Styple Delivers News From Civil war Front

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 26, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

Insight: You've collected a lot of letters by Northern soldiers. What about Johnny Rebs?

WBS: I've been collecting Confederate letters from Southern newspapers for several years. I've found some great material that hasn't been republished, and I hope one day to write the Confederate part of the story. The problem is that during the struggle paper became scarce, and the Southerners couldn't write to newspapers as much as, say, the Sunday Mercury correspondents did, so the material isn't there. But I have found some good material nonetheless.

Insight: After all the research you've done on the Civil War, do you think the South could have won?

WBS: I don't think the Confederacy ever had a chance, and I'll tell you why. In the same pages of the Sunday Mercury where they printed the correspondence of the soldiers, they also printed the baseball box scores. In New York City there were hundreds of ballplayers playing games and competing in sports.

[Civil War historian] Shelby Foote said in Ken Burns' famous TV documentary of the war that the North fought with one arm tied behind its back. I believe that. In the South colleges and other schools closed because all the manpower that might have been attending or teaching in the schools was off fighting. There sure wasn't anyone left for baseball and other sports. I think it was poor leadership in the North in the first part of the war that kept the Yankees from winning sooner than they did, but when that problem was overcome it was only a matter of time until the South lost.

Insight: How essential was Lincoln's leadership?

WBS: I would say the war would not have been won without him.

Insight: You've done so much valuable work on the Civil War. What are you working on now?

WBS: I have to get back to my biography of Gen. Kearny. It's long overdue, and it's my lifelong project. He had a 25-year military career, lost an arm in the Mexican War, fought Indians out West and a lot more. I've been to Europe and to Paris to do research about him there because he served in the French military just before the American Civil War as a volunteer aide and military adviser. He was the first American to receive the Legion of Honor and had a great deal to do with keeping France on the side of the Union. Kearny fought in the Civil War for 13 months before he was killed at the Battle of Chantilly in Virginia in 1862.

Personal Bio

William B. Styple: Dressed for a Civil War reenactment.

Currently: Civil War historian. Editor, Writing and Fighting the Civil War: Soldier Correspondence to the New York Sunday Mercury.

Born: Kearny, N.J.; July 7, 1960.

Family: Wife, Nancy; two children, Kim and Brad.

Education: Catawba College, Salisbury, N.C. European-history major.

Video Documentaries: Echoes of the Blue and Grey, two volumes of footage of North and South Civil War veterans at reunions and other events from the late 1890s onward; a video of Spanish-American war footage, The Splendid Little War.

BOOKS: The Andersonville Diary and Memoirs of Charles Hopkins, 1st Maine Infantry; History of the 57th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry; The Little Bugler: The True Story of a Twelve-Year-Old Boy in the Civil War, among others.