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cc >> Thank you all for coming out to the Wisconsin Veterans Museum for this very special lecture with Mr. Lance Herdegen. We're very excited to have Lance here again. As you know, the Wisconsin Veterans Museum is an educational activity of the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs. And so, without further adieu, I'd like to introduce Lance, the author of this fine book, "Those Damned Black Hats! The Iron Brigade and the Gettysburg Campaign," which is available downstairs in our bookstore. So if you'd like to purchase one after the talk, please go downstairs. Lance will be happy to sign one for you. Lance is an award winning journalist and a former director of the Institute of Civil War Studies at Carroll University. He previously worked as a reporter and editor at United Press International News Service, covering national politics and civil rights. He is now the historical consultant for the Civil War Museum of Upper Middle West in Kenosha. He is the author of many articles, and is regarded as the authority on the Iron Brigade. Ladies and Gentleman, Lance Herdegen. ( applause ) >> Who is that guy?! How did you guys all get off from work? ( laughter ) >> We were all laid off! ( laughter ) >> I can see this is going to be a rascally group. I'm glad you're not one of my classes. It's always fun to come to the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, which is really one of the better museums facilities in the country. Its displays downstairs are very good. And they have holdings of some of Wisconsin's real treasures from the Civil War period and elsewhere. This is the first time I've had to talk here since the passing of Dr. Richard Zeitland, of course. And what a great scholar he was. Can't you hear me? Is that better? I'll lean closer to the microphone. So it's kind of a bittersweet appearance for me with not having Rich here. He certainly was a great scholar and I wanted to acknowledge what a good friend he was to me and to history, and to Wisconsin history. So today, I'm going to talk about my book, "Those Damned Black Hats! The Iron Brigade and the Gettysburg Campaign," and what I found out, and what I discovered. Then I'll be happy to answer questions briefly. The story of the Iron Brigade has been told. It's pretty familiar. They marched to Gettysburg on the morning of July 1, 1863. The Iron Brigade is made up of the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin, the 19th Indiana, which were together from the very beginning days of the war. The brigade was reinforced by the 24th Michigan after the Battle of Antietum in September, 1862. So the new guys are the Michigan guys. They were more Michigan soldiers when they came to join the Army than there were in the four regiments. And of course, they felt very out of place. They had just been issued their black hats in the weeks before Gettysburg. The black hats made the Wisconsin men famous. They were singled out in the Army for a couple of reasons. One is that they were the only all-western brigade. And we're all westerners, by the way, under that definition. All western brigade in the Army, the Potomac. When their gray uniforms sent by the state began to break down, the government went into the federal stores to re-issue uniforms. Now, all those Yankee regiments from New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and all those strange places that I don't want to go anymore, were issued those snappy flat caps, because General McClellan liked them so. But there weren't enough of those caps to go around. So they went into the quartermaster stores and they found the old, outdated dress hats of the US Regular, a big, flat pilgrim style cap, made out of black felt. They were also issued the dress coats of the US Regulars, which is a nine-button knee-length frock coat, with a padded vest. Can you imagine wearing that in 90-degree weather, marching around? And at first, they got the caps because there was nobody to speak for them. They weren't given the latest equipment. But the Wisconsin soldiers tended to like those black hats, because one soldier said it made them as tall as giants. When they marched across a field, they looked, you know, they were big, strapping frontier regiment. And it gave them a very good look. And they enjoyed that. They began to be called the Black Hat Brigade because of those hats, because it made them distinctive. Among themselves, however, they referred to themselves as the Big Hats. You very rarely see a reference to the Black Hats among personal correspondence. They always said the Big Hats. It was like this, the Big Hats can outmarch anybody; the Big Hats can shoot better; the Big Hats are tougher than anybody, and whatever. They had a terrible time in the east, because easterners didn't have any sense of Wisconsin as a frontier and what it was like. So