“I Surrender!”
The Holy Grail of Civil War Swords
P. 40
P. 80
VOL. 7, NO. 3
“ God of War” His troops saw Robert E. Lee as the embodiment of their cause— the one man they could not afford to lose.
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
V O L U M E 7, N U M B E R 3 / FA L L 2 017
FEATURES
Salvo
“God of War”
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
30
TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to Newport News VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 On Picket
LANPHER PRODUCTIONS, INC. (NEWPORT NEWS); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); SCREENPROD / PHOTONONSTOP / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (GLORY)
DOSSIER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 William Tecumseh Sherman PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Civil War Trust Celebrates 30-Year Anniversary FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 The U.S. Christian Commission
Five times Robert E. Lee tried to lead his Army of Northern Virginia into combat during the war’s last year, and five times his men stopped him. What do these incidents say about the general—and the soldiers who followed him?
COST OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A T.L. Pruett D-guard Bowie Knife IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 The 1st U.S. Veteran Volunteer Infantry
By Barton A. Myers
Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 The March to the Sea, Part 1 STEREOSCOPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 The Civil War as a Home Invasion
Books & Authors THE B&A Q&A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
WITH RONALD S. CODDINGTON
THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
BY J. MATTHEW GALLMAN
In Every Issue EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Marble Man PARTING SHOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 The Holy Grail of Civil War Swords
“I Surrender!” 40 More than 300,000 soldiers surrendered during the Civil War. For those who had a choice in the decision, their motivations varied widely—as did their later experiences as prisoners of war.
The 54th Massachusetts Infantry in film and fiction
By David Silkenat
By Douglas R. Egerton
ON THE COVER: General Robert E. Lee. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. Colorized by Mads Madsen of Colorized History.
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editorial
VOLUME 7, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2017
Terry A. Johnston Jr. PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Laura June Davis David Thomson Robert Poister Katie Brackett Fialka CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
The Marble Man in his pioneering 1977 book The Marble Man, historian Thomas L. Connelly set out to reexamine Robert E. Lee. The Confederate general’s reputation, Connelly noted, had risen steadily in the postwar decades, buttressed by ex-comrades and southern writers who helped elevate the former commander of the Army of Northern Virginia to hero status, a military genius whose leadership was as flawless as his character. Yet Connelly found Lee a “troubled” man, his life “replete with frustration, self-doubt, and a feeling of failure.” Connelly’s work sparked a scholarly reevaluation of Lee—the general and the person—that continues to this day. While Connelly, and some writers since, have found Lee’s reputation to be overblown, it is difficult to dispute the deep and sincere connection that existed between Lee and the men of the Army of Northern Virginia, as historian Barton Myers demonstrates in this issue’s cover story (“‘God of War,’” page 30). The strength of that bond was arguably never clearer to discern than during the five occasions in which Lee attempted to personally lead his men forward into combat during the war’s final year. In each instance—at the Wilderness, three times at Spotsylvania, and at Sailor’s Creek—Lee’s soldiers prevented him from doing so, unwilling to risk the life of their beloved commander. Lee may have been a flawed man, but as these incidents show, he certainly held the respect of his men. Want to share your thoughts about this or other articles in the issue? Send your emails to letters@civilwarmonitor.com.
•I’m pleased to announce that the Monitor’s own Matthew Hulbert received the
2017 Wiley–Silver Prize for the best first book in Civil War history published the previous year. Matt’s book, The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West (University of Georgia Press), analyzes how Americans have remembered—and misremembered— the guerrilla warfare that took place on the Missouri–Kansas border during the Civil War. He’ll receive the $2,000 prize at this September’s University of Mississippi Conference on the Civil War. Well done, Matt!
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: letters@civilwarmonitor.com
2
Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor Matthew C. Hulbert EDITORIAL ADVISORS
Jennifer Sturak Michele Huie COPY EDITORS
Brian Matthew Jordan BOOK REVIEW EDITOR BRIAN@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Katharine Dahlstrand SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR
Patrick Mitchell CREATIVE DIRECTOR
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The Civil War Monitor (issn 2163-0682/print, issn 21630690/online) is published quarterly by Bayshore History, llc, 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. Periodicals postage paid at Atlantic City, NJ, and additional mailing offices. postmaster: Send address changes to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 292336, Kettering, OH 45429. Subscriptions: $23.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $33.95 per year in Canada, and $43.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Views expressed by individual authors, unless expressly stated, do not necessarily represent those of The Civil War Monitor or Bayshore History, llc. Letters to the editor become the property of The Civil War Monitor, and may be edited. The Civil War Monitor cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited materials. The contents of the magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of the publisher. Copyright ©2017 by Bayshore History, llc all rights reserved.
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d i s pat c h e s
Sherman during the march:
“SPOONS” BUTLER
I enjoyed Mark Grimsley’s article on Benjamin Butler in the summer 2017 issue [“American Iliad: ‘Spoons’ Butler,” Vol. 7, No. 2]. However, it seems that Grimsley accepts the milder interpretation of Butler’s famous “Woman Order,” in which any woman in New Orleans who insulted Union military personnel was to “be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation,” implying that she would be arrested for prostitution. Since “the oldest profession” was officially illegal, this could be one take on Butler’s proclamation. However, as Grimsley notes, prostitution in New Orleans (and in other occupied southern cities) tended to be ignored. It was viewed as a necessary evil throughout the war to alleviate the sexual needs of thousands of young men stationed far from wives and sweethearts. The “Woman Order” was properly understood throughout the South and abroad as a not-so-veiled invitation to Union soldiers and officers to sexually assault any female resident of New Orleans who in their view had engaged in disrespectful behavior toward them. After all, how could a soldier rape a prostitute “plying her avocation”? Innocent women could be victimized in a “he said, she said” scenario in which little if any credence would be lent to the women. No wonder Jefferson Davis ordered that Butler should be hanged if he fell into Confederate hands. Dennis Middlebrooks BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Nov. 18: Rain in p.m. Nov. 19: Rain all day Nov. 20: Rain all day Nov. 21: Rain a.m./snow p.m. Nov. 22: Snow in a.m. Dec. 3: Rain in p.m. Dec. 6: Rain in p.m. Dec. 7: Rain in a.m. Dec. 9: Rain in p.m. I’ll let you do the math. Noah Andre Trudeau VIA EMAIL ED. Thanks, Noah, for the correction. The source we consulted for this particular factoid is obviously dated, at least as it concerns the weather during Sherman’s march; we would have been wise to have consulted your work as well.
GOOD STUFF
A NOT-SO-DRY MARCH TO THE SEA
I realize the March to the Sea figures in your summer issue [“Figures: The March to the Sea,” Vol. 7, No. 2] are more intended to indicate the scope of things than tie down hard numbers, but one item—the claim that it rained but twice during William T. Sherman’s march through Georgia— caught my eye. When I wrote my book Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea (2008) I utilized a large number of manuscript soldier diaries that usually had distressingly little to say about events of the march, but almost always commented on the weather. Collating those entries I came up with the following regarding precipitation falling on
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwarmonitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
My copy of the summer issue of the Monitor arrived yesterday, and it kept me up late last night reading most of it. Normally I start with my favorites, i.e., the columns and Books & Authors section. However, seeing that Stephen Sears, one of my favorite Civil War authors, had an article in the issue [“Meade, Grant, and the Path to Victory,” Vol. 7, No. 2], I started with that one, and found it very interesting. Sears has a way of taking a positive approach to even some of the most troublesome relationships, in this case the one between generals George G. Meade and Ulysses S. Grant. I also spotted the advertisement for Sears’ new book on which the article was based, Lincoln’s Lieutenants, and added that to my Fa-
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Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett was born in Richmond, graduated from West Point, and at Gettysburg played a major role in the charge named for him. One of his horses was named Lucy.
ther’s Day gift wish list. Congratulations to the Monitor crew for putting together a marvelous collection of articles and features in each issue of the magazine. Please keep them coming. Thomas J. Ryan
the Atlanta History Center, this museum will soon offer a Civil War experience available at few other places in the United States. Rick Beard HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
BETHANY BEACH, DELAWARE
AN OLDIE BUT GOODIE BEST MUSEUMS
The experts who contributed to your recent examination of “The Best Civil War Museums” [“Travels,” Vol. 7, No. 1] need to travel a bit farther afield lest they miss one of the nation’s best— the Atlanta History Center. Its 8,000-square-foot exhibition, Turning Point: The American Civil War, showcases one of the country’s foremost assemblages of Civil War artifacts and memorabilia, including more than 600 Confederate firearms, edged weapons, flags, uniforms, and accouterments. With the opening in 2018 of the restored Atlanta Cyclorama, recently relocated to
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As a ravenous reader of the Civil War period, I’m always looking for new and enlightening material—both narrative and photographic. The Civil War Monitor never disappoints. Case in point: the cover story in your spring 2012 issue [Vol. 2, No. 1], “Birth of a Demon” by Thom Bassett. I was astounded, even dumbfounded, to learn that General William T. Sherman was actually warmly received by most southerners after the war. Incredibly, this in spite of the general’s merciless path of destruction and desolation wrought through Georgia and the Carolinas, which resulted in civilian suffering of epidemic proportions. However, those warm sentiments eventually chilled in 1881 following the publication of Jefferson Davis’ seething memoirs, which depicted Sherman as an unprincipled barbarian. A venomous war of words between the two antagonists quickly ensued. Long live the Monitor’s Age of Enlightenment! Rich Neiswender
MY FAMILY IS FROM . MY AUNT’S NAME IS . I PLAN TO STUDY AT
Richmond
Lucille West Point There are 162,000 stories here. I found mine. Explore the artifacts. Wonder at the Cyclorama. Understand our shared story. Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center.
To plan your next trip, call 877-874-2478 today!
GettysburgFoundation.org
MESQUITE, TEXAS
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Agenda TALK
History Happy Hour—Central Virginia: Battling Starvation TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 6:30 – 8 P.M. MACADO’S RESTAURANT FARMVILLE, VIRGINIA
The Civil War caused chaos throughout much of the southern home front. The burden of feeding the Confederate armies fell to those left at home, which intensified the threat of starvation for southern civilians. Join The American Civil War Museum’s Karissa Swain at Macado’s Restaurant in Farmville to hear how southerners got by when facing the daily struggle of feeding themselves. FREE (EXCEPT FOOD AND DRINKS); FOR MORE INFORMATION: ACWM.ORG or 434-352-5791 X203. LIVING HISTORY
Lives in Limbo: Contraband Camp in the Shadow of John Brown’s Fort SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 LOWER TOWN DISTRICT, HARPERS FERRY NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK
John Brown’s Fort
HARPERS FERRY, WEST VIRGINIA
Runaway slaves who came into Union lines were called contrabands, or enemy property confiscated by the Union army. Join Harpers Ferry National Historical Park’s living history staff and volunteers in the shadow of John Brown’s Fort as they step back to the tense days when contrabands defined their own freedom. FREE WITH PARK ADMISSION; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS.GOV/HAFE/ or 304-535-6029.
OCTOBER TOUR
A Soldier’s Return Home: Reunion and Remembrance SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 10 A.M. – 4 P.M. BENNETT PLACE
TION: BENNETT@NCDCR.GOV or 919-383-4345. EXCURSION
Hiking Through History SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2 P.M. MONTEREY PASS BATTLEFIELD PARK & MUSEUM WAYNESBORO, PENNSYLVANIA
Hike through the woods and enjoy the fall colors as park staff discuss key positions of the Battle of Monterey Pass—an engagement fought during Robert E. Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg—and other related history. Bring a snack and bottled water, dress for the weather, and wear comfortable shoes. The hike begins at the Monterey Pass Battlefield Museum and will cover three miles. $5 DONATION SUGGESTED; FOR MORE INFORMATION: MONTEREYPASSBATTLEFIELD.ORG.
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
LIVING HISTORY
After the end of the Civil War, soldiers and civilians began the long road to rebuilding their lives. Take a special guided tour around the Bennett farm and learn about life during the immediate postwar decades from living historians and actors portraying people—black and white, soldiers and civilians—who lived through that difficult time.
Civil War Soldiers: A Day in the Life
$3 ADULTS; $2 CHILDREN; FOR MORE INFORMA-
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 10 A.M. – 4 P.M. BATTLE OF LEXINGTON STATE HISTORIC SITE LEXINGTON, MISSOURI
Members of the Holmes Brigade will be representing soldiers from the Missouri State Guard as well as Union troops who fought at the 1861 Battle of Lexington. Interact with the soldiers to learn about their daily lives—as well as their weapons, uniforms, and motivations. A drill demonstration will be held at 1 p.m. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: MOSTATEPARKS. COM/PARK/BATTLE-LEXINGTON-STATE-HISTORICSITE or 660-259-4654.
NOVEMBER LIVING HISTORY
31st Annual Battlefield Reenactment SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5 FORT BRANCH CIVIL WAR SITE OAK CITY, NORTH CAROLINA
Fort Branch has been described as one of the best preserved Civil War earthworks east of
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NATIONAL PARK SERVICE (VICKSBURG); CHRIST LUTHERAN CHURCH
SEP TEMBER
Monterey Pass Battlefield Park
CAROL M. HIGHSMITH ARCHIVE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (JOHN BROWN FORT); MONTEREY PASS BATTLEFIELD PARK & MUSEUM
Your Fall 2017 Guide to Civil War Events
Vicksburg National Military Park
the Mississippi. The weekend’s reenactments will simulate Foster’s Raid and the Union assault of Fort Branch in early November 1862. The Saturday event will take place at the fort; the Sunday event will occur between the fort and the nearby highway. $10 PER CAR; FOR MORE INFORMATION: FORTBRANCHCIVILWARSITE. COM or THE11THNC.COM. EXCURSION
Fee Free Days SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 VICKSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK
Learn about the epic struggle for Vicksburg, Mississippi, during the Civil War by exploring the Vicksburg National Military Park for free during Veterans Day Weekend. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS. GOV/VICK/ or 601-636-0583.
Songs and Stories of a Civil War Hospital SATURDAY, NOV. 18, 7:30 P.M. CHRIST LUTHERAN CHURCH GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
The music group Dearest Home will lead the audience in singalongs and perform Civil Warera music. The program will also feature the experiences of a wounded soldier and a nurse who spent time at the Christ Lutheran Church hospital through readings from their wartime writings; the tale of Chaplain Horatio Howell, who was slain on the church’s front steps during the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg; and the journey of a local African-American woman who escaped her captors and hid in the church bell tower to escape slavery. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: SONGSANDSTORIESGETTYSBURG.ORG or 717-334-5212.
Christ Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE (VICKSBURG); CHRIST LUTHERAN CHURCH
CAROL M. HIGHSMITH ARCHIVE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (JOHN BROWN FORT); MONTEREY PASS BATTLEFIELD PARK & MUSEUM
VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI
LIVING HISTORY
Share Your Event
Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
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Salvo Facts, Figures & Items of Interest
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IN THIS SECTION travels 10 A VISIT TO NEWPORT NEWS voices 14 ON PICKET dossier 16 WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN preservation 18 CIVIL WAR TRUST CELEBRATES 30-YEAR ANNIVERSARY figures 20 THE UNITED STATES CHRISTIAN COMMISSION cost of war 22 A T.L. PRUETT D-GUARD BOWIE KNIFE in focus 24 THE 1ST U.S. VETERAN VOLUNTEER INFANTRY
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In this lithograph by Currier & Ives, the Confederate ironclad vessel CSS Virginia rams the wooden, sail-powered USS Cumberland in the waters off Newport News, Virginia, on March 8, 1862. The following day, CSS Virginia would clash with USS Monitor in the first-ever engagement between ironclad warships. For more on Newport News, turn the page. 3
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Newport News VIRGINIA
in march 1862, Union general George B. McClellan launched the Peninsula Campaign, his ambitious attempt to capture Richmond by conveying his Army of the Potomac by sea from the vicinity of Washington, D.C., to the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, then advancing on foot toward the Confederate capital, defeating any southern troops in his path. In April, McClellan’s massive force reached the Confederate line of defense that spanned the width of the peninsula from Yorktown to present-day Newport News. Though greatly outnumbered, the Rebels succeeded in stopping McClellan’s advance for weeks before pulling back, in the process buying valuable time for reinforcements to help buttress the capital’s defenses. By early July, McClellan’s forces were in retreat, having been turned away from Richmond by newly minted Confederate army commander Robert E. Lee. The campaign that had seen some of its first fighting at Newport News was over. Interested in visiting Newport News? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area— Drew Gruber and J. Michael Moore—to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic city.
Fort Nonsense Historical Park
1 CAN’T MISS
If you’re a Civil War enthusiast visiting Newport News, you can’t miss The USS Monitor Center at the Mariners’ Museum (100 Museum Dr.; 757-596-2222). The museum, which became the official repository for the remains of the famed ironclad in 1987, consists of over 200 tons of artifacts from the vessel, including its revolving gun turret. Exhibits tell the story of Monitor, its fight with CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads just before the outset of the Peninsula Campaign, and its preservation through relics, paintings, maps, firsthand accounts, and a full-size replica of the iconic vessel. Lectures on a variety of Civil War topics enhance the museum’s offerings. There’s something here for everyone. DG The main attraction at Fort Nonsense Historical Park (junction of Route 3 and Route 14, Mathews, VA), located just across the York River on the Middle Peninsula, has a quirky history as an earthwork seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Opened on land owned by the Mathews County Historical Society in 2014, the park contains the remains of the Confederate earthwork, which was built by enslaved labor in 1861. Recent research has revealed the important role it played in the defense of Richmond. MM
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Noland Trail
2 BEST KEPT SECRET
On the east and west ends of Cedar Lane, which runs from Warwick Boulevard (Route 60) toward the James River, are newly placed Civil War Trails signs that mark the spots of skirmishes that occurred between Union and Confederate forces in July 1861. Together they offer a fascinating look at the early maneuvering, personalities, and circumstances that set the stage for the Peninsula Campaign of 1862. Near the easternmost sign runs the Noland Trail, a five-mile path that circles Lake Maury and which is owned and operated by The Mariners’ Museum. The path has some great picnic spots and space for kids to run after getting some Civil War history in. DG Take a stroll through City Center at Oyster Point (701 Town Center Dr.; 757-873-2020), a collection of interesting shops, restaurants, a movie theater, and other amenities located in midtown Newport News. Throughout the year, Newport News Parks, Recreation and Tourism sponsors seasonal concerts, outdoor film festivals, and other fun activities there. MM
Virginia Living Museum
3 BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
The Virginia Living Museum (524 J. Clyde Morris Blvd.; 757-595-1900) is amazing. Whenever my friends with kids go, I figure out a way to tag along. From the Touch Tank to the habitariums, the Dinosaur Discovery Trail to the Planetarium Theater, the museum offers a truly inspiring and fun experience. DG
The Mariners’ Museum
The Mariners’ Museum has a variety of kid-friendly activities, including a LEGO shipbuilding area and an activity ship, where children can experience what life was like on the high seas. A bonus: The museum has lowered its admission fee to $1 through Labor Day. MM
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Lee Hall Mansion
4 BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
Newport News Park (13560 Jefferson Ave.; 757-888-3333) contains the site of the April 1862 Battle of Dam No. 1, the first major engagement of the Peninsula Campaign. While most of the dam is now covered by Lee Hall Reservoir, its ends are still visible from the footbridge that spans the water. The park also is home to a phenomenal set of preserved earthworks that were part of the Confederate defensives constructed to help slow George B. McClellan’s advance toward Richmond. DG Lee Hall Mansion (63 Yorktown Rd.; 757-888-3371) served as headquarters for Confederate generals Joseph E. Johnston and John B. Magruder during the initial stages of the Peninsula Campaign. Confederate forces even launched a hot-air balloon from the yard to reconnoiter nearby Union activity. The basement of the historic brick house is home to a Peninsula Campaign gallery and a great assortment of artifacts. Guided tours of the house’s upper two floors are available as well. MM
Hornsby House Inn
5 BEST SLEEP
The Hornsby House Inn (702 Main St., Yorktown, VA; 757-3690200), a beautiful Colonial Revival home that overlooks the York River, is within easy distance of Newport News. You’ll feel at home in the sunroom, at breakfast, or while strolling the historic area. DG
Newport News Park
The Boxwood Inn (10 Elmhurst St.; 757-888-8854) is a bed and breakfast located in Lee Hall Village, a community in the western section of Newport News. The friendly owners are always glad to tell their guests stories of the historic building’s original owner, Simon Curtis, who was a political figure in old Warwick County. MM
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6 BEST EATS
The Lunch Bell (694 Town Center Dr.; 757-873-1839), located in the center of Newport News, is where the locals go for breakfast. Don’t be surprised if you encounter a bit of a wait; that’s a testament to its popularity. I’m partial to the meat and cheese omelet and the sweet potato pancakes. The Indian– Nepalese restaurant Aago (11745 Jefferson Ave., Unit 8; 757-310-6457) is one of the city’s best kept dining secrets. It only has a few tables, but the carefully prepared food is outstanding. My favorite dish is the shrimp biryani, but you can’t go wrong with the traditional curries or tikkas. Another local institution, the Crab Shack (7601 River Rd.; 757-245-2722) is a great seafood restaurant located along the James River. I always order the fresh catch of the day and finish with a slice of key lime pie. It’s a great spot to enjoy the river and watch the sun go down. If you’re interested in craft wine, beer, and spirits, a visit to Ironclad Distillery (124 23rd St.; 757-245-1996) is a must. The familyowned enterprise’s commitment to history is clear, and there are often tours of the facility on Saturdays. DG
Ironclad Distillery
The Boxwood Inn has superb barbeque pork sandwiches, chicken salad, and daily specials. You can dine in one of the beautiful rooms or eat at the lunch counter. The Crab Shack is a terrific restaurant by the James River Bridge. The locally harvested oysters are great raw or steamed, while the soft-shell crabs (in season) and their signature crab cakes are amazing. Plus, you can’t beat the view. MM
7 BEST BOOK
The Lunch Bell
Boxwood Inn
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS
J. Michael Moore is the curator for Lee Hall Mansion and Endview Plantation in Newport News.
Drew Gruber is executive director of Civil War Trails and a member of the Virginia Board of Historic Resources.
