Lore of Civil War Makes Park Service Historian a ‘National Treasure’

If Edwin Bearss, chief historian of the National Park Service, hadn’t been hit by five machine gun bullets during World War II, he might have become a Marine Corps general.

Instead, he left the Corps with a permanently disabled left arm and became a military historian whose enormous knowledge of the Civil War awes his fellow historians.

During the last 35 years, Bearss has repeatedly tramped and studied hundreds of Civil War battlefields. He knows what happened on each one, when it happened, and can tell you the names, ranks and backgrounds of the Yanks and Rebs who played important roles in each battle.

About 40 times a year, Bearss conducts lengthy guided tours of selected battlefields for historians, scholars and Civil War buffs.

He is, as historian-author James McPherson said, “a national historic treasure who probably knows more about the Civil War than any man alive.”

“If you blindfolded Ed Bearss, then put him on a battlefield and took off the blindfold, he’d know exactly where he was in 15 seconds,” McPherson said. “Then he’d tell you about everyone who fought there and exactly how many casualties occurred.”

Bearss’ taste for military history came naturally. He was born and reared on a Montana cattle ranch 25 miles from the valley of the Little Big Horn River, where George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry were wiped out by the Sioux and Cheyenne in 1876.

He began studying the Civil War as a boy and was fascinated by it.

His personal involvement with military history was in World War II. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in early 1942, fought with the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal, and was in the first wave during the invasion of New Britain in late 1943.

On Jan. 2, 1944, Corp. Bearss was hit in the left elbow, right shoulder, torso and left foot by 7.7-millimeter machine gun bullets. Two of the bullets permanently maimed his left arm and put him in naval hospitals for 26 months.

After the war, Bearss earned an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a masters in history from Indiana University. If he hadn’t been disabled, Bearss said, he would have rejoined the Marine Corps and aimed at becoming a general.

Instead, he became absorbed in his first love, history. After a brief stint with the Defense Department’s Office of Military History, he joined the Park Service and became the historian at the Vicksburg (Miss.) National Military Park.

It was at Vicksburg that Bearss began walking and intimately studying Civil War battlefields.

“The Civil War was the country’s watershed experience,” Bearss explained in the clipped, gravelly voice of a Marine Corps drill instructor. “It had tremendous impact on our country socially, politically and economically. It formed the nation we are today.”

To understand the war’s battlefields, you must walk them, slowly and thoroughly, he believes.

“Unless you walk the ground where Pickett’s men charged at Gettysburg, you can’t know there were times that the Yankees couldn’t see the advancing rebels, that for a while they were hidden in a swale. The terrain of Pickett’s charge is not a gently rising hill as most people believe.”

To supplement his knowledge, Bearss read voluminously about the men who fought the war, especially the 200,000-page Official Record of the Civil War--the action reports of every battle, engagement, siege and skirmish.

“I think Ed Bearss knows the Official Record better than any man alive,” said historian-author James Robertson. “He knows more Civil War lore than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Bearss is especially interested in the war’s colorful personalities like Phil Sheridan (“a mean little son of a bitch”), Nathan Bedford Forrest (“a very tough fighter”) and Jeb Stuart and Custer (“foppy guys who made serious mistakes.”)

Bearss has enormous respect for the generalship of Ulysses S. Grant and, to a lesser extent, Robert E. Lee.

“If Grant had been in command of the Union army early in the war, he might have ended the war in 1862,” Bearss said. “Grant was the model general of the war, a master of maneuver and a great strategist.”

Lee, in contrast, had great charisma, Bearss said, but Lee’s generalship was based on a bygone era that wasn’t suited to the Civil War’s murderous weaponry.

After studying, conducting tours of the Civil War’s western battlefields and writing 13 Civil War books and treatises, Bearss was transferred to the Park Service’s Washington headquarters in 1966. He immediately began walking and leading tours on the Civil War’s eastern battlefields. Then, in 1981 he became the Park Service’s chief historian.

As his fame grew, so did the number of requests for battlefield tours. He now does 25 a year for the Smithsonian Institution and another 15 for scholars and Civil War buffs. Most of his tours last one to three days, but one requires a week.

Bearss also has walked and studied every French & Indian War and Revolutionary War battlefield and is an avid student of the performance of American fighting men during World War II and Vietnam.

His favorite field is Antietam, Md., where Union and Confederate armies suffered more than 23,000 casualties on Sept. 17, 1862.

“Antietam still looks very much the way it was in 1862,” he said.. “It’s beautifully maintained and very open. There are some places at Antietam where you can see most of the battlefield.”

When Bearss walks Antietam he can see in his mind’s eye exactly what happened.

“I can imagine the whole thing. I can see Sedgwick’s men (Union soldiers) coming out of the East Wood shoulder to shoulder with a second rank behind them,” he said. “And I know what happened to them.” (They got butchered by Lee’s Confederates.)

Antietam is one of four battlefields that Bearss recommends for those who are interested in the Civil War but who have never visited a battlefield.

“The war had two types of battlefields, those fought in the open and those fought in thick forests,” he said. “Antietam and Gettysburg have sweeping vistas where you can see a lot. Chickamauga (Ga.) and Shiloh (Tenn.) are good examples of battles that were woodsy, blindman’s bluffs.”

Though Bearss is the Park Service’s chief historian, he is not a preserve-every-battlefield fanatic.

“There is no way that Uncle Sam can preserve them all,” he said. “There are some of national significance that the government should preserve, but there are a lot of battlefields of lesser significance which states and local governments might want to save.”

And how does he feel about George Armstrong Custer, who died not far from Bearss’ birthplace?

“Custer was a good cavalryman during the Civil War, but out West he was impetuous and unpopular,” Bearss said. “At Little Big Horn he didn’t reconnoiter, underestimated his foe and divided his command in the face of an overwhelming number of enemies. He violated all the rules of a prudent military leader.”