News---Sculptor Michael Kraus Restores Antietam Monument

Civil War's General Nagle Finally Gets His Sword Back, Marylynne Pitz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 29, 2010.

In 1848, when James Nagle returned home to Pottsville after serving in the Mexican War, Schuylkill County residents gave the 26-year-old hero a beautifully engraved, silver presentation sword with a purple amethyst at its handle. Brig. Gen. Nagle treasured the weapon, carrying it through the Civil War's bloody hours at Second Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg, where his brigade of 1,500 men suffered heavy casualties. The only Pennsylvanian to recruit four regiments for the Union Army during the Civil War, Gen. Nagle was honored again in 1904 when 36 surviving veterans of the 48th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry erected a statue of him at Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Md. And, by design, a bronze sword hung beside the statue.

Sometime in the 1920s -- no one seems to know how or when -- the weapon attached to the 7-foot-tall statue disappeared. During a ceremony today, the figure of a man so beloved by his soldiers that they looked upon him as a friend will be given a new sword created by Mike Kraus, a McCandless artist, historian and Civil War re-enactor.

Great-great-grandchildren of the general are expected to come from North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Arizona, said John David Hoptak, a National Park Service ranger at Antietam. The author of two Civil War books and an authority on Gen. Nagle, Mr. Hoptak expects as many as 60 people for the ceremony. "I'm looking forward to that," he said.

Like his hero, Mr. Hoptak also hails from Schuylkill County, north of Philadelphia. He noticed that the sword was missing and in 2008, began raising $7,000 to pay for a new one. He was aided by Western Maryland Interpretative Association, a nonprofit group that runs the bookstore at Antietam. Donations arrived from descendants of Gen. Nagle and regimental veterans. "I think he represented the American spirit of the 19th century," Mr. Hoptak said. "There was a devotion to duty and to the nation. He had no military training, but he raised a company that fought in Mexico."

Gen. Nagle's daring leadership earned his men's respect. "He was always leading from the front. He had a good ability to inspire his men on the battlefield. He took care of them," Mr. Hoptak said. "We always regarded you as a friend and father, rather than a mere military commander," one of his soldiers wrote in a letter dated October 1861. His men presented him then with a field glass, a forerunner of binoculars. The instrument allowed him to get a better look at terrain and troop movements. While he earned a living as a painter, paper hanger and county sheriff, Gen. Nagle may have been influenced by a relative's example.

"His own grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War under [George] Washington. Perhaps that was an inspiration. His grandfather lived until the 1840s and was around for Nagle's adolescence," Mr. Hoptak said. A year after the Civil War ended, Gen. Nagle, 44, died of heart disease, leaving behind a wife and seven children.

"She never remarried but she did fight to get a pension from his military service. ... Most of the children were under 18 at the time of his death," Mr. Hoptak said. Earlier this month, Mr. Kraus, curator at Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum in Oakland, traveled to Antietam with the new 44-inch-long sword and took measurements to make sure that it fit properly. Cast in bronze at a Cleveland foundry and weighing 9 pounds, this new solid bronze weapon will be carefully attached to the statue and draped in an American flag until it is unveiled today. To make the new version, Mr. Kraus examined photographs of Gen. Nagle's original presentation sword, which was donated by a descendant in 1999 to the Schuylkill County Historical Society.

Mr. Kraus, who earned a degree in fine art at Edinboro University in 1976, is no stranger to working in bronze. In 2000, he created a Holocaust memorial for Temple Ohav Shalom in McCandless. In a more recent commission, he used 850 pounds of memorial plaques from various Jewish congregations that have closed to forge a new sculpture. From the plaques, he created six bronze triangles that emerge from a boulder at a Beaver Falls cemetery in Beaver County. Together, the bronze triangles form a six-pointed Star of David. But this is the first sword he has ever made. He is excited to see his work at Antietam, and to see Gen. Nagle's statue intact once more.

Text and Photo Source: Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Caption: "Artist and Civil War historian Mike Kraus, left, and National Park Service ranger John David Hoptak at the statue of Brig. Gen. James Nagle. A new bronze sword Mr. Kraus made for the statue in his McCandless studio will be unveiled during a dedication ceremony today at Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Md.It connected me to the battlefield and the memorials that were placed there. We said we care. We said we want to see it the way the veterans envisioned it. We put it back to what it was."

Middle Image Source: Schuylkill County

Bottom Image Source: Nagle with presentation sword. Save Historic Antietam Foundation

Forthcoming: The Letters of Israel B. Richardson

Until Antietam: The Life and Letters of Major General Israel B. Richardson, U.S. Army, Jack C. Mack, Southern Illinois University Press; October 19, 2009, 288 pages, $29.95.

While researching this book, Jack C. Mason made the kind of discovery that historians dream of. He found more than one-hundred unpublished and unknown letters from Union general Israel B. Richardson to his family, written from his time as a West Point cadet until the day before his fatal wounding at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. Using these freshly uncovered primary sources as well as extensive research in secondary materials, Mason has written the first-ever biography of Israel Bush Richardson.

