LINCOLN’S FINAL JOURNEY P. 24 A PATCH OF HELL ON EARTH P. 54 VOL. 4, 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 }
broken soldiers Stories of the Civil War’s wounded, from battlefeld to recovery and beyond. ★ A S P E C I A L P H 0 T O F E AT U R E ★
PLUS
SOLDIER IN DISGUISE: THE STORY OF JENNIE HODGERS
SUMMER 2014
★ $5.99
P. 22
CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
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Commemorates Three Civil War Battles in 2014 Second Battle of Kernstown
July 19-20
Participate in a day-long motorcoach tour with author/ historian Scott Patchan, revisiting the places and events leading up to the battle. Kernstown Battlefield will also host the Civil War 150 HistoryMobile, guided tours, live period music, period fashion shows, and living history demonstrations with sharpshooters and cavalry units.
Third Battle of Winchester
Battle of Cedar Creek
October 18-19
Witness one of the most exciting battle reenactments in the country! This unique opportunity also includes a children’s activities tent, Sutler Row shopping area, a luminary commemoration service, and night firing of cannons. Guided group tours are available and include grandstand seating for the reenactments. Free admission for children 6 and under.
September 19-20
The site of an ambitious restoration project, Third Winchester Battlefield will host special battlefield tours, a kids camp, living history programs, a battle re-creation on the pivotal “Middle Field,” and a Commemorative Program on Third Winchester and the 1864 Shenandoah Campaign.
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Contents
VOLUME 4,
DEPARTMENTS
FEATURES
Broken Soldiers
Salvo
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
10
VOICES
14
DOSSIER
16
PRESERVATION
18
PRIMER
20
DISUNION
22
IN FOCUS
24
Sounds of War Ulysses S. Grant Campaign 150 Marches On Corps Badges NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; FRANCIS T. MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
30
TRAVELS
A Visit to Atlanta
Albert Cashier’s Secret Lincoln’s Final Journey
For the nearly half million Union and Confederate soldiers wounded during the Civil War, the path to recovery was as uncertain as it was lengthy. And for those fortunate enough to survive their ordeals, a new challenge awaited: adjusting to life with a broken body. “There were dreadful sights at the Surgeon’s bench. I saw them cutting of limbs. It looks strange to see a leg with its stocking lying on the grass.”
Columns CASUALTIES OF WAR
26
BATTLEFIELD ECHOES
28
Larkin Milton Skaggs
Losing Focus at Cedar Creek
NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2014
Ten Miles from Richmond 44
At the tiny crossroads town of Cold Harbor, Ulysses S. Grant hoped to crush Robert E. Lee’s army and hasten the war’s end. What happened instead would become one of his greatest regrets. by allen c. guelzo
A Patch of Hell on Earth
54
Books & Authors LETTERS HOME: CORRESPONDENCE FROM MEN AT WAR 67 BY PETER S. CARMICHAEL
VOICES FROM THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, PART 3 71 BY GARY W. GALLAGHER
In Every Issue EDITORIAL
The Cost of War
PARTING SHOT
Smoke ’em if You Got ’em
2 80
William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 campaign against Atlanta was one of speed and maneuver—with one exception: the June 27 Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. On a rise later known as Cheatham Hill, the fghting was particularly ferce, earning that patch of land a haunting name: The Dead Angle. by patrick brennan
ON THE COVER: Captain E.B. Gates,
4th Pennsylvania Reserves. Image courtesy National Museum of Health and Medicine (CP 1110).
1 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2014
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editorial VOLUME 4, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2014
Terry A. Johnston Jr. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Laura June Davis Angela Esco Elder David Thomson Robert Poister CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
The Cost of War how do you tell the full story of a war? There is no end to the articles we could (and will) run on the military history of the Civil War—stories of the battles, the armies who fought in them, the commanders who led them, and the strategies and tactics they employed. In this issue, two of our favorite Civil War authors (both Monitor editorial advisors) contribute feature articles that shed light on two key Civil War battles: Allen C. Guelzo writes about the brutal struggle between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee at Cold Harbor in June 1864 (“Ten Miles from Richmond,” on page 44), while Patrick Brennan probes the of-overlooked story of the fght for Cheatham Hill in Georgia during William Tecumseh Sherman’s campaign to take Atlanta (“A Patch of Hell on Earth,” page 54). Yet the history of any confict encompasses so much more than what occurred on the feld of battle—from the politics and economics of the day to the goings-on at the home front. In short, to truly understand the war and its legacy, our explorations of the confict must be as wide as they are deep. Our cover story (“Broken Soldiers,” page 30) is a case in point. When the Civil War ended, its soldiers became veterans who carried the scars and the stories of their wartime experiences. Yet the struggles of these men—particularly those grievously wounded—rarely get the coverage they deserve. What happened to them afer the guns fell silent? What did their path to recovery look like, and what became of them afer the war? The stories of the wounded are difcult to read; their photos hard to face. But as part of war’s brutal reality, they have a place in our pages.
Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor EDITORIAL ADVISORS
Jennifer Sturak COPY EDITOR
Matthew C. Hulbert SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGER MATT@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Brian Matthew Jordan BOOK REVIEW EDITOR BRIAN@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Katie Brackett Fialka SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR
Patrick Mitchell CREATIVE DIRECTOR MODUS OPERANDI DESIGN (WWW.MODUSOP.NET)
Zethyn McKinley ADVERTISING DIRECTOR ADVERTISING@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM (559) 492 9236
Margaret Collins ADVERTISING ASSOCIATE MARGARET@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Howard White CIRCULATION MANAGER HWHITEASSOC@COMCAST.NET website
www.CivilWarMonitor.com
M. Keith Harris Kevin M. Levin Robert H. Moore II Harry Smeltzer DIGITAL HISTORY ADVISORS SUBSCRIPTIONS & CUSTOMER SERVICE
Civil War Monitor / Circulation Dept. P.O. Box 567, Selmer, TN 38375-0567 phone: 877-344-7409 fax: 731-645-7849 EMAIL: CUSTOMERSERVICE@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
The Civil War Monitor [issn 2163-0682/print, issn 21630690/ online] is published quarterly (4 times per year) by Bayshore History, llc (8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402). Pending Periodicals postage paid at Atlantic City, NJ, and at additional mailing ofces. 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). Postmaster: send address changes to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 567, Selmer, TN 38375-0567.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: letters@civilwarmonitor.com
2
Views expressed by individual authors, unless expressly stated, do not necessarily represent those of The Civil War Monitor or Bayshore History, LLC. Letters to the editor become the property of The Civil War Monitor, and may be edited. The Civil War Monitor cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited materials. The contents of the magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of the publisher.
Copyright ©2014 by Bayshore History, llc all rights reserved.
printed in the u.s.a.
THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2014
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The BesT of
Celebrating
60 Years
C IVIL WAR H ISTORY JOuRnAL Confict & Command
Civil War History Readers, Volume 1 Edited by John T. Hubbell
Civil War historian John T. Hubbell reintroduces infuential essays that treat military matters in a variety of contexts, including leadership, strategy, tactics, execution, and outcomes. Those interested in the ofcers and soldiers, logistics and planning, and outcomes of the battles in America’s bloodiest confict will welcome this essential collection.
Civil War History Readers, Volume 2 Edited by John David Smith
In this second volume of the best of Civil War History, John David Smith has selected groundbreaking essays that examine slavery, abolitionism, emancipation, Lincoln and race, and African Americans as soldiers and veterans. His introduction assesses the contribution of each article to our understanding of the Civil War.
On Lincoln
Civil War History Readers, Volume 3 Edited by John T. Hubbell
Lesley J. Gordon, Editor
Published Quarterly
by The KenT STaTe UniverSiTy PreSS
This third volume of the best of Civil War History examines Lincoln’s assertive idealism, leadership, views on slavery, abolitionism, emancipation, and Lincoln as war president. Hubbell’s introduction contributes to our understanding of Lincoln and the Civil War.
C IVIL WAR H ISTORY
Race and Recruitment
Subscribe today! Available from your local bookstore or from www.KentStateUniversityPress.com
www.KentStateUniversityPress.com or call C. Heller at 330.672.8090
The KenT STaTe UniverSiTy PreSS 1118 University Library • Kent, Ohio 44242
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ate soldier images, the rebel yell, and the battle for Nashville. And in this issue, you might especially enjoy Pat Brennan’s article on the fght for Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, on page 54.
Aw, Shucks
Great website. Great mag. Keep up the good work. Peter Hofer VIA EMAIL
* * *
* * * The Civil War Monitor only gets better with age! You could not do a better job if you tried! I am a subscriber for life! Tony Ostrowski C H I C O P E E , M A S SAC H U S E T TS
* * * I am a subscriber to The Civil War Monitor because of the demise of North & South magazine. You honored the remaining issues on my N&S subscription by sending the Monitor instead. Boy, am I glad you did; what an upgrade! When the time came, I couldn’t re-subscribe fast enough. Now I get detailed articles that are well written and interesting, illustrated by graphics that are relevant, useful, and pleasing to the eye. Even the paper is an upgrade, with a slick cover and pages that feel good to the touch. I am hooked. My only complaint is that four issues a year are not enough! Keep up the good work. Curtis Mildner KENNEBUNK, MAINE
Reader Requests
erage, anywhere, of the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Generally, all the southern attention goes to Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. As you well know, the Monitor has covered a ton of Yankees: Custer, Sherman, Lincoln, etc. (or at least y’all put them on the cover). In all fairness, y’all probably get a ton of requests from Yankees wanting more northern content, and I know you can’t please everybody. Please give us some love here in Alabama, and keep up the good work. Dallas Dorsey VIA EMAIL
I love your magazine, and I have really enjoyed my subscription. May I suggest more southern content? There is very little cov-
ED. We hear you, Dallas, loud and
clear. Keep an eye out in future issues for articles on Confeder-
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwar monitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
Your spring 2014 issue was a pleasure to read. I commend you for the unique way you have presented new perspectives on a variety of Civil War topics. I am disappointed, however, that the Battle of Shiloh has not graced your pages. I believe Shiloh is unusual among major Civil War battles in that comparatively little has been written about it. The Civil War Monitor is indicative of this absence of coverage. In your last eight issues, Shiloh has received only a few brief mentions (in Vol. 2, No. 2, and Vol. 2, No. 4) until your current issue’s last page [“Parting Shot: Take Me Out to the … Battlefeld,” Vol. 4, No. 1] whereon we are treated to the wonderful little story of a baseball found on the battlefeld. I’d like to suggest an area of research that I believe would shed new light on the outcome of the battle: the extraordinary heroism of Ulysses S. Grant’s chief of staf, Colonel Joseph D. Webster, who on the afernoon of April 6, 1862, at the order of Grant, assembled some 50 to 60 artillery pieces and placed them on what would later be known as Grant’s Last Line (of defense). Webster did this under what must have been absolute chaos on the battlefeld. Not only did he have to assemble the guns in a defensive line in the
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SIU Press Favorites midst of battle, he also in many cases had to commandeer terrifed soldiers, who were running for their lives, and teach them how to man and fre the weapons. Webster’s feat is mentioned only in passing in any written work that I have been able to fnd about the battle, if it is mentioned at all. Having survived several frefghts while serving in Vietnam with the 173d Airborne Brigade, I think I have some sense as to what it must have been like for Webster that bloody afernoon at Shiloh. Thus, my real purpose is to hopefully interest you in researching this unsung act of heroism and bringing it to light in a future issue. In any event, I wish you well in your quest to present “a new look at America’s greatest confict.”
lion would have consumed another third of the budget for a period of more than 10 years. Thanks for another engaging issue. I read it cover to cover. Steve Walrath C L E V E L A N D, O H I O ED. We forwarded your observation to
James Marten, who confrmed that the building in fact cost $900,000, not $900 million. Thank you, Steve, for catching this. You have a good eye indeed!
Correction
Clewell W. Smith S P R I N G H I L L , F LO R I DA
Oops!
ED. A few readers wrote to ask what
While I thoroughly enjoyed James Marten’s article about a man who was very prominent in his own time but almost forgotten today [“The Ubiquitous Mr. Tanner,” Vol. 4, No. 1], I have to wonder whether the Pension Bureau building really cost $900 million, as stated on page 65. If $88,275,113 represented one third of the entire annual federal budget (as also stated on page 65), then $900 mil-
CWM12-FOB-Letters.indd 5
sources we consulted in compiling the casualty fgures presented in Garry Adelman’s article “The Overland Campaign in Pictures,” which appeared in our spring 2014 issue. We gleaned the numbers from a variety of sources, chief among them: The Ofcial Records of the War of the Rebellion; William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War (1898; reprint, 1993); Edward H. Bonekemper III, A Victor, Not a Butcher (2004); and Alfred C. Young, Lee’s Army during the Overland Campaign: A Numerical Study (2013). We should have included these titles in our note on sources; our sincere apologies for the oversight, which was ours alone, not Mr. Adelman’s.
www.conciselincolnlibrary.com
www.siupress.com 1-800-621-2736
Supported by a grant from the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation
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agenda
MEMORABILIA
41st Annual Civil War Collector’s Show SATURDAY, JUNE 28 – SUNDAY, JUNE 29
Allstar Expo Complex
GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
One of the most popular Civil War relic shows celebrates its 41st year. Over 300 tables of authentic, quality artifacts will be on display by a variety of dealers—for perusal or purchase.
Your Guide to Civil War Events
SUMMER 2014 JUNE 2014 LECTURE
A Day Long to be Remembered: Lincoln in Gettysburg FRIDAY, JUNE 13, 6:30 P.M.
Pages of the Past Bookstore GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
Historian Michael Burlingame and landscape photographer Robert Shaw discuss their new book, A Day Long to be Remembered: Lincoln in Gettysburg, a multifaceted look at Lincoln’s role in the events at Gettysburg from May to November 1863. FREE (SEATING LIMITED TO 50); FOR MORE INFORMATION: PAGESOFPAST.COM or 717-334-0572 PERFORMANCE
A. Lincoln: A Pioneer Tale THURSDAY, JUNE 19 – SATURDAY, JULY 12
Lincoln Amphitheatre LINCOLN CITY, INDIANA
$7 ADULTS; CHILDREN UNDER 12 FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: 717-334-2350
A two-act musical drama tells the story of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood years, including his frst love, the deaths of his mother and sister, and his frst encounter with a slave auction while visiting New Orleans. $19 ADULTS; $16 STUDENTS; $16 SENIORS AND MILITARY; $6 CHILDREN (+$2 FOR TICKETS BOUGHT AT THE DOOR ON DAY OF PERFORMANCE); FOR MORE INFORMATION: LINCOLNAMPHITHEATRE. ORG or 800-264-4223 C O M M E M O R AT I O N
Juneteenth: The First Day of Freedom SATURDAY, JUNE 21 – SUNDAY, JUNE 22
Atlanta History Center ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Genealogical workshops, performances, exhibitions, and kid-friendly activities help visitors explore the themes of freedom and family history during this two-day commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States.
JULY 2014 LECTURE
Treating Orthopedic Injuries from the Battle of Monocacy SATURDAY, JULY 5, 1 P.M.
Monocacy National Battlefeld Visitors Center FREDERICK, MARYLAND
Dr. John M. Rathgeb, M.D., explores real cases from Union and Confederate soldiers wounded during the Battle of Monocacy. The presentation, hosted by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, will examine their injuries, courses of treatment, and outcomes, and compare them with modern orthopedic practices. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: 301-695-1864 x1013 REENACTMENT
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: ATLANTAHISTORY CENTER.COM or 404-814-4000
SATURDAY, JULY 12 – SUNDAY, JULY 13
Sharon Woods Park CINCINNATI, OHIO
A full weekend of living-history demonstrations includes portrayals of camp and town life and battle reenactments. In addition, several “education stations” for children will present how people lived during the Civil War. $8 ADULTS; $4 CHILDREN 5-11; CHILDREN UNDER 4 AND MUSEUM MEMBERS ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: HERITAGEVILLAGECINCINNATI.ORG OR 513-563-9484.
LINCOLN AMPHITHEATRE; HERITAGE VILLAGE MUSEUM
Heritage Village Museum Civil War Weekend
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C O M M E M O R AT I O N
Second Battle of Kernstown Commemoration SAT, JULY 19 – SUN, JULY 20
Kernstown Battlefeld
LECTURE
The Fall of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind : History or Fiction?
WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, NOON
Celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Second Battle of Kernstown—fought on July 24, 1864—with two days of events, including guided tours, live period music, period fashion shows, and living history demonstrations with sharpshooters and cavalry units.
The Museum of the Confederacy
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: KERNSTOWNBATTLE.ORG OR 877871-1326 FESTIVAL
Atlanta Cyclorama Family Fun Day SUNDAY, JULY 20
Atlanta Cyclorama Auditorium ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Spend a family day at the Cyclorama learning in fun, hands-on ways about the Battle of Atlanta and the Civil War. Educators will teach young people and their families the games and pastimes of the period. Storytellers, face painters, and reenactors will keep you entertained and learning about the confict through engaging, interactive activities. KERNSTOWN BATTLEFIELD ASSOCIATION
AUGUST 2014
$10 ADULTS; $8 SENIORS; $8 CHILDREN 4-12; FOR MORE INFORMATION: ATLANTACYCLORAMA.ORG OR 404-658-7625
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
The movie Gone with the Wind is one of the most enduring cinematic depictions of the American Civil War. One of its most famous scenes illustrates the fall of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1864—but is Hollywood’s depiction historically accurate? Curator Cathy Wright examines the true historical events, then analyzes author Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 book and the 1939 MGM movie for historical accuracy. Bring your own brown-bag lunch. FREE WITH MUSEUM MEMBERSHIP OR ADMISSION; FOR MORE INFORMATION: MOC.ORG or 855-649-1861 x121 C O M M E M O R AT I O N
Manassas Civil War Weekend FRI, AUG 22 – SUN, AUG 24 MANASSAS, VIRGINIA
Old Town Manassas, the Manassas Museum, and Liberia Plantation host a weekend of events—including lectures, exhibits, artillery demonstrations, live music, and a period baseball game—highlighting life during the Civil War. FREE; INFORMATION: MANASSASMUSEUM.ORG or 703-368-1873
USS Monitor Center at The Mariners’ Museum Plan your visit today to see this award-winning Civil War attraction! Be a part of the action in our highdefnition Battle Theater, walk the deck of the full-sized Monitor replica, see artifacts like the iconic revolving gun turret.
Save the Date!
Battle of Hampton Roads Weekend March 7 & 8, 2015 Commemorating the 153rd anniversary of the Civil War Battle of the Ironclads with living history encampments, s, lectures, familyy programming, g, a food tasting g event and more!
Share Your Event Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
www.MarinersMuseum.org 1-800-581-SAIL (7245) Newport News, VA Just 20 minutes from the Historic Triangle of Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown.
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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
}
In this Kurz & Allison lithograph, Union and Confederate forces clash on July 22, 1864, during the Battle of Atlanta, where Major General James B. McPherson (pictured at right, on brown horse) was killed. FOR MORE ON ATLANTA, TURN THE PAGE. ☛
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IN THIS SECTION Travels
A VISIT TO ATLANTA Voices
SOUNDS OF WAR
...........
10
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Dossier
ULYSSES S. GRANT. . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Preservation
CAMPAIGN 150 MARCHES ON
..
18
Primer
CORPS BADGES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Disunion
ALBERT CASHIER’S SECRET . . . 22 In Focus
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
LINCOLN’S FINAL JOURNEY
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ATLANTA GEORGIA In May 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman launched his campaign to take Atlanta, a vital rail and industrial center for the South. From Chattanooga, Tennessee, Sherman invaded Georgia and, through a series of aggressive fanking maneuvers and battles (including Resaca on May 13-15 and Kennesaw Mountain on June 27), methodically pushed the Confederate forces defending Atlanta under General Joseph E. Johnston back toward the city. Sherman followed up these successes with victories against Johnston’s replacement in command, General John B. Hood. On September 2, Union forces triumphantly entered Atlanta, a timely victory that many believe helped propel embattled President Abraham Lincoln to reelection in November. ¶ Interested in visiting Atlanta? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area—Gordon L. Jones and Brian Craig Miller—to ofer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic city.
