After a series of battles in central Mississippi in May 1863, Union forces backed a Confederate army into the port stronghold  of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River bluffs.  A premature May 19 attack on the fortifications left a thousand Union soldiers dead and wounded. On May 22, Major General Ulysses S. Grant ordered his troops to make a second and broader assault.  Private Edwin A. Loosley fought in the 81st Illinois Infantry, part of Major General James B. McPherson’s 17th Army Corps, at the center of the May 22 assault.   On June 1, Loosley described the battle in a letter to his wife Ann.

“[W]e went up at a double quick, formed into line, and lay down in a hurry when the rebels opened onto us the most terrific fire that troops ever sustained.  They threw bushels of grape and canister from both flanks while infantry in front was pouring deadly volleys at us.  All the time we were ordered not to fire a shot till we got into the rebel works and there we lay shot down like dogs by scores without the power of returning a shot in a complete trap.  We were there about 10 minutes during which time 2 out of every 3 in our Company was shot…. I was to the left of the company and in a few minutes everyone in both ranks to my right for 10 yards was hit, the last one of them, leaving me solitary and alone and company ‘C’ on my left suffered nearly as bad.  I would not have given a counterfeit 5 cent piece on the Southern Confederacy for my life one minute the balls were so thick.  I lay there very patiently waiting for the ball to come and do its work but it did not come though they were all around me.  I could have picked up a hat full of balls without getting up.  They hit the ground under me and hit my clothes over me and several spent balls hit me but did not damage.  After about half the regiment was killed and wounded we were ordered to charge which we did.  We got about 30 yards of the rebels when we were ordered to retreat and then there was some tall running done you may be sure.  The attempt to storm was a failure all round the entire lines and our loss was fearful.”  Among the three thousand Union casualties was the commander of the 81st Illinois, James J. Dollins of Benton.  “Our Colonel was shot through the head the top being shot off.  There we lost a leader.  He was the soul of bravery and honor and I felt that I lost a friend when he was gone.”  Edwin, a baker before and after the war, had served Dollins as a cook.  (Edwin A. Loosley Papers, SCRC.)  See John Y. Simon, “An Illinois Soldier at Vicksburg,” Manuscripts, XIX, 3 (Summer 1967), 23-31.

After the second assault failed Grant and his army dug in.  The siege of Vicksburg had begun.

Thure de Thulstrup, “Siege of Vicksburg,” chromolithograph, Louis Prang & Company, 1888. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

On Wednesday and Thursday, April 17 and 18, SCRC celebrated SIUC’s 2013 Arts Education Festival, organized by the University Museum, by introducing some special visitors to the art of the book.

Judy Simpson and first-graders from Cobden, Illinois. Photo by Beth Martell.

Here, Judy Simpson gives a hands-on lesson to a first-grade class from Cobden in how books are made and how they are made beautiful.  The children washed their hands and got to touch a variety of covers and pages to feel the textures used in old and new books.  The books ranged in language and format and from the very old to a recent “musical book” by the Icelandic songstress Bjork.  The children attended Miss Judy’s instructions and were very respectful of the books.

Christina Gould (right), Anancia Stafford (left), and Cobden first-graders. Photo by Aaron Lisec.

Across the hall in the break room, another group of Cobden first-graders learned how to marbleize paper under the enthusiastic tutelage of SCRC’s Christina Gould.  Wearing painting smocks made from garbage bags the students mixed three drops of three different acrylic colors into the water on their plates, mixed the colors together with plastic forks, and dipped the paper into the resulting wash long enough for the image to absorb.   The finished pages, each a unique and beautiful one of a kind pattern, will be sent to the class once they dry.

Emily to Ben Wiley, April 5, 1863. SCRC Manuscripts.

April 5, 1863 was Easter Sunday, and Emily Wiley wrote to ask her husband Ben, stationed in Helena, Arkansas, with the 5th Illinois Cavalry, whether he had enjoyed eggs for breakfast as she had.

