Since I had been fascinated by the American Civil War from childhood, it didn't come as too much of a surprise that one sunny day in April of 1996, I would be drawn to speak to Michael Fostar of the 69th New York State Volunteers (NCWA) unit at the Scottish Games and Gathering in Roseville, California. Michael piqued my already deep-seated interest in living history, and the next month I joined the 69th at the Kelley Park event in San Jose, California, reenacting as a private and later as Union brigade color corporal. For five years, I portrayed an Irish immigrant soldier and provided divertisement to the men and public with a minstrel impression, singing period songs at lyceums and in between battles.

After moving from Sacramento to Bakersfield in 1998, I helped to organize Company D of the 28th Massachusetts Infantry unit at Ft. Tejon, but decided that I would like to share my writing skills, sketching talents and profession as a history teacher by taking up a mightier weapon than a musket; that of the pen. Given my background in drawing and writing, I decided to try the largely-neglected role of war correspondent at the Kearney Park event in Fresno, California in the fall of 1999. All I had to wear was a pair of blue wool army trousers, a white shirt, a partially completed civilian vest, and the broad-brimmed straw hat pictured at left.

Having spent over ten years compiling my family's history, I knew of my great-great grandfather, James Allen Davis, who was born in Missouri in 1856 and had ended up in Los Angeles, California with a wife and children. He had died mysteriously in 1894 in a fire at the tender age of 38, coincidentally the same age at which I began using his name on the reenacting field. I thought to honor his memory and nipped life with my Civil War correspondent impression, believing he lives on in me as I bring his era to life and imbue his name with the intellect and artistry of my soul.

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Harper's Weekly Special Artist Correspondent James Allen Davis was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1831, the eldest son of a printer who worked as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1852, Davis married and moved to Iowa and then to Kansas to work as a schoolteacher on the frontier. After his daughter's death in Kansas in 1856, Davis joined Jennison's Jayhawkers and participated in raids against slaveholding settlements in Missouri.

In early 1862 he returned to Cincinnati and was hired as an Army scout by Brig. General Ulysses S. Grant. He followed General Grant's 1862 Tennessee Campaign, after which he was hired by Harper's Weekly to cover the 1862 Peninsula Campaign in Virginia. He remained with Harper's throughout the Civil War, covering such famous battles as Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Franklin, and Appomattox.

After the War, Mr. Davis traveled extensively abroad for Harper's to cover the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Custer's Black Hills Expedition of 1874, and the Zulu War of 1879. He retired in San Francisco, where he died at age 76 in 1907.

Click here for dispatches.

Click on the Sketches Link below to see art work from the field.

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