Issue 31

Travel Special Day Trip: Petersburg to Appomattox

P. 10

VOL. 9, NO. 1

Henry Sibley’s 1862 invasion of New Mexico signaled Confederate plans to create a western empire.

Or did it?

How the West Wasn’t Won PLUS

SPRING 2019

H

$6.99

CHILDREN OF THE BATTLEFIELD P. 80

CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

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Introducing

Head tilting history •

Curated stories for t curious-minded sort.

Head-Tilting History uncovers the stories that make the modern world look tame, like when

hot air balloons were used as spy vessels, female

militias were wielding pitchforks, and thousands of Southern soldiers battled one another in epic snowball fights. Join us in exploring the lesserknown history of our nation and the conflicts that defined its first 100 years.

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Contents DEPARTMENTS

VOLUME 9, NUMBER 1 / SPRING 2019

FEATURES

Salvo

{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}

How the West Wasn’t Won 32

TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Day Trip: Petersburg to Appomattox VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Avid Readers

Henry H. Sibley’s 1862 invasion of New Mexico signaled Confederate plans to create a western empire.

Or did it?

FACES OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Charley’s Legacy

By Gary W. Gallagher

FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Satterlee General Hospital PRESERVATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Celebrating Park Day Volunteers COST OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 A Rare Photo of the Boy General IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Brady at Work?

Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 The Great Emancipator LIVING HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Map Quest

Books & Authors AMELIA COURT HOUSE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)

THE B&A Q&A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Mutiny in the Army 54

WITH PETER S. CARMICHAEL

THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

BY GEORGE C. RABLE

In Every Issue EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Heading West PARTING SHOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Children of the Battlefield

The letters of a Union sailor bring to life the valuable service performed by the formidable ironclad warship USS Onondaga and its crew during the war’s final year.

A January 1866 revolt by African-American soldiers in the 128th U.S. Colored Troops sheds light on the often troubled path to freedom experienced by former slaves who joined the Union military.

By Noah Andre Trudeau

By Jonathan Lande

“Gibraltar of the James” 42

ON THE COVER: Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress. Colorized

by Mads Madsen of Colorized History.

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editorial

VOLUME 9, NUMBER 1 / SPRING 2019

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

Heading West

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

my introduction to the presence of the Civil War in the Far West was the movie Massacre at Fort Holman (1972), a spaghetti western—and notso-subtle knockoff of The Dirty Dozen (1967)—starring James Coburn and Telly Savalas that I watched whenever I found it on cable television as a kid.

Set in New Mexico Territory, the film follows Coburn, who plays a disgraced Union colonel on a mission to retake the fictional Fort Holman, a formidable desert bastion that he had previously—and mysteriously—surrendered without a shot fired to Rebel forces led by Savalas, a Confederate officer. Before the mission can begin, Coburn first has to convince his superior officer of its value.

Capturing Holman, he argues, would allow Union forces to retake Santa Fe from the Confederates, who could then be pushed south along the Rio Grande into Texas and beyond. Coburn’s superior is impressed with the colonel’s bold plan. “It could decide the outcome of the war,” he muses.

The remainder of the movie—which devolves into a simple revenge flick marked by massive explosions and so-bad-it’s-almost-good acting—has nothing more to say about the Civil War in the Far West. But it did spur me to read up on the subject—one that I discovered was, regrettably, almost entirely absent from the Civil War history books on my shelves.

In the decades since, as Gary Gallagher notes in this issue’s cover story, “How the West Wasn’t Won” (page 32), the war in the Far West, and in particular Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley’s failed attempt in 1862 to drive Union forces from New Mexico Territory, has received increased attention from historians. Some of them see Sibley’s campaign as evidence of Confederate interest in creating a western empire. Gallagher considers their arguments and gives his own take. Want to share your thoughts about this or other articles in the issue? Send your emails to letters@civilwarmonitor.com.

Jennifer Sturak Michele Huie COPY EDITORS

Brian Matthew Jordan BOOK REVIEW EDITOR BRIAN@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

Patrick Mitchell CREATIVE DIRECTOR

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Howard White CIRCULATION MANAGER HWHITEASSOC@COMCAST.NET

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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.

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Subscriptions: $23.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $33.95 per year in Canada, and $43.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Views expressed by individual authors, unless expressly stated, do not necessarily represent those of The Civil War Monitor or Bayshore History, llc. Letters to the editor become the property of The Civil War Monitor, and may be edited.

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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2019

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d i s pat c h e s

MEADE’S COUNCIL OF WAR

Allen Guelzo’s article “Meade’s Council of War” [Vol. 8, No.4] kept the suspense until the very end. Then he passed sentence: “George Gordon Meade really did think that ‘Gettysburg is no place to fight a battle.’”

Focus rather on what Meade actually did and said that July 2 evening, and several things are clear.

For one, he never said Gettysburg was no place to fight a battle.

That was John Newton, quoted in John Gibbon’s full and careful account, and Dan Butterfield’s minutes of the council (“Newton thinks it a bad position”) confirming Newton’s sentiments.

For another, Meade did not call his generals together intending a council of war, an important distinction. At 8 p.m. on July 2 he reported to Washington, “shall remain in my present position to-morrow,” a clear statement of intent. Then (not mentioned

by Guelzo) Meade learned that interrogation of Confederate prisoners accounted for all units except George Pickett’s division.

That would be Robert E. Lee’s sole reserve for the morrow, while Meade had the entire VI Corps in reserve. Winfield Hancock exclaimed, “General, we have got them nicked!”

Meade had to find out from his generals the condition and numbers of their commands and their views of the shaping battle. He only reached Gettysburg in the early moments of July 2 and was immersed in that daylong struggle. When the evening gathering bogged down in aimless conversation, Meade agreed to the format of a council of war to gain what he required. And when it was

quickly evident that all his lieutenants, alongside Meade himself, intended to stand and fight, retreat was not (nor ever had been) an option; Meade’s vehement denial deserves respect.

A better ending for Guelzo’s piece would be Meade’s letter to his wife, written early on July 3: “Dearest love, All well and going on well with the Army. We had a great fight yesterday, the enemy attacking & we completely repulsing them.... Army in fine spirits & every one determined to do or die.”

Stephen Sears

NORWALK, CONNECTICUT

Ed. We asked Allen Guelzo if he

would like to respond. He writes: Mr. Sears doth protest too much.

On page 356 of my 2013 book, Get-

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

tysburg: The Last Invasion, I indeed note that Newton was the first one to suggest that Gettysburg was no place to fight a battle. (“John Newton loyally supplied the table-setting observation that Gettysburg was ‘a bad position’ and that Cemetery Hill ‘was no place to fight a battle in.’”).

Butterfield’s testimony before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War describes Meade “after the council had finished” remarking “that, in his opinion, Gettysburg was no place to fight a battle.” Similarly, if Meade indeed sent his dispatch, informing Halleck of his intention to remain “in my present position” at 8 p.m., then it passes understanding why he assembled his corps commanders and allowed them to believe that he had made no such decision. In fact, Meade’s dispatch was not sent until after the council. As I point out in the article, the 8 p.m. time-stamp on the dispatch in the Official Records is an error; at 8 p.m., the fighting he describes in it was still going on. No wonder Meade’s son, in his biography of the general, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade (1913), corrects the time-stamp to 11 p.m. (volume 2, p. 96). Yes, Meade avoided losing what might have been the Union’s last battle, and all honor to him for that. But so did William Rosecrans at Murfreesboro.

Rather than quoting Meade’s own self-congratulations after the battle, Sears might explain to us the opinion of “the President, the Secretary of War and General Halleck” in December 1863 concerning the Army of the Potomac, that “from that army nothing is to be hoped under its present commander” (OR, vol.

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31/3:457–458).​The real George Meade is probably somewhere in between.

BUILDING THE PERFECT ARMY

The Civil War Monitor is hands-down the best periodical dealing with America’s great internecine bloodletting. I look forward to its arrival in my mailbox with great anticipation and rarely am disappointed by anything I read in its pages. However, the failure of your panelists to include Nathan Bedford Forrest when assembling their ideal armies [“Building the Perfect Army,” Vol. 8, No. 3] is extremely puzzling. For five leading historians of the conflict to not choose Forrest suggests political and academic “correctness” writ large. When I was a Ph.D. student at Ole Miss in the late

1980s Shelby Foote was a guest speaker at a history symposium. One of my colleagues asked the late author whether the Civil War “produced any geniuses.”

Foote quickly cited Abraham Lincoln and then, with but slight pause, added: Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was one of the towering figures of the Civil War and highly respected and feared by William T. Sherman and others on the Union side. Post-defeat, Jefferson Davis considered Forrest to be perhaps his best pure soldier. With anywhere near even strength and adequately used and backed by his government and military superiors, the nonpareil cavalryman would have been even more remarkable.

While Union cavalry leader James H. Wilson (picked by one of your panelists) indeed should be included in a larger perfect army, to claim that he

“defeated Forrest twice” is risible. Forrest did his best as John Bell Hood destroyed the Army of Tennessee at the gates of Nashville. And, yes, Wilson overwhelmed Forrest in northern Alabama weeks before the end of the war when the Confederacy was on life support. The only organized force to truly defeat Forrest was his own government.

He was neutralized by the shortsightedness, elitism, and strategic limitations of the leadership in Richmond and in the overall Confederate command structure. Forrest belongs in any perfect army as a creative, fearless, and indefatigable fighter from the figurative back alley to the literal set-piece grand battle.

Rani-Villem Palo EMERITUS, HISTORY UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA ALBERTA, CANADA

EXPERIENCE

In partnership with

THE END

THE APPOMATTOX CAMPAIGN

March 30 - April 14, 2019

A cooperative retelling of the last days of the Appomattox Campaign — General Lee’s retreat from Petersburg to Appomattox. Nine partner organizations recount the events of the campaign on that day in history from March 30 through April 14 to get you as close to the action as possible.

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the music and the Victorian Dance Ensemble will lead the dancing. To prepare for the ball, free Civil War dance classes will be held at The National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg on February 10 and March 24. Note that advance reservations are required for the ball.

Agenda

$65 PER COUPLE; $35 PER SINGLE; $20 PER STUDENT (18 AND YOUNGER); FOR MORE INFORMATION: CIVILWARDANCE.ORG or 717-732-5330.

Your Spring 2019 Guide to Civil War Events

APRIL LIVING HISTORY

Reenactment of the Battle of Fort Blakeley SATURDAY, APRIL 6, 8 A.M.–4:30 P.M. HISTORIC BLAKELEY STATE PARK SPANISH FORT, ALABAMA

Relive the sights and sounds of Alabama’s largest Civil War battle, fought in defense of Mobile on April 9, 1865, on one of the nation’s best-preserved battlefields. Weapons demonstrations, exhibits, lectures, and a special “Civil War on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay” cruise will take place throughout the day.

Civil War Preservation Ball

$10; BOAT TRIP $27 (INCLUDES ADMISSION); FOR MORE INFORMATION: BLAKELEYPARK.COM or 251-626-0798.

DISCUSSION

MARCH

Grant and the Battle for the Rivers

RECEPTION

TUESDAY, MARCH 26, 6:30 P.M.

History Bites

NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA

Come to The Mariners’ Museum for a food-tasting event of historic proportions! Hampton Roads’ top restaurants, caterers, and culinary schools will prepare their best interpretations of 19thcentury dishes. Guests can sip and savor while mingling with others—including Abraham Lincoln—and vote for favorite entrees, sides, and desserts. Dozens of delicious dishes will be enjoyed throughout the evening. Cooks will compete for the coveted Cast-Iron Skillet Awards, including People’s Choice and Judge’s Choice. $35 FOR MUSEUM MEMBERS; $45 GENERAL ADMISSION; FOR MORE INFORMATION: MARINERSMUSEUM.ORG or 757-596-2222.

History Bites at The Mariners’ Museum

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Civil War military histories typically treat land and sea battles separately. But Ulysses S. Grant stressed joint army and naval operations aimed at both solid and liquid Confederate “assets.” Using the 1863 Vicksburg Campaign as a starting point, three distinguished historians of the era— John F. Marszalek, Craig L. Symonds, and Harold Holzer—explore this revolution in military strategy.

$38; $24 FOR SOCIETY MEMBERS; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NYHISTORY.ORG/PROGRAMS or 212-873-3400.

FUNDRAISER

16th Annual Civil War Preservation Ball SATURDAY, MARCH 30, 7–10 P.M. ROTUNDA OF THE PENNSYLVANIA CAPITOL BUILDING HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

The Civil War Dance Foundation’s 16th annual Civil War Preservation Ball raises money to assist the Pennsylvania Gettysburg Monument Project in its mission to repair and maintain the monuments at Gettysburg National Military Park. The Philadelphia Brigade Band will provide

Reenactment of the Battle of Fort Blakeley

CONFERENCE

“A House Divided”: Dissent, Disagreement, and Subversion During the Civil War SATURDAY, APRIL 6, 8:30 A.M.–4 P.M. HESTER AUDITORIUM, SHENANDOAH UNIVERSITY WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA

The McCormick Civil War Institute at Shenandoah University’s spring conference brings together a number of historians—including Dennis Frye, Jonathan Noyalas, Paul Quigley, and Jennifer Weber—to talk about the ways in which the Civil War strained relations among political officials of the same government, soldiers of the same army, communities, and friends. Registration is required; space is limited. $50 (REGISTRATION AND LUNCH); $25 STUDENTS WITH VALID ID; FREE FOR SHENANDOAH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS; FOR MORE INFORMATION: SU.EDU/ ARTS/SPECIAL-PROGRAMS/MCCORMICK-CIVILWAR-INSTITUTE-2 or 540-665-4501.

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ZURKO PROMOTIONS

THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM AND PARK

CIVIL WAR DANCE FOUNDATION; THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM AND PARK; SHERRY STIMPSON FROST (BLAKELEY)

SATURDAY, MARCH 9, 6:30 P.M.

ANTIQUES SALE

Chicago Civil War Show & Sale SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 9 A.M.–4 P.M. DUPAGE COUNTY FAIRGROUNDS WHEATON, ILLINOIS

Civil War dealers from throughout the United States will have thousands of Civil War-era items, including weapons and uniforms, for sale.

Booksellers and other Civil War groups will also have tables, and attendees can view a special display of Civil War artillery. $9; CHILDREN 12 AND YOUNGER ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: CHICAGOCIVILWARSHOW.COM or 715-526-9769.

which combines the holdings of the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar and the Museum of the Confederacy— will tell stories from multiple perspectives: the Union and Confederacy, free and enslaved African Americans, and soldiers and civilians. Visitors on this day can take in a special daylong lecture series—sponsored by The Civil War Monitor—that highlights the work of a number of up-and-coming Civil War historians.

FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: ACWM.ORG or 804-649-1861 CONTEST

VisitSpotsy.com

Virginia Period Firearms Competition FRIDAY, MAY 17 – SUNDAY, MAY 19 FORT SHENANDOAH

MAY

WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA GRAND OPENING

Emerging Scholars Lecture Series SATURDAY, MAY 4 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Celebrate the grand opening of The American Civil War Museum’s new state-of-the-art facility, located at the ruins of the Historic Tredegar ironworks in Richmond. The new museum—

Join the North-South Skirmish Association for its 139th National Competition, where over 3,000 uniformed competitors will compete in live-fire matches with muskets, carbines, breech-loading rifles, revolvers, mortars, and cannon. It’s the largest Civil War live-fire event in the country and will include costume competitions, historical lectures, a large sutler area, and food service.

FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: N-SSA.ORG or 248-258-9007.

Historic Surratt House Museum Where 19th-century culture mingles with the ghosts of the Lincoln Assassination story.

Chicago Civil War Show & Sale ZURKO PROMOTIONS

CIVIL WAR DANCE FOUNDATION; THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM AND PARK; SHERRY STIMPSON FROST (BLAKELEY)

A Page in American History

Share Your Event

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

Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com

9118 Brandywine Road Clinton, MD 20735 301.868.1121 SurrattMuseum.org Ask about our popular

John Wilkes Booth Escape Route Tours

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Salvo Facts, Figures & Items of Interest

On April 6 and 7, 1865, the High Bridge (shown here as it appears today), an important railroad bridge that spanned the Appomattox River, was a site of contention between Union and Confederate troops. The Confederates tried to burn the wooden structure, but failed to entirely destroy it, in an attempt to cover the retreat of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which had begun days earlier with the evacuations of Richmond and Petersburg. On April 9, Lee would surrender his army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. For more on Lee’s final retreat, turn the page. 3

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IN THIS SECTION travels 10 DAY TRIP: PETERSBURG TO APPOMATTOX voices 16 AVID READERS faces of war 18 CHARLEY’S LEGACY figures 20 SATTERLEE GENERAL HOSPITAL preservation 22 CELEBRATING PARK DAY VOLUNTEERS cost of war 24 A RARE PHOTO OF THE BOY GENERAL

HIGH BRIDGE TRAIL STATE PARK

in focus 26 BRADY AT WORK?

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ROAD TRIP

Petersburg to Appomattox

Pamplin Historical Park

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RAGLAND MANSION

centration of Civil War history than Central Virginia. The historical significance of the region is reason enough to visit, but the fact that you can retrace the conflict’s final major campaigns within the span of 24 hours makes it too good to miss.

For those looking to get the most out of their time in Richmond or Petersburg, we put together the ultimate Civil War day trip—and there’s no better route to follow than that of the Appomattox Campaign. From Petersburg to Appomattox, the historic wonder, scenic beauty, and small-town charm can’t be beat—it’s the quintessential Civil War experience.

Along a hundred miles of picturesque country road, one can see well over a dozen significant historical sites while following the steps of Union and Confederate forces entwined in desperate battle during the final days of the Civil War in Virginia. The Appomattox Campaign begins with the Siege of Petersburg and the Breakthrough Battle, so we’ll start our ultimate Civil War day trip off in Petersburg.

PAMPLIN HISTORICAL PARK

few regions offer a denser con-

Ragland Mansion

RAGLAND MANSION

PAMPLIN HISTORICAL PARK

b

STARTING POINT: PETERSBURG

Between June 1864 and March 1865, Petersburg was the site of a grueling campaign between the armies of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Union forces had laid siege to the vital southern city, through which supplies were shipped to the Confederate capital at Richmond, located approximately 20 miles to the north. On April 2, 1865, Grant’s men finally achieved the breakthrough in the Confederate lines they had long been hoping for, resulting in the surrender of Petersburg, the evacuation of Richmond, and the westward retreat of Lee’s army toward Appomattox.

Start your journey off after a good night’s rest at the historic Ragland Mansion (205 S. Sycamore St.; 800-8618898). The mansion, built circa 1856 by Reuben Ragland, a wealthy railway and real estate mogul, survived the ninemonth Siege of Petersburg and went on to host all manner of celebrities and dignitaries. The nine-room, 10,000-square-

foot bed and breakfast in the Poplar Lawn area of historic Petersburg still has 150-year-old mysteries, hinted at by its hidden storage for silver bars and man-sized passageways and crawl spaces built in between the floors. The breakfast here, however, is unambiguously delicious.

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STOP 1: PAMPLIN HISTORICAL PARK

As you leave Petersburg, stop by Pamplin Historical Park (6125 Boydton Plank Rd.; 877-726-7546), which features stateof-the-art museums, informative living historians, live artillery firing demonstrations, and original Confederate earthworks.

One could easily spend a weekend soaking in all that Pamplin has to offer (and we definitely think you should), but for the purposes of this trip, the Battlefield Center should be your focus. Its 3D exhibit of the Petersburg Campaign leading up to the breakthrough and a detailed fiber-optic map of troop move-

ments during the Appomattox Campaign provide context for your journey west to Appomattox Station.

Exiting the Battlefield Center, you’ll find the entrance to the Breakthrough Trail. Visitors of all abilities can tour the interpretive trail (“loops” range from 0.3 to 1.25 miles, or 15 to 45 minutes at a leisurely pace) and enjoy sweeping views of the battlefield, the Confederate picket line, an original artillery redan, and many other artifacts and resources preserved by the park.

