Commemorating The Civil War: A Learning Experience

From National Parks Traveler: Commemorating The Civil War: A Learning Experience

While the vicious battles of the American Civil War resonated through the minds and hearts of those who lived them in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the impact of the war has seemingly faded in the consciousness of modern Americans.
With the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War now in full swing, there's a rich opportunity for Americans to understand the underlying causes of the war, the impact it had on our modern society, and to fully embrace the progress we have made as a nation.
For more than a few, the exact cause that sparked the Civil War can be hard to capture. Granted, slavery was a major factor, but the tensions between the North and South had been building for decades as a result of political, economic and social differences.
While the Northern states’ economy was largely centered on industry, the South’s economy was agriculturally based. After Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, large scale production of cotton in the South became possible, increasing the demand for cheap labor, and causing the institution of slavery to become closely intertwined with the Southern economy. Slaves and indentured servants were put to work in the fields, tilling and harvesting crops, to meet the national and international demand for agricultural products such as cotton and tobacco.
Another factor was the concern for representation in Congress. By 1820, all but one president had come from Virginia, boosting Southern confidence that they would not become a minority in Washington. But as droves of immigrants poured into the Northern states with hopes of acquiring industrial jobs, Northern populations exploded and the number of representatives from Northern states surged.
When Missouri applied for statehood in 1820, the balance of power in Congress could have shifted dramatically, contingent upon whether Missouri was admitted to the Union as a free state or a slave state.

Civil War re-enactors at Petersburg National Battlefield. Kurt Repanshek photo.

The Compromise of 1820 (also known as the Missouri Compromise) was reached, which decreed that states north of the Mason-Dixon Line would be prohibited from embracing slavery, while states south of the line could choose to be a slave state or not.
While the Compromise worked for a few decades, by 1846 Southern states seized the opportunity after the war with Mexico to snatch up large tracts of land below the Mason-Dixon Line with the hopes that those territories could become slave states, which would result in a shift in the balance of power in Congress.
As more states joined the Union, Southern hopes were not realized. Tariffs imposed by Congress on agricultural products and exports further strained relations between the North and South. The state of South Carolina prevailed upon President Andrew Jackson to address their concerns about several of these tariffs and their negative economic impact, to no avail.
South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification in 1832, which stated that the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and therefore null and void within the sovereign boundaries of the state. Vice President John C. Calhoun and President Jackson disagreed on the issue, and Calhoun resigned his position in order to run for the Senate where he could more effectively defend nullification.
As a response to South Carolina’s refusal to submit to federal tariffs, the Force Bill was passed by Congress in 1832 that authorized President Jackson to use any force necessary in order to collect federal tariffs.

Slavery played a role in sparking the Civil War, but it wasn't the only reason for the war between the states. National Archives photo.

Eventually, conciliation was reached through the Compromise Tariff of 1833, introduced by Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun.
The compromise reduced the tariff by one-tenth every two years, satisfying South Carolina and other Southern states. South Carolina repealed its Nullification Act shortly thereafter, but tensions continued to build.
In 1859, John Brown, heading a small group of individuals who meant to overthrow the institution of slavery by violent means, raided the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. His intent was to incite a slave insurrection, and although he was suppressed by federal forces, Brown became a martyr in the eyes of the Abolitionist movement.
Brown’s unsuccessful raid, along with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, led Southern states to believe that they could never survive under an anti-slavery president. South Carolina led the Southern states in secession from the Union, followed by Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Texas.
Although each state’s secession was entirely separate and there was no original intent on creating a nation separate from the United States, it became abundantly clear that they would be stronger if they banded together.
By February of 1861, delegates from the seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama and formed the Confederate States of America. They drafted a constitution and elected Jeffeson Davis as their president.

The battle of Fort Sumter, as portrayed in a Currier & Ives lithograph.

