How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? Whether Native Americans (to use that title) or immigrants (as nearly everyone in this country are a descendant), we owe our personal history to those that preceded each generation. 

We may all have some smart and successful people as ancestors. However, I’m willing to bet there is at least one branch or character in each of our family trees that was a little notorious and the family chooses to ignore them.

Sometimes, those bad tree limbs fall away or long forgotten. Perhaps their actions were so horrible or successful they could not be ignored. Either way, reality tells us the family tree has some interesting branches stretching over time.

The American Civil War was such a blemish on our American heritage tree. It’s the “infamous” relative we sometimes don’t want to claim. It’s the branch we wish had never grown. History says you can’t forget them but must learn from them. Ignoring them will not work.

However, as Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed, “… Let him without sin cast the first stone…” 

The events happening over one hundred and fifty years ago was a terrible event in America’s history. It’s unfortunate but it was an event that had to happen to change or eliminate the “sins” of our national past. 

Paraphrasing Jesus again, the nation had to learn to “…go and sin no more.”

In contemporary times, we too often see the practice of Sociological Relativism being maliciously employed. This means there are observations being made by contemporary society trying to align their own personal behaviors and moral beliefs as the basis to judge others of the past or another culture. In other words, we judge other cultures and societies, regardless whether contemporary or historical, as “good, bad, or evil,” using our contemporary and “more civilized mores and beliefs.”

Who made us prosecutor, judge, and jury?

It is too easy to paint individuals as part of a much larger group just because they share one or more characteristics of a similar group. If people presume to create assumptions on the quality of a culture or person’s soul based on those similar characteristic, you are practicing sociological relativism, i.e., judging others based on your rules not by their norms of culture or history. 

If any judgment is to be made on this earth, each person should be judged for the totality of their lives, not geographic birth, nor the period in which they were born. Because you lived in the South does not mean you are a racist. If you lived in the North, it did not mean your family didn’t own slaves for a hundred years. So, who is the “most guilty?”

If you were born in 1776, 1791, 1812, 1861, 1941, 1963, 2000, 2008, 2016, or 2020, you are no worse, no smarter, or a more morally grounded person than someone born in any of those previous generations. 

You only have the benefit of the lessons learned from the history and generations of the past. To paraphrase Professor of Economics, Thomas Sowell, “You’ve learned to use trade-offs to create the desired outcomes.” 

Let’s get serious. You go through the same human process for decision making as they did in each of those earlier periods. However, if you’re alive today, you have access to more information than you can possibly read. So, ask and answer this question, “Are we a better people today, than we were in 1776?”

So, we are here, not by coincidence but by the grace of God, still trying to learn our lessons with one experience “stacked upon the previous lesson.” We’re moving through life on a journey, as Doctor of Philosophy so artfully explained where we wander, seek, find, and discover a different form of life than our own. Learn from the hero’s journey, take the best of it, and push aside the rest for another day. Don’t judge what is right or wrong, judge what is practical and useful. 

When will we ever really learn?

Thoughts for consideration: “I don’t know what I don’t know; but when I do know it, I’ll know what to do with it.” 

Hint, it’s not a coincidence in the Cosmos.

Question 1: What roles define you in life?

Answer 1: Wow! That’s a deep one! 

First, I would say I grew up in a Christian home and as such was regularly in church each Sunday morning, afternoon service, and Sunday night service. When I say Christian home, my mother was the enforcer of the church requirements. My Dad was a truck driver at that time and he was a long-haul driver and often away from home on Sundays. I sometimes wonder if he was gone on Sundays on purpose. 

That foundation meant a lot to me as it gave me both a place to learn and a place to socialize. I believe that by my 16^th birthday, I had read the entire Bible 21 times; there was a reason for reading it that many times. While I can’t memorize the text, I can recount the place and the context behind most messages. I have tabbed my Bible(s) with passages to me that mean the most to my faith.

That faith has carried me through many events in my life that makes me believe God has a purpose for me and while I don’t truly know what that purpose clearly is, I have faith it will come to me when the time is right. Each time I thought I saw that path and purpose, He quickly showed me, “It’s not time yet.” By this time in my life, I can point to numerous times I can convinced that I should be dead and yet, here I am. Each time, blessed by the Grace of God.

