SPECIAL
THE BEST CIVIL WAR BOOKS OF THE YEAR
P. 67
VOL. 3, NO. 4
{ 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 }
THE
Most Influential* Politicians, Civilians, Inventors, Spies & Soldiers of the Civil War (*That you’ve probably never heard of) PLUS WINTER 2013
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WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO THE CONFEDERATE SUBMARINE HUNLEY ? P. 48 CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
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GETTYSBURG COLLEGE C I V I L WA R I N S T I T U T E SUMMER CONFERENCE JUNE 20 – 24, 2014 Explore new dimensions of the Civil War in 1864 with lectures, battlefield tours, panels, and group discussions. Topics include the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, Sherman’s March, the Battle of the Crater, guerrilla warfare, and prisoners-of-war. Explore 1864 battlefields such as the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Cedar Creek, and Monocacy. Speakers include Peter Carmichael, Gordon Rhea, Brooks Simpson, Caroline Janney, Megan Kate Nelson, Robert E.L. Krick, John Hennessy, Susannah Ural, and Ed Bearss.
www.gettysburg.edu/cwi/conference
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
VOLUME 3, NUMBER 4 / WINTER 2013
FEATURES
Most Influential* Politicians, Civilians, Inventors, Spies & Soldiers of the Civil War (*That you’ve probably never heard of) 29
Salvo
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
TRAVELS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The
Not every noteworthy figure in the Civil War is as recognized today as Lincoln, Davis, Grant, or Lee. Indeed, some of the conflict’s most significant players remain largely unknown. We polled leading historians—and ranked their picks—for the most influential people who never got their due.
A Visit to Boston
VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Homesick
PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Thank a Teacher
DISUNION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 From Battlefield to Ballfield
CONVERSATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Author Tony Horwitz
IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Christmas in Camp
Columns CASUALTIES OF WAR . . . . . . . . 24 Laurence Massillon Keitt
BATTLEFIELD ECHOES . . . . . . 26 Bitter Allies
Books & Authors THE BEST CIVIL WAR BOOKS OF 2013 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 WITH KENNETH W. NOE, ANDREW WAGENHOFFER, ROBERT K. KRICK, ETHAN S. RAFUSE, BROOKS D. SIMPSON, HARRY SMELTZER & KEVIN M. LEVIN
In Every Issue EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Sorry, Kate
PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 A Modern-Day Mathew Brady
Mystery of the Confederate Deep 48
The story of H. L. Hunley#—# the Confederate submersible that disappeared in the waters off Charleston on February 17, 1864, after torpedoing and sinking the Union blockading vessel USS Housatonic#—#has captivated historians and buffs for decades. Four dedicated researchers offer their takes on what might have happened to Hunley and her crew. BY ANDREW W. HALL WITH MICHAEL CRISAFULLI, KIMBLE JOHNSON, BARRY ROGOFF, AND CARY MOCK
WAR AT THE DOOR 58 Pharaoh’s Army—a 1995 independent film about a vulnerable Kentucky family’s tense encounter with foraging Union troops—shows just how personal the Civil War was in Appalachia, where the lines between home front and battlefield blurred. BY JOHN C. INSCOE
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EDITORIAL VOLUME 3, NUMBER 4 / WINTER 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
Sorry, Kate WHICH 25 INDIVIDUALS might be deemed the American Civil War’s most influential? That’s the question we try to answer in this issue’s lead article (see p. 29)—but with a twist. You won’t see Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis on our list. Nor will you find Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert E. Lee, or Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, or prominent civilians such as Edmund Ruffin, Walt Whitman, or Clara Barton. That’s because we specifically asked the historians we polled to nominate individuals—Union or Confederate, military or civilian, male or female—whose names or stories aren’t widely known, even among ardent Civil War enthusiasts. What seemed like a straightforward question turned out to be anything but. How should we define “influential” and “unknown”? (We reached no clear resolution on either, in the end instructing our historians to follow their instincts.) Even more difficult was selecting—and ranking—25 names from the scores we received. Many fascinating individuals just missed the cut, including one of my personal picks, Washington socialite Kate Chase (above), the politically astute daughter of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and wife of Rhode Island governor William Sprague, who had the ear of myriad civilian and military leaders during the war. The end result, we hope, will be thought provoking—and perhaps a little controversial. Disagree with one of our picks? Is there someone else you would have included? Let us know by emailing your comments—or your own picks—to: letters@civilwarmonitor.com.
E DI TO RI A L A DV I S O RS
C O PY E DI TO R
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 Jennifer Sturak Matthew C. Hulbert
MATT@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM S O C I A L M E DI A E DI TO R
C RE AT I V E DI REC TO R
Katie Brackett Fialka 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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WEBSITE
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DIGITAL HISTORY ADVISORS
M. Keith Harris Kevin M. Levin Robert H. Moore II Harry Smeltzer
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The Civil War Monitor [ISSN 2163-0682/print, ISSN 2163-0690/ online] is published quarterly (4 times per year) by Bayshore History, LLC (8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402). Pending Periodicals postage paid at Atlantic City, NJ, and at additional mailing offices. Subscriptions: $21.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $31.95 per year in Canada, and $41.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Postmaster: send address changes to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 567, Selmer, TN 38375-0567. 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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InInAssociation InAssociation Association with with the the Smithsonian Smithsonian Institution Institution with the Smithsonian Institution In Association with the Smithsonian Institution In Association with the Smithsonian Institution
Do Do you you know know WHAT WHAT you you are are MISSING? MISSING? Do you know WHAT you are MISSING? Do you know WHAT you are MISSING? Do you know WHAT you are MISSING? With With extraordinary extraordinary displays, displays, the the museum museum covers covers the the With With extraordinary extraordinary displays, displays, the the museum museum covers covers the the entire entire American American Civil Civil War War from from beginning beginning to end. to end. With extraordinary displays, the museum the entire American War beginning to entire American Civil Civil War from from beginningcovers to end. end. entire American Civil War beginning One One Lincoln Lincoln Circle Circle at from Reservoir at Reservoir Park Park to end. One Lincoln Circle at Reservoir Park
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One Lincoln Circle PA at Reservoir Park Harrisburg, Harrisburg, Harrisburg, PAPA One Lincoln Circle at PA Reservoir Park Harrisburg, 717.260.1861 717.260.1861 717.260.1861 Harrisburg, PA 717.260.1861 www.NationalCivilWarMuseum.org www.NationalCivilWarMuseum.org www.NationalCivilWarMuseum.org 717.260.1861 www.NationalCivilWarMuseum.org www.NationalCivilWarMuseum.org
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D I S PAT C H E S
ED. We showed your letter to Dave
Why I Fight
Powell, who responds: “Mr. Raymond is, I suspect, referring to the 96th Illinois’ first position, on the left of Mitchell’s brigade, and he is correct as far as that goes. However, later in that fight, the 96th was moved farther to the right, and as the monuments show today, the 96th held a position on Mitchell’s right (west), with two companies of the 96th being shifted even farther west as a flank guard. Many of the troops in Mitchell’s command never realized that the 96th was plucked out of their first position and shifted that far to the west. By the way, I have read Mr. Raymond’s excellent book on the 78th Illinois. A fine story about a fine regiment.”
I really enjoyed Matt Dellinger’s article on Civil War reenacting in your most recent issue [“Why I Fight,” Vol. 3, No. 3]. Being a reenactor myself, I felt the author did a good job capturing what it’s like to be there. I also think Caroline Janney’s article [“Hell Hath No Fury”] reinforces how our remembrance of the Civil War is such an important topic to explore. There’s what happened 150 years ago, and then there’s how we remember what happened. Often those two are not the same, and that colors so much of what’s going on in America still today. Tom Mack LU R AY, V I R G I N I A
Angels of the Lost Cause Chasseurs, Not Zouaves
A caption on page 32 of your fall 2013 issue contains an error. It states: “A member of the original 14th Brooklyn poses in the regiment’s colorful Zouave uniform.” The 14th was actually a Chasseur unit. Because they wore red pants and kepis, the soldiers were often mistaken for Zouaves. Mike Peters P I C K E R I N G TO N , O H I O
We stand corrected. Thanks for setting the record straight. E D.
A Visit to Chickamauga
In your fall issue’s Travels section [“Destination: Chickamauga”] David A. Powell remarked that he always urges people to “find the
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” on Horseshoe Ridge. He is correct, of course. But the Union flank extended much farther to the right than the position occupied by the 96th Illinois. As detailed in my book, In the Very Thickest of the Fight: The Civil War Service of the 78th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the area beyond the 96th was defended by the four regiments of Colonel John Grant Mitchell’s brigade: (from left to right) the 113th and 98th Ohio, the 78th Illinois, and the 121st Ohio. It’s a long walk to the end of the line. Steve Raymond W H I D B E Y I S L A N D, WAS H I N G TO N
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@civilwar monitor.com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
Your magazine is great! I read every article. You have terrific writers. I must say, Thom Bassett’s article about Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels [“Angels of the Lost Cause,” Vol. 3, No. 2] was a breath of fresh air in the muddled world of political correctness, history revisionists, and Lost Cause mythology. When I first started reading about the major figures of the Civil War, it astounded and confused me that Confederate general James Longstreet came under so much criticism for his performance at Gettysburg, even though he was Robert E. Lee’s most trusted lieutenant. Turns out most of the bad press came from fellow Confederate generals Jubal Early and John B. Gordon. Why? Mostly Longstreet didn’t shy away from speaking his mind about Lee’s failures. And he joined the Republican
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Party after the war. Two major no-no’s in the eyes of Lost Causers. Richard D. Boles VIA EMAIL
Based on previously unpublished primary sources, Gone to God tells the story of loss and remembrance-one family's sacrifice that mirrored thousands like theirs in a conflict that changed America and its citizens, North and South, forever. The perfect gift for any lover of history!
* * * Thom Bassett’s skewering of The Killer Angels reeked of self-righteousness and political correctness. He stated that KA does not lead to a “morally sound” understanding of our history. Since the book is revered by almost everyone who follows the Civil War, I guess all those people are, in Bassett’s understanding, “immoral.” Poppycock! When Michael Shaara wrote of southern reasons for the war, he was reflecting what the great majority of southern soldiers believed at the time. Joshua Chamberlain is depicted in KA as believing that southern soldiers were valorous? It’s called reconciliation. It’s what brought the country back together after the conflict. Bassett also states that KA is “harmful” to a real understanding of the Civil War. That is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever seen in print. KA, and the resulting movie Gettysburg, have brought more people to a “real” understanding of the war than anything in the past 40 years. Ron Carlson C L A R E N D O N H I L L S, I L L I N O I S
We asked Thom Bassett to address Mr. Carlson’s comments. He writes: “Anything that stimulates deeper interest in the Civil War is to that extent good. The Killer Angels does, so I count that appeal as one of its virtues, along with Shaara’s powerful and sometimes remarkable writing. Mr. Carlson’s protests are understandable: This novel is for many people a moving account of the Battle of Gettysburg. But it doesn’t follow that its depiction of the war’s causes and meaning is historically sound or morally defensible.” E D.
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Henry Lord Page King
I read with interest the article in the latest issue of The Civil War Monitor by Stephen Berry about Captain Henry Lord Page King [“Casualties of War,” Vol. 3, No. 3]. The impression it gives of the life and character of Captain King does not take sufficiently into consideration his career in Confederate service, nor do him justice as a soldier and a man. By relying on personal quotations from King’s mother and other family members, Berry shortchanges King—both as a successful student at Yale and at Harvard Law School and as a young Confederate officer. Indeed, Berry nearly entirely ignores King’s wartime record, which included service at Williamsburg, in the Seven Days Battles, and at Antietam. There are ample sources with which to tell this part of King’s story, as I discovered in editing King’s Maryland Campaign diary for publication in Civil War Regiments: A Journal of the American Civil War (Vol. 6, No. 2, 1998). For more detail, Berry could have consulted my four-column entry for King in my Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (2010), as well as Nathaniel Hughes’ Yale’s Confederates (2008). Helen P. Trimpi G R ASS VA L L E Y, C A L I FO R N I A
Praise for Gone to God: A Civil War Family’s Ultimate Sacrifice: “Top picks of the year” Civil War Monitor Magazine “…resonate(s) with power…a first rate book!” Robert K. Krick, Author of Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain. “…a moving tale…resourceful research and elegant prose…” Joseph T. Glatthaar, Stephenson Distinguished Professor of History University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Author of General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse. “…an intimate glimpse into… patriotism, sacrifice, and heartbreak.” William C. “Jack” Davis, Author of Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour.
Other reviews: “A GREAT read! Recommend for Civil War enthusiasts and novices alike.” KJ “Everybody should read this book!” SB “I could not put the book down. Loved, loved, loved it!!!” MB Available on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and through http://KeithKehlbeck.com
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{
FA C T S , F I G U R E S & I T E M S O F I N T E R E S T
}
In this lithograph by Kurz & Allison, the men of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, led by their colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, storm the walls of Fort Wagner in South Carolina on July 18, 1863. The regiment of black enlisted men and white officers had left Boston—where it had trained and received financial and political support from the city’s leading abolitionist families— less than two months earlier. For more on Boston, turn the page.
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IN THIS SECTION Travels A VISIT TO BOSTON
................
8
Voices HOMESICK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Preservation THANK A TEACHER . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Disunion FROM BATTLEFIELD TO BALLFIELD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Conversation AUTHOR TONY HORWITZ . . . . . . . 18
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In Focus CHRISTMAS IN CAMP . . . . . . . . . . 22
7 LITHOGRAPH BY KURZ & ALLISON
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T R AV E L S
Destination: Boston FEW, IF ANY, AMERICAN CITIES boast a richer history than Boston, Massachusetts, which witnessed many of the principal events that led to the country’s founding. Often forgotten amid its strong connection to the American Revolution, however, is Boston’s rich Civil War-era history—whether its deep association with the abolition movement, its role as a center of Union army recruitment and training, or its fertile landscape of commemorative sites and monuments. ¶ Interested in experiencing Civil War-era Boston? To help make the most of your trip, we enlisted a local historian and asked for his 10 favorite spots in or near the city. We hope his answers will provide readers with ample ideas for their journeys. THE EXPERT
KEVIN M. LEVIN,
1
Shaw Memorial on Boston Common
1. BOSTON COMMON: ROBERT GOULD SHAW MEMORIAL & SOLDIERS AND SAILORS MONUMENT
The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, on the edge of Boston Common directly opposite the Massachusetts State House, was created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and unveiled on May 31, 1897. The impressive bronze relief sculpture depicts Colonel Shaw and his regiment of black soldiers, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, marching into battle at Battery Wagner, the regiment and engagement made famous by the 1989 movie Glory. Don’t forget to walk to the rear of the memorial to read its inscription. A short
walk into the Common will take you to the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, which was designed by Martin Milmore and dedicated to the memory of the Massachusetts soldiers and sailors who died during the Civil War. Twenty-five thousand people attended its dedication in 1877, including former Union generals Joseph Hooker and George McClellan. (Boston Common, Charles Street; 888-7332678)
a resident of Boston since 2011, teaches history at Gann Academy in Waltham, Massachusetts, and is the author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War As Murder (2012). You can find him online at Civil War Memory (www. cwmemory.com).
