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.