War Poems, by John H. Callin

The story behind the book

You can get your copy here:

I don’t remember when I first learned about Grandpa John’s book of poems, but I feel like I remember the adults - Dad, Aunt Vicki, Grandma Nancy, and Grandpa Bob - were standing between me and Grandma’s swimming pool at the time, so details are going to be sketchy.

It would come up on occasion over the years, but it was always something that “Grandma has stashed away somewhere” or, later, “Vicki has in a treasured place of honor.” They probably found it amongst boxes of photos and keepsakes when they were clearing out the old house on Gardenia Avenue in the early 2000s. I think I remember Vicki writing a paper on it and whenever the subject came up, she praised her great-grandfather’s grasp of meter.

A selection of page scans from the original War Poems

When I first started my Mighty Acorns blog in 2007, not long after Grandpa Bob died, it was a family-only project. One of Vicki’s contributions was a poem from this book, The Morgan Raid.

We talked about publishing the collection for many years, but it was always just outside of practical consideration. I lived too far away, the book was too fragile, and nobody had the time to devote to transcribing the water-damaged pages and deciphering the old handwriting style.

Then the Pandemic came.

We started with Vicki sending me iPhone shots of the pages - like you see in the gallery above. Then, I would do my best to transcribe them. We made a conscious effort to preserve the sometimes inconsistent spelling and punctuation - although I fixed a handful of obvious mistakes. You can see that John lettered “CONTETS” instead of “CONTENTS” - and there were a lot of places where we couldn’t tell the difference between a comma, semi-colon, or a smudge.

At some point, Vicki decided to simply send me the original book, which was a heady thing to be entrusted with. It is so badly damaged that I wore nitrile gloves and an N-95 mask (which were plentiful at the time) to handle it.

But after several months, a lot of research for the end notes and Library of Congress photos, and tedious tweaking of the spacing to get the poems to line up the way I wanted them on the page, we had a final product:

Me, trying to look scholarly but only managing to look sleepy.

Eventually, I got the original book safely back to Vicki. This version is far less fragile and doesn’t make me sneeze.

Inside, there are about 70 poems, most of which are about fighting in the Civil War.

John H. Callin served in the 21st Battery of the Ohio Light Artillery. At some point, he was an artillery sergeant serving under a Capt. James Patterson; at a later point, John was a private again. John was married to Lucy Patterson from 1865 to 1873, but I don’t know if those points of fact are related. I also don’t know if Lucy and Capt. James were related. But some of the poems deal with the topic of lonely soldiers separated from their girls back home, and one can only speculate how much of his subject matter was taken from real life.

Two of John’s brothers also served - James Monroe Callin enlisted in the 67th Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Company H, and he was seriously injured during the charge at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on 18 July 1863. (This was the battle depicted at the end of the 1989 film, Glory.) One of John’s poems praises the heroics of that battle, though he wasn’t there himself, and his text omits some of the details that made that battle memorable to historians.

George W. Callin served with his brother John in the 21st Artillery, and later in life published the Callin Family History that my grandfather passed on to me.

The Callin brothers also had numerous cousins who served in the Union armies - many from Indiana and Illinois. One of their cousins, William Callin, was in the 55th Regiment, Ohio Veteran Volunteer Infantry, and was captured during Sherman’s Campaign. He spent the rest of the war in Andersonville prison - the subject of another famous movie.

Strangely, John didn’t mention Andersonville much - but he did address the horrors of “Libby Prison” in more than one poem. I was able to find some interesting photos to illustrate several of these topics. The Library of Congress has many public domain photos that show what the buildings were like, and there’s even a picture of one of the infamous guard dogs. I was also able to illustrate events like the execution of a deserter named Johnson, several battlefields, and some of the artillery John was likely to have fired.

I’m quite proud of what we accomplished with this book - though I’m terrible at marketing and I really should talk about it more often.

Perhaps I’ll make it a newsletter topic…