Whose Father Was He? (Part Two)

By ERROL MORRIS

This is the second of five installments of “Whose Father Was He?” — an investigation into a photograph of three children found on the dead body of Amos Humiston, a fallen Union soldier, at Gettysburg in 1863. Part one can be read here.

I contacted Mark Dunkelman, who lives in Providence, R.I. Here was someone clearly obsessed with these questions. Also, I wanted the story of how he had researched the book, of how the book had come into existence.

MARK DUNKELMAN: In all the previous tellings of this story, Amos Humiston appears as a corpse on the battlefield with this photograph in his hand. I wanted to resurrect the man somehow. And I was able to finally do that by making a connection with a guy in Belmont, Mass., Allan Lawrence Cox. His branch of the family is the one that had preserved Amos’s letters home to his wife. And that was the key because Amos spoke again through the letters. It was a tremendous find. It was exciting because I had long known that there was a book there. But without his voice, it was an empty shell. And bingo, I made the connection.

ERROL MORRIS: Let me back up a moment. Can you tell me how you first became aware of Amos Humiston?

MARK DUNKELMAN: As a child I heard stories of my great-grandfather, a fellow named John Langhans, who served in the Civil War with the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry. My dad had grown up on a farm with his grandfather and his parents in Ellicottville, Cattaraugus County, N.Y. And my dad had imbibed these stories that his grandfather told, of marching with Sherman to the sea. And he in turn imparted them to me during my youth in suburban Buffalo, N.Y., in the 1950s and ‘60s. And the stories grabbed me. They just fascinated me. And together with the stories were relics that the family had preserved, including six letters John had sent home to a younger brother during the war, some cotton-bolls he reportedly had picked during Sherman’s march to the sea, ribbons he had worn at regimental reunions, the buttons from his Grand Army of the Republic coat, the silver star corps badge, 20th Corps badge, that he had worn during the war. And those tangible reminders excited me as well. I was a kid. My interest soon went beyond his personal involvement to that of his regiment as a whole. And I started to do research. As a teenager I made my first visit on a family trip to Washington to the National Archives. And they set three immense boxes full of records in front of me.

ERROL MORRIS: So you knew that you were going to research the Civil War, or was it something more specific?

MARK DUNKELMAN: I was even more interested in becoming an artist. I had been the class artist since third grade. So that’s what took me to RISD [the Rhode Island School of Design] rather than to a liberal arts college to study history. But I said to myself that I wanted to research and publish a regimental history of the 154th New York by the time I reached the age of 50. I figured that gave me plenty of time. And I started to collect material. And in the 30-plus years since then, I’ve had the good fortune to connect with more than a thousand descendants of members of the regiment who shared with me more than 1,600 wartime letters written by members of the 154th, 25 diaries, portraits of more than 200 members of the regiment and basically a roomful of other material. And if it isn’t the largest, it’s one of the largest collections of primary source material on any single particular Civil War regiment.

ERROL MORRIS: My God.

MARK DUNKELMAN: During my high school years, I became good friends with a neighbor, Christopher L. Ford, who had Confederate ancestors. We both shared this interest in the Civil War. So we would discuss the Civil War often. As a matter of fact, we used to hold sort of trivia contests to see who could stump each other on our Civil War knowledge. And at one point, Chris gave me a book that he had had for a while. It’s called “Gettysburg: What They Did Here,” [3] by L.W. Minnigh.

MARK DUNKELMAN: In the back is a collection of human-interest stories relating to the battle of Gettysburg. The very first one is about John Burns, the elderly Gettysburg resident who took his War of 1812 musket and joined the battle when the armies arrived at his hometown. And the very second story is about the Humiston children. And it included a post-war photo of the three kids, a very brief description of the story and a copy of James Clark’s poem/song, “The Children of the Battlefield.” That was my first exposure to the Humiston story. When Mike Winey and I published our history of the 154th, “The Hardtack Regiment,” we included an account that was brief (at the time, it was all I knew about Amos) and of course a copy of the famous ambrotype of the three kids. And then it occurred to me that I’d never sent for Amos’s pension records. So I did. And they provided some more material. And I said, “Jeepers, I wish I would have done this before the book was published.”

