LINCOLN AND THE MONITOR P. 54 JACKSON THE MAGICIAN P. 26 VOL. 8, NO. 3
e h t g n i d l i u B y m r A t c e f r e P
What if you could create the ideal Civil War fighting force? Five top historians take their shot.
FALL 2018
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
VOLUME 8, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2018
FEATURES
Salvo {Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to Sharpsburg VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Slurs and Slights FACES OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 The Virtuous Knight of the Orphan Brigade PRIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 A U.S. Army Surgical Kit PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Three Batteries and a Trio of Opportunities COST OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A Confederate Cipher Disk
Building the Perfect Army 30 What if you could create the ideal Civil War fighting force? Five top historians take their shot. With Lorien Foote, Brian Matthew Jordan, Jennifer Murray, Ethan S. Rafuse, and Brooks D. Simpson
IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 The Sable Arm in Kentucky
“Death Comes to Us by Many a Way” 44
Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Jackson the Magician STEREOSCOPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Varina
A look at the fatal dangers that Civil War soldiers, sailors, and civilians faced away from the battlefield.
Books & Authors LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3); TODD DETWILER
THE B&A Q&A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 WITH WILLIAM W. FREEHLING
THE B&A Q&A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 WITH DAN ABRAMS
By Brian Steel Wills
Mr. Lincoln and the Monitor 54
EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Picking Favorites
The Union’s famed ironclad warship had a fan in the country’s president, who paid the vessel an eventful visit in the spring of 1862.
PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 A POW’s Thoughtful Gift
By Anna Gibson Holloway and Jonathan W. White
In Every Issue
ON THE COVER: An assortment of Union and Confederate officers. Images courtesy of the Library of Congress and the National Archives.
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editorial
VOLUME 8, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2018
Terry A. Johnston Jr. PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Picking Favorites
Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor Matthew C. Hulbert EDITORIAL ADVISORS
like many of you, my interest in the history of the American Civil War spans decades. I read my first book about the conflict— or rather, about one of its most significant personalities, Abraham Lincoln—when I wasn’t yet 10 years old. Since then, the titles have piled up: battle studies, biographies, social and political histories, collections of soldiers’ and civilians’ letters—you name it. And, as I’m sure is true for you, through all of this reading I’ve developed a particular interest in certain events and participants, some prominent and others more obscure. My own reading list is heavy on presidents Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, as well as Union and Confederate generals like Isaac Stevens and James Longstreet. I also have a special affection for the fighting Scotsmen of the 79th New York Infantry and the largely foreign-born Union Light Infantry of Charleston, South Carolina. And I’ve always been intrigued by the daring work of Union and Confederate spies and the ways in which African Americans helped support the war effort and secure their own freedom. In short, we all seem to have our favorites when it comes to the history of the Civil War—and, as I’ve learned over the years, Civil War enthusiasts are not hesitant to share and even debate their choices. Which brings me to this issue’s cover story. What if you could put together your ideal Civil War fighting force? Whose skills or character have you come to admire over your years of learning about the conflict, and would they make your army’s roster? We asked five Civil War historians for their picks, and then assembled a panel of three experts to evaluate the results. In “Building the Perfect Army” (page 30), you can see their selections and the judges’ opinions. Care to share your thoughts about the exercise—whether about the armies or the judgments? Send us an email at letters@ civilwarmonitor.com or post them on our Facebook page: facebook. com/CivilWarMonitor.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: letters@civilwarmonitor.com
Jennifer Sturak Michele Huie COPY EDITORS
Brian Matthew Jordan BOOK REVIEW EDITOR BRIAN@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Patrick Mitchell CREATIVE DIRECTOR
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Alicia Jylkka DESIGNER
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
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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: $23.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $33.95 per year in Canada, and $43.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Views expressed by individual authors, unless expressly stated, do not necessarily represent those of The Civil War Monitor or Bayshore History, llc. Letters to the editor become the property of The Civil War Monitor, and may be edited. The Civil War Monitor cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited materials. The contents of the magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of the publisher. Copyright ©2018 by Bayshore History, llc all rights reserved.
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Explore Our Nation’s Past Every Saturday 8 am through Monday 8 am ET
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d i s pat c h e s
But it was a Dr. James May of the Theological Seminary of Virginia who, in this regard, placed Lee as potentially in a league apart from Napoleon and Wellington. Ironically, Lee’s April 30 letter to his wife, in which he wrote that there was “no prospect” of a truce, clearly demonstrates he did not share this sentiment. Whether one wishes to call Lee’s actions in the spring of 1861 indecisive, wily, or even deceitful, few would deny that, four Aprils later, when confronted with the choice of surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia or possibly initiating a quasi-guerilla war, he acted decisively in the best interests of America. That, to paraphrase Robert Frost, made all the difference. And that is why Lee is properly revered in the annals of American history.
MEN OF FAITH
Having been a student of the Civil War for over 50 years, I found the piece about Union chaplains [“Figures: Men of Faith,” Vol. 8, No. 2] super interesting. However, you failed to caption the image of a chaplain standing among a group of soldiers, which serves as the article’s backdrop. Taken before the Battle of Bull Run, the photo shows the men of the 69th New York State Militia and their regimental chaplain, Father Thomas Mooney. Every time I see the photo, I wonder which of those young boys is my underage greatgrandfather, who enlisted with his big brother in the 69th. Also in the photo, standing next to Father Mooney, is the regiment’s commander, Colonel Michael Corcoran; nearby (though obscured by the article’s text) is Captain Thomas Francis Meagher, who would rise to the rank of general and command the famed Irish Brigade. Steve Reilly LOST MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA
LEE’S DECISION
Allen Guelzo deserves much credit for his attempt, in his article in the Summer 2018 issue of The Civil War Monitor [“The Decision,” Vol. 8, No. 2], to establish coherency from an episode that is arguably the most confounding of Robert E. Lee’s life. However, there are too many lingering uncertainties that prevent a wholly credible story from hanging together. Alan Nolan, in Lee Consid-
Craig F. Montesano
ered (1991), makes a convincing argument that Lee knew exactly what was afoot when he boarded the train to Richmond with Judge John Robertson on April 22, 1861. In fact, it might have been the worst kept secret in Virginia. The fact that Governor John Letcher dispatched Robertson 72 hours after the state’s ordinance of secession was passed leaves little doubt that Lee’s name was in wide circulation in the corridors of official Richmond. Even the Alexandria Gazette, in its April 20 edition, declared Lee the only man fit to command Virginia’s military forces. Also, a clarification: Cassius Lee did indeed express the hope that Lee’s appointment would put him in a position to help bring about a peaceful settlement between North and South.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
***
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwarmonitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
The caption for the full-page image of Robert E. Lee used on page 33 of Allen Guelzo’s article “The Decision” claims that the image is of “a younger Lee” who “dons his U.S. Army uniform in the 1840s.” However, this description is entirely mistaken about the history behind this photograph, which, in fact, was over 10 years in the making. This image of Lee first appeared as a newspaper engraving in the August 24, 1861, issue of Harper’s Weekly. It was copied from an 1850 image of the man in civilian dress. In the original picture, a dark-haired, mustached Lee wears a dark double-breasted frock coat unbuttoned enough
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to reveal his cravat, white shirt, and vest. He appears to be holding a book in his left hand. It’s one of three prewar images of Lee known to exist. By the summer of 1861, after Lee had made his decision to side with the Confederacy but months before he took command of what became the Army of Northern Virginia, he had made enough of a name for himself that the northern public demanded to know what he looked like. Using the 1850 image, Harper’s printed a copy of the photo but dressed Lee in a “Confederate” uniform, which was dark in color (not gray). His book was turned into a shako-styled hat marked “VA” for Virginia on the front. The “photoshopped” image was entirely an artist’s conception. Apparently, little to nothing was known by the northern press about what Confederate uniforms actually looked like at that time (similar uniforms would also be drawn onto existing pictures of other Confederate generals). Bryan Cheeseboro VIA EMAIL
The N-SSA is America’s oldest and largest Civil War shooting sports organization. Competitors shoot original or approved reproduction muskets, carbines and revolvers at breakable targets in a timed match. Some units even compete with cannons and mortars. Each team represents a specific Civil War regiment or unit and wears the uniform they wore over 150 years ago. Dedicated to preserving our history, period firearms competition and the camaraderie of team sports with friends and family, the N-SSA may be just right for you.
For more information visit us online at www.n-ssa.org.
CIVIL WAR TOURS May 1-5, 2019
Based in All programs Chambersburg, PA. include tours, lectures, meals, tactical maps, book vendor, & more. Reasonable Rates!
6th annual national Ed BEarss syMposiuM
Exploring American military history! New tours to Monterey Pass, Washington Co., MD., Forbes Campaign including Ft. Ligonier, Bushy Run, etc. Led by Steve Bockmiller, Dr. Richard Sommers, others. Special guest Ed Bearss!
July 23-28, 2019 antiEtaM: thE BloodiEst day
GETTYSBURG
I generally despise these compendium issues, but your Gettysburg issue is superb. It’s especially spoton in terms of the content about the Confederate retreat and the Union pursuit after the battle. George F. Franks III
Based in The LARGEST Antietam Seminar ever held! Shepherdstown, WV. Detailed battlefield walks and specialized tours
including Crampton’s Gap, Harpers Ferry, C&O Canal, Shepherdstown, more. Led by Dennis Frye, Carol Reardon, John Schildt, Tom Clemens, Ted Alexander, etc.
oct. 23-27, 2019 Based in Chambersburg, PA.
VIA FACEBOOK
Ed. Thanks, George, for the kind words! Folks who would like to purchase a copy of their own can do so at civilwarmonitor.com/gettysburg.
GuErillas, partisans & raidErs
Examining irregular warfare through the ages from the Romans to present. Tours of McCausland’s Raid, Johnston/Gilmore Baltimore Raid, Mosby’s Confederacy, McNeill’s Raids, more. Led by Steve French, Kevin Pawlak, Ted Alexander, Martin West, others.
www.CivilWarSeminars .org Special thanks to our Sponsor:
/CivilWarSeminars
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& MORE
CONTACT US! 717-264-7101
lkennedy@chambersburg.org 100 Lincoln Way East Chambersburg, PA 17201
8/25/18 11:13 PM
Agenda
torical Society’s 33rd annual Lincoln Colloquium. Talks include “Abraham Lincoln’s Body” by Richard W. Fox, who will explore how Lincoln’s funeral train kept the late president’s memory alive, and “The Country Reacts,” a moderated discussion on how Indiana responded to Lincoln’s death. Lunch is included in the ticket price. Space is limited. $55 ADULTS; $40 SOCIETY MEMBERS; $15 STUDENTS; FOR MORE INFORMATION, OR TO RESERVE A SPOT: INDIANAHISTORY.ORG or 317-232-1882.
Your Fall 2018 Guide to Civil War Events
OCTOBER LIVING HISTORY
156th Battle of Corinth Anniversary SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6 – SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7 CORINTH CIVIL WAR INTERPRETIVE CENTER CORINTH, MISSISSIPPI
Commemorate the 156th anniversary of the Battle of Corinth at the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center. Multiple events will take place both days, including infantry demonstrations and interpretive talks. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS.GOV/SHIL/ LEARN/HISTORYCULTURE/CORINTH.HTM or 662287-9273. EXCURSION
Ghosts from the Civil War Halloween Tour Surratt House Museum
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 – SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28 THE LOCKWOOD-MATHEWS MANSION MUSEUM
SEP TEMBER
NORWALK, CONNECTICUT
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 7 A.M. – 7 P.M. SURRATT HOUSE MUSEUM CLINTON, MARYLAND
Follow the trail taken by John Wilkes Booth from Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., where he assassinated President Lincoln, to the spot of his death 12 days later near Port Royal, Virginia. Relax and enjoy the history and scenery on this 12-hour, fully narrated bus tour. Reservation and payment are required in advance.
Shenandoah Valley Civil War Era Dancers will call the dances. A delicious buffet and non-alcoholic beverages are included.
$85; FOR MORE INFORMATION: SURRATTMUSEUM. ORG or 301-868-1121.
$25; FOR MORE INFORMATION: KERNSTOWNBATTLE.ORG OR 757-593-8227.
LIVING HISTORY
CONFERENCE
Civil War Ball
The Long Goodbye: Grieving Lincoln in the Heartland
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 7 – 10 P.M.
Kernstown Battlefield Association’s annual Civil War Ball
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 8:30 A.M. – 5 P.M.
ARTILLERY ANNEX WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA
The Kernstown Battlefield Association is hosting its third annual Civil War Ball. The Second Virginia Cavalry String Band will provide the music, and members of the
EUGENE AND MARILYN GLICK INDIANA HISTORY CENTER INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA
Explore how America mourned for its first assassinated president at the Indiana His-
Living-history volunteers share tales about the specter that haunted the battlefields of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville and discuss Abraham Lincoln’s premonition of his own demise. Ghosts will wander throughout the first and second floors of the mansion; tour guides will do their best to protect you. Note: Children under 16 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian; tickets must be purchased in advance and will not be available at the door. $20; FOR MORE INFORMATION: LOCKWOODMATHEWSMANSION.COM or 203-838-9799.
NOVEMBER CONVERSATION
House 200—From Shrine to Museum SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2 P.M. WHITE HOUSE OF THE CONFEDERACY RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
How and why did the staff of The Confederate Museum, founded in 1896 in the White House of the Confederacy, transition the organization in the 1960s to one with a more scholarly approach to history?
SURRATT HOUSE MUSEUM/BUDDY SECOR, PHOTOGRAPHER; ERIC FITZPATRICK
EXCURSION
John Wilkes Booth Escape Route Tour
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Explore their decisions with the museum’s first professional executive director, Peter Rippe, and The American Civil War Museum’s John Coski. $10 ADULTS; FREE FOR MEMBERS; FOR MORE INFORMATION: WHC200. ORG or 804-649-1861. LECTURE
“This Trying Hour” SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 11 A.M. – 12 P.M. IRISH RAILROAD WORKERS MUSEUM BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Historian and author Scott Mingus discusses his book, coauthored with Robert L. Williams, This Trying Hour: The Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad in the Civil War, the story of one of the most important supply and troop transport routes in the Civil War’s eastern theater. Copies of the book will be available for purchase. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: IRISHSHRINE.ORG or 410-347-4747. LIVING HISTORY
a house tour, and explore the grounds.
CEREMONY
16th Annual Remembrance Day Illumination SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 5:30 – 9 P.M. GETTYSBURG NATIONAL CEMETERY GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8 – SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10
The Gettysburg Foundation presents the 16th Annual Remembrance Illumination at the Gettysburg National Cemetery. This solemn commemoration features a luminary candle on each of the 3,512 Civil War soldiers’ graves. Names of the fallen soldiers will be read throughout the evening.
FRANKLIN, TENNESSEE
At both the Carter House and Carnton Plantation, around which the Battle of Franklin swirled in November 1864, guests can meet Civil War reenactors, get hands-on experience with the clothes, trades, and weapons of the past, take
VisitSpotsy.com
$18 ADULTS; $8 CHILDREN 6-15; CHILDREN UNDER 6 ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: BOFT.ORG/BLUE-GRAYDAYS or 615-786-1864.
Blue & Gray Days
CARTER HOUSE AND CARNTON PLANTATION
NATHAN ZUCKER; GETTYSBURG FOUNDATION
Blue & Gray Days
FREE; $18.63 TO SPONSOR A CANDLE IN MEMORY OF A LOVED ONE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: GETTYSBURGFOUNDATION.ORG or 717-338-1243.
Remembrance Illumination at Gettysburg National Cemetery
Share Your Event
Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
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Salvo Facts, Figures & Items of Interest
In this photo by Alexander Gardner, Union soldiers mill about the grave of a comrade killed during the recent Battle of Antietam, fought outside Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862. The fight remains the bloodiest single day of combat in American military history. for more on sharpsburg, turn the page. 3
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IN THIS SECTION travels 10 A VISIT TO SHARPSBURG voices 14 SLURS AND SLIGHTS faces of war 16 THE VIRTUOUS KNIGHT OF THE ORPHAN BRIGADE primer 18 A U.S. ARMY SURGICAL KIT preservation 20 THREE BATTERIES AND A TRIO OF OPPORTUNITIES cost of war 22 A CONFEDERATE CIPHER DISK
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
in focus 24 THE SABLE ARM IN KENTUCKY
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Sharpsburg MARYLAND
emboldened by the Confederate victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run—and determined to take the war into enemy territory—Robert E. Lee moved his Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River and into the state of Maryland on September 3, 1862. On September 13, as George B. McClellan and the Army of the Potomac followed in pursuit, two Union soldiers came upon a mislaid copy of Lee’s battle plans in the grass at an abandoned Confederate campground. The papers, which were delivered to McClellan, revealed that the Confederate commander had divided his army, sending one wing under Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson to capture Harpers Ferry. The following day, McClellan’s army battled the balance of Lee’s force through the passes of South Mountain. On the 17th, the armies clashed again outside the town of Sharpsburg. The resulting fight, known to history as the Battle of Antietam, proved tactically inconclusive, but resulted in over 22,000 casualties, making it the bloodiest single day of battle in American history. The following day, Lee began the move back toward Virginia, his army bloodied but intact. Interested in visiting Sharpsburg? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area—Thomas G. Clemens and Dennis Frye—to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic town.