Glenn David Brasher’s The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation (2012) is one of my favorite Civil War books. Brasher reinforces the strategic importance of the Peninsula and the sociopolitical implications of the campaign. DG John V. Quarstein and I co-authored Yorktown’s Civil War Siege: Drums Along the Warwick in 2012. We combined almost 40 years’ worth of primary research on the Civil War on the Virginia Peninsula, along with two decades of experience leading tours of wartime sites in Newport News, to tell the story of the conflict in this part of Virginia in 1861–1862. MM
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voices
On Picket “I had a tough time on picket last night…. We were not troubled any by the enemy but the mosquitoes and fleas gave us the devil.” Illinois soldier Charles Wills, in his diary, September 17, 1861
Surgeon John Gardner Perry (left), 20th Massachusetts Infantry, April 23, 1863
“ Frequently the pickets get very chummy…. [W]hen the men seem to be getting familiar, orders will be issued by one side or the other to commence firing, and then we hear, ‘Get into your holes, Yanks,’ or ‘Lie low, Johnnies, we’ve got orders to fire.’” Union officer Augustus Brown, in his diary, July 26, 1864
“ One of our men went out on the picket line yesterday and watched around till he thought he had a good chance, when he made a run for the rebel picket line—but one of our pickets saw him, and ... shot him in the small of the back: served the deserter just right.” Union soldier Warren H. Freeman, in a letter to his parents during the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, August 12, 1864 SOURCES: ARMY LIFE OF AN ILLINOIS SOLDIER (1906); MEADE’S HEADQUARTERS, 1863–1865 (1922); LETTERS FROM TWO BROTHERS SERVING IN THE WAR FOR THE UNION (1871); LETTERS FROM A SURGEON OF THE CIVIL WAR (1906); THE DIARY OF A LINE OFFICER (1906); THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, BEHIND THE SCENES (1863).
“A picket line is always one of the most picturesque sights in an army…. [Y]ou follow along from one rustic shelter to another, and see the sentries, out in front, each standing behind a good tree and keeping a sharp lookout for Rebel scouts, bushwhackers and cavalry.” Union staff officer Theodore Lyman, in a letter to his wife, December 14, 1864
LETTERS FROM A SURGEON OF THE CIVIL WAR (1906); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
“ A soldier who had never been under fire ... described to me his absolute terror at first finding himself one dark night on picket duty.... It seemed to him that an enemy lurked behind every bush, and when a shot did cut the air he distinctly felt his cap rise with his bristling hair.”
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Ships,History
AND
THE
Historic Homes & Earthworks
Great Outdoors USS Monitor Center at The Mariners’ Museum and Park
Battle of the Ironclads
LETTERS FROM A SURGEON OF THE CIVIL WAR (1906); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
888.493.7386 newport-news.org
Minutes to Williamsburg, A short drive to Virginia Beach.
ALWAYS LEGENDARY
DISCOVER LEGENDARY “ABE-SPIRATION” IN SPRINGFIELD, IL. Like no other destination, Springfield offers the best of Abraham Lincoln. Walk in his footsteps at the Lincoln Home. Get to know him as a husband, father and politician at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Pay your respects at the Lincoln Tomb. All of this and so much more is waiting for you in Springfield. ORDER YOUR VISITORS GUIDE AND START PLANNING YOUR TRIP TODAY
VISITSPRINGFIELDILLINOIS.COM
800-545-7300
Visit Springfield: Springfield Convention & Visitors Bureau
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William Tecumseh Sherman “I propose to … make … [southerners] feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.” So wrote William Tecumseh Sherman in October 1864 on his reasoning for destroying military and civilian targets as he moved his army from Atlanta across the state of Georgia to capture the port city of Savannah—a campaign known to history as the March to the Sea. In his embrace of hard-war policies, Sherman—who had been a colonel at First Bull Run and served under Ulysses S. Grant in the West— earned the respect of his men but the ire of southerners. As South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote of Sherman at war’s end, “It is hard not to curse him.” ¶ To see where Sherman’s legacy stands today, we asked a panel of historians to assess the controversial Union general’s record.
Yes 11%
No 89%
What do you most admire about Sherman...
…and what was his biggest flaw?
DANIEL SUTHERLAND:
JAMES M. McPHERSON:
“ His honesty and directness. Sherman did not care whose sensibilities he might offend.”
“His failure to restrain the excesses of some of his soldiers in Georgia and especially South Carolina.” ALLEN C. GUELZO:
“His utter racial blindness to the value of black troops.”
GARY W. GALLAGHER:
“ His self-awareness. Sherman understood his strengths and weaknesses.”
STEVEN E. WOODWORTH:
“He was terrible at anticipating what his opponents were going to do.”
JOSEPH T. GLATTHAAR: BROOKS D. SIMPSON:
“ No. Sherman may have pushed warfare’s boundaries to target civilian morale and enemy infrastructure, but his image is more rhetoric than reality.” When was Sherman at his peak?
“ Creative thinking.” BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN:
ETHAN S. RAFUSE:
“ His protracted battle with the demon that is depression.”
“For all of his accomplishments, he was a very petty and insecure man.”
LESLEY J. GORDON:
“ His candid recognition of the cost and brutality of war.”
TIMOTHY B. SMITH:
“Impulsiveness.”
FIRST BULL RUN
SHILOH
VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN
J U LY 1 86 1
A P R I L 1 86 2
M A R C H – J U LY 1 86 3
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
Do you consider Sherman to be the inventor of total war?
We asked our panelists to rank Sherman’s performance in seven major campaigns, giving the highest mark for his best performance and the lowest for his least impressive. This chart represents an average of all responses.
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What is your favorite book about Sherman? JOAN WAUGH:
JOSEPH T. GLATTHAAR:
CHRISTOPHER STOWE:
“Marszalek’s book is a fascinating and detailed examination of the intersections between Sherman’s private and public life.”
“Despite some exaggerations, Sherman’s Memoirs provide great insight into the way a truly creative military mind operates.”
“This is the definitive collection of Sherman correspondence.”
16%
22%
11% 11%
22% 6% 6% 6%
What is your favorite quote by or about Sherman?
“Although he was pronounced Crazy at one time, I wish all Generals were afflicted as he is.”
“ I can … make Georgia howl.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
SHERMAN, IN A TELEGRAM TO ULYSSES S. GRANT ABOUT HIS INTENDED MARCH FROM ATLANTA TO SAVANNAH, OCTOBER 9, 1864 (LARRY J. DANIEL)
“ I am a damned sight smarter man than Grant; I know a great deal more about war, military history, strategy, and grand tactics than he does; … but I’ll tell you where he beats me and where he beats the world. He don’t care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell!” SHERMAN TO UNION GENERAL JAMES HARRISON WILSON IN 1864 (GARY W. GALLAGHER)
ONE OF SHERMAN’S SOLDIERS, IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, SEPTEMBER 1864 (JOSEPH T. GLATTHAAR)
“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” SHERMAN, IN A LETTER TO THE MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL OF ATLANTA ABOUT HIS RECENT ORDER TO EVACUATE CIVILIANS FROM THE CITY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1864 (LESLEY J. GORDON, JOHN F. MARSZALEK, ANNE SARAH RUBIN, DANIEL SUTHERLAND, STEVEN E. WOODWORTH)
CHATTANOOGA CAMPAIGN
ATLANTA CAMPAIGN
MARCH TO THE SEA
CAROLINAS CAMPAIGN
S E P T E M B E R – N OV E M B E R 1 86 3
M AY – S E P T E M B E R 1 86 4
N OV E M B E R – D E C E M B E R 1 86 4
JA N UA RY – A P R I L 1 86 5
Participants: Larry J. Daniel; Gary W. Gallagher; Joseph T. Glatthaar; Lesley J. Gordon; Mark Grimsley; Allen C. Guelzo; Earl J. Hess; Brian Matthew Jordan; John F. Marszalek; James M. McPherson; Christopher Phillips; Ethan S. Rafuse; Anne Sarah Rubin; Brooks D. Simpson; Timothy B. Smith; Christopher Stowe; Daniel Sutherland; Joan Waugh; and Steven E. Woodworth.
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Civil War Trust Celebrates 30-Year Anniversary m e m b e r , c i v i l wa r t r u st
thirty years ago this summer , a small
group of Civil War historians and enthusiasts gathered in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to create the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites (APCWS)—the first national organization devoted to saving Civil War battlefields. The following year, in 1988, the APCWS notched its first preservation victory: the Coaling at the Port Republic Battlefield in the Shenandoah Valley. In 1991, APCWS was joined by another national nonprofit, the original Civil War Trust. The groups struggled to find common ground and competed for members, money, and government grants, but bonds ultimately formed among their board members—and from those bonds, a 1999 merger resulted that accelerated battlefield preservation exponentially. In November 1999, longtime Maryland politico and preservation advocate Jim Lighthizer became president of the unified organization, dubbed the Civil War Preservation Trust. His first challenge was the more than $6 million of debt the fledgling organization inherited, which he eliminated in a year with help from a federal battlefield grant program. Under Lighthizer’s leadership, and with the help of federal and state governments as well as the donations of more than 45,000 members, the Trust (renamed Civil War Trust in 2011) has maintained a steady drumbeat of new acquisitions. The land purchases have been accompanied by tough, boots-on-the-ground battles against developers. In 2002–03, the Trust went to war against a massive mixed-use development on the first day’s battlefield at Chancellorsville, forming a
coalition of national and local organizations that thwarted the project. Ultimately, the Trust reached agreements to preserve more than 200 acres and create an invaluable buffer between the battlefield and development creeping west from Fredericksburg. With the Trust’s leadership, preservationists have twice stopped proposed casinos within cannon shot of the Gettysburg battlefield. Trust-formed coalitions also helped save historic Morris Island near Charleston, South Carolina, and fought a plan for a Walmart on Virginia’s Wilderness battlefield, convincing the corporation to move a few miles west. These battles have come hand in hand with crucial, high-profile saves, such as at Slaughter Pen Farm, where more than 9,000 Union and Confederate soldiers fell on December 13, 1862. The $12 million
purchase of the 208-acre Slaughter Pen Farm in 2006 stands as a private-sector record for a single battlefield acquisition. None of its more than 600 transactions had a higher profile than the Trust’s 2014 purchase of Lee’s Headquarters at Gettysburg, a stone house within a 4.14acre commercial complex on Seminary Ridge. The acreage has been restored to its 1863 appearance, making the site one of the jewels of the Gettysburg battlefield. The Trust has helped save 46,000 acres at 132 battlefields in 24 states. The organization averages more than three acquisitions each month. “Battlefields are not preserved by accident,” emphasizes Lighthizer. “Rather, they are saved through the work and generosity of thousands—and the struggles, missteps and successes merge to become a lasting legacy of preservation.”
Students interact with living historians at the Slaughter Pen Farm on the Fredericksburg Battlefield. The Slaughter Pen Farm, purchased by the Civil War Trust in 2006, is the most expensive private-sector acquisition in battlefield preservation history.
3 THE CIVIL WAR TRUST (CIVILWAR.ORG) IS A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO THE PRESERVATION OF ENDANGERED CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELDS.
DOUG ULLMAN/CIVIL WAR TRUST
by bob zeller
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362 Yorktown Road Newport News, VA
(757) 887-1862 www.endview.org
Explore one family’s 400-year connection to Endview Plantation. Daily house tours offer a peek at the Civil War era history of the 1769 home. A nature trail, reenactments and living history programs are offered throughout the year.
163 Yorktown Road Newport News, VA (757) 888-3371 www.leehall.org
Territorial Capital of Kansas, 1855 – 1861
Lecompton KANSAS
Completed in 1859, Lee Hall offers a glimpse into the lives of its residents in the years before, during and after the 1862 Peninsula Campaign. In addition to guided tours, festivals exhibitions and programs are offered throughout the year.
Two museums and numerous historic sites
785-887-6148 www.lecomptonkansas.com
I-70 EXIT 197 BETWEEN TOPEKA AND LAWRENCE
Have you visited?
The Lincoln Memorial Shrine Since 1932, the only museum and research center dedicated to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War west of the Mississippi
DOUG ULLMAN/CIVIL WAR TRUST
Located in Redlands, California Halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs Open Tuesday-Sunday, 1-5pm Closed most holidays, but always open Lincoln’s birthday Free admission! For more information, please visit www.lincolnshrine.org/civilwar or call (909) 798-7632 CVM ad 1.indd 1
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Title Title
The United States Christian Commission
In November 1861 leaders of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) formed an organization called the United States Christian Commission “to promote the spiritual and temporal welfare” of Union soldiers and sailors. Volunteers, known as delegates, included men and women; they assisted in hospitals, distributed donated goods to soldiers, set up mobile libraries near army camps, handed out a variety of religious and secular reading materials, and held frequent prayer meetings. While some observers believed that the delegates’ proselytizing was at times aggressive or inappropriate (one volunteer nurse wrote to her sister in 1864 “about the visit of a Chrisb y o commission . j a m e s l i g hdelegate t h i z e r to p rtheir e s i d ehospital n t , c i v i land wa r t r gloomy ust tian the sermons on death he preaches to the convalescents, till her hair stands on end”), others were appreciative of their efforts. “The Christian Commission is beginning to make itself felt here,” wrote a grateful Union soldier in 1864. “Their agent visits us every day, distributes tracts, papers, writing paper, envelopes, etc., gives good advice, sings patriotic and other airs, prays with and for us, and does it all in such a kindly, benevolent way that he has won all hearts.” Here we highlight a number of statistics about the wartime efforts of the Christian Commission, members of which are shown providing refreshments to soldiers in this photo taken at White House Landing, Virginia, in June 1864.
$2,524,512.56 Amount of cash raised by the Christian Commission during the war
$734,751.09
spent on publications for the troops
$866,596.79 spent on hospital supplies
$66,342.87
spent on stationery and stamps for the troops
4,859
Number of delegates commissioned during the war
127
Average number of delegates in the field at a time
38
Average duration, in days, of each delegate’s service
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SOURCES: LEMUEL MOSS, ANNALS OF THE UNITED STATES CHRISTIAN COMMISSION (1868); M. HAMLIN CANNON, “THE UNITED STATES CHRISTIAN COMMISSION,” THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL REVIEW, VOL. 38, NO. 1 (JUNE 1951): 61–80. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
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39,104,243
Pages of tracts distributed
58,308
Number of sermons preached by delegates
18,126,002
Number of religious newspapers distributed
77,744
Number of prayer meetings held by delegates
8,308,052
Number of “knapsack” books (in paper or flexible covers) distributed
1,466,748
Number of Bibles, testaments, and portions of scriptures distributed
50–60
Number of “special diet kitchens” established by the Christian Commission at military hospitals
157
Number of women who managed special diet kitchens
1,370,953
7,067,000
Sheets of writing paper distributed
7,066,000
Number of envelopes distributed
Number of hymn and psalm books distributed
767,861
Number of magazines and pamphlets distributed
92,321
Number of letters written for the troops by delegates
285
Number of mobile loan libraries created
75–125
Number of volumes each library contained
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� 14,375 A FEARSOME BLADE BRINGS A HANDSOME SUM THE ARTIFACT
CONDITION
The knife is in good overall condition. The blade shows old sharpening and a scalloped reduction in cutting edge about six inches from the tip. There is also a contemporary repair in the knuckle bow. The accompanying scabbard, while missing its tip and four inches of stitching, is sound. DETAILS
In 1861, blacksmith T.L. Pruett was plying his trade in Prattville, Alabama, where he lived with his wife and two children. When the Civil War broke out, the native Kentuckian decided to lend his skills to the Confederate cause, creating massive Dguard Bowie knives for 39 enlisted men in the local Autauga Guards. One of these knives—which measured approximately 20 inches long, over two inches wide, and over a quarter-inch thick—went to J.A. Robinson, a 29-year-
old physician who joined the Autauga Guards in September 1861. Robinson and his comrades would eventually become part of the 44th Mississippi Infantry and serve in the Army of Tennessee, seeing action at many of the larger battles fought in the western theater, including Shiloh and Chickamauga. Pruett himself would enlist in the army in 1862, the year after he made the Bowies. While his ultimate fate is unknown, his skill as a metalworker did not go unnoticed; in 1863, he was ordered to Mobile to work on the construction of Confederate gunboats. QUOTABLE
On September 18, 1861, the Richmond Dispatch reran a description of Pruett’s knives that had appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser. “We were shown yesterday a knife, manufactured by Mr. Pruett … which is the most
formidable looking weapon in the shape of a knife we have seen yet. The Arkansas toothpick is left completely in the shade. The blade of the new one we saw was nineteen inches in length, and weighed two and one half pounds. It seemed to be of good steel, and appeared powerful enough to divide a Yankee completely.” VALUE
$14,375 (price realized at James D. Julia Inc. in Fairfield, Maine, in 2015). “T.L Pruett produced what are now the most well known of all southern-identified, blacksmith-made knives,” noted John Sexton, longtime consultant and cataloger for James D. Julia, at the time of the sale, “and this is the only known brassmounted Pruett. The other eight examples of his work are iron mounted, and none has an original scabbard.”
