Blue Springs Battle Reenactments Set Today And Sunday

By TOM YANCEY

Staff Writer

They may not remember everything they heard on Friday, but it's certain that the 931 fifth-graders who attended "Education Day" at the Battle of Blue Springs Reenactment will remember what they saw.

They will remember the noise of the cannons -- real cannons, that fired to let the children and teachers know to advance to the next "Living History Station."

The children will remember the smell of horses, and remember how hot the battlefield was on a sunny fall day, as they marched from station to station, following a member of the "cadre" that led them, sometimes in military formation, but mostly not.

Many of them will use the free admission pass they received for the reenactment to bring parents or grandparents to see what they saw, and more, during battle reenactments being held today and Sunday.

Many will visit www.battleofbluesprings.com on the Internet, to learn more.

Ticket Prices

Tickets may be purchased at the gate when entering the reenactment site. Adults (age 12 years and above) $7 each; children (7 years to 11 years) $5 each; children 6 years and under are free. Scouts in uniform get $1 off, according to the reenactment Website.

Many Scouts are camping on the battlefield this weekend, working on merit badges, officials said.

Something To Remember

Jim Allen, the battle reenactment executive director, said his goal for Education Day was to present enough aspects of the Civil War that each child would hear or see something that would ignite a passion to learn more.

Allen praised the 864 reenactors who registered for this weekend's activities and especially those members of the 19th Tennessee Infantry who served as hosts for Education Day, and led school groups from stop to stop Friday.

Because of their efforts, children will remember seeing adult men portraying U.S. and Confederate soldiers, right down to authentic boots and buttons.

Some of those men, such as Daniel Luther, an employee of the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site who on Friday portrayed Johnson as a U.S. senator from Tennessee at the start of the Civil War, pointed out that history was made by real people, doing the best they could in real places like Greene County.

From local historian Dr. Robert Orr the children learned that not everyone in East Tennessee agreed on the questions that led to the Civil War, and that some were involved in secret efforts to keep their state in the Union.

At a total of 16 "Living History" stations, the children learned about the real problems of daily life during the war faced by everyone from generals using primitive communications methods to mothers trying to feed and clothe a family while the "men folk" were away, fighting.

'It's All Our Heritage'

"It's all our heritage," said Lizzie Watts, superintendent of the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site.

"Seeing it being reenacted brings it to life, makes it real, and fun. It gives children the chance to value and treasure the specialness of our corner of the world."

Watts continued, "I really do believe that if the next generation doesn't understand that their heritage has value, then they won't understand who they are," and won't appreciate what went into giving them the life they live today.

Confederate Uniforms

Sgt. Jim Woods of the host unit, the 19th Tennessee Infantry, said showing a group of children around the battlefield and seeing them react and learn was rewarding to him as a reenactor.

Woods even gave them a sneak peek at his long drawers.

"Don't tell your teachers I did this," Woods stage-whispered, as teachers nearby smiled and pretended not to notice. He then pulled the leg of one of his pants out of the top of a knee boot to expose a length of his white cotton "drawers," long underwear typical of the period.

That little skit gave Woods the opportunity to talk about how the idea of modesty has changed in the last 145 years.

Woods was dressed in a Confederate uniform that looked as much tan as gray. He said it was modeled as nearly as possible after a real 19th Tennessee Infantry uniform on display at the East Tennessee Historical Society's museum in Knoxville.

He explained that the uniform is made of authentic "wool jeans" material, lined with a patterned cotton print, which was also typical of uniforms of the time. Wool was hot, but it was durable, and available, he said.

50-Acre 'Museum'

In a way, the children got the benefit of walking into a 50-acre outdoor "museum" where the exhibits come to life, walk around, and talk about themselves.

This year's Education Day was called the "Andrew Johnson Bicentennial Education Day," in part because the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site partnered with the Battle of Blue Springs Planning Committee and the Town of Mosheim, and provided $13,000 to finance the effort.

The First Tennessee Foundation presented a $15,000 check to the Andrew Johnson Bicentennial Committee at the battle site on the John I. Myers farm near Mosheim on Friday. (Please see accompanying article.)

Teachers who brought their fifth-graders to the event were able to prepare the children, and themselves, by using a teacher's manual and a DVD with lectures, music and battle scenes.

The DVD and other materials were prepared by a group headed by Darlene McCleish, who retired last year after a career as a teacher at Chuckey Elementary School.

Funding for the teachers' materials has been provided by the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area, a statewide network headquartered at Middle Tennessee State University.

Slavery Discussed

Woods predicted that teachers and parents will spend the next few weeks answering questions about the Civil War that students may not have thought of at the time, or may have been too overwhelmed or shy to ask.

Not all students held back, however.

