Monday, March 14, 2005 7:30
PM at the Indiana Historical Society
Indiana Regimental
Photographs
Members of the 3rd Indiana Cavalry near Petersburg, Va., November 1864
The Civil War was the first military conflict in
which photography was widespread, and we tend to think of the thousands of
soldier photos, battlefield pictures, fading stereographs as something almost
commonplace. But to the people of the
early 1860’s, photography was a new and exciting idea. Many letters, regimental histories, and
memoirs recall the first time young soldiers “had their likeness made” by a
photographer, and radiate with pride and emotion on being able to send these
amazing technological mementoes home to loved ones. Just as the Civil War was beginning,
photography was evolving from a difficult and demanding medium confined to a
few “artists” to a standardized process that almost anyone could understand and
set up as a small business. The process
was still messy, difficult, and expensive, but hundreds of small photographic
establishments soon sprung up across the land.
In addition, the apparatus, chemicals, and photo-lab equipment were
portable enough to be packed into wagons and actually follow the armies.
Literally hundreds of thousands of soldier
portraits were made during the Civil War.
As a long-time collector of Indiana Civil War photographs, Craig Dunn
has amassed the largest single collection of images of Hoosier soldiers and
personalities of that War—in excess of 2,400 photographs. At our March meeting, Craig will share some
of the prize images from his collection —memories of the days of glory when
young Hoosier men (and not a few old) stepped forward in record numbers to
fight for their country, and on the way, to have their “likenesses” captured
for posterity.
About Our Presenter:
Craig L.
Dunn is the author of two
outstanding books about Indiana regiments: Harvestfields of Death: The Twentieth Indiana
Volunteers of Gettysburg (1999)
and Iron Men, Iron Will: The Nineteenth Indiana Regiment
of the Iron Brigade (1995). In addition to his writing and interest in
Civil War photography, Craig finds time to maintain a website dedicated to
Indiana Civil War history, which may be found at http://www.civilwarindiana.com. Craig is also involved with The Civil War CD-ROM, an acclaimed,
computer-searchable compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.
A 1975 graduate of Ball State University, Craig owns an investment company and several
ancillary businesses in his hometown of Kokomo, Indiana. He is
married and the father of four children.
Please
join us prior to the meeting for the opening of Craig Dunn’s exhibit, Indiana Regimental Photographs, at the
Col. Eli Lilly Civil War Museum located on Monument Circle in the Indiana
Soldiers and Sailors Monument 5:30 to 7:00 p.m., March 14th.
ICWRT
News
At the February
meeting, nominating committee representative Steve Hill presented the
committee’s slate of candidates for
ICWRT officers during the 2005-2006 campaign. The committee’s nominees were
approved and elected by voice vote of the members in attendance. They are:
Ray Shortridge President
Douglas Rouch Vice President
Janet Mitchell Secretary
Doug Wagner Treasurer
Tom Krasean
reported that editorial work on our forthcoming commemorative history, Indianapolis Civil War Round Table: The
First Fifty Years, is nearing completion.
The 112-page book should be available in time for our Golden Anniversary
celebration at the April meeting. Anyone
wishing to reserve a copy should return an order form, together with their full
payment, to Treasurer Doug Wagner no later than March 16th. The cost is $20 per volume for the hardback
edition and just $10 for the softcover version.
Nikki Schofield
announced that the ICWRT annual field trip is set for June 18-24, 2005. Billed as the “On To Richmond!” tour, the trip will include stops in Cincinnati,
Lexington and Richmond,
Virginia, and Lexington,
Kentucky.
The full itinerary and particulars may be found in the attached
information sheet. Space on the tour bus
is limited, so sign up now for a fun and educational experience. Nikki will be happy to answer any questions
you may have about the trip. She may be
reached at 317-328-8782.
Nikki will also
be conducting a “Civil War Generals Tour” at Crown
Hill Cemetery
on two Sundays this year, April 17th and October 2nd. Crown Hill is the nation’s third largest
cemetery and the last resting place of some 17 Civil War generals. Each tour will begin at 2:00 p.m. and will last approximately two hours. See the Calendar
of Events in this issue of HARDTACK
for more information.
50th Anniversary Desk Caddies Still
Available!
Don’t miss out on your
chance to buy a 50th Anniversary commemorative desk caddy. The black
leatherette caddies, which contain a notepad and compartments for pens and
other desktop miscellanea, feature the Soldiers and Sailors Monument and “Indianapolis Civil War Round Table / 50th Year
1955-2005” imprinted in gold on the cover.
