Some Local Civil War History

I was down at Lakewood Park for a 5K race known as the Lakewood Ambulance Chase a few weeks ago. The race benefits Lakewood Hospital, which is a sister hospital to Fairview Hospital where I was treated (both are part of the Cleveland Clinic System).

If you’re wondering why I ran this race …. Surely you didn’t think a lawyer could pass up the chance to run behind a Ghostbuster style ambulance for 3.11 miles?!? You have to admit, the mental image of an attorney chasing after an ambulance is a good one.

Anyway.

I was killing time after the race while waiting for the awards ceremony and decided to walk down to Lake Erie. I’ve been to Lakewood Park only once before (for another 5K race) and had never explored it. Anyway, I found a little bit of local Civil War history: a brick paver plaque marking the location of an Underground Railroad Station that was located here near the mouth of the Rocky River. It was placed relatively recently in 2006.

It was the type of historical monument / memorial that would be easy to miss and I imagine most people walk past it on their way down to the breakwall and never notice it, so I thought I’d share a little bit of local Civil War related history. Ohio played a pretty significant role in helping freed slaves reach freedom through the Underground Railroad.

(Oh and for those who care, I did get a trophy for my ambulance chasing prowess.)

By the way my stomach seems to be doing better. Knock on wood. Thanks for the kind thoughts.

understanding history

Harry Smeltzer has a website and blog about Civil War history in general, and the battle of Manassas in particular, called Bull Runnings. The topic of whether history should be presented in narrative format is popular right now and Harry has a good post today about that topic. In the post Harry asks whether “web projects, perhaps, [can] be something more than alternatives to traditional print narratives: can they somehow be more illustrative of the fragmented, chaotic nature of events, military or otherwise, and so provide a better understanding of what happened than traditional narrative?”

I think web projects can be. But even the best web project cannot address the problem of conveying what it was really like to be there.

A web project can go further than the traditional narrative history book in that a web project has at least the potential to be multimedia which in turn appeals to multiple senses; there is also the opportunity to build large archives and collections of different types of descriptions to create a more complete picture of a topic. For example, a website on a battle can include narrative descriptions of the fighting, maps of troop movements, maps depicting topography, photographs of the battlefield past and present. There can be paintings or depictions of art in other form. It can include descriptions from women, old men, children, fighting men, and generals — all each conveying a different part of the experience. Music from the period, the sounds of battle, could also be included. Books cannot convey sound and most are limited in what they can present in the way of photographs and maps. A good website can gather all of these things in one place. Furthermore, there’s more opportunity in a web project to have different authors.

(Not to say books should be replaced by websites. But I do think the electronic medium has a lot of potential to create a more complete version of history.)

But no multimedia presentation and no book no matter how detailed can convey what it was really like. Historians, like it or not, are constrained in part by the medium — the English language can only go so far in it’s descriptiveness. The brain can only absorb and process so much at any given time.

Part of the problem is history is the craft of describing human life and affairs, and life is in and of itself a sensory experience. Words can try to describe things we sense — what a man’s face looks like, what a battlefield smelled like, what a Whitworth projectile heading overhead sounded like, how the ground rises and falls — but unless you experience those things for yourself, you really don’t understand. Further complicating matters is the fact that people perceive things differently. Sure, there is usually a common thread, but reality is different for each of us. Asked to describe the same exact event, we’ll all come up with slightly different ways to do so, maybe even widely divergent ways. How we will describe the event in part is based upon our own past experiences, but probably also has something to do simply with the fact that we’re all biologically wired somewhat differently.

Take the example of chemo for cancer treatment. Most of you out there have not ever experienced first-hand what it is like to do chemo. I can tell you that no matter how much you try to understand what it is like to undergo chemo, you cannot understand unless you’ve been through it yourself. I can try to convey to you what it is like, but my reality and your reality are different. Think of trying to describe to someone who has never heard one what a saxophone sounds like — you have points of reference to use to try and describe it, but until you have experienced it yourself, you cannot say you really know or understand.

I think that is what the chaos of battle is like. We can try to understand it, but really never cannot because we have not experienced it the same way they experienced it. Historians try to describe it, but can only go so far.

The more ways you can sense history — touch it, experience it for yourself — I think the closer you can get. But you never are going to know what it actually was like to be there, unless you were there. Even then, you cannot ever have the full picture.

Since none of us are witnesses, we’re also limited by having to make sense of what we’re given by the historical record. The historical record has it’s problems. Go back to trying to describe the same event and coming up with different stories to describe it. We may sense it differently, but there is more to it than that. Our descriptions also may vary depending on what we’re trying to convey. Do we want sympathy? Do we want someone to believe us and not someone else? Is there something to be gained if our version of what happened is believed over another? This can impact what we emphasize when we tell our own version of what happened. It can lead us to consciously or unconsciously distort the record.

Historians, in the end, are a lot like attorneys, really. I think that’s the reason you find so many lawyers writing history or interested in history. As attorneys, we are given a set of facts — all filtered through the eyes of witnesses with different experiences who may have differing motivations for how they tell the story of what happened. They may all be telling the truth, or at least think they are telling the truth (though of course some will lie and the attorney will have to try and sort fact from fiction which is in and of itself sometimes impossible). An attorney takes these “facts” and then cobbles them together to create a story to be told in a brief, or to the judge, or to the jury. The attorney creates a story to explain reality. In the end, isn’t that really what a historian does — gather evidence and tell a story? Of course, we like to think that historians don’t have reason to give the story a certain “spin,” whereas the lawyer obviously tries to tell the story in a way that most benefits the client. But is there such a thing as a totally unbiased historian? I don’t think there is.