2
Massachusetts State House
eral Hooker sculpted by Daniel Chester French. Inside the State House are portraits of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner (the antislavery U.S. senator from Massachusetts who was seriously injured when congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked him in the Senate chamber for his views), as well as statues of Lincoln and Massachusetts’ wartime governor, John Andrew. Another French statue, of Major General Francis Bartlett, a Massachusetts native who was wounded four times during the conflict, is located in the corridor leading to Nurses Hall, while in Memorial Hall you’ll find Edward Simmons’ painting “The Return of the Colors to the Custody of the Commonwealth,” an emotional depiction of Massachusetts volunteers turning over their battle flags to the state at war’s end. (24 Beacon St.; 617-722-2000) 3. AFRICAN MEETING HOUSE
2. MASSACHUSETTS STATE HOUSE
The capitol and its surrounding grounds contain numerous statues of historical figures, including an equestrian statue of Gen-
The newly renovated African Meeting House in the Beacon Hill community was completed entirely by black laborers in 1806 and quickly became the center of
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4
black public and religious life. In 1832 abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison used the hall to establish the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and speeches by Frederick Douglass and other leading abolitionists were common occurrences in the time leading up to the war. In 1863 the building played a critical role as the place where Douglass and other black leaders recruited members for the 54th Massachusetts. Take some time to tour the adjacent Abiel Smith School, founded in 1835 as the first public school for free black children. (46 Joy St.; www. afroammuseum.org) 4. GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC HALL IN LYNN, MASSACHUSETTS 3
African Meeting House on Beacon Hill
Visitors to this GAR hall about 10 miles north of downtown Boston
Grand Army of the Republic Hall in Lynn
will leave with an appreciation of the importance that local communities attached to the service of their Civil War veterans. Built in 1885 with funds raised by veterans, the building was the meeting place of the General Frederick W. Lander Post No. 5 of the GAR. Today, it is home to the Grand Army of the Republic Museum; the walls are lined with photographs of Civil War veterans and the furnishings are all original. (Note that while the hall maintains regular hours, visitors are advised to call in advance to make sure sufficient staff is on hand.) (58 Andrew St., Lynn, MA; 781-477-7085) 5. HARVARD UNIVERSITY’S MEMORIAL HALL
This beautiful High Victorian
9 PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIC KULIN
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5
Harvard Memorial Hall in Cambridge
Gothic building, just north of Harvard Yard in Cambridge, honors the 138 Harvard students who were killed while fighting for the Union during the Civil War. Harvard alumni raised the money for the project, which cost nearly $400,000 and was completed in 1877. I enjoy surveying the 28 white marble tablets with the students’ names, as well as the dates and locations of their deaths. The hall’s beautiful stained-glass windows make the experience all the more moving. (45 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA; 617-496-4595) 6. MOUNT AUBURN CEMETERY
While in Cambridge take a stroll through “America’s first garden cemetery,” which opened in 1831. The Civil War is remembered with Martin Milmore’s unusual “American Sphinx,” the artist’s attempt to commemorate the preservation of the Union, the end of slavery, and the nation’s strength in a single Egyptian Revival sculpture. There are also
6
“American Sphinx” in Mount Auburn Cemetery
monuments to Robert Gould Shaw and the First Corps of Cadets, a military organization that provided officers to several Massachusetts volunteer regiments. After viewing those sights, spend some time locating the gravesites of prominent Civil War-era figures Charles Russell Lowell, Charles Devens, Charles Sumner, Edward Everett, and Dorothea Dix, among others. (580 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge, MA; 617-547-7105) 7. TREMONT TEMPLE BAPTIST CHURCH
Founded by antislavery Baptists, this important landmark played host to a number of prominent religious and public events during the antebellum and Civil War years. In 1848 a young congressman by the name of Abraham Lincoln spoke here while on a campaign trip for Whig presidential candidate Zachary Taylor. In 1859 a violent crowd prevented Frederick Douglass from speaking in honor of John Brown fol-
7
Tremont Temple Baptist Church
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Fort Warren on Georges Island in Boston Harbor
10
Melvin Memorial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Emancipation Memorial at Park Plaza
lowing Brown’s failed raid at Harpers Ferry. And on January 1, 1863, Bostonians gathered at this church to hear the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. (88 Tremont St.; 617523-7320) 8. PUBLIC GARDEN & PARK PLAZA
WIKIPEDIA COMMONS (FORT WARREN)
9
Adjacent to Boston Common is the Public Garden, a large park that includes statues of notable abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, William Ellery Channing, and William Lloyd Garrison. Cross the street and walk the few blocks to Park Plaza, where you’ll find an 1877 bronze replica of Thomas Ball’s impressive Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial shows a slave kneeling at the feet of President Lincoln, whose right hand rests on a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation while his left hand gestures as if to free the man. President Ulysses S. Grant was among the dignitaries to attend
the monument’s dedication. (69 Beacon St.; 617-635-4505)
uled Civil War-related events. (Georges Island; www.bostonharborislands.org)
9. FORT WARREN
Situated in Boston Harbor on Georges Island, the fort was completed shortly after the start of the Civil War and served as both a training camp for Union volunteers and a prison for captured Confederates. Among the fort’s notable prisoners were diplomats John Slidell and James M. Mason, who were held here briefly after being intercepted and seized by Union forces while en route to Europe, precipitating the so-called Trent Affair; generals Richard Ewell, Isaac Trimble, and Simon Bolivar Buckner; and Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, who was imprisoned here for five months after war’s end. The fort remained an active military installation until the mid-20th century. Today, visitors can enjoy the fort’s museum, gift shop, picnic grounds, and regularly sched-
10. MELVIN MEMORIAL, SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY, CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS
In 1897 James C. Melvin commissioned Daniel Chester French to sculpt a fitting memorial to his three brothers, Asa, John, and Samuel, all of whom served in Company K of the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery and died during the war. French’s “Mourning Victory” was unveiled in 1909 during a ceremony attended by 88 veterans of the 1st Massachusetts. The sculpture depicts a mourning angel over the empty graves of the Melvin boys. In one hand the angel holds a laurel branch and in the other an American flag with stars that are only vaguely visible. It is a stirring tribute to one family’s loss. (Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, 34 Bedford St., Concord, MA; 978-318-3233)
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VOICES
/ HOMESICK
“They are sadder than if wounded by a bullet.”
SERGEANT OSBORN OLDROYD, 20TH OHIO INFANTRY, ON CERTAIN SOLDIERS’ DISAPPOINTMENT WHEN NOT RECEIVING LETTERS FROM HOME, JUNE 1863
“BUT ONE THING I MUST LAY STRICT COMMANDS NOT TO WRITE, AND THAT IS ABOUT MY COMING HOME. YOU MAKE ME ABSOLUTELY SO HOMESICK THAT I SHAN’T BE FIT FOR DUTY.”
UNION GENERAL BENJAMIN “BEAST” BUTLER (LEFT), IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, SARAH, AUGUST 25, 1864
UNION SURGEON ALFRED CASTLEMAN, ON THE FIRST SOLDIER TO DIE IN HIS REGIMENT, THE 5TH WISCONSIN INFANTRY, OCTOBER 21, 1861
SOURCES: A SOLDIER’S STORY OF THE SIEGE OF VICKSBURG: FROM THE DIARY OF OSBORN H. OLDROYD (1885); LETTERS OF JOHN BRATTON TO HIS WIFE (1942); PRIVATE AND OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF GEN. BENJAMIN F. BUTLER, VOL. 5 (1917); THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, BEHIND THE SCENES … (1863); THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS READE ROOTES COBB, 1860-1862 (1907); ARMY LIFE OF AN ILLINOIS SOLDIER (1906).
“Yes, I am sick, sick, a poor, wretched homesick boy. It is weakling in a soldier that ought to be all iron, but it is a truth and I do not wish to conceal it from you….” SOUTH CAROLINA OFFICER JOHN BRATTON, IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, BETTIE, JULY 17, 1861
THOMAS R.R. COBB, DELEGATE FROM GEORGIA TO THE PROVISIONAL CONFEDERATE STATES CONGRESS IN MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, MARCH 2, 1861. COBB WOULD JOIN THE CONFEDERATE ARMY SEVERAL MONTHS LATER AND BE KILLED IN ACTION AT FREDERICKSBURG IN DECEMBER 1862.
“I DO DESPISE THESE WHINERS.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
“The poor fellow died of Nostalgia (home-sickness), raving to the last breath about wife and children. It seems strange that such an affection of the mind should kill strong, healthy men; but deaths from this cause are very frequent in the army.”
“I am worn out and homesick and starving and from my heart can say, I am sorry I ever came here. File this letter away and read it to me whenever, hereafter, the silly notion takes my head that my services are peculiarly necessary to the safety of the republic.”
ILLINOIS SOLDIER CHARLES WRIGHT WILLS ON THE HOMESICK SOLDIERS IN HIS REGIMENT, SEPTEMBER 17, 1861
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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Chambersburg Civil War Seminars & Tours The years 2011 to 2015 mark the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War. Chambersburg Civil War Seminars and Tours will commemorate the “Sesquicentennial” with seminars in 2014 that correspond with events of 150 years ago.
“A WEEKEND WITH ED BEARSS”
Meet Ed Bearss and learn about his first-hand experiences in WWII and lifelong study of the Civil War. Friday: lectures about Ed’s WWII wounding and salvage of the U.S.S. Cairo; Saturday: bus tour to Gettysburg and Antietam with the master battlefield tramper. Mingle Saturday evening with Ed at our dessert reception; Sunday: lectures with National Park Service Historian Dennis Frye on his 30 years of insights on Ed Bearss; “Me and LBJ”: Ed shares his personal interaction with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Based in Chambersburg, PA
APRIL 4-6
“WILDERNESS AND SPOTSYLVANIA”
MAY 16-18
with Robert K. Krick. Sites toured include Saunders Field, Widow Tapp’s, where “Lee to the rear” incident took place, Mule Shoe salient and Bloody Angle, and many more. Based in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
“TERROR ON THE BORDER: SUMMER 1864”
JULY 23-26
with Ed Bearss, Jeffry Wert, Richard Sommers, Eric Wittenberg, Ted Alexander and others. Tours of Jubal Early in the lower Shenandoah, July and August 1864, McCausland’s Raid and the Burning of Chambersburg, Early’s Raid and the Battle of Monocacy. Based in Chambersburg, PA.
“WINCHESTER TO FISHER’S HILL”
SEPT. 26-28
With Ed Bearss, Jeffry Wert, Eric Campbell, and others. Includes bus tour of 3rd Winchester, Cedar Creek and Fisher's Hill Battlefields. Based in Chambersburg, PA.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
Remember when you support Chambersburg Civil War Seminars you support battlefield preservation. $160,000.00 raised to date for preservation.
A Division of the Greater Chambersburg Chamber of Commerce 100 Lincoln Way East | Chambersburg, PA 17201 (717) 264 7101
www.ChambersburgCivilWarSeminars.org
CO-SPONSORS OF CHAMBERSBURG CIVIL WAR SEMINARS & TOURS
(866) 646 8060 www.ExploreFranklinCountyPA.com
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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
WAS THERE A SINGULAR MOMENT when you realized that you loved history? Maybe you read a book, like the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, or The American Heritage History of the Civil War, with its iconic maps. Perhaps you had a moment of awakening when visiting a historic site with your family. ¶ Or maybe, like thousands of other Civil War Trust members, you had a teacher who opened your eyes to this fascinating world. Today, I’m writing to you on behalf of the outstanding teachers who inspire the next generation of historians and preservationists. ¶ It’s no secret that today’s schools put a lot of demand on teachers. In a time of limited resources, subjects like history, which too many administrators see as auxiliary, can be the first to suffer. But the Trust believes that dedicated teachers are “force multipliers”—they can each ignite a life-changing passion in hundreds, if not thousands, of students over their careers. From our free online curriculum and lesson plans to our multi-day continuing-education workshops, the Civil War Trust is dedicated to providing today’s teachers with tools to inspire their students. In the end, people won’t preserve battlefields if they don’t care about them, and they won’t care about them unless they know
Students from West Springfield High School in Virginia make use of traditional and 21st-century interpretive techniques (including the Trust’s Battle App™ guides) on a field trip to Gettysburg in 2011.
what happened on them. Through the Civil War Trust Education Fund, we put extremely powerful educational tools in teachers’ hands. And, perhaps even more important, we can show these dedicated professionals that a whole community thanks them for ensuring that the next generation will understand the uniquely American values that the study of history can teach. By creating a separate fund for educational projects, we ensure that member contributions for
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
land acquisition are not diverted away from that goal. We all know it’s hard to put a price on education, but just as I do for every piece of land we buy, let me offer you some specifics on exactly what a gift to the Trust Education Fund can accomplish. $100: Allows one of our “Traveling Trunks” to visit three schools, letting about 300 students per school don a kepi or feel the weight of a minie ball. $250: Funds one week of content creation for our industryleading educational technology efforts—projects like our Battle App™ guides, animated maps, and 360-degree panoramas. $500: Defrays travel and lodging costs for a classroom educator to attend one of our renowned Teacher Institutes, connect with peers, and learn new techniques. While the event is free, many teachers and their cash-strapped school systems cannot pay to get there. And consider this: A gift of $1,500—while certainly a considerable sum—can sponsor an entire classroom field trip to a Civil War battlefield, including bus, historian tour guide, admission fees, and boxed lunches. When you realize that’s 30 students seeing where history unfolded with their own eyes— most for the first time—it’s a strikingly profound impact. To learn more about the initiatives that the Trust Education Fund supports or to make a contribution, visit www.civilwar.org/education/educationappeal-2013.
CIVIL WAR TRUST
Thank a Teacher
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A MAJOR NEW
COLLECTION
OF MODERN
COMMENTARY, from scholars, historians
and Civil War buffs,
on the significant events of
THE CIVIL WAR
CIVIL WAR TRUST
Three Eras in American History and the One Man that Changed Them All... From the Highly Acclaimed Journalist, Historian and Author Stephen Bates “Riveting...one of the best historical fiction books I’ve read.� -Tom Ellsworth
Includes essays from esteemed contributors such as Ken Burns, Stephanie McCurry, Adam Goodheart, Edward Ayers, and many more, covering events beginning with Lincoln’s presidential victory through the Emancipation Proclamation.
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S A LV O
BY GEORGE B . KIRSCH
DISUNION
From Battlefield to Ballfield
daily newspapers and weekly sporting journals. By the summer of 1863 renewed economic prosperity, fueled mainly by federal military spending, and encouraging news of Union military victories boosted baseball higher in public favor. And by the end of that year the leading clubs of Boston and Philadelphia had adopted the New York City rules of baseball—before the war the game was played in different ways in different places—further strengthening the sport’s standing as the national pastime. But even as baseball prospered during the latter part of the war, and even as fans poured in to watch the games, the war remained constant in the background. As baseball players marched off to war in the spring of 1861, civilian anxieties focused on battlefield news, and interest in playful contests naturally waned. Two months after the first shots at Fort Sumter, a New York Clipper editorial noted that in New York City the war “has knocked sports out of business, and thrown a damper on every little amusement we heretofore enjoyed so well.” At summer’s end in 1861 that journal
reported: “Many of our … friends have enlisted in the defence of the Union, while those that remained … lacked the spirit to indulge in those recreations so rife among us in former seasons.” Several clubs disbanded and others scheduled fewer practice days and first-nine interclub contests. The Atlantics of Brooklyn did not inaugurate the 1861 season until August 11 and played only seven matches that year, compared with 16 in 1860. Their archrivals, the Excelsiors, did not play a single formal match against another club that year, with slim attendance on their grounds on practice days. Joseph Leggett’s departure with the 13th New York Infantry dealt a severe blow to the Excelsiors because, according to The Clipper, he was the “life and soul of the club.” Ninety of his fellow clubs members also enlisted under the colors of the Union army. Yet despite the hardships and distractions of wartime, die-hard club officials and players kept their favorite pastime alive during the trying times of 1861. At year’s end The Clipper reflected on the sport’s resiliency in the New York region:
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.
