Issue 19 by The Civil War Monitor

Medals of Honor: A Portfolio of Heroes P. 40 VOL. 6, NO. 1

{ a n e w l o o k a t a m e r i c aâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s g r e a t e s t c o n f l i c t }

In war there must be an enemy. How Confederates defined and demonized their northern opponents SPRING 2016

$5.99

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ALWAYS LEGENDARY CHRIS KOEHLER (TOP); CARL J. CRUZ COLLECTION (MEDAL OF HONOR); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

VISIT ABRAHAM LINCOLNâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S HOMETOWN AND WATCH HISTORY COME ALIVE RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES. Like no other destination, Springfield offers the best of Abraham Lincoln. Walk in his footsteps when you visit the Lincoln Home. Get to know him as a husband, father and politician when you tour the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum. Witness a moving flag lowering ceremony at the Lincoln Tomb. All this and more is waiting for you in Springfield.

START PLANNING YOUR TRIP TODAY VisitSpringfieldIllinois.com 800-545-7300

Springfield, Illinois Convention & Visitors Bureau

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Contents DEPARTMENTS

VOLUME 6, NUMBER 1 / SPRING 2016

FEATURES

Salvo

{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}

TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to Springfield

VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Souvenirs

FACES OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 A Death Far From Home

PRESERVATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 FIGURES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Damn Yankees

COST OF WAR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

In war there must be an enemy. How Confederates defined and demonized their northern opponents by george c. rable

Lee’s Headquarters Saved

Life and Death on Point Lookout An Instrument of War

IN FOCUS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 A Scene of Suffering

CHRIS KOEHLER (TOP); CARL J. CRUZ COLLECTION (MEDAL OF HONOR); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Ulysses S. Grant and the Long, Hard Slog

LIVING HISTORY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 The Unintended Expert

Books & Authors VOICES FROM THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC: PART 7 . . . . . . . 65

Honor 40 In the century and a half since its creation, the Medal of Honor has been awarded 3,513 times. Of these, over 40 percent were in recognition of actions during the Civil War. We present 17 stories of extraordinary valor.

BY GARY W. GALLAGHER

A RECONSTRUCTION BOOKSHELF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 BY BROOKS D. SIMPSON

In Every Issue EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Hating the Enemy

PARTING SHOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 An Unusual Accessory

THE WILDERNESS REVISITED 56 A year after war’s end, former Union officer Theodore Lyman returned to the ground where the opening battle of the Overland Campaign was fought—and recorded his impressions in two detailed letters to his wife. by stephen w. sears

ON THE COVER:

Illustration by Chris Koehler

THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2016

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editorial VOLUME 6, NUMBER 1 / SPRING 2016

Terry A. Johnston Jr. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

Laura June Davis David Thomson Robert Poister Katie Brackett Fialka CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

a week before the bombardment of Fort Sumter, William Howard Rus-

sell, the famed correspondent for The Times of London, dined with a group of southerners in a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Russell had traveled across the Atlantic the previous month to take the pulse of a country that seemed on the verge of civil war. That night, he gained some sense of the level of passion that motivated secessionists. His companions, Russell soon learned, were “fanatical in … opposition to any suggestions of compromise or reconstruction” with the North. Heaping scorn on President Abraham Lincoln (whom “they spoke of with contempt”) and Secretary of State William Seward (whom “they … regarded as the ablest and most unscrupulous of their enemies”), the group reserved their greatest ire for the northern people, especially the men, whom they characterized as “cowards.” By evening’s end, Russell (pictured right) had grown “certain” that “there is a degree of something like ferocity in the Southern mind towards … [the North] which exceeds belief.” In this issue’s cover story (“Damn Yankees,” page 30), historian George Rable offers a fascinating look at the many ways in which—and the many reasons why—southerners came to demonize their northern opponents. He examines how, in short, they created enemies out of fellow countrymen—and by extension justified the act of secession. Elsewhere in this issue, we move from hate to inspiration in “Honor” (page 40), our look at some of the individuals who earned our country’s greatest military award, the Medal of Honor. And author Stephen Sears explores the postwar visit of former Union officer Theodore Lyman to some of the fields upon which the armies of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee clashed during the Overland Campaign of 1864 (“The Wilderness Revisited,” page 56). Have any thoughts on this issue or others? We’re always eager for feedback. Send your comments to letters@civilwarmonitor.com.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: letters@civilwarmonitor.com

Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor Matthew C. Hulbert EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Jennifer Sturak Michele Huie COPY EDITORS

Brian Matthew Jordan BOOK REVIEW EDITOR BRIAN@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

Katharine Dahlstrand SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR

Patrick Mitchell CREATIVE DIRECTOR MODUS OPERANDI DESIGN (WWW.MODUSOP.NET)

Zethyn McKinley ADVERTISING & MARKETING DIRECTOR ADVERTISING@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM (559) 492 9236

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Howard White CIRCULATION MANAGER HWHITEASSOC@COMCAST.NET website

www.CivilWarMonitor.com

M. Keith Harris Kevin M. Levin Robert H. Moore II Harry Smeltzer DIGITAL HISTORY ADVISORS SUBSCRIPTIONS & CUSTOMER SERVICE

Civil War Monitor / Circulation Dept. P.O. Box 292336, Kettering, OH 45429 phone: 877-344-7409 EMAIL: CUSTOMERSERVICE@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

The Civil War Monitor (issn 2163-0682/print, issn 21630690/online) is published quarterly by Bayshore History, llc, 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. Periodicals postage paid at Atlantic City, NJ, and additional mailing offices. postmaster: Send address changes to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 292336, Kettering, OH 45429. Subscriptions: $21.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $31.95 per year in Canada, and $41.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Views expressed by individual authors, unless expressly stated, do not necessarily represent those of The Civil War Monitor or Bayshore History, LLC. Letters to the editor become the property of The Civil War Monitor, and may be edited. The Civil War Monitor cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited materials. The contents of the magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of the publisher.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Hating the Enemy

printed in the u.s.a.

THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2016

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

ACWM.ORG

WHITE HOUSE OF THE CONFEDERACY 1201 E. Clay Street, Richmond VA

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HISTORIC TREDEGAR 500 Tredegar Street, Richmond VA

MUSEUM OF THE CONFEDERACY- APPOMATTOX Rte. 24 at Rte. 460, Appomattox VA

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d i s pat c h e s

troops, deliberately sabotage John Pope’s Second Manassas efforts, fail to save Union troops at Harpers Ferry, fail to destroy Lee’s vulnerable army over several days at Antietam, and fail to pursue Lee after Antietam. McClellan was no threat to Lee or the Confederacy. Lee had many reasons to be grateful to Mac. His gratefulness extended to his postwar compliment to his unworthy foe.

Lincoln and Little Mac

Richard P. Cox SUN CITY, ARIZONA

* * * In his essay “Lincoln and Little Mac,” Mark Grimsley bemoans

Edward H. Bonekemper III WILLOW STREET, PENNSYLVANIA

Kudos

the fact that we do not take seriously Robert E. Lee’s description of George B. McClellan as his most formidable opponent. Perhaps Lee’s statement was based on his dislike for the hard-war approach of Ulysses S. Grant, his embarrassment over his crushing defeat by George Meade at Gettysburg, or his respect for McClellan’s old-school gentleman’s approach to war and opposition to overturning the South’s peculiar institution. Lee read McClellan like a book and played him for a fool. Lee had seen Mac take two months to move up the Virginia Peninsula, send his army into a panicked retreat from a thinly defended Richmond, abandon his army twice during the retreat, sit useless on the James River with 100,000

I wanted to write a few lines to tell you how much I enjoy your magazine. I especially like all the human-interest articles, such as the recent pieces about Civil War nurses [“Angels of War,” Vol. 5, No. 2] and the prison at Belle Isle [“Death and Life on Belle Isle,” Vol. 5, No. 2]. Articles about Civil War battles bewilder and bore me, but I can’t get enough of the personal stories. Thank you again. Roger Kolb Letters to the editor: email us at letters@civilwarmonitor.com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.

SOMERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS

ED. Thanks very much for the feed-

back, Roger. While we certainly won’t stop covering the war’s military aspects, we promise to keep the “human-interest articles” you enjoy coming too.

What They Fought For

I received my first issue of The Civil War Monitor last week and am constrained to reply to a letter to the editor by Donald Colonge-

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Mark Grimsley’s reconsideration of George B. McClellan’s tenure as commander of the Army of the Potomac [“American Iliad: Lincoln and Little Mac,” Vol. 5, No. 4] is, I think, further damning by faint praise. His analysis, for example, lauds McClellan during the 1862 Seven Days Battles because he “easily thwarted Lee’s attempts to destroy the Army of the Potomac.” What this overlooks is that McClellan was supposedly the aggressor. McClellan’s constant delusions of being vastly outnumbered hindered his timing (e.g., at Yorktown) and put him on the defensive instead of remaining on the offensive, thus destroying any chance of taking Richmond. Similarly, Grimsley praises McClellan for repelling Lee’s 1862 invasion at Antietam. This assertion neglects to acknowledge that McClellan had generous unused reserves of troops that, had he used them on September 17 or 18, might have destroyed Lee’s army and led to a speedy end of hostilities. Grimsley should have mentioned the one thing for which McClellan should be praised: his efforts to bring coherence, training, and morale to the Army of the Potomac, which turned it into a formidable fighting force despite its poor leadership in the early years of the war.

li that appeared in it [“Dispatches,” Vol. 5, No. 4]. Mr. Colongeli asserts, “In my opinion, many of the young men who served in the Confederate army did not fight for slavery, but rather to protect their homes from northern invasion.” In truth, anyone and everyone who aided, abetted, fought for, gave aid to, supported, helped, assisted, sanctioned, etc., the Confederate rebellion did so to preserve, promote, and perpetuate the so-called “peculiar institution” of black slavery. In the words of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, “If we ain’t fightin’ for slavery, then I’d like to know what we are fightin’ fer” (as quoted in Carl Sandburg’s Storm Over the Land, page 246). Since the general was there at the time, I would think that he knew what the South was fighting for! The Civil War was truly a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” The rich and powerful of the South brought on the war and the poor and non-slaveholders were duped into fighting it for them, under the lie that their civil liberties were being taken away by the federal government. But can anyone name a right that was allowed those of the North but denied those of the South, or viceversa? Furthermore, the term “northern invasion” is a southern invention and myth. No country “invades” its own territory. The powers

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that be in every country have the right to send government troops to any part of that country to put down trouble and rebellion. Did George Washington “invade” Pennsylvania to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion during his tenure as president? What’s the difference between the two rebellions except size and cause? If Washington could lawfully send federal troops into Pennsylvania to suppress a rebellion, then Abraham Lincoln had every right to do the same. If not, why not? Tom Adams CALERA, OKLAHOMA

USS Monitor Center at The Mariners’ Museum Plan your visit today to see this award-winning Civil War attraction! Be a part of the action in our high-definition Battle Theater, walk the deck of the full-sized Monitor replica, see artifacts like the iconic revolving gun turret.

MarinersMuseum.org 1-800-581-SAIL (7245) | Newport News, VA Just 20 minutes from the Historic Triangle of Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown.

Update

Grand Army Men ED. Andy Waskie, president of

the General Meade Society of Philadelphia—and subject of our Winter 2015 issue’s “Living History” column—was kind enough to share the above image of the 200th birthday celebration for General Meade held on December 31, 2015, at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. He informs us that the event, which drew over 300 attendees, was a big success. To learn more about the society and how you can get involved, visit generalmeadesociety.org.

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agenda

APRIL CLEANUP

Civil War Trust Park Day SATURDAY, APRIL 2

Multiple sites NATIONWIDE

Your Guide to Civil War Events

SPRING 2016

MARCH LECTURE

The Consequences of War SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 1:30 P.M.

Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

Park Ranger Evangelina Rubalcava-Joyce discusses the impact of the Civil War, a conflict that not only left a swath of physical destruction, but also affected families in myriad ways. Learn about the war’s shocking aftermath and the fortitude of those who endured it. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS.GOV/GETT or 717-338-4469. TOUR

Along This River: The Warwick-Yorktown Line SATURDAY, MARCH 19, 9 A.M. – 3 P.M.

Lee Hall Mansion NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA

Join historian J. Michael Moore for a tour of portions of the main defensive line estab-

lished by Confederate forces on the Virginia Peninsula in 1862. Among the sites included are Fort Crafford, Lee’s Mill, Skiffes Creek Redoubt, Dam No. 1, and Yorktown. The tour van leaves from Lee Hall Mansion; participants are asked to bring a lunch and drink (small coolers are permitted) and to wear comfortable walking shoes. Space is limited, and prepayment is required. $45; FOR MORE INFORMATION: LEEHALL.ORG or 757-888-3371 X306.

Since 1996, the Civil War Trust has sponsored Park Day, an annual hands-on preservation event to help Civil War—and now Revolutionary War—battlefields and historic sites tackle maintenance projects large and small. Each participating site chooses activities to meet its own particular needs, which can range from raking leaves and hauling trash to painting signs and trail buildings. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION, INCLUDING A COMPLETE LIST OF PARTICIPATING SITES: CIVILWAR.ORG/ ABOUTUS/EVENTS/PARK-DAY/ or 202-367-1861. MEMORABILIA

American Civil War Show FRIDAY, APRIL 8 – SATURDAY, APRIL 9

Fredericksburg Expo Center FREDERICKSBURG, VIRGINIA

FORUM

Abraham Lincoln Symposium SATURDAY, MARCH 19, 9 A.M. – 5 P.M.

Ford’s Theatre WASHINGTON, D.C.

The Abraham Lincoln Institute and Ford’s Theatre Society present a full-day symposium focused on the life, career, and legacy of President Abraham Lincoln. Noted authors and historians Sidney Blumenthal, Thomas L. Carson, Louis P. Masur, Stacy Pratt McDermott, and Edna Greene Medford will discuss aspects of our 16th president’s leadership, family life, and vision for emancipation and Reconstruction. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: FORDS.ORG or 202-347-4833.

A guided ride on the James River aboard the Discovery Barge II

The Northern Virginia Relic Hunters Association presents a two-day show featuring over 350 tables of Civil War weapons, military effects, relics, books, paper goods, and artwork. $6 (FOR BOTH DAYS); CHILDREN 12 AND UNDER ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NVRHA.COM/SHOW. HTM or 703-367-7999. LIVING HISTORY

Civil War Encampment SATURDAY, APRIL 16 – SUNDAY, APRIL 17

Fort Scott National Historic Site FORT SCOTT, KANSAS Reenactors depicting Union infantrymen, cavalrymen, and artillerists help highlight the importance of Fort Scott, which due to its strategic location became a major base of Union operations during the Civil War. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS.GOV/FOSC or 620-223-0310.

Civil War on the James SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 5 – 7 P.M.

Deep Bottom Park Join local interpreter Scott Williams for a ride aboard the Discovery Barge II, a 24-foot pontoon boat, on a 2-hour Civil War tour on the James River. Enjoy the natural beauty of the James as you trace the naval actions that took place during the conflict in the areas of Dutch Gap, Trent’s Reach, and Jones Neck.

MIKE OSTRANDER

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

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CIVIL WAR TRUST (TOP); PAMPLIN HISTORICAL PARK

TOUR

HARDIN H COUNTY T ENNE S S E E

Volunteers get ready to work at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park during Civil War Trust Park Day 2014. $50; FOR MORE INFORMATION: DISCOVERTHEJAMES.COM or 804-938-2350.

MAY TOUR

Biking Chickamauga Battlefield SATURDAY, MAY 21, 9:30 A.M.

