Gilbert R. Tredway

Gilbert Riley Tredway (born 1922) is a retired historian from Indiana and Kentucky, who has authored two books relating to the American Civil War.

Early years, military, education
Tredway was born in Dubois County in southern Indiana to George Riley Tredway (1883–1958) and Pearl C. Tredway (1886–1979) and reared there in Cuzco. He served in the United States Army in World War II, having been stationed first in the Panama Canal Zone and Ecuador before he volunteered for action in the Pacific theatre. An aircraft gunner on a B-17, Tredway was wounded while protecting a convoy in New Guinea and received the Purple Heart. After the war, he received all three of his degrees from Indiana University in Bloomington. Thereafter he taught for a total of eight years at Mitchell High School in Mitchell in Lawrence County, also in southern Indiana, and in Cincinnati, Ohio.

American Civil War studies
Tredway taught history and geography at Baptist-affiliated Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Kentucky, when it was still known as Campbellsville College. His colleagues included Bobby Russell Himes (1931–2008) and William Edward Bennett (1943–2006) in history and political science, respectively. He was on the faculty of Campbellsville College from 1959 to 1963, when he accepted a position at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. He returned to Campbellsville in 1966, where he remained until his retirement in the spring of 1984.

His Democratic Opposition to the Lincoln Administration in Indiana, published in 1973, stems from his Ph.D. dissertation, which he completed eleven years earlier in 1962 from Indiana University in Bloomington. It is a study of the northern Democrats, some of whom were Copperheads demanding a negotiated settlement of the war or an immediate ending of hostilities. Tredway found that the judge advocate general in some of the cases against Democrats accused of undermining the war effort had "protected prosecution witnesses, browbeat defense witnesses, practiced brazen partisanship, and even accepted third-hand testimony." Tredway's research reveals that the large majority of Indiana Democrats were not Copperheads, the best known of which was U.S. Representative Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, but were loyal to the Union and desired national restoration. A Princeton University thesis from 2005 finds that secession had been painful to most people in Indiana, whose agricultural economy depended heavily on southern commerce and on the Mississippi River, at least before the rise of railroads, as a way to bring commerce to market. "Formation of the Confederacy and the commencement of hostilities thus threatened both the livelihood and the identity of many in Indiana," writes Elisheva R. Coleman in her study entitled Call It Peace or Call It Treason. Tredway reveals too that Democratic congressional districts in Indiana often outperformed Republican strongholds in recruiting soldiers into the Union Army even though Republicans had claimed that northern Democrats were not pulling their weight in troop commitments for the war.

In 1981, Tredway wrote a book review in the Indiana Magazine of History of a work similar to his own, Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement by Hubert H. Wubben.

In 1994, Tredway penned an historical novel, The Way It Was: A Novel of the Civil War, the story of a Union soldier promoted to officer from Dubois County.

Tredway today
Tredway and his wife, the former Mary Antonnette Canzanari (1919–1978), had a daughter, Patricia Tredway Stomps, who died in the early 1990s as a result of an automobile accident. Their son is George Rodney Tredway (born ca. 1951) of Lewisport in Hancock County in northwestern Kentucky. who was previously married to the former Janice Marie Slusser. Tredway had two brothers, W. C. Tredway (1911–1942), and Paul W. Tredway, who died as an infant in 1920. Tredway resides in Jasper in Dubois County. He is Baptist. In 1995, Tredway was the subject of an oral interview at the Center for the Study of History and Memory at the Herman B. Wells Library at Indiana University.