The Civil War Monitor, Vol. 1, No. 1

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Blood-Soaked Reality at Bull Run, p. 20 | Gettysburg Travel Tips, p. 6

ier Prem Issue

VOL. I, NO. 1

{ 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 }

It Begins. Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and the Coming of War

FALL 2011 + $5.99

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From General Ulysses S. Grant’s military leadership to Mary Bickerdyke’s contributions in nursing to Jay Cooke’s innovative financing of the war effort—the Buckeye State had a deep and lasting impact on the Civil War and the nation. Help support conservation efforts and educational outreach to remind Ohioans of the war’s importance in our history and to reflect upon its enduring legacy in our lives by contributing to the Ohio Civil War 150, led by the Ohio Historical Society and the Ohio Civil War 150 Advisory Committee.

ohiocivilwar150.org/support to donate online today.

Join in the Commemoration. OHIO CIVIL WAR SESQUICENTENNIAL (2011—2015)

Find out what’s happening across Ohio and how you can get involved by visiting

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Ohio History Center 800 E. 17th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43211 (I-71, exit 111) / 800.686.6124 / 614.297.2300 / ohiohistory.org CWM_FOB-TOC.indd 2

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Contents

“We do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter.”

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FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

The Men & The Hour: Lincoln, Davis, and the Struggle to Avert War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

2 . . . . . Editorial: . . . . . . Welcome to the Monitor

Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both moderate politicians who in 1861 deeply desired peace. What went wrong? BY RUSSELL MCCLINTOCK

4 . . . . . Salvo: Facts, Figures & . . . . . . Items of Interest TRAVELS: A Visit to Gettysburg VOICES: The War Begins PRIMER: Getting to Know Civil War Headgear PRESERVATION: Big Plans for the 150th FIGURES: Resources of the Union & Confederacy IN FOCUS: Baking for the Cause

The Work That Remains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Even after the fighting stopped, women waged their own battles to bring the bodies of their loved ones home. BY JUDITH GIESBERG

Run Aground at Sailor’s Creek. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 In one of the war’s final battles, the veteran infantrymen of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia fought alongside an unlikely set of comrades—the sailors and marines of Commodore John Randolph Tucker’s Naval Battalion. BY DEREK SMITH

Captive Memories: Union Ex-Prisoners and the Work of Remembrance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

18 . . . . Casualties of War: . . . . . . Clara Harris Rathbone 20 . . . . Battlefield Echoes: Blood. . . . . . Soaked Reality at Bull Run

“Babylon is Fallen”: The Northern Press Reports Sherman’s March to the Sea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

70 . . . . Books & Authors: Essential Reading on the Coming of the War By Russell McClintock Musings of a Civil War Bibliophile By Robert K. Krick The Books that Made Me By Steven H. Newton

Contrary to popular belief, the northern public was kept well aware of the goingson of General Sherman’s infamous Georgia excursion. BY SILVANA R. SIDDALI

80 . . . . Parting Shot: Word-clouding . . . . . . the Presidential Inaugurals

Survivors of Confederate prison camps soon found themselves waging an unexpected, and unwanted, struggle at home. BY BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN

COVER ILLUSTRATION: David A. Johnson

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VOLUME I, NUMBER 1, FALL 2011

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF . . . . . . . . .

Terry A. Johnston Jr.

TERRY@civilwarmonitor.com CONTRIBUTING EDITORS . . . . . . . . . . Laura June Davis

Angela Esco Elder

Welcome to The Civil War Monitor

EDITORIAL ADVISORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Berry

“The real war will never get in the books.”

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR . . . . . . . . . . Matthew C. Hulbert

THE QUOTE—AND THE STORY BEHIND IT—might be familiar to most Civil War enthusiasts. After learning that his brother, a soldier in the Union army, had been wounded in battle, famed poet Walt Whitman raced from New York to Washington, D.C., in hopes of finding him in one of the capital’s many military hospitals. After he did (his brother’s injury was not as serious as he had feared), Whitman remained, so affected by the extensive scenes of suffering that he volunteered to be a nurse. Later, when reflecting on his experiences, Whitman feared that the story of the war he had witnessed—not the romanticized tales of battlefield glory or heroics, but those of the conflict’s vast human cost—would not be told. In one sense, Whitman was right. For decades after the guns fell silent— and at times still today—many authors of the war’s popular histories papered over the conflict’s less savory or controversial elements, opting instead to tell simplified, sanitized, or sentimental tales of a chivalrous contest fought by strictly honorable men. The Civil War, in such histories, is presented through a rose-colored lens, void of context and absent any attempt at understanding its causes and consequences, let alone the times in which it was fought. But as Whitman learned firsthand, the Civil War was an undeniably complex and untidy event, one whose impact stretched far beyond the battlefield. And, thankfully, recent decades have witnessed a new and growing generation of scholars and enthusiasts who have dedicated themselves to telling stories of the “real” war—not just shedding new light on well-known battles and leaders, but also highlighting the many subjects and participants long ignored by the war’s chroniclers. Our goal at The Civil War Monitor is to advance this important work. In every issue, you’ll find original articles and new perspectives by leading historians and authors. Meanwhile, on our website (www.civilwarmonitor.com), we’ll be making use of the new and exciting possibilities the digital age has to offer—from blogging to social media to video—in an effort to bring the full drama and meaning of our nation’s greatest conflict to life. We’ll be counting on you, our readers, to help us in our efforts. Please, let us know what you think about our premier issue—as well as what topics you’d like to see covered in our pages.

COPY EDITOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jennifer Sturak

Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor MATT@civilwarmonitor.com

ART DIRECTOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Patrick Mitchell

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Curtis Circulation Company www.curtiscirc.com The Civil War Monitor [ISSN 2163-0682/print, ISSN 21630690/online] is published quarterly (4 times per year) by Bayshore History, LLC (P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ, 08403). 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 ©2011 by Bayshore History, LLC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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- &0) Facts, Figures & Items of Interest

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IN THIS SECTION Travels A VISIT TO GETTYSBURG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Voices THE WAR BEGINS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Primer CIVIL WAR HEADGEAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Preservation BIG PLANS FOR THE 150TH . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Figures RIVALS’ RESOURCES COMPARED . . . . . . . . 15

In Focus

THE GETTYSBURG FOUNDATION

BAKING FOR THE CAUSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

☛ Union soldiers advance during the Battle of Gettysburg’s decisive third day in this scene from Paul Philippoteaux’s majestic Gettysburg Cyclorama painting. For more about Gettysburg, turn the page.

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Destination: Gettysburg

JOHN PETERSON is a 22-year-resident of Gettysburg, where he previously managed the FARNSWORTH HOUSE INN’s bookstore and currently works as a sales associate at the military antique shop called THE HORSE SOLDIER. BEST SLEEP: THE DOUBLEDAY INN , for its magnificent window on the first day battle scenes. Provides easy access to both McPherson’s and Oak ridges. BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY: Medium and older-aged kids will enjoy the new GETTYSBURG MUSEUM & VISITOR CENTER , with its stupendous, recently restored Paul Philippoteaux cyclorama painting. Littler kids will find Gettysburg’s LAND OF LITTLE HORSES FARM PARK as “awesome� as ever. BEST TIME TO BE HERE: For me, the NoLINCOLN DINER

vember “REMEMBRANCE� WEEKEND is always best. In particular, the parade that retraces President Lincoln’s 1863 “Gettysburg Address� route to the national cemetery. If you can, watch it while standing between the two huge sycamores (“witness trees�) that were present when Lincoln rode by. On Baltimore street, just opposite the Farnsworth House. CAN’T MISS: The HAUSER ESTATE WINERY , located eight miles west of Gettysburg, not far from where Lieutenant General A.P. Hill’s Confederates camped en route to town. Good food, great wine, and magnificent 360-degree mountain vistas. BEST OF THE BATTLEFIELD: LITTLE ROUND TOP , southern slope. Visitors are advised to take advantage of the parking pull-off in the hollow just opposite the 83rd Pennsylvania monu-

DOUBLEDAY INN

ment—which places them smack dab in the Little Round Top “killing zone.� BEST-KEPT SECRET: Gettysburg hosts fine BLUEGRASS FESTIVALS in mid-May and early September. Visitors who share my taste for string band music are advised to schedule their battlefield pilgrimage to coincide with either one. BEST BATTLEFIELD COMPANION: William Frassanito’s GETTYSBURG: A JOURNEY IN TIME (Scribner, 1975) and EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY AT GETTYSBURG (Thomas Publications, 1996)—two masterful photo studies that will help visitors visualize the field and town as they were in 1863.

CHRISTINE THOMAS (DOUBLEDAY INN); JOHN PETERSON (GARRYOWEN PUB); DON PEARSE PHOTOGRAPHERS, INC. (MAJESTIC); ASHLEY BOND O’BRION (MAP)

IF THERE IS A CIVIL WAR MECCA, it’s Gettysburg. Every year, more than 3 million tourists flock to the small Pennsylvania town where Union and Confederate forces clashed in what is still regarded by many to be the fight that marked the war’s turning point. And with the battle’s 150th anniversary less than two years away, odds are those numbers will only keep rising. Interested in visiting Gettysburg? To help plan your trip, we’ve enlisted a trio of locals—individuals who live in, work in, or are otherwise intimately familiar with the historic town—to offer their personal suggestions for what to see and do.

BEST EATS: The LINCOLN DINER is Gettysburg’s only all-night eatery, and a tolerably good one for quick bites. Try breakfast at ERNIE’S TEXAS LUNCH for the best scrambled eggs in town. Arrange to lunch on chicken breast at the DOBBIN HOUSE TAVERN . For excellent Shepherd’s Pie, try the superb GARRYOWEN IRISH PUB .

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GARRYOWEN IRISH PUB

GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

SUE BOARDMAN, a Gettysburg Licensed Battlefield Guide, is owner-manager of THE ANTIQUE CENTER OF GETTYSBURG. BEST SLEEP: I like THE DOUBLEDAY INN. It’s right on the battlefield, and the couple that runs it is devoted to their guests.

☛

BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY: The GETTYSBURG DIORAMA is very popular with school kids. It has a light and sound show and thousands of scale model figures. BEST TIME TO BE HERE: While the battlefield is beautiful during all four seasons of the year, my favorite is FALL—the foliage is brilliant, the crowds are smaller, and the cooler weather makes spending hours on the field comfortable. Perfect for a photography buff!

MAJESTIC THEATER

CAN’T MISS: The GETTYSBURG CYCLORAMA . Some folks don’t know what a cyclorama is, and tend to overlook it as an important interpretive tool. Known as the IMAX of its day, there’s nothing else quite like it.

BEST-KEPT SECRET: The MAJESTIC THEATER is great for live performances, movies, film premieres, art exhibits and musical shows. It’s been called the grandest small-town theater in America, and for good reason.

BEST OF THE BATTLEFIELD: CULP’S HILL is one of the most under-interpreted areas of the battlefield and one of the most interesting. Not only is it an important part of the battle story, it is where a company of Union troops (the 147th Pennsylvania Infantry) from my home area fought.

BEST BATTLEFIELD COMPANION: GETTYSBURG: A JOURNEY IN TIME by William Frassanito contains images taken on the battlefield within days of the fight. Frassanito tells you about the images and helps you find the sites. There is no better way to connect to Gettysburg than through these powerful images.

GETTYSBURG DIORAMA BEST EATS: The LINCOLN DINER has the most incredible desserts! They are open 24 hours every day so there’s no reason to go hungry in Gettysburg. THE AVENUE RESTAURANT or THE PLAZA RESTAURANT & LOUNGE both have consistently great food and fast, friendly service. Love the deep-fried pickles at the Avenue and the homemade soups at the Plaza. The DOBBIN HOUSE TAVERN also has wonderful food and a great atmosphere. The seafood entrees are incredible and the roast duck is heavenly! ☛ {Cont. next page}

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Gettysburg Navigator 83RD PA MONUMENT THE DOUBLEDAY INN 104 Doubleday Avenue, 717-334-9119

THE GETTYSBURG HOTEL One Lincoln Square, 717-337-2000 DINING

LINCOLN DINER 32 Carlisle Street, 717-334-3900

THE DOBBIN HOUSE TAVERN

THE AVENUE RESTAURANT 21 Steinwehr Avenue, 717-334-3235

THE PLAZA RESTAURANT & LOUNGE PETER CARMICHAEL is director of the Civil War Institute and the Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College.

BEST OF THE BATTLEFIELD: WILLOUGHBY RUN , just below the 26th North Carolina monument where the Tar Heels and Iron Brigade fought to the death on July 1. Along the banks of the creek, away from the park road and hidden from the monuments, the horror of the place seems almost palatable.

JOHN PETERSON (3)

LODGING

2 Baltimore Street, 717-334-1999

DOBBIN HOUSE TAVERN 89 Steinwehr Avenue, 717-334-2100

THE RAGGED EDGE COFFEE HOUSE 110 Chambersburg Street, 717-334-4464

THAI CLASSIC IV

BEST-KEPT SECRET: The beautifully restored MAJESTIC THEATER offers a wide range of classic and foreign movies and is connected to a wonderful eatery. If you want a place to relax near the center of town after a day on the battlefield and you are in no mood for a ghost tour, this is the place to go during the evening.

51 Chambersburg Street, 717-334-6736

BEST SLEEP: THE GETTYSBURG HOTEL . It is right on the square, across from the David Wills house, and overlooks the center of town. BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY: THE JUNIOR RANGER PROGRAM at the National Park. It’s the best way to turn your kid into his or her own historian. BEST TIME TO BE HERE: I love WINTER. One can take in the battlefield landscape without obstruction since the leaves and tourists are gone.

ERNIE’S TEXAS LUNCH 58 Chambersburg Street, 717-334-1970

GARRYOWEN IRISH PUB 126 Chambersburg Street, 717-337-2719

HAUSER ESTATE WINERY 410 Cashtown Road, Biglerville, PA 717-334-4888 PLACES OF INTEREST

GETTYSBURG MUSEUM AND VISITOR CENTER, 1195 Baltimore Pike, 717-334-1124 THE GETTYSBURG DIORAMA 241 Steinwehr Avenue, 717-334-6408

MAJESTIC THEATER 25 Carlisle Street, 717-337-8200

CAN’T MISS: PENN HALL on the Gettysburg College campus is a beautiful wartime building that served as a hospital during and after the battle. Confederate prisoners were also quartered nearby. Most visitors wrongly believe that the armies skirted Gettysburg College during the fight (called Pennsylvania College at the time), but Penn Hall and the entire campus witnessed much of the first day’s battle and is likely the most overlooked area on the battlefield.

LAND OF LITTLE HORSES FARM PARK 125 Glenwood Drive, 717-334-7259

GETTYSBURG BLUEGRASS FESTIVALS www.gettysburgbluegrass.com/festival/ SHOPPING

FARNSWORTH HOUSE INN BOOKSTORE

BEST BATTLEFIELD COMPANION: Mark Grimsley and Brooks Simpson’s GETTYSBURG: A BATTLEFIELD GUIDE (University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Nothing gives a first-time visitor a better orientation of the field and how the ground shaped and influenced the tactical developments of the battle. The writing is crisp, the analysis compelling, and the authors never lose sight of the battle’s high drama. BEST EATS: THE RAGGED EDGE COFFEE HOUSE has the best smoothies, superb coffee, and well-crafted sandwiches that are not made of the toxic materials found in the chain restaurants. And you can’t beat the free Wi-Fi and the wonderful courtyard in the back. For dinner, THAI CLASSIC IV . Try the Shrimp Drunken Noodles—they’ll satisfy the most famished battlefield visitor.

401 Baltimore Street, 717-334-8838

THE HORSE SOLDIER 219 Steinwehr Avenue, 717-334-0347

THE GETTYSBURG HOTEL

THE ANTIQUE CENTER OF GETTYSBURG 30 Baltimore Street, 717-337-3669

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IN THE FIRST PERSON: THE WAR BEGINS

“Secession is the fashion here. Young ladies sing for it; old ladies pray for it; young men are dying to fight for it; old men are ready to demonstrate it…!. The utter contempt and loathing for the venerated Stars and Stripes, the abhorrence of the very words UNITED STATES, the intense hatred of the Yankee on the part of the people, cannot be conceived by anyone who has not seen them.” LONDON TIMES REPORTER WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL ON THE POPULAR MOOD IN CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, ON APRIL 17, 1861, FOUR DAYS AFTER THE FALL OF FORT SUMTER.

“Oh! how I do hate the North.” A female resident of Baltimore, Maryland, in a letter to a friend, June 1861.

“A reckless and unprincipled tyrant has invaded your soil…!. All rules of civilized warfare are abandoned, and they proclaim by their acts, if not on their banners, that their war-cry is ‘BEAUTY and BOOTY.’ All that is dear to man—your honor, and that of your wives and daughters, your fortunes and your lives, are involved in this momentous contest.” BRIGADIER GENERAL PIERRE G.T. BEAUREGARD, C.S.A.,

in a June 5, 1861, proclamation to residents of Virginia warning them that the true intention of Union soldiers was to rape and pillage their way through the South.

“[W]e ought to make the war overwhelming… . We ought to pour our legions forward. It is mercy now to go strong and fight hard… . Let it be settled from henceforth in this land that a Government has a right to be a Government… . Let us meet and settle the issue now, and bury it so deep, in a grave so blood-cemented, that it shall have to the end of time no resurrection. Let us not be eager for peace as to heal this hurt slightly. Let the laws go with the army. HANG TRAITORS.” THE REVEREND ANDREW LEETE STONE TO THE CONGREGATION OF BOSTON’S PARK STREET CHURCH, APRIL 26, 1861.

“WE MUST PIERCE, FIGHT, AND CRUSH THE TRAITORS UPON THEIR OWN SOIL, UNDER THE SHADOW OF THEIR OWN HOMES— OR IF NEED BE, AMID THE GLARE ARISING FROM THEIR BLAZING DOMICILES.” Troy Times (NEW YORK), APRIL 22, 1861.

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“WE ARE LIVING A MONTH OF COMMON LIFE EVERY DAY…. [T]HE ATTITUDE OF NEW YORK AND THE WHOLE NORTH AT THIS TIME IS MAGNIFICENT. PERFECT UNANIMITY, EARNESTNESS, AND READINESS TO MAKE EVERY SACRIFICE FOR THE SUPPORT OF LAW AND NATIONAL LIFE….” NEW YORK CITY LAWYER AND DIARIST GEORGE TEMPLETON STRONG, APRIL 18, 1861.

“I think that many persons are beginning now to feel that the excitement of our people…is becoming too intense, and is running into VIOLENT FANATICISM which may soon plunge us into all the BRUTALITIES of the lowest and most savage forms of warfare… . [We] are in danger, as it seems to me, of inaugurating here, on our own soil and against our brothers and fellow countrymen, scenes of REVOLTING BUTCHERY that will make us blush in after times, and hang our heads in shame… .” THE REVEREND DAVID PITKIN, IN A SERMON TO WORSHIPERS AT ST. PETER’S CHURCH IN ALBANY, NEW YORK, APRIL 30, 1861.

SOURCES: WILLIAM E. GIENAPP, ED., THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION: A DOCUMENTARY COLLECTION (NEW YORK, 2001); ANDREW S. COOPERSMITH, FIGHTING WORDS: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS OF THE CIVIL WAR (NEW YORK, 2004).

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Getting to Know: Civil War Headgear “THEIR UNIFORMS ARE AS various as the states and cities from which they came,� observed Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman of the new Union recruits who crowded Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1861. The same could be said of the men who joined the Confederate army. On both sides, military volunteers donned a wide variety of uniforms—and perhaps nothing reflected this diversity more than their headgear. Below are some of the many types of hats and caps worn by those who served during the Civil War.

This “BEEHIVE�-STYLE SLOUCH HAT— a design popular with Confederate soldiers in all theaters of the war—was reportedly found on the Gettysburg battlefield after the fighting.

The wide-brimmed felt

SLOUCH HAT was another widely worn by soldiers— particularly officers— on both sides. An officer in the 111th Illinois Infantry wore this one during the war.

With its distinctive square brim and circular, sunken top, the French-inspired KEPI is the cap most associated with the American Civil War. It came in a variety of colors and was adorned by a multitude of bands, braiding, and insignia—all depending on its wearer’s allegiance, regiment, and rank. This particular version belonged to Hugh Mortimer Nelson, a Confederate officer who died of disease in 1862.

This distinctive KEPI belonged to a Vermont man whose U.S. sharpshooter regiment wore dark green uniforms devised to blend in with the greens of nature during the active campaigning seasons— spring and summer. Volunteers on both sides joined so-called

Zouave regiments, whose attire was inspired by the uniforms of the French army regiments of the same name. More decorative than practical, the exotic fezzes were a perfect compliment to the Zouaves’ boldly colored uniforms. A member of the 5th New York wore this FEZ during the war.

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This cap is outfitted with a havelock, a

white linen cloth meant to protect its wearer’s neck from the sun. While many early war volunteers donned havelocks— they were widely seen on troops at Bull Run—most soon jettisoned them as impractical and bothersome. This HAVELOCK belonged to the chaplain of the 6th Massachusetts Militia.

The model 1858 “HARDEE” HAT was the regulation dress hat for the U.S. Army. But not all Union soldiers received one, nor did all who received one use it—the hat’s heavy black felt made for hot and uncomfortable wearing during the warmer months. Still, many Union soldiers donned their Hardees with pride, most notably the western volunteers of the famed Iron Brigade, whose men became known as the “Black Hats.”

Soldiers on both sides utilized waterproof

garments—products of the India Rubber Company—to help protect them from inclement weather. A Union soldier took this RUBBERIZED RAIN HAT from the body of a Confederate soldier killed at the Battle of Corinth, Mississippi, in October 1862. Sailors on both sides wore these ROUND,

BRIMLESS, HEAVY-CLOTH CAPS while on fatigue duty. Union seaman Charles Sharter, an African American, wore this cap while serving on board the USS Vermont and Tallapoosa, ships of the West Gulf Squadron. Often confused with the kepi, the FORAGE

CAP sported a similar look but with noticeable differences, including its short, downward-pitched visor. Descended from the shako, the tall and rigid cylindrical leather hat donned by members of the antebellum U.S. Army, the more relaxed forage cap was the hat most frequently worn by Union soldiers during the Civil War. This forage cap bears the insignia of the 3rd Rhode Island Light Artillery, Battery A. SOURCES: John D. Billings, Hardtack and Coffee, or The Unwritten Story of Army Life (Boston, 1888); Earl J. Coates, Michael J. McAfee, and Don Troiani, Don Troiani’s Regiments & Uniforms of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 2002); Roy M. Marcot, U.S. Sharpshooters: Berdan’s Civil War Elite (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 2007). Photos courtesy of the Military & Historical Image Bank (www.historicalimagebank.com).

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Battlefields Gain Ground for 150th Anniversary President, Civil War Trust

TO MARK THE sesquicentennial anniversary of the American Civil War, the Civil War Trust recently unveiled an ambitious national campaign that aims to permanently protect 20,000 acres of battlefield land over the next five years. Campaign 150: Our Time, Our Legacy kicked off with an event held at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg on June 30. Announcing the project was Civil War Trust chairman Henry Simpson, who was joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom James McPherson and the organization’s newest trustee, country music superstar Trace Adkins. The Civil War Trust is the largest non-profit organization devoted to the

☛ The historic Dogan House, located near the “Deep Cut” on the Second Manassas battlefield, is part of the Civil War Trust’s latest acquisition.

preservation of America’s endangered Civil War battlefields. Its goal is to preserve the nation’s Civil War sites and to promote appreciation of these hallowed grounds through education and heritage tourism. To date, the Trust has preserved more than 30,000 acres of battlefield land in 20 states. Its commitment to conscientious stewardship and fiscal responsibility has led to the organization regularly receiving the coveted Four Star ranking from the nonprofit watchdog group Charity Navigator and a Best in America rating by the Independent Charities of America. Adkins suggested that the sesquicentennial is the ideal time to redouble battlefield preservation efforts: “No other outcome of this anniversary period could be more appropriate than setting aside the blood-soaked battlegrounds of that conflict as permanent

memorials to the courage and sacrifice of our ancestors. This is the type of lasting legacy each of us can take pride in, and I am proud to be a part of such a noble and patriotic effort.” McPherson stressed that, even beyond the anniversary, time is of the essence. “With an average of 30 acres of battlefield land lost each day, now is the time for a major preservation initiative,” he said. “If successful, Campaign 150 will have allowed us to set aside those landscapes that future generations will require in order to gain a full understanding of the Civil War. This project will enable us to substantively complete protection of many of the conflict’s storied fields.” In order to protect such a tremendous amount of land, the Trust must raise $40 million from the private sector. These funds will be leveraged with government grants and foundation and corporate support to purchase battlefield ground at fair market value or place it under permanent conservation easements. Aiding the Trust in its efforts to protect this priceless nineteenth-century history is twenty-first-century technology—cellular phones. Individuals can contribute directly to the Trust’s mission by text message, making a donation anytime and anywhere. When you text “civilwar” to 50555, a $10 charge will appear on your wireless bill or be deducted from your prepaid account balance. EDITOR’S NOTE: 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 www.civilwar.org

THE CIVIL WAR TRUST

BY O. JAMES LIGHTHIZER

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=@>LI<J =@>LI<J

VALUE of MANUFACTURED GOODS

By the Numbers: Resources of the Union & Confederacy

$1,730,000,000

AT THE OUTBREAK of the Civil War, the opposing sides seemed equally matched in many areas: Each boasted a galvanized populace, was confident in the righteousness of its cause, and viewed victory as a virtual certainty. Beyond fervency and determination, however, the matchup seemed much less balanced when it came to the industrial and financial wherewithal with which to wage war. Indeed, as the following graphics reveal, the seceded states that formed the Confederacy ( ) lagged dangerously behind the Union ( ) in several key areas.

