That’s what pastor admires about Civil War
Published 3:14 pm Thursday, October 11, 2007
By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
As he does every fall, Davey Troxel of South Bend, Ind., pastor of Mishawaka Grace Brethren Church, toted an arsenal into Union High School Wednesday morning.
Jason Hurrle was amazed to be holding a weapon with a bayonet in the DUHS media center.
Troxel's artifact table also contained a side knife from a barn in Virginia, a Bowie knife, iron knuckles and an Ames sword.
The company is still in business, but today makes garden tools.
Troxel also displayed a variety of canteens, including a barrel with a spigot from a horse-drawn ambulance equipped with four cots.
They learned a valuable lesson about sterilization when they noticed that the wounded sewed up with disinfected horse tail hair healed better than those stitched with surgical thread because it was boiled.
Another sword was owned by a man in the Irish Brigade.
Thousands of Irishmen came during the potato famine and fought for both sides.
"A Springfield rifle was very accurate and could shoot the eyelash off a gnat at 100 yards. Very accurate compared to what they had during the American Revolution. Its spiraled grooves made the bullet come out spinning, making it fly a lot straighter than if it came out of a tube. Bullets were conical shaped, pointed in front. When fired, the hollow back part explodes and wraps around, making a tighter seal with more thrust. The point of it made sure it didn't drift one way or the other. Very accurate and very deadly."
"But they didn't change their tactics," he said. "They still fought shoulder to shoulder in firing lines, sometimes no more than 30 to 40 yards apart. Tremendous casualty figures, over 650,000, including 28,000 in one day at Antietam and 51,000 in one day at Gettysburg. How do you measure the losses there? It's too staggering. These are human lives, not to mention families and farms," which is why he plays a letter read in Ken Burns' PBS series written by a Rhode Island major to his wife July 14, 1861, a week before his death. "I have no lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged," he wrote. "My courage does not falter … know that when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name."
"But that's not why I do this," Troxel said. "I don't glorify the killing. I'm here to remember those who gave their lives in a cause in which they believed. You don't find too many people today who are willing to take a stand on anything. That's what intrigues me about this period of history. We always need people willing to say, 'Here's what I stand for, and I'm willing to give my life.' We need more of that determination, which we seem to have lost to wavering. You can't lose with that kind of courage and integrity."
Troxel is a Civil War re-enactor who shares his collection, including muskets, swords, a cannonball and one of the first artillery shells designed to blow up on impact, to breathe life into dusty history for students.
Students were not only awake, they flinched when he showed the primitive tools of battlefield surgery and heavy slave chains. Some came up to him afterward and shook his hand in thanks, even though they shivered in 47-degree rain to glimpse his courtyard campsite with its cramped eight-man tent.
Those in togas for Homecoming provided a jarring sight alongside his Wisconsin soldier with a plumed hat.
Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan formed the Iron Brigade and camped west of South Bend until they shipped down to New Albany, Ind., near Louisville. From there, they boarded steamboats or trains to be sent to whichever theater they were needed.
"The Iron Brigade was known for its tactics and its hats," which were tall and more like officers' than enlisted men. "They never gave ground. They died or went forward, but they never retreated. They wouldn't give," Troxel said. "There were people who came from Washington to Bull Run with picnic baskets. They thought the war would be over in a Sunday afternoon. They laid blankets on the hill, ate food and watched people kill each other. The South routed the North and drove them back into Washington."
What looked like an oversized toothpick probed wounds. Balls from $14 muskets which by 2002 sold for $450 usually shattered bones they encountered, so many a limb was sawed off in the name of saving lives if shrapnel could not be removed. That explains the origin of "biting the bullet," including some still bearing teeth marks.
"Not everything's expensive," Troxel said. "You can get into collecting at any level you want. At relic shows there are items for $75,000 to $100,000. There was a battle flag made for Gen. Custer by his wife that sold at auction for $1.2 million. Down where I am, I paid $12 for my cigar maker."
A crutch is too short for Troxel because Civil War-era men averaged 5-foot-7.
While the Civil War was waged mainly in the South, Indiana was invaded twice.
Troxel dressed as a Union infantryman, though when he first became interested he was on the Confederate side.
In Osceola with a metal detector, he uncovered a jacklike object scattered on roads to cripple the feet of horses and oxen, halting the army in its tracks.
Troops consumed "all kinds of jerky – beef, pork and chicken. It's already cured and won't spoil. You can eat it without stopping and have protein while you walk," Troxel said. They also ate cracker-like hardtack. It won't mold, but needed to be "busted up" and softened in soup or coffee.
"We were the most vulnerable on foot," says Troxel, emptying the white pouch on his belt crammed with more items than a woman's purse.
There was a penny whistle, a Jew's harp, a government-issued prayer book and pen and paper to correspond.
When you're only making $12 to 20 a month, depending on your rank, you don't want pay deducted for not writing home frequently enough, just in case you've already been docked for swearing in front of a woman.
Students examined a homemade deck of cards lacking numbers. Troxel said illiterate soldiers played by comparing shapes because many couldn't read figures. He showed the large billfolds soldiers carried which, put together with a packet of letters in a pocket, were known to stop bullets.
