Obscure kin part of pivotal events

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In a way, the roar and blood of the Civil War, which began 150 years ago today, was Nebraska's cradle.

Any schoolkid can tell you about Nebraska's contributions to the conflict — the places said to be stops along the Underground Railroad, for example, or how the Kansas-Nebraska Act intensified the slavery debate. Less known is how the war shaped “the Soldier State.”

One Nebraskan — Nathan Tye, a 22-year-old Creighton University senior — has had a personal, almost eerie encounter with that idea. Two years ago for a history project, Tye decided to poke into an old family story.

When he was growing up in Kearney, he said, there had always been talk about “two obscure uncles” on his mother's side, distant twigs of the family tree who supposedly fought in the Civil War and survived Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison. One died on the way home after the war.

That was all. A murky family tale. The kind of yarn grandpas ramble about and kids roll their eyes at in countless Nebraska and Iowa homes.

Wartime letters the two uncles had written were bundled and stored away with other family things, Tye said, but no one troubled to wade through them.

Meanwhile, Tye went off to college and became a history major. Bundles of old letters tend to bug history majors.

“No one had looked at them till I came along,” he said.

Moreover, historians had shifted their gaze over the years, Tye said. “Great Man” history — the study of famous figures — had given ground to the study of common people and their day-to-day lives.

The era also had caught the popular imagination, thanks partly to documentaries like “The Civil War,” Ken Burns' PBS series.

Tye plunged into the old letters.

The project stretched into two years, his interest growing as the story's threads multiplied and twisted and took him across the country hunting clues. A research fellowship helped pay expenses.

The first revelation was a personal one.

The letter writers, William and James Graham of Mattoon, Ill., weren't “obscure uncles” at all. James was Tye's great-great-great-grandfather, the man who started the family tree's move west after the war, first to Iowa, then Nebraska. William, the one who perished on the way home from the war, was James' elder brother.

Discovery of a forgotten piece of family history would have been reward enough, “the best part” of the project, Tye said. But there was more.

The two brothers from Illinois, he said, turned out to be “Forrest Gump-like figures,” a pair of farm boys whose exploits repeatedly thrust them into movie-esque scenes and famous episodes of the war:

For starters, their parents, Jonathan and Lurana Graham, both Southerners by birth, apparently weren't happy with their boys' enlistment in the Union Army in 1861.

“Some says it is a silly notion that has got into my wild cracked brains,” William wrote in one letter, “whilst others say it is for some scandalous action why I wander so far from home.”

The two fought under Gen. Ulysses Grant at Shiloh, the Tennessee bloodbath famous as the most lethal battle America had yet experienced. They chased Confederate guerrillas through the wilds of Missouri and met freed slaves, “the happiest people on Earth.” They were converted to mounted infantry, traveling on donkeys under command of Gen. Grenville Dodge, for whom Omaha's main street is named.

William was shot through the shoulder — so painful “I thought my head would burst,” he wrote from a hospital — but recovered and returned to the ranks. Then the brothers were captured on patrol in Tennessee in 1864 and imprisoned at Andersonville, the Georgia hellhole where 13,000 of their comrades died of starvation or disease.

The brothers managed to survive, Tye said, but William, the elder, was so sick at the war's end that James had to carry him to Union lines. They became separated, James told an interviewer years later, and “I never saw him again alive.”

William died of typhoid fever in a West Virginia hospital. James went home to the family farm in Illinois.

Tye said discovering the family connections to the Civil War included two moments that left him thunderstruck.

One was when he found, at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the receipt William's mother signed to receive her dead son's effects and back pay from the government. The signature was an X. She couldn't read. The woman, widowed midway through the war, saved her boys' letters — the bundle that later captured Tye's curiosity — but had to have others read them aloud to her.

Moment No. 2, Tye said, occurred at a cemetery in Griswold, Iowa, about 40 miles east of Council Bluffs. It was a place his family had visited for years on Memorial Day because an ancestor from the clan's farming years in Iowa was buried there.

In all those annual visits, he said, “we never noticed the grave just beside it,” never noticed the bronze “GAR” star poking from the ground, identifying a Grand Army of the Republic veteran. It was James, his great-great-great grandfather, the war survivor who'd come west to Iowa to start a postwar life.

That scenario — the veteran leaving behind bloodied Eastern battlefields for the lure of new farmland — profoundly shaped the first state founded after the war, in 1867, said James Potter, a researcher at the Nebraska State Historical Society. Both Nebraska and Kansas for a time claimed the nickname “the Soldier State.”

In more than 40 years as a society historian, Potter said, he's been struck by Nebraskans' surprise at learning how “intimately connected” their state is to the war — a main theme of his forthcoming book, “Standing Firmly by the Flag: Nebraska Territory, the Civil War and the Coming of Statehood.”

Most obvious was the tide of military men the war's end brought to Nebraska.

The territory had a prewar population of about 28,000, roughly the number living in Kearney today.

During the war — “a time of constant, coming-and-going turmoil,” Potter said — Nebraska took in many deserters, draft dodgers and other transients. Then came the flood of veterans, mostly of Union blue but a few of Confederate gray, he said. By 1870, five years after the war and three years after statehood, the population had more than quadrupled, to 122,000.

As 150th-anniversary commemorations roll out over the next four years, Potter, a longtime Civil War buff, will be all ears.

So will Tye, who aspires to be a college history professor. He already has presented his paper at conferences, telling professional historians how he researched the two brothers, the one who never came home from the war and the one who went west to sire a clan of Iowans and Nebraskans.

Contact the writer:

402-444-1140, roger.buddenberg@owh.com

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