FREE OF JONESFROM GETS FREE HISTORY (MOSTLY) RIGHT 28 THE WESTERNWAY WAYOF OFWAR WAR PP.. 5656 WHATSTATE WE LEARNED STATE OF JONES P. 28 P. THE WESTERN VOL. 6, NO. 3
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Faces of the Navy THE WAR AT SEA
18 Extraordinary Stories of Union and Confederate Sailors A S P E C I A L P H 0 T O F E AT U R E
PLUS
“ YOU HAVE JUST KILLED THE BEST MAN IN THE CONFEDERACY!”
FALL 2016
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The Quintessential Civil War Destination winchester FREDERICK COUNTY virginia
Come explore the most interpreted Civil War destination in all of Virginia. Winchester changed hands 72 times; more than any other town during the war. The area is also home to 3 preserved battlefields, and witnessed
6 major battles between 1861-1864. Stonewall Confederate and Winchester National Cemeteries Cedar Creek & Belle Grove National Historic Park Shenandoah Valley Civil War Orientation Center Stonewall Jackson’s Headquarters Museum Old Court House Civil War Museum 37 Civil War Trails sites Annual reenactments
JIMELL GREENE (TOP LEFT); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
• • • • • • •
www.visitwinchesterVA.com Opportunities for school groups, bus tours, special groups, reunions and more. Image by award-winning photographer Buddy Secor, taken at Cedar Creek Battlefield
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
VOLUME 6, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2016
FEATURES
Salvo
Faces of the Navy 30
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
TRAVELS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 A Visit to Washington, D.C.
VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Drill
DOSSIER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Images and stories of the Union and Confederate sailors who fought the war on water
Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson
PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
by ronald s. coddington
Preserved Battlefields as Training Grounds
FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
THE WESTERN WAY OF WAR 56
The Napoleon
COST OF WAR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Beauregard’s LeMat
IN FOCUS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 On the Path to Freedom
Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 The Fire of Philip Sheridan
STEREOSCOPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Compelling History
JIMELL GREENE (TOP LEFT); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
Books & Authors THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 BY GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ
LOOKING BACK ON CIVIL WAR AMERICA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 WITH GARY W. GALLAGHER
“ You have just killed the best man in the Confederacy!”
In Every Issue
46
EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
The rise and fall of controversial cavalryman John Hunt Morgan
From hard-line tactics to emancipation, the war in the West helped shape the larger conflict—and secure ultimate victory for the Union.
by terry bisson
by christopher phillips
The Water War
PARTING SHOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Nap Time
ON THE COVER:
Union sailors on the deck of an unidentified U.S. gunboat. Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
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editorial VOLUME 6, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2016
Terry A. Johnston Jr. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Laura June Davis David Thomson Robert Poister Katie Brackett Fialka CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
The Water War on november 25, 1860, only weeks after the election of Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Naval Academy cadet Roswell H. Lamson penned a letter to his cousin that captured both the sense of anticipation and the divisiveness among his fellow students. “There is a good deal of political excitement among the students, and as most all of our crew are warm Southroners, we do not agree very well as to what is right, and what wrong,” Lamson wrote. “All Southroners here will resign as soon as their states secede…. For myself I shall stand by the Union as long as there is a plank afloat or a stitch of canvas that will draw.” In his passion for his country and its cause, Lamson was hardly alone; the following year, after the firing on Fort Sumter, he was one of hundreds of thousands of northerners and southerners who would officially join the fight. The vast majority of those volunteers would enlist in the Union or Confederate armies—massive organizations that would march across, occupy, and battle each other on the country’s vast lands, their every movement recorded and scrutinized by the press. By contrast, Lamson and many thousands of others fought as members of the Union or Confederate navies. Vastly smaller than their counterparts on land, these naval forces have long been overlooked by history, their actions, sacrifices, and the significance of their service underappreciated. In this issue’s cover story, “Faces of the Navy” (page 30), Ron Coddington helps give the men who fought the war on water their due. The powerful and personal stories of a diverse group of Union and Confederate sailors—including Lamson—demonstrate their vital contribution to the war’s outcome. Finally, I’m happy to note the appearance of a new recurring column by Megan Kate Nelson, “Stereoscope,” in which she’ll offer musings on the Civil War in popular culture. In this installment, Megan gives her take on the recent Civil War movie Free State of Jones (page 28). For fans of Jenny Johnston’s “Living History” column, not to worry—you’ll see it again soon!
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: letters@civilwarmonitor.com
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 MODUS OPERANDI DESIGN (WWW.MODUSOP.NET)
Zethyn McKinley ADVERTISING & MARKETING DIRECTOR ADVERTISING@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM (559) 492 9236
Howard White CIRCULATION MANAGER HWHITEASSOC@COMCAST.NET website
www.CivilWarMonitor.com
M. Keith Harris Kevin M. Levin Robert H. Moore II Harry Smeltzer DIGITAL HISTORY ADVISORS SUBSCRIPTIONS & CUSTOMER SERVICE
Civil War Monitor / Circulation Dept. P.O. Box 292336, Kettering, OH 45429 phone: 877-344-7409 EMAIL: CUSTOMERSERVICE@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
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: $21.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $31.95 per year in Canada, and $41.95 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 ©2016 by Bayshore History, llc
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all rights reserved.
printed in the u.s.a.
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“A MASTERPIECE.” ~ S C O T T L. M I N G U S , S R . ~ T H E C I V I L WA R M O N I TO R ~
The epic battle of the Civil War told dramatically in the soldiers’ own words, selected from thousands of original letters home, daily diaries, journals and eyewitness accounts—many you likely have never read. This spectacular new book is more than 400 pages printed on high-quality glossy paper in a large, museum-caliber hardcover format, with four fold-out color maps.
W I N N E R O F T H E 2016 INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER B R O N Z E M E DA L F O R U.S. H I S T O RY Order today by credit card online at www.newgettysburgbook.com or telephone toll-free 866-278-1994. You may also send a check for $75 plus $15 for Priority Shipping to: Gettysburg 1863, Post Office Box 240608, Montgomery, Alabama 36119. Your copy will ship immediately. ★
LISTEN
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TO T H E
★
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SOLDIERS
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AT :
★
★
www.newgettysburgbook.com
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d i s pat c h e s
tons appear as mirror images of what they should look like.
Redeeming Lincoln
I’m writing regarding Allen C. Guelzo’s article in the summer 2016 issue [“The Redemption of Abraham Lincoln,” Vol. 6, No. 2]. While I consider the reasons cited by the author for the decline in Abraham Lincoln’s reputation to be valid, I believe there is another important factor. In recent years, in addition to the customary neo-Confederate rants against him, Lincoln has come under fierce attack from a more respectable quarter, namely libertarian and conservative ideologues (like economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo of the University of Maryland and former New Jersey judge and Fox News chief legal analyst Andrew Napolitano) who regard our 16th president as a tyrant responsible for the destruction of sacred constitutional liberties. To these men and their adherents, Lincoln is the architect of intrusive “Big Government.” The fact that Lincoln was responding to an armed insurrection that would have destroyed the nation matters not to them. Neither does the fact that after the war, the scope of the federal government, especially the military, was vastly reduced, or that the administration of Jefferson Davis also lifted the writ of habeas corpus, introduced military conscription, and, in contrast to Lincoln, not only had opponents of the cause imprisoned, but hanged. It being risky to denounce the 20th-century presidents truly responsible for the vast expansion of government (including FDR and Ronald Reagan), these critics have reached safely back over 150
Charles Shepard VIA EMAIL
ED. Thanks for your message,
years to find their nemesis in Lincoln, the man who actually saved the Constitution they claim he had destroyed. Dennis Middlebrooks BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Faces of War
The photo featured on page 16 of your summer issue [“Faces of War: A Pickett’s Charge Survivor,” Vol. 6, No. 2] is interesting. However, it appears that either you or the folks at Military Images magazine who provided the image got it backward. I presume the letters on Confederate soldier Zachariah Blanton’s cap should be FG for “Farmville Guards.” But his cap and his but-
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@civilwarmonitor.com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
Charles. It’s actually the original image itself that appears “backward.” We asked Ron Coddington, Military Images publisher and overseer of our Faces of War department, to provide an explanation. He writes: “The first commercially successful photograph, the daguerreotype, was celebrated for superior image quality. There were two issues, however, that the technology of the time was unable to overcome—blurring from movement and subjects appearing in reverse. Ambrotypes and tintypes, like this one of Blanton, suffered the same issues. Many soldiers tried to compensate by holding their muskets in the opposite hand, flipping belts and cartridge boxes, and even reversing the company letters and regimental numbers on their caps. It was not until the arrival of the popular carte de visite format in America that the reversal problem was finally solved.”
More on Mac
I enjoyed reading Mark Grimsley’s article on General George B. McClellan [“American Iliad: Little Mac Fauntleroy,” Vol. 6, No. 2] in your summer 2016 issue. I feel McClellan’s reputation as an incompetent, arrogant, and even cowardly battlefield commander is well deserved. And how ironic that the following quote by General Stonewall
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Jackson [in “Voices: War Wisdom”] appears just a few pages before Grimsley’s column: “Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow; for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half their number.” This embodies the very antithesis of McClellan’s battlefield strategy and substantiates his reputation as the worst general in American history!
start a new magazine on the Civil War. With the digital age in full swing and magazines seemingly going the way of the dinosaur, it must have taken a great deal of courage and blind faith to roll out your first issue. But you have been able to produce a magazine that has raised the bar on Civil War coverage, opened new areas of discussion, and established a new high for quality in this area of study. Good luck and I hope I am still reading new issues of The Civil War Monitor 10 years from now.
Gary C. Russo
TILLAMOOK, OREGON
Mike Pierce HOPEWELL JUNCTION, NEW YORK
The Civil War in Color Keep Up the Good Work
I’m writing to tell you how much I enjoy your magazine. For the past 50plus years, I’ve subscribed to one or more Civil War magazines, starting with Civil War Times Illustrated, adding Blue & Gray, and finally North & South. I began with you a few years back and quickly acquired all back issues. The Civil War Monitor is now my only Civil War periodical. While I’ve certainly dug into battles, leaders, and tactics over the years, that has gotten a bit old. That’s why I appreciate your approach to the conflict. The offbeat stories and features are especially interesting. Of course, I’ll continue to study battles— one must, to be a student of the war— but I’ll still seek out the more unique tales, such as those you tell. Please keep up your unique approach. Bill Welsch
Your latest special issue, The Civil War in Color, is brilliant! Never before have I felt so drawn into the subject matter and the details presented to the viewer are fantastic. With that being said, may I point out a couple of color issues in the photo of the 93rd New York noncommissioned officers’ mess that appears on page 49? First, the chevrons on the soldiers’ uniforms should be sky blue and not yellow. Second, the camp furniture should be the color of ash wood. Again, I enjoyed the issue very much. Yours is the best Civil War magazine in print because you’re not afraid to write about the more obscure events and people that played vital roles but are forgotten in conventional history. Thank you and keep up the fine work. Theodore E. Wojciechowski VIA EMAIL
GLEN ALLEN, VIRGINIA
ED. Thanks, Theodore, for the kind words
* * * I have no idea what you were thinking back in 2011 when you decided to
and feedback. For readers who have not yet picked up a copy of The Civil War in Color, they are still available for purchase. See page 79 for how to order.
WANT MORE CIVIL WAR? Stay connected with The Civil War Monitor wherever you are!
facebook.com/ CivilWarMonitor @CivilWarMonitor
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provided compliments of Battlefield HarleyDavidson. Note that registration begins two hours before the ride begins. $10; FOR MORE INFORMATION: ABATEPA.COM or 717-731-8955.
OCTOBER LIVING HISTORY
North-South Skirmish Association’s 134th National Competition
Your Guide to Civil War Events
FALL 2016
FRIDAY, OCT. 7 – SUNDAY, OCT. 9
(L TO R): NORTH-SOUTH SKIRMISH ASSOCIATION; PERRYVILLE BATTLEFIELD STATE HISTORIC SITE; BATTLE OF FRANKLIN TRUST
Fort Shenandoah WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA
Join the North-South Skirmish Association for its 134th National Competition—the largest event of its kind in the United States— in which member units compete in live-fire matches with original or authentic reproduction Civil War period muskets, carbines, breech-loading rifles, revolvers, mortars, and cannons. There are also competitions for authenticity of Civil War period dress, both military and civilian, lectures on topics of interest, and a large sutler area.
The North-South Skirmish Association’s National Competition
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: N-SSA.ORG or 248-258-9007. LIVING HISTORY
Battle of Perryville Reenactment SATURDAY, OCT. 8 – SUNDAY, OCT. 9
Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site PERRYVILLE, KENTUCKY LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA
TOUR
Courage: A Civil War Walking Tour SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 11 A.M.
10th and E Streets NW at Cosi restaurant WASHINGTON, D.C.
Accompany guides in period dress, each of whom takes on the demeanor of a humble or famous Washingtonian, on a historic walking tour of the nation’s capital—a unique and entertaining way to learn what life was like in the city during the Civil War. The tour lasts about 90 minutes. $15; FOR MORE INFORMATION: HISTORICSTROLLS. COM or 301-346-5303. TOUR
Smithsonian Magazine’s Museum Day Live! SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 9 A.M. – 5 P.M.
Stonewall Jackson House
Take a free tour of the house occupied by Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson from 1858 to 1861 during Museum Day Live!—an annual event hosted by Smithsonian magazine in which participating museums across the country open their doors to all who present a Museum Day Live! ticket, which can be downloaded at the Smithsonian magazine website.
Enjoy the Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site’s annual commemoration of the Battle of Perryville, the largest battle fought in Kentucky during the Civil War. It will include re-creations of small sections of the engagement, including the “fight for the Cornfield” on Saturday and the “fight for Bottom’s
FREE WITH MUSEUM DAY LIVE! TICKET; FOR MORE INFORMATION: SMITHSONIANMAG.COM/ MUSEUMDAY EXCURSION
Ride to Gettysburg SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1 P.M.
Commonwealth Avenue, behind the capitol HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
Join ABATE (Alliance of Bikers Aimed Toward Education) of Pennsylvania on a ride from the capitol in Harrisburg to Battlefield Harley-Davidson in Gettysburg. All funds raised will be donated to the Pennsylvania Monuments Fund and the Historic Daniel Lady Farm. Lunch and live music will be
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
SEP TEMBER
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farm” on Sunday. $20 ADULTS; $15 CHILDREN 6–12; CHILDREN 5 AND UNDER ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: PERRYVILLEBATTLEFIELD.ORG
Blue and Gray Days in Franklin, Tennessee
and Park
LECTURE
“How the Civil War Still Lives” THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 6:30 P.M.
Elks Lodge
(L TO R): NORTH-SOUTH SKIRMISH ASSOCIATION; PERRYVILLE BATTLEFIELD STATE HISTORIC SITE; BATTLE OF FRANKLIN TRUST
HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA
Renowned Civil War historian James I. Robertson is the guest speaker at the Tennessee Valley Civil War Round Table’s October meeting. In his talk, “How the Civil War Still Lives,” Robertson will reflect on how the conflict remains the pivotal event in our nation’s history. $20; $15 IF REGISTERED BY SEPTEMBER 30; FOR MORE INFORMATION: TVCWRT. ORG or 256-278-5533.
NOVEMBER LIVING HISTORY
Blue and Gray Days FRIDAY, NOV. 4 – SAT., NOV. 5
The Carter House and Carnton Plantation FRANKLIN, TENNESSEE
Gather on the grounds of The Carter House and Carnton Plantation—around which the Battle of Franklin was fought in November 1864—for two days of Civil War activities, including interaction with reenactors and handson experience with clothes, trades, and weapons of the past. $15 ADULTS; $8 CHILDREN 6–12;
A participant in a recent Battle of Perryville reenactment
CHILDREN UNDER 6 ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: BOFT.ORG or 615-794-0903. LECTURE
3-D Monitor SAT., NOV. 12, 2:30 – 3:30 P.M.
The Mariners’ Museum NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA
Want to experience what it’s like at the famed Civil War ironclad USS Monitor’s wreck site? Using 3-D imaging techniques, archaeologist Joe Hoyt discusses the ongoing work at the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary as well as other wreck sites located in the area known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. FREE WITH MUSEUM ADMISSION; FOR MORE INFORMATION: MARINERSMUSEUM.ORG/MONITORFOUNDATION/ or 757-591-7726.
Plan your visit to America’s award-winning Civil War attraction at The Mariners’ Museum and Park
Be a part of the action in our high-definition Battle Theater, walk the deck of the full-sized Monitor replica, see artifacts like the iconic revolving gun turret and more! Just 20 minutes from the Historic Triangle of Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown.
MarinersMuseum.org • (800) 581-SAIL (7245) Newport News, VA • I-64, Exit 258A
DISCUSSION
Grant Invades Tennessee SAT., NOV. 12, NOON (CENTRAL) AUTHORSVOICE.NET
Jump online and join author Timothy B. Smith for a live-streamed discussion of his most recent book, Grant Invades Tennessee: The 1862 Battles for Forts Henry and Donelson. Viewers will have the opportunity to order a signed copy of Smith’s book during the program, which is part of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop’s Author’s Voice series. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: AUTHORSVOICE.NET/EVENT/VIRTUALBOOK-SIGNING-WELCOMES-TIMOTHYB-SMITH/
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Share Your Event Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
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In this photograph by Andrew J. Russell, civilians mill about Horatio Greenough’s statue of George Washington on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on July 11, 1863. Construction of the Capitol’s new cast-iron dome, which had been halted in 1861 with the outbreak of the war, had resumed in 1862 and would be completed in 1868. FOR MORE ON WASHINGTON, D.C., TURN THE PAGE ☛
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IN THIS SECTION Travels
A VISIT TO WASHINGTON, D.C. 10 Voices
DRILL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Dossier
THOMAS J. “STONEWALL” JACKSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Preservation
PRESERVED BATTLEFIELDS AS TRAINING GROUNDS . . . . . 18 Figures
THE NAPOLEON . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Cost of War
BEAUREGARD’S LEMAT . . . . . 22 In Focus
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
ON THE PATH TO FREEDOM . . 24
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WASHINGTON D.C. in december 1860—mere weeks after Abraham Lincoln was elected president—Washington, D.C., was far from the bustling and vibrant city it would one day become. In the words of historian Margaret Leech, Washington then stood as “a sprawling and unfulfilled embodiment of a vision of national grandeur,” a “mere ambitious beginner, a baby among capitals.” With the next spring’s outbreak of the Civil War, however, the city experienced a sea change. Its population spiked as thousands of soldiers, civilian workers, and contractors poured into the capital, while the construction of scores of forts and miles of earthworks, as well as a number of hospitals, warehouses, factories, and supply depots, drastically altered the city’s landscape. By the time the victorious Union army paraded triumphantly down Pennsylvania Avenue in May 1865, Washington was a changed city, no longer a “deserted village” but an urban center of national importance. Interested in visiting Washington? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area—Garry Adelman and John O’Brien—to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic city.