ERROL MORRIS: What were in the pension records?

MARK DUNKELMAN: More material on the later life of his wife and children. There was nothing about him or his service record. It was more about all the procedures that Philinda went through to obtain a pension, because her husband had been killed in battle, and a little more about her post-war life. So I wrote an article and submitted it to Civil War Times Illustrated, which is the largest circulating of the popular slick Civil War mags. And they published it. It was called “The Hunt for Sergeant Humiston.” And there the matter lay for a number of years. I would collect anything that I saw about the case. And I kept thinking, “Boy, there’s a book here. There’s a book here.” But without Amos’s voice, I couldn’t pull it off. It really seemed like a pipe dream. It seemed virtually impossible that I’d be able to find what I needed. According to the National Union Catalogue of Manuscript Collections, there was nothing. And it didn’t appear that I was going to be able to find anything in repositories of Amos’s own writing. And so years passed.

ERROL MORRIS: What did you find so compelling about the original story, the Amos Humiston story?

MARK DUNKELMAN: Well, it got his name into books about Gettysburg. He was the most well-known of the 1,065 men who served in this regiment that I was busy trying to chronicle as deeply as I could. And the story itself just has this intrinsic drama and interest to it — that jeepers, it’s a great story.

ERROL MORRIS: There’s the irony that the Gettysburg soldier who was the Unknown Soldier becomes the best-known soldier of Gettysburg.

MARK DUNKELMAN: He is. I think there’s sort of a triumvirate of human-interest stories to emerge from Gettysburg that virtually every Civil War aficionado knows about. John Burns, Jennie Wade, the civilian who was killed in her house when a bullet struck her while she was baking bread, and the Humiston story. It’s a big story. And then I realized there’s this influence of the media in the story. It was integral to the story — the fact that he had a photograph, that the photograph was the means of identification, that it was the newspapers that spread the story. And of course they didn’t reproduce the photograph. They couldn’t do that then. They gave a very minute description of the children — how they were posed, what they were wearing, their approximate ages. And that’s what led to the identification. If Dr. J. Francis Bourns didn’t have the photograph in his hand, none of it would have happened. If he hadn’t taken it back with him to Philadelphia and instigated this wave of publicity, Amos and his family would have never been identified.

ERROL MORRIS: Chance.

MARK DUNKELMAN: Yes, and there was another element of chance. Dr. Bourns did not travel directly from Philadelphia to Gettysburg. Instead, he first went to Chambersburg, a designated rendezvous for civilian physicians heading to the battlefield. Had he gone direct from Philadelphia to Gettysburg, he would not have passed through Graeffenburg, as he did by approaching Gettysburg from the west. And he would not have stopped at Schriver’s tavern and would not have seen the ambrotype.

ERROL MORRIS: It’s amazing that you were able to uncover these odd details.

MARK DUNKELMAN: Yes. I was rolling along, but I needed primary source material. So in Portville, N.Y., Amos Humiston’s hometown, I managed to make good connections. And somebody in Portville managed to track down a Humiston descendent. And I got in touch with this fellow. His name is David Humiston Kelley. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. And David is a very interesting guy. I eventually met him several times. He is an archaeologist whose first book was helping to break the Mayan code, to learn how to read all those Mayan hieroglyphics. And I’ve got a copy of his most recent book here. It’s called “Exploring Ancient Skies: An Encyclopedic Survey of Archaeoastronomy.” [4] I open this book to any page at random, and it’s virtually unintelligible to me. But I’m sure that it’s the definitive word on the subject. So I got in touch with David, and we started a correspondence. And eventually, I went out to Calgary and spent a week with him going through all the Humiston material he had. I was really kind of surprised at what little mention there was of Amos. The family was thrust into the spotlight against their will. They became celebrities. And they didn’t like being celebrities, particularly celebrity born out of tragedy. They tried to avoid the story pretty much. I learned an awful lot about what happened to Philinda and her three children in the years after the war, but it still left a great big gap regarding Amos and his wartime service. And so I was out of luck there. Now, David, in addition to his archaeoastronomy work, is a very avid genealogist. He’s traced branches of his family back to King David in the Bible.

