Issue 9

IRONCLADS IN ACTION P. 22 HELL HATH NO FURY P. 58 VOL. 3, NO. 3

{ 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 }

Why I Fight The weight of a gun.

The roar of cannon.

The sight of a line of men coming toward you.

The love of history—and wanting to honor it.

A REENACTOR’S STORY

FALL 2013

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who

Contents DEPARTMENTS

VOLUME 3, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2013

FEATURES

Salvo

28

WHY I FIGHT

Why reenact the Civil War? One devotee of the hobby explains its multifaceted and enduring appeal.

{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}

BY MATT DELLINGER

TRAVELS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 A Visit to Chickamauga

PRIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 The Other Medical Kit

VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Soldiers’ Pets

PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

AN ACT OF WAR 40

DISUNION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Napoleon Perkins Loses His Leg

Exclusive, behind-the-scenes images from the Blue Gray Alliance 150th Gettysburg Reenactment

IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JONATHAN KOZOWYK

Simpson and Stewardship

Ironclads in Action

Columns CASUALTIES OF WAR . . . . . . . . 24 Henry Lord Page King

BATTLEFIELD ECHOES . . . . . . 26 Sherman’s Mississippi Raid

Books & Authors VOICES FROM THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

THE PURITAN & THE CAVALIER 50 Opposites in appearance and demeanor, Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart nonetheless forged a deep and abiding wartime friendship.

BY JEFFRY D. WERT

BY GARY W. GALLAGHER

MEMOIRS: THE ULTIMATE CONFEDERATE PRIMARY SOURCES . . . . . . . . . . .72

Hell Hath No Fury 58

In Every Issue

Even as their husbands and brothers turned to reconciliation in the decades following the Civil War, northern and southern women were far less willing to let bygones be bygones.

BY ROBERT K. KRICK

EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Past Is Present

PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 The Rail-Splitter’s Right Hand

BY CAROLINE E. JANNEY

ON THE COVER: Author Matt Dellinger

at a recent reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. Photograph

by Jonathan Kozowyk

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EDITORIAL VOLUME 3, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2013

E DI TO R - I N - C H I E F

Terry A. Johnston Jr.

TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

C O N T RI B U T I N G E DI TO RS

Past Is Present IT SEEMED LIKE A DUBIOUS idea at first: Devoting the cover story of our last issue—our 150th Gettysburg anniversary special edition, no less—to the modern-day struggles of the buffs, diehards, and historians who spend years, even decades, trying to become Gettysburg licensed battlefield guides. Frankly, we didn’t know if readers would appreciate seeing a piece set in the present day in a history magazine. Well, given your responses to the article, “Badge of Honor,” and to the special issue as a whole (see “Dispatches,” on page 4, for a sampling of the feedback), it was a good thing we put those initial fears aside.

In the end, we decided that inviting the present into a Civil War history magazine might offer a bit of fresh air, a chance to mine interesting and important topics that aren’t normally explored in such publications. (We do it again with this issue’s cover story, “Why I Fight,” about Civil War reenacting.) Or, as one of our close friends and advisors put it, “If the Civil War exists only in the past, we feel like antiquarians. If we remember how many people care about it and teach it and write books about it in the present—if we study its quirky contemporary cultural back roads, it is invigorating and fresh.”

While the present day won’t be so prominent in every issue, you will see it from time to time. After all, keeping history fresh is a good thing. *

*

*

On a related note, I’m sad to report that Clyde Bell (pictured above), the supervisory park ranger who oversaw Gettysburg’s licensed battlefield guide test last October and for 17 years before that, passed away unexpectedly in June. He was 61. I regret not getting the chance to thank him for his invaluable assistance over the several months the article came together. In truth, we couldn’t have done it without him. Our condolences to his family, friends, and many admirers.

E DI TO RI A L A DV I S O RS

B O O K RE V I E W E DI TO R

Laura June Davis Angela Esco Elder David Thomson Robert Poister Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor Matthew C. Hulbert

MATT@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

C O PY E DI TO R

Jennifer Sturak

C RE AT I V E DI REC TO R

Patrick Mitchell

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A DV E RT I S I N G DI REC TO R

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Howard White

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DIGITAL HISTORY ADVISORS

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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.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAUDIO VASQUEZ

8/21/13 10:31 PM

CivWarM

Every Sat. 8 am – Mon. 8 am ET Watch American History TV every weekend for 48 hours of people and events that help document the American story.

Weekly Programming on the Civil War Sat. 6 pm, 10 pm; Sun. 11 am ET As the country marks the 150 th anniversary of the Civil War, we bring you debates and interviews about the events and people who shaped the era.

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D I S PAT C H E S

other civilian casualties were: T. Duncan Carson (wounded); Jacob W. Gilbert (wounded); Frederick A. Lehman (wounded); Robert F. McIlhenny (wounded); Georgianna Stauffer (wounded); and Amos Whetstone (wounded).

Gettysburg Special Issue

Can you get any better than this?

I just purchased the 150th Gettysburg anniversary special issue [Vol. 3, No. 2]. Wow, what an incredible issue! This is by far the best one yet.

* * *

Charles Fraley VIA EMAIL

* * * I subscribe to four Civil War magazines and read a fifth publication. And I was totally astounded by the most recent issue of The Civil War Monitor! Each article was well written and superbly researched.

I was especially interested in the lead article, “Badge of Honor”

by Jenny Johnston. I’m an annual Gettysburg visitor, and a few years ago I treated myself to the services of a licensed battlefield guide. Her name was Suzanne and she gave me so much more information and insight than I could have gleaned on my own.

Her story of being a young college coed at the 1938 Gettysburg reunion and the impact and excitement of being with the veterans was a truly interesting story to me.

Thank you for another outstanding edition.

Jim Munyer A L B E RT L E A , M I N N E S OTA

charter subscriber and can’t wait for the next issue!

Bob Conklin VIA EMAIL

* * * In your 150th Gettysburg anniversary special, you mention [in “Figures: Gettysburg by the Numbers”] two women and six civilian men killed or wounded during the battle. I only know of Jennie Wade (killed) and John Burns (wounded). Who else?

* * * I just received my copy of your summer Gettysburg special issue.

You put together an amazing, informative, and unique publication about the War of the Rebellion! Thanks very much! I am a

Ron Lasher R O C KY R I V E R , O H I O

We asked historian Allen C. Guelzo, who contributed this factoid, for the answer. Besides Wade (killed) and Burns (wounded), the ED.

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.

A mistake was made in your summer 2013 issue. In the photo of veterans gathered at Gettysburg for the battle’s 25th anniversary [“In Focus: Reunion on Little Round Top”], you misidentify former Union general John Hartranft. Hartranft is not the man you’ve marked with the number 5; rather, he is in the second row of veterans between James Longstreet (#1) and Daniel Sickles (#3).

I wrote a chapter in my book, Soldiers to Governors, about Hartranft, and I am sure that I am correct.

Richard C. Saylor P E N N S Y LVA N I A STAT E ARCHIVES

We brought your letter to the attention of William Howard, who submitted the photo and the story.

After a reexamination, he responded: “Mr. Saylor is correct. The labeling on the original photograph misidentified General Hartranft.

Saylor’s eagle eye has correctly identified Hartranft as standing E D.

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between Generals Longstreet and Sickles.” Good eye indeed, Richard. Thanks for helping set the record straight.

War & Whiskey

I enjoyed your recent feature about whiskey [“Voices: War & Whiskey,” Vol. 2, No. 3], which reminded me of a letter in one of our collections here at Southern Illinois University’s Morris Library, where I’m a research specialist. It’s by a soldier in the 31st Illinois, Joseph Skipworth, who wrote his wife the following lines on December 30, 1864, from Savannah, Georgia: “Well I must not forget to mention about Christmas. I had a small spree. Whiskey is cheap onley ten dollars a canteen. You may judge what kind of a spree it was. There was eight of us got hi on the one canteen of Whiskey.”

I hope you keep up the good work and don’t focus too much on battles and tactics—the most interesting history is in the everyday lives of the soldier and the family back home.

most enduring) military conflict. The recent article on the existence of enslaved Africans in Confederate camps [“Confederate Like Me,” Vol. 3, No. 1] is extremely pertinent in understanding the dynamic of American slavery and in confronting the myriad myths surrounding the history many Americans continue to disregard.

While the article was enlightening on the issue of enslaved Africans who were wartime “body servants,” it presented a rather narrow view of the panoply of roles in which the enslaved were critical to the Rebel war effort. For instance, the impressment of slaves, authorized throughout the Confederacy in 1862, sent countless men to construct earthworks at various strategic locations. As a research historian I have lectured on this topic and I am continuing my examination into these activities in the Appalachian counties of southwestern Virginia. I hope to see further scholarship on the use of slave labor in the Confederacy in your magazine.

The History Press Civil War Sesquicentennial Series offers thoroughly researched, accessible accounts of the war rarely covered outside the academic realm. Explore a range of topics from influential but lesser-known battles and campaigns to the local and regional impact of the war’s figures—whether celebrated generals or common soldiers. Each book is crafted in a way that Civil War enthusiasts and casual readers alike will enjoy.

John H. Whitfield VIA EMAIL

Aaron Lisec C A R B O N DA L E , I L L I N O I S

The Bogans Confederate Like Me

Your magazine continues to address the salient topics regarding America’s most significant (some might say

I’ve been researching West Bogan— the slave who killed his master, Monroe Bogan, near Helena, Arkansas, in December 1863—for several months. Seeing Amy Murrell Taylor’s splendid piece about these men [“Casualties of War: Monroe Bogan,” Vol. 3, No. 1] was like finding gold. Taylor deftly drafts the crux of a dichotomous story while breathing life into both of these extreme characters. Thank you for a wonderful article and publication.

John Lovett H OT S P R I N G S, A R KA N SAS

ACCESS OUR ENTIRE C I V I L W A R C ATA LO G U E O N L I N E AT W W W . H I S TO RY P R E S S . N E T OR CALL

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S A LVO S A LV O

{ 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 Alfred R. Waud drawing, a line of Confederate troops advances toward a Union position during the Battle of Chickamauga (September 19-20, 1863).

FOR MORE ON CHICKAMAUGA, TURN THE PAGE.

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IN THIS SECTION Travels

A VISIT TO CHICKAMAUGA . . . . . . . 8 Primer

THE OTHER MEDICAL KIT . . . . . . 12 Voices

SOLDIERS’ PETS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Preservation

SIMPSON AND STEWARDSHIP . . 18 Disunion

NAPOLEON PERKINS LOSES HIS LEG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 In Focus

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

IRONCLADS IN ACTION . . . . . . . . 22

7 DRAWING BY ALFRED R. WAUD

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T R AV E L S

Destination: Chickamauga IN SEPTEMBER 1863, AT CHICKAMAUGA, Georgia, the Union’s Army of the Cumberland under Major General William S. Rosecrans suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of Confederate forces commanded by General Braxton Bragg. Rosecrans, fresh on the heels of capturing the key rail hub and manufacturing center of Chattanooga, Tennessee, had pursued Bragg’s retreating Rebels into northwest Georgia. Bragg, determined to take back the vital city and reinforced by newly arrived infantry divisions from Virginia under General James Longstreet, launched a series of attacks against Rosecrans. On September 20, the Battle of Chickamauga’s second and final day, only the resolute stand of Major General George H. Thomas on a piece of the battlefield known as Horseshoe THE EXPERTS

Downtown Chickamauga

SAM ELLIOTT has

Ridge helped save the Union army from complete destruction.

Interested in visiting Chickamauga? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted a couple of experts—individuals who are intimately familiar with the historic town—to offer their personal suggestions for what to see and do.

as the Civil War-era Crutchfield House. | D.P. | For convenience, either the Best Western or Super 8 in Fort Oglethorpe can’t be beat.

Both boast clean rooms, reasonable accommodations, and are within a mile of the battlefield park’s visitors center.

BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY

BEST SLEEP

| S.E. | While the Best Western Battlefield Inn is close to the Chickamauga battlefield, I recommend staying in nearby Chattanooga at the Sheraton Read House, located on the same site

| S.E. | Open on weekends in May, September, and October, as well as every day in the summer, Lake Winnepesaukah is a classic amusement park with rides and activities for every age. On the lake itself, giant carp love to

practiced law in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for over 30 years. Previously the president of the Friends of the ChickamaugaChattanooga National Military Park, he is the chairman of the Tennessee Historical Commission.

DAVID A. POWELL

has published numerous articles and several books about the Civil War, most recently Failure in the Saddle: Nathan Bedford Forrest, Joe Wheeler, and the Confederate Cavalry in the Chickamauga Campaign (2011).

eat popcorn thrown by guests.

In 2013, SoakYa Water Park was added. | D.P. | The Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum is great, and offers rides on authentic steam trains on Saturdays. The trains stop in the town of Chickamauga, just a block from the famous Crawfish Spring and the Gordon-Lee Mansion, which served as both Union headquarters and a hospital during the battle. On the way back they stop at Wilder Tower, the 85-foot-tall monument erected in honor of Union colonel John T. Wilder and his men, which offers visitors an excellent view of the battlefield.

These excursions run May through September, and are a great way to experience the local atmosphere.

BEST TIME TO BE HERE

| S.E. | The battlefield park is so big and diverse that any time of the year there is fun. Every March, however, National Park Service historian Jim Ogden and author and historian Dave Powell conduct their “Seminar in the Woods,” during which participants study discrete actions and/ or units at Chickamauga. The temperature is likely to be reasonably warm, yet the leaves have not come out, allowing a good appreciation of the topography. | D.P. | For me, it’s September. The weather tends to be just about perfect in north Georgia—warm and sunny during the day but cool at night—and the park always holds commemorative walks and

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIM REDMAN

8/20/13 3:03 PM

Clockwise, from above: The view from the front porch of the Gordon-Lee Mansion; an interior shot of the Chickamauga Battlefield Visitors Center; a monument on Horseshoe Ridge; Wilder Tower; and Snodgrass Hill.

tours on the field around the anniversary of the battle.

CAN’T MISS

| S.E. | McLemore’s Cove is a valley at the southern end of Chickamauga Creek, walled in by Lookout Mountain to the west and Pigeon Mountain to the south and east, a few miles south of the battlefield. On September 10, 1863, Bragg’s officers failed to execute a plan to destroy the lead division of Thomas’ XIV Corps.

To this day, it’s considered one of the Army of Tennessee’s great missed opportunities. | D.P. | Surprisingly, many people don’t walk out to what was the very end of the Union line on Horseshoe Ridge, where the battle finally ended on September 20, 1863. The terrain is just hilly and wooded enough to prevent many visitors from realizing that the line continues well past where they thought it ended. I always urge people to find the

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T R AV E L S

monuments to Battery M, 1st Illinois Light Artillery, and the 96th Illinois Infantry; then at least you’ll know you’ve found the Union right flank.

BEST OF THE BATTLEFIELD

| S.E. | Depends on the time of year.

In the summer, I enjoy Snodgrass Hill and the adjacent complex of hills because of their relative accessibility and their importance to the battle. From late fall to early spring, I like to hike the trails on the less-accessible eastern side of the park, where most of the fighting occurred on September 19, 1863. Even after almost 30 years of studying the park, I can still find markers and monuments out there that I’ve never seen. | D.P. | The monument denoting the location where the 5th U.S. Artillery’s Battery H was unexpectedly captured by Edward C. Walthall’s Mississippi Brigade helps explain the great sense of confusion experienced by combatants and modern-day visitors alike (much of the fighting was in the woods, with units moving in various and surprising directions). This spot is out on the first day’s battlefield, also deep in the woods, accessible from either the Brotherton or Reeds Bridge roads about 400 yards west of Jay’s Mill. It is always quiet and shaded, with guns standing mutely along the low ridge marking the action. Whenever I walk out to it, it always seems to appear unexpectedly from the surrounding timber.

Fort Oglethorpe, which takes its name from the home base of the 6th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, located there until the mid-20th century. Known locally as the Post, the area is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

It includes the old parade ground, officers’ homes, and a museum with artifacts, uniforms, weapons, accoutrements, photos, and period vehicles. | D.P. | A boat trip up into the gorge of the Tennessee River is always a treat. Ten thousand years of human history—and several hundred million years of geologic history—are observable from the

Bailey’s Bar-BQue’s Patsy Martin is ready to take an order.

CHICKAMAUGA NAVIGATOR

* PLACES OF INTEREST 6th Calvary Museum (6 Barnhardt Cir., Fort Oglethorpe, Ga.; 706-861-2860) Chickamauga Battlefield Visitors Center (3370 LaFayette Road, Fort Oglethorpe, Ga.; 706-866-9241) Gordon-Lee Mansion (217 Cove Rd., Chickamauga, Ga.; 706-375-4728) Lake Winnepesaukah (1730 Lakeview Dr., Rossville, Ga.; 706-866-5681) River Gorge Explorer (1 Broad St, Chattanooga, Tenn.; 800-262-0695) Seminar in the Woods (contact Dave Powell at dpowell334@aol.com) Southern Belle Riverboat (201 Riverfront Pkwy #2, Chattanooga, Tenn.; 423-266-4488) Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum (4119 Cromwell Rd., Chattanooga, Tenn.; 423-894-8028)

* LODGING Best Western Battlefield Inn (2120 Lafayette Rd., Fort Oglethorpe, Ga; 706-866-0222) Sheraton Read House Hotel Chattanooga (827 Broad St., Chattanooga, Tenn.; 423-266-4121) Super 8 (2044 Lafayette Rd., Fort Oglethorpe, Ga.; 706-861-1744)

BEST-KEPT SECRET

* DINING

| S.E. | Most Civil War travelers have an interest in military history eras other than the time of the “late unpleasantness.” Adjoining the park is the town of

Canyon Grill (28 Scenic Hwy., Rising Fawn, Ga; 706-398-9510)

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Bailey’s Bar-B-Que (5540 Highway 41, Ringgold, Ga.; 706-935-2969)

Choo-Choo Bar-B-Que & Grill (1015 Lafayette Rd., Chickamauga, Ga.; 706-375-7675)

boat. The Southern Belle Riverboat offers daily dining cruises, while the Tennessee Aquarium’s River Gorge Explorer offers both natural history and Civil War history cruises. Both are located in downtown Chattanooga.

