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Walking in Lew Wallace's Shoes

Ray Boomhower — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 08:15:00 -0400

A retired U.S. Department of Defense employee who serves as a volunteer at the Monocacy National Battlefield, Gail Stephens, author of the new IHS Press book Shadow of Shiloh: Major General Lew Wallace in the Civil War, also lectures on the Civil War, teaches courses at area colleges and gives battlefield tours. Here she talks about her experiences in writing about Wallace.

What inspired you to write a book about Lew Wallace's Civil War career?

I've been a volunteer at Monocacy National Battlefield, south of Frederick, Md., for 10 years. On July 9, 1864, at the battle of Monocacy, Wallace, with 6,500 men, half of whom had never fought in a battle, held a veteran Confederate army of 14,000 for an entire day, giving Ulysses S. Grant time to reinforce a vulnerable Washington, D.C, only 30 miles to the south.

I was curious how a man who had accomplished this feat could have been out of field command between the fall of 1862 and March 1864. I was told that he had failed Grant at Shiloh on April 6, 1862, when he arrived too late to fight that day, and that Grant had gotten rid of him. That Wallace should have been so very careless, cowardly or incompetent was difficult for me to reconcile with the man who fought at Monocacy. I decided to see what answers I could find in the primary sources and this book is the result.

How important were your actual visits to battlefields in writing the book?

Crucial. A battlefield must be seen to be interpreted and ground must be walked in order to understand why officers and men made the decisions they made. In October 2005, with seven other historians, I walked the entire route of Wallace's controversial April 6 march to the battlefield of Shiloh. What we learned that day in terms of the length, difficulty and timing of the march is key to my conclusions about that controversy.

Just how good a general was Wallace?

I think that the battle of Monocacy and his defense of Cincinnati in September 1862 demonstrate how good he actually was. He understood the importance of terrain because at Monocacy, he picked a position on high bluffs with a river in his front, where he had an edge that would in part make up for his much smaller force. He placed his best troops – the veteran division from Grant's army – where he expected the most fighting and his green troops along the periphery. He used his one six-gun battery of artillery judiciously to protect a bridge and to provide aid to his veteran division. Most important, he knew how long to fight and when to give it up.

At Cincinnati, he showed that he was not only good at fighting but good at organizing. Between Sept. 2 and 10, 1862, with Lt. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith's Confederate army just 80 miles away, he assembled a force of 72,000 volunteers, completed seven miles of fortifications with eight artillery batteries, and armed 18 steamboats to patrol the Ohio River, a herculean task. On Sept. 10, when Maj. Gen. Harry Heth's division of 10,000 moved on Cincinnati at Smith's order, Heth judged the city to well defended and retreated. Wallace had good military instincts, was a tough, scrappy fighter, and had a natural ability to lead men and choose where and how he would fight. However, Wallace had a problem with authority and he was not a team player, fatal qualities in the army.

What was Wallace's greatest service to the Union cause during the war?

Wallace had some great military moments, his afternoon attack at Fort Donelson, which regained the potential Confederate escape route for the Union, his defense of Cincinnati, and his "brilliant little battle of Monocacy," which helped save Washington, D.C., but one non-military event may trump those.

In 1864, when Wallace took command of the Middle Department, President Abraham Lincoln told him that he had a most important task – to ensure that slavery was abolished in Maryland by a constitutional process and without excessive military intervention. In previous elections, the Union military had exercised a heavy hand in secession-prone Maryland. The stakes were very high in 1864 when Maryland first prepared to vote on which delegates they would send to a constitutional convention where the key issue was whether to abolish slavery. The state's voters would then be asked whether they approved of the amended constitution. Lincoln desperately wanted one of the border states to abolish slavery via a peaceful constitutional process and demonstrate that democracy was firmly entrenched in the Union. Wallace worked closely with the Unionist governor of Maryland, Augustus Bradford, and local judges of election to ensure that the election was fair and peaceful, so his troops remained in their encampment. It worked. Slavery was abolished in Maryland on Nov. 1, 1864, and Wallace had a 100-gun salute fired from Fort McHenry, the inspiration for The Star-Spangled Banner. One Marylander wrote Wallace that his name would forever be associated "with a cause more enduring than that of many a stricken field – that of free institutions and their consolidation forever."

Did Wallace every achieve any kind of "peace" about what happened at Shiloh?

I don't think so. Shiloh was widely discussed and even though Grant exonerated him in his memoirs, but even after they were published, the criticism continued. For a man to whom honor was a tangible concept, this criticism was a constant thorn in his side. He fought the charges whenever and wherever he could, but they always pained him.