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STOP 2: SUTHERLAND TAVERN

Continuing west, hop on US-460 for just three miles before turning right on Namozine Road.

Immediately on your left is Sutherland Tavern, also known as Fork Inn (19621 Namozine Rd., Sutherland, VA; 804-265-8141). A Civil War Trails sign describes the fighting that occurred at Sutherland’s Station on April 2, 1865, when four Confederate brigades were 11 SPRING 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

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overwhelmed by Union forces under Major General Nelson Miles. This victory marked the Union capture of the South Side Railroad—Lee’s last supply line into Petersburg.

After the battle, the building served as a field hospital for the wounded. Today the tavern is owned by the Olgers family and is open for tours during Southside Virginia Heritage Days (April 13–14 this year) or by appointment year round.

STOP 3: NAMOZINE CHURCH

Sutherland Tavern

Namozine Church

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AMELIA COURT HOUSE

Continue on Namozine Road for another 10 miles and you’ll come to Namozine Church (near the intersection of Namozine Road and Route 622)—also worth a stop.

One can see bullet holes in the building’s exterior from skirmishes that took place nearby on April 3, 1865—the first clash between Union and Confederate forces after Lee’s evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond. Elements of Major General George Armstrong Custer’s cavalry under the command of Colonel William Wells caught up with and engaged troops from the rear guard of the retreat-

COURTESY OF VIRGINIA’S CROSSROADS (2)

3

Amelia Court House

ing Army of Northern Virginia, led by Major General Fitzhugh Lee’s horsemen.

The Confederates lost the skirmish, along with one gun, 10 caissons, and approximately 350 men who were captured. The church later served as a field hospital; bloodstains from the wounded are still visible on the floors.

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STOP 4: AMELIA COURT HOUSE

Another 20 rolling miles west (via State Route 708 and VA-38 West) lies Amelia Court House. Stop here to stretch your legs on the lawn of the present-day courthouse building in the town center

(16441 Court St.; 804-561-6364) and grab a quick bite to eat across the street at Hatcher’s Catering (16420 Court St.; 804-561-0334). A Central Virginia staple, Hatcher’s serves up country comfort done right. Classic sandwiches, barbecue platters, breakfast—whatever you’re in the mood for, Hatcher’s has the fix.

Back at the courthouse, you’ll note a lone Confederate mortar—it was captured by Union forces on April 5, 1865, after Lee’s armies, who rendezvoused here on April 4–5 in desperate need of rations but were sorely disappointed at the arrival of rail cars full of munitions, continued their retreat.

Alexandria

Fredericksburg Charlottesville

NAMOZINE CHURCH FARMVILLE BABCOCK HOUSE

AMELIA COURT HOUSE

COURTESY OF VIRGINIA’S CROSSROADS (2)

P ETERSBU RG TO A PP O M AT TOX: THE ROU TE

Lee’s plan had been to march south along the Richmond and Danville Railroad toward Danville and North Carolina, where he hoped to combine forces with the Confederate army commanded

by General Joseph E. Johnston, but in lieu of a resupply, he was forced farther west into Farmville, where rations awaited him. We’ll follow their footsteps there— hop on 360 West for eight miles and then veer right onto 307 West and follow the sign for Sailor’s Creek Battlefield.

Roanoke

SAILOR’S CREEK

Richmond RAGLAND MANSION

Appomattox AMELIA COURT HOUSE SUTHERLAND TAVERN PAMPLIN HISTORICAL PARK

Petersburg

Norfolk

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STOP 5: SAILOR’S CREEK

The visitors center at Sailor’s Creek Battlefield State Park (6541 Sayler’s Creek Rd., Rice, VA; 804-561-7510) is a mandatory stop for any Civil War enthusiast. The offerings at this small but mighty historic state park—where, on April 6, 1865, nearly a quarter of the soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia were wounded, killed, or captured in a decisive defeat at the hands of Grant’s Union force—include interactive displays, an impressive collection of artifacts, and interpretive walking trails that retrace troop movements across the battlefield.

The Hillsman House, located across the battlefield from the visitors center, is also of note. Guests can walk the grounds outside the home where 20 pieces of artillery under the command of Major Andrew Cowan bombarded the Confederate lines on the opposing ridge.

This battlefield was the scene of desper-

ate fighting—it was the last major clash of the war between Lee’s and Grant’s armies—after which the Hillsman House was used as a field hospital for both Union and Confederate wounded.

Today it is available for tours by request.

Within 72 hours of the horrific fighting at Sailor’s Creek, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, where we’ll journey after a brief stop in Farmville.

6

STOP 6: FARMVILLE

For those looking to turn this day trip into a weekend affair, Farmville is a great place to spend the night.

Hotel Weyanoke (202 High St.; 434658-7500) offers top-of-the-line amenities like a rooftop bar, three restaurants, and amazing access to the historic Civil War sites in and around Farmville.

The most obvious of these is High Bridge Trail State Park (dcr.virginia.

gov/state-parks/high-bridge-trail; 434315-0457), which is 31 miles long and bisects the town. Confederates partially burned High Bridge, which spans the Appomattox River, after crossing it on April 7, 1865. Union forces, however, were able to prevent the bridge’s complete destruction and used its lowerlevel wagon bridge to continue their pursuit of Lee’s men into Farmville.

High Bridge is located five miles east of the trail’s downtown intersection with Main Street. Bike rentals from the Outdoor Adventure Store (318 N. Main St.; 434-315-5736) are available. You can also drive to the Camp Paradise parking lot, which is a short walk from the bridge and provides trail access to the Appomattox River below.

Lee’s forces left Farmville with Union troops right on their heels. In fact, Lee and Grant both passed through Farmville on April 7—Lee and his armies while moving westward to Lynchburg in search of rations and Grant just hours

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APPOMATTOX COURT HOUSE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK (MCLEAN HOUSE); THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM—APPOMATTOX

5

SAILOR’S CREEK BATTLEFIELD STATE PARK

Hillsman House

behind in pursuit. Our tour continues to Appomattox, where Lee and Grant negotiated a final surrender.

Need to refuel before hitting the road? Check out Uptown Coffee Cafe (236 N. Main St.; 434-392-5282) for a caffeine fix. For those in search of a meal, try Walker’s Diner (307 N. Main St.; 434-392-4230), which offers a quick and delicious breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

APPOMATTOX COURT HOUSE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK (MCLEAN HOUSE); THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM—APPOMATTOX

SAILOR’S CREEK BATTLEFIELD STATE PARK

7

STOP 7: APPOMATTOX

From Farmville it’s another 30 minutes on US-460 West to our final destination, Appomattox, which witnessed the final days of the Civil War and where two sites work to preserve that history.

The first of these is Appomattox Court House National Historical Park (111 National Park Dr.; 434-3528987), which is home to the McLean House, where Lee formally surrendered to Grant, effectively ending the war. Visitors can start their journey at the visitors center in the reconstructed courthouse. From there, guests can walk through a small historic village complete with tavern and general store. The park also has over eight miles of both natural and historic trails.

Nearby is The American Civil War Museum–Appomattox (159 Horseshoe

McLean House

Rd.; 434-352-5791), which this spring will feature a new rotating exhibit titled “Enacting Freedom: Black Virginians in the Age of Emancipation,” curated in cooperation with Virginia Tech’s Center for Civil War Studies. The exhibit explores how African Americans from Virginia communities experienced freedom after enslavement. The museum’s permanent exhibit, “Appomattox,” is replete with hundreds of fascinating artifacts, photographs, and documents. They include a digitized copy of the original Appomattox parole log; guests can search for familiar names and even print out pages

The American Civil War Museum—Appomattox

to take home.

With the day likely now nearing an end, a clean room and fresh linens may sound like a good option. For those who don’t have plans to return to Petersburg for the night, the historic Babcock House in Appomattox (250 Oakleigh Ave.; 434-352-7532) is a gem of a bed and breakfast. Built circa 1884 by Bradley Babcock, a Confederate cavalryman and cousin of Orville Babcock, a Union officer who helped secure the McLean House for the final surrender negotiations, this six-room B&B offers a peaceful stay with local and historic charm. The locals rave about the food, too, so if you can’t get a room, a table is a close second. note that many of the historic sites mentioned above are offering anniversary programs—from March 30 to April 14, 2019—that retell major events of the Appomattox Campaign on the days they occurred 154 years ago, allowing visitors to turn this 100-mile day trip into an immersive two-week program. For more information, visit appomattoxcampaign.org.

However you decide to enjoy the Civil War history of Central Virginia, make sure you connect with the people sharing these stories. Park rangers, interpreters, and historical society members are the vanguards who are helping us find new ways to connect, define, and contextualize our American history.

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voices

Avid Readers “PLEASE DROP PAPERS.” —Message on a sign made by Union soldiers on guard duty along the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, in hopes that passengers might toss them reading materials

“No sooner did an army halt within reach of these enterprising fellows than they were to be seen galloping from brigade to brigade distributing daily newspapers to eager buyers…. With what delight the veterans read descriptions of actions they had taken part in….”

—War correspondent George F. Williams, on the arrival of newspaper vendors in camp, in his reminiscences of the conflict

—Rev. E.P. Smith, U.S. Christian Commission, on the wounded soldier he encountered after the Battle of Missionary Ridge

“ You see I must read something, or my mind would become as rusty as a boy’s jack knife that has been lost in a rubbish pile for a year or two, and in the absence of anything better I devour every novel I get hold of.”

—Major James A. Connolly, 123rd Illinois Infantry, explaining why he had read David Copperfield and The Confessions of Con Cregan, in a letter to his wife, February 14, 1864

“ I wish I had some books. The best I can do now is to repeat over and over such pieces of poetry as I have committed to memory.”

—Charles B. Hayden, 2nd Michigan Infantry, in his diary, June 21, 1861

SOURCES: ANNALS OF THE UNITED STATES CHRISTIAN COMMISSION (1868); DAVID KASER, BOOKS AND LIBRARIES IN CAMP AND BATTLE (1984).

“ We opened one morning at nine o’clock with a stock of four thousand books and papers, and at two o’clock P.M. all were gone, and almost every one taken from the counter,—a book or paper to each man who presented himself.”

—Rev. William A. Lawrence on the soldiers’ reading room established by the U.S. Christian Commission in Savannah, Georgia, after the city’s capture by Union forces in December 1864

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)

“ While we were bringing water he sat down on the ground, and pulled from his bosom a copy of Andrews’ Latin Grammar. It was covered thick with his blood. He turned to the fifth declension and began with res, rei. He said that … he found this book, and had carried it under his blouse in the fight, thinking if he was wounded or taken prisoner he would be able to go on with his Latin.”

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)

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fac e s o f wa r

Charley’s Legacy b y r o n a l d s . c o d d i n g t o n p u b l i s h e r , m i l i ta ry i m ag e s

RON ALD S. CO

DDI NGT ON CO

LLE CTI ON

Captain Charles Gloyd came home after three years of service in the 118th Ohio Infantry with haunting memories of the war—and a serious alcohol addiction. Charley, as his drinking buddies and other pals called him, continued to hit the bottle with his Mason brothers with tragic results. No one was more affected by his raging alcoholism than his wife, Carrie, whom Charley wed in 1867.

The short marriage ended when Charley drank himself to death in 1869. He shared the fate of many a soldier who failed to adjust to life after the Civil War. ¶ Charley’s demise left Carrie, 23, a widow with an infant daughter, named Charlien after her late husband. She struggled for some years before remarrying. Still, she never forgot Charley. In fact, his untimely death inspired her to speak out about the evils of alcohol. She eventually became a leading advocate for temperance, making stump speeches around the country and wielding her famous hatchet to smash the fixtures and stock at bars and saloons. ¶ Americans came to know her as Carrie Nation, her second husband’s surname.

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

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

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figures

Satterlee General Hospital 2

Number of corridors (each 775 feet long)

34

Number of hospital wards (each 167 feet long by 24 feet wide) in October 1863

150

Number of hospital tents on the grounds

4,500

Patient capacity of the overall hospital (including tents)

5,847

Number of patients admitted from October 8, 1862, to October 8, 1863

110

Number of patient deaths during this period

4,062

Greatest number of patients admitted in any month during this period (July 1863)

25

Greatest number of patient deaths in any month during this period (August 1863)

40

Number of physicians who worked at the hospital during the war

91

Number of nuns (Sisters of Charity) who volunteered as nurses at the hospital during its existence

2

Number of hours the hospital band performed every afternoon, weather permitting, from the observatory

3

Miles distant the band might be heard in favorable winds

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14

Height, in feet, of the fence that surrounded the hospital

25

Number of sentries posted in and around the hospital

Food consumed at Satterlee, September 1862 – September 1863

177

803,418

Number of men comprising the hospital guard

Pounds of bread

540,519

Pounds of beef and mutton

41,052

Pounds of pork

37,420

Pounds of chicken

95,250

Pounds of fish

490,388

Pounds of potatoes

283,120

Pounds of mixed vegetables

23,635

Pounds of coffee

4,425

Pounds of tea

74,325

Pounds of sugar

334,222

Quarts of milk

27,272

Dozens of eggs

“I was learning to love the place—to love its kind people, and even its very scenery….

Days, months and perhaps years may roll on before I am permitted to see my second home again.” So wrote a grateful Union soldier in 1863 about Philadelphia’s Satterlee General Hospital, where he had recently been a patient. Opened in June 1862 as Western Philadelphia Hospital, it was renamed the following year after the army’s chief medical purveyor, Richard S. Satterlee, and became the Union’s largest military hospital. Designed in the “pavilion” style, with its multiple wards linked to two long central corridors and supplemented by tents, the hospital occupied roughly 16 acres of high ground, which, according to one of its staff, contributed to it possessing “all that could be desired as to pure air, and other natural helps to the procurement of round health.” During its nearly three years of operation (the hospital closed in August 1865), Satterlee buzzed with activity, its well equipped and trained doctors, nurses, and other workers catering to the needs of a rotating array of sick and wounded Union soldiers. Their efforts proved remarkably successful, resulting in a patient mortality rate of approximately two percent. Here we highlight a number of figures about Satterlee and its operations.

SOURCE S: REV. NATHANIEL WEST, HISTORY OF THE SATTERLEE U.S. A . GEN. HOSPITAL (1863); MARGARET HUMPHREYS, MARROW OF TRAGEDY: THE HEALTH CRISIS OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR ( 2013); CHARLES MAGNUS (LITHOGRAPHER), “SATTERLEE U.S. A . GENERAL HOSPITAL , WEST PHILADELPHIA” (1864). IMAGE COURTESY OF THE COUNT WAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE .

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p r e s e r va t i o n

Celebrating Park Day Volunteers p r e s i d e n t , a m e r i c a n b at t l e f i e l d t r u s t

every spring for 22 years, volunteers have taken to our nation’s battlefields and historic landscapes for a day to tend to and reflect upon the sites rooted in the defining conflicts of America’s first century. The catalyst behind these important—and mutually impactful—volunteer projects is the American Battlefield Trust’s nationwide Park Day event.

In just one day of volunteering, thousands of participants experience and help preserve some of America’s most storied places. The wide scope of projects welcomes volunteers of all ages and abilities.

Whether removing brush at Gettysburg or constructing Civil War-era snake-rail fencing at Antietam, Park Day participants better prepare our nation’s treasured sites to serve visitors who want to learn more about our history.

At a time when budget and staffing hardships have become more the rule than the exception, Park Day is increasingly important. Its volunteer power makes it possible to implement projects, large and small, that may otherwise be delayed or scuttled entirely. Time and again, our volunteers have answered the call and selflessly devoted time to bettering their local communities and safeguarding American history.

Although it’s easy to think of Park Day as merely another volunteering opportunity, there is much more to the event. Park Day promotes the connections between people, preservation, and America’s past.

For the citizens who came last year to Virginia’s Petersburg Battlefield, where they toiled alongside Boy and Girl Scouts and the men and women of our armed forces,

or the JROTC members who flocked to South Carolina’s Buford’s Massacre battlefield, their contribution was more than clearing a trail or painting a sign—it was a chance to interact with longtime neighbors and new friends and know that their work would help ensure that our most treasured landscapes are prepared for another year of eager visitors.

The secret to Park Day’s success is not simply the sheer amount of volunteerism it generates—25,000 hours from

7,000 volunteers in 2018 alone—but the unwavering dedication of the battlefield preservationists, history enthusiasts, and nature lovers who have made Park Day what it is. Without our volunteers, it would be but another spring day.

This Park Day, I look forward to seeing faces familiar and new join our ranks for the 23rd consecutive year. Park Day will take place nationwide on April 6, 2019.

Find a site near you at battlefields.org/ parkday.

Volunteers pitch in at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park for Park Day 2018.

3 THE AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST (BATTLEFIELDS.ORG), A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO BATTLEFIELD PRESERVATION, IS COMPOSED OF TWO DIVISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR TRUST AND THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR TRUST.

AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST

by o. james lighthizer

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Start Your Gettysburg Journey at the Heart of the First Day’s Fighting

“Of all Gettysburg museums, this is the one I like best” ~ Katharina S. Visit the site of one of the battlefield’s largest field hospitals Explore award-winning interactive exhibits and displays Experience the stunning 360-degree view of the battlefield

AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST

Take advantage of special group programs and discounts

www.seminaryridgemuseum.org Tickets: 717-339-1300 Group Tickets: 717-339-1354 111 Seminary Ridge Gettysburg, PA 17325

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c o s t o f wa r

�40,250 A RARE PHOTO OF THE BOY GENERAL EARNS BIG

THE ARTIFACT: A wartime photograph of Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer

DETAILS: Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, William F. Browne, a native of Northfield, Vermont, enlisted as a private in the 15th Vermont Infantry.

Soon after mustering out of the army in August 1863, Browne found work as the camp photographer of the 5th Michigan Cavalry, part of the Michigan Cavalry Brigade commanded by 23-year-old Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer.

Browne would take some of the earliest photos of the newly minted general, including the one shown here, taken about two months after the Battle of Gettysburg, where the reckless bravery for which he would become famous—and that would be responsible for his demise at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876— had been on full display.

The following year, Browne would be employed by famed photographer Alexander Gardner to take photos of the fighting around Petersburg, Virginia, over 100 of which Gardner would later publish under the title View of Confederate Water Batteries on the James River.

After the war, Browne returned to his native Vermont, where he died in 1867 of tuberculosis.

QUOTABLE: In a letter he wrote from the camp of the Army of the Potomac on September 17, 1863—around the time Browne is thought to have taken this image of Custer—Colonel Theodore Lyman, an aide to Major General George G. Meade, described the famous young cavalryman to his wife: “This officer is one of the funniest-looking beings you ever saw, and looks like a circus rider gone mad! He wears a huzzar jacket and tight trousers, of faded black velvet trimmed with tarnished gold lace. His head is decked with a little, gray felt hat; high boots

and gild spurs complete the costume, which is enhanced by the General’s coiffure, consisting in short, dry, flaxen ringlets! His aspect, though highly amusing, is also pleasing, as he has a very merry blue eye, and a devil-maycare style.”

VALUE: $40,250 (price realized at Morphy Auctions in Denver, Pennsylvania, in March 2018). “This is without a doubt the finest known hard image of Custer and has no peers,” noted a representative of Morphy Auctions at the time of the purchase.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF MORPHY AUCTIONS (MORPHYAUCTIONS.COM).

CONDITION: The image—a half-plate ambrotype measuring 5 ½ inches by 4 ¼ inches—is in very fine overall condition.

It is housed in its original veneered case with gold trim. The hinge is broken but can easily be repaired.

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civil war Tours 2019

Now in our 19th Year!

The Vicksburg Campaign, March 28-31, 2019. *Wait List Only!

Join historians Terry Winschel & special guest Ed Bearss as they spend three days examining the Vicksburg Campaign. We will follow the action from the Battles of Grand Gulf, Port Gibson, Raymond, Champion Hill, to the Big Black River Bridge. We will also examine the siege of Vicksburg and see the U.S.S. Cairo, the ironclad gunboat raised from the Yazoo River by a team led by Ed Bearss.

