Pubdate: Tue, 26 Mar 2002
Source: Reporter-Times, The (IN)
Website: http://www.hoosiertimes.com/mv-to-top/index-rt.php3
Address: P.O. Box 1636, Martinsville, IN 46151
Copyright: 2002 The Reporter-Times
Fax: (765)342-1446
Author: Robert Kendall

THE SCRIBBLER

Martinsville & Civil War

BY THE TIME this gets into print, we'll know whether Br'er Geo. Alexander's 
worries about the President's health will have been realized, or whether 
Mr. Bush II has escaped the Shining Path assassins in Peru. The voters 
turned out the relatively good Japanese administration of that narcotic 
growing South American land and the crooks have taken over.

Br'er Geo. has set up several Christian broadcasts in Peru's peaks and 
valleys, wherein the only profitable business involves drugs. Most of the 
dope comes into the United States, to the profit of the producers in Peru 
and the dealers in America.

Our government tries to bribe the Peruvians to turn from narcotics to corn, 
or whatever. But until millions of Americans forswear their addictions, it 
won't work. We've already filled our prisons with addicts, and imprisonment 
doesn't work. If they aren't impressed by the horror of jail life, they 
will not be deterred from the addictive pleasures of the coca trees, from 
which cocaine is derived. The profits from this trade are worth killing 
for. The only thing staying the Shining Path's assassins is the possible 
arousal of us Americans to the dreadful perils facing our land.

SO, TO FORGET the madness of the 21st century, I now and again repair to an 
earlier time, when the United States tried to deal with another form of 
human depravity, chattel slavery. Our Civil War is over, but its after 
effects endure. But just maybe, in another century, we may dispel the 
notion that skin pigmentation is a reliable measurement of a human being's 
worth.

Every now and then, we take interest in some old account from the Civil 
War, the roster of wounds entitling a veteran to a small pension, a list of 
warriors who distinguished themselves or who made political hay from their 
enrollment in the bloodletting that sent nearly two-thirds of a million 
young Americans to early death.

But it's not always easy to document the record as it applies to Morgan 
County. A dozen or so years after the North won the war a crooked 
officeholder set the Martinsville courthouse fire to conceal evidence of 
his crimes. So a good deal of local information on the Civil War is not 
available.

Mythology has it that pretty close to a full-fledged battle broke out 
against the Civil War draft in northwestern Johnson County, next to Madison 
Township. It could have spilled over into Green Township, but I can't 
document it.

The area was packed with Dixiecrats. Indiana's Republican Governor Oliver 
Morton was nobody to fool with, and he turned the state into a 
dictatorship, as did President Lincoln for large sections of the country. 
Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin Stanton told a visitor to his office, "A 
little tap on that bell, and I can send you to where you won't hear the 
dogs bark." (My middle name has a connection to Stanton, but that's another 
story.)

Morgan County may have produced a colonel or so, but our role in the Civil 
War didn't come close to the World War II record, as the wall of fame at 
Poe's Cafeteria attests.

OUR COUNTY had a bona fide invasion fright in 1863, at the very same time 
the main armies of the North and South were slaughtering each other at 
Vicksburg, Miss., and Gettysburg, Pa. We got "mentioned in dispatches," as 
the Brits say. It was in connection with the early summer of the frightful 
year.

And Martinsville wasn't memorialized just in a courthouse cannon or a 
county auditor's pension list. There was a real invasion threat, and 
thousands of our forebearers turned out to meet it. The only major work 
mentioning our experience is generally recognized as the single best 
account of that frightful conflict. It's in volume two of Shelby Foot's 
"Civil War - A Narrative." If we get the thing together, it'll come in my 
next effort in this space, or something like that.
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