RICHMOND IN RUINS
P. 26
DEATH & LIFE ON BELLE ISLE
P. 52
VOL. 5, NO. 2
{ a n e w l o o k a t a m e r i c a’s g r e a t e s t c o n f l i c t }
Angels ofWar
Civil War nurse Anna Etheridge, one of only two women to receive the Kearny Cross
Stories of the Civil War’s volunteer nurses—the unsung heroines who cared for the armies’ sick and wounded
PLUS
SUMMER 2015
H
$5.99
CLOSING ACT: THE WAR ENDS IN TEXAS P.40
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
VOLUME 5, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2015
FEATURES
Salvo
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
TRAVELS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to Jackson
VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Dog Days
DOSSIER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Robert E. Lee
PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Saving the Heart of Antietam
FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 The Rifle Musket
Angels of War 28 Like the men they saw off to the front, women too felt the pull of patriotism at the outbreak of the Civil War. For many wives, daughters, and sisters—northern and southern, young and old—the most useful way to support country and cause was to volunteer as a nurse.
DISUNION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 RORY DOYLE (SALVO); GALVESTON AND TEXAS HISTORY CENTER (CLOSING ACT); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
Lee Surrendered, But His Lieutenants Kept Fighting
COST OF WAR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 George C. Clapp Letters
IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Richmond in Ruins
Books & Authors VOICES FROM THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, PART 5. . . . . 65
DEATH & LIFE ON BELLE ISLE 52
By Gary W. Gallagher
THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME . . 69 By Brian Matthew Jordan
In Every Issue EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Angels of War
AGENDA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Summer 2015 Civil War Events
PARTING SHOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 An Invisible Wound
ON THE COVER: Civil War nurse Anna Etheridge. Image courtesy of Chris Foard.
Closing Act 40 In the last months of the Civil War, Texas and the TransMississippi of the Confederacy struggled to hang on.
An idyllic setting on the James River—where modern Richmonders bike, swim, run, and relax—belies a dark Civil War history.
by andrew w. hall
by john m. coski
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2015
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editorial VOLUME 5, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2015
Terry A. Johnston Jr. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Laura June Davis David Thomson Robert Poister CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
“the first gun fired on Sumter fired every drop of my blood,” recalled Massachusetts resident Mary Gardner Holland of her reaction to the Civil War’s opening. “It seem[ed] to me that I must go to the war.” Unable to serve in the army and obliged to care for a sick mother at home, Holland was nevertheless determined to find a way to support her country. Holland wrote to Dorothea Dix, superintendent of army nurses, in search of a position. Dix, she knew, had strict standards for her nurses, who were required to be “plain-looking” women over 30. “I am plain-looking enough to suit you, and old enough,” Holland assured Dix. “Will you Mary Gardner Holland, as she appeared in the 1890s take me?” Dix did, and Holland would spend the next 14 months ministering to the army’s sick and wounded in hospitals in and around Washington, D.C. It was a decision she never regretted. “What more fitting place for women with holy motives and tenderest sympathy,” Holland later wrote, “than on those fields of blood and death, or in retreats prepared for our suffering heroes?” In this issue’s cover story, “Angels of War” (page 28), we introduce you to a few of the thousands of women who, like Mary Gardner Holland, volunteered as nurses during the Civil War. Many of the photographs we share belong to collector Chris Foard (himself a registered nurse), who has compiled a remarkable archive of more than 3,000 items relating to Civil War nurses. We are grateful to him for sharing his collection with us and with our readers. finally, i’m sad to report the passing of Civil War historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who died in a car accident in April. She was 64. Pryor’s 2008 book Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, which co-won that year’s prestigious Lincoln Prize, remains one of the most popular and respected studies of the famed Confederate leader; indeed, a plurality of the historians we polled about Lee for the current issue of the Monitor selected it as their favorite alltime work on the general (“Dossier: Robert E. Lee,” page 16). Our condolences go to her family, friends, and many admirers.
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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: $21.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $31.95 per year in Canada, and $41.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Views expressed by individual authors, unless expressly stated, do not necessarily represent those of The Civil War Monitor or Bayshore History, LLC. Letters to the editor become the property of The Civil War Monitor, and may be edited. The Civil War Monitor cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited materials. The contents of the magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of the publisher.
OUR ARMY NURSES (1895)
Angels of War
Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor
Copyright ©2015 by Bayshore History, llc
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2015
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CLoSE oUT SALE Limited edition CoLLeCtors PLates Commemorating The Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, 1861–1865
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Handmade in the USA OUR ARMY NURSES (1895)
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found no serious flaws in my contention that the salute probably never happened, and he provided no evidence beyond Chamberlain’s ever-changing story that it did, yet he seems to have concluded that Chamberlain must have made some flattering gesture to the surrendering Confederates. My assertion being a negative one, it is impossible to prove, but his implied argument that a salute did occur would be very easy to prove if there were some evidence. All it would take is a demonstrably original 1865 diary or letter from either side, acknowledging a salute. No one has ever produced one, and I doubt anyone ever will. However, in history as in religion, I am happy to let those who wish to accept their legends as literal believe as they choose.
Surrender Stories
Stephen Cushman’s article [“Surrender Stories,” Vol. 5, No. 1] describing the evolution of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s gesture of respect (“honor answering honor”) during the surrender of the Confederates at Appomattox is fascinating. Some years ago I wrote an article about Chamberlain’s heroic stand with his 20th Maine Infantry on Little Round Top. There too his recounting of the events reveals progressive embellishment. My question for the author—and what seems missing from his splendid article although perhaps implied by its specific absence— is: Has he located any eyewitness accounts of the salute other than those of Chamberlain? One might expect the outspoken General John B. Gordon or others would have remarked about a supposed exchange of military salutes. David F. Cross, M.D. GLADE HILL, VIRGINIA ED. Thanks for your letter, David,
which we forwarded to Stephen Cushman for comment. He writes: “My thanks to Dr. Cross for his good question. My article in the Monitor is a compressed version of a chapter in my book Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (UNC Press, 2014). In that chapter I discuss Gordon’s response to Chamberlain’s gesture in Gordon’s own book, Reminiscences of the Civil War (1903), as well as his
earlier public appearance with Chamberlain on the same New York lecture stage in 1893. So yes indeed, Gordon confirmed Chamberlain’s version, both in person and in print. I apologize for cutting this information from the Monitor version, and I am grateful to him for giving me the chance to add it now.” * * * I was genuinely entertained, if not persuaded, by Stephen Cushman’s stylistic and historiographical examination of Joshua Chamberlain’s purported Appomattox salute in “Surrender Stories.” Mr. Cushman (who references my books, A Place Called Appomattox and Lee’s Last Retreat: The Flight to Appomattox, in his article)
William Marvel SOUTH CONWAY, NEW HAMPSHIRE
Fugitives Photo
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwarmonitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
The image that appears on the opening pages of Lorien Foote’s article in your winter 2014 issue [“The Fugitives,” Vol. 4, No. 4] is one of my favorites. Over the years I recall having seen at least four different descriptions of the men featured in it— that they are Rebel prisoners at Chicago’s Camp Douglas; that they are some of Confederate cavalryman John Hunt Morgan’s men who were captured in Ohio; that they are Unionist refugees from eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, come down from their
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Hosting Civil War tours since 1989.
THE END OF THE WAR: RICHMOND, PETERSBURG, AND APPOMATTOX mountain hiding places to join the Union army in Knoxville, Tennessee, after its capture by General Ambrose Burnside; and, from the caption you provide for the image, that they (at least most of them) are escaped Union prisoners from Florence, South Carolina, photographed after having reached Union-occupied Knoxville. Is there recently found evidence to substantiate that these indeed are escaped Union prisoners? Glenn Land VIA EMAIL ED. Thanks for your note, Glenn. The infor-
mation in our caption is from the image summary on the website of the Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs Division, where we obtained the copy we used. If any of our readers can shed further light on the group, please email us at letters@ civilwarmonitor.com.
Join Dr. Richard Sommers, Dr. James “Bud” Robertson, Ed Bearss, Robert E. L. Krick, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, Chris Calkins, and others touring 1864 and 1865 battle sites. Based in Richmond, VA.
“LINCOLN” WITH ED BEARSS AND LEADING LINCOLN HISTORIANS
Mr. Lincoln’s Army at Gettysburg, John Wilkes Booth Escape Tour, & sessions with leading Lincoln historians: Ed Bearss, Bob Allen, Dan Vermilya, Ed Steers, James Getty, Bob O’Connor, Joe Mieczkowski, and others. Based in Chambersburg, PA.
Our Littlest Follower ED. Here at the Monitor, we’re very proud of our diverse readership, which is not bound by gender, geography, or—as the image below of my one-year-old niece, Tessa, enjoying a recent issue shows— age. I guess it’s never too early to catch the Civil War history bug.
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agenda Your Guide to Civil War Events
SUMMER 2015
Members of the Ship’s Company in action aboard USS Constellation $10 ADULTS; $5 SENIORS AND AGES 4–17; CHILDREN 3 AND UNDER ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: LCFPD.ORG/CIVILWAR or 847-968-3400. LIVING HISTORY
Reflections of the Civil War SATURDAY, JULY 11 – SUNDAY, JULY 12
Gilbert Gaul’s “Battery H 1st Ohio Volunteers Light Artillery in Action at Cold Harbor,” part of the Toledo Museum of Art’s new exhibition
Great Performances in the Great Gallery SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 3 P.M.
Toledo Museum of Art TOLEDO, OHIO
Soprano Margaret Barron performs a variety of American songs, including those popular during the Civil War, in the Toledo Museum of Art’s Great Gallery, where The American Civil War: Through Artists’ Eyes, an exhibit of approximately 50 wartime objects drawn from the collections of local institutions, is on display through July 5. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: TOLEDOMUSEUM. ORG or 419-255-8000.
JULY C O M M E M O R AT I O N
A Watershed of War: The Surrender at Jacksonport SATURDAY, JULY 4, 2 P.M.
Jacksonport State Park Courtyard NEWPORT, ARKANSAS
Learn about how the war came to a close in Jacksonport, a main mustering point for southern troops in Arkansas that was occupied by both Union and Confederate forces during the conflict. The hourlong event includes a reenactment of the speech given by Brigadier General M. Jeff Thompson, known as the “Swamp Fox of the Confederacy,” at the surrender of Rebel troops there in June 1865. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: JACKSONPORT@ ARKANSAS.COM or 870-523-2143. LIVING HISTORY
Join military and civilian reenactors as they relive the Civil War through a variety of events, including battle reenactments, a ladies tea, and musical performances. $5; CHILDREN 12 AND UNDER FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: SEMINOLEVALLEYFARMMUSEUM. NET or 319-378-9240.
AUGUST LECTURE
The United States Colored Troops to the Rescue SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 4 P.M.
Civil War Days
Historic Surratt House Museum
SATURDAY, JULY 11 – SUNDAY, JULY 12
Howard University historian Edna Green Medford highlights the roles that the U.S. Colored Troops played in the American Civil War, a time when African Americans made up only 1 percent of the northern population yet comprised an estimated 10 percent of the Union army and 25 percent of the Union navy. Recognizing their contributions, President Abraham Lincoln declared, “Without the military help of the black freedmen, the war against the South could not have been won.”
Lakewood Forest Preserve WAUCONDA, ILLINOIS
The boom of cannon, the crack of rifles, and the galloping of horse hooves welcomes you to the annual Civil War Days encampment. Wander the camps to see soldiers, civilians, and tradesmen at work. Watch as Union and Confederate forces collide in battle. Visit the 1863 Summer Fair and shop Civil War-era vendors. Kids can enjoy period crafts, games, and a scavenger hunt.
CLINTON, MARYLAND
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: SURRATTMUSEUM. ORG or 301-868-1121.
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LAWRENCE J. BOPP, PRESIDENT, SHIP’S COMPANY INC.
PERFORMANCE
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA
COURTESY OF THE TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART
JUNE
Seminole Valley Farm Museum
they endured what they did, and how they should be remembered. By the end of the century, their collective recollections reshaped this troubling and traumatic past, and the “unfortunate regiment” emerged as the “Brave Sixteenth.” FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: PENINSULAHISTORY.ORG/CWLS2015 or 330-657-2528. LIVING HISTORY
Ship’s Company
The soldiers’ experience in the petersburg campaign
SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 10 A.M.
USS Constellation
BALTIMORE HARBOR, MARYLAND
EXHIBITION
Handling History SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2 P.M.
The Mariners’ Museum NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA
Tired of those “Do not touch” signs in museums? Here’s your chance to get up close and personal with artifacts from USS Monitor. Conservators will put history into your (gloved) hands during this interactive event. FREE WITH MUSEUM ADMISSION; FOR MORE INFORMATION: MARINERSMUSEUM.ORG or 757-596-2222.
USS Constellation’s own Ship’s Company of living historians provides a fascinating view of service at sea. Presentations and hands-on activities (including gun drill and firing, working the capstan, knot tying, cutlass drill, Marine small arms drill, and mess call) will focus on dayto-day shipboard life in Mr. Lincoln’s Navy. $11 ADULTS; $9 SENIORS; $5 AGES 6 – 14; FREE FOR CHILDREN 5 AND UNDER; FOR MORE INFORMATION: HISTORICSHIPS. ORG or 410-539-1797.
SEP TEMBER LIVING HISTORY
Gone for a Soldier: Civil War Camp and Soldier Experience SAT., SEPT. 5 – SUN., SEPT. 6
LECTURE
A Broken Regiment THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 7 P.M.
G.A.R. Hall
LAWRENCE J. BOPP, PRESIDENT, SHIP’S COMPANY INC.
COURTESY OF THE TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART
PENINSULA, OHIO
Historian Lesley Gordon recounts the tragic history of the 16th Connecticut Infantry, one of the Civil War’s most illfated Union military units and the subject of her recent book, A Broken Regiment. Organized in the late summer of 1862, the 16th Connecticut was unprepared for battle a month later, when it entered the fight at Antietam. Over time, competing stories emerged of who they were, why
Old World Wisconsin EAGLE, WISCONSIN
Get a taste of what Civil War camp life was really like. Muster in, drill with members of the infantry, visit the surgeon’s tent, sample a soldier’s rations, meet the cavalrymen and their horses, go on a scavenger hunt, and experience a little of life on the home front, too. This is not a battlefield reenactment, but a chance to be part of the daily camp life of a member of the Midwest’s famed Iron Brigade. $19 ADULTS; $16 SENIORS; $10 CHILDREN 4-12; CHILDREN UNDER 4 ARE FREE; $50 FAMILY PASS; FOR MORE INFORMATION: OLDWORLDWISCONSIN. ORG or 262-594-6301.
Share Your Event Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
“... highly recommended for all Civil War students and historians.” - Earl J. Hess, author of Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg and In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications & Confederate Defeat
“A unique regimental history.”
- Mark H. Dunkelman, author of Brothers One and All: Esprit de Corps in a Civil War Regiment Explore the battles - including the Crater, Poplar Spring Church, and April 2, 1865 AND MUCH MORE • medical care • prisoners of war • desertion
• 1864 election • citizen soldiers • recruitment
• religion • and much more
“If I have got t, to go and figh” I am willing. Forged A Union Regiment paign in the Petersburg Cam
“My brave boys will you follow me?”
Gregg - Colonel William
“
... highly recommended for all Civil War students and historians. - Earl J. Hess
The 179th r Infantry New York Voluntee 1864-1865
edwin p. rutan,
ii
e-book $14.95! Download today and let the journey begin with 30 enlargeable maps and over 180 images.
Available online at
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FA C T S , F I G U R E S & I T E M S O F I N T E R E S T
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In this sketch by A.E. Matthews of the 31st Ohio Infantry, Union troops charge the Confederate defensive position during the Battle of Jackson, Mississippi, on May 14, 1863. The resulting Union victory helped secure U.S. Grant’s path to Vicksburg to the west. FOR MORE ON JACKSON, TURN THE PAGE. ☛
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IN THIS SECTION Travels
A VISIT TO JACKSON . . . . . . . . 10 Voices
DOG DAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Dossier
ROBERT E. LEE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Preservation
SAVING THE HEART OF ANTIETAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Figures
THE RIFLE MUSKET . . . . . . . . 20 Disunion
LEE SURRENDERED, BUT HIS LIEUTENANTS KEPT FIGHTING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Cost of War
GEORGE C. CLAPP LETTERS . . 24 In Focus
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
RICHMOND IN RUINS . . . . . . . 26
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JACKSON MISSISSIPPI as part of his quest to capture Vicksburg—a key Confederate bastion on the strategically significant Mississippi River—General Ulysses S. Grant maneuvered his army across the waterway at the end of April 1863 and headed northeast toward the state capital at Jackson. He intended to cut the supply lines linking the two cities, thereby preventing Vicksburg’s Rebel garrison from receiving provisions and reinforcements. Grant’s men reached Jackson during the morning of May 14, where a small Confederate force held off the numerically superior Federals as the city, by order of General Joseph E. Johnston, was evacuated. By mid-afternoon, with the Confederate withdrawal complete, Union forces entered Jackson. Two days later, after destroying railroads and much of the city, Grant’s army headed back toward Vicksburg. Its flanks secure, the Union army besieged Vicksburg on May 18 and captured it on July 4, a vital step on the path toward opening the Mississippi River to Union control—and cutting the Confederacy in two. Interested in visiting Jackson? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area—Jeff Giambrone and Grady Howell—to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic city.
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DON’T MISS
The Oaks House Museum (823 N. Jefferson St.; 601-353-9339) is well worth a visit. Built in 1853, “The Oaks” was the home of James Hervey Boyd and his wife, Eliza. A four-time mayor of Jackson, Boyd served as a city alderman throughout the Vicksburg Campaign in 1863, during which fighting swirled around the cottage. Today, the museum does an excellent job of preserving the structure—one of the few that survived the wartime burning of Jackson—and its original furniture, as well as explaining what life was like for the Boyd family during the Civil War. Also worth a look is Jackson City Hall (219 S. President St.; 601-960-1111). As a working city hall, it’s not exactly a tourist mecca. But the building, constructed in 1847, was used as a soldiers hospital during the war and, like The Oaks, survived the conflict intact. JG The Oaks House is one of those places that should be seen but, since it is a bit off the beaten path, is often overlooked. It is one of only five private homes that survived the torches of the different visitations of the Union army during the Civil War. GH
An interior view of the Oaks House Museum
2 Best Family Activity For anyone traveling with small children, the Mississippi Children’s Museum (2145 Highland Dr.; 601-981-5469) is a must. It has 20,000 square feet of exhibit space promoting Mississippi heritage, health and nutrition, literacy, cultural arts, and science and technology—enough to keep the little ones occupied for hours. jg I recommend the Mississippi Children’s Museum and the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science (2148 Riverside Dr.; 601-3547303), both located in LeFleur’s Bluff State Park. At the Children’s Museum, children can run free in a protective environment and interact with exhibits ranging from art to history to adventure. The Museum of Natural Science offers both children and adults a chance to learn about the flora and fauna of the state. Highlights include displays of a variety of fish and reptiles and an exhibit that tells the story of dinosaurs that once roamed the state. gh
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BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
The Old Capitol Museum (100 S. State St.; 601-576-6920) is one of my favorite Civil War spots in the city. Built in 1839, the Old Capitol was the site of Mississippi’s secession convention in January 1861. Informative exhibits provide a great overview of the many historic events that took place in the building, Jackson’s oldest surviving structure and a National Historic Landmark. Another must-see Civil War spot is Greenwood Cemetery (intersection of West and Lamar streets; greenwoodcemeteryjackson.org). Among the many notable individuals buried there are six Confederate generals, including William Barksdale, who was killed while leading his brigade during the Battle of Gettysburg. Greenwood is also the final resting place of over 100 rank-and-file Confederate soldiers. JG
The Old Capitol building, home of the Old Capitol Museum
The Old Capitol building is by far my favorite Civil War-related site. In the wake of damages caused by Hurricane Katrina, the museum went through extensive renovations and re-opened in 2009 with updated and expertly crafted exhibits that detail the building’s history and preservation. Within walking distance of the Old Capitol are a number of other historic buildings worthy of a visit, including the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion (300 East Capitol St.; 601-359-6421). GH Greenwood Cemetery
The Mississippi Children’s Museum
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Recommended Jackson restaurants include Walker’s Drive-In and Babalu Tacos and Tapas (below).
