Issue 23

Expert Picks: The Best Civil War Museums

P. 10

VOL. 7, NO. 1

E

“Muzzles were made for dogs … and no press and no party can put a muzzle on my mouth so long as I value my freedom.”

The Scourge of the Confederacy The story of John Minor Botts, Virginia’s most outspoken Unionist PLUS

SPRING 2017 H $5.99

CARL SANDBURG: THE FORGOTTEN BARD P. 28

CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

CWM23-FOB-Cover.indd 1

1/31/17 8:03 PM

CYNTHIA MOORE , WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY, LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA (COVER TOP AND TOP LEFT); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BOTTS, FORBES); COURTESY DAVID ROBINSON (PETTY)

ACWM.ORG

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

CWM23-FOB-TOC.indd 2

HISTORIC TREDEGAR 500 Tredegar Street, Richmond VA

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

1/31/17 7:54 PM

X

Contents DEPARTMENTS

V O L U M E 7, N U M B E R 1 / S P R I N G 2 017

FEATURES

Salvo

The Scourge of the Confederacy 32

{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}

The Story of John Minor Botts, Virginia’s Most Outspoken Unionist

CYNTHIA MOORE , WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY, LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA (COVER TOP AND TOP LEFT); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BOTTS, FORBES); COURTESY DAVID ROBINSON (PETTY)

By John J. Hennessy

TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

The Best Civil War Museums

VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Raw Recruits

FACES OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Elizabeth’s Father

PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Good News for Petersburg Battlefield

FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

The Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon

COST OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Colonel Paul Joseph Revere’s Sword

IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

“He has lost his right arm but I my right”

Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

The Forgotten Bard

LIVING HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Bringing Battles to Life

Books & Authors THE B&A Q&A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

WITH BEVERLY LOUISE BROWN

THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

A Brothers’ War 54

BY MATTHEW C. HULBERT

In Every Issue

Eyewitness to Gettysburg 42

EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Artist Edwin Forbes’ watercolors of the Battle of Gettysburg, which he based on the sketches he made during the fighting, present the war’s bloodiest engagement in vivid detail.

Meet The Bison

PARTING SHOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

The President in Petticoats

ON THE COVER: John Minor Botts. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. Colorized

by Mads Madsen of Colorized History.

CWM23-FOB-TOC.indd 1

The wartime diaries of Thomas and Summerfield Petty, siblings from Virginia who fought on opposite sides during the Civil War, testify to a family divided by the conflict.

By John M. Coski

1 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

1/31/17 7:58 PM

editori a l

VOLUME 7, NUMBER 1 / SPRING 2017

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

writing to attorney general Edward Bates from his Richmond home a week after the firing on Fort Sumter, planter and former U.S. Congressman John Minor Botts expounded on the unfolding march toward war between North and South. He was especially concerned about President Abraham Lincoln’s April 15 call for 75,000 volunteer troops to put down the rebellion and the decision of his beloved home state of Virginia to secede from the Union in response. “I cannot begin to give you a just conception of the excitement created, not only here, but throughout the whole Southern country, by the proclamation of the 15th,” Botts wrote. “You cannot meet with one man in a thousand who is not inflamed with a passion for war … [and] reason (with them on John Minor this point) would as soon arrest the motion Botts of the Atlantic as it would check the current of their passions.”

Unlike most of his fellow Virginians, Botts would remain a loyal Unionist throughout the war. He made clear his love of country in his letter to Bates: “I need hardly say that no man in this nation has held in higher appreciation the value of our blessed Union; no man has labored more constantly and earnestly for its perpetuation than I. No man’s heart can bleed more freely for its loss than mine; no man can mourn more sorrowfully for its overthrow than I will.”

Not surprisingly, Virginia’s most prominent Unionist did not endure the Civil War with ease. His political beliefs, coupled with his outspokenness and obstinacy—he had been nicknamed “the Bison” as a younger man—would see him run afoul of his fellow southerners, and even some northerners. In our cover story (“The Scourge of the Confederacy,” page 32), historian John J. Hennessy tells the fascinating story of the man whom his contemporaries found hard to ignore but who has largely been forgotten by history.

Want to share your thoughts about this or other articles in the issue?

Send your emails to letters@civilwarmonitor.com.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: letters@civilwarmonitor.com

2

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

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)

Alicia Jylkka DESIGNER

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

Howard White CIRCULATION MANAGER HWHITEASSOC@COMCAST.NET website

www.CivilWarMonitor.com

M. Keith Harris Kevin M. Levin Robert H. Moore II Harry Smeltzer DIGITAL HISTORY ADVISORS

SUBSCRIPTIONS & CUSTOMER SERVICE

Civil War Monitor / Circulation Dept.

P.O. Box 292336, Kettering, OH 45429 phone: 877-344-7409

EMAIL: CUSTOMERSERVICE@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

The Civil War Monitor (issn 2163-0682/print, issn 21630690/online) is published quarterly by Bayshore History, llc, 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402.

Periodicals postage paid at Atlantic City, NJ, and additional mailing offices. postmaster: Send address changes to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 292336, Kettering, OH 45429.

Subscriptions: $21.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $31.95 per year in Canada, and $41.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Views expressed by individual authors, unless expressly stated, do not necessarily represent those of The Civil War Monitor or Bayshore History, llc. Letters to the editor become the property of The Civil War Monitor, and may be edited.

The Civil War Monitor cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited materials. The contents of the magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of the publisher.

Copyright ©2017 by Bayshore History, llc all rights reserved.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Meet the Bison

Laura June Davis David Thomson Robert Poister Katie Brackett Fialka

printed in the u.s.a.

THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-EdPage.indd 2

1/31/17 5:26 PM

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

CWM23-FOB-EdPage.indd 3

1/31/17 5:26 PM

d i s pat c h e s

into possession of Lee’s Lost Order shortly before 3 p.m. on September 13 and that he acted with all due diligence that day.

The Lost Order

Maurice D’Aoust OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA

caught the error and corrected it on the president’s copy. Based on the related evidence, whoever did add the “idnight” was entirely correct in doing so.

Sears’ far-fetched theory wherein Alfred Pleasonton’s 11 a.m. dispatch to McClellan on September 13 would have been good enough for McClellan to claim having possession of the Catoctins at noon is an example of “unhistory” at its worst. In truth, Sears’ article is rife with such imaginings. For example, XII Corps commander Alpheus Williams’ message to McClellan the same day about the discovery of the Lost Order bears no time stamp, yet Sears proposes it was sent “at midmorning” and provides no contemporary evidence.

In the final analysis, it must be concluded that McClellan came

Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwarmonitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.

* * * In his article in the Monitor’s winter issue, Stephen Sears insists McClellan received the famous Lost Order during the morning of September 13, 1862, and sent a telegram to Lincoln confirming the discovery at noon. As evidence, Sears cites the famous story of a southern sympathizer who observed McClellan talking with local dignitaries in his headquarters tent at the time the general was handed the Lost Order. McClellan reportedly threw up his hands and said, “Now I know what to do.”

If, as Sears states, the Lost Order was in McClellan’s hands in his headquarters tent before noon, then we must ask: At what time was McClellan’s headquarters established, and when was the general there? A look at available contemporary sources indicates McClellan’s headquarters tent was located at the Steiner farm, northwest of Frederick, and not established until at least early afternoon. In fact, until afternoon this farm was beyond Union lines, and thus unsafe for a commander’s headquarters.

The Headquarters Guard during the Maryland Campaign was the 93rd New York Infantry, which was in charge of escorting the wagons and erecting headquarters tents. Their itinerary shows that on September 13 they marched 12 miles from Urbana, Maryland, to beyond Frederick.

4 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-Dispatches.indd 4

1/30/17 9:22 PM

GENERALS IN GRAY

In his zeal to prove that General George McClellan squandered over six hours on September 13, 1862, after receiving a copy of S.O. 191, Robert E. Lee’s operational orders for the Maryland Campaign, at his headquarters tent in Frederick, Maryland, Stephen W. Sears [in “The Curious Case of the Lost Order,” Vol. 6, No. 4] ignores some important contradictory evidence, foremost being the numerous accounts that confirm the Army of the Potomac’s XII Corps, including the 27th Indiana Infantry, the regiment to which Corporal Barton W. Mitchell (the man who found the Lost Order) belonged, did not even reach the outskirts of Frederick until noon.

Sears is adamant that McClellan’s September 13 telegram to Abraham Lincoln, in which the general acknowledged his possession of the Lost Order, could only have been sent at noon, or “12M,” and completely discounts Lincoln’s midnight copy. As it happens, the Official Records contains another “12M” telegram from McClellan. Dated two days earlier, it is addressed to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck. Unlike the Lincoln telegram, McClellan’s sent copy of Halleck’s message has survived. Thomas G. Clemens and Gene Thorp managed to locate that document, whose time stamp clearly designates “12 Midnight.”

Obviously, the War Department telegrapher mistakenly deciphered the time as “12M” and certainly did so again two days later when Lincoln’s message came in.

Evidently, someone (either the telegrapher, a War Department clerk, or even Lincoln himself )

The headquarters trains followed the II Corps, whose men McClellan was greeting as they entered Frederick around noon. Thus McClellan’s headquarters could not have been established before noon. John Haverty of the 93rd New York wrote in a letter on September 30, 1862, that his regiment did not arrive in Frederick until 3 p.m. From these accounts it seems clear that McClellan could not have been observed at his headquarters before early to mid-afternoon, because there was no headquarters camp established until that time. Thus the noon timing of McClellan’s telegram to Lincoln does not hold up under close scrutiny, and Sears’ conclusion is ill founded.

Tom Clemens KEEDYSVILLE, MARYLAND

GENERALS IN GRAY

ed. Thanks, Maurice and Tom, for

your letters, which we forwarded to Stephen Sears for comment. He responds: Focus on the War Department telegrapher’s transcriptions of McClellan’s September 13 telegram to Lincoln—file copy, carbon, Lincoln’s copy, all in the telegrapher’s hand, all timemarked “12M.” The “idnight” added to Lincoln’s copy (to repeat) can only be Lincoln’s doing: Handed the telegram early on the 14th, seeing “2.35 AM,” he assumed a midnight writing; in fact it was a noon telegram delayed 14.35 hours

by Rebel wire cutters.

Maurice D’Aoust claims someone—War Department clerk, telegrapher, Mr. Lincoln— “corrected” Lincoln’s copy to read “12 Midnight,” to match McClellan’s sending copy. But I must ask: How did that someone know

to “correct” Lincoln’s copy (but not the file and carbon copies)?

There’s no sending copy; there’s no “corrective” dispatch from McClellan. There are just three telegrapher copies, all marked “12M.” No one in Washington knew more than that.

12M is telegraphese for Meridian, noon. There are a half-dozen McClellan dispatches, in his hand, marked “12M,” to show his standard usage for referencing noon. McClellan wrote his Lost Order telegram moments after the order was shown to him, at noon on September 13.

The Lost Order indeed reached the XII Corps at midmorning.

Ezra Carman (who served in the same brigade with Barton Mitchell) was there. He wrote Samuel Pittman, Lost Order authenticator, “I am digging for facts.” Pittman replied, “I thought the hour earlier than noon, and from 9 to 10 A.M. has always been in my memory.” He confirmed rushing the find to McClellan. Pleasonton indeed reported in the Catoctins at 11 a.m. (McClellan Papers, reel 31), so McClellan claimed them at noon.

Tom Clemens’ claim of army headquarters not being established until 3 p.m. is irrelevant, considering these proofs that McClellan somewhere telegraphed Lincoln at noon. Lee’s 1868 recollection (via J.E.B. Stuart) of McClellan being handed a document that startled him merits at least some informal command setting for a spy to witness. In any case, it is irrelevant.

Having studied George McClellan for three decades now, I’m confident he wrote his exuberant, unique telegram to the president

just moments after receiving it— at noon, not at midnight 12 hours later, and especially not an hour after his 11 p.m. doom-and-gloom report to Halleck. Read them both and be enlightened.

Wrong Guy

While I really enjoyed Brian Matthew Jordan’s excellent article about Colonel Seraphim Meyer and the 107th Ohio Infantry in the winter issue [“The Unfortunate Colonel,” Vol. 6, No. 4], I thought I should point out that the image identified as Seraphim’s son Edward on p. 60 is in fact an image of Confederate general John A. Wharton.

The misidentification can be blamed on the faulty caption that accompanies the image in the Massachusetts mollus collection at the U.S. Army Military History Institute. Above is an actual image of Edward Meyer from Jacob Smith’s Camps and Campaigns of the 107th Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry.

Roger D. Hunt GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

5 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FOB-Dispatches.indd 5

1/30/17 9:22 PM

DANCE

Agenda Your Spring 2017 Guide to Civil War Events

MARCH EXPO

Mid-South Military History & Civil War Show SATURDAY, MARCH 4 – SUNDAY, MARCH 5 AGRICULTURE SHOWPLACE ARENA MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

Join the Mid-South Military History & Civil War Show for its 50th anniversary event.

Over 200 dealers will offer books, relics, currency, documents, weapons, uniforms, and photographs from the Civil War and other conflicts. There will also be a veterans tribute and ceremony, speakers, and a cannon fire. $10; VETERANS AND CHILDREN 12 AND UNDER ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: MIDSOUTHMILITARYHISTORY.COM or 901-682-8000.

LECTURE

“Border Agitator, David R. Atchison” SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2 P.M.

PRESENTATION

5th Annual Red, White, Blue, and Gray Ball SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 6–10 P.M. MELROSE CAVERNS LODGE HARRISONBURG, VIRGINIA

The Shenandoah Valley Civil War Era Dancers host the 5th Annual Red, White, Blue, and Gray Ball. Don semi-formal period attire and dance to music performed by the Shenandoah Valley Minstrels. A social hour, with light refreshments, begins at 6 p.m.; the ball runs from 7 to 10 p.m. All proceeds will be donated to the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation.

“It was, indeed, a scene of unsurpassed grandeur and majesty”

$20 SINGLES; $35 COUPLES; FOR MORE INFORMATION: TOMMACK1861@GMAIL.COM or 540-743-9389.

SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 1 P.M.

APRIL

GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK MUSEUM AND VISITOR CENTER

LIVING HISTORY

GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

Over the past six years, the National Park Service has covered the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War through extensive photography and video projects. From behind the camera, Jason Martz and a team of passionate and dedicated staff and volunteers have spent countless hours capturing these once-in-alifetime events. Beginning with the anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run) and ending with the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, Martz will highlight some of the most remarkable and stunning pictures and videos he’s taken during the conflict’s sesquicentennial. $4; $3 FOR FRIENDS OF GETTYSBURG MEMBERS; FOR MORE INFORMATION: GETTYSBURGFOUNDATION.ORG or 717-338-1243.

U.S. Colored Troops Living History Encampment SATURDAY, APRIL 8, 10 A.M. – 4 P.M. FORT WARD MUSEUM & HISTORIC SITE ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

Reenactors from the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, Co. B., and the 23rd United States Colored Troops (USCT) will stage a military encampment that portrays the history, training, and soldier life of AfricanAmerican units associated with the Civil War defenses of Washington. Visitors will learn about the role of the USCT in the Union war effort, and about specific units that were trained and stationed in the local area. Historical figures such as Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood of

CONSTITUTION HALL STATE HISTORIC SITE

$3 DONATION SUGGESTED; FOR MORE INFORMATION: CONSTHALL@KSHS.ORG or 785-887-6520.

David R. Atchison

The Shenandoah Valley Civil War Era Dancers

6 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-Agenda.indd 6

1/31/17 1:29 PM

ROBERT DORN

Chris W. Taylor, executive director of the Atchison County Historical Society, will speak about David R. Atchison, the U.S. senator from Missouri and prominent proslavery activist who was deeply involved in the prewar struggle over the presence of the peculiar institution in Kansas Territory—a conflict that further deepened the sectional divide and portended the Civil War.

ATCHISON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY; THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY CIVIL WAR ERA DANCERS

LECOMPTON, KANSAS

the 4th USCT, a Washington resident and civic leader after the war, will be portrayed.

FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: FORTWARD.ORG or 703-746-4848.

LECTURE

“Conserving Civil War Shipwrecks—Research and Innovations” SATURDAY, APRIL 8, 2:30 P.M. THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA

There is no one way to conserve a Civil War shipwreck. One of a conservator’s major assignments is to research the most appropriate methods to stabilize artifacts and, consequently, to preserve them. After discussing a conservation code of ethics, USS Monitor Center conservator Elsa Sangouard will discuss recent research examples from Texas to Virginia, illustrating the nation’s efforts to preserve iconic Civil War vessels.

Note that seating is limited and can be reserved by contacting the museum in advance.

HARDIN H COUNTY T ENNE S S E E

LIVING HISTORY

Civil War Court Day SATURDAY, MAY 20, 10 A.M. – 5 P.M. HISTORIC SPOTSYLVANIA COURTHOUSE SPOTSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA

Travel back in time, witness a historic court procedure, and decide for yourself if the verdict was fair or unjust. Take a guided tour of the courthouse, interact with reenactors, and enjoy the offerings of various food vendors.

The nearby Spotsylvania County Museum will be open for more information on the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse.

FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: VISITSPOTSY.COM/HISTORIC-COURTDAY or 540-507-7090.

7

OUR MEETINGS MAKE

history

join us for the 155th anniversary of the battle of shiloh HHH

GENERAL S BREAKFAST AT CHERRY MANSION • APRIL 1 SHILOH REENACTMENT · APRIL 6-9 SHILOH GRAND ILLUMINATION • APRIL 8

FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: MARINERSMUSEUM.ORG or 757-591-7789.

tourhardincounty.org

MAY

tnvacation.com

LIVING HISTORY

Battle of Resaca Reenactment FRIDAY, MAY 19 – SUNDAY, MAY 21

Caroline Janney

CHITWOOD FARM

The first major battle of the Atlanta Campaign was fought around the tiny village of Resaca on May 14–15, 1864. Over two days, Union and Confederate forces attacked and counterattacked, with both armies losing approximately 2,800 men. Commemorate the battle by attending Georgia’s oldest and largest reenactment at the historic Chitwood Farm, one of the few such events in the nation held on part of an original battlefield. Reenactors will portray the infantry, cavalry, and civilian refugees who converged on Resaca, while period sutlers and modern-day food vendors offer breakfast, lunch, and dinner onsite. $5 ADULTS; $2 CHILDREN UNDER 12; INFANTS ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: BATTLEOFRESACA@GMAIL. COM or 706-625-3200.

ROBERT DORN

ATCHISON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY; THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY CIVIL WAR ERA DANCERS

RESACA, GEORGIA

DISCUSSION

Civil War Conversation— Appomattox’s Peace Memorial THURSDAY, MAY 25, 6:30 P.M. MUSEUM OF THE CONFEDERACY–APPOMATTOX APPOMATTOX, VIRGINIA

Though the War Department was moving forward with plans to erect a Peace Monument at Appomattox Court House in the summer of 1932, the monument was never built. Purdue University historian Caroline Janney leads a discussion about the fierce battle that erupted over plans to build a monument at the place where peace had been secured nearly 70 years earlier. $5 MUSEUM MEMBERS; $10 NONMEMBERS; FOR MORE INFORMATION: ACWM.ORG or 434-352-5791.

Share Your Event

Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space?

Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com

CWM23-FOB-Agenda.indd 7

1/31/17 1:29 PM

Salvo Facts, Figures & Items of Interest

The elaborate entrance hall of the White House of the Confederacy was the first room encountered by visitors when entering the building, which was the residence of President Jefferson Davis and his family during the Civil War. The historic Richmond structure has been overseen for more than a century by the Museum of the Confederacy, one of the country’s premier Civil War museums.