Washington Monument State Park
1 CAN’T MISS
A branch of the Museum of Civil War Medicine, the Pry House Field Hospital Museum (18906 Shepherdstown Pike, Keedysville, MD; 301-432-6352) is located in the historic Phillip and Susan Pry house on the east bluffs of Antietam Creek. Union generals Joseph Hooker and Israel Richardson were treated here for their wounds, and the latter died in an upstairs bedroom weeks after the battle. While the house has a great view of the battlefield and General George B. McClellan did spend time there, it’s a popular misconception that the house served as his headquarters during the battle. tc Washington Monument State Park (6620 Zittlestown Rd., Middletown, MD; 888-432-2267). Located atop South Mountain (about 20 minutes from the Antietam Battlefield), the park offers a beautiful view of the Antietam Valley from the tower of its 40-foot-tall Washington Monument, the first in the country built in honor of the first president. df
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The view from Jefferson Rock. Below: the Appalachian Trail at Harpers Ferry
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There are lots of outdoor activities for the whole family, including biking or walking the nearby Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath (nps.gov/choh; 301-739-4200), and vendors can arrange tubing or kayaking on Antietam Creek or the Potomac River. On a rainy day try Discovery Station (101 W. Washington St., Hagerstown, MD; 301790-0076), a hands-on museum designed with young people in mind. tc
BEST KEPT SECRET
No question, that title belongs to Nutter’s Ice Cream (100 E. Main St.; 301-432-5809), located just south of Sharpsburg’s town square. Their offerings are delicious and inexpensive, but get there before 8 p.m. to avoid the line out the door! tc Hiking the Appalachian Trail at Harpers Ferry (appalachiantrail. org; 304-535-6331). In a short distance, one sees three states (Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia); two rivers (Potomac and Shenandoah); Jefferson Rock (a spectacular view made famous by Thomas Jefferson); a historic town that changed America’s destiny; and John Brown’s Fort, where the beginning of the end of slavery occurred. df
BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
Nutter’s Ice Cream
Harpers Ferry National Historical Park (767 Shenandoah St., Harpers Ferry, WV; 304-535-6029), located about a half hour away from Sharpsburg, is a very good option for families. There are spectacular views that feature rivers and rocks and rapids and ruins. The place is naturally wild, with miles of trails, and the historic town (including its souvenir and ice cream shops) is juxtaposed into a mountain river gap. df
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BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
The Maryland State Monument on the Antietam National Battlefield (302 E. Main St.; 301-432-5124) is a special place. Located across from the famed Dunker Church, it is the only monument erected by a state to honor the men from Maryland who fought on both sides at Antietam. Dedicated in 1900, with veterans of both armies present, its message of reconciliation is eloquently expressed on a plaque on its northwest side. tc
Burnside Bridge is the most iconic landmark on the Antietam Battlefield, and it’s isolated from all 21stcentury intrusions. It’s the best place at Antietam to time-travel back to battle day. Even more compelling, it’s the original bridge that witnessed the fighting on September 17, 1862. When you stand on that bridge, it feels as though you’re part of the action. A bonus is the tremendous sycamore “witness tree” that is still standing today, connecting us with life in 1862. df
Burnside Bridge
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Captain Bender’s Tavern
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The Inn at Antietam
BEST EATS
For breakfast, I recommend Bonnie’s at the Red Byrd (19409 Shepherdstown Pike, Keedysville, MD; 301-4325822), located only three miles outside of Sharpsburg. It’s a small, friendly place with good food. Try the chipped beef on toast. Captain Bender’s Tavern (111 E. Main St.; 301-432-5813) serves a wide selection of sandwiches and several local microbrews on tap. Their fresh-cut French fries are my favorite. For a more upscale meal, try the Bavarian Inn (164 Shepherd Grade Rd., Shepherdstown, WV; 304-876-2551), located just across the Potomac River. German food is my favorite, and theirs is wonderful (especially the sauerbraten). There is formal dining upstairs, and a more relaxed Rathskeller downstairs. tc The Bavarian Inn in Shepherdstown is a very good option for breakfast. Only about a five-minute drive from the Antietam Battlefield, it offers a great morning atmosphere overlooking the Potomac River. The omelets are superb, and the stacked pancakes are the best in the area. Blue Moon Cafe (200 E. High St., Shepherdstown, WV; 304-876-1920) boasts a creative and eclectic sandwiches and salads menu, featuring many locally raised farm products. There’s also wonderful outdoor seating along the Town Run stream. For dinner, visit the Old South Mountain Inn (6132 Old National Pike, Boonsboro, MD; 301-432-6155) and dine in the building atop Turner’s Gap that Confederate general D.H. Hill used as his headquarters during the Battle of South Mountain. People travel for hours for the prime rib and the escargot appetizer. df
Bavarian Inn
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS
Thomas G. Clemens, a resident of the Sharpsburg area for 30 years, is a retired history professor, president of Save Historic Antietam Foundation, and an Antietam Battlefield guide.
Jacob Rohrbach Inn 6
BEST SLEEP
The Jacob Rohrbach Inn (138 W. Main St.; 301-432-5079), a bed-andbreakfast set in an 1804 home, has several very nice rooms that are well furnished with antiques. Innkeepers Chris and Amy Vincent sponsor a free Wednesday night lecture series in the summer. Chris, quite well versed in local history himself, is also a National Park Service-approved battlefield guide. tc The Inn at Antietam (220 E. Main St.; 301-432-6601), a bed-and-breakfast located in a Victorian masterpiece on an eminence near the Antietam National Cemetery, is beautifully restored and furnished. Set back from the main highway, the inn provides guests with a peaceful and restful environment. The innkeepers are excellent hosts. df Dennis Frye, a native of the Antietam Battlefield area, is a co-founder of the Save Historic Antietam Foundation and the American Battlefield Trust. He recently retired as the chief historian at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park after 42 years as a professional public historian.
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BEST BOOK
Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler have written a very good battlefield guide, A Field Guide to Antietam (2016), which focuses solely on the battle of September 17. Ethan Rafuse’s guidebook of the entire Maryland Campaign, Antietam, South Mountain & Harpers Ferry (2008), is also very useful. For a short and well written narrative of the battle, I recommend Daniel Vermilya’s That Field of Blood: The Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862 (2018). tc
James Murfin’s The Gleam of Bayonets (1965) is an easy read full of soldiers’ reflections that personalize the Battle of Antietam. The book also contextualizes the battle’s transformative national and international consequences. df
13 PHOTOGRAPHS BY GREG DOHLER
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Slurs and Slights “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?” President Abraham Lincoln to Major General George B. McClellan (both pictured at right), who had cited tired horses to justify the Army of the Potomac’s lack of activity in the weeks following the battle, October 25, 1862
“I will be in my coffin before I will fight again under your command.”
“I don’t care for John Pope a pinch of owl dung!”
“I always imagine, when I see a man with his hair so long, that there is a vacancy in his cranium…. But perhaps this is only my prejudice against foppishness and every thing effeminate in men.” Nurse Kate Cumming, reflecting in her diary on meeting Confederate general Thomas Hindman (above), May 9, 1862
“I supposed not … for any one who would insult a prisoner is too cowardly to go where there is any danger.” Union soldier William Merrell, who was captured at the First Battle of Bull Run and taken to a Richmond prison, responding to a local resident who had mocked his condition before admitting he had not been at the battle himself SOURCES: THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, VOLUME 5 (1953); LIFE OF LIEUTENANT-GENERAL NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST (1908); REMINISCENCES OF GENERAL HERMAN HAUPT (1901); KATE: THE JOURNAL OF A CONFEDERATE NURSE (1998); FIVE MONTHS IN REBELDOM (1862).
DUKE LIBRARIES (HINDMAN); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3), COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY
Samuel D. Sturgis to fellow Union general Herman Haupt after learning that his men would have to wait to be moved by train until after other troops destined for Army of Virginia commander John Pope (below) were transported, August 23, 1862
Nathan Bedford Forrest (below) to fellow Confederate general Joe Wheeler after the latter ordered a failed attack on Fort Donelson in Tennessee in February 1863
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Chattanooga Battlefield, Tenn. BUDDY SECOR
- Are you passionate about American history? Are you inspired by the places where momentous events occurred? If so, then you should be a member of the American Battlefield Trust. We have preserved more than 50,000 acres at some of the most famous battlegrounds in the annals of warfare. We also encourage interest in Civil War history through online content, animated maps, mobile touring apps, and our award-winning magazine, Hallowed Ground. Join the American Battlefield Trust and help us continue the fight to save our nation’s battlefields. By joining now, you can become a FOUNDING MEMBER of the Trust — demonstrating you are on the cutting edge of the battlefield preservation movement. Become a Founding Member Today! But hurry — this is a limited-time offer. To learn more, please visit:
www.battlefields.org/welcomeCWM
The American Battlefield Trust is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that preserves our nation’s hallowed battlegrounds and educates the public about what happened there and why it matters today. We permanently protect these battlefields for future generations as a lasting and tangible memorial to the brave soldiers who fought in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.
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The Virtuous Knight of the Orphan Brigade p u b l i s h e r , m i l i ta ry i m ag e s
Some Civil War soldiers aspired to high rank; others refrained from senior leadership, preferring to remain among enlisted men. The latter group included an unlikely warrior—a bookish, retiring, and reclusive Kentucky native with the marvelous military name of Lafayette Hewitt. p “Fayette,” as he was known to friends, was a young academic star who had pursued a career as an educator before the war. His talents attracted the attention of fellow Kentuckian Joseph Holt, postmaster general for President James Buchanan. Hewitt went to work for Holt in late 1860, but resigned after the election of Abraham Lincoln, and a few months later made his way to Richmond to help establish the new Confederate Post Office Department. p But Hewitt really wanted to be a soldier. In late 1861, he was commissioned a captain and assistant adjutant general in the Confederate army. In early 1863, he joined the staff of fellow Kentuckian Benjamin H. Helm, who commanded the famed all-Kentucky Orphan Brigade, so called after its ranks were decimated at the Battle of Stones River on January 2, 1863. p Hewitt distinguished himself with the Orphans in battle at Jackson, Mississippi, and Chickamauga. During the Battle of Atlanta on June 22, 1864, an officer in the 5th Kentucky Infantry praised Hewitt’s bravery and “cool judgement,” qualities “of which real generals are made.” Along the way, Hewitt refused a promotion to colonel that would have taken him away from his Kentucky brothers. p Hewitt survived the war and returned to his home state, where he served in various civic roles, including state auditor, before dying in 1909 at age 77. Perhaps his most enduring legacy is the thousands of pages of original reports, correspondence, and other papers related to his beloved Orphan Brigade that he donated to the U.S. War Department in 1887. They are now housed in the National Archives. 3 MILITARY IMAGES (MILITARYIMAGESMAGAZINE.COM) IS A MAGAZINE DEDICATED TO SHOWCASING AND PRESERVING PHOTOS OF CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS.
BRIAN BOEVE COLLECTION
by ronald s. coddington
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THE NATIONAL CIVIL WAR MUSEUM PRESENTS OUR NEWEST EXHIBIT
SWEAT STEAM AND
TRANSPORTATION IN THE CIVIL WAR
OPEN DAILY Mon, Tue, Thurs, Fri & Sat: 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Wed: 10 a.m. - 8 p.m. Sun: 12 p.m. - 5 p.m. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 717-260-1861
www.nationalcivilwarmuseum.org
Please join us for the 2018
Blue & Gray Gala Thursday, September 27, 2018
$75.00 per Individual or $125.00 per Couple (2 Tickets) $50.00 NCWM Member Admission; Attire is Business Casual
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A U.S. Army Surgical Kit IN 1918, PHYSICIAN WILLIAM KEEN, who had served as a Union army surgeon during the Civil War, reflected on the surgical conditions he and his fellow military doctors faced in the early 1860s. “We operated in old blood-stained and often pus-stained coats, the veterans of a hundred fights. We operated with clean hands in the social sense, but they were un-disinfected hands.” Still worse, he concluded, “We used undisinfected instruments from undisinfected plush-lined cases…. If … an instrument fell on the floor it was washed … in a basin of tap water and used as if it were clean.” While the conditions that Keen and other surgeons operated in—and the practices that many of them employed—were unsanitary, the tools they used were crafted with care and often innovative. The surgical kit shown here—one of nearly 5,000 purchased by the Medical Purveyor’s Office during the war for Union physicians—was manufactured in Philadelphia in 1862 and contained a variety of instruments aimed to assist an army physician with a wide variety of procedures.
1 Surgeons used this amputation knife to cut flaps through the muscle of an injured limb—both to expose the bone prior to sawing it off and to use to form the stump after amputation.
3 The hook-like tip of the tenaculum helped pull back tissue so that the surgeon could better observe what he was cutting with a scalpel.
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1 The rigid reinforcement bar on this metacarpal saw—used to provide stability when cutting through the small bones of a hand—could be lifted out of the way (as shown) when deep incisions were required.
1 Galt’s trephine, a conical device with a saw-toothed cutting edge at one end, was used to bore a hole into a patient’s skull to treat a depressed fracture—both to aid in the removal of shattered fragments of bone and to release pressure.
5 Hey’s saw, with one rounded and one straight edge, was used to cut into a patient’s skull.
1 A Petit screw tourniquet—named after the French surgeon Jean Louis Petit who designed it in the early 18th century— was used to prevent a patient from hemorrhaging during amputation. Its strap was buckled around the limb above the wound and tightened by twisting the screw.
7 The flexible blade of this chain saw was employed when a surgeon wanted to extract a section of bone rather than amputate a limb. It minimized damage to the overlying muscle tissue when cutting through bone. The surgeon operated the device by holding both handles and pulling the saw back and forth across a section of bone.
1 The handle of this capital saw—used to cut through long bones in order to amputate a limb—appears to be based on the pattern specified by Richard Satterlee, medical purveyor of the U.S. Army during the Civil War.
1 These long forceps—known as bullet forceps—were used to extract bullets and other fragments from soldiers who had suffered penetrating gunshot wounds.
SOURCES: MAJOR W.W. KEEN, EEN, M.D., “MILITA “MILITARY SURGERY IN 1861 AND IN 1918,” IN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY, VOL. 80 (NOVEMBER 1918). WITH GREAT THANKS TO ALAN J. HAWK, COLLECTIONS MANAGER AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE, FOR HIS ASSISTANCE. ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE; PHOTOS BY MATTHEW BREITBART/RELEASED.
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Three Batteries and a Trio of Opportunities p r e s i d e n t , a m e r i c a n b at t l e f i e l d t r u s t
THREE ARTILLERY BATTERIES, ON THREE
battlefields, in three states. All of them positioned on land that would be hallowed by combat in 1862. Today, each of the three sites where the batteries were located is near property that the American Battlefield Trust (through its Civil War Trust division) is striving to preserve. These three preservation opportunities are linked with Union captain Andrew Hickenlooper’s battery at Shiloh, Union lieutenant Alanson M. Randol’s battery at Glendale, and Confederate lieutenant Alanson M. Latimer’s battery at Fredericksburg. Together, the parcels total 28 acres worth $1.17 million. Thanks to grants and a generous landowner, the Trust can acquire them with $243,000 in contributions—representing a match of $4.85 for every dollar. The deals at Shiloh and Glendale will bring those battlefields closer to being entirely preserved. At Fredericksburg, saving the 11 acres next to Latimer’s Knoll will further preserve the southern end of the battlefield where the strugle was decided. Of the June 30, 1862, action at Glendale, where the Trust aims to save nine acres, Confederate major E. Porter Alexander wrote, “No more desperate encounter took place in the war; and nowhere else, to my knowledge, so much actual personal fighting with bayonet and butt of gun. Randol’s battery, over which it began, was taken and retaken several times.” The brutal fight erupted as soldiers battled for Glendale’s critical crossroads. General Robert E. Lee was trying to cut off Major General George
B. McClellan’s army before it could reach the refuge of the James River. Near the eight-acre Shiloh site, Captain Hickenlooper—an ancestor of Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, a Trust member—worked his guns to try and halt the gray tide on April 6, 1862. The Confederates’ Rebel yell caused “an involuntary thrill of terror to pass like an electric shock through even the bravest of hearts,” he recalled. Overwhelming the Union line, southern soldiers thought they’d won, but the two-day battle was just beginning. At Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, Captain Latimer feared he’d lose
his guns to the 15th New Jersey Infantry’s attack. He galloped over to urge on Evander Law’s Alabama brigade, which pushed near the Bowling Green Road until encountering a Union column led by Daniel E. Sickles. This site is near the 208-acre Slaughter Pen Farm, which the Trust has worked so hard to preserve. The landowner intends to donate a conservation easement worth $900,000, leaving closing costs of just $15,000. Preserving this sacred ground will stitch vital pieces into the storytelling quilts that the Trust is making at these iconic battlefields. Learn how you can help at battlefields.org/1862campaign.
The Trust is seeking to preserve the ground where Lieutenant Alanson M. Latimer’s battery was positioned during the Battle of Fredericksburg, not far from the already protected ground at Prospect Hill, shown here.
3 THE AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST (BATTLEFIELDS.ORG), A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO BATTLEFIELD PRESERVATION, IS COMPOSED OF TWO DIVISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR TRUST AND THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR TRUST.
BUDDY SECOR
by jim lighthizer
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Start Your Gettysburg Journey at the Heart of the First Day’s Fighting
“Of all Gettysburg museums, this is the one I like best” ~ Katharina S. Visit the site of one of the battlefield’s largest field hospitals Explore award-winning interactive exhibits and displays Experience the stunning 360-degree view of the battlefield Take advantage of special group programs and discounts
www.seminaryridgemuseum.org Tickets: 717-339-1300 Group Tickets: 717-339-1354 111 Seminary Ridge Gettysburg, PA 17325
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18,000 0
$
A RARE DECODING DEVICE HITS PAY DIRT
THE ARTIFACT:
A Confederate cipher disk
CONDITION: The cipher is in excellent condition given its age. Its stamped letters still retain their black and red coloring.
QUO O OTABL QUOTABLE: J. Willard
Bro Brown, a member of the U.S Signal Corps during U.S. the Civil War, reflected on the use of ciphers in his postwar history of the organization: “It do does not do away with th the utility of ciphers th that they may be so sometimes deciphered, for we must often use the conscious that, them, wit sufficient time and with the appliances, they can be interpreted; but knowing, also that the time interpretaalso, tion will require will render the me message useless to an enemy.”
added d to coded messages—ofte messages—often made the decoding process difficult and time consuming. By 1864, LaBarre, who was married with two children, was living in Baltimore, where the city directory listed his occupation as a “tinner.” He died in 1871, reportedly by committing suicide. He was in his early 50s.
VALUE: $18,000 (price realized at Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati, Ohio, in November 2014). “Only a handful of Confederate cipher disks are known to exist, and this example comes from the highly regarded collection of distinguished American historian Philip D. Sang (1902–1975),” noted Wes Cowan, founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions, at the time of the sale.