Chickamauga Battlefield FORT OGLETHORPE, GEORGIA

The Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park and Outdoor Chattanooga join forces again this year to offer a free historical bike tour through the Chickamauga battlefield. The public is invited to bring their bicycles and join in the leisurely paced historical ride, which takes approximately two hours. National Park Service rangers will talk about the history of the battlefield while Outdoor Chattanooga staff and volunteers provide ride leadership and support. Ride length is approxi-

mately three to four miles on flat to moderately hilly terrain. The rides are appropriate for adults and children ages eight and older when accompanied by an adult. All participants are required to wear helmets. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS. GOV/CHCH/ or 706-866-9241. LIVING HISTORY

OUR MEETINGS MAKE

history

join us for the

generals breakfast at cherry mansion, april 2nd

battle

shiloh

HHH

Memorial Day Weekend

summer concert series begins memorial day in shiloh

SAT., MAY 28 – MON., MAY 30

tourhardincounty.org

Pamplin Historical Park PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA

Throughout the holiday weekend, Pamplin Historical Park plays host to a variety of living history programs, including an artillery demonstration, a Memorial Day ceremony, and the Walk of Honor, a guided tour (Monday only) focusing on specific soldiers who fought and sacrificed in the area of the Breakthrough Trail.

visitswtenn.com

tnvacation.com

FREE WITH PARK ADMISSION; FOR MORE INFORMATION: PAMPLINPARK. ORG or 877-726-7546.

CIVIL WAR TRUST (TOP); PAMPLIN HISTORICAL PARK

MIKE OSTRANDER

Historic interpreters at Pamplin Historical Park

Share Your Event Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com

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s a lv o s a lv o

{

FA C T S , F I G U R E S & I T E M S O F I N T E R E S T

}

Residents of Springfield, Illinois, welcome Abraham Lincoln home in the fall of 1860 after his successful campaign for president of the United States. He would depart for Washington, D.C., the following February. FOR MORE ON SPRINGFIELD, TURN THE PAGE. â&#x2DC;&#x203A;

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IN THIS SECTION Travels

A VISIT TO SPRINGFIELD . . . . 10 Voices

SOUVENIRS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Faces of War

A DEATH FAR FROM HOME . . . 16 Preservation

LEE’S HEADQUARTERS SAVED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Figures

LIFE AND DEATH ON POINT LOOKOUT . . . . . . . . . . 20 Cost of War

AN INSTRUMENT OF WAR . . . 22 In Focus

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A SCENE OF SUFFERING . . . . . 24

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s a lv o

t r av e l s

SPRINGFIELD ILLINOIS on february 11, 1861, President-elect

Abraham Lincoln addressed the crowd that had gathered at the Great Western Depot in Springfield, Illinois, to see him off to Washington, D.C. “My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting,” he began. “To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.” Lincoln went on to acknowledge his deep connection to the city, in which he had met his wife and established a successful law practice. “Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man,” he said. “Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington…. I bid you an affectionate farewell.” Lincoln’s life would be cut short before he was able to see his adopted hometown again. His body would return to Springfield for burial in May 1865. ¶ Interested in visiting Springfield? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area—Christian McWhirter and Samuel Wheeler—to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic city.

Edwards Place

CAN’T MISS

Just north of downtown is one of Springfield’s best Lincoln-era historic homes: the Edwards Place (700 N. 4th St.; 217-523-2631). Having recently undergone an extensive historic restoration, the home offers an immersive tour and a peek into the lives of one of Illinois’ most prominent 19th-century families. The Edwards clan was very close to Abraham Lincoln, and among the home’s treasured items is the “courting couch” on which a young Abraham wooed Mary Todd. cm Most visitors to Springfield have the Lincoln Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery (1500 Monument Ave.; 217782-2717) on their itinerary, but after paying their respects to the sixteenth president and his family, many leave too soon. Explore the cemetery fur-

The Lincoln Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY SETH LOWE

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The Lincoln Home

ther and find two memorials to Civil War soldiers as well as the graves of Lincoln’s Springfield contemporaries, including William Herndon (Lincoln’s law partner and biographer), Ninian and Elizabeth Todd Edwards (Mary Todd’s brother-inlaw and sister), John Todd Stuart (Lincoln’s first law partner), and James Matheny (the best man at Lincoln’s wedding). sw

BEST KEPT SECRET

Every year, Springﬁeld hosts a number of fun and interesting festivals. My personal favorite is the Springfield Old Capitol Art Fair (socaf.org). For two days every May, artists from around the country show their work in the open square around the grand building where Lincoln gave the “House Divided” speech. It’s always a fun time and gives the town a different, colorful aspect in the spring. cm

BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT

Rather than just identifying one place, I’ll recommend the same trio of historic sites I show visitors: the Lincoln Home (426 S. 7th St.; 217-492-4241), the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (112 N. 6th St.; 217-558-8844), and the Lincoln Tomb. If you plan your day right, you can visit all three before sundown, and each offers unique insights into Lincoln’s life and legacy. I prefer to hit the museum first, where visitors can learn the Lincoln story, and then get a tour of the home before finishing the day at the impressive tomb. cm At the top of my list of Springfield’s best Civil War spots is the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Plan on giving yourself at least three hours to tour the museum exhibits that detail Lincoln’s life and times. Honorable mentions on my list are the Old State Capitol (6th & Adams Streets; 217-785-7960) and the Lincoln Home, both a short walk from the museum. sw Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

Hundreds of thousands of people come to Springfield every August for the Illinois State Fair (illinois. gov/StateFair), now in its 160th year. The fair features an amusement park, harness racing, evening concerts, a variety of foods to sample, and even a life-sized sculpture of a cow made of butter. sw

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Mel-O-Cream Donuts

“The Den” Chili Parlor

BEST EATS

I’m a sucker for diner breakfasts and Springfield has one of the best at Charlie Parker’s (700 W. North St.; 217-2412104). It’s a little south of downtown but well worth the drive for hearty, massive helpings of standard breakfast fare, and pancakes so large they’re served on pizza trays. Cafe Moxo (411 E. Adams St.; 217-788-8084), just west of the Old State Capitol, is my go-to spot for lunch. The deli serves original soups and sandwiches as well as the best chicken pot pie I’ve ever had. Bonus—you get a cookie with every lunch order! Arlington’s (210 Broadway; 217679-6235), located a block from the state capitol building, offers typical pub fare with a twist. The burgers are terrific, as is the ambiance, making it a perfect spot to unwind after a day of sightseeing. cm For the last 80 years, Mel-O-Cream Donuts (217 E. Laurel St.; 217-544-4644) has been a breakfast staple in Springfield. Do yourself a favor and get a chocolate Bavarian to start your morning. For lunch, try “The Den” Chili Parlor (820 S. 9th St.; 217-523-4989), a local favorite where the menu and recipes are the same as they were when the diner first opened in 1945. I usually get the medium-hot chili or the cheese hot dogs, which are amazing. Obed & Isaac’s Microbrewery & Eatery (500 S. 6th St.; 217-6700627) is a fantastic dinner spot. Everything on the menu is good, including the horseshoe (a Springfield original that you must see to believe). Head to the microbrewery’s outdoor space to dine around the fire pit or challenge your friends to a game of bocce ball. sw

Knights Action Park

Obed & Isaac’s Microbrewery & Eatery

BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY

Located just south of town, Lake Springﬁeld is ringed with a variety of family-friendly spots, including a wildlife sanctuary, fishing piers, and picnic areas. My personal favorite is a hidden gem: Lincoln Memorial Garden (2301 E. Lake Shore Dr.; 217-529-1111). Designed as a living tribute to Lincoln by world-renowned architect Jens Jensen, the site approximates the landscape of Lincoln’s time and includes trails, a nature center, and programs for all ages. cm If the kids have been well behaved at the historic sites, then they’ve earned a trip to Knights Action Park (1700 Recreation Dr.; 217546-8881). They’ll love the bumper boats, water slides, wave pool, arcade games, batting cages, mini golf, and Ferris wheel. In the evening, catch a movie at the drive-in theater. sw

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY SETH LOWE

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A New Book on Mosby

The Abraham Lincoln Hotel (here and below)

In his second Civil War biography, Gregory Wilson offers a unique, unbiased account of John S. Mosby’s early military career.

BEST SLEEP

You can’t go wrong with the Abraham Lincoln Hotel (701 E. Adams St.; 217-544-8800), situated between the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Lincoln Home. While it’s a bit pricey, the hotel is within walking distance of most of the other major downtown sites. cm

“★★★★” Foreword Clarion Reviews

ava i l a b l e f o r p u rc h a s e at

There are a number of fine hotels in Springfield, particularly downtown, but if you are looking to stay somewhere with elegance and history, I recommend a bed and breakfast called the Pasfield House Inn (525 S. Pasfield St.; 217-525-3663). The renovated Georgian-style residence was originally built in 1896 by a Lincoln contemporary. It’s located within walking distance of most of the downtown historic sites and the suites boast Jacuzzi baths with double tubs and showers in which to relax after a busy day of touring. sw

FOR MORE INFO, EMAIL THE AUTHOR:

greg@civilwarquakerscout.com

The Ultimate Source on Confederate Uniforms

BEST BOOK

Bryon C. Andreason’s Looking for Lincoln in Illinois: Lincoln’s Springﬁeld (2015) is chock-full of details about the city during Lincoln’s time and doubles as a walking tour for visitors. I highly recommend it to anyone seeking to get the most out of their Springfield trip. cm Paul M. Angle’s “Here I Have Lived”: A History of Lincoln’s Springfield, 1821-1865 (1935) is a great introduction to both Springfield and the life of Abraham Lincoln. Readers come away with an appreciation for how the town embraced Lincoln and contributed to his success as a lawyer and politician. So many of the locations eloquently described in the book are still standing, waiting for visitors to rediscover them. sw

ABOUT OUR EXPERTS

Christian McWhirter, a resident of Springfield since 2013, is an assistant editor with The Papers of Abraham Lincoln and editor of the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.

Samuel Wheeler, a Springfield native, is the research historian for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Organized chronologically and by region, The Soldier’s Words brings together a variety of first-hand accounts about what Confederate soldiers actually wore. Even the most knowledgeable Civil War uniform researcher will learn something new. Available on Kindle and Amazon.com, BooksaMillion.com & BarnesandNoble.com

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voices

/ SOUVENIRS

“ I WALKED OVER ON THE HILL AND SAW A FEW DEAD YANKEES. THEY HAD BECOME STIFF, AND ONE WAS LYING ON HIS BACK WITH AN ARM HELD UP. I PICKED UP A GOOD MUSKET AND CARRIED IT BACK WITH ME TO THE HOUSE AND GAVE IT TO THE YOUNG “ The country people flocked to the battlefield like LADY I SAW RUNNING vultures.… [H]undreds were scatered over the field, AWAY THE DAY BEFORE. eagerly searching for souvenirs in the shape of cannon balls, guns, bayonets, swords, canteens, etc.” SHE THANKED ME FOR LIEUTENANT JOSIAH FAVILL, 57TH NEW YORK INFANTRY, DESCRIBING IN HIS DIARY THE CIVILIANS HE ENCOUNTERED IT, AND SEEMED VERY WHILE LEADING A BURIAL PARTY ON THE BATTLEFIELD OF ANTIETAM, SEPTEMBER 1862 MUCH PLEASED TO HAVE IT AS A MEMENTO OF “ I sent you … enclosed in a small bottle, three THE BATTLE.” magnolia buds. They CONFEDERATE SURGEON SPENCER WELCH, ON WALKING THE BATTLEFIELD TWO DAYS AFTER THE FIGHTING AT CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA, IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, SEPTEMBER 3, 1862

are real natural trophies, as they were plucked from a tree upon the battlefield, which bears evidence of the sweeping fire of the enemy, which was intended for the breasts of our friends.” UNION GENERAL ALEXANDER HAYS (RIGHT), IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE FROM THE BATTLEFIELD OF FAIR OAKS, VIRGINIA, JUNE 15, 1862

“ He can learn to throw … with them when he is a little older.”

CONFEDERATE GENERAL JOHN BRATTON (ABOVE), REMARKING IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE ON THE TWO BULLETS HE HAD PICKED UP ON THE FREDERICKSBURG BATTLEFIELD AND SENT HOME TO HIS YOUNG SON, FEBRUARY 1862

“ I bought his cedar canteen to preserve as a souvenir of Port Hudson and its sharpshooter. I fear more than one of our poor fellows has felt his skill; but, for all that, he was a goodnatured fellow….” MASSACHUSETTS CORPORAL JAMES HOSMER, WRITING IN HIS DIARY ABOUT HIS ENCOUNTER WITH A CONFEDERATE SHARPSHOOTER KNOWN AS “OLD THOUSAND YARDS” DURING AN OFFICIAL PAUSE IN THE FIGHTING AT PORT HUDSON, LOUISIANA, JULY 12, 1863

“ I stacked them all in the corner of the tent thinking if they could speak they would have heroic tales to tell. Some of them were almost new, but others were torn and tattered, lashed by tempests of shot and shell. The fortunes of war have separated them from their brave defenders, and there is no one to even tell to whom they belonged.” EBENEZER GILPIN, 3RD IOWA CAVALRY, WRITING IN HIS DIARY ABOUT THE CAPTURED CONFEDERATE BATTLE FLAGS “AND OTHER CAPTURED TROPHIES” HE PROCESSED IN MACON, GEORGIA, FOR SHIPMENT TO THE WAR DEPARTMENT, APRIL 1865 SOURCES: LETTERS OF JOHN BRATTON TO HIS WIFE (1942); THE COLOR-GUARD (1864); THE DIARY OF A YOUNG OFFICER … (1909); THE LAST CAMPAIGN (1908); LIFE AND LETTERS OF ALEXANDER HAYS (1919); A CONFEDERATE SURGEON’S LETTERS TO HIS WIFE (1911).

f e h

FRANCIS MILLER, PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (BRATTON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (HAYS, BURIAL PARTY ); HARPER’S WEEKLY.

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onfederate Currency rounded into poker chip form. Original images and artwork from actual Confederate Currency appeal to cardplayers, historians, collectors, and enthusiasts alike. Detailed illustrations, rich color, and powerful symbols honor the history and the heritage of -

t Firs

Av e Tim

ChrOrder istm Now as D for eliv er y

le! b a l ai

Sailing Ship

Train

Five Females

Justice & Agriculture

FRANCIS MILLER, PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (BRATTON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (HAYS, BURIAL PARTY ); HARPER’S WEEKLY.

Capitol - Nashville, TN

South Striking Down Union

Design Highlights

• Images and Artwork from Actual Confederate Currency • Eleven Outer Stars Represent Each of the Confederate States • States of the Confederacy Shown on Chip Backs in Order of Seccession • Three Chip Values on Each Chip with Roman Numerals and Medallions • Antique Parchment Background with Modern Casino Quality Ceramic

Continuous Decorative Edge Writing on each Chip

The Confederates poker set is available in six denomonations in the following quantity: $1 - 50, $5 - 75, $20 - 75, $100 - 50, $500 - 25, $1000 - 25 • 300 - 10 Gram Ceramic Chips • Direct Print Casino Quality • 39 mm X 3.3 mm Chips • Antique Matte Chip Finish • Two Decks Playing Cards • “C.S.A.” Deluxe Dealer Set • Engravable Brass Name Plate

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Confederate Poker • P.O. Box 1865 • Sheffield, AL 35660 • (855) 333-1865 • Fax (855) 333-1864 CWM19-FOB-Voices.indd 15

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by ronald s . coddington publisher , military images

fa c e s o f wa r

A DEATH FAR FROM HOME he marched into battle at Seven Pines, Virginia, on May 31, 1862, Theodore K. Klinck had been witness to several of the young conflict’s more notable events. As a cadet at the Citadel during the secession crisis of 1860–1861, Klinck was in Charleston for the outbreak of the war. Following the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Klinck—who had helped man the city’s defenses as a member of the Washington Light Infantry, a local militia company—joined Hampton’s Legion, a unit organized and partially financed by wealthy South Carolina plantation owner Wade Hampton III. Hampton’s men were involved in some of the heaviest fighting at Manassas in July 1861. Klinck escaped the battle without injury and reportedly “acted his part well.” He was not as fortunate at Seven Pines, where Confederate forces commanded by Joseph E. Johnston confronted George B. McClellan’s advancing Union army on the outskirts of Richmond. During the battle’s first day, Klinck, who had recently been promoted to first lieutenant, was seriously wounded in the thigh. After comrades dragged him to safety, he sat alone without food or assistance for 18 hours until Union soldiers took him prisoner. Klinck was then sent by steamer to Philadelphia for medical treatment. As he was being transported by stretcher off the ship, Klinck “requested that a newspaper should be laid over his face, that he might not be recognized and insulted as a Confederate,” according to an eyewitness. The following day, his leg was amputated at the upper thigh. Klinck died soon thereafter, succumbing to “the effects of the operation.” He was 23.

