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By CHRIS SHIPMAN
Hometown News
“Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War: Letters of the Anderson, Brockman, and Moore Families, 1853-1865”, compiled and edited by Tom Moore Craig, will be out in Spartanburg on Monday, April 20. The official launch will take place 7 p.m. at The Showroom, 149 S. Daniel Morgan Ave., in Spartanburg, at the old Gilbert’s Shoes building.
The majority of the letters in the collection were written by or to three young men: John Crawford Anderson, born 1842, Andrew Charles Moore, born 1838, and Thomas John Moore, born 1843. There are also letters from sisters, fathers, mothers, and even those from two slaves included in the volume.
Since completing the book, Craig has spoken with many people about his ancestors and the war, at seminars, group meetings, and with people just interested in history.
“It surprised me, the depth of interest in the Civil War,” he said. People want to know more for “so many different reasons,” he added, not just about the war itself, but for any number of specialized areas of interest whether it is collecting artifacts, maps, reenactment, or whether it’s an interest in the home front, naval history, or the technology of the day. “There is a large body of people, both North and South, who have an interest in this conflict,” he said. Tune into Antiques Road Show, and that’s easily evident, he said. “After the Revolution,” he said, “the Civil War is one of the most important parts of our young country’s history.”
The book details some of the differences between Upcountry and Low Country slavery. In the Upcountry, smaller plantations led to more daily interaction between master and slave. There were many references in the letters to individual slave’s illnesses, and how the owners treated and nursed them.
“As it was against the law in South Carolina to teach a slave to read and write, someone in the Moore family or on the Moore plantation risked prosecution in teaching Stephen and Elihu (the two slaves whose letters have been saved) to read and write,” Craig said. “Their letters give us a bit more insight and information to add to the very sketchy details of slave life in the Upcountry.”
The letters also go beyond sweeping narratives and bloody battlefields and detail the lived experience of combatants as well as those who had to deal with the war behind the lines. It paints a picture of an extended family’s life during the most traumatic era in American history. Craig said he believes it will “appeal to people North and South because it details common situations”—whether it’s a worried mother admonishing her son not to get involved in the excesses of boarding school life, a father ribbing his son about the greenness of Citadel cadets—they should be shouldering their rifles, instead of their books, he advised—or a pair of slaves driving provisions from Spartanburg to Virginia writing home to their wives. In these letters written so very long ago, the individual voices come out, and the war takes on a human face.
“We do lose sight of the fact that it wasn’t glorious,” Dr. Melissa Walker, of Converse, who collaborated with Craig on the book, said. “Thomas Moore had to write home and tell his mother about the loss of his brother, that wasn’t glorious at all, that was just heartbreaking.”
“These letters, the voices in this book,” Craig said, “I don’t think they necessarily reflect a total commitment to states’ rights and slavery, to the exclusion of a more realistic appraisal of what was going on in their lives.”
“If we were to experience war today,” Walker said, “most of us would experience it from the home front perspective, we would not be experiencing it from combat. That is the way we can best relate to war, to think about how it affected ordinary people on the home front.”
The book will be available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, Irwin Ace Hardware in Hillcrest, and other locations. It can also be ordered from the University of South Carolina Press, 718 Devine St., Columbia, S.C., 29208, 1-800-768-2500.
shipman.news@gmail.com
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