From the standpoint of history, World War I was a much bigger and far more cataclysmic event than the American Civil War. The United States took part in the first World War for the last year and a half, and was indeed the reason the allies won and Imperial Germany lost.
Yet in the United States, World War I is nearly forgotten today. Even many educated people know little beyond the fact that it had something to do with doughboys and trench warfare and poison gas attacks. Though it ended barely a century ago, it seems ancient history.
But the Civil War is still very much with us. Hundreds of Americans participate in Civil War battle reenactments every year, and thousands visit battlefields from Gettysburg to Antietam.
It was, after all, the only major war fought on our soil since the Revolution, and more Americans died in the Civil War than in all the wars since, even though the country then had only about one-tenth of the population it does now.
But what often has been overlooked was Michigan’s role in the Civil War. We were then a small agricultural state, far from any battlefield. But in fact, we played a far greater role in that war than is commonly known. Twenty-three percent of the eligible male population of the state fought before the war was over – that would be equivalent to more than two and a quarter million Michigan men today. Nearly 15,000 of those soldiers died.
That would be equivalent to almost 200,000 military deaths today. When Michigan was first asked to send four regiments, we sent seven.
When the first troops arrived in Washington in the month 158 years ago, President Abraham Lincoln said, “Thank God for Michigan.”
However, our state’s role in that “great and bloody conflict” was long too little known, and has since been largely forgotten. We had, after all, no Generals named Grant or Lee or Hooker or Stuart. But Jack Dempsey, the author and co-author of six books on Michigan history, has been doing his best to give us back the past that we’ve forgotten.
His book, Michigan and the Civil War, taught me a lot I hadn’t known, and now he’s back with a new book about a man who spent his life being underappreciated. The title is Michigan’s Civil War Citizen-General, Alpheus S. Williams. He was a man who bravely led troops into battle throughout the war, a commander in the field who was a key part of the victories at Antietam and Gettysburg, but constantly got passed over for promotion in favor of lesser men.
But “Old Pap,” as they called him, didn’t quit in a huff, didn’t whine, he just soldiered on and did his job. His was a largely sad life; his wife died young, as did two of his children, but he just kept on keeping on. Eventually, he did get elected to Congress, where he, as usual, put country above party in crucial moments.
When a third-party candidate caused him to lose his re-election bid, he nevertheless resolved to keep on working, largely for veterans’ causes, till his term expired. That’s when, of course, he had the stroke that would kill him. Jack Dempsey, the executive director of Heritage Michigan, has done history and us the favor of telling his full story for the first time. Old Pap lived in an entirely different world from the one we inhabit.
Yet, I think he would have fit in with the hard-working, largely blue-collar Michiganders I grew up with. I often think of the fact that in late July 1863, when bloated corpses of men and horses still littered the Gettysburg battlefield, a farm wife outside Detroit gave birth to a baby who would change the world. She named him Henry Ford. We know a lot about him.
But we ought to know a little more about men like Alpheus Williams who saved the nation that would someday buy millions of Ford’s cars.
Editor’s Note: You can hear both this essay and my interview with Jack Dempsey about the Civil War on my podcast on the Zing media network. And please subscribe to my YouTube channel!
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