by Jack Neely
Each April, this young man's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of the Civil War. When people ask me whether I'm a Civil War buff, I never know how to answer just because I'm not certain what a buff is, and don't want to give people the wrong idea. But April is the month the war started and the month it ended, and I always think about it.
Some enthusiasts–not to say buffs–ask why I don't write about the Civil War more often and the main reason is a book called Divided Loyalties, by Digby Seymour, M.D. Most of the good stories are already told, in there.
Whatever a buff is, Ed White is not one. He's an actor who for the last several years has been one of the most talented mainstays in dozens of comedies at Theatre Central on Gay Street.
A few months ago he volunteered to help a friend dig up an old fountain in her yard in Fort Sanders. As he was digging, he happened to turn up a heavy bullet-shaped object. It's thicker than any modern bullet. It's light tan in color, and looks like dirty limestone, but it's heavier than rock.
It has three rings around its shaft. But on the cone, near the tip, is a deep gash, as if it had collided at high speed with some object more solid than lead.
It's a Civil War minié ball, or bullet, as some prefer. It's named for Claude Etienne minié, the French army officer who designed it. The three rings on this one indicate it was probably of Union manufacture; its white color, which is typical, is corrosion. It was originally gray lead.
It's impossible to know when it was fired, and how it got here. As far as we know, a kid could have picked it up as a souvenir in Chattanooga in 1952, and it happened to fall through the hole in his pocket as he was helping his dad install a fountain. However, it seems at least as likely that it's no coincidence that Ed found it on the site of what was, 136 years ago, the deadliest fighting in Knoxville's portion of the war.
In November, 1863, Fort Sanders was a Union earthworks, its main ramparts along 17th Street, just five blocks east of this spot, within gunshot range. The ill-advised Confederate charge rolled right across this yard, long before it was a yard. In only 20 minutes, at least 129 men died. We say at least because after those 20 minutes, 226 were missing, some blown into fragments too small to recognize. In addition, 458 men were wounded, many of them by these three-ringed Federal minié balls.
I'm grateful to Ed for letting me borrow it for a while. I'd seen hundreds of minié balls in museums, but I'd never seen one freshly found. I'd never rolled one around in my hand. I've been carrying it around in my pocket, taking it to lunch, taking it for rides on my bicycle.
It was only a week after seeing that one, though, that I happened to see my second. It's framed on a wall over Ken Smith's desk.
Ken Smith is, arguably, a Civil War buff, though I'd never tell him so to his face; he used to be a re-enactor. He works as a designer at Media South in their new headquarters on Gay Street, though calling it new takes some license. It's a new-looking place, sure enough, with a design trendy enough to shoot a scene of Ally McBeal, but the office is actually in one of the oldest buildings on the street. It's a stretch of commercial buildings on the east side of Gay Street between Church and Cumberland. Besides the Lamar House, they're the only buildings on Gay Street that were probably there during the Civil War. A couple of them were heavily damaged by a a fire a year or two ago, but renovated, they appear to be in much better shape, and better used, than they've been in years.
The bullet looks a little different from the one Ed White found. For one thing, it has only two rings. That's supposed to indicate Confederate origin.
Renovator David Dewhirst found it a few months ago, and found it in an odd place. After a fire in the building, he pulled down some paneling and found it in the wall, just tucked there in the hollow of the concrete masonry between the bricks, as if someone had only placed it there.
Its origin seems less obvious. Though the first casualty of the Civil War in Knoxville was when a Unionist citizen was shot to death from a window at the Lamar House, right in this vicinity, in the spring of '61, there wasn't otherwise much combat downtown. We know there was a poolhall in this building at one time, maybe several over the years; Dewhirst found some old cue racks–and for all we know it may have been the same poolhall where Union veteran Samuel Dow organized the region's first baseball games in the summer of 1865. After actual battlefields like Fort Sanders, poolhalls are pretty high on the list of sites visited by gunfire.
Oddly, this particular minié ball doesn't appear damaged. Maybe it was never even fired, but just placed here for some now-forgotten purpose. Or maybe someone did fire it, perhaps a Confederate veteran disgruntled over an unpaid debt or a bad bank shot, and it slowed down going through something soft before coming to rest in this cozy niche in the wall.
Who knows how many more there are in Knoxville, probably thousands, in the walls of antebellum buildings and the lawns of Fort Sanders. I think about it every time I see a backhoe in Fort Sanders, scooping around where a house used to be. I watch them loading the dirt and debris and wonder where they're taking it, wonder whether anyone will ever notice that hundreds of men once bled on it.
Projectile Roundup originally appeared in Metropulse
, Knoxville's alternative weekly magazine
The 18th Century comes alive at the Colonial Trade Faire in Fort Loudoun State Park. Featuring British soldiers and French soldiers, Creek Indians and Cherokee Indians, Magicians and Musicians, and even a Sword Swallower, this is the biggest event of the year at the Fort.
