An article in yesterday's Today section about two Maryland junior officers who served during the Civil War misidentified the Union Army officer. He was Capt. Robert B. Meads.
The Sun regrets the errors.
Margaret Fresco looks down the long corridors of the years and sees the past much more clearly than the present.
At 90, she's a handsome, buoyant woman who bears her age with easy grace, even though for the last few years her sight has been failing badly.
She can envision the tombstone of her grandfather with its Confederate emblem more precisely than the dim forms and faint colors of visitors to her assisted living apartment at Solomons, in Southern Maryland. She and a grandson set the stone in an old St. Mary's County churchyard toward evening on a cold, rainy day only four years ago.
During the Civil War, her grandfather, Capt. Joseph Forrest, rallied Marylanders to the Confederate cause and organized them into the Chesapeake Artillery battery after they had rowed across the Potomac River to Virginia.
Sixty miles north of Solomons in Carney, just off the Baltimore Beltway, Janice Harding, who is a vibrant, youthful 60, sees a different history when she peers into her family's past.
"This is a Union house," she says, with good-humored fervor. And indeed her comfortable house with a pond and a brace of faux Canada geese out front abounds with Union artifacts inside.
Her great-great-grandfather, Capt. Thomas B. Meads, fought with the Union Army of the Potomac, from Gettysburg to the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Her husband's grandfather,Sgt. Edward S. Harding, was a Union soldier, too.
Though they have never met, Fresco and Harding share a great, if divergent, pride in their Civil War ancestors. It's a pride well-founded, says historian Kevin Ruffner, who lists both men among 365 officers surveyed in his new collective biography, "Maryland's Blue and Gray."
The book (Louisiana State University Press, $34.95) is a study, as his subtitle explains, of "a border state's Union and Confederate junior officer corps" -- the captains and lieutenants who actually led troops on the ground and into battle, sometimes against each other.
"In essence," Ruffner writes, "this book attempts to discover the cultural similarities between Union and Confederate Marylanders and the irreconcilable differences that brought them into mortal combat."
Margaret Fresco and Jan Harding each have made their separate peace with this past, but each remains loyal to the heritage that has come down to them through the generations.
Harding sometimes refights the old campaigns on chat room and e-mail battlegrounds with friends who are Confederate sympathizers. Fresco approaches her past with some of the nostalgic resignation perhaps characteristic of survivors of the Lost Cause.
"I think it was the darkest time in our country," Fresco says. "People had to murder each other. I think it was pitiful. I hope the country will never come to that again. But who knows? I'm sure the North thought they were in the right. And the South thought they were in the right."
Steeped in history
Author Ruffner knows something about the small-unit commanders he writes about. He's a major in an Army Reserve unit at Fort Meade and served three years' active duty with the Third Armored Division in Germany.
Now he's a staff historian with the Central Intelligence Agency, -- which means he researches, writes and teaches agency history. And he works with historians from the State Department and other governmental agencies.
"It's public history," he says. Well, not quite. "Probably about 75 percent is classified."
But he's an earnest, mild-mannered, friendly academic kind of guy without a hint of cloak-and-daggerism. He lives with his wife, Sonya, and their infant son, Tristan, in a porch-front rowhouse just outside the historic district on Washington's Capitol Hill.
His book is one of the first to look at Maryland officers from a social-military viewpoint. He found the forces rending the nation reflected in the split between the men who joined the Maryland Line of the Confederate Army and the Union loyalists who fought with the Maryland Brigade of the Army of the Potomac.
Ruffner's study shows a deep divide in the social and economic caste of Confederate and Union officers. He challenges some old shibboleths.
"It is a kind of commonplace to say Maryland was basically a Confederate state occupied by Yankee soldiers," he says.
Yet a common estimate suggests 60,000 Marylanders -- including 8,000 blacks -- fought for the Union, compared to perhaps 25,000 who joined the Rebels of the Confederacy.
"The Union number is double the Confederate number, you could say," Ruffner suggests. With lots of room for error, he adds.
The Confederates, he says, won the postwar "battle for memory."
"The Confederates get remembered better than the Union. In a lot of ways it's because the Confederates tended to be from a better social class before the war so they still have that sort of panache and the allure after the war."
Of the two sides in Maryland, he says, the Confederates definitely reflected the state's aristocracy.
"Not only the landed gentry of Southern Maryland and the Baltimore area that dated back for generations," he says. "But even [in] Western Maryland, Frederick County and Montgomery County, they tended to be the older Maryland establishment."
Union soldiers, he found, tended to be craftsmen, workmen and small-businessmen, immigrants, new arrivals from the North. Union volunteers included many men born in Pennsylvania, while the Confederate Marylanders were often natives of Virginia or the Carolinas.
The Civil War was, after all, in part a clash between the agrarian South and the industrial North, the old order vs. the new.
"Maryland was at the epicenter," Ruffner says. "The war was a defining point for Maryland."
The Industrial Revolution had arrived. Baltimore, then the third-largest city in the United States, had grown "incredibly" between 1790 and 1860 to a population of 212,418. Baltimore already had a large immigrant population and the largest free black community in the nation, numbering 27,600, as opposed to 2,200 slaves.
