Philadelphia’s Civil War

You may never have heard of the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum of Philadelphia, but not because it hasn’t been around for a while. It was founded in 1888, by members of a veterans group called the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, and it’s the oldest Civil War museum in the nation. It has resided since 1922 in a brick row house on Pine Street. For most of that time it was simply the Civil War Library and Museum; in 2003 it added “Underground Railroad” to its name.

Philadelphia, with a large free black population and active abolitionist organizations, was an important hub along that surreptitious and informal network of escape routes from slavery. Adding that to the Museum’s title was a decision to broaden both the appeal of the institution and the story it tells. And further changes are on the way. Harris Baum, the museum’s chairman, says that by 2009 the entire collection—3,000 artifacts, 7,000 books, and thousands of photographs and documents—will move into a building leased from National Park Service, closer to Independence Mall. The emphasis in the new location, Baum says, will be on “what it was like to be a citizen—maybe not even a citizen, but just a person—in Philadelphia during the Civil War.”

Visitors should hope the move won’t alter the museum’s unique personality. It’s a row house–size cabinet of curiosities, a throwback to the way museums used to be. The stairs and wooden floors creak with age. There are paintings everywhere, portraits and lots of Civil War escutcheons, a once-fashionable way to emblazon your war record in a colorful coat-of-arms. An armory of Civil War weapons occupies the top floor. One level below, a glass case in the Confederate Room holds President Jefferson Davis’s dressing gown, a brightly colored garment that may have been responsible for the stories that he was captured disguised as a woman. (One contemporary cartoon on display shows him fleeing in a dress, with the caption, “Don’t provoke him. He might hurt you.”) The room’s other artifacts include a scarf that belonged to the famous Confederate cavalryman John Singleton Mosby and a blanket used by Henry Wirz, commander of the notorious Andersonville Prison, while he awaited trial in a Washington jail.

Down another floor, the Abraham Lincoln Room displays a variety of Lincoln images, including a huge bust by Henry K. Bush that sits on one of the room’s “battle logs,” a piece of tree stump from Big Round Top at Gettysburg with a large shell embedded in it. A slab of marble from Lincoln’s original vault sits on another battle log. The Grant Room has a death mask of the general, a cigar case, and the pen Lincoln used to sign his commission as lieutenant general.

The ground floor contains a small exhibit about slavery. There you can see one of the pikes John Brown used at Harpers Ferry in his 1859 raid, copies of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, paintings and artifacts related to African-American soldiers who fought for the Union, slave shackles, and an early edition of William Still’s history of the Underground Railroad.

“The Underground Railroad will still be an important part of the museum,” Baum says, “and that’s because Philadelphia was important to the Underground Railroad.” Still was one reason why. Born free in 1821 to parents who had once been slaves, he moved to Philadelphia when he was 23, taught himself to read and write, and became a prominent contact for fugitives. As a member of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and director of the General Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia, which helped finance Harriet Tubman’s efforts to get slaves out of the South, he used his contacts with safe houses around the Northeast to help escapees move north toward Canada. He also interviewed fugitives he aided, seeking information he could use to reunite families torn apart by slavery. In 1872 he published the stories he had collected as The Underground Railroad. In one of its most dramatic episodes, he told of how one of the escapees he interviewed, a man he had never met before, turned out to be his own brother.

The slavery exhibit shares the ground floor with the General George Gordon Meade Room. The most unusual artifact there is the head of Old Baldy, Meade’s horse. The general bought him for $150 after the First Battle of Bull Run, where the animal had been twice wounded. It suffered an additional dozen wounds during the war. Meade often rode Old Baldy in Philadelphia afterwards, and the horse marched riderless in the general’s funeral procession in 1872. Old Baldy died in 1882 at the age of 30. Today his head is mounted on a plaque that lists the battles he witnessed, inside a glass case it shares with Meade’s spurs and riding boots. Nearby are a huge full-length portrait of the general and the frock coat and slouch hat he wore at Gettysburg.

Meade, born in Cadiz, Spain, to American parents and raised in Philadelphia, was living just around the corner from the museum at the time of his death. He now resides permanently at Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery, a sprawling necropolis on rolling hills above the Schuylkill River. It’s a riot of Victorian funerary sculpture, with carved wreaths, broken columns, weeping figures, urns, shields, angels, obelisks, and ornate mausoleums. There’s also a stone for a fictional character, Adrian Balboa, the wife of Rocky. After creating the stone as a prop in the film Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone donated it to the cemetery.

Meade and his family lie beneath modest marbles sheltered by a big maple on the slope of a hillside overlooking the river. As he did at Gettysburg, he commands the high ground. While the more grandiose monuments at Laurel Hill proclaim the importance of the dead they commemorate, Meade was content with a simple marker. “He did his work bravely and is at rest,” it reads.

The Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum, 1805 Pine Street, is open 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Thursday to Saturday. Admission is $5 for adults. Visit www.cwurmuseum.org or call (215) 735-8196. Laurel Hill Cemetery, at 3822 Ridge Avenue, is open 8 to 4:30 weekdays and 9:30 to 5 weekends. Visit www.thelaurelhillcemetery.org or call (215) 228-8200.