During the commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, take the opportunity to visit a Civil War park. You can also visit the National Park Service’s Civil War website by clicking here, where you can view a timeline of the war and learn more about the battles, soldiers and life during the war.
Many parks will be commemorating their respective battles with a multitude of events, including living history demonstrations, reenactments and children’s programs.
Here is a list of some parks that are commemorating battles this year:
Antietam National Battlefield
Fort Donelson National Battlefield
Fort Macon State Park
Fort Pulaski National Monument
Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park
Harper’s Ferry National Historic Park
Manassas National Battlefield Park
Pea Ridge National Military Park
Richmond National Battlefield Park
Shiloh National Military Park
Stones River National Battlefield
Yorktown National Battlefield
For a great overview of the Civil War, visit the Civil War Interpretive Center at Shiloh National Military Park
You can also read more about the Civil War through the National Park Civil War Series, available on eParks.com.
 

The Civil War’s Rip Van Winkle

From the New York Times: The Civil War’s Rip Van Winkle

Great fiction, we all know, has the uncanny ability to imitate the unpredictability and emotion of real life. So it’s a testament to the Civil War’s otherworldliness that real life imitated great fiction in the remarkable story of Isaac Israel Hayes, one of America’s most famous early Arctic explorers.

It’s unclear if Hayes ever read Washington Irving’s classic short story “Rip Van Winkle,” or if he even knew the plot, in which the main character inadvertently sleeps through the American Revolution. But by the spring of 1862, Hayes would have easily identified with Irving’s famously henpecked hero. Like Rip, Hayes had one day ventured off into the unknown, missed some of the most defining moments of his generation (in this case everything from Lincoln’s election to the Battle of Balls Bluff) and returned to a country he barely understood.
Hayes didn’t sleep through the opening of the Civil War, but he might as well have. The Pennsylvania native had instead spent 15 of the most important months in American history — from July 1860 to October 1861 — looking for the North Pole between and above Greenland and Canada.
 

Because telegraphs and mail didn’t run that far north, Hayes had no idea that the United States had been torn in two during his absence. He heard rumors of the conflict on his way home, but it wasn’t until he finally anchored in Boston Harbor in late October 1861 that the war’s terrible realness stopped him cold. Within moments of stepping ashore, Hayes realized that “the country which I had known before could be the same no more.” Quoting the Book of Exodus but also presaging the title of Robert A. Heinlein’s sci-fi classic, he wrote, “I felt like a stranger in a strange land, and yet every object which I passed was familiar.”

Hayes hadn’t always longed for something so familiar. Born in 1832 and raised in a Quaker family in Chester County, Pa., he was a medical doctor by training, but rather unexcited about the predictable rhythms of private practice. Instead, he was drawn to the barrens of the Arctic, an unforgiving and mysterious world where a young man could prove himself, and even achieve renown. If nothing else, the northernmost frontier would give Hayes the opportunity to lead what he would soon call “a novel sort of life.”

Equal parts science and adventure — with undertones of national ambition— Arctic exploration during the mid-19th century captivated the world much like the space race would do a century later. The top of the planet was impossibly cold, dark and often fatal. But Victorian explorers kept going back: first, in a renewed search by the British and others for the Northwest Passage; then, in typically hopeless rescue missions for the crews that never returned; and finally, after much of the North American Arctic had been mapped, they began a dangerous, often obsessive race “to reach the north pole of the earth,” as Hayes first proposed in early 1860, that would last into the 20th century.

Few American or European scientists had ever made it above 80 degrees north latitude, but Hayes believed, like other explorers, that an “open polar sea” blanketed the very top of the world: a navigable ocean, kept ice-free by a mixture of warm Gulf Stream waters, strong undersea currents and prevailing surface winds. He had been a member of an earlier Arctic team led by Elisha Kent Kane between 1853 and 1855 that claimed to have found evidence of the sea’s existence, and now he desperately wanted confirmation. Anxious to go back, Hayes organized a follow-up expedition.

The small crew left Boston in early July 1860, vowing to cross the ice belt in the lower latitudes, reach the open sea and sail straight to the North Pole. Hayes’s ship was “snug, jaunty looking,” he said, but whether it would survive the dangerous and unchartered waters in its future remained to be seen. Hayes named his ship the United States.