$156,000,000

MANUFACTURING ESTABLISHMENTS

(

(

BANK DEPOSITS

TOTAL POPULATION

110,000

18,000

RAILROAD MILEAGE 22,000

9,000 $207,000,000 22,300,000

$47,000,000

9,100,000*

SHIPPING TONNAGE

BANK CAPITAL WHITE MALE POPULATION (1 8 t o 45 )

$330,000,000

$27,000,000 4,600,000

VALUE of FIREARMS PRODUCED

CAPITAL INVESTMENT

$850,000,000

290,000

$2,290,000

$73,000 $95,000,000

COAL PRODUCTION (t ons) COTTON PRODUCTION (bal e s) 4,600,000

1,100,000

SOURCE: William E. Gienapp, ed., The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection (New York, 2001).

*Slaves accounted for 3,500,000 of the total population.

43,000

to

5,344,000

13,680,000

650,000

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@E @E =F:LJ =F:LJ

Baking for the Cause ARMIES HAD TO BE FED, not just armed. The inglorious yet important task of providing fresh bread to the many thousands of Union soldiers who occupied Alexandria, Virginia, the strategically significant town situated across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., fell to the roughly 200 civilian employees of the city’s U.S. Government Bakery. Using the facility’s 20 ovens, these men—pictured at their work stations in this undated photo from the lens of famed Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner—produced as many as 100,000 loafs of bread a day for the troops. Until recently, Gardner’s striking image of the bakery’s white-aproned workforce remained hidden away in the private collection of a family descended from its original collector, a Union soldier from New York. To the best of our knowledge, it appears here on the printed page for the first time. The non-profit Center for Civil War Photography is devoted to collecting, preserving, and digitizing Civil War images for the public benefit. To learn more about the organization and its mission, visit: www. civilwarphotography.org

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PHOTO COURTESY COWAN’S AUCTIONS, CINCINNATI, OH (WWW.COWANSAUCTIONS.COM).

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Casualties of War CLARA HARRIS RATHBONE BY STEPHEN BERRY

S NEWS OF THE assassination rippled out, a distracted nation looked up from its varied pursuits and focused for a single collective moment on a shared spectacle. A president had never been assassinated before, and there were no emotional precedents. Walt Whitman spent the day with his mother. “We heard the news very early in the morning,” he remembered. “Mother prepared breakfast—and other meals afterward… but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper, morning and evening…and pass’d them silently to each other.” An unknown diarist was too agitated to remain at home. He wandered the streets of New York for miles, hours, sketching the hastily hand-painted memorials that adorned

the city’s businesses. “Oh how solemn this day,” he wrote on the cover of his sketchbook. “What a great calamity has fallen upon our country. Never in the history of our government has such a gloom pervaded every mind, sadness is seen on every countenance.”¹ The psychological damage was greater the closer one got to the epicenter of the disaster. Mary Lincoln had been sitting next to her husband, holding his hand, during the play. Even so, her love had had no power to protect him, and her mental tether, never the strongest, now snapped. At the

president’s deathbed, James Tanner thought Mary Lincoln’s wail worse than anything he’d heard in the Manassas hospital where he’d had both his legs sawed off. “I have witnessed and experienced much physical agony,” he noted, “but of it all nothing sank deeper in my memory than that moan of a breaking heart.”² If one listened carefully, one could hear the breaking of a mind too. For the rest of her life, Mary never felt truly safe. People were out to steal from her, she said, or murder her. She kept stocks and bonds secreted on her person; she fled the country; when she returned home she carried a gun until her family worried that, in her mental twilight, she might hurt someone, including herself. No one has ever pointed out the similarities in the mental aftermaths of Mary Lincoln and Henry Rathbone. Henry and his fiancée, Clara Harris, completed the quartet in the Lincolns’ box that night. Clara was the daughter of New York senator Ira Harris, a man who had been so often underfoot at the White House that Lincoln joked he always checked under his bed before retiring to make sure the senator wasn’t waiting to ambush him first thing in the morning. Clara performed heroically in the assassination’s aftermath and was Mary’s main support both at Ford’s Theater and at the Petersen House, where they took Lincoln to die after. It was only much later that Clara felt the full mental weight of what had happened. “I [cannot] settle myself quietly,” she wrote a friend a week after the assassination. “When I [sit] down to write, I [do] not intend alluding to these fearful events at all, but I really cannot fix my mind on anything else—

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though I try my best to think of them as little as possible, I cannot sleep, & really feel wretchedly.”³ Her fiancé was even more haunted. Like Clara, Henry Rathbone had conducted himself faultlessly that evening. He had been the first to register what was happening; he was the only man in the theater to actually grapple with Booth, a courage that won him a savage knife wound from his elbow to his armpit. Bleeding profusely on his fiancée’s dress, hair, and face, he helped carry Lincoln out of the theater before beginning to swoon. In a pale delirium, he was carried back to the Harris household where he still had no concern for himself but only raved about Lincoln: “The president has been shot!” “God in heaven save him!” Henry recovered, but like Clara, he could not immediately shake the experience, and in him the damage took deeper root. He seems never to have gotten over the possibility that he had

not done enough or had failed some critical test. In truth, Booth’s bullet had penetrated all their brains and, as in Mary’s case, Henry’s tortured feelings of helplessness and insecurity became generalized as he aged. He and Clara married in 1867 and had three children in the years after, but Henry became gradually obsessed by the idea that Clara would leave him. He may have been dimly aware that his possessiveness was the only thing driving her away, but after the assassination nothing could be held tightly enough, nothing dear was secure. Mary Lincoln had the same reaction. She clutched her son Tad, her brooches, laces, and calfskin gloves, and held on for dear life in the midst of a mental maelstrom. Rathbone clutched his wife the same. And he too began to carry a gun. Just before Christmas 1883, the Rathbones were in Germany, where they had lived for seven months. The children were in bed, and Henry want-

☛ In this Currier & Ives rendition of the Lincoln assassination, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, look on in helpless horror as the president, seated next to his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, is shot by John Wilkes Booth.

ed to check on them, but Clara led him back toward their bedroom. There he slipped into the chamber, raised a gun and pulled the trigger, failing yet another person he was pledged to protect. He then turned a knife on himself.⁴ In all his years at the asylum, he could never quite admit that he had committed the crime. He preferred to think that he had suffered his new wound while struggling with his wife’s assassin, which in a sense he had. Memory must run clean all the way back to its headwaters, to pure origins in the mist of childhood. When bad things happen the mind may get stuck in an eddy ☛ {Cont. on p. 75}

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BattleÞeld Echoes BLOOD-SOAKED REALITY AT BULL RUN

HEN THE Civil War began in April 1861, very few believed that it would last longer than a year. Many in the North and South thought that a single, climactic battle would provide a decisive victory for their side. Triumph in the recent Mexican-American War, remembered as a relatively short and uncomplicated affair, remained in the forefront of the public and military mind. This new conflict, with the belligerents’ opposing capitals separated by only 83 miles, appeared to lend itself to an even more rapid conclusion. Ironically, the hero of the war with Mexico, General Winfield Scott, was one of the few influential U.S. figures who anticipated a prolonged, arduous conflict. He warned against a war of conquest and proposed a strategic plan (dubbed the Anaconda Plan

by the northern press) that called for a methodical blockade of the South and gaining control of the Mississippi River. The majority of the northern public and U.S. military, however, were not supportive of such a conservative approach. Indeed, military leaders on both sides envisioned a conflict dominated by the strategic offensive. Napoleonic-style clashes on the field of battle—marked by turning movements, bayonet charges, and decisive pursuits—were seen as the preferred methods for victory. This confidence—or, more accurately, over-confidence—in the pros-

pects for a short conflict was echoed in the northern and southern press. The Chicago Tribune claimed the Confederacy could be defeated in three months at the most, while the Memphis Appeal predicted that the very first clash between the two armies would result in the “final success of our great and glorious cause and of the eventual defeat” of the Union.¹ While such opinions were not universal, they were indeed the most common and most vociferous during the war’s first months. In the weeks preceding the battle at Bull Run, a handful of engagements took place, amounting to little more than skirmishes. Both sides were busy building, organizing, and training their armies. Time, however, worked against the Union. Reacting to mounting political pressure for action and the impending expiration of enlistment terms for 90-day volunteers, President Abraham Lincoln authorized an offensive against the Confederate army positioned in northern Virginia, which posed the most glaring threat to the U.S. capital. The two armies that met near Manassas, Virginia, on the morning of July 21, 1861, were evenly matched. Each boasted nearly 30,000 troops and were commanded by graduates of West Point with similar military experience—Brigadier General Irvin McDowell for the U.S. and Brigadier General Pierre G.T. Beauregard for the Confederacy. Hundreds of citizens from Washington and the surrounding areas took to the nearby hills overlooking the battlefield to watch what they believed would be the war’s entertaining single act. The atmosphere was one of eager, almost jovial, anticipation. That mood would soon change, however, as the battle raged into the afternoon, when a Confederate

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BY CLAY MOUNTCASTLE

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counterattack against the Union right flank sparked a frantic U.S. retreat. The retreat quickly turned into a disorganized, confused rout as McDowell’s panicked army streamed back toward Washington. Victorious, but suffering from disorganization itself, the Confederate army did not pursue. The outcome of Bull Run came as a shock, especially for those in the North. The casualty numbers alone were significant—more than 800 killed and 2,600 wounded from both sides. Never before had as many Americans died in a single day’s battle. And yet, it was the manner in which McDowell’s army lost— disintegrating in panic—that carried the day’s most salient message. This war would not be easy, nor would it be won quickly. It was to be a war of attrition, not annihilation. The strategic and tactical advantage would most often reside with the defender. It would be a bloody war. Although the participants did not know it at the time, the immense destruction and loss of life

that awaited them over the next four years would make the optimistic prewar predictions seem tragically naïve. While the southern press trumpeted the Confederate victory, the newspaper headlines in the North were filled with alarm and doubt. The Philadelphia Press, which before the battle had predicted that the Confederate “ragamuffins” would scatter like “chaff before the wind” when faced by superior U.S. troops, now proclaimed Bull Run a “disaster” that presented “a terrible political problem” for the North.² Whether the defeat at Bull Run served to galvanize the Union war effort or start the trend of battlefield futility in Virginia that would haunt the Army of the Potomac for another two years, the outlook for the war immediately changed. Those who had been so certain of a short contest now knew they had been wrong. The grueling next four years would prove just how wrong they had been. Within the story of Bull Run we find a cautious reminder for today. Re-

☛ The Battle of Bull Run, fought near Manassas, Virginia, on the morning of July 21, 1861, served as a rude awakening to those in the North and South who were expecting a brief and relatively bloodless conflict.

cent years have seen the emergence of a sort of false confidence expressed by various U.S. military and political leaders in our ability to identify the nature or character of our future wars. Our ongoing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with the current geo-political climate, have led many to declare with conviction that our military’s foreseeable future will be dominated by similar unconventional, “small war” campaigns. As a result, a great amount of effort has been placed on shaping military organization, doctrine, and academic curriculum to deal specifically with stability and counterinsurgency (COIN) missions. In other words, we are banking on the assumption that tomorrow’s wars will ☛ {Cont. on p. 75}

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THE HOUR Lincoln, Davis, and the Struggle to Avert War BY RUSSELL MCCLINTOCK

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EFFERSON DAVIS SPENT THE WINTER of 1860-1861 fighting to protect his beloved society from destruction at the hands of a hostile, irrational, and ruthless opponent. ¶ Abraham Lincoln spent his winter doing precisely the same thing. ¶ For inspiration and guidance in his fight, Davis turned to America’s Founding Fathers, justifying his actions with the idealism of their principles and supporting his arguments with the wisdom and justice of their Constitution. ¶ So did Lincoln. ¶ Even as he fought, Davis struggled mightily to maintain the moral high ground: searching for an acceptable middle course, keeping an open mind to reasonable terms of adjustment, reaching out to potential allies among those who had not yet chosen sides, and above all seeking any honorable means of preventing a potentially devastating war among those who had always looked upon each other as brethren and friends. ¶ So, too, Abraham Lincoln. The failure to achieve a peaceful resolution in the winter of America’s discontent lay not in any conscious refusal to compromise—the majority of those in both North and South were relative moderates who saw themselves as bending over backward to be reasonable. Failure lay rather in the vast distance that separated each side’s minimum terms. After decades of bitter accusations and growing defensiveness, the slaveryspawned conflicts that divided North and South defied compromise—and the failure of compromise raised the specter of secession, which was even less negotiable. By 1860, the immense gulf between the sections blurred distinctions among opponents and made efforts of those on the other side to reach across seem puny and insincere. Both Davis and Lincoln were chosen largely for their moderate views. But moderation is nothing if not relative, and one section’s moderate was the other’s radical. To the southerners who looked to Davis for more prudent, levelheaded leadership than that of militant secessionists—“fireeaters”—like lawyer and planter William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama or editor Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, Lincoln’s blunt condemnation of slavery was an open threat. To the northern Republicans who embraced Lincoln’s views on slavery as a sensible alternative to the zealous agitation of radicals like Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner and Ohio governor Salmon Chase, Davis’ insistence on federal protection for slavery in the western territories marked him as a southern extremist, and his support for both the right and the justice of secession made him downright dangerous. In this volatile context, what to one side seemed an acceptable compromise to the other looked selfish and narrow minded. And despite what each side deemed its own best effort at peace, the war came.

IN THE DEEP SOUTH of the 1850s, no one found political success without being both an outspoken defender of slavery and a staunch advocate of a state’s constitutional right to secede from the American Union. So when the North’s antislavery Republican Party capped an explosive half-decade’s growth by capturing the White House in November 1860, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi joined other Deep South leaders in viewing Abraham Lincoln’s victory as “a transfer of the government into the hands of the abolitionists,” an ominous development that almost certainly compelled southern secession. Unlike the fire-eaters, though, Davis came to this conclusion with

great reluctance. He knew a great many northerners—even counted some of them good friends—and he did not share the belief of most of his Deep South colleagues that the North would not fight to prevent secession. What was more, he knew firsthand the horrors that war entailed—still carried those horrors with him, in fact, in a recurring infection from a foot wound incurred at the Battle of Buena Vista 13 years earlier. So while Davis vigorously upheld a state’s right to secede, he also urged his fellow southerners to proceed slowly. Precipitous action, he argued, would alienate the more conservative upper tier of slave states that ran from North Carolina, Kentucky, and Arkansas north, and dramatically increase the odds of a conflict. “If the border slave holding states unite with us there will probably be peaceful separation,” he reasoned, for the federal government would hesitate to use force against nearly half the Union— “but if the cotton states are to maintain their position alone, war is probable.”¹ So when Congress convened in early December, the senator was determined to encourage sectional compromise and see how Republicans responded. Yet Davis’ notion of compromise, like that of a good many other congressional delegates in 1860-1861, acknowledged neither the need for nor even the desirability of both sides to make sacrifices. “Upon you of the majority section it depends to restore peace and perpetuate the Union of equal States,” he informed Republicans, for he believed that their antislavery fanaticism had caused the problem. If they wanted to save the Union, he asserted, they must renounce their hateful attacks upon the South’s slave-based society and instead prove “the purpose of your constituents to ful-

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fill in the spirit of justice and fraternity all their constitutional obligations.”² It quickly became clear that Republicans were not willing to concede the justice of slavery, confirming Davis’ belief of their ill intentions toward the South. Their stubborn refusal to compromise proved to him the need for secession, and he immediately set about demonstrating that for those misguided southerners who still clung to the illusion that their society would be secure in a Northern-dominated Union. His strategy was simple: contrast the Deep South’s willingness to make concessions with the Republicans’ intransigence. On the Senate’s Committee of Thirteen, created in midDecember to broker a sectional resolution, Davis voted in favor of the popular compromise plan of Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden, which had captured the hopes and imaginations of unionists North and South, despite knowing that its proposition for banning slavery in the northern U.S. territories was anathema in the cotton states and stood no chance of halting secession there. Sure enough, Republican opposition defeated Crittenden’s plan, accelerating the Deep South’s secession. To Davis, this course was not deceitful: he was merely showcasing the northern hostility that he believed had forced the South into disunion.³

HE PRESIDENT-ELECT, who spent most of the secession winter observing events from his home in Springfield, Illinois, was blind to the distinction between enthusiastic secessionists like Yancey and reluctant secessionists like Davis, but from his perspective that difference was meaningless anyway. Lincoln had long since recognized that Deep South leaders of any stripe would accept nothing less than northerners’ smiling embrace of the essential goodness of slavery. “What will satisfy them?” Lincoln had demanded several months before the November election. “This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them.” He was right; that was essentially what Davis required for a successful compromise.⁴ Yet in other ways Lincoln was profoundly ignorant of what was happening in the South. Like most Republicans, he was convinced that disunion was a baseless threat, a “shallow pretext” for “extorting a compromise” from anxious northerners.⁵ Merely the ploy of a small but powerful group of

T

☛ Abraham Lincoln and his sons posed for this photograph outside their Springfield, Illinois, home shortly before the president-elect departed for Washington, D.C.

elite agitators, secession had no popular support; unless northerners did something to provoke southerners, Lincoln predicted, they would come to their senses and loyalty to the Union would prevail. After a brief storm, then, the question of secession would at long last be dead. “The tug has to come,” he wrote, “and better now, than any time

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hereafter.”⁶ With that in mind, Lincoln acted behind the scenes to squash a procompromise movement gathering steam among Republicans in Congress. In mid-December, he wrote several letters urging his party to hold fast. Those letters enabled the hardliners in his party to gain the upper hand in the struggle over concessions, and the movement failed.⁷ Yet Lincoln saw himself as undermining a war-averting compromise no more than Davis did. For years, Republicans believed, southerners had used the threat of disunion to bluff northerners into proslavery concessions, thereby expanding slavery and bolstering the power of southern planter-aristocrats. Combatting this Slave Power was precisely why outraged northerners had formed the Republican Party to begin with. So like Davis, who generously gave northerners one last chance to prove their goodwill, Lincoln saw his outlook as more than reasonable. While he stood “inflexible” on slavery’s extension, he urged his party to concede “whatever springs of necessity from the fact that the institution is amongst us”—to enforce the fugitive slave law, for example.⁸ But disunion was neither a bluff nor a political coup staged by a handful of radicals, and the southern unionism Lincoln was counting on was highly conditional: As Jefferson Davis had astutely recognized, the other slave states would go, too, if secessionist predictions proved true and Republicans showed any intention to act against the peculiar institution, or if the federal government tried to coerce the seceding states of the Deep South into staying. In that sense Lincoln’s entire policy rested on a fundamental misreading of southern politics.⁹ Yet Lincoln would not have changed his course even if he had read the South more accurately. We have already seen that he recognized that the Deep South would not agree to any terms that the Republicans might realistically offer. Procompromise northerners like New York senator William H. Seward might focus on keeping the border slave states from seceding, but they could only hope vaguely that the Deep South would be unable or unwilling to go it alone and would eventually return to the Union.

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“[M]ake all who oppose us smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.” JEFFERSON DAVIS, in a speech delivered a few days before his inauguration as president of the Confederate States of America on February 18, 1861. LEFT: An artist’s rendition of the inauguration based on a photograph taken of the event.

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For Lincoln, who was not willing to take that chance, no congressional compromise could have resolved the crisis. In addition, while Lincoln may not have grasped the true nature of southern unionism, he did recognize that unionists demanded nothing less than the surrender of Republicans’ most deeply held principle: free soil in the western territories. That concession would crush the party. And like most Republicans in 1860, Lincoln believed that if his party were to crumble under the threat of secession, the American republic itself would collapse. “Any concession in the face of menace,” he said, would establish a fatal precedent for a minority’s trumping the will of the majority and thus mean “the destruction of the government itself.” Moreover, the Republican Party was the only means of restricting the spread of slavery and returning the United States to the antislavery course upon which Republicans believed its Founders had placed it.¹⁰

BETWEEN DECEMBER 20 and February 4, the seven states of the Deep South formally seceded from the United States. Their senators and representatives gradually withdrew from Congress, and on February 4 delegates from those states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to work out the details of a new slave-state confederacy. Although he had begun working for secession back in December, Davis nevertheless found his front-row view of the Union’s collapse wrenching. Upon learning of Mississippi’s secession in early January, he had pleaded with Republicans to let the departing states go peacefully. Three days later, he had collapsed under the strain; for over a week he lay in a darkened room with an excruciating attack of facial neuralgia. Nevertheless, on January 21, having received an appointment to serve as commanding general of Mississippi’s armed forces, Davis had shuffled painfully to the Senate chamber to bid a tearful goodbye to his colleagues. Even at that tender moment, he felt compelled to point out the dangerous radicalism of northerners’ applying the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality to blacks; the blamelessness of southerners, who were merely doing what their Revolutionary forebears had done when the British had similarly threatened their rights; and the risk of trying to coerce the seceded states, who

wanted peace but would fight if necessary. The next day he left Washington for the last time.¹¹ Back home in Mississippi, his pain finally receded, Davis prepared for the war he feared was coming. Despite his desire for peace, the former soldier and secretary of war felt he could do the most good as a military leader. He continued to believe that if the federal government faced a sufficiently armed and united South, it would back down. He was dismayed, therefore, when a telegraph informed him that the Montgomery delegates had appointed him provisional president of the Confederate States. Watching as he read, his wife was shocked at his expression. “He looked so grieved that I feared some evil had befallen our family,” she recalled later. When he told her the contents of the telegram, it was “as a man might speak of a sentence of death.”¹² But the call of duty was not to be ignored. Davis left for Montgomery the next day, February 11, on a six-day journey marked by cheering crowds and over two dozen speeches. Displaying his typical moderation, he insisted that the “only hope” for the South lay “in a determined maintenance of our position, and to make all who oppose us smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel,” even as he stressed that fighting would occur only “if coercion should be persisted in.” If war came, he declared in his February 18 inaugural address, the Confederacy would be “doubly justified by the absence of wrong on our part, and by wanton aggression on the part of others.”¹³

EANWHILE, SOME 500 miles north, Abraham Lincoln was similarly striving to avoid an appearance of belligerence while still projecting firmness of purpose.¹⁴ On February 1, he sent New York senator William Seward, the leading procompromise Republican and Lincoln’s secretary of state-designate, a token to assuage his Upper South friends: a letter from the president-elect supporting (acquiescing in, really) any reasonable agreement that did not allow slavery into the federal territories. At the same time, Lincoln was drafting an inaugural address that emphasized his oft-repeated pledge to uphold the constitutional rights of the slave states. Yet in that same speech Lincoln explicitly rejected congressional compromise, pledged to uphold the Republican platform, condemned secession as “the essence of anarchy,” and vowed not only to hold onto the few remaining federal possessions in the South—including military installations—but to recapture those that had already been seized. His stern resolve was plainly visible in his closing lines—words that could as easily have been penned by Jefferson Davis: “In your hands, my fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war… . With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’”¹⁵ Despite his stern words, Lincoln, like Davis, was acutely aware of the importance of maintaining friendly relations with the eight slave states that had not seceded—the more so once his February 23 arrival in Washington brought him into direct contact with their representatives. Though all eight Upper South states had rejected secession during that fateful February, Lincoln quickly realized that the unyielding resolve he had stuck to all winter in

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“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” ABRAHAM LINCOLN, addressing southern secessionists in his inaugural address, March 4, 1861. RIGHT: A crowd gathers outside the U.S. Capitol to observe Lincoln’s inauguration as America’s sixteenth president.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Yet despite this significant softening of tone, Lincoln retained, in what was now the penultimate paragraph, his insistence that should war occur, it would not be his fault. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,” he continued to assert, “and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.”¹⁷

RESIDENT DAVIS SPENT his first several weeks in office preparing the new government for the war that both leaders hoped desperately to avoid. He quickly earned notoriety for being both an indefatigable worker and a hopeless micromanager. Secretary of War Leroy Pope Walker, more than any other cabinet officer, found himself at the beck and call of the new president—Davis actually kept a little bell on his desk for summoning his war secretary. A great many of those meetings revolved around Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, and Fort Pickens, just outside Pensacola Harbor. These held the only significant garrisons of U.S. soldiers left in the seceded states.¹⁸ Davis viewed the presence of foreign troops at the two sites as equally important, but public attention South and North focused on Charleston. There, in late December, Major Robert Anderson had unexpectedly transferred his federal garrison from a vulnerable coastal fort to the more easily defended island stronghold of Fort Sumter, thereby kicking off a chain of events that had nearly exploded into war when South Carolina artillery had fired upon a U.S. ship bringing Anderson supplies and reinforcements. Since then, Sumter had become the primary symbol of federal authority in the seceded states, hence the most likely flashpoint for conflict. Even while still in the U.S. Senate, Davis had been in close touch with Governor Francis W. Pickens, urging the hotheaded South Carolinian to have patience. “We have much of preparation to make, both in military and civil organization,” he wrote, “and the time which serves for our preparation, by its moral effect

P

tends also towards a peaceful solution.”¹⁹ Davis was convinced that the best way to avoid war was to show the federals a strong face. That meant filling out and stabilizing the new government, building and organizing an army and a navy, and engaging in diplomacy with foreign nations, most importantly the United States. On March 3 General P.G.T. Beauregard arrived in Charleston, commissioned with readying Confederate forces there both to prevent reinforcements from reaching Sumter and to capture the fort if necessary. On the same day, Martin Crawford of Georgia arrived in Washington, one of three commissioners appointed by Davis to, he hoped, negotiate a peaceful separation from the U.S.

