330. Who Really Won?

It’s a fascinating book. Published three years after the end of the Civil War, The History of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery, by Theodore Vaill, this regiment’s adjutant, is an obscure work that’s probably known to few. Brought to my attention by Virginia Shultz-Charette a historian in Winsted, Conn., this book tells the story of my ancestors’ and their comrades’ experiences during the War Between The States.

My great-great grandfather, William Addison Hosford, was among the many volunteers from the Winsted area who were killed or wounded at the Battle of Cold Harbor in 1864. William’s brigade, which had never seen battle before, was selected to lead the first Union charge at this small village on the road to Richmond, Virginia.

Vaill wrote that as they reached the rebel defenses, “A sheet of flame, sudden as lightning, red as blood, and so near it seemed to singe the men’s faces, burst along the rebel breastwork…” A moment later a second rebel line appeared on the left and opened fire. In less than a minute over 250 volunteers from Winsted – including William — lay wounded or dead. Somehow William survived being hit by a musket ball that entered under one arm and exited under the other and he eventually rejoined his Company.

William’s older brother, Benjamin Franklin Hosford was less fortunate; he was the first Union officer killed at the Battle of Cedar Creek near the end of the war.   The book tells how William tried to carry his brother’s body away from the carnage but was forced to abandon it as Confederate troops overtook them. Though later recovered, all of William’s brother’s possessions – including his shoes — had been stolen.

Yet another of William’s brothers, Calvin, was captured at Drewry’s Bluff (also in Virginia) and imprisoned at the infamous Andersonville prison where he nearly perished from abuse, disease and starvation.

Reading this at a time when many Southerners are defending the Confederate battle flag as an important symbol of their “heritage” makes me think about my own family’s heritage of being killed, wounded and imprisoned to help free the slaves. Shouldn’t it be the winners who are celebrating their heritage, not the losers???

But then again maybe we ultimately were the losers. Though we won the shooting war, as Michael Lind recently observed on Politico.com, without the South the U.S. would be a more liberal, secular nation with far less racial and political polarization. Lind maintains that the influence of southern conservatism makes America “an extreme outlier” in the advanced world. In the South gun violence and racism are widespread, and unlike in other modern democracies, southern politicians routinely claim to speak for God, just as Islamic mullahs do.

Maybe Lind’s right. A veteran Republican politician, who began his career in Washington in the 1960s, recently told me that Americans don’t understand the inordinate influence southern politicians have had since the end of Reconstruction, adding that it’s the party’s southern base that has pulled it so far to the right today.

By not following through on their victory in the Civil War – by allowing Jim Crow, segregation, and lynchings to persist into the 1960s, the North allowed the Confederacy to live on. No wonder the Confederate battle flag was waved with such a sense of triumph at the nation’s capital a few years ago when Tea Partiers shut the government down. A century and a half after the Civil War it seems the Confederacy is ascendant, winning this time not through force of arms but instead through the regressive appeal its antebellum ideology has on many voters today.

Comments

  1. Virginia Shultz-Charette Said,

    I was just about to email a link to your column to a member of your family in New York who has written a genealogy about the Hosfords, when I came across this new column. So glad you were able to use this info in an article that must be said. A Southerner in the 19th century said that “the South lost the war, but we won Reconstruction”. Truer words were never spoken. In the rush to reunification, former slaves who had at least had value in the antebellum South had no value to a society who now despised and hated them. And the North was complicit by turning its attention elsewhere. But I believe what Martin Luther King, Jr. said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.

  2. Karen DeHond Said,

    A local group is having a program on this subject in 2 weeks, am hoping I can find a ride. In the meantime I’ve forwarded this article to a good friend who’s also very interested.

    Karen

  3. WilliamKn Said,

    wow, awesome article post.Thanks Again. Awesome. Gentili

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