The Best Civil War Movies of All Time
  P. 67
VOL. 9, NO. 2
Refugees The
Reaching Union lines was only the first step on the long path to freedom for African Americans who escaped slavery P. 32
The Perils of Occupation P. 56
Old Rosy Reconsidered P. 44
SUMMER 2019
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
VOLUME 9, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2019
FEATURES
Salvo
CLOCKWISE , FROM UPPER LEFT: NED LEARY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY); THE WAR WITH THE SOUTH (1862); ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to Wilmington VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 War’s Hardening Hand PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Remembering Our Veterans Across Generations
The Refugees 32
DOSSIER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 J.E.B. Stuart FACES OF WAR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 A Bright Future
For the many thousands of African-American men, women, and children who escaped to the safety of Union lines during the Civil War, the quest for freedom was far from over—and often precarious.
FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 The Weight They Carried
By Amy Murrell Taylor
COST OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Gardner’s Sketch Book IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Relics of the War’s First Martyr
Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 The Impact of the Lost Order PUBLIC HISTORY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Recollections of a Military Staff Ride
Books & Authors THE BEST CIVIL WAR MOVIES OF ALL TIME . . . . . . . . 67
WITH MATTHEW CHRISTOPHER HULBERT AND JAMES MARTEN
The Perils of Occupation 56
THE B&A Q&A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
WITH LARRY J. DANIEL
In Every Issue EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Fragility of Freedom
A look at the flawed but successful Civil War career of William Starke Rosecrans
Union soldiers charged with keeping the peace in civilian areas faced a different kind of warfare marked by its own struggles and dangers.
By William B. Kurtz
By Andrew F. Lang
Old Rosy Reconsidered 44
PARTING SHOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Cat vs. Cat ON THE COVER: A refugee from slavery. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. Colorized by Mads Madsen of Colorized History.
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editorial
VOLUME 9, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2019
Terry A. Johnston Jr. PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
The Fragility of Freedom
Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor Matthew C. Hulbert EDITORIAL ADVISORS
in april 1863, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass published an essay titled “Why Should a Colored Man Enlist?” in which he urged African Americans to join the Union army. Of the nine reasons he outlined in favor of black military service, his final was perhaps his most persuasive. “You should enlist because the war for the Union, whether men so call it or not, is a war for Emancipation…. Enlist, therefore, enlist without delay, enlist now, and forever put an end to the human barter and butchery which have stained the whole South with the warm blood of your people, and loaded its air with their groans.” As most students of the Civil War know, some 180,000 African Americans joined the Union armed forces by war’s end, providing much-needed manpower to the federal government in its efforts to suppress the rebellion—and helping deal, as Douglass urged, a fatal blow to the institution of slavery in the country. But there is much more to the wartime story of America’s black population than the service of those who donned the Union blue. As Amy Murrell Taylor shows in this issue’s cover story, “The Refugees” (page 32), the path to freedom for the country’s approximately 4 million enslaved men, women, and children—who represented nearly 90 percent of the country’s total black population—was precarious and uncertain, even for those who reached the relative safety and security of Union army lines. Want to share your thoughts about this or other articles in this issue? Send your emails to letters@civilwarmonitor.com. ••• By the time you read this, our friends at The American Civil War Museum will have opened their new, state-of-the-art facility at Richmond’s historic Tredegar Iron Works. With 6,000 square feet of permanent gallery space, the new museum will be a place “to tell unforgettable human stories of real people forced to engage in a life-and-death struggle to define the very nature of the American people and its government,” as they note. We wish them all the best—and urge you to pay them a visit the next time you’re in Richmond.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: letters@civilwarmonitor.com
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Jennifer Sturak Michele Huie COPY EDITORS
Brian Matthew Jordan BOOK REVIEW EDITOR BRIAN@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
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Howard White CIRCULATION MANAGER HWHITEASSOC@COMCAST.NET
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The Civil War Monitor (issn 2163-0682/print, issn 21630690/online) is published quarterly by Bayshore History, llc, 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. Periodicals postage paid at Atlantic City, NJ, and additional mailing offices. postmaster: Send address changes to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 292336, Kettering, OH 45429. Subscriptions: $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. The Civil War Monitor cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited materials. The contents of the magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of the publisher. Copyright ©2019 by Bayshore History, llc all rights reserved.
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2019
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THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM
“Building this new museum is about building a new ideology about how we do history.” Christy Coleman CEO, ACWM ACWM.ORG | 804.649.1861 CWM32-FOB-Editorial.indd 3 1 ACWM_FullAd_April2019.indd
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d i s pat c h e s
Ed. We asked Gary Gallagher if he would like to respond. He writes: “Megan Kate Nelson’s letter underscores the degree to which historians can reach different conclusions about an array of topics. I invite readers to explore the readily available evidence, in print and online, to assess for themselves how Sibley’s campaign and the trans-100th-meridian West more expansively figured in U.S. and Confederate planning and allocation of resources.”
HEADING WEST
In Gary W. Gallagher’s article, “How the West Wasn’t Won” [Vol. 9, No. 1], he argues that Henry H. Sibley’s campaign to take the Far West for the Confederacy was not an imperial move, and that in the end, Sibley’s actions had no impact on the Civil War in the trans-Mississippi or the eastern theater. Regarding the first argument, Gallagher critiques historians’ overreliance on the account of Trevanion Teel, who testified long after the war about Sibley’s aims in the region. This point is well taken, but Gallagher ignores many participants’ accounts of the campaign. Confederate lieutenant colonel John R. Baylor’s letters and reports of his initial invasion of New Mexico Territory and his campaigns in Arizona and Mexico, and Colonel James Reily’s letters and dispatches from his diplomatic missions to northern Mexico, provide evidence of Confederate officers’ convictions that they were in the Southwest as part of a campaign of conquest. In addition, the congressional act creating the Territory of Arizona (not Jefferson Davis’ proclamation, which is the only text Gallagher cites) ensured that slavery would be legal in that territory, and that the declaration of Arizona’s legitimacy would not prevent the Confederate states from taking the rest of the New Mexico, or any other territories north of the 34th parallel. When the Confederate Congress passed this legislation in January 1862, it had every expectation that the foothold they had gained with Baylor’s occupation of southern New Mexico would be a base for their invasion of California, and
COUNCIL OF WAR REDUX
expansion to the Pacific. I have already published a response to Gallagher’s second argument, which he has made before in other publications and lectures. Given the limited space of the Monitor’s letters to the editor section, I will not elaborate on my arguments about the significance of the Civil War West here. Interested subscribers can read that piece (megankatenelson.com/why-the-civil-war-westmattered-and-still-does), my own article on John Baylor’s invasion of New Mexico in the Monitor’s Spring 2012 issue [“Dying in the Desert,” Vol. 2, No. 1], or my forthcoming book on the Civil War West, which will be published by Scribner in February 2020. Megan Kate Nelson LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwarmonitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
I have to weigh in on the skirmish between Allen Guelzo and Stephen Sears in the Spring 2019 issue [“Dispatches,” Vol. 9, No. 1] regarding George G. Meade’s willingness to stand and fight at Gettysburg. The fact that Guelzo relies on Joseph Hooker friend and apologist Dan Butterfield’s flawed testimony to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to support the assertion that Meade did not wish to fight at Gettysburg dooms his argument, in my opinion. Did Meade choose the ground on which the Army of the Potomac fought at Gettysburg? No. He had communicated his chosen ground to his generals and staff in the Pipe Creek Circular. But after the battle began on July 1, and Meade was informed of General John Reynolds’ death early in the fight, he gave General Winfield Hancock command of all corps then assembled at Gettysburg and asked Hancock to advise him if Gettysburg was a suitable place to fight a battle. When Hancock report-
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T H I S I S H OW W E R E C L A I M A B AT T L E F I E L D .
ed that it was, Meade immediately directed the Army of the Potomac to converge on Gettysburg. The die was cast. The major difference between Meade and Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg was that Meade consulted with and listened to his generals. By taking Hancock’s word, he put his army in a position to win. I give credit to Meade for what he did, and dismiss spurious testimony from those with reason to diminish him, or those who impugn him because they claim to know what Meade was really thinking.
comfort.” Benjamin returned home after a weeklong visit; soon after, Henry succumbed to his illness and was buried at Mount Moriah County Cemetery in Philadelphia on June 21. One of Henry’s comrades penned a poem the day the young solider died and sent it to Benjamin Brown at the family home in Connecticut. It reads:
Jim Williams
Not by whistling Rebel bullets/ Nor by dreaming shot or shell/ It was by the feeble hand of sickness/That your noble soldier fell.
VIA EMAIL
A DEATH AT SATTERLEE
I read with interest the piece in the Spring 2019 issue on Satterlee Hospital [“Figures: Satterlee General Hospital,” Vol. 9, No. 1]. My greatgreat-uncle, Private Henry W. Brown, Battery K, 1st U.S. Artillery, was a patient there from May 19 to June 19, 1864. He was suffering from either malaria or dysentery. Henry’s father, Benjamin—who had received a note from one of his son’s comrades that read in part “i should think it would be quite proper to see him as soon as possible, as he is very ill indeed”—arrived at Satterlee on June 10. Benjamin in turn wrote his wife, “He is very weak. He can’t help himself at all. He is nothing but skin and bones. He has the best of care; everything he can have for his
Did you see our noble soldier?/ Did you bid him a goodbye?/ Sad sad to the beholder/For he did not go forth to die.
And we never again shall greet him/For with earth he has got through/No we never more shall see him/For he has passed from mortal view. In his company they shall miss him/There will be one vacant place/In the ranks he filled while with them/But they will never see his face.
Franklin, Tennessee | Tours offered daily | boft.org
Texas Book Consortium
tamupress.com 800.826.8911
AVAILABLE NOW!
He has gone on a long furlough/ Ever on the other shore/Gone to see his much loved comrades/ Who have sunk to rest before. And where peace and love abideth/Where a rebellion cannot come/There in peace our soldier restate/In his bright and happy home. John Henry Proctor IVORYTON, CONNECTICUT
ORPHAN IMMIGRANT SOLDIER fights in the Civil War | fights for the American Dream This collection of 170 never-before published letters tracks a soldier over 7,000 miles through 75 battles. 5
AVAILABLE AT MANY FINE BOOKSELLERS
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Agenda Your Summer 2019 Guide to Civil War Events
Gettysburg National Military Park. Note the tour will involve some modest walking; pre-registration is advised. $30; FOR MORE INFORMATION: GETTYSBURGTOURGUIDES.ORG/HISTORY-WALKS-MAIN or 717-337-1709.
LIVING HISTORY
Living History Weekend at Spotsylvania Court House Battlefield SATURDAY, JUNE 22 – SUNDAY, JUNE 23 FREDERICKSBURG AND SPOTSYLVANIA NATIONAL MILITARY PARK FREDERICKSBURG, VIRGINIA
Reenactment of the action at Wilson’s Wharf
Special programs about the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, including both marching and musket-firing demonstrations, will occur throughout the weekend. Visitors will have the opportunity to engage with reenactors by receiving an identity card containing information about a soldier who actually fought in the battle. Attendees may immerse themselves in the battlefield’s history while learning about what happened to their designated soldier. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS.GOV/FRSP or 540-693-3200.
JULY
“Not Respectable” The Enterprising Women of Civil War Frederick Walking Tour
SATURDAY, JUNE 1 – SUNDAY, JUNE 2
SATURDAY, JUNE 1, 3 – 4:30 P.M.
Fort Pocahontas was the site of the May 24, 1864, engagement in which United States Colored Troops defended the fort they had built against an assault by Fitzhugh Lee’s Confederate cavalry. Enjoy a weekend of Civil War living history, including a dress parade, mortar demonstration, and family activities. Battle reenactments will be held at 1 p.m. on both days.
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CIVIL WAR MEDICINE FREDERICK, MARYLAND
Join National Museum of Civil War Medicine historian John Lustrea for a walking tour of Frederick with a focus on learning about the remarkable women who shaped the city during the Civil War era. While soldiers marched off to war, the ladies battled on the home front. Many supported organizations that provided relief for their husbands, brothers, and sons who served in the army. Others entered the realm of politics and business to reshape Frederick forever. DONATIONS WELCOME; FOR MORE INFORMATION: CIVILWARMED.ORG/EVENT/FREDERICK-WOMEN or 301-695-1864.
FORT POCAHONTAS CHARLES CITY, VIRGINIA
$10 ADULTS; $8 STUDENTS; FOR MORE INFORMATION: FORTPOCAHONTAS.ORG or 804-829-9722. EXCURSION
“The 11th New Jersey Volunteers: ‘I tell you we are going to have a fight’” TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 5:30 P.M. GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
Share Your Event
Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
Kick off the eighth year of the Association of Licensed Battlefield Guides’ “Walks Through History” tour series with Licensed Battlefield Guide Bill Trelease, who will talk about the 11th New Jersey Infantry’s involvement in the Battle of Gettysburg. The walk will meet at the intersection of United States Avenue and Sickles Avenue in the
LIVING HISTORY
Powerland Heritage Park Civil War Reenactment THURSDAY, JULY 4 – SUNDAY, JULY 7 POWERLAND HERITAGE PARK BROOKS, OREGON
The nonprofit Northwest Civil War Council hosts this multiday living-history event, which will feature battle reenactments and living historians who will portray military (infantry, cavalry, and artillery) and civilian figures. Come see the battles, tour the camps, and visit with the reenactors. $12; CHILDREN 12 AND UNDER ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NWCWC.NET or COBCORP@AOL.COM. LIVING HISTORY
Anniversary: The Battle of Fort Stevens SATURDAY, JULY 13, 10 A.M. – 4 P.M. FORT STEVENS WASHINGTON, D.C.
Celebrate the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Stevens—during which Union forces turned back Confederates under Jubal Early who were advancing on the U.S. capital during the summer of 1864—with living-history demonstrations, live period music, and 19th-century games and crafts. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS.GOV/CWDW/ or 202-829-2163.
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GETTYSBURG FOUNDATION; PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY HISTORIC PRESERVATION DIVISION
EXCURSION
155th Anniversary: The Action at Wilson’s Wharf
SHELLY LIEBLER
LIVING HISTORY
JUNE
155th Anniverary Civil War Battles of Spotsylvania Courthouse at the Mule Shoe An Evening with the Painting
LECTURE
“Manufacturing for our Masters: Slave Labor, the Tredegar Iron Works and the Confederate War Effort” SUNDAY, JULY 27, 1 – 2 P.M.
GETTYSBURG FOUNDATION; PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY HISTORIC PRESERVATION DIVISION
SHELLY LIEBLER
THE NATIONAL CIVIL WAR MUSEUM
$20 ADULTS; $10 CHILDREN AGES 6 – 12; FOR MORE INFORMATION: GETTYSBURGFOUNDATION.ORG or 877874-2478. DISCUSSION
History by Campfire: Shepherdstown Comes to Manassas FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 7 – 8 P.M.
HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
BEN LOMOND HISTORIC SITE
When Virginia seceded it brought to the southern war effort one of the most important and significant war industries: the Tredegar Iron Works, which was essential in making the Confederacy self-sufficient in military hardware by 1863. Critical to Tredegar’s success was its African-American slaves, who forged the weapons, artillery pieces, and iron plates. Join Dr. Mary DeCredico, a professor of history at the United States Military Academy, for her talk about Tredegar and its slave labor.
MANASSAS, VIRGINIA
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NATIONALCIVILWARMUSEUM.ORG or 717-260-1861.
AUGUST PRESENTATION
An Evening with the Painting
Join us for a campfire, roasted marshmallows, and a history lesson at Ben Lomond Historic Site. On July 21, 1861, local resident Ben Lomond was inundated by hundreds of young men who were wounded at the Battle of First Manassas. A good number of these boys were from the area around Shepherdstown (now West Virginia). Soon families and religious leaders came from Shepherdstown to assist in taking care of their sons, neighbors, and loved ones. Join us for a talk about these people, who they were, and how the trying days and nights they spent at the Lomond residence impacted their lives. $5; FOR MORE INFORMATION: PWCGOV.ORG/GOVERNMENT/DEPT/ PARK/HP/PAGES/BEN-LOMOND-HISTORIC-SITE or 703-367-7872.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 6 – 8 P.M. GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK MUSEUM & VISITOR CENTER
A Page in American History
Historic Surratt House Museum Where 19th-century culture mingles with the ghosts of the Lincoln Assassination story. 9118 Brandywine Road Clinton, MD 20735 301.868.1121 SurrattMuseum.org
GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
Join the Gettysburg Foundation’s Sue Boardman, licensed battlefield guide and author/ historian, on the Gettysburg Cyclorama platform for an exclusive after-hours, behindthe-scenes program about the famed painting.
June 22-23, 2019
Ben Lomond Historic Site
Ask about our popular
John Wilkes Booth Escape Route Tours 7 SUMMER 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
pgparks.com
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Salvo Facts, Figures & Items of Interest
In this lithograph by T.F. Laycock, a fleet of U.S. vessels under the command of Rear Admiral David D. Porter bombards Fort Fisher on the North Carolina shore in mid-January 1865. A subsequent land attack by Union troops forced the fort’s surrender, opening the way for the capture of the port city of Wilmington. For more on Wilmington, turn the page. ➽
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IN THIS SECTION travels 10 A VISIT TO WILMINGTON voices 14 WAR’S HARDENING HAND preservation 16 REMEMBERING OUR VETERANS ACROSS GENERATIONS dossier 18 J.E.B. STUART faces of war 20 A BRIGHT FUTURE figures 22 THE WEIGHT THEY CARRIED cost of war 24 GARDNER’S SKETCH BOOK
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
in focus 26 RELICS OF THE WAR’S FIRST MARTYR
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s a lv o
t r av e l s
Wilmington NORTH CAROLINA
among the confederacy’s most important cities was Wilmington, North Carolina, a key port located 30 miles upstream from the mouth of the Cape Fear River, its connection to the Atlantic Ocean. For most of the war, the city—protected from Union assault by nearby Fort Fisher—operated a brisk trade with foreign countries. Running the Union blockade of the coast, it shipped cotton and tobacco overseas in exchange for vital supplies, such as munitions and foodstuffs, which were sent inland via rail throughout the Confederacy. After the fall of Norfolk, Virginia, in 1862, Wilmington became the main Confederate port on the Atlantic. In December 1864, Union forces set their sights on Fort Fisher and attacked but failed to capture the formidable bastion. The following month, a second assault proved successful. With Fort Fisher in Union hands, Wilmington fell soon thereafter, robbing Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia of a key supply source. The war would end just two months later. Interested in visiting Wilmington? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area— Christine Divoky and Bill Jayne—to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic city.
