not attend the march but remembers the Fort Wayne movement to make buses available for local residents to attend. Stith was the mother of a 7-year old who watched on television with her. Stith reminisced about she and her brothers selling papers and learning “to read early”.

“So many ugly things were happening. I was a very good friend of Dr. Bernard Stuart, president of the NAACP in Fort Wayne.” Stuart went to Washington with others from our city. “It was about time somebody do something,” said Stith.

Lee added that “everything the march intended to do came to pass” but we knew “anything could happen” since whites were more concerned about the potential for violence. But Smith countered that “no one was thinking of violence” in the black community.

A number of white Hollywood stars supported the March on Washington including Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Shelley Winters, James Garner, Tony Bennett and Steve McQueen.

Stith, in talking about Fort Wayne in 1963, said, “This was a very prejudiced community but there were a lot of good people here too.” She particularly singled out the Unitarian House, Margaret Ann Keegan, Ian Rolland, Larry Hayes, the Urban League and the NAACP.

“We had good white involvement.”

Lee seconded Rolland’s involvement and Hayes, who was editor of the Journal Gazette, for his “goodwill for the march”. Leonard Goldstine was also among those recognized for his work.

But Stith added that there was a “sheer absence of white churches” in response to segregation and civil rights issues in Fort Wayne and wished that there had been “more stalwart support”. However, in her view, the March on Washington “helped the community. We’ve seen some improvements in this community. But things have not come easy for us.”

Lee, who is white, spoke emphatically about the “venomous bias and hatred that was tolerated” in the area and that signs in “Mom and Pop” stores stating “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone” were blatant anti-black statements.

Smith explained that clergy, doctors, lawyers and other black professionals were out in front of the local civil rights movement because anyone working in a factory job or had other employment that was affiliated with a union was fearful of losing his job.

“The unions had to support you.”

Many of the speakers who followed the panel, and panel members themselves, voiced the idea that respect for others and a focus on character rather than skin color are necessary for our nation even today.

And in summing up King’s address and the March on Washington, Stith said, “They had no idea it would be the success it was. This speech runs circles around the Gettysburg Address.”