What is your next project?

I'm writing an essay on the role of national cemeteries in battlefield preservation, more specifically on whether the men who created the national cemeteries on Civil War battlefields like Gettysburg and Shiloh understood that in creating these hallowed places, they were preserving the core of what would become today's national battlefield parks. When that's published, I would like to dig more deeply into the 1864 advance on Washington, D.C., so memorably delayed by Wallace, in particular the reasons behind Robert E. Lee's decision to send an army to seize the Union capital, the reasons why the Union high command was so slow to realize Washington was vulnerable, and the repercussions from the campaign.

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Ray E. Boomhower is senior editor for the IHS Press. He likes to think he can write faster than anyone who can write better and write better than anyone who can write faster.

Let's Talk About Beer

Ray Boomhower — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:00:00 -0400

A Bloomington-based independent journalist and writer, Douglas A. Wissing, author of the new IHS Press book Indiana: One Pint at a Time; A Traveler's Guide to Indiana's Breweries, brings some family history to his work detailing the history and culture of the Hoosier State's brewing history. Wissing is a descendant of nineteenth-century Indiana-German brewers. In the following interview, Wissing, who has covered the war in Afghanistan, reflects on his experiences writing about Indiana's brewing past and present.

Did you know much about the history of beer in Indiana before you began your research for Indiana: One Pint at a Time?

From growing up in southern Indiana, I had experience with later industrial beers brewed in Evansville, Fort Wayne and South Bend, and knew about some of the historical breweries dotted around the state, including one called Hack and Simon in my hometown of Vincennes, where there are still some old brewery buildings. But not much beyond that.

When I began research on the book, it was a big shock to eventually figure out that more than 500 breweries have operated in the Hoosier State since the Harmonists began the Indiana brewing tradition in 1816.

Were there any individuals in Indiana’s early beer history that caught your attention?

Some of the pioneer brewers captured my fancy: George Bentel, the German utopianist who was the brewer for the Harmonist communards in New Harmony. He was the first brewer in Indiana, and his house still stands on Brewery Street in New Harmony. It was very cool to track down one of his recipes, which the Brewers of Indiana Guild – today's organization of Hoosier craft brewers – used for their "replicale" for this year. About 10 craft brewers around the state brewed Bentel's recipe for a dark lager, so as part of the book kick-off, Hoosiers can drink Indiana's First Beer this summer.

There was another early brewer who was associated with the second New Harmony communal experiment that followed the progressive ideas of Robert Owen. His name was Hew Ainslie, who was an iconoclastic Scottish poet who'd followed his dream to frontier of Indiana. He became a well-regarded brewer in New Albany, while continuing to parse the poesy of his years on the Wabash River.

And of course there was Ezra Boswell, a one-eyed Quaker brewer who opened Indiana's second brewery in Richmond in late 1817. Boswell learned his trade in Great Britain, before migrating to the Quaker town.

Beyond being a brewer and father of eleven children, Boswell was a town leader, as the citizens elected him as town clerk and later onto the board of trustees. Richmond was a straight-laced town, so there was some "tongues of slander" when it became known the trustees were drinking Boswell's brews at town expense.

How much traveling did you do to research microbreweries now in the state?

Oh, I wandered all over the place. Beyond my trips to research archives and locales about historical breweries, I visited all the contemporary craft brewery operating in the state at the time – almost three dozen at this point. This is the most breweries operating in Indiana since Prohibition.

Was there anything that surprised you about beer in Indiana during your research?

I had a funny experience down in Vincennes, where I descended from French and Alsatian-German stock. I was in the public library looking at an early 20th-century county history, the type that include biographies and engraved photos of the leading businessmen and professionals of the day. It is a good source of information on historic breweries, as they were often one of the major industries in town. I was looking for info on the Hack and Simon Brewery, which was a big regional player with a brewery that stretched a couple of blocks long near what is today the Vincennes University campus.

I was flipping through this 100-year-old county history, when I suddenly encountered a photo of my father – or so I first thought. After I got over the disjuncture of seeing what I thought was a totally impossible picture, I learned it was a picture of my great-grandfather John Ebner. (They always said my long-deceased father looked like the Ebner side of the family.) As I read the bio, I realized John Ebner was the founder of the Hack and Simon brewery, first naming Eagle Brewery before leasing it to Hack and Simon. I never knew he was a brewer, though he had a mansion in Vincennes, which was typical for the Indiana-German brewers of the heyday of lager brewing. I learned John Ebner was an Alsatian, who'd served in the French Foreign Legion in Africa before immigrating here. Made me think I came by both my wanderlust and love of beer honestly.

