THE STRUGGLE FOR NASHVILLE P. 40 FIXING FORT SUMTER P. 24 VOL. 4, NO. 3
{ a n e w l o o k a t a m e r i c a’s g r e a t e s t c o n f l i c t }
Robert E. Lee HE WAS THE CONFEDERACY’S GREATEST GENERAL. BUT DID HE LIVE UP TO THE LEGACY OF HIS OWN MILITARY HERO?
PLUS
REBEL YELL:
“ THE UGLIEST SOUND THAT ANY MORTAL EVER HEARD.” P. 52
Broken Promıse FALL 2014
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
VOLUME 4, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2014
FEATURES
Salvo LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (COVER); HOLLIS BENNETT (FRANKLIN); FRANCIS MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (NASHVILLE); ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION (REBEL YELL); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEE).
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
TRAVELS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to Franklin
VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Close Calls
BROKEN PROMISE
LIVING HISTORY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Hatmaker Tim Bender
PRIMER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 The Election of 1864
PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Reclaiming Lee’s Gettysburg Headquarters
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Robert E. Lee was the Confederacy’s greatest general. But did he live up to the legacy of his own military hero? by glenn w. lafantasie
DISUNION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 An Unlikely Friendship
IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Fixing Fort Sumter
Early Winter Sunset 40
Columns CASUALTIES OF WAR. . . . . . . . 26 Jacob Plowden
BATTLEFIELD ECHOES. . . . . . . 28 Saltville’s Dark Legacy
Books & Authors VOICES FROM THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, PART 4 . . . . . . 63
REBEL YELL!
BY GARY W. GALLAGHER
THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME. . . 66 BY BROOKS D. SIMPSON
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In Every Issue EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 A Small World ... and a New Department
PARTING SHOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 The Accidental Housekeeper
In the decisive struggle for Nashville, Tennessee, in December 1864, Confederate general John Bell Hood lost not only a battle but also his army—and the Confederacy’s last chance at winning the war in the West.
A look at the terrifying Confederate battle cry, one of the most feared and revered sounds in American history.
by patrick brennan
by craig a. warren
ON THE COVER: General Robert E.
Lee. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
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editorial VOLUME 4, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2014
Terry A. Johnston Jr. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
A Small World... and a New Department a funny thing happened during last May’s Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse 150th anniversary reenactment, commemorating the epic battles that occurred between the forces of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee during the Overland Campaign of 1864. As a proud co-sponsor of the festivities, the Monitor maintained a booth in the sutler area, where a diverse group of folks, looking to sell or promote a wide variety of Civil Warrelated products, set up shop. Many people stopped by our booth. Some were subscribers looking to say hello, while others were interested in learning more about us. We enjoyed talking to them all—but there was one person in particular who grabbed our attention. Her name was Rachel Smith. An expeRachel Smith rienced Revolutionary War reenactor (in civilian life, she’s a professional historian with an expertise in Early America), Rachel was participating in what was only her second Civil War reenactment. As it turns out, we had been there for her first as well—last year’s massive 150th anniversary commemoration at Gettysburg. We took hundreds of photos of reenactors at that event, and published a few in our fall 2013 issue. Rachel had heard she might be among those whose images were included, and a quick search of that issue proved her correct. (A fast-thinking colleague snapped the above photo just after the discovery.) Great to see you again, Rachel! Looking forward to our next encounter. some of our favorite articles in the Monitor have been those in which we’ve had the chance to interact with people like Rachel—individuals not only enthusiastic about American history, and the Civil War in particular, but who in some way have devoted a part of their lives to its study, memory, interpretation, or preservation. From the reenactors who dedicate themselves to meticulous re-creations of 1860s life to the men and women who strive to join the ranks of Gettysburg’s licensed battlefield guides, we’ve encountered a number of passionate people whose stories are worth sharing. Moving forward, we’ll be sharing those stories with you in a new department we call “Living History,” a space where we introduce you to remarkable people whose lives are in some way tied to the Civil War. (You can read the inaugural installment, a profile of hatmaker Tim Bender, on page 16.) Please, tell us if you know someone whom we might profile in future issues. We’d be happy to hear your ideas.
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Laura June Davis Angela Esco Elder David Thomson Robert Poister CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor EDITORIAL ADVISORS
Jennifer Sturak COPY EDITOR
Matthew C. Hulbert SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGER MATT@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Brian Matthew Jordan BOOK REVIEW EDITOR BRIAN@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Katie Brackett Fialka SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR
Patrick Mitchell CREATIVE DIRECTOR MODUS OPERANDI DESIGN (WWW.MODUSOP.NET)
Zethyn McKinley ADVERTISING DIRECTOR ADVERTISING@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM (559) 492 9236
Margaret Collins ADVERTISING ASSOCIATE MARGARET@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Howard White CIRCULATION MANAGER HWHITEASSOC@COMCAST.NET website
www.CivilWarMonitor.com
M. Keith Harris Kevin M. Levin Robert H. Moore II Harry Smeltzer DIGITAL HISTORY ADVISORS SUBSCRIPTIONS & CUSTOMER SERVICE
Civil War Monitor / Circulation Dept. P.O. Box 567, Selmer, TN 38375-0567 phone: 877-344-7409 fax: 731-645-7849 EMAIL: CUSTOMERSERVICE@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
The Civil War Monitor [issn 2163-0682/print, issn 21630690/ online] is published quarterly (4 times per year) by Bayshore History, llc (8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402). Pending Periodicals postage paid at Atlantic City, NJ, and at additional mailing offices. Subscriptions: $21.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $31.95 per year in Canada, and $41.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Postmaster: send address changes to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 567, Selmer, TN 38375-0567. 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 ©2014 by Bayshore History, llc all rights reserved.
printed in the u.s.a.
THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR MONITOR PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE FALL 2014
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CivWrM
Every Sat. 8 am – Mon. 8 am ET Watch American History TV every weekend for 48 hours of people and events that help document the American story. As the country marks the 150 th anniversary of the Civil War, we bring you debates and interviews about the events and people who shaped the era.
Created by Cable. Offered as a Public Service. c-span.org/history
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Broken Soldier Follow-Up
Happy Readers
I just received the latest issue of The Civil War Monitor, and it’s great! I particularly liked the cover story, “Broken Soldiers,” and I thought you might like to know a little more about one of the soldiers featured in the article, Judson Spofford. Spofford, who grew up on a Vermont farm, enlisted in the Union army in 1862 at age 16. He fought in all of the battles in which his regiment, the 10th Vermont Infantry, participated, and was severely injured in the attack upon Petersburg, Virginia, on March 25, 1865. (The image you show of him on page 36 of “Broken Soldiers” was, as you note, taken in a military hospital while he recovered from his wounds.) According to Spofford, the first surgeon to glance at his wound (a bullet had entered his torso and punctured both lungs) declared that he could do nothing for the young soldier and left him on the ground outside the hospital to die. The night was growing cold, and Spofford was defiant. “I will not die,” he reportedly told the surgeon. “Can’t you take me inside the hospital? Is it necessary for me to freeze to death out here?” The doctor relented, and Spofford eventually made a full recovery. After the war Spofford made his fortune and moved to Idaho, where he served as commander of his local Grand Army of the Republic post. When he died in 1937, he was recognized as the last surviving Union veteran of the July 9,
The Civil War Monitor now stands unequaled in its field! It examines and presents its subjects with a thoroughness and perspective that cannot help but add to our knowledge of the conflict. It also covers entirely new topics that significantly broaden our understanding at a time when many other Civil War publications have become trapped in a repetitive cycle. The only downside of this is that you are currently publishing only four issues per year. If you should find a way to step up your schedule to, say, six issues per year, I’d be happy to pay the additional cost to keep my subscription paid up! Jim Santagata BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
* * *
1864, Battle of Monocacy. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I’m including an image of Spofford as an older man, wearing his gar hat [below]. Jeff T. Giambrone CLINTON, MISSISSIPPI
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwar monitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
I can’t explain how much I enjoyed your summer issue, especially the articles on Jennie Hodgers/Albert Cashier [“Disunion: Albert Cashier’s Secret”] and Larkin Skaggs [“Casualties of War: Larkin Milton Skaggs”]. This magazine is just over the top! I have subscribed to so many Civil War magazines in the past and yours is truly special. Edward Binasiewicz NEWARK, DELAWARE
Reader Request: Give “Credit”
Your summer issue’s articles on Philip Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign [“Bat-
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“ It is One Thing to Read about a "IT IS ONE READ ABOUT A BATTLE AND QUI Battle andTHING QuiteTOAnother to Learn ANOTHER TO LEARN WHILE WALKING THE GROUNDS" While Walking the Grounds.’’
Yourtime timeisisvaluable, valuable,you Youowe oweitittoto yourself to travel wit Your yourself to travel with like minded minded people and professionals who know the ground a people and professionals who lead beyond "What" into the Why" of the eve know theyou ground andthe can lead you beyond the “what” into the “why” of the event
Over 20 years experience and over 300 programs
Over 20 years experience and over 300 programs
Something for every budget and schedule from
Something for every budget and "Weekend WarriorsWarriors to Civil War Field University" schedule from “Weekend to Civil War Field University”
tlefield Echoes: Losing Focus at Cedar Creek”] and William T. Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign [“A Patch of Hell on Earth”] were very good and informative, but they mentioned only briefly a very important aspect of the Union military action: Sheridan and Sherman, as well as Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Grant, had decided to destroy the South—or, as Grant put it, make the region a “barren waste.” The U.S. Army burned houses, barns, and villages, as well as destroyed crops and killed livestock, leaving southern civilians, white and black, to starve. This started a new policy of total destruction by U.S. troops that persists to this day. After the Civil War, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan used these same tactics against American Indians in the West. During World War II, the United States firebombed Dresden, Germany, destroying a city of no military value, and used atomic bombs against Japan. In Vietnam and the Middle East, American forces routinely killed civilians and razed villages. In future issues would you please give Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan the credit and recognition they so rightly deserve for a type of warfare that leaves utter destruction in its wake and “barren waste” for the survivors? W.T. Michel DUTTON, MONTANA
Join the BGES on tour. Join the BGES on tour
For more information visit www.blueandgrayeducation.org or call 434-250-99 Upcoming programs: Mar 7-9 – The Battle for Kennesaw Mountain with Keith Bohannon Mar 27-29 – The Battle at Wilson's Creek with Bill Piston and Rick Hatcher Apr 6-12 – The Apache Indian Wars with Neil Mangum MANY REGISTRATIONS Apr 25-27 – Vicksburg, NMP, The Art of Commemoration with Parker Hills FOR 2015 PROGRAMS May 11-15 – Hood Fights for Atlanta with Gary Eclebarger and Scott Patchan NOW OPEN & ONLINE May 16-18 – The Battle of Stones River with Chris Kolakowski 19-23 – The Overland Campaign with Gordon Rhea May UPCOMING PROGRAMS: Jun 15-18 – The Retreat from Gettysburg with Parker Hills and Len Riedel SEP 12-14 MARCH 24-28, 2015 SEPT 17-20, 2015 Jul 24-27and – Mobile Shenandoah Campaign Patchan Pensacola with Summer, Early's Grant’s1864 BayouValley Expeditions and with Scott Lincoln in Richmond with Bert Richard McMurry the Battle of Helena with Parker Dunkerly, Mike Gorman, et. al Aug 15-17 – The Battle of Chickamauga with Jim Ogden Hills and Len Riedel OCT Sep 6-10 5-10 – Sibley's 1862 New Mexico Campaign with Neil Mangum OCT 2-4, 2015 Hunter in the Valley with Len Riedel APRIL 13-19, 2015 Peninsula Campaign with Sep 12-14 – Pensacola and Mobile with Richard McMurry The Retreat The A Silence at Appomattox: Len Riedel OCT 17-19 and Surrender of the Army of OctBeginning 6-10 – Hunter in the Valley withNorthern Len Riedel The of the Atlanta Virginia with Neil Mangum OCT 10-18, 2015 Campaign McMurry Oct 17-19with – Richard The Beginning of the Atlanta Campaign with Richard McMurry APRIL 29-MAY 2, 2015 Founding Father’s Tour: DEC 12-14 A Walking of Lexington andwith Parker Nov 11-15 – The Van Dorn and Forrest Raids ofTour December 1862 HillsJefferson’s World with Thomas Spring Hill and Franklin with Thomas Concord with Len Riedel Neil Mangum and Len Riedel Dec 12-14 – Spring Hill and Franklin with Thomas Cartwright and Greg Biggs Cartwright and Greg Biggs JAN 14-18, 2015
Sherman’s March Through SC & Potter’s Raid with Stephen Wise
MAY 27-30, 2015
Sherman in North Carolina with Mark Bradley
OCT 28-31, 2015
Campaign for Mobile & Surrender at Citronelle with Len Riedel
BGES is a non profit, JUNE tax 17-20, exempt 2015 organization. Donations are deductible from Federal taxes Confederacy and NOV 10-14, 2015 and net proceeds Mosby’s or educational tours fund other educational project and programs.
FEB 6-8, 2015
The Wilmington Campaign with Chris Fonvielle
Guerilla War in Virginia with Horace Mewborn and Bob O’Neil
FEB 17-21, 2015
AUGUST 11-15, 2015
The Red River Campaign Part 2, Retreat from Mansfield and the Camden Expedition with Parker Hills FEB 27-MARCH 1, 2015
Forts Henry & Donelson with Ken Gott & Jim Vaughan MARCH 20-22, 2015
The Battle for New Orleans with Len Riedel
Lincoln is Killed: A Study of the Events Leading to the Murder of the President with Gloria Swift, Karen Needles and others SEPT 8-13, 2015
Lincoln’s Other War: The Great Dakota Sioux Uprising of 1862 with Neil Mangum
Gettysburg: A Study on How Terrain Dictated the Campaign and Battles with Parker Hills and Len Riedel NOV 29-DEC 3, 2015
A Tactical Walk of Chickamauga with Jim Ogden DEC 3-6, 2015
A Tactical Walk of the Siege of Chattanooga through Lookout Mountain with Jim Ogden
FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT WWW.BLUEANDGRAYEDUCATION.ORG OR CALL 434-250-9921 BGES is a non profit, tax exempt organization. Donations are deductible from Federal taxes and net proceeds from our educational tours fund other educational projects and programs.
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agenda Your Guide to Civil War Events
FALL 2014
An NPS ranger conducts a program at the Third Winchester Battlefield
OCTOBER 2014 COMPETITION
North-South Skirmish Association 130th National Competition FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3 – SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5
Fort Shenandoah
OUTSIDE WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA
The North-South Skirmish Association, the country’s oldest and largest Civil War shooting sports organization, holds its 130th National Competition at Fort Shenandoah. Participants from various member units, dressed in period garb, compete in live-fire matches with original or authentic reproduction Civil War period muskets, carbines, breech-loading rifles, revolvers, mortars, and cannons. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: N-SSA.ORG or 248-258-9007. FESTIVAL
St. Albans Raid 150th Anniversary THURSDAY, SEPT. 18 – SUNDAY, SEPT. 21
Third Battle of Winchester FRIDAY, SEPT. 19 – SATURDAY, SEPT. 20
Third Winchester Battlefield WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA
Mark the sesquicentennial of the northernmost land action to take place during the Civil War with a series of reenactments, lectures, walking tours, and period music.
The site of an ambitious restoration project, the Third Winchester Battlefield will host special battlefield tours, a kids camp, living history programs, a battle reenactment, and much more to mark the 150th anniversary of the clash between the forces of Jubal Early and Philip Sheridan at Winchester during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864.
FREE (OUTDOOR EVENTS); FOR MORE INFORMATION: STALBANSRAID.COM/EVENTS/ or 802-527-7933.
BATTLEFIELD EVENTS: $10; FREE FOR AGES 9 AND UNDER; FOR MORE INFORMATION: VISITWINCHESTERVA.COM or 877-871-1326.
Downtown
ST. ALBANS, VERMONT
Civil War Steam Days Weekend SATURDAY, OCT. 4 – SUNDAY, OCT. 5
B&O Railroad Museum BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Celebrate steam power and steam engines at the birthplace of American railroading. Take a steam locomotive train ride behind an historic steam engine and explore a Civil War encampment on the museum’s west end, near the site of Baltimore’s largest Union encampment during the Civil War.
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NORTH-SOUTH SKIRMISH ASSOCIATION
C O M M E M O R AT I O N
C O M M E M O R AT I O N
VICKI BELLEROSE ( WINCHESTER); B&O RAILROAD MUSEUM
SEP TEMBER 2014
EXHIBIT
How the Civil War Changed Washington MON., OCT. 27 – MON., SEPT. 21, 2015
Anacostia Community Museum WASHINGTON, D.C.
MUSEUM ADMISSION: $16 FOR ADULTS; $14 FOR SENIORS; $10 FOR CHILDREN 2-12; TRAIN RIDE: $3 FOR ADULTS; $2 FOR CHILDREN; FOR MORE INFORMATION: BORAIL.ORG or 410-752-2490. FESTIVAL
Civil War: At the Front and the Home Front SAT., OCT. 11 – SUN., OCT. 12
Madison County Museum Complex
E X P L O R AT I O N
Halloween Walking Tour of Blandford Cemetery SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, 6 P.M.
As part of Madison County’s 45th annual Covered Bridge Festival, historians, reenactors, and a hospital tent display— where children can experience being bandaged like a wounded soldier—help depict what life was like during the Civil War.
Blandford Reception Center PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA
Visit the final resting places of Civil War soldiers who are buried in historic Blandford Cemetery during this tour on Halloween night. FREE (REGISTRATION REQUIRED); FOR MORE INFORMATION: 804-733-2396.
LECTURE
NOVEMBER 2014
1864: The Western Theatre
D E M O N S T R AT I O N
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11, 9 A.M.
Kennesaw State University
KENNESAW, GEORGIA
The Civil War Center at Kennesaw State University hosts speakers as part of its fall symposium, “1864: The Western Theatre.” Talks include the subjects “Nadir of Nashville,” “Civil War Atlanta,” and “New Insights on the Battle of Franklin.” NORTH-SOUTH SKIRMISH ASSOCIATION
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: SI.EDU/MUSEUMS/ANACOSTIA-COMMUNITY-MUSEUM or 202-633-4869.
WINTERSET, IOWA
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: MADISONCOUNTYHISTORICALSOCIETY.COM/ CIVIL_WAR.HTML or 515-462-2134.
VICKI BELLEROSE ( WINCHESTER); B&O RAILROAD MUSEUM
The Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum presents an exhibition on the social and spatial impact of the Civil War on the nation’s capital and the resulting dramatic changes in social mores, and in the size and ethnic composition of the city’s population. The exhibition contextualizes these and other changes while telling the fascinating stories of individuals who came to Washington during the Civil War and who contributed to its shaping.
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: KENNESAW.EDU/CIVILWARERA or 678-797-2551.
Civil War Medicine SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1 P.M.
Pamplin Historical Park PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA
Join Pamplin Park historians as they explore the experiences of wounded Civil War soldiers from the battlefield to the operating table and beyond. $12.50 FOR ADULTS; $11.50 FOR SENIORS; $7.50 FOR CHILDREN 6–12; CHILDREN UNDER 6 FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: PAMPLINPARK. ORG or 804-861-2408.
Share Your Event Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
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FA C T S , F I G U R E S & I T E M S O F I N T E R E S T
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In this Kurz & Allison lithograph, Rebel soldiers under the command of General John Bell Hood assault entrenched Union positions on November 30, 1864, at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee—a resounding and bloody defeat for the Confederates. FOR MORE ON FRANKLIN, TURN THE PAGE. ☛
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IN THIS SECTION Travels
A VISIT TO FRANKLIN . . . . . . . . 10 Voices
CLOSE CALLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Living History
HATMAKER TIM BENDER . . . . . . 16 Primer
THE ELECTION OF 1864 . . . . . . . 18 Preservation
RECLAIMING LEE’S GETTYSBURG HEADQUARTERS . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Disunion
AN UNLIKELY FRIENDSHIP . . . . 22 In Focus
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
FIXING FORT SUMTER . . . . . . . . 24
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FRANKLIN TENNESSEE In November 1864, Confederate general John Bell Hood considered his next move after a defeat in September’s battle for Atlanta. He looked northward to Tennessee, where the victorious William T. Sherman had left a rearguard from his Union force behind as he launched his March to the Sea through Georgia. Hood and his Army of Tennessee went on the offensive on November 21, pushing Union troops commanded by General John M. Schofield back to the town of Franklin. Determined to crush Schofield’s force before it could escape to the safety of nearby Nashville, Hood repeatedly threw his troops against entrenched Union positions at Franklin on November 30. The results were devastating. By day’s end, the endeavor had cost Hood’s 27,000-man army more than 6,000 casualties, including 14 generals and over 50 regimental commanders, and ended its days as an effective fighting force. ¶ Interested in visiting Franklin? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area—Julian L. Bibb and Eric A. Jacobson—to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic town.
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Don’t Miss
The McLemore House (446 11th Ave. North; carnton.org/mclemore_ history.htm), built by a free slave named Harvey McLemore just after the Civil War, is now a local museum devoted to African-American history. –jb The Meriwether Lewis death and burial site (natcheztracetravel. com), located at milepost 385.9 on the Natchez Trace Parkway, a historic, two-lane route from Nashville to Natchez, Mississippi, is well worth a visit. So is the James K. Polk Home and Museum (301 W. 7th St., Columbia; 931-388-2354) in Columbia, which contains a variety of artifacts associated with the country’s 11th president and family. –ej
Fort Granger
McLemore House
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BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
Franklin contains many mustsee sites relating to the fight that occurred on November 30, 1864, including Fort Granger (113 Fort Granger Dr.; 615-7942103), which was manned by Union troops during the battle, and Winstead Hill (4023 Columbia Ave.; 615-794-2103), from which Hood’s Confederates launched their attack. There’s also the Lotz House (1111 Columbia Ave.; 615-7907190), which served as a hospital after the fighting, and the Carter House (1140 Columbia Ave.; 615-791-1861) across the street, where the family took shelter in the basement during the battle. For those who can’t make time for a full battlefield tour, I’d suggest a tour of Carnton Plantation (1345 Eastern Flank Cir.; 615-794-0903) and the adjoining Eastern Flank Battlefield Park (1343 Carnton Lane; 615-794-2103)—it’s an excellent way to get a sense of the enormity of the engagement, including the movements of both armies and the aftermath. –jb
Winstead Hill Carter House
Carnton Plantation
No doubt anything on the Franklin battlefield qualifies, but especially the McGavock Confederate Cemetery (mcgavockcemetery.org) adjacent to Carnton Plantation. It’s the largest privately held Confederate cemetery in the country, and some 1,500 southern soldiers killed during the battle are buried there. –ej
McGavock Confederate Cemetery
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BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
“I Spy Downtown Franklin” (114 E. Main St.; 615-400-3808), a scavenger hunt-like game for kids held twice a week during the summer, is unusual and fun. Activities include exploring Franklin’s Public Square by identifying architectural details on buildings and making plaque and statue rubbings with pencil and paper. If you’re here in October, don’t miss Gentry’s Farm (1974 New Hwy. 96 West; 615-794-4368). Family-owned since 1849, the farm offers hayrides, a pumpkin patch, and a corn field maze. –JB A zoo may seem like an obvious choice, but the nearby Nashville Zoo (3777 Nolensville Pike, Nashville; 615-833-1534) really is one of the nicest I have ever been to. –EJ
11 PHOTOGRAPHS BY HOLLIS BENNETT
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Puckett’s Grocery and Restaurant
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4 BEST SLEEP Franklin is full of great places to stay, all of them reasonably priced. One of my favorites is the Embassy Suites Nashville-South/ Cool Springs (820 Crescent Centre Dr.; 615-515-5151), located right off Interstate 65 and three miles from the center of downtown Franklin. It has great amenities, dining options, and bar. Another is the Moonshine Hill Inn (5456 Old Hwy. 96; 615-500-1234), a luxury country log cabin that sleeps up to five. –jb The Magnolia House Bed and Breakfast (1317 Columbia Ave.; 615794-8178) is small, quaint, and sits in the heart of Franklin’s historic district. The battlefield is within walking distance. –ej
Magnolia House Bed and Breakfast (here and below)
Gray’s on Main
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Moonshine Hill Inn
Merridee’s Breadbasket
BEST EATS
Puckett’s Grocery and Restaurant (120 4th Ave. S; 615-794-5527) in downtown Franklin is a terrific spot for breakfast—great atmosphere, very friendly staff, and delicious omelets. For a quick bite anytime of day, try Merridee’s Breadbasket (110 4th Ave. S; 615-790-3755). Make sure not to miss their breads and desserts, all of which are baked fresh on site. A good choice for lunch is Puckett’s Boat House (94 E. Main St.; 615-790-2309), where you can dine outside and choose from a broad menu. Their fried pickles are a real treat. For dinner, I’d suggest either Gray’s on Main (332 Main St.; 615-435-3603) or Red Pony Restaurant (408 Main St.; 615-595-7669). Both have a great menu and a full bar with good wine selections. Gray’s hosts live music on the weekend, and Red Pony offers outdoor dining. –jb For breakfast, you can’t go wrong at Puckett’s, which has a casual feel and great crowd. If you’re into Cajun food, don’t miss Papa Boudreaux’s Cajun Café (328 Main St.; 615-807-2324). They make a terrific shrimp Creole. The Bunganut Pig (1143 Columbia Ave.; 615-794-4777) offers a laid-back atmosphere and the best burgers you’ll find in Franklin. Franklin Chop House (1101 Murfreesboro Rd.; 615-591-7666) is an excellent option for dinner, with a grilled catfish that’s as good as you can get. –ej
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Franklin Theatre
6 Best Kept Secret Nightly entertainment at the Franklin Theatre (419 Main St.; 615-538-2075 ) is a real treat. Some of the music industry’s biggest names—Sheryl Crow, Vince Gill, Little River Band, Pam Tillis—play there regularly. —JB Lower Broadway, an entertainment district of Nashville. It’s a great scene, full of honky-tonk bars and home to the Ryman Auditorium (116 5th Ave. N, Nashville; 615-889-3060 ), which housed the Grand Ole Opry until 1974. Everyone should experience it at least once. —EJ 7 BEST BOOK Eric Jacobson’s For Cause & for Country: A Study of the Affair at Spring Hill and the Battle of Franklin (2007) is a detailed and well researched account of the battle that includes sound analysis of the critical decisions made by the leaders of both armies. Robert Hicks’ novel The Widow of the South (2006) brings Carnton Plantation vividly to life. It’s a great way to learn about the passion of the lady of the house, Carrie McGavock, who oversaw the care of hundreds of Confederate wounded after the battle, before you visit. –JB It’s hard for me not to suggest my own book, For Cause & for Country! –EJ
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS
Julian L. Bibb, a Franklin resident for over 40 years, serves as president of the Heritage Foundation of Franklin and Williamson County.