COWAN’S AUCTIONS (COWANAUCTIONS.COM)
he DETAILS: At the outbreak of the Civil War, Francis LaBarre, a ing gold and silver worker plying his trade in Washington, D.C., fled the city and made his way to Richmond, where on April 22, 1861, he enlisted h as a private in the 7th le Virginia Infantry. While his stint as a soldier proved brief—he was discharged on May 14, 1862—LaBarre e was contracted by the Confederate army to produce “cipher disks,” which were used to encrypt messages. Based on od the Vigenère cipher, a method of polyalphabetic substitution, de LaBarre’s devices, which were made of brass and measured just under 60 millimeters in diameter, consisted of two concentric disks that shared a common axle, each of them stamped with the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet written out clockwise around their outer edges. Armed with a disk and a secret keyword, the recipient could (in theory) quickly decode the ciphertext. In practice, errors in transmission—including letters missing or mistakenly
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civil war Tours 2018-19 The Maryland Campaign: South Mountain &Antietam, Oct 11-14, 2018
Spend 3 days with historians Ed Bearss & Tom Clemens as we cover the events that led to America’s bloodiest day in history. We will tour Harpers Ferry, the gaps of South Mountain, and the key sites of Antietam Battlefield including the North Woods, West Woods, Bloody Lane, and Burnside’s Bridge.
Fredericksburg in the Civil War, October 20-23, 2018. In the span of 18
months, five major battles were waged within a 15-mile radius of this Virginia town-Two Battles of Fredericksburg and the Battles of Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Court House. Join Ed Bearss & Frank O'Reilly as we examine three of these significant engagements, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness.
Spotsylvania Court House, No. Anna, & Cold Harbor, Oct. 24-27, 2018.
On May 4, the Federals crossed the Rapidan River launching the Overland Campaign of 1864, pitting Grant and Lee against one another for the first time. We will trace the armies as they clashed in a series of brutal engagements in a 5-week period following the Battle of Wilderness. Included is a stop at Guinea Station to see where General Stonewall Jackson died on May 10, 1863. Led by Ed Bearss & Frank O'Reilly.
The Vicksburg Campaign, March 28-31, 2019. Join historians Ed Bearss &
Terry Winschel as they spend 3 days examining the Vicksburg Campaign. We will follow the action of the dramatic events associated with the Battles of Grand Gulf, Port Gibson, Raymond, Champion Hill, and the Big Black River Bridge. We will also examine the siege operation at Vicksburg and see the U.S.S. Cairo, the ironclad gunboat raised from the Yazoo River by a team led by Ed Bearss.
Chickamauga & Chattanooga, April 11-14, 2019. Join expert historians Ed Bearss & Jim Ogden on this 3-day tour of the Battle of Chickamauga & Chattanooga. This in-depth tour will include stops at Reed’s Bridge, Snodgrass Hill, Orchard Knob, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, and the National Cemetery. ★★★★★★★
Cost of 3-day tours: $550 pp Cost includes evening lecture, lunches, tactical maps, and expert battlefield guide(s). Price does not include lodging.
See our detailed itineraries at www.civilwartours.org
Civil War Tours -‐ P.O. Box 416, Keedysville, MD 21756 email: info@civilwartours.org
Tel: (301) 676-‐4642
★★★★★★★
Be sure to check out our sister company: South Mountain Expeditions Our 2018 History Tours include: D-Day Normandy and Third Reich Germany
email: tours@smountainexpeditions.com website: www.smountainexpeditions.com
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in focus
The Sable Arm in Kentucky by bob zeller
p r e s i d e n t , c e n t e r f o r c i v i l wa r p h oto g r a p h y
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COLLECTION OF C. WESLEY COWAN
In this image, captured by Chicago photographer John Carbutt on a stereoscopic glass-plate negative, African-American soldiers from the 4th U.S. Colored Artillery conduct a changing of the guard on the parapet of Fort Halleck overlooking Columbus, Kentucky, in July 1864. These men, mostly runaway slaves from Tennessee and Kentucky, were part of a 1,000-man regiment that was formed in Columbus in 1863 and remained stationed there through war’s end. They fended off raids by Confederate general Nathan B. Forrest while coping with a hostile local population. In the words of Columbus historian John Kelly Ross Jr., “Even most pro-Union Kentuckians did not want African-American men to serve as soldiers.” In 1861, the Confederates had built the fort—originally named Fort DeRussy—atop the 180-foot Iron Banks bluff overlooking the port town from the north. Testing the strength of this bastion in November 1861, Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant engaged in his first Civil War trial by combat in the Battle of Belmont directly across the Mississippi River from Columbus in Missouri. Grant bypassed the stronghold, and after he captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson it was outflanked and became irrelevant. The Confederates abandoned the fort in March 1862, and the town became an important Union military supply depot. Runaway slaves soon flocked to Columbus, prompting the successful effort to recruit black soldiers. By the summer of 1864, three out of every four Union troops in western Kentucky were African American. Today, the remains of Fort DeRussy—which Union forces renamed Fort Halleck—are within the Columbus Belmont State Park at a spot called Arrowhead Point. 3 THE NONPROFIT CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY (CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY.ORG) IS DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES.
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american iliad
Jackson the Magician
“oh, for the presence and inspiration of Old Jack for just one hour!” That was the cry of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander “Sandie” Pendleton, a former staff member of Lieutenant General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, when his new superior, Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell, decided against attacking Cemetery Hill in the waning hours of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. At least, so writes Henry Kyd Douglas, another member of Jackson’s staff, in his influential memoir, I Rode With Stonewall.¹ But Pendleton almost certainly did not say these words. A letter by Pendleton, written just after Gettysburg, contains no criticism of Ewell and places responsibility for the defeat with General Robert E. Lee.2 But his supposed sentiment is pervasive. A claim made by the Rev. J. William Jones, who knew Lee after the war, is even more extravagant. In an 1874 memoir he declared that Lee said shortly before his death, “If I had had Stonewall Jackson at Gettysburg, we should have won a great victory. And I feel confident that a complete success there would have resulted in our independence.”3 Historians have marveled at Jackson’s military genius, particularly as displayed in the Shenandoah Valley, at Second Manassas, and during the Chancellorsville Campaign. And frequently in the literature—and certainly in popular imagination— Jackson’s talents seem almost limitless. One of the most powerful components of the American Iliad is Jackson’s power to transform defeat into victory. Within the psychological framework of Carl Jung, this transformative power corresponds to the “Magician” archetype. “The Magician energy,” write Jungian psychologist Robert Moore and mythologist Douglas Gillette, “is the archetype of awareness and of insight.”4 Jackson was a great warrior, but so were many others. The essence of his genius was the quality of coup d’œil, the ability to take in a situation at
a glance and discern what needs to be done. Many writers have claimed that Jackson, had he been at Gettysburg, would have understood that attacking Cemetery Hill was the key to the Union position. Lee is said to have trusted Jackson’s judgment as much as his own, so much so that (again, according to Jones) when he heard firing in the opening phase of the Chancellorsville Campaign, Lee did not concern himself with its significance. Instead he told his staff: “Say to General Jackson that he knows just as well what to do with the enemy as I do.”5 An obvious allusion to Jackson as Magician is his insistence on secrecy. “Mystery—mystery is the secret of success,” is one remark famously attributed to him.6 “If my coat knew my plans, I would burn it at once” is another, referring to his propensity for hiding his intentions even from his staff and subordinates, on the theory that if he could keep secrets from them, he could surely hide them from the enemy.7 His penchant for mystery could elide into eccentricity. Ewell, a division commander under Jackson, once told a colonel that he was certain “Old Jack” was crazy. “He is as mad as a March hare; here he has gone off, I don’t know where, and left me here with no instructions except to watch [Union major general Nathaniel] Banks, and wait until he returns, and when that will be I have not the most remote idea.”8 The Magician archetype helps to explain why the Jackson legend contains numerous expressions of his peculiarities. Many of these would be the portrait of a crackpot if applied to anyone else, but they are beloved elements of the Jackson myth because they underscore his remove from ordinary mortals. Ewell was the source for many well-known claims about Jackson’s quirks. He insisted that he never saw one of Jackson’s couriers approach without expecting an order to charge the North ☛ } CONT. ON P. 70 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE
UNDERSTANDING THE MYTH SURROUNDING THE MAN KNOWN AS “STONEWALL” BY MARK GRIMSLEY
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Thomas J. “Stonewall� Jackson, as he appeared in November 1862. The legend of his battlefield prowess only grew after his death in the wake of the Battle of Chancellorsville the following year.
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stereoscope
Varina
a young woman in an unhappy marriage whose rise to first lady makes her both exhilarated and uncomfortable. Her much older husband, loyal only to himself and the power that the presidency will bring him. A past so riddled with lies they tell themselves that nothing is certain. Charles Frazier’s new Civil War novel, Varina, feels strangely relevant in 2018. The novel’s protagonist is “V,” better known as the Confederacy’s only first lady, Varina Howell Davis, who married Jefferson Davis when she was 18 years old and he was 36. She chafed against gender convention, often speaking her mind and reveling in her prewar role as an engaging and witty dinner party hostess in Washington. Her actions during and after the Civil War, however, were controversial, provoking rumors that she was not devoted enough to the nation her husband helped to create. Varina supported the South in public but also visited Union prisoners in Richmond hospitals and maintained correspondence with friends in the North. After Jefferson Davis died in 1889, she moved to New York City and wrote pieces for northern papers that advocated for sectional reunion. Although she was never ardently proslavery, Varina was fully aware that she had benefited from the slave system—and did nothing to resist it. After the war, when her former house slave Ellen tells reporters that her owner was “nice enough,” Varina simultaneously understands and resents that assessment: “V kept thinking, Just all right? Nice enough? We were friends.” In the end, as Frazier shows, Varina is the kind of fictional antihero who has become popular of late: a flawed person whose understandings of herself and the world around her are often compromised. If he were an academic, Frazier would be a dark historian; what he finds so interesting in Varina is her simultaneous hatred of and complicity in the ideologies and actions of the Confederacy. Frazier is also interested in getting the history
right. His acknowledgements include a bibliography that lists Joan Cashin’s biography of Varina, First Lady of the Confederacy (2006), and William Cooper’s examination of her husband, Jefferson Davis, American (2001), among other texts. Frazier’s depiction of the Confederacy’s collapse and the Davis family’s resulting escape from Richmond in the spring of 1865 is deeply rooted in historical detail. Of course, as a novelist and not a historian, Frazier can create visceral images that transport you to the time and place. In Montgomery, at the beginning of the war, red clay oozes between cobblestones, “like margins of recent wounds still weeping.” As he proved in his breakout Civil War novel, Cold Mountain, Frazier is adept at conveying the terror of a journey into an unknown landscape. Varina’s flight from Richmond is the best sequence of the book. Although we know what happened, Frazier still generates almost unbearable tension as Varina, her children, Ellen, and a band of armed protectors make their slow, ominous passage through the swamps and forests of the deep South. But history also constrains Frazier. Cold Mountain’s Inman, Ada, and Ruby were embedded in history, but they were fictional characters that the reader, not knowing how the story would end, could become invested in. Varina’s life is well-known, and she is not so easy to like. The pleasure of this novel is in Frazier’s beautiful writing and the non-chronological narrative structure. Varina’s story is, as the character herself describes, “distracted by memory—its habit of looping and echoing.” The action jumps from 1906 Saratoga Springs, where Varina is trying to break an opiate addiction, to the end of the war, to her days as a teenage bride, and back again. The impetus for her memories is James Blake, an African-American schoolteacher who has realized late in life that he spent part of his childhood with the Davises. He remembers little and wants the former first lady to fill in ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72
COURTESY OF JOHN O’BRIEN
COLD MOUNTAIN AUTHOR CHARLES FRAZIER TURNS HIS ATTENTION TO THE CONFEDERACY’S FIRST LADY BY MEGAN KATE NELSON
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Confederate first lady Varina Davis, the subject of a new novel by Charles Frazier, as she appeared shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War
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Building the Perfect Army b W i t h l o r i e n f o o t e , b r i a n m at t h e w j o r d a n , j e n n i f e r m u r r ay, e t h a n s. ra f us e , a n d b ro o k s d. s i m p s o n
b if you could build the ideal Civil War force from scratch, what would it look like? We recently enlisted the assistance of five Civil War historians to get their takes. To do so, we held an eight-round draft—much like one for a fantasy sports league. After determining what “positions” each army would consist of—army, corps, division, artillery, and cavalry commanders, as well as a fighting regiment and two “utility” players (two soldiers or civilians to supplement an army’s overall strength)—we randomly selected the participants’ drafting order, and the picking commenced. b We gave each of our historians the following instructions: (1) They could fill their roster positions in any order. (2) Once an individual was selected, he or she could not be picked again. (3) For the army, corps, and division commander slots, they needed to pick individuals who held these positions during the war; for corps and division commanders, they needed to pick individuals who not only held these positions during the war, but who didn’t rise above them (i.e., their division commanders never held formal corps or army command; their corps commanders never commanded an army). (4) So that the draft did not become too unwieldy, we asked that all selections were associated with the land war—no naval picks allowed. And, perhaps most importantly, (5) we asked that the individuals selected were evaluated strictly on their talent and skill, not ideology or cause. b Each of the resulting forces were then judged by a panel of experts (more about them and their decisions on pages 42–43), who assigned a numeric value from 1 to 10 for each pick as well as for two additional categories: “draft grade” (an assessment of each participant’s drafting strategy) and “intangibles” (how each army might perform given its component parts). We took these scores, averaged them, and added them up for a final tally. b Read about the fantasy fighting forces and their evaluations, presented in the order they were ranked, on the following pages.
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M U R R AY ’ S S T R AT E GY
ARMY COMMANDER
George G. Meade
CORPS COMMANDER
Thomas J. Jackson
DIVISION COMMANDER
Cadmus Wilcox
ARTILLERY COMMANDER
John Pelham
FIGHTING REGIMENT
83rd Pennsylvania Infantry C AVA L RY C O M M A N D E R
Philip Sheridan
UTILITY POSITION
UTILITY POSITION
Herman Haupt
Horace Greeley
my army’s philosophy centers on speed and maneuverability. My selections demonstrate the best of the war’s aggressive commanders, proven in mobile operations and relentless pursuits of the enemy. I can control the time and tempo of the war by executing aggressive offensives while dominating transportation networks, namely railroads. Complementing this strategy is a hard-war policy that will destroy the enemy’s resources and weaken civilian morale, while fostering support for the war on my home front. George G. Meade is a worthy army commander. While strategically calculated, Meade trusted his subordinates to execute his orders. Although he certainly does not possess the aggressive nature of Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee, Meade’s preference for situational and collaborative leadership will allow his subordinates—Thomas J. Jackson, Philip Sheridan, and John Pelham—to take initiative and execute hard-hitting campaigns of maneuver. Jackson and Sheridan represent the war’s best offensive commanders. Jackson’s “foot cavalry” will maneuver quickly, while disrupting and confusing the enemy. Sheridan offers a two-pronged approach, with both his ability to execute tireless pursuits, as seen during the Appomattox Campaign, and his willingness to implement hardwar policies on the enemy’s civilian population. My artillery will be commanded by one of the war’s most innovative, well-regarded artillerists, John Pelham. Pelham’s success in pioneering light artillery will further enhance my army’s maneuverability. While my army focuses on offensive maneuverability, my division commander, Cadmus Wilcox, offers a proven record of defensive success, as seen in his actions in the final days of the Petersburg Campaign. My fighting regiment, the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry, is experienced in combat, having served in nearly every major battle in the Civil War’s eastern theater. Its men will suit my strategy of maneuverability well. Herman Haupt, the superintendent of railroads, is the cornerstone to the philosophy of mobility. His presence will be invaluable and will allow me to quickly move men and supplies, perfectly complementing Jackson and Sheridan. Finally, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, will be essential to shaping public opinion and maintaining support for the conflict. Wars cannot be won without popular support, and here Greeley excels.
FRANCIS MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (PELHAM); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (6)
ARMY ROSTER
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OPPONENTS’ OPINIONS
“Defeating this army, with its high quality of leadership in its infantry and cavalry wings, will be difficult in a stand-up fight.”
“Murray’s army will be immobilized by feuding between Meade and Sheridan, egged on by the always mercurial Horace Greeley.”
Jennifer Murray’s Army DRAFT A N A LY S I S
OVERALL RANK
3
SELECTIONS
JUDGES’ AVERAGE SCORE
ROUND PICK SELECTED NUMBER
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
0
Jennifer Murray is an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, specializing in American military history and the Civil War. She is the author of On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933–2013 (2014) and is currently working on a biography of George Gordon Meade.
10
Meade
1
3
Jackson
2
3
Wilcox
8
3
Pelham
5
3
Sheridan
3
3
83rd Penn. Infantry
7
3
Haupt
4
3
Greeley
6
3
Draft Grade
—
—
Intangibles
—
—
OVERALL SCORE
3
80.0 33 FALL 2018
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
8/27/18 7:54 PM
F O OT E ’S S T R AT E GY
ARMY COMMANDER
William T. Sherman
CORPS COMMANDER
John B. Gordon
DIVISION COMMANDER
Patrick Cleburne
ARTILLERY COMMANDER
William Pegram
FIGHTING REGIMENT
54th Massachusetts Infantry
C AVA L RY C O M M A N D E R
James H. Wilson
UTILITY POSITION
UTILITY POSITION
Jedediah Hotchkiss
Edward Wellman Serrell
this is the most flexible and mobile army in the field, under the command of the most strategically creative leader of the Civil War. This force projects power into the enemy’s interior with great speed, confounding any opponent as to our location while destroying its war resources, severing the connection between its armies and its material and human support, and breaking the will of the civilian population that supports it. William T. Sherman, the army’s commander, has proven superiority in conceptualizing and waging this kind of “total” warfare. His orders and personal example ensured that his army traveled with minimal baggage. The speed with which his army marched through the swamps and rain-swollen rivers of South Carolina in winter, building its own roads and bridges, was a stunning logistical triumph. The army’s mapmaker, Jedediah Hotchkiss, will ensure our ability to move at will through enemy territory. His ingenuity in assessing terrain for the optimal points to locate and maneuver troops was unmatched during the Civil War. Cavalry commander James A. Wilson uses speed, mobility, and tactical prowess in battle and can conduct raids deep into enemy territory. During the Civil War, he defeated Nathan Bedford Forrest twice and his independent cavalry corps conducted the largest cavalry raid of the conflict, capturing four fortified Confederate cities in Georgia and Alabama, destroying munitions production, and rendering the Confederate railroad network completely inoperable. Our young artillery commander, William Pegram, who rose from sergeant to full colonel during the Civil War and shares the intensive mind-set of our entire army, will deploy his guns as offensive weapons to inflict maximum damage. The superlative ingenuity and logistical excellence of our army commander is supported by the internationally acclaimed civil engineer Edward Wellman Serrell. The British journal Engineering proclaimed his construction of a floating battery in an impassible swamp on Morris Island to be one of the greatest feats of the war. This army will mobilize all available social resources to conduct its campaigns. Its division commander, Patrick Cleburne, whose troops were renowned for their skill and valor, proposed in January 1864 that the Confederacy arm slaves and offer them freedom to fight. He recognized, as does this army, that AfricanAmerican manpower represents the margin of victory in the war. That’s also reflected in the selection of a fighting regiment: the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, a superbly trained and disciplined African-American unit raised in the northern states, whose members fight for freedom, giving them an extra fighting edge. Serving under corps commander John B. Gordon, whose troops successfully repelled attacks and assaulted positions in every one of the bloodiest battles of the eastern theater, our troops will effectively execute the will of the high command.