Oakdale Cemetery
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Brunswick Town 1
CAN’T MISS
An out-of-the-way gem is Oakdale Cemetery (520 N. 15th St.; 910762-5682), the “rural” cemetery established in 1856. With its Spanish moss bearded oaks, flowering shrubbery, and ornate sculpture, it’s easy to picture this cemetery as it appeared in the mid-19th century. You’ll find headstones engraved with the names of the families who made Wilmington. There’s a Hebrew section, a Masonic section, a section for those who died of yellow fever, and over 350 Confederate soldiers buried under what’s known as Confederate Mound. Among the graves are those of Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow and Fort Fisher commander Major General W.H.C. Whiting. cd Just south of Wilmington is Fort Anderson State Historic Site (884 St. Philip’s Rd. SE, Winnabow, NC; 910-371-6613), which showcases the “best-preserved Civil War earthworks in the country,” in the estimation of renowned historian Ed Bearss. During the Civil War, Fort Anderson guarded the approach to the city of Wilmington. The site also preserves the ruins of colonial Brunswick Town, burned by the British in 1776. bj
Wilmington Riverwalk 2
BEST KEPT SECTRET
Wilmington has a great downtown for those on foot. Walk the residential historic district with tree-lined streets and 875 historic buildings, or stroll the 1.75-mile Wilmington Riverwalk (capefear-nc.com/wilmington-riverwalk.html) along the Cape Fear River. With its restaurants, shops, historic buildings, and stunning view, Wilmington’s riverfront was named the top riverfront in the country by USA Today in 2015. cd Airlie Gardens (300 Airlie Rd.; 910-798-7700) on tidal Bradley Creek offers 67 acres of walking paths, formal gardens, centuries-old live oaks, and more. The history of the site goes back to the 1700s, but in the late 19th century Pembroke and Sarah Jones made Airlie their principal residence. They converted the existing inn into a 39-room mansion. The Joneses continued to expand the mansion and entertained well-heeled visitors from all over—giving rise, many say, to the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.” bj
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North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher
BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
Fort Fisher State Historic Site (1610 For Fisher Blvd. S., Kure Beach, NC; 910-251-7340) is a must-see. By late 1864, Wilmington was the last major Confederate port on the eastern seaboard, and it was guarded, at the Cape Fear River’s New Inlet, by Fort Fisher, an earthwork bastion known as the Gibraltar of the South. Much of the fort has been lost to erosion or the landing strip installed during WWII, but the remaining portion of the fort nearest the Cape Fear River was the scene of the most decisive fighting in 1865. The site has an artifactfilled museum and an enthusiastic and informative staff. There are daily tours, rifle demonstrations, and, depending on when you come, all kinds of programming, including speakers, kids’ programs, and an anniversary reenactment in January. Sitting between the ocean, the marsh, and the Cape Fear River, and surrounded by twisted and gnarled live oaks, this is a truly beautiful spot to enjoy Civil War history. cd Beside Fort Fisher, the fortifications near the Cameron Art Museum (3201 S. 17th St.; 910-395-5999), where the Battle of Forks Road was fought as Union troops closed in on the city of Wilmington in January 1865, are worth a visit. Five regiments of U.S. Colored Troops led the charge against Major General Robert Hoke’s division of seasoned Confederate veterans. Ultimately, Hoke retreated under orders and moved north toward a rendezvous with remaining Confederate forces and their last-ditch effort to halt William T. Sherman’s march through the Carolinas. bj
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BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
The North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher (900 Loggerhead Rd., Kure Beach, NC; 910-772-0500) is a great spot for the entire family. There’s an albino alligator named Luna, a rescued bald eagle, jellies, eels, sharks, sea turtles, rays, a touch tank, and of course all kinds of fish. Plus, the kids can watch the scubadiving volunteers feed the shark! cd At the Fort Fisher State Recreation Area (1000 Loggerhead Rd., Kure Beach, NC; 910-458-5798) you’ll find not only a great beach, but also a short walking trail through the marsh and maritime forest that brings you by the WWII bunker where Robert E. Harrill, “the Fort Fisher Hermit,” lived for almost 18 years. The trail continues on to “The Rocks,” where the Corps of Engineers closed up New Inlet after the Civil War. In town, Jungle Rapids Family Fun Park (5320 Oleander Dr.; 910-791-0666) features a water slide, miniature golf, a gokart track, and all the other usual suspects when it comes to keeping kids entertained. bj
Fort Fisher State Historic Site
Fort Fisher State Recreation Area
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5
BEST EATS
Courtyard by Marriott
Locals mark their calendars for the opening day of Britt’s Donuts (11 Carolina Beach Ave. N., Carolina Beach, NC; 910-707-0755)—it’s open only in the spring and summer. Plan to wait in line and don’t look for sprinkles, chocolate, or other shenanigans. Britt’s only serves glazed doughnuts, coffee, and milk. Order more than you think you’ll want, and eat them hot from the bag as you walk along the beach. For lunch, I recommend The Copper Penny (109 Chestnut St.; 910-762-1373). It’s always busy and always good. Try the Ft. Fisher Fish-nChips, the Penny Slaw, and the burgers. Elijah’s (2 Ann St.; 910-343-1448) is classic Wilmington dining—a gorgeous river view with solid food. If you’re not concerned about the view, Cape Fear Seafood (5226 S. College Rd., Suite 5; 910-799-7077) offers great, fresh seafood, served elegantly but with ingredients you can recognize. cd A favorite breakfast place of mine is The Basics (319 N. Front St.; 910-343-1050) in The Cotton Exchange building in downtown Wilmington. Their creative meals are based on southern favorites—for instance, the Southern Benedict, with buttermilk biscuit, over-easy eggs, smoked ham, and sausage gravy. For lunch, try Detour Deli & Café (510 ½ Red Cross St.; 910-538-4093), a tiny place located across the street from St. Stephen AME Church, considered the “mother church” of North Carolina with roots that predate the Civil War. A great dinner choice is Benny’s Big Time Pizzeria (206 Greenfield St.; 910-550-2525), which offers riffs on the old standards, like “Porchetta-Bout It,” a pizza with provolone, crispy potato, onion, chili, and herbed honey. Benny’s is named for Ben Knight, the husband of Vivian Howard of PBS’ A Chef ’s Life fame. bj Britt’s Donuts
C.W. Worth House 6
The Copper Penny
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS Christine Divoky, executive director of Friends of Fort Fisher, has called the Wilmington area home for 23 years.
Bill Jayne is the president of the Cape Fear Civil War Round Table. A devoted student of the Civil War since the 1970s, he has lived in the Wilmington area for a dozen years.
BEST SLEEP
For family stays I’d look to the beaches. On Wrightsville Beach, check out the Blockade Runner Beach Resort (275 Waynick Blvd., Wrightsville Beach, NC; 877-6848024). In Carolina Beach, I’d stay at the Courtyard by Marriott (100 Charlotte Ave., Carolina Beach, NC; 910-458-2030). Both are right on the sand, have pools, in-house restaurants, great drinks, and seasonal kids’ programs. The Blockade Runner is a bit more upscale and has beautiful grounds; the Courtyard by Marriott has both indoor and outdoor pools for off-season fun. cd
It’s hard to top Chris E. Fonvielle Jr.’s The Wilmington Campaign: Last Rays of Departing Hope (1997). But if I had to pick another book, I’d go with Rod Gragg’s Confederate Goliath: The Battle of Fort Fisher (1991). It’s a very readable, entertaining look at Fort Fisher and all that took place during the two battles fought there. cd
In the historic district, a favorite B&B is the delightful Victorian architectural confection, the C.W. Worth House (412 S. 3rd St.; 910762-8562). The nearby Carolina Beach Inn (205 Harper Ave., Carolina Beach, NC; 910-622-8393) is pet friendly, spacious, and modern. It has the feel of a house rental at the beach and it’s close to the boardwalk attractions. bj
The Wilmington Campaign by Chris E. Fonvielle Jr. is the indispensable guide to Wilmington during the Civil War. In fast-paced and clear prose, the book conveys the importance of Wilmington as a blockaderunning port—by 1864 the only port able to supply Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Fonvielle tells the story of Wilmington as only a native expert can. bj
7
BEST BOOK
13 PHOTOGRAPHS BY NED LEARY
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voices
War’s Hardening Hand “I will be a perfect Barbarian if I Should Stay hear 3 years.” —Recently enlisted Vermont soldier J.E. Hart, in a letter to his wife, June 16, 1861
“ If you think soldiering cures anyone of wild habits it is a great mistake, it is like Sending a Boy in the Navy to learn him good manners. We have Drummer Boys with us that when they came at first could hardly look you in the face for diffidence but now could stare the Devil out of contenance and cant be beat at cursing, swearing and gambling.” —Alfred Davenport, 5th New York Infantry, in a letter to his parents, March 9, 1863
“ Am waiting for this fellow to die, so I can get his watch and ring.” —Confederate soldier Jim Randall, after being asked by a comrade why he was sitting near a wounded Union officer after a battle
“ We passed the night high up the mountain, where we moved to reach our supply wagons. A cold rain was falling, and before we found them … I had lunched comfortably from the haversack of a dead Federal. It is not pleasant to think of now….” —Confederate general Richard Taylor (right), on an incident that occurred during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862, in his memoirs
“ I had no idea of the filth and vulgarity of men in camp until I tried this little experiment.” —Colonel William Barksdale, 13th Mississippi Infantry, reflecting on his recent decision to join the army, in a letter to his brother, June 11, 1861
“ It seems to me I am quite callous to death now, and that I could see my dearest friend die without much feeling…. During the last three weeks … I have witnessed hundreds of men shot dead, have walked and slept among them, and surely I feel it possible to die myself as calmly as any.” —Union surgeon John Gardner Perry, in a letter home written during the Battle of North Anna, May 24, 1864 SOURCES: BELL IRVIN WILEY, THE LIFE OF BILLY YANK (1952) AND THE LIFE OF JOHNNY REB (1943); LETTERS FROM A SURGEON OF THE CIVIL WAR (1906); DESTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION: PERSONAL EXPERIENCES OF THE LATE WAR (1879)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
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Don’t Let This Moment
PASS YOU BY Antietam National Battlefield
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
In the Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area
Call or visit us online to get a free Visitor’s Guide! CWM32-FOB-Voices.indd 15
301-791-3246 • visithagerstown.com 4/29/19 5:37 PM
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Remembering our Veterans Across Generations 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
Too often, we forget that those who lived through earlier eras and fought in America’s defining conflicts were individuals with hopes, dreams, and fears— just like us and the brave men and women in uniform today. And while a remarkable spirit unites military heroes past and present, our hallowed grounds play an important role in reminding the rest of us of the honor due for their service and sacrifice. In a humbling and exciting new project, “Brothers in Valor,” the Trust traveled to preserved Civil War battlefields (at Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and Morris Island) with three modern recipients of the Medal of Honor—our nation’s highest decoration for valor in combat—to walk in the footsteps of Civil War soldiers who also received the Medal of Honor for experiences parallel to their own. On these storied sites, the modern recipients explained to us the importance of battlefield preservation and what it means to our veterans. Preserving America’s battlefields ensures that every service member’s story lives on, whether from the Civil War or conflicts before and after it. Our battlefields give people of all ages and backgrounds the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of those who served, shaped, and defended our nation. These beautiful open spaces are living monuments and places of reflection where we can recognize the challenges faced, and bravery exhibited, by soldiers throughout our history. Visiting these remarkable landscapes should be a source of inspiration for all Americans. Perhaps no one better con-
veys the essential role of preserved battlefields in modern life than Hershel “Woody” Williams, a great friend of the Trust and the last living Medal of Honor recipient from World War II’s Battle of Iwo Jima. On a special visit to Gettysburg, Woody reminded us, “Being at a battlefield where you know that individuals sacrificed their lives is a profound experience. We need these places to keep reminding us of those who gave more than any of us.” Our battlefields are vital to understanding just what it took to forge our nation; preserving these places is a lasting and powerful way to recognize the profound courage displayed there and honor the lives of countless Ameri-
can soldiers across time. In the age of technology, the Trust has committed to honoring these heroes both on and off the battlefield. As part of the Brothers in Valor project, the Trust debuted a groundbreaking digital database that brings together biographical information on all 1,522 Civil War-era recipients of the Medal of Honor in a searchable format. The American Battlefield Trust is proud to save our nation’s most hallowed grounds—and, in so doing, to remember and honor the sacrifice and service of those who fought for the very freedoms Americans hold dear. To learn more about the project, visit battlefields.org/ learn/topics/brothers-valor.
Medal of Honor recipients Melvin Morris (left) and Britt Slabinski visit Civil War battlefields at Morris Island, South Carolina, and Fredericksburg, Virginia, as part of the Trust’s “Brothers in Valor” project.
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.
CHARLES HARRIS (MORRIS); ROBERT MAXWELL (SLABINSKI)
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 CHARLES HARRIS (MORRIS); ROBERT MAXWELL (SLABINSKI)
Explore award-winning interactive exhibits and displays Experience the stunning 360-degree view of the battlefield 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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J.E.B. Stuart “Go back, go back, and do your duty, as I have done mine, and our country will be safe.” So Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart reportedly remarked to his retreating troops as he was carried, wounded, from the field at Yellow Tavern, Virginia, on May 11, 1864. The following day, the 31-year-old Confederate cavalry commander died, leaving behind an impressive yet imperfect Civil War record— one marked by fearless charges on the battlefield and bold raids behind enemy lines; versatility (he led infantry at Chancellorsville after Stonewall Jackson’s wounding); and questionable decisions (such as the one that led to his long separation from the Army of Northern Virginia during the Gettysburg Campaign). To get a sense of where Stuart’s legacy now stands, we asked a panel of historians to assess the record of the flamboyant Confederate cavalier.
Was J.E.B. Stuart the Civil War’s most talented cavalry commander?
What do you most admire about Stuart...
…and what was his biggest flaw?
PETER C. LUEBKE:
“ Panache.”
JOSEPH T. GLATTHAAR:
No
Yes 48%
52%
A. WILSON GREENE:
“ No. Jeb was one of the best, no doubt, but my money is on Nathan Bedford Forrest for the top spot.”
When was Stuart at his peak?
“ His intelligence, readiness, resoluteness, and flexibility.”
STEPHEN W. SEARS:
“His need for recognition and praise.”
ERIC J. WITTENBERG:
“ His extraordinary gift for performing the traditional roles of cavalry: scouting, screening, and reconnaissance.”
TIMOTHY J. ORR:
“Stuart often underestimated the capabilities of his foe.”
JOSEPH T. GLATTHAAR:
“ His excellent eye for terrain.”
JEFFRY WERT:
JOHN J. HENNESSY:
“His burning ambition.”
“ He brought energy to the Army of Northern Virginia. Every organization needs an element that generates energy.”
FRANK O’REILLY:
“Pride.”
FIRST BULL RUN
PENINSULA CAMPAIGN
SECOND BULL RUN CAMPAIGN
MARYLAND CAMPAIGN
J U LY 1 86 1
M A R C H –J U LY 1 86 2
J U LY– S E P T E M B E R 1 86 2
S E P T E M B E R 1 86 2
THE WAR WITH THE SOUTH (TOP); ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION
“He created a myth about himself and could not live up to it.”
GLENN W. LAFANTASIE:
We asked our panelists to rank Stuart’s performance in nine major campaigns, giving the highest mark for his best performance and the lowest for his least impressive. This chart represents an average of all responses.
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What is your favorite book about Stuart? ETHAN S. RAFUSE:
BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN:
JENNIFER M. MURRAY:
“Well researched, readable, and thorough, it is the best modern work on Stuart.”
“Thomas sought to understand both the man and the legend that was J.E.B Stuart.”
“This is an invaluable, firsthand account and essential to understanding Stuart and his exploits.”
14% 5%
38%
33%
5%
THE WAR WITH THE SOUTH (TOP); ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION
5%
What is your favorite quote by or about Stuart?
“I realize that if we oppose force to force we cannot win, for their resources are greater than ours. We must make up in quality what we lack in numbers. We must substitute esprit for numbers. Therefore, I strive to inculcate in my men the spirit of the chase.”
“ I intend to make the Yankees pay for that hat.” STUART, IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, AFTER HIS NEAR CAPTURE BY UNION FORCES—AND LOSS OF HIS NEW PLUMED HAT— AT VERDIERSVILLE, VIRGINIA, IN AUGUST 1862 [ETHAN S. RAFUSE]
“ Raiding with General Stuart is poor fun and a hard business. Thunder, lightning, rain, storm, mud, nor darkness can stop him when he is on a warm fresh trail of Yankee game.” GEORGE M. NEESE, A MEMBER OF STUART’S HORSE ARTILLERY, IN HIS POSTWAR MEMOIR [A. WILSON GREENE]
STUART, IN AN EARLY WAR LETTER TO HIS BROTHER [JOHN J. HENNESSY]
“He never brought me a piece of false information.”
ROBERT E. LEE’S ALLEGED COMMENT ABOUT STUART UPON HEARING OF THE CAVALRYMAN’S MORTAL WOUNDING AT YELLOW TAVERN [JENNIFER M. MURRAY, STEPHEN W. SEARS, BROOKS D. SIMPSON]
FREDERICKSBURG CAMPAIGN
CHANCELLORSVILLE CAMPAIGN
GETTYSBURG CAMPAIGN
BRISTOE CAMPAIGN
OVERLAND CAMPAIGN
D E C E M B E R 1 86 2
A P R I L– M AY 1 86 3
J U N E –J U LY 1 86 3
O C TO B E R– N OV E M B E R 1 86 3
M AY 1 86 4
Participants: Patrick Brennan, Peter S. Carmichael, Gary W. Gallagher, Joseph T. Glatthaar, A. Wilson Greene, John J. Hennessy, Wayne Hsieh, Brian Matthew Jordan, Glenn W. LaFantasie, Peter C. Luebke, Jennifer M. Murray, Kenneth W. Noe, Frank O’Reilly, Timothy J. Orr, Ethan S. Rafuse, Stephen W. Sears, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Brooks D. Simpson, Christopher S. Stowe, Jeffry Wert, and Eric J. Wittenberg.
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A Bright Future b y r o n a l d s . c o d d i n g t o n
This Union officer sporting stylish spectacles with tinted glass and a second pair of lenses is Captain Thomas Bartlett Griffith, a prosperous furnace manufacturer from Carver, Massachusetts. Griffith’s striking supplementary lenses could have been used for extra sun protection, as bifocals, or simply for decoration. Because a postwar portrait shows him wearing traditional glasses, this set was probably prescription eyewear. ¶ In September 1862, Griffith and fellow members of his hometown militia company mustered into federal service as Company K of the 3rd Massachusetts Infantry, in which they would spend a largely uneventful ninemonth enlistment along the North Carolina coast. He survived his term and returned to Massachusetts, where he resumed his business, embraced the Republican Party, and—due to his belief in communicating with the spirits of the dead—converted to Spiritualism. ¶ Griffith went on to invest heavily in the Boston Fruit Company, which became a dominant player in the global banana trade and lives on today as Chiquita Brands International. Upon his death in 1897 at age 63, Griffith’s considerable fortune passed to his wife and a daughter, Hannah. The young woman eventually married Benjamin Shaw and lived comfortably as a philanthropist until she passed away in 1933. One legacy of the Griffith money is the Hannah B.G. Shaw Home, a senior living community that was established in Middleboro, Massachusetts, in 1941 and is still thriving today. 3 MILITARY IMAGES (MILITARYIMAGESMAGAZINE .COM) IS A MAGAZINE DEDICATED TO SHOWCASING AND PRESERVING PHOTOS OF CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS.
RONAL D S. CODDI NGTON COLLE
CTION
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The Weight They Carried 143 pounds
Average weight of Union soldiers
5’ 6.4”
Median height of Union soldiers
6 pounds
11–14 pounds
Empty knapsack
Rifle and “accouterments”
5 pounds
4 pounds
1.75 pounds
4.5–5.0 ounces
Army-issued wool blanket
Half shelter tent
2 pounds
Single change of underclothing (shirt, drawers, socks)
5.75 pounds
Haversack containing three days’ cooked rations
40 rounds of ammunition
Uniform hat without trimmings
3.2 pounds
Trousers, woolen shirt, drawers, and socks
5.25 pounds
Union soldier’s winter overcoat
1 pound
Daily ration (10 pieces) of hardtack
3.8 pounds
During the Overland Campaign of 1864, veteran Union soldier John Billings took notice when a full-strength—and fully equipped—regiment of reinforcements marched past his camp. “These men had started from Washington with knapsacks that were immense in their proportions, and had clung to them manfully the first day or two out, but this morning in question, which was of the sultriest kind, was taking them beyond endurance.” As these new arrivals soon learned, a full knapsack compounded a soldier’s burden on the march, which could exceed 60 pounds. While veterans like Billings found ways to minimize this load—discarding all but the most necessary personal effects, and even the knapsacks themselves— the extra weight could (and sometimes did) cause serious health problems, including hernias, when not shouldered wisely. Here we highlight the average weights of key elements contributing to Billy Yank’s personal cargo.
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SOURCES: JOHN D. BILLINGS, HARDTACK AND COFFEE (1887); EARL J. COATES AND FREDERICK C. GAEDE, EDS., THE 1865 QUARTERMASTER MANUAL , VOLUME I (2013); BENJAMIN GOULD, INVESTIGATIONS IN THE MILITARY AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL STATISTICS OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS (1869); CHARLES SMART, THE MEDICAL AND SURGICAL HISTORY OF THE WAR OF THE REBELLION, PART III, VOLUME I, MEDICAL HISTORY (1888); U.S. WAR DEPARTMENT, THE WAR OF THE REBELLION: A COMPILATION OF THE OFFICIAL RECORDS 129 VOLS. (WASHINGTON, 1880–1901), SERIES I, VOL . 25, PT. 2. WITH THANKS TO ROBERT LEE HODGE FOR HIS ASSISTANCE.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Full army canteen
4/29/19 5:48 PM
Next upcoming exhibit
Boots and Saddles: Horses in the Civil War opening on June 22, 2019 and runs through May 31, 2020
June 21 - 23, 2019
CIVIL WAR DAYS IN THE
HARRISBURG AREA Invasion of South Central Pennsylvania For more information:
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
www.NationalCivilWarMuseum.org
The National Civil War Museum H
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A R R I S B U R G,
P
E N N S Y L VA N I A
1 Lincoln Circle at Reservoir Park, Harrisburg, PA 17103 www.NationalCivilWarMuseum.org
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c o s t o f wa r
$84,000 A PHOTOGRAPHIC MASTERPIECE FINALLY PAYS OFF
THE ARTIFACT: An original copy of Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War CONDITION: Both volumes have scuffing to the corners, head, and foot of the spine and scattered surface abrasions on the covers. Several pages in Volume 1 are fully separated from the spine, while the front cover of Volume 2 is partially separated from the binding. Wear to the photographs varies throughout both volumes, with tones ranging from good to near-excellent. DETAILS: Born in Scotland in 1821, Alexander Gardner first viewed the work of photographer Mathew Brady in 1851 at the Great Exhibition in London. Five years later, Gardner, who had started a portrait business in Glasgow the year before, emigrated with his family to the United States and reached out to Brady, who hired him. In 1862, the talented
Scotsman accompanied the Army of the Potomac in the field, and was with it during the bloody clash at Antietam in September. Gardner’s shocking photos of the carnage there, published under Brady’s name, received wide acclaim. Several months later Gardner split with Brady and formed his own Washington, D.C., studio, hiring many of Brady’s former staff. Gardner carried on taking images of the Union army on campaign, most notably at Gettysburg, until war’s end, when he documented the execution of those convicted of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. In 1866, Gardner published 100 wartime images in a two-volume work titled Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War. While containing what are now considered to be among the Civil War’s most iconic photos, the set’s high price ($150, the equivalent of roughly $2,300 today) and limited print run led to the project’s
financial failure. Gardner would continue in photography until 1871, when he helped start an insurance company. He died in Washington in 1882 at age 61. QUOTABLE: In a brief introduction to the Sketch Book, Gardner wrote: “As mementoes of the fearful struggle through which the country has just passed, it is confidently hoped that the following pages will possess an enduring interest. Localities that would scarcely have been known, and probably never remembered, … have become celebrated, and will ever be held sacred as memorable fields, where thousands of brave men yielded up their lives a willing sacrifice for the cause they had espoused. Verbal representations of such places, or scenes, may or may not have the merit of accuracy; but photographic presentments of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith.” VALUE: $84,000 (price realized at Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati, Ohio, in November 2015). “It has been estimated that no more than 200 copies of the Sketch Book were produced, and this example includes a dated, personalized presentation in ink on the front flyleaf,” noted Wes Cowan, founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions, at the time of the sale. “Copies of the Sketch Book with a period presentation are rarely encountered.”
