DECORATION DAY

As I settled into my bench on a clear Sunday morning, my thoughts kept returning to a disquieting subject. Perhaps it had something to do with the Psalm facing up from the open Bible beside me, beginning with the line, “Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God,” or an acknowledgement of the city cemetery just beyond the trees outside our meetinghouse windows. Perhaps it was a continuation of a thought I’d had the night before, how the event being observed this weekend was originally called Decoration Day, conducted to commemorate the Civil War dead. The act of decorating gravestones seems to me to be superficial or even, in some perverse way, profane – and yet, as the subject kept returning in the stillness, I realized there’s one pilgrimage I would make, to leave a flower on the neglected stone.

I had uncovered much in the previous six months, delving once more into my genealogy research. There was no intention of resuming intense investigation and writing at this point when I responded to a few innocent online queries, which unexpectedly snowballed. The project itself had begun a quarter-century earlier with the surprising discovery that my Hodson ancestors had been Quaker, the faith I had also joined after a circuitous spiritual journey. The historical research later expanded into my grandmother’s Dunker (or German Baptist Brethren/Church of the Brethren) lineage, which also came as a revelation. Here, much of my fascination has been with the dynamics within communities of faith and the ways the members extended their religious practice to all facets of their lives. Crucially, both churches maintained that bearing arms and military service are contrary to the spirit and teaching of Christ, and both churches were based on traditions of lay ministry.

Once identified as a genealogist, however, I soon became the recipient of family miscellany, regardless of value. That is, one becomes the guardian of last resort, or all that stands between antiquity and the dump. Somehow, I’ve become the caretaker of a flag draped over a great-uncle’s casket for military burial, a scrapbook of a great-aunt’s post-World War I newspaper clippings, and many curling photographs of unidentified people and places – things that presently add nothing to the ancestral story. On the other hand, I took up the project just a few years too late to save a great-aunt’s correspondence with my great-great-grandparents, who remained in North Carolina after their sons moved to Indiana and Ohio. Even so, I have also come to possess a few priceless letters and photos and other bits that allow sharp insights into lives that would otherwise be unknown.

In August 1985 I received a package with a note that said, “I am also sending a copy of someone’s journal. It is either from Grandma Hodson’s or Ralph McSherry’s papers. I thought we might be able to figure out the author. Or whatever?” At the time, I transcribed the photocopy of the handwritten memoir, A Journal of My Experience in the Rebellion of 1861-2, and attempted to analyze its curiously bland text. The opening paragraphs went into almost agonizing daily detail of marching across Kentucky, setting up camp, and moving on, often with no sight of the enemy. By the time the unit moves to the Battle of Shiloh, however, the descriptions are brief, even rushed, as if the writer were embarrassed of being ill in the infirmary rather than fighting, even if that illness likely saved his life. And then the text trails off. Since this manuscript would have been from my great-grandmother Alice McSherry Hodson’s line, I tentatively thought it might have been written by her father, who would have then come home to Ohio to marry, but I could find no record of his serving in the Civil War. I identified some other possibilities in her family surnames and had to leave it at that.

Much later, when I reopened my genealogy reports, I decided also to clean up materials my mother had collected on her side of the family in Missouri. With an array of new source material available online, I found myself sifting through Census reports and death certificates and then Civil War records and Census slave schedules – the latter items things I’d never previously encountered, and many of the details troubled me. In the practice of genealogy, you build a personal history that somehow invests you in the unfolding action; sometimes it stands at odds with the general history you were taught in school, or sometimes it allows you to see individuals moving within a larger picture. As I looked at my ancestors in Civil War Missouri, I was surprised to learn that illness killed more soldiers than the fighting did; in my case, John Gilmore died in camp a month after enlisting. I had no clue of the extent of Confederate guerrillas until learning of my Gatewood kin’s clandestine ambushes of Union soldiers. Still, I’ve argued that if one undertakes genealogy, one must be prepared to accept the facts one uncovers.