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JAMES D. JULIA AUCTIONEERS, FAIRFIELD, MAINE , JAMESDJULIA.COM. SOURCES: JAMES D. JULIA INC. PRESENTS EXTRAORDINARY FIREARMS AUCTION, OCTOBER 5, 6, & 7, 2015 (2015); “J.A. ROBINSON’S PRUETT KNIFE ,” OLDSOUTHANTIQUES.COM/OS1286P1.HTM
A D-guard Bowie knife made by T.L. Pruett
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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JAMES D. JULIA AUCTIONEERS, FAIRFIELD, MAINE , JAMESDJULIA.COM. SOURCES: JAMES D. JULIA INC. PRESENTS EXTRAORDINARY FIREARMS AUCTION, OCTOBER 5, 6, & 7, 2015 (2015); “J.A. ROBINSON’S PRUETT KNIFE ,” OLDSOUTHANTIQUES.COM/OS1286P1.HTM
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The 1st U.S. Veteran Volunteer Infantry p r e s i d e n t , c e n t e r f o r c i v i l wa r p h oto g r a p h y
Facing severe recruitment shortages for the Union army in the fall of 1864, the Adjutant General’s Office in Washington, D.C., ordered the organization of a new corps strictly for veterans. Designated as the 1st Army Veteran Corps, it was to be led by Winfield Scott Hancock, the esteemed major general who was back in service after recovering from wounds suffered at the Battle of Gettysburg. The corps was to consist of 20,000 or more men who had been honorably discharged after serving for at least two years. Despite an “extra liberal” $300–$400 bounty, the army struggled to fill the new unit, and by March 1865 had only recruited about 4,400 veterans. That same month, the corps’ first regiment, the 1st U.S. Veteran Volunteer Infantry, gathered in formation on F Street in Washington, D.C., for a unit photograph, taken by a photographer from Alexander Gardner’s gallery. The image, rich with details such as flags and other patriotic expressions, reveals that some of the soldiers are wearing the distinctive short-waisted uniform jacket designed for this new unit. This regiment saw duty in the Shenandoah Valley until July 1866, when the last of its veterans were discharged. 3 THE NONPROFIT CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY (CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY.ORG ) IS DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
by bob zeller
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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american iliad
The March to the Sea, Part 1 UNDERSTANDING THE ENDURING REPUTATION OF SHERMAN’S SAVANNAH CAMPAIGN BY MARK GRIMSLEY
in 2014, found that Americans regarded its 1939 film adaptation as their favorite movie, period.3 Yet the March to the Sea held a unique place in American memory long before Mitchell set pen to paper in the 1930s. Another possible influence is “Marching Through Georgia,” the jaunty song composed in 1865, with its memorable refrain: Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the jubilee! Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free! So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea While we were marching through Georgia. But we have other famous Civil War novels and songs. So the question remains: Why is it Sherman’s March to the Sea, not the Carolinas Campaign or Philip Sheridan’s 1864 razing of the Shenandoah Valley, that holds such a grip on the American imagination? The explanation, I want to argue, lies in the relationship between two key factors: first, the mistaken but deeply held belief in the March to the Sea’s allannihilating fury, if your sympathies lie exclusively with the South; and second, Sherman’s memorable statements equating the operation with righteous Old Testament vengeance, if your sympathies are firmly with the North. The American Iliad fuses these two impressions and gives them a power that, individually, neither would possess. The utility of the March to the Sea depends upon the conviction that it was the Civil War’s quintessential act of destruction. Torched barns in the Shenandoah Valley and the conflagration that destroyed Columbia, South Carolina, pale next to Mitchell’s “smoking ruins of Atlanta” and “hundreds of homes in flames.” This conviction requires a considerable effort to ignore the facts. Yes, Georgia suffered considerable destruction, but mostly ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY
mention “sherman’s march” to almost any American, and they will assume you mean Sherman’s March to the Sea—if they have heard of it at all. Students of the Civil War, of course, know that Major General William T. Sherman and his 60,000-man army did not stop marching when they reached the coast at Savannah, but continued north through the Carolinas. Logically, this should be better known. Sherman regarded the first leg of the march—known officially as the Savannah Campaign—as child’s play compared with its sequel, the Carolinas Campaign. And if we associate the march with destruction—and we certainly do—the Union advance through South Carolina was far more devastating than the march through Georgia. Yet, as historians and publishers well know, the March to the Sea belongs to the American Iliad in a way that the march through the Carolinas does not. Joseph T. Glatthaar titled his study of Sherman’s soldiers during the Savannah and Carolinas campaigns The March to the Sea and Beyond. Jacqueline Glass Campbell wrote a book that focused entirely on the experience of African Americans and white women in the Carolinas Campaign, yet had the good sense to call it When Sherman Marched North from the Sea. Other books use the phrase “Sherman’s March” in their titles, inviting association with the March to the Sea.1 Why is this? One reason is obvious: Margaret Mitchell’s enormously popular novel Gone With the Wind, set in Civil War Georgia. It contains an unforgettable image of the march: “Sherman was marching through Georgia, from Atlanta to the Sea.... In a swath eighty miles wide the Yankees were looting and burning. There were hundreds of homes in flames, hundreds of homes resounding with their footsteps.”2 The influence of Mitchell’s harrowing depiction is hardly surprising, given that her novel has sold 30 million copies since its publication in 1936. A 2008 poll discovered that Americans ranked Gone With the Wind just behind the Bible as their favorite book; another, taken 26 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR FALL 2017
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY
Sometime after the fall of Atlanta on September 2, 1864, Major General William T. Sherman had his photo taken in one of the Union works that surrounded the city. In November he’d launch his next campaign, the March to the Sea.
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stereoscope
The Civil War as a Home Invasion HOW THE BEGUILED GETS ITS HISTORY (MOSTLY) RIGHT BY MEGAN KATE NELSON
and the home front collide—a wartime experience that has been the subject of several recent Civil War histories. The Beguiled may not seem, at first, to be a Civil War Over the course of the war, as Confederate and film. The movie, which is a remake of the 1971 Clint Union forces maneuvered back and forth over the Eastwood feature (which was itself based on the novel southern landscape, female-led households took in A Painted Devil by Thomas Cullinan, published in the injured and the dying from both armies. North1966), begins with a panning shot of treetops and the ern men entered southern homes in other, more viosound of birdsong and buzzing insects. As the camera lent ways as well. comes to the ground, it follows a young girl named As historian Lisa Tendrich Frank argues in The Amy (Oona Laurence), who wanders in the forest, Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers humming to herself as during Sherman’s March she picks wild mush(2015), Union officers inrooms. As she walks cluding William Tecumdown a long avenue of seh Sherman recognized live oak trees festooned the power that southwith strands of Spanern women had in susish moss, there is a faint taining the Confederate cannon boom in the diswar effort—and targeted tance. Amy pays this no them in order to undermind. The sounds of mine that power. Union war are common in this soldiers knocked down part of 1864 Virginia, doors, entered parjust another of life’s relors and bedrooms, and verberations. rifled through bureaus, Amy happens upon a “besieging the female Actress Kirsten Dunst (left) and wounded Union soldier domain” in order to huscreenwriter and director Sofia Coppola on the set of The Beguiled (Colin Farrell). They exmiliate and dominate change names and pleassouthern women. antries, and then Amy That Sofia Coppola’s escorts the soldier—a corporal in the 66th New York film should reflect studies in Civil War gender history is Infantry named John McBurney—to the grounds of probably an accident. She is not particularly interested the Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies, where he in the historical reality of the war, especially its roots in passes out from blood loss. Amy summons her fellow slavery and emancipation. This is evidenced by the fact students, her teacher Miss Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), that she removed Mattie, the only enslaved woman and the headmistress, Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman), in the novel and the 1971 film, from her production, to help carry him inside. a choice for which she has been much criticized by hisThe entrance of a strange northern man into these torians. In order to explain the distinctive whiteness southern women’s domestic space changes all of their of Farnsworth, Amy tells McBurney that “the slaves lives. It is a pivotal moment in which the battlefield all left.” McBurney accepts this ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
BEN ROTHSTEIN / FOCUS FEATURES (2)
spoiler alert: This article will discuss major plot points in the 2017 film The Beguiled.
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BEN ROTHSTEIN / FOCUS FEATURES (2)
Nicole Kidman as Miss Martha and Colin Farrell as Union soldier John McBurney in a scene from The Beguiled
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“god of war”
Soldiers from the Army of Northern Virginia surround General Robert E. Lee (center) as he bids them goodbye at war’s end.
EDMUND OLLIER, CASSELL’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES VOL . 3 (1877)
Five times robert e. lee tried to lead his Army of Northern Virginia into combat during the Civil War’s last year, and five times his men stopped him. What do these incidents say about the general— and the soldiers who followed him?
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EDMUND OLLIER, CASSELL’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES VOL . 3 (1877)
by barton a. myers
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1 Robert Edward Lee was not a stranger to the perils of a combat post. He was repeatedly in perilous situations during the Mexican–American War, in particular prior to the Battle of Cerro Gordo in April 1847, when Lee’s personal reconnaissance of the enemy’s lines provided U.S. general Winfield Scott with vital critical intelligence for a crushing flank attack by the Americans.1 To be sure, Lee also was exposed to
danger on the battlefield while in command of the Army of Northern Virginia during the war’s early years. At Fredericksburg in December 1862, he and General James Longstreet were standing on Telegraph Hill near a 30-pounder Parrott rifle, a heavy piece of field artillery rarely used by the Confederate army, when it exploded and “fragments flew all about them, but none was hurt.”2 At Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863, Lee, who was conspicuous along the front lines of General Lafayette McLaws’ division as it performed diversionary maneuvers, found himself under long-range Union artillery fire. During one moment, “a 10-pound shell cut the tree square off just about a yard above” the heads of Lee and McLaws. A short time later, a Confederate soldier described how “a shell burst immediately in front” of Lee and his horse, Traveller, “who reared up and stood as straight as ever I saw a man.” Lee’s men urged him to “go back under the hill” for safety, only to see him a little while later calmly watching the action from the front lines a few hundred yards away.3 Colonel Edward Porter Alexander, who commanded the Confederate artillery barrage that preceded Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, recounted another incident of Lee exposing himself to danger, this time while preparing a defense against a possible Union counterattack. “General Lee rode up, entirely unattended,” Alexander recalled. “He must have intentionally sep-
Robert E. Lee had been in harm’s way on the battlefield many times before his late-war attempts to personally lead the Army of Northern Virginia into combat—during both the MexicanAmerican War and the Civil War's first several years. Left: Lee as he appeared during the Mexican-American War. Right: Lee observes the fighting during the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, where an exploding Confederate cannon sent fragments flying by him.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
on April 6, 1865, he grabbed the staff of a worn Confederate battle flag during the height of the chaos on the battlefield at Sailor’s Creek, Virginia. He was intending to rally the battered remnants of his army, which were being overrun by a much larger Union force. It was the fifth time during the Civil War’s final year that he had intentionally placed himself in harm’s way to pull his men through near catastrophe on the battlefield. In each instance—once at the Wilderness, three times at Spotsylvania Court House, and during this incident at Sailor ’s Creek—the men in his army convinced Lee to turn back. Each of these moments reveals something of Lee’s character, his generalship, and his overall thinking about the art of command, as well as how his men viewed him as the physical embodiment of their cause, a man whom they could not afford to lose.
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General Robert E. Lee had been commander of the Army of Northern Virginia for precisely 1,041 days when,
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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mander. Ives responded, “Alexander, if there is one man in either army, Federal or Confederate, who is, head & shoulders, far above every other one in either army in audacity that man is Gen. Lee, and you will very soon have lived to see it. Lee is audacity personified. His name is audacity, and you need not be afraid of not seeing all of it that you will want to see.” Alexander would come to agree with Ives’ assessment, writing in his memoir of the war, “I think that military critics will rank Gen. Lee as decidedly the most audacious commander who has lived since Napoleon, & I am not at all sure that even Napoleon in his whole career will be held to have overmatched some of the deeds of audacity to which Gen. Lee committed himself in the 2 years & 10 months during which he commanded the Army of Northern Virginia.”6
1 Of the moments when Lee placed himself in a tactical combat situation during the war’s final year, perhaps the most well known occurred on the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness, the first engagement during Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign. On the morning of May 6, 1864, the Army of the Potomac’s II Corps, commanded by General Winfield Scott Hancock, attacked the right flank of the Army of Northern Virginia’s line, occupied by General A.P. Hill’s Third Corps, driving the Confederates back in confusion. Only the timely arrival of reinforcements—led by the famed Texas Brigade—from General James Longstreet’s Second Corps saved Lee’s army from disaster. At the time of the reinforcements’ arrival, Lee was in the widow Catharine Tapp’s field along the north side of the Orange Plank Road. An excited and relieved Lee rode up to the arriving Texans, who “saw him & gave a cheer,” noted one of the soldiers. As the men began their assault against Hancock’s advancing II Corps—which would ultimately stem the Union advance—Lee accompanied them. “The old man, with the light of battle in his eyes, & in the joy of seeing them arrive, rode up behind their line, following them in the charge,” noted one of the Texans, who instantly objected to having their commander endanger his life. “At once the men began to shout, ‘Lee, go back! Lee to the rear,’ & when he still rode on, a major took his horse by the bridle, & someone pointed out Gen. Longstreet to him, whom he had not yet seen, & he was in that way pulled off.” Even though he didn’t accompany the Texans’ charge, Lee had left himself open to significant danger, considerably greater than his exposure the previous year at Gettysburg, where he had been much farther removed from the enemy. At
Confederate soldiers forced Lee to safety each of three times he attempted to lead them into combat during the struggle for the “Mule Shoe” salient during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House (depicted above in a painting by Thure de Thulstrup), fighting that one participant described as “probably the most desperate engagement in modern warfare.”
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arated himself from his staff & couriers or some of them would surely have been with him or followed him in a few minutes.” Alexander had “no doubt whatever” that Lee “intended, himself, to have a hand in rallying them, & in the fight which would follow. He had the combative instinct in him as strongly developed as any man living.” Lee, Alexander concluded, “had come out determined, if there was any more [fighting], that he would be in the thick of it. I’ve sometimes felt sorry that there wasn’t! I’d like so to have seen him in it.”4 Certainly, the physical presence of Lee on the field or in camp could be striking. Countless soldiers and civilians commented on his soldierly bearing and magisterial appearance. Even for the carefully comported, an encounter with Lee could be awe-inspiring. Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Fremantle, a foreign military observer and member of the elite British Coldstream Guards who accompanied the Army of Northern Virginia during the Gettysburg Campaign, commented admiringly on Lee’s imposing figure: “General Lee is, almost without exception, the handsomest man of his age I ever saw. He is fifty-six years old, tall, broad-shouldered, very well made, well set up—a thorough soldier appearance; and his manners are most courteous and full of dignity. He is a perfect gentleman in every respect. I imagine no man has so few enemies, or is universally esteemed.”5 And yet many had questioned Lee’s promotion to the command of the Army of Northern Virginia after its commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, was seriously wounded in the shoulder and chest during the Battle of Seven Pines on May 31, 1862. “Granny Lee” and “The King of Spades” were some of the less-than-flattering names attached to Lee by southern newspaper editors after his lackluster performance during the war’s first year, which included a defeat at the Battle of Cheat Mountain in western Virginia in June 1861, his underappreciated work as organizer of the coastal defenses in South Carolina and Georgia, and his subsequent efforts constructing defensive works around Richmond in the early part of 1862. Those who knew Lee personally, however, predicted forceful action from the former superintendent of West Point. Descriptions of Lee’s aggressiveness as a commander and predictions of his assertive command style predated his Civil War battlefield successes. One prophecy came from the explorer Joseph Christmas Ives. In 1861, Ives, who was born in New York City and graduated from West Point in 1852, served closely with Lee as his chief engineer during his time in Georgia and South Carolina. When Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia, the young artillerist Edward Porter Alexander asked Ives for his thoughts on Lee as a battlefield com-
3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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the Wilderness, as one Confederate officer on the scene later recalled, Lee was “among the thick flying balls on the front lines, waving his hat and encouraging the men.”7 Less than a week after Lee’s attempt to lead the Texans, he would once again insert himself among troops set for the attack. Following the Battle of the Wilderness, Grant maneuvered his army to the southeast in hopes of bringing Lee to a fight on favorable ground. Lee, however, beat Grant to the critical crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House, where the Army of Northern Virginia entrenched and waited for Union forces to assault. While formidable, the Confederate line held a weakness: a large bulge, or salient, known as the “Mule Shoe” in the part of the defenses occupied by the army’s Second Corps, now commanded by General Richard Ewell. In essence, Ewell’s part of the line stuck out like a big thumb, one that could be smashed by a hammer blow. This is precisely what the Union army attempted—and nearly succeeded at—on May 10, 1864.8
Led by the innovative Colonel Emory Upton, 12 handpicked Union regiments, some 5,000 men in all, rushed toward the western face of the salient around 6 p.m. Upton’s plan was for the lead regiment to breach the Confederate line, which the following regiments could instantly exploit. The initial phase of the attack was a success, as Upton’s force sent the Georgians who occupied that sector of the salient reeling back. Sensing the magnitude of the threat posed by Upton’s attack, Lee quickly moved to organize a counterassault. As the general prepared to ride with Traveller toward the sound of the heaviest fighting, his staff officers, including colonels Walter Taylor and Charles S. Venable, stopped him. Lee reportedly said in response, “Then you must see to it that the ground is recovered.” Taylor mounted his horse, grabbed a battle flag (a highly unusual move for a staff officer), and, along with other officers, led reinforcements to the embattled section of the works. Gradually, Confederates were able to push Upton’s forces from the salient, as 35 FALL 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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General’s countenance showed that he had despaired and was ready to die rather than see the defeat of his army,” he later wrote.13 A similar incident occurred that same morning, as Lee continued to rally the defense of the Mule Shoe. “We soon came under the fire of the enemy’s artillery,” recalled Lee’s staff officer Charles S. Venable after war’s end. “This excited General Lee’s horse, and as he was in the act of rearing, a round shot passed under his belly, very near the General’s stirrup. The men of the brigade cried out: ‘Go back, General! Go back! For God’s sake, go back!’ and perhaps some made a motion to seize his bridle.” According to Venable, Lee responded, “If you will promise me to drive those people from our works, I will go back!” To which the nearby troops—part of a brigade of Mississippians commanded by Nathaniel H. Harris—“shouted their promise with a will.” Lee then directed Venable to guide Harris’ men to the troubled sector in the salient. “Never did a brigade go into fiercer battle under greater trials; never did a brigade do its duty more nobly,” noted Venable. “The entire salient was not recaptured, but the progress of the enemy was checked, and they were driven into a narrow space in the angle which they had occupied.” Reflecting on the moment after war, Venable asserted, “I believe that few battle incidents recorded in history rise in grandeur above those two occasions when General Lee went into the charge with the Texans at the Wilderness and when he led the Mississippians into battle at Spotsylvania.”14
1 By the spring of 1865, the Army of Northern Virginia was a shadow of its former size, its ranks withered from the tens of thousands of losses incurred during the Overland Campaign and the subsequent siege of Petersburg. Even when all looked lost after Grant’s army broke through the Petersburg defenses on April 2, necessitating the Confederate evacuation of that city and Richmond, Lee remained willing to place himself in danger at the head of his troops. Knowing the gravity of his army’s situation better than anyone else, Lee was aware at Sailor’s Creek on April 6, 1865—where quickly moving Union forces caught up with and overwhelmed the retreating Confederates—of how close the possibility of annihilation was for the Army of Northern Virginia. Virginia-born general William Mahone, a battle-tested veteran whose troops served as the army’s rear guard at Sailor’s Creek, later struggled to depict the harrowing scene. “On reaching the south crest of the high ground at the crossing of the river road overlooking Sailor’s Creek, the disaster which had overtaken our army was in full view, and the scene beggars description,”
Right: Robert E. Lee as he appeared in the spring of 1864, not long before the battles at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House.