BEST BOOK

| S.E. | Dave Powell’s The Maps of Chickamauga (2009) enables readers to understand the battle on the micro level. Matt Spruill’s Guide to the Battle of Chickamauga (1993) and Steve Woodworth’s Chickamauga: A Battlefield Guide (1999) are also useful. | D.P. | I would recommend my own book, The Maps of Chickamauga. Each page contains a combination of maps and text to help clarify the battle, either for locating or following a specific unit during the fighting or for understanding the overall flow of the engagement.

BEST EATS

| S.E. | I frequently stop for a classic country breakfast at the Old South Restaurant, situated in the historic Rossville Gap held by retreating Union forces on September 21, 1863. Park Place Restaurant boasts a variety of country-type cooking at reasonable prices and is frequented by battlefield visitors. For great barbecue, the locals love Bai-

Old South Restaurant (796 Chickamauga Ave., Rossville, Ga; 706-866-8933) Park Place Restaurant (2891 Lafayette Rd., Fort Oglethorpe, Ga.; 706-861-5368) Waffle House (909 Battlefield Pkwy., Fort Oglethorpe, Ga.; 706-866-1312)

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIM REDMAN

8/20/13 3:03 PM

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

S A LV O

ley’s Bar-B-Que, located at the intersection of Highway 41 and GA Highway 2 (Battlefield Parkway), which is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and has a rib special two nights a week. If you’re looking for more sophisticated fare and are willing to travel a bit farther, the Canyon Grill on Lookout Mountain is a great option. But note, it’s BYOB since local law does not allow wine or liquor sales. | D.P. | Being from Chicago, I rarely get to eat at Waffle House, so I make a point of finding one on just about every trip south.

The Waffle House on Battlefield Parkway in Fort Oglethorpe is an excellent representative of the chain—good food with fast service, and all the breakfast staples.

At Old South Restaurant (top left), the breakfast menu and the burgers (above) are favorites.

Park Place Restaurant, just outside the park’s north entrance, is a step above fast food, with home cooking and southern favorites on the menu. It is only open for lunch and dinner, so I usually hit the place at midday after a busy morning on the battlefield. At the south end of the park, ChooChoo Bar-B-Que & Grill offers a tasty pulled pork sandwich with

very little wait. The Canyon Grill, a small place a few miles out in the country on Lookout Mountain, has an excellent menu and outstanding food (don’t miss the Slash-n-Burn Catfish). Dining here is a little upscale, not at all what you’d expect given the location, but well worth the drive and remarkably affordable for fine dining.

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S H E R AT O N R E A D H O U S E .C O M CIVIL P H : THE (423 ) 6 4WAR 3 1 3MONITOR 77 SUMMER 2013

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PRIMER

The Other Medical Kit MOST READERS OF CIVIL WAR HISTORIES are familiar with the iconic surgical instruments of the period: knives, tourniquets, bone saws. But beyond field and regimental hospitals, where such devices were the primary tools for treating battlefield injuries, physicians employed a variety of more obscure instruments and therapies—including vaccinations, special diets, massage, and electrical treatments—to combat the myriad wounds and diseases that afflicted soldiers. Featured here are some of these lesser known medical tools, with an emphasis on those utilized at Turner’s Lane Hospital in Philadelphia, where physicians specialized in treating neurological disorders and made findings that aided military doctors well into the 20th century.

V At the conclusion of the war, Union army

physicians undertook a study, sponsored by the U.S. Sanitary Commission, of the physical measurements of black and white soldiers. Among the devices they used was a spirometer, similar to this one, which measured lung capacity—a statistic thought to help reveal a soldier’s vitality.

V During the Civil War, thermometers

were used to evaluate disease, not as diagnostic tools. This bent-design thermometer was meant to determine a patient’s skin temperature (via the armpit) in the study of certain inflammations due to nerve disorders.

SOURCES: All images courtesy of The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (www.college ofphysicians.org/mutter-museum).

Our thanks to Robert D. Hicks and Evi Numen for their assistance.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

V

Manufactured for both home and clinical use, this magneto-electric machine aimed to relieve “nervous diseases.” Turning the handle caused the rotation of two bars of iron, wrapped in copper wire and enclosed in fabric, alongside a horseshoe magnet, thus inducing an electric (alternating) current. The current passed into the patient’s body by the application of two electrodes (the two tubes connected to the machine).

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The scarificator—a brass case enclosing spring-loaded blades—and its accessories (above) were intended for therapeutic bloodletting. With the device (below) placed against a patient’s skin, a button released a dozen blades to create multiple shallow incisions.

A glass cup was placed over the wound; a small pump attached to it created a vacuum, drawing blood to the surface.

As bloodletting grew less routine during the war, so did the use of these devices.

V

V

Although uncommon during the war, hypodermic syringes were used occasionally to administer morphine. The syringe’s needle did not puncture the skin directly; rather it was inserted into a small wound opened first by a lancet or knife.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

V

13 PHOTOGRAPHS BY EVI NUMAN

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S A LV O

PRIMER

V

This tool—known as a pap boat— was used to feed invalids. Usually filled with a warm mixture of milk and pulpy bread, the device’s tube was inserted into the patient’s mouth to introduce some nutrition.

V

Physicians used this instrument, called a sphygmograph, to measure blood pressure. When attached to a patient’s arm, it determined the amount of pressure needed to stop blood flow in the radial artery. An attached pen recorded the magnified pulse waves onto a strip of paper.

V This small nickel-plated device is a vari-

olation tool that was used exclusively for smallpox inoculation. Operated by a small lever, it was first placed against a smallpox pustule to remove some of the fluid within, which was then inserted under the skin of a healthy person, in whom it was hoped a secondary form of infection would take hold, resulting in lifetime immunity.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

V

Ord 1-­80 inde

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

SI

This portable kit contains some of the various medicines used— normally to treat discomfort or gastrointestinal ailments—during the Civil War. In the right foreground, unopened since the 19th century, is a bottle of laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol used in a variety of treatments, including pain relief and suppression of diarrhea. At left is rhubarb, commonly used to relieve constipation.

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S A LV O

VOICES

F

/ S O L D I E RS ’ P E T S

“I CAPTURED A FINE ST. BERNARD DOG, WHICH WAS PROTECTING THE CORPSE OF A COLONEL OF A PENNSYLVANIA REGIMENT.” —CONFEDERATE OFFICER BRYAN GRIMES, 4TH NORTH CAROLINA INFANTRY, ON AN INCIDENT THAT OCCURRED DURING THE SEVEN DAYS BATTLES IN 1862. THE DOG, NICKNAMED “GENERAL,” REMAINED WITH GRIMES’ REGIMENT UNTIL 1864, WHEN HE “SUCCUMBED TO THE HARD MARCHING, BROKE DOWN AND WAS LOST.”

“[The] General … has a great liking for pets….

[D]uring meal time … two little Indian ponies range themselves as quick as he sits down, and he lays biscuits on the corner of the table for them, which they gobble with the greatest relish. He spreads biscuits for one pony with sugar, and with salt for the other.

His conversation is divided about equally between his ponies, … [his] dog, and his other guests.”

“There is not a regiment nor a company, not a teamster nor a negro at head-quarters, nor an orderly, but has a ‘rooster’ of one kind or another.…

They must all fight, however, or be killed and eaten.”

—ILLINOIS SOLDIER CHARLES WRIGHT WILLS, RECORDING IN HIS DIARY THE SCENE HE ENCOUNTERED WHILE DINING WITH UNION GENERAL ALEXANDER ASBOTH (SHOWN BELOW, RIDING ALONGSIDE HIS PET DOG), JUNE 1862

—GEORGE WARD NICHOLS, 5TH NEW YORK INFANTRY, IN HIS DIARY, NOVEMBER 30, 1864

“HER LITTLE STIFFENED BODY WAS ENCOFFINED IN A PAPER BOX, AND PLACED IN THE CENTRE OF THE BARRACK. A SMALL AMERICAN FLAG WAS THROWN OVER IT.”

SOURCES: EXTRACTS OF LETTERS OF MAJOR-GENERAL BRYAN GRIMES (RALEIGH, NC, 1884); LETTERS FROM THE FORTYFOURTH REGIMENT M.V.M. (BOSTON, 1863); THE STORY OF THE GREAT MARCH. FROM THE DIARY OF A STAFF OFFICER (NEW YORK, 1865); ARMY LIFE OF AN ILLINOIS SOLDIER (WASHINGTON, D.C., 1906); REMINISCENCES OF MY LIFE IN CAMP WITH THE 33RD UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS (BOSTON, 1902).

“That pig grew to be the pet of the camp, and was the special care of the drummer boys, who taught him many tricks; and so well did they train him that every day at practice and dress parade, his pigship would march out with them, keeping perfect time with their music.”

—AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARMY NURSE SUSIE KING TAYLOR, IN HER MEMOIR, ON THE UNUSUAL PET OF THE 33RD UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)

—GEORGE WARD NICHOLS, 5TH NEW YORK INFANTRY, IN HIS DIARY, —ZENAS T. HAINES, 44TH MASSACHUSETTS VOLUNTEER MILITIA, ON NOVEMBER 30, 1864 THE PASSING OF HIS COMPANY’S PET CAT, OCTOBER 18, 1862

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S A LV O

BY O . JAMES LIGHTHIZER PRESIDENT , CIVIL WAR TRUST

P R E S E R VAT I O N

AT THE TRUST, WE FERVENTLY BELIEVE that every battlefield can become an outdoor classroom, enabling visitors to absorb lessons they could never glean from a book.

To that end, some of the most meaningful work of battlefield preservation begins after a property is purchased. ¶ This was the philosophy of Henry Simpson of Birmingham, Alabama, the Trust’s immediate past chairman, who passed away unexpectedly on July 8.

His tenure as chairman marked one of the Trust’s greatest periods of success in terms of land acquisition, including the permanent protection of 5,000 acres of hallowed ground.

Among the properties are some of the most historic ever protected by a private battlefield conservation entity, including acreage at Gaines’ Mill, Virginia; Shiloh, Tennessee; and Saunders Field on the Wilderness Battlefield in Virginia.

Henry spearheaded several on-site interpretive projects, including one at Hog Mountain, Alabama, that opened in April 2013 to correspond with the 150th anniversary of Streight’s Raid. His final interpretive effort— working with the Richmond Battlefields Association to erect a monument to Alabama troops on the battlefield at Second Deep Bottom—followed explicit speci-

fications from the memoirs of the unit’s commander, Colonel William C. Oates.

In Henry’s memory, I want to share some of the work we do to ensure that battlefields are kept safe, beautiful, and functional.

Once the Trust has closed on a property, we place a conservation easement on the land as an additional guarantee that it will be protected and respected forever.

Another critical step is creating a management and steward-

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 WWW.CIVILWAR.ORG

Gathered during the Trust’s sesquicentennial fundraising effort “Campaign 150: Our Time, Our Legacy” on June 30, 2011, are (left to right) Henry Simpson; fellow trustee and country music singer Trace Adkins; Gettysburg NMP superintendent Bob Kirby; and historian James M. McPherson.

ship plan. In some instances, we know that the Trust will merely safeguard the land until it can make its way into a national, state, or regional park. In those cases, we evaluate any work that can be done more easily by the Trust prior to the transfer. This may include removing nonhistoric structures or vegetation or—as we recently did at Gettysburg—creating a walking trail.

When the land will not quickly become part of a larger park, there are other issues. Do any Civil Warera structures need to be stabilized or studied? Could a local farmer lease the land and keep it in agricultural production? On large or remote properties, we try to identify a local partner who will keep an eye on maintenance and upkeep needs for us.

As we plan for the long term, we compare the property’s current condition to its wartime appearance. Could trees be removed to clear the landscape?

We also look at interpretive options. Is the land suitable for a multi-stop walking or biking trail, or would an interpretive plaza do the trick? Our education and land stewardship staffs weigh all these questions and more.

This ongoing process to maintain and manage our battlefield properties was profoundly shaped

by Henry Simpson during his 15 years on our board. I hope that the next time you enjoy a battlefield park, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the work that goes into that experience, and perhaps give a moment of thanks to my friend.

CIVIL WAR TRUST

Simpson and Stewardship

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S A LV O

BY MEGAN KATE NELSON

DISUNION

NAPOLEON PERKINS DRAGGED HIMSELF toward the plank road behind the Chancellor House, shot and shells plowing up the ground all around him and apple blossoms drifting into his hair. Moments before, during some of the fiercest fighting at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, Perkins had been unhitching one of his horses from a 5th Maine artillery caisson when a Rebel shell struck him just above his right knee. At first he did not realize how badly he had been wounded, but when he tried to walk, his leg buckled and nearly severed in two. Perkins managed to reach the road and began to crawl across it, but could go no farther. Dizzy but still conscious, he watched the Chancellor House and the nearby woods catch fire and burn, killing many of his wounded comrades who could not flee the flames.

Luckily, Perkins’ friends soon found him, cinched a rope to form a tourniquet, and carried him on a blanket for three miles to the nearest field hospital. There, surgeons prepared to amputate his leg, but Perkins objected.

His resistance was not unusual; many Union and Confederate soldiers recoiled at the thought of amputation. Mid-19th-century gender conventions invested a great deal of meaning in the whole white male body; the loss of an arm or leg, they well knew, would result in the loss of masculinity, status, and power.

The surgeons sighed and acceded to Perkins’ wishes, loading him on an ambulance that bumped and rocked its way northward over Virginia’s frightful roads for two days. “One can hardly realize what I suffered with that shattered leg,” Perkins wrote in his memoir. By the time he had been placed aboard railroad cars and then a steamer for Washington, his leg was “swollen as large as the skin would allow.”

Perkins was ultimately sent to St. Aloysius General Hospital, a set of wooden barracks attached to a Catholic church. The days

he spent at St. Aloysius “seemed very long and some of the nights longer”; the pain and swelling in his leg kept him awake most of the time. One morning, a surgeon making his early rounds looked sharply at Perkins’ leg and then went to fetch the other doctors. Perkins’ right foot was gangrenous and he would not live another three days without an amputation. Again, the 20-yearold private resisted. He had seen friends die after amputations or go crazy, tearing at the bandages around their stumps. The surgeon’s pronouncement had an air of finality about it, however, and there was a chance he would survive if they took off the leg. Perkins agreed to the surgery.

On May 23, 1863, almost three weeks after his injury, Napoleon Perkins lost his right leg to the Civil War. He was one of around 60,000 Union and Confederate soldiers to undergo amputations, and one of about 45,000 to survive his surgery. It took two doses of ether and one of chloroform to knock him out. But he swam up through the haze twice during the surgery, and was fully awake when the surgeons tied up his arteries and sewed the flesh over

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.

his bone.

Once his stump began to heal, Perkins learned to navigate hospital corridors on crutches. He told his physicians that he wanted to be fitted with an artificial leg before he was discharged. So a few days later, Perkins found himself on the grounds of the Government Hospital for the Insane, later known as St. Elizabeths, part of which had been converted into a general hospital for amputees.

There were 80 men in this ward, soldiers from every state in the Union. They spent their days here as they had in camp—talking, playing cards, writing home.

Every now and then, a large group would visit theaters, racetracks, and other places of amusement in Washington, attracting “considerable attention.” This was a pleasant time for Perkins, who found a camaraderie that he had been missing since his injury. He was not anxious or embarrassed about his missing limb, and could talk about future plans with men who felt a similar sense of loss.

After a few weeks, it was Perkins’ turn to be measured for an artificial leg. The American prosthetics industry had grown considerably during the antebellum period; newly constructed factories and railroads took hands, feet, arms, and legs from their workers with alarming frequency.

Limb manufacture expanded even more rapidly during the Civil War, a result of not only the proliferation of war amputees but also a federal program established in

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Napoleon Perkins Loses His Leg

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

1862 that provided artificial arms and legs for 6,600 Union veterans, including Perkins.

When he received the finished leg, Perkins went out in the grove behind the hospital and did more falling than walking as he learned to use it. He was anxious to get accustomed to his new leg; he wanted to wear it home so that his injury “would not seem so bad to my mother.”

Finally, on December 7, 1863, Perkins collected his pay, applied for his pension, and boarded a train for New Hampshire. His troubles were not over, however.

As veteran amputees recovered from their surgeries, they had to renegotiate their place in society. Could a veteran amputee woo women, marry, procreate, and support his family? During a time in which citizenship was

Surgeons operate on wounded soldiers at a Union field hospital—much like the one Private Napoleon Perkins was carried to after receiving his gruesome leg wound—during the Battle of Chancellorsville.

seen as “embodied” in adult white males, could an amputee be considered a full citizen?

For the next 10 years, Perkins traveled from New Hampshire to Ohio to Montreal and back again, working a series of temporary factory jobs. Most employers turned him away, feeling sorry for him but having “no work that a one leg man could do.” Perkins lived from hand to mouth on his pension benefits ($8 a month initially), and it was not until he married a woman named Jennie Shedd and took over a harness shop in 1873 that he began to prosper. He attributed all of his subsequent success to the “industry and good management of my wife,” although he continued to struggle with physical and emotional pain. “No one except those who have lost a leg as near the body as

I have,” he wrote in his memoir, “can realize what it means.”

On May 3, 1913, Napoleon Perkins sat down on his porch with James Loomis, who had found him on that roadside, bound up his wound, and carried him to the field hospital 50 years before.

They talked about old times for several hours, rehashing the terrible toll the Battle of Chancellorsville took on the 5th Maine battery. (Six men were killed and 22 wounded, a casualty rate of about 40 percent.) Perkins survived the battle and the surgeries that took his leg. And he, like all veteran amputees, carried the marks of the war’s violence back home.