Emily’s news from Makanda that morning included concern over their son Willie, recently taken to St. Louis to board with an eye specialist.  She fretted that both Willie and his father were gone at the same time.  She wrote of her own health amid the constraints of a pregnancy she didn’t directly mention.

Tucked into the body of her letter is Emily’s account of an incident that hints at social and economic tensions simmering in her southern Illinois neighborhood halfway through the war.  “Last night about ten oclock four men rode up to gate and called/Maxfield went to door/they told him to tell me the boys had to leave in ten days or they would see some way for them to get away/he wanted them to come in and tell me/they told him he could tell me with an oath to it and if that did not do they would help them away/he did not know any of their names/one of them he had saw.  he said he went in to put on his p[an]ts and they had left by that time [he] was going out to have a talk with them/I was asleep and did not hear them.”  B. Maxfield is listed under B. Wiley in the 1865 Jackson County census; a Benjamin Maxfield married in Jackson County in June 1863.  Maxfield may have worked the Wileys’ farm in Ben Wiley’s absence.

Emily returned to this subject in her next letter, written April 9, 1863.  “The boys are washing some this morning expect to leave tonight or in morning/they have not decided which way they will go/they are afraid if they go north they could not get to stay and it would cost them just that much more/They are talking some of going to Cairo.  Think I shall try and go over to Shearers this afternoon/perhaps he would know which would be the best/I know he has no prejudice against them and would tell whatever he thought would be right/I got $40 for them from Daniel and some things at the store but that does not pay them up/told them whenever they got to some place where they could have someone write and let me know and I would send them the rest when I got it.”

In her book The Prairie Boys Go To War: The Fifth Illinois Cavalry 1861-1865 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013, p. 70), Rhonda Kohl quotes part of this passage and writes that Ben Wiley had hired African-American refugees in Cairo the previous fall to work on his farm.  Some months later Ben was charged under Illinois’ 1850s era “Black Laws” with importing blacks with the intent to free them.   That prosecutors aspired to enforce such a law even as their fellow citizens died fighting the men who had owned these refugees illustrates just how divided southern Illinois could be at any given place and time during the war.

Emily finished her April 9 letter with a piece of related news.  “Some person set fire to those houses of Fathers in the bottom where the bl[ac]k folks were/the fire was put out before it did much damage/the man that brought them there took them to Cairo and then I think to Island No 10.”  Emily’s father was Winstead Davie, an early Union County settler who named the town of Anna after her mother.  The “bottom” was the floodplain that stretched west of Jonesboro to the Mississippi River.

Patriotic envelope used by Joseph Skipworth, 33rd Illinois Infantry. SCRC Manuscripts.

Emily’s letters offer a cryptic peek into the shadowy world of the southern sympathizing Knights of the Golden Circle and less organized like-minded groups in southern Illinois.  For a fictional account of wartime strains among the Wileys’ neighbors along the Jackson-Union County border, see Mary Tracy Earle’s 1902 novel The Flag On The Hilltop, free on Google books.  For more on freedmen in the Makanda area see Kay Rippelmeyer, Giant City State Park and the Civilian Conservation Corps (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010, p. 22).

A heart felt thanks goes to our Graduate and Student Assistants for all their hard work.  We couldn’t do our work without you.  You guys rock!! Back row: Anancia Stafford (GA), Kristen Kelly, Brent Ritzel (GA), Jana Simonis (GA).  Front row: Hailey Stevens and Kierstyn Walton.  We love you, SCRC staff and faculty

On February 8, 1863, Private Edwin A. Loosley, 81st Illinois, wrote to his wife Ann from a camp near Memphis.  Having trained in Anna and Cairo, Illinois, during the previous summer and fall, the regiment had moved in stages from Cairo to Columbus, Kentucky, to Humboldt and La Grange, Tennessee.  Now they had orders to move in three days–rumor had it to Vicksburg.  Amid the bustle of preparations, Edwin confided his private worries to his wife.  “I expect for the first time to see the real elephant as we shall undoubtedly have a deal of fighting to do.”