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Union reinforcements never came to support the successful initial breach. Lee’s men, however, suffered 650 causalities in that one action alone.9 Two days later, on May 12, the Army of the Potomac’s II Corps would follow up Upton’s partially successful assault with an even larger attack on the salient. At about 4:30 a.m., Hancock’s 20,000 troops overwhelmed the Confederate line in what one Union officer characterized as “probably the most desperate engagement in modern warfare.”10 Union forces soon began to lose cohesion, however, offering the Confederates the opportunity to mount a counterattack. As General John Brown Gordon, who commanded this sector of the line, began sending troops forward to halt the Union breakthrough, he spotted the commanding general approaching. “Lee looked a very god of war,” Gordon later noted. “Calmly and grandly, he rode to a point near the centre of my line and turned his horse’s head to the front, evidently resolved to lead in person the desperate charge and drive Hancock back or perish in the effort.” Gordon, who “resolved to arrest him in this effort, and thus save to the Confederacy the life of its great leader,” immediately spurred his horse, putting himself between Lee and the front and grabbing Traveller’s bridle. In a loud voice— one that he “hoped might reach the ears of my men and command their attention”—Gordon then called out, “General Lee, you shall not lead my men in a charge…. You must go to [the] rear.” Within seconds, cries of “General Lee to the rear, General Lee to the rear!” could be heard from Gordon’s men, who “gathered around him, turned his horse in the opposite direction, some clutching his bridle, some his stirrups, while others pressed close to Old Traveller’s hips, ready to shove him by main force to the rear. I verily believe that, had it been necessary or possible, they would have carried on their shoulders both horse and rider to a place of safety.” With Lee secure, Gordon and his men continued with their counterattack, which soon succeeded in taking back the eastern sector of the Mule Shoe.11 While Lee had not accompanied them, Gordon nevertheless credited the commander with the success of the counterattack. “It was a powerful factor in the rescue of Lee’s army. It had lifted these soldiers to the very highest plane of martial enthusiasm,” Gordon remembered of Lee’s attempt to guide the charge. “The presence of their idolized commander-in-chief, his purpose to lead them in person, his magnetic and majestic presence, and the spontaneous pledges which they had just made to him, all conspired to fill them with an ardor and intensity of emotion such as have rarely possessed a body of troops in any war.”12 A soldier in the 31st Georgia Infantry, one of Gordon’s troops, offered a more concise diagnosis of Lee’s actions at Spotsylvania. “The
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (MAHONE); BATTLES AND LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR (SAILOR’S CREEK)
Left: General William Mahone was among the Confederates who ushered Lee to safety during the Battle of Sailor’s Creek, where Union forces overwhelmed the Army of Northern Virginia. Right: Confederate soldiers surrender during the fighting at Sailor’s Creek.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (MAHONE); BATTLES AND LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR (SAILOR’S CREEK)
Mahone later wrote. “Hurrying teamsters with their teams and dangling traces (no wagons), retreating infantry without guns, many without hats, a harmless mob, with the massive columns of the enemy moving orderly on.” Mahone noted Lee’s deportment during this critical moment for the army. “At this spectacle General Lee straightened himself in the saddle, and, looking more the soldier than ever, exclaimed, as if talking to himself ‘My God! has the army dissolved?’” Mahone replied, “No general, here are troops ready to do their duty.” Lee, in a “mellowed voice,” responded, “Yes, general, there are some true men left. Will you please keep those people back?” As Mahone placed his division as instructed, he witnessed “the retiring herd … had crowded around General Lee while he sat on his horse with a Confederate battle flag in his hand. I rode up and requested him to give me the flag, which he did.” This scene became one of the most enduring memories for many Confederate soldiers who survived the war’s final campaign. Three days later, Lee would surrender his army to Grant at Appomattox Court House.15
1 How should we interpret the several “Lee to the rear” moments that occurred during the conflict’s final year? On one level, they might be considered manifestations of Lee’s aggressiveness and personal bravery. For nearly three years of war, Lee had sought the “American Austerlitz”— a climactic, set-piece battle against a numerically superior foe, a masterpiece of command that could end the war. He had come close at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and even Gettysburg. But the brutal stalemate in the Wilderness, the near destruction of a corps at Spotsylvania, and the unfolding disaster at Sailor’s Creek of-
fered Lee what he had not seen before: the possibility of his army’s collapse and by extension the Confederacy’s. In these late-war battles, Lee was willing to place himself personally in the gap to prevent either from happening. Given the excellent movements of Grant and his subordinates at the Tapp Field and Mule Shoe, a battlefield commander of lesser ability could have seen their army cut apart at any of these moments. Perhaps more significantly, Lee was also aware of his reputation among his men, and that his presence on the battlefield at the proper moment could inspire the army.16 With the attrition rate in the Army of Northern Virginia’s officer corps reaching a dangerous level by the summer of 1864 (Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson had been mortally wounded at Chancellorsville and James Longstreet wounded in the Wilderness), Lee knew that his personal attendance would be more critical than ever. As Confederate chaplain J. William Jones would write of the connection between Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, “When he rode among his troops he was always greeted with enthusiastic cheers, or other manifestations of love and admiration. I one day saw a ragged private whom he met on the road … stand with uncovered head, as if in the presence of royalty, as he rode by.”17 When Lee exposed himself to danger at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Sailor’s Creek, his men naturally reacted to protect him. As Chaplain Jones put it, “Nothing so pleased the private soldier as to see his officers willing to share his dangers; and among our Confederate soldiers especially, the officer who did not freely go himself wherever he ordered his men soon lost their confidence and respect. But General Lee was an exception to this rule. The soldiers could never bear to see him exposed to personal danger, and always earnestly remonstrated against it.” Unlike Edmund Ruffin, the ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74 39 FALL 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Surrender!” •
More than 300,000 soldiers surrendered during the Civil War. For those who had a choice in the decision, their motivations varied widely—as did their later experiences as prisoners of war.
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• B Y D AV I D S I L K E N AT
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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A Union cavalryman tracks down a fleeing Confederate soldier to take him prisoner in Alfred R. Waud’s wartime sketch “Surrender!!!”
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The command structure of both the Union and Confederate armies dictated that the primary responsibility of enlisted men was to follow orders. They were ordered when, where, and how fast to march. They were ordered when to fire, reload, and charge, when to wheel, when to reform from column to file, and when to retreat. A popular drill manual used to train recruits from both armies distinguished between officers and common soldiers as those “who command” and those “who obey.”3 Soldiers who failed to obey could be harshly, at times draconically, punished. Within these confines, a soldier’s ability to surrender was
A Civil War soldier’s decision to surrender was often made hastily and during the heat of battle. Above: F.O.C. Darley’s depiction of the disorderly Union retreat at the Battle of Bull Run, during which hundreds of northern troops were taken prisoner.
3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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THE WAR WITH THE SOUTH VOL . 1 (1862)
onfederate soldier gart johnson had often
prayed that he “might never be wounded,” but “never gave much thought to be captured—at least not enough to make it an object of prayer.” In a September 1864 skirmish near Harpers Ferry, however, Johnson “didn’t hear the command [to retreat] and stayed at the front too long.” Surrounded, Johnson recognized that the alternative to surrendering was death: “I chose the former, and threw my sword as far as I could send it.”1 Over the course of the conflict, more than 300,000 soldiers shared Gart Johnson’s experience, finding themselves in situations in which surrendering seemed to be the best, or only, option. Official records and modern historians often use the term “captured” to describe soldiers held as prisoners of war after a battle, effectively equating soldiers with battle flags, cannon, railroad depots, or hilltops. Unlike inanimate objects or geographic locations, however, soldiers had to throw down their guns, raise their hands or a white flag, and yell, “I surrender!” before being taken prisoner. It was an act of transformation for both the soldier and his enemy—one changed from active warrior to prisoner of war; the other had to accept the surrender and transition from combatant to captor. These fraught decisions were often made in seconds during the heat of battle—with weapons aloft, amid the confusing roar of gunfire and blinding smoke—and reflected soldiers’ competing desires for bravery and self-preservation. For many soldiers, surrendering was an almost unconscious decision. One Wisconsin soldier in Arkansas recalled that, surprised by the sudden appearance of Rebels, “Instantly and almost instinctively my hands went up in token of surrender.”2 Although soldiers rarely had the opportunity to deliberate and reflect in the midst of combat, surrendering was one of the few choices enlisted men were empowered to make on the battlefield.
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a rare example of autonomy. Refusing to accept an enemy’s offer of surrender was the exception rather than the rule. In this respect, Civil War soldiers proved unusual, as studies of combat in the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, and World Wars I and II indicate that only half of all offers to surrender in those conflicts were accepted; soldiers were understandably loathe to surrender, given the fair possibility that their would-be captors might kill them. Most Civil War soldiers did not have this fear; they expected that offers to surrender would be honored. African Americans and Southern Unionists were notable outliers, as Confederates did not consider either group legitimate soldiers
and therefore denied them the sanctuary provided by surrender. Civil War soldiers who served at least a year had a one in six chance of being called on to surrender, and an even greater chance of accepting the surrender of an enemy soldier. Although quick to brand officers who formally surrendered unnecessarily as cowards, soldiers almost never criticized a fellow or enemy soldier for doing so. Surrendering on the battlefield required a dangerous proximity to the enemy, one that shirkers and cowards avoided. Indeed, many Civil War soldiers recognized that those most likely to find themselves in a situation to surrender were likely to be brave but unfortunate. As historian James McPherson has 43 FALL 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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timely flight, but our retreat was cut off; it was either surrender, or foolishly throw our lives away.”5 Skirmishers, pickets, sharpshooters, and couriers—who all worked alone or in small groups— found themselves in surrender scenarios much more frequently than soldiers fighting in closed formation. Rice C. Bull, a New Yorker with William T. Sherman’s army, drew more than his fair share of picket and skirmish duty and discovered his proximity to the enemy entailed numerous calls and demands for surrender. Once, on a light skirmish line, Bull found himself facing a much larger Confederate advance. Beating a quick retreat, Bull noted that “we skirmishers were loaded with our full equipment” which “made it harder for us to retreat than for them to follow.” With the pursuing Confederates “calling on us to surrender,” Bull ran as fast as he could, “every man for himself,” and escaped. A few weeks later, Bull had the opportunity to return the favor while on early morning picket duty. He participated in a daring advance, capturing the enemy’s “entire picket line of nearly two hundred men” by sneaking up on their rifle pits. The Confederate pickets, some of whom were sleeping on duty, “surrendered at once without making any resistance.”6 Sharpshooters, who tended to work alone, were extremely vulnerable to surrender situations. One Confederate noted that they “were exempt from the usual solder’s routine … and that every man acted on his own free will when there was anything doing, without restraint, subject only to or-
Soldiers who worked alone or in small groups—such as skirmishers, pickets, sharpshooters, and couriers—regularly found themselves in surrender scenarios. Above: Winslow Homer’s sketch of a Union sharpshooter taking aim at a distant target.
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observed, Civil War soldiers often worried that their courage would fail them in battle, and many soldiers feared being labeled a coward more than they did dying. This fear sometimes manifested itself in unnecessary risks. Soldiers who advanced too quickly or retreated too slowly often found themselves isolated and surrounded. Soldiers’ positions and roles on the battlefield factored significantly into who surrendered. Civil War armies tended to fight in close formations, soldiers marching “shoulder to shoulder” and fighting at “the touch of the elbow.” Tactical manuals emphasized the importance of unit cohesion. The more chaotic a battle became, the more often soldiers found themselves cut off from their regiment and in a position to surrender. A New York soldier noted that “Disintegration begins with the first shot. To the book-soldier all order seems destroyed, months of drill apparently going for nothing in a few minutes.”4 Hasty retreats created the most chaotic battlefield environments, and almost every regiment retreated at some point during the Civil War. Although orderly retreats did take place, most retreats became panicked and anarchic, if only for a moment. Illinois soldier Samuel Boggs described the scene at Chickamauga when he was forced to surrender: “The Rebels made a desperate charge; there was a crashing roar; the air seemed full of bullets, dust and Rebel yells. Men went down on all sides of me; we were in a hand-to-hand encounter; some of our men had saved themselves by 44 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR FALL 2017
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ders from the division commander or Longstreet himself.”7 Louis Leon, a Confederate sharpshooter, witnessed the ease with which sharpshooters could take prisoners or be taken prisoner themselves at the Wilderness. Far removed from the main Confederate force, within the space of a few minutes Leon saw a fellow sharpshooter take an unsuspecting Union officer prisoner, just before Leon himself was overwhelmed by Union soldiers who forced his surrender.8 The primary weapon of the Civil War soldier, the rifle musket, often conspired against him, compelling his surrender. Once discharged, the rifle proved as much of a burden as an asset until it was reloaded. Although it could function as a serviceable club or (with a bayonet attached) a spear, soldiers knew that such secondary uses would prove suicidal against an enemy with a loaded weapon. Rifles could also become jammed with powder residue, or misfire because of damp or defective ammunition. A Union soldier at Chickamauga surrendered when a Confederate pointed “his gun point blank at my breast.” He noted in his memoir that “I had loaded my gun but not capped it,” effectively rendering it useless. He acutely understood the likely outcome were he not to surrender immediately: “There was a good Enfield rifle pointing at me, not ten feet away, in that gun was an ounce ball, behind that ball was sufficient powder to blow it a mile, on the gun was a waterproof cap, warranted to explode every time, and behind the whole was a Johnny who understood the combination to a nicety.” Seeing that the Confederate clearly “had the drop on me,” he handed over his own rifle in surrender.9 The sensory overload on a Civil War battlefield made surrender difficult. Soldiers rarely saw or heard the enemy clearly, their senses obscured by rifle and cannon smoke and noise. At the Battle of Peachtree Creek near Atlanta, one Union soldier noted, “The clouds of smoke from the muskets of both sides … poured down on us to hide everything but the flash of the enemy’s guns.” The incessant noise of the battlefield left many soldiers temporarily deaf. A soldier at Shiloh noted that “His sense of hearing is well-nigh overcome by the deafening uproar going on around him. The incessant and terrible clash of musketry, the roar of cannon, the continual zip, zip of the bullets as they hiss by him, interspersed with the agonizing screams of the wounded or the death-shrieks of comrades falling in dying convulsions right in the face of the living.”10 A soldier threw down his arms in surrender only if he were close enough that the enemy could see him clearly; he would demand surrender only when he knew that his yell could be heard over the cacophony. Even under ideal conditions, communicating an offer to surrender could be difficult. Surrounded during one of the initial charges at Missionary Ridge in November
1863, an Iowa soldier waved a newspaper “in token of my surrender.” The attacking Confederates evidently “didn’t read the Ledger” and fired upon him. Only when he ran toward one of the Rebel lines did the Confederates accept his surrender.11
1 Soldiers had mixed and complicated emotional reactions to being taken prisoner. An Illinois soldier said, “I cannot describe the state of my mind just then, but guess I felt like the boy, after getting a good whipping which he did not deserve, very despondent.”12 For some soldiers, surrendering in the midst of battle put them into a fugue. Called on to surrender at Shiloh, an Ohio soldier entered a kind of trance. “I seemed to lose all thought of home, wife, friends, earth, or heaven,” he later noted.13 Similarly, an Ohio soldier taken prisoner in 1861 recalled that “what we had undergone had so blunted and benumbed our feelings that we were unable to realize the full extent of our calamity.”14 Soldiers indicated that upon surrendering, the battle around them seemed to pause and fade into the background. This cognitive detachment reflected the alienating process at work as they transitioned from soldier to prisoner. The surrender process created unusual venues for conversations between Confederate and Union soldiers. “I had a talk with a Johnny among a number of prisoners laying around there,” one Union soldier wrote in his diary. “He wanted something from me as a relic, such as a comb, a penknife, or anything so as it would come from a yankee.”15 Despite their precarious situation, surrendering soldiers often boldly proclaimed their devotion to their respective causes, believing that a captor who had accepted his surrender was obliged to tolerate him, no matter how inflammatory his rhetoric. Taken prisoner at Peachtree Creek, Confederate James Nisbit impressed his captors with his nonchalance. Asked why he showed no fear, Nisbit noted, “I have captured thousands of your men, since the war commenced, and always treated them right.” For Nisbit, surrenders were familiar environments, even if he was usually on the other side of the situation.16 These types of interactions also allowed some soldiers to see beyond demonized caricatures of the enemy. Before battle, Confederate and Union soldiers alike tended to vilify their foes as uncivilized and savage. In the process of surrendering, some soldiers recognized the humanity in their enemy. Recently surrendered soldiers often recalled unexpected kindnesses. During a retreat at Chickamauga, Isaac Johnston, who had taken ill several days earlier, could not keep up with the rest of his unit and surrendered to the advancing 45 FALL 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Surrender held its greatest appeal between July 1862 and July 1863, when the Dix-Hill cartel—a prisoner exchange system resulting from negotiations led by Union general John A. Dix (left, top) and Confederate general D.H. Hill (left, bottom)—saw soldiers quickly paroled after being taken prisoner. The accord also served to alleviate the conditions at overcrowded prisons, whose populations had swelled after several large surrenders in early 1862, such as at Fort Donelson in February (depicted at right).
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ber of enemy prisoners, with a point system that valued non-commissioned officers at twice as much as an enlisted man and second lieutenants at three times as much. A commanding general could be worth up to 60 enlisted men. Commissioners of Exchange kept lists of paroled prisoners, reconciling the exchanges regularly.19 The prisoner exchange accord could not have happened at a more fortuitous time. Intense campaigning in early 1862 had swelled both Union and Confederate prisons beyond capacity. Fort Donelson’s surrender in February resulted in 12,000 Confederate soldiers entering Union prisons, an influx they were hardly prepared or equipped to handle. Approximately 7,000 Rebels who surrendered at Island No. 10 joined them less than two months later. At Shiloh, approximately 4,000 Union and Confederate soldiers surrendered. Union soldiers captured during the Peninsula Campaign and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Valley Campaign added more than 8,000 men to Richmond’s prison population. The difficulty in transporting and housing Confederate prisoners led some Union commanders to simply parole them on the battlefield. In coastal North Carolina in March and April 1862, Ambrose Burnside paroled more than 3,000 soldiers who had surrendered at Roanoke Island, New Bern, or Fort Macon, instead of sending them on to northern prisons. In its early months, the Dix-Hill cartel was remarkably effective at emptying prisons. In July 1862, when the cartel was ratified, Union prisons held 20,500 Confederates. After one month of exchanges, one-third of those prisoners were paroled. By year’s end, only 1,286 Confederates remained imprisoned. William Hoffman, the Union’s commissary-general of prisoners, ordered the remaining Confederate POWs consolidated at Alton Penitentiary, Camp Chase, and Johnson’s Island, closing the remaining camps. Confederate prisons also emptied. At the end of August 1862, the last Union captive left Salisbury Prison in North Carolina. Over the next few months, outlying Confederate prisons at Macon, Lynchburg, Charleston, Mobile, Atlanta, and Tuscaloosa closed, leaving only the Richmond prisons open.