T IMAGE COURTESY THE CITADEL ARCHIVES AND MUSEUM; SOURCES: PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER , JUNE 12, 1862; CHARLESTON MERCURY , JUNE 24, 1862.

BY THE TIME

COURTESY OF MILITARY IMAGES, A MAGAZINE DEDICATED TO SHOWCASING, INTERPRETING, AND PRESERVING PHOTOS OF CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS. TO LEARN MORE, VISIT MILITARYIMAGESMAGAZINE.COM. THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2016

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KSU CW

ShadowS

of antietam Robert J. Kalasky

A revolutionary re-creation of the historic Antietam Battlefield photographs

wo photographers sent by Mathew Brady— Alexander Gardner and James Gibson—recorded

the horror of war at Antietam with the first-ever images of dead American soldiers. In Shadows of Antietam,

IMAGE COURTESY THE CITADEL ARCHIVES AND MUSEUM; SOURCES: PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER , JUNE 12, 1862; CHARLESTON MERCURY , JUNE 24, 1862.

Robert J. Kalasky has painstakingly re-created Gardner’s and Gibson’s output, retracing their footsteps by location, date, and time to chronologically and sequentially place their images. With the help of reenactors and black-andwhite photography, Kalasky assembled a comprehensive study, based on sunlight and shadow, of the 74 known glass plates recorded by Gardner and Gibson at Antietam.

“Kalasky has produced a seminal study on the photography of Antietam. This important work should be required reading for all serious students of the battle.” —Ted Alexander, Chief Historian, Antietam National Battlefield “Kalasky brings to the living the dead of Antietam.” —Dennis Frye, author of Antietam Revealed

The Kent State University Press 1118 Library • Kent, Ohio 44242-0001 www.KentStateUniversityPress.com CWM19-FOB-FacesofWar.indd KSU CWM ad 16.01.20.indd 1 17

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by o . james lighthizer president , civil war trust

p r e s e r vat i o n

Lee’s Headquarters Saved on july 1, 2014, the Civil War Trust and the Department of the Interior launched a $5.5 million fundraising campaign to acquire four acres at the site of General Robert E. Lee’s headquarters during the Battle of Gettysburg. This represented one of the Trust’s most important preservation efforts, and its failure would have left this famous battlefield landmark vulnerable to development. ¶ Today, the Trust is confident that restoration of the property will soon be well underway. Victory was secured thanks to countless Trust members, a gift from FedEx, and partnerships with the National Park Service, the American Battlefield Protection Program, and the Gettysburg Foundation. ¶ The Trust will restore a 1.5-story home built around 1833 and known as the Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery, were positioned around the house, delivering raking canister fire into the advancing Rebel line. By the evening of July 1, 1863, General Lee had established his headquarters on the property, Lee himself in the stone home and his staff officers in tents. Over the next two days, Lee directed the fighting, discussed the July 2 and 3 assaults with his lieutenants, and made many of the

LOOK FOR REGULAR PRESERVATION NEWS AND UPDATES FROM THE CIVIL WAR TRUST IN FUTURE ISSUES. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION AND HOW YOU CAN HELP, VISIT CIVILWAR.ORG

The Mary Thompson House in Gettysburg as it appears today and as it did in a photo taken shortly after the battle. The Trust is in the process of restoring the building and the surrounding property to its 1863 appearance.

CIVIL WAR TRUST

Mary Thompson House, after the 69-year-old widow who lived there during the war. (The home also has the distinction of being co-owned by U.S. congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who was instrumental in passing the Thirteenth Amendment.) Restoring the property to its 1863 appearance will include replacing the roof and installing historic fence lines, a porch, and an orchard. The Trust will also remove the adjacent, non-historic buildings on Seminary Ridge. One of the first steps in that process, asbestos abatement, has begun and should be complete before spring. Several images of the Thompson House and surrounding land captured by wartime photographer Mathew Brady will guide the restoration. Though the Thompson House is historic in its own right, the adjacent acreage witnessed critical battle action. On the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the land and house were caught in heavy fighting as Confederate forces overran the final defensive positions of the Union I Corps west of Gettysburg. Retreating Union soldiers formed a new line on Seminary Ridge, and three guns of

battle’s tactical decisions. Mrs. Thompson remained at the house despite the ongoing struggle, and cared for wounded Confederate and Union soldiers brought there after the battle. The house later became a popular attraction, and in 1921, it was converted into the General Lee’s Headquarters Museum. The nearby modern buildings, including a hotel and a restaurant, were constructed in the 1960s. When the Trust unveils the restored headquarters this year, the site will include a walking trail and interpretive signs about the importance of the Thompson House and Seminary Ridge to the Battle of Gettysburg. For explanatory videos and restoration updates, visit civilwar.org.

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Excerpt from Book II

Requiem in Honor of James Cameron th NewYork Highlanders Colonel Requiem in 79 Honor of James Cameron

Colonel 79th NewYork Highlanders

Dust toinDust! Clay Clay! Requiem Honor of JamestoCameron NewYork Highlanders Colonel 79 Virginia claimed our best today and fitting menClay shed to firstClay! Blood Dust to here Dust! Dust to Dust! Clay to Clay! to rest claimed ‘neath redour Virginia mud! Virginia Virginia claimed our bestbest today today Oh hear! Oh hear! the raven call! and fitting here men shed first Blood and fitting here men first Blood Sharptoasrestthe crack ofshed musket ‘neath red Virginia mud! ball hear! Oh hear! raven call! mud! to rest ‘neath redthe Virginia Oh Oh hear! O hear the raven call Sharp as the crack of musket ball as oneOhwe yetthe sing’ly hear!stand, O hear the raven call fall! call! Oh hear! Oh hear! raven th

as one we stand, yet sing’ly fall!

Sharp as the crackfresh of musket ball Asleep within Asleep withinmy my fresh pinepine case case OhAn hear! O hear the An innocence cast o’er hisraven face innocence cast o’er his facecall raised against offended foe raised againstyet as Hand one Hand we A rebelstand, marksmen layoffended himsing’ly low foefall! Hear marksmen ye! Hear ye! thelay Eagle cry!low A rebel him What clouds the gleam once in thy eye? HearHear ye! ye! Hear ye! theEagle Eagle cry! Hear ye! the cry! Asleep within my fresh pine What clouds thesons gleam once thy case eye? Tell his dear and true wife,in why! AnHear innocence cast o’er his face ye! Hear ye! the Eagle cry! Go on! Receive thy due reward Tell hisraised dear sons andnow true Hand against offended foe Bold Soldier! Serving thewife, Lord why! She waits beside a vacant chair

A rebel marksmen layhidehim low Black clothed... Black cloth doth her hair Go on!passion Receive thy due reward That ’d quenched her fervent lip Hear Hear the Eagle cry! Remolded asye! the Potter’s Boldye! Soldier! Serving nowslip the Lord Now still... the thunder of our gun! What clouds thebeside gleam oncechair in thy eye? SheYour waits a vacant loss marked by the day we won! Black clothed... Blackye! cloththe doth hide her hair Hear ye! Hear Eagle cry! passion ’d quenched her fervent lip TellThat hisRemolded dear sons and true wife, why! as the Potter’s slip

CIVIL WAR TRUST

Now still... the thunder of our gun! Youron! lossReceive marked bythy the due day we won! Go reward

BoldSam Soldier! Serving now Houston’s Cherokee name was ‘The the Raven.’Lord Secretary of War Cameron’s administration (March ‘61 - January ‘62) Shemarked waits beside a vacant chair by scandals, intrigue & blatant fraud. Black clothed... Black 15cloth doth hide her hair ©2004 Postlethwaite Publishing. RHawk61@gmail.com That passion ’d quenched her fervent lip Illustration and design by DM Designs, LLC. Video Production by G.Muse Studios. Remolded as the Potter’s slip “Red Hawk” The Battle of Gettysburg Narrative online at www.youtu.be/rOTiew8ziVA Now still... the thunder of our gun! Books & Illustration Note Cards at Turn The Pagemarked Bookstore Boonsboro, Md. Sam Houston’s Cherokee was Your loss byname the day‘The weRaven.’ won! Secretary of War Cameron’s administration (March ‘61 - January ‘62) www.RHJournal.com and www.TTPbooks.com marked by scandals, intrigue & blatant fraud.

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by tktktktktktk s a lv o

figures

Life and Death on Point Lookout HOME TO A POPULAR summer resort before the war, Point Lookout—the

long, sandy peninsula located at the junction of the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River—began its transformation to a major military installation in June 1862, when the federal government leased the land and began building a hospital for Union soldiers at the peninsula’s extreme end. The following year, faced with a swelling prisoner-of-war population after the Battle of Gettysburg, Union authorities designated space north of the hospital for a prison camp. By the end of 1863, the addition of structures to host military personnel, nurses, and escaped slaves made Point Lookout (shown here in an 1864 lithograph) a bustling place. “The post is a queer one,” noted volunteer nurse Jane Woolsey in September 1863, “hos-

pital, military encampment, Contraband camp, [and] rebel camp…. Quite a mixture.” ¶ By conflict’s end, Hammond General Hospital would earn a positive reputation as one of the Union’s largest and busiest federal medical facilities. By contrast, the nearby prison camp had become a site of extreme suffering, its occupants enduring the effects of severe overcrowding, poor sanitation, meager rations, and exposure (prisoners were housed in tents, not barracks). Their plight did not go unnoticed by residents of surrounding St. Mary’s County, Maryland. “No one knows the suffering of body and mind those ragged, sick and hungry Confederate prisoners [experienced],” noted one local resident several years after the war was over. “[T]hese brave men went through the tortures of hell itself.”

HAMMOND GENERAL HOSPITAL 16

Number of hospital buildings

1,400

Number of beds

20–30

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Approximate number of prisoners transferred to the hospital for treatment per day

20,000

Capacity, in gallons, of the water reservoir at the center of the hospital complex

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POINT LOOKOUT PRISON

3,803

Official number of prisoners who died in captivity

Approximate percent of deaths due to diarrhea or dysentery, the leading known causes of prisoner deaths

Approximate size, in acres, of the enlisted men’s pen

Height, in feet, of the board fences that enclosed the prison pens

324

Number of prisoners who died in May 1865, the deadliest month at Point Lookout Prison

10 7

Number of cook and mess halls in the prison

Approximate size, in acres, of the officers’ pen

Official number of prisoners who successfully escaped

Number of meals prisoners received per day

Number of months that Point Lookout Prison was operational

10,000 22,000+

Number of nuns who arrived from Baltimore’s Sisters of Charity in 1862 to serve as hospital nurses

Number of prisoners who took the Oath of Allegiance during their stay

Intended capacity of the prison

23,000

Peak prison population

52,264

Total number of inmates held at Point Lookout

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Number of nuns who died due to disease (typhoid fever) during their time at Hammond General Hospital

SOURCES: LONNIE R. SPEER, PORTALS TO HELL (1997); RICHARD H. TRIEBE, POINT LOOKOUT PRISON CAMP AND HOSPITAL (2014); GEORGEANNA WOOLSEY BACON AND ELIZA WOOLSEY HOWLAND, EDS., LETTERS OF A FAMILY DURING THE WAR FOR THE UNION … (1899); JAMES M. GILLISPIE, ANDERSONVILLES OF THE NORTH (2011). WITH THANKS TO BOB CRICKENBERGER, CHAIRMAN, FRIENDS OF POINT LOOKOUT, INC., FOR HIS ASSISTANCE.

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c o s t o f wa r

$8,625 AN INSTRUMENT OF WAR BRINGS A TIDY SUM THE ARTIFACT

The drum carried by John Brown Holloway Jr., a musician in the 148th Pennsylvania Infantry, during his Civil War service CONDITION

The drum’s batter head is dry and patinated. Most of the ears (leather side pieces) are missing; the bottom head contains a one-inch tear.

serve in field hospitals. By the time the 148th mustered out of the service on June 1, 1865, it had lost nearly 400 men to battle and disease. After leaving the army, Holloway settled in Ohio, where he died on January 5, 1923.

DETAILS

EXTRAS

In addition to the drum, the collection included a pair of drumsticks, a sixth-plate tintype of Holloway, photocopies of Holloway’s military records, and a 138-page journal, thought to contain a transcription made in the late 19th century or early 20th century of Holloway’s wartime diary, with possible additions. Holloway kept his diary between August 25, 1862, and June 8, 1865. QUOTABLE

Of the fighting on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Holloway wrote, “Pretty heavy firing began this morning but did not continue

long. The hard fighting began in the afternoon and continued til night. The struggle was a fearful one though I think we gained a victory—saw the most wonderful artillery duel of the war—being on high ground where I had a good view. The work was awful—Pickett’s charge.” VALUE

$8,625 (price realized at Cowan’s Auctions Inc.

in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2009). “It’s extremely rare to encounter an identified Civil War musician’s instrument along with his personal account of such significant battles,” noted Wes Cowan, founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions, at the time of the sale, “and that is undoubtedly why this grouping generated such strong interest.”

COWANS AUCTIONS INC. (COWANSAUCTIONS.COM)

On August 2, 1862, Holloway, a native of Aaronsburg, Pennsylvania, enlisted in Company D of the newly forming 148th Pennsylvania. After serving for a few months in the defenses of Baltimore, the 148th was assigned to the Army of the Potomac’s II Corps, with which it would remain for the duration of the conflict. The regiment participated in some of the war’s greatest campaigns, and Holloway listed 14 of them—including Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg—on a label affixed to the drum that accompanied him to them all. As a musician, Holloway, when not in the line of battle, was frequently dispatched to

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COWANS AUCTIONS INC. (COWANSAUCTIONS.COM)

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in focus

by tktktktktktk

A Scene of Suffering

THE CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY IS A NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES FOR THE PUBLIC BENEFIT. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CCWP AND ITS MISSION, VISIT CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY.ORG

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

by bob zeller president , center for civil war photography

PHOTOGRAPH LIBRARY OF CREDIT CONGRESS HERE

“i noticed the 16th New York, in regimental line, this morning, and they presented a really neat and tidy appearance with their new chapeaus.” So wrote Union surgeon Thomas Ellis after passing the camp of the 16th New York Infantry during the Peninsula Campaign in June 1862. Not long before, the regiment’s colonel, Joseph Howland, had presented each of his men with a new straw hat as a means of protection from the intense summer heat in Virginia. On June 27, the men of the 16th would wear their new hats into battle at Gaines’ Mill, during which they executed a bold counterattack to retake Union artillery pieces captured by Confederate troops. By the time the fighting was over, the 16th had suffered over 200 casualties, including Colonel Howland, who received a thigh wound that ended his military career. In this image, hand-tinted at the photograph gallery for added effect, James Gibson captures the bloody and disorderly scene at a Union field hospital at Savage’s Station, Virginia, the day after the battle. Wounded men—many of them easily identifiable as members of the 16th New York by their straw hats—lie about the ground outside hospital tents as they await medical attention. The following day, most of these men were taken prisoner after Confederate forces attacked and overran Savage’s Station.

