“Any understanding of this nation,” said the late novelist and historian Shelby Foote — whose honeyed drawl and white, nicotine-tinged beard were made famous by a 1990 Ken Burns documentary — “has to be based on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It made us.”
It’s doubtless the belief of John Jackson, too, who, since a trip to Chanute’s Elmwood Cemetery in 2004, has been compiling a database of Civil War gravesites, concentrating the better part of his efforts — at least so far — on southeast Kansas.
Jackson discussed the project in front of a small gathering at the Iola Public Library Tuesday evening. “I’ve been to 225 cemeteries, been to 75 counties. I’ve researched Civil War veterans all over the place.”
After pacing the morbid aisles of this or that prairie cemetery, Jackson, armed with the identifying information he’s culled from the headstone, will take a deep scholarly dive into the archives, until he’s got his fill of each soldier’s story.
Jackson, who lives with his wife in Chanute, was recently named assistant manager at Walmart in Iola, which hasn’t left him as much free time for sleuthing as he’d like. But in the tradition of the best amateur historians, he sets out in his car on weekends and on vacations with the idea of drawing a few lost facts back into the light of public memory.
The Kansas Historical Society has recognized the significance of Jackson’s pursuit and provides an interactive version of his findings — the “Sleeping Heroes” database — on its website.
Although none of the most famous battles of the Civil War were staged in Kansas, Jackson is not unwise to the fertile ground he’s treading. To the extent that the country staged anything like a dress rehearsal for its formative catastrophe, it took place along the woodland border of eastern Kansas, where, years before the first shells burst upon the grounds at Fort Sumter, men took up guns in answer to the question of slavery.
Jackson, who speaks about the partisans who emerged from Bleeding Kansas as if they were personal friends or colleagues, entertained the handful of history buffs with anecdote for close to an hour Tuesday. “You know, I have a thousand Civil War stories,” Jackson said, probably undershooting.
Two percent of the United States population died in uniform in the Civil War — about 620,000 men. The equivalent toll today would be 6 million. Some of those bodies were never returned, and were buried among the mixed limbs of fellow soldiers in trenches a long way from home. Of the small-town Kansans whose bodies were returned and who did receive a proper burial, their graves have largely been forgotten, their names and faces and contributions allowed to sink back into the mass of statistics which mark the Union dead. And so it takes someone like Jackson who, when he gets time off from the store, seeks out these mute stones and, often with as little information as a name, reaches back into the submerged past until he can grasp his hands around the heart of a specific story.
Historian tracks Civil War veterans
