FAREWELL TO A GENTLEMAN AND A SCHOLAR
Aficionados of American Civil War History—including several regiments’ worth in southeast Louisiana—have lost a great friend. Dr Arthur W. Bergeron Jr fell in his final battle—with a rare form of kidney cancer—on Monday, February 8.
Born in Alexandria in 1946, Art graduated from Lecompte High School, served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, earned the PhD at LSU under Professors T. Harry Williams and William J. Cooper, and worked as a historian at Port Hudson State Historic Site, the Louisiana Office of State Parks, the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier at Petersburg, Virginia, and the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.
Art was a prolific scholar, perhaps best known for Confederate Mobile, 1861-1865. His work addressed both Confederates—The Civil War Reminiscences of Major Silas T. Grisamore CSA—and Unionists—A Thrilling Narrative: The Memoir of a Southern Unionist. Much of it focused on Louisiana—a Guide to Louisiana Confederate Military Units, 1861-1865; Louisianians in the Civil War (co-edited with Lawrence Hewitt); and two volumes—The Civil War in Louisiana, Part A: Military Activity and Part B: The Home Front—in the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series. Add to that hundreds of articles, reviews, and presentations.
Within hours of Art’s death, Civil War websites, Facebook, and the Internet were flooded with tributes, all heartfelt and well deserved, to the man who used to fire the cannon for visitors at Port Hudson. But here are some things that you will not read anywhere else.
Art and I both grew up in Lecompte, a town named for a racehorse, famous for Lea’s hams, and now the state’s official pie capital. Our lives frequently intersected. His father ran the Meeker Sugar Mill, once the northernmost facility of its kind and for years the best customer of my family’s business, the Lecompte Hardware Company. The mill is gone now, but you still can see the towering smokestacks on Highway 71 south of town.
I met Art through a mutual friend, Dwayne Self, with whom we shared an obsession common among historians—collecting baseball cards. I still have a 1954 Mickey Mantle card that lived in a shoebox at Art’s house before finding its way to me through Dwayne. I am not sure what Art got out of this three-way transaction—probably somebody from the Cardinals.
One of Art’s closest friends was Charles Neal—now prominent in the Red River Civil War Round Table—who also was one of my best buddies. Again we had a common passion—history. They were older and way ahead of me, I admired them greatly, and both inspired me to work harder. For years I had a life-sized poster of Napoleon that passed from Art to Charles to me before I turned it over to a fellow student to make room on my wall for Henry VIII.
My fellow “Lecompetian” and I briefly overlapped in the PhD program at LSU. Then a few years after I began teaching at Southeastern Louisiana University, we reconnected through another mutual friend, Larry Hewitt, who arrived in the Department of History and Political Science a couple of years after me, founded the Deep Delta Civil War Symposium here, and soon invited Art for the first of many appearances on the annual program.
Art was always fabulous. His lectures were informative, he engaged other scholars in stimulating debates, he would answer questions from audience members—in the auditorium or the lobby—for as long as they cared to ask, and he could talk about anything. He was always in demand, and there is probably not a Civil War Round Table or Symposium in the country at which he has not spoken. He appeared at Southeastern just last June and at the Red River CWRT in September, right before he became ill. He was a real gentleman.
Art was relatively quiet, but his sly smile offered a faint clue to a hilarious sense of humor. Once in graduate school, I and two fellow Southerners—Jerry Sanson and Ken Startup—were pondering the irony that the Union General Sherman was LSU’s first president. We decided to “found” an imaginary organization called the William Tecumseh Sherman Memorial Literary Society. Our intent was to present an annual Julia Dent Grant Award (named for General Grant’s wife, one of the worst history writers ever) to the new doctoral History dissertation with the most absurd title. Given that postmodernism had just appeared, we had lots of material.
At the next Louisiana Historical Association meeting, we shared this with Art, who immediately got the joke and proceeded to top it. He invented a slogan—“Honoring flagrant contributions to history”—and sent “charter members” a suitable-for-framing parchment certificate bearing Sherman’s likeness and the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense (“Shame be to him who thinks evil of it”), stolen from Edward III’s Order of the Garter. Mine is still in my office. For a long time we met each year at the LHA and, amid considerable mirth, chose the year’s dubious winner.
Art—preceded in death by his mother Elsie and son Geoffrey—is survived by his father Arthur Sr, wife Carol, daughter Kathleen Livingston, stepson Terry Powers, sister Sarah McDuffie, and a host of friends. They have requested, in lieu of flowers, donations to the American Cancer Society or the March of Dimes.
Though Art has left the field, his firm Southern Baptist faith assures that the final victory is his. Meanwhile, here on earth, his work will continue to stand, like the smokestacks of the vanished Meeker Sugar Mill, for years to come. We will miss you, my friend. Ave atque vale.
William B. Robison
William B. Robison, Ph.D.
Department Head / Professor of History
Department of History and Political Science
Southeastern Louisiana University
SLU 10895
Hammond, LA 70402