Cushing’s Medal of Honor awarded
More than 151 years after his heroic actions during Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, 1st Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing was awarded the Medal of Honor at the White House by President Barack Obama. The November ceremony was the culmination of a four-decades-long struggle by Cushing supporters to recognize the Wisconsin native. Because of a requirement that Medal of Honor recommendations be made within two years of the specific act of valor, Cushing’s case required a special exemption from Congress, which was approved in December 2013.
It took some effort for the Army Past Conflict Repatriations Branch to find a living relative to accept the medal, as Cushing died childless at 22 and none of his brothers had any children. Helen Loring Ensign, 85, of Palm Desert, Calif., was finally identified as his closest living relative; she is related through Cushing’s mother and is his cousin twice removed.
Cushing, commander of Battery A, 4th U.S. Artillery, II Corps, Army of the Potomac, manned the sole remaining artillery piece in his battery as Confederate forces attacked. Wounded in the abdomen and right shoulder, Cushing refused to be evacuated and, instead, continued directing the artillery operation until he was killed by Rebel forces. His actions, according to eyewitness accounts, helped hold the line during the crucial battle.
Hawaiian soldier identified
More than 100 native Hawaiians are known to have served in the Civil War, but most are lost to history because they fought under anglicized names. But one, J.R. Kealoha, was identified and honored in October in a Honolulu cemetery.
Kealoha died in 1877, but any headstone had long since been lost. That bothered Anita Manning, an associate in cultural studies at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, who stumbled across Kealoha’s war and burial records in 2011 but found no tombstone in the cemetery. “I was struck immediately that this man who had put himself in harm’s way for my future had been forgotten,” Manning told Hawaii News Now.
A group of historians petitioned the Veterans Administration for a headstone, and after three years of red tape, Kealoha, who fought for the Union, got his own stone.
Kealoha’s name was known only because of a twist of fate—a chance meeting with a fellow Hawaiian, future Gen. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who noted the conversation in a letter to his family. Chapman’s father was a missionary in Hawaii.
Hawaii was a sovereign nation when the war broke out, and although its leaders sympathized with the South, prudence prevailed and Hawaii declared its neutrality.
Civil War Trust expands focus to Revolution, War of 1812
On Veterans Day, at the site of George Washington’s first victory over the British, the Civil War Trust announced it will begin preserving battlefields from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Its work to preserve Civil War battlefields will continue.
Trust President Jim Lightizer said the two earlier wars dovetail naturally with the Civil War to tell the story of the American journey.
According to the National Park Service, 40 percent of the Revolutionary and 1812 battlefields still possess features that would be recognizable to those who fought there. The Park Service has identified 243 of these battlefields, and of those, 141 have been altered to the degree that land acquisition wouldn’t make sense.
The Trust, which has preserved 40,000 acres of Civil War battlefields, believes there are approximately 10,000–15,000 acres of Revolutionary and 1812 battlefield sites worth protecting.
The Campaign 1776 initiative will employ the same public-private preservation strategy that has worked well for protecting Civil War battlefields. Its first target will be 4.6 acres at the Princeton, N.J., battlefield, a 1777 engagement that is considered a turning point.
“The patriots who fell during the struggle for American independence deserve to have their sacrifices remembered and honored just as much as those who took up arms ‘four score and seven years’ later during the Civil War,” Lighter said.
Antietam park could expand into West Virginia
The National Park Service has tentative plans to expand the Antietam National Battlefield across the Potomac River into West Virginia, scene of the Battle of Shepherdstown, where retreating Confederate troops held off a Union pursuit and made the infamous getaway that so angered President Abraham Lincoln.
The government says the land on the south side of the Potomac isn’t significant enough to warrant a separate national park, but could become a satellite of the 3,200-acre Antietam Battlefield park five miles north. The 500-acre addition would require congressional approval. The park service held public hearings on the issue in the fall.
The Battle of Shepherdstown began two days after Antietam, on Sept. 19, 1862, and extended into the following day, with two Union divisions eventually being rebuffed by two Confederate divisions under Gen. A.P. Hill. Although there were fewer than 700 total casualties, it was the bloodiest engagement to occur in what would later become the state of West Virginia.
With the Confederates back on Southern soil but still alive and kicking, Lincoln took the opportunity to emancipate Southern slaves from their bondage, while emancipating Union Gen. George McClellan from his command.
Residents balk at planned statue removal
When a towering granite statue of a Civil War soldier was dedicated in the small town of Pleasant Hill, Ohio, in 1894, patriotic citizens lined the streets in celebration. A band played, politicians spoke and a butcher killed a beeve and passed out free soup.
Voters had approved the sale of $500 in bonds to help pay the $750 cost of the statue, and, the introduction of the automobile being some years off, no one had an issue with the statue’s location smack in the middle of the main intersection.
Today the monument, located at the junction of two state routes, impedes visibility and is blamed by the town for causing more than a dozen traffic accidents in the past three years. So the council passed a resolution late last summer to move it—an action that went largely unnoticed for a couple of months before word leaked out.
That led three dozen residents armed with a petition signed by 200 to pack the small council chambers, demanding the resolution be rescinded.
They are apparently going to get their way.
