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Foreword
- Syracuse University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
xv Foreword Many years ago my grandfather gave me an old photograph taken in the first decade of the twentieth century. Twenty-one dark-uniformed old men from western New York sit or stand in front of a tall granite war memorial flanked by a large cannon and surrounded by thousands of graves. Each face is resolute, though the presence of many walking sticks and canes testifies to the irretrievable past when their resolution was translated into ardor for their cause and when instead of the peacefulness of a Memorial Day graveyard they experienced the roar and flash of combat. Looking at the old, bearded warriors always reminds me of the African adage that when a man dies, a thousand stories die with him. Not every experience that engulfs young men at war goes untold. No doubt some of the men in the picture regaled their sons and grandsons with the stories of the remembered past, incidents that changed their lives forever. Perhaps some of them wrote impassioned letters to their parents or wives from distant fields, describing landscapes and people they would otherwise have never seen had not the hand of Providence brought them to unknown places to kill or be killed by other unknown young men. Around the same time that my grandfather identified those old veterans in the picture and in the same beautiful Allegheny River valley where I grew up, a cousin of mine showed me a cache of letters written by his great-great-grandfather during the Civil War. My direct ancestor of the same generation was seated in that photograph taken some forty years after the war, but his was not. Killed in Virginia in 1865 in an anonymous woodlot during an attack in freezing weather,Will Whitlock, a thirty-five-year-old farmer xvi Foreword with a wife and four children, was silenced forever and buried in a soldier’s grave. I held in my hands the cherished letters that a loving family had received from Will and had kept on a shelf or in a drawer since 1865. When I hold such artifacts from the past, I feel a connection to that generation; they hardly seem gone and may be just around the corner, telling their stories. Those accounts resonate with soldiers and families of every generation. The letter writers speak of sacrifice and loss; they ask questions of their family regarding the children’s health and the state of the crops. They wonder about the meaning of the war they are in, and they assure their loved ones or at least express the hope that they will do their duty, stand in the day of battle, and come out alright. The letters of the life and times of Will Whitlock are a distant echo of the many thousands of men who flocked to the colors, North and South, learned to march thousands of miles, coped with the vicissitudes of camp life, sprang to arms when the bugle called, and marched to the sound of the guns. Valgene Dunham, who descends from Will and other settlers of the Allegheny’s picturesque valley who sent many sons to war in the early 1860s, has interpreted these soldier letters in their social and historical environments. He senses the disruption of the timeless rhythms of the agrarian life by the call to war to preserve the Union. He seeks to know what these men knew and unintentionally preserved for posterity in their letters. The men and women of that bygone era were under no illusions regarding the shortness of life. Although most of them passed in the vapors arising from the rivers and creeks of home, a few were called upon to vanish in the smoke of gunfire. Bill Potter Historian and Curator American History Guild Roswell, Georgia, 2011 ...