Thure de Thulstrup, “The Battle of Shiloh,” chromolithograph, 1888. Louis Prang & Co., Boston.

In nineteenth-century America, “seeing the elephant” was slang for the penultimate experience, from the idea that once you saw an elephant at a circus or carnival, there wasn’t anything bigger to see.  In civilian life it was among other uses a euphemism for prostitution, as in a visit to a town’s red light district.  During the Civil War the phrase was widely used to describe a soldier’s initiation to combat.  See Joseph Allan Frank and George A. Reaves, Seeing the Elephant: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh (1989; reprinted 2003).

Edwin A. Loosley Papers, SCRC

Loosley anticipated a big battle for Vicksburg.  “I have no doubt but we shall take the place soon after our regement gets there, and I can only hope to come out safe, and well, and if I do that I shall be lucky as tis said to be A very unhealthy place.  but if I fall either by sickness or bullets I shall want you to kindly remember me to my children and when they get big to let them know that I fell in A good cause, that I fell A sacrifice to the demon of Slavery, and teach them to hate Slavery, both for my sake and the sake of the country, as much as tis possible to hate any thing.”

As noted in an earlier post, “The Emancipation Proclamation at 150,” Loosley and the 81st saw heavy combat in a series of battles leading up to the surrender of Vicksburg.  His vivid descriptions in letters to Ann will feature in future posts and in an exhibit to mark the sesquicentennial of the siege.

Mary Hegeler Carus

Help us mark Women’s History Month 2013 with a symposium celebrating women in engineering and science on Tuesday, March 5, at the Special Collections Research Center in Morris Library.  The symposium will feature “Petticoats and Slide Rules,” an exhibit on the life of Mary Hegeler Carus (1861-1936).

A native of La Salle, Illinois, Carus was the first woman to study engineering at the University of Michigan, graduating with her bachelor of science degree in 1882.  After further study at the School of Mines in Freiburg, Germany, Carus took an active role in the family zinc factory, which she ran after her father’s death in 1910.  When her husband died in 1919 Carus took over the other family business, The Open Court Publishing Company, specializing in philosophical and theological works that advanced scholarly discourse.  Her achievements in both ventures stand as a testament to her intellect and pioneering spirit in an era when a woman’s ambition was often bounded by the walls of her home.

The March 5 symposium will begin at 3 p.m. in Guyon Auditorium, Morris Library.  Speakers include Josephine Cantrell, great-great-granddaughter of Mary Hegeler Carus; Kay Purcell, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Southern Illinois University Carbondale; and Melinda Yeomans, Director, University Women’s Professional Advancement.  A reception and exhibit opening follow in the Hall of Presidents and Chancellors.

Carus flyer

SCRC is pleased to announce that retired U. S. Representative Jerry F. Costello of Illinois (D-Belleville) has chosen us as the repository for his congressional papers.  At the end of December 2012 SCRC received 705 boxes of materials from Representative Costello’s offices in Washington, D. C., Belleville and Carbondale.

Representative Costello was St. Clair County Board chairman when he was elected to Congress on August 9, 1988 to fill the vacant seat of the late Rep. Melvin Price.  He was elected to his first full term that fall.  His more than 24 years of service in the U. S. House of Representatives made him the longest serving member of the Illinois delegation at the time of his retirement.

Costello’s tenure in Congress covered a very import period in history of southern Illinois and the nation, from the end of the Cold War through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  His work on behalf of his southern Illinois constituents stretched from the floods of 1993 through the May 2009 derecho to the tornados that severely damaged Harrisburg and other parts of southern Illinois in February 2012.

Costello served on the Science, Space and Technology Committee and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, rising to the rank of chair of the aviation subcommittee.  Through his committee work Costello accomplished much to improve the infrastructure of southern Illinois.  Notable achievements include work on Mississippi River bridges, bringing the Metro Link from St. Louis to the Metro East, and finding new roles for Scott Air Force Base to preserve Illinois jobs.