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Confederates. He later regretted not learning the names of the two officers who accepted his surrender, as “they treated me with marked kindness, as brave men ever treat a conquered foe.”17 A Connecticut cavalryman captured in July 1863 observed that his “treatment by my immediate captors was gentlemanly in the extreme.”18 Soldiers recognized their common peril and the vicissitudes of fortune; accepting a surrender today did not forestall being forced to surrender tomorrow. But these positive experiences often contrasted sharply with prisoners’ later treatment by prison guards, who rarely recognized their humanity. Throughout the war, soldiers on both sides heard rumors about conditions in enemy prisons. Starting in 1861, narratives published in both the North and the South documented the horrors of captivity. If the dynamics of the battlefield occasionally gave soldiers the agency to surrender, their expectations of their coming fate shaped how often they decided to lay down their arms. If they anticipated a lengthy tenure in a prisoner-of-war camp, physical abuse, or worse, soldiers became apprehensive about surrendering, even when the alternative was imminent defeat or death. Conversely, if they expected to be quickly paroled or receive otherwise humane treatment, surrender became more appealing. Surrender held its greatest appeal between July 1862 and July 1863. During this year-long window, soldiers knew they would be quickly paroled after surrender. After lengthy and contentious negotiations, Confederate and Union officials had agreed on July 22, 1862, to a prisoner exchange system known as the Dix-Hill cartel. Named after its chief negotiators, Union general John A. Dix and Confederate general D.H. Hill, the cartel built upon the exchange guidelines used during the War of 1812 and required that all prisoners, including those held at the time of agreement, had to be paroled within 10 days of capture at Aiken’s Landing, Virginia (for the eastern theater), and Vicksburg, Mississippi (for the western theater). Paroled prisoners were honor-bound not to resume fighting until they had been exchanged for an equivalent num-
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eggs ad libitum.” Three weeks of such fare transformed “the hungry, gaunt crowd” that had surrendered into “well-dressed, lazy men sauntering about the fort.” The finalization of the Dix-Hill cartel ended Hunter’s brief imprisonment. After less than a month in captivity, Hunter and his fellow prisoners would be reunited with the Army of Northern Virginia. Dreading a return to meager Confederate rations and camp life, Hunter noted, “Well, of course we were glad to go, and yet sorry.” In later years, Hunter recalled that “the Federal Government had treated us royally” during his time in prison, and that “our captivity was but a summer jaunt North, an ocean voyage and several weeks guest at a watering-place, where we were treated more as honored guests than as prisoners of war.” After a brief furlough, Hunter rejoined his regiment in time to fight at Second Manassas and participate in Lee’s march into Maryland. On the extreme right of the Confederates at the Battle of Antietam, not far from the Burnside Bridge, Hunter’s undersized regiment took heavy casualties. When their position was overrun, he was one of only two men from his regiment taken pris-
The efficiency and generosity of the Dix-Hill cartel made officials on both sides worry that their soldiers might surrender unnecessarily. In response, Union officials established several parole camps to house Federal soldiers who had been paroled but not yet exchanged. Above: The Union parole camp at Annapolis, Maryland.
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While efficient, these rapid paroles became controversial. Pledging not to resume military activities until exchanged—and facing execution if they did so and were recaptured—individual soldiers took their responsibility to uphold the system seriously. Paroled soldiers often would not engage in labor they believed violated those terms. For instance, soldiers in the 9th Michigan who had surrendered at Murfreesboro in July 1862 and been paroled refused to assist in building Union military fortifications at Nashville because they had not yet been exchanged. Similarly, Union soldiers who had surrendered at Harpers Ferry in September 1862 refused to be sent to Minnesota to fight with federal forces against native Dakota tribes in the Dakota War, arguing that any military service would be a violation of their parole. While some soldiers may have been eager to face the enemy and tempted to violate the terms of their release, the evidence suggests that almost none did during the height of the Dix-Hill cartel. Few soldiers benefited more from the cartel’s provisions than Confederate soldier Alexander Hunter. The native of Alexandria, Virginia, had enlisted after Fort Sumter and seen action at a number of early war battles, including Manassas, Yorktown, and Seven Pines, among others. At the Battle of Frazier’s Farm on June 30, 1862, Hunter’s regiment found itself outnumbered and fled the field in a chaotic retreat. “Officers and men broke and scattered,” he later recalled, “for each individual was acting under his own orders—general, colonel, captain and private all combined in his own consciousness. The timid were striking for the rear, the cautious were snugly ensconced in the ditches awaiting developments; the reckless and the bulldogs ramming home their cartridges with unrelenting ardor.” When the Union line approached to within 10 feet of their position, Hunter and his ditch mates yelled, “Billy Yank, we surrender!” Escorting Hunter to the rear, one of the Union soldiers noticed blood on his trousers and asked if he was injured. A quick self-inspection revealed that he was unharmed, the blood from “some unfortunate, splashed over me.” Hunter was marched to Harrison’s Landing that evening and received rations of “crackers, coffee, sugar and meat of good quality and fair quantity.” He noted, “Some of the ‘Billy Yanks’ showed us most disinterested kindness by sharing with us their hot coffee and doing all in their power to alleviate our woes.” As Hunter and other prisoners boarded a steamboat the next day, they were given blankets and full rations for their journey north. Imprisoned at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, he had little to complain about. “Certainly no prisoners of war had ever been treated so luxuriously before,” he wrote. “Breakfast consisted of coffee—real, not ground rye or corn—fresh loaf bread, mess-beef, hominy, broiled ham and 48 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR FALL 2017
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oner, but grateful to have survived the battle unharmed. Hunter’s second captivity proved even shorter than his first. He was paroled two days later, along with “the whole battalion of prisoners, numbering five hundred and fifty officers and men.” They received news of their parole with “delight” as they would be “sent home instead of being forwarded North and confined in prisons. Full rations were given to us.” Instructed to “remain at their homes until notified by the proper Southern official that they had been exchanged,” Hunter and his fellow prisoners were escorted to the Potomac, where they waded across into Confederate territory. After a few weeks, Hunter was exchanged and returned to service, participating in the defense of Fredericksburg.20 In 80 days, Hunter had surrendered twice. His quick return to arms after each episode indicated not only the efficiency of the Dix-Hill cartel, but also the relatively benign treatment he received from his Union captors. The generosity of the Dix-Hill cartel gave both Union and Confederate soldiers ample incentive to surrender. Indeed, some worried that its terms were an inducement to unnecessary surrenders.
One Union soldier complained that the liberal policy encouraged malingering comrades to obtain a “little rest from soldiering.” All they needed to do, he claimed, was engage in “straggling in the vicinity of the enemy” and allow themselves to be captured. After parole, they could “visit home, and sojourn awhile where [there] were pleasanter pastures than at the front.”21 Many Union government officials agreed. As Secretary of War Edwin Stanton opined in September 1862, “[T]here is reason to fear that many voluntarily surrender for the sake of getting home.”22 To dissuade soldiers from surrendering unnecessarily, Union officials established parole camps at Annapolis, Columbus, and St. Louis to house Federal soldiers who had been paroled but not yet exchanged. These parole camps, which were subject to overcrowding, epidemic disease, and poor food, proved to be deeply unpopular with both the northern public and with soldiers, who complained about being held prisoner by their own government. One Union officer wrote home from a parole camp, “Thank Heaven you have never had the experience of a ‘Paroled Camp,’ and may you never!… The men feel unanimously that we 49 FALL 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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1 The debate over the status of surrendered soldiers that produced the Dix-Hill cartel also contributed to the Civil War’s most coherent codification of the unwritten laws of war, officially called General Order No. 100, but popularly known as the Lieber Code. Its author, GermanAmerican legal philosopher Francis Lieber, had long critiqued the Federal reluctance to exchange prisoners and lauded the introduction of regular prisoner exchanges in 1862 as a hallmark of civilized warfare. Despite his praise for prisoner exchange, Lieber condemned the parole of surrendered soldiers, arguing that the oath not to fight until exchanged violated a soldier’s primary oath to fight for his country and “put a fearful premium on cowardice.” In December 1862, Lieber was appointed to a five-member commission tasked with crafting a codified “set of rules and definitions providing for the most urgent issues, occurring under the law and usages of war.” Drafted primarily by Lieber, with substantial editorial help from commission chair Henry Halleck, the resulting codification received the blessing of President Lincoln, who issued the document on April 24, 1863. The rights of surrendering and surrendered soldiers formed the heart of Lieber’s code. It decreed that all soldiers taken “by individual surrender” or who had “thrown away their arms and ask[ed] for quarter” were “entitled to the
privileges of a prisoner of war.” Among those rights was protection against “any intentional infliction of any suffering, or disgrace, by cruel imprisonment, want of food, by mutilation, death, or any other barbarity.” The Lieber Code inscribed the long-assumed right to individual surrender into military jurisprudence, claiming that “it is against the usage of modern war to resolve, in hatred and revenge, to give no quarter. No body of troops has the right” to refuse to accept an individual soldier’s surrender. The Lieber Code placed guerrillas firmly outside the protections of the laws of war, but asserted that black volunteers were entitled to the full panoply of rights afforded to white soldiers, as “[t]he law of nations knows no distinction of color.” Viewing black men in arms as tantamount to slaves in rebellion, Confederates had been outraged when Union officials in Louisiana and South Carolina began enlisting African Americans in August 1862. From these earliest appearances in uniform, Confederates had denied that African Americans could be legitimate soldiers entitled to surrender and treatment as prisoners of war. When Confederates captured six black soldiers on Saint Catherine’s Island, Georgia, in November 1862, the local commander characterized them as “slaves with arms in hand against their masters and wearing the abolition uniform,” recommending “some swift and terrible punishment should be inflicted that their fellows may be deterred from following their example.” Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon agreed, ordering that one of the black soldiers “be executed as an example.”24 In April 1863, the Confederate Congress concluded that arming African Americans would “bring on a servile war” inconsistent with the principles
Union recruitment of black men as soldiers complicated the system of prisoner exchange. While northern officials, like Francis Lieber (below, left), insisted that black prisoners be afforded the same rights as white prisoners, some of their Confederate counterparts disagreed. General Edmund Kirby Smith (right), for one, criticized an officer under his command after learning he had taken black prisoners at the June 1863 Battle of Milliken’s Bend (depicted above). Smith instead advocated for “giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers. In this way we may be relieved from a disagreeable dilemma.”
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have no right to ask a thing of them, while the line officers hold that doing guard duty and police work is violation of their parole, as well as drilling. If the Government will only let us go home, we will take care of ourselves till our exchange.”23
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of civilized warfare. Surrendered black soldiers would be returned to slavery, and white officers leading black soldiers would be “deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall if captured be put to death.”25 Some Confederate generals believed the official policy of enslaving black prisoners too lenient and that black soldiers should be executed rather than allowed to surrender. In taking up arms, they argued, black men were engaging in a slave rebellion, a crime punishable by execution. After Brigadier General Henry McCulloch, commanding Walker’s Texas Division, took black prisoners at Milliken’s Bend, he received the condemnation of his superior officer, General Edmund Kirby Smith. “I have been unofficially informed that some of your troops have captured negroes in arms,” Smith wrote McCulloch. “I hope this may not be so.” Instead, Smith counseled a policy of “giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers. In this way we may be relieved from a disagreeable dilemma.” Secretary of War Seddon eventually overruled Kirby Smith, claiming that black soldiers were “deluded victims” who “should be received and
treated with mercy and return to their owners.” Seddon did not object to the execution of some black soldiers, as “a few examples might perhaps be made,” but argued that “to refuse them quarter would only make them, against their tendencies, fight desperately.”26 Like many Confederates, Seddon assumed that black soldiers would surrender at the first sight of danger. Convinced that African Americans were naturally docile, subservient, and cowardly, many military professionals in both the North and the South did not anticipate that they would make good soldiers. As events on the battlefield would reveal, these assumptions proved categorically incorrect. Although Confederate policy called for captured black Union soldiers to be returned to slavery, battlefield realities proved to be somewhat different. Enraged by the presence of black men in uniform, many Confederates refused to take them prisoners. Reports from the Battle of Milliken’s Bend in June 1863, the first significant engagement in which black soldiers participated, indicate that Confederates shouted “no quarter!” Before the Battle of Olustee in February 1864, a Confederate officer instructed his men that the enemy were “negroes from Georgia and South Carolina, who have come to steal, pillage, run over the state and murder, kill, and rape our wives, daughters and sweethearts. Let’s teach them a lesson. I shall not take any negro prisoners in this fight.”27 Reports of Confederates refusing to accept the surrender of black soldiers or executing black prisoners arose after the battles at Port Hudson (May 27, 1863), Goodrich’s Landing (June 29, 1863), and Battery Wagner (July 18, 1863). Only recently exchanged himself after four months imprisoned in St. Louis, one Texas officer noted the brutality against black troops. “I never saw so many dead negroes in my life,” he wrote. “We took no prisoners, except the white officers, fourteen in number; these were lined up and shot after the negroes were finished.” Having executed the prisoners, the Rebel soldiers tossed their bodies, including some “hardly dead,” into the Ouchita River.28 Confederate policy and practice effectively made it impossible for black soldiers to surrender. They knew that under the best conditions, surrender would result in their re-enslavement: dragooned into building Confederate fortifications or returned to their prior owners. Joseph T. Wilson, a black man who fought with the 2nd Louisiana Native Guard and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, observed that when confronted with African-American troops, Confederate soldiers believed that “honor forbade them to ask or give quarter. This fact was known to all.”29 In 1863, a white officer of the 2nd Louisiana Native Guard wrote that his men “fight like bloodhounds, and never surrender.”30 That July, the Charleston Daily 51 FALL 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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1 The issue of black prisoners proved fatal to the Dix-Hill exchange regime. Its demise came gradually, after repeated ultimatums by Union officials demanding equal treatment. On May 25, 1863, Union officials stopped the exchange of officers, and by August 1863, the exchange of enlisted men had effectively ground to a halt, with only periodic
exchanges, usually of sick or wounded prisoners, until Ulysses S. Grant halted all exchanges in April 1864. In an early September 1863 letter, James C. Bates of the 9th Texas Cavalry explained how the introduction of black soldiers affected the prisoner exchange regime and the willingness of soldiers to surrender. Bates noted that exchange commissioners had come to an impasse “and I think it hardly probable they will come to any understanding.” According to Bates, “The difficulty is … that Lincoln insists on negroes being recognized and treated as, prisoners of war, and that when captured they shall be exchanged for white men. This will never be submitted to by the confederate authorities & the exchange of prisoners will therefore be at an end.” Bates concluded that without the promise of exchange, soldiers would not surrender and “it will not be long before no prisoners are taken.” For his part, Bates saw no reason to take black prisoners, claiming that “the only course … is to take every Negro found in arms, and every man connected with them, into some thicket or swamp and hang them as soon as captured. This course we have heretofore pursued and our men will continue to do so.”34 Few understood the consequences of the cartel’s demise as well as Alexander Hunter, the Confederate soldier who surrendered and was paroled twice in 1862. After his second stint as a prisoner of war and a convalescence in a Confederate hospital, Hunter secured a transfer to a cavalry regiment. In the wake of the Battle of Gettysburg, Hunter’s regiment, the Black Horse Cavalry, was tasked with raiding Union lines and taking prisoners. “The design of our detail,” Hunter wrote, was “to get within the enemy’s line on foot and lurk near their camp,” capturing unsuspecting cavalrymen, and return to Confederate lines with their prisoners and horses. While they managed to capture “thousands of prisoners” in the months immediately after Gettysburg, their success didn’t last. “Few prisoners were taken that winter,” Hunter noted. “The Yankees had learned caution.” Hunter should have taken the lesson of caution to heart. In January 1864, he rode out on a solo scouting mission, intent upon capturing Union horses. After encountering an enemy patrol, Hunter attempted to take shelter in a nearby church. He had nearly escaped capture when “my confounded, infernal horse gave a long, loud neigh.” Scrambling up a ladder into the church loft, Hunter listened to the Union cavalrymen search for him. After deducing his location, the Union soldiers threatened to burn down the church unless he surrendered. Acquiescing, Hunter threw down his revolvers and descended the ladder. This third surrender would prove markedly different than his earlier experiences. The provost marshal accused Hunter of being a
After the system of prisoner exchange effectively came to a halt in the summer of 1863, Union and Confederate soldiers had little hope that imprisonment would be short. Above: Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C., where Confederate soldier Alexander Hunter spent his third stint as a prisoner of war. “That all exchange of prisoners was ended was patent to all,” Hunter noted. “It was a bitter thing to look forward to, that of being caged like so many wild beasts.”
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Courier explained the paucity of black prisoners by noting that those few who did surrender “believe they are to be hung, and gave as a reason for fighting as well as they did, that they would rather die of [a] bullet than [a] rope.”31 Some black soldiers and their white officers concluded that if Confederates would not accept their surrender, they were under no obligation to respect the surrenders of Rebel soldiers. “We are outlawed, and therefore not bound by the rules of regular warfare,” observed Colonel James Montgomery, commander of the 2nd South Carolina Infantry, one of the earliest black regiments. To be sure, many black soldiers and white officers rejected this idea. Critical of Montgomery’s stance, the 54th Massachusetts’ Colonel Robert Gould Shaw noted “my own distaste for this barbarous sort of warfare, I am not sure that it will not harm very much the reputation of black troops and of those connected with them.”32 Nonetheless, numerous references suggest that black soldiers, largely in retaliation for Confederate policy, felt no obligation to take Confederate prisoners. A soldier in the 2nd Maine Cavalry noted in October 1864 that black soldiers refused to take prisoners, claiming that “it did not make eny differance to them about the Rebs surrendering.” He added that officers had difficulty stopping black soldiers from “killing all the prisoners.”33 At the end of July 1863, Lincoln reinforced the Lieber Code’s stance on black soldiers. In General Orders No. 252, the president proclaimed, “To sell or enslave any captured person on account of his color and for no offense against the laws of war is a relapse into barbarism and a crime against the civilization of the age.” He ordered that “for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war a rebel soldier shall be executed, and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor … until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war.” Despite his harsh rhetoric, Lincoln was loathe to execute Confederate prisoners and never followed through on this pledge. When pressed by Frederick Douglass to enforce a policy of retaliation, Lincoln demurred, claiming that “once begun, I do not know where such a measure would stop.”