Eric A. Jacobson is chief executive officer at the Battle of Franklin Trust, a position he’s held since 2006.
OUR MEETINGS MAKE
history HARDIN COUNTY TENNESSEE SAVANNAH H PICKWICK SHILOH H CRUMP H SALTILLO
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voices
/ CLOSE CALLS
“ [The ball did] not bring more blood than many a barber.”
“ [T]he huge iron ball (a 300-pounder) lay in the sand almost within reach of me, the fuse frizzing and frying and emitting sparks like the wick of a boy’s firecracker on a Fourth-of-July morning…. Seconds appeared hours as we waited for the explosion, knowing full well that we could not all escape; and yet we did, for the fuse went out. A merciful God, he who takes care of the fatherless and the widow, took care of the soldier.” CONFEDERATE SOLDIER ALBERT RHETT ELMORE, RECALLING AN INCIDENT DURING THE BOMBARDMENT OF FORT GREGG ON MORRIS ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA, IN SEPTEMBER 1863
“ I have seen some fellows who had narrow escapes. One had his knapsack shot off his back by a solid shot and was not hurt. One had a ball through a cup that he was just about to drink from. One had a Minie ball pass through fifteen thicknesses of cloth (a knot in his cape) and lodge against a rib. Another had the tassel shot off his cap.” UNION SOLDIER OLIVER WILLCOX NORTON (RIGHT), IN A LETTER TO HIS SISTER, APRIL 21, 1862
“ I have had three horses shot under me and disabled…. My saddle was shot through the pommel. I got four holes through my overcoat besides the ball that passed through my arm. I tell you these things, my darling wife, in order that you may be still more grateful to our Heavenly Father for his most wonderful and merciful preservation of my life.” CONFEDERATE GENERAL STEPHEN DODSON RAMSEUR (LEFT), IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, JUNE 4, 1864, FOUR MONTHS BEFORE HE WAS MORTALLY WOUNDED AT THE BATTLE OF CEDAR CREEK
“ We had a heavy rain this afternoon, accompanied by thunder and lightning, and a severe storm which uprooted a large tree near my shelter, that came very near falling on me…. In gratitude for my narrow escape I went to prayer meeting this evening like a good boy.” CONFEDERATE ARTILLERIST GEORGE M. NEESE, IN HIS DIARY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1863
“ A ROUND BULLET HOLE, AS IT WAS SUPPOSED, WAS NOTICED IN COLONEL LIPPINCOTT’S FELT HAT. ‘A PRETTY CLOSE CALL, COLONEL,’ SOME ONE REMARKED. ‘OH, NO,’ SAID LIPPINCOTT, WITH COOL INDIFFERENCE, AS THE REBEL BULLETS WERE WHISTLING PAST HIS HEAD, ‘I CUT THESE HOLES THIS MORNING FOR THE PURPOSE OF VENTILATION IN THIS HOT WEATHER.’” ALBERT O’CONNELL MARSHALL, 33RD ILLINOIS INFANTRY, DESCRIBING COLONEL CHARLES E. LIPPINCOTT’S RESPONSE TO ONE OF HIS MEN DURING THE BATTLE OF HILL’S PLANTATION, ARKANSAS, JULY 7, 1862
SOURCES: LETTERS FROM A SURGEON OF THE CIVIL WAR (1906); SOLDIERS’ LETTERS, FROM CAMP, BATTLE-FIELD AND PRISON (1865); THE COLOR-GUARD … (1864); LETTERS OF A FAMILY DURING THE WAR OF THE REBELLION, 1861-1865 VOL. 2 (1899); THE STORY OF A COMMON SOLDIER OF ARMY LIFE IN THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 (1920).
BATTLES AND LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR (RAMSEUR); ARMY LETTERS, 1861-1865 (NORTON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
IOLA CALEB, A SOLDIER IN THE 17TH MAINE INFANTRY, ON THE BULLET THAT GRAZED HIS BEARD AT THE BATTLE OF CHANCELLORSVILLE IN MAY 1863
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A UNiQUe, MUltiFAceteD exploration of the
DAy-tO-DAy liFe of the solider— from the solider’s fascinating perpective.
A CORPORAL’S STORY
Civil War Recollections of the Twelfth Massachusetts By George Kimball Edited by Alan D. Gaff and Donald H. Gaff
trANSPOrt yOUrSelF tO the FrONt liNeS
$34.95 HARDCOVER · 368 PAGES 22 B&W ILLUS.
Collected in A Corporal’s Story, George Kimball’s writings form a unique narrative of one man’s experience in the Civil War, viewed through a perspective enhanced by time and reflection.
SOLDIERS IN THE ARMY OF FREEDOM
The 1st Kansas Colored, the Civil War’s First African American Combat Unit By Ian Michael Spurgeon
BATTLES AND LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR (RAMSEUR); ARMY LETTERS, 1861-1865 (NORTON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
$29.95 HARDCOVER · 400 PAGES 11 B&W ILLUS.
Soldiers in the Army of Freedom is the first published account of the first black unit and, in particular, its contribution to Union victory in the trans-Mississippi theater of the Civil War. As such, it restores the First Kansas Colored Infantry to its rightful place in American history.
with this deluxe kit containing a book, stereoscopic viewer, and 35 3D photographs, many culled from the Smithsonian Institute Archives.
AvAilAble everywhere OctOber 2014 ISBN: 978-1-57912-972-9 • $34.95 • Published by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
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The definitive portrait of a nation at war, now in a collector’s boxed set
THE CIVIL WAR Told by Those Who Lived It
GEORGE CROOK
From the Redwoods to Appomattox By Paul Magid $39.95 HARDCOVER · 408 PAGES 21 B&W ILLUS.
Renowned for his prominent role in the Apache and Sioux wars, General George Crook (1828–90) was considered by William Tecumseh Sherman to be his greatest Indianfighting general. Paul Magid’s detailed and engaging narrative focuses on Crook’s early years through the end of the Civil War.
7/18/14 2:03 PM
Brooks D. Simpson Stephen W. Sears Aaron Sheehan-Dean editors
Hundreds of pieces by scores of participants form a unique firsthand record of events—as seen from North and South, in the heat of battle and at the home front—from November 1860 to June 1865. Each hardcover volume features a chronology of events, capsule biographies of the writers, and detailed notes. The boxed set includes four fold-out posters presenting enlarged versions of the original hand-drawn endpaper maps prepared by expert Civil War cartographer Earl McElfresh. “A masterpiece. . . . It will forever deepen the way you see this central chapter in our history.” —Malcolm Jones, Newsweek 3624 pp. • $157.50
THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY INSTITUTION. WWW.OU.EDU/EOO
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The Library of America
www.loa.org
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living history
by jenny johnston
Hatmaker Tim Bender in 1991, tim bender was 50 years old, newly retired from his job in corporate security, and beginning to dabble in real estate as a second career. Then, one weekend, he found himself at a Civil War reenactment with his son-in-law at the time, a modern-day member of the 7th Tennessee. Taking in the 19th-century atmosphere, something inside Bender stirred. ¶ In a way, the Civil War had long been a part of Bender’s life. Growing up in Hagerstown, Maryland, he had spent countless boyhood hours wandering the Antietam battlefield and its surrounding farmlands, “finding bullets and other little things.” One of his great-grandfathers, a German immigrant and a watchmaker and clockmaker by trade, had fought with the 6th Ohio Infantry. Not long after that reenactment, Bender ditched his real estate plan and set up shop as a general line sutler, selling period-correct goods to reenactors full time. He sold everything from cutlery and Union-issue New Testaments to “hundreds and hundreds” of pairs of glasses. “I would go to these antique malls and scrounge around for anything that was period appropriate,” explains Bender. He also made wood items that reenactors could use around the campsite—things like lanterns and tables and lap desks for officers, all modeled to 19th-century specs.
to sell. So he set out to make them himself. The community of 19thcentury hatmakers is a small one. Currently, there are just three main players, including
Tim Bender (below) makes between 650 and 700 hats per year using 19thcentury materials and techniques.
Bender. He says they are collegial. But given the circumscribed nature of the Civil Warera hat buying market, they are not particularly collaborative. “As far as getting someone to teach me to make a hat, nobody was going to do that, because I would cut into their business,” he says. So Bender taught himself. He’d met a local antique merchant—a woman at least 90 years old, and ornery—who had an extensive collection of Victorian-era hats, at least 20
somewhere along the way, Bender’s general interest in Civil War-era commodities narrowed sharply to just one. “I developed a fascination with hats,” Bender confesses. Flattop bowlers, bell-crown top hats, dome-top arabias, porkpies—he loved their look, their style, their craftsmanship. He would run across period hats at the antique malls occasionally, but most of them were in such raw shape that they weren’t fit
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of them from the Civil War period. “I cajoled her into letting me come to her house to inspect them,” recalls Bender. “She wouldn’t let me take any pictures, and she wasn’t about to sell any of them. But I had a good look at them firsthand—the types of lining, the binding, the materials that were used.” Elsewhere, Bender purchased one antique hat in particular that became his model and his muse. “It was rather misshapen due to age, but my best guess is that it started life as a low-crown rounded top with a somewhat short brim of about three inches,” says Bender. He paid $200 for it, and took it apart almost stitch by stitch to see how it was put together and what techniques were used to sew it. “That was my basis,” he says. now 72, bender has been creating period hats for going on 20 years, all of them made to order and sold through his company, TP&H Trading Co. (The name stands for Trust, Pride, and Honesty.) His basement workshop brims with hat parts, including dozens upon dozens of “ As far as getting someone to teach me to make a hat, nobody was going to do that.” hat blocks—smooth wooden forms that are used to shape each hat. “You need about eight blocks all of the same type but in different sizes for each hat style,” he explains. Bender offers around 15 standard styles, so that’s 120 blocks right there. He makes all of his blocks by hand.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GENE SMIRNOV
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His hats are made from the same materials—mainly fur felt and leather—and via the same processes that would have been used 150 years ago. When he talks about the “old ways,” his tone borders on reverent. “Back in the Civil War era, sweatbands on hats were made of real leather, not like today, where you end up with all kinds of garbage—it might be an amalgamated leather of some kind, and they’re kind of narrow,” he explains. “Back then, they averaged about two and a half inches wide and they were handstitched, one stitch at a time, to the hat. Directly through the leather, through the felt. Eight stitches to the inch was about the average.” That’s Bender’s average, too. While Bender creates hats for a variety of clientele—he makes custom hats for Revolutionary War reenactors and for members of the Single Action Shooting Society, who stage competitions with six-shooters while dressed period appropriately as cowboys—his primary market is Civil War reenactors. Fourteen of the 15 standard 19th-century styles Bender offers are civilian hats. The only military hat he makes is the Union-issue Hardee hat, but the market for it is a big one: The Hardee accounts for about 25 percent of overall sales. Bender sells between 650 and 700 hats per year, priced from $120 to $180 (plus shipping). His customers don’t seem to mind the price tag. “I’ve got one guy down in Texas who has 40 hats that I’ve made for him,” he says. “I told him there’s a 12-step program for that. He just loves hats.” Apparently, he’s not ☛ } CONT. ON P. 70
Civil War News Current Events Monthly Newspaper civilwarnews.com
facebook.com/CivilWarNews
The
Artilleryman
For People Interested In Artillery 1750-1900 theartilleryman.com 8/7/14 3:53 PM
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primer
The Election of 1864 “this morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected.” So wrote Abraham Lincoln on August 23, 1864— exactly 11 weeks before voters would decide whether to grant him a second term. He had good reason for concern. Recent Confederate battlefield victories had deepened the pessimism of a war-weary population. Moreover, his Democratic opponent, Union general George B. McClellan, seemed primed to appeal to large segments of the public who longed for a new commander in chief. ¶ In the end, Lincoln’s fears were not realized. He benefited from William T. Sherman’s timely capture of Atlanta in September, from McClellan’s failure to unify his party’s pro-war and peace factions, and from overwhelming support among Union soldiers—all of which helped him cruise to a decisive win. Five months later, the war would end in Union victory. ¶ In honor of the election’s 150th anniversary this November, we present a cross-section of artifacts from this critical political contest, which pitted a wartime president against his former general-in-chief.
5 This colorful ribbon was worn by members of a local “Lincoln and Johnson” club.
1 These “patriotic medals” bear the names and likenesses of candidates George McClellan (top) and Abraham Lincoln and his running mate, Andrew Johnson. 7 Produced in Philadelphia, this ticket for Lincoln and Johnson displays the name used by Republicans in the 1864 presidential election: the “National Union” party.
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1 Inspired by the U.S. flag, this banner flown by supporters of Lincoln and Johnson includes an eagle and the word “Union” in its blue field.
13 Citizens could show their support for a candidate by wearing a pin bearing his likeness, such as these Lincoln and McClellan campaign pins.
3 A Democratic voter would have carried this tin lantern. Its side is embossed with the words “McClellan For President.”
3 Supporters of both parties crafted songs to honor their candidates. This pro-McClellan song includes the lines “Of the present Back-woods lawyer the Country’s had enough / And we want a true Statesman for that station.” 5 McClellan supporters in need of help removing their footwear would surely have prized this iron bootjack, which bears the Democratic candidate’s name and the expression “The Union at all Hazards.”
SOURCES: Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; William C. Davis, Lincoln’s Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation (1999). Images of the patriotic medals, McClellan campaign pin, Lincoln/Johnson flag, McClellan lantern, and McClellan bootjack courtesy of the Military and Historical Image Bank (historicalimagebank.com). All other images courtesy of the Library of Congress.
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by o . james lighthizer president , civil war trust
p r e s e r vat i o n
Reclaiming Lee’s Gettysburg Headquarters
house, which was significant to the fighting on July 1, 1863. In fact, this tract, located along Chambersburg Pike on Seminary Ridge, may be the bloodiest part of the battlefield not yet preserved. Because businesses have been operating around Lee’s headquarters since 1921, we never considered that we might have an opportunity to preserve the site. Then, everything changed: We were approached by the property’s owners as their franchise agreement with Quality Inn was ending. I have nothing but praise for those sellers, sincere stewards who have operated the headquarters building as a private museum and ensured its upkeep. They could have sold to other hoteliers, who might have transformed the lowprofile structures surrounding the Thompson House into a much larger resort—or even torn down the historic building. Given those realities, I am eternally grateful that the sellers sought us out. As another gesture of sincerity and support, the owners also donated much of the headquarters museum’s
remarkable collection—including pieces related to the battle and the Thompson House itself—to the Trust. Many people have asked us what will happen after our purchase. We have weighed all these considerations carefully, and I hope you’ll allow me to put a few rumors to rest. We plan to take ownership of the property and begin restoring it in early 2015. Until then, Impact Hospitality will continue to operate the Quality Inn at General Lee’s Headquarters. The hotel’s 24 employees
LOOK FOR REGULAR PRESERVATION NEWS AND UPDATES FROM THE CIVIL WAR TRUST IN FUTURE ISSUES. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION AND HOW YOU CAN HELP, VISIT CIVILWAR.ORG
will either receive severance packages or be reassigned to another Impact Hospitality property in the area. The Appalachian Brewing Company has another Gettysburg location on Route 30, east of town, but is seeking a new site, allowing it to maintain two facilities in the community. Employees will be reassigned to one of the chain’s eight other area brewpubs. The preservation of this property will change its tax status, reducing the amount collected by local municipalities in certain categories. We intend to address this—and maintain a positive relationship with local governments— in a manner similar to one used by our stewardship partner, the Gettysburg Foundation, which provides payments in lieu of taxes related to many of its properties. Other tax revenue categories, ☛ } CONT. ON P. 70
The house used by Robert E. Lee as his Gettysburg headquarters (center) sits between a Quality Inn (left) and the Appalachian Brewery Company (right) on Route 30. The Trust hopes to purchase and restore the 4.14-acre property that surrounds them.
CIVIL WAR TRUST
have you ever found something that you thought was lost forever? Then you know how I feel about one of the most important unprotected historic structures in America: the stone house that Robert E. Lee used as his headquarters at Gettysburg. The structure—occupied by widow Mary Thompson during the battle—was overwhelmed by development decades ago and now sits adjacent to a Quality Inn and a brewpub. But soon (provided we can raise $5.5 million), it will become part of Gettysburg National Military Park. ¶ While it’s true that protecting buildings is usually outside our purview, the Mary Thompson House is just one aspect of what we aim to save; the preservation plan includes the 4.14-acre property that surrounds the
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disunion
by kenneth weisbrode
social scientists tell us that soldiers fight for one another more than for any other reason. A commitment to defend one’s unit has been shown to exceed a willingness to die for family, cause, or country, and even the fear of capture. Yet unit cohesion in battle is a tricky thing to measure, let alone compare. ¶ A related quality—a subset of unit cohesion, let’s say—is person-to-person friendship. Military friendships and loyalties are among the strongest because in many cases they are literally ones of life and death. But again, they are not very well understood or discussed. ¶ This is true especially for those at the highest levels. There are many famous generals and admirals, but very few famous friendships in American military history. Those we know about are atypical and asymmetrical, such as the one between George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, or between George Marshall and Sir John Dill. Most senior commanders tend to be solitary figures, at least in public. This is one reason the friendship between General James Longstreet and General Ulysses S. Grant was so remarkable. Neither man was known for being an extrovert; one of their few commonalities was a love for horses over people. Even more stunning was the fact that they fought on opposite sides—Longstreet for the Confederacy and Grant for the Union. Their backgrounds could not be more different: Grant grew up in small-town Ohio; Longstreet was born in South Carolina and was raised a southern gentleman in Georgia. By the time he entered West Point, “Pete” Longstreet was over six feet tall, well built, and handsome. “Sam” Grant, when he arrived a year later, stood just an inch over five feet, and was slight, scrappy, and
silent—a “plodding enigma,” as one of his biographers described him. And yet, somehow, Sam and Pete became good friends. After graduation both were posted to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. Longstreet’s West Point roommate and cousin, Fred Dent, was from nearby, and a visit to the Dent house led to a meeting between Fred’s sister, Julia, and Grant. The two married in 1848, with the newlywed Longstreets in attendance and, according to some accounts, with Longstreet himself as groomsman. Both men then went their separate ways. Sometime later they ran into each other in St. Louis when Grant, having left the army, “had been unfortunate,” and, in Longstreet’s recollection, “really in needy circumstances.” They joined a few other army men in “an old time game of brag.” Later, Grant insisted on repaying a 15-yearold debt of $5 to Longstreet. The latter refused but Grant insisted: “You must take it. I cannot live with anything in my possession that is not mine.” So he took it.
THIS ARTICLE IS EXCERPTED FROM DISUNION, A NEW YORK TIMES ONLINE SERIES FOLLOWING THE COURSE OF THE CIVIL WAR AS IT UNFOLDED. READ MORE AT WWW.NYTIMES.COM/ DISUNION.
Then came the Civil War. Longstreet rose quickly up the ranks. His dignified bearing overlaid a tough and imperturbable nature in battle and a supreme tactical instinct. Such qualities endeared him to General Robert E. Lee, who called “Old Pete” his closest aide and “war horse.” A breach would open between the two, however, at Gettysburg when they had their famous quarrel over both the battle plan and the invasion itself. Lee prevailed in the dispute but not in the battle, which the Confederates lost badly. Longstreet got much of the blame. To this day he is shunned by southern partisans who charge him with disloyalty and even sabotage of Lee’s plan. Nevertheless, Longstreet continued to lead troops, serving bravely at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. Then, the following May at the Battle of the Wilderness, he faced Grant’s troops directly. It did not go well for Longstreet. He was shot in the shoulder and the neck by someone on his own side and lost the power of his right arm. But he survived and resumed fighting in the fall. For his part, Grant, who, after returning to military service, began the war in obscurity, had by then risen to command the Union army. At one point a proposal was floated between General Edward Ord
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
An Unlikely Friendship
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
of the Union and Longstreet to initiate a peace conference, using Mrs. Grant and her old friend Mrs. Longstreet as the initial intermediaries. General Grant, following the orders of President Lincoln, put a stop to the idea. The two friends would finally meet again following the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House. It was Longstreet, according to various accounts, who persuaded Lee that Grant would offer generous terms there. When Grant did just that, the mood in the room was one of stiff relief. It was the same when Grant met a few southern officers shortly after. But as soon as he saw Longstreet in the group, he approached him warmly, grabbed his hand and said, “Pete, let us have another game of brag, to recall the days that were so pleasant.” Longstreet was overcome:
Despite their vastly different backgrounds, Generals Ulysses S. Grant (left) and James Longstreet (right) formed a friendship as young men that would survive their opposing loyalties during the Civil War.
“Great God! I thought to myself, how my heart swells out to such magnanimous touch of humanity. Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?” That sentiment, alas, was not widespread. When time came to weigh amnesty for Confederate officers, Grant put in a strong recommendation for Longstreet. It was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, who said to the southern general, “There are three persons of the South who can never receive amnesty: Mr. Davis, General Lee, and yourself. You have given the Union cause too much trouble.” “You know, Mr. President, that those who are forgiven most love the most,” replied Longstreet. “Yes,” said Johnson, “you have very high authority for that, but you can’t have amnesty.”