PHOTOGRAPH LIBRARY OF CREDIT CONGRESS HERE

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

25 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

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american iliad

Ulysses S. Grant and the Long, Hard Slog “ WELL, GRANT, WE’VE HAD THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY, HAVEN’T WE?” WILLIAM T. SHERMAN TO ULYSSES S. GRANT (PICTURED RIGHT) AT THE BATTLE OF SHILOH

To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.

takes solace from Grant’s dogged persistence during the Overland Campaign of 1864. “I felt I was fighting my way through the Wilderness Campaign,” he will tell a journalist about his year of combat during the 2007 Surge, the operation that would eventually stabilize the military situation in Iraq but initially brought a sharp increase in the number of U.S. casualties. The commander of the Surge, General David Petraeus, finds inspiration from Grant as well. During the long, arduous operation he reads a number of military biographies and memoirs, most of them of generals who prevailed in what he called “seemingly lost or at least very difficult causes,” including William Slim during World War II’s Burma Campaign and Matthew Ridgway during the Korean War.3 Prominent among these works are Bruce Catton’s Grant Takes Command and Josiah Bunting’s brief biography of Grant.4 The copy of Grant Takes Command is a gift from William Glenn Robertson, a historian at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center. In it, Robertson has written, “On the days when casualties mount, subordinates fail, politicians waver, and victory seems utterly unattainable, it may be of some small comfort to consider how another great commander successfully surmounted similar challenges.”5 Later, while on ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

arly on the morning April 6, 1862, a Union army sleeps peacefully in its encampments near Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, a few miles north of the Mississippi state line. Most of its 48,000 soldiers have no combat experience. Their commander, Major General Ulysses S. Grant, is also asleep, a few miles downriver in the small town of Savannah. At dawn a Confederate army of approximately equal strength strikes them by surprise. Here and there clots of Union soldiers make a stand, but many flee in terror. By mid-morning, thousands cower beneath the bluffs of Pittsburg Landing. Grant, having heard the sound of guns upriver, boards the steamboat Tigress. He arrives on the battlefield at 9 a.m. and rides along what remains of the Union line, giving orders to his division commanders, including one near Shiloh Meeting House: Brigadier General William T. Sherman. During the course of the day the Union line steadies but gradually falls back, finally taking refuge on the northern lip of a deep ravine. It begins to rain. Grant takes shelter in a cabin along the bluff. But it has been turned into a makeshift field hospital where the wounded groan and surgeons amputate shattered limbs, so Grant walks a short distance to an oak tree. He clamps a cigar in his teeth. Sherman appears from the darkness and joins him. “Well, Grant,” he says, “we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” “Yes,” Grant nods. The cigar ﬂares briefly as he takes a quick, hard puff. “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”1 The next day Grant counterattacks, slowly but inexorably forcing the Confederates back. By nightfall his army has recovered its encampments. A century and half later, a U.S. Army brigade in Iraq suffers six dead in a single day—nothing compared to the casualties of Shiloh, but a demoralizing loss in the context of the Iraqi insurgency. The next morning the brigade’s commander, Colonel Sean MacFarland, finds his commanders and staff downcast. “Everyone was sort of looking at their feet,” he later recalls. To rally them, MacFarland recounts the story of Shiloh and the quiet determination of Grant’s response to Sherman: “Lick ’em tomorrow.”2 MacFarland also

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

THE ENDURING IMPACT OF THE FAMED GENERAL’S DETERMINATION AT SHILOH BY MARK GRIMSLEY

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

27 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

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living history

HOW A CHANCE ENCOUNTER LED GARRY ADELMAN TO A SECOND CAREER IN CIVIL WAR HISTORY BY JENNY JOHNSTON

t was june 1983, the last day of Garry Adelman’s sophomore year in high school. Finished with exams and waiting for a friend, he headed, somewhat randomly, for the school library. Adelman wasn’t the kind of kid who sank time into bookshelf browsing, and to this day he has no idea what compelled him toward the stacks. But he was there, and the books were there, and a white one with blood-red letters down its spine caught his eye. He plucked it from the shelf, and in that instant changed his life. The book was William A. Frassanito’s Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day. In it were dozens of period photographs of the battlefield, paired with modern shots taken at the same spots, from the same angles—a sort of “then and now” comparison spanning a century. Adelman opened the book to then-and-now photos of Dunker Church, a modest house of worship that had been a focal point of Union attacks. In the ﬁrst photo, the church’s whitewashed walls are riddled with shell holes. In the modern view, the holes are gone and the trees have thinned. A monument stands on a small rise once crowded with dead Confederates. Adelman was a D student in history, barely interested in the subject. But photographs were a different story. Their ability to “capture the passage of time over place,” as he puts it, had intrigued him for as long as he could remember. He liked photographing buildings marked for demolition, with the idea of taking “after” photos later. Whenever he saw shots of his younger self, he wondered where they’d been taken and what those places looked like now. Adelman was a then-and-now enthusiast almost by nature. But he had no idea that it was a historical genre in its own right, or that photography even existed that long ago. Standing in the library, flipping through Frassanito’s book, he felt a jolt of excitement. Says Adelman: “I became, at that moment, obsessed with the Civil War and Civil War photography.” Soon the Illinois teenager was devouring Civil War books, memorizing every detail of a war he’d blown off in class. He studied 19th-century photographic tech-

“ I JUST HAD A DIFFERENT THEORY, THAT MAYBE IT WAS ON AN OFFSHOOT OF A STREAM THAT ONLY BECOMES A STREAM DURING HEAVY RAINS LIKE THEY HAD AFTER THE BATTLE.”

Garry Adelman on pinpointing the spot from which Alexander Gardner took his famous “All Over Now” photo (below) on the Gettysburg battlefield

niques, and buried himself in Frassanito’s work. Still, when he headed to college at Michigan State, it wasn’t for a history degree. “I was that rare kid who knew exactly what I was going to do with my life even before high school,” Adelman explains. He wanted to run restaurants, maybe even own them. So he majored in hotel and restaurant management. In 1989, he moved to Chicago to work for the improbably named Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, managing a trendy restaurant called Hat Dance (“an upscale Mexican place with a Japanese twist,” as Adelman describes it). The hours were brutal, but he was good at his job and moving up fast. His fate should have been sealed. Except that by this point his Civil War hobby had become more like an insatiability. Adelman had taken his ﬁrst trip to the Gettysburg battleﬁeld in college, and now he

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couldn’t stay away. “I would close up [the restaurant] on Saturday night at 2 a.m., hop in the car, drive 12 hours to Gettysburg, spend that afternoon and the next day there, and then drive back,” he recalls. He used his scant time off for nothing else, his knowledge of the battle growing encyclopedic. Back home, Adelman’s friends and coworkers didn’t share his passion, but he compulsively overwhelmed them with it anyway. “I singlehandedly made them hate the Civil War and in some cases American history because of how hard I would push it,” Adelman admits. But during his Gettysburg trips, Adelman started encountering people equally obsessed. On one trip, while browsing a relics shop, he met Tim Smith, a soon-to-be Gettysburg licensed battleﬁeld guide whose staggering Civil War knowledge made Adelman feel like a kindergartner. They struck an instant friendship. Whenever Adelman was in town, he would crash at Smith’s house, and the two would (and still do) spend endless time tromping the battlefield together. Adelman also made contact with William Frassanito. Many Civil War photographs have never been matched to an exact location, and Adelman had joined the ranks of those who scour battlefields in search of these hallowed spots. Early on, he identiﬁed the place where Alexander Gardner took his famous “All Over Now” photo-

Garry Adelman holds the first Civil War image he ever owned, an ambrotype of an unidentified Union soldier given to him by his grandmother at age 16.

graph of a dead Confederate soldier arched backward in a pile of boulders. “I just had a different theory, that maybe it was on an offshoot of a stream that only becomes a stream during heavy rains like they had after the battle,” says Adelman. The photo was listed in one of Frassanito’s books as unlocated, so Adelman called him. A teenager had stumbled upon the site two years earlier, the author revealed. But Adelman didn’t care. For one, he was on the phone with Bill Frassanito. And he had made his first attempt to contribute to history rather than only consume it.

His transformation from hobbyist to historian accelerated from there. In 1992, Adelman turned down a chance to run his own Chicago restaurant and moved to Gettysburg instead. He opened a coffeehouse, eventually selling the business to Gettysburg College, then ran the school’s food service operations for a few years. In the meantime, he passed the grueling test to become a Gettysburg licensed battlefield guide and, like Tim Smith, started leading tourists around the national park. In 1997, he and Smith published a book on Devil’s ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72

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During his inauguration as president on March 4, 1861 (pictured here), Abraham Lincoln, addressing his “fellow countrymen,” famously pleaded, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” During the coming civil war, northerners and southerners would ignore To view this article’sand reference Lincoln’s entreaty notes, turn to page 78. instead learn to despise each other.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

the Georgian informed his fellow senators in December 1860. Alfred Iverson Sr. had held a variety of state and federal offices for over three decades, had just celebrated his 62nd birthday, and in less than two months would withdraw from the Senate. This rambling speech was hardly a notable performance, and there was surely a good deal of hyperbole in it, yet Iverson spoke what many would have acknowledged to be painful truths. “Disguise the fact as you will,” he pointedly remarked, “there is an enmity between the northern and southern people that is deep and enduring and you never can eradicate it.” Iverson talked of revolution and even war but more importantly of hatred: “I believe that northern people hate the South worse than ever the English people hated France; and … there is no love lost upon the part of the South.”1 In some ways, Iverson’s remarks were premature, even though the sectional crisis of the 1850s was approaching its climax. It is doubtful that most northerners and southerners actually despised each other—at least not yet. Southern states were preparing to secede, but whether disunion meant war was by no means clear to many Americans at the time. Nor was the growing enmity between North and South considered irreversible. Three months later, addressing his “fellow countrymen” in his inaugural address, newly elected president Abraham Lincoln would famously plead, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” But the coming war would require no little hatred. In war there must be an enemy, and that enemy must be defined, excoriated, and defeated. Wartime propaganda typically portrays “the enemy” as outside the bounds of civilization or even humanity. Subtlety and ambiguity vanish. The enemy embodies pure evil, at least for the purpose of ginning up and maintaining a war fever; raw emotion supplants cool reason. “When our own nation is at war with any other, we detest them under the character of cruel, perfidious, unjust and violent. But [we] always esteem our-

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“We are enemies as much as if we were hostile states,”

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

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battlefield, its staying power as remarkable as its hyperbole. Yankee demons haunted Confederate imaginations, compounding and intensifying the real suffering and damage caused by flesh-andblood Yankees. The process of dehumanizing the enemy had begun several decades earlier, as southern intellectuals, politicians, and editors created powerful and all-purpose images of the “Yankee.” In an 1838 essay on steam navigation, London’s Quarterly Review had attempted to sum up “brother Jonathan’s” national character: “As a driving, penetrating, indefatigable, business people, the Americans have a name literally all over the world; they are emphatically the ‘universal Yankee nation.’”8 By this time the phrase “universal Yankee nation” had become commonplace in European commentary on American affairs. It evoked a certain admiration but also sly criticism, and in the United States, the phrase became something of a badge of honor. In the southern states by the 1840s, however, the words carried a distinct note of sarcasm and even a sense that the so-called nation had become a disgrace to civilization. By the beginning of the Civil War, southern editors used the phrase to encapsulate northerners’ mercenary qualities, to excoriate men who worshipped profit and served the devil. “Yankee,” a word of uncertain origin at first applied to New Englanders, came to include northerners in general. Southerners often viewed Yankees as rootless vagabonds in both an intellectual and geographical sense, men with little respect for tradition or place. Whether such critiques of northern civilization actually penetrated the consciousness of the typical southerner is difficult to say. But the idea of southerners as an embattled minority about to be overwhelmed by a northern majority fueled calls for intellectual and eventually political independence. The archetypal Yankee therefore became the ultimate villain in this narrative of cultural conflict and nascent tyranny. Confederate army chaplain Nicholas Davis knew how to tell a vivid story, such as the undoubtedly apocryphal tale of the Yankee clock peddler “who stole the land-lady’s counterpane off her own bed, and then sold it to her.” With no fear of exaggeration, he noted in a book published during the war how the word Yankee applied to “their every act of lying and stealing from the days of Washington till the present hour, in all their political, legislative, executive, commercial, civil, moral, literary, sacred, profane, theological, and diabolical history.” And just to make sure readers grasped the point, he recited a long list of adjectives capturing the northern character in all its infamy: “medTo view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.

“ THE MAGNITUDE OF THEIR LOVE [FOR THEIR FAMILIES] IS ONLY EQUALED BY ONE SINGLE THING, AND THAT IS THEIR CONTEMPT—YEA, THEIR UTTER LOATHING—FOR THE YANKEES.” A CORRESPONDENT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES AFTER READING CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS’ LETTERS FOUND IN 1862

During the Civil War, many southerners railed against Yankee “Puritans,” accusing their northern adversaries of no longer worshipping the living God, but instead bowing before the false idols of flag and Union. Right: Major Robert Anderson and the Union garrison at Fort Sumter gather around the U.S. flag in prayer on December 27, 1860, four months before the outbreak of the conflict.

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selves and allies equitable, moderate, and merciful,” wrote the philosopher David Hume more than a century before Iverson’s speech.² A correspondent for The New York Times who read Confederate letters found following the evacuation of Fort Henry in Tennessee in February 1862 well described such thinking: “The magnitude of their love [for their families] is only equaled by one single thing, and that is their contempt—yea, their utter loathing—for the Yankees. In these letters the Northerners are all Yankees; they are nasty Yankees; they are dirty Yankees; cowardly Yankees; infernal Yankees; d — d Yankees—in short, every kind of Yankees that the dictionary of abuse, and Billingsgate affords a cognomen for.”³ Yet defining the enemy entails more than passion and hatred; it involves the brain as well as the viscera. By the 19th century, the word “propaganda” had not yet come into widespread use, though the art was clearly being practiced. Decades later, George Orwell would observe that “one of the most horrible features of war is that all war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes inevitably from people who are not fighting.”4 He no doubt had journalists and politicians in mind— those who presented the narrative, the incidents, and the words that struck a chord, shaped opinion, and ultimately fostered hatred and resistance. But what Orwell’s point misses is that soldiers too expressed strikingly similar views of the enemy. Epithets—whether nouns or adjectives—became the weapons in this verbal war. “The truthful historian,” one North Carolina editor claimed in the summer of 1861, “will write down the Yankee Nation, as ineffable asses and miserable cowards, thoroughbred brutes and blackguards.”5 This style dictated piling word upon word, insult upon insult. Three years into the war, the Richmond Daily Dispatch railed against “Yankeedom,” this “vast assemblage of pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, infidels, and sharpers.”6 Northerners seemed capable of any crime, and any respectable Confederate could reel off a long list of their offenses with ease. Northerners and southerners had become distinct and separate peoples, at least in the claims bruited about by sectional extremists for decades before the war. “The Northern and Southern people are entirely different,” Georgian Gertrude Thomas remarked. “They are moraly and socialy as well as politicaly the antipodes of each other. This war makes the line of demarcation broader.”7 Emphasizing a North-South divide—regardless of shared characteristics and historical heritage—became critical for sustaining a war that was increasingly described as two civilizations locked in mortal combat. The Confederates developed a literature and rhetoric that strained not only credulity but the limits of language itself. It flourished and survived regardless of what was happening on the

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flower.”16 The sins of 17th-century New Englanders were legion: self-righteousness, covetousness, envy, pride, conceit, bigotry, arrogance, presumptuousness, cowardice. The Yankees’ pretended piety, civilization, and philanthropy for enslaved Africans all bespoke a deep-dyed hypocrisy that ran through the entire history of the “race.” For those seeking a shorthand condemnation, “witchburning Puritans” achieved great currency among Confederates, despite the fact that the condemned witches in America had been hanged. From Connecticut’s infamous “blue laws” through the Maine anti-liquor law, southerners saw a history of narrow-minded interference in other people’s lives. The word “Puritan” acquired an elastic meaning in Confederate discourse. Some saw the Puritans as modern Pharisees, enemies to the teachings of Christ, who turned religion into a gloomy, legalistic exercise. Others thought latter-day Puritanism largely ignored law and certainly shunned orthodoxy, loosely interpreting the Bible and eventually lapsing into Unitarianism and worse. The Puritans began, the famous proslavery ideologue George Fitzhugh argued, “by persecuting people who would not conform to their faith, and are ending by having no faith at all.”17 “There is faith about nothing—speculation about all things,” claimed an article published in DeBow’s Review a few months

“ OUR ENEMIES ARE A TRADITIONLESS, ROOTLESS RACE. FROM THE TIME OF CROMWELL TO THE PRESENT MOMENT THEY HAVE BEEN DISTURBERS OF THE PEACE.” CONFEDERATE PRESIDENT JEFFERSON DAVIS (ABOVE)