MEGAN KATE NELSON TEACHES IN THE HISTORY AND LITERATURE PROGRAM AT HARVARD. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF RUIN NATION: DESTRUCTION AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (2012).

21 DRAWING BY EDWIN FORBES

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S A LV O

IN FOCUS

Ironclads in Action ON SEPTEMBER 8, 1863, photographer George S. Cook traveled to Fort Sumter for the Confederate government, commissioned to document the extensive damage from incessant enemy bombardments, part of the Union campaign to capture Charleston. Early in the morning of his visit, Confederates in Sumter spotted a Union monitor, the USS Weehawken, which had become stuck on a sandbar in Charleston Harbor. Rebel gunners at nearby Fort Moultrie started shooting at the stranded warship.

That brought out other Union vessels, which returned fire in defense of the Weehawken.

Recognizing that this was a far more dramatic subject, Cook crawled to Sumter’s shellravaged parapet and balanced his camera on a piece of broken gun carriage. Cook’s resulting two images, one of which appears here, show the massive ironclad USS New Ironsides (far right) blasting away at Fort Moultrie as two Union monitors follow. A long string of harbor obstructions, which appear as black dots in the water, can also be seen, as can the American flag waving from a pole on the trailing monitor.

During the fight—which lasted over four hours (the Weehawken would free itself and steam off to safety that evening)—Union ships fired at least 46 shells into Fort Sumter, making Cook the first photographer in history to capture battle action images while under fire himself.

Contributed by Bob Zeller, president of the Center for Civil War Photography, a non-profit 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

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PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORGE S. COOK

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COOK COLLECTION, VALENTINE RICHMOND HISTORY CENTER

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C A S U A LT I E S O F WA R

Henry Lord Page King

“How little have I done to be proud of,” noted the would-be Napoleon, “how much to be sorry for.”

Y AIDE-DE-CAMP, Capt. H.L.P. King, was killed on Marye’s Hill,” Confederate general Lafayette McLaws reported after the Battle of Fredericksburg. “[He was] pierced with five balls while conveying an order to Brigadier-General Cobb. He was a brave and accomplished officer and gentleman.” After learning of his death, Varina Davis, wife of the Confederate president, told a friend that Lordy King had been “the most lovely and remarkably attractive young man she had ever seen.”1 We cannot know Lordy’s thoughts as he lay on the field bleeding out. It is a trope, but perhaps a true one, that as we quit the world our fading consciousness treats us to a flickering slideshow of our time on Earth. If so, Lordy’s psychic history must have filled him with the deepest regrets, about the life he had lived, and the life he would not.

Born in 1831, Henry Lord Page King was the product of an unhappy marriage. His father was absent on business for most of his childhood. His mother was a matriarch of the wilting type. For all her strength, Anna King wanted most to be weak, to feel that a man was taking care of things, even if less ably than she could take care of them herself.

“We want a head among us,” she noted of her family.

“I have no mind of my own. Neither have I experience or judgment.… Alas poor me I have no head for anything.”2 Lord and his nine siblings grew up on Retreat Plantation on St. Simons Island, Georgia. They were by any measure affluent, but also insular—“stuck down on this lost end of the world,” Anna said. There was a vague sense too that the Kings’ way of life was doomed, even before the North made war on slavery.

“The ground seems almost tired,” Anna complained.

“It is just like working in ashes.”3 Growing up with a depressed mother and a mythical father on an island draped in moss and fog, the King siblings led a languid, gauzy childhood. Anna told her husband, Thomas, that their children were “ill-calculated … to bear with the trouble of this world,” and she wished he had been home “to give them by

To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our new Notes section on page 78.

your example and precepts better instruction than I have been able to impart.” With no one to introduce them into society, the girls never made their debuts. “I am ‘whole sixteen,’” Georgia wrote her father. “I have not been further than the illustrious city of Darien, and am a through-bred country girl. I hope however I will not always be so, for I have great ideas of going about with you!”

This never happened, and by the time they reached their twenties Georgia and her sisters had settled down to “vegetate, old maids on the sand beach.”4 The boys had equal problems.

Plantation living, Anna said, had made them “tyrannical as well as lazy,” but she doubted her ability to go beyond carping to correct the problems. “I would I could go where we could put our children to school,” she begged Thomas. “There is no emulation [here], nothing to rouse them up.

All the same ding dong everyday business.… But this can never be done unless you had an office, a sure income & where you could be more with us. Think you that time will ever arrive?” That time did not arrive. Ten years later the boys had gone off to college only to return home to hang around the plantation. Thomas had assured one of his sons that he would help him find a position as an engineer, but the promise fell through. “We all stand waiting,” Anna wrote him, “for you to do something for

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COASTAL GEORGIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ST. SIMONS ISLAND

NO REDEMPTION, ONLY REGRET, FOR THE RECKLESS SON OF A TROUBLED SOUTHERN FAMILY. BY STEPHEN BERRY

COASTAL GEORGIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ST. SIMONS ISLAND

your sons. Time goes on, other young men are working for themselves.… Depend on it my beloved husband that idleness is destructive to youth.”5 In 1853, the least idle of the King boys had taken over the day-to-day operations of Retreat.

“Butler’s cough is still very bad,” Anna wrote to Thomas, “though he does not let it prevent his attending to plantation business….

No son could possibly love and honor a parent more than he does…. He is out except at meals from morning until dark [and] he is pretty tired when night comes on.” Struggling for his father’s approval and wanting desperately to provide his mother some rest from her anxieties, Butler wrestled and tore at the dead lands of Retreat for five years, experimenting with manures and reclamation and always coming up a bit short to pay the bankers.

On January 20, 1859, he stood brushing his hair before a mirror when he felt an odd twitching in his left eyelid. He turned to Lordy to “point out this strange symptom” but found he could not speak distinctly. He was quickly placed in a tub of hot water; a galvanic battery was hooked up and he was given a mustard emetic.

His hands were paralyzed so his brother Mallery put a finger down his throat. “A little blood came the first throw,” Anna said, “then it came up in volumes. Great God! What a sight.” Laid out on a

Henry Lord Page King, known to family and friends as “Lordy,” as a young man.

bed, Butler seemed to be resting peacefully when he was seized by “awful convulsions” that persisted until “his mind left him” and “his noble soul left his body.”6 If Butler had wanted to be everything his father was not—a steady planter and a comfort to his mother—second-born son Lordy wanted to be everything he believed his father was—a man too busy to bother with trifles as he acted out his life on a grand

stage. Lordy’s ambition was colossal. “It may sound ridiculous to say so now,” he wrote his father at the age of 17, “but I hope or rather think that I will be one of these days or years a great man, whether a Washington or a Napoleon, a Bishop or a Tom Paine.” Eleven years later, jobless and shaken by family tragedy, Lordy was still looking for a stage broad enough to trifle with.7 Hoping to find } CONT. ON P. 75

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B AT T L E F I E L D ECHOES

Sherman’s Mississippi Raid

“We left every town that we passed through in ashes.”

ICKSBURG HAD FALLEN, and the Union finally controlled the Mississippi River. Now, in the opening weeks of 1864, leaders in Washington were searching for the best way to use their forces in the West. Moving them east for an anticipated spring campaign into Georgia was ideal, but to pull that off, the Federals would have to deal with an obstacle positioned in the rail junction town of Meridian: the Confederate Army of Mississippi under the command of Major General Leonidas Polk.

Major General William T. Sherman, the new commander of Union armies in the West, was up to the challenge. After spending over a year on the Mississippi trying to capture Vicksburg, the feisty, cantankerous West Pointer was ready to deliver a lasting blow to the South. He planned an expedition toward Meridian with three objectives in mind: demolish the Mobile & Ohio railroad line, drive out Polk’s army, and destroy the will of the southern people. Unlike other cities up and down the Mississippi, Meridian would not experience an extended occupation; Sherman’s march here would be a raid.

As such, this campaign would be different than the slow, plodding advance on Vicksburg that the Army of the West had just experienced. In order to seize the initiative and prevent Polk from receiving reinforcements, Sherman knew he must move his column quickly and not be hampered by supply lines; he would live off the farms and factories of Mississippi. He explained as much to his troops, stating “the expedition is one of celerity … not a tent will be carried, from the commander-in-chief down.

The sick must be left behind, and the surgeons can find houses and sheds for all hospital purposes.”1 Sherman was taking a new tack by destroying infrastructure and conducting a show of force without holding territory, waiting for his supply trains, or occupying cities for lengthy periods. As one scholar of the campaign explained, Sherman “simply wanted to destroy the railroads and return to Vicksburg.”2 The operational raid, however, was not new to the Civil War, much less to American history. Par-

THE MERIDIAN CAMPAIGN DATE

February 1864 LOCATION

Meridian, Mississippi COMMANDERS

William Tecumseh Sherman (USA); Leonidas Polk (CSA) DAMAGE

Sherman’s campaign resulted in the destruction of an estimated 200 miles of railroad track, 20 locomotives, 28 train cars, 61 bridges, 3 sawmills, and unknown quantities of cotton.

In addition, Union forces captured 400 Confederate prisoners, brought away 5,000 contraband slaves, and seized 3,000 animals (horses, mules, and oxen).

ticularly in early 19th-century campaigns against native Indians, U.S. military leaders became adept at conducting expeditions that focused less on holding terrain and more on pursuing the enemy. The Mexican War, however, witnessed a return to the reliance on extended supply lines and slow, deliberate advances.

The Union campaigns of 1862 and 1863 proved that the tyranny of logistics still reigned supreme in the Federal war-making repertoire. Sherman would change all that, and he would do so first in Mississippi.

His army of 26,000 men marched east from Vicksburg on February 3, many of them unaware of the final objective.3 They marched through Jackson, Morton, and Brandon, doing a fair amount of pillaging and some damage to both public and private buildings. Along the way, the only threats were some local Confederate guerrillas and the periodic Rebel cavalry detachment, and neither was capable of hindering Sherman’s advance. Outnumbered and unable to predict Sherman’s next move, Polk withdrew his army from Meridian and headed into Alabama. Only 10 days after departing Vicksburg, the Union column, close on Polk’s heels, arrived at the rail junction, and the next day Sherman’s men began their devastating work.

The demolition of Meridian was meticulous and thorough

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MERIDIAN: HIS DRESS REHEARSAL FOR THE MARCH TO THE SEA. BY CLAY MOUNTCASTLE

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and, in Sherman’s own words, “the most complete destruction of the railroads ever beheld.”4 Factories, public buildings, and warehouses were cleaned out and in many cases burned. Sherman’s men spent the better part of a week attacking more than 100 miles of railroad track with axes and crowbars, ensuring that the crucial rail junction would be unusable for the remainder of the war. When they received the order to return to Vicksburg, very little remained standing.

On the return march, Sherman’s men focused on destruction of the vindictive sort. The towns of Clinton, Lauderdale Springs, and New Albany, which held little or no importance to the

Men from General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army tear up track on the railroad leaving Atlanta in 1864, an act of destruction they had perfected earlier that year during the Union raid on Meridian, Mississippi.

To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our new Notes section on page 78.

Confederate war effort, all felt the rage of a hungry army fed up with bushwhacker attacks and Rebel defiance. In a letter sent home after the campaign, one of Sherman’s troops claimed, “We left every town that we passed through in ashes.”5 The end result was remarkable. A crucial Confederate rail hub had been destroyed, Polk’s army had deserted the state, and a severe message had been sent to the southern people, all at very little cost to Sherman’s army.6 It also served as a rehearsal for the campaign that would cement Sherman’s place in history, the march across Georgia in November 1864.

The raid strategy became

common practice in later conflicts. As commanding general, Sherman clearly had a profound impact on the U.S. Army’s campaigns against the Plains Indians from 1868 to 1890. Much as he punished Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina during the Civil War, Sherman advocated for punitive campaigns against Indian tribes that dared to defy the federal government.

The vast majority of cavalry operations were nothing more than prolonged raids deep into Indian territory followed by a retreat to an isolated outpost or fortress.

This carried over to the Philippine-American War of 18991902, which saw counterguerrilla campaigns that } CONT. ON P. 75

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Author Matt Dellinger (center right, lying on his side) and his comrades in Company E, 14th Brooklyn, take a break during a recent reenactment in Gettysburg.

WHY I FIGHT The weight of a gun. The roar of cannon. The sight of a line of men coming toward you.

The love of history—and wanting to honor it.

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BY MATT DELLINGER PHOTOGRAPHS BY JONATHAN KOZ O W Y K

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IT’S A SUMMER NIGHT IN GETTYSBURG,

quite warm, and to the sound of drums and bugles we form up on the road. Not the paved, lit road made for cars—that’s some distance away— but a muddy, rocky path through the woods that will be nearly impossible to follow after nightfall. It’s an 1860s kind of road. We are camped along it, each company’s tents around a small fire. There has been both rain and smoke all day, and both linger in the trees. We are outside but inside. Tidy but dirty. Things do not have their normal boundaries.

We form up on the road, shoulder to shoulder. We’ve eaten jerky and apples and fistfuls of bread for dinner. We stand in our wool and leather, shouldering our rifled muskets. The men from one group of tents meet the men from the next until we’re a single mass of blue coats. We no longer think for Members of Comourselves. Orders are given, from men on horses to pany E, 14th Brooklyn, participate men with swords to men with stripes to men with in re-creating the nothing to do but listen and act. We stand until we’re fighting for Culp’s Hill on June 28, told to turn. We march until we’re told to stop.

2013, during the And when we reach a hillside and we’re ordered to Blue Gray Alliance 150th Gettysburg quickly build a wall with whatever fallen timber and Reenactment. rocks we can find, we become a colony of ants, a hive of bees. Each man knows what to do; there is no negotiation or disagreement. Without conversation, as if our lives depend on it, we stack logs and stones between trees, breathing thick air made of three kinds of smoke (wood, pipe, meat) soon to be joined by a fourth.

The cannon fire first, and our fortifications, by necessity, are complete. These breastworks are more like shin works, but we’re happy to have them. We kneel and crouch in the loam. We load our muskets with black powder and caps and we hold fast. There are people watching, probably, somewhere, but we don’t see them or think about them.

We stare down the hill into the bent trunks and shadows and we wait for the men in tan and gray to emerge. They speak the same language.

They carry the same guns. They appear in the twilit woods in a sudden sloppy line, each man finding his footing until they’re ordered to halt.

But when they come close enough, a terrible fight erupts. We’re told to ready, then aim. They’re told to ready.

Then, together as a company, we fire a mean torrent of downhill lead. Seconds later it comes back at us, their muzzles flashing in the woods. And then a constant barrage, each man loading and firing as fast as he can. It’s desperate and loud. Above a steady beat and chirp of drums and fifes, there is yelling at all times in all directions, but somehow you hear the yelling that’s meant for you.

The trees between our lines gradually lose their lower leaves. Black powder smoke is accumulating. Ears are ringing. The Rebels fall back, and then reform and push up the hill again toward us. Our first sergeant tumbles back screaming, shot in the gut, and men crouch over him. More men slump over the wall, but we stay in the pits, firing urgently, for what feels like an hour but also five minutes. Eventually, the Rebels recede and they don’t return. We cease fire when the bugles and yelling tell us to do so. A few seconds of silence, and then cheering along the lines. Culp’s Hill held.

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“Those were great days for speeches, I can tell you. Speeches back then were full of fire, and lightning, and thunder, quite unlike the oratory that is in favor today.”

}

too nice to spend in a cemetery, but we went on our bicycles, and I was wise enough to carry a notepad.

We gathered on a high hill with a sweeping view years ago. We weren’t there for the suspense, but we felt suspense of lower Manhattan and dotted with war memorianyway—along with terror and wonder and excitement and pride. We als and important graves. Prime real estate for the all talked about it for days. We commented on Facebook, where one dead. A crowd of a few dozen sat in folding chairs a can always find pictures and video taken surreptitiously during restone’s throw from Leonard Bernstein’s final restenactments. We talked about how it was one of the best scenarios in ing place, waiting for the Brooklyn borough presrecent memory. As good as the cornfield at Antietam, where the thick ident, Marty Markowitz, who arrived 30 minutes corn was hacked down by our attacks, and replaced with thick smoke late, in an untucked peach polo shirt and no socks, and terrible noise. to deliver a short address evoking our “deeper unWhat we felt, fighting, wasn’t what the real participants felt 150 derstanding of the sacrifices of patriotism.” years before—not by a long shot. But it was something more than the Moments later, on small portable speakers, they people watching us felt. And the people watching us, I reckon, felt played “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the theme from something more than people who visit the granite monuments and 2001: A Space Odyssey, as cemetery workers pulled plaques on Culp’s Hill. And the people who visit cloth sheets from the restored Culp’s Hill feel more than the people who simply monument’s four life-sized read about Culp’s Hill. And the people who read bronze figures—a Union cavalryabout Culp’s Hill feel more than the people who man, infantryman, artilleryman, don’t even know what it is. We choose to learn and engineer. A small squad of and remember by doing, and it’s a hell of a time. red-trousered reenactors gave a Reenacting, I’m now fond of saying, is a fun musket salute. mix of boyhood pursuits—camping, American One of the reenactors—from history, Halloween, and playing war. People get the 14th Brooklyn regiment, into the hobby for a lot of reasons. Some enjoy Company E, it turned out—was the weaponry. Some get deep into the uniforms standing in the color guard, and period details. Some sons join because their twitching. It was all Anthony fathers do it. Some fathers join because their DellaRocca could do to mainsons want to do it. Some Vietnam and Iraq vettain his composure. “I know I’m erans take to it because they’ve grown accusnot supposed to turn my head, tomed to army life, while others, like me, suit but when they were playing that up in part because we have no personal frame Space Odyssey and pulling off the of reference for war. But what I’ve learned in sheets—that shot the back of my my two and a half years as a reenactor is that hair up, I’ll tell ya right now.” Delno matter what attracts people, the people who laRocca, then 43 years old, had keep reenacting truly love the history, and they been spending a lot of his spare Above: The Civil War Soldiers’ Monument in want to feel closer to it and to honor it by living Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Opposite: A time wandering old cemetermember of the original 14th Brooklyn poses in it from time to time. ies looking for forgotten graves the regiment’s colorful Zouave uniform.