Longstreet eventually got his amnesty and Grant became president. Grant even appointed Longstreet, then his “political friend and adherent,” to the position of surveyor of customs at New Orleans. It was something of an achievement because Longstreet had made himself very unpopular in that city by publishing positive views on Reconstruction, which went against those then prevailing throughout much of the South. Longstreet remained in the job until 1873 and went on to accept appointments as a federal marshal, a collector of revenue, a commissioner of railroads, and even as a minister to the Ottoman Empire, just two years after Grant visited there on his postpresidential world tour. Longstreet died at age 82, in 1904. Grant had died nearly two decades earlier, following two difficult terms ☛ } CONT. ON P. 70
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in focus
by tktktktktktk
Fixing Fort Sumter
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
THE CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY IS A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES FOR THE PUBLIC BENEFIT. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CCWP AND ITS MISSION, VISIT WWW. CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY.ORG
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
8/4/14 11:32 PM
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
by bob zeller president , center for civil war photography
COLLECTION OF KEITH BRADY
on april 13, 1861, after enduring a massive, 34-hour bombardment, the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter surrendered the embattled bastion to Confederate forces. In the weeks that followed, the victorious Rebels went to work repairing the considerable damage caused during the attack, with an eye toward restoring the vital fortress in Charleston Harbor. This remarkable photograph, which has only recently come to light, shows a fort in transition, with southern workers taking a lunch break at a long dining table in Sumter’s parade ground not long after the engagement that started the Civil War. The image also provides significant new information about the fort, namely that its Confederate occupants enclosed Sumter’s second-tier casements so as to create quarters, with doors and windows cut out of the makeshift wood-plank walls. “The amazing thing to us is we have never seen anything or any record of all these casemates being enclosed,” says Rick Hatcher, historian at Fort Sumter National Monument, who notes that previously known images taken immediately after the federal surrender show the casements still exposed. As for the image’s larger significance, Hatcher points to it as evidence that the Confederates “wanted to get the fort back on line as quickly as possible,” and that they “were getting pretty well organized, with all those slabs of stone or granite that are next to the large table where the men are eating.” The long dining table, with room for dozens, exemplifies the lengths to which southerners were willing to go to repair the bastion, which during the war became more than a fort, but a symbol of the defiance and independence of the Confederacy.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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c a s u a lt i e s o f wa r
A PROTEST OVER ILL TREATMENT TURNS DEADLY FOR A BLACK UNION SOLDIER AND FIVE COMRADES. BY JUDITH GIESBERG
ix black coffins lay in a neat row on a beach overlooking the Atlantic. Around noon on December 1, 1865, the six condemned men were escorted out of the guardhouse at Fort Clinch on Amelia Island, Florida, and past a small group of onlookers. “Good bye, my boy,” one of the doomed men said to a child in the crowd.1 At 46, Private Jacob Plowden was a good deal older than those he walked alongside that day. Perhaps the child reminded him of his own sons back home, 10-year old Jesse and six-year old John. Plowden had left the boys in Bedford, Pennsylvania, in July 1863, making his way to Philadelphia to enlist in Company E of the 3rd United States Colored Troops. He had not seen his family since, and he never would again. On a sandy rise, Jacob Plowden stood alongside five of his fellow recruits in the 3rd usct and listened as their sentences were read aloud. Private Joseph Green had engaged “in a mutiny to resist the authority of his superior officer.” Private David Craig had engaged “in a mutiny, and did incite others to join therein.” Private Joseph Nathaniels did “discharge his fire arms, with intent to kill” his commanding officers. Private Thomas Howard “did aim, and attempt to discharge his fire arms” at two of his superior officers. And Private Jacob Plowden had engaged “in a mutiny to resist the authority of his superior officers … and did actively incite and encourage others to engage therein, at which time, and in connection wherewith, numerous fire-arms, in the hands of enlisted men, were discharged towards” their superior officers. All were sentenced “to death with musketry.”2 Across from the men stood 36 members of the 34th usct. As the 2nd South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, they had participated in the June 1863 Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, helping to free hundreds of slaves. Now they were charged with a far grimmer task. Just after noon on the nearly deserted beach, they trained their
JACOB PLOWDEN WHO
A soldier in Company E, 3rd United States Colored Troops BORN
Pennsylvania, 1819 DIED
December 1, 1865, by firing squad, at Fort Clinch, Amelia Island, Florida FACTOID
Plowden, a farm laborer in Cumberland County Township, Pennsylvania, before the war, was not able to read or write.
To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our Notes section on page 78.
rifles on Plowden and company as the men were blindfolded and ordered to kneel before their coffins. As two clergymen led the condemned in prayer, First Lieutenant John Stuart, commander of the 34th usct, gave the order: “Fire!” With that, they discharged their weapons, killing Plowden and the rest. The burial detachment moved in, placed each man face down in his coffin, and buried them where they were shot. The unceremonious burial and the face-down position represented the army’s stance that Plowden and his comrades had been convicted of a particularly heinous crime. Article 7 of the Articles of War held that “[a]ny officer or soldier who shall begin, excite, cause, or join in, any mutiny or sedition, in any troop or company in the service of the United States, or in any party, post, detachment, or guard, shall suffer death, or such other punishment as by a court-martial shall be inflicted.” Article 9 further stipulated the same treatment for “[a]ny officer or soldier who shall strike his superior officer, or draw or lift up any weapon, or offer any violence against him, being in the execution of his office, on any pretense whatsoever, or shall disobey any lawful command of his superior officer.”3 Jacob Plowden and two of
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Jacob Plowden
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his brothers, Benjamin and John, had been among the early rush of black volunteers. They enlisted eagerly, two days after Frederick Douglass urged men to rise and be counted at a large meeting in Philadelphia in July 1863. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket upon his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket,” Douglass entreated the crowds, “and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”4 Plowden and the others had donned the blue uniform and shouldered muskets in hopes, perhaps, of earning equal rights of citizenship. Yet something went terribly wrong. After an assignment on Morris Island, South Carolina, where they formed part of the force besieging Fort Wagner, the 3rd was detailed to Jacksonville, Florida, where they were put on garrison duty. There, on October 29, 1865, some six months after the Con-
A wartime sketch of Fort Clinch, Florida, where six black soldiers from the 3rd United States Colored Troops were executed on December 1, 1865. They had been convicted of participating in a mutiny against their white officers.
federate surrender at Appomattox and just 20 days before the regiment was due to muster out, Plowden lashed out when a white officer hung a black soldier up by his thumbs for stealing molasses, allegedly shouting that “white soldiers were not tied up that way and no other colored soldiers only in our regiment” and that “there would be no more of it if he had to die on the spot.” Repeating this threat, Plowden, with his gun in his hand, “walked around” camp “shaking his hands and body” and “vowing revenge.” Plowden’s challenge was taken up by others, and a confrontation between the white officers and black soldiers ensued. The regiment’s lieutenant colonel was shot in the thumb; several usct were also wounded, including 19-year-old Private Joseph Green, who suffered two bullet wounds. Although an officer at his trial described Plowden as “usually obedient,” this had not been Plowden’s first offense. In October 1863, Plowden was promoted to corporal in rec-
ognition of his work on Morris Island; three weeks later, he was stripped of his rank in a court-martial at which he was found guilty of having disobeyed orders from a senior officer. When asked to assist the officer in hanging a black comrade by his thumbs for having insulted the white man, Plowden had refused, seizing the officer’s musket and yelling that “no God-damned white officer” would threaten him. Besides losing his rank, Plowden also served 30 days in the stockade.5 Plowden, then, had established himself as a critic of harsh punishments for soldiers accused of minor offenses— insulting an officer, perhaps, or stealing food. “Nothing instigated trouble within the u.s.c.t.,” historian Joseph Glatthaar has observed, “like tying up black soldiers.” Black soldiers repeatedly resisted white officers’ efforts to tie them. Indeed, mutinies resulted from similar confrontations in two other black regiments. In the 38th usct, a private held off a white officer ☛ } CONT. ON P. 70
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b at t l e f i e l d echoes
n the fall of 1864, the southwestern region of Virginia would not have appeared on any lists of noteworthy military locations. The armies of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee were deadlocked in the trenches around Petersburg; William T. Sherman was racking up victories in the Deep South; and in Washington, a presidential election that would determine the fate of the conflict was looming. And yet, in early October, one short, sharp engagement in the remote mountains of Smyth County, Virginia, did take on significant strategic importance for one specific reason—salt. The small town of Saltville contained the salt works that were the Confederacy’s main source of the critical mineral.1 Salt provided the only means to preserve rations for the Rebel army and to keep livestock healthy. Losing the works would have been a severe blow for the Confederacy, which was struggling to provide enough food and materiel for its men. It was the possibility of delivering such a setback that prompted a force of nearly 3,700 Union soldiers, commanded by Brigadier General Stephen Burbridge, to move upon Saltville in the early hours of October 2. The Federal column included cavalry regiments from Ohio and Michigan and, most notably, approximately 400 men from the 5th U.S. Colored Cavalry Regiment. Awaiting the Yankees was a Confederate force of no more than 2,800 Tennesseans hunkered behind a defensive line of logs and earthworks built into the sides of the surrounding hills.2 Late in the morning, the Union column clashed with Confederate pickets, forcing them to retreat to the prepared Rebel defenses. Burbridge kept advancing, and after hours of pushing through heavy, smoke-filled woods, the Yankees arrived at the Rebel line. After an intense, close fight, the Federals were able to overwhelm the Confederates and push them back toward the town. But the uncoordinated Union attack failed to reinforce any success gained along the
line. As the Rebels brought in reserves, the Yankees lost all momentum, seemingly stuck in place while taking heavy causalities. As one Confederate observed, “The enemy seemed to content himself in maintaining his ground, in full view of the coveted Saltworks, but fully a mile away.”3 As night fell, THE BATTLE the battered Union regiments OF SALTVILLE made camp and then left before DATE dawn. It was as if the Federals October 2, 1864 had simply lost interest in their LOCATION objective. Saltville, Virginia RESULT What happened next came Confederate to permanently overshadow victory the battle. On the morning of COMMANDERS October 3, Confederate scouts Brigadier General Stephen Burbridge scoured the battlefield and, (USA, above); upon finding a number of Brigadier General Alfred E. Jackson wounded black Yankees, exe(CSA) cuted them on the spot. “The QUOTABLE continued ring of the rifle sung “The continued ring of the rifle the death knell of many a poor sung the death negro who was unfortunate knell of many a poor negro who enough not to be killed yesterwas unfortunate enough not to be day,” one Rebel wrote. “Our killed yesterday.” men took no negro prisoners.”4 —A CONFEDERATE SOLDIER ON THE MURDER Some reports suggest that OF WOUNDED UNION SOLDIERS BY REBEL TROOPS THE DAY AFTER white soldiers were killed as THE BATTLE OF SALTVILLE well. The exact number of murdered soldiers, white or black, has never been determined— the best assessments vary between five and 46—but it was enough to cement a legacy of atrocity to Saltville.5 The brutality was indicaTo view this article’s reference tive of the type of conflict that notes, turn to our the Civil War had become by Notes section on page 78. 1864. The killing of enemy
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HARPER’S WEEKLY
A SMALL CLASH IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA PROMPTS A RACIALLY CHARGED ATROCITY. BY CLAY MOUNTCASTLE
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
I
Saltville’s Dark Legacy
HARPER’S WEEKLY
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
wounded or prisoners was no longer uncommon. Whether it was at the hands of guerrillas or vengeful troops, atrocities occurred with increasing frequency, and not always by Confederates. Towns such as Shelton Laurel in North Carolina and Centralia in Missouri became synonymous with massacre, but as historian Lonnie Speer correctly noted, such acts “occurred throughout the war, in both theaters, on both sides, and in nearly every state that had a battle or skirmish.”6 Only the racial component made Saltville stand out, and it was not even the most notorious such example. That one occurred six months prior, at Fort Pillow, north of Memphis. A force of 1,500 Confederate cavalrymen commanded by Nathan Bedford Forrest captured the Union garrison and
Confederate troops kill black Union soldiers who had already surrendered in this dramatization of the massacre at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, on April 12, 1864. Six months later, another mass killing of black soldiers occurred after a brief clash at the small southwestern Virginia town of Saltville.
killed or wounded over half of the 550 Union troops manning it, many of whom were black. Records indicate that many of the Federals were killed after the garrison surrendered and that the black soldiers were specifically targeted.7 Like Saltville, exact numbers have never been determined, but it can safely be concluded that the extent of the massacre at Fort Pillow greatly eclipsed that at Saltville. Unfortunately, the questionable killing of prisoners and wounded enemy soldiers by Americans has marked nearly every war the nation has fought. The massacre of Indians at Sand Creek in 1864 and the execution of South Korean civilians at No Gun Ri in 1950 are just two examples. Even World War II, America’s “good war,” includes stories of the
torture and killing of Japanese prisoners by U.S. soldiers for reasons of reprisal, anger, or frustration.8 As with Saltville, it would be both naïve and dishonest to claim that race played no part in these killings; those involved often admitted as much. Military historian John Keegan once observed that war is more brutal and ripe for atrocities when the opponents have different ethnic backgrounds.9 Even so, the mass killing of captured German soldiers in retaliation for the Malmedy massacre during World War II’s Battle of the Bulge showed that racial differences have not always been a factor.10 One would certainly hope that incidents like that seen at Saltville would continue to become less frequent in our continuing ☛ } CONT. ON P. 71
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BROKEN
PROM
ROBERT E. LEE WAS THE CONFEDERACY’S GREATEST GENERAL. BUT DID HE LIV E UP 30
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Robert E. Lee and his role model, fellow Virginian George Washington (opposite).
MISE
E LIV E UP TO THE LEGACY OF HIS OWN MILITARY HERO? BY GLENN W. LaFANTASIE 31
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because lee’s early war postings—defeats in western Virginia, supervising the repair of coastal fortifications in South Carolina, and pushing paper as President Jefferson Davis’ military aide in Richmond—revealed little of his military prowess, it was not until the conflict’s second year that Lee began to emerge in the eyes of southerners as a formidable Confederate hero, a leader who
embodied all of the attributes that Washington was known for: grace, charm, and the prerequisite stoicism of a classical hero. As head of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee’s prowess on the battlefield over the course of 1862 and early 1863—from the Peninsula Campaign to Second Manassas to Fredericksburg to Chancellorsville—elicited comparisons to the great Revolutionary leader. In the fall of 1862, for instance, a Georgia newspaper asserted that Lee had won “everybody’s confidence” and emphasized that the Confederate general had “much of the Washingtonian dignity about him,” having gained the respect of “all with whom he is thrown.” Following Lee’s victory at Fredericksburg, Mary Jones, a Georgian, wrote in a diary entry that she felt “thankful that in this great struggle the head of our army is a noble son of Virginia, and worthy of the intimate relation in which he stands connected with our immortal Washington.” Early in 1863, in the Southern Literary Mes-
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Before long, Confederates would come to believe they possessed their own George Washington in the virtuous figure of Robert E. Lee, who was himself a descendant of pure Virginia stock, the son of a Revolutionary War hero, and the husband of Martha Custis Washington’s greatgranddaughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis of Arlington.1 But a closer look reveals that Lee fell short of the mark as a new Washington, not only because his demeanor was too closely modeled on 18th-century ideas and values, but also because he broke his vow of loyalty to the United States— and in so doing, contradicted Washington’s own repeated pronouncement that the Union was perpetual.
senger, Peter W. Alexander extolled Lee’s great military talent and his upstanding character. “Like Washington,” wrote Alexander, “he is a wise man and a good man, and possesses in an eminent degree those qualities which are indispensable in the great leader and champion upon whom the country rests its hope of present success and future independence.” The following year, the Richmond Dispatch would claim to find in Lee “a closer resemblance to George Washington than we had supposed humanity could ever again furnish.”2 As if to cement the relationship between the two Virginians—the one who fought against British tyranny and the one who wanted to escape Abraham Lincoln’s despotism—Lee had lived for a time at Arlington, the hilltop mansion and shrine to Washington maintained by Lee’s father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis. Lee named his eldest son George Washington Custis Lee, although the boy was often called “Boo” or simply “Custis.” Like Washington’s outnumbered and often ragtag army, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia also faced disadvantages—in numbers, munitions, supplies, and food—on and off the battlefield. Among the ranks, Lee’s soldiers admired and even loved him, not because of any familiarity or fraternization, but because he showed his inner nobility and stoicism, just as Washington had done. In proclaiming their devotion to the Confederate cause, soldiers in the 45th North Carolina Infantry composed a set of resolutions that bellowed their commitment to the idea of liberty, which had been bestowed upon the country by “the good, great and noble Washington … [and] equaled by none save our own [be]loved Lee.”3 Other Confederates would later comment on the remarkable resem-
PREVIOUS SPREAD: ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION (2); USAMHI
as the nation split apart in the winter of 1860-1861, many secessionists liked to think that their actions were not revolutionary, but some admitted that the southern states’ justification for leaving the Union to form the Confederate States of America flowed directly out of the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that citizens had every right to replace their government if the existing one proved to be destructive to the natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. One might suppose, then, that Confederates would have honored Thomas Jefferson above all the other heroes of the American Revolution, but, in fact, the Old Revolutionary they most revered was George Washington. As the New Orleans Picayune put it, in an editorial typical of the sentiment, southerners were “defending the memory of Washington from obloquy, and the work of his great mind and heart from destruction. If we fail, we may indeed say Washington will have labored and lived in vain.”
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PREVIOUS SPREAD: ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION (2); USAMHI
John Brown’s raiders, holed up in the arsenal engine house in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, attempt to fight off advancing U.S. Marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee on October 18, 1859. Opposite page: Robert’s father, Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee.
blance between Lee and Washington as well. After Lee’s death, John W. Daniel, a veteran of the Army of Northern Virginia, stated that “with Washington as his exemplar of manhood and his ideal of wisdom,” Lee paid reverence to Washington’s “character and fame and work with a feeling as near akin to worship as any man can have for aught that is human.” In 1884, at an unveiling of a statue of Lee in New Orleans, Charles Fenner, a former Confederate officer, observed that Lee had been “born in the same county with Washington, and [was] thus bound to his memory by ties of hereditary friendship.” “Fate,” said Fenner, “seems to have determined that this illustrious exemplar [i.e., Washington] should ‘rain influence’ upon Lee from every source.”4 Born in 1807, Robert Lee was the son of Henry “Light-Horse Harry”
Lee, who served with distinction as a major in the War for Independence and as commander of “Lee’s Legion,” an independent partisan cavalry corps. After the war, Henry Lee turned to politics and became a die-hard Federalist. Shortly after Washington’s death in 1799, he wrote a congressional resolution that memorably described his fellow Virginian as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Henry Lee taught his sons to venerate the great Washington, just as he had done for most of his adult life. Robert shared this reverence, and in fact found more satisfaction in admiring the father of his country than his own family patriarch, as Light-Horse Harry was often away squandering the family fortune. Even Lee’s mother, Anne Hill Carter, reinforced this image: Washington was Anne’s own childhood hero as well,
for her father had instilled in her the idea that after allegiance to God, it was every American’s duty to uphold an unwavering loyalty to Washington. For the Lee family, Washington was more than a great man or even an inspiringly symbolic Cincinnatus; he was a civic god. It was the virtuous Washington, not the dissipated Light-Horse Harry, on whom Robert Lee would model his life—except in one disastrous instance.5 One thing Robert did owe to his father was a love of military service and glory. He was raised on stories of Light-Horse Harry’s exploits during the War for Independence. The young Lee attended the U.S. Military Academy and graduated second in his class in 1829. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. His first army assignments involved construction projects in Georgia,
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desperately wanted. In fact, it had taken Lee 28 years to climb from a captain to a colonel. In 1861, 22 men stood between him and a commission as a general officer. Yet he was probably the highest regarded officer in the entire army. Having recommended Lee’s unsuccessful promotion to brigadier general, James M. Porter of Pennsylvania, who served in John Tyler’s administration as an unconfirmed secretary of war, was
Robert E. Lee, as he appeared in the 1850s.
effusive in his praise: “Col. Lee is one of the most accomplished and best educated officers in the Army…. He is a highly finished gentleman in his manners and deportment and one of the best educated men, both in a military point of view and as a general scholar, that we have in this country. I have always considered him a model officer; the pattern of a soldier and a gentleman. He is in the prime and vigor of life, and admirably adapted for the command of our forces.” Brevet Lieutenant General
Winfield Scott, who commanded the regular army until Lincoln replaced him with George B. McClellan in 1861, believed that Lee was “the very best officer that I ever saw in the field” and “the greatest military genius in America.” But all these compliments did not satisfy Lee’s longing for higher rank and more important commands in the U.S. Army. Writing to a friend in 1856, Lee had said, gloomily and revealingly: “Tell Robert I cannot advise him to enter the army. It is a hard life, and he can never rise to any military eminence by serving in the army.”7 Nevertheless, Colonel Lee acquired a higher military reputation and broader military knowledge than Washington had ever possessed as a Virginia colonel. But the similarities went only so far— ultimately Lee never received a general’s star in the Old Army. Yet it was to Washington that Lee looked for his own model of military demeanor and aptitude. Rejecting his biological father as an unbecoming figure to emulate, Lee, like other Virginians of his time, saw Washington as the preeminent hero of the Old Dominion. Unlike other Virginians, however, Lee was steeped in Washington’s biography: in his milieu in the Northern Neck, Tidewater, and Potomac Basin sections of Virginia; in his possessions that filled Arlington Mansion almost to the brim; and in his legacy to his state and nation. Indeed, later in life, Lee began to think of himself in terms of Washington’s own experiences. Six months after his surrender at Appomattox, Lee wrote to former Confederate general Pierre G.T. Beauregard: “I need not tell you that true patriotism sometimes requires of me to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them—the desire to do right—is precisely the same. The circumstances which govern their actions change;
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Virginia, St. Louis, and New York. During the Mexican War, he served under Major General Winfield Scott and, with skill and bravery, helped American forces win victories at Cerro Gordo, Contreras, and Churubusco by finding direct assault routes through the rugged Mexican terrain. He won a brevet colonelcy for identifying and mapping enemy defenses at Chapultepec. From 1852 to 1855, Lee was the superintendent of West Point, although he had attained only the rank of major. The slow process of promotion in the peacetime army frustrated him. He finally achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel when he was assigned to the 2nd U.S. Cavalry on the frontier. He took over command of the unit in 1857. Two years later, while staying at Arlington on army court-martial duty in Washington, Lee was ordered to take command of a detail of Marines from the Navy Yard dispatched in haste to Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where radical abolitionist John Brown and a small party of insurgents— holding several hostages—had taken refuge in the engine house of the federal arsenal there. Lee demanded that Brown surrender. While waiting for Brown’s answer, Lee heard one of the hostages inside the engine house—Lewis W. Washington, President Washington’s great-nephew— shout out: “Never mind us—fire!” Lee was impressed. “The old Revolutionary blood does tell,” he said.6 After Brown refused to give up, Lee’s small force quickly attacked the engine house, subdued the insurgents, and captured Brown alive, without harming any of the hostages. By 1860, Lee was the darling of the antebellum army. In late March 1861, as the cold secession winter heated up into a turbulent spring, Lee received news that he had been promoted to colonel and given command of the 1st U.S. Cavalry. But he had not won the general’s star he so
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and their conduct must conform to the new order of things. History is full of examples of this. Washington himself is an example. At one time he fought against the French under Braddock, in the service of the King of Great Britain; at another, he fought with the French at Yorktown, under the orders of the Continental Congress of America, against him. He has not been branded by the world with reproach for this; but his course has been applauded.”8 Obviously, Lee’s own actions— having once sworn to protect and defend the Constitution and then breaking that oath to swear allegiance to the Confederate States of America—weighed heavily on him. In George Washington, Lee found a paragon by whom he could explain his own inconsistencies, which included rationalizing how he had betrayed the very country his hero had founded and defended against all odds. Lee’s justifications required a huge leap: He must have known, deep in his heart, that he was no Washington after all. The proof, in a sense, was in the pudding. Washington won his biggest war; Lee did not. In that regard, southerners who likened Lee to Washington must have also suffered from wishful thinking or deep denial. Without foreign recognition, the Confederates could not win their war and Lee could not truly become the Confederacy’s Washington. Yet there was a deeper reason why Lee was no George Washington. Put bluntly, Lee lacked Washington’s greatness. It was not simply that his reputation suffered because he was forced to surrender his Army of Northern Virginia (or what was left of it) at Appomattox, thus losing the war he had waged so strenuously and artfully. If anything, Lee’s public stature actually grew because of the way he handled himself on the battlefield, at Appomattox, and after the war (as president of Washington College, which would later become Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia). It was something less tangible, something buried in the man. In the end, Lee never could quite mea-
sure up to Washington’s formidable moral character, despite all the words modern biographers have expended to prove that Lee was a pure example of a Christian gentleman.9 Lee’s tragic flaw was that he was essentially an 18th-century aristocrat in a society that had left older ideas of social privilege and nobility behind. Lee seemed almost too gentlemanly, too austere for the turbulent 19th century. The rise of Jacksonian democracy in the 1830s had swept away the old society of patronage and deference that had prevailed before the American Revolution. As Alexis
Former Confederate generals Joseph E. Johnston (left) and Lee in 1870. Johnston was one of many to remember and remark upon Lee’s taciturn manner as a West Point cadet.
de Tocqueville, the French commentator, observed: “As conditions in a nation become more equal, individuals appear smaller and society seems greater, or, rather, each citizen, having become just like all the others, is lost in the crowd, until nothing can be seen any more but the vast and magnificent image of the people itself.”10 As a result, the social elite found themselves forced to the edge of their own world, outsiders looking
in on a rambunctious nation of gogetters and scramblers who sought to make their way in the world by whatever means might come along. Yet amid the swirling changes that came with the rise of political democracy, the onslaught of the market revolution, the burgeoning industrial revolution, and the advent of the common man, Lee displayed an 18th-century stoicism that isolated him. At West Point, in fact, his fellow cadets called him the “Marble Model” for his stonelike demeanor.11 It required enormous self-restraint to carry oneself like an 18th-century gentlemen when the men now leading the nation had risen to prominence because of their talents and accomplishments, not their family’s legacy. Lee never was a self-made man, a term that describes the thenprevailing belief among northerners and westerners that anyone could achieve success with hard work and undaunted determination. Instead, Lee tried to live as he believed George Washington would have done, with dignity and an air of detachment from the turbulence that pervaded the antebellum era. His long career in the Old Army and his marriage to a Custis allowed him to regard himself as an epitome of Virginia aristocracy, despite the fact that it was Light-Horse Harry Lee’s squandering of the family fortune that had required his gainful employment in the U.S. Army. Washington had been able to carry off an air of social detachment along with a gracious elitism in his time, but Lee’s contemporaries sometimes regarded the Army of Northern Virginia’s commander as icy and unreachable. Mary Boykin Chesnut, the flower of Charleston society and of the ladies who flocked to Richmond with their politician husbands, famously remarked that Lee was difficult to know: “He looks so cold and quiet and grand.” In the fall of 1860, a Kentuckian expressed similar sentiments: “I knew him well, perhaps I might say, intimately, though his grave, cold dignity of bearing and the prudential reserve of his manners rather chilled over-early, or
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Like his model, General Washington, Lee sought to command by the potency of his own character rather than face-to-face encounters that might prove less than comfortable. This leadership style worked amazingly well with General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, although even Jackson failed to live up to Lee’s high expectations on occasion—during the Peninsula Campaign in 1862, for example. To a German observer,
A romanticized depiction of Lee’s last meeting with Stonewall Jackson (right) before the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. In reality, the leader of the Army of Northern Virginia preferred not to rely on face-to-face encounters to communicate with his subordinates.