they would come up to these Wisconsin kids, and they were kids. They were generally fairly young. They'd ask them questions like, you know, do you sleep on the ground at night? You know, where do you hang the scalps that you take? And, can you shoot very well? And of course, the Wisconsin boys played into it very much. Well, we can knock the eye out of a gray squirrel at a thousand yards. ( laughter ) You ask which eye. And then they would ask questions like, you know, what's that strange animal in that field. The farmer would say, why that's a cow. And they'd say, oh, I thought we only had buffalo in Wisconsin. And it went on and on. And the fact of the matter is that most of them were from Pennsylvania and New York, and eastern states, and were out in the frontier trying to make a name for themselves. So the fact that they were westerners made them unique in an Army of easterners. It singled them out. A 6th Wisconsin soldier from Baraboo said that, "We felt we were the test of the west, and the eyes of the east were on us." Well, that puts a pretty heavy burden on you when you're a young soldier. They wore the black hats. It was at the Battle of South Mountain in 1862, just before the Battle of Antietum. They were fighting their way up the national road, under the eyes of General McClellan, who was commanding the Army at the time. And McClellan supposedly said, at least this is the story he liked to tell, he said, "Who are those boys going up the road?" And somebody said they're the Western Brigade of John Gibben. And he said, "Why, they fight as if they are made of iron." And of course, the story goes back down, and pretty soon they began to be known as the Iron Brigade. The Iron Brigade of the West. There was a New York brigade that called itself the Iron Brigade as well. After a march of 50 miles in two days, their Colonel said, "You boys must be made of cast iron." So the Wisconsin boys were always quick to point out that they were the Cast Iron Brigade, and not the real Iron Brigade of the West. When they wrote about it, immediately after the name was given to them, they talked about them in terms of they were always identified as the Iron Brigade of the West. They were rarely, from the first day, they want to be linked with those guys. We still have trouble. There's a guy out in Maryland today, a professor named Tom Clemens, who goes around making a ribbon claiming that the Iron Brigade was really those New Yorkers. Ah, shameless fellow he is. But professors are shameless fellows! ( laughter ) So the Iron Brigade is held out of the war for almost a year, where they were reserves in the Washington reserves. Ultimately, they went to Fredericksburg, when McClellan went to the peninsula. They were horrified that they were going to be out of the war and never get to fire a shot. And they wrote these letters home, the war is over, we'll be home soon, how are we going to explain to mom and dad and to the rest of the folks back home that we never got into it. Well, they got into it pretty heavily. They fought in four pitched battles in the space of 21 days. That's --, the second Bull Run, South Mountain and Antietum. In the course of that, they lost 50% of their membership. By Gettysburg, there were probably, the number, I distrust all the numbers that you get, because these are all clerks putting them together, and the numbers tend to be inflated. They said they marched to Gettysburg with 1,833 men. That night of July 1, after fighting most of the day, when they rallied on the cemetery ridge, the records say there were only 671 left. Think of that loss, almost 1,200 men down and dying and missing. I think that number is false. A quartermaster claimed that he only fought 500 men that night on the hill. So they were pretty beat up. A company of 50 or 60 men would come in, there would be five or six of them around the flag when they finally reached the rally point at Gettysburg. So they played a key role in the opening of the battle. They were thrown into the fight early in the morning. They were northwest of town. They were the only federal infantry, among the only federal. There were other federal units coming up at that time. In the course of the morning, they knocked down two brigades, Archer's confederate brigade and Joe Davis' confederate brigade. Then in the afternoon, they fought five other brigades in a holding action, at a place called Seminary Ridge and MacPherson's Ridge, that lasted almost four hours. They were outnumbered three and four to one at the time, and were under the impression that they had to hold out. They believed that they were holding, so the rest of the Army could come up. There was a mistake made at the time. In the mid-afternoon a rider came up and told the general commanding, who was Meredith at the time, that they had to hold the ridge. They said they had to hold Cemetery Ridge. Now Cemetery