After tacking up Greenland’s west coast, dense pack ice forced them to make winter camp near Smith Sound above Baffin Bay. Hayes traded for sled dogs and provisions with the Arctic’s native peoples; were it not for their guidance — they did, after all, live in the very place Hayes had come to discover — his expedition would have ended much differently. After a long and dark winter in which temperatures dropped to 68 degrees below Fahrenheit, Hayes and most of his crew survived into the spring.

Just days before the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumter, Hayes pushed northward in search of the open polar sea. Traveling by dogsled, he struggled across the Arctic’s broken terrain and its fields of ice hummocks. In mid-May, at a latitude Hayes recorded as 81 degrees 35 minutes north, he observed veins of open water fanning out like a “delta” across what he believed was the polar basin. He took a few measurements, enjoyed the view, planted a flag and turned around. Severe damage to his ship prevented him from attempting to sail to the Pole, as he had originally intended.

Hayes later said that he “led a strange weird sort of life” in the Arctic. The irony, of course, is that it would only get stranger and weirder when he went back home. In 1860, Hayes had embarked as a celebrity; he returned over a year later a mere afterthought, ridiculed in print. “Surely,” wrote the Detroit Free Press a short while after Hayes docked at Boston,

enough of treasure and valuable life have been spent in search of facts to substantiate somebody’s theory about the polar regions, which, whether it is this way or that way, is of no practical importance to anybody in the wide world. Suppose the continent of land does run up to the north pole, or suppose it don’t. Suppose there is an open sea there or suppose there isn’t. What does it amount to? Who will go there on a pleasure voyage or a trout fishing?

But if the country had no time for Hayes, the explorer found the war an all-consuming horror. He felt out of place in an America that now seemed more alien than the Arctic north, leaving him “sad and dejected,” he said. Confident that he had found the open sea but disappointed at not having reached the Pole, Hayes’s existential anxiety came rushing back. In the spring of 1862, despite his Quaker beliefs, he accepted a commission as a surgeon in the Union Army and was quickly appointed director of the massive Satterlee Hospital, outside Philadelphia.

After Hayes died in 1881, follow-up expeditions challenged his findings and overturned his claim about the existence of the open polar sea. He largely faded out of memory. But recent studies, including a 2009 biography by Douglas W. Wamsley, have begun resuscitating his legacy. Not only had Hayes pioneered the use of photography in the Arctic, Wamsley and others note, but he had also helped establish the route that later explorers — including his better-known rival, Charles Francis Hall — would follow in subsequent expeditions to locate the Pole.

Hayes once wondered if his time in the Arctic had been “set down in a dream.” In a sense, he was right — and more like Rip Van Winkle than anyone had ever realized, if they realized it at all. Coming back to the States in 1861 had indeed been a rude awakening.

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Sources: Detroit Free Press, Nov. 1, 1861; New York Times, Nov. 15, 1861 and Dec. 18, 1881; “The Polar Exploring Expedition: A Special Meeting of the American Geographical & Statistical Society,” (March 22, 1860); Isaac Israel Hayes, “The Open Polar Sea: A Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery Towards the North Pole, in the Schooner ‘United States’”; Pierre Berton, “The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909’; John Edwards Caswell, “Arctic Frontiers: United States Explorations in the Far North”; Clive Holland, ed., “Farthest North: Endurance and Adventure in the Quest for the North Pole”; Trevor H. Levere, “Science and the Canadian Arctic: A Century of Exploration, 1818–1909”; Michael F. Robinson, “The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture”; W. Gillies Ross, “Nineteenth-Century Exploration of the Arctic,” in “A Continent Comprehended: North American Exploration,” vol. III, John Logan Allen, ed.; Douglas W. Wamsley, “Polar Hayes: The Life and Contributions of Isaac Israel Hayes, M.D.”; Nathaniel West, “History of the Satterlee U.S.A. General Hospital at West Philadelphia, From October 8, 1862 to October 8, 1863.”