Chickamauga & Chattanooga, April 11-14, 2019 Join expert historian Jim Ogden and guest Ed Bearss on our popular 3-day tour of the Battles of Chickamauga & Chattanooga. This in-depth tour includes stops at Reed’s Bridge, Snodgrass Hill, Orchard Knob, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge. Jim has been the historian at Chickamauga National Military Park for over 30 years.

Charleston in the Civil War, April 25-28, 2019 This spring, we will spend three days touring the Civil War sites of historic Charleston, SC. Visits will include: The H.L. Hunley, Fort Sumter, Fort Moultrie, Magnolia Cemetery, and the Battle of Seccessionville. Our historian guide will be retired Fort Sumter National Park Service Historian, Rick Hatcher accompanied by our special guest Ed Bearss.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF MORPHY AUCTIONS (MORPHYAUCTIONS.COM).

Gettysburg: The Second Day, November 1-3, 2019 Follow critically-acclaimed author & historian Jeff Wert and guest Ed Bearss as we spend two days tracing the events of July 2, 1863, the pivotal day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

We will concentrate on the action at Culp’s Hill, Little Round Top, Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard.

Petersburg to Appomattox, November 7-11, 2019 Following a full day examining the Siege of Petersburg, continue with historian guide Patrick Schroeder and guest battlefield guide Ed Bearss on an expanded 3-day tour of the Lee's Retreat to Appomattox. Just some of the stops we will make include: Five Forks, Sutherland Station, Amelia Court House, Sailor's Creek, Good Hope Church, and Appomattox.

★★★★★★★

See our detailed itineraries at www.civilwartours.org Civil War Tours

P.O. Box 416, Keedysville, MD 21756 email: info@civilwartours.org ★★★★★★★

Tel: (301) 676-­‐-­‐ 4642

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Your Atlanta Campaign tour was the most informative, engaging and rewarding Civil War tour I've ever taken and I'm no stranger to our National battlefields, battlefield guides (both short term and day long) and personal investigations. The depth and breadth of presentation was second only to being there and lord knows I wouldn't want to have been there! Truly a memorable and gratifying experience.

Thank you, Charlie Vavrina, May 22, 2018

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in focus

Brady at Work?

In the spring and summer of 1861, as Washington, D.C., filled with tens of thousands of Union soldiers, renowned photographer Mathew B. Brady and his crew visited the army camps, where they took dozens of glass plate negatives of troops posing in groups or by themselves, often in front of their tents.

These “Illustrations of Camp Life,” as Brady entitled them, show eager, confident young Union recruits and their officers, unaware of the awful toll soon to be demanded by the war’s grim reaper.

Hundreds of Brady’s “Camp Life” negatives are among the 6,000-plus Civil War negatives at the National Archives. The scant identifying material that accompanies the images establishes that Brady visited the 7th New York Infantry at Camp Cameron in Georgetown, the 12th New York Infantry at Camp Anderson in the District, the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry at Camp Sprague on Bladensburg Road near Washington, and several other units.

At least seven of the negatives show soldiers of the 33rd New York Infantry, including this sunlit image of an unidentified mounted officer. It was likely taken either in July 1861, when the regiment reached Washington and encamped at Camp Granger on 7th Street, or in August, when it moved to Camp Lyon near the Chain Bridge on the Potomac River.

This is the only “Camp Life” negative in which the shadow of Brady’s camera, on its tripod and covered by its cloth shroud, is visible, along with the shadow of the photographer. The square shape above the photographer’s head shows that he was wearing a top hat, as Brady often did, so it’s possible that we see the shadow of Brady himself, though assistants usually operated the camera even if Brady was present.

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

NATIONAL ARCHIVES 111-B-5353

b y b o b z e l l e r president, center for c i v i l wa r p h oto g r a p h y

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american iliad

The Great Emancipator

ask most americans who freed the slaves and they will respond, “Lincoln.” Yet Lincoln himself would have been the first to disagree. His Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, specified that only slaves in areas not already occupied by Federal troops were free. It carefully excluded all areas in the Confederacy held by Federal troops, as well as the four border states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware—and even the entire Confederate state of Tennessee.1 (The exclusions were considered necessary so that the proclamation could be issued under the president’s war powers, apart from the Constitution’s due process clause, which both recognized and protected the institution of slavery.) Over a million slaves were unaffected by the proclamation, and most would not receive their freedom until the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.

The belief that Lincoln freed the slaves is misleading in another sense. It implies that he did so as a voluntary act of racial justice, yet a case can be made that many slaves had already liberated themselves by the time Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. A chaplain in Major General Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee observed that by November 1862, thousands of slaves were streaming into Union lines: “The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities.”2 By this interpretation, Lincoln acted because the actions of the slaves made any other course untenable. He was, as one critic has said, “forced into glory.”3 Yet the idea that Lincoln liberated the slaves remains a central feature of the American Iliad. This should not be surprising. During the 19th century the Emancipation Proclamation was seen only through the lens of great statesmanship. Artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter, who in 1864 spent six months at the White House working on a magisterial painting commemorating the event, chose to portray Lincoln at the moment he first read the proclamation

to his cabinet. He carefully placed Lincoln slightly to the left of center on the canvas, and set Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase on Lincoln’s right, symbolizing their status as the two strongest advocates of emancipation. On Lincoln’s left were Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and Secretary of State William H. Seward, followed by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith, and finally Attorney General Edward Bates—all deliberately ordered from those most in favor of emancipation to those most skeptical of its utility.

Lincoln holds the proclamation in his left hand, facing Seward, who sits with folded arms and a pensive look. Lincoln had told Carpenter how Seward had disagreed with the timing of the proclamation’s announcement. The July 22 cabinet meeting portrayed in the painting was less than a month after the grave Union defeat in the Seven Days’ Battles outside Richmond, and Seward had warned that issuing the proclamation then would have looked like an act of desperation. “It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government,” Lincoln quoted Seward as saying, “a cry for help; the government stretching forth its hand to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to the government.” Seward’s idea, Lincoln continued, “was that it would be considered our last shriek, on the retreat.”4 Lincoln did as Seward suggested and put away the document for a more propitious moment. On September 22, five days after the Battle of Antietam, he summoned his cabinet again. Carpenter could easily have chosen this moment as the subject of his painting, for it was just as dramatic. After an incongruous beginning—the president read a story by the humorist Artemus Ward—Lincoln told them that the time had come to announce the proclamation. Lincoln had made a vow, Secretary Welles ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.

THE GEORGE F. LANDEGGER COLLECTION OF DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PHOTOGRAPHS IN CAROL M. HIGHSMITH’S AMERICA, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION

UNDERSTANDING THE LORE SURROUNDING ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S ROLE IN THE ENDING OF SLAVERY BY MARK GRIMSLEY

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THE GEORGE F. LANDEGGER COLLECTION OF DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PHOTOGRAPHS IN CAROL M. HIGHSMITH’S AMERICA, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION

Thomas Ball’s Freedmen’s Memorial, which stands a few blocks east of the U.S. Capitol, is a clear representation of a white man’s interpretation of emancipation in which Lincoln is portrayed as the Great Emancipator.

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living h i sto ry

Map Quest HOW A PENNSYLVANIA ENGINEER BROUGHT LIFE BACK TO ONE OF GETTYSBURG’S MOST STORIED ATTRACTIONS BY JENNY JOHNSTON

it was a sight that stopped traffic: a 10,000pound chunk of plaster-on-steel, 27 feet long and seven feet wide, dangling in the air as a crane operator wormed it through the second-story window of a historic building in downtown Hanover, Pennsylvania. Over the course of 12 hours, three more equally sized blocks would follow. On the street below, a scrum of news crews and locals surveyed the progress, heads tilted upward. Orchestrating this heavy midair dance was Scott Roland, the new owner of these mammoth rectangles—the four pieces of the fabled Gettysburg electric map.

Ask any Civil War enthusiast older than 20 what they remember about their first visit to the Gettysburg Battlefield and they’ll probably pull up a memory of the electric map. Built in 1963 to mark the engagement’s centennial, the map told the story of the Battle of Gettysburg through a sequenced display of tiny lights—blue for Union troops, amber for Confederate—on a giant contoured model of the battlefield.

During a 22-minute narrated show, visitors watched those lights shift and move across the miniaturized landscape, following along as units of troops advanced and retreated. For decades, the map served as one of the visitors center’s main attractions, orienting an estimated 60 to 70 million people to the details of the epic three-day battle. Some called it a national treasure.

In 2008, the visitors center was bulldozed to make way for a new one—and it looked like the map might go with it. Many felt the map was kitschy and outdated, ready for replacement by slicker, digital storytelling. “The last park superintendent to oversee it called it the ‘electric nap,’” says Roland. The map was also the size of a backyard swimming pool and as heavy as 10 midsize trucks. And yet its ability to help visitors understand the battle was legendary, bordering on mystical. Opposition to its obliteration was vehement. Ultimately, the Park Service spared its destruction but not its retirement. They used a demolition saw to cut the map into four parts, then stuck

it in storage. It seemed like the end of its story, and the end of an era.

Scott Roland had seen the map as a kid, in the early 1970s. A native Pennsylvanian, he’d camped on the Gettysburg Battlefield with his Boy Scout troop, in pursuit of three coveted patches—one each for hiking the Union and Confederate lines, and a third for viewing the electric map. Roland still has the patches and can describe them in detail. Had the map’s blinking lights and thumb-size trees made a similar impression? Well, not exactly. “I remember it as something you had to do to get the patch, and not much beyond that,” he admits.

Opportunity, not memory, motivated Roland to acquire the map. A mechanical engineer, Roland worked for years in the electronic connector industry, manufacturing those tiny metal pieces at the end of phone chargers and thousands of other things like them. When he started out, Central Pennsylvania was the electronic connector capital of the world, home to industry giants like Amp, FCI, and Tyco.

Roland worked his way up from production supervisor to owner of his own company, but then the whole industry shifted to China. He sold out of the connector business in 2007, at 45 years old.

Early retirement didn’t suit him. So he started buying real estate and restoring and repurposing empty historic buildings in Hanover. In mid-2012, Roland bought a 10,000-square-foot former bank in the heart of downtown. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. Then he saw a news story about the electric map going to auction. Somewhere in Roland’s brain, connectors connected. More than a million people visit Gettysburg each year. If a fraction were willing to drive just 15 more miles to see the map, it could bring a boom of tourism to Hanover, which, like many small towns, could use the business. Roland convinced an architect friend to meet him at the bank building, armed with a tape measure. “We determined the map would fit, but he ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72

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After overseeing its restoration, Scott Roland stands on a corner of the fabled Gettysburg electric map in its new home in Hanover, Pennsylvania.

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• Henry H. Sibley’s 1862 invasion of New Mexico signaled Confederate plans to create a western empire. Or did it?

• b y g a ry w. g a l l a g h e r

The ruins of Fort Union, New Mexico, as they appeared in the mid-20th century. The fort was one of several U.S. military installations that Confederate general Henry H. Sibley had hoped to capture during his failed 1862 campaign in New Mexico Territory.

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BATTLES AND LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR

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

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

rigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley’s movement up the Rio Grande Valley in 1862 has garnered a good deal of recent attention. Long relegated to the periphery of the Civil War, the Confederate invasion of New Mexico figures in the work of historians who call for a closer alignment of scholarship devoted to the Civil War and to the trans-100th-Meridian West. This region extended from the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles to the Pacific Ocean and embraced, but was not limited to, modern-day New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California. Scholars who find increased significance in Sibley’s campaign see it as reflective of Confederate imperial ambitions in the West that must be taken seriously. Only by shifting the focus westward, they contend, can the true scope and nature of the Civil War era be appreciated.

This interpretive trend speaks to the vitality of scholarship in the field of Civil War history, which has experienced expansion, both geographically and chronologically, as historians apply fresh analytical lenses in search of previously undetected patterns or connections. Increased scrutiny of New Mexico, as part of this larger historiographical phenomenon, invites a reconsideration of how best to frame Sibley’s campaigning along the Rio Grande between February and May 1862. Did it represent a peripheral operation of little consequence? Or should it be cast as an important element of Confederate hopes to create a western empire beyond the territorial reach of the slaveholding republic’s 11 original states?

The writings of four historians convey the tenor of how Sibley’s operation has been given enhanced prominence as part of Confederate imperial designs. Nearly 25 years ago, Donald S. Frazier anticipated a good deal of current scholarship when he argued that for “more than thirty years prior to Sibley’s campaign, South-

ern writers, statesmen, and warriors had urged the occupation and development of the American Southwest and parts, if not all, of Mexico.”

Following the establishment of the Confederacy in 1861, “the time and conditions for a Southern empire had arrived.” The invasion of New Mexico, as a feature of that imperial striving, “was the heir of Manifest Destiny, filibustering, and the American drive for expansion.” Frazier quoted A. Latham Anderson, who wrote about the campaign in the 1880s for the Century Company’s Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, to underscore the campaign’s importance. Anderson had served in New Mexico in 1862 as a lieutenant in the 5th U.S. Infantry and took a challenging stance: “The remote and unimportant territory of New Mexico was not the real objective of this invasion. The Confederate leaders were striking at much higher game—no less than the conquest of California, Sonora, Chihuahua, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah—and above all, the possession of all the gold supply on the Pacific coast.” Although Sibley failed, Frazier thought the stakes had been momentous, seeking “creation of a Confederate Empire [that] would have secured western wealth and European recognition.... The empire, like the Confederacy, was not to be, despite the investment of so much blood and treasure.”1 A pair of shorter pieces by Kevin Waite and Megan Kate Nelson add weight to the idea that Sibley’s campaign should be linked to Confederate empire building. Waite emphasizes Jefferson Davis’ antebellum interest in the Southwest and Far West and suggests that it carried over into the war. Although conceding that Davis knew “the war would be won or lost in the major military theaters of the East,” Waite sketches a Confederate president who from “the first flush of secession to the rebellion’s collapse ... never turned his back on the Far West.” Davis’ government targeted the Southwest with a “modest invasion” by approximately 250 Texans under Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor in 1861 and then “a far larger invasion force” of 2,700 troops under Sibley that “captured the New Mexican capital, Santa Fe, and seemed poised for further conquest.” Waite quotes Trevanion T. Teel, an artillerist under Sibley who, like Latham Anderson, wrote for Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. “The objective aim and design of the campaign,” wrote Teel, in text he italicized for emphasis, “was the conquest of California.” According to Waite, Sibley’s retreat closed “the high water mark of Confederate empire in the Far West” but did not end “proslavery western fantasies” or stop Davis from authorizing several more “ambitious southwestern campaigns.”2

BATTLES AND LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Historians continue to debate the significance of Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley’s campaign along the Rio Grande between February and May 1862. Was it an important element of Confederate imperial ambitions to create a western empire, or a minor operation of little significance? Right: A sketch of Sibley based on a wartime photograph.

Nelson similarly connects antebellum hopes for a slaveholding empire in the Southwest, including those of Jefferson Davis, to Confederate actions. She references Frazier’s argument (which drew on Teel’s account) that “Building a Confederate Empire from the rubble of the Union was a basic goal of Southern independence, not an afterthought.” Given his “already strong emotional and political investments in the West,” states Nelson, Davis readily accepted Sibley’s proposal for an invasion of New Mexico.

The plan embraced “the central tenets of Confederate Manifest Destiny” and offered a military path to achieve long-held goals. In the end, the environment of New Mexico frustrated Sibley and left him to brood over a “story of failure, of dreams of conquest dashed in the harsh land

and climate of the southwestern desert.”3 Sibley’s campaign also appears in broader interpretive studies such as Steven Hahn’s recent book, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910.

Echoing Frazier, Waite, and Nelson (and by extension Anderson and Teel), Hahn posits great interest on Jefferson Davis’ part and ascribes to Confederates an intention “not only to seize control of New Mexico and Arizona but also to occupy the gold-mining areas of Colorado and California.” Sibley convinced Davis of the plan’s potential and, after being named commander of Rebel forces in New Mexico, by March 1862 had taken control of Albuquerque and Santa Fe and “looked north toward Colorado.” Hahn quotes the ubiquitous Latham Anderson: “The con35 SPRING 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

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quest alone of this vast domain ... would have insured the recognition of the Confederacy by the European powers,” to which Hahn appends: “And, Anderson might have added, an independent and increasingly powerful Confederate state.” Hahn treats the Rio Grande campaign as significant, placing Sibley’s eventual retreat alongside defeats at Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, and Shiloh and the loss of New Orleans as notable southern failures during the first months of 1862.4 The National Park Service’s website for Glorieta Pass highlights how such scholarly interpretations migrate into public history. Pronouncing the climactic battle of Sibley’s campaign “the high water mark for a bold Confederate offensive into Union Territory on the western frontier,” the text invites consideration of how Confederate victory “would be a necessary prelude to detaching the western states from the Union and expanding the Confederacy to the Pacific Ocean.” The fight at Glorieta, “[r]eferred to as the ‘Gettysburg of the West’ by many historians,” was thus a “great turning point in the Civil War, the battle that shattered the western dreams of the Confederate States of America.”5

A brief review of Sibley’s campaign will set the stage for an assessment of how it and the trans100th-Meridian West figured in Confederate planning and national aspirations. In April 1861, three regiments of U.S. regulars garrisoned various posts in New Mexico Territory, including Fort Craig, on the Rio Grande more than half way from El Paso to Albuquerque, and Fort Union, northeast of Santa Fe. Most of those troops were ordered elsewhere in June and July— to be replaced by January 1862 with several thousand New Mexico volunteers and militia. Sibley initially met with Jefferson Davis in the summer of 1861 and received orders on July 8 to drive the Federals from New Mexico. The principal Rebel movement commenced in early February 1862, when 2,600 Texans in a brigade Sibley grandly denominated the “Army of New Mexico” marched north along the Rio Grande toward Fort Craig. The preceding December, from Fort Bliss, Texas, Sibley had issued a proclamation to the people of New Mexico. “By geographical position, by similarity of institutions, by commercial interests, and by future destinies,” he announced, “New Mexico pertains to the Confederacy. Upon the peaceful people of New Mexico the Confederate States wage no war. To them we come as friends, to re-establish a governmental connection agreeable and advantageous both to them and to us....”6 Between February and May, the Texans cov-

ered an impressive distance across inhospitable terrain that became a bit less forbidding as the column reached Santa Fe, where the western foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains contained stands of piñon and other evergreens. The Rebels fought battles upriver from Fort Craig at Valverde (on February 21) and just beyond Santa Fe at Apache Canyon (on March 26) and Glorieta or Pigeon’s Ranch (on March 28). Casualties in the major engagements totaled about 600 for the Federals, who slightly outnumbered their opponents, and more than 400 for the Confederates. Although the Rebels gained some tactical success in two of the battles and controlled both Albuquerque and Santa Fe for a short time, they could not sustain their strategic offensive with a movement toward Fort Union. Isolated and exposed in northern New Mexico, unable to provision his troops locally and far from sources of supply in Texas, Sibley, who drank heavily throughout the campaign, ordered a retreat. The exhausted survivors of his little force reached El Paso in early May and then continued on to San Antonio.

An embittered Sibley informed Richmond on May 4 that severe shortages of supplies had forced the retreat. “[I]t is proper that I should express the conviction, determined by some experience, that, except for its political geographical position, the Territory of New Mexico is not worth a quarter of the blood and treasure expended in its conquest,” he wrote, in stark contrast to the scenario of expansionist triumph he had articulated to Davis in the summer of 1861.

He could not “speak encouragingly for the future, my troops having manifested a dogged, irreconcilable detestation of the country and the people.” Sibley took a more positive stance in an address to his men dated May 14. He congratulated “the Army of New Mexico upon the successes which have crowned their arms in the many encounters with the enemy during the short but brilliant campaign which has just terminated.” Future generations, Sibley prophesied, would judge the campaign “one of the brightest pages in the history of the Second American Revolution.”7 Contemporary evidence reveals minimal interest in what Sibley predicted would become a memorable chapter in the Confederacy’s story.