Lee explained: “I think and work with all my power to bring the troops to the right place at the right time; then I have done my duty. As soon as I order them forward into battle, I leave my army in the hands of God.” Colonel Walter H. Taylor, Lee’s aide,
complained rather bitterly that Lee “was too careful of the personal feelings of his subordinate commanders, too fearful of wounding their pride, and too solicitous for their reputation.” At Gettysburg, where Jackson—who had died a few months earlier—was sorely missed, Lee’s leadership suffered because he failed to give explicit orders and because he could not bring himself to dress down his men in person. After Gettysburg, and up until his death, he complained about how his subordinates had failed him there—but never once during the campaign or the battle did he confront his officers with his concerns.14 To be sure, General Washington had also disliked confrontation, although he was known for unpredictable outbursts of anger, both in the saddle as a military commander and behind his desk as a commander in chief. Yet Washington’s stoicism, which dated back to the classical heroes of ancient Greece and Rome, led to success in his 18thcentury war, and later in politics. Lee’s unflappable composure and impassive disposition—his own brand of 18th-century republican virtue—led to surrender in his 19th-century war. Of course, the defeat of the Confederacy and the capitulation of the Army of Northern Virginia weren’t entirely Lee’s fault. After all, Lee had no French army or navy with which to partner. Yet to an enormous degree, Lee operated during the Civil War as a very old-fashioned general, especially compared to more modern commanders such as Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan. These men, who to a considerable extent defined a new American way of waging war, issued direct and specific orders, praised subordinates for their successes, took pride in their management skills, and let their anger rip when officers failed to carry out their orders to the letter. Lee’s approach,
ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION (2)
over-much intimacy.” In 1862, Henry Wise, the former governor of Virginia, said to Lee, perhaps with some sarcasm, “General Lee, you certainly play Washington to perfection.”12 Lee’s taciturn manner seemed oddly old-fashioned to many. His fellow cadet (and later, fellow Confederate general) Joseph E. Johnston recalled in later years how Lee, although genial and fun-loving, nevertheless displayed at West Point a “correctness of demeanor and attention to duties” and “a dignity” that made the other cadets acknowledge Lee as their superior. Unlike other educated, refined gentlemen of his generation, Lee did not smoke, drink, use foul language, or even show his temper. In a letter to his son Custis, who was a cadet at West Point, Robert Lee summarized the salient aspects of being an officer and a gentleman: “You must study to be frank with the world; frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do right. If a friend asks a favor you should grant it if it is reasonable; if not tell him plainly why you cannot; you will wrong him and yourself by equivocation of any kind. Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or keep one; the man who requires you to do so is purchased at a sacrifice. Deal kindly but firmly with all your classmates. You will find it the policy which wears best…. There is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man’s face and another behind his back.”13 Lee actually found it difficult to be as forthright in his dealings with others as he advised his children to be. It was one measure of his outof-date disposition as an officer and gentleman. In fact, he was notorious for failing to confront his subordinates about mistakes and for rarely giving frank, precise orders.
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While he was, like Robert E. Lee, a mostly traditional military thinker, George Washington’s conventional approach to war did not rule out innovation. Above: Washington takes command of the Continental Army in 1775 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
governed by the dictates of civility, was a thing of the past. Modern generaling required directness, forthrightness, and something more than just honorable intentions, good character, and a faith in God. If Lee did show some grasp of modern warfare (and some scholars argue that this was evident in his use of trench warfare and his audacity on the battlefield), he remained for the most part a genteel general held back by outdated ideas and superannuated notions of Napoleonic strategy and tactics—a general who sought his own Waterloo victory in vain. Over and over, Lee tried to annihilate his enemy, when modern warfare meant that he could not possibly achieve that goal, no matter how many soldiers he might have. This new warfare was predicated on waging hard war against the enemy, including
civilians if necessary, and on being aware that battles could result only in incremental gains or losses. He was a Napoleonic general fighting a war that relied on new weapons, strategy, and tactics.15 At Appomattox, Lee arrived at the surrender meeting dressed in his military finery, as if he were sitting for a portrait rather than capitulating a starving, ragtag army. Grant, the modern victor, showed up in a private’s blouse, with his trousers and boots covered in mud.16 Such was the new face of war. Ironically, even as he wielded his 18th-century sword, George Washington—a traditional military thinker, for the most part—had understood that keeping his army together was a priority; he did not bother himself about losing cities or towns to the enemy nor did he ever maneuver his army into the wrong side of
a siege (as Lee did trying to defend Richmond). And Washington’s conventional approach did not rule out innovation, especially when it came to using guerillas, militia, and other irregulars effectively—moves that Lee rejected. In the long run, Lee’s decision to follow Virginia out of the Union and to resign his commission from the U.S. Army further reveals his 18th-century sensibilities, which emphasized state over country and a parochial interest in defending home and family rather than one’s nation. In choosing loyalty to his state over loyalty to his country, Lee ensured that his destiny would be tainted by defeat and the specter of treason. For all his popularity today, in the North and especially in the South, there remains an element of tragedy in his story, a fatal flaw—hamartia,
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“ A UNION THAT CAN ONLY BE MAINTAINED BY SWORDS AND BAYONETS, AND IN WHICH STRIFE AND CIVIL WAR ARE TO TAKE THE PLACE OF BROTHERLY LOVE AND KINDNESS, HAS NO CHARM FOR ME.” ROBERT E. LEE ginia forces went to fight at Manassas in what became the first Confederate victory, Lee was forced to remain behind in Richmond. He was sour about it. “I wished to partake in the struggle,” he wrote his wife, “and am mortified at my absence.”17 For someone who had apparently agonized over his loyalties, he quickly became an eager rebel warrior, chomping at his bit. Early in 1861, when several states followed South Carolina’s bold march out of the Union, Lee had taken a strong stand against disunion, even writing to one of his sons that “secession is nothing but revolution.” The Founding Fathers, he said, would have “never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its [the Constitution’s] formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will.” In his estimation, the supreme law of the land “was intended for ‘perpetual union,’ so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or the consent of all the people in convention assembled.” Yet Lee would only go so far in seeing how the Old Revolutionaries’ nation could be defended if it came to civil war. “A Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me,” he wrote. If Virginia should secede, “I shall mourn for my country and for the welfare and progress of mankind. If
the Union is dissolved, and the Government disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and save in defense will draw my sword on none.”18 f secession were madness, how, then, could Lee have so willingly enlisted himself in a lunatic cause? How could a man who considered honor more important than life itself reconcile breaking his oath of allegiance to the United States with his personal code of honor? He was hardly alone among his peers in supporting secession, however. Perhaps the more salient question is, how could he have disowned his own role model? Lee’s ambivalence and ultimate disloyalty to the United States betrayed both George Washington’s decisiveness in joining the revolutionary movement and the Founding Fathers’ rock-solid allegiance to their new country. How could Lee have gone so adrift? Like so much in Lee’s life, the answer has to do with the struggle between the examples of Light-Horse Harry Lee and George Washington, the two 18th-century gentlemen who guided Lee’s actions in absentia. For most of Lee’s life, it was Washington’s influence that held greater sway. But when the time came for Lee to deal personally with Virginia’s secession from the Union, he decided to emulate what he believed to be LightHorse Harry Lee’s political predilections and assert his state allegiance over his national obligations. It was
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as the ancient Greeks called it. Signs can be detected in his early ambivalence about secession, devotion to his country, and loyalty to his state. In the months leading up to the secession of Virginia in April 1861, Lee expressed a blurry uncertainty about where his loyalty actually lay. In December 1860, a few weeks before South Carolina took itself out of the Union, Lee told his son Rooney that he prized the Union “very highly, & know of no personal sacrifice that I would not make to preserve it, save that of honour. I must trust in the wisdom & patriotism of the Nation to maintain it.” On January 16, 1861, he wrote to a cousin that “if the Union is dissolved, I shall return to Virginia & share the fortune of my people.” In his resignation letter from the U.S. Army, which he wrote the day after he learned that Virginia had seceded from the Union, he stated once more that “save in defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.” That same day, he wrote his sister to tell her, somewhat strangely (given that his decision had been made by that time), that “with all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” He also received a message that Governor John Letcher wanted to see him in Richmond on April 22. When Lee and the governor met on the appointed day, Letcher offered him command of “the military and naval forces of Virginia” with the rank of major general. Lee immediately accepted. Later that year, when Vir-
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Robert E. Lee and his horse, Traveller, as they appeared in 1866. “The great mistake of my life,” said Lee after the Civil War, “was taking a military education.”
a disastrous choice. Although Henry Lee had been an ardent Federalist— staunchly supporting the Constitution and Washington’s presidency, and even suffering physically when he and other Federalists attempted to defend from a mob a political friend in Baltimore who had written editorials opposing the War of 1812—in his son Robert’s reckoning, he was a devoted supporter of states’ rights and an advocate of decentralized federal power. When Alexander Hamilton put forward his plan for the central government to assume state debts, Light-Horse Harry Lee supposedly protested the scheme, even over President Washington’s endorsement. In the introduction to his father’s memoirs, which he edited and published after the Civil
War, Robert E. Lee pointed out that his father, despite “his devotion to the Federal Government,” recognized nonetheless “a distinction between his ‘native country’ and that which he had labored to associate with it in the strictest bonds of union.” He said, in fact, that his father had declared “that the State of Virginia was his country, whose will he would obey, however lamentable the fate to which it might subject him.”19 The younger Lee sounded like he was writing about himself rather than his father. It is, in fact, open to question whether Light-Horse Harry was as die-hard as his son claimed in his loyalty to state over nation. The elder Lee had been a fierce nationalist during and after the War for Independence. If, after the ratification of the
Constitution and Washington’s two terms as president, he had decided that his state was more important than the Union, it is a wonder that he did not shift his political allegiance to the Jeffersonian Republicans, the party that became the beneficiary of the Anti-Federalist legacy. Instead, Light-Horse Harry spoke passionately against the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 (in which James Madison and Thomas Jefferson introduced the idea of state nullification of federal laws), denounced Jefferson and his presidency, and, like other Federalists, distrusted the public and feared the growing excesses of “wicked citizens … incapable of quiet.” If states could override federal laws such as the Alien and Sedition Acts, ☛ } CONT. ON P. 71
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Early Winter Sunset
In the decisive struggle for Nashville, Tennessee, in December 1864, Confederate general John Bell Hood lost not only a battle but also his army—and the Confederacy’s last chance at winning the war in the West.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
A view of the Union lines outside Nashville on December 16, 1864, the morning of the battle’s decisive second day. The men would soon be on the move, pursuing John Bell Hood's retreating Confederates.
B Y PAT R I C K B R E N N A N
41 PHOTOGRAPH BY JACOB F. COONLEY
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vors southward through the murky twilight, many if not most of the Federals in General George Thomas’ command believed the battle for Nashville over. Still, if Hood decided to halt his retreat, Thomas would be ready with plenty of firepower to apply the lash again. General John Schofield’s XXIII Corps pushed south along the Hillsboro Pike with a division of cavalry protecting his right flank. A corps-sized detachment from the Army of the Tennessee under General Andrew J. Smith formed on Schofield’s left. All were told to prepare to attack in the morning. One last thrust marked the end of the day’s actions. After sunset, a brigade from Schofield’s Second Division gingerly crept into the hilly gloom a half mile east of the Hillsboro Pike, searching for signs of enemy resistance. As the advance mounted a ridge, rifle fire exploded across the front to the southeast. Coleman’s Confederates on their hill had answered the challenge. The northerners went to ground and returned the fire for some 30 minutes. Second Division commander
General Darius Couch forwarded his two other brigades in support, but the firing petered out and the Yanks withdrew, prompting one Texan to crow about the enemy’s “desperate but unsuccessful effort to drive us from the hill.”3 Probably not as desperate as the Lone Star soldier had calculated, this final Federal push of the day not only located the new Confederate line, it confirmed Hood’s determination to continue the battle for Nashville—and “the independence of the Confederacy”—the next day. A third effect soon became obvious. John Schofield began seeing the devil everywhere. He reacted to this minor skirmish and some other unrelated intelligence by determining that “the enemy now moved a considerable force toward our right, with the evident design of turning our right flank and recovering the position just lost.”4 He quickly ordered his Third Division, commanded by General Jacob Cox, to a position arcing south off of Couch’s right and ordered both to dig in. He then dispatched General James Wilson’s cavalry corps to defend his
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The Rebels filled the main road south to Franklin, as well as the Granny White Pike farther to the west. Tattered shoes stuck hard in the muddy roadways, discarded muskets and abandoned cannon littered the fields, and prisoners by the hundreds surrendered to the Yankee onslaught. “I blush for my countrymen,” wailed a Rebel sergeant confronted by the chaos, “and despair of the independence of the Confederacy.” Blush he might, but south he went.1 As the early winter sunset darkened the melancholic retreat, Colonel David Coleman and his brigade had fallen back almost two miles. Adrift in the battle’s wake, they were soon ordered up a sturdy, 250-foot-high hill some 600 yards west of the Granny White Pike. At the top they found General Hood himself, mounted and determined. Easily defensible ridges rose high to the south, but Hood had decided to hold his ground, stitching a line together starting there on the hill and stretching to the east. “I want you to hold this hill,” implored their commander, and his men shouted, “We will do it.” Hood rode into the darkness, while Coleman’s inspirited Texans and North Carolinians formed a line along the brow of the hill facing west and dug in.2 As they pursued Hood’s survi-
PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
December 15, 1864, had been a hard day for General John Bell Hood’s Confederates. Half their defenses along the hills south of Nashville, Tennessee, had been pulverized by the sweeping assaults of General George H. Thomas’ Federals, and at least a third of Hood’s defeated army rushed south “like a herd of stampeded cattle.”
Groups of spectators gather on high ground (above and top left) to watch the fighting outside Nashville, Tennessee, on December 15, 1864. By day’s end, Union forces under General George Thomas (below) would have the Confederates commanded by General John Bell Hood (opposite page) on the run.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (4)
PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
right flank. Come morning, Schofield would be prepared to resist anything Hood had in mind, real or otherwise. Inevitable Encounters Long before the Civil War, Nashville had grown into one of the most important cities in the South. It sat on a picturesque wedge of hills in a bend in the Cumberland River, and its wharf fueled its early growth. By 1861, eight major roadways and three rail lines radiated from Nashville’s bustling streets, making it a central point for antebellum commerce and transportation—and a prime target for Federal operations. In February 1862, she fell, and inexorably the war transformed the Tennessee capital into an industrial hub of 100,000 serving the massive Federal war effort. With its supply dumps and blacksmiths, its
stables and quarters, Nashville was now one of the most important cities in the Union. John Bell Hood’s trail to Nashville had begun September 1, 1864, the day he lost Atlanta to General William Tecumseh Sherman. After abandoning the vital rail hub to the Yankees, Hood attempted to lure Sherman into battle by retreating into northwest Georgia. After some initial jostling, Sherman ignored the bait and returned to Atlanta to destroy the battered city and begin his march to Savannah. Hood then announced a new plan to strike and defeat various enemy commands in Tennessee, capture Nashville, and move through Kentucky to the Ohio River. Both Confederate president Jefferson Davis and theater commander General P.G.T. Beauregard supported the risky strategy, given the desperate straits of the dying Confederacy. In early November, Hood began crossing the Tennessee River near Tuscumbia, Alabama. The operation took almost two weeks, but once across, Hood moved quickly and nearly captured Schofield’s XXIII
Corps near Spring Hill. On November 30, Schofield managed to reach Franklin, where he barricaded his divisions in a ring of powerful entrenchments. He fully expected to cross the Harpeth River that night and make Nashville the next day. But that afternoon, Hood launched the largest infantry attack of the war— and suffered one of its worst defeats. That night, Schofield resumed the march to Nashville, which he reached on December 1. Bloodied but intact, Hood followed. When, on December 2, Hood’s bedraggled troops crested the Brentwood hills in Schofield’s wake, the view was both heartwarming and heartbreaking. The Capitol rose like a welcoming beacon just five miles away in Nashville’s center. Across the intervening ground, however, earthen and brick fortifications lined the perimeter, and artillery covered any and all approaches. Behind those works, George Thomas gathered his four army corps and cavalry corps, a total of some 57,000 troops. With his supply chain stretched beyond limit and his troops bled to exhaustion, Hood’s army was in a terrible state. One Confederate soldier recalled how, after Franklin, “Nearly all our captains and colonels were gone. Companies mingled with companies,
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on the Granny White Pike, their left “connected with Bate’s division on the slope of a high, wooded hill and near its foot.” Walthall did not like the ground, ordering his one surviving section of artillery onto the hill behind Bate, “there being no suitable position for it on my own line.”9 Bate appeared equally uneasy. He had expected Walthall’s line to be farther north, near the Bradford house, but Stewart’s entire force had been withdrawn nearly 700 yards before dawn to take advantage of a stone wall that ran east to Overton Hill, Hood’s new right flank. Dawn revealed the redeployment. Bate’s salient now jutted nearly 100 yards farther north than the rest of Hood’s line. Furthermore, his line ran along the hill’s crest and not forward along the military crest, making what Bate knew to be a bad situation markedly worse. With the pale light came the Yankees. They uncoiled almost organically in plain view of the hill’s defenders: thousands of bluecoats, thousands of muskets, thousands of horses boiling down from the north and spilling over the Hillsboro Pike from the west. As the sun rose and burned off the mist, Bate and Walthall stood and watched. The enemy filed into the woodlots and fields north and west of the hill, disappearing behind the knolls and ridges that shaped the area. Bate looked on as Federal batteries began to deploy across the front: on the hill 600 yards to the north, to the right near the Bradford house, on the heights to the west, even on a rise a mile to the northeast. The general ordered up another section of howitzers, but the early morning had revealed three bare truths: He and his hill were halfsurrounded by uncounted opponents, his artillery was badly outnumbered, and the Yankee horde was swelling by the minute. in this federal throng rode Andrew J. Smith’s First Division commander, General John McArthur. At the conclusion of the fighting on the 15th, his people spent the night just north of Couch’s division facing east. Around dawn, to confront the new Rebel lines, McArthur right-wheeled
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (TOP); FRANCIS MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
regiments with regiments, and bridivision to begin the process. The gades with brigades.”5 Hood had left corps commander personally led General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Bate’s footsore columns (by one the cream of his cavalry at Murfreesaccount, about a quarter of them had boro to harass the Federal force there no shoes) through the shambles of and protect his fragile supply lines. General A.P. Stewart’s routed corps Hoping he might receive reinforceto the Bradford house, the left flank ments from the Trans-Mississippi of Stewart’s fallback position. Fires and realizing this could very well be were sparked to guide the troops, his last chance to turn the tide, Hood and in the windy darkness Bate went positioned his 23,000 disheveled solabout establishing a line from Stewdiers south of Nashville and deterart’s left to Compton Hill, 1,100 yards mined “to await [Thomas’] attack.”6 to the southwest. Serious problems On December 7, as Thomas prepared to fulfill Hood’s expectation, a cold front whipped A cold front whipped across across central Tennescentral Tennessee and dropped see and dropped the the temperature well below temperature well below freezing. Sleet and then snow freezing. Sleet and pummeled the exposed then snow pummeled Confederates, and ice coated the exposed Confederthe ground, prompting one ates, and ice coated the soldier to later remember, ground, prompting one “Ambition and even life itself were almost frozen out of us.” soldier to later remember, “Ambition and even life itself were almost frozen out of flared almost immediately. us.”7 The storm proved a painful Although the Granny White Pike blessing to the southerners, though, ran about 300 yards west of the as Thomas could not move his own Bradford house, Bate would have to men into action, despite a series of navigate across adjoining fields that demands from General Ulysses S. had been reduced to nearly impassGrant in Virginia. When the thawable marshes by the thaw. Neither his ing sun finally reappeared on the artillery nor his ambulances could 15th, and as Grant readied orders wade through the morass. At the to replace him, Thomas attacked, top of the hill, Bate discovered his crushing Hood’s left flank and then line would connect with Coleman’s throwing most of his blue-clad army at a right angle, a salient that enemy in pursuit. sharpshooters already found appeThat night they found the defiant tizing even in the dark. He protested Rebs on Coleman’s sturdy heights. to Cheatham that the position was a The locals called the wooded emibad one, but Cheatham replied that nence Compton Hill. “he was not authorized to change it.”8 Bate’s men went to work with what few tools they could find and Dispositions spent the rest of the night wrestling a Hood’s presence on the hill when he modest trench line out of the muddy encountered Coleman’s brigade that hillside. night was no accident. With three Around 2 a.m., General Edward enemy corps in the vicinity, disposiWalthall’s division of Stewart’s corps tional care was paramount. Hood had arrived. Though they had avoided ordered General Benjamin Cheathmuch of the previous day’s fightam’s corps—relatively unbloodied ing, the Mississippian and his three during the previous day’s fighting, brigades still mustered only about during which they had held the Con700 effectives. In the pre-dawn darkfederate right flank—to defend this ness, one of Hood’s engineers placed new chunk of ground, and Cheatham them in a muddy cornfield about 450 called on General William Bate’s yards wide, their right flank resting
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (TOP); FRANCIS MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
As part of their fortification of Nashville, Union forces dug extensive earthworks (right) and mounted guns (above) around the State Capitol.
his three brigades using Schofield’s left flank as a pivot, then rolled south along the broken, hilly terrain. Soon his boys halted. Some 600 yards beyond lay the enemy battle line, menacingly crowning Compton Hill and running east from its base. Many of his men grimly determined that the hill was too steep to attack; one of McArthur’s brigade commanders
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Compton Hill, shown here as it appeared in the 1880s, was an imposing sight to the Union troops tasked with attacking the Confederates positioned atop it. “[N]o assaulting party could live to see the summit,” feared one Union officer.
enemy make a heavy attack.” Soon thereafter, Schofield admitted to George Thomas that he was “at a loss to understand the infantry movement which General Wilson reports, unless it be troops arriving from a distance.”15 In fact, a phantom enemy force had frozen Schofield in place while real Confederate infantrymen arrived opposite his center to bolster their own dangling flank. as part of his redeployment to the left flank of the army, Cheatham had ordered another of his divisions, commanded by Brigadier General Mark Lowrey, to the area south of Compton Hill. These troops arrived throughout the early morning— attracting the attention of Couch, Cox, and Wilson—and struggled into line. Their march, mostly on the run in fits and starts, was indicative of the state of Hood’s force. Wrote one Tennessean, a veteran of nearly the entire war: “Everything seemed confused … somewhat like a flock of wild geese when they lost their leader…. I have never seen an army so confused and demoralized.”16 One of Lowrey’s four brigades, under Colonel Andrew Kellar, went into line south down the slope from the apex of Compton Hill and into
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Thrust, Parry, and Thrust Again That morning, as early fog cleared and temperatures began to climb, Wilson had concentrated his three cavalry divisions on Schofield’s right, near the six-mile post on the Hills-
boro Pike. Although his troopers had enjoyed much success the day before, the terrain he now faced east of the pike gave him serious pause. Ridges, broken timber, creeks, and hillocks made for tough going, but Wilson did dispatch a dismounted force under Brigadier General John Hammond to investigate the Confederate rear. Hammond’s pickets already had penetrated the maze and spent the night well behind the Rebel lines. Now, the 19th Pennsylvania Cavalry followed their trail. About a mile and a half from their jump-off—and a mile southeast of Compton Hill—the Keystoners ran into enemy infantry pickets near the Granny White Pike. A firefight ignited and Hammond reported the contact to Wilson. More Confederates arrived and pushed the cavalrymen back, but not before the horsemen took some prisoners. Most were from Cheatham’s division and were arriving in “heavy masses” to extend the defenses on Compton Hill farther south. Hammond duly reported the reinforcement of the Rebel left flank to Wilson.14 Wilson received the intelligence around 10 a.m. and immediately relayed the information to Schofield. In his report, Wilson betrayed his discomfort with the terrain when he strikingly concluded he might render better service “on the other flank of the army.” About an hour later, Schofield advised Wilson that he “had better hold your forces in readiness to support the troops here, in case the
BATTLE OF NASHVILLE PRESERVATION SOCIETY
figured “no assaulting party could live to see the summit.”10 The general thought otherwise, concluding that the hill was key to the Confederate defenses and any delay attacking the position “would be employed by the enemy to our disadvantage.”11 To his chagrin, however, he found “no dispositions [had been] made by the corps on my right to co-operate with me.” Schofield’s entire command was entrenched and showing little aggressive inclination, and no doubt McArthur would have cursed the causes. The night of the 15th, George Thomas himself had ordered Schofield to pursue and attack the fleeing Rebels, but Schofield had literally gone to ground. “Preparations for defense and co-operation with the cavalry” would be Schofield’s mantra for the morning, and his divisional commanders did nothing to dispel his concerns. Couch’s three brigades had entrenched in an arc opposite the enemy from the hill directly north of Compton Hill to the “deflection” northwest of the heights. From there, Couch reported the movement of an enemy column beyond Compton Hill toward the Union flank. He also informed Schofield, “I might take the above hill in front but am not certain as to my ability to hold it.”12 Off Couch’s right flank, General Jacob Cox and his Third Division continued the line to the south on a ridge 1,500 yards west of Compton Hill. Cox also heard of the Rebel column moving toward his right, and he vowed to hold his ground “tenaciously.”13 Artillery moved up, took aim on the Rebels on the hill, and began a steady bombardment, but the infantry, save the skirmishers, ceased motion. Compton Hill and the chimeric threat to his right prompted Schofield into stubborn inaction. Meanwhile, he waited for James Wilson and his cavalry—now seeking out the Rebel left flank—to calm his thoughts.
