Aloha! I’m writing from vacation in Hawai’i, where there’s not much American Civil War history baked into the landscape, as you can probably imagine. 

Yet the war is not totally absent. On the way to Oahu’s north shore, I drove past Schofield Barracks, named for former Civil War general John M. Schofield. Schofield served as general in chief of the U.S. Army from 1888-1895 – a highly consequential tenure during which he proved to be an influential reformer. (He also served a stint as secretary of war under controversial Andrew Johnson.) People might best know the barracks as the setting of From Here to Eternity.

Schofield came to Hawai’i in 1872 and first recommended the establishment of a military base at Pearl Harbor. I of course visited the NPS site at Pearl so I could pay my respects at the USS Arizona memorial. That has been a bucket-list destination for me my entire adult life. The experience was profound. I appreciated a remark one of the rangers made before the ferry departed for the memorial: “This is not an ‘attraction.’ It’s a cemetery. Treat it the same way you would the hallowed ground at a place like Gettysburg or even Arlington.”

The most unexpected Civil War connection came when we landed on the west side of the Big Island. Hawai’i is the youngest of the islands, and so Mother Nature has had less time to work her magic on the land. A ridge of dormant volcanoes bisects the island, and they capture all the moisture on the island’s east side, which is lush and tropical. The drier west side consists of mountainous grasslands and vast lava beds in various stages of erosion. The less-eroded stretches looked like dried black cow patties, hundreds of yards wide. In places where wind and rain have worked on the landscape, the lava had begun to break apart and more resembled huge tumbles of dark, rich humus deposited willy-nilly by a Titan’s dump trunk. Think moonscapes.

This brought to mind the experience of Robert E. Lee during the Mexican War. In August 1847, Lee had to scout a path through a lava-bed region known as the Pedregal, “a field of volcanic rock like boiling scoria suddenly solidified, pathless, precipitous….” It was reportedly a land where no horses could go and “men only with difficulty.” Lee, a captain, had to scout out a crossing and lead Winfield Scott’s army across. Jeff Shaara actually writes a good account of this in his novel “Gone for Soldiers,” which is where I first heard of it. But I could never quite understand what Lee faced in that dangerous mission—until I saw the lava beds on Hawai’i’s west side.

It was one more reminder of the many ways landscapes help us understand history, and why preserving the ground remains so vital.

— Chris Mackowski, Ph.D.

Editor-in-Chief

ECW Bookshelf

Neil Chatelain is out with his newest book, Treasure and Empire in the Civil War.

Across North America's periphery, Civil War campaigns waged over whether the United States of Confederacy would dominate lands, mines, and seaborne transportation networks of North America's mineral wealth. The United States needed this wealth to stabilize their wartime economy while the Confederacy sought to expand their own treasury. 

Confederate armies advanced to directly seize the West and its gold and silver reserves while warships steamed to intercept Panamá route ships transporting bullion from California to Panamá to New York. United States forces responded by expelling Confederate incursions and solidified territorial control by combating Indigenous populations and enacting laws encouraging frontier settlement. At sea, the US Navy patrolled key ports, convoyed treasure ships, blocked Confederate naval attacks, and integrated continent-wide intelligence networks in the ultimate game of cat and mouse. 

Explore the hemispheric land and sea adventures to control North America's mineral wealth, linking the Civil War's military, naval, political, diplomatic, and economic elements like never before.

Shrouded Veterans

Here’s the latest project from Frank Jastrzembski’s Shrouded Veterans project:

On January 12, 1884, Edward Heaton, a distinguished artillery lieutenant during the war, shot himself in the dining room of his New Jersey home. He was 41 years old. Was Heaton’s decision to take his life linked to war trauma, or could there have been other factors involved? Whatever the cause, he took the answer to the grave. 

Read more about Heaton and the effort to mark his grave.

March:

19: Neil P. Chatelain, “The Panama Route in the US Civil War”, 2024 Lone Star College North Harris Economics Conference

20: Jim Morgan, “Battle of Secessionville,” New Orleans CWRT

20: Jon-Erik Gilot, “Dangerfield Newby’s Fight for Freedom,” Phil Kearny CWRT (virtual)

20: Evan Portman, “Chaos and Confusion in the Wheatfield at Gettysburg,” Western Pennsylvania Civil War Round Table, Sewickley, PA 

21: Jim Morgan, “Battle of Secessionville,” Austin CWRT

23: Chris Mackowski, “The Rise of Stonewall Jackson,” Prince William County History Symposium

April:

8: Jim Morgan, “Battle of Secessionville,” Kingsport, TN CWRT

9: Jim Morgan, “Battle of Secessionville,” Knoxville TN CWRT

10: Jim Morgan, “Battle of Secessionville,” Crossville TN CWRT

10: Jon-Erik Gilot, “Hardships & Dangers Will Bind Men as Brothers: The Ohio National Guard in the Summer of 1864,” Cleveland CWRT, Cleveland, OH

11: Dwight Hughes, “The Naval Civil War in Theaters Near and Far,” Montgomery County Civil War Roundtable, Gaithersburg, MD

13: Jon-Erik Gilot, Phill Greenwalt, Rob Orrison, “Riding a Raid: Paradigms & Personalities of Civil War Raids,” Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall, Carnegie, PA

18: Jon-Erik Gilot, Kevin Pawlak, “John Brown’s Raid,” Cedar Valley CWRT (virtual)

25–28: Chris Mackowski, American Battlefield Trust Annual Conference, Gettysburg, PA

27: Neil P. Chatelain, “Annual Freshet impacts on 1862’s Mississippi River Valley Naval Campaigns”, 2024 Baton Rouge Civil War Symposium