Ohio: Historical Society seeks new members

From the Review: Historical Society seeks new members

WELLSVILLE - Wellsville Historical Society members have a jam-packed calendar for the summer and fall season, and are busy boosting membership and planning events around the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. Society members at Thursday's luncheon meeting of the Wellsville Area Chamber of Commerce distributed brochures to Chamber members and gave some history of the Society and its home, the River Museum at 1003 Riverside Ave. Tom Davidson, Society president, gave the program. The Society was the Chamber's featured business of the month.

Davidson said the River Museum is open 1-4:30 p.m. on Sundays from June through August. The museum is also open for special events. He said the members are working on some living history encampments by American Civil War and French and Indian War re-enactors.

Davidson asked the members of the Chamber in attendance at Thursday's luncheon to display brochures in their businesses. He said Society members are seeking involvement of school- and college-age students to foster interest in local history and membership in the Society among the area's young people. Membership is $10 per year.

He said about six or seven members have been meeting for about two hours each Tuesday for the last year to inventory items and otherwise organize the River Museum.

"We have accomplished a lot," he said. "There is a lot to do. We know some of what we have, but we've been finding some things that are amazing to us."

Besides maintenance of the River Museum, the members are also working on repairs and restoration to the pottery kiln near state Route 7. He said they want to repair the kiln and coat it with a sealant, and work on the surrounding ground to prevent runoff that has been damaging the kiln.

They are working to create a library in the museum and are seeking photographs that show the history of Wellsville and the area. Davidson said members would borrow and reproduce the photos, which will then be returned.

Members are decorating the River Museum in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. Davidson said the Society has had donations of clothing from the period and are dressing the mannequins. There are also flags and other items of the period on display. Davidson said there is a U.S. flag of the period and also a Confederate battle flag on display to honor the Americans who died on both sides of the American conflict.

Two of the programs planned for the summer are related to the American Civil War, Davidson said. Ray Vanderpool was at the battle re-enactment for the 150th anniversary of the battle of Shiloh, and will give a presentation on the battle at 2 p.m. June 3. Historian Bill Johnson is an expert on Abraham Lincoln and will speak on the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation. Also on that day there will be a display of a replica of Lincoln's casket, courtesy of the Batesville Casket Co.

Davidson said that in the works for July 2013 is a re-enactment for the 150th anniversary of Morgan's Raid. Davidson said local historical societies in Ohio are coordinating efforts with the Ohio Historical Society to plan re-enactments of the raid, starting in the Cincinnati area. The local re-enactment would be the last, since Confederate General John Hunt Morgan and his remaining raiders surrendered near Lisbon, and Morgan was taken to Wellsville. The Wellsville Historical Society has Morgan's sword in its collection.

For more information about the Wellsville Historical Society call the Society at 330-532-1018.

UR effort maps the end of slavery

From Richmond-Times: UR effort maps the end of slavery
The path to freedom for African-Americans in the South was not as simple as a march to Union lines or a wait for emancipation.

It took many twists, had a few U-turns and led not to the Promised Land but to a new set of challenges.

That's part of what comes across in Visualizing Emancipation, an interactive online map created by the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab.

The map plots more than 3,000 emancipation-related events from 1861-1865 in 10 categories that range from government actions to abuse of African-Americans. An additional 50,000 entries show Union troop locations during the Civil War, making it easy to see the impact of opportunity on an animated timeline of the war years.

"It tells us that the end of slavery was this really complicated process that happened all over the South, but more in some places than others during the war," said Scott Nesbit, associate director of the lab.

"The chance for freedom came about on water and on rails. That's where the Union troops were. But at some places in the South, people remained enslaved the entire war, long after the Emancipation Proclamation.

"And, just because you get to Union lines doesn't mean you're going to start having a good time. These first years of freedom, if we can even call it that, were filled with coercion and danger. ... (In the contraband camps,) African-Americans were treated as essentially free, as free as someone can be who is impressed into service by the military and not allowed to leave."

Edward L. Ayers, UR president and co-leader of the project as a historian of the American South, elaborated in an announcement of the new website.

"Emancipation did not happen on just a few days, by a single document, or on a fixed field of battle," Ayers said. "It came around the edges of the story. It started before the war began and ended long after the smoke cleared. It happened on dark roads and in formal government documents. It started, stopped, raced forward and cut back."