COWAN’S AUCTIONS (COWANAUCTIONS.COM)
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Have you visited?
The Lincoln Memorial Shrine Since 1932, the only museum and research center dedicated to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War west of the Mississippi Located in Redlands, California Halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs Open Tuesday-Sunday, 1-5pm Closed most holidays, but always open Lincoln’s birthday Free admission! For more information, please visit www.lincolnshrine.org/civilwar or call (909) 798-7632
CVM ad 1.indd 1
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COWAN’S AUCTIONS (COWANAUCTIONS.COM)
New from University Press of Mississippi
Available at your local bookseller. UMP_CivilWar_Half Pg_May-2019.indd 1
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upress.state.ms.us | 800.737.7788
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in focus
Relics of the War’s First Martyr
The blood-spattered uniform of Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth, the first Union officer to die in the Civil War, was one of the most gripping sights amid a vast conglomeration of war relics on display in the “Arms and Trophies Room” of the Metropolitan Fair. The exhibition, held at Union Square in New York City on April 4–23, 1864, was a fundraiser for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Modeled after a Sanitary Fair held in Chicago in the fall of 1863, the New York event was a great success, raising more than $1 million to benefit the organization in its efforts to help wounded and sick Union soldiers. As was the custom for museum exhibitions in the mid-19th century, the items on display—including an array of guns, swords, and captured battle flags, along with Ellsworth’s jacket and pants—were all crammed together on a wall. Ellsworth, the 24-yearold commander of the 11th New York Infantry, known as the “Fire Zouaves” because its ranks were mostly filled with New York City firemen, was shot to death by innkeeper James Jackson after removing a large Confederate flag from the roof of the Marshall House in Alexandria, Virginia, on May 24, 1861, the day after Virginia seceded from the Union. Ellsworth had been Abraham Lincoln’s law clerk in Springfield, Illinois, in 1860, and the president had his body brought to the White House, where it lay in state in the East Room before being taken to New York. Ellsworth soon achieved martyrdom, and the phrase “Remember Ellsworth” became a rallying cry throughout the North. 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 Impact of the Lost Order
shortly after noon on Saturday, September 13, 1862, First Sergeant John M. Bloss and Private Barton W. Mitchell made the find of a lifetime. It was early in the Maryland Campaign. General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had slipped across the Potomac the previous week, paused for a few days at the market town of Frederick, and then marched westward beyond the green wall of South Mountain several miles distant. Its current movements were anyone’s guess. Bloss and Mitchell belonged to the 27th Indiana Infantry, which like dozens of other Union regiments was encamped on the same ground the Confederates had occupied before they pulled out of Frederick. The detritus of that occupation was everywhere: blackened remains of campfires, discarded or forgotten items, and just plain trash. Bloss and Mitchell had scarcely dropped their knapsacks when they noticed one particular item. The bulky envelope stood out against the rest of the trash, and even more surprising were the three cigars inside it. This would have been memorable enough, but a glance at the document wrapped around them threw the cigars’ discovery into eclipse. Labeled Special Orders No. 191, it was festooned with the names of senior Rebel generals and signed by an assistant adjutant general, R.H. Chilton, who had endorsed it, “By command of General R.E. Lee.” It quite obviously contained the details of the planned Confederate movement beyond South Mountain. The soldiers hurried to place their find, cigars and all, in the hands of the regiment’s colonel, Silas Colgrove, who bypassed brigade headquarters and took the order straight to Brigadier General Alpheus S. Williams, his division commander and temporarily in charge of the XII Corps. The order could have been fake, meant to mislead the Yankees, but Colgrove put the document in the hands of Williams’ adjutant general, Colonel Samuel E. Pittman. Pittman had known R.H. Chilton before the war and
recognized his elegant handwriting. If it was a ruse, it was a ruse conceived at the very highest Confederate level—which meant it was probably no ruse at all. The envelope’s next stop was the headquarters of Major General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac.1 Such is the beginning of one of the classic stories of the American Iliad, beloved because it illustrates how great events can pivot on trivial origins. The document discovered by Bloss and Mitchell has gone into the history books as the “Lost Order,” and strictly speaking, its military significance does not begin until McClellan and his staff concluded it was genuine and based the next stage of their plans upon it. But no one would ever tell the story without mentioning the two lucky soldiers and the three cigars. It situates ordinary people within extraordinary events. But this version of the story contains one great trap. Because the order was discovered by two modest soldiers, the story is unsatisfactory unless McClellan used the order to secure a major advantage. But was that the case? And did it substantially alter what McClellan would have done had he not got hold of Special Orders No. 191? To get at those questions requires a detailed examination of the military situation addressed in the order, including the 12,500-man garrison at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). The town was located at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers and provided access to the lower Shenandoah Valley. But more importantly, it protected the vital bridge that carried the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad across the Potomac. With only a few brief interludes, the Union army occupied the town throughout the Civil War. By Lee’s strategic reasoning, one of those interludes should have occurred as soon as he crossed the Potomac and headed for Frederick. ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
RETHINKING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DISCOVERY OF SPECIAL ORDERS NO. 191 BY MARK GRIMSLEY
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Army of the Potomac commander George B. McClellan is depicted on horseback during the Battle of Antietam in this engraving from 1863. The discovery of the plans of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia—in a document called Special Orders No. 191—days earlier may have hindered more than helped McClellan’s larger plans for a decisive victory in Maryland.
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public h i sto ry
Recollections of a Military Staff Ride
it was a beautiful day with minimal cloud cover and a gentle breeze. The group surrounding me was attentive, hands grasping their newly acquired maps. Their aides hovered behind them, just in earshot, phones at the ready. I had just told them about the valiant charges of the Federal II Corps against the Sunken Road at Antietam and the equally valorous but ultimately unsuccessful Confederate defense. I was about to launch into a “so what?” discussion when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff leaned toward me and looked at the embroidered slogan on my tennis shirt. “It depends,” he said, reading the italicized script. “Well, it sure as hell does,” he added. There were snickers and nods from the group, and a sidebar conversation between two other generals broke out. “That’s my seminar’s motto at the Army War College,” I offered. “The students understand that nothing is ever really an easy answer in war. There are always variables that affect a decision and, in turn, are affected by that decision. One must think hard about everything, much as you gentlemen do every day.” There were more nods and asides, and the chairman puckered his lips into a slight grin. “The problem here on September 17, 1862, was that McClellan thought too much about all those variables, and lost what Clausewitz calls the coup d’oeil moment,” I continued. “The third and final Union charge against this position, where we are standing now, broke through the Confederate line, flanked it, and poured fire down the length of what would become known as Bloody Lane. Reinforcements were called for but were not sent. The center of Robert E. Lee’s line was pierced and he had no intact, nearby units to plug the hole. McClellan could’ve won it here but hesitated—and the second great contingency point in this battle came and went.” I paused, trying not to be overwhelmed by the moment. Here, gathered on the Antietam Battlefield about a decade ago, were all the Joint Chiefs of Staff—our nation’s
highest ranking military officers—and most of the geographic commandant commanders. And they were listening to me. It was a high honor. Historians in the U.S. Department of Defense dream of such experiences, and some never get them, even after decades of service. I was lucky: A student I had taught at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College ended up on the chairman’s staff and recommended me when the chairman asked who could lead a “ride” at Antietam. A staff ride is an experiential visit to a battlefield in which participants are led on a focused evaluation of historical decision-making at all levels of war, on the ground where those decisions were made, to gain valuable insights on the nature of war and leadership. They are not “tours,” but we do walk the terrain and think about what happened on it. I had been leading staff rides for over five years when I was offered this opportunity. I took a deep breath and asked my first question. “If you had been the Union commanding general at that moment and knew what he knew, which as we discussed was not a lot, but saw this breakthrough happen, what would you have done?” This was the key historical query for this stand, or stop, of the staff ride. Somebody answered: “Order in enough troops to secure and exploit this position, but keep enough reserves in hand until I knew what I was up against.” I parried with a follow-up: “What about all those unknown masses of Rebels who could be hidden behind the Piper field and in Sharpsburg itself ?” The reply: “I’d find out pretty fast if they were there, and their numbers, by advancing a recon in force from here.” More nods, grunts of agreement, and one of the principals stepped away to confer with his aide. I queried the group if they thought that was a good idea, and if other options theoretically beckoned. Other participants jumped in then, proffering would-be decisions for Army of the Potomac commander George B. McClellan: ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
COURTESY BRIGADIER GENERAL (RET) JOHN W. MOUNTCASTLE
TRANSFORMING CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELDS INTO LIVING CLASSROOMS BY CHRISTIAN B. KELLER
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COURTESY BRIGADIER GENERAL (RET) JOHN W. MOUNTCASTLE
Cadets from the United States Military Academy at West Point take in the view from Little Round Top during a staff ride at the Gettysburg Battlefield.
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NATIONAL ARCHIVES
The Refugees
Former slaves mill about the grounds of a “contraband camp”—one of over 300 such settlements established in Union-occupied regions during the conflict—in Richmond, Virginia, in 1865.
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NATIONAL ARCHIVES
For the many thousands of African-American men, women, and children who escaped to the safety of Union lines during the Civil War, the quest for freedom was far from over—and often precarious. By Amy Murrell Taylor
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nslaved people in the Civil War South knew that freedom was not going to come directly or easily to them. It had to be searched for and claimed, no matter the promises of federal policy. The Emancipation Proclamation, so monumental in turning the Union’s war effort toward a decisive battle against slavery, did not free anyone instantly. For any one person to realize the promise of freedom, it would still take a daring escape from slavery and an equally courageous journey along the roads and waterways of the South. This fact set thousands upon thousands of people in motion during the Civil War—500,000, or one-eighth of the enslaved population, by some estimates. Men, women, and children all set out amid the nation’s most destructive war to find a protected space where they could establish a household and begin living as free people. They set their sights on the lines of the Union army, knowing that protection was waiting if they could just get behind those lines and into a military encampment.1 So they ran and they walked and they boated toward Union army installations in cities like St. Louis and Vicksburg, as well as new encampments that emerged along the coast of Virginia and the Carolinas and down the Mississippi Valley. Under the supervision of the military, escaped slaves set up over 300 new settlements in these Union-occupied regions.2 Some army officials called these “contraband camps,” reflecting the earliest Union policy of May 1861 that admitted enslaved people into Union lines as “contraband” of war. Others called them “refugee camps,” a designation that better captured their inhabitants’ personhood as well as the uncertain status with which they lived.3 Indeed, these freedom-seeking people shared many of the qualities of today’s refugees, as defined by the United Nations: They fled persecution and sought protection in another country, in this case the United States.4 It was not clear until the end of the war whether that protection would result in their long-term freedom; the Union had to win the war to make that happen. One of the places where these refugees from slavery settled was on a plantation located about 70 miles south of Nashville, in Giles County,
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They set their sights on the lines of the Union army, knowing that protection was waiting if they could just get behind those lines and into a military encampment.
HARPER’S WEEKLY
Fugitives from slavery race toward the safety of Unioncontrolled Fort Monroe on the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula in this August 1861 sketch from Harper’s Weekly. In all, some 500,000 African Americans, or one-eighth of the country’s enslaved population, sought protection in Union-occupied regions during the Civil War.
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Tennessee. Over 1,000 people from across Middle Tennessee, as well as Alabama, Georgia, and Kentucky, descended on this property. By the summer of 1864, they had established a village of 240 newly built houses, and references to what was once “Brown’s plantation” increasingly gave way in Union records to a new moniker, “Tunnel Hill,” which referred to a nearby railroad tunnel.5 The Tunnel Hill camp would be the foundation on which these freedom-seeking people would begin turning their long-anticipated hopes of freedom into a concrete reality. In 1865 a federal government clerk conducted a census of the residents of Tunnel Hill. In neatly drawn columns indicating their names, ages, former owners’ names, and states of origin, the census listed children ranging in age from one-year-old Ann Owens, who arrived at Tunnel Hill from Alabama, to 17-year-old William Drake from Tennessee. Children were just over half— 52 percent—of the population, a proportion consistent with many of the slave refugee camps in the South. Among the adults were their parents as well as the elderly; the oldest was 85-year-old Bethany Jackson, from Alabama. That we know names like hers is striking: This was the first time in their lives that the federal government had acknowledged them by name in a census—a sure sign of their changing status.6 But that recognition did not translate into a smooth path to freedom. The refugees’ hold on land in Tunnel Hill and similar settlements—their claim to a spot of land that would anchor them in freedom—would be essential. It distanced them from their owners and from the Confederacy, and thus from slavery, and it enabled them to build homes and communities that conformed to their visions of freedom. But their claim to the land was never secure in a time of war. The story of Tunnel Hill would instead come to more closely resemble a modern-day refugee crisis than a sudden, triumphant achievement of freedom. unnel Hill took root on exactly the sort of plantation that the Confederacy had gone to war to protect. It was a thriving cotton operation before the war, with a real estate value of $115,000 in 1860 dollars. The owner of the land, Thomas J. Brown, had another $152,000 tied up in his personal estate, which included 63 enslaved
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The Tunnel Hill camp would be the foundation on which these freedom-seeking people would begin turning their long-anticipated hopes of freedom into a concrete reality.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
At refugee camps across the South (like the one shown here in Hampton, Virginia), former slaves built homes and established communities, part of their search for new lives in freedom.
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3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
witness a dramatic sequence of events over the course of 1863 that would transform the former slave plantation into an encampment of freedom. They would witness an alteration of the landscape that to some people was an act of poetic justice— but to others a “spice of spitefulness,” as a Confederate surgeon residing on a nearby property put it.12 t did not matter that the Emancipation Proclamation officially exempted Tennessee when it was issued in January 1863. Thanks to other federal policies, in particular an article of war passed by Congress in March 1862 that prohibited Union soldiers from returning fugitive slaves to their owners under penalty of court-martial, Union lines were open to any man, woman, or child who could get themselves safely there.13 And enough arrived over the course of 1863 that by January 1864 the Union appointed a “Superintendent of Contrabands” to oversee the affairs at Tunnel Hill as well as three nearby refugee settlements, in Pulaski and Hendersonville, Tennessee, and Decatur Junction, Alabama. Lieutenant J.W. Harris of the 57th Illinois Infantry assumed the position after having previously worked in a slave refugee camp at Corinth, Mississippi.14 Harris’ job was vast—to oversee both the hiring of refugees to work for the army, as well as the provision of food rations, shelter, and medical care to all who came inside Union lines. (Other forms of relief, such as clothing, would be the purview of civilian relief organizations.) It was not the sort of task for which the army was prepared at the outset of the war, and officials like Harris often had to improvise means of acquiring and paying for the relief that the refugees so desperately needed. Harris managed to hit on an idea for making it work: He ordered the collection of all the harvested cotton abandoned by the Confederates on the plantations where refugees were settling. The cotton was then sold, raising $9,000 to pay for all the food and supplies.15 The people, meanwhile, got to work. Men deemed physically “able” enlisted in the Union army, even if they did not want to—impressment, as one Union report conceded, was frequently relied upon in this region and “very little respect was paid to the negro’s preference, for, or against, the service.”16 Those who did not enlist
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people. In the years leading up to the war, many of the property’s enslaved laborers planted and picked cotton in the fields, while others worked to remove the fiber’s seeds in the plantation’s gin house.7 The cotton they baled likely made its way to Memphis, and then New Orleans, and then to markets far beyond the South. Each enslaved person on the Brown property was thus a key link in the slave-based cotton economy that appeared threatened by the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Their owner felt that threat intimately in late 1860 and early 1861. So did his family. Thomas J. Brown was closely tied to a number of leading proslavery figures in Tennessee. His father-inlaw, Gideon J. Pillow, had served as major general of volunteers during the Mexican War and later campaigned actively for proslavery Democratic candidates in Tennessee; by July 1861 Pillow was commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate army. Brown’s uncle, Aaron V. Brown, had been a Democratic representative in Congress and then governor of Tennessee during the Mexican War, as well as the former law partner of President James K. Polk, who led the nation’s proslavery imperial expansion during the Mexican War.8 It was almost predetermined, then, that Brown’s ties to the proslavery political class, and especially his own personal investment in slavery, would swing his loyalty to the Confederacy. When war came Brown did not enlist in a combat role, but he did sign up as a conscription officer for the Confederacy; he also supported the southern army in other ways, including providing corn and fodder to feed army horses and hiring out at least three of his slaves to work as laborers for the army.9 But that support was not enough to help the Confederates hold off the arrival of the Union army. By late 1862, Union forces had moved in and occupied the southern portion of Middle Tennessee, a moment that forced Brown and his wife, Mary, to flee south. They resettled in Macon, Georgia.10 It is not known if the Browns took any enslaved people with them. But some of them did remain behind on the plantation, according to the 1865 census, including a five-year-old girl named Elvira, a 32-year-old man named Horace, and a 50-year-old woman named Litha.11 These individuals would
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You’re in the Army Now The Union’s impressment of black men around Tunnel Hill was not an isolated incident. At various times throughout the war, the northern army exerted force to compel black men to fill the ranks of its laborers—and sometimes, its soldiers. In some cases local officers were acting without the consent of their superiors. But impressment orders also came directly from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, whose staff once wrote to Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs that “[i]f it be necessary or expedient to impress the contrabands the necessary authority will be given.” Stanton followed up that statement with an order authorizing the impressment of 1,000 black men in Virginia in the summer of 1863.1 The Union did have legitimate needs for manpower. But its resort to impressment was also driven by racist assumptions that black men could—and should—be made to labor under the compulsion of white men. Yet the men, newly freed from slavery, frequently resisted: They were determined to push back against a practice that bore resemblance to the coercion of bondage. They also feared being separated from their family members, since in many cases impressment meant being sent long distances to work on the Union’s defenses or to join a regiment. The men remained loyal to the Union—but, as freed people, they wanted to exert the power to decide when and how to serve its army. Some fled in order to elude the authorities trying to impress them, while others appealed their case up the army’s chain of command. The forced enlistment of men from Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, to serve in the 10th USCT drew some of the most severe resistance. In late 1863, the men targeted for impressment took their case to local missionaries and to the superintendent of negro affairs, who launched an investigation. The men then told investigators about being confined in the guard house, and about being forced to “tote the ball from one oclock P.M. till nine or ten” (referring to a cannonball that weighed over 30 pounds) until they agreed to enlist. Some reported being driven “to the point of the Bayonet,” while another was told by a local recruiting officer that “you shall go now, or I will blow your brains out.”2 The investigation led the commanding general in the region, General Benjamin Butler, to put a stop to impressment, noting that it was “hindering recruiting and spreading distrust and alarm among the negroes.” He also ordered that the officer directing the impressments be “dismissed [from] the service.”3 Incidents like this were just one of the ways in which the Union army, though committed to fighting for freedom in the abstract, struggled to incorporate that principle into its everyday operations.
found employment as regimental cooks and as personal servants for army officers; others remained at Tunnel Hill to work the 1,000 acres of cotton, 200 acres of corn, and the three vegetable gardens planted in 1864.17 It is not clear if consistent wages were paid; throughout the South the Union army became notorious for promising, but not paying, wages to refugee laborers.18 There were other signs that local Union officials viewed their freedom in more narrow terms than the refugees did. Lieutenant Harris, hearing from nearby planters who professed to be loyal that they needed labor for the coming season, tried to push the refugees out of Tunnel Hill and onto local plantations, with the promise that he would negotiate contracts to pay them wages or a share of the crop. “But few complied,” one report noted, and “moral suasion failed to drive many out of camp.”19 The prospect of returning to a plantation was too risky and too disheartening for a refugee from slavery to consider. There was good reason for them to stay at Tunnel Hill too. The residents of this and of the other camps across the South wanted nothing more than to begin building new, free lives. Besides constructing houses, they set about creating independent black churches; teaching themselves to read and write, with the assistance of newly arrived northern teachers from Indiana and Illinois; and enjoying the freedom to marry and have children without the threat of the slave trade pulling them apart.20 In places far removed from active combat, these settlements grew so large that they effectively became towns, laid out with streets and parks. Others, like Tunnel Hill, remained closer to the hostilities, which meant that their stability remained an open question. his was war, after all. And as the Tunnel Hill residents would soon learn, the rhythms of war can change quickly—and with it, one’s prospects for the future. In late September 1864 word came that Confederates were approaching, though the news arrived so quickly that there was little time to get out of the way. Then came Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest and the roar of his cavalry of 6,000 to 7,000 men.21 The Rebels had been tearing through northern Alabama and into Middle Tennessee that month, successfully targeting the
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Which must have been Forrest’s goal. There was no military advantage to burning down the houses: Although the Confederates had seized a commissary warehouse at the site, one that allowed Forrest to provide sugar, coffee, and “several days’ rations” to his men, no such provisions were taken from the refugees’ houses. It did not give his troops any material or strategic advantage, and it did not hurt the Union militarily (except to demoralize black troops, if they got word of their families’ plight). General Forrest himself described his actions as having “burnt up this den of wretchedness”—as if he had cleaned up something unsightly on the Tennessee landscape. But what he called “miserable hovels” were to the refugees newly built homes, betraying his skewed and racist beliefs that associated blackness with dirt (or as he put it, “the negroes were all ragged and dirty”).26 The burning of Tunnel Hill was not an exceptional moment in the life of a refugee settlement. Across the occupied South, refugee camps became frequent targets of racial violence, ranging from attacks on emerging leaders, to the sexual assault of women, to the destruction of an entire camp. Some of the worst, most pervasive violence came at the hands of Confederate guerrillas in the Mississippi Valley in the last year of the war, as Union forces shifted east and left the valley and its camps without adequate protection. “There is scarcely one of them all which has escaped guerrilla atrocities,” railed the superintendent overseeing all refugee affairs in the region, in his yearly report to the adjutant general.27 To Confederates, the camps embodied the social revolution that they had gone to war to prevent. To destroy a camp was to stop emancipation in its tracks.28 But the reality was far more complex, for although a camp’s destruction set back the journey to freedom in a significant way, it could never extinguish the underlying desire to be free. As long as refugees avoided being kidnapped back into slavery and kept themselves alive in the weeks and months afterward, there was a chance that a
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY); FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER
Union railroads and supply depots that supported Union general William T. Sherman’s progress toward Atlanta. After forcing the surrender of a Union fort near Elkton, Tennessee, Forrest and his men continued north toward Pulaski—and along their path sat the Tunnel Hill camp.22 The refugees had every reason to be fearful. Just five months before, at Fort Pillow in western Tennessee, Forrest and his men had turned a battle into a racial massacre, opening fire on the black Union soldiers who had already surrendered and killing nearly 200 of them.23 Maybe the residents of Tunnel Hill had not yet heard about Fort Pillow—but they did know they were largely on their own to meet Forrest’s men. Military records suggest that the Union troops guarding their camp were outnumbered and retreated quickly, leaving the nearly 1,300 black men, women, and children who remained to confront the Confederates with basically no protection.24 Forrest and his men captured Tunnel Hill quickly. According to a Union report, the general then “ordered them [the refugees] to take their things out of the houses”—which likely referred to the few clothes they had stockpiled, along with personal possessions such as cooking implements, children’s toys, Bibles, and bedding. The Confederate troops “did nothing to injure” the people themselves, the report conceded, though they seized the possessions and “set fire to, and burned up the negroes clothing and stuff.” Even more devastatingly, Forrest’s men torched every last one of the 240 houses recently built by the refugees.25 The Tunnel Hill camp was left in ruins. It marked a shattering turn for those who saw their freedom taking shape in those houses. No firsthand accounts of their reactions have survived, but it takes little imagination to understand what they must have been thinking. How would they shelter and feed themselves? Where should they go? Could they still secure any freedom in Tennessee? Their shelter had become their anchor in Union lines—but that anchor had been lifted and all of their progress toward freedom set adrift in a matter of minutes. 40 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2019
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY); FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER
The refugees had every reason to be fearful. Just five months before, at Fort Pillow in western Tennessee, Forrest and his men had turned a battle into a racial massacre, opening fire on the black Union soldiers who had already surrendered and killing nearly 200 of them.