Second, education has always been important to me. My mother and father did not graduate from high school but got married soon after Dad returned from World War II. Much later, Mom went to the local community college and graduated with her GED. She was an unbelievable and ferocious reader. She certainly passed that passion to me. 

By the time I got to high school and three teachers turned me around, I was just like Mom, a passionate reader and those teachers taught me to write essays and tell stories. What they really showed me was there was a whole world ready to be explored by reading. From Reading, I only wanted to learn and travel and see that world. I’m guessing the Lord gave me that opportunity when He found me in the military draft in 1970. 

Third, after enlisting and going a great distance out of the state of North Carolina for the first time, I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey for basic training and advanced infantry training. Later I was assigned to Fort Hamilton, New York where they thought as an infantryman, I would make a good Chaplain’s Assistant go figure). 

Eventually, the Army thought I would make a good officer and sent me to Army Officer Candidate School and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the infantry (after all, Vietnam was really hot at the time). By the time I graduated, I was immediately assigned to the US Army Infantry School at then Fort Benning, GA to get my Basic Officer Course and several other courses. I served with the First Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas as a mechanized infantry platoon leader, company executive officer, and Battalion Intelligence Officer and Operations Officer. During this time, I served as the Operations and Training Officer for a First Cavalry Division Round Out Battalion. 

I served similar roles in the Fourth Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado. In between those assignments, I attended the Infantry Officer Advance Course and other courses. After multiple assignments I moved to Division, Corps, and Army Headquarters assignments in both combat and training development. One such assignment gave me the opportunity to teach as an Assistant Professor of Military Science at Appalachian State University’s Army Reserve Officers Training Corps in Boone, North Carolina. I taught there for four years before returning to the US Army Training and Doctrine Command where I served with two of my former brigade commanders.

From TRADOC, I moved to the Washington, DC area and serviced at the Army HQ and other subordinate commands. After graduating from the US Army Command and General Staff College, the Defense Service Management College, Defense Acquisition University, and the National Defense University, I served as the Program Manager for multiple Army Information Technology Acquisition Programs representing several billion dollars. I eventually retired at my 30 years mark and began to pursue other careers.

 While traveling the world and experiencing different cultures, the US Army was kind enough to send me to places I wanted to see and a couple I was not particularly interested in but was certainly appropriate for my training and experience. 

Fourth, regardless, some of those assignments required me to be away from home and family. Some of those travels placed me in certain places at certain times that were so memorable, I would whisper out loud and say, “ I wish Jolene were here to see this!”  I meant it each time. I will not bother with the long litany of places and things I have experienced but needless to say, they helped define me and my purpose in this life. My devotion for my family as always been paramount, even when I had to be reminded of the reason for loving them. 

At about the 10-year mark of my Army career, I was being deployed and again and as I was packing, my lovely wife handed me my schedule planner (you know, the Steve Covey approach to management). She said, “When you get back you are going to have to decide, are you married to the Army or are you married to your family.” To say I was confused would be mildly describing my thought process at the time. While sitting in a C-130 aircraft, I wandered through my calendar trying to find out what she was saying to me. 

I suddenly realized that I had spent 48 weekends doing things for the Army instead of my family, not to mention the other 52 weeks of the year. calendar  Duly noted, I started to rearrange my calendar to focus on the family as much as I was focusing on my career in the Army. 

Like I was, I wanted our children to be raised to respect others, get a proper education, and be thankful for the blessings they enjoyed. Both Brian and Adrienne received college educations with absolutely no debt to pay. They have both used that education to achieve great things in their lives and own careers. We love them and their families and due to distances, we don’t see them often enough. However, we like to think we were a good footstone to their successes. 

Fifth, what good is an education, a lifetime of experiences, and the benefits of a long life unless you share them? When I started in college in 1967, I wanted to be a teacher, to repay those teachers that changed my life. Sometimes it got lost in the movement of time and events but I have always been teaching. While in the Army I was teaching soldiers, students and cadets what wanted to be officers, taught various schools for the Army, taught high school social sciences and business and economics, taught at the community colleges and university level as well.

If you can’t give it back, what good did you perform to make the world a better place that on December 10, 1948 (my birthday). Did I make it better for someone else or did I make it worse. Only God truly knows.  