President Lincoln’s Cottage
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CAN’T MISS
There are several hidden gems in Washington that shouldn’t be hidden at all. President Lincoln’s Cottage (140 Rock Creek Church Rd. NW; 202829-0436), where Lincoln spent more of his presidential time than any other place save the White House, is well preserved and endowed with excellent interpreters. Nearby, the only Civil War battlefield in the District (and the one where President Lincoln came under enemy fire) is Fort Stevens (13th St. & Quackenbos St. NW; 202-895-6000). It is only partially preserved, but still allows visitors to picture the events of July 1864, when its garrison clashed with Confederate general Jubal Early’s army during its advance toward the capital. ga New York Avenue Presbyterian Church (1313 New York Ave. NW; 202393-3700) was where the Lincolns worshipped during the Civil War. Located only three blocks east of the White House, it is home to some interesting Lincoln memorabilia, including the family pew, a hand-written draft of a proposed law for “compensated emancipation,” and the “Lincoln hitching post.” The president would often walk to church, but when accompanied by Mrs. Lincoln, he would tie up the carriage at this 1820 landmark. Call ahead for a tour. jo
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National Museum of Natural History
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BEST KEPT SECRET
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BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
The outdoor Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (700 Independence Ave. SW; 202-633-1000) showcases lovely works of art below ground level, removing you from the bustle of the Mall above. In the winter, part of the garden becomes an ice rink, too. I am also a fan of the opulent Anderson House (2118 Massachusetts Ave. NW; 202-785-2040), home of the Society of the Cincinnati and the American Revolution Institute. Despite a Revolutionary War emphasis, there are Civil War connections: Larz Anderson, who built the house, was the son of a Civil War brevet general (Nicholas Longworth Anderson), and at least one of the house’s paintings includes a Civil War scene. ga
I think all of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums do a great job appealing to children, so just pick their favorite area of interest and go! The National Museum of Natural History (10th St. and Constitution Ave. NW; 202-633-1000) and the National Air and Space Museum (600 Independence Ave. SW; 202633-2214) are especially safe bets for families. I personally recommend the National Museum of American History (14th St. and Constitution Ave. NW; 202-633-1000), which has an incredible Civil War exhibit, but one that might fly over the heads of younger kids. ga
Pershing Park, which occupies the small but interesting triangle on Pennsylvania Avenue NW between 14th and 15th streets, honors John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. Tablets describe the progress of that conflict and the important role that our troops played during its final year, nearly 100 years ago. jo
Two kid-friendly attractions are the White House Visitor Center (1450 Pennsylvania Ave. NW; 202208-1631) and the National Park Service museum at Ford’s Theatre (517 10th St. NW; 202-426-6925). Both offer well-organized visual presentations with hands-on displays. jo
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
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Wok and Roll
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BEST EATS
Choose one of two Ted’s Bulletin locations (1818 14th St. NW, 202-265-8337; 505 8th St. SE, 202544-8337) for traditional breakfast served all day in a cool throwback atmosphere. I like the intriguingly named Walk of Shame Breakfast Burrito and their homemade pop tarts. For lunch, you can’t miss with these D.C. classics: Ben’s Chili Bowl (1213 U St. NW; 202-667-0909), where you should order the chili in or on anything, and the Old Ebbitt Grill (675 15th St. NW; 202-3474800), which serves fresh oysters from both coasts. For dinner, let’s go with a Lincoln theme. Try the French-themed Bistro d’OC (518 10th St. NW; 202-393-5444) right across from Ford’s Theatre or the Chinese restaurant Wok and Roll (604 H St. NW; 202-347-4656) in the building that used to be convicted Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt’s boarding house. Lastly, don’t forget the Lincoln (1110 Vermont Ave. NW; 202 386-9200) and its unique floor with hundreds of thousands of Lincoln pennies embedded in it. ga The Sunrise Café (1102 17th St. NW; 202-463-0032) boasts one of the most interesting breakfast menus in the White House district. Food trucks have revolutionized lunchtime in Washington, and you can usually find them at the downtown parks and major tourist sites by mid-morning. If it’s a sit-down lunch you’re looking for, try the Old Ebbitt Grill. The seafood is outstanding and the burgers are deliciously generous. Bistro d’OC has a calm, 19th-century vibe that complements the country feel of their classic, moderately priced dishes from the Languedoc region of southern France. jo
Lafayette Square
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BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
Just north of the White House is Lafayette Square (16th St. & Pennsylvania Ave. NW; 202-619-6344), where everyone walks but few contemplate the Civil War history. It has famous former residents (including George McClellan, Rose Greenhow, Gideon Welles, and Daniel Sickles, who in 1859 shot and killed his wife’s lover, Philip Barton Key, in the park), and was the endpoint of the Grand Review of the Armies parade in May 1865. And, of course, it has lovely views of the adjacent Treasury, White House, and the site of the old War and Navy departments. ga
Old Ebbitt Grill
Don’t miss President Lincoln’s Cottage, on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, which has been beautifully restored. Its visitor center contains helpful exhibitions on the Lincolns’ home life, the history of the Soldiers’ Home, and wartime Washington. jo
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PHOTOGRAPHS PHOTOGRAPH BY JIMELL BY JOHN GREENE DOE
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“Outstanding ... Thoroughly researched and beautifully written …
Willard InterContinental
We can now add their names to the human toll of America’s greatest conflict.”
—James M. McPherson author, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
The Mayflower
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Gunpowder Girls
BEST SLEEP
If you are willing to spend the money (or if you can get a great deal), I’d suggest the Hay-Adams Hotel (800 16th St. NW; 202-638-6600), which occupies the spot where the homes of Lincoln’s private secretary, John Hay, and the historian Henry Adams once stood. It boasts great service and beautiful views of the White House. There’s also the Willard InterContinental (1401 Pennsylvania Ave. NW; 202-628-9100), which sits on the site of the original Willard Hotel, where Lincoln stayed before his first inauguration and which Nathaniel Hawthorne termed “more justly called the center of Washington than either the Capitol or the White House or the State Department.” For more affordable options (although D.C. is expensive in general for much of the year), try The Mayflower (1127 Connecticut Ave. NW; 202347-3000), a hotel with a classic older feel, good service, and a great location, or the quirky Hotel Rouge (1315 16th St. NW; 202-232-8000). ga I always suggest visitors stay close to the historyrich area around Lafayette Square, just north of the White House, where Abraham Lincoln spent countless hours walking while president. Affordable nearby hotels, all convenient to the Metro, include the Capital Hilton (1001 16th St. NW; 202-393-1000) and the Washington Marriott at Metro Center (775 12th St. NW; 202-737-2200). jo
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS
Garry Adelman walks miles through D.C. every day on his way to work as Director of History and Education at the Civil War Trust.
Tanya Anderson Some were as young as 10. They kept the armies stocked with bullets. And they too made the ultimate sacriice. For readers 12 and up. $16.95 hardcover
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BEST BOOK
Ernest B. Furgurson’s Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (2004) is beautifully written and comprehensive. No other book has taught me so much about the Union capital. ga No one has yet supplanted Margaret Leech’s awardwinning history of the U.S. capital in wartime, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (1941), though if you’re looking for a briefer read, try Lucinda Prout Janke’s richly illustrated A Guide to Civil War Washington, D.C. (2013). jo John O’Brien, a resident of the capital region since 2005, is a vice president with the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia and a licensed D.C. tour guide.
Tillie Pierce
Teen Eyewitness to the Battle of Gettysburg Tanya Anderson “Insightful perspective” – Kirkus Nonnction $14.95 gatefold softcover
Firebrand Fi Aaron Barnhart
Based on the life of Jewish freedom ghter August Bondi, best known for his role in John Brown’s army. Historical ction $14.95 hardcover
Clarina Nichols Frontier Crusader for Women’s Rights Diane Eickhoff
She moved the movement west. Women’s history $17.95 hardcover
Wherever distinctive books are sold Samples, audio, and e-books at QuindaroPress.com
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voices
/ DRILL
“ Of course, we drill; it would be hard to imagine a military camp without drill; but it would make a horse laugh to see us do it.”
“ THE FIRST THING IN THE MORNING IS DRILL, THEN DRILL, THEN DRILL AGAIN. THEN DRILL, DRILL, A LITTLE MORE DRILL. THEN DRILL, AND LASTLY DRILL. BETWEEN DRILLS, WE DRILL AND SOMETIMES STOP TO EAT A LITTLE AND HAVE ROLL-CALL.” OLIVER WILLCOX NORTON (ABOVE), 83RD PENNSYLVANIA INFANTRY, OCTOBER 9, 1861
“ The drill ... disclosed the fact that many, otherwise intelligent, were not certain as to which was their right hand or their left. Consequently, when the order ‘Right, face!’ was given, face met face in inquiring astonishment....” JOHN L. SMITH, 118TH PENNSYLVANIA INFANTRY, ON THE DRILLING SKILLS OF THE REGIMENT’S VOLUNTEERS SHORTLY AFTER THEIR ENLISTMENT
“ WE SHALL ALL “ I don’t LEARN TO LIKE IT know IN TIME ... BUT LIKE what OLIVES, TOBACCO Oi’ll AND SOME OTHER do. You LUXURIES, ONE want MUST GET us to ACCUSTOMED drill in TO IT TO English REALLY and the ENJOY IT.” devil a GEORGE G. BENEDICT wurd (RIGHT), 12TH VERMONT INFANTRY, IN A LETTER I know TO HIS HOMETOWN NEWSPAPER, but SEPTEMBER 26, 1862, THE REGIMENT’S French.” ON FIRST-EVER “KNAPSACK DRILL” AN IRISH-BORN CONFEDERATE SOLDIER IN A LOUISIANA REGIMENT, TO HIS LIEUTENANT
SOURCES: OLIVER WILLCOX NORTON, ARMY LETTERS, 1861–1865 (1903); BELL IRVIN WILEY, THE LIFE OF JOHNNY REB (1943); J.L. SMITH, HISTORY OF THE CORN EXCHANGE REGIMENT (1905); G.G. BENEDICT, ARMY LIFE IN VIRGINIA (1895); DAVID LANE, A SOLDIER’S DIARY (1905); GEORGE EGGLESTON, A REBEL’S RECOLLECTIONS (1875)
“ Every amateur officer had his own pet system of tactics, and the effect of the incongruous teachings, when brought out in battalion drill, closely resembled that of the music of Mr. Bob Sawyer’s party, where each guest sang the chorus to the tune he knew best.” CONFEDERATE SOLDIER GEORGE C. EGGLESTON, IN HIS MEMOIRS
(L TO R): ARMY LETTERS, 1861–1865 (1903); HARD TACK AND COFFEE (1887 ); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ARMY LIFE IN VIRGINIA (1895).
DAVID LANE, 17TH MICHIGAN INFANTRY, IN HIS DIARY, AUGUST 24, 1863
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Ships,History
AND
THE
Historic Homes & Earthworks
Great Outdoors USS Monitor Center at The Mariners’ Museum
Battle of the Ironclads
(L TO R): ARMY LETTERS, 1861–1865 (1903); HARD TACK AND COFFEE (1887 ); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ARMY LIFE IN VIRGINIA (1895).
888.493.7386 newport-news.org
Minutes to Williamsburg, A short drive to Virginia Beach.
75
London - Laurel County Crossroads to Adventure
Visit Camp Wildcat Civil War Battlefield!
Located on the historic “Wilderness Road” in Laurel County, Kentucky A beautiful and well-preserved Civil War Battlefield that still has many of the original trenches intact!
Don’t miss the London-Laurel County Tourist Commission
1-800-348-0095
Reenactment! october 14-16, 2016
www.laurelkytourism.com
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dossier
Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson by the early afternoon of July 21, 1861, Confederate forces engaged in the Battle of Bull Run seemed on the verge of defeat. The timely arrival of reinforcements, however, some led by Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson, helped stabilize the Confederate position. “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall,” reportedly remarked a Rebel officer after spotting the fresh troops. “Rally behind the Virginians.” By day’s end, Union forces had been driven from the field and Jackson would be known afterward to both friend and foe as “Stonewall.” His career would end with his death at Chancellorsville two years later. ¶ To get a sense of where Jackson’s legacy stands today, we asked a panel of historians to assess the record of the talented and enigmatic Confederate general. WHAT DO YOU MOST ADMIRE ABOUT JACKSON ...
“Devotion to duty.”
“He rarely worked well in coordination with others.”
A. WILSON GREENE
Yes 78%
BROOKS D. SIMPSON
“ His composure, which allowed him to deal with any situation swiftly and instilled confidence in his men.”
“His repeated and often unnecessary clashes with his subordinates.” JOSEPH T. GLATTHAAR
“Stonewall never learned to embrace flexibility, an indispensable trait in a general.”
DANIEL SUTHERLAND
No 22%
“ His ability to size up the enemy’s weaknesses and swiftly exploit them.”
A. WILSON GREENE
JOAN WAUGH
“ Yes. His military exploits were notable in securing Confederate victories at crucial moments in the war.” JOAN WAUGH
... AND WHAT WAS HIS BIGGEST FLAW?
“He worked himself (and his breathless men) to excess.”
“ His intensity and focus— his unmatched determination to achieve his end.”
BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN
JOHN HENNESSY
“Perhaps a bit too bold, which, in the end, killed him.”
“Doggedness.” KATHRYN SHIVELY MEIER
DANIEL SUTHERLAND
ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION (TOP); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
BESIDES ROBERT E. LEE, WAS JACKSON THE CONFEDERACY’S BEST GENERAL?
WHEN WAS JACKSON AT HIS PEAK? We asked our panelists to rank Jackson’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.
First Bull Run {july 1861}
Valley Campaign {march – june 1862}
Peninsula Campaign {june – july 1862}
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WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE BOOK ABOUT JACKSON? “ James I. Robertson Jr.’s biography is the most thoroughly researched, accurate, and insightful.” JAMES M. McPHERSON
“ Vandiver’s biography holds up very well after almost 60 years as a well-researched, lively, analytical study of manageable length.”
“ I relish The Destructive War, because the mythology Americans spun around Jackson, even while he still lived, far surpassed the appeal of the actual man.” KATHRYN SHIVELY MEIER
GARY W. GALLAGHER
5% 55% 5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
5%
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE QUOTE BY OR ABOUT JACKSON?
“ Never take counsel of your fears.” A “FAVORITE APHORISM OF JACKSON’S,” ACCORDING TO CONFEDERATE ORDNANCE OFFICER WILLIAM ALLAN [FRANK O’REILLY]
“ I like liquor—its taste and effects—and that is just the reason why I never drink it.” JACKSON’S ALLEGED COMMENT TO AN ARMY SURGEON WHO SUGGESTED HE TAKE “A LITTLE BRANDY” AS A REMEDY FOR FATIGUE [M. KEITH HARRIS]
Second Bull Run {august 1862}
Maryland Campaign {september 1862}
“ Well, sir, when he commenced it I thought him crazy; before he ended it I thought him inspired.” CONFEDERATE GENERAL RICHARD S. EWELL ON JACKSON’S VALLEY CAMPAIGN [BROOKS D. SIMPSON]
“ Boys, he isn’t much for looks, but if we’d had him we wouldn’t have been caught in this trap.” A UNION SOLDIER CAPTURED BY JACKSON’S TROOPS AT HARPERS FERRY IN SEPTEMBER 1862, UPON SEEING THE GENERAL RIDE INTO TOWN, TO HIS COMRADES [STEPHEN W. SEARS]
Fredericksburg Campaign {december 1862}
Chancellorsville Campaign {april – May 1863}
PARTICIPANTS: Glenn David Brasher; Gary W. Gallagher; Joseph T. Glatthaar; Lesley Gordon; A. Wilson Greene; Allen C. Guelzo;
M. Keith Harris; John Hennessy; Brian Matthew Jordan; James M. McPherson; Kathryn Shively Meier; Kenneth W. Noe; Frank O’Reilly; Ethan Rafuse; Stephen W. Sears; Brooks D. Simpson; Christopher S. Stowe; Daniel Sutherland; Joan Waugh; and Jeffry Wert.
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by o . james lighthizer president , civil war trust
p r e s e r vat i o n
Preserved Battlefields as Training Grounds americans conceive of our country’s preserved battlefields as places of remembrance and reflection, but these sites also serve an important role in training today’s military. Park rangers and military instructors often lead customized battlefield tours called “staff rides,” giving leadership lessons steeped in the history these battlefields witnessed. Because staff rides have become so critical to military education, with widespread adoption throughout the armed forces, preserved battlefields are now an important part of American national security. ¶ Staff rides came into practice in the United States around the turn of the 20th century. Today, every branch of the U.S. military, visiting leaders of allied militaries, and even civilians working in intelligence and the Department of Defense use staff rides opposing commanders. As military historians Christian Keller and Ethan Rafuse note, staff rides “offer participants a rich opportunity to apply historical insights to modern strategic and operational issues and potential problems.” Historic battlefields, however, are a finite commodity, and the availability of preserved, intact, and interpreted battlefields is essential. Colonel Benjamin T. Watson, commanding officer of
LOOK FOR REGULAR PRESERVATION NEWS AND UPDATES FROM THE CIVIL WAR TRUST IN FUTURE ISSUES. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION AND HOW YOU CAN HELP, VISIT CIVILWAR.ORG
National Park Service historian Jim Ogden conducts a staff ride for a group of U.S. Army National Guard officer candidates at the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.
CIVIL WAR TRUST
as training tools. The rides have evolved to include a broad range of activities, from simple tours to competitive role-playing exercises. The military itself organizes most of these trips, often with the support of nonprofit organizations. Civil War battlefields are especially popular tour sites, owing both to their ubiquity in the South and East as well as the scale of the battles and the depth of historical interpretation. Land preserved by the Civil War Trust at Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, and Chancellorsville has been used for staff rides. There are many reasons for the rides’ continued training value. Visiting a battlefield allows leaders to face the same dilemmas as those encountered by historical figures. Unlike other simulations, staff rides challenge leaders with random chance and unforeseeable factors in a way that reflects actual combat situations. Seeing how well an officer’s plans stood up to reality can be a powerful lesson in how to adapt to changing circumstances. One recent ride, for example, placed service members at the Vicksburg siege to conduct reconnaissance on the battlefield and examine the decisions made by the
the Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C., has remarked that “[t]he close proximity of the Marine Barracks to several Civil War battlefields is a great learning opportunity.” It is an opportunity best utilized when battlefields are administered as government parks, which ensures that they will be protected and maintained, with a professional staff dedicated to educating visitors and interpreting the battles fought there. Because of their transcendent capability, America’s hallowed battlegrounds represent an important educational asset for our military in the modern age. Preserving, restoring, and interpreting these storied sites will continue to give our military leadership an edge in applied strategic and tactical thought.
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Excerpt from Book II
Battle at Harper’s Ferry September 15, 1862 Boilin up sweet breakfast coffee ~ burnin tobacco in m’ bowl On a Shenandoah Ridge ~ return to solace fer m’ soul Shroud o’ mist a liftin ~ underneath the thin smoke screen New Yorkers twen’y days in uniform and summer apple green Kids left shepherdless ‘n charged to fortify the hills A warm mornin! all frozen up in mortifyin chills Sad scene so pathetic, tryin not to be amused Abandoned in the thicket by the tired old ewes Wolfpack on the double quick ‘n spreadin ‘round the path So close to hear ‘em call and cuss and joke and laugh to hear the grey dogs yip near causin me to smile Scamprin under cover ~ comin at ‘em injun style Cool headed vet’ran marksmen get a gift and grin in glee Lambs exposed alone or cowerin three to every tree Brave lieutenant turns to rally! refusin to meet disgrace ‘n he set a fine example til a reb blew off his face Thought o’ tradin in my shovel for a tomahawk As the mountains come alive! and Parrotts start to talk Fools follow fools commands ‘n put us all in peril Sent a ringed around in woods like fish stuffed in a barrel Over ten thousand armed men drawn in the lucky lot Given up to scroungy mutts ~ no chance to fire a shot Our colonel sends out surrender ~ blamin duty for his folly A southern gunner chanced to blast ‘im with a final volley And so, ol’ mousy Miles retires ~ earnin his eternal nap † Leavin his entire army with their tails tight in a trap
CIVIL WAR TRUST
† Union Colonel Miles was mortally wounded by an errant projectile at the close of the battle.
©2004 Postlethwaite Publishing. RHawk61@gmail.com Illustrations and design by DM Designs, LLC. Video Production by OddBox Studios. “Red Hawk” The Battle of Gettysburg Narrative online at www.youtu.be/rOTiew8ziVA
ODDBOX STUDIOS
Books & Illustration Note Cards at Turn The Page Bookstore Boonsboro, Md. www.RHJournal.com and www.TTPbooks.com CWM21-FOB-Preservation.indd 19
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figures
The Napoleon PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JAMES D. JULIA AUCTIONEERS, FAIRFIELD, MAINE, USA, WWW.JAMESDJULIA.COM.