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Don’t Miss
Pickett’s Mill Battlefeld (4432 Mt. Tabor Church Rd., Dallas, GA; 770-443-7850) in Paulding County is probably the most pristine Civil War battlefeld in the United States. The tree lines and clearings are virtually unchanged since the May 27, 1864, battle. There is a visitors center and walking trails, but no monuments, so you see the same things the soldiers saw in 1864. It’s really worth exploring. –gj
Pickett’s Mill Battlefeld
Atlanta is home to so many prominent Civil War and civil rights locations. However, I love spending an afernoon at the Atlanta History Center (130 West Paces Ferry Rd. NW; 404-814-4000) in Buckhead. It has fantastic exhibits laying out the history of the city, and the Civil War section contains a wealth of artifacts. The staf is friendly and will make your visit an informative and enjoyable one. –BCM
Atlanta History Center
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BEST TIME TO VISIT
Spring is one of the most enjoyable times in Atlanta. Everything awakens in bloom and the residents are ready for great outdoor activities. Sheep to Shawl, held each spring at the Atlanta History Center’s Smith Family Farm, is a local favorite. Visitors experience seasonal activities of a working 1860s farm, including sheep shearing, and participate in the process of carding, cleaning, dyeing, and spinning the wool into beautiful cloth. –gj I love going to Atlanta anytime in the late spring or early summer (April to June). The weather is perfect, with warm temperatures but low humidity. It is a great time to be outside, especially if you are walking the battlefeld trails in Kennesaw or catching an evening Braves game. –bcm Georgia Aquarium (here and at left)
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BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
Atlanta is a superb city in which to travel with children. Zoo Atlanta (800 Cherokee Ave. SE; 404-624-5600) is an excellent zoo and home to several giant pandas; the Georgia Aquarium (225 Baker St. NW; 404-581-4151) is stunning, with massive stingrays that perform mesmerizing barrel rolls; and the World of Coca-Cola (121 Baker St. NW; 404-676-5151) includes a soda room where your kids can sample varieties from around the world, which will provide them with all the energy they need for the rest of the trip. –BCM The Center for Puppetry Arts (1404 Spring St. NW; 404-873-3089) in Midtown, which boasts a variety of exhibits, hands-on activities, and live performances, is a great place to take the kids. Both adults and kids enjoy using their imaginations at the Legoland Discovery Center (3500 Peachtree Rd. G-1; 404-848-9252). If you go, don’t miss Miniland, a cityscape of Atlanta built out of Legos—it’s quite remarkable! –GJ
11 PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIM REDMAN
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Atlanta Cyclorama
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Best Civil War Spot
The Atlanta Cyclorama (800 Cherokee Ave. SE; 404-658-7625) in Grant Park—a giant, 360degree painting created in 1886 to depict the July 22, 1864, Battle of Atlanta—is one of only two of such circular Civil War paintings that survive. While you’re in the park, see the earthen ramparts of Fort Walker, the only remnant of the 1864 Confederate defensive line. –GJ
The Georgian Terrace Hotel
I personally love the cyclorama and really enjoy taking my Civil War students there when we embark upon feld studies of the South. Since the seats slowly revolve, you get the full perspective of the painting and you will walk away with a great historical overview of the Civil War campaigns that took place around the city in 1864. –BCM
5 BEST SLEEP The Georgian Terrace Hotel (659 Peachtree St. NE; 404-897-1991) in Midtown is a favorite for many reasons. It’s conveniently located near restaurants and attractions including the Margaret Mitchell House and the Fabulous Fox Theatre. I personally appreciate its historical character and its ties to Gone With the Wind (many of the stars attended a gala in the hotel’s grand ballroom when the movie was released in 1939). I also recommend the Hyatt Midtown (125 10th St. NE; 404-443-1234) and the Ellis Hotel (176 Peachtree St. NW; 404-523-5155) for their décor, pricing, and convenient locations. –GJ The Civil War Museum at the Atlanta Cyclorama
I love the Westin Peachtree Plaza (210 Peachtree St.; 404-659-1400). Its round tower ensures an excellent view of the city, especially if you ask for a higher foor, and it is walking distance from many downtown attractions, including the World of Coca-Cola, the Georgia Aquarium, and CNN Center. –BCM
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Busy Bee Cafe
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BEST EATS
7 BEST BOOK
OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF THE CITY OF ATLANTA (CYCLORAMA); COURTESY OF THE GEORGIAN TERRACE
For breakfast, I’d suggest Sun In My Belly (2161 College Ave. NE; 404-370-1088) in the Kirkwood neighborhood. Try “The Hangover,” an open-face biscuit with sausage, a fried egg, avocado, and cheese. Pizza lovers shouldn’t miss Antico Pizza (1093 Hemphill Ave. NW; 404-724-2333) in West Midtown. All of the pizza is authentic Italian and simply amazing, though I’m partial to the Fromaggio (four cheeses, fresh garlic, and basil). Mary Mac’s Tea Room (224 Ponce De Leon Ave. NE; 404-876-1800) is a southern staple (and rumored to be one of Margaret Mitchell’s favorites). You must try the chicken and dumplings. King + Duke (3060 Peachtree Rd. NW; 404-4773500)—a swanky restaurant that combines urban design with primitive cooking techniques (like cooking over fre)—is a great option for dinner. Be sure to try the bone marrow! –GJ The Silver Skillet (200 14th St.; 404-847-1388) ofers classic southern cooking with mouth-watering grits. Order the Southern Breakfast to sample a superb selection of southern culinary classics. For brunch, try Joy Cafe (316 Pharr Rd. NE; 404-816-0306) in Buckhead, north of downtown. This cozy joint has insanely good biscuits and gravy and shrimp and grits. The pancakes are fufy and the service is great. You might be in for a wait, but it’s worth it. If you’re looking for a burger, you must try The Vortex Bar and Grill (438 Moreland Ave.; 404-688-1828). Located in the Little Five Points district, this eclectic neighborhood gem has the hands-down best turkey burger I have ever devoured (juicy, with the right amount of back heat). The rest of the burgers are also out of this world and it is a great place to relax either for lunch or in the early evening afer a long day of touring. If you are looking for soul food, put the Busy Bee Cafe (810 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. SW; 404-525-9212) on your list. With a wide range of options, including chitlins, ham hocks, fried chicken, and great meatloaf, you can’t go wrong. The side dishes (greens, mac ’n’ cheese, and fried green tomatoes) and the key lime cake are my favorites. –BCM
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS
Gordon L. Jones is the senior military historian and curator at the Atlanta History Center in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has worked since 1991.
Brian Craig Miller, an associate professor and associate chair of history at Emporia State University, became an Atlanta afcionado after spending several months in the city researching two of his books, John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory (2010) and Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (2015).
Barry L. Brown and Gordon R. Elwell’s Crossroads of Confict: A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia (2010), published by the Georgia Civil War Commission for the sesquicentennial, is a good place to start for anyone looking to visit the state’s Civil War sites. Probably the most accurate, detailed, and balanced account of Atlanta during the war is Steve Davis’ What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta (2012). And a great classic on the struggle for Atlanta is Albert Castel’s Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (1992). –GJ Bill Link’s Atlanta, Cradle of the New South (2013) explores the intersecting roles of race and memory in the city during and afer the Civil War. It is an excellent history that will ofer insights to those visiting Atlanta. –BCM
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voices
/ SOUNDS OF WAR
“I HAVE NEVER, SINCE I WAS BORN, HEARD SO FEARFUL A NOISE AS A REBEL YELL. IT IS NOTHING LIKE A HURRAH, BUT RATHER A REGULAR WILDCAT SCREECH.” UNION SURGEON JOHN GARDNER PERRY(RIGHT), MAY 5, 1863
“The groans of the dying, the shrieks of the wounded, and the almost unearthly screaming of
shells and cannonballs, mingled with the rattle of musketry, made up a scene that men see but a few times in a lifetime, and the fewer the better.” SERGEANT STEPHEN A. ROLLINS, 95TH ILLINOIS INFANTRY, IN A LETTER TO HIS MOTHER ABOUT A UNION ASSAULT AGAINST THE DEFENSES OF VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI, MAY 22, 1863
“Profound silence … prevailed in the ranks, broken only by the rattle of canteens against the shanks of the bayonets, and the heavy, monotonous tramp of the men.” ILLINOIS INFANTRYMAN LEANDER STILLWELL, REMEMBERING A NIGHT MARCH SHORTLY AFTER THE FALL OF VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI, IN HIS MEMOIRS
“ THERE IS NOT MINUTE, DAY OR NIGHT, BUT WHAT WE HEAR THE CANNON’S ROAR OR THE RIFLE’S CRACK. BUT WE DON’T MIND IT MUCH. WE HAVE GOTTEN USED TO IT. IT IS OUR TRADE; ‘TIS MUSIC TO US. WE GO TO SLEEP TO IT, WE WAKE TO IT; BUT I CANNOT SAY WE LIKE IT.” CHARLIE H. WHITE, 21ST MASSACHUSETTS INFANTRY, IN AN UNDATED LETTER DURING THE SIEGE OF PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA, IN 1864
“[T]he whole immense line rushed in most forgiveable bad alignment, singing, screaming, bellowing, cheering, sweating, the line surging and bending like a snake, but the roar of their multitudinous voices never letting up for an instant….” UNION OFFICER CHARLES WILLIAM WOOLSEY, ON A SCENE DURING THE MAY 1864 FIGHTING AT SPOTSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA, IN HIS MEMOIRS
THEN FOLLOWS THE HUNGRY, RAVENING SHRIEK OF THE SHELL, WHICH BREAKS FORTH LIKE A HORRIBLE BIRD OF PREY TO DEVOUR THE WHOLE WORLD. IT SWEEPS HOARSELY TOWARD THE ENEMY’S LINE; THEN I HEAR IT GO ‘THUD-THUD!’ THROUGH SOME OBSTRUCTION. IN A MOMENT, THE AIR BEYOND IS LIT UP WITH ITS BURSTING; AND THE SOUND ROARS BACK TO US….”
JAMES KENDALL HOSMER, 52ND MASSACHUSETTS INFANTRY, ON THE FIRING OF UNION HEAVY ARTILLERY DURING THE BOMBARDMENT OF PORT HUDSON, LOUISIANA, IN HIS DIARY, JUNE 1863
SOURCES: LETTERS FROM A SURGEON OF THE CIVIL WAR (1906); SOLDIERS’ LETTERS, FROM CAMP, BATTLE-FIELD AND PRISON (1865); THE COLOR-GUARD … (1864); LETTERS OF A FAMILY DURING THE WAR OF THE REBELLION, 1861-1865 VOL. 2 (1899); THE STORY OF A COMMON SOLDIER OF ARMY LIFE IN THE CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865 (1920).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; LETTERS FROM A SURGEON OF THE CIVIL WAR
“CLASH GO MY TEETH TOGETHER, MY BONES ALMOST RATTLE;
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
5/6/14 4:01 PM
“It is One Thing to Read about a Battle and Quite Another to Learn While Walking the Grounds.’’ Your time is valuable, you owe it to yourself to travel with like minded people and professionals who know the ground and can lead you beyond the “what” into the “why” of the event Over 20 years experience and over 300 programs Something for every budget and schedule from “Weekend Warriors to Civil War Field University” Join the BGES on tour
2015 SCHEDULE NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE
UPCOMING PROGRAMS: JUNE 15 - 18
SEPTEMBER 12 - 14
The Retreat from Gettysburg with Parker Hills and Len Riedel
Pensacola and Mobile with Richard McMurry
JULY 24 - 27
OCTOBER 6 - 10
Shenandoah Summer, Early’s 1864 Valley Campaign with Scott Patchan
Hunter in the Valley with Len Riedel
AUGUST 15 - 17
The Beginning of the Atlanta Campaign with Richard McMurry
The Battle of Chickamauga with Jim Ogden SEPTEMBER 5 - 10
Sibley’s 1862 New Mexico Campaign with Neil Mangum
OCTOBER 17 - 19
DECEMBER 12 - 14
Spring Hill and Franklin with Thomas Cartwright and Greg Biggs
FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT WWW.BLUEANDGRAYEDUCATION.ORG OR CALL 434-250-9921 BGES is a non profit, tax exempt organization. Donations are deductible from Federal taxes and net proceeds or educational tours fund other educational projects and programs.
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dossier
Ulysses S. Grant in may 1864, Ulysses S. Grant embarked upon what would become one of the most consequential operations of the Civil War: the Overland Campaign. Over nearly eight weeks, the armies of Grant and Robert E. Lee clashed repeatedly in northern Virginia. And while these battles collectively produced more Union than Confederate casualties, Grant’s relentless pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia allowed him to maneuver it into a siege at Petersburg and ultimately eliminate it as an efective fghting force. ¶ The campaign’s 150th anniversary seemed a ftting time to refect upon the general ofen credited with winning the war. To do so, we asked a panel of leading historians and authors to assess Grant’s record and legacy. WAS GRANT THE CIVIL WAR’S BEST GENERAL?
Yes 87%
WHAT DO YOU MOST ADMIRE ABOUT GRANT ...
... AND WHAT WAS HIS BIGGEST FLAW?
“Poor choices of subordinates.”
“Determination: his willingness to keep moving on, undeterred by setbacks.”
ALLEN C. GUELZO
“The same aggressiveness that was Grant’s strength was also ofen his greatest weakness.”
BROOKS D. SIMPSON
“Clear thinking. Grant was an extremely calm and clear– headed general ofcer.”
No 13%
“Despite his imperfections and shortcomings, in the end he comes out on top.” BROOKS D. SIMPSON
LESLEY GORDON
“Stubbornness. This is the dark side of his tenacity.”
JOSEPH GLATTHAAR
DANIEL SUTHERLAND
“His genuine humbleness. Grant did not think he was better than anyone else, or above whatever duty needed doing.”
“Grant was a poor judge of character outside of a military setting.” GREGORY URWIN
CHANDRA M. MANNING
“None.”
“Unpretentiousness.” STEVEN WOODWORTH
JOSEPH GLATTHAAR
WHEN WAS GRANT AT HIS PEAK?
We asked our panelists to rank Grant’s performance in seven major campaigns, giving the highest mark for his best performance and the lowest for his least impressive. This chart represents an average of all the responses.
Forts Henry & Donelson {february 1862}
Shiloh
{april 1862}
Vicksburg Campaign
{december 1862–july 1863}
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WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE BOOK ABOUT GRANT?
“His memoirs rank with the best reminiscences in American literature.”
“A gracefully written biography that captures every dimension of Grant’s life.”
GARY W. GALLAGHER
PETER CARMICHAEL
“It is the most comprehensive biography, the best written, and the most intelligent appraisal of the presidential years.” JAMES M. MCPHERSON
“It is unbiased, balanced, all in all a penetrating look at a man who let few into his inner circle.” LARRY J. DANIEL
9%
35%
17%
9%
9%
9% 4%
4%
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE QUOTE BY OR ABOUT GRANT?
“[T]he art of war is simple enough; find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can, and strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
GRANT, AS QUOTED BY MAJOR JOHN H. BRINTON, IN PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF JOHN H. BRINTON (DANIEL SUTHERLAND)
GRANT, IN A DISPATCH TO SECRETARY OF WAR EDWIN STANTON, MAY 11, 1864 (MICHAEL BALLARD)
“He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.” THEODORE LYMAN, DESCRIBING GRANT IN MEADE’S HEADQUARTERS, 1863-1865 (KENNETH W. NOE)
Chattanooga Campaign
Overland Campaign {may–june 1864}
WHAT WORD BEST CHARACTERIZES GRANT’S PRESIDENCY?*
Underrated 21.7% Naïve 13% Well-intentioned 13% Disappointing 8.7%
“I propose to fght it out on this line if it takes all summer.”
{september–november 1863}
4%
Inconsistent 4.35%
Essential 4.35%
Defective 4.35%
Modern 4.35%
Trying 4.35%
Encumbered 4.35%
Progressive 4.35%
Regrettable 4.35%
Controversial 4.35%
Problematic 4.35%
Petersburg Campaign {june 1864–march 1865}
Appomattox Campaign/ Army of Northern Virginia Surrender {march–april 1865}
PARTICIPANTS: Michael Ballard; Peter Carmichael; Larry J. Daniel; Gary W. Gallagher; Joseph Glatthaar; Lesley Gordon;
Allen C. Guelzo; M. Keith Harris; Brian Matthew Jordan; Chandra M. Manning; John Marszalek; James M. McPherson; Kenneth W. Noe; Gerald Prokopowicz; Ethan Rafuse; Stephen W. Sears; Brooks D. Simpson; Christopher S. Stowe; Daniel Sutherland; Gregory Urwin; Elizabeth Varon; Joan Waugh; and Steven Woodworth.
17
*Because of rounding, percentages do not add up to 100%. THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2014
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by o . james lighthizer president , civil war trust
p r e s e r vat i o n
Campaign 150 Marches On
beyond anything I ever hoped for. In less than three years, the Civil War Trust has completed the initially stated fundraising goal of Campaign 150: Our Time, Our Legacy. But afer reaching our target more than a year early, we faced a dilemma: Could we set our sights even higher? Afer all, this program has saved some of our highest-profle properties, including key land at Brandy Station, Chickamauga, Gaines’ Mill, Shiloh, and Vicksburg. We have translated increased public awareness of the Civil War during this anniversary period into tangible achievements that will stand the test of time. Afer discussions with our all-volunteer board of trustees, we decided to issue a “stretch goal”: an additional $10 million toward the permanent protection of the nation’s endangered hallowed ground. We are grateful to every individual who has contributed thus far. But we also know that there is much more work lef to do and no better time to do it than during this sesquicentennial. Continuing Campaign 150 will propel the Trust toward an
all-time mark of 40,000 acres saved. We will also reinvigorate our education programs in the classroom, in print, and online. With more than 200,000 people using our state-of-the-art digital interpretive products— including Battle App® guides, 360-degree panoramas, and animated maps—the Trust is
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
marrying 21st-century technology with 19th-century history like never before. Extending the campaign will further enable the public to access these free innovative educational oferings, laying the groundwork for a new generation of historians and preservationists. Reaching this new milestone will be a tremendous challenge, but we owe it to the brave men and women who answered this nation’s call to service. Afer all, a preserved battlefeld is a living monument—not just to those who fell at one specifc site, but to all our fallen heroes—where future generations will learn the values that have shaped our nation.
This rolling ground on the Gaines’ Mill battlefeld, which witnessed one of the largest Confederate assaults of the Civil War, is among the many high-profle properties preserved thanks to funds raised through Campaign 150.
CIVIL WAR TRUST
at the civil war Trust, we’ve never been afraid of setting ambitious goals. Raise a million dollars in a few months to save a critical piece of battlefeld property? Sure. Persuade Walmart to move a new store location farther away from important historic resources? Count us in. But back in 2011, even I was hesitant about announcing the daunting sesquicentennial task that our staf and board of trustees had set. ¶ It was $40 million, the most ambitious private fundraising efort in the history of American heritage land preservation. ¶ Flash-forward 32 months. That goal that I thought we’d maybe, just maybe, be able to reach by the end of the sesquicentennial? The outpouring of support for battlefeld preservation that the sesquicentennial engendered went
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FREE Trial Issues!
Civil War News Current Events Monthly Newspaper civilwarnews.com
The
Artilleryman
For People Interested In Artillery 1750-1900 theartilleryman.com CWM12-FOB-Preservation.indd 19
What if your father were killed iin war! Blake’s father is killed at Shiloh. He has to do something about it and decides to go to the war and kill the soldier who killed his father. But it’s not as simple as he thinks. Entering the war during the Kentucky Campaign of 1862 with the 2nd Tennessee, he later fnds himself with the 31st Indi-ana when he falls at Perryville. Youngg Blake sees the gut-wrenching destruction and aftermath of battle with its loss of life and of friends, wounded and killed. He no longer wants to kill Yanks. He just wants to go home. Friendship with an enemy soldier has unexpected con-sequences. The regiments and their histories in this story are real, the events did happen.
BLAKE’S STORY,
REVENGE AND F WRITT
ORGIVENESS
EN BY J. ARTHUR MOO RE AND BRYS ON B. BRO DZINSKI CREATED BY BRYS ON B. BRO DZINSKI
BLAKE ’S STORY, REVENGE AND FORGIVENESS GIVENESS BY J. A RT H U R M O O R E & B RYS O N B. B R O DZ I N S K I AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER ($29.99), PAPERBACK ($19.99), OR eBOOK ($3.99) FROM:
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TO PURCHASE COPIES OF THE BOOK FOR RESALE (OR TO REQUEST A COMPLIMENTARY REVIEW COPY ), PLEASE CALL:
(888) 795-4274 x7879
5/6/14 8:41 PM
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primer
Corps Badges inspired by general Philip Kearny’s insistence that his men wear small pieces of red cloth on their hats to distinguish them from other troops, the Union army in March 1863 mandated that distinct badges be worn by the men of its various corps. Cut from colored cloth and worn on the hat or jacket breast, each badge allowed easy identifcation of a soldier’s corps (by its shape) and division (by its color). The badge system also seemed aimed at installing unit pride and improving the army’s sagging esprit de corps. By war’s end, more than 25 corps and specialty badges had been issued, most of which are pictured here. (Note: The 13th and 21st Corps did not adopt badges.) KEY
1ST CORPS
2ND CORPS
3RD CORPS
3rd Div.
Among the army’s frst corps badges was its simplest: the sphere worn by the 1st Corps.
Union ofcer Joshua L. Chamberlain thought the clover-leaf badge “a peaceful token, but a triple menace to foes.”
Two months afer his men started wearing their “lozenge”shaped badges, General Daniel Sickles would lead them into battle at Chancellorsville.
4TH CORPS
5TH CORPS
6TH CORPS
7TH CORPS
The original 4th Corps, organized by George McClellan, had no badge, but the reorganized corps, under George Thomas, adopted the triangle in April 1864.
The Maltese cross badge was worn in some of the war’s bloodiest struggles, from Gettysburg to the Overland Campaign.
The 6th Corps wore a St. Andrews cross as a badge until 1864, then changed to the Greek cross shown here.
This crescent-and-star badge was not adopted until afer the war’s close, in June 1865.
8TH CORPS
9TH CORPS
10TH CORPS
11TH CORPS
Though the six-pointed star was never ofcially adopted as a badge, men of the 8th Corps were wearing it as one by mid-July 1864.
In April 1864, this elaborate shield with a fgure 9, anchor, and cannon was adopted. By year’s end, it was changed to a simple shield.
Units of the 10th Corps—including the famed 54th Massachusetts Infantry—donned a fourbastioned fort badge afer its adoption in July 1864.
The 11th Corps wore this crescent badge for a little over a year, until it was consolidated with the 12th Corps in April 1864 to form the 20th Corps.
Most corps issued badges in these standard colors to signify division. 2nd Div.
20
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
1st Div.
SOURCES: JOHN D. BILLINGS, HARDTACK AND COFFEE (1888); PHILIP KATCHER AND RON VOLSTAD, AMERICAN CIVIL WAR ARMIES 2: UNION TROOPS (1986); THEODORE D. STRICKLER, WHEN AND WHERE WE MET EACH OTHER (1899); JOSHUA LAWRENCE CHAMBERLAIN, THE PASSING OF THE ARMIES (1915).
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12TH CORPS
14TH CORPS
15TH CORPS
16TH CORPS
The star badge stayed with the 12th Corps when it consolidated with the 11th Corps to form the 20th Corps in April 1864.
It’s thought that the 14th Corps’ acorn badge was an ode to its men’s reliance on the nut for sustenance while besieged at Chattanooga in 1863.
“If any corps … has a right to take pride in its badge”—a cartridge box with “40 rounds” stamped on it— it was the 15th Corps, noted its commander in 1865.
This badge, “a circle with four Minie-balls, the points towards the centre, cut out of it,” was called the A.J. Smith cross afer the corps’ commanding general.
17TH CORPS
18TH CORPS
19TH CORPS
20TH CORPS
General Francis Blair wrote of his corps’ arrow, “In its swifness … and its destructive powers … it is … as emblematical of this corps as any design that could be adopted.”
Ofcers in this corps were initially ordered to wear their badge— a cross with equi-foliate arms— on the breast, suspended from a tri-colored ribbon.
In contrast to other corps, the second division of the 19th Corps wore its “fan-leaved cross, with octagonal centre” in blue, the third division in white.
