I Have the Sword
What does that war have to do with us?
Dear Friends and Family Historians,
A few years ago when I was reading Confederates in the Attic, by the late great writer Tony Horwitz, it struck me how strangely incurious I’d always been about the Civil War. Nobody in my childhood was able to spark my interest in such things. Horwitz, on the other hand, was curious from an early age: He opens his story with a memory of his six-year-old self visiting his great-grandfather, who loved to pore over a treasured book of Civil War sketches. His own father read to him at night from a ten-volume collection called The Photographic History of the Civil War. “Before long,” he writes, “I began to read aloud with my father, chanting the strange and wondrous rivers—Shenandoah, Rappahannock, Chicahominy—and wrapping my tongue around the risible names of rebel generals: Braxton Bragg, Jubal Early, John Sappington Marmaduke, William “Extra Billy” Smith, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard.” As a third-grader, young Tony “embarked on an ambitious art project, painting the walls of our attic with a lurid narrative of the conflict.”
Horwitz calls it “the unfinished Civil War” (R.I.P. Robbie Robertson, a Canadian who in 1969 wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) and notes that there had been more than 60,000 books on the war published by the time his came out in 1998. Even Americans who had no direct connection to the war were fascinated by it. His great-grandfather, Isaac Moses Perski, had fled Czarist Russia and arrived in New York years after the Civil War was over. “Why did this war still obsess so many Americans 130 years after Appomattox?” Horwitz wondered. “I returned to Poppa Isaac’s book. What did that war have to do with him, or with me?”
His answer comes over the next few years as he falls in with a group of Civil War re-enactors—but not just any re-enactors. He took up with those who described themselves as “super hardcore.” They tried to replicate the actual conditions of soldiers in the 1860s, with “absolute fidelity.” The homespun clothing, the food and utensils, the antique weapons, the speech patterns. No modern conveniences allowed. It sounds to me like hell on earth, but Horwitz endured it and the result is a book that is literally one for the ages.
I noted last month that I had a tiny tactile connection with the Civil War. As a boy visiting my grandparents in Homewood, Illinois, I was sometimes allowed to hold a Civil War sword that was kept in my grandfather’s study. As much as I was fascinated with the object itself, I don’t remember asking my grandparents anything about it. Nor did I ask my father what he knew about it after it was passed down to him. What did that war have to do with him, or with me?
My father died last year and the family consensus was that the sword would be my inheritance. In July I went out to Wisconsin, where it awaited me at my older sister’s house. What shocked me as I lifted it for the first time in perhaps fifty years was that it wasn’t nearly as heavy as I remembered it being. It suddenly seemed more plausible as a weapon.
When I got home, I found the curiosity I should have had as a child—or at least as a college student who had finally become interested in American history. As it turned out, it didn’t take much investigation to learn more about the sword’s provenance. The clues were there in a green binder of family genealogy that my Grandmother Denison prepared four decades ago for her grandchildren—and had given to us when we were in college! When I received that gift, though, my interest was in History Writ Large, not my own historically insignificant family. My attitude was “some day I shall look through all this.” And then I stashed it away.
To my surprise, I now saw that the binder contained a two-page account called “Personal history of Joseph Denison.” My grandmother typed it up from a handwritten document our ancestor had made, probably around 1907. Born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1832, he was my grandfather’s grandfather. “In 1851,” he wrote, “my parents, two brothers Conrad and Noah and myself moved to the West, located in Bloomington, Ill.” Married in 1854, seven children. “In March 1862 I applied to Gov Yates for a permit for A.W. Walden and myself to recruit a company of men for three years service during the war, which was granted.” They recruited 88 men and joined the 84th Illinois regiment. They left Bloomington on August 25, 1862, for Benton Barracks in St. Louis. “The leaving was a trying time, leaving Home and Dear Ones, not knowing when I ever would see them again,” he wrote. “March 1863 Capt. Walden resigned and I was commissioned Captain for the Company.
And here is Capt. Joseph Denison, one-hundred sixty years ago.
His left hand rests on what is almost certainly the sword that he must have given to his son Bertral (b. 1866), who gave it to his only son Joseph (b. 1905), who was my grandfather. My great-great-grandfather’s account mentions taking part in the siege of Vicksburg until the surrender there on July 4, 1863. Then he was ordered to Yazoo City, Miss., and then “took part in skirmishes on the Achafalia River, La.” [That is, the Atchafalaya River.] After time in New Orleans, “was sent to Brownsville, Texas, by gulf routes where we camped for nine months doing nothing.” His last engagement was at the Spanish Fort, Mobile, Alabama. That ended on April 8, 1865. He reports: “War over. After the evacuation of Spanish Fort, I was sitting on a stump resting when the news came of the assassination of President Lincoln.”
He returned home in the fall of 1865, moved to Lexington, Illinois, and set up a grocery business. He tried many other pursuits as well. In 1891 he “organized a building and loan ass’n but did not make good at it.” “In 1893 moved to Chicago, a step I have always regretted.” He ends on a downcast note: “I have spent a long life of activity with but little to show for it, and I ascribe it to one reason — lack of sufficient education in early life.”