Five months after his men massacred African-American troops who had surrendered at Fort Pillow (depicted above in a sketch from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper), Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest (opposite page) captured the refugee camp at Tunnel Hill. His men set fire to the residents’ possessions and houses, dealing a serious blow to their recent progress toward freedom.
camp could be rebuilt. And at Tunnel Hill, since most of the people remained behind after Forrest’s men moved on, by November 1864 the prospect of rebuilding seemed promising.29 he future of Tunnel Hill would have remained hopeful had Confederate general John Bell Hood not entered the scene. That same month, Hood led a campaign north through Tennessee in an attempt to distract Sherman’s troops and pull them out of the Deep South. As Hood’s army of 20,000 men thundered into the southern part of the state and began moving north, the outnumbered Union troops fled from Giles County and other parts of Middle Tennessee and moved to maintain the Union’s hold on Nashville.30 This left the refugee camps at Tunnel Hill and other spots in Middle Tennessee unprotected once again. This time the refugees took flight. Some scat-
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tered into the nearby countryside, while “1500 fell in with the army on its retreat to Nashville,” according to one Union report. A large caravan of refugees began winding its way toward the city. Some loaded themselves into available space in supply train wagons, “many children and sick persons” were placed on board 200 animals made available by the army quartermaster, and most others walked the entire way.31 Soldiers in the 73rd Illinois Infantry who witnessed the scene described how “old and crippled men and women hobbled along with their loads,” while “small children followed along, many of them bare-footed.”32 The caravan gained numbers as it moved, attracting enslaved people who found an opportunity to escape for the first time. But it also lost some refugees, as one report noted that “many died of exposures and fatigue on the road.” A total of 2,000 men, women, and children eventually made their way into Nashville in mid-December.33 Harrowing conditions awaited them. A twoday battle that erupted in the city just after their arrival ended in a Union rout that sent the Confederates retreating into Mississippi.34 The city was also crowded: At least 15,000 other refugees had already taken up residence in burned-out buildings and makeshift shanties. Little space remained for the Tunnel Hill arrivals, who were ushered into an army barracks. The situation there quickly became intolerable—and even lifethreatening.35 “The barracks they occupy are lined with vermin,” a Union commander wrote in complaint to the military governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, on December 20. “I found six dead bodies.... Some having been dead two days and no effort made to bury them.”36 Another officer observed that “The stench arising from the excrement & urine in and around their quarters was intolerable even in the coldest weather.” Worse, women had been singled out for sexual assault. “The officers and other white men in charge of them selected mulatto women with whom they were in the habit of sleeping,” he continued, “thus demoralizing instead of bettering the condition of these truly unfortunate people.”37 It was an unsustainable situation. The governor ordered an internal investigation—but it led to denials from the officers in charge, and little came of it.38 Still, there was reason for the refugees to have some hope. In early January came a state conven41 SUMMER 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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s
ome, but not all, of the Giles County refugees went to Donelson farm. The rest exercised a power that they never had while in slavery and either resisted the move or chose to go elsewhere. Some likely remained in Nashville, since cities were among the most desired destinations for refugees across the South. Urban spaces including Memphis, New Orleans, and Vicksburg may have been crowded, but that had its advantages—there was safety in numbers, as well as the likelihood of finding someone who might have information to help them locate long-separated family members. A greater concentration of churches, schools, and jobs were a draw as well.41 But Tunnel Hill also exerted its own pull— once again. By early 1865 dozens had returned and the settlement began to rise one more time, with 465 people living there by August 1865. Among them were 16 people once owned by Thomas J. Brown.42 They had already witnessed two rounds of Confederate attacks on the property, and still they returned—but why? Maybe it was because the military situation in the region had cooled again, especially with the surrender of Confederate forces at Appomattox, Virginia, in April 1865. They may also have been aware that the new Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress in March 1865, was setting up a field office in nearby Pulaski and was committed to extending the army’s wartime protection of formerly enslaved people. The bureau would provide food rations and physical protection, along with assistance in gaining wage-paying employment and setting up schools. They may also have maintained, like so many other freedom-seeking people, an attachment to the land—not based on any sort of nostalgia for their slave past, but for the people and the families who had lived and supported them there. They may have hoped to turn what was once a
village of 240 houses into a permanent town or even a city for freed people. As residents of another refugee settlement in Virginia explained, “We are anxious and willing to build up a city upon our lands,” one that would be “as orderly, as prosperous, as religious, as patriotic, and as intelligent as could be done by any other people.”43 Their connection to the land also may have been based on a sense of right. They had been loyal to the Union during the war. Shouldn’t this land, abandoned by the Confederate Thomas J. Brown and now in Union hands, be available to them to rent or purchase? Shouldn’t all the abandoned and confiscated land now in Union possession—a total of over 800,000 acres across the South by war’s end—be kept out of the hands of disloyal Confederates and made available to freedpeople? Residents of other refugee camps thought so.44 “Are not our rights as A free people and good citizens of these United States To be considered,” declared those living on Edisto Island, South Carolina, “before the rights of those who were Found in rebellion against this good and just Goverment [sic].”45 There was plenty of support in Congress for this argument, especially among Radical Republicans, and even among some military commanders like General Sherman, who ordered the land the Union army had confiscated along the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coasts subdivided and distributed among freedpeople (the so-called “40 acres and a mule” plan).46 But, crucially, that support was not shared by the new president, Andrew Johnson, who fatefully issued an Amnesty Proclamation in May 1865 that promised former Confederates “restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves” after they took an oath of loyalty to the Union.47 It should not have been surprising that the antebellum owner of the Tunnel Hill land, Thomas J. Brown, would take advantage of Johnson’s generosity. After taking the oath, he wrote directly to the president, requesting “your Exalancy [sic] to grant him Pardon & Amnesty.”48 (This direct appeal was a step Johnson required of the largest landowners and highest-ranking Confederate officials.) Johnson, a fellow Tennessean who may have known Brown and his Pillow in-laws before the war, quickly granted the pardon. “Thomas J. Brown,” reported one newspaper, “has been pardoned by the President. A fine farm in Giles
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tion that approved a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery in Tennessee—offering reassurance that the Union would protect their legal freedom.39 Then came the Nashville officials’ decision to relocate the refugees, moving them out of the insufferable barracks and onto a farm located northeast of the city. The new settlement near the town of Hendersonville was known as “Donelson farm” and housed 900 people by early February.40
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The status and security of refugees from slavery (some of them pictured above) remained precarious even after war’s end, when ex-Confederates were able to repossess their lands from a forgiving President Andrew Johnson and organizations like the Ku Klux Klan emerged to suppress AfricanAmerican progress.
County, Tennessee, which had been seized for confiscation, has been returned to him.”49 That account made the transaction sound like a clean legal transfer, but to the residents of Tunnel Hill it was a devastating betrayal. It fell to Freedmen’s Bureau official Clinton B. Fisk, headquartered in Nashville, to close the Tunnel Hill settlement, which he was ordered to do in August 1865.50 It took him four months to get the job done, though the record is silent on why. Maybe the residents’ resistance played a role: In other refugee settlements across the South, freed people held public meetings, pooled savings to hire lawyers, and appealed to members of Congress in desperate attempts to forestall a camp’s closure. Rarely was this successful—only settlements on lands previously owned by the most conspicuously treasonous Confederates, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, remained intact. The rest were forcefully shut down within two years of the war’s end.51 Three times a camp for freed people arose at Tunnel Hill—and yet the settlement disappeared once and for all by December 1865. Donelson farm, where some of the Tunnel Hill refugees had gone months before, was also returned to its antebellum white owner by that same month.52 The freed people then set out on the road again, some to Nashville and others to surrounding lands owned by former Confederates, where they would struggle to earn a livelihood along-
side white people hostile to their freedom. They dispersed across the Tennessee countryside just as another group was coming together—one that would ensure that nothing like the Tunnel Hill settlement ever rose again. It was in mid-1866 that a group of Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee. The most powerful terrorist organization devoted to protecting white supremacy and suppressing black progress emerged only eight miles down the road from the Tunnel Hill site.53 The Klan’s origins in Giles County, and its subsequent reign of terror, are well known today. That history has left an imprint on Americans’ historical memory that dwarfs any recollection of what happened in the slave refugee camps like Tunnel Hill. The refugees’ housing disappeared, the people dispersed, and few to no traces remain on the landscape to remind us of those first steps to freedom. But these Civil War settlements deserve remembrance today, if only to remind us that the Klan’s reign was not inevitable. Something else was possible in the 1860s—and it was glimpsed by each resident of Tunnel Hill. AMY MURRELL TAYLOR IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY AND THE AUTHOR OF EMBATTLED FREEDOM: JOURNEYS THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR’S SLAVE REFUGEE CAMPS (UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, 2018) AND THE DIVIDED FAMILY IN CIVIL WAR AMERICA (UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, 2005).
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UNITED STATES ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER, CARLISLE , PA
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A look at the flawed but successful Civil War career of William Starke Rosecrans
UNITED STATES ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER, CARLISLE , PA
By William B. Kurtz
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W I LLI A M S. ROS EC R AN S WAS born on September 6, 1819, in Delaware County, Ohio. Both his father, a veteran of the War of 1812, and his mother, a devout Protestant, greatly shaped young William’s future. In 1838, lacking the money to attend college, he applied for and was received into the United States Military Academy at West Point. Despite his lack of formal education, Rosecrans graduated fifth in his class in 1842. He was so highly thought of that he was brought back to West Point in 1843 to serve as an engineering professor under noted military theorist Dennis Mahan for several years. Sometime in 1844 or 1845, Rosecrans left behind his family’s Protestant faith and converted to Catholicism. Before long, he had converted most of his family and set up a religious confraternity in the U.S. Army, for which he was thanked personally by Pope Pius IX himself. Indeed, Rosecrans was as devout in his faith as any of his fellow West Point
alumni, including the deeply pious Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and Oliver Otis Howard.1 By 1854 Rosecrans had left the army, having missed the Mexican War while serving in a number of engineering roles. He went into the mining business in western Virginia and Cincinnati, while also working on several related inventions, including a process to refine petroleum into an odorless oil and two new oil lamps.2 At the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, Rosecrans, though a Democrat, firmly supported the Union cause. He later explained his decision to rejoin the army to his wife by telling her that a “sense of duty impelled me to seek posts of usefulness regardless of personal danger and I trust that God in his infinite goodness will protect and sustain [me] in soul and body.” Rosecrans immediately began training with a local Ohio militia group, but more important things were in store for him. In early June he was appointed as Chief Engineer of the State of Ohio, and just a few days later he assumed command of both Camp Chase and the 23rd Ohio Infantry as its first colonel. After cultivating a relationship with President Abraham Lincoln’s treasury secretary, his fellow Ohioan Salmon P. Chase, Rosecrans was appointed brigadier general in the regular army to date from May 16, 1861. Shortly afterward he received orders to report to Major General George B. McClellan, who was conducting a campaign against Confederate forces in western Virginia.3 Rosecrans’ collaboration with McClellan would be short and strained. The two men came up with a plan of attack that called for a twopronged assault on Confederate positions near Rich Mountain. Rosecrans’ brigade had the difficult task of marching “over pathless mountains” to flank the Rebels while McClellan kept them distracted to their front. Rosecrans attacked and drove the Confederates from the field on July 11, but McClellan never launched his promised supporting assault. Yet “Little Mac” received much of the credit for the victory—and after the disastrous Union defeat at the Battle of Bull Run on July 22, he would take over command of the force that would become the Army of the Potomac. The fight at Rich Mountain highlighted two important aspects of Rosecrans’ generalship. First, he firmly believed that providence was on his side. “The blessing of God was on me and on the expedition,” he told his wife after the battle. “I was as collected under the enemy’s fire and as little sensible of danger as at any time in any ordinary business.” Second, it foreshadowed his troubled relationships with his superiors. Although Rosecrans assumed command of the Department of the Ohio, a vast department encompassing western Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
HARPER’S WEEKLY
until his defeat at Chickamauga in September 1863, Major General William Starke Rosecrans was one of the Union’s most successful commanders. Rosecrans was certainly not without his flaws: He had a bad temper, swore and smoked incessantly, barely slept, and distrusted most of his superior officers and many of his subordinates. But he was also a brilliant engineer, devout Catholic, abhorrer of slavery, and hardworking officer. Rosecrans won victories that helped secure western Virginia for the Union in 1861, defeated two Confederate armies in Mississippi in 1862, provided a badly needed if bloody victory at Stones River in January 1863, and captured the important railway hub of Chattanooga that summer. Ultimately, though, his weaknesses contributed to costly losses at the Battle of Chickamauga—the worst defeat for the Federals in the conflict’s western theater—and undermined his promising career. In addition to his mistakes at Chickamauga, his long feud with Ulysses S. Grant, who savagely criticized Rosecrans in his famous Memoirs, has hurt his reputation with many scholars. As a result, Rosecrans’ substantial efforts on behalf of the Union cause have been all too often underappreciated or forgotten.
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HARPER’S WEEKLY
Department of the Ohio commander William S. Rosecrans (seated at table) consults with his staff in the fall of 1861. During this period, Rosecrans faced off against Confederate forces in western Virginia and continued his feud with fellow Union general George B. McClellan.
and Illinois, from McClellan, good relations between the two soured as both men grew to resent the other’s conduct during and after Rich Mountain. As Rosecrans bluntly wrote in 1865, “McClellan, contrary to agreement and military prudence, did not attack.” Indeed, Ohio journalist Whitelaw Reid later claimed that Rosecrans publicly criticized McClellan’s failure to attack after his superior’s departure. Such criticism, if it had reached McClellan’s ears, would have been unlikely to win him the love of the man who would soon be general-in-chief of the Union army.4 Rosecrans set to work fortifying his new command and dealing with the difficult supply situation in the mountainous region. On September 10, he won an important albeit small battle at Carnifex Ferry that helped secure the future independence and statehood of West Virginia. While holding Robert E. Lee, who commanded Confederate forces in western Virginia, at bay that fall, Rosecrans continued to clash with McClellan. In
the months after, McClellan, who assumed the position of general-in-chief in November, rejected Rosecrans’ plan to attack and capture the strategic town of Winchester, siphoned off most of Rosecrans’ troops to other armies, and placed the incompetent political general John C. Frémont in charge of his department, leaving Rosecrans without a command. Appealing to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton for a new position, Rosecrans was given a thankless task of babysitting Brigadier General Louis Blenker’s division, which had become lost en route to the Shenandoah Valley after being detached from the Army of the Potomac. Not content with such obvious busywork, Rosecrans twice made an intelligent but unsolicited suggestion for the creation of an overall command structure for the multiple Union armies in the Shenandoah Valley. This infuriated Stanton, who simply wanted Rosecrans to keep quiet and obey orders. Rosecrans had made another powerful enemy. Nevertheless, 47 SUMMER 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Rosecrans declaring Grant “an honest man” in a letter to his wife while Grant privately noted, “I regret that Gen. Rosecrans has not got rank equal to his merit.” While the country’s attention was on Lee’s and Braxton Bragg’s respective invasions of Maryland and Kentucky, Grant and Rosecrans would work together to deal with Confederate forces under Sterling Price and Earl Van Dorn.6 Rosecrans soon proposed a plan to Grant that was reminiscent of the one he devised at Rich Mountain: While Grant kept Price’s army near Iuka, Mississippi, occupied, Rosecrans would march his men around the Confederates and hit them with a surprise attack in the rear. If they were successful, Price’s army would be trapped between Grant and Rosecrans and utterly destroyed. Unfortunately, not all went according to plan. Some of Rosecrans’ men took a wrong road during their flanking march, which delayed the
While Rosecrans defeated Confederates commanded by Earl Van Dorn (opposite page) at the Battle of Corinth (depicted above) in early October 1862, the victory did little to repair the quickly crumbling relationship with his old friend—and superior officer— Ulysses S. Grant.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
the wisdom of his strategic suggestion would be proven when Stonewall Jackson exploited the uncoordinated, divided Union forces in the area during his famous Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862. Such a victory would have been “impossible,” Rosecrans later noted, had Stanton followed his plan.5 In May 1862, Rosecrans was reassigned to a command under Major General John Pope in Mississippi. When Pope soon thereafter headed east for his infamous and ill-fated career as head of the Army of Virginia, Rosecrans assumed control of the Army of the Mississippi, in which role he was subordinate to his old West Point friend Ulysses S. Grant, who both commanded the Army of the Tennessee and oversaw the military District of West Tennessee. Grant was at first delighted to have his old friend nearby. The two men greeted each other cordially, with 48 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2019
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
attack by a day. A breakdown in communication between Grant and Rosecrans further complicated matters. When Rosecrans began his attack on September 19, he fully expected that Grant would launch his assault—in the form of three Army of the Tennessee divisions commanded by Brigadier General Edward Ord—when he heard the sounds of Rosecrans’ guns. A northerly wind, however, may have caused an acoustic shadow, preventing the sounds of battle from reaching Grant and Ord, whose troops remained in place a few miles away and who learned of the fighting only after it was over. By day’s end, Price and his army, far from destroyed, had escaped by way of a road left unguarded by Union forces. While Grant praised his old friend in his first report of the Battle of Iuka (“I cannot speak too highly of the energy and skill displayed by General Rosecrans in the attack”), rumors that Grant had been drunk soon appeared in newspapers friendly to Rosecrans and began to poison relations between the two men.7 An even bigger problem than Price’s escape at Iuka was Van Dorn’s army. Reinforced by Price’s force, it soon moved to attack the strategically important, Union-occupied city of Corinth in northern Mississippi. Rosecrans, who had returned to Corinth after the fighting at Iuka, put a group of African-American laborers to work rebuilding the city’s fortifications in preparation for Van Dorn’s expected attack. On October 3, Van Dorn assaulted the Federal defenses north of the city, driving Rosecrans’ troops back to their inner works. “Things is workin’” was Rosecrans’ confident message to his staff at the end of the first day of fighting. True to his word, Rosecrans—through a combination of his own bravery, superior Union artillery, and the dogged tenacity of his troops—delivered a major blow on October 4 to the Confederates, sending them into full retreat by early afternoon. Believing that his exhausted army was outnumbered, Rosecrans did not begin pursuing the retreating Confederates until the 5th, only to be recalled by Grant a few days later despite Rosecrans’ pleas that he could take Jackson, Mississippi, and by implication Vicksburg if allowed to continue.8 By this point, Grant had lost all faith in his old friend. Not only was he critical of Rosecrans’ delayed pursuit at Corinth, but he continued to blame him for the negative newspaper reports that appeared in the wake of the Battle of Iuka. Remembering the harsh criticisms of his generalship after Shiloh, Grant and his staff were determined to punish anyone who threat-
ened his authority, even someone who had just won two important battles for the Union. Grant issued General Orders Number 88 on October 7, in which he both minimized Rosecrans’ achievements at Corinth and implicitly criticized Rosecrans and his men for the apparent strain that existed between them and the command of General Edward Ord. Rosecrans quickly took offense, writing Grant that there was “no foundation” for such an accusation. To Grant’s charges that his staff was spreading rumors about Grant, Rosecrans assured his superior that “no headquarters in these United States [are] less responsible for what newspaper correspondents … say of operations than mine.” Ultimately, only the timely intervention of President Lincoln, who in late October saw fit to promote Rosecrans to an independent command away from Grant, prevented the latter from relieving Old Rosy from duty. Although Rosecrans would always maintain they parted as friends, Grant’s retaliation was only the beginning of a decades-long feud between the two men, one that did neither of them any credit.9 On October 27, Rosecrans officially assumed Don Carlos Buell’s command—which had just been renamed the Army of the Cumberland— after Buell was relieved for his lackluster performance against Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee at the recently fought Battle of Perryville, Kentucky. The next month Rosecrans advanced his new force to Nashville and began repairing the railroad connecting the city to his main base of supply in Louisville. Rosecrans believed the railroad too brittle and susceptible to enemy cavalry raids to be relied upon, so he decided to accumulate 20 days of supplies in Nashville before advancing against Bragg’s forces near Murfreesboro. In a letter to his brother, Rosecrans admitted that he hoped “to induce the rebels to concentrate their forces and fight us near Nashville, thus saving the wear, tear, detachments and delays of pursuing them through the mountains and fighting them in force.” But with no sign of a Rebel attack on his position imminent, intense pressure from Washington urging him to advance, and his supplies gathered, Rosecrans finally prepared to move his army south toward his foe. His chief of staff, an old army friend and devout Catholic, Colonel Julius Garesché, however, prevailed upon Rosecrans to delay the march by one day so the troops could properly celebrate Christmas. On December 26, the army marched.10 After some skirmishing, Rosecrans’ and Bragg’s armies met each other head on outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on New Year’s Eve. 49 SUMMER 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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el cannonball as he rode alongside Rosecrans; his blood covered the uniform of the nearby commanding general. At a council of war he held that night to decide the army’s next move, Rosecrans resolved with his staff to stay on the field and fight it out the following day.11 Fortunately for the Army of the Cumberland, Bragg didn’t attack on January 1, allowing Rosecrans to reposition his troops and receive badly needed ammunition from Nashville. On January 2, Bragg renewed his assault but was bloodily repulsed by massed Union artillery. Through heavy rains Bragg retreated south to Tullahoma that night while Rosecrans’ forces moved a few days later to occupy Murfreesboro. “Thank God and our Lady for the victory,” he wrote to his wife. When he filed his official report of the battle in February, Rosecrans made sure to give “public acknowledgement due to Almighty God.” He ended his report with a Latin prayer from Psalm
After his January 1863 victory at the Battle of Stones River (depicted above) against Braxton Bragg (left) and the Army of Tennessee, Rosecrans was hailed as a hero in the northern press. “[A]t the present moment Gen. Rosecrans, if success be the standard, stands at the very head of the Union Generals,” declared The New York Times.