WHEN LINCOLN TOOK OFFICE on March 4, his faith in southern unionism led him to believe that he could wait out the secession movement, maintaining a hands-off policy toward the seceded states while keeping a symbolic federal presence at Forts Sumter and Pickens. The very next morning, his plans suffered a monstrous blow when he received word that Sumter’s garrison was running low on food. Worse, Major Anderson estimated that it would take at least 20,000 men to break through the Charleston defenses and relieve the fort.²⁰ General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, aged hero of the Mexican War, counseled that since the entire U.S. Army presently consisted of just 16,000 soldiers, most of them spread across the West fighting Indians, it would take six to eight months to raise and train the necessary forces for a rescue mission. As Anderson had only six weeks’ worth of supplies, General Scott recommended the fort’s immediate evacuation. He drew up the orders for Anderson’s withdrawal.²¹ To Lincoln, there seemed little choice. After learning of the situation at a cabinet meeting on Saturday, the 9th, Attorney General Edward Bates wrote that he was “astonished to be informed that Fort Sumter must be evacuated.”²² By Monday, newspapers across the country were reporting the fort’s imminent evacuation. Those stories were premature, but on Friday, March 15, the cabinet voted overwhelmingly to follow Anderson’s and Scott’s recommendations, a vote that most of the secretaries believed was decisive. For all Lincoln’s resolve to maintain possession of

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Springfield was not the best policy. He privately offered to pull the federal garrison out of Charleston Harbor if the Virginia secession convention— dominated by unionists yet still in session in Richmond—would adjourn.¹⁶ He also significantly revised his inaugural address. The speech Lincoln delivered on the afternoon of Monday, March 4, still condemned secession as the essence of anarchy and still vowed to enforce the Constitution and protect federal property. But it neither stressed the new president’s obligation to party principles nor pledged to recapture federal property seized by secessionists. And no longer did the speech end abruptly with the implied threat, “With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’”—Lincoln had deleted that line entirely and now closed with an eloquent plea for forbearance and peace, rooted in a heartfelt appeal to Americans’ shared history and mutual devotion to the Union:

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AS LINCOLN STRUGGLED to digest the news about Sumter, Davis’ commissioners kept him apprised of their efforts to pressure Seward into recognizing their diplomatic mission as legitimate—which would imply a federal recognition of the Confederacy as an independent nation. Crawford and John Forsyth of Alabama, who arrived on March 5 (the third commissioner, A. B. Roman of Louisiana, would arrive on the 11th), reported that the new secretary of state did not know how to handle their warnings that a refusal to recognize them would result in war. Seward appeared to be giving in.²⁴ The tone of their reports shifted suddenly on Saturday, March 9,

with a brief telegram: “The impression prevails in Administration circles that Fort Sumter will be evacuated within ten days.” Davis was optimistic at this news, but through his own secretary of state, Robert Toombs, he warned the commissioners to be wary: “Can’t bind our hands a day without evacuation of Sumter and Pickens,” the telegraph flashed back. A longer letter elaborated: “The evacuation by the United States of Fort Sumter, you are to insist on as a sine qua non. While the United States maintain a force at this fort…it is utterly idle to talk of peace negotiations.”²⁵

FRANK LESLIE’S THE SOLDIER IN OUR CIVIL WAR

the southern forts, it appeared that his first major act as president would be to abandon the most prominent of them.²³

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“The President has not the courage to execute the order agreed upon in Cabinet for the evacuation of the fort.” Confederate commissioner MARTIN J. CRAWFORD to General P.G.T. Beauregard, April 1, 1861. LEFT: Jefferson Davis’ commissioners to Washington (left to right)—A.B. Roman of Louisiana, John Forsyth of Alabama, and Martin J. Crawford of Georgia.

The commissioners agreed that “a refusal to treat with us…in the absence of the evacuation of the Charleston and Pensacola forts is, from our point of view, certain war,” but they wrote hopefully that “the Administration still talks of peace,” and even added that “the opinion gains ground here” that Fort Pickens, too, would be evacuated. Then, beginning on the 15th, the reports became more certain and more specific: “We are sure that within five days Sumter will be evacuated.” The reason, it turned out, was a new, high-level contact in the negotiations—Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell of Alabama, who was now relaying them assurances from Seward himself. The arrangement served everyone’s agenda, allowing Seward to keep the lines of communication open without officially recognizing the Confederate emissaries, Campbell to help broker a potential peace, and the commissioners to keep Seward talking while Davis readied his government and prepared his defenses. That Campbell’s first message was an assurance of Sumter’s imminent evacuation was an auspicious sign for these would-be peacemakers.²⁶

LINCOLN COULD NOT help but know of the commissioners’ presence—if nothing else, it was all over the newspapers—but what he understood of Seward’s actual dealings with them is uncertain. Seward acted from the shadows throughout those weeks, not trusting Lincoln or anyone else in the administration to follow the path most likely to avoid war. What we do know is that for months, the chief concern Seward had been hearing from his allies in the Upper South was that a collision must be avoided or all was lost. In his view, withdrawing Sumter’s garrison would ease tensions and buy critical time with Crawford and the other commissioners, and he was relieved that Major Anderson’s ultimatum would force Lincoln to make that decision. On March 15, Justices Campbell and Samuel Nelson arrived at the state department to urge the secretary to make peace with the commissioners. By coincidence, the cabinet had just voted to evacuate Fort Sumter, and Seward took advantage of this unexpected opportunity to inform the justices of that decision. In fact, he told them theatrically, if Campbell were to write Jefferson Davis with the news, the garrison would be removed before his letter could even reach

Montgomery. Campbell eagerly relayed that message to Crawford with his own assurance that the information could be trusted. Crawford, as we have seen, passed it on to Davis.²⁷ And everyone waited for Major Anderson to begin his move.

AMPBELL HAD informed the commissioners that the garrison would be withdrawn within five days. That deadline came on Wednesday, March 20, with no movement at Sumter. The commissioners remained confident, and urged Davis to be patient. “If there is faith in man, you may rely on the assurances we have as to the status,” they wired. “Time is essential to a peaceful issue of this mission. In the present posture of affairs precipitation is war.” But they also sent Justice Campbell back to Seward to find out what was happening. Seward calmly assured Campbell that nothing had changed—the new president was merely a bit scattered, preoccupied with distributing jobs to an endless horde of office-seekers.²⁸ Seward did consider Lincoln to be disorganized and overly concerned with patronage, but in truth he had no idea why the order to Anderson had not yet been issued. No one did, other than Lincoln, who shared his thoughts with no one. Days passed, then weeks, and the president gave no indication of his plans. Seward was not alone in beginning to think that he had none. Lincoln understood that evacuating Sumter would eliminate the most dangerous threat of war, but he feared that removing this important symbol of federal authority would constitute a legitimization of secession and a de facto recognition of the Confederacy. While he struggled to make up his mind, he ordered the reinforcement of Fort Pickens at Pensacola—his insurance policy in case he had to abandon Sumter. He also cast desperately about for all possible information. Even as Seward offered his guarantees to Campbell on March 21, Gustavus V. Fox, a former naval officer who had proposed a plan for getting reinforcements past the Confederate artillery at Charleston Harbor, arrived in the city to study the situation at Fort Sumter. On that same day two more emissaries departed for South Carolina to investigate the political climate. These missions yielded nothing positive. Fox returned optimistic about his plan’s chance of success, but a telegram from Anderson insisted that it would never work. The other two scouts, transplanted South Carolinians Stephen Hurlbut and Ward Hill Lamon, reported that their native state showed none of the latent unionism on which Lincoln was relying; secessionism was widespread and deeply rooted. They also reported that Confederate forces would fire upon any U.S. ship attempting to enter the harbor. A peaceful delivery of supplies, it appeared, was impossible.²⁹ By the time Hurlbut and Lamon reported on March 27, Lincoln knew time was short. The pressure on the president was crushing. “Our poor President…came here tall, strong, and vigorous, but has worked himself almost to death,” one senator wrote home. Lincoln himself confessed to feeling “in the dumps.” And no wonder—with every passing day Anderson’s food diminished, Charleston’s defenses strengthened, criticism from impatient Republicans grew, unionists in Virginia’s secession convention had more trouble holding off disunionists (Seward had told them, too, of

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the cabinet’s decision to evacuate Sumter), and odds that the authorities in Montgomery would demand action increased. Behind all loomed the overwhelming question of peace or war. REPORTS OF SUMTER’S evacuation were gratifying to Davis, but he was too experienced a statesman to assume their truth—especially when his commissioners interspersed their reports with speculations that Lincoln might still be influenced by Republican hardliners. “Give but little credit to the rumors of an amicable adjustment,” he warned Beauregard. To Governor Pickens he noted, “I have not been of those who felt sanguine hope that the enemy would retire peaceably from your harbor.”³⁰ So even as he encouraged his Washington commissioners, Davis monitored the progress of Beauregard’s defenses. The Charleston commander had used his time well, not only improving on South Carolina’s earlier measures for a potential assault on Fort Sumter but also sealing off the harbor from any reinforcements by sea. On April 4, he reported his preparations “all complete.”³¹ Davis was also under tremendous pressure, but unlike Lincoln he was spared the burden of choosing between war and peace; as he had been saying for weeks, the Confederacy sought only to be left alone, but would defend itself if necessary. As far as he was concerned, whether secession would mean war was entirely Lincoln’s decision.

INCOLN, FOR HIS PART, did not want it. For him the crisis came to a head on the evening of March 28, when General Scott caught him completely by surprise—a “cold shock” was how the president would describe it a few days later—by recommending that the government evacuate both Sumter and Pickens. None of his advisers had ever mentioned abandoning Fort Pickens—on the contrary, all assumed that federal authority in the South required that Sumter’s evacuation be coupled with Pickens’ reinforcement. More distressing still was Scott’s reasoning: The continued presence of U.S. troops in the seceded states, he said, was an irritant to southern unionists and was undercutting their ability to resist secession. This was not military but political advice. Since the administration’s reluctance to reinforce Sumter rested chiefly on Scott’s assessment, the general’s foray into politics instantly cast into doubt its entire Sumter policy. With the strain of the previous weeks bearing down upon him, Lincoln gave the startled Scott an uncharacteristic tongue-lashing. After consulting briefly with his stunned cabinet, he spent a long, sleepless night brooding on his dilemma.³² The next day—Friday, March 29—the same cabinet advisors who two weeks earlier had overwhelmingly favored evacuation now voted for reinforcement. Lincoln ordered an expedition prepared for Sumter’s relief, and one for Pickens as well, as there had been no confirmation yet that the additional troops he had ordered to Pensacola weeks earlier had ever arrived. But still he hesitated, reluctant to give the final order that would send the ships to Charleston and war. The strain of those days was staggering. On Saturday the brittle, embattled president again lost his temper, snapping heatedly at a California politician before snatching the man’s papers from of his hands and throwing them into the fireplace. Later that day, he collapsed with what his wife called a “sick-headache,” his first in years.³³

L

IT DID NOT TAKE long for Davis to learn that his commissioners’ continued assurances of Sumter’s abandonment might not be accurate. When their emissary, Justice Campbell, went back to Seward again on Saturday, March 30, Seward promised to consult Lincoln and asked the justice

to return on Monday. Whether the beleaguered secretary of state actually spoke to Lincoln is unknown, but on April 1, he handed Campbell a cryptic note. “The President may desire to supply Fort Sumter,” he had written carefully, “but will not undertake to do so without first giving notice to Governor Pickens.” Seward tried to soften this astonishing statement by adding verbally that Lincoln found evacuating the fort “irksome” and so allowed himself to be swayed by schemes to supply it. But not to worry—“I do not think that he will adopt any of them.” In any event, he said, there was no actual plan for reinforcement. Seward also informed the oddly credulous justice that “the President may desire to supply Pickens, but will not do so.” Desperate to believe war could yet be avoided, Campbell allowed himself to be convinced. Not only did he assure Crawford and the other commissioners that all was still well, but two days later he wrote President Davis to the same effect.³⁴ The commissioners were not so trusting. Crawford opined to Beauregard that “the President has not the courage to execute the order agreed upon in Cabinet for the evacuation of the fort.” Regarding Seward’s new pledge, they cautioned their government that Lincoln’s “form of notice to us may be that of the coward, who gives it when he strikes.” Over the next several days, the commissioners’ reports were filled with talk of naval expeditions being prepared. These were said to be intended for the Caribbean, but that “may be a mere ruse,” they reported. “The rumor that they are destined against Pickens and perhaps Sumter is getting every day stronger.”³⁵

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (SCOTT, CAMPBELL, SEWARD); NATIONAL ARCHIVES (BEAUREGARD)

☛ Four major players in the secession crisis (left to right): Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell, General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and General P.G.T. Beauregard.

Davis reiterated that the commissioners were to make no commitments without an agreement that both Sumter and Pickens be evacuated. In the meantime, as he had done since assuming office, he continued laboring “to make all the necessary arrangement for the public defence, and the Solidifying of their Government.”³⁶ On Monday, April 8, just five weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, the crisis broke. Four weeks earlier the commissioners had sent the State Department a formal letter requesting recognition as accredited representatives of an independent nation. Assurances of Sumter’s evacuation had led them to back away from this ultimatum, but now war preparations were so plainly evident and Seward’s responses so pitiful that they decided to demand a response. “If Seward’s reply is not satisfactory,” they informed their government, “we shall consider the gauntlet of war thrown down.”³⁷ Seward’s reply was not the least bit satisfactory: He refused to meet with the three gentlemen, he wrote, on the grounds that the administration recognized neither the Deep South states’ secession nor, therefore, the Confederacy’s existence. The commissioners drafted an indignant response and prepared to leave Washington. But it no longer mattered. That evening they received a telegram from General Beauregard: “Special messenger from Lincoln…informs us Sumter to be provisioned peaceably; otherwise forcibly.” In Charleston Harbor, the endgame had begun, and in a totally unexpected way.³⁸

FOUR DAYS EARLIER, on April 4, Lincoln had finally ordered the Fort Sumter relief expedition to proceed. There was still no word from Pensacola regarding the landing of reinforcements there, and to abandon Sumter without being certain Pickens was secure would represent a recognition of secession and, he believed, the effective end of the American republic. Lincoln had finally given up his ideal of maintaining both peace and the Union—as he saw it, the time had come when he must choose one or the other. Technically, Lincoln could cancel the Sumter mission right up to the time it actually departed, which turned out to be the morning of April 10. But circumstances took that option from his hands some three-and-ahalf days early. On the afternoon of Saturday, the 6th, the administration finally heard from Fort Pickens, and the news was bad: The reinforcements ordered back in early March had never been landed. The fort’s new relief fleet, the one Lincoln had ordered on the 29th, was just then steaming out of New York Harbor, but with no guarantee that it would reach Pickens before Sumter’s supplies ran out, Lincoln saw no choice but to take his final, irrevocable step. He dispatched a State Department clerk to Charleston to notify Governor Pickens that Fort Sumter was to be relieved with provisions only, but that, if the Confederates refused permission, force would be used to throw in reinforcements as well. With that move he threw the contest back into Davis’ hands.

THE CLERK, ONE ROBERT CHEW, arrived in Charleston on the evening of April 8 and was admitted to Governor Pickens immediately. Upon receiving Chew’s message, Pickens summoned General Beauregard and read him the note. Beauregard in turn wired Secretary of War Walker, who consulted with Davis. The president’s first instinct was resistance. “Under no circumstances,” Davis responded, “are you to allow provisions to be sent to Fort Sumter.”³⁹ Since assuming command in early March, Beauregard had been preparing Charleston’s defenses for two possible scenarios: to prevent a hostile fleet from entering the harbor, and to take Fort Sumter by force should diplomacy fail. They would be needed now for both. It seemed clear, Davis explained later, that “the design of the United States was

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“We do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter.” JEFFERSON DAVIS, April 11, 1861. The following morning, all hope for a peaceful resolution to the Sumter stalemate was lost when Confederate forces opened fire on the beleaguered fort (BELOW), sparking civil war.

to place the besieging force at Charleston between the simultaneous fire of the fleet and the fort.” To avoid this disadvantage, there seemed “no alternative but to direct that the fort should at once be reduced.” On Wednesday, April 10, after two days of intense cabinet discussions, the administration ordered Beauregard to demand the fort’s immediate evacuation—“and if this is refused…reduce it.”⁴⁰ Beauregard put off the demand until the following afternoon; he was short of gunpowder but expected a new shipment. In Montgomery, Davis and Walker waited impatiently, irritated at the delay. On Thursday evening word finally came—and with it an unanticipated hope of peaceful deliverance. As expected, Major Anderson had refused to comply with the ultimatum, but in refusing, Beauregard wrote, “he adds verbally: ‘I will await the first shot, and if you do not batter us to pieces, we will be starved out in a few days.’ Answer.”⁴¹ Anderson’s voluntary evacuation promised the ideal resolution: Fort Sumter would be removed from the equation without hostilities. But if the U.S. relief fleet, which was likely to show up at any time, arrived before Anderson’s food ran out, Beauregard would be left fighting both the ships and the fort—the very situation Davis was trying to avoid. Four hours of intense debate later, at shortly past 9 p.m., the president replied. “We do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter,” he began carefully. As long as Anderson gave a specific time at which he would evacuate, and in the meantime pledged his honor not to “use his guns against us, unless ours should be employed against Fort Sumter,” Beauregard should arrange a truce. If the major refused, however, Beauregard’s orders were clear: he should “reduce the Fort.”⁴² Again they waited. By the next morning—Friday, April 12—the suspense was too much. “What was Anderson’s reply?” the administration wired anxiously. Beauregard’s terse response crushed the last hope of peace: “He would not consent.” Anderson, also aware that the relief fleet was on its way, would not agree to stand by while Confederate batteries fired upon U.S. ships. At 4:30 that morning the attack had commenced.⁴³

of northerners. Typical was Illinois Republican O.H. Browning, a trusted friend of Lincoln’s, who had urged back in February that “in any conflict which may ensue…it is very important that the traitors shall be the aggressors, and that they be kept constantly and palpably in the wrong.” Several of Lincoln’s advisers had said much the same at the March 15 cabinet meeting, and others had added their voices two weeks later.⁴⁴ So Lincoln’s new Sumter plan enabled him to tell the American public that the Charleston defenders “knew—they were expressly notified— that the giving of bread to the few brave and hungry men of the garrison, was all which would on

HUS IT WAS that two moderates, both anxious for peace, together began a war. Given the paradox, a closer look at each president’s final decision is in order. Seward’s April 1 note pledging not to resupply Fort Sumter without giving prior notice was the earliest indication that the administration was rethinking the only relief plan it had discussed up to that point: Gustavus Fox’s scheme to arrive unannounced, drive off any enemy ships by force, and run in troops and supplies at night on small, fast tugboats. Whether Lincoln had yet abandoned Fox’s plan when Seward gave his assurances to Justice Campbell is not clear, but it is certain that by April 6, when he alerted Governor Pickens that the ships were coming, the president had deliberately discarded a relief plan that had some small chance of success for one that was destined to fail. Neither he nor anyone else in the administration had any illusion that Charleston authorities might allow the relief ships into the harbor. From the start, Lincoln’s advisors had warned that if war could not be avoided, the Confederates must be the aggressors—they had to fire the first shot. The concern was that any appearance of federal belligerence would alienate both the eight still-loyal slave states and a large segment

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that occasion be attempted, unless themselves, by resisting so much, should provoke more.” It was perfectly clear, in other words, that “by the affair at Fort Sumter…the assailants of the Government, began the conflict of arms.”⁴⁵ Much of this was political posturing, of course—obviously Lincoln recognized that his relief mission involved more than “the giving of bread to [a] few brave and hungry men.” Yet he fully believed that in the larger view his administration had done all it could to avoid a conflict— short of surrendering the government. In his eyes it had been the secessionists who had created this crisis, who had pushed and prodded and backed him into this corner; it had been they who had labored “to drive out the visible authority of the Federal Union, and thus force it to immediate dissolution.” Why should the government now appear the aggressor? “The Executive,” Lincoln

declared, “well understood” their goal of destroying the Union, “and having said to them in the inaugural address, ‘You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors,’ he took pains, not only to keep this declaration good, but also to keep the case so free from the power of ingenious sophistry, as that the world should not be able to misunderstand it.” Jefferson Davis, needless to say, saw the situation a bit differently. To him it was not a question of radical southerners bent on destroying the Union but of states freely exercising their sovereignty, protecting themselves from “the wrongs which they had suffered and the evils with which they were menaced” by hostile antislavery fanatics in the North. Davis insisted that he had acted “with the firm resolve to avoid war if possible”—not until “every effort compatible with self-respect and the dignity of the Confederacy was exhausted” did he “yield to the conviction that the Government of the United States was determined to attempt the conquest of this people.” But with regard to the final act in Charleston Harbor, Davis did, of course, have an alternative: the status quo. The Confederates could have allowed the supplies to land peacefully, eluding the onus of drawing first blood that Lincoln was trying to place upon them. Davis was keenly aware of the importance of avoiding an appearance of aggression—just a week

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earlier, he had predicted to General Braxton Bragg, his commander at Pensacola, that “for political reasons” Lincoln would hesitate to attack the Confederates “so long as the hope of retaining the border states remains.” Carrying the notion a step further, he had mused that “there would be to us an advantage in so placing them that an attack by them would be a necessity.” Plainly Davis recognized the neat little box into which Lincoln had put him; he had pondered doing the same to Lincoln.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, only one voice in Davis’ cabinet protested the proposal to strike first. Secretary of State Robert Toombs is said to have declared that firing upon Fort Sumter “is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North… . It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal.”

To Davis and the others, however, losing northern sympathizers—even risking the loss of the Upper South—was less dangerous then passively allowing Anderson and his men to stay indefinitely. For Confederates, “the spectacle of a fortress held within their principal harbor” was “a standing menace against their peace and independence,” and their president knew that they would not stand for its indefinite continuation.⁴⁷ In the end, Davis simply did not see that his options included permitting the supplies to

ENDNOTES 1

Jefferson Davis to George W. Jones, January 20, 1861, in William Cooper, ed., The Essential Writings of Jefferson Davis (New York, 2003), 188; Jefferson Davis, Speech in Corinth, Mississippi, September 21, 1860, in ibid., 182.

2

Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 2nd Session, December 10, 1860, 20-21.

3

4

Journal of the Proceedings of the Special Committee under the Resolution of the Senate of the 18th of December, 1860. Thirtysixth Congress, Second Session. Rep. Com. No. 288 (1861), December 22, 1860, 2-8. Abraham Lincoln, Address at Cooper Institute, New York City, February 27, 1860, in Roy P. Basler, et al, eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1955), 3:547-548.

5

Abraham Lincoln to James T. Hale, January 11, 1861, in ibid., 4:172.

6

Abraham Lincoln to Lyman Trumbull, December 10, 1860, in ibid., 4:150.

7

Abraham Lincoln to Lyman Trumbull, December 10 and 17, to Elihu Washburne, December 13, to William Kellogg, December 11, to Thurlow Weed, December 17, and to John D. Defrees, December 18, all in Basler, ed., Collected Works, 4:149-155. See also Charles Francis Adams diary, December 22, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; John M. McClernand to Charles H. Lanphier, December 25, Charles H. Lanphier Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library; Samuel R. Curtis Journal, December 28, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library; Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., December 22, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), 1:70; Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill, 2008), 79-82.

8

Quotations from Abraham Lincoln to William Seward, February 1, and to Elihu Washburne, December 13, in Basler, Collected Works, 4:183, 151. See also Abraham Lincoln to William Kellogg, Decem-

ber 11, to Lyman Trumbull, December 17, and to Thurlow Weed, December 17, all in ibid., 4:150, 153, 154, and Lincoln, Resolutions Drawn up for Republican Members of Senate Committee of Thirteen, and, Inaugural Address, Final Draft, in ibid., 4:156-157, 262-264. 9

Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1989).

10 Abraham Lincoln, “Remarks concerning Concessions to Secession,” c. January 1921, 1861, in Basler, ed., Collected Works, 4:176; Lincoln to Trumbull, December 10 and 17, to Elihu Washburne, December 13, to William Kellogg, December 11, to Thurlow Weed, December 17, to John D. Defrees, December 18, and to James T. Hale, January 11, 1861, all in ibid., 149-155, 172. 11 Jefferson Davis, Speech in U.S. Senate (Farewell Address), January 21, 1861, in Cooper, ed., Essential Writings, 190-194. 12 Jefferson Davis to Alexander M. Clayton, January 30, 1861, in Cooper, ed., Essential Writings, 195; Varina Howell Davis, Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederacy: A Memoir, 2 vols. (New York, 1890), 2:8, 18-19. 13 Jefferson Davis, Speech at Montgomery, February 16, 1861, and Inaugural Address, February 18, 1861, in Cooper, ed., Essential Writings, 196, 198-200. 14 See McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War, esp. chapters 7-9. 15 Abraham Lincoln to William H. Seward, February 1, 1861, in Basler, ed., Collected Works, 4:183; Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address, First Draft, in ibid., 250-261 (quotations on 256 and 261). 16 Charles S. Morehead, Speech to the Southern Club of Liverpool, October 9, 1862, printed in “Important Statement by the Ex-Governor of Kentucky,” ed. David Rankin Barbee and Milledge L. Bonham, Jr. Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28:1 (June 1941): 65-73; C.S. Morehead to John J. Crittenden, February 23, 1862,

printed in Mrs. Chapman Coleman, The Life of John J. Crittenden, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1871), 2: 337-338; New York World, n.d., copied in Richmond Enquirer, March 16, 1861, quoted in Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 2008) (unabridged online version at the Knox College website, http:// www.knox.edu/documents/pdfs/LincolnStudies/Burlingame,%20Vol%202,%20 Chap%2020.pdf) chapter 20, p. 2177 (accessed May 23, 2011). 17 Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address, Final Draft, in Basler, ed., Collected Works, 4:262-271 (quotation from 271); McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War, 196-197, 319n.19. 18 William C. Davis, “A Government of Our Own”: The Making of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1994), 196-223. 19 Jefferson Davis to Francis W. Pickens, January 20, 1861, in Samuel W. Crawford, The Genesis of the Civil War: The Story of Sumter, 1860-61 (New York, 1887), 265. 20 Robert Anderson to Samuel Cooper, February 28 and March 2, 1861, (the latter enclosing a Norman J. Hall memorandum, March 1, 1861), Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter ALP); Joseph Holt and Winfield Scott to Abraham Lincoln, March 5, 1861, ibid. 21 Abraham Lincoln to Winfield Scott, March 9, 1861, in Basler, ed., Collected Works, 4:279; Winfield Scott to Abraham Lincoln, March 11 and March 12, 1861, and to Robert Anderson, March 11, 1861, ALP. 22 Howard K. Beale, ed., The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859-1866 (Washington, D.C., 1933), March 6 and 9 entries, 177. 23 Martin J. Crawford to Robert Toombs, March 6, 1861; John Forsyth and Martin J. Crawford to Robert Toombs, March 8, 1861; and Martin J. Crawford and John Forsyth to Robert Toombs, March 9, 1861, in Commissioners of the Confederate States of America to the Government of the United States, letter book, Washington, D.C., Feb 27-April 11, 1861 (hereafter Commissioners’ Letterbook).

