West of downtown Fort Wayne, past St. Joseph’s Hospital on Main Street, across the Carole Lombard Memorial Bridge, over the St. Marys River and beyond the Camp Allen Drive intersection, is Center Street.

It’s only seven blocks long, north to south, and a block from the St. Marys River it intersects Huron Street, another nondescript residential street in a neighborhood that has seen more prosperous times.

At the southeast corner of the intersection is a small, quarter-block neighborhood park – a couple of swings, teeter-totters, a picnic table and a Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department sign: “Camp Allen Park, established in 1912.”

Stand here for a moment and consider the advice of Indiana historian James Madison: “History,” he says, “is often about seeing things that are not there.”

There is little here to see, but there is much history at this corner and in the surrounding blocks. Because 150 years ago, shortly after the opening shots of the Civil War had been fired, this place was coming alive as an induction center for thousands of northeast Indiana men who were being mustered to fight at places such as Shiloh, Antietam, Vicksburg, Pea Ridge, Gettysburg and a thousand other lesser-known bloody fields.

In all, 4,103 Allen County men would go to the war; 489 of them would not return. They were among 196,363 Indiana men and women who fought for the Union. And 26,672 Hoosiers died of wounds, disease and privation in that American war fought against other Americans.

Memorial Day was created to honor them.

So if it is a living link to the Civil War that we seek, it is on this weekend and at this place.

Honoring the dead

“Decoration Day” was set aside just as the guns fell silent; set aside to put flowers on the graves – to decorate them as the resting places of those who had died during four years of war.

By 1870, nearly 300,000 Union dead had been buried in 73 national cemeteries, mainly near the great battlefields where they had died. In 1871, Michigan became the first state to declare Decoration Day a state holiday.

It’s also instructive to remember that Allen County voters twice – in 1860 and again in 1864 – voted against Abraham Lincoln for president. In 1860, they preferred Stephen A. Douglas, the combative Democrat from Illinois; in 1864, they overwhelmingly voted for Gen. George McClellan, 4,932 to 2,244.

But despite deep and divided convictions, to this place the young men of Allen County and northeast Indiana came to form the 30th Indiana Regiment, the 44th Indiana Regiment, the 12th Indiana Infantry, the 74th Indiana, the 88th and 100th and the 11th Indiana Battery. Some went on to serve in fabled units such as the Iron Brigade. Others were less storied if no less heroic.

For the duration of the war, from the late spring of 1861 until the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, men were mustered in and marched and equipped for war here, within a few hundred yards of this intersection. Hugh B. Reed, Camp Allen post commander, saw to it.

Another Fort Wayne man, a lawyer named William S. Smith, served as enrolling and drafting commissioner here.

But why do we care about all this? It’s dead and gone. All of it.

Decoration Day now has more to do with auto races than cemeteries. And the picnic table and teeter-totter are here now for the neighborhood kids. The homes that line Center and Huron streets are modest, populated by people who get up and go to work every day, some leaving their young children at the child-care center around the corner on Elm Street just west of Cherry Street – right in the heart of what was once Camp Allen.

But no more than a dozen blocks northeast of here, at 616 W. Superior St., is the elegant – and silent – home that once housed Hugh McCulloch, the banker to whom President Lincoln turned to figure out how to pay for the war, first as comptroller of the currency and later as secretary of the Treasury.

And a mile or so to the southeast of the McCulloch House, at 436 E. Douglas Ave., is a more active place that would have been simply unthinkable without the Civil War: The African/African-American Museum, created 11 years ago through the efforts of many, but most particularly by the dedication of Hana Stith.

All about slavery

At 83, Stith, a retired Fort Wayne teacher, has lived much of the post-Civil War black experience: Jim Crow, segregation, Brown v. the Board of Education, the Voting Rights Act, the civil rights movement.

In short, all the things for which the Civil War was fought. It just took longer than it was supposed to.