Wanting to be closer. That’s why I became a of Brooklyn 14th veterans and reenactor. I’d read books and seen movies about cleaning off their headstones. He the Civil War, but there was always a thick pane of intellectual glass had recently purchased, for several thousand dolbetween me and the action. Studying the war can be like listening to a lars (and to his wife’s chagrin), a handwritten offifootball game on the radio. You get the broad strokes, but when somecer’s log from the 14th’s three-year tour. He knew thing big happens, you find yourself wishing you were there. You can enough, had internalized enough, cared enough, to memorize the chess moves of generals and armies. But then there is the be viscerally excited by the sight of the monument— smell of sweat and gunpowder. The weight of the gun, the ringing ears, and viscerally upset by the next speaker. the growling belly and the sore back, the sight of a line of men coming A man impersonating Edwin Morgan, the govtoward you, a cannon firing nearby. ernor of New York when the Civil War began, stood The Civil War was still all books and monuments to me when I met throughout the proceedings in character, with chest the group I would eventually join, the Brooklyn 14th. Eleven years ago, a puffed and thumb in waistcoat, smoking a cigar in friend in Brooklyn, knowing me to be a sucker for local history and smallthe hot sun even while other local dignitaries sat town civic observances, invited me to a ceremony rededicating a war shaded by a green canopy. From under his top hat, monument in Green-Wood Cemetery. It was a Saturday, a day perhaps he spoke emotionally of his two terms as gover-

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WE KNEW CULP’S HILL WOULD HOLD. The guys we’re dressed as settled that 150

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nor, and recalled seeing the men line up to join the militia, and how cataloged. Later that weekend I posed for pictures he roused them. “Those were great days for speeches, I can tell you. with Dennis Boyé and Deborah Trill, two descenSpeeches back then were full of fire, and lightning, and thunder, quite dants of John Boyce, the Brooklyn 14th soldier I had unlike the oratory that is in favor today,” he said, stepping away from chosen to portray. the microphone to let his unamplified voice bellow. “I can still recall I chose John from a list of Company E privates— saying things like, ‘To arms! A war cry has again sounded! Your counit would be hubris to portray an officer—and because try is heaving to and fro, amidst the surging, roaring waves of a desI was a latecomer, all the “good” privates (those who perate rebellion!’” survived the entire three-year enlistment) were DellaRocca thought that was rich. “I’ll tell you what I wanted to do taken. I had to choose between guys who’d left early when Governor Morgan was speaking. I wanted to spit!” he told me or started late. I picked the latter, since I was a late later, in an excited Italian-Long Island accent. “Governor Morgan tried joiner to the group. I also wanted someone who had to screw the 14th to the sticking post.” It seems that in 1861, Morgan seen a lot. John Boyce was a blue-eyed 18-year-old had indeed recruited men to join the militia, but then hoarded the English immigrant when he joined his two brothers troops. The Brooklyn men had to go over Morgan’s head, through an in Company E in August 1862, just before the Battle emissary, to get their battle orders from President Abraham Lincoln. of Antietam. (I’m a man of many brothers myself, “He was acting all happy there, talking like an angel, but the guys in another affinity.) At the Battle of Chancellorsville in the 14th despise Governor Morgan.”

1863, John was crossing the Rappahannock River Don’t get DellaRocca started. Reenactors often “adopt” real soldiers when a shell struck the pontoon bridge on which to portray, and Tony had adopted Charles Augushe was marching and drove a tus Bartow as his second personality. He told me large splinter into his right foot. the stories of battles as if he’d been there, with He was taken to a Union hospidialogue, names, subtle moments, the fates of tal in Alexandria, Virginia—he certain horses. Barlow’s descendants, DellaRocwas recuperating there in July ca told me, had adopted him right back, since he 1863, when the regiment fought knows more about their great-great-grandfather all three days at Gettysburg— than they do. “Once you get attached to a soldier, and he returned to the army it really is like your long-lost brother. I’m attached in August and fought another to the hip to this guy.” year. On May 14, 1864, less than From reading letters, journals, records, and two weeks before the Brooklyn every edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle news14th would finish its three-year paper from 1861 to 1865, DellaRocca knew the tour and make its triumphant intimate details of Barlow’s injuries. “Charles return home, Boyce was capwas wounded twice. At Second Bull Run, he got tured at the Battle of Spotsylclipped in the chest. The ball went up and exited vania. He spent the final year his breast and broke two ribs. He’s out six weeks,” of the war in Andersonville he told me. “The second time he got whacked was Prison in Georgia, where he at Gettysburg, the second day. We were holding contracted the rheumatism Above: The Edward B. Fowler monument in Brooklyn. Opposite: The author portraying the back line of the army. He got hit in the leg, that would affect him the rest Private John Boyce of Company E, 14th Brooklyn. broke his femur. The ball traveled up, clipped his of his life. right testicle, and stuck in his pelvis. But don’t John came home to Brookworry. Everything was in working order. He had lyn after Appomattox, marfour kids after the war!” Perhaps with Bartow’s injury still in mind, Delried, and worked as a pipefitter. He had five chillaRocca confessed, “I would give my left nut to win the lottery, just so I dren who survived, and three who did not. When could take care of my family and just talk about history every little day.” his wife died and his ailments worsened, he moved DellaRocca has not won the lottery, and his obligations to his family in with his son and daughter-in-law on Vanderbilt and job eventually took him away from reenacting. But that afternoon Avenue, not far from my apartment. He would have at Green-Wood his passion for the Brooklyn 14th lodged like a minie seen the buildings I had seen, when they were new. ball in my pelvis. Nine years later, DellaRocca had hung up his red He would have walked the streets I walked. In Seppants, but I owned a pair. On Memorial Day weekend in 2011, I wore tember 1923, just before his 79th birthday, John my uniform and stood guard by that same monument in Green-Wood Boyce grabbed his cane, hobbled into Fort Greene Cemetery, while a procession of Brooklynites filed past in observance Park (another local haunt of mine) and stood at atof the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the war. Paper-bag lumitention. Boyce was one of the last 12 survivors of naries marked the graves of soldiers, some of which DellaRocca had the Brooklyn 14th, and he had joined a crowd of

{

I chose John from a list of Company E privates—it would be hubris to portray an officer—and because I was a latecomer, all the “good” privates were taken. I had to choose between guys who’d left early or started late.

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3,000 in the park for an annual Sabbath service in honor of his dead comrades. They stood at the foot of a statue of Edward B. Fowler, the colonel who led the 14th into all those bloody battles John had seen.

How many times did he sit in front of that statue when the park was empty? Had he been to the park as a boy of 17, too young to enlist, to see his brother and his regiment camped there before marching off to war? Private Boyce died in May 1929, at the age of 84. He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

IT’S NOT MANY WARS THAT END WITH THE WINNERS AND LOSERS AS COUNTRYMEN. The veterans of the Civil War, Confed-

erate and Union, spent their postwar days in a nation laboring awkwardly to hold together, a land littered with the fields and rivers for which they had killed one another’s neighbors and friends. Hallowed ground was purchased and preserved. States erected granite monuments. And on occasion the skinny, bearded vets would meet once more on the old battlefields and have a look around. In 1913, for instance, some 50,000 veterans from both sides of the Civil War came together at Gettysburg on the 50th anniversary of the battle. People in the hobby like to say that Civil War soldiers themselves were the first reenactors.

Photography having become commonplace by then, we know that many of the men were still rail thin. Many still wore beards. But instead of rifles, they carried canes and parasols. They stood for portraits, northerners and southerners together, and they didn’t have to stand as still as they had to half a century before. There are even candid pictures—clear, crisp crowd shots of former Rebels in white shirtsleeves and boater hats standing somberly by the wall at the Bloody Angle, the apex of Pickett’s Charge, looking up to the high ground at the Yankee veterans, who appear a little more animated, a little more relaxed. They were all Americans now. Again. Their feelings about that, about what had happened, were surely complicated. But they didn’t stay away.

They didn’t pretend it had never happened.

A few years later these men’s grandkids would fight in World War I, and their great-grandkids would fight in World War II. Their greatgreat-grandkids would fight in Vietnam. And by the time their greatgreat-great-grandkids were adults, fighting in Iraq or probably not, many of those descendants wouldn’t even know that their forebears had been Civil War soldiers. Maybe the branch of the family that had passed down the uniform or the musket or the box of letters would know. But for many down the line, the years swallowed the stories.

It turns out I was one of those descendants ignorant of my family history—until reenacting prompted an urgent curiosity, which dovetailed conveniently with the proliferation of digitized records on genealogy websites. My father had a vague sense from his father that we’d had family on both sides of the conflict, but to know any more, my father at my age would have had to scour libraries and clerks’ offices. I sat in my boxer shorts and entered my credit card number on Ancestry.com.

I knew that my father’s father’s family, the Dellingers, came to the U.S. long enough ago to have Civil War potential, so I started scrutinizing my male ancestors from that branch of my tree. My 19th-century predecessors were not from Indiana, as I was; nor from Ohio, as my father was; nor from Michigan, as my grandfather was. I was a Mid-

western-born Brooklyn resident, a Union reenactor, but history didn’t care. About an hour after logging on, I had found my Civil War ancestors. They were from North Carolina, which as you may know is in the South. Dixie.

Not one but two of my great-great-great-grandfathers took up arms in the war against northern aggression. Archibald C. Dellinger might have had to. He joined Company K of the 1st North Carolina Cavalry on Halloween in 1864, late in the war, when he was pushing 40, which smacks of desperation and/or conscription. From what little I can gather, Archibald (how terrific to have an ancestor named Archibald!) spent much of his seven-month enlistment in winter quarters before fighting the tail end of a brutal conflict that had devolved into trench warfare and attrition.

But then there was George Washington Yount.

George enlisted with his older brother Miles (and a whole clan of Younts) in the 38th North Carolina Infantry in 1861, also on Halloween. George fought for almost two years and then deserted on June 18, 1863, for three months. Perhaps he went home to work the farm for the summer. One website has him getting married on July 5. What is not clear is whether he knew then that his brother Miles had died four days earlier, on the first day at Gettysburg. He surely knew by the time he returned to the regiment in September and was docked pay for time absent and the cost of one musket and accouterments. George continued to fight in Robert E. Lee’s army until May 1864, when he was taken prisoner at Hanover Court House, Virginia, right around the same time and place that my adopted Yankee alter ego, John Boyce, was cap-

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tured. They traded places. The Federals held George at Point Lookout Prison in Maryland until the end of the war, when they made George take an oath of loyalty and then sent him home to start his family.

My family.

In the pale computer light, I learned I am a son of Confederate veterans. I could read the handwritten pages, the notes from when George returned.

“One musket and accouterments,” in fancy script. I thought of him standing there at roll call, his honeymoon and the harvest over, his brother dead and buried in Pennsylvania, and a sergeant dipping into ink to record that George owed the army for accouterments. I wouldn’t have seen that long-forgotten page, wouldn’t have cared to look, had I not become a reenactor. And there’s plenty I don’t know about George.

But there I was, meeting him, while in a closet in the other room hung a replica of the uniforms George had seen down the barrel of his weapon. Because of the times I’d worn the uniform, these little atoms of information, the Confederate army’s bureaucratic detritus, became vivid images of dirty gray pants, worn shoes, long marches, humid afternoons in camp with Miles. Suddenly I was on both sides of a conflict from five generations before, and the whole war seemed to double in size.

That spring, last spring, I visited a friend near Asheville, and I snuck away one afternoon and drove a few hours to the small town of Conover, an hour west of Charlotte. In a cemetery there, I walked the rows reading hundreds of names until I found a stone marked “CSA” and “George Yount.” It was a bright, newer stone. Someone had remembered.

Well before I did, someone had cared.

ONE GROUP THAT CARES A WHOLE LOT IS THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, the good people who oversee a plethora

of military parks and cemeteries, and who forbid combat reenactments on battlefields, for ethical reasons. “It is fundamentally disrespectful to those who actually fought and died on a particular piece of ground,” the NPS says, “to pretend to be able to accurately portray their deaths, sacrifices, and suffering. Even the best-researched representations of combat cannot replicate the tragic horror, complexity, or scale of real warfare.”

Fair enough. And thank God! That would be no way to spend the weekend. The reenactors I fell in with try to be on the “best-researched,” serious half of the spectrum. But don’t think we don’t drink cans of beer after the public goes home. Don’t think we don’t enjoy plentiful drinking water from giant trucks stashed discreetly (or not so discreetly) in the woods. And don’t think I don’t personally take full advantage of sunscreen and the latest technological advances in sweat-wicking underwear.

Everyone loves taking pictures of reenactors looking at our iPhones.

They love seeing us climbing out of cars or standing in line at the convenience store in uniform. They love catching us in the 21st century, which is only natural: Juxtapositions make good humor, as do moments where earnest facades are lowered or fail. It’s funny to us too, I assure you. We get it. And personally, I understand perfectly why the National Park Service doesn’t want us doing our thing on national battlefields or cemeteries. I don’t want that either.

At the same time, being close to the ground and close to the experience is important for us, and the people who observe us. The enjoyment of reenacting depends on a maximum level of suspended reality, an immersion in history. If my neighbor is not in character, he makes it harder for me to be in character. And being in character is what we do, or what we try to do. It is, after all, what we spent loads of money on. Seven hundred bucks for the musket alone, $120 for the hat. Then Below: The author and some comrades fill their canteens from a giant water truck during the 150th Gettysburg reenactment in June 2013.

Left: A fellow reenactor takes a cellphone break at the same event.

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$100 plus for the pants, $80 or so for a good shirt, $20 for the suspenders, $300 for the coat if you’re portraying a unit with a non-standard uniform (such as our Brooklyn 14th), and then several hundred dollars more for brogans, leathers, a tent. You end up buying a period toothbrush and period pencils and period shoelaces. You burn candles. And you burn rounds. Someone added up the cost of powder, cap, and paper cartridge and decided it costs 44 cents every time a reenactor fires his musket. Never mind the guys with horses—or cannon.

When you buy all of this stuff, learn how to use and wear it, break it in doing drill and camping, and the time comes for you to battle in the cornfield at Antietam, you don’t want to look over and see a digital watch on a guy’s arm or a Nike logo on his shoes. For the same reason you wouldn’t want to go to an expensive restaurant and sit next to someone with their feet on the table. It ruins the mood.

And yet there is a wide spectrum of seriousness within the hobby, reflected in both appearance and training. The guys who prize authenticity and grow period beards and pack only what they can carry and do bayonet drill even though they’ll never use it in the field do tend to shake their heads at the privates wearing black sneakers who pitch giant A-frame tents worthy of generals and stock them with cots and coolers and then don’t know basic drill. The design of events matters too, and long-brewing frustration between the sub-sub-cultures within reenacting, between “mainstream” reenactors and the more authenticity-minded “progressive” reenacA reenactor at June’s 150th tors, prompted a number of duplicate events in this Gettysburg 150th anniversary cycle. There were two Shilohs, event heads for two Antietams, two Gettysburgs. the makeshift parking lot.

Their differences are not unlike those between a zoo and a safari. At a mainstream event, the reenactor is marched, often through a parking lot, onto a battlefield set up like a high school football stadium. Spectators generally sit in risers while an announcer gives a play by play over a speaker. At progressive events, the modern world is tamed. Spectators might have to stand or bring their own folding chairs, maybe even hike a piece, so that the battle can take place in a period setting and reenactors can march through woods into battle, ideally along a route not littered with port-a-potties and elephant-ear stands.

There are times when the quest for authenticity can start to feel like a fetish, like the ends and not the means. But we never lose touch for long with why we care about the details in the first place. Eventually something happens that humbles you. This April, for instance, at a fairly casual event in Pennsylvania, our first of the season, a friend from Brooklyn brought his parents and sister and girlfriend for the day.

They visited me in camp, and I was self-effacing, talking them through my gear, but playing it a little cool. Later, when we marched past them on the gravel road to the battlefield, I saw them smiling and waving and taking pictures. The scenario was short, and it went OK. Nothing too mind-blowing for us reenactors. But when I talked to my friend again, at a bar back in Brooklyn, he told me that his girlfriend and mother had both been incredibly moved. They wept. It was the sight of our fighting and dying, my friend said, but it had a lot to do with the fact that they’d talked to a few of us beforehand, had seen us putting on our uniforms and leathers. It made the battle personal.

To be honest, I was surprised, and even a little jealous. I had never been that moved at a reenactment. Or I’d been moved in a different way, an intense inside-the-battle way. It was heartening to know that our performance could have this effect, but it made me wonder what I was missing.

At Gettysburg I found out. On the second day, the } CONT. ON P. 75

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There are times when the quest for authenticity can start to feel like a fetish, like the ends and not the means. But we never lose touch for long with why we care about the details in the first place. Eventually something happens that humbles you.

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The beginnings and ends of reenactment weekends are my favorite moments.

The 19th and 21st centuries occupy the same space-time, they mix.

And these transition periods, like dawn or dusk, are a little disorienting, a little

PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE BLUE GRAY ALLIANCE 150TH GETTYSBURG REENACTMENT ON JUNE 28-30, 2013.

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an act of war

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JONATHAN KOZOWYK TEXT BY MATT DELLINGER

magical. Trucks pull wooden-wheeled cannon. SUVs park next to officers’ horses.

People wear kepis with concert tees, or tunics with tennis shoes.

They hunt in their glove compartments for pocket watches or wire spectacles.

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They put their bayonets and black powder rounds into Tupperware bins.

These moments are amusing for the spectator, and dreamy for the participants.

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Whether female or male, bearded or barefaced, military or civilian, reenactors coming and going have to swap mentalities.