The game has too strong a foothold in popularity to be frowned out of favor by the lowering brow of ‘grim-visaged war,’ and if any proof were needed that our national game is a fixed institution of the country, it would be found in the fact that it has flourished through such a year of adverse circumstances as those that marked the season of 1861.
EIGHTEEN SIXTY-TWO began with more setbacks, as the two leading teams in Newark, New Jersey, came close to suspending play because so many of their men had enlisted in state regiments. But baseball’s prospects brightened in Boston, when a visit by the Excelsiors of Brooklyn in July stirred excitement among Boston’s ball-playing fraternity and resulted in the adoption of the New York rules over the “Massachusetts game.” The most striking evidence of baseball’s capacity to survive amid the adversity of war occurred in Philadelphia, where it triumphed over two related sports, cricket and townball. The first invasion of Philadelphia players into the New York City region took place in 1862, as a team from that city’s Olympic and Adriatic clubs competed against teams from Newark, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. By 1863 the Philadelphia Athletics had vanquished their local rivals and, as the premier club in Philadelphia, thus earned the right to challenge the leading teams of New York City and Brooklyn as a legitimate contender for (unofficial) national championship honors.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
THE FRATRICIDAL STRUGGLE BETWEEN the Union and the Confederacy had a profound and often tragic impact on northern society, but after the initial shock, people began to return to some semblance of a normal life—including sports. Although membership in baseball and cricket clubs and the number of games declined sharply during the first year of combat, a revival of baseball (but not yet of cricket) began in 1862. Most of the men on the first nines of the premier clubs were able to avoid military service, but a few of them risked their lives by enlisting in state regiments. Still, by the second year of the war, championship competition among the leading clubs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and northern New Jersey attracted large crowds of spectators and increased coverage by
The sporting challenges among the prominent clubs from Newark, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia continued for the duration of the war. In June 1863, as Robert E. Lee’s Confederates invaded Pennsylvania and threatened an attack on Philadelphia, the Athletics traveled north and won two out of six games against tough competition. Harper’s Weekly employed the war analogy in a brief commentary:
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
While Philadelphia is invaded; Pennsylvania invades. While the balls of the rebels are base, it is with base-balls that the sons of the Keystone state advance upon New York. Still there is difference. It is play that the latter come for; it is in deadly earnest that the rebels ride.
That journal concluded that a baseball club had “this great value at the present moment, that it is the ‘school of the soldier’ in vigor, endurance, and agility.” The war and baseball continued to bump against each other, though. In August 1864 the Resolutes and Atlantics, both from Brooklyn, journeyed to the City of Brotherly Love to play a series
Though their schedules and rosters were disrupted by the conflict, professional baseball clubs in many northern cities and towns continued to play. The game's popularity recovered and even grew steadily. Above: Union POWs play a game of baseball in the prison camp at Salisbury, North Carolina.
of matches against that city’s Camden, Keystone, Olympic, and Athletic clubs, even though a Confederate attack by General Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley threatened Washington, Baltimore, southern Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia. The new Rebel strike into the North greatly reduced public interest in these games and deprived the Philadelphia teams of several of their best players. The Clipper explained: “The gallant members of the Philadelphia base ball clubs being prompt on all occasions to respond to the call of duty, were unable to aid their respective clubs with their services, and hence most of the Philadelphia clubs were unable to present their strength.” The Athletics’ chances for victory in their feature match against the Atlantics depended heavily on the performance of their star pitcher, James Dickson (“Dick”) McBride, who was then in the middle of a 100-day enlistment as a private with Company A of the 196th Pennsylvania Infantry. Although McBride was able to obtain a three-day furlough to play against
the Atlantics, he was evidently not in shape to face the fearsome Atlantic lineup. The hometown crowd of between 2,000 and 3,000 spectators watched the visiting Atlantics rout McBride and trounce the Athletics, 43-16. McBride’s double service as soldier and athlete appears to have been atypical. Most of the first-class baseball players avoided military service. A recent study by members of the Society for American Baseball Research identified only about 30 players or managers in the first professional leagues who were veterans of the war. Seven saw combat and one was wounded. Only one, Morgan Bulkeley, has been enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown—not as a player, but as the first president of the National League. Some of the club officials and ballplayers who did not enlist in the Union army felt an obligation to support the war through charitable contributions. In 1862 the Continental Base Ball Club of Brooklyn offered a silver ball as a trophy to be awarded to the winner of a series } CONT. ON P. 74
17 LITHOGRAPH BY OTTO BOETTICHER
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S A LV O
C O N V E R S AT I O N
BY JENNY JOHNSTON
Revisiting Confederates in the Attic IT’S BEEN 15 YEARS SINCE the publication of Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, the bestseller chronicling journalist Tony Horwitz’s quest to uncover how the Civil War is still being remembered—for better or worse— throughout the American South. In the book, Horwitz takes readers along as he visits numerous battle sites (some well preserved, some paved over by strip malls), lingers in communities still haunted by deep racial divides, and meets a handful of memorable characters—not least of which is Robert Lee Hodge, the hardcore Confederate reenactor who ushers Horwitz into his world. Here, Horwitz talks about the book, his memorable travels with Hodge, and whether writing another Civil War book is in his future. How has your life changed in the 15 years since Confederates in the Attic was published? I have two school-age sons, moved from Virginia to uber-Yankee Massachusetts, and am in my 50s, too old to spoon in ditches with Rob Hodge and his fellow hardcores. In short, I’m a long way from the world I inhabited for a few years while researching and writing Confederates in the Attic. If you were to set out to write Confederates now, do you think you’d get a similar book? Confederates is really a snapshot of a moment in time, the mid1990s, when certain issues like the Rebel flag were very hot. The militia movement was also strong (Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City in the midst of my research). So some of the extremist views I encountered were more evident then, I suspect, than they would be if I wrote Confederates today. Also, the South as a whole has changed a great deal, due to immigration and other factors. My general impression is that diehard defenders of the Confederacy are a smaller and diminishing percentage of the southern population. And while there’s
obviously still a lot of racial division—in every part of the country—and moments when this tension flares, I think there’s also been tremendous progress in dayto-day race relations, particularly among young people. Do you still get Confederates fan mail? I get about 20 letters or emails a week from readers, and the book is assigned in a fair number of high school and college courses. The feedback is generally positive, though perhaps one out of 10 responses comes from someone who believes I’ve defamed their Confederate forebears. I occasionally hear from readers at the other extreme, who accuse me of being a Confederate apologist. For a good part of the book you’re traveling with Rob Hodge, the pair of you wearing Civil War uniforms and sleeping in very uncomfortable places. Road-tripping with Rob must have been unique, to say the least. There was never a dull moment. Rob is one of the most remarkable people I’ve had the pleasure to know. He’s also a hero to me, an American individualist of the sort
TONY HORWITZ
WHO:
Author DATE OF BIRTH:
June 9, 1958 HOMETOWN:
Washington, DC FACTOID:
Won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting while working at The Wall Street Journal SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Baghdad Without a Map, 1991 Confederates in the Attic, 1998 Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, 2011
Thoreau and Emerson extolled, who has the courage to follow his own (sometimes eccentric) drummer and defy the herd. Simply letting me into his life in the way he did, and allowing me to write frankly about it, was a brave act and I know he caught a lot of flak as a result. But I hope he feels as I do, that we had a lot of fun and laughs along the way, and opened people’s eyes to the wonder of the Civil War and the desperate need to preserve the sites and landscapes that remain. He’s carried on that hard work ever since, for which I admire him all the more. Do you have a favorite Rob Hodge story? I still laugh every time I recall marching with Rob and two other Rebel hardcores across the field of Pickett’s Charge on the afternoon of July 3—with a battalion of gawking tourists close on our tail. One of them asked Rob what we were, and when he gruffly mumbled “Confederates” she replied, “Ferrets?” I sometimes wish I’d called the book Ferrets of the Confederacy. Did you learn anything from your dabble in reenacting that’s stuck with you? It’s easy to make fun of reenactors, and I certainly did at times in my book. But I came away feeling there’s great value in going to the places where history happened and trying to inhabit the lives of people then. The sound of cannons, the clouds of smoke, the feel of carrying a musket or walking 10
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The group of hardcore Civil War reenactors whom author Tony Horwitz fell in with while researching his book Confederates in the Attic.
miles in broken-soled brogans— these and other experiences came alive for me while reenacting in a way that wasn’t always possible from reading alone. Very occasionally, I also had that mystical “period rush,” that momentary sense of connecting with the past. And I certainly saw the way in which reenactments bring history alive for spectators. So I’m a big advocate of reenacting, as long as people recognize its limits. No matter how hard we try, we can’t “be there.” Have you been tempted to don a uniform again? I occasionally have the urge, and then it passes. It’s one of those experiences I’m very glad I had and hope never to repeat. Why do you think the Civil War continues to grip so many people? That was really the question that
Robert Lee Hodge (left) and Horwitz in full Confederate gear.
lay at the heart of Confederates. Personally, one aspect that keeps drawing me back, even when I think I’m burned out on the subject, is the power of the words and images we have from that era. All I have to do to rekindle my passion is to read Abraham Lincoln’s or Frederick Douglass’ speeches, or soldiers’ letters. The honesty and eloquence and plainness of their words puts me in touch with an American voice I love, and that we almost never hear today, certainly not from our leaders. The photographs have a similar power, carrying me back to an America before interstates and sprawl and the Gap and the rest of our consumer culture made so much of the country look the same. It’s worth remembering that photography was about as old at the time of the Civil War as the Internet is today. People were still figuring out what to do with
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C O N V E R S AT I O N
this new technology, which adds to the freshness and strangeness of the images. I can look at them all day. What’s your take on the sesquicentennial and how the Civil War is being re-remembered right now? My impression is that it’s been a fairly muted affair. There’s been some excellent discussion and scholarship and museum displays. But I’m not sure the general public is engaged to the degree many people might have hoped. I may be wrong, but I don’t sense that people are as excited by the Civil War as they were in the ’80s and ’90s, or feel it’s as relevant to their lives. Perhaps there’s just so much more noise in our culture, and competition for our time and attention. Or maybe it’s just the greater distance we feel today from the Civil War, the civil rights struggle, and so on. You’ve written about Gettysburg for Smithsonian, and of course you wrote a great book on John Brown. What aspect of the Civil War might you explore next? Will there be another book? I’ve become more interested in the history—what happened and why—as opposed to contemporary memory of the war, which was the main subject of Confederates. Too often, I think, Civil War buffs (myself included) focus on the great battles and leaders without stepping back and asking how it is that mid-19thcentury Americans, who for the most part shared a common language and culture and religion, came to slaughter each other by the hundreds of thousands. Will I write another book about the Civil War? I’m not sure. But I’ll never say never.
CATCHING UP WITH ROBERT LEE HODGE It’s hard to imagine Confederates in the Attic without Robert Lee Hodge—the illustrious Civil War reenactor with whom Horwitz travels on a rapid-fire pilgrimage dubbed the “Civil Wargasm.” In real life, Hodge is also a photographer, an award-winning filmmaker, and a Civil War battlefield preservationist. But it’s his commitment to visual authenticity (not to mention his ability to imitate a bloated corpse on the battlefield) that has made him famous among reenactors—and thousands of Confederates readers. Here are highlights from the Monitor’s recent interview with Hodge, in which he reveals what motivates him to reenact and why visual authenticity is so critical yet so hard to achieve. To read the full interview, go to: civilwarmonitor.com/hodge.
Tony Horwitz and Rob Hodge at an event at Ford’s Theatre in February 2013.
You’re pictured on the cover of Confederates in the Attic, and heavily featured in it. Do people still recognize you from the book? All the time. The last 15 years have been a long, strange trip. I got a lot of attention because of the book, and it’s been very flattering. But there are so many other people who deserve that attention— well, at least for the positive things. Maybe not for urinating on buttons or mimicking a bloated corpse. By the way, how did Tony Horwitz stack up as a reenactor? Oh, boy. He was a comical soldier. Him holding a musket was just … I don’t know. He’s not to be marching out in the field with a muzzleloader. He might get hurt.
Are there any big differences between reenacting now and reenacting back when Confederates was written? It has changed astronomically. As much as I like technology, the Internet has helped shrink reenacting. Immediate communication—through online forums and Facebook—is supplanting face-to-face interaction. The technical is replacing the physical and negating the genuine enthusiasm for putting the key in the ignition and driving several hundred miles to hang out in person with your friends. As a result, the physical appearance of people in uniform en masse has greatly depreciated. There are other reasons for this too, like real war, less disposable income, and higher gas prices. Also, I think that
today’s reenactments aren’t as well thought out. Back in the 1990s, reenactments were much more history-based. Now they often look more like football games than historic attempts at a visual reality. Are there more hardcore reenactors these days, or fewer? I think it’s probably the same. Around the time Confederates came out I noticed even more division growing between authentics and non-authentics. A lot of the hardcore elements wanted to do their own thing. They wouldn’t come out en masse to the big reenactments, and I think that hurt reenacting overall. When you have a mass of dudes with quality authentic impressions show up, the visual impact is enormous. Tony said he’d experienced brief moments of “period rush” during his short reenacting career. Have you felt it often? You hope for that equation to come together at a reenactment, but usually the house rules say it won’t. You might get a few nanoseconds of visual believability before it’s messed up by some “farby” reenactor, or a telephone line, or any of the multitude of problems you can find at every moment. The best and longest moment of visual authenticity I’ve ever experienced was last September, at one of the 150th anniversary Antietam reenactments. I had 20 minutes of near perfection—an unheard of amount of time for believability. It was visual chaos, the audio was amazing, and I was with a great group of people who looked the part. It was early morning and the ground fog was heavy, masking some of the visual intrusions. The Federals were faint silhouettes through the smoke, over 100 yards away. We didn’t get up close on them, which was more authentic. And we only fired muskets maybe three or four times in that entire 20 minutes. But it was phenomenal. It’s why I go to this stuff. I mean, I should have played the lottery that day, and a lot of other people felt the same way.
COURTESY OF ROBERT LEE HODGE
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Marrow of Tragedy The Health Crisis of the American Civil War Margaret Humphreys “A consistently engaging overview of Civil War medicine in its every aspect. Based on careful research and mastery of an abundant literature, Marrow of Tragedy provides a powerful depiction of a subject revealing of a dynamic and increasingly complex American society.�—Charles Rosenberg, Harvard University “If there is one study that shows us the significance of sickness in the Civil War, and the attempts to define and counter it, this is it. With admirable scholarship and an eye for key turning points, Humphreys has written a compelling history of the war’s medical costs and achievements.�—Steven M. Stowe, Indiana University “Full of fresh perspectives, thoughtful insights, and judicious reassessments, this sweeping synthesis by an outstanding historian will fundamentally change the way we think about Civil War medical history. For scholars and general readers alike, Marrow of Tragedy is a must-read book.�—James C. Mohr, University of Oregon DMPUI r FCPPL
t QSFTT KIV FEV
New from
Alabama
TH E U N I V ER SIT Y OF A L A BA M A PR ESS
P
ublished to mark the Civil War sesquicentennial, The Yellowhammer War tells the story of Alabama’s role in and experience of our bloody national conflict. During the first winter of the war, Confederate soldiers nicknamed the soldiers of an Alabama unit “Yellowhammersâ€? for their yellow-trimmed uniforms that allegedly resembled the plumage of the yellow-shafted flicker or “yellowhammer.â€? In The Yellowhammer War, Auburn University historian Kenneth Noe presents the definitive collection of essays about the Civil War in the “Hearts of Dixie.â€? Readers will appreciate the grand sweep of military and political history as well as recent discoveries about race, women’s lives, the home front, and Reconstruction. CONTRIBUTORS: Jason J. Battles / Lonnie A. Burnett / Harriet E. Amos Doss / Bertis English / Michael W. Fitzgerald / Jennifer Lynn Gross / Patricia A. Hoskins / Kenneth W. Noe / Victoria E. Ott / Terry L. Seip / Ben H. Severance / Kristopher A. Teters / Jennifer Ann Newman TreviĂąo / Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins / Brian Steel Wills Edited by Kenneth W. Noe, Alumni Professor and Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University and author of Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861.