As historian Martin Hardwick Hall noted almost 60 years ago, “Confederate public opinion concerning the New Mexican campaign was confined almost exclusively to the state of Texas. For while Sibley’s small army was engaged in distant New Mexico, the attention of the rest of the nation was held by the spectacle of far larger armies clashing in great bloody conflicts close at home.”8 Three of the most quoted and detailed Confederate civilian accounts—published edi-

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The War in the Far West |

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NE W ME XI CO TER RITORY

FE BRUA RY – MAY 1862

In February 1862, Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley led a brigade of Confederate soldiers on a mission to drive Union forces from New Mexico Territory. They marched north along the Rio Grande from Fort Bliss in Texas toward Union-controlled Fort Craig. Sibley’s men engaged enemy troops in battle at Valverde (February 21), Apache Canyon (March 26), and Glorieta (March 28). While the Confederates had experienced some tactical success and temporarily controlled both Albuquerque and Santa Fe, they could not sustain their offensive as planned with an advance toward Fort Union. Isolated and low on provisions, Sibley ordered a retreat. He and his surviving men reached El Paso in early May before continuing on to San Antonio. Confederate hopes for taking New Mexico were over.

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EL GRINGO; OR, NEW MEXICO & HER PEOPLE (1857)

States of all that coast we desire. It is also the opening scene for our manifest destiny.” In contrast, Austin’s State Gazette insisted that the few men deployed in New Mexico would have done better service “somewhere within the bounds of civilization, where the soil is not sand, and water the essence of bitterness, towns hovels in mud, the comforts fleas and rattlesnakes, and the people cayotes.” Texas governor Francis R. Lubbock also shared doubts in a letter to President Davis on May 1. Unless reinforced, remarked Lubbock, Sibley’s troops in New Mexico, “so distant from friends and supplies,” should be withdrawn lest they be “cut to pieces or captured.” Two months earlier, a doctor in Texas had recommended to Davis that Sibley’s regiments could do better service protecting the state’s exposed areas: “I say the sacrifices made by that army & the government might be worth more to the country nearer home, had they have remained on this side of the Wilderness....” Texas needed troops to guard against Indians on the frontier, the doctor urged, and “Arizona & New Mexico would materially increase that frontier.”10 Readers of newspapers in Richmond and New York between February and June 1862 could glean tidbits, sprinkled amid exhaustive coverage of events in Tennessee and Virginia, about activity along the Rio Grande. Richmond’s Daily Dispatch and Enquirer, often reprinting items from Texas newspapers, reported victories at Valverde and Glorieta and the capture of Albuquerque and Santa Fe. A handful of the reports presented Sibley’s movements as contributing to Confederate expansion toward the Pacific, as when the Enquirer’s semi-weekly edition trumpeted “A Cheering Victory in Arizona” on April 15. This article, which incorrectly claimed the capture of Fort Craig, described Valverde as a battle “of more importance to the Southern Confederacy than any that has been fought during the war. It will give us the Territory of Arizona and New Mexico ... and will greatly add to the prestige of our arms.” On June 17, long after the campaign had dissolved in chaotic ruin, the Dispatch published a letter signed “A Soldier” summarizing Sibley’s campaign as “the most successful one of modern times” before going on to claim that “Gen. Henry Sibley ... will show the enemy west of the Mississippi, that there is a ‘Stonewall’ on both sides of

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (STRONG); A DIARY FROM DIXIE (1905)

tions of which comprise nearly 2,500 pages— support Hall’s statement about public interest.

John Beauchamp Jones, the clerk in the Confederate War Department whose voluminous diary chronicled myriad aspects of the conflict, devoted not a single sentence to Sibley, New Mexico, or an incipient Confederate empire in the trans-100th-Meridian West. Similarly, renowned southern diarists Mary Chesnut and Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, who read newspapers assiduously and commented about a stunning range of people and topics, recorded nothing about Sibley, events along the Rio Grande, gold from Colorado and California, or gaining a Confederate foothold on the Pacific.

Frequently quoted northern sources are comparably silent.

Within the Lincoln administration, the diaries and journals of Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase contain nothing about Sibley’s campaign or fears of Confederate designs on the Southwest.

Prominent New York lawyer George Templeton Strong’s diary, which like Chesnut’s and Edmondston’s casts an eye on untold characters and episodes of the war, similarly offers nothing. Perhaps more important, Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address and annual messages to Congress in December 1861 and December 1862 convey no sense of concern about Confederate threats to the Southwest. In December 1861, the president affirmed, “So far the authority of the United States has been upheld in all the Territories, as it is hoped it will be in the future.” A year later, he made no allusion to Sibley’s campaign, New Mexico, or Arizona in stating that the “Territories of the United States, with unimportant exceptions, have remained undisturbed by the civil war, and they are exhibiting such evidence of prosperity as justifies an expectation that some of them will soon be in a condition to be organized as States, and be constitutionally admitted to the federal Union.”9 Newspapers in Texas did accord considerable space to Sibley’s campaign, which also garnered sporadic notice from editors in Richmond and New York City. Some papers in Texas, exemplified by an article in Houston’s Telegraph, cheered the idea of conquering New Mexico as “the entering wedge to the breaking off from the United

The paucity of popular attention to Sibley’s activities when battles of far greater magnitude and strategic importance contended for headlines is not surprising. But how did the campaign figure in Confederate long-term planning? More specifically, did Jefferson Davis, as is often suggested, see it as an important element of an imperial project? Did his indisputable prewar interest in southwestern expansion carry over into the Confederate years?

Davis’ major public statements in 1861–1862 do not mention the territories and states of the Southwest or Far West. His provisional and regular inaugural addresses delivered in February 1861 and February 1862, as well as his messages to the Confederate Congress on April 29, 1861, and February 25, 1862, betray no imperial pretentions. Indeed, his message in April 1861 affirms the stance he typically took—namely, that the Confederacy would “seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the States with which we were lately confederated; all we ask is to be let alone....”14 Moreover, the published Davis papers—10 volumes in the 1923 edition and 14 in the modern edition completed in 2015—do not buttress the idea of a committed Confederate expansionist. Neither does Davis’ two-volume postwar memoir discuss Sibley’s operations in New Mexico.

Davis did issue a proclamation on February 14, 1862, declaring a congressional act “to organize the Territory of Arizona” to be “in full force and operation.” Congress had responded to John R. Baylor’s proclamation of August 1, 1861, establishing the “Territory of Arizona,” which in theory extended westward, below the 34th parallel,

EL GRINGO; OR, NEW MEXICO & HER PEOPLE (1857)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (STRONG); A DIARY FROM DIXIE (1905)

Contrary to Sibley’s prediction that his campaign in New Mexico would become a memorable chapter in the Confederacy’s story, contemporary evidence reveals minimal interest in his activities among prominent easterners, including southern diarist Mary Chesnut (opposite page, top) and New York lawyer George Templeton Strong (opposite page, bottom). Readers of eastern newspapers, however, did receive occasional updates on Sibley’s campaign, including the captures of Santa Fe and Albuquerque (pictured below in an 1850s sketch).

the river.” If the Confederate government reinforced Sibley, this writer claimed, “he would dip the Confederate flag into the Pacific at San Francisco before another year.”11 New York papers printed brief accounts of various stages of the campaign—including Valverde, the Rebels’ withdrawal after Glorieta, and their final departure from the Rio Grande Valley.

On September 19, both the Daily Tribune and the Herald ran summaries that stressed Union triumph and incorrectly reported Sibley’s death.

Conceding the loss of Albuquerque and Santa Fe for a time and “a temporary success at Valverde” for Sibley, the Herald described a Confederate retreat during which a “great number were killed or wounded, and about one-half the whole force were taken prisoners.” The Daily Tribune asserted Confederate “survivors were so much exasperated that they assassinated Gen. Sibley ... during their retreat.” Union forces “took possession of El Paso and Fort Bliss” and, having vanquished the Texans, controlled everything as far as Fort Clark, just more than 100 miles from San Antonio. “Sibley’s brigade was the great effort of Texas, and contained the best fighting material in the whole State,” concluded the Herald. “Great things were expected of it, but it has failed as signally as it deserved.”12 A reprinted northern account gave readers of the Daily Dispatch in Richmond their last information about Sibley and his men. “The news from Arizona,” read the text on August 18, 1862, “... states that Gen. Carleton, with the California volunteers, had reached the Rio Grande without opposition. The rebel General Sibley had withdrawn his forces from New Mexico into Texas.”13

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

from the Texas border through modern-day New Mexico and Arizona to California. Baylor’s excursion had secured a foothold at Mesilla, on the Rio Grande just north of the border with Texas.

Confederates never controlled the proclaimed territory, and within a few months of Davis’ declaration Union forces had displaced the few Rebels. In sum, the Confederate territory of Arizona, with its capital at Mesilla, was illusory and the presidential proclamation merely symbolic.15 The documentary skeleton for Sibley’s campaign in the Official Records reveals a modest, and transitory, flirtation with imperial expansion.

The key items include Adjutant and Inspector General Samuel Cooper’s communication to Sibley on July 8, 1861, which followed the latter’s meeting with Davis in Richmond. “In view of your recent service in New Mexico and knowledge of that country and the people,” wrote Cooper, “the President has intrusted you with the important duty of driving the Federal troops from that department, at the same time securing all the arms, supplies, and materials of war.” Proceeding to Texas at once, Sibley should, “in concert with Brigadier-General Van Dorn, organize, in the speediest manner possible, from the Texas troops, two full regiments of cavalry and one battery of howitzers, and such other forces as you deem necessary.” If successful in clearing out Union troops, Sibley should, “in the exercise of a sound discretion, proceed to organize a military government within the Territory.” On December 14, 1861, General Orders No. 10, issued from Fort Bliss, announced Sibley’s taking “command of all the forces of the Confederate States on the Rio Grande at and above Fort Quitman and all in the Territory of New Mexico and Arizona.” The Official Records also includes Sibley’s proclamation to New Mexicans and his reports to Cooper on the campaign between February and May. The reports do not lay out an imperial purpose.16 The one direct communication between Davis and Sibley in the Official Records indicates how little support the president committed to the New Mexican adventure. Dated June 7 and written before Davis knew of Sibley’s retreat, it applauded “the distinguished successes of your command” in the face of “the superior number and means of supply of the enemy, and the other difficulties under which you have labored.” Two additional regiments would be coming to Sibley from Texas, stated Davis, who made clear that would be the extent of the government’s contribution. “I trust that you will be able to meet the more immediate and pressing exigencies that may arise,” the president cautioned, “and that your own ability and military resources and the valor of your troops may supply comparative inferiority in numbers and munitions of war.”17 The president’s leaving Sibley to his own 40 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2019

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By the late summer of 1862, Union officers on the ground— including Brigadier General James H. Carleton (above left) and Brigadier General E.R.S. Canby (below left)—knew Confederates posed no real threat in the Southwest. In a letter to Canby in August, Carleton wrote that the former’s successful movements against Sibley “left us nothing to do on the Rio Grande.”

devices made sense within the overall strategic situation in early June 1862. Massive threats on multiple fronts directly menaced the existence of the Confederacy. George B. McClellan’s 100,000-man Army of the Potomac had reached the outskirts of Richmond, another 100,000 Union soldiers under Henry W. Halleck had pushed into northern Mississippi and occupied Corinth, and, the day before Davis wrote to Sibley, Memphis had fallen into Federal hands.

In contrast to these powerful Union offensives in the western and eastern theaters, whatever might transpire in New Mexico that summer, good or bad, could have had little or no impact on determining Confederate independence.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

Anyone seeking to situate Sibley’s campaign within the hierarchy of Confederate national commitments should look to how resources were allocated. Such an examination underscores the marginality of New Mexico and the Southwest. Sibley explained his grandiose goals to Trevanion Teel “just after the former had assumed command of his army”—the conversation around which Teel, whose account is uncorroborated by other testimony, constructed his muchquoted article in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. According to Teel, Sibley pitched the idea of advancing up the Rio Grande based on his knowledge of Arizona “and of New Mexico; and as to the condition of the United States forces in those Territories, the quantity of Government stores, supplies, transportation, etc.” Sibley assured the president he could raise the requisite troops and arm and supply them from sources in Texas and New Mexico. Davis “authorized him to enlist three regiments in Texas, to constitute a brigade to be mounted and mustered into the service, with such arms as could be obtained in Texas, and, upon arriving in New Mexico, the brigade was to be furnished with arms and equipments out of the supply already captured or that might be captured.” Sibley’s campaign, averred Teel, “was to be self-sustaining.”18 A “self-sustaining” operation by definition requires no commitment of resources from elsewhere. The president’s response to Sibley in the summer of 1861 thus indicates neither deep interest in the Rio Grande Valley nor determination to assert Confederate imperial authority over the greater Southwest. What could have been easier for Davis than to approve a scheme requiring no reallocation of existing military assets? His signing off on the campaign meant only that Sibley was free to recruit a few regiments in Texas, arm and provision them, and do what he could in New Mexico.

It was Teel’s retrospective piece, rather than

anything from Jefferson Davis’ wartime or postwar testimony, that laid out a blueprint for Confederate empire. Teel related a fantastic scenario: “[A]s soon as the Confederate army should occupy the Territory of New Mexico, an army of advance would be organized, and ‘On to San Francisco’ would be the watchword; California had to be conquered, so that there would be an outlet for slavery ... which would greatly strengthen the Confederate States.” If successful in occupying California, New Mexico, and Arizona, Sibley, in Teel’s telling, envisioned opening “negotiations to secure Chihuahua, Sonora, and Lower California, either by purchase or by conquest....”19 Sibley’s biographer, while admitting the “seizure of California was not specifically mentioned” in his orders, nonetheless expresses “little doubt that it was the eventual objective of the impending campaign.” Other scholars have relied on Teel to clinch a point about Confederate imperial aspirations—or supplemented Teel with Latham Anderson’s assertion that the entire Southwest and Far West were in play during Sibley’s maneuvering along the Rio Grande. Because of California’s vulnerability, insisted Anderson, “and of the momentous consequences of its capture by the Confederates, the conflict in New Mexico should be regarded as one of the decisive campaigns of the war.”20 By the late summer of 1862, Union officers on the ground knew Confederates posed no real threat in the Southwest—never mind in the Far West. Brigadier General James H. Carleton, who had led the “California Column” from Fort Yuma across the fictive Confederate territory of Arizona to the Rio Grande, made this point in a letter to Brigadier General E.R.S. Canby, the Union commander in New Mexico. Dated August 2, it explained that Carleton’s small force, composed of the 1st California Infantry, five companies of the 1st California Cavalry, and four guns of Company A, 3rd U.S. Artillery, had been ordered to “cross the Yuma and Colorado Deserts, and recapture the posts in Arizona and Southern New Mexico, then supposed to be in the hands of the rebels, and open the Southern Overland Mail Route.” By the time the column approached New Mexico in early August, having encountered a few Indians at Apache Pass and elsewhere but no Confederate military force of note, Carleton discovered that Canby’s successful movements against Sibley “left us nothing to do on the Rio Grande.”21 The absence of a Confederate military presence in New Mexico distressed Carleton. “[T]he marches of this column,” he stated, “tend always toward the heart of the rebellion; the men will forget their toils and sufferings on the Great Desert in their hope ultimately to reach the enemy.... [I]t would be a sad dis☛ } CONT. ON P. 75 41 SPRING 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

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• The letters of a Union sailor bring to life the valuable service performed by the formidable ironclad warship USS Onondaga and its crew during the war’s final year.

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b y n o a h a n d r e t r u d e au

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“Gibraltar of the James”

The warship USS Onondaga is shown on the James River in 1864. The following year, the ironclad would play a central role in the Battle of Trent’s Reach, one of the war’s last major naval engagements.

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mid-1862 a powerful warship began taking shape at the Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint, New York. A product of the monitor mania gripping the War Department following USS Monitor’s dramatic debut, the new vessel represented one of several variations on a theme. This monitor would be an all-iron affair and carry two turrets with four guns. Unlike the first (and many of her clones), whose iron deck extended out from the hull, this warship’s deck and hull were seamlessly joined, something her designers hoped would improve her oceangoing qualities. She tipped the scales at 2,592 tons and had a draft of 12 feet 10 inches.

USS Onondaga was formally launched in late July 1863. In the months that followed, machinery and weapons were installed and the 150 or so men who would operate and fight aboard the craft were enlisted. The recruits reported for processing to the 40-year-old receiving vessel, USS North Carolina. Observed a reporter present when one batch arrived: “As soon as they get aboard the ship they are all placed in line and their papers handed to the 1st Lieutenant of the vessel, who notifies the Captain. The coxswain then reads the names off, and as each man’s name is called he answers to his rate, such as ‘landsman,’ etc., is looked at by the Captain and then detailed to his quarters.”1 Among those signing on to Onondaga was a landsman named Michael J. Callinan. The officer interviewing the Irish immigrant encountered a warmhearted, genial man, 5 feet 6¾ inches tall, red haired and with a florid complexion. He failed to catch the finer point of the newcomer’s patronym, entering him on the rolls as Callahan. In all other ways save one, Callinan was no different from the many thousands brought into the Union navy during the conflict, but that one difference was significant. Before enlisting, Callinan had been a sometimes reporter and essayist for the New York City-based newspaper

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

In

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Launched in 1863, USS Onondaga boasted two turrets with four guns and a crew of approximately 150 men.

Shown here are the warship’s officers, who gathered on Onondaga’s deck for the camera in 1864.

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After a shakedown cruise in the New York City area, Onondaga was ordered to report to Newport News, Virginia. She departed on April 21, 1864, arriving on station two days later. Garryowen’s first letter was dated May 3 from the “James River.” He briefly described the voyage from New York, proclaiming that Onondaga was “one of the most formidable of the Monitors,” adding her “armor … consists of four heavy guns, two in each turret, of fifteen-inch smooth bore and eight-inch rifle.” All in all, she was a warship “looked upon to accomplish great results.”3 Two days later, Callinan and Onondaga joined a large Union fleet advancing up the James River as part of Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s spring offensive. While Grant and the Army of the Potomac tackled General Robert E. Lee’s army in northcentral Virginia, a second force under Major General Benjamin F. Butler ascended the James to attack Richmond from the south. More than 120 vessels were involved, divided into a “First Fleet” (army-controlled ships) and a “Second Fleet” (the Union navy component, commanded by Acting Rear Admiral Samuel P. Lee). “The day was beautifully fine,” observed Garryowen, “and the mustering and starting of so many vessels was indeed magnificent.”4 Sandwiched between the two fleets were eight armed steamships whose job was to clear the river of Rebel mines (then called torpedoes) so that the powerful navy monitors could advance.

This precaution was tragically validated on May 6, when the torpedo screeners reached the Deep Bottom area. By this time a portion of Butler’s land forces had seized City Point, while the larger body was moving westward across a fat finger of land known as Bermuda Hundred, with the Appomattox River defining its southern side and the James marking its northern and eastern boundaries. Everything along the north bank of

the James River was considered enemy territory, with good reason: Posted here were nine Rebel firing stations wired to powerful torpedoes set in the river channel.

It appears that one of the Union warships, a converted ferry boat named Commodore Jones, violated standing orders by getting too close to the small craft grappling for the mines and steamed over one. An alert Confederate firing team promptly completed the electrical circuit.

A New York Tribune reporter nearby witnessed “a column of smoke astern, and fragments of wood shoot up, heard a smothered explosion, felt a slight shock, saw the Com. Jones raised up from the center then settle away, and then nothing was visible but the bow and the stern, with both colors flying.” One of the lucky survivors recalled: “They say that the noise of the explosion was terrific, but I don’t know anything about it.