Ridge is where the rally point is south of town. But the officer that brought that command that they had to hold Cemetery Ridge was German, and his English was broken. And the commanders of the Iron Brigade thought he said Seminary Ridge, which is where they were fighting. So they stayed long past the time that they should have, and only left that ridge when they were literally chased off on the run. They lost a lot of soldiers in that retreat from the ridge, which is around the Lutheran Seminary, into Gettysburg. They had to pass through the streets. One soldier said that confederates were firing at them from one side of the street to the other. They finally reached Cemetery Hill, where the Union Army had gathered. They were 400-500 of them left. And General Winfield Scott Hancock, who had taken command of the Union Army at that point, before General Mead came up, ordered them to a place called Culp's Hill, which is probably the Fish Hook area. As I said, when they got there and actually counted up, there weren't many of them left. The 24th Michigan went into the battle with 497 men, and they counted 91 around their flag that night. The heaviest losses for any of the federal regiments. They were in the thick of fighting in the afternoon. So in effect, in the Battle of Gettysburg, the Iron Brigade was all but destroyed. The regiments were re-filled later. It went up to big numbers, 600-700. The regiment was supposed to have a thousand men, but Civil War regiments by Gettysburg were 300-400 men. And they were reinforced, but it wasn't by the same type of people. You know, these volunteers from the frontier towns all across Indiana, Wisconsin and even Michigan. They didn't like the Michigan at first. They thought they enlisted for bounty money, which is not true. Michigan men had enlisted as volunteers. It was a big deal to be a volunteer. In other words, you went not for any monetary gain, but because of your patriotism to the country. They thought that the Michigan guys brought way too stuff from home. They called them the feather bedders. ( laughter ) They said they brought everything from home, including their kitchen sink and feather beds. But after the battle of Gettysburg, there was no doubt that the 24th Michigan had earned its reputation. So what about the Iron Brigade today? The Iron Brigade today is probably more well known and celebrated than it was at the time of the Civil War. There's a couple reasons for that. When the war ended, the boys went back home to the west. And most of the major unions were held at Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Washington. Of course, all those eastern soldiers liked to talk about what they did at the Battle of Gettysburg. So as a result, the Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan men always felt that they were not getting the attention that they should have. Everybody was talking about the Vermont Brigade, or the New York Brigade, or the Irish Brigade, but very few people paid much attention to a ragtag bunch of people in strange old black hats, living in funny places called Baraboo, Wonewoc and Mauston. They first came to public attention, really, after 1890. Rufus Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin wrote his first memoir, "Service with the 6th Wisconsin Volunteers," and was published in 1890. That's quite a bit after the war. It was the first book published on an Iron Brigade regiment. And if you haven't read it, it may be the best memoir by a soldier in the Civil War, at least in my opinion. O.B. Curtis added the "History of the 24th Michigan" the next year. Philip Cheek and Mair Pointon wrote a book called "Sauk County Riflemen" about Company A of the 6th Wisconsin. But it was really Bruce Catton, the historian in the 1950s, who brought attention to the Iron Brigade when he began to use Dawes' memoir and the Sauk County Riflemen's memoir, and the Michigan memoir, and wrote about the Black Hat Brigade in his books, "Glory Road," "A Stillness at Applomattox," and of course, the book I like best of all is "Mr. Lincoln's Army." In 1961, an Indiana man by the name of Alan Nolan wrote a book called "The Iron Brigade" on very simply, the Iron Brigade. And he wrote a very powerful standard history of the brigade that brought them more to public attention. And in that period, a number of other writers, including myself, have added to the Iron Brigade's story, mainly because it's such a rich and wonderful story, and because it has so much relevance. When I began to research the Iron Brigade, I found that none of the historians were looking in the repositories in the Midwest. You know, if you're going to write about Gettysburg, you don't go to Wisconsin to look for it. Wisconsin's soldiers fall at Gettysburg, and all these places, and there's this wonderful wealth of material. And it was added to, because they felt that they were slighted. They