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It’s a different speed of thinking, another character, a different set of rules and concerns. It’s how athletes must feel after a game, or performers after a play.

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As you spend more time in this world, a funny thing starts to make these moments sweeter: You notice that your pards look the same to you in both centuries, in cars and in tents, in suspenders and sunglasses. You know them that well.

It’s only the world around you that changes.

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The PURITAN

&

OPPOSITES IN APPEARANCE AND DEMEANOR, CONFEDERATE GENERALS STONEWALL JACKSON AND 50 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR FALL 2013

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&

The Cavalier

JEB STUART NONETHELESS FORGED A DEEP AND ABIDING WARTIME FRIENDSHIP. BY JEFFRY D. WERT 51 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR FALL 2013

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THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN the introverted 39-year-old Jackson and the jovial 30-year-old Stuart puzzled fellow officers and men. Henry Kyd Douglas, who served on Jackson’s staff, witnessed the remarkable bond between his commander and Stuart. “The intimacy between these two officers, so dissimilar in every respect,” recalled Douglas in his memoir, “was the cause of much comment—they seemed to have so little in common…. How could Prince Rupert or Murat be on congenial terms with Cromwell? But Jackson was more free and familiar with Stuart than with any other officer in the army, and Stuart loved Jackson more than he did any living man.”1 Their personalities, as Douglas noted, could hardly have been more disparate. Jackson was inexplicable to many. He seemed to have erected a wall around himself. “If silence be golden,” wrote Brigadier General Richard Taylor of his superior, “he was a bonanza.” Another staff officer stated, “He [Jackson] seems to be cut off from his fellow men and to commune with his own spirit only, or with spirits of which we know not.”2 There was a rare fervency to Jackson, fueled by a deep religious piety and a strict adherence to duty. As a soldier, he was maniacal in the performance of duty, unforgiving of failure in subordinates, and unbending in discipline. When Jackson believed that Brigadier General Richard Garnett had disobeyed orders at the Battle of First Kern-

stown in March 1862, for instance, he removed Garnett from command of the Stonewall Brigade and filed charges against him. Jackson, asserted a fellow general, “measured other men by his own standard and required them to come to his own ideas of duty to be performed.” This servant of the Lord was a relentless warrior.3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our new Notes section on page 78.

PREVIOUS PAGES: VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE (JACKSON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (STUART)

APTAIN Richard H.T. Adams halted in the woods along Ely’s Ford Road northwest of Chancellorsville, Virginia, minutes before midnight on May 2, 1863.

The signal officer had been sent in search of Major General James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart, the Army of Northern Virginia’s cavalry commander. Adams found Stuart and his aides in a hollow and handed the general a message. Stuart read it with the aid of a candle, hurriedly issued instructions to his staff officers, mounted his horse, and rode away into the darkness.

The message was brief: Lieutenant General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and Major General A.P. Hill had been wounded and Stuart was to assume command of the army’s Second Corps. Even without more details, Stuart surely understood the import of the order and the burden of duty that he now faced. He would not only command infantry in a major battle for the first time in his life, but he would also be leading his best friend’s distinguished “foot cavalry,” renowned for its celerity on the march and prowess in combat.

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PREVIOUS PAGES: VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE (JACKSON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (STUART)

Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson (right, on horseback) is wounded during the Battle of Chancellorsville. Shortly afterward, his close friend, General James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart, was charged with leading Jackson's famed Second Corps, Army of Northern Virginia.

If Jackson saw life as a test, Stuart reveled in it.

“Simple existence was to him a pleasure,” said a staff officer of Stuart. He could be playful, if not boyish.

He frolicked with aides and guests at his headquarters, delighting in jokes and pranks at his or their expense. Stuart craved attention, and noise seemed to envelope him wherever he went. A subordinate, Colonel Thomas Munford, described Stuart as “a light-hearted dashing rollicking young fellow.”4 “Stuart’s camp is always one of the jolliest,” an English visitor to the army noted, “as the General is very

fond of music and singing, and is always gay and in good spirits himself, and when he laughs heartily, as frequently happens, he winds up with a shout very cheering to hear.” Stuart’s zest for life appeared unquenchable. Critics among fellow officers, however, regarded him as frivolous and vain. A newspaperman called him “the Prince of showy men.”5 Yet Stuart’s flamboyance was a veneer over the soul of a warrior.

As he and Jackson learned, they shared an unshakable Christian faith, a firm adherence to duty, and a steadfast devotion to the Confederate cause. Ambition burned like a hot flame within each of them. Despite the outward differences, both men were, first and foremost, professional soldiers. It was upon these attributes that they built a close friendship.

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ACKSON AND STUART met for the first time when the cavalryman reported for duty at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in May 1861. Jackson was the post’s temporary commander, and Stuart arrived to assume command of several mounted companies that became the 1st Virginia Cavalry. Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston replaced Jackson and later withdrew the force south into the lower Shenandoah Valley. On July 2, Stuart’s companies participated with Jackson’s infantry in the engagement at Falling Waters. “Colonel Stuart and his command merit high praise,” reported Jackson, “and I may here remark that he has exhibited those qualities which are calculated to make him eminent in his arm of the service.”6 At First Manassas on July 21, Jackson earned his enduring nickname, and Stuart led a mounted counterattack against Union infantry. During the succeeding months, while the army remained in the Centreville area, they rarely met. Stuart’s cavalry manned advanced outposts toward the federal capital, a duty that kept him with his troopers. In November, Jackson departed for command of the Valley District, a separation that lasted for eight months.

A bold offensive by the army’s new commander, General Robert E. Lee, brought Jackson and Stuart together again. On June 25, 1862, Stuart and his cavalry met Jackson’s command as the infantry came marching east to initiate the Seven Days Campaign. The friends were surely pleased to be reunited. Now, both of them were Confederate heroes—Jackson for his brilliant Shenandoah Valley campaign in May, when he and his troops outmarched and outfought three Federal commands, and Stuart for his daring ride around the Union Army of the Potomac in mid-June, which reinvigorated southern civilian morale.

An onlooker to the reunion could not have helped noticing the contrast in their appearances. Jackson was, in the words of G. Moxley Sorrel, James Longstreet’s chief of staff, “quite shabbily dressed, but neat and clean—little military ornament about him.” Another, less charitable observer thought that the general’s nondescript uniform “isn’t worth a dollar.”7 Stuart preferred resplendence. He wore a double-breasted gray shell jacket with rows of buttons and laced with braid, a “fawn colored hat” adorned with a gold star and black ostrich plume, and long buckskin gauntlets. An infantryman recounted later that Stuart “looked like a prince as he rode by our camp.” The uniform befitted a Confederate knight.8 The Seven Days Campaign proved to be a turning point in the

war. The Confederate victory secured Richmond’s safety and redirected the war’s course in the East.

Jackson’s lethargic performance during the campaign—in particular his failure to advance against the enemy’s rear at White Oak Swamp on June 30—has remained controversial. Stuart, meanwhile, performed capably in a limited role, earning promotion to major general. Jackson wrote to his friend: “Permit me to congratulate you upon your well earned promotion. I am desirous of seeing you along the front of my lines.”9 In late July, Lee dispatched Jackson and his command to central Virginia to confront the newly formed Union Army of Virginia under Major General John Pope. Before long, Jackson requested that Stuart be sent to inspect Jackson’s cavalry. Stuart arrived on August 10, a day after Jackson’s victory at Cedar Mountain over the vanguard of Pope’s army.

Undoubtedly, Jackson warmly greeted his friend.

Confederate general D.H. Hill stated that Jackson’s “fondness for Stuart was very great, and it was cordially reciprocated. Their meeting after a temporary absence was affectionate and brotherly in the extreme.”10 The two friends served closely together throughout the Second Manassas Campaign. Before the offensive began, Stuart and his cavalry captured Catlett’s Station, a Union supply base on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. The Rebels discovered Pope’s official correspondence and papers and his uniform coat at the depot.

When Stuart joined Jackson’s march around the Federals’ right flank, he allegedly called out: “Hello Jackson! I’ve got Pope’s coat; if you don’t believe it, there’s his name.” In a rare moment of humor, Jackson replied, “General Stuart, I would much rather you brought General Pope instead of his coat.”11 On September 17, 1862, at Sharpsburg, Maryland, in the Army of Northern Virginia’s finest hour, Stuart helped Jackson deploy artillery and infantry during the fearful and bloody fighting. Stuart had a horse shot under him and a courier killed beside him. Afterward, Jackson praised his friend in a report: “This officer rendered valuable service throughout the day.”12 The Confederates’ strategic defeat at Antietam forced Lee to retreat into Virginia, where the army spent weeks healing and replenishing its ranks in the Shenandoah Valley. Stuart and 1,800 troopers recrossed the Potomac River in October and con-

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ducted a raid through south-central Pennsylvania.

Upon their return, Stuart hurried to Jackson’s headquarters, “approaching with his usual clatter and gayety,” in the words of Henry Kyd Douglas. When he saw his friend, Jackson shouted, “How do you do, Pennsylvania?” Stuart handed Jackson a picture that he had found during the raid. The caption read, “Where is Stonewall Jackson?” They both enjoyed a hearty laugh over it.13 This autumn interlude deepened their bond.

Stuart visited Jackson’s headquarters when duty allowed. One night he arrived when Jackson and his aides were asleep. Entering the tent, the cavalry commander unbuckled his saber belt and crawled into bed beside his friend. The next day, when Jackson emerged from his tent, Stuart greeted his bedmate, “Good morning, General Jackson, how are you?”

Jackson looked at his friend and replied: “General Stuart, I’m always glad to see you here. You might select better hours sometimes, but I am always glad to have you.” Pausing and rubbing his legs, he continued, “But, General, you must not get into my bed with your boots and spurs on and ride me around like a cavalry horse all night!” Only with Stuart could Jackson be, according to an aide, so “free and easy.”14 While the army remained in the lower Shenandoah Valley, Stuart presented Jackson with a new general’s uniform coat. Stuart had commissioned a Richmond tailor to make one of fine wool, with gilt buttons and lace, to replace his friend’s “old weather-stained coat.” When the new coat arrived, Stuart sent an aide, Heros von Borcke, with it to Jackson’s headquarters, insisting that von Borcke make the famous Stonewall try it on.

Von Borcke delivered the package and waited for Jackson to open it. “I was heartily amused,” the staff officer recounted, “at the modest confusion with which the hero of many battles regarded the

fine uniform from many points of view, scarcely daring to touch it.”

Jackson then carefully folded the coat and laid it in his trunk.15 “Give General Stuart my best thanks, Major,” Jackson said to the aide. “The coat is much too handsome for me, but I shall take the best care of it, and shall prize it highly as a souvenir. And now let us have dinner.” But von Borcke insisted he try it on so he could tell Stuart if it fit. Jackson complied and walked outside his tent to the dinner table.

His appearance stunned his staff and, as the news spread through the camps, officers and men “came running to the spot desirous of seeing their beloved Stonewall in his new attire.”16 Jackson stored the coat away, but the gift obviously pleased him.

He wrote to his friend: “I am much obliged to you for the beautiful coat you have presented to me. Your injunction will be heeded. My lost buttons have been replaced. We learn by experience. When you come near don’t forget to call & see me.” (Jackson had allowed female admirers to take buttons from his old coat, and Stuart had asked that he be more careful with the new one.17) Jackson donned the coat again on the day of battle at Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862. When he joined Lee, Longstreet, and their staff members that morning on Telegraph Hill, “we broke into astonished smiles,” stated Moxley Sorrel. “He was in a spick and span new overcoat, new uniform with rank marks, fine black felt hat, and a handsome sword. We have never seen the like before, and gave him our congratulations on his fine appearance.” Jackson said he “believed it was some of friend Stuart’s doings.”18 A Confederate artillerist claimed after the war that Fredericksburg had been “the easiest battle we ever fought.” Once again, Jackson and Stuart worked closely together, inspecting their position and examining Union deployments. When the engagement began, Stuart’s cavalry and horse artillery covered Jackson’s right flank. The Federals penetrated Jackson’s front line, but Confederate reserves sealed the breach. On the army’s left and center, Longstreet’s infantry and artillery slaughtered Union attackers below Marye’s Heights.19 Lee’s army wintered in the Fredericksburg area along the Rappahannock River. When he was not conducting a raid or away on other duties, Stuart frequently visited Jackson’s headquarters at Moss Neck, the home of the Richard Corbin family. “No more welcome guest ever came than General J.E.B. Stuart,” declared James Power Smith, a member of Jack-

The close friendship between the reticent Jackson and the flamboyant Stuart both confounded and amused their Confederate comrades, including (above, left to right) Dr. Hunter McGuire, Henry Kyd Douglas, James Power Smith, and (opposite page) Heros von Borcke.

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Army of Northern Virginia commander Robert E. Lee (left) confers with Stonewall Jackson early on the morning of May 2, 1863. Later that day, during the fighting at Chancellorsville, Jackson would suffer wounds that would require the amputation of his left arm. He would develop pneumonia and die eight days later. Opposite page: Jackson on his deathbed.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

son’s staff. “With clanking saber and spurs and waving black plume he came and was warmly greeted at the door. Paper and work were all hastily laid aside.”20 Jackson used a small frame house near the Corbin mansion as his office. On one occasion Stuart walked in and examined pictures of racehorses and a bull on the walls. Then, as Smith recounted later, Stuart “paused and stepped back, and in solemn tones said he wished to express his astonishment and grief at the display of General Jackson’s low tastes. It would be a sad disappointment to the old ladies of the country, who thought Jackson a good man.” Jackson, added Smith, “was delighted above measure. He blushed like a girl, and hesitated, and said nothing but to turn aside and direct that a good dinner be prepared for General Stuart.” Smith noted, “All the genial humor and frolic of that splendid cavalier were enjoyed exceedingly, with utter incapacity for response.”21 Dr. Hunter McGuire, Jackson’s medical director, wrote that during the winter weeks at Moss Neck “there was a great increase in his [Jackson’s] sociability, and he unbent much more, as at table, & in enjoying an innocent jest.” McGuire continued, “Maj. Gen. Stuart especially used to break the ice & make him laugh, sometimes uproariously, at his grotesque raillery.” Stuart kept an autograph book with signatures of fellow generals and aides. In one of the rare written sentiments, Jackson penned, “Your much attached friend.”22 Spring ended the camaraderie of winter quarters and brought a renewal of active operations.

The confrontation between the old nemeses, the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, came at Chancellorsville during the first five days of May. Outnumbered two to one and opposed on two fronts, Lee reacted by dividing his army and undertaking what was arguably his boldest offensive of the war. When Stuart’s cavalrymen reported that the right flank of the main body of Major General Joseph Hooker’s Union army was unsecured by any dominant terrain and vulnerable to an attack, Lee ordered Jackson to assault.

Stuart accompanied Jackson during the famous flank march on May 2. As the Confederate infantrymen advanced about 6 p.m., Stuart and his staff followed. It was after dark when Stuart requested permission from Jackson to secure Ely’s Ford Road, a possible retreat route for the Yankees. Though the two friends didn’t know it then, it was the last time they would see each other.

T WAS JUST A FEW HOURS later when Stuart received the midnight message that told him of Jackson’s injury and summoned him back to the infantry corps. “I did not like Genl Stuart & did not want to see him command that corps,” asserted Major William H. Palmer, Hill’s chief of staff, after the war. Palmer admitted, however, “I think it was wise in that emergency after Hill to select Stuart for the command…. Stuart was well known in our corps.”23 Henry Kyd Douglas shared Palmer’s personal dislike of Stuart, but he confessed later, “Genl Stuarts reputation in the corps then was, in some respects only second to Jackson. Jackson had great admiration for him as a soldier … [and] knew the men in the corps would have more confidence in him than any man who would take his place.”

Stuart was, added Douglas, “the best man” at the time.24 When Stuart assumed temporary command of the Second Corps, he received orders from Lee to renew the attack at daylight. Stuart conducted a reconnaissance along his lines in the dark woods and realigned units. May 3 at Chancellorsville was a bloody struggle for fieldworks. Stuart seemed to be everywhere along the firing lines, encouraging the troops, redeploying brigades, and singing, “Old Joe Hooker, won’t you come out’ the Wilderness—come out’ the Wilderness.” When Hooker blundered by ordering the abandonment of Hazel Grove, an elevated plateau, Confederate artillery crews unlimbered cannon on it, sweeping Union infantry and artillery with a terrible fire. Rebel infantrymen surged forward, wrecking the enemy’s ranks.

In the woods around Chancellorsville that day, Jeb Stuart rendered his finest service to the Confederate cause. His inspiring leadership counted for much amid the confusing combat. Jackson “expressed great gratification that General Stuart had handled his corps so admirable,” according to Douglas.25 Jackson had been struck by three bullets. Two of the minie balls had fractured bones in his left arm, necessitating amputation of the limb. He was taken to a cottage at Guiney Station, where he rallied briefly before succumbing to pneumonia. “The great and good Jackson,” as Lee called him, died at 3:15 p.m. on May 10. When Stuart was informed, he told his staff that Jackson’s death “is a national calamity.” He said later of his friend, “His example, his Christian and soldiery virtue are a precious legacy to his countrymen and to the world.”26 In time, Stuart penned a sympathy note to Mary Anna Jackson.

She replied: “Your kind words of sympathy for me, } CONT. ON P. 76

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HELL HATH NO FURY

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Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, photographed in 1912.

Even as their husbands and brothers turned to reconciliation in the decades following the Civil War, northern and southern women were far less willing to let bygones be bygones.

BY CAROLINE E. JANNEY

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To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our new Notes section on page 78.

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MEDFORD PUBLIC LIBRARY, MEDFORD, MA (TOP); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

SOUTHERN WHITE WOMEN SUCH AS those at Manassas did not embrace an anti-reconciliationist stance simply to irritate Union veterans. They recognized that their Confederate identity had allowed them to venture into the public sphere first through soldiers aid societies

and later Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAs)— organized in 1865 and 1866 to rebury the southern dead in Confederate cemeteries—where they saw themselves as patriots performing vital civic duties.