320 pp, 4 illustrations, $49.95 ISBN: 978-0-8173-1808-6
Published in cooperation with the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South.
THE YELLOWHAMMER WAR THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION IN ALABAMA
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S A LV O
IN FOCUS
BY BOB ZELLER PRESIDENT , CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY
Christmas in Camp avenues; a makeshift flagpole has been fashioned from the tall, stripped trunk of a single tree. These soldiers, about half from Bangor, had tasted battle by then, charging up Henry Hill at the First Battle of Bull Run in an assault on a Confederate artillery position. In a matter of months they would participate in the Peninsula Campaign (where Jameson would be wounded and, soon after, die of
THE CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY IS 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
disease) and then go on to fight in some of the war’s bloodiest engagements: Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. Most of the men, two-year enlistees, were mustered out on June 9, 1863, and feted with a grand celebration in Bangor. By that time, 69 had been killed or wounded, and 70 lost to disease. But 120 of the men had enlisted for three-year terms, and they became mutinous when their proud
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
IT IS CHRISTMAS DAY in 1861, and the boys of the 2nd Maine Volunteer Infantry stand in formation in front of the elaborately decorated Camp Jameson (named after their original commander, Charles Davis Jameson), located at Hall’s Hill, near Yorktown, Virginia. Tall archways adorned with greenery, each of a different design, front the camp’s company
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
regiment evaporated. They vowed to fight no more. Reassigned to the 20th Maine Infantry, these were the angry soldiers whose morale Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had to restore in quick order as the Army of the Potomac only weeks later began its inexorable march toward Gettysburg, where the Maine men had a date with destiny on the southern slope of Little Round Top.
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C A S U A LT I E S O F WA R
A NOTORIOUS FIRE-EATER GROWS TO REGRET THE WAR HE WANTED. BY STEPHEN BERRY
N FEBRUARY 1857, a general melee broke out on the floor of the House of Representatives. For three days the legislators had been engaged in a heated debate over the admission of Kansas as a slave state. The Buchanan administration had rammed the bill through the Senate with relative ease, but House forces were evenly matched and perennially illhumored. One representative captured the general mood when he suggested that each man check his sidearm at the door—he was only half kidding. On the third day of debate, opposition forces gained an unexpected advantage—an unusual number of dinners and dances seriously depleted Democratic ranks. Frantic, Alexander Stephens sent messengers to the likely salons to round up the wayward pols. Most probably, South Carolina congressman Laurence Keitt was among these reinforcements. Keitt’s passion for politics was equaled only by his passion for fashionable life, and he was one of the city’s most notorious gallants. Regardless, by 2 a.m. the “leader of the Palmetto State’s young chivalry” (as Keitt was called) had dragged himself into the House, where he lay sprawled across two tables, half drunk and half asleep, one of his shoes having fallen to the floor. The Republican floor leader, Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania, was conferring with opposition-minded Democrats on the Democratic side of the House when John Quitman of Mississippi offered another in a line of silly motions designed to forestall a vote. Tired, frustrated, and not a little belligerent himself, Grow objected “with considerable tartness” to Quitman’s parliamentary pettiness. The remarks apparently came as an unwelcome intrusion to the napping Keitt. With eyes still closed, he inclined his head just long enough to growl, “[I]f you are going to object, go back to your own side of the house.” “This is a free hall,” Grow answered the prostrate congressman, “and I have the right to object from any part of it when I choose.”1 At this Keitt was up in a flash, fumbling for his footwear. “Wait until I put my shoe on, you Black Republican puppy,” he snarled at Grow, “and we will see about
“I had as much to do probably as anyone else in bringing about this revolution and I must accept its consequences.”
To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our Notes section on page 78.
that.” Slightly amused, Grow held his ground, claiming he would be damned before some “nigger driver” fresh off the plantation would crack a whip about his ears and tell him where or where not to stand in the House of Representatives. Keitt, normally adept at such verbal sparring, seemed at a loss for words and instead launched himself at the defiant Republican, meaning to choke him. Accounts vary dramatically as to what happened next. Republican papers and Grow partisans claim the well-proportioned congressman caught Keitt with a hard right, knocking him to the floor. Keitt backers claim his fist went wide of the mark and that Keitt had “merely tripped.” Regardless, the tussle set off a brawl in front of the speaker’s podium in which dozens of congressmen fell upon each other, one wielding a heavy spittoon. The older representatives were just beginning to get wheezy when Cadwallader Washburn of Wisconsin grabbed William Barksdale of Mississippi by the hair, preparing to deliver him a heavy blow to the face. Unfortunately Barksdale’s wig came loose in Washburn’s hand and the startled Wisconsin representative swung at nothing but air. Convulsed by laughter, the rioters attempted to regain their composure as the embarrassed Barksdale reacquired and repositioned his crumpled hair. The next day, Keitt apologized
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
I
Laurence Massillon Keitt
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
for the incident, admitted he was the aggressor, and claimed that any blame belonged to him alone. Even Keitt’s friends shook their heads at his conduct, which confirmed what they had always known about the impetuous congressman. “He is a good fellow,” William Gilmore Simms said of Keitt, but he seems likely “to founder his bateau in smooth waters.” William Henry Trescot agreed. “I like Keitt for many things,” he noted, but “he has sadly depreciated the old Carolina standard” and he gives me “a nervous apprehension of some new mortification whenever I hear that a South Carolinian has been ‘distinguishing’ himself.”2 It was for incidents like this one that Laurence Keitt earned the sobriquet “Harry Hotspur of the South.” There is much in his career to justify the title. Less than a year before the Grow altercation, Keitt had “distinguished” himself for his involvement in the caning of Charles Sumner, the senator from Massachusetts whose “Crime against Kansas” speech had enraged southern colleagues. Keitt was nearby when the assault by fellow South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks began and made sure the “licks were well laid on” by threatening any man who moved to interrupt the flogging. Brooks had ambivalent feelings about his handiwork afterward, but Keitt was delighted by the debacle. More than any-
South Carolina congressman Laurence Massillon Keitt, nicknamed “Harry Hotspur of the South” for his fiery disposition.
thing he was sick of “stagnation”; if northern men would rise en masse, he promised, “the city would … float with blood.”3 Keitt, then, was a Fire-Eater par excellence. Legendary for staging “pyrotechnic” displays on the floor of Congress, Keitt paced his desk, scattered papers before him “like people in a panic,” and pounded “the innocent mahogany” until pens, pencils, documents, and even “John Adam’s extracts shuddered under the blows.” To Keitt, the War with Mexico and the Revolutions of 1848 had been just the beginning.
The entire Atlantic world, he believed, was on the brink of revolutionary consolidation, “rocking with the throes … of august developments” that could “no more be stifled than the spirit of the earthquake.” In the coming storm, lesser men would be overwhelmed; they would miss the opportunity to shape the world and, as suddenly as it had come, the drama would be over, “its agencies, like waves, rocking and rolling themselves heavily to sleep.” This, Keitt said, was to be his “Promethean moment,” his chance to marry } CONT. ON P. 74
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B AT T L E F I E L D ECHOES
Bitter Allies
HEN FRENCH SOLDIER AND statesman Charles de Gaulle said, “The soldier often regards the man of politics as unreliable, inconsistent, and greedy for the limelight,” he was not referring to the atmosphere during the American Civil War, but he might as well have been.1 Much like the American Revolution before it, and every American conflict since, the Civil War saw a measure of animosity and discord between military leaders and civilian politicians. Much of it was rooted in personal or petty disputes, while other instances stemmed from philosophical differences on the conduct or objectives of the war. Either way, the Civil War offers perhaps the most blatant display of an enduring truth about American civil-military relations: Generals and politicians often don’t get along. Undeniably, the most famous example of this dynamic is the storied rift between President Abraham Lincoln and Major General George B. McClellan. Theirs was a troubled partnership punctuated by personal barbs, such as McClellan referring to Lincoln as a “gorilla” and the president accusing McClellan of having a case of the “slows” when it came to military action.2 Of course, Lincoln’s frustrations with McClellan were justified in many ways. For one, the general suffered from what, in the words of historian James M. McPherson, “can only be called a messiah complex.”3 Secondly, McClellan’s constant hesitation and inaction were enough to make an eager Lincoln apoplectic at times. Lincoln “did not pretend to know anything about the handling of troops” (a point McClellan vociferously agreed with) but the president did know the importance of “celerity” and bemoaned the fact that the general seemed not to.4 The stormy Lincoln-McClellan relationship was just one among many personal conflicts. Major General Fitz John Porter, a personal ally of McClellan, engaged in some of the most public recriminations of Union political leadership. In a letter to the editor of the New York World newspaper, Porter blamed incompetent politicians for the Union losses in Virginia in 1862 and opined that perhaps the military should move on Washington “to rid us of incum-
“Washington is as corrupt as Hell.... I will avoid it as a pest house.”
To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our Notes section on page 78.
bents that are ruining our country.” These remarks—and the bad blood they helped cause—could have contributed to Porter’s eventual court-martial for failure to follow orders and misbehavior at Second Bull Run.5 No discussion of Civil War rancor would be complete without mention of William Tecumseh Sherman. The pugnacious Union commander’s contempt for politicians was exceeded only by his disdain for newspaper reporters and editors. As a West Pointer and career soldier, Sherman had little respect for his politically appointed peers and even less for those who appointed them. His relationship with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, whom he referred to as a “liar and a coward,” was particularly frosty and grew worse as the war went on. Shortly after the war’s end, Sherman wrote to his wife, claiming, “Washington is as corrupt as Hell…. I will avoid it as a pest house.” Proving that his hyperbolic prose knew few limits, he added, “Lincoln’s assassination was not plotted in Richmond, but nearer his Elbow.”6 Sherman’s vitriol, however, was not confined to civilian leaders; he often expressed disdain for his peers in uniform, including generals John Pope, Joe Hooker, and, most emphatically, Henry Halleck. When Halleck sided with Stanton, who publicly criticized Sherman’s handling of the surrender of
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
THEN AND NOW, WARTIME RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN GENERALS AND POLITICIANS ARE OFTEN LESS THAN FRIENDLY. BY CLAY MOUNTCASTLE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Confederate forces in North Carolina, Sherman, who previously considered Halleck “a great man,” sent off a testy note to the chief of staff stating, “I cannot have any friendly intercourse with you.”7 If uniformed acrimony during the Civil War had a face, it would have certainly have been that of Major General William T. Sherman. And while the North had the most evident cases of civil-military strife during the Civil War, the South engaged in much of the same. History has largely remembered Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his commanders as simpatico, but as historian Joe Glatthaar notes, “Davis possessed an unusually thin skin” and “could not endure criticism.” So when field commanders including the self-centered Pierre G.T. Beauregard or the headstrong Joseph E. Johnston accused Davis of ineptitude or shortsightedness, it was not long before Davis transferred Beauregard to the West and took on a much more adversarial posture with Johnston.8
As with all American conflicts, the Civil War witnessed its share of friction between generals and politicians. Above: The two men who best embody the conflict’s civilianmilitary strife— President Abraham Lincoln and General George B. McClellan—meet at Antietam in October 1862.
As bitter and nasty as the dialogue between civilian and military leaders could be, however, it did usually remain just talk—and the sniping was almost never face to face. Very rarely did the friction result in active insubordination by the generals or tangible abuses of political power by the politicians. Also, the generals’ most harsh and pointed criticisms were usually aimed at other commanders, and the same went for politicians and their political opponents. So while the civil-military divide may have made the war extremely frustrating to prosecute at times, and did little to enhance the reputations of some of the most vocal complainers, it did not seriously threaten the political or military operations of either side. The dynamic continues still in American conflicts. Whether it was General Douglas MacArthur’s campaign of contempt for President Harry Truman’s administration during the Korean Conflict, or General William Westmoreland’s belief that political
leaders presiding over the Vietnam War should, in the words of one scholar, “get out of the way of the military professionals,” the wars of the 20th century contained several reminders of traditional civil-military tensions.9 The recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have offered further examples (although perhaps not as blatant as those from MacArthur or Westmoreland) of disparaging comments aimed at civilian leadership. More than one highlevel military career has paid the price as a result.10 In short, the animosity and distrust evident during the Civil War, while remarkable, was not exceptional to our history—and will likely continue. While this tendency might be less than ideal, the bigger and perhaps more interesting question is this: Does it matter? Should we expect an environment of unhindered cooperation from our military and political leaders, free from negativity, spite, or distrust? Or should we accept that the cultural divide } CONT. ON P. 75
27 PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDER GARDNER
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Winter 2013
The
Most Influential*
Politicians, Civilians, Inventors, Spies & Soldiers of the Civil War (*That you’ve probably never heard of) Not every noteworthy figure in the Civil War is as recognized today as Lincoln, Davis, Grant, or Lee. Indeed, some of the conflict’s most significant players remain largely unknown. We polled leading historians—and ranked their picks—for the most influential people who never got their due. 29 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR WINTER 2013
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Charles Graham Halpine
Emory Upton TACTICAL INNOVATOR
LEE’S “OTHER RIGHT ARM” None would dispute that the Army of Northern Virginia had an outsized impact on the course of the Civil War. Commanded by Robert E. Lee from 1862 to Appomattox, the ANV represented at most 25 percent of Confederate forces in the field, but it inflicted 45 percent of all Union casualties. Such effectiveness earned the admiration of Ulysses S. Grant and made household names of Lee, James Longstreet, and Stonewall Jackson. But at the center of the operation was Lee’s “other right arm,” the adjutant general Walter Taylor. At 24, Taylor functioned as Lee’s chief of staff, drafting and delivering orders, overseeing logistics, and answering a volume of correspondence he found “truly appalling.” As Taylor later noted, it was only the exceptionally “knotty and difficult case” that he would put before Lee, thus freeing the general up to do what he did best—inflict Union casualties.
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PRIVATE MILES O’REILLY CREATOR
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FRANCIS PEYRE PORCHER REBEL HEALTH GURU
Attempting to alleviate medicinal shortfalls, Confederate surgeon general Samuel Preston Moore commissioned Francis Peyre Porcher to prepare a list of herbal and home remedies that soldiers might use to practice self-care in their camps. The resulting 600-page Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, published in Charleston in 1863 (and republished in new editions thereafter), dramatically exceeded Moore’s expectations. Not only did Porcher list the medical uses of thousands of commonly found herbs, shrubs, and trees but he created a guide to self-sufficient soldiering, with lists of edible roots and berries and recipes for homemade soap and bat-guano gunpowder. If Porcher had ever succeeded in finding an effective substitute for quinine, he would deserve to be even higher on the list.
Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor AfricanAmerican recruitment was immediately popular with broad swaths of the northern public. This was particularly true among the newly immigrated Irish, a generally Democratic group who could ill afford to compete for factory jobs with large numbers of freed slaves. Journalist Charles Halpine, however, helped convince many of his fellow Irishmen to support the war and the formation of the United States Colored Troops, even if they didn’t particularly like black people. Writing under the pseudonym Private Miles O’Reilly, Halpine turned racism against itself, for instance, in the satirical poem “Sambo’s Right to be Kilt”: “Some tell me ’tis a burnin’ shame / To make the naygers fight, / And that the trade of bein’ kil / Belongs but to the white. // But as for me, upon my soul! / So lib-ral are we here, / I’ll let Sambo be shot instead of myself / On ev’ry day in the year.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (TAYLOR, UPTON, DICKINSON); SOUTH CAROLINIANA LIBRARY (PORCHER); RONALD C. CODDINGTON (HALPINE)
Walter Taylor
In a war notorious for doomed charges, something remarkable happened on May 10, 1864. Twelve Union regiments ordered to take an impossible position outside Spotsylvania Courthouse actually succeeded, thanks to a new infantry assault tactic taught to them by a young colonel, Emory Upton. Instead of forming his men in a long line and having them fire in volleys as they moved toward the enemy’s trenches, Upton had them bunch up, like the head of a spear, and told them to withhold their fire until they had pierced the salient and could fan out, left and right, using their bayonets to exploit the break in the line. The tactic worked (though supporting forces were so badly managed they did nothing to take advantage of it). If Upton’s revelation had come earlier, it might have led to a rethinking of Civil War infantry tactics. As it was, Upton’s influence would crest after the war when his Military Policy of the United States helped usher in a fundamental reformation of the U.S. Army.
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Anna Elizabeth Dickinson MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER
Though all but forgotten at the time of her death, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was once known across the Civil War North as the “Queen of the Lyceum” and “America’s Joan of Arc.” A committed abolitionist and devastating critic of anti-war Democrats, the precocious Dickinson defied the gender conventions of her day to become a highly prized public speaker, often commanding $100 an appearance, an extraordinary sum at the time. “Never was an audience more electrified and amazed than they were with the eloquence and power of [that] young girl,” noted Elizabeth Cady Stanton after one of Dickinson’s patented harangues. A force in Republican politics during the pivotal 1863 and 1864 elections, Dickinson also became a hero to young abolitionist women across the North. “I don’t ever expect to lecture myself,” one female fan wrote to Dickinson, “but I feel.” Dickinson died in obscurity in 1932, and her later years were sad ones, but in her heyday she gave voice to the feelings of thousands.
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19 Anson Stager MASTER OF COMMUNICATION
U.S. GRANT’S CHAMPION
“Grant is my man, and I am his the rest of the war!” President Abraham Lincoln famously exclaimed after the fall of Vicksburg. But how did Lincoln know that Grant could be trusted? How did he know that the rumors of Grant’s drinking were unfounded? He knew because his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, received regular and detailed reports from journalist and self-described “official spectator” Charles Dana. As the “eyes” of the administration, Dana sent reports back to Washington about the field performance of many Union generals, but none impressed him so much as Grant, and he fully supported Grant’s ascension to the supreme command of all Union forces in the field. Grant excelled at the role and became the grand architect of Union victory. But to a large degree he owed his rise to Charles Dana.
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18 ROBERT SMALLS FREEDOM FIGHTER
African Americans, individually and en masse, played critical roles in bringing the Civil War on and in seeing it through. It is a travesty, then, that most Americans know the names of only Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. One name that deserves greater renown is that of Robert Smalls, a slave whose derring-do became the talk of the nation in May 1862. Smalls commandeered a Confederate military transport ship, CSS Planter, and steered it first to a nearby wharf to pick up his family and then out to sea to surrender the vessel to the Union blockade, all the while sending signals to Confederate forts that nothing was amiss. Smalls’ actions galvanized the antislavery North, making a more eloquent argument than any speech ever could that AfricanAmerican men would risk everything for the Union and for freedom, if only they were given a chance.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
Charles Dana
Much has been said about Abraham Lincoln’s use of telegraphy during the Civil War. The only U.S. president to hold a patent, Lincoln seemed intuitively to understand that the new invention had revolutionized the conduct of warfare (and the reach of the commander-in-chief). “I think Lee’s army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point,” Lincoln telegraphed a shaky Army of the Potomac commander Joe Hooker, who seemed to want to duck out of a confrontation with Lee in Pennsylvania, in June 1863. “Hold with a bull-dog grip, and chew and choke, as much as possible,” Lincoln wired Grant during the Overland Campaign in 1864. None of these messages would have been possible without the tireless professionalism of the head of the Military Telegraph Department, Anson Stager, who kept the entire national system running from October 1861 until the end of the war.
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17 GEORGE HENRY SHARPE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
YANKEE SPYMASTER
Most Civil War buffs have heard of Alan Pinkerton, but it was Colonel George Henry Sharpe who created the first true military intelligence outfit of the war. Sharpe’s Bureau of Military Intelligence, established on February 11, 1863, and lasting through Appomattox, employed approximately 70 field agents, who were tasked to comb through enemy newspapers, sift through captured camps, rifle the pockets of the battlefield dead, and interrogate prisoners, deserters, and refugees. The bureau’s reports were usually highly accurate, though both Hooker and George Meade preferred to rely on their cavalries for their eyes and ears. It was Grant who first and most clearly saw the value of Sharpe’s operation, and he came to rely on Sharpe to help him “keep track of every change the enemy makes.” Union cavalry general Philip Sheridan too was impressed: Sharpe and his men, he said, “cheerfully go wherever ordered, to obtain that great essential of success, information.”
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Dennis Hart Mahan PROFESSOR TO THE (CIVIL WAR) STARS
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WEST POINT MUSEUM
Virtually all of the Civil War’s major officers were products of the United States Military Academy at West Point. (The class of ’37 alone included future generals Braxton Bragg, Jubal Early, John Sedgwick, John Pemberton, and Joe Hooker.) And no one made it through West Point without taking Professor Dennis Hart Mahan’s military science course. Thinking back on his West Point education, Confederate general Richard Ewell made the uncharitable assessment that he and his fellow students had been taught everything “they needed to know about commanding a company of fifty dragoons on the western plains against the Cheyenne Indians, but nothing else.” This is unfair to Mahan, and to West Point. Colleges are not designed to predict the future; they are designed to prepare their graduates to adapt to and shape the future. By this measure, Mahan was one of the most influential figures of the Civil War.
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15 John Sherman FINANCIAL GENIUS
Sherman is a name familiar to every student of the war, but the accomplishments of William Tecumseh have too often overshadowed those of his little brother, John. Elected U.S. senator from Ohio in 1861, John Sherman served on the enormously powerful Senate Finance Committee, where he quickly saw that “a radical change in existing laws relating to our currency must be made, or … the destruction of the Union would be unavoidable.” The result was a series of acts that created a new national currency system (the greenback), a new banking system (not yet the Federal Reserve, but a step in that direction), and a new national income tax— all of which helped to put the government’s fiscal house in order. Whatever William Tecumseh Sherman did to win the war militarily, it could be argued that his brother did almost as much to win it financially.
14 WILLIAM B. HAZEN
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
OMNIPRESENT SOLDIER Few soldiers have found themselves so often in such key positions as William B. Hazen. Hazen, it should be noted, was not alone in seeing action at Shiloh, Perryville, Murfreesboro, Tullahoma, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and the Atlanta, Savannah, and Carolinas campaigns. What sets him apart is the number of times he was involved in the most critical action. This was particularly true at Stones River, where Confederate general Braxton Bragg had driven Union general William Rosecrans from the field and only Hazen’s brigade staved off a total disaster. So why didn’t Hazen, like “the Rock of Chickamauga” George Henry Thomas, ever become immortalized as “the Rock of Stones River”? Partly because he hadn’t Thomas’ rank, but also because he proved so quarrelsome in the postwar period that Ambrose Bierce dubbed him “the best-hated man I ever knew.”
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JAMES H. BURTON
André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri CREATOR OF CIVIL WAR “TRADING CARDS”
During the Civil War, it was not the daguerreotype but the carte de visite that dominated the national consciousness. In 1854, French photographer AndréAdolphe-Eugène Disdéri patented the first system of mass-producing photographs. Called cartes de visite (visiting cards), these paper images were not as visually rich as the daguerreotype, but they could be produced cheaply and in high numbers. This was a boon to common soldiers, who took images of their families to their camps and left behind pictures of themselves, posing and proud in their uniforms. The carte de visite spawned the first photo albums and set off a national craze of portrait collecting. Oliver Wendell Holmes captured their emotional importance in calling them the “sentimental greenbacks of civilization.”
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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Like most scientific advances, the Civil War minie ball has a complicated history. The saga begins in 1830s India, where British captain John Norton noticed the natives using a blowgun dart with a spongy base that expanded when blown, making it easy to load but also providing a better seal and thereby better range. Norton applied the principle to the rifle bullet in a design that Frenchman Claude Minié improved, making the bullet smaller and longer and cutting four rings into the side to ensure that it would expand evenly when fired (thus “taking” the grooves of the gun barrel). But it was actually James H. Burton, an armorer at the United States Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, who improved the design further and petitioned then Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to make the soft-lead bullet and the rifled musket the new standard for the prewar U.S. Army. The decision was a fateful one, altering tactics and ensuring that Civil War soldiers would face a bullet that not only had a more effective range but tended to do more irreparable damage.
THE FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO, MUSEUM PURCHASE, ACHENBACH FOUNDATION FOR GRAPHIC ARTS ENDOWMENT FUND, 1998.16 (DISDÉRI); HISTORIC PHOTO COLLECTION, HARPERS FERRY NHP (BURTON)
PERFECTER OF THE MINIE BALL
Herman Haupt RAILROAD REVOLUTIONARY
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Historian Will Thomas has lately made the case that railroads were central to the conduct and outcome of the Civil War, acting variously as avenues of advance for invading armies, paths to freedom for escaping slaves, and modes by which Confederates reinforced points of collision within their interior lines. The unacknowledged pioneer and master of this new military leviathan was Herman Haupt, railroad superintendent for the Union army. Praising Haupt’s MacGyver-like skills of improvisation, Abraham Lincoln marveled that Haupt had rebuilt the Potomac Creek Bridge in nine days: “That man … has built a bridge four hundred feet long and one hundred feet high … [out of] nothing but cornstalks and beanpoles,” he marveled. Haupt would later quit his post when the army refused to establish a more robust Bureau of U.S. Military Railroads, but by then he had disciplined the system and revolutionized the use of military transportation as an instrument of modern war.
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JACOB THOMPSON SECRET SCHEMER
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Spy outfits, if they are any good, cover their tracks. By this measure at least, Jacob Thompson, the assumed head of the Confederate Secret Service in 1864, was very good. Thompson is most definitively associated with the failed plot to free Confederate prisoners on Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie. He seems probably connected to a more nefarious plot to burn down New York City in the fall of 1864. And the charge he most emphatically denied, but from which he cannot be fully cleared, is the conspiracy involving John Wilkes Booth and an attempt to kidnap President Lincoln. Booth would later cook up the assassination on his own initiative, but who knows by then how much men like Thompson had done to encourage Booth’s fever dream of playing Brutus to Lincoln’s Caesar? Influence cannot be measured solely by one’s accomplishments; it must also be measured by what is within one’s power to accomplish. Thompson’s various plots may have been longshots, but how might history be written if he had succeeded?
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Jonathan Letterman
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
FATHER OF BATTLEFIELD MEDICINE
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Appointed medical director of the Army of the Potomac, Jonathan Letterman was given broad powers to bulk up and reorganize the army’s medical corps. Almost single-handedly, he came up with what became known as the “Letterman System”—a vast network of rapidly deployable ambulance trains, advance dressing stations, and field hospitals that ensured the smooth transfer of wounded from the battlefield to longer-term care. The system was emulated by other armies and then standardized by act of Congress in 1864. Though remembered as the “Father of Battlefield Medicine,” Letterman was no simple functionary. At Gettysburg he and his stretcher-bearers were in the thick of the action, and a Lieutenant Sullivan of the 14th Indiana later recalled that Letterman “coolly rode all over the field, sometimes in the thickest of the firing, and away to the front even of our pickets on his errand of mercy, not satisfied to leave a single suffering man uncared for on the bloody field. All honor to such noble fellows.” Historians have a rough sense of how many died during the Civil War, but we will probably never know how many Letterman and his system saved.
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John Bingham FRAMER OF THE 14TH AMENDMENT
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Thanks to Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, most Americans now know the name of Thaddeus Stevens, the radical congressman and racial egalitarian played so impeccably by Tommy Lee Jones. Few, however, could recall the name or deeds of a man who deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Stevens and for many of the same reasons. Ohio congressman John Bingham was a radical in his own right, and he drafted some of the most important legal language in American history—Article I of the Fourteenth Amendment, which would eventually become the platform by which successive courts vastly expanded the civil rights protections of all Americans.
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Francis Lieber CODE OF WAR AUTHOR
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Jurist and scholar Francis Lieber spent more than 20 years as chair in history and political economy at South Carolina College before his distaste for slavery drove him to seek a new post at Columbia. Lieber’s eldest son stayed behind, however, and was eventually killed in Confederate service. Another son joined the Union army and lost his arm at Fort Donelson. Given his family situation and his deep understanding of history, war, and politics, Lieber was from the start of the conflict obsessed with the idea of codifying the humanitarian rules by which modern conflicts should be conducted. On April 24, 1863, Lincoln issued Lieber’s Code as General Orders 100, and it remains the core of international understanding of how civilized nations balance military necessity and humanitarian concern.
SAMUEL COOPER
MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISOTRY (COOPER); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LIEBER)
THE ULTIMATE PAPER-PUSHER
Few now know of Samuel Cooper, the highest-ranking general in the Confederate army. Cooper had been adjutant general of the U.S. Army, and he served the Confederacy in the same capacity for the entirety of the war. Cooper was too far under the thumb of Jefferson Davis to exercise any independent influence, and it is the usual fate of bureaucrats to be forgotten. But Samuel Cooper has another claim to fame. As the Confederacy’s master record-keeper, it was Cooper who personally oversaw the packing up of government files and their safe transference to Union hands after the fall of Richmond. Cooper had saved his country’s voluminous paper trail (which would eventually become the Confederate half of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion) because he knew it would be “essential to the history of the struggle,” and so it has proven. Indeed, without Cooper’s actions historians would have a much more indistinct picture of what the Civil War was.
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Charles Janeway Stille Late in the summer of 1862, as northern morale absorbed the losses of George B. McClellan’s increasingly pointless Peninsula Campaign, Charles Janeway Stille rallied the nation with what is arguably the war’s most important propaganda pamphlet, How a Free People Conduct a Long War: A Chapter From English History. Channeling the same message that Winston Churchill would later deliver to Britain in its “Darkest Hour,” Stille dispelled the prevalent notion that the war would be a short one and urged his countrymen to dig in, as the Duke of Wellington had done in the six-year saga that finally brought Napoleon to his knees at Waterloo. “Hard pounding this, gentlemen,” Wellington had said to his officers during the battle, “but we’ll see who can pound the longest.” Stille’s pamphlet, which went on to sell half a million copies during the war, played an enormously important role in recalibrating northern expectations of what it would take to win.
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UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ARCHIVES
PRO-WAR PAMPHLETEER
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4 RUFUS SAXTON
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
ADVOCATE FOR THE SABLE ARM
In 1863, no man in America was more synonymous with black recruitment than Rufus Saxton. As military governor of the Department of the South, Saxton worked tirelessly not just to recruit the first black regiments but to publicize them, protect them, and ensure that their men saw real combat, received equal pay and provisions, and were generally treated honorably. (When a philanthropic organization sent him a long, vaguely racist list of questions asking what his soldiers were like, Saxton fired back a two-word answer: “intensely human.�) Saxton was just as even-handed with African-American civilians. As overseer of the Port Royal Experiment, Saxton hoped to prove that if they were given land the freedmen would become as self-sufficient and as industrious as any class in America. Saxton was relieved of command by Andrew Johnson in 1866; the land was returned, and his experiment collapsed. But by then Saxton had established an indelible record of how Reconstruction might have gone.
