haunted by a ghost of the civil war

I've been haunted a lot by a ghost these past few days – not one of those terrifying Hollywood ghosts, nor a cutesy friendly children's ghost either.

The ghost I've been haunted by is the sort who makes you stop consider how well we are meeting the challenge of our times, compared to how well the ghost faced theirs. When this particular ghost was still alive, there was a war on, and his country needed him. Eleven states in the South, fearful that the president would abolish slavery, had declared themselves free and independent of their brothers in the North. So one morning he got up, kissed his mother and father goodbye, and left the Pennsylvania farm he had known his whole life.

He is an ancestor of mine whom I've only known through a family legend. As his ghost has drifted through the house, I have wondered at how little I know about him. Did he enlist because he had a moral conviction that the Union must be preserved at all costs, or was there another reason? Did he think the war would end soon, or was he expecting to be away for years? Did he ever wonder if it would be worth it in the end?

To tell the truth, until recently I didn't even know his name. All I knew was one horrifying detail of his life.

“I have an ancestor who was a prisoner of war at Andersonville,” I once told one of my best op-ed columnists. Marc Kelley wrote for the Cranford Eagle while I was its managing editor, and also worked as a Realtor in the downtown.

“Did he survive?” Marc asked. “That was an awful place, you know. The commander of that camp was the only Confederate officer to be executed for war crimes after the Civil War ended.”

“He did,” I said, “and it's a good thing for me, too. After the war, he went on to get married and have children.”

That was all I really knew about him. For the longest time, I assumed he was a Learn, since I knew he was an ancestor on my father's side. A few weeks ago an email from my father set me straight. His name was Samuel Bowman, and he was the father of my Grandmother Ruth Learn's father.

With a little searching, I was able to find an online database of records pertaining to the Civil War, including a list of POWs at Andersonville, more formally known as Camp Sumter. I'd checked before but had been unable to find anyone named Learn in the database. Now that I had the right name, I went back to see what I could find. It wasn't encouraging.

According to the database, a Pvt. Sam Bowman died on July 20, 1864, while held at Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Ga. The cause of his death is listed as diarrhea. No other information was listed, aside from his unit — 147th New York Infantry, Company H — which told me nothing. Most likely Pvt. Bowman was buried in one of several mass graves on site.

The snippet of genealogy my father had included in his email mentioned that Samuel Bowman, born in 1842, had enlisted in the Union Army with his older brother James "J.J." Bowman. It also reported that Sam and his wife had one child, a son.

The Andersonville records do not list a James Bowman, who is buried at the Cambria Mills Cemetery in Fallentimber, Pa. I assume that J.J. made it home after the war had ended, and I hope that he lived a long and happy life with his wife, Eliza, and however many children and dogs they had.

But Sam! The story of his family seemed too painful even to consider. If he died in 1864, Sam couldn't have been more than 22 when he died. Was his wife already visibly pregnant when he left, or was she not yet showing? Did they even know?

Maybe their son already was born. Just imagine the tableau: She stands there in the early morning as J.J. and her Sam leave together. As she watches him go, never to return, she cradles their young son in her arms, or maybe feels him tug at her dress from where he stands next to her on the porch.

It's easy to picture her, young face darkened with foreboding; and just as easy to imagine the grief that would have pierced her heart when news came that her husband had died. She would never take another husband. When her son became a man himself, he married and continued the Bowman line. Picture the single mother, raising her son with the help of her late husband's family, reminded daily of the man she had loved as the son he had left her grew daily into his likeness.

But then, history smiled and I was pleased to discover that my original story was more correct. There was more than one Samuel Bowman at Camp Sumter. Pvt. Bowman died, but my ancestor Sam didn't.

When Sam left Camp Sumter and made the long trek home, he stopped along the way and courted Elizabeth “Fanny” Swain, and married her. They had one son, whom they named Edgar and raised together. When the time came, Edgar married May Cartwright. Together they had four children of their own, the second of whom was named Ruth Virginia Bowman. She was my grandmother.

Of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners held at Camp Sumter during the war, nearly 13,000 died, primarily from scurvy, diarrhea and dysentery. When rescue finally came at war's end, the prisoners' deliverers described them as skeletal, emaciated, and covered with filth and vermin. There are pictures on the Internet. They could just as easily be pictures of Holocaust survivors.

As Marc had told me, the general pardon that President Lincoln extended to the rebel soldiers at the end of the Civil War did not extend to the commander of Camp Sumter. The record shows that Capt. Henry Wirz was tried and hanged for war crimes, the only Confederate official to be so tried and convicted.

(To be fair, some historians dispute that Wirz was responsible for the conditions at Camp Sumter, and instead blame the overcrowding and infectious disease, both due to circumstances beyond his personal control.)

In many ways, Sam Bowman is the perfect ancestor at a time like this. Like Lincoln, Gen. Ulysses Grant strode through his time like a titan. By dint of his position, his character and his drive, he moved the river of history from one bed to another. Claiming him as ancestor would be an exercise in vanity, like trying to make myself better by the association. Sam, on the other hand, was a nondescript nobody from central Pennsylvania.

