Skip to main content

Echoes Of The Civil War

March 2023
1min read

In “A Confederate Odyssey” by Charles Hemming (December 1984), the young Confederate lands near the St. Mark’s Lighthouse. The lighthouse is still there, and the Battle of Natural Bridge, which decided that Tallahassee would be the only state capital not taken by Union forces, is still reenacted each year in the swamps of Wakulla County. Only fifteen years ago ammunition stored by the cadets in Tallahassee was unearthed on the Campus of the Florida State University, having been left when they marched off to battle.

In the same issue, the moving story by Everett Wood on the effect of Stephen Vincent Benêt on an Alabama ensign reminded me of my own introduction to that poet and storyteller. At that time I was stationed at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, with the 87th Infantry Division in the spring of 1943. Since passes into town were infrequent, I was fortunate to discover that the post library was close to our company street.

In browsing I discovered John Brown’s Body and, like Lieutenant Wood, I was enchanted, fascinated, and drawn into involuntarily memorizing. In the same library I found The Devil and Daniel Webster and Other Stories . Later, while in an Army hospital in England, I was fortunate to come across the Pocket Book of Americans by Rosemary and Stephen Benét.

Benét’s next book in the Western Star sequence was to have begun:


Now for my country that it still may live, All that I have, all that I am I’ll give. It is not much besides the gift of the brave And yet accept it, since ‘tis all I have.

The gift, as Wood and I have found, greatly exceeded the worth placed on it by the giver.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April/May 1985"

Authored by: Andrew Kull

It was a hundred years ago, and the game has changed a good deal since then. But there are plenty of people who still hold that cranky old Hoss Radbourn was the finest that ever lived.

Authored by: Jonathan Yardley

Walden is here, of course; but so too is Fanny Farmer’s first cookbook

Authored by: Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr.

While a whole generation of artists sought inspiration in the wilderness, George Inness was painting the fields and farms of a man-made countryside

Authored by: David Nasaw

One of the country’ more bizzarre labor disputes pitted a crowed of outraged newsboys against two powerful opponents—Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolf Hearst

Authored by: Joseph E. Persico

Forty years ago, a tangle of chaotic events led to the death of Hitler, the surrender of the Nazis, and the end of World War II in Europe

Authored by: Roland Marchand

The twenties and thirties saw a host of new ways to separate customers from their money. The methods have not been forgotten.

Authored by: William D. Middleton

Magnificently impractical and obsolete almost as soon as they were built, the cable lines briefly dominated urban transportation throughout the country

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.