All I do know is that I found myself in the water with a confused idea that I had been hit with a club.” Sixty-nine men died in that explosive instant. Onondaga was out of sight downstream, but Callinan learned of the incident and Garryowen declared, “So much for rebel ingenuity.”5 This loss laid bare one of the sore spots in army-navy partnership. As long as the Rebels had free rein along the north bank of the James, swept areas could be quickly reseeded with torpedoes and horse batteries could execute hit-and-run ambushes. Admiral Lee needed the army’s manpower to sanitize the north bank and keep it that way. Butler was sympathetic to the navy’s needs, but he was fully engaged in fighting through to Richmond with a force reckoned to be half of what was needed. He wanted the naval guns supporting his right flank, but Admiral Lee would not rush the sanitizing process, so the navy element lagged behind. Butler’s manpower shortage also meant that Lee had to worry about maintaining supply and communication lines back to Hampton Roads, as well as respond to requests from General Grant for support as the Army of the Potomac maneuvered southward, all of which stretched the James River force to its limit.

The navy arrived at Trent’s Reach on May 17—the last east-west river stretch touching Bermuda Hundred before the James looped northward. Here the channel narrowed, the depth reached only 8½ feet, and high bluffs rose in the distance. The deep-draft monitors could proceed no farther, and until the army cleared the banks ahead, Lee would not risk his wooden gunboats.

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

Left: Acting Rear Admiral Samuel P. Lee

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The Irish-American. He had promised his editor to continue that role once aboard Onondaga and was a man of his word. From May 1864 to April 1865 he contributed 25 letters to the weekly paper. They provide invaluable insights into the experiences of a common sailor and the service performed by a Civil War monitor.2 For his premuster contributions to the newspaper Callinan had employed the nom de plume “A Garryowen Boy,” after his Irish heritage. He continued that practice during his military service, eventually shortening it to plain “Garryowen.”

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The Struggle for Trent’s Reach |

JA ME S RIVER, VIRGINIA

|

MAY 1864 – JANUARY 1 865

During Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s spring 1864 offensive against General Robert E. Lee in north-central Virginia, a second Union force under Major General Benjamin F. Butler ascended the James River with plans to attack Richmond from the south. Butler’s force included more than 120 vessels, which were divided into two fleets (army-controlled ships and navy-controlled ships). The naval advance stalled in May at Trent’s Reach, a point where the James narrowed and beyond which Confederate troops maintained control. The stalemate broke the following January, when a Confederate fleet attempted to breach the Union barricade at Trent’s Reach and continue on to threaten City Point, Grant’s major supply and command center. The Rebel ships eventually withdrew after heavy fighting, leaving the vital stretch of river under Union control. Less than three months later, Lee would surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House.

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the weekly fueling. It was a hard and dirty job (involving tens of tons of coal for each delivery), which Garryowen tactfully refrained from describing. He did, however, brag that Onondaga’s power plant was “the most important part of the ship.”7 The army also helped by establishing some land batteries watching over Onondaga’s anchorage area, but then stirred the pot by erecting a signal tower nearby (colloquially called the Crow’s Nest) that made a great aiming point for the Rebel guns. Benjamin Butler brought the pot to a boil with his decision to bypass the enemy batteries west of Trent’s Reach by digging a canal across the narrow neck of the loop at a point called Dutch Gap, perhaps a mile and a half north of Onondaga’s forward parking space.

Stopping this activity became a Confederate obsession, and hardly a day passed throughout the summer and fall of 1864 without enemy shells falling near Onondaga, which occasionally returned the compliments. The “avowed object” of the Rebel efforts was, Garryowen acknowledged, “to annoy us or drive us away from our canal operations. But they ‘can’t do.’ Their range, so far, is decidedly wide of the mark, and, consequently, ‘the work goes bravely on.’”8 Admiral Lee had undertaken the James River campaign believing he would direct the naval contribution to a drive on Richmond. By early summer it was clear that the land forces were engaged in a lengthier operation aimed at Petersburg, with the navy’s role scaled back to river security. So Union efforts turned to erecting a barrier blocking Trent’s Reach to prevent the Confederate ironclads from coming down. A number of disposable vessels were obtained, positioned, sunk, and bound together with spars and chains. Lee turned his attention to managing the coastal blockade, leaving the James River operations to the senior officer on station, Captain Melancton Smith, commanding USS Onondaga.

Any Confederate deserters picked up on or along the river were first brought to Onondaga for questioning before being passed along to the army for additional interrogation. They did not escape Michael Callinan’s attention. We “have more or less of them every day,” Garryowen informed his readers, “and their reports of the condition of the Southern people is humiliating, if we could indulge in any compassion for them; but that they are tired and sick of the war, there is no doubt, and only pant for the opportunity to safely declare themselves so.”9 It was partly intelligence gleaned from Confederate deserters that led to one of the more dramatic combined operations of the James River campaign.

When the Federals established their Deep Bottom bridgehead and successfully beat back a Confederate effort to retake it, the Rebels had

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Butler’s movement had meanwhile shifted into reverse gear under heavy enemy pressure, and just three days after the navy arrived on scene the Union ground force had fallen back to a defensive line stretched across Bermuda Hundred, anchored on its right by Lee’s guns. In taking his position, Butler ceded control of the high ground west of Trent’s Reach, allowing the Confederates to erect a powerful battery—Dantzler (also called Howlett)—there.

Admiral Lee’s problems may have been well above Michael J. Callinan’s pay grade, but this didn’t prevent Garryowen from observing some of the consequences, without connecting them to any larger picture. “Though not actually engaged in fighting,” he wrote his readers on May 26, “we are improving the time by making every preparation—occasionally sending one of our messengers of death [i.e., artillery shells] through the woods to keep off prowling guerillas as we now and then get reports that they are locating themselves along the river. In such cases we proceed to the scene of operations, when they seem to anticipate our movements and make themselves scarce.” Those pinpricks blossomed into a major effort on June 21, as Battery Dantzler—supplemented by Confederate warships— opened a sustained bombardment on the Union navy’s front line. “Everything was immediately put into fighting trim,” reported Garryowen, “decks cleared; hammocks ‘piped’ up; the watch below aroused from their quiet slumbers; ‘all hands to quarters;’ and every preparation on our part made to participate in the melee, should the occasion require or an opportunity offer.” When the contretemps ended after six and a half hours, the situation remained the same.6 By now Onondaga was positioned at the eastern end of Trent’s Reach, carefully out of any direct line of fire. This became one of her primary posts from then on, along with Aiken’s Landing (three miles east). This location, and some key army decisions that assisted the navy mission, would essentially define Michael J. Callinan’s personal war experience. One of those important decisions was made by General Grant, then investing Petersburg with the Army of the Potomac, who ordered a bridgehead established on the north bank of the James at Deep Bottom.

This was accomplished on June 20 and greatly reduced the threat level for the Union warships patrolling the river. A big beneficiary was the Union navy’s most effective and unsung asset in this campaign: its replenishment capabilities.

Onondaga’s log charts the businesslike routine of weekly shipments received: fresh vegetables and meat, clothing and munitions, machine parts, and—most importantly in this steam age—coal.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

USS Onondaga (visible in the distance) stands watch in the James River near Trent’s Reach. The formidable ironclad’s presence proved a powerful deterrent to Confederate naval ambitions in the area.

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In the fall of 1864, while the sailors of Onondaga fought what crewmember Michael J. Callinan termed “dull monotony,” the vessel did witness activity, including a change in the ship’s command from Captain Melancton Smith (above left) to Commander William A. Parker (below left) and the ongoing construction of the Dutch Gap Canal (shown at right).

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available aboard, there were sick tickets issued for transport to the Norfolk Marine Hospital.

For those needing nourishment of the soul, there were prayer meetings and regular Sunday services, which Garryowen testified were well attended.

Above all, discipline was maintained. Callinan may have been among 150 men packed into a small space, but Garryowen viewed the confining quarters through rose-colored glasses. “We have a good set of officers, [and] a bully crew,” he proudly declared. Yet Onondaga’s log dutifully documented a steady litany of infractions onboard: swearing, fighting, malicious or insolent language to a superior officer, and theft. A log entry from late 1864 notes: “John Cameron cox’n placed in double irons … for quarrelling. J.T. English placed in double irons for attempting to shoot J. Cameron & W.T. Price also placed in double irons for being accessory to the act.”11 “Our ‘boys’ are variously employed,” Garryowen wrote in October 1864, “exercising at drill.”12 This routine included fire drills, small arms drills, as well as regular exercises for guns and turrets. A monitor was part submarine, with most of the crew living and working below the water line, so escape drills were a necessity. It says something about the crewmembers’ survival instincts that the 150 aboard Onondaga generally took less than a minute to come up on deck, and in one instance did so in 35 seconds. But even a bully crew needed a break from the war, and liberty parties were regularly dispatched, though they couldn’t go much beyond City Point.

Garryowen entertained his readers with three accounts of what he termed “aquatic sports,”13 providing play-by-play coverage of races among four of the small boats carried aboard the monitor: the captain’s gig, the whale boat, the lifeboat, and the launch.

The whale boat was the favorite to win, and it didn’t disappoint in the first running. “The greatest excitement and enthusiasm was manifested on the occasion,” Garryowen commented, “and as the crew of the winning boat, flushed with victory, tossed their oars, the captain ordered three cheers for the coxswain and crew of the ‘1st whale boat,’ which were responded to with a will, and such cheers only as a jolly set of man-of-war men can give. They were taken up and re-echoed by a large crowd of enthusiastic

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to extend an exterior defensive line south to the river. It was a slow work in progress and had yet to reach a house and buildings belonging to Henry Cox, where the Confederates were using two mills to process food for the troops and constructing torpedoes in the barn. After Federals gathered intelligence about the activities, a conference aboard Onondaga deemed the structures a worthwhile target and a mission to destroy them was mounted under the overall command of army Lieutenant David W. Chambers.

On the evening of July 11, a force consisting of 70–80 men from the 3rd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery (previously assigned to the navy for picket duty) and 50 more from the 10th Connecticut Infantry were conveyed

by USS Stepping Stones to a landing near Dutch Gap. A navy ensign served as guide and the raiding party approached the Cox farm in two columns. A Rebel picket alerted the small security force from Richmond’s City Battalion assigned to the farm, who opened fire on the Yankees.

Lieutenant Chambers ordered a charge that routed the two dozen defenders, capturing 14 of them.

The raiders had come equipped with turpentine fireballs, which soon had the buildings ablaze. The approach of a large Confederate reserve caused the Federals to withdraw, but not before they confiscated a torpedo and its firing equipment, some military papers, and an armorpiercing shell of British manufacture. A nearby signal station was also destroyed. Even though Garryowen had no specific comment on the affair, he did reflect that this was a time “while the hostile parties on both sides of us are measuring their strength and manuring the soil of Virginia with their hearts’ blood.”10 While Onondaga’s steely presence proved a powerful deterrent to the enemy’s naval ambitions in the area, its essentially passive assignment led to what Garryowen bemoaned as “dull monotony.” Dull it may have been in the engine room, but the monitor’s administrative wheels were constantly turning. “Our old crews’ time is expiring now every week,” noted Garryowen, “and the boys are going home—in twos and threes at a time. Of course new hands fill up their places.” Included among the new crewmembers was a pair of contraband slaves who were logged as “shipped as of this date.” For those crewmembers who became too ill for the basic treatments

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2)

soldiers from ‘Crow’s Nest,’ who were strewed along the bank, anxious and excited spectators of the sport, and who made the valley of the James River ring with their war-like yells of victory.”

A repeat engagement 21 days later produced the same result, though it was almost a tie. Finally, in a November heat, the launch took the honors.14

In late October 1864, there were changes at the top for Onondaga. Captain Melancton Smith was promoted to command of USS Wabash, which would soon join the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Garryowen was sorry to see Smith go, proclaiming him “one of the most skillful and experienced officers in the service.” Lieu-

tenant Commander Charles H. Cushman took over on an interim basis (prompting Garryowen to assure his readers that “the right man is in the right place”). A permanent replacement eventually arrived in the person of Commander William A. Parker. Hats were also changed at the top of the command pyramid, with Rear Admiral Lee replaced by Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. Commander Parker would have a starring role in what would be Onondaga’s one major and still controversial ship-to-ship engagement.15 Callinan and his mates had a front row seat for General Butler’s audacious plan to carve a canal through the narrow neck of Dutch Gap, the project that had attracted unrelenting Confederate shelling. Garryowen’s first reference to the scheme had come in a missive dated August 21.

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sword in Trent’s Reach, which should have been sufficient defense as the Confederate navy had yet to test the barricade.

However, the steady drumbeat of Union military successes in the fall and winter greatly raised the pressure on Richmond’s naval officials to make use of their three expensive ironclads, CSS Fredericksburg, CSS Richmond, and CSS Virginia II. The trio had been regularly positioned near Drewry’s Bluff and sporadically dropped downriver to lob shells at extreme range. The formidable line of obstructions that the Federals had placed across Trent’s Reach remained the single greatest impediment to any sortie, though persistent mechanical breakdowns and poor crew training had also aborted some earlier Confederate efforts.

A significant mid-January thaw changed the picture. River levels rose, and the additional freshet pressure compromised the barrier’s integrity. The timing was now or never, although it remained a high-risk operation for the Confederate navy. The mission: muscle through to City Point to wreak havoc on the Union army’s major supply and command center. Union intelligence services were effective enough that on January 21 Commander Parker was alerted by Grant’s chief of staff that plans for an enemy sortie were afoot.

Steps were undertaken to re-establish the barricade and strengthen the artillery defenses, but

In this sketch by Alfred Waud, a Confederate fleet breaks through the Union obstructions at Trent’s Reach while taking heavy fire during the evening of January 23, 1865.

Onondaga—then positioned several miles away near Aiken’s Landing—would engage the remaining Rebel vessels the following morning and drive them from the area.

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Mentions followed in almost every letter, often no more substantial than noting that the work continued, spiced with comments on the persistent Rebel disruption efforts. Finally, on January 1, 1865, all was deemed ready, and the dams holding back the river water on either end were dynamited. Reported Commander Parker to Admiral Porter: “The earth was thrown up into the air about 40 or 50 feet and immediately after fell back into its original place.” Garryowen pronounced it a fiasco, writing that “nothing remains of the ‘great Dutch Gap canal’ but a ditch with a stream of water running through it, not sufficient to float a skiff; and instead of the recent flood clearing it, it only helped to fill it in.”16 New events soon placed Callinan and Onondaga directly in harm’s way. Admiral Porter was tasked with commanding the naval component of the Union effort to shut down the Confederate seaport of Wilmington, North Carolina.

The effort would require capturing the potent Fort Fisher, which guarded the Cape Fear River’s entrance. Porter assembled a powerful fleet for the job, and in the process stripped away all the monitors assigned to the James River, save Onondaga, as well as many other gunboats and warships. (Several that he believed he was leaving behind ready for action were actually immobilized in Hampton Roads undergoing repairs.)

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these efforts were still being organized when the Confederate attack force steamed downriver.

Military positions had changed drastically since Onondaga had arrived in the James River the previous May. In September, Butler’s Army of the James had crossed to the north side of the river in an unabashed drive on Richmond. As so often happened with Butler’s grand plans, reality fell short of aspiration, and his soldiers got no farther than the Confederate exterior line, some half-dozen miles southeast of the capital. They soon established Fort Brady on the north bank of the James, perhaps five miles upriver from the Trent’s Reach barricades. The Confederate hold on portions of the south bank remained solid, so the Rebel battle fleet steaming from Drewry’s Bluff had to first run the gauntlet of Fort Brady before gaining the protective cover of the friendly batteries overlooking Trent’s Reach. The three Confederate ironclads were assisted in the venture by five gunboats and three torpedo boats, each mounting one spar torpedo.

Onondaga began the night of January 23 at her alternate post near Aiken’s Landing (three miles downriver from the barricade), supported by two gunboats and a torpedo boat. At 8:30 p.m. the monitor’s deck officer noted that he “heard heavy firing in the direction of Fort Brady.” Two hours later the Crow’s Nest reported enemy sappers were within the obstructions. General quarters sounded sometime between 10:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. to summon the crew, and the night was, according to Garryowen, “dark as pitch.”17 Unknown to them, the Rebel attack force was already in the throes of dysfunction. While the vessels got past Fort Brady without any significant damage, soon afterward Virginia II’s maneuverings caused one of the Confederate torpedo boats to run aground. A gunboat remained behind to salvage the grounded craft, so both were essentially lost to the operation.

As CSS Fredericksburg, which had the shallowest draft of the ironclads, steamed slowly into the compromised barricaded area, her two ironed consorts each went aground behind her.

This drew the gunboats and torpedo boats to assist them, leaving Fredericksburg with just one escort. Meanwhile, every Union army battery in range was pouring shot and shell into the cluster.

Although she suffered bothersome damage doing so, Fredericksburg cleared the barrier zone and had reached a point just below the eastern end of the Dutch Gap Canal when her captain received a recall order. The ironclad returned to the main body, where the captain reported that no Union navy opposition had been encountered.

In letters written on January 24 and February 6, Garryowen provided what remains the most extensive narrative of these events from a participant aboard Onondaga:

Last night about eight o’clock, heavy and continuous firing was heard in the direction of “Howlett’s” [battery] and about eleven o’clock we were signaled, “the rams are coming.” We immediately were beat to quarters, and in quick time every man was at his station. We lay in hourly expectation of them till about four o’clock this morning, when we concluded to have at them. With this intention we weighed anchor, when our vessel suddenly “sheared,” and grounded on the opposite shore, our port propeller thereby becoming deranged, to what extent as yet we can’t tell, but sufficient to render the port engine at present useless. On account of the unexpected accident we dropped down to the pontoon bridge at Jones’ Landing [near Deep Bottom, two miles from Aiken’s Landing], there to await them, and at the same time protect the bridge and base of supplies for the Army of the James. At about nine this morning, seeing they were not advancing, our undaunted Captain procured two tugs and had them to tow us up [to the barricade], which was accordingly done, we working the starboard engine only; and in this crippled condition faced the rebel foe, and poured our 15-inch solid shot into them thick and heavy, for about two hours, the result of which was that one of them was struck in the magazine and blown up, the other two “turned tail and run,” and left us alone in our glory.18

The vessel that exploded at 7:10 a.m. was not a Rebel ram, but the gunboat Drewry, which had been overwhelmed by land battery hits. Onondaga did strike Virginia II with two 15-inch shells, both of which penetrated her ironed casement, causing damage and causalities. The Rebel warships eventually withdrew, leaving Onondaga holding her position near the barrier. From the perspective of General Grant, the navy had badly mishandled the engagement and exposed City Point to a potentially catastrophic firestorm. His anger centered on Commander Parker’s “failure” to immediately engage, and such was the force of the general-in-chief ’s censure that the Navy Department relieved, then courtmartialed, Parker. Garryowen wrote his second letter about the engagement just after his commander’s dismissal.

The “rebels did not come down on a fool’s errand,” he explained, “they were well provided with torpedo boats and other instruments of destruction, which we, single-handed as we were, by any means of strategy or prowess could baffle.

We could fight the rams, it is true; but the torpedo boats, like hornets, would swarm around us in the dark, and cause such a ‘rise’ in Yankee patriotism as would cast the gold speculators of Wall street in the shade. And for not committing such a rash act, we are cowards!” Garryowen praised Commander Parker, who throughout the chaotic events was “cool, calm and collected—to him we owe our presence here now; and to him the numerous shipping, bridges and warehouses on the James are indebted for their preservations.”19 Parker’s court-martial convened a dozen days after Garryowen’s letter. In the ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76 53 SPRING 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

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A January 1866 revolt by AfricanAmerican soldiers in the 128th U.S. Colored Troops sheds light on the often troubled path to freedom experienced by former slaves who joined the Union military.

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By Jonathan Lande

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HARPER’S WEEKLY

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General William T. Sherman and his army conducted their March to the Sea in November and December 1864, enslaved women and men flocked to the U.S. standard for safety. Sherman’s force marshaled Georgian land as Union territory before driving the war into the Confederacy’s South Carolinian heart. On February 18, 1865, the Union army plunged the spike into Charleston. The 21st U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) regiment was at the vanguard. Black Charlestonians greeted the soldiers with glee. New-York Tribune correspondent James Redpath recalled their warm embrace: “The negroes cheer us … [and] dance for joy when they see our glorious flag.”