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3 Jay Cooke STELLAR SALESMAN
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JAY COOKE COLLECTION, HAYES PRESIDENTIAL CENTER
Jay Cooke may not be a household name like Andrew Carnegie or J. Pierpont Morgan, but of all the war-made millionaires (and future robber barons), Jay Cooke had the greatest impact on the conflict’s outcome. After helping Salmon P. Chase secure his post as Secretary of the Treasury, Cooke was authorized to create a vast army of bond salesmen to canvass the countryside peddling the war to the public. Cooke was notoriously slow in forwarding the proceeds to the federal government (thereby amassing a vast personal fortune on the interest), but Congress could never investigate because the Treasury Department seemed helpless to sell bonds without him. “Never in the history of nations,” remarked The New York Times, “was such an enormous amount of money raised for public use with such extraordinary rapidity and success.” In grudging acknowledgment of Cooke’s achievement, one disgruntled Confederate supposedly remarked: “The Yankees did not whip us in the field. We were whipped in the Treasury Department.”
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THE W.S. HOOLE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARY, THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA
Josiah Gorgas WIZARD OF ORDNANCE
2
Born in Pennsylvania, Josiah Gorgas went to West Point and was assigned to a number of national arsenals before he met and married the daughter of Alabama governor John Gayle. “The South has … wooed and won me,” Gorgas admitted, saying more than he knew. “Its blandishments have stolen my senses, and I am its willing victim.” Victim or no, Gorgas proved incredibly resourceful as the Confederacy’s chief of ordnance. Importing guns despite the blockade, Gorgas also set up a vast network of armories, arsenals, and powderworks, all ensuring that while the Rebel armies often lacked something to eat, they never lacked something to shoot.
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MONTGOMERY MEIGS Montgomery Meigs is probably better known than most on this list, but he is still comparatively underappreciated given the scope of his accomplishments. At a time when early Union mobilization efforts were marred by widespread corruption, speculation, and fraudulent contracts, Meigs set about to discipline every link in the Union’s logistical supply chain. He and his department bought or built hundreds of ships, laid hundreds of miles of railroad track, and drove hundreds of thousands of horses and mules, all to ensure that Federal soldiers would never fight shoeless or hungry. “Perhaps in the military history of the world there never was so large an amount of money disbursed upon the order of a single man,” noted congressman (and later presidential candidate) James G. Blaine. “The aggregate sum could not have been less during the war than fifteen hundred million dollars, accurately vouched and accounted for to the last cent.” Secretary of State William Seward’s estimate of Meigs was more succinct: “Without the services of this eminent soldier, the national cause must have been lost.” 46
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QUARTERMASTER EXTRAORDINAIRE
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The story of H. L. Hunley — the Confederate submersible that disappeared in the waters off Charleston on February 17, 1864, after torpedoing and sinking the Union blockading vessel USS Housatonic — has captivated historians and buffs for decades. Even now, more than 10 years after the boat’s recovery, questions about her design and the circumstances of her final voyage remain unanswered. Here, four dedicated researchers offer their takes on what might have happened to Hunley and her crew.
BY ANDREW W. HALL WITH MICHAEL CRISAFULLI, KIMBLE JOHNSON, BARRY ROGOFF, AND CARY MOCK ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANDREW W. HALL
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IT’S EASY TO SEE WHY Hunley captures the imagination. Only two submarine projects reached operational status during the Civil War, one on each side. The Union submarine, unofficially dubbed Alligator, was attached to the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the Peninsula Campaign in the summer of 1862, but no effective use could be found for it. The boat eventually sank in the Atlantic off Cape Hatteras while under tow to Port Royal, South Carolina, in April 1863. It was the Confederate submersible H. L. Hunley that would achieve fame and operational success—though at a terrible price. The boat was the brainchild of Horace Lawson Hunley, a 38-year-old New Orleans attorney. Working with machinists James McClintock and Baxter Watson, Hunley created a hand-cranked boat called Pioneer. The boat apparently never saw action, though, as the team’s tests were interrupted by the Union navy’s passage of the forts below New Orleans and subsequent capture of the Crescent City in April 1862. Hunley and his team were forced to scuttle Pioneer in a canal, where Union soldiers would find the odd-looking iron beast. After the war the hulk was sold at public auction for its scrap value; the winning bid was $43.1 Reorganizing their group in Mobile, Hunley, McClintock, and Watson constructed a new boat. This boat proved to be slow, but it gave the team valuable practical experience. The team’s second boat sank in Mobile Bay in February 1863, without loss of life, but the boat’s limited success showed Hunley and the others that they were on the right track.2 Using their second boat as a guide, the team quickly began on a replacement. This craft was larger, with space for nine men: seven to crank, one to operate an air pump, and one to serve as pilot and commander. In July 1863, the new boat successfully sank a barge at Mobile. At this time, though, Mobile was a relatively quiet theater of war; Union forces were pressing their naval and land campaign against Charleston. The new “fish boat” was soon on its way by rail to that blockaded South Carolina port, where Confederate authorities were looking for a means of striking back against the Union fleet offshore. Soon after arriving at Charleston, the boat was taken over by the Confederate army. At the end of August 1863, she was alongside the wharf at Fort Johnson after a training exercise when something went terribly
wrong and the “fish boat” dropped below the surface, green seawater pouring through the open hatches. The commander and two crew members escaped; five others were trapped and drowned in the tight confines of the boat’s iron hull.3 Recognizing that the boat required experienced hands at the controls, Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard agreed to allow its civilian creator, Horace Hunley, to take a more active role, and Hunley promptly stenciled his name on the side of the boat. Tests continued into the fall of 1863. Day after day, Hunley and his crew practiced “attacking” Confederate ships anchored in the Cooper River by towing a mock explosive charge that floated on the surface behind them, diving and running under the target, and pulling the explosive against the ship’s side. Then, on October 15, 1863, the boat failed to surface after running a mock attack on CSS Indian Chief. Salvage crews eventually found the boat, her knifeedge bow buried deep in the silt of the Cooper River. It was three weeks before she was hauled to the surface. Her entire crew died this time, including Horace Hunley. In addition to the monies paid to the salvors for recovery of the boat, $400 was allotted for removing the remains of the crew and giving the interior of the boat a thorough scrubbing and white-washing.4 After this second fatal accident, Beauregard balked
ANATOMY OF A SHIP KILLER When the Confederate submersible H. L. Hunley cast off her lines and sailed into the Atlantic on February 17, 1864, she represented two years of knowledge gained through inspiration, hard work, and trial and error. Two previous sinkings, resulting in the deaths of 13 men (including the boat’s creator, Horace L. Hunley), had proved Hunley to be a temperamental vessel, one that left no room for mistakes.
ADJUSTABLE IRON SPAR
135-POUND SINGER TORPEDO
To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our Notes section on page 78.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
EN YEARS AGO NEXT April, thousands of Americans crowded along the waterfront at Charleston to witness an event both solemn and spectacular. To experience what was being billed as “the last funeral of the Civil War,” tourists and locals watched as thousands of men, women, and children, dressed in reproduction uniforms or 19th-century civilian attire, marched in a procession carrying the remains of eight Confederate mariners, men who died in one of the most audacious exploits of the war. The men—Arnold Becker, C.F. Carlsen, Frank Collins, George E. Dixon, C. Lumpkin, Augustus Miller, Joseph F. Ridgaway, and James A. Wicks—were the crew of H. L. Hunley, the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel in combat. For most in Charleston that day, the funeral procession was a vivid display of remembrance, patriotism, and fellowship. But for others, the story of H. L. Hunley and her crew has been an ongoing fascination, a collection of unanswered questions to be solved through a careful sifting of the evidence.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
at any further use of the little submersible. But LieutenThe time finally came on the evening of February 17. It was cold, ant George Dixon, an Alabama infantry officer who’d with a flat sea and good visibility. Dixon and seven crewmen set out been disabled at Shiloh and subsequently attached from Breach Inlet, and came upon the blockader USS Housatonic about himself to the submarine project, and four miles offshore. Housatonic’s crew, well aware of others prevailed on Beauregard to earlier attacks by steam-powered torpedo boats called let them try again. Beauregard reluc“Davids,” spotted Hunley while she was still about 100 tantly agreed, but insisted that there yards off, approaching from the Union ship’s starboard would be no more submerged attacks; side. Housatonic’s officer of the deck later said the subfuture operations would be carried out mersible “had the appearance of a plank moving in on the surface.5 the water.”6 He sounded the general alarm and issued Again the boat was refitted. The orders to get the gunboat underway. Sailors and marines explosive charge, previously towed rushed to the rail, opening fire on the little craft with behind the submersible, was fitted small arms. Then came an explosion, and a moment of on the end of an iron spar, hinged at stunned silence. the foot of the bow and projecting out The submarine’s charge had blown a tremendous 15 feet ahead of the hull. Dixon and hole in Housatonic’s starboard quarter, one so large that his new crew, all volunteers, trained cabin furnishings washed out through the opening. The Confederate general P.G.T. through the winter. By early Febru- Beauregard, commander of the 205-foot-long ship sank quickly, settling in about 30 feet ary 1864, they’d moved their boat to a forces defending Charleston of water. Five men aboard the Union vessel died.7 spot on the inshore side of Sullivan’s at the time of Hunley ’s attack. Of the submersible H. L. Hunley, there was no sign. Island, behind Fort Marshall. Here they were adjacent to Breach Inlet, a passage into the Atlantic beyond, where the blockading SINCE THE WRECK’S RECOVERY in 2000, the Warren Lasch Confleet lay. They began observing the positions of Union servation Center at the old Charleston Navy Yard has been the site of warships offshore and making practice runs into the research, preservation, and analysis. An informal cadre of researchers Atlantic at night, waiting for the right combination of has also taken up the effort, poring over historical records, academic wind, tide, and sea conditions to make their attack. papers, press releases from the Hunley project team, and even frame
FORWARD HATCH
FORWARD BALLAST TANK
SNORKEL BOX
CRANKSHAFT
AIR PUMP BELLOWS
DIVING LEVER
PORTS FOR LIGHT
DIVE PLANES
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AFT BALLAST TANK
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grabs from webcams to develop their own, often hotly debated analyses of the events of February 17, 1864, when Hunley sank USS Housatonic off Charleston. Below, we profile the work of four unaffiliated researchers who’ve devoted countless hours to resolving lingering questions about the Hunley story. They don’t necessarily agree with each other. Their analyses may ultimately be disproven or, because they suppose things that go beyond the historical and archaeological record, remain speculative. Nonetheless, their work stands as an example of how, with application and diligence, anyone can contribute to the public’s understanding of events 150 years ago.
MICHAEL CRISAFULLI: THE SPAR An engineer from upstate New York, Michael Crisafulli became intrigued years ago by the description of Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus in the novel 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. He began analyzing the fictional ship and eventually published his work on a personal website, The Vernian Era (vernianera.com). A few months after Hunley was raised from the sea floor in 2000, Crisafulli drove from New York to Charleston to see the boat. Over the next several years, he gave his web audience his best analysis of what Hunley archaeologists were uncovering, based largely on screen captures from the lab’s webcams. His Hunley work has been highlighted in numerous books, magazines, and news stories, including Tom Chaffin’s 2008 work The H.L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy. Here, Crisafulli looks at the iron spar that delivered the fatal torpedo into the side of USS Housatonic: IN THE PAST THERE HAS BEEN disagreement as to how Hunley’s torpedo was to be detonated after the crew abandoned the original concept (diving under the target ship while towing it) and began fitting it on an iron spar. Several contemporary accounts show concern the submarine would be drawn into its target when the bow-mounted torpedo exploded, implying impact triggers. This was the approach used for other Confederate torpedo boats. In 1914 Confederate navy veteran C.L. Stanton quoted one officer’s concern “that if he struck a vessel with the torpedo staff projecting horizontally he feared the boat would enter the hole made by the explosion in the ship’s side.” The officer, John A. Payne, thought “that if the torpedo staff was lowered to an angle of forty-five degrees when the ship was struck the torpedo would explode near the keel, and the Fishboat’s bow, striking the solid planking of the ship, would recoil sufficiently to make the machinery effective in backing out of danger.”8 These accounts indicate the angle of the torpedo spar was adjustable. Daniel McClaurin, a former Confederate soldier, gave this account of a February 17 repair request: “Lieutenant Dixon landed and requested that two of my regiment ... go aboard and help them to adjust the machinery, as it was not working satisfactorily. Another man and I went aboard and helped propel the boat for some time while the Lieutenant and others adjusted the machinery and the rods that held the torpedo and got them to working satisfactorily.”9 The steam-powered David torpedo boats in service at Charleston at that time show a rig that permitted the torpedoes to be lowered below the surface near their targets. Using such a rig would be difficult and dangerous from the very narrow hatches of the Hunley, but McClaurin’s machinery may have been intended for that purpose. It is also possible that Dixon was making adjustments to keep the torpedo stable or at a particular depth. In January 2013 the group that coordinates the conservation and excavation of the boat, the Friends of the Hunley, announced impor-
tant findings about the spar and torpedo system, and released several photographs of the cleaned and conserved spar. The most significant conclusion was that the torpedo was probably still attached to the spar when it was detonated; the submarine apparently did not back off before the explosion. Conservation revealed that a thin metallic material, originally believed to be a lead joint where the detachable torpedo was affixed to the spar, was actually copper and probably part of the torpedo casing. The torpedo attachment bolt remains fixed to the spar end and the copper sheathing is torn (on both sides of the spar) as if it had been pushed back around the bolt shank. This could have happened when the torpedo was rammed into the side of Housatonic or, because the torpedo end of the sheathing is rolled over, as a consequence of the explosion. The Friends also announced that a drawing labeled “Singer’s Torpedo used for blowing up the Housatonic” in the National Archives, which shows a hard mount to the spar set at an approximately
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Recent evidence indicates that CSS Hunley ’s spar (depicted below) was adjustable, perhaps even while in the water.
22-degree angle, may in fact be an accurate depiction of Hunley’s torpedo configuration. This revised arrangement, with no spike and with the detonators at the impact point, indicates the intent was explosion on impact. Confederate Davids had problems with torpedoes not detonating, and this might explain the multiple detonators shown in the original drawing.10 While the data remain incomplete, we can draw some preliminary conclusions. First, the apparatus was more complex than has generally been depicted. Second, a system of guy wires or stays stabilized the torpedo. Third, there was a mechanism to raise and lower the torpedo. And finally, the raising/lowering mechanism may have been workable on the water. While we need more information about the artifacts found near Hunley’s bow, and the fittings on the hull, to finally determine the exact arrangement of the spar and torpedo, we now have a much clearer picture than we did just a year ago of how the crew of H. L. Hunley delivered the charge that sank an enemy warship—and possibly their own.