“There was one [Confederate] regiment that stood up before the fire of two or three of our long-range batteries and of two regiments of infantry, and though the air around them was vocal with the whistle of bullets and screams of shells, there they stood, and delivered their fire in perfect order,” wrote Union army surgeon Thomas Ellis in his diary of a scene from the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. “[T]here they continued to stand,” Ellis noted, “until a battery of six light twelves was brought to bear on them, and before that they broke. Nothing mortal can bear a battery of six light Napoleon guns….” ¶ Ellis was referring to the Model 1857 12-pounder field cannon, popularly known as a “Napoleon.” Created in response to U.S. Army officers’ prewar demands for a lighter 12-pounder, and inspired by a design attributed to Emperor Napoleon III of France, the Napoleon became the most widely produced and utilized cannon during the Civil War. Its mobility, reliability, and versatility—it could fire solid shot, shell, case shot, and canister—would earn the smoothbore weapon the praise of artillerists on both sides. As one Confederate gunner noted of his unit’s Napoleons, “We would not have exchanged them for … any other style of guns. They were beautiful, perfectly plain.... We are proud of them and felt towards them almost as if they were human....” Pictured here is a Confederate Napoleon manufactured in New Orleans.
128
Number of artillery rounds able to be carried in the Napoleon’s caisson and limber
6
Number of horses needed to move the Napoleon
$565–$615
Cost to produce a standard Napoleon in the North during the war
8
Number of men assigned to operate the Napoleon
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1,692
4.62
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JAMES D. JULIA AUCTIONEERS, FAIRFIELD, MAINE, USA, WWW.JAMESDJULIA.COM.
Total number of Napoleons produced during the Civil War, including 1,157 from five private foundries in the North and an estimated 535 from three private foundries and four government factories in the South
Bore diameter (caliber) of the Napoleon, in inches
3,865
Weight, in pounds, of the gun, carriage, limber, ammunition, and miscellaneous implements required for service
1,227
Weight, in pounds, of a standard Union Napoleon
63.6
Length of bore, in inches
1,619
A Napoleon’s range, in yards, when firing a 12-pound solid shot at 5 degree elevation using a 2.5-pound powder charge
1,128
Weight, in pounds, of the Napoleon’s twowheel carriage
SOURCES: THOMAS T. ELLIS, LEAVES FROM THE DIARY OF AN ARMY SURGEON (1863); NATHANIEL CHEAIRS HUGHES JR., THE CIVIL WAR MEMOIR OF PHILIP DAINGERFIELD STEPHENSON, D.D. (1998); JOHN GIBBON, THE ARTILLERIST’S MANUAL (1863); MILITARY COMMISSION TO EUROPE IN 1855 AND 1856. REPORT OF MAJOR GENERAL ALFRED MORDECAI, OF THE ORDNANCE DEPARTMENT (1861); INSTRUCTION FOR FIELD ARTILLERY (1861); WILLIAM H. FRENCH, ET AL, INSTRUCTIONS FOR FIELD ARTILLERY (1864). WITH THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR THANKS TO CRAIG SWAIN FOR HIS ASSISTANCE.
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c o s t o f wa r
$224,250 A GENERAL’S PISTOL EARNS A WHOPPING SUM THE ARTIFACT
The LeMat revolver that belonged to Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard
The gun is in extremely fine condition, retaining over 95 percent of its original blue finish. Its grips are well fit, showing raised grain and sharp diamond point detail. The accompanying original holster is also in fine condition, perhaps the best of any known LeMat holster, with supple leather and only light craquelure. DETAILS
While stationed in New Orleans in 1858, U.S. Army major P.G.T. Beauregard formed a partnership with local physician (and his cousin by marriage) Jean Alexandre Francois LeMat to promote and sell the innovative pistol the latter had patented two years earlier. Also known as the “grape shot revolver,” LeMat’s weapon combined the features of a standard six-shot revolver and a single-barreled shotgun. By shifting the LeMat’s hammer up or down, its user could fire nine shots of .42-caliber ammuni-
tion from the main cylinder or a .63-caliber buckshot cartridge from the larger central barrel. When the Civil War broke out, LeMat, whose partnership with Beauregard ended amicably in 1860, received contracts to produce 5,000 of his revolvers for the Confederacy. But faced with the challenges of shipping weapons through the Union blockade of the southern coast (the war forced him to manufacture his pistols overseas), LeMat ultimately delivered only between 2,000 and 3,000 of his novel revolvers into Confederate hands. While rare and bulky (the LeMat weighed about a pound more than the Colt Army Model 1860 revolver), the weapon proved popular with Confederate officers, including generals Braxton Bragg, Richard H. Anderson, and J.E.B. Stuart. Beauregard’s LeMat, one of the first models produced, didn’t stay with
him for the entire war. While en route to assume command of Confederate defenses in and around Charleston, South Carolina, in 1862, Beauregard left his pistol at the home of a longtime family friend named Thomas Henderson. According to family correspondence, instead of retrieving it, he made the gun a gift to Henderson, a soldier in the Savannah Volunteer Guards. QUOTABLE
In March 1859, a panel of U.S. military officers who tested the LeMat wrote of it, “We consider this arm far superior to any
we have seen for the use of cavalry acting against Indians or when charging on a square of infantry or a battery of field pieces. It is also indispensable for artillerists in defending their pieces against such a charge, and for infantry defending a breach…. Its advantages in the naval service in boarding or repelling boarders is too obvious to require anything but passing notice….”
VALUE
$224,250 (price realized at James D. Julia Inc. in Fairfield, Maine, in 2016). “This is the finest identified Confederate handgun extant that belonged to one of the most important Confederate personalities,” noted John Sexton, longtime consultant and cataloger for James D. Julia Inc., at the time of the sale.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JAMES D. JULIA AUCTIONEERS, FAIRFIELD, MAINE, USA, WWW.JAMESDJULIA.COM. SOURCES: JAMES D. JULIA INC. PRESENTS EXTRAORDINARY FIREARMS AUCTION, MARCH 14 & 15, 2016 (2016); WILLIAM A. ALBAUGH III, ET AL, CONFEDERATE HANDGUNS (1963).
CONDITION
H
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CVM ad
“This is a deeply satisfying rendering of an important subject.” —GARY W. GALLAGHER, Nau Professor of History, University of Virginia, and author of The Union War
“Only those who have known slavery can understand how fiercely the fire of liberty can burn in the human heart. Douglas R. Egerton’s account of Massachusetts’ African American volunteers—the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry and 5th Massachusetts Cavalry—lays out vividly the energies and personalities that prompted their gallant rush.” —A L L E N C . G U E L Z O , New York Times bestselling author of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JAMES D. JULIA AUCTIONEERS, FAIRFIELD, MAINE, USA, WWW.JAMESDJULIA.COM. SOURCES: JAMES D. JULIA INC. PRESENTS EXTRAORDINARY FIREARMS AUCTION, MARCH 14 & 15, 2016 (2016); WILLIAM A. ALBAUGH III, ET AL, CONFEDERATE HANDGUNS (1963).
“Thunder at the Gates is the first book to provide a full account of the three black regiments raised by Massachusetts in the Civil War. The narrative is enriched by the stories of more than a dozen individual soldiers and officers, which gives a human and personal dimension to this important work.” —JAM ES M . M cPHERSON
Have you visited?
The Lincoln Memorial Shrine
Special Gettysburg Address event November 19 featuring Civil War music!
CWM21-FOB-CostofWar.indd 23 CVM ad 2.indd 1
Since 1932, the only museum and research center dedicated to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War west of the Mississippi 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 8/15/16 6:22 8/11/2016 4:56:54 PMPM
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in focus
On the Path to Freedom in the wake of their victory at the Battle of Port Royal, South Carolina, in November 1861, Union forces secured a foothold on Hilton Head Island and its surrounding isles, establishing a base from which they intended to move against Charleston and Savannah. Accompanying the Union army on the campaign was photographer Henry P. Moore. Among Moore’s subjects throughout the following spring were the plantations and AfricanAmerican slaves abandoned by the retreating Confederate army and residents. In the May 1862 image shown here, slaves impressed to build defenses by Confederate general Thomas F. Drayton, who commanded the military district at Port Royal, gather on a portion of the 700-acre Fish Haul (or Hall) Plantation, which was owned by Drayton’s wife’s family. Union occupation of the area brought sizable, if not enduring, changes to these and other slaves abandoned during the Port Royal Campaign. Among these was the establishment of a town for slaves at Fish Haul in late 1862. Called Mitchelville (after the Union general who commanded the Department of the South at Hilton Head), by November 1865 the self-governing town would boast a population of 1,500, many of whom worked as wage laborers for the U.S. Army. By the turn of the century, though, the town would be largely abandoned.
by craig heberton board of directors , center for civil war photography
THE CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY IS A NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES FOR THE PUBLIC BENEFIT. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CCWP AND ITS MISSION, VISIT CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY.ORG
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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american iliad
HOW THE COMMANDER KNOWN AS “LITTLE PHIL” BECAME THE STUFF OF LEGEND BY MARK GRIMSLEY
n popular imagination, a triumvirate of Ohioans won the Civil War: Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, chief of the Union army; Major General William T. Sherman, his closest partner in command; and Major General Philip H. Sheridan, who pursued and brought General Robert E. Lee to bay at Appomattox Court House. For sheer ability, few American generals equal Grant in America’s military pantheon. And Sherman’s March to the Sea is one of the standout operations of the war, known even to Americans only casually acquainted with the conflict. But for sheer aggressiveness, neither Grant nor Sherman topped “Little Phil” Sheridan. His trademark fury in battle resembled that of the Greek warrior Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. The epic poem opens with these words: “Sing, goddess, the anger of … Achilles and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians….”1 Substitute “Sheridan” for “Achilles” and “Confederates” for “Achaians,” and you have captured his image in the American Iliad. Barely 30 years old when the war broke out, Sheridan stood just five feet five inches tall. Lincoln, who met him in 1864, described him as “a brown, chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can scratch them without stooping.”2 He had a famously bullet-shaped head and a fierce temper. As a West Point cadet he was suspended for a year after a fistfight with an equally fierce—and much taller—classmate. Sheridan began the war in Missouri as a minor officer on Major General Henry W. Halleck’s staff. Not until May 1862 did he receive a combat command, but his career skyrocketed thereafter. Promoted to brigadier general in September 1862, he became a division commander and gave strong performances in the battles of Perryville, Stones River, and Chickamauga. But it was at the besieged town of Chattanooga in November 1863 that he achieved prominence. In a bid to break the siege, the Union Army of the Cumberland launched a seemingly foredoomed frontal assault upon the Confederate Army of Tennessee’s
“ TURN BACK, MEN! TURN BACK! FACE THE OTHER WAY!... YOU’LL HAVE YOUR OWN CAMPS BACK BEFORE NIGHT!” —PHILIP SHERIDAN TO RETREATING UNION TROOPS DURING THE BATTLE OF CEDAR CREEK
To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
forbidding position atop Missionary Ridge. Then, dramatically, they scrambled to the summit and threw the Rebels into headlong retreat. Although a number of generals deserve credit for this “miracle on Missionary Ridge,” it’s Sheridan who is usually credited with leading the charge. It was said that during the lull at the base of the ridge, Sheridan saw a Confederate artillery commander and toasted him with a slug of whiskey from a silver flask. When the artillerist responded with a salvo from his six cannon, Sheridan growled, “I’ll take those guns for that!”3 He started up the slope. The troops gave a mighty cheer and followed. Sheridan’s role at Chattanooga brought him to the attention of Grant, who placed him in charge of the cavalry corps in Major General George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac. During the May 1864 Battle of the Wilderness, Meade assigned the cavalry simply to screen the army. Sheridan despised the mission; he lusted to defeat rival cavalry commander Major General J.E.B. Stuart. He confronted Meade in a fiery tirade that should have gotten him relieved but instead won him permission—from Grant—to do as he wished. A few days later his troopers bested Stuart at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, mortally wounding Stuart in the process. In mid-August 1864, Grant placed Sheridan in charge of the Army of the Shenandoah, giving
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
I
The Fire of Philip Sheridan
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
him two assignments: end the verdant Shenandoah Valley’s days as a critical food source for Lee’s army, and eject Lieutenant General Jubal Early’s troublesome army from the region. Sheridan immediately embarked on the first task, torching 2,000 barns in an episode that Virginians would bitterly remember as “The Burning.” In September 1864 he bested Early in two major battles and thought himself master of the Valley. Early thought otherwise. Soon after dawn on October 19, 1864, his 21,000 Confederates launched a surprise attack on Sheridan’s 31,000 Federals at Cedar Creek, 12 miles south of Winchester, a picturesque town in the Shenandoah Valley. Although superior in numbers, the Union army was caught flat-footed and fell back in disarray. Many bluecoats simply ran from the field. Sheridan had been in Winchester when the attack began, but the mutter of battle
General Philip Sheridan rallies Union soldiers on October 19, 1864, as he makes his way from Winchester to Cedar Creek in Thure de Thulstrup’s painting “Sheridan’s Ride.” It was not the first time that the actions of the diminutive commander would be credited with turning the tide of a battle.
reached his ears. He swung into the saddle of his favorite horse, Rienzi, and rode up the Valley Turnpike toward the sound of the guns. As they neared Cedar Creek, Sheridan and his staff spurred their horses into a gallop, Sheridan in front, the officers streaming behind. They encountered groups of soldiers—hundreds in all—who had fled the battlefield. Sheridan pulled in Rienzi’s reins several times, halting long enough to yell, “Turn back, men! Turn back! Face the other way!” He assured them, “You’ll have your own camps back before night!”4 Let Bruce Catton, one of the American Iliad’s greatest bards, tell what happened next: “The effect was electric.... All along the way men sprang up and cheered. Those who were near the road turned and shouted, waving their arms in frantic signal, to attract the attention of men who were saun-
tering across fields a quarter mile away. They pointed to the speeding cavalcade in the road and at the top of their lungs they cried: ‘Sheridan! Sheridan!’”5 Reaching the front, Sheridan gave no thought to any course of action but to counterattack as aggressively as possible. He succeeded beyond what anyone could have imagined, smashing Early’s army into ruins and converting near defeat into a triumph so absolute it is credited with helping to ensure Lincoln’s re-election as president a few weeks later. A poet named Thomas Buchanan Read gained instant fame with a dashed-off poem, “Sheridan’s Ride.” In it, Sheridan rode 20 miles, not 12, and Rienzi managed to gallop the entire distance—an impossibility for any horse. Although conceding that Read had taken poetic license, Catton insisted, “The legendary picture is close enough to fact.”6 ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72
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stereoscope
s i settled into my seat with my notebook, pen, bag of popcorn, and Junior Mints, I muttered to myself, “Please let this be good.” I was about to see Free State of Jones, a new film about a group of Confederate deserters, fugitive slaves, and freed people who made new lives for themselves in southern Mississippi in the 1860s and 1870s. I had every reason to think that it would be good. First, it’s based on Victoria Bynum’s 2001 book The Free State of Jones, a deeply researched and beautifully narrated history of Newton Knight and his interracial band of renegades, who rebelled against the Confederacy and fought for their rights during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Second, director Gary Ross had given every indication that he values historical accuracy (or at least credibility), consulting no fewer than 11 historians, including Bynum, Margaret Storey (who has studied Unionists in Alabama), and Steve Hahn (whose book about black political struggles during this period, A Nation Under Our Feet, won the Pulitzer Prize). He also created a website (freestateofjones.info) with links to relevant historical documents and other sources. Third, we’ve been seeing some quality films and television about slavery and the Civil War lately, including a remake of the miniseries Roots and two new series, Underground and Mercy Street. The films 12 Years a Slave and Lincoln, in particular, showed that screenwriters and directors could tell vivid and important stories about 19th-century America and attract big audiences. When the credits rolled at the end of Free State of Jones, I was happy. It was good. The depictions of warfare were realistic; the acting was compelling; many of the scenes, especially those filmed in the swamps of Louisiana (standing in for Mississippi), were hauntingly beautiful. And the last portion of the film, which tracks the members of the Knight Company during Reconstruction, is one of the best portrayals of both black political action and the racial violence that followed that I have ever seen in film or television. There were problems, of course. It was a little slow
Opposite page: Matthew McConaughey as Confederate soldier Newton Knight in the 2016 movie Free State of Jones
in parts. Only Newt (Matthew McConaughey) and Moses Washington (Mahershala Ali playing a composite character meant to represent the transition to freedom for southern slaves) were truly well developed characters. The romantic plot—the evolving relationship between Newt and the slave then freedwoman Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw)—felt flat and unconvincing. All of the other black characters were marginalized; we did not even know their names. And I was not a fan of the blackand-white period photographs and expository text that appeared every now and again, interrupting the visual narrative and giving the film a Ken Burns-y feel. But overall, I thought that the film did manage to convey historical events in a compelling and dramatic way—a combination that is difficult to achieve, given the demands of current filmmaking. I looked around, wondering what everyone else in the theater thought. But my fellow audience members at the 3 p.m. Sunday show bolted the theater before I could ask. I needed to talk to other people—non-academics, non-Civil War specialists— about Free State of Jones. And so I picked up the phone. “Hello, Megan.” This was my father, a man who stops at most historical markers on road trips. “Halloooo!” And my mother, a cinephile who has seen more movies in her lifetime than you ever will. No, really. ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
FREE STATE OF JONES AND THE QUEST TO TELL ONE OF THE CIVIL WAR’S LESSER-KNOWN STORIES BY MEGAN KATE NELSON
MURRAY CLOSE/STX PRODUCTIONS, LLC
A
Compelling History
MURRAY CLOSE/STX PRODUCTIONS, LLC
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
29 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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NATIONAL ARCHIVES & RECORD ADMINISTRATION
Faces of t The crew of the gunboat USS Hunchback poses on deck in this photo attributed to Mathew Brady.
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the Navy AN ALBUM OF UNION AND CONFEDERATE SAILORS BY RONALD S. CODDINGTON
NATIONAL ARCHIVES & RECORD ADMINISTRATION
navigable waters are central to our Civil War narrative. In Charleston Harbor, Rebel artillery pounded the walls of Fort Sumter to brick dust in April 1861. Far away in the Bering Sea, a Confederate cruiser fired the last hostile shots of the war across the bow of a New England whaler two months after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. A vast array of vessels— converted passenger steamers, sleek modern cruisers, antiquated wooden frigates, and the first ironclads—fought the water war. The men who served aboard them came from all walks of life. Some were skilled merchant mariners or fishermen. Others were country farmers or city clerks with no obvious connection to the sea. An elite cadre of them was educated at the U.S. Naval Academy. Although their daring deeds have often been overshadowed by those of the great blue and gray armies, the following representative portraits reveal that the men who served in the Union and Confederate navies were as patriotic and full of fight as their counterparts in the ground forces.
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EUGENE BROWN
CONFEDERATES IN MAINE
GERALD ROXBURY (OPPOSITE); THIS PAGE: RON FIELD (LEFT); RONN PALM (RIGHT)
The schooner Archer eased into Maine’s Portland Harbor at sunset on June 26, 1863, and anchored amid a fleet of merchant vessels. She attracted no attention as her masts blended in with a forest of other ships. But beneath her sails was a situation worthy of notice. The crewmen were Confederates, and their number included a lone engineer, Eugene Brown. The Virginia native had distinguished himself in actions along the Mississippi River before being assigned to special service as a raider. Now, as chief engineer and second-incommand of Archer, it was up to him to help capture Caleb Cushing, a sleek U.S. revenue cutter in Portland Harbor. At about 1:30 a.m., Brown and his comrades boarded Caleb Cushing and subdued its crew. But when the moment came to make their getaway, Brown failed to get the vessel’s engines running and they had to leave under sail. At 10 a.m., a Union convoy approached Caleb Cushing, which had made only about 20 miles. The crew abandoned ship and were taken prisoner. Brown was eventually exchanged and ended the war in North Carolina, where he surrendered on April 26, 1865. He settled in Baltimore, Maryland, after the war and lived until 1916.