For more on the best Civil War museums, turn the page. 3

8 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR  SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-Salvo.indd 8

1/31/17 1:07 AM

IN THIS SECTION travels 10 THE BEST CIVIL WAR MUSEUMS voices 16 RAW RECRUITS faces of war 18 ELIZABETH’S FATHER preservation 20 GOOD NEWS FOR PETERSBURG BATTLEFIELD figures 22 THE COOPER SHOP VOLUNTEER REFRESHMENT SALOON cost of war 24 COLONEL PAUL JOSEPH REVERE’S SWORD

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM

in focus 26 “HE HAS LOST HIS LEFT ARM BUT I MY RIGHT”

9 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FOB-Salvo.indd 9

1/31/17 1:07 AM

s a lv o

t r av e l s

The Best Civil War Museums O U R E X P E R T S R E C O M M E N D T H E I R F AV O R I T E S

National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

Michael Weeks AUTHOR, THE COMPLETE CIVIL WAR ROAD TRIP GUIDE (NEW EDITION, 2016) CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

The stories relayed at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (50 E. Freedom Way, Cincinnati, OH; 513-333-7500) are amazing. They tell not only about the horrors of slavery but also the courageous souls who actively fought against the institution. The center is in a beautiful, massive building that is packed with modern displays that present viewpoints from every conceivable angle.

While its focus is the United States, it doesn’t let you forget about the millions of enslaved persons suffering around the globe today. Its location is also a center-

10 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-Travels.indd 10

1/31/17 1:16 AM

PENELOPE M. CARRINGTON/THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM (TOP); MISSOURI CIVIL WAR MUSEUM

way to engage with the history of the Civil War is to visit one of the conflict’s preserved battlefields, that walking the same ground over which the opposing armies fought and died is to come as close as possible to learning about the struggles of the men and women who served as soldiers, caregivers, or in other roles. While doing so undeniably offers a valuable perspective, it’s not necessarily the best way to gain a complete sense of the conflict. Increasingly, delivering that experience is the role of the country’s many Civil War museums. For this, our first-ever special Travels feature, we asked a panel of avid Civil War travelers to recommend their three favorite Civil War museums. We hope the resulting list, while admittedly nowhere near exhaustive, provides readers with destinations for their next Civil War sojourn.

CYNTHIA MOORE , WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY, LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA (TOP); NATIONAL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD FREEDOM CENTER

it’s often said that the ideal

PENELOPE M. CARRINGTON/THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM (TOP); MISSOURI CIVIL WAR MUSEUM

CYNTHIA MOORE , WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY, LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA (TOP); NATIONAL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD FREEDOM CENTER

American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar

piece of Cincinnati’s revitalized riverfront, so after your visit, drive along the Ohio River and see many of the Underground Railroad sites that still remain.

The Civil War in Missouri and neighboring Kansas was violent and personal, and lasted much longer than the period of 1861–1865. You can still get a sense of that today by visiting sites along the

Missouri Civil War Museum

Kansas-Missouri border, where you’ll hear a Yankee or Rebel take on the conflict depending on which side of the state line you’re on. That’s one of the reasons the Missouri Civil War Museum (222 Worth Rd., St. Louis, MO; 314-845-1861) is so impressive to me. It’s the most impartial and balanced site I’ve seen that covers that contentious period in detail. Plus,

the building in which it’s housed—the historic Jefferson Barracks Post Exchange and Gymnasium Building—makes for a fascinating and unique setting.

For decades, Richmond’s Museum of the Confederacy (1201 E. Clay Street, Richmond, VA; 804-649-1861) was the Smithsonian of the South, boasting an amazing collection of artifacts and manuscripts, as well as overseeing the preservation and interpretation of the historic home that served as the White House of the Confederacy. Its merger in 2013 with the city’s American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar (500 Tredegar Street, Richmond, VA; 804-649-1861) to form the American Civil War Museum seems like a can’t-miss proposition, as do the new museum’s plans to expand into a 7,000-square-foot space at the Tredegar site. If the ACWM’s satellite location at Appomattox (159 Horseshoe Rd., Appomattox, VA; 434-352-5791), which opened in 2012, is any indication of what’s to come, we’re in for a real treat when the new facility opens in 2018.

11 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FOB-Travels.indd 11

1/31/17 1:16 AM

The “Recumbent Lee” monument at the Lee Chapel and Museum

Len Riedel EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE NONPROFIT BLUE AND GRAY EDUCATION SOCIETY; EDITOR OF THE CIVIL WAR: A TRAVELER’S GUIDE (2016) CHATHAM, VIRGINIA

People have been attempting to understand Robert E. Lee since the days of the Civil War. A visit to the Lee Chapel and Museum (204 W. Washington St., Lexington, VA; 540-458-8768) is among the best ways to do so. The chapel, built at Lee’s request during his tenure as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) from 1865 until his death in 1870, contains his meticulously preserved office, where he guided the young students who would lead the post-Civil War South for decades to come. It is also home to the Lee family crypt—the final resting place of Lee’s parents, wife, and children (Lee was buried beneath the chapel before the crypt’s construction)—and a magnificent monument, “Recumbent Lee.” Outside the chapel is the final resting spot of the

general’s beloved horse, Traveller, and across campus is Grace Episcopal Church (since renamed R.E. Lee Memorial Episcopal Church), where he attended services and served as an elder. I remember, as a cadet at the nearby Virginia Military Institute, being compelled to salute the general when passing the chapel. While cadets are no longer required to do so, Lee Chapel remains a special place.

Battle of Richmond Visitor Center (101 Battlefield Memorial Hwy, Richmond, KY; 859-624-0013) is an inspirational reminder of a rather insignificant and uneven engagement fought between the forces of generals Edmund Kirby Smith and William Nelson on August 29 and 30, 1862. Located in the Rogers House—around which the battle White Oak Civil War Museum

swirled and which served as a hospital after the lopsided Confederate victory— the center, which opened in 2008, is the robust product of a dedicated staff and local preservation association. Its sophisticated electronic map sets up a well marked battlefield tour, while its wonderful artifacts and an impressive number of locally produced brochures on a variety of topics and personalities hold visitors’ attention.

The White Oak Civil War Museum (985 White Oak Rd., Fredericksburg, VA; 540-371-4234) remains one of the most important interpretive Civil War sites.

Founded more than 20 years ago in Stafford County, Virginia—an area where Union and Confederate forces frequently camped, marched, and fought—the museum contains thousands of locally dug artifacts as well as a re-creation of a winter army camp. Although nearby Fredericksburg and its battlefields are the most significant resources in the area, visitors would be remiss to not also stop by the White Oak Museum. Together, they make for a significant Civil War experience.

12 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-Travels.indd 12

1/31/17 1:16 AM

CLAUDIO VASQUEZ (TOP); COURTESY OF NCDNCR

t r av e l s

CYNTHIA MOORE , WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY, LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA (TOP); STAFFORD COUNTY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND TOURISM

s a lv o

Drew Gruber EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CIVIL WAR TRAILS; MEMBER, VIRGINIA BOARD OF HISTORIC RESOURCES WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA

While many people shy away from indepth looks at anything medical, the well-curated exhibits at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine (48 E.

Patrick St., Frederick, MD; 301-695-1864) are not only inviting but engaging. The dioramas are both evocative and distant enough to suggest human suffering without being too graphic. Located in downtown Frederick, which contains many museums and other exhibits, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine stands out as a real treat, a place where you can easily spend several hours. Consider also Fort Fisher State Historic Site

CLAUDIO VASQUEZ (TOP); COURTESY OF NCDNCR

CYNTHIA MOORE , WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY, LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA (TOP); STAFFORD COUNTY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND TOURISM

National Museum of Civil War Medicine

taking in the museum’s two affiliated sites, the Pry House (18906 Shepherdstown Pike, Keedysville, MD; 301-4162395) and the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum (437 7th St. NW, Washington, D.C.; 202-824-0613), for a fuller story of medical care during the conflict.

Located in Charleston’s historic Market Hall, the Confederate Museum (188 Meeting St., Charleston, SC; 843-723-1541) boasts an immense number of Confederate artifacts—from swords to uniforms to flags—rarely seen in publications or rotating exhibits outside its walls. (My favorite piece is a green knit balaclava, or head and face covering, that belonged to a Confederate soldier.) Founded in 1899 by the Charleston chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the museum has a wonderful early-20thcentury feel. And while it might not be the most engaging spot for kids, a dedicated Civil War buff could spend a lot of quality time there.

The exhibits at Fort Fisher State Historic Site (1610 Fort Fisher Blvd. S., 13 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FOB-Travels.indd 13

1/31/17 1:16 AM

s a lv o

t r av e l s

Garry Adelman DIRECTOR OF HISTORY AND EDUCATION, CIVIL WAR TRUST; VICE PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY BRUNSWICK, MARYLAND

While not technically a museum, Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center (501 W. Linden St., Corinth, MS; 662-287-9273) is foot for foot the best targeted Civil War educational facility in the country.

The exhibit flow introduces visitors to the context of the Civil War, then takes

them through the Battle of Shiloh, and thence to Corinth as both a town and, in October 1862, a battlefield. The audiovisuals and other exhibits are simple and tastefully done, and the peaceful water feature located in the center’s courtyard, called “The Stream of American History,” is a moving experience—literally— that serves as a great transition from the museum facility to the battlefield.

The National Civil War Museum (1 Lincoln Circle, Harrisburg, PA; 717260-1861) is a beautiful and rather wellknown facility that remains elusive to many Civil War travelers due to its somewhat out-of-the-way location. Those who make the trek, however, will find an incredible collection, excellent interpreCorinth Civil War Interpretive Center

tation, and an active roster of rotating exhibits and special events that keep visitors coming back. The museum evenly covers the entire war, so you’ll see everything from personalized weaponry (like the swords of generals Joseph B. Kershaw and Alexander S. Webb) to regimental flags, limber chests, letters, field desks, Robert E. Lee’s Bible, military commissions, shovels, and bloodstained and bullet-riddled books. Their focus has also resulted in a giant collection of artifacts, manuscripts, and research assets.

Pamplin Historical Park & The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier (6125 Boydton Plank Rd., Petersburg, VA; 804-861-2408) is situated on and adjacent to the place where the most consequential attack of the Civil War—the final breakthrough of the Confederate lines around Petersburg (which led to the evacuation of Richmond that evening) in April 1865—occurred, but it boasts four museums, four antebellum homes, living-history venues, and shopping opportunities for history buffs. The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier, the main museum at Pamplin, uses

14 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-Travels.indd 14

1/31/17 1:16 AM

PATRICK NIDDRIE

Kure Beach, NC; 910-458-5538) are not limited to traditional interior displays, artifacts, and maps (though the 16-foot fiber-optic battle map that illustrates the successful Union attack against the earthen Confederate bastion south of Wilmington, North Carolina, in January 1865 is worth the trip itself ). Visitors also have the opportunity to stroll an interpretive walking path, dotted with trailside exhibits, around the fort’s restored remnants, including a reconstructed artillery emplacement.

NATIONAL CIVIL WAR MUSEUM (TOP); SHILOH NMP

National Civil War Museum

innovative technology to tell the story of the 3 million common volunteers who fought in the conflict. Galleries include interactive computers, videos, life-sized dioramas, and more than 1,000 period relics. Most memorable is the multisensory battlefield simulation, “Trial by Fire,” which re-creates the sounds and sights of combat, including big-screen views of an advancing enemy, shouted orders from officers, shaking floors when cannon roar, and puffs of air that simulate enemy fire. It is simply an unforgettable experience. I also love its adventure camp for kids and adults alike, during which you live like a soldier for 24 hours on the battlefield—uniforms, drill, hardtack, winter huts, and all.

Patrick Brennan

PATRICK NIDDRIE

NATIONAL CIVIL WAR MUSEUM (TOP); SHILOH NMP

Confederate Memorial Hall Museum

EDITORIAL ADVISOR, THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR; AUTHOR, SECESSIONVILLE: ASSAULT ON CHARLESTON (1996) AND SEVERAL OTHER BOOKS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Springfield, Illinois, hosts a wealth of

Lincolniana, including the 16th president’s antebellum home, the Old State Capitol where he served as a member of the state legislature, and his grave.

Twelve years ago, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (112 N. 6th St., Springfield, IL; 217-558-8844) joined the lineup and almost immediately became the most popular presidential museum in the country—with good reason. Two separate journeys guide you through Lincoln’s life. The first begins at his boyhood cabin and leads you through his career to 1860 and the secession crisis.

The second takes you through the front doors of the White House into his four years as president during the Civil War. The experience is immersive and amazing, whether you are peeking into his law office, sitting in on a cabinet meeting, or confronting the enormous human cost of the conflict. When his—and your— journey ends, the emotional effect is nearly overwhelming.

Opened in 1891, the Confederate Memorial Hall Museum (929 Camp St., New Orleans, LA; 504-523-4522) may be the oldest museum in New Orleans,

but it remains an absolute gem. It claims to hold one of the largest collections of Confederate memorabilia in the country.

When you enter the main hall, which is literally packed with photos, muskets, documents, flags, and even a cannon, you will have little trouble agreeing with them. Situated apart from the typical N’awlins tourist attractions, Memorial Hall is only a block away from the highly regarded and decidedly modern National World War II Museum. The contrast between the two is both instructive and entertaining.

The Grand Army of the Republic Civil War Museum and Library (4278 Griscom St., Philadelphia, PA; 215-2896484) is Philadelphia’s only Civil War museum. Its collection is broad and includes fascinating memorabilia from the area’s many GAR organizations. Housed in a 200-year-old mansion in the Frankford neighborhood, the museum transports you back in time with a plethora of items unique to both Philadelphia’s war effort and the area’s subsequent postwar endeavors to memorialize the Union’s sacrifice.

15 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FOB-Travels.indd 15

1/31/17 1:16 AM

s a lv o

voices

Raw Recruits “It is wonderful how close to Mother Earth a raw recruit can get when he hears the ‘Hark from the tomb’ of the first shell. When the first shell passed over our heads to-day I laid so close to the ground that it seems to me I flattened out a little, yearning for a leave of absence.”

“ You are green, it is true; but they are green also; you are all green alike.”

President Abraham Lincoln (above) to Major General Irvin McDowell, urging the reluctant Union army commander to do something with his soldiers, mostly 90-day volunteers, before their terms expired. A few weeks later, the July 1861 Battle of Bull Run— a resounding Confederate victory— would be fought.

“Boy, what are you doing here, with mother’s milk hardly dry on your lips?”

Ebenezer Nelson Gilpin, recalling in his diary the first words a veteran orderly sergeant spoke to him during his days as “a new recruity” in the 3rd Iowa Cavalry, March 11, 1865

“They are considerably disgusted with our unveteran-like ways, and furnish us with innumerable suggestions. The bugles, numbers, &c., upon our caps, they regard as vanity … and it is now rumored that those of our boys who shall appear in the streets … with ‘infantry’ buttons will find themselves suddenly minus those articles.”

Zenas T. Haines, 44th Massachusetts Infantry, a militia regiment called into active service for three months, on its members’ treatment by “the men of the old regiments,” in a letter from Newbern, North Carolina, October 29, 1862 SOURCES: WILLIAM C. DAVIS, BATTLE AT BULL RUN (1977); THREE YEARS IN THE CONFEDERATE HORSE ARTILLERY (1911); FORGET-ME-NOTS OF THE CIVIL WAR (1909); THE LAST CAMPAIGN (1908); ARMY LIFE IN VIRGINIA (1895); LETTERS FROM THE FORTY-FOURTH REGIMENT M.V.M. (1863).

“ The overcoats, knapsacks, belts, cartridge boxes and haversacks were distributed yesterday morning completing our equipment….

Why have they made them all so heavy?”

George Grenville Benedict (above), a soldier in the newly formed 12th Vermont Infantry, in a letter to his hometown newspaper, October 4, 1862

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY); HARD TACK AND COFFEE (1887 ); COURTESY FRANCIS GUBER (GEORGE GRENVILLE BENEDICT )

Confederate artillerist George M. Neese, on his first time under fire in the army, in his diary, December 19, 1861. Neese had enlisted only eight days earlier.

16 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-Voices.indd 16

1/31/17 1:20 AM

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY); HARD TACK AND COFFEE (1887 ); COURTESY FRANCIS GUBER (GEORGE GRENVILLE BENEDICT )

Find your Civil War Spot in Spotsylvania

Visitspotsy.com

75

London - Laurel County Crossroads to Adventure

Visit Camp Wildcat Civil War Battlefield!

Located on the historic “Wilderness Road” in Laurel County, Kentucky A beautiful and well-preserved Civil War Battlefield that still has many of the original trenches intact!

Don’t miss the London-Laurel County Tourist Commission

1-800-348-0095

Reenactment! october 20-22, 2017

www.laurelkytourism.com

CWM23-FOB-Voices.indd 17

1/31/17 1:20 AM

s a lv o

fac e s o f wa r

Elizabeth’s Father p u b l i s h e r , m i l i ta ry i m ag e s

Elizabeth Lyman was born just nine days before the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Growing up in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, during the war years, she saw little of her father, Jonas Wellman Lyman, who joined the Union army a few months after her birth as surgeon of the 57th Pennsylvania Infantry. By the time this portrait of her and her father was taken circa September 1864, he had recently been promoted to lieutenant colonel of the 203rd Pennsylvania Infantry. (Above, he proudly wears his Kearny Medal, an honor presented to officers who served in Major General Philip Kearny’s division prior to the general’s death at the Battle of Chantilly, Virginia, in 1862.) Three-year-old Elizabeth could not have known that this would be one of the final times she would see her father. On January 15, 1865, Jonas Lyman and the 203rd were part of the Union force that attacked Fort Fisher near Wilmington, North Carolina. When the regiment’s colonel and major fell with wounds, Lyman led the 203rd forward into the fort, where the fighting was hand to hand. After using his pistol to dispatch a Rebel officer who charged at him with his sword, Lyman was shot through the heart and killed. Elizabeth, her two older brothers, and her mother, Louisa, survived him. Little Elizabeth would grow up, marry, have children of her own, and live into the 20th century.

3 MILITARY IMAGES (MILITARYIMAGESMAGAZINE.COM.) IS A MAGAZINE DEDICATED TO SHOWCASING AND PRESERVING PHOTOS OF CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS.

RICK CARLILE COLLECTION

by ronald s. coddington

18 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-FacesofWar.indd 18

1/30/17 9:25 PM

Welcome to

Historic Site White Hall State arcellus Clay M Home of Cassius

RICK CARLILE COLLECTION

Battle of Richmon Visitors C d Site of a Center ivil War B attle

Fort Boonesborough State Park Replica of Daniel Boone’s Fort

Visit www.richmondkytourism.com or call 800.866.3705 1613 Foxhaven Dr, Richmond, KY 40475 CWM23-FOB-FacesofWar.indd 19

1/30/17 9:25 PM

s a lv o

p r e s e r va t i o n

Good News for Petersburg Battlefield p r e s i d e n t , c i v i l wa r t r u st

U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (center) visits the Petersburg battlefield shortly after Congress approved the expansion of the park’s boundary.

THE SIEGE OF PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA,

was both the lengthiest military event of the Civil War and the longest siege in American history. Petersburg was an important supply center to the Confederate capital at Richmond, and over nine and a half months General Ulysses S. Grant cut off all of its supply lines. By April 3, 1865, Richmond had fallen, and six days later General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant.