Twenty-five miles west, in a small cemetery at the edge of Huntington, is the grave of Lambdin Milligan, a man who believed so passionately that the war was wrong that he was imprisoned and sentenced to death for treasonous talk in time of war.

And closer to this corner, only a mile or so away, in Sec. H, Lot 33 of Lindenwood Cemetery, is the grave of Mrs. Eliza George. Known as “Mother George,” she so passionately believed in the Union cause that she worked herself to death as a nurse, dying of typhoid fever at age 57 at an army camp in Wilmington, N.C., in the final days of the war.

She lies now in a plot near that of Col. Sion Bass, who, at age 25, left his business to come to Camp Allen to help train the 30th Indiana Infantry. Bass fought for the Union’s cause and every American’s freedom, and he was fatally wounded on April 7, 1862, at the Battle of Shiloh.

And 150 years later we care ... because?

Because, James Madison says, it was all about slavery, about issues of race and equality and freedom. In a few words, about the one great issue with which America still has not fully come to grips.

Madison, professor of history at Indiana University in Bloomington, has written much about race and Indiana, including a book on the lynching of two black men in Marion in 1930.

“To me, the larger context is the difference between history and memory, with memory fragile and changing and constructed to serve present-day purposes. The most egregious example of this is the still-popular notion that the war was about states’ rights,” he says. “It was about slavery – all else comes from slavery. No slavery, no war.

“There was nothing good about the Southern cause, and I say that as a descendant of a Rebel. It was not a lost cause or a glorious cause, despite the ongoing claims that even some Yankees fall for,” says the historian, who was reared within walking distance of the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania.

A case of treason

Lambdin Milligan, the man buried in the rural Huntington cemetery, would certainly have disagreed with Madison. Milligan was a scruffy sort: frizzy hair, an agitated look in the few photographs of him, his bow tie slightly askew, his black frock coat with the high collar awry.

His name is attached to a case in the U.S. Supreme Court that still resonates today all the way from Washington, D.C., to Guantanamo Bay. The principle and precedent of the case is wrapped up in “ex parte Milligan,” which in legalese means “for the benefit of Milligan.”

Milligan was a Southern sympathizer who lived in the North and tested the very fabric of the Constitution and the patience of Abraham Lincoln.

Copperheads, Knights of the Golden Circle, the Sons of Liberty – Confederate sympathy and sentiment went by several names and was usually discussed in hushed tones because it was, in a word, treason.

The Union was at war with the Confederate States of America. To give aid and comfort to the enemy during war is treason.

Milligan’s particular treason was to be an outspoken leader of the Knights of the Golden Circle. Lincoln found the dissent intolerable. He set aside the U.S. Constitution to silence it.

Milligan and several others in Indiana were arrested, jailed and tried, not by a jury in an Indiana courtroom but by military tribunals at military installations. The president, in other words, suspended habeas corpus, the long-held right of the accused to appear in a public trial and defend himself.

There’s a mountain of fascinating stories around the arrest, trial, conviction and death sentence handed out to this lawyer from Huntington, this enemy of the state.

Similarly, there are intriguing points and counterpoints to the stories of those enemies being held today without habeas corpus, detained by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Thus, much of the argument for trying these detainees – imprisoned after the Sept. 11 terror attacks – in open court lies in the Supreme Court case of “ex parte Milligan,” which found that the lawyer from Huntington had been wrongfully imprisoned, unfairly tried and sentenced and that, indeed, even in wartime, Milligan was entitled to his day in court.

A soldier’s story

Back in Fort Wayne, nestled deep in a secure room in the Allen County Public Library, is a clutch of letters that give voice to those times and this place.

The letters – four years’ worth – were written by George W. Squier to his “Dear Ellen,” his wife living in the family home at Hall’s Corners in Scipio Township in northeastern Allen County.

The letters are a part of the Lincoln Financial Collection formerly housed in the defunct Lincoln Museum and now owned by the state of Indiana and protected by the Friends of the Lincoln Collection of Indiana.