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AMOS FOSTER
GERALD ROXBURY (OPPOSITE); THIS PAGE: RON FIELD (LEFT); RONN PALM (RIGHT)
THE LIEUTENANT WHO NEARLY DROWNED LINCOLN
On April 3, 1865, Union ground forces made a mad dash into Richmond after Confederates evacuated their capital. Close on their heels were Acting Lieutenant Amos Foster and his crew aboard the warship Commodore Perry, which advanced north on the James River. When it was only about seven miles from the city, Foster’s vessel became entangled in underwater obstructions left by the Confederates. Until Commodore Perry could break free, no other ships could pass. Soon after, USS Malvern approached, carrying Admiral David Dixon Porter and President Lincoln, both of whom were eager to enter Richmond. Unwilling to wait, Porter and Lincoln boarded a small, flat-bottomed barge to be rowed the rest of the way, accompanied by another barge full of Marines. In 1914, Foster shared the story of what happened next with a veteran’s group: “Between the Perry and the shore was a very narrow passage of deep water, and it was through this that the admiral intended the boats should pull. But on reaching this, he found it was not wide enough for him to pass through pulling the oars on both sides. Just as they had given the barge good headway—thinking she would shoot far enough ahead to clear the steamer and allow them to use the oars again—the current struck her on the bow and set her directly under the steamer’s immense wheel. At this very moment the engineer, not aware that anyone was near the wheel, began to turn her over.” Foster added, “The President halloed; the admiral halloed; and the crew halloed.” Foster ran to his engineer. “I rushed to the engine room hatch, roared out to stop her. He stopped her, but one half turn more would have killed the President, Admiral and all.” Foster lived until 1916.
CHARLES HENRY BRADFORD
THE STORMING OF FORT SUMTER
The nighttime attack on Fort Sumter on September 7, 1863, by Union forces determined to retake the famed bastion in Charleston Harbor ended in a stinging defeat for the U.S. Navy. Among the casualties was First Lieutenant Charles Henry Bradford, who was part of the U.S. Marine Corps force that stormed the fort. The civilian doctor who treated him before he succumbed to his wounds was both a unionist and a fellow Mason, and he arranged for Bradford’s burial in Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery. But after citizens complained about having a Yankee buried among their people, Bradford’s remains were unceremoniously removed to a potter’s field. After Charleston fell to Union forces in February 1865, Rear Admiral John Dahlgren had Bradford’s body reburied in Magnolia Cemetery with full military honors. “I desire to restore the body to the resting place, where, through the kindness of a friend it was originally placed,” he wrote at the time. In 1873 Bradford’s remains were transferred to the new national cemetery in Florence, South Carolina. Somewhere along the way, however, the body was lost or misidentified. His exact whereabouts today are unknown.
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GEORGE WORK
THIRTY SECONDS AT MOBILE BAY
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION (2)
Rear Admiral David G. Farragut refused to go into action against Confederate forces stationed at Mobile Bay, Alabama, in the summer of 1864 without the monitor Tecumseh, one of the Union’s best ironclads. Farragut postponed his planned attack by a day to await the arrival of the metal monster. The cadre of officers aboard Tecumseh included Paymaster George Work, a 42-year-old former schoolteacher who had amassed a small fortune as a Wall Street trader. Work and his comrades steamed into action aboard Tecumseh at the head of Farragut’s fleet early on the morning of August 5. The vessel struck an underwater mine soon after the action began and sunk in about 30 seconds. Most of the crew was lost, including Work. His body was never recovered.
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WILLIAM STARR DANA
REDEMPTION BEFORE MOBILE BAY
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION (2)
Ensign William Starr Dana, shown (right) with his brother Richard, was among the U.S. Naval Academy’s brightest cadets in the Class of 1863. His career almost ended on his first assignment aboard the frigate USS Niagara, however. He and several officers left their watch before being properly relieved and were severely reprimanded. Dana was given a second chance and assigned to USS Hartford, the flagship of Rear Admiral David G. Farragut. He redeemed himself by participating in the successful capture and burning of a blockade runner and fighting in the Battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864. He survived the war and remained in the navy. He died of pneumonia while on active duty in 1890.
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MARK SUNSTROM
BAPTISM OF FIRE ON USS MONITOR
The original slate of officers assigned to USS Monitor, the first ironclad warship commissioned by the U.S. Navy, represented a wide range of naval education and experience. On one end of the scale stood John L. Worden, his long graying beard and lined forehead a testament to his years of service on the high seas. On the other end stood fresh-faced 18-year-old Mark Sunstrom, a Maryland boy on his first assignment. Sunstrom was assigned to be the fourth assistant engineer on Monitor on February 7, 1862. A month later he and his crewmates helped usher in a new era of naval warfare when they fought the metalsheathed CSS Virginia to a draw at Hampton Roads, Virginia. Sunstrom appears in at least two photographs made of Monitor soon after the historic battle. He survived Monitor’s sinking in stormy weather at the end of the year and went on to serve on several warships in the Atlantic blockade. He died of tuberculosis in 1875.
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AUTHOR’S COLLECTION (LEFT); EARL SHECK (RIGHT)
Sailor Nathan Hopkins and two of his comrades from the Union frigate Minnesota needed a break from the monotony of routine patrols along the James River in June 1864. Granted a brief shore leave to stretch their legs, they soon encountered a few Rebels. It was then that Hopkins realized his two mates were bounty jumpers—individuals who joined the navy to receive the cash payout for new enlistees and then deserted, often repeating the process until caught. Hopkins’ companions quickly declared their intentions to desert. Hopkins, however, proclaimed his allegiance to the Union and was sent to the infamous prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville, Georgia. Hopkins survived his ordeal and lived until 1923.
JERRY & TERESA RINKER (LEFT); THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM, NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA (RIGHT)
NATHAN HOPKINS
FATEFUL SHORE LEAVE
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION (LEFT); EARL SHECK (RIGHT)
JERRY & TERESA RINKER (LEFT); THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM, NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA (RIGHT)
ROSWELL HAWKS LAMSON
WILLIAM CUSHMAN
A BRILLIANT ENGAGEMENT AT HILL’S POINT
VICTORY AT CHERBOURG
In southeastern Virginia during the spring of 1863, Rebel artillerists entrenched on high ground known as Hill’s Point occupied an enviable position overlooking the strategically important Nansemond River between the towns of Norfolk and Suffolk. The Union officer in charge of a four-ship flotilla in the region, 25-year-old Naval Academy graduate Lieutenant Roswell Hawks Lamson, came up with a novel way to dislodge the Confederates. First, he cloaked USS Stepping Stones in hammock cloths to conceal its guns, his crew, and the 270 infantrymen he had enlisted for the mission. Then, as noted a Union sailor onboard, “Lamson, pretending that he was afraid to venture into that zone of fire, stopped the vessel and slowly retired up stream, where he rested for awhile. Then, as though intending to make a supreme dash past the battery, he ordered full speed ahead, and downstream went the Stepping Stones until just short of the bend before the battery, when the helm was put to starboard and she went hard against the river-bank.” Lamson ordered the cloths pulled up and the infantrymen disembarked, charging and taking the Rebel battery with minimal casualties. Lamson would fight with distinction through the rest of the war and live until 1903. A grateful navy went on to name three warships in his honor.
When word arrived that the Confederate raider Alabama was soon to leave the safety of the neutral Cherbourg Harbor in France, where it had been receiving repairs, the crew of the Union sloop-of-war Kearsarge, which had been pursuing the enemy vessel for two years, prepared for action. One of Kearsarge’s officers, William Cushman, wrote his mother a letter brimming with confidence that he and his mates would be victorious, and that he would survive the Rebel guns. Cushman was correct on both counts: Kearsarge sank Alabama, and Cushman was not among the three Union sailors wounded during the fighting. Soon after the battle, however, Cushman was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He barely survived the war, dying in November 1865.
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SAILING MEN Based on surviving records, we know more about the men who made up the Union navy than we do about their Confederate counterparts. Shown here are some statistics about both groups of sailors, which serve to demonstrate that the men who fought the war on the seas were as diverse a lot as those who battled it on land.
5,213
Number of men who enlisted in the Confederate navy from 1861 to 1864
78
Percentage of men who joined the Union navy with no prior nautical experience
55
Percentage of Union sailors born in the U.S.
118,044 45
Number of men who enlisted in the Union navy from 1861 to 1865
Percentage of Union sailors born outside of the U.S.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CANADA: 4.7%; ENGLAND: 10.26%; GERMANY: 4.01%; IRELAND: 20.04%; NORWAY: 1.13%; SWEDEN: 1.0%; FRANCE: 0.74%; OTHER: 3.46%
An unknown cameraman captures the crew of the Monitor-class ship USS Lehigh from the bank of the James River in this undated wartime photo.
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26
Average age of a Union sailor
18,000
Number of African Americans who joined the Union navy (15.25% of entire force)
53.50
Percentage of Union sailors who were skilled laborers before the war UNSKILLED LABORERS: 7.48% FARMERS AND FARM LABORERS: 3.10% WHITE-COLLAR AND COMMERCIAL: 2.01% PROFESSIONAL: 0.53% NONE/UNEMPLOYED: 33.38%
373
Number of U.S. Navy personnel who resigned and joined the Confederate navy by the end of 1861
29.79
Percentage of Union sailors from New York 16.93% FROM MASSACHUSETTS; 11.89% FROM PENNSYLVANIA; 10.48% FROM WESTERN STATES; 30.91% FROM OTHER STATES
OTHER
WEST
MA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
PA
SOURCES: MICHAEL J. BENNETT, UNION JACKS: YANKEE SAILORS IN THE CIVIL WAR (2004); WILLIAM S. DUDLEY, GOING SOUTH: U.S. NAVY OFFICER RESIGNATIONS & DISMISSALS ON THE EVE OF THE CIVIL WAR (WASHINGTON, 1981); UNITED STATES NAVAL WAR RECORDS OFFICE, OFFICIAL RECORDS OF THE UNION AND CONFEDERATE NAVIES IN THE WAR OF THE REBELLION 30 VOLS. (WASHINGTON, 1894-1922), SERIES II, VOL. 2.
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HUBBARD MINOR JR.
BRILLIANT AFFAIR ON OSSABAW SOUND DAVID W. VAUGHAN (LEFT); GREG FRENCH (OPPOSITE)
Hubbard Minor Jr. joined the Confederate army when he was only 17 and made a name for himself as an artillerist in the defenses of Port Hudson, Louisiana. He left the army in 1863 and transferred to the Naval Academy in Richmond, lured by the romantic high-seas adventures of Captain Raphael Semmes and other Confederate raiders. A year later, Midshipman Minor and other sailors rowed across Ossabaw Sound, off the Georgia coast near Savannah, under cover of darkness. They captured the U.S. warship Water Witch after a tough hand-to-hand fight with enemy sailors that left Minor with a bullet wound in the leg. He soon recovered and served until conflict’s end, but died in 1874 of an unknown cause at age 29.
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AARON CARTER JOSEPH
PENETRATING THE BUCKLER OF SECESSION
DAVID W. VAUGHAN (LEFT); GREG FRENCH (OPPOSITE)
Looking to secure a base on the coast of South Carolina from which to begin operations against Charleston and Savannah, Union naval forces attacked the Confederate forts protecting Port Royal Sound on November 7, 1861. One of the sailors who made the Union victory possible that day was Landsman Aaron Carter Joseph, who along with his crewmates on USS Mohican helped reduce Fort Walker on Hilton Head Island during the battle. Northerners, still reeling from the devastating Union defeat at Bull Run, Virginia, a few months earlier, celebrated the win with wild abandon. The New York Times declared, “The spear has penetrated through the bosses of the buckler of secession. The glorious oriflamme of the Union, first struck down by parricidal hands in that State, reappears after six months with flaming vengeance on the soil of South Carolina. Already the whirligig of Time begins to bring round his revenges.” Little more than three years later, Joseph would participate in the Union victory at Fort Fisher, outside Wilmington, North Carolina, which served to close the last major port open to the Confederacy—putting him at two of the Union’s most important naval successes along the Atlantic coast. He survived the war and lived until 1916.
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WILLIAM CONWAY WHITTLE JR.
“NO COUNTRY, NO FLAG, NO HOME”
William Conway Whittle, a first lieutenant in the Confederate navy, penned the words “No country, no flag, no home” in his diary after he learned of Robert E. Lee’s surrender and the fall of the Rebel government. He and his comrades were in the North Pacific on the commerce raider Shenandoah when they received the news on August 2, 1865—months after the events had transpired. Shenandoah ended its reign of terror against Union shipping and steamed for England, where the crew hoped to avoid the piracy charges that were likely in a U.S. court. The vessel and crew surrendered to British authorities on November 6. The Confederate flag was lowered for the final time at 10 a.m. that day, and with it ended the Civil War on the seas. Whittle eventually returned to the U.S. and died in 1920.
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JERRY & TERESA RINKER (LEFT); AUTHOR’S COLLECTION (RIGHT)
Less than a week after South Carolina seceded from the Union, Charleston-born Jack Grimball resigned his U.S. Navy commission and returned home. He soon joined Palmetto State forces and was assigned to Fort Moultrie, which had recently been evacuated by Major Robert Anderson and his federal garrison. Grimball participated in the January 9, 1861, attack on Star of the West, a civilian vessel sent by the U.S. to reinforce Anderson at Fort Sumter. Thus began Grimball’s Confederate career. He served in a variety of assignments, his last as an officer on the raider Shenandoah, which had the distinction of being the final Confederate ship to surrender to Union forces in November 1865. Upon his death in 1922, Grimball was remembered as one of the longest-serving military men in the Confederacy.
THE LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEFT); GERALD ROXBURY (RIGHT)
JACK GRIMBALL
EARLY DEFENDER OF HIS HOMELAND
JERRY & TERESA RINKER (LEFT); AUTHOR’S COLLECTION (RIGHT)
THE LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEFT); GERALD ROXBURY (RIGHT)
JUSTUS BUCK
ISAAC S. BRADBURY
SEAMAN IN COMMAND
FACE TO FACE WITH A REBEL
After Union forces established themselves along the South Carolina coast near Beaufort, the Union navy had its hands full dealing with large numbers of slaves who fled to the Stars and Stripes in search of freedom. Naval commanders on the scene made vessels available to assist the black men, women, and children to the safety of Union lines. One of the vessels, USS Dale, was placed in the command of Ordinary Seaman Justus Buck. An experienced sailor, he relished the rare opportunity for an enlisted man to have his own ship. Though his tenure lasted only a month, it was memorable. Buck left the navy in 1863 when his enlistment expired, and lived until 1881.
One day in early 1864, the Union warship Cambridge left her place along the outer line of the blockade along the North Carolina coast near Wilmington to embark on a routine patrol. After an alert crewman spotted five Rebel soldiers on shore, Acting Ensign Isaac S. Bradbury and crew hopped aboard a small boat and rowed to land to capture them. A gunfight ensued and Bradbury shot one of the Confederate men dead. “We crept down until we was about one hundred yards, when our party rushed out and summoned them to surrender,” Bradbury wrote of the harrowing experience in a letter to a friend. “One of the d-d scoundrels answered me with a ‘ball & buck’ it missed me, and I instantly drawed a bead on him with my ‘Sharps rifle’ and I made a hole in his face as big as an egg. I went up to the corpse and it was a horrible sight, oh god I hope & pray that this awful war will soon com[e] to an end. But I had to do this action for self defense, there was nothing on him excepting a rebel newspaper ‘Wilmington Journal’ and two or three envelopes.” Bradbury went on to become commander of his own ship at war’s end, and stayed in the navy after the conflict ended. In January 1866, the ship wrecked in a storm and all hands were lost. Bradbury was 26.
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GEORGE EDWARD CLARK
THE PRECARIOUS POSITION OF “YANKEE NED”
THE LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEFT); JERRY & TERESA RINKER (RIGHT); ORTON BEGNER (OPPOSITE)
Seaman George Edward Clark found himself in an exposed position on his ship during the victorious Union attack at Beaufort, North Carolina, in 1862. He vividly recounted his experiences in the battle there and elsewhere in his 1867 memoirs, Seven Years of a Sailor’s Life. “We were so near that we could plainly see the rebels as they jumped up and loaded their guns,” he wrote about the fight at Beaufort. “The wind was at the westward, cold and strong; we opened fire on the fort, and the loaders and spongers stripped to the waist, and worked like men.” Published under the nom de plume Yankee Ned, Seven Years of a Sailor’s Life received enthusiastic reviews, including one in a Midwestern newspaper: “It has been said, ‘No one but a sailor can write a sailor’s book;’ and here we have evidence of what a sailor can do. So graphically is every page written, that, as we read, we can almost hear the wind whistling among the shrouds, snuff up the salt air, and see the white spray on the vessel’s path.” Clark left the navy around the time his book was published. He became a traveling salesman and died in 1914.
FRANK BEVILLE
CAPTURED ON PATROL
On the evening of March 14, 1863, Frank Beville, an 18-year-old Confederate navy midshipman, was placed in command of a guard boat on patrol for recently deserted Rebel sailors off the Georgia coast near his hometown of Savannah. Once they were out of sight, the boat’s five-man crew—who themselves intended to desert—mutinied, overpowering Beville and stripping him of his weapons. The crew navigated the vessel under flag of truce to the nearest Union blockade ship and surrendered. Beville remained a prisoner until October 1864, when he was released. He was in Richmond at war’s end, evacuating the city on April 2, 1865, and participating in the Battle of Sailor’s Creek four days later. He lived until 1905.
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BENJAMIN HORTON PORTER
LEADING THE ASSAULT AGAINST FORT FISHER
THE LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEFT); JERRY & TERESA RINKER (RIGHT); ORTON BEGNER (OPPOSITE)
The successful Union attack against Fort Fisher, North Carolina, on January 15, 1865, came at great cost to the Union navy. A strike force of 1,400 sailors landed, charged across a narrow strip of beach, and became hopelessly trapped in a murderous Confederate fire. Casualties were heavy. Among those who lost their lives was one of the navy’s best, Lieutenant Benjamin Horton Porter. His death was widely mourned by his comrades and superiors. “I have seen my official family cut down one after another, and my heart is so sad that I feel as if I could never smile again,” confessed Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter in a letter to Porter’s parents. “Among all the young men who have been on my staff no one had my entire confidence more than your lost son—lost only for a time. You will find him again where all is peace and joy. I would like to drink of the waters of Lethe and forget the last four years.”
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“You Have Just Killed the Best Ma n i THE RISE AND FALL OF CONTROVERSIAL CAVALRYMAN JOHN HUNT MORGAN BY TERRY BISSON
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Ma n in the
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Confederate cavalryman John Hunt Morgan leads his Raiders forward in this 1895 watercolor by artist Henry Alexander Ogden.
