Among the contenders for the first place in the nation to celebrate Memorial Day is Carbondale, Illinois, this blog’s hometown.  On April 29, 1866, Major General John A. Logan addressed a small crowd gathered at the town cemetery to honor their war dead.  Two years later, on May 5, 1868, in his role as commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, now-Congressman Logan proclaimed May 30 as a day for “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves” of fallen soldiers.

One of those fallen soldiers was Joseph Skipworth, a private in Company H of the 31st Illinois Infantry–the regiment Logan organized and led before he rose to higher command.  Skipworth idolized his colonel.  After the battle of Fort Donelson in February 1862 Skipworth penned some verse urging a relative back home to name a new baby after his hero.

Joseph to Mary Ann Skipworth, March 27, 1862, SCRC

“Delpha you had a boy/if you dont call it John A Logan dont call it at all/for John White he did fall/and John A Logan made them squall.”

( John H. White, second in command of the 31st, had been killed at Fort Donelson; Logan himself was nearly pronounced dead on the battlefield.)

Skipworth farmed in Williamson County, near the Jackson County line.  The nearest post office, Fredonia, has long since disappeared.  Joseph served the entire war from September 1861 to July 1865, fighting at Fort Donelson, through the Vicksburg campaign and the March to the Sea.  At Vicksburg he wrote to his wife Mary Ann on the back of a captured Confederate quartermaster’s form; at Savannah he wrote her on the back of a sheet of printed checks from the Planter’s Bank.

Skipworth survived the war but not for long: he died sometime between July 1865, when he was mustered out at Louisville, and December 1866, when Mary Ann remarried.  Besides his widow and four children he left behind some one hundred wartime letters.  Joseph was a phonetic speller who closed each letter the same way–”your affectionate husband until death”–and he occasionally bettered more literate soldiers in his descriptions of battle and army life.  A good example is his account of his first battle at Belmont, Missouri, November 7, 1861, written to Mary Ann three days later.

Joseph to Mary Ann Skipworth, November 10, 1861, SCRC

“I will tell you all about the great battle we had down here.  I got a bayonet run through the arm and a cannonball struck a tree close to me and the splinters from the tree hit me on the head and knocked me down but thank god I got up and hope [helped?] take a man that was by my side.  He was shot rite by my side and I could not load my gun anymore and I went to the hospital and had my arm dressed and fixed and all.  So I got shot in the back part of my head but it did not happen to go through the skull but it raised a knot on my head.  I tell you that there was no time for playing there.  Every man was put to his post and fighting like tigers but there was about five to one and we stood up to them like Men…. I would love to see you and tell you how it all went off.  I could not rite all about it in a week.  If only I could see you I would be glad.”

Joseph Skipworth is buried in McKinney Cemetery, Crab Orchard Township, about five miles from Woodlawn Cemetery in Carbondale, where his old commander began the tradition we honor each Memorial Day.

The Battle of Shiloh began on the morning of April 6, 1862, a Sunday.  Confederate troops attacked a Union camp at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, near the Mississippi border.  For two days the battle raged over river bluffs, farm fields, orchards, forested ravines, wagon roads, and a few rough-hewn log buildings, including a Methodist church known as Shiloh.  Estimates vary but as many as 110,000 soldiers took part: 45,000 Confederates and 65,000 Union troops, including the Union reinforcements that tipped the scales on the second day, forcing the Confederates back toward Mississippi.

William S. Morgan map of the battlefield at Shiloh; pencil on paper. Michael K. Lawler Papers, SCRC.

Afterward, 1700 soldiers on each side were dead, and the combined casualties (dead, wounded, and missing or captured) totaled 23,000.  It was then the largest battle yet waged on the North American continent.  Veterans who later fought in other great battles during the Vicksburg and Atlanta campaigns reportedly told new recruits that nothing compared to the ferocity of Shiloh.

The battle hinged in part on the Union’s tenacity in defending several key points during the afternoon of the first day, April 6.  The most famous of these was the Sunken Road, which the Confederates called the Hornet’s Nest.  Concentrated artillery and hand to hand fighting killed several hundred as troops from Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio held off repeated attacks by men from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  Union troops finally surrendered, but too late in the day for the Confederates to exploit the advantage.  Reinforcements arrived overnight and helped retake the ground lost the previous day.