were writing to each other, telling what they did. They exchanged things. And they never got a lot of attention out east. I did a seminar three years ago, to a crowd about as big as this, at Seminary Ridge. That's where they fought on that July 1 day. And I asked how many had been out to the Iron Brigade site, which was slightly west of the Seminary. And out of a group this large, probably 12 or 15 people raised their hand. All these Civil War buffs who were coming to conferences had never been out to the look at the first day's fighting. There's a reason for that, I think. I mean, I don't think that's any kind of a slippery thing. I think what happened is that the writings of eastern regiments and the fact that they were from the east really led them to places of the second day of the battle, and of course, the third day, with the final charge. And along comes this wonderful book, "Killer Angels," and Joshua Chamberlain, who becomes this folk figure because he writes so well about the war. I'm going to be a little cranky now. The 20th Main, did not suffer a lot of casualties in that battle. All the Wisconsin regiments in the first two hours of fighting, lost more men than the 20th Main did in their whole action. But it's overlooked because one, it was a defeat for the Union Army, and two, most of the regiments that got a lot of attention ended up on the second or third day. So when I started to go into this whole thing of looking through the records on Wisconsin and the Battle of Gettysburg, I had written a book called "In the Bloody Railroad Cut at Gettysburg," with my friend, William JK Beadot in 1990. That's something. Gosh, it seems like yesterday. My life is sliding away. And I never had thought about going back to do Gettysburg. You know, Gettysburg, I had done some of the Iron Brigade at Gettysburg, and I had no intention to go back. And people kept sending me stuff. I was the director of the Civil War Institute at Carroll at the time. All of a sudden, I started getting letters and copies of journals, and pictures would come in. A lot of them dealt with Iron Brigade regiments. And we kept a file of all these letters and documents. Now, I had this box full of stuff. I was telling this to a friend of mine, I said, gee, I've got all this wonderful material on Gettysburg that's never been used, that families have sent me. And I was talking to a guy, some of you know out there, Charlie Foster, who was a big collector. And he said to me, you know, Lance, if you don't write about these guys at Gettysburg, all that material will be lost forever. And it will never, you know, they'll be forgotten. I said, well, thanks a lot, Charlie, lay a real load on me. So I kept plucking away at this history of the Iron Brigade at Gettysburg. This is the first book length copy of it. And in research, I came across something very interesting. I was in the Chicago Public Library. And they had some Iron Brigade stuff, but just a couple letters from people. And the lady said, you know, we have a pretty good file on the Grand Army of the Republic. So, bring that out, I'll take a look at it. In the Chicago Public Library, now what the hell is it doing down there? I started going through it. And in it were these photographs labeled the headquarters camp at the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg, the Iron Brigade. And a guy named Charlie McConnell, of the 24th Michigan, had erected a huge tent, bigger than this room, on the Battlefield of Gettysburg during the 50th anniversary. And in that pile of stuff were letters from him, documents and newspaper clippings, and these photographs of the Vets at Gettysburg, in the Iron Brigade reunion tent. The tent, of all things, was dedicated to the 24th Michigan and the 26th North Carolina. Those were the two regiments that came head to head in the afternoon, and just fought a horrific fight. They fought at ranges of 90 feet apart, in two lines, almost for a half hour of steady fighting. And of course, both regiments were shot to pieces. I think that's the heaviest infantry fighting in a war, in that space of an hour, before the 24th Michigan is pulled off the ridge. The reason that Charlie McConnell put up this tent was kind of strange. He was a young corporal in the 24th Michigan at Gettysburg. He was a printer out of Detroit. And just before they fled from Seminary Ridge, Charlie had one cartridge left. And he said, Captain, I've got one round left, and I'm going to make it count. He wrote this, now. Charlie probably embellished this a little. And the captain says, Charles, Charles he called him, not Charlie. He said, Charles, you see that splendid fellow carrying the rebel flag, he said, take a shot at him. And Charlie says, by God, I will. By the eternal, I'll put him down. He said that. So he leaned against his friend to get a steady aim, he fires and the flag bearer goes down. He