Confederacy!” 47
PAINTING BY HENRY ALEXANDER OGDEN
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It was cold. It was getting dark. It was December 1862 in Tennessee.
guest of honor, renowned Confederate cavalry commander John Hunt Morgan, danced expertly to a Virginia reel with his bride, Martha (“Mattie”) Ready, known as the “Belle of Tennessee,” while two regimental bands played in turn and flutes of champagne, already dear in the beleaguered South, were raised in toasts and cheers. Morgan was one of the most famous fighters of the Confederacy, celebrated in song, story, and worshipful newspaper headlines for his daring and enterprise. He was the very template of a southern cavalier with his imperial goatee, spotless uniform, knee-high boots, and gold braid. His lightning cavalry raids into Union-occupied Kentucky were fodder for newspapers both North and South. He was denounced in the Yankee press as a horse thief, a “thieving, pillaging marauder,” but lionized in the Rebel states as the Kentucky Cavalier, a dashing, romantic hero on To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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meanwhile, inside the ballroom of the elegant Ready family mansion, the traditions, pretensions, hopes, and dreams of the South were being celebrated in high style. The groom and
By the time of his marriage to Martha Ready in December 1862, Confederate cavalry commander John Hunt Morgan had established a reputation as one of the Confederacy’s boldest fighters. Left: Morgan and his wife as they appeared in 1863. Opposite page: The April 1862 Battle of Shiloh, one of several early war actions in which Morgan distinguished himself.
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY ARCHIVES
The lights from the Ready mansion, far across the fields in Murfreesboro, extended neither warmth nor cheer, but the men of the 2nd Arkansas Infantry, CSA, huddled around their fire, were not complaining. It was easy and honorable duty, guarding the famous wedding of the “Thunderbolt of the Confederacy” and his bride. They could even hear the distant music from the brightly lit mansion. Then they heard hoofbeats approaching and scrambled to their feet in a rough approximation of attention. It was a cavalry officer from the 2nd Kentucky, CSA, bringing a platter of cake and, even better, white whiskey in a jar. Without dismounting, but returning their salutes with a genial smile, he passed the cake around—compliments of the general. A cheer for the general, then the jar went around. The Union forces were miles away, and the guard duty was nothing but a formality. Discipline was loose and spirits were high. The dashing General Morgan was much admired, and most of the foot soldiers around the fire were hoping to meet him personally, to salute him or maybe even shake his hand when the ceremonies were over. Most, but not all. Private Andrew Campbell took a drink that warmed his gut if not his heart. An immigrant, he had been conscripted into the Rebel army, and had no love for slavery. The South’s haughty aristocrats too often reminded him of his native Ireland’s English overlords. But Campbell was a willing soldier, a ready fighter, and he liked the men he served with. And Tennessee moonshine tasted a bit like Irish poteen. Harsh, but friendly. Campbell even raised the jar to the general before passing it on. He was to meet with Morgan, less than two years later. But not to salute, and never to shake his hand.1
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UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY ARCHIVES
horseback, the living embodiment of southern chivalry. John Hunt Morgan readily embraced the role he was born into. Raised in wealthy Lexington, a scion of planter aristocrats, and famously expelled from Transylvania College for dueling, he had eagerly enlisted in the 1848 invasion of Mexico, where he had performed with honor and the requisite gallantry. After that brief, one-sided conflict he had returned to Lexington, traded in slaves, hemp, and wool, and, unerringly faithful to the ideal of the southern gentleman, gambled, drank, raced horses, hunted squirrels, charmed the ladies, and defended his honor from rivals both real and imagined. Though his sympathies were entirely southern, Morgan had at first opposed secession as impractical. But when “neutral” Lexington was occupied by Union troops, he raised a Confederate flag over his closed woolen factory, sold his slaves south, and led his volunteer “Lexington Rifles” to secessionist Bowling Green to enlist in the Confederate army. Even before they were officially mustered in, “Captain” Morgan and his militia swung into ac-
tion, galloping almost nightly through Union lines and burning bridges, spiking railroads, and taking prisoners. The Confederates in western Kentucky were steadily losing ground, but as they retreated, Morgan’s reputation grew. His “Raiders” frustrated the Union command and cheered the area’s many southern sympathizers with lightning raids where they fought swift-pitched battles and then slipped back into Bowling Green (and later, when that city was captured, into Tennessee). In April 1862 he distinguished himself at the Battle of Shiloh with an old-style cavalry charge into the teeth of the enemy, sabers raised and horses at the gallop. The newspapers loved it. Even after Union forces occupied Nashville, Morgan continued to strike into his beloved Kentucky. Swiftly promoted to colonel, he was popular with his men, to whom he promised loot as well as action; generous to his prisoners, whom he often disarmed and paroled; and conspicuously gallant to ladies, in true southern fashion. He once stopped a train and assured the Union wives aboard that he would spare their captured husbands, then removed his white kid gloves so
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FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER
and a favorite of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Davis himself was in Murfreesboro—for the wedding, it was rumored; but actually to sign off on Morgan’s promotion and slip away without attending the ceremonies. Davis was no fan of Morgan, whose recent reception (complete with parade) in the Confederate capital of Richmond had proven that he was far more popular than the president himself, who was, to put it generously, not a charismatic man. After a short honeymoon, Morgan departed, with his new wife’s blessing, on his famous Christmas Raid. By now Morgan was in command of almost a division, and his Raiders included Texas Rangers, Cherokee volunteers, and many freebooters who had transferred in to escape the discipline and boredom of camp life. He led his men into the heart of the Bluegrass, as far north as Cynthiana and almost to the Ohio River (the Mason-Dixon line). He was welcomed, boldly but briefly, into occupied Lexington itself, where supporters lined the streets waving the Stars and Bars. Then it was back to work, “liberating” horses, cutting telegraph lines, and burning the critical Muldraugh Hill railroad trestles
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they could kiss his hand in gratitude. His style was traditional but his military objectives thoroughly modern. He cut telegraph lines, often after sending false messages to confuse his pursuers. In Cave City, Kentucky, he blew up a locomotive, and in Gallatin, Tennessee, he destroyed the railroad tunnels funneling Union supplies into Nashville. At a time when both armies were often dressed in motley rather than gray or blue, he sometimes passed himself off as a Union officer to avoid capture or to gain intelligence. Morgan convinced his commander, General Braxton Bragg, that Kentucky could be recovered for the Confederacy, and in the fall of 1862 Bragg mounted a larger campaign in which Morgan’s Raiders were only a part. But the Kentuckians who were eager to fight for the South had already enlisted, and even the local partisans were growing weary of war. When Bragg’s forces were met by the Union army at Perryville, the battle was a draw, but it marked the end of the South’s dream of recapturing Kentucky. Bragg retreated into Tennessee, but even so, the southern press trumpeted “Morgan Victorious!” headlines, more interested in the spirit than the hard facts. Morgan’s bold raids thrilled the South, which was engaged in a largely defensive war in northern Virginia. The Confederate army was mostly led by West Point graduates, many of whom had served with the Union generals they now fought against with all the machinery and protocols of modern war. How much better, how much more appropriate, was this gallant raider, the Kentucky Cavalier whose exploits recalled the “romantic and daring feats of the days of knighthood and chivalry”—all served with a Rebel yell.2 Tall in the saddle, with the brim of his black felt hat pinned up at one side, Morgan was perfectly cast for the part. He was compared to Walter Scott’s romantic hero Rob Roy, and to Francis Marion, the South Carolina “Swamp Fox” who had helped George Washington defeat the British. Heralded by the southern press as “our gallant Marion,” Morgan lent romance to the brutal grind of war. Children were named after him, as were forts, fords, horses, and dogs. Ladies fought to claim a lock of his hair, or even a strand from the mane of his warhorse, Black Bess. Between raids he was often seen in the Confederate stronghold of Murfreesboro, gallantly courting his eager fiancée, Mattie Ready, the daughter of a former Tennessee congressman who had seceded from Washington along with his state. By the time of his wedding to Ready in December 1862, Morgan had been promoted to brigadier general. The ceremony itself was performed by General Leonidas Polk, an Episcopalian bishop
As the war progressed, Morgan’s reputation continued to rise among most southerners, who were thrilled by his daring exploits. Opposite page: The cover sheet of a song published in Morgan’s honor on January 1, 1864.
that carried Union soldiers and supplies south. Riding “like a rocket,” covering 500 miles in 14 days, Morgan’s Raiders wrecked railroads, burned bridges and ferries, and “confiscated” cattle, horses, and even slaves. Morgan carefully cultivated his image as the embodiment of southern chivalry, but his men grew less restrained as the war got meaner. Brandishing shotguns and Bowie knives, they robbed local banks and looted stores, even those of Confederate sympathizers. Their welcome into Kentucky grew less enthusiastic as they laughingly scattered nearworthless Confederate dollars while carrying off hams, horses, bourbon, and bullion. They were even known to steal the coats and shoes of their prisoners. Kentucky was rich in thoroughbreds and Confederate sympathizers, and the Federals were frustrated in their attempts to capture Morgan or cut him off. (“They are all on race horses!” complained a Union officer.) The raid even alarmed President Abraham Lincoln, who wired his commanders, “There is a stampede in Kentucky. Look to it!”3 Contrary to his heroic reputation in the South, Morgan was vilified in the North as “one of the greatest scoundrels that ever went unhung.”4 He was also mistrusted by his superiors in the Confederate military, who found the loose discipline of his men and his arrogant disregard for the chain of command troubling. Still, his exploits inspired the South, which was sorely in need of victories, even militarily unimportant ones. Morgan’s dashing raids showed that the martial spirit of the South was still intact. So, in the spring of 1863, Bragg reluctantly agreed to yet another cavalry raid into Kentucky. Morgan and his men mounted up for what came to be called the Great Raid. At first it was
the usual pageantry of thundering hoofs, burning barns, Rebel yells, and clever evading of Union pursuers. Then, in a bold and ultimately foolhardy move, Morgan seized a ferry in Brandenburg and went across the Ohio River into Indiana, even though he was under strict orders not to cross the river. The local militias, never expecting to fight “real” Confederates, much less Morgan’s Raiders, fell back in disarray. Newspapers North and South followed Morgan’s every move as he led his cavalry through southern Indiana and then east across Ohio. Cincinnati cowered under martial law as Morgan’s Raiders galloped across the Midwest in a precursor of William Tecumseh Sherman’s march through Georgia the following year. The South was thrilled once again. Morgan was taking the war to the enemy’s heartland, something even Robert E. Lee had failed so far to do. “More Morgans!” cried the Richmond papers. Here was a fighter with dash and derring-do. This glorious and popular escapade, however, would also become his most conspicuous failure. Morgan planned a triumphant getaway into Virginia, where he hoped to hook up with Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. But he and the bulk of his Raiders (some 2,000) were cut off, surrounded, and captured trying to cross the Ohio into West Virginia. It was a disaster. General Morgan, fallen into Union hands at last, learned to his dismay how powerful his legend was in the North. His hopes that he might be exchanged for Union officers, a common practice between the two armies, were dashed when he and his staff were marched into a penitentiary rather than a POW camp. The northern papers crowed, and the South was outraged when the Kentucky Cavalier’s locks and beard were shorn
FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER
ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION
The increasingly loose discipline of Morgan’s Raiders earned the ire of northern—and even southern—civilians. Right: In this sketch published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Morgan’s men are shown pillaging the town of Salem, Indiana, during the Great Raid in 1863.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
though tennessee, unlike Kentucky, had seceded, mountainous east Tennessee was still a contested area. The Appalachian southerners
owned few slaves, and many were resentful of the cotton aristocracy that ruled the Confederacy. Greeneville, a prosperous town of 10,000 at the foot of the Smokies, had been a hotbed of abolition and a station on the Underground Railroad. A convention there had even tried to secede from Tennessee when the state joined the Confederacy. Its population was bitterly divided, and banditry and partisan raids from Union sympathizers were common. Indeed, Lincoln had appointed a native of Greeneville, Andrew Johnson (who later became his vice president), as military governor of mostly occupied Tennessee. By late 1864 the Rebel army was stretched thin. Vicksburg on the Mississippi had fallen, Sherman was on the march toward Atlanta, and Richmond was besieged. The Confederacy was being lost, piece by piece. Morgan got word that Johnson was sending a Union force to seize Greeneville, his hometown, which was thinly defended. Greeneville was part of Morgan’s command, and he saw his chance to get back into action. He assembled his forces in Virginia and on November 4, they mounted up and headed south and west, to surprise the Federals. His glory days were not quite done. (Ironically, that very morning Morgan had been relieved of his command pending an inquiry into the scandalous behavior of his troops on their last two Kentucky raids. But the order from headquarters had arrived too late—or Morgan had chosen to ignore it.) In his customary high style, Morgan rode boldly into Greeneville in the vanguard of his division of about 1,500. Black Bess had been lost in battle but he now rode Sir Oliver, a thoroughbred stallion given to him by a Bluegrass supporter. With his signature flourish he presented himself at the Williams mansion, home of the town’s leading family, staunch Confederates. One of his staff officers was Mrs. Williams’ son. He was welcomed enthusiastically but warned by Mrs. Williams that the area was thick with Union sympathizers, and that the Federals were at Bulls Gap, only 20 miles away. Morgan, who wore his legend like his uniform, coolly reminded her that he was quite capable of defending the honor of the South from Yankee marauders. Besides, he added with a smile, “They don’t know I am here with a full division, and are in for a big surprise.”6 While the Williams family and their slaves prepared a grand dinner and reception in his honor, Morgan stationed his troops in an arc a few miles north of town, facing Bulls Gap. A small force, including his headquarters staff and a few pickets, stayed with him in the town.
PHOTOGRAPH UNIVERSITY OFCREDIT KENTUCKY HEREARCHIVES
and he was thrown into a cell like a common criminal.5 But after months of solitary confinement, Morgan and a handful of his officers managed an escape, tunneling out of the Ohio prison. The failure of the Great Raid was eclipsed by the bold success of Morgan’s escape and return, with a precious few of his men, back south, where allies disguised him as a Union mule buyer and helped him through Kentucky and back to Confederate lines. Reunited with his faithful Mattie in Virginia, Morgan found himself more a hero than ever. “The Leopard is free ... is free!” sang one southern headline seeking new hope after Lee’s July 1863 defeat at Gettysburg. “O, for a Dozen Morgans!” Morgan was feted and adored once again in Richmond with a parade of thousands (while Davis glowered), and Mattie herself was honored by a special decree of the Confederate Congress. Encouraged, Morgan put out a call for replacements for his depleted Raiders and thousands responded, but Confederate military officials, stung by his losses, denied transfers to most. He appealed to Bragg, who allowed him one last glory raid, in the spring of 1864. Morgan collected his scattered Raiders, and added to them a dubious mix of deserters and “bummers”—soldiers other commanders were eager to get rid of. With a force of 1,900 he swept into Kentucky through the Cumberland Mountains and raided the Bluegrass towns of Winchester, Mt. Sterling, and Georgetown. This time even Confederate sympathizers were shocked as his undisciplined men kicked in doors and looted stores of coffee, cloth, pots and pans, silverware, and cash, with little of the chivalry of his earlier ventures. By the time Morgan returned to Virginia, Lee and the Confederate commanders had had quite enough of his adventures. He was far too popular to cashier, so, in an effort to rein him in, he was “promoted” to commander of the Department of Eastern Tennessee and Southwestern Virginia, which held the saltworks and lead mines essential to the South. Stationed in tiny Abingdon, Virginia, Morgan feared that his glory days were over. Mattie joined him, and was soon pregnant. But domesticity was not to his liking. Pinned down by administrative duties, “unhorsed” as it were, the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy fretted while his men played cards, drank, grumbled—or simply deserted.
tents; like most of the Confederate commanders, he preferred clean linens and a featherbed. Meanwhile, a local teenager, resentful that a sack of flour had been stolen from his family by Confederate soldiers, was on his way to Bulls Gap, where he informed the Union commander that Greeneville was being reinforced with Confederate troops. At least a hundred or so, he thought. The Union commander decided to advance in the rain and gain the advantage of surprise. Expecting a skirmish at most, he sent a force of about 500 to approach Greeneville by back roads. Meanwhile, in the elegant drawing room of the Williams mansion, the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy was being toasted with blackberry wine and Tennessee whisky. The southern stalwarts of the town were enchanted to meet the dashing Kentucky cavalier and his genial staff of-
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
PHOTOGRAPH UNIVERSITY OFCREDIT KENTUCKY HEREARCHIVES
A group of Kentucky cavalry officers taken prisoner in Ohio during the Great Raid dines while in captivity. By the time of Morgan’s final mission, the makeup of his Raiders had changed to include a dubious mix of deserters and “bummers.”
Morgan’s hostess, Catherine Williams, had two sons in the Confederate army, but reflecting the divided loyalties of the region, another son with the Union. His wife, Lucy Williams, was also in the house, although she absented herself from the festivities by taking a wagon out to check on the family farms. After an elegant dinner party where the town’s leading Confederates hung on his every word, Morgan rode out on Sir Oliver to review his forces outside of town. Confident that the Union army at Bulls Gap didn’t know his division was in Greeneville, he ordered his men to prepare for an attack at dawn. While the men pitched tents and bedded down in the rain, Morgan returned to entertain the ladies of the town at the Williams mansion reception. He was always ready to fight alongside his men, but less eager to share their rations and
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A man on a horse galloped up. He wore a brown denim jacket instead of Union blue, so Morgan and Rogers emerged from the hedges, taking him to be a Confederate rescuer. But it was Andrew Campbell, the same Irishman who had helped guard Morgan’s magnificent wedding in Murfreesboro less than two years before. He had since deserted and joined the Union, where he served with Wilcox’s cavalry. Raising his carbine, he ordered them both to surrender. Rogers obeyed, dropping his pistol, but Morgan ducked and ran toward the stables where his last hope, Sir Oliver, waited. Campbell shouted “Stop!” then fired one shot—which was to reverberate throughout the South. Struck in the back, John Hunt Morgan fell face forward into the mud, crying out, “Oh, God! Oh, God!”11 Campbell had no idea who he had shot. He saw a man in a nightshirt, slippers, and a rough wool coat, and feared it was a civilian. By then a crowd was gathering, Wilcox among them. He ordered one of Morgan’s captured staff, Captain Henry Clay (the Kentucky statesman’s grandson), to identify the body. Clay knelt down and turned the body over. He wiped the mud from Morgan’s face, turned to his captors, and wailed, “You have just killed the best man in the Confederacy!”12
Right: This head-andshoulders portrait of John Hunt Morgan, made postumously shortly after war’s end, claims to show the general as he appeared shortly before his death in 1864.
there was still honor, at least among officers, in those days, and the Union commanders returned Morgan’s body to the Williams mansion and arranged a truce. John Hunt Morgan, the Ken ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72
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rogers and clay complained bitterly as their commander’s body, in its bloody nightshirt, was roughly slung across Campbell’s horse. But Wilcox said his orders were to “bring Morgan out dead or alive,” and he sent Campbell, mounted behind the body, toward the Union lines. Meanwhile, Morgan’s forces north of town had heard the shooting and were striking their tents and grabbing their weapons. Then they heard a mighty roar—what was later described by one of them as “a loud, sustained and chilling sound.” It was the Union troops, cheering wildly, as the horse with Morgan’s body on it was led through their lines. The disheartened Confederates knew immediately what it meant. After a short skirmish and a few cannon shots, they regrouped and retreated to nearby Jonesborough. The fighting was over, for a time.