The university received a $48,155 grant for the project in 2010 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Students helped to search through military records, newspapers, wartime letters and diaries to find emancipation events.

"When we first started," Nesbit said, "we thought we would want to find places where people were becoming free. When we started looking at the evidence, we realized it was never clear when or where that happened. Rarely could we look at any piece of evidence and say, 'Aha, these people became free!'

"It led us to begin thinking of emancipation as much more complicated, filled with somewhat contradictory events."

Thus, the categories for events include fugitive slaves, African-Americans helping the Union, African-Americans captured by Confederates (which often led to re-enslavement), African-Americans captured by Union soldiers, African-Americans conscripted by both armies and abuses of African-Americans.

"Atrocities, absolutely they occurred," Nesbit said, "more at the hands of Confederates than at the hands of Union soldiers, but certainly on both sides. ...

"What's really clear is that African-Americans bore the brunt of the war, simply because they were the most vulnerable people in society," he said. "The lack of food, the lack of protections - they felt the brunt of the war in all these ways."

Nesbit expects the emancipation map to evolve as scholars and the public contribute more examples of events that occurred along the path of freedom.

In its first few days of operation, mention on Civil War blogs and social media has attracted users from 30 countries.

"The absolute numbers are not as interesting," he said, "but a lot of people are coming from all over the world."

Civil War casualty lists should be higher

From Commercial News: Civil War casualty lists should be higher
A recent study by Binghamton University historian J. David Hacker indicates that the previous estimate of 620,000 American casualties in the Civil War — America’s deadliest war — should actually be 20 percent higher; the figure 750,000 is probably more accurate. The casualty list includes men who died in battle as well as those who died as a result of poor conditions in military camps. “Roughly two out of three men who died in the war died from disease.”

Hacker’s findings will be published in the December issue of Civil War History and Rachel Coker’s article on this study can be read at http://discovere.binghamton.edu/news/civilwar-3826.html.

1940 census
While waiting for the index to the 1940 federal census to become available online, it would be wise to prepare for the data it contains by having a form on which to record the census data. The national Archives has made such a form available at http://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940/1940.pdf.

Researchers will be pleased to note there were many questions on the 1940 census that had not appeared on previous census questionnaires. To read a more legible list of questions asked on the 1940 census, visit http://1940census.archives.gov/questions-asked.

The Instructions to Enumerators includes some noteworthy remarks about recording personal descriptions. “Column 10 — Color or race — Any mixtures of white and nonwhite blood should be recorded according to the race of the nonwhite parent. A person of mixed Negro and Indian blood should be reported as Negro unless the Indian blood greatly predominates and he is universally accepted in the community as an Indian. Other mixtures of nonwhite parentage should be reported according to the race of the father. Mexicans are to be returned as white, unless definitely of Indian or other nonwhite race.” To read all instructions to enumerators, visit http://1940census.archives.gov/downloads/instructions-to-enumerators.pdf.

FamilySearch has reported that its 1940 U.S. Census Community Project has had more support than any previous project. Estimates are that it will take about two weeks for all states to be indexed. “Volunteers completed the indexing for the state of Delaware in the first 24 hours.” Next states to be indexed: Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Virginia. Visit the FamilySearch indexing updates page to learn more. Go to http://www.familysearch.org, click on United States, and browse the list. Click on Indexing to learn more about what indexing is being done and how to participate.

Muncie Genfest
The Muncie (Ind.) Public Library will host another Genfest from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. June 22-23. Those in attendance will be able to conduct genealogical research, attend seminars, view exhibits, shop at the various vendor stalls and network with other researchers. With the exception of Friday’s dinner and Civil War exhibit at Minnetrista, all events are free and open to the public.

For complete details visit http://www.munpl.org, click on Adults, then Local History and Genealogy, and follow the Genfest link.

Echoes from the Civil War Era May 16 at Moline Library

From Quad-Cities Online: Echoes from the Civil War Era May 16 at Moline Library
MOLINE -- Five impersonators of Riverside Cemetery residents who lived during the American Civil War will speak about their lives and their wartime experiences at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 16, at the Moline Public Library, 3210 41st St., Moline.

