Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

The Seminar's Saturday morning session continues as Scott Hartwig, a Supervisory Park Ranger at Gettysburg, follows William Hewitt and steps up to present to his audience “The Gettysburg Campaign and Battle – An Eclectic Review.”

Co-sponsored by the Gettysburg National Military Park and The Gettysburg Foundation, this bi-annual seminar, which this year focused on “Gettysburg: The Aftermath and The End of the Campaign,” has to be one of the best kept secrets going. I found out about the seminar by word- of-mouth only three weeks before the event and was fortunate to get in, because enrollment was limited to 250 participnts. I’m labeling the seminar a well kept secret, because in February I had put together a long list of conferences and seminars scheduled for around the country during the year and will give you a guess as to one didn’t that appear on that list.

This is a genealogical truth: most branches of a family tree wither and die out after four generations. Charles Lachman's chronicle of Abraham Lincoln's family, "The Last Lincolns: The Rise and Fall of a Great American Family" certainly bears this out.

Every now and then, I am surprised at how far we as a country have come. While searching for that elusive Confederate relative, I found that I have a relative that is a veteran of The Spanish-American War. So I started following up leads on him and found something called “The Georgia Society of New York”.

I couldn’t find much on it, besides news articles in the New York Times and the Evening Independent. Most of the article were about events that the Society was holding but one, in the Evening Independent had the following:

New York, March 28 – Members of the Georgia Society of New York will give an entertainment this evening at the Plaza for the benefit of the philanthropic fund of the society. Impersonations of Southern darkies and mammies will be followed by a playlet and a reception and dance.

I have to admit, I am quite happy on how much we as a society have come over the past 100 years – and that we don’t have to worry about reading anything as offensive as this in today’s papers.

Locked into a forty to fifty hour per week grind of a job that you absolutely hate? Then Gloria Swift will make you hate that job even more. As Curator of the Ford's Theater Museum she's doing something she absolutely loves, i.e. seeing and touching history every single work day and still getting goose bumps in the process. She's so passionate about her work, in fact, that her husband has been urging her to write an article titled "Dead Men I Have Loved."

A former seminary student whose passion turned from religion to looking fashionably good in the saddle while riding hard and fast as a courier for the Confederacy, John Harrison Surratt was the only member of the conspiracy to kidnap/assassinate Abraham Lincoln who was tried before a civil court and the only one to escape punishment. Had he been caught in the dragnet that swept up members of Booth's team in April 1865 Surratt would have undoubtedly swung from the gallows next to his mother Mary. Former Navy pilot and now full time author Andrew C.A. Jampoler traces Surratt's flight to avoid prosecution, his capture in, of all places, Alexandria, Egypt, and a quirk in the law that ultimately set him free. After hearing the full story no one should wonder as to why Surratt's post-assassination saga helped fuel allegations of the Catholic Church's complicity in Lincoln's murder.