William H. L. Wallace

One of the commanders at the Hornet’s Nest was William H. L. Wallace, a lawyer from Ottawa, Illinois.  Wallace was a Mexican War veteran who distinguished himself as colonel of the 11th Illinois in the Fort Donelson battle seven weeks before.  Promoted to brigadier general of volunteers, he commanded one of five divisions at Shiloh.  After hours of fighting, he ordered his men to withdraw, but Wallace himself was shot through the eye as his staff were driven off.  Confederates covered him with a blanket against the overnight rain, and when the Union retook the position in the morning, his brother-in-law, Cyrus E. Dickey, found him still breathing.

By coincidence, Wallace’s wife Ann had arrived the previous day to visit her husband.  Wallace was taken to Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters at the Cherry Mansion in Savannah, Tennessee, where Ann tended him for three days.  He had survived the wound but on April 10 he died, likely from infection, telling Ann “We meet in Heaven.”

SCRC holds only one letter from Wallace, but it occupies a special place in our Civil War collections.  Wallace wrote to Ann on January 13, 1862, from Bird’s Point, Missouri, on the Mississippi River.  His regiment had been ordered to join the expedition that was to capture Forts Henry and Donelson on the Kentucky-Tennessee border a month later.  But now he and his troops had seen little if any action, and he was excited and nervous.  He wrote that he had done all he could to make his men comfortable against snow and ice on the journey ahead.

“Going as we do, without knowing where or on what particular mission of course makes us all feel somewhat anxious, and it makes me feel that I am in the hands of a kind and overruling Providence who will order all for the best.  I feel & have ever felt since I embarked in this cause that the hand of God was in it, and that out of all this seeming evil He would evoke the greatest good.  Men, even the ablest & the best, are but instruments to accomplish his ends–and if He wills that they perish on the field or live to return to their homes, all is for the best.  Man can die but once, & to fall in support of the constitution and the government our fathers established under so many evidences of Divine favor, is no mean ending of this period of existence.  But I am looking to the worst contingency.  Beside this is the prospect of doing what I may to reestablish the government & then return unscathed to enjoy all the delights of a house hallowed by the presence & love of the best of women…. God bless you darling.  I feel comforted in the assurance that I have your prayers & Blossoms prompted by you.  Kiss the dear little “coot” for me–My love to Tilly–I love you dearest of all on earth–Good bye”

Among the materials donated to the Special Collections Research Center by Katherine Dunham is what appears to be a Black Madonna. Upon further research, I discovered that this is not really a black Madonna but Erzulie Dantor, a Haitian Voodoo goddess and her child and interpreter, Anais.

However, the image of Erzulie Dantor is based on the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.  The icon of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa is a sacred relic and national symbol of Poland. The Black Madonna of Czestochowa is an icon in Eastern Orthodox Byzantine style rather than typical Western Roman Catholic. The mother and child are dark-skinned. Mary has two scars on her right cheek inflicted on her by enemies of Poland who sought to desecrate the image. Some sources say she was once jeweled and the scars on her face come from where the thieves stole the jewels. In this image, like the image of Erzulie Dantor, the baby carries a book.  The baby in the Polish icon is the baby Jesus but in the Haitian icon, the baby is Anais.

Some differences between the Black Madonna and Erzulie Dantor are that Erzulie and her interpreter, Anais, wear gold-and-bejeweled crowns, and their halos are white instead of golden. The Black Madonna and baby Jesus are not crowned, but have golden halos.

The Haitians became acquainted with the Black Madonna when Polish soldiers brought copies of the icon with them during the Haitian Revolution against France. The Haitians modified the Polish image to suit their own needs. Poland’s Black Madonna has a fleur-de-lis on her robe. The fleur-de-lis is a symbol of France. It is often displayed in New Orleans as well. This symbol of Haiti’s oppressors is not found on Erzulie Dantor’s robe.

