Brandon's Civil War stake revealed
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By Cristina Kumka Staff Writer - Published: June 20, 2010
In today's dollars, a slave would cost $70,000.
That was one of the tidbits about the Civil War offered Saturday at Brandon's all-day flashback called "Marching Through Brandon: One Vermont Village and the War Against Slavery."
Only the wealthiest of Americans could afford to buy slaves in the time leading up to the Civil War of 1861-1865, according to re-enactor Steve Gunlock of Burlington, who has studied the war and collected related memorabilia from around the world for the last 50 years.
The impetus for what remains the deadliest war in American history was an economic one, as Gunlock sees it.
The effects of the war reached deep into urban centers and rural communities, including Brandon, where historians and researchers Saturday showed the public what the war and slavery left in its wake.
The event, which included speeches by University of Vermont history professor Kevin Thornton, a walking historical site tour and a silent film screening, was a learning experience and fundraiser for the town's Stephen A. Douglas Birthplace Community Center. The politician was born in Brandon in 1813 and lost to Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential race.
The Green Mountain State was a linchpin in the Underground Railroad, Gunlock said under the town's gazebo in front of the Brandon Inn.
Gunlock was surrounded by artifacts — ranging from a gun of the type used to kill President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, to a bullet cartridge melted in a battlefield fire and believed to have come from a Vermont soldier's ammunition box, to a pocket watch chain made from the hair of a soldier's sweetheart.
There were also shackles that Gunlock said were found around the neck of a young slave who was found dead in a southern cotton field.
Articles and artifacts have documented the passage through Vermont of escaping slaves on a route from Rochester, N.Y., to Canada, according to the Vermont Historical Society.
Jedediah Holcomb, a Baptist from Brandon, alluded to the town's Underground Railroad in a letter to the National Anti-Slavery Standard on Sept. 16, 1841, about an advertisement in the District of Columbia offering a reward for a runway female slave:
"I am pretty confident I saw the woman, on her way to Canada; and her owner, as he calls himself, may as well give up the chase. ... There are several individuals here, who gladly give a helping to all such wayfarers; and we not unfrequently have it in our power to do so. It seems to be the unanimous voice of these oppressed strangers, that they would most gladly return to the South, if they could only be free there. This goes to prove that when the slaves are emancipated, the South will be in no danger of losing her laborers, and the North will incur no risk of being overrun with more than she can employ."
And Brandon's Orson Murray founded the Brandon Anti-Slavery Society in 1834 and published the radical anti-slavery paper the Vermont Telegraph in town.
Vermont prohibited slavery in 1777, widely acknowledged as the first state to write abolition into its constitution, and slaves took advantage of that for their escape, according to the state historical society.
The stories of some of Brandon's anti-slavery leaders are known.
What hasn't been revealed about Brandon's role in the Civil War is what Scott Tower has dedicated his life to for the last four years.
According to his estimates, 800 soldiers were born, raised or died in Brandon during the four-year war.
Many are unknown, but some descendants live in town today — from the Nichols' family to Tower himself.
The state roster of Civil War soldiers lists only 320 from the town, but through his research Tower has found soldiers from Brandon registered elsewhere.
During that time, towns solicited men from anywhere they could to meet their town's enlistment target and avoid a draft, Tower said.
Before enlisting, many of those soldiers had arrived in Vermont from Canada or Ireland to log, farm or work in the marble industry.
"Every day I learn something new" about the many men from Brandon who served in the war and were never acknowledged for it, Tower said.
"Like in golf, I get one good shot in and I go back the next day."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
cristina.kumka@rutlandherald.com
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