Richardson’s letters span more than twenty years of service in the U.S. Army. He served on the front lines of the Seminole War, chasing Indians through the swamps of Florida; fought in every important battle of the Mexican-American War, during which he distinguished himself by capturing a Mexican artillery piece and turning it against the enemy at the Battle of Cerro Gordo; guarded dangerous outposts in southwest New Mexico; and raised a regiment at the start of the Civil War that would become the 2nd Michigan. During the Civil War, Richardson fought at the First Battle of Bull Run, patrolled the area south of Washington, D.C., and led his division in the Peninsular Campaign. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Union Army over the first year of the war, as he was admired for his common sense, motivating leadership, and straightforward approach to combat.

Mason traces Richardson’s growth as a soldier, through his experiences and the guidance of his superiors, and then as a leader whose style reflected the actions of the former commanders he respected. Though he was a disciplinarian, Richardson took a relaxed attitude toward military rules, earning him the affection of his men. Unfortunately, his military career was cut short just as high-ranking officials began to recognize his aggressive leadership. He was shot while leading his men at Antietam and died on November 4, 1862.

Until Antietam brings to life a talented and fearless Civil War infantry leader. Richardson’s story, placed within the context of nineteenth-century warfare, exemplifies how one soldier’s life influenced his commanders, his men, and the army as a whole.

Jack C. Mason is a Department of Army civilian and a lieutenant colonel in the U. S. Army Reserve. He serves as an instructor for the Command and General Staff College and has published several articles in Army magazine.



Text Source: Amazon.com
Image Source: Richardson canon at Antietam

News---Antietam's Cornfield Yields Grave of New York Soldier

Union Soldier's Remains Found at Antietam, Linda Wheeler, Washington Post, December 28, 2008.

The soldier was just a teenager. Somewhere in New York state, he had signed up to fight for the Union. The band was playing on the day he marched away from home, headed South to to kill those rebels. Everyone said it would be a short war. He'd be home in no time. All of that ended on Sept. 17, 1862 at Antietam when he and his comrades were crossing a farmer's field. A bullet or piece of shrapnel found him. He sagged to the ground and was dead. His buddies moved on; they had to. The fighting was intense. By the end of the day, the battle considered the bloodiest of the war would end with 23,000 casualties.

The next day, under a flag of truce, a Union burial detail began its grim work. Sometime in the next week, the New Yorker was put in a shallow grave near where he fell, but away from the the farmer's plow. He was buried near a limestone outcropping that rippled just above the surface. This was temporary. Either his family or the government would move him to a cemetery and give him a proper burial. No one ever came for him. His grave was overlooked when the Union dead were gathered and moved to the new Antietam National Cemetery, dedicated exactly five years after the battle.

For 146 seasons, crops were planted all around him and even over him if a farmer could make the tight turn at the rocky place, but nothing disturbed his sleep. He could have been there forever, never found and never known except for a ground hog who happened to build a tunnel at that spot. The tunnel was deep, angling down under the limestone. At some point, the tunnel became clogged with debris and the ground hog vigorously kicked it out of the way, flinging it all the way to the surface. It included pieces of tea-colored bone. A visitor who was walking the battlefield in mid-October,strayed off the Corn Field Trail and saw some bones on the ground that he later left at the visitors' center. He didn't give his name, saying only he had found something in a field off the trail, next to an animal hole.

"It was a jaw bone with four teeth attached and one loose plus some other fragments," said Ed Wenschhof Jr., Antietam's chief of Natural Resources Management and Resources Protection. "We get a lot of these bones brought in here, almost all of them are animal." He needed to check it out. Several photographs were emailed to the National Park Service's regional archaeologist, Stephen Potter, in Washington. Potter said he knew right away the jaw, and what turned out to be skull fragments, belonged to a human. And he knew they were very old bones.

"When I realized what I had -- an unmarked, unknown burial of a Civil War soldier, not a victim of modern mayhem -- it grabbed me in the gut," he said. "I was totally focused. I forgot everything else. I immediately started planning what we would do next." He said he estimated the soldier's age at 19 to 21, based on an impacted wisdom tooth in the jaw bone, the lack of wear on the teeth and an open suture in the cranium. That suture closes only when an individual ceases to grow. He called Wenschhof. Potter wanted to see the the bones but his first impulse was to collect whatever else was out there in the field. It was going to be difficult to find the spot. The field covered acres of land, but they had to move quickly because relic hunters might hear about the discovery and disturb the grave.

Wenschhof and a team of park rangers crisscrossed the field that was adjacent to the infamous Corn Field, where brutal hand-to-hand fighting had taken place during the battle. There were burrows everywhere, and they had to be careful not to step in to them. Finally, one of the team found bone fragments and several pieces of leather outside a ground hog hole. It had to be the right place. The soldier had been found. Potter had sent the photographs to Douglas Owsley, a well-known forensic anthropologist with the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution. He agreed with Potter's assessment but felt the soldier was somewhere between 18 and 21 and most likely was a teenager.