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ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BRAGG)
Rosecrans’ plan was for the left wing of his force to swing across Stones River and attack Bragg’s army by surprise on its right flank. However, Bragg’s plan also called for an attack against his enemy’s right flank, and Bragg struck first. Chaos ensued as attacking Confederates drove the soldiers comprising Rosecrans’ right wing into a hasty retreat that was saved from becoming a complete rout only by the dogged fighting of Union troops commanded by Brigadier General Philip Sheridan and by the arrival of reinforcements that Rosecrans had hurriedly dispatched to the scene. The situation was so desperate that Old Rosy personally rushed from crisis to crisis with his staff, using his personal charm and exhortation to urge his men to hold firm. As the men rode from one spot of danger to another, they were exposed to constant fire. Before the first day’s fighting was over, Colonel Garesché was decapitated by a Reb-
ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BRAGG)
113:9, “Non nobis Domine! Non nobis sed nomini tuo da both Lincoln and Stanton at their word and congloriam” (“Not to us, O Lord, not to us; but to thy stantly called for more supplies and men for his army, particularly additional cavalry and repeatname give glory”).12 While Rosecrans had suffered heavy casualties ing rifles to better deal with the more numerous at the Battle of Stones River and thus did not at- and experienced Confederate horseman who tempt a serious pursuit of Bragg, his triumph was opposed him. Although Rosecrans’ cavalry had an important one coming on the heels of horrible won a number of small engagements against their Union defeats at Fredericksburg in Virginia and Rebel counterparts during recent months, the near Vicksburg in Mississippi just weeks before. bulk of the Army of the Cumberland remained President Lincoln was especially grateful for the behind heavy fortifications, where the general developments in Tennessee. He wrote to Rose- hoped the Confederates would attack him as they crans on January 5, “God bless you and all with had at Corinth. As he wrote to Chase in mid-Janyou. Please tender to all, and accept for your- uary, “My view from the beginning has been that self, the Nation’s gratitude for yours, and their, it is cheaper and better for us to compel the enskill, endurance, and dauntless courage.” Both emy to come to us than for us to go to him. If we he and Secretary of War Stanton would person- can whip [him] at all we can whip him on ground ally promise to do anything they could to help that we know and understand.” When GenerRosecrans in the future. “Your country owes you al-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck urged him to adan immense debt,” wrote Rosecrans’ benefactor, vance, Rosecrans responded by arguing that the Salmon Chase, on January 6. “God grant that landscape that confronted him was “full of natuyou may quadruple the obligation.” The north- ral passes and fortifications and demands [a] suern press also heaped praise upon Rosecrans. perior force to advance with any success—What can you send?” Such missives Harper’s Weekly lauded him as soon destroyed the goodwill a strategist “second to none,” with the War Department he while The New York Times dehad won at Stones River. Even clared that “at the present mo“My view from the after his eventual advance in ment Gen. Rosecrans, if sucbeginning has been that June, Stanton and Halleck becess be the standard, stands it is cheaper and better for us to compel the enemy sieged him with admonitions at the very head of the Union to come to us than to move now.15 Generals.” The Catholic Herald for us to go to him. If we Rosecrans’ period of inacof Philadelphia held the genercan whip [him] at tivity in early 1863 not only al up as a role model for young all we can whip him on earned him the ire of his supeCatholics while hoping that his ground that we know riors, but has also drawn the victory at Stones River would and understand.” disdain of modern-day histoforce nativist northerners to rians, one of whom declared it renounce their religious preju“always required the largest of dices once and for all.13 In the coming months, Old Rosy further en- Archimedes’ levers” to get Old Rosy to move at deared himself to Republicans, especially those in all. Even though Rosecrans’ wasn’t the only army the party’s “Radical” faction, by writing fierce de- to sit idle for months at a time during the war, the nunciations of the anti-war Democrats known as criticism—then and now—is largely fair. An ear“Copperheads” and against the institution of slav- lier movement against the Confederates in Midery. “Slavery is dead,” Rosecrans informed Father dle Tennessee would only have helped Grant’s Edward Purcell, the editor of The Catholic Tele- army, which had begun its operations against graph, in April 1863. “Nothing can resuscitate it…. Vicksburg, and could have resulted in the deNo statesman will vindicate it, no friend of hu- feat of Bragg’s army before it was reinforced latman progress will stretch forth a hand to break its er that year by a force commanded by Lieutenfall, no lover of humanity and religion will grieve ant General James Longstreet. Still, Rosecrans for its overthrow.” These letters were soon wide- was making meaningful changes to the Army ly reprinted in papers throughout the North; the of the Cumberland, some of which would bear antislavery editor of the New York Tribune, Horace fruit even after his removal as its commander Greeley, even sent an intermediary to sound Rose- that October. When Halleck denied his request crans out for a possible presidential run in 1864.14 for new engineering regiments, Rosecrans enRosecrans spent most of the spring of 1863 re- listed black laborers as engineers and authorized organizing the Army of the Cumberland, stan- groups of artisans from various white regiments dardizing its regiments’ weapons, repairing the to form a “Pioneer Brigade” to support his army’s railroads that supplied it, and amassing supplies engineering and construction needs. Faced with in Murfreesboro prior to the resumption of his a shortage of cavalry, he created mounted infancampaign against Bragg, whose army now occu- try units. The resulting “Lightening Brigade,” pied Tullahoma in Middle Tennessee. He took commanded by Colonel John T. Wilder, would 51 SUMMER 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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UNITED STATES ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER, CARLISLE , PA
UNITED STATES ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER, CARLISLE , PA
The Tullahoma Campaign of 1863 saw Rosecrans (left) repeat his wellknown routine of caution and delay before eventual victory—followed by further caution and delay. It was a pattern that frustrated even Rosecrans’ allies in the army, including James A. Garfield, who criticized Old Rosy’s “slow progress” in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase that July.
perform admirably in the coming months. Rose- from Nashville and Louisville. Even Garfield crans also designed a mobile pontoon bridge sys- had had enough. On July 27, he wrote to Salmon tem for crossing rivers and a system of maps that Chase about their mutual friend, criticizing the relayed information from his regiments’ colonels army’s “slow progress” even if it meant doing “injustice to a good man and say[ing] … things which back to his headquarters.16 As he began to plan for his campaign against were better left unsaid.” Despite his growing list Bragg, Rosecrans received at his headquarters of critics, when Rosecrans finally began his adMajor General James A. Garfield, an ambitious vance against Bragg in August, he again outOhio politician who had joined the Union army maneuvered the Confederates, forcing them to in 1861 and whom Rosecrans would soon appoint abandon Chattanooga and leading to the capture as his chief of staff. The two men took to each of the important railway hub on September 10. other immediately, as evidenced by their letters Characteristically, Rosecrans celebrated this latto their wives. “General Rosecrans thinks rapidly est triumph in religious terms: “Request the most and strikes forward into action with the utmost Reverend Archbishop & his clergy to offer the diconfidence in his own judgement. In this he is vine Sacrifice for our success in the great cause perfectly unlike McClellan,” declared Garfield. of truth, justice, & human liberty,” he wrote to Rosecrans called Garfield “a very superior man” his wife.19 Flushed with success, constantly prodded by at the same time, telling his wife, “I like him.” Their growing friendship aside, the more aggres- the administration, and believing that Bragg’s sive Garfield would later lament the Army of the army was finally ripe for the taking, Rosecrans Cumberland’s relative inactivity and its com- threw caution to the wind and advanced his army mander’s “conservative and cautious” approach by three separate mountain passes well south of Chattanooga. By the time he to fighting the enemy.17 realized the trap that Bragg’s That summer, though, reinforced army had set for the Army of the Cumberland him, he only barely managed would see its faith in Rosecrans to get his own army back tovindicated by his brilliant cam“General Rosecrans gether and in fighting shape by paign of maneuver against thinks rapidly and strikes forward into September 19, when Bragg atBragg, which began on June 24 action with the tacked him near Chickamauga and became known as the Tulutmost confidence in Creek in northern Georgia. Aflahoma Campaign. Rosecrans his own judgement. ter holding his own on the first utilized a series of feints and In this he is perfectly day’s fighting despite being the local road network to move unlike McClellan.” outnumbered, Rosecrans reBragg out of his heavily fortisolved with his generals to fight fied positions. By July 3, Roseit out in the morning. On the crans’ force had—with remark20th, Rosecrans continually ably few casualties—all but liberated the remainder of Middle Tennessee and fed reinforcements to his men under Major Genstood poised to follow Bragg to Chattanooga and eral George H. Thomas on his left, dangerously capture it as well. This accomplishment, however, weakening his right. Late in the morning, a staff was overshadowed by the Union victories at Get- officer erroneously reported that there was a gap tysburg and Vicksburg in early July. Stanton tele- in the Union lines. Without checking, Rosecrans graphed him on the 7th: “Lee’s Army overthrown; hastily issued orders to General Thomas Wood to Grant victorious. You and your noble army now move his men to fill the non-existent gap, which have the chance to give the finishing blow to the in turn created a very real gap that Longstreet’s rebellion. Will you neglect the chance?” Rose- advancing Confederates exploited. In the ensucrans was predictably incensed: “You do not ing minutes, Rosecrans and a large portion of his appear to observe the fact that this noble army army were driven from the field in disarray.20 has driven the rebels from Middle Tennessee, of What happened next has been a subject for which my dispatches advised you. I beg in behalf debate ever since. While Thomas remained on of this army that the War Department may not the field, earning the sobriquet “Rock of Chickaoverlook so great an event because it is not writ- mauga” for holding off subsequent Confederate ten in letters of blood.”18 attacks and thereby allowing the eventual escape Again Rosecrans paused to repair the railroad, of the entire Army of the Cumberland, Rosecrans resupply his army, and prepare for his next move. retired to Chattanooga to secure his communicaAgain the government urged him to action. tions and prepare what was left of his forces to Again Rosecrans noted the increasingly difficult defend the city against the victorious Confederterrain he faced, his lack of sufficient cavalry, and ates, who soon occupied the surrounding heights the need to secure his supply lines, which had in- and besieged Union forces. Given his personal creased in length as his army got farther away bravery at Corinth and Stones River, it is hard 53 SUMMER 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Rosecrans habitually used himself badly in time of excitement. He never slept, he overworked himself, he smoked incessantly. At Iuka, at Corinth and Stone River, the stress of excitement did not exceed a week. His strong constitution could stand that, but at Chickamauga, this strain lasted a month and Rosecrans’ health was badly broken. Many of his best friends think that this accounts for his debatable order to Wood to close up promptly on Reynolds and support him, so written, ignorant of the situation and undoubtedly causing the loss of a great battle.21
Despite his two egregious mistakes at Chickamauga, Rosecrans still retained Lincoln’s confidence in the early days after the battle. The general’s usual optimism quickly returned; he called the overall campaign “substantially triumphant” in a letter to his wife on September 25. Now seriously outnumbered and with a weakened army, Rosecrans once again begged for reinforcements. This time the government listened, sending him two corps from the Army of the Potomac under Major General Joseph Hooker and, eventually, troops from Grant as well. Rosecrans made plans to relieve and resupply his men and attack the Confederates. Unfortunately, negative reports from subordinates, including Garfield and especially Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, soon undermined his standing with Lincoln. His calls for help were interpreted as evidence of his willingness to abandon Chattanooga and forfeit the gains of his campaign. When Grant was given command of the newly formed Military Division of the Mississippi, effectively placing him in control of all Union military efforts in the war’s western theater, Lincoln did not stop him from promptly replacing Rosecrans on October 19. Too embarrassed to meet his men, Rosecrans left in the middle of the night to Cincinnati to await further orders. Grant would soon execute Rosecrans’ plan to open the so-called “Cracker Line,” ultimately driving Bragg’s forces back into Georgia by the end of November.22
Rosecrans was given a second chance to prove himself in late January 1864, when he was put in command of the Department of Missouri. Beset by constant guerrilla warfare between Unionists and pro-Confederate bushwhackers, Rosecrans’ new command was an impossible one. His selfconfessed political “naiveté” was on full display when he bragged to his wife about upsetting conservatives in the state legislature on his arrival. Soon the radicals would be upset at him as well for not prosecuting pro-southern sympathizers strongly enough. He unsuccessfully tried to convince the Lincoln administration of the danger posed by the Order of American Knights, a secret society supposedly bent on overturning the federal government in the Midwest. Despite these early troubles in adjusting to his new command, Rosecrans’ residual popularity was great enough that he was considered briefly as Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 presidential election.23 Yet Rosecrans’ difficulties in Missouri did not let up. His superior officers repeatedly stripped his command of troops, leaving him with few men to fend off Major General Sterling Price’s Confederate invasion of the state in September. That Rosecrans managed to do so was made possible only by his foresight in recruiting 12 regiments of one-year volunteers and delaying the departure of troops meant for other stations, including General A.J. Smith’s XVI Corps. Despite this, Grant criticized Rosecrans for hoarding troops while not dealing Price a significant enough defeat, even though the Confederates never again seriously threatened the state. When asked by Stanton on December 2 where Rosecrans might be reassigned, Grant responded: “Rosecrans will do less harm doing nothing than on duty. I know no department or army commander deserving such punishment as the infliction of Rosecrans on them.”24 A few days later Rosecrans was officially relieved of duty. He would spend the remainder of the war at his home in Cincinnati awaiting a future assignment, which never came. Rosecrans was particularly incensed to have been relieved a second time “without a single official, or private reason ever having been communicated to me for this treatment.” Garfield, still his friend, helped arrange for him to give testimony before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War in April 1865, where Rosecrans attempted to repair his name while drawing attention to what he considered his unjust removal. He also composed a 28-page narrative of his wartime service, which, while admittedly self-serving, nonetheless accurately pointed out
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
to see this action as one of simple cowardice, as his detractors alleged, although Rosecrans clearly should have remained on the field. Calling the hours after Longstreet’s breakthrough “the most trying and anxious period of my life,” Rosecrans sought solace in prayer and the attention of his personal chaplain, Father Jeremiah Trecy. Long, hard-working days with little sleep had clearly worn Rosecrans down and affected his judgment. As his friend and former cavalry commander David Sloane Stanley recalled later:
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
Rosecrans’ subpar performance at the Battle of Chickamauga (pictured above)—where Major General George H. Thomas (opposite page) would save the Army of the Cumberland from complete disaster—marked the beginning of the end of his Civil War military career. By the end of 1864, Rosecrans was back home in Ohio awaiting a future assignment that would never come.
his many accomplishments in all of the war’s major theaters. In 1866, over the objection of his implacable enemy Grant, he received a brevet promotion to major general in the regular army in tribute to his performance at Stones River.25 Rosecrans left the army in 1867 in order to pay off his debts and pursue fame, fortune, and redemption in the western U.S. and Mexico in various mining, land, and railroad ventures. Although postwar success in business proved elusive, he was elected to Congress in 1880, serving two terms as the San Francisco district’s representative. And his feud with Grant continued. In 1885, while serving as chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs, Rosecrans unwisely tried to block a pension bill for the dying ex-president. Grant got the last laugh in his famous Memoirs, however, with harsh and largely inaccurate criticisms of his former friend’s generalship. Rosecrans died in California in March
1898 at age 78, outliving Grant by nearly 13 years. Rosecrans is remembered today more for his failures and weaknesses than his triumphs, personal courage, or gifts. Too often, he has been summarily dismissed with a citation to Grant’s biased memoirs, his string of victories from the summer of 1861 to the summer of 1863 unfairly ignored. The courage he displayed as a fierce opponent of slavery, at a time when most northern Catholics and Democrats hated abolition more than the peculiar institution, has been all but forgotten as well. Certainly Rosecrans did himself no favors by repeatedly refusing to write his own memoirs, largely confining his public writings on the war to a few published essays and one article. Still, despite his many shortcomings as a person and at Chickamauga, Rosecrans deserves to be understood on his own merits—and in his own words, which are available in letters at the UCLA Library Special Collections ☛ } CONT. ON P. 75 55 SUMMER 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Union soldiers charged with keeping the peace in civilian areas faced a different
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kind of warfare marked by its own struggles and dangers.
BY A N D R E W F. L A N G
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
This 1861 lithograph provides a bird’s-eye view of the camp of the 7th Maine Infantry at Patterson Park in Baltimore, Maryland, a city occupied by Union forces within weeks of the outbreak of the Civil War.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
At first glance, Edward S. Hall’s May 1861 pencil sketch of the federal military occupation of Baltimore appears to suggest that the dawn of civil war had hardly touched the great Maryland city on the Chesapeake Bay. It seems to indicate that Baltimore might even be spared from the calamities of a war that would kill 750,000 men, maim and injure millions more, devastate incomprehensible amounts of property, and collapse the nation’s most profitable industry—while simultaneously liberating 4 million enslaved people. Although a southern slaveholding state and home to a small coterie of Fire-Eating secessionists, Maryland refrained from joining the Confederate rebellion of 1861, due in large measure to the occupation of the state’s largest city in the early days of the conflict. Indeed, merely one month after the war’s opening engagement at Fort Sumter, and two months before the fateful battle at Bull Run, Hall’s sketch hints that, as early as May 1861, the war might well pass Maryland by. Yet art can be deceiving, fixed in its own prescribed time and context, and measured by the still completion of the artist’s tranquil pen. As a professional artist whose drawings documented the advent of the Civil War for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Hall did not intend to mislead the viewer. He rather sought to capture a moment in which Union soldiers quietly labored behind the lines to enforce federal authority during the war’s first moments.1 And indeed, Hall accurately captured what appeared to be order, peace, and calm throughout the Chesapeake. But in so doing, his sketch also implies that zones of military occupation were free from conflict, liberated from the presence of massive armies, and absolved from the destructive conflagration of battle. Hall’s rendition of occupation thus neglects perhaps the single greatest challenge of the entire American Civil War: waging the uncertain aftermath of invasion.
E DWA R D S. H A L L , “O C C U PAT I O N O F BA LT I M O R E” ( 1 86 1 ) , C O U RT E SY T H E B EC K E R C O L L ECT I O N
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Edward S. Hall’s May 1861 pencil sketch of the early days of the Union military occupation of Baltimore imparts a sense of tranquility and order. In truth, the city would experience its share of uncertainty and conflict during the balance of the war.
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Invading foreign territories in pursuit of national military objectives, and defeating enemy armies upon the field of battle, posed great difficulties for 19th-century American armies. It was likewise vastly complicated to occupy territories and peoples hostile to the invaders’ presence. Union armies during the American Civil War did not merely engage Confederate forces in open battle, waging the grand, romantic campaigns of national lore. Approximately one-third of Union soldiers also occupied the Confederate States of America and even portions of the loyal slaveholding South, populating scores of garrisons across an antagonistic landscape. There, the uncertain and often confusing dynamics of military occupation exposed Union soldiers to a unique kind of warfare waged far beyond the front lines, one that few volunteers imagined when they enlisted in the armed forces.2 And it all began in Baltimore. Hall’s work might indeed reveal a composed, serene wartime landscape. But what occurred in Baltimore a few weeks prior to the sketch’s production foreshadowed the twin challenges of invasion and occupation. Long before belligerent armies could meet on the battlefield, the enslaved had a military haven to escape to, or grisly casualty lists consumed the national consciousness, Union soldiers experienced the complicated and unpredictable trials of invading territory unfriendly to the federal Union. It is here that Edward S. Hall’s drawing offers a window into the turbulent first days of the Civil War, while also introducing the broader challenge of military occupation, a problem that would plague United States armies for the remainder of the conflict and in wars ever since.