Just some thoughts bouncing in my head, as Harry put it. Although I don’t think there are any answers to some of these problems, I think that mulling over them and understanding that they exist is a good thing.

CLE

I spent the entire day at a CLE. CLE stands for continuing legal education (it also stands for Cleveland Hopkins airport). The topic was “How to Win Your First Civil Trial.”

(I am also WAY behind on answering email, so if you emailed me in the last few days, I am getting there.)

I’ve already won my first civil trial, but there were still some helpful things I learned which hopefully will aid me the next time I have a trial. It also made me realize how much I basically just fly by the seat of my pants. :) I am a fearless young lawyer (there’s just not THAT much for me to lose in small claims type trials and I seem to do better when I get aggressive).

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find this class was a good use of my money. I still haven’t changed my mind about the “Substance Abuse” provision, though. Ohio requires all lawyers to get an hour of CLE credit every two years of training about “Substance Abuse.” I think its frankly kind of an insulting requirement. I’ve never had alcohol in my life and, having experienced the ultimate poisioning and hangover in chemo, I never ever will touch the stuff. Plus, alcohol makes lymph nodes hurt if you have the Hodge. (That’s a classical Hodgkin’s Disease symptom that as far as I know is unique just to Hodgkin’s Disease.)

moms are cool that way

A rare law related post.

My mother came bounding up the stairs excitedly today to tell me she found a CLE program for me.  I was rather taken aback.  CLE stands for Continuing Legal Education, by the way.  Its sort of the bane of my existence because my employer doesn’t pay for mine and I’ve been trying to figure out how I am going to swing around $600 to get the 12 credits I need by the end of the year to keep my law license, what with the Hodge and all (not only doesn’t my employer help with getting credits, I also don’t work full-time right now).  But I digress.  Anyway, my mother found me a program called “Win Your First Civil Trial.”  Of course, I’ve already “won” a couple small claims civil trials (I do mainly landlord-tenant law).  But the CLE  program agenda actually looks good — dare I say useful even — and it’ll give me a chance to network with other lawyers.  My mother also, very graciously, is paying my way (money is very tight for me with the Hodge — can’t even afford to indulge my running shoe habit too often).

Moms can be very cool that way.

a hint of spring

There’s a hint of spring in the air. It is Cleveland and it is very early March (and thus there could be at least one more large snowstorm), but the hint of spring is all around. Evidence:

1. The days are getting longer — there’s more daylight in both the morning and the evening. Stays light considerably past six now.
2. There are robins everywhere. (Big, fat fluffed up robins. But robins nonetheless.)
3. It was warm enough to run in shorts today (though I saw several other runners and I was the only one in shorts).
4. The snow isn’t sticking around as long.
5. The angle of the sun looks like spring.

All this of course makes for a happy Jenny. This is close to perfect running weather — well, ok, my perfect running weather is probably around 50 degrees (I can comfortably run in shorts and a t-shirt and that point), but still. I’m trying to look at the bright side!

lawyer as historian

Reading again. And, no, this time not just drooling over the males in “Surfer Magazine.”

I picked up Gordon Rhea on the Wilderness today and started to carefully read it. I haven’t carefully read a Civil War book since I started law school. I have breezed through many history books during law school, but my careful reading for pleasure days were lost in a sea of poorly written and edited cases that I was forced to read until my eyes nearly bled.

One reason I chose Rhea — I also strongly considered Freeman’s “Lee’s Lieutenants” and I imagine that set will be next (I absoutely refuse to read an abridgement) — is because he’s a lawyer just like I now am.

I think lawyers bring an interesting set of skills to historical writing. To have even made it through law school and the bar exam, all lawyers have to be good readers and at least fairly decent writers. But beyond that, law school teaches us a different way of thinking. We refer to this as “learning to think like a lawyer.” Law school isn’t really about memorizing a body of law. Oh, sure, we do memorize the basic rules of the “black-letter” law in particular areas. But mostly, law school is learning to question, to think carefully and critically, to consider options, to research a problem thoroughly. The art of law is taking a legal problem, knowing where to look for the answer, finding what the law is, and then carefully applying the law to that particular problem. We learn to build arguments and argue our side zealously, but we also learn that you cannot ignore contrary evidence: you have to either distingush it or show how it does not apply to these particular set of facts. (In fact, as lawyers, we have an ethical obligation to disclose adverse authority.) We also learn when its simply not worth making an argument because we cannot win. With those skills in place, you can tackle any area of the law or any legal problem.

Anyway, that’s an interesting set of skills for a historical writer. Different from say, a journalist writing history.

I’d love to someday tackle the task of telling the story of A.P. Hill’s Light Division; I’d like to someday write a book. I have my website on Hill; if I had the time and inclination I’d rewrite the entire thing, foot-noting it and inevitably changing and reconsidering some of my conclusions and choice of words. Mostly created when I was an undergrad, it’d reflect someone who now thinks like a lawyer. I’m still kind of proud of the site even though I feel it deficient in many respects. But I’d like to make it better. Perhaps that’s a task I’ll try and at least start on since I don’t have a job and the hiring season is probably going to be dead until January now that the holidays are rolling.

But for now, I’m just enjoying carefully reading Gordon Rhea, a lawyer-historian, with a slightly new set of eyes and a new way of thinking.