KIMBLE JOHNSON: THE BLAST Kim Johnson graduated from The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, but it was not until 2004, when a friend attended the funeral of the Hunley crew members, that he acquired a deep interest in the Civil War. “I started reading everything available on the subject,” he recalls, “but found that many claims made by different authors that seemed to be accepted as gospel by others, just didn’t stand the test of common sense to me.” Johnson’s analyses have focused on the loss of the submersible. Here, he looks at the effect the torpedo might have in explaining the boat’s loss: IN 1998, TWO YEARS before the wreck of Hunley was raised from the sea floor, the National Park Service published a 200page document summarizing everything that was recorded about the wreck since its discovery three years before. In one section, “Explosion Analysis,” the archaeologists discuss the effects of the detonation of black powder, the explosive used in Hunley’s torpedo. Black powder is a low-velocity explosive, with an initial velocity of 560 to 2,000 feet per second. (Dynamite, by comparison, is about 10 times as fast.) Nevertheless, because water is effectively non-compressible, the shock
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A contemporary sketch of the destruction of USS Housatonic off Charleston on February 17, 1864.
wave from an explosion would have exerted a tremendous pressure on the hull. Using formulas developed for underwater explosives during World War II, the scientists calculated that at a distance of 50 feet from the blast—the assumption then was that the submersible drove the torpedo into the side of Housatonic and backed off before detonating it by lanyard—Hunley would have experienced a shock wave pressure of about 953 pounds per square inch using a 90-pound charge. Subsequent discoveries indicate that the charge was much larger and much closer—135 pounds, at the end of a 16-foot spar—so the blast must have been many, many times that calculated in 1998. Even with the earlier estimate, the scientists concluded 15 years ago, “Hunley was likely close enough to the torpedo blast to part some seams, causing a leak that could
not be overcome by the pumps.”11 Apart from damage to the boat itself, I believe that the crew, or at least Dixon, was incapacitated, if not killed outright, by the concussive effects of the explosion of the 135-pound torpedo. If the Hunley crew members were incapacitated to the extent that they lost effective control of the boat for five to 10 minutes after the explosion, then that’s enough time for Hunley to drift backward in a one-knot current while in a slow, shallow descent to the bottom. The boat was trimmed so that it had minimal buoyancy, so even small uncontrolled leaks could sink it. Hunley hit the bottom of the sea bed slightly seaward of Housatonic, about 900 feet from the sinking Union gunboat. The left side of the propeller guard, which was missing from the wreck, may have been torn off by the impact with the bottom, and the right side of the propeller guard suffered three gashes as a result of being forced into the propeller as it struck bottom and rotated slightly into the propeller guard. This damage would be consistent with a slow, shallow backward descent as opposed to simply sinking to the bottom in a level, upright orientation. The rudder was found underneath the boat, which also supports this theory. The forward hatch was found closed but unlatched, and the Hunley project scientists have said that Dixon could not see out of the portholes with the hatch in the latched position. That suggests that Dixon kept the hatch unlatched so he could see where he was going during the final run-in to the target, but
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A re-creation of the fatal attack, which shows Hunley’s torpedo detonating on impact with the Union vessel.
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because he was incapacitated by the effects of the explosion, he failed to secure the hatch as the boat sank. The evidence seems to indicate that the crew died from a lack of oxygen, not from drowning, which further indicates to me that they were incapacitated from the effects of the explosion and thus made no attempt to save themselves.
BARRY ROGOFF: THE SINKING THEORY THAT NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR A retired software technical writer, Civil War history buff, and tournament bridge player, Barry Rogoff has always been fascinated by early submarines and has been a frequent contributor to the Hunley Internet discussion group since it began. He lives in Nashua, New Hampshire. While others have argued that the little submersible’s crew may have been rendered unconscious or incapacitated, and succumbed relatively peacefully due to lack of oxygen, Rogoff outlines a sinking scenario that depicts a more desperate and gruesome end for Hunley’s crew.
CONSIDER THE EVENTS THAT would have resulted from a propulsion system failure during or shortly after H. L. Hunley’s attack on USS Housatonic. This would be consistent with the “blue light” sighting mentioned by a sailor on USS Canandaigua, which was steaming to Housatonic’s assistance. The signal was purportedly displayed by Hunley’s crew about 45 minutes after the sinking—sometimes viewed as evidence of the boat being afloat and under control for an extended period after the attack—a gap that could account for time that Dixon and his crew spent trying to restore the propulsion system. Had the effort failed, Dixon would have been faced with two choices: death or surrender. There would be no rescue attempt, and the water was too cold and the distance—about four miles—too great to swim to shore. He would have understood the imperative (and may have been under direct orders) to scuttle the boat, rather than allow a Federal ship to find the secret Confederate submarine drifting on the surface with a dead crew. To surrender was unthinkable: Even if it weren’t a breach of military discipline, it would have been a disgrace. Dixon had reason to believe they’d all be summarily executed if caught. When all hope of returning home was gone, Dixon might still have tried to signal those on shore. Knowledge that Hunley succeeded in its mission and survived the attack would have been very important to many people, including friends, family, colleagues, military superiors, and historians. After making the signal, Dixon might have ordered the front hatch opened, knowing that by the time enough water sloshed in to sink the boat, he and the crew would be unconscious or dead from hypothermia,
H. L. Hunley likely drifted and hit the bottom stern-first, about 900 feet to the east of the sinking USS Housatonic, as this illustration shows. Injuries to the crew, uncontrolled leaks, or mechanical failure all may have contributed to the submersible’s loss.
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a relatively painless death. Dixon may have opened and closed a seacock to accelerate the process. There may have been damage to the propulsion system as well, not necessarily caused by the torpedo’s explosion. The crankshaft was connected to a gear or chain that turned a flywheel mounted on the drive shaft. The system was designed to go forward, not backward, as was necessary in order to pull away from a target. If the mechanism bound up due to a bent, twisted, or broken shaft, the crew would have had very few options for survival. Damage to the propulsion system might have been external, as well. The screw was enclosed inside a cowling that supported the rudder, and it’s possible that the screw was fouled with seaweed, rope (possibly one of the lines used to position the spar torpedo), or other debris. Further, it would have been difficult or impossible to steer the boat when moving backward because water resistance would have forced the rudder to one side or the other. Photographs of the recovered boat show that the screw is intact, but only about half of the cowling is left. The rudder itself was found broken off, under the boat, but the support rods and rudder mechanism are gone. They may have rusted away, but it’s possible that a fouled mechanism could have been torn loose by the force of seven anxious men turning the prop shaft as hard as they could.
This theory is consistent with the historical record and the physical evidence, particularly the orderly positions of the crew, the forward latch mechanism being found on the floor, the differences in granularity of the sediment found inside the boat, and so forth. It’s not a heroic or glamorous ending to a Civil War legend, however, and thus far has not been officially acknowledged. The notion that Dixon intentionally settled the boat on the bottom, waiting for the tide to turn, is romantic nonsense. Had Hunley been able to run for home, she would have. To wait on the bottom would have been like committing murder and then hiding in the bushes—cold, wet, and miserable—while waiting for the police to leave. The crew would have been breathing increasingly oxygen-depleted air inside a cramped tube reeking from sweat, vomit, and human waste. The best way to honor the incredibly brave men who climbed inside an iron tube and went out to sink a Federal steam sloop-of-war is to uncover the truth about their fate, and that’s not possible unless all valid scenarios are considered, heroic or not.
U. S. NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER
Conservators of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley remove the first section of the crew’s bench at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in January 2005. The boat’s hand crank (bottom center), hull reinforcing rings, and portside dive plane (upper right) are clearly visible.
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CARY MOCK: A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER A climatologist and professor at the University of South Carolina, Cary Mock has a long-standing interest in historical climatology, particularly in the antebellum South. Although formal weather records weren’t collected in South Carolina until the end of the 19th century, data is available in many other sources. Taking guidance from Mark Twain’s comment that “everybody talks about the weather,” Mock has painstakingly compiled instrumental observations from the military, the U.S. Signal Service, the medical community, and volunteer observers. He also consulted newspapers, ship logbooks, and weather diaries kept by wealthy plantation owners. All of these observations reveal interesting weather
VERY COLD
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U. S. NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER
and west at the time of the attack. These were very good conditions for Hunley, particularly because the offshore wind would tend to flatten the sea—a critical consideration for a craft that had only inches of freeboard to begin with. Northwesterly winds would also have helped Hunley’s crew in the four-mile transit from Breach Inlet to their position to attack the Union gunboat. As Dixon and his crew headed out into the Atlantic under a clear sky, weather conditions were almost perfect for the attack on Housatonic. In the hours after the attack, though, conditions on the water grew steadily worse. The mercury continued to drop, and the wind that had helped propel them out into the Atlantic now stood against them. By early the next morning, February 18, temperatures along the coast were dropping into the 20s, and even into the teens in some places, extremely unusual for South Carolina in February. The South was coming under
extremes not always apparent in events within our records of the past 100 years. Here, Mock argues that even if everything else had gone to plan, an unanticipated weather front would have made it much more difficult for Hunley’s crew to return safely. WHEN GEORGE DIXON AND HIS CREW set out from Breach Inlet on the evening of February 17, they were going out on the heels of an abnormally cold weather front that rolled through the area. The air temperature was probably in the upper 30s, and we know from Housatonic’s log that there were moderate winds blowing from the north
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Charleston
❿
the grip of a full-blown snowstorm, with reports of snow from Texas to Louisiana to the Carolinas. The winds were from the north and they got brisk and gusty. “The dry, dusty and boisterous March-like weather which we have been enduring for the past few days, was rendered still more uncomfortable and disagreeable yesterday [February 18] from the intense cold and the heavy frost from the preceding night,” the Charleston Mercury newspaper noted. “During the forenoon the atmosphere was dark and sullen ... but towards the afternoon the [snow] particles increased in magnitude, and about dusk assumed the full proportions of very small snowflakes, which soon whitened the grey } CONT. ON P. 75
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WAR AT THE DOOR
Pharaoh’s Army—a 1995 independent film about a vulnerable Kentucky family’s tense encounter with foraging Union troops—shows just how personal the Civil War was in Appalachia, where the lines between home front and battlefield blurred. BY JOHN C. INSCOE
Patricia Clarkson as Sarah Anders in a scene from Pharaoh’s Army.
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ELATIVELY FEW HOLLYWOOD TREATMENTS of the Civil War focus on the home front, but several that do have been set at least in part in wartime Appalachia. Despite their vastly different characters and plots, films such as The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1961), Shenandoah (1965), Cold Mountain (2003), and others embrace themes drawn from the experiences of highland families caught up in the region’s brutal inner war, a conflict exacerbated by the area’s bitter poverty and divided loyalties between North and South. Together these films dramatize the blurred lines between home front and combat zones in much of the vast mountainous region, which spreads across parts of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. Often the films’ plots are driven by southern highlanders’ efforts—mostly futile—to maintain their neutrality and keep the war at bay. Such struggles played out on an intensely localized level, and usually far removed from the “official” military conflict. Perhaps the most accomplished cinematic treatment of Appalachia’s irregular war is Pharaoh’s Army (1995), a low-budget independent film written, produced, and directed by Kentucky native Robby Henson. An intimate drama set in Kentucky’s Cumberland Mountains, this gem of a film captures the perils and traumas that beset so many highland men, women, and children during the war. In particular, it portrays a contentious showdown between troops and civilians that typifies much of Appalachia’s irregular war, and explores in far more compelling ways than most the psychological and emotional toll such confrontations exacted from both their victims and their perpetrators.
With her husband away in Confederate service, Sarah Anders (Patricia Clarkson) is left to work the family farm with her 11-year-old son.
HENSON DREW HIS INSPIRATION for Pharaoh’s Army, his first feature film, from an 1863 incident described in the book Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1962), Harry Caudill’s classic portrait of the Kentucky mountains. Caudill writes that in 1941 at age 19, he went with his father to visit
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“These women, who have been driven from their homes by the most savage warfare our country has been cursed with … impressed me as living wholly to revenge their wrongs.”
The Anders family’s lives are interrupted by the arrival of a band of foraging Union soldiers, led by Captain John Abston (Chris Cooper).
a 90-year-old mountain farmer. Their elderly host led his guests to a sinkhole high on a wooded hillside above his family farm to point out where he, as an 11-year-old, had helped his 15-year-old brother, Oliver, bury a Union soldier that Oliver had shot and killed not far from their home. As the farmer recalled the incident (in a conversation that Caudill reproduces verbatim), a band of some 50 Union soldiers showed up at the remote homestead “foraging” for food. “They went through the country robbin’ widders and orphans,” he told Caudill and his father, “and payin’ them with greenbacks if they was on the Union side and nothin’ at all if they was Democrats.” The Yankees set up camp beside the farm, and proceeded to “eat up all our ham meat and about ten fat hens.” When they moved on the next morning, the troops took their cows and work stock; “their captain said he didn’t have to pay us a cent because pap was a traitor.” Oliver grabbed his father’s hog rifle and the two boys moved along a ridge running above the creek bed along which the troops traveled. After lying in wait until they passed by below, the older boy took aim at the last man in the procession, and “shot him right betwixt his galluses.” The brothers scampered home, cleaned the gun, and were hoeing corn by the time the Yankees showed up with the corpse of their fallen comrade. As angry as his men were, the captain insisted that the boys were innocent. (In an area full of snipers, that was not an unreasonable assumption.) He led his men up to the family graveyard and had them bury the body. He then returned the plow mule they’d originally taken and warned the boys to stay out of trouble, saying he had two “young ’uns about like us” back home. The old man concluded: When they got plumb gone ma tol’ me and Ol to go dig up that Yankee and git him outen our graveyard. So we uncovered him and pulled him up the hill and buried him in a sinkhole where a big tree had turned up by their roots. We didn’t git him very deep though, ’cause a hog rooted him up and carried off his head. Ma said that proved that hogs and other Yankees were the only things that could stomach a Yankee, dead or alive!1
Henson took Caudill’s twice-told tale and made it the premise of his screenplay. The result is a dark and somewhat somber film, marked by rich, nuanced characterizations, and yet it remains a deceptively simple story. It centers on a mother, Sarah Anders, and her only son (about 11, the same age as Caudill’s informant). With the man of the house off in Confederate service, the two struggle to eke out a living on their small mountain farm along Meshack Creek in eastern Kentucky’s Cumberlands (where the production was filmed—to very good effect). Instead of 50 Union soldiers, it is a mere five who arrive on a spring day in 1862.2 Henson’s timing is appropriate; Union forces began to occupy much of this region in January 1862, and their demands for foodstuffs, horses, and other supplies on the minority of residents with Confed-
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While the relationship between Abston and Anders warms, it never blossoms into a romance. “Let’s just keep to being enemies,” she tells him.
scatter gleefully across the property to take what they can—primarily chickens—their captain, John Abston (Chris Cooper), explains that “your husband is fighting against his country,” which makes their farm a legitimate target for the plunder needed to feed Union troops gathering nearby at Cumberland Gap. (This too conforms to reality, as Federal forces amassed at the Gap in May and June 1862 in preparation for a push into East Tennessee.4) Abston is civil, even apologetic, but Sarah remains cold. When he says he has a farm much like hers across the Ohio River, she mutters under her breath, “Why didn’t you stay there?” To view this article’s reference notes, turn to our Notes section on page 78.
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PHOTOFEST (5)
erate sympathies became all too regular occurrences for much of that winter and spring.3 The film opens and closes with a burial; Henson uses these incidents as a running motif for the deeply rooted animosity in the region. In this first scene, it is Anders’ young daughter who is laid to rest in a church cemetery. In voice-over narration, an elderly man (the unnamed son in his later years) explains: “When sister died, weren’t none but women and old men to bury her.” He continues, “That night, some Yankee bastards dug her up and tossed her out like a rag doll, ’count of Pap siding with the South.” Sarah (Patricia Clarkson) refuses the preacher’s offer to rebury the girl and have his slave, Israel, stand guard over the grave; she insists on taking the body back home. The preacher (Kris Kristofferson, in a cameo role that nevertheless received top billing) responds, “There’ll be hell to pay.” And so there will be. Soon the five-man patrol appears in the distance, and mother and son scramble to hide everything from hams and livestock to firearms and a photograph of her husband in Confederate uniform. As his men
ALL IMAGES, UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, ARE COURTESY OF ROBBY HENSON
“To the day of her death she was an unreconstructed Rebel, and her eyes glinted and her lips tightened into a thin line at the merest mention of even the grandchildren of her father’s killers.”