JENNINGS CROPPER WISE , THE LONG ARMY OF LEE (PEGRAM); FRANCIS MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (CLEBURNE); NATIONAL ARCHIVES (GORDON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (4)
ARMY ROSTER
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OPPONENTS’ OPINIONS
“The men of the 54th Massachusetts went into a fight with clenched jaws and clear motivation— a lethal combination for any opposing force.” “ Foote’s army is led by a marcher, not a fighter, who was often scared by what he thought someone else would do. And while it’s nice to see the 54th Massachusetts present, we all know that Sherman had no use for black soldiers, so their talents will be wasted.”
Lorien Foote’s Army DRAFT A N A LY S I S
OVERALL RANK
3
SELECTIONS
JUDGES’ AVERAGE SCORE
ROUND PICK SELECTED NUMBER
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
0
Lorien Foote is the Patricia and Bookman Peters Professor in History at Texas A&M University. She is the author of four books, most recently The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy (2016).
10
Sherman
1
2
Gordon
2
4
Cleburne
3
2
Pegram
6
4
Wilson
4
4
54th Mass. Infantry
7
2
Hotchkiss
5
2
Serrell
8
4
Draft Grade
—
—
Intangibles
—
—
OVERALL SCORE
3
84.5 35 FALL 2018
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
8/27/18 7:54 PM
J O R DA N ’S S T R AT E GY
ARMY COMMANDER
George Thomas
CORPS COMMANDER
Winfield Scott Hancock
DIVISION COMMANDER
John Cleveland Robinson ARTILLERY COMMANDER
Henry Hunt
FIGHTING REGIMENT
6th Wisconsin Infantry C AVA L RY C O M M A N D E R
George Armstrong Custer
UTILITY POSITION UTILITY POSITION
Jonathan Letterman
Elizabeth Van Lew
mine is the only army to be led exclusively by
Union men. Its commanders are representative of all points on the political spectrum—giving voice to southern Unionists (George Henry Thomas), War Democrats (Winfield Scott Hancock), and abolitionists (John Cleveland Robinson). Supplied with the tidings of spy Elizabeth Van Lew’s “Richmond Underground,” each general, steady and stouthearted, maintains a keen sense of what is at stake in the war. Thomas and Hancock, for instance, subordinated section and party, respectively, in the interest of preserving the Union. From Mill Springs to Stones River, from Snodgrass Hill to Nashville, modest and undervalued George Thomas turned in estimable battlefield performances. “He could not be driven from a point he was given to hold,” Ulysses S. Grant averred in his memoirs, esteeming the Virginian as a “sensible, honest and brave” commander who “gained the confidence of all who served under him.” So too did Hancock enjoy the allegiance of his men, despite his habit of always finding the thickest part of a fight. Indeed, from Cemetery Ridge to the Mule Shoe, his II Corps was a steady pillar of the Army of the Potomac. “Hancock,” Grant aptly concluded, “stands as the most conspicuous figure of all the general officers who did not exercise a separate command.” Though the final days of Hancock’s Civil War career along the siege lines of Petersburg were less than inspiring, it is fair to say that good, hard fighting exhausted him. Sporting one of the war’s most impressive beards, the alert John Cleveland Robinson earned a Medal of Honor for his daring at Laurel Hill, Virginia—a sharp fight that unfolded as the armies coiled earthworks around Spotsylvania Court House. Packed into his division are the confident, black-hatted foot soldiers of the 6th Wisconsin Infantry, who scaled South Mountain, pressed down the Hagerstown Turnpike at Antietam, and charged a railroad cut west of Gettysburg. Their pluck and fighting spirit is unmistakable. These men are supplied battery support by Henry Hunt, who literally co-authored the Union army’s field artillery manual. Also lending aid is the mounted arm, led by an intrepid George Armstrong Custer—whose record of daring during the Civil War would be effaced by the events at Little Bighorn. Finally, whatever casualties the opposing armies might inflict will be well and efficiently treated by my army’s chief medical inspector, Jonathan Letterman.
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE (VARON); NATIONAL ARCHIVES (HANCOCK, HUNT); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (4)
ARMY ROSTER
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OPPONENTS’ OPINIONS
“ This army combines modern efficiency and careful preparation—from the telegraphic communication from headquarters to the medical structure that will save lives—with the ability to deliver powerful blows on the battlefield.” “Hancock never really functioned well as a corps commander (he did not serve in that capacity at Gettysburg), while Thomas was, shall we say, deliberate. And while I admire the choices of Hunt, Letterman, and the 6th Wisconsin, I wonder what Thomas would have made of Custer.”
Brian Matthew Jordan’s Army DRAFT A N A LY S I S
OVERALL RANK
3
SELECTIONS
JUDGES’ AVERAGE SCORE
ROUND PICK SELECTED NUMBER
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
0
Brian Matthew Jordan is assistant professor of Civil War history and director of graduate studies in history at Sam Houston State University. His Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (2014) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. His next book, Enduring War, is forthcoming in 2019 or 2020.
10
Thomas
8
2
Hancock
2
2
Robinson
7
4
Hunt
1
4
Custer
5
4
6th Wis. Infantry
4
2
Letterman
3
4
Van Lew
6
2
Draft Grade
—
—
Intangibles
—
—
OVERALL SCORE
3
85.7 37 FALL 2018
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
8/27/18 7:54 PM
S I M P S O N ’S S T R AT E GY
ARMY COMMANDER
Ulysses S. Grant
CORPS COMMANDER
James Longstreet
ARTILLERY COMMANDER DIVISION COMMANDER
William Mahone
Edward Porter Alexander
FIGHTING REGIMENT
5th New York Infantry
C AVA L RY C O M M A N D E R
J.E.B. Stuart
UTILITY POSITION
UTILITY POSITION
Josiah Gorgas
Clara Barton
building this army required thinking about how several people would work together as a unit. Ulysses S. Grant as army commander was an obvious choice: In turn, James Longstreet, who could attack like a sledgehammer and defend like a stone wall, simply needed a respected directing hand, and his respect for Grant ensures a smooth-working machine. Division commander William Mahone could launch a furious counterattack, and he would also be acting under proper supervision (he nosed out Charles F. Smith for the job). That assured me of having top-flight command talent that would work well together (and would have worked well together during Reconstruction too). Like Grant, Edward Porter Alexander could write as well as he could fight, and he had a keen understanding of Robert E. Lee’s weaknesses that would have come in handy. Both men could be relied upon to reflect upon their experiences in ways that would assure us that their force triumphed. J.E.B Stuart would have been superb in collecting intelligence and in providing a distraction at key moments, and, given Grant’s ability to write lucid orders, Stuart would have stayed on task during a campaign (in a pinch he would have been able to command infantry if needed). The 5th New York Infantry adds a dash of color, flair, and élan to this force (in contrast to the plain commander) as well as the possibility of G.K. Warren serving in what would have been his proper calling as chief of staff and Judson Kilpatrick rising to his position as a crazy cavalryman. Confederate ordnance chief Josiah Gorgas fared so well given limited resources that one wonders what he could have achieved on a level playing field, and Clara Barton would have played a major role in ensuring that the soldiers in this hard-fighting force would receive superior medical care. In short, this is an aggressive army, led by pragmatic, level-headed generals, well-supported logistically and medically, whose two top commanders served in both theaters east of the Mississippi. It’s a resilient group, with just enough flash to complement its skill, determination, and reputation for hard fighting.
FRANCIS MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (ALEXANDER); NATIONAL ARCHIVES (MAHONE , BARTON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (4)
ARMY ROSTER
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OPPONENTS’ OPINIONS
“Simpson’s army is led by the war’s most aggressive commander. If my force is to beat his, it will have to be a quick, decisive conflict that ends before Grant unleashes a war of attrition.”
ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION
“If concerns about navies and joint operations were part of the exercise, in light of Grant’s unmatched competence in them, I might be concerned. They aren’t, so I am not— especially since he is relying for intelligence on a guy who is only good at his job south of the Potomac River and a corps commander who lost a battle to Ambrose Burnside.”
Brooks D. Simpson is Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University. His most recent work is Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality (2018).
Brooks Simpson’s Army DRAFT A N A LY S I S
OVERALL RANK
3
SELECTIONS
JUDGES’ AVERAGE SCORE
ROUND PICK SELECTED NUMBER
0
10
Grant
1
1
Longstreet
2
5
Mahone
8
5
Alexander
3
1
Stuart
6
5
5th New York Infantry
4
5
Gorgas
5
1
Barton
7
1
Draft Grade
—
—
Intangibles
—
—
OVERALL SCORE
3
88.0 39 FALL 2018
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
8/27/18 7:54 PM
R A F U S E ’S S T R AT E GY
ARMY COMMANDER
Robert E. Lee
CORPS COMMANDER
John Gibbon
DIVISION COMMANDER
Philip Kearny
ARTILLERY COMMANDER
John Mendenhall
FIGHTING REGIMENT
123rd Illinois Infantry
C AVA L RY C O M M A N D E R
John Buford
UTILITY POSITION
UTILITY POSITION
George Sharpe
Montgomery Meigs
my selection process couldn’t have started better, with Robert E. Lee dropping into my lap as my army commander. The only better choice for this position would be Ulysses S. Grant, and only because of Grant’s demonstrated ability with joint army-navy operations. But since our instructions indicated we were not to worry about navies, I have no reservations in matching the war’s best operational field commander up against anyone. Going from Lee, my priority was seeing that my army had what modern military theorists call “information dominance.” Thus, my selection of George Sharpe for one of my utility positions and the nobrainer of John Buford as cavalry commander—with the certainty that my army commander will find it quite a welcome change to have good information both south and north of the Potomac. Next, for my fighting regiment, I chose the 123rd Illinois Infantry because they carried Spencer repeating rifles during the Civil War. With their prowess and the skill demonstrated by the much underappreciated John Mendenhall in managing artillery in the Army of the Cumberland (and with John Gibbon available for consultation), I will have a firepower advantage against any foe. For that reason, I commend those who included Jonathan Letterman and Clara Barton as utility picks, for they will have ample need of their services after crossing swords with my guys. Of course, there is a serious potential danger with all of this firepower—namely, running out of ammunition. Thus, my selection of Montgomery Meigs for my second utility position. With him handling logistics, I will have no shortage of ammunition even after my Illinoisans have shredded the boys from New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin manning the other armies. On top of this, I have Phil Kearny and John Gibbon as my division and corps commanders, providing quality second-echelon leadership in the decidedly unlikely event that having Lee as my army commander plus information superiority plus overwhelming and amply supplied firepower proves insufficient. Granted, Kearny most certainly did not always play well with others (but usually if he perceived them lacking in aggressiveness—not a problem with “audacity personified” Lee), but no one could lead a division under fire like he did. Plus, he got along well with and respected Gibbon—and for good reason, as Gibbon was one of the war’s truly and consistently first-rate combat commanders. With Robert E. Lee backed by northern firepower, intelligence, and logistics, and leading a tough, competent, and cohesive command team, my only concern is that my army will win this war too quickly and easily.
JOHN MENDENHALL IMAGE COURTESY OF HENRY DEEKS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES (SHARPE); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (5)
ARMY ROSTER
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OPPONENTS’ OPINIONS
“ I find Rafuse’s army to present the toughest challenge, because its lineup is aggressive and shrewd. Lee is a fighter capable of offensive moves that bewilder his enemy and defensive maneuvers that bog the opponent down.” “Ultimately, Lee will destroy his own army with high casualty rates. And he does not recognize that hard war must be practiced to win.”
Ethan Rafuse’s Army DRAFT A N A LY S I S
OVERALL RANK
3
SELECTIONS
JUDGES’ AVERAGE SCORE
ROUND PICK SELECTED NUMBER
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
0
Ethan S. Rafuse is the 2018–19 Charles Boal Ewing Visiting Professor of Military History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
10
Lee
2
1
Gibbon
8
1
Kearny
1
5
Mendenhall
7
5
Buford
3
5
123rd Illinois Infantry
5
5
Sharpe
4
1
Meigs
6
1
Draft Grade
—
—
Intangibles
—
—
OVERALL SCORE
3
88.4 41 FALL 2018
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
8/27/18 7:54 PM
F U L L D R A F T R E S U LT S ( AV E R AG E S C O R E ) ROUND 1
JUDGES’ INDIVIDUAL SCORES MH
CM
WH
10 10 8 10 9
10 7 7 9 8
10 9 8 10 9
9 10 9 9 10
9 9 8 7 9
9 8 9 8 10
JUDGES’ VERDICTS EXPLAINED
ETHAN RAFUSE’S ARMY 1. Ulysses S. Grant (10) 2. William T. Sherman (8.7) 3. George G. Meade (7.7) 4. Henry Hunt (9.7) 5. Philip Kearny (8.7) ROUND 2
1. Robert E. Lee (9) 2. Winfield Scott Hancock (9) 3. Thomas J. Jackson (8.7) 4. John B. Gordon (8) 5. James Longstreet (9.7) ROUND 3
1. Edward Porter Alexander (9.3) 2. Patrick Cleburne (9.7) 3. Philip Sheridan (8) 4. Jonathan Letterman (9.7) 5. John Buford (8)
9 9 9 8 8
8 7 9 6 6
9 9 10 8 8
8 10 10 7 9
9 9 7 7 9
10 8 8 8 10
10 8 8 10 9
10 7 5 8 8
10 8 8 8 9
9 8 8 9 8
5 6 8 7 6
9 9 9 8 9
3 Look for a close working relationship between Grant and Longstreet, who both bring a no-nonsense approach along with great chemistry. Stuart, however, while possessing unmatched speed and flair, is uncreative offensively. Barton, while an angel on the battlefield, was also a shameless selfpromoter, making her the clear weak link. [CM]
10 9 8 8 8
7 7 7 7 9
8 8 8 8 8
3 Simpson had the advantage of selecting first overall, which meant he could take Grant—in my view, the clear No. 1 overall pick—but he also made sure to draft other solid choices, including a group of leaders without especially problematic personalities. [WH]
ROUND 7
1. Clara Barton (7.7) 2. 54th Massachusetts Infantry (7.7) 3. 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry (8.3) 4. John Cleveland Robinson (8) 5. John Mendenhall (7.7)
3 Lee is a real playmaker, and no one here has a tougher lineup working under him. Buford is a double-threat at reconnaissance and combat. That aggressiveness makes him a good fit with Gibbon and Kearny, while Sharpe’s intelligence will supplement their skills. Meigs is an especially inspired choice, able to provide all the logistical support Lee perpetually lacked during the Civil War. Watch out for overaggressiveness from this army, though, which could make them their own worst enemy. [CHRIS MACKOWSKI]
10 10 10 9 8
ROUND 6
1. Montgomery Meigs (10) 2. Elizabeth Van Lew (7.7) 3. Horace Greeley (7) 4. William Pegram (8.7) 5. J.E.B. Stuart (8.7)
[MATTHEW C. HULBERT ]
10 10 4 10 8
ROUND 5
1. Josiah Gorgas (9) 2. Jedediah Hotchkiss (9) 3. John Pelham (8.3) 4. George Armstrong Custer (7.3) 5. 123rd Illinois Infantry (9.3)
3 The teaming up of Lee, the elite Virginia planter, and Kearny, the New Yorker renowned for talking smack on the battlefield, is a masterstroke of aggressive command. Throw in Gibbon’s panache, the 123rd Illinois’ deadly mobility and firepower (owed in large part to repeating carbines), and Sharpe’s capabilities in handling intelligence duties, and this is likely the army with the most potent offensive capabilities. The addition of Meigs, a bargain in the sixth round, ensures that Lee and company never run out of ammunition.
