The Civil War – A Family Story Becomes a Book

The chimney from the first of Henry Buck's lumber mills dates to about 1828.  It is perhaps fifty yards from his house, now occupied by the widow Patsy Buck.

(Photo by the author, April 2013)



Captain Nickels’ great-granddaughter asked me a simple question last night – “What surprised you most during your research?”

I have an answer, Berta. Hands down, it was the macro- and micro-views of the American Civil War that Captain Nickels gave to me. It took me two years to sort that out. Because it involved families – families I never knew were related in any but the most oblique way to ours, and to our Captain. I did full genealogies on both the McGilvery and Buck families, so I could see how the puzzle pieces fit the Captain’s life. I did genealogies on their ships, too – Who built them? Who commanded them? Where did they travel? Who bought them? How did they end?

The McGilverys were complicated – but with the important exception of William McGilvery's daughter Desiah, they remained rooted in New England during the Captain’s life. But those Bucks! The prolific Bucks of the Penobscot were everywhere I turned. Where there was money to be made by hard work and ingenuity, the Bucks were there making it. Shipyards in Maine and South Carolina, tobacco plantations in Virginia, cotton warehouses in Maryland, a shipping company in New York City, a horse farm in Saratoga (to shelter the prize blood stock of both sides from war service), and the lumber mills on the Waccamaw. There are stories galore there – but this was the Captain’s life and when all was said and done, they weren’t my stories to tell – except for the folks who left the Penobscot and set up housekeeping on the banks of the Waccamaw River.

My genealogy training teaches me to present facts as facts, without judgement. I was schooled in the 1950’s and 1960’s – when U.S. History was taught from recorded history, before the years of revisionist history, before history became an entrée served with a side of opinion, interpretation gravy, and editorial soup – now washed down with a super-sized gulp of politically correct brew. Surely, you can argue that history is always recorded by the winners. But in a Civil War, there are no winners – only survivors – and the letters written by folks on both sides of the conflict show that they were simply families trying to take care of each other, hoping to emerge whole on the other side of a war no one wanted. Like most people my age, I studied this war, the brother against brother, the father against son, but it didn’t seem terribly personal to me -- that is until my great-great-grandfather introduced me to his place in the Civil War, and I got rather closely acquainted with his friends and cousins, the families of William McGilvery and Henry Buck -- and walked a virtual mile in their shoes.

“You think we lived in a vacuum?” the Captain asked me. “We had jobs to do, families to feed, lives to live. You need to look closer. It wasn’t all about Searsport or Addison or romantic trips to the Orient. You need to dig out Mary Ann’s diary. You know, the one that your cousin Ronie Strout sent you last year? You need to read it more closely. There are clues aplenty there. It wasn’t the first time we all had been to Bucksville, you know. We had a very long history with those folks. Start digging.” That was near the end of 2011.

April 2013 was the first time I visited the Buck family and stood with Patsy Buck at the old chimney near Henry’s home on the edge of the Waccamaw River -- and I knew to my core that my great-great-grandmother Priscilla, and her sister Mary Ann, and her brother Sidney, and her daughters Alice and Priscie, and her husband Captain William, and his brother Captain James, all of them had stood in this very same place many times during the decade that straddled the Civil War. That was then I discovered that the men, my Captains James and William, and great-great-uncle Sid Austin, had been here in this very same place on the day that first shot was fired at Fort Sumter. That was the moment I knew this man’s story had to be a book.

MRP
 

Ed Cutts (descendant of Henry Buck), Patsy Buck (widow of Henry Buck IV), and Janice Cutts (Ed's wife) welcomed us to a picnic on the shores of Henry Buck's home on the river. Note our 2012 blue Jeep parked in the background.

(Photo by the author, April 2013)