Join us on this exciting journey to Gettysburg. In the past two years over 200 acres of non-historic trees have been removed, opening up startling vistas over the fields. Our trip will include over 15 hours of battlefield exploration under the tutelage of licensed battlefield guides. We'll visit the newly opened Visitor Center and view the newly restored Cyclorama painting. Our trip will even include a Ghosts of Gettysburg tour.

It's time to sign up, so if you haven't already received an email, contact Jon Thompson immediately at 440-871-6439 or
jkjj1259 [@] aol.com.  Tentative Trip Schedule

In order to hold the line on expenses, the CCWRT Executive Committee voted unanimously July 8 to move the Roundtable's meetings for the upcoming season from the Playhouse Club to Judson Manor beginning with the September 10th meeting.

Judson Manor is located at the corner of East 107th Street and Chester in downtown Cleveland, just off University Circle and less than two miles from the Playhouse Club. Parking is available next to Judson Manor and in the church parking lot directly across the street from the main entrance. The price for dinner will remain $25 and reservations will continue to be handled the same as before, through JAC. More information to follow later this summer.  (Map to Judson Manor | 2008-09 program schedule)

In this election year, I thought it might be interesting if my "History Briefs" for summer and fall were taken from the election year of 1864 - a year that many historians consider to be the most important in our history.

Would Lee ever falter? Was Grant a butcher? Could Sherman take Atlanta? Would the North lose its patience with the war? Could Lincoln be reelected?

The reelection of Lincoln, as we know, was anything but certain and, although in Grant he had the leader he always needed, Lee still held the winning hand that spring and early summer causing unprecedented Union casualties in the Wilderness and at Cold Harbor. The war was not yet going well and as it went so would Lincoln go.

By late August, Lincoln believed he would not be reelected and even had his cabinet sign an unseen memo he wrote to that effect, pledging that they would have to do all they could to win the war before the opposing party, led by George McClellan as their presidential candidate, took office. Lincoln believed the Democrats would negotiate an end to the war (as they said they would in their platform), leaving the nation divided.

In researching those times I came to believe that it would be a good idea to let the people involved tell the story of those deciding days for themselves - through their letters, memos and diary entries. I hope you agree.

Their words represent snippets of what was happening, and the feelings about these events as they took place - they take us back there to see through their writers' eyes and words, the hope, despair, joy and sorrow of that election year.

Although it's always tempting to find parallels between those times and these, none was intended in selecting the words used in the briefs - I'll leave any comparisons to the reader.

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Each year the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable sponsors The Jon Thompson Poetry Contest at Lee Burneson Middle School in Westlake as part of their annual "Civil War Days" event. (More on Buneson Middle School's "Civil War Days".)  The contest is named in honor of Language Arts teacher (and current CCWRT president) Jon Thompson who devoted 35 years to the students of Lee Burneson before retiring in 2006.

"The Widow"

Those entering the poetry contest are asked to consider a picture called "The Widow" showing a woman in black mourning garb kneeling next to the headstone of a Confederate soldier while a ghostly image of the dead soldier hovers next to her offering quiet solace. 

Over 2000 poems have been entered in the contest since its inception. This year, for the first time, multiple winners were named due to the exceptionally high quality of the submissions.  This year's winners, who presented their poems at May's Roundtable meeting, were Phil Papajcik, Abigail Kane and Dennis E DiFranco.  You can read all three winning poems as well as the winning poems from past years here.

POETRY PRIZE WINNERS>>

Two days after the disastrous Union defeat at Bull Run, Richard Yates, Governor of Illinois, sent a dispatch on July 23, 1861 to Simon Cameron, Secretary of War. He asked Cameron to authorize sixteen additional regiments from Lincoln’s home state. “Illinois demands the right to do her full share in the work of preserving our glorious Union from the assaults of high handed rebellion, and I insist that you respond favorably to the tender I have made.”

Richard Yates

Sometime in the autumn of 1861, three young men from Wayne County, Benjamin, John, and Marshall Crews (a distant relative of CCWRT past president Dick Crews), rode the 125 miles north to Camp Butler on the outskirts of Springfield, the state capital.  Volunteering for three years service in the 5th Illinois Cavalry Regiment, they were mustered into D Company, which contained a vast majority of men from their home county. Other Crews kinsmen from Wayne County joined infantry regiments.

The Crews family came from a region in southern Illinois known from pioneer times as “Egypt” because, like the Nile River, the high waters in spring from the Mississippi, Ohio, and Wabash flooded low lying farm lands. Since most of the region’s population had roots in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, there was more empathy for the Confederacy than in the counties north of Vandalia. In the election of 1860, Egypt had voted three to one against Lincoln and the “Black” Republicans. The Cairo Gazette announced in December of 1860 that “the sympathies of our people are mainly with the South.” Most of the young men from Egypt who fought in the Civil War wore Federal Blue, but some fled south of the Ohio River to join the Confederacy. Company G of the 15th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry was called the “Southern Illinois Company.” However, the opposite also occurred -- some of the troopers in D Company were from the border states of Kentucky and Missouri.

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