My great-great-grandfather saw the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln. He saw the nation quit its half-hearted attempts at Reconstruction, and may have heard about the rise of jim crow justice and how by brute force the resentful South undid much of the hard-won work the Union did in liberating the slaves.

Sam may even have heard stories about the Great Migration as blacks fled a reign of terror in the South that would have put ISIS to shame, and ran North to places like New York and Chicago in the hopes of life, liberty and a future.

I only can imagine how he'd react to hearing that the Republican Party, once the Party of Lincoln, had forsaken that heritage and descended into what it's become now; and how it had elected a man as unstable as Donald Trump and so openly racist that the Ku Klux Klan was celebrating his election as their vindication.

Sam Bowman fought to save the Union. I'd hate to think of what he'd say to see it now, and I wonder how he would fight to save it again.



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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the learn family massacre

I believe this is by a third or fourth cousin of mine. I share it here for its value first as a bit of family history, but also for its account of a man's search for his roots.

The Learn Family Indian Massacre
By Paul Learn

"No Stone Left Unturned," an article by freelancer Ned T. Sooy in South Jersey Living (November 27, 1977) pointed up the fun of tracing your ancestors. It described the research of genealogist Ed Sherry, a Millville native who brooms the dusty tombstones of South Jersey cemeteries in search of his ancestral roots.

Genealogy has become the second-most popular hobby in the Nation, because the pursuit of your distant biogenetic past is for the most part entertaining. Sometimes, however, it can be disturbing and even downright embarrassing.

My absorption with tracing my family history had its seed on the farm of my great-uncle, Phillip Learn, in a village named Pond Creek in the hard-coal region of Pennsylvania. I was 7 years old, and I was standing on the porch of Uncle Phillip's farmhouse.

My Uncle Harvey Learn, father of Wayne Learn of Northfield and Arlene Clemens of Pleasantville, said with a laugh:

"Did you know that some of your Learn ancestors were killed by Indians? Your great-great-great-grandfather, Jake Learn, survived the Learn massacre by hiding in a haystack."

That wasn't very heroic of him, I thought. No wonder my cousin Buddy calls me a sissy. It's in my genes.

"Your great-great-great-great-grandfather, John Learn, was scalped."

"You also have an ancestor who I was hanged for murder," Uncle Harvey said, and laughed again.

Revelation that there was a Learn Massacre -- it's noted on a large mural giving historic events of Pennsylvania in the Penn-Stroud Hotel in Stroudsburg, Pa. -- fascinated me. In my child's mind, I envisioned the Learn wagon train being surrounded by whooping Indians and their fighting to the death to protect their women and their young.

It launched me on my years-long search for my roots: My search for heroes and heroic legend with which I could identify.

It was ego-satisfying to learn from The Pennsylvania Archives that when the John Learn family settled in Tannersville, Pa., in Monroe County outside Stroudsburg, it was the farthest northern white penetration into the Pennsylvania wilderness at that time. They were on the "point," so to speak.

My genealogical search through the Pennsylvania Archives revealed this account of the Learn Indian Massacre, which I'll paraphrase. It destroyed my childhood illusions of a John Wayneish fight to the death against insuperable odds behind the wheels of a wagon train.

The Indians who killed my kinfolk were known to them. The Learn murders were not the work of strange marauders lurking in the bushes who suddenly attacked. The archives do not spell out what lay behind the tragedy. There is a hint, however, that the Indians had been drinking liquor sold to them by whites. One Indian even is named in the archivist's account.

On July 5, 1781, the Indians attacked the Learn farming settlement and killed and scalped John Learn, the family patriarch, and killed his son, George; George's wife, and their baby.

The history records, but notes that the story is apocryphal, that either Jake Learn, my great-great-great grandfather, or his brother, John Jr., was chased by an Indian. The Learn boy hid in the bushes while the Indian stalked him.

During those days one-shot muskets were used, and after one shot was fired, the guns required reloading. Taking advantage of this, the Learn boy hiding in the bushes put his hat on a fallen tree branch, and (just like in the movies!) held it aloft to attract the Indian's musket fire. The ruse succeeded: The Indian fired, and while reloading his gun, my ancestor stood up and shot him dead.

His father wasn't so lucky. My scalped patriarch, according to the archivist, was shot and killed after he fired at his killer -- and missed. The Indian killed him while he was attempting to reload his musket.

After the slayings, Jake Learn and his brother, John Jr., went to Stroudsburg eight miles away to report the deaths and to get help. A posse was organized under the leadership of Colonel Jakob Stroud, after whom the City of Stroudsburg is named and whose equestrian statue is in the middle of the town square of Stroudsburg.

It seems that there was bad blood between the Learns and the Strouds. The colonel had accused the Learns of being Tories during the American Revolution, which perplexes me, because I have found the names of Learns in the Northumberland Militia, which fought on George Washington's side.

This Learn-Stroud feud may have been behind Colonel Stroud allowing the posse that was raised to carry along two jugs of booze on the chase. That was the mistake, the archivist indicates.

