"On 3,2,1, OK, you're live."

Civil War diary of Christian Fleetwood.

Monday, April 13, 2015, in studio.

On 3, 2, 1, OK, you're live.

Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to Bill Arp's History Book. I'm your host, Bill Arp. Today, we have with us as our guest, Dave Smoot, the originator, owner and operator of a blog entitled, "Greyback Diary." Welcome to the program, Dave.

Dave: Thank you. Glad to be here, Sir.

Bill: Dave, tell us about your blog. What's it about?

Dave: Greyback Diary is the collection of diary entries of David Tooms of Beaufort, South Carolina. The entries chronicle what happened to him and his friends during the Late Unpleasantness.

Bill: You mean the American Civil War?

Dave: This is South Carolina, Bill. Here, and in much of the gentile South, it''s the Late    Unpleasantness.When we're not feeling too polite, we call it the War of Northern Aggression.

Bill: May we compromise on the War Between the States?

Dave: Fine by me.

Bill: What gave you the idea to create a blog the subject matter of which is a wartime diary?

Dave: I wish I could say, Bill. That was four years ago. I just do not remember why or how I got it into my head to do this. I suppose that it sounded like a good idea at the time.

Bill: Is this your first blog?

Dave: Yes. This was all new turf for me.

Bill: As a blogger...

Dave: Sorry to interrupt, Bill, but I do not call myself a blogger. I don't know enough about the artform to feel confortable about calling myself a blogger. There are so many people who do a much better job at this than I do, Kimberly Burnette-Dean being one of them. You can call it a blog if you want to, but I'm no blogger.

Bill: I see. What should we call you, then?

Dave: Dave.

Bill: OK, Dave. When did this all begin?

Dave: In 1861, sorry, 2011. That was the first year of the 150th anniversary of the war.

Bill: That would be the so-called Sesquicentennial?

Dave: That's right. Actually, the Sesquicentennial truly begins in December of 1860/2010 with the secession of South Carolina from the Union.

Institute Hall, where the South Carolina Ordnance of Secession was signed on December 20, 1861.

What the delegates signed.

A few days after the Ordnance of Secession was passed, a great fire swept through Charleston. Institute Hall, where the Ordnance was signed, was destroyed by the fire. The ruins are in the right foreground.

Bill: So the blog began then?

Dave: No, it didn't. The idea to start a blog was months later and it took some months later to work up the nerve to publish the first entry which was August 17, 1861/2011.

Bill: Work up the nerve? Was this a scary proposition?

Dave: It was. I am a product of the last century. My computer skills are far below par for my generation. The first diary entry to be published committed me to see the thing through to the end. Once I started, I could not stop. That was un-nerving.

Bill: You started the blog in Beaufort, South Carolina? Why that place and not some place with more name recognition like New Orleans or Atlanta or Richmond. Why Beaufort?

Dave: I wanted to start from a zone of comfort. I wanted to have a degree of familiarity with my starting point so I'd have some credibility to begin with.

Bill: So Beaufort it was. Your diarist is David Tooms. Why did you make him the way you did?

Dave: Again, Bill, it was a case of familiarity. Tooms is not a young buck. He was in his late 50's when the diary entries started. Tooms is a geezer. This is certainly not the typical war soldier. They were quite young. I haven't been young since before the turn of the century. I don't know what that's like anymore.

Bill: Did Tooms being an older soldier influence the way your blog was written?

Dave: Indeed it did. Being older meant that I could write from the perspective of one who had been around for awhile. Tooms has life experiences that the young bucks do not have.

Bill: Such as?

Dave: For instance, this is not Tooms' first war. He is old enough that he saw service in the Mexican War in a Virginia regiment.

Colonel John Hamtramck, Tooms' regimental commander during the Mexican War.

Bill: A Virginia regiment? How does that happen? Tooms is from South Carolina.

Dave: He lives in South Carolina but he moved there from Virginia.

Bill: I have read several references to the Mexican War in Tooms' diary and Virginia figures markedly in the entries.

Dave: Tooms' body is in South Carolina but his heart is in Virginia. Tooms being in the Mexican War gives him some experience as a soldier and some stories that transend into the next war.

Major General Zachary Taylor, commander of an army during the Mexican War in which served the Virginia Regiment.

Bill: The young bucks as you call them, look up to Tooms as an elder adviser in all things military?

Dave: They do.

Bill: Now, once you chose your diarist and gave him some particulars, you had to find a unit, a regiment to put him in for the sake of the story. You chose the 12th South Carolina Infantry. Why was that?

Dave: I had thought about settling upon a western theatre regiment at first. The story of those who fought there does not get the recognition that the eastern units receive. There are many more books on the Army of Northern Virginia than are on the Army of Tennessee or the Army of Central Kentucky.

Bill: I'm sorry. What was that last one? I've never heard of it.

Dave: My point exactly. I thought for awhile about putting Tooms in a Trans-Mississippi regiment for the same reason, that there's comparitively so little information about that theatre.

Bill: But in the end, you settled on an eastern theatre regiment.