THE BATTLE OF NASHVILLE
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
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DECEMBER 15-16, 1864
After his Army of Tennessee was soundly defeated by General George Thomas’ Union force outside Nashville on December 15, 1864, Confederate general John Bell Hood withdrew his army southward, forming a new line in hopes of renewing the fight the following day. On the 16th, Thomas’ pursuing army reached Hood’s new line, which was anchored to the west on a 250-foot rise called Compton Hill. A steady artillery bombardment and an early afternoon attack overpowered the already battered Rebels, who broke eastward in retreat. The decisive Union victory effectively ended the Civil War in the West.
Compton Hill, December 16
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© 2014 VLW Cartography
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h
WH
William Bate
St e
S.D. Lee
S t ew a r t
HOOD
ARMY of TENNESSEE
FRANKLIN P IKE
Sch o
an
NY
North 2000 feet
Coo
Sm i t
GRAN
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3); FRANCIS MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (3)
Colem
ld fie
n ma ed
BATTLE OF NASHVILLE PRESERVATION SOCIETY
Feild
IT E
Vaughan
Bradford House
NY W HITE PIKE
H
Hub b a r d
SMITH (XVI CORPS)
GRAN
COUC
SCHOFIELD (XXIII CORPS)
McARTHUR
North .5 miles
Edward Walthall
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ceed on foot, the fourth to hold the horses—and plunged east into the wooded, broken terrain to seek out the enemy.20 John Hammond’s cavalry brigade led the way and quickly ran into trouble. Regiments lost cohesion as companies broke apart to climb hills or negotiate thick woods and rocky vales. Occasional rifle fire punctuated encounters with Confederate pickets as the troopers trudged through the thickets. Still, by noon Hammond’s lead unit, the 10th Indiana Cavalry, crossed the Granny White Pike and successfully battled James Chalmers’ gray-clad horsemen for possession of a hill. The rest of Hammond’s brigade formed a line facing north anchored on the Hoosiers. At this moment, few Rebs blocked their way. Colonel Datus Coon’s five-regiment brigade followed in Hammond’s wake and found the going equally slow. Coon recalled, “The steep hills, rising abruptly from 100 to 200 feet high, and covered with thick undergrowth, rendered it almost impossible for the movement of troops.” Instead of a single battle line, the colonel fed his cavalry
BATTLE OF NASHVILLE PRESERVATION SOCIETY
a small valley where he managed to With the enemy closer to his headmuscle four guns into position. Two quarters than he to Compton Hill, more brigades continued the formaHood no doubt knew things were tion over a hill 620 yards southwest going wrong—and that he needed to of Compton’s (and 60 feet lower), do something. and a fourth, led by Colonel Hume Feild in the absence of its comas the morning progressed, mander, George Maney, who had George Thomas’ hope “to renew the been wounded the previous year at battle at an early hour” faded with Chickamauga, mounted a second hill the mist. General Thomas J. Wood’s another 490 yards farther south (and IV Corps had come up on Andrew 40 feet higher than Compton Hill). A J. Smith’s left, and General James battery of guns the brigade had capSteedman’s XX Corps formed on tured at Perryville two years before Wood’s left, extending Thomas’ were deployed nearby. Also arrivline around Hood’s eastern flank ing at this time was Cheatham’s final at Overton Hill. By Thomas’ reckdivision, commanded by Brigadier oning, these two corps would hold General James Smith. However, they the Rebels in place while Schofield stood to “but a short time” before repeated the triumph of the 15th departing under Hood’s orders to and crushed Hood’s left. Thomas reinforce the army’s center.17 The inspected the front and reiterated to remaining Rebels scraped at the Wood that Schofield would deliver ground to build up whatever works the main blow but that Wood could they could. Meanwhile, standing look for opportunities to strike off to the west and maneuvering to advantageously. Artillery fire began the south were the Yankees, close to pound the Confederates—espeenough for the ragtag Confederates cially on Overton Hill—but the mornto see “their bluecoats and banners … ing continued to pass and John and hear their commands.”18 Schofield had done little to renew A little over a mile southeast anything. As cloud banks began to of Compton Hill, John Bell Hood mount, Thomas trotted to the right had established his headquarters flank to investigate the delay. at Lealand, the home of John and Sometime near 11 a.m., Thomas Elizabeth Lea. With Hood’s right met with Wilson at his headquarensconced to the east on Overton ters on the Hillsboro Pike and Hill, the army commander was equiordered the cavalryman to press the distant from both of his flanks, and attack. He assured him that once the stone wall marking the northern Wilson engaged the enemy, Schoboundary of the Lea property profield would launch his entire corps vided excellent protection for most at the Rebel flank. Thomas evidently of his front. The enemy had slowly made himself clear, for gone were gathered opposite his entire line, thoughts of Wilson operating elsebut Hood was greatly heartened as a number of spiritless Yankee probes were easily With the enemy closer to repulsed. According his headquarters than he to to Hood, his men were Compton Hill, Hood no doubt “waving their colors in knew things were going defiance, crying out to wrong—and that he needed the enemy, ‘Come on, to do something. come on.’”19 However, when the commander discovered the dismounted Yankee where. The cavalry chieftain, who cavalry mid-morning on the Granny had shown considerable caution up White Pike—just three quarters of a to this point, immediately threw two mile from Lealand—Hood ordered full dismounted brigades forward Brigadier General James Chalmers’ with a third in reserve. The troophorsemen to strengthen the area. ers counted fours—three to pro-
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A postwar image of the Bradford house. A Union battery stationed nearby pummeled the Confederate position on Compton Hill, prompting one of the hill’s defenders to note, “If a man raised his head over the slight works, he was very apt to lose it.”
units in successively “from left to right,” eventually halting them along a ridgeline facing north about a mile east of the Hillsboro Pike. There, within supporting distance of Hammond’s left, they waited.21 The Federal buildup did not go unnoticed. Earlier, David Coleman’s doughty brigade had retired from the line on Compton Hill to go into reserve on the hill’s eastern slope behind Walthall’s division. Although a mobile reserve would obviously be needed, Bate was furious with the move and demanded reinforcements, a request Cheatham said would be impossible to fulfill. Hood also received reports of enemy activity increasing on his left, so the army commander ordered Daniel C. Govan’s brigade from Cheatham’s corps to reinforce Lowrey’s flank. Still, noon had passed and the majority of Yankees remained inert, but every man near Compton Hill could hear the
sounds of skirmishing to the south— and rolling slowly to the east.22 federal artillery had maintained a steady barrage on Compton Hill since mid-morning, but sometime after noon the ferocity increased dramatically—even as a light rain began to fall. Cox’s cannon blanketed one of Bate’s brigades, led by Brigadier General Thomas Benton Smith, on the hill’s western face, but the gunners also dropped shots into the rear of the Johnnies lining the hill’s eastern slope. Less than 700 yards to the northwest, Couch’s batteries hit the right flank of Smith’s Georgians and Tennesseans, and blanketed the unfortunate Floridians commanded by Jacob A. Lash, who crouched at the very hinge of Bate’s position. But Andrew J. Smith’s heavy metal did the most damage. Six guns from the 2nd Iowa Light Artillery positioned about 600 yards north of Compton Hill blasted the now exposed salient. A battery near the Bradford house spun shells into the rear of Thomas Benton Smith’s men from 1,100 yards, and yet another set of guns less than 500 yards east of the Bradford house joined the chorus.
Bate’s division on Compton Hill was surrounded by Yankee artillery with ammunition to spare. On top of Compton Hill, William Bate despaired while his trenches— “only intended to protect against small arms”—disappeared in the fury. “If a man raised his head over the slight works,” recalled one witness, “he was very apt to lose it.”23 Another southerner marveled, “It was almost a miracle anyone survived.” Walthall watched from east of the hill as “concentrated artillery fire” raked the defenders. But of equal concern was the scene to the south. Wrote Benton Smith’s aide-de-camp, “Every old ragged Reb, as he lay there during that long day … watched the enemy in full view working around to our left and rear.” Walthall could see it too: “A [Federal] line was distinctly visible on the hills in our rear covering much of our corps.”24 Near Hume Feild’s hill, 16th Tennessean W.H. Kearney also peered to the south. A fitful rain fell as the temperature had climbed into the low 60s, and he later remembered the moment well: “We saw two Federal officers ride up to the top of a high hill in front of us and point to our lines. We suspected what was coming.”25 The Vice Colonel Danus Coon prepared his brigade of dismounted cavalrymen to advance. The 7th Illinois Cavalry threw the first punch. From their position near the brigade’s right flank, the Illini swarmed across the shallow valley and stormed up an incline east of Feild’s hill. Blasting away with their rapid-firing Spencer rifles, they quickly overran the thin Rebel line—probably Govan’s brigade—and captured 75 crestfallen Rebels. But double-quicking up the hill’s northern slope were David Coleman’s Confederates, who Hood had ordered to reinforce the flank. Evidently disordered by their initial victory, the Illini presented little more than a skirmish line to the arriving southerners. “We climbed the hill,” wrote one Texan, “which was very steep, and drove them off.” “Repulsed with heavy loss,”
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john mcarthur had had enough. Around 2 p.m. he impatiently rode over to Darius Couch and asked where things stood. The cautious Couch replied that Thomas’ chief of staff had inquired about the feasibility of an attack, but Couch demurred. McArthur spat out that he was going to assault the hill himself and departed. A half hour later, McArthur trotted up to his First Brigade commander, Brigadier General William McMillen, who was then overseeing the construction of defensive works, and gave a simple order: “Take that
Impatient because he had not received instructions to attack Compton Hill by early afternoon, General John McArthur (above) took matters into his own hands. “Take that hill,” he ordered one of his brigade commanders. Opposite page: General Thomas Benton Smith, whose Confederate brigade defended Compton Hill.
hill.” Surprised, McMillen duly left to make preparations. McArthur then wrote a dispatch to Andrew J. Smith telling him he was initiating a charge unless he heard otherwise. Across the way, the Confederate flank continued to unravel. Pressed hard by Coon’s troopers, David Coleman called for support. Walthall received the request shortly after
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bardment around Compton Hill heralded the battle’s last act.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
admitted a Yankee of the results. With the enemy in retreat, Coleman’s men extended the Rebel line to the east.26 Mark Lowrey recognized the growing danger. He ordered his command to spread out to cover Govan’s setback, “which left me to hold the works with a single rank, thinly scattered along the works.” His infantry shuffled left, the line growing “thinner and thinner” as they grappled with the slick hillsides and the marshy bottoms.27 As 3 p.m. approached, Datus Coon ordered his leftmost regiments, the 6th and 9th Illinois Cavalry and the 2nd Iowa Cavalry, to pressure the “strongly fortified pinnacle” of Feild’s hill. The 9th Illinois pushed forward and “joined in fierce combat” with the Tennessean defenders. Even Coon’s division commander, General John Hatch, entered the fray. He personally ordered two guns to be dragged by ropes into firing position southwest of the hill. Two companies from the 2nd Iowa broke ranks to aid the endeavor, and soon the cannon “opened upon the rebels on this hill with telling effect.”28 James Wilson was thrilled with the developments, but his requests for Schofield to support his left garnered no response. As Coon’s troopers pressed the enemy lines, Wilson rode back to urge Schofield forward. As Wilson galloped away, the battered Confederate line finally began to crack. Good ground, excellent cover, and a sensible caution on the part of Hammond and Coon had greatly benefited the defenders, but numbers started to tell. Hood had ordered Coleman and Chalmers to protect the Granny White Pike, which froze them in place. With Yankee pressure building, a gap developed between Feild and Coleman. Feild’s butternuts tried to slide into the break but ran into the advancing enemy. More Confederates were captured or fell dead. At Lealand, however, Hood claimed confidence. Yankee attacks had been repulsed along his front, and Hood composed a short announcement commending the army and assuring victory. Little did he realize, the swelling artillery bom-
FRANCIS MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
3 p.m. and sent Brigadier General Daniel H. Reynolds’ brigade to stem the tide. The Arkansans left their place in line and tore south across the muddy cornfield east of Compton Hill and halted in “a little grassy field” 300 yards east of the Granny White Pike.29 McMillen concurrently put his five Federal regiments in motion, moving them a quarter mile to the right in front of Couch’s leftmost brigade. Hoosiers, Buckeyes, Illini, and Minnesotans, McMillen’s boys scrambled into two lines about 500 yards directly north of Bate’s hinge. Skirmishers scattered south into the sodden field as the Yanks fixed bayonets. Despite the day’s bombardment, McMillen wanted concentrated covering fire, but his supporting battery, Cogswell’s Independent, had run out of ammunition. The call went out, and the 2nd Iowa Battery hastily rushed 10 rounds per gun to their depleted comrades. Finally, McMillen was ready. At 3:30 p.m., Cogswell’s guns exploded, and McMillen’s brigade lurched forward.30 Reynolds’ butternuts heard McMillen’s bugles sound the charge. george thomas was trotting west after his conference with Thomas Wood. To the south not a mile away, smoke wreathed Compton Hill as Federal shells arced through the air and slammed into its contours. It remained, however, an artillery operation only. The army commander, no doubt concerned that his infantry stay unengaged, was headed to Schofield’s headquarters to demand answers, but he stopped for a time to discuss the situation with Andrew J. Smith. Just then a courier informed both generals that John McArthur was about to attack the hill unless he heard otherwise. The stolid Thomas told the courier that McArthur should delay until Schofield initiated an assault, then rode off to prod his XXIII corps commander into action. By the time the courier found
McArthur, the attack was on. Bate watched this action in horror as Thomas trotted past Couch’s divithe far left flank broke. “[O]ur infansion and found Schofield behind a try line of battle was driven back,” he small hill about 1,000 yards west of recalled, “down the hill into the field Compton Hill. Schofield was arguin my rear, and the balls of the enemy ing that an assault on the Rebel bastion held much danger when a spirited James Wilson trotted up. The cavalry commander was on fire, John McArthur had had enough.... explaining “with ill-con[He] trotted up to his First Brigade commander, Brigadier ceived impatience” that General William McMillen, his boys were flanking who was then overseeing the the enemy and that now construction of defensive was the time to strike. works, and gave a simple order: It was 3:30 p.m. Dark“Take that hill.” ness had begun to settle on the cloudy winter day, and Thomas calmly surveyed were fired into the backs of my the scene through his field glasses. men.” Yankees now stood astride the He asked the cavalryman if he was Granny White Pike, so Bate ordered sure those were his troops. Wilson his few artillery pieces to move east replied he “was dead certain of it.”31 as best they could. He later claimed, Thomas then angled his glasses to “I saw and fully appreciated the his left. There in the fields north of emergency.”33 Compton Hill rolled McArthur’s diviMeanwhile, McMillen’s brigade sion. Thomas sussed out the situaswept across the 400 muddy yards tion immediately. “General Smith is north of Compton Hill. Rebel artilattacking without waiting for you,” lery hacked at the 10th Minnesota Thomas drily remarked to Schoon the left front (“We thought they field, adding, “Please advance your would falter,” worried one comrade), entire line.” Wilson rode off to join his but most of the bluecoats made it command, while Schofield quickly to the safety of the base of the hill ordered Cox to join the assaults. with minimum damage. At the top, Thomas Benton Smith followed their movements, but the angle of the hill Finale and the poor line location now hid With John Hatch’s hand-drawn McMillen’s troops from his sight. artillery raking the Rebels to “tellSmith sent “some reckless, gallant ing effect,” Coon’s advance finally soul” forward to see what was happaid off. The 9th Illinois charged pening. Upon observing the enemy the sector at Feild’s hill and mass rolling up the hill, the soldier shivered the thin Confederreturned to report, “They’ll give us ate line. Soon thereafter, Hell directly.”34 the surging 7th Illinois Hell they delivered. All five regiprobed the gap a quarter ments swarmed up the damp slope, mile to the east. Feild’s past the leafless trees, taking scatTennesseans who had tered fire as they ascended. One witsidled east to stem ness recalled, “[O]ur men could be the 7th’s assault were seen climbing the hill, and then stopcrushed and recoiled ping and dressing up their lines, then before the blue wave. All on they went … climb[ing] slowly and the while, the Confederdeliberately, while our shells plunged ates could hear the enemy in just above their heads.”35 Benton barrage to the north and Smith’s aide-de-camp still couldn’t knew “they were having trouble see them, but he “realized, by the over there also.”32 increased firing and cheering, that On top of Compton Hill, William the Yankees were ☛ } CONT. ON P. 73
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YE
REBEL 52
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
REBEL YELL!
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A LOOK AT THE TERRIFYING CONFEDERATE BATTLE CRY, ONE OF THE MOST FEARED AND REVERED SOUNDS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
L! P AINTING BY DON TROIANI, WWW.HISTORICALARTPRINTS.COM
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
YEL
BY CRAIG A. WARREN
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So wrote author Ambrose Bierce, veteran of the 9th Indiana Infantry, when recalling the Rebel yell unleashed by thousands of Confederates at the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga. The collective scream—shrill, wordless, and lacking any cadence— rose from the smoke and heat of countless Civil War battlefields to unsettle, and sometimes terrify, Union troops.1 Ferocious and haunting, the yell was difficult to describe and impossible to forget. Yet it was far from ugly to the Confederate soldiers who gave it life during four years of war. To many of them, the peculiar cry bordered on the divine. “This Yell untaught—is a wild inspiration,” one veteran declared in verse. “Voice of the South—it defies
Few Confederate soldiers could boast of military experience at the outset of the Civil War—a fact not lost on London Times correspondent William Howard Russell, who toured the South during the first summer of the conflict. When observing southern troops stationed about 60 miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, Russell found the new soldiers to be lazy, unreliable, casually dressed, and openly belligerent toward their officers. Likewise, these men sounded different than what Russell perceived to be proper soldiers. They received good news in camp with the same brand of noisemaking practiced by southern civilians, what the British journalist termed “the whooping and screeching sounds that pass muster in this part of the world for cheers.” Nothing like the steady “hurrahs” or “huzzahs” common to England and the northern U.S., southern cheering lacked words, word sounds, rhyme, or cadence. Dissonant noises blended to form a strange, “jubilant” shriek with “a touch of the Indian war-whoop in it.”3 Why did southerners embrace this style of communal screeching? The antebellum South echoed with all manner of high-pitched yells, including hunting calls, frontier war whoops, and the hollering associated with animal hus-
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Confederate soldiers unleash the Rebel yell as they attack Union positions during the Battle of Corinth in October 1862. The southern cheer sounded, in the words of London Times correspondent William Howard Russell (bottom), like “whooping and screeching” with “a touch of the Indian warwhoop in it.”
WARTIME
ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (RUSSELL)
“ IT WAS THE UGLIEST SOUND THAT ANY MORTAL EVER HEARD.”
imitation[. It] comes all unbidden—a gush of the Soul.”2 For eight decades after the guns fell silent, southern soldiers who survived the Civil War continued to use the legendary scream in their personal and public lives, voicing it at events ranging from family reunions to memorial parades to the campaign trail. These men’s lifelong relationship with the Rebel yell explains why the battle cry remains one of the most dynamic sounds in all of American history.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (RUSSELL)
While most famously employed on the battlefield, the Rebel yell was also put to use in other settings, including prison, where Confederate captives used the scream to steady morale, express defiance, and unnerve their captors. above: Rebel prisoners are held under guard at Fairfax Court House, Virginia, in June 1863.
bandry. Farmers also used loud cries to send long-distance messages to family and neighbors. Many of these vocal practices became veritable institutions in the South, the legacy of which can be found in today’s hog-calling and hollering competitions. It appears that the abundance of yells over time shaped how many southern communities approached routine, communal cheering—both in town and country. During the Civil War, southern troops would militarize this style of yelling. But in June 1861 it just seemed natural for the Confederates to cheer in that way. As the war progressed, reports of southern screeching emerged from both western and eastern theaters, and under all manner of circumstances. Soldiers yelled to celebrate popular officers in camp or welcome good news. But the scream did not always convey pleasure. European military observer FitzGerald Ross recalled Confederates screeching with defiance upon entering Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, during the Gettysburg Campaign: “There is a fine wooden statue of [Benjamin] Franklin, boldly perched on the top of the county court-house, and painted to resemble marble. I
am sorry to say that this great man excited the derision of the passing soldiers, who saluted him with that ‘terrible scream and barbarous howling,’ a real Southern yell, which rang along the whole line. I heard it that day for the first time. It was a very peculiar sound. By practice, many have arrived at a high pitch of perfection, and can yell loud enough to be heard a mile off.”4 Most famously, southern yelling occurred on the battlefield itself. What began in camp as a celebratory sonic blast developed organically into an unforgettable battle cry. The British military observer Lieutenant Colonel A.J.L. Fremantle attached himself to the Army of Northern Virginia during the Gettysburg Campaign, and soon after published his celebrated memoir Three Months in the Southern States (1863). The British officer may well have been the first to record the phrase “Rebel yell” in print when describing the Confederate combat cry: “The ordnance on both sides is of a very varied description. Every now and then a caisson would blow up—if a Federal one, a Confederate yell would immediately follow. The Southern troops, when charging, or to express
their delight, always yell in a manner peculiar to themselves…. [T]he Confederate officers declare that the rebel yell has a particular merit, and always produces a salutary and useful effect upon their adversaries. A corps is sometimes spoken of as a ‘good yelling regiment.’” Fremantle may have been the first writer to assert that Confederate officers used the scream to frighten and demoralize northern troops, and his statement suggests that the practice was well established in the Army of Northern Virginia by the summer of 1863.5 Confederate soldiers themselves did not write extensively during wartime about the Rebel yell. But their memoirs teem with references, sometimes matter of fact but often prideful, nostalgic, or even poignant. Many veterans extolled the screech as purely southern in character, “an exultant sound, unshrouded by the form of words.” Spontaneous, lively, and informal, it captured the spirit of the Confederate people and illustrated the cultural gulf between North and South. As for its military effects, southern soldiers often celebrated the unique battle cry’s ability to rattle the enemy.