“The donation of these papers is a great boon to researchers at SIUC,” said political papers archivist Walter Ray.  “All of Costello’s work on national issues and on behalf of his constituents is well documented.  From his work on the aviation subcommittee alone there are some 42 cubic feet of material, perhaps 100,000 pages of documents.”

Costello’s papers join those of U. S. Senators Paul Simon and Roland Burris, U. S. Representatives Ken Gray and Glenn Poshard, St. Louis Mayor Clarence Harmon, Illinois State Senator Kenneth Buzbee, Illinois State Representative Jeanne Hurley Simon, and the records of a number of community groups, grassroots organizations and labor unions, which make up SCRC’s political papers unit.  “SCRC is rapidly becoming an important center for the study of local, regional, and national political history,” said Ray.  “Representative Costello’s papers will be an important addition because of his length of service and the significance of his accomplishments.”

Representative Costello’s papers are currently being inventoried.  According to the terms of the transfer, parts of the collection will become available to researchers by the end of next year.

Melissa Barden, Ohio, Age Over 80. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

SCRC is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863) with an exhibit that highlights narratives of three former slaves from neighboring states as well as excerpts from two southern Illinois soldiers discussing slavery.

Lucy Davis lived at 319 S. Frederick Street in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, when the Federal Writer’s Project interviewed her sometime between 1936 and 1938.  Her narrative, held in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, was rendered in the syntax and orthography of “Negro dialect” so commonplace at the time and so offensive to modern readers.  Lucy remembered the war as a little girl enslaved by a Cape Girardeau family.  “When de sojers was round de neighborhood dey’d allus have me playing’ round de front gate so I cud tell em when dey’s comin’ up the road.  Den dey goes an’ hides ‘fore de sojers gits dar.  Dey all skeer’d o’ de sojers.  I’s skeerd too but dey say sojers won’t bother little black gal.”  Lucy also recalled her emancipation. “When de war wuz over Ole Massa Joe came in an’ he say, ‘Rose, you all aint slaves no mo’–You is all free as I is.’  Den you should a heard my mammy shout!  You never heard sich shoutin’ in all yo’ bahn days.”  As slaves in a border state, Lucy and her mother had to wait for the end of the war for their freedom–two years and four months longer than slaves in Union-held parts of neighboring Arkansas or Tennessee, less than a hundred miles down the Mississippi River from Cape Girardeau.

Peter Dunn, Indiana. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Another Cape Girardeau resident, James Monroe Abbot, lived in the late 1930s in an alley a half block north of the A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) Church.  James too remembered emancipation.  “Wen de war wuz over dey didden want us to know bout it.  Dey want to keep us es long es they could.  But it cum out in de papers dat de Guvment men wuz gonna cum round an’ see so dey had tuh turn us loose.”

Charles Graham, interviewed in Little Rock, was born in Clarksville, Tennessee on September 27, 1859. “The first clear thing I remember was when everybody was rejoicing because they were free.  The soldiers were playing and boxing and chucking watermelons at one another.  They had great long guns called muskets.  I heard ‘em say that Abraham Lincoln had turned ‘em loose.  Where I was at, they turned ‘em loose in ’63.  Lincoln was assassinated in ’65.  I heard that the morning after it was done.  We was turned loose long before then.  I was too young to pay much attention, but they were cutting up and clapping their hands and carrying on something terrible, and shouting, ‘Free, free, old Abraham done turned us loose.’”

Edwin Loosley in the Murphysboro (Illinois) Independent, September 1893.