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guerrilla and told him that he “deserved to be shot,” and that “every Rebel found with arms ought to be hanged.” Exposed to the bitter cold and wind, Hunter and other prisoners struggled without blankets, shelter, or fire; only by pacing all night did they keep themselves from freezing. All around the prisoners’ pen, Hunter could see Union soldiers well fed and sheltered: “Billy Yank was comfortable in body and stuffed to the throat with the good things of life.” Once he was sent to Old Capitol Prison, Hunter found “the rooms were large, well ventilated, very well heated by open grates at each end,” and “the fare was ample and wholesome, much better indeed than Dixie could afford to give her troops.” Despite the relative comfort, Hunter quickly grew despondent, as “it was not a hopeful outlook that the future gave. That all exchange of prisoners was ended was patent to all.… It was a bitter thing to look forward to, that of being caged like so many wild beasts.” Hunter recognized that the indeterminate prison terms fundamentally changed the paradigm of surrender. “For Northerner or Southerner,” Hunter wrote, “the dragging out of a prison life was grievous enough to
bear.… Many held death a preferable fate.”35 Facing little prospect of parole or exchange, Hunter plotted his escape. On his first attempt, he was forced to surrender by a Union patrol boat while crossing the Potomac on a raft. Sent to a prison in Wheeling, West Virginia, he escaped a second time, but was recaptured after taking shelter in a home he wrongly suspected to hold southern sympathies. While being escorted back to prison, Hunter escaped a third time, this time making it to Confederate lines in early 1864, where he received a brief furlough to recover from his imprisonment before returning to his unit. 1864 marked the nadir in the culture of surrender, with soldiers increasingly choosing to fight to the death rather than face an indefinite stay in a prisoner-of-war camp, where the likelihood of survival proved no better than on the battlefield. This widespread aversion to surrender changed the way that the war was fought. In muster reports from 1862 and 1863, when the Dix-Hill cartel regularly paroled captured soldiers, soldiers captured in battle usually outnumbered those killed. After ☛ } CONT. ON P. 75 53 FALL 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Augustus SaintGaudens’ bronze relief sculpture, Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, as it appeared in 1906, nine years after its unveiling on Beacon Street in Boston
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Destined for Glory
Cras ju egesta nulla n nas fau sem m Cras ju egesta tempu suada m
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The 54th Massachusetts Infantry in Film and Fiction By Douglas R. Egerton
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particularly when it comes to fact-based films and novels. Scholars are invariably pleased to hear that a forthcoming film will delve into the past, especially if it will introduce audiences to a lesser known person or episode. But actually reading the finished novel or watching the completed film can be a painful experience, as complicated or uncomfortable truths get smoothed into simplistic narratives, palatable for mainstream audiences. Or worse, facts become mangled, either because directors failed to consult specialists or because they willingly chose to alter the past. When taken to task by historians or informed viewers, filmmakers and scriptwriters invariably appear surprised by the criticism. As Connecticut congressman Joe Courtney watched Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln, he was stunned to see two of his state’s lawmakers vote against the Thirteenth Amendment. In reality, all had cast their votes in favor. After Courtney wrote to Spielberg, requesting changes in the DVD version of the film, screenwriter Tony Kushner defended the scene. “In making changes to the voting sequence, we adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama,” he assured The Wall Street Journal. “I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters.” Kushner reasoned that while all of Connecticut’s congressmen did indeed support the amendment, the state was not “solidly” proLincoln. (Actually, Lincoln carried every county
in Connecticut in the presidential election of 1860, and all but one in 1864.)¹ More recently, journalist and commentator Jamelle Bouie defended alterations of fact in Ava DuVernay’s 2014 movie Selma, including screenwriter Paul Webb’s creation of a tense meeting between Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson. “Selma isn’t a documentary, or even dramatized history. It is a film based on historical accounts, and like all films of its genre, it has a loose relationship to actual history,” Bouie insisted. “This is all to say that it’s wrong to treat nonfiction films—even biopics—as documentaries. Instead, it’s better to look at deviations from established history or known facts as creative choices— license in pursuit of art.”² Historians, of course, are well aware that Hollywood films are not documentaries, and that historical novels are not heavily footnoted works of nonfiction. Complex stories, historians concede, need to be distilled when adapted into a two-hour film, and lengthy congressional debates—or extended Supreme Court orations, as in the case of John Quincy Adams’ seven-hour appeal that was dramatically shortened in Spielberg’s 1997 film Amistad—require editing. Nor were Lincoln specialists shocked when Kushner invented dialogue for a scene of the president and Mary fighting behind closed doors; their often unhappy relationship and the tension caused by the war and the death
While the creators of historical films and novels may need to take some liberties when telling their stories, there is no clear consensus among filmmakers, writers, and scholars as to standards of accuracy in historical drama. Above: Screenwriter Tony Kushner on the set of Lincoln.
3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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2012 DREAMWORKS II DISTRIBUTION CO., LLC AND TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Historians have an uneasy relationship with popular culture,
2012 DREAMWORKS II DISTRIBUTION CO., LLC AND TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
of their son Willie are well documented. But what did Kushner mean by the “time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama?” That all filmmakers consciously mangle the facts, and so it is permissible to do so? And what to make of Bouie’s claim that “all films of its genre” have “a loose relationship to actual history?” Historians might rightly wonder just how loose that relationship can be before any connection between data and creative imagination simply falls apart. Can screenwriters or novelists cross a line that denies them the right to use “historical” in their “historical drama”? Most historians probably think so, but just where that hazy line exists is unclear. Southern novelist Sue Monk Kidd’s 2014 book The Invention of Wings fictionalizes the life of Sarah Grimké, the South Carolina-born abolitionist. Historians would not argue, surely, with Kidd’s creation of dialogue. But they should object to her portrayal of Denmark Vesey, the bondmanturned-carpenter who was hanged in 1822 for plot-
ting a major slave rebellion, as a polygamist and serial womanizer. The historical Vesey, by comparison, had three wives during the 39 years he lived in Charleston (17 of which he was an enslaved domestic), but no evidence suggests that the marriages were anything but sequential. Since only his third wife, Susan, died a free woman, the most likely explanations for the endings of his first two marriages is that the women’s owners refused to allow him to buy their freedom after he successfully purchased his own in 1799.3 Kidd’s unfortunate fabrication did not prevent the novel from topping the New York Times bestseller list or being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. One wonders, however, if readers would have been as forgiving had Jennifer Chiaverini, in her 2014 novel Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, a fictionalized study of former slave Elizabeth Keckley, depicted Mary Lincoln’s husband as a serial womanizer. Is the line only crossed if readers find the historical alterations unpalatable? And if so, scholars might wonder why so many readers are willing to accept Kidd’s portrayal of a black ac57 FALL 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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tivist who risked his life to free his enslaved children as a brute who humiliated his wife by openly consorting with mistresses. Novelists and filmmakers often reply that it is up to their audiences to understand, as Bouie argued, that their work is not completely factual. But how many of the thousands who read The Invention of Wings went on to read scholarly monographs on slavery in Charleston or biographies of Denmark Vesey? Spielberg promised to give DVD copies of Lincoln to any school library that requested one, which suggests that he supports his film’s use as a teaching tool. When a film opens with the claim that it is based on a true story, is it not reasonable to assume that the only alterations of fact are designed to clarify plot points or a character’s motivation? When, for example, at the end of Lincoln, congressman Thaddeus Stevens folds a copy of the Thirteenth Amendment and takes it back to his residence, Kushner strongly hints that Stevens had a romantic attachment to Lydia Hamilton Smith, his African-American housekeeper. But most biographers suspect that allegations of a common-law marriage of sorts were indeed true—because Smith was of mixed race, an actual marriage was illegal under Pennsylvania law—and curiously, the original copy of the amendment in Cornell University’s library had in fact been folded.
11 Perhaps the best example of the thorny relationship between history and popular culture is Edward Zwick’s 1989 movie Glory. For most American viewers, the film was their introduction to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. Brilliantly acted, dramatically shot, and featuring a haunting score performed by the Harlem Boys Choir, Glory was showered with awards and accolades, including an NAACP Image Award. No previous film about the Civil War had depicted so many black men in uniform, and it is now a staple in classrooms across the country. Viewers will find a good measure of toughminded reality in Glory, from the racism faced by the regiment’s black soldiers to the bloody, unsuccessful assault on Battery Wagner. Unlike Roland Emmerich’s 2000 The Patriot—which appeared to be set in a strange, all-white version of Revolutionary-era South Carolina rather than the actual colony, the only English mainland colony with a black majority—Glory engages the issue of race in a serious fashion. For white Americans who had no idea that black Americans were important combatants during the final two years of the Civil War, the film was a revelation. Journalist Peter Burchard’s 1965 book, One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment, returned to print in 1990 with a new title (Glory: One Gal-
Actor Morgan Freeman (center) on the set of Edward Zwick’s 1989 movie Glory, which tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first AfricanAmerican regiment raised in the North during the Civil War.
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Robert Gould Shaw, the young colonel of the 54th Massachusetts, was one of the few characters in Glory who actually existed. Left: Shaw as he appeared in 1863. Right: Actor Matthew Broderick as Shaw in Glory.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
odists and Baptists from New York and Ohio who signed on with the 54th.5 Only one of the six main characters in the film, Rob Shaw, actually existed; the other five are composites or wholly invented. John Rawlings appears to be largely based on Peter Vogelsang, a Manhattan hotel clerk who, at age 46, was the oldest man in the regiment. Morgan Freeman, who was a robust 52 when he played the role, wonderfully depicts both the New Yorker’s steadying leadership in camp, as well as his ferocious abilities on the battlefield. (Vogelsang was shot through the lung on James Island, but not before shooting, bayonetting, or clubbing five Confederates.) In Glory, Rawlings holds the rank sergeant-major, the highest that can be awarded to a noncommissioned officer, although in fact that honor first went to the far younger Lewis Douglass, the eldest son of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Curiously, neither Lewis nor his younger brother Charles Douglass, the first New Yorker to enlist in the 54th, appears in the film, and in a brief scene featuring Frederick Douglass—who had not yet turned 45— he is played by a far older actor, perhaps because in the popular mind, Douglass was ever the whitemaned lion of abolition. Cabot Forbes, the character played by Cary Elwes, dies a major in the film, while the model for his character, Edward Needles “Ned” Hallowell, fought at Battery Wagner as a lieutenant colonel and was badly wounded but returned to lead the regiment until the war’s end. Shaw’s character is somewhat sanitized in the film. The real Shaw’s early use of racial epithets after being given command of the 54th does not appear in the movie, and the fictitious Thomas Searles is at one point called his childhood friend. In reality, the fact that Shaw’s contact with his men—his first real interaction with African Americans—quickly eroded his genteel racism is one of the more interesting aspects of his real-life story. Absent also is any reference to his brief marriage to Annie Haggerty, and the film inflates his role in the fighting on James Island on July 16, 1863. However, actor Matthew Broderick, a slight man of below average height, was 26 when the film was made and closely resembles the young colonel who died at the age of 25. Although more famous
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEFT); PREVIOUS SPREAD AND RIGHT: SCREENPROD / PHOTONONSTOP / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
lant Rush) and an image from the film on the paperback cover. Two years later, historian Russell Duncan published a new collection of Shaw letters, and then in 1999 produced a slim biography of the young colonel. Yet Glory also presents an incomplete and an inaccurate picture, and some of its flaws are significant. It goes perhaps farther than Lincoln or Selma in crossing that ill-defined line separating acceptable from ahistorical fiction. Unlike the campy Patriot or the intentionally hilarious Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Glory wishes to be taken seriously, and as a drama, it succeeds brilliantly. As history, however, the film stumbles far too often, and unnecessarily so. Perhaps the most egregious error is the suggestion that most of the soldiers in the 54th were former slaves. The reality is that the vast majority were born free in the North. Of its four central black characters, only Thomas Searles (played by Andre Braugher) accurately reflects the regiment’s demographics. This inaccuracy, perhaps, is designed to tell a larger truth about African Americans in the Union army: By the war’s end, of the roughly 178,000 black men who served in the army, approximately 141,000 were former slaves.4 Yet Glory is not set in an unnamed, fictitious regiment; its architect, Governor John A. Andrew, was a real person, as was Rob Shaw, its first commander. Compare it with the 69th New York Infantry, which was famously dubbed the “Irish Brigade.” Would Zwick or screenwriter Kevin Jarre have thought it acceptable to film a story of that regiment and people it with German-speaking actors? In keeping with their fiction that the 54th was a regiment of southern runaways, Zwick and Jarre depict the literate Searles as a cultural outsider in his company. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, the soldiers stand in a circle, praying and singing on the night before battle. For Searles, the southern ring-shout is strange and unfamiliar, although he finally joins in. In reality, that scene was lifted from the memoirs of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Massachusetts-born minister and reformer, and described soldiers in his 1st South Carolina Volunteers. They were Carolinians fresh out of slavery—hardly the free-born Meth-
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEFT); PREVIOUS SPREAD AND RIGHT: SCREENPROD / PHOTONONSTOP / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
drew did not receive permission to raise the regiment until mid-January 1863, and the first recruits arrived in Readville in late February.
11 On occasion, the film’s mistakes even seep into serious nonfiction histories. In her 1999 book Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass, biographer Maria Diedrich describes what Charles and Lewis Douglass discovered upon arriving at Camp Meigs. “For months the Massachusetts 54th remained without uniforms or proper shoes,” she claims. “[T]heir weapons were ridiculously outmoded.” Diedrich evidently learned that fiction from Glory. In reality, enlistees were handed boots and new uniforms on the day of their arrival at Readville, and by April 1863, the regiment was outfitted with 1853 Pattern Enfields, a Britishmanufactured rifled musket favored by soldiers on both sides of the conflict.8 One also sees evidence of the film’s influence in Joseph E. Stevens’ 1999 monograph, 1863: The Rebirth of a Nation. Stevens writes of the contingent of New Bedford men who caught the train for Readville, claiming that the recruits were “disillusioned by what they saw,” as there “was nothing to eat, and no one seemed to have any idea of where they should go.” Although that description mirrors the muddy confusion of the arrival
The July 18, 1863, assault on Battery Wagner on Morris Island—part of the Confederate defenses of Charleston, South Carolina— serves as the dramatic ending of Glory. While costly, the battle did not bring an end to the 54th Massachusetts, as the movie implies. Above: The men of the 54th begin the attack on Wagner in Glory. Opposite page: Kurz & Allison’s dramatic 1890 rendition of the struggle for Wagner (above); Denzel Washington as Private Silas Trip (inset).
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (KURZ & ALLISON); ENTERTAINMENT PICTURES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (LEFT); SCREENPROD / PHOTONONSTOP / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (RIGHT)
today as a Broadway song-and-dance man, Broderick perfectly captures the haunted expression that Shaw almost surely wore as he gazed toward Battery Wagner on the afternoon of July 18, as he had twice warned Hallowell after the James Island skirmish that he felt sure he would die in the next battle.6 Shaw’s actual white officers and black recruits did describe him as a tough taskmaster, but the episode in the film in which Private Silas Trip is flogged for briefly deserting Camp Meigs, while powerful, never happened. (The scene, however, undoubtedly helped Denzel Washington win the Oscar for best supporting actor.) The army had given up corporal punishment two years before, and as the military drew no distinction between going absent without leave and permanently deserting, the fictitious Trip might have been shot. But as suggested by the real-life experience of John M. Smith, an African-American private in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, the army needed live soldiers in 1863. (After going missing from camp, Smith, a Maine stove peddler, was arrested in Boston but allowed to return to his unit.)7 Nor did the soldiers spend as much time at Camp Meigs in Readville, Massachusetts, before leaving for the front. In the movie, Shaw and Thomas Searles encounter one another by the camp’s tents—they actually resided in wooden barracks— on Christmas night in 1862. In fact, Governor An-
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (KURZ & ALLISON); ENTERTAINMENT PICTURES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (LEFT); SCREENPROD / PHOTONONSTOP / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (RIGHT)
scene in Glory, the truth is far different. One of the New Bedford recruits, former sea cook James Henry Gooding, reported that Shaw and his efficient officers quickly saw to “the comfort of those now in camp,” and when they reached the barracks—recently vacated by white troops who had shipped South—they “found a nice warm fire and a good supper in readiness.”9 Even more recently, historian Alan Axelrod indicates that Shaw “volunteered” for the assault on Battery Wagner, despite knowing that the mission “was close to suicidal.”10 Here again are the film’s errors bleeding into nonfiction scholarship. Although it is certainly true that Shaw had been pushing to get his regiment into a fight, fearing that the army intended them only for fatigue duty or guerrilla operations such as the June 1863 burning of Darien, Georgia, ordered by Colonel James Montgomery—a disreputable episode that Glory gets exactly right—the decision to place the 54th in the lead column during the July 18 attack on Battery Wagner was the decision of General Truman Seymour. An avowed racist, Seymour infamously remarked that the assault might have the virtue
of getting rid of the black soldiers under his command. But George Crockett Strong, who actually offered the task to Shaw, honestly wanted to see what the regiment could do. Shaw and Hallowell both understood that their regiment was in for a rugged evening, but Strong assured them that Wagner had no more than 300 soldiers defending it, their numbers seriously reduced after days of shelling. In fact, Strong underestimated the Confederate strength by roughly 1,400 soldiers, who sat out the bombardment in a capacious bombproof covered with tons of sand.11 The failed assault was indeed suicidal, but nobody in the Union army knew that when the order was given to advance. The July 18 assault on Battery Wagner provides a tragic but dramatic ending for a two-hour movie. Yet in leaving its story there, Glory implies that the battle brought an end to the regiment. All six of the main characters appear to die in the assault, although viewers are never shown the bodies of Forbes and Rawlins. The last soldier seen holding the regiment’s U.S. flag is Private Trip, who dies. In reality, a soldier named William Carney carried the banner away from the battle, ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76 63 FALL 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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BOOKS & AUTHORS
ANNE CODDINGTON
The B&A Q&A: Ronald S. Coddington few know more about civil war photography than Ronald S. Coddington. For over a decade, he has collected the images and stories of Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians and shared them with the public—both through his series of books on Civil War military photos and in the magazine he publishes, Military Images. We recently sat down with Coddington to learn more about his work, including his involvement in a new project, Civil War Photo Sleuth.
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B&A Ronald S. Coddington mans the Military Images booth during a recent artifact and collectibles show in Gettysburg.
Growing up in New Jersey, my parents took me and my brothers on daytrips to historical sites. One of those trips was to Gettysburg. I must have been about 10 years old. I remember coming away fascinated with what I saw. Our family also enjoyed antiquing, and we spent happy times hunting for treasure at flea markets. It was at one of these sales when I found a table covered in old photo albums, the bindings long gone and the pages haphazardly stacked in loose piles. I began sorting through them and found a photo of a Civil War soldier. I was instantly fascinated. Here was a young man in uniform staring back at me, and he had an intensity of purpose that captured my imagination. This image was unlike anything I recalled
seeing in my history books. I spent $4 of my hard-earned newspaper boy money to purchase it. This was in July 1977. I was 14 years old. Forty years later, I feel the same enthusiasm for Civil War portrait photography. I’ve come to appreciate that these rare portraits humanize the terrible conflict that raged on our soil during the four bloodiest and most violent years in our history. When I see these photos, which were personal, intimate objects shared with family, friends, and comrades at a time of war, I am reminded of these soldiers’ courage, and my own responsibilities as an American, and as a world citizen. I did not know that there were men and women across the country having a similar shared experience, one that had its roots two decades earlier. In the 1950s, as the last blue and gray soldiers passed away, plans were underway to commem-
orate the approaching centennial, and Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox popularized the war for the current generations. Civil War artifacts began to show up for sale at flea markets, antique shops, in newspaper classifieds, and elsewhere. Collectors active during this time told me that at first, guns and uniforms formed the core of the market. Photographs were given away as freebies. It did not take the sellers long to realize that collectors would pay for the photos too. You’ve published four books of Civil War photographs. How do you find the images you include?