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dlesome, impudent, insolent, pompous, boastful, unkind, ungrateful, unjust, knavish, false, deceitful, cowardly, swindling, thieving, robbing, brutal and murderous.”9 To plumb the depth of such wickedness became the task of politicians and propagandists. “Our enemies are a traditionless, rootless race,” Confederate president Jefferson Davis asserted. “From the time of Cromwell to the present moment they have been disturbers of the peace.”10 As Davis and other Confederate leaders pointed out, the story had been the same in England, the Netherlands, and the United States. “History is only repeating itself in this country,” the editor of a Richmond newspaper wrote. “The brutal, cruel, greedy, licentious, hypocritical and sacrilegious Roundheads are alive against their descendants.”11 Some commentators added a racial element to the mix. “The Yankee is the same now that he was at the time of Cromwell,” remarked a Virginian who was visiting Louisiana early in the war. “It is the same now that it was more than two hundred years ago—the Saxon against the Norman, the Puritan & Cavalier, and this time Mason & Dixons line divides two Races as different as the Irish & the English, the Gaul & the German.”12 Labeling the Yankees a separate race in a most race-conscious society made sectional differences both wider and irreconcilable. Once this idea of the Yankees as an ignoble race developed, Confederate writers poured forth endless streams of abuse. Northerners were loathsome, detestable people, “the vilest race on the face of earth,” claimed one editor.13 Was bigotry, vulgarity, spite, envy, or cowardice the Yankees’ besetting sin? It was hard to choose among so many. These assumptions made it easy to dismiss any northern newspaper account—and especially those of a Confederate defeat—as a tissue of falsehoods. “It has undoubtedly become generally true of the Yankee race, that with the exception of the Chinese, they have the least reverence for truth of any people on the face of the earth,” claimed the editor of the Daily Dispatch, the largest-circulation newspaper in the Confederate capital.14 Even such broad-brush attacks hardly went far enough for the harshest critics, who maintained that the Yankees simply lacked humanity. One Confederate soldier compared them to “ferocious monkeys.”15 Religion almost immediately entered the discussion. Many Confederates cast typical northerners as persecuting bigots, and diatribes against Yankee “Puritans” were pervasive. The Daily Dispatch carried at least 225 references to Puritanism during the war, printed several long editorials on the question, and led the way in emphasizing the Puritan origins of Yankeeism. Even Robert E. Lee, according to one British military observer, “spoke of the Puritans with intense disgust” and denounced “the pestiferous crew of the May-

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Southerners focused particular ire on Abraham Lincoln, whom they characterized as both a fool and a despot. below: This cartoon of Lincoln as the devil in disguise appeared in The Southern Illustrated News in 1862.

after the outbreak of the war.18 To declare your enemy to be God’s enemy is commonplace in wartime, and in this case, helped turn the conflict into a holy crusade. The Yankees, the common charge went, warred against both God and his word. In East Tennessee, the pious Eliza Fain feared that the invading Federals “would soon take our Holy Bible and mutilate it until the word of God would become the traditions of men.” She refused to believe that “Christian mothers North laid their sons with the same loyalty of feeling upon their country[’s] altar that we mothers of the South have done. I feel it can hardly be possible.”19 An aspiring poet dismissed Yankees as a people “Whose warrant is the grasping hand/Of creeds without a Christ.”20 For Confederate critics of northern religion, the key word was “infidelity.” No longer did northerners worship the living God, but instead bowed

before the false idols of flag and Union. This encompassed everything from what a letter in a Georgia newspaper termed “inveterate Unitarianism” to “bacchanals on the birthday of Tom Paine.”21 The northern states had become infected with all manner of heresy, and lists of Yankee “isms” became standard fare in screeds against northern religious apostasy. Mormonism, spiritualism, and Millerism were prime examples but so were universalism, deism, and mesmerism. Confederates routinely linked northern infidelity with fanaticism and treated it as a disease that had swept across the North. It was described as “malignant” or interpreted as a sign of “insanity.” In this view, the northern people were plunging headlong toward national suicide. Surely southerners could never be reunited with a people who carried the most crack-brained ideas to their logical extremes. Some southerners believed that the most radical faction in the Republican Party—often labeled “Jacobins,” after the ruthless political club of the French Revolution—might even deal with their enemies by setting up “guillotines,” a term generally but not always used metaphorically. The search for historical comparisons, however, proceeded even further afield as the war began. Was the new Lincoln administration worse than Austrian autocrats or Russian czars? “Give us Mexican, give us Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese,” declared one Georgia editor who sounded like he was running out of countries. “Any government under the heavens is preferable to the United States of America.”22 Deciding what to make of Lincoln sent fearful and enraged Confederates off in many directions. As northern military preparations proceeded apace, more than one editor referred to him as the “Baboon Despot.” This combination of ridicule and horror bespoke panic and confusion; southerners would eventually deride him as both a simple fool and a crafty usurper. The prime exhibit in the case against the northern government was Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus; Confederates—including Jefferson Davis—responded by referring to northern prisons as “Bastilles,” and claiming that because the northern people could neither enjoy nor preserve their own freedom, they appeared determined to subjugate the southern people. Writing to his sons, a Georgia lieutenant explained, “But then it is better that your Father should leave and become a soldier than that you should become slaves and serfs, losing all hopes of becoming great and good men.”23 As the war progressed, defaming of the enemy intensified. A little over a month after the Battle of Gettysburg, Walter Taylor, a staff officer in the Army of Northern Virginia, declared that his “contempt” for the Yankees’ fighting ability was

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upon a fair field,” a Georgia lieutenant wrote to his father. “Puritan stock will fight.”24 As the war grew bloodier, descriptions of Yankee “cowardice” were less about physical than moral weakness. Southerners predictably pointed to their foes’ mercenary qualities. Everyone knew that a Yankee would walk a mile to save five cents. All this signified a fundamental difference in heart and soul: The northern people waged war to enrich greedy contractors, while upright southerners defended their liberties. If swindling was the Yankees’ “natural trade,” as one anonymous poet claimed, such cupidity masked a more basic flaw. The apparent prosperity of the North was nothing but a sham, or as one newspaper correspondent claimed, “railways, ships, machine shops, manufacturing establishments ... themselves produce nothing or but little.”25 Such an odd statement echoed antebellum critiques of industrial civilization and reflected hopes that the northern economy was a house of cards that would collapse under the pressures of war. The Yankees would spend millions upon millions of dollars in a vain effort to subjugate the Confederacy, and, as financial difficulties

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growing “every day.” Dismissing them as a “miserable cowardly race,” he prayed that Confederate soldiers would not “for a moment contemplate the bare possibility of being conquered by such a people.” Confederate views of the enemy shared certain themes that changed as morale rose and fell. During the war’s early phases, the weaknesses of Yankee character received the greatest attention. The first great Confederate victory at Manassas merely confirmed an assumption that the northern people were cowardly by nature. A Confederate army could easily defeat the Yankees even if outnumbered three to one, a figure regularly bandied about during the war’s first year. Some ardent patriots claimed that one Confederate could actually whip 10 Yankees. The Union capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in 1862 did not exactly end such fantasies, but it did prompt some Confederates to concede two elemental facts: early battlefield victories had bred overconfidence, and the Yankees would fight. “Our people must also disabuse themselves of any erroneous impressions as to the inability of our enemy to cope with us

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Early in the conflict, Confederate battlefield successes led to widespread southern claims of Yankee cowardice and unfitness for combat. As the war dragged on, such charges increasingly gave way to accusations about the motivations and makeup of the men who served in the Union army. left: Union soldiers retreat in panic from the field at Manassas, Virginia, in July 1861.

multiplied, even they would come to realize that fighting simply did not pay. As one Confederate soldier stationed near Yorktown, Virginia, put it at the end of 1861, “The Yankees are spending so much and accomplishing so little they cannot stand it much longer.”26 Confederate commentary began to focus on the ever-rising northern public debt. In his inaugural address on February 22, 1862, Jefferson Davis predicted that “our foes must sink” under a “load of debt” that had reached “fearful dimensions.” Yet such statements rested on contradictory assumptions, doubtful evidence, and wishful thinking. Was northern debt really a fatal weakness, some southerners wondered, or would it make the money-mad Yankees fight all the harder to make their vanquished foes assume this economic burden? The scattershot comments on Yankee character were especially prominent in Confederate assessments of northern fighting men. The stereotype of Yankee as money-grubber assumed at least two distinct forms. First, the typical northern soldier was fighting for one reason only: his pay. As the always flamboyant Rebel general John Bankhead Magruder told his troops on the Virginia Peninsula, “Our enemy, dead to the spirit of liberty, can only fight while their coffers are unexhausted. Commerce is their king. Their god is gold.”27 In essence, Yankee soldiers became men without a cause. Those who fought for the basest of motives could not measure up to noble-hearted Confederates. A second point in this critique cropped up with even greater frequency. Not only did the typical northern soldier fight for “mercenary” reasons, but the Yankees turned to actual, foreign-born mercenaries to fill their armies. Although in reality three of four Union soldiers were native born, anyone perusing the Confederate press might soon conclude that they were largely German or Irish immigrants. The obvious comparison was to the American Revolution’s “Hessians”— German troops hired by the British—and Confederates were quick to dub enemy soldiers with the same name. After First Manassas, a headline in one Richmond newspaper screamed, “Flight of the Hessians.” Northern armies had gathered up the lowest forms of humanity, many Confederates believed. Georgia Methodist bishop James O. Andrew sneered at these one-time “inmates of

foreign poor houses and prisons … the scum and offscourings of foreign lands.”28 In point of fact, Confederates often asserted, few “true” Yankees had enlisted in the northern armies. Perhaps the better class of Yankees eagerly sent “hirelings” into the southern states but would recoil at actually joining such brutes on a battlefield and putting their own precious skins at risk. What might be termed sociological speculation grew more farfetched, finally predicting that should the United States government ever resort to conscription, the real Yankees would balk and bring the war to a close. Plantation mistress Catherine Edmondston explained disparities between Union and Confederate casualty figures by asserting that the Yankees ignored the “Irish, Germans & Negroes” and only counted native-born white men.29 Indeed, Confederates almost took pity on the ignorant dupes who presumably made up the bulk of the northern armies. “It seems to me the Yankees do not care how many of their men die,” Virginian Mary Stribling remarked. “It is nothing when they have only the dregs of society and those foreigners whose lives are not valuable to the Yankees.”30 Given such broad assertions, some Confederates reveled in finding new and colorful ways— including “rabble,” “riff raff,” and “scum”—to condemn their enemies. “The crowd we are to fight,” declared a Georgia editor, consists of “roughs, thieves, [and] pickpockets.”31 In parlance familiar to white and black southerners alike, the Yankees were simply “white trash.” One Confederate soldier considered Federals from Ohio and the western states “scum, spawned of prairie mud, these world’s wonders of brutality.”32 Not to be outdone in rhetorical overkill, the Daily Dispatch predicted that the bodies of these “thieving, idle, abandoned, dissolute, God-forsaken, hell-deserving and gallows-tending” Yankees would soon manure southern soil.33 A superficial reading of virtually any Confederate newspaper would yield reams of anti-Yankees polemics, and such diatribes not only shaped public opinion but influenced the war’s course. The fight simply had to go on because the Yankees embodied nearly every contemptible characteristic in the human imagination. Appearance and even odor supposedly reflected the invaders’ base character. “I cannot bear to be nearer than three or four pews,” a disgusted Mississippi woman wrote of the Yan- ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74

“ OUR ENEMY, DEAD TO THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY, CAN ONLY FIGHT WHILE THEIR COFFERS ARE UNEXHAUSTED. COMMERCE IS THEIR KING. THEIR GOD IS GOLD.” CONFEDERATE GENERAL JOHN BANKHEAD MAGRUDER (PICTURED ABOVE) ON HIS NORTHERN OPPONENTS

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IN THE CENTURY AND A HALF SINCE ITS CREATION, THE MEDAL OF HONOR HAS

WERE IN RECOGNITION OF ACTIONS DURING THE CIVIL WAR. ON THE FOLLOWING 40 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2016

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BEEN AWARDED 3,513

PAGES, WE PRESENT 17

TIMES. OF THESE, OVER 40 PERCENT

STORIES OF EXTRAORDINARY VALOR. 41

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BORN JANUARY 26, 1841, SANGERVILLE, MAINE RANK LIEUTENANT AND ADJUTANT UNIT 6TH MAINE INFANTRY AWARDED MAY 13, 1896

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

After his VI Corps was thwarted by Confederate forces in its attempt to link up with the main body of the Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville on May 4, 1863, Union general John Sedgwick ordered his troops to retreat across the Rappahannock River at Banks’ Ford under cover of darkness. As Union soldiers crossed the river on pontoon bridges, one of Sedgwick’s regiments, the 6th Maine Infantry, covered the retreat. “[O]ur position was at the extreme right, on a bluff,” recalled the regiment’s adjutant, Charles Clark. “The spot was important. A battery of artillery stationed on this bluff would command our pontoon bridge. We had orders to hold the position as long as possible, and then, if cut off from the remainder of the corps, to make our way to the bridge if we could.” As advancing Confederate troops probed the area, the 6th’s position became increasingly perilous. Convinced the enemy was about to launch an attack, Clark pleaded with the senior captain (the regiment’s colonel had been cut off from the regiment while reconnoitering the area) to withdraw the regiment. When the captain wouldn’t, Clark did. “There was no time to be lost,” he later noted. “I rode along the line, cautioned the men to maintain perfect silence and not to rattle their canteens or accouterments, then left-facing the regiment I led them over the bluff. It was a sheer descent of fifty to sixty feet. I started over on horse-back. When part of the way down, my horse lost his footing, and I found myself falling with him through the air.” Clark soon recovered and made his way to the bottom of the bluff on foot with the rest of the men. They crossed the bridge just in time, Clark noted, “for as we went over the enemy opened fire with a battery from the bluffs above us.” Clark would be awarded the Medal of Honor for his “remarkable presence of mind and fertility of resource” 42at Banks’ Ford in 1896. He died 17 years later at age 72. THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2016

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: CARL J. CRUZ COLLECTION (MEDAL OF HONOR); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (CLARK); RICK CARLILE COLLECTION (GRANT, URELL)

CHARLES A. CLARK

GABRIEL GRANT BORN SEPTEMBER 4, 1826, NEWARK, NEW JERSEY RANK MAJOR AWARDED JULY 21, 1897

A prominent physician in Newark, New Jersey, prior to the conflict, Gabriel Grant served as the surgeon of the 2nd New Jersey Infantry during the war’s early months. By early 1862, he had been promoted to division surgeon in the Army of the Potomac. He was repeatedly praised for his battlefield conduct— after the fight at Fredericksburg in December 1862, for instance, Brigadier General William French noted that the surgeon had been “indefatigable in the discharge of his duties. Under no circumstances have I noticed the wounded more skillfully or rapidly relieved.” But Grant’s actions during the Battle of Fair Oaks on June 1, 1862, were particularly noteworthy. During that bloody clash, which produced some 5,000 Union casualties, Grant, according to his Medal of Honor citation, “[r]emoved severely wounded officers and soldiers from the field while under a heavy fire from the enemy, exposing himself beyond the call of duty, thus furnishing an example of most distinguished gallantry.” In September 1863, Grant was placed in command of the U.S. Army Hospital in Madison, Indiana, a position he held until February 1865. He died in 1909 at age 83.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: CARL J. CRUZ COLLECTION (MEDAL OF HONOR); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (CLARK); RICK CARLILE COLLECTION (GRANT, URELL)

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MICHAEL EMMET URELL BORN NOVEMBER 8, 1844, IRELAND RANK PRIVATE UNIT 82ND NEW YORK INFANTRY AWARDED JUNE 6, 1870

82nd New York Infantry private Michael Urell’s Medal of Honor citation reads simply, “Gallantry in action while detailed as color bearer, was severely wounded.” A brief newspaper account of Urell’s participation in the October 14, 1863, Battle of Bristoe Station, Virginia, is only slightly less understated, and sheds further light on the young Irishman’s battlefield heroism: “The boy, a color bearer, was left for lifeless on the battlefield, surrounded by a ring of bodies. His bayonet was bloodied and his musket stock was shattered from hard work as a shillelagh. Happily, someone noted in time he was still alive.” Urell recovered fully from his injuries and rejoined the 82nd, ending the war as a second lieutenant. He would go on to serve as an officer during the Spanish-American War. Upon his death in 1910, a fellow Union veteran remembered him as “[a] brave soldier, a courteous gentleman and lovable comrade … [who] will be greatly missed by all who knew him.”