The youngest of the patrol, Newt (Huckleberry Fox), is seriously wounded when he falls from a hay loft onto a pitchfork, and the captain decides they’ll remain until his fever breaks. Sarah shows no concern for Newt, only for the fact that his mishap has turned transient marauders into a longer-term occupation force. When her son asks if the young soldier (then occupying what seems to be their only bed) is going to die, she replies coldly, “If the skinny Yank
gets well, he might well be the one shooting at your pap.” Late that night, the boy stares at his father’s tintype, then sneaks up on a sleeping Newt and aims his pistol at him, though he can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. At the same time, Abston panics when Sarah seems to have disappeared, though he soon discovers her sleeping outside on her daughter’s grave to prevent its violation by the troops, who suspect the fresh mound is merely another ploy to hide goods. Over the course of several weeks, the captain warms up to his reluctant hostess, and in small but fleeting ways, she softens toward him. To
Strong Southern Women at War Female characters are few and far between in Civil War films, and strong southern women as protagonists are even rarer. In addition to Pharaoh’s Army, here are five other films that put tough, resilient women front and center. Together they represent a wide range of ways in which southern women coped as the war encroached upon their homes and families. WEAKq
SO RED THE ROSE (1935)
GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)
THE BEGUILED (1971)
SOMMERSBY (1993)
COLD MOUNTAIN
PHOTOFEST (5)
(2004)
STRONGq
STRONGESTq
This saga of a Mississippi plantation family’s plight centers on a spirited young belle (Margaret Sullavan). When she’s not romancing a reluctant Confederate officer (Randolph Scott) or mourning the deaths of both her brother and her first love, she is holding off Union troops and browbeating her family’s slaves to give up on dreams of freedom and get back to work.
Scarlett O’Hara (brilliantly embodied by Vivien Leigh) rules the roost both at Tara and in Atlanta as she pulls her family, her slaves, and mostly herself through the war and its aftermath in this most successful of home front epics. No other movie heroine has proved as iconic as Margaret Mitchell’s manipulative but resourceful creation.
In one of the quirkiest of Civil War films, Clint Eastwood plays a wounded Union soldier who’s rescued by the students of a female boarding school in Mississippi. In response to her girls’ attraction to their quickly recuperating patient, the headstrong headmistress (Geraldine Page) takes matters into her own hands, all the while holding off Confederate and Union forces outside the school gates.
Jodie Foster plays a widow working her East Tennessee farm alone after her husband is killed—until someone claiming to be him (Richard Gere) returns at war’s end. She must eventually decide whether to expose him as an imposter, thus granting her considerable power over the post-war readjustment underway both on their farm and in their community.
Confederate soldier Inman (Jude Law) deserts the army and treks across North Carolina to return to his beloved Ada (Nicole Kidman). She has teamed with the irrepressible Ruby (Renee Zellweger) to keep her farm afloat. The women’s struggles are intercut with those of Inman, who encounters an array of other feisty women en route.
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5 QUICK QUESTIONS WITH PHARAOH’S ARMY SCREENWRITER-DIRECTOR ROBBY HENSON
What sources, other than Harry Caudill’s book, did you draw upon when creating the screenplay for Pharaoh’s Army ? I had finished a documentary called Blood Memory: The Legend of Beanie Short, about the oral history legends surrounding the Civil War raider Beanie Short, who raided and plundered where the Cumberland River crosses from Kentucky into Tennessee, just before I wrote Pharaoh’s Army. I had heard about the Short legend from oral historian Lynwood Montell, who taught at Western Kentucky University. So I was pretty immersed in border-state Civil War guerrilla fighting lore when I happened upon the oral history Harry Caudill collected about the war in Night Comes to the Cumberlands. I even named the creek in Pharaoh’s Army after Meshack Creek, where Beanie Short raided, because I like the name. How much of a priority was historical accuracy in crafting the film? I was big on emotional truth and “dirt.” By that I mean I wanted to tell a true-sounding story and I wanted the world to be dirty, authentic, hardscrabble, not like we had just stuck Hollywood actors in rented costumes. What was your inspiration for Sarah Anders and her anger? Did you base her on Caudill’s grandmother? Or on any other real or fictional women?
The Sarah Anders character didn’t really come from any single reference. My mother’s family were stoic Scotch-Irish farmers in Kentucky and my great-grandmother was supposed to be a hard-working farm woman, so I had heard stories about her, and maybe that was an influence, but just growing up in Kentucky and reading regional history and literature was also a big influence on my creation of her. I remember after the film was finished, some questioned if she was too hard, that she might have heated up with the Chris Cooper character more. But now when I see the film, years later, I actually am proud that I didn’t compromise with her. She was a mountain woman, tough as nails. And that was also Patty Clarkson’s choice on how she wanted to play her. Why did Caudill’s story move you? Did you see remnants of the feelings expressed in the book as you grew up in the area? I love regional history and the history of my home state, so I was drawn to how the conflict at the core of this story really showed how rough the Civil War was in Kentucky. What about Pharaoh’s Army are you most proud of? And if you were to make the movie today, do you think you’d end up with a similar film? I am very proud of Pharaoh’s Army. It was my first film and is also my best film. I think with some of my other films (and I’ve directed five features), I tried to please other producers or other audiences, but with Pharaoh’s Army I was only trying to please myself, and tell what I honestly thought was a great story. I love so much about Pharaoh’s Army—the photography, the music, the sets that my father helped me build. It was my favorite group of actors to work with. So it really stands as a nice artistic memory when I look back. I wish I had made more films as beautiful.
the filmmaker’s credit, their relationship never blossoms into a romance. When Abston does attempt to court Sarah, she resists, telling him: “We ain’t gonna be friends. Let’s just keep to being enemies.” He replies, simply, “Yes, ma’am. I forgot. You’ve got a better memory.” More than almost any other Civil War film, Pharaoh’s Army manages to make its Union and Confederate antagonists—Captain Abston and Sarah—equally sympathetic, no mean feat given the seemingly one-sided power struggle between an intruding occupier and the innocent target, even victim. Also striking is Abston’s consistently conciliatory and humane treatment of Sarah, and his regret at the situation to which they’ve both been subjected. The four men under his command are relatively benign: Despite their glee at the confiscation of the Anders chickens, they never display any real maliciousness toward either mother or son. A revealing exchange soon follows between Abston and one of his men, a Polish immigrant nicknamed Chicago. When Abston asks Chicago (Robert Joy) how he got himself mixed up in all this, he replies in broken English: “I think I get to see new places; I get tired of chopping sausages.” The captain calls that “a pretty thin reason to get shot at,” to which the Pole retorts: “You got better one? I heard your big ones— to save the Union, to free the slaves. Nobody I know wants to get killed for a bunch of nigs.” “It’s a mess, ain’t it?” the captain replies, and when asked why he signed on, he says: “A minister brought a runaway slave into our church, ripped off his shirt, and shows us a back covered in the ugliest damn strap scars. And then right there from the pulpit, he asked for volunteers, and here I am stealing chickens.” Unlike many films about the conflict, this is one in which slavery matters to those who fight, either as a reason to get into the war, or as a rationale for staying out of it. On the other hand, we never get any sense of why Sarah is a die-hard Confederate, nor what motivated her husband to join the ranks. (Harry Caudill quoted his elderly source as having said: “Pap warn’t no nigger lover and on t’other hand, he didn’t hate ’em. But he thought hit was right to own ’em because they are skasely human accordin’ to the Bible. So when the war started Pap got ready and went off to fight fer the South.”5) Sarah never expresses any pro-South or pro-slavery sentiment, but acts almost purely out of a vitriolic hatred for Union forces. Thus she remains unforgiving of Captain Abston and unwilling to respond to his abundance of goodwill. Perhaps the most chilling display of her animosity comes in her reaction to the tragedy that befalls her neighbors. (This incident generates the only reference to actual guerrilla activity in the film.) Gunshots in the distance send three of the soldiers up the creek to see what’s happening. They come upon the charred remains of a smoldering farmhouse, with buzzards circling above. They find its occupants,
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Sarah Anders’ anger and resolve ring historically true: Mountain women had an unadulterated hatred for not only the war, but for those who brought the war to their doors.
an elderly man and wife, slaughtered and stuffed down their own well. When the men report back to the captain, he asks Sarah if she knows whose place it is. “Yankees” is her one word reply. “Ma’am, they weren’t Yankees; just some ole farmer and his wife,” one of the soldiers responds. “They sent two boys into the Union army,” she states smugly, before spitting off the porch and walking away. This illustrates one of the more compelling truths in Henson’s film: Mountain women had an unadulterated hatred for not only the war, but for those oppressors—Union or Confederate, local or from elsewhere—who brought the war to their doors. Patricia Clarkson’s understated but highly disciplined portrayal of Sarah Anders fully embodies that resolve. From her character’s initial reaction to the desecration of her daughter’s grave to her brewing resentment of the Union patrol’s initial thefts and then occupation of her farm, she rarely wavers in her contempt. Postwar observers seemed to detect these sentiments more acutely in mountain women than in other southerners. A Federal soldier who served at
a refugee camp for Unionist civilians near Chattanooga at war’s end recalled the Appalachian women who had sought safe haven there. “I heard them repeat over and over to their children the names of men which they were never to forget, and whom they were to kill when they had sufficient strength to hold a rifle,” he wrote. “These women, who have been driven from their homes by the most savage warfare our country has been cursed with … impressed me as living wholly to revenge their wrongs.”6 Indeed, the character of Sarah and her intensity echoes another anecdote from Harry Caudill’s book—the story of his own grandmother. She was 13 years old when her Confederate father came home on furlough, or “crop leave,” in 1864. One day while working his field, six or so Union guerrillas swept down and riddled him with bullets. His daughter rushed out and “held his shattered head while his brains ran out onto her aproned lap.” Caudill concludes, “To the day of her death she was an unreconstructed Rebel, and her eyes glinted and her lips tightened into a thin line at the merest mention of even the grandchildren of her father’s killers.”7 Back on the Anders farm, the mood remains one fraught with tension, as Abston’s men grow restless and resentful. Rody, the most brutish, threatens to destroy the captain’s delicate truce with Sarah. After a physical altercation between Rody and Sarah over his } CONT. ON P. 76
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READING THE CIVIL WAR James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War JOHN W . QUIST & MICHAEL J . BIRKNER ,
EDS .
I Fear I Shall Never Leave This Island Life in a Civil War Prison DAVID R . BUSH
Hardcover $69.95
Paperback $19.95
“A timely contribution during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.” —Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
“An informative and fascinating window into the experiences of Civil War POWs.”—Southern Historian
“One of the must-read political history books of the year.”—Civil War Books & Authors Rose Cottage Chronicles Civil War Letters of the Bryant-Stephens Families of North Florida ARCH FREDRIC BLAKEY , ANN SMITH LAINHART , & WINSTON B . STEPHENS JR ., EDS . Paperback $29.95
“A must read. . . . A family’s intimate thoughts have become a record of the era—the diction, the lifestyles, the morality and even the prejudice of the times.”—Florida Living
The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim ROBERT E . MAY , ED . Revised Edition Paperback $19.95
“Important reading.”—Journal of Southern History “Successful in raising larger issues of concern for Civil War historians.” —Illinois Historical Journal “Provides a wonderful opportunity for scholars of the Civil War and U.S. diplomatic history alike to reconsider old topics in new ways.”—Civil War History
Available wherever books are sold
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA 800.226.3822 | www.upf.com
from the university of georgia press Becoming Confederates Paths to a New National Loyalty Gary W. Gallagher
paper, $18.95 | 978-0-8203-4540-6 Ebook available Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures
A Late Encounter with the Civil War Michael Kreyling
Available February 2014 paper, $19.95 | 978-0-8203-4657-1 Ebook available Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures
Weirding the War Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges Edited by Stephen Berry
paper, $24.95 | 978-0-8203-4127-9 Ebook available
CWM10-BOB-Books.indd 66
Ruin Nation Destruction and the American Civil War Megan Kate Nelson paper, $24.95 | 978-0-8203-4251-1 Ebook available Finalist, Jefferson Davis Award Museum of the Confederacy
War Upon the Land Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War Lisa M. Brady paper, $24.95 | 978-0-8203-4249-8 Ebook available
Crossroads of Conflict A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia Barry L. Brown and Gordon R. Elwell
paper, $22.95 | 978-0-8203-3730-2 A publication of the Georgia Civil War Commission Award of Merit American Association for State and Local History
11/7/13 11:38 AM
R
sland
BOOKS & AUTHORS
Civil
nity U.S. nsider War
PATRICK MITCHELL/MODUS OPERANDI DESIGN
RIDA
The Best Civil War Books of 2013 WITH THE END OF 2013 NEARLY upon us, we thought it the perfect time to take stock of the year’s best Civil War books. We enlisted the help of seven Civil War historians and enthusiasts, avid readers all, and asked them to share their favorite and an honorable mention. 67 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR WINTER 2013
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B&A KENNETH W. NOE In methodology classes for history majors, we sometimes teach that a deep study of a seemingly small topic can illuminate much bigger issues. John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis’ The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On (Oxford University Press) is a fascinating exemplar of the “microhistory” approach. Here is the history of the Union cause and its memory in a familiar musical nutshell. Instead of depicting a lineal progression from “John Brown’s Body” to Julia Ward Howe’s apocalyptic lyrics, however, the authors range from the tune’s camp meeting origins to Southeastern Conference football games and the 9/11 terrorist attacks to demonstrate how the song and the meaning of the war that produced it became contested political terrain, claimed and shaped by contending groups and later generations with their own agendas. Stauffer and Soskis also explain why Civil War memory embraced “a hundred circling camps” while largely (but never completely) jettisoning any desire to “hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree,” a choice that would have surprised hosts of boys in blue. HONORABLE MENTION: One book that could use both “John Brown’s Body” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as its theme songs is Bruce Levine’s The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South (Random House). In this monumental popular retelling of the war, Levine places the demise of slavery at its heart. The author effectively links political events and military campaigns to what Top Pick
he depicts as competing slaveholders’ and slaves’ revolutions in a crisp and ultimately brave narrative that will prove eye-opening to many readers. KENNETH W. NOE, ALUMNI PROFESSOR AND DRAUGHON PROFESSOR OF SOUTHERN HISTORY AT AUBURN UNIVERSITY, IS AUTHOR OR EDITOR OF SEVERAL BOOKS, INCLUDING RELUCTANT REBELS: THE CONFEDERATES WHO JOINED THE ARMY AFTER 1861 (2010) AND THE YELLOWHAMMER WAR: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION IN ALABAMA (2013).
ANDREW WAGENHOFFER Hampton Newsome’s Richmond Must Fall: The Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, October 1864 (Kent State University Press) is the first book on the Petersburg Campaign to rival the current gold Top Pick
standard in Petersburg military studies—Richard Sommers’ Richmond Redeemed (1981)—in quality and scope. Richmond Must Fall is a model study in its own right— with exhaustive research, thoughtful interpretation, abundant maps, and skillfully written battle narrative that never makes the exhibition of minute detail feel tedious. Criticisms of operational planning on the Richmond-Petersburg front (especially on the Union side) are well formulated, showing students why a long series of Union offensives in 1864 failed to crack the Confederate defenses and why the changes in the spring of 1865 resulted in Union breakthrough and victory. It also represents the first full treatment of the so-called Sixth Offensive in late October 1864 to appear in the Civil War literature, which is just now experiencing an uptick in releases related to the Petersburg Campaign. The significance of Richmond Must Fall is enhanced by the book’s able examination of fall 1864 military planning in the context of the political needs and uncertainty of the pre-election period. This study is award-worthy material for all these reasons and more. HONORABLE MENTION: While it doesn’t focus on the war years, James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War (University Press of Florida), edited by John W. Quist and Michael J. Birkner, probes the presidential administration in power during the height of the prewar secession crisis. James Buchanan is popularly placed among the worst U.S. presidents for his handling of that turbulent, critical time. This collection of scholarly