In Southern Maryland, where a plantation economy still flourished, there were about 50,000 slaves and an aristocracy more like Richmond's than Baltimore's.
Genealogy
Forrest, Fresco's St. Mary's County grandfather, precisely matches Ruffner's profile of the Confederate Marylander. Ruffner's Union matrix fits Meads, Harding's great-great-grandfather, rather more loosely.
Meads, a Baltimore shipwright and son of a Fells Point shipbuilder, nonetheless came from an old Eastern Shore family. The Harding ancestors of her husband held one of the original land grants in "Prince George's Parish."
Both Harding and Fresco are deeply interested in genealogy and have amassed volumes of family records.
Fresco, in fact, has published two genealogical books. Her 500-page "Marriages and Deaths, St. Mary's County, Maryland, 1634- 1900," is a tour de force that took 10 years of research. It's in libraries in every state -- and a best seller at the St. Mary's County Historical Society.
Her "Doctors of St. Mary's County 1634-1900" (her father was a doctor) runs to 300 pages but has a more limited audience.
But her failing eyesight has curtailed two favorite activities: reading and genealogical research.
"There's so much I have to learn," she says. "That's the only reason I'd like to set that clock back."
She already knows plenty, though, about her Confederate grandfather. Joseph Forrest was the son of an officer in the War of 1812 and the grandson of a Revolutionary War officer. He married an "heiress" descended from the Fenwick family, which dates back to the first colonists who arrived on the Ark and the Dove.
"They had 12 children and my mother was the 12th," Fresco says. Her mother was Henrietta Forrest (King), her grandmother Henrietta Plowden (Forrest).
Ruffner's research shows Forrest was "the richest man to serve as a junior officer in the Maryland Line." The now legendary Maryland Line was a kind of generic name for Marylanders who rallied to the Confederate cause, but as a military unit it never quite came to fruition as a combat force.
Forrest also owned 56 slaves, a large number for a Maryland Confederate officer, Ruffner says, and a relatively small number of Maryland Confederates owned slaves.
Her mother, Fresco says, told her that Forrest "did not believe one man should own another man." "But that was the fabric of the economics at that time," Fresco says. "He did not believe in slavery, but it was part of the economics of the day."
Fresco's mother kept Forrest's sword and sheath and field glasses. Today, they are in the museum at Point Lookout State Park, site of the Union prison camp at the tip of St. Mary's County -- along with a copy of the oath of allegiance the Confederate officer took after the war and the pardon granted him by President Andrew Johnson in October 1865.
Forrest may never have been in combat. The Chesapeake Artillery -- always short of cannon -- was reorganized before it went into active service in 1862 and Forrest lost his command. He moved on to Texas with his wife and children.
"For all that I'm so proud of him, I don't think he got that sword bloody," Fresco says. "I swear to God that's the truth."
Call to arms
Janice Harding's most prized possession is a yellowed citation she found behind an old picture in her grandmother's house. It was presented to her great-great-grandfather in honor of a comrade who fell at Spotsylvania Court House in the most BTC savage hand-to-hand combat of the war.
From Ruffner's book: Union Capt. James Bride, an Irish fish and cheese dealer from Baltimore, seized his regiment's flag and cried: "Come on, my brave boys! Follow me, Marylanders!"
"Bride was struck by a Confederate shell and died holding the flag," Ruffner writes.
Spotsylvania was, of course, one of the most costly battles fought during Grant's march on to Richmond and victory.
Bride and Thomas Meads were comrades in arms and friends. Meads may have been at his friend's side when he fell. Bride's father apparently gave Meads the citation, perhaps with a swatch of the regimental colors, now lost.
When she found the old paper, Harding says, "I began to comprehend what [my great-great-grandfather] had opened himself up for, without any regret whatsoever: 'This is a thing I must do.' "
"And it was not against the South," she says. "They wanted the Union preserved. And that's where their heart was. It was not against their brothers from Maryland. It was against the rending of the Union."
Thomas Meads enlisted in the Union Army in the summer of 1861, about the same time Joseph Forrest was drilling his newly formed Confederate St. Mary's Rangers in an encampment near Charlotte Hall.
After the war, victorious Meads "marched in the Grand Parade, the Grand Review in Washington, D.C.," says Harding. The defeated Forrest, about the same time, was petitioning for return of his wife's farm so he could plant wheat for the coming year.
Thomas Meads died March 10, 1882, at his home in Canton. A half-dozen fellow officers from the 4th Maryland Infantry were pallbearers. A drum corps from a post of the Grand Army of the Republic led a cortege of perhaps 350 mourners from Canton to his burial place in Baltimore Cemetery.
Joseph Forrest lived until 1889, when he died at Cole's Farm, his last holding in St. Mary's County, the remnant of his wife's inheritance.
But in the end, for all their dissimilarity, Ruffner says in his book's summing up, the two men share a common legacy:
"Men who served as junior officers in the Maryland Line and the Maryland Brigade came from two societies in one state. Despite the vast differences among them both groups of officers 'embodied the faith and pride' of their Maryland."
Pub Date: 6/22/98