Have you ever tried to homebrew?

I believe I am one of the worst homebrewers ever. I have brewed horrible beer – beer so bad not even my son's post-college rock-and-roll band, Johnny Socko, would drink it. Those guys would drink any virtually free beer, so it was a real sign that I needed to stick to writing about beer, rather than trying to actually brew it. I think the world is a better place for that decision.

What is your favorite Indiana beer?

I'm not being coy when I say I don't have a favorite Indiana beer. There are just a lot of great beers being brewed across the state. Many folks know that the Three Floyds Brewery in Munster was rated the top brewery in the world, as well as having their Dark Lord imperial stout being ranked as the world's best beer. But that's just the start. Hoosier brewers up and down the state are brewing world-class beer – and getting recognized for it. And we get to drink.

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Ray E. Boomhower is senior editor for the IHS Press. He likes to think he can write faster than anyone who can write better and write better than anyone who can write faster.

Murder in Their Hearts

Ray Boomhower — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:00:00 -0400

In March of 1824, a group of angry and intoxicated settlers brutally murdered nine Indians camped along a tributary of Fall Creek. The carnage was recounted in lurid detail in the contemporary press and the events that followed sparked a national sensation.

As author David Thomas Murphy notes in the new IHS Press book Murder in Their Hearts: The Fall Creek Massacre, although violence between settlers and Native Americans was not unusual in the Old Northwest Territory during the early 19th century, in this particular incident the white men responsible for the murders were singled out and hunted down, brought to trial, convicted by a jury of their neighbors, and, for the first time under American law, sentenced to death and executed for the murder of Native Americans.

Chairman of the Department of History and Political Science at Anderson University, Murphy teaches courses in Western Civilization, modern German history, the history of modern Europe, and the history of the Holocaust and comparative genocides. Murphy tackled a different subject in Murder in Their Hearts. In the following interview, he explains how he came to write about this tragic incident in Indiana's pioneer past.

How did you get interested in writing about the Fall Creek Massacre?

Through my work as a teacher of history here at Anderson University. One of the courses I teach regularly is called "Historical Inquiry," and it's designed to get our advanced history majors working on topics that use primary research materials. One of the most accessible ways to do that, in my experience, is to have students complete either a genealogical or local history project, and I always require that. A few years ago, one of my students in the course who came from the Pendleton area did his project on the Fall Creek Massacre.

I am originally from northern Illinois, and had never heard of the massacre. The paper really intrigued me, and when I looked for more information on the episode, I didn't find much. There was Jessamyn West's novel, and there were a few articles, but no archivally based, book-length study. And that was the beginning of the project. (And, yes, I do thank that student in the preface.)

In doing your research, did anything surprise you about the event?

A couple of things surprised me. One was the variety and complexity of the attitudes held toward Native Americans by the settlers of the early white Indiana community. There were, of course, a few truly racist Indian haters, and that didn't surprise me so much. But I have come to believe that such unalloyed hostility was anything but the norm. Most of the whites, so far as their feelings are today discernible, seem to have regarded their native neighbors with mingled respect, fear, suspicion, tolerance and, at times, sympathy for a people whom many believed had been treated cruelly by fate. John Johnston, the Indian agent in the area, for example, had a deep respect for the nobility of character he believed he saw in many of his charges, while never romanticizing them or ignoring their sometimes fearsome cruelty in battle.

I was also surprised by the sophistication of the land speculation business on the frontier. Every settler of any means was deeply committed to the steady appreciation of land values – investment in land was the stock market of that time and place – and the steps taken to exploit (and manipulate) that generator of wealth seemed like they could have been taken from the headlines of the last few years.

The unreliable nature of frontier record-keeping took some getting used to as well. I have done two previous books on aspects of modern German history, so I know that error creeps into the official record at times. But I still found in early county records a casual disregard for getting basic facts straight that surprised me.

How hard was it to reconcile the conflicting accounts of the event?

Sometimes it was not hard at all. For example, it was pretty easy to use contemporary newspaper accounts, which were carefully dated, of course, to figure what dates in the transcripts were accurate and which had to be incorrect.

Other times it was very difficult, and could finally be resolved only by making judgments about what seemed most plausible. A dozen conflicting accounts of the tribal origins of the victims of the massacre are out there, and sometimes the same witness will identify them as of one tribal group at one time and as of a different group later. So, I had to take the results of modern anthropological research about who was most likely to have been here in numbers at the time, consider that with the testimony of the earliest and most knowledgeable sources, and try to decide where the truth seemed most probably to lie. I believe I came up with a defensible and plausible solution, but there is no way to say, categorically, that my view on this or some similar matters is the right one.