Today, Petersburg National Battlefield Park covers 2,700 acres and commemorates 18 battlegrounds associated with the siege. The Civil War Trust has helped protect more than 2,500 acres of hallowed ground at Petersburg, but nearly 2,000 of those could not be transferred to the National Park Service until recently.

With a vote in the United States Senate on December 8, 2016, Congress expanded the boundary of Petersburg National Battlefield by 7,238 acres, giving it the potential to become one of the nation’s largest historical parks. Although no properties will be immediately added to the existing park, the legislation authorizes the National Park Service to incorporate historic battlefield lands previously located outside the park boundary. Now, the lands preserved by the Trust and other conservation organizations can be seamlessly integrated into the park.

Grant’s attack on Petersburg began on June 15, 1864. After four days of failed attempts to take the city, Grant laid siege to Petersburg. The Federals advanced around the Confederate defensive line,

intent on wearing down southern forces by cutting off railroads and other supply lines. For the next nine months, the armies engaged in skirmishing, sniper fire, and mortar shelling, as well as battles at the Crater, Weldon Railroad, Fort Stedman, and Five Forks. On April 2, 1865, Grant and Major General George Meade ordered an assault against the Petersburg lines. A heroic defense of Fort Gregg by a handful of Confederates prevented the Federals from entering the city that night. After dark, Lee ordered the evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond. Grant had achieved one of the major military objectives of the war.

Petersburg National Battlefield was established as a national military park in 1926, designated a national battlefield in 1962, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. The recent boundary expansion, allowing for the future addition of over 7,000 acres, is no doubt another monumental moment for the park. (Battlefields at Petersburg Breakthrough, Hatcher’s Run, White Oak Road, and Ream’s Station will also benefit from the legislation.)

The battlefields of Petersburg serve as memorials to all of America’s veterans, including the 70,000 men whose blood hallowed the ground around the city during the siege. In addition to land preserved at Petersburg and over 44,000 acres saved in 23 states, the Civil War Trust supports expansions of the boundaries of Shiloh National Military Park in Tennessee and Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park in Georgia, efforts that will lead to more historic battlegrounds saved for generations to come.

3 THE CIVIL WAR TRUST (CIVILWAR.ORG) IS A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO THE PRESERVATION OF ENDANGERED CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELDS.

CIVIL WAR TRUST

by o. james lighthizer

20 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-Preservation.indd 20

1/31/17 1:04 AM

CIVIL WAR TRUST

CWM23-FOB-Preservation.indd 21

1/31/17 1:04 AM

s a lv o

figures

The Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon On September 14, 1863, Wilbur Fisk and his fellow members of the 2nd Vermont Infantry traveled by train to Washington, D.C., after a month in New York City, where they helped restore order after the draft riots. “It was near midnight,” Fisk later recalled, “when we got to Philadelphia … [where] we found a glorious supper ready prepared expressly for us. Bread of excellent quality, butter and cheese, pickles, hot coffee, and all that a hungry soldier need ask.” ¶ Fisk and his comrades had enjoyed the hospitality of the Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon, a two-story brick edifice on Ostego Street, near the depot of the Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore Railroad. In May 1861, a group of Philadelphia residents, determined to provide comfort and sustenance to the throngs of Union volunteers passing through the city, had converted the former factory space into a large kitchen and dining area with an outdoor washing station. A few months later, they expanded by opening a small hospital for soldiers. The Cooper Saloon, which was financed entirely through private donations and also accommodated southern refugees and freedmen, remained open—and busy—through August 1865, a full four months after war’s end. Their efforts were appreciated by thousands of soldiers, including Wilbur Fisk. “It was not soldiers’ living at all,” the Vermonter recalled of his stop at the Cooper Saloon. “[I]t was good enough for a first class hotel.”

50–60

Number of active volunteers at the Cooper Saloon

$70,000

Gallons of coffee the Cooper Saloon kitchen staff could boil at a time

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Approximate cost of the Cooper Saloon’s wartime efforts

240

22 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-Figures.indd 22

1/30/17 10:07 PM

780 350

Number of men who could be fed at the Cooper Saloon at a time

27

1,000

854

15,000

Number of patients the Cooper Saloon Hospital could accommodate at a time

Number of patients treated there during the war

14

Number of patients who died there

Number of men who could be fed at the Cooper Saloon in an hour

Number of men (from the 8th New York) entertained on the Cooper Saloon’s first day of operation, May 27, 1861

928

Number of men (from the 32nd USCT and 104th Pennsylvania) fed on the Cooper Saloon’s last day of operation, August 28, 1865

Number of southern refugees, freedmen, and “not a few” Confederate prisoners fed at the Cooper Saloon

400,000

Approximate number of all men fed at the Cooper Saloon during the war

15

Length, in minutes, of a typical seating at the Cooper Saloon dining room

4,800 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Square footage of the Cooper Saloon building

Sources: Sharon Bisaha, A Great and Noble Work (2016); J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War (1990); James Moore, History of the Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon (1866); Frank H. Taylor, Philadelphia in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (1913).

CWM23-FOB-Figures.indd 23

23 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

1/30/17 10:07 PM

s a lv o

c o s t o f wa r

�22,425.00 A HARVARD MAN’S WEAPON BRINGS A WINDFALL

THE ARTIFACT

CONDITION The sword is in very good to fine overall condition: the 30½-inch blade retains discernible fine-etched panels with scattered staining and pitting; the sharkskin grip is complete and intact with only minor chipping and wear; and the original twisted wire wrap is complete and tight. In addition, the scabbard body is sound and solid with scattered small scrapes and scratches.

sachusetts as its colonel. During the Battle of Gettysburg’s second day, July 2, 1863, a Confederate canister shell burst above him, sending shrapnel into his left lung. Revere died two days later, having, according to a comrade, “lived long enough to know that the Union arms were triumphant” in the battle. Revere’s body was returned to Boston and interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

DETAILS In the summer of 1861, 28-year-old Boston native Paul Joseph Revere determined to join the fight to preserve the Union. “I have weighed it all,” he told a friend about his decision, “and there is something higher still. The institutions of this country—indeed free institutions throughout the world—hang on this moment.” A member of the Harvard class of 1852 and grandson of the Revolutionary War hero, he went off to war as major of the 20th Massachusetts Infantry. The sword he carried bore the initials of the 11 Harvard friends who gave it to him as a parting gift.

On October 21, Revere and the 20th participated in the humiliating Union defeat at Ball’s Bluff, where the young major was wounded in the leg and taken prisoner. Paroled the following February, Revere rejoined the 20th in time to participate in the Seven Days Battles during the Peninsula Campaign. In September, Revere, recently promoted to lieutenant colonel and appointed inspector general of the army’s II Corps, was wounded again during the Battle of Antietam, in which his brother Edward, a surgeon in his old regiment, was killed. Revere convalesced at home until the following spring, after which he rejoined the 20th Mas-

QUOTABLE A year after war’s end, Civil War veteran and fellow Harvard graduate Thomas Wentworth Higginson remembered Revere as follows: “A resolute will … enforced his convictions of duty against all obstacles of self-interest.

What he thought to be right, he did. With all the sterner and rigid attributes of human nature, so necessary to overcome the rough places in the path of life, his heart was a deep and ever-welling spring of warm affection. Distress never called to him in vain for needed relief. Amid the din of battle he would kneel by a dying comrade to receive his whispered and choking accents of parting love to dear ones at home.”

VALUE $22,425 (price realized at James D. Julia, Inc., in Fairfield, Maine, in 2012). “This sword … is in beautifully preserved condition,” noted John Sexton, longtime consultant and cataloger for James D. Julia, Inc., at the time of the sale. “Even in today’s softer market for Civil War memorabilia, it’s surprising a sword belonging to such an American icon didn’t fetch an even higher price.”

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JAMES D. JULIA AUCTIONEERS, FAIRFIELD, MAINE , USA, WWW.JAMESDJULIA. COM. SOURCES: JAMES D. JULIA INC. PRESENTS EXTRAORDINARY FIREARMS AUCTION, OCTOBER 1 & 2, 2012 (2012); THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, HARVARD MEMORIAL BIOGRAPHIES , VOL . 1, 236–237.

The Civil War Sword of Colonel Paul Joseph Revere

24 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-CostofWar.indd 24

1/30/17 9:19 PM

Extraordinary Firearms Auction April 11, 12 & 13, 2017 | Fairfield, Maine

Our spectacular Spring auction will include prestigious Private Collections and Estates including The Extraordinary Warren Buxton Estate Collection of Important and Rare Walther Arms; The Fantastic Semi-Auto Pistol Collection of Frank H. Wheaton, III; The Dr. Zack Catterton Collection of Rare Confederate Arms; The Second Session Of The Allen Hallock Schuetzen Collection; The Doug Buhler Collection of Rare and Spectacular German Imperial Headgear and Pickelhauben; Outstanding Winchesters; Fine Colts including Historic Colt SAA Picked Up By Captain Benteen After the Battle of The Little Bighorn; Fine Sporting Arms; Class-3 and Other Fine Military Arms; Confederate and Civil War and many more items of interest.

View our website for more highlights in the April auction - www.jamesdjulia.com

Some of the finest collectible firearms in the world pass through our hands.

Here is a Sample of Some of the Treasures to be Offered in our April, 2017 Auction: The Dr. Zack Catterton Collection of Rare Confederate Arms

Rare Dance Texas Made CS Dragoon Revolver

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JAMES D. JULIA AUCTIONEERS, FAIRFIELD, MAINE , USA, WWW.JAMESDJULIA. COM. SOURCES: JAMES D. JULIA INC. PRESENTS EXTRAORDINARY FIREARMS AUCTION, OCTOBER 1 & 2, 2012 (2012); THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, HARVARD MEMORIAL BIOGRAPHIES , VOL . 1, 236–237.

Extremely Rare Spiller & Burr Revolver with “CS” & Full Firm & SN 104 on Cylinder

Fine Confederate Leech & Rigdon, New to market SN 820 w/Original Holster

Very Rare Confederate C.H. Rigdon Augusta Georgia Revolver

Rare Early First Model Conf. Lemat Revolver, SN 22

Fine Original Confederate 2nd Model Lemat Revolver

Fine 1st Model Griswold CS Revolver

Extremely Fine Confederate “JS Anchor” Kerr Revolver

The Finest Known London Made Confederate Early War Grapeshot Revolvers,Few Known of Each Type with Early Reciprocating Pin Mechanisms

Extremely Rare State of Alabama Confederated Davis & Bozeman Carbine

Extremely Rare Late Production Maker Marked Confederate Morse Brass Frame Breech Loading Carbine

Rare State of North Carolina Confederate Mendenhall Jones & Gardner Rifle

Very Rare Early Griswold Revolver, SN 133

Extremely Rare and Fine Civil War “State of New York” Delafield Rifled Field Gun, Serial Number 3

Beautiful and Rare N.C. Confederate 1st National Battle Flag w/Great Collection History

Incredibly Rare and Fine Confederate Billharz Rising Breech Carbine

Extremely Rare and Finest Example Known Confederate States Armory “Heavy” Staff Officer’s Sword

Email: firearms@jamesdjulia.com | Tel: + 1 207 453-7125 | Web: www.jamesdjulia.com Fairfield, Maine | Auctioneer: James D. Julia | Lic#: ME:AR83 | MA: AU1406 | NH 2511 01-20-17civilwrmon.indd 1 CWM23-FOB-CostofWar.indd 25

1/12/17 12:58 PM

1/30/17 9:19 PM

s a lv o

in focus

“He has lost his left arm but I my right” p r e s i d e n t , c e n t e r f o r c i v i l wa r p h oto g r a p h y

After dark on May 2, 1863, Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, whose men had surprised and routed the Union army’s XI Corps at Chancellorsville during a late-afternoon flank attack, rode out ahead of his army’s lines to reconnoiter for a follow-up assault. ¶ Jackson and a handful of staff officers and couriers rode east on Orange Plank Road and turned off onto Bullock Road, then Mountain Road, which ran obliquely to the east. Soon they were between the opposing armies’ lines. As the group returned, soldiers from the 18th North Carolina Infantry, positioned immediately to their front, let loose a volley. The fire killed one man in Jackson’s party and wounded another. Two bullets hit Jackson’s left arm and another lodged in his right palm. Though his shattered left arm was soon amputated, Jackson developed pneumonia and died eight days later. Upon learning of the incident, Robert E. Lee reportedly remarked, “He has lost his left arm but I my right.” ¶ This image, half of a stereoscopic view by G.O. Brown of Baltimore, shows the approximate location of the shooting, which occurred just inside the dense woods at left. On the right are Orange Plank Road, with clearly visible planks, and the well-worn dirt road alongside it. This photo, the earliest known image of the site, recently surfaced and is published in print here for the first time.

3 THE NONPROFIT CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY (CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY.ORG ) IS DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES.

3 THE CIVIL WAR TRUST (CIVILWAR.ORG) IS DEVOTED TO THE PRESERVATION OF ENDANGERED CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELDS.

26 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-InFocus.indd 26

1/31/17 12:54 AM

PRIVATE COLLECTION

by bob zeller

PRIVATE COLLECTION

3 MILITARY IMAGES (MILITARYIMAGESMAGAZINE.COM.) IS A MAGAZINE DEDICATED TO SHOWCASING AND PRESERVING PHOTOS OF CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS.

27 SPRING 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FOB-InFocus.indd 27

1/31/17 12:54 AM

american iliad

The Forgotten Bard

STORIES NEED STORYTELLERS. MYTHS NEED BARDS.

Paradise Lost had Milton; the Aeneid had Virgil; the Iliad had Homer. The American Iliad has several writers whose literary gifts have brought the Civil War to life for millions of readers. I won’t try to list all the authors I would number in that distinguished company.

Instead I want to resurrect a name that would have been on anyone’s list eight decades ago, but nowadays is often omitted: Carl Sandburg.

Born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1878, Sandburg was a son of Swedish immigrants who almost self-consciously crafted himself into a character out of an American folk tale. He started out as a farmhand, served as a volunteer soldier in the Spanish-American War, and even took a turn as a hobo—and spent 10 days in jail for vagrancy—before finding a career as a news reporter in Milwaukee and Chicago. Then, at age 38, he rocketed to fame as one of America’s most celebrated poets. Chicago Poems, published in 1916, was acclaimed for its raw-boned free verse, reminiscent of Walt Whitman but rich with an earthiness that evoked both America’s agrarian heartland and its city smokestacks. His second collection of poems, Cornhuskers, won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1919. For the next 20 years, although Sandburg continued to compose poetry, children’s stories, and folk songs, he increasingly turned his attention to the life of Abraham Lincoln. Like Sandburg himself, Lincoln was a product of the heartland, and he embodied, more than any other figure, the genius of the ordinary American.

In 1926 Sandburg published Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a two-volume biography that carried Lincoln’s story to the moment where, as presidentelect, he boarded the train that would take him to Washington from his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. After that Sandburg spent the next 13 years preparing Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. It was not just a continuation of The Prairie Years. Sandburg’s vision for The War Years was much more expansive.

He saw it as a book that would convey not only Lin-

coln’s personal story but that of the war that engulfed the nation. The project took him to archives and libraries across the country and made him one of the foremost experts on Lincolniana.

The result, published in late 1939, was an epic: four thick volumes packed with 1,175,000 words, more than the complete works of William Shakespeare. Sandburg’s artistic strategy was to construct a prose poem comprising an immense collection of detail, much of it intended to be impressionistic rather than to advance the story directly. One critic likened The War Years to the Bible—a collection of all sorts of writings: stories, laws, songs, poems, epistles, and so on. The shaggy dog nature of The War Years comes through at once. The first chapter contains a two-page single sentence—composed of clauses reflecting documents from all kinds of sources on all kinds of subjects, separated by 40 semicolons—in which Sandburg sketches a description of America on the eve of the Civil War. One of the copious engravings that illustrate the chapter is a facsimile of a note from Winfield Scott to a hotel, requesting that the general-in-chief be given either a bed large enough for someone 6 feet 6 inches tall or else one without a footboard. Sandburg included it for no other reason than that the chapter contains a brief description of Scott. Yet this unusual strategy brings alive Lincoln’s life and times in a way that a conventional biography could not have done.

When first published, The War Years won lavish praise, including the Pulitzer Prize for history. Time placed Carl Sandburg on its cover. The accompanying review praised The War Years as “a work whose meanings will not soon be exhausted, whose greatness will not soon be estimated. It can be said that no U.S. biography surpasses it in wealth of documentation and fidelity to fact, that none ... can compare with it in strength, scope and beauty.”1 ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.

CARL SANDBURG HOME NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

CARL SANDBURG AND THE MAKING OF AN OVERLOOKED CLASSIC BY MARK GRIMSLEY

28 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-AmIliad.indd 28

1/30/17 9:16 PM

CARL SANDBURG HOME NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

Carl Sandburg sits at his typewriter at home in this undated image.

Sandburg had attained fame as one of America’s most celebrated poets before he turned his attention to chronicling the life of Abraham Lincoln.

29 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

CWM23-FOB-AmIliad.indd 29

THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

1/30/17 9:16 PM

living h i sto ry

Bringing Battles to Life

LAST YEAR, HISTORICAL ARTIST DON TROIANI PUT THE his fascination with war started early. His father, a final brushstrokes on a painting called Valverde. The commercial artist, was a World War II veteran who work captures the February 1862 lancer charge by saw heavy fighting at Metz and elsewhere, and Company B of the 5th Texas Mounted Rifles against a Troiani grew up on his stories. When most kids were superior force of Union infantry in what is now New still drawing circles and rainbows, he was sketching Mexico. As with all Troiani’s wartime depictions, the soldiers—thousands of them. His parents were also painting is so vivid it feels almost three-dimensional: avid antiques collectors, and later in his childhood The Confederate soldier at center, yelling and driv- they started dragging Troiani to auctions all over ing his lance forward, seems set to burst through the New England. “To keep me quiet, they’d buy me a canvas, even as panicked men and horses behind him Civil War sword or a Japanese rifle or whatever went shrink back. But Valverde is remarkable for another cheap,” he recalls. Troiani wasn’t just hearing about reason. It could be the last Civil War painting that war anymore; he was touching its remnants. Soon Troiani ever creates. he was doing business of his own, selling World War In Civil War circles, Troiani is a legend. He has II bayonets and Civil War pistols out of his school made a career of bringing the conflict’s most iconic locker. moments—everything from J.E.B. Stuart’s attack When he was in middle school, Troiani’s family on the 11th New York at took a trip to Paris. His parFirst Bull Run to the solemn ents dropped him for the day Union salute of surrendered at the Army Museum, which Confederates at Appomathouses one of the world’s tox—into vibrant focus. Outlargest military history and side of period photographs, art collections. “There was much of today’s visual record nobody in the place, just all of the Civil War is Troiani’s these muskets and uniforms creation. His work has been and military paintings,” featured in countless books, Troiani remembers. It was films, and documentaries, the paintings that gripped and in more than 50 magahim. Most were created by Don Troiani in his Connecticut studio zines. His paintings hang in the great French academthe Pentagon, the Smithsonic painters and military artian, the Washington Monument, the National Civil ists of the 19th century, known for their precision War Museum, and dozens of national parks and bat- and detail. Says Troiani: “I stared at them for hours, tlefields. and I thought, God, I’d like to do that. Look at those It seems impossible, then, that America’s most re- things.” spected historical artist would step away from porTroiani’s grades were dismal; his artwork wasn’t. traying its greatest conflict. But Troiani, now 68, But in the late 1960s, when he attended art school, views it more practically. “I’ve done 35 years of Civil classical instruction was hard to come by. He spent War paintings,” he says. “I think I covered it pretty most of his time in the school’s museum, planted in good.” front of the Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer Troiani never set out to be a Civil War expert. But paintings, learning from them in☛ } CONT. ON P. 73

REPUBLICAN AMERICAN; DON TROIANI (OPPOSITE)

DON TROIANI’S QUEST TO RECREATE THE GREAT SCENES OF OUR PAST BY JENNY JOHNSTON

30 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FOB-LivingHistory.indd 30

1/31/17 2:51 PM

REPUBLICAN AMERICAN; DON TROIANI (OPPOSITE)

A detail from Don Troiani’s painting Valverde, which depicts the February 1862 lancer charge by Company B of the 5th Texas Mounted Rifles in what is now New Mexico.