In Haitian Voodoo, Erzulie has three aspects. She can be Erzulie Freda, a virgin goddess likened to the Virgin Mary; Erzulie Dantor who is the goddess of jealousy and passion; or La Siren, a personification of the sea and goddess of motherhood.  Erzulie Dantor is a mulatto woman who is often portrayed as the Black Madonna, or the Roman Catholic “Saint Barbara Africana”. She is the Voodoo goddess of love, romance, art, jealously, passion and sex. She is the patron goddess of lesbian women, women experiencing domestic violence, women betrayed by lovers, single mothers, and business women. She is also the patron goddess of New Orleans. She loves women and will protect them at all costs. She also loves knives and is the protector of newly consecrated voodoo priests and priestesses.

Haitian tradition holds that the revolution against France began when the priestess, Erzulie Dantor, spoke rallying the oppressed majority of African descent to rise up against their French masters.

Legend holds that Erzulie Dantor was a priestess and a warrior and was abused during the revolution against France. According to one account, her tongue was cut out while she was tortured after being captured by the French. Another account says her own people cut out her tongue to keep her from revealing secrets to the enemy if she was captured. She is mute and can only speak one syllable, the sound of her tongue clicking on the roof of her mouth, “ke-ke-ke-ke!” As a result, Erzulie Dantor cannot speak in coherent language when she takes over one of her worshippers in the ecstasy of Lwa(goddess)-trance.  This is why she is pictured with her daughter, Anais, who serves as her interpreter since she cannot be understood.

Courtesy of Christina Gould

1950 postcard addressed to Ulysses S. Grant III. Grant Family Papers, SCRC.

On March 29, 1862–150 years ago–Major General Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his wife Julia from this house in Savannah, Tennessee.

Six weeks earlier and 120 miles up the Tennessee River, Grant had won his first big victory of the war, capturing Forts Henry and Donelson and more than 12,000 Confederate prisoners.  He captured a bit of the Northern mood as well, with his terse message to the Confederate commander at Donelson, Simon Bolivar Buckner.  Grant and Buckner were classmates twenty years before at West Point, but Grant refused to negotiate terms and demanded the “unconditional and immediate surrender” of the fort and its occupants.  The happy coincidence of the phrase “Unconditional Surrender” with Grant’s initials, which also stood for the nation, made him an instant hero in the North, where little had gone well in the first ten months of the war.  The capture of the forts was a strategic triumph, opening the Cumberland River from Paducah, Kentucky, to Nashville, which fell to the Union on February 25.  The Union navy also controlled the Tennessee River, leaving western Tennessee open to invasion.

In spite of his success and newfound acclaim, Grant spent the intervening weeks battling with his superior, General Henry W. Halleck.  Grant had not reported his movements and plans often enough to please Halleck, who ordered Grant to stay at Fort Henry while he tried to replace him.  Halleck failed–President Abraham Lincoln intervened and promoted Grant to major general.  Restored to command, on March 17 Grant followed his army up the Tennessee River (in this case, south) to Savannah, near the Mississippi border.  From his headquarters in the Cherry Mansion, he watched his forces gather a few miles away at Pittsburg Landing.  Many of the soldiers were untested recruits, and their training continued as the Confederate army massed in northern Mississippi.

Grant began his letter by reassuring Julia that he was now well, having weathered a bout of diarrhea and a malaria attack.  That said, he assessed the military situation:

Collection of Ulysses S. Grant materials, SCRC.

“Dont know when we will move.  Troops are constantly arriving so that I will soon have a very large army.  A big fight may be looked for someplace before a great while which it appears to me will be the last in the West.  This is all the time supposing that we will be successful which I never doubt for a single moment.”

Grant then updated Julia on staff matters before devoting the bulk of his letter to the feud with Halleck and the subsequent newspaper fallout.  He assured Julia that even Halleck would have regretted Grant’s removal.  And he concluded as he began, with a plain-spoken self confidence remarkable in a man who, a year earlier, seemed to have no future prospects–reduced to clerking in his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, after failing as a farmer outside St. Louis.

“You need not fear but what I will come out triumphantly.  I am pulling no wires, as political Generals do, to advance myself.  I have no future ambition.  My object is to carry on my part of this war successfully and I am perfectly willing that others may make all the glory they can out of it.”