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land—and for precisely the same reason that Lincoln had decided that he could not evacuate the fort without attempting to supply it. Fort Sumter was the concrete symbol of federal authority in the South. Davis knew that as long as U.S. troops remained there, the Confederate states would not be independent. Lincoln knew that to abandon the fort without a fight “would be our national destruction consummated.”⁴⁸ And so it was that by 1860, what had begun years earlier as the charges and countercharges

24 Martin J. Crawford to Robert Toombs, March 6, 1861, and John Forsyth and Martin J. Crawford to Toombs, March 8, 1861, in ibid. 25 Robert Toombs to Martin J. Crawford and John Forsyth, March 11, 1861, and William M. Browne to Martin J. Crawford and John Forsyth, March 14, 1861, in ibid. 26 Martin J. Crawford and John Forsyth to Robert Toombs, March 12, 1861, in ibid. 27 John A. Campbell, “Papers of John A. Campbell, 1861-1865,” Southern Historical Society Papers 4 (1917): 32-33. 28 A. B. Roman, Martin J. Crawford, and John Forsyth to Robert Toombs, March 20 and 22, 1861, in Commissioners’ Letterbook; Campbell, “Papers,” 33-34. 29 On Fox, see G.V. Fox, “Official Report,” February 24, 1865, in Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1865, reprinted in John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), 3:389; Simon Cameron to Robert Anderson, April 4, 1861, and Robert Anderson to Lorenzo Thomas, March 22, 1861, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies 128 vols. (1880-1901), Series I, Volume 1: 235, 211 (hereafter cited as OR; unless otherwise indicated, all references are to this volume); Crawford, Genesis, 369372. On Stephen Hurlbut and Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s other two emissaries, see Stephen A. Hurlbut to Lincoln, March 27, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter ALP); and John G. Nicolay interview with Stephen A. Hurlbut, May 4, 1876, in Michael Burlingame, ed., An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays (Carbondale, 1996), 62-64. Ward Hill Lamon’s Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865 (Chicago, 1911), 74-79, is an unreliable source on this and most other episodes. 30 Martin J. Crawford, John Forsyth, and A. B. Roman to Robert Toombs, March 26, 1861, in Commissioners’ Letterbook; L. P. Walker to P. G. T. Beauregard, March 15,

of proslavery and antislavery extremists had reached the point where even moderates on each side took proslavery or antislavery as a given, a starting point rather than a radical conclusion. And by early April 1861, what had begun months earlier as the threats and counterthreats of secessionist and antisecessionist extremists had reached the point where even moderates on each side took the right or the treason of secession as a given, and were willing to go to war for it. RUSSELL MCCLINTOCK teaches history at St. John’s High School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and is the author of Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (UNC Press, 2008).

1861, in OR, 276; Jefferson Davis to Francis W. Pickens, March 18, 1861, in Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, 10 vols. (Jackson, MS, 1923), 5:61. 31 P. G. T. Beauregard to L. P. Walker, April 4, 1861, in OR, 286. 32 March 28, 1861 [misdated March 15], Winfield Scott memorandum, in OR, 200-201; Montgomery Meigs, March 30, 1861, diary entry in “General M.C. Meigs on the Conduct of the Civil War,” American Historical Review 26:2 (1920-1921): 300; E. D. Keyes, March 29, 1861, diary entry in Erasmus Keyes, Fifty Years’ Observation of Men and Events (New York, 1884), 377-378. 33 New York Herald, March 31, 1861; Samuel Ward to S. L. M. Barlow, March 31, 1861, S. L. M. Barlow Papers, Huntington Library. 34 John A. Campbell to William Seward, April 13, 1861, ALP; Campbell, “Papers,” 34-35; John A. Campbell to Jefferson Davis, April 3, 1861, in Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, 3:411-412; Martin J. Crawford and A. B. Roman to Robert Toombs, March 30, 1861, in Commissioners’ Letterbook. 35 Martin J. Crawford to P. G. T. Beauregard, April 1, 1861, in OR, 283-284; Martin J. Crawford and A. B. Roman to Robert Toombs, April 2, 1861, and Martin J. Crawford, John Forsyth, and A. B. Roman to Robert Toombs, April 3, 4, 5, and 6, 1861, in Commissioners’ Letterbook; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (London, 1863), April 5, 1861, entry, 38-39. 36 Robert Toombs to Martin J. Crawford, John Forsyth, and A. B. Roman, April 2, 1861, Commissioners’ Letterbook. 37 Martin J. Crawford, A. B. Roman, and John Forsyth to Robert Toombs, April 7, 1861, and John Forsyth, A. B. Roman, and Martin J. Crawford to Robert Toombs, April 8, 1861, Commissioners’ Letterbook. 38 William Seward memorandum, March 15, 1861, and John Forsyth, Martin J. Crawford, and A. B. Roman to William

Seward, April 9, 1861 in Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States, during the Great Rebellion, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C., 1865), 108-110; P. G. T. Beauregard to Crawford, April 8, 1861, Commissioners’ Letterbook. 39 Theodore Talbot to Simon Cameron, April 12, 1861, in OR, 251-252; P. G. T. Beauregard to L. P. Walker, April 8, 1861, and L. P. Walker to P. G. T. Beauregard, April 8, 1861, in ibid., 289. 40 P. G. T. Beauregard to L. P. Walker, April 4, 1861, in OR, 286; Jefferson Davis, Message of Jefferson Davis, April 29, 1861, in Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, 11 vols. (New York, 1861-1868), 1:171; L. P. Walker to P. G. T. Beauregard, April 10, 1861, in OR, 297. 41 P. G. T. Beauregard to L. P. Walker, April 11, 1861, in OR, 301. 42 L. P. Walker to P. G. T. Beauregard, April 11, 1861, in ibid. 43 L. P. Walker to P. G. T. Beauregard, April 12, 1861, and P. G. T. Beauregard to L. P. Walker, April 12, 1861, in ibid., 305. 44 Orville H. Browning to Abraham Lincoln, February 17, 1861, ALP. See the cabinet opinions in ibid., filed under March 15 and March 29, 1861. 45 This and the following paragraph are drawn from Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress in Special Session, July 4, 1861, in Basler, Collected Works, 4: 421-426. 46 Jefferson Davis to Braxton Bragg, April 3, 1861, in Cooper, ed., Essential Writings, 206. 47 Jefferson Davis, Message of April 29, 1861, in Moore, ed., Rebellion Record, 1:171. 48 Pleasant A. Stovall, Robert Toombs: Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage (New York, 1892), 226; Jefferson Davis, Message of April 29, in Moore, ed., Rebellion Record, 1:171; Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, July 4, in Basler, Collected Works, 4:424.

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The Work That Remains EVEN AFTER THE FIGHTING STOPPED, WOMEN WAGED THEIR OWN BATTLES TO BRING THE BODIES OF THEIR LOVED ONES HOME. BY JUDITH GIESBERG

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* * * ARY HALL WAS hardly alone in her grief or in her journey. More than 620,000 soldiers died during the Civil War, leaving millions of civilians anguished by their deaths. How and where a soldier got killed, as well as his rank, often dictated whether his family received his remains. The bodies of officers or other soldiers of means were sometimes shipped home, while men who died in military hospitals were often buried in adjacent graveyards, their headstones clearly marked and the grounds well tended. However, the bodies of men killed in the chaos of the battlefield, especially enlisted men, were rarely sent home. To be sure, both sides tried to ensure that all of their fallen soldiers would receive proper burials. U.S. military officials issued orders during the war’s first months making officers responsible for

M

THIS AND PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

IN MAY 1865, one month after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Mary Hall’s Civil War was not yet over. Her husband, Emory, had enlisted late in the war, leaving their farm just south of Pittsburgh in March 1864 to join Company A of the 22nd Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry. Just four months later he was dead, killed in battle near Lynchburg, Virginia. Like many soldiers, Emory had been buried near the spot where he died. Like many widows, Mary wanted her husband home. In the months that followed, Mary had pressed Emory’s fellow soldiers for details about his burial. Where exactly was his grave, and how was it marked? Their descriptions were detailed enough that Mary believed her husband’s burial place could be found. “He is buried 10 miles from Lynchburgh on the tye river on the south side of blurdig,” Mary informed state officials, in her efforts to get them to help retrieve his remains and ship them back to her. “[H]is boddy lyes under and apple tree.”¹ When it became clear that the officials would not help her, Mary made up her mind. She would pack her bags and set out for Lynchburg. If the U.S. Army would not bring Emory home, she would make the 300-mile, weeks-long journey and get him herself. That is, if she could find him.² ☛ Families of Civil War soldiers killed in battle yearned to have a body to bury close to home. In this undated photo, an unidentified woman in mourning dress holds the framed image of a fallen loved one. PREVIOUS SPREAD: In this September 1862 photo, Union soldiers pose for Alexander Gardner’s camera near the battlefield grave of a comrade killed at Antietam.

the interment of soldiers who died under their command or in their jurisdiction. In early 1862, these instructions became even more specific. “In order to secure, as far as possible, the decent internment of those who have fallen, or may fall, in battle,” read General Orders No. 33, it is made the duty of Commanding Generals to lay off plots of ground in some suitable spot near every battlefield, so soon as it may be in their power, and to cause the remains of those killed to be interred, with headboards to the graves bearing numbers, and, when practicable, the names of the persons buried in them. A register of each burialground will be preserved, in which it will be noted the marks corresponding to the headboards.³

The war’s unexpected and unprecedented carnage soon rendered such directives impractical, however, and most soldiers were buried by their comrades near where they had fallen, in graves marked by whatever was available—slabs of wood, tent posts, or fence rails. Men left for

“GET ME HOME IF YOU CAN. BURY ME ON SOME NICE LOYAL SPOT OF GROUND, PLANT FLOWERS OVER THE GRAVE… . I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP IN THE LAND OF TRAITORS. I COULDN’T REST WELL.” THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR FALL 2011

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burial by the enemy were often placed in hastily constructed common graves, if at all. Indeed, the U.S. War Department estimated that of all Union soldiers killed in battle, some 25,000 were never buried.⁴ The ad-hoc nature of battlefield burial made life far more complicated for surviving family members, throwing them into an often agonizing limbo. For women in particular, the absence of a body to bury and a grave to tend compounded their grief. Without a body, families were unable to perform the rituals that marked the passage from life to death considered vitally important during the nineteenth century. A “good death” meant the dying were surrounded by family members, both lending their strength and saying goodbye; after death, women often washed and dressed the body for burial, which usually occurred in a family plot of a scenic location that proved soothing to visit. Soldiers who died far from home and unattended were denied the possibility of a good death, a fact not lost on the men who left to fight the war. Union soldier William Vermilion likely spoke for most of his comrades when he instructed his wife Mary what he wanted her to do should he die while in the army. “Get me home if you can,” he wrote, “bury me on some nice loyal spot of ground, plant flowers over the grave.” “I don’t want to sleep in the land of traitors,” he concluded. “I couldn’t rest well.”⁵ Faced with the death of a loved one on a distant battlefield, then, many women felt compelled to bring home their remains. They wanted them close; they wanted a grave to tend and to visit. Ultimately they hoped that their family, separated in life, could at least be reunited in death. But time, resources, and a lack of sufficiently detailed information prevented the majority of women from completing this journey. The minority of women who did embark on these trips faced a daunting task. Hopeful and heartbroken, these women pressed on, determined to locate their loved ones’ bodies and bring them home.

☛ Men who died in military hospitals, unlike those who died in battle, were often buried in adjacent graveyards, where headstones were clearly marked and the grounds well tended. Pictured below is the graveyard of General Hospital at City Point, Virginia.

covered some 1,600 miles, Wightman traveled by rail, wagon, steamer, horse, and foot. He faced many delays along the way, from late trains to absent boats, requiring him to spend several nights sleeping uncomfortably in saloons and other places. Ten days after starting out, Wightman arrived at his destination, having walked the last three miles in a blinding rainstorm across a marsh. But his work had just begun.⁶ For the next six days, Wightman haggled with U.S. Army generals and surgeons for permission to disinter Edward’s body. Using the professional connections he had made as a lawyer in New York and Connecticut, he eventually secured both military approval and all of the supplies he required for the task, including the aid of 20 soldiers and the materials—a pine box, salt, and pitch-treated canvas—to seal and preserve his son’s remains for the trip home. On the way back to New York, Wightman booked passage and quarters on military vessels (he described his cabin in one as “a nasty, filthy place unfit for a human being to sleep in”) and rode and took meals with a variety of officers, soldiers, and doctors. Three weeks after he had started, Wight-

* * * EGARDLESS OF THE mission, making a trip into the South near or shortly after the war’s end presented civilians with myriad obstacles, from securing proper military passes to attempting to navigate the region’s damaged or destroyed railroad lines. Not atypical were the challenges faced by Stillman Wightman, who left New York City for Fort Fisher, North Carolina, the day he read in the paper about his son Edward’s death. In a journey that by his estimate

R

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man and his son arrived home.⁷ While his journey was both physically and emotionally challenging, Stillman Wightman enjoyed many advantages over women who ventured south on similar travels. Besides his gender, business connections, and firm knowledge of his son’s location, Wightman had the financial resources with which to make such a lengthy trip. Women, especially those like Mary Hall who occupied the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, rarely had such luxury. Indeed, financial concerns were among the biggest barriers women faced when attempting to retrieve the bodies of fallen loved ones. When Philadelphia resident Mary Raivley learned that her son had been killed in battle, she scraped together the funds to send an undertaker to retrieve his body at City Point, Virginia. When he came back emptyhanded, Raivley despaired. She had at least two other children at home, and her husband, a city laborer, could not afford the expense of a trip. Desperate to have her son home, Raivley wrote to state officials, whom she hoped would pay for her travel. “If he was laid in a Cemetary like those that fell at Gettysburg I could be content,” she explained of her need to make the journey herself. “[T]o think that he must lay on an open battle field for his bons to be scattered, o dear me I can never think of it.” Indeed, she was so determined to make the trip on her own, she informed the officials that if the state would not help, she was willing “to beg my way to the battle field my self.”⁸ Margaret Arbunkle, who contemplated setting forth to retrieve the body of her husband, Archibald, lying on a battlefield near Pine Knob, Georgia, faced a similar predicament. Like Raivley, Arbunkle felt compelled to make the journey but did not have money for the trip. Her husband had enlisted in 1861, leaving Margaret to sustain the family with little support from him throughout the war, and now his death made that tenu-

☛ While both sides tried to ensure that all of their fallen soldiers would receive proper burials, the war’s unexpected and unprecedented carnage soon rendered such plans impractical. Before long, the elaborate funeral processions that marked the conflict’s early days (like the one, pictured above, held for the four Massachusetts militiamen killed in the Baltimore riot of April 19, 1861) increasingly gave way to battlefield burials. OPPOSITE: Flimsy wooden boards mark soldiers’ graves on the field at Bull Run.

ous situation permanent. “I am a poor woman and have to work hard to support myself and 3 children now,” she lamented to state officials.⁹ In Pennsylvania, as in several other northern states, such pleas for state assistance eventually resulted in a program that reimbursed family members for the travel and expenses of locating and returning a body. And while women like Mary Raivley and Margaret Arbunkle, as mothers or widows of a Union soldier, thought such compensation was their right, petitioners for state aid aimed to convince officials that they knew the location of their loved one’s body. Mary Hall, who had been informed by her late husband’s comrades of the specific apple tree beside which he was buried, reassured state officials, “[I]f I will go fore him they all say here that thire will not bee enney difficulty in findeng his grave.”¹⁰ Though the first attempt to retrieve her son’s body failed, Mary Raivley projected confidence to the state. “I know for certin that he is buried wheir I said,” she insisted, “for I was sent word where he was killed [and] that he was buried their.”¹¹ Perhaps more than anything, Mary Raivley’s certainty—like that of Mary Hall—resulted from the information that she received from her son’s comrades, members of his company who in the fall of 1865 had returned home and offered his mother information about his death. Whether transmitted by word of mouth or included in a condolence letter, such information about a loved one’s last words and battlefield grave not only had a powerful effect on grieving family members—allowing them to become, as historian Drew Faust has argued, “virtual witnesses” to their deaths, bridging the distance between battlefield and home—but also often included vivid and detailed descriptions of where the man’s body was buried.¹² When William Callahan of Company E, 93rd Pennsylvania Volunteers died from an injury he sustained fighting in Williamsburg, Virginia, on May 5, 1862, W. W. Rogers, an officer in his regiment, sent his widow, Nancy, a condolence letter offering her details about when and where he was shot and how he died. “Those who were with him,” Rogers explained, “say that nearly all he spoke about was his family”; he spoke of the couple’s children, “lamenting his separation from them and expressing sorrow for the lonely and desolate condition they would be in after he was taken from them by death.” Rogers apologized for not being able to arrange for William’s body to be returned home, but he described in detail how and where the man was buried should she go in search of him. William Callahan was buried without a coffin but with a rough headboard, “on the farm of Thomas Whitaker, now in posses-

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“IF HE WAS LAID IN A CEMETARY LIKE THOSE THAT FELL AT GETTYSBURG I COULD BE CONTENT. [T]O THINK THAT HE MUST LAY ON AN OPEN BATTLE FIELD FOR HIS BONS TO BE SCATTERED, O DEAR ME I CAN NEVER THINK OF IT.” FALL 2011 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

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sion of a man named Adams, on the road leading from Yorktown to Williamsburg, and about three miles from the latter place…on a point or knoll.” Nancy Callahan was surely comforted by the information in Rogers’ letter, which provided her sufficient details with which to apply for a widow’s pension.¹³ Even when armed with state support and detailed descriptions of the location of bodies, women who ventured south on this grim duty were required to go to often extraordinary lengths to retrieve their loved ones. Some had no choice but to travel with their children. Just one week after she learned of the death of her husband—a soldier of two years’ service in the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry—Elizabeth Dyson planned to take her baby with her to retrieve his body from Petersburg, Virginia.¹⁴ Others were required to make multiple trips. Elizabeth Hines had already brought one of her four sons home to be buried when she wrote a letter asking for state support to retrieve the body of another. Having previously made a similar journey, Hines stated matter-of-factly that George was buried at the “20th Division Calvary Hosp grave yard

☛ Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin. TOP: Unfinished Confederate graves on the Gettysburg battlefield.

near Petersburg,” expecting this information to be enough for Governor Andrew Curtin to send her travel passes. “His name is on his head and foot board,” Hines explained confidently, “His name is George P. Hines.”¹⁵ Even though she had lost two boys to the war, and had a third soldier-son whose whereabouts were unknown (“either he is living or dead,” she noted to officials), the state made no special arrangements to bring George home for burial near his family in York Furnace, Pennsylvania. So Hines set out to try to find George herself, preparing to make a round trip of likely more than 500 miles. If she had doubts, she did not betray them. Early in October 1865, Jane Deans left Philadelphia for a hospital in City Point, Virginia, to retrieve “the corpse of my husband.”¹⁶ Deans took the youngest of her five children with her, leaving the older children behind.¹⁷ On the way back, Deans—now traveling by boat with an infant, her dead husband, and the headboard that she found on his Virginia grave—accidentally left behind the state-issued travel pass allowing her free passage. She realized her mistake just as the boat pulled away from shore. Fortunate-

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ly, soldiers and a doctor on board helped pay her way—and for the ticket she had to buy for her dead husband’s passage. Back in Philadelphia, Deans buried her husband, Mark, near his home. Having paid for the trip out of the meager funds she had available to her (she still awaited her husband’s back pay), Deans negotiated with the undertaker to have her husband interred on credit. By the time she returned from her trip to Virginia, two of her children were sick, and, as she explained, “I am so redused for wont of money that I cannot buy them any thing to do them good and if any of them was to die I would not like to call on the undertaker until I pay him for the burying of my husband which is 20 dollars.” Still, Deans clearly felt that making the trip was the right choice. “[N]ow I am content,” she explained, “for his 5 littel orphans can go with me to see where thier Fathers bones do ly.” Having her husband’s remains close to home brought Jane Deans’ Civil War to an end.¹⁸

ENDNOTES 1

Mary L. Hall to H.H. Gregg, May 8, 1865, Adjutant General’s Correspondence, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission Archives (PHMC), Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Record Group (RG) 19.29, Box 25.

2

Distance estimates are based on current-day travel. With destroyed rails and incomplete lines, wartime and postwar travel was much longer than these estimates.

3

As quoted in Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008), 65.

4

Lisa Long, Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War (Philadelphia, 2004), 67.

5

John R. Neff, Honoring The Civil War Dead: Commemoration And The Problem Of Reconciliation (Lawrence, KS, 2004), 51; Drew Gilpin Faust, “The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying,” The Journal of Southern History vol. 67, no. 1 (February 2001): 5-12; Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883 (New Haven, 1999), 30-35; Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 61-63; William Vermilion, Helena, Arkansas, to Mary Vermilion, June 30, 1863, in Love Amid the Turmoil: The Civil War Letters of William and Mary Vermilion ed. Donald C. Elder III (Iowa City, 2005), 150.

6

Stillman K. Wightman, “‘A Father’s Journey,’ March 1865,” in From Antietam to Fort Fisher: The Civil War Letters of Edward King Wightman ed. Edward G. Longacre (Cranbury, NJ, 1985), 230-237.

N HER POPULAR 1868 novel, The Gates Ajar, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps explored the doubts a woman experienced when her husband, son, or—in the case of her protagonist, Mary Cabot— brother died abruptly on a Civil War battlefield. Jolted by the news of her sibling’s death, Cabot is not comforted by faith or offers of condolence, which she dismissed as “[b]ut a hundred little needles pricking at us.” Instead, she yearned to have him home again. “If I could have gone to him, could have busied myself with packing and journeying, could have been forced to think and plan, could have had the shadow of a hope of one more look, one word,” Cabot muses, “I suppose I should have taken it differently.”¹⁹ Trying to salvage some semblance of a good death, countless women expressed similarly strong desires to bring home the bodies of their husbands or sons. They scoured letters from his comrades and held on tightly to bits and pieces of information that helped them. And when they packed their bags and planned their journeys, they betrayed a hope that was larger than their doubts—that on the little knoll or under the apple tree they would find him, bring him home, and, as Jane Deans described it when she buried her husband Mark, be “content.”

7

Ibid., 244.

8

Mary Raivley to Gregg, October 30, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 26. The 1860 federal census lists Edward “Ravely” as a “laborer,” 21-year-old John as a “Plumber,” 20-year-old George as a “Moulder,” and two other teenage boys. The family claimed $100 in property. 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Ancestry.com. Accessed 05/25/2011.

9

Margaret Ann Arbuckle to Mr. A. L. Russel, November 23, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 27; Samuel Bates, History of Pennsylvanian Volunteers, 1861-1865 (Harrisburg, 1869-71), vol. 1, 524; http://www.pacivilwar.com/bates.html. Accessed 05/15/2011.

JUDITH GIESBERG, author of Army at Home: The Civil War on the Northern Home Front (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), is associate professor of history at Villanova University, where she teaches the Civil War and Reconstruction.

18 Jane Deans to Andrew Curtin, November 28, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 27; Deans to Curtin, December 18, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 27.

* * *

I

10 Mary L. Hall to H.H. Gregg, May 8, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 25. 11 Mary Raivley to Major H.H. Gregg, October 30, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 26. 12 Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 15. 13 W.W. Rogers to Mrs. Callahan, May 22, 1862, William Callahan Pension File, Civil War Pension Files, 1861-1864, PHMC, RG-2, 2-3. 14 Elizabeth Dyson to Col. L. M. Gregg, October 27, 1864, RG 19.29, Box 27; Bates, vol. 3, 1237. 15 Elizabeth Hines to Andrew Curtin, November 19, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 27. 16 Jane Deans to Andrew Curtin, November 28, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 27; Deans to Curtin, December 18, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 27. For other women who traveled with small children, or contemplated doing so, see Elizabeth Dyson to Colonel L. M. Lucy, October 27, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 25 and Margaret Arbuckle to A. L. Russel, Adjutant General of Pennsylvania, November 23, 1865, PHMC, RG 19.29, Box 27. 17 Unfortunately, no information about Mark Deans’ enlistment could be found. According to the 1860 census, Mark and Jane Deans had two children in 1860—four-year-old Mary and two-year-old Maggie. In 1865, the ages of Jane Deans’ children likely ranged in age from nine years to one or two years old. No Jane Deans could be located in the 1870 census, but Jane seems to have applied for a federal pension. 1860 U.S. Federal Census and Civil War Pension Index, Ancestry.com.

19 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar (Boston, 1869), 4, 6.

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RUN AGROUND AT SAILOR’S CREEK In one of the war’s final battles, the veteran infantrymen of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia fought alongside an unlikely set of comrades—the sailors and marines of Commodore John Randolph Tucker’s Naval Battalion.