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and confidence to the troops in gray, even those who were physically and mentally exhausted. An officer in Virginia remembered one such moment in 1864: “Again the shout arose on the right—again it rushed down upon us from a distance of perhaps two miles—again we caught it and flung it joyously to the left, where it ceased only when the last post had huzzahed. The effect was beyond expression. It seemed to fill every heart with new life, to inspire every nerve with might never known before. Men seemed fairly convulsed with the fierce enthusiasm; and I believe that if at that instant the advance of the whole army upon Grant could have been ordered, we should have swept [him] into the very Rappahannock.”7 The Rebel yell likewise helped steady the morale of Confederate soldiers in dire straits, including those who had been captured. These imprisoned southerners, stripped of conventional weapons, still had one piece of the southern “arsenal.” At
“ [IF] A RECRUIT HAD NOTHING AT HAND BUT THE ‘REBEL YELL,’ HE COULD AT LEAST HELP TO INTIMIDATE AN ADVERSARY.” ates celebrated the rolling scream as a powerful demonstration of southern audacity, might, and numbers. One Rebel reported that the yell was “heard like the rumbling of a distant train[;] it came rushing down the lines like the surging waves upon the ocean, increasing in loudness and grandeur; and passing, it would be heard dying on the left in the distance.” The man left no doubt about the yell’s cocksure attitude and intended message: “It was a yell like the defiant tones of the thunderstorm, echoing and reechoing.” Another southerner believed the “rolling” scream imparted life
times, they yelled defiantly at their captors. On other occasions, they screamed as a sign of their unbroken spirit, or simply as a way to recall a home they prayed to one day see again. In one memorable episode, some Confederate prisoners unleashed the Rebel yell after hearing of President Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865—a display that both enraged and unnerved the federal guards.8 Throughout the war, each Confederate soldier had a stake in the Rebel yell, and many took pride in their vocal contributions to the collective voice of a people strug-
gling for independence. The scream uplifted the white populace of the Confederacy and inspired faith in its armies. “Do you really comprehend the ‘rebel yell’?” asked one southerner after the war. “It was the one message in one tongue sent back upon generous breezes from the advancing host to mother and sister, to wife and babe: ‘I am here; grim peril runs riot before me; ravenous death leaps and laughs above and around me. I am here between home and Lincoln!’” As this quotation suggests, the Rebel yell was more than a battle cry; it was an agent for bolstering national morale.9
RECONSTRUCTION The Rebel yell did not go dormant in the wake of Appomattox. While Confederate flags, gray and butternut uniforms, and other martial emblems of the defeated nation were packed away, the screech endured. It became in many respects the most prominent symbol of white southern identity during the Reconstruction era—its survival made possible precisely because of its nature as an invisible, organic, and aural phenomenon. For some young veterans, the Rebel yell commemorated fallen comrades. For others, it was a declaration of pride in their community, or simply an expression of their survival and continuing place in America. And for some former soldiers, the yell was a defiant statement against federal occupation. Voiced spontaneously at political rallies, community gatherings, and, sometimes, at scenes of racial violence, the Rebel yell became a rallying cry for a white civilian population who, though defeated in war, demanded more autonomy within postwar life. The Rebel yell was on prominent display when former Confederate president Jefferson Davis was released in May 1867. Davis, who had been imprisoned at Fort Monroe, Virginia, for nearly two years, was transported to a Richmond courthouse, where supporters paid the $100,000 bond for his release. He left the building to find crowds
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Some thought the yell helped Confederates release nervous energy and momentarily suppress the natural fears that accompanied combat. “It was really an inspiration arising from facing danger and death,” a southern general opined, “which, as brave men, they resolved to meet.” One southern cavalryman suggested that the yell partly neutralized battlefield deficiencies in numbers or materiel. “[Our general] set about collecting the absentees and other recruits, many of whom were without arms and poorly mounted,” he remembered. “He acted upon the principle that an unarmed man was better for the occasion than no man at all. [If] a recruit had nothing at hand but the ‘rebel yell,’ he could at least help to intimidate an adversary.”6 Some southerners reflected on its uses before and after a hardfought battle. Different units sometimes passed the yell from one end of the army to the other, creating a virtual wave of sound. Confeder-
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
This 1868 Harper’s Weekly sketch by Alfred R. Waud depicts an agent of the Freedman’s Bureau separating armed groups of white and black southerners. At many similar events in the immediate postwar years, Confederate veterans used the Rebel yell as a symbol of defiance against federal occupation and the new racial order of Reconstruction.
of white southerners screaming the Rebel yell. Northern journalists groused at the role of the southern battle cry in the affair, citing it as an example of the South’s ongoing disloyalty. But the screech’s use at that event struck a more nostalgic than treasonous note. The same could not be said at scenes of actual violence in opposition to Reconstruction and its agents.10 One such event occurred in New Orleans in September 1874, when members of the Crescent City White League, a paramilitary group determined to overthrow the state’s Republican administration, faced off against the state militia and police forces within the city. Of the 8,400 League members present, many had served in the Confederate army. These veterans charged the mostly black militiamen “with the old rebel yell,” killing some and driving off the others. Although federal troops
arrived two days later to arrest the rebel leaders and restore order, the street fight proved that the Rebel yell still lived in the throats of former Confederate soldiers, the same men who had nominally rejoined the Union. A far uglier episode occurred one year later, when bands of armed white men in Clinton, Mississippi, “scoured the country” in search of freedmen whose votes could have threatened white political control over the area. This story of white men screaming the Rebel yell while killing or pursuing African-American voters confirmed long-held beliefs among many northerners that the yell stood for racism and the rejection of federal law.11 The Rebel yell also played a political role in the Reconstruction years, with the term sometimes used abstractly to represent southern interests on the national stage. Alabama’s Mobile Register reflected
on the forthcoming presidential election in an 1868 editorial titled “The Rebel Yell.” “How clear that note used to ring upon the air of Vicksburg of a night in years long past!” the segment began. “[It] will make the air resonant from the Rio Grande to the Potomac at the last irresistible charge next November, cheering the hearts of our Democratic friends and chilling those of our oppressors. Stand by for that yell.” Many other newspapers made similar symbolic use of the words “Rebel yell.” But veterans themselves were less interested in abstractions than in actual noisemaking. Between 1865 and 1877, they yelled during political marches, at the polls, and in some unexpected places—including an October 1876 Democratic Party parade in Indianapolis. To the consternation of many in the North, the southerners “made the streets of that beautiful
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capital resound with the old-fashioned rebel yell.” The scream could also be heard as far from the South as Helena, Montana, where Confederate veterans gathered at the polls in 1868 to vote and screech in support of the Democratic ticket.12 Indeed, for many Confederate soldiers who survived the Civil War to become veterans, the Rebel yell was not a relic of a former life. It remained a powerful voice within a conflicted nation—a scream suited as much for a street fight or political rally after 1865 as for the battlefields before.
THE GILDED AGE With the end of federal Reconstruction in 1877, white Americans North and South moved gradually into a period of national reconciliation. Intersectional hostility declined as federal forces left most southern communities, returning local political power to southern whites. White northerners, in turn, began to take a kinder view of southern veterans and their symbols. As historians such as
Nina Silber have noted, Americans of the Gilded Age, beset by political corruption and occasional financial crises, often viewed the South as representing an older, nobler period in the nation’s history: “In effect, northerners began to view the South, and the reunion process more generally, from the perspective of Victorian nostalgia, from a standpoint of growing concern regarding their own society’s declining Victorian standards.” Within this nostalgic vision, the Rebel yell underwent a surprising transformation. Formerly condemned or feared in the North as a voice of treason, the “Voice of the South” became a cry for a traditional way of life, celebrated nationwide as an American achievement.13 Postwar memoirs of Union and Confederate soldiers did much to mold national attitudes toward the screech. The last decades of the 19th century were the heyday of the veteran’s memoir, with thousands of regimental histories and personal remembrances coming to print. Devoured by a reading public eager to touch the great battles firsthand, these texts extolled the man-
hood, courage, and patriotism of old Yankees and Rebels alike and led many Americans to see the southern screech as a central voice within the nation’s greatest and most awful struggle. Old Rebels celebrated the battle cry in print, and some northern veterans helped matters by remembering how they had quaked in fear at its sound. A private in an Iowa regiment never forgot the “infernal, blood-curdling, earsplitting, hair-raising rebel yell.” He recalled first hearing it at the 1862 Battle of Iuka in Mississippi: “To say that I was scared is putting it mildly. That first rebel charging yell rings in my ears yet. It brought my heart into my mouth, and I thought at the time that I had swallowed it back down on the wrong side.” Two members of a Wisconsin unit remarked on the visceral quality: “And that yell. There is nothing like it this side of the infernal region and the peculiar corkscrew sensation that it sends down your backbone under these circumstances can never be told.” “You have to feel it,” they insisted, “and if you say you did not feel it and hear the yell you have never
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
During the Spanish-American War, the Rebel yell—having evolved from an expression of southern defiance into one of support for the restored United States during the Gilded Age—became the battle cry of American forces. above: Former Confederate general Fitzhugh Lee (center, in front of his staff) dons U.S. blue as major general of volunteers during the 1898 conflict. opposite page: The Rough Riders charge up San Juan Hill on July 1 while shouting the Rebel yell (top) and pose atop the hill after winning the fight (below), with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt in the center.
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been there.” If former Union soldiers could respect and honor the scream in print, readers nationwide could likewise admire it.14 In fact, the accumulated written references to the screech made many readers eager to hear it in person—albeit in the safety of peacetime—and thousands of Confederate veterans willingly cooperated. At veterans’ reunions during the late 19th century, they blasted forth the yell in support of the restored United States and the national flag. In an 1880 article reprinted as far away as Denver, the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune reflected on a recent visit by old Confederates for a reunion with northern veterans. Describing a “grand and thrilling episode,” the paper recounted what happened once the orchestra on the scene struck up “Dixie”: “For a moment there was a hush. The old soldiers of the north and the old soldiers of the south looked at each other, and the throng was still. But before the second bar was struck the emotions of the gallant Southerners overcame them, and almost simultaneously they sprang to their feet, more
than a thousand strong, and the old Southern battle cry made the lofty arches ring again. Side by side with them stood the Northern hosts and cheered with them.” When a veteran turned to the governor of Tennessee, who was in attendance, and said, “That is the old rebel yell,” the politician reportedly replied: “Yes, and now hear it raise for the stars and stripes.” As the orchestra took up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the audience “arose as one man, and the old union cheer blended with the old rebel yell to the notes of the national air for the first time since the dark and bloody years of the civil war…. All the sound of the oschestra [sic] and organ was lost in the exultant shouts of reconciliation and common patriotism.”15
Perhaps no single event did more to further reconciliation than the Spanish-American War, in which the Rebel yell played a startling role as the U.S. battle cry. In 1898, many middle-aged veterans of the Civil War still lived to inspire— and, in some cases, to lead—American soldiers entering the conflict with Spain. Fitzhugh Lee, a former Confederate general and nephew of Robert E. Lee, gained national recognition in May 1898 when he accepted an appointment as major general of United States Volunteers. Likewise, Joseph Wheeler—another former cavalry general of the Southern Confederacy—exchanged his gray uniform for blue when President William McKinley appointed him major general. What could bet-
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differences and mutual suspicions. The St. Louis Republic announced that sectionalism “received a staggering blow when war with Spain was declared and volunteers from Dixie crowded to the recruiting camps to enroll themselves under the flag. It weakened when McKinley, who fought on the Union side, appointed ex-Confederates Lee, Wheeler, and [Matthew Calbraith] Butler to share in the command of the armies organizing against a foreign foe…. It perished when old Joe Wheeler led his division up the deadly slope of San Juan Hill.” And the Rebel yell had been present throughout, the battle cry of the Confederacy now shared with other Americans in order to defeat a mutual enemy.17 The Spanish-American War spelled the end of the Rebel yell as a military phenomenon, largely because it was the last major conflict in which Confederate veterans actually participated. But in truth, by the close of the 19th century, old
“ AS THAT YELL IS THE OFFSPRING OF THE TEMPEST OF THE BATTLE AND DEATH, IT CANNOT BE HEARD IN PEACE, NO, NEVER, NEVER!” at Las Guasimas the old general “rolled back the calendar to his Confederate days by whooping a Rebel yell, calling ‘Come on, boys, we’ve got the damned Yankees on the run!’” The screech also appeared in the war’s most famous episode. A correspondent for the New York Sun reported that at San Juan Hill, “the First and Tenth Cavalry came up, as did also the Rough Riders…. Some one set up the old-fashioned rebel yell, and the others took it up as one man.”16 To many, it seemed that the Spanish-American War had enabled Americans to overcome lingering
Confederates had started to lose control over the battle cry they had birthed in 1861 and nourished ever since. The screech had played such a prominent civilian and political role that Americans no longer saw it as an exclusively military expression. By 1900, it was commonplace for young people to voice the battle cry of the Old South as part of everyday life, particularly as a sign of southern pride. In light of such widespread civilian use, it appears that the war with Spain represented not a true extension of the screech’s military career but instead a glorious exit.
THE MYTH OF THE LOST REBEL YELL During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some Confederate veterans grew unhappy with the postwar life of their beloved Rebel yell. Although southern veterans themselves screeched in the service of parades, political rallies, or building dedications, they could take umbrage when civilians co-opted the scream. Such unauthorized yelling, even if young people meant only to honor the South and its history, struck some old soldiers as cultural trespassing. Similarly, they found frequent requests to hear the Rebel yell more than a little irreverent. These veterans cherished the yell as the anthem for a sacred cause, not a curiosity or party trick, and some refused to “perform” it, even if their comrades did so willingly. Kellar Anderson, a Confederate veteran native to Kentucky, respectfully declined the request of a southern matriarch to demonstrate the famous scream at a soldiers’ reunion in Memphis during the 1880s. “There is a Southern mother on this stand who says she wants to hear the rebel yell once more,” he acknowledged. But when the time came to offer the scream, Anderson resisted. Drawing a wide gulf between the past and the present, the veteran declared that the yell could no longer be given or heard: “The young men and youths who composed this unearthly music were lusty, jolly, clear-voiced, hardened soldiers, full of courage, and proud to march in rags; barefoot, dirty, and hungry, with head erect to meet the plethoric ranks of the best equipped and best fed army of modern times. Alas! how many of them are decrepit from ailment and age, and although we will never grow old enough to cease being proud of the record of the Confederate soldier, and the dear old mothers who bore them, we can never again, even at your bidding, dear, dear mother, produce the rebel yell. Never again; never, never, never.” Anderson’s final summing up, with its repetition of “never again,” left no doubt that the Rebel yell had been lost to history. A meta-
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THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
ter symbolize southern loyalty and leadership within the United States than these former Rebels, now serving the restored nation? That spring and summer, the Rebel yell rang out from the throats of American forces, many of them southern born. Sometimes the men yelled on command. One former Confederate, leading troops from Tennessee in the Philippines, prepared for an assault by saying, “Boys, I’m going to lead you across that bridge, and when I give the command I wish you to give an old-time Rebel-Yell.” Of course many young men shrieked less in response to orders than in an effort to emulate an older generation of soldiers. Northern- and westernborn soldiers also made use of the Rebel yell, as taught to them by leaders and comrades from the South. In one famous episode in Cuba in 1898, Wheeler apparently let the excitement of battle cloud his sense of time. As described in an Army Service Forces manual,
THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
Five Confederate veterans demonstrate the Rebel yell for the camera at a 1932 event in New Orleans, Louisiana. During the early decades of the 20th century, not all ex-Rebels were so willing to perform their old war cry, insisting that it belonged to another time and another nation.
phor for the Old South from which it arose, the valiant scream had been crushed by the federal military— the “best equipped and fed army of modern times.” As for the remaining veterans, the Kentuckian suggested that they were simply not the same men who had voiced the yell decades earlier. Old age, comfortable living, and mournful memories had changed them. In this view, the Rebel yell had belonged to a particular moment in time and to a particular nation. One could no more revive the screech than the Confederacy itself. Anderson and those like him found a courteous but firm way to protect the Rebel yell from postwar society, cordoning it off from the world of civilian banquets, ral-
lies, and merrymaking. Only in the minds and hearts of veterans would it still remain alive.18 Other former Confederates took a more rhetorically aggressive stance, declaring the yell the exclusive property of the men who wore the gray. The most notable example may be Confederate general Samuel G. French, who in 1901 wrote these words emphasizing its military origins and character: “The ‘Rebel yell’ was born amidst the roar of cannon, the flash of the musket, the deadly conflict, comrades falling, and death in front—then, when rushing forward, that unearthly yell rose from a thousand Confederate throats, loud … and with the force of a tornado they swept on over the
field to death or victory. O how the heart throbs and the eye glares!” French then turned his attention to peacetime and its inhabitants, echoing the sentiments of Anderson about a Lost Rebel yell: “As that yell is the offspring of the tempest of the battle and death, it cannot be heard in peace, no, never, never! … It died with the cause that produced it.” He concluded by addressing the civilian reader directly: “Ye children of peace can never hear it; wherefore I write of a sound that was produced by [an] environment ye will never have.” French published these observations three years after the Spanish-American War, yet he paid no attention to the role of the scream in that conflict. In his ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76
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South Carolina Fire-Eater
The Life of Laurence Massillon Keitt, 1824–1864 Holt Merchant
“Perhaps the purest of the fire-eaters, Keitt fought earnestly for secession and won. He then fought with equal vigor for the Confederacy and died. Merchant’s path-breaking biography is deeply researched and skillfully presented. A mustread for anyone interested in the breakup of the young union.”—James I. Robertson, Jr., author of Stonewall Jackson 264 pp., 13 b&w illus., hardcover, $39.95; ebook, $21.95
Notes from a Colored Girl
The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis Karsonya Wise Whitehead
“With Notes from a Colored Girl Karsonya Whitehead has painstakingly rendered the obscure visible and shed light on a singular figure whose life is a stand-in for millions of unknown stories. This is history at its most democratic and scholarship at its most vital.”—William Jelani Cobb, Institute of African American Studies, University of Connecticut 280 pp., 9 b&w illus., hardcover, $39.95; ebook, $21.95
By the Red Glare
A Novel John Mark Sibley-Jones
Foreword by Marion B. Lucas
“Sibley-Jones’s characters, both historical and invented, loom up as great symbols of the cruelty and courage inherent in the Civil War-torn South, but the truths we glean from their riveting story resonate still today, passing the test of historical fiction with high honors.”—Pat Conroy, New York Times bestselling writer Story River Books 248 pp., hardcover, $29.95; ebook, $21.95
800-768-2500 • www.uscpress.com
FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS |
UGAPRESS.ORG
Introducing . . .
NEW PERSPECTIVES on the Civil War the latest series from UGA Press SE R I ES ED I TO R
New Perspectives on the Civil War is dedicated to the
Judkin Browning is associate professor of history at Appalachian State University. He is the author of Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina and The Southern Mind Under Union Rule: The Diary of James Rumley, Beaufort, North Carolina, 1862-1865.
publication of primary sources of the Civil War era (including letters, diaries, and speeches) from a wide diversity of perspectives—respecting the soldier’s voice, but not privileging it over every other voice. The series recognizes that there are a great many voices from the Civil War era that need to be heard. Soldiers, civilians on the home front,
To inquire about publishing in the series, please contact: Mick Gusinde-Duffy, editor-in-chief University of Georgia Press mickgd@uga.edu
correspondents, diplomats, and foreign observers all have a particular insight into that great conflict and deserve to have a forum for their stories. The series will also include a digital component to provide an enhanced experience for its volumes and make them more appealing for classroom adoption.
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slaves, political officials, government bureaucrats, newspaper
I N QUI R I ES
BOOKS & AUTHORS
Voices from the Army of the Potomac, Part 4
MODUSOP.NET PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
BY GARY W. GALLAGHER men born outside the United States figured prominently in the history of the Army of the Potomac. Nearly a third of all militaryage men in the loyal states at the war’s inception were born abroad, and thousands of them shouldered muskets in the ranks. Many others held positions of great authority, from colonels of regiments to corps commanders. My choices for foreign-born voices include a common soldier in the Irish Brigade, the most prominent German
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who in “military skill and in courage and bravery on the battlefield ... was second to none in the Army of the Potomac.” Yet he also addresses the general’s reputation for drunkenness: “Alas, poor fellow, he had one besetting sin ... intemperance.” McCarter noted that Winfield Scott Hancock, who commanded the army’s II Corps, in which the Irish Brigade served, cut a striking figure but seldom gave “orders to his men on the march, drill, parade, or even the battlefield ... without an oath of the most unpardonable nature” and “could never address the troops without taking God’s name in vain.” During the assault on Marye’s Heights at Fredericks-
Irish-born Union soldier William McCarter’s memoir sheds light on a number of key Civil War events and personalities, including the Battle of Fredericksburg (depicted above) and General Thomas Francis Meagher (below).
burg, McCarter found himself “among heaps of my wounded, dying and dead companions.” With his right arm shattered, he struggled to escape the killing ground and suffered “that most terrible of all thirsts known to and experienced only by the wounded on a battlefield where water was not to be had.” Darkness allowed him to stumble back toward Union lines—“every minute now seemed like an hour to me”— where he finally found water and safety. Five months later, a Union surgeon pronounced McCarter unfit for further service because of his mangled arm. “I ceased to be a soldier of the United States Army,” remarks McCarter, “very much against my will and inclination.” Carl Schurz took a very different path to the Army of the Potomac. A German intellectual and
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officer in the XI Corps, and a French aristocrat who rose to the rank of brigadier general. William McCarter enlisted in the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry in August 1862. A native of Derry, Ireland, he settled in Philadelphia and worked as a tanner. He joined the army, despite being married and the father of several children, “because of my love for ... the Union, one and inseparable, ... its institutions, its Stars and Stripes, its noble, generous, brave and intelligent people ever ready to welcome, and to extend the hand of friendship to the downtrodden and oppressed of every clime and people.” His memoir, parts of which first appeared in the Philadelphia Weekly Times’ “Annals of the War” series in the early 1880s, covers his service between the summer of 1862 and his discharge from the army in May 1863 due to wounds received at Fredericksburg. My Life in the Irish Brigade: The Civil War Memoirs of Private William McCarter, 116th Pennsylvania Infantry, edited by Kevin E. O’Brien (1996), includes excellent material on the early activities of the regiment in the lower Shenandoah Valley, the Battle of Fredericksburg, and medical care for wounded soldiers—as well as memorable passages on various Union commanders. The 116th joined the Irish Brigade in October 1862, and McCarter’s writing skills helped secure his appointment to General Thomas Francis Meagher’s staff. McCarter writes admiringly of Meagher as “a gentleman of no ordinary ability”
NATIONAL ARCHIVES (MEAGHER); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
B&A
“ Had our success at Gettysburg been so followed up as to destroy Lee’s army, or at least to render it unable to keep the field, the war would probably have been a year shorter.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (SCHURZ); NATIONAL ARCHIVES
NATIONAL ARCHIVES (MEAGHER); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
GERMAN-BORN UNION GENERAL CARL SCHURZ (RIGHT).
revolutionary who reached the United States in 1852, he played an active role in Republican politics in antebellum Wisconsin and was appointed a brigadier general in 1862. He led a division in the XI Corps at Chancellorsville and the entire corps for part of the first day at Gettysburg. The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (three volumes, 1907-1909), recounts Schurz’s political and military activities during the war. He worked hard in early 1862 to “advocate emancipation on the ground that it would give us the support of the moral sentiment in all civilized countries.” He also pressed President Abraham Lincoln, who knew Germans would loom large in the Union war effort, for a commission, “convinced that ... the true place for a young and able-bodied was in the field.” Schurz’s narratives of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg highlight a passionate devotion to the XI Corps. He bitterly resented General Oliver O. Howard’s postwar claim that no one warned of a possible flanking threat to the XI Corps on May 2, 1863. “I most earnestly—although ineffectually—endeavored to convince him,” asserts Schurz, “that in case of such an attack from the west, our right, as then posted, would be hopelessly overwhelmed.” Howard’s final disposition left the XI Corps in an “absurdly indefensible position” that Stonewall Jackson crushed. Subsequent slanders against the corps, often fueled by anti-German prejudice,
Régis de Trobriand (below), a Frenchborn writer, artist, and lawyer, rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Army of the Potomac.
obscured the stalwart service of “that ill-fated body of brave soldiers.” Circumstances also conspired against the XI Corps at Gettysburg, where it was outflanked a second time. Schurz concedes “that there were a good many stragglers hurrying to the rear in disorderly fashion” on the afternoon of July 1; however, while the corps executed “a retreat after a lost battle with the enemy in hot pursuit ... there was no element of dissolution in it.” Schurz blames Francis Channing Barlow, overseeing the First Division, for advancing his troops to occupy the knoll that now bears his name, thereby losing touch with other Federals. “One of the coolest and bravest” officers in combat, he writes, Barlow “made the mistake of being too brave” and exposed his division. The final result of the battle disappointed Schurz. “Had our success at Gettysburg,” he suggests, “been so followed up as to destroy Lee’s army, or at least to render it unable to keep the field, the war would probably have been a year shorter.” Philippe Régis Denis de Keredern de Trobriand also fought at Gettysburg. A writer, artist, and lawyer, he moved to New York from France in 1841. He began his wartime activities as colonel of the 55th New York Infantry, saw extensive action as a brigade and division chief, and closed with the rank
of brigadier general of volunteers (major general by brevet). De Trobriand’s memoir, titled Four Years with the Army of the Potomac (1889), details events in a generally evenhanded fashion. The sections devoted to the 1862 Richmond campaign, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Petersburg, and Appomattox are especially useful. Although certainly worth consulting, the memoir lacks the immediacy of Our Noble Blood: The Civil War Letters of Major-General Régis de Trobriand (1997), edited by William B. Styple and translated by Nathalie Chartrain. The handling of emancipation illustrates this point. In the memoir, de Trobriand writes that targeting slavery meant “we were no longer merely the soldiers of a political controversy.... We were now the missionaries of a great work of redemption.” A letter from Our Noble Blood shows him exhibiting a far different attitude as events unfolded in late September 1862. His daughter, no doubt responding to Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, informed her father that she applauded the action. He responded testily on September 30, pronouncing her comments “incredible” and “perfectly impertinent.” “It isn’t for
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B&A
GARY W. GALLAGHER IS THE JOHN L. NAU III PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. HIS MOST RECENT BOOKS ARE THE UNION WAR (2011) AND BECOMING CONFEDERATES: PATHS TO A NEW NATIONAL LOYALTY (2013).