The 11th and 12th Corps consolidated and adopted the latter’s star badge, though some wore a hybrid star-crescent to show their 11th Corps roots.
22ND CORPS
23RD CORPS
24TH CORPS
25TH CORPS
A cinquefoil badge was worn by members of this corps, which served in the defense of Washington, D.C.
The 23rd Corps adopted a shieldtype badge, similar to that worn by the 9th Corps, whose commander, Ambrose Burnside, had ordered the corps’ formation in 1863.
The heart badge, noted the 24th Corps’ commander, “testifes our afectionate regard for all our brave comrades … and our devotion to the sacred cause.”
The commander of this corps— composed almost entirely of black troops—urged his men to make their square badge “immortal” by their conduct in battle.
HANCOCK’S 1ST CORPS VETERANS
SHERIDAN’S C AVA L R Y C O R P S
General Winfeld Scott Hancock lef the 2nd Corps to command this military reserve organization, which adopted a wreath-of-laurel badge.
While General Philip Sheridan’s Cavalry Corps had a badge—goldcrossed sabers on a blue feld—it was not generally worn.
U.S. SIGNAL CORPS
ENGINEER CORPS
The Signal Corps’ key communicative tools—fags and a faming torch— adorned its badge.
A castle badge was worn by the men responsible for building military bridges, forts, and roads.
Badges from the 6th Corps (left) and 12th/20th Corps (opposite page) adorn the uniforms of Union soldiers.
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by jean r . freedman
disunion
Albert Cashier’s Secret in the spring of 1914, a Civil War veteran named Albert Cashier arrived at the Illinois state hospital for the insane with symptoms of advanced dementia. As a young private, Cashier had fought at the siege of Vicksburg, where he and his comrades broke the spine of the Confederacy, and his name was inscribed on the Illinois victory monument there. He had lived out the intervening years in modest circumstances, working as a farmhand, a laborer, and, on occasion, a street lamplighter, one of the many former soldiers whose civilian lives never achieve the glory of their wartime service. He was destined for the same obscurity in death, had it not been for a secret that the state hospital made public: Albert Cashier was actually a woman named Jennie Hodgers. Little is known of Hodgers’ early life; she was born in Ireland and came to the United States while still a young girl. No one knows exactly when or why she began to dress as a boy, but long before the frst shots were fred on Fort Sumter, she had abandoned skirts for trousers. On August 6, 1862, she joined the 95th Illinois Infantry afer a cursory medical examination that required recruits only to show their hands and feet. Though the shortest soldier in her company, she was also one of the bravest. At Vicksburg, she was captured while on a reconnaissance mission, but escaped by attacking a guard, seizing his gun and outrunning her captors till she reached her comrades. On another occasion, when her company’s fag was taken down by enemy fre, she climbed a tree and attached the tattered fag to a high branch while snipers’ bullets soared past her. Jennie—or Albert, as she was called most of her life— was not the only Civil War
soldier who spent much of her time hiding her sex, fnding ways to bathe and dress alone in that least private of environments, the military encampment. Indeed, historians have uncovered accounts of hundreds of women who passed as men to fght, some of whom, like Jennie/Albert, had been passing long before the fghting started. Hodgers’ fellow soldiers recalled her as a modest young man who kept his shirt buttoned to the chin, hiding the place where an Adam’s apple should be. Her comrades teased her because she had no beard, but this was an army of boys as well as men, and she was not the only beardless recruit in her company. She resisted sharing a tent with anyone, but made close friends among her fellow soldiers; with one of them, she briefy owned a business afer the war. Despite her diminutive size, she could “do as much work as anyone in the Company.” Hodgers served in General Nathaniel P.
Banks’ Red River Campaign in the spring of 1864, marching for miles in the Louisiana heat; by December of that year, she was in Nashville, fghting with the Army of the Cumberland in its hard-won victory over John Bell Hood’s forces. Her fnal combat experience came during the siege of Mobile, Alabama, a fght that did not end until afer Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.
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.
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ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY & MUSEUM (2)
By all accounts, Hodgers never avoided danger—indeed, at times she seemed to court it—but despite her frequent participation in combat, she was never wounded severely enough to require medical treatment. A combination of good luck, good health, and skillful soldiering kept Hodgers from the attention of those who might penetrate her disguise. Indeed, Hodgers served an entire three-year enlistment without anyone guessing her sex. “Albert Cashier” mustered out of the service with the rest of her regiment on August 17, 1865, and went back to Illinois. Acting as a man was now an ingrained habit, and it eased the return to civilian life. Hodgers could not read or write, and the jobs available for an illiterate woman would have sunk her into poverty, or even prostitution. But as a man, she could get by as she had in the army, working steadily and honestly, and she made an adequate—if hardly afuent—living as a handyman, a farm laborer, and a janitor, turning her work-worn hands to whatever came her way, supplementing her income with a veteran’s pension. People in the town of Saunemin, where Hodgers eventually settled,
may have wondered why the shy young veteran never married, but no one thought it strange for a man to live alone and make a living at any job he could fnd. It all came crashing down No one knows exactly when or why she began to dress as a boy, but long before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, she had abandoned skirts for trousers.
Jennie Hodgers, as she appeared in 1864 while serving in the 95th Illinois Infantry as Albert Cashier (lef) and in 1913, the year before her secret was discovered.
when Hodgers, elderly and enfeebled, entered the state hospital for the insane. There, once discovered, she was required to abandon the masquerade that had been her lifeline and live in the narrow hallway that early 20th-century America had designed for women. Ofcials at the Illinois state hospital forced her to wear skirts for the frst time in over 50 years; she found the garb restrictive and humiliating and perhaps more dangerous than the sniper fre she had outwitted so many years before. Unused to walking in the long, cumbersome garments deemed appropriate for her sex, she tripped and fell, breaking a hip that never properly healed. Bedridden and depressed, her health continued to decline, and she died on October 11, 1915, less than two years before women gained the right to serve openly—if minimally—in the Armed Forces. By the time of Hodgers’ death, the presence of female
soldiers on both sides of the Civil War was well known and well documented. Their exact number is unknown, because their service had to be clandestine, but the ones whose stories we know ofer a fascinating glimpse of women who pushed against the boundaries of their Victorian confnement at a time when American women could not vote, serve on juries, attend most colleges, or practice most professions, and who, when they married, lost all property rights in most states. Some women were discovered when they were wounded, others when they gave birth, still others when they were taken prisoner. Some women soldiers were discovered only when their bodies were being dressed for burial, and some were discovered years afer the fghting stopped. The female Civil War soldiers were not the frst American women to fght on the battlefeld; Deborah Sampson of Massachusetts served for nearly two years during the Revolution before her sex was discovered in a military hospital. (Afer being honorably discharged, Sampson received a veteran’s pension for her Revolutionary service, which went to her children upon her death.) Nor would they be the last. But their service came at a crucial time—when the foundation of the Republic had shifed to allow an expansion of individual rights, when ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
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s a lv o
in focus
by tktktktktktk
Lincoln’s Final Journey
by bob zeller president , center for civil war photography
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 WWW. CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY.ORG
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
for almost 150 years, this photograph of the funeral procession for President Abraham Lincoln in New York City has remained shrouded behind its bland title, “Scene in front of church.” But what we see here is Lincoln’s hearse, captured in a blur from photographer Mathew Brady’s studio, as it passes the massive Grace Church on Broadway. The New York City procession was one of several tributes across the country as the “funeral train” carrying Lincoln’s body traveled from Washington, D.C., to Illinois. Center for Civil War Photography member Paul Taylor of Columbia, Maryland, came across the image in early January while combing through the thousands of Civil War photographs available online from the National Archives. Afer careful study, he tentatively identifed the blur as Lincoln’s hearse. With further research, he established that the image was taken from Brady’s New York studio and that the procession passed this location on April 25, 1865. Other experts have confrmed Taylor’s fndings. National Archives photo specialists say they cannot remember anyone else ever asking about the image. This image and one taken before the procession are the frst known Brady photographs of the New York funeral and the most detailed ever seen of the solemn-faced mourners, including men removing their hats as the president’s body passes.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY MATHEW BRADY
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NATIONAL ARCHIVES
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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c a s u a lt i e s o f wa r
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Larkin Milton Skaggs AN OVEREAGER GUERRILLA INCURS THE WRATH OF A DEVASTATED TOWN. BY MATTHEW C. HULBERT
n august 21, 1863, hundreds of rumbling hooves broke the forenoon silence in Lawrence, Kansas. The town had been attacked before—sacked in May 1856 by fanatics who destroyed some printing presses and burned down the Free State Hotel. But nothing could have prepared residents for the ferocity of what descended upon them that morning. With William C. Quantrill at their head, more than 300 hardened Missouri guerrillas engulfed the town. For these Confederate raiders, destroying Lawrence made perfect sense. The municipality was an alleged sanctuary for runaway slaves and considered a vanguard in social equality for its black residents. It was also the epicenter of abolitionism in the borderlands and the de facto headquarters of Senator James H. Lane—a man particularly despised in Western Missouri for organizing numerous irregular attacks as a leader of the “jayhawkers,” a militant free-soil group that clashed frequently with the pro-slavery “bushwhackers.” (In fact, the bushwhackers would narrowly miss an opportunity to kill Lane during the raid; he fled in his pajamas to a nearby cornfeld and eluded capture.) Quantrill’s men frst dispatched a small encampment of Union soldiers—and then turned their sights on the local populace. The result was a hellish montage of roaring flames, sufocating smoke, and near-uninterrupted screaming. Homes and storefronts were put to the torch whether their occupants had evacuated or not; women begged desperately, and ofen unsuccessfully, for the lives of their men; and the corpses of those gunned down by guerrillas were lef around town in all manner of peculiar positions and locations. In many cases, men were coaxed from concealment by promises of truce and parlay—only to be felled immediately upon surrendering. Some died in their homes, others in back alleys and barn lofs, more still beneath wagons, under desks, and in underground wells. One man was even shot in the head while his wife lay prostrate over him in the
LARKIN MILTON SKAGGS WHO
One of William C. Quantrill’s band of guerrillas BORN
Kentucky, 1831 DIED
August 21, 1863, at Lawrence, Kansas FACTOID
Skaggs, a Baptist preacher before the war, was the only one of Quantrill’s men to die during the raid on Lawrence.
To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our Notes section on page 78.
vain hope of shielding his body. He died instantly. Quantrill and company slaughtered roughly 200 men and boys in Lawrence and burned large swaths of the town. The emotional damage was incalculable, while the physical likely totaled upward of $2 million. In the process of notching this victory—perhaps the most lopsided of the entire irregular war—Quantrill lost only one man. And even that man, Larkin Milton Skaggs, seems to have almost tried to achieve his anomalous distinction. Skaggs was atypical among Quantrill’s band. He was a former Baptist preacher and had been in Lawrence before, having participated in the pro-slavery assault of 1856. Despite his former devotion to the cloth he was, by virtually all accounts, an unholy terror. One teenager, John Speer, had the misfortune of stumbling across Skaggs, then heavily intoxicated, in the street during the raid. The guerrilla reportedly demanded Speer’s wallet and, upon receiving it, shot him in the stomach before wandering of. According to multiple witnesses, it was Skaggs’ apparent enjoyment of his “work” that proved his undoing. As the raid drew to a close and the rest of the command lef the city en masse, he lingered in Lawrence, bantering with a woman
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about whether he would burn down her house. By then, odds are very good that he was the only guerrilla lef in the town. His drunken carelessness soon turned to panic, and he bolted the scene on a stolen horse, heading east on the Eudora road. Unbeknownst to Skaggs, however, Quantrill had led the others southward. Farmers along the road spotted Skaggs. Still too drunk to load his revolvers, he became easy prey. The Kansans wounded his horse and disarmed Skaggs. What must have been the nowdefenseless guerrilla’s worst fear came to fruition as the men led him back through the smoldering ruins of Lawrence. At the town center, the Kansans ordered Skaggs down from his mount and commanded him to run for his life. Still on horseback, they pursued the rapidly sobering bushwhacker like a game animal. The frst shot fred
Rebel guerrillas raid Lawrence, Kansas, on August 21, 1863. By the time it was over, some 200 of the town’s male residents had been slaughtered and many of its buildings burned.
narrowly missed Skaggs’ head, but set his shirt aflame—then the rest of the group let loose. One eyewitness called the spectacle of powder and flying lead a “regular fusillade.” Multiple slugs cut into Skaggs but he continued in flight for the brush.1 According to the same witness, a Delaware Indian, White Turkey, stepped forward and propelled an arrow through the guerrilla’s abdomen. A second Delaware, Little Beaver, then delivered Skaggs a fatal blow from his “big bufalo rifle.” (Both men likely hailed from a nearby Delaware reservation along the Kansas River, although it’s unknown whether they witnessed the raid or arrived immediately aferward.) Afer commandeering the slain prisoner’s brand new boots—apparently plundered during the raid—Little Beaver took Skaggs’ corpse “by the hair of the head, made a motion pretending to scalp
him, looked back at the crowd a few rods away, and in a gutteral [sic] voice uttered ‘Ugh, ugh’ [in] Indian fashion.” Further abuses to the corpse followed.2 According to one observer, African-American residents of Lawrence subsequently took ultimate possession of the body. They tied a rope around Skaggs’ neck and dragged him through town behind a horse. As the body was paraded through the streets, “a crowd was following pelting the rebel with stones.” An attempt was made to burn what remained of the corpse but this failed. (No one seems to have recorded why the guerrilla’s body wouldn’t burn.) The charred remains of Larkin Skaggs were never buried and, as summer gave way to fall and then winter, the bones sat exposed to the elements. Occasionally, local boys would saw rings from the decaying fngers— ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
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b at t l e f i e l d echoes
I
Losing Focus at Cedar Creek DISTRACTED BY THE SPOILS OF WAR, A REBEL ARMY LETS VICTORY SLIP AWAY. BY CLAY MOUNTCASTLE
t was a resounding victory for General Jubal Early’s Army of the Valley—until it wasn’t. To this day, the Confederates’ performance in the Battle of Cedar Creek, fought on October 19, 1864, stands as an enduring lesson on the failure to solidify battlefeld gains. The summer of 1864 saw the return of fullscale war to the Shenandoah Valley. A short, ill-fated valley campaign led by Union general Franz Sigel ended in defeat at the Battle of New Market on May 15. General David Hunter led the Federals’ next try, and made it as far south as Lynchburg before being turned back by a force of 14,000 Confederates commanded by Early. With Hunter’s army retreating back into the mountains of West Virginia, the Shenandoah was wide open for Early to take the ofensive. He moved forcefully down the valley and into Maryland, scored a victory at the Battle of Monocacy on July 9, and arrived at the outskirts of Washington, D.C. But with a scattered, disorganized force and an imposing Federal defensive line in front of him, Early soon withdrew back across the Potomac into Virginia. The next Union commander to enter the Shenandoah would put Early on his heels. The aggressive Philip H. Sheridan was placed in command of the Army of the Shenandoah and instructed by General Ulysses S. Grant in August to “put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.”1 Surprisingly, however, the intrepid cavalryman took his time, slowly advancing up the valley. It was not until mid-September that Sheridan and Early would engage in battle, frst at Winchester (known as Third Winchester or Opequon) on September 19 and then, three days later, at Fisher’s Hill. Both clashes resulted in signifcant losses for the Confederates, and Early retreated up the valley, leaving it exposed for Sheridan to burn farms and destroy mills, carrying out Grant’s intention of making the
THE BATTLE OF CEDAR CREEK DATE
October 19, 1864 LOCATION
Shenandoah Valley, Virginia RESULT
Union victory COMMANDERS
Jubal Early (CSA, above); Philip Sheridan (USA) QUOTABLE
“But for their bad conduct I should have defeated Sheridan’s whole force.” JUBAL EARLY, ON THE MEN HE COMMANDED AT CEDAR CREEK, IN A LETTER WRITTEN A DAY AFTER THE BATTLE.
To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our Notes section on page 78.
Shenandoah “a barren waste.”2 It certainly appeared that the Confederate operations in the valley were fnished. Jubal Early was not yet done, however. As the Union Army of the Shenandoah lingered in camp near Cedar Creek, 12 miles south of Winchester, the Confederate commander planned to go back on the ofense. Afer darkness fell on October 18, his force of 20,000 hardened and hungry Confederates quietly moved into position. The Rebels attacked at sunrise, sending the stunned Yankees rushing from their tents. The Confederate Second Corps under the command of General John Gordon exploited a weak fank on the Union lef, and drove the Federals back out of their camps in disarray. The rout was on, and for the moment, Confederate fortunes of war took a gigantic leap forward. But as eager as Early’s troops were for victory, they were also famished; Sheridan’s destruction of the valley had taken its toll. Food, munitions, horses, blankets, and more were suddenly all for the taking, and the jubilant Rebels took their time gathering what they could, suddenly disinterested in chasing afer their feeing opponents. Order and discipline gave way to looting and celebrating the rare spoils of war.
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Sheridan, who had spent the previous night in Winchester, awoke to the sound of the distant artillery fre. He immediately mounted his horse and rode to meet the retreating remnants of his army. The scrappy Irishman succeeded in turning around each feeing column he came across, reportedly proclaiming, “Boys, turn back…. I am going to sleep in that camp tonight or in hell!”3 And turn back they did. As one scholar noted, Sheridan’s “magnetism was such that many feeing men abruptly decided to become soldiers again and rejoin an army that was no longer whipped.”4 The re-established Federal army launched a counterattack in the late afernoon, crashing into the ill-prepared Confederates. Afer a short, sharp fght the Rebel force disintegrated, falling back to the south.
In this Kurz & Allison dramatization of the fghting at Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864, Major General Philip Sheridan leads Union cavalry forward in the counterattack that turned the tide of the battle.
Early was defeated, this time for good. As historian James M. McPherson described it, “Within a few hours Sheridan had converted the battle of Cedar Creek from a humiliating defeat into one of the more decisive Union victories of the war.”5 Had Early’s army pressed the fght afer its morning success, it is highly unlikely that Sheridan would have had this chance. Ironically, almost the exact same situation had occurred not far from Cedar Creek two years before. Afer Stonewall Jackson’s Confederates defeated Nathaniel Banks’ Union force at Front Royal on May 23, 1862, Rebel cavalry under the command of Turner Ashby were in hot pursuit of the enemy retreat. When Ashby’s forces encountered Banks’ wagon trains near Newtown, the chase quickly ended and the
cavalrymen “disintegrated into a plundering mob,” according to historian James I. Robertson.6 Upon learning of the delay, Jackson was highly agitated. Fortunately for him, however, Nathaniel Banks was no Philip Sheridan, and the Confederates faced no Federal counterattack that day. The need to consolidate forces and exploit tactical success is a timeless rule on the battlefeld. Whether the example is the British army failing to follow up its initial success at the Battle of Princeton in 1777 or a score of prematurely completed attacks during the Civil War, the message is the same: Don’t quit until the battle is won. Current U.S. Army doctrine dictates that tactical success must be followed up with a pursuit or, at least, efective preparation for a counterattack. What Cedar ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
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For the nearly half million Union and Confederate soldiers wounded during the Civil War, the path to recovery was as uncertain as it was lengthy. From the unsanitary conditions of the feld hospital—where overworked surgeons frequently erred on the side of amputation—to the often
disease-breeding confnes of the general hospital—where blood disease, pneumonia, and gangrene threatened the lives of countless convalescing men—soldiers not killed outright on the battlefeld might easily spend a year navigating the perils of wartime medical treatment before going home. And for those fortunate enough to survive their ordeals, a new challenge awaited: adjusting to life with a broken body. On the following pages, we look at some of their stories.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Broken Soldiers
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CP 1175 (MAXWELL), PHOTOGRAPH OTIS HISTORICAL CREDITARCHIVES, HERE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE; OPPOSITE PAGE: M- 129.0005, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE (PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MAT THEW BREITBART / RELEASED)
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New York soldier William E. Maxwell, whose right leg was amputated in 1864. Opposite page: A “Jewett leg,” an artifcial limb invented by Samuel B. Jewett and meant for use with above-the-knee amputations.
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SAMUEL C. WRIGHT n
Sufered a gunshot wound during the Second Battle of Petersburg on June 17, 1864. The ball, a minie, struck the right orbit, fracturing the bone. Wright was discharged from the hospital six months later, afer making a “good recovery.”
ISRAEL SPOTTS ,
24 / CORPORAL 200TH PENNSYLVANIA INFANTRY
Shot in the upper back on March 25, 1865, at Petersburg. Afer he developed a “harassing cough” and “anxiety of countenance,” doctors operated and removed “six pints of sanious pus” from his chest. Spotts recovered nicely afer the surgery and deserted the hospital on May 28.
Soldiers wounded in battle were frst transported—by litter, ambulance, or wagon—to regimental hospitals set up not far from the action. Though marked by myriad defciencies early in the war, such facilities improved with time as the armies developed professional ambulance corps, moved feld hospitals closer to the battlefeld, and created a system of triage that dramatically improved outcomes. Above: The ambulance corps of the 57th New York Infantry practices its craf. Opposite: Doctors tend to Union wounded at a feld hospital during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862.
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CP 931 ( WRIGHT) AND CP1010 (SPOTTS), OTIS HISTORICAL ARCHIVES, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
21 / SERGEANT 29TH MASSACHUSETTS INFANTRY
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“There on the ground, covered with blankets, are about 200 Union men, and about 500 Rebels, with all concievable kinds of wounds.... [Y]ou will hear plaintive cries, deep groans, and from scores of lips, ‘Lord, have mercy on me.’”
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
UNION CHAPLAIN HALLOCK ARMSTRONG, IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, MARCH 26, 1865
33 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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Shot in the leg at Petersburg, Virginia, on March 31, 1865. The wound became gangrenous on May 10, while Dixon was still in the hospital, but treatment was successful. At last report, he was “doing well.”
CP 1032 ( WILBUR) AND CP 910 (DIXON), OTIS HISTORICAL ARCHIVES, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE
JOHN A. DIXON n
32 / SERGEANT 116TH PENNSYLVANIA INFANTRY
STEPHEN D. WILBUR n
22 / PRIVATE 109TH NEW YORK INFANTRY
Sufered a gunshot wound to the right forearm during the fghting at Petersburg, Virginia, on April 2, 1865. The forearm was amputated on the feld by a circular incision. Gangrene set in shortly thereafer, but treatment produced “favorable” results.