Riding their horses out of Stroudsburg, the posse followed the Indians' trail, along which they chanced on John Learn's scalp, and caught up with the Indians. But by this time almost all of the posse were drunk, and the archivist writes that when the whites attacked, there was "so much whooping and hollering" that the whites lost the element of surprise and the Indians escaped.

The posse's chase had turned into a drunken party, so the two Learn youths, disgusted, took off by themselves after the Indians.

They caught up with two of them asleep under a tree. Quietly, they approached them, shot and killed them, and, in revenge, hung their bodies upside down on a tree limb and mutilated them.

Later the Learn clan brought a lawsuit against Colonel Stroud, charging him with libel, but my search of the archives so far has failed to uncover the result of the court case.

Colonel Stroud, whose heroic equestrian statue stands in the city square, with pigeons doing their "thing" on it, was court-martialed for a variety of derelictions, including his conduct during the Learn Massacre and his pilfering of Army stores during the War. The court reprimanded him.

When I was a boy on the Pond Creek farm I had envisioned the Learn Massacre as a bloody battle in which hundreds had died, and for years I indicated such to my children when telling them about this family history.

I was therefore somewhat dismayed last year when my cousin, Wayne Learn, whose hobby also is genealogy, said, "As far as I can find, only four Learns were killed in the massacre, as church records show that John Learn's wife, Katerina, lived on long after."

Taken off guard, I cried, "Only four were killed? What kind of a massacre is that?"

Since Wayne's disclosure my son, Michael, disparagingly refers to the Learn Massacre as the Learn Mugging.

* * *

In our family history, too, has always been the story that one of our ancestors, Peter Learn, was killed in the War of 1812, shot off his horse while leading a cavalry charge.

I have always felt uneasy about that story, as I had never read of any cavalry charges in the War of 1812.

Wayne's genealogical research cleared up that story: The truth is that Peter Learn was killed while trying to stop a horsethief from making off with his farm animal.

* * *

One day, browsing through the archives in search of my roots, I came across it in an index. It. read: "Werkheiser, Karlos, execution of."

The sound of my Uncle Harvey's voice on the long ago farm echoed in my mind: "You also have an ancestor who was hanged for murder."

Karlos Werkheiser (another family name) was hanged in the public square of Stroudsburg on June 21, 1783.

Like John Learn Sr., he also was the pioneer of his family, coming over from the German Palatinate after Henry of Navarre had devastated the land.

He immigrated with his wife and eight children.

Since spotting that line in an archive index, I found two more references to his execution. One was Governor William Penn's rejection of the plea for clemency, filed by his friends.

I have not been able to find out whom my other great-great-great-great-grandfather murdered, or why.

What annoys me about the two meager references is that his name is spelled two ways: Werkheiser and Workheiser. How ignoble it is to have your name, which is an important part of your identity, misspelled at your execution! Poor Great-Great-Great-Great-Granddaddy, I thought.

In my pursuit of more information on the Werkeiser Execution, my wife, Connie, has said, "You better let that ghost lie. He might come back to haunt you."

"I'm trying to clear his name. Perhaps he was innocent, or perhaps he killed a man in a duel while defending his mistress's honor."

"A likely story," she scoffed.

I'm still going to pursue why my Great-Great-Great-Great-Granddaddy was hanged in the public square of Stroudsburg.

I just hope he wasn't a horsethief.

My family bleeds history

If the sap of a tree is blood, then my family tree bleeds history, like I suppose all family trees must.

My wife's mother was part of the second generation in her family born in the United States. Her maiden name was Wilhelmy, a surname her grandfather assumed after passing through Ellis Island as a nod to his ancestry. As she has explained to me, my wife — and therefore our daughter as well — is descended from Kaiser Wilhelm.

As an aside, I've always understood that my wife's great-grandfather added the Y to Wilhelm in an attempt to mask his ancestry, from a concern over potential germanophobia. I imagine an angry mob chasing the fellow down a dark alley only there to hear his name properly for the first time.

"Wait boys," the mob's leader says. "His name is Wilhelmy. He's not a kraut after all. Sorry about the misunderstanding, sir."

There is no such illustrious pedigree on my side of the family, from what I can gather, although I do have a Green ancestor who served in the court of King Richard II of England. He even appears in Shakespeare's play. The first Learn was an immigrant from one of the German lands who appeared in Tannersville, Pa., some time before the American Revolution.

We have our share of interesting legends, though. They include an ancestor who was a prisoner of war at Andersonville during the Civil War, and an Indian attack on the original Learn homestead that led to the Sullivan campaign in the Northeast to drive the local Indians off the land.

That second one was a pretty tragic story. The whole family was killed except for one teenager and a couple infants/toddlers, who were taken prisoner. The teen went into Stroudsburg to get help in mounting a rescue, but the rescue party was so drunken and disorganized that the Indians heard them coming a mile off and the children were killed.

The family tree bleeds history. I need to find out more.



Copyright © 2001 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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