Troxel exhibited a bone-handled tooth brush with pig hair bristles that was "like kissing a hog every morning."
Troxel demonstrated the loading of a weapon from a supply of 40 cartridges with bullets at one end and gunpowder on the over. Clutching the cartridge in their teeth, they tore it open and poured the gunpowder down the barrel, set the mini-ball on top, tamped it down with the ramrod and fired.
"You built the bullet right there in your rifle," he explained. "If you were really fast, you could do that every 20 seconds, three times a minute. That means you're out of ammunition – 40 shots – in 15 minutes. When you run out, you have to leave the field, be resupplied or fight hand to hand."
Soldiers carried sewing kits to mend their uniforms and combs with fine teeth to remove bugs and burrs from their hair from sleeping on the ground.
Troxel said women followed the camps and made money doing laundry for the soldiers. The Union army traveled with a band and it was not unusual during lulls for the Rebels to shout requests, said Troxel.
He played a mournful "Shenandoah" on his harmonica reminiscent of the original farmer yearning to be home in his valley.
His souvenir from the western end of the War Between the States is a horse shoe from New Mexico. "There was a battle in Albuquerque" among some 5,000 battles of the Civil War which in some cases pitted family members against each other.
An estimated 300,000 slaves, or 10 percent of the 3 million Africans in the United States, made it to freedom in the north or Canada following the Underground Railroad, the trail of safe houses established by abolitionists.
Fleeing slaves traveled 20 miles a night, hiding during the daytime in the network of safe houses, communicating by code sung in songs and embroidered in quilts which doubled as maps while keeping travelers warm, although that is hotly disputed in some quarters.
Troxel said when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, some free blacks joined the Union army to go back to fight for their families' freedom and earned reputations as fierce warriors. Those who migrated west became the "Buffalo soldiers."
Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address was delivered while he suffered from smallpox and lasted three minutes, compared to a preceding preacher who droned on for two hours. It was originally thought to be a failure. It was so short the only photograph was taken from a distance as he signed an autograph.
Troxel showed the students some slave shackles as well as a chain from the notorious Andersonville, Ga., prison with one link almost filed through.
History has always been a passion of Troxel's that was only fueled by the first re-enactment he witnessed. "I never knew such things went on," he said. "I thought, 'I've got to do that.' I started out as a Confederate, then eventually changed sides – basically because when I go to schools like this and put the Stars and Bars (Rebel flag) out in a camp, you never know what's going to happen around here with the (Ku Klux) Klan.
"I do lectures like this about 12 times a years and I work out of the Northern Indiana Center for History in South Bend and do some stuff for them, too. If you could travel far enough, you could find (a re-enactment) every weekend. In my case, they're always on weekends and being a pastor, I'm fighting the devil on weekends, so I don't get to too many. Once in a while I'll get a conference or vacation that falls on the same weekend," said Troxel, who first got interested on a Gettysburg family vacation in junior high.
"I was intrigued by how many men had come to that one place with such organization and all that material. My first relic was a mini-ball. In college, I saw a re-enactment in Fort Wayne" in which his uncle fought. "I was hooked," though he fought for the South during the 11 years he lived in New Albany.
Part of the fascination of the Civil War to Troxel is it represents "the last chivalrous war, which carried with it the older codes of honor. People I talk to are interested in the stamina, the integrity, the courage it took to face 50,000 muskets and 300 cannons and what you must have had in the way of desire to win to face something like that.
"You had to look your enemy in the eye," he said. "You had to believe in what you were doing or you were going to run. Even if you never fought in a battle, just to do all that marching and to give up that much of your life and to suffer that hardship for a cause is something that's totally gone right now. People don't care anymore. 'Just give me $10 and let me play my video games and leave me alone.' My feeling is if you look back and realize what you've done in the past, you'll benefit by not doing it again in the future. You'll benefit personally from mistakes other people have made."
"With this group right here," Troxel said on a previous visit, "I could tell you in 10 minutes which ones are going to succeed because of their interest in where other guys have been. You can see it in their eyes. They're crossing off decisions that led to mistakes … There's nothing new under the sun. The trials are the same. If you really have an interest in history, you can use that to succeed in the future. There's a lot we're not doing now that we learned from Vietnam. That's why we go in with bombers and hold back the troops."
"You can always 'if' things," he said, "but if (the South) had won Gettysburg, they probably would have won the war. They'd won every major battle up to that point" and Europe was poised to enter on its side. The Confederacy, under Gen. Robert E. Lee, consistently outmaneuvered the North's "terrible commanders," Troxel said.
A horn signifies infantry on his hat and his uniform has blue trim. Yellow trim meant cavalry, the "eyes and ears of the army," scouting enemy positions. Red represented artillery.
Fanning himself, Troxel said they could be used to cool, but also as an arbiter of etiquette "You had to know all the rules," because the young woman might be telling a potential suitor to get lost with a flick of her fan.
Women napped from 1 to 3 in the heat of the day to keep their creamy complexions. Having a healthy tan sent the message the family was not well off enough to hire someone to do their farmwork for them.