“THERE WERE DREADFUL SIGHTS AT THE SURGEON’S STRANGE TO SEE A LEG WITH ITS STOCKING LYING ON MASSACHUSETTS SOLDIER HENRY WARREN HOWE, NOVEMBER 6, 1863
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CP 980 (JENKINS) AND CP 1563 (SURGERY ON TABLE), OTIS HISTORICAL ARCHIVES, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
ROBERT JENKINS n
20 / PRIVATE 6TH NEW YORK INFANTRY
Shot in the face at Petersburg, Virginia, on March 25, 1865, the ball entering the side of the nose and exiting the opposite cheek. The injury was treated with a “simple dressing.”
By 21st-century standards, Civil War surgery was primitive. Impediments included insufcient equipment, poor lighting, unsanitary conditions, and a lack of staf. As the war progressed, however, surgeons gained experience and developed more skilled approaches to abdominal, chest, eye, plastic, and orthopedic surgery, as well as surgery for head wounds, which resulted in an improvement in survival rates. By war’s end, Civil War surgeons had performed roughly 60,000 amputations, with an overall survival rate of 75%. Above: A Union surgeon readies to perform an amputation for the camera. Lef: A surgeon demonstrates an operation in the feld.
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ON’S BENCH. I SAW THEM CUTTING OFF LIMBS. IT LOOKS G ON THE GRASS.”
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“To the parents of many I have made a solemn vow that their sons shall be properly cared for in times of trouble.”
JUDSON SPOFFORD n
19 / PRIVATE 10TH VERMONT INFANTRY
JOSEPH BRIGGS n
41 / PRIVATE 8TH PENNSYLVANIA INFANTRY
Accidentally shot in the lef hand on March 15, 1865, the ball entering the palm and exiting the back of the hand. Use of his middle fnger was “much impaired” as a result; several pieces of loose bone were removed, and the wound subsequently healed “entirely.”
Sufered a gunshot fesh wound to the chest at Fort Fisher, Virginia, on March 25, 1865. The ball entered about two inches from the right nipple and passed “transversly through integuments,” exiting one and a half inches from the lef nipple. On April 20, Spoford had recovered sufciently to be transferred to a hospital in his home state, Vermont.
CP 916 (BRIGGS) AND CP 953 (SPOFFORD), OTIS HISTORICAL ARCHIVES, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
UNION SURGEON ALFRED LEWIS CASTLEMAN, MARCH 6, 1862
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Soldiers who survived their initial surgeries were sent to recover at general hospitals, which were farther from the war zone but sufered from overcrowding and limited resources. As the war progressed, both sides increased the number, quality, and size of such facilities. In Washington, D.C., one of the chief medical centers for the Union, the only military hospital at the start of the confict was a six-room brick structure used for smallpox patients; by war’s end, the city boasted roughly 16 convalescent centers and 28 hospitals, including Lincoln Hospital, which as the North’s largest hospital cared for more than 50,000 men during the confict. Lef: Dr. Reed Bontecou, chief of Washington’s 3,000-bed Harewood Hospital (pictured opposite page), whose comprehensive photographic records of his patients included the images of wounded soldiers on the previous pages. Above: Physicians stand by their patient, Corporal Calvin Bates, a former prisoner at Andersonville whose feet “decayed” due to “exposure,” necessitating their amputation.
COURTESY RONALD S. CODDINGTON (BONTECOU); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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“O the sad, sad things I see—the noble young men with legs and arms taken off—the deaths— the sick weakness, sicker than death, that some endure, after amputations.”
BRAZER WILSEY n
30 / SERGEANT 4TH NEW YORK INFANTRY
Shot in the lef shoulder on April 2, 1865, at Petersburg, Virginia. The bullet fractured the head of the humerus. The same day, a feld surgeon operated, removing “about four inches of shaf.” At last report three months later, Wilsey had “progressed favorably.”
WILLIAM H. DOUGHERTY n
23 / PRIVATE 6TH WEST VIRGINIA CAVALRY
Shot over the lef parietal bone on May 17, 1865, by a member of a military patrol in Washington, D.C. (the exact circumstances are unclear). He was removed to Harewood Hospital, where he remained in a “comatose condition”—unable to articulate a single word—for a week before beginning to revive. The wound was kept open and treated by simple dressings. By the end of June, Dougherty had “so far recovered as to be on duty in the Hospital.”
HIRAM WILLIAMS ,
23 / PRIVATE 198TH PENNSYLVANIA INFANTRY
Wounded by an artillery shell during the fghting at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. Surgeons amputated the lower third of Williams’ leg by circular incision and performed a “Heyes’ operation” of his right foot “at [the] junction of the tarsal and metatarsal bones.” By September, Williams was doing “very well,” had “considerable” use of his right foot, and was awaiting an artifcial limb and discharge from the army.
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CP 933 (DOUGHERTY ) AND CP 1020 ( WILSEY ), OTIS HISTORICAL ARCHIVES, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
WALT WHITMAN, MAY 26, 1863
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT CP 1101HERE ( WILLIAMS), OTIS HISTORICAL ARCHIVES, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE
Given that roughly 45,000 amputees survived the war, the demand for artifcial limbs was considerable in the years following the confict. While some made do with rudimentary devices, or managed without them, many disabled veterans benefted from government programs established to provide artifcial limbs (like those pictured below) to ex-soldiers at little or no cost. Others relied on the generosity of family or benefactors to help pay for prosthetics.
SAMUEL H. DECKER %
AGE UNKNOWN / PRIVATE 4TH U.S. ARTILLERY
Accidentally hit when his gun prematurely fred while he was ramming it during the Battle of Perryville, Kentucky, on October 8, 1862. The blast blew of the lower parts of both of Decker’s forearms and badly burned his face and chest. Field surgeons removed more of both forearms. Decker was discharged from the service the following month. Two years later, with his wounds fully healed, he began experimenting with creating artifcial limbs, producing in March 1865 the apparatus shown in this photograph, which allowed him to write legibly, pick up objects as small as a pin, feed and clothe himself, and on several occasions prove himself “a formidable police ofcer” in the congressional gallery in his postwar position as doorkeeper at the House of Representatives.
C.H. BOWEN %
AGE UNKNOWN / PRIVATE 27TH INDIANA INFANTRY
Shot by a musket ball that fractured his lef femur at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. Bowen was released afer a year’s hospitalization, during which surgeons operated twice to remove necrosed bone, discharged from the service, and employed by the Interior Department. A recurrence of abscesses led to his re-hospitalization in the fall of 1867; shortly afer, surgeons removed his leg. The wound healed well. Two months afer the operation, staf at the Army Medical Museum took this photograph of Bowen, who posed alongside his battle-scarred femur.
SP 229B (BOWEN) AND SP 205 (DECKER), M-129.00032 AND M-129.00059 (PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS BY MATTHEW BREITBART / RELEASED), NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE; OPPOSITE PAGE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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“[T]HERE ARE FEW OF US WHO HAVE NOT A CRIPPLE AMONG OUR FRIENDS, IF NOT IN OUR OWN FAMILIES. A MECHANICAL ART WHICH PROVIDED FOR AN OCCASIONAL AND EXCEPTIONAL WANT HAS BECOME A GREAT AND ACTIVE BRANCH OF INDUSTRY. WAR UNMAKES LEGS, AND HUMAN SKILL MUST SUPPLY THEIR PLACES AS IT BEST MAY.”
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR., 1863
41 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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COLUMBUS G. RUSH %,
AGE UNKNOWN / PRIVATE 21ST GEORGIA INFANTRY
CP 1216 (LEFT) AND SP 133 (RIGHT), OTIS HISTORICAL ARCHIVES, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE
Wounded by a shell fragment during the Confederate attack on Fort Steadman at Petersburg, Virginia, on March 25, 1865. The shell “laid open the right knee-joint” and “shattered the upper third of the lef tibia.” Taken prisoner, Rush was soon operated on by Union surgeons, who removed both of his legs at the thigh. He spent the summer at Lincoln Hospital in Washington, D.C., (where the photo at lef was taken) before being sent to St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, where on February 22, 1866, he was furnished with artifcial limbs (pictured right), which enabled him to walk with the aid of two canes. Soon thereafer, Rush returned home to Atlanta, Georgia.
42
SOURCES: LETTERS FROM A PENNSYLVANIA CHAPLAIN AT THE SIEGE OF PETERSBURG (1961); PASSAGES FROM THE LIFE OF HENRY WARREN HOWE (1899); THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, BEHIND THE SCENES … (1863); THE WOUND DRESSER (1898); OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, “THE HUMAN WHEEL, ITS SPOKES AND FELLOES” (1863); BELL WILEY, THE LIFE OF BILLY YANK (1952); JAMES I. ROBERTSON JR., SOLDIERS BLUE AND GRAY (1989); GUY R. HASEGAWA, MENDING BROKEN SOLDIERS (2012); ALFRED JAY BOLLET, CIVIL WAR MEDICINE (2002). WITH GREAT THANKS TO ERIC BOYLE, ALAN HAWK, AND MATTHEW BREITBART OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE FOR THEIR ASSISTANCE.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
43 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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Ten Miles from Richmond AT THE TINY CROSSROADS TOWN OF COLD HARBOR, ULYSSES S. GRANT HOPED TO CRUSH ROBERT E. LEE’S ARMY AND HASTEN THE WAR’S END. WHAT HAPPENED INSTEAD WOULD BECOME ONE OF HIS GREATEST REGRETS.
Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant (seated fourth from left) and staf pose in front of his headquarters tent at Cold Harbor, Virginia, in June 1864.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
By Allen C. Guelzo
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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By late May 1864, the Army of the Potomac resembled a wagon with the wheels coming of. Since May 4, when the army had crossed the Rapidan River and begun what would become known as the Overland Campaign, it had faced an incessant strain of day-afer-day combat—in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania Court House, at the North Anna River, and in a dozen smaller brushfres in between. The relentless pace had brought the Army of the Potomac to what its commanding general, Major General George Gordon Meade, believed was the end of its tether. “I don’t believe the military history of the world can ofer a parallel to the protracted and severe fghting which this army has sustained for the last thirty days,” Meade complained, and he feared that “with all this severe fghting … the physical powers of the men would be exhausted.” But Meade had little choice but to slog onward. Although he was still, by title, in charge of the army, he was taking direction from Lieutenant General Ulysses Simpson Grant, the overall general of all Union armies, and Grant was determined “to fght it out on this line,” from the Rapidan to the Confederate capital of Richmond, “if it takes all summer.”1 So far, it looked like it would take far beyond summer. Over the course of May’s campaigning, the Army of the Potomac had lost a stomach-sinking total of 40,000 men out of action. And it would soon lose more without fring a shot, as 34 of the army’s three-year regiments were due to see their enlistments expire in June. Historian John Codman Ropes estimated that “exclusive of worthless bounty-jumpers and such trash,” Grant had “only about 65,000 veteran infantry in the three corps,” an advantage of less than 10,000 over his Confederate foe Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.2 To make up the shortfall, Grant raided the District of Columbia’s garrison for another 33,000 men—although half of them were in huge heavy-artillery regiments and had never done anything more in the way of war than guard the intricate string of Washington’s fortifcations and pose heroically for photographers. On the other hand, the Army of Northern Virginia had also been severely ground down. James Longstreet, commander of the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia and Lee’s “old war-horse,” had been wounded by mistaken Confederate bullets in the Wilderness; Richard Ewell, another corps commander, had sufered a near-complete breakdown at Spotsylvania.3 Lee found replacements—Richard Heron Anderson for Longstreet and Jubal Early for Ewell—but neither Anderson nor Early would ever shine as great subordinates. And, like Grant, Lee would fll the gaps in the ranks only by stripping elsewhere, including the Richmond defenses of Robert F. Hoke’s division and the Shenandoah Valley of John C. Breckinridge’s division, and recalling the division commanded by the unreliable George Pickett from semi-exile in North Carolina. Above all, Lee could not repair the damage a month’s savage fghting had done to the northern Virginia countryside,
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which he would need to feed his army. “There are no crops worth speaking of,” reported one Yankee colonel. “The country is one vast graveyard—graves everywhere, marking the track of the army on the march and in battles.”4 From a strictly military point of view, Grant’s great-
est frustration on this campaign had been geography. The rivers of northern Virginia—the Rapidan, North Anna, and Pamunkey—ran west-east, and Lee attempted to make the most of their obstacles. Bitter fghting had taken place along all these rivers in May, and even if Grant could get across the Pamunkey without another costly fght, he would face Totopotomy Creek and then the Chickahominy River. But surprisingly, the movements across the Pamunkey and the Totopotomy proved the easiest of the entire campaign. On May 27, the Army of the Potomac crossed the Pamunkey with two divisions of Phil Sheridan’s cavalry and the VI Corps (under Horatio Wright) at Dabney’s Ferry.5 Winfeld Hancock’s II Corps followed the VI, while the army’s remaining two infantry corps, Gouverneur K. Warren’s V Corps and Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps, crossed farther downstream at Newcastle Ferry. Grant also detached the XVIII Corps under William Farrar “Baldy” Smith from the stalled Union expedition on Bermuda Hundred, and brought them up to the York River, where they could disembark and extend the Union reach still farther, to the Totopotomy. Lee’s response to this threat was curiously sluggish, and Grant took this as a sign that the long month of campaigning was fnally wearing down the Army of Virginia. Despite the horrendous Union casualties, Grant convinced himself that “Lee’s army is really whipped.… I may be mistaken, but I feel that our success over Lee’s army is already assured.”6 On May 30, Grant extended the frst elements of the Army of the Potomac over the Totopotomy, beginning with Warren’s V Corps and a division of Sheridan’s cavalry, pushing all the way down to the crossroads of Old Cold Harbor, only a mile and a half above the Chickahominy and less than 10 miles from Richmond.
Union soldiers forage through a potato feld along the banks of the Pamunkey as elements of the VI Corps cross the river on a pontoon bridge during the Army of the Potomac’s southward move in late May 1864.
the etymology of the odd name Cold Harbor has long been a puzzlement, since the village was neither a harbor nor, in the chalky-dry summer of 1864, anything like cold. But the name’s genealogy stretches back to Roman Britain, where a col herbergh was an unfortifed guard post along the Roman-built roads. John Stow’s celebrated survey of the cities of London and Westminster names the Lord Mayor’s mansion as “Cold Harbour,” and it was not difcult for Shropshire antiquarian Charles Henry Hartshorne to fnd over 70 Cold Harbors in northern England alone in 1841.7 Whatever the romantic origins of its name, the Cold Harbor in the Army of the Potomac’s path consisted of little more than a tavern, a collection of buildings, and a crossroads. Seizing and holding the area would force Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia into a fast shufe, giving Grant the opportunity to knock the Confederates apart with an attack. Grant could, in that case, “crush Lee’s army on the north side of the James, with the prospect in case of success of driving him into Richmond, capturing the city perhaps without a siege, and putting the Confederate government to fight.” Politics contributed another behind-the-scenes motive. The Republican National Convention was due to assemble in Baltimore on June 7 to renominate Abraham Lincoln for the presidency. If Grant could deliver a signifcant victory on the eve of the conven-
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Delays in the attack of the Union VI and XVIII Corps on June 1 allowed Confederate troops at Cold Harbor to erect hasty, but efective, breastworks. below: XVIII Corps commander William F. Smith (seated) and his staf in June 1864. above: Part of the Rebel defenses at Cold Harbor.
“about 3 p.m., afer a march of more than twentyfve miles.”10 Nevertheless, Wright and Smith had preemptory orders from Meade to move to the attack. “General Wright is ordered to attack as soon as his troops are up,” Meade wrote to Smith at noon, “and I desire you should co-operate with him and join in the attack.” Just by the numbers, Wright and Smith should have been more than sufcient for the task; together, they could mass six divisions—between 25,000 and 30,000 men—and even though it took another three hours to get “into position a little to the west of the old tavern, at Cold Harbor Cross Roads,” by 6 p.m., the two Federal corps “were formed in four lines of battle, by regiments,” and ready to advance to the attack.11 But the delay gave the Confederates time to entrench, a recurring course of events on the campaign, and one that usually had fatal consequences for Federal attackers. Hoke’s division, with its four brigades, had been joined by Breckinridge, and then by Joseph B. Kershaw’s division (from Anderson’s corps) and Harry Heth’s division (from A.P. Hill’s corps), and together they had dug themselves into defenses along a string of hills and ridges perpendicular to Cold Harbor Road, just west of the crossroads. The entrenchments were something less than a marvel of engineering. The terrain was cut sharply by ravines, gullies, and streams, and Thomas Clingman (whose North Carolina brigade held the frst section of the line stretching northward from Cold Harbor Road) was bothered by a gap “of about seventy-fve yards” made by a stream that ran between his lef fank and the next Confederate brigade, William T. Woford’s, in Kershaw’s division. There was at least enough time to create an abatis of cut pine trees, “interlocking with each other and barring all farther advance.” That would have to do.12 Sometime before 6 p.m., with “the sun … less than an hour high,” both Wright’s and Smith’s corps “almost simultaneously” advanced “to the To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our Notes section on page 78.
PREVIOUS SPREAD: FRANCIS T. MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR ; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
tion, it would enhance Lincoln’s nomination and silence Radical Republican dissidents, who were already assembling their own rival convention in Cleveland to nominate John C. Fremont.8 At frst, this was exactly how the scene promised to play. Two Union cavalry divisions arrived at the Cold Harbor crossroads on May 31, clearing out a “slight force of [Confederate] cavalry.” Alarmed, Lee at once tried to recover the crossroads by dispatching an entire division of Confederate cavalry under Fitzhugh Lee and diverting Robert Hoke’s newly arrived infantry division; Richard Heron Anderson’s corps would follow as fast as they could march. But neither Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry nor the frst infantry brigades to get on the ground—Lawrence Keitt’s South Carolina brigade and Thomas Lanier Clingman’s North Carolinians—were able to dislodge Federal troopers armed with repeating carbines.9 Now began a race to get infantry to Cold Harbor, and Grant looked to be in the lead. Horatio Wright’s VI Corps was already in motion afer midnight on May 31, and William F. Smith’s XVIII Corps had just debarked from its transports and moved down to the Totopotomy, with orders from Grant to push on to Cold Harbor. Sliding down behind them, the II Corps and V Corps would link up with the VI Corps and XVIII Corps and form a protective, west-facing shield a half-mile west of the Cold Harbor crossroads. Wright and the advance guard of the VI Corps arrived at Cold Harbor on June 1 to the delirious cheers of the Yankee cavalry and a band “out on the skirmish line playing ‘Hail Columbia.’” The problem was that this arrival did not occur until 9 a.m. Charles Dana, the assistant secretary of war, was traveling with the army, and coldly noted Wright’s lack of energy. “Instead of having his advance there at 9 a. m.,” Dana tattled furiously to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, “it was General Grant’s and Meade’s design that his whole corps should be on the ground at daylight, when a rapid attack in mass would certainly have routed the rebel forces.” Worse still, it was not until noon that the bulk of the VI Corps was fully in place, “getting into line of battle and digging rife pits all along the line” west of Cold Harbor. Baldy Smith and the XVIII Corps had been given wrong directions by a staf ofcer, and didn’t appear until
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THE BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR
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COLD HARBOR, VIRGINIA
J U N E 1 –3 , 1 8 6 4
Determined to defeat Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and take Richmond, Ulysses S. Grant advanced the Army of the Potomac southward in May 1864, looking for a fght. After clashing with Lee in a series of bloody but indecisive battles, including at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House, Grant launched another attack at Cold Harbor, a tiny crossroads town less than 10 miles from the Confederate capital. On June 1, Union forces repeatedly assaulted Lee’s outnumbered but wellentrenched Confederates, but to no avail. The same result awaited the Union troops who renewed the attack two days later. By the time Grant fnally called a halt to the operations on June 3, over 13,000 of his men were dead, wounded, or missing. Grant would later admit he regretted the assault at Cold Harbor “more than any one I have ever ordered.” Cold
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charge, a dash by more than 25,000 men.” Smith’s XVIII Corps went into the attack “in battalions in column closed in mass,” trying to spear their way through the Confederate defenses. A soldier in the 25th Massachusetts Infantry saw that “they had entered the opening of a valley shaped like a horse-shoe, and that the land rose in front and on either fank, covered with wood and brush, so that” even in their hastily contrived “line of rife-pits and a low breastwork of logs and rails,” the Confederate fre was too heavy to stand. Once they had overrun the outer skirmish line, the men of the XVIII Corps “were at the mercy of a concealed enemy,” and began to fall back.”13 In front of the VI Corps, the going was even tougher. One of David Russell’s brigades, commanded by the newly promoted Emory Upton, had been reinforced by the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, one of the units Grant had fshed from the Washington fortifcations. The unbloodied “heavies” counted an unwieldy 1,800 men in line (heavy artillery regiments had to maintain both an artillery and an infantry component), and they were more than twice as big as the entire rest of Upton’s brigade (the 5th Maine, 95th and 96th Pennsylvania, and Upton’s own 121st New York). In their unfaded uniforms, brass shoulder scales, and red-piped jackets, they endured endless jibes as “fresh duck” and “pets of the War Department.” Cold Harbor ofered them their frst opportunity to
prove themselves.14 Emory Upton was only too happy to oblige. He formed up his brigade in four lines: three battalions of the 2nd Connecticut (with four companies in each battalion line) and the rest of the brigade in the fourth line. Their colonel, Elisha Kellogg, led from in front, wearing a straw hat and aiming directly at Thomas Clingman’s North Carolina brigade, 400 yards away. They brushed through the outlying Confederate skirmish line, crossed an open feld, then spilled down into a ravine and up the far side, where Clingman’s main line was waiting for them. “A sheet of fame, sudden as lightning, red as blood, and so near it seemed to singe the men’s faces, burst along the rebel breastworks,” wrote the adjutant of the 2nd Connecticut, Thomas Vaill. “The air was flled with sulphurous smoke, and the shrieks and howls of almost two hundred and ffy mangled men, rose above the yells of the triumphant rebels.” In the rear rank of the Union attack, a soldier in the 121st New York could see the Connecticut “heavies” collapse “in all shapes. Some
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Men of Brigadier General James Ricketts’ VI Corps division advance to assault an entrenched Confederate position during the fghting of June 1. The attack, which pierced the Rebel line, was one of the day’s few successes for Union forces.
