People from the Northern United States

I majored in history and I hate to see an event like the Civil War dismissed because someone thinks it is unpleasant to talk about. If we ignore the effects of that war we lose any understanding of why America is the way it is.

An example: Missouri was a slave state that Lincoln did not want to lose to the Confederacy so when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation he excluded Missouri, except for blacks who joined the Union Army. After the war the state drafted a new constitution and freed the slaves. In that same constitution they disenfranchised men who fought for the Confederacy. They could not hold public office or serve as church deacons. Returning veterans were infuriated and the black people suffered from the anger. Blacks, for the most part, migrated to Kansas City and St. Louis for protection by the federal troops stationed there. There are not many blacks living outside of those cities even today.

When Missouri schools were integrated there was "white flight" from both cities and when busing was ordered more flight. What did that accomplish? Urban sprawl for one thing.

Missouri could not integrate the schools in Kansas City or St. Louis to the government's satisfaction so a federal judge was appointed to integrate those two systems. The judge threw money at the situation for years and years under the idea that he could build an educational system that whites would flood to get bused into. This went on for twenty some years as I recall. All of the other schools in Missouri suffered from the lack of funds that were poured into those two schools districts.

The judge finally threw the disaster back to the state just a few years ago and nothing has ever changed. And there is a serious division of the races in Missouri as a direct result of the Civil War. Some school systems still suck as a direct result of that war. And there are a lot of bad attitudes in rural and small town Missouri and the people don't even know why they have them. They have been passed down through families with the reason being lost along the way.

To me, this is just one example of why that war should not be dismissed. The thing is too important. If we don't understand it we don't know who we are.

I'm a Missourian because of the war. My family lost everything in the war and moved to Missouri from West Virginia after the war. For better or worse I'm who I am because of a great event that happened in the 1860s. If I had refused to ever learn about the war I wouldn't really know who I am.

Phil Dolan

PS I wrote this from memory so there may be mistakes.

Zada, I'm so glad you posted about your community. I grew up in a very, very small town in Northern California and the entire town would rally whenever anyone needed help. The city I live in now is much larger and definitely doesn't have the same feel. I don't even know my neighbors in my apartment complex (there are approx. 470 apartments).

Phil,

You did quite well. There are some who believe the war began in Missouri, with Missouri being a slave state and Kansas being a free state. I wrote about this in my first historical novel, Flow On Sweet Missouri. Ann from this messageboard is also writing a historical novel on the Civil War in Missouri and we think our ancestors both fought in the Battle of Lone Jack, on different sides. (An extremely bloody horrific battle. The personal accounts of this battle are outstandingly written.)

I knew my book would never be popular in Lexington Missouri, the town my ancestors came from, although I speak from both sides. I felt like I was truly the enemy.

My family moved to Chicago, but my mother wanted to go visit Lexington to see where he grandmother was born. My great-grandmother was born on the banks of a coal mine while her mother was fleeing bushwhackers. And after taking my mother there, my daughter went to graduate school in Missouri and the most direct way across the Missouri River was the bridge at Lexington.

I don't think it should be ignored either. I just think it should be addressed in a serious way. A few years ago my husband's old commanding officer took his squadron on a visit to Fredericksburg, since he had done a thesis on this battle. He had tears streaming down his face as he told how soldiers took water to the fallen enemy during the night. This man had fought in several wars.

It is not my war or yours. It is ours and it is time for northerners and southerners to look at the atrocities realistically so they never happen again and we can put our history to rest as we have with the British. (I think.)

Carol

Missouri is pockmarked with little towns with Historic Site signs. If the town was pro-North the guerrillas committed murder and atrocities there. If the town was pro-South the guerrillas conducted a great raid there against Yankee sympathizers. Heros in one town, murders in the next town...LOL

We lived in Lee's Summit which is only a few miles from Lone Jack. Some Memorial Days we put flowers on Confederate graves there. Other years we placed flowers on the Confederate graves at the Confederate Soldiers Home of Missouri at Higginsville. Once we decorated graves of soldiers killed at the Battle of Wilson's Creek in the "Cemetery within a Cemetery" in Springfield. We did this because their families are long gone and we felt sad for them.

There are family stories of severed Union soldier's heads being placed in front of my ancestors' home. When we went to the Battle of Lone Jack site, the museum attendant showed us where the Confederates were buried, but didn't know about the Yankees. In studying the battle I found some believed the Yankees were buried next to the Confederates, although my family member fought there but didn't die there.