Percent of Civil War Medal of Honor recipients who served in the: Army

Navy

Marines

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UNITED STATES ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER, CARLISLE, PA (GOULD, ORTH, PLUNKETT); STEVE MEADOW COLLECTION (HOLLAND)

JACOB G. ORTH BORN NOVEMBER 25, 1837, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA RANK CORPORAL UNIT 28TH PENNSYLVANIA INFANTRY AWARDED JANUARY 15, 1867

Of his actions at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Jacob Orth later wrote: “Business commenced quite early for the Twenty-eighth Pennsylvania Infantry at Antietam. It was six o’clock in the morning, when we charged and drove the rebels back across the fields to an apple orchard where we encountered a very hard task. No less than three rebel regiments and a battery were our opponents. To secure a victory over them meant hard fighting. It fell to my lot to encounter the color-sergeant of the Seventh South Carolina regiment. A hand-to-hand fight ensued. The final result of our short but sharp conflict was that the Carolinian was minus his flag, and I had secured the trophy. I also had a shot through my shoulder. Six other stands of colors were taken by our regiment in this charge.” Orth died in 1907 at age 69.

Number of Medals of Honor presented for Civil War service

Number of African Americans awarded the Medal of Honor for their Civil War service

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MILTON HOLLAND

UNITED STATES ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER, CARLISLE, PA (GOULD, ORTH, PLUNKETT); STEVE MEADOW COLLECTION (HOLLAND)

BORN AUGUST 1, 1844, AUSTIN, TEXAS RANK ACTING SERGEANT MAJOR UNIT 5TH UNITED STATES COLORED INFANTRY AWARDED APRIL 6, 1865

Eager but unable to join the Union army at the start of the war because of his color—he was the alleged son of a white man and a slave woman—Milton Holland enlisted in the 5th United States Colored Infantry during the summer of 1863, one of the many black units to form in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The following year, Holland and the 5th participated in the Union attack on Confederate defenses at New Market Heights, Virginia. Within moments of the start of the assault, four of the regiment’s 10 company officers were wounded. Milton and three of the 5th’s sergeants rallied the officerless companies and led them forward in the successful attack. All four would be awarded the Medal of Honor for their gallantry. Holland left the army in September 1865, married, and moved to Washington, D.C., where he held a number of jobs, including with the U.S. Post Office and the Treasury Department. Upon his death in 1910 at age 65, the Washington Bee eulogized Holland as “one of the bravest colored soldiers during the Civil War.”

CHARLES G. GOULD BORN MAY 5, 1845, WINDHAM COUNTY, VERMONT RANK CAPTAIN UNIT 5TH VERMONT INFANTRY AWARDED JULY 30, 1890

THOMAS PLUNKETT BORN 1841, IRELAND RANK SERGEANT UNIT 21ST MASSACHUSETTS INFANTRY AWARDED MARCH 30, 1866

Soon after the 21st Massachusetts Infantry entered into battle at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, 1862, joining the Union advance up the Confederate-fortified heights west of the city, the regiment’s color sergeant was shot and fell to the ground. Sergeant Thomas Plunkett, in the words of the colonel of the 21st, “seized the colors and carried them proudly forward to the farthest point reached by our troops during the battle. When the regiment had commenced the delivery of its fire, about forty rods from the position of the rebel infantry, a shell was thrown with fatal accuracy at the flag.” The blast hit Plunkett in the arms, mangling them both. He clutched the flag against his chest until a comrade relieved him of the banner. Plunkett would lose his arms but live until 1885. In 1902, a pair of rapid-fire guns at Fort Warren on Georges Island in Boston Harbor were designated as Battery Plunkett in his honor.

On April 2, 1865, Charles Gould and the 5th Vermont Infantry were part of the massive Union advance against Robert E. Lee’s defenses at Petersburg, Virginia. Gould was among the first to reach the enemy’s lines in the assault, the 5th being the lead regiment in its brigade. Upon mounting the Confederate works, Gould, in the words of his Medal of Honor citation, “received a serious bayonet wound in the face, [and] was struck several times with clubbed muskets, but bravely stood his ground, and with his sword killed the man who bayoneted him.” Gould held off the enemy until his comrades drove the Confederates from their front. He would bear the visible scar from his act of “extraordinary heroism” until his death in 1916 at age 71.

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GEORGE WHITE HOOKER BORN FEBRUARY 6, 1838, SALEM, NEW YORK RANK FIRST LIEUTENANT UNIT 4TH VERMONT INFANTRY AWARDED SEPTEMBER 17, 1891

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As his regiment moved against the Confederate position at Crampton’s Gap during the Battle of South Mountain, Maryland, on September 14, 1862, George Hooker rode well ahead, reaching Confederate lines before his comrades. By the time his men caught up, Hooker had singlehandedly secured the surrender of a Confederate major and 116 enlisted men. By war’s end, he had been wounded multiple times in battle and had received many promotions. After the war he lived in Vermont, where he was a banker and active in Republican politics. He died in 1902 at age 64.

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CHARLES A. TAGGART

JOHN J. TOFFEY BORN JUNE 1, 1844, PAWLING, NEW YORK UNIT 33RD NEW JERSEY INFANTRY

RANK FIRST LIEUTENANT AWARDED SEPTEMBER 10, 1897

The night before the Battle of Missionary Ridge, Tennessee, on November 25, 1863, an ill John Toffey was ordered to the hospital by the regimental surgeon, who told him, as the young officer later recalled, “that I was not able to take part in the engagement that we were expecting.” Toffey, “determined not to be deprived of my share of the excitement,” rejoined his regiment against doctor’s orders. Early during the Union assault of the Confederate works the following day, several of the 33rd’s officers were killed, demoralizing the men. Recognizing that “something had to be done,” the regiment’s colonel ordered Toffey to take command of the right of the regiment. “I ran across the open field and reached the advance line in time to prevent it from breaking,” Toffey later noted. “I reformed the line and we again charged the almost impregnable position in the face of an accurate and deadly fire.” Just as he and his men were carrying the enemy works, Toffey received a severe wound that would permanently disable him. In April 1865, he witnessed President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre and would also observe the subsequent execution of the conspirators. He died in 1911 at age 66.

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During a lull in the fighting at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek, Virginia, on April 6, 1865—the last major engagement between the armies of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant— Private Charles Taggart stepped out about 20 paces in front of his regiment’s position onto a slight rise of ground. From there he spotted a group of approximately 20 Confederate soldiers in a low, protected spot who were firing on Union troops to his right. A postwar account of his actions details what happened next: “Taking shelter behind a tree near by he fired several shots into their midst, when to his surprise he observed a rebel flag among them. Immediately he started for their color-bearer, demanding the surrender of the flag, which he grasped, and in the struggle for its possession he found himself assisted by another Union man who had also seen the colors and who was intent upon their capture. The two wrested them from the rebel, but Taggart’s comrade was shot down, while he, taking advantage of an opening, rushed back with the colors into the Union lines. Unfortunately the Federals took him for a leader of a rebel charge and it was miraculous that he escaped with but one slight wound on his right leg.” Lee would surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House three days later. Taggart would live until age 95, dying in 1938.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RICK CARLILE COLLECTION (TAGGART); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (TOFFEY ); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BROWNELL)

BORN JANUARY 17, 1843, NORTH BLANFORD, MASSACHUSETTS RANK PRIVATE UNIT 37TH MASSACHUSETTS INFANTRY AWARDED MAY 10, 1865

FRANCIS E. BROWNELL

On May 24, 1861, Francis Brownell accompanied the colonel of his regiment, Elmer Ellsworth, and several comrades into Alexandria, Virginia, on a mission to secure the local telegraph office. On the way, they spotted a Confederate flag flying atop a local inn. The group of soldiers entered the building, cut down the banner, and were descending the stairs to leave when the proprietor of the establishment emerged with a shotgun and killed Ellsworth with a blast to the chest. Brownell immediately leveled his weapon and killed the man, the earliest action of the Civil War to merit the Medal of Honor. Brownell would serve in the 11th until 1863, when he retired from the service as a first lieutenant. After the war he lived in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a clerk in the Pension Office. He died in 1894 at age 53.

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RICK CARLILE COLLECTION (TAGGART); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (TOFFEY ); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BROWNELL)

BORN JULY 18, 1840, TROY, NEW YORK RANK PRIVATE UNIT 11TH NEW YORK INFANTRY AWARDED JANUARY 26, 1877

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CECIL CLAY

BORN FEBRUARY 2, 1842, MADISON, NEW YORK RANK FIRST LIEUTENANT UNIT 10TH NEW YORK CAVALRY AWARDED NOVEMBER 22, 1889

After his company’s captain was killed during the Battle of Trevilian Station, Virginia, on June 11, 1864, First Lieutenant Noble D. Preston voluntarily led the 10th New York Cavalry in a charge against an enemy position. Just after Preston and his comrades dismounted and scaled a fence in their path, a Confederate bullet slammed into the young lieutenant’s right hip. “There was an instant of dizziness, a forgetfulness of everything as I reeled and fell,” Preston later recalled. As bullets struck the ground around him—Preston mused that “the Rebels were disposed to finish the work which they had but partially accomplished”—he dragged himself to a tree stump while the 10th continued forward. “The cheers, which rapidly receded in the distance, told that they were driving the foe before them,” he noted. Preston would receive an honorable discharge for disability five months later. In 1889, he published a history of the 10th New York Cavalry’s Civil War exploits. He died in 1917.

RICK CARLILE COLLECTION (PRESTON); UNITED STATES ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER, CARLISLE, PA (CLAY ); NATIONAL ARCHIVES ( WALKER)

NOBLE DELANCE PRESTON

On September 29, 1864, during the Battle of New Market Heights, Cecil Clay led his regiment in an attack against Fort Harrison, part of the Confederate defenses of Richmond. After advancing over several hundred yards of open ground while under fire, Clay and his men “struck the works on the north face, where the ditch was fully ten feet deep,” as Clay later remembered. Using his sword, which he “plunged into the embankment,” as a “footstep,” and carrying the colors of a fellow Pennsylvania regiment that he had picked up during the advance, Clay led his men up the parapet. Within moments, two Confederate bullets hit his right arm. “Shifting the colors to my left hand,” Clay later remembered, “I continued to lead the advance until that hand was shot through also, and I had to stop and lay the colors up against the parapet.” While Union forces successfully took the fort, Clay would lose an arm as a result of his wounds. After the war, Clay held a number of jobs, including as a clerk in the U.S. Department of Justice. He died in 1903 at age 61.

Number of Civil War Medals of Honor awarded posthumously

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BORN FEBRUARY 13, 1842, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA RANK CAPTAIN UNIT 58TH PENNSYLVANIA INFANTRY AWARDED APRIL 19, 1892

MARY EDWARDS WALKER

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RICK CARLILE COLLECTION (PRESTON); UNITED STATES ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER, CARLISLE, PA (CLAY ); NATIONAL ARCHIVES ( WALKER)

BORN NOVEMBER 26, 1832, OSWEGO, NEW YORK RANK CIVILIAN; ACTING ASSISTANT SURGEON AWARDED NOVEMBER 11, 1865

An 1855 graduate of Syracuse Medical College, Mary Walker volunteered her services to the Union army at the outbreak of the Civil War. At first allowed to practice only as a nurse, she ministered to soldiers wounded at First Bull Run and worked at the Patent Office Hospital in Washington, D.C. After serving as an unpaid field surgeon at several major battles, including Fredericksburg and Chickamauga, Walker was employed as a “Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian)” by the Army of the Cumberland and later as the assistant surgeon of the 52nd Ohio Infantry. Captured by Confederate troops in April 1864, she spent four months in prison before being exchanged for a Confederate surgeon. Immediately after the war, Generals George Thomas and William Tecumseh Sherman recommended Walker for the Medal of Honor, a request President Andrew Johnson signed. In 1917, however, she was one of over 900 recipients to have their names removed from the Army Medal of Honor Roll after an eligibility review. Walker and the others were not required to return their medals, and Walker wore hers until her death in 1919 at age 86. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter reinstated Walker’s medal posthumously, restoring her status as the lone female recipient of the country’s highest military honor.

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WILLIAM CARNEY

WEST VIRGINIA AND REGIONAL HISTORY CENTER, WVU (CARNEY ); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (CUSTER); FOLLOWING SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

During their assault on Battery Wagner on the evening of July 18, 1863—an event brought to life in the 1989 movie Glory—the white officers and black enlisted men of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry faced withering fire from the fort’s Confederate defenders. As he made his way forward, William Carney, a former slave who had joined the unit upon its formation that March, came across the regiment’s national flag, which had been dropped by its bearer. Picking it up, he made his way to the front of the line and joined Colonel Robert Gould Shaw in the vanguard of the attack. When Shaw was shot dead while climbing the ramparts, Carney pressed on. “All around me were the dead and wounded, lying one upon top the other,” he later remembered. Upon reaching the parapet, Carney planted his colors amid the shot and shell. “I was almost blinded by the dirt flying around me and nearly distracted by the shrieks and groans of the wounded and dying men about me.” When it soon became clear that the attack was failing, Carney “looked about for a chance to retreat under cover … wrapped the precious colors about the staff and cautiously picked my way among the dead and dying.” Before reaching safety, Carney was shot in his left hip by a Confederate bullet and received a grazing wound to the head from a passing canister shot. Of his reunion with the surviving members of the 54th, Carney noted, “When I reached these men they cheered me and the flag, and my reply was ‘Boys, the old flag never touched the ground.’” He handed the banner to the lone officer present before being transported to a nearby military hospital. Carney was discharged from the service due to disability in June 1864. He died in 1908 at age 68.

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BORN FEBRUARY 29, 1840 RANK SERGEANT UNIT 54TH MASSACHUSETTS INFANTRY AWARDED MAY 23, 1900

BORN MARCH 15, 1845 RANK SECOND LIEUTENANT UNIT 6TH MICHIGAN CAVALRY AWARDED MAY 3 AND MAY 26, 1865

Thomas Custer, the younger brother of George Armstrong Custer, was one of only three soldiers to be awarded two Medals of Honor for conduct during the Civil War. He earned his first medal for actions at the Battle of Namozine Church on April 3, 1865, where he captured the flag of the 2nd North Carolina Cavalry and took 14 Confederates prisoner. Three days later, similar actions at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek would earn him his second medal. There, according to the official citation, Custer “leaped his horse over the enemy’s works and captured 2 stands of colors, having his horse shot from under him and receiving a severe wound.” Thomas would die alongside his brother George at the Battle of Little Bighorn 53 in the Montana Territory in 1876. He was 31.

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WEST VIRGINIA AND REGIONAL HISTORY CENTER, WVU (CARNEY ); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (CUSTER); FOLLOWING SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

THOMAS W. CUSTER

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ALONZO H. CUSHING BORN JANUARY 19, 1841, DELAFIELD, WISCONSIN RANK FIRST LIEUTENANT UNIT BATTERY A, 4TH U.S. ARTILLERY AWARDED NOVEMBER 6, 2014

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Alonzo Cushing’s Medal of Honor was awarded 151 years after his death at the Battle of Gettysburg, where the 22-year-old officer commanded Battery A, 4th U.S. Artillery, during Pickett’s Charge. Cushing’s actions are detailed in the official citation that was read at the 2014 presentation ceremony at the White House: “That morning, Confederate forces led by General Robert E. Lee began cannonading First Lieutenant Cushing’s position on Cemetery Ridge. Using field glasses, First Lieutenant Cushing directed fire for his own artillery battery. He refused to leave the battlefield after being struck in the shoulder by a shell fragment. As he continued to direct fire, he was struck again, this time suffering grievous damage to his abdomen. Still refusing to abandon his command, he boldly stood tall in the face of Major General George E. Pickett’s charge and continued to direct devastating fire into oncoming forces. As the Confederate forces closed in, First Lieutenant Cushing was struck in the mouth by an enemy bullet and fell dead beside his gun. His gallant stand and fearless leadership inflicted severe casualties upon Confederate forces and opened wide gaps in their lines, directly impacting the Union forces’ ability to repel Pickett’s Charge.”

SOURCES: W.F. BEYER AND O.F. KEYDEL, EDS., DEEDS OF VALOR (1903; REPRINT, 1994); ROBERT P. BROADWATER, CIVIL WAR MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENTS (2007); RONALD S. CODDINGTON, AFRICAN AMERICAN FACES OF THE CIVIL WAR (2012); JOURNAL OF THE FORTY-FIFTH NATIONAL ENCAMPMENT, GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC (1911); “THE HONORED FEW,” MILITARY IMAGES (WINTER 2015); PETER COZZENS AND ROBERT I. GIRARDI, EDS., THE NEW ANNALS OF THE CIVIL WAR (2004); “DR. GABRIEL GRANT,” THE UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE (JANUARY 1892).