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Yet the June 1 attack was not entirely unsuccessful. Although Upton’s brigade was stalled and pinned down, it did not retreat. And just as Thomas Clingman had feared, when James Ricketts’ VI Corps division hit the gap between Clingman’s line and Kershaw’s division, one of Ricketts’ brigades broke through, finging William Woford’s Georgia brigade backward in panic. The brigade “carried the works in its front and captured several hundred prisoners, who were taken to the rear,” then “notwithstanding the difculties encountered in a dense thicket and swamp,” they forced both Hoke’s and Kershaw’s divisions to abandon their entrenchments and pull back a quarter-mile to a new line.17
would fall forward as if they had caught their feet and tripped and fell. Others would throw up their arms and fall backward. Others would stagger about a few paces before they dropped.”15 Kellogg was still on his feet, and close enough that Clingman noticed him and locked eyes for a moment even as he gave the order to fre. Kellogg took of his hat to cheer his men on, but Clingman’s fre “knocked down the front ranks of the column, while the oblique fre along the right and lef cut down men rapidly all along the column towards the rear.” Kellogg was shot in the arm, and struggled to give the order to about-face when he was hit in the head and fell dead “upon the interlocking pine boughs” of the abatis. The slaughter was so unnerving that Emory Upton, whose horse had been shot from under him, actually stopped the second battalion of the “heavies” from going in and ordered them to lie down, then recruited a squad of marksmen to join him in picking of Confederate heads above the breastworks in order to dampen the Rebels’ enthusiasm for more fring.16
the coming of darkness gave Lee space to move more of Anderson’s and A.P. Hill’s brigades down to the hastily redrawn Cold Harbor defenses. He could be grateful that on June 2, the weather, which had been sand-dry through May, suddenly clouded over and brought on a “deluge of rain.” Meade and Grant had seen just enough success so far that (as they had done at Spotsylvania) they decided to try another attack, this time adding Warren’s V Corps and Hancock’s II Corps to make the blow at Cold Harbor an overwhelming one. Grant’s intention, Horace Porter recalled, “was to attack early in the morning … push it vigorously, and if necessary pile in troops at the successful point from wherever they can be taken.” But getting Hancock’s corps to Cold Harbor proved no easier than getting Wright and the VI Corps there the day before. Hancock denounced it as “the most severe march of the campaign, marching ten and one-half hours until June 2.” The head of the old Irish Brigade only “reached Cold Harbor at 6.30 a.m.,” and even then was “in such an exhausted condition that a little time was required to allow the men to collect and to cook their rations.” Reluctantly, Grant delayed any fresh attack until 4 p.m. Then down came the “tempest of wind and rain.” Hancock “was so earnest in opposition to” the idea of an assault “that Meade countermanded the order,” and set the attack back to 4:30 a.m. on June 3.18 As Hancock and Warren arrived, Grant positioned Hancock’s corps on the lef of the VI Corps, below Cold Harbor Road; Lee promptly matched that by bringing up the balance of A.P. Hill’s corps, along with Breckinridge’s division. He lined them up opposite Hancock and set them to digging. All the Rebels needed was time, and Hancock’s tardiness and the afernoon downpour granted it. “Both sides anticipated battle on the 3rd,” wrote Confederate artilleryman Robert Stiles. But since the Confederates intended to fght this battle on the defensive, they “set to work to rectify the lines about this point.” One of Anderson’s brigadiers, Evander McIvor Law, actually “laid of the new line with his own hand and superintended the construction of it during the night of the 2d.”19 The rest of the Army of the Potomac knew how to read these signs. As Horace Porter wandered along the lines, observing the “preparations for the next morning’s assault, I noticed that many of the soldiers had taken of their coats and seemed to be engaged in sewing up rents in them.” At frst, he thought this was a charming but puzzling efort to look one’s best in a fght. “But upon closer examination it was found that the men were calmly writing their names and address on slips of paper, and pinning them on the backs of their coats, so that their dead bodies might be recognized upon the feld, and their fate made known to their families at home. They were veterans who knew well from terrible experience the danger which awaited them….”20
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At 4:30 the next morning, a single signal shot was
fred from the 10th Massachusetts battery. The frst light was “cloudy and foggy,” and the rain was “still pattering in ftful showers.” In the “blinding mist,” Union ofcers could barely discern on the south side of the road an “intrenched line of the enemy … on a low hill that was quite long, ending … on the Chickahominy swamps, making it quite impossible to turn the position without crossing the river.” Against this ground, Grant proposed to throw all three divisions of Hancock’s II Corps, storming against the Confederate entrenchments south of Cold Harbor Road; north of it, Wright and Baldy Smith would renew the attacks the VI and XVIII Corps had made two days before. “The tactical movement was very simple,” wrote Charles Porter of the 39th Massachusetts. “Each corps commander was to form his corps as he might determine, a grand rush was to be made, and great were the hopes that success would crown our arms.”21 Hancock formed his corps with the divisions of Francis Barlow and John Gibbon in front, and David Birney’s division in reserve, ready to exploit any opening. Barlow, in turn, formed his four brigades into two waves, and as the Federal artillery erupted with a barrage “heavy and incessant” enough to awaken Richmonders “from their slumbers,” his two lead brigades sprang forward, headed for the trenches held by John Breckinridge’s small division. Double-quicking, and “without fring a shot,” Barlow’s men overran the Confederate picket line, crossed over a sunken road at the
base of the long hill occupied by the Rebels, “and swept into the enemy’s lines, capturing prisoners and three pieces of artillery.” There were no “artifcial obstructions, such as abatis or ‘slashings,’ to detain an assaulting column,” and the 7th New York Heavy Artillery, in John Brooke’s brigade, snatched the regimental fag of Breckinridge’s 26th Virginia Battalion.22 But the going was less easy farther northward. In John Gibbon’s division, the 155th New York made a rapid advance to “within 50 yards of the enemy’s works.” But the hill was steeper here, and the “sunken road” in the ravine deeper, and in the face of “the heavy fre from the enemy’s breastworks, it was impossible for the regiment to gain the works.” Afer 30 minutes of pointless punishment, the New Yorkers began inching backward, until, “at about 150 yards from the enemy’s line the regiment halted and established a new line … by using fence rails and throwing up earth with bayonets and tin cups.” Soon enough, even Barlow’s headlong attack lost its momentum. The 116th Pennsylvania “succeeded in gaining the main works of the enemy … but they were soon forced out by the heavily reinforced Con-
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
While showing initial promise in places, the attack by the Army of the Potomac’s II Corps on June 3 ended in disappointment. above: II Corps commander Winfeld Scott Hancock (seated) is shown with his division commanders (from lef to right): Francis Barlow, David Birney, and John Gibbon. opposite page: Men of the 7th New York Heavy Artillery break through the Confederate lines on June 3 before being pushed back by a counterattack.
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federates.” They “fell back … about seventy-fve yards from the enemy’s line and quickly covered themselves with rife pits or took advantage of such shelter as the broken ground aforded.”23 Eventually, Barlow’s men, too, began to wilt under Confederate counterattacks, clambering out of “the captured works” and feeing “wildly for the protection of ... the Union guns.” In all, “twenty minutes had not passed since the infantry had sprung to their feet,” and now the “dazed and utterly discouraged” survivors “drifed of … and found their regiments, but some of them drifed to the rear and to cofee pots.”24 Still, the failure of Hancock’s attack was less dismal than the result that awaited Wright and Smith on the north side of Cold Harbor Road. “About sunrise here they came,” wrote William McClendon of the 15th Alabama, “charging through the pine thicket, huzzaing as they came, expecting to run over and capture all that were in the breast-works.” Smith’s XVIII Corps jumped to their attack in close column, “ten lines deep, with arms at a trail,” and so closely packed that “it was hardly possible for a ball to pass through without hitting some one.… I never in all the bloody conficts that I have been in saw such destruction of human lives. They literally piled on top of one another, ofen the dead would hold down the wounded and vice versa.” Grifn Stedman’s brigade was stacked in column of regiments, with the 12th New Hampshire frst, then the 11th Connecticut, 8th Maine, and 2nd New Hampshire. The 12th took the brunt of the fre, the men (according to Sergeant John L. Piper) bending over “as they pushed forward, as if trying … to breast a tempest, and the fles of men went down like rows of blocks or bricks pushed over by striking against one another.” Another sergeant, Jacob Tuttle, saw so many of his men drop to the ground at once that he thought he had missed an order to lie down. He was wrong. Most of his company had been killed outright, and he “dropped … among the dead, and did not discover my mistake until my living comrades had advanced some distance beyond me.”25 The Confederates who opposed them could
scarcely believe the easy targets the Yankee attackers ofered. “The excitement ran so high … that the surgeon of the regiment quit his litter corps and was in the line fring before I discovered him,” marveled one Confederate, while “the ofcers, with hats in hands, went up and down the line, feeling so much elated that they would strike the men over the heads and faces and shout with all the joy ever expressed at a camp-meeting by a new convert.” The Alabama brigadier, McIvor Law, “found the men in fne spirits, laughing and talking as they fred.… I had seen nothing to exceed this. It was not war; it was murder.” Or even worse, massacre. William Oates, commanding the 15th Alabama in Law’s brigade, saw the 25th Massachusetts barreling toward him “in a column by divisions, thus presenting a front of two companies only.” The Alabamians opened up “the most destructive fre I ever saw.... I could see the dust fog out of a man’s clothing in two or three places at once where as many balls would strike him at the same moment. In two minutes not a man of them was standing.26 At some point, the havoc ceased to make sense even to the Confederates who were wreaking it. In front of Law’s Alabama brigade, a Union regiment had been “so roughly handled” that most of its survivors had fallen back without orders—except their color sergeant who, oblivious of his abandonment, “steadily advanced, solitary and alone, proudly bearing his fag.” Not even Law’s hardnosed veterans could stand shooting the man, and instead began waving their arms and yelling, “Go back! Go back! We’ll kill you!” When his peril fnally dawned on him, the Yankee sergeant stopped, lifed his fag from its socket, and looked anxiously and deliberately “frst to the right rear, and then his lef rear.” Then “with the same moderation gathered in the fag, right-shoulder-shifed his charge, came to and about-faced as deliberately, and walked back amid the cheers of Law’s men.”27 The mood was less generous among the battered survivors of the VI and XVIII Corps. Orders “to renew the attack without reference to the troops on the right or lef” were issued, conveyed, and passed down “through the wonted channels; but no man stirred, and the immobile lines pronounced a verdict, silent yet emphatic, against further slaughter.” In Stedman’s brigade, one captain “stood up before his superiors in rank” and “declared with an oath that he would not take his regiment into another such charge, if Jesus Christ himself should order it.” Baldy Smith was more succinct: “I received a verbal order from General Meade to make another assault, and that order I refused to obey.”28 The attacks on the morning of June 3 lasted barely an
hour. All operations had practically halted by 11 a.m., and at 12:30 p.m., Grant advised Meade that “The opinion of the corps commanders not being sanguine of success in case an assault is ordered, you may direct a suspension of farther advanced for the present.” There was desultory fghting farther northward at Bethesda Church, and in the evening, A.P. Hill’s Confederates attempted a short-lived counterattack below Cold Harbor Road to clear what small advances the Yankees had made there in the morning. But Federal artillery vengefully “opened with shell, case, and solid shot,” leaving “the rebel line back broken and shattered” and “leaving their dead and part of their wounded on the feld.”29 This was small consolation to Grant, who had hoped to deliver a fatal military blow to the Army of Northern Vir☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
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To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our Notes section on page 78.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Union gunners fre upon Kennesaw Mountain during the fghting of June 27, 1864.
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William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 campaign against Atlanta was one of speed and maneuver—with one bloody exception. On June 27, the Union general launched his army against Confederates entrenched on Kennesaw Mountain. On a rise known later as Cheatham Hill, the fghting was particularly ferce, searing the memories of survivors and earning that patch of land a haunting name: The Dead Angle. by patrick brennan
A of
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
on
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graying veteran and his wife clambered out of the rented buggy and peered at the hardscrabble Georgia ground. The driver, a former slave from nearby Marietta, asked if he recognized the place. The Ohioan reckoned he did. He had traversed it under fre almost 33 years before, and today, under circumstances far more benign, he would cover it again. ¶ He ambled over the surviving Federal defenses and descended through the underbrush into a modest vale bisected by a meandering creek. He climbed east out of the low ground and approached the peaceful contours of what was now called Cheatham Hill. A massive line of Confederate trenches and earthworks crowned the ridge and ran in both directions as far as he could see. Lowered and rounded by three decades of Georgia weather, the red and yellow mixture of upturned dirt and clay—strangely free of grass cover— made the escarpment distinct and unavoidable. ¶ The Yankee worked his way a little south to a 90-degree bend in the former Rebel line, then climbed down the hill. At the base, he found vestiges of Federal trenches built afer the assault he and his comrades had made on the hill went to ground. At one point, only a few dozen feet separated the opponents’ works. “Almost untouched,” he thought, as though the two armies had only recently marched away. ¶ His attention shifed to another battlefeld remnant. Nearby stood a grubby oak, perhaps 20 feet high, that had taken a mighty pounding during the fghting. Bullets still emerged from the many holes in the bark, and few leaves grew on its gnarled, traumatized branches. “Wounded almost to death,” he mused, like his comrades scarred by war “ever living and yet ever dying.” This place, he recalled, was “a horrid dream, a bloody drama, a patch of Hell on earth.”1
The Deadly Duet ★
During the Civil War’s fourth spring, two great military campaigns played out in mirror image. In Virginia, General Ulysses Grant and the Army of the Potomac struck south and sought out General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Each encounter over the blasted Old Dominion landscape resulted in both stunning bloodshed and Grant’s increased determination to turn Lee’s right fank until the Confederate capital
of Richmond was taken. In northern Georgia, General William Tecumseh Sherman led three army groups against General Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, with the capture of Atlanta the ultimate prize. Here, in a series of maneuvers, Sherman repeatedly forced Johnston from his defensive positions north of the city by turning the Confederate lef fank. Battles—when they happened— proved far less bloody than those occurring in Virginia but just as strategically successful. In mid-June 1864, while Grant had Lee pinned against the rail hub of Petersburg, Sherman confronted Johnston near Marietta, within sight of the spires of Atlanta. For the most part, Sherman had relied on these fanking maneuvers to force his opponent out of entrenched positions. With his army at another impasse in the
shadow of the twin peaks of Kennesaw Mountain, however, the high-strung commander claimed something of a conversion. Another turning movement would angle him away from his rail supply line, a dangerous move indeed, but one he had made before. Instead, Sherman decided that his boys had grown too used to maneuvering (“a single mode of ofense,” as he termed it) and now needed to recall the “moral efect” of delivering a frontal assault. He there-
PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
As Union forces commanded by General William Tecumseh Sherman made their way south toward Atlanta, they repeatedly pushed back Confederates led by General Joseph E. Johnston. Above: A depiction of the fghting on May 13-15 at Resaca, one of several clashes during the early phase of Sherman’s invasion of Georgia. Opposite page: Generals Johnston (lef) and Sherman.
fore determined to attack Johnston’s center and break the enemy in two.2 On June 24, Sherman revealed his plans to his lieutenants. General James McPherson and his Army of the Tennessee would push against the Confederate right and pin it in place. General John Schofeld would lead his Army of the Ohio south and east to pressure the Rebel lef. The hard work of creasing the Confederate center—where the enemy was supposedly spread thin—would be
lef to General George Thomas. The jump-of would occur the morning of June 27. Salutes were ofered and returned, and the army commanders departed to carry out their orders. ★ in later years, Joseph Eggleston Johnston would recall moments throughout May and June 1864 when he determined to attack Sherman and defeat this invasion of Georgia. But these moments were rare.
At Rocky Face Ridge, Resaca, and Adairsville, Johnston retreated south when the Federals fanked him, always on the lef. At Cassville, lieutenant generals Leonidas Polk and John Bell Hood fretted over a salient in the lines that threatened their troops; their fears convinced their commander to abandon the otherwise strong position. Again, to the increasing agitation of the war department in Richmond and many of his own men, Joe Johnston ceded more Geor-
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ever, three-quarters of a mile south of the Dallas Road, Presstman found trouble. Here, the wooded ridge ended abruptly on a modest hilltop, and with belts of trees and an open pasture extending to the west, the only good defensible ground lay another 300 yards to the east. The ofcer solved the problem by curving the line 90 degrees lef along the hilltop and running it east to the next ridgeline. Perhaps it was the darkness, perhaps a simple oversight. Whatever the reason, Presstman had abandoned the hill’s military crest and run the line higher up on the hill’s natural crest, creating a vulnerable salient. None of the Confederates from General Benjamin Cheatham’s division, which arrived June 19 to start constructing the works, recognized the faw: A gunner in the trench would not be able to see the bottom of the hill or a considerable area around it. Presstman had unwittingly created a dead zone across most of the salient’s front.
Ominous Appearances ★
General George H. Thomas had spent hours peering across this new stretch of rugged Georgia countryside. As was usual, opposite lay the Rebels, dug in along terrain that appeared impervious to attack. However, Thomas had orders to target suitable areas to breach this latest Confederate position, and the impassive ofcer—in close consultation with his subordinates—did his best to fnd them. He fnally fngered two spots: the gorge south of Little Kennesaw near Pigeon Hill where Burnt Hickory Road bisected the Rebel defenses, and the ridge running south from Dallas Road. A total of fve Union brigades would assault the latter: three from Brigadier General John Newton’s Second Division of
Major General Oliver O. Howard’s IV Corps, and two from Brigadier General Jeferson C. Davis’ Second Division of Major General John Palmer’s XIV Corps. The plan inspired little confdence. Palmer fatly thought Sherman’s “whole army could not carry the position.” Howard called the area near Pigeon Hill the “least objectionable” on the feld, while Davis considered “a projecting point in the ridge” in his front “the most assailable.” However, Sherman was convinced his opponent’s lines were stretched beyond efectiveness. A breakthrough at either point would sweep the Unionists across the high ground and into the streets of Marietta, where Joe Johnston’s army would be sliced in two. Just beyond Marietta ran the Chattahoochee River, then Atlanta. The
BATTLES AND LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR
gia soil to the invaders. South of the Etowah River, the nature of the campaign changed dramatically. Gone were the open valleys and long ridgelines of northern Georgia, replaced by rough tracks, boundless thickets, and endless woods. The enemy broke from their supply lines along the Western and Atlantic Railroad and again lunged lef into a red clay wilderness. Johnston, however, was nothing if not adroit. He stymied the movement with a line centered on New Hope Church and held it for 10 days. Sherman quickly grew frustrated and sidled back toward the railroad. Johnston countered with new positions along three mountains— Brushy, Pine, and Lost—where the armies spent two weeks brutally testing each other’s defenses and wrestling for the slightest advantage. On June 16, Sherman reverted to his former ways by sending a force around Johnston’s lef fank. Following the theme of their deadly duet, Johnston played his part perfectly, parrying the thrust in a pounding rainstorm that would last for days. Meanwhile he dispatched his engineers to Kennesaw Mountain to lay out a new defensive line, and three days later, the Army of Tennessee abandoned the Pine Mountain Line and fled into its strongest position of the campaign. On cue, Sherman’s boys sallied forth and dug in north and west of the forbidding inclines of Kennesaw. Johnston’s engineers—led by Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Presstman—had performed something of a minor miracle. In the darkness of June 18 they laid out a defensive line that would ultimately run for seven miles. As it curled around the northern slope of Big Kennesaw, then ran south across Little Kennesaw Mountain and Pigeon Hill, the line hewed to the military crest—the optimal position for observing and fring down the hill—of the various heights. How-
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FRANCIS T. MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR
Confederate forces positioned on Kennesaw Mountain were well prepared for the Union assault on June 27, having created a line of imposing entrenchments in the days leading up to the fght. Above: A section of the Confederate defenses on Kennesaw Mountain. Opposite page: Rebel troops haul guns up the mountain’s slope in preparation for battle.
prize hung in the simmering heat, there for Sherman’s taking.3 Davis’ two brigades spent the night of June 25 stumbling from the far lef of the Union line to a staging area south of John Newton’s division. Upon arrival, Colonel Daniel McCook’s Third Brigade extended the line south from Newton’s boys, while Colonel John Mitchell’s Second Brigade took up the southern fank of the assault formation. The Ohioans, Indianans, and Illinoians who constituted Davis’ division spent the next day resting as best they could in the summer heat. They watched as limbers were flled, feld hospitals located, orders barked, and ammunition distributed. Wrote one veteran bluecoat, “Appearances are ominous of an advance of our lines.”4 About a half mile to the east, op-
posite Davis’ people, Tennesseans from Cheatham’s division continued to strengthen the defenses on the crown of their modest hill. Brigadier General Alfred J. Vaughan’s brigade labored along the northern and western wall of the salient, while Brigadier General George Maney’s brigade sweat along the southern leg of the arc. Under a daily barrage from numerous Yankee guns, they had spent nearly a week repairing the damage and improving the position. The results were fearsome indeed. At some places the clay wall stood 12 feet wide and seven feet tall. A rifeman could stand on a step along the bottom of the trench to fre from a slit under a protective head-log, lower himself to load, and rise to fre again. Fence rails crossing the top of the trench prevented dislocated head-logs from fall-
ing onto the defenders. Across much of their front, industrious Johnnies spent the nights clearing felds of fre from the wooded ridge and constructing defensive slashings from the downed trees. With skirmishers lining the bottomland to the west, Cheatham’s men occupied a unique position of strength. Except for some thick trees on Vaughan’s right and a thin belt at the base of his ridge, the open ground the Yanks would have to traverse to attack the hill yawned well to the west and south. Shoulder to shoulder the undermanned Tennesseans barely flled their fring line, but these veterans of some of the war’s worst bloodshed stood grim and ready, although some of the more tactically astute “high privates” who were to do the shooting and the kill-
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ing were now aware that a dead zone cradled most of their front. Engineer Presstman’s week-old error would demand retribution. ★ in the warm, pre-dawn gloom of June 27, 1864, orderlies awakened the men of Jeferson Davis’ division at 4 a.m. and advised them to eat breakfast and clear for battle. In two hours they would move forward to their launch positions. Two hours afer that, they would attack. Dan McCook and John Mitchell led their boys to their respective staging areas along a ridge about 600 yards from the enemy lines, ordered them to lie down, and issued fnal instructions. Both would attack in columns of division—one regiment in front of the next—with a cloud of skirmishers leading the way. McCook’s lead regiment, the 125th Illinois, was to hit the salient in the Rebel line dead on; the 86th Illinois following would move by lef fank and engage the Rebs just north of their fellow Illinoians. The 22nd Indiana and the 52nd Ohio were to exploit any breakthroughs. Just to the south, Mitchell wanted his lead regiment—the 113th
Then up spoke brave Horatius The Captain of the gate: “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds For the ashes of his fathers And the temples of his gods.[”]
By the time he reached the brigade front, a signal gun of to the lef boomed. Dozens of Union cannon then joined the chorus. McCook shouted out a postscript to his “heathen refrain”: “Attention Battalion. Charge Bayonets.”6
Peal of Thunder ★
The Confederates in the salient had heard these sounds before: the low shufe of an army on the move, the sharp report of picket fre, the clattering of wagons as they bounced along the primitive clay paths. The veteran soldiers could keenly sense when battle loomed, and this day had all the markings. Still, they spent the early morning dodging the hot sun by drawing their blankets across the trenches and relaxing in the gouged earth. At 8 a.m., pandemonium erupted. Across the front, enemy cannon fre exploded, and shells began to plough into their earthworks. “Blankets went down and we kept out of sight,” recalled a private in the Consolidated 1st/27th Tennessee at the apex of the salient. The backbreaking work of the previous week held up well as the massive earthworks soaked up the Yankee metal. Only in a few places were the head-logs displaced. Otherwise the two small brigades of Tennesseans simply hunkered down until the short bombardment ended and the smoke began to clear.7 Almost immediately the fading artillery concussions were replaced by rolling cheers. Down the wooded slope less than 600 yards to the west boiled two masses of bluecoats heading directly for the salient. “Our cartridge boxes were quickly adjusted,” wrote a Tennessean, and from under the surviving head-logs “every gun was in place.” They then waited for the orders to blow the charging Yankees to hell.8 Two swarms of skirmishers led the Federal attack: the 85th Illinois fronting McCook and four companies of the 34th Illinois preceding Mitchell. Covering 225 yards, they scrambled over some rude breastworks held by troops from General James D. Morgan’s brigade—some of whom joined the advance—and “sprang away like a trained racer” into a pasture. Fify yards later, at the bottom of the slope, they splashed across a branch of John Ward Creek, slowing a bit to negotiate a tangle of vines and overgrowth that lined the watercourse. In the wood belt across the front, Rebel pickets
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Major General Benjamin Cheatham, whose men occupied the salient in the Confederate line on the hill that would later bear his name.