said, then we ran for the town, just ahead of the rebel line. Well, he never got over it. So Charlie became rich, moved to Chicago, where he sold retail drugs. And so, that's how the stuff ended up in the Chicago Public Library. So around the time, he gets to be 40 or 50 years old, and suddenly these days when he was a young soldier, he was the color bearer of the 24th Michigan the rest of the war. And in fact, he was in the Honor Guard for Lincoln's funeral in Springfield, with the 24th Michigan. You know, that's a big deal for you. You're 21 years old, and you're in the Battle of Gettysburg. And he began to seek out people, and he would tell the story about how he was on the ridge. And he was in Richmond on business, and talking to an ex-confederate. And the confederate says, well, you've got to see John -- in North Carolina. He said, because his brother was killed with the 26th North Carolina. And so, Charlie said, well, I'll do that. And he gets an invitation to go down. And he visits this brother of a colonel of the 26th. There's a couple of confederates there, and Charlie tells this story. And the brother smiles and says, well, you shot Colonel Jim Lane, who is standing right here. So Charlie says, holy cow, you know, here's the guy he shot. He thought he had killed him. And Lane's got this big beard. He pulls his beard up and shows where the bullet went through his neck. ( laughter ) This is all in these letters and newspaper accounts. They took him all over the place, and around this town, to show him where the regiment was raised, and show him all of this. Lane and him are best friends. Charlie said, thank God my hand was spared and I didn't kill this gallant soldier. So they agreed to meet at Gettysburg on the 40th anniversary, which is 1903. When they get there and have their pictures taken. All these photographs are in this file. You know, it took me a while to figure out who was who. When you read through the documentation and newspaper accounts, you quickly realized what was going on. And Charlie said, so Charlie accompanies Lane to a reunion on the 40th of Gettysburg. And Lane speaks to a crowd of several thousand confederate veterans. And he begins the story, a great beginning. He says, when I was young, I was a soldier and I fought on this field. He then began to tell the story of how he came on the field. Then he tells how five of their color bearers have been shot. And finally, he picked up the flag himself, and he turned back to call his men forward when he was shot. Down he fell. And then he grabs Charlie, who was standing next to him, pulls him over and said, this is the man who shot me! ( laughter ) Man, you know, thousands of confederates, I'd have run for it, right? ( laughter ) But of course, Charlie gets all, you know, glad to see you, glad I didn't kill you. And it's this wonderful reunion thing. And it's the last time they meet, because Lane dies before the 50th. But when Charlie comes, he's the Illinois representative of the state for the reunion at Gettysburg in 1913. He puts this big tent up. He takes all these photographs. He said 1,400 people a day visited that tent. And they had all sorts of entertainment. They had the Soldiers Fiddlers Society, the Blue and Gray Fiddlers, two confederate fiddlers and two Yankee fiddlers, if you can imagine that. And they played the old songs and sang. They had a wonderful time. It's in the book. There's a list of all the people who registered at his tent. They're from all over, all sorts of different individuals. So Charlie had a wonderful time. He hosts another reunion of the Iron Brigade at Detroit right after that time. He said it was the last one, and this is going to be a lot of fun, and everyone should come. And he promises the confederate guys that he's going to build a $50,000 monument at Gettysburg, dedicated to the 24th Michigan Armed Brigade and the 26th North Carolina Brigade. But you know, he dies before he gets it into his will. Charlie was famous. He made fortunes and lost them like every four years. He'd get rich and went up and down. He was good at making money. So when they wrote his obit, they said, you know, Charlie McConnell, a well-known retail and wholesale druggist died such and such a time. They said he was known for having made several fortunes and losing them as fast as he made them. And there was no mention at all of his service with the Iron Brigade or his reunion, or all of that. So it was all lost. That was one of the things that I found in that. It was a pretty touching story. And I kind of feel sorry for Charlie McConnell. He wrote one account of the battle, and it's pretty fanciful if you read it. He's single handedly holding the whole Confederate Army. ( laughter ) But he wrote in that article, he said the basic reason the he thought that the attention of the Iron Brigade never got a lot of renown, right after the war, is