Hoosiers on the Home Front , livre ebook

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
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Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
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2022 by Indiana University Press
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bakken, Dawn E., editor.
Title: Hoosiers on the home front / edited by Dawn Bakken.
Other titles: Indiana magazine of history.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022011608 (print) | LCCN 2022011609 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253063458 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253063465 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253063472 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Indiana-History, Military. | Indiana-History-Civil War, 1861-1865. | World War, 1939-1945-Indiana.
Classification: LCC F526 .H65 2022 (print) | LCC F526 (ebook) | DDC 355.009772-dc23/eng/20220328
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011608
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011609
CONTENTS
Introduction / Dawn Bakken
1. absent So long from those I love : The Civil War Letters of Joshua Jones / Eugene H. Berwanger
2. Democratic Attitudes in Johnson County during the Civil War Era: A Look at the Demaree Papers / William G. Eidson and Vincent Aker
3. Recollections of Morgan s Raid / Middleton C. Robertson
4. The Battle of Corydon / Arville L. Funk
5. This Just Hope of Ultimate Payment : The Indiana Morgan s Raid Claims Commission and Harrison County, Indiana, 1863-1887 / Stephen Rockenbach
6. The Grand Army of the Republic, the Indianapolis 500, and the Struggle for Memorial Day in Indiana, 1868-1923 / Nicholas W. Sacco
7. The War against German-American Culture: The Removal of German-Language Instruction from the Indianapolis Schools, 1917-1919 / Paul J. Ramsey
8. Draftee s Wife: A Memoir of World War II / Virginia Mayberry
9. Education Denied: Indiana University s Japanese American Ban, 1942 to 1945 / Eric Langowski
10. Patriotism May Require Opposing the Government at Certain Times : Howard Zinn s Antiwar Speech at Indiana University, December 1, 1967 / Alex Lichtenstein
11. The Other Side of Campus: Indiana University s Student Right and the Rise of National Conservatism / Jason S. Lantzer

Introduction
DAWN BAKKEN, EDITOR
THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY ( IMH ) appeared in print in 1905. The IMH , a peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the Indiana University (IU) Department of History, is one of the oldest continuously published state history journals and now operates as part of IUScholarWorks. The journal publishes articles by academic scholars and independent researchers; its archive is also filled with original diaries, memoirs, and letters. Many of the articles and the primary source documents treat the subject of Hoosiers on the battlefront-from territorial days to the twentieth century-and their loved ones back home. 1
This collection showcases eleven IMH articles on the Indiana home front. Readers will meet, among others, Joshua Jones of the Nineteenth Indiana Volunteer Infantry and his wife, Celia; Attia Porter, a young resident of Corydon, Indiana, writing to her cousin about Morgan s Raid; Civil War and World War I veterans who came into conflict over the Indianapolis 500 and Memorial Day observances; Virginia Mayberry, a wife and mother on the World War II home front; and university students and professors-including antiwar activist Howard Zinn and conservative writer R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.-clashing over the Vietnam War.
Wars are fought on the home front as well as the battlefront. Spouses, family, friends, and communities are called on to sacrifice and persevere in the face of a changed reality. Individuals and societies seek to understand the meaning and purpose of the conflict; they often disagree over what constitutes patriotism and loyalty to one s country in a time of war; in the aftermath of war, they look for ways to honor and commemorate their loved ones.
The Civil War was a test of endurance and loyalty for both men and women. Newspapers, sermons, poems, and songs affirmed that, as J. Matthew Gallman puts it, patriotic women sacrificed and suffered. 2 Women s duty was to give up their men to fight for the Union and then to support them. Women helped run family farms and businesses, managed money and collected debts, and raised children. They rolled bandages and formed societies to raise funds for the care of wounded soldiers. Women waited for news of their loved ones, carried in letters that might take weeks to reach them. 3
In July 1861, twenty-three-year-old Joshua Jones enlisted in the Nineteenth Indiana Volunteer Infantry. Two years before his enlistment, he had married Celia Gibson; the couple settled on a farm near Muncie, and their son, George, was born in June 1860. Joshua began writing to his wife in August 1861, as his regiment trained for battle. Celia preserved his letters and handed them down through her family, but her letters to her husband did not survive. Nevertheless, a picture of Celia s life emerges from Joshua s words. 4
Families on the home front longed for any news. Joshua, like so many other soldiers, tried to share some part of his experiences but hesitated to share too much of the horrors of war. He wrote in September 1862, after the Second Battle of Bull Run, of how he had been forced to listen for incoming cannon balls and shells, fall[ing] down when they bursted to keep from getting killed. But he added, I would not had you or Mother to of known Just my situation for nothing in the world while you was going about the house or in your bed asleep.
Many of the letters Celia received dealt primarily with family and business. Like other rural women, Celia took on responsibility for running the farm and finding workers in the absence of her husband s labor. Joshua tasked Celia with dealing wisely with the money he sent home, paying the family s debts, and transacting business. He also sent instruction on how to raise their son: I want our little boy to be learned to do as he is told and be mannerly to evry body. I do not want to See a bad little boy like Some Children when I Come home.
Joshua s letters reveal that the couple loved each other deeply and longed for the day when he would return home to family life. Celia must have written to Joshua about the pain it caused her to see people around her who seemed unaffected by the war: You spoke of your feelings when Seeing others Sporting around home . Often do I think of the hapy days when I Could Sit down to Breakfast with you and laugh while we was eating and talking to each other as hapy as too kings. My dear I can See now that we lived as pleasant a life as any too on earth.
In late September 1862, Celia received a letter from one of Joshua s commanding officers. Written just after the campaign at Antietam, it gave her the news no wife wanted to hear: her husband had been shot and his leg amputated. Lt. George W. Green conveyed Joshua s reassurance that he was recovering and Celia might expect him home some time this fall. Celia must have written back immediately, but her letter never reached her husband. One of the last two letters she preserved came from regimental surgeon J. N. Green: I deeply regret to iform you that your husband is no more.
Celia and her son continued to live in the Muncie area after Joshua s death. She married again in 1903, at the age of sixty-five, and after losing her second husband in 1929, she lived with her son, George, and his family.
Life on the Civil War home front brought a different kind of challenge for many Indiana families. Political discord was rife in the Hoosier state well before Republican governor Oliver P. Morton, a staunch supporter of President Abraham Lincoln and the war effort, put out his first call for recruits. Hoosier Democrats believed in the Union, but many felt that the best way to preserve it was to allow Southerners to keep their slaves and maintain their way of life. Democrats railed against Lincoln s declaration of war and the draft, his Emancipation Proclamation, and the curtailment of civil liberties by the governor and military commanders. Some formed secret societies, such as the Knights of the Golden Circle, who attempted to foment rebellion against the state government. 5 Others were no less vocal about their opposition but confined their dissent to letters published in sympathetic newspapers and heated discussions among friends and family members.
Members of the staunchly Democratic Demaree family-twelve siblings and their spouses-lived in Johnson County, Indiana, and in the neighboring state of Kentucky, corresponding frequently on everyday matters, such as the weather and crops as well as politics and the war. Many Hoosiers had relatives in Kentucky, a Union state that in various ways stood as an uneasy border between the North and the Confederacy. For Indiana Democrats opposed to Morton s and Lincoln s conduct of the war, family ties between the two states often made for difficult politics. 6
A series of family letters survive, all written to George Whitefield Demaree, a Kentucky Democrat who held strong sympathies with the South and supported states rights and slavery. In 1856, as western territories struggled over allowing slavery in their soon-to-be states, the family shared news of a Kansas relative who had voted the proslavery ticket in the new territory. William Shuck, the husband of George s