Throughout February and March, freedpeople cheered black and white liberators alike. The famed 54th Massachusetts Infantry and its sister regiment, the 55th Massachusetts, streamed through the city to jubilant huzzahs. The freedpeople celebrated the fall of slavery, a reverence that culminated in a festival of 5,000 revelers who gathered on March 21 in the Citadel Green to voice their thanks. To flag the death of bondage, they paraded through the city with a coffin marked “SLAVERY.” All the while, perhaps inspired by the sight of fellow black men donning striking blue uniforms or compelled to action by continued Confederate resistance, freedmen throughout South Carolina and Georgia left their families to join the Union army, even as the war’s end came into view in the spring and summer of 1865.1 The army put many of the newly enlisted men into the 128th U.S. Colored Troops regiment. The regiment had been mustered into service only eight days before General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House and a few weeks before General Joseph E. Johnston conceded to Sherman in North Carolina. Most Confederates submitted soon after Lee and Johnston, so the black troops of the 128th USCT never had the chance to fight their former enslavers. But even though combat had abated, the men would not be headed back to the plantations. The nation needed an occupying force, and these black men were the sole option after the government decided to send

HARPER’S WEEKLY

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The 55th Massachusetts Infantry, an AfricanAmerican regiment, marches through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1865.

Though the war was coming to a close, sights like these helped spur further military enlistments among the region’s black residents.

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white soldiers back to their northern homes. To maintain a presence, the army distributed black troops around the South. In South Carolina, as the white Yankees marched home, only the 128th USCT, 13 companies of regular infantry, and two companies of regular cavalry remained.2 While the army provided a wage, meals, and shelter to the black men who enlisted in the 128th and other USCT regiments, occupying the former Confederacy still posed grave challenges.

Not only did the troops have to enforce rules on war-torn communities, but they also helped exslaves with the challenging transition from slavery to freedom in the face of resistance from defeated Confederates, who took off their uniforms but continued antagonizing their former slaves and the Union authorities. In short, black soldiers became the agents implementing Union victory and emancipation in the South. White southerners reacted vehemently, taunting black occupiers and discrediting them.3 They attacked black soldiers and, when they were unable to assault the men, harassed the soldiers’ families. Black troops retaliated to protect themselves, their kin, and the freedoms won during the war, but the struggles would grow more intense.4 In October 1865, news of a protest in Jamaica increased the tension. In what became known as the Morant Bay rebellion, black Jamaicans killed more than 20 Europeans and Jamaicans of European descent.

That uprising stoked long-held fears of black violence across the South. In South Carolina, the state’s governor betrayed white paranoia in a letter to the occupying army, which requested that it be “vigilant and watchful keeping the negroes in perfect order and arresting every one of them who may be turbulent or drunk.”5 Black troops’ postwar battles were not confined to their skirmishes with white southerners or even the struggle for liberty on a national scale.

The men also faced numerous difficulties in their everyday lives as soldiers. Aside from having to deal with ill-behaved and often violent ex-Confederates, the troops suffered from disease. Disease had hit freedpeople particularly hard during the war. While in service, freedmen’s chances of staying well did not improve greatly. Even though they received resources including shelter, clothing, and nutrition, illnesses—including diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and smallpox—still killed many black soldiers.

Smallpox was a particular menace. The disease had killed five times as many black men as white men during the war, and while the 128th USCT was stationed at Folly Island in South Carolina, it suffered a smallpox outbreak that claimed at least two men in the regiment.6 The new soldiers were stricken with boredom, too. The army was a place of rigid discipline, limiting men’s mobility and controlling life’s daily

rhythms. Garrison duty required them to wake up early, drill in the morning and afternoon, and eat meals and go to bed at set times. As the former slaves discovered, the grind and boredom of military routines did not often live up to the excitement they might have hoped for when they dreamed of martial glory and life beyond the plantation fields—making the arrival of a steamship seem like an escape from the tyranny of camp malaise for the men of the 128th USCT. On July 18, 1866, the steamboat Idea appeared like a mirage to the men of the 128th as it arrived in Stono Inlet around 6 p.m. Hoping to relieve the stress of soldiering and break the daily monotony with a dance on the steamer that summer evening, the soldiers serving in Company G charged out of their tents toward the wharf. It had not been uncommon for slaves to throw parties as a way to free themselves from the drudgery of the fields for a few moments.7 Perhaps unaware of the men’s innocent desire to have a little fun, Lieutenant Lester Hall, one of the company’s white officers, concluded that Idea’s presence was distracting the men from their duties.

He marched to the wharf to order the steamboat to open water and the men to their quarters.

When Hall delivered his order, the men ignored him. The young officer had only taken a command in the 128th the previous month after serving in the 56th New York Infantry, so

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

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In July 1866, the African-American soldiers of the 128th USCT— who, like most volunteers, had dreamed of glory on the battlefield—found a welcome diversion from the boredom and discipline of military occupation duty in the arrival of a steamship near their camp on Folly Island, South Carolina. Below: A steamboat dock on Morris Island, South Carolina, during the war. Opposite page: A slave-turned-soldier kills a Confederate foe in this wartime depiction of African-American battlefield heroics.

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Dense rows of tents cover the ground in a Union army camp on Folly Island, South Carolina, during the war—a camp much like the one in which the mutiny in the 128th USCT took place in July 1866.

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maybe he thought repeating himself would to the trick.8 Twice more he issued the order, but to no effect. Swollen with disgust at the men’s insubordination, Hall began pushing them toward camp. In response, Private Nelson Hicks told Hall he had “no right to shove” them. Like many of his comrades, Hicks had joined the army late in the war and had been a slave before it. (Recruiters recorded him as a laborer when he enlisted in Savannah, Georgia, on March 8, 1865.9) Meeting the defiance head-on, Hall pulled out his revolver and thrust it toward Hicks and the men, driving them from the wharf. Hall then escorted Hicks to his quarters. To silence him, Hall bucked and gagged the private, a brutal punishment in which a soldier’s arms were drawn up around his knees and a rod inserted between them to immobilize him.10 Civil War troops disdained such painful punishments, and former slaves especially so, with the violence wielded by plantation overseers still fresh on their minds.

Satisfied that he had restored order, Hall went to dinner.11 As he ate, the men fumed. They talked rebellion.

Although rebellion had not been a major issue for the Union armies, the concept itself was not new to white or black Americans. Indeed, the Civil War itself had in effect precipitated a massive slave rebellion in America, with countless black southerners going on strike when the war began and many of them leaving plantations behind.12 By war’s end, 4 million Americans had exited bondage as a result of escape, rebellion, and Union policy. As they became free, AfricanAmerican women and men endeavored to define that freedom, yet they were not the only ones to do so. The government and its officials—including white officers in USCT regiments—carried their own ideas into the South. At times, the ideas of freedpeople and government officials meshed. As historian Chandra Manning has pointed out, the U.S. government and freedpeople negotiated a new social contract as the war unfolded, with a “wartime citizenship” based on what the former slaves offered the national government at its core. In exchange for intelligence, labor, and loyalty, the government helped secure black freedom and provided food and clothing to former slaves.13 A key aspect of this wartime alliance between the government and freedpeople was the direct participation of African Americans in the northern war effort as members of the Union military.

Black men had been barred from military service before the Civil War, but activists like Frederick Douglass identified such service as a route to freedom and pressed Union officials to admit

black men into the army and navy. As Douglass famously declared, “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.” Douglass got his wish.

When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he consented to the use of black troops, an action given teeth by the formation of the Bureau of Colored Troops shortly after. Many black men soon enlisted for the chance to toughen their claims to manhood after centuries of degradation.

Union and African-American interests aligned—for the moment. The government received more than 180,000 devoted black soldiers by the war’s end. While 51,032 were from northern states—of those, Pennsylvania offered the most with 8,612—the South contributed the majority. A total of 135,065 black troops joined from the seceded states and the border slave states.

The army mustered them into USCT regiments, including the 128th USCT. Most of the men who enlisted in the 128th hailed from Georgia and South Carolina, which provided 3,486 and 5,462 men, respectively.14 While Douglass offered his thoughts on the meaning of military service, exslaves brought their own ideas and expectations.

In an institution defined by strict rules and regulations, these became a source of friction for black recruits and their white allies. Such was the case for the troops of the 128th USCT when the emergence of the steamship Idea landed Private Hicks in ropes.

The men of the 128th discussed their options as Lieutenant Hall ate. Believing an injustice had been done, several of them snuck into Hall’s tent and cut Hicks loose. After finishing his dinner, Hall sauntered back to his tent and noticed Idea had not yet left the dock as he had ordered. He hiked to the wharf and reiterated his orders to the steamer, which promptly headed toward open water. Hall then learned that Hicks had been freed from captivity. Hall found the insolent Georgian, brought him back into his tent, and bucked him again.

In response, men from Company G poured out of their quarters. They loaded their guns and fixed bayonets. Hall met the men in the street to dissuade them from mutiny. Alone and outnumbered, he attempted to reason with them. When his rhetorical powers failed him, he resorted to a more aggressive form of persuasion: He pulled his revolver and leveled it at the crowd in hopes of dispersing the increasingly fervent gathering.

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A month later, Clark awaited court-martial in a Charleston jail. During the American War of Independence, colonists had borrowed courtsmartial from the British legal system in order to adjudicate infractions and maintain military order.18 Over the 19th century, the courts-martial system grew in sophistication as the army determined the best way to organize and discipline American soldiers. The Revised United States Army Regulations of 1861 outlined the procedure.

Two separate courts-martial bodies were created.

Regimental courts-martial were called to manage lesser crimes, such as theft, while more serious crimes, such as rape, murder, and mutiny, went to a general court-martial. These general courts-martial did not have juries and a judge.

Instead, they were decided by officers, ranging in number between five and 13, who sometimes but rarely had experience in the law. A judge advocate prosecuted the alleged criminal, and the accused defended himself, though he could receive legal assistance at the tribunal’s discretion.19 At Clark’s trial, the white officers of the court listened to testimony for eight days. The judge advocate had charged Clark with mutiny, alleging that Clark encouraged his comrades to run Hall through with their bayonets and that Clark intended to murder Hall. To build his case, the judge advocate called Hall to testify. The lieutenant said that the matter began when Idea arrived and the men wanted to have a “frolic” with ship’s passengers. When some of the troops at the wharf refused to obey his order to return their tents, he said, he shoved a man, which sparked a “spirit of resistance” in Private Nelson Hicks.

After recounting all relevant details, Hall noted that on the morning of July 19, Clark had been “[h]ostile, insubordinate, [and] showed signs of ugliness.” Hall added that Clark, as well as all members of his company, had had the Articles of War read to them after their enlistments and therefore knew the conduct required of soldiers.

Clark presented an alternative story. He undermined the judge advocate’s argument, attempting to douse the prosecution’s claim that he had led the mutiny and intended to harm the lieutenant. Clark explained that his comrades had compelled him to join. He told the court that when men in his company grew agitated over the injustices, he did not participate. The men tried to goad him into the fight, he said: “When the men began to gather in the Company street, I was sitting down on my door step. They said to me, ‘Clark, ain’t you going[?]’ I said ‘no, I would not go.’ Some one said I was a damned coward. I said, ‘I’d take that for my shame and stay.’” He argued that he would not budge, even when they questioned his manhood.20 When Clark finished his statement, the court

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

fired several times and hit three men.

Hall quickly retreated, and in the confusion he heard a soldier yell, “Run him through!”

The men from Company G returned fire as they withdrew from the street toward their quarters, but missed their target. Hall found cover within the Quarantine Hospital, even as bullets cut through the tent canvas. Tensions then apparently cooled temporarily, as there is no record of continued violence that day. The enlisted men surveyed the damage and found that one of the men whom Hall had hit had died. That night, the men reflected on the incident. No record of their exchange exists, but in the end, the men resolved to act. At 4 the next morning, Hall awoke in his tent to the furious yells of Private James Clark demanding justice for the murder of a soldier.

Clark, a slave prior to the war, had enlisted in the 128th on March 8, 1865, in Beaufort, South Carolina. While the regiment was stationed on Folly Island, Clark’s wife and mother resided in Charleston. Prior to the war Charleston had been a refuge for enslaved women who escaped but either could not make it to the North or chose to remain under the Carolina sun. Perhaps Clark’s wife found work there, as many AfricanAmerican women had before emancipation.15 Clark’s mother, however, needed her son’s help, and he traveled to the city when he could. The opportunity to travel to see them probably felt like a great privilege. Slaveholders regularly separated loved ones and controlled slave marriages, so freedpeople rejoiced when they could form and maintain families. Keeping a family was one of many new freedoms they held dear. Clark may have enlisted to support his family as a freedman and felt a growing sense of respect as a soldier and wage earner.16 Having lived under the depravities of bondage, the South Carolinian likely saw Hall’s violence as an affront to his freedom and that of his fellow black soldiers.

Stepping from his tent, Hall encountered Clark loading a double-barrel shotgun. Supported by a few comrades beside him, Clark boldly shouted, “Do you know what you did?

You killed one man and wounded two others.”

Tuning Clark out, Hall pleaded with the others to lower their muskets. Unable to diffuse their anger, Hall fled. Clark opened fire, but he squandered the shot. The troops chased Hall for miles, but he eluded them and made it to Lighthouse Inlet, where he happened upon a fisherman who ferried him to regimental headquarters on Morris Island. There, Hall found the commanding officer. The officers gathered reinforcements to accompany Hall back to Folly Island later that day. With this bolstered force, Hall subdued the rebellion and arrested Clark to stand trial for mutiny.17 62 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SPRING 2019

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Clashes—some of them violent—between white officers and black enlisted men were not uncommon during the war. Above: The white officers and black non-commissioned officers of the 4th U.S. Colored Troops at Fort Slocum in Washington, D.C., in April 1865.

deliberated. The court could choose to execute him. Precedent proved execution could be used for mutineers, as their actions threatened the war effort. Yet courts-martial had also factored white officers’ mistreatment of black soldiers into their decisions before, perhaps giving Clark optimism.

Many Civil War officers realized that black soldiers faced challenges due to racial discrimination or the difficulties of transitioning to freedom and military life. Abolitionist minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who became colonel of the 1st South Carolina Colored Regiment in 1863, was among the most compassionate men to command black troops. Before joining Lincoln’s army, Higginson advocated for the end of slavery with such vigor that his New England congregation asked him to step down. He later funded John Brown’s insurrection, which ended at Harpers Ferry. As a colonel, Higginson made special considerations for his men. He ordered his fellow white officers to abstain from using the worst epithets among the rank and file and to elect less violent punishments for them so as to not stir memories of slavery.

Not all officers of African-American troops exercised such empathy, though. Multiple clashes between white officers and black soldiers oc-

curred during the war. Lieutenant Colonel Augustus Benedict of the 4 Corps D’Afrique, for instance, had a history of harassing the regiment’s black enlisted men. He was known to strike the men without cause, and once he had a soldier tied to the ground by his legs and arms. He then poured molasses on the man’s face, hands, and feet and forced the soldier to bake in the sun while insects, attracted by the sweet scent, crawled over his body. In every instance, the black soldiers—many of them former slaves—serving beneath Benedict did not act, possibly fearing retribution. However, when Benedict whipped two members of the regimental band on December 9, 1863, the regiment exploded. A quarter of the men rushed the parade ground in outrage. One yelled, “Kill all the d—d Yankees,” and another fired into the air. They called for Benedict’s head. While most did not join the fight, neither did they help suppress the rebellion. After discipline was finally restored, 22 of the men faced court-martial; 13 were acquitted, seven received jail time, and two were sentenced to death. The case was referred to the department commander, Major General Nathaniel Banks, who commuted both sentences and instead imprisoned the men.21 Soon after the incident, Banks hired inves63 SPRING 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Private William Johnson of the 23rd USCT hangs after being sentenced to death by a court-martial for desertion and rape in 1864. Two years later, Private James Clark of the 128th USCT faced the same fate for his role in the Idea mutiny.

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tigators to examine its cause. One of them, an officer named William Dwight, found that the regiment had been run by licentious men who routinely used violence to enforce order. Dwight concluded that brutality merely produced “physical terror, and when that goes beyond endurance, there follows—mutiny.” He compared the regiment’s white officers to nasty overseers who, unlike slaveholders, did not even care for the value of the enslaved laborers under their control. He determined that the capricious violence would end in insurrection, acknowledging the former slaves’ hunger for dignity: “This Regiment will rise in revolution if the abuse of its soldiers is suffered to continue—and the next revolt will not be bloodless.” To prevent further violence and placate the troops, Banks made an example of Benedict. He ordered that the lieutenant colonel be tried by court-martial, which ultimately convicted him of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on his men, to the prejudice of good order and military discipline. The court then discharged Benedict from the army.22 Lester Hall had not resorted to the same violence as Augustus Benedict, yet Hall’s actions had nonetheless prompted his men to compare military life to their prior lives in slavery. To black soldiers, menacing white officers evoked memories of bondage. For many, the prospect of freedom meant more than the chance to kill Confederates or earn a wage. Free men, as Nelson Hicks declared, had rights and, as James Clark insisted, deserved justice when wronged.

When Hall violated their sense of freedom, Hicks and Clark confronted their lieutenant, but their appeals were met with belligerent authority. Now, a court of white officers sat in judgment. Whether they considered Hall’s actions out of line would determine whether Clark went back to his duties or walked to the gallows.

When the court returned, Clark’s hopes were dashed. The panel of judges sided with Hall and convicted Clark of mutiny. They also decided to exercise the full extent of the court’s power and sentenced Clark to death. The army planned to hang the former South Carolina slave at Castle Pinckney for the Idea mutiny. The execution was set for September 28, 1866.23 As he sat in his jail cell awaiting his fate, Clark continued to fight his case. He caught a break when his execution was suspended until November 1. That date came and went with the army taking no action. Finally, Clark decided to make an appeal. On December 14 he wrote to the general commanding the area and asked him to either explain why he had been in jail or to release him so that he might help his ☛ } CONT. ON P. 77 65 SPRING 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

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Located in Redlands, California Halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs

BOOKS & AUTHORS

The B&A Q&A: Peter S. Carmichael

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

last november, the University of North Carolina Press

published The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies by Peter S. Carmichael, the Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.

The book is garnering significant praise for its innovative approach in telling the story of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb. We recently sat down with Carmichael to learn more about his research and writing process.

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B&A

What sources did you find particularly useful or important in your research?

I quickly gave up on the idea of finding the common soldier or any sample group of men who might stand for the millions who served in Union and Confederate armies. In fact, I have long thought that the search for typicality is a pointless foray, and for historians who seek a rep-

Peter S. Carmichael talks about The War for the Common Soldier at the Loudoun Museum in January 2019.

resentative study group, it almost always draws from the ranks of the privileged.

These men fit our stereotype of Civil War soldiers as always courageous, dutiful, and patriotic, and thus push to the periphery the dissenters and the disillusioned. Too often these latter groups are dismissed because they are perceived (though wrongly) as apolitical or nonideological—the supposed deadbeats of the army.

In terms of sources, the court-martial records from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., were indispensable. From these official documents the actual voices of the men can be heard.

Charged with a crime and facing serious penalties, they had to justify why they challenged military authority.

ALEX HAWKINSON, LOUDOUN MUSEUM

Gary Gallagher and Michael Parrish, the editors of the Littlefield History of the Civil War Era series at the University of North Carolina Press, invited me to write a volume on the common soldier. All 16 books in the Littlefield series are intended to accomplish two things: synthesize the existing scholarship on the chosen topic and advance new interpretations. Trying to do both proved difficult. I struggled to find the opening to make an original contribution that could also stand upon the existing platform of soldier scholarship.