Sara Gabbard, editor of “Lincoln Lore” and a longtime student of the Civil War era, knows the letters well and sees them as part of a mosaic of story-telling.

“Soldiers regularly wrote in diaries and sent letters home. We have, therefore, an extensive history of the war, written by those who fought in it,” she says. Squier’s letters are “an excellent example.”

“They range from optimist patriotism to concerns in December 1862 that the Emancipation Proclamation will cause some soldiers to desert, rather than risk their lives in the battle to free slaves.

“Medical conditions in the camps can easily be determined when one reads that Squier and his fellow soldiers refer to the company surgeon as ‘Dr. Death,’ ” she says.

In other letters written in his careful hand, “Squier gives Ellen instructions about running the farm as she, like so many other wives, were required to step into the void left by their absent husbands.”

Squier, 29 when the war began, enlisted in the 44th Indiana Infantry at Camp Allen and was mustered out in the fall of 1865. He had risen from corporal to captain. His letters show devotion to his wife, keen observation of what was going on around him and a talent for writing.

Two snippets of his letters will have to suffice; the first focuses on military life:

“We are now within 3 miles of Corinth and can hear the rebel drums in their camps. Our pickets and the Rebs are within three hundred yards of each other and sometimes they “Holler” at each other. Yesterday our regiment was on picket duty and Lt. Grim of our regiment went and talked with a Rebel capt. We have been building works in the past week in front of our camp. Much hard work the whole time. We expect a hard fight, but can thrash the Rebs in fine style.”

And this, from later in the war:

“For however we may try to avoid the fact, slavery (mind you when I speak of slavery I mean the system of oppression practiced by the southern Gentleman – not the negro, for the negro is no more responsible for this war than is the steel blade which the assassin plunges into the heart of his victim responsible for the deed of murder) is the cause of all of our troubles. I would have this a free country. It needs no argument other than common sense to point to the inconsistency of a free government resting even partially on the basis of slave labor. Slavery must disappear from our constitution and statute books or this county dies.”

Squier returned to Allen County alive but disabled. He and his “Dear Ellen” later moved to Grand Haven, Mich., where he died in April 1907.

Names to remember

Less than a mile from the corner of Center and Huron streets, across the river to the west, is Lindenwood Cemetery.

“Mother George” and Col. Sion Bass are both buried here, but so are dozens of others who, if granted speech only briefly, could tell us so much about why we should care after all these years.

Christian Boseker, for instance. He died in 1900 and is buried in Sec. J, Lot 144. A German immigrant, he came to Fort Wayne in 1846 and trained as a carpenter. He enlisted in the 30th Indiana Infantry right here at Camp Allen and fought until 1863, when he was disabled.

He came home, returned to carpentry and helped build the new county jail, the old Masonic Temple, the former First Presbyterian Church and the old City Hall.

Or John Godown, who lived until 1911 and served in Company K of the 12th Indiana. He fought in 28 battles, and his regiment served at Memphis, the siege of Vicksburg, Mission Ridge at Knoxville, and with Gen. Sherman on the long march from Atlanta to Savannah.

After the war, he was a civil engineer and Fort Wayne city clerk.

Henry Lankenau was another German immigrant. He served in the 5th Indiana Cavalry and was captured by the Confederates at the siege of Atlanta. Consigned to hell on earth at Andersonville prison, he managed to survive and later taught school in Van Wert and Decatur.

The list goes on. And on. And on.

“So how could we not care?” historian Madison asks. “And why do we continue to disagree about the meaning of the war?

“It has something to do with our different notions of America, not only its past but its present and its future and the meaning of our ideals. ‘The last best hope of earth,’ Lincoln called the nation. Well, perhaps.”

And finally, this: The Civil War defined us as Americans. Still does.

Before the war, Americans spoke of the nation in the plural: “The United States of America are … ”

After the war, that changed. Today we speak in the singular: “The United States of America is … ”