Ohio—to storm the lower arc of the salient on McCook’s right. The trailing regiments—the 121st Ohio, the 98th Ohio, and the 78th Illinois—were formed en echelon to the right; once they cleared the Buckeyes, they would wheel to the lef and move against the Confederate works in a brigade front. Only 20 paces separated the regiments in each column. The sky slowly brightened, promising another sultry day. Ofcers gathered to talk about dispositions and expectations. One group discussed their dreams from the night before, some serene, others disturbing. Elsewhere, soldiers did what soldiers do before a battle. Some talked of home, others lamented their circumstances. One grizzled warrior thought that this looked worse than an earlier bloodletting at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, warning “We’ll ketch hell over’n them woods.” Many simply lay there quietly, their thoughts to themselves. “The silence,” a northerner recalled, “became painful.”5 Toward the rear of his brigade, McCook concluded one fnal meeting with Davis. As “Colonel Dan” strode away toward the front, the general offered some parting advice: “Don’t be rash, colonel, don’t be rash.” McCook responded by reciting an epic Thomas Macaulay poem:
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THE FIGHT FOR CHEATHAM HILL
O U TS I D E M A R I E T TA , G E O R G I A
|
J U N E 2 7, 1 8 6 4
Less than two months after invading Georgia, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union forces were on the outskirts of Marietta, not far from his ultimate goal, Atlanta. After repeatedly falling back against the advancing enemy, General Joseph E. Johnston and his Army of Tennessee decided to make their latest stand on nearby Kennesaw Mountain. The Confederates constructed an imposing, seven-mile-long line of defensive trenches. On the morning of June 27, 1864, Sherman launched an all-out assault upon Kennesaw. The fghting was particularly ferce at the southern end of the Confederate position, at a salient occupied by Major General Benjamin F. Cheatham’s troops. Here, two brigades of Union soldiers, commanded by Daniel McCook and John Mitchell, reached the trenches, beaten back only after hand-to-hand combat. Johnston’s men held their lines. Still, fearing for his fank, Johnston abandoned Kennesaw on July 2. Atlanta would be Sherman’s two months later.
PO L
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Cheatham Hill Turner’s Mississippi Battery
1 3/1 5 4 T N
CHEATHAM
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9T VA N 12 UG / 4 7 T N HA N
Mebane’s Tennessee Battery
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/27
85 IL
McCO
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19 T N
MAN
EY
4/5 0 TN
OK
6/9 T N
85 IL XVI
Union skirmish line
es enn
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THOMAS
34 I L
IV
North
XIV
1000 feet © 2012 VLW Cartography
ounta
Daniel McCook
John Mitchell
LORING
JOHNSTON HARDEE
Marietta
Cheatham Hill
Fight for Cheatham Hill June 27
XX
Springer
Benjamin Cheatham
in
Pigeon Hill
HOOD North
SCHOFIELD
Jeferson C. Davis
aw M
K
McPHERSON
3 4 IL
M O R G AN OH 113
121 OH
MITCHELL 98 OH 78 IL
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (4); FRANK T. MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR ( VAUGHAN, MANEY )
125 IL
86 IL
22 IN 52 OH
DAVIS
XVII
SHERMAN
Perry’s Florida & Phelan’s Alabama Batteries
George Maney
1 mile
Alfred J. Vaughan
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Tennessee soldier Sam Watkins, one of the Confederates who defended the salient on Cheatham Hill, noted that their position was so favorable, “All that was necessary was to load and shoot.”
vivors from moving much farther. Marveled an Illinois soldier as the regiment collapsed, “Oh! How that fre of hell beats in our faces.”12 Minutes later, into the human welter pounded the 86th Illinois. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Allen L. Fahnestock, found the 125th Illinois decimated and the front clogged by felled trees and obstructions “staked and wired together.” Winded, his people had the bare energy to press into the melee and fre at the Rebel head-logs “thirty paces in front,” even as a storm of lead lashed their ranks. Recalled one member of the 11th Tennessee
directly opposite the mass of Illinoians, “We swept them down with great slaughter.”13 Farther north along the Confederate defenses, the remaining gray-clad regiments found themselves in an unlikely position. Other Yankee attacks were crashing against Major General Patrick Cleburne’s division on their right fank, but the 29th Tennessee, the Consolidated 12th/47th Tennessee, and the Consolidated 13th/154th Tennessee (from south to north) found their front relatively quiet. So, craning his neck above the head-logs, Tennessean J.T. Bowden could look south to see McCook’s
COURTESY OF RUTH HILL FULTON McALLISTER
chipped at the blue wave from their “rabbit holes,” but the Illinoians came on in such a frenzied rush that the stunned Confederates either surrendered or ran for their lives. Slightly over 100 yards up the ridge in front lay the Rebel salient.9 On the retracted Rebel line east and south of the salient, Phelan’s Alabama Battery and Perry’s Florida Battery had full view of the Yankees swarming across the pasture. At 2,000 feet, their frst deliveries were somewhat inefective as the eight gun crews sought the range of the enemy. One northerner later explained that “each step changed the range,” but that would not last.10 On Mitchell’s front, the skirmishers from the 34th Illinois (“Yelling like so many Comanches,” according to one witness) swung slightly to the lef and pounded toward the apex of the enemy line. The 113th Ohio, with Lieutenant Colonel Darius Warner screaming encouragement, followed close behind. Uneven musketry began to tumble some bluecoats while others tripped over stumps. But about 20 yards from the earthworks, as Mitchell’s spear point pressed up against a tangle of downed trees— heretofore unseen—the Confederate line exploded in a “terrifc jar of a peal of thunder close at hand.” The 1st/27th Tennessee fnally got their orders, joined by the 19th Tennessee just to their lef. “A sheet of fame burst,” wrote one Johnny, “and the missiles of death crashed.” The gust hammered the Yankees, killing and wounding dozens while driving some survivors to the ground, other survivors to fight.11 Just to the north and some 100 feet from the enemy, the head of McCook’s column received the same treatment. One Confederate remarked that the Yanks had grown quiet in their last, brave lunge up the ridge. That changed quickly. The concerted Rebel rife blast—“a storm of lead and iron”—pulverized the 125th Illinois as their colors repeatedly fell and rose on the bloody incline. “They halted and staggered with considerable confusion,” remembered one Tennessean, and the tree slashings prevented the sur-
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“The cannons bellowed like so many mad bulls.... The air was so full of sulphurous smoke we could not see, and the roar of musketry so continuous we could not distinguish the report of our gun from that of the one by our side.” A CONFEDERATE DEFENDER OF CHEATHAM HILL
harried bluecoats massing in front of the salient. Earlier, an ofcer had warned him and his comrades to look for just this sort of opportunity, so the Johnnies directed their fre obliquely to the lef and lacerated the exposed fank of the enemy.14
The Killing Grind
ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY & MUSEUM (2)
★
While McCook’s men bled, Mitchell’s brigade surged into its own maelstrom. Colonel Henry Banning raced toward the salient with his 121st Ohio. His orders were to clear the 113th Ohio’s right fank, wheel lef, and assault the enemy position, but the initial Rebel volley seemed to literally consume the lead regiment. One of Banning’s men thought the 113th “broke and fed” from the feld while another assumed “they were all killed.” Whatever had happened to them—their loss of 153 men in 20 minutes explains enough—Banning completed his maneuver as best he could and advanced.15 Along the front, Rebel musketry gashed the northerners. Of to the east, the Alabama and Florida batteries zeroed in on the Yankee right fank. A Tennessee infantryman fring at the 113th recalled, “The cannons bellowed like so many mad bulls…. The air was so full of sulphurous smoke we could not see, and the roar of musketry so continuous we could not distinguish the report of our gun from that of the one by our side.”16 Here and there, singly and in small groups, Buckeyes and Illinoians fltered through the obstructions and mounted the works only to be captured or killed. Banning quickly calculated the futility of these brave
actions. Battered by “grape and cantling at the apex, soldier Sam Watkins ister from both fanks and a full line recalled, “All that was necessary was of small-arms fre from my front,” the to load and shoot,” and with McCook’s colonel ordered his boys to halt. Some two lead regiments massed just a did, to fght and die in line, but othfew dozen yards away, Watkins and ers fell back to positions behind what his comrades could barely miss. But trees were still standing and opened return fre began to tell, “a solid line of fre on the nearly invisible enemy. blazing fre right from the muzzles of Rebel artillery shells exploded above the Yankee guns being poured into our them, “cutting down trees faces.” Hair and clothing and felling limbs as if the singed, the Tennesseans air and the treetops were dared not give an inch, full of invisible sappers even with “the hot blood and miners.” The swirl of our dead and wounded of metal and shattered spurting on us.” Smoke wood caught many of the choked their throats and wounded working their clouded visibility, forcway toward the rear, adding many Confederates ing to or putting them out to aim through the murk Lieutenant Colonel of their misery.17 by sound alone. And the Allen L. Fahnestock Banning pulled his sound—a swelling of survivors back about 20 screams and curses on yards. Here the Georgia the very edge of life, rife geography ofered a gif. fre, and artillery blasts A small branch that ran of such numbing conwest to John Ward Creek cussion that “the blood had created enough of a [gushed] out of our noses slope to give some proand ears”—prompted tection from enemy bulone southerner to acidly lets. Banning ordered his declare, “Hell had broke battered regiment to take loose in Georgia, sure Adjutant Lansing Dawdy advantage of the swale. enough.”19 One rank targeted the Down the slope from enemy head-logs with a near-continWatkins, Adjutant Lansing Dawdy uous fre, “creating such a splattering of the 86th Illinois thought he saw an of lead and splinters that the defendopening. Most of the Federals on Mcers lay low.” The rest of the Ohioans Cook’s front had stopped at the abatis used “bayonets, tin cups, plates and and opened a ragged fre on the slits hands … to dig themselves under under the enemy head-logs. Howcover.” If Banning couldn’t take the ever, just yards south near the Rebel position, he wasn’t going to leave it apex, a clearing in the obstructions either.18 gave easier access to the earthworks. Dawdy and Sergeant John Brubaker ★ gathered some two dozen survivors inside the salient, the dogged of Company A and ordered them to infantrymen of Cheatham’s division rush the opening. Two of the Illimaintained their killing grind. Batnoians who heard the orders took one
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look at the target, then clasped hands as the attack command rang out. In a mad rush, the clot of bluecoats swirled through the clearing and charged. Ten feet from the earthworks, a minie ball slammed into Dawdy. Nearby, another creased Brubaker. It would be the same for their boys. Wrote a Tennessean in the salient who helped repel the thrust, “They had foemen to meet them who never quailed.” In a few short seconds, seven Illinoians fell dead and 14 were wounded. Realizing that “All who were with us were now down,” a writhing Brubaker rolled onto his side and vomited.20
For The Ashes of His Fathers ★
Under a bright sun and a metallic blue sky, Colonel Daniel McCook knew that his attack’s success hung in the balance. Not 15 minutes afer step-of, his skirmishers and frst two regiments had degenerated into a confused mass just a stone’s throw
from the Rebels, and the arrival of the 22nd Indiana only increased the throng. Artillery pounded both of his fanks, rife fre scythed his front, and his boys battled away on a veritable island with little support. Soldiers overcome by the howling barrage began to leak to the rear, frst in driblets, then in clumps. “To stand still was death,” recalled one of those boys of the crisis. For the colonel, with panicked swatches of his command tumbling of the battle line, this would not do. McCook worked his way to the right front, where he saw the fag of the 86th Illinois. “Forward with the colors,” he bellowed as he jostled through the obstructions, then sprinted across the fnal few dozen yards to the earthworks. For a moment he stood there—just north of the angle—but as he turned to encourage his men to join him, “the right battalion of the brigade … made a surge to his rescue.” Many charged, but “a fusillading volley … swept most of them down.” Most, but not all. Private Samuel Canterbury of the 86th Illinois survived the dash and
hugged the earthen wall as he tried to get his breath back. J.T. Seay and remnants of the 85th Illinois clawed up the outer wall and launched into “a hand to hand fght across the works, the men using their guns, bayonets, and stones.” Up scrambled McCook onto a head-log. Parrying bayonet thrusts with his sword, “Colonel Dan” cried, “Surrender, you damn traitors” and screamed back at his boys to “Bring up those colors.” As more of his comrades pushed forward to the works, Canterbury grabbed the colonel’s coat and begged him to get down, earning him a curse and a warning to tend to his own business. Just then, a Tennessean rose up, pointed his rife a few inches below McCook’s right collarbone, and fred.21 ★ south of mccook’s death struggle, the rest of Mitchell’s brigade went to ground. Phelan’s and Perry’s Confederate guns had the full range of the position and swept the southern slope of Cheatham Hill with a punish-
RE-UNION OF COL. DAN MCCOOK’S THIRD BRIGADE
Third Brigade commander Colonel Daniel McCook (above, waving hat overhead, and opposite page) leads his men forward in the assault against the Confederate salient on Cheatham Hill. Soon afer scrambling atop the Rebel works, McCook would fall wounded, shot in the chest.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
ing barrage. The Tennesseans lining the lower face of the salient fred at the roiling enemy lines with a determination that was, by one account, “intuitive, mechanical.” The result was stunning. When the 98th Ohio charged in the wake of the 121st Ohio, blasted elements of Mitchell’s lead regiment, the 113th Ohio, retreated through two companies of the 98th and swept them away. As Confederate bullets riddled their colors, the rest of the 98th’s men hit the dirt to the right of Banning’s diggers and extended the improvised trench line. The last of Mitchell’s regiments, the 78th Illinois, could do little more than join the desperate entrenchers muscling out the ragged ditch. Hundreds of northerners thrashed at the ground with everything from bayonets to bare hands, and, slowly, the killing feld surrendered a small swatch of its lethality. But the exercise also betrayed a bald military reality: Mitchell’s attack had shot its bolt.22 The backwash of both brigades
produced scenes both typical and unique to combat zones. Under “a perfect storm of lead,” McCook’s last regiment in line, the 52nd Ohio, stormed toward the front, only to discover “wounded and bloody men … pour[ing] past us.” Here and there, cowering bluecoats hid behind trees and dead comrades, dodging and ducking the constant sweep of metal. To Major James T. Holmes it appeared that “the line of every regiment in front of us was broken…. Men came rushing down the slope in crowds, breathing hard through fear and physical exhaustion. The tide of retreat swelled.” Despite the chaos, the 52nd Ohio pounded up the slope into the hellfre.23 Riding well behind his brigade, John Mitchell took in the same grim chaos. His people never came near overrunning the Rebel position and now had gone to ground. Many of McCook’s men still fought along the battlements north of the salient’s
apex, but the grand rush evidently had come to naught. Out of the turmoil came three soldiers carrying a wounded ofcer. As the group moved closer, Mitchell recognized Dan McCook. A bullet had ripped into his right breast at point-blank range; he was “weak and … spoke with difculty and seeming pain.” However, he rose up to castigate Mitchell for leading from behind and promised him a court-martial if he survived. Nonplussed, Mitchell turned to his staf while the soldiers carried “Colonel Dan” away. Later, McCook managed to tell one of John Palmer’s stafers that “we did all we could to break the rebel line … but it was impossible.”24
Dead Angle ★
Colonel Hume Field certainly knew how to lead from the front. The commander of the Consolidated 1st/27th Tennessee stood near the apex and screamed at his men to “Give them the bayonet if they come over.” But this was not enough. He dispatched his adjutant to the lef to fnd reinforcements, and with more Yanks pressing against the outer wall of the salient, the ofcer grabbed a rife, clambered onto a support beam for the head-logs, and fred into the crowd. His Tennesseans began to hand him loaded weapons that he discharged with gusto. Suddenly a bluecoat scuttled over the earthwork to cross muskets with Field—and beat him to the draw. The bullet grazed the southerner’s skull and knocked him out.25 Confederates low on ammunition fung rocks at the Yanks, and the Yanks returned the favor. Small knots of northerners continued to bull over the wall. Sam Watkins drilled two with one shot and was feverishly reloading when a third came on, screaming, “You have killed my two brothers, and now I’ve got you.” The Yankee leveled his rife and fred, but Watkins’ messmate William Hughes grabbed the muzzle and redirected the shot into his own hand and arm. The wound proved mortal, later prompting Watkins to write, “In saving my life, he lost his ☛ } CONT. ON P. 75
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Letters Home: Correspondence from Men at War BY PETER S. CARMICHAEL
we would like to believe that Civil War letters transport us back to the historical reality of the camp and the battlefeld. These letters are not, however, transparent windows into the past. They are products of men struggling to depict a situation that was radically diferent than anything they had endured before.
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B&A We would also like to believe that soldiers wrote candidly about what they were experiencing. Questions of truthfulness, however, obscure how the act of writing was and is an act of perceiving. Men acted and thought in contradictory ways, but in writing letters home they restored a degree of stability to their lives, even though they admitted to readers that they were navigating the unknown. The men profled below—Charles Bowen, William Wagner, and Charles Biddlecom—illustrate how soldiers’ words and actions were not always in alignment, even as they professed strong opinions about the nature of the war, the political stakes of the confict, and why they fought. Dear Friends at Home: The Civil War Letters and Diaries of Sergeant Charles T. Bowen, Twelfth United States Infantry, 1861-1864 EDITED BY EDWARD K. CASSEDY (2001)
On June 18, 1864, as he looked across a barren landscape toward Petersburg, Virginia, Charles Bowen of the 12th United States Infantry imagined his own death. On the far horizon arose a massive Confederate fortifcation loaded with artillery and infantry. Sure that he would be in the last spasms of life in less than an hour, Bowen turned to a sick soldier headed for the rear and handed him some personal items—a pocketknife, a diary, and a locket containing a picture of his wife—in hopes of having them returned to his family in Utica, New York. He then took his place in the ranks, just before the order to advance was given. As soon as Bowen
and his comrades stepped into the open expanse, they were engulfed in a fame of smoke and fre. One solid shot knocked a fle of men 10 feet in the air, but out of the chaos the ranks staggered forward, until they were within the lethal range of canister. Each blast shredded soldiers into unrecognizable forms of humanity. “Men were cut in two & hurled [into] a disfgured mass of fesh & rags to the ground,” a stunned but whole Bowen later wrote. “Arms, legs, headless trunks, & heads without bodies were strewn in every direction.” Quick-thinking ofcers ordered Bowen and other survivors to fnd shelter in a swale until the benevolence of night gave them sufcient cover to throw up a line of earthworks. The next morning the sun unveiled a maze of trenches zigzagging in every direction, constructed throughout the night by men in awe of their own survival. Bowen tried to make light of his ordeal, joking to his wife that he had expected
to be discharged from “earth & army at the same time.” No attempt at humor, however, could sofen the memories of nearly continuous killing in the six weeks since the inception of the Overland Campaign on May 5, 1864. Throughout his military career—one that included every major engagement of the Army of the Potomac from 1862 through 1864—Bowen wrote with remarkable fearlessness about the savagery of soldiering. Bowen was more introspective than most Civil War veterans in exploring the ways that war twisted him into a strange and unfamiliar person. Conficted feelings pulled him down afer every battle, leaving him torn about the act of killing, despite his unfaltering obedience in following his ofcers into infernos of death. On the eve of the Overland Campaign, Bowen confded to his wife, “I hate to go to the front again, my time is so near out, but Im in for it I suppose & will have to take my share.” “One thing I am determined on,” he asserted, “that is to do my duty at whatever cost, & you may rest assured that I shall die like a soldier or come home afer having done my duty as a soldier.” Bowen adhered to his grim promise, even when his unit was called upon to attack Confederate works in one senseless charge afer another. While duty pushed him forward, it did not reconcile the New Yorker to the monstrous acts of human destruction. At the beginning of June 1864, afer his regiment had repulsed an enemy assault outside Richmond, Bowen recorded the scene: “When the smoke cleared up we could see
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“One thing I am determined on … is to do my duty at whatever cost, & you may rest assured that I shall die like a soldier or come home afer having done my duty as a soldier.” CHARLES BOWEN, 12TH U.S. INFANTRY, IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE ON THE EVE OF THE OVERLAND CAMPAIGN IN 1864
the ground in front & it was a horrible sight indeed, human beings wounded, struggling & squirming over the dead, cries for water, help, mercy & the Lord only knows what else.” Three Union generals publicly recognized the heroics of Bowen’s regiment, but their compliments were unsettling to him: Praise from above generally signifed more fghting. “I don’t like the infernal mean scrapes it gets [us] into,” he admitted. When Bowen put pen to paper he sought the realism that evaded many Civil War soldiers. The New Yorker, who managed to survive the war, was an uncompromising writer who demanded that those at home bear witness to the colossal brutality of organized killing. If the sacrifce of blood was to redeem the Union, Bowen believed, those at home must confront the carnage and see it in all of its grotesque forms. Otherwise, they would never understand or sufciently appreciate the sufering that had been endured for the cause. At the same time, he wanted his readers—then, and probably now—to realize that his writings spoke no single truth. Letters of William F. Wagner: Confederate Soldier EDITED BY JOE M. HATLEY AND LINDA B. HUFFMAN (1983)
The letters of Confederate William Wagner should be read out loud. A farmer of modest means and limited education, he struggled to make his pen articulate what he usually said in person to his wife. His grammar is jagged, his spelling phonetically creative, and his thoughts spill out
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The Photographic History of the Civil War (1911) By Francis Trevelyan Miller
This 10-volume work is the starting place for any serious student of historic photography. Know Miller, and you’ll understand why interest in the Civil War endures. The depth, breadth, and quality of these volumes continue to move me more than a century after they were published.