Question 2: Why is the history of the Civil War so personally important to you?

Answer 2: That story began in the Summer between my twelfth and thirteenth birthday or the Summer of 1961. As usual for me, the weekend following the end of every school year meant traveling to Southeastern North Carolina to the Ward (Dad’s side of the family) and Thompson (Mom’s side of the family) farms. 

It was on such a Summer, that I discovered a “secret” staircase behind a closet door. On a Sunday afternoon, with nearly everyone catching an afternoon nap after church and a big farm lunch, I climbed the staircase to find another door. 

Behind that second door, I found an attic, my attention was quickly drawn to a medium sized sea chest. It was made of wood slats bound by metal strips. It had a large metal lock on the front side. Being curious, I eased the metal lock open and lifted the top of the chest. It is dusty in the attic of most farmhouses. As I lifted the chest lid, dust swirled in the air, and some got into my eyes.

 A tray covered the top inside of the chest. I could see lots of letters and other documents bundled into small packages bound with colored ribbons, tobacco twine, and thick strings. What got my real attention was a large bayonet and some military medals and decorations. As I lifted the tray of bound letters, I found other military equipment, most of it much older than that of the current (1961) military wear. Even at that early age, I recognized it was from a different era.

I returned to examine the top tray and noticed some of the letters at the top of each of the bundles. I saw 1861 and many other letter dates. I untied the ribbon off one of the bundles and read one of the letters from a Private James Ward, of Company E, 26^th Regiment of North Carolina Troops. 

Most of that afternoon, while most of my extended family were napping, I realized I had history in my hands. Not history from a textbook, but actual history from someone that had been there.

For the next several years, I found time to read each and every letter. Some were a little more virtuous than others and some were a little more salacious between a man and his wife. But it was emotionally moving to read of his accounts of his life in war and her life on the farm.

This adventure in history fueled an even greater curiosity for history, US History in particular. For the next sixty years of my life, I spent more time on battlefields, museums, libraries, and purchased nearly everything I could find about the period leading up to, thru, and after the US Civil War. I do not consider myself an expert.

While in the Army, I was assigned to the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where I was trained and certified to be an Assistant Professor of Military Science and Military History. This course taught me to use the Battlefield Staff Ride as an excellent technique to put the contemporary soldier into another time and place, using the nine principles of war taught as our military doctrine today. 

I have conducted battlefield staff rides in Guam, South Korea, Bastogne Belgium, Fulda Gap in Germany, Gettysburg, The Little Blue River, Nashville, Shiloh, Antietam, Manassas, Vicksburg, Guilford Courthouse, New Bern, Fort Fisher, and Bentonville. 

Finally, after 62 years, numerous visits to the North Carolina Museum of History where I spent hundreds of hours researching, reading, and printing documents (we didn’t have digital capabilities in those early days), I had captured nearly every major record of the 26^th Regiment of North Carolina Troops to be found. 

I have poured through and noted thousands of citations and attended lectures by renowned authors and historians such as Shelby Foote, Bruce Canton, and Stephen Ambrose. I had the privilege of having an extensive conversation standing by the cannon at the front of the Casemate Museum located on Fort Monroe, VA with Mr. Ken Burns, Executive Producer of the ultimate presentation of the Civil War on PBS. 

Why this story? What makes it any different than any other story of the Civil War or any other war for that matter. 

My answer is simple. This is my story. The results of all of the people, events, timelines, and decisions came to the very incarnation of my existence, my birth on December 10^th, 1948.

If James Ward had not gotten dysentery in camp in the early Fall of 1862, he would not have been at home on furlough. If he had not been on furlough and recovering from his illness, they would not have made love on those fateful nights in November and early December 1862. The end result did not end with his death at Gettysburg in 1863. 

If not for that fateful encounter, my direct ancestor would not have been born. My Great-Great Grandfather and his son, and my Great Grandfather, and his son and my Grandfather, and my father Howard Carl Ward would not have been born. I would not have been born for the opportunity to share my family’s story.

When the time came to be called to service, a member of our family was at the Battle of Camden, in South Carolina during the American Revolutionary War. During the War of 1812, a Ward son volunteered and fought in Maryland and Louisiana against the British. In 1846, a descendent also answered the call to go to Mexico. The Ward family offered several soldiers in the Civil War. My Grandfather went to Europe and fought against Germany in World War I. My father’s older brother Christopher Calhoun Ward, at age eighteen, died on the beaches of Anzio, Italy in 1943. My father served in World War II in the Pacific and as part of the Occupation Force in Japan after the War.