ERROL MORRIS: King David?

MARK DUNKELMAN: But he’s been unable, to this day, to link Amos’s branch of the Humistons to this first Henry Humiston, the first Humiston to arrive in America back in the 1600s in Connecticut. There’s a missing link, and David’s been unable to fill it in.

ERROL MORRIS: So, after you got this additional information from David Humiston Kelley, what happened next?

MARK DUNKELMAN: I’m not really sure about the sequencing of all this, but at one point, some good friends of my wife and mine, the Reverend Dan Warren and his wife, Meg, invited us to a little dinner party. One of the reasons was, they wanted to introduce me to another Episcopalian minister, a fellow named Gardiner H. Shattuck, also known as Tuck. Tuck had written a very well regarded Civil War book called “A Shield and Hiding Place,” a study of religion in the Union and Confederate armies. So we got together at the Warrens here in Providence. And Tuck and I proceed to be very rude, and basically ignore everybody and jabber to each other all night about the Civil War. Toward the end of the evening, Tuck says, “Well, what are you working on now?” And I said, “The Humiston story.” And he said, “Eleanor Cox, Amos’s granddaughter, was the church secretary when I was at a parish in Belmont, Mass.” And that was a branch of the family that David Kelley had lost track of. The next day, I called information. This is all in the pre-Google era, right? I got a number for a Mrs. John Cox in Belmont, Mass. And a male voice answers the phone. I introduce myself, explain what I’m doing, and Allan Lawrence Cox says to me, “You’re lucky you caught me. My mom’s in a nursing home, and I only come by the house about once a month to check on things. And you just happened to catch me while I’m here.” And he said, “I’ve got Amos’s wartime letters home. Why don’t you come up and take a look at them?”

ERROL MORRIS: He had Amos’s letters? That’s amazing.

MARK DUNKELMAN: It was meant to be. It was meant to be. It was just astonishing. Needless to say, I got up there pretty soon. I took a look at these letters, and I saw the one line acknowledging the receipt of the photograph: “I’ve received the likeness of the children.” And there was Amos’s poem.

Two pages of letter and text above from the Mark H. Dunkelman Collection

ERROL MORRIS: Was this the first time that these letters had been seen?

MARK DUNKELMAN: Other than by the Humiston family and the descendants. Allan Cox just had this stuff stored in an old shoebox or something. He didn’t really pay much attention to it.

ERROL MORRIS: Why was it even saved?

MARK DUNKELMAN: Soldiers’ families saved their letters. They were writing letters all the time back then, but these were letters chronicling the most momentous events in their lives. Often they didn’t save the letters that the wife sent the husband. They saved the letters that were sent from the husband or son describing these great adventures.

ERROL MORRIS: I take it the other letters are just simply lost — the letters that Philinda sent to Amos.

MARK DUNKELMAN: Unfortunately, they are.

ERROL MORRIS: And the last letter that Amos sent?

MARK DUNKELMAN: It was sent on May 24th, about five weeks before Amos died. The most powerful letter is the one sent two weeks before, the letter of May 9th:

Mark H. Dunkelman Collection

Mark H. Dunkelman Collection

May 9 1863
Camp near Stafford

Dear Wife,

It is with [pleasure] that I address a few lines to you to let you know that I am in the land of the living after the battle.

The last letter that I wrote to you I was in the hospital but when Captain Warner came back I was with company and was in the last battle at [Chancellorsville] and got away with a [whole] head but I got [hit] in the side with a spent ball that made me think of home. It struck on the short ribs just over the [heart] but glanced off. If it had not I should not be writing to you.

The 154 has gained a name but at what a loss. Our company has lost 17 in killed wounded and missing. Seymour Sikes is [killed] he was hit with a piece of shell in the head. Mart Champlain is missing, [but] that is all that is missing from our place. The regiment lost 227 men. We had a hard fight.