A week later, on the morning of Sunday, April 6, a Confederate force of near 45,000 attacked the Union camp at Pittsburg Landing.  The Battle of Shiloh had begun.

Nancy Clendenin Mann (1829-1912) lived in Liberty (now Rockwood), Illinois, a small town on the Mississippi River about ten miles below Chester.  During the Civil War her husband John served in the Fifth Illinois Cavalry.  Nancy kept house and raised their four daughters.  Her letters to John kept him informed about town news, the girls’ activities and health, the price and availability of local commodities, and news of friends and relatives in other regiments.

Looking out on the busy Mississippi, Nancy sometimes witnessed scenes that brought the war to her doorstep. On February 20, 1862, she watched as five boatloads of Confederate prisoners, captured at the surrender of Fort Donelson on February 16, passed Liberty on their way to prison camps at Camp Butler in Springfield or Camp Douglas in Chicago.  Nancy wrote a breathless description for her husband, who had barely finished training camp and seen nothing yet of the war.

“My eyes are so tired with looking through the spy glass at rebel prisoners that I can scarcely see to write.  The S. B. Alex. Scott is laying at Hamiltons wood yard, laden with prisoners taken at Fort Donelson.  Emily, Nannie and I, have been looking through the glass at them.  They are clad in dirty looking garments of various colors.  They have no uniformity of dress, they do not have overcoats but wear a blanket with a hole in the center through which they put the head.  This gives them a very slovenly appearance.  The blankets are some red, some striped, some white, the dirtiest things you ever saw.  Tthe men walk, or sit, around on the boat.  They do not make a very lively appearance.  Our men who are guarding them on the boat step round with their heads up and try keep themselves warm.  You will never know what a contrast there is between the Union loveing men and the rebels untill you see them together,…” (Mann Family Papers; punctuation and capitalization corrected)

Launched in 1848, the steamboat Aleck Scott plied the Mississippi for more than a decade.  Samuel L. Clemens served as cub pilot on the Aleck Scott from December 1858 to April 1859, making five trips between St. Louis and New Orleans.  After the fifth trip Clemens acquired his pilot’s license, having worked two years on the river.  The dates and boats he served are chronicled here by the Mark Twain Project at the University of California at Berkeley.

Pressed into Union Army service as a quartermaster ship in 1861, the Aleck Scott was renamed Fort Henry after February 1862.  In September 1862 the ship was converted to an ironclad, renamed Lafayette and transferred to the Navy.

Christina Gould located the following letter to Edward and Gustave Carus from Paula Carus giving them advice on how to treat a lady. The letter is undated so we are not sure when or for what occasion she was issuing this advice but the letter is fabulous for Valentine’s day and perhaps others could benefit from Paula’s advice.

Dear Edward and Gustave,

I now take a great task upon myself by writing you this letter, and because of the importance of the facts herein discussed please read it, and think carefully over all that I have said.

1. Buy the girls’ tickets –-both ways if possible—the way back (away from Madison) if not.
2. Have rooms—the best possible and have a decent place for them to eat so that they will not have to be embarrassed by walking up and down the streets looking for an eating place.
3. See that your clothes are in perfect order.
   1. good dancing pumps and silk black stockings. (Edward, you must see that if Gustave goes he will have these.)
   2. A good evening suit—dress suit—you know the kind. A fine shirt, collar and white tie.
   3. The kind of hat necessary.
   4. Gloves, white gloves that fit.
   5. Then some kind of a coat and a white cravat (I mean ruffled neck piece.

That is all I can think of along the clothes line. Now when you meet her at the train be dressed decently. Gus should not have old shoes on but polished ones.  Your clothes should be brushed and put on strait, and you should be dressed warm enough that you do not look cold.

Now bring her to her room and be sure to introduce her to some girl—at least one.  I would be frantic if I should not meet any if I were one of your girls.  She must know one of her own sect living in the house where she is staying.  Then see that she has everything she wants. I don’t know what the custom is about supper. You will have to find out about that. You will also have to find out about the flowers.  She will need a special color to match her dress, but I don’t know just what you should do about it. Ask some other boy.  Then, don’t forget—the carriage—I suppose both of you will take one together or work it some way like that.