The Books That Built Me BY BROOKS D. SIMPSON circumstance and timing best explain how a young boy growing up during the Civil War Centennial became interested in the American Civil War. I learned, thanks to my Grandmother Simpson, that one of my ancestors fought in the war. (Further research revealed that, in fact, two ancestors joined the ranks of the Union: James L. Denton of the 5th and 146th New York and William M. Thomas, a drummer boy with the 23rd Pennsylvania—all Zouave regiments, by the way.) I collected toy soldiers, read articles on the war in National Geographic, and dragged my father into the Illinois pavilion at the 1964-1965 World’s Fair to watch Walt Disney’s “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” more times than I can count. (I have since forced my daughters to join me in visiting Mr. Lincoln at Disneyland.) And then there were the books. Pride of place, I believe, goes to The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (1960). Oh, the text by Bruce Catton was interesting enough, but I was entranced by the battle maps featuring intricate drawings of very small soldiers. Then there was Catton’s masterful A Stillness at Appomattox (1953), which brought together the stories of generals and soldiers during the final hard year of the war in Virginia, and
Brooks D. Simpson
his children’s novel, Banners at Shenandoah (1955), loosely based on the tale of Quaker schoolmistress Rebecca Wright and featuring Phil Sheridan. I picked up a paperback copy of Ulysses S. Grant’s personal memoirs, namely a condensed edition entitled Grant’s Civil War (1962). In his way Grant proved to be as good a storyteller as Catton, as his narrative marched confidently along to Appomattox. Finally, there was Carl Sandburg. Visiting my grandmother’s house, I thumbed through the four volumes of Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939) and found it fascinating and colorful.
BROOKS D. SIMPSON
the nigger we fight,” insisted de Trobriand, but “... for a great political principle, the Federal Union which can alone save the country from ruin.” Although de Trobriand saw considerable combat under various commanders, his letters often reflect George B. McClellan’s long-term imprint on the Army of the Potomac. Shortly after Chancellorsville, de Trobriand seemed content to have avoided disaster after Joseph Hooker’s brief offensive. He spoke not of seeking out the enemy but rather awaiting what Robert E. Lee might do: “At any moment the dance can begin again, if, as it is probable, that the enemy emboldened by its success, undertakes to cross the river and attack our depots at Aquia Creek.” Not quite two years later, on April 10, 1865, de Trobriand manifested a more aggressive spirit. “Lee surrendered to us yesterday,” he reported. “The 2nd Corps was on his heels, and never gave him rest since the brilliant fight of the sixth [at Sailor’s Creek], when my old brigade was ahead of everything, and my Division behaved so splendidly.” As a trio, McCarter, Schurz, and de Trobriand suggest the range of backgrounds, experiences, and attitudes among foreign-born men in the Army of the Potomac. Their voices enrich the wonderful body of evidence that awaits our perusal.
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“ I collected toy soldiers, read articles on the war in National Geographic, and dragged my father into the Illinois pavilion at the 1964-1965 World’s Fair to watch Walt Disney’s ‘Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln’ more times than I can count.”
BROOKS D. SIMPSON
BROOKS D. SIMPSON
My parents, noticing my interest in the war, nurtured it in many ways, including visits to Washington, D.C., in 1966 and Gettysburg in 1967 (my longsuffering sister Joy still shudders when she hears the name of Jennie Wade, the lone civilian killed during the battle). More important was their decision to purchase The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols.; 1953); the three volumes on Grant through the Civil War penned by Lloyd Lewis and Bruce Catton: Captain Sam Grant (1950), Grant Moves South (1960), and Grant Takes Command (1969); and Edwin Coddington’s The Gettysburg Campaign (1963). To read Lincoln’s own words offered a bird’s-eye view into the life of the 16th president, while the work of Lewis, Catton (again), and Coddington opened the door to historical scholarship (I devoured the footnotes with almost as much enthusiasm as I had for the text). During prep school at Phillips Exeter Academy and college at the University of Virginia, I continued to read (and reread) Catton and company, but the work of two historians not known as Civil War scholars made quite an impact on my developing sense of what it meant to write about history. Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948) offered an engaging set of essays that defied conventional wisdom with both intellectual and literary skill, while A.J.P. Taylor’s writings proved witty—sometimes sardonic, occasionally (well, more than occasionally) sarcastic—as he too encouraged me to look at
QUICK PICKS
Voices From Texas BY ANDREW W. HALL
Rags and Hope: The Recollections of Val C. Giles, Four Years with Hood’s Brigade, Fourth Texas Infantry (1961) Edited by Mary Lasswell
This long-out-of-print memoir, compiled from Giles’ papers by Mary Laswell, stands as one of the most vivid, detailed, and often funny firsthand accounts of a Texas soldier in the Civil War. Giles (1842-1915) fought with John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade at Second Manassas, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga before being captured during the Chattanooga Campaign. Giles went on to be active in veterans groups after the war, and his memoir captures both his youthful enthusiasm at being part of the great adventure and his older self’s sense of irony and good humor.
The Civil War Adventures of a Blockade Runner (2001) By William Watson; edited by J. Barto Arnold III
William Watson (1826-1906), a Scotsman living in Louisiana at the outbreak of the conflict, spent a year in the Confederate army before turning to blockade running as his livelihood. Watson ran the Union blockade in and out of Texas three times, twice in his own schooner, Rob Roy, and then as a steamship pilot near the end of the war. Watson’s detailed memoir, first published in 1892, recounts the narrow escapes, complex business ventures, and bureaucratic infighting that characterized this little-appreciated side of the conflict.
A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864 (2001) By Elizabeth Scott Neblett; edited by Erika L. Murr
The papers of Lizzie Scott Neblett (1833-1917) offer an unusually candid picture of life in rural Texas during the antebellum and war years. Left to manage the family’s farm and slaves while her husband was at war, Neblett left a vivid record of an increasingly difficult life, marked by the contrast between romanticized southern womanhood and the hard realities of her situation in a rough and unfinished country.
ANDREW W. HALL IS AN AUTHOR AND BLOGGER LIVING IN GALVESTON. HIS SECOND BOOK, CIVIL WAR BLOCKADE RUNNING ON THE TEXAS COAST, WAS PUBLISHED BY THE HISTORY PRESS IN JUNE 2014.
time-honored interpretations with skeptical eyes. He made a simple text, From Sarajevo to Potsdam (1966), sparkle, while his The Origins of the Second World War (1961) stood orthodoxy on its head. A pair of Lincoln books, David Donald’s Lincoln Reconsidered (1947) and Richard N. Current’s The Lincoln Nobody Knows (1958), fostered my interest in American political history and provided model examples of the historian’s craft. So did David M. Potter’s terrific The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1977), still my favorite explication of the coming of the Civil War, and Don Fehrenbacher’s The
Dred Scott Case (1978), which was about as careful a piece of historical scholarship as I am ever likely to encounter. And I cannot forget another book that I pored over: William Frassanito’s Gettysburg: A Journey in Time (1975). I’ve never looked at Civil War photographs the same way since. There were also books by people I came to know personally, sometimes as mentors at Virginia and the University of Wisconsin, where I commenced graduate study in 1979. They included the tightly argued The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978) by Michael F. Holt; Richard H. Sewell’s
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Ballots for Freedom (1976), which thoroughly explored a topic I was once sure that I would pursue, the politics of antislavery; Allan Bogue’s The Earnest Men: Republicans of the Civil War Senate (1981), where I actually contributed a point of refinement that a senior scholar not only took with good grace but highlighted in his acknowledgments; and two dissertations-turned-books that I deeply admired, Eric Foner’s perceptive Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970) and Michael Les Benedict’s A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction (1975), the latter including a list of manuscript collections I deeply envied. These books set high standards, just as Holt, Sewell, and Bogue set them as teachers and mentors. Foner and Benedict reminded me that even first books could be important books. Several books that I encountered during these years proved critical to the thinking that led to my first book, Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861-1868 (1991). First was William B. Hesseltine’s Ulysses S. Grant: Politician (1935), which took Grant seriously as a political figure, something all too rare in those days. So did John A. Carpenter’s concise Ulysses S. Grant (1970), an undervalued volume that forecast the reassessment of Grant’s presidency that we’ve seen in the past several decades. My first research paper at Exeter had explored Grant’s Appomattox terms, especially when Grant shielded Robert E. Lee from prosecution for treason; at Virginia my
honors thesis, looking at Grant as president, found more opportunity for reconsidering the administration of a president widely considered a failure by most scholars at the time. Hesseltine and Carpenter suggested that Grant was not quite the political ignoramus he was often believed to be. The same was true of the Grant presented in William S. McFeely’s Grant: A Biography (1981), the book that convinced me to take Grant seriously as a topic for a dissertation. Examining what McFeely says about Grant’s views on bloodshed and African Americans led to my first article in a scholarly journal, and people in the profession began taking note of me. Although I disagree with much of what McFeely argues, he offers a challenging if (in my mind) badly flawed portrait that has had more staying power than several more recent biographies that treat Grant more favorably. I have found it a worthy work with which to contend. Not all my reading was in history. Carl von Clausewitz’s On War (1832) offered tremendous insights into the relationship between war, politics, and society as well as the art and science of command and military leadership. It helped frame much of the analytical framework that informs Let Us Have Peace and led me to look at the Civil War and Reconstruction as part of a larger struggle, with Appomattox as a point of transition rather than termination. Clausewitz’s observation that how a society wages war reflects that society’s values helps explain why policymakers make the choices they make, while his emphasis on the intangibles of command
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A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta BY WENDY HAMAND VENET (YALE, 2014)
“Grounded in a variety of compelling primary sources—from diaries and letters, to business records, government documents, and newspapers—this book encourages us to focus on how the southern middle class, urban development, and the war influenced and shaped each other. It deserves a wide readership.” —Brian Luskey
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helps remind us of just how difficult it is to explain why certain generals succeed while others fail. Finally, two books published in the early 1980s helped shape my understanding of much of what I’ve emphasized in my own work. Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones’ underappreciated How the North Won (1983) remains the single best study of strategy and command in the Civil War, and reminds us of the importance of logistics. LaWanda Cox’s Lincoln and Black Freedom (1981) offers two essential reminders: that politics is the art of the possible and that the challenge facing the skilled policymaker is to expand
Relating to Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War and U.S. Presidents
the boundaries of the possible. Both provide educations on what leadership could (and could not) accomplish. Here and there, other books have sparked inquiry or developed insights, but the books named here were fundamental in shaping how I go about my work. That education continues.
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BROOKS D. SIMPSON IS ASU FOUNDATION PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY. HE HAS AUTHORED, CO-AUTHORED, OR EDITED 15 BOOKS, INCLUDING LET US HAVE PEACE: ULYSSES S. GRANT AND THE POLITICS OF WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1861-1868 (1991), ULYSSES S. GRANT: TRIUMPH OVER ADVERSITY, 1822-1865 (2000), AND THE CIVIL WAR IN THE EAST: STRUGGLE, STALEMATE, AND VICTORY (2011).
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DISUNION
the only client of Bender’s with a hat problem: 75 percent of his customers are repeats. “It’s reached the point where I’m so busy with orders that I don’t have time to make up any stock and go out to events,” he says. Bender may be past retirement age, but he doesn’t plan to stop making hats anytime soon. And he is always up for a challenge. “A lot of times these guys will see a picture of a guy from the Civil War and he’s wearing a hat that they fancy. They’ll send me a picture and say, ‘Can you make this?’ And I’ll say, ‘Yep, I can make it,’” says Bender. “If he needs a hat, I can fix him up.”
as president and a fatal bout with throat cancer. In spite of a vivid memoir, he did not say much about his friendship with a man he described as “brave, honest, intelligent, a very capable soldier, subordinate to his superiors, just and kind to his subordinates, but jealous of his own rights, which he had the courage to maintain.” Longstreet, he concluded, “was never on the lookout to detect a slight, but saw one as soon as anybody when intentionally given.” As with many friendships, the thoughts expressed about the other may say as much or even more about the man himself. Good friendships, even those as vexed by history as the one between Grant and Longstreet, tend to do this from both sides and “between the lines.” They are akin, as Grant implied, to the bidirectional and organic loyalty necessary for good leadership—and not only in battle. They speak to the qualities that leaders honor and lack in the estimation of themselves, and those they seek, want, and even need from others. And they point to a neglected aspect of our own leaderless political culture, which remains obsessed with the foibles and failures of leaders.
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JENNY JOHNSTON IS A FREELANCE WRITER AND EDITOR BASED IN SAN FRANCISCO.
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notably the “pillow tax,” should not see a decline, as visitors to Gettysburg who would have stayed at the Quality Inn can easily find accommodations at other nearby hotels. Our initial focus will be on removing non-historic buildings, but our eventual goal is to restore the property to its 1863 appearance as closely as possible. We will consult with qualified historians, archaeologists, and other experts. At present, the land is outside the authorized boundary of Gettysburg National Military Park, meaning it is not eligible for immediate donation to the National Park Service. This is, beyond a doubt, one of the most important preservation efforts we’ve yet undertaken. To learn how you can help, visit civilwar.org/battlefields/gettysburg/gettysburg-2014/. www.facebook.com/ CivilWarMonitor
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KENNETH WEISBRODE IS A WRITER AND HISTORIAN. HIS LATEST BOOK IS THE ATLANTIC CENTURY.
CASUALTIES OF WAR CONTINUED FROM P. 27
by bayonet while he tried to free two tied-up comrades. “No white sonof-a-bitch can tie a man up here,” the man stated. “We are free, our Colonel told us so, and we will fight before they shall keep our men tied,” another insisted. In the 2nd usct Cavalry, a white officer shot a black soldier who was resisting being tied. The white officer was eventually cashiered.6
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LIVING HISTORY
No military regulation prohibited officers from using this sort of punishment on unruly soldiers; indeed, regimental courts-martial routinely sentenced men to be bound and gagged to a chair, forced to stand on barrels in the hot sun, tied to a rail, or hung by their thumbs. Of course, slave drivers also tied, gagged, and hanged slave women and men, a point that was not lost on the men of the usct, whether or not they had experienced these punishments firsthand. White officers ignored the symbolism at their own peril. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the white colonel of the 1st South Carolina Infantry, a black regiment, criticized inexperienced white officers for failing to strongly mark “the difference between the slave and the soldier.”7 Jacob Plowden was not the only critic of the 3rd’s white officers. At least a year before the confrontation in Jacksonville, Florida, men of the 3rd usct expressed resentment about their white officers and unfair discipline. In a June 1864 letter published in The Christian Recorder, for example, a soldier in the 3rd identified as “R.H.B.” listed a string of complaints, including a moral double standard: “we have a set of officers here, who apparently think that their commissions are licenses to debauch and mingle with deluded freedwomen, under cover of darkness, and with (rebel) Union women during the day…. I found out long since, that rank and pay was, in many cases, the cause of their sympathy and their being identified with us.”8 Jacob Plowden’s service in the U.S. Army came to an abrupt end on December 1, 1865. His younger brothers, who also served in the 3rd, finished out their enlistments and, later in life, filed for federal pensions. The Plowden brothers had mustered into service in Philadelphia under the 3rd’s rousing battle flag, which depicted Lady Columbia and a flag-holding usct soldier with the words “Rather Die Freemen, Than Live to Be Slaves.” They had had high hopes for what the experience would mean for them and others, some who had been slaves ☛ } CONT. ON P. 71
trends in war can easily be reversed by unforeseen circumstances. As such, we can hope for no future battlefield atrocities from our troops, but we can in no way be certain of it.
CASUALTIES OF WAR CONTINUED FROM P. 70
and others who had not. But when soldiering as a “freeman” began to feel like being a slave, Private Jacob Plowden took a stand and paid the price. JUDITH GIESBERG IS A PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY. SHE IS THE EDITOR OF EMILIE DAVIS’S CIVIL WAR: THE DIARIES OF A FREE BLACK WOMAN IN PHILADELPHIA, 1863-1865 (PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014).
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history as a nation. It is true that many aspects of the Civil War would not be condoned in today’s military. But time has done nothing to change the fact that war is highly unpredictable. Keegan was correct when he stated that battle always includes “uncertainty and doubt.”11 Current
CLAY MOUNTCASTLE, A LIEUTENANT COLONEL IN THE U.S. ARMY, CURRENTLY SERVES AS THE PROFESSOR OF MILITARY SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON IN SEATTLE. HE HOLDS A PH.D. IN HISTORY FROM DUKE UNIVERSITY AND IS THE AUTHOR OF PUNITIVE WAR: CONFEDERATE GUERRILLAS AND UNION REPRISALS (UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KANSAS, 2009).
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he predicted, insurrection and disunion would be the result. “If we love the Union,” wrote Light-Horse Harry, “if we wish peace at home, and safety abroad; let us guard our own bosoms from a flame which threatens to consume all reason, temper and reflection.” He did not condone disunionism in his own time, so it was unlikely he would have approved the creation of the Confederate States of America or his son’s prominent involvement in
fighting a bloody war for the southern nation. But his son believed otherwise, artfully shaping his father’s words to suit his own decision not only to support Virginia’s secession—while claiming to oppose disunion—but also to commit insurrection against his country by convincing himself that he was doing so in the name of his native state (although most of his service took place in the Confederate army, not the Virginia militia). These were the very things his father had warned his countrymen to avoid at all costs.20 The extent to which Robert Lee became the maker of his own downfall, the force behind his own inner agony, can be readily seen in one simple postwar remark, made without elaboration or qualification. “The great mistake of my life,” Lee said, “was taking a military education.” Of course, this confession implies that he regretted his career as a soldier, the job in which he spent his entire adulthood. Being a soldier was all that Lee had ever been—and all that he would ever be in the American memory. Perhaps, one supposes, if he had not attended ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72
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West Point and become a soldier, he would never have faced taking up arms against his country in 1861. More than anything, his decision to become a soldier, coupled with his failure as a general of the South’s great revolution, left him bitter about his choices and about the military itself. After the war, all things military seemed to irk him. “I have felt so little desire to recall the events of the war since the cessation of hostilities,” he wrote to Edward A. Pollard, a Richmond editor and writer, “that I have not read a single work that has been published on the subject.” When it came to marking Civil War battlefields with monuments, Lee told the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association that he believed it wiser “not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”21 For good reason, Lee wanted to forget the war. Had Robert E. Lee followed the example of George Washington, rather than pursuing his own muddled understanding of his father’s opinions on states’ rights and state loyalty, he would have landed on firmer ground during the secession crisis and might have avoided the personal tragedy—laced with so many regrets and sorrow—that he created for himself and for his family. Washington could never have approved of secession, despite all the appeals that Lee, Jefferson Davis, and a host of Confederates made to the nation’s greatest Founding Father. After the adjournment of the Constitutional Convention, Washington wrote in November 1787: “If there are characters who prefer disunion, or seperate Confederacies to the general Government which is offered to them, their opposition may, for ought I know, proceed from principle; but as nothing in my conception is more to be depricated than a disunion, or
Robert E. Lee in 1865
these seperate Confederacies, my voice, as far as it will extend, shall be offered in favor of the latter [i.e., the Union].” After the ratification of the Constitution, the examples of Washington advocating the idea of a perpetual union of the states are plentiful in number and heartfelt in sentiment. Writing to James Madison in 1792, Washington revealed that, in his estimation, love of country meant “giving every possible support, and cement to the Union.”22 y the time of the Civil War, Lee’s cool attitude and genteel manners had become automatically associated with Washington. He achieved his 18thcentury comportment by means of strenuously enforced self-control and self-denial—traits that he identified as having shaped Washington’s character but that his father had noticeably lacked. Lee’s aide, Walter Taylor, remarked that the Army of Northern Virginia’s great commander was “never so uncomfortable as when he was comfortable.” Another member of his staff, Charles Venable, acknowledged that Lee’s temper rarely resulted in any outward sign except for a “flush” that came over “that grand forehead” and the swelling of his “temple veins.” In Venable’s opin-
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BROKEN PROMISE
ion, Lee had the same “high strong temper of a Washington, and habitually [hid it] under the same control.”23 But Washington was never as tightly wound as Venable believed. Self-control gave Lee the appearance of mastery—over himself, if not the world around him—and the aura of republican dignity that nearly everyone who met Lee mentioned. John Esten Cooke, a captain in J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry and the author of a postwar biography of Lee, praised the general for “his imposing dignity of demeanor, and his calm and measured tones.” Describing his meeting with Lee at Appomattox, Ulysses S. Grant remembered: “As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassable face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it.” This repeated display of dignity and aloofness, though, effectively distanced him from everyone around him. As a result, no one ever felt deeply close to Robert E. Lee. “No man was great enough to be intimate with General Lee,” said a member of the faculty at Washington College.24 Like Washington, Lee struck an impeccable pose of dignity; unlike Washington, his stance did not epitomize pure virtue and greatness; instead, it masked character faults, antediluvian assumptions, and outdated propensities. Lee, the anachronism, was doomed to walk through life in the wrong century. It is said that some individuals are born ahead of their time. In Lee’s case, he was born behind his time, stuck in the past, a man of the 18th century forced to survive—and founder as he did so— in the 19th. Surely, then, Lee’s tragic flaw was not completely of his own making, nor could he have readily overcome it. Like a character in a Greek tragedy, he was forced to fulfill a destiny that had been preordained by his own shortcomings of character, by his entrapment in the past, and by his obsessive concern over how he would be judged in the future. History, in fact, has been kind to him, thanks in large measure to the southern cult of the Lost Cause, which
has steadily boosted his reputation ever since Appomattox. Despite his betrayal of George Washington, his role model, Lee has become America’s most lauded soldier—and the country’s most beloved traitor. GLENN W. LAFANTASIE IS THE RICHARD FROCKT FAMILY PROFESSOR OF CIVIL WAR HISTORY AND THE DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE FOR CIVIL WAR STUDIES AT WESTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY. HE IS WORKING ON A BOOK ABOUT ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND ULYSSES S. GRANT DURING THE CIVIL WAR.
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charging.” Suddenly, the Federals boiled over the military crest just yards from Smith’s flattened defenses. The Confederates fired a ragged volley, the bullets mostly sailing over the attackers’ heads, one Federal crying out when his uniform caught on fire from the discharge. With the Yanks closing in, the Rebs threw axes, shovels, even muskets at them. Then a brutal, hand-to-hand melee broke out as McMillen’s overwhelming numbers, cheering to the
heavens, engulfed the hinge in Bate’s line. Small clots of Confederates found themselves surrounded; the Federals seemed to be everywhere. “They could not fire on us,” recalled one encircled survivor, “without killing their own men.” As Lieutenant Colonel William B. Shy tried to rally his shell-shocked Tennesseans, a bullet fired from point-blank range slammed into his brain. Thomas Benton Smith and another band were overrun and surrendered. In an act of battle fever, a Federal officer then struck Smith on his head with his sabre, cracking the southerner’s skull and causing a wound that debilitated him for the rest of his life. Along the crest to Smith’s right, a shocked Rebel soldier called out to his comrades, “Look at the U.S. Flag on our breastworks!” To the left they saw “our ditches [were] empty, the men escaping through the mountain woodland.” A few Floridians fought to the end, but most joined the rush down their hill and into the field behind Walthall’s line. East from the crest, units of Georgians and Mis-
sissippians broke next. A Tennessean wrote of the chaos here, “Such a scene I never saw. The army was panic-stricken.”36 One Florida soldier recalled how Confederate commanders tried to stem the flow of retreat: “Col’s and Gen’s came dashing across the hills trying to rally the men, with pistols and swords drawn.”37 One such general was William Bate, who was employing “some pretty hot words in an attempt to rally the now thoroughly demoralized command.” Bate, “cool as a cucumber,” called out, “Let’s make a stand here” along a fence line, but one of Thomas Benton Smith’s men bleakly realized, “I didn’t have much stop left in me.” As Bate left to rally his troops elsewhere, Smith’s survivors continued their flight.38 To the north, Federal brigades spurred on by McMillen’s triumph were launching successive assaults from west to east. At least two brigades charged Walthall’s front, and the weary general had seen enough. With his left flank gone and his front besieged, he knew ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
When War Passed This Way is available again!
Out of print for more than 30 years, this critically acclaimed history of the Civil War in southern Pennsylvania by W.P. Conrad and Ted Alexander is being re-released with new maps, images, and revised text. “ When War Passed This Way is rich in first-hand accounts of war-torn south-central Pennsylvania communities. I have used it often in my research on the 1863 and 1864 campaigns as it has details not found in other works. This revised new printing is most welcome and will be a benefit to Civil War historians and buffs.” JEFFRY D. WERT, AUTHOR OF GETTYSBURG, DAY THREE
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Soldiering for Freedom How the Union Army Recruited,Trained, and Deployed the U.S. Colored Troops CONTINUED FROM P. TK
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Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County David F. Allmendinger Jr.