After a great deal of reading outside of the field of Civil War history—mostly books about World War I and French history—I reached the conclusion that much of the existing Civil War scholarship fails to capture the lives of soldiers as they were actually lived. As much as I admire the scholarship of historians like James McPherson, Joseph Glatthaar, Chandra Manning, and many others, I thought their emphasis on ideology and identity created the impression that soldiers acted in predictable ways to concepts like duty and nationalism. The complicated ways in which soldiers coped with their unpredictable and often volatile existence was lacking, in my estimation. In short, I thought we needed a study of Union and Confederate soldiers that captured the totality of their experience by encompassing their physical, political, cultural, and intellectual worlds.

I decided to rely upon a case-study approach, but I make it clear in the introduction of the book that no one man can stand for all of the experiences in the rank and file. I selected nearly 30 soldiers who reflect the class, racial, and regional diversity of Civil War armies.

In fleshing out the lives of these men, I relied on heavily contextualized stories that resemble what cinematographers call deep focus. This approach is biographical in its orientation, and

it enabled me to keep the lens on the main figure without blotting out the background. The result is a narrative of greater depth, for it allows the reader to see how individual soldiers interacted with their comrades, officers, civilians, and the impersonal forces of war.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Why did you decide to write a book about Civil War soldiers?

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“ After a great deal of reading outside of the field of Civil War history …

I reached the conclusion that much of the existing Civil War scholarship fails to capture the lives of soldiers as they were actually lived.”

ALEX HAWKINSON, LOUDOUN MUSEUM

PETER S. CARMICHAEL, AUTHOR OF THE WAR FOR THE COMMON SOLDIER: HOW MEN THOUGHT, FOUGHT, AND SURVIVED IN CIVIL WAR ARMIES

Their testimony sheds rich insights into the boundaries of dissent in Civil War armies, enabling us to better understand what powers confronted soldiers on a daily basis.

I also thought that the voices of the illiterate and semi-literate needed to be heard. I was fortunate to discover the correspondence of Georgia’s Wright Vinson and North Carolina’s John Futch. Both men were poor and illiterate, both dictated their letters to comrades, and both freely expressed feelings of despair while scraping by to survive in the ranks. The stories of men like Vinson and Futch do not follow the popular script of the heroic Civil War soldier. I lifted up similar stories throughout The War for the Common Soldier.

into the shoes of the soldier so that they might imagine the world as the men perceived it, to feel the daily struggles of military life as they were endured by the rank and file, and to appreciate what choices were available to enlisted men whose lives were constrained in ways that ideological studies, with their emphasis on agency, tend to diminish.

Did you learn anything about Civil War soldiers that surprised you?

How does your take on Civil War soldiers—their motivations, ideologies, and experiences—differ from previous studies?

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

I lean heavily on studies devoted to soldier ideology, but I was frustrated by the standard methodology that relies upon cherry-picking of quotes from soldier letters to prove an overarching theme as to why men fought and what motivated them to stay in the ranks. I tried to minimize this approach by placing the words of soldiers within the flow of events over an extended period of time, revealing the fluid nature of thought and action in the ranks, rather than offering the reader a static snapshot of soldier thought at one particular place and moment.

But I didn’t write The War for the Common Soldier as a rebuttal to the important soldier studies on why men fought. I wanted to build upon their scholarship, but I asked a slightly different question: How did Civil War soldiers think? Such an inquiry required a more expansive approach that included cultural history, material culture, environmental history, sensory history, and visual culture. Through these methodologies it was my goal to put readers

Being a Civil War soldier, I concluded, was never a state of being or a fixed identity. Situational thinking prevailed, and it enabled Civil War soldiers to be many different things at different times in the war. Pragmatism—called “adaptability” by the men in the ranks—gave men the flexibility to react to varying conditions of war. Adhering to a strict code of conduct proved unsustainable in the field on both sides and in all armies. To most men’s shock, well-established binaries of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by the war.

Situational thinking drew from their hard experiences and lessons learned on the ground. Depending on the circumstances, Union and Confederate soldiers could lean on God or put trust in themselves, their officers, and their comrades without adhering to some abstract truth, principle, or allegiance.

Is there anything about Civil War soldiers that we still need to study?

We need to know more about the emotional lives of the rank and file, the underground economies in Civil War armies, crime and punishment, the reading habits of the men, sexual violence, and how the act of writing shaped representations of military life. I also hope that historians will look more closely at how Civil War soldiers coped with the trauma of combat by focusing on the language the troops employed in coming to terms with the killing fields of the Civil War. 69 SPRING 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR

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B&A given my increasing interest in southern history and the fact that T. Harry Williams, who taught there, had recently won a Pulitzer Prize.

As an undergraduate, I had read Williams’ Huey Long (1970), and this proved to be a fine introduction to Williams the historian and the man. He grabs and vividly recall how exciting it was as a col- keeps the reader’s attention with a comlege student to be introduced to serious bination of great style, ingenious use of history. At that time, Bluffton students oral history, and a cast of wonderfully who maintained a certain class standing colorful Louisiana characters. Williams received a bookstore credit. One of my always said he studied powerbrokers, best choices in using that credit was Ken- starting with Abraham Lincoln early in neth M. Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution: his career and Lyndon Johnson toward Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956). I the end of it. Indeed, reading Williams’ knew little about slavery but devoured Lincoln and His Generals (1952) drew me this book, and decided that if this was further into the Civil War era. Comthe kind of history that professional his- bining fine narrative with provocative torians did, I was more than interested. analysis, Williams presents Lincoln as a Unruh encouraged me to apply to gradu- superb war leader. His tart judgments on ate school at Louisiana State University, generals including George B. McClellan and Joseph Hooker are especially memorable, but he also offers a model study that can reach both professional and lay audiences. And of course, I eventually did get around to Bruce Catton. My favorite of his works has always been the Army of the Potomac trilogy: Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951), Glory Road (1952), and A Stillness at Appomattox (1953). Catton deserves all the praise he has received for his writing style, but I have been equally impressed with how well both his research and his narrative have held up over the years.

In about 1971, I developed a strong interest in the political history of Reconstruction.

While working on my undergraduate thesis, I had carefully read Eric L. McKitrick’s fine study, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (1960). McKitrick’s portrait of Johnson as an outsider remains memorable, and he is especially good George C. Rable at portraying the fraught and

I was not one of those precocious Civil War enthusiasts who started reading Bruce Catton at the age of 10. Even when I was in high school, my tastes ran more to literature than to history. The first history book that left a serious impression was John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (1957). For some reason the chapter on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson and Kansas senator Edmund G. Ross, whose vote against convicting Johnson allowed the president to stay in office, struck me as fascinating—especially given the tumultuous politics of the late 1960s. As it turns out, of course, the patronageseeking Ross was not exactly a profile in political courage, but reading about that episode led me to an interest in the Reconstruction period and eventually to a college senior thesis on Johnson’s impeachment.

I had vague notions of becoming a high school math teacher, but at Bluffton College I had the great good fortune to take classes from John Unruh— an experience that changed my life. Unruh was a superb teacher who emphasized the importance of research in primary materials, historiographical sophistication, and clear writing. His magisterial, multiple-prize-winning (and sadly, posthumously published) The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1860 (1979) displays all these virtues. It quickly became a classic work that exemplifies the best the historical profession has produced. I can

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complex relations between the president and Congress—something that seemed particularly relevant when I was reading it as the Watergate scandal unfolded. Equally apropos, though some 25 years old at the time I finally read it, Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948) introduced me to a first-rate historical mind taking on familiar subjects with brilliant originality and mordant wit. I soon discovered that any book by Hofstadter was well worth reading.

At LSU I developed a deeper interest in not only Reconstruction but also southern political history—largely spurred by classes taught by William J. Cooper. I was first exposed to many of the interpretations and evidence later presented in Cooper’s The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856 (1978) in his compelling and commanding lectures. Cooper presented his arguments for the centrality of slavery in antebellum southern politics—in the book and in his lectures—with abundant examples, absolute clarity, and great forcefulness. It is fair to say that Unruh, Williams, and Cooper not only greatly shaped my research interests but also set an example of how superb scholars can also be extraordinary teachers.

An interest in 19th-century southern (and American) politics soon broadened into a more capacious fascination with southern history broadly defined. To understand the history of the South requires an appreciation of its rich literary tradition. There is, for instance, the “Christhaunted South” of Flannery O’Connor.

I have read and reread O’Connor’s searing and perceptive short stories and novels, most conveniently in the Library of America volume Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (1988). Through unforgettable characters and bizarre plots, O’Connor probes the southern psyche, most notably its religious underpinnings and pretensions. Her writing stimulated my slowly growing interest in religious history. Of course, there was no need to turn to fiction for fascinating and eccentric individuals. Drew Gilpin Faust’s

James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (1982) deals with a peculiarly unappealing individual without succumbing to either preachiness or presentism. The reader enters the world of a slaveholder, politician, and deeply flawed human being—and in the process learns a great deal about southern history.

When it comes to great historians of the Civil War era, I would cite two more (and leave out a good number of deserving names). Any student of the sectional conflict should begin with David M. Potter’s posthumously published The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (1977). Potter masterfully untangles complex issues such as slavery expansion and its impact on national politics. His lucid prose and brilliant analysis make his book a classic for both scholars and teachers. The same is true of another landmark study, James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988). Turn to almost any page and enjoy a historian fully in command of his subject. I began reading this book in an airport and was hooked immediately. The mastery of theme, of detail, of anecdote, of quotation remains a stunning example of Civil War history at its best. McPherson’s work on the common soldier has certainly shaped my thinking about how to approach military history.

Throughout my career at the University of Alabama and now in retirement, I’ve tried to keep up with the flood of books on the Civil War era (and especially any well-edited primary sources), although I would advise students to keep reading the classic works in the field. Today, I live happily surrounded by books in virtually every room of the house and the garage. And more come in than go out.

GEORGE C. RABLE IS PROFESSOR EMERITUS, AND FORMERLY THE CHARLES G. SUMMERSELL CHAIR IN SOUTHERN HISTORY, AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA. HIS BOOKS INCLUDE FREDERICKSBURG! FREDERICKSBURG! (2002), GOD’S ALMOST CHOSEN PEOPLES: A RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (2010), AND, MOST RECENTLY, DAMN YANKEES! DEMONIZATION AND DEFIANCE IN THE CONFEDERATE SOUTH (2015).

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

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Civil War Barons

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Wilson’s Raid: The Final Blow to the Confederacy

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“Though focused on a single national cemetery, Where Valor Proudly Sleeps is also a history of how Americans remember sacrifice and continue to struggle with the legacies of the Civil War.” — Rebecca Capobianco

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informed his diary, “that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation.... God had decided this question in favor of the slave. [Lincoln] was satisfied that it was right—was confirmed and strengthened in his action by the vow and the results.”5 The idea of Lincoln as God’s instrument would have been a good source of artistic inspiration, and to some extent it comes through in a second major artistic project commissioned in the years immediately after the president’s assassination. This was the Freedmen’s Memorial, a life-size sculpture by Thomas Ball that now stands in Washington’s Lincoln Park, a few blocks east of the U.S. Capitol. Despite its title, the sculpture was sponsored by whites and its features represent a white man’s interpretation of emancipation. Here once again is Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. He stands with his right hand resting on the Emancipation Proclamation while he holds his left above a kneeling slave, bidding him to arise from his broken chains. This depiction gives Lincoln’s act a quasi-divine aura, reinforced by the awed expression on the face of the slave.

At the base of the statue is the word “EMANCIPATION,” attesting that the audience is looking at the essence of the act of emancipation.

Ball’s statue has come under heavy criticism for its portrayal of the enslaved African American as the passive recipient of freedom. Another sort of artistic statement was possible even in the mid1860s, as evidenced by Freedman, an 1863 statuette by John Quincy Adams Ward, which shows a freedman alone, rising proudly from chains he has broken himself.6 But in mythic terms, if Lincoln is to be the Great Emancipator then the slave must be the passive recipient of freedom, not its co-equal author. The question, then, is why has the American Iliad insisted upon this image of emancipation?

The idea of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator is itself defensible. Histo-

the concept has protected the American Iliad as a white man’s Iliad focused on the morally equivalent military valor of the white soldiers in the Union and Confederate armies. Such a focus would be impossible if we moved the strivings of enslaved African Americans to center stage and recognized their activism in deserting their masters and their valor in fighting on behalf of the Union cause. If we do accept this view, the popular image of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator could be revised, with his role reduced to that one triumphant act of statesmanship. If the American Iliad is a living myth, subject to change and improvement, then here is a worthwhile opportunity for change.

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.

LIVING HISTORY

CONTINUED FROM P. 30

thought I was nuts,” says Roland. “Probably still does.”

Then came the bigger question: Could he even get it? The auction was held online, and there were only two bidders—Roland and a man from Gettysburg. There was no viewing the map beforehand. On auction day, bidding started at $100 and climbed slowly. At the exact minute the auction was scheduled to end, Roland had the high bid at about $3,000. But there was a glitch.

Somehow, the bidding kept going.

Frenzy ensued. When the other bidder jumped to $10,000, Roland hit back with $14,010—then suddenly, the auction expired. And there he was, having paid an epic sum for four big nostalgic blocks of plaster, sight unseen.

Roland was given directions to a trucking yard some 25 miles away, and soon after that he was shining a flashlight into a giant shipping container for the first view of his purchase. Then came the spectacle of getting the pieces to Hanover and through the second-story window—a journey that drew national attention. “Our son was living in California, and our daughter was living in

Florida,” says Roland. “They both called to say, what are you doing, Dad? You’re in the newspaper for moving a map.”

But the work was just getting started.

The electric map had no control panel and no power supply. “The original map had been made with a bunch of leftovertype stuff—cut-up strands of Christmas lights and old telephone wire,” Roland says. Lighting it again would require at least a thousand new wires, and getting the map’s 635 lights to work on cue would require 7,000 connections.

“There were no wiring diagrams, nothing,” says Roland. “We had to figure out what lights came on at the same time and what was what.” That an engineer with specialized knowledge of electrical connectors was the map’s new owner was starting to feel like fate.

Roland enlisted Greg Ruff, a friend from the connector business, to help him tackle the rewiring. “Greg volunteered—or volunteered is a little—maybe I conned him into helping rewire it,” says Roland. The map was on cinderblocks, 18 inches off the ground. They bought mechanics creepers—the wheeled trolleys you lie on to work under a car—and

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SCOTT ROWLAND

AMERICAN ILIAD

CONTINUED FROM P. 28

rian James M. McPherson made a strong case for it in his “Who Freed the Slaves?” essay, a rebuttal to the argument that Lincoln was a reluctant liberator or, as expressed in most extreme form, that the slaves liberated themselves: “Lincoln did not accomplish this in the manner sometimes symbolically portrayed, breaking the chains of helpless and passive bondsmen with the stroke of a pen by signing the Emancipation Proclamation.”7 But without the total impact of Lincoln’s presidency—the way his mere election caused the slave-holding South to secede, to his choice to preserve the Union through war, his decision that the war could not be won without the destruction of slavery, and thereafter his insistence on emancipation as a Union war aim—it is unlikely that slavery would have come to an end.

But the idea that Lincoln acted to liberate millions of slaves who did nothing to liberate themselves is historically untenable. In mythic terms, however,

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SCOTT ROWLAND

An artist works on the restoration of the Gettysburg electric map after its move to its new home in Hanover, Pennsylvania.

spent long hours rolling this way and that way under the map, running 2.5 miles of new wire. Meanwhile, Roland found a machine-controlled computer on eBay—to serve as the map’s brain— and he and Ruff spent months learning how to program it.

The lights were a hassle. More than half of them didn’t work—and, it turns out, hadn’t worked even in the last few years the show was still running. “I watched a video someone made of one of the map’s last showings,” says Roland.

“When the narrator talked about Little Round Top and how it went back and forth several times, nothing was going on with the lights. If you look at the physical map itself, the lights were there, but they didn’t work.” Some bulbs had been painted over, so Roland used an ultrasonic cleaner with brake fluid to take off the paint. Others had burned out or lost their connection.

About 20 percent of the map’s bulbs were missing, but replacements in their shape and size weren’t made anymore.

Roland remembered a toy from his childhood—the Vac-U-Form machine, manufactured by Mattel in the 1960s,

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LIVING HISTORY

CONTINUED FROM P. 73

which let you heat up plastic and mold it into parts—and used a few he found on eBay to make bulbs that looked identical to the originals. Shading them Union blue or Confederate amber was the next hurdle. Roland recalled yet another 1960s toy— Dip-a-Flower, which came with a pre-colored dye formula that he thought would made the right colors. So he tracked down the toy’s UK-based manufacturer. The dye hadn’t been made for years, but they still had some. Improbably, their lone U.S. distributor was in Gettysburg. “It’s pretty difficult to tell the new bulbs from the original,” says Roland. “The whole project was an exercise in making what we didn’t have and learning what we didn’t know.”

Beyond repairs, Roland didn’t change the map’s appearance or function. “Some people suggested we could put trees and this, that, and the other on it, and we said no,” Roland says.

He even resurrected the original narration, read

by Joseph Rosensteel, the map’s creator, cleaning up the audio until it “THE WHOLE sounded almost unblemPROJECT WAS AN ished. Over the decades, EXERCISE IN MAKING that narration had drawn WHAT WE DIDN’T HAVE fire for its simplicity, but AND LEARNING WHAT some think it’s what WE DIDN’T KNOW.” made the map experience so effective. “Less is more, and the map is really like that,” says Marc Charisse, a York College of Pennsylvania professor who helped Roland on the project. “Rosensteel had a genius for the exact right amount of information.”

On June 3, 2016, the electric map reopened to the public in the newly dubbed Hanover Heritage & Conference Center.

The TV crews came out again, and people waited in line for the first showing. The ones drawn there by nostalgia were not disappointed. “Some told me that the light show was far more compelling than they remember it,” says Roland. Just as satisfying were the map newbies who marveled—just as newbies had marveled for decades—that they hadn’t understood the Battle of Gettysburg until seeing the show. Thanks to Rosensteel, and now Roland, they got it.

After a strong first season, the electric map closed due to building permitting issues. “By the time word was getting out there, we were closing,” says Charisse, who ran the map show.

Now he gets several calls a day, asking when the map will reopen.

Good news: It is tentatively scheduled to reopen this spring, in time for the Gettysburg tourist season. “It’s a big deal to those who know about the map, remember it, and hold it dear,” says Roland. “It’s greater than just nostalgia. It is a piece of history in its own right.”

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

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HOW THE WEST WASN’T WON

CONTINUED FROM P. 41

appointment to those from California if they should be obliged to retrace their steps without feeling the enemy.” Because New Mexico offered no Rebel target, Carleton proposed taking the war into the Confederacy. “I hope I do not ask too much,” he wrote, “when I inquire whether a force could not profitably be thrown into Western Texas, where it is reported the Union men are only waiting for a little help to run up the old flag.” Carleton soon replaced Canby as head of the Department of New Mexico, set up headquarters in Santa Fe, and spent most of his ensuing time in the region dealing with Native Americans rather than Rebels.22 Back in Washington, officials in the War Department exhibited comparable assurance that Sibley’s fiasco left New Mexico and the Southwest safely under Union control. In his 19-page annual report to Congress in early December, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton dealt with events along the Rio Grande in one sentence. “The rebels under Sibley were driven from the department of New Mexico by General Canby,” his matter-offact recounting read, “and the force in that department, now under command of General Carleton, will be able to protect the inhabitants of that remote territory.” As for the Far West, Stanton declared, “The department of the Pacific has been free from any of the calamities occasioned by the rebellion....”23 Andrew E. Masich’s recent study, titled Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867, observes that “Jefferson Davis never had great confidence in the scheme for a Confederate empire in the Far West” and “dedicated little financial support and manpower” to Sibley’s effort. Yet “the invasion of New Mexico and Arizona did serve to divert significant federal resources that relieved pressure in other theaters.”24 It is incontestable that only the most modest amount of Confederate “blood and treasure” had been expended along the Rio Grande—though that phrase, whether deployed by Sibley or by later historians, sets a nice melodramatic tone. The United States, however, did not divert substantial resources to deal with Sibley. Canby commanded approximately 5,000 Union troops in New Mexico in early 1862—1,500 of them regulars. Reinforcements sent to arrest Sibley’s advance included more than 900 Colorado volunteers, who played a key role at Glorieta, and the California Column, which numbered just fewer than 1,300 when it approached Messila. Without Sibley’s presence along the Rio Grande in 1862, the large majority of those troops would not have been deployed to any of the hotly contested theaters farther east.