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BY DEREK SMITH

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☛ Commodore John Randolph Tucker, postwar. FALL 2011 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

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* * * OR 10 LONG months, the Army of Northern Virginia had been mired in the mud and filth of the labyrinthine trenches that stretched around Petersburg, staving off repeated attempts by the U.S. Army to take the strategically significant town and cut the vital railroad lines that ran through it to supply both Lee’s troops and the nearby Confederate capital in Richmond. On April 1, a U.S. force of infantry and cavalry, led by Major General Philip H. Sheridan, broke the lengthy stalemate, winning a decisive victory against part of Lee’s army at Five Forks and exposing the South Side Railroad, by then the Confederates’ last remaining supply line, to capture. The following morning, as Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant launched an all-out offensive against the newly fragmented and vulnerable Confederate lines, Lee, realizing he and his army were no longer in a position to defend the capital from the advancing enemy, sent a dispatch to Confederate president Jefferson Davis suggesting Richmond be evacuated immediately. With little choice, Davis concurred. At the same time, Lee planned for his army’s withdrawal, in hopes that he might regroup his

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☛ The decisive Union victory at Five Forks left Lee with little choice but to withdraw his army from the defenses around Petersburg. Below: Rebel soldiers taken prisoner at Five Forks are guarded by U.S. troops.

forces to fight another day. To this end, he ordered the various elements of his army to march to Amelia Court House, 40 miles to the west, where he planned to reunite with the troops of Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell’s Richmond Defense Corps, whom he ordered there from their positions defending the capital. From Amelia, Lee intended to strike southwest toward North Carolina so as to connect with the army of General Joseph E. Johnston, who had been trying with little success to blunt the unrelenting northward advance of Major General William T. Sherman’s veteran blue-clad army. If Lee could successfully link his men with Johnston’s, their combined forces, he hoped, might be in a position to defeat Sherman’s and then Grant’s armies. It was a long shot at best, but Lee had few, if any, options remaining. * * * MONG THE TROOPS streaming westward with Lee was Commodore John Randolph Tucker’s Naval Battalion, comprising roughly 300 sailors and 200 marines. For most of the war, Tucker, a 53-year-old Mexican War veteran who in 1861 had ended his 35year career in the U.S. Navy to side with his native Virginia, had led his “tars” in combat against enemy ships on the high seas, first on board the steamer CSS Patrick Henry and then the ironclad CSS Chicora. Most recently assigned to the Confederate naval force stationed at Charleston, South Carolina, where they battled the vessels that enforced the U.S. coastal blockade, Tucker and his men found themselves land-bound after the city fell to U.S. forces in February. By train and foot, they made their way north to Drewry’s Bluff, the Confederate stronghold near Richmond on the James River, where they joined other Confederate sailors who also lacked a command. With the evacuation of Richmond and Petersburg, Tucker and his men packed up again and marched to join Lee’s army. The Naval Battalion reached Amelia Court House during the morning of Wednesday, April 5, and linked with the army’s Second Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General Richard Ewell and composed of the divisions of Major Generals George Washington Custis Lee, who was Robert E. Lee’s oldest son, and Joseph B. Kershaw, a stalwart South Carolinian. Assigned to Custis Lee’s division, Tucker’s men found

A

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“AYE AYE!” As they marched from Richmond and Petersburg in early April 1865, the grizzled foot soldiers of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia were no doubt puzzled by the navy jargon heard in the ranks. With them on the grim retreat were the few hundred sailors and marines of the Confederate Naval Battalion, who soon would fight their first—and last—land battle along the weedy banks of a sluggish stream, ironically named Sailor’s Creek, where they would earn a reputation as men “who didn’t know how to surrender.”¹

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The March to Sailor’s Creek In the wake of the evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, Lee ordered his forces west, in hopes that they might eventually link up with General Joseph E. Johnston’s Rebels in North Carolina and live to fight another day. After a brief stop on April 5 at Amelia Court House, where the men (including Tucker’s Naval Battalion) of Richard Ewell’s corps joined the retreating Confederate column, Lee’s force continued its westward race, only to be caught the following day by pursuing Union troops. At 2 p.m. on April 6, the Battle of Sailor’s Creek commenced.

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themselves among mostly bottom-of-the-barrel reserve troops and heavy artillerists who, like them, were now forced to fight as foot soldiers. Still, while many of the men in Custis Lee’s command were marked by a general lack of infantry experience, Tucker and his lads stood out, their nautical dress and mannerisms making them an immediate target of amusement and often derision for many of their fellow Rebs. “I remember, in all the discomfort and wretchedness of the retreat, we had been no little amused by the Naval Battalion,” related Major Robert Stiles. “The soldiers called them the ‘Aye, Ayes,’ because they responded ‘aye, aye’ to every order, sometimes repeating

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the order itself and adding, ‘Aye, aye, it is, sir!” Other Confederates, however, seemed much less amused by their new comrades. “I remember the Naval Battalion particularly,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel W.W. Blackford, a Virginia cavalryman and engineer. “The sailors did well enough on the march, but there were the fat old captains and commodores, who had never marched anywhere but on a quarterdeck before in their lives, limping along, puffing and blowing and cursing everything black and blue.”² Tucker’s command was in Amelia only a few hours before Lee ordered the army westward about 1 p.m. There was no time to linger. An expected ration train had not arrived, forage wagons had turned up little food in the surrounding countryside, and, most importantly, U.S. troops—Major General George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac, led by its II, V, and VI Corps, along with Sheridan’s cavalry—were in active pursuit, Grant’s forces having two days earlier occupied Richmond and Petersburg in the

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wake of the Rebel exodus. Unknown to Lee at the time, elements of the U.S. Army, namely the V Corps and Sheridan’s troopers, had raced ahead of him to Jetersville, where they intended to block his path. Upon learning this, Lee, not wanting to risk a major fight, bypassed the town and marched his men through the night, past the village of Amelia Springs and the crossroads at Deatonville before reaching bottom lands cut by Little Sailor’s Creek and Big Sailor’s Creek, both tributaries of the Appomattox River that, while normally only a few feet wide, had been swelled by spring rains and turned into muddy quagmires. It was a taxing excursion for already exhausted men, “the most cruel marching order of the war,” thought one Confederate officer.³ * * * UNRISE ON Thursday, April 6, found the Rebel army still on the move west. The men of Lee’s First Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General James Longstreet, were in the lead, followed by those of Lieutenant General Richard H. Anderson’s Fourth Corps. Ewell’s divisions were next, trailed by the several hundred vehicles of Lee’s wagon train. Bringing up the rear was Major General John B. Gordon’s Second Corps. By late morning, Longstreet, who was accompanied on the march by Lee, had crossed both Sailor’s Creeks to reach Rice’s Station on the South Side Railroad. Learning that enemy troops might be in the vicinity, Longstreet began to dig in. What Longstreet and Lee did not know was that the army’s remaining three corps were in trouble on the roads about four miles behind them. A division of U.S. cavalry had pounced on Anderson’s men near Holt’s Corner crossroads, forcing the Confederate commander into a stopand-go fight that served to further slow the already ponderous Rebel retreat. Indeed, the column had slowed so much as to open a two-mile gap between it and Longstreet’s position, and before long additional U.S. horsemen, primarily those of Brigadier General George Custer’s division, raced to fill the breach, while the pursuing U.S. infantry steadily gained on the column from behind. Anderson’s divisions managed to cross Little Sailor’s Creek via the Rice’s Station Road, but by about 2 p.m. they could go no farther, three Yankee cavalry divisions now blocking the way. With the march

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☛ The guns of Captain Andrew Cowan’s artillery brigade, positioned near the James Moses Hillsman house (pictured above), pounded Ewell’s exposed Confederates with a deadly fire from a distance of about 800 yards.

stalled, Ewell diverted the wagon train that trailed his corps onto an alternate route. At Holt’s Corner, the train wheeled north onto the Jamestown Road, a farm lane that ran generally parallel to the Rice’s Station Road. Gordon’s Rebels, fighting an escalating rearguard action against the Army of the Potomac’s VI Corps, commanded by Major General Horatio G. Wright, broke off from the column and followed the wagons, though he had received no orders to do so. After reaching Holt’s Corner, Wright chose not to follow Gordon and the wagons on the Jamestown Road, but rather continued after Ewell’s command on the Rice’s Station Road. Before long, Wright’s men found themselves within sight of Kershaw’s division, whose soldiers formed the rear of Ewell’s portion of the column and had been expecting to see Gordon’s troops coming up behind them. Faced with this new and unexpected threat, Ewell quickly deployed a rearguard, posting a brigade of infantry and a regiment of dismounted cavalrymen near the James Moses Hillsman farm. The bulk of his corps continued on Rice’s Station Road across Little Sailor’s Creek—a matter of a few hundred yards—but quickly found the route ahead clogged with Anderson’s troops, who had begun to dig in along the road to stave off an expected U.S. cavalry attack from the south. Unable to move forward, Ewell arranged his corps in a defensive position along a treelined ridge about 300 yards south of the creek, generally facing toward the northeast, where the lead regiments of Wright’s corps, consisting of the regiments of Brigadier General Truman Seymour’s Third Division, could be seen readying for an assault. Custis Lee’s troops occupied the left of the hastily assembled Rebel line, Kershaw’s men the right, and the sailors and marines of the Naval Battalion the center. As they awaited the enemy advance, Tucker’s men got on their bellies, making due with whatever protection the natural contours of the open ground upon which they lay offered. Seymour’s troops swatted aside the Rebel rearguard with little difficulty, but Wright decided to wait for his First Division, commanded by Brevet Major General Frank Wheaton, to reach the battlefield before launching an all-out assault on Ewell’s line. While Wheaton’s men hus-

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tled toward the action, five batteries of Wright’s artillery brigade, led by Captain Andrew Cowan, rumbled into position near the Hillsman house and unlimbered. From a distance of about 800 yards, Cowan opened fire on the Rebel positions about 5:15 p.m. With Ewell having no guns to respond, his men, lying in the open, could do little but hug the ground while deafening enemy rounds tore flesh and earth in their midst. “From our commanding position,” noted a U.S. officer at the scene, “batteries were brought up to bear on this exposed position of their line, which was cut up terribly by our plunging fire of shell and case-shot.” Shortly after the barrage began, Wheaton’s brigades (save one assigned to guard a wagon train) arrived on the field and were ordered into line to the left of Seymour’s men. Now with approximately 7,000 troops on the scene, Wright was ready to attack.⁴ At about 6 p.m., the blue line surged forward with a shout, dashing across open fields on both sides of the road down into the creek valley. Upon reaching the stream they slowed, incoming fire from Confederate skirmishers and the mucky terrain causing them to lose momentum. Struggling out of the mud and water, Wright’s men reformed their ranks and, covered by renewed fire by Cowan’s artillery, continued up the sloping ground toward the waiting enemy. Suddenly, the Confederate line flamed with a devastating volley. Wheaton’s men, at the time closer to Ewell’s position than Seymour’s, were

☛ Alfred R. Waud titled his pencil sketch of surrendering Confederate troops at Sailor’s Creek “The Last of Ewell’s Corps.”

hardest hit by this awful fire, which sent two of his regiments staggering back toward the creek. Sensing an opportunity, the eager yet inexperienced artillerists-turned-infantrymen of Colonel Stapleton Crutchfield’s brigade, whose men occupied a spot in Ewell’s line to Tucker’s immediate right, broke ranks without orders and charged after the fleeing enemy regiments. The impromptu counterattack met with initial suc-

cess amid hand-to-hand fighting along the creek bank, but soon stalled under canister fire from Cowan’s gunners. In minutes, Crutchfield was dead, shot in the head, and the headstrong survivors of his command scampered back to their positions on the ridge. As Ewell’s men held on, the fight was going worse for the Rebels in other quarters. At about the same time Wright had launched his attack against Ewell, three Union cavalry divisions, some 10,000 troopers in all, descended upon Anderson’s position in what one U.S. officer called “probably the grandest cavalry charge of the war.” While the fighting was fierce for a few minutes, Anderson’s Rebels, posted behind hastily erected defenses of logs, fence rails, rocks and dirt, stood little chance. Most of his men soon broke, many unable to escape the oncoming horsemen, who rounded up scores of prisoners.⁵ With Anderson’s corps splintered, Ewell’s divisions, already heavily engaged with Wright’s troops, found themselves sandwiched by the enemy. Pressed hard by U.S. infantry to his front and cavalry from behind, Kershaw ordered his division to pull back and attempt to cut its way out. It was too late; U.S. forces seemed now to be everywhere in swarms. Before long, Kershaw and most of his men laid down their arms. Soon too did Custis Lee and Ewell, who surrendered as he watched his corps disintegrate around him. On the Jamestown Road, Gordon’s Rebels had fared no better as they battled Union Major General Andrew Humphreys’ II Corps along the ridges and swamps near the James Lockett farm. Dozens of wagons in the train that had preceded his men on the road had bogged down in the creek’s bottomland, forcing Gordon to make a stand. His soldiers fought stoutly, repelling one attack, but were overpowered by superior numbers and routed about 6 p.m. Despite the confusion that surrounded them, the Naval Battalion held firm. Tucker had remained unruffled in his first land battle, calmly shouting orders as if he were walking a warship’s quarterdeck, his tars responding with their distinctive “Aye, aye, sir!” When at one point early during the fight a Confederate officer rode up and offered Tucker assistance, the commodore quickly declined. “Young man,” he reportedly told the infantryman, “I understand how to talk to my people.” After Crutchfield’s counterattack, which had temporarily blunted the U.S. assault in his sector, Tucker had moved the Naval Battalion into a nearby thicket, where they remained in relative protection as enemy forces overwhelmed Ewell’s line, surging past them on both flanks.⁶ As night descended on the field, word reached Brigadier General J. Warren Keifer, who commanded a brigade in Seymour’s division, that a nest of Rebels appeared to be in the thicket. Informed that these men had temporarily ceased firing, but had not laid down their arms, Keifer decided to ride forward and investigate for himself. Entering the trees, the general almost immediately stumbled into Tucker’s battle line. Keifer maintained his composure enough to try to bluff his way out of the situation. He shouted, “Forward,” and some of the southerners complied, passing the order down the ranks. In the shadowy light, they mistook him for a Rebel officer. Given this respite, Keifer decided to make a break for it, wheeling his horse for a scamper to safety. The underbrush prevented him from a clean getaway, however, and by the time he had pulled clear the Confederates had realized he was a U.S. officer. When some of the Rebs raised muskets to kill him, Tucker and one of his officers, a ☛ {Cont. on p. 76}

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CAPTIVE MEMORIES Union ex-prisoners of war and the work of remembrance BY BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN

HORTLY AFTER 11 A.M. ON June 15, 1882, nearly 2,000 blue-coated veterans crowded into Memorial Hall on the campus of the National Soldier’s Home in Dayton, Ohio. Just a few moments later, old soldiers completely filled the chairs that lined the parquet floor of the flag-festooned auditorium, requiring many veterans to take their seats in the galleries. ☛ THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR FALL 2011

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☛ An emaciated Union POW, recently released from captivity, poses for the camera.

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Following the invocation, Joseph O’Neall, formerly a private in the 35th Ohio Infantry, delivered welcoming remarks. “This is no ordinary meeting,” he explained. “It is a meeting of ex-prisoners who preferred to starve and rot rather than sacrifice their honor, or falter in the discharge of their duty.” O’Neall was a survivor of Andersonville, the Confederacy’s infamous military prison in southwestern Georgia. He and his comrades assembled in Dayton that morning for the third annual reunion of the Ohio Union Ex-Prisoners of War Association, one of at least 61 local, state, and national organizations fashioned by the survivors of Confederate prison-pens.¹ Gustavus Gessner In the postbellum years, thousands of “living witnesses,” such as those who convened in Dayton, became impatient custodians of what Walt Whitman called the war’s “interior history.” Some were determined to compile a public catalog of Confederate cruelties. “It is a sacred duty we owe to our fallen comrades, to ourselves, and to posterity,” maintained Andersonville survivor Gustavus Gessner, “to spare no effort to make the true story of our sacrifices and sufferings as inmates of rebel prison-pens a part of the history of the war for the Union.”² Others shared their stories in an attempt to help those around them understand the realities of the Civil War and what it often entailed. “How I wish every man and woman in the North could understand,” one ex-POW lamented.³ Still others searched for a way to come to terms with their own experiences. As Andersonville survivor Alson Blake asked an assembly of former prisoners, “Can it be possible that I endured all that suffering and am still living to tell this dreadful tale?”⁴ Whatever their goals, accomplishing them in the complicated aftermath of a deadly and destructive fratricidal conflict soon proved daunting. Rebel prisons were simply too incompatible with the sanitized Civil War narrative that captivated the public’s imagination in the late-nineteenth century; tortured and starved ex-POWs were hardly convincing characters in the popular “brother’s war” epic of the 1870s and 1880s. As a result, prison survivors turned inward to perform the necessary work of remembrance and healing. * * *

W

HEN THE U.S. BEGAN enlisting African-American troops in the summer of 1863, incredulous officials in Richmond responded by ceasing the prisoner of war exchanges that had characterized the war’s early months. Before long, Confederate authorities needed a new location to house the mounting numbers of Union captives. In February 1864, what would prove the most notorious of these new prison hells, Andersonville, located a dozen miles from Americus, amid the thick, pine forests of southwestern Georgia, began receiving captives. By summer, nearly 33,000 prisoners crowded into the prison, each inmate receiving barely 34 square feet of living space.⁵ Nineteen feet within the stockade wall ran a row of stakes marked the ‘dead-line.’ Prisoners who dared put “so much as…a foot” over the line faced being shot by one of Andersonville’s many well-perched sentinels.⁶ Incarceration at Andersonville was dehumanizing, robbing inmates of their dignity. “Of all places of distress and misery and suffering which I have ever seen this is the worst,” observed inmate Ira Forbes, who was captured from the ranks of the 16th Connecticut Infantry at Plymouth, North Carolina, in April 1864. Prisoners described Andersonville as a

“restless, broken sea of human misery.” From a distance, the tightly packed inmates seemed to ebb and flow as if one, savage organism. “It is shocking to humanity,” another Connecticut inmate concluded, “to see the condition of some of the prisoners,” many of whom wallowed in mud and water “like hogs.” Because Confederate authorities did not devise a plan to provision prisoners, rations were virtually nonexistent. Malnourishment reduced men to skeletons. “Their sunken eyes, extended cheek bones, and regular claw fingers, they seemed to haunt me for days,” Private Lessel Long of the 13th Indiana wrote of his time at Andersonville. The prisoners’ only water source was a shallow stream choked with filth, excrement, and decaying bodies. Violent epidemics of scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery distressed the captives, who lacked adequate medical care. During the summer, up to 100 prisoners died every day. By the time Andersonville closed in May 1865, some 13,000 of the 45,000 men incarcerated behind the so-called “gates of Death” had died of disease, exposure, or starvation.⁷ The men held captive at Andersonville experienced not only extreme physical suffering, but also endured acute mental trauma. Homesick and disheartened under these conditions, prisoners became lethargic. “I believe that the loss of health, exposure to privation and physical suffering…are not the saddest effects of our present captivity,” Forbes posited, “but that which is most lamentable I think is the mental debility which under the present state of things, we necessarily experience. The finer feelings, that which makes man lovely as a social being— love, affection, friendship, kindness, sympathy, courtesy are being constantly deadened.” One “weak and wasted” Andersonville ex-prisoner recalled “a deep sense of despair” settling in among the inmates, “with their upturned, wildly-ghastly, staring faces, and wide-open eyes.” Remembering the stockade’s surreal environment, Ohio survivor Solon Hyde recalled it was “no uncommon thing to see men wandering in idiocy, —reason, sense, feeling, all dead.” Diaries pulsed with descriptions of tortured and weary minds “going wild,” and utilized such phrases as “prison fever,” “idiocy,” “nostalgia,” and “homesickness.”⁸ Even once liberated, prisoners found it difficult to escape the war. “I was more than glad to be at home,” Connecticut veteran A.A. Hyde noted, “although the home was new to me. Several times each night for many nights I awoke feeling intensely…of that wretched misery.” Richard Thatcher, an Illinois drummer boy

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taken prisoner during the Atlanta Campaign, confessed to a fellow ex-prisoner, “Right in the abominable Andersonville, right there I received impressions that have followed me ever since.” Rhode Island cavalryman Gilbert Sabre became “deeply absorbed” in “still fresh” scenes of Andersonville life flashing before his eyes; his mind, he wrote, “lurk[ed] mournfully in the dark sepulchers of the past.”⁹ Andersonville, in short, was a callous nightmare that stalked its disbelieving survivors. “A period of captivity in Andersonville can never be effaced,” ex-prisoner Joseph Waters explained. “It is a plague we remember by its holocaust.” Many survivors were likely suffering from what modern-day war psychiatrists label post-traumatic stress disorder. “On my arrival at home,” Pennsylvania survivor Ezra Ripple explained, “meeting my friends braced me up so that for a time I forgot my sickness, but when I went to bed that night, I was to remain there…most of the time in delirium, in which the dogs, the prison, the rebel cavalrymen who took me back, and the old transport all contributed to keep me in terror and trouble night and day.” Elizabeth Maher, the granddaughter of an Andersonville

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☛ Andersonville prisoners line up to receive their meager rations. Malnutrition and disease reduced many inmates in Andersonville and other Civil War prisons to skeletons.

survivor from New York, recalled that her grandfather feared starvation for the rest of his life.¹⁰ Many survivors, unable to cope with “moans of starving and dying comrades ringing in [their] ears” and “eyes yet retain[ing] the mental picture of the utter wretchedness” sometimes found homecoming literally unworkable. Haunted by Andersonville and gripped by rage, Simeon Haun, a Pennsylvania private captured at Gettysburg, was emotionally unable to return to his family. Once paroled at Harrisburg’s Camp Curtin, he decided to take work in a nearby hotel dining room. By decade’s end, he secured a coveted homestead tract in the West, leaving behind his kin and prewar life for the isolation of Dakota Territory.¹¹ Unlike Private Haun, most veterans of Confederate prison-pens returned to their homes seeking to share their stories; they wanted to explain to civilians just what they had endured. Many, like Ohio artillerist and Andersonville survivor Henry M. Davidson, opted to write accounts of their ordeals. Convinced that “the Northern people” did not understand the horrible conditions of their incarcerations, Davidson and his comrades “pledged ourselves to each other if any of our number should ever make his way to the North, to do all in his power to spread abroad a knowledge of our treatment and arouse the sympathies of our friends to action in our behalf.” When compiling his memoir, Warren Lee Goss, a Massachusetts sergeant incarcerated at Richmond’s Libby and Belle Isle prisons, selected “scenes of prison life best fitted to convey to the minds of general readers” its characteristic horrors. “Are not the scenes through which [we] passed worthy of commemoration and remembrance in the hearts of his fellow country-men?” he asked.¹² During the war’s final year and immediately after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, ex-POWs found an enthusiastic audience for their writings among a northern populace hungry for retribution. Stories of Confederate abuse of Union captives had circulated in the North since 1864, when the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a volunteer relief agency, launched an

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Mortality in Civil War Prisons The following figures provide a comparative analysis of life and death in Civil War prisons. Even these numbers, however, do not tell the whole story, as death registers for notorious rebel stockades such as Cahaba (Alabama), Millen (Georgia), Goldsboro (North Carolina), Blackshear (Georgia), and Belle Isle (Virginia), are either incomplete or nonexistent. And, of course, what tables such as these cannot convey are the emotional costs of captivity, which haunted survivors for the rest of their lives. PRISON

DATES OF OPERATION

NUMBER OF PRISONERS

NUMBER OF PRISON DEATHS

SALISBURY

October 1864– February 1865

11,000

3,708

33%

4,000

1,297

32%

45,000

13,000

29%

12,122

2,963

24%

22,000

3,584

16%

18,000

2,802

16%

30,000

4,454

15%

12,000

221

Salibury, North Carolina

DANVILLE Danville, Virginia

MORTALITY RATE

4 Months December 1863– January 1865 13 Months

ANDERSONVILLE Americus, Georgia

February 1864– April 1865 14 Months

ELMIRA Elmira, New York

POINT LOOKOUT Point Lookout, Maryland

FLORENCE Florence, South Carolina

CAMP DOUGLAS Chicago, Illinois

July 1864–June 1865 12 Months

September 1863– February 1865 17 Months September 1864– February 1865 5 Months February 1862– July 1865 41 Months

JOHNSON’S ISLAND

February 1862– July 1865

Sandusky, Ohio

41 Months

2%

SOURCES: Andersonville National Historic Site; Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA, 1997), 323-340; David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Civil War (New York, 2000).

investigation of “the true physical condition” of the prisoners. The commission’s report, based on depositions taken from both a dozen furloughed survivors and the U.S. medical officers who cared for them upon release, accused Confederate policy makers with intentionally “denying food and clothing” to their captives. Little more than a year later, a military tribunal convicted Andersonville’s commandant, Henry Wirz, of “violations of the laws and customs of war,” based largely on the testimony of over 100 survivors of the prison. In July 1867, the U.S. House of Representatives, in an effort to provide “the country a faithful and true official history of the wrongs and sufferings” endured at Andersonville, appointed a select committee on Confederate prisons. The committee examined nearly 150 ex-prisoners and produced a 1,200-page report that validated some of the

survivors’ most horrible tales.¹³ With a sympathetic audience, prisoners wrote—and publishers printed—stockade reminiscences at a brisk pace during the immediate postwar years. Nineteen prison memoirs appeared in 1865 alone, followed by seven more in 1866, three in 1867, and five in 1868. As the Sanitary Commission put it, “Every returned prisoner has brought his tale of suffering, astonishing his neighborhood with an account of cruelty and barbarity on the part of the enemy.” The return of pale and emaciated survivors—a famil-

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COURTESY CHRIS HEISEY

iar scene in many northern towns and villages in the first summer after the war—lent credence to prisoners’ horrid tales. “Their arms and legs look like coarse reeds with bulbous joints,” remarked the editor of a journal called the Chicago Medical Examiner. “Their faces look as though a skillful taxidermist had drawn tanned skin over the bare skull, and then placed false eyes in the orbital cavities.”¹⁴ * * *

EFORE LONG, however, the northern public’s appetite for such scenes waned; images of broken bodies and ruined landscapes were steadily replaced in the civilian psyche by more alluring panoramas of heroism, glory, and sacrifice. Mounting war weariness was mostly to blame; having seen the country pass through unprecedented death and destruction, northern civilians yearned to let bygones be bygones, no longer willing to reckon with the late conflict and its cause, enormous costs, and complex consequences. Upon coming home in 1866, Phineas Whitehouse, a New Hampshire corporal who lost an arm in battle, noted the changing mood. “The returning wounded, with powerless arms, shattered legs, or bloody and fearfully disfigured faces,” he lamented, “were objects [too] dreadful to look upon.”¹⁵ Ex-prisoners were among the most affected by the shift in civilian opinion. Indeed, within a few years of the war’s end, it seemed the more reminiscences that the former POWs produced, the less sympathetic the public became. In an 1867 review of former prisoner Warren Lee Goss’ The Soldier’s Story of His Captivity, one periodical observed, “We do not like to read such narratives. They are too remindful of the late sorrow, and we would for our own taste discourage their publication.” Others began doubting the genuineness of prison tales. After finishing Andersonville survivor John McElroy’s book about his POW experiences, a Kansas man wrote to a local survivor mentioned in the tome. “I have been reading a book…on Southern prisons, and I would ask you if the truth is told in regard to them,” he queried. To this and other civilians, McElroy and his fellow survivors seemed “fuller of bitterness than of patriotism.” As the Sanitary Commission observed, “The public have been made very uneasy by these reports. One class have accepted them as true; another have felt them to be exaggerated; still another have pronounced them wholly false, fictions purposely made and scattered abroad to inflame the people.”¹⁶ By 1869, the previously frenzied production

B

of prison narratives had ground to a halt. Most major publishers now refused to produce prison reminiscences, perceiving them as destined for commercial failure. Former prisoners looking to see their stories in print either turned to local bookbinders, self-published, or reluctantly shelved their unpublished manuscripts. Many ex-prisoners lamented the new reality. In the manuscript of his unpublished memoir, survivor Ezra Ripple complained: “Where hundreds have written of the battles on land and sea for the Union, not more than a score or two have written of the horrors of the Southern prisons. The subject is not a pleasant or attractive one. We would all sooner listen to a description of a grand battle where all the bravery and dash of trained soldiers in assault and defense is portrayed in the most vivid and glowing colors than to a tale which has little in it but that which is revolting, sickening, and sorrowful.” John McElroy echoed the sentiment in the preface to his own Andersonville opus: “The country has heard much of the heroism and sacrifices of those loyal youths who fell on the field of battle, but it has heard little of the still greater number who died in the prison pen.”¹⁷ While keenly aware of the public’s growing reservations about the late war, ex-prisoners were hurt by the implication that their sacrifices were not worthy of publication. Survivor H.B. Hoffman “refrained giving a description of many scenes that I have witnessed,” deeming them “unfit for publication.” One Connecticut ex-prisoner conceded that sections of his account would “be skipped by those who are unwilling to know the truth,” while another feared people would “think that he was making up a story.” Warren Lee Goss explained that there existed “such a misunderstanding” of prisons that veterans required aid “in giving to the public anything which will more thoroughly convince [them] that Andersonville was not a myth but a hell that tried American endurance and fidelity and courage more than its battlefields.” As the New Orleans Times Picayune trenchantly observed in 1869, Union ex-prisoners were becoming “intensely absorbed in the apprehension that a fading away of the painful memories of the war” was writing them out of history.¹⁸ In the minds of a growing number of survivors, the “fervid atmosphere” of the Civil War seemed, as Walt Whitman cautioned, “in danger of being totally forgotten” by decade’s end. With few exceptions, media outlets in the 1870s and 1880s treated exprisoners no better, denying those who refused to moderate their tone the opportunity to publish narratives about their experiences. Promoting section☛ Andersonville, behind whose walls some 13,000 inmates died during the conflict, ranked among the deadliest of all Civil War prisons. ABOVE: Headstones mark the graves of soldiers buried in the Andersonville National Cemetery.