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BEST EATS
Founded in Jackson in the 1920s, Primos Café (2323 Lakeland Dr., Flowood, MS; 601-936-3398) serves a terrific breakfast. The Early Bird Platter is wonderful, and I highly recommend the buttermilk pancakes. Walker’s Drive-In (3016 N. State St.; 601-982-2633) is a lunchtime favorite of native Jacksonians. Everything on the menu is great, but I especially love the burgers and po’ boys. Hal & Mal’s (200 Commerce St.; 601-948-0888) is a perfect place to sample Mississippi cuisine. The weekday blue plate special is a real value, and the catfish is amazing. If you’re looking for great steak or seafood, try Crechale’s (3107 U.S. 80; 601-355-1840). It’s been a Jackson institution for decades; I remember going there as a child with my parents, and the 1950s café setting has not changed since. JG Broad Street Bakery (4465 N. Hwy. 55 #101; 601-362-2900) serves a delightful breakfast with tasty pastries made in-house. The lunch menu at Georgia Blue (111 Colony Crossing Way #130, Madison, MS; 601-898-3330) offers delicious items at very reasonable prices. Locals are drawn to Rooster’s (2906 N. State St.; 601-982-2001) in the city’s Fondren area; the food is very good, and I appreciate the retro ambiance. For dinner, you can’t miss at either Babalu Tacos and Tapas (622 Duling Ave.; 601-366-5757) or Anjou Restaurant (361 Township Ave., Ridgeland, MS; 601-707-0587), both of which serve appetizing meals with flair. GH
Best Time to Be Here
I’m fond of May, when one of my favorite events, The Trail of Honor (trailofhonor.org), takes place. Three days of living history programs, covering the period from the French and Indian War through the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the chance to interact with military veterans, make this a terrific experience. In the past, the Trail has hosted Medal of Honor recipients, Tuskegee Airmen, Pearl Harbor survivors, and former prisoners of war. If you enjoy talking to individuals who have lived through some of the most important moments in American military history, this is definitely the event to attend. jg My favorite times of the year in Jackson are spring and fall; the stifling heat and humidity of the summer months can be overwhelming to those not used to them. As for local events, in March the Fondren community in north Jackson holds its annual Zippity Doo Dah Weekend and Sweet Potato Queens Convention (zddparade.com), several fun-filled days that include a concert and a colorful, joyous parade, with all proceeds benefiting the city’s Blair E. Batson Hospital for Children. Every May the St. Francis of Assisi Church (4000 W. Tidewater Ln., Madison, MS; 601-856-5556) about 15 miles north of Jackson hosts a Cajun Fest; great food and fellowship are enjoyed by all who attend. And while it takes place during summer, late June’s Interactive Civil War Relic Show (scv265.com) in nearby Brandon, Mississippi, draws hundreds of vendors and thousands of visitors each year. The event is free to the public. gh
12 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2015
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY RORY DOYLE
6/1/15 7:22 PM
The Civil War’s Quaker Scout
The grounds of the Old Capitol Inn (here and below)
6
Best Sleep
I recommend the Old Capitol Inn (226 N. State St.; 601-359-9000). Located in the heart of downtown Jackson, it is within walking distance of the Old Capitol Museum, the War Memorial Building, and the monument to Mississippi’s Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. In addition to its convenient location, the Inn has an excellent lunch menu—the shrimp and grits is highly recommended! JG Though there are many good places to stay in and around Jackson, three stand out: the Old Capitol Inn, for its proximity to downtown sites; the Fairview Inn (734 Fairview St.; 888-948-1908), a bed-and-breakfast with great ambiance; and Hyatt Place at Colony Park (1016 Highland Colony Pkwy, Ridgeland, MS; 601-898-8815), located next to one of Jackson’s premier shopping centers. GH
7
Jonathan Roberts of Fairfax, Virginia, reconciled his religion with his sense of duty to preserve the Union and abolish slavery.
“★★★★★” Foreword Clarion Reviews
ava i l a b l e f o r p u rc h a s e at
For more info: CivilWarQuakerScout.com
BEST BOOK
Chimneyville: “Likenesses” of Early Days in Jackson, Mississippi (2007) by H. Grady Howell is very well written, packed with great images, and serves as a powerful illustration of the toll the Civil War took on both soldiers and civilians in Jackson. Also worthy of attention is Ninety-Eight Days: A Geographer’s View of the Vicksburg Campaign (2000) by Warren E. Grabau. This book, which covers the entire Vicksburg Campaign, contains a very good section on the Battle of Jackson. As a bonus, it has some outstanding maps of the Jackson terrain, which are very useful since so much of the battlefield is today covered by urban sprawl. jg My book Chimneyville: “Likenesses” of Early Days in Jackson, Mississippi, which consists of 214 pages of images and maps (helpful for locating Civil War sites around the city), discusses the four separate occupations of the city by the Union army during the war. It is not available in bookstores but can be ordered by emailing gradyhowell@att.net. gh
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS
Jeff T. Giambrone, a native of Jackson, is a senior historic resources specialist with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. His books include Remembering Mississippi’s Confederates (2012).
The Long Overdue Story DVD
H. Grady Howell Jr., a ninth-generation Mississippian, is a historian emeritus of the Mississippi state archives.
is an authentic, unique and inexpensive resource for educators teaching the history of the Civil War. Dianne Cross started with only her great-great grandfather’s name, portrait and oral family history. Her extensive research over several years has enabled her to weave together Isaac Hall’s life from slave to soldier to freeman to his final resting place.
PURCHASE THE DVD AND DIGITAL DOWNLOAD AT
www.longoverduestory.com
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voices
/ DOG DAYS
“ Yesterday it was so hot that I could not write or do anything else but lie in the shade and sweat.” OLIVER WILCOX NORTON, 83RD PENNSYLVANIA INFANTRY, IN A LETTER TO HIS MOTHER FROM BEVERLY FORD, VIRGINIA, AUGUST 13, 1863
“ [T]his afternoon as we crossed the low dusty fields lying just south of Petersburg the hot sunshine poured down with scorching intensity, and as I looked across the low, level expanse the quivering heat danced like as if it were playing around the roasting point. I am truly glad that I am a horse artilleryman, for I do not perceive how our infantrymen can endure the oven-like heat in the trenches.” CONFEDERATE ARTILLERIST GEORGE M. NEESE, IN HIS DIARY, JUNE 27, 1864
“WERE I TO SAY THE WEATHER IS EXCESSIVELY HOT, MY WORDS WOULD CONVEY BUT A FAINT IDEA OF THE TERRIBLE, BURNING, CONSUMING HEAT TO WHICH WE HAVE BEEN SUBJECTED THE LAST THREE DAYS. SURELY THE ‘SKY IS BRASS, THE SUN A BALL OF FIRE.’ I THINK OF THE HOTTEST DAYS, IN HARVEST TIME, AWAY NORTH, IN MICHIGAN, AND OH, HOW COOL, COMPARED WITH THESE.” DAVID LANE, 17TH MICHIGAN INFANTRY, WRITING FROM CITY POINT, VIRGINIA, IN HIS DIARY, JUNE 6, 1864
“ I THINK OF YOU OFTEN IN THE COOL, QUIET PARLOUR AT HOME ENGAGED IN NEEDLEWORK PERHAPS OR SOME OTHER LIGHT OCCUPATION WHILST I A POOR SOLDIER AM SWELTERING UNDER A BURNING SUN....”
“ We made desperate efforts to keep cool, but were wholly unsuccessful. Our tents are covered with pine boughs; the fly is up in front as an awning, and the sides of the tents looped up to the cords, making a free circulation, but still we were almost suffocated.” JOSIAH MARSHALL FAVILL, 57TH NEW YORK INFANTRY, IN HIS DIARY, JULY 30, 1862
“ The men and animals suffered awfully.... Finally at the end of the ten-mile journey we reached the banks of the Tensas river, and though the water was stagnant, in mere pools, we threw ourselves down, brushed aside the green scum and drank that hot, sickly water to quench our thirst.” ALEXANDER G. DOWNING (ABOVE RIGHT), 11TH IOWA INFANTRY, WHILE ON CAMPAIGN IN LOUISIANA, IN HIS DIARY, AUGUST 23, 1863 SOURCES: ARMY LETTERS, 1861–1865 (1903); THE DIARY OF A YOUNG OFFICER SERVING WITH THE ARMIES OF THE UNITED STATES DURING THE WAR OF THE REBELLION (1909); THREE YEARS IN THE CONFEDERATE HORSE ARTILLERY (1911); A CIVIL WAR MARRIAGE I VIRGINIA: REMINISCENCES AND LETTERS (1956); DOWNING’S CIVIL WAR DIARY (1916); A SOLDIER’S DIARY: THE STORY OF A VOLUNTEER, 1862–1865 (1905).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3); DOWNING ’S CIVIL WAR DIARY (1916)
CONFEDERATE SOLDIER GREEN BERRY SAMUELS, IN A LETTER TO HIS FUTURE WIFE FROM FAIRFAX STATION, VIRGINIA, JULY 26, 1861
14 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2015
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Explore the African American & Civil War history of Spotsylvania Courthouse with our mobile app
(540) 507-7090
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3); DOWNING ’S CIVIL WAR DIARY (1916)
www.visitspotsy.com
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dossier
Robert E. Lee in his seminal 1977 work The Marble Man, historian Thomas L. Connelly set out to reexamine Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Lee’s reputation, Connelly noted, rose steadily in the postwar decades, buttressed by ex-comrades and southern writers who helped elevate the former commander of the Army of Northern Virginia to hero status, a military genius whose leadership was as flawless as his character. Yet Connelly found Lee a “troubled” man, his life “replete with frustration, self-doubt, and a feeling of failure.” ¶ Connelly’s work sparked a scholarly reevaluation of Lee—the general and the person—that continues to this day. To get a sense of where Lee’s legacy now stands, we asked a panel of historians to assess the professional and personal record of the renowned Confederate leader. WAS LEE A TRAITOR?
WHAT DO YOU MOST ADMIRE ABOUT LEE ...
Yes 63%
“ His willingness as a commander to take risks and accept the consequences without blaming others.”
... AND WHAT WAS HIS BIGGEST FLAW?
“Lee’s aggressiveness became a flaw when he combined it with wishful thinking—as he did at Gettysburg.” GREGORY URWIN
JAMES M. MCPHERSON
“ Yes. Lee betrayed the nation he not only swore to defend but also had served with unwavering loyalty.” JOAN WAUGH
ELIZABETH VARON
ALLEN C. GUELZO
“ His moral character and basic, fundamental decency as a human being.”
“He was unable to adapt and adjust, not only to the demands of this new kind of war, but to his enemy, which was adapting.” LESLEY GORDON
ETHAN RAFUSE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
No 37%
“Overconfidence, in himself and his men; Lee’s confidence shaded into self-righteousness.”
“ Lee possessed an uncanny ability to sort out the important from the trivial, and understand where the course of events was most likely to flow.”
WHEN WAS LEE AT HIS PEAK?
We asked our panelists to rank Lee’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.
Peninsula Campaign {march – july 1862}
Second Bull Run {august 1862}
Maryland Campaign {september 1862}
Fredericksburg Campaign {december 1862}
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WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE BOOK ABOUT LEE?
“ Exceptional research, beautiful prose, and judicious analysis makes Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s Reading the Man an incomparable biography of General Lee.”
“ Thomas paints a wonderfully compelling picture of Lee’s personality and character.” ETHAN RAFUSE
PETER CARMICHAEL
30%
“ Connelly’s book was the first I read that pulled Lee off his pedestal and treated him as a mortal man—someone to be understood and even respected rather than worshiped.”
GREGORY URWIN
25%
15% 10%
5%
5%
5% 5% WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE QUOTE BY OR ABOUT LEE?
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
“ It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”
sburg ign
r 1862}
LEE’S ALLEGED COMMENT TO GENERAL JAMES LONGSTREET DURING THE BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG [LESLEY GORDON, BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN, JAMES M. MCPHERSON, CHRISTOPHER STOWE, GREGORY URWIN]
“ Lee is audacity personified.” LIEUTENANT COLONEL EDWARD PORTER ALEXANDER QUOTING COLONEL JOSEPH C. IVES, JUNE 1862 [GARY W. GALLAGHER, JEFFRY WERT]
Chancellorsville Campaign {april–may 1863}
Gettysburg Campaign {june–july 1863}
“ Our army would be invincible if it could be properly organized and officered. There never were such men in an army before. They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led.” LEE TO GENERAL JOHN BELL HOOD, MAY 21, 1863 [BROOKS D. SIMPSON]
“ I have been up to see the Congress and they do not seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving.” LEE IN A LETTER TO HIS OLDEST SON, G.W. CUSTIS LEE, MARCH 1865 [KENNETH W. NOE]
Overland Campaign {may–june 1864}
Petersburg Campaign {june 1864–march 1865}
PARTICIPANTS: Peter Carmichael; William C. Davis; Gary W. Gallagher; Joseph Glatthaar; Lesley Gordon; A. Wilson Greene; Mark Grimsley; Allen C. Guelzo; M. Keith Harris; Brian Matthew Jordan; James M. McPherson; Kenneth W. Noe; Ethan Rafuse; Brooks D. Simpson; Christopher S. Stowe; Daniel Sutherland; Gregory Urwin; Elizabeth Varon; Joan Waugh; and Jeffry Wert.
Appomattox Campaign/ ANV Surrender {march–april 1865}
17
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by o . james lighthizer president, civil war trust
p r e s e r vat i o n
E
Saving the Heart of Antietam as the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War draws to a close, it seems a fitting time to reflect on the extraordinary efforts of those who fought, and often gave their lives, on the conflict’s many battlefields. We must remember, however, that these battlefields are not automatically protected. Many preservation groups and dedicated citizens tirelessly work to preserve these historic acres— including the site of the bloodiest single day of fighting in American history, Antietam. ¶ Americans saw the crucial need to preserve the Antietam battlefield soon after the Civil War ended. In the 1890s, the site of the September 1862 engagement became one of the country’s first five Civil War battlefield parks—the others were by purchasing “inholdings” (parcels of privately owned property surrounded by existing parkland), owning and maintaining the land until a transfer to a park is possible. While the Trust and other organizations have helped secure much of the hallowed ground at Antietam, threats still remain. At present, 44 acres at the epicenter of the battlefield, bordered by such iconic landmarks
LOOK FOR REGULAR PRESERVATION NEWS AND UPDATES FROM THE CIVIL WAR TRUST IN FUTURE ISSUES. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION AND HOW YOU CAN HELP, VISIT CIVILWAR.ORG
A monument to the 124th Pennsylvania Infantry looks south over part of the 44acre tract at the epicenter of the Antietam battlefield, which the Civil War Trust is attempting to purchase and preserve.
CIVIL WAR TRUST
Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Shiloh, and Chattanooga—with the creation of the Antietam National Battlefield Site, which was placed under the administration of the United States War Department. In 1933, the park, which at the time encompassed only a fraction of the battle’s most sensitive sites, was transferred to the newly created National Park Service. In the decades that followed, the pace of battlefield preservation quickened, hastened by both increased funding from the federal government and the growing threat of encroaching development. At the Antietam battlefield, cooperation on preservation efforts has come from nonprofit organizations and government entities, including the Antietam National Battlefield Park, the Save Historic Antietam Foundation, the Conservation Fund, the American Battlefield Protection Program, the state of Maryland, the Board of Commissioners of Washington County, and the Civil War Trust. The Trust, which has saved 255 acres at Antietam, preserves land
as the Cornfield, the Dunker Church, and the East and West Woods, remain privately owned. For $575,000, the Civil War Trust can purchase and restore this land, preserving it forever. Several of the Trust’s top supporters and trustees have already pledged a total of $460,000, but we need your support to raise the final $115,000 by June 30, 2015. Help ensure that this crucial ground, which historian Dennis Frye has called “the bloodiest ground of the bloodiest day in American history,” is saved forever. I hope you will consider joining the Trust in this important mission. To learn more or to make a donation, visit civilwar.org/battlefields/ antietam/antietam-2015/.
B
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© R I “
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CIVIL WAR TRUST
Excerpt from Book III
America! America! What are these dying for Unheard of! the instigator of this unholy war Once rent throughout the Union what were a few ragged threads forever ruined… her vesture bloodstained… torn to shreds America! America! Quiet now! every gun Once booming Heralds of Freedom Silent! Shamed! Desolation! Laws of Nature o’er ruled of humans Eagles Soar! Soldiers die! From our Birth We Learn… Understanding and now We must know… Why! America! America! these armies depart… disgraced! None Dare Declaration of Victory in Light of the Dawn we must face! Gathered to count all the killing All equal all now in God’s Grace Reluctants… and those who went willing and those… we must leave in this place Forever Remember their Story! the Thousands and Thousands who’ve died Whether here to taste unsavored Glory or fallen… upholding States’ Pride We leave here… each is his own witness O Brother! ahead, a long ride Hear out Prayer, Lord! He must remain here Faraway… from his Child… and His Bride July 4, 1863
©2004 Postlethwaite Publishing. RHawk61@gmail.com Illustration and design by DM Designs, LLC. Video Production by G.Muse Studios. “Red Hawk” The Battle of Gettysburg Narrative online at www.youtu.be/rOTiew8ziVA
Books & Illustration Note Cards at Turn The Page Bookstore Boonsboro, Md. www.RHJournal.com and www.TTPbooks.com CWM16-FOB-Preservation.indd 19
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13 10 ⁄8 103⁄4 10 ⁄16 7
101⁄2
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THE MODEL 1861 SPRINGFIELD
908,568
at the outbreak of the Civil War, both the Union and Confederacy confronted the same problem: a dearth of suitable weapons. After exhausting their existing stockpiles of firearms, which consisted largely of outdated smoothbore muskets, both sides moved to obtain more serviceable models for their troops. The weapon most sought after was the muzzle-loading rifle musket. Unlike smoothbores, rifle muskets had grooved barrels that spun the projectiles they fired, most commonly cylindrical-conical lead bullets known as minie balls, resulting in increased range (over twice that of older smoothbore weapons) and accuracy. To obtain the hundreds of thousands of rifle muskets needed to arm their volunteers, both sides increased domestic production and purchased rifle muskets from overseas, most notably the British-made Enfield and the Austrian-produced Lorenz. The U.S. Ordnance Department also contracted with a number of private firms to produce new rifle muskets. By war’s end, these efforts guaranteed that most Civil War infantryman carried some type of rifle musket when marching into battle. The weapon shown here, the Model 1861 Springfield (named for the Springfield, Massachusetts, armory that manufac-
tured it), was the conflict’s most commonly used rifle musket, and one of the most popular among the troops. As one Vermont soldier described it, “With our arms we are especially pleased. They are the … best arm in the world, light, strong, well-balanced.” Springfields and other rifle muskets were also deadly; by war’s end, they would account for approximately three-quarters of all battlefield casualties.