The 19th Century cast of characters and their impersonators will be:

Nehemiah 'Nick' Zeigler 1848-1919 played by Bob White -- Nick was the youngest of seven brothers who all fought for the Union and was only 16 when he enlisted. After the war he became a skillful and highly recognized blacksmith.

Helen Davenport Whipple Reed 1815-1881 played by Dorothy White -- Born and well educated in the East, Helen moved to Moline and during the Civil War she organized the Moline Ladies Aid Society which raised supplies and funds for wounded soldiers and hospitals. Most of these supplies were sent to the United States Sanitary Commission, a national relief organization that helped save the lives of thousands of soldiers.

Elizabeth 'Eliza' Smythe Manley 1836-1885 played by Kathleen Seusy -- An Irish immigrant, Eliza's husband James fought for both the South and the North while she managed to flee their farm near Memphis and get herself and her two small children safely back to family in Rock Island.

Dr. Henry F. Salter 1815-1882 played by Dennis Harker -- Salter was Moline's first physician and also served as a surgeon in the Civil War. Discharged due to ill health, Salter was also one of the doctors who went over to help with the smallpox and pneumonia epidemic amongst the Confederate prisoners in early 1864.

"The Unknown" played by Ann Boaden -- Next to the Soldiers Monument on the hill at Riverside is a small white marker dedicated to the "Unknown" by a woman's group. Ann will describe the building and dedication of the monument in 1883 and offer a eulogy for all 'war dead, with a rendering of "Taps," a piece of music that was composed during the Civil War.

In addition, Shaun Graves will show pictures from Riverside Cemetery including actual stones of the people portrayed at the program and the Civil War Soldiers Monument.

The free program is open to all ages. Register at the Reference Desk at the Moline Public Library, phone (309) 524-2470, or e-mail reference@molinelibrary.org

Making History: The Civil War Reproductions of Hanover Brass

From Copper Development Organization: Making History: The Civil War Reproductions of Hanover Brass
During the American Civil War, when the Confederate General Robert E. Lee dressed for the day, he often buckled a belt whose face was imprinted with the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” In Latin, the phrase means “thus always to tyrants,” and on his buckle, those words arched above a scene of a knight standing triumphantly over his defeated opponent, sword drawn. It was a fitting image for Lee, the man who led southern forces through the bloodiest war in U.S. history, and sympathized with their desire to secede from the nation at large. Then, as now, a belt buckle said a lot about a person’s character and beliefs.

One morning, more than 100 years after Lee’s death, Gary Williams stood in his shop holding Lee’s buckle. For more than 40 years, Williams has been the proprietor of Hanover Brass Foundry, a company that reproduces original belt plates from the era of the American Civil War, and sells them to collectors and museums. That day, Lee’s buckle was on loan from the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, VA, located about 25 minutes from Williams’ home in Mechanicsville, on the route of Virginia’s Civil War Trail.

Carefully, Williams pressed both sides of Lee’s belt plate into a cask full of sand, creating an imprint that would serve as the mold for his piece. Nearby, a small forge was heating a container full of molten brass to 2200 degrees. Williams removed Lee’s buckle, closed the mold, and with a pair of long tongs grasped the cup of molten metal, pouring it quickly into the cavity his imprint had created. In a few hours, when the brass had cooled, he would grind it, polish it, and clean it. The resulting buckle was virtually indistinguishable from Lee’s original. History had been reproduced.

For the residents of central Virginia, the Civil War is hardly a thing of the past. Williams himself lives near the site of the Battle of Cold Harbor, where on June 3 of 1864 Union soldiers charged a well-fortified Confederate line. By day’s end, more than 7000 had died. For most Americans such battles are merely the stuff of textbooks, but for Williams they’re as real as his own backyard.

