Kirstein Ta on “Ars Moriendi – The Good Death”

Dying far from home and loved ones was a harsh reality that soldiers had to face. Many turned to comrades, religious leaders, nurses, or doctors to help them facilitate “a good death”—a death reflective of character and legacy, based on faith, repentance, and acceptance of God’s will.

“Civil War soldiers were, in fact, better prepared to die than to kill, for they lived in a culture that offered many lessons in how life should end. But these lessons had to be adapted to the dramatically changed circumstances of the war. Soldiers and their families struggled in a variety of ways to mitigate the cruel realities and to construct a good death amid chaos.” —Drew Gilpin Faust

Kirstein Hansen-Ta is a new student of the Civil War. In July 2024, she inherited ten six-inch binders containing her family history, dating as far back as 1630 to the present day. As incredible as all this history is, she found none as fascinating as her family’s experiences during the Civil War. Several men on both sides of her family fought for the Confederacy, including her second great-grandfather and a number of uncles. She is happy to report that, with the exception of one, they all returned home.

Among the hundreds of pages in these binders, Kirstein came across what she considers the most valuable: four typewritten pages of a letter from an uncle describing all three of his older brothers and their time in the Confederate army. Additionally, he describes what life was like for the family during the Civil War. After reading these stories, Kirstein realized that the most intriguing part of the Civil War wasn’t necessarily the battles or the politics, but rather the people who lived through it.

Wanting to learn more about the Civil War, Kirstein discovered the website for the South Bay Civil War Round Table and officially became a member in October 2024. She looks forward to learning more about this significant time in our country’s history.

Alan Sissenwein on “The Checkered Civil War Career of Edwin Vose Sumner”

History has not always been kind to Maj. Gen. Edwin Vose Sumner, the Civil War’s oldest corps commander. Born in Massachusetts in 1797, he had over four decades of military service behind him—with much combat experience—when the South seceded. In 1862, he was assigned to command the 2nd Corps in the Army of the Potomac, a position that some historians believe was beyond his capacity. Later that year, at the start of the Fredericksburg campaign, he took charge of the Right Grand Division, consisting of the 2nd and 9th Corps along with two cavalry brigades.

Sumner’s critics cite his performance at the Battle of Antietam as proof of his ineptitude. There, he led one of his divisions into the West Woods, where a Confederate counterattack inflicted over 900 casualties and sent the Federals reeling. Sumner’s culpability in this fiasco remains a source of debate, but the incident was unquestionably the worst moment of his military career.

Whatever Sumner’s limitations, his Civil War record also included successes. The general can be credited with averting disaster on at least two occasions. At the Battle of Fair Oaks, Sumner was ordered to cross the flooding Chickahominy River and support the isolated 3rd Corps, which was being hard-pressed by a Confederate attack. Ignoring warnings that the river had become impassable, Sumner and the 2nd Corps crossed the waterway over a pair of rickety bridges, one of which was soon destroyed by the surging current while the other was in danger of being swept away. Remarkably, they managed to reach the fighting in time to save the 3rd Corps from destruction. Six months later, at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Sumner staved off a potentially larger catastrophe when he dissuaded Ambrose Burnside from renewing his assaults against Marye’s Heights. This talk will examine Sumner’s personality and generalship, showing how they influenced the war for both good and ill.

Alan Sissenwein has been a member of the South Bay Civil War Round Table since 1997 and currently serves as its vice president. A professional writer, he holds a bachelor’s degree in history from UC Berkeley and a master’s in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He is currently writing the second draft of a book on the Battle of Fredericksburg.

David Hsueh on “Requiem for Innocence: Destruction of Nature and Animals in the Civil War”

Five days after the bloodiest single day in American history at Antietam, Union XII Corps acting commander Brig. Gen. Alpheus Williams rode across the devastated battlefield. The ground was still littered with corpses, and the stench of decay hung in the air. That evening, in a letter home to his daughter, Williams struggled to describe the scenes he had witnessed. One image, however, refused to leave him:

“The number of dead horses was high. They lay, like the men, in all attitudes. One beautiful milk-white animal had died in so graceful a position that I wished for its photograph. Its legs were doubled under, and its arched neck gracefully turned to one side, as if looking back to the ball hole in its side. Until you got to it, it was hard to believe the horse was dead.”

Unbeknownst to Williams, three days earlier, on September 19, the photographer Alexander Gardner had encountered the very same animal. He captured it in a haunting image later published in his Photographic Sketch Book of the War, titled “Confederate Colonel and Horse, Both Killed at the Battle of Antietam.” Williams’ words and Gardner’s lens together preserved the same tragic scene: an animal of striking beauty transformed into a casualty of war. Once overlooked, the photograph has, in recent decades, gained recognition as a powerful emblem of Antietam and of the Civil War itself, embodying not only the vast human slaughter but also the silent suffering of the animals drawn into the conflict.

This talk explores the wider devastation of the natural world during the Civil War: the destruction of landscapes, the slaughter of horses on the battlefield, and the displacement of other wildlife. It portrays the conflict not only as a human tragedy but also as an ecological catastrophe—a wound inflicted upon both creation and the divine. Its aim is to illuminate a different dimension of wartime destruction: the suffering borne by those who could not speak for themselves.

David Hsueh is a fourth-year political science student at the University of California, Berkeley. An avid history enthusiast since kindergarten, his first introduction to the American Civil War came through reading about President Lincoln. His true passion for the war began after his first viewing of the movie Gettysburg and his subsequent visits to the Gettysburg and Antietam battlefields seven years ago, at age 11. His main interests in the Civil War center on leadership decisions at the brigade-to-army level and on human-interest stories—both of generals and of the common soldier. A cinephile and film lover, he drew inspiration for the themes and topic of this talk from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar.

Mark Costin on “The Civil War Campaigns Against the Apache and the Navaho”

At the conclusion of the Civil War New Mexico campaign, the victorious Union appointed James Henry Carleton as commander of the Department of New Mexico. Carleton considered the local Native American tribes, the Apache and Navajo, grave threats and pursued a relentless campaign against them. This talk describes these little-known campaigns, which had severe consequences for the Native Americans in the West.

Mark Costin is an engineer living in Sunnyvale, California, recently retired from working on functional safety for automated and autonomous vehicles. A longtime history enthusiast, Mark now has more time to devote to his hobby. He holds a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from Case Western Reserve University, an M.Eng. from McMaster University, and a B.Eng. from McGill University.