.58
caliber
56˝ long
40˝
round barrel, rifled with three broad grooves
53˝
walnut stock
9 lbs. 3
P
number of shots a trained soldier was to be able to fire in one minute
p w h C
100–400 yards effective firing range
500–600 yards
COWAN’S AUCTIONS INC. (COWANSAUCTIONS.COM)
The Rifle Musket
the number of Model 1861 Springfields manufactured during the war (265,129 made at the Springfield Armory, with another 643,439 delivered by private contractors)
maximum firing range
$13.93
cost to manufacture the Springfield in June 1861
T w a th h s a
M s
SOURCES: Joseph G. Bilby, Civil War Firearms (1996); Earl Hess, The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat (2008); Margaret E. Wagner, Gary W. Gallagher, and Paul Finkelman, eds., The Library of Congress Desk Reference (2002); THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR George Grenville Benedict, Army Life in Virginia (1895)
20
SPRING 2015
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©
Pride of the South
Civil War Commemorative Watch Etched on the back with Pride of the South and historic Civil War symbols
P
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6/1/15 6:51 PM
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by elizabeth r . varon
disunion
“if the programme which our people saw set on foot at Appomattox CourtHouse had been carried out … we would have no disturbance in the South,” testified the former Confederate general (and future senator) John Brown Gordon in 1871. Speaking before a congressional committee investigating the widespread anti-black violence in the former Confederacy, Gordon was accusing Radical Republicans of bad faith—specifically, of breaking the “Appomattox Compact.” ¶ Some northerners might have been surprised by the idea that anything resembling a “compact” came out of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865. But Gordon, along with other prominent veterans of Lee’s army, believed that the agreement at Appomattox was more two-sided than many in the North believed. The notion of the compact was rooted in two points: that the Union military victory was illegitimate, a triumph of might over right, and that Lee had negotiated a deal with Grant at Appomattox containing the promise that “honorable” southern men would not be treated dishonorably. This position might have seemed incongruous, were it not for the fact that Gordon and a cadre of influential former Confederate officers—including the former generals Henry A. Wise, Armistead L. Long, William N. Pendleton, and Edward Porter Alexander, along with other senior officers like Charles Marshall and Walter Taylor— spent decades advocating it, long after the North grew tired of arguing about the war. And to a large extent, they won, not only undermining Reconstruction, but distorting its memory. Gordon’s first point, the “might over right” argument, was enshrined in Lee’s April 10, 1865, Farewell Address to his troops. The address, drafted
by Marshall, his aide-de-camp, attributed Confederate defeat to the Yankees’ “overwhelming numbers and resources.” In the context of proslavery ideology, this was a kind of code, conjuring up images of the heartless efficiency of northern society. Responding to Lee’s repeated plea that the “bravery and devotion of the Army of Northern Virginia shall be correctly transmitted to posterity,” Lee’s officers churned out speeches, articles, and memoirs designed to banish the specter of Confederate failure and to disseminate the idea that Lee had faced insurmountable odds of five-to-one or worse in the final campaign. Lee’s “eight thousand starving men” at Appomattox, Taylor explained, had surrendered to an unworthy foe that “had long despaired to conquer it by skill or daring, and who had worn it away by weight of numbers and brutal exchange of many lives for one.” This doctrine referred not only to the size but also the social composition of the Union army. Appomattox veterans lamented that they had
THIS ARTICLE IS EXCERPTED FROM DISUNION, A NEW YORK TIMES ONLINE SERIES FOLLOWING THE COURSE OF THE CIVIL WAR AS IT UNFOLDED. READ MORE AT WWW.NYTIMES.COM/ DISUNION.
been compelled to surrender to a mercenary army—“German, Irish, negro, and Yankee wretches,” as Pendleton put it bitterly—of their social and racial inferiors. Scholars have since established that Lee faced odds of two-to-one at Appomattox, no worse than odds he had beaten before. But in its day, the numbers game had a distinct political purpose. By denying the legitimacy of the North’s military victory, former Confederates hoped to deny the North the right to impose its political will on the South. And it worked: As Reconstruction unfolded, northern commentators again and again observed that white southern recalcitrance was nourished by the sentiments of the Farewell Address. An exasperated northerner traveling through the South in 1866 characterized his encounters with Confederates this way: “‘We were overpowered by numbers,’ they say.… They’ve said that to me more than fifty times within the last few weeks. And they say that they are the gentlemen; we are amalgamationists, mudsills, vandals, and so forth.” The message was clear: The North had not won a moral victory or mandate at Appomattox. The second front in this war of words concerned the surrender terms themselves. Grant’s leniency, so Lee’s officers insisted, was a form of
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ANNE SK BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION
Lee Surrendered, But His Lieutenants Kept Fighting
ANNE SK BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION
homage to southern bravery. In Confederate eyes, Lee was not a passive recipient of that leniency at Appomattox, but instead made a series of propositions, such as the suggestion that Confederates might retain their horses, to which Grant assented. More important still, Lee extracted from Grant, during their brief April 10 meeting on horseback, the promise that each Confederate soldier would receive a printed parole pass, to prove that he came under the April terms. In keeping with the language of the surrender terms, a parole certificate vouched that if a soldier observed the laws in force where he resided, he was to “remain undisturbed.” Confederates argued that these paroles conferred general immunity against Yankee reprisals, such as confiscation and treason trials. Edward Porter Alexander reckoned that the Appomattox terms “practically gave an amnesty to every surrendered sol-
Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee (center left and right) meet on April 10, 1865. That same day, in his Farewell Address to the men of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee attributed Confederate defeat to the Union’s “overwhelming numbers and resources”—a notion that many ex-Rebels would use to deny the legitimacy of the North’s military victory.
dier for all political offences.” When Henry A. Wise, on his way home to Norfolk from Appomattox, was confronted by a Yankee cavalryman who wanted to confiscate his horse, Wise brandished his parole certificate, declaring that he had “Gen. Grant’s safe-guard” and was “under its protection!” A little more than a year later, in May 1866, Wise gave a pair of defiant speeches in Virginia in which he insisted that securing favorable terms was a kind of victory. “I have the profound satisfaction,” he declaimed, “of saying that I fought until we won the privilege of being paroled.” But Confederates went further still, emphasizing that the peace was conditional— dependent on the North’s good behavior. In a late April 1865 interview with the New York Herald, Lee himself issued a warning. If “arbitrary or vindictive or revengeful policies” were enacted by the Yankee government, southerners
would renew the fight, and “give their lives as dearly as possible.” In the same spirit, Pendleton asserted that the promise that southerners would remain unmolested by federal authorities was no “mere military arrangement” but instead a “solemn compact, rigidly binding on both sides.” The Confederates would not have laid down their arms without this “pledge of honor for their protection.” As Reconstruction got underway, former Confederates again and again invoked their interpretation of the Appomattox terms, and particularly the “remain undisturbed” clause, as a shield against social change. Republican efforts to give freedpeople a measure of equality and opportunity and protection were met by white southern protests that such a radical agenda was a betrayal of the Appomattox agreement—that the prospect of black citizenship, as one Virginia news☛ } CONT. ON P. 72
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c o s t o f wa r
$18,400 THE ARTIFACT
CONDITION
102 Civil War letters written by George C. Clapp, a solidier in Company G, 37th Massachusetts Infantry, to his parents and brothers
The letters, nearly all accompanied by their original envelopes, came to auction in good condition throughout with only minor wear. DETAILS In July 1862, Clapp, a 23-year-old bookbinder from western Massachusetts, enlisted as a private in the newly forming 37th Massachusetts, which soon became part of the
Army of the Potomac. He would fight in—and write detailed letters home about—some of that army’s most significant engagements, including Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Overland Campaign, and Philip Sheridan’s Valley Campaign. In April 1865, Clapp was discharged for wounds received the previous September at Winchester, Virginia; he had spent the intervening months recovering in northern military hospitals. He returned to Massachusetts, where he died in 1892. EXTRAS In addition to Clapp’s papers, the collection included two small pen knives, a miniature set of three dice and telescoping shaker, and a piece of shrapnel—possibly the fragment that shattered Clapp’s right humerus.
QUOTABLE
VALUE
On the fighting at Fredericksburg in May 1863, Clapp wrote: “We were ... in the hottest of it. We were supporting a battery right in front of us and … they went at it & such a noise of cannon & musketry I never did dream of hearing. It was exciting in the highest degree bullets whistled around us like hail in a very hard hail storm. We could see the Rebels coming up at a steady pace not halting for anything, our batteries would make a hole in their lines a rod wide & they would close right up as though nothing had happened and march right on.”
$18,400 (price realized at Cowan’s Auctions Inc. in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2007). “It is hard to convey a sense of the rich quality of Clapp’s writing, the flavor he gives of camp life and marches, battles and skirmishes, his attitudes toward duty and war, his officers and fellow soldiers, and quite often turning the daily and trivial into an unforgettable scene,” noted Wes Cowan, founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions, at the time of the sale. “This is a stunning collection of the size and sort that rarely comes on the market any longer.”
COWAN’S AUCTIONS INC. (COWANSAUCTIONS.COM)
A SET OF SOLDIER’S LETTERS SELLS FOR A HEFTY SUM
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s a lv o
in focus
Richmond in Ruins while evacuating richmond in the face of advancing Union forces during the early morning hours of April 3, 1865, Confederate general Richard S. Ewell ordered various structures deemed of military value— including the city’s tobacco warehouses—set afire. Aided by a stiff breeze from the south, the conflagration quickly spread out of control. By sunrise, some 35 blocks, including the vast majority of the city’s business district, were engulfed in flames. “Richmond presented a spectacle that we hope never to witness again,” noted the Richmond Whig. “[T]he air was lurid with the smoke and flame of hundreds of houses sweltering in a sea of fire.” ¶ Not long after the fires were extinguished (by local firefighters and, ironically, Union soldiers who occupied the city later in the day), northern photographers arrived to capture the extent of the devastation in what would become known as the city’s “Burned District.” While many images of the damage were taken, this particular view of the still-smoldering ruins—which shows, at right center, the white steeple of St. Paul’s Church, where Jefferson Davis was worshipping when he received word of the need to evacuate the Confederate capital—has only recently come to light. Shot by photographer William Hathaway, the image remained hidden away for decades in the files of a photo studio in Hanover, Pennsylvania, until obtained by collector Fred C. Sherfy of Gettysburg. “Totally an unknown photo,” says Civil War photography expert and National Park Service historian Mike Gorman. “This is one heck of a find.”
by bob zeller president , center for civil war photography
COURTESY FRED C. SHERFY
THE CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY IS A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES FOR THE PUBLIC BENEFIT. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CCWP AND ITS MISSION, VISIT CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY. ORG
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COURTESY FRED C. SHERFY
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Like the men they saw off to the front, women too felt the pull of patriotism at the outbreak of the Civil War. For many wives, daughters, and sisters—northern and southern, young and old—the most useful way to support country and cause was to volunteer as a nurse. As they would learn, the job had difficulties and dangers—including long hours, often resentful male colleagues, exposure to communicable diseases, and battlefield hazards. By war’s end, thousands of women had answered the call, performing invaluable service to the armies’ sick and wounded. On the following pages, we look at some of their stories.
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ARABELLA MACOMBER REYNOLDS
ANNA ETHERIDGE
REBECCA WISEWELL
f Rebecca Wisewell, a 20-year veteran of nursing at the time the Civil War broke out, instantly impressed those in charge of the Boston hospital where she volunteered in March 1862. “You ought to be out at the front,” they informed her. Within days she was off to Washington, D.C., where she was greeted by Superintendent of Army Nurses Dorothea Dix and put to work at Seminary Hospital. Wisewell, then in her
50s, stayed there for two years before being sent to the Shenandoah Valley and Fortress Monroe, her final post before war’s end. “I often sang for my patients when requested to do so, and I have stood by some of the most blessed deathbeds I can imagine,” she later reflected on her wartime service. “There were a great many praying men in the army—a great many I hope to meet on the other shore.”
Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Anna Etheridge, age 22, accompanied 18 other women in joining the recently formed 2nd Michigan Infantry as vivandieres, or daughters of the regiment, to care for its sick and wounded. Within a few months, all had returned home but Etheridge, who soon would transfer to the 3rd Michigan Infantry and eventually the 5th Michigan Infantry. Known by the troops as “Gentle Annie” for her “thoroughly modest, quiet, and retiring” demeanor, Etheridge would participate in 28 engagements by war’s end, have two horses shot out from under her, and experience a number of close calls. At Second Bull Run, for instance, a wounded soldier was torn to pieces by a Confederate shell “under her very hands.” At Chancellorsville, minie balls grazed her hand, pierced her dress, and killed a Union officer standing next to her. For her repeated courage under fire, Etheridge was awarded the Kearny Cross (which she is wearing in this image), one of only two women to receive the honor. After the conflict, Etheridge worked for the Treasury Department and received a federal pension for her wartime service. Upon her death in 1913 at age 73, she was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with veteran’s honors.
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When her husband enlisted in the 17th Illinois Infantry in May 1861, Arabella “Belle” Macomber Reynolds, age 20, decided to join him. “I will tell you why I shall not miss you and shall not want you to come home,” she reportedly told him. “I am going to the war with you. Now, don’t protest…. I am in perfect health, as strong as you and as patriotic.” Eventually adopted as a “daughter” of the regiment, Reynolds devoted herself to caring for her husband’s sick and injured comrades. At Shiloh, she treated the wounded on a vessel in the Tennessee River while the battle raged nearby. “Through the day the thunder of artillery had almost deafened us; the air seemed filled with leaden hail, and the spent balls would patter upon the deck like a summer shower,” she would later write about the experience. “Solid shot, directed at the ammunition boat, which was close by us, would pass over our heads and drop into the water.” When Illinois governor Richard Yates visited the battlefield a week later, he was so impressed with Reynolds’ tireless efforts that he awarded her a major’s commission. After the war, she moved to California with her husband, whom she divorced in 1884. Reynolds died in 1937 at age 96.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (PREVIOUS SPREAD); CHRIS FOARD COLLECTION (3)
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (PREVIOUS SPREAD); CHRIS FOARD COLLECTION (3)
ELIDA B. RUMSEY
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Like so many young women interested in volunteering as an army nurse—she was 20 when the war began—Elida B. Rumsey was turned away due to her age. Undeterred, the New York City native and her fiancé, a clerk in the Navy Department named John Fowle, traveled to hospitals, where they attempted to entertain the troops—telling stories and supplying them with pictures, books, and playing cards. Rumsey also used her “sweet voice,” regularly singing patriotic songs for the soldiers recovering in Washington hospitals. The pair soon established a Sunday evening prayer meeting in Columbian College General Hospital, as well as a free library for soldiers, most of the funds coming from Rumsey’s concerts. Immediately after the Second Battle of Bull Run in August 1862, the pair set out with a load of supplies to the front, determined to help the wounded. At first rebuffed by a guard, Rumsey “fell on her knees before him and begged her way through.” They soon happened upon a small cabin near the battlefield occupied with injured. At first, the “terrible odor and scenes of suffering” caused Rumsey to faint. “To think that I have come all this way … to bind up the wounds of these soldiers, and here the first case of running blood I see I have to become helpless,” she later recalled chiding herself. “I won’t faint. I will go back, and work among these poor soldiers.” Rumsey and Fowler would spend the day binding wounds until the Union army retreated. They married in the spring of 1863 and continued their work for the remainder of the war, after which they relocated to Dorchester, Massachusetts. 32 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2015
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CHRIS FOARD COLLECTION (3)
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MARIA M.C. HALL
CHRIS FOARD COLLECTION (3)
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
i Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Maria M.C. Hall— whom an acquaintance characterized as “highly educated, … of pleasing manners and dress, … [and] well fitted to grace any circle”— was determined to “consecrate herself to the service of the nation” by ministering to the sick and wounded after the outbreak of the war. After Dorothea Dix turned her down for a hospital spot for being too young (Dix set a minimum age of 30 for her army nurses), Hall found another facility in the capital willing to take her on. In the summer of 1862, she served aboard the hospital transport ship Daniel Webster, after which she was posted to Smoketown Hospital, where she cared for soldiers wounded during the Battle of Antietam from September 1862 until May 1863. One of her patients there, a soldier in the 12th Massachusetts Infantry, would later write to her, “There are kind deeds received which a
man cannot ever forget, more especially when they are done by one who does not expect any rewards for them, but the satisfaction of having helped humanity. But as one who first unfortunate, and next fortunate enough to come under your kind cares, I come rather late perhaps to pay you a tribute of gratitude which should have been done ere this.” Hall ended the conflict as general superintendent of the Naval Academy Hospital in Washington, where some 4,000 wounded might be cared for at any one time. After the war, Hall moved to Connecticut, married, and had two daughters. She died in 1912 at age 76. Of her days as a wartime nurse, she noted, “I mark my Hospital days as my happiest ones.”
ANNA M. ROSS
o In October 1861, Anna M. Ross was appointed “Lady Principal” of the Cooper Shop Hospital, a branch of the Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon in Philadelphia, her native city. Noted one observer of her performance: “Day and night she was at her post—watching while others slept, dressing with her own hands the most loathsome wounds; winning the love and admiration of all with whom she was associated.” In 1863, after touring New Jersey and Pennsylvania to raise funds for a new, permanent home for discharged soldiers, Ross fell ill; she died on December 22, from what some believed to be the effects of “extreme fatigue.”
“ So closes the brief and imperfect record of a beautiful life; but the light of its lovely example yet remains.”
FROM A TABLET ERECTED AT THE GRAVE OF ANNA M. ROSS “BY HER FRIENDS”
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EMILY E. PARSONS
i Iowa resident Carrie Wilkins, age 18, spent two years as a nurse in various facilities in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana, as well as on hospital ships. After the war, she taught children orphaned during the conflict. In 1868, she moved to the West Coast, where she married a doctor and had a daughter. She died in 1924.
JANE JENNINGS
f After her brother, a soldier in the 3rd Wisconsin Infantry, was wounded during the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, 24-year-old Jane Jennings traveled to Washington to enlist as a nurse. She soon obtained a position in a hospital tent; within a few weeks, she was in charge of several tents. After the war, Jennings worked at the Treasury Department and, at age 59, again ministered to wounded soldiers, this time aboard the transport ship Seneca during the Spanish-American War. Jennings died of a stroke in December 1917.
“ Her presence in the hospital was always a blessing, and cheered and comforted many a despondent heart, and compensated in some degree, for the absence of the loved ones at home.”
A WARTIME ACQUAINTANCE OF EMILY E. PARSONS
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CARRIE WILKINS
At the outbreak of the war, Massachusetts native Emily E. Parsons, inspired by Florence Nightingale and her nurses during the Crimean War, trained as a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital. For the next year and a half, she was “thoroughly and carefully instructed” by the hospital’s surgeons, “all of whom took great interest in fitting her for the important duties she proposed to undertake, and gave her every opportunity to practice, with her own hands, the labors of a good hospital nurse.” After a two-month stint at Fort Schuyler Hospital on Long Island at the end of 1862, Parsons was posted to St. Louis, where she worked in Lawson Hospital and aboard the hospital steamboat City of Alton before becoming superintendent of female nurses at Benton Barracks Hospital, the city’s largest. She remained there until August 1864, when a bout of malarial fever caused her to return to Massachusetts; by the time she had recovered, the conflict was over. Of her wartime service, one admirer wrote: “Among the sick and suffering she brought the sunshine of a cheerful, loving heart, beaming from a countenance expressive of kindness and good will and sympathy to all.”
CHRIS FOARD COLLECTION ( WILKINS, JENNINGS, DUNCAN); U.S. ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER (PARSONS)
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KATE M. DUNCAN
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CHRIS FOARD COLLECTION ( WILKINS, JENNINGS, DUNCAN); U.S. ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER (PARSONS)
Kate M. Duncan, whose husband was a soldier in the Union army, served for a year as a nurse at Baltimore’s Patterson Park Hospital. The surgeon in charge of the first ward in which she worked, Duncan recalled, “did not like women.” She was soon transferred to another ward, whose lead surgeon was much more encouraging. “He had me assist him on his morning rounds, dressing wounds, and did not think anything was too bad for me to see.” Duncan was also present at one of the war’s deadliest engagements, the Battle of Gettysburg, about which she recalled, “I … did not have my clothes off for a week after the wounded began to arrive.” (The photo here of Duncan, seated right, was taken at Gettysburg in July 1863.) Duncan lived in Iowa after the war and died in 1912.
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ANNA LOWELL
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i Before a single southern state seceded from the Union, Washington resident Almira Fales, convinced that Abraham Lincoln’s election would lead to armed sectional conflict, began in December 1860 “to prepare lint and hospital stores for the soldiers of the Union, not one of whom had then been called to take up arms.” Derided for her efforts, Fales was proven right the following spring with the firing on Fort Sumter. She would go on to care for wounded at a number of major engagements, including Shiloh, Second Bull Run, and Fredericksburg. She worked under fire during the Seven Days Battles in 1862, during which she ministered to “the saddest
creatures that she ever saw.” After her soldierson was killed in action at Chancellorsville in May 1863, Fales wrote a friend, “I feel now that I must work harder and do more for the living than I have ever done, and to this end I go daily 6, 8, 10 or 12 miles to the distant camps, forts and hospitals where a female is seldom seen, and furnish the sick and suffering boys with all with things as you good ladies are sending me from time to time. I wish I could do more.” Fales would survive the war by only three years, dying in 1868 at age 59.
“ I do what I can for them. I care for them, I pray with them, I sing to them, I work for them and feed them, and think I need do no more.” HELEN GILSON, UPON BEING ASKED WHETHER SHE QUERIED HER PATIENTS ABOUT THEIR RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION
HARRIET A. DADA
i Engaged before the war as a missionary among Native American tribes in the Southwest, Harriet A. Dada headed to Washington, D.C., shortly after the Battle of Bull Run to offer her services to Dorothea Dix. “Are you ready to work?” Dix asked Dada upon her arrival. “You are needed in Alexandria.” Thus began Dada’s Civil War
nursing career. By conflict’s end, she had been stationed at hospitals in Harpers Ferry, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Murfreesboro, and Chattanooga. Dada, who preferred work on the battlefield, “where the real comfort of the sick and wounded was the chief concern of those in charge of them,” would be close to combat on many
occasions—such as the Battle of Winchester in May 1862, when Confederates overran her field hospital in pursuit of retreating Union forces, leaving her and her colleagues isolated and under enemy guard. After the war, Dada married and became a physician. She died in 1909 at age 74.