"He said the kid never saw his 20th birthday," Potter recalled. Within a few weeks, Potter and a crew were at Antietam, also known as Sharpsburg, scraping away the top layer of brown earth and then delving into the reddish layer of clay. They were working under a blue and white tent erected to shield themselves from the rain and wind and to protect whatever they found. Two animal holes were within the the rectangle sketched on the earth, probably boundaries of the grave. The resident of the burrow had been captured a few days earlier and delivered to a new neighborhood beyond the field.

The excavation work was slow. There weren't any large bones in the grave shaft. "Ground hogs can do a lot of damage," Potter said. "Context means everything. if the bones are moved or damaged or if the ground hog gnawed on them, and ground hogs do gnaw on bones -- they need their daily calcium supplement -- things can be hard to figure out." In this case, the ground hog had destroyed most of the soldier's bones.

What they did find was a number of jacket or coat buttons that connected the soldier to a New York regiment. The ones from the cuffs had the state emblem and some of the larger ones from the front had the emblem and the Latin word, "Excelsior," meaning upward. The other buttons found were general government issue, indicating the soldier was not a green recruit but a veteran who had been around long enough to have replaced lost buttons. They also found a belt buckle with "U.S." engraved on it, and some bits of leather later identified as coming from boots or shoes.

Potter told the crew, "We now know three things: our soldier was a young guy, probably a teenager, but he was a veteran and not a new recruit and he was part of a New York regiment." The crew, having plotted the exact position on paper of every bit of metal and bone and leather taken from the grave site, filled the 18-inch-deep excavation and tried to make it look like just another part of the farmer's field. The next step is for Owsley to examine all the bones and items found in the grave to see if he can tease any more information from them. He won't be able to do that for several months.

John Howard, Antietam battlefield superintendent, had been following the progress of the search closely. He had come out to watch the crews excavating the grave. Later he said it was unlikely the solider would ever be identified because so little was known about him and, on the day of the battle, there were many New York regiments involved. One of the rangers who works for Howard, Brian S. Baracz, has studied the battle for 10 years. He said there had been 68 infantry regiments, 12 artillery and seven cavalry units from New York at Antietam. Close to the area where the soldier was found, two dozen New York infantry regiments had crossed through. Using just those 24 units and narrowing the list of possible soldiers to those of the right age who were listed as "missing," he said the number would range between 25 and 50.

Howard said if they ever got "really lucky and identified the soldier, we'd make a real effort to track down the next of kin. We'd ask them what they wanted us to do. We could ship the remains or give him a proper burial here at Antietam." If there is no identification, he expects the soldier will be buried in the New York section of the national cemetery, which is near his office. "Just like any other American soldier, we will give him a proper burial," he said. "This is where he fought. This is where he died. This is now his home."

Text, Top and Middle Images Source: Washington Post, December 26, 2008

Bottom Image Source: Through the Cornfield, Keith Rocco. Keith Rocco is among the very best artists working in the field of American Civil War and Napoleonic Era painting. He as two published collections of his work, On Campaign: The Civil War Art of Keith Rocco, and The Soldier's View: The Civil War Art of Keith Rocco

CWL---The Real War Is Getting Into the Books: First Person Accounts of Carnage, September 1862

Misery Holds High Carnival, Judson H. Nelson, America's Civil War, September 2007, pp. 30-39.

". . . a thousand blackened, bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice and maggots hold high carnival . . . . " Surgeon Daniel Holt, 121 New York Volunteers, began writing letters home after the battle of South Mountain, Maryland on September 14th. Rare is the soldier who wrote the Mrs. of Rebels with brains blown out, eyes popped out, and arms lifted in the air.

John H. Nelson, author of As the Grain Falls Before the Reaper: The Federal Hospital Sites and Identified Federal Casualties at Antietam, a CD-Rom, has collected a series of striking remarks from surgeons, newspaper correspondents, U.S. Sanitary Commission and U.S. Christian Commission worker, civilians and rank-and-file soldiers and organized them into an article.

At the Smoketown Hospital, really shebangs for the wounded, "The medicines are on the grounds, and tables, boxes , etc. without order or regularity. There is want of attention to police the wards and camp. Direst and garbage are accumulated in large quantities. . ." describes Assistant Medical Director W. R. Mosely. He contrasts the Smoketown shebangs with the Locust Spring Hospital, that had 24 tents each with their own stone fireplaces and superior bedding, that is bedsteads described as sacks filled with straw and covered with sheets, quilts and blankets.

Among the many descriptions Nelson has presented, CWL fully appreciates the material on the Otto Farm, located on the west side of Burnside's Bridge, a discussion that may be representative of the blight upon the farming community. With damages in excess of $2,300, Otto received a settlement check for $893.85. Another farmer,
Ephraim Getting whose farms held a portion of the Locust Spring hospital, claimed $1,238.45 in damages. He received no settlement.

For CWL, the article is a unfootnoted tease. CWL hopes that Nelson expands the article and North and South Magazine publishes it.