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al reconciliation, major periodicals commissioned ☛ Former POWs often their meeting veterans—mostly high-ranking officers—to com- bedecked places with prison relics, pose war narratives intended to “soften contro- visual reminders of their versy.” The most successful of these publications wartime experiences. Matthew Brady photowas Century Magazine, which, in the mid-1880s, graphed this group of printed hundreds of articles emphasizing the mu- Andersonville artifacts, from the pertual courage and patriotism of Union and Con- assembled sonal collections of survifederate soldiers. At first, the series excluded any vors, in 1866. discussion of Confederate prisons from its pages. The unrivaled commercial success of the project, however, eventually convinced editors to begin accepting submissions from ordinary enlisted men, including ex-prisoners. Even so, Century did its best to soften the polemical writings submitted by ex-inmates. Editors required survivor Thomas Mann to delete “nearly all the explosive adjectives and personal opinions” from his articles on Andersonville. Warren Lee Goss encountered similar obstacles. “The Century people have been very kind to me in the matter of letting me have my own way,” he commented upon submitting his essay, “but they sometimes take exceptions to sharp things which I believe justice required to be uttered.”¹⁹ * * *

FACED WITH A CIVILIAN population that eagerly embraced a sanitized interpretation of the war, one that also pervaded the ranks of the U.S.’s largest veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, ex-POWs increasingly turned inward to perform the work of remembrance, embrac-

ing each other as fictive kin. “Though no man holds dearer his regimental comrades, there is a stronger affection that binds together in remembrance of hardship and suffering those who were prisoners of war,” declared former Libby inmate George Bliss. “No one who has not had experience of the miseries of confinement in southern prisons,” New York veteran Lester Phelps maintained in a moving letter to his fellow Andersonville survivor George Whitney, “can realize or imagine suffering and horrors there endured nor the patriotism and loyalty of those who endured it.” Scores of survivors addressed postwar letters to “brother captive” and signed them “fellow prisoner.” Many others functioned as custodians of information relating to prison life. Ex-POWs could often rely on a fellow survivor to supply crucial, authenticating details. “It is very kind of you to send me the papers containing the articles pertaining to our prison life,” Charles Johnson told Ira Forbes. “They brought back afresh to my memory many things that occurred while we were at Florence.” Robert Kellogg, who moved to Ohio from Connecticut after Appomattox, frequently referenced his personal library of prison memoirs upon the request of an ex-inmate.²⁰ From these informal networks of attention and understanding, survivors fashioned an array of ex-prisoner organizations. In 1873, Warren Lee Goss and his fellow ex-prisoner Charles Shaw formed “The National Union Survivors of Andersonville and Other Southern Military Prisons,” which synchronized the activities of some 20 state ex-prisoner associations. These orders sought to strengthen “ties of fraternal fellowship and sympathy” among survivors and to “secure justice” by the reiteration of “the truths of our hardships.”²¹ Ex-prisoner associations not only became sites of memory and mourning, but exclusive spaces wherein survivors shared and worked through the trauma that the “burning, scalding crucible of the rebel prison pen” imposed upon them.²² Membership in these organizations helped validate the experiences of former prisoners. Applications required aspiring veterans to provide the details of their capture, imprisonment, and release, as well as to affirm that they had never sworn an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Ex-prisoners prized the membership certificates issued by the associations. Printed on parchment in gilt and color, and adorned with signatures and seals, these elaborate diplomas not only “certified” an ex-prisoner’s membership in the organization, but also established the truth of his tale. For a small fee, members could also obtain elegant brass badges, which they affixed to their lapels with blue ribbon and often personalized by adding brass bars stamped with

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the names of the stockades in which they suffered. Association meetings were exclusive affairs. After a ritual roll call, the club’s president would recite the names of various Confederate prisons. Upon hearing their incarceration site called, members responded with an enthusiastic ‘Aye’ and stood for acknowledgement.²³ More important to ex-prisoners were the stories they exchanged at such meetings. None of the dismissive disbelief that greeted former POWs elsewhere intruded on their utterances; here, inmates “expressed themselves frankly and freely,” drawing strength from each other’s tales and finding meaning in their shared ordeals. It was “a great jollification,” as the Boston Journal put it, for former inmates to listen to “the stories of the suffering and the hardships endured.” At one gathering in Centralia, Illinois, a member’s “graphic” recital of “the horrors of Andersonville…got the boys thoroughly enthused.” Exprisoner Christ Engel wrote to thank a fellow member of the Ohio Association who had narrated his stockade miseries in titillating detail at one of their meetings. “Your address at the reunion of the Prison Association reminded me of the Old times,” Engel noted, “and carried me back to when I spent nine months at that hell hole of Andersonville Prison.”²⁴

of fellow survivor Thomas O’Dea’s “Andersonville Prison,” a bird’s-eye rendition of the stockade produced from memory, for display in one of the rooms. The affecting lithograph brought “tears to many eyes” of those who assembled for an evening of storytelling.²⁵ Having found both a secure place and understanding counsel, members of the District of Columbia Association worked through their grief together. Former captives often readied their meeting spaces for the work of remembrance by bedecking them with prison relics. After calling meetings to order with pine gavels fashioned from stockade timbers, association presidents often invited members to highlight their own treasured items. “[Prison relics] are precious, and should be preserved with care,” wrote survivor Robert Kellogg. At one Connecticut State Association meeting, Norman Hope displayed, “with touching appeal,” his “small but unique collection” of broken Andersonville knives, forks, and spoons. Clark Wakeman, a private from the 21st Michigan who was captured at Chickamauga, “exhibited a few relics” of his months in Andersonville, including the small tin cup that had held his scant rations, at a Michigan Association banquet. And ex-prisoner Frank Smith, who ventured to the infamous Georgia stockade to collect souvenirs in 1883, prepared an arresting exhibition for the Tri-State Association that included a deadline stake he had removed himself.²⁶

* * *

EYOND THE SYMBOLIC spaces that these organizations opened for survivors, ex-prisoner associations established physical locations for former POWs to perform the work of healing. In April 1887, after meeting in various hotel lobbies, fraternal lodges, and members’ homes, the District of Columbia Association leased two adjoining rooms downtown in the Corcoran Building—a space of their own. “It was the desire of the officers and comrades that all should make these rooms their resting place when down city in the evening,” the association’s minute-book noted. “The rooms will be kept open every evening,” the Washington Post announced, “and all ex-prisoners are cordially invited to the rooms, to talk over their old battles, and smoke the pipe of peace and friendship.” Association member John McElroy contributed a “handsomely framed” copy

NATIONAL ARCHIVES; THE RUTHERFORD B. HAYES PRESIDENTIAL CENTER

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☛ Veterans who joined ex-prisoner associations prized the membership certificates they received. The Andersonville Survivors’ Association issued this certificate to member David Daub, who served during the war in the 45th Pennsylvania Infantry.

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Associations became custodians of the prison experience, challenging those who sought to revise history. In 1876, when media outlets published a fiery letter in which former Confederate president Jefferson Davis posited that the mortality rate for Rebel prisoners in the hands of federal authorities exceeded that of U.S. soldiers in Confederate prisons, the National Union Survivors of Andersonville responded in kind. Drawing on official reports and the testimony of Confederate leaders, Warren Lee Goss, the group’s president, demonstrated that the mortality rate in southern prisons “was about three times as great as that in Union prisons.” And when news of a proposed memorial to the Confederate soldiers who died in Chicago’s Camp Douglas reached Goss’ office in 1895, his group promptly issued an acerbic protest. In their minds, emphasis on the shared suffering of Union and Confederate prisoners was sim-

ply too objectionable. “When we remember the condition of those Confederate prisoners from Camp Douglas as compared with that of our comrades coming from Confederate prisons for exchange, we feel that we cannot remain still… . Would those who rear this memorial at Chicago wish us to depict the Union prisoner as he was, on a like shaft at Andersonville?”²⁷ Ex-prisoners also transformed accounts of captivity into stories of sacrifice; their rhetorical alchemy was a demonstration of how much the public demanded tales of daring and bravery. Homer Sprague, one-time lieutenant colonel of

ENDNOTES 1

Joseph O’Neall, Constitution and By Laws of the Ohio Association of Union Ex-Prisoners of War, Together With Register of Members and Proceedings at the Reunion Held at Dayton, June 14 and 15, 1882 (Columbus, 1883), 6-7; “Great Preparations for Forthcoming Reunion of Ex-Prisoners,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 6, 1882; Edwin Beach, “To Ex-Prisoners of War,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, June 12, 1882; “The Ex-Prisoners Reunion,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 15, 1882; [Chicago] Inter Ocean, June 15, 1882.

2

Gessner, notes for address, Ohio ExUnion Prisoners of War Reunion [c. 1890], Gustavus A. Gessner Papers, Box 1, Folder 4, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center [RBHPC], Fremont, OH.

3

Opium Eating: An Autobiographical Sketch, by An Habituate (Philadelphia, 1876), 27.

4

Alson Blake, “Speech About Andersonville Imprisonment,” [1920], Blake Papers, MSA 278, Series IV, Folder 10, Vermont Historical Society, Barre, VT.

5

Ovid Futch, History of Andersonville Prison (Gainesville, Florida, 1968), passim; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), 796.

6

Norman Hope, “The Story of Andersonville,” lecture notes, Hope Papers, Connecticut State Library [CSL].

7

Forbes diary, May 3, 1864, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; S.J. Gibson diary, May 5, 1864, Connecticut Historical Society [CHS]; on mud, see H.B. Hoffman, unpublished manuscript, Hoffman Papers, Andersonville National Historic Site Archives [ANHS] Andersonville, GA; Lessel Long, Twelve Months in Andersonville (Huntington, Indiana, 1886), 102; Oliver Gates diary, May 3, 1864, CHS; Futch, History of Andersonville Prison.

8

Forbes diary, August 24, 1864; Kellogg to Whitney, June 3, 1908, Whitney Papers,

RG 69:23, Box 5, CSL; Opium Eating, 20; Solon Hyde, A Captive of War (New York, 1900), 228; “In the Prison at Andersonville,” Saturday Evening Post, July 1, 1865; Albert Hyde, “Life of a Connecticut Soldier in Confederate Prison During the Stormy Days of the War,” undated memoir manuscript, A.A. Hyde Papers, CSL; Ezra Ripple, Dancing Along the Deadline, ed. Mark Snell (Novato, Calif., 1996), 91-92; Luther Billings, unpublished memoir, Billings Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; G.E. Sabre, Nineteen Months A Prisoner of War (New York, 1865), 69; Inter Ocean, October 9, 1879. 9

Albert Hyde, “Life of a Connecticut Soldier in Confederate Prison During the Stormy Days of the War,” A.A. Hyde Papers; Richard Thatcher to Boston Corbett, letter, September 7, 1882, Boston Corbett Papers [microform], Kansas Historical Society [KHS], Topeka, KS; W.W. Hensley, “What a Soldier Never Forgets,” National Tribune, May 10, 1883; Sabre, Nineteen Months, 9.

10 Joseph Waters, address, Kansas Union Ex-Prisoners of War, March 5, 1898, Topeka Weekly Capitol, March 8, 1898; for PTSD, see American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC, 1987), 250; Ripple, Dancing Along the Deadline, 148; Elizabeth Maher to “Violet,” February 6, 1967, ANDE 284, ANHS. 11 Long, Twelve Months in Andersonville, 5; Haun, “War Record,” unpublished typescript, Haun Collection, ANDE 5086, ANHS. 12 Henry M. Davidson, Fourteen Months in Andersonville (Milwaukee, 1865), vii; Warren Lee Goss, The Soldier’s Story of His Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle, and Other Rebel Prisons (Boston, 1866), 3-4. 13 United States Sanitary Commission, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers While

Prisoners of War in The Hands of Rebel Authorities (Philadelphia, 1864), 64; Norton Parker Chipman, The Horrors of Andersonville Rebel Prison: The Trial of Henry Wirz, The Andersonville Jailer (San Francisco, 1891), 12-18; House Special Committee on the Treatment of Prisoners of War and Union Citizens, Report on the Treatment of Prisoners of War Kept By the Rebel Authorities During the War of the Rebellion, 40th Congress, 3rd session, 1869, H. Rept. 45. 14 Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth (Berkeley, California, 2000), 226n13; United States Sanitary Commission, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers While Prisoners of War in The Hands of Rebel Authorities, 19; “The Starvation of Prisoners,” Chicago Medical Examiner (June 1865). 15 Phineas Whitehouse, “My First Battle,” manuscript dated August 1866, in William Oland Bourne Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 16 “New Publications,” Flag of Our Union, March 2, 1867; J.T. Gist to Corbett, March 16, 1882, Boston Corbett Papers; Springfield [Massachusetts] Republican, August 11, 1886; Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers, 19. 17 Ripple, Dancing Along the Deadline, 5-6; John McElroy, Andersonville (Toledo, Ohio, 1878), xv. 18 Hoffman, unpublished manuscript, ANHS; Hyde, “Life of a Connecticut Soldier in Confederate Prison during the Stormy Days of the War,” A.A. Hyde Papers; Redpath, “Defense of Slavery,” The Independent, August 10, 1865; Goss to Hamlin, August 6, 1885, Hamlin Papers, MOLLUS Collection, Houghton Library; “An Andersonville Column,” Times Picayune, June 9, 1869. 19 On Century, see David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Mem-

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the 13th Connecticut and a survivor of North Carolina’s Salisbury Prison, argued that it was “comparatively easy to face death in battle,” for the soldier “swept along with the mass,” beholding the “gleaming lines, the dense columns, the smoking batteries, the dancing flags, the cavalry with flying feet.”²⁸ William Lyon, a Massachusetts infantryman who survived Andersonville, devoted an entire chapter of his memoir to “the contrast” between the “loyalty and bravery” required on the field of battle and that necessary in the prison-pen. “The prisoner has nothing to inspire or encourage him,” Lyon

ory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 173-179; T.H. Mann, “A Yankee in Andersonville,” Century 40 (July 1890): 447-461; Century 40 (August 1890): 606-622; Goss to Hamlin, August 14, 1885, Hamlin Papers. 20 Richard Thatcher to Corbett, September 17, 1882, Corbett Papers; see also National Tribune, May 10, 1883; D.L. Jewell to Kellogg, March 9, 1908, Whitney Papers; “Survived Horrors,” Worcester [Massachusetts] Daily Spy, October 19, 1895; Phelps to George Whitney, March 12, 1905, CT Andersonville Monument Commission Records, CSL; Johnson to Forbes, April 23, 1907, CT Andersonville Monument Commission Records; Kellogg to Whitney, November 21, 1921, Whitney Papers, and Kellogg to Norman Hope, July 19, 1922, Hope Papers. 21 Constitution of the National Union Survivors of Andersonville and Other Southern Military Prisons (New York, 1882), 1-2; “Prisoners of War,” Hartford Daily Times clipping, Robert Kellogg Vertical File, OHS; program for NY Association Memorial Service, Connecticut Andersonville Monument Commission Records; Robert Beath, History of the Grand Army of the Republic (New York, 1889), 680, and Sydney Phillips, Patriotic Societies of the United States (Broadway, NY, 1914), 130-131. 22 J.E. Wilkins, remarks, September 5, 1883, quoted in Proceedings of the Annual Reunion Iowa Prisoners of War Association (Des Moines, 1883), Petitions and Memorials Referred to Committees (HR 48AH34.4), Committee on Invalid Pensions, 48th Congress, Records of the House of Representatives, RG 233, NA; “Iowa Prisoners of War Association,” National Tribune, November 23, 1882. 23 Certificate of Membership, New York State Union Ex-Prisoners of War Association, for William T. Ackerson, April 19, 1884, Folder 4, Collection 109, Ackerson Papers, Monmouth County Historical Association Library, Freehold, NJ; Certificate of Membership, Andersonville Survivors’ Association, for David Daub,

maintained. “The music is gone. There are no words from his officers to help him but the long, monotonous days and dreary, sleepless nights.”²⁹ And while Amos Stearns of the 25th Massachusetts “did not receive a wound” on the battlefield, he alleged to “carry more scars than many of my old comrades” after Andersonville.³⁰ Insisting that those who suffered and died in Confederate prisons “gave their lives for their country as though they had fallen in battle,” ex-inmates attempted to expand the public’s constricted definition of the gallant warrior.³¹ “For more than twenty-three centuries civilized mankind has drawn inspiration and example from the patriotism and valor of those who fell on the field of Marathon in delivering Greece from the yoke of Persia,” veteran Gustavus Gessner explained. “It ought not to be considered inappropriate to speak of the heroic dead of Andersonville.”³² ☛ {Cont. on p. 77}

Miscellaneous MSS, RBHPC; Constitution of the Illinois State Association of Union Prisoners of War, Corbett Papers; “Meeting of Ohio Ex-Prisoners of War,” Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune, May 15, 1884; “The Andersonville Survivors,” Boston Daily Globe, April 10, 1875; “Union Ex-Prisoners Dine,” NY Tribune, December 22, 1891; Constitution of the National Union Survivors of Andersonville and Other Southern Military Prisons, 12; “Prisoners of War,” Inter Ocean, October 21, 1880; “Andersonville,” Inter Ocean, October 9, 1879. 24 Illinois Prisoners of War Association handbill, November 1, 1881, Corbett Papers; “Days Recalled of Prison Life,” Boston Journal, August 16, 1904; “Prison Tales Retold,” Boston Daily Globe, April 8, 1892; “Survivors of Prison Pens,” Inter Ocean, October 28, 1886; Engel to Gessner, February 6, 1890, Gessner Papers. 25 DC Union Ex-POW Association, minutes, April 4, 1887, minute-ledger, Associated Survivors of the Sixth Army Corps Papers, Manuscript Division, LC; “Union Ex-Prisoners of War,” Washington Post, April 5, 1887; “The Ex Prisoners of War,” Washington Post, April 9, 1887. 26 “Survivors of Prison Pens,” Inter-Ocean, October 28, 1886; Kellogg to Richard Atwater, January 4, 1909, Dorence Atwater Papers, CSL; “Andersonville Relics,” clipping, Ira Emory Forbes Papers, CSL; “Michigan Ex-Prisoners of War,” National Tribune, December 21, 1882; “Frank Smith’s Visit to Andersonville,” National Tribune, September 20, 1883. 27 “Reply to Jefferson Davis,” New York Times, February 8, 1876; Farmer’s Cabinet [Amherst, NH], February 16, 1876; “Union Ex-Prisoners Protest,” Washington Post, May 30, 1895. 28 Homer B. Sprague, Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons (New York, 1915), 134; A. C. Roach, A Prisoner of War, and How Treated (Indianapolis, 1865), 64. 29 William Franklin Lyon, In and Out of Ander-

sonville Prison (Detroit, 1905), 106-109. 30 Amos E. Stearns, Narrative of Amos E. Stearns (Worcester, Mass., 1887), 57. 31 John Read, as quoted in Boston Daily Globe, August 16, 1904. 32 Gessner, reunion speech mss., Box 1, Folder 4, Gessner Papers. 33 “Petition to the Honorable Senators and Representatives of New York at Washington,” Petitions and Memorials Submitted to Committees (HR 47A-H10.2), Committee on Invalid Pensions, 48th Congress, Records of the House of Representatives, RG 233, NA; J.E. Wilkins, remarks, September 5, 1883, in Proceedings of the Annual Reunion Iowa Prisoners of War Association (Des Moines, 1883), Petitions and Memorials Referred to Committees (HR 48A-H34.4), Committee on Invalid Pensions, 48th Congress, RG 233, NA; NY State Association of Union Prisoners of War, “Appeal in Behalf of the Union Ex-Prisoners of War,” February 1, 1882, Petitions and Memorials Referred to Committees (HR 47AH10.2), Committee on Invalid Pensions, 47th Congress, RG 233, NA. 34 “Resolutions of Toledo Association Union Ex-Prisoners of War, Relative to Pensions,” Petitions and Memorials Referred to Committees (HR 51A-10.1), Committee on Invalid Pensions, 51st Congress, RG 233, NA; J.J. Stuckey, “Memorial of Iowa Prisoners of War Association,” April 26, 1890, ibid.; Lyle Adair to Committee on Invalid Pensions, April 7, 1884, Petitions and Memorials Referred to Committees (HR 48A –H11.4), Committee on Invalid Pensions, 48th Congress, RG 233, NA. 35 “Gen. Hawley On Pensions,” [Montpelier, VT] Argus and Patriot, April 16, 1890; Hays Post to Committee on Invalid Pensions, March 27, 1882, Petitions and Memorials Referred to Committees (HR 47A –H10.2), Committee on Invalid Pensions, 47th Congress, RG 233, NA.

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“Babylon Is Fallen.” BY SILVANA R. SIDDALI

THE NORTHERN PRESS REPORTS— WITH SHOCK AND AWE— ON SHERMAN’S MARCH TO THE SEA

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☛ Major General William T. Sherman poses for the camera shortly after the fall of Atlanta in one of the myriad U.S. fortifications that enveloped the vital southern city.

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* * *

I. THE MARCH THE SEEDS OF Sherman’s march were planted in the spring of 1864, when Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, recently given command of the entire U.S. Army by President Lincoln, headed east to craft a strategy to end the war. While Grant confronted Robert E. Lee in Virginia, Sherman, his friend and trusted subordinate in whose hands he had left command of the western armies, was to advance upon Atlanta. Under orders from Grant to “get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their War resources,” Sherman pushed steadily into Georgia with overwhelming force, nearly 100,000 soldiers in all, during the early months of summer. By August, he had Atlanta in a stranglehold, and on September 2, after Sherman’s men had successfully cut off its vital railroad connections with the rest of the South, the Confederate army that defended it had little choice but to evacuate, ☛ U.S. soldiers wreak havoc on the Georgia countryside in this 1883 lithograph of the march.