My ancestor eventually was wounded and ill and ended up as a guard at the Rock Island prison, sometimes called "The Andersonville of the North." While he was there, over 900 soldiers died of smallpox. (I think that was the disease.) From a personal account, the Yankee guards would take pot shots at the prisoners as they went out in the night to relieve themselves. One day my ancestor did not report for duty and was not heard from. He did reunite with his family in Missouri and went to Chicago. However, I do not think he told his family, as after he died his wife applied for a pension and was turned down because he had deserted.

My email is at the bottom if you want to contact me further. I love this subject and do think it needs to be talked about. None of the soldiers on either side should ever be forgotten. That is good that you put flowers on their graves.

A week from tomorrow night my husband and I are doing a presentation at our library where I read from my book and he plays Civil War songs on his harmonica.

Carol

Carol, my gg grandfather, John H. Whitley, and his brother James were
in the 42nd Alabama Infantry. James was a POW at Rock Island, but was
released in a prisoner exchange. No family stories about his ordeal
have ever been found.

There is a pretty good website on Rock Island at http://www.mvr.usace.army.mil/rockislandhistory/Prison.htm

Brew,

That is a good site, updated since I looked several years ago. Thanks.

This is just another example of the importance of this serious endeavor. Our ancestors were possibly there together, one a prisoner and one a guard, and both in an environment beyond decent human circumstances.

These men on both sides deserve to be honored.

Carol

I agree wholeheartedly, Carol. It seems though that hard feelings still
exist even today, especially among the "losers" (for lack of a better
word).

None of my ancestors in Alabama were slave owners. They only joined
after the Union forces invaded Alabama. My gggrandfather was a
"Minister of the Gospel", forty years old with a wife and seven kids at
home at the time. He refused to carry a weapon so they made him a
litter bearer.

Brew,

I see those feelings. We've traveled to Japan and Germany and they were losers also, as were the British and Spain.

How do people come together after war, even after all those who fought have died? And I don't believe it is just the losers that have difficulties.

I think we are all losers in war.

(I have gotten way too serious here, but I am.)

Carol

While on a geneology 'dig' in North Carolina, we visited the cemetery in New Bern. Someof my ancesters are buried there. Some were 'yankees' who were buried alongside those from the other side. It is a lovely place, with statues dedicated to the soldiers from both sides. I could easily have spent several days there, simply going through the rosters.

One ancestor left an accounting of being in prison and visited by a 'yankee' cousin who beseached him to sign his allegiance to the north in order to obtain his freedom. He declined and spent the remainder of the war in prison. Happily, he survived prison and then rejoined his family in Alabama or Georgia (memory fails me at the moment).

I have a cousin in Alabama that every year places flowers on the grave sites of unkown Union soldiers, and has stories of kindnesses to soldiers of both sides who were wounded.

In some ways, it may be easier for me to look at it than some since I am actually a 'Westerner' and not a 'yankee'. (At least that is what they told me many years ago when my first husband was in the army and stationed in Alabama.)

I believe as you do, Carol, that it is important to understand what happened to keep it from happening again.

I found out an eighth grade teacher was reading my book to her class as part of her unit on the war. I told her she might want to leave out the part about the severed heads, but she said she had already read that chapter and it was the students' favorite. I went to the class and answered questions about the book. A black boy raised his hand. "What I want to know is what whoever put the severed heads in front of the house hoped to accomplish." I had no answer.

I put a story in my book of a Confederate and Yankee sitting together as soldier died in their arms. One boy asked if that was true. (This is a historical novel after all and it is not all true.) I told him it wasn't true, and he told me that things like that really happened.

It is about the sadness all felt, the effects on later generations, like a great-grandmother who knew only war as a child and became nasty and possessive except with my mother, her granddaughter. It is about another soldier, in my next great-grandmother book, who became abusive and his wife committed suicide. It is about a Yankee hero who was with a group that received the first Medals of Honor, even met Lincoln, and when I went to see his medal on display in a museum, it had been stolen the year before.

It doesn't go away. Visiting the battlefields in this country is like visiting Verdun or the Omaha Beaches in Europe. You just know in your soul people died there. You just know.

Carol

My great-grandfather Peter Lynch had come to this country from Ireland a few years before the war, which he cared nothing about. His war was with the British. He was drafted so he paid someone $20 to go in his place, which was legal at the time. All he knew or found the least bit interesting about the war was that his cousin Phil (Sheridan) was a general in the Union army.