American Realities with Bill Youngs
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      • Table of Contents
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      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
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      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
  J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, American Realities, Volume One: 
Historical Episodes from First Settlements to the Civil War, Chapter Fifteen


                                                                Slideshow images courtesy of Wiki Commons

              15. The Civil War
                    Two Soldiers and their Worlds

Picture

Summary

This essay describes the early life and wartime experiences of two soldiers, William Wheeler of New York and Charles C. Jones, Jr., of Georgia. We follow Wheeler’s career as an artillery officer in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Georgia. Then we turn to Jones who, like Wheeler, went to Harvard Law School and, after serving briefly as mayor of Savannah, became an artillery officer. By observing their lives and thoughts we come to see the reasons why people on both sides believed they were fighting for a righteous cause.

Author reads from the Text

He [William Wheeler] acknowledged, however, that when he was not occupied by present duties, a longing for home swept through him. On a “beautiful Sabbath afternoon” in the South he thought of his mother walking through the autumn leaves on her way to church. He missed good conversation and domestic surroundings: “a quiet supper with a chosen crowd . . . and then a sensible chat over the apples and Madeira until the small hours.” He begged his family and friends to fill their letters to him with the details of daily life. “It is the neat little touches thrown skillfully in,” he wrote, “that make the home picture glow with life, and make the heart of the absent member beat warmly as he looks at it.”

Affected as he was by memories of his home, he found himself sympathizing with the people whose lands the northern armies occupied. He could speak facetiously of “fried secessionists for breakfast,” and he fired cannon shot at the enemy with unbridled enthusiasm. But when he came face to face with southerners his feelings changed. As the soldiers marched along, they often saw women “dressed in black and weeping as if their hearts would break.” In Virginia Wheeler sought to prevent excessive demands on the local farmsteads, interfering in one case, “in favor of a sheep, some bee-hives, and the potato patch” and winning in return an invitation to dinner. He was solicitous of enemy soldiers wounded in battle. At Gettysburg he walked among the southerners where they “lay scattered over the field in groups of twenty, fifty, or even a hundred.” Wheeler brought water to one, propped another on his side, and rigged up a bed of straw for a third. 


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Chapter 14: A Slave's Story
American Realities: Volume 2