The images that illustrate my first book, Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories (2004), come from my own collection. I selected original, wartime soldier portraits, all in the carte de visite format.
CHUCK MYERS
How did you become interested in the Civil War in general and Civil War photography in particular?
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“ I’ve come to appreciate that these rare portraits humanize the terrible conflict that raged on our soil during the four bloodiest and most violent years in our history.” RONALD S. CODDINGTON ON HIS FASCINATION WITH CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY
CHUCK MYERS
You’ve also been the publisher of Military Images magazine since 2013. How did you get involved, and what are your plans for it in the future?
For the uninitiated, the carte de visite, or card photograph, was a French import that landed in America on the eve of the Civil War. These relatively small images, roughly the dimensions of modern trading cards, are largely forgotten today. They were cheap, able to be reproduced from a glass negative (cutting edge technology!), and a genuine phenomenon. Photo albums were invented to hold the countless images collected by families during the war years. I included 77 soldier photos in Union Faces. Each soldier was identified, and I told the stories of their lives and military service using primary sources such as military service and pension files from the National Archives, regimental history books, letters, diaries, newspaper reports, and other period documents. After Union Faces was published, my editor, the great and recently retired Bob Brugger, asked me what I wanted to do next. The idea of a second book had never crossed my mind. The logical next volume would focus on Confederates, but I only had a few such images in my collection—all unidentified. I turned to my fellow collectors for help and they came through in a big way. They provided the bulk of the images reproduced in Faces of the Confederacy (2008) and my other books, African American Faces of the Civil War (2012) and Faces of the Civil War Navies (2016). They will also be helping with my forthcoming book about nurses.
Military Images had its origins in 1975, when collecting soldier photos was in its infancy. Its founder, Harry Roach, a graduate student in history, was inspired by two events: a Civil War photo gifted to him and the publication of William Frassanito’s landmark battlefield photographic study, Gettysburg: A Journey in Time. Frassanito’s photo sleuthing shed new and exciting light on iconic battlefield images. Roach was inspired by the stories of the common soldiers, and decided that the time was right for a publication dedicated solely to Civil War soldier photography. The inaugural issue of MI was published in 1979, and it included a feature interview with Frassanito. Little information was available to collectors who were eager to be educated and to share their finds. MI filled the void. Moreover, it fostered a community of devoted enthusiasts, including me, from around the country. Roach sold MI in 2000, and it changed ownership again in 2004. In 2013, I purchased the magazine and became the fourth editor and publisher. The job plays to my professional background in journalism and design, my work as an author, and my passion for collecting. I came into the role at a unique time. The collecting field had matured, and basic information was only a Google search away. Social media had created new venues to congregate, discuss, and share photos. The market for the finest images had continued to grow despite the sluggish economy. And the Library of Congress had recently debuted the Liljenquist Family Collection, a large grouping of images assembled by Tom Liljenquist and his sons in memory of President Abraham Lincoln and the estimated 750,000 war dead. This was the first time a major institution had placed a significant cul-
tural value on original photos of Civil War soldiers. I spent the next six months considering all of these changes. I also listened to collectors, both veterans and those new to the field, and conducted a subscriber survey. I came away from these investigations firm in the belief that MI was as necessary now than at any time in its history. I am very proud of what we’re doing, and it could not happen without the passion of the collecting community. The magazine is a reflection of their enthusiasm and energy, and their deep commitment to preserving history. Your latest venture, Civil War Photo Sleuth, aims to help identify currently unknown individuals in wartime photographs. How will it work?
Before getting to the how, it is important to understand why cwps (civilwarphotosleuth.com) was created. Putting a name to the face of an unidentified soldier or sailor is incredibly important to collectors. For many of us in the community, it is at the core of what we do. One of the champions of soldier identification is Kurt Luther, an assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech with an emphasis on crowdsourc-
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B&A ence points on each face. These points are compared against all the images in the archive to display potential matches, filtered by the tags supplied earlier. In our tests, we’ve been able to identify unknown soldiers from more than 15,000 possibilities. cwps will also be an online community to discuss results and share information. Kurt said it best in his column: “While technology remains a valuable tool, photo sleuthing ultimately involves a human process, requiring hard work and careful research from ourselves, and building on those who came before us.” We’re actively seeking individuals to become beta testers later this year. More information is available at civilwarphotosleuth.com.
Civil War Photo Sleuth employs face recognition software that measures the ratios between landmarks detected on an unidentified face and finds the most similar ratios in a database of identified faces. The technology works on both modern photos and historical ones, like these images taken during the Civil War.
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COURTESY J. MATTHEW GALLMAN
To achieve our goal, we’re building a comprehensive online archive of Civil War portraits of soldiers, sailors, and civilians. The sources that will ultimately feed the archive include public and private collections scattered across the world—from a single image owned by the family of a veteran, to well-known public collections, to the holdings of the Civil War photo collecting community. These images will be uploaded and tagged with key information. This can include the rank and branch insignia on a uniform, the name of the photographer, details about the format of the photo, any writing on the front or back of the image, and more. Then, cwps uses state-of-the-art face recognition technology to analyze unique refer-
BETAFACE
ing. In 2015, Kurt launched a column in MI called Photo Sleuth. In it, he shares best practices and case studies for responsible soldier identification. This includes basic observations of uniforms, equipment, and backdrops, provenance, and painstaking research using primary documents, journals, books, databases, and other sources. Kurt founded cwps and is making it a reality in partnership with MI, Virginia Tech, and the National Science Foundation. cwps is a research tool with an ambitious goal, as Kurt described in his recent column. It “aims to bring together technology and community, creating an entirely new approach to researching Civil War portraits.”
COURTESY J. MATTHEW GALLMAN
BETAFACE
The Books That Built Me: J. Matthew Gallman
unlike many of my peers in the Civil War field, I did not grow up fascinated by the War Between the States. My father had a beautiful boxed set of Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command (1940), which I admired from a distance but did not pore over until decades later. I recall one boyhood visit from our North Carolina home to Gettysburg, where I stood before carefully stacked stones in Devil’s Den and studied the displayed copy of Alexander Gardner’s photograph “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter.” From there, I looked up at Little Round Top, where the statue of Union general Gouverneur Warren stares down upon his assembled foes. That made an impression, but it did not turn me into a Civil War historian. As a graduate student at Brandeis University I came to see myself (after an extended flirtation with the 17th century) as a “social historian” of the 19th century. I decided to write a dissertation about Philadelphia during the Civil War, approaching the conflict as an enormous social and economic “crisis” that required the City of Brotherly Love to respond in myriad ways. I wanted to write about workers, women, voluntarism, ritual, crime, business, and a host of topics that predated the war but changed—or perhaps did not change— during the sectional conflict. I concluded that I should learn something about the American Civil War first. I read widely. I began my crash course
by devouring Allan Nevins’ magisterial eight-volume Ordeal of the Union (1947– 1971), focusing on the final four books on the war years. This reading project taught me many things. By the time I began, Nevins had been dead for over a decade. He had published the first volume a decade before I was born. No doubt one can disagree with some of his points of fact or interpretation, but as I read I was overwhelmed with how brilliant these books were. It is, I concluded, a good thing to start with the older volumes. Nevins (like Freeman and so many others) also taught me the value of great prose. And, finally, while telling a story that was in fact far removed from my topical areas of interest, Nevins pushed
a broad interpretive structure that I still find compelling. It’s often said that you do not really begin to understand a topic until you are asked to teach it. When I began teaching the American Civil War in 1986 at Loyola College in Maryland, my bible was James McPherson’s Ordeal by Fire (1982). I had taken McPherson’s undergraduate course on the Civil War at Princeton, and when Ordeal by Fire was published a few years later, it almost amounted to a more detailed version of my lecture notes. Four years later McPherson covered the same terrain, in Pulitzer-winning fashion, in Battle Cry of Freedom. McPherson’s writing on soldiers’ motivations, the Battle of Antietam and contingency, black sol-
J. Matthew Gallman
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B&A
diers, the naval war, and Abraham Lincoln have shaped how I view the conflict. I am not a military historian, but I have read in the field. There are so many military historians to admire, both for their detailed grasp of complex topics and for their marvelous prose. Every time I pick up the latest from Earl Hess I learn something new. But for a single formative title, I would choose T. Harry Williams’ Lincoln and His Generals (1952).
Like Ordeal of the Union, here is a book that was a quarter-century old when I first read it (assigned by McPherson, in fact). Williams is excellent in examining the importance of relationships and administrative structures, as well as individual personalities, in shaping events. It is a narrative history driven by strong interpretations, offering one model for writing about the past. As a scholar and teacher I have turned
to dozens of published diaries and journals to help me understand and explain the war’s complexities. The list is long, but here are a few: Mary Chestnut’s Civil War (1981) is the classic diary of an elite Confederate woman; Letters of a Civil War Nurse: Cornelia Hancock, 1863–1865 (1971) brings to life a young, sometimes annoying but always fascinating, northern woman who decides to go to war; Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the escape of William
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“ As I look to the future I have been wrestling with how we should think about power and politics during the Civil War, and the importance of specific places and particular stories that illuminate bigger themes.” J. MATTHEW GALLMAN
and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860) is the truly amazing tale of a married couple who escaped from bondage when Ellen Craft— a biracial enslaved woman—successfully posed as a white man; and Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (1989) is the account of Robert E. Lee’s top artillery officer, who was barely 28 years old when the guns roared at Gettysburg. These are all highly personal accounts of very distinctive events, written in different forms at different times. But each underscores the importance of the individual opinion and experience in shaping history. And all are superb reads. I first dipped into the scholarship on Civil War fiction in graduate school, reading the crucial volumes by Edmund Wilson (Patriotic Gore, 1962) and Daniel Aaron (The Unwritten War, 1973), but at the time I was not satisfied with how they were defining the scope of their studies. When I decided to turn to my own analysis of wartime culture I found more inspiration from Alice Fahs’ The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (2001) and Gary Gallagher’s The Union War (2011). Fahs offered a much broader understanding of popular literature as a source for interpreting the Civil War years. Gallagher (here and elsewhere) demonstrated the historic value in oft-neglected printed sources. In my own recent work, Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front (2015), I waded deeply into novels, short stories, songs, poems, cartoons, and all manner of popular public writings. The older literary scholars were right that much of this massive output, although of historical interest, is of limited artistic value. For the pure joy of reading great prose uncovering important themes, I return again and again to Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863), and I recently embarked on a reconsideration of Alcott’s Little Women (1868) as a book about the northern home front. When I first decided to shift my focus to the Civil War, one of my best friends
went to a used bookstore in Boston and bought me a wonderful old edition of Francis Trevelyan Miller’s 10-volume Photographic History of the Civil War (1911). This massive compendium of wartime photographs provided a different glimpse into the war’s many faces and facets. While Miller faithfully reproduced a huge array of photographs, William A. Frassanito’s Gettysburg: A Journey in Time (1975) treated the photograph as source. Frassanito, an indefatigable sleuth, sought to identify the specific location where iconic photographs had been taken. Among his many discoveries was that Alexander Gardner’s famed photograph of the Devil’s Den sharpshooter was not quite what it appeared to be. The picture was indeed of a dead Confederate soldier, but he was no sharpshooter and he did not die precisely where Gardner and his assistants had posed the poor man. Even now, I like to start my Civil War class by showing my students Gardner’s “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter” and discussing what it does and does not tell us about the past. As I look to the future I have been wrestling with how we should think about power and politics during the Civil War, and the importance of specific places and particular stories that illuminate bigger themes. These thoughts lead me to a book I read long ago, Phillip Shaw Paludan’s short gem, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (1981). Set in western North Carolina, Victims is a close reading of a powerful moment in January 1863 when Confederate soldiers killed 13 men they believed were Unionist guerrillas. The study of guerrilla warfare during the Civil War is a field that has grown dense with great new scholarship, but Paludan’s book set a standard that is hard to meet. As always, it seems, looking forward to new topics and questions requires that I keep one eye firmly on those who have come before. J. MATTHEW GALLMAN IS A PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA. THE AUTHOR OR EDITOR OF 10 BOOKS, HE IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON A STUDY OF NORTHERN DEMOCRATS DURING THE CIVIL WAR.
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AMERICAN ILIAD
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of public property that directly aided the Confederate war effort. Yes, Union soldiers ransacked farms in search of foodstuffs, but the legitimacy of living off the countryside when necessary was well established in the laws and customs of war. Yes, Union soldiers sometimes stole family heirlooms and committed acts of vandalism, but assaults, rapes, and killings of civilians were rarer than the march’s later reputation would suggest. (Evidence has been found for approximately eight instances of rape of southern white women, although it is suspected that considerably more African-American women may have been sexually assaulted.) 4 On top of that, Gone With the Wind notwithstanding, few houses in Georgia were put to the torch during the march. In 1955 an amateur historian meticulously retraced the route taken by the Union XIV Corps, using as his guide a detailed series of maps made by the unit’s topographical engineer. The surviving maps, covering a 60-mile stretch of the route, indicated all houses, barns, and outbuildings along the line of the march. Of these, two structures bear the notation “ruined.” A third was “on fier [sic]” as the topographer passed by. The amateur sleuth was able to locate the sites of 72 of the houses shown on the maps, saw that 22 of them were still standing, and, upon questioning the locals, learned that nine others had definitely burned or been torn down after the war was over. Having been raised to believe that Sherman’s troops destroyed everything in their path, the man assumed that many of the 41 houses unaccounted for must have been burned by Union soldiers. But he could determine with certainty the fate of only three: the same three shown on the topographer’s maps.5 Towns and villages burned during the march are even scarcer, creating for Georgians the somewhat awkward problem of sustaining a belief in the all-destructive fury of Sher-
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man’s army while also taking pride in the many antebellum buildings that grace their towns. Since the governing conviction is that every other town got put to the torch, it becomes imperative to explain why their own hometown escaped the flames. But Georgians have proven equal to the task, and folklorist Elissa R. Henken has compiled a list of their rationalizations. Covington, for instance, was supposedly spared because Sherman spent the night there in the home of an unnamed West Point classmate. Madison purportedly owes its salvation to an old girlfriend of Sherman’s who lived in the town. In Milledgeville it’s said that a Freemason prevailed upon Sherman not to burn the town, since Sherman was supposedly a Mason himself (he emphatically was not). Numerous other Georgia towns have similar cherished stories.6 Some years ago I gave a presentation about Sherman’s march to a group of southerners, many of them members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I told them what historians knew about what did and did not happen during the march. By the time I concluded, the audience was pretty well convinced—a tribute to their ability to absorb and accept new evidence. Yet at lunchtime the event organizer overheard one audience member say to another, “I’m sure he’s right, but I need to believe it the other way.” A lot of Americans need to believe it the other way. And so the question remains: Why? As I have suggested, part of the explanation centers on the march’s durable reputation as the ultimate act of destruction. But the other half—and I would argue the most important half—hinges on what Sherman said about the march, because in the American Iliad, Sherman’s voice is that of a prophet. We will confront that voice in the next issue. MARK GRIMSLEY, A HISTORY PROFESSOR AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, IS THE AUTHOR OF SEVERAL BOOKS, INCLUDING AND KEEP MOVING ON: THE VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN, MAY-JUNE 1864 (2002) AND THE HARD HAND OF WAR: UNION MILITARY POLICY TOWARD SOUTHERN CIVILIANS, 1861-1865 (1995). HE HAS ALSO WRITTEN MORE THAN 50 ARTICLES AND ESSAYS.
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to seal his corpse into a bed sheet before they carry it out of the house, just as they carried his wounded body in. The film’s quietness returns in the final scene, as the Farnsworth women wait on the porch for Confederate soldiers to arrive and take McBurney’s body away. The camera recedes slowly, putting the Farnsworth gate between the audience and the women. They have survived the invasion of their home, and in doing so have created their own, sequestered community of violence. It appears, then, The Beguiled is a true Civil War film after all.
STEREOSCOPE
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explanation, and does not bring it up again. That he is an Irish immigrant, a bounty soldier, and possibly a coward also serves to prevent conversations about slavery that a Union soldier might otherwise have had with southern white women. These elements of plot and characterization allow Coppola to (mostly) ignore history and focus instead on the southern gothic vibe of Farnsworth and the interpersonal, psychosexual dynamics that McBurney’s arrival catalyzes. “You can trust me in your place, ma’am,” he reassures Miss Martha. But we know not to trust the sly look in his big brown eyes. Almost immediately, McBurney inaugurates a campaign of his own, assessing the needs and desires of the Farnsworth women and manipulating them accordingly. Standing at a window with the shy Edwina, he raves about her beauty and independent spirit. Sipping brandy with Miss Martha, McBurney compliments her strength as the head of household. He tells Amy, his savior, that she is his “best friend” in the house, that he relies on her for everything. He does not have to work hard to woo Alicia (Elle Fanning), the petulant teenager; she makes eyes at him from the beginning. Through all of his flirting, McBurney makes the Farnsworth women believe that although they saved his life, it is he who has rescued them from the tedium of daily wartime survival. And they love him for it. The mood in the house changes, however, when McBurney sneaks away from his makeshift room in the parlor and makes his way upstairs to Alicia’s bedroom. This is a profound breach of etiquette, an invasion of the women’s privacy. When Edwina discovers his treachery, she shoves him down the stairs and a bone in his leg snaps. The women panic and drag him back into his parlor room, blood staining their snowy white nightdresses. It is a scene reminiscent of Gone With the Wind, when Scarlett shoots the Union straggler on his way up the stairs of Tara, and Melanie offers her nightgown as a shroud. Back in the Farnsworth parlor, Miss
MEGAN KATE NELSON IS A WRITER AND HISTORIAN WHO LIVES IN LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF RUIN NATION: DESTRUCTION AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (2012) AND TREMBLING EARTH: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE OKEFENOKEE SWAMP (2005).
