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By CHRIS SHIPMAN
Hometown News
Tom Moore Craig spent many hours, magnifying glass in hand, straining his eyes, poring over more than ten dozen letters written more than 150 years ago. The letters, which were saved by his great aunt, Harriet Moore Fielder, and passed down to his father and then himself, are now a part of a new book coming out April 20, Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War: Letters of the Anderson, Brockman, and Moore Families, 1853-1865.
In 1996, Craig started transcribing the letters, just as a personal project. “I couldn’t help but become a historian,” Craig said. His parents donated the Walnut Grove Plantation to the Spartanburg Historical Association in the 1960s, he said, so he had the rare privilege of being a part of that family and also growing up seeing how the generations before the Civil War lived.
In January 2007, he took an interim course at Converse College—Dr. Melissa Walker’s U.S. History, 1850-1870—in order to expand his knowledge of the time. He decided to share the letters with the class. Walker told him that the collection was of more than just common interest and that it could actually boost the knowledge of the war and pre-war period.
“I thought the letters were really important because there were so many different voices there,” Walker said. “They give a perspective on the war from a number of different people, and I didn’t know of any other collection that did that.”
There are a lot of Civil War letter collections, she said. The people understood it was a historic time and held on to their letters but tended to save only those from soldiers. “There were a lot of women who kept diaries,” she continued, “but to get this whole family talking together during the war makes a huge difference. You get a much fuller picture.” She knows of no other published volumes of this kind of work.
“The reader will gain a better understanding of how the war affected the Upstate,” Walker added. The Upstate “wasn’t in the middle of the fighting, and the war didn’t create the same upheaval as somewhere where you would come into direct contact with the troops,” she said. “This volume paints a better picture of life for the people who weren’t living near the battlefield.”
Putting the book together, Craig said the letter writers began to take on unique personalities—young men traveling and fighting, women at home, and even two slaves, Stephen and Elihu, who drove provision wagons to the front. Over the course of the war, the voices of the women started to change, he said, “as the bodies started coming home, and they started asking what have we gotten ourselves into.” The men, he said, were loyal to the end, even in prison camp. “The men were very young,” he said, “mostly 17- or 18-years-old. My great-grandfather turned 21 in the army. They were mostly privates and corporals because of their age, but they grew up in the army. They were pulled out of their adolescences and forced into adult tasks.”
One such young man, Andrew Charles Moore, who had only just graduated from the University of Virginia Law School, wrote to his recently remarried mother, Nancy Moore Evins, after a visit to the body-strewn battlefield of First Manassas, Va. “On yesterday, Sam Means and I walked to the battlefield of 21st July. On the battlefield, I saw several Yankees partially rooted up by hogs. One fellow was completely exhumed, lying on his back, the flesh fallen and falling from his bones & the head gone…. Never, never, was I so forcibly impressed with the idea that war proceeds from want of humanity, & wickedness of heart.” Ten months after the letter was written, Moore was killed at Second Manassas.
Another letter recounts Craig’s great-grandfather’s story of getting home from a prisoner of war camp. He was being marched through Baltimore and saw a woman standing along the way. He thought she looked like a good person, managed to scribble his name and address on a piece of paper, balled it up and threw it at her feet. The woman kept up with him and even sent him money that probably kept him alive in the camp.
Other letters from home deal with everyday life, especially the scarcity of salt and rice, but also ordinary things such as going to church, canning fruit, dances and fundraisers. Writing the book, Craig said he “realized that even with a war going on there was a certain degree of normalcy.” Many also express strong opinions about the events of the day, especially between close relatives. The letters end with one of the Andersons’ plan to implement a sharecropping system on his plantation. Craig felt it was an appropriate place to end, setting the stage for Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
Craig said he would like to hear from anyone else who may have letters to add to the collection and connect with African Americans who can trace their ancestries back to the Anderson, Brockman, or Moore plantations.
The book launch will take place, Monday, April 20, at 7 p.m. at the The Showroom, 149 S Daniel Morgan Ave., Spartanburg. It will be on sale at Irwin Ace Hardware in Hillcrest, Barnes and Noble, and other locations. And, it can be pre-ordered from the University of South Carolina Press, 718 Devine St., Columbia, S.C., 29208, 1-800-768-2500, www.sc.edu/uscpress.
shipman.news@gmail.com
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