Dave: That's right, I did. I had to consider the potential readership. If Tooms was in the Trans-Mississippi, for instance, he would be making diary entries about Sabine Crossroads, Palmetto Ranch, Shrevesport, Mansfield and Prairie Grove. Readers would go, "Never heard of them", and would stop reading. In the end, I caved in to the eastern theatre bias.

Bill: Fair enough. Why the 12th South Carolina? Why that one in particular?

Dave: I wanted a regiment that served some time in the Carolina lowcountry but later would be transferred to more familiar haunts. Had I picked a unit that did its' entire war service in the area, the diary entries would be more about fighting mosquitoes and no-see-ums than Yankees.

Bill: All right. Why Company I of the 12th? Do you have any connections to that company or the 12th for that matter?

Dave:  I have no connections whatsoever to the 12th or Company I or to the area from which they were recruited. I've never visited the area and I know I should. I chose Company I purely for their nickname, the, "Lancaster Hornets". I found an online roster of the company and picked the major players for the blog.

Bill: The major players as you call them, how did you decide which ones to pick? What did you know about them?

Dave: The picks were at random. At the time, I had no personal or biographical information about any of them. It was only afterwards that I gained access to their service records at the National Archives and could personalize them.

Bill: Reading through your blog, for being random picks, they are very interesting.

Dave: To mention a few, Dennis Castles, Burrell Hancock, William Barton, Jr., and Jefferson Mathis. When I picked those out as major participants, I had no idea that Castles would desert, Barton would be killed in action or that Mathis would die in prison. Only Hancock...never mind.

Bill: No, go on. What about Burrell Hancock? What happens to him?

Dave: Readers will just have to keep reading. We have not yet reached the last diary entry.

Bill: And what happens to Tooms?

Dave: Keep reading, Bill.

Bill: Fair enough. You obviously have placed great stock in authenticity and sources. Had you been more creative, you might have been able to make some money. It would have been more exciting and more people would have read it. Some newspaper or magazine or cable channel might have picked the story up.

Dave: I deliberately stayed away from that. Had I gone that route, all credibility would have vanished. I could imagine a phone call, "Dave Baby this is your editor at Greatbighugemonolith, Inc. Listen, Baby, we need some punch. Have Tooms in a romance with Varina Davis. Your love child by her has to be smuggled into Canada by Beauregard and that Bragg guy, who are secret gay lovers. Throw in a killing of a jealous lover by a one-armed man who's really an extra-terrestrial. It's beautiful, Baby. Ciao." Not on my watch. That's intensely disrespectful to the people who were there-our ancestors. They deserve better. Both sides.

Varina Davis, First Lady of the Confederacy.

Bill: And what are your sources?

Dave: Almost all the photographs come from the Library of Congress. They are more than books. The service records and medical records come from the National Archives. Official reports come from the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, commonly called the OR's. There are many more sources.

Bill: Yes, there are. Let me quote just a few. "Brigades of Gettysburg", by Bradley Gottfried, "The Last Citadel", by Noah Trudeau, "Witness to Appomattox", by Richard Wheeler, "The Petersburg Campaign", by Ed Bearss, "Chancellorsville", by Stephen Sears, and one that you have depended on quite heavily, "The History of a brigade of South Carolinians", by J.F.J. Caldwell. Impressive.

Dave: Those are all good. There are many more.

Bill: There's one here, "Sacramento Remembers the Civil War", by Robert Bundy, Charles Davis and David Smoot. Is that you? You're an author?

Dave: Just a contributor.

Bill: Sacramento and the Civil War?

Dave: No battles were fought there unless you count street brawls between pro and anti-union factions. Still, there were connections. For instance, future General William T. Sherman surveyed the city during the Gold Rush along with another future general, E.C. Ord. Both of them worked for John Sutter. It was on Sutter's property that gold was discovered in January of 1848, starting the Gold Rush.

William T. Sherman

Edward C. Ord, commander of the Army of the James

John Augustus Sutter.

There was a fugitive slave case tried there in 1858. Not as famous as the Dred Scott case though. There were slave auctions in Sacramento just the same as there were in Richmond or Atlanta, the only difference being one of scale.

Slave auction house, Richmond.

Atlanta slave auction house.

Bill: Let's get back to Beaufort for a moment. Beaufort is not as well known as Gettysburg or Antietam but...

Dave: Sharpsburg, Bill. Gettysburg and Sharpsburg.

Bill: Sorry. Sharpsburg. What can you tell us about Beaufort?

Dave: Beaufort and Hilton Head Island were captured early in the war, November of 1861. Those places and the surrounding areas remained occupied for the duration of the war. Some of the most famous photographs of the war were taken there.

Bill: But there were no battles there.

Dave: The biggest battle was between slavery and freedom. Freedom won.

Bill: We have a photograph that I think many Americans will instantly recognize. George?

Dave: This photo was taken in Beaufort, South Carolina. It shows five generations of slaves born on the same plantation.

Bill: Every documentary that has been seen on the war or slavery shows this photograph. Dave, we are just about of time. Once your blog, Greyback Diary, is concluded, will there be another blog about some historical event?

Dave: Not if I can help it.

Bill: On that note, thank you, Dave for being with us today.

Dave: You're welcome, Sir.