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ficers. At about midnight, the general bade them all good night. The rain was still pouring, so he amended his morning orders from dawn to 7 a.m. While the Williams slaves brushed and hung up his uniform, he pulled off his boots and went to bed in an upstairs room. While he slept the Union forces were slogging through the mud. At about dawn, a Union sympathizer rode into their ranks with “urgent news.” Morgan’s Raiders, 1,500 of them, were stationed in an arc around the town, and the Federals were marching into a trap!7 Morgan’s Raiders in Greeneville? The commander ordered a halt. A young black man (perhaps one of the Williams slaves) also hurried through the rain. He brought a more detailed message. Morgan himself was in the Williams mansion, along with his general staff, guarded only by a few pickets. Rather than turn back, the Union commander saw a chance and took it. He sent two crack companies of cavalry, under a bold captain named Wilcox, on a “dash” into the town. Their orders were to surprise the Confederate pickets, surround the Williams mansion, capture Morgan, and “bring him out, dead or alive.” The surprise worked well, as did the surround. Morgan’s pickets, many of whom had taken shelter from the rain in sheds and porches, were caught dozing. Awakened by the melee, Morgan grabbed two loaded pistols and ran downstairs, clad in only a nightshirt and slippers. Mrs. Williams met him at the kitchen door. “Where are they?” Morgan demanded. “Everywhere,” she said. “They are onto you, General! Hide! Quick!”8 He looked around for his officers, but they were all outside, many of them already captured and disarmed. “Where?” She pointed to the Episcopal church next door. Leaving his uniform and boots upstairs, Morgan grabbed a coat off a peg and ducked out the back door and into the church basement. But he heard boots upstairs and knew he would be discovered, so he slipped back outside, into the Williamses’ formal gardens, which connected the house to the stables. He was joined there by his aide, Captain J.T. Rogers, one of the few officers who had evaded the Union troops.9 “We’re surrounded, sir,” Rogers said. “There is no chance of escape.” “We must try,” said Morgan, handing one of his pistols to the captain. Ducking below the trimmed box hedges, they headed toward the stables. A woman’s voice cried out, “I see him! There he goes! There he goes!”10
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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THE WESTERNR WESTE the
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FROM HARD-LINE TACTICS TO EMANCIPATION, THE WAR IN THE WEST HELPED SHAPE THE LARGER CONFLICT— AND SECURE ULTIMATE VICTORY FOR THE UNION. BY CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS
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Way of War
General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army cuts a swath through Georgia during the March to the Sea in this 1868 engraving by Alexander Hay Ritchie.
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manded that distinguished Illinoisans, especially Republicans, would be prominent among the speakers. Among them were President Ulysses S. Grant, the former and current governors, and noted Civil War generals John Pope and Stephen A. Hurlbut. Non-Illinoisans who were honored guests included Vice President Henry Wilson, Secretary of War William W. Belknap, the Society’s current president, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer.1 Toasts, poetry, and speeches celebrated the “Invincible” western armies that were “never defeated,” reserving special attention for Sherman’s destructive 1864 Georgia campaign that these westerners universally affirmed as having helped to win the war, and which they referred to as simply “The March.” But the evening mood was not fully celebratory. With the president in attendance, Reconstruction politics hung over the meeting. Although Grant’s wartime reputation was unquestioned, his presidential leadership was under siege. Rampant white violence by
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on october 15, 1874, as a balmy indian summer wrapped Springfield, Illinois, in a blanket of falling leaves, the Civil War returned to town. Not that it had ever been far from anyone’s mind. Less than a decade before, nearly as the fighting ended, residents had laid their former neighbor, the martyred president Abraham Lincoln, in a hillside crypt a few miles north of the old state capitol, where he had served four terms in the state legislature. The gravesite was painful evidence of the sacrifice the war had exacted from the community and the nation. Only the night before, there had been a public dedication of a new burial tomb and monument marking the permanent resting place of Lincoln and three of his four sons. Now, the following evening, the newest reminder of the bloody struggle was a reunion of Union veterans who commemorated not the president’s murder, but his military forces’ victory. Officers of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee, a veterans group for the most decorated of the Union’s western armies, met at the festooned Leland House, Springfield’s toniest hotel near its bustling capitol square. The coincidence of the meeting and the dedication de-
To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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emancipation of slaves, which many western soldiers, politicians, and civilians opposed out of traditional understandings of states’ rights and widespread racial conservatism. Hailed by many easterners as the defining element of the Union’s military and moral victory, the emancipationist legacy continued to deeply divide the western veterans just as it had in wartime, especially since northern Republicans and former abolitionists effectively seized control of political rhetoric. Lincoln’s assassination at the hands of a proslavery extremist had only helped them to claim slave emancipation as the linchpin of Union victory, re-crafting the war’s meaning from one that westerners understood, that the war was for Union rather than for emancipation. This night would remind westerners in the audience, many of them former or current Democrats, that another victory narrative needed cultivating, one that celebrated their own armies and their hard fighting, which these men believed had in fact won the war.4 These competing war legacies provided a background drumbeat for the evening, and it would be the regional tones that sounded loudest this night. Following Grant’s patriotic toast (“Our Country, and all of it”), John Pope stepped
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Generals William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and Ulysses S. Grant advise President Abraham Lincoln on war matters in this 1865 lithograph by Currier & Ives. The impact that western commanders—and their way of warfare—had on the conflict’s outcome was a source of pride among western veterans after the war.
far-right Democratic “Redeemers” was sweeping away Republican governments in the former Confederates states, and a recent “Liberal” insurgency within the northern Republican ranks, with its epicenter in the western states, over Radical-led constitutional amendments giving citizenship and voting rights to former slaves, threatened Grant’s (and Lincoln’s) legacy. Not surprisingly, amid such controversies, the veterans gathered in Springfield made few claims to national reconciliation.2 This night’s speechmakers, in fact, drew down on two targets—former Confederate foes in the South, and former blue-coated compatriots in the East. The western soldiers and officers gathered that night still carried chips on their shoulders that had been placed as far back as the war and especially during its public victory celebration in the nation’s capital. At the two-day Grand Review of the Armies that paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in May 1865, the celebrated Army of the Potomac had marched on May 23, while Union regiments from western states had followed on May 24. The separation was symbolic of the national war narrative since, which emphasized the accomplishments of the eastern armies and largely left those of the West in shadows.3 Central to this narrative was the wartime
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With rousing cheers, the officers adjourned.6
Westerners were among the earliest advocates of a hard-line war in which civilians and their property were not spared from violence. Above: Adalbert John Volck’s wartime etching depicts a band of Charles R. Jennison’s antislavery “Jayhawkers” attacking civilians in Missouri.
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the words and tone of the springfield meeting suggest that these western veterans saw their contributions to victory in the Civil War not only as overlooked, but seminal. In their minds, westerners hadn’t just won the war; they had changed the conflict’s military and social trajectory, expanding its scope and transforming it into the type of war that could be won. Their collective voice welled up from a western war record that could support these claims. Many of the conflict’s leading commanders had previously served in frontier posts in the far West, where the conflict known as Bleeding Kansas had provided a violent dress rehearsal for the war, including a similar ideological and political foundation. More saliently, once the war began, several of the western states served as a proving ground for what much of the conflict would ultimately become, including hard-line military policies and practices that incorporated civilians and slavery politics. Ironically, the related incorporation of wartime emancipation and the integration of African Americans as military personnel—issues that the Springfield meeting had so consciously avoided—had also emerged in the western theater even before their appearances in the eastern theater. Just as western commanders transferred hard-war tactics to the eastern theater, so did some carry wartime emancipation with them—and the combination dramatically evolved Union war strategy. Nearly immediately upon the war’s outbreak, guerrilla warfare erupted in Missouri, western Virginia, and other parts of the trans-Appalachian West as the onset of war destabilized civilian populations and forced state leaders and Union military commanders to contend with their deeply contested allegiances. Independent irregular bands, both pro-Union and especially pro-Confederate, roamed many rural localities, and retaliatory warfare followed. In the war’s first months, unionist newspapers reported robberies by “Secession marauders who ... allowed no Union men to ‘sass’ them.” Nightriders stole horses, and saboteurs destroyed symbols of federal authority, including railroads, trestles, and bridges. They interrupted mail, attacked stagecoaches, fired at riverboats, or derailed trains with women and children aboard, often enough for a Missouri
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
to the podium to deliver a different message. A career U.S. Army officer and now department commander in St. Louis, this westerner was known for his bombast, which was derisively called “Pope’s Bull” and had alienated eastern officers and soldiers alike during Pope’s command in Virginia. (“I have come to you from the West,” Pope had announced to the men of the newly formed Army of Virginia upon assuming its leadership in 1862, “where we have always seen the backs of our enemies.... Success and glory are in the advance.”) But his fellow westerners also knew him as a hard-liner, someone who used the army as a bludgeon against civilians in the slave states. In response to bushwhacker violence in Missouri during the war’s first summer, for instance, Pope had introduced a type of warfare that punished subversive civilians: Those who could not “prove” that they had either actively resisted saboteurs or informed federal authorities of their identities would be fined, and local officers would label them as disloyal.5 Pope now offered his former comrades in arms “stronger meat.” Western soldiers might have opposed emancipation, but they had won the war nonetheless with their hard fighting style—an approach that was eventually adopted in all theaters and brought the Confederacy to its knees, he argued. It made sense, therefore, that westerners had assumed the mantle of leadership in the national government in the wake of Union victory. “When the war was over we found that the President of the United States was a Western man; the Vice-President a Western man; the Speaker of the House a Western man; the Secretary of the Treasury a Western man; the Secretary of War a Western man; the Secretary of the Interior a Western man; the Postmaster General a Western man; the Attorney General a Western man; the General of the Army a Western man; the Lieutenant-General a Western man; the Admiral of the Navy a Western man,” Pope reminded his audience. “The whole power of the government, both in its civil and military departments, had, in this great struggle, passed into the hands of men of the West.” Finishing the night’s toasts and speeches, Milton M. Bane, an Illinois regimental commander who had lost an arm at Shiloh, punctuated Pope’s point about the western armies’ way of war-making, one that had produced nothing but victories on fields from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. “It made war terrible and destructive, that peace and safety might the sooner come, and come to stay.” Mentioned only obliquely during the evening was the freeing of slaves, much less its importance to the war victory. Not mentioned at all were the divisive politics that surrounded the aftermath of emancipation following the war’s end.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
editor to claim it “degrading to think white men would do [this].” The pervasive fear of “marauding parties,” real as well as imagined, drove unionists in southern Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana to organize border patrols and home guards that were sanctioned by their anxious state legislatures. Some crossed state lines and acted the part of bushwhackers as much as the gangs they sought.7 When Missouri and Kentucky evinced versions of neutrality designed to maintain the traditional balance of unionism and proslavery within their own borders, federal and state troops soon entered the first slave states most had ever seen. Military-civilian conflict followed, as armies and state militias quickly subverted civil liberties in an effort to keep order. Soldiers and officers in both armies used support for or opposition to slavery as the measure of civilians’ war loyalties, shaping military action and civilian response. The Kansas-Missouri border, long the scene of violence over slavery’s extension, witnessed among the earliest and most blatant military violations of proslavery citizens’ rights, whether they were secessionist, neutralist, or even unionist. Abolitionist “Jayhawkers,” including James Montgomery and Charles R. Jennison, zealously promoted hard-line tactics, exacting justice for decades of what they considered proslavery sins. In early 1862, a unionist in Jackson County, Missouri, complained that Jennison’s men had stolen horses, insulted and assaulted women, robbed families and even the local post office, and committed more extreme acts of terror, including burning homes and “put[ting] ropes around in-
nocent mens necks threatening to hang them.” Missouri unionist George Caleb Bingham soon complained that hard-line Jayhawkers “have made war upon Union Men as fiercely as upon Secessionists,” and were “turn[ing] peaceable and quiet citizens into desperate guerillas.”8 Not all of this hard-lining was spontaneous or purely on the ground. As part of what historian James M. McPherson has termed Lincoln’s “strong-arm strategy,” the president gave a long leash to Union commanders in these western states who demonstrated the inclination and capacity for aggressive military measures. In the war’s first year, he often appointed politicians to military rank and promoted officers, regardless of political affiliation, who assumed the most bellicose postures. Nathaniel Lyon, John C. Frémont, Franz Sigel, David Hunter, James Henry Lane, and John Pope, all in Missouri, were the earliest beneficiaries of Lincoln’s latitude, which allowed officers to formulate what historian Bruce Tap has called “positively draconian” policies toward the civilian populations. Also among those promoted was William Tecumseh Sherman, who, after returning to Kentucky following a bout of depression made worse by unhappy stints in deeply divided St. Louis and Louisville, quickly adopted a dialectical view of loyalty. “When one nation is at war with another, all the people of the one are enemies of the other,” he wrote Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase. “Most unfortunately, the war in which we are now engaged has been complicated with the belief on the one hand that all on the other are not enemies.”9 Among the officer corps, hard-lining had an early political dimension in the West that would deepen as the war progressed. Conservative Democrats like Grant and Sherman, who initially believed emancipation should not be an issue in the war but nonetheless employed hard-war tactics to advance the western armies, were promoted. “I always acted on the supposition that we were an invading army; that our purpose was to move forward in force,” Sherman recalled, offering an impassioned call for hard-lining the war to Lincoln’s first secretary of war, Simon Cameron, in the fall of 1861. “The rebellion could never be put down, the authority of the paramount Government asserted,” he railed, “and the union of the States declared perpetual, by force of arms, by maintaining the defensive.... [I]t was absolutely necessary the Government should adopt, and maintain until the rebellion was crushed, the offensive.” Conversely, western commanders who urged caution or conciliation, favoring a moderate policy that would allow time for slave states with majority unionist populations to reconsider secession and re-enter the Union,
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the regiment shot to death an alleged disloyalist, 19-year-old Donald McDonald. Although later reports charged that the young man flew a secessionist flag from his house, in his official report Curtis termed the death a “homicide.” Lingering charges of murder appeared to have little troubled the detachment’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel James M. Tuttle. “[P]erhaps I am responsible,” he responded when confronted publicly with the incident years later. “If so, I have nothing to take back. Our business down there was to put down the rebel colors and of course we commenced as soon as we saw where the work commenced.... His flag came down and so did he.”12 Similarly, John Pope refused to accept locals’ professions of ignorance when questioned about the identities of saboteurs of a key railroad bridge in northern Missouri. “If people who claim to be good citizens choose to indulge their neighbors and acquaintances in committing these wanton acts, and to shield them from punishment,” he snapped, “they will hereafter be compelled to pay for it.” Pope labeled them disloyal until they proved themselves otherwise, and local officers assisted in the creation of “committee[s] of public safety” as civilian arms of the military. Guerrilla warfare, which would spread to other war fronts as Union armies moved southward, saw its fullest expression—and the fullest hard-line response—in the West. In the spring of 1862, Sherman ordered two west Tennessee towns burned to the ground in response to guerrilla depredations. “This ... is an expense not chargeable to us,” he retorted after widespread complaints, “but to those who made the war; and generally
NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION (LANE, FRÉMONT); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
were replaced. Among them were Winfield Scott, William S. Harney, Robert Anderson, George B. McClellan, and Don Carlos Buell, all proslavery Democrats.10 Federal hard-liners’ narrow views of loyalty (anyone who was not an unconditional unionist was disloyal) quickly led to suppressive measures—including “overwhelming physical force,” as McClellan, aspiring for an eastern command, advised Lincoln after leaving Ohio for Virginia. Unlike McClellan, a Philadelphian who had lived in Cincinnati for a decade prior to the war, other westerners would make good on such boasts in their own region. In northern Missouri in July 1861, northern Illinoisan Stephen Hurlbut, a staunch Republican, waged the type of warfare that Lane and others had initiated a few months earlier in the western part of the state. When Hurlbut’s men learned that John McAfee, the deposed speaker of the Missouri House, was at his home in Shelby County, he “was arrested and required by General Hurlbut to dig trenches in the hot sun ... all day,” a unionist remarked. “Hurlbut himself told me he set him at it ... still it was admitted that it was very doubtful if any charge could be maintained against him.... I fear he will be able to do us much more hurt than heretofore.... Such outrages will make more enemies than thousands of men can quell.” Within two months of his release McAfee had joined Missouri’s rump legislature and presided over its secession ordinance. Hurlbut also empowered local home guards in northern Missouri to determine loyalty by “dispers[ing] and break[ing] up by force any and all gatherings and assembly which may be held by persons hostile to the United States,” and allowed John Edwards, lieutenant colonel of an Iowa home guard regiment, to disarm all local Missouri home guards and replace them with his own. “[L]oyal men of both States, separated merely by an imaginary line, have the same sympathies in a common cause,” Edwards assumed, in contrast with “the neutrals and a great many terror-stricken secessionists.”11 Occupying troops were eager to listen to local unionists’ reports of their neighbors’ disloyalty, and their hard treatment could exceed even Hurlbut’s. On the early morning of June 15, 1861, a detachment of the 2nd Iowa Volunteers, moving westward on a rail expedition ordered by Colonel Samuel R. Curtis to secure the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad line in northern Missouri, disembarked at Stewartsville, a sleepy rail town east of St. Joseph. At several prior points, Curtis had reported encounters with “Rebels,” arresting some and firing upon “several who fled.” Within minutes of their arrival “at the front,” as one participant referred to this area of northwestern Missouri, a fracas erupted and a member of
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NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION (LANE, FRÉMONT); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Well before emancipation policy had become settled in Congress, western generals like James Henry Lane (below, top) and John C. Frémont (bottom) began acting on their antislavery beliefs, enlisting slaves as laborers and even soldiers. Above: A group of contraband slaves in Virginia goes to work for the Union army, a scene that would have been common in the western theater as well.
