Background
Willbur was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, on the 31st of August 1792. He was the son of Isaiah Fisk and Hanna Bacon.
(As a war correspondent, Wilbur Fisk was an amateur, yet h...)
As a war correspondent, Wilbur Fisk was an amateur, yet his letters to the Montpelier Green Mountain Freeman comprise one of the finest collections of Civil War letters in existence. "Literary gems," historian Herman Hattaway calls them. "It would be believable that some expert novelist had created them." But Fisk was no novelist. He was a rural school teacher from Vermont, primarily self-educated, who enlisted in the Union Army simply because he believed he would regret it later if he didn't. Unlike professional war correspondents, Private Fisk had no access to rank or headquarters. Instead, he wrote of life as a privateas one of the foot soldiers who slept in the mud and obeyed orders no matter how incomprehensible. "As for the plans our superiors are laying out for us to execute," he wrote, "we know as little as a horse knows of his driver." Between December 11, 1861 and July 26, 1865, Fisk wrote nearly 100 letters from the battlefield to the Green Mountain Freeman, all of them signed "Anti-Rebel." At the beginning of the war he was exuberant and eager for contact with the enemy. In his first letter he boasted, "This regiment would relish a fight now extremely well." Two years later, after the battle of Gettysburg, Fisk was disillusioned and war weary. "The rebel dead and ours lay thickly together, their thirst for blood forever quenched. Their bodies were swollen, black, and hideously unnatural. Their eyes glared from their sockets, their tongues protruded from their mouths, and in almost every case, clots of blood and mangled flesh showed how they had died, and rendered a sight ghastly beyond description. I thought I had become hardened to almost anything, but I cannot say I ever wish to see another sight like that I saw on the battlefield of Gettysburg." Fisk wrote as eloquently on the moral and political issues behind the war as he did on the everyday hardships of life in the Army of the Potomac. He saw the war as a question of right and wrongof freedom against slavery and democracy against aristocracyand he continued to believe that the war had to be fought, even after he was well acquainted with its horror and pointlessness. "When they have done their killing, there remains the question to be settled the same as before. They might as well have settled it before the shooting as afterwards." In this volume editors Ruth and Emil Rosenblatt have included all of Fisk's existing letters to the Freeman, along with three speeches from the 1890s in which Fisk looks back on his wartime experiences from the vantage point of an older man.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0700606815/?tag=2022091-20
(Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary...)
Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past and can't be restored." Well, over recent years, The British Library, working with Microsoft has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its collection of 19th century books. There are now 65,000 titles available (that's an incredible 25 million pages) of material ranging from works by famous names such as Dickens, Trollope and Hardy as well as many forgotten literary gems , all of which can now be printed on demand and purchased right here on Amazon. Further information on The British Library and its digitisation programme can be found on The British Library website.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003MNG952/?tag=2022091-20
Willbur was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, on the 31st of August 1792. He was the son of Isaiah Fisk and Hanna Bacon.
He studied at the university of Vermont in 1812-1814, and then entered Brown University, where he graduated in 1813. He studied law, and in 1817 came under the influence of a religious revival in Vermont, where at Lyndon in the following year he was licensed as a local preacher and was admitted to the New England conference.
Fisk became a licensed Methodist preacher on March 14, 1818, and worked with several churches in Vermont and Massachusetts. He was the first college- trained Methodist minister. He served churches Craftsbury, Charlestown, Massachusetts (1819-25). He was principal of Wesleyan (later, Wilbraham) Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts (1825-30). In report made to the Committee Education of the Methodist Episcopal General Conference in 1828, Fisk advocated the establishment of academies for the instruction of youth. He was influential in the founding of Wesleyan town, Connecticut. Fisk best-known published was Travels on the Continent of (1838). He also authored a number of religious works including Calvinistic Controversy (1835). He died on the 22nd of February 1839 in Middletown, Connecticut.
(As a war correspondent, Wilbur Fisk was an amateur, yet h...)
(Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary...)
In Lyndon, he came into the great religious revival that covered the state of Vermont. His mother, Hannah, had forsaken her New England Calvinist roots to become a Methodist, and her home was a center of Methodist activity in northern Vermont. Fisk decided to become a Methodist minister and was appointed an itinerant minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1818. He served as a minister for three years in Vermont and Massachusetts before becoming interested in furthering educational opportunities in New England.
He was a member of the Connecticut Board of Education in 1838.