On April 18, 1861—four days after the surrender of Fort Sumter, three days after President Abraham Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to squash the rebellion, and one day after Virginia seceded, the 6th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Militia paraded triumphantly along the avenues of New York City before resuming its rail journey to Washington to join a swelling Union army. Confident and cocky, the Massachusetts soldiers were headed first to Baltimore, one of the South’s finest cities, to change trains for the final leg of their journey to defend the nation’s capital. Yet rumors circulated throughout the city that the men might not be allowed a peaceful transfer. Although most of Maryland’s citizens had opposed secession, many were also appalled at Lincoln’s recent call for troops, an ostensible admission that the administration sought war against Maryland’s slaveholders. A mix of secessionists and rabblerousers, many of them armed, thus pledged not to let the Yankee invaders pass through Baltimore
F.O.C. Darley’s “Massachusetts Militia Passing Through Baltimore” depicts the bloody clash between Union troops and pro-secessionist locals on April 19, 1861—an event that foreshadowed the twin challenges of invasion and occupation during the Civil War.
THE WAR WITH THE SOUTH (1862)
11
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THE WAR WITH THE SOUTH (1862)
“[The soldiers] increased their step to double-quick, which seemed to infuriate the mob, as it evidently impressed them with the idea that the soldiers dare not fire...; pistol shots were numerously fired into the ranks, and one soldier fell dead. The order, ‘Fire!’ was given, and it was executed; in consequence, several of the mob fell, and the soldiers again advanced hastily.”
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away. I saw four fall on the sidewalk at one time. They followed us up, and we fought our way to the other depot—about one mile. They kept at us till the cars started. Quite a number of the rascals were shot, after we entered the cars. We went very slow, for we expected the rails were torn up on the road.”5 The Massachusetts soldiers, now securely on the train for Washington, soon departed for the safety of the capital. What might be considered the first skirmish of the Civil War ended with four dead Union soldiers, 12 dead civilians, and an additional 36 troops and nearly 50 civilians wounded.6 In a war that would come to be distinguished by the bloody killing fields of Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg, the inaugural fight in the streets of Baltimore seemed to be more a disjointed donnybrook than a precursor to those large-scale engagements and their nearly 100,000 combined casualties. But the Baltimore riot did nevertheless foreshadow the complications of invasion, including the turbulent interactions between Union military forces and hostile southern civilians. It was becoming clear that a war of occupation might well be necessary to secure victory and preserve the Union. This realization, however, contradicted the plans of high-ranking generals, who had criticized the premise of conquering and holding territory. As early as March 1861, General-in-Chief Winfield Scott warned against a protracted war of occupation, fearing that Union forces might become mired indefinitely in the hostile South. A successful occupation, Scott warned, would take years to complete, require hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and yield an “enormous waste of human life to the North.” Moreover, wars of invasion and subjugation frequently inspired hatred and vengeance between victor and vanquished, undermining the ultimate goal of a national reunion. And in the process, the United States might well transform into a military leviathan, unintentionally shattering the democratic republic that was the envy of the world. “Fifteen devastated Provinces,” Scott predicted, referring to the nation’s 15 slaveholding states, would replace semi-sovereign states, “held for generations by heavy garrisons,” bleeding dry the federal treasuries and burdening a once free citizenry with taxation to sustain a standing military state.7 Yet the contingencies of war and the immediate memories of Baltimore shattered Scott’s desire for a limited, bloodless conflict. What might happen if, in the attempt to prevent future incursions by the Union army, Maryland seceded and joined the Confederacy? Losing that state would mean that the United States capital was surrounded on all sides by a newly declared foreign nation, subsumed by enemy forces, and isolated from the very republic over which it claimed le-
In the wake of the Baltimore riot, the Lincoln administration—balancing wishes for a bloodless conflict with the desire to prevent Maryland from seceding from the Union—authorized a military occupation of the state. Soon after, the 6th Massachusetts Militia (shown here bivouacked in Monument Square in July 1861) returned to the streets of Baltimore as a symbolic gesture of federal authority.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
toward their rendezvous at Washington. Because Baltimore’s two train stations had no direct rail connection, horses were to pull the Massachusetts soldiers’ rail cars across town after the regiment arrived at the city’s President Street Station on April 19. As they began the trek, they were met with taunts and insults from a ballooning mob that blocked the cars. Then, in an act reminiscent of the one that preceded the socalled Boston Massacre of 1770, someone in the crowd launched a stone at one of the soldiers’ cars, unleashing chaos. The more than 200 Massachusetts soldiers—who had already left the cars, determined to continue on foot—formed into what seemed to be two battle columns. Though they attempted to project a daunting presence, these citizen soldiers had no formal military training and had been in uniform for less than a week. Likely terrified, they nonetheless approached the throng, hoping to scatter the rabid locals. But the civilian horde resisted the soldiers’ steady advances. Ultimately, the blue-clad northerners were compelled to fire warning shots into the air, which inspired the opposite of their intended effect. The restive crowd then flung bricks, hurled stones, tossed bottles, and finally opened fire on the Union soldiers, who responded in kind.3 Edward Jones, the colonel of the 6th Massachusetts, described the incident in his official report: The regiment “proceeded to march in accordance with orders, and had proceeded but a short distance before [it was] furiously attacked by a shower of missiles, which came faster as [it] advanced. [The soldiers] increased their step to double-quick, which seemed to infuriate the mob, as it evidently impressed them with the idea that the soldiers dare not fire...; pistol shots were numerously fired into the ranks, and one soldier fell dead. The order, ‘Fire!’ was given, and it was executed; in consequence, several of the mob fell, and the soldiers again advanced hastily. The Mayor of Baltimore placed himself at the head of [our] column ... and proceeded with [us] a short distance ... begging ... not to let the men fire; but the mayor’s patience was soon exhausted, and he seized a musket from the hands of one of the men, and killed ... [a member of the mob] therewith.”4 Captain Albert S. Follansbee of the 6th Massachusetts echoed his colonel’s account: “As soon as the order was given, the brick-bats began to fly into our ranks from the mob. I called a policeman, and requested him to lead the way to the depot. He did so. After we had marched about a hundred yards, we came to a bridge. The rebels had torn up most of the planks. We had to play ‘Scotch hop,’ to get over it. As soon as we had crossed the bridge, they commenced to fire upon us from the street and houses. I ordered the men to protect themselves; and then we returned their fire, and laid a great many of them 62 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2019
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“ I am afraid we shall not get a chance to see a bit of a fight. We marched through this notoriously secession City entirely unmolested. [T]he secession party here now dare not say a word as they are entirely at our mercy.... [W]e make quite a formidable appearance.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
JOHN CORDEN, 6TH MICHIGAN INFANTRY
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[T]his Capital … [g]eographically … lies surrounded by the soil of Maryland; and mathematically the necessity exists that they [Union soldiers] should come over her territory. Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air. There is no way but to march across, and that they must do. But in doing this there is no need of collision. Keep your rowdies in Baltimore, and there will be no bloodshed. Go home and tell your people that if they will not attack us, we will not attack them; but if they do attack us, we will return it, and that severely.
In a hurried attempt to maintain the state’s loyalty, Lincoln soon authorized a federal military occupation of Maryland, suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the state, imprisoned a prosecession newspaper editor, and arrested several public officials and members of the state legislature suspected of harboring Confederate sympathies. Soon after, the 6th Massachusetts Militia returned to the streets of Baltimore as a symbolic gesture of federal authority.8 By May 1861, Union military forces had established a permanent occupation of the city that would last the entire war. Benjamin F. Butler, an ambitious Massachusetts politician who used his prewar political connections to secure a generalship in the Union army, was charged with pacifying the city and establishing a functioning occupation. Butler sought to “revenge” what he called “the cowardly attack made upon” his fellow Massachusetts soldiers earlier in the spring. And, as he later wrote in his memoirs, “I desired to keep that promise.” Butler promptly went to work fortifying both the interior of the city and the surrounding countryside with troops and heavy cannon, while also guarding entry into Baltimore Harbor and limiting civilian access to the railroads. Butler’s efforts, embodied by his declaration to local residents that he “had come there to stay,” were as effective as they were swift.9 Union troops occupying Baltimore noticed the changing sentiments of the city’s residents as they came to terms with their northern visitors. Charles Blake, a soldier in the 12th Maine Infantry, noted in June, “when we arrived in Maryland we began to feel that we were in an enemys country.... Before [arriving] we [received] ten cartridges and we loaded our guns so as to be ready for any emer-
gency, and as we drew near Baltimore we examined our pieces to see that they were all in shooting order, and then we waited for the onslaught.” With stories of the April riot undoubtedly fresh in their minds, Blake and his comrades expected the worst from their civilian enemies. “But there was no fight,” he concluded, “for General Butlers men were in town and evry thing was quiet.”10 By September, as the war escalated elsewhere, Baltimore seemed pacified. “Secession is dieing very fast,” noted John Corden, a member of the 6th Michigan Infantry. “I am afraid we shall not get a chance to see a bit of a fight.” He continued, “We marched through this notoriously secession City entirely unmolested[. T]he secession party here now dare not say a word as they are entirely at our mercy.... [W]e make quite a formidable appearance.” Other occupying soldiers, even if they noticed Confederate sympathizers, remarked that their presence was hardly threatening, due principally to the Union army’s position. “We are Encampt about in the Center of the City,” wrote another 6th Michigan soldier in September, “[and when we arrived] we was greeted at most every corner of the street by Rebels Hurrahing for Jeff Davis.” Still he felt secure, “for there is about 40,000 men here [and our guns] are all turned uppon the city.”11 It indeed appeared that order had been restored to the city, as reflected in Edward Hall’s sketch of occupied Baltimore. New York attorney and diarist George Templeton Strong traveled through Baltimore in late May and noted the seeming calm that had befallen its once chaotic streets: “Baltimore, that nest of traitors and assassins, was traversed in peace. There were crowds at the corners of the streets watching the trains. They were looking out for the troops that were in a train we passed on a turn-off at Havre de Grace. But the crowd was silent and innocuous, for Fort McHenry is now strongly reinforced and Federal Hill is white with the tents of government troops.”12 But the appearance of peace in the midst of war was merely that: an appearance. Military occupation during the Civil War represented an independent war unto itself. As 1861 morphed into 1862, the mere presence of Union armies, carrying the banner of federal authority, did not naturally convince rebellious white southerners to renounce their secessionist ways. It became clear that a defined process of the occupation of Confederate communities would be required to secure victory.13 Hall’s sketch of occupied Baltimore could not capture these complicated dynamics. Soldiers depicted in his drawing were some of the first Union troops to face the problems of wartime occupation, experiences that would soon be repeated by northern volunteers throughout the occupied Confederacy. As Frank Peck, a soldier in the 12th Massachusetts Infantry—the first
HARPER’S WEEKLY
gitimacy. In a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote on April 20 to Maryland governor Thomas H. Hicks and Baltimore mayor George W. Brown, the president declared that “[p]reserving the peace of Maryland” stood among his principal objectives. Two days later, while addressing a delegation of Baltimore citizens visiting the White House, Lincoln explained the centrality of Maryland to the Union war effort and the necessity of maintaining peace throughout the state:
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HARPER’S WEEKLY
As the war entered its second year, the mere presence of Union armies— in Baltimore and other occupied areas throughout the South—did not naturally convince rebellious white southerners to renounce their secessionist ways. Right: In this sketch from Harper’s Weekly, a pro-secessionist woman flaunts her allegiance by donning a Confederate flag apron while walking past Union troops in the streets of Baltimore.
Union regiment to march into New Orleans in May 1862—wrote of the civilians he encountered, “You cant feel as we do who have for six months been in the midst of people who would rejoice to see every one of us in the bottom of the sea, and who are merely conquered [but] not converted.” Peck would come to deplore occupying New Orleans, admitting, “[this] isnt what I enlisted for.”14 Or consider Cyrus Boyd of the 15th Iowa Infantry, who, while on occupation duty in Holly Springs, Mississippi, encountered someone who did not appear to be a traditional enemy. A local woman approached Boyd, pleading for protection of her property and children. “I told her not to fear as no man would disturb her,” Boyd explained. “This evening this same woman was arrested for shooting one of our men who was on guard.... She cowardly shot him although he was guarding her property.”15 Boyd’s vignette underscores how Union sol-
diers across the occupied Confederacy interacted with civilian-enemies who did not wear a Confederate uniform. Indeed, occupying armies throughout the ages have inspired fierce, violent, and clandestine resistance—and the Civil War was no different. Union soldiers learned that a surreptitious southern enemy stalked federal armies, employing any means necessary to repel the invaders. An unrestrained war unfolded within the more sanctioned conflict waged by otherwise civilized belligerents—and in many respects, the Baltimore riot of 1861 might well be considered the inauguration of guerrilla conduct during the Civil War. This conflict, waged far beyond the front lines, had few rules and perpetuated chaotic violence. Union soldier John M. King, whose regiment occupied Middle Tennessee, described the civilian insurgents who swarmed the lines around Nashville. “The citizens were all rebel in sympathy and to guard those magazines and ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76 65 SUMMER 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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ALLSTAR PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
BOOKS & AUTHORS
The Best Civil War Movies of All Time for our recent newsstand-only special issue The Civil War Almanac, we asked a number of Civil War historians for their opinions on a variety of popular topics, including the war’s most overrated and underrated commanders, top turning points, and most influential women. Space constraints prevented us from including the full answers to one of the questions: What are the 10 best Civil War movies? Here are the complete lists of two of our participants, which illustrate that successful historical films rely on a good story well told. Cold Mountain
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B&A
Following a private screening at the White House, P r e s i d e n t Wo o d r o w Wilson allegedly said that D.W. Griffith’s blockbuster was “like writing history with lightning” and lamented that the film’s plot—which included black rapists, incompetent black politicians, avaricious Yankee villains, and heroes decked in the regalia of the Ku Klux Klan—was “all so terribly true.” Despite its gross historical inaccuracies, the film served as a rallying cry for proponents of Jim Crow segregation and spawned false understandings of Reconstruction that continue to reverberate. 3. THE CIVIL WAR (1990)
b 1. GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)
I have defined “best” here as the films, TV programs, or documentaries that have wielded the greatest influence over how Americans understand, imagine, and remember the Civil War. Thus, in tandem with Margaret Mitchell’s novel, which was an international sensation in its own right, Victor Fleming’s magnum opus has unquestionably done—and continues to do—more to influence the way multiple generations of Americans remember the Civil War and its causes than any other piece of popular fiction. Unfortunately, that influence involved propagating the idea of happy, loyal slaves and caricatured, untrustworthy Yankees in the lead-up to the civil rights movement.
Ken Burns’ nine-episode documentary series made Shelby Foote a household name, introduced David McCullough’s now iconic voice to television history, and combined new— but ironically quite simple—camera techniques with an unforgettable soundtrack to change what Americans expect from historical documentaries. Despite its flaws and charges of Lost Cause-ism, The Civil War was a TV phenomenon that has stood the test of time; it remains the gold standard of Civil War documentaries. 4. GLORY (1989)
If assessed only for cinematic and technical qualities, Glory would likely be the finest motion picture on this list. Chronicling the formation of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry led by Robert Gould Shaw and culminating with the regiment’s heroic service at Fort Wagner, the film illustrated for the
first time the major contributions and sacrifices of black soldiers to the Union war effort—and landed a serious blow in American pop culture against the mythology of the Lost Cause. 5. GETTYSBURG (1993)
It can be campy at times (think Robert E. Lee strolling dreamily through wildflowers), but coming on the heels of Ken Burns’ documentary, Ron Maxwell’s film adapted Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels (1974) to show audiences the moving parts and gory results of a major Civil War battle as they’d never seen before on the big screen. Moreover, the movie featured standout performances from Tom Berenger, Stephen Lang, Richard Jordan, Jeff Daniels, Sam Elliott, and Kevin Conway. 6. THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES (1976)
Clint Eastwood’s iconic role as a Missouri farmer-turned-bushwhacker showed another side of the Civil War: It introduced millions of American moviegoers to the guerrilla conflict. And in spite of some cringeworthy dialogue (e.g., Wales’ and Indian chief Ten Bears’ “words of life and death”), the film does get quite a bit right about irregular violence and its aftermath. It was later revealed that the book upon which the film was based had been penned by Gone with the Wind
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ROBBY HENSON
2. THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915)
SPORTSPHOTO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Matthew Christopher Hulbert
none other than exiled segregationist Asa Earl Carter, who had borrowed significantly from the little-known historical account of real-life bushwhacker William Wilson.
That said, no primary evidence exists to suggest that Noland—or any other slaves—fought voluntarily for the Confederate cause and to maintain their enslavement.
7. THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE (1951)
9. NORTH AND SOUTH (1986)
Based on the book by Stephen Crane and directed by Hollywood legend John Ford, the film featured Audie Murphy (who happened to be the most decorated American veteran of World War II) as a soldier struggling to cope with cowardice and the ferocity of Civil War combat. It provided a darker look at manhood and the futility of war at a time when many other war pictures fit snugly into a mold of triumphant American exceptionalism.
Americans of a certain age will recall that North and South, essentially a soap opera based on the coming of the Civil War, constituted a legitimate TV sensation. The miniseries format attracted viewers unlikely to sit through a documentary or more traditional war film—and actually dealt thoughtfully with issues of slavery and gender.
ROBBY HENSON
SPORTSPHOTO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
8. RIDE WITH THE DEVIL (1999)
Ang Lee’s 1999 adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel Woe to Live On (1987) follows a group of Confederate bushwhackers in the Missouri-Kansas borderlands. Much of the picture is historically on point; indeed, it is by far the most accurate and complete portrayal of Civil War guerrilla violence on film. The film’s deepest flaw is its treatment of Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), a slave who hides out with the guerrillas and participates in the Lawrence Massacre. The character is based on a real-life slave named John Noland.
James Marten:
10. THE HORSE SOLDIERS (1959)
Starring John Wayne and William Holden, the second John Ford film on the list abandons the darker elements of the war to focus on the glories of soldiering and the romance of reunion. As a sort of fusion of The Quiet Man (1952) and The Searchers (1956), it features comedic breaks in the form of drunken Irish sergeants and boy-soldiers spanked on the battlefield, daring cavalry charges (which Wayne’s horse did not appear to appreciate), and melodramatic backstories. The film’s conclusion involves Wayne’s character, a colonel in the Union cavalry, falling in love with a southern belle—a silver screen reaffirmation of the sociopolitical alliances outlined by historian David Blight in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). MATTHEW CHRISTOPHER HULBERT IS THE AUTHOR OR EDITOR OF THREE BOOKS, INCLUDING THE GHOSTS OF GUERRILLA MEMORY: HOW CIVIL WAR BUSHWHACKERS BECAME GUNSLINGERS IN THE AMERICAN WEST (UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS, 2016), WHICH WON THE 2017 WILEY-SILVER PRIZE. BEGINNING IN THE FALL OF 2019, HE WILL BE AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY AT HAMPDEN-SYDNEY COLLEGE IN VIRGINIA.
Pharaoh’s Army
b 1. PHARAOH’S ARMY (1995)
This is a riveting, well-acted, and atmospheric account of a small squad of Union cavalrymen (led by an officer heartachingly played by Chris Cooper) who are forced to take over the farm being managed by the wife of an absent Confederate soldier. Although there are moments of empathy and a kind of attraction develops temporarily between the officer and the farmwife, the movie recognizes the 69 SUMMER 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Impossible not to include in a list of best Civil War movies, Lincoln transcends an “inside baseball” approach to legislating emancipation and a bit of Spielbergian overreach. Daniel Day-Lewis offers the kind of Lincoln that Americans want to believe in, and that most historians found palatable. 3. GLORY (1989)
Although it doesn’t completely avoid romanticizing the contributions of African-American soldiers, this remains a moving narrative of sacrifice and ideology, with terrific battle scenes and great acting. It’s particularly effective in presenting the ambiguity in the relationships between the Union army’s white officers and black common soldiers. 4. COLD MOUNTAIN (2003)
Based on Charles Frazier’s award-winning 1997 novel, Cold Mountain’s vivid imagery, excellent cast, and compelling vignettes drive a narrative that covers all the bases of the southern home front: hardship and loyalty, greed and disaffection, confusion and heartbreak. Despite probably trying to do too much, it all rings true. However, after enduring all of Confederate deserter W.P. Inman’s extraordinary adventures and close calls, the viewer deserves a happier ending.