Emboldened by this new public outlet, many southern white women ardently embraced the image of the unreconstructed she-rebel to continue expanding their sphere of influence, even as men increasingly celebrated the era of reconciliation. But no group relied more on its Confederate identity or found greater influence in its opposition to what one veteran referred to as the “blue-gray gush” of reconciliation than the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

On September 10, 1894, an assembly of women

PREVIOUS PAGES: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

ETURNING HOME to Pennsylvania after the Manassas Peace Jubilee and Reunion in July 1911, Union veteran James E. Maddox seethed with indignation. The Virginia women, he charged, had spoken curtly and refused water to the troopers of the 15th Cavalry “because they wore the uniform of the United States army.” Amid the blue-gray cluster of men greeting each other and appearing to forget the wrongs of days past, the southern women had maintained an icy attitude. “Our women will never forgive the North,” one Confederate veteran proudly explained. “They are as bitter today as they were when the civil war was declared.” Isabel Worrell Ball, president of the Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC) Department of the Potomac, found the southern white women not only bitter, but fiercely disloyal and corrupting. Upon arriving in Manassas, she had been appalled to observe Confederate battle flags as well as the Stars and Bars fluttering alongside Old Glory from nearly every storefront and home. “To the United Daughters of the Confederacy is due the cunning arrangement of the decorations on all these Blue Gray occasions,” she charged.1 In the 50 years since the war, veterans seemed to have found reasons to shake hands with their former foes in the name of reconciliation, but the women—of both sides—had not been so quick to join forces.

Between the 1880s and early 1900s, women attended reunions of former Confederate and Union veterans along with their husbands or fathers, but almost always played only symbolic or supportive roles.

Few in the late 19th or early 20th century questioned this male-centered culture of reconciliation. After all, reconciliationist sentiment had largely been premised on the shared experience of combat—of course it would be the veterans who gathered to reminiscence on the horrid marches and gallant charges they had all experienced. Efforts to establish the national military parks had been orchestrated in the male bastions of Congress; battlefields had been marked and preserved by the men who had fought on those fields; and it was male officers and politicians who delivered the dedicatory addresses. Without the fraternal bonds of soldiering or political and financial incentives, northern and southern women found little reason to commiserate.

They might join with their counterparts across the Mason-Dixon line in the name of issues such as temperance, but remembering the war remained a whole other issue. In fact, women proved to be some of the fiercest defenders of sectional animosity well into the 20th century.2

MEDFORD PUBLIC LIBRARY, MEDFORD, MA (TOP); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

PREVIOUS PAGES: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The ranks of northern and southern women’s organizations devoted to commemorating the Civil War swelled during the late 19th century. Above: Members of the Woman’s Relief Corps gather in 1900 in Medford, Massachusetts, to cast flowers into the Mystic River in honor of deceased Union soldiers. Below, left: The presidents of the Woman’s Relief Corps and Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic (both seated) gather with the heads of other veterans organizations in 1915.

led by Caroline Meriwether Goodlett and Anna Davenport Raines gathered in Nashville, Tennessee, to organize a national federation of all southern women dedicated to promoting a positive memory of

the Confederate cause. An outgrowth of LMAs and other Confederate memorial societies that had been active since 1866, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) directed most of their efforts toward raising funds for Confederate monuments, organizing Confederate “Memorial Days” to honor their fallen soldiers, caring for indignant Confederate widows, sponsoring essay contests and fellowships for southern students, and maintaining Confederate museums and relic collections. A hereditary association (much like the Daughters of the American Revolution), the UDC admitted only relatives of those devoted to the southern cause: Confederate veterans’ female kin, women who had served the Confederacy, and the documented descendants of both these groups.

The UDC grew rapidly in membership and influence; during its first year alone, 20 chapters were chartered. Within three years that number had swelled to 138. By 1912, the Daughters listed more than 800 chapters and 45,000 members in their memorial army.3 Women’s commitment to honoring the Union cause likewise compelled tens of thousands of northern women to enlist in memorial associations. Although the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a fraternal

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In the decades following the conflict, southern men (such as Mississippi politician James Vardaman, pictured here with the widow of Confederate general James Longstreet in 1913) continued to argue that their women had endured much greater wartime hardships than their northern counterparts.

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organization composed of Union veterans, had initially refused to allow women to join, by 1883 the men had reconsidered and invited women to form a national order to assist the GAR in its charity work.

Designated as “auxiliaries” to the men’s posts, the groups would serve in separate and subordinate associations, required to affiliate with and take the name of the nearest GAR post. Within months, 26 women’s associations from 16 states formed under the banner of the Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC)—with the word “relief” emphasizing the group’s primary purpose.4 In the coming years, Union women found other opportunities to memorialize their cause. By 1898, 25,000 women belonged to Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic (LGAR), a group devoted to caring for wounded U.S. veterans and furthering loyalty to the Union cause through efforts such as textbook campaigns. Two years later the Daughters of the Union claimed 1,000 inductees while the Ladies’ Aid Society reported 8,000 members. The WRC, however, proved the most popular, having grown from 10,000 members in 1884 to more than 118,000 by the turn of the century. Every state except Alabama boasted at least a handful of local corps, with membership strongest in New England and the Midwest.5

ESPITE THE FACT that far more Union women were active in memorial groups than their Confederate counterparts, it was the southern veterans who saw their women’s role in the war and its commemoration as far more influential. In the years after Appomattox, Confederate veterans gushed about their loyal, devoted, and sacrificing women in southern newspapers, Confederate Memorial Day addresses, and monument dedications. Above all, they praised Confederate women’s tenacious and feisty defense of the cause. During the war, argued Mississippi governor James Vardaman in 1907, Confederate women “were at home doing greater deeds than even Lee or Grant…. The greatest battles were fought by the mothers of men.”6 The men proudly acknowledged how their women’s war experiences had been more difficult than that of their Union counterparts.

“Northern women had no special care or discomfort,” exhorted Captain Francis W. Dawson before a group of Confederate veterans in Baltimore in 1882.

“They were in no danger themselves. There was no Milroy, no Butler, no Hunter, no Sheridan, no Sherman, to taunt and upbraid them, to strip them of their most precious mementoes, to steal or scatter their scanty store of provisions and burn their homes over their head.” All Confederate women,

A few of the many northern women who volunteered during the war with the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a northern aid organization.

he declared, “are beyond the reach of comparison, and stand nobly, supremely alone, without peer or rival.”7 The message was that Confederate women were not only essential, they were exceptional.

In striking contrast, northern men were nearly silent on their women’s wartime role. In the immediate aftermath of war, a few publications had celebrated the angelic qualities of female hospital workers and the tireless loyalty of Union women on the home front. But by the 1880s, these tributes had become infrequent. Memorial Day orators in the North routinely focused on the bravery and “patriotic zeal” of soldiers, the triumph of the Union, and (in some cases) the emancipation of 4 million slaves, but largely ignored the trials and labors of women. The same held true among black veterans, who rarely recognized the role black women had played as laundresses, nurses, and cooks. References to women at Union monument dedications, in regimental histories, or even among memoirs of generals such as Ulysses S. Grant were conspicuously absent. While Confederate veterans launched a campaign to build monuments to their southern women on every statehouse lawn in the South, no memorials honoring all Union women were erected. Only when celebrating specific nurses or directly addressing the women of the WRC or LGAR did Union veterans appear inclined to praise their war contributions.8 This failure to remember, much less celebrate, Union women had its origins in the war itself. The distance between the battlefront and the home front meant that Union soldiers and the northern press often perceived northern women as indifferent to the war effort, a sentiment that gained credence in the postwar years. Men had fought to save the Union and, many added, to emancipate the slaves, but the Union women’s “relief” on the home front had not been seen as essential to either. Seldom subject to wartime invasions and unlikely to be caught in crossfire (with the notable exceptions of those near Gettysburg, Antietam, or the border regions), white northern women seemed to have experienced very little of the conflict. Only the nurses and sanitary workers who risked their lives on the front lines received acknowledgement. For example, Rossiter Johnson’s 1896 book Campfire and Battle-field included a chapter on women of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and U.S. Christian Commission, noting that “many of them lost their lives, directly or indirectly, in the consequence of their labors.”

The following year, the Department of Kansas GAR set aside July 19 as Mother Bickerdyke Day (after famed nurse and hospital administrator Mary Ann Bickerdyke) to honor “all that noble band of American

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In the North, women’s organizations lobbied to have the wartime contributions of women acknowledged. Pictured here is an 1888 petition by the Woman’s Relief Corps to secure federal pensions for army nurses.

Union women attended Memorial Days, but their role was limited to procuring floral arrangements to decorate the fallen soldiers’ graves. Men’s organizations likewise dominated the efforts behind most monuments and memorials to their cause, as well as movements to preserve battlefields like Gettysburg.

Having no political reason to take the lead in memorialization, northern women’s postwar efforts tended to be extensions of their wartime charity and relief work. In every city, town, and hamlet, declared the WRC president at the second national gathering, loyal northern women could be found ministering to wounded soldiers just as they had done during the war. “When our soldiers had accomplished their work,” she observed, they had “returned to their homes, laid down their arms, returned to the State authorities their precious flags … and become private citizens.” But unlike their soldier counterparts, the women of the Relief Corps had “not mustered out.”

Yet aiding needy veterans, widows, and orphans— the primary efforts of the WRC and LGAR—may have been far less noticeable activities than staging Memorial Days and erecting monuments, as southern women had done.11 Equally as important were demographics.

Because 75 to 85 percent of white southern men of military age had served in the Confederate armies, the war had been a defining experience for virtually all white southerners. In the North, a slight majority of the population did not serve. And as immigration increased in the last decades of the 19th century, that percentage increased.12 So although a greater number of northern women were active in memorialization compared to their southern sisters, they represented a far smaller percentage of the northern population. It was another way in which northern women’s memorial work was simply less visible than in the South.

There is yet another possible explanation for northern women’s inconspicuous role in Union memory: Defeat may have been easier to share than victory. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, many U.S. veterans began to worry that the northern public’s appreciation of their service and sacrifice was waning. They lamented the pathetic turnout at Memorial Day observances and a general attitude that veterans should move on with their postwar lives. Amid debates about federal soldiers’ homes, pensions, and an economic boom that convinced many that anyone who could not make something of himself deserved to fail, the northern public increasingly stereotyped veterans as grasping pensioners, alcoholic dependents, or even wayward tramps. Given this, some may have found it difficult to share any glory with a female public that they believed had contributed relatively little to the cause.13 Women might be welcomed at Memorial Days and monument dedications, but it had been men who had endured the harsh

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heroines—THE ARMY NURSES.” But in the eyes of many Union veterans, most northern women were tangential to both the Union war effort and its memorialization.9 Aware that they were becoming invisible, and no doubt animated by the perception that they had been less committed to the war than Confederate women, some Union women worked tirelessly to ensure that they would not be forgotten. “Let us remember that from the soldier alone came not all the sacrifice,” urged WRC president Florence Barker in 1884. “Many a brave woman’s duty in the hospital—yes, in the march and in the field—would compare in deeds of valor with that of the soldier,” she declared. Such sentiments led the WRC to campaign for federal pensions for all army nurses, which they finally achieved in 1892. Other northern women took up their pens, including former U.S. Sanitary Commission leader Mary Livermore, who published her memoirs in 1887. “The consecrated and organized work of women, who strengthened the sinews of the nation with their unflagging loyalty,” had not yet been “fully narrated,” she observed.10 If the divergence between the commemorations of Union and Confederate women was partly due to perceptions about their respective causes, it was equally a response to women’s role in shaping the war’s memory. Where LMAs had inaugurated and continued the tradition of Confederate Memorial Days to honor their fallen soldiers (in large part because such activities would have been deemed treasonous had they been led by southern white men), Union celebrations were the province of men and the federal government. For the first 20 years after the war,

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Ex-Rebels extolled southern women’s postwar resistance to northern forces during Reconstruction.

Above: In this Alfred R. Waud sketch made shortly after the war’s end, Richmond ladies turn up their noses at a passing Union officer as they make their way through the city’s ruins to collect government rations.

realities of camp and the field of battle. They believed that veterans, not women, were best suited to control the war’s memory (a fact underscored by the GAR’s refusal to recognize the WRC until 1883).

Confederate men, on the other hand, consistently praised their women as actors in Civil War commemorations. In the wake of war, these veterans recalled, southern women had been first at the grave, helping to soothe defeat and fostering an eternal devotion to the Lost Cause. “Southern women were the most ardent of original secessionists, the most hopeful and indefatigable of belligerents,” declared one newspaper editor in 1867, “and to-day their submission is the most tardy and reluctant.” Six years later, speaking before the Southern Historical Society at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Jefferson Davis similarly extolled not only the wartime devotion of all Confederate women, but also their continued resistance to northern forces. While southern men had been forced to yield to the “punishment” of Reconstruction and give up the principles for which they had struggled, the former Confederate president declared that he had never seen a reconstructed southern woman.

Their devotion would be paramount, he argued, in teaching the next generation to maintain and perpetuate all that had been lost.14 Many white southerners understood that women might be especially well suited to keeping the flames of sectionalism alive. Just as had been the case with the mourning rituals of the LMAs in 1866 and 1867, both southern and northern men might dismiss southern white women’s defiance as mere emotion. Women might prattle on about the horrors of Yankee troops, the righteousness of secession, and the unjustness of Reconstruction, but surely their bombastic and unreconstructed sentiments were benign. Such could not possibly jeopardize sectional reconciliation. Conversely, white northerners could embrace a memory of the war that emphasized devoted, if emotional, women—even if it contradicted their own interpretation of the conflict. This domesticated, romantic rendering of the Confederacy simultaneously feminized the region and its cause. In some instances, sympathizing with poor, selfsacrificing (and nonpolitical) southern women offered white northerners a more acceptable path toward reconciliation than did alliances with southern white men. Not surprisingly, a widely repeated formula in postwar literature heralded the domestic union between a northern man and southern woman—acknowledging the economic dominance of the North but conceding the feminine virtue of the South.15 Perhaps most important, extolling southern white women’s continued hostility to the North into the early 1900s allowed ex-Confederates

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to both embrace and repudiate the sectionalist rhetoric. Men often concealed their lingering bitterness for the sake of business ventures or national and international politics, but by commending southern white women’s visceral loyalty to the Lost Cause, men like Davis could simultaneously espouse the contradictory impulses of sectional animosity and a desire for a reunited nation.16 Assured of their special place within the Confederate cause, southern white women became increasingly determined to protect and promote it. Even the passing of the war generation did not dissuade their efforts, but only seemed to encourage their fierce attachment to the Lost Cause and encourage their fiercely anti-reconciliationist sentiments.

OUNDED DURING THE height of reconciliationist pageantry, the UDC intended in large part to provide an antidote to the blue-gray gush. “I am pained to see and realize that so many of our people have accepted and are preaching the Creed that there is no North or South, but one nation,” Anna Raines wrote Meriwether Goodlett in April 1894. For several months, as the two corresponded to plan their organization, Raines could not contain her disgust at sectional reconciliation. “No true Southerner can ever embrace this new religion,” she insisted, “and those WHO DO should be ostracized by the ‘Daughters of the Confederacy.’”17 Vindicating the Confederate generation served as the UDC’s paramount objective. Proving that their parents and grandparents had been justified in secession and war guided the Daughters’ textbook and memorial campaigns.

“Our duty is clearly defined,” declared Mildred Rutherford, chairman of the UDC’s Historical Committee, in 1899. “To strive to vindicate, by a truthful statement of facts we can prove, the heroism of our fallen comrades and surviving Veterans, it should be our privilege and is certainly their right.” Mary Overman, president of the North Carolina Division, echoed her sentiments. The “promulgation and preservation of the truth” should be the “earnest effort” of every UDC member, she beseeched. “It will be the one thing eternal in our organization—preserve the truth—in that lies the vindication of our brave men and faithful women of the South.” Enlivened by the nefarious teachings of northerners who argued that secession had not been constitutional and that Confederates had fought for slavery, Helen DeBerniere Wills, president of the Leonidas Polk chapter, called upon all the Daughters to create children’s auxiliaries such as the Children of the Confederacy to further “vindicate the South and her heroes, and place before the world a narrative of facts instead of the falsehoods which have been hitherto disseminated.”18 With a concerted effort on the part of the UDC, these women believed, future generations would not misunderstand the motives of their ancestors. Indeed, they would uphold them as exemplars of honor and virtue, defenders of constitutional right.

Unionist women could be equally as disdainful

of reconciliationist gestures. In 1880, former abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote that she was especially pleased with erstwhile Union general James Garfield’s emphasis “on the assertion that there was a right and wrong in the War of the Rebellion.”

Slavery had been wrong, she maintained, and “the means they took to sustain and extend it were bad….

I have been disgusted, and somewhat discouraged, by the ‘mush of concession’ that has passed current under the name of magnanimity. The tendency to speak of both sides as equally in the right, because they both fought bravely, is utterly wrong in principle and demoralizing in its influence.” In 1887, Mrs. Edward Roby, the founder of the LGAR, wrote President Grover Cleveland that his offer to return captured battle flags to the Rebels revealed him “untrue to the cause of freedom, country, and God.” That same year, at the WRC’s fifth national convention, Elizabeth D’Arcy Kinne of California fiercely objected to a suggestion that the women decorate the graves of Confederates on Memorial Day. “Treason is treason, living or dead,” declared Kinne, the group’s national president. “Our boys in blue were loyal and true. We cannot say that of the other side, and while we are willing to forgive and forget the past, never while life shall last, will we of the WRC honor and love the gray.”19 If women were, in 19th-century parlance, the

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Whereas members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (two of whom are pictured here in 1912) expressed disgust at the idea of reconciliation, northern and southern veterans were increasingly putting the war behind them. Opposite: Former Confederate and Union soldiers walk arm in arm in this illustration from the cover of Puck magazine in 1913.