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To view this articleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reference notes, turn to page 78.

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Major General George G. Meade (seated center) and his staff, including Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Lyman (highlighted at right), in Culpeper, Virginia, September 1863

THE WILDERNESS REVISITED A year after war’s end, former Union officer theodore lyman returned to the ground where the opening battle of the Overland Campaign was fought— and recorded his impressions in two detailed letters to his wife.

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by stephen w . sears

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served as aide-de-camp to Major General George Gordon Meade from August 1863 to the end of the war, and his journal and his letters to his wife offer a singular picture of the inner workings of the Army of the Potomac in its final struggle against Robert E. Lee.1 Lyman, a well-connected Bostonian, Harvard class of 1855, had first met then-Lieutenant Meade in 1856 on the Florida coast. Lyman was collecting marine specimens for Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and engineer Meade was building lighthouses. In these lonely precincts the two struck up a lasting friendship. Lyman was on a European grand tour when the Civil War began, and wrote to Meade about securing a place on his staff. On his return to America it was arranged. Lyman soon proved to be the most highly valued member of Meade’s staff, both militarily and personally. Lyman’s first glimpse of battle came in the Mine Run campaign of November 1863, Meade’s aborted effort to turn Lee’s right on the Rapidan River in central Virginia. Lyman’s first unvarnished experience of battle came in the Wilderness (May 5–6, 1864), the initial contest of the Overland Campaign, where he served as Meade’s eyes and ears at what he called the vortex of that bloody melee. Meade’s Mine Run Campaign, undertaken in late November 1863, was an attempt to turn Lee’s strongly fortified position along the south bank

Nearly two years after the bloody clash in the Wilderness during the Overland Campaign, Theodore Lyman (above left) revisited the site of the fighting with a fellow veteran of the battle, Charles L. Peirson (below). right: Lyman’s old friend George G. Meade, on whose staff he served during the war’s final years.

To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.

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OPENING SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MEADE’S HEADQUARTERS, 1863–1865 (LYMAN); COLLECTION OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY (PEIRSON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (MEADE)

LIEUTENANT COLONEL THEODORE LYMAN

of the Rapidan by crossing downstream (east) of the defenses of a tributary called Mine Run. After sharp fighting for position, Meade’s plan of attack had to be cancelled when the target area was discovered to be heavily fortified. Meade saw no profit here, and the weather had turned bitterly cold. He withdrew, and the two armies went into winter quarters. In May 1864, with the concurrence of Generalin-Chief U.S. Grant, Meade launched a similar offensive to turn Lee’s right on the Rapidan, this time taking a wider line, beyond the Mine Run defenses and through the tangled Wilderness toward the Confederate rear. But Lee elected to fight in the Wilderness, where numbers meant less and artillery was nearly useless. The hellish two-day struggle cost the two armies nearly 29,000 casualties. Theodore Lyman was mostly an observer at Mine Run, but in the Wilderness he was squarely in the midst of the fighting. Less than two years later, in April 1866, Lyman determined to revisit his first, vivid experiences of war by examining these battlefields in their guise of peace. Lyman’s companion in this journey was fellow Harvard man Charles L. Peirson, an ofﬁcer with the 39th Massachusetts Infantry in the Wilderness fighting. Setting out on horseback from the town of Culpeper, they inspected the remains of the Confederate works on the south bank of the Rapidan River, traced the 1863 movements along Mine Run, and then moved on to the nearby memorable scenes of the brutal 1864 struggle in the Wilderness. With the same unerring eye for telling detail he displayed in his wartime letters and his journal, Lyman described this postwar journey in two letters to his wife, Elizabeth. Beyond describing the battle sites and the people he encountered there, he also meant these letters to aid him in turning his 1864 journal entries into the record of his wartime service. During their 1866 visit, Lyman and Peirson did not follow the track of the Army of the Potomac to the fighting fields, but instead crossed the Rapidan—which Lyman rendered as “Rapid Ann,” its original form combining “rapids” and England’s Queen Ann—well upstream and approached the battlegrounds from the Confederate perspective. They explored, from the rear, the still-imposing remains of Lee’s defensive line on the south bank of the Rapidan, clear evidence why a turning movement was necessary. Following the Orange Turnpike, they reached the remains of the imposing defensive line behind Mine Run. It would have given them fits to charge this line, Lyman realized.

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OPENING SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MEADE’S HEADQUARTERS, 1863–1865 (LYMAN); COLLECTION OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY (PEIRSON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (MEADE)

even, it is hard to determine.” That would seem a fair enough judgment today as well. Lyman’s 1866 letters, below, are transcribed from the Lyman Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, with only the addition of paragraph breaks for readability.

••• spottsylvania court house, va. apr. 14, 1866 My dear Wifekin: I will start this letter here and finish it, I suppose, in Richmond; for this seems a good place to head an epistle, after the experiences we have had of it. By the way, pray save this letter & my others, as I want to have them to write up my diary by. I sent you a note from Culpeper, giving our doings thaar (as the people hereabouts pronounce it). Bon. Then yesterday we started for the Wilderness, having engaged, for that end, two saddle horses and a faithful negro on a third, who was to bring them back from that place.... Our day was perfect, our health robust, and, at 8 a.m. we were on our way down the railroad, bound ﬁrst for Mitchell’s Station, which is about 4 miles from the Rapid Ann, and is the place where Gen. Warren had his sword presented in the autumn of ’63.2 About ¾ of a mile west of this place was the camp of the 39th Mass., which was noted as the handsomest in the army, for the ﬁnish and the number of the houses; and, I may add, the best situated, for it lay on a gentle slope facing the broadside of Cedar mountain and in full view of

Theodore Lyman (pictured top, second from left, at Army of the Potomac headquarters in April 1864) recorded detailed accounts of his experiences during the Battle of the Wilderness, including an encounter with Brigadier General Charles Griffin (above). right: A postwar photo of surviving Confederate entrenchments along the Orange Turnpike on the Wilderness battlefield.

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This is how he had described it on November 29, 1863: “Along their ridge the Rebels have thrown up a heavy and continuous breastwork, supported by entrenched batteries.... Any troops, advancing to the assault, would be exposed to a heavy artillery fire from the very outset, over the space of a mile, besides having to encounter the still worse musketry at the end.” Leaving the Mine Run site, the travelers continued east on the Turnpike to the Wilderness, again approaching from the Confederate perspective and coming on growing evidence of the heavy fighting here two years earlier. Charles Griffin’s division of the Army of the Potomac’s V Corps saw a breakthrough at this area along the Turnpike on May 5, only to fall back when flank support was wanting. In his journal for May 5, 1864, Lyman witnessed Griffin rushing into headquarters at the Lacy house: “He is stern & angry. Says in a loud voice that he drove back the enemy, Ewell, ¾ of a mile, but got no support on the flanks and had to retreat.” Lyman described Griffin going on in this vein, blaming his superiors, then rushing back to the fighting. General Grant, hearing the tirade, “asked Meade, ‘Who is this Gen. Gregg? You ought to arrest him!’ Meade said ‘It’s Griffin, not Gregg, and it’s only his way of talking.’” On the second day of their trip, Lyman and Peirson inspected the Orange Plank Road, parallel to and south of the Turnpike, the area where the heaviest of the fighting on May 6 took place. His description of the Wilderness in this 1866 letter to his wife harks back to his description in an 1864 letter to her: “Do you know the scrub oak woods above Hammond’s Pond, a sort of growth that is hard for even a single man to force his way though for any great distance? That is the growth of most of this country, minus the stones, and plus a great many ‘runs’ and clay holes, where in bad weather, vehicles sink to their axles.” The vortex of the prolonged fighting on May 6 (the “whirlwind of musket balls,” Lyman called it) occurred around the intersection of the Brock and Orange Plank roads. At first Winfield Hancock’s offensive that day was successful against A.P. Hill, but then a counterattack by James Longstreet pressed the Yankees back toward the intersection, where they held in a paroxysm of gunfire. In his journal entry for May 6 Lyman wrote, “on the left, along the Plank Road, there were places in front of the rebel pits, where the entire growth of saplings was cut down by musketry”—a sight that still astonished, in peacetime, two years later. As to the ultimate reckoning—who won and who lost—of the Battle of the Wilderness, Theodore Lyman made an effort to sum up in closing a letter to his wife dated May 17, 1864: “As to fighting, when two people fight without cessation for the best part of two days, and then come out about

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“ [E]very tree ... was cut down by the musketry!” THEODORE LYMAN, UPON EXAMINING THE WILDERNESS BATTLEFIELD IN 1866

lets came, wish! wish! and I went to the Colonel and told him he must detail me because that was no place for me!” At least this ci-devant ambulance driver was outspoken! And so we slowly descended to the run, and up on the opposite slope till we came to our line, which amounted to nearly nothing. I do well recollect that awfully cold weather and now see what fits we would have got had we tried to charge!6 Two miles more brought us to Robertson’s Tavern, where we halted and built a big fire in the lower room, while the infantry were going past. All this while, you comprehend, we were nearing the great field of the Wilderness, which lies east of the Mine Run region. In two or three miles we began to see marks— here a scrap of rubber blanket, and there a cartridge-box all warped and cracked with the sun and frost of two years. Then came a little log house where plainly had been a rebel hospital, and there were three or four graves, & one a federal captain, “died May 24, 1864.” A sad end to be left, mortally wounded, on the field, and linger out the last few days in the hands of the enemy! Griffin got this far, when Hayes broke the rebel line in the morning of May 5th—but we were driven back again. Then we got to the rebel breastworks, with a battery on the pike, and, in front, an open field, where Peirson’s brigade arrived just in season to stop the enemy’s advance.7 Here of course we stopped to examine so interesting a spot; as well as to look at the “Wilderness National Cemetery No. 1.” This is a small and neat enclosure, in which have been buried the remains of all Union soldiers found among the woods. They are all marked by headboards as “Unknown.” A year since the government sent down to these fields and had all recognizable graves marked with large, white headboards conspicuously lettered. In the Wilderness two cemeteries have been enclosed at places where the carnage was greatest. Thence we kept on to the Lacy house8 (see my big map, rolled up), where we arrived just at dusk having come between 25 & ☛ } CONT. ON P. 75

During their postwar sojourn to the Wilderness, Lyman and Peirson encountered myriad traces of the violent struggle that had occurred there in 1864. above: A man looks upon Union graves on the Wilderness battlefield in a photo taken shortly after war’s end. right: Trees mangled by Union and Confederate fire during the battle as they appeared around the time of Lyman and Peirson’s Wilderness trip.

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the battle ground.3 Some of the officers’ houses are still found standing, and, what was curious, there was the fair flag-staff, with the inscription “39th Mass. Vols.” The hospital was occupied by a family of negroes whose master had been “refugeeing it” during the war, and who now remarked that he could do nothing for them; which was a cheerful position. Thence we struck across country for Racoon Ford, the scene of my first cavalry fight,4 but we struck short of it and came out at Somerville Ford, a mile and a half up stream. Here we forded the Rapid Ann, at a pretty spot, by a broken dam. On the other side, to our right, rose the ridge of Clark’s mountain, and directly opposite was the high, retreating crest which was crowned by the works of the enemy. On riding laboriously to the top we found the strength of these had not been exaggerated. Besides a variety of advanced pits and batteries on the lower terraces, there ran along the summit a continuous and very heavy parapet with slashings and brush arranged as an abattis. Thence we had a magnificent view over the river and far away towards Culpeper. There was never anything more completely commanded than the north bank by the south bank at this place. Within a couple of miles we came to a farm, which for size and extent of ploughed ground and fencing, exceeded anything we had met. You must know, en passant, that fences and tillage are the two great signs of reviving prosperity. There we settled to take lunch, and rode straight to the big white house, which we found quite empty saving an “Agent,” Mr. Pleasants, who bade us welcome and set forth the universal “hog & hominy.” This great place, of 4000 acres, belonged to an old man named Morton, one of the ancienne noblesse, who has shared the fate of his French prototypes.5 He sold his estate, put the proceeds in Confed. bonds, and now is penniless. It was bought by a certain Stearns, of Richmond (a Connecticut Yankee, needless to say), who saw the times and knew that land was land and Confed. bonds were paper! Now the great front hall is full of wheat and corn, and a rough agent lives in one upper room in solitary grandeur. Thence we kept on, by asking the way once or twice, towards Old Verdiersville, which is one brick house about 3 miles west of Mine Run and on the Orange pike, which ancient thoroughfare is even in worst order than when we marched up it at Thanksgiving 1863. As we crowned the ridge that overhangs the run we came on the rebel line from the rear, and a stout line it was, with a thick embankment and great traverses all reveted with large oak logs, which a solitary man was busily splitting into fence rails. “Yes, he was in the service,” he remarked. “Kemper’s brigade. They put me out on picket at Yorktown, and the bul-

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JUNE 15, 1863. –To-day we heard that the Rebels were crossing the river in heavy force, and advancing to this State. ~ T H E D I A RY

OF A

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The epic battle of the Civil War told dramatically in the soldiers’ own words, selected from thousands of original letters home, daily diaries, journals and eyewitness accounts—many you likely have never read. This spectacular new book is more than 400 pages printed on high-quality glossy paper in a large, museum-caliber hardcover format, with four fold-out color maps. N OW S H I P P I N G !

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Voices from the Army of the Potomac: Part 7 BY GARY W. GALLAGHER the final installment in this series shifts the focus away from firsthand accounts to three titles that have garnered well-deserved attention from generations of readers. This trio includes an early postwar narrative by a leading northern newspaper correspondent; a campaign study that, after more than a century, ranks among the best of its genre; and a pioneering unit history. Âś William Swintonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Campaigns of the Army

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of the Potomac: A Critical History of Operations in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania from the Commencement to the Close of the War, 1861-5 (1866) devoted more than 600 pages of closely printed text to “that mighty creation of the patriotism of a free people, which ... waged a struggle unparalleled in its continuous intensity.” Swinton had been present for much of what he chronicled. A native of Scotland who in 1858 joined the staff of Henry J. Raymond’s The New York Times, a Republican sheet, he became one of the newspaper’s leading correspondents with the Army of the Potomac. He soon gained a reputation as a journalist who freely criticized Union generals, and who was prone to reveal a great deal about military movements and other sensitive topics. During the Overland Campaign, he ran afoul of Ambrose E. Burnside and, more seriously, Ulysses S. Grant, for what they considered improper behavior. Burnside pushed for a harsh punishment, and Grant ordered Swinton’s banishment from the army on July 1, 1864. Raymond defended his employee, observing, “We believe our readers will generally concur with us in the belief that in losing Mr. Swinton the public lose one of the most intelligent, impartial and competent of the many correspondents who have given the record of

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this war to the world.” Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac stands as Swinton’s greatest contribution to the historical record. Professing “to speak truly of actions and men whereof there has been hitherto little else than false witness,” he had at hand “such a mass of documentary material as it seldom falls to the writer of contemporary history to obtain.” This bounty of evidence came from veterans of the army who trusted Swinton and sent him “manuscript ofﬁcial reports ... [and] a prodigious mass of memoirs, private note-books, dispatches, letter-books, etc.” Access to such items, together with Swinton’s personal knowledge of many battles and characters, lends an unusual degree of authority to his book—though readers always should keep in mind his obvious prejudices. A theme throughout the book is that the army’s soldiery deserved better leadership. Swinton insisted that both George B. McClellan and George G. Meade failed their men, whose willingness to shed blood won tactical victories the commanders frittered away by not pursuing Robert E. Lee aggressively after Antietam and Gettysburg. Joseph Hooker performed even more ineptly at Chancellorsville: “The officers despised his generalship, and the rank and file were puzzled at the result of a battle in which they had been foiled without being fought, and caused to retreat without the consciousness of having been beaten.” Swinton anticipated Lost Cause explanations for Confederate defeat in describing the Army of Northern Virginia as “that incomparable infantry ... which for four years carried the Revolt on its bayonets, opposing a constant front to the mighty concentration of power brought against it....” In the end, wrote Swinton in a passage that doubtless would have elicited nods of approval from former Confederates, “the army of Northern Virginia fell before the massive power of the North, yet what vitality had it shown! How terrible had been the struggle!”