Then have all the dances taken that you possibly can. And see that she is introduced sometime to everyone she dances with.  I guess you know everything else to do that evening. Make some engagement with her for the next day. I don’t think you are meant to eat breakfast with her, but perhaps so. Try and do as many interesting things as you can, but also do not do anything she does not care to do.

Arrange everything very carefully with her before she comes—and be sure you know what train and also be sure that she knows where you live and who with so she will not get in the same fix that I was. –That was terrible.

Now for a very personal talk with both of you.  Please don’t get her into an embarrassing situation by anything that you do or by the way you dress. You owe to the girl (I talk in the abstract for I only know one.) that you are dressed well washed clean, no high water marks.

Don’t let her fall on the street (It is all icy, I know.) but don’t hang on to her arm too much.  Good luck to you both and please—oh please remember what I have written here and above all remember that she is a woman and you are a man—that every inch of you must be a man and show that you are in the way you treat her.

 I am, only, Your loving sister,

 Paula

In honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens (February 7, 1812), we present a sketch of the novelist and his wife Catherine, part of a series of caricatures by the Irish artist Henry Edward Doyle (1827-1892).

Charles and Catherine Dickens, from a sketch by Henry Edward Doyle. SCRC VFM 365.

Henry Doyle was the son and brother of political cartoonists John (“H. B.”) and Richard Doyle, both contributors to the British weekly Punch, to which Henry also contributed.  Henry later served as director of the National Gallery of Ireland (1869-1892).  Another brother, Charles, was the father of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Other caricatures in the small collection of Doyle sketches held by SCRC include the essayist Thomas Carlyle, Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth, Italian patriot Alessandro Gavazzi, and Irish painter George Petrie.  The collection also includes a letter dated May 8, 1878, from Irish poet Denis Florence MacCarthy to his son Florence.   The connection between the letter and the sketches is unclear.

Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet  

As part of Black History Month 2012, the Special Collections Research Center of Morris Library and the SIU Black History Month Committee cordially invites you to a lecture by Joanne Braxton, The College of William & Mary, on Monday, February 13, at 7 PM in Guyon Auditorium.  She will discuss “Reflections on Phillis and her daughters: Words of Liberation.”  You will also be able to view SIU’s very own copy of Phillis Wheatley’s “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral ” published in 1773 in London in the Hall of Presidents and Chancellors.

Please join us for a reception after Dr. Braxton’s presentation on behalf of the Friends of Morris Library.

Wiley Collection, John A. Logan Museum, Murphysboro, Illinois

The good people of Anna, Illinois, thirty miles north of Cairo, did not let the first Christmas of the Civil War pass without a traditional Christmas Ball.  Founded several years before along the line of the new Illinois Central Railroad, Anna had hosted a military camp for training recruits since the first month of the war.  Acting Mustering Officer Ulysses S. Grant spent a week there in May 1861, mustering in a regiment that became the 18th Illinois Infantry.  In a May 21 letter to his wife Julia, Grant shared his impressions of “the people of Egypt,” as southern Illinois was commonly known.  Though the local inhabitants, many with roots in the Confederate states, were stereotyped as “ignorant, disloyal, intemperate and generally heathenish,” Grant found instead that these recruits were “the equal, if not the superior, of any of the Regiments raised in the State, for all the virtues of which they are charged with being deficient.”  (The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Volume 2, p. 33.)  Anna remained a military camp for much of the war, and many Illinois recruits spent at least a few weeks there, learning the soldier’s trade, before heading south.

Among the managers listed on this invitation is Robert B. Stinson, “who carried on an extensive barrel factory near the railroad into Anna where he employed 30 men and manufactured 50,000 barrels per year and other packages for shipping fruit and vegetables.” (Lulu Leonard, History of Union County, [1941]).  Stinson, aged 30, enlisted in the army the day before this Christmas Ball and was mustered in seven weeks later as Second Lieutenant, Company F, 60th Illinois Infantry.  He served three and a half years and was mustered out in July 1865.  After the war he resumed his business and was active in the Grand Army of the Republic.  When he died in 1903, he endowed the city of Anna with a fund to build a “fireproof” library.   Through a chance local connection, the library board hired Walter Burley Griffin, architect and chief draftsman for Frank Lloyd Wright, to design it.  The Stinson Memorial Library was dedicated in 1914, just as Griffin left for Australia to design the new capital, Canberra.  Aside from a house Griffin designed for his brother in Edwardsville it is the only example of the Prairie Style school of architecture found in the southern third of Illinois.

