Lost diary brings to life the Civil War in Cape Girardeau County

The story begins in June 1861, when a Union Army force of 5,000 arrived in Jackson in search of secessionists following a march from Cape Girardeau.

It continues on Aug. 30, 1861, when another Union force arrived, stationed guards around the perimeter of Jackson and began a systematic search of homes. From that point forward, the Rev. Joseph C. Maple describes events of the first year of the Civil War in Cape Girardeau County and nearby areas in a diary that was recently reproduced, with a typed transcript, by the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center.

The diary, long lost, resurfaced in Jackson at an auction in a box of purchases by former Southeast Missouri State University professor William Halcomb. The diary was published by the archive center at the urging of Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at the university.

Halcomb declined to be part of a story about the diary in April 2007. He could not be reached this week. But Nickell said the document is an example of the invaluable assistance that personal, written records give to historians searching for more than the description of battles and political manuevers of the Civil War.

"It gives an insight into someone who lived in a part of the area," Nickell said. "Right or wrong, it gives an impression of what people were thinking," Nickell said. "What they chose to include or exclude tells a lot about them. Historians would be at a great loss if there were no diaries that survived."

Missouri was a front-line state during the Civil War, which lasted from April 1861 to April 1865. Missouri ranks third, behind only Virginia and Tennessee, in the number of recorded battles and skirmishes during the conflict, the bloodiest and last major war on American soil.

Maple, an Ohio native who was in charge of the Jackson Academy from 1857 to 1864, never expresses direct support of the Confederate cause. He does, however, severely question the methods of Union forces, describes their indifference to alleged crimes by slaves against whites and reports the wanton destruction of property.

On Sept. 2, 1861, a regiment of "infidel barbarous -- aliens Dutch" went to the home of militia Col. H.H. Williams, who was not at home. His wife and two children were, and they were accosted by "these demons in human form" who threatened Mrs. Williams and searched the house. The eldest child, Clara E. Williams, 9, died after being "so frightened as to be thrown into paroxysms and from that into fever."

"But she was frightened to death by a horde of vandals, who joined the army, only that they might have a chance to steal -- ruffians, whose patriotism has been aroused by the promise of 15 dollars per month, which is about twice as much as they ever earned before, unprincipled cowards, who find a 'Secesh' wherever they find property unprotected, but sneak from the approach of danger like a 'suck egg' dog from the approach of the wench that habitually bosses him for his bad conduct," Maple wrote.

The sesquicentennial of the war is rapidly approaching. In September, Gov. Matt Blunt announced the formation of a Missouri Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission to coordinate the state's commemoration of the war. About 160,000 Missourians fought on both sides of the conflict. While Missouri was a slave state, with sharp divisions, Unionists took the upper hand almost from the beginning of the conflict and kept the state from joining the Confederacy.

There is no local group preparing for the sesquicentennial, Nickell said.

On Nov. 15 Nickell will be leading a bus tour of Civil War sites in Cape Girardeau. With two buses full already, there is no more room for additional people on that tour. But Civil War sites abound in the area. During the war, Cape Girardeau was protected by four forts, designated A, B, C and D, of which the site of Fort D off Ranney Avenue is maintained as a city park and historic site.

The diary is a big addition to the archive center's Civil War material, said Steven Pledger, the county archivist. Much of the archive's material relating to the war is contained in genealogical records, such as a special census of Civil War veterans conducted in 1890.

But there are other nuggets as well, Pledger said. He has compiled a list of Civil War actions in Cape Girardeau County, ranging from scouting missions to the action known as the "Battle of Cape Girardeau" on April 26, 1863. The battle, which took place near where Thilenius Street crosses Caruthers Avenue, is described on a storyboard at the intersection.

Pledger has also written a 10-page account of the battle.

Other nuggets at the archive center, Pledger said, can be found in court documents from cases where people refused to take loyalty oaths to a murder case in which the prisoner, William Allen, was released after the court received a letter from Col. Albert Jackson of the 12th Regiment of Cavalry of the Missouri State Militia. Allen had killed Green Randol, Jackson wrote, in an action "done against a rebel in active hostility against the government."

"The Germans who settled here were pretty much pro-Union," Pledger said. "The old families were pretty much Southern sympathizers."

Nickell puts Maple firmly in the camp of the sympathizers. After his tenure at the Jackson Academy, he resided in other parts of Missouri and in Iowa before retiring in Armstrong, Mo. In 1909, his wife died, and he returned with her body for burial in new Lorimier Cemetery, where he was also interred upon his death in 1917.

The kind of personal story told in Maple's diary could become a thing of the past, Nickell said. While more people write more words than most people did during that time, he notes, many of those words are in electronic form and easily lost to history.

"We need some kind of storage system so people in the future will know how we lived in this century," Nickell said. "We need to see the evolution of society. We need to know that, we need to know how we change."

rkeller@semissourian.com

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