ALBANY ATLAS:

“HE HAS SWEPT THROUGH THE COUNTRY LIKE A PRAIRIE FIRE, AS TERRIBLE BUT AS TRANSIENT.”

leaving the city to U.S. forces.² After evacuating Atlanta’s residents and ordering the city’s arsenals, factories, and public buildings burned, Sherman pondered his next move. While the Rebel army that had fled Atlanta was still at large, Sherman decided not to pursue with his full force. Instead, he requested that Grant permit him to march the bulk of his army, some 62,000 men, through the heart of Georgia to the seacoast. While risky, the potential benefits of such a move, Sherman argued, were significant. Not only could Sherman “divide the Confederacy in two,” cutting the lines of supply and reinforcements to Lee, who at the time was fighting Grant to a stalemate in Virginia, but he might also deliver a significant psychological blow to southern civilians by demonstrating that their government could not protect from an invading enemy army. Or, as Sherman put it in a letter to one of his generals, “I propose to demonstrate the vulnerability of the South, and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.”³ On November 15, after cutting his lines of communication with Washington, Sherman departed Atlanta and began the southeasterly advance toward Savannah. He intended for his army to travel as lightly and quickly as possible. Anything that might slow their progress—heavy artillery, extra supply wagons, and miscellaneous noncombatants—was left behind. Packed with only 20 days’ rations on their backs, his soldiers would live off the land, foraging liberally for necessary provisions throughout the surrounding countryside. As Sherman outlined in his marching orders, while his troops were not allowed to enter “the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass,” they were permitted to take various foodstuffs (with the caveat that families be left with sufficient victuals to survive) as well as horses, mules, and wagons. Sherman also authorized his corps commanders to order the destruction of mills, houses, and cotton gins, except in areas where the army was “unmolested.” Yet wherever guerrillas or bushwhackers hindered the march, or where inhabitants burned bridges or obstructed roads, or “otherwise manifest[ed] local hostility,” U.S. officers were to “order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.”⁴ As it turned out, Sherman faced little serious resistance. Indeed, Confederate commanders in Georgia could scrape together only about 13,000 troops—many of them old men and young boys—to oppose the swiftly moving U.S. columns. In eight days, Sherman’s men reached the state capital, Milledgeville; about three weeks later, in mid-December, they arrived at the outskirts of Savannah, which surrendered without

PREVIOUS PAGE & THESE PAGES: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

ON NOVEMBER 17, 1864, residents of Princeton, Illinois, awakened to a stunning headline: Major General William Tecumseh Sherman had “destroyed Atlanta and the railroad leading to…Chattanooga.” Now he was marching eastward, blared the Bureau County Republican, “in the direction of the Atlantic coast, intending to strike probably Savannah or Charleston.” The newspaper’s editor hinted that the information had come to him through “private sources,” because General Sherman desired that the march, and particularly its geographic objective, remain secret. Nonetheless, the Republican forecast a brilliant victory—especially given who was traveling with him. Sherman’s soldiers were tough Midwesterners—“the very flower of his army, 40,000 strong.”¹ Most Bureau County Republican readers were Illinois farmers and staunch Midwestern patriots; many had sent their sons to fight in the war’s western theater. Many historians have described the fear, anger, or desperate courage of those who found themselves in the path of Sherman’s armies during their campaign through Georgia. But the northern home front’s response to the march—as it was unfolding—has remained unexplored. In fact, newspapers like the Republican kept their readers closely informed of the progress of Sherman’s men, and their editors’ reports and opinions, both positive and negative, reveal a great deal about the North’s enduring political divisions and the changing American ideas on the subject of warfare against civilians.

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☛ Sherman’s men destroy railroad track en route to Savannah.

bloodshed on the 22nd. The march had been an unmitigated success. Swiftly and efficiently, Sherman’s army had cut a nearly 60-mile-wide field of destruction through the heart of Georgia, demolishing railroads, burning public and private buildings, and stripping the countryside of most of its livestock and crops along the way. Beyond its material impact, the march had, as Sherman intended, also wreaked emotional havoc on the local populace. Southern newspapers like the Richmond Enquirer, which at first delighted in the news that U.S. forces had left Atlanta for the coast, falsely interpreting the move as a sign of enemy defeat, soon began receiving disturbing reports from Georgia. Descriptions of the widespread pillage and destruction being inflicted by Sherman’s men, including rumors of brutality against women, soon filled the southern press, helping fuel the sense of panic and helplessness that gripped the Georgians in Sherman’s path and negatively impacting southern morale.⁵ * * *

II. REPORTING SHERMAN’S MARCH IN THE NORTH Beginning in late November, stories about the march began making their way into northern newspapers, whose editors pieced together information about Sherman’s whereabouts and activities from a variety of sources. Official reports by recently relieved or furloughed U.S. officers provided a number of assorted details, as did interviews with newly secured Rebel prisoners and deserters. On November 30, for example, The Cincinnati Enquirer printed the words of freshly captured Confederate general Roger A. Pryor, who had reportedly remarked that “the South now regarded Gen. Sherman with more alarm than any other officer in the service of the United States.”⁶ Similarly, the Daily Illinois State Journal noted on December 13 that a group of imprisoned Confederate deserters told U. S. soldiers that they

had heard “that Sherman was only a short distance from Savannah, and that he was halting there waiting for the concentration of his various columns.”⁷ And Sherman had indeed reached the outskirts of Savannah by then. But northern newspapers relied most heavily on their southern counterparts for information about the march. Or, as the editor of the Scioto (Ohio) Gazette put it on November 29, “[A]ll our information about [Sherman] must come through rebel sources.”⁸ Southern newspaper reports, which usually contained accurate details on Sherman’s movements, normally took a week to reach northern editors, who reproduced them carefully in their own publications. As a result, northern papers were able to report with accuracy that Sherman’s men had clashed with enemy forces at Griswoldville on November 22, had captured Milledgeville the following day, and were heading in the direction of Savannah in mid-December. These reports and headlines were frequent enough—at least as to Sherman’s position and direction—that the northern public knew, in essence, where Sherman’s columns were and how they were faring. What the newspaper reporters and editors did not know—at least until early December—was where Sherman’s army was going, and why. “This is the first instance of an army lost during this war,” declared the Cleveland Plain Dealer on November 17. “No one knows where SHERMAN has gone or what he has gone after. All is speculation.” In trying to make sense of it all, northern editors frequently betrayed their political allegiances. Republican editors—men who generally supported the ongoing U.S. war effort—reported news of Sherman’s early successes triumphantly, praising the U.S. troops involved as hard-bitten warriors and expressing little sympathy for the southern civilians in their path. “Audacity is undoubtedly necessary to success in war,” wrote a Republican editor in Ohio in mid-November. “[B]ut this movement of SHERMAN is one of the boldest on record—[he should be] able to break the backbone of the rebellion, this time certain.”⁹ Some Democratic editors, while generally distrustful of the administration and dissatisfied with the war effort, also found positive things to say in response to these early reports. Even though he wrote on November 10 that the “story that Sherman has burned Atlanta and [is] marching upon Charleston, South Carolina is not believed,” the editor of the Cincinnati Examiner nevertheless thought the prospect of Sherman’s success in Georgia was “highly encouraging.” Similarly, the ultra-conservative and at times nearly pro-southern Chicago Times proclaimed toward month’s end that the “panic created both in Georgia and South Carolina by the march of the irresistible conqueror is something which has no parallel during the war.”¹⁰ As more details came in about the march, however, some Democratic papers began adopting a much less charitable tone. Editors of the Chicago Times, for example, soon revived their old questions about Sherman’s mental stability. (Earlier in the war, both Sherman and Grant had battled ugly rumors published widely in northern papers: Grant that he was an alcoholic, and Sherman that he was “crazy.” These reports resulted in a permanent feud between Sherman and the press, which is why Sherman regularly expelled reporters from his armies and once even court-martialed a civilian reporter who had dared to criticize him.) On December 2, the Times worried that “while Sherman is no doubt steadily advancing across the state of Georgia, in full accordance with the programme which he prepared for himself before leaving Atlanta…we might consider his course very erratic.” In spite of—or, perhaps because of—this rather strong hint about Sherman’s sanity, the paper also described him as elusive and unfathomable: “His army is omnipresent, and then again it is nowhere. It is here, there, and everywhere, stretching its terrific lines across the state, and soon it has vanished entirely.”¹¹ The political leanings of northern editors were nowhere more apparent than in their reporting of the conduct of Sherman’s men. News

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that Sherman’s foragers were terrifying southern civilians—“creating an intense and widespread panic,” as an editor in Baltimore put it—caused many Democratic editors to express grave doubts about the ethics of the march.¹² Newspapers like The Cincinnati Enquirer, whose editor harbored sympathies with the southern cause and had come out against Lincoln in the recent presidential election, devoted much space to highlighting what was portrayed as unnecessary aggression on the part of U.S. soldiers. In a typical report on December 10, the Enquirer focused on the destruction of civilian property wrought by Sherman’s men: No farm [on the road to Milledgeville] and, as far as we can hear, towards Atlanta, escaped these brutal savages. The country below here to the Oconee river road was strewn with the debris of their progress—dead horses, cows, sheep, hogs, chickens, corn, wheat, cotton, books, paper, broken vehicles, coffee mills, and fragments of nearly every species of property that adorned the beautiful farms of this country, strew the wayside as monuments of the meanness, rapacity, and hypocrisy of the people who boast that they are not robbers and do not interfere with private property.”¹³

Other Democratic editors viewed the march similarly, many of them worried that Sherman’s scorched-earth policy would only serve to embitter southern civilians and therefore make it more difficult to reunite the nation later on. The purpose of Sherman’s march was not to end the war, but rather to “make a wilderness and to call it peace,” concluded the editor of the Columbus (Ohio) Crisis.¹⁴ Sherman—and, by extension, the administration’s war effort—also took criticism from Democratic editors for other reasons. On November 23, the Albany Atlas condemned Sherman bitterly, but not because his men were harming southern civilians. “He has left a bloody track and marked his line of march in the blaze of conflagration,” noted the editor, who lamented only that the destruction had negatively impacted Sherman’s own men and supplies. “The blood of his own soldiers has flowed as freely as that of the enemy,” bemoaned the Atlas, “and the torch which has devastated the country has consumed his own source of supplies.” If anything, Sherman’s activities were to be disparaged because they were too fleeting: “He has swept through the country like a prairie fire, as terrible but as transient.” Still, the Atlas conceded that Sherman’s march would be judged from the result, and it joined Republican newspapers in admiring Sherman’s “boldness and originality.”¹⁵ Much more than their Democratic counterparts, the North’s Republican editors appeared generally willing to excuse Sherman’s men any excesses they might have been committing on the march. Some newspapers, like The New York Times, justified Sherman’s heavy hand in Georgia as an acceptable means to a satisfactory—and speedy—end to the conflict. While the march might “leave a track of desolation and ruin,” the Times wrote, “humanity in war demands that it should be short and severe.”¹⁶ Others reveled in what appeared to be the incompetent defense of the Rebels’ territory. In Iowa, the Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye mocked the Georgia civil and military officials who, out of desperation, resorted to issuing “fierce and feverish proclamations calling in every male, old and young, able to shoulder a musket to immediately report for duty.”¹⁷ Republican editors saved their strongest opinions for those southerners who found themselves in Sherman’s path. Rebel citizens were to be held responsible for their loyalties to the Confederacy, such editors explained, especially if they in any way supported the guerrilla fighters who harassed Sherman’s army along its path to the sea. In short, even the severest punishment meted out to those who supported the war against the Union should be considered right and just. Speaking of Sherman’s foraging policy, and the impact it was having throughout the Georgia countryside, an Iowa editorial published shortly after U.S.

☛ These soldiers—members of the 21st Michigan Infantry—were part of the veteran army with which Sherman made the March to the Sea.

forces had arrived at the outskirts of Savannah described the order as a “singular example of moderation in enforcing the severities of war, in circumstances which might excuse the most pitiless exactions.” Foraging was nothing more than the “ordinary method of supplying troops during their progress through a hostile district.” Indeed, according to the editor, Sherman displayed “an unwonted solicitude for those who deserve as Rebels no tenderness at his hands

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CHICAGO TIMES:

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

“HIS ARMY IS OMNIPRESENT, AND THEN AGAIN IT IS NOWHERE. IT IS HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE, STRETCHING ITS TERRIFIC LINES ACROSS THE STATE, AND SOON IT HAS VANISHED ENTIRELY.”

by requiring…foraging parties to leave…subsistence enough for the families from whom they take their supplies of grain.” Moreover, because guerrillas constituted a “predatory force, without organization and without means of subsistence except such as are furnished by those who sympathize with them,” then those who supported guerrillas ought to be decimated.¹⁸ Still, Republican newspapers certainly recognized that civilian populations would suffer

during such a campaign, and that it would be harder to reconstruct the nation after war’s end if southern noncombatants were deprived of food and the means of livelihood. In December, an editorial in The New York Times acknowledged the destruction being wreaked by Sherman’s soldiers and the likely consequences for civilians. The march, its author made clear, was not to be “viewed merely as a raid.” Because Georgia was the “granary for the Confederacy, destroying its harvests would cripple Lee’s army in the coming winter. Carrying off cattle and horses would lame the transporting power of the rebel Confederacy.” At the same time, the writer recognized that a “destructive invasion of this kind” would create a “vast

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THE NEW YORK TIMES:

“EVERY MAN ROBBED AND STRIPPED BY THE TEMPEST OF DESTRUCTION NOW SWEEPING THRO’ GEORGIA, IS HENCEFORTH A HUNDRED‒FOLD MORE BITTER HATER OF THE NORTH AND THE UNION THAN EVER BEFORE.” number of new enemies. Every man robbed and stripped by the tempest of destruction now sweeping thro’ Georgia, is henceforth a hundred-fold more bitter hater of the North and the Union than ever before.” It would be just as if Robert E. Lee and his Confederate army were to sweep the banks of the Hudson River, leaving nothing but “blackened homesteads and wasted farms” in their wake. To be sure, in civil warfare, there was a “certain limit, beyond which, if you injure a man, nothing is left but hate and despair.” Even so, he concluded, those were the “necessary evils of war… . The sole and the grand importance of the invasion of Sherman we hold to be its military aim.”¹⁹ After more than three years of bitter conflict, it is hardly surprising that a pro-administration paper would take such a sharp line toward noncombatants. According to Republicans, destroying the southern home front’s ability to feed and supply the Rebel armies was of paramount importance, regardless of the physical or psychological consequences for southern civilians. This tough line only hardened toward the end of November, when reports about the horrific conditions at Andersonville prison began reaching the North. Contempt for Georgia civilians, who were held partly to blame for the starvation and abuse suffered by U.S. POWs in the infamous pen, soon reached a fever pitch. When the Daily Illinois State Journal reported that escaped Union prisoners had carried back news that Sherman was “devastating the country generally,” its editor boasted that soon the general would “have his heel on that naughty state and on the stiff necks of the rebels.”²⁰ * * * AFTER SHERMAN REACHED Savannah on December 21, he wired President Lincoln, proffering the city and 25,000 bales of cotton as a Christmas present. Sherman’s career through Georgia figured in newspaper accounts as a madcap festival—even a schoolboy’s prank. An Iowa paper crowed that every railroad depot, line, and tie in Sherman’s path had been destroyed “leisurely,” and that his army had fared “sumptuously.” Horses, pigs, and other livestock had been shot and wasted; the editorial expressed no regret that civilians might suffer starvation as a result, nor even that these animals were not necessary to feed Sherman’s victorious warriors. “This is war,” declared the Hawk-Eye, “according to Sherman.”²¹ Sherman and his soldiers soon became objects of extreme adulation in the northern press. Some editorials swooned over them as handsome, strong, devil-may-care heroes; others praised their experience as hardbitten western soldiers, indeed, as the “flower of the best and bravest material which the West has given to the war, the heroes of hundreds of battles, the veterans who have oft before laurelled their brows by their heroic deeds of valor and renown.”²² Newspapers that had previously criticized Sherman’s appearance as gaunt, disheveled, and even peculiar now took an astonishing turn. Perhaps no one would have been more surprised by one Ohio newspaper’s breathless appraisal of Sherman’s looks than the general himself: “Tall, straight, lithe, with a firm step; deep, gray, expressive eyes; face not unmarked with care, but usually placid, his nose slightly aquiline; hair dark, and now interwoven with threads of silver; hands that were made to be useful rather than ornamental, intellectual brow. Well balanced head,

strong shoulders, small waist, active limbs, and feet enclosed in good sized boots.”²³ After the capture of Savannah, Sherman resumed regular telegraph, dispatch, and mail contact with his superiors in Washington, D.C., where General Henry Halleck, the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, soon dropped some strong hints about the possibility of an “accident” befalling the capital city of the most rebellious of all rebel states: Charleston, South Carolina. Indeed, Halleck mused that “if a little salt should be sown upon its site, it may prevent the growth of future crops of…secession.”²⁴ And every northern editor sensed that Sherman would now turn his steps toward South Carolina, the Cradle of the Rebellion. The recent flattering descriptions of the general and his soldiers in the northern press now grew strident; these men would bring the Rebels to their knees. Predictably, anti-administration papers began reprinting, without comment, fearful southern descriptions of the devastation left behind by Sherman’s army. The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, for one, published an editorial clipped from the Richmond Whig entitled “Reconstruction and Subjugation,” which condemned the march through Georgia and expressed dread of the coming news from South Carolina. “Our outraged women, our homeless babes, our sons untimely slain, our blackened homes, our slaves in arms against us, our prisoners…all tell us what the Yankee is at heart.”²⁵ Most northern newspapers, however, refrained from publishing such comprehensive denunciations of Sherman’s march, and even the Democratic editors who did reprint them did so without remark. The political tide had turned. Anti-Lincoln papers had to be careful how they presented negative war news. Republican journals, however, became nearly gleeful in their predictions of punishment for the Palmetto State. The Scioto Gazette boasted that Sherman’s men had grown tired of “chickens, sweet potatoes, sorghum, &c.,” and had been promised a rare South Carolina delicacy: “Oysters on the half shell, oysters roasted, stewed, &c., —in short, oysters.”²⁶ Indeed, because Sherman’s armies boasted a significant proportion of men from the western states, Ohio Valley and Midwestern newspapers seemed particularly interested in South Carolina’s fate. “The soldiers of Sherman’s army are said to be intensely anxious to be led into South Carolina,” no doubt so that they could

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teach the “fire-eating denizens of that cradle of treason” a few sharp lessons. The Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer expressed a devout hope that the soldiers would soon be gratified. “The people of South Carolina,” the Plain Dealer explained, had been “the most insulting and defiant of any in the South, [and]…[n]o men are better qualified to silence their boastings and bring them to the dust than the gallant soldiers of Sherman.”²⁷ Similarly, an Iowa paper gloated, “With the talent for desolating a country, [it] will be impossible to restrain the men…and it is almost impossible to wish to have them restrained from wiping from existence so foul an enemy to the Republic.” Such editorials frequently assumed a mocking tone. Sherman was often assailed by “good-humored requests to be taken to South Carolina.” And when the men did finally reach the state, the Hawk-Eye fancied that its residents’ “flower pots will suffer somewhat.”²⁸ Sherman’s campaign in South Carolina was as effective as his march through Georgia. On February 15, 1865, General P.G.T. Beauregard evacuated Charleston, and three days later the city surrendered to the U.S. Army. Taking their headlines from the title of a popular hymn, many northern newspapers announced, in inch-high capitals: “BABYLON IS FALLEN.” It was time to strike down South Carolina’s traitors and bring the state back into the Union. The task, thought many northern editors, would no doubt be easy for Sherman’s men; his army was still healthy, strong, and intact, “with all its original power unwasted by battle, glowing with the enthusiasm ready for [the] active work” of reconstructing South Carolina.²⁹

the tide of the changing world that overtook the Civil War generation. The story of the March to the Sea receded from memory for a decade or two. There is little doubt, however, that the northern public had been kept well-informed of Sherman’s activities, and that the stories of devastated farms and burned cities had created little outrage, even among conservative northerners. The northern reading public had weighed the ends against the means. War-weariness, revenge, and military necessity struggled against the possibility of reconstructing the nation by refraining from war against civilians. But the long-term assessment, according to the way the war is remembered, is simply that this was “war according to Sherman”: perhaps baffling, but entirely in keeping with the new calculating, uncompromising, ruthless forms of conflict that characterized the postwar decades. SILVANA R. SIDDALI, associate professor of history at Saint Louis University, is the author of From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861-1862 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005) and Missouri’s War: The Civil War in Documents (Ohio University Press, 2009). She is currently writing a book on democracy and self-government in the Old Northwest Territory. With great thanks to Nora Koziol, an outstanding undergraduate research assistant who earned her B.A. at Saint Louis University in 2011.

ENDNOTES 1

Bureau County Republican (Illinois), November 17, 1864.

2

Quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), 722.

3

* * * TWO MONTHS AFTER the fall of Charleston, however, both praise and criticism of Sherman’s exploits abruptly ceased, as a horrified nation confronted Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Even the president’s severest critics fell silent in the North, and no one cared to be reminded of southern civilians’ sufferings. Indeed, when news leaked that Sherman had given sweeping and generous terms of surrender to General Joseph E. Johnston only four days after the killing, he was nearly accused of treason, and had to face the Committee on the Conduct of the War, a joint congressional committee that oversaw and controlled military matters. Sherman was exonerated, but the accusation left him angry and bitter. Memoirs by both northern and southern participants of the war, such as Jefferson Davis, Sherman himself, and Ulysses S. Grant, briefly revived accusations of excess or brutality on the part of Sherman’s men, but they could not stem

4

5

6

7

McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 808; telegram to General George H. Thomas, October 20, 1864, quoted in Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York, 1986), 6-7. William T. Sherman, Military Division of the Mississippi Special Field Order 120, November 9, 1864. The Richmond Enquirer, November 21, 1864, quoted in David Herbert Donald, Jean Harvey Baker, and Michael F. Holt, The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 2001), 390. The Cincinnati Enquirer, November 16, 1864.

8

Scioto Gazette, November 29, 1864.

9

Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, November 17, 1864.

10 Chicago Times, November 30, 1864. 11 See also the Daily Illinois State Journal, December 6, 1864, for a similar view. 12 Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser, November 24, 1864. 13 The Cincinnati Enquirer, December 10, 1864.

widely reprinted in northern newspapers. 20 Daily Illinois State Journal, November 18, 1864, December 13, 1864. 21 Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, December 31, 1864. 22 The Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, December 5, 1864. 23 The Cincinnati Commercial, reprinted in the Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, February 21, 1865.

14 Columbus Crisis 24 Quoted in The Civil (Ohio), December 14, War and Reconstruc1864. tion, 393. 15 Albany Atlas and Argus editorial, reprinted in the Cleveland Daily Enquirer, November 23, 1864. 16 The New York Times, November 19, 1864.

25 The Richmond Whig, reprinted in the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, January 29, 1865. 26 Scioto Gazette (Ohio), January 3, 1865.

27 Cleveland Daily Plain 17 Burlington Weekly Dealer, December 30, Hawk-Eye, December 1864. 3, 1864. 18 Ibid.

19 “The Objects of Sherman’s Invasion,” The Daily Illinois State The New York Times, Journal, December December 6, 1864. 13, 1864. This editorial was

28 Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, December 31, 1864. 29 Bureau County Republican, March 2, 1865.