Based on Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, this film captures some of the charm of its source novel—especially in the personalities of the main characters—and overcomes a great deal of earnest speechifying and appalling facial hair to give us a sense of how a Civil War battle might have looked and why men fought. It’s not exactly Saving Private Ryan, but it is effective when taken on its own terms. 6. THE BEGUILED (1971)
A candidate for the creepiest Civil War movie ever made, this one features a youngish Clint Eastwood as a wounded Union soldier being seduced and, in turn, seducing various members of a household of southern women and girls. Although not particularly useful in helping viewers understand the war, it does present a band of women that could be seen as a somewhat through-the-looking-glass version of the ladies featured in the famous 1864 paint-
ing of the funeral of a Confederate cavalry officer, The Burial of Latané: Both portray women trying to manage in a world without men. 7. THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915)
The movie’s technical sophistication (for its time), complicated story line (featuring more nuanced versions of the relationship between the North and South than many movies), impressive battle scenes, and sweeping narrative almost balance out its appalling racism. But even that provides somber teachable moments for those studying the racial politics and culture of not only the Civil War and Reconstruction but also the era in which the movie was made. 8. SHENANDOAH (1965)
A favorite of mine since childhood, Shenandoah suffers from a little wooden acting by supporting characters and a few unlikely scenarios. (When do these white non-slaveowners actually do the work on this huge and ap-
The Birth of a Nation
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KATHY DANIEL PATTERSON
2. LINCOLN (2012)
5. GETTYSBURG (1993)
MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
difficulty of either reconciliation or sympathy between North and South, even at the micro level, and understands that violence is sometimes the easiest, if unhappiest, resolution.
parently prosperous farm of theirs?) But its flaws fail to completely overwhelm some useful points related to disaffection, Confederate tax policies, and the fog of war. And Jimmy Stewart does a classic slow burn as the doggedly determined, apolitical farmer whose family is nearly destroyed by the conflict. 9. MAJOR DUNDEE (1965)
Fe a t u r i n g C h a rl to n Heston and Richard Harris, this was one of Sam Peckinpah’s first directorial efforts. Implausible, messy, and famously plagued with on-set and post-production problems, it’s on my list because it brings together several disparate and unusual historic threads: the war in the far western theater, the use of “galvanized” Yankees to fight Indians, the ongoing Indian wars that eastern-obsessed Civil War buffs usually ignore, and the invasion of Mexico by French troops during the 1860s.
Another film from my childhood, Journey to Shiloh follows seven cocky Texans as they travel to join the Confederate army before the Battle of Shiloh. It’s not a great movie, but a useful one. Its clumsy anti-war message—all but one of the boys die from a variety of accidents and fights along the way and in the battle itself—is notable coming just three years after the war’s centennial. And, in one of his first movies, Harrison Ford plays one of the unfortunate young men. KATHY DANIEL PATTERSON
MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
10. JOURNEY TO SHILOH (1968)
JAMES MARTEN IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY AND A FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY OF CIVIL WAR HISTORIANS. HIS MOST RECENT BOOKS ARE SING NOT WAR: THE LIVES OF UNION AND CONFEDERATE VETERANS IN GILDED AGE AMERICA (2011) AND AMERICA’S CORPORAL: JAMES TANNER IN WAR AND PEACE (2014).
The B&A Q&A Larry J. Daniel in may, the University of North Carolina Press published Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed by historian Larry J. Daniel. The book—Daniel’s seventh Civil War title—focuses on the inner workings of the Confederacy’s key western army, offering a reassessment of the force’s performance and fate. We recently sat down with Daniel to learn more about his research. You’ve written several books about the Army of Tennessee. How is Conquered different? Three of my six books have been traditional battlefield histories: Island No. 10: Struggle for the Mississippi Valley (1996), Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War (1997), and Battle of Stones River: The Forgotten Conflict between the Confederate Army of Tennessee and the Union Army of the Cumberland (2012). While I do go into grand strategy and operational movements in Conquered, I chose to take a broader war and society approach. I did this for two reasons. First, I wanted to go beyond the battlefield to balance the argument. Second, I wanted to avoid my book simply being an updated extension of Thomas Connelly’s epic two-volume history of the Army of Tennessee, Army of the Heartland (1967) and Autumn of Glory (1971). It is hard to believe that Connelly’s work is now 50 years old. He took a topdown, high command approach. I saw this as an opportunity to take a fresh look at the subject. I was forced to cut 130 pages from the original manuscript (one of the painful realities of publishing today), so I could not spend time simply rehashing standard battlefield narratives. In that respect, I followed the ex-
Larry J. Daniel
ample of Joseph T. Glatthaar’s study of the Army of Northern Virginia, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (2009), as a model. I hope I did not shortchange the battles, but I wanted to explore new dimensions and keep the book to a single volume. Why, as you note in the book’s subtitle, did the Army of Tennessee fail? Connelly’s answer to that question was inept generals and a dysfunctional command structure; he was partially correct. I contend that the failure of the army was much more complicated and went beyond personalities. There were competing influences that affected the army’s culture, including religion, the politics of race, sectionalism, the intrinsic connection with Mississippi (which siphoned off manpower and protected the Army of Tennessee’s flank), the inability of geography (the Cumberland Mountains, the Tennessee River, etc.) to stop the Army of the Cumberland, and the breakdown of the home front, which added tremendous stresses on the ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72 71 SUMMER 2019 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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soldiers, to mention a few. I wanted to examine the army’s and region’s DNA to get to the root causes of failure. What sources did you find particularly useful or important in your research? No one can truly understand the personality of the Army of Tennessee without delving into the letters and diaries of its soldiers. Only then can the reader grasp how their loyalties ebbed and flowed during the war. Unfortunately, students of the western theater face a particular challenge when it comes to sources. Unlike the Army of Northern Virginia, about which there is a huge store of extant resources, many in Richmond’s The American Civil War Museum alone, the primary sources for the Army of Tennessee are scattered from Texas to Ohio. While all of the Alabama Civil War newspapers are online, several important Georgia papers are not. Researchers of the western theater should be prepared to cast a wide net for sources. The group Historians of the Civil War Western Theater has been a tremendous asset in my research. Its members meet annually as a kind of think tank to discuss the latest scholarship, talk about our current projects, and share sources. The value of networking with historians such as Tim Smith, Dave Powell, Sam Elliott, John Marszalek, James Lee McDonough, Richard McMurry, Brian Wills, and Steven Woodworth cannot be underestimated. Did you learn anything about the Army of Tennessee that surprised you? William W. Freehling’s 2001 book, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War, was an eye-opener for me. Kentucky contributed 25,000 troops to the Confederacy and 50,000 to the Union, but 187,000 Kentuckians of military age sat out the war. The state’s feeble response to the Confederacy, I contend, hurt the Army of Tennessee more than the de facto loss of border state Maryland hurt the Army of Northern Virginia.
Ohio gave more troops to the Union than the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi combined gave to the Confederacy. The only way to mitigate this huge reserve of raw manpower was for Kentucky to give as many troops to the Army of Tennessee as Tennessee did. That meant that Kentucky would have needed to provide not just a single brigade (the Orphan Brigade), but two divisions! Such a response, of course, did not come close to happening. Confederate general Patrick Cleburne’s proposal to enlist slaves into the army has long been recognized by historians, but I discovered that, despite the army’s best efforts to keep it quiet, it had leaked out into the ranks and was openly discussed around campfires. It caused Army of Tennessee soldiers to question how desperate their plight must be if the generals were considering such a radical proposal. Not only general officers, but also several field officers turned bitterly on Cleburne, denouncing him as an abolitionist. I was also surprised to learn that a near riot occurred in Cleburne’s division in January 1864. Sentinels were pushed down, and an officer was attacked. At one point the mob grew to 2,000 soldiers. It was a nasty affair. Excessive drinking, especially among officers, became a serious problem during the winter of 1863–1864 under William J. Hardee’s temporary command. Say what you want to about Braxton Bragg, but he kept the lid on the Army of Tennessee. Which of the western war’s events or participants are most in need of further study? Updated biographies of William Rosecrans and P.G.T. Beauregard are both needed. I wish that someone would do for the Vicksburg Campaign what Albert Castel did for the Atlanta Campaign—write a book that explores how the military shapes politics and how politics shape the military. Richard McMurry is nearing completion of his biography of Joseph E. Johnston, which will be required reading for western historians. Let’s face it, the western battles have been fully explored. With Dave Powell’s and Glenn Robertson’s current multi-volume sets on the Battle of Chickamauga, is it really necessary to keep churning out more material on that subject? Of course, that never stopped anyone from writing another
book on the Battle of Gettysburg. The point is, western historians are going to have to get more creative. The lowhanging fruit has all been taken. We need more authors like Earl Hess and Kenneth Noe, who are not afraid to get off of the beaten path. What’s up next for you? Do you have another project in mind? Perhaps editing a book. I would like to edit the letters of William Preston Johnston, son of Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, who was Jefferson Davis’ aide-de-camp and had an office directly across from the Confederate president. His letters to his wife are quite revealing. Unfortunately, the letters are sometimes difficult to decipher. I’ll have to decide if it is doable.
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His movement isolated Harpers Ferry from the Army of the Potomac and made it vulnerable to attack. Logic dictated that the Union garrison would abandon the town and move northward out of harm’s way. The garrison, however, did nothing of the kind, thereby throwing a monkey wrench into the machinery of Lee’s invasion plans. Lee wasn’t interested in Harpers Ferry. He was interested in getting into Pennsylvania as quickly as possible. But the presence of Union troops at Harpers Ferry placed them squarely on his line of communications with the Shenandoah Valley and dangerously in his rear if he marched into Pennsylvania without removing them. Suddenly Lee’s plans were in disarray. Special Orders No. 191 contained the solution. It laid out a scheme whereby the Confederate army would temporarily divide into four parts. The main body would cross South Mountain and pause at the town of Boonsboro, located just beyond the ridge and astride the National Road, the main highway leading to Hagerstown and the gateway to Pennsylvania. The other three parts would march to surround the Harpers Ferry garrison. According to Special Orders No. 191, “Genl Jackson’s command”— that would be Major General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson—would march well to the west of Harpers Ferry, recross the
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Potomac, and then wheel eastward to capture a smaller Union garrison at Martinsburg before intercepting any enemy troops trying to escape from Harpers Ferry. Meanwhile two divisions under Major General Lafayette McLaws would occupy the cliff, known as Maryland Heights, just north of Harpers Ferry. A third division would occupy Loudoun Heights to the east. The order stipulated that these movements were to be completed by “Friday morning”—or September 12, the day before the Lost Order reached McClellan. Once the Harpers Ferry garrison was eliminated, all three detachments were to rejoin the “main body of the army at Boonsboro or Hagerstown.”2 Upon receiving the order, McClellan is supposed to have said, “Now I know what to do!”3 And in a dispatch to President Abraham Lincoln he exulted, “I have all the plans of the Rebels and will catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency.”4 But McClellan ought to have known what to do already, and his decision to catch the Confederates in their own trap actually distracted him from that task. On September 13, McClellan’s army was divided into three “wings,” two of which had converged at Frederick while the third—the VI Corps, under Major General William B. Franklin—was encamped some miles to the south at the village of Buckeystown. McClellan well knew that Harpers Ferry remained garrisoned, and he knew from other sources that Lee was still in western Maryland. That means he would have moved westward across South Mountain even without the benefit of the Lost Order. The order’s primary impact was that it suggested that Lee’s “main body,” supposedly at Boonsboro—it had actually moved on to Hagerstown—was substantially understrength thanks to the detachments required to liquidate Harpers Ferry. This led McClellan to make a mistake. The obvious move was to relieve the garrison and add its 12,500 men to his own 87,000, which he instructed Franklin to do. But thanks to the Lost Order this maneuver became secondary to McClellan’s new principal effort, a lunge ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
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directly at Lee’s main body. As a result, Franklin received no reinforcements, and indeed was told that the Confederates had two divisions in the vicinity of Crampton’s Gap, the key mountain pass through which he was supposed to reach Harpers Ferry. The result is well known. The following day—September 14—the bulk of McClellan’s army attacked Lee’s main body while Franklin moved gingerly toward Crampton’s Gap, slowed not only by his native caution but also by the knowledge that he had a force barely adequate to carry out his mission. He had scarcely made it across the gap before nightfall halted his operations. This gave the Confederates time to capture Harpers Ferry. (It was the largest mass surrender of U.S. troops until the Philippines in 1942.) We know that if the garrison had held on— still more so had it been relieved—Lee would have abandoned the Maryland Campaign then and there. But as events turned out, Lee remained in Maryland long enough to fight the Battle of Antietam on September 17, resulting in a marginal victory for McClellan but saving the Army of Northern Virginia from an ignominious retreat. Thus the finding of the Lost Order arguably worked to the detriment of McClellan’s plans. But the story’s entrenchment in the American Iliad ensures that it will ever be told in the more poetic way.
Hold the Sunken Road with the remnants of the II Corps and some of the VI Corps and stop there; ride down to see IX Corps commander Ambrose Burnside and push him to move immediately in his sector while the enemy was still reeling from this rupture; or, as Little Mac decided, do very little indeed. The generals started to discuss with each other, rather than focus on me. The chairman turned around and joined them. I smiled. This was exactly what I hoped for. With staff riders this senior in rank, one never knows how they might react to open-ended Socratic questions, especially on a day when they were preoccupied with bad news from the Middle East. “What does McClellan’s actual decision-making tell us about the role of intelligence in war, and how it influences the timing of events?” I asked after they started to quiet down. A general to my right answered immediately, “It’s the key to everything. If you have weak or inadequate intel, you can’t do a darn thing, or you can’t do it with any assurance of success.” “As all of you know, we can’t ever have complete, perfect intel,” I added. “So how do we—how do you, as our country’s senior-most military leaders—mitigate this reality?” I was taking a chance, uncertain as I was about their feelings on the recent issue or whether they’d think this was a simple question about current technological capabilities, one that was beneath their rank. But it was the best way to start connecting this segment of the battle to the modern-day realities besetting our armed forces. Had the chairman
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).
not asked about the “It depends” on my shirt, I would have arrived at this point eventually, but in modern military staff rides, one goes with the flow of conversation, molding and framing the discussion toward a culmination point containing insights for today’s leaders. No stand ever goes exactly the same, regardless of how many times you’ve led it, and the insights gleaned at the Sunken Road might be different from those considered by other groups at this same spot. The keys to leading a good staff ride, besides a strong working knowledge of the battlefield, are flexibility and knowing your group. The chairman replied to my question with something like this: “We have to build good relationships with each other, with other officers at every rank, to help build trust in each other’s judgment.” His answer encapsulated the purpose of this particular staff ride: building trust among his immediate subordinates to better create a team of teams. Many organizations in the Department of Defense and the federal government engage in staff rides for that very reason. Learning about Civil War history as a group, outside on the field, is always a better day than one spent in office cubicles in Washington. But a good staff ride, led by a strong facilitator, should offer participants much more. It should help them gel as colleagues working for a common goal; inform them that the basic essence of any problem they face is, actually, not all that new; provide clear insights from the past that inform (not predetermine) their decision-making; and make them think hard about the nature of war and
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its unchanging features, like chance, fog, and friction, that afflicted Lee and McClellan and still affect modern military leaders. It was a wonderful moment. For a small while, no one said anything, and then I broke the silence with an observation about the famed Irish Brigade’s decimation in the field in front of us and the ensuing destruction of the organization a few months later at Fredericksburg. Combined with the issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and the sacking of their beloved Little Mac within weeks of the fight at Antietam, the Irish of the North, nearly all Democrats, starting losing faith in the Union war effort, transforming this battlefield event into a policy-level headache for President Abraham Lincoln. My group was especially interested because this demonstrated a truism that most of them had experienced: The levels of war often conflate at particular moments, in which tactical-level events can and do affect strategy and policy. When I asked if they had undergone anything similar, a lot of heads bobbed up and down. Then I asked a tough question, one we historians in professional military education cherish: “What does this sequence of events tell us about the stream of time?” I got a lot of blank looks, which I expected. Sometimes one must bring up uncomfortable topics to intensify learning and synthesis. Whether to keep pressing depends on the group: their education, preparation, or experience (all groups are asked to read a few key documents beforehand to familiarize themselves with the campaign), and whether they’re tired or sun-drenched from the day’s weather. I took the measure of this group and
went for the hard closer. “When you study history to gain value for modern strategic thinking, as all of you do,” I said, “you can’t help but notice that an historical decision made earlier in time—upstream, if you will—directly or indirectly influences what decisions will even exist, let alone be brought to the fore, later on or downstream.” I waited a few seconds, then asked if that sounded like modern doctrine. “Branches and sequels,” a general to my left blurted. “Second- and third-order effects!” another quickly replied. A few more responses, and it was clear everyone got the message. They all knew the answer, but it was my job to remind them that decisions made on this bloody field, many years ago, were not that different from the ones they make every day. Leaders must choose among options, but they must think hard before doing so, as every decision has consequences and births new issues to grapple with. When lives are on the line, they must think about the stream of time. In the end, that observation probably resonated more than any other that day. “OK, Gentlemen, on to our next stand, Burnside’s Bridge!” I called and started walking back to our minibus. I turned my head on the way and noticed the chairman deep in thought, still looking out at the field. “Victory,” I thought, as I smiled to myself. CHRISTIAN B. KELLER IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND THE GENERAL DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER CHAIR OF NATIONAL SECURITY AT THE U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE. BESIDES LEADING STAFF RIDES AND TEACHING MILITARY STRATEGY AND THEORY, HE IS THE AUTHOR OR CO-AUTHOR OF FIVE BOOKS ON THE CIVIL WAR, INCLUDING THE FORTHCOMING THE GREAT PARTNERSHIP: ROBERT E. LEE, STONEWALL JACKSON, AND THE FATE OF THE CONFEDERACY (PEGASUS BOOKS, JULY 2019).
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in Los Angeles, and too seldom used. Although there is plenty to criticize about his generalship, Old Rosy is nonetheless due more credit for the Union’s eventual victory.26 In 2013, 150 years after Rosecrans’ victory at Stones River, a group of Ohio Union reenactors erected an equestrian statue in his honor in Sunbury, Ohio, near his hometown. Recent books by Albert Castel, David Moore, and Frank Varney have also tried to rehabilitate his reputation by pointing out that his quarrels with Grant, whose reputation has rightly risen in the esteem of modern scholarship, should not overshadow Old Rosy’s patriotism or battlefield victories. Nor does his defeat at Chick-
amauga cancel out his important victories in western Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Missouri. It remains to be seen whether such tributes are evidence of a coming greater appreciation among Civil War enthusiasts and scholars of William S. Rosecrans and his flawed but nevertheless largely successful Civil War career.27 WILLIAM B. KURTZ IS THE JOHN L. NAU III CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR HISTORY’S MANAGING DIRECTOR AND DIGITAL HISTORIAN. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF EXCOMMUNICATED FROM THE UNION: HOW THE CIVIL WAR CREATED A SEPARATE CATHOLIC AMERICA (FORDHAM, 2016) AND CO-EDITOR OF THE FORTHCOMING SOLDIERS OF THE CROSS, THE AUTHORITATIVE TEXT: THE HEROISM OF CATHOLIC CHAPLAINS AND SISTERS IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS, 2019). HE IS WORKING ON A BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM S. ROSECRANS.
