Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

I’ve only seen the game played in one place and that was in Manchester, N.H. We called it “Flip” and the object was to seat a baseball card between your fingers and thumb and then, using your own special technique, send the card tumbling sideways toward the ground. If you were good you could make it land face up or face down at will. The object was simple. One player would flip five to seven cards at a time and the opponent had to match what you had laid down. If you flipped a combination of say four heads and a tail, then the second player had to do the same thing, or they’d lose. The prize of course was the pile of cards. Serious games could involve twenty cards at a time. I, for one, happened to be very good and could increase my collection of cards without much difficulty. I lost occasionally and found out I didn’t like losing, especially if I lost the card of a big time ballplayer. That was another rule of the game. If you were willing to risk a Willie Mays card your opponent had to be willing to risk a card of similar value.

Not that we necessarily valued our cards as kids. The value lay more in how large a stack of cards you accumulated. We didn’t take care of them either. We wrapped rubber bands around the stacks, put them inside our baseball hats, and the spokes of our bicycle tires, attaching them with clothespins. The loud vroom sound they made while you were riding was like nirvana and when you had a pack of kids riding together mothers were absolutely terrified into thinking a motorcycle gang had invaded the neighborhood.

I don’t have a single baseball card from my childhood and even if I did they wouldn’t be worth anything because of the abuse they took. Don’t let any adult male who grew up in the 1950’s or 1960’s try to fool you into believing they’d be wealthy today if they still had their card collections.

Maybe it was an effort to somehow return to the innocence of childhood that led me to start buying baseball cards again in my early twenties. A couple of years later it seemed like everybody was into collecting. Then along came people who saw the hobby as an investment opportunity and who drove the price of cards skyward and out of the reach of the average kid or adult. The hobby was transformed from pure fun to something that resembled the stock market. The number of card shops that sprung up boggled the mind. A card that only a few months before had been selling for $20 or $25 was suddenly going for hundreds.

Fast forward to 2006. You have to look long and hard to find a card shop. The Wall Street crowds have faded away and the hobby has been returned to the faithful few. I stopped buying cards fifteen years ago when prices outdistanced my ability to pay, but unlike my childhood collection, I still have the cards. I recently thought about selling them and consulted a price guide to assess their current worth. What I saw surprised me a little, but shouldn’t have. The cards carry less value today than they did ten years ago and in most cases are worth less than what I paid for them.

Which brings us to the current state of all things Civil War, i.e. memorabilia, including equipment, books, letters, buttons, CDVs, etc., being sold at shows, in antique stores, and on eBay. One of the principles of economics states “whatever the market will bear.” And right now the market will bear an awful lot. eBay is an excellent barometer by which to measure the direction in which things are going. The concept of eBay is pure genius, a cyber flea market where you can find anything and everything your imagination could possibly wish for and even things you never dreamt of buying. Carte de Vistas of Civil War soldiers provide the best single example of where the market is headed. Five years ago an unidentified soldier would fetch a relatively low dollar value. Now it’s not unusual to see a dealer fetching $80 or even up to $175. If a dealer is able to identify the individual, winning bids can vary from a couple of hundred to more than a thousand, depending on the fame of that individual. A CDV of an identified private in the 6th Massachusetts Infantry recently sold for $625. One of Robert Gould Shaw fetched in the neighborhood of $1500. But it’s not limited to CDVs. A first edition set of Grant’s Memoirs, in very good condition, recently went to a first time bidder for more than $600. And we’re not talking about the “Shoulder Strap” edition. Contrast this to the $125 I paid for a set in similar condition at a bookstore in New Hampshire. There’s a feeding frenzy afoot with no end in sight, at least not for the foreseeable future.

So, where is all this leading us. In my humble opinion, in the same direction as baseball cards. Sooner or later prices are going to start eliminating the average buyer and the field will become the exclusive province of those who have the financial wherewithal and who view their collections as they do any other investment. If we fast forward twenty or even thirty years from now, what are we going to find? Will that $175 CDV of an unidentified Confederate soldier have increased in value, to say double, or will it be worth a tenth of what the buyer originally paid?

One of the saddest experiences Tom went through, and I certainly felt his pain on this one, was seeing a collection of letters, war time souvenirs, and equipment once belonging to his great-great grandfather Edmund Churchill go on the auction block. The letters formed a fairly large collection and we naively asked the dealer if he would allow us the opportunity to copy them. We were turned down flat, as the dealer informed us we would decrease their value by copying them. We accepted the fact the dealer had paid a small fortune to acquire the collection and was trying to make a profit on his investment. Yet, we were cut off completely from reading letters that would have helped us to round out the story of the 18th Massachusetts we are currently in the process of writing. I can’t believe the collector who purchased the letters had any emotional attachment to them when he wrote his check, at least not in the same way that Tom, Steve, or I would have.

All three of us have acquired items relating to the 18th Massachusetts. I can’t speak for Tom or Steve, but I wouldn’t consider selling any of my items even if offered twenty times the amount I paid for them. Ok, maybe I’d weaken a little if someone told me they’d give me thirty times their value.

All of this, in turn, led me to consider what my future obligation and responsibility is toward these items. I recently purchased 11 letters written by Pvt. Edward Loker, Co. H, 18th Massachusetts. I know I paid more than they were worth, but I was not going to risk letting them slip from our grasp. The word “our” meaning Steve, Tom, and me. There have been far too many items relating to the 18th that have eluded us and disappeared into other collectors’ hands. The Loker letters will be shared with the reading public through their inclusion in our history of the 18th Mass. and I’m taking steps to ensure they’ll be properly preserved, owing to their current fragile state.

I’ve made a verbal promise to will my collection to someone, not if, but when I leave this life. That promise in some ways presents a personal quandary and begs the question as to what is ultimately best for these items. Individually most of the items I have would not necessarily be considered valuable, but collectively as a grouping the value is probably fairly substantial. Should they remain in private hands, where they’ll certainly be treasured by those they’re bequeathed to, or do they belong in a museum or historical society where they can be accessed by many? I don’t know the answer. It’s a tough one to decide, whether individual emotional attachment and meaning outweigh the benefits of leaving them to the world. And it also poses a moral dilemma about keeping my word and not breaking a promise. Yet, I think that person would understand whatever the decision because they would know it would be one made from the heart.