But that’s not exactly where my thoughts kept returning this morning. Rather, it was to the consequences of one website I had come across while working on my mother’s ancestors’ Civil War service, which now allowed me to consider the possible authors of the memoir I’d transcribed. The movements it detailed matched those of the 1^st Ohio Infantry and 2^nd Ohio Volunteers, units my great-grandmother’s uncle, John Z. Bahill, served in – back on my father’s side of the family.

The Psalm describes enemies, but that morning I was not led to ponder my own potential enemies. Besides, they would be nothing like the enemies Bahill encountered. His memoirs break off on June 17, 1862, in Alabama before the actions at Battle Creek and then pursuit back to Louisville, Kentucky, the Battle of Perryville, or the march to Nashville before coming to Stones River near Murfreeboro, Tennessee – his second round in that locale. That is, his chronological narrative breaks off before the real action begins.

If you can’t identify the Battle of Stones River, you’re not alone. Neither could I, before Bahill led me to it. The fighting began in the sleet, rain, and fog of New Year’s Eve morning in 1862, and erupted into what would stand as the eighth deadliest battle of the Civil War. It was a crucial victory for the Union forces, coming half a year before Gettysburg and denying the Confederacy the essential agricultural resources of Tennessee. When the three days of fighting were over, there were 24,645 casualties – more than one in every four participants.

You can look at hour-by-hour analyses of the campaign. The opposing strategies, too: the Union plan foiled when the Confederate forces made the first move. Read the reports. As the Union flank collapsed, Bahill’s unit was part of the force that held ground at all cost. No one can imagine being in close fighting where your own death is imminent. Even the description of the deafening cannon fire is beyond comprehension.

This is what I was sitting with, in the quiet of a Sunday morning. Not the noise or the blood but an awareness of the dedication of one’s life to a larger cause.

This was also at crosscurrents with the stream of vocal ministry that morning. One Friend spoke of the importance of having all people agree on a set of basic rights for all humans. Later, another recalled the New Testament scholarship of Albert Schweitzer, which led another to speak of an uncle who gave up university prestige and security to become an inner city pastor instead, where he was murdered in murky circumstances.

I wonder if the Civil War might have been averted by nonviolent movement. The first speaker reminds us that rarely does anyone give up a position of privilege voluntarily. Not unless he sees himself gaining something better. I think of the slaveholders’ great capital wealth combined with the unequal political clout it had given them in the nation’s affairs, and their ruthless efforts to expand it. The witness of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King seem all the more miraculous in contrast. And I wonder what might have happened if Bahill’s unit had crumpled under its relentless assault. And those are the thoughts I kept circling back on in the silence.

Bahill was among the wounded. I have no idea what his wounds were, precisely, or if he underwent amputation. Still, from the title of his memoir, he apparently knew that his war service was over. The officer commanding the 2^nd Ohio, Lt. Col. John Kell, had been killed in action, as had the lieutenant leading Bahill’s company.

But I had been wrong in my initial analysis of the text. I now assumed this was something Bahill undertook on his hospital bed, before the infection set in. Something he undertook, in other words, on his deathbed. He died 2½ weeks later, before he could finish his memoirs. He was 26.

From another website, I view a section of the National Cemetery in Murfreesboro, where he is buried, far from his family in Ohio. He was the last male in his Bahill line and unmarried. The memoirs have come down through my great-grandmother, born 2½ years after his death.

Decoration Day, initiated to remember people like Bahill, seems a more fitting name than Memorial Day. One conveys an action, even if it’s more ritualistic than I would embrace. Memorial Day, in contrast, feels cloudy and unfocused. Who can say if his gravestone was ever decorated by his family? A farm boy, without his garland.

Later, recovering in the hospital from surgery, I would wonder if Bahill had the strength or clarity to write on his deathbed. More likely, it seems he drafted what he did before re-enlisting, perhaps even as an exercise convincing himself to do so. We’ll never know for certain.