behind AotW

Tom Clemens makes his debut in the blogosphere today on The Maryland Campaign of 1862. That’s also the title of his two-volume series coming soon from Savas-Beatie: a carefully annotated edition of General Ezra Carman’s life’s work.

Volume 1: South Mountain arrives mid-May 2010.

Among other things, Tom promises to use the site to get some of the hundreds of letters from battle veterans to Carman and the Antietam Battlefield Board online. Those eyewitness accounts formed much of the factual basis for Carman’s iconic narrative of the battle.

Tom’s new website/blog uses WordPress software, with a custom visual design built on the Thematic framework. I can recommend this software combination to anyone who wants to get online quickly, while still serving clean, fast-running and compliant code, with simple maintenance and vast flexibility in visual appearance.

In short, the tool doesn’t get in the way of the content.

WordPress makes it easy for Tom – who is not a web guy by profession – to maintain both the content and the look & feel of his online home down the road.

Good blogging and welcome, Tom!

As I’m sure you know by now, the excellent web gallery Generals of the American Civil War is offline. The site was a comprehensive online collection of photographs of very nearly every Confederate and Union General (about 1,000 individuals) – plus most of the 1,400 Federal officers who were made General by brevet. It had operated since 2001 as generalsandbrevets.com, and I remember it being up under another url for at least a couple of years before that.

When I first noticed the loss back in March 2009, I asked site owner and collector Mikel Uriguen about it by email. He could only tell me that he could no longer keep it going. I asked if I could help in any way. I also offered to host and maintain the site on his behalf, but have no further reply.

On the original site he wrote:

I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Mikel Uriguen and I live in Bilbao, a city in the Spanish Basque-Country. I’m a long-time enthusiast of the American Civil War. On this site I’ve tried to collect pictures of every general officer of the War. It’s usually interesting to put a face with a name.

In another section of this site you’ll also find the pictures of those officers appointed to brigadier or major general by brevet.

I realize that this type of site might be a little dull to some visitors. But we have to remember the real value of data-base sites: they assemble related material (in this case pictures) in an organized way and offer it to those who are interested.

He’s absolutely right about the tremendous value of his online collection. For that reason, I’m having trouble simply accepting that it’s gone. I think it’s too useful to too many people to let it go extinct.

As an experiment in PHP programming I’ve prototyped a database-backed site that might reprise the concept of generalsandbrevets. I have excess capacity on my own server and I could make some time over the coming months to re-gather and index the photos and push them into the database. It wouldn’t be difficult with a good picture “scraping” script – or help from online friends.  Given that all the pictures he so carefully collected and posted are in the public domain, there’s no legal reason I couldn’t build another website home for these Generals’ faces.

The problem, of course, is that it was Mikel’s site – and his image collection – and he’s chosen (or been forced) to take it down. The reasons are none of my business, and his privacy is key. I feel I’ve already intruded enough and don’t want to badger him again.

So. What to do, what to do. Swoop in like some kind of vulture?  Just let it drop?

Either of my readers have a thought?

Frank Schell accompanied the Army of the Potomac on the Maryland Campaign of 1862, and was on the field for the battle on 17 September.  He was a civilian there from New York – a sketch artist for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

Fortunately for those who study the battle, a number of his original battlefield sketches have survived. I’ve recently discovered a set sold at auction in 2007, and a group preserved in a collection at Boston College, in particular. I’ve grabbed some selected gems among them to use here.

Even better, in 1904 Schell published his recollection of the events that were going on around him as he was drawing these same pictures. So in sharing his pictures and his superb eye, I can also leave the writing to Frank – to narrate his own drawings and give us a sense of his Battle of Antietam.

Hooker’s Corps crosses the Antietam (16 September 1862, pub. Leslie’s 11 Oct 1862)

As I awoke soon after daylight on the morning of September 17, 1862,  the air was already vibrating with mighty sounds of battle … With spirits aflame, I speeded at my best from Keedysville for the headquarters of the commanding general … I joined the group about the commanding general, who was anxiously scanning through his field glass the situation to the right, across the Antietam. Looking more to the left, the thick west wood, with its dark, broad front so clearly emphasized by the little white Dunker church, was clearly in view along its entire extent upon the Hagerstown turnpike.

General McClellan suddenly lowered his glass, and, with a few animated words and expressive gestures, called Porter’s attention to something that caused an immediate ferment of buzzing excitement throughout the group and a close scrutinizing of the bit of woodland, for the time being, the focus of such absorbing interest …

An excellent companion to Moore’s Roster for researching North Carolina troops is the 5 Volume Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War, 1861-1865, published by the State of North Carolina in 1901. Editor Walter Clark was Adjutant of the 35th Regiment at Sharpsburg, and later Lieutenant Colonel of the 70th Regiment.

All NC military units – along with an array of related subjects – are represented in one or more articles, and each piece is written by a veteran who served in the regiment, battalion, or battery. Their works range from brief essays to fairly sophisticated unit histories. As a bonus, most include selections of war-period photographs of officers and men.  There are hundreds of faces altogether across the volumes.

These volumes are available online from both GoogleBooks and the Internet Archive (IA) Collection.  I like the IA image quality and paging interface best, so a hyperlinked table of contents (hyperTOC) for that online edition follows …