Were there books or authors that you drew upon for inspiration as you wrote your book?

While I was working on this book, Larry McMurtry, whose writings I admire, published a book called O, What a Slaughter about interracial violence in the Old West. That book gave me some ideas about how a person might present such events in a way that was historically accurate and appealing to readers who, while not experts, are discriminating, perceptive and educated. I relied a lot upon the Indiana histories of Barnhart and Carmony, upon James Madison's Indiana Way, and Drew Cayton's Frontier Indiana. And I think anyone interested in writing regional history that is accurate, sophisticated and written with verve can do a lot worse than consider John Bartlow Martin's Indiana: An Interpretation.

What is your next project?

I am working on two books now. One is a study of Jewish and Catholic interfaith relations in the West over the last two centuries. It is really just in the beginning stages and relates to some earlier research I have done in German history. The other is a book about literature and education tentatively entitled The Twenty-First Century Mind-Diet. We'll see what happens with that.

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Ray E. Boomhower is senior editor for the IHS Press. He likes to think he can write faster than anyone who can write better and write better than anyone who can write faster.

"And the Winner Is ... "

Ray Boomhower — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:10:00 -0400

Three books published by the IHS Press in 2009 have been named as finalists in ForeWord Reviews 2009 Book of the Year Awards.

The books selected as finalists and their categories are:

By Freedom’s Light, by Elizabeth O’Maley, juvenile fiction
My Indiana: 101 More Places to See in Indiana, by Earl Conn, travel guide
Steve McQueen: The Great Escape, by Wes Gehring, biography

The finalists, representing 360 publishers, were selected from 1,400 entries in 60 categories. The winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers selected from ForeWord Review’s readership. Gold, Silver and Bronze winners, as well as Editor's Choice Prizes for fiction and nonfiction, will be announced at a special program at BookExpo America in New York City on May 25. The winners of the two Editor's Choice Prizes will be awarded $1,500 each. The ceremony is open to all BEA attendees.

ForeWord's Book of the Year Awards program was designed to discover distinctive books from independent publishers across a number of genres.

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Ray E. Boomhower is senior editor for the IHS Press. He likes to think he can write faster than anyone who can write better and write better than anyone who can write faster.

Telling a Hero's Tale

Ray Boomhower — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:15:00 -0500

As a nonfiction writer who engages in the field of biography, I often give talks to groups around the state. During the question-and-answer portion, one of the queries I always get is how to come up with a subject to write about. I usually advise the questioner to pick a subject her or she will enjoy spending time with, as the writing of a biography can take years. I point to a lesson I learned from David McCullough, who had begun to research a biography of the famed Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. Early in his research, McCullough discovered that he disliked the man and did not want to write about him. He was able to convince his publisher to switch to a new subject – Harry S. Truman – a decision that resulted in a bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize.

I have followed McCullough’s example and try to select subjects that I respect and whose career I have some interest or knowledge about. That was the case in my newest book, the IHS Press youth biography Fighter Pilot: The World War II Career of Alex Vraciu. Back in the spring of 2008, I was trying to think of a new book project to work on. I was flipping through some back issues of Traces magazine when I came across the special issue we did to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. On the cover of that issue was a photograph of an American pilot leaving his airplane after successfully shooting down a host of Japanese aircraft in the Pacific.

The pilot was Alex Vraciu of East Chicago, Ind. During the war, Vraciu had shot down 19 enemy aircraft, including six dive-bombers in just eight minutes during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Here was a story that combined a number of my interests – aircraft, World War II and, especially, the Pacific theater. I had always been fascinated by the American effort against the Japanese, especially the long distances involved and the savageness of the fighting.

Vraciu had retired to Danville, Calif., and, with the assistance of a former colleague from the IHS Press, Doug Clanin, I wrote the former ace and asked him if he would be willing to cooperate with me in writing his biography. At first reluctant, Vraciu finally gave his consent when he learned that the book was part of the IHS Press’s youth biography series – books aimed at the middle school/high school audience. Vraciu had given numerous talks before young audiences about his wartime experience, and saw this as another opportunity to tell the story of his service to a new generation.

I traveled to Vraciu’s home and spent a couple of days with him talking about his life. He provided great details about growing up in northwest Indiana, attending DePauw University, training as a navy pilot and flying with his mentor in the air, Butch O’Hare. Vraciu also shared his large collection of photographs with me, many of which are reproduced in the book. It has been an honor to tell his story.

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Ray E. Boomhower is senior editor for the IHS Press. He likes to think he can write faster than anyone who can write better and write better than anyone who can write faster.