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 continued to take the field as James Allen Davis, Special Artist Correspondent for Harper's Weekly, through the end of the 2008 reenacting season. During those ten seasons of reenacting, I was pleased to see the impression of war correspondent grow in numbers and authenticity across the nation, honoring those brave "gentlemen of the ravenous pen," the famous "Bohemian Brigade."
Click
here for Fictitious Time Line
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
to serve as a Presbyterian minister on the frontier. After his daughter's
death and the departure of his wife in 1855, Davis left the ministry and moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where he fought in "bleeding Kansas" in 1856 and later as an officer in Jennison's Jayhawkers from 1858-1861.
In
early 1862 he joined Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Tennessee as a scout. He followed General
Grant's 1862 Tennessee Campaign and was wounded at Shiloh, after which he left the army and began to sketch forHarper's Weekly in 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.