he says is because it was a losing battle. And nobody liked to write about being whipped. So he went on. And of course, a lot of veterans went back to Gettysburg after the war, went there to see where they had been shot, and all of that. So it's a pretty wonderful story. I hope you all buy the book, just because it's fun to read and to get a connection to these guys. So tonight, I have an assignment for you. I always give my classes an assignment. And I expect you to do it, as well. When you're falling asleep, you know, there's that wonderful period when you're laying there just drifting off, thinking about the day's events. Well, you should probably think about this story of Charlie McConnell, and how he shot that color bearer at Gettysburg, and how he ended up putting up this wonderful tent at Gettysburg, and how he was so struck by his service at Gettysburg. I want you to say a silent prayer for him, because I don't think there's many people praying for Charlie McConnell any more. The Battlefield of Gettysburg is a wonderful place to visit. I hope you all get to see it. If you haven't, and I hope you all go out to the first day's fighting, and look at the wonderful monuments. It's starting to have a little erosion now, because of acid rain and some things. But they're still fairly clear. I should do a caution for you. The battlefield has changed because they put a road through it. And when you go there, you get a sense of how they fought, but it's not quite as clear. So you have to literally walk through the woods and jump over the trees. And if you find any bullets on the ground, that have been shot in the battle and fell out of old trees, give them to me. ( laughter ) Thank you very much. ( applause ) I'd be happy to answer three or four easy questions. And I'll be happy to sign any books that flopping around. If you haven't bought yours, run and buy it now. I'll stay until all is gone. All right, who was asking a question in the back? Okay, you've got to speak up, because I can't hear very well. >> Lance, has any part of this story been modified by the re-interpretation of the Gettysburg Battlefield, which has been going on recently? >> Are you talking about the story of Gettysburg, the more politically correct version of it? >> I hear talk about how the historians have re-interpreted the Gettysburg Battlefield. >> There's been a lot of that. It's based almost entirely on primary sources, written by guys that were there. If there's a flaw in it, it's that I tend to accept the stories more at face value than I should. There's a lot of people that say you should have three versions of the story before you believe it, and all that. But I didn't want to do that, because I really wanted to get a sense of these old guys, how they remembered Gettysburg, and how it affected them. So if that's the criticism, I will argue against it, yeah. The new interpretation of Gettysburg involves Lincoln. It involves abolitionism. It involves the big cause, fighting for slavery. The story of the slavery thing is an interesting concept. In my book, I wrote about the reaction of Wisconsin soldiers to slavery. You know, a lot of the kids had never seen slavery. And they were pretty ambivalent about it. They weren't. Some were abolitionists. Some saw it as an evil. But most of them didn't really care much, one way or another. Until it began, as the war goes on, they get a sense of the unfairness of the system, which I found was interesting. One guy's writing, and he says, here's this black carpenter, you know, and all of his labors benefit his master. And he sees none of the benefit of his work. And they thought that was not right. That was not right. He's not that much darker than half the guys in my regiment. And so they begin to evolve into a real opposition to slavery. Not at first, but if you read through the letters, they become much more anti-slave, and they really, really, really want to destroy slavery, because they think it'll end the war, and you know, preserve the Union. >> So how does that impact the interpretation of the battlefield? >> How does it impact it? >> When you say it's being re-interpreted. >> I'm not sure what I'm writing does impact on the interpretation of the battlefield. I think what they're writing now is trying to make it more politically correct. And they're trying to put it in much larger contexts. I'm always going to get in trouble with this. But I'll say what I'm going to say anyway. And I'll deny I said it. ( laughter ) I think what happens is that the war ends. At first, everybody's kind of happy that the Union's been preserved and the war is over. But then they begin to look around and they begin to look at the cost. You know, 600,000 men die, and all of the damage, and things that went on. And the soldiers, especially the Union soldiers, almost had an emotional need to have a reason for that happening. I