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I volunteered for the Army thirty years ago. Looking back to the word then it seems so much further away and different than simply the passing of the years. One dramatic change for the better is that our service men and women are shown something approaching the respect they deserve. Society cannot repay them appropriate to the sacrifices they make, but we should try.

Much of my youth was spent in Cobb County near to Kennesaw Mountain. I heard about Sherman and the “War of Northern Aggression” enough to make me sick of hearing about it all and turned away from any thoughts about the Civil War. In the fall of 1995 I had an ASFA judging assignment in Roanoke, VA and two weeks later in upstate, New York. I turned it into a three week road trip visiting Civil War battlegrounds. I was not prepared for the emotional impact this had on me. It was one thing to study the Civil War and read the unimaginable numbers of people lost as a youth in public school. It was entirely different as a veteran to stand on a hilltop at Antietam in Maryland and know that more than 23,000 men were lost on a single day in the fields around you. I do not believe in ghosts, but those are haunted places.

I live just a few miles from the Marietta National Cemetary. If you are in the area, do not miss visiting it and the nearby Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield. For a truly haunting experience, a few hours south of Atlanta is Andersonville, the National Prisoner of War Museum and Andersonville National Cemetary.

I think we are relative age peers (at 45.7, I may be a couple digits younger than you). But in a couple of interesting ways, we were polar opposites in our youth. I was in that unique “slot generation” that came of age after the draft ended, and passed out of usable military age before the Selective Service began registering people.

When I turned 18, I was in my first semester of sophomore year at Wake Forest University. My interest in the military extended to a history course I wanted to take that my adviser convinced me wouldn’t help my elective course needs. And before I’d turned 19, I’d been sucked into a full-time career in that decadent industry known as “radio,” where I was held hostage until I escaped at the age of 25. Volunteering for the military, as you did, was an option that never crossed my path or my mind. I had no bias against it at all, quite the opposite. I was just led in a different direction by a creative (if warped) muse.

The other opposition in our past is interesting as well. I, too, was born in the South, but we moved around a lot as I was growing up. And I always had an interest in the Civil War. When we were planning a family vacation for the 4th of July weekend in 1970, my Dad drew a circle on a map representing “reasonable driving distance” from the place we lived then, Clinton, NJ. When he asked me where in that circle I might like to go, I saw my choice near the very edge of the circle: Gettysburg.

Even at the age of 12, I knew the basics of the battle’s history pretty well, and standing on those fields with my still innocent imagination, I could “see” those men. I couldn’t quite imagine the scale of Pickett’s charge, but I saw the bare field those 15,000 men crossed under fire, and that was enough to bring chills. I took this picture of the clump of trees thought to be the “aiming point” for the attack. Even at that age, I knew that was a haunted place.

So I’ve been to Andersonville, and Kennesaw Mountain, and Resaca, and the banks of Peachtree Creek (where I lived for years), and most any Civil War site I’ve been near in my life. They are all haunted places.

And not to get all ethereal (in fact, I write this with great hesitation), but if there can be such a thing as personal evidence of the concept of reincarnation, it is this area that comes closest for me. There are times that I know, feel, and understand things that I shouldn’t. Things I have no experience in, in this lifetime. And I felt them even as a 12 year old boy, standing on Cemetery Ridge.

Outstanding essay and photo gallery! One small quibble, Sherman actually had three grand armies under his command (Army of the Cumberland, Army of the Ohio, and the Army of the Tennesse), with a high aggragate total of 112,000 in June, 1864. To counter them, Confederate commander Joseph Eggleston Johnston had a single great army, the Army of Tennessee, consisting of three corps and a high total of 65,000 men in June. Sherman reported losses of 4,423 KIA and 22,822 WIA, while the AoT lost 3,044 KIA and 18,952 WIA, with a total of 17,335 MIA’s from both sides during the Atlanta Campaign. (Many dead in the Marietta NC died of disease, or succumbed later to their wounds, and a relative handful are from those who died during the Nov-Dec Georgia Campaign) Most of the Confederate combat losses occured during the three Atlanta battles, after John Bell Hood had replaced Johnston.

Thank you for putting this up; I teach high school social studies (and write a little ACW history on the side), and I take my students on a yearly staff ride through Kennesaw Mountain NBP and some nearby related sites.

One other area I cannot recommend in stronger language is Pickett’s Mill and New Hope Church, part of the Dallas Line campaign just a few miles west of the Marietta Square. These are usually forgotten in the retelling of the Atlanta Campaign (perhaps because Sherman “forgot” to mention them in both field reports and postwar memoirs), but illustrate well the incredibly rought terrain this campaign operated in, and what a good line of defense can do to a much superior offensive force.

The New Hope Church cemetary played a significant role in that battle (Stovall’s Georgia Brigade was placed there, and refused to dig in among the graves, suffering terrible casualties as a result), and it is quite sobering for even highly self-absorbed teenagers to walk through that graveyard, seeing headstones that were blasted down to stumps during the battle, directly adjacent to several dozen “Unknown Confederate Soldier” graves.

Pickett’s Mill is widely (and accurately) heralded as the “best preserved Civil War battlefield” in the nation, primarily due to the fact that the state parks system got ahold of it in recent years, but before massive growth hit the area. It is pristine, without a single monument, marker or other modern embellishment to be seen, and a nice system of using small, unobstrusive numbered stakes with an associated map to find your way around.

As often as I walk these fields (Chickamauga is another good, fairly local one, as well), the shear magnitude of what occured in those quiet places never fails to bowl me over as well, and it is sometimes very hard to put into words the enormity of both the sacrifice and significance of what had occured there not so terribly long ago.

Believe it or not, we just lost our last living link to that war – Alberta Martin of Elba, Alabama, the last surviving widow of a Civil War soldier, died yesterday.

I’ve participated in a number of Civil War re-enactments for both the Blue & the Grey (depends on how many re-enactors show up) and I’d like to mention one of them in particular here.

Antietam was the bloodiest day on American soil in U.S. history; there is a photo from that time, shot just outside of the Dunker Church, that depicts a gun-crew that has recently been blasted, sprawled beside the caisson of the cannon.

My gun crew and I, after participating in the 135th Anniversary of Gettysburg a few years ago, decided to stop by Sharpsburg on the way home. Because we were still in Confederate uniform, we decided to lie down on the ground in almost the exact same postures, to get a picture (the Church is still there). One can still get the angle and framing almost exactly as the original photographer.

Long story short, the film never developed with US IN THE PICTURE but the Church and grounds could be clearly seen. Eerie.

I don’t know if anyone has attempted the same thing with digital cam/equipment, but I have heard of others who tried to stage the same thing that we did (with no disrespect intended!) and have had similar results with the photographs not developing properly.

Thanks.

very informative site, :)