After listening to Bill Regan, who is a first-person interpreter at the Dickson-Williams Mansion in Greeneville, explain the economic realities involving slavery that led to the war, one little blonde girl held up her hand.

She asked, "Why didn't the white people just let the black people alone, and let them do their work and raise their food? Were the white people lazy?"

Regan answered that, perhaps some of the white people may have been lazy. But unfortunately, he said, not very many people at the time had the same attitude that the little girl showed. Some people at that time believed that black people were not really human, and they justified slavery that way.

Slavery was a problem from the beginnings of this country, said Regan, who portrayed Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, who started several anti-slavery newspapers, including one in Greene County.

Of the 13 original colonies, Regan said, seven were slave-holding states, while six were "free," with little slavery.

Despite documents like the Declaration of Independence that talked about freedom and liberty, "From day one," slavery was a problem for America, because slaves had neither freedom nor liberty.

But for political reasons, and to get enough votes from enough states to ratify the U.S. Constitution and get the new country going, Regan told the children, the founders decided to leave the problem of slavery for the next generation to solve.

He explained that a book called Uncle Tom's Cabin, written just before the Civil War by a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe, portrayed slavery so well that it became, "after the Bible, the best-selling book of the 19th Century."

Impact Of Cotton Gin

Regan explained that the invention of the cotton gin in the late 1700s made cotton into a profitable cash crop in the South. At one point, he said, there were more millionaires in cotton-growing Mississippi than in commercially and industrially prosperous New York.

After direct importation of slaves from Africa became illegal, slaves that were already in the United States became more and more valuable, he said, to the point that a slave was worth "about $35,000 in today's money."

People who owned a few slaves were strongly tempted to sell them at those prices, Regan said, to brokers who then resold the slaves "like used cars" to buyers in places farther south where slaves were used for planting, weeding, and picking cotton.

Regan said he believes that the Civil War was the ultimate result.

He said people who wanted to abolish slavery, called "abolitionists," are sometimes blamed for the war, but he said abolitionists were more like people who shouted "fire" after a house was already burning.

Emancipation Proclamation

Once the war was well under way, President Abraham Lincoln shrewdly issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the statese that were part of the Confederacy, but not in the areas under the control of the United States government.

Regan pointed out that President Lincoln did not have the authority under the Constitution to free slaves in the U.S., but could free those in states that were "in rebellion."

Lincoln hoped that his action would make slaves less useful to the Confederacy, Regan said, and it worked. He pointed out that 150,000 black men served in the Union Army by the end of the war.

Regan said Lincoln must have realized that, once those men had fought under the American flag, most Americans could never again consider letting former U.S. soldiers return to slavery, "and the Union Army started treating blacks like free people."

The rest of the slaves were not freed until seven months after the war ended, Regan told the children. Former Confederate states could not rejoin the Union until they ratified constutional amendments outlawing slavery.

He pointed out, however, that Mississippi did not ratify those amendments until 1995, though they had been law for more than a century already by then.

'Slave' Talks To Students

At the Living History station right next door to Regan, the children encountered Crystal Montgomery, who portrayed "Aunt Minerva Clem," who was a "house slave" in the home of Dr. Alexander Williams and his wife, Catherine Dickson Williams, which is now the restored Dickson-Williams mansion.

As "Aunt Minerva," Montgomery told the children of seeing famous people like Davy Crockett and Presidents James K. Polk, Andrew Jackson, whom she knew as "Old Hickory," and Andrew Johnson, as well as "the great compromiser," Henry Clay of Kentucky, and others.

Montgomery asked the children to sing "When the Saints Go Marching In" with her, and introduced them to a song in which a dying person asks a friend to promise to plant a watermelon vine on the dying person's grave.

One teacher said the children sang that song for the rest of the morning, as they walked from station to station.

Cemetery Restoration

But, more importantly, Montgomery told the children that, by getting involved in the restoration and reclamation of the Wesley Heights Cemetery in the last two years, she found things that led her to learn more about her own family.

She asked the children to think about the game in which a sentence is whispered from one person to another in a circle, and by the time it completes the circle, important parts of what was originally said are missing or distorted.

Then she said that an elderly relative of hers always told her to love the Wesley Cemetery, but never said why.

Until doing research this past year, Montgomery said, she did not know that her great-grandfather, Thomas Clem, was one of the original charterers of the cemetery.

That part of the story was lost until it was uncovered by research, just as graves of black Civil War and World War I soldiers were uncovered when years of weeds and briars were removed from the historic cemetery.

Greeneville's African-American history includes slaves, Montgomery said, but it also includes people who lived in "a free colored society, too," and worked hard to make it better.

"All of them need to be remembered," she said.

When it comes to local and family history and heritage, Montgomery told the children, "If you don't tell it, and pass it on, it gets taken for granted and lost."

She added, "If you don't know where you come from, how are you going to know where you're going?"