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A Connecticut Yankee in Lincoln’s Cabinet Navy Secretary Gideon Welles Chronicles the Civil War Edited by J. Ronald Spencer
Selections from an insider’s wartime diary $24.95 paper / ebook available
“With a keen editorial eye and a deep knowledge of the Civil War, J. Ronald Spencer has selected key passages from Gideon Welles’s extraordinary diary and organized them topically. The result allows readers to eavesdrop on the central dramas of the day as the Secretary of the Navy confided his feelings about Lincoln, the cabinet, various admirals and generals, the meaning of the war, and issues in his home state of Connecticut. This edition of Welles’s diary should be required reading for all students of military and political history.” —Louis P. Masur, author of Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union, winner of the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize for 2012 Published by The Acorn Club
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“an immediate withdrawal ily to keep his men in line was necessary.” He called around the “conical hill,” for retreat, but his diviwhen a soldier yelled, “Look sion simply melted, forcing yonder, Colonel!” CompWalthall to admit, “Everyton Hill was out of sight to where within my view the the north, but the “old field” disorder was great and genoff their left and rear was eral.”39 “full of Yankees marchFor a brief few moments, ing around us”—Coon’s Lowrey’s brigades held men exploiting the breech. their positions south of Harris called out, “Boys, Compton Hill. Coloevery fellow for himnel Luke Finley of self!” His “boys” the 4th Tennesspiked their artilsee watched lery, then “beat a awestruck as hasty and disorBate’s men fled derly retreat.”42 east. A nearby As thousoldier drew sands of solhis attention diers both when he loudly blue and gray Brigadier General exclaimed, “Look converged in the Mark Lowrey there at the United twilight, the muddy States flag on the cornfields east of hill.”40 Finley’s chieftain, Compton Hill turned into Colonel Andrew Kellar, bedlam. “We were between described what happened two fires of the enemy artilnext: “[T]he troops seeing … lery,” recalled a dazed Reb, [Compton Hill] in the hands “the shells met and passed of the enemy, and seeing each other.” An officer the left wing of the army remembered, “The sticky running without making a mud … adhered to our shoes stand, fled also.”41 Some did … fast progress was impossistay, preferring to surrender ble.” John McArthur’s entire rather than run the gauntlet. division now swarmed over One of Jacob Cox’s brigades Walthall’s former line and finally did join the assault blasted away at the flank of and overran the abandoned the gray mob racing east, works, capturing the guns but some Rebs “would Kellar was forced to leave. occasionally stop and fire Most, however, plowed back at them and then coneast through the sodden tinue their retreat.” Some of fields and forest stands with Cheatham’s men rallied for a McMillen’s men pressing moment on a flag bearer, but their left and Coon’s troopone admitted, “[T]he bulers singeing their right. As lets were striking the corn each minute passed, the stalks around me so thick pincers grew tighter. that I gave up hope.” Others, Just to the south, the exhausted beyond endurholdouts from Feild’s briance, simply sat down in the gade took one final action. mud and waited to surrenLieutenant Colonel John der. “Quite a number gave Harris was fighting mightdown,” wrote a Tennessean,
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“already weak and worn, and sought protection.”43 The Compton Hill collapse had triggered a chain reaction that put most of Hood’s army to flight, slowed only by Stephen D. Lee’s stand near Overton Hill and David Coleman and Daniel Reynolds’ fighting retreat along the Granny White Pike. Their work helped save Hood’s army. With his corps destroyed, Benjamin Cheatham rode toward the Brentwood Hills, calling out, “Take care of yourselves, boys, the best you can. I am going to make that pass through the ridge or die in the attempt.” A veteran from Feild’s brigade who heard Cheatham’s pronouncement thought, “the whole army was lost beyond all help.”44 Mark Lowrey also thought he and his division had no chance of escaping capture, especially after “Rebel,” his favorite mount, was killed in the crossfire. But Lowrey, William Bate, and Edward Walthall all made it through the pincers and joined the long Confederate trek back to the Tennessee River. Shocked that his left flank had collapsed, Hood was
also caught up in the retreat. Nearly a third of his army had been killed, wounded, or captured. On Compton Hill, William Shy’s lifeless body lay among the detritus of the battle. In tribute to his heroic effort, the heights came to be known as Shy’s Hill. That night, in a pouring rain, George Thomas encountered James Wilson. “Dang it to Hell, Wilson, didn’t I tell you we could lick ‘em,” the normally taciturn army commander enthused, “didn’t I tell you we could lick ‘em?” His crowing—a “tone of exaltation,” Wilson called it—was justified. The “Rock of Chickamauga” had for all practical purposes just ended the Civil War in the west.45 Meanwhile, a few miles to the south, a Tennessee private saw John Bell Hood at his headquarters. The general pulled at his hair “much agitated and affected” and was “crying like his heart would break.” The soldier felt strongly for Hood, who had sacrificed so much for the Confederacy that “a garland of glory” would surely surround him. However, the private faced the hard ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76
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EARLY WINTER SUNSET
balls. Killed in action: 68. Wounded in action: 506. Of McMillen’s charge, he composed a worthy testament:
CONTINUED FROM P. 75
REBEL YELL
CONTINUED FROM P. 61
[O]nward was their motto, and their banners were planted on works defended by the choicest troops of the rebel army, calling forth the remark of the rebel officers that powder and lead were inadequate to resist such a charge. Onward still the division pressed … until the hills in rear of the enemy’s lines were secured, where the line was formed for the night, and attention turned to the many brave officers and men who had so gloriously maintained their country’s honor and sealed it with their blood.
realities. Many of his comrades had discarded their rifles and headed home, “despair and pity written on their features.” Abandoned wagons and spent horses littered the roadway, and confusion reigned. Although some command elements retained a notable cohesion, he darkly surmised, “The once proud Army of Tennessee had degenerated into a mob.” Of Hood, the Tennessean had one last thought. Time would pass and wounds would heal until, finally, “Mercy has erased all his errors and faults.”46
A battle sealed with soldiers’ blood but crowned by a quick-tempered Scotsman and his angry order: “Take that hill.”
three days after Christmas, John McArthur finished his official report on the Battle of Nashville. He calculated the bounty: 4,273 Confederate prisoners, 13 battle flags, 24 artillery pieces, 4,500 small arms. He listed the expenditures: 4,681 artillery rounds and 84,000 musket
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view, neither the “children of peace” nor soldiers of later wars could ever know the Rebel yell, as it had died with the Confederacy.19 Yet any veteran who promoted the concept of the “lost” Rebel yell faced an uphill battle, as many of his old comrades continued to perform the yell during the first three decades of the 20th century. Indeed, film and audio recordings held by the Library of Congress and the United Daughters of the Confederacy prove that some ancient veterans happily delivered their best Rebel yells for American audiences as late as the 1930s. Anderson, French, and like-minded men would have been gratified, however, to learn that their sentiments would ultimately find a home with some 20th-century commentators who, in service to their own political and cultural agendas, found it helpful to declare the Rebel yell lost to history. One such figure, the Mississippi writer and media personality Shelby Foote, would in fact do a great deal during the second half of the 20th century to convince the world that the famous battle cry was indeed a lost artifact. In his bestselling books and national television appearances, he declared the scream to be “dead” and “totally lost” despite the existence of audio recordings. Foote’s hyperbolic claims only gained traction with the public, however, because no Confederate veterans survived to shape thinking about the Rebel yell’s past, present, and future. The storied men in gray had left the yell in the care of later generations to use—and abuse—as they saw fit.20
THE LEGACY OF THE YELL The career of the Rebel yell was far from over when the last Confederate veteran passed away sometime in the mid-20th century. During the civil rights era of the 1950s and
For more information, visit: http://press.umsystem.edu
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR 1960s, segregationists voiced the yell when verbally and sometimes physically attacking civil rights activists. It would thereafter enter global popular culture in truly extraordinary ways, embraced by the British rocker Billy Idol and others to market everything from whiskey to a line of women’s clothing. But the Rebel yell remains forever linked to the Confederate soldiers who transformed a regional style of cheering into the most famous battle cry of modern times—one that could express joy and rage, sorrow and pride, anxiety and confidence. Perhaps more striking is the range of sometimes conflicting principles and practices that veterans later used it to support: southern pride, localized insurrection, white power, Old South nostalgia, southern exceptionalism, Democratic politics, Republican politics, national reconciliation, U.S. military power, and American might and determination on the world stage. This dynamic range of values and meanings speaks to why this battle cry of a defeated republic has fascinated generations of Americans. Confederate veterans proved so successful at associating the Rebel yell with the ideal of the democratic voice that it became relevant to nearly any political or cultural circumstance. The scream’s old caretakers ensured that the sonic experience never lost the qualities that U.S. citizens so often associate with the national character: irrepressible energy, unbending individualism, and defiance in the face of authority. “The rebel yell was the sublimest Americanism that ever was born,” one celebrant announced in 1897. “It was the one Democracy that will never die here in the land of its birth.” Most southern veterans would have been thrilled by those sentiments. The Confederacy may have died in 1865, but in the immortal Rebel yell the voice of the Confederate soldier would endure forever. CRAIG A. WARREN IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF ENGLISH AT PENN STATE ERIE, THE BEHREND COLLEGE. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF THE REBEL YELL: A CULTURAL HISTORY, TO BE PUBLISHED THIS FALL BY THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS.
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3 William C. Davis and Meredith L. Swentor, eds., Bluegrass Confederate: The Headquarters Diary of Edward O. Guerrant (Baton Rouge, 1999), 545. 4 Ibid., 546-547. 5 See Thomas Mays, The Saltville Massacre (Abilene, TX, 1998) and William Marvel, “The Battle of Saltville: Massacre or Myth?” Blue & Gray, vol. 8, no. 6 (August 1991). Mays offers 46 as a “conservative” estimate of blacks killed at Saltville, while Marvel suggests that only five were truly confirmed.
SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
CASUALTIES OF WAR (Pages 26-27, 70-71) 1
“Execution of the Six Mutineers of the 3d U.S.C.T. at Fernandina,” Florida Union (Jacksonville), December 9, 1865. For a fuller treatment of the trial and execution, see John F. Fannin, “The Jacksonville Mutiny of 1865,” The Florida Historical Quarterly Vol. 88, No. 3 (Winter 2010): 368-396.
2 Jacob “Plowder,” [sic] Company E, 3rd United States Colored Infantry, Court Martial Case Files, 1809-1938, File No. 00 1477, Record Group 153: Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General (Army), National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
6 Lonnie R. Speer, War of Vengeance: Acts of Retaliation Against Civil War POWs (Mechanicsburg, PA, 2002), xvii. 7 The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference, 298-299. 8 See Patrick K. O’Donnell, Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II’s Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat (New York, 2002). Several accounts mention the brutal treatment or execution of Japanese prisoners, to include a technique known as “the Indian death lock” (127-128). 9 John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo & the Somme (New York, 1977), 298. 10 Martin K. Sorge, The Other Price of Hitler’s War: German Military and Civilian Losses Resulting From World War II (New York, 1986), 147. 11 Keegan, The Face of Battle, 298.
BROKEN PROMISE
3 Revised United States Army Regulations of 1861 (Washington, 1863), 486.
(Pages 30-39, 71-73)
4 Addresses of the Hon. W.D. Kelly, Miss Anna E. Dickinson, and Mr. Frederick Douglass at a Mass Meeting, Held at National Hall, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863 (Philadelphia, n.d.), 7.
2 Columbus Times [Fall 1862], quoted in Gary W. Gallagher, “Another Look at the Generalship of R. E. Lee,” in Gallagher, ed., Lee the Soldier (Lincoln, NE, 1996), 281; Mary Jones, quoted in Robert B. McCaslin, Lee in the Shadow of Washington (Baton Rouge, 2001), 122; Peter Alexander, “Confederate Chieftains,” Southern Literary Messenger 35 (January 1863): 34-35; Richmond Dispatch, March 19, 1864.
5 Corporal Jacob Plowden, Company E, 3rd USCT Infantry, Case 3, Regimental Court Martials, RG 94: Regimental Courts Martial and Guard Report Book, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., E112-115, PI-17, Vol. 7 of 7. 6 Joseph Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (Baton Rouge, 1990), 114-115, 222-223; Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor, and Manhood in the Union Army (New York, 2010), 165-166. 7 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (New York, 1869), 259. 8 “Florida Correspondence,” The Christian Recorder, August 6, 1864.
BATTLEFIELD ECHOES (Pages 28-29, 71) 1
Robert C. Whisonant, “Geology and the Civil War in Southwestern Virginia: the Smyth County Salt Works,” Virginia Minerals, vol. 42 (August 1996).
2 Margaret Wagner, Gary Gallagher, and Paul Finkelman, eds., The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference (New York, 2002), 315-316. Sources vary on the actual size of the armies engaged at Saltville.
1
New Orleans Picayune, February 22, 1862.
3 Richmond Examiner, February 25, 1865. 4 John W. Daniel, “Address of Major John W. Daniel,” Southern Historical Society Papers 11 (August-September 1883): 342; Charles E. Fenner, “Oration,” ibid., 14 (January-December 1886): 64.
R.E. Lee; and Clifford Dowdey, Lee (Boston, 1965). 10 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 2004), 790. 11 Freeman, R.E. Lee, 1:68. 12 C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), 116; Freeman, R.E. Lee, 1:415; Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (Baltimore, 2000), 15. 13 Freeman, R.E. Lee, 1:74; Lee to George Washington Custis Lee, April 5, 1852, Robert Edward Lee Papers, Virginia Historical Society (hereafter, Lee Papers, VHS). 14 J.F.C. Fuller, Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship (London, 1957), 112, 120; Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg (New York, 2003), 500-505; Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (New York, 2013), 453-465; Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee, 154-164. 15 Fuller, Grant and Lee, 95-131, 242-258; T. Harry Williams, “The Military Leadership of North and South,” in David Herbert Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1960), 23-48; Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of the United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York, 1973), 125127, 141-151. 16 George Forsyth, “The Closing Scene at Appomattox Court House,” Harper’s Magazine (April 1898): 700-711; Bruce Catton, “Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrasts,” in Earl Schenk Miers, ed., The American Story: The Age of Exploration to the Age of the Atom (Great Neck, NY, 1956), 202-205. 17 Lee to William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, December 3, 1860, Lee Papers, VHS; Lee to Annette Carter, January 16, 1861, Robert E. Lee Papers, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia; Lee to Markie Williams, January 22, 1861, in Avery Craven, ed., “To Markie”: The Letters of Robert E. Lee to Martha Custis Williams (Cambridge, MA, 1933), 58; Lee to Winfield Scott, April 20, 1861, in Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee (Boston, 1961), 9; Lee to Ann Marshall, April 20, 1861, in ibid., 10; Lee to Mary Ann Custis Lee, July 27, 1861, in Robert E. Lee Jr., Recollections and Letters of General Lee (New York, 1904), 37. 18 Lee to William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, January 29, 1861, Lee Papers, VHS.
5 McCaslin, Lee in the Shadow of Washington, 13-23. On Light-Horse Harry Lee, see Charles Royster, Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution (New York, 1981).
19 McCaslin, Lee in the Shadow of Washington, 18; Henry Lee, The Revolutionary Memoirs of General Henry Lee, 3rd ed. (1869), ed. Robert E. Lee (reprint edition, New York, 1998), 45-46, 50.
6 Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York, 1995), 181.
20 Royster, Light-Horse Harry Lee, 144-147.
7 Douglas Southall Freeman, R.E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York, 1934-1937), 1:386, 294, 365. 8 Robert E. Lee to Pierre G. T. Beauregard, October 3, 1865, in J. William Jones, ed., Life and Letters of Robert E. Lee: Soldier and Man (New York, 1906), 390. 9 For Lee as a Christian gentleman, see Jefferson Davis, “Robert E. Lee,” North American Review 150 (January 1890): 56-67; Freeman,
21 M.W. Humphreys, “Reminiscences of General Lee as President of Washington College,” in Franklin L. Riley, ed., General Robert E. Lee after Appomattox (New York, 1930), 38; Lee to Pollard, January 24, 1867, Lee Papers, VHS; Lee to David McConaughy, August 9, 1868, McConaughy Papers, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA. 22 Washington to David Stuart, November 30, 1787, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1931-1944), 29:323; Washington to Madi-
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son, May 20, 1792, in ibid., 32:48. 23 Taylor and Venable both quoted in McCaslin, Lee in the Shadow of Washington, 180. 24 Stanley F. Horn, ed., The Robert E. Lee Reader (New York, 1949), 191; Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, ed. James M. McPherson, Library of America ed. (New York, 1999), 601; Thomas, Robert E. Lee, 396.
EARLY WINTER SUNSET
28 Pierce, History of the Second Iowa Cavalry, 147. 29 Dr. Robert H. Dacus, Reminiscences of Company H, First Arkansas Mounted Rifles (Dardanelle, AR, 1897), 21; Daniel H. Reynolds Unpublished Diary, courtesy of Jim Kay Jr.. 30 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 1), 442. 31 James H. Wilson, Under The Old Flag: Recollections of Military Operations in the War for the Union, the Spanish War, the Boxer Rebellion, etc. (New York, 1912), 116.
(Pages 40-51, 73-76)
32 Logsdon, Eyewitnesses, 92.
1
33 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 1), 746, 749.
Edmund Eggleston, “Excerpts of the diary of E.T. Eggleston” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4 (December 1958): 350.
2 Confederate Veteran, Vol. 12 (Nashville, 1904): 348. 3 Ibid. 4 United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, Vol. 45 (Part 1), 345 (hereinafter cited as OR).
34 Logsdon, Eyewitnesses, 89. 35 Ibid. 36 Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 224. 37 Jonathan C. Sheppard, By the Noble Daring of Her Sons: The Florida Brigade of the Army of Tennessee (Tuscaloosa, 2012), 218. 38 Logsdon, Eyewitnesses, 90.
5 Sam R. Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment, or A Side Show of the Big Show (Chattanooga, 1900; reprint edition, Wilmington, NC, 1987), 221.
39 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 1), 724.
6 J. B. Hood, Advance and Retreat: Personal Recollections in the United States and Confederate States Armies (New Orleans, 1880; reprint edition, 1959), 300.
41 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 1), 45.
7 William J. Worsham, The Old Nineteenth Tennessee (Knoxville, 1902), 30.
44 Ibid.
8 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 1), 748. 9 Ibid., 723.
40 Confederate Veteran, Vol. 15 (Nashville, 1907): 405.
42 Logsdon, Eyewitnesses, 93. 43 Ibid.
45 Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1888; reprint edition, 1991), Vol. 4, Part 2, 470. 46 Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 224-225.
10 Ibid., 442. 11 Ibid., 438. 12 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 2), 216. 13 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 1), 407. 14 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 2), 223-224. 15 Ibid., 214-216. 16 Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 222. 17 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 1), 740. 18 Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 223. 19 Hood, Advance and Retreat, 393. 20 Thomas B. Van Horne, The Life of Major-General George H. Thomas (New York, 1882), 330. 21 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 1), 591. 22 Ibid., 723. 23 Ibid., 726; Confederate Veteran, Vol. 33 (Nashville, 1925): 222. 24 OR, Series I, Volume 45 (Part 1), 723. 25 David R. Logsdon, ed., Eyewitnesses at the Battle of Nashville (Nashville, 2004), 79. 26 Confederate Veteran, Vol. 12, 349; Lyman Pierce, History of the Second Iowa Cavalry (Burlington, IA, 1865), 147. 27 Mark P. Lowrey, Unpublished Autobiography, courtesy of Jim Kay Jr.; Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 223.
REBEL YELL
(Pages 52-61, 76-77) 1
Ambrose Bierce, “A Little of Chickamauga,” San Francisco Examiner [as “Chickamauga”], 1898, reprint, The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, vol. 1 (New York, 1909), 277.
2 F.J.V. LeCand, “The Charge at Chancelorsville [sic]: or, ‘The Rebel Yell,’” pamphlet “Compliments of the Author” (1907): 2–3. 3 William Howard Russell, “‘The Civil War in America’: From Our Special Correspondent,” London Times, July 10, 1861, 5; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (London, 1863), II: 26. 4 FitzGerald Ross, “A Visit to the Cities and Camps of the Confederate States, 1863–64,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 96 (December 1864): 656. 5 Allen Walker Read, “The Rebel Yell as a Linguistic Problem,” American Speech 36.2 (May 1961): 84; Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, Three Months in the Southern States: April - June, 1863 (1863; reprint, New York, 1864), 259. 6 D. Cardwell, “A Brilliant Coup: How Wade Hampton Captured Grant’s Entire Beef Supply,” Southern Historical Society Papers 22 (January-December 1894): 151; Samuel Gibbs French, Two Wars: An Autobiography of Gen.
Samuel G. French (Nashville, 1901), 212; John Milton Hubbard, Notes of a Private (Memphis, 1909), 207. 7 Quoted in John Cannan, The Spotsylvania Campaign (Conshohocken, PA, 1997), 29; quoted in Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography (New York, 1935), III: 303. 8 C. B. Christian, “The Battle at Bethesda Church,” Southern Historical Society Papers 37 (January–December 1909): 242. 9 J.W. DuBose, “The Rebel Yell,” Birmingham [AL] Age-Herald, 1897, reprint, Fayetteville [NC] Observer, December 6, 1897, 264A. 10 See Virginius Dabney, Richmond: The Story of a City (Charlottesville, 1990), 207; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 58; “By Telegraph from Richmond: The Release of Jeff. Davis,” Boston Daily Journal, May 14, 1867, [2]. 11 William Garrett Piston, Lee’s Tarnished Lieutenant: James Longstreet and His Place in Southern History (Athens, 1987), 123; “The Rebel Yell Which Proved the Death-Knell of One Hundred Negroes at Clinton, Mississippi,” Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, September 8, 1875, 5. 12 “The Rebel Yell,” Mobile [AL] Register, 1868, reprint, Jamestown [NY] Journal, August 21, 1868, [1]; “At the Democratic Boys in Blue Parade,” Philadelphia North American, October 7, 1876, 713; “The Democracy in Montana,” New York Herald-Tribune, September 1, 1868, 2. 13 Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 9. 14 Quoted in Peter Cozzens, The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Iuka and Corinth (Chapel Hill, 1997), 104; Philip Cheek and Mair Pointon, History of the Sauk County Riflemen: Known as Company “A,” Sixth Wisconsin Veteran Volunteer Infantry, 1861–1865 (Madison, 1909), 39. 15 “The Rebel Yell: An Episode of the Southern Excursionists’ Visit to Cincinnati,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, 1880, reprint, Denver Rocky Mountain News, March 28, 1880, 3. 16 Quoted in Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913 (New York, 1987), 151; Army Service Forces Manual, Leadership and the Negro Soldier (Washington, DC, 1944), 88. 17 “Sectionalism Dead,” St. Louis Republic, 1898, reprint, Literary Digest 17 (1989): 765. 18 Quoted in “The Rebel Yell” in Confederate Scrap-Book, ed. Lizzie Cary Daniel (Richmond, 1893), 105, 108. Some published references to Anderson print his first name as “Keller.” I have used “Kellar” in keeping with the spelling found in my sources. 19 French, Two Wars, 212. 20 William C. Carter, ed., Conversations with Shelby Foote (Jackson, MS, 1989), 140–41, 145. See also Foote’s comments on the Rebel yell in The Civil War: Episode 4: “Simply Murder,” DVD, directed by Ken Burns (1990; Hollywood, CA: PBS Home Video, 2004).
79 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR FALL 2014
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THE MUSEUM OF THE CONFEDERACY COLLECTION AT THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM
pa r t i n g shot
The Accidental Housekeeper IN EARLY 1861, 38-year-old Baltimore resident Mary O’Melia made an innocent decision that altered the course of her life.
Leaving her three children behind with relatives, the widowed Irish immigrant embarked on what she envisioned as a short trip to visit friends in Virginia. After that state seceded from the Union in April, however, O’Melia was trapped, unable to make the return journey north. She appealed to Varina Davis, wife of the Confederate president, whom friends thought might be able to help. Instead, Davis prevailed upon O’Melia to take the job of housekeeper at the White House of the Confederacy, a position she would hold for the entirety of the conflict. Only after war’s end did O’Melia return to her family. She lived in Baltimore, where she operated boarding houses, until her death in 1907. ¶ Recently, a woman whose late husband was a relative of O’Melia’s donated a few of her possessions to the Museum of the Confederacy, which maintains the Confederate White House in Richmond. Among the items was the first known photo of O’Melia, shown here, which at long last provides us a glimpse of the housekeeper who became a trusted confidante of the Confederate first lady—and a chance witness to history.
80 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR MONITOR PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE FALL 2014
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THE MUSEUM OF THE CONFEDERACY COLLECTION AT THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM
T
he Civil War touched Americans’ lives in ways that no other conflict has, before or since. Soldier. Politician. Merchant. Slave. Freedman. Man. Woman. Child. Learn about this epic struggle that ripped our country apart at the seams, from the viewpoint of all the participants. Whether your interest is in the causes for Confederacy, the struggle for Union or the fight for Freedom, you’ll find it at The American Civil War Museum. ACWM.ORG
Please visit our three locations, in Richmond and Appomattox. MUSEUM & WHITE HOUSE OF THE CONFEDERACY 1201 E. Clay Street, Richmond VA
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AMERICAN CIVIL WAR CENTER AT HISTORIC TREDEGAR 500 Tredegar Street, Richmond VA
MUSEUM OF THE CONFEDERACYAPPOMATTOX Rte. 24 at Rte. 460, Appomattox VA
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