war is destruction and nothing else.”13 In part, this destruction occurred because many Union officers and soldiers in the western region used slaveholding as an essential measure of disloyalty (just as Confederate ones saw it as proof of loyalty). Not surprisingly, antislavery hard-liners were among the quickest to judge. In the western states, politicians as well as Union officers and soldiers (especially antislavery Republicans), did not easily divest themselves of longheld ideological predilections gained from years of struggle and even violence with slave state citizens over the peculiar institution. Few saw the need to conciliate proslavery residents, especially slave owners. As writer James Russell Lowell argued in 1861, “there can be no such thing as a moderate slaveholder ... moderation and slavery can [not] coexist.” The provost marshal at Palmyra, Missouri, Ephram J. Wilson, was equally blunt. “[A]ny man [who] would hold a slave with very few exceptions is neither a Christian, a patriot or a loyal citizen,” he wrote, a charge echoed by a Missouri militiaman who fumed “[t]he Americans who are slaveholders are the enemies of the government.” Prejudice among many such unionists derived from absolutist views of inferior cultures of slaveholding states. Federal soldiers from the northern portions of the West labeled these border slave state residents as worse than “secesh.” In Missouri, they were “pukes.” “[T]here being so many of that class of people in Missouri,” Edward Daniels, colonel of the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry garrisoning Cape Girardeau, lectured residents, as one of them recalled. “[I]ndeed the great reason of the whole rebellion is ‘IGNORANCE.... The Col. told them this in plain words, and extorted them to educate their children.’”14 By then, before Congress began wrangling over the army’s authority over black fugitives and more than a year before the Emancipation Proclamation permanently altered the political and ideological trajectory of the war, emancipation politics were affecting the nature of civilian-military interactions in the western border states. Indeed, even as Union general Benjamin Butler issued a controversial contraband policy in eastern Virginia that historians regard as having triggered the reversal of the government’s slavery noninterference war policy, Union troops, state militia, and slaves on the ground in the West were already commencing the halting march toward wartime emancipation. Within days of the firing on Fort Sumter, James Henry Lane and James Montgomery were in contact with prominent northern abolitionists, proclaiming their intention to liberate slaves if granted army commissions. By the time they got them, they and other Kansas “Jayhawkers” were confiscating slaves from their Missouri owners, liberating them,
and using them as laborers or enlisting them as soldiers. Indeed, Lane and Montgomery became known widely as “negro thieves” because of how regularly they confiscated slaves from Missouri’s citizens. As a new brigadier general, Lane used his troops to liberate slaves held by “the wives and children” of Missouri men in Rebel service, and boasted that his Kansas Brigade would be joined by “an army of slaves marching out.” Exasperated by Lane’s zeal and resulting civilian complaints, by fall General Henry W. Halleck, commander of the Department of the Missouri, referred to Lane’s raids as “great jayhawking expedition[s] ... [to] prostitute [his men] into negro catchers.”15 Even before Halleck’s predecessor, John C. Frémont, the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 1856, had issued a controversial and short-lived emancipation proclamation in Missouri in August 1861, forcing Lincoln to rescind it (and remove its author from command) for fear of driving loyal border states headlong to secession, Iowa and Illinois troops in northern and southeastern Missouri were enticing Missouri slaves to abscond and become servants for “fair wages.” The military also benefited from slaves who offered information about guerrillas and disunionists. In many ways, the progress of emancipation followed the armies’ movements. As he pursued retreating Confederates southward in the fall, Frémont would not allow contraband slaves to be returned to the masters who claimed them in southern Missouri. When fugitive slaves crossed the rivers to Cairo, Illinois, Kentucky-born Union general John A. McClernand issued a confiscation order there despite local whites’ remonstrances that the western armies appeared to be “waging war for the purpose of abolishing slavery.” By the following spring, Benjamin Gratz Brown concluded “there [were] scarcely any slaves ... remaining in the counties along the northern, southern and western borders of [Missouri.]” The Union army set up contraband camps, ostensibly for slaves confiscated from the Confederacy, along the Mississippi River at Helena, Arkansas; Cairo, Illinois; Columbus, Kentucky; and on Island No. 10. Although these camps were established exclusively for fugitive slaves from the Confederacy, those from Missouri and Kentucky were sheltered among them.16 As the western armies pushed south into the Lower Mississippi Valley, thousands of slaves fled their owners to Union camps in western Tennessee, eastern Arkansas, and northern Mississippi, forcing a humanitarian and political crisis. Military policy required Union officers to return these slaves, but many officers refused to comply, encouraging Congress to be☛ } CONT. ON P. 76
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South Carolina in the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras Essays from the Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association Edited by Michael Brem Bonner and Fritz Hamer A collection of important, but little-known, scholarship examining the Civil War and Reconstruction
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BOOKS & AUTHORS
00 m
The Books That Built Me BY GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ
asked to write about the half dozen or so books that “built” me, my first thought was to clarify that these are the books that shaped my career as a Civil War historian, not all the books that shaped my life: no need to mention the Hardy Boys, the Bible, Mad magazine paperbacks, The Lord of the Rings, The Strawberry Statement, Mystery Train, or The Great Gatsby. Instead, the first book will be no surprise to anyone who dates
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back to the Centennial era: Bruce Catton’s American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (1960). I was nine years old when I first encountered it in 1967, too young to appreciate the text but mesmerized by the bird’s-eye battlefield maps with their hundreds of tiny soldiers forming lines and columns. My efforts to re-create those scenes on the floor of my bedroom with the Louis Marx Blue & Gray playset led to the discovery of Arms and Equipment of the Civil War (1962) by Jack Coggins, which supplied the technical information I craved to make my floor battles more realistic, from the range of a rifled musket to the deployment of a regiment’s 10 companies in line of battle. I went off to the University of Michigan with no idea of what I would do for a career, so I chose to major in the subject I loved while waiting to see what pathway opened. In my junior year I took a class from John Shy, who invited me to sit in on the Military History Study Group, where grad students and faculty talked about recent publications and shared reports on their own research. It was my first look behind the curtain of academia—so this was where books came from! The group session that stuck with me most was not one about an academic work, however, but an animated debate over Michael Shaara’s novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels (1974), which I had just read. Hearing professional historians discussing Shaara’s book seriously showed me that the scholarly monograph need not be the only vehicle for the expression of meaningful historical interpretation. The idea of teaching and writing history was tempting, but by 1980 the job market for history professors had entered the trough from which it has yet to emerge, so I went off to law school and then a job with a firm in Chicago’s Loop. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of law school, but found the culture of commercial legal practice profoundly alienating. During lunch hours and while commuting, I escaped into a rereading of Cat-
ton’s three-volume Centennial History of the Civil War (1961–1965). Catton’s prose was like French haute cuisine, redolent of the 1960s and almost unbearably rich, but after a few samples impossible to resist. History kept me grounded, but reading it in my spare time didn’t change what a future in the law seemed to promise for me: substantial wealth, along with the likelihood of alcoholism, multiple divorces, and a lifetime of regret. I decided to change course and go to grad school after all. As an undergraduate history student, I had begun to catch on to the differences between academic and popular historical writing. The former had those little numbers after some sentences and paragraphs, pages of notes in the back, and long subtitles, but there was a conceptual difference as well. Popular historians could choose their topics and approach-
es based on whatever seemed most interesting (which helped make their books popular), while academic historians were supposed to have an underlying thesis that contributed something new to the store of human knowledge. It wasn’t enough to say that I wanted to write my dissertation about the Battle of Stones River; I had to have something new to say about it, and a methodological strategy for supporting my ideas. While I struggled with this, Peter Cozzens beat me to the punch by publishing No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River (1990), pre-empting the field and causing me to change my topic from Stones River to a history of one of the armies that fought in it. Here I was greatly inspired by Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 18611862 (1967) by Thomas Connelly, which showed me how a narrative history of a single military organization could also
CLIFF HOLLIS/ECU NEWS SERVICE
B&A
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“ I went off to the University of Michigan with no idea of what I would do for a career, so I chose to major in the subject I loved while waiting to see what pathway opened.” GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ
of the job market, and although I had always loved to visit history museums I had never considered working in one. It turned out to be an incomparable professional experience. For the next nine years I was steeped in Lincolniana. I read hundreds of books about Lincoln, making it almost impossible to name just a few as particularly influential, but since that is the task at hand, I will mention Lincoln in American Memory (1994) by Merrill Peterson, for its demonstration of how the public uses and understands history; Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (2002) by William Lee Miller, for reminding me how important it is for the reader to hear the author’s authentic voice; Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (1998) or anything else by Douglas Wilson, for graceful writing and depth of scholarship; and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) by Allen Guelzo, for igniting the scholarly revival of interest in Lincoln’s ideas as well as his actions. I read many other fine books, some of them as good or perhaps even better than these, but these are ones that I read at the right moment to be of excep-
CLIFF HOLLIS/ECU NEWS SERVICE
Gerald J. Prokopowicz in the History Department at East Carolina University
carry broader implications for understanding the war in general. It became the model for my dissertation and first book, All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861-1862 (2001). Civil War military history would remain my primary interest, but while studying at Harvard I encountered Abraham Lincoln. I had the great good fortune to have David Herbert Donald as my thesis advisor and, better still, the opportunity to serve as one of his research assistants on the project that became his classic biography Lincoln (1995). As Lincoln was to John Hay, Professor Donald was my “Tycoon.” He was the master of research, writing, teaching, and everything else I hoped to do professionally, and he played a vital role in helping me secure my first job as a historian. My debt to him remains incalculable. That first position was as the Lincoln Scholar and director of public programs at the late, lamented Lincoln Museum (1928–2008) in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Graduate history education at that time was still geared almost solely toward producing more professors, regardless
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B&A
GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY.
{The B&A Q&A}
Looking Back on Civil War America WITH GARY W. GALLAGHER for the last 30 years, historian Gary W. Gallagher has been an integral part of the team that has overseen the highly respected Civil War America series published by the University of North Carolina Press. We sat down with Gallagher, who recently relinquished his role as CWA’s editor, and asked him to reflect on his involvement with the series that has helped shape the course of Civil War scholarship over recent decades. How would you describe the Civil War America series? Officially launched in May 1993, the series quickly became a prominent element of the press’ offerings. The initial roster of books embraced military and nonmilitary topics and extended from the antebellum roots of the war through the postwar decades. It also brought to UNC Press a good combination of senior and junior scholars. By the end of the 1990s, 21 titles had appeared, among them Nina Silber’s The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900, George Rable’s The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics, and James Marten’s The Children’s Civil War. The decade between 2000 and 2009 yielded another 50 titles and pushed UNC Press to the forefront of academic publishing in the field. Military offerings included tactical studies of Gettysburg by Harry W. Pfanz and Earl J. Hess, treatments of Vicksburg and the 1862 Valley Campaign by Michael B. Ballard and Peter Cozzens, and Daniel E. Sutherland’s A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. William Blair, Caroline E. Janney, and Joan Waugh contrib-
Gary W. Gallagher
uted notable volumes on memory. Between 2010 and 2015, the series added another 26 titles and expanded its topical reach. Representative titles include Barbara A. Gannon’s The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic, Elizabeth D. Leonard’s Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky, Andre M. Fleche’s The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict, and Kathryn Shively Meier’s Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia. There are many ways to measure the quality of volumes in Civil War America. The series has garnered more than 65 prizes and awards, including two Avery O. Craven Awards from the Organization of American Historians, seven Lincoln Prizes either won or shared, two Tom Watson Brown Book Awards, the first four Wiley-Silver Prizes for the best first Civil War book, and the inaugural Bobbie and John Nau Book Prize. Every president of the Society of Civil War Historians
DAN ADDISON
tional value to what I was trying to accomplish as a historian. Since 2003 I’ve taught history at East Carolina University, earning tenure only 27 years after graduating from college and trying to do something other than history for a living. At ECU I wrote a book about Lincoln, then accepted an administrative appointment that put my Civil War research, but not my reading, on temporary hold until last year. Since 2004 I’ve hosted the podcast Civil War Talk Radio, reading a new Civil War-era book for most of the 360-plus episodes. Some were a chore to finish, but most were enlightening, interesting, or inspirational. Mark W. Geiger’s Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861-1865 (2010) is all three; it shows how a talented historian can take a narrow, seemingly obscure topic and apply new analytical tools and evidence to draw conclusions that help to explain much larger issues. Looking back at the books that have built me as a historian, I’m struck by the absence of pattern and the role of contingency. Those that I’ve listed are not necessarily the best historical books I’ve encountered, but for one reason or another each became especially memorable. That’s why no book on my shelves means more to me than Edwin B. Coddington’s The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (1968)—not just because it is a model campaign study and still the best book on its topic, but because the pages of my paperback copy carry the faint smell of campfire smoke from a canoe trip through Minnesota’s Boundary Waters some 30 years ago. It might be more academically respectable if my book choices reflected a coherent research arc developing over a lifetime of scholarship, but not knowing how or when the next book will strike home and change my path has made life far more interesting.
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for the past 20 years—Michael Parrish, George Rable, Jim Marten, Anne Rubin, Carrie Janney, Dan Sutherland, and I— has at least one book in the series. Moreover, the editors who have overseen the scholarly journals Civil War History and The Journal of the Civil War Era for most of the same period—William Blair, Lesley J. Gordon, and Judith Giesberg—have four books in the series. Finally, an impressive number of fine first books carry the Civil War America imprint. I am very proud of the fact that scholars such as Alice Fahs, Lesley Gordon, Mike Parrish, Peter Carmichael, Nina Silber, Brooks Simpson, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Anne Rubin, and Michael Bernath published their first books in Civil War America. How did you get involved with CWA? I placed my revised dissertation at UNC Press in 1984, and the book appeared the following year as Stephen Dodson Ramseur: Lee’s Gallant General. The press had not published a Civil War title since the Centennial, and the director, Matthew Hodgson, took note of the fact that my book sold several thousand copies and was picked up by the History Book Club. Matt suggested that I try to recruit other
titles that might position the press to contend for leadership in the field. We agreed at the outset to cast a wide net, welcoming military and nonmilitary titles and manuscripts from non-academic as well as academic authors. Some of the first titles were from National Park Service historians such as Harry W. Pfanz and Robert K. Krick. In 1989, Alan T. Nolan, a lawyer in Indianapolis, discussed with me his revisionist work on Robert E. Lee. Two years later, Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History achieved huge critical and monetary success for the press. Early academic authors included Brooks Simpson and Stuart McConnell, whose Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction and Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 earned substantial praise. I was an archivist at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, when all this began, and then, starting in the fall of 1986, an assistant professor of history at Penn State University. Between 1987, when Pfanz’s Gettysburg—The Second Day appeared, and 1992, the press published 16 Civil War titles without a series designation. In early December 1985, Matt first
A Self-Made Man BY SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL (SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2016)
“In highly readable prose, Blumenthal … deftly guides readers through the first forty years of Abraham Lincoln’s life, placing special emphasis on Lincoln’s political development.” —Robert O. Faith
The Second Day at Gettysburg BY DAVID L. SHULTZ AND SCOTT L. MINGUS SR. (SAVAS BEATIE, 2015)
“Every Gettysburg aficionado will want to add this book to their collection, and Civil War readers in general will appreciate the high level of research and discourse.” —Thomas J. Ryan
The Memorial Art and Architecture of Vicksburg National Military Park BY MICHAEL W. PANHORST (KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015)
“[Panhorst’s study] serves as a fascinating introduction to the battlefield commemorative art of the period, detailing the processes and materials of monument making…. This is a marvelous book, and it is highly recommended.” —John D. Fowler
Lincoln and Emancipation BY EDNA GREENE MEDFORD (SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015)
DAN ADDISON
“As Medford demonstrates, Lincoln was integral to emancipation, but so too were the African Americans who placed stresses on the institution of slavery well before him….” —Glenn David Brasher
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B&A
QUICK PICKS
Prison Tales BY BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN
They Have Left Us Here to Die: The Civil War Prison Diary of Sgt. Lyle Adair, 111th U.S. Colored Infantry (2011) Edited By Glenn Robins
The diary of Lyle Adair, a Hoosier who endured seven trying months of Rebel captivity, brims with original insights about the physical, psychological, and emotional realities of life in the prisons at Cahaba, Millen, Blackshear, Thomasville, and Andersonville. Skillfully annotated, the original diary entries are likewise enhanced by Robins’ concluding chapter—an exegesis of Civil War prisoner narratives that is an essential starting point for future work on the subject. Sergeant Adair’s important account now takes a deserved place alongside the well-known testimony of Union POWs Warren Lee Goss, Ezra Hoyt Ripple, and Robert Kellogg.
The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (2001)
By Michael P. Gray
Almost a quarter of the more than 12,000 gray-clad soldiers held captive at Elmira would expire—making the New York stockade deadlier than all other northern prison camps (including Chicago’s notorious Camp Douglas and Johnson’s Island, the compound for Confederate officers on ice-choked Lake Erie). This well-researched, accessibly written monograph offers a rich analysis of Elmira’s social and cultural history. Gray establishes the prison’s influence on the local economy and recounts the civilians who, perched on crude observation decks, jockeyed for a glimpse of the lice-infested captives. The result is a fine prison study that says something profound about life on the northern home front, too.
Haunted By Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory (2010) By Benjamin G. Cloyd
Even as the Civil War’s embers cooled in the decades after Appomattox, rancorous memories of captivity in Libby and Elmira blazed with intensity. This well-argued book tracks how northerners and southerners attempted to make sense of the war at its most obscene—beginning during the conflict itself and continuing through the last decades of the 20th century. From prison narratives to monuments to the advent of the Andersonville National Historic Site—from retribution to blame to pride—this is an essential addition to memory studies and a powerful reminder of each generation’s need to revise the past.
The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy (2016) By Lorien Foote
This autumn, the University of North Carolina Press will release Foote’s long-anticipated addition to the prison literature, The Yankee Plague. By mapping the escapes of Union prisoners, Foote will not only intervene in debates about Confederate defeat, but will remind us that the prisoner-of-war experience was hardly stationary. BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN IS AUTHOR OF MARCHING HOME: UNION VETERANS AND THEIR UNENDING CIVIL WAR (2015), WHICH WAS A FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY.
broached the topic of a series with me. He understandably thought I needed to be more senior in academic rank to serve as a credible editor. By the early 1990s, when I had been promoted to full professor at Penn State, we decided it was appropriate to launch Civil War America under my editorship. From the outset, we sought to find the best works on military topics, politics, memory, the background and consequences of the war, leading figures, and any other topics that seemed promising. Largely because of the success of 1989’s Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, which I edited, we also agreed to look for selected firsthand accounts. Matt retired just before the press formally announced the series in the spring of 1993. “I do think that we have the best list of Civil War books of any university press (thanks to your guidance),” he generously wrote at the time of his retirement, “and it has been great fun to have worked with you.” I treasure that note, which features Matt’s tiny, precise handwriting. My association with him ranks among the most satisfying parts of my professional life. The series continued without interruption as Kate Douglas Torrey took over the directorship of the press. Kate, editor-inchief David Perry, and I worked together closely for almost 20 years. With the series clearly established as the leading one in the field, David and Kate agreed to add, retrospectively, the 16 titles from the late 1980s and early 1990s that had marked the true beginning of CWA but had not been officially included. In 2011– 2012, the three of us worked out the transition to the editorial troika that would eventually replace me: Peter Carmichael, Carrie Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean. The last volume to carry my name as sole Civil War America editor was Elizabeth Leonard’s biography of Joseph Holt. My name and those of the three current series editors appeared in 15 volumes published between 2012 and 2015. My name will be on the editors’ page of Stephen D. Engle’s Gathering to Save a
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“ From the outset, we sought to find the best works on military topics, politics, memory, the background and consequences of the war, leading figures, and any other topics that seemed promising.” GARY W. GALLAGHER ON UNC PRESS’ CIVIL WAR AMERICA SERIES
Nation: Lincoln and the Union’s War Governors, due out in October 2016. That will bring to 113 the number of volumes with which I have worked in the series.
on memory, Jim Marten on children, Alice Fahs on popular literature, Dan Sutherland on guerrilla war, and Andre Fleche on the war in an Atlantic context.
What makes a good CWA book? Matt Hodgson and I wanted books written in clear, accessible prose because we hoped our books would reach both academics and informed lay readers. We welcomed well-researched books that revisited old topics and themes in search of new information or insights as well as those that charted new directions methodologically or topically. Examples of studies that ventured into well-worked areas include Harry Pfanz’s trilogy on Gettysburg and Mark Wahlgren Summers’ A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction. Among the many authors who opened up or expanded new areas in the field were Nina Silber
How has Civil War publishing evolved over the years? The most obvious change is the breathtaking expansion of the field from one dominated by military and political topics to one that features gender, culture, the environment, and other analytical lenses. Civil War America offers a road map for the directions the field has taken over the past 30 years.
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What’s up next for you? I still have a good deal of editing work in progress. Mike Parrish and I continue as co-editors of UNC Press’ 16-volume “Littlefield History of the Civil War Era,” the 11th and 12th volumes of which will
be published in the near future. Matt Gallman and I are editing a collection of brief essays about particular places that resonate with a group of 27 historians— a sequel of sorts to our Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War (2015). My essay in this collection will focus on the monument in the plaza in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is not far from where I grew up in southern Colorado. A third project, which Elizabeth R. Varon and I are overseeing, will offer essays on the Union side of the war by a group of young scholars. Apart from these editorial labors, I am completing a brief history of the Chancellorsville Campaign for Basic Books that will situate the operation within the volatile political and social context of the first months of 1863. I feel certain that all of these enterprises, in some way, will profit from the splendid scholarship in Civil War America.
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AMERICAN ILIAD
STEREOSCOPE
Six months later Sheridan led seven divisions into battle at the crossroads of Five Forks. It lay at the extreme right flank of Lee’s army, which for 10 months had defied the Army of the Potomac in the Petersburg trenches. Sheridan’s objective was the South Side Railroad, Lee’s last unbroken line of communications with the rest of the Confederacy. If at Cedar Creek Sheridan’s aggressiveness had been inspiring, at Five Forks it was savage. He seemed everywhere, urging his troops forward, and accepting nothing less than all-out performance. To an infantryman who fell, shot in the throat, Sheridan barked, “You’re not hurt a bit! Pick up your gun, man, and move right on to the front!”7 The soldier got up, staggered forward a dozen steps, and crumpled to the ground, dead. To an officer who proudly reported that his unit had captured five cannon—traditional trophies of victory— Sheridan snapped, “I don’t care a damn for their guns, or you either, sir! What I want is that Southside Railroad!”8 In the belief that corps commander Major General Gouverneur K. Warren was not on the field, Sheridan sent orders relieving Warren of command. A short time later Warren came up, the order in his hand, and asked him to reconsider. “Reconsider, hell!” Sheridan snapped. “I don’t reconsider my decisions! Obey the order!”9 Warren left the field, his career in ruins. The victory at Five Forks forced Lee to abandon Richmond and Petersburg and begin a desperate retreat westward, hoping to turn south and unite with General Joseph E. Johnston’s army in North Carolina. Sheridan led the pursuit—one of the few strong pursuits of the entire war— and brought Lee’s army to bay. On April 9, 1865, he stood in the parlor of the McLean House at Appomattox Court House, watching Lee sign the terms of surrender. No one had done more than he and his fiery temperament to bring that moment about.
