Summer 2004

An Eye for the Battlefield

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Angela Zombek

Home: Westlake, Ohio

Major: History

I.S. Title: "History Hides the Lies of Our Civil War:" The Forgotten Battle of Pickett’s Mill

Adviser: Jeff Roche

To say Angela Zombek is interested in Civil War history is like saying ESPN is interested in sports, or Madonna is interested in publicity. Zombek owns more than 250 books on the war. She reenacts battles with the 41st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. She visited Gettysburg with her boyfriend during spring break ("You just can’t date me and not go to Gettysburg," she says ). In short, she is contagiously passionate about the subject. The opportunity to pursue that passion through I.S. brought her to The College of Wooster.

Zombek focused on the 1864 battle of Pickett’s Mill, a relatively obscure clash in Georgia, because "I wanted an undiluted perspective on war that would allow me to examine soldiers’ memories in an unbiased fashion."

Pickett’s Mill was a rare and bloody setback for General William Tecumseh Sherman during his march across Georgia. On the afternoon of May 27, 1864, Sherman ordered two brigades to advance across a thickly wooded ravine and attack Confederate forces strongly entrenched along a ridge. The first brigade to make the attempt left 500 men dead or wounded in 45 minutes. One company of the 41st Ohio lost 90 percent of its men in the assault; another, more than 80 percent. The second wave fared no better. In all, 700 Federals were killed and more than 1,000 wounded. The official history of the 41st Ohio called it "a bloody burial of brave endeavor – an offering without an altar, a hopeless sacrifice."

Digging further into the history of the battle, Zombek discovered a curious fact: Sherman made no mention of it in either his official records or his memoirs.

"Sherman appeals to me as a historical figure," she says. "He was a brilliant man with regard to military tactics, the first modern general, and I was intrigued that to save his reputation, he would ignore a battle that went horribly wrong for him in a campaign that, up to that point, had been going quite well."

As she read more and talked with her adviser, Jeff Roche (history), Zombek decided to organize her I.S. around the role of historical memory: how "military rank, field position, victory and defeat cause men to remember the same battle differently."

"She could have written the entire I.S. on the battle," Roche says. "But Angie wanted to be something more than just a military historian. We fooled around with a number of ideas and slowly this one came through her exploration of the documents…. This is what’s great about Angie’s project and her work as a historian: the documents tell the story. She didn’t formulate a thesis and then go look for things to support it. She carefully analyzed what she had and then figured it out, based on the evidence."

Zombek studied contemporary news accounts, letters and diaries of officers and enlisted men, regimental histories, individual memoirs, and remembrances published years after the battle. Some Union officers, like Sherman, glossed over Pickett’s Mill or ignored it entirely, focusing instead on battles the day before and the day after which went the Union’s way. Others focused on the courage displayed by their men in the doomed assault, or expressed grief and anger at the missteps of their fellow commanders.

Confederate generals, on the other hand, "clung to the memory of their shining military performance and recorded its events with careful pride." Enlisted Confederates also exulted in the victory and marveled at the Union forces’ punishment.

But the Federal enlisted men were in many ways the fiercest in their determination that the battle – and their sacrifice – not be forgotten. "Sherman in his memoirs was unfair to us in failing to mention our battle on the 27th," wrote George Putenny of the 37th Indiana Regiment.

Sergeant Gregory McDermott of the 23rd Kentucky wrote in a newspaper for Civil War veterans, The National Tribune: "Soon it will be 33 years since our division was hurled into that slaughter-pen, and our brigade and the division structure almost destroyed."

Reading primary sources like these gave Zombek "a real sense of the passion the men felt for what they were doing, and the fear…a sense of them as really human people."

Last year, Zombek was one of 14,000 re-enactors at the 140th anniversary of the battle of Antietam. That experience added a new dimension to her interpretation of Pickett’s Mill. She understood first-hand the noise and smoke and confusion of a battlefield, the difficulty of maintaining formation in rough terrain and ensuring coordination among units as orders moved down the chain of command.

"Her re-enacting gives her an eye for the battlefield that I wouldn’t have," Roche observes. "It helped her get inside the enlisted men’s heads and make the way they looked at the battle make a lot more sense."

This fall Zombek heads to the University of Akron, where she will work with Civil War historian Lesley Gordon. She plans to use her I.S. as the foundation for her master’s thesis.

Roche knows Zombek will be a fine historian. She is the sort of student "where your role as an adviser is often reining them in, keeping them with their eyes on the prize, because they get so excited... Nothing’s more fun than saying, ‘Here’s a book you should read,’ and they read it and go off and apply it. Then every week for an hour, I’m talking with a fellow scholar…That’s why I love I.S."