8 9 10 10 8
ROUND 4
1. George Sharpe (8.7) 2. 6th Wisconsin Infantry (8.3) 3. Herman Haupt (9.3) 4. James H. Wilson (7.3) 5. 5th New York Infantry (7.3)
1
3 Meigs was an absolute steal so late in the selection process. Kearny was also a solid pick, as was the 123rd Illinois Infantry. As a whole, Rafuse had a great draft, especially for someone who had the last pick in the first round. [WAYNE W. HSIEH]
BROOKS SIMPSON’S ARMY
2
3 Natural chemistry between Grant and Longstreet (the latter having stood up for the former at his 1848 wedding to Julia Dent) gives this army the best top and corps command combination of the entire bunch. The pairing of Grant—one of the war’s most thoughtful commanders—and Barton is also intriguing. Stuart was a steal in round six, assuming Grant can keep him on point. Alexander is a dependable pick but also a reach in the third round with the likes of Pelham and Pegram still available. [MH]
ROUND 8
1. John Gibbon (8.3) 2. George Thomas (8) 3. Cadmus Wilcox (7.7) 4. Edward Wellman Serrell (7.7) 5. William Mahone (8.3)
42 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN’S ARMY
3
3 When it comes to artillery, sometimes it’s best to go big or go home. Hunt constitutes big. Thomas in the eighth and final round is hands-down the steal of this draft. The “Rock of Chickamauga” paired with “Hancock the Superb” and the “Iron Brigade” is the recipe for one hell of a tough, dependable army. Letterman’s ability to keep more men alive only adds to that designation. The chink in this army’s armor is the drama-prone Custer, who brings “character issues” to the organization. [MH] 3 This is the least flashy army of them all, with the exception of Custer, but he has the kind of fight in him that backs up his flash. This force will perform well with the rock-solid, underrated Thomas, who’s apt to be outshone by not only Custer but also Hancock. Still, look for Hancock and Thomas, in particular, to build a good rapport with each other as the conflict unfolds and they rack up some gritty victories. That’ll take its toll on the 6th Wisconsin—a regiment that will be tough to beat early but have a difficult time as the war grinds on. With Hunt, Robinson, and Van Lew, this army has a stalwart lineup, but it will be Letterman—the army’s MVP—who will save the day over and over. [CM]
3 Picking Hancock ahead of both Longstreet and Jackson? And choosing Custer ahead of Stuart? I wonder if Jordan’s affinity for his alma mater, Gettysburg College, and its proximity to the arena where these Union generals bested their Confederate rivals affected his better judgment. But who can blame a fan for a bit of homerism in such an exercise? [WH]
LORIEN FOOTE’S ARMY
4
3 Foote’s army is an imposing mix of grit, aggression, and creativity. Sherman is second only to Grant as a commander, while Gordon and Cleburne are just the sort of subordinates to carry out Uncle Billy’s orders for “hard war.” Serrell and Hotchkiss are inspired picks; one the “MacGyver” of Civil War engineers and the other arguably the best mapmaker in the business. The only knock on the 54th Massachusetts is war experience—which is almost entirely not the fault of the unit itself. There’s just no soft spot on this roster. [MH] 3 Sherman’s greatest asset is his maneuverability, which matches him up well with most of the other army commanders, but he bogs down when drawn into stand-up brawls, so look for trouble against both Lee and Grant. Fortunately, Gordon, Cleburne, and Pegram are all good brawlers, so they’ll keep Sherman in the fight. The 54th Massachusetts has undeniable grit, but not an extensive combat record, so a key question will be how they hold up over the duration of
the conflict. Expect Wilson to get better as the conflict goes on, if the army can survive any early gaffes. Hotchkiss will help make up for Wilson’s deficiencies. [CM] 3 Foote’s pick of Cleburne was truly inspired, but Gordon was a reach. I also would have taken Meigs or Gorgas ahead of Wilson, who took time to emerge as a solid cavalry commander. Meigs or Gorgas would also have helped Foote in the utility spots. [WH]
JENNIFER MURRAY’S ARMY
5
3 Pelham and Sheridan stand out as the best overall artillery– cavalry combination of any of these armies. And with Haupt as her logistics guru, Murray’s group is guaranteed to be an efficient fighting force. The brilliance of Pelham and Sheridan is, however, counterbalanced by the vulnerability created by selecting Meade with the third overall pick. To some observers the overall commander will matter less than the subordinates; in that case, though, how the personalities of Meade and Jackson might mesh is an unknown quantity. [MH] 3 Jackson and Pelham both bring lot of offensive power, and they’re backed by a workhorse regiment in the 83rd Pennsylvania. Meade and his more deliberate style, while hard-nosed, won’t mesh well with Jackson, who is used to a more aggressive style, or with Sheridan. Meade will also have his hands full with Greeley, who makes a great cheerleader when he’s feeling up, but who is overall more trouble than he’s worth. Much will fall on Haupt, the most solid member of Murray’s army, to keep everyone on track. [CM] 3 It’s true Meade deserves more credit than he’s received among both professional and lay students of the war, but picking him third overall and ahead of Robert E. Lee? However, I loved the Sheridan pick—in selecting Sheridan, Murray not only got a fine cavalry commander, but one who could also effectively serve as an army commander. In the end, though, the large number of irascible personalities in this group hurts its larger cohesion. [WH] THE JUDGES
Matthew C. Hulbert is the author or editor of three books, including The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West, which won the 2017 Wiley-Silver Prize. Chris Mackowski is editor in chief at Emerging Civil War (emergingcivilwar.com) and teaches writing at Saint Bonaventure University. Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. He is the author of West Pointers and the Civil War (2009) and co-author, with Williamson Murray, of A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War (2016).
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“Death Comes to Us by Many a Way”
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A look at the fatal dangers that Civil War soldiers, sailors, and civilians faced away from the battlefield.
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In this wartime image by Andrew J. Russell, a man stands among the graves at Soldiers’ Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia.
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The American Civil War proved especially brutal, with soldiers and civilians falling to myriad effects, often unintended. Death had a way of uniting individuals on both sides of the conflict, particularly when lives were lost off the battlefield. When one pro-Confederate family, living along the path of the war between Manassas and Washington, D.C., lost their patriarch, a Union officer who had come to know them reacted with understanding. “Such is life,” he observed, “we are all passing away.”1 That so many soldiers and citizens made the ultimate sacrifice due to noncombat causes made such losses particularly poignant. Union and Confederate newspapers and letters conveyed the news of fatal accidents and illnesses to readers and loved ones at home with daunting regularity. Soldiers’ diaries and journals recorded many instances of the same perils. Each one underscored the fact that most who perished in the war were not destined to do so in lines of battle next to their comrades. Historian James I. Robertson Jr. observed that of 360,222 Union deaths, only about 110,000 were “enemy-induced.” Illness accounted for the largest number of the others, as would be true for the Confederates, too, causing him to label this effect “the grimmest reaper.”2 At the outset of the conflict, the ideas of war, especially in the minds of the young and the uninitiated, were of banners flying and glory won over the din of battle. The stark reality offered a different view, as two examples illustrate. On February 12, 1861, two months before the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Noble Leslie DeVotie, a 24-year-old chaplain, fell from a gangplank and drowned as he attempted to board a steamer with Alabama troops bound for Fort Morgan, outside Mobile. Then, on March 20, when U.S. troops left Texas, First Lieutenant James B. Witherell stumbled while boarding a steamboat at the mouth of the Rio Grande and disappeared into the murky waters below.3 At Fort Sumter itself, the war’s first fatalities came not during the bombardment, but when a crew at the surrendering garrison fired a salute for the departing Union troops. A premature explosion ripped through one of the artillerists, Private Daniel Hough, tearing away his right arm and resulting in his death shortly after. Nearby rounds also detonated, sending shards of metal and pieces of the damaged masonry into several men who were too close to the blasts. One of them, Private Edward Galloway, died a few days later.4 Men were prepared to fall in headlong charges or under galling blasts of battle. Yet the men
and the public that sent them to war were not prepared for the large number of fatalities from noncombat situations. A Vermont newspaper informed its readers in early 1863, “The excess of the mortality due to disease and accident, over that due to wounds in action, is a noticeable fact in the volunteer army of the United States, as in all other armies, two-thirds of the deaths of officers and five-sixths of those of the men resulting from disease and accident; the remaining onethird and one-sixth, respectively, being caused by wounds received in battle.”5 A depiction of life and death that appeared in the Corning Journal of New York on May 30, 1861, may best summarize the challenges beyond combat that faced the new recruits. “The casualties of the camp and the field, the hardships that rack the frame and make disease a frequent visitor, the exposures and scanty supplies of food and clothing that render the pestilential air of the malarious regions deadly effective ... these are the dangers that must cross the path of the gallant volunteers, before they can hope to return to their homes.”6 G.C. Phillips, a surgeon posted in Kentucky, recalled watching men die from the ravages of illness with the observation, “It was worse than a battle.” Years later, Phillips concluded, “It was no fault of theirs that they did not live to be killed at Shiloh, Vicksburg or Franklin, where so many of the regiment were killed, and whose resting places are marked by headstones and beautiful monuments—erected by loving descendants and friends in memory of their heroism, courage and glorious death.”7 Lieutenant Henry Lyon of the 34th New York Infantry recorded the failing health of a compatriot in his diary. When the man finally succumbed to illness, he wrote, “Poor fellow—it seems worse to us than it would if he had fallen on the field of Battle.”8 Some of these men died of disease without ever firing their weapons in combat, while others died after surviving earlier battlefield ordeals. When he learned that a friend had perished to illness, Confederate Robert Patrick remarked, “He died at Tuskegee, Alabama, of consumption, the disease having been brought on by exposure during the siege of Vicksburg. Poor fellow! He had escaped all the shells and balls to linger a few months and die in an obscure village.” Patrick noted candidly, “I think I would have preferred sudden death from a cannon shot, to a lingering 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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All wars exact terrible tolls.
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Sick and wounded Union soldiers convalesce in one of the wards of Harewood General Hospital in Washington, D.C. During the Civil War, more men died due to disease than to combat, a fact that troubled many of their comrades. “I think I would have preferred sudden death from a cannon shot, to a lingering illness,” wrote one Confederate soldier upon learning of the demise of an army friend due to sickness, “which would inevitably result in a dissolution of body and soul.”
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7 he noted that the ship’s surgeon insisted “it is not the yellow fever” that was ravaging the crew, but men quickly began expiring nonetheless. “They are sick but a few days,” he noted. Somehow, Van Nest managed to remain well, although on August 10 he wrote, “Two more of the men died this morning and I think more will die.... It is hard to see men die and still this vessel lies here on the Blockade.” Eventually the psychological toll proved too great. The officer who had assumed command after the ship’s captain died reported, “At 6 p.m. on the 18th instant, Acting Master’s Mate J.F. Van Nest in, it is supposed, a fit of derangement jumped overboard and was drowned in spite of every effort made to save him.”15 The war had claimed another life. Misfortune, incompetence, mismanagement, and simple neglect also led to soldiers’ unnecessary deaths. Men who died from disease might yet obtain a level of nobility for their stoicism in the face of death. However, those who perished at the hands of friendly forces, by their own hand, in transportation or industrial accidents, or simply by being at the wrong place at the wrong time failed to achieve even that sense of meaning. Even routine duties, such as felling trees for quarters or improving earthworks, could go horribly awry. Death at the hands of comrades was especially cruel. In the chaos and confusion of battles ranging from Big Bethel and First Manassas to the Wilderness and Franklin, Tennessee, soldiers fell from the fire of comrades. While Confederate generals Albert Sidney Johnston (at Shiloh) and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson (at Chancellorsville) were the most famous men to die under such circumstances, many others perished in a similar manner. Perhaps more troubling were instances of honor gone awry, often tinged with the presence of alcohol or explosive tempers, that cost the lives of several officers, including William “Bull” Nelson, Earl Van Dorn, and John A. Wharton, as well as men of lesser rank. “Poor Tobe,” one soldier noted of a comrade slain accidentally while on picket duty, “he was a good soldier and had passed through many battles and
Especially cruel were deaths at the hands of comrades, both accidental and intentional. Among the more prominent soldiers who suffered such a fate were (above, left to right) Earl Van Dorn, Albert Sidney Johnston, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, and William “Bull” Nelson.
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illness, which would inevitably result in a dissolution of body and soul.”9 New Yorker Charles W. Gould wrote home in September 1861, “Death comes to us by many a way.... Many here to[o] has bit the dust.” He hoped to “prepair to meet the Monster Death as he is daily staring us in the face. He is calling many of our friends from among us.”10 Indeed, disease had taken such a toll on Confederate soldier Mason Hill Fitzpatrick’s comrades that he retreated to the only solace that he thought the situation offered in his letter home: “Pray for me.”11 Another soldier lamented in late 1862 that if combat did not occur soon, “there will be no army to fight with.”12 For the men in the field, issues relating to health and disease were intensely personal. Connecticut soldier Charles Sherman wrote with conviction in a letter to his family in October 1862 regarding health care for the troops. “I have known men that has been told that nothing was the Matter with them and before midnight thay was Dead men,” Sherman explained. Camp physicians seemed powerless to stem the dismal tide. “That is the Class of Doctors we have with us and if Justice was meated out to one that is with us he whouled be hanging on the first Tree the Boys couled get him to.”13 Certainly, many in the ranks shared a disdain for the surgeons charged with their care, but the price paid during the war by these medical officers was heavy as well, including nine who perished in accidents and 285 who died of disease.14 A particularly tragic tale befell the crew of J.S. Chambers, a Union vessel on blockade duty off Florida in 1864. Acting Master’s Mate John F. Van Nest wrote a series of letters home that detailed the devastating effects of illness among the officers and crew. As July gave way to August, innocuous references turned ominous: “The weather is very warm and makes me feel very uncomfortable and millions of Mosquitoes, and they almost eat me up and I can scarcely sleep at night for them. I hope that I shall not have to spend another summer down on this coast for it will use me up for I can not stand this weather.” On August 48 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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skirmishes, and it seemed hard that he should thus fall at the hands of a friend.”16 Bursting artillery tubes and misfires also caused unintended fatalities. Admiral David Dixon Porter became alarmed at the frequency of accidents related to Parrott rifled guns, noting the loss of numerous gun crews and maintaining in understated fashion that the situation had “disconcerted the crews of the vessels” in which the incidents had occurred.17 No doubt just as disconcerting were the situations in which faulty powder or aiming caused rounds to drop on friendly troops. Foolishness was perplexing, especially for men who had experienced much of the war and its inherent dangers. “Two men killed by our own men shooting at hogs,” wrote one Union surgeon in August 1864.18 Tempers could flare at any point during heated boxing matches or card games and lead to the demise of one or more participant. Life in army camps was often tedious and routine, but there always seemed to be room for
questionable behavior, sometimes with deadly outcomes. William Henry King of the 28th Louisiana Infantry noted several instances of mishandled artillery shells causing fatalities. “One shell was found unexploded, & Albert Spurlin & his mess appropriated it to the use of a fire log. It exploded, wounded Spurlin mortally, & Drew Malone slightly.” King’s reaction to another incident represents the sense some of the soldiers had for the fatal mischief that could arise in camp. On March 17, 1863, King explained that the presence of an artillery shell had proven too great a temptation for members of a Louisiana mounted unit. “Two men belonging to the La. Cavalry attached to this division, in playing some tricks with a shell, it exploded, killing one, & wounding two others.” He concluded, “‘Tis passing strange that men have no more prudence.”19 Union general Francis Walker was particularly harsh in his assessment of the parties he held responsible for such incidents. “I have known several cases of soldiers opening shells, pouring
Dissecting Noncombat Deaths In his exhaustive 1889 book Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, William F. Fox provided a detailed accounting of noncombat fatalities in the Union army, as evidenced by the numbers below. Of the category “Causes known, but unclassified,” Fox wrote that these were deaths “resulting from quarrels, riots, and the like, and which are not definitely reported as murder; from being shot for insubordination, or by provost-guards or sentinels in attempting to escape, or pass the lines; from exhaustion or exposure; [and] killed while depredating upon the property of citizens.” CAUSE
OFFICERS
ENLISTED MEN
2,712
197,008
199,720
83
24,783
24,866
Accident
142
3,972
4,114
Drowning
106
4,838
4,944
Sunstroke
5
308
313
Murder
37
483
520
Suicide
26
365
391
Military Execution
—
267
267
Execution by the enemy
4
60
64
Causes known, but unclassified
62
1,972
2,034
Cause not stated
28
12,093
12,121
Died of disease In Confederate prisons
AGGREGATE
Not included in the numbers above are noncombat fatalities in the U.S. Navy, a number that Fox set at 3,000. “This includes 71 deaths from accidents; 265 from accidental drowning; 37 scalded; and 95 deaths in Confederate prisons,” he wrote.
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Union soldiers bathe in the North Anna River during a break in the Overland Campaign in May 1864. For soldiers and sailors alike, bodies of water—even those that seemed harmless—could prove deadly.
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out all the powder (they always pour out all the powder), and then dropping in a coal or a match to see if there were any powder left. Out of all the lives lost in this way, I never once knew the original idiot to be injured.”20 Some soldiers—who fought internal demons or found the strain of facing battle more than they could tolerate—chose to end their lives. Confederate general Philip St. George Cocke and Union general Francis Engle Patterson were among the more prominent officers to select this path. The great irony for such individuals was that in dying by their own hands they retained some measure of control over their fates, though they sacrificed their lives to war as surely as those who fell in formalized engagements.21 Shipboard fatalities were not uncommon for crews exposed to tropical extremes, but the most gruesome death for a naval crew member was arguably that of Edward Tibbetts of the sloop-ofwar USS Kearsarge. In July 1862, while Tibbetts was enjoying a swim off Algeciras, Spain, a shark attacked and killed him.22 Another bizarre noncombat death was recorded by a Union ship captain named Charles Henry Davis. He noted, “A man was killed in the mortar fleet this morning in a curious way. He had a cylinder of loose powder over his shoulder and a lighted cigar in his mouth.” Davis added matter of factly, “His head was blown off.” No other details appeared to be necessary, but the officer concluded of the incident and the victim, “These mortar men are said to be very careless.”23 For sailors and soldiers alike, bodies of water— even those that seemed harmless—could prove deadly. On more than one occasion, a simple desire for cleanliness or refuge from summer’s heat led to dire results. In June 1861, a Cincinnati newspaper reported, “A soldier named McNally, attached to the ‘Greenup Invincibles,’ from Greenup County, Ky., was drowned in the river, while bathing yesterday.”24 Artidore Bear was close to his native Waynesboro, Virginia, after a year serving in the saddle for the Confederacy when he reached a crossing of the South River. “He was almost home,” a writer observed, “and his great anxiety to reach home, made him venture to ford the river, which was at the time very high and rapid, and he lost his life in the attempt.”25 Captain Edward H. Mix of the 16th Connecticut was on his way home aboard a transport in March 1864. A “blow from the boom” struck Mix and propelled him overboard, where the burden of his coat and heavy boots caused him to drown before help could reach him. The 16th’s historian, who had also served in the regiment, observed that the accident “snatched [Mix] from the bloody glory of dying in his country’s cause, to perish alone and uncheered—no banner above him but the silent clouds—no sounds around him but the 50 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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A train uses the Potomac Creek Bridge to cross over Potomac Creek in Virginia during the Civil War. Transportation accidents— including train derailments and collisions—caused their share of noncombat deaths.
rush of waters.”26 The White River in Missouri was the scene of a particularly harrowing accident that resulted in several deaths, according to the diary of Union soldier Benjamin F. McIntyre. He had noticed the tenuous nature of a crossing using loaded flatboats and a rope line and “shuddered at the thought of how frail a link connected them from accident and death.” Then, the unthinkable happened as a loaded boat became unmanageable and sank, ejecting the human and animal passengers. “The river presented a Scene I do not again wish to witness—Men and mules struggling in the water for life, many clinging to the Sunken boat—the water was icy cold & the current setting from the shore required a superhuman effort to reach it. While we as gazers on could render no assistance & be only witness of their death Struggle.” Some of the men came agonizingly close to shore before giving out “raising their hands above their heads and you could see the agony on their face and hear the cry—O cannot you save me—then sunk to rise no more.” The veteran remained traumatized by the event that unfolded before him. “I have seen death in many forms—have seen my companions fall at my Side in battle and without a feeling of sorrow passed on to revenge them—I have seen those expire who have been wounded.... But to die as our companions have today—to sacrifice all for the sake of their country and then to find Such a grave.”27 Violent storms were often the most dramatic illustrations of the noncombat dangers the men faced in the field. Strong winds and heavy downpours could prove deadly. While the chance of perishing from lightning strikes was not significant, it was not nonexistent, as some troops learned. On June 16, 1862, Confederate marine Henry Lea Graves recorded the aftereffects of a storm-related incident at his camp at Drury’s Bluff, Virginia. “One of the same crew was killed yesterday by a stroke of lightening…. I saw the body this morning and a horrible looking sight it was.” He worried that the war had desensitized him. “Such sights do not affect me as they once did.”28 Other unmerciful extremes in weather added to the death tolls. A Union surgeon observed of the effects of blistering summer heat, “It was something new to me to see men fall as if shot and die almost as quickly, from sun stroke. A moment previous to falling he would be marching on as if nothing unusual was to pay, when a stagger and fall, and in some instances death, followed each other in a few moments time.”29 Wintry conditions could present just as much of a threat. Even when the weather was clear, transportation accidents on land and water—from railroad wrecks, derailments, and boiler explosions to ship sinkings, scaldings, and steamer or transport collisions—caused their share of deaths. Men were swept from the rooftops of box- ☛ } CONT. ON P. 73 53 FALL 2018
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Crew members of USS Monitor stand on the vessel’s deck in this July 1862 photograph by James Gibson. Damage to its rotating gun turret, suffered during the Battle of Hampton Roads, is visible at left.