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store houses was no easy task,” he wrote in early 1863. “Rebel spies and bushwhackers were going in and coming out [of the city] dressed as farmers, women, and the like, crawling through the guard line under the cover of darkness, getting ammunition and supplies to shoot our men from behind a tree or under a bush.”16 From Baltimore to New Orleans, from Holly Springs to Nashville, Union armies would eventually occupy scores of southern communities, ultimately eclipsing the conciliatory vision that President Lincoln once considered necessary to subdue the rebellion. Civil and military leaders initially believed in 1861 that conciliatory policies would assuage white southern angst and convince the region’s Unionists to disavow the Confederate rebellion and restore the Union. Lincoln himself warned of the conflict deteriorating into a “violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” which he feared would shatter the limits of restraint, col-
lapse stable southern institutions, and serve in the Union army. By war’s end, stoke bitter resentment between the some 180,000 black volunteers donned American belligerents. But when Con- the Union blue. Most United States Colfederates mounted a bitter and violent ored Troops (USCT), as they were desresistance to Union armies, it compelled ignated, served behind the lines in auxthe federal government to wage a “hard iliary capacities, but in so doing they war” of occupation against armies and ci- participated directly in the Union’s milivilians. “War is the remedy our enemies tary occupation of the Confederacy.18 have chosen,” observed Union general As occupiers, African-American William Tecumseh Sherman. “I say let us troops played critical roles in shattergive them all they want; not a word of ar- ing the institution of slavery, as evident gument, not a sign of let up, no cave in in the experiences of the 1st USCT as it till we are whipped or traversed the counthey are.” Union forces tryside of southeastswept across the southern Virginia in 1864. ern landscape, crushWhile on a foraging ing the will to resist, expedition, the regi“WAR IS THE REMEDY hindering southernment captured a loOUR ENEMIES HAVE cal planter who “had ers’ ability to make war, CHOSEN.” a reputation for metand, most significantly, ing out the most undismantling the cause merciful whippings to of secession: slavery.17 enslaved women.” The By 1863 the Union’s military occupations of the Confedera- soldiers brought the slaveholder to their cy—and the Civil War itself—assumed a camp, where they disrobed their captive, new character when Lincoln issued the applied a whip, and brought “the blood Emancipation Proclamation. A war mea- from his loins at every stroke, and not forsure aimed to deprive the Confederacy of getting to remind the gentlemen of the critical but unfree labor, the proclama- days gone by.” George Hatton, a soldier in tion invited African-American men to the 1st, thus observed: “But behold what has been revealed in the past three or four years; why the colored men have ascended upon a platform of equality, and the slave can now apply the lash to the tender flesh of his master ... while standing upon the banks of the James River, on the soil of Virginia, the mother state of slavery, as a witness of such a sudden reverse!”19 Although fraught with great challenges, military occupation during the Civil War succeeded in consolidating federal authority, establishing points of departure for campaigning Union armies, enacting the policies of emancipation, and beginning the long process of Reconstruction. It also waged a kind of war against domestic institutions to convince white southerners of secession’s folly. “We cannot change the hearts of those people,” Sherman confessed in late 1862, “but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that, however brave and gallant and devoted to their country, still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.”20 Yet General-in-Chief Winfield Scott’s 1861 warnings about becoming
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mired in the South seemed to resonate throughout the conflict. The Union’s war of occupation ended up requiring untold amounts of troops, costing exorbitant amounts of money, transforming the United States army into a bureaucratic institution, and engendering tensions between the occupiers and occupied, the implications of which became deeply entangled in the challenges of postwar reunion. Such an effort was nonetheless critical to preserving the Union and unfolding the essential processes of emancipation.21 One final consequence of military occupation during the Civil War—one that is not captured in Edward S. Hall’s sketch—should be considered. Brief passages penned by two U.S. soldiers illustrate it well. “We are guarding 80 Tons of Powder [on behalf of the government],” the first wrote. “Soldiers have to be careful what they Buy [in this city] for [the local residents] Poison most Evry thing they seel to [the soldiers]. there is a great many got Poisoned. they Shoot the Pickets that is Stationed among here[.] there was 2 shot here the other night.” “The life of an infantryman is never safe,” wrote the second soldier. “How do I know? Well I live it every day. I lost a good friend of mine just two days ago to an enemy.... The worst feeling in the world is having lost one of your own and not being able to fight back. The more I go on patrol, the more alert I tend to be, but regardless of the situation here ... we are never safe. No matter the countermeasures we take to prevent any attacks. They seem to seep through the cracks. Every day a soldier is lost or wounded by enemy attacks. I for one would like to make it home to my family one day. Pray for us and keep us in your thoughts.” These two descriptions
reveal a small fraction of the challenges associated with military occupation. And while their authors speak a unified language, articulating similar fears and uncertainties, they are separated by nearly 150 years. The first was written during the Civil War by Charles Henry Moulton, who served in the occupation of Baltimore in 1861. Staff Sergeant Juan Campos from Texas wrote the second in October 2006 from Iraq. He died in 2007 from a roadside bomb attack. Although Moulton and Campos entered the army more than a century apart under wildly dissimilar circumstances and interpreted their incongruent missions in fundamentally different ways, each was united by a sense of disillusionment, discouraged by a restrictive uncertainty about their respective environments. The occupations of the Confederacy in the 1860s and Iraq during the 2000s could not be more disparate in their political dynamics, contrasting in their cultural dimensions, and divergent in their martial conduct. Soldiers in both conflicts nevertheless echoed strikingly similar refrains about the enduring challenges of invasion. And thus as we glance at Edward S. Hall’s seemingly innocuous sketch, we see that the problem of military occupation is not a dead artifact of the American past.22 ANDREW F. LANG IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF IN THE WAKE OF WAR: MILITARY OCCUPATION, EMANCIPATION, AND CIVIL WAR AMERICA (LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017), WHICH RECEIVED THE SOCIETY OF CIVIL WAR HISTORIANS’ TOM WATSON BROWN BOOK AWARD. HE IS ALSO THE COEDITOR OF UPON THE FIELDS OF BATTLE: ESSAYS ON THE MILITARY HISTORY OF AMERICA’S CIVIL WAR (LSU PRESS, 2018) AND THE LEAD CO-AUTHOR OF THE FORTHCOMING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE WORLD: LIMITED WAR, LIMITED PEACE, THE FINAL INSTALLMENT OF THE LITTLEFIELD HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS.
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20, 1865; Confederate Citizens File: Thomas J. Brown, M346, Record Group 109, War Department Collection of Confederate Records, NARA. 10. Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Roy P. Stonesifer Jr., The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow (Chapel Hill, 1993), 295–296. 11. “Report of the Number of Freedmen In Camp of Funnel Hill, Tenn, Aug. 30th, 1865.”
Notes SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
AMERICAN ILIAD
(Pages 28–29, 72–74)
1. Silas Colgrove, “The Finding of Lee’s Lost Order,” in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War 4 vols. (New York, 1886), 2: 603. 2. “Special Orders, No. 191,” in Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of R.E. Lee (New York, 1961), 301–303. 3. Quoted in Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York, 1988), 281. 4. McClellan to Lincoln, September 13, 1862, in Stephen W. Sears, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860– 1865 (New York, 1989), 453.
THE REFUGEES (Pages 32–43)
1. I explore the general history of Civil War refugees from slavery more fully in Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill, 2018). 2. Ibid., 5–6. 3. Benjamin F. Butler to Winfield Scott, May 24, 1861, Benjamin F. Butler Papers, Library of Congress; Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 3–4, 9–10. 4. “What is a Refugee?” USA for UNHCR, unrefugees.org/refugee-facts/what-is-a-refugee/ (accessed October 21, 2016). 5. Lieutenant James Nesbitt to Brevet Major General Fisk, December 16, 1865 (hereafter Nesbitt to Fisk), in Ira Berlin, et.al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, Series I, Volume II: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (Cambridge, 1993), 474–477. Thank you to Kelly Hamlin, executive director of Wolf Gap Education Outreach, Pulaski, Tennessee, for insights on the “Tunnel Hill” name. 6. “Report of the Number of Freedmen In Camp of Tunnel Hill, Tenn, Aug. 30th, 1865,” Record Group 105: Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1861–1879, M999: Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Tennessee, Reel 7, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). 7. 1860 United States Federal Census, Population and Slave Schedules, Giles County, Tennessee, Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2009, 2010; Nesbitt to Fisk, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 476. 8. Thomas J. Brown married Mary Amanda Pillow, a daughter of Gideon J. Pillow. “The Lewis Brown Family,” Giles County Historical Society Bulletin, October 9, 1977, 3–5, 18. 9. His position is described as “conscription officer” in Sydney Morning Herald, December
the West, for the Relief of Freedmen,” January 10, 1865, in Friends Review, April 29, 1865. 36. Captain R.H. Clinton to Brigadier General Andrew Johnson, December 20, 1864, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 458. 37. Lieutenant S.V. Clevenger to Brigadier General Andrew Johnson, December 28, 1864, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 459–460.
12. Dr. Samuel H. Stout, M.D., “Some Facts of the History of the Organization of the Medical Service of the Confederate Armies and Hospitals, Part XIII,” Southern Practitioner 24 (1902): 622– 623. Thank you to Kelly Hamlin for sharing this source with me.
38. See annotation, Berlin, et. al., Freedom, 459.
13. Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 58–60.
42. “Report of the Number of Freedmen In Camp of Funnel Hill, Tenn, Aug. 30th, 1865.”
14. Nesbitt to Fisk, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 475– 477; Lieutenant J.W. Harris to General Lorenzo Thomas, June 15, 1864, ser. 363, Letters Received by General Lorenzo Thomas, Record Group 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office (AGO), NARA. 15. Nesbitt to Fisk, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 474– 475. 16. Ibid., 474. 17. Lieutenant J.W. Harris to Colonel J.B. Weaver, May 10, 1864, ser. 363, Letters Received by General Lorenzo Thomas, Record Group 94, Records of the AGO, NARA. 18. Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 37–46. 19. Nesbitt to Fisk, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 474– 475. 20. The arrival of northern teachers and missionaries in the region is discussed in John Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861–1865 (Tuscaloosa, 1985), 54–55. 21. Report of Major General L.H. Rousseau to Major General George H. Thomas, September 29, 1864, United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901), Vol. 39, Ch. LI, Part I, 506 (hereafter OR). 22. Report of N.B. Forrest, October 17, 1864, OR, Ch. LI, Part I, 542–545. 23. Cimprich, 92–96; Earl J. Hess, The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi (Chapel Hill, 2012), 234–235. 24. Population figure from Lieutenant J.W. Harris to Colonel J.B. Weaver, May 10, 1864, ser. 363, Letters Received by General Lorenzo Thomas, Record Group 94, Records of the AGO, NARA. 25. Nesbitt to Fisk, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 476. 26. Report of N.B. Forrest, October 17, 1864, OR, Ch. LI, Part I, 545. 27. Report of the General Superintendent of Freedmen, Department of the Tennessee and State of Arkansas, for 1864 (Memphis, 1865), 53. 28. Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 129–133. 29. Nesbitt to Fisk, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 476. 30. Hess, Civil War in the West, 252–254. 31. Nesbitt to Fisk, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 476. 32. A History of the Seventy-Third Regiment of Illinois Infantry Volunteers (1890), 395. Thank you to Kelly Hamlin for sharing a transcription of this source with me. 33. Nesbitt to Fisk, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 476. 34. Hess, Civil War in the West, 256–257. 35. Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 46–47, 52; Captain R.H. Clinton to Brigadier General Andrew Johnson, December 20, 1864, in Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 458–459; “Report of a Committee on Freedmen to Friends’ Board of Control, Representing the Associated Yearly Meetings of
39. Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 114–116. 40. Nesbitt to Fisk, Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 476–477. 41. Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 80–82.
43. “Can the Freedmen Take Care of Themselves?” True Southerner, November 24, 1865. 44. Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Land Ownership (Baton Rouge, 1978), 37. 45. Henry Bram, et.al., to the President of the United States, October 28, 1865, in Steven Hahn, et.al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, Series 3, Volume 1: Land and Labor, 1865 (Chapel Hill, 2008), 442–444. 46. Oubre, Forty Acres, 46–71; LaWanda Cox, “The Promise of Land for Freedmen,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45 (December 1958): 413–440. 47. Hahn, et.al., Freedom, 399–400. 48. Thomas J. Brown to Andrew Johnson, [undated], M1003, Confederate Amnesty Papers, NARA, fold3.com (accessed January 22, 2019). 49. Sydney Morning Herald, December 20, 1865. 50. Samuel Taggard to Clinton B. Fisk, August 19, 1865, M999, Reel 7, Frame 0025, NARA. 51. Taylor, Embattled Freedom, 209–238. 52. See annotation, Berlin, et.al., Freedom, 477. 53. Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 2015), 27–41. SIDEBAR: YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW 1. Brigadier General D.H. Rucker to M.C. Meigs, Washington, D.C., June 8, 1863, ser. 225, Consolidated Correspondence File: “Contrabands,” Record Group 92, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, NARA; C.P. Day to Rev. Jocelyn, July 8, 1863, reel 206, American Missionary Association Archives. 2. Testimony of Joseph Webb, Frank Shepard, and Moses Reddick, undated, reel 114, M1913, Virginia Pre-Bureau Records, Record Group 105, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, NARA. 3. General Order No. 4, by command of Major General Benjamin Butler, January 9, 1864, ser. 5078, General Orders Issued, Department of Virginia and North Carolina, Record Group 393, Pt. 1: Records of the United States Army Continental Commands, NARA.
OLD ROSY RECONSIDERED (Pages 44–55, 75) 1. William M. Lamers, The Edge of Glory: A Biography of William S. Rosecrans, U.S.A. (New York, 1961; reprint, 1999), 8–16; William B. Kurtz, “‘A Singular Zeal’: William S. Rosecrans’s Family in Faith, Triumph, and Failure,” U.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Spring 2017): 31–36. 2. Lamers, The Edge of Glory, 16–19. 3. William S. Rosecrans (WSR) to Lorenzo Thomas, June 15, 1865, Letters Received by the Commission Branch of the Adjutant General’s Office,
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1863–1870, RG 94, National Archives (hereafter Rosecrans, “Personal Report”); WSR to Ann Rosecrans, June 4, 1861, William S. Rosecrans Papers, University of California at Los Angeles Special Collections (hereafter UCLA). 4. Lamers, Edge of Glory, 27–39, 66; WSR to Ann, July 18, 1861, UCLA; Rosecrans, “Personal Report,” 3. 5. Lamers, Edge of Glory, 39–82; Rosecrans, “Personal Report,” 3–8; WSR to Ann, June 30, 1862, UCLA. 6. Lamers, Edge of Glory, 86–96; Leslie Gordon, “The Failed Relationship of William S. Rosecrans and Grant,” in Grant’s Lieutenants: From Cairo to Vicksburg, ed. Steven E. Woodworth (Lawrence, 2001), 115; Evan C. Jones, “A ‘Malignant Vindictiveness’: The Two-Decade Rivalry between Ulysses S. Grant and William S. Rosecrans,” in Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862–1863, eds. Evan C. Jones and Wiley Sword (Baton Rouge, 2014), 177–178.
20. Lamers, Edge of Glory, 311–353; Peter Cozzens, This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga (Chicago, 1992), 305–375; WSR’s Report on Chickamauga, OR, Series 1, Vol. 30, Part I, 47–64. 21. WSR to Sylvester, October 9, 1863, UCLA; Cozzens, Chickamauga, 369–479; WSR to Horace Greeley, January 8, 1866, Miscellaneous Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress; TwentyNinth Annual Reunion of the Association of the Graduates of the United States Military Academy, June 9th, 1898, 70–71, penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/ United_States/Army/USMA/AOG_Reunions/29/ William_Starke_Rosecrans*.html (accessed December 12, 2017). 22. WSR to Ann, September 25, 1863, UCLA; Lamers, Edge of Glory, 361–398; David A. Powell, The Chickamauga Campaign: Barren Victory: The Retreat into Chattanooga, the Confederate Pursuit, and the Aftermath of the Battle, September 21 to October 20, 1863 (El Dorado Hills, 2016), 152-155; Rosecrans, “Personal Report,” 20–23.
7. Ulysses S. Grant to Henry W. Halleck, September 20, 1862, United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901), Series 1, Vol. 17, Part II, 64 (hereafter OR); Peter Cozzens, The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Iuka & Corinth (Chapel Hill, 1997), 66–73, 125–134; Lamers, Edge of Glory, 103–130; Rosecrans, “Personal Report,” 10–12; Evans, “A Malignant Vindictiveness,” 183–188.
23. Steven E. Woodworth, Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns (Lincoln, 1998), 153; WSR to Ann, February 18, 1864, “Committee of 738 Union Men” to Abraham Lincoln, November 4, 1864, UCLA; Lamers, Edge of Glory, 420–425; Stephen E. Towne, Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland (Athens, 2015), 188–194.
8. Lamers, Edge of Glory, 131–170; Rosecrans, “Personal Report,” 12–14; WSR to Grant, dispatches of October 7 & 8, 1865, OR, Series I, Vol. 17, Part I, 163–165.
24. Lamers, The Edge of Glory, 415–439; Rosecrans, “Personal Report,” 24–27.
9. Gordon, “Failed Relationship,” 119–123; Lamers, Edge of Glory, 122–123, 170–182; Evans, “A Malignant Vindictiveness,” 185–190. 10. Lamers, Edge of Glory, 181–216; WSR to Sylvester, December 15, 1862, UCLA. 11. Peter Cozzens, No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River (Chicago, 1990), 76–174. 12. Ibid, 175–204; WSR to Ann, January 20, 1863, UCLA; WSR to Lorenzo Thomas, February 12, 1863, OR, Series 1, Vol. 20, Part I, 188–200. 13. Lamers, Edge of Glory, 245–247; Chase to Rosecrans, January 6, 1863, UCLA; Harper’s Weekly, January 17, 1863; The New York Times, January 7, 1863; Catholic Herald, January 31, 1863. 14. WSR to Edward Purcell, April 27, 1863, UCLA; Kurtz, “Singular Zeal,” 38–41; Lamers, Edge of Glory, 258–260. 15. Rosecrans, “Personal Report,” 15–17; Lamers, Edge of Glory, 244–254; WSR to Chase, January 15, 1863, Salmon P. Chase Papers, Library of Congress. 16. Donald Stoker, The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (New York, 2010), 319; Philip L. Shiman, “Engineering and Command: The Case of William S. Rosecrans 1862–1863,” in The Art of Command in the Civil War, ed. Steven E. Woodworth (Lincoln, 1998), 84–117; Lamers, Edge of Glory, 253–254; David A. Powell, “Heavy Metal,” Civil War Times, February 2018, historynet.com/ heavy-metal.htm (accessed December 5, 2017). 17. James Garfield to Lucretia Garfield, January 26, 1863, Garfield to Harry Garfield, June 13, 1863, quoted in The Wild Life of the Army: Civil War Letters of James A. Garfield, ed. by Frederick D. Williams (East Lansing, MI, 1964), 225–226, 275–276; WSR to Ann, January 30, 1863, UCLA. 18. Rosecrans, “Personal Report,” 17–18; Lamers, Edge of Glory, 272–291; Stanton to WSR and WSR to Stanton, July 7, 1863, OR, Series 1, Vol. 23, Part II, 518. 19. Garfield to Chase, July 27, 1863, quoted in The Wild Life of the Army, 289–291; Lamers, Edge of Glory, 300–311; WSR to Ann, September 6, 1863, UCLA.
25. Edward D. Townsend to Rosecrans, December 6, 1864, UCLA; Rosecrans, “Personal Report,” 27–28; WSR to J.C. Ketton, October 24, 1866, Letters Received by the Commission Branch of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1863–1870, RG 94, National Archives; Evan C. Jones, “A Malignant Vindictiveness,” 212–213. 26. Kurtz, “A Singular Zeal,” 44–53; Jones, “A Malignant Vindictiveness,” 212–217; WSR to Ann, June 20, 1875. 27. Albert Castel, Victors in Blue: How Union Generals Fought the Confederates, Battle Each Other, and Won the Civil War (Lawrence, 2011); David G. Moore, William S. Rosecrans and the Union Victory: A Civil War Biography (Jefferson, NC, 2014); Frank P. Varney, General Grant and the Rewriting of History: How the Destruction of William S. Rosecrans Influenced Our Understanding of the Civil War (El Dorado Hills, 2013).
THE PERILS OF OCCUPATION (Pages 56–65, 76–77) 1. Hall’s “Occupation of Baltimore” is part of Boston College’s Becker Collection: beckercollection. bc.edu. 2. This essay derives from the author’s book, In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America (Baton Rouge, 2017). 3. This version of the Baltimore riots is referenced in Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2009), 1–6; William W. Freehling, The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York, 2001), 47–50; and Frank Towers, “‘A Vociferous Army of Howling Wolves’: Baltimore’s Civil War Riot of April 19, 1861,” Maryland Historian 23 (December 1992): 1–27. 4. Report of Colonel Edward Jones, April 22, 1861, quoted in John W. Hanson, Historical Sketch of the Old Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers during its Three Campaigns in 1861, 1862, 1863, and 1864 (Boston, 1866), 38; and quoted in Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, eds., The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It (New York,
2011), 305–306. 5. “Capt. Follansbee’s Account,” quoted in Hanson, Historical Sketch of the Old Sixth, 39–40; Sears, et al., eds., Civil War: First Year, 307–308. 6. Sutherland, Savage Conflict, 4; Freehling, The South vs. the South, 48–50. 7. Winfield Scott to William H. Seward, March 3, 1861, in Winfield Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott, LL.D 2 vols. (New York, 1864), 2:627; Lang, Wake of War, 46. 8. Abraham Lincoln to Thomas H. Hicks and George W. Brown, April 20, 1861, and Lincoln, “Reply to Baltimore Committee,” April 22, 1861, both quoted in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 9 vols. (New Brunswick, 1953–1955), 4:341, 342 (hereafter cited as CWL). 9. Benjamin F. Butler, Butler’s Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler (Boston, 1892), 226, 233. 10. Charles Blake diary entry, June 2, 1861, Charles H. Blake Diary, Historic New Orleans Collection, Williams Research Center, New Orleans. 11. John Corden to My Dear Wife, September 21, 1861, John Corden Papers, and Charles Henry Moulton Diary entry, September 3, 1861, Charles Henry Moulton Papers, 1835–1916, both in Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 12. Strong diary entry, May 29, 1861, quoted in Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong: The Civil War (New York, 1952), 3:150–151. 13. The most comprehensive treatments of wartime military occupation are Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill, 1995); Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, 1995); Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, 2015); Lang, Wake of War. 14. Peck to Mother, October 20, and September 22, 1862, Peck Correspondence, Montgomery Family Papers, 1771–1974, Library of Congress; Lang, Wake of War, 60–62, 85–86, 120. 15. Mildred Throne, ed., The Civil War Diary of Cyrus F. Boyd, Fifteenth Iowa Infantry, 1861–1863 (Baton Rouge, 1998), 97; Lang, Wake of War, 66–67. 16. Diary entry, February 10, 1863, in Claire E. Swedburg, ed., Three Years with the 92d Illinois: The Civil War Diary of John M. King (Mechanicsburg, 1999), 52; Sutherland, Savage Conflict, 1–6, passim; Lang, Wake of War, 107–108, 105–128. 17. Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress,” December 3, 1861, CWL, 5:48–49; William T. Sherman to James Guthrie, August 14, 1864, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies 129 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901), Series 1, 39:2:248 (hereafter OR). 18. Lang, Wake of War, 129–181. 19. Letter of George W. Hatton, May 28, 1864, in Edward S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York, 1992), 95–96; Lang, Wake of War, 178. 20. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, October 4, 1862, OR, 17:2:261. 21. D.H. Dilbeck, A More Civil War: How the Union Waged a Just War (Chapel Hill, 2016); Lang, Wake of War; Aaron Sheehan-Dean, The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (Cambridge, 2018). 22. Charles Henry Moulton to Brother and Sister, September 3, 1861, Moulton Papers, Bentley Historical Library; Juan Campos blog entry, October 3, 2006, published in The New York Times, March 22, 2008.
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pa r t i n g shot
In 1865, lithographers E.B. and E.C. Kellogg offered a peculiarly feline interpretation of the recently concluded Civil War. Titled The Question Settled, the print features three kittens on a flag-draped table. The white kitten, wearing a stern look and a red, white, and blue ribbon with the words “Old Abe” around its neck, forces the gray kitten, with a rope around its neck marked “Jeff,” from the patriotically printed milk pan in which they’re standing. A third, black cat, wearing a ribbon marked “contraband,” peeks out from the protection of Old Abe, its paw resting on a map of the southern states. If only the actual conflict had been so bloodless.
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