Another manager was Wallace Kirkpatrick, who co-founded Anna Pottery with his brother Cornwall in 1859.  The brothers cast everything from sewer pipe to annual jugs commemorating the county fair.  Their temperance-themed liquor jugs, often in the shape of pigs (imbibers drank from the “wrong” end) or jars wreathed by snakes, are prized by collectors and museums as examples of Midwestern folk art.

Dancers at the ball whirled to the music of the Terpinitz String Band, led by Joseph E. Terpinitz, a local jeweler.  Born in 1836 in Austria, Terpinitz studied at the Vienna Conservatory of Music.  In a penciled reminiscence for Professor George W. Smith of the Southern Illinois Normal University in Carbondale, Terpinitz wrote:  “I was a revolutionist in the uprising in Vienna in 1848.  I was only twelve years old, I was seriously wounded by the saber stroke of an imperial cavalryman and was long in the hospital, after which I was spirited away into Switzerland where  I remained until Francis Joseph was placed upon the throne.”  In 1856, Terpinitz emigrated with his father to the Kornthal settlement, a community of Austrians just south of Jonesboro, Illinois.  He became a jeweler and started a band.  During the 1858 Senate campaign in Illinois, Democrats hired the Terpinitz band to play at the Jonesboro debate between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.  Terpinitz described his first sight of Lincoln, during the procession from the hotel to the debate ground.  “[W]e noticed to our left in the path by the road side a tall odd looking man walking along with his hands behind him.  He wore a tall plug hat, rather long tailed coat, and was a person who would attract one’s attention in a crowd.  He seemed in deep meditation walking with his head down. “  (Vertical File Manuscript 39, SCRC.)

The invitation is part of the Wiley collection, generously loaned to SCRC by the John A. Logan Museum in Murphysboro, Illinois.  The invitation accompanies a letter written by Mary Davie Perrine, wife of Thomas M. Perrine (also listed as manager), to her sister, Emily Davie Wiley.  The collection was scanned, uploaded to our digital Southern Illinois Civil War collection (to join our own Wiley family letters), and the originals returned to the museum.

At various times throughout the history of Illinois, coal has been king, particularly in Southern Illinois. A special exhibit at Southern Illinois University Carbondale  Special Collection Research Center spotlights the valuable resource and those whose lives it has touched.

This special exhibit highlights “Rock Dust Johnny,” as many knew the late mine safety pioneer and Franklin County resident John E. Jones.  Born in Wales in 1883, Jones was a seventh-generation coal mining industry worker who went on to earn a civil engineering degree and become a major player in the field of coal mine safety.  He initially served as a state mine inspector 1915-1917 and then worked as a safety engineer for Old Ben Coal Corp. from 1917 until retiring in 1952.

Credited by many as the preeminent authority on mine safety during the first half of the century, Jones pioneered a variety of safety practices including rock dusting, which he freely distributed to save miners’ lives although it was a patented technology.  In fact, many current federal regulations stemmed from his research. The Special Collections Research Center at Morris Library houses an extensive collection of Jones’ papers from 1910 to 1957.

Jones also collected Pennsylvanian age fossil plants in Southern Illinois, West Virginia and Arkansas and discovered the first long-leaved specimen “Lepidodendron” in 1942.  The exhibit also highlight’s the region’s coal resources.  Included are a collection of Jones’ materials and photographs by John Richardson of abandoned mines, as well as pictures of Southern Illinois coal mines and the miners who worked in them snapped by C. William “Doc” Horrell.

In addition, exhibit visitors can view photographs of Franklin County’s Orient I and II mines.  On Dec. 21, 1951, the Orient II mine became the site of the second worst mine disaster in the state’s history when 119 men died there.  The display also features other Illinois mine disasters, mine accidents in which five or more miners lost their lives.