CWM23-FOB-LivingHistory.indd 31

1/31/17 2:51 PM

the scourge of T H E C O N F E D E R AC Y The story of John Minor Botts, Virginia’s most outspoken Unionist

BY J O H N J. H E N N E S SY

32 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Botts.indd 32

1/31/17 7:26 PM

John Minor Botts (seated) and his family pose on the porch of Auburn, their home in Culpeper County, Virginia, in September 1863.

33 SPRING 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-Botts.indd 33

1/31/17 7:26 PM

In 1864, amid a war far more horrid and destructive than most imagined it might be, no place assaulted the senses more directly than

Culpeper County, Virginia.

1 For a time in 1860, Botts toyed with the idea of running for president. But the moderate course he proposed satisfied almost no one. Presidentelect Abraham Lincoln briefly considered him for a cabinet position, but that too quickly passed.

Instead, Botts urged his fellow Virginians toward moderation. Indeed, in early 1861, most Virginians thought much as Botts did. But with Lincoln’s inauguration in March, the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, and the federal government’s April 15 call for troops (including 3,000 from Virginia) to put down the rebellion, Virginians who had only months before been committed to Union peeled away and joined the clamor for secession.

Botts—his hair perpetually mussed, his onceyouthful brawn morphed to portliness—stood defiantly as perhaps the most famous Unionist in Virginia, and maybe the entire South. He reveled in the controversy. “Muzzles were made for dogs,” he declared, “and no press and no party can put a muzzle on my mouth so long as I value my freedom.” His fame accorded him some immunity against common southern persecutors, but as spring 1861 warmed, his ability to change 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.

After the death of his parents when he was nine, Virginian John Minor Botts followed his own path, achieving prominence—and a reputation for a fiercely independent spirit— at a young age.

Right: Botts as he appeared in 1841, when he served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

34 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Botts.indd 34

1/31/17 2:35 PM

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

in the House. Burly, brusque, and imperious, he earned the nickname “the Bison.” After three terms, his constituents turned him out.

But they could not make him go away. As the nation spiraled toward disunion, Botts provoked the pro-slavery Fire-Eaters with his unending arguments against secession. He owned slaves, to be sure (13 in 1860), but refused to argue for slavery’s expansion. He loved Virginia almost romantically, and believed its interests could best be served by remaining in the Union. He revered the Union, loathed southern agitators as “insane” and “infamous,” and refused to accept secession’s inevitability. In a letter published in The New York Times, he wrote, “I am not willing to sacrifice the best interests of my State and my country, and the hopes of oppressed mankind throughout the world, in upholding South Carolina in a bad cause.” Still, he conceded in another letter, “The sky looks threatening, I grant you.”

But if “the government of the United States is to be overthrown, no part of the folly, the wickedness … shall be charged upon me.”3

PREVIOUS PAGES AND RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The camps of the Union’s Army of the Potomac sprawled across the landscape—tens of thousands of men in thousands of makeshift huts in dozens of enclaves, some orderly, some not. Each camp seemed like a creosote bush in the desert—a bastion of life that kills everything around it to ensure its own survival. An ever-expanding patch of desolation grew around each camp as impromptu roads gouged old fields, stands of timber vanished, orchards fell, and fences—symbols of a prosperous, working concern—disappeared from the landscape. An Englishman who visited the Union encampment called Culpeper County “a vast dusky desert…. [A] mass of dark mould.”1 Yet in the middle of it all stood Auburn, a whitewashed, pillared, and well trimmed home with a two-story portico that overlooked more than 2,000 acres of some of Virginia’s finest farmland. Shade trees and an orchard surrounded the eight-year-old structure, whose Greek Revival form reminded some northern observers of a Yankee farmhouse. Out back stood a handful of log and frame cabins, home to a dwindling population of enslaved men, women, and children. In front, the view from Auburn’s porch revealed a broad (and exceedingly rare) lawn, intact fields, and, most notably, fences—miles of them. Within these fences, one Union general wrote, “the sheep grazed, the turkeys gobbled, the chickens clucked, the geese ate the grass, and the plump ducks slept with their bills under their wings.” It was, he wrote, “a rural sight which we had long before lost the habit of seeing in Virginia”—especially in war-torn and forsaken Culpeper County.2 Auburn owed its anomalous condition to the unusual circumstances and machinations of its owner, Virginian John Minor Botts. Through decades of sectional strife and three years of war, Botts, born in 1802, commingled deep affection for his state, a powerful nationalist instinct, and a relentless determination to agitate—to be known and to be noticed. When he was nine, Botts’ parents died in the 1811 Richmond Theatre fire, and thereafter Botts followed his own path, aided some by relations in Fredericksburg. He consumed knowledge as if at a trough, capping his Alger-like path by studying law and passing the bar, all in just six weeks. He took up practice in Richmond, earned well, became a planter, and then entered politics as a Whig, assuming a seat in the House of Delegates at age 28. By the 1840s, he’d ascended to a seat in Congress and become one of the loudest (if not most effective) Whigs

PREVIOUS PAGES AND RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

35 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

CWM23-FEA-Botts.indd 35

SPRING 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

1/31/17 2:35 PM

it (Botts hid it well). Despite the efforts of a military board convened to investigate his supposed misdeeds, it became apparent that no formal case against Botts could be constructed. Instead, he became even more famous in Richmond as “the recognized leader of the disaffected … and of the vile remnant of the Union party.”6 Botts lingered uncharged in the jail for nearly two months, producing a circumstance Virginia had not witnessed in decades: public discourse absent the voice of John Minor Botts. The government finally released him in late April, but with conditions. Botts needed to move to Lynchburg, Danville, or Raleigh—each distant enough from Richmond to keep Botts’ troublesome voice at bay. He also signed a pledge that he would stop his talk predicting the Confederacy’s failure. As he later explained, he agreed to this simply because the Confederates “would not be long in

36 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Botts.indd 36

1/31/17 2:35 PM

GENEALOGY AND MEMOIRS OF ISAAC STEARNS AND HIS DESCENDANTS (1901)

[Botts] continued to espouse the virtues of the Union, the foolishness of Virginia’s Confederate experiment, and his disdain for Jefferson Davis— “the most unscrupulous despot that has appeared since the days of Nero.”

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

any conversations about Virginia’s future passed.

True to his pledge never to quiet himself, Botts simply sought a new audience—in Washington.

Rather than tilt against Virginia’s seemingly inexorable march to secession, Botts tried to affect Washington’s policies toward his beloved state.

On April 7 he had met with President Lincoln in a last-minute attempt to avert violence at Fort Sumter. He had served with Lincoln in Congress in the late 1840s, but their conversation that day came too late to accomplish anything. After Fort Sumter and Virginia’s vote to leave the Union, Botts shifted his efforts to preventing Virginia’s destruction in the looming war. Declaring himself “a strong, devoted, unalterable friend of the Union,” he wrote to Attorney General Edward Bates to urge a truce and a “National Convention” that would recognize the independence of the seceded states. Botts proposed this, he wrote, not just to avoid bloodshed, but because it would be the fastest way to demonstrate that “the experiment of separate Government [for the South] … is the most egregious error that man, in his hour of madness, ever committed.”4 Botts’ formidable pen, presence, and power failed to divert the unstoppable tide of war. The man who would be neither muzzled nor blamed retreated to his farm, Half Sink, near Richmond and watched the war unfold around him.

He did not, of course, do so in silence. Mindful of the suspicions that surrounded him, Botts kept close to home but happily received visitors.

To them he continued to espouse the virtues of the Union, the foolishness of Virginia’s Confederate experiment, and his disdain for Jefferson Davis—“the most unscrupulous despot that has appeared since the days of Nero.” He also started work on a book, a “secret history” of the rise and progress of the “Great Rebellion.” Word of the book and Botts’ utterances filtered back to President Davis. On March 1, 1862, prompted by a rising tide of crime, Davis imposed martial law in Richmond, Petersburg, and Lynchburg. The declaration turned local affairs over to the national government and, most importantly for Botts, suspended habeas corpus—clearing the way for the government to arrest dissenters without charging them with a crime. Botts was likely first on the list. Dissenters in time of turmoil become enemies in time of war.5 Just before sunrise on March 2, 100 Confederate soldiers surrounded Botts’ house in Henrico County and placed him under arrest—the first of dozens of men taken in a sweep of dissenters. Botts ended up in a former slave jail in downtown Richmond, the symbolism apparent to all. While Botts sat in solitary confinement, the Confederate government sought to build a case against him, spending a good deal of energy looking for Botts’ allegedly disruptive manuscript. They could not find

GENEALOGY AND MEMOIRS OF ISAAC STEARNS AND HIS DESCENDANTS (1901)

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Botts and Franklin Stearns (right), his longtime friend with whom he formed a business partnership during the war, were both jailed by the Confederate government after President Jefferson Davis (opposite page) imposed martial law and suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Richmond.

finding that out for themselves.”7 Botts’ parole finally quieted the man known as the Bison. But he simply could not sit still for long. Over the coming months, Botts forged a business partnership with a well-heeled Unionist and longtime friend (and fellow arrestee), Franklin Stearns. Botts had little money of his own (in 1860 he owned land worth $8,000 and personal property worth $5,000, most of that in the form of enslaved human beings), but Stearns had a net worth in 1860 that exceeded $350,000, much of it made in the distilling business. Stearns seems to have been the demurer of the two, but a clever dealer. The Richmond Examiner claimed he sold liquor to Confederate soldiers at the rate of $5,000 per day. “His vile deleterious distillations have busily sapped the health and strength of our soldiers,” the paper wrote. He “has killed more of our men and done more to disorganize our army than all the balance of the Yankee nation put together.” Stearns also dealt in real estate, and on this he and Botts found common ground.8

1 Truly patriotic Confederate civilians sustained the Confederate cause by volunteering to fight or by loaning the nascent government their excess capital by buying bonds. Not being patriots, Stearns and Botts opted for another, more practical course. Surely recognizing that rampant inflation threatened to render even the most immense Confederate fortunes worthless, Stearns and Botts decided to convert their Confederate dollars into something more tangible: land.

And that is how Virginia’s most famous Unionist ended up living in the middle of the most con-

tested landscape in the Confederacy: Culpeper County, 75 miles northwest of Richmond. In the fall of 1862, Stearns bought three of the most prominent farms in Piedmont, partnering with Botts to purchase Auburn. The two paid 100,000 bloated Confederate dollars for the property, leaning hard on the stricken, diminished owner, James Beckham, to make the deal while he still might.

They succeeded. Beckham, a highly literate man, had strength enough only to sign the purchase agreement with an “X.”9 Botts quickly received the required permission of the Confederate government to leave his Henrico County farm (they were surely happy to see him go—“they hated me, I despised them,” Botts wrote). On January 8, 1863, John Minor Botts, his wife, Mary, three adult daughters, and one son moved to Auburn. He became master of its 2,200 acres about four miles northeast of Culpeper and two miles west of Brandy Station, in the middle a landscape that had already seen the passage of armies at least four times.10 In coming to Culpeper County, Botts moved against the tide of migrating white humanity in wartime Virginia. Throughout central and northern Virginia, white civilians had fled the advance of armies, and wealthier denizens often relocated entirely to Richmond, Danville, or points farther south. Few, if any, willingly moved into the marched-over bosom of central Virginia.

Surely Botts thought of this, and surely the idea suited him. The man whose affections teetered between his state and his Union now lived on the functional border between the Union and the Confederacy—a contested place that would probably witness the passage of armies more than any other place in North America. The man who would not choose sides chose a home where he would at least be seen by both sides, constantly, for the next 18 months.

Botts moved into Auburn four weeks after the great Confederate victory at Fredericksburg, while the armies still glowered at each other across the Rappahannock. Auburn stood on the fringes of the armies’ reach, largely safe, but close enough to be bothered by Confederate cavalry patrolling the upper crossings of the Rappahannock. Landowners like Botts who had lived inside the Confederate lines around Richmond had largely enjoyed immunity from hardships caused

by Confederate troops. But in Culpeper County, absent the close eye of the Confederate government and the convenience of immense stores in Richmond itself, the Confederate army operated more freely, taking sustenance where it could, often leaving little behind. Botts quickly learned hard realities about the presence of armies on a landscape, and especially one owned by a man seen largely within the Confederacy as an enemy.

Botts had “hardly gotten comfortably warm,” 37 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-Botts.indd 37

1/31/17 2:35 PM

Despite the flight of slaves and loss of some fencing and livestock, Botts seems to have fared better than most of his less-famous neighbors. The Confederacy had no desire to create a suffering martyr in John Minor Botts (one newspaper even declared “the government of the Confederate States stand[s] in … fear” of Botts). But Botts never shied from a battle against the Confederate army, raising objections in Richmond at every incident or intrusion, using his considerable persona and fame to intimidate adversaries.

When on June 5, 1863, J.E.B. Stuart held an im-

During the first several months after his relocation to Auburn (pictured here), Botts clashed repeatedly with flamboyant Confederate cavalryman J.E.B. Stuart (above left) and his men, who frequented the Bison’s property to hold troop reviews, graze their horses, and pilfer his fence rails for firewood.

38 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Botts.indd 38

1/31/17 2:36 PM

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

1

mense review of his cavalry on Botts’ farm, the Bison protested fiercely the trampling of one his cornfields. He confronted Stuart with a loud harangue that by one account left the general laughing while Botts “ripped and snorted.” Botts kept assiduous records of each Confederate levy and all damage. Not only did he submit the claims for payment to Richmond, but he pressed them by traveling there with his formidable self. The effort only antagonized both the Confederate bureaucracy and press, for most of Virginia’s civilians suffered quietly, even willingly. In the end, Botts’ claims went unpaid and the Bison fumed, grumbling that he was “nothing more than Gen. Stuart’s overseer,” but without enough pay to make good for the annoyance.14 On June 8, 1863, Robert E. Lee joined Stuart for yet another review of the Confederate cavalry on the fields of Auburn. The next day, Botts watched from his front porch as some of Stuart’s regiments charged across his land into battle at Brandy Station—the largest cavalry battle of the war. When Confederate general Robert Rodes stopped his infantrymen in Botts’ yard, Botts burst forth: “I’ll have no fighting around my house!” Rodes dismissed him as a “damn fool” and had Botts escorted inside.15 Through October, the armies would come and go (to Gettysburg and back, and then some), and Botts entertained officers from both sides in his dining room. The final stay of Lee’s army in Culpeper that fall provided a last and memorable exchange between Botts and J.E.B. Stuart. Confederate soldiers of the 4th Virginia Cavalry had ripped up Botts’ garden, trampled his corn, turned hundreds of horses loose to graze in his fields, and kindled campfires uncountable.

The cavalrymen burned what corn they could not carry, adding Botts’ vaunted fence rails to the blaze for good measure: “Pile on boys, they are nothing but d----d old Yankee rails,” growled one of Stuart’s men. Botts responded as he always did, by proclaiming his grievances loudly.16 Botts’ fulminations only antagonized Stuart, and the next morning the general sent a detachment to Auburn to arrest Botts. Stuart leveled no charges beyond a generic violation of parole but wisely instructed his provost marshal, “Don’t allow him to annoy General Lee.” The Confederates hauled Botts off to Culpeper Court House as “a prisoner of state,” according to Stuart. They held him only a few hours—just long enough to provoke a cascade of protests from Botts. Whether Lee intervened or Stuart relented we do not know, but by that evening, Botts was back in his

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

as he put it, when some of General J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry arrived. They would come and go, a nuisance to Botts for many months. The cavalrymen turned their horses into Botts’ fields, killed his hogs, and confiscated or (as Botts claimed) stole $50,000 worth of horses. The army paid Botts 10 cents per day for each horse grazing his pastures, but that assuaged him not. “Daily and hourly I was subjected to all sorts of vexatious annoyances,” he remembered. In turn, Botts complained to authorities in Richmond that the army did “as much injury as a hostile army could.”11 The fate of his fences irked Botts more than anything—indeed, over time, the fences of John Minor Botts of Auburn would become nationally famous. On a chilly night in the spring of 1863, some of Stuart’s men availed themselves of the fire-making convenience of split rails, and soon they blazed in small campfires across his farm.

Botts confronted them, “sour as a lemon,” as one witness put it. But, that soldier wrote, “we didn’t care. He was a Yankee at heart and had no sympathy for us.”12 In moving farther north, closer to Union lines, Botts failed to reckon with one thing: the Emancipation Proclamation.

Hardly had Botts arrived in Culpeper County than a number of his slaves ran off and presented themselves to Union troops near Manassas. Botts had opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, and now petitioned Washington for the return of his slaves—because he, Botts, “was a loyal man.”

The commander at Manassas instantly realized the potential sensitivity of offending one of the Union’s friends in the South and telegraphed Washington for guidance. The response: The formerly enslaved people “were free as soon as they entered our lines.” Botts’ celebrity status would get him much, but not immunity from Lincoln’s momentous proclamation.13

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

39 SPRING 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-Botts.indd 39

1/31/17 2:36 PM

1 Botts took especial care to cultivate relationships with officers in the Army of the Potomac—the higher the rank, the better. The officers took note, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Theodore Lyman of General George Gordon Meade’s staff called Botts “the tough and unterrified.” He described Botts as fat, “with a mild blue eye, and his clothing seemed to show the world had gone hard with him.” Like most officers who encountered Botts, Lyman thought him “a ☛ } CONT. ON P. 75

PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE COLLECTION CREDIT HERE OF BRIAN POHANKA, VIA CLARK B. HALL

house. This would prove to be the last clash between the Confederacy’s Cavalier and the Bison.

Botts would later write, “The open account left standing between General Stuart … and myself was all settled by [Stuart’s] early death.”17 The departure of Lee’s army meant the arrival of the Army of the Potomac, and in November and December 1863 nearly 100,000 Union soldiers settled into a sprawling winter encampment that would endure until May 4, 1864. Most locals resented the intrusion, but Botts, at least, made the best of it, for the atmospherics in Culpeper that winter greatly favored a famous Unionist. To some Federals, Botts was a legitimate national celebrity—the man who had dared to defy his rebellious brethren. The arrival of the Union army in Culpeper unleashed a steady stream of reporters and curious Union officers to Botts’ door, some of them intent, as the New York Herald put it, on showing “their appreciation of his fearlessness in avowing his belief and principles.” One lauded his “heroic endurance,” another his “clear-headed sagacity.” But not everyone was impressed. Writing to his hometown paper, a Connecticut soldier hardly saw Botts as a statesman: “We … think he would be a very popular landlord to a country inn.”18 Surely wary of violating his parole, Botts took care to ensure his political views did not end up splashed across northern newspapers. But he did share them privately—revealing that for all his bluster and contentiousness, the intellectual engine that drove him remained unchanged from the war’s early months. In a private letter to a Union officer, who eventually sent it on to President Lincoln, Botts explained his beliefs. “I have but one prayer to offer up on the subject of this horrible, atrocious, feindish [sic] war, and that is, that it may result in whatever will contribute most to the permanent peace, prosperity, happiness and freedom of the people of Virginia.” He knew well “the difference between separation and Independence,” he wrote, “and I know that mere separation, with the North as a hostile neighbor, is eternal war.” Though devoted to his Confederate-bound state, Botts could hardly be labeled a neutral in the conflict.19

40 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Botts.indd 40

1/31/17 2:36 PM

Botts took especial care to cultivate relationships with officers in the Army of the Potomac—the higher the rank, the better.

PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE COLLECTION CREDIT HERE OF BRIAN POHANKA, VIA CLARK B. HALL

Below: Part of the sprawling camp established by the Union army in Culpeper County during the winter of 1863–1864. The Army of the Potomac’s extended presence near Botts’ residence would afford the Virginian ample opportunity to interact with its men.

41 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-Botts.indd 41

1/31/17 2:36 PM

EYEWITNESS TO GETTYSBURG

11 On the Battle of Gettysburg’s second day, July 2, 1863, Union general Daniel Sickles and his staff (on horseback) inspect the lines of the Army of the Potomac’s III Corps on the edge of the Peach Orchard. Confederate forces can be seen massing for an attack in the distance.

42 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 42

1/31/17 3:00 PM

Edwin Forbes is best known today for his work during the Civil War as a special correspondent for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which published a multitude of his illustrations based upon firsthand observances while embedded with the Union army. Between 1862 and 1864, the native New Yorker’s skilled hand captured the action at some of the war’s major battles, including Second Manassas, Antietam, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Petersburg. At Gettysburg, Forbes yet again was an observer to history, sketching the epic engagement as it unfolded. p After the war, Forbes continued to produce works based on his wartime experiences, including a series of copper etchings titled “Life Studies of the Great Army,” which garnered significant acclaim upon its release in 1876. He also created a number of oil paintings, including Civil War scenes.

Only a dozen survive, all pertaining to the Battle of Gettysburg and preserved by the Library of Congress. On the following pages, we present six of them.

43 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 43

1/31/17 3:00 PM

11 Infantrymen from General James Longstreet’s corps of the Army of Northern Virginia advance upon Union forces positioned along the rocky slope of Little Round Top, which anchored the far left of the Army of the Potomac’s defensive line, during the afternoon of July 2. The hill’s outnumbered defenders were able to turn back the attack through dogged determination and a timely bayonet charge. Note how Forbes incorrectly depicted nearby Big Round Top, which is shown as having two peaks instead of one.

44 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 44

1/31/17 3:00 PM

45 SPRING 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 45

1/31/17 3:00 PM

11 While Longstreet’s men engaged the far left of the Union line, Confederate soldiers from General Richard Ewell’s corps moved against the Union right at Culp’s Hill. The fighting didn’t begin until late afternoon and continued after darkness fell. “Fighting in the dark was always one of the most trying and difficult phases of soldierly experience, keeping the nerves wrought up to the highest point of tension,” Forbes would later write, “and once the fight was over, and matters quieted, officers and men exhausted by the terrible strain dropped down upon the ground oblivious to all surroundings, and slept peacefully till daybreak.” Culp’s Hill’s defenders, like their comrades on Little Round Top, held their ground.

46 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 46

1/31/17 3:00 PM

47 SPRING 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 47

1/31/17 3:00 PM

11 Not long after the attack on Culp’s Hill began, Confederates launched another assault against the Union position at neighboring Cemetery Hill. Hand-tohand fighting ensued along the crest, where Union gunners were overrun by the swarming Rebel attack. Eventually, Union reinforcements helped beat back the threat. “The charges made upon the position at Cemetery Gate and Culp’s Hill at nightfall were bloody and stubbornly prolonged, but fate was against the attacking forces,” Forbes later noted, “for, although success first promised, the tenacious courage of the Union troops turned the tide.”

48 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 48

1/31/17 3:00 PM

49 SPRING 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 49

1/31/17 3:00 PM

11 After trying and failing to turn the Union flanks the previous day, on July 3 General Robert E. Lee directed three Confederate infantry divisions to advance upon the center of the Union line.

Known to history as Pickett’s Charge, the Rebel attack proceeded over nearly a mile of open ground before reaching its objective. This Forbes painting captures the moment when Confederate troops breached the Union line at the copse of trees on Cemetery Ridge, pictured at center left. Their success was short-lived, however, as Union reinforcements helped push the Confederates back. “I could not visit this portion of the line until the next morning,” Forbes later wrote, “but even then the sight was ghastly. A great convulsion of nature could not have made more universal destruction; everything bore the mark of death and ruin…. The earth was ploughed and torn by the terrible artillery fire, and under fences and in corners, and anywhere that slight shelter offered, the dead lay in dozens, showing the spots fought for.”

50 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 50

1/31/17 3:00 PM

51 SPRING 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 51

1/31/17 3:00 PM

11 With the failure of Pickett’s Charge, Lee in effect sounded the end of the three-day battle, opting to ready his army for its return to the relative safety of Virginia. The Confederates began their southward march late the following day. And while the Army of the Potomac followed in hopes of cutting off the Rebel retreat—Forbes’ painting here shows Union soldiers marching in pursuit in the rain on the road near Emmitsburg, Maryland—by July 14 Lee’s army was back in Virginia. All told, over 23,000 Confederates were killed, wounded, captured, or missing during the Gettysburg Campaign. The victorious Union army suffered nearly as many casualties, making Gettysburg the Civil War’s bloodiest battle. Forbes would later reflect on the epic struggle: “The battle of Gettysburg is famous for more desperate and gallant charges than any single battle of the great war. Here came the culmination of the efforts of Lee’s army when it for the last time threw itself so recklessly against the Union line. Subsequent battles occurred in other localities, but never again was life so prodigally spent.”

52 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 52

1/31/17 3:01 PM

Sources: Edwin Forbes, Thirty Years After: An Artist’s Memoir of the Civil War (1890; reprint, Baton Rouge, 1993); all images courtesy of the Library of Congress. Note: images have been cropped slightly to fit the page.

53 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-Forbes.indd 53

1/31/17 3:01 PM

A BROTHERS’ WAR The wartime diaries of Thomas and Summerfield Petty, siblings from Virginia who fought on opposite sides during the Civil War, testify to a family divided by the conflict.

BY J O H N M. C O S K I

on april 8, 1863, private James Thomas Petty of the 17th Virginia Infantry noted in his pocket diary that he had received a letter with news of his brother from kinsman George Newton Petty, “who has just returned from Camp Chase, O[hio], & been exchanged. He speaks of the kindness of Mollie & Kelly & alas! of the apostacy [sic] of poor Summerfield to Yankees.” ¶ Thomas Petty resumed the lament for his apostate brother, John Summerfield Petty, the following day in his tight, immaculately neat script: “Poor dear Summer! How it wounds my heart to think of him as a traitor to his family, to Virginia, & to all our earliest & fondest associations of mutual childhood and innocence! Little thought I when we parted 3 short years ago, as only brothers who loved could part, that ere we met again a wider than Dives’ gulf should flow darkly between our souls and sunder our life paths for all time!

Would God this cup had passed.” ¶ That the American Civil War was a “brothers’ war” can be a tired cliché, the stuff of melodrama.

54 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-PettyBros.indd 54

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

1/31/17 2:08 PM

Thomas (left) and Summerfield Petty

55 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

CWM23-FEA-PettyBros.indd 55

SPRING 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

1/31/17 2:08 PM

“how it wounds my heart to think of him as a traitor to his family…”

The brothers’ paths diverged in 1861 and 1862, when they decided to support opposing sides in the sectional conflict. Thomas’ reactions to the “thrilling” news from Fort Sumter in April 1861 made clear his southern—specifically Virginian— sympathies. “All my friends nearly condemn me but believing I’m right I still cry hurrah for Old Virginia! Whither she goes I’ll follow,” he wrote on April 16.

Still, Thomas did not regard the prospect of disunion with unalloyed enthusiasm. “Oh! that God might save us yet from civil war! My country! O my country! I could weep tears of blood if it would avail to restore the old, the true “Union” in peace! War will never, never do it,” he wrote the next day.

The news on April 19—that Massachusetts militiamen en route to Washington had clashed in the streets of Baltimore with anti-war supporters and pro-secessionist citizens—propelled Thomas Petty to act. “The Mass. troops were assaulted in Balt[imore] today & there was a bloody time – This is the first blood spilt and today is the anniversary of the first battle of the Revolution! Have resolved to respond to Gov. [John] Letcher’s call & go to Virginia to volunteer.” On April 26, Thomas enlisted as a private in the Warren Rifles, a volunteer company in his parents’ adopted hometown of Front Royal.

The Warren Rifles spent a month stationed in Alexandria, directly across the river from Washington, D.C. That ended on May 24, the day after Virginia voters ratified their state’s secession from the Union.

“Capt. Simpson awoke us at 3 a.m. with the remark ‘Wake up boys! They are coming! By

Thomas Petty’s diary entries in the spring and summer of 1861 recorded his feelings about secession, his decision to join the Confederate army after the Baltimore riot of April 19 (depicted below), and his early experiences as a soldier. Opposite page: Thomas’ diary entries about his experiences during the First Manassas Campaign.

3 This article is adapted from one that appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of The American Civil War Museum Magazine. Words that appear in italics were underlined in the original diaries.

56 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-PettyBros.indd 56

1/31/17 2:08 PM

DAVID ROBINSON (PREVIOUS PAGES); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEFT); THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM

Thomas Petty’s diary entries remind us of the truth underlying that trite expression, infusing it with palpable emotional reality.

Like so many other Confederate soldiers, Thomas Petty had come to think of northern soldiers as bitter enemies, men who had little in common with him and his southern comrades.

His diary entries breathed fire and brimstone at the “vandals” and the “cruel and bloodthirsty foe.”

No wonder his reaction to his younger brother’s “apostacy” resembled a primal scream.

In 1943, Thomas Petty’s descendant, Colonel James Petty, U.S.A., donated three of his ancestor’s pocket diaries to Richmond’s Confederate Museum, now part of The American Civil War Museum. Those diaries, covering the years 1861 to 1863, and a fourth diary for 1864 (in the collection of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park) have been cited and quoted in numerous books.

It was the extended quotations in historian Joseph Glatthaar’s prize-winning 2008 study, General Lee’s Army, that caught the attention of David Robinson of Grapevine, Texas. Looking for a permanent home for the four diary volumes of his ancestor, John Summerfield Petty, Robinson decided to unite the diaries of Summerfield and Thomas, much as the two brothers eventually reconciled. Robinson donated Summerfield’s diaries to The American Civil War Museum in 2015.

But that is getting ahead of the story.

James Thomas and John Summerfield Petty were among nine surviving children born to the Rev. James Spilman Petty and his wife, Margaret Eleanor Petty. The middle-class family lived in Falmouth, Virginia, across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg, where the brothers were born (Thomas in 1836, Summerfield in 1838), and moved to Alexandria when they were adolescents.

In 1860, the Petty family moved to Front Royal in Warren County. By that time Thomas had become a bookkeeper in Washington, D.C.; Summerfield had also lived in D.C. before relocating to Strasburg, Pennsylvania, where he was an apprentice millwright, and then to the Columbus, Ohio, area, where he taught school.

Born less than two years apart, the brothers were similar in many respects. Both were well educated, well read, and skilled in penmanship and clerical work—talents that shaped their respective military careers and made their wartime diaries unusually neat and literate. Both men were also devout members of the Methodist Episcopal Church; their religiosity infused almost every aspect of their lives.

DAVID ROBINSON (PREVIOUS PAGES); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEFT); THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM

George, they are across the bridge’!” Thomas wrote in his diary. “At 6.50 a.m. we filed out of town with our rear guard only one & a half squares in advance of their van (the Yankees) – We numbered 500 men…. We arrived at Manassas Junction (Called now Camp Pickins [sic]) 27 miles from Alexandria at 11 o’clock on the cars….”

At Manassas, Thomas’ company was assigned to the 17th Virginia Infantry commanded by Colonel Montgomery Corse. Detached on staff duty, Thomas was not with the unit when it fought its first battle at Bull Run—now known as the skirmish at Blackburn’s Ford—on July 18. The next day he commented on news about the fight: “It is certain we did not lose over 10 killed & between 30 & 40 wounded – The [word erased] regt. fired into our troops & wounded more than the enemy – In heaven’s name what do they mean by acting so – they are two [too] quick to fire – Just say boo! & pop goes a gun at whoever is before them – I can’t call this courage for brave men are cool – this is the third time they have done this trick[.]”

On the morning of July 21, Thomas and his company crossed Bull Run as skirmishers, but encountered the advancing enemy and fell back.

“Capt. S. fell in the water – a puddle waist deep – I fell on a rock & rolled down on the Capt. in the water – Bruised myself badly & lost my gun in the water – came back to the trenches, got another gun & went back to the company – Capt.

Simpson ordered me to return to camp,” he wrote in his diary that day. Thomas ended up watching the Battle of First Manassas—and the rout of the Union army—from a nearby hill.

During the subsequent months of watchful waiting in northern Virginia, and for much of the war, Thomas spent most of his time detailed for clerical work, primarily with the brigade Commissary Department. He was with the regiment on the Virginia Peninsula in the spring of 1862.

In March, General George B. McClellan landed his massive Army of the Potomac at Fort Monroe, with plans to march northwest up the peninsula and capture Richmond. Within two months, McClellan’s force had reached the outskirts of the Confederate capital. On May 31, the opposing armies clashed at Fair Oaks.

“We were awoke at 2 a.m. with orders to get 2 days rations in our haversacks & march at daylight,” Thomas wrote during a break on the 57 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-PettyBros.indd 57

1/31/17 2:08 PM

“when my brother thomas and i rambled through the forests…”

While Thomas was making his way through the Fort Warren library, his brother made the fateful decision to enlist in the U.S. Army.

Summerfield Petty’s war diary begins on September 8, 1862: “Left Columbus at 4:00 AM arrived safe at Mansfield. Found the company I wished to enlist in, in camp.” Two days later he wrote that he was sworn in at 11 p.m. “and retired expecting to leave at early dawn for the seat of war.” The next day, September 11, he “passed examination and was dressed in a suit of Uncle Sam’s clothes.”

During the Peninsula Campaign in 1862, Thomas Petty and the 17th Virginia Infantry participated in the fighting at Fair Oaks (depicted above) and at Glendale, where he was captured. Opposite page: Thomas’ brother Summerfield, who joined the Union army in September 1862.

58 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-PettyBros.indd 58

1/31/17 2:08 PM

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

as skirmishers and after we had advanced to the front about 400 yards I was sent back with a message to Genl. Kemper. Unwittingly I obliqued a little too much to our right and walked into the enemy’s lines. I was met by Genl. Barry chief of artillery, Lt. Col. Sweitzer and a cavalry captain, to whom, much chagrined, I surrendered my faithful rifle. The battle raged fearfully from the time I was taken (2 p.m.) till night. We drove the enemy some distance, captured 2 batteries and 700 prisoners. Our regiment fell into an Ambuscade, was surrounded on all sides and ought to have been captured or killed to the last man. We lost, however, only 61 prisoners and cut our way through.

Some of our best men fell in the affair. Phil Durr, DeKalb Pipher, Ive Elbon, R. Rinker were killed in our company – I staid at McClellan’s Headquarters last night in charge of Company F regular cavalry (20 Regt.) and was very kindly treated.”

Transported north as a prisoner of war, Thomas spent a few weeks at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. During his time there, he read voraciously and took the opportunity to write to his brother, Summerfield, on July 20. Thomas was exchanged and released in early August, before he had received a reply.

ANNE SK BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION (LEFT); COURTESY OF DAVID ROBINSON

morning of the battle. “It is now 8.30 a.m. & we are halted several miles from Richmond on the New Kent C.H. road. Col. Corse has just made us a speech telling us that the great battle is expected today and advising us to keep cool, keep close, aim low, and remember the glory of Bull Run, Manassas, and Williamsburg, and expressing entire confidence in our determination and ability to conquer the Yankees in thus defending our homes, our firesides and our liberties – My mind is calmly resting on God and I trust my hope of heaven is bright & glorious[.]”

“The battle began yesterday as expected at 2 p.m.,” Thomas resumed his account on June 1, “our forces making the attack and driving the enemy over a mile capturing his breastworks and 8 pieces of artillery (Empire Battery) at the point where our regiment was engaged – Barker’s farm – Our brigade entered the fight at 4.30 – The firing was kept up till after dark – Our regiment lost 67 killed and wounded out of less than 300 engaged – Our entire brigade suffered severely from bad management in leading us into the engagement. I left the field at 6 o’clock to carry off poor Charlie Richardson who was very badly wounded in the neck and shoulder.”

In the days and weeks following the Battle of Fair Oaks, Thomas and his comrades endured endless rain and mud, scoffed at northern accounts of the Confederate victory, and tried to anticipate what their new army commander, General Robert E. Lee, would do.

Thomas’ unit was not engaged in the first of the several battles between Lee’s and McClellan’s forces—known as the Seven Days Battles—from June 25 to July 1. That changed on Monday, June 30, at Glendale. “Very hot – In line of battle and expect to engage the enemy in a few minutes,” began his terse entry for that day. “We are about 10 miles below Richmond. It is just 1 o’clock p.m.” “[F]ive minutes after the entry of yesterday was closed we moved forward to engage the enemy,” he wrote on July 1. “Our regiment led the advance on our extreme right. Our company was deployed

ANNE SK BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION (LEFT); COURTESY OF DAVID ROBINSON

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

59 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

CWM23-FEA-PettyBros.indd 59

SPRING 2017  THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

1/31/17 2:08 PM

thy but what a sad change time has wrought. He is in the army arrayed against my country, and I perhaps am to meet him in the deadly conflict.

Oh that God would keep us from a meeting other than as two loving brothers should meet.”

When the 120th Ohio left camp at the end of October, Summerfield Petty’s prayer was answered: The regiment went to Cincinnati and crossed the Ohio River to become part of the garrison at Covington, Kentucky. Less than a month later, the 120th made a weeks-long journey on steam transports down the Ohio to the Mississippi River, bound for Memphis, Tennessee—and away from Virginia and brother Thomas.

Several days after arriving in Memphis, Summerfield Petty went out on picket and saw another face of war. “We passed a house in ruins, having been burnt during the night. It was the property of a widow who sat in an arm chair mourning over her great loss. My heart was pained at the sight. O what a great desolation follows in the path of the army…. The widow refused to give lodging to sick soldiers declaring in favor of secession which perhaps was the cause of her misfortune.”

Summerfield “saw the elephant” on Sunday, January 11, 1863, in Arkansas at the Battle of Arkansas Post (or the Battle of Fort Hindman), one of the first engagements during Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi. “[I]f we must fight commence it on some other day than the holy Sabbath,” he began his

Summerfield Petty’s first experience in combat occurred in January 1863 at the Battle of Arkansas Post (depicted below), after which he wrote that he would dedicate himself to serving God “more faithfully” if he survived the war.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

He and his unit—Company C of the 120th Ohio Infantry—did not leave immediately for the seat of war. Instead, it spent a month in training camp in Mansfield, Ohio, with opportunities for visiting family and friends.

