Roanoke Times Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: FRIDAY, May 19, 1995 TAG: 9505190054 SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Grandson of Blacksburg's founder, Black was an accomplished 19th century man - a medical doctor, a hospital superintendent and one of Virginia Tech's creators.
During the Civil War, Black, a high-ranking medical officer, rubbed shoulders with many renowned Confederate generals. He helped to amputate the left arm of the man Robert E. Lee called his right arm, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.
Many lesser men than Black wrote their war memoirs with the conviction that they were doing society a great favor. That was not Harvey Black's style.
What little Black had to say about himself from the field was addressed confidentially to his beloved wife, Mollie, and none of their dialogue was meant for posterity. "Only to my dear wife can I reveal my thoughts, my feelings, joys, sorrows," Black wrote to her in 1864.
However, a number of Black's wartime letters, preserved and passed down through the generations, have been compiled and annotated in a newly published book that will reintroduce the man and his times.
Despite five years spent researching and writing "A Surgeon with Stonewall Jackson: The Civil War Letters of Dr. Harvey Black," author Glenn L. McMullen says Black eluded familiarity. "He didn't dwell on his experiences."
Born in Blacksburg in 1827, Black served in the Mexican War and graduated from the University of Virginia's medical school. He wooed young Mary Irby "Mollie" Kent and married her in 1852.
Black would have contentedly toiled in his hometown of 403 residents throughout his career, McMullen says. "He was happiest as a country doctor. But things kept getting in the way."
When war came in 1861, Black joined the 4th Virginia Infantry, along with many of his friends, relatives and former patients. "He was a tall, spare-made man, quiet and thoughtful in manner, very black whiskers with a forward inclination of head and shoulders when he was walking," said a fellow doctor.
Incorporated as part of the renowned "Stonewall Brigade," Black bound the bloody wounds of soliders who often found themselves at the hornet's nest of major Eastern Theater battles. "It makes my heart sad to think how this Brigade has struggled to maintain its fair reputation - how its brave men have been mowed down ...," he wrote Mollie after the Battle of Second Manassas.
"There is no place I dislike so much as the vicinity of of a battlefield a few days after an engagement," Black told Mollie. Yet he said little else about the mind-numbing carnage of battle wounds and camp diseases that ravaged the generation of soldiers in blue and gray.
Black was also characteristically circumspect about his role in one of the war's pivotal events, the wound suffered by Stonewall Jackson during the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. He assisted during the field-hospital amputation of Jackson's bullet-shattered arm, and he was nearby when the irreplaceable Jackson died a week later.
"We had quite a number of interesting operations," is all that Black told his wife.
"You wish he had been more descriptive," McMullen says. Probably Black's intent was to spare his Victorian-era mate the grisly details.
Also, the doctor sought to treat his wife's persistent wartime blues - or at least exert care not to make her mental state darker - by writing upbeat letters.
Whether huddled in a wagon, or bending over a desk in a dark, drafty tent, Black scratched out assurances to Mollie that he was hale and convinced of Southern victory.
Three of her responses written during the early winter of 1863 are included in the book. "Her letters are very down," says McMullen.
"This has been a long, lonesome day to me. ... When will it end?" she plaintively asks.
Also apparent in Mollie Black's writings is the war's impact on the homefront. Food is scarce, money tight and Yankee raiders are swooping around Western Virginia. "How much I would like to see you tonight," she wishes to her husband, gone nearly two years.
Harvey Black missed his wife and their four young children just as intently. The war had divided their house and their community. They share anxieties about Unionist sympathizers in Montgomery County, and about blood relatives who lived in the North and fought for the Union.
Many other familiar local names appear in the letters exchanged by the Blacks. McMullen has painstakingly footnoted each reference and told as much about the Blacks' acquaintances and relatives as census or military records allow.
An appendix tells of Blacksburg in 1860, and introductions to each chapter fill in the personal gaps left by lost letters and historical contexts to their correspondence. McMullen says his emphasis on using the letters to illuminate the oft-overlooked Civil War homefront was intentional.
Black's 27 surviving letters covered two years of war, from 1862-64, and end where they began, campaigning in the Shenandoah Valley.
He was still with the army and joined in its surrender at Appomattox the next year before journeying home for a bittersweet reunion with Mollie.
Duty soon called again. Black was elected president of the Virginia Medical Society in 1872. That same year he was influential in the founding of the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College - now Virginia Tech - and was chosen to head the new school's first Board of Visitors.
Before he died in 1888, Black also was superintendent of both Eastern and Southwestern state mental hospitals, and served two terms representing Montgomery County in the Virginia House of Delegates.
The Blacksburg United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter is named in Black's honor. Yet somehow his illustrious public life nearly disappeared into what McMullen calls historical anonymity.
The author, former head of the Special Collections Department at Virginia Tech's Newman Library, learned of the Black letters when they were donated to the library by descendants.
"Nothing had been written about him," says McMullen, who now heads library special collections at Iowa State University.
"That was one of my goals - to try to help remedy that situation," he says.
\ Glenn McMullen will attend a reception and book signing Saturday at the University Volume Two Bookstore in Blacksburg from 2 to 4 p.m. The book will be sold for a special one-day-only price of $24, $6 less than the list price. Proceeds from the event's sales will benefit The Friends of the University Libraries to enhance the library's civil war collection.
by CNB