Utility Men
In baseball, a “utility player” is one who can play any number of positions. In work, the expression is “jack of all trades, master of none.” It struck me when reading about Capt. Joseph Denison’s checkered career that my grandfather, Joseph N. Denison, followed a similar path. He took odd jobs through his middle years, at one point driving a van around Chicagoland delivering phone books. Later he had a job as a night-time security guard. My father was the same way: he once worked in Chicago as a functionary for the Canadian Consulate, then he moved to Wisconsin and tried to make money in harvesting tobacco and putting up pole barn buildings. He finally found steady employment as a Wisconsin bureaucrat, working for the state’s department of revenue, and then as an SSI adjudicator for Dane County.
For better or worse, I managed to break the pattern by determining in college that I would be a newspaper or magazine journalist and then stubbornly sticking with it, through thin and thin, all the way into the dying throes of the print medium.
Is the pen really mightier than the sword? It would be pretty to think so. But in today’s America, the country is crawling with people who hate journalists and love guns and talk loosely about how we’re heading for another civil war. Horwitz opens his book with a quote from Gertrude Stein: “There never will be anything more interesting in America than the Civil War never.” I wouldn’t be so sure: We’ve never seen a showman-demagogue quite like the one who now seems to have a 50-50 chance of ushering in the collapse of our barely functioning American democracy, while the planet churns and burns. When he was nominated for the presidency in 2016, his imbecile delegates at the Republican convention waved signs that said “Trump Digs Coal.”
Editorial Aside
As of this moment, that leading candidate of a major political party is facing four criminal indictments and perhaps half the country will consider voting for him because the Democratic incumbent seems worrisomely elderly. Hmmm. . . We’ve got a candidate (also old and unhealthy) of blatant and shameless corruption vs. an old guy who is just like every other uninspiring Democrat we’ve ever elected. We’ve got a hopelessly mendacious individual who hatched several desperate plots to overturn an election vs. a codger who mainly wants politics to be the way it was in the 1980s and 1990s again. It’s possible one or both of these candidates will keel over, next week or the week after. Or not. Either way, as we look forward to the coming political season with dread, you can be sure that 2024 will be an “interesting” year.
Literary Aside
By the way, another interesting year was 1968. That year is chronicled in Uwe Johnson’s powerful novel, Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl. There’s a diary entry for every day, beginning on August 21, 1967, ending August 20, 1968. Avid readers recommend “synching”—that is, beginning today and giving yourself a year to make it through the two volumes. The diarist, Gesine, arrives as a young woman from Germany in 1961. She lives on Riverside Drive on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, with her precocious ten-year-old daughter Marie. Gesine is a daily reader of the New York Times, which to her is an “honest old Auntie,” both necessary and maddening. Much of the book recounts Gesine’s research and memories of her ancestors in Germany, most of whom stood idly by, or even became Nazis, as Hitler rose to power. She takes us deep into the experience of fascism, while watching America cope with its entrenched racism, turbulent politics, and its brutal war in Vietnam. I finished it last August 20, but now I’m tempted to start again. What stays with you is how a country can slip into barbarism almost uneventfully, in slow motion, with ordinary people going on with their ordinary lives.
Exit Now
Will we someday look back on the year 2023 as being a calm interlude year?
I had a pleasant drive in a rental car with my younger sister back from Wisconsin, right after July 4. We were on a mission to make it in two days—Madison to Cleveland, Cleveland to New England, so there wasn’t time to meander through the backroads. I often have the urge to stop and take photos when I see the strange sights of America. This time I was just taking snapshots in my mind. Somewhere in the northeast corner of Ohio, or maybe just across the state line into Pennsylvania, I saw a billboard that looked a little something like this.
Black Bear Update
Close readers of Dots & Arrows will recall our account, almost exactly a year ago, of watching a large black bear amble through our back forty. A few days ago, we looked out the window and saw a fox sitting on its haunches, watching something attentively. Then we saw, not far from the fox, a bear lumbering around. Why wasn’t the fox high-tailing it the hell out of there? Suddenly the fox ran toward the bear and made a circle around it, as if to say “you want a piece of me?” The bear half-heartedly chased for a few strides and then turned away. Was it a game? Or, I wondered, was this a mother fox trying to create a distraction so the bear wouldn’t stray toward her den? Anyway, these foxes are so fleet. No bear is going to be able to catch a fox. The bear went on its way, passing about twenty feet away from us, as we watched from our deck above. Beautiful animal. But . . . should I have stopped in Pennsylvania and purchased some of that pepper spray? Several days have gone by now and we haven’t seen it since, but it’s hard to escape the feeling the bear is lurking around, somewhere nearby.
Thanks for filling in that family history. I’m a little worried anout that bear, though. Perhaps you shoukd wear the sword every time you venture outside, just in case.
Another inspiring musing by world-class writer and muser, Dave Denison, whose great great grandfather looks exactly like Dave Denison dressed as a re-enactor.