By Gary Topping–
I’ve never been one, even as a kid, to stay up to celebrate the arrival of a new year. Instead, I’m usually long since in bed and hoping the hullaballoo doesn’t wake me up. This year, though, I’m celebrating the advent of a new year long ago–January 1, 1863 to be exact–when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. I’m celebrating it because it seems to have been the Proclamation that motivated my great-grandfather, Oscar F. Topping, to enlist in the Civil War.
I’ve written about the Proclamation on this blog previously, pointing out that its intention and effect are often misunderstood. But while it immediately did not free any slaves, it did have the effect of widening the goal of the war from preservation of the Union to emancipation of the slaves. In that, it precipitated the greatest social revolution in American history, a revolution that, sad to say, is still unfinished as I write. At the time, in was not universally hailed, even in the North, where many were willing to fight to preserve the Union, but not to free the slaves.
My great-grandfather was not among those. Ohio, where he was born, and Illinois, where he had just gotten married when the war broke out, were hotbeds of abolitionism. While I do not know what his precise position on slavery might have been, he was obviously opposed to it, and the Proclamation may have been the catalyst that induced him to enlist as a private in Company C of the 8th Illinois Cavalry on December 21, 1863. That unit had previously seen some very heavy action, including both the battles of Antietam and Fredericksburg (in fact, it was the narrow Union victory at Antietam that persuaded Lincoln to issue the Proclamation). Oscar was obviously prepared to go in harm’s way.
Why did he wait so long to enlist? He and his wife, Ellen Powell, had had a baby on the way when the war broke out, and another was born shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, so I’m speculating that family responsibilities temporarily outweighed his patriotism. At age 29 and with a wife and two small children, nobody surely would have held it against him if he had decided not to join the war at all. He did see action in northern Virginia during the war’s final phase when General Grant cut off General Lee’s retreat from the Richmond area and brought about his surrender.
As a postscript, the rest of Oscar’s life was not a particularly happy one. He and Ellen joined the westward movement, winding up in Williams, Oregon near Grant’s Pass, where the last of their five children, George Powell Topping, my grandfather, was born in 1872, and where he supported them by timber speculation. But there were domestic problems, including violence between two of his sons, and Ellen eventually left Oscar, presumably returning to Illinois. They separated, according to my only surviving cousin, because he chewed tobacco and spit into the fireplace. Much more likely, I think, is a family rumor that he had had an affair with a woman on the Klamath Indian Reservation. When my grandfather married and opened a law practice and political career in Bandon, Oregon in the 1890s, Oscar lived with them until his death in 1903.
Today Oscar’s tombstone in the old Bandon cemetery has eroded beyond legibility. The only thing it contained was his name and his service in the 8th Illinois Cavalry.
