History’s Headlines by Frank Whalen (CWRT Member)
August 26, 2023
WFMZ.com
Ed Root was excited. A past president of the Civil War Roundtable of Eastern Pennsylvania, a local group of war-between-the-states history enthusiasts, he had just heard that the man who owned a sword that was carried by Captain Jonathen Taylor, a Bethlehem man who died of his wounds shortly following the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, wanted to sell it. Root did not want to own it himself, but he did think it should be returned to the Lehigh Valley and to Bethlehem, which Taylor and his family considered home at the time of his death. Recently, Root has been working closely with others to see that the sword could be purchased.
One of those who has expressed an interest is the GAR Museum in Philadelphia. The initials stand for Grand Army of the Republic, which was a name given to those who fought in the army on the Union side during the Civil War. One of their proud possessions is Old Baldy, the horse that Union General George Gordon rode at the Battle of Gettysburg. He was stuffed long ago. Root notes the sword will be on display at Nitschmann Middle School. The Bethlehem Area School District, Historic Bethlehem Museum and Sites, The Civil War Roundtable of Eastern Pennsylvania and the GAR Museum have coordinated the effort. The GAR Museum will be the ultimate owner. Root adds that he has been working closely with John Rohal of Bethlehem on this project.
The modern idea behind the sword began in 2017 when Peter Maugle, a former student at Nitschmann Middle School in Bethlehem, was speaking to a group of students at the rededication of the city’s Civil War monument in the Rose Garden. He reflected on his own days as a student there and had often wondered how the monument came to be. As fate would have it, Maugle became a park ranger and historian at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. It was here he learned that the monument he saw as a boy had been erected in part to honor Taylor. With special permission from the Moravian Church, which Taylor had attended before the war, he was buried in God’s Acre cemetery. The monument’s dedication in 1887 had attracted the largest parade in the city’s history.
Before he left for the war Taylor’s friends gave him the magnificent sword. “We don’t know exactly when they gave it to him, but believe he carried it on the Fredericksburg battlefield,” says Root. The current owner has agreed to sell, and the money is being raised. The sword is a foot infantry officer’s weapon, not a saber.
By the era of the 1860s cavalry sabers were among the last weapons of that kind being used in actual warfare. And even then carbines were more effective when used by mounted soldiers. A sword was a weapon that suggested rank and was in general carried by officers. As a captain it was understandable that Taylor would have carried one. According to one account, the education he received included the sword fighting warrior heroes of antiquity of Greece and Rome.
The long history of swords and sword-like weapons gave them an aura that persisted long after they had become obsolete. In the opening days of World War I, there were still European armies that believed mounted horse cavalry with sabers could serve as shock troops. The were soon disabused of this notion, which, like the red pantaloons worn by French infantry, died in the mud of Flanders.
Although a mounted Polish cavalry unit on the first day of World War II surprised, attacked and dispersed some members of a German infantry unit, causing a slight delay in their invasion, there is apparently no truth to stories of them charging tanks with swords and lances, an assumption made by journalists at the time and perpetuated by the post-war Communist regime.
It could be argued that swords were already outdated as weapons in the mud of Fredericksburg. Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals were often photographed with swords but presumably did not attempt to use them as weapons. It is hard to imagine there are not some pictures of General Ulysses Grant holding a sword but probably very few of them. At Appomattox Grant refused to accept Lee’s sword as a token of surrender.
In 1781, at the end of the battle at Yorktown that ended the fighting of the American Revolution, the British commander Lord Cornwallis sent a subordinate, General Charles O’Hara, to turn his sword over to Washington. In response Washington had a subordinate, Major General Benjamin Lincoln, of a similar rank to O’Hara, to receive it.
At least as far back as the Bronze Age cutting weapons were used in combat. Homer’s warriors before Troy used them for close fighting. Ancient Athens and Sparta used them in their Peloponnesian wars. As did Alexander the Great in his famous battles. Probably the most proficient use of the weapon they called the gladius were the legions of Rome. After hurling their pilum or spear, it was the fighting with their short sword gladius that gave Rome her long empire.
Through the Middle Ages in both myth and reality swords were the weapons of knighthood. The mythical sword in the stone of the King Arthur legend and Durendal, carried by French knight Roland in chivalric romances, come to mind. And they retained that role even with the arrival of cannons and gunpowder. As late as the 18th century George Washington, like most of…