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ALMIRA FALES
CHRIS FOARD COLLECTION (FALES, DADA, GILSON); U.S. ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER (LOWELL)
During the summer of 1862, Boston resident Anna Lowell served aboard a hospital transport ship on the James River. It was during this time that her brother, a Union soldier, died in the fighting outside Richmond. In November, Lowell was assigned to Ward K of Washington’s Armory Square Hospital, where she remained until it was broken up in August 1865. By then she had been placed in charge of the facility’s special diet kitchen as well as Ward K.
HELEN GILSON A resident of Chelsea, Massachusetts, where she had served as governess for the children of Mayor Frank B. Fay, 23-year-old Helen Gilson petitioned Dorothea Dix for a nursing appointment when the war began. Rejected because of her age, she accompanied Fay and his assistants to Virginia after the Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 to minister to the sick and wounded. In 1862, she took a position as a nurse aboard a hospital boat during the Peninsula Campaign before working in field hospitals after the battles at Antietam and Fredericksburg. Soon known for her skills in surgical dressing and preparing special diets for convalescing men, Gilson would go on to treat the wounded after some of the war’s greatest clashes, including Gettysburg, the Overland Campaign, and the Petersburg Campaign. By war’s end, she would take particular interest in the care of the army’s AfricanAmerican soldiers, campaigning for the creation of the Colored Hospital Service, an organization she would eventually lead. Gilson returned to Chelsea after the war; she married in 1866 and died in childbirth two years later. Gilson “had noble qualities of mind and heart,” Frank Fay later recalled. “She was a winning personality, and was strong and brave….”
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CHRIS FOARD COLLECTION (FALES, DADA, GILSON); U.S. ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER (LOWELL)
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AFTER THE WAR
“ These are women who, in their early womanhood, filled with the same patriotism that sent to the defense of the flag their husbands, fathers, brothers, and lovers, went to the front to care for the sick and wounded.” KATE M. SCOTT, NATIONAL SECRETARY, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF ARMY NURSES OF THE CIVIL WAR, 1910
Much like the soldiers they ministered to during the conflict, many nurses who survived the war reconvened to discuss old times, to preserve a record of their wartime activities, and to lobby the federal government for benefits. The most prominent organization of veteran nurses—the National Association of Army Nurses of the Civil War— formed in 1881 under the direction of Dorothea Dix. Admission was limited to women of “good moral character” who had served at least three months as a nurse during the Civil War. Its members met regularly at encampments of the largest northern male veterans organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, and both groups helped “perpetuate the grand principles for which the boys in blue fought and died.” Due in large part to the organization’s efforts, Congress in 1892 passed legislation that approved a $12 monthly pension for nurses who had been hired by the government between 1861 and 1865. The association’s final encampment occurred in 1939. RIGHT: Members of the National Association of Army Nurses of the Civil War gather in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the national encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic in 1910. LEFT: A postwar ribbon worn by former Civil War nurses. SOURCES: Mary A. Gardner Holland, Our Army Nurses (1895); “Ministering Angels,” Military Images
38
vol. 33, no. 2 (Spring 2015); L.P. Brockett and Mary C. Vaughan, Woman's Work in the Civil War (1867); William Howell Reed, ed., War Papers of Frank B. Fay (1911); Julia Ward Howe, et al, Representative Women of New England (1904); Frank Moore, Women of the War; Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice (1867); In Honor of the National Association of Civil War Army Nurses (1910). With sincere thanks to Chris Foard, Ronald S. Coddington, and Michael J. McAfee for their assistance.
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CHRIS FOARD COLLECTION (2)
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CLOSIN 40 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2015
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In the last months of the Civil War, Texas and the Trans-Mississip pi of
NG ACT BY ANDREW W. HALL
COURTESY OF TEXAS STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES COMMISSION
ssip pi of the Confederacy struggled to hang on.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
In this sketch from Harper’s Weekly, Confederate forces attack occupying Union troops at Galveston, Texas, on January 1, 1863. They successfully recaptured the city later that day.
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To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our Notes section on page 78.
over the dunes, discouraging a Union landing party. Acting Ensign Börner and most of his men, who had been put on board to watch over McCluskey and his crew, were now themselves prisoners; Sting Ray would later be hauled out into the surf and refloated. The Union sailor left swimming was eventually fished out by his shipmates aboard Kineo, “in a beastly state of intoxication, crazy drunk and howling.”1 The innovation and determination shown by Dave McCluskey in the spring of 1864 were typical traits for blockade runners, who over the next year turned the western Gulf of Mexico from a slow backwater of the South into a hive of activity, a final southern port that would survive 1865’s fall of Richmond by two months. Yet even as blockade runners turned their attention to Texas, this last stronghold of the Confederacy was crumbling from within. texas had been one of the first states to secede in 1861, along with the Deep South cotton states. Part of the Union for only 15 years, Texas was then populated mostly by transplants from the southern United States, who worked actively to re-create a plantation culture like the ones they had left in North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. Except for the native Texans of Hispanic descent—called Tejanos, they were mostly excluded from opportunities for economic and political power
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THE SOLDIER IN OUR CIVIL WAR (1893)
He put five of his sailors on board, under the command of a Prussianborn junior officer named Paul Börner, and turned his gunboat around to return to his anchorage off the river’s mouth. He gave Börner orders to follow behind in Sting Ray. The 34-year-old McCluskey was an immigrant to Texas, a resourceful mariner who had spent the years before the war running steamboats on area rivers and streams. And he was not about to lose the schooPaul ner, the principal source Börner of his livelihood, to the Yankees now. While Börner poked around in McCluskey’s cabin, looking for incriminating documents, McCluskey and his men casually invited the Federal sailors remaining on deck to sample some of the expensive liquor they were carrying as cargo. The seamen, whose fondness for alcohol exceeded their own good sense, were soon quite drunk. When the hapless Börner and another sailor emerged from the cabin and challenged McCluskey and his men, they were quickly overpowered. One Federal sailor stumbled over his own feet and fell overboard; McCluskey tossed him a wooden spar to use as a float. Another Union sailor retreated to the rowboat being towed astern and quickly cut the boat adrift. McCluskey, now in control of his schooner again, changed course and ran for the beach, with Kineo in belated pursuit. McCluskey continued into the shallows where Kineo could not follow and gently landed on the sand. A moment later a group of Confederate horsemen rode up
and collectively dismissed as “Mexicans”—everyone, it seemed, came from somewhere else. The published journal of the Texas State Legislature at the time of secession includes a table listing House and Senate members, with columns for their birthplace and the year they immigrated to Texas.2 While the western half of the state remained a raw and violent frontier, the eastern half quickly gave itself over to growing cotton and, near the coast, sugar cane. Texas gained a reputation as “a virtual empire for slavery” through its years as a republic and into early U.S. statehood. Its slave population grew at a faster rate than its free population did; the number of enslaved persons more than tripled between 1850 and 1860, largely due to southern slaveholders swarming into the state where good land was plentiful and cheap. Cotton shipments from Galveston and other Texas ports rose steadily, with shipments of 500-pound bales rising from 31,806 in 1850 to just under 250,000 in 1860, an increase of nearly 700 percent in just a decade. The majority was shipped to other U.S. ports in what was termed the “coastwise” trade, while about 45% of it in 1860 went overseas, mostly in ships bound for the United Kingdom.3 As elsewhere in the South, secession had been widely met in Texas with boisterous patriotism and bravado. For many, it was a lark. In Galveston, eager volunteers took over a cupola on the roof of the threestory Hendley’s Row, one of the taller buildings in the city, and made it into a lookout station. They created a code of signal flags to inform the citizenry about the ships offshore, hosted visitors to the cupola, and generally made a grand game of their assignment. The game ended abruptly on July 2, 1861, with the arrival of USS South Carolina, whose captain, James Alden, gave formal notice that the Texas coast was now under Federal blockade. Alden drove
GALVESTON AND TEXAS HISTORY CENTER, ROSENBERG LIBRARY, GALVESTON, TEXAS (BÖRNER); FRANCIS MILLER, PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
Dave McCluskey was one angry Scotsman. ¶ His small blockade-running schooner, Sting Ray, had been captured while trying to slip into the mouth of the Brazos River in Texas, and McCluskey and his small crew were soon put under guard by a boarding party from the Union gunboat Kineo. McCluskey had presented documents claiming he was traveling from Havana, Cuba, to Veracruz, Mexico— a common ruse among blockade runners—but the commander of Kineo had remained suspicious.
THE SOLDIER IN OUR CIVIL WAR (1893)
GALVESTON AND TEXAS HISTORY CENTER, ROSENBERG LIBRARY, GALVESTON, TEXAS (BÖRNER); FRANCIS MILLER, PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
USS South Carolina engages Confederate batteries at Galveston in August 1861. This action, which resulted in a single civilian death, was the first significant military engagement on the Texas coast. Opposite page, bottom: USS South Carolina’s captain, James Alden, who had announced the U.S. blockade on the Texas coast a month prior.
home the reality of the war the following month when, in response to one of his vessels being fired on by a shore battery, he brought his own ship close inshore and exchanged fire with the Confederate artillerists. Many of the Federals’ shells passed clear over their targets, exploding in the town beyond. Civilians who had lined the dunes along the beach, expecting to see a dramatic sea fight, fled in headlong panic. Many of them hastily packed their belongings and departed for Houston and other points inland, where they remained beyond the range of the U.S. Navy’s guns for the duration of the conflict.4 The Federal blockade of the South had initially been declared by President Abraham Lincoln on April 19, 1861, nominally in response to Jefferson Davis’ call for Confederate privateers to attack Union shipping. It was a dubious proposition under international convention at the time—blockade was recognized as a legitimate form of warfare between nations, but
not against part of a nation in rebellion, as the Lincoln administration insisted the Confederacy actually was—but ultimately the other major powers, notably Britain and France, declined to challenge it directly, or to extend formal diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy.5 But while foreign governments tried to stay out of the conflict, many of their citizens saw an opportunity. Running a sailing vessel into a Confederate port and back out again was a risky proposition, but with skill and luck it was also enormously profitable. An extensive blockaderunning system soon developed, with fast schooners or steamships carrying cargoes between Confederate ports and neutral harbors such as Bermuda, Nassau, and Havana. Southern ship owners, like Dave McCluskey, registered their vessels under a neutral flag, usually British, and carried false papers showing them bound for a neutral port. (This rarely fooled Union navy officers if
the ships were caught.) A successful round trip into a Confederate port and back out again might pay for the purchase of the ship, inbound and outbound cargoes, and the wages of the crew, and still make a profit. While the Confederate government eventually bought and operated its own blockade-running ships in the latter part of the war, the vast majority of blockade runners were backed by private investors. Between 1861 and 1864, the Union navy gradually expanded its blockade of the Texas coast. The Federals captured Galveston in the fall of 1862, only to have it retaken by the Confederates under Major General John Bankhead Magruder on New Year’s Day 1863. Another Union invasion fleet was turned back at Sabine Pass the following September. Smaller, successful landings were made farther south, at Corpus Christi and Brazos Santiago, near the mouth of the Rio Grande. Despite these events, though, the Gulf of Mexico
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munitions, military supplies, and civilian goods between June and September 1864, almost as many as had entered prior to that time since the beginning of the conflict three years before.6 William Watson was another Scotsman who, like Dave McCluskey, had immigrated to the South and later ran the blockade under sail. Watson made one last run into Galveston late in the war, as hired navigator and pilot of a steamship, Pelican. Watson found the propellerdriven steamer itself adequate for running the blockade, but almost none of the crew had made the attempt before, and the new captain
“knew nothing of navigation.” The first night out of Havana, Watson had to stop the ship’s master from setting Pelican’s running lights—white, red, and green lamps that would reveal their presence for miles around. When he arrived at Galveston at the end of March 1865, after an absence of several months, Watson found that his experience aboard Pelican was hardly unique. Everyone was getting into the blockade-running game now. Years later Watson reflected in his memoirs on how, early in the war, when the blockade there had been sparse and ineffectual, there was little coordinated effort made by foreign shippers.
COURTESY OF TEXAS STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES COMMISSION
west of the mouth of the Mississippi remained a theater of secondary importance to the war east of the river. That changed somewhat in the late summer of 1864, when the U.S. Navy’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron forced the entrance to Alabama’s Mobile Bay, ending Mobile’s days as a destination for blockade runners operating out of neutral Cuba. Many of them immediately shifted their operations to Galveston, which by that point was the only significant port on the Gulf of Mexico still in Confederate hands. At least 10 steamers, all from Havana, successfully ran into Galveston carrying
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COURTESY OF TEXAS STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES COMMISSION
Confederate ships attack Federal blockading vessels on January 1, 1863, during a successful attempt to retake Galveston from Union forces. While the city would remain under Confederate control for the remainder of the war, the action only temporarily disrupted the U.S. blockade of Galveston.
Now, he noted, “a fleet of from twelve to fifteen heavily armed steamers lay off the port, and a number of fast cruisers ... cruised all over the Gulf of Mexico, overhauling and capturing vessels wherever they found them, yet in the face of all this, notwithstanding, the number of steamers and schooners that passed in and out was almost incredible.”7 For all the new bustle of activity on the waterfront, though, conditions in the city itself had become almost untenable for civilians. After Galveston was recaptured in January 1863, Confederate authorities reinforced its defenses and declared it to be an “armed camp,” under martial law.
The population dwindled even as the number of garrison troops increased. Crimes, both petty and violent, became commonplace. Houses left vacant by evacuating civilians were stripped of their furnishings, and fences and outbuildings were torn down for firewood. Bored soldiers found or created various forms of entertainment to amuse themselves, and vice flourished. While obtaining basic foodstuffs was not generally a problem in Texas, the difficulties of transport made obtaining sufficient food to eat a major difficulty on the island. In February 1864 soldiers of the 8th Texas Infantry turned out in formation on a Sunday morning and marched, with reversed arms and muffled drums, to the courthouse square where they conducted a mock funeral for a beef carcass, issued as rations, that they deemed inedible. Two months later, a group of soldiers’ wives, angry at the military commander’s decision to stop selling them flour, protested at both his living quarters and his office.8 Insubordination and outright mutiny increasingly became a challenge during the latter part of the war as well. In August 1863 men of the 3rd Texas Infantry and 1st Heavy Artillery refused their daily fourhour drill in the August heat without improved rations. Desertions became commonplace, even though many Confederate troops were stationed in isolated posts miles from settlements. Senior officers, seeing their commands melt away, published notices offering pardons to deserters who turned themselves in to their old commands.9 Issues related to desertion, along with men taking to the woods to avoid conscription, became a serious problem throughout the region. The area around Winter’s Bayou, now part of the Sam Houston National Forest in east Texas, became known as a place where “‘jayhawkers’ and deserters had taken up their abode, built comfortable shanties, cleared lands, planted corn, erected a tan yard for making leather of the hides of stolen cattle, and surrounded themselves with many of the appliances of civilization.” Authorities
responded by using “Negro dogs,” bloodhounds bred to track runaway slaves, to hunt them down.10 Desertion was easier for soldiers stationed on the coast; they needed only to secure a boat or other craft to make it to a Union blockading ship anchored offshore, and Federal naval officers reported frequent arrivals of Confederate deserters and other refugees who, seeking to secure their protection, often provided updated intelligence about military developments and conditions on land. One would-be deserter who didn’t make it was Anton Richers, a private in an artillery battery stationed at Galveston. Richers stole a boat in December 1864 and attempted to take it out to the Federal ships outside the harbor. But Richers’ boat capsized on some harbor obstructions, and he was rescued by Confederate soldiers who heard his cries of distress. Richers was subsequently court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to death; he was executed on March 3, 1865, in front of detachments from all the regiments stationed on the island. If the court-martial that ordered Richers’ execution believed it would serve, as the thinking went, pour encourager les autres, the actual event almost certainly increased dissatisfaction in the ranks and made morale worse. Richers himself refused to be tied or blindfolded, and placed his hand over his heart as a target for the firing party. Fourteen men from Richers’ artillery regiment brought a pair of field guns to the execution ground, in an attempt to stop the proceedings. They were quickly arrested and sent off to the guardhouse, but after the execution it was learned that a local clergyman had traveled to Houston the day before to urge a reprieve for Richers. The commanding general of the district had granted the reprieve that evening, but the telegraph lines were down and his order was not received at Galveston until 15 minutes after Richers’ death.11 like william watson’s shipmates aboard Pelican, some of the men who tried their luck in the last months of the war were woefully
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
John Newland Maffitt, one of the more effective blockade runners operating out of Galveston, struck one contemporary observer as “more like a cool, unconcerned passenger than a Captain in the C.S. Navy, with a Scotch cap, a torn coat, and a pair of rubber shoes, without socks.”
LIFELINE OF THE CONFEDERACY
The key to blockade running was fast vessels making short trips. The main routes through the Gulf of Mexico used Havana and Veracruz as neutral ports to import needed supplies and export cotton and other goods. MOBILE NEW ORLEANS
HOUSTON GALVESTON
Sting Ray captured here
BROWNSVILLE/ MATAMOROS
Mobile to Havana, 540 nautical miles, 68 hours at 8 knots
Galveston to Havana, 754 nautical miles, 94 hours at 8 knots
Rio Grande to Havana, 830 nautical miles, 104 hours at 8 knots
(Mouth of the Rio Grande)
HAVANA
Galveston to Veracruz, 610 nautical miles, 77 hours at 8 knots
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
VERACRUZ
unprepared, but nonetheless tried to claim a piece of the action before the opportunity passed them by altogether. They included the crew of Acadia, a big Canadian-built paddle steamer, whose effort proved to be one of grand schemes and almost comical execution. Under the command of Captain Thomas Leach, Acadia sailed from Halifax in early December 1864. Leach stopped at Nassau and Havana before heading to Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. There, he dropped off his passengers—supposed Confederate agents who set off on a scheme to cross overland to the Pacific and capture a U.S. mail steamer carrying specie from the California gold hills—and turned north for the Texas coast. Arriving near his destination around dusk on February 5, 1865, Leach found the coast enveloped in a heavy fog, a common situation during the winter months. By some accounts Leach
was trying to bring his ship into the mouth of the Brazos River, a deeply wrongheaded notion, given Acadia’s large size and relatively deep draft. The ship’s magnetic compasses had reportedly never been fitted properly on deck or adjusted to compensate
Lookouts used this tower on the Bolivar Peninsula, at the entrance to Galveston Bay, to keep track of Union blockading vessels and to signal blockade runners attempting to enter the harbor.
for the iron fittings in the hull, and Leach’s hired pilot, frustrated at both the weather and perhaps the incompetence of the ship’s management, gave up responsibility for navigation and stomped off below to his cabin. The steamer struck hard and fast on the shore between the mouth of the Brazos River and San Luis Pass, about 30 miles south of Galveston. Only part of its cargo had been salvaged the next morning when the fog lifted and it was spotted by the Union blockader USS Virginia. The Federal gunboat moved in close and opened fire on the stranded steamer, leaving it a wreck “riddled by shell and shot.”12 In addition to being badly mismanaged by officers unprepared for the challenges of running the blockade, Acadia exemplified another aspect of the blockade: the propensity of merchants to import high-end civilian goods over more mundane
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CORNUBIA : POACHER TURNED GAMEKEEPER IN OCTOBER 1864 A GALVESTON merchant named George Grover made a detailed sketch of U.S. Navy warships anchored offshore in the
Gulf of Mexico. Grover carefully recorded each vessel: sidewheelers and propeller-driven craft, square-rigged ships and schooners. One vessel, though, stood out from the others—a sidewheel steamer with two funnels, a cut-down rig, and a gracefully curved bow profile. Grover’s drawing of it even hints at the existence of a white-painted figurehead, rarely seen on naval vessels in the latter stages of the war. The ships in Grover’s drawing are not identified, but this sidewheeler is almost certainly USS Cornubia, which was stationed off Galveston at the time. Cornubia began life as a British civilian steamer, launched in March 1858 and put into service carrying passengers and light cargo between Hayle and Bristol. Bought by the Confederate government in 1862, it first ran the Federal blockade into Wilmington, North Carolina, in the fall of that year. Running under the name Lady Davis, the steamer proved to be one of the most successful blockade-running ships of the war, making the round trip between Bermuda and Wilmington at least nine times. Its luck ran out, though, on November 8, 1863, when it was captured by the Union gunboats James Adger, Niphon, and Daylight. The steamer was condemned at a prize court in Boston and sold at auction, where the U.S. Navy bought it for $99,192.29 and restored its original name, Cornubia.1 As Peter Joseph, a Cornubia researcher from Penzance, Cornwall, put it, “the poacher had turned gamekeeper.” Cornubia spent most of its Union service in the Gulf of Mexico, much of it off Galveston. In June 1865, it was the light-draft Cornubia that the Federal naval commander, Benjamin F. Sands, selected to take into Galveston Harbor to reclaim Texas for the Union. The U.S. Navy sold it to private owners in 1865 for $19,000, a fifth of what they’d paid two years before. Renamed New England, it was stripped of its machinery and converted to a four-masted sailing vessel, a novelty at the time. In this configuration it made one last visit to Galveston in October 1872. It sailed again on November 11 for the French port of Havre, carrying, ironically enough, 1,175 bales of cotton.2
GALVESTON AND TEXAS HISTORY CENTER, ROSENBERG LIBRARY, GALVESTON, TEXAS (2)
Galveston merchant George Grover’s October 1864 sketch of U.S. Navy warships anchored offshore includes Cornubia (labeled No. 4), which had been one of the most successful blockade running vessels of the war before being captured and purchased at auction by the Union.