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Books & Authors

ESSENTIAL READING ON THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR RUSSELL MCCLINTOCK THE LITERATURE ON the coming of the Civil War is more than vast—it is overwhelming. Choosing just a handful of the thousands of books written on the subject—and the dozens of books absolutely critical to any real understanding of it—is by its nature arbitrary and subjective. That said, the half-dozen titles discussed here offer an outstanding (and readable!) introduction to this fascinating and enormously complicated subject. If all the leading experts in the field were to compile short lists of the books they would most recommend to readers, these titles would be found somewhere

on most of those lists, and a few of them would sit near the top of nearly all. David M. Potter’s The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher, 1976) is the indisputable starting point for all readers interested in the war’s origins. In lucid, engaging prose and displaying an astonishing depth of insight and wisdom, one of the great historians of the twentieth century offers an absorbing and artfully balanced narrative of the tumultuous period from the end of the Mexican War to the evacuation of Fort Sumter. Potter is at his best when thoughtfully assessing slavery’s role in the growing sectional tensions, never losing sight of the larger political and cultural contexts in which attitudes toward slavery operated. For the last half a century, almost all historians have agreed that slavery somehow lay at the center of the war’s origins. Naturally, a great many have emphasized Americans’ contentious debate over the institution’s morality, but Michael F. Holt’s landmark The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978) disagrees, downplaying the northern antislavery crusade as a principal factor in the coming of war. Holt argues that as long as a

national two-party system thrived in the United States, Americans felt confident in their government. But in the early 1850s the sudden decline of the Democratic-Whig rivalry—due largely to economic factors—provoked a deep sense of crisis that led Americans to perceive internal threats and enemies. For a variety of reasons, southern fears focused on northern abolitionists, while northern concerns centered on aristocratic southern planters. As a result, the new Republican Party gained popularity in the North and an increasingly unified South came to dominate the Democratic Party. Party politics no longer contained but aggravated sectional conflict, deepening the sense of crisis and leading rapidly to war. More recently, Marc Egnal has recast Holt’s political explanation as a primarily economic one in Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (2009). As long as economic ties united North, South, and West, Egnal contends, shared interests (and the national parties produced by those interests) bound the country together. Once canals and railroads had linked East and West more tightly than North and South, however, economic differences began to outweigh perceived commonalities, unleashing sectional conflict. Taken together, these works pose a serious challenge to the popular notion that the Civil War stemmed from moral differences over slavery. But neither Holt nor Egnal contends that slavery-related issues were not central to the growing hostility between North and South, only that attitudes toward slavery were much more intricate and intertwined with other, more immediate aspects of life—political power and economic interest, for example—than most historians generally credit. For the most part, then, their works complicate and complement rather than contradict the many studies that have slavery playing a more direct, central role, including a wealth of wonderful scholarship exploring the profound (and profoundly complex) ties between black slavery and white society and culture in the South. Among this literature, Charles B. Dew’s Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (2001) stands out for its power and persuasiveness. By exam-

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ling and Ayers provide their readers with an unparalleled understanding of how Americans both powerful and ordinary perceived the momentous events of their troubled times, and how and why they reacted as they did—as well as an important reminder that the course of history is dictated by human decisions and often could have turned out differently. Varying levels of discontent and violence have always been a part of American democracy, but only once has the political system utterly failed to contain the country’s broad social, cultural, economic, and constitutional differences. The result was a unique four-year period of massive, organized carnage that devastated a generation and transformed the republic in ways we still grapple with today. Historians have debated the causes of that rupture for a century and a half. No half-dozen books can give readers a full sense of those debates, but the titles listed here offer a fascinating and illuminating overview of key events and crucial questions. RUSSELL MCCLINTOCK, author of this issue’s cover story (see page 22), is currently working on a biography of Stephen A. Douglas.

ining the arguments presented by the Deep South agents who blanketed the Upper South during the Secession Crisis of 1860-1861, Dew unearths white southerners’ most cogent case for secession. What he finds is an astounding focus on a single, dominant line of reasoning: the maintenance of racial dominance. Secession agents warned again and again that submitting to Republican rule would mean emancipation, and with it racial equality, race war, and racial mixing and degradation. Two other recent books bring a more focused, human perspective to the specific attitudes, decisions, and events of the period, exploring with vivid nar-

rative flair and brilliant insight the fascinating point where historical forces met individual ideas and decisions. William W. Freehling’s Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007), the longawaited conclusion to his two-part epic, The Road to Disunion, presents the best broad account of the southern role in the war’s origins in generations. Edward Ayers’ In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 (2003) takes a microcosmic look at two remarkably similar communities, one in southern Pennsylvania, the other in northwestern Virginia, separated by just 200 miles and the institution of slavery. Together Freeh-

MUSINGS OF A CIVIL WAR BIBLIOPHILE: RECENT BATTLE BOOKS ROBERT K. KRICK STUDENTS OF THE Civil War—the audience for the brave new publishing venture in which this is the first serial— come to their special interests from every conceivable tangent on the topical compass. They include enthusiasts for uniforms and weapons and accoutrements; for horses and balloons and spies and art. I have friends who specialize in each of those sub-genres, and others who focus ardently on foreigners, earthworks, sexual shenanigans, photography, railroads, religion, tactics, rare books and pamphlets, fraternization with enemies, women in uniform, music (especially

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drummer boys), and many another niche. A friend and curator in California cares, of all things under the sun, about nothing quite so much as southern aeronauts— odd fellows who circulated in the Confederacy raising money for a flying machine that would end the war (a Texan dentist planned an “artisavis” designed to “drive from our soil every hostile Yankee”). Ample evidence demonstrates that, in addition to that variegated range of specialties, more Civil War students are interested in battles than any other aspect of the riveting story of America rent apart. The academic community stands starkly opposed to military history of the battle-narrative stripe, and dismissive of its validity. Their obligation to subordinate Civil War history—the entire past human experience, in fact—to serve the modern Iron Triangle of “race, class, and gender,” leaves them scornful of the unwashed hoi polloi who find such stuff interesting. The book-reading public, unfettered by any strictures against perusing

what interests them, and indifferent to cloistered derision, has plenty to contemplate in recent literature. Some of it does deserve scorn, on its own merits, or lack thereof, rather than generically. Other titles will be easy to fit onto Civil War shelves with pleasure and profit. A new book by Adrian Tighe, The Bristoe Campaign, offers a far more detailed narrative on that intricate affair during the fall of 1863 than ever has been published. Tighe’s name is not familiar in the field; I never had heard of him. Diligent work in primary sources is enough to earn any book high marks from the start, and Tighe surely did his full duty in that regard. The book runs well beyond 500 pages, and includes a full chapter on the under-reported cavalry derring-do known as “Buckland Races.” Some prose infelicities and citation anomalies betray the back-alley publishing origins, but do not detract fatally from a battle book worth having. Despite the dramatic aspects of the Battle of New Market, especially the famous role played by the Virginia Military Institute cadets, only two significant battle studies appeared within more than a century after the event: Edward Turner’s old classic (1912) and a well-researched, highly literate narrative by William C. Davis (1975). The halfcentury mark approaching again, surely it was time for a new history, based on sources recently uncovered. Charles R. Knight’s Valley Thunder: The Battle of New Market and the Opening of the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, May 1864, achieves that goal successfully. Fifteen years ago Scott C. Patchan wrote the first detailed examination of

the small but pivotal June 1864 Battle of Piedmont, where colorful William E. “Grumble” Jones died. As the unmistakable reigning authority on the topic, Patchan’s recent The Battle of Piedmont and Hunter’s Campaign for Staunton deserves attention. It is modestly dimensioned, at 192 pages, but clearly encompasses the latest available evidence. Technological progress has revolutionized publishing and printing in recent years, allowing many more things to reach print than of yore. Some of them serve well; Tighe on Bristoe makes the case nicely. Quite a few titles in the new era, however, accomplish nothing whatsoever. Books with breathless, profound pronouncements in the subtitle tend to retail breeze devoid of substance. Two brand-new battle books fit that mold: slender titles about Glendale (more often called Frayser’s Farm), ….The Day the South Nearly Won the Civil War, by J. Stempel; and about Fair Oaks (more often called Seven Pines), the …Turning Point of McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, by R.P. Broadwater. Each seemed likely to fill a notable void, but neither affords even a minuscule scrap of new information. As Gertrude Stein said famously of Oakland, California, “there’s no there there.” Gettysburg always warrants an inning on the witness stand when considering new books, because something on that subject tumbles from the presses every few hours, it seems. Inevitably, much of it is of limited value, or none at all. The new era of easy publication has turned the Gettysburg stream into a perpetual freshet. Staples in the Gettysburg torrent

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are theoretical treatises focused on “new light,” usually self-generated, perhaps as a result of insights earned by the author as a logistical officer in the twenty-firstcentury U. S. Army. The most important recent Gettysburg books probably are focused on maps, produced with modern tools, that supply significant and useful topographic and tactical reference points. The Gettysburg Campaign Atlas by Philip Laino sets a gratifyingly high standard for such things. Surely someone soon will provide something new on Sharpsburg, and carefully documented histories of Brandy Station, Trevilian’s, and the Seven Days Battles (skilled historians are at work on Gaines’ Mill and Malvern Hill). ROBERT K. KRICK, chief historian (retired) at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, has written 18 books on the Civil War, including Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain (2001) and The Smoothbore Volley That Doomed the Confederacy (2004).

THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME STEVEN H. NEWTON CIVIL WAR ENTHUSIASTS understand that historians construct campaign and battle narratives from official reports, maps, letters, journals, newspaper articles and the like. When reading an account penned by any popular author, there is an additional depth to be considered: not just the sources, but the

preferences and interests of the historian. At conferences (and sometimes in bars) when historians gather, they often talk about influences on their work, but their readers rarely share in such conversations. Sometimes these influences can be found by combing through the footnotes of their books, but not always. Besides, most people want to read books, not footnotes. What would happen if we asked Civil War historians to explain the five books that had the greatest influence on their early careers? I can put a date to reading of one of my major influences: August 17, 1977. That was the day I came home from a road trip to Antietam, and also, incidentally, the day that Elvis Pressley died. Motivated by having stared up the forbidding terrain opposite Burnside’s Bridge, I picked up Clifford Dowdey’s Lee’s Last Campaign (1960), which chronicled the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness through the mid-June assaults on Petersburg. Dowdey was a disciple of Douglas Southall Freeman (both as historian and newspaperman) who never achieved his idol’s reputation. He was less judicious than Freeman (his character sketches sometimes bordered on caricature) and not a devotee of research minutiae (he intentionally avoided ever footnoting anything). Today, his works are mostly relegated to the discount bin, or occasionally appear on lists of “old classics” that nobody ever finds time to read. Yet the man could write. His battle scenes brought you into smoke, fire, and chaos, and managed the difficult narrative trick of simultaneously keep-

ing the reader informed while explaining why officers on the field never had any real idea what was happening. Before reading Dowdey, my interest in the Civil War had not extended into battle narratives because too many of them seemed convoluted, dry, and passionless. Dowdey led me to Edward Coddington, Bruce Catton, Stephen Sears, Robert Tanner, and a much larger company of craftsmen in the art of bringing war to life. Ironically, in writing my own Joseph E. Johnston and the Defense of Richmond (1998) I had the paradoxical aims of rebutting Dowdey’s interpretation of General Johnston while trying to live up to his narrative standard. Two years earlier I had stumbled upon Archer Jones’ Confederate Strategy from Shiloh to Vicksburg (published in 1961). Before reading Jones, my interest in Civil War battles had been Virginia-based, and my knowledge of the Western campaigns came primarily from war games and “Old Unreliable” (1959’s The West Point Atlas of American Wars—chiefly known for its erroneous, albeit clear and well-organized, maps). Jones introduced me to the dynamic push-and-pull in the Confederate high command between the Virginiaoriented Lee and that cluster of officers that he and Thomas Connelly eventually labeled “the western concentration bloc.” More importantly, the final chapter (“The Gettysburg Decision”) suggested an entirely new idea: choosing to invade Pennsylvania instead of reinforcing Vicksburg might have been a greater strategic disaster for the Confederacy than Pickett’s Charge. These were heady ideas, and opened

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me up to a rich vein of Civil War scholarship about which I had previously been ignorant. Confederate Strategy led me to the Jones-Connelly collaboration, The Politics of Command (1973), followed by Connelly’s own The Marble Man (1977) and his two-volume history of the Army of Tennessee. (Connelly’s Autumn of Glory remains one of my personal favorite pieces of Civil War literature.) In the early 1980s, Jones teamed with Hermann Hattaway to write the revisionist How the North Won, which audaciously argued that historians like T. Harry Williams had been “wrong for the right reasons.” Modern followers in that revisionist tradition include Grady McWhiney, William Garrett Piston, and Richard McMurry. Again, some caveats: Much of Archer Jones’ earlier work has been eclipsed by later research, and—as my dissertation advisor (Ludwell H. Johnson, author of The Red River Campaign) never tired of reminding me— many of Thomas Connelly’s citations leave a great deal to be desired. That’s the promise and the peril of revisionism: When you set out to challenge accepted wisdom, you will see things dif-

ferently and everybody will be gunning for you. I discovered that myself when I wrote Lost for the Cause: The Confederate Army in 1864 (2000), arguing that there had been tens of thousands more Rebels in the fight during the war’s last year than has been generally accepted. I found a slim volume by Rollin G. Osterweis entitled The Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865-1900 (1973) in my junior year at college. This was the first historiographical book I had ever read (at least voluntarily), and it fascinated me. Osterweis tracked the development of “Lost Cause” mythology through postwar literature, and built a strong foundation for what would later be called “history and memory studies.” In particular I was captivated by the chapter in which Osterweis went through the famous Battles & Leaders collection, article by article, to show the development of completely different, competing, northern and southern interpretations of what the war meant. Most modern Civil War enthusiasts have never even heard of Osterweis, but his work clearly influenced historians like David Blight, Gary Gallagher, Lesley Gordon, and Sarah Ann Rubin in their respective arguments that how we remember the war (often mistaking mythology for history) is as important in many ways as what actually happened. Michael Fellman’s Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the America Civil War came along much later (1989), but it is difficult to understate the book’s impact on my thinking about the war. Fellman challenged my suppositions about the importance of the guerilla war, and also introduced me to the value of non-narrative history. Inside War borrows from sociology and anthropology, examining at simi-

lar categories of situations rather than adhering to strict chronological order. Initially, I found this approach frustrating, yet later I appreciated the power of this analysis, especially after reading Stephen Ash’s When the Yankees Came (1995), Ervin Jordan’s Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees and Civil War Virginia (1995), or John Inscoe and Gordon McKinney’s The Heart of Confederate Appalachia (2000). Finally, there is Albert A. Nofi’s article in Strategy & Tactics (vol. 43, 1974), “The American Civil War.” In about 15 pages, Nofi accomplishes the near-impossible: boiling down the entire war into a piece to be read in a single sitting. Nofi’s writing is engaging rather than encyclopedic (Burnside, he notes, had the courage to organize an attack, but “lacked the brains to plan one”). The article covers not just military campaigns, but also diplomacy, tactics, and the naval war; despite being a bit dated, it is still the basic introductory work I use with my undergraduates. Nofi proves that you do not have to be verbose to be informative—a lesson more writers need to take to heart. Those are my influences: a battle/ campaign piece by Dowdey, western strategy by Jones, historiography by Osterweis, social history by Fellman, and Nofi’s ultimate condensation of the whole war. Intriguingly, I discover no biography, no regimental history, and no soldier memoirs on the list, which I find revealing about my own preferences writing Civil War history. Makes you wonder what your favorite historian was reading way back when, doesn’t it? STEVEN H. NEWTON is Professor of History and Political Science at Delaware State University.

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Casualties of War

Battlefield Echoes

☛ {Cont. from p. 19} and turn stagnant circles for a time. Sometimes the eddy releases the mind; sometimes the eddy becomes a whirlpool, and draws the whole of a man down into dark water. “There is a fatality,” Nathaniel Hawthorne knew, “a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.”⁵ We recognize the 620,000 men who died in the war. To some lesser degree, we recognize the other battlefield casualties: the wounded and the missing and those whom artillery reduced to “pink mist.” But war’s damage has a way of piling up, rippling out, to claim even those far removed from it in place and time. Clara Harris Rathbone belongs on that list of unfortunates, for she too was a casualty of war.

☛ {Cont. from p. 21} look very much like those of today. This assumption is understandable, but also questionable. To best prepare our military for future wars, we have little alternative but to engage in some strategic forecasting—to identify potential threats and hypothesize how social and military landscapes will develop in the coming years. In doing so, however, we should always keep a wary eye on our history and realize that no level of certainty should be placed on our predictions. Twenty-five years ago, the landmark study America’s First Battles carried the central message that “[t]he record of Americans’ ability to predict the next war…has been uniformly dismal.”³ Despite all the advancements in technology and military organization over the last quarter of a century, there is no evidence to suggest that that ability has improved. Military analysts, strategists, authors of doctrine—and historians—can read the tea leaves of the past and present all they want. In the end, however, our best guess about the next war is still just a guess. As the Battle of Bull Run and its surprising outcome aptly demonstrated, there is no way to know the scope, length, or character of future wars for certain until they arrive.

STEPHEN BERRY is associate professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is the author or editor of four books on America in the Civil War era, including House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007).

ENDNOTES 1

Whitman, Memoranda During the War (1875), 82; Ted Widmer, “New York’s Lincoln Memorial,” The New York Times, April 16, 2009.

2

James Tanner, “Last Hours of President Lincoln,” New York Legislative Documents, vol. xxxvii (1920), 334.

3

Harold Holzer, “Eyewitnesses Remember The ‘Fearful Night’,” Civil War Times Illustrated (March/April, 1993): 14.

4

For details of Rathbone’s crime, see “Colonel Rathbone’s Mania,” New York Tribune, December 31, 1883, p. 1.

5

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York, 2011), 21.

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).

ENDNOTES 1

Quoted in Brayton Harris, Blue and Gray in Black and White: Newspapers in the Civil War (Washington, D.C., 2000), 54; The (Memphis) Appeal, June 19, 1861.

2

The Philadelphia Press, July 23, 1861.

3

Charles Heller and William Stofft, America’s First Battles, 1776-1965 (Lawrence, KS, 1986), xii.

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Run Aground at Sailor’s Creek

☛ {Cont. from p. 51} marine captain named John Simms, used their swords to strike their men’s gun barrels, diverting their aim. His life spared, Keifer galloped to the safety of U.S. lines. Before long, the general was en route back to the Confederate position, this time under a flag of truce. Keifer met with Tucker, informing him it was futile for him and his men to fight on. The commodore, while aware that the Confederate brigades on either side of him were no longer in action, and having been informed that Ewell himself had surrendered (something a Rebel seaman noted Tucker “refused to believe”), would not budge. “I can’t surrender,” he told Keifer. With that, Keifer rode off, and Tucker instructed his tars to prepare to continue the contest.⁷ The battle soon resumed, marked by what was some of the most intense

combat of the day. A mix of VI Corps commands, including Keifer’s troops, charged into the thicket, where Tucker’s men and some of Crutchfield’s remaining artillerists fought them handto-hand. The ferocity of it all startled even the most seasoned of veterans. “I was next to those Marines and saw them fight,” noted a Georgia infantryman. “They clubbed muskets, fired pistols into each other’s faces and used bayonets savagely.” Major Robert Stiles, of Crutchfield’s brigade, recalled that the “battle degenerated into a butchery and a confused melee of brutal personal conflicts. I saw numbers of men kill each other with bayonets and the butts of muskets and even bite each other’s throats and ears and noses, rolling on the ground like wild beasts.”⁸ In the midst of the chaos, a Rebel navy lieutenant brought Tucker a message confirming Ewell’s capitulation. Based on this information and Keifer’s recent entreaty, the commodore “followed the example of the infantry” and ordered his men to cease fir-

ENDNOTES 1

J. Thomas Scharf, History of the Confederate States Navy From Its Organization to the Surrender of Its Last Vessel (Avenel, NJ, 1996), 749.

2

W. W. Blackford, War Years With Jeb Stuart (New York, 1945), 283; Robert Stiles, Four Years Under Marse Robert (New York, 1904), 329; Ralph W. Donnelly, The Confederate States Marine Corps: The Rebel Leathernecks (Shippensburg, Pa., 1989), 58-62.

3

Nancy Scott Anderson and Dwight Anderson, The Generals: Ulysses S. Grant And Robert E. Lee (New York, 1987), 434.

4

United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, Volume 46, Part 1, pp. 651-652 (hereinafter OR).

5

Ibid., 1151.

6

Stiles, Four Years, 329.

7

Scharf, History of the Confederate States Navy, 749.

8

Burke Davis, To Appomattox: Nine April Days, 1865 (New York, 1959), 255; Derek Smith, Lee’s Last Stand: Sailor’s Creek, Virginia, 1865 (Shippensburg, Pa., 2002), 157-163; Stiles, Four Years, 333-334.

9

Scharf, History of the Confederate States Navy, 749; John C. Stiles, “Confederate States Navy at Sailor’s Creek, Va.,” Confederate Veteran, vol. 28, no. 7 (July 1920): 252.

10 Burleigh Cushing Rodick, Appomattox: The Last Campaign (New York, 1965), 62; OR, Series I, Volume 46, Part 1, 914, 947; Noah Andre Trudeau, Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War, April-June 1865 (Baton Rouge, 1994), 112; OR, Series I, Volume 46, Part 1, 998; Donnelly, 61-62. 11 James Longstreet, From Manassas To Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America (Philadelphia, 1896), 614-615; Richard Harwell, Lee: An Abridgement in One Volume of the Four-volume R. E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman (New York, 1961), 476. 12 Scharf, History of the Confederate States Navy, 196.

ing. He would later tell a fellow officer that he had “supposed everything was going well” before his command was overwhelmed. Tucker’s performance, and that of his Naval Battalion, did not go overlooked. “He had continued the fighting fifteen minutes after they [the bulk of Ewell’s men] had lowered their arms, and the naval colors were the last to be laid down,” an admiring Rebel wrote of Tucker and the tars. “The bravery of the sailors was observed along the Federal lines, and when they did surrender the enemy cheered them long and vigorously.”⁹ Members of the U.S. forces did indeed take note of Tucker and his men. Some were stunned to see their new prisoners donning naval uniforms. “Good heavens!” exclaimed one incredulous bluecoat. “Have you gunboats up here too?” But most praised the Rebel seamen as worthy opponents. “The Confederate Marine Battalion fought with peculiar obstinacy,” wrote General Seymour in his official report on the battle, while General Wheaton remarked in his how “[a] brigade of Southern marines stubbornly continued the fight” before being “compelled … to speedily recognize our victory” in the face of overwhelming odds. No less impressed was General Keifer, who wrote his wife shortly after the battle to tell her of his close call, noting how Tucker had “knocked up the muzzles of the guns nearest to me and saved my life.” He also had kind words for the Naval Battalion, who he thought “fought better and longer than any other troops upon the field.”¹⁰ AMAZINGLY, ROBERT E. LEE had spent most of the day unaware of what was transpiring at Sailor’s Creek. The battle was nearly over by the time he and one of Longstreet’s divisions approached the field to investigate. The sight of hundreds of Confederate survivors streaming toward them along the road shocked Lee. “My God!” he is said to have remarked. “Has the army dissolved?”¹¹ Indeed, the defeat at Sailor’s Creek essentially sounded the death knell for the Army of Northern Virginia. Eight Confederate generals had been captured and over 7,000 troops lost, most of them taken prisoner, representing approximately one-third of the Rebel

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force that had marched out of Amelia Court House the previous day. By contrast, U.S. forces emerged from the fight relatively unscathed, suffering losses amounting to less than 1,200 men. Grant continued his dogged pursuit of Lee’s army, which he soon caught up to at Appomattox Court House. On April 9, three days after the fight at Sailor’s Creek, Lee, recognizing the futility of further bloodshed, signed terms of surrender. AFTER THE WAR, Commodore Tucker relocated to South America, securing an appointment as rear admiral in the Peruvian navy and fighting with the combined fleet of that country and Chile in their war with Spain. He also surveyed the upper reaches of the Amazon River before returning to the U.S. He died in his native Virginia in 1883 at age 71. Warren Keifer was elected to the House of Representatives as a Republican from Ohio, and served as Speaker of the House from 1881 to 1883. In 1898, he again took up arms for his country, accepting an appointment as brigadier general of volunteers during the Spanish-American War. When he learned that his old adversary was suffering from ill health, Keifer returned the sword that Tucker had surrendered to him at Sailor’s Creek, where years earlier a small band of Rebel seamen, a hundred miles from the sea, had, in the general’s words, “fought with most extraordinary courage.”¹² DEREK SMITH is the author of three books on the Civil War. His fourth, In the Lion’s Mouth: Hood’s Tragic Retreat from Nashville, 1864, is set for release this fall by Stackpole Books.

Captive Memories

☛ {Cont. from p. 61} IN A FURTHER attempt to establish their place in the pantheon of the war’s heroes, prison survivors demanded a prominent place on government pension rolls. Initially reserved for soldiers who were wounded in battle or otherwise disabled as a result of their service, federal pensions required veterans to supply affidavits—usually from a regimental surgeon or commissioned officer—testifying to the merits of their claim. Ex-prisoners found it difficult to support their declarations of injury. “From the peculiar circumstances surrounding [ex-prisoners], it is utterly impossible in almost all cases to furnish these proofs,” one petitioner argued. Moreover, the pension bureaucracy did not recognize mental trauma as a legitimate disability; only those veterans whose psychological problems coexisted with physical disease had hope of securing a pension. “I need not recount the fact that ninety-nine out of every hundred who were incarcerated in rebel prisons and lived to return home came broken down…wrecks of their former selves; and that our pension laws are wholly inadequate to give relief to this class of soldiers,” the Iowa State Association president declared. In demanding pensions, ex-prisoners argued that mental trauma was as authentic and debilitating as bodily injury. “It was impossible for one to spend any length of time there without injury to both physical and mental faculties,” one petitioner from New York asserted.³³ Frustrated with the existing process, and convinced that such a measure would signal the ultimate reception of their

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message, former POWs petitioned Congress for legislation authorizing the creation of prisoner pensions. “The passage of this measure,” the Toledo Association maintained, “would indicate a desire on the part of the government to recognize the claims [of survivors].” Members of the Iowa Association urged Congress to accept the proposal, and thereby “teach us that Republics are not ungrateful.” Former sergeant Lyle Adair, who prior to his incarceration at Andersonville had been a recruiting agent for a regiment of United States Colored Troops, argued that prisoner pensions were hardly charity, “but an act of justice.”³⁴ Despite their persistent appeals, survivors met continued opposition. At least four attempts to extend federal pension benefits to ex-POWs failed to secure Congressional approval. Even some of the most liberal proponents of veterans’ pensions dismissed the need for a specific ex-prisoner pension bill. “I do not complain so far as a dollar of it was necessary to relieve real distress,” Connecticut senator Joseph Hawley vowed. “If this bill passes as it stands,” one Grand Army of the Republic post resolved, “it will include “The returning many who are not entitled wounded, with to a Pension because having no disability.”³⁵ Though powerless arms, some ex-POWs became the shattered legs, or beneficiaries of private penbloody and fearfully sion legislation, as a fradisfigured faces ternity, survivors of Rebel prisons failed to extract the were objects public gratitude they de[too] dreadful to sired. When the ink dried look upon.” on the 1890 Dependent Pension Act, which extended a monthly pension to “all persons who served ninety days or more” in the U.S. Army during the Civil War, ex-prisoners found themselves subsumed into a universal class of aging, blue-coated veterans. Their psychological suffering would continue to go unrecognized in the nation’s collective memory of the Civil War. Ultimately, Union ex-POWs failed to convince northern civilians—who, in search of national healing, enthusiastically embraced a sanitized Civil War—of the truth of their suffering. But we should hardly dismiss what ex-prisoners of war were able to accomplish in their postwar gatherings. Thumbing through prison memoirs, donning tiny brass badges and bars, reciting troublesome tales, responding to ritual roll calls, gathering for annual banquets, collecting stockade remnants, and demanding pensions, prison survivors crafted for themselves a coherent narrative of their traumatic experiences. Today, at the dawn of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial observance, a celebration that shares far more with the dismissive incredulity of late-nineteenth-century civilians than we might care to admit, and as a nation at war once more, we need to hear the insistent message of the Union ex-prisoners more than ever. BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN, a 2009 graduate of Gettysburg College, is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in U.S. History at Yale University, where he is working on a dissertation titled “When Billy Came Marching Home: The World of Union Veterans.”

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In their respective inaugural addresses, both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln tried to convince the American public—and the world beyond—of the rightness of their stance on secession and their strong desire to prevent civil war. Here are the words they used to make their cases (Davis top, Lincoln bottom). The more frequently they used a word, the larger it appears. Intriguingly, both presidents relied on a similar set of words (though they may not have meant the same things by them), and each man used a few words that were uniquely his own.

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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR FALL 2011

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%0/ 530*"/* America’s Most Respected Military Artist

“Never Give Up the Field” — July 21, 1861 Battle of 1st Manassas

www.historicalartprints.com

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