Each of our speakers this year will be receiving one of these caddies as
a gift. The desk caddies are available
to members on a first-come, first-served basis, and will be available for
purchase at the March meeting. The cost
is $20 each.
Celebrate your membership in ICWRT on
its 50th Anniversary!
Reserve your copy
of Indianapolis Civil War Round
Table: The First Fifty Years, TODAY!!
An order form is
included with this issue of HARDTACK.
Remember---your order must be placed by March
16, 2005, for
delivery at the Anniversary
celebration meeting in April
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Upcoming ICWRT Programs
All of the
following meeting dates are the second Monday of the month.
March 14, 2005 Indiana Regimental Photographs Craig Dunn
April 11, 2005 Draft Riots Iver Bernstein, Washington University
May 9, 2005 Topic to be Announced Mark Neely, Penn State University
June 13, 2005 Annual Banquet/ Battlefield Dave Duncan and Jim Lighthizer,
CWPT
Preservation Update & Fundraiser
Calendar of Events
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March 14
|
ICWRT: Indiana Regimental
Photographs presented by Craig Dunn
Indiana Historical Society Auditorium, 450
West Ohio, Indianapolis, IN 7:30 PM
http://indianapoliscwrt.org
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March 15
|
“Will
Stott’s Civil War”: first person presentation by Dr. Lloyd Hunter
Franklin College campus Chapel, Franklin, IN
For more
information, call Lloyd at 317-738-8221 (office)
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March 16
|
Clay-Carmel
CWRT: Morgan's Raid presented
by Dick Skidmore
Monon Depot Museum, 211 First Street, S.W., Carmel, IN 7:30 PM
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March 20
|
Randolph County CWRT: “Memories of the Blue and Gray, Part 3”
presented by Steve Jackson; Randolph County Historical Society Museum,
416 South Meridian St., Winchester, IN; 1:30 to 3:00 PM
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March 21
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Madison
Cty. CWRT: Civil War Geneology presented by Amy Johnson
Anderson Public Library, Anderson, IN 7:30 PM
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March 22
|
CWRT of West Central Indiana: Civil War Portraits of Alexander Lawrie
presented by Dick
Skidmore
F.W. Olin Biological Sciences Building, Depauw University campus
Greencastle, IN 7:30 PM
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/civilwar
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April 17
|
Crown
Hill Cemetery Civil War Generals Tour conducted by Nikki Schofield
2:00 to 4:00 p.m. $5 for adults, $4 for
seniors and $3 for students
Enter Crown Hill by the 34th Street gate, off Boulevard Place. For more information, contact Nikki
Schofield (317-328-8782)
|
We
recommend confirming all dates, times and locations for events not sponsored by
the ICWRT
If you know
of a Civil War-related event that may be of interest to ICWRT members, please
send your information to Norris Darrall (norrisdarrall@hotmail.com) and HARDTACK (HardtackEditor@comcast.net).
Trimble’s Trivia
1. What unit was known as, “Jeff Davis’s Pet Wolves”?
2. What was the object known as, “Jefferson Davis”?
3. Why did the U.S. Senate reject the nomination of
Col. Robert Buchanan
to the rank of
Brigadier General?
4. What was the Austrian Lorenz?
5. Where was Slaughter’s Field?
---Answers
will be published in the April issue---
Answers
to February’s Quiz:
1.
What is a “bog-trotter”? Slang for an
Irish soldier, used by both sides.
2.
What is a “hospital bullet”? A substitute for anesthetic, literally biting on a bullet
3. Presidential slang used by Union troops to
describe hardtack. “Lincoln Pie”
4.
What was “robbers’ row”? Area of camp reserved for sutlers
5.
Who or what was known as the “Provost Marshall”? A large shark
that patrolled the moat at Ft. Jefferson
Have you turned in your
Survey?
If you have not yet turned in a completed
Member Survey, please do so at the March meeting. Your responses may also be
mailed or emailed to Tony Roscetti using the form accompanying last month’s
edition of HARDTACK.
The
Survey is intended to help us better understand the interests of our
members. The information you provide
will not be disclosed to anyone outside our organization.
From the Bookshelf
“The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His
Agenda, and an Unnecessary War” by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Three
Rivers Press 2002) 333 pp.
The
“Real” Lincoln? Hardly.