The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (1960) By Bruce Catton
This is the book that inspired my boyhood interest in the war. I spent countless hours absorbing its photographs, maps, and illustrations. The images, and Catton’s words, make the war come alive.
Introduction to Civil War Photography (1991) By Ross J. Kelbaugh
If you’re new to collecting Civil War photographs, or are simply curious about photographic formats and photographers from the period, this slim paperback is a must-have. Consider it Civil War Photography 101. RONALD C. CODDINGTON, AUTHOR OF THREE BOOKS ON CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY, IS PUBLISHER AND EDITOR OF MILITARY IMAGES MAGAZINE.
in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Listening to Wagner’s letters is jarring, clueing us into how difcult it was for some soldiers to communicate with those at home. Most Civil War soldiers were used to face-to-face communication, and Wagner wrote to his wife as if he were sitting at the kitchen table, chatting about the day’s afairs. Wagner’s letters ofer rare insights into the contradictory thinking of a reluctant Confederate, one who ultimately gave up on his nation for the fantasy of returning to the Union. He enlisted under the pressure of conscription, joining the 57th North Carolina in 1862, just in time to see bodies mangled at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Confederate victories did little to relieve the depression of a man who thought the
war a grotesque violation of humanity. When Lee’s army began its northern raid during the summer of 1863, he dreaded the imminent prospect of more slaughter. Upon entering Pennsylvania he was struck by the number of civilian men in every town and the lushness of a countryside untouched by war—incontestable proof in Wagner’s eyes that a depleted Confederacy could not persevere against such odds. Defeat at Gettysburg crushed Wagner’s spirit, though he was thankful to Providence for sparing him during two vicious attacks, including a desperate charge at Cemetery Hill. When he returned to Virginia, Wagner drew hope from comrades who deserted. In late summer and early fall, scores of Lee’s veterans headed for the hills. “I wouldent care if they would all Runaway,” he wrote on August 15, “and then I am shure I would go too for God onleys knows I want this war to End.” Wagner was torn. He wanted to slip away, but his wife, thinking of the perilous life of a deserter, wanted him to stay. He loathed his ofcers, calling them “big-headed” men for publishing patriotic resolutions in the newspapers that were falsely attributed to the rank and fle. He wanted his wife to know that the men had never passed such resolutions, and that they were badly divided over whether to continue the fght. Wagner’s rage never materialized into subversive action. He remained in the ranks not out of a sense of duty, but because he felt trapped. His gut-wrenching desire to
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B&A
“I have tried my gun on the Rebs to my satisfaction and now I should like to come home. But I suppose Uncle Abe will keep me at this war as long as I can shoot a gun.” UNION SOLDIER CHARLES BIDDLECOM
escape Lee’s army and reunite with his family was poignantly captured in a postscript to an August 15, 1863, letter: “Dear if I onley could be at home to Eat peaches.” Wagner never made it back to his Catawba County farm to enjoy the simple pleasures of family life. He was captured during the fghting at Rappahannock Station on November 7, 1863, and sent to Point Lookout prison, where the North Carolinian died two months later of chronic diarrhea. His body was buried in a mass grave in Maryland. No Freedom Shrieker: The Civil War Letters of Union Soldier Charles Biddlecom EDITED BY KATHERINE M. ALDRIDGE (2012)
Just as New Yorker Charles Biddlecom was about step into line and enter the Wilderness with the Army of the Potomac, a few comrades took him aside and begged him to desert. They were headed west to the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the opposite direction from the killing grounds of the 1864 Overland Campaign. Biddlecom had wanted to run away as soon as he was conscripted in 1863. In the ranks, he felt as if he were a thing, a disposable part to be used by uncaring and unthinking ofcers. “Cursed be the day that saw my name drawn as a conscript and d—d be the hour that I made up my mind to come as a draf,” he wrote. “I think sometimes that if it was not for you and my children I would blow out my brains. D—n the South. D—n the war and all that had anything to do in getting it up.” Not long afer he joined the
Army of the Potomac, Biddlecom’s body started to break down. During a November 1863 hike, his legs swelled, diarrhea struck, and he collapsed by the roadside. In a 24-hour period he expelled “over thirty passages of the bowels.” He had “passed so much blood and mucus and become so weak,” he wrote, that he “could hardly stand alone.” Biddlecom sought a medical discharge, but the army’s surgeons were indiferent to his sufering. At that moment of crisis, when his body and mind were on the verge of collapse, Biddlecom could have felt justifed in feeing, but in the end he watched his comrades vanish toward the Blue Ridge. A few days later Biddlecom was engulfed in a ferocious killing spree that exceeded
his darkest imaginings. On June 29, 1864, afer surviving the bloodiest campaign in the history of the Army of the Potomac, Biddlecom neared his breaking point. He could not imagine another day in the ranks, let alone the two years remaining in his enlistment. “I hate this life worse than a cat does hot soup,” he exclaimed to his wife. “If I ever get out I will stuf my old uniform with straw and stand it up in one corner to look at when I feel out of humor just to remind me that home with its little cares and troubles is not the worst place in the world for a man to enjoy life.” Eleven days later, Biddlecom experienced an incredible reversal of thought when he was issued a new blouse. Suddenly, he hated to bid farewell to his old coat, wanting to send it home and to display not as a reminder of the worst, but as a relic of his heroic service and the bloody sacrifces of his comrades. The remarkable letters of Charles Biddlecom illustrate how members of the rank and fle never stopped valuing their battle experiences as a testament to their manliness, even during those moments when their thoughts and actions were convulsed in contradictions over how they should act in the ranks. Civil War soldiers never stopped reminding those at home that although they were weary of bloodshed, they were inmates in the army, having no choice but to do their duty amid the madness of war. “I have tried my gun on the Rebs to my satisfaction and now I should like to come home,” Biddlecom confded afer his frst encoun-
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ter with the Confederates. “But I suppose Uncle Abe will keep me at this war as long as I can shoot a gun.” In just a few sentences Biddlecom outlined what thoughts and actions were available to him in the ranks. He acknowledged the institutional forces of the army were beyond his powers to challenge. Biddlecom would survive his enlistment and return to his native New York, but during his time in the ranks he never stopped loathing the war, loving his comrades, despising the Lincoln administration, or believing that killing for the nation was a sacred duty. Like Bowen and Wagner, Biddlecom was remarkable in his ability to reach deep into the dark side of war. But it would be a mistake to put forth these three books as pathways to the “real war.” Our obsession with fnding authentic voices from the ranks is ridiculously subjective and largely a fruitless debate over what constitutes realism in the Civil War. It distracts us from fully appreciating how soldier correspondence— when examined as an entire body of work and not through isolated quotes from individual letters—exposes the ebb and fow of soldier thought, including tensions and contradictions that naturally arose when men had to confront the imponderable moral and political questions of organized warfare. PETER S. CARMICHAEL IS FLUHRER PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND DIRECTOR OF THE CIVIL WAR INSTITUTE AT GETTYSBURG COLLEGE. HE IS COMPLETING THE WAR FOR THE COMMON SOLDIER, TO BE PUBLISHED AS PART OF THE LITTLEFIELD HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA SERIES FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS.
Voices from the Army of the Potomac, Part 3 BY GARY W. GALLAGHER
valuable testimony about the Army of the Potomac resides in regimental histories published between 1863 and 1866. Written while memories were fresh and usually compiled without expectation of monetary gain, these regimentals commemorated the service of citizen-soldiers with an eye toward distribution among members of the authors’ units and their families. Timing also counted in terms of these books’ value. They provide extensive frsthand evidence from a period when veterans thought about what their service had meant but, because they had returned to civilian life, no longer wrote letters home. Three regimentals in particular convey why accounts from this time period merit attention from students of the Army of the Potomac. David W. Judd’s The Story of the ThirtyThird N. Y. S. Vols: or Two Years Campaigning in Virginia and Maryland (1864) chronicles a two-year regiment raised in the spring of 1861 and eventually assigned to the VI Corps. The title page quotes the familiar northern motto “The Union. Now and Forever,” and Judd, while acknowledging that the war might remove slavery’s “foul stain from our national escutcheon,” identifes the soldiers’ primary purpose as saving the republic. As when
Abraham Lincoln spoke of the United States as the “last best, hope of earth,” Judd afrms: “[W]e owe to ourselves, and the world, whose hopes and progress are identifed with this last and noblest experiment of a free government, to manfully and successfully resist the breaking away of a single thread from the woof of our national….” Judd makes a number of interesting observations about ofcers and campaigns. He blames Fitz John Porter rather than John Pope for the Union defeat at Second Bull Run, describes George B. McClellan’s emotional leave-taking from the army on November 10, 1862, as an “afecting and imposing … spectacle,” and dismisses Joseph Hooker, under whom the regiment sufered its heaviest casualties at Second Fredericksburg, as “the prince of braggarts.” Judd deploys common negative stereotypes when describing the 33rd New York’s encounters with black people, but also deplores how cruelly white southerners treated slaves. Near the end, he quotes the regiment’s chaplain, who addressed the men before they returned to civilian life. “This is not a Democratic war, nor a Republican war,” explained the chaplain, “neither is it a ‘Negro
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B&A
“The war is over. We have the satisfaction of knowing that all we fought for has been gained. The rebellion is suppressed…. The supremacy of National over State authority has been demonstrated by the sword.” CHAPLAIN THOMAS G. MURPHEY, 1ST DELAWARE INFANTRY
Edwin Forbes’ depiction of the “escape” of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia after the Battle of Gettysburg. Shortly after war’s end, Chaplain Thomas G. Murphey wrote of his regiment’s deep disappointment at the result.
among men in the V Corps. Gettysburg fgures prominently in the book. In one of his more hyperbolic passages, Judson exaggerates both the enemy’s strength and the impact of fghting on Little Round Top. “The feld, and the day, and the enemy, too, were ours,” he gushes. “A small brigade of four regiments, scarcely numbering eleven hundred and ffy men, had resisted and hurled back the best part of a division of the enemy’s chosen troops, and had saved the army from rout and perhaps the nation from disgrace.” A few days later, members of the 83rd spoke to wounded Rebel prisoners, who expressed continuing devotion to the Confederacy by declaring “that rather than live under the government of the United States they would live under a King.” Chaplain Thomas G. Murphey wrote most of Four Years in the War. The History of the First Regiment of Delaware Veteran Volunteers … (1866) “on the feld, during active operations of the army.” One of William F. Fox’s “three hundred fghting regiments” (as was the
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“Woodward unequivocally asserts in Marching Masters that not only were most Confederate soldiers fundamentally proslavery, but that slavery shaped every aspect of army life.” —Kenneth Noe
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War BY MICHAEL C.C. ADAMS (JOHNS HOPKINS, 2014)
“The tapestry constructed by Adams is less woven than sewn together; it is a quilt assembled from scraps of anguish, loss, depravity, psychological torment, and human beastliness. In Adams’ hands, the Civil War’s legacy is unmitigated personal horror, societal sufering, and political factionalism.” —Ian Isherwood
Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 BY JAMES CONROY (LYONS PRESS, 2014)
“[W]hat Steven Spielberg so intriguingly introduced to the broad public … in his movie Lincoln has been carried a giant step forward by James Conroy’s gripping and well-researched page turner…. Conroy shows that it is possible to write exciting prose with scholarly integrity intact.” —Harold Holzer
The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America BY DAVID T. GLEESON (UNC PRESS, 2013)
“Gleeson contends that the Civil War fundamentally changed the way Irish immigrants thought of themselves and that this story forces us to reorient our understanding of the Civil War from a national struggle to one with global ramifcations.” —Brian Luskey
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
war,’ nor an ‘Abolition war.’ Let us regard all such appellations as the result of mere party spirit rather than of genuine loyalty. This is the Nation’s war.” Captain Amos M. Judson largely avoids sweeping statements about the war’s purpose in History of the Eighty-Third Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers (1865). Part of the army’s V Corps, the 83rd stood second among all Union regiments in the number of men killed or mortally wounded in combat, and McClellan pronounced it “one of the very best regiments in the army.” The regimental follows the 83rd through many operations, including Gaines’ Mill (the site of its heaviest losses), Malvern Hill, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg (where it fought in Strong Vincent’s brigade on Little Round Top), the Overland Campaign, and Petersburg. Judson’s matter-of-fact tone seldom glosses over Union setbacks. “The campaign before Richmond had proved a failure,” he concludes of the Peninsula and Seven Days campaigns. “For nearly six weeks the army had lain within fve miles of the rebel capital and accomplished nothing. They were now over twenty-fve miles from there; and afer the losses in the Seven Days were in no condition to make another advance.” Like Judd, he evokes the soldiers’ emotion at McClellan’s departure from the army— “the air was rent by long, loud and enthusiastic cheering”— and fnds little to praise about Hooker, remarking that George G. Meade’s elevation to army command “was received with quiet but apparent satisfaction”
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Abraham 83rd Pennsylvania), the 1st Delaware served in the II Corps from the Maryland Campaign of 1862 to the end of the war. Murphey aligns almost perfectly with Judd concerning the war’s major goal. “Our interests and our honor at home and abroad were involved,” he explains, “… republican constitutional government would have been undermined and its fall inevitable, if we had not struggled to establish our nationality.” Murphey relates discussions with Rebel ofcers and soldiers about slaveholding Delaware’s attitude toward emancipation and the employment of black troops by the United States. He describes one Confederate asserting that the Yankee soldiers’ “professed object was to defend the Union and not to abolish slavery. So it is, said I. The proclamation is not directed against slavery but the rebellion, except so far as the former is sustained by the latter.” And Rebels, adds Murphey, also used slaves: “If they had not formally enlisted negroes, they had done and were doing the same thing in efect, for they employed them to drive their teams, haul their rations, and work on their fortifcations, thus relieving their soldiers, and in that way reinforcing their army with fghting men.” Robert E. Lee’s escape afer Gettysburg deeply disappointed men in the regiment, who hoped “the great battle” would yield a more decisive result. “On the morning of the 4th the pursuit of the retreating foe was commenced,” writes Murphey, “and strong hopes were entertained that they could not recross the Potomac. A heavy rain which fell, swelling the river, strengthened these hopes. They had re-crossed it afer the battle of Antietam, but that, it was said, was the fault of the commanding General.” Yet the Rebels did get back to Virginia, and the “disappointment of the loyal people was intense …
many yet wonder why it was permitted, especially with former examples before us. There may be those who know, we do not. Some who censure General McClellan, exculpate General Meade.” As a cleric, Murphey worried about ubiquitous profanity in the regiment but could also fnd humor in it. On one occasion the men, worn out by marching and generally disgruntled, “cursed all who were supposed to be the cause of their hardships. Brigadiers, Major-Generals, Generalin-Chief, the President, Jef. Davis, the Abolitionists, the Secessionsists” and others received a “share of maledictions.” From the ranks, “a wag” grown weary with the level of blaspheming called out: “Why don’t you curse Christopher Columbus for discovering America and be done with it.” The comment “had more efect than would a long lecture on the third commandment in restoring good humor and arresting the profanity.” Murphey closes with a tribute to citizen-soldiers and what they accomplished: “The war is over. We have the satisfaction of knowing that all we fought for has been gained. The rebellion is suppressed…. The supremacy of National over State authority has been demonstrated by the sword.” Beyond those fundamental achievements, “More has been efected by the war than was originally intended:—Slavery is abolished.” Judd and Judson—as well as most Union soldiers—surely would have nodded their agreement. Indeed, Murphey’s fnal observations can be taken as a starting point for understanding the men who flled the ranks of the Army of the Potomac. 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).
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CONTINUED FROM P. 23
the very nature of freedom was being questioned and the bonds of restricted servitude were being broken, and when the unfulflled promise that “all men are created equal” was tentatively held out to an expectant generation of American women who, almost 20 years earlier at Seneca Falls, had
JEAN R. FREEDMAN TEACHES HISTORY AND WOMEN’S STUDIES AT MONTGOMERY COLLEGE.
CASUALTIES OF WAR
BATTLEFIELD ECHOES
trophies of a very small victory culled from a much larger, bloodier defeat.3 Since the turn of the 20th century, multiple renditions of this story have been circulated, each with a varying explanation as to who exactly killed Skaggs and, perhaps more interestingly, who began the process of mutilation. Regardless of storyteller, though, one element remained constant: The tactics of terror so gleefully employed by Larkin Skaggs were turned on him wholesale. By the afernoon of August 21, 1863, the morning’s most exultant hunter had become the hunted. The town’s own carnival of the grotesque had become a macabre kind of therapy. And therein the cogs of irregular violence turned along the Missouri-Kansas border. Death spawned grief; grief necessitated vengeance; and so, as Larkin Skaggs discovered too late, the cycle of violence kept rolling on.
Creek, and several other battles during the Civil War, proved is that when soldiers are more interested in the spoils of war than the fate of the enemy, good tactical judgment and discipline can easily disappear.
CONTINUED FROM P. 27
MATTHEW C. HULBERT IS AN HISTORIAN OF CIVIL WAR MEMORY, GUERRILLA WARFARE, AND FILM; HIS ESSAYS ON THESE SUBJECTS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED BY THE JOURNAL OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA, JOURNAL OF THE WEST, CIVIL WAR HISTORY, AND COMMON-PLACE.
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Ulysses S. Grant at Cold Harbor, June 1864
CONTINUED FROM P. 29
CLAY MOUNTCASTLE, A LIEUTENANT COLONEL IN THE U.S. ARMY, CURRENTLY SERVES AS THE PROFESSOR OF MILITARY SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON IN SEATTLE. HE HOLDS A PH.D. IN HISTORY FROM DUKE UNIVERSITY AND IS THE AUTHOR OF PUNITIVE WAR: CONFEDERATE GUERRILLAS AND UNION REPRISALS (UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KANSAS, 2009).
TEN MILES FROM RICHMOND CONTINUED FROM P. 53
ginia. With the Republican convention so near at hand, he was unusually terse in the notifcation he sent to Washington before the end of the day on June 3. “We assaulted at 4.30 a.m. this morning, driving the enemy within his intrenchments at all points…. Our loss was not severe.” Suspiciously, Grant refused to ask for the customary postbattle truce to recover the wounded trapped between the armies. Tradition dictated that the loser ask for the truce, but Grant was unwilling to make such an admission until 5:30 p.m. on June 7, by which time the Republican convention was already in full swing.30 To his staf, however, Grant freely admitted that he had made a hideous
mistake. “I regret this assault more than any one I have ever ordered … as it has proved, no advantages have been gained sufcient to justify the heavy losses sufered.” He would eventually have to report—as an aggregate of all the casualties from the cavalry fght at the crossroads, the infantry attacks on June 1 and 3, and the skirmishing that followed for the next week—a depressing total of 13,153 killed, wounded, or missing from the Army of the Potomac. Only a third of these actually took place on the fatal morning of June 3. But eventually the futile assaults that morning came to stand for the cluster of battles around Cold Harbor, and the staggering total of over 13,000 fxed itself in the public mind for June 3 alone.31 Cold Harbor would cling to Grant like mud, sealing his image as an unfeeling butcher whose primary strategic metaphor was a meat grinder. For the Army of the Potomac, Cold Harbor would remain a monument to chances lost instead of seized. “It is very interesting to revisit the battlefelds of the war, but I never heard any one who was engaged there express a wish to see Cold Harbor again,” wrote a former VI Corps stafer afer the war. “It remains in memory the Golgotha of American history.”32 ALLEN C. GUELZO IS THE HENRY R. LUCE PROFESSOR OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA AT GETTYSBURG COLLEGE AND THE AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING GETTYSBURG: THE LAST INVASION (2013).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
DISUNION
inscribed their gender onto Thomas Jeferson’s ringing prose. It would be many years before their sisters-in-arms would reap the beneft of their fedgling feminist agitation—in a world where the word “feminist” did not even exist. Like many pioneers, they sowed the seeds that they would not live to see burst into fower.
