‘Pennsylvania's Civil War'

Getty150

Corporal
Joined
Oct 14, 2012
Location
Pennsylvania
John Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh:

When the Civil War and Pennsylvania are mentioned together, the sentence often has to do with Gettysburg.

But Leslie Przybylek, a curator at the Senator John Heinz History Center in the Strip District, says the story of the war and the state goes far beyond that battle.

“It is the story of how people experienced the war,” she says of the exhibit, “Pennsylvania's Civil War,” which opens at the center June 22. “In this state, there wasn't great consensus of what to think. Western Pennsylvania was very pro-Union, but there were businesspeople in the Philadelphia area who were thinking that some sort of agreement could be reached.”

Przybylek is one of the main planners of the exhibit that will run through Jan. 5. It is being presented this year because it is the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, the Civil War event for which Pennsylvania is most famous, Przybylek says.

http://triblive.com/lifestyles/history/4143364-74/history-center-pennsylvania#axzz2Wa1WIJ8l
 
Hee. Well yes, with all respect to the folks who researched that, the operative word for the Philadelphians who had that conversation would have been ' business '. War would have interferred with plain, old profits. I'm not incredibly crazy about the way the guy wrote that- western Pa being very pro-Union 'but' Philadelphia... . It does kind of presuppose that maybe the eastern part of the state inclusive of Philly was not. Pretty incorrect. Schuylkill County, here in the EAST, east, for instance, sent one soldier for every seven people who lived there. The recruiters kept having to send men home, there were just too many coming in to sign up. You walk around the cemetaries here in Dauphin County in the summer, can't move 2 feet without tripping over a GAR marker, flag attached, there's a bazillion of them. Phiily sent their share of regiments to the front, to be sure, along with the flags sewn by home-grown regiments of the proverbial women left behind. Some cool stories out of Philadelphia.

Anyway, do not mean to pick holes in the article, just seemed to imply there was more of a split in PA than was the case. Anytime an historian highlights something outside the normal mainstream, it's a great thing, should be an wonderful exhibit.

More good information regarding PA and the Civil War, would be found in " Flames Beyond Gettysburg ", Scott Mingus, Jr., the 'Beyond' part containing some extremely cool Pennsylvania information.
 
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