For 55 years, Williams has been a hunter of civil war relics, striking out into the woods with his 38-inch “deep seeker” metal detector, tracing old trench lines and hoping to stumble upon scraps that soldiers left behind. Because of a hearing problem brought on by the high-pitched beeping of his detector, Williams couldn’t talk on the phone for this story. But according to his website, he has dug over 1200 US belt plates from the battlefields since 1955.

And colleagues and family members alike say his passion for reproducing civil war buckles is born out of the joy he gets from finding them himself.

“Gary is a relic hunter at heart,” says his wife, Theresa Williams, a retired educator of 30 years. “Some hunters really like to find ammunition or other things, but his passion is belt buckles. The buckles are so beautiful, and they’re very scarce. Eventually Gary figured that rather than having to find them, why not make them himself?”

According to Mrs. Williams, the same passion for history that drives her husband drove their mutual attraction when then met, more than 40 years ago, at a Civil War relic show in Atlanta. At the time, she said, Williams was mainly selling buckles to fellow relic hunters, to support his own hunting habit.

Once they were married, “I suggested that he make it into a bigger business,” she says. “We advertised in a couple of Civil War magazines, and did a mail order catalog for his buckles.”

Over time, that evolved into a storefront in a shopping complex in Williamsburg, VA, where Williams demonstrated his buckle-making process and sold his wares. He soon opened a small civil war museum near the shop, to display the thousands of items he had collected over years of relic hunting.

The buckles that Williams reproduces were a vital part of the average soldier’s wardrobe both before and during the Civil War. And as soldiers changed–from members of private, local militias to foot soldiers in a national conflict–the buckles changed with them.

In the years leading up to the war, private militias of 50 to 100 men often provided security for particular cities, regions, or states. To identify themselves, they designed their own uniforms, often including ornate and artistic belt buckles that featured detailed lettering and agricultural or military scenes. The scene depicted on Robert E. Lee’s buckle is also the Virginia state seal, and it exemplifies the style of these pre-war buckles.

“The ornamental uniforms really came out of the Napoleonic Wars,” said Mike O’Donnell, a civil war historian and co-author of the book “American Military Belt Plates,” and many other works on civil war relics. “Americans imitated the dress of the French and the British, and their flashy uniforms really embodied the glory of war,” he said. “As the Civil War developed, many of the local companies started getting organized into regiments, and the belt buckles were a way for the soldiers to display their identity.”

As the war dragged on, though, time and resources became increasingly scarce for both sides, and the buckles got more generic. Confederate soldiers wore buckles emblazoned with C.S.A. for “Confederate States of America,” while the buckles of northern soldiers simply read “U.S.”

The color of buckles also changed. In the early years of the conflict, until about 1863, the south was importing zinc from overseas for belt plates, and combining it with locally mined copper to create yellow brass, a light colored alloy that contains about 33 percent zinc.

As zinc became scarcer, red brass (at least 80 percent copper) grew more common, and buckles from this later period are characterized by their reddish tinge. They are also much less uniform in their makeup and appearance than pre-war buckles.

“A lot of times, buckle makers melted down stuff they already had to make buckles,” says Tim Parsely of Parsley’s Brass, another reproducer of Civil War buckles located in Hanover, VA. “Especially near the end of the war, they were more concerned with getting something out of it than with the precise way it looked.”

As a result, collectors consider the pre-war buckles with individual state insignias to be far more valuable than the buckles from the later part of the war.

“Union state buckles are collectable at a high price, and Confederate state buckles can give you a down payment on a house or buy you a car,” says Williams. “It’s because they are so rare.”

Today, Williams has closed his retail shop and mostly sells his buckles through the mail, to collectors and civil war aficionados.

“He used to sell a lot to the Civil War re-enactors,” says Theresa Williams, ”but I think he pretty much saturated that market.”

Many of Williams’ current clients, she said, seem motivated by the same love of history that has kept him hunting relics for 55 years. “He sells to a lot of people interested in their ancestry who find out that their grandfather fought in the civil war, and want the same belt buckle he was wearing at the time,” she says. “It’s pretty exciting to think that soldiers were once marching around the places we live now.”

Resources: Hanover Brass, 5155 Cold Harbor Rd., Mechanicsville, VA, (804) 781-1864