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A PATCH OF HELL ON EARTH CONTINUED FROM P. 65
own.”26 West of the bloody earthworks, the 52nd Ohio tore up the incline under a storm of lead “pouring down upon our heads [like] the old historic curse from heaven.” Four color-bearers had fallen in the assault (one participant described facing a “plunging fre [that] tears away comrades on lef and right”), but a ffh carried the fag through “sheets of fame” to the earthworks. Tennessean John Beasley reached over the head-log and tried to grab it, but the Ohio fag bearer pulled his pistol and blew the Rebel’s head of.27 As he rallied with the remnants of McCook’s brigade and his surviving Ohioans, one Buckeye called their position “the fnal stand”: Deadly volleys mowed us down. The ground was strewn with the dead and the dying. The living crouched behind the dead comrades.
Soon the only Ohioans at the wall were wounded, dead, or dying. The rest clustered at the abatis, shooting at anything they could.28 The front had proven deadly for infantryman and offcer alike. McCook was gone, and Colonel Oscar Harmon of the 125th Illinois was killed before he realized he was the brigade’s new leader. Command now devolved onto Colonel Caleb Dilworth of the 85th Illinois. Incredibly, Confederate volleys had intensifed when the Consolidated 6th/9th Tennessee arrived from their position on the far lef of the salient and added their muskets to the roar. Their rifes became so hot that shavings from their bullets melted in the barrel grooves. Captain James Hall of the 6th/9th showed his boys how to reverse their guns to permit the melted lead to drain onto the ground. Problem solved, the Tennesseans resumed their faying of McCook’s shattered brigade. Lieutenant Colonel Allen Fahnestock of the 86th Illinois had spent the entire assault cajoling his men, reforming their ranks, and trying all he could to somehow get his troops over the wall. However, when Rebel fre halted the 52nd Ohio’s thrust among the piles of the broken and the bleeding, he sought out Dilworth for instructions. “I told him we could not retreat and I did not now feel willing to surrender,” recalled Fahnestock, and Dilworth agreed. They made their choice. Word soon circulated to the survivors: Fall back under the crest of the hill and dig in.29 And so McCook’s survivors dug, at some points just 30 feet from the apex of the salient, using their powder-stained hands and whatever tools they could scrounge to fashion their own bastion. They found a bare veneer of safety here, for the Rebs in line on the crest of the hill couldn’t see the Yanks at the bottom; the Confederate engineering mistake of 10 days before came back to haunt them. The bluecoats occupied a safe zone—as they would call it, the Dead Angle— and burrowed into the ground for the remainder of the day. Their right arced back to Mitchell’s new ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76
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A PATCH OF HELL ON EARTH CONTINUED FROM P. 75
works, and their lef snaked back into the woods north of the pasture. Eventually, entrenching tools were carted to the front. The walls became higher, the trenches deeper, and a terrible game of cat and mouse developed at a range so close few could recall its equal. Wounded Federals who couldn’t fall back lay in no-man’sland pondering their fate, crying out for water. Some surrendered and went over the wall and of to southern hospitals. Others waited through an afernoon of heat and hell to crawl back to safety under night’s cover. Many simply bled to death. Meanwhile, inside the salient, Sam Watkins observed: I never saw so many broken down and exhausted men in my life. I was as sick as a horse, and as wet with blood and sweat as I could be, and many of our men were vomiting with excessive fatigue, over-exhaustion, and sunstroke; our tongues were parched and cracked for water… and our dead and wounded were piled indiscriminately in the trenches.
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Watkins’ right arm was covered with bruises and “sore as a blister.” He calculated he shot his rife more than 100 times during the battle and easily killed more Yankees than on any other day in his war. “It was verily,” he said, “a life and death struggle.”30 ★
Living Hell The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C. C. Adams “In Adams’ hands, the Civil War’s legacy is unmitigated personal horror, societal sufering, and political factionalism . . . Living Hell engagingly opens up the ‘dark side’ of the Civil War to comparative scrutiny with other modern wars.”—Civil War Monitor “Adams sees the Civil War for what it was, and not how we like to imagine it. . . . Living Hell brilliantly recovers the terrifed voices of men who were emotionally torn and twisted by combat. This is a compelling and important book that forces us to think deeply about how we ‘celebrate’ the heroism of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb.” —Peter S. Carmichael, Gettysburg College “Provides a vital gut-wrenching counterpoint to the Civil War’s glamorization in America’s collective memory, a perspective as important to understanding the war as any political history or general’s biography . . . Those with the fortitude to endure its darkest moments will fnd it fascinating.”—Shelf Awareness
sherman’s other attacks that day along the Kennesaw line failed equally, although McCook’s men bragged that they occupied the line of their farthest advance. Two days later, a truce was called to bury the putrefying Federal corpses between the lines, and then the soldiers returned to the trenches to resume the sniping and the killing. At the base of the Dead Angle, the Yanks began burrowing a mine into Cheatham Hill in an attempt to blow the position up; what they couldn’t capture by assault they would now destroy by subterfuge. But on July 2, just fve days afer the battle, it all became meaningless. Fearing again for his lef fank, Joe Johnson pulled his army out of its Kennesaw fortress and retreated to the Chattahoochee River. The soldiers would never forget the fght at the Dead Angle. One northerner called it “our Golgotha and Waterloo,” while Sam Watkins thought his Tennesseans earned there “a wreath of imperishable fame.” Ironically, neither Sherman nor Johnston wrote much about the battles of June 27. In his memoirs, Sherman admitted Thomas’ assault remained the hardest fought of the campaign north of the Chattahoochee, but he spent less than a paragraph describing it. Johnston’s recollection proved more expansive but considerably less than extensive; he mistook Vaughan’s brigade as Cheatham’s reserve and thought their casualties high because they fought “unprotected by intrenchments.” Amid backtalk of incompetence and needless slaughter, Colonel Dan McCook framed the attack most succinctly.
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In Nashville recuperating from his wound, he claimed that if he and Harmon hadn’t been shot, they would have needed only 15 more minutes to breach the Rebel position. Perhaps.31 On July 16, 1864, at his brother’s house in Steubenville, Ohio, Dan McCook received a brigadier’s star. By one account, he declined the honor, saying it had come too late. The next day, with Sherman just a few miles from Atlanta and John Bell Hood the new commander of the Army of Tennessee, McCook died.
Epilogue
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
★
Near the gnarled oak, the old soldier noticed the opening to the mine. It appeared as solid as the day it was gouged out of the ground 33 years before, and as he squinted into its emptiness he thought of the poor nameless Yank who had crabbed into its recesses on knees and elbows, grasping a small candle to light the way. From a local farmer the Ohioan learned that many veterans came here to do what he did: climb nearby Kennesaw Mountain, walk the battlefelds, putter about the earthworks, and stare into the darkness of the mine. He told the farmer the land should be preserved so that future generations could come to this peculiarly innocent place and perhaps
Guns on Cheatham Hill, Kennesaw Mountain battlefeld, Georgia
understand what had happened here. The farmer—who happened to own the land—agreed. Of course, the soldier already knew the history. He was James T. Holmes, a major in the 52nd Ohio on the day McCook’s brigade charged Cheatham Hill. On June 27, 1864, he had crossed the valley, climbed the slope, and somehow survived the carnage along the crest. He would march with the regiment to the end of the war, then return to Ohio to marry and build a life. Today, he had brought his wife to see the place where armies
gathered and battle erupted. As he stood awash in memories, he absently scanned the ground. Something caught his eye: a bullet half hidden in the Georgia dirt. He bent down, picked it up, and put it in his pocket to take back home.32 PATRICK BRENNAN, A MEMBER OF THE MONITOR’S EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD, IS THE AUTHOR OF SECESSIONVILLE: ASSAULT ON CHARLESTON (1996). A MUSIC PRODUCER BASED IN CHICAGO, HE HAS COWRITTEN TWO MAJOR TELEVISION WORKS, FIELDS OF FIRE: THE CIVIL WAR IN 3D FOR DISCOVERY/SONY (2011) AND INSIDE WORLD WAR II FOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC (2012), AS WELL AS THE MUSIC FOR OVER 250 BROADCAST DOCUMENTARIES.
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4
Russell Weigley, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865 (Bloomington, 2000), 377.
5
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 780.
6
James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (New York, 1997), 402.
TEN MILES FROM RICHMOND (Pages 44-53, 74) 1
CASUALTIES OF WAR (Pages 26-27, 74)
J. M. Henry, September 24, 1915, “Account of Eye Witness,” Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, 2.
2
Henry, “Account of Eye Witness,” 2-3; William E. Connelley, Quantrill and the Border Wars (Cedar Rapids, IA, 1909), 104, 127-128.
3
Account of C. M. Chase reprinted in Connelley, Quantrill and the Border Wars, 382.
BATTLEFIELD ECHOES (Pages 28-29, 74) 1
As quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 778.
3
As quoted in Paul Andrew Hutton, “Paladin of the Republic: Philip H. Sheridan,” in With my Face to the Enemy: Perspectives on the Civil War, Robert Cowley, ed. (New York, 2001), 355-356.
9
Robert Stiles, Four Years Under Marse Robert (New York, 1910), 274; Noah Andre Trudeau, Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May-June 1864 (Boston, 1989), 266267; Louis J. Baltz, The Battle of Cold Harbor, May 27-June 13, 1864 (Lynchburg, VA, 1994), 74-79.
Meade to M.S. Meade (June 5, 1864), in The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, ed. George Meade Jr. (New York, 1913), 2:201; E.M. Stanton to John A. Dix (May 11, 1864), in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Ofcial Records of the Union and Confederate Armies 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, Vol. 37 (pt 1): 427 (hereafter cited as OR); Ernest B. Furgurson, Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864 (New York, 2001), 42; Dana to Stanton (May 30, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 83.
11 Meade to Smith (June 1, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 999; Haynes, History of the Tenth Regiment, Vermont Volunteers, 78. 12 John Hill Wheeler, Reminiscences and Memoirs of North Carolina and Eminent North Carolinians (Columbus, OH, 1884), 73; Thomas L. Clingman, “Second Cold Harbor,” in Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War 1861-65, ed. Walter Clark (Goldsboro, NC, 1901), 5:199; “Report of Brig. Gen. Emory Upton, U.S. Army” (September 1, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 671.
2
John C. Ropes, “Grant’s Campaign in Virginia in 1864” (May 19, 1884), in Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts (1905; reprint, Wilmington, NC, 1989), 4:373; Gordon C. Rhea, Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26-June 3, 1864 (Baton Rouge, 2002), 16.
3
Thomas Livermore, “Grant’s Campaign Against Lee” (November 14, 1887), in Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, 4:451
13 William Kreutzer, Notes and Observations Made During Four Years of Service with the Ninety-Eighth N.Y. Volunteers in the War of 1861 (Philadelphia, 1878), 199; S. Millett Thompson, Thirteenth Regiment of New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion (Boston, 1888), 340; “Reports of Maj. Gen. William F. Smith, U.S. Army” (August 9, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 1000; Abijah Perkins Marvin, History of Worcester in the War of the Rebellion (Worcester, MA, 1870), 260.
4
Robert McAllister to Ellen McAllister (June 4 and 6, 1864), in The Civil War Letters of General Robert McAllister, ed. J.I. Robertson (New Brunswick, NJ, 1965), 433, 434.
14 Richard W. Smith, The Old Nineteenth: The Story of the Second Connecticut Heavy Artillery in the Civil War (Lincoln, NE, 2007), 107, 110-111.
5
E.M. Haynes, A History of the Tenth Regiment, Vermont Volunteer (Lewiston, ME, 1870), 78; John C. Ropes, “The Battle of Cold Harbor” (February 12, 1883), in Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, 4:344.
6
Captain Charles H. Porter [39th Massachusetts], “The Battle of Cold Harbor” (December 12, 1881), in Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, 4:322; Grant to Halleck (May 26, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36 (pt 1): 9.
15 History of Litchfeld County, Connecticut: with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of its Prominent men and Pioneers (Philadelphia, 1881), 59; Theodore Vaill, History of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery, Originally the Nineteenth Connecticut Vols. (Winsted, CT, 1868), 62-63; Isaac Oliver Best, History of the 121st New York State Infantry (Chicago, 1921), 155-156.
Ulysses S. Grant to Henry Halleck, August 1, 1864, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York, 1982), 469.
2
Porter, “The Battle of Cold Harbor,” 324; Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York, 1897), 172.
10 Haynes, History of the Tenth Regiment, Vermont Volunteers, 79; Thomas W. Hyde, Following the Greek Cross: Or, Memories of the Sixth Army Corps (Boston, 1894), 210; Dana to Stanton (June 1, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36 (pt 1): 85-86; Asa W. Bartlett, History of the Twelfth Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion (Concord, NH, 1897), 200; Porter, “The Battle of Cold Harbor,” 328.
SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
1
Furgurson, Not War But Murder, 76-77. 8
7
Charles Henry Hartshorne, Salopia Antiqua or an Enquiry from Personal Survey into the ‘Druidical,’ Military, and Other Early Remains in Shropshire and the North Welsh Borders (London, 1841), 253-258; “A History of the College of Arms,” Eclectic Review 2 (April 1806): 304; John Stowe, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, Borough of Southwark, and Parts Adjacent (London, 1735), 904;
16 Clingman, “Second Cold Harbor,” in Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina, 5:201-202; Vaill, History of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery, 63; Upton to Maria Upton (June 5, 1864), in Peter Michie, The Life and Letters of Emory Upton, Colonel of the Fourth Regiment of Artillery, and Brevet Major-General, U.S. Army (New York, 1885), 109. 17 Haynes, History of the Tenth Regiment, Vermont Volunteers, 80; Porter, “The Battle of
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Commencement to the Close of the War, 18611865 (New York, 1882), 487; Bartlett, History of the Twelfth Regiment, 204; Smith, “The Eighteenth Corps at Cold Harbor,” in Battles & Leaders, 4:227.
Cold Harbor,” 330. 18 “Reports of Maj. Gen. Winfeld S. Hancock, U.S. Army” (September 21, 1865) and “Report of Capt. James Fleming, Twenty-Eighth Massachusetts Infantry” in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 344, 390; Porter, Campaigning With Grant, 173; Lyman, “Operations of the Army of the Potomac, June 5-15, 1864” (January 9, 1882), in Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts: Petersburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (1906; reprint, Wilmington, NC, 1989), 5:11; Wiliam P. Derby, Bearing Arms in the Twenty-Seventh Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteers (Boston, 1883), 301; Dana also mentions the “deluge of rain” in the afternoon to Stanton (June 2, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 87. 19 Stiles, Four Years With Marse Robert, 276; Porter, “The Battle of Cold Harbor,” 331. 20 Porter, Campaigning with Grant, 174-175. 21 John D. Billings, The History of the Tenth Massachusetts Battery of Light Artillery in the War of the Rebellion (Boston, 1909), 261-262; Porter, “The Battle of Cold Harbor,” 333-34. 22 “The War News – Heavy Fighting All Along the Lines,” Richmond Daily Dispatch (June 4, 1864); Porter, “The Battle of Cold Harbor,” 334; Ropes, “The Battle of Cold Harbor,” 355; “Report of Maj. James E. Larkin, Fifth New Hampshire Infantry” (August 9, 1864) and “Report of Brig. Gen. John R. Brooke” (November 1, 1865), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 376, 414; Rhea, Cold Harbor, 320-323. 23 “Report of Maj. John Byrne, One Hundred and Fifty-ffth New York Infantry” (August 7, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 463; St. Clair Mulholland, The Story of the 116th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion (Philadelphia, 1903), 255.
29 Grant to Meade (June 3, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 3): 526; “Report of Capt. Edwin B. Dow, Sixth Maine Battery” (August 7, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 515. 30 “Reports of Lieut. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, U.S. Army” (June 3, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36 (pt. 1): 11; Ropes, “The Battle of Cold Harbor,” 361. 31 Porter, Campaigning With Grant, 179; Walter Taylor to Elizabeth Saunders (June 9, 1864), in Lee’s Adjutant: The Wartime Letters of Colonel Walter Herron Taylor, 1862-1865, ed. R.L. Turner (Columbia, SC, 1995), 167. Casualties for all the fghting on June 3 have been estimated at 4,500, with the morning assaults costing 3,500. Hancock originally estimated that the II Corps lost 3,024, but the actual total was probably closer to 2,500, with the VI Corps losing another 600 and the XVIII Corps around 1,500. By contrast, the Army of Northern Virginia sufered only about 700 casualties; overall Confederate casualties for the entire two weeks of action around Cold Harbor amounted to less than 5,300. See “Report of Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, U.S. Army” (November 1, 1864) and “Reports of Maj. Gen. Winfeld S. Hancock, U.S. Army” (September 21, 1865), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 195, 345; Rhea, Cold Harbor, 358362; Alfred C. Young, Lee’s Army During the Overland Campaign: A Numerical Study (Baton Rouge, 2013), 240. 32 Hyde, Following the Greek Cross, 214.
26 Pinckney D. Bowles, “The 25th Mass. Vols. at Cold Harbor,” in William Andrew Emerson, Fitchburg, Massachusetts, Past and Present (Fitchburg, MA, 1887), 135; Law, “From the Wilderness to Cold Harbor,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, eds. R.U. Johnson & C.C. Buel (New York, 1884-88), 4:141; Oates, The War Between the Union and the Confederacy, 366-367.
Re-Union of Col. Dan McCook’s Third Brigade, Second Division, Fourteenth A.C., Army of the Cumberland (Chicago, 1900), 84; Holmes, 52nd O.V.I., 178; Allen L. Fahnestock Journal, KMNBPL; Robert M. Rogers, The 125th Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry (Champaign, IL, 1882), 91.
7
James L.W. Blair, “The Fight at Dead Angle” Confederate Veteran, Vol. XII, 532.
8
Ibid.
9
Payne, History of the 34th Regiment, 128.
10 Holmes, 52nd O.V.I., 178. 11 Earl J. Hess, Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign (Chapel Hill, 2013), 129; F.W. McAdams, Everyday Soldier Life, or A History of the One Hundred and Thirteenth Ohio Volunteer Infantry (Columbus, OH, 1884), 343; Payne, History of the 34th Regiment, 532. 12 Rogers, The 125th Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry, 91-92; Richard A. Baumgartner, Kennesaw Mountain, June 1864 (Huntington, WV, 1998), 152. 13 Fahnestock Journal, KMNBPL; Baumgartner, Kennesaw Mountain, 152. 14 Hess, Kennesaw Mountain, 120-121. 15 Baumgartner, Kennesaw Mountain, 144-145. 16 William J. Worsham, The Old Nineteenth Tennessee (Knoxville, 1902), 121. 17 OR, Series 1, Vol. 38, Part 1, 703; Worsham, The Old Nineteenth Tennessee, 121. 18 Baumgartner, Kennesaw Mountain, 149. 19 Sam R. Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment, or A Side Show of the Big Show (Chattanooga, 1900; reprint edition, Wilmington, NC, 1987), 157.
24 Frank Wilkeson, Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac (New York, 1887), 128-133; Charles Francis Atkinson, Grant’s Campaigns of 1864 and 1865 (London, 1908), 453; Rhea, Cold Harbor, 335-336. 25 “Report of Maj. Hiram B. Crosby, Twenty-frst Connecticut Infantry” (June 12, 1864), in OR, Series I, Vol. 36(pt 1): 1013; McClendon, Recollections of War Times, 211; Bartlett, History of the Twelfth Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers, 203; William C. Oates, The War Between the Union and the Confederacy, and Its Lost Opportunities (New York, 1905), 366-367.
Infantry (Clinton, IA, 1903), 127. 6
20 Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 157; Re-Union of Col. Dan McCook’s Third Brigade, 121. 21 Re-Union of Col. Dan McCook’s Third Brigade, 40. 22 Hess, Kennesaw Mountain, 132.
A PATCH OF HELL ON EARTH (Pages 54-65, 75-77) 1
J.T. Holmes, 52nd O.V.I. Then and Now (Columbus, OH, 1898), 176-201.
2
United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Ofcial Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, Vol. 38, Part 1, 68 (hereinafter cited as OR).
3
John M. Palmer, Personal Recollections of John M. Palmer (Cincinnati, 1901), 205; Oliver O. Howard, Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard (New York, 1907), 582.
27 The Story of the Twenty-frst Regiment, Connecticut Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, 1861-1865 (Middletown, CT, 1900), 243244.
4
28 William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac: A Critical History of Operations in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania from the
Frank Chester Diary, Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefeld Park Library (KMNBPL), Kennesaw, Georgia.
5
Holmes, 52nd O.V.I., 198; Edwin W. Payne, History of the 34th Regiment of Illinois Volunteer
23 Holmes, 52nd O.V.I., 182-183. 24 Re-Union of Col. Dan McCook’s Third Brigade, 103-104, 121-122. 25 Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 158-159. 26 Ibid. 27 Nixon B. Steward, Dan McCook’s Regiment, 52nd O.V.I. (1900), 117-118. 28 Ibid., 119. 29 Fahnestock Journal, KMNBPL. 30 Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 159. 31 Re-Union of Col. Dan McCook’s Third Brigade, 35; Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” 158; Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations (New York, 1874; reprint edition, Bloomington, IN, 1959), 343. 32 Holmes, 52nd O.V.I., 176-201.
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pa r t i n g shot
Smoke ’em if You Got ’em civil war soldiers passed their free time in a variety of ways, from writing letters and reading to playing music
and gambling, as Union veteran John Billings noted. He also observed that men not interested in such pursuits opted for a popular alternative: “the proverbial soldier’s pastime of smoking.” Tobacco was “their omnipresent companion,” Billings wrote, “and seemed to make up to them in sociability for whatsoever they lacked of entertainment in other directions.” As today, many became reliant on the nicotine-rich plant. “The average soldier,” observed a Wisconsin private, “can bear cold, heat, hunger, thirst, forced marches and lost sleep with comparative cheerfulness, but when he is out of tobacco he is ‘cross as a bear.’” Or, as another Union soldier wrote to his father, “I am sorry you object to my smoking. I don’t think I could give it up now; it is one of the greatest comforts I have.”
LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION OF CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHS, LIBRARY RARY OF CONGRESS
The Union soldiers pictured here seem to have been among those with a special afection for a good smoke, having their likenesses taken while indulging in one. Why they decided to strike this unusual pose is anyone’s guess.
SOURCES: JOHN D. BILLINGS, HARDTACK AND COFFEE (1888); JAMES I. ROBERTSON JR., SOLDIERS BLUE AND GRAY (1988); WARREN FREEMAN, LETTERS FROM TWO BROTHERS ... (1871).
80 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2014
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