Civil War for the day

This is the second of five parts of Errol Morris' column in The New York Times about the discovery of a Civil War photograph and its owner:

I contacted Mark Dunkelman, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Here was someone clearly obsessed with these questions. Also, I wanted the story of how he had researched the book, of how the book had come into existence.
MARK DUNKELMAN: In all the previous tellings of this story, Amos Humiston appears as a corpse on the battlefield with this photograph in his hand. I wanted to resurrect the man somehow. And I was able to finally do that by making a connection with a guy in Belmont, Massachusetts, Allan Lawrence Cox. His branch of the family is the one that had preserved Amos’s letters home to his wife. And that was the key because Amos spoke again through the letters. It was a tremendous find. It was exciting because I had long known that there was a book there. But without his voice, it was an empty shell. And bingo, I made the connection.
ERROL MORRIS: Let me back up a moment. Can you tell me how you first became aware of Amos Humiston?
MARK DUNKELMAN: As a child I heard stories of my great-grandfather, a fellow named John Langhans, who served in the Civil War with the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry. My dad had grown up on a farm with his grandfather and his parents in Ellicottville, Cattaraugus County, New York. And my dad had imbibed these stories that his grandfather told, of marching with Sherman to the sea. And he in turn imparted them to me during my youth in suburban Buffalo, New York, in the 1950s and ‘60s. And the stories grabbed me. They just fascinated me. And together with the stories were relics that the family had preserved, including six letters John had sent home to a younger brother during the war; some cotton-bolls he reportedly had picked during Sherman’s march to the sea; ribbons he had worn at regimental reunions; the buttons from his Grand Army of the Republic coat; the silver star corps badge, the 20th Corps badge, that he had worn during the war. And those tangible reminders excited me as well. I was a kid. My interest soon went beyond his personal involvement to that of his regiment as a whole. And I started to do research. As a teenager I made my first visit on a family trip to Washington to the National Archives. And they set three immense boxes full of records in front of me.
ERROL MORRIS: So you knew that you were going to research the Civil War, or was it something more specific?
MARK DUNKELMAN: I was even more interested in becoming an artist. I had been the class artist since third grade. So that’s what took me to RISD [the Rhode Island School of Design] rather than to a liberal arts college to study history. But I said to myself that I wanted to research and publish a regimental history of the 154th New York by the time I reached the age of fifty. I figured that gave me plenty of time. And I started to collect material. And in the thirty-plus years since then, I’ve had the good fortune to connect with more than a thousand descendants of members of the regiment who shared with me more than 1,600 wartime letters written by members of the 154th, twenty-five diaries, portraits of more than two hundred members of the regiment, and basically a roomful of other material. And if it isn’t the largest, it’s one of the largest collections of primary source material on any single particular Civil War regiment.
During my high school years, I became good friends with a neighbor, Christopher Ford, who had Confederate ancestors. We both shared this interest in the Civil War. So we would discuss the Civil War often. As a matter of fact, we used to hold sort of trivia contests to see who could stump each other on our Civil War knowledge. And at one point, Chris gave me a book that he had had for a while. It’s called Gettysburg: What They Did Here, by L.W. Minnigh.

Rico says there's way too much here to purloin, even for the internet, so go there and read it in the original; you'll get all the pictures that way, too. More tomorrow from the same source.