Putting Civilians Back into Civil War Memory

Remember the Bicentennial?  There were all those commemorative stamps with the words and faces of the Founders, of course, but also Sybil Ludington and Betsy Ross and Jewish financier Haym Solomon.  The Independence struggle in America produced few great generals but lots of everyday heroes, and a folk history that praises the Minuteman as the ideal Common Man and the efforts of civilians and statesmen alongside those in uniform. 

Compare this with how we commemorate our Civil War.  Today there is a lopsided infatuation, almost verging on fetish, with a bevy of generals in gray and certain colonels in blue (Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain foremost among the latter of these).  We make heroes out of every combatant (though we know than not everyone was).  Aside from Abraham Lincoln, we do not remember other politicians as making meaningful contributions; rather, we recall the bungling of politically appointed Union generals and the parochialism of southern governors.  Who celebrates the diplomats who kept Europe neutral (Charles Henry Adams, the son and grandson of presidents), or remembers the names and accomplishments of the inventors and industrialists whose machines and materiel made this the first modern war?  A few specialists and Civil War buffs, and that is all.

Yet in earlier times, we did celebrate specific civilians as well as the volunteer soldiers in butternut or blue.  In case some of these get overlooked during the Sesquicentennial, here is a starter list, in no particular order, of noteworthy citizens whose contributions great or small to the struggle who are worth commemorating.

• Anthony Burns - An escaped slave whose 1854 trial in Boston galvanized northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act

• Mary Ann Bickerdyke - "Mother Bickerdyke", the volunteer nurse who by the end of the war had helped establish 300 hospitals and of whom General Sherman remarked "She ranks me."  She lead the XVth Corps at the Grand Review in Washington at the close of the war.

• Barbara Fritchie - The Frederick Maryland native and staunch Unionist who was the inspiration for Whittier's poem with its famous line " 'Shoot if you must, this old gray head / But spare your country's flag.' she said."  The nonagenarian probably never waved a Union Flag at Stonewall Jackson's troops, but her patriotism in this divided border community is without question.

• John Burns - "The Old Hero of Gettysburg", a veteran of the War of 1812 who fought as a civilian with the Iron Brigade during the 1st day's battle, and though left wounded on the field after the Union withdrawal was taken for a noncombatant by the confederates instead of being executed as a bushwhacker.

• Rose O'Neal Greenhow - Washington socialite and Confederate spy

• Pauline Cushman - Actress and Union Spy made an honorary Major for her services.

• Allan Pinkerton - Founder of the Union Intelligence Service, forerunner of the  the Secret Service, who foiled an assassination plot against President Lincoln early in the war.

• Dred Scott - He sued for his freedom, and while ultimately the U.S. Supreme court ruled that as property and not a person he had no legal standing to do so, the decision in 1857 further divided the country on the eve of war.

• Harriet Tubman - "Moses" who lead 300 people to freedom on the Underground Railroad and later spied for the Union.

• Frederick Douglass - the most eloquent and prominent African American of his time, a major abolitionist who argued that slavery was not only immoral but unconstitutional.

• Dorothea Dix - Social reformer and Superintendent of Union Army Nurses

• Harriet Beecher Stowe - "The little lady who started this great war", her Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best selling novel of the 19th Century and second in sales only to the Bible.

• Julia Ward Howe - Her "Battle Hymn of the Republic" became a marching song for the ages.

• John Brown - The firebrand that touched off the powder keg.

• James Ryder Randall - His lyrics for "Maryland, My Maryland" made it the most martial song of the South.

• John Ericsson - His invention of the double screw propeller was as significant as his Ironclad "Monitor."

• Thaddeus Lowe - Pioneered the use of gas observation balloons.

• Andrew Carnegie:  The noted industrialist and philanthropist was also Union Assistant Secretary of War and organizer of the military telegraph system.

• Clara Barton - Union frontline nurse and later founder of the American Red Cross

• Christopher Minor Spencer - His repeating rifle gave a massive firepower edge.

• Horace Lawson Hunley - his eponymous submarine was the first vessel of its kind to sink an enemy warship.

• Dr. Henry W. Bellows - founder of the U.S. Sanitary Commission

• Matthew Brady - The most famous of the Civil War photographers.

• Andrew Gardner - His battlefield photographs brought the dead of Antietam to the Union home front.

• Charles C. Wellford - The proprietor of Catherine Furnace, who alerted Stonewall Jackson to a forest road he had recently opened up that allowed the Confederates to successfully flank the Union lines at Chancellorsville.

• James Edward Hanger - The first amputee of the Civil War, this Virginian lost his leg to a cannonball and then dedicated his life to making better artificial limbs.  Hanger Orthopedic has over 1,000 employees today.

• Issac Solomon - manager of a tomato canning plant in Baltimore who in 1860 developed a method that made sterilization take a fraction of the time it had previously and allowed for increased production of canned food for the war effort.

• Eli Whitney - He is responsible for the Cotton Gin that lead to an explosive increase in the demand for slaves to produce southern cotton and also gets credit as an early proponent of interchangeable gun parts, which would ultimately enable the mass production of weapons that helped the North put down the rebellion.

• Kate Cumming - a confederate nurse with a remarkable wartime journal

• Walt Whitman - volunteer nurse and author of "Drum Taps", including "oh Captain, My Captain."

• Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin - Pennsylvania governor who organized and hosted the Loyal War Governor's Conference in September, 1862  that reaffirmed their support of Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation and the effort to see the war through.  They also suggested the removal of General McClellan after Antietam.

• The brothers Harper - James, John, Joseph and Fletcher, publishers of Harper's Weekly, the most important and influential periodical of the war.

This is by no means a comprehensive list.  You have probably noted a preponderance of Unionists.  Noteworthy though they may be, it is difficult to commemorate a white supremist fire-eater like Edmund Ruffin or a presidential assassin like John Wilkes Booth the way we do Paul Revere, or for that matter once did John Burns.