Evidence of that regard shows not only in the facial expression of the soldier in the Civil War Monument in Ferncliff Cemetery & Arboretum, where a monument to U.S. Colored Troops of Clark County will be dedicated at 10:30 a.m. Friday; it also shows in the burials surround the statue in the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) mound.
Once delayed by COVID, the dedication ceremony is expected to last about 45 minutes, during which masks and social distancing will be encouraged.
The new monument to the Colored Troops, as they were called, sits at the edge of the road that circles the mound developed with the help of the G.A.R., the Union Army veteran’s organization, which had more than 30,000 members in Ohio and 400,000 nationwide.
J. Warren Keifer, a Union general who represented this area in Congress and would serve as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, served as one of the Ohio G.A.R. commanders.
A pattern of gray stonework beneath the four-ton monument to Black soldiers appears almost cross-like to those who approach it from the cemetery’s main entrance to the north, and stonework and monument align perfectly with the central statue and the flagpole that rise above them to the south.
The monument is inscribed with the names of 139 U.S. Colored Troops, most of whom are buried in Clark County cemeteries.
The text in the same granite observes two special moments so many of them experienced.
“Forty-four of them, identified by asterisk, were present at either General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, or at Confederate General Joseph E. Johnson’s surrender to William T. Sherman at Bennett Place April 26, 1865.”
To have been present at the surrender ending the war that would give so many their freedom must have been particularly moving for many former slaves.
Clark County’s 139 Black soldiers were among about 5,000 Black Ohio troops and 179,000 nationwide who served in the Union Army during the war. Forty thousand of those Black soldiers died in the field, a ratio of sacrifice higher than those of white troops.
Although buried in South Carolina, where he died in service to the 54th Massachusetts, Charles Gammon, son of the owners of Springfield’s Underground Railroad house, is on the monument. Others from the same unit highlighted in the movie “Glory” are Springfield’s Edward Washington and Varnell Mayo.
Also on the monument is Addison White, the escaped slave this area rallied around when slave catchers traveled to Mechanicsburg in an effort to return him South, an act permitted by the Fugitive Slave Act in the fractious years before the war.
The monument project was initiated by Springfielder Dale Henry , whose great-grandfather, Samuel L. Bryant, is listed on the monument. Bryant was present at Lee’s surrender and was among the last U.S. Colored Troops to be disbanded when Co. A of the 113th U.S. Colored Troops disbanded two years after war’s end in Brownsville, Texas.
Henry said all of those honored “had to fight for more than just their lives. They had to fight for equality and their families and their manhood” — and for the purpose the monument describes: “to bring the end to slavery, to receive full citizenship; and to gain the right to vote.”
Henry, who is president of the Gammon House Committee, called the monument project “an opportunity to work together (with Ferncliff’s Board of Directors) and make something happen that makes the cemetery a special place.”
The board, which includes Paul “Ski” Schanher, the driving force behind the Clark County Heritage’s Civil War Symposia, not only approved the project but, in the end, provided just short of $20,000 in funding and site preparation work.
“When we told Dale (the funding) was all taken care of,” Schanher said, “his mouth dropped.”
Research done on the G.A.R. mound — some based on Ferncliff burial records, others by Washington High School students in Washington Court House — indicates that the addition of the monument would sit well with Clark County Civil War veterans Black and white.
Reynoldsburg, Ohio, genealogist Amy Crow said the burials in the Springfield Civil War Mound, sponsored by Springfield’s Mitchell Post 45 of the G.A.R., provide evidence of two things: the inequality borne by Blacks emerging from slavery and the extent to which the G.A.R. tried to address them at the soldiers’ final resting place.
Of the 303 G.A.R. Chapters in Ohio, seven were in Clark County, one each in Enon, Tremont City, New Carlisle, Catawba and two in Springfield — the Mitchell Post and the John Brown Post, one of nine African-American posts in the Buckeye State.
In 2013, Crow told the News-Sun that Merritt Johnson, a Springfielder who served in the 117th U.S. Colored Infantry and is buried in the mound, “really sort of encapsulated” what her research showed was going on in Clark County.
“It seems so obvious that this man had a disability and (that) it was easily traced back to his service, but he kept having to go back through all this bureaucracy” to claim his legitimate soldier’s pension.
“The massive amount of forms and questionnaires which veterans had to file would be daunting to anyone who could not read or write,” she said, which was the case with so many Black veterans.
Her paper cites a study by scholar Donald Shaffer, who reports that while 92.6% of white Civil War veterans who applied received pensions, the success rate for Black soldiers who applied was 75.4%. But Crow says the G.A.R. may be responsible for the Black soldiers’ rate being as high as it was.
In a study group of veterans from Springfield’s Fifth Ward, Crow found that “none of the nine Blacks who did not apply for a pension was a G.A.R. member” and “of the seven Black veterans who drew pensions and were totally or partially illiterate, five were members of the G.A.R.”
“The Women’s Relief Corps, the ladies’ auxiliary of the GAR, also disbursed aid (to veterans) which was often substantial,” Crow added.
The G.A.R. also “strove to prevent any indigent Civil War veteran — regardless of membership (in the G.A.R.) — from being buried in a pauper’s grave” for lack of money, Crow said. “You didn’t even have to be a G.A.R. member to be buried (in a G.A.R. grave), “you just had to be an honorably discharged Union veteran.”
First G.A.R. Ohio Department Commander Thomas Young called an honorable discharge from the Union Army “a diploma of patriotism” that earned the soldiers a respectable burial.
With the help of state legislation, Crow said, “by 1889, 161 local G.A.R. posts in Ohio owned burial plots set aside for this purpose.”
This made a huge difference.
In her study of 21 Black veterans and 24 white veterans from Springfield’s Fifth Ward, “the overwhelming percentage of African American veterans buried in the GAR Section (86% vs. 21% for their white counterparts) is an indication of the more difficult economic situation of those veterans and their families.”
A separate survey done by students at Washington High School, found that of 116 Black Civil War veterans they found in Ferncliff Cemetery, 77, or about two-thirds, were buried in the G.A.R. Mound. The much lower percentage of white veterans likely indicates their families had the means to bury them in family plots.
The result, Crow says, is what the solider looking down upon the graves in the G.A.R. Mound in Ferncliff sees: “Everybody’s marker is the same. You look across there, and they’re all equal, regardless of their race, regardless of their rank regardless of the branch of service they served in. They’re all equal.”
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