“fairer sex,” why did they so adamantly resist the gestures of reconciliation that many (though not all) men seemed willing to at least occasionally embrace?

There are several possibilities. First, both Union and Confederate veterans had shared the experience of combat. Despite their fierce ideological differences, veterans often believed, consciously or not, that their former foes better understood what it meant to shoulder a rifle, suffer the screams of their comrades, or endure a winter sleeping on the bitterly frozen ground.20 But without that shared experience, women emphasized what they perceived as their regionally distinctive wartime contributions.

Southern women understood—and their men continued to remind them—that they had suffered far more than their northern counterparts and devoted more of themselves to their cause, even if it had failed.

They had been martyrs to their cause just as much as southern white men. Union women simply could not abide by what they perceived as such nonsense.

Second, men had a litany of practical rationales for encouraging a reunited, reconciled nation, from the U.S.’s global ambitions to domestic politics. Such was not the case for women. An increasing number of women were demanding the vote through the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, but they had yet to achieve their goals of electoral participation and political recognition by

mainstream America. Largely barred from the business and political world, women were free to embrace bitterness without jeopardizing financial or partisan opportunities. They could air their true feelings without consequences. The fact that they were never censured—and often praised—for such sentiment by their respective veterans suggests that men quietly shared these feelings, even if gestures of reconciliation were customary in legislative halls and on former battlefields.

A third possibility arises from the generational difference between the most active members of the WRC and those of the UDC. Constrained by its 1883 rules admitting only women who had personally supported the Union cause, the WRC had state and national leaders that were older than many of the UDC officers. WRC leaders were more likely to have sent their husbands and sons off to the front lines. Alternatively, many of the most active Daughters had been young girls during the conflict or had been born after Appomattox. The ever-outspoken UDC member Mildred Lewis Rutherford, for example, had been born in 1851 and experienced the war as a child. This was another way in which Union and Confederate women might have found very little over which to commiserate.

The very nature of women’s Civil War societies was perhaps the most important factor shaping their resistance to the reconciliation. How could the Daughters actively pursue their primary mission of honoring the Confederate past and instilling a “southern” sense of pride in their youth if they joined forces with northern women? As UDC member Adelia A. Dunovant observed, if white southern women failed to recognize the sovereignty of the states or work to vindicate the “earth’s noblest heroes, the men of the Confederacy,” they would “destroy the very basis upon which our association of United Daughters of the Confederacy stands.”21 The same held true for Union women of the WRC and } CONT. ON P. 76

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BOOKS & AUTHORS

Voices from the Army of the Potomac

BY GARY W. GALLAGHER ONE OF THE GREAT JOYS of studying the Civil War lies in discovering favorite witnesses who help us understand the conflict’s often intimidating complexity. Beginning with this column, I will discuss some indispensable published primary materials relating to the Army of the Potomac. My initial group of titles includes a diary from an important artillerist and books of letters from a staff officer and

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B&A try were safely back in Africa.”

In the wake of Chancellorsville, Wainwright listened while Joseph Hooker unburdened himself to a group of officers, blaming John Sedgwick, among others, for his failure to defeat Robert E. Lee. “I said nothing in reply to his statements,” notes Wainwright, “but my feelings were divided between shame for my commanding general, and indignation at the attack on so true, brave, and modest a man as Sedgwick.” On July 14, 1863, Wainwright addresses the fact that Lee’s army had recrossed the Potomac into Virginia: “People at home of course will now pitch into [General George G.] Meade, as they did McClellan after Antietam, for letting him escape. My own opinion is that under the circumstances and with the knowledge General Meade then had he was justified in putting off his attack….”

For testimony regarding General Meade and the rest of the army’s high command during the last 18 months of the war, few accounts rival Theodore Lyman’s Meade’s Headquarters

Union artillerists race into action at Chancellorsville. Charles S. Wainwright, chief of artillery of the Army of the Potomac's I Corps during the battle, was privy to the finger-pointing among army leaders in the wake of the decisive Union defeat.

1863-1865: Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman from the Wilderness to Appomattox, edited by George R. Agassiz (1922; reprint titled With Grant and Meade from the Wilderness to Appomattox, 1994).

Acquainted with Meade since the mid-1850s, the Harvard-educated Lyman joined the general’s staff in September 1863 and soon began writing richly descriptive and analytical letters home. (Lyman’s wartime journals, which lie beyond the purview of this column, were edited by David W. Lowe as Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman [2007].)

Two passages suggest the irresistible appeal of Lyman’s correspondence. On April 12, 1864, after a group of staff officers first saw Ulysses S. Grant in Culpeper, Virginia, Lyman presents what became a widely quoted comment about the new general-inchief. “Grant is a man of a good deal of rough dignity; rather taciturn; quick and decided in speech,” writes Lyman perceptively. “He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined

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a division chief.

Charles S. Wainwright commanded a brigade of guns in the I Corps and later in the V Corps and saw significant action in most of the battles from Fredericksburg through Appomattox.

A well-educated New Yorker, he kept a journal that historian Allan Nevins edited as A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, 1861-1865 (1962). The journal offers a wealth of material about military affairs, political leaders and events, and the most famous Union army’s “long arm.” A Democrat and staunch supporter of George B. McClellan, Wainwright frequently criticizes the Lincoln administration and, most harshly, the Radical Republicans in Congress. For Wainwright, the war was a struggle to preserve the Union in which emancipation figured only tangentially. Put off by the attention the New York press paid to a newly raised black regiment in March 1864, for example, Wainwright remarks, “For my part, I wish all the negroes in the coun-

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“He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it. I have much confidence in him.”

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COLONEL THEODORE LYMAN, UPON SEEING GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT FOR THE FIRST TIME, APRIL 12, 1864.

to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it. I have much confidence in him.” Several weeks later, after the bloodlettings at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, Lyman records Meade’s reaction to a letter from William Tecumseh Sherman to Grant.

The letter conveyed Sherman’s hope that Grant could make the Army of the Potomac fight as well as the Union’s western armies.

In a voice Lyman likens to “cutting an iron bar with a handsaw,” Meade raged: “Sir! I consider that despatch an insult to the army I command and to me personally.

The Army of the Potomac does not require General Grant’s inspiration or anybody’s else inspiration to make it fight!” As for Sherman’s men, Meade dismisses them as “an armed rabble.”

Politics are far less obvious in Lyman’s letters than in Wainwright’s, though his unhappiness with waning resolution behind the lines in the North emerges

Union general Alpheus S. Williams (top) wrote extensively about his wartime experiences.

His letters were published in 1959 under the title From the Cannon’s Mouth (below).

clearly. A conservative Boston Brahmin, Lyman joined Wainwright in expressing little enthusiasm for black soldiers, as when, on May 18, 1864, he wrote about the United States Colored Troops division in Ambrose E. Burnside’s IX Corps: “As I looked at them, my soul was troubled and I would gladly have seen them marched back to Washington.

Can we not fight our own battles, without calling on these humble hewers of wood and drawers of water, to be bayonetted by the unsparing Southerners?”

Alpheus S. Williams belongs on any roster of the Army of the Potomac’s fighting generals, and From the Cannon’s Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus S. Williams, edited by Milo M. Quaife (1959; paperback reprint, 1995) belongs on any short list of essential sources on the army. A native of Connecticut, Williams spent much of his successful antebellum career in Detroit. He served in both the eastern and western theaters and compiled an enviable record as a brigade, division, and corps commander. His letters describe battles such as Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Atlanta; unsparingly evaluate a number of Union generals; and offer opinions about a range of political and social issues. Among the topics Williams addresses are morale among officers in the Union army, the impact of the war on the Confederate home front, and reaction among soldiers to various measures enacted by the Republican Congress.

Williams directs a number of barbs toward fellow officers.

“Suffice it to say…,” reads one passage about John Pope just after Second Bull Run, “that more in-

solence, superciliousness, ignorance, and pretentiousness were never combined in one man.”

Elsewhere, Williams states that Nathaniel P. Banks seemed “to get sick when there is most to do,” accuses Samuel W. Crawford of skulking and perhaps purposely wounding himself at Antietam, notes that Ambrose E. Burnside was “a most agreeable, companionable gentleman and a good officer” who was not “regarded by officers who knew him best as equal to McClellan in any respect,” and avers that “Little Mac,” who shared Williams’ Democratic politics, might have exhibited “too much of the Fabian policy.”

Although a determined combat officer, Williams, like Wainwright, fits comfortably into the culture of command created by McClellan. Williams often seems satisfied merely to avoid decisive defeats and habitually urges caution in pressing the Army of Northern Virginia. When the Army of the Potomac withdraws to the north bank of the Rappahannock River after suffering defeat at Chancellorsville, he observes that neither “the most extravagant self-conceit nor the wildest lunacy could bring anyone to the belief that with our reduced army we can, with the least prospect of success, cross the Rappahannock just now…. [O]ffensive operations are out of the question.”

Future columns will add other voices to this initial trio, producing, in the end, a roster of accounts that illuminates the history of the greatest Union army.

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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B&A { MUSINGS of a CIVIL WAR BIBLIOPHILE }

Memoirs: The Ultimate Confederate Primary Sources

BY ROBERT K. KRICK EARLIER ESSAYS IN this space have hymned the virtues of Confederate eyewitness accounts written at the time of the great events they described, or soon thereafter. That immediacy, free from knowledge of what would come later, and unclouded by the passage of years, affords priceless clarity to diaries and letters.

In fact, though, Confederate memoirs provide more important information than do diaries and letters. We wish it were not so—it would serve far better if war-dated accounts answered our questions, employing their powerful virtue of avoiding distortions imposed by time. The annoyingly slim bulk of most diaries, though, leaves us eager for more, and letters, even when lengthy, talk mostly of home matters instead of military events.

Most memoirists fulfill our yearning for topical focus more than do contemporary writers.

As these writers looked back, pen in hand, the great events in which they played a role—no matter how modest—demanded thorough description. Would that the pens of diarists and correspondents during the 1860s had behaved in similar fashion, at those far more apt moments for producing riveting narrative—but most of the time they simply did not.

The absence of negative themes probably constitutes the most pervasive loss of clarity in later-life memoirs. Many Confederate memoirs—most, in fact— describe executions, and talk of gnawing hunger and weariness.

Very few, though, speak pointedly about cowardice, misprision by officers, rampant desertion, or other universal defects that beset every army.

The modern politically correct view of such silence insists that southerners engaged in a vast conspiracy to manipulate the record: They all swallowed “The Myth of the Lost Cause” Kool-Aid, and must not be trusted. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything (and many modernists simply cannot resist it).

In fact, old veterans of both sides behaved in precisely the same way. (Was there a “Myth of the Won Cause”?) So did, and do, veterans of Anzio and Angaur. Men looking back on episodes in their youth, when they participated in dramatic and exciting scenes, almost always filter out some of the horrors.

Confederate memoirs that deserve special credit, therefore, are those that wax blunt and cleareyed about cowards, bad officers, and deteriorating discipline. John Overton Casler’s classic Four

Years in the Stonewall Brigade (1893) long has been lauded as one such book, and deserves the asterisk. Casler’s postwar shenanigans fit the mold: He was ejected from the Soldiers’ Home in Richmond for being drunk and cursing the commandant. Later he faked his own death in Oklahoma as an insurance scam. It is hardly surprising that many soldiers who appear in Four Years also showed up on AWOL lists during the 1860s.

Benjamin James Haden of the 1st Virginia Cavalry, known for some reason as “Jerry,” wrote a memoir as unwavering in its descriptions as Casler’s, but without the latter’s personal involvement

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In his memoir, the 1st Virginia Cavalry's Benjamin James Haden remembered his colonel, R. Welby Carter (above), with scorn. Below: Confederates commanded by Stonewall Jackson battle Union forces at Cedar Mountain in August 1862.

reported sarcastically, “our beloved Colonel Carter run twenty five miles, never stopping until he got inside our infantry line at New Market.”

A Confederate court-martial agreed with Haden, cashiering Carter for cowardice. A few weeks later, an Illinois cavalry detachment captured the erstwhile colonel at home, hiding in his underwear behind a chimney.

A black youngster pointed him out, and said the fugitive was his father.

Hundreds of more traditional, less acidulous, Confederate memoirs appeared in print, fortunately for readers interested in the Army of Northern Vir-

ginia. Typical among innumerable good examples are John H. Worsham’s One of Jackson’s Foot Cavalry (1912) and Edward A. Moore’s The Story of a Cannoneer under Stonewall Jackson (1907).

Worsham belonged to an elite prewar Richmond company that became part of the 21st Virginia Infantry, in Jackson’s original division. Ned Moore’s narrative of service in the renowned Rockbridge Artillery is said to have been General George Catlett Marshall’s favorite Civil War book. Marshall no doubt knew the artillerist-turned-memoirist while a student at Virginia Military Institute. Moore’s dust jacket featured a photograph of his bat-

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in malfeasance. Haden’s Reminiscences of J. E. B. Stuart’s Cavalry, published in Charlottesville about 1900, deserves designation as a classic because of its unflinching candor. He admired Stuart and Colonels William A. Morgan and James H. Drake (who looked startlingly like Dick Ewell, coincidentally), but Haden described the other long-term colonel of the 1st, R. Welby Carter, with scathing derision. “We had no love for Colonel Carter,” Haden wrote.

“He was always fat and looked greasy, [but] I never knew of any member of the regiment to possess enough of cannibalism to ever wish to eat him.” After the Battle of Tom’s Brook, Haden

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B&A tery’s original complement of four guns, which stood just in front of Marshall’s barracks during his cadetship—and still stands there today.

Both Worsham and Moore have been reprinted more than once, as is the case with most classic memoirs. Beware, though, of a Worsham edition in which the veteran’s own words have been gerrymandered and bowdlerized on the remarkable premise that it makes for easier reading.

An enormously useful variant in the memoir line is compendiums, which are drawn from numerous veterans and focus on a particular theme. George S. Bernard’s War Talks of Confederate Veterans (1892) is one such book. It prints accounts by more than 100 veterans of Mahone’s Brigade, most particularly about the Crater.

Contemplating the merits of a broad genre, as this column has done, cries out for a subjective conclusion: What is the prize of the lot? It would be difficult to imagine any memoir better than that by artillerist E. P. Alexander, published in 1989 under editing by Gary W. Gallagher: Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander.

Alexander’s sheer brainpower and personality resonate vigorously across the years. He quickly becomes that most appealing of memoirists: someone a reader would love to meet and know, or at least chat with for a time, face to face. He also brought to bear on his literary endeavor an incomparable asset, a surviving diary (kept for most of the war) from which to expand his account, on the basis of a terse but contemporary record.

ROBERT K. KRICK, CHIEF HISTORIAN (RETIRED) AT THE FREDERICKSBURG AND SPOTSYLVANIA NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, HAS WRITTEN 20 BOOKS ON THE CIVIL WAR, INCLUDING STONEWALL JACKSON AT CEDAR MOUNTAIN (2001) AND THE SMOOTHBORE VOLLEY THAT DOOMED THE CONFEDERACY (2004).

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CASUALTIES OF WAR CONTINUED FROM P. 25

rejuvenation in the North, Lordy traveled to New York to study for the bar under one of the Kings’ old tutors. His family was impressed with his (claimed) church attendance and application to study, but the journal he kept from February to December 1860 paints a somewhat different portrait. He lived above his office, rose early for breakfast, then studied for the bulk of the day. His nights were spent at billiards or whist, smoking and drinking with male companions, or calling on neighborhood women. Often he did not return home before 2 a.m. and would fall asleep at his books the next morning. Sometimes he did not return at all, spending more than a few evenings in the bed of a married woman he identifies only as “Mrs. Helen X.” But the sad truth, Lord began to admit to himself, was that even his carousing had settled into a dull rhythm. In one twomonth period he pledged to quit drinking four times and smoking twice. His life had become “awfully dull” and “one day very much like another”—he punctuated most of his diary entries with an “as usual.”

When Lord turned 29 in April 1860, it was clear that middle age would take its toll on him. “How little have I done to be proud of,” noted the would-be Napoleon, “how much to be sorry for.”8 In May, Lordy began a liaison with an old sweetheart. Lillie, he confided to his diary, was “as charming as ever, more so.”

They spent their afternoons in the library talking and reading her poetry, their evenings walking, dining, or attending the opera. One bitterly cold day, they took a stroll around the harbor. Shivering, Lillie confessed to Lord that she loved him.

Typical of both his bravado and his staccato diary style, Lordy shrugged off the incident with a simple note: “Who can believe?” Whether he gave love, Lillie, or women in general so little credence is open to question, but clearly the rut into which his life had fallen would not be altered by the prospect of marriage.9 The deepening sectional crisis, on the other hand, promised something more tangible, and Lordy was quick to see in it a revolution worthy of his energies. In early October he noted that the whole

city had “gone Black Republican,” and a week after Abraham Lincoln’s election he began putting his affairs in order for the long trek south. His northern acquaintances, including his Pennsylvania uncle, thought his politics “extreme,” but Lord felt suddenly certain he was doing the right thing. “The revolution [is] going on very well,” he noted in his diary.

“No one here will believe it. So much the worse [for them].” On December 13, Lord said goodbye to Lillie. Crushed, she told him tearfully that she wanted to be his wife, that she would rather live in a hut with him than in a mansion with anyone else. Scrupulously maintaining his distance, Lord belittled the emotional outpouring as “quite a scene” and took Lillie to dinner to “quiet her down.” It would be unfair to interpret his actions as willfully cruel. Like his father, Lord believed women were unworthy vessels for a man’s ambition and shrugged off their protestations of love as so much theatricality. The alternative—that Lillie, like his mother, had been genuinely hurt—was unthinkable; in a world where women seemed so regularly disappointed in men, the safest response was simply to disbelieve them.10 Upon arriving home, Lord traveled to the would-be Confederate capital in Montgomery, Alabama, and quickly secured a lieutenancy under General Pierre G.T. Beauregard. He was in Charleston during the bombardment of Fort Sumter—a “magnificent sight,” he told his brother. “I begged … Gen’l Beauregard to let me go under fire but he declined.” Promoted to captain and attached to Brigadier General McLaws’ staff, Lord pestered his superiors for the most dangerous assignments and dreamed of marching into Pennsylvania to show the Yankees how it felt to be invaded. His sister Florence, who had inherited her mother’s infinite capacity for worrying, begged him to be careful.