When my turn came, I entered the Army as a Private during the Vietnam War era and for thirty years, I made a career starting as an enlisted soldier, then an officer, out of a sense of duty for my country, as was expected by our family traditions. Why would my family today hinge on such a coincidental moment like the impregnation of an incredibly young bride in North Carolina in the Winter of 1862?

I really don’t believe in coincidences. I believe in God. I believe God never makes us do anything. I believe He gave us free will and as such, we create our own hells and heavens. 

The Civil War was necessary. Our Nation was at a critical moment in time and history. As a nation, our temporary compromises were just that, temporary. It would take a schism like the Civil War and the following period of reconstruction to remedy the wrongs of the past. The Civil War and the following period of Reconstruction were not particularly great successes either. For me, that schism meant being a member of a community that wanted no part of the Civil War and yet, when put to the task, they did their duty as others dictated to them.

The title of the novel is simple. James Ward did his duty for nothing more than twenty dollars in gold, offered as an enlistment bonus, for windowpanes and hardware for a cabin and the love of his wife. Following the thoughts of the vast majority of the State, he expected to serve his duty in North Carolina for one year and then return home. He thought he was protecting her, his extended family’s lives, and the land they worked so hard to make successful; they were “land rich and cash poor.” They did this with not a slave to be found. 

They were self-educated by using a family Bible as their teaching aide. They believed in God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and the grace and providence provided to all. 

Question 3: Do your past and present careers have common themes or connections? 

Answer 3: Absolutely! 

I believe these common themes are really linked by my faith in God. What that faith demands is to take care of family and others as you would take care of yourself. Many times, we have to do that with courage because life challenges us to “do the right thing.” However, even courage can’t be blind to us for what is the truth. That recognition demands we do not compromise the truth, we do it with the conscious integrity of knowing it is the right thing to do, and by acting upon it accordingly.

I grew up with on a farm and living a farm life. While I worked hard, I knew it was not the life I wanted to live. The more I read and learned, the more I knew my life was meant for something else. It was not because I was “better”, or as my Dad would say, “Don’t get above your raising, boy.”

What a farm will teach you is real work is hard. You start early and you work late. The only thing that changed was if you hurried and took shortcuts. What you truly learned was shortcuts don’t work well and you learned what “doing it right” meant. 

No, I learned to do whatever I was asked to do as best as I could. If you made mistakes, don’t make them again. If you promise someone you will do something for them, do it or don’t make the promise. 

Take praise with due humility. Doing a job right does not require high praise. Doing it consistently through life, that’s different. God will forgive your brief and selfish pride for doing what He expects you to do well. He would expect no less.

Love and cherish your family. Protect and care for them at all costs, including with your life. Face life and death the same way, all out, enjoying the experiences, lamenting the disappointments, and never regretting what you could not change. 

Make your memories worth lasting for a lifetime; let your disappointments be for fleeting moments, as an afterthought.

Always ask yourself, “Did I do the best I could and leave the world a better place.”

Question 4: What do you hope to share in your writings? 

Answer 4: This question is really not that hard to answer. I believe the answer can be summed up well in Matthew 6:34 through 7:14:

I believe Jesus certainly had it right when He said, 

“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today. Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment, you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get…. Ask, and it will be given; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches find, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened…. In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets…. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” 

Enough said!

Question 5: What are you working on currently? 

Answer 5: Thanks for asking. 

Currently I am spending time promoting the Civil War novel, traveling a bit, and trying to keep up with family responsibilities.

From a writing standpoint, I am just about to finish Volume 2 of the “Thoughts of a Common Man” series regarding many of today’s contemporary issues in essay form.  It is a series of essays regarding many issues being debated in contemporary society and whether we are talking about the problem, the solution, or the tradeoffs of trying to make the world a better place. 

Education is a big topic for sure. Diversity, Pride, Bucket List Items, Oaths of Marriage and Love, and Tolkien’s Eowyn character are some highlights. Volume 1 is already available on Amazon as well.