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GALVESTON AND TEXAS HISTORY CENTER, ROSENBERG LIBRARY, GALVESTON, TEXAS (2)
Galveston’s Central Wharf, where the blockade runner Lark was looted during the conflict’s closing days, is seen here in a photograph taken just before the war.
military and civilian necessities. An auction of private cargo recovered from Acadia included flannel cloth, Nova Scotia wool, linen and silk handkerchiefs, lead pencils, letter paper and envelopes, percussion caps, hand tools, preserved fruit, black tea, claret, playing cards, gold lace, French quinine, calomel, and “blue mass,” a mercury-based medicinal used to treat everything from constipation to syphilis to tuberculosis to birthing pain. Early in the war the Confederacy had trusted the twin motives of profit and patriotism to supply their needs, but by 1864 the government in Richmond began requiring all ships calling at Confederate ports to devote half their cargoes to government consignments. Still, it was not enough. The editor of the Galveston Weekly News was disgusted at the premium paid for luxury items recovered from the Acadia wreck, even as the Confederacy was entering its death throes:
“The few dozen preserved fruits ... brought from four to five hundred per cent on first cost, while the necessary articles of iron brought but 10¢, but a trifle over actual cost, showing a proneness to indulge our appetites in preference to supplying the actual wants of the country.”13 Not all attempts to run the blockade were quite as amateurish as Acadia’s. In mid-April, John Newland Maffitt ran his governmentowned blockade runner, Owl, into Galveston. Maffitt, already famous for commanding the Confederate navy raider Florida earlier in the war, was well qualified for the task, having been employed before the war surveying the U.S. coast along the Gulf of Mexico. Nevertheless, Maffitt drove his paddle steamer aground on a shoal near the entrance to the harbor on the evening of April 14, 1865—the same night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Washington, D.C. Undoubtedly there were
several Union vessels and guard boats in the vicinity, but Maffitt remained undetected. At this point in the war blockade runners operating out of Cuba often carried members of the Confederate Signal Corps, perhaps to facilitate communication with troops on shore. Whether through the efforts of one of these men or on his own, Maffitt was able to pass word of his predicament to Confederate signalmen several hundred yards away on the Bolivar Peninsula, who were then able to relay that message to Galveston. An old river steamboat, Diana, chugged out from the harbor, found Maffitt’s ship in the dark, and succeeded in towing it off the sand and into port. It was a difficult, dangerous maneuver, but according to one eyewitness, Maffitt never lost his casual bearing. The famous officer “looked more like a cool, unconcerned passenger than a Captain in the C.S. Navy, with a Scotch cap, a torn coat, and a pair of
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
General E. Kirby Smith, commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department, lamented that he could not get enough of the over 36,000 troops he commanded to fight on after Robert E. Lee’s and Joseph E. Johnston’s surrenders in Virginia and North Carolina, respectively, in April 1865. “[Y]ou have made yr. choice,” he wrote in a bitter farewell message to his men at the end of May. “It was unwise and unpatriotic.... I pray you may not live to regret it.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
rubber shoes, without socks.”14 The Federal gunboats never spotted Owl that night, and Maffitt got clean away when he sailed out again several days later. At the time John Newland Maffitt was working to get his ship off the shoal and into Galveston, it was not yet known locally that Robert E. Lee had already surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House. The local press kept up a bold confidence. The Galveston Weekly News, which was being composited and printed in Houston at the time, explained to its readers on April 19 that Lee’s withdrawal from the defense of Petersburg and the evacuation of Richmond now freed him to exercise “those brilliant strokes by which peace is wrung from war.” Farther down in that same column of the newspaper appeared a bulletin from Galveston assuring readers that “the Yankees watch our harbor like cats watch a mouse-hole, and, doubtless, have gloated in anticipation over many a rich prize ... but they have not captured one a month during the past year, according to their own published accounts.” The paper reprinted a resolution adopted by citizens of Limestone County (near present-day Waco) declaring that “there is no alternative left but to fight on with all our strength, determined to conquer an honorable peace, and with it our independence,” and another from Matagorda, near the coast, pledging their lives, property, and honor “to meet the enemy on our own soil, [where] out motto shall be, ‘fight it out.’”15 By late April, news of both Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination had reached Texas. The newspapers maintained their confident and defiant tone, but the odds had become too long, and time too short, for most of the runners. Only four steamships are known to have attempted the run into Texas after Appomattox, all to Galveston. Imogene arrived on April 16, and Wren around May 5, both from Havana. On the night of May 23—between the two days of the Union’s triumphant Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, D.C.—
two runners from Havana made the attempt. Lark made it through the Federal cordon successfully, but Denbigh grounded on a shoal north of the harbor entrance, where it was spotted, shelled, and burned at first light.16 A different ordeal was in store for Lark and its crew. Slipping into the harbor in the first hours of May 24, Lark’s master noticed that the Confederate batteries at the end of the island seemed deserted. Later that morning three soldiers from the 2nd Texas Infantry strolled down to Central Wharf to look at the newly arrived runner, when a mounted courier pounded past them onto the pier and shouted at the ship’s crew, “Cut loose your vessel and get out into the stream!” One of the sightseeing soldiers, Private Z.T. Winfree, recalled what happened next. “Hearing a noise up the street, all eyes were turned in that direction…. About 200 armed infantry soldiers were coming up the wharf and making straight for the steamer Lark at a double-quick gait…. It was a scene of greatest confusion; sailors flying to loose the vessel; officers shouting hoarse commands, and the approaching soldiers yelling and cheering in a maddening manner. A sailor grabbed an ax and cut loose the mooring of one end of the vessel, but before he could get in the other fastening the soldiers were upon the scene and without checking in the least jumped aboard the vessel, ran out another line and made her fast securely and then commenced the business for which they had come— pillage.”17 Winfree watched as the solders swarmed through the ship “like bees,” and presently brought up a crate of brandy, which was broken open and the bottles passed around. Next came crates of wine. To this point, much of the gathered crowd had held back, expecting the Confederate commander on the island, Colonel Ashbel Smith, to arrive any moment with an armed detachment to restore order. But Smith never arrived, and soon the looting became general. “Soldiers, citizens, women and children came aboard and helped
themselves. The scene was one never to be forgotten by those who saw it or took part in it.”18 The looting went on into the afternoon. Eventually the crowd dispersed enough to allow Lark’s master to shoo the rest off his vessel and get underway. As night fell he stopped briefly at another pier to take on board Denbigh’s crew, who had been ferried over from the Bolivar Peninsula, and then he made a dash out again, bound for Havana. Lark is the last blockade runner known to have cleared a Confederate port.19 That same evening, Winfree and his messmates were transported by train to Houston as part of a general military evacuation of Galveston Island. The following day in Houston, Winfree witnessed similar scenes of looting, “a general pillage of all things which the Confederacy had for her soldiers, such as ordnance, commissary and quartermasters’ supplies, C.S. mules, wagons, etc.” Winfree saw a crowd of soldiers at one of the buildings used as a headquarters, and learned that discharges were being freely handed out to all who requested them. The clerks soon ran out of printed discharge forms, so many soldiers, including Winfree, received papers granting them openended furloughs from their units. “We had not been acting very honorably for the past two days,” Winfree reflected years later, “but after all we had only been taking our own.”20 In fact, the entire Confederate Department of the Trans-Mississippi was rapidly unraveling. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia in early April, and Joseph E. Johnston had surrendered the Army of Tennessee to William Tecumseh Sherman on April 18, but other Confederate theater commanders were left without orders. In early March the commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department, General E. Kirby Smith, had as many as 36,000 troops scattered across Texas, Arkansas, parts of Louisiana, and the Indian Territory. Perhaps another 10,000 men were detached from their units on other assignments, and 4,000 on furlough. Though the readiness of many of Kirby Smith’s ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72
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DEATH & LIFE ON BELLE ISLE
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An idyllic setting on the James River—where modern Richmonders bike, swim, run, and relax—belies a dark Civil War history. BY JOHN M. COSKI
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The site of the former prisoner of war camp on Belle Isle as it appeared on April 8, 1865, nearly a week after the city of Richmond (visible on the opposite bank of the James River) fell to Union forces
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as at all civil war sites, the war was only a brief moment in Belle Isle’s history. The Englishman who founded Richmond as a port city for tobacco trading in 1737, William
Byrd II, also provided the earliest recorded description of what he called Broad Rock Island: “There is a very wild prospect both upward and downward, the river being full of rocks over which the stream tumbled with a murmur loud enough to drown the notes of a scolding wife. The island would make an agreeable hermitage for any good Christian who had a mind to retire from the world.”1 Instead of becoming one man’s hermitage, Belle Isle soon acquired its familiar name and became a bourgeoning industrial site. As early as the 1810s, an iron rolling mill on the island’s south bank exploited the power of the river’s running water. When the Richmond and Danville Railroad built a spur line to the island from the south side of the James in the early 1850s, the Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works Company became one of the most successful nail factories in the United States. By the eve of the Civil War, Old Dominion had grown into a major manufacturer that employed 175 men and produced more than 75,000 kegs of nails annually. Many of the employees lived on the island, and the company erected a small church and Sunday school for their benefit. The “extensive iron works” attracted the attention of the southern nationalist periodical DeBow’s Review, which concluded: “Probably, there is no place in the United States, from the advantages of iron and coal, an almost unlimited water power, its isolated position capable of being impregnably fortified, and its railroad communications, could make a better site than Belle Isle for a national foundry.”2 When Virginia seceded and Richmond became the Confederate capital, Old Dominion became a defense contractor, selling more than 15,000 kegs of nails, spikes, and tacks, tons of plate iron, and even an iron safe to the Confederate army and navy during the war. Hugging the south bank and nestled around the railroad spur, the iron works occupied only a few of the island’s 54 acres, most of which consisted of
a hill that was useless for a factory dependent on water power. The business was going strong when the Confederate government found a new use for the island in the late spring of 1862.3 Exactly when and under what terms Belle Isle became the location of a prison camp are not known, but the need for a prison camp and Belle Isle’s suitability for that purpose are very clear. The Seven Days
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
for the last 19 years I have commuted by bicycle to my job at the Museum of the Confederacy in downtown Richmond. My route takes me along the trails of the James River Park and across the jewel in the park’s crown: Belle Isle. As a Civil War historian, I am well aware that I am riding over ground where a prison camp for Federal enlisted men stood and where hundreds of men died and tens of thousands suffered. I try to think about those soldiers desperately burrowing into that very soil for warmth instead of mindlessly contemplating the work day ahead or just past. Remembering that Belle Isle is hallowed ground sometimes requires a conscious act and a creative imagination. Despite the presence of a commemorative tablet and several interpretive signs, Belle Isle’s 21stcentury reality belies its 19th-century infamy. A ride across the plain where the camp was located offers visual distractions: an arresting view of downtown Richmond and the ingenious suspended footbridge leading to it; brick and stone ruins and looming, rusted iron skeletons of past industrial ages; rushing rapids over a rocky shoreline populated by ducks, geese, and great blue herons; an anomalous artificial landscape of hills and bumps that make up a new mountain bike course; and people—often hundreds of them— walking, running, biking, swimming, fishing, kayaking, bird watching, relaxing, roughhousing, and generally living. Many of the people who spend time on Belle Isle today are unaware of its notorious history. In this it is typical of Civil War prison locations: Until recently, most had been forgotten or neglected. The history of Belle Isle—what it was and what it is—reveals something about how we remember and forget Civil War prisons.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A rare wartime photo of the Belle Isle prison camp shows the densely packed tents that housed Union captives. In the foreground, wearing Confederate gray and a soft felt hat, is the commandant of Richmond’s Libby Prison, Major Thomas P. Turner.
Battles fought near Richmond in June and July swelled the number of Federal captives, overwhelming the city’s network of warehouse prisons. Belle Isle had the virtues of adequate space near Richmond and easy communication with the city, yet was conveniently separated by a formidable barrier of swiftly moving water. On July 9, 1862, a local newspaper reported plans to use Belle Isle
as a prison and, five days later, that “Already over 3,000 of the Yankee prisoners have been conveyed to this salubrious and pleasant spot.”4 Obviously intended as temporary, the new prison camp had all the physical hallmarks of impermanence. It boasted no stockade or barracks, but consisted instead of low earthen walls and flanking ditches around a few acres on the island’s northeastern side. Inside were an expanding
number of streets of conical canvas Sibley tents. Belle Isle’s supposed salubriousness became a weapon in the South’s arsenal to counter northern propaganda about the alleged mistreatment of prisoners. Southern newspapers described Belle Isle as “a very pleasant spot—much more agreeable than any locality which has been given our wounded soldiers…. Their friends in the North
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ferred to Andersonville; Florence, South Carolina; and other camps farther south. “There were a number of the Belle Isle prisoners at Andersonville, who had been transferred there before our arrival,” recalled a soldier in the 118th Pennsylvania
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEFT); HARPER’S WEEKLY
in January 1863 after the battles at Fredericksburg and Murfreesboro (Stones River), and then again in May 1863 after the battle at Chancellorsville. Those prisoners were soon exchanged, but the camp remained open and its population swelled in July with prisoners from Gettysburg. Meanwhile the July 1862 prisoner exchange cartel faltered, then collapsed, and many of the Gettysburg prisoners were still on the island when thousands of prisoners from Chickamauga arrived in late September and early October 1863. Belle Isle’s winter of infamy had begun.9 Belle Isle soon became the ugly face of prisoner-of-war camps. In December 1863—nearly five months before the infamous prison at Andersonville, Georgia, received its first inmates—Harper’s Weekly featured an illustration depicting “the conditions of our poor fellows who are so unfortunate as to be prisoners of the rebels at Richmond, Virginia.” The accompanying article claimed that “our brave soldiers, to the number of fifteen to eighteen thousand, are shivering and starving to death on Belle Island” and that the “first intimation we had of their sufferings was the receipt of a boat-load of sick and wounded at City Point, on 29th September.” Southerners cried foul, pointing out that the release of the sickest men to receive medical care in the North was a humanitarian gesture that was being used against them to score propaganda points. Fair or foul, the appearance of those Belle Isle prisoners horrified the northern public. Over the next months, sick prisoners released from Belle Isle arrived in Federal lines at Annapolis, Maryland. Woodcut illustrations based on photographs— often later misidentified as images of Andersonville survivors—appeared in the June 18, 1864, edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. By then, many of the Belle Isle prisoners had indeed been trans-
FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER
may be perfectly satisfied that they will pass a pleasant summer at Richmond.”5 The Richmond Daily Dispatch noted that the “Yankee prisoners now encamped on Belle Isle seem determined to ‘make the most of a bad job,’ and to enjoy themselves in the best fashion possible. The majority of them are quartered in tents, and between and among them, in various places, they have dug wells, either for the purpose of obtaining better water than is afforded by the muddy bed of the river or to bathe in.”6 The prisoners did not have access to the rock shelf on the island’s north side (now a beach for modern Richmonders), but had to content themselves with a placid lagoon on the eastern (downstream) end with adjacent areas for drinking water, bathing, and the sinks. An alleyway flanked by board fences connected the prison compound with that stretch of river. The northern press and Federal prisoners themselves disputed the southern claim that the captives were “enjoying themselves.” Most of the time the prisoners were confined to what the U.S. Sanitary Commission later described as a flat plain, “low, sandy, and barren, without a tree to cast a shadow, and poured upon by the burning rays of a Southern sun.” The sandy soil crawled with vermin.7 A soldier in the 9th Massachusetts Infantry who was captured at Malvern Hill and arrived at Belle Isle on July 13 noted that rations were unreliable at best and that men occasionally went days without any food. “I suppose they intend to starve us,” he wrote bitterly in his diary. Indeed, his diary tallied the men who died, reportedly from starvation, exposure, or sickness.8 Between July and September, the prison population ebbed and flowed, hundreds arriving and leaving at frequent intervals, thanks to a prisoner exchange agreement formalized in mid-July. By September 24, the camp had emptied but the site had proven its value as a prison should the need arise again. Within months, it did: first, temporarily,
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LEFT); HARPER’S WEEKLY
FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER
Depictions of the hardships suffered by Belle Isle prisoners in the northern press (including Harper’s Weekly, above, and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, opposite page), as well as disturbing images of recently released captives (such as the one of the Indiana soldier at left, taken in May 1864), horrified and angered the northern public.
Infantry. “It seemed hardly possible that men could be as fleshless as some of them were, and yet live…. We were hopeful and listened with credulity to the oft-told tales of parole and exchange, but hope had died in them, and they looked forward to death as the only escape from captivity.” A Wisconsin soldier at Andersonville remarked simply: “The Belle Isle boys are a hard set.