“So what did you think?” I asked. They had seen Free State of Jones that afternoon, despite a terrible review in their local paper. Mom: “It was great.” Dad: “I thought it was a very good movie. Very interesting history, and a fascinating study.” They agreed with me that the action was compelling. They noted the marks of historical authenticity—the bloody battle violence, dirty fingernails, and dresses coming apart at the seams—and the graphic scenes of death and wounding that were hard to watch, but necessary. “War is just a video game to people now, that’s all it means,” my mother said. They agreed that we must see the Civil War’s grim realities more often on screen in order to see its costs. The slower pace didn’t bother my parents. They thought that it helped convey all of the complicated backstories and contributed to the realism. They liked seeing both black and white women take part in resistance against the Confederacy—this, too, seemed authentic to them. Several elements of Free State of Jones did surprise them: that Serena, Newt’s first wife (Keri Russell), would come back after the war to live with Rachel and Newt; that the Free State of Jones was so far south rather than closer to the border states; and that such a community of renegades could form in the first place. “Where would Newt Knight have developed the willingness to work with slaves and say that they are real men?” my father asked. “That wasn’t real common in the South, was it?” This points to a central argument of the film: that the “Solid South” was not solid, before, during, or after the war. Some of the Confederate deserters hiding out in the Jones County swamps were racists, and most of the Knight Company members were motivated by self-preservation rather than a sense of racial justice. But there were those who agreed with Newt that the company’s rebellious actions “ain’t just for us. Black, white, rich, poor. It’s for everybody.” As Victoria Bynum told me during a
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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.
CONTINUED FROM P. 28
recent interview, we need to understand the broad range of white southerners’ experiences during the Civil War in order to understand that conflict and what came after. “In bringing the story of the Free State of Jones to the masses,” Bynum said, “not only is the image of a white Solid South negated, so also is the agency of Southern dissenters during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction asserted.” My parents had never heard of the Free State of Jones or its interracial community before that Sunday afternoon. For that reason alone, the film is “a great accomplishment,” as my mother noted. And it made all three of us think about the reverberations of the Civil War and Reconstruction today; we went on to talk about its connections to recent acts of racist violence and attempts to restrict voting. In the end, while I gave Free State of Jones four out of five cannonballs, both of my parents gave it five. Dad: “I found it very interesting, and a pretty compelling film.” Mom: “I would actually buy it. And I don’t even like Matthew McConaughey that much.” 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 (UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS, 2012) AND IS WORKING ON A BOOK ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR IN THE DESERT SOUTHWEST.
MORGAN
CONTINUED FROM P. 54
tucky Cavalier, was taken upstairs and reverently cleaned up, then dressed in his still pressed, still spotless uniform by the tearful ladies of the house—Lucy Williams among them. The Confederates were allowed to take his body out of the house, through an honor guard of raised sabers, and carry it to Abingdon, where it was met by his pregnant wife, now widow, Mattie.13 The news was rushed to the White House by a War Department courier. Sherman, who got it by wire, replied only, “Good.” Within days, Andrew Campbell was promoted to sergeant and then lieutenant for his success in “arresting, by an accurate shot, the flight of John Hunt Morgan, one of our country’s most prominent enemies.” ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
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The South, already demoralized by Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, was at first silent—then outraged. Stories were told of how Morgan’s naked body had been dragged through the mud and abused. It was even said that he had been betrayed by Lucy Williams and murdered in cold blood after he had surrendered. The Belle of Tennessee, his widow, knew better. After his experience in Ohio, Morgan had vowed to Mattie never to be captured again. He even signed his letters “Mizpah,” after a Biblical covenant, to remind her of this pact between them. After funeral services in Abingdon, Morgan’s body was taken to Richmond, where it was laid in state in the Confederate House of Representatives, to be viewed and mourned by thousands, including all the top officials and notables of the Confederacy (except fellow Kentuckian Jefferson Davis, of course). It
john hunt morgan’s glory days long outlasted the man himself. The war was lost but the myth flourished, and before the turn of the century the war to preserve slavery had become “the Lost Cause,” honored by white Americans both North and South. The postwar reconciliation of former enemies came at the expense of African Americans, who would lose most of the rights they had gained in the brief period of Reconstruction. Jim Crow laws and Ku Klux Klan terror accompanied the beatification of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Morgan, and other Confederates as gallant heroes. The slave society they had fought for was whitewashed into a nostalgic memory of “My Old Kentucky Home” where even “the darkies were gay.” “Morgan’s Men” were honored throughout formerly contentious Kentucky. One of his officers was twice elected governor, and for years it was hard for anyone to be elected to Kentucky
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office, even mayor or sheriff, without claiming to have an ancestor who had ridden with Morgan.14 In 1911, 10,000 or more crowded into Lexington for the unveiling of a gigantic statue of Morgan on Sir Oliver that had been erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Kentucky state legislature. Confederate banners waved while the band played “Dixie.” The legend of the Kentucky Cavalier accomplished what his raids had never done—and by embracing the Lost Cause, Kentucky “joined the Confederacy” after the war and became part of the “Solid South.”
after morgan’s abingdon funeral, the heartbroken Mattie retreated to Georgia and gave birth to a daughter, whom she named after her father. Beautiful young Johnnie Morgan was a favorite at Confederate veteran reunions throughout the South as the heroes of the Lost Cause were honored and remembered with battle flags, nostalgic speeches, and Rebel yells. After her untimely death from typhoid fever in 1888, Johnnie ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
MORGAN
was then interred in a vault until 1868, when it was returned to Lexington and buried with great ceremony.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy are among those present for the unvailing of a statue of John Hunt Morgan in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1911.
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Grand Army Men MORGAN
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was mourned as the last direct descendant of the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy. But that was not exactly so. In fact, an early leader of the NAACP was also a direct descendant of the Kentucky Cavalier. His grandmother had been a “favored” slave of Morgan in Lexington, and he acknowledged his patrimony though he took no pride in it. A distinguished Ohio scientist and engineer (and the first African American to own a car), Garrett Augustus Morgan is credited with the invention of a smoke mask that saved many firefighters’ lives
and, even more important, the three-color traffic signal, a necessary device in the early 20th century as Cleveland and the nation transitioned from horseback to the automobile.15 Green for go. Red for stop. Yellow for caution, a hue to which John Hunt Morgan, in both legend and military reality, was colorblind. KENTUCKY NATIVE TERRY BISSON IS A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER, EDITOR, AND BIOGRAPHER WHO LIVES IN CALIFORNIA. HIS ANCESTORS AND RELATIVES FOUGHT ON BOTH SIDES IN THE CIVIL WAR.
WESTERN WAR CONTINUED FROM P. 63
gin debate over new policies about confiscation and slave “contrabands,” leading in the summer of 1862 to legislation allowing the military to free, employ, and even enlist slaves from the Confederacy. Consequently, by the time Lincoln completed the final draft of his famous proclamation, black troops from the border states were already in military service in the West. As early as November 1861, as Grant led white troops southward on a riverine foray from the vital military port at Cairo to engage Confederates at Belmont, Missouri, Charles Jennison reportedly led an entire company of liberated western Missouri bondmen, under command of a black officer, on a raid. Two months later, James Henry Lane formed the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, the first black regiment of the
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war. To enlist them that summer, he loosely interpreted recruiting instructions from the War Department as well as Congress’ authorization that the president employ “as many persons of African descent as he may deem necessary and proper for the suppression of this rebellion.” Despite the secretary of war’s admonitions they should not be received, Lane’s black enlistees, comprising slaves from Missouri, Arkansas, and the Indian Nations, filled nearly two regiments. In October, detachments of Lane’s “Brigade” saw action, repulsing repeated attacks by white Missouri horsemen at Island Mound. It was the first time that armed blacks participated in the war. By the spring of 1863, former Jayhawker James Montgomery would lead one of the first
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two black regiments comprised entirely of freed slaves in the Confederacy. In the coastal Sea Islands, he would introduce the hard warfare that a disapproving Robert Gould Shaw—commanding the celebrated 54th Massachusetts (mistakingly hailed today as the war’s first black regiment)—would refer to as Montgomery’s “conflagration policy.” The Bostonian, who found Montgomery’s “Indian ... mode of warfare” more extreme than anything he had seen while serving in the Army of the Potomac, complained, “It isn’t a fair stand up such as our Potomac Army is accustomed to,” and groused that “praying, shooting, burning and hanging ... firing into houses occupied by noncombatants, and burning down dwellings which shelter only women and children ... are [not] the true means to put down the Rebellion.” Montgomery’s bona fides as a fellow abolitionist were nearly overwritten by his destructive way of war. But even Shaw would soon understand that this westerner had brought together the salient elements of full war-making, well ahead of the officers in his own army.17 A year later they would catch up, when two of those westerners in attendance in Springfield, Grant and Sherman, were transferred to commands in the eastern theater after their successes in the West. They brought their western style of war and put it to use in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Together, Grant’s Overland Campaign and Sherman’s March to the Sea represented the strategic turn to a harder form of warfare by which the hard hand of destruction, whether to armies or civilian property and morale, broke the Confederacy’s capacity and its peo-
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ple’s will to resist. Within a year it would lead to ultimate Union victory. Nearly from its outbreak, western commanders and soldiers exerted a pivotal influence on the trajectory of the conflict. In the fall of 1874, veterans of the western war who gathered in Springfield quite naturally saw their wartime record represented by the hard warfare of “The March,” in part because many of them had participated in Sherman’s storied campaign. But that record extended far beyond that campaign and its influence on the eastern theater. Although they claimed victory by hard fighting untainted by the emancipation efforts they ascribed to eastern politics, these officers’ ambivalence toward wartime emancipation and black enlistment belied the fact that these pivotal measures had commenced in the West. Introduced to the war’s eastern theater by celebrated westerners like Grant and Sherman but also by lesserknown western commanders like John Pope, Stephen Hurlbut, and James Montgomery, this pairing produced the kind of collective warfare that drove down the Confederacy. Indeed, despite the selective memory of the veteran officers who gathered in Illinois’ capital, the style of warfare that had won the war in the West had fully entwined hard war and emancipation nearly from the start. Once spread to the various Union armies in the conflict’s eastern theater, the western way of war they now celebrated had become the nation’s.
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CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND DEPARTMENT HEAD AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF SEVEN BOOKS ON THE CIVIL WAR ERA, INCLUDING THE RIVERS RAN BACKWARD: THE CIVIL WAR AND THE REMAKING OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE BORDER (OXFORD 2016).
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2 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, 2001), 71-72; Anne Sarah Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel Hill, 2014), 2.
SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
4 Cincinnati Gazette, undated, as quoted in ibid., 52. 5 Robert Orr, Earl Fletcher, and Timothy Reaves, Blue, Gray and Homespun: The Civil War in East Tennessee (privately published, 2013), 271. 6 Greeneville Democrat, March 7, 1895, as quoted in ibid., 273. 7 Ibid., 271. Unionist “citizens” involved in the Morgan “affair” hid their identities to avoid retaliation after the war. 8 Williams family scrapbook, as quoted in ibid., 280. 9 Letter from Captain J.T. Rogers to a Union officer recounting events of the morning of Morgan’s death, as quoted in the Knoxville Whig, October 2, 1864 (hereafter cited as “Rogers letter”).
AMERICAN ILIAD (Pages 26–27, 72)
1 The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago, 1951), 59.
10 Orr, et al, Blue, Gray and Homespun, 284. Sarah E. Thompson of Greeneville, in an attempt to secure a pension after the war, claimed it was she who spotted Morgan and cried out, but this is much disputed.
2 Quoted in Roy Morris Jr., Sheridan: The Life and Wars of General Phil Sheridan (New York, 1992), 1.
11 Rogers letter.
3 Bruce Catton, This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War (Garden City, NY, 1956), 298.
13 Orr, et al, Blue, Gray and Homespun, 284.
4 Quoted in Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, NY, 1953), 312.
12 Ramage, Rebel Raider, 238. 14 Ramage, Rebel Raider, 253. 15 “Who Made America? Garrett Augustus Morgan,” pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/ whomade/morgan_hi.html.
5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 313. 7 Horace Porter, “Five Forks and the Pursuit of Lee,” in Clarence C. Buel and Robert U. Johnson, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War 4 vols. (New York, 1887), 713. 8 Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac (1915; reprint, Gettysburg, PA, 1994), 143. 9 Ibid., 151.
WESTERN WAR MORGAN
(Pages 46–55, 72–76) 1
James A. Ramage, Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan (Lexington, KY, 1986), 135, 237.
2 Richmond Whig, undated, as quoted in Ramage, Rebel Raider, 66. 3 Ibid., 104.
(Pages 56–63, 76–77) 1
Society of the Army of the Tennessee, “Eighth Annual Report of the Proceedings of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee,” in Report of the Proceedings of the Army of the Tennessee at the Sixth Annual Meeting, Vols. 6-10 (Cincinnati: By the Society, 1878), 264-67, 288-90, and passim; Nancy Hill, “The Transformation of the Lincoln Tomb,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 27 (Winter 2006), 39-56.
3 For a challenge to prevailing interpretations of widespread pro-emancipation politics among Union soldiers, see Jonathan W. White, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge, 2014). On western veterans and emancipation, see Matthew E. Stanley, The Loyal West: War and Reunion in Middle America (Urbana, IL, forthcoming 2016). 4 Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, 2011), 12-26; John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence, 2005), passim. 5 Report of the Proceedings of the Army of the Tennessee, 244-245; Notice, July 21, 1861, General Order No. 3, July 31, 1861, Report and Order of Brig. Gen. John Pope, U.S. Army, August 17, 19, 1861, all in War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington D.C., 1881-1901), Series 1, Vol. 3, 404, 418, 135 [hereinafter cited as OR]; J.T.K. Hayward to John C. Fremont, August 10, 12, 1861, OR, Series 2, Vol. 1, 204-206; Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (Cambridge, 1996), 38; Wallace J. Schutz and Walter N. Trenerry, Abandoned by Lincoln: A Military Biography of General John Pope (Urbana, 1990), 66-69; Peter Cozzins and Robert I. Girardi, eds., The Military Memoirs of John Pope (Chapel Hill, 1998), 16-26. 6 Stanley, The Loyal West, 4; Report of the Proceedings of the Army of the Tennessee, 244245; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1996), 524-533. 7 [Richmond, In.] The Broad Axe of Freedom, February 13, 1864; Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2010), 10-11, 16-17, 38-40, 100-101; Cicero Maxwell to To Whom it may Concern, May 6, 1863, and Affidavit of Jacob S. Cave, March 31, 1865, both in RG 393, pt. 1, ser. 2229: Correspondence, Affidavits, and Oaths Regarding Civilians Charged with Disloyalty, Department of Kentucky, box 1, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. [hereafter cited as NARA]; Hannibal [Mo.] Daily Messenger, September 4, 1861. 8 Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 37; A. Barnett to Henry W. Halleck, February 5, 1862, and William Crawford to Halleck, January 5, 1862, both in RG 393, pt. 1, ser. 2593: Letters Received, Department of the Missouri, 1862-67, box 2, NARA; George Caleb Bingham to John M. Schofield, June 4, 1863, Correspondence: Letters Received, series 1, 1861-1875, John McAllister Schofield Papers, box 2, folder B4-30, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. [hereafter cited as LC]. 9 James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York, 2008), 30-33; William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, 2 vols. (New York,
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1875; reprint New York, 1984), 1:210-214, 229, 266-267, 277-278. 10 W. James Morgan to Henry W. Halleck, December 24, 1861, OR, Series 2, Vol. 1, 238; General Orders No. 13a, February 26, 1862, OR, Series 1, Vol. 7, 669-670; Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 64-65.
History, Competition & Camaraderie
11 Cape Girardeau Eagle [Union Series], May 5, 1862; Stephen A. Hurlbut to Joseph Story, July 22, 1861, Record Group 133: Adjutant General Records, Home Guards (Adair County, Walmuthsville Company), Orders, Missouri State Archives; John Edwards to S[amuel] J. Kirkwood, July 31, 1861, Correspondence, Orders, and Returns Relating to Operations in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, the Indian Territory, and Department of the Northwest, from January 1 to December 31, 1863, Notice, July 21, 1861, General Order No. 3, July 31, 1861, all in OR, Series 1, Vol. 5, 6; Vol. 3, 434, 412-413 404, 418, 135; Vol. 22, pt. 2, 109-110. 12 Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 16-17; Samuel R. Curtis, “Report on Operations of Iowa Troops in Missouri in June, 1861,” in Charles Aldrich, ed., The Annals of Iowa: A Historical Quarterly, 3rd ser. (Des Moines, 1907-1908), 8:358-361; Clinton [Mo.] Advocate, August 3, 1876; Carrollton [Mo.] Democrat, August 25, 1876. Curtis’ report, dated June 27, 1861, was not included in OR.
The N-SSA is America’s oldest and largest Civil War shooting sports organization. Competitors shoot original or approved reproduction firearms as well as artillery. All teams represent a specific Civil War regiment or unit and wears the uniform they wore over 150 years ago. N-SSA is dedicated to preserving our history, period firearms competition and the camaraderie of team sports with friends and family.
13 Report and Order of Brig. Gen. John Pope, U.S. Army, August 17, 19, 1861, General Orders No. 5, 7, and 11, July 10-23, 1862, and J.T.K. Hayward to John C. Fremont, August 10, 12, 1861, all in OR, Series 1, Vol, 12, pt. 2, 50-52; Ser. 2, Vol. 1, 204-206; Sherman, Memoirs of William T. Sherman, vol. 1, 277-278; Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 64-65; Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1862. 14 James Russell Lowell, “Pickens-and-stealin’s Rebellion (1861),” in The Works of James Russell Lowell, vol. 5 (Boston and New York, 1871), 86; Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 1-6, 23, 35-36; Ephram J. Wilson to Odon Guitar, July 27, 1863, Odon Guitar Papers, Mss. C0882, Western Manuscripts/State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia; Cape Girardeau Eagle [Union Series], May 6, 1862; Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York, 1989), 13-15, 161. 15 Albert Castel, A Frontier State at War: Kansas, 1861-1865 (Washington, D.C., 1958), 45-46, 50, 55-56; H[enry] W. Halleck to D[avid] Hunter, February 13, 1862, and J[ames] H. Lane to S[amuel]. D. Sturgis, October 3, 1861, both in OR, Series 1, Vol. 8, 554-55, Vol. 3, 516. 16 Hannibal [Mo.] Daily Messenger, October 3, 1861; Ira Berlin, et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, The Wartime Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge, 1988), 403-404; Benjamin Gratz Brown, Emancipation as a State Policy: Letter of B. Gratz Brown to the “Palmyra Courier” (n.p., 1862), 8-9; Leslie Schwalm, “‘Overrun with Free Negroes’: Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest,” Civil War History 50 (June 2004): 154-155. 17 Russell Duncan, ed., Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Robert Gould Shaw (Athens, GA, 1991), 363-370.
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pa r t i n g shot
Nap Time photographs of the death and destruction wrought on the battlefield, Alexander Gardner chose a lighter focus in this August 1862 image, in which he captured an unsuspecting officer, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel W. Owen of the 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry, taking a nap in camp. It’s unclear whether the bottle by Owen’s side is his own or a plant by a mischievous comrade—or photographer.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDER GARDNER
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