Something about Sibley’s campaign leads to fanciful comparisons and extravagant musings about what might have been. Glorieta Pass often has been labeled the “Gettysburg of the West.” Two books carry that phrase as their subtitle— including one whose authors, somewhat confusingly but to their credit, assure readers that they “reject the phrases ‘Battle that saved the West’ and ‘Gettysburg of the West.’” No one at the time or since, it seems safe to say, described Gettysburg as the “Glorieta of the East.” Even careful scholars fall into the trap of mentioning highly improbable outcomes. In this vein, Thomas W. Cutrer’s Empire of Sand: The Strug- ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76

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HOW THE WEST WASN’T WON

CONTINUED FROM P. 75

gle for the Southwest, 1862, closes its exploration of Sibley’s campaign with the comment that available Federal troops “likely would have stopped the Confederates and pushed them back” even if Forts Craig and Union had fallen. Rather than leave readers with that point, Cutrer speculates that had invading Texans been able “to accomplish Sibley’s grandiose vision of crossing the deserts of Arizona and California and reaching San Diego and Los Angeles, the American Civil War might well have had a different outcome.”25 In reality, Sibley’s campaign had no potential to shift the Civil War’s trajectory toward a different outcome. Many Confederates, Jefferson Davis among them, would have welcomed acquisition of New Mexico, Arizona, southern California, Colorado, and parts of northern Mexico, together with the at-

tendant mineral wealth and commercial possibilities. But such expansionist calculations always remained tangential, if not irrelevant, as Davis and others performed the hard task of determining strategic goals and allocating limited human and material resources in a life-or-death struggle to establish a nation. Overwhelmingly, the Confederacy expended its blood and treasure, to revisit that phrase one last time, far to the east of the 100th Meridian. Anyone at the time gazing eastward from Arizona or New Mexico would have known they stood well beyond the boundaries of the real conflict, the one that would decide the fate of the rebellion and, profoundly shaped by which side prevailed, the long-term future of the Southwest and Far West.

GARY W. GALLAGHER IS THE NAU PROFESSOR OF HISTORY EMERITUS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. THE AUTHOR OR EDITOR OF MORE THAN 40 BOOKS, HE MOST RECENTLY CO-EDITED, WITH J. MATTHEW GALLMAN, CIVIL WAR PLACES: SEEING THE CONFLICT THROUGH THE EYES OF ITS LEADING HISTORIANS (UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, 2019), AND CO-AUTHORED, WITH JOAN WAUGH, THE AMERICAN WAR: A HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA (REVISED EDITION, FLIP LEARNING, FORTHCOMING 2019).

“GIBRALTAR OF THE JAMES” CONTINUED FROM P. 53

end, the panel found the commander guilty of avoiding a fight and recommended his dismissal. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, however, overturned the verdict, allowing Parker to retire.

The few months of service remaining for Onondaga passed with Callinan continuing to write cheerful dispatches as Garryowen. Then came the collapse of the Confederacy in April, a moment symbolized for Callinan by the unannounced visit of President Abraham Lincoln to inspect the vessels (now including additional monitors) watching over the refurbished barricade at Trent’s Reach. Remembered Garryowen, “repairing on deck, I observed that illustrious gentleman on a tug proceeding towards the head of the fleet, and afterwards, slowly descending in a rowboat, viewing the iron ‘mud-turtles’ as he passed. Our crew were drawn up on

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the port-side, rigged and equipped with Sharp’s rifles, and on his passing presented arms, which Father Abraham acknowledged and passed on.”20 On May 29 Onondaga weighed anchor for the final time in the James River and eight days later docked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to begin the decommissioning process. Garryowen’s discharge had preceded that by nearly two months, and in his final letter, dated April 10, he thanked the officers and crew “for their uniform kindness and indulgence to me.”21 Garryowen had teased his readers on several occasions about his identity, never revealing his real name, but it seems clear that Callinan’s connection to Garryowen was an open secret on his home patch.

He returned to his old “job” of sometimes-correspondent covering events of importance to the Irish-American community. The Garryowen byline continued until 1872, when Callinan suffered a serious fall from his apartment steps. The accident resulted in his death at age 40 from the effects of concussion.

In a letter to The Irish-American written before his military service began, Garryowen said: “The first and most important duty of man is to his God; the next to his country and then to his family, friends and relatives.”22 While in the midst of his service he reflected on his ship’s role in the war and his higher motivation: “As is generally known, there is not sufficient water to allow us to ascend the river any higher, or else the rebel

navy would ere now have been numbered among the things that are past— hence our present inactivity. But, as it is, we are of incalculable value, inasmuch as the rams aforesaid (in case of our withdrawal) would have no formidable enemy to encounter in their descent, and would sweep the river from City Point to Hampton Roads, thereby cutting off the supplies which are absolutely necessary for maintaining our grand army in the field. Thus it is that we are the ‘Gibraltar of the James.’ Our glorious and time-honored banner, the ‘Stars and Stripes,’ waves defiantly and triumphantly from our flag-staff. Our noble officers and heroic crew (as fine specimens of humanity as ever decorated the decks of any navy in the world) are eager for the fray. Our sole ambition is to re-establish the principles and laws of our government as we found them, and as they have heretofore protected us and guaranteed us the right of freemen and citizenship,—and if those rights and privileges have been impeded during the prosecution of the war, the government nevertheless stands, and we mean that it shall stand.”23 NOAH ANDRE TRUDEAU IS THE AUTHOR OF NUMEROUS MILITARY HISTORY ARTICLES AND EIGHT CIVIL WAR HISTORY BOOKS. HIS BOOKS INCLUDE: THE LAST CITADEL, LIKE MEN OF WAR, GETTYSBURG: A TESTING OF COURAGE, AND SOUTHERN STORM. HIS LATEST, LINCOLN’S GREATEST JOURNEY, TRACKS THE EXPERIENCES OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN WHILE AT CITY POINT, VIRGINIA, IN MARCH-APRIL 1865.

MUTINY IN THE ARMY

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family in Charleston. “I have an old mother living in the city … who depends on me for support as well as my wife. I therefore would deem it a great favor of you to have me released, if possible, or let me know what I am confined for and how long I am to remain here,” he wrote. It is unclear whether Clark truly did not understand why he was incarcerated. He had testified at his trial, of course, but perhaps after sitting in prison for months with two scheduled execution dates passing, curiosity truly arose. It is also possible that he simply feigned ignorance to get the commander’s attention. Whatever

the reason, Clark took the opportunity to explain his plight and earn sympathy. Five days later, upon reviewing his case, the commander stayed the executioner’s hand, stating that the court had acted illegally, yet did not provide further explanation. He advised that a new trial was necessary. Surprisingly, Clark’s military service record does not report what became of him after that, but he at least lived to fight for freedom another day.

The Idea melee was not the first confrontation sparked by differing ideas

of freedom in the army. On September 30, 1863, African-American soldiers in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry had refused their wages in protest over being offered less pay than white troops.

William Walker and other soldiers in the 3rd South Carolina Colored Regiment had gone on strike on November 19, 1863, over incidents of mistreatment and unequal pay. The frequency and varying causes of such conflicts suggest that black men did not always discover military service to be an ennobling experience or view the army as an institution that respected, much less guaranteed, their freedom.

These men’s experiences yield a stark contrast to the army experiences of black soldiers remembered for their valor. African Americans accomplished great things in the Union army. They not only helped turn the tide of war, but they also proved their manhood and their humanity in combat. Yet to see soldiers as merely fighting for freedom and embodying the passage of black life from bondage to liberty misses how black troops struggled for freedom within the army as well.

The army was an institution where black men, especially former slaves, attempted to build lives as they worked through the meaning of emancipation.

Unlike most white enlisted Union men, who saw service as an adventure with a deeper purpose to be accomplished before they returned home, formerly enslaved men did not view service as temporary or as detached from their homes and families. To them, soldiering was inextricably linked with freedom: a means to earn a wage, improve their lives, and maintain relationships with their families. As freedpeople throughout the South adjusted to life after slavery, so too did the black troops of the 128th USCT. They were determined to live out their ideas of freedom, even as members of an occupying military force.

JONATHAN LANDE, WHO EARNED A PH.D. FROM BROWN UNIVERSITY (2018), WHERE HE WAS THE RECIPIENT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING, IS THE IRENE AND BERNARD SCHWARTZ POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW AT THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND THE NEW SCHOOL. IN 2019, HE WILL BE HEADING WEST TO BEGIN A POSITION AS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY. HE IS CURRENTLY RESEARCHING AFRICAN-AMERICAN SOLDIERING AND RESISTANCE WITHIN THE UNION RANKS.

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The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 127 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901), ser. 1, vol. 4:63-65, 89 (hereafter cited as OR; all references are to ser. 1); Frazier, Blood & Treasure, 54; Thomas S. Edrington and John Taylor, The Battle of Glorieta Pass: A Gettysburg in the West, March 26–28, 1862 (Albuquerque, 1998), 15.

Notes SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES

American Iliad (Pages 28–29, 72) 1. “Emancipation Proclamation,” January 1, 1863, Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953), vol. 6, 28–30.

2. John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War (1907; reprint, New York, 1969), 2.

7. Ibid., vol. 9:511–512; Theophilus Noel, A Campaign from Santa Fe to the Mississippi; Being a History of the Old Sibley Brigade (1865; reprint, Raleigh, 1961), 38–39.

8. Martin Hardwick Hall, Sibley’s New Mexico Campaign (Austin, 1960), 214.

9. Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, 1953-55), 5:46–47, 521.

Scott, Glory, Glory, Glorieta: The Gettysburg of the West (Boulder, 1992), and the chapter titled “Gettysburg of the West” in Alvin M. Josephy Jr., The Civil War in the American West (New York, 1991).

“Gibraltar of the James” (Pages 42–53, 76–77) 1. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 27, 1864.

2. Information on Callinan is taken from the 1864 Onondaga muster rolls (National Archives), and his obituary appearing in the July 2, 1872, edition of The Irish-American.

3. The Irish-American, May 21, 1864.

4. Ibid., May 28, 1864.

10. Hall, Sibley’s New Mexico Campaign, 215–217; Jefferson Davis, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, ed. Lynda L. Crist and others, 14 vols. (Baton Rouge, 1971–2015), 8:83–84, 84n6.

5. New York Tribune, May 10, 1864; New York Press, April 24, 1898; The Irish-American, May 28, 1864.

11. Richmond Enquirer (semi-weekly edition), April 15, 1862; Richmond Dispatch, June 17, 1862. See also the Enquirer (semi-weekly edition), March 4, April 8, 1862; the Dispatch, March 22, May 30, 1862; and the Daily Dispatch, April 16, May 31, July 12, 1862.

8. Ibid., September 3, 1864.

12. New-York Daily Tribune, September 19, 1862; New York Herald, September 19, 1862. See also the Daily Tribune, March 14, 18, 26, April 14, 24, June 9, 1862; and the Herald, March 9, 10, April 4, 26, 1862.

6. The Irish-American, June 11, August 27, 1864.

7.

Ibid., May 28, 1864.

9. Ibid., September 24, 1864.

10. The description of the July 11–12 raid comes from a variety of sources beginning with the reports of Captain Smith and Lieutenant Chambers, in United States Naval War Records Office, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion 30 vols.

(Washington, 1894-1922), Volume 10, 267 (hereafter cited as ORN); a more extensive account in the Philadelphia Inquirer, July 18, 1864; and two brief pieces in the Richmond Dispatch, July 14-15, 1864. Garryowen’s observations come from The Irish-American, June 11, 1864.

3. Lerone Bennett Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago, 2000).

13. Richmond Daily Dispatch, August 18, 1862.

4. F.B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln: The Story of a Picture (New York, 1866), 22.

14. Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis Constitutionalist: His Life and Letters, 10 vols. (Jackson, 1923), 5:84.

5. Entry for September 22, 1862, The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles, ed. by William E. Gienapp and Erica L. Gienapp (Urbana, 2014), 54.

15. James D. Richardson, ed., The Messages and Papers of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy, Including Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861– 1865, 2nd ed. with introduction by Allan Nevins, 2 vols. (New York, 1966), 1:167. Baylor’s proclamation is in OR, vol. 4:20–21.

11. Onondaga log book (National Archives), entries for September 1 and November 29, 1864; The Irish-American, May 28, 1864, and December 17, 1864.

16. OR, vol. 4:93, 157. For the reports, see OR, vol.

9:540–541, 507–512.

13. Ibid.

6. Fig. 3-1, John Quincy Adams Ward, Freedman, 1863, in Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 53.

7. James M. McPherson, “Why Freed the Slaves?” in McPherson, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York, 1996), 207.

How the West Wasn’t Won (Pages 32–41, 75–76) 1. Donald S. Frazier, Blood & Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest (College Station, 1995), 22, 5, 298, 300–301.

2. Kevin Waite, “Jefferson Davis and Proslavery Visions of Empire in the Far West,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 6 (December 2016): 554–556.

3. Megan Kate Nelson, “Death in the Distance: Confederate Manifest Destiny and the Campaign for New Mexico, 1861-1862,” in Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (Oakland, 2015), 36–37, 45.

4. Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York, 2016), 236–237, 266.

5. “The Battle of Glorieta Pass, A Shattered Dream,” National Park Service website, nps.gov/nr/ twhp/wwwlps/lessons/91glorieta/91glorieta. htm, accessed November 19, 2019.

6. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion:

17. Ibid., vol. 9:717–718.

18. T.T. Teel, “Sibley’s New Mexico Campaign.—Its Objects and the Causes of Its Failure,” in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols. (New York, 1887–88), 2:700 (hereafter cited as B&L).

12. The Irish-American, October 22, 1864.

14. Ibid., November 12 and December 17, 1864.

15. Ibid., October 29 and November 5, 1864.

16. ORN, Volume 11, 400; The Irish-American, February 4, 1865.

17. ORN, Volume 11, 656; The Irish-American, February 4 and 15, 1865.

19. Ibid.

18. The Irish-American, February 4, 1865.

20. Jerry Thompson, Henry Hopkins Sibley: Confederate General of the West (Natchitoches, 1987), 219; Latham Anderson, “Canby’s Services in the New Mexican Campaign,” in B&L, 2:698.

19. Ibid., February 18, 1865.

21. OR, vol. 9:557–559.

22. Ibid., February 24, 1866, reprinting a letter dated April 2, 1864.

22. Ibid., 559.

23. Edwin M. Stanton, “Report of the Secretary of War,” in U.S. House of Representatives, 37th Congress, 3d Session, Executive Document No. 1, Message of the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of the Third Session of the ThirtySeventh Congress, vol. 4 (Washington, 1862), 7 (report dated December 1, 1862).

24. Andrew E. Masich, Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 (Norman, 2017), 110.

25. Edrington and Taylor, Battle of Glorieta Pass: A Gettysburg in the West, 114; Thomas W. Cutrer, Empire of Sand: The Struggle for the Southwest, 1862 (Buffalo Gap, 2015), 114. See also Robert

20. Ibid., April 8, 1865.

21. Ibid., April 22, 1865.

23. Ibid., September 10, 1864.

Mutiny in the Army (Pages 54–65, 77) 1. William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (New York, 1875), II: 289. For military service and recruiting, see William Dobak, Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867 (New York, 2013), 81–82. For freedom celebrations in Charleston, see Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, “When Freedom Came to Charleston,” The New York Times, February 19, 2015.

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2. Dobak, Freedom by the Sword, 487.

3. Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, 2015), 41.

4. Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (Baton Rouge, 1990), 208–217.

5. Quoted in Dobak, Freedom by the Sword, 481.

6. Widow’s Pension Certificate No. WC 136174, Filed by Doll Bellinger, Mother of Soldier, Tedore Bellinger, Sergeant, Company C, 128th U.S. Colored Troops; Widow’s Pension Certificate No. 99490, Filed by Phillis Fleming, Wife of Soldier, William Fleming, Lieutenant, Company H, 128th U.S. Colored Troops, “Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War With Spain,” Record Group 15, National Archives (hereafter cited as NA), Washington, D.C. Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (NY, 2012). For disease rates among white and black soldiers, see Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore, 2008), 11.

13. Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York, 2016), 206.

14. Adjutant General’s Office, Bureau for Colored Troops, Annual Report, 1865, October 20, 1865, in U.S. War Department, Adjutant General’s Officer, The Negro in the Military Service of the United States, 1639–1877, reel 4, vol. 6, 186501877, 3723.

15. Amani T. Marshall, “‘They are Supposed to be Lurking about the City’: Enslaved Women Runaways in Antebellum Charleston,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 115, no. 3 (July 2014): 189.

P.O. Box 45556 Philadelphia, PA 19149 www.generalmeadesociety.org generalmeadesociety@gmail.com 215-423-3930 Membership Form on Website, JOIN TODAY!

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16. James Clark Service Record, Private, 128th U.S. Colored Troops, Company G, “Carded Records Showing Military Service of Soldiers Who Fought in Volunteer Organizations During the American Civil War, compiled 1890–1912, documenting the period 1861–1866,” Record Group 94, NA.

P.O. Box 455 Philadelphia, PA

17. OO1785, RG 153.

18. George James Stansfield, “A History of the Judge Advocate General’s Department United States Army,” Military Affairs 9, no. 3 (Autumn 1945): 219–237.

7. For the parties slaves threw, see Stephanie Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830–1861,” New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed. by Edward Baptist and Stephanie Camp (Athens, 2006), 87–125.

19. For more on how the courts-martial operated and formerly enslaved men’s trials, see Jonathan Lande, “Trials of Freedom: African American Deserters during the U.S. Civil War,” Journal of Social History 49, no. 3 (March 2016): 693– 709.

8. Lester Hall Service Record, First Lieutenant, Company G, 128th U.S. Colored Troops, “Carded Records Showing Military Service of Soldiers Who Fought in Volunteer Organizations During the American Civil War, compiled 1890–1912, documenting the period 1861– 1866,” Record Group 94, NA.

20. OO1785, RG153.

9. Nelson Hicks Service Record, Private, Company G, 128th U.S. Colored Troops, “Carded Records Showing Military Service of Soldiers Who Fought in Volunteer Organizations During the American Civil War, compiled 1890–1912, documenting the period 1861–1866,” Record Group 94, NA.

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21. Fred Harvey Harrington, “The Fort Jackson Mutiny,” The Journal of Negro History 27, no. 4 (October 1942): 420–425.

22. Ibid., 426, 430.

23. OO1785, RG153.

10. John D. Billings, Hardtack & Coffee or The Unwritten Story of Army Life (Boston, 1887), 146.

11. Courts-Martial Case File OO1785, Record Group 153, NA (hereafter cited as OO1785, RG153).

12. See also Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, 2009), 57–72.

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pa r t i n g shot

During the Battle of Gettysburg, 22-year-old local resident J. Howard Wert served as a scout for Major General George G. Meade, guiding Union troops to strategic positions on the field and seeing for himself the terrible carnage and destruction the battle wrought. “No words can portray the awful picture of desolation, devastation, and death present,” Wert wrote after walking over the battlefield two days after the fighting had ended. “Across the field was the debris of battle, broken muskets, soiled bayonets, shattered ammunition chests, blood defiled clothing, trodden cartridge boxes and splintered swords…. Everywhere death, and death in its most abhorrent forms!”

Before the engagement was over and for years after it ended, Wert collected relics of the struggle. He gathered some directly from the battlefield—like these photos of children, mementos that soldiers had carried into the fight— while others were donated to him by veterans of the battle. By the time of his death in 1920, Wert had assembled thousands of Gettysburg artifacts.

J. HOWARD WERT GETTYSBURG COLLECTION TM

Children of the Battlefield

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