Ed Bearss - Postwar Education

Postwar Education

Bearss used the G.I. Bill to finance his education at Georgetown University, from which he obtained a B.S. degree in Foreign Service studies in 1949. He worked for three years in the United States Navy Hydrographic Office in Maryland and used his spare time to visit numerous Civil War battlefields in the East. He received his M.A. in history from Indiana University in 1955, writing his thesis on Confederate General Patrick Cleburne. As part of his research, he visited the Western Theater battlefields on which Cleburne fought, telling friends, "You can't describe a battlefield unless you walk it." In February 2005, Lincoln College awarded Bearss an honorary doctorate, and in May 2010, Gettysburg College awarded him an honorary doctorate of humane letters.

On the battlefield of Shiloh in 1954, he made a career decision inspired by the park historian he met, Charles E. (Pete) Shedd: interpretation of battles in the field was far more interesting than the academic study of history in an office. Although attracted to a National Park Service career, he first joined the Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army, but soon took work as an historian at Vicksburg National Military Park, Vicksburg, Mississippi. It was at Vicksburg that he met his wife, Margie Riddle Bearss (1925–2006), also a Civil War historian; they were married on July 30, 1958. They first lived in the Leila Luckett House in Vicksburg formerly occupied by then-Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's soldiers in 1863, and eventually had three children: Sara Beth, Edwin Cole, Jr., and Mary Virginia (Jenny).