On a 2007 outing to the Northeast Kingdom, Tyler Alexander stopped by the Westlook Cemetery in Glover to visit his grandfather’s grave. While there, Alexander’s father pointed out the headstone of a Civil War soldier named Dan Mason, etched with a long list of battles in which Mason had fought. Alexander and his father, both American history buffs and descendants of a soldier in Mason’s unit named Elijah Stone, marveled at how much Mason had experienced in his 26 years.
Years later, Alexander discovered an extensive collection of Mason’s Civil War letters to his hometown sweetheart, Harriet Clark, housed at the Vermont Historical Society library in Barre. Hoping to learn more about his own genealogy, Alexander began combing through the letters in 2020. He soon realized that the more than 100 missives from Mason — who served as a soldier in the Sixth Vermont Infantry, then as an officer in the 19th U.S. Colored Troops — were remarkable, both for their vivid descriptions of war’s harsh realities and as a window into what motivated a young man from a rural Vermont town to fight.
Alexander was especially struck by the passion and eloquence with which Mason, a white rank-and-file officer with no more than a high school education, wrote about the moral wrong of slavery.
Transcribing Mason’s words, Alexander came to believe that the soldier’s story and its lofty themes had the makings of a book. He began writing, interspersing Mason’s letters with historical commentary and other documents that shed light on the national context of the time.
The final product, If I Can Get Home This Fall: A Story of Love, Loss, and a Cause in the Civil War, was published last month by the University of Nebraska Press. The cover displays a painting of Mason’s brigade by Vermont Civil War veteran and noted artist Julian Scott. While seeking permission to use Scott’s painting, Alexander discovered that it was owned by the University of Houston in Texas and would soon be up for auction. In May, Lyman Orton, owner of the Vermont Country Store, purchased the painting for $110,000. It will be displayed in the Vermont Statehouse later this fall.
Alexander, who taught for 17 years at North Country Union High School in Newport and now teaches U.S. history and AP U.S. government and politics at Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg, celebrated the book’s publication in early September with a launch party at the Glover Town Hall. Speakers included Lt. Gov. John Rodgers and Civil War historian Howard Coffin.
Several weeks after that event, the 41-year-old Richmond resident sat down with Seven Days to talk about his book and his work as a history teacher during a politically fraught time.
When did you become interested in the Civil War? And how has your understanding of the war evolved?
My first exposures were through my father. I remember him, when I was probably only 7 or 8 years old, explaining the Gettysburg campaign to me. I just found it to be so irresistible and grand. That was also when Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War came out. I remember watching it when it aired live. It’s been criticized since; parts of it are certainly dated. There’s definitely a lot of sympathy for Confederate leaders, but I didn’t understand all of that at the time.
In college and beyond, I learned more about Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and the politics of the time — and how nuanced and complicated it was. I took a course in 2017 with David Blight, a prominent Civil War historian at Yale University, while he was writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Douglass. So that was very transformational.
During Obama’s presidency, we had conversations about the meaning and legacy of the Civil War that we hadn’t, probably, since the 1960s. That also brought the war into focus in a new way for me, with more of an emphasis on race than had been present in the 1990s.
When did you first learn you had a relative, Elijah Stone, who was a Civil War soldier?
My middle name is Elijah, so I was very familiar with that. But I didn’t know much about him until I was probably 20 and realized that we had some of his letters. They were written during the height of Grant’s Overland Campaign toward Richmond, Va.; Vermont suffered horribly in that campaign. That really drew my attention to the scale of carnage and loss. And my ancestor was there, in the thick of it, so I wanted to learn more about the enlisted troops and what motivated them.
I became much more interested in trying to understand the war from the bottom up, the gritty details of carrying eight days’ worth of rations in your haversack and marching on these dusty Virginia roads for 20 miles a day in a hot wool uniform without a change of clothes and then having to do it again the next day. It may sound a little sentimental or cliché, but I can’t help but admire that conviction and that endurance. I’ve never been asked to do anything like that, so I’m in no position to minimize the idealism and the bravery and heroism.
What were some of the reasons young men like Dan Mason enlisted in the war?
There are any number of motives, as in any war. But I do think that the Civil War is unique in many respects, in that there was a real sense, especially after the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter, that this was treason and cannot be tolerated. And what good are we as a democracy if we have a free and fair election and the loser secedes from the Union and then fires on federal property?
But what I argue in the book is that it’s not just about that. There [was], in Vermont, a real conviction — not just from a radical fringe minority, but a mainstream conviction — that slavery is a moral wrong. The conventional narrative is that abolitionism was something that the elites favored and most of the ordinary soldiers who took up arms for the Union could care less about slavery and were only in it to preserve the Union. But in Vermont there was a real groundswell, from the bottom up, of antislavery sentiment.
How often do you use primary sources, such as letters, with your students, versus, say, a textbook?
I use primary sources all the time, in every course. I don’t want history to be a dry subject for students. I want it to feel relevant and meaningful and to humanize individuals who have been affected by the grand sweep of history — and for students to feel a connection not just to the major players and the elites but to ordinary people, including men and women from here in Vermont. If you can think about the past as somebody else’s present and try to understand through their eyes the decisions that they were making with the information that they had available at the time, it becomes much more tangible and awe-inspiring.
As a teacher and historian, how do you view attempts by the Trump administration to remove information that reflects negatively on our country from museums and exhibits?
I think there is a risk, a danger, of sanitizing history and only focusing on a triumphal narrative. I think the Civil War is ultimately a triumphant story, but then, in the aftermath, Reconstruction fails, and we go back in time. And so that’s important to remember, too.
So yes, we can focus on the noble aspects of our past. But we have to remember the ugly parts, too. We would do a gross disservice to ourselves if we scrubbed that clean because it makes us feel uncomfortable. There are so many stories to be told. And the more stories that we have, the better, the richer the narrative is. So why would you not want to tell certain stories? That just seems historically irresponsible. History is ultimately a search for the truth.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Author event with Tyler Alexander, Thursday, October 9, 7 p.m., at Pierson Library in Shelburne. Visit tyleralexandervt.com for more upcoming talks.
The original print version of this article was headlined “His Story | A new nonfiction book gives remarkable insight into one Vermonter’s Civil War experience”
This article appears in Oct 8-14 2025.
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