John Bigelow Jr. applied ﬁrsthand knowledge of military affairs to his study of Chancellorsville. A West Pointer, he served with the 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry in the 1870s and 1880s. He received multiple wounds and won a Silver Star at San Juan Hill in 1898 during the war with Spain. While teaching military science and tactics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1890s, he chose Chancellorsville as the “theme for a course of lectures ... because that campaign presented a greater variety of mili-

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“ The officers despised his generalship, and the rank and file were puzzled at the result of a battle in which they had been foiled without being fought, and caused to retreat without the consciousness of having been beaten.” WILLIAM SWINTON ON GENERAL JOSEPH HOOKER’S PERFORMANCE AT THE BATTLE OF CHANCELLORSVILLE

U.S. Army veteran John Bigelow Jr. (below left) applied firsthand knowledge of military affairs to his detailed study of the Chancellorsville Campaign. above: Union artillerists rush a gun forward during the fighting at Chancellorsville. opposite page: Henry J. Raymond, founder and editor of The New York Times.

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tary problems and experiences than any other in which an army of the United States had taken part.” From this beginning emerged The Campaign of Chancellorsville: A Strategic and Tactical Study, a 528-page masterpiece published in 1910 by Yale University Press (Morningside Press produced a superb reprint in the 1990s; other reprints, which lack the maps, should be avoided). Bigelow’s book set a standard seldom matched by subsequent campaign histories. Drawing on the Official Records and

other available sources, scrupulously fair in assessing commanders on both sides, and meticulous in charting the ebb and flow of the action, Bigelow fully met his stated goal: “My object in describing the campaign has been not only to tell what was done, but also to show how it was done, to present a characteristic, or typical, view of the conditions and methods of troop-leading that obtained during our Civil War.” Forty-seven maps, which often show the tactical situation in 30minute increments, allow readers to

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“ For at least one hundred years, the word Gettysburg was to have a unique meaning for Americans, rivaled only by two other names, Lexington and Concord, where the American story had begun.” ALAN T. NOLAN IN THE IRON BRIGADE: A MILITARY HISTORY

Union general John Reynolds is shot as he supervises the deployment of the Iron Brigade during the first day of the fighting at Gettysburg. By battle’s end, the Iron Brigade would suffer more than 1,000 casualties.

unique meaning for Americans, rivaled only by two other names, Lexington and Concord, where the American story had begun. The Iron Brigade from the Old Northwest had been there, and there it had made its last stand.” Never the same after Gettysburg, the unit underwent a number of organizational changes but maintained a presence in the Army of the Potomac until Appomattox. A native Hoosier and prominent attorney in Indianapolis, Nolan adopted an expansive approach for his study. Rather than rush readers to the battlefield, he allocated nearly a quarter of his attention to how the men came into service, who commanded them, how politics intruded on the process of raising regiments, and other important topics. This conveys a good sense of the inner workings of the individual regiments and of the brigade before the first shot is fired. Unlike many authors who become mired in tactical detail, Nolan ensured that readers remain in control of the action. A gifted literary stylist, Nolan wove compelling personal testimony into his

chapters. He highlighted the motivations of members of the brigade, their opinions about military subjects and politics (including emancipation and slavery), and their day-to-day concerns. He thus brought a human dimension to the story, which, in tandem with analytical passages that in no way compromised the power of the narrative, resulted in a book that is satisfying on several levels. Swinton, Bigelow, and Nolan relied heavily on the kinds of testimony discussed in the ﬁrst six installments of “Voices from the Army of the Potomac.” Both the published primary accounts and later works that drew on them remind us of the bountiful literary evidence relating to the army—and explain why exploration of the army’s history, and of its ofﬁcers and enlisted men, can be deeply satisfying. GARY W. GALLAGHER IS THE JOHN L. NAU III PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. HIS MOST RECENT BOOKS ARE BECOMING CONFEDERATES: PATHS TO A NEW NATIONAL LOYALTY (2013) AND THE AMERICAN WAR: A HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA (2015; WITH JOAN WAUGH).

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follow the action very closely. Bigelow’s summary judgments indict Hooker for fumbling away a brilliant opportunity to punish Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. “No greater mistake was made during the campaign than Hooker’s ﬁnal one of recrossing the Rappahannock,” asserted Bigelow. “Lee was about to play into his hands by attacking him on his own ground; the condition on which his plan of operation was based was at last to be realized, when he weakly retired from the contest.” Alan T. Nolan’s The Iron Brigade: A Military History (1961) introduced Centennial-era readers to one of the great ﬁghting brigades of the Civil War. At the peak of its power, the all-western brigade comprised the 19th Indiana, 24th Michigan, and 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin. Eighteen hundred strong as it went into action at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, it suffered more than 1,000 casualties along the slopes of McPherson’s and Seminary Ridges. “For at least one hundred years,” wrote Nolan with obvious feeling, “the word Gettysburg was to have a

A Reconstruction Bookshelf BY BROOKS D. SIMPSON

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It’s safe to say that while many Americans take a great interest in the battles and leaders of the Civil War, far fewer are familiar with the events of Reconstruction, the dozen years after the conflict. Moreover, much of what people do know about this time—when the federal government attempted to rebuild the country and define the meaning of freedom for millions of former slaves—comes from dated scholarship that reached its

most popular expression in the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. As a historian of Reconstruction politics and policy, I often find it challenging to contest long-held beliefs about these important postwar years—speciﬁcally the view that Reconstruction was a wrong-headed effort to punish white southerners by constructing new regimes throughout the South led by irresponsible whites and incompetent

blacks, and supported by federal bayonets. I also find that people seem reluctant to read about this area of American history. For those who are interested in an introduction to Reconstruction, the following list of books, while far from exhaustive, is a first step to understanding the period that to a large extent determined what the Civil War did—and did not—achieve. Start with Eric Foner’s masterful Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988). Like W.E.B. DuBois in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935), Foner places African Americans at the center of his story, highlighting the achievements of Reconstruction even as he chronicles its collapse in the 1870s. Foner gives due emphasis to events in the North as well as the South that shaped the outcome of

In this sketch by Alfred R. Waud, a federal official stands between armed groups of southern whites and African Americans during Reconstruction, the important but oftoverlooked period that followed the end of the Civil War.

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Reconstruction, and he reminds us that the period witnessed a true political, economic, and social revolution, however abortive. Those in search of a quicker read (Foner’s Reconstruction is over 700 pages) might consult the author’s Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (2005), a much more concise introduction to the period. Although over a half-century old, John Hope Franklin’s Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961) remains an excellent treatment of the period, with a keen appreciation of Reconstruction’s possibilities, achievements, failures, and shortcomings. A more recent overview of Reconstruction that challenges prevailing understandings is Mark Wahlgren Summers’ The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (2014). Summers suggests that scholars have underestimated the importance of sectional reconciliation and placed far more emphasis on black rights than many policymakers at the time. In short, according to Summers, the revolution that Foner believes was left unﬁnished

was never really intended: The war for reunion was, all things considered, a resounding triumph, even if a messy one. Many wonder what might have happened differently if white southerners had been left to work out their own issues during the immediate postwar years. Fortunately, Dan T. Carter’s When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South (1985) reminds us that white southerners, encouraged by a supportive president, had just such an opportunity immediately after the war, and they used it to subordinate African Americans as much as they could. Republican policy initiatives, often portrayed as sparking white supremacist violence, were in fact a reaction to this suppression. In After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (2015), Gregory P. Downs takes the federal occupiers’ point of view to describe why and how the United States military responded to protect the freedpeople and help construct a new political order to promote freedom and equality. Meanwhile, Leon F. Litwack’s Been In The

Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979) remains essential to understanding the perspective of the newly liberated blacks. This is narrative history from the bottom up at its finest, rich with stories that help us recover what was going on in the South as blacks sought to carve out a new existence. Taken together these three books highlight the limitations as well as the possibilities of Reconstruction during the first years after Appomattox. One comes away wondering whether the rapid restoration of civil government in the South was such a good idea. Today, the fantastic headlines, wild claims, and rushed reporting that characterize the Internet and social media can make it hard to tell what is really happening in the world. As Mark Wahlgren Summers argues in A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction (2009), things were not much different during Reconstruction, when exaggeration and sensationalism often held sway. Yet the stories of white supremacist terrorist violence

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ON OUR WEBSITE

Recently Reviewed @The Bookshelf CIVILWARMONITOR.COM/BOOK-SHELF

The World the Civil War Made ED. BY GREGORY P. DOWNS AND KATE MASUR (UNC PRESS, 2015)

“This volume will radically change how historians approach the post-Civil War period…. [M]arshaling an impressive cast of scholars, asking new questions, wielding innovative methodologies, and declaring fresh paradigms, Downs and Masur’s volume reveals that the field has matured enough not to displace [Eric] Foner, but rather to complicate, expand, and collapse existing interpretations about the kind of world America’s Civil War wrought.” —Andrew F. Lang

The Civil War Guerrilla ED. BY JOSEPH M. BEILEIN JR. AND MATTHEW C. HULBERT (UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY, 2015)

“Joseph Beilein and Matthew Hulbert have compiled an anthology that addresses the complexity of guerrilla warfare during the Civil War while expanding the field into the arena of postwar interpretations.” —Brian McKnight

against African Americans and their allies were not fabricated tales, as Douglas R. Egerton vividly reminds us in The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (2014). Those Americans who think that terrorism or the violent overthrow of regimes never happened in the United States will have their eyes opened. Why such violence became the preferred means of overthrowing Reconstruction in the South is the theme of Michael Perman’s The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (1984). Perman shows how politicians’ efforts to move past Reconstruction and focus on other issues were foiled by economic depression, Republican factionalism, and the disintegration of centrist politics in the South. In the wake of these setbacks, white southerners were determined to topple Republican regimes by force. Taken together, the studies of Summers, Egerton, and Perman also remind us that growing northern apathy toward events in the South, as well as erosion of both the will and the ability of Republicans to prevail,

Inventing Custer BY EDWARD CAUDILL AND PAUL ASHDOWN (ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD, 2015)

“This book is not only essential reading for Custer aficionados, but for anyone who seeks to understand how a historical legacy is created, manipulated, and changes with the evolving moods of an ever-changing nation.” —Jonathan Noyalas

Lincoln’s Final Hours BY KATHRYN CANAVAN (UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY, 2015)

“Lincoln’s Final Hours is a well-written, fast-paced narrative aimed primarily at a popular audience…. I recommend it as one of the better assassination books.” —Thomas Horrocks

The Battle of Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864 BY SEAN MICHAEL CHICK (POTOMAC BOOKS, 2015)

“[U]nquestionably contributes to our knowledge of the massive and underappreciated story of the long and arduous fighting around the Cockade City…. [T]he first study of these four fateful days since Thomas Howe’s groundbreaking Wasted Valor, published in 1988.” —A. Wilson Greene

Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South BY BRIAN CRAIG MILLER (UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS, 2015)

“Miller has crafted a beautifully written and extensively researched book on a topic we must give greater attention: the bodily ramifications of the Civil War.” —Sarah Handley-Cousins

played an essential role in the collapse of the endeavor to secure black rights. These books serve as a point of entry— and hopefully a point of departure—for people who seek to understand Reconstruction policy and politics, as well as the brave efforts of the freedpeople to gain what was rightfully theirs. One

cannot fully understand the meaning of the American Civil War without coming to grips with what happened during Reconstruction. BROOKS D. SIMPSON IS FOUNDATION PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY AND THE AUTHOR OF SEVERAL BOOKS ON THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION.

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a visit to Afghanistan as chief of Central Command, Petraeus will visit the 101st Airborne Division, which he had led during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. He arrives on a day when the diDavid Petraeus

MARK GRIMSLEY, A HISTORY PROFESSOR AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, IS THE AUTHOR OF SEVERAL BOOKS, INCLUDING AND KEEP MOVING ON: THE VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN, MAYJUNE 1864 (2002) AND THE HARD HAND OF WAR: UNION MILITARY POLICY TOWARD SOUTHERN CIVILIANS, 1861-1865 (1995). HE HAS ALSO WRITTEN MORE THAN 50 ARTICLES AND ESSAYS.

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Den that won the prestigious Bachelder-Coddington Award. Adelman has since written or edited 19 more Civil War books, including then-and-now books on Antietam and the Manassas battlefields. In 1999 Adelman cut all ties to the food business, at last propelling himself into history full time. He took a job as director of marketing at Thomas Publications—the company that put out Frassanito’s books—and helped found the Center for Civil War Photography, a small nonproﬁt aimed at enhancing public access to wartime images; Adelman still serves as its vice president. In 2002, after earning a master’s in applied history at Shippensburg University, he joined the historical consulting firm History Associates Inc., where he helped develop a line of business called interpretive planning. One of his major clients was the Civil War Trust, which purchases and preserves Civil War land. Adelman started interpreting battle-

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vision has lost two men killed in action. Two others died the previous day. It is, he tells a reporter, “a ‘lick ’em tomorrow’” day for his old division, and recounts the desperate first night of Shiloh.6 This is not the first time he has used “lick ’em tomorrow” as shorthand for the grit to persist in the face of adversity. Gesturing at his staff on another occasion, he tells a journalist, “These guys have heard me say it a couple of times.” He continues: “I think it takes that kind of indomitable attitude and sheer force of will at times in these kinds of endeavors.”7 That journalist, Tom Ricks, will go on to write The Gamble, a 2009 account of the Surge. In it, he observes, “As the Army has come to grips with Iraq, Grant seems to be enjoying a resurgence in popularity with today’s officers, perhaps because he is its patron saint of the long, hard slog.”8

tourS ConDuCteD By npS hiStorian SaturDay at 11am may - oCtoBer

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ROBERT D. WARD

fields and giving tours to donors, happily figuring he had just reached the pinnacle of his career. He hadn’t. In 2010, the Civil War Trust offered him a job as director of history and education. “It’s beyond any dream job that I ever could have conceived,” Adelman says. The former restaurant manager now spends his days developing animated maps, battleﬁeld apps, and brief videos about basic Civil War topics that are viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. He also oversees the stewardship of the 8,000 acres of battlefields that the Civil War Trust owns, and helps raise funds to support the organization’s mission. “Everything I do at work goes toward permanently preserving Civil War land and getting people excited about history and the Civil War,” says Adelman, who is now 48 years old. “It’s the perfect job.” But the insatiability that got him to this place still compels him to do more— particularly for the future of Civil War photography. New Civil War photos emerge all the time, he explains. So do new details about known ones. For Adelman, hunting for these details has become its own quest. A few years ago,

when the Library of Congress made extremely high-resolution versions of its collection of wartime photos available to the public, Adelman started zooming into them to reveal elements and features that someone looking at the larger photo would miss: the buttons and belt buckles on uniforms; the soldier cradling a stray dog; the Antietam grave digger, arm resting on a rifle stack, who is staring right at you. The practice has almost a time-travel effect, so clear are the details. “It really helps take people back to the moment of exposure,” Adelman says. The Facebook page on which he shares these images (“Garry Adelman’s Civil War Page”) has more than 9,000 followers. Meanwhile, Adelman continues to search battleﬁelds for the exact sites where dozens of still-unlocated Civil War photos were taken. He has found many. But a few—including “A Harvest of Death,” a series of haunting photos of dead soldiers, taken somewhere on the Gettysburg battleﬁeld—have eluded him for nearly three decades. “The whole purpose is that you transform a photograph from an illustration in a book to a primary document,” he explains. “Once you know when and where it was taken,

suddenly the information in that photo can teach you sometimes as much or more as any other account. You know exactly what that stone wall looked like. You know just which trees were here and what the terrain looked like. And there is no other account, no map, nothing else that can do that as precisely as a photo taken right after a battle.” A few years ago, Adelman came into possession of the same copy of Antietam he had pulled from the library bookshelf back in 1983. The due-date card is still inside, stamped with the date he first borrowed it. “That book started my whole life, you could say,” Adelman reasons. Without it, he never would have moved east, met his wife, or had his two boys. He never would have known what it feels like to pursue a passion that has proved so enduring. “I thought my interest in the Civil War would eventually wane or wear out, but I’m more into it today than I’ve ever been,” he says. “I’m pretty well convinced, like the expansion of the universe, it will remain constant forever.” JENNY JOHNSTON IS A FREELANCE WRITER AND EDITOR BASED IN SAN FRANCISCO.