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Abraham Lincoln and the M By Anna Gibson Holloway an
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he Monitor y andmr. Jonathan W.and White lincoln the monitor • The Union’s famed ironclad warship had a fan in the country’s president, who paid the vessel an eventful visit in the spring of 1862.
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authorities became alarmed in 1861 when they learned that Confederates in Norfolk, Virginia, were converting the salvaged USS Merrimack—a wooden steam frigate scuttled shortly after the outbreak of the war at the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth—into the ironclad warship CSS Virginia. After considering several proposals for an ironclad vessel of their own, Union naval leaders settled on a submission from Swedish inventor John Ericsson—a marvel of design in which all of the vessel’s machinery and living quarters were located underwater. Only the deck, pilothouse, and a cylindrical revolving gun turret would ride
above the water line. Abraham Lincoln was captivated by the proposal for the ship, which would be named USS Monitor. According to one of his secretaries, “Mr. Lincoln said he was like the fat girl when she put on her stocking—she thought there was something in it, and so he did, and the building of the Monitor was ordered.”1 Virginia made her maiden voyage on March 8, 1862. She steamed up the Elizabeth River and rampaged the Union blockading fleet in Hampton Roads, destroying the wooden warships Cumberland and Congress. That night Monitor arrived in Hampton Roads after a difficult journey from New
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USS Monitor and CSS Virginia battle to a draw at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on March 9, 1862. It was the first-ever battle between ironclad warships and ushered in a new era in naval warfare.
Left: John L. Worden, USS Monitor’s first commander
York. The next day the two ironclads battled for four hours to a draw. While neither vessel was able to inflict any permanent damage on the other, the engagement revealed to naval leaders around the world that the age of wooden warships was coming to a close and that navies would now need vessels constructed of iron.2 After the battle, Lincoln told his cabinet that he wanted to shake the hand of Monitor’s wounded commander, John L. Worden. Lincoln traveled to the Washington home where Worden was recuperating, his eyes having been temporarily blinded by a shot from Virginia’s rifled stern gun. “You
do me great honor, Mr. President, and I am only sorry that I can’t see you,” Worden said to Lincoln as they shook hands. Moved with emotion, Lincoln apparently burst into tears and said, “No, sir, you have done me and your country honor and I shall promote you. We owe to you, sir, the preservation of our navy. I can not thank you enough.” Lincoln then “expressed the warmest sympathy” with Worden’s “suffering, and admiration of his bravery and skill.”3 Over the ensuing months, the presence of the Rebel ironclad in Hampton Roads caused great trepidation for Union leaders. General George 57 FALL 2018
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vessel with care, manifesting great interest, his remarks evidently shewing that he had carefully studied what he thought to be our weak points & that he was well acquainted with all the mechanical details of our construction.” Reflecting upon this moment later in the day, Keeler thought about how different the president was from most visitors to the famous ironclad vessel. “Most of our visitors come on board filled with enthusiasm & patriotism ready, like a bottle of soda water, to effervesce the instant the cork is withdrawn, but with Mr. Lincoln it was different. His few remarks as he accompanied us around the vessel were sound, simple & practical, the points of admiration & exclamation he left to his suite.” When offered a glass of whiskey, Lincoln instead asked for a glass of ice water. The crew then mustered on the deck and the president “passed slowly before them hat in hand.” They returned the salute with “three hearty cheers.”6 Later in the afternoon, CSS Virginia made an appearance in Hampton Roads, but after she retired General Wool proposed that the president’s entourage ride out to Camp Hamilton— the first camp established by the Union army in Virginia after the state’s secession—“and see what was to be seen.” They saw the remnants of the city of Hampton, which had been burned by the Confederates in 1861. “I never saw such a ruin,” wrote Chase, “—bare, blackened, crumbling walls on every hand—the old Court House almost two hundred years old, but of remarkable beauty for that time— the old Church, amid the graves of generations, a gem of a building—of brick brought from England in the old time—where generation after generation of Virginians had been baptized, confirmed, married, admitted to the Communion, and dismissed with tears and benedictions to their last repose.” The president and his companions returned from their tour “saddened,” but soon the mood changed. General Wool had ordered a grand review of the troops stationed in Hampton. First the cavalry went by, then “regiment after regiment of infantry, all appearing handsomely and some wonderfully well,” wrote Treasury Secretary Chase. Chase noted that the “troops were gratified by the President who rode along their line alone, uncovered, inspiring great enthusiasm. It is delightful, by the way, to observe every where the warm affection felt and expressed for the President.”7 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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B. McClellan’s advance toward Richmond was stalled on the Virginia Peninsula while army and naval forces were making no headway toward capturing Norfolk. Finally, in May, President Lincoln decided to visit Fort Monroe, located at the southern end of the peninsula, in the words of Lincoln’s private secretaries, “to ascertain by personal observation whether some further vigilance and vigor might not be infused into the operations of the army and navy at that point.”4 Just before dark on Monday, May 5, Lincoln traveled down the Potomac River toward the fort with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and Brigadier General Egbert L. Viele on board the U.S. revenue cutter Miami. The weather was rough and the men had difficulty eating their lunches once they reached the waters of Chesapeake Bay. “The President gave it up almost as soon as he began, &, declaring himself too uncomfortable to eat stretched himself at length on the locker,” remembered Chase. “The rest of us persisted; but the plates slipped this way and that; the glasses tumbled over and slid & rolled about; and the whole table seemed as topsy turvy as if some spiritualist were operating upon it.” The men reached Fort Monroe in the evening of May 6, and they went aboard USS Minnesota with Brigadier General John E. Wool, commander of the army’s Department of Virginia, to confer with Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough, commander of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, about “military & naval movements, in connexion with the dreaded Merrimac.”5 The following day the president and his entourage toured Monitor. The ironclad’s paymaster, William F. Keeler, observed that Lincoln “had a sad, care worn & anxious look in strong contrast with the gay cortege by which he was surrounded.” Keeler noted that as Miami approached his vessel, “every eye” on the president’s boat “sought the Monitor but his own.” The president “stood with his face averted as if to hide some disagreeable sight. When he turned to us I could see his lip quiver & his frame tremble with strong emotion & imagined that the terrible drama in these waters … [during the Battle of Hampton Roads] was passing in review before him.” After Lincoln boarded the ironclad someone pointed out that Keeler was also from Illinois. The president “was very happy he said to find one from Illinois on board the Monitor,” the paymaster recalled. Lincoln “examined everything about the 58 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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On May 7, 1862, President Lincoln and his entourage—which included Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase—toured the devastated city of Hampton, Virginia (shown here), which had been burned by the Confederates in 1861. “I never saw such a ruin—bare, blackened, crumbling walls on every hand,” wrote Chase. Opposite page: Abraham Lincoln (top) and Salmon Chase.
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Back at Fort Monroe, the president slept in Colonel Le Grand B. Cannon’s room in Quarters No. 1 from May 8 until the 11th. One night just before dinner Lincoln entered the room while Cannon was dressing. “Why, I think you are making rather an elaborate toilet, Colonel,” said Lincoln. “Of course,” replied the officer. “In such presence I could not do otherwise.” “Well,” said Lincoln, “I don’t know but if you will lend me that brush, I think I will fix up a little, too.” Cannon handed Lincoln a hairbrush made of ivory and a comb made of shell. “Why, I can’t do anything with such a thing as that. It wouldn’t go through my hair,” joked the president. “Now, if you have anything you comb your horse’s mane with, that might do.” At that point Lincoln looked at the colonel and said he must tell him a story about his hair. “When I was nominated for President at Chicago—as much to my surprise as to the surprise of the country—people naturally wanted to see how Abe Lincoln looked,” he began. “I had been up to Chicago a year or two previous, and had been persuaded to have my photograph taken. An en-
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
For many among the troops, this was the first time they had seen the president in person. One New Yorker remarked, “The ex rail splitter is as homely as a stone fence and dresses shockingly, but their [sic] is an appearance about him which indicates great firmness, and strength of character; take him as I saw him, and he is just the picture of a Western hoosier, tall, lank, and gaunt.”8 A Pennsylvanian recalled decades later that Lincoln rode General Wool’s “spirited little bay horse” over to the review. “General Wool was a small man and the little bay and he were well proportioned,” recalled this soldier, “but when Abraham Lincoln, with his long legs, strode the same little bay, the disproportion between rider and horse was very obvious.”9 After their tour of the area and the grand review, Lincoln asked Wool, “Why don’t you take Norfolk?” speculating that “it may be easier taken than the Merrimac; and, once [Norfolk is] in our possession, the Merrimac, too, is captured, not, perhaps, actually, but virtually she is ours.” “Pooh,” replied Wool, “you don’t understand military necessity.”10 Lincoln would soon prove otherwise.
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at the Rip Raps. Watching from Fort Monroe, Secretary of War Stanton thought it “was a beautiful sight to witness the boats moving on to Sewell’s Point, and one after another opening fire and blazing away every minute.” After a short while, however, smoke began to curl up above the trees near Sewell’s Point and several men shouted, “There comes the Merrimac.” The wooden vessels of the Union navy began to depart, but Monitor and another ironclad vessel “held their ground,” according to Chase, as Virginia slowly approached. “Then the great rebel terror paused—then turned back—& having finally attained what she considered a safe position, became stationary again. This was the end of the battle,” wrote Chase. On the Union side, nobody was hurt, but the Confederates had lost at least one powerful battery on the shoreline. “Another certainty is that the rebel Monster don’t want to fight,—& won’t fight if she can help it, except with more advantage than she is likely to have,” noted Chase.12 After witnessing this scene, the president remarked that Virginia “must be destroyed
THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM, NEWPORT NEWS, VA.
Union troops at Fort Monroe prepare to embark for the invasion of Norfolk, Virginia, under the watchful eye of President Lincoln (visible alongside General John E. Wool and Treasury Secretary Chase at center bottom), who had been involved in the preparations, on May 10, 1862.
terprising fellow in the Convention knowing of this, went to the photographer and bought the negative, and he was so expeditious about his scheme, that by the time the news got down to Springfield, where I lived, the boys were running through the streets crying: ‘Here’s a likeness of Abe Lincoln. Price, two shillings. Will look a great deal better when he gets his hair combed.’” Lincoln told the story again at dinner to the delight of everyone present.11 Lincoln, however, was not delighted at the visible presence of Confederate batteries at Sewell’s Point, which protected the city of Norfolk. Hoping to press Wool into action, Lincoln personally ordered Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough to attack the Rebel batteries in preparation for a federal advance. That same day—May 8—the president and several companions traveled in a tugboat across the channel to Fort Wool, on a small island known as the Rip Raps located at the mouth of Hampton Roads, to see the orders carried out. Several ships, including Monitor, opened fire on the Confederate batteries, as did the larger guns
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President Lincoln was sitting on the edge of the bed. General Wool was there, in full uniform and
all covered with dust, and one or two of his officers were also there. Secretary Stanton rushed impetuously into General Wool’s arms in his excitement, and embraced him fervently. The President broke out laughing at seeing the General in full uniform and the Secretary in his nightshirt clasped in each other’s arms, and said: “Look out, Mars! If you don’t, the General will throw you.”
During breakfast the next morning, Lincoln joked that a painting should be made for the U.S. Capitol to commemorate the taking of Norfolk and that “it should be illustrated by a picture showing the meeting of the Secretary of War and General Wool, on the announcement of the capture.”16 At 4:58 a.m. on May 11, the sailors aboard Monitor heard “a very large Explosion,” with one sailor telling his wife that “nothing could be seen of the Merimack [sic] after it.”17 The Confederates had been forced to destroy their own ironclad vessel to prevent it from falling into Union hands. Before leaving Hampton Roads, Lincoln’s party made it a point to see “the point where the suicide had been performed.”18 Reflecting on recent events, Secretary Chase wrote, “So has ended a brilliant week’s campaign of the President; for I think it quite certain that, if he had not come down, Norfolk would still have been in possession of the enemy, and the ‘Merrimac’ as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever. The whole coast is now virtually ours.”19 Others agreed. “It is extremely fortunate that the President came down as he did—he seems to have infused new life into everything, even the superannuated old fogies begin to shew signs of life & animation,” wrote Keeler, Monitor’s paymaster. “He has been busy today visiting different points— first the Com’re, then us [aboard Monitor for a second time], then to the Rip Raps, then to the Fortress [Monroe], not a place has escaped him where he thought his presence could do any good.”20 A local artist—possibly a soldier—had captured the scene at Fort Monroe as Union soldiers were preparing to embark for Norfolk. As hundreds of infantrymen and cavalrymen pass by on their way to steamers that will carry them across the waters of Hampton Roads, a tall figure in a top hat stands in the foreground, at the center of this propitious moment. Lincoln towers over the much shorter General Wool, while Secretary Chase stands behind them. The artist, whose name appears to be either “G” or “O” Kaiser, gave a sense of the movement at Fort Monroe as well as the tension of what lies beyond, as Virginia hovers by the Confederate batteries at Craney Island and Sewell’s Point, and Monitor lies waiting ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76
Right: This cartoon, published in Vanity Fair, depicts the reaction of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (pictured at left)—who, clad in his nightshirt, has jumped into the arms of General Wool as Lincoln looks on—upon learning of the capture of Norfolk by Union forces.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; VANITY FAIR
if it took the whole navy to do it.”13 On May 9, Chase, Wool, and several others took Miami across Hampton Roads to scout for a landing point near Norfolk. When they returned to Fort Monroe they found that Lincoln had been conversing with a pilot and studying a chart for landing spots. He believed he had found a nearer one than they had located “and wished to go and see it on the spot.” Chase, Stanton, and the others went to the Rip Raps, where they picked up 20 armed soldiers and then headed toward the shoreline. As they neared the beaches, Lincoln chose another spot that he liked for the landing, although Wool ultimately decided to use the one he and Chase had found earlier in the day. According to one account, the ship came under fire and others aboard urged the president to seek safety below. “Although I have no feeling of danger myself,” he replied, “perhaps for the benefit of our country, it would be well to step aside.”14 On the morning of May 10, 1862, 5,000 Union soldiers landed on the shore near Ocean View and began moving inland. According to several accounts, Lincoln (who had remained at Fort Monroe) was upset that Wool did not send as many troops as he could have to capture the city. One Union officer observed the president “rushing about, hollering to someone on the wharf— dressed in a black suit with a very seedy crape on his hat, and hanging over the railing, he looked like some hoosier just starting for home from California, with store clothes and a biled shirt on.”15 In truth, Lincoln needn’t have worried. By 5 p.m. the soldiers had reached downtown Norfolk, where Mayor William Lamb staged an elaborate surrender ceremony that involved presenting the “keys to the city” to the Union commander—a ruse that allowed the remaining Confederate troops time to leave the town and to destroy Gosport Navy Yard. Now without a home, CSS Virginia would have to be scuttled, her commander determined. Following the capture of Norfolk, General Wool returned to Fort Monroe, where Lincoln was preparing for bed in Quarters No. 1. When Lincoln heard Wool return, Colonel Cannon observed that he appeared like “six feet of white nightshirt at the French window.” Upon hearing the good news, the president called for Edwin Stanton. “My God!” exclaimed Stanton as he jumped out of bed. The secretary of war then ran to the president’s room, where Cannon recorded what he saw:
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63 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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The B&A Q&A: William W. Freehling it’s been estimated that well over 60,000 books have been written about the Civil War—a testament to Americans’ continued fascination with the conflict and its participants. Of these titles, more than 15,000 have focused on a single person: Abraham Lincoln. With so many studies of Lincoln already written, one might wonder what new information can be revealed about the country’s 16th president. We recently talked to the authors of two new Lincoln books, both of which
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B&A show that there’s still much to be learned about “Honest Abe.” First up: Veteran historian William W. Freehling—author of a number of groundbreaking books, including the two-volume The Road to Disunion (1990, 2007) and The South versus The South (2001)—discusses his latest work, just published by the University of Virginia Press, Becoming Lincoln, which emphasizes Lincoln’s life in the years before the Civil War. When and why did you decide to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln?