“If my life could be taken as a ransom for those of my brothers, what a happy woman I would be. Dear Lordy, I cannot live the life of misery I see before me. My heart is bleeding to death.”11 “In all this war nothing has made me half so sad as the tone of your last two letters,” Lord wrote back. “I beg you not to waste your grief and tears upon us.”

Neither grief nor tears were wasted; Lordy was killed at Fredricksburg, 20

yards in advance of the Confederate line. What he might have been, had he had a father, had he remained in New York to marry Lillie, had he listened to his sister, we will never know.

STEPHEN BERRY IS AMANDA AND GREG GREGORY PROFESSOR OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA. HE IS THE AUTHOR OR EDITOR OF FOUR BOOKS ON AMERICA IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, INCLUDING HOUSE OF ABRAHAM: LINCOLN AND THE TODDS, A FAMILY DIVIDED BY WAR (HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT, 2007).

BATTLEFIELD ECHOES CONTINUED FROM P. 27

more closely resembled Sherman’s raids than conventional, deliberate occupations.

During the conflicts of the 20th century, the U.S. Army utilized operational raids when it sought limited objectives and didn’t need to control terrain. Missions to liberate American prisoners of war, including Cabanatuan in World War II and Son Tay in Vietnam, are perhaps the most well-known examples.

Large-scale maneuvers in the modern era, however, require extensive logistics and resources. While the raiding concept still exists in the U.S. military’s smaller, tactical arena and special operations missions, gone are the days of living off the enemy’s territory. Today’s army does not (and could not) do what Sherman did to Mississippi in early 1864, a further reminder of the totality of the Civil War in comparison to the conflicts of recent years.

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).

WHY I FIGHT CONTINUED FROM P. 38

afternoon after the epic Culp’s Hill fight, we switched uniforms, into standard blues, and went out into the Wheatfield as the 52nd New York. Per true events, there was a whole string of battles taking place simultaneously—the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, Little Round Top—but as a foot } CONT. ON P. 76

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WHY I FIGHT CONTINUED FROM P. 75

soldier, I was aware of little more than my immediate surroundings and the orders I was given. We fought a tense battle, and after a half hour or so in the hot sun, we were pulled back into the woods. We stacked arms, drank water, and rested in the shade. Then a few people wandered to the tree line, came back, and reported that the scene was something we’d want to see.

We stood and followed them back, just into the clearing, under a giant oak tree.

A few thousand reenactors, stretched across 180 degrees of gorgeous countryside, were deep in battle. It was majestic and brutal. We never get to watch like this, and at first I observed as a fellow performer. From inside, I know, it feels something like choreography, and I appreciated the well-acted scenario. The guys were being good sports and taking hits, instead of acting bulletproof. They were maneuvering realistically.

And then my mind slipped, and suddenly I was just watching a battle, from afar, with innocent eyes. It was beautiful. Horses and officers and flags caught my attention first, then I took in the long lines of infantrymen, moving as an organism. A man falls and he’s replaced seamlessly by the man who was behind him. I saw stoic bravery, and desperation too. An Irish regiment charged a Confederate line and got mowed down.

Two survivors picked up the fallen flag.

Everywhere I turned, regiments were struggling like this. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the spectator area in the distance, where folks looked like ice cream sprinkles in their loud modern clothes. But I was absorbed in the armies of dark muted colors clashing in the smoke and tall grass, in the wheat, in the rocks. I was choked up, and walked a few more steps forward so I could tear up unnoticed.

Then suddenly we’re called back in.

We rush back into line, take arms, and march out. It’s mean. We’re pushed back, off step, retreating across uneven rutted ground in tall grass. The Rebs haven’t even rested, but they seem to like the heat. Their fire is relentless, and I am shot in the shoulder. (I’m always

asked how we know when to die. It’s like Quaker meeting—you just know. But for safety reasons, it’s never when you’re loaded.) Soon the Confederates pass over me. The boys in blue are pushed back into the trees, and it’s over.

We dead rise up and file back into ranks, and the Rebs and Yanks find themselves just a few feet apart, staring close into each other’s sunburnt faces.

We’d just been shooting at each other and now we’re not. It’s a little awkward.

The play animosity is replaced with something that’s not nothing. Mutual respect? Gratitude? Wistfulness? The front ranks are shaking hands as we line up to march out. Good game. Nice fighting, boys. The Union guys share some bottled water and ice we had

stashed in the woods with the Confederates. The Union band leader calls for his boys to play Dixie, and the guys in gray sing along.

Tomorrow will be Pickett’s Charge, the high-water mark of the Confederacy, when we’ll devastate the Rebel advance with chants of “Fredericksburg!” But just now, out of view of the candy-colored spectators who are filing back to their cars, deeply moved or not, we soldiers have this little moment to ourselves. A little piece of history made that much more alive, despite our poor power to add or detract.

THE PURITAN & THE CAVALIER

HELL HATH NO FURY

& your tribute of admiration for my noble Husband were warmly appreciated. I need not assure you of which you already know, that your friendship & admiration were cordially reciprocated by him. I have frequently heard him speak of Gen’l Stuart as one of his warm personal friends, & also express admiration for your soldiery qualities.”27 Almost a year to the day after Jackson’s death, on May 11, 1864, Jeb Stuart suffered a mortal wound at Yellow Tavern. He was rallying his troops after a Union attack when he was shot in the abdomen by a fleeing Yankee cavalryman. Taken in an ambulance to Richmond, the famous cavalry commander died at 7:38 p.m. the next day. He was 31 years old.

The friendship between Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart had seemed inexplicable to observers, but the bonds they shared outweighed their stark differences. John Esten Cooke of Stuart’s staff put it well when he said they “seemed to have a sincere friendship for each other, which always impressed me as a very singular circumstance indeed; but so it was.”28

LGAR. How would they celebrate their chief contribution—their loyalty to the nation—alongside the women of the UDC? The difficulties of reconciliation between Union and Confederate veterans were serious enough, explained one Union veteran in 1903. But women’s associations proved even more likely to “nurse the old fight.” “The women,” he noted, “are said to be the most implacable foes. Why, if you got the GAR Relief Corps with the Daughters of the Confederacy together there’d be hair pulling sure.” Though he likely overstated the degree of animosity between the groups, the notion that there was little sisterly feeling between the women of North and South was well founded.22 There would be no grand reunions of blue-gray women, no newspaper stories heralding the efforts of the WRC and UDC to unite the nation. Northern and southern women would have to leave the war behind and move on to issues such as prohibition, and eventually suffrage, to find common ground.

CONTINUED FROM P. 57

JEFFRY D. WERT IS AN AWARD-WINNING CIVIL WAR HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR OF NINE BOOKS. HIS LATEST WORK IS A GLORIOUS ARMY: ROBERT E. LEE’S TRIUMPH, 1861-1863 (SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2011).

MATT DELLINGER IS AT WORK ON A BOOK ABOUT THE 14TH BROOKLYN. HIS FIRST BOOK, INTERSTATE 69: THE UNFINISHED HISTORY OF THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN HIGHWAY, WAS PUBLISHED IN 2010.

CONTINUED FROM P. 67

CAROLINE E. JANNEY IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF REMEMBERING THE CIVIL WAR: REUNION AND THE LIMITS OF RECONCILIATION (2013) AND BURYING THE DEAD BUT NOT THE PAST: LADIES’ MEMORIAL ASSOCIATIONS AND THE LOST CAUSE (2008).

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(reprint, Dayton, OH), 89; Susan Leigh Blackford, ed., Letters from Lee’s Army, or Memoirs of Life in and out of the Army in Virginia During the War between the States (New York, 1947), 115.

SOURCES AND CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES

ber 6, 1860, November 17, 1860, December 2, 1860, December 13, 1860.

11 Florence to Lordy, July 28, 1861, King Papers; Lordy to Florence, July 28, 1861, King-Wilder Collection.

3

William Booth Taliaferro, “Personal Reminiscences of Stonewall Jackson,” Civil War Times Illustrated, vol. 34, no. 2 (May-June 1995): 18.

4

Quoted in Jeffry D. Wert, Cavalryman of the Lost Cause: A Biography of J. E. B. Stuart (New York, 2008), 142, 174.

5

Fitzgerald Ross, Cities and Camps of the Confederate States (reprint, Urbana, IL, 1958), 168-69; William B. Styple, ed., Writing and Fighting from the Army of Northern Virginia (Kearny, NJ, 2003), 226.

6

United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies 129 vols. (Washington, DC, 1880-1901), Series I, vol. 2, p. 186 (hereafter cited as OR).

7

G. Moxley Sorrel, Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer (reprint, Jackson, TN, 1958), 22; quoted in Jeffry D. Wert, A Glorious Army: Robert E. Lee’s Triumph 1862-1863 (New York, 2011), 29.

8

Mary Lasswell, ed., Rags and Hope: The Recollections of Val C. Giles. Four Years with Hood’s Brigade, Fourth Texas Infantry (New York, 1961), 79.

9

Quoted in Wert, Cavalryman, 115.

CASUALTIES OF WAR (Pages 24-25, 75) 1

2

3

United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series 1, Volume 21, p. 582; Lynda Lasswell Crist, ed., The Papers of Jefferson Davis, volume 8 (Baton Rouge, 1995), 554.

Anna to Hannah (King) Couper, July 10, 1852, Couper Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter Couper Papers).

Anna to Hannah, December 21, 1856, Couper Papers; Anna to Thomas, August 9, 1842, Thomas Butler King Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter King Papers).

4

Anna to Thomas, August 11, 1842, Georgia to Thomas, June 28, 1849, Georgia to Floyd, May 14, 1860, King Papers.

5

Anna to Thomas, December 27, 1844, Anna to Thomas, June 25, 1848, Anna to Thomas, June 16, 1858, King Papers.

6

Anna to Thomas, February 14, 1856, King Papers; Anna to Floyd and Tip, January 21, 1859, King-Wilder Collection, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah (hereafter KingWilder Collection).

7

Lordy to Thomas, April 7, 1848, King Papers.

8

Henry Lord Page King Diary, King Papers (hereafter H.L.P. King Diary), March 14, 1860, March 27, 1860, April 3, 1860, April 9, 1860, October 26, 1860, October 31, 1860, November 1, 1860, April 25, 1860.

9

H.L.P King Diary, May 30, 1860.

10 H.L.P King Diary, October 10, 1860, Novem-

BATTLEFIELD ECHOES (Pages 26-27) 1

Mark Coburn, Terrible Innocence: General Sherman at War (New York, 1993), 67-68.

2

Buck T. Foster, Sherman’s Mississippi Campaign (Tuscaloosa, 2006), 30.

3

Clay Mountcastle, Punitive War: Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals (Lawrence, 2009), 86.

4

Report of Major General William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, February 27, 1864, in United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, vol. 32, pt. 1, 173.

5

Margaret Brobst Roth, ed., Well, Mary: Civil War Letters of a Wisconsin Volunteer (Madison, 1960), 37.

6

Foster, Sherman’s Mississippi Campaign, 103.

Foster notes how Sherman’s losses to foraging exceeded those from actual combat.

10 Peter Cozzens, ed., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Volumes 5 and 6 (Urbana, IL, 2002-2004), vol. 5, p. 135 (hereafter cited as B&L).

11 The Confederate Veteran Magazine, 40 vols. (reprint, Wilmington, NC, 1987-88), vol. 34, p.

221 (hereafter cited as CV).

12 OR, vol. 19, pt. 1, p. 957.

13 Douglas, I Rode, 192; Cozzens, B&L, vol. 5, p.

135.

14 Douglas, I Rode, 196; Quoted in Wert, Cavalryman, 48.

THE PURITAN & THE CAVALIER

15 Heros von Borcke, Memoirs of the Confederate War of Independence (Dayton, OH, 1985), 295.

(Pages 50-57, 76)

16 Ibid., 295, 296.

17 Quoted in Wert, Cavalryman, 164-165.

1

Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode With Stonewall (Chapel Hill, 1940), 193.

18 Sorrel, Recollections, 131.

2

Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War

19 Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of Gen-

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eral Edward Porter Alexander (Chapel Hill, 1989), 185.

20 James Power Smith, With Stonewall Jackson in the Army of Northern Virginia (reprint, Gaithersburg, MD, 1982), 40.

6

Minnesota Vicksburg Monument Commission, Minnesota in the Campaigns of Vicksburg, November, 1862-July, 1863 (St. Paul, MN, 1907).

7

Francis W. Dawson, Our Women in the War: an address by Capt. Francis W. Dawson, Delivered February 22, 1887, at the Fifth Annual Reunion of the Association of the Maryland Line, at the Academy of Music, Baltimore, Md. (Charleston, SC, 1887).

8

Nina Silber, Gender & the Sectional Conflict (Chapel Hill, 2008), 83-84; Alice Fahs, “The Feminized Civil War,” Journal of American History 85 (March 1999): 1461-1494; Frank Moore, Memorial Ceremonies at the Graves of Our Soldiers: Saturday, May 30, 1868 (Washington, 1869).

21 Ibid., 40-41.

22 Quoted in Wert, Cavalryman, 198, 199.

23 Quoted in Ibid, 224.

24 Quoted in Ibid., 225 25 Douglas, I Rode, 226.

26 OR, vol. 25, pt. 2, p. 792; quoted in John W. Thomason Jr., Jeb Stuart (New York, 1930), 412.

27 Quoted in Wert, Cavalryman, 233.

28 The Annals of the War Written by Leading Participants North and South (reprint, Dayton, OH, 1988), 673.

9

Rossiter Johnson, Campfire and Battle-field: History of the Conflicts and Campaigns of the Great Civil War in the United States (New York, 1896), 533-540; GAR, Dept. of Kansas, Mother Bickerdyke Day, General Order No. 4, May 12, 1897, by Department of Kansas, GAR (Topeka, 1897); Silber, Gender & the Sectional Conflict, 13, 20-22, 88.

10 WRC, Journal of the Second National Convention (1884), 13; Jane E. Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (Chapel Hill, 2004), 189; Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, 2005), 272-274; Livermore quoted in Silber, Gender & the Sectional Conflict, 84-85.

HELL HATH NO FURY (Pages 58-67, 76) 1

Washington Post, July 23, 1911; Woman’s Relief Corps (hereafter WRC), Journal of the Twenty-Ninth National Convention (1911), 395-396.

2

This article is adapted from chapter 8 of the author’s Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill, 2013).

3

Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville, 2003), 16-29; Mary Poppenheim, et al., The History of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (1938; reprint, Raleigh, NC, 1955), 8; Cecelia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, 1999), 82; Francesca Morgan, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill, 2005), 28-30; Wallace Evans Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans’ and Hereditary Organizations in America, 17831900 (Cambridge, 1955), 40-41; Confederate Veteran 5 (January 1897): 34; Confederate Veteran 5 (October 1897): 499.

4

WRC, Proceedings of the National Convention (1883); WRC, Proceedings of the Second National Convention (1884).

5

Chicago Daily Tribune, August 5, 1900; Davies, Patriotism on Parade, 38, 76; Morgan, Women and Patriotism, 12; United Daughters of the Confederacy (hereafter UDC), Minutes of the Seventh Annual Meeting (1900), 9-37.

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11 WRC, Journal of the Second National Convention (1884); Silber, Gender & the Sectional Conflict, 85-86.

12 James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill, 2011), 20.

13 Ibid, 19-21, 53, 77, 245-251.

14 Southern Opinion (Richmond), July 27, 1867; Atlanta Constitution, August 19, 1873.

15 Nina Silber, Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1993), 50.

16 O’Leary, To Die For, 121.

17 Raines quoted in Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, 141.

18 Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, 3, 32, 96, 106, 143, 158; UDC, Minutes of the Sixth Annual Convention (1900), 68-69; UDC, North Carolina Division, Sixth Annual Meeting (1903), 12; UDC, North Carolina Division, Seventh Annual Meeting (1904), 58.

19 Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child, ed. by John G. Phillips Whittier (Boston, 1883), 280; LGAR founder quoted in Davies, Patriotism on Parade, 259; WRC, Proceedings of the Fifth National Convention (1887).

20 Marten, Sing Not War, 245-249.

21 “The Term ‘Nation,’” Confederate Veteran (March 1901): 111.

22 St. Louis Republic, May 27, 1903.

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PA R T I N G SHOT

The Rail-Splitter’s Right Hand young Republican Party to pose for a likeness. To avoid the need for lengthy sittings, Volk suggested creating plaster molds of Lincoln’s face, torso, and hands, and over a series of sessions, Lincoln submitted to the uncomfortable process. Q On the day that Volk took the casts of Lincoln’s hands, he found his subject’s right hand badly swollen, “on account of excessive hand-shaking the evening before.” Volk had Lincoln clutch a piece of broom handle to minimize the distortion. The resulting cast showed, in the words of historian Harold Holzer (whose latest book, The Civil War in 50 Objects, features an 1886 bronze copy of the cast and other treasures held by The New-York Historical Society), “the gargantuan hand of a frontier rail-splitter, champion wrestler, and acclaimed prairie debater … that would one day sign the Emancipation Proclamation and grasp the text of both the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural.” Q For the finished work—a life-size bronze statue unveiled in the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield in 1876, 11 years after Lincoln’s death—Volk replaced the piece of broomstick with the Emancipation Proclamation. He continued to authorize the creation of plaster and bronze copies of Lincoln’s life mask and hands, the one shown here made by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

WHEN HE LEARNED that Abraham Lincoln planned on visiting Chicago in March 1860, sculptor Leonard Wells Volk determined to get the rising star in the

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