Like many other pious young men, Summerfield Petty was concerned about his own and others’ religious health in the army. On September 12 he wrote optimistically, “Camp life agrees with me, and the Lord gives me grace to resist the evil. Oh the consolation of religion…. Had a real pleasant prayer meeting out on the grass. This I hope is the commencement of good times in religion.” Two days later, on Sunday the 14th, he confronted the reality of army life: “The drum beat a ‘tattoo’ and we ‘fell in’ for roll call. Oh how the Sabbath is desecrated.”

A letter from a friend at home prompted Summerfield’s only wartime diary entry in which he mentions his brother Thomas. “Home,” he wrote on September 26. “What thoughts come flitting through my mind as I write that word. When as an undivided family we assembled around the hearthstone at home and heard the passages of Divine truth expounded and the matin song or the vesper hymn of praise ascended to the throne of the Heavenly Mercy. When my brother Thomas and I rambled through the forests or fished in the clear streams of the ‘Old Dominion.’

Then we looked forward to a future of pleasant intercourse, when we would be united in sympa-

60 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-PettyBros.indd 60

1/31/17 2:08 PM

Prewar New Orleans

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

All-Expense-Paid Tours of the South Soldiers are tourists. During the Civil War, marching and campaigning gave young men an opportunity to see the world beyond the confines of their familiar neighborhoods. The diaries of Thomas and Summerfield Petty often read like travelogues as they describe and react to new places.

Thomas spent most of the war in his native Virginia, but even he found much to remark upon. He had been in Richmond before, but on May 21, 1862, he described the Confederate capital as a sightseer might. “I walked over a good portion of the city, saw public buildings, strolled through the beautiful grounds surrounding the capitol, luxuriating in the shade and feasting my eyes upon Crawford’s noble monument, the Clay Statue and Houdon’s cast of Washington, and last but not least, the many beautiful women whose beaming smiles and queenly carriage lent so much graceful radiance to a scene already fairy-like in its beauty.”

Traveling by rail with General James Longstreet’s corps to East Tennessee in September 1863 took Thomas Petty through a part of the Old Dominion that apparently was new to him. On September 15 he wrote, “At Blue Ridge Springs and all along the road crowds of pretty women maids and matrons greeted us with great enthusiasm and much good cheer, & showering their rosiest smiles and choicest ‘snacks’ right and left with old Virginia liberality. God bless them all and give each one a husband! Rode on top of the cars and had a glorious panoramic view of the Blue Ridge. Passed through a magnificent country and saw corn, tobacco, sorghum, buckwheat, &c., growing finely.”

Summerfield Petty’s wartime travels took him down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and along the Gulf coast. He described Covington, Kentucky, as “quite a romantic looking town” and the country around it as “remarkably hilly.” The country around Fort Mitchell outside Covington, in contrast, he found depressing. “There is great desolation in this country,” he wrote on October 29, 1862. “Splendid mansions tenantless or left in charge of those who take no interest in their welfare. There is scarcely a fence to be seen. Agriculture belongs to the things ‘that were.’”

Traveling by transport down the “Father of Waters,” Summerfield on May 5, 1863, described the river from Perkins Landing, Mississippi. “I climbed up the promontory where the rebs had a strong battery planted – but a rear attack destroyed their feelings of security. The sight was indeed a grand one – the eye could detect the meandering of the Mississippi for many miles, and then the appearance of the country from that vast height baffles description.”

A business assignment gave Summerfield an opportunity to visit New Orleans on October 5, 1863. “I had a splendid opportunity of viewing the ‘Crescent City’ with its array of ‘beauty and fashion’ that were promenading the streets,” he wrote. “The streets of New Orleans are wide and clean – the edifices are of the finest and most improved architecture.”

His impression of New Orleans was not as favorable when he visited on February 9, 1864—in the midst of Mardi Gras. “This day excels anything I ever witnessed – judging from the street scenes, the devils seem to have full sway today. I witnessed some of the most ludicrous costumes & figures I ever saw. All the lewd women of the city (and their name is ‘legion’) seemed to be trying to exhibit themselves in the worst conceivable shape – some dressed as Indians, devils – monks – some half naked and riding in open carriages – exposing just as much of their person as possible – especially a well formed one – exhibited her parts to as good advantage as possible, with flesh colored hose – and dresses coming to the knees – like a dancing girl.

‘Mardi Gras’ in New Orleans will long be remembered.”

entry that day. “Heavy firing commenced near noon and was kept up almost constantly from the fort & our gun boats & batteries. I never heard anything to equal it before. We were ordered to advance and support Foster’s battery.

When no fears were entertained for that, a body of skirmishers from our regiment were sent out, and shortly afterward we were ordered ‘forward double quick,’ March. We advanced within 60 yards of the fort & lay there exposed to the enemy’s fire until 4 o’clock when the white flag was hoisted & we advanced into the fort. Our flag was the first upon the battlements.… God be praised I was preserved unhurt, though the bullets cut the brush over my head & fell all around me, though I had no visible protection. I can say God was my rock & my fortress and in Him will I trust. O how good the Lord is to me. If he preserves me through this war, I will serve him more faithfully than I ever have before.”

Within a month of his first battle, Summerfield Petty’s army service took a turn that echoed that of his Confederate brother. “I was taken out of the ranks of the pickets & ordered to report at 10-1/2 O’clock tomorrow at Gen. M’clernand’s Headquarters to be examined as a clerk,” he wrote in his diary on February 12. “My prayer is that I may obtain the situation if it is good for me.” The following day he wrote, “I went to the Headquarters & succeeded in obtaining employment as a clerk but how permanent I cannot tell.”

His detachment lasted for more than a year.

During that time, the 120th Ohio continued its service in the lengthy campaign for Vicksburg and the subsequent campaign against Jackson, Mississippi, before being transferred to New Orleans and the Department of the Gulf for service in western Louisiana.

Clerical work did not exempt Summerfield from active service or other kinds of danger. For most of the months-long Vicksburg Campaign, Petty suffered intensely from fever and diarrhea—diseases that killed so many other soldiers, North and South. He developed the often deadly “bloody flux,” or dysentery, in May 1863 as he and the rest of Grant’s Army of the Tennessee began its investment of Vicksburg from the east.

“God be praised I still live and even feel a little better this morning,” he wrote on May 17, the morning after the largest battle of the campaign at Champion Hill, Mississippi. “When I came out of the negro hut this morning a pile of dead, perhaps a dozen, with faces upturned, greeted me.

Life’s battles with them are over and their spirits are with the God who gave them. I get no attention and must wait until others are served. My malady appears better today. Oh! Would that God would stretch forth his hand and heal me and I will glorify him.”

By January 10, 1864, Summerfield was grow61 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-PettyBros.indd 61

1/31/17 2:08 PM

duty since February 14th, 1863,” he wrote. “I have enjoyed many privileges and comforts since my stay here that I would have been deprived of in the company, and yet I feel glad to return and be with my old comrades again.”

“i would very much like to hear from home”

Upon his release from captivity, Thomas Petty had continued his clerical work with the Confederate Commissary Department. As part of General James Longstreet’s corps, Thomas’ regiment was in the Blackwater River region near Suffolk, Virginia, in early 1863. And, as part of General Montgomery Corse’s brigade, it was not with the rest of General George Pickett’s famed Virginia Division at Gettysburg in July 1863. Thomas and the 17th Virginia were, however, among the troops who spent a trying and frustrating winter of 1863– 1864 on detached service in East Tennessee.

Thomas, like Summerfield, left his clerical post and rejoined his company in 1864. He served in the grueling Overland Campaign of 1864 and Petersburg Campaign of 1864–1865. He was wounded at Dinwiddie Court House on March 31, 1865, and was in a Farmville, Virginia, hospital when Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

As Thomas Petty’s war was ending in Virginia, Summerfield Petty was in the trenches before Fort Blakely, Alabama, one of the last Confederate strongholds protecting Mobile. Summerfield had become adjutant of the 114th Ohio Infantry, into which the remnants of the 120th had been consolidated in November 1864.

“There was a salute of 100 guns fired from Spanish Fort, Blakely and Mobile at 8 oclock A.M. in honor of the capture of Mobile & our recent successes in Virginia,” Summerfield wrote in his diary on April 13, 1865. “The silver lining of the dawn of peace – seems visible in the horizon. God speed its onward course!”

The 114th Ohio would spend another four months on garrison duty in Alabama and Texas, but with the war’s end, reconciliation within the fragmented Petty family could begin. “I wrote to Father & Mother today and to Thomas several days ago,” Summerfield noted in his diary on June 2. “I would very much like to hear from home.” His father gratified him with a July 4 letter in which he assured his son “that as ever you are most affectionately remembered daily by us all.” “You speak of having acted conscientional throughout this dreadful struggle,” his father continued. “We are sure you did so and therefore you have nothing to reproach yourself for, and moreover what gives us great comfort is the assurance that you are striving to get to a better world, where war is not heard

COURTESY OF DAVID ROBINSON (2)

ing restless in his clerical position. From a berth aboard the steamship St. Mary, he observed bitterly that “The idea of soldiering as a private for the sake of patriotism is ‘played out’ – emphatically. I cannot bear to be treated as a menial by those who are my superiors only by their ‘shoulder straps.’ Experience is a dear, dear school, but her lessons are not soon forgotten[.] It is quite likely that our number of clerks will soon be thinned out & I may return to the Company Adjutant. I am prepared for it. I have no regrets.”

He was still a headquarters clerk in the spring of 1864 when his regiment participated in Major General Nathaniel P. Banks’ ill-fated campaign up Louisiana’s Red River. “I am really pained when I learn the particulars of the carnage at [the April 8 battle at] Pleasant Hill,” he wrote on April 21 from New Orleans, where he had remained. “We are now entering on a vigorous campaign – the future seems dark and ever gloomy. God grant that light may soon shine through the gloom and our arms crowned with success.”

But the news only grew worse. On May 4, he learned that his own regiment, which had been held in support at Baton Rouge until May 1, was ordered into action, only to be surprised and routed and most of the men taken prisoner. “Oh how sad it is for men to be stricken down in that manner – without chance of defense – who have so often faced death in the field.”

Even aboard a river transport, Summerfield’s own position was precarious as the river level fell precipitously. “The enemy have blockaded Red River, thus severing our line of communication with N.O.,” he wrote on May 6. “Two of our gunboats were captured yesterday, and one transport which had on board the 56th Ohio Vet. Vols. en route for home to spend their furlough among friends. I must confess that things in this Department look rather dark. Our supplies will not last over twenty five days, and unless we succeed in effecting more than has been done lately – we will come to mule soup and parched corn. Such is unsuccessful warfare. There will be great anxiety on our account at home.”

Finally, on May 16, back safely in New Orleans, Summerfield was able to exhale. “Never did famished traveler across the desert more eagerly hail the fertile oasis, or a bird escaped from its prison more eagerly flap its wings in freedom and enjoy the balmy air of liberty, than we enjoyed the sight of the noble Mississippi after being penned up in the inhospitable Red River Country for so long and being exposed to the guerrilla firing in descending the river.”

Two weeks later, on June 1, Summerfield Petty finally returned to the ranks. “Having been appointed Sergeant Major of the 120th O.V.I. I applied for my relieval from duty as clerk at Headquarters 13th Army Corp where I have been on 62 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-FEA-PettyBros.indd 62

1/31/17 2:08 PM

COURTESY OF DAVID ROBINSON (2)

After war’s end, Thomas and Summerfield Petty quickly reconciled.

Above: The brothers (Thomas left, Summerfield right) as they appeared later in life.

– where peace reigns.”

Then, on July 21, Summerfield noted in his diary: “I got a very affectionate letter from Thomas – the first I received since the war commenced.

Oh! how highly I prize it! I am rejoiced to think that I can soon have the pleasure of meeting him as I am to be mustered out as soon as the rolls can be made.”

True to the pledge he made at Arkansas Post, Summerfield Petty devoted his life to the service of God. In May 1866 he became a minister in the Holston Conference in East Tennessee. For the next 30 years he served a succession of churches in the area where his older brother served in the Confederate army during the winter of 1863– 1864.

In December 1865 Summerfield married Sallie A. Hunt, a Maryland girl who (as he wrote in his diary in July 1863) had “wound herself around the tendrils of my heart” and with whom he felt “a congeniality of thought and sentiment I seldom meet[.]” The couple had five children before she died in 1875. Petty outlived two other wives by whom he had eight more children and fathered a 14th child (who lived only a few days) by a fourth wife he married in 1898.

Summerfield retired from the ministry in 1909 and died in 1911. The Union army veteran is buried in the National Cemetery in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Brother Thomas similarly began a long postwar life with a December 1865 marriage to his wartime sweetheart. Thomas and Martha Adeline “Mattie” Deshields had five children together, and lived in Washington, D.C. For more than four decades Thomas worked in D.C. city finance, including 15 years as city auditor until a trusted assistant embezzled funds, ensnared Petty in a public scandal, and led to his transfer.

Thomas Petty was also active in Camp No. 171 of the United Confederate Veterans. He died on May 3, 1929, and is buried in the Confederate section of Arlington National Cemetery.

In March 1866, Thomas described himself and Summerfield as brothers “who love each other so frankly and devotedly and so well understand each other[.]” That fraternal love and devotion survived a fratricidal war. Appropriately, their diary accounts of that war are now united in one place.

JOHN M. COSKI IS HISTORIAN AT THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.

63 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-FEA-PettyBros.indd 63

1/31/17 2:08 PM

The Lincoln Memorial Shrine Since 1932, the only museum and research center dedicated to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War west of the Mississippi Located in Redlands, California Halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs Open Tuesday-Sunday, 1-5pm Closed most holidays, but always open Lincoln’s birthday Free admission!

For more information, please visit www.lincolnshrine.org/civilwar or call (909) 798-7632

CVM ad 1.indd 1

CWM23-BOB-Books.indd 64

3/12/2016 3:41:49 PM

1/30/17 8:54 PM

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY

Have you visited?

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY

BOOKS & AUTHORS

The B&A Q&A: Beverly Louise Brown renowned historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor died tragically on April 13, 2015, in Richmond, Virginia, when her car was rearended by a driver traveling at 107 miles per hour. She left behind the completed manuscript for Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons, which Viking published in February. ¶ Her sister, art historian Dr. Beverly Louise Brown, undertook the task of seeing the book through publication. Here she

65 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-BOB-Books.indd 65

1/30/17 8:54 PM

B&A answers questions about her sister, the book, and the perils and delight in finishing another scholar’s work.

Please tell us about Elizabeth and how she came to her career as a historian.

Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Civil War, but mother’s storytelling ability. “History” after all means “story,” and mother was able to make it seem very real to the three of us. Mother died just four months after Elizabeth, but shortly before her death, I spent an afternoon talking to her about Elizabeth. When I asked what she remembered most about her middle daughter, she said without hesitation, “She was always standing at the kitchen counter looking things up in the encyclopedia.” One often finds the phrase “meticulously researched” in reviews of her books, but even at an early age she loved to ferret out answers and unearth hidden gems.

Elizabeth’s works on Barton and Lee stand as bookends on either side of a distinguished career as a Foreign Service officer. She served in Spain, South Africa, and at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna, as well as being the foreign affairs advisor to both houses of Congress. Few other Civil War historians can marry personal experience with scholarly insight in such a compelling way. When we read her criticism of Lincoln as commander in chief, we

should remember that she was once the chief U.S. spokesperson for NATO and had earlier been deeply involved with Bosnia, serving in Sarajevo at the time of the siege. She experienced firsthand the importance of military discipline under fire and understood that rank matters. As she was fond of saying, she had lived “realtime” history. It was her unique ability to tie the various threads of her life experience together and reflect upon the lessons she had learned that allowed her to render such a vivid picture of 19th-century American history. I do not think that there is any better example of this than Six Encounters with Lincoln.

How did she come to focus on Abraham Lincoln?

Elizabeth never set out to write a book on Lincoln. It was a chance discovery that provided the catalyst. On the day she received the Lincoln Prize in 2008 for her book on Lee, she had spent the morning doing research at the New-York Historical Society. When she arrived back at the flat where we were staying, she was ecstatic, because she had just discovered an

66 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-BOB-Books.indd 66

1/30/17 8:54 PM

COURTESY OF BEVERLY LOUISE BROWN (2)

Civil War enthusiasts will know Elizabeth’s work from her two award-winning books, Clara Barton, Professional Angel (1987) and Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (2007). Both books reflect her experience working for the National Park Service. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1973, she became a ranger assigned to the Washington Monument. With characteristic determination, by the end of her first day she had brought a class action suit claiming discrimination because, as a woman, she was only allowed to collect the visitor fees. By the end of her second day, the forward-looking Park Service had acquiesced and allowed her to take visitors up and down in the elevator. It was the beginning of a long and fruitful association that saw her working at both Arlington House (the Robert E. Lee Memorial) and the Clara Barton National Historic Site.

The two monuments sparked her imagination and precipitated her research into Clara and “Our Bob,” as she always called Lee. Those experiences also inspired her to return to school for a graduate degree in history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Elizabeth and I and our sister, Peggy, were raised listening to our mother’s stories of the Civil War—as a child, our mother had spent hours sitting on the front porch in Terre Haute, Indiana, hearing the tales of her great-grandfather John J. Kenley. Grandpa Kenley had been a foot soldier in the 24th Indiana Regiment. We grew up reading his letters (some of which are quoted in Six Encounters with Lincoln) and surrounded by family “heirlooms,” including the walnut bookcase made for his wedding in 1863 and the fork from his mess kit.

But, as Elizabeth often said, it was not “the stuff ” that got her hooked on the

“ Elizabeth was adamantly against ‘retread’ history. No matter how compelling another author’s arguments might be, it was imperative to return to the original sources, judging them on their own merit.”

DR. BEVERLY LOUISE BROWN ON HER SISTER, HISTORIAN ELIZABETH BROWN PRYOR

COURTESY OF BEVERLY LOUISE BROWN (2)

unpublished drawing of Abraham Lincoln sketched in a letter written home by one of his military guards. As she put it, “There sits Abraham Lincoln, with a familiarity almost unimaginable today, legs folded and tall hat in place, looking for all the world like a cricket perched on the nation’s front porch.”

Over the next seven years Elizabeth submerged herself in the letters, diaries, and newspaper articles of the 1860s, carefully piecing together six episodes that explored Lincoln’s difficulty in managing a republic. Each of the six tales describes an encounter between the 16th president and his constituents—plebeian or prominent—revealing his opinions and character in surprising ways. On the most basic level, these incidents are cracking good stories, showing Lincoln in all his quirky greatness. But each tale also provides a springboard for delving into significant aspects of Lincoln’s administration that have been neglected or previously unknown. We meet characters as diverse as Lee, Susan B. Anthony, and an old Confederate with a menacing stick in his hand named Duff Green,

who was concerned about rebuilding the South after the Civil War. There is an awkward first meeting with army officers on the eve of the conflict, which reflects Lincoln’s unease with military culture. The meeting with John Ross, chief of the Cherokee nation, shows just how catastrophic the Lincoln administration was for Native Americans and is poignant, given his reputation as a defender of human rights. There are also many instances that reveal Lincoln’s discomfort with strong-minded women.

Elizabeth came to realize that the backstories to these encounters were even better, causing us to ponder our preconceptions about Lincoln. The episodes are also connected by a number of common threads, so that in the end the yarn she wanted to spin reformed itself into a web.

How does her work differ from that of other Lincoln scholars?