In 2007, having published my sixth Old South book, it was past time to turn to the Old North. But what Yankee project would best round out a lifetime of Civil War writing? I sought a shorter format than deployed in my massive, southern-focused Road to Disunion. I wished for a less packed, faster-moving narrative that dramatically conveyed the Yankee side of the history. With a fresh take on the colossus who usually epitomized the northern centrist antislavery movement and presided over the national climax, I thought I might be able to slip my southern work into a better understood national drama. But a fresh Abraham Lincoln, others warned, would be elusive. The Lincoln story had been allegedly repeated too often, leaving too little to discover. I would supposedly end up not with a helpfully revised Yankee epic, better connected with my southern saga, but with a tired northern tale, dragging slaveholders along familiar national ruts. I still commenced investigating Mr. Lincoln. I indeed spotted little novel to report about his wartime course. But I increasingly found that his prewar adventures, encompassing over 90 percent of his life, offered very promising unexplored angles. As often occurs in historical inquiry, early events conditioned final upheavals. After reporting my discoveries about Lincoln’s tortuous struggle toward prewar
maturity, my three final chapters could freshly relate the matured statesman’s impact on the secession crisis. Then a 5,000-word epilogue could analyze how a passionate prewar Unionist and guarded antislavery trimmer slowly morphed into the Great Emancipator that the wartorn Union required.
How would you describe your research process?
To portray the Fire-Eaters in Road to Disunion, I had spent many months in some three dozen southern repositories, studying unpublished private correspondence not seen for decades, if at all. To locate a new Lincoln, in contrast, I mostly re-
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“I still commenced investigating Mr. Lincoln…. But I increasingly found that his prewar adventures, encompassing over 90 percent of his life, offered very promising unexplored angles.” WILLIAM W. FREEHLING ON HIS RESEARCH FOR BECOMING LINCOLN
searched at home. Unused Lincoln letters barely existed. The few extant private letters, while valuable, were either published (mostly in Lincoln’s Collected Works) or on the internet (mostly from the Library of Congress’ Lincoln Papers). Contemporaries’ memories of Lincoln abounded, but they too were almost all in print or on the internet, and memories can be suspect. How could I breathe new life into well-known public documents? Largely, I found, by reading published speeches (especially in Lincoln’s Collected Works), with sharpened eyes for what had been missed. I discerned little new in the president’s wartime orations. But the prewar published documents yielded a treasure trove for explaining how Lincoln’s past wreckage prepared him for future heroism, while he staggered for three decades down a non-glory road.
COURTESY OF WILLIAM W. FREEHLING
How does your take on Lincoln differ from previous portraits?
My Lincoln was only partially the purported “self-made man.” True, he taught himself enough law to start as a primitive lawyer and proceed as a crude surveyor. But attending frontier “blab” schools— where pupils recited their lessons out loud—had helped him to a “primitive” style of reading, always perfect for a natural orator. Other boosters subsequently helped him surpass primitiveness, including to become a cultivated state Supreme Court lawyer and then to become a presidential nominee while sitting at home. His lieutenants surrounded a lonely, melancholic man with colorful characters, contributing occasionally hilarious jokes—perfect for his sanity and my tales. His talent for directing collective advance came to climax at Fort Sumter, in ways never fully understood, when he led his team (and they led him) to a dramatic end of the prewar period. His prewar striving more often aborted his dramas. Perhaps his rarest talent was to blame only himself for epic spills and to correct his errors immediately (sometimes even while still orating). His humility after falls and recoveries for the next
William W. Freehling
travail make his comeback adventures relevant far beyond Civil War specialists, to all who must overcome crushing disappointments (almost all of us). His early extravagant attempts at securing internal improvements for Illinois especially failed. He understood that his state’s impoverished transportation system stymied economic progress, including poor men’s attempts to rise toward equality. Yet the nationalist crashed out of the state legislature and managed to lose Illinois’ only “safe” Whig congressional seat, while his great enemy, the state’s righter Stephen A. Douglas, secured Illinois’ rescue by the U.S. government, with land grants to build an Illinois Central Railroad. Except for the infuriating fact that Douglas received all the credit for the nationalistic triumph, Lincoln came away from Illinois’ turning point with a fanatical conviction that “all men are created equal” required far-flung republican Union, with a central government helping the impoverished in stagnant provinces to rise. The lesson both made him loathe slavery more and shrink from antislavery action repeatedly, lest the South smash the Union. We have never fully understood how continually the future Great Emancipator fudged on prewar attempts at preliminary federal antislavery action. The details of how this eloquent critic of slav-
ery inched toward only slightly more antislavery action—toward becoming the racist North’s dominant cautious mainstreamer—comprise one of America’s most fuzzily understood and most widely revealing stories. On the eve of Civil War, Lincoln’s most forgotten incremental forward step epitomized how widely his antislavery tiptoes illuminate his era. The new president appointed highly moderate Republicans to local posts in the most northern, least enslaved part of the South, urging that democracy required election winners to receive the spoils. South Carolinians, heading for the national exits, called that hardly radical idea the beginning of the terrible end. Slaveholders’ dominion, these despots believed, requires that dissenters be shut out of homeland offices and agitation, not least in shaky hinterlands. This climactic collision between the political needs of despotic and democratic social systems, often evident earlier in the Lincoln story, here displayed the Yankee’s moderation and the Slave South’s extremism at ominous loggerheads. I illustrate my point with two glorious photographs. On the one hand, a famous image depicts Lincoln, strikingly uncombed and off to rally fellow commoners toward the voting boxes. On the other hand, a usually neglected photograph depicts an important Caro67 FALL 2018
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B&A
Have you learned anything about Lincoln that surprised you?
At this early 21st-century U.S. moment, with politicians shunning mainstream compromise, Lincoln can teach much about why republican progress requires some give and take. I do not see how the Yankees’ wretched Civil War could have come off as well as it shabbily did, in such a racist nation, without a cautious moderate at the helm. Still, I think Lincoln sometimes drew back disappointingly— further than necessary. I do not think the prototype moderate had to become the only president who sent a boatload of blacks back to Africa or the only antislavery American who said he would settle for abolition in a hundred years. Nor do I think Lincoln’s paranoid fear that Douglas conspired to spread slavery to the North was necessary, to dominate the Yankee dead center. I more admire Lincoln’s humility about his final partial success, the perfect parallel to blaming himself for early plunges. He knew that his ultimate glory, saving the Union and emancipating the slaves, had not been achieved in the manner his prewar shade had incessantly preached—peacefully, without northern imposition, with eventual southern consent, and without murderous civil war. His grief at the failing helped turn his second inaugural address into his greatest—America’s greatest—speech. So too, the bereaved head in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ magnificent Chicago statue, Standing Lincoln, is one of our greatest—and hitherto too littleknown—artistic masterpieces. I rejoice that I commissioned Frank Dina’s exquisite photograph of that mourning head and that it dominates my cover, giving the statue wider recognition and my abstractions deeper thrust.
The B&A Q&A: Dan Abrams in lincoln’s last trial, published earlier this year by Hanover Square Press, Dan Abrams and co-author David Fisher examine the case of 22-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison, who went on trial in the summer of 1859 for murder and was defended in court by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had achieved national fame the previous year during his campaign for U.S. senator against Stephen Douglas, and would the following year successfully campaign for the presidency. Harrison’s trial would be the last murder case of Lincoln’s two-decade career as a lawyer, and as Abrams—the chief legal
analyst for ABC News—and Fisher argue, it sheds new light on the man who would go on to lead the country during the soon-to-erupt Civil War. Without giving too much away, what can you tell us about Lincoln’s Last Trial?
It is not widely known that during his legal career Abraham Lincoln was the defense attorney in 27 murder trials. This book is about his last one, which took place less than a year before he was nominated for the presidency. He knew all of the participants: The victim had apprenDan Abrams
ABC PHOTOGRAPHY DEPT.
lina Fire-Eater, meticulously coiffed and off to rally fellow sneering patriarchs beyond supposedly perilous mobocracy. In history books as in lectures, pictures do help non-abstractionists see the power of abstractions.
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Abraham Lincoln Book Shop Inc. Stephen Douglas. David had found an obscure reference to the transcript while researching a book about the Civil War and it aroused his curiosity. He was able to locate a copy in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. It is the only transcript in existence showing Lincoln at work in a courtroom, and few people were aware it existed. In addition to this transcript we relied on contemporary newspaper reports of the trial, books, and articles involving all the participants, as well as several Lincoln experts and descendants of the participants. We brought all of the material together to try to present a portrait of a compelling trial in a small American city, while bringing to life Abraham Lincoln, the lawyer. ticed in his law office, and the defendant was both the son of one of his strongest financial supporters and the grandson of the leading evangelical of the time—nationally known Peter Cartwright, who also had been Lincoln’s strongest political rival for two decades. Cartwright had heard the victim’s deathbed statement and would become the key witness in the case. The trial took place at a time when America’s embryonic legal system was just developing and involved one of the oldest and most complicated defenses: self-defense. Tell us about your research process. What sources did you use? And how did you first learn about the trial?
My collaborator, David Fisher, brought the existence of the trial transcript to my attention. It was found in a mousechewed shoebox tied with a ribbon in the garage of a home in Fresno, California, where the great-grandson of the accused killer had once lived. It was made public by the great-grandson’s widow in 1989. The transcript was hand-written by one of the nation’s first court reporters, Robert Hitt, who a year earlier had helped Lincoln gain national attention when he transcribed his debates with
As someone who is not only a lawyer, but who has covered countless court cases for major news organizations, how would you characterize Lincoln’s performance in the courtroom?
Not only did Lincoln know how to speak to the jury in a colloquial and understandable manner, he knew when to stop. He recognized that he would be able to return to an issue later with witnesses or argument and avoided over-litigating his case. Many lawyers of Lincoln’s stature— and at that time, he was known as one of the best—like to hear themselves talk. Lincoln spoke with a purpose and meaning and knew that he did not want to lose or bore the jurors.
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Have you learned anything about Lincoln that surprised you?
One of the most surprising things was seeing how enraged Lincoln became at the judge when he seemed to lose a critical legal argument. People who were present at the time describe Lincoln’s fury, which is not something we hear about him all that often. It serves as a reminder that Lincoln was not just a principled, thoughtful storyteller, he also knew how to be really tough when necessary.
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the other: “Do you know why General Jackson would not decide upon our suggestion at once? It was because he was going to pray over it, before he makes up his mind.” And sure enough, when Ewell returned to Jackson’s headquarters to retrieve a forgotten sword, he found Jackson upon his knees in prayer. If the story ended there it would sound like another of Jackson’s peculiarities, but the man who told it saw it differently, saying that the general was “praying, doubtless, for Omniscient guidance in all his responsible duties, for his men, and for his country.”16 Indeed, Jackson’s religious faith was an integral part of him, as natural to him as breathing, and English clergyman Parkes Cadman accurately connected it to the Magician archetype, which is also characterized by access to the divine. Cadman spoke of Jackson’s “alliance with eternal realities,” calling him “a spiritual prince who was greater than anything he did.”17 In cold reality there were limits to Jackson’s generalship. He could and did perform poorly—Mark Boatner’s Civil War Dictionary includes an entry for “Jackson of the Chickahominy,” which it calls “A phrase used to distinguish the brilliant ‘Jackson of ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Pole, and that Jackson said that he never used pepper because it made his left leg weak. But tales of Jackson’s odd behavior come from others, too. Lieutenant General Richard Taylor insisted that Jackson habitually sucked lemons: “Where Jackson got his lemons ‘no fellow could find out,’ but he was rarely without one.”10 Henry Kyd Douglas claimed that at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, Jackson sucked on a lemon throughout the engagement and that it scarcely left his lips “except to be used as a baton to emphasize an order.” At the end of the fight, when Douglas last saw the lemon, “it was torn open and exhausted and thrown away, but the day was over and the battle was won.”11 The infatuation with lemons is such a familiar element of the Jackson legend that one feels a pang of disappointment to find that it is wholly without foundation. Jackson just happened to like fresh fruit.12 Surgeon Daniel B. Conrad of the Stonewall Brigade claimed that Jackson
“imagined that the halves of his body did not work and act in accord.”13 West Point classmate Dabney H. Maury said something similar, reporting that Jackson confided to fellow cadets that he had “a peculiar malady which troubled him, and complained that one arm and one leg were heavier than the other, and would occasionally raise his arm straight up, as he said, to let the blood run back into his body, and so relieve the excessive weight.” But Maury added perceptively, “These peculiarities have often been regarded and cited as evidences of the great genius he possessed.”14 Alongside mystery and eccentricity was a third element: Jackson’s religious faith. This too could be caricatured. Surgeon Conrad merged Jackson’s foibles and religiosity in a single sentence: “He followed hydropathy for dyspepsia, and after a pack in wet sheets every Sunday morning he then attended the Presbyterian church, leading the choir, and the prayer-meetings every night during the week.”15 On one occasion, when two of Jackson’s division commanders made a tactical suggestion, Jackson requested that they wait until morning for his answer. When they left him, one of them—inevitably, it was Ewell—told
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the Valley’ from the ineffective Stonewall Jackson who failed five times during the Seven Days’ Battles.”18 And a number of military historians believe that Ewell was correct to not attack Cemetery Hill, that with two divisions exhausted from a forced march and extended combat, he could not have stormed an elevation held by ample fresh troops and artillery. By extension, neither could Jackson. But in the American Iliad, Jackson will always be the Magician who could have sent his soldiers whooping the Rebel yell up the slopes of Cemetery Hill, transformed the outcome at Gettysburg, and perhaps even carried the Confederacy to independence. MARK GRIMSLEY, A HISTORY PROFESSOR AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, IS THE AUTHOR OF SEVERAL BOOKS, INCLUDING AND KEEP MOVING ON: THE VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN, MAY–JUNE 1864 (2002) AND THE HARD HAND OF WAR: UNION MILITARY POLICY TOWARD SOUTHERN CIVILIANS, 1861-1865 (1995). HE HAS ALSO WRITTEN MORE THAN 50 ARTICLES AND ESSAYS.
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the blanks—how she “adopted” him, known then as Jimmie Limber, off the street to live with her at the Confederate White House and why he joined them as a fugitive from the Yankees. She obliges, and the novel takes the form of her memories, with all of their looping and echoing. The importance of war memory—and its unreliability—is unsettling to contemplate in 2018, as the events of Charleston and Charlottesville continue to reverberate. In an interview with NPR, Frazier gestured to this, and to the other ways that his new novel feels modern. “After Cold Mountain,” he said, “I never thought I wanted to write about the Civil War again. But as the past three or four years have shown, it’s not done with us—as a country, as a culture.” As Varina says in one of her final conversations with Blake, “Remembering doesn’t change anything—it will always have happened. But forgetting won’t erase it either.” In a way, Varina is a perfect Confederate monument for our time: It reveals all of the racism and the greed and the violence of the Confederate worldview, and the flawed and broken humanity of those who fought for it. MEGAN KATE NELSON IS A WRITER LIVING IN LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS. HER BOOK MANUSCRIPT ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR IN THE DESERT SOUTHWEST, WHICH WON A 2017 NEH PUBLIC SCHOLAR AWARD, WILL BE PUBLISHED BY SCRIBNER IN 2020.
USS Galena (1862-1872). Photograph looking forward along the ship’s port side, shortly after her May 15, 1862 action with Confederate batteries at
FALL 2018 Drewry’s Bluff, on the James River, Virginia. NH 53984 courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command. Image colorized by Nick Edwards.