Even if the council were to dig in its heels, Mayor Gary Johnson said no money is available to pay for the move, which would almost certainly cost far more than it did to erect the statue in the first place.
Cemetery honors African Americans
Four African-American Civil War veterans buried at Leesburg, Va.’s Mount Zion Community Cemetery were recognized with a new Civil War Trails sign installed at the cemetery last fall.
The remains of James Gaskins of the 39th U.S. Colored Infantry, Joseph Waters of the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry, William Taylor of the 1st U.S. Colored Infantry and John W. Langford of the U.S. Navy rest at Mount Zion.
There were about 300 African-American Civil War soldiers and sailors from Loudoun County, Va., but only about 20 settled there after the war, according to Kevin Grigsby, author of From Loudoun to Glory, a book about the lives of local African Americans during the Civil War.
The sign was sponsored by the Black History Committee of the Friends of the Thomas Balch Library, the Loudoun County Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee and the Mosby Heritage Area Association. It is the first historical marker in Loudoun to recognize the service of African-American Civil War veterans.
Landscaping homeowner finds soldier’s headstone
After three years of treading on a stone step near his burn pile, a Granville, Ill., homeowner turned the stone over while landscaping his yard and discovered a Civil War headstone for a local man. The stone reads “George M. Cunningham, 2 Lt. Co. I 47, Ill. Infantry.”
“It was face down in the dirt, and when I flopped it over, you could see the imprint of the face in the dirt and it was perfect,” Butch Gapinski told the LaSalle News Tribune.
Gapinski, senior vice commander of the Putnam County VFW Post, knew it was a military headstone but couldn’t pinpoint the time period. He turned to his VFW commander Gary Bruno, who recognized it as from the Civil War. Theresa Clausen, secretary of Putnam County Historical Society, filled in more blanks.
In an odd coincidence, Gapinski, a Putnam County deputy sheriff, noticed the name “George M. Cunningham” on the wall of his office lobby that lists all previous sheriffs of Putnam County. George M. Cunningham was Putnam County Sheriff from 1864-66.
Cunningham enlisted in the Illinois Infantry, fighting in the Civil War three separate times. He died in 1923 and is buried in Riverside Cemetery in nearby Hennepin.
How the headstone came to be in Gapinski’s backyard and not on Cunningham’s actual grave is a mystery Gapinski hopes will be solved someday, and he hopes to return the stone to Cunningham’s descendants. To that end, he can be contacted at dgapinski@putnamcounty sheriff.com. Until then, the headstone is being kept in a secure location.
Sailor’s Creek, High Bridge land preserved
The Commonwealth of Virginia accepted the transfer of 127 acres from the Civil War Trust in October, preserving 12 acres of land at Sailor’s Creek Battlefield Historical State Park in Amelia and Prince Edward counties and 115 acres at High Bridge Trail State Park in Prince Edward County.
According to the Trust, the properties were preserved, in part, through funding from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation and the Virginia Civil War Site Preservation Fund, administered by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. In addition, the Trust also secured a 118-acre conservation easement at Sailor’s Creek Battlefield in partnership with Virginia DHR.
With the transfer, the Trust and Virginia have now protected 885 acres at Sailor’s Creek, site of the last major fight between Gens. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee prior to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
At High Bridge Trail State Park, the Trust has preserved 175 acres. The site also saw fighting in the waning days of the war, and includes a period wagon road and the best preserved of four remaining Civil War forts in the area.
Painstaking work identifies soldiers buried in Georgia
Armed with 2,500 pounds of hospital records, historian Brad Quinlin and members of the Marietta (Ga.) Confederate Cemetery Foundation have managed to put names to 350 of the 3,000 unidentified soldiers buried at the cemetery.
Quinlin said officials at the Marietta Museum of History asked him about the possibility of finding paperwork to help identify the soldiers. After two weeks, he found pay dirt in the records of Samuel Hollingworth Stout, the Confederate surgeon general in charge of the hospitals in Tennessee and Georgia. But they were spread among various institutions, so Quinlin spent two years gathering records from universities across the South. With the help of cemetery officials Betty Hunter and Fran Wagner, he pored through 45,000 documents to identify men buried at the Confederate cemetery. Quinlin said he is currently working to identify 408 more.
The names have been added to a memorial wall at the cemetery.
Civil War sites acquire more land
The Bennett Place State Historic site in Durham, N.C., raised $310,000 needed to purchase two acres of adjoining historic land, beating the October 31 option deadline with just days to spare. State officials were concerned the property would be developed if not purchased, said Dr. Kevin Cherry, deputy secretary of the Office of Archives and History, which called for the donations. Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston surrendered to U.S. Gen. William Sherman in 1865 at Bennett Place, ending fighting in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida.
Meanwhile, Chesterfield County, Va., purchased 15 acres overlooking the James River to expand the Battery Dantzler Civil War site. Confederate soldiers began building the fort at Battery Dantzler on May 18, 1864, using the high ground to prevent Union Navy vessels from advancing toward Richmond. The troops abandoned the site April 2, 1865, joining the Army of Northern Virginia and marching to Appomattox Court House.
Originally published in the March 2015 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.