Elizabeth was adamantly against “retread” history. No matter how compelling another author’s arguments might be, it was imperative to return to the

Beverly Louise Brown (right), her sister Elizabeth Brown Pryor (center), and their mother, Sandy Hamingson, at the Lincoln Prize award dinner in 2008. Pryor won that year’s award for her book Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (2007).

original sources, judging them on their own merit. Too often the yellow varnish applied so thickly by scholars to enhance a story simply obscures the truth. Elizabeth would remind me that there was so little in Lincoln’s own words about his feelings that we are beholden to the observations of those around him. But she would warn me that we should be at once both grateful for and skeptical of such observations. As a historian, she would say, you have no greater tool than your skepticism.

Unsatisfied with well-trawled sources, Elizabeth became something of a ferret, unearthing new nuggets of information in the most unlikely and farflung places. The Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading in Great Britain springs to mind, but that was only one of some 50 libraries and archives that she worked in while researching this book. With a fine-tooth comb, she sifted through more than 350 unpublished collections of family papers and diaries. This was in addition to the sizable number of letters, memoirs, and chronicles that have already seen print.

It might be best to let Elizabeth speak for herself about what she felt was the book’s contribution to her field. In the introduction, she wrote: The democratic “demons” evoked in the title are not just the political devils Lincoln battled in his ambitious exercise of power—though that could be said to have fully demonized America.

They arise from the contradictions inherent in self-government, representing the darker side of our bright republican currency. Among the phantoms that plagued Lincoln’s administration were: greed; impatience; the ignorance of the public; the need to manage a large army while subordinating it to the popular will; the structural dysfunction of the American government, guaranteed by Founding Fathers, who were suspicious of any authority that might be too efficient; and constant demands from competing sectors of the population— sectors with little in common save their appetite for dominance. Every chief magistrate struggles with this reality,

67 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-BOB-Books.indd 67

1/30/17 8:54 PM

B&A but Lincoln confronted it in the rawest possible context: a nation at war with itself. Throughout his presidency Lincoln struggled with the very nature of democracy, not only its definitions and traditions but its momentum and fluidity, that irksome capacity to change swiftly like a flash flood in the mountains. He wrestled with the very people that made up so vibrant a community, grappling with their clamorous diversity, their impatience, their outspoken opinions and above all their demands.

What strikes me about Elizabeth’s analysis is how the demons that Lincoln confronted find parallels in the torments and anxieties facing our contemporary leaders. What she has to say has great resonance today. Democracy was and still is a slippery concept.

When I arrived in Richmond the day after Elizabeth’s death I found her study stacked high with books on Lincoln, piles of the corrected pages of Six Encounters with Lincoln, and a phalanx of flash drives, where she had backed up each chapter and painstakingly stored her transcriptions of original documents. The previous January she had jubilantly called me in London to announce that she had finally finished her work on “the tyrant Lincoln” and I found that the text, footnotes, and bibliography were virtually ready for publication. Elizabeth had meticulously highlighted in yellow any quotations or page numbers that needed to be rechecked. Only the preface and acknowledgements were missing. I undertook the task of checking the footnotes, quotations, and bibliography, but what appears in the book is her scholarship in her own words.

Elizabeth had ordered four or five photographs, but left no list of illustrations.

I only knew that she had once told me that she wanted “a lot of pictures.” Luckily, as an art historian, ordering photographs is one thing I know how to do. As

I read through the manuscript, I tried to visualize what she was describing and set about to find appropriate images. She may have never intended to illustrate the party given at the White House in February 1862, but when I found an illustration of it in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, I knew that it would be the perfect accompaniment to her account of the event. In addition to the sketch of Lincoln that set Elizabeth on her scholarly journey, she had also unearthed at least two other previously unrecognized drawings of Lincoln. I was able to add several more drawings of him that were virtually unknown in the great canon of Lincoln scholarship. One depicts the 16th president walking through the rainy streets of Washington on a “midnight thinky,” and

another shows him traveling incognito to his first inauguration.

Polishing her manuscript and seeing it through publication was a labor of love that took me outside my own comfort zone of Italian Renaissance art. For a year I gave up my own scholarship as I grappled with learning an entirely new field of history and cast of characters. I was acutely aware of needing to stay true to Elizabeth’s vision and of not imposing my own views or style of writing. I simply wanted to make certain the facts were correct and do her hard work justice. I have no words to express adequately my admiration for her achievement as a historian. I only know that more than once the sheer beauty of her prose brought tears to my eyes.

68 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-BOB-Books.indd 68

1/30/17 8:54 PM

COURTESY MATTHEW C. HULBERT

How did you help see the manuscript to publication? Were there any challenges or “aha” moments along the way?

COURTESY MATTHEW C. HULBERT

The Books That Built Me: Matthew C. Hulbert i’m always fascinated to learn what first drew historians to the Civil War, whether it was trips to battlefields, coveted sets of toy soldiers, or reenacting with fathers and grandfathers. Although my parents took me to iconic sites such as Gettysburg, Arlington, and Ford’s Theatre, my own childhood fascination with the conflict truly started with the films of Clint Eastwood—and the added benefit of watching countless home screenings with my dad. The melodramatic showdown between Eastwood’s bounty hunter, Blondie, and the mercenary Angel Eyes over a buried cache of Confederate gold in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and his free-for-all with Union guerrilla hunters as ex-Confederate bushwhacker Josey in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) never failed to entertain. Nor was the western timbre of these pictures a coincidence, given the nature of what I write about today. The films opened my eyes to a western-looking version of the conflict, one that I’ve been trying to place in American culture ever since.

In my relatively short career as an historian of Civil War memory and western guerrilla violence, I’ve gravitated toward scholarly texts that tell excellent stories about the past. (This is of course in addition to inspirations of phrase and style, for which I frequently look to biographers and travel writers like David McCullough, Jane Ridley, Bill Bryson, Jim Harrison, and Anthony Bourdain.)

Better still, the books that have most influenced my own scholarly thinking have been the ones that chronicle everyday people—the politicians, soldiers, widows, slaves, orphans, editors, and outlaws—who are not only struggling to

control how they would be remembered by posterity, but trying to wield the past in the political present.

With my interests in guerrillas, memory, and the West, 2008 to 2015 was a fortuitous time to be in graduate school—minus that whole apocalyptic downturn in the economy and needing to be employable at the end. The study of social memory was in the middle of a mini-renaissance, and the

importance of irregular combatants, many of them based west of the Mississippi River, to the Civil War experience seemed to be gaining traction daily. A movement informally known as the “Dark Turn” in Civil War history—one that focused on the true costs and traumas of the war—came into its own behind a path carved in large part

by Stephen Berry, who sat on my dissertation committee.

These circumstances in mind, the book around which all the others orbited for me, and most other students of social memory, was David Blight’s Race and Reunion (2001).

Blight masterfully plotted the landscape of postbellum culture and politics in the East—the “Big Bang” period of legacy building that determined how the masses would remember the Civil War for generations. At once Blight set the pace and

Matthew C. Hulbert

69 SPRING 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-BOB-Books.indd 69

1/30/17 8:54 PM

B&A

ON OUR WEB SITE

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

The Quartermaster

BY ROBERT O’HARROW JR. (SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2016)

“O’Harrow’s thorough, masterfully crafted, and impeccably researched biography is destined to become the authoritative volume on [Montgomery C.] Meigs.” —Jonathan Noyalas

The Second Battle of Winchester

BY ERIC J. WITTENBERG AND SCOTT L. MINGUS SR. (SAVAS BEATIE, 2016)

“Wittenberg and Mingus have written a readable study of the Second Battle of Winchester that should find an appreciative audience among those interested in the Gettysburg Campaign, the interactions between battlefield and homefront, and Virginia during the Civil War.” —Cecily Zander

Scarred: A Civil War Novel of Redemption

BY MICHAEL KENNETH SMITH (CREATESPACE, 2016)

“Scarred illustrates how the violence of war is not just limited to the battlefront…. [It’s] an intense reading experience that leaves the reader wanting more.” —Angela Riotto

Bushwhackers

BY JOSEPH M. BEILEIN JR. (KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016)

the boundaries for future memory studies and, in my case, provided a springboard for dissent: I wanted to explore the outcasts of mainstream remembrance. I wanted to amalgamate the West and guerrillas and the Dark Turn—to see what sort of commemorative Frankensteins lurked beyond the borders of mainstream memory and could be shocked to life.

Anne Marshall’s Creating a Confederate Kentucky (2010) came at just the right

moment, setting a new standard in Border State memory studies precisely as I started wrapping my head around Western Missouri’s claim to diehard Confederate status even though the state had never seceded from the Union and myriad proslavery advocates there chose to fight as guerrillas rather than join the Confederacy proper. By laying bare how postwar identity politics directly influenced the construction of counterintuitive col-

“Beilein’s book says many important things. It … should be read by everyone interested in Missouri’s turbulent Civil War experience.” —Brian D. McKnight

Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy

BY EARL J. HESS (UNC PRESS, 2016)

“All in all, Hess succeeds in arguing in favor of Bragg’s generalship while not discounting his role in the personal conflicts that he endured during the war.” —Nate Buman

70 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-BOB-Books.indd 70

1/30/17 8:54 PM

Abraham Lincoln Book Shop Inc. lective memory narratives in Kentucky, Marshall’s book helped me distill Missouri’s confluence of southernness and westernness into something coherent. At the same time, while institutional studies of the Lost Cause had largely gone out of vogue, Gaines Foster’s Ghosts of the Confederacy (1987) still held water. (It still holds up today, if you’re interested.)

Foster had a major influence on my understanding of how collective memories are actually constructed and disseminated, not in the abstract realms but by real individuals and organizations with concrete political intents.

Around the same time that my philosophy of Civil War memory took discernible shape, my ideas on guerrilla warfare and counter-narrative wartime experiences were also coming together. Credit here goes in large part to a more eclectic trio. For those who know it well, Phillip Shaw Paludan’s Victims (1984) is a masterwork in Civil War history. His coverage of individuals simultaneously waging and suffering through a more local, personal conflict that was part of the broader war but also separate from it—and their abilities to understand that disconnect in real time—was pioneering. More than anything, Paludan drove home to me that guerrilla warfare could be military history in its own right—and it could be beautifully written.

For the postwar years, Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels (1959) and T.J. Stiles’ Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (2002) were never far from hand. Hobsbawm’s theories on social banditry have been tweaked over the years, in some cases by Hobsbawm himself, but they’re where anyone wishing to appreciate community-sanctioned warfare and communitysponsored insurgency should look. And I did so often. Stiles’ book provided something of a death blow to orthodox guerrilla studies—books that discounted the possibility of western guerrillas fighting with legitimate ideological motivations.

Rather than stripping a bushwhacker like James of his political sensibilities or rubberstamping him as a nihilist or an apo-

litical bandit, Stiles reimagined postwar crime as terrorism tethered to still-simmering partisan hostilities. This didn’t just give the Border West new cache in the world of Reconstruction politics— it forced us to start rethinking the war’s established timeline. It also helped make a study of what I came to call “guerrilla memory” worth writing.

In retrospect, it’s striking that the “books that built me” seem to have appeared at just the moment I needed them.

Moreover, they seem to fall within neat, topical groupings that coincided with exactly what I eventually wrote a book about. This is partially correct, but also something of a mirage, the result of limited space and perhaps my own romanticized recollections of coming of age as an historian. (This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the fringes of history are streamlined and collective memories born!) Truth be told, numerous other works played roles in piecing together my view of the Civil War world. (Books by Megan Kate Nelson, Ed Ayers, Daniel Sutherland, Bill Blair, Emory Thomas, and Stephen Berry all come to mind.) Our field is overflowing with talented scholars and, as my wife can attest, as long as I have a credit card, those scholars will sell books.

And yes, I know more traditional military historians are feeling a disturbance in the Force right about now. So I would be remiss not to say that Peter Cozzens and Ed Bearss are among my all-time favorite Civil War writers and that I’m continually in awe of the folks who can write military history well. I occasionally even lament not having the pen for it.

That pang comes and goes, but the call of the margins—of bushwhackers and jayhawkers, of exiled memories and outlawed experiences—is constant. Which means that more encounters with Josey Wales and Blondie are in my future. As is more guerrilla history.

MATTHEW C. HULBERT TEACHES AMERICAN AND AFRICAN HISTORY AT TEXAS A&M–KINGSVILLE AND IS THE AUTHOR OF THE GHOSTS OF GUERRILLA MEMORY: HOW CIVIL WAR BUSHWHACKERS BECAME GUNSLINGERS IN THE AMERICAN WEST (UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS, 2016).

Specialists in Historical Americana Since 1938

Featuring a Fine Selection of: • Artifacts • Autographs • Books • Campaign

Memorabilia

• Ephemera • Manuscripts • Paintings • Photographs • Prints • Sculpture

Relating to Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War & U.S. Presidents

Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, Inc. 824 W. Superior St., Suite 100 Chicago, IL 60642 (312) 944-3085 ALincolnBookShop.com

New Address

☛

If It's on Our Shelves...

It's History!

CWM23-BOB-Books.indd 71

1/30/17 8:54 PM

Own a true piece of history!

RARE CIVIL WAR ERA BEAUTY!

AMERICAN ILIAD

Nestled in the foothills on a flat, .69 acre lot, this” built to last” church has low ($250) property taxes and zoned ‘VC’ (VillageComm) and is not historically registered.

CONTINUED FROM P. 28

*1866 Solid Field Stone Church with Civil War Era cemetery *Second story flooring and stairs added 15 years ago for extra use *Electric Powered (100amp); no water

A MUST HAVE FOR AVID CIVIL WAR HISTORIANS

WANT MORE CIVIL WAR? STAY CONNECTED WITH THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR WHEREVER YOU ARE!

WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/ CIVILWARMONITOR

@CIVILWARMONITOR

Journalist Lloyd Lewis, author of Sherman: Fighting Prophet (1932), a minor classic of Civil War biography, was unstinting in his praise: “Sandburg was born for this particular job, and it has waited for him.” To Lewis The War Years seemed destined to be “one of the tallest sycamores in the forest of American literature, one of the landmarks in the history of our writing.”2 Most critics noted that The War Years went well beyond simple biography. “Quite properly,” wrote Robert E. Sherwood, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), “Mr. Sandburg’s great work is not the story of the one man’s life. It is a folk biography. The hopes and apprehensions of millions, their loves and hates, their exultation and despair, were reflected truthfully in the deep waters of Lincoln’s being, and so they are reflected truthfully in these volumes.”3 Academic historians were, naturally, more measured in their praise. For one thing, Sandburg did not encumber The War Years with footnotes, although he did include a detailed bibliography and Lincoln scholars could usually discern specific sources. For another, Sandburg apparently never met a juicy quote he didn’t like, and he used sources whose veracity was suspect.

Finally, Sandburg seldom dealt with the problem of weighing different historical interpretations. For those reasons professional historians appraised it chiefly as a work of literature, not rigorous biography.

But they did so respectfully.

And because of Sandburg’s commanding literary stature and The War Years’ best-selling

status, the American public learned more about Lincoln from Sandburg than any historian.

They also learned a great deal about the Civil War itself. The War Years contained enough history of the conflict that Sandburg readily adapted it into a one-volume history entitled Storm Over the Land: A Profile of the Civil War (1942).

Bell Wiley, who would author two enduring classics of Civil War social history, The Life of Johnny Reb (1943) and The Life of Billy Yank (1951), praised the adaptation generously. “The narrative fairly glows with drama and interest,” he wrote, particularly admiring Sandburg’s prose portraits of such figures as Horace Greeley, George G. Meade, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant. “His descriptions are indeed so vivid that the excellent photographs which accompany the text become something of a superfluity.”4 Carter G. Woodson, a pioneer in African-American history, wrote that the volume was “very much a humanized story. Even the Negro—something unusual for an American history—is made an actor in the drama. The Negro figures as a person rather than merely as a thing about which there was a much regretted quarrel.”5 But despite Sandburg’s fame, the critics’ confident pronouncements that The War Years and The Prairie Years (which were published as a set) would stand forever, and the set’s numerous reprintings (my own 1980s copy is from the 18th printing), Sandburg is today a mostly forgotten Civil War bard. An informal survey of my numerous colleagues within the Civil War community yielded a near universal response. Although many reported owning a copy of Sandburg’s Lincoln set, they confessed that it gathered dust on their bookshelves.

72 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-BOB-Jump.indd 72

1/31/17 7:43 PM

One said that he had given his away unread: “The spines were very nice and I understand that there were words inside.”6 What might be the reason for its sharp reduction in stature? Part of the explanation owes to the ceaseless outpouring of Lincoln scholarship in the decades since Sandburg’s biography first appeared. But much of it is due to the slippage in Sandburg’s reputation among literary critics. What was once praised as a robust, uniquely American voice now seems a bit overripe, and passages formerly considered eloquent now come across as overwrought and self-indulgent. At their worst they veer into sheer bathos. But just when you’re starting to roll your eyes, Sandburg can move you to tears. For example, The

LIVING HISTORY

CONTINUED FROM P. 30

stead. Troiani studied American military art as well, but he was surprised to find much of it rife with inaccuracy.

“They didn’t carry that kind of musket, or the uniforms were wrong,” he explains.

For Troiani, those blunders signaled an opportunity.

“Nobody had ever done serious uniform and equipment reconstructions of these battles using all the known accounts.” His first chance came in the early 1970s during the buildup to the bicentennial of the Revolutionary War, when the National Park Service hired him to create illustrations for the event. Not long after that, he branched into the Civil War. It’s been the focus of about 70 percent of his work ever since.

For Troiani, just preparing to reconstruct one histori-

CWM23-BOB-Jump.indd 73

War Years has a passage about the aftermath of the Gettysburg Address, when the crowd has dispersed and the town is still. Sandburg takes the reader to the home of parents far away, grieving for their lost soldier son. A newspaper arrives with the text of Lincoln’s brief address, and the words explain to them the meaning of their son’s death. It is an astonishing feat of literary imagination. Taken on the whole, Sandburg’s The War Years deserves a fresh look, as does his status as a bard of the American Iliad.

MARK GRIMSLEY, A HISTORY PROFESSOR AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, IS THE AUTHOR OF SEVERAL BOOKS, INCLUDING AND KEEP MOVING ON: THE VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN, MAY-JUNE 1864 (2002) AND THE HARD HAND OF WAR: UNION MILITARY POLICY TOWARD SOUTHERN CIVILIANS, 1861-1865 (1995).

HE HAS ALSO WRITTEN MORE THAN 50 ARTICLES AND ESSAYS.

cal scene can take years. He starts by reading every known account of the moment he plans to depict, including eyewitness reports and postwar memoirs. He also researches weather and terrain, often walking the ground himself. (“Was there a fence across here? Were these trees there at the time? Were they that tall? Was the ground dusty?

Was it muddy? What happened there before?”) He combs personal records for details like the color of each officer’s horse and hunts down surviving personal items.

Then he researches the regiment as a whole. “What kind of guns were they carrying?

Did they have new uniforms issued, or were they wearing stuff that was six months old?

Same thing with the flag. Does it still exist? What condition was it in at the battle?” Troiani ticks off. “Then you do all that again for the opposing side.”

No detail is too small for Troiani. While working on a p a i n t i n g ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74

THIS ARMY DOES NOT

RETREAT The Memoirs of General George H. Thomas A novel by

JACK M. ZACKIN In this fictional memoir, author Jack M. Zackin presents the exciting life of General George H. Thomas from this great general’s own perspective.

Available now at

1/31/17 7:43 PM

The Virginia Memorial with General Robert E. Lee astride his horse, Traveller.