Death is rapidly diminishing their number. They were starved to death & frozen to death before they came here.”10 The unusually cold winter of 1863-1864 exacerbated the suffering for those who remained at Belle Isle.11 By late November, a New York prisoner wrote, “We are beginning to suffer from the cold.”12 The first week of January brought several nights of single-digit temperatures, and the mercury dipped below 20 degrees for six nights in mid-February. Cold alone did not produce the suffering that was Belle Isle’s infamy. The heart of the problem was overcrowding: 10,000 or more captives were held in the four-acre enclosure intended to hold just 3,000. Shelter consisted of an inadequate number of threadbare Sibley tents, and firewood was in short supply. “Very seldom dureing [sic] my stay on the island that all could get into tents,” wrote Private Roland E. Bowen of the 15th Massachusetts Infantry, who penned one of the most detailed accounts of that winter in Belle Isle immediately after his re-
lease in March 1864. “At times many hundreds had to sleep on the street and in the ditch with out a blanket or an overcoat…. They were half naked and would lay down 8 or 10 together like pigs just as close as they could get, in this way they would shiver out a part of the night, the remainder of wich [sic] they would walk the street. The silent hours of night are always broken by the dismal tread of a hundred shivering forms as they pass to and fro.”13 Where modern Richmonders bike, run, and gather in groups for fitness training, northern prisoners exercised to survive. Gilbert Sabre of the 2nd Rhode Island Cavalry described the scene on what he judged the coldest night of the winter in January 1864: “About midnight I could no longer stand my shivering, and jumped into the open air for exercise. I never shall forget the scene I witnessed there. The whole camp was crowded with men, dashing about, jumping, stamping their feet, and swinging their arms according to their strength and the degree of heat still left or awakened in them. I joined that throng, clasping my hands rapidly around my shoulders and jumping occasionally to start the circulation in my feet.”14 Many Belle Isle diarists recorded in detail the quantity and quality of their rations. The staple was “corn dodgers,” a small square of rough cornbread made with flour ground
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prisoners and was experiencing 10 deaths a day—and sought to transfer some men to hospitals in Richmond or other Virginia cities. Carrington had inspected not only the hospitals, but Belle Isle itself, and found there “most of the causes of the severity and frequency of the sickness,” which he then detailed: “The men are too much crowded. They have not sufficient quantity of blankets nor sufficient fuel supplied. They sleep on the ground and are exposed to all the vicissitudes of temperature incident to our climate, increased buy the position and the winds blowing over the water. An additional cause of disease is want of discipline and authority, no officer being with the men to enforce attendance on the sick, who are despoiled of their rations by those stronger.” He also cited the depressing effects of hopelessness because the men had been told they would not be exchanged.18 In March 1864, Carrington received reports from surgeons G. William Semple (in charge of the Belle Isle hospital) and John Wilkins (in charge of a Richmond hospital that received Belle Isle prisoners) that echoed what the prisoners wrote about the unsifted cornmeal producing diarrhea; Semple also noted the filth that covered the camp as a result of closing the sinks at night. He wrote frankly about the overcrowding and that many of the men “were badly clad and destitute of blankets.” But he was quick to pin the blame on the prisoners themselves. He cited “the absence of personal cleanliness of the prisoners” and their cruelty in turning out weaker men into cold nights, their failing to answer sick call and thus get medical attention, and the tendency to sell the blankets and clothing that their own government issued to them.19 prison officials and prisoners alike recognized the real effects of hopelessness on physical and mental health. At least until the beginning of 1864, most prisoners arrived at Belle Isle and other prison camps with the hope of remaining only a short time. Even after the breakdown of
the cartel, prisoners suffered from a condition they called “exchange on the brain”—clinging to rumors rather than contemplate an interminable stay on Belle Isle. Some prisoners even defended Confederate authorities for holding out “false hopes” because they believed that such “white lies” gave men some hope and kept them alive. Approaching Christmas 1863, Belle Isle prisoners reported that exchange was “certain.” The deadly cold, severe overcrowding, and uncertain rations that followed instead in early 1864 trumped all hope and encouraged men to take their fate into their own hands.20 While it may be an island, Belle Isle was hardly Elba or Alcatraz. Despite postwar southern claims, prisoners did break out of Belle Isle. Almost all of the escapes involved individuals or small groups of men. It’s not clear how many men swam to freedom and how many simply took advantage of the frequent movement of prisoners between Belle Isle and the city to make their escape.21 Directly across the north channel of the James River lay Tredegar Iron Works and Hollywood Cemetery. Downriver less than a half mile was the city’s commercial district. When swelled by rains, the James was (and is) ferocious and intimidating, but otherwise it posed no barrier to strong swimmers, especially from the island’s northeastern corner. Arriving on the island from the south shore, prisoners could see how close the island was to the town of Manchester (now south Richmond). Surrounding the camp to guard against escape were a ditch and an earthen berm (two to three feet high), with sentries posted every 12 to 15 paces. The guard consisted of 112 men divided into three shifts. For a while, Georgia and Alabama soldiers comprised the force, but they were succeeded by soldiers of the 25th Battalion, Virginia Local Defense Troops, also known as the “City Battalion”; one of that unit’s officers, Lieutenant Virginius Bossieux, was post commander from 1863 until the end of the war. De-
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THE SOLDIER IN OUR CIVIL WAR (1893)
from the entire ear, pone and all—a recipe that played havoc with men’s bowels. They were served with what the men called “buggy bean soup” or “wormy rice soup” and insisted was merely water soaked overnight with beans. “Rotten beef” occasionally appeared on the menu, but meat and vegetables became increasingly rare as autumn dragged into winter. Some prisoners believed that the Confederates were deliberately starving them.15 Aware that the South could hardly feed its own people, much less 10,000 unwanted guests, the U.S. Sanitary Commission sent boxes of food south, and Confederate authorities deputed Federal prisoners to distribute them. This became another front in the propaganda war when northerners accused Confederate guards of stealing the food and Confederates refuted the charge.16 Overcrowding, exposure, and poor diet led predictably to rampant illness, especially diarrhea. After some soldiers escaped by swimming away from the riverfront on their way to the sinks, authorities closed that access after dark, forcing soldiers to relieve themselves within the camp at night. “As there were 6000 prisoners on 3 acres of ground you must know the condition of the camp in the morning must be filthy beyond description,” observed prisoner Roland Bowen in early 1864. “They had men detailed to clean the camp every morning but it was not half done, much of the offal being covered up rather than carried away. And I think I may safely say that one fourth of the filth is never touched at all.”17 There’s nothing remarkable, of course, about prisoners complaining about rations and camp conditions, but surviving wartime Confederate documents confirm that conditions at Belle Isle were worse than officials admitted publicly. In late November 1863, Medical Director W.A. Carrington replied to Brigadier General John H. Winder’s “inquiry as to the causes of the mortality among the Federal prisoners[.]” He noted crowding in the prison hospital—which then housed 1,200
THE SOLDIER IN OUR CIVIL WAR (1893)
Union cavalrymen set out on the early 1864 raid led by Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick and Colonel Ulrich Dahlgren to free the captives on Belle Isle. While unsuccessful, the attempt solidified the Confederates’ determination to move Union prisoners from Richmond to points farther south.
tachments of Confederate engineer units and convalescent soldiers also drew guard duty. Unimpressive as ditch and berm were, they constituted a “deadline” enforced as seriously as Andersonville’s more infamous one. Guards killed prisoners occasionally, eliciting accusations of cold-blooded murder and rumors of rewards.22 A few artillery pieces were positioned on the edge of the hill overlooking the camp. Prison authorities’ fears of captives exploiting their numerical advantage were not unjustified. In late January 1864, as conditions worsened, rumors of mass breakout plans ran rampant. “Men in camp talk again of overpowering the guard and making our escape,” wrote New York infantryman George Hegeman on January 15. But he added: “There are plenty of traitors in camp who would sell themselves and their
comrades in arms for a little consideration from the Rebels.” The guards heard the same rumors and took precautions that made an impression on the prisoners. “3 x 12-pounders bearing on us from the Richmond side,” observed Hegeman on the 16th. “2 more guns brought over to the island on a scow and bearing down on us from the hill; 2 more brought over this afternoon.” A few men were rumored to have absconded on the 17th, and on the 18th Hegeman noted that “Rebels have been throwing shell after shell over camp for two hours to intimidate us.”23 The most famous plot to free Belle Isle prisoners came from outside the camp. The botched twopronged cavalry raid led by Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick and Colonel Ulrich Dahlgren in March 1864 sought to liberate the Belle Isle prisoners—whose suffering was by
then front-page news in the northern press—and set them against the Confederate government and citizens of Richmond. Prisoners recorded rumors of a Kilpatrick-led cavalry raid as early as late December and again in early February, but seemed oblivious of the actual event except to note an unusual level of excitement in the city. The raid did redouble Confederate authorities’ determination to hasten the process already underway of removing prisoners from Richmond to points farther south. By late March the Belle Island prison was all but empty. A lucky few were destined for the U.S. parole camp at Annapolis, Maryland. Most were bound for Andersonville. The winter of 1863-1864 was not the end of misery at Belle Isle, and the next chapter differed from the previous one only in the weather.
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federal government had transferred 210 bodies, only 115 of them identified, to Richmond National Cemetery. That number seems far too small considering the anecdotal wartime accounts of deaths and burials. Prisoner George Hegeman was told that there were 900 bodies buried in the cemetery when he arrived in November 1863, before the spike in deaths later that winter.26 Just how many men died at Belle Isle remains a mystery; no comprehensive death records or prisoner registers survive. An official Confederate inquiry in February 1865 claimed that only 164 Federal prisoners had died there between June 1862 and February 10, 1865, but this figure (and the report generally) had all the hallmarks of a whitewash: Confederate reports a year earlier suggest that several hundred men died in the winter of 1863–1864 alone. If those figures were accurate, what became of all the bodies? Prisoner William Tippett wrote in his diary on February 28, 1864, that “There are now Lying 4 [corpses] at the Hospital which have been there aweek [sic], and are partly eaten by the Hogs—but this is not the first instance of this Kind which have come to my knowledge this is the third time this Cruel treatment of dead occurred Since I came here.” Journalist John Trowbridge visited Belle Isle during his sojourn through the defeated South in 1865 and 1866. “‘Where were the dead buried?’ I asked. ‘The dead Yankees? They buried a good many thar in the sand-bar. But they might about as well have flung ‘em into the river. A freshet washed out a hundred and twenty bodies at one time.’” Northern newspapers published similar stories, claiming that prisoners’ bodies, carelessly buried too close to the water’s edge, were washed away downstream. A Connecticut soldier visiting the island in 1901 was told that many prisoners’ bodies were still buried there.27 Most of the men who died during their imprisonment, however, had been removed to hospitals in Richmond before their deaths and
were buried in cemeteries there. According to Medical Director Carrington’s report, the sick from Belle Isle reportedly accounted for most Federal soldier deaths at Richmond hospitals (including 590 in February 1864 alone). If most of the approximately 3,200 Federal soldiers reinterred from Richmond’s Oakwood Cemetery to the national cemetery were victims of Belle Isle, then only about 10 percent to 15 percent of the estimated cumulative prison population of between 20,000 and 30,000 died—a rate far lower than the 25 percent death rate at Andersonville, Florence, South Carolina, and Elmira, New York, the war’s deadliest prison camps.28 Immediately after the war, Belle Isle reverted to its antebellum identity as an important industrial site. Physical evidence of the infamous
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The population swelled again with prisoners from the Overland Campaign in May and June, reaching an estimated 6,000. As they had in the summers of 1862 and 1863, Belle Isle prisoners in the summer of 1864 suffered from heat, exposure, and the ubiquitous “greybacks”—lice. Confederate authorities were no more able to provide for thousands of prisoners than they had been months before. Rations were short and shelter scarcer than ever. “No tents on the island,” wrote Henry H. Ladd of the 24th Michigan Infantry on August 22, 1864. “We have to lay on the ground like hogs. No tents. Very cold,” echoed Samuel McClain of the 144th Ohio Infantry eight days later. On September 8, Ladd wrote in his diary, “closes with a row and a call for tents.”24 Again, Confederate authorities were keenly aware of the problem. “The sufferings of the prisoners of war on Belle Isle for want of protection from the weather are so great that they may lead to serious consequences,” wrote one officer as summer turned to autumn. He issued orders to “at once provide either tents or the necessary material for building them winter quarters, and have the latter erected at once, the prisoners themselves providing the labor.” The officer receiving the order investigated and replied, “I can neither get a sufficient number of tents nor the material for building quarters for the prisoners at Belle Isle.”25 Rather than risk the “serious consequences,” Confederate authorities began emptying Belle Isle of prisoners before the onset of winter. Most went to Danville, Virginia, and Salisbury, North Carolina, where they endured grim conditions. Others were paroled or exchanged after Federal and Confederate authorities worked out a new temporary exchange protocol. Only a few hundred prisoners remained at Belle Isle into early 1865. By the time of Appomattox and the end of the war in Virginia, the only Yankees who remained on Belle Isle were those buried in a cemetery located along the river just west of the prison. Within a few years the
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Photographer Alexander Gardner took this image of graves of Union prisoners on Belle Isle in April 1865. Within two years, the federal government had transferred 210 bodies to Richmond National Cemetery, though rumors persisted that many others were washed away by the nearby river or remained on the island.
prison disappeared quickly—much like the buildings of Chimborazo and Richmond’s other sprawling general hospitals. The Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works, which had already begun expanding from its original site astride the millrace on the island’s south side, exploded onto the plain where the prison camp had been. A new railroad bridge built in the early 1870s finally connected the island to Richmond. By the early 20th century, the island was home to iron and steel factories that employed more than 1,000 men, a power plant that produced electricity for the southside lines of Richmond’s pioneering streetcar system, and a quarry that cut stone from the “broad rock” for the city’s streets and buildings. As it did in the 1860s, Belle Isle made headlines in Washington, D.C., and
other metropolitan newspapers, but most often for labor strikes, gruesome industrial accidents, drownings, or legal disputes over riparian rights.29 A former prisoner visited the island in 1892 and found it quite changed. “As we stepped from the bridge to the Island a panorama of 28 years ago passed rapidly before us,” wrote Briscoe Goodheart in the veterans newspaper The National Tribune. “Where the prison-pen was located is now an immense rollingmill owned and operated by the Old Dominion Nail and Iron Co. Where the writer lay in the sand with P.A. Davis and Rube Stypes, and where both died during that memorable Winter of 1863-’64, is now located a large Fairbanks scale for weighing ore…. Where the prisoners caught Serg’t Haight’s dog, and ate him in
about 15 minutes, is now a large set of rolls, rolling out red-hot bar-iron. Where the hospital tent was located, beside which the dead were piled up to the number of 200 waiting burial, is now an immense bank of dead cinders from the rolling mills.”30 In the early 1930s the highway department constructed the highrise Robert E. Lee Bridge (carrying the major north-south artery, U.S. 1 / 301) directly over the island, sinking huge abutments into the soil and bedrock just west of the prison camp site. A half-century later, the highway department replaced it with a wider span located just to the east, further disrupting and even scraping away soil on which the prison camp once sat.31 As early as the first decade of the 20th century, the owner of Old Dominion Iron and Steel Works proposed converting the non-industrialized majority of the island into a public park.32 The decline of the city’s iron industry and major floods that repeatedly inundated Belle Isle eventually brought that proposal to fruition. The city acquired the entire island in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and initial plans for an ambitious recreational park (including a marina and a monorail) gave way to the limited-access nature and recreation park that exists today. In 1995 the island was designated a National Historic Landmark.33 in the midst of the sesquicentennial of Belle Isle’s winter of infamy, my museum colleague, Kelly Hancock, gave a stimulating talk about Richmond’s Civil War prisons. During the Q&A, an older man asked rhetorically why the prison camp site on Belle Isle had not been preserved as hallowed ground, preferably under the care of the National Park Service. He complained about the raucous “beer parties” occurring on the island and postulated that this lack of respect is because Richmond, still caught up in “Lost Cause” ideology, does not want to admit that it was a place where prisoners suffered and died. Is that indictment valid? Al-
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
though unreconstructed southerners are alive and well in modern Richmond, the city’s population today is largely non-white and liberal. In the half-century following the war, when Richmond was the bastion of the Lost Cause, its citizens and leaders certainly did not rush to erect monuments to the men who died there, but nor did they ignore it: The island was a highlight of Civil War tours for visitors. If the men who had died on the island had been Confederates, postwar Richmond certainly would have commemorated their sacrifice. But the site returned quickly to its prewar use because industrial activity on the island never ceased and the Confederacy always considered the prisoner-of-war camp a temporary expedient, not a transformation. Richmond, in fact, allowed virtually all of its war sites to disappear; only when the city proposed razing the former Confederate Executive Mansion in 1889 did preservation of Civil War sites begin. What of other cities and towns around the country—South and North—that found themselves home to prison camps and to cemeteries filled with the other side’s dead? The cemeteries have become hallowed ground, cared for by the U.S. government—though federal maintenance of Confederate graves in the North came after 1906. Neither southerners nor northerners have been intent on preserving or commemorating the sites that symbolize the mistreatment of prisoners in their care. Masonry forts used as prisons have survived and a few, notably Fort Delaware, have become historic sites dedicated to the POW experience. But the camps built with stockades and earthen walls left essentially nothing to be preserved. As a result, the sites of major prison camps such as Johnson’s Island and Camp Chase in Ohio, Elmira in New York, and Camp Douglas in Illinois are now housing developments and commercial areas. The Civil War Trust has focused its considerable energies on preserving battlefields, and has not saved a single acre of former prison camp ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
After the end of the Civil War, Belle Isle reverted to its antebellum identity as an important industrial site. This undated postwar image shows the Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works, which expanded onto the plain where the prison camp had been.
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Voices from the Army of the Potomac, Part 5
JACKSON MITCHELL
BY GARY W. GALLAGHER men who attended harvard before joining the Union army produced a superlative body of evidence relating to the Army of the Potomac. The best known published letters and diaries by former Harvard students include those of Theodore Lyman, a member of George G. Meade’s staff whose astute observations I discussed in an earlier installment of this series. Also notable are Robert Gould Shaw’s correspondence during his time with the 2nd Massachusetts
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served on George B. McClellan’s staff in 1862. Just 15 when he entered Harvard, he graduated as valedictorian in the class of 1854 and later married Robert Gould Shaw’s sister Josephine. Among his letters, edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s son Edward in Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell (1907), is one from September 19, 1862, that recounts Antietam’s toll among Harvard officers: “Frank Palfrey is wounded, not seriously,—Paul Revere, slightly wounded,— Wendell Holmes shot through the neck, a narrow escape, but not dangerous now … Dr. Revere is killed,—also poor Wilder Dwight, … Bob Shaw was struck in the neck by a spent ball, not hurt at all,— Bill Sedgwick very badly wounded.” “This is not a pleasant letter,” admitted Lowell to his mother, “… we have gained a victory—a complete one, but not so decisive as could have
Captain James Hope’s painting “Artillery Hell” depicts a phase of the fighting at Antietam, the bloody September 1862 battle in which a number of Harvard men serving in the Army of the Potomac were wounded or killed.
been wished.” Connections among Harvard officers also appear in Higginson’s letters, including one from July 1864 that mentions a dinner at City Point, Virginia, with “Barlow, Channing Clapp, and Charles Adams.” “Barlow” was Francis Channing Barlow, who commanded the First Division in Winfield Scott Hancock’s II Corps and, like Charles Russell Lowell, graduated first in his class at Harvard (1855) and married one of Rob Shaw’s sisters (unlike Lowell and Shaw, he would survive the war). Known as one of the army’s fighting generals, Barlow suffered terrible wounds at Antietam and Gettysburg. “Fear Was Not in Him”: The Civil War Letters of Major General Francis C. Barlow, U.S.A. (2004), edited by Christian G. Samito, illuminates elements of a complex personality as well as important military events.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Infantry at Cedar Mountain and Antietam, gathered by editor Russell Duncan in Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (1992), and Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1946), edited by Mark De Wolfe Howe, which covers the first three years of the war with especially rich material on the Overland Campaign. Two officers in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, Henry Lee Higginson and Charles Francis Adams Jr., provide valuable testimony about operations in the spring and summer of 1863 in author Bliss Perry’s Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson (1921) and editor Worthington Chauncey Ford’s two volumes of A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865 (1920). Charles Russell Lowell Jr., whose time at Harvard overlapped with Higginson’s,
ANTIETAM NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD
B&A
“ I am utterly disgusted with the craven spirit of our people. I wish the enemy had burned Baltimore & Washington & hope they will yet.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
ANTIETAM NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD
FRANCIS CHANNING BARLOW, RESPONDING TO NEWS OF CONFEDERATE GENERAL JUBAL A. EARLY’S RECENT RAID TOWARD THE U.S. CAPITAL, JULY 15, 1864
Barlow’s letters reveal a somewhat dark worldview, with scant admiration for many leading officers in the army and open contempt for some of the soldiers who served under him. In January 1862, he pronounced his army routine “a damned stupid life,” adding, “I hardly think this disgusting country is worth fighting for.” In the wake of the Seven Days Battles, he observed “that McClellan has little military genius & that he
Francis Channing Barlow, who graduated first in his class at Harvard in 1855, would rise to the rank of brevet major general and command a division in the Army of the Potomac’s II Corps.
is not a proper man to command this Army.” Heading a brigade in Oliver Otis Howard’s XI Corps at Chancellorsville, Barlow was deployed east of the position where Stonewall Jackson’s flank attack crushed the Federal line on the evening of May 2. “Howard is full of mortification & disgust,” he wrote home six days later about the humiliating rout, “& I really pity him.” As for the part of Howard’s command that collapsed, Barlow thought
his family could “imagine my indignation & disgust at the miserable behavior of the 11th Corps.” During the Overland Campaign, Barlow experienced a partial mental breakdown aggravated by lingering effects of his injuries. On July 15, deep pessimism dominated a letter that responded, in part, to news of Jubal A. Early’s raid across the Potomac River and to the outskirts of Washington. “I am utterly disgusted with the craven spirit of our people,” wrote Barlow. “I wish the enemy had burned Baltimore & Washington & hope they will yet.” As for operations at Petersburg and Richmond, “I do not believe we shall starve out the rebel Army by cutting the railroads even if we could keep them cut.” The enemy, he predicted, “have enough rations there to subsist their Army all summer.” War Diary and Letters of Stephen Minot Weld, 1861-1865, privately published in 1912 and reissued in 1979 by the Massachusetts Historical Society with a new introduction by David Herbert Donald, ranks among the finest sets of letters by any officer in the Army of the Potomac. Weld manifested negativity similar to Barlow’s in the aftermath of the Overland Campaign. Commander of the 56th Massachusetts Infantry, part of the First Division of the IX Corps, Weld gave his father a summary of the previous six weeks’ action on June 21, 1864. “The feeling here in the army,” wrote an embittered Weld, “is that we have been absolutely butchered, that our lives have been periled to no purpose, and
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wasted. In the Second Corps the feeling is so strong that the men say they will not charge any more works.” Weld’s wartime career included stints as a staff officer as well as in regimental and
brigade command, and his letters address politics, military affairs, and many other topics. A conservative, he hoped slavery would end but had no patience with abolitionists and cared little about black people.