I am tired and worn out with hard marching and hard fare.

I looked for a letter from you when I got back but did not. I am in hopes to get one to night. I got the likeness of the children and it pleased me more than anything that you could have sent me. How I want to see them and their mother is more than I can tell. I hope that we may all live to see each other again if this war does not last [too] long. The first time that I see you I [will] tell you more than [I] can think of now. Be a good girl, so good by.

AH

******

ERROL MORRIS: But I interrupted. You were talking about the two Humiston descendants.

MARK DUNKELMAN: Allan is the total opposite of David Kelley. He is not really interested in the past. But he and I hit it off, just as David and I hit it off. And several times, David came back east for conferences at Harvard. And the three of us would get together. Allan’s got a lot of health problems, including a bad back. We were getting together. And Allan had a favorite seafood restaurant. I showed up once, and David was already at Allan’s apartment. David likes to go around without shoes on. So he’s barefoot. Allan doesn’t have his shirt on because he’s got some back brace he wants to put on himself. And I look at the two of them, I say, “We’re going out for lunch and here’s no shoes and no shirt. And you expect service?” It was just highly amusing to me, these two guys, who were so unlike, but nonetheless, they’re family. I served as a link between the two because they both really supported my efforts to tell their ancestor’s story. And then another crazy thing happened. One of the newspaper articles published after Amos was identified stated that he had made a Pacific Ocean whaling voyage. I have a neighbor here in Providence, who was the librarian at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I said to her, “How can I find out if a guy named Amos Humiston made a whaling voyage out of New Bedford back in the heyday of the American whaling industry?”

Courtesy of the Special Collections department of the Providence Public Library, from the Nicholson Whaling Collection.

She said, “I’ll get back to you.” She called me a couple days later. She said, “Amos Humiston sailed out of New Bedford on the ship Harrison in 1850. And the logbook of the voyage is at the Providence Public Library.” And so there it was, right in my backyard — the story of Amos’s three-plus years aboard a whaling ship. I just kept digging, because I knew that there was a book there.

Adapted from maps by Mark Dunkelman.Gettyburg’s Unknown Soldier. [5]

Adapted from maps by Mark Dunkelman. Gettyburg’s Unknown Soldier.

Adapted from maps by Mark Dunkelman. Gettyburg’s Unknown Soldier.

ERROL MORRIS: From the moment you saw these letters in the box?

MARK DUNKELMAN: Yes. Allan had them in a shoebox. They were bundled up somehow. And he hadn’t looked at them, for God knows how long.

ERROL MORRIS: As you read the letters for the first time, did you feel that Amos was coming back to life?

MARK DUNKELMAN: Yes. My whole idea of him was changing because I knew nothing of his personality or his personal experiences during the war. He was sick on occasion during the war. He mentions his comrades caring for him like a brother. And he referred to his hands. He said they looked like bird’s claws. That was great stuff. That was the key to me. That was the key. He could speak again. He could be a living person again instead of a corpse in rigor mortis on the battlefield.

(This is the second of five installments of “Whose Father Was He?” The remaining three parts will be published on consecutive days this week.)

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FOOTNOTES

[3]
The Minnigh guidebook is a book that a young boy could page through endlessly. The front cover with pictures of the two commanders, Lee and Meade, the bucolic scene of Pickett’s Charge, and the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here but it can never forget what they did here.” Oddly, the events of Gettysburg may sink into oblivion, but it is less likely that Lincoln’s words will be forgotten. There are lists of soldiers, pictures of monuments, and a foldout map of the entire battlefield. The best part, however, is Minnigh’s introduction to the battlefield, “The contest at Gettysburg marks the flood-tide of the rebellion. The Southern cause received its deathblow on that field. The decisive victory infused new hope into Northern hearts and nerved their arms for the brilliant victories which culminated in the formal surrender of Lee at Appomattox. The Gettysburg of today no longer reeks of blood. The dead are buried, the widespread devastation of those few days has been repaired by the merciful hand of Time, and yet, every spot is hallowed with memories that can never die.”