mean, how do you justify the cost. Was the saving of the Union worth what happened? Maybe, maybe not. And it is at that point they really buy into the concept emotionally, and probably correctly so, that the war was ultimately the end of slavery and of secession. You know, the threat of secession is a pretty serious thing, too, that anybody can walk out of the Union. Wisconsin tried to secede from the Union before the Civil War, in the fugitive slave war. We almost declared war on the United States. I think we ought to do that again. ( laughter ) Did I answer that enough? I'm not sure there's a good answer for it. ( indistinct talking ) >> Do we know the nationality of the majority of the Iron Brigade people? What nationality were they? The majority, were they German? Were they English? Norwegian? >> They were a little bit of everything. A lot of Yankee stock. You've heard the expression Native Americans are of English descent, people who settled the country early? Probably the majority were of New England, New York, and English descent. A lot of Irish. Then a big bulge of Germans come in in that period, when the 48ers came in, and began to see that. You also have a large number of French Canadians. Now, what's a French Canadian? Native Americans were not allowed to join the Army. So you have this whole culture, for years, of mixed culture in the northern part of the state of Native Americans and French, right? From the old fur trapping days. So to enlist, these mixed bloods, or Metis, began to call themselves French Canadians. So you've got this funny spike, you know, Germans, and all of a sudden, French Canadians. Where the hell do they come from? ( laughter ) Well, I know. And I have tracked at least five or six African Americans who served in the Iron Brigade regiments, as soldiers, not as cooks. They actually enlisted, and served. One of them was killed. One of them was wounded. One mustered out. And they just overlooked it. They wouldn't write about it because he was illegal. Wisconsin's a funny place. You've got this social thing going on. You've got all these mixed people. It's not like back east. Here, you've got you know, Ojibwas, French. You've got Germans. You've got Irish. You've got immigrants. You've got Norwegians and God knows what else. And they all, you know, are trying to get along on the frontier. It's a soup, a wonderful soup. I'm always in trouble for this, too. I think it's the first real Americans, because where you have this mix of different cultures and peoples coming together and creating a whole new type of people. I think Lincoln is the result of that, in some ways. He grew up in that kind of culture. I probably can't defend that, and some historian will stab me in the heart and kill me for heresy. But the heck with it. Yes? >> As a follow-up to that, when I was in Gettysburg a couple years ago, I met a battlefield guide whose researching a woman who fought in the Iron Brigade, either the 2nd or the 6th, was wounded there, shipped back to Chicago, and was found out to be a woman, and was treated as a hero. She came back to the Madison area, apparently re-enlisted. >> She's actually from the 7th Wisconsin. >> All right. >> That whole story's based on a newspaper clipping of about 75 words. And it suddenly becomes whole cloth, because it's fascinating, and a little glimpse. I'm sure, they argue whether there were about 400 women who served in units in past as soldiers. I think that number is a lot higher. But there's no way to ever prove it. It's like trying to run down Native Americans. When they enlisted, they tended to, you know, these Army clerks can't write down Ojibwa names, and all that. So they call them John Smith, Frank Smith, Henry Smith, or whatever. Well go ahead. >> John Burns. >> John Burns? >> Yeah, whatever happened to him? >> I touch on that in the book. I spent a long time reading other people's literature. There are so many damn stories, I can't figure out which one is true and what isn't. So I used all of them. ( laughter ) Because they're delightful stories. He fights with the Iron Brigade part of the time. And there was a lot of eye witness accounts from five or six different soldiers in the 7th and one in the 2nd, as well as some Pennsylvanians and others. But in the course of that, I think he was there. I think that whole story became romanced, to use a polite term. And I think Burns romanced it, as well. I like John Burns. I'm about his age, and ready to tip my musket and go out and take a shot at the damn Johnnies, wouldn't you? He was mad. That's a good story. There's a good book by a guy named Tim Smith. It's just a thin little book that they sell at Gettysburg, which really, really examines all the arguments one way or the other. He couldn't reach any conclusions either. Well, you've been very kind. Thank you very much. I'm so happy we got a chance to talk. ( applause )