A review by Dave Klinestiver
Looking beyond the myth, and seeking the historical
“truth” of the matter, is fundamental to the task of every historian. Finding new meanings and interpretations in
the events of the past, moreover, is rightfully the purview of each succeeding
generation of historical commentators.
There is no excuse, however, for any serious historian—and certainly not
a professional scholar of academia—to claim to offer readers the “real” story
of a man and his era when the writer has not bothered to master the essential
facts of his subject matter.
This reviewer first became aware of Thomas DiLorenzo
and “The Real Lincoln” about a year ago, when Book-tv (on C-SPAN2) aired a talk given by the
author at a booksigning. When DiLorenzo
began his presentation by stumbling over—and then misstating—the years in which
this country was “engaged in a great civil war,” it was evident to me that the
author’s scholarly authority fell well short of the demands of his subject. As I listened that evening to DiLorenzo rave
on about Lincoln’s “real agenda” (in sum: to promote Northern industrialism and a federal empire by waging
a bloody and “unnecessary” war to economically and politically subjugate the
South), it was clear to me that the person with the real agenda was Mr. DiLorenzo.
The book itself only confirms those initial
impressions. Rather than presenting his
readers with a balanced, scholarly analysis of Lincoln’s political/social/economic
principles and beliefs and how those views informed and influenced his
decisions as president, DiLorenzo seems more intent on recasting Lincoln’s mythic
image as the Great Emancipator to that of the Great Instigator of all Evils of
post-Civil War America and, by doing so, to further his own Jeffersonian
interpretation of American political-economic history.
DiLorenzo paints Lincoln as a conniving, power-hungry politician and economic
“mercantilist” (even worse, in the author’s opinion, than a capitalist!) who
was morally indifferent to slavery, and who merely used the issue to bolster
his own political ambitions and objectives.
By ignoring context and the full historical record, by using selected
facts to draw conclusions that are as outrageous as they are fallacious, and by
imbuing Lincoln with a prescience of future events and consequences surpassing
that of Nostradamus, DiLorenzo manages to construct a character that is utterly
unrecognizable to anyone familiar with the man, however complex and enigmatic,
that emerges from a wealth of primary source material—beginning with Lincoln’s
own writings—as well as innumerable studies over many decades that DiLorenzo chooses
to dismiss as whitewashed mythologizing.
As a professor of economics at the School of Business and Management at Maryland’s Loyola College (not to be confused with Loyola University in Chicago) specializing in political history and political
economy, DiLorenzo is certainly entitled—and presumably qualified—to champion
his own views on the subject of United States economic history.
In examining his book, however, it is clear that DiLorenzo has not
bothered to undertake anything close to a scholarly investigation into Lincoln’s evolving views on slavery, economic development or
the role of the federal government. DiLorenzo
also lacks an appreciation for the times and political/social culture in which Lincoln lived and which imposed (as Lincoln himself well
understood) significant constraints on what he could effectively
accomplish. Whatever period of history it
is in which DiLorenzo qualifies as a “specialist,” it is clearly not the Civil
War and antebellum eras of this country.
One need only look at the book’s bibliography to see
the shortcomings of DiLorenzo’s scholarship.
Beyond the paucity of references to leading works in the Lincoln canon
(which one would expect to find in any academic work, whatever its ideological
bent), DiLorenzo actually cites Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, a pseudo-biographical work of fiction no less, as one of
his background sources! (the book itself is not mentioned in DiLorenzo’s text). It is not surprising that no leading Civil
War or Lincoln historian has endorsed this book, particularly since
DiLorenzo manages to denigrate most of them by name. It is also telling that DiLorenzo’s two “anonymous
peer reviewers” apparently asked that they not be identified in his
acknowledgments.
Every year brings dozens of new books about Lincoln on top of the thousands of titles published over the
preceding 140 years. Some are very good
and a few are outstanding; others are mediocre—or worse. What is particularly unfortunate about this
book is that, as a work with the imprimatur of authorship by an academician,
less informed “mainstream” readers—not just the die-hard “states’ righters” who
are predisposed to this sort of thing—may actually buy-in to the misrepresentations
and contrarian claptrap espoused by DiLorenzo as historical truth.
If you want to read a libertarian rant on the evils wrought
by the Republican Party and the federal government during and after the Civil
War, you will undoubtedly enjoy DiLorenzo’s book. If, however, you are in search of a fair and
balanced view of the “real” Abraham Lincoln, you will not find him here.