He thought Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation unnecessary and predicted that the Union army would prove decisive in killing slavery. “Leave the whole thing alone,” he recommended, “and as our armies advance, slavery must go under.” At Appomattox, Weld penned a revealing letter to one of his sisters who had noted his lack of enthusiasm in the wake of Lee’s surrender. “To tell the truth,” he confided, “we none of us realize even yet that he has actually surrendered. I had a sort of impression that we should fight him all our lives. He was like a ghost to children, something that haunted us so long that we could not realize that he and his army were really out of existence to us.” Henry Livermore Abbott did not live to see the Confederate surrender. An officer in the 20th Massachusetts Infantry, popularly known as “the Harvard regiment” because it contained so many men who had attended the school, he witnessed a great deal of combat before being mortally wounded on May 6, 1864, in the Wilderness. His letters, published in Robert Garth Scott’s Fallen Leaves: The Civil War Letters of Major Henry Livermore Abbott (1991), show a great devotion to the Union but also a preference that emancipation remain far from center stage. “The president’s proclamation is of course received with universal disgust,” he reported to an aunt on January 10, 1863, “particularly the part which enjoins officers to see that it is carried out. You may be sure that we shan’t see to any thing of the kind, having decidedly too much reverence for the
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SHAWNA SHERRELL
While he hoped slavery would end, conservative Harvard graduate Stephen Minot Weld had no patience with abolitionists and saw no need for President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
INTERNET ARCHIVE
B&A
“ The feeling here in the army is that we have been absolutely butchered, that our lives have been periled to no purpose, and wasted.” STEPHEN MINOT WELD, 56TH MASSACHUSETTS INFANTRY, IN A JUNE 21, 1864, LETTER TO HIS FATHER ABOUT THE RECENTLY COMPLETED OVERLAND CAMPAIGN
SHAWNA SHERRELL
INTERNET ARCHIVE
constitution.” Not surprisingly, Abbott often praised George B. McClellan. He hoped for the general’s return after the Battle of Fredericksburg: “The enthusiasm of the soldiers has been all gone for a long time. They only fight from discipline & old associations. McClellan is the only man who can revive it.” Abbott expected success as the armies prepared to engage in the spring of 1864. Meade and Ulysses S. Grant seemed a good combination, the former “quick witted, skilful, a good combiner & maneuverer” and the latter an officer of “force, decision &c, the character which isn’t afraid to take the responsibility to the utmost.” Yet his admiration for McClellan remained undiminished. On March 6, having read McClellan’s Organization and Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, Abbott praised his old commander’s “sagacity & foresight, both political & military, wonderful comprehensiveness, energy, tenacity & directness of purpose, & above all his pluck.” The literary record of Harvard’s Civil War soldiers lends support to the claim of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a distant cousin of Henry Lee Higginson), who edited a collection of biographical tributes published in 1867. “There is no class of men in this republic,” affirmed Higginson, “from whom the response of patriotism comes more promptly and surely than from its most highly educated class.” GARY W. GALLAGHER IS THE JOHN L. NAU III PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. HIS MOST RECENT BOOKS ARE THE UNION WAR (2011) AND BECOMING CONFEDERATES: PATHS TO A NEW NATIONAL LOYALTY (2013).
The Books That Built Me BY BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN i suppose you could say that I started researching my recently published book, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, when I was 12 years old. In 1998, I met a man from my hometown of Akron, Ohio, who spent much of his late teens and early twenties crisscrossing the Midwest in search of the last survivors of Abraham Lincoln’s armies. Nearly 70 years old and the son of a World War I private, John “Gary” Dillon and I struck up a most unlikely friendship.
Though a self-effacing man of little means and few words, Gary always had plenty to say about the men he called “my veterans.” “There was an aura about them,” he explained. Gary recalled the precious days that he passed with “Uncle Dan” Clingaman of Wauseon, Ohio (who entrusted to Gary his program from the final BlueGray reunion in Gettysburg in 1938); his attendance at a birthday party for Alvin Smith, who served with the United States Colored Troops and recalled
Brian Matthew Jordan
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B&A
“ [I]t is my own scrapbook of the Grand Army, my attempt to recover the ordinary voices of some extraordinary men.”
with precision the price he had fetched on the slave auction block; and his rail journey to Duluth, Minnesota, where he finally met his venerable pen pal Albert Woolson, who before his death at age 109 in August 1956 was the last survivor of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the largest northern veterans’ organization. Gary pasted his snapshots of the furrowed “old boys” in three leather-bound scrapbooks, each teeming with newspaper clippings that chronicled how the GAR slowly but inexorably folded up its tents. When the time came, Gary would lovingly mount the veterans’ obituaries on subsequent pages. Before I went off to college, I spent an evening with Gary, turning once more the brittle pages of those albums that he shared with me so often. “You got the sense,” he said, “that even after so many decades, they had never really put the war behind them.” And I never really put that haunting remark behind me. As an undergraduate, it rang in my ears when I read David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) and Nina Silber’s The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (1993). These books made powerful arguments that a culture of sectional reconciliation prevailed in the late 19th century, sanitizing and segregating the Civil War narrative. It made perfect sense, and yet I could never fully embrace the idea that Americans—much less grizzled veterans sporting empty sleeves—ever reached meaningful sectional accord.
QUICK PICKS
First Bull Run BY HARRY SMELTZER
The First Battle of Manassas: An End to Innocence, July 18-21, 1861 (1989) By John Hennessy
A quarter century has passed since this book appeared in print, and it’s still the best and clearest tactical study of the campaign. Many First Bull Run studies get bogged down in the causes of the war or the details of troop movements in the Shenandoah Valley, either out of a failure to dig deep or an attempt to be all things to everyone. Not this book. And good news: A revised edition will be available from Stackpole Books in the near future.
If This Is War: A History of the Campaign of Bull’s Run by the Wisconsin Regiment Thereafter Known as the Ragged Ass Second (1991) By Alan D. Gaff
Based primarily on soldiers’ letters to hometown newspapers, Gaff’s study focuses solely on the experiences of the men of the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry, from the raising of the regiment through the fighting at “Bull’s Run” and the retreat to Washington. He makes no attempt to describe actions in which the regiment was not involved. Some care is required in reading it, since the narrative is built on the perceptions of a limited group of eyewitnesses, which vary in accuracy.
The Early Morning of War: Bull Run, 1861 (2014) By Edward G. Longacre
This latest campaign history is essential if only because it utilizes the most comprehensive and current sources as its foundation. Weighing in at 502 pages of text and years in the making, the narrative has a nice flow and is a joy to read. It’s not without flaws, but it covers the movements of the armies in Washington, Manassas, and the Shenandoah Valley, and includes a fast-moving yet deep account of the fighting along the Bull Run line.
HARRY SMELTZER IS A CIVIL WAR RESEARCHER, WRITER, AND PRESERVATIONIST, AND HOST OF BULL RUNNINGS, A WEBSITE DEDICATED TO THE CAMPAIGN OF THE FIRST BATTLE OF BULL RUN (BULLRUNNINGS.WORDPRESS.COM).
As a young boy, I had maintained a steady diet of harrowing battle studies—Gordon C. Rhea’s The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–6, 1864 (1994), Ernest B. Furgurson’s Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave (1992), Earl J. Hess and William L. Shea’s Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West (1992), and the volumes in Gary W. Gallagher’s “Military Campaigns of the Civil War” series with the University of North Carolina Press were among my
favorites—and found it too difficult to believe that the rancor of the Civil War was something easily willed away. I’d likewise never forgotten the emotional punch packed by photography historian William A. Frassanito’s haunting books Gettysburg: A Journey in Time (1975) and Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day (1978). So it was off to graduate school—with David Blight at Yale University. He was a mentor’s mentor. If I persuaded David that his Race and Reunion did not do enough to emphasize the Union veterans who fanned the war’s embers, he (and many years of research) ultimately persuaded me that white northern civilians did indeed seek to “let bygones be bygones.” Marching Home, then, became the tale of how men who couldn’t forget lived in a society that—perhaps until my friend Gary’s generation—wouldn’t remember. Marching Home is indebted to many books and to many historians. Readers can likely detect the influence of soldier studies like James M. McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), another childhood favorite and the one that perhaps opened my eyes to the power of archival sources. And yet Marching Home is most especially my effort to understand those men whom Gary Dillon described but could never explain. Rooted in research that took me to nearly 30 states, it is my own scrapbook of the Grand Army, my attempt to recover the ordinary voices of some extraordinary
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BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN
BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN ON HIS RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOK MARCHING HOME: UNION VETERANS AND THEIR UNENDING CIVIL WAR
Abraham men. Union veterans did not abandon their cause, but were forsaken themselves by a country hurtling headlong toward the Gilded Age. There are certain chance encounters that change your life forever. I don’t know how Gary Dillon came into my life, but I know why. A few months ago, I visited Gary at his Akron home, littered with newspapers he can no longer read. At 86, he is losing his sight—and his powers of recollection. But tears welled behind his thick lenses as I related the news that the book was finished. “The boys would be proud,” he said. I opened the book to the photograph of his old chum Albert Woolson. It took him a moment to focus. “215 ½ East Fifth Street,” he suddenly belted out, recalling the veteran’s Duluth address with precision.
And then we cried together. Before long, I’ll receive that dreaded call. Before long, a man who gripped the hands of a former slave and veterans of the Union army will join them at their eternal campfire. Gary knows that the end is near, too, which is why he bundled up those scrapbooks—and Uncle Dan’s reunion program—and gave them to me. One day I’ll donate them to an archive, so that future generations of historians can profit from them the way I have. But I’ll be holding on to them for now. Held together by string, those crumbling old albums are, above all others, the books that built me.
Lincoln Book Shop, Inc. Specialists in Historical Americana since 1938
Featuring a Fine Selection of
• Artifacts • Autographs • Books • Letters • Campaign Memorabilia
BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN IS A CULTURAL HISTORIAN OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA. HE IS AT WORK ON A BIOGRAPHY OF POLITICIAN AND UNION GENERAL BENJAMIN BUTLER.
• Ephemera • Paintings • Photographs • Prints • Sculpture Relating to Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War and U.S. Presidents
BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN
Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, Inc. 357 W. Chicago Ave. Chicago, IL 60654 (312) 944-3085
The author (left) at age 12 with his friend and fellow Civil War enthusiast John “Gary” Dillon
ALincolnBookShop.com
If it’s on our Shelves…
It’s History!
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paper put it, “molests and disturbs us.” None of Lee’s lieutenants did more to register such protests than John Brown Gordon, a leader of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan and future senator and governor. In his 1871 congressional testimony, he gave a stalwart defense of his region against charges of brutality and lawlessness, repeatedly invoking the Appomattox terms. Back in April 1865, Gordon argued, Confederates had been gratified by the “deferential” treatment they received at the surrender. “We should not be disturbed, so long as we obeyed the laws”: This was the pledge, Gordon said, that Grant had made to the Confederates. Peace would have come swiftly and surely, Gordon continued, if Radicals had not betrayed the spirit of Appomattox by telling Confederates “your former slaves are better fitted to administer the laws than you are.” Trafficking in the toxic myth that congressional Reconstruction was a time of white southern prostration and vindictive “black rule,” Gordon claimed, “our people feel that the faith which was pledged to them has been violated.” Southerners were “disturbed” by the congressional program, “deprived of rights which we had inherited—which belonged to us as citizens of the country.” If they had known what indignities and disabilities awaited them, Gordon surmised, Confederates would not have surrendered on April 9, 1865. Gordon’s message was clear: The only way to restore peace was to leave the white South alone to manage its own affairs. This Confederate campaign did not go unchallenged. Northern Republicans and southern unionists, white and black, offered their own interpretation of Appomattox, in which the Union victory was the product of skill and bravery, Grant’s magnanimity was the emblem of northern moral superiority, and the
paroles protected the lives of the surrendered Rebels but also commanded their political atonement and obedience. Grant spoke for all these groups when he told a northern reporter in May 1866 that he was deeply disappointed in Lee’s demeanor since the surrender—Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.” Grant hoped more white southerners would make the choice that General James Longstreet—who became a convert to the Republican Party after the war—had made. In Longstreet’s eyes, the North’s victory at arms was a victory for its principles, and southerners must yield, in keeping, Longstreet wrote, with “the obligations under which we were placed by the terms of our paroles.” But Longstreet was an anomaly. Gordon’s views proved ascendant in the late 19th century, leaving those who favored social change and social justice to sing their own laments over the lost promise of Appomattox. In 1912, with the Lost Cause cult at a peak of popularity, an article in The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, observed somberly, “Southern thought is conquering the entire country on the race question.” The article quoted a poem called “Appomattox,” by the black poet Charles R. Dinkins, in which Lee addresses his defeated army with the following charge:
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field formations was questionable, in principle they constituted a sizable force.21 Two months later, though, by the middle of May, Kirby Smith was receiving reports from his commanders and elected officials around the department complaining that their troops were simply putting down their arms and going home. Governor Harris Flanagin of Arkansas guessed there wasn’t a single Confederate soldier on duty in his entire state, and fewer than 3,000 scattered across the entire TransMississippi Department. Despite the fall of Richmond and the surrenders of Lee and Johnston in the East, though, some of Kirby Smith’s own senior commanders were determined to fight on. Several, including Jo Shelby and Sterling Price, began to doubt Smith’s commitment, and went so far as to meet clandestinely and pledge to each other to seize control of the department and fight on, should Smith attempt to capitulate to Federal forces prematurely. Senior officers made the rounds of different regiments, giving speeches to USS Fort Jackson, aboard which General E. Kirby Smith formally surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederacy on June 2, 1865
When fails the sword, the better way Becomes the soldier’s part to play; The south will whip the north some day With ink and pen.
Lee’s prophecy, the article noted, had come to pass: The unrepentant South had struck down the doctrine of social equality, and “revolutionized the sentiment, doctrines and practices of the north.” Gordon’s war of words would continue. ELIZABETH R. VARON TEACHES HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. HER MOST RECENT BOOK IS APPOMATTOX: VICTORY, DEFEAT, AND FREEDOM AT THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR.
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4/16/15 boost the units’ morale, but many soldiers simply refused to listen. When one officer attempted to make a “war speech” to Major General John George Walker’s division in April, John Simmons, a private in the 22nd Texas Infantry, wrote his wife that only a third of the soldiers bothered to listen. The others stood off at a distance, shouting and making so much noise that the speaker eventually gave up.22 On May 18 Kirby Smith began shifting his headquarters from Shreveport to Houston, thinking that he might at least rally Major General John Bankhead Magruder’s troops near the coast. It was a futile effort; even as Smith’s stagecoach rumbled south, he began to pass squads of Confederate soldiers trudging home. At Hempstead, the troops of Walker’s division began disbanding themselves in mid-May. Walker, who had recently been assigned to take charge of his old Texas division after serving as a regional commander, admitted to Smith that he could do little to stem the desertions. “They consider the contest a hopeless one,” Walker informed him, “and will lay down their arms at the first appearance of the enemy.” One of Walker’s soldiers, Irish-born Ser☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
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Captain Benjamin F. Sands
Smith formally surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederacy—the last major Confederate command to capitulate.24 Three days later the commander of the Federal squadron, Captain Benjamin F. Sands, steamed into the harbor in the side-wheel steamer Cornubia, with the gunboat Preston
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
geant Joseph Palmer Blessington of the 16th Texas Infantry, recalled that the men “put their arms around each other’s necks, and sobbed like children; others gave the strong grasp of the hand, and silently went away with hearts too full for utterance; while still others would mutter a huskily-spoken ‘Good-bye’ or deep oath…. The parting—perhaps for years, perhaps forever—wrung their souls with torturing agony.” Others were not so maudlin; on May 20 the soldiers remaining at Hempstead broke open the quartermaster and commissary warehouses, looting them for all the supplies and provisions they could carry.23 On May 24, the same day that looters tore apart Lark in Galveston, General Magruder had sent a note out to
the Federal squadron anchored off the port, asking the navy to transport representatives to New Orleans to negotiate an armistice in Texas. Texas governor Pendleton Murrah endorsed this plan, but things were moving quickly at this point. By the end of May, Kirby Smith himself publicly acknowledged the collapse of the Trans-Mississippi, issuing an angry and bitter farewell message to his troops, writing, “you have made yr. choice. It was unwise and unpatriotic…. I pray you may not live to regret it.” On May 31, at Houston, Kirby Smith distributed $1,700 of his command’s last remaining specie to his senior officers as back pay; the rest, he instructed, should be turned over to Union forces. Two days later, at Galveston, Generals Kirby Smith and Magruder boarded a flag-of-truce boat and went aboard the Union blockaders’ flagship, anchored offshore. There, late in the afternoon, in the captain’s cabin of USS Fort Jackson, Kirby
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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following behind. Cornubia had itself been a successful blockade runner before being captured in 1864, condemned by a prize court, and bought by the U.S. Navy. Cornubia tied up at Central Wharf, near where Lark had been scavenged two weeks before. Captain Sands and a handful of other officers crossed the gangplank to the wharf, where they were met by a Confederate officer who led them a few blocks to the city hall. Sands and his officers did not take an armed escort with them. On their way they must have passed Hendley’s Row; undoubtedly someone made a clumsy joke about the rooftop lookout station that had been the bane of the blockaders over the previous four years. At city hall, both the mayor and Sands briefly addressed the crowd that had gathered. Both men made assurances of their mutual goodwill, and urged the population to go about their business. Sands told the crowd that he wore a sidearm that day as a sign of respect for the mayor and local officials, rather than out of any fear for his own safety. Then, along with the mayor, Sands continued on to the old U.S. Customs House, where he “hoisted our flag, which now, at last, was flying over every foot of our territory, this being the closing act of the great rebellion.”25 By that time, Kirby Smith, Walker, and Magruder were headed overland for neutral Mexico, where they would wait out developments to see what their fate might be under Federal occupation. There was, Walker explained later, “a belief, prevalent in Texas at the time ... that officers of high rank in the Confederate Army would be held for trial before Civil or Criminal tribunals of this Country for their participation in the war.”26 Such tribunals never came about, of course, and all three later returned to the United States and obtained pardons from the new U.S. president, Andrew Johnson. Most Confederate soldiers in the Trans-Mississippi simply went home and presented themselves at some later date at a Federal provost marshal’s office to formally secure a parole. Joseph Blessington, the Irishman who wrote home about the soldiers of his division shouting ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76
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Join the BGES on tour. Join the BGES on tour
For more information visit www.blueandgrayeducation.org or call 434-250-99 Upcoming programs: Mar 7-9 – The Battle for Kennesaw Mountain with Keith Bohannon Mar 27-29 – The Battle at Wilson's Creek with Bill Piston and Rick Hatcher Apr 6-12 – The Apache Indian Wars with Neil Mangum Apr 25-27 – Vicksburg, NMP, The Art of Commemoration with Parker Hills REGISTRATIONS May 11-15 – Hood Fights for Atlanta with Gary Eclebarger and Scott Patchan FOR 2016 PROGRAMS May 16-18 – The Battle of Stones River with Chris Kolakowski OPEN JULY 1 May 19-23 – The Overland Campaign with Gordon Rhea Jun 15-18 – The Retreat from Gettysburg with Parker Hills and Len Riedel UPCOMING PROGRAMS: Jul 24-27 – Shenandoah Summer, Early's 1864 Valley Campaign with Scott Patchan FEB MAY 1–5, SEPTEMBER 23-25, 2016 Aug10–15, 15-172016– The Battle of Chickamauga with2016 Jim Ogden In the Footsteps of the Fighting 54th The Battle of Antietam with Tom The Overland Campaign in Five Sep 5-10 – Sibley's 1862Wagner New Mexico Campaign withWilderness Neil Mangum Massachusetts from Battery Clemens Parts: Part 1, The with to Olustee Wise Gordon Rhea McMurry Sep 12-14with – Stephen Pensacola and Mobile with Richard SEPTEMBER 30–OCTOBER 10, 2016 MARCH 4–11, 2016 Oct 6-10 – Hunter in the Valley withMAY Len 23–29, Riedel2016 The Great American Historical Road The Legendary Pancho Villa: The Destiny at the Little Big Horn, the Trip: Route 66 with Neil Mangum and – Theand Beginning Campaign with Oct 17-19 100th Anniversary the 180thof the Atlanta 140th Anniversary StudyRichard with NeilMcMurry Len Riedel Commemoration of the Alamo and Magnum Nov 11-15 – The Van Dorn and Forrest Raids of December 1862 with Parker Hills Goliad with Neil Magum NOVEMBER 1-5, 2016 JUNE 8–11, 2016 Cartwright and Greg Biggs Dec 12-14 – Spring Hill and Franklin with Thomas Grant Suffers a Hard Lesson: ForMARCH 13–17, 2016 Bleeding Kansas, the 160th AnniverThe Vicksburg Campaign, A Terrain Study of the Fields of Operations with sary of the Start of the Civil War with Kendall Gott and Kyle Sinsi Parker Hills with Jim Ogden
rest’s West Tennessee Raid and the Holly Springs Raid with Parker Hills NOVEMBER 17-20, 2016
BGES is a non profit, tax exempt organization. Donations are deductible from Federal taxes Lee and Stuart, 20/20 Vision in the 22-24, 2016 and net proceeds JULY or educational tours fund other educational project Civil War? with Clark Bud Hall and programs. Kennesaw Mountain and Kolb’s Farm MARCH 18–20, 2016
with Keith Bohannon APRIL 8–10, 2016
Streight’s Raid: The Lighting Mule Brigade by Norm Dasinger Jr. APRIL 12–16, 2016
The Atlanta Campaign, Part 1 of a 4-Year Study with Gary Ecelbarger
“The Institute Will Be Heard From Today,” VMI in the Lower Valley during the Civil War with Keith Gibson
DECEMBER 5-20, 2016
December 1941, War Comes to the United States, The 75th Commemoration of the attack on AUGUST 10-13, 2016 The Saratoga Campaign with Douglas Pearl Harbor, Guam, Singapore and the Philippines with Len Cubbison Riedel and Duncan Anderson AUGUST 19-21, 2016
Monocacy, the Battle that Saved Washington with Gloria Swift
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down a senior officer come to give a patriotic “war speech,” waited until the end of June to obtain his parole at Houston; Z.T. Winfree, the soldier who had witnessed the looting of the steamer Lark at Galveston, waited another week before collecting his parole on July 5.27 And Captain Dave McCluskey, the Scot who recaptured his schooner, was not in the least deterred by his close brush with the Union blockaders. He went back to blockade-running with Sting Ray, escaping again with a load of cotton bound for Tampico, Mexico. But his most satisfying success probably came a few weeks after his adventure with the boarding party from USS Kineo. McCluskey hitched a ride aboard a flag-of-truce boat at Galveston to go out to the Federal fleet. There, on the quarterdeck of the division flagship, with a transparent display of faux humility, he requested the return of his personal effects that had been packed and stowed in the small boat that was cut loose from his schooner during the fight. The Federals, still smarting at the loss of a captured vessel (and the prize money that went with it), were infuriated. McCluskey continued to tease them, pointing out the expensive liquor he’d offered the bluejackets: “you know I was very good to your men.” He then asked for a single crate of brandy taken from his schooner, adding with an ingratiating smile, “I’m sure that neither you nor any of your officers have any use for such a thing.”28 Captain Dave didn’t get his belongings back, nor the brandy, but he likely didn’t expect to. Tweaking the noses of the Yankees, under a flag of truce where they couldn’t lay a finger on him, was probably reward enough.
