The Last Battleground by Philip Gerard

Author:Philip Gerard [Gerard, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, History, Military, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV)
ISBN: 9781469666112
Google: 3qVYzgEACAAJ
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2021-08-15T22:33:05+00:00

26

WRITING THE WAR

Jacob Nathaniel Raymer is a literary adventurer: a lean, handsome young man with a long, angular face, a strong nose, and intense eyes. At age twenty-one, he leaves his home in Catawba County and strikes out for the west—Arkansas—his mind set on seeing the world beyond the mountains. At Swannanoa Gap, east of Asheville, he lingers for a last look homeward, “and from that lofty pinnacle, the dividing line between home and strangers,” he writes in his diary, “I did take a long farewell.”

Well-read and already erudite, he composes a wistful poem of 201 lines, preoccupied with death and loss, that he titles, “A Last View of Home.” “Knowing that / Life at best, is uncertain as the wind,” he writes, “And man, with death’s ghostly messengers / On all sides is beset—. Nor leaves behind / A memento of his existence. … Fame dies with the individual.”

His Arkansas sojourn lasts just a couple of years, and by 1860 he is back home, living with his parents and teaching at the Common Schools. On June 7, 1861, soon after North Carolina secedes from the Union, Raymer crosses the county line into Iredell to join Company C of the 4th North Carolina Infantry as a private soldier and musician. Before setting off for training at Garysburg, he visits his schoolhouse one last time. The young scholars strike up a chorus of “Mount Vernon,” and Raymer joins in. “But when we began ‘Unity,’ my voice failed—I could not sing—I felt so sad! So strange!”

His company is nicknamed the Saltillo Boys, since it includes some veterans of the Mexican War. Raymer begins a journal he will keep faithfully throughout four years of war, chronicling nearly every major battle in the east: the Peninsula Campaign, the Seven Days Battles, Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, the siege of Petersburg, and the last stand at Appomattox.

Raymer draws from his copious, detailed notes to write letters home—not to his parents, but to a public audience. By choice, he becomes one of the Confederacy’s corps of a hundred-odd war correspondents. Many of them, like Raymer, are soldiers who send home letters to their local newspapers as circumstances allow. In the Confederacy, a letter may take a month or more to reach its destination, and the 50,000 miles of telegraph lines in the eastern states, like most other resources, are heavily concentrated in the North.

Some paid correspondents work as part of a ragged consortium called the Press Association of the Confederate States—counterpart to the newly formed Associated Press in New York—but with few of AP’s resources.

The Northern newspapers, by contrast, field more than 500 paid correspondents, although they are not well paid. The New York Herald alone sends 63 correspondents into the field, and its sister papers, the Times and the Tribune, each send 20. Mostly young, untrained, and inexperienced on a battlefield, the correspondents earn only $10 to $25 per week, including expenses, which can be exorbitant in the war zone.

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