TITLE

CONTINUED FROM P. TK

MY GRANDFATHER’S DOG WAS NAMED . MY DAD’S NAME IS .

THEY CALL ME

Traveller

LIVING HISTORY

CONTINUED FROM P. 73

Robert Lee

There are 162,000 stories here.

I found mine.

Battlefield tours, museums, historic sites and more bring history to life at Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center.

called The Men Must See Us Today, featuring the 124th New York’s struggle for Devil’s Den at Gettysburg, a historian who had studied the regiment in depth mentioned that its colonel’s aide-de-camp was wearing a college fraternity pin during the battle. Troiani tracked down the design of the pin, then carefully painted it in. “I figure if you’re doing historical paintings, people are trusting you to get it as accurate as humanly possible,” says Troiani, whose major works range in price from $40,000 to $55,000.

Achieving that level of accuracy relies, in part, on access to period artifacts: the same guns, uniforms, saddles, swords, and other accouterments worn or carried by the soldiers Troiani depicts. For most paintings, Troiani poses models—gaunt guys he finds through newspaper ads or Facebook—outside his Connecticut home to create an approximation of the scene he aims to paint. Having them

hold real Civil War objects helps Troiani capture fine details—the way the weight of a rifle musket pulls down a shoulder, or just how much a slouch hat slouches—that make his work even more precise. It’s not surprising, then, that over the years Troiani amassed a vast collection of thousands of Civil War artifacts, including 250 uniforms and three cannons. “Unless you have the real cannon,” he explains, “how are you going to figure out how shadows fall across the spokes?”

To exasperate Troiani, just present him with a historical inaccuracy. In 2003, he was hired as a uniform and equipment consultant for the film Cold Mountain. Initially, the filmmakers just wanted to make uniforms from his patterns, but Troiani was soon bombarding them with advice and corrections. After spotting a slew of inaccuracies in a scene where a group of Confederate soldiers make breakfast, Troiani sent recipes for the food they would have been eating, along with photos of period-correct utensils. To illustrate what a Confederate camp would have looked like, he built brush shelters in his yard

Come experience the stories of Gettysburg and you might just find your own.

GettysburgFoundation.org

Clear the Way, Don Troiani’s depiction of the Army of the Potomac’s Irish Brigade during the Battle of Fredericksburg

DON TROIANI

To plan your next trip, call 877-874-2478 today!

74 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-BOB-Jump.indd 74

1/31/17 7:43 PM

and sent photos of them, too.

“You just couldn’t stop it all,” he says of the errors. A decade earlier, Troiani designed three Civil War battlefield coins for the U.S. Mint, including a halfdollar featuring a drummer boy. When the Mint’s sculptor wanted to change the roping on the drum, every detail of which Troiani had painstakingly researched, “I blew my stack,” he recalls. (They changed it back.) He is hard on his own work as well. He can’t look at any of his paintings without spotting something he wants to fix or change. “All I see is what’s wrong,” he admits. It’s why he keeps none of his original work.

That includes Valverde.

Soon after the painting was finished, Troiani sold the bulk of his Civil War artifact collection to the United States Army Center of Military History—more than a thousand items altogether, including rarities like nine Zouave uniforms and a pair of Civil War underwear. The only things he kept were some guns, some swords, and the cannons. “I don’t think the Army needed them anyway,” he figures. The

BOTTS

DON TROIANI

CONTINUED FROM P. 40

great talker and very much on himself.” Still, Lyman enjoyed the man. Another soldier noted that Botts “has the haughty self important air & demeanor of a Virginia slaveholder.”

Botts took pains to meet the army’s provost marshal general, Marsena Patrick, for he was responsible for not only policing and discipline in the army but also the guards assigned to protect Botts’ home. In his diary, Patrick recorded frequent encounters with Botts, including one on January 16, 1864:

CWM23-BOB-Jump.indd 75

collection will be incorporated into the future National Museum of the United States Army.

The sale gave Troiani the freedom to pick what he paints, and what he wants now is to stretch his brush further back in time, to the Revolutionary War. “It’s always been my favorite period,” admits Troiani, who once published an entire book on American Revolution military buttons.

Currently he is working on a large painting of the Boston Massacre and has two Revolutionary War books in the works. (His final Civil War book, a four-year project on uniforms called Civil War Soldiers, will be released in early summer.) “My goal is to do all the major Revolutionary battles, especially if there are no accurate depictions,” he says.

“I want to create the great scenes of America’s past.”

Could that same impulse compel him, at some point, to return to the Civil War? Unlikely, he says. “But I won’t say never.”

JENNY JOHNSTON IS A FREELANCE WRITER AND EDITOR BASED IN SAN FRANCISCO.

Grand Army Men

“John M. Botts has been over today & has bored me some and pleased me Some. I would like very well to see him, at any time when I have 3 hours to spare.”20 The Union officer corps embraced Botts in return, despite his penchant for reading aloud to them various long-winded letters and articles he had written. He received an invitation to the great III Corps ball in January 1864 (though the prospect of his three daughters attending likely added extra incentive for the officers).

He dined with Meade at least twice. The band of the 10th Vermont Infantry gave a concert on his front porch (an honor few ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76

1/31/17 7:43 PM

southern civilians could claim), and three officers in the III Corps performed opera in Botts’ parlor. Ulysses S. Grant visited Auburn for the grand review of the VI Corps in April 1864, and then dined with Botts and a bevy of generals two weeks later (“We had a good time but a little too much of the Botts egotism,” wrote one officer who was there). The embracing of Botts’ family by Union officers went beyond the figurative. In 1866, Mary Minor Botts would marry Captain B.W. Hoxley, an ordnance officer in Meade’s army, in Patterson, New Jersey.21 Woven through the pleasant interplay between Botts and the Army of the Potomac was the important subtext: Union officers needed to treat Botts well because he mattered politically—he was the most prominent member of a class, Southern Unionists, that the federal government hoped to encourage. For his part, Botts surely saw his celebrity status as a means to both protect his investment in Auburn

CLARK B. HALL

BOTTS

CONTINUED FROM P. 75

tect Botts’ property. Soldiers’ indignaand get some free publicity, too.

Both Botts and the army largely suc- tion rose again when a brigade of the III ceeded in their respective ends—but Corps was directed to rebuild his fences not without a price. The indulgences re- (regardless, apparently, of which army quired to satisfy Botts often came by the had destroyed them). In a week, miles labors of men in the ranks, and many of of fence re-appeared. General Regis de them viewed Botts with disdain. Botts Trobriand of the III Corps acknowlmet every assault on his fences with a re- edged Botts’ triumph over the armies of buke (though this both sides: “Howhardly discouraged ever great a victim the wood seekers). the honorable Mr. Soldiers interpretBotts had been, he ed Botts’ loud comhad nevertheless plaints as signs of succeeded in savquestionable loyaling some valuable ty: “Had Botts been remains from the a sincere Union shipwreck.”22 m a n , h e wo u l d Eventually Botts n o t h av e c o m and the Army plained of having of the Potomac our army encampachieved an agreeAuburn, John Minor Botts’ wartime ed on his grounds,” able equilibrium. home in Culpeper County, Virginia, as it appeared in 2014 one Union soldier

By May 1864, Botts had receded from wrote. Many wondered, as another soldier noted, if Botts the news. All around him, Culpeper wasn’t “carrying water on both shoul- bore heavily the devastating presence ders, levying tribute from both armies.” of Union forces, while Auburn seemed a The soldiers’ outrage grew when, shortly shiny dollar in coal dust. On May 4, the after arriving in Culpeper County in No- Union army took to the roads south, emvember 1863, they were ordered to pro- barking on the campaign that ultimately

A GRIPPING NEW CIVIL WAR DRAMA BETHFISHREADS

“ In his description of the Richmond prisons and Andersonville, the author demonstrates that he is quite knowledgeable about Civil War prison camps. History buffs and scholars alike will appreciate Smith’s dedication to historical accuracy...Readers will especially enjoy Smith’s inclusion of well-known officers into the narrative, as this heightens the reading experience and helps anchor the story firmly into Civil War history.”

THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

CWM23-BOB-Jump.indd 76

H P aperback, Kindle and audio editions available at Amazon.com H I SBN-13: 9781530379743 Distribution through Amazon.com Pages: 192 Price: $13.99

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

“ SCARRED would be a good match for Civil War buffs and historical fiction fans as well as anyone interested in a good story”

FROM THE AUTHOR OF HOME AGAIN

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

1/31/17 7:43 PM

CLARK B. HALL

determined the fate of the Confederacy that Botts so lustily despised. Botts lived out the remainder of the war at Auburn largely undisturbed, beyond the reach of the Confederate government and no longer of interest to reporters. In 1866, he published his formerly secret (and hunted) manuscript, Great Rebellion: Its Secret History, Rise, Progress, and Disastrous Failure. Southern reviewers hated it.

A year after the war, former Union staff officer Theodore Lyman paid Botts a visit at Auburn and found him stout and “in full health and vim.” “He talked a good bit,” Lyman recorded (echoing a familiar refrain), and he noticed Botts had done a “good bit” of fencing since the war. Botts remained politically active and thus, in Virginia and the South, unpopular. No less than Robert E. Lee would place him among the “worst” men in the Commonwealth—a man of the sort who, according to Lee, ought not hold the future of Virginia in his hands.23 John Minor Botts, Virginia’s greatest Unionist, died in 1869. His farm Auburn still stands, whittled from 2,200 acres to 425, but still picturesque and a noticeable expanse of green among shrinking farms and expanding suburbs near Cul-

peper. Today, to those who know the story, Botts and Auburn have come to symbolize the frayed realities of Unionism in Virginia and the tangled complexities and contradictions of America’s Civil War—a man who earned the enmity of his beloved homeland and the admiration of his homeland’s enemies, who sought peace but chose to live on the country’s most contested landscape.

In time, Virginians who remembered Botts recalled a man of immense intellect and conviction, even if his convictions were (to them) misguided. “A more right hearted, wrong headed man never lived,” wrote a former Confederate soldier. But in fact, most Virginians and virtually all Americans have forgotten John Minor Botts, as have historians. No substantive article, no book has ever been written about him—only a master’s thesis, completed in 1972. Americans cherish their rebels, but apparently not so much when they resist rebellion itself.24 JOHN J. HENNESSY, A HISTORIAN WITH THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, IS THE AUTHOR OF RETURN TO BULL RUN: THE CAMPAIGN AND BATTLE OF SECOND MANASSAS AND FIRST MANASSAS: AN END TO INNOCENCE, AS WELL AS SEVERAL ESSAYS AND ARTICLES ON THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC.

ReLive History with the reVistor App 3D AUGMENTED REALITY SCENES OF HISTORICAL EVENTS

General Sherman with escort at the Bennett Place

CIVIL WAR TOURS & MORE April 6-9

Based in Chambersburg, Pa.

Ed BEArss symposium: militAry lEAdErship Military history tour with sites of the ill-fated Braddock Campaign of 1755 to Fort Necessity. Ed Bearss, Dr. Richard Sommers, Chris Kolakowski, others...$445

Union Infantry at attention

mAy 17-21 shiloh Based in Corinth, Ms.

Covering new ground to the Western Theater. Tours of Shiloh, Corinth, Brice’s Crossroads, Tupelo, and more with Tim Smith, Tom Parson, others...$545

July 26-30 “on to richmond” Based in Richmond, Va.

Conference includes Stuart’s Ride around McClellan, The 7 Days, & the Lower Peninsula. Tours & talks by Robert E. L. Krick, Ed Bearss, John Querstein, others.

sEpt 21-24 lincoln At AntiEtAm Based in Chambersburg, Pa.

Featuring bus tours of Lincoln’s October 1862 visit to Antietam with John Schildt and others.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

All programs include tours, lectures, meals, tactical maps, & more!

Call (717) 264-7101 for a 2017 brochure !

www .

C ivil w Ar S emiNArS .Org

Reasonable Rates & eaRly biRd specials! touRs since 1989.

Special thanks to our Sponsor:

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

/CivilWarSeminars

CWM23-BOB-Jump.indd 77

The First Flight, a fully motioned event, at Kill Devil Hills, NC NOW WITH EVENTS AT: Bennett Place, Bentonville, Kill Devil Hills, Gettysburg, Malvern Hill, Chickamauga, Malvern Hill and Shiloh. We are adding new content and more motion based on your feedback.

Try out our FREE app!

CONTACT US! 717-264-7101

lplessinger@chambersburg.org 100 Lincoln Way East Chambersburg, PA 17201

revistor.com

1/31/17 7:43 PM

ure (New York, 1866), 152-153, 233; J.M. Botts, “Union Sentiment in Virginia,” The New York Times, January 30, 1861; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume 2: Secessionists Triumphant (Oxford, 2007), 324.

4 Botts, The Great Rebellion, 152, 258.

5 Ibid., 279.

Notes SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES

6 Botts, The Great Rebellion, 290; “Arrest of Union Men in Richmond,” Richmond Examiner, March 3, 1862.

7 “Correspondence of the Examiner and Herald,” Lancaster Examiner and Herald, February 11, 1863; Botts, The Great Rebellion, 290, 292.

8 Alexander Hunter, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank (New York and Washington, 1905), 436; “Keep it Before the People,” Richmond Examiner, March 4, 1862.

9 Twelve years later, after Botts’ death, the courts would overturn the sale, ruling that Botts and Stearns had forced a sale on a mentally incompetent Beckham. Auburn returned to the Beckham family.

10 Botts, The Great Rebellion, 294.

11 Botts, The Great Rebellion, 294; J.B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary (Philadelphia, 1866), Vol. 1, 364.

American Iliad (Pages 28–29, 72–73)

1 “Your Obd’t Servt.,” Time, vol. 34, no. 23 (December 4, 1939): 86.

12 John J. Shoemaker, Shoemaker’s Battery: Stuart Horse Artillery, Pelham’s Battalion, Afterward Commanded by Col. R. P. Chew, Army of Northern Virginia (Memphis, 1908), 37.

13 Canton [OH] Repository, June 3, 1863; Milwaukee Sentinel, May 23, 1863.

2 Lloyd Lewis, “Carl Sandburg Sings the ‘LincolnMusic,’” New York Herald Tribune Books, December 3, 1939.

14 Myrta Lockett Avary, ed., A Virginia Girl in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York, 1903), 238–240; Botts, The Great Rebellion, 299; Gerard Patterson, Galloping Thunder: The Stuart Horse Artillery (Mechanicsburg, 2002), 330.

3 Robert E. Sherwood, “The Life of Carl Sandburg,” New York Times Book Review, December 9, 1939.

15 Terry L. Jones, Campbell Brown’s Civil War: With Ewell in the Army of Northern Virginia (Baton Rouge, 2001), 190.

4 Bell Irvin Wiley, review of Storm Over the Land in Journal of Southern History, vol. 9, no. 1 (February 1943): 121.

16 Botts, The Great Rebellion, 296, 302; “The Retreat of Meade from the Rapidan to Manassas,” Richmond Examiner, October 26, 1863.

5 C.G. Woodson, Journal of Negro History, vol.

28, no. 1 (January 1943): 90.

17 Botts, The Great Rebellion, 296.

6 Mannie Gentile to the author, December 20, 2016.

18 “Meade’s Army,” New York Herald, September 22, 1863; “Hon. John Minor Botts,” Hartford Daily Courant, January 27, 1863.

19 John B. Fry to Abraham Lincoln, September 29, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Series 1, General Correspondence, Library of Congress.

20 David W. Lowe, ed., Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman (Kent, 2007), 39, 44; Theodore Lyman, Meade’s Headquarters, 1863-1865 (reprint, Salem, NH, 1970), 46; Jonathan E. Helmreich, ed., To Petersburg with the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Letters of Levi Bird Duff (Jefferson, NC, 2009), 155; David Sparks, ed., Inside Lincoln’s Army: The Diary of General Marsena Rudolph Patrick (New York, 1964), 330.

The Scourge of the Confederacy (Pages 32–41, 75–77)

1 George Augustus Sala, My Diary in America in the Midst of War (London, 1865), 500.

2 Régis de Trobriand, Four Years with the Army of the Potomac (Boston, 1880), 551–552.

3 John Minor Botts, The Great Rebellion: Its Secret History, Rise, Progress, and Disastrous Fail-

21 Alexander Webb to his wife, April 29, 1864, Alexander Webb Papers, Yale University; William Marvel, The Great Task Remaining: The Third Year of the Lincoln’s War (Boston and New York, 2010), 286.

22 De Trobriand, Four Years, 551.

23 Letter of Theodore Lyman, April 12, 1865, Lyman Letterbooks in the Lyman Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

24 Hunter, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, 434.

78 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-BOB-Notes.indd 78

1/31/17 7:31 PM

GET MONITOR BACK ISSUES DON’ T MISS A SINGLE COPY OF THE MONIT OR! COMPLETE YOUR BACK ISSUE COLLECTION TODAY!

$8.95

QUANTITIES ARE LIMITED...

DON’T DELAY! ORDER WHILE SUPPLIES LAST…

(PRICES IN U.S. DOLLARS; SHIPPING & HANDLING INCLUDED; INTERNATIONAL ORDERS SUBJECT TO A SURCHARGE.)

TO ORDER, VISIT CIVILWARMONITOR.COM/BACK-ISSUES OR CALL TOLL FREE: 877-344-7409 CWM23-BOB-Notes.indd 79

1/31/17 7:31 PM

pa r t i n g shot

The President in Petticoats

A L

VIS HI

Lik Lin mu mo ge Sp

GARY BART

After the fall of Richmond and surrender of Robert E. Lee’s army in April 1865, Confederate president Jefferson Davis rounded up his family and moved south, headed for Texas to continue the fight. When Union cavalrymen intercepted the Davises in Irwinville, Georgia, surrounding their camp during the early morning hours of May 10, Mrs. Davis urged her husband to attempt an escape. In his haste, Davis mistakenly grabbed his wife’s overcoat; Union troopers surrounded him soon thereafter and placed him under arrest.

News of Davis’ capture spread like wildfire across the country, and many reports relayed, with some delight, the falsehood (initially spread by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton) that the former president had been captured in full women’s clothing—not just an overcoat, but a hoopskirt, petticoat, and dress as well.

In this image, taken a month after Davis’ capture, an anonymous New Yorker with a sense of humor immortalized the myth of the “President in Petticoats,” as one northern headline had reported it.

80 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2017

CWM23-BOB-PShot.indd 80

1/30/17 8:57 PM

CivilWa

Summer 2017

ALWAYS LEGENDARY VISIT ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S HOMETOWN AND WATCH HISTORY COME ALIVE RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES. Like no other destination, Springfield offers the best of Abraham Lincoln. Visit this summer when History Comes Alive! Enjoy live period music and interactions with nineteenth century characters. Witness a moving flag lowering ceremony at the Lincoln Tomb. You might even get to meet Mr. Lincoln himself! All this and more is waiting for you in Springfield.

GARY BART

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

Springfield, Illinois Convention & Visitors Bureau

CWM23-BOB-PShot.indd 3 CivilWarMonitor_2017_FullPage_Summer2016.indd 1

1/30/17 8:59 PM 1/20/17 10:02 AM

30 FIND OVER

HISTORICAL DESIGNS ONLINE Use promo code

POD30OFF

for 30% off the entire collection

©2017, Simplicity is a registered trademark of Simplicity Pattern Co. Inc.

Vist us at www.Simplicity.com/OnDemandPatterns CWM23-FOB-Cover.indd 4

1/31/17 7:54 PM