SCRC’s own holdings include two commentaries on slavery from southern Illinois soldiers.  Edwin Loosley, born in 1835 in England, a baker before the war, served as cook in the 81st Illinois.  Stationed in Cairo in September 1862, training to be a soldier, Loosley wrote to his wife Anne after bathing at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.  “I went to where the 2 rivers meet, to the extreme point of free soil, in the country/on one side was Kentucky and on the other lay Missouri, both slave states, and both protectors of the institution that has already cost so much bloodshed and misery, and unhappiness, and has broken up so many firesides among which is our own, and I could not help but regarding the war as but a great punishment for the great sin that has been committed for so many years, and I think the punishment is but just, though the innocent might suffer with the guilty.  The Mississippi was thick the waters dark, muddy, and troublous, and stormy just how the times are now.  The Ohio was clear, calm and placid like a beautiful lake or mirror, and it reminded me of how the times used to be and how they will be again/one seemed to be the emblem of peace and the other of war.”  Loosley later saw heavy combat in the Vicksburg campaign, and a future post (and exhibit) will showcase his vivid descriptions of battle in long letters home to Anne.

Excerpt from March 30, 1862 letter from Amos to Emily Sanford. VFM 1951, SCRC.

Born in Ohio in 1836, Amos Sanford settled in Illinois and practiced law before joining the 55th Illinois.  A week before he fought in the battle of Shiloh, he wrote his wife Emily from Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee.  “About a mile from here I saw a negro woman ploughing with one old horse, & a small one horse plough.  She just skimmed the ground, & didn’t plough more than 2 inches & yet it is as good as the soil will bear…. But the old negro woman has been to work in this way for the last week and where do you think her master keeps himself, why he sits in the manse & talks to the soldiers that come up to his door & when he gets tired of sitting up he lays down on the bed.  He has a wife & several children and this poor old negro woman works & earns enough for the whole family.  Poor Woman! when will the day come when these poor people will be allowed to call their souls their own?  I felt like giving the lazy master a good kicking and setting him to work.  The lazy trifling scamp!  The house he lives in is no better than the one we lived in the Summer of 1851 on the Prairie & yet this man has not ambition enough to even daub it up with mud.  You can’t have any Idea what a set of ignoramusses the people down here.  All of them wear butternut clothes & are too lazy to do anything except raise “Secesh” soldiers & cotton‑‑and Slavery is the great cause of all of it.”

“The Emancipation Proclamation at 150″ is on display Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 4:30, in the Hall of Presidents, Morris Library.

Funding to support a traveling exhibit and programs on Mary Hegeler Carus at the Southern University at Carbondale during Women’s History Month in March 2013. 

Mary Hegeler Carus was the first women to study engineering at the University of Michigan and was the president of the Matthiessen and Hegeler Zinc Company in Peru, IL from 1903 to 1936. She distinguished herself as a mining engineer, industrialist and philanthropist. 

The Morris Library of SIUC holds the family papers of Mary Hegeler Carus and plans to develop a traveling exhibit titled,  “Petticoats and Slide Rulers: The Life of Mary Hegeler Carus” that will tell the story of how American women have shaped technology and society for over one hundred years. 

The exhibit will be first presented at SIUC’s Morris Library and will eventually travel around the state. The public programs related to the exhibit will take place at two middle schools in Carbondale and LaSAlle, the Hegeler Carus Mansion in LaSalle, and at the SIUC campus. Two scholars from the Special Collection Research Center will participate in the programs as well as Josephine Cantrell, the great-great granddaughter of Hegeler Carus.

Thanks to the work of Morris Library’s Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), anyone can view “a wealth of information about the growth of Southern Illinois University, the activities of its students, as well as writings by students,” says SCRC Director Pam Hackbart-Dean. “After selecting the year you would like to view, these yearbooks can be read either online, by PDF, or even on your Kindle.” Digitized through the University Archives and the CARLI Book Digitization program, the SIU student annual yearbooks available include the Sphinx (1899), Obelisk (1914-1973), and Obelisk II (1976-1987 and 2004-2005). Browse them at archive.org, and put Obelisk in the search box. To see all collections related to SIU, go to http://archive.org/details/southernillinoisunivcarbondale.