land. The obvious exception is Andersonville, which has benefited from geographic isolation. The Women’s Relief Corps purchased it in 1893, and in 1910 turned it over to the federal government, which created the Andersonville National Historic Site in 1970. The site now commemorates not only the Andersonville prisoners, but “all Americans who have served their country, at home and abroad, and suffered the loneliness and anguish of captivity.”34 In recent decades, interest in historic preservation and the fading of sectional rancor have led to groups determined to embrace the prison sites in their midst. Point Lookout, Maryland, is preserved within a sprawling state recreation park, and volunteers have documented the camp and its history. Similar friends groups have formed to better mark and interpret other prison sites, and archaeological excavations have revealed new details about Camp Douglas in Chicago, the Florence Stockade in South Carolina, and Camp Lawton in Millen, Georgia.35 Considering the total absence of prison camp buildings or other physical evidence, Belle Isle is a remarkably well-preserved and wellinterpreted Civil War site. A century of intense industrial use and bridge building so altered the ground that archaeological excavations have discovered only a few Civil War artifacts and located only a small stretch of the ditch and berm that once marked the camp’s border. Since Richmond’s founding, Belle Isle has occupied a well defined place in the city’s industrial and, now, recreational life, so there are strong competing claims on its history. In fact, the soil over which I ride my bike today is not, after all, the soil in which suffering Federal prisoners burrowed for warmth. This revelation not only allows me to commute across Belle Isle without
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ANDREW W. HALL IS A RESEARCHER AND AUTHOR WHO SERVES AS A VOLUNTEER MARINE ARCHAEOLOGICAL STEWARD WITH THE TEXAS HISTORICAL COMMISSION. HE HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THE INVESTIGATION OF FOUR CIVIL WAR SHIPWRECKS, INCLUDING THE BLOCKADE RUNNERS DENBIGH AND WILL O’ THE WISP, AND THE FEDERAL WARSHIP HATTERAS.
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guilt, but also to consider the island’s whole history as worthy of study. Still, there are occasions that remind me that the men whom Abraham Lincoln immortalized as “these honored dead” who “gave the last full measure of devotion” do not receive the attention they deserve. On Memorial Day 2014, the unofficial beginning of summer, the island was crowded with hundreds of people, most of them congregated on the broad rock beach. They represented modern Richmond: middle-aged couples, families, and, especially, young people—black, white, Hispanic, Asian, mixed race, and many of them heavily pierced and tattooed. As mobbed as the island looked and felt that day, it was sobering to think that 10,000 men were once crammed onto the exposed plain—where today only a handful of people linger longer than it takes to get to the water. On the northern edge of the POW camp site, just off the path from the pedestrian bridge, someone had erected a small memorial. Measuring roughly seven by 10 feet, it consisted of red, white, and blue ribbons with U.S. flags at the corners, front, and back, a vase of red roses and Stella de Oro daylilies, and a handwritten sign that read: MEMORIAL To the thousands of Union Troops Who Perished in the Prison [sic] of War Campground Each of the 2000 to 3000 dead Paid for this Space We should dedicate this Hallowed Ground In Honor of Those Who Preserved The Union to Make ALL FREE
The dead prisoners may have “paid for this space,” but it seems they forfeited that title when their bodies were removed to the national cemetery. For better or for worse, Belle Isle today belongs to the living. JOHN M. COSKI, HISTORIAN AT THE MUSEUM OF THE CONFEDERACY (NOW PART OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM), HAS RECENTLY BEGUN A FULL-LENGTH STUDY OF BELLE ISLE’S HISTORY. HE WOULD LIKE TO THANK MICHAEL D. GORMAN, ROBERT E.L. KRICK, ROBERT B. GILES, AND EVAN A. KUTZLER FOR GENEROUSLY SHARING THEIR OWN RESEARCH ON BELLE ISLE.
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12 Frank Hole, “The Acadia: A Civil War Blockade Runner.” Report to the State of Texas Antiquities Committee, August 1974, 8; Galveston Weekly News, March 1, 1865; ORN, Series I, Vol. 22, 32. 13 United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, Vol. 34, Pt. 4, 666; Houston TriWeekly Telegraph, February 20, 1865; Galveston Weekly News, February 22, 1865. 14 Galveston Daily News, April 19, 1865.
SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
15 Galveston Weekly News, April 19 and 25, May 18, 1865. 16 Wise, Lifeline of the Confederacy, 273. 17 Galveston Daily News, May 28, 1891. 18 Ibid., 9.
CLOSING ACT
(Pages 40–51, 72–76) 1
United States Naval War Records Office, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion 30 vols. (Washington, 1894-1922), Series 1, Vol. 21, 293-295 (hereafter ORN).
2 State of Texas, Journal of the House of Representatives, Eighth Legislature (Austin, 1860), 722. 3 Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 18211865 (Baton Rouge, 1991), 253; Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia, http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/php/start. php?year=V1860; Charles Waldo Hayes, History of the Island and City of Galveston (Austin, 1974), 749-751. 4 Galveston Civilian and Gazette Weekly, May 28, 1861; James M. Schmidt, Galveston and the Civil War: An Island City on the Maelstrom (Charleston, 2012), 32; Galveston Civilian and Gazette Weekly, July 9, 1861; ORN, Series I, Vol. 16, 607–608; Schmidt, Galveston and the Civil War, 34; Hayes, History of the Island and City of Galveston, 498. 5 Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals (New York, 2008), 39–41. 6 Stephen R. Wise, Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War (Columbia, 1988), 272. 7 William Watson, The Adventures of a Blockade Runner; or, Trade in Time of War (London, 1893), 304-305. 8 Houston Daily Telegraph, March 8, 1864; Ralph J. Smith, “Reminiscences of Life on the Gulf Coast with the Second Texas Infantry,” in B. P. Gallaway, ed., Texas: The Dark Corner of the Confederacy (Lincoln, NE, 1994), 191; Edward T. Cotham Jr., Battle on the Bay: The Civil War Struggle for Galveston (Austin, 1998), 162–164.
19 Galveston Daily News, May 28, 1891; Cotham, Battle on the Bay, 179; Wise, Lifeline of the Confederacy, Appendix 18, 275, 219. 20 Galveston Daily News, May 28, 1891. 21 Robert L. Kerby, Kirby Smith’s Confederacy: The Trans-Mississippi South, 1863-1865 (New York, 1972), 405-406.
(Pages 52–63, 76) 1
Quoted in Don Pierce, “Belle Isle: Paradise and Pain,” Richmond Journal of History and Architecture vol. I (Autumn 1994), 4. The best and most accessible overview of Belle Isle is John S. Salmon’s nomination for the National Register of Historic Places (dhr.virginia.gov).
2 “Cities of the South – Richmond,” De Bow’s Review, vol. 28 (1860): 191-192. 3 Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works Papers, Records Relating to Confederater Citizens and Business Firms, RG 109 (M-346), National Archives and Records Administration (accessed via Fold3.com). Several prisoners’ wartime and postwar accounts described the iron works operating and even employing prison labor. 4 Richmond Daily Dispatch [hereafter RDD], July 9, 1862; “Belle Isle,” RDD, July 11, 1862. 5 Macon [GA] Telegraph, July 15, 1862, from the Richmond Enquirer. 6 “Enjoying Themselves,” editorial in RDD, July 26, 1862.
22 Kerby, Kirby Smith’s Confederacy, 422-423, 417-418; Richard Lowe, Walker’s Texas Division, C.S.A.: Greyhounds of the Trans-Mississippi (Baton Rouge, 2004), 253.
7 U.S. Sanitary Commission, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers While Prisoners of War… (Philadelphia, 1864), 45.
23 Quoted in Lowe, Walker’s Texas Division, 253; Kerby, Kirby Smith’s Confederacy, 422-423; J.P. Blessington, The Campaigns of Walker’s Texas Division (New York, 1875), 307; Lowe, Walker’s Texas Division, 254.
8 “On To Prison,” Civil War Times Illustrated (May/June 1990), entry for July 13, 1862.
24 Benjamin F. Sands, From Reefer to Rear Admiral: Reminiscences and Journal Jottings of Nearly Half a Century of Naval Life (New York, 1899), 272–273, 276–277; Kerby, Kirby Smith’s Confederacy, 423–424, 426. 25 Hayes, History of the Island and City of Galveston, 640–641; Sands, From Reefer to Rear Admiral, 277–278. 26 John G. Walker to Andrew Johnson, October 23, 1866, Case Files of Applications from Former Confederates for Presidential Pardons (“Amnesty Papers”), National Archives and Records Administration, NARA M1003. 27 J.P. Blessington, Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Texas, Sixteenth Infantry (Seventh Infantry; Flournoy’s Infantry), National Archives and Records Administration, NARA M323; J.T. Winfrey [sic], ibid., Second Infantry (First Infantry, Moore’s Regiment; Galveston Regiment; Van Dorn Regiment), NARA M323. 28 Watson, The Adventures of a Blockade Runner, 184-185.
9 Houston Tri-Weekly News, April 3, 1865; Austin Weekly State Gazette, April 12, 1865.
CORNUBIA SIDEBAR
10 Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, December 21, 1864.
1
11 J. G. Walker, Head Quarters, Dist. of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, General Orders No. 6, Houston, February 23, 1865; Hayes, History of the Island and City of Galveston, 631.
LIFE AND DEATH ON BELLE ISLE
(Page 48)
Paul H. Silverstone, Civil War Navies, 18551883 (New York, 2006), 48; Wise, Lifeline of the Confederacy, 294-295; ORN II:2, 66.
2 Galveston Tri-Weekly News, November 13, 1872.
9 Richmond Examiner, September 24, 1862; Sandra V. Parker’s Richmond’s Civil War Prisons (Lynchburg, 1990) and Roger Pickenpaugh’s Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy (Tuscaloosa, 2013) provide overviews of Belle Isle’s prison history. 10 The Survivors’ Association, History of the 118th Pennsylvania Volunteers... (Philadelphia, 1905), 614; Edward Beach, Misery on All Sides: A Union Soldier’s Letters, POW Experiences, Andersonville Diary, Love Letters, and Papers, ed. by Janet Elaine Selma Marx (privately printed, 2011), 72. 11 See weather map in Cary Mock, “A Change in the Weather,” The Civil War Monitor (Winter 2013): 57. 12 Details on weather from Robert K. Krick, Civil War Weather in Virginia (Tuscaloosa, 2007), 109-122, and Diary of William S. Tippett, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia (hereafter Tippett diary); George Hegeman, “The Diary of a Union Soldier in Confederate Prisons,” ed. by James J. Heslin, The NewYork Historical Society Quarterly vol. 41 (July 1957): 233-278 (hereafter Hegeman diary); J. Osborn Coburn, Hell on Belle Isle: Diary of a Civil War POW, ed. by Don Allison (Bryan, OH, 1997); Diary of Pvt. William Dolphin, 2nd New York Cavalry, August 14, 1863–April 4, 1864, photocopy from private collection in Virginia Historical Society (hereafter Dolphin diary). 13 Gregory A. Coco, ed., From Ball’s Bluff to Gettysburg… and Beyond: The Civil War Letters of Roland E. Bowen, 15th Massachusetts Infantry, 1861–1864 (Gettysburg, 1994), 176; Charles
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Fosdick, Five Hundred Days in Rebel Prisons (Bethany, MO, 1887), 12. 14 Lieutenant G.E. Sabre, Nineteen Months a Prisoner (New York, 1865), 45-47. 15 Diary of Zelotes Musgraves (ohio45.homestead.com/musgrave.html); Coburn, Hell on Belle Isle, November 30, 1863; Tippett diary, November 23, 1863. 16 Neal Dow, The Reminiscences of Neal Dow: Recollections of Eighty Years (Portland, ME, 1898), 723-724; U.S. Sanitary Commission, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings, 8-15; United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series II, Vol. 8, 343 (hereafter OR). 17 Coco, ed., From Ball’s Bluff to Gettysburg, 184. 18 OR, Series II, Vol. 6, 587-588, 1085-1086. 19 OR, Series II, Vol. 6, 1085-1087. 20 Warren Lee Goss, The Soldier’s Story of His Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle, and Other Rebel Prisons… (Boston, 1867), 42; James Madison Page, A True Story of Andersonville. A defense of Major Henry Wirz (New York, 1908), 42. 21 “On to Prison,” July 19, 24, 1862; Coburn, Hell on Belle Isle, 80; Hegeman diary, December 18, 1863, January 17 and 19, 1864; Tippett diary, October 3, 1863; Dolphin diary, October 3, 1863. 22 Coco, ed., From Ball’s Bluff to Gettysburg, 173; Goss, The Soldier’s Story of His Captivity, 47-48; Robert J. Driver Jr., Richmond Local
Defense Troops, C.S.A. (Wilmington, NC, 2011), 17, 35, 184. References to shooting incidents include Hegeman diary, November 23, December 11 and 24, 1863, and February 10, 1864; Tippett diary, October 16, 1863 and February 11, 1864; [Joseph Arnold], “Belle Isle,” in Twenty Months in Captivity: Memoirs of a Union Officer in Confederate Prisons, ed. by Frederic Trautmann (Rutherford, NJ, 1982), 136. 23 Hegeman diary, January 15-19, 1864; Sabre, Nineteen Months, 69-70; John L. Ransom, Andersonville Diary (Philadelphia, 1883), January 11, 12, 28 and February 5, 1864. 24 “Diary of Henry H. Ladd, Prisoner of War at Belle Isle, VA, and Salisbury, NC” (laddfamily. com/Files/Henry%20Ladd/Henry%20Ladd. htm); Diary of Samuel McClain, 144th Ohio Volunteers, MS 640, Samuel McClain Papers Transcripts, Bowling Green State University, entry for August 30, 1864. 25 OR, Series II, Vol. 7, 870-871. 26 Hegeman diary, October 31, 1863. Figures on Belle Isle burials from National Register nomination for Richmond National Cemetery. 27 OR, Series II, Vol. 8, 346; Tippett diary, February 28, 1863; John. T. Trowbridge: The South: a tour of its battle-fields and ruined cities… (Hartford, 1866), 157; W.L. Blackman, “Visit to Historic Spots,” in The National Tribune, February 28, 1901 (accessed via www.mdgorman. com). 28 Charles W. Sanders, While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton
Rouge, 2005), 272. 29 For example, “Richmond Nailers’ Strike,” Washington Post [WP], June 20, 1886; “Killed By A Freight Car,” WP, March 14, 1888; “Iron Works Loses Suit,” WP, January 30, 1917. 30 Briscoe Goodheart, “Belle Isle Revisited,” The National Tribune, November 10, 1892 (accessed via www.mdgorman.com). 31 See Browning & Associates, “Phase I Archaeological Reconnaissance Survey Robert E. Lee Bridge, U.S. Rt. 1 City of Richmond, Virginia,” Virginia Department of Transportation Project 0001-127-101, PE101, and Browning & Associates, Ltd., “Belle Isle ‘Prison Camp’ Site 44HE579 Archaeological Investigation City of Richmond, Virginia,” October 1995. Copies of both reports courtesy of Robert B. Giles. 32 “May Open Park on Belle Isle,” Richmond Times-Dispatch [RTD], July 25, 1909. 33 James E. Davis, “Belle Isle Monorail Proposed,” RTD, January 3,1969. 34 Postwar history of prison camps in Sanders, While in the Hands of the Enemy, 290-292; Benjamin G. Cloyd, Haunted By Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory (Baton Rouge, 2010), 79, 88, 166-167. 35 Information on friends groups and archaeological work available at campdouglas.org; dnr. state.md.us/publiclands/ptlookouthistory.asp; salisburyprison.org; class.georgiasouthern. edu/camp-lawton; bing.com/search?q=florenc e+south+carolina+prison+camp&form=IE10TR &src=IE10TR&pc=HPNTDFJS.
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An Invisible Wound of men injured during the Civil War, not all carried obvious signs such as facial scars, crutches, or an empty sleeve. Among the myriad invisible injuries was hearing loss related to the thunderous noises of combat. Indeed, a recent study reveals that approximately one-third of Union veterans who received federal pensions were compensated for diminished hearing. ¶ Many veterans who suffered from hearing loss looked for help in the form of ear trumpets, devices widely manufactured during the postwar years that aimed “to aid defective hearing … by collecting and concentrating the waves of sound, so that they may impinge upon the tympanum [eardrum] with increased force,” as one contemporary description put it. The telescopic ear trumpet shown here, which likely dates to the 1870s, would have been one such model employed by ex-soldiers. Made of tin and panted a deep maroon, it could collapse for easy carrying and storage. of the hundreds of thousands
THE MÜTTER MUSEUM OF THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF PHILADELPHIA (MUTTERMUSEUM.ORG)
pa r t i n g shot
SOURCE: RYAN K. SEWELL, ET AL, “HEARING LOSS IN UNION ARMY VETERANS FROM 1862 TO 1920,” THE LARYNGOSCOPE (DECEMBER 2004)
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