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Feature article
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Historian looks at ‘Fort Sumter Crisis’
By Jim McGuinness
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Now 80, Bearss got hooked on the war as a seventh-grader growing up in Billings, Mont. The impetus was a biography of Confederate Gen. Jeb Stuart read to him by his father.
“Stuart was a rather glamorous fellow,” Bearss said over the phone from his Arlington, Va., home. “Very flamboyant and the kind of character who would cap ture the fancy of a young boy.”
Fancy soon turned to obsession for young Bearss on his grandfather’s ranch in nearby Hardin, Mont., just a bike ride from the Custer Battlefield. While on the ranch, he took to naming cattle for Civil War generals and battles (his favorite milk cow was named Antietam).
Johnson City Civil War Roundtable: Edwin C. Bearss discusses “The Fort Sumter Crisis”
WHEN: 7 p.m., Saturday, March 8
WHERE: Eastman’s Toy F. Reid Employee Center, Kingsport
COST: Free
CONTACT: 323-2306
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Today, Bearss is considered one of the nation’s preeminent Civil War authorities, having served 15 years as chief historian for the National Park Service in Vicksburg, Miss. and Washington, D.C. He’s been on the lecture circuit since relinquishing that post in 1970, and currently holds the position of chief historian emeritus for the National Park Service in Arlington. Although officially retired, he still spends more than 250 days a year on the road.
“I don’t get paid, but I have an office and I have e-mail,” Bearss said. “I get to travel and speak on the war. I like it because it gives me something to do.”
Bearss will be at Eastman’s Toy F. Reid Employee Center on Monday to discuss “The Fort Sumter Crisis” before the John son City Civil War Roundtable.
Bearss has an encyclopedic knowledge of Civil War minutia. His goal, he says, is for his listen ers understand the war’s enormous impact on our history.
“People need to realize the sacrifice that was made on both sides,” said Bearss, who served in the Marines during World War II. “Almost as many people died in prison camps in the Civil War as died in all causes in the Vietnam War. The casualties were like what France suffered in World War I. That should tell you the impact it had.”
Bearss plays no favorites during his discussions. He has, how ever, noticed a sympathetic eye for the South that he thinks strikes at the core of most Americans.
“The American people have a feeling for the underdog, and the South was definitely the underdog," Bearss said. “So Lee has be come a mythic figure. Grant was as good a general, probably even a better general, but he doesn’t get the aura that’s associated with Robert E. Lee because Lee was the underdog.”
As for his own Civil War heroes, Bearss lists three from each side: Generals Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Winfield Scott Hancock from the North; Generals Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Stonewall Jackson from the South.
What about the infatuation with boyhood hero Jeb Stuart?
“That kind of disappeared,” Bearss said. “In one of my popular talks, I contrast General Forrest with General Stuart and Stuart doesn’t come off very well. He was a boyhood hero but as an adult I have different heroes.”
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