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cars by low bridges or caught between the cars during sudden movements on the tracks. Others simply fell while trying to enter or exit the trains, or were trapped or crushed by vehicles on the rails. Some died in freakish accidents on horseback or when ambulances or wagons overturned. Storm-tossed oceans and rough surf, or a misstep along a wharf or canal could spell doom with equally unexpected swiftness. Some regimental records reflected the diversity of causes other than disease for the noncombat deaths of their men. One account for a North Carolina brigade recorded “20 men met accidental or violent non-battle deaths. Four were murdered, 1 committed suicide, 4 were killed by militia taking up deserters, 6 were killed in accidents, most involving discharge of a weapon, and 6 others were killed by falling trees or in railroad accidents.” Three members of the brigade faced charges for murder.30 The 4th U.S. Cavalry had approxi-
mately 112 men die from battle-related wounds, including 68 known to have perished and others injured and presumed dead. Another 91 men fell to fatal illness. As was the case with other units on both sides, there were a number of other noncombat deaths, including three men who died from “unknown” causes and nine from accidents. The rolls attributed four of the command’s deaths to drowning, three to “murdered by citizens,” one to a “skull fracture,” and another to stab wounds received in a house of ill repute. One wounded trooper killed himself.31 Historian Joseph Glatthaar found that, compared to their white comrades, noncombat deaths among members of the United States Colored Troops were staggering, with neglect, indifference, and racism exhibited by some of the physicians among the contributing factors. For example, pneumonia struck down 5,233 of these men, producing a mortality rate five times greater than among white volunteers with the same malady. A lieutenant in a USCT regiment posted in Louisiana observed, “The mortality in our Regt. beats anything I ever saw.”32 civilians too paid a terrible, if frequently unheralded, price during the
conflict. Among the most well-known individuals to perish as combat swirled through their communities were Judith Henry, an elderly woman killed by an artillery shell fired into her home during the battle at First Manassas, and Mary Virginia (“Ginnie” or “Jennie”) Wade, a 20-year-old resident of Gettysburg shot by an errant bullet while baking bread in her sister’s kitchen. Higher-profile figures were not immune. Both presidents lost children—Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie died of typhoid fever in 1862, and Jefferson Davis’ son Joseph died after an accidental fall in 1864—as did Union general William T. Sherman, whose son died of disease in 1863, an event that haunted Sherman for the rest of his life. Citizens of cities including Charleston, Vicksburg, Atlanta, and Petersburg perished during siege operations when ordnance dropped on homes, businesses, or streets. As one Union soldier observed, “let me tell you spherical case, and shell don’t discriminate between those who are combatants and those who are not.”33 Even for those who lived far from the war’s battlefields, the fatal impact of war still hovered. Mayhem presented itself in myriad forms and places—in the
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city streets, the hospital wards, and the manufacturing and industrial centers. In Washington, D.C., the demand for war supplies turned sprawling facilities such as the Washington Arsenal and the Navy Yard from storage to production centers, with the attendant dangers of explosions and fires. As new personnel filled the workshops, civilian fatalities were inevitable. Richmond saw a similar surge in industrial production—and accidental disasters—as the Confederacy geared up for a war of indeterminate size and duration. The most notable such Confederate calamity occurred on March 13, 1863, when explosions rocked a government laboratory on Brown’s Island, raining bodies and debris onto the surrounding streets. Dozens of workers, many of whom were women and girls, died instantly or suffered lingering agony before finally giving way to their injuries.34
in august 1863, an exasperated William Christie, a member of the 1st Minnesota Light Artillery, wrote home from Vicksburg, Mississippi. “Father, I am sick of reading in the papers of ‘the glory’ of war. The truth is, there is no glory in it; Everything about it is simply horrible.” He had seen the many ways that death intruded into both soldiers’ and civilians’ lives: “Is there glory in the cry of the mother as she sees her child’s head swept off by a cannonball? Is there glory in the weeping of widows and orphans? Is there glory in the burning cities and the desolated homes that War leaves behind him?”35 If the noncombat deaths of soldiers and civilians were less glorious in their circumstances than battlefield deaths, those they left behind still mourned and strove to accept and understand the losses. The outcome they had most dreaded when their kinfolk and community members went off to war had indeed occurred. In his own style, Milton Barrett of the 18th Georgia Infantry noted the long-lasting impact of the deaths of comrades from his post in Virginia: “ther vakens in ranks can be fill with others but in the sirkle of friends at
home and a round fiar side tha neve can be fild. We bered them in the oners of war and mark the place so ther friends may find ther graves.”36 Even so, soldiers like Barrett feared that the sacrifices they and their comrades witnessed or experienced away from the battlefield would be lost to posterity. One Union veteran explained of a fallen comrade, “He will soon be forgotten and the incidents attending his death be lost amoung the things of the past so far as his regiment is concerned, and the country will forget such a man ever existed.”37 Of course, their efforts at recording these incidents in wartime references and postwar reminiscences were a small measure of ensuring that the country would not forget these sacrifices. Certainly, the lives lost, regardless of the circumstances, are an essential part of the human story and toll of America’s greatest conflict. BRIAN STEEL WILLS IS DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA AND A PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT KENNESAW STATE UNIVERSITY. HE HAS AUTHORED NUMEROUS WORKS ON THE WAR, INCLUDING INGLORIOUS PASSAGES: NONCOMBAT DEATHS IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KANSAS, 2017).
HARPER’S WEEKLY
Men and women scatter as a shell bursts in the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, during the war. Civilians such as these were not immune to death or injury as a result of the conflict.
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THE GAR AND ITS MALE ORGANIZATIONS
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A STRIFE OF TONGUES The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War STEPHEN E. MAIZLISH “Beautifully written, vigorously argued, and important.”—Daniel Crofts
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in the water. By the end of his visit, Lincoln’s demeanor and appearance had improved noticeably. As his vessel steamed by Monitor on May 11, Keeler observed the president “had his hat off bowing, appearing highly pleased at the successful result of his plans.”21 According to a New York Times correspondent, Lincoln returned to Washington “in high spirits, and greatly refreshed and invigorated by his sojourn at the seat of war.”22 Yet for the men aboard Monitor, things would take a turn for the worse over the ensuing months. During the remainder of McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, which would end in defeat on the outskirts of Richmond, the ironclad’s crew found themselves doing river duty on the James, with temperatures below decks reaching 165 degrees. Chief Engineer Isaac Newton complained that “the inevitable Monitor” was going to be “dragged along up this dirty shoal river,
gracious only knows for what purpose except to be stuck & abandoned.” Monitor, he continued, proved to be “a mighty hot concern in warm weather.”23 The vessel’s officers also chafed under the command of Flag Officer Goldsborough, a man “whose principal qualifications are immense size, big feet & the faculty of using neat, heavy round oaths when the occasion permits,” thought
The officers and crew loathed Captain Jeffers. One engineer aboard the ship believed him to be “the personification of selfishness.” Newton. Monitor’s crew especially resented that Goldsborough was “quietly rusticating on board the Minnesota in Norfolk Harbor” while they were sweltering in an iron coffin on the James.24 Lincoln would again visit Monitor on July 9, 1862—this time to relieve Goldsborough of command. Also visiting that
day was James F. Gibson, a Scottish photographer who had worked with Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner. Unfortunately Lincoln was gone by the time Gibson arrived. Gibson took eight photographs of the ship’s officers and crew aboard the deck of Monitor. Most featured the men in groups of various sizes— sitting or standing on the decks, talking, reading letters or newspapers, playing games, and cooking. One image featured a former slave, Siah Carter, who had recently joined the crew. And in one was the commander of the vessel, Captain William N. Jeffers—a solitary figure sitting alone next to an empty chair. The officers and crew loathed Captain Jeffers. One engineer aboard the ship believed him to be “the personification of selfishness,” while another member of the crew called him a “damd old Gluttonous Hogg,” adding, “I hope the curse of Hell will rest on him.” For his part, Paymaster Keeler lamented Jeffers’ “extreme selfishness & his want of decisive energetic action,” as well as the “most supreme contempt” Jeffers showed toward volunteer officers. Still, Keeler suspected that the president might like him. “Mr. Lincoln evidently respects Capt. J.’s opin-
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USS Monitor captain William N. Jeffers sits next to an empty chair on the ironclad’s deck in this July 1862 photo by James F. Gibson.
ions,” Keeler wrote to his wife, “& I am inclined to think will give him his support if his plans appear at all reasonable or feasible.”25 It very well may be that the empty chair next to Jeffers was one he had reserved for the president, hoping he could have his photo taken in front of the ironclad’s dented turret next to the commander-in-chief of the army and navy. If Kaiser’s painting of Fort Monroe on May 10 captured the activity and optimism of that day, Gibson’s portrait of Jeffers next to an empty chair meant for Lincoln belied the gloom and discouragement of the summer of 1862. The war would take another three years to close, and that would not be until after Lincoln visited Hampton Roads again in 1865.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
ANNA GIBSON HOLLOWAY, THE FORMER CURATOR OF THE USS MONITOR CENTER AT THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM IN NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA, IS DIRECTOR OF MUSEUM SERVICES FOR SEARCH INC. IN THE D.C. AREA. JONATHAN W. WHITE IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN STUDIES AT CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT UNIVERSITY AND THE AUTHOR OR EDITOR OF SEVERAL BOOKS ABOUT ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE CIVIL WAR. THEY ARE CO-AUTHORS OF “OUR LITTLE MONITOR”: THE GREATEST INVENTION OF THE CIVIL WAR (KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018).
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ville, 2006), 72, 87.
“Death Comes to Us by Many a Way” (Pages 44–53, 73–74) 1.
2. James I. Robertson Jr., Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia, 1988), 145, 147.
Notes SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode With Stonewall: The War Experiences of the Youngest Member of Jackson’s Staff (Chapel Hill, 1940), 247. Throughout this column I have cited the earliest printed primary source I can locate, but most are endlessly detailed in the secondary literature.
2. Peter S. Carmichael, “‘Oh, For the Presence and Inspiration of Old Jack’: A Lost Cause Plea for Stonewall Jackson at Gettysburg,” Civil War History 41:2 (June 1995): 163. 3. J. William Jones, Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee (New York, 1874), 156. 4. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (San Francisco, 1990), 106. 5. Jones, Personal Reminiscences, 155–156. 6. John Esten Cooke, The Life of Stonewall Jackson (New York, 1863), 85.
7.
J. William Jones, “The Career of Stonewall Jackson,” Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 35 (1907): 83.
8. Ibid. 9. Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction (New York, 1879), 38. 10. Ibid., 50. 11. Douglas, I Rode With Stonewall, 103–104. 12. James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend (New York, 1997), xi. 13. D.B. Conrad, “History of the First Battle of Manassas and the Organization of the Stonewall Brigade,” Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 19 (1891): 83. 14. Dabney H. Maury, “General T. J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson: Incidents in the Remarkable Career of the Great Soldier,” Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 25 (1897): 316. 15. Conrad, “History of the First Battle of Manassas,” 83. 16. R.L. Dabney, Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-General Thomas J. Jackson (New York, 1866), 440. 17. S. Parkes Cadman, “English Clergyman on Stonewall Jackson,” Confederate Veteran, vol. 20 (1912): 220. 18. Mark Mayo Boatner III, The Civil War Dictionary (revised edition; New York, 1991), 433.
21. Diane Miller Sommerville, “‘A Burden Too Heavy to Bear’: War Trauma, Suicide, and Confederate Soldiers,” Civil War History Vol. 59, No. 4 (December 2013): 453–491. 22. Steven J. Ramold, Slaves, Sailors, Citizens: African Americans in the Union Navy (DeKalb, IL, 2002), 174.
4. W.A. Swanberg, First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter (New York, 1957), 328.
23. C.H. Davis, Life of Charles Henry Davis, Rear Admiral, 1807–1877 (Boston, 1899), 236.
5. “Mortality and sickness of the United States Volunteers,” Caledonian (St. Johnsbury, VT), January 30, 1863.
24. “Soldier Drowned,” Cincinnati Daily Press, June 17, 1861.
7.
(Pages 26–27, 70)
20. Francis A. Walker, History of the Second Army Corps in the Army of the Potomac (New York, 1886), 501.
3. Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, 1997), 4.
6. Corning Journal (Corning, New York), May 30, 1861.
American Iliad 1.
“My dear Ellen, Alexandria, Va., April 13, 1862, in Civil War Letters of General Robert McAllister, ed. by James I. Robertson Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1965), 133.
Berry Craig, Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase (Lexington, 2014), 180–181.
8. “Dear Brother, Camp near Harrisons Springs Va. July 30th 1862,” in “Desolating This Fair Country”: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Lt. Henry C. Lyon, 34th New York, ed. by Emily N. Radigan (Jefferson, NC, 1999), 135.
9. “Mobile, Alabama, Saturday, March 26, 1864,” in Kenneth W. Noe, Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861 (Chapel Hill, 2010), 138.
10. “Dear Sister, HEADQUARTERS Washington REGT., 3rd CAMP Caldwell Co. I Washington D.C. Sep 9, 1861” in Dear Sister: The Civil War Letters of the Brothers Gould, compiled by Robert F. Harris and John Niflot (Westport, CT, 1998), 5, 7. 11. M.H. Fitzpatrick to “Dear Amanda A P Hill’s Division Hospital Near Richmond, Va. August 10, 1862,” in Letters to Amanda: The Civil War Letters of Mason Hill Fitzpatrick, Army of Northern Virginia, ed. by Jeffrey C. Lowe and Sam Hodges (Macon, GA, 1998), 23. 12. Quoted in Jeffry D. Wert, The Sword of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac (New York, 2005), 91. 13. “Dear Wife & Chirldren, Camp Kerney, October 20, 1862,” in Letters to Virtue: A Civil War Journey of Courage, Faith and Love, ed. by Ann K. Gunnin (Alpharetta, GA, 2014), 107. 14. J.R. Weist, “The Medical Department in the War,” Sketches of War History Ohio Commandery (Cincinnati, 1888; reprint edition, 1991), II: 90. 15. “Yellow Fever on the Blockade of the Indian River: A Tragedy of 1864,” Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4 (April 1943): 352–353, 355–357; United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901), Series I, Vol. 17, 748, 749.
25. “Soldier Drowned,” Staunton [VA] Spectator, March 3, 1863. 26. Quoted in Lesley J. Gordon, A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2014), 126.
27. “1863 Camp at Forsyth Mo., Sunday March 1st,” in Federals on the Frontier: The Diary of Benjamin F. McIntyre, 1862–1864, ed. by Nannie M. Tilley (Austin, 1963), 116-117, “Camp at Forsyth Mo March 1863 Monday 16th,” 124, and “Camp at Forsyth Mo (April 1863) Wednesday 15th,” 138. 28. “Camp Walker, Drury’s Bluff, Va., June 16, 1862,” in A Confederate Marine: A Sketch of Henry Lea Graves with Excerpts from the Graves Family Correspondence, 1861–1865, ed. by Richard Harwell (Tuscaloosa, 1963), 59.
29. Daniel M. Holt, A Surgeon’s Civil War: The Letters and Diary of Daniel M. Holt, M.D., ed. by James M. Grenier, Janet L. Coryell, and James R. Smither (Kent, OH, 1994), 12. 30. Aldo S. Perry, Civil War Courts-Martial of North Carolina Troops (Jefferson, NC, 2012), 156. 31. John L. Herberich, Masters of the Field: The Fourth United States Cavalry in the Civil War (Atglen, PA, 2015), 253. 32. Joseph T. Glatthaar, “The Costliness of Discrimination: Medical Care for Black Troops in the Civil War,” in Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas, ed. by Lesley J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe (Baton Rouge, 2005), 251, 262, 264, 266. 33. “Dear Brother, Before Vicksburgh, June the 6, 1863,” in Thomas Christie and William Christie, Brother of Mine: The Civil War Letters of Thomas and William Christie, ed. by Hampton Smith Sr. (St. Paul, MN, 2011), 136–137. 34. David L. Burton, “Richmond’s Great Homefront Disaster: Friday the 13th,” Civil War Times Vol. 21, No. 6 (October 1982): 36-41. 35. “My Dear Father, Vicksburg, Aug. 6, 1863,” Brother of Mine, 161.
16. Samuel H. Sprott, Cush: A Civil War Memoir, ed. by Louis R. Smith Jr. and Andrew Quist (Livingston, AL, 1999), 127–128.
36. “Dear Brother and Sister, Camp Winder Richmond, Oct 14, 1861,” in The Confederacy Is on Her Way Up the Spout: Letters to South Carolina, 1861–1864, ed. by J. Roderick Heller III and Carolynn Ayres Heller (Athens, 1992), 27–28.
17. David D. Porter, The Naval History of the Civil War (New York, 1886), 696–697.
37. “White House Ranch July 29th, 1864,” in Federals on the Frontier, 381.
18. “Sunday August 28, 1864, Holly Springs Mississippi,” in James A. Black, A Civil War Diary: Written by Dr. James A. Black, First Assistant Surgeon, 49th Illinois Infantry, ed. by Benita K. Moore (Bloomington, 2008), 231.
Mr. Lincoln and the Monitor
19. I No Pardons to Ask, nor Apologies to Make: The Journal of William Henry King, Gray’s 28th Louisiana Infantry Regiment, ed. by Gary D. Joiner, Marilyn S. Joyner, and Clifton D. Cardin (Knox-
(Pages 54–63, 76–77) 1.
William O. Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary, ed. Michael Burlingame (Lincoln, 2000), 20.
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2. See Anna Gibson Holloway and Jonathan W. White, “Our Little Monitor”: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War (Kent, OH, 2018). 3. Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life 2 vols. (Baltimore, 2009), 2:307–308.
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4. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln 10 vols. (New York, 1890), 5:234. 5. Salmon P. Chase to Janet “Nettie” Chase, May 7, 1862, in John Niven, et al., eds., The Salmon P. Chase Papers 5 vols. (Kent, OH, 1993–1998), 3:186–87.
6. William F. Keeler to Anna, May 7, 1862, in Robert W. Daly, ed., Aboard the USS Monitor: 1862: The Letters of Acting Paymaster William Frederick Keeler, U.S. Navy, to His Wife, Anna (Annapolis, 1964), 106. 7.
Chase to Nettie, May 8, 1862, in ibid., 189–90.
8. William Lee Monegan to Joseph Monegan, May 7, 1862, William Monegan Papers (MS0014), The Mariners’ Museum Library, Newport News, Virginia (hereafter TMM). 9. Samuel S. Thompson, Some Personal Experiences at Fortress Monroe in 1862 (Philadelphia, 1915), 10–11. 10. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 2:312. 11. Le Grand B. Cannon, Personal Reminiscences of the Rebellion, 1861–1866 (New York, 1895), 168-72; Chester D. Bradley, “President Lincoln’s Campaign against the Merrimac,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society Vol. 51 (Spring 1958): 77–84. 12. United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Ser. 1, Vol. 11, 148, 153, 155–56 (hereafter cited as OR); draft of Chase to Nettie, May 8, 1862, in Niven, Chase Papers, 1:339. 13. Isaac Newton to William Kelly, July 19, 1862, Isaac Newton Papers (MS13), TMM. 14. Chase to Nettie, May 11, 1862, in Niven, Chase Papers, 3:193-96; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 2:312.
15. OR, Ser. 1, Vol. 11, 162; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 2:313. 16. Cannon, Personal Reminiscences, 161–168.
17. George Geer to Martha, May 11, 1862, George S. Geer Papers, TMM; OR, Ser. 1, Vol. 11, 163–164. 18. Chase to Nettie, May 11, 1862, in Niven, Chase Papers, 3:197. 19. Ibid. 20. Keeler to Anna, May 9, 1862, in Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 115. 21. Keeler to Anna, May 12, 1862, in Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 121.
22. The New York Times, May 13, 1862. 23. Newton to mother, May 14–19, and June 30, 1862, Newton Papers. 24. Newton to mother, June 30, 1862, Newton Papers. 25. Newton to mother, June 30, 1862, Newton Papers; George S. Geer to Martha Geer, July 1, 1862, George S. Geer Papers (MS10), TMM; Keeler to Anna, May 7 and June 23, 1862, in Aboard the USS Monitor, 108, 162.
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pa r t i n g shot
According to one wartime visitor to the Confederate White House in Richmond, the walls and mantels of First Lady Varina Davis’ reception room “were almost covered with chains and all kinds of knick-knacks, made and presented to her by those who had been captured and imprisoned by the enemy.” Among them was the ring shown here. Due to an interior inscription that reads “Ft Del Pris,” it is believed to have been made by a Confederate captive at Fort Delaware, a military prison located on Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River. Over 30,000 Confederates were held prisoner at Fort Delaware during the war, and slightly over seven percent of them died in captivity. When exactly the soldier who made the ring was imprisoned there is unknown.
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