Martha amputates McBurney’s leg. That she accomplishes it without killing McBurney is perhaps the most remarkable flight of fancy in the entire film. This is another pivotal moment, when The Beguiled’s quietness turns to menace and Civil War gender history comes back into play. McBurney awakens to a missing leg and loses his mind. He rants and raves, throws furniture around the parlor, and accuses the “vengeful bitches” of Farnsworth House of taking his leg on purpose. Historians of Civil War wounding and disability—such as Brian Craig Miller, author of Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (2015)—will recognize this McBurney, the man who equates the strength and wholeness of his body with his manhood. “I’d rather be dead than a man without a leg,” he shouts at Miss Martha and the girls. “I’m not even a man anymore. You butchered me!” At this point the danger that McBurney embodies from the beginning of the film comes to fruition. He gets ahold of Miss Martha’s revolver, and threatens to kill them all. “We are not safe with him in the house,” Miss Martha concludes. This sets in motion another campaign, one that the Farnsworth women wage against the Union soldier who has invaded their home. That they rid themselves of McBurney at the dinner table, making polite conversation and wearing their best clothes and jewelry, is part of their reassertion of female power. They use their sewing skills
“GOD OF WAR” CONTINUED FROM P. 39
fire-eating secessionist who killed himself after the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on April 9, 1865, Lee was not a suicidal, diehard secessionist. In each of these late-war “Lee to the rear” instances, he was taking a calculated risk—one that had the desired effect of inspiring his men at times when the army was in peril. Lee’s men recognized his qualities. To them, the survival of Lee—the physical embodiment of their cause—was the army’s only opportunity for success. As long as Lee remained alive, there was still a chance for Confederate victory in the eyes of the battle-hardened veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia. For both the soldiers and the general, Lee’s performance fit the narrative of a faultless leader: personal sacrifice to save the army, to save Virginia, to save the Confederate cause—and even if he could not do that, to do everything in his power to try. BARTON A. MYERS IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CIVIL WAR HISTORY AT WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY AND THE AUTHOR OF EXECUTING DANIEL BRIGHT: RACE, LOYALTY, AND GUERRILLA VIOLENCE IN A COASTAL CAROLINA COMMUNITY, 1861-1865 (2009) AND REBELS AGAINST THE CONFEDERACY: NORTH CAROLINA’S UNIONISTS (2014). HIS LATEST BOOK (CO-EDITED WITH BRIAN D. MCKNIGHT), THE GUERRILLA HUNTERS: IRREGULAR CONFLICTS DURING THE CIVIL WAR, WAS PUBLISHED BY LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS IN APRIL.
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its demise, these figures came to parity. While the end of the Dix-Hill cartel was only one factor in the transition to a “hard war” in 1864, the increasing dread with which soldiers held prison made them fight in situations in which they would have surrendered a year earlier. For those who did surrender, life as a prisoner of war changed dramatically after the collapse of the exchange regime. Camps that had been nearly empty quickly became overcrowded. New Union prison compounds opened at Point Lookout (August 1863), Rock Island (December 1863), and Elmira (July 1864). Confederates followed
officers and all, let them have them have their horses to plow with and, if you like, their guns to shoot crows with.… Give them the most liberal and honorable of terms.” While most Confederates who surrendered in the coming months were part of large formal surrenders at Appomattox Court House, Bennett Place, and other sites, a significant number of individual soldiers also chose to lay down their arms. Among them was Alexander Hunter, who surrendered for a sixth time in April 1865. On a recruiting detachment from the Army of Northern Virginia when he heard of Lee’s surrender, Hunt-
“Let them surrender and go home, they will not take up arms again. Let them all go, officers and all, let them have their horses to plow with and, if you like, their guns to shoot crows with.… Give them the most liberal and honorable of terms.” ABRAHAM LINCOLN, MARCH 1865
a similar path, reopening Belle Isle (May 1863) and opening new prisons at Cahaba (June 1863), Danville (November 1863), Andersonville (February 1864), and Millen (September 1864). Hastily constructed, these later prisons were the stuff of nightmares. And without the prospect of exchange, escape attempts witnessed a significant escalation in 1864. In the war’s final months, however, the culture of surrender took one final turn. In early 1865, the Lincoln administration reopened limited prisoner exchange, a move that tacitly signaled its intention to treat surrendering Confederates magnanimously. “Let them surrender and go home,” Lincoln told Grant and Sherman in March 1865, “they will not take up arms again. Let them all go,
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er “determined to reach Johnston’s army [in North Carolina], and if he surrendered, to join Kirby Smith in Louisiana.” Before he could rendezvous with Johnston, however, he learned that the entire Confederacy had collapsed. After considering and rejecting the prospect of continuing the war as a guerrilla, Hunter elected to surrender himself to Union officials at Petersburg and, like the men at Appomattox, received his parole.36 The Civil War may have been both more civilized and more savage than we thought. The ubiquity of surrender throughout the conflict indicates that most soldiers thought they were fighting in a civilized war, one in which they could expect humane treatment as pris- ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76
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“I SURRENDER!” CONTINUED FROM P. 75
oners. These expectations, however, did not remain constant throughout the conflict, as prison conditions and the prospect of exchange shifted. And for those whom the enemy deemed illegitimate soldiers, including African Americans and guerrillas, surrender was always a risky, often fatal, choice. While recent scholarship has emphasized some of the Civil War’s more brutal and destructive aspects, looking at how and when soldiers chose to surrender reveals a very different picture of their experience, one in which the white flag featured much more prominently than the black flag. DAVID SILKENAT IS A SENIOR LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF DRIVEN FROM HOME: NORTH CAROLINA’S REFUGEE CRISIS (2016) AND MOMENTS OF DESPAIR: SUICIDE, DIVORCE, AND DEBT IN CIVIL WAR ERA NORTH CAROLINA (2011). HE IS CURRENTLY FINISHING A BOOK ON SURRENDER DURING THE CIVIL WAR.
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an action for which he would receive a Congressional Medal of Honor. Like the fictitious Trip, at least, Carney was a runaway slave. (He had been an enslaved oysterman near Norfolk, Vir-
Grand Army Men
ginia, but by 1859 he was living in New Bedford and training for the ministry.) Having been wounded two days before on James Island, Vogelsang was not part of the assault on Wagner, but like Ned Hallowell, after convalescing, he returned to the regiment and served until the war’s end. The film also ends with crawling text that erroneously informs the audience that Battery Wagner was never captured; actually, it fell to Union forces on the night of September 6, 1863. Instead, the film could have provided a brief history of the regiment’s later service. Glory ends just six months into the 54th’s career; the regiment would serve another 26 months in Florida and South Carolina, seeing action at Olustee, Honey Hill, and Wateree Junction. In a curious irony, the film’s truncated timeline may be due to the regiment’s first appearance in popular culture, Louisa May Alcott’s short story My Contraband. Written just months after the assault on Battery Wagner, Alcott’s tale— initially called The Brothers—revolves around Faith Dane, a nurse in a Union army hospital. Two of those in her charge are Bob, a light-skinned runaway slave and contraband, and “Captain Ned,” a wounded Confederate officer. At length, Faith discovers that the two men are half-brothers, and that Ned raped Lucy, Bob’s wife, who then committed suicide. In the story’s conclusion, the two meet atop Battery Wagner’s parapet, where Bob, now a soldier in the 54th, can legally exact his revenge.12 Alcott’s tale helped to establish the narrative that July 18 was the high point of the 54th’s service. (In fact, the regiment suffered 13 soldiers killed, 66 wounded, and eight missing in February 1864 at Olustee, Florida, a casualty rate roughly the same as at Battery Wagner.)13 That viewpoint continued in Peter Burchard’s One Gallant Rush, which also ended with the fight for Battery Wagner, as if the regiment ceased to exist when its first colonel perished. The reality is much richer. The unit liberated hundreds of enslaved southerners in the Carolina Lowcountry, was the honor guard at the rededication ceremony at Fort Sumter in April 1865, and served as an army of occupation in Charleston during the following summer. The saga of the 54th ended only on September 2, 1865, when it arrived back at Boston’s Commercial Wharf. Altogether, 1,442 men, black and white, served in the regiment. Ninety-three, including Shaw, were killed in action or died shortly after being wounded. Forty-three were declared missing. Another 107 died from disease or accident, and 34, including Corporal James Henry Gooding, died while prisoners of war.14 It is possible that nothing that historians say will prod novelists and screenwriters into telling a more accurate version of the past. Perhaps scholars should be content that film studios squeeze the occasional historical film between innumerable superhero movies, or that some novelists are interested enough in our rich American past to set their stories in an earlier era. Certainly readers and audiences need to be more discerning, and not simply assume that what they see on the screen or page is sound history. But artists working within popular culture also bear responsibility for their work, to the past, and to the facts, so far as they can be known. To fall back on the “it’s just a movie” defense, or to insist that a conscious mangling of history stands within a “time-honored” or legitimate standard is lazy. The past is too complex and fascinating to require fictional embellishments. DOUGLAS R. EGERTON, WHO TEACHES HISTORY AT LE MOYNE COLLEGE, IS THE AUTHOR OF SEVEN BOOKS. HIS MOST RECENT IS THUNDER AT THE GATES: THE BLACK CIVIL WAR REGIMENTS THAT REDEEMED AMERICA (2016), WHICH WAS THE CO-WINNER OF THE LINCOLN PRIZE.
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4
See, e.g., Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York, 1995).
5
David J. De Laubenfels, “With Sherman Through Georgia: A Journal” Georgia Historical Quarterly 41 (1957): 288–300.
6
Elissa R. Henken, “Taming the Enemy: Georgia Narratives About the Civil War,” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 40 no. 3 (September–December 2003): 289–297.
Notes
ety Papers (Richmond, 1880): 8:107–108; Freeman, R.E. Lee, 3:320–321. Freeman argued that the moment when the shell passed below Traveller while he was leading Harris’ Mississippians to the front on May 12 “was the narrowest escape from death that he had experienced since that day, seventeen years before, when the sentinel had fired on him as he and [P.G.T.] Beauregard had come out of the covered way at Vera Cruz.” 15 James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America, (Philadelphia, 1896), 614–615. 16 Fremantle, Fremantle Diary, 197. 17 J. William Jones, Southern Historical Society Papers (Richmond, VA, 1880): 8:32.
SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
”GOD OF WAR” (Pages 30–39, 74) 1
AMERICAN ILIAD (Pages 26–27, 72–73) 1
Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York, 1985); Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North From the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (Chapel Hill, 2003). Examples of titles that foreground “Sherman’s March” include Burke Davis, Sherman’s March: The First Full-Length Narrative of William T. Sherman’s Devastating March Through Georgia and the Carolinas (New York, 1980); James Reston, Sherman’s March and Vietnam (New York, 1984); Anne Sarah Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel Hill, 2014). Numerous books deal exclusively with the March to the Sea. I know of just one major work devoted only to the march through the Carolinas.
2
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 60th Anniversary Edition (New York, 1996), 440.
3
“The Bible Is America’s Favorite Book, Followed by Gone With the Wind,” Harris Interactive Press Release, April 8, 2008: media.theharrispoll.com/documents/ Harris-Interactive-Poll-Research-The-Bible-is-Americas-Favorite-Book-Followed-byGone-with-the-Wind-2008-04.pdf (retrieved July 10, 2017); “Gone But Not Forgotten: Gone With the Wind Is Still America’s Favorite Movie,” December 17, 2014: theharrispoll. com/health-and-life/Gone_but_Not_Forgotten__Gone_with_the_Wind_is_Still_America_s_ Favorite_Movie.html (retrieved July 10, 2017).
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John S.D. Eisenhower, So Far From God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (New York, 1989), 278; Douglas Southall Freeman, R.E. Lee: A Biography (New York, 1934), 1:223. Lee was also under fire in a dangerous situation during the siege of Vera Cruz on March 7, 1847.
2
Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill, 1989), 172.
3
J.B. Minor, “Gen. Robert E. Lee Under Fire,” Confederate Veteran, 17 (1909): 333.
4 Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy, 265. 5
Arthur Fremantle, The Fremantle Diary: Being the Journal of Lieutenant Colonel James Arthur Lyon Fremantle, Coldstream Guards, On His Three Months in the Southern States., ed. Walter Lord (Boston, 1954), 197–198, 214.
6 Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy, 91, 92. 7
J. Tracy Power, Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox (Chapel Hill, 1998), 23.
8
Gordon C. Rhea, The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7–12, 1864 (Baton Rouge, 1997), 89–91.
9 Freeman, R.E. Lee, 3:313–314. 10 John Brown Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York, 1903), 286. 11 Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War, 278; Rhea, Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, 343. 12 Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War, 279; Freeman, R.E. Lee, 3:318; Rhea, Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, 343. For an account that places Lee in front of the 49th Virginia of Pegram’s Brigade (Hoffman) during the same moment, see J. William Jones, ed., Southern Historical Society Papers (Richmond, VA, 1880): 8:562– 565. 13 I.G. Bradwell, “Spotsylvania, May 12, 13, 1864,” Confederate Veteran 28 (1920): 102–103. 14 J. William Jones, ed., Southern Historical Soci-
”I SURRENDER!” (Pages 40–53, 75–76) 1
W. Gart Johnson, “Prison Life at Harpers’ Ferry and on Johnson’s Island,” Confederate Veteran 2 (1894): 242.
2
Melvin Grigsby, The Smoked Yank (1888), 51.
3 Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics (1861), 19. 4
Earl Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle (1997), 47.
5
Samuel S. Boggs, Eighteen Months a Prisoner (1887), 6
6
Rice C. Bull, Soldiering: Civil War Diary of Rice C. Bull, ed. K. Jack Bauer (1977), 134, 158.
7
J.W. Minnich, “Famous Rifles,” Confederate Veteran 30 (1922): 247-248.
8
Louis Leon, Diary of a Tar Heel Confederate Soldier (1913), 60.
9
William W. Day, Fifteen Months in Dixie (1889), 5.
10 Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle, 9–15. 11 Samuel Hawkins Byers, What I Saw in Dixie (1868), 4. 12 Henry Harrison Eby, Observations of an Illinois Boy (1910), 126. 13 John James Geer, Beyond the Lines (1863), 27-28. 14 William C. Bates, Stars and Stripes in Rebeldom (1862), 77. 15 Diary, April 13, 1865, William B. Gore Papers, New York Historical Society. 16 James C. Nisbet, Four Years on the Firing Line (1914), 312. 17 Isaac Johnston, Four Months in Libby (1864), 35 18 United States Sanitary Commission, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings (1864), 155.
19 United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901), Series 2, vol. 4: 266–268 (hereafter cited as OR).
The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (New York, 2016), 118. 7
Ibid., 184.
20 Alexander Hunter, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank (1905), 191, 198, 200, 218–221, 226–227, 306– 307, 313.
8
Maria Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York, 1999), 248; Egerton, Thunder At the Gates, 78.
21 John McElroy, Andersonville (1879), 98.
9
22 OR, Series 2, vol. 4: 499. 23 Otto Eisenschiml, Vermont General (1960), 50.
Joseph E. Stevens, 1863: Rebirth of a Nation (New York, 1999), 112–114; On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front, ed., Virginia Adams (Amherst, 1991), 5.
10 Alan Axelrod, The Twenty Most Significant Events of the Civil War: A Ranking (New York, 2017), 244. 11 Egerton, Thunder At the Gates, 125–128. 12 Louisa May Alcott, “My Contraband,” in Short Stories (New York, 2010 ed.), 23–39. 13 Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment (Boston, 1894), 172–173. 14 Ibid., 318–320.
24 OR, Series 2, vol. 4: 945–946. 25 OR, Series 2, vol. 5: 940–941. 26 OR, Series 2, vol. 6: 21–22. 27 Arthur W. Bergeron, “The Battle of Olustee,” in Black Soldiers in Blue (2005), 144. 28 George R. Gautier, Harder than Death (1902), 10–11. 29 Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx (1888), 315. 30 John David Smith, “Let Us All Be Grateful,” in Black Soldiers in Blue (2005), 47. 31 Charleston Courier, July 17, 1863. 32 Russell Duncan, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune (1999), 343. 33 George S. Burkhardt, Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath (2007), 55. 34 James C. Bates, A Texas Cavalry Officer’s Civil War (1999), 270. 35 Hunter, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, 443, 449– 456. 36 Ibid., 697–705.
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DESTINED FOR GLORY (Pages 54–63, 76) 1
Christopher Farley, “Tony Kushner Fires Back at Congressman’s ‘Lincoln’ Criticism,” The Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2013; Douglas R. Egerton, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War (New York, 2010), 209.
2
Jamelle Bouie, “What Matters in Selma,” Slate, January 2, 2015.
3
On Vesey’s wives, see The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History, eds., Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette (Gainesville, 2017), 11 n. 1.
4
David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, 1989), 164.
5
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston, 1870), 22.
6
Douglas R. Egerton, Thunder At the Gates:
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After his nephew, Robert Gould Shaw, was commissioned colonel of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry—the first African-American regiment formed in the North during the Civil War—George R. Russell ordered the young officer a new sword. The blade reached Shaw about July 1, 1863, little more than two weeks before the Union attack against Battery Wagner, one of several Confederate fortifications that protected the approaches to Charleston, South Carolina. After Shaw’s death during the failed assault—he was shot in the chest, sword in hand, while leading his men up the fort’s parapet—Confederate soldiers stripped his body of personal effects, including his sword. Shortly after war’s end, a Union general stationed in North Carolina learned that a former Confederate officer who lived near Goldsboro was in possession of Shaw’s sword. The general had it retrieved and sent to Shaw’s father in Boston. “So far as such words may be applied to an inanimate thing it is the weapon which has done most for our colored people in this war,” he wrote upon receiving it. The sword passed to Shaw’s sister. In March 2017, three of her great-grandchildren discovered the blade in an attic and donated it to the Massachusetts Historical Society. The society’s president, Dennis Fiori, lauded the discovery, describing the long-missing weapon as “the holy grail of Civil War swords.”
COURTESY STUART C. MOWBRAY PHOTOGRAPHY
The Holy Grail of Civil War Swords
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Civil War Tours 2017-18
NOW IN OUR 17TH YEAR!
Fort Henry & Fort Donelson, September 28-30, 2017 Our popular Shiloh
battlefield historian Tim Smith recently released his newest book, Grant Invades Tennessee. We immediately asked Tim to lead a tour of Fort Donelson for us. In February 1862, General Grant's troops captured Confederate Forts Henry and Donelson located near the TennesseeKentucky border. These Union wins opened the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, crucial routes needed to invade the South. These victories also elevated Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant from an unproven leader to the rank of major general, and earned the Union hero the nickname of "Unconditional Surrender" Grant. Join Ed Bearss & Tim Smith on this trip. $375
Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, & Wilderness, November 2-5, 2017
Spend 3 days examining the hallowed ground in and around the town of Fredericksburg with historians Ed Bearss & Frank O’Reilly. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Fredericksburg became strategically important due to its location midway between Washington and Richmond, the opposing capitals of the Union and the Confederacy. In a period of 15 months, five major battles were waged within a 15-mile radius of the town: Two Battles of Fredericksburg and the Battles of Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Courthouse. Our tour will examine three of these significant engagements. $550
The Atlanta Campaign, March 22-25 & May 17-20, 2018. The capture of Chattanooga in November 1863 opened “The Gateway of the South.” Following that victory, General U.S. Grant assigned General William T. Sherman the mission of capturing Atlanta. Following 4 months of maneuvering, sieges, and battles, Atlanta fell, setting the stage for “Sherman’s March to the Sea.” Battlefield historians Ed Bearss & Jim Ogden will lead us on an in-depth, 3-day tour that traces the armies’ movements from Ringgold to Resaca; Kennesaw Mountain and into Atlanta. $550
Other tours in 2018 will include: Antietam & Gettysburg ★★★★★★★
Check our website for our complete 2017-‐18 tour schedule and detailed itineraries: www.civilwartours.org COURTESY STUART C. MOWBRAY PHOTOGRAPHY
MOST OF OUR 2017 TOURS SOLD OUT SO DON’T DELAY *Our tours include evening lectures, lunches, tactical maps & the finest battlefield guides!
Civil War Tours -‐ P.O. Box 416, Keedysville, MD 21756 email: info@civilwartours.org Tel: (301) 676-‐4642 ★★★★★★★
Be sure to check out our sister company: South Mountain Expeditions
2017-‐18 History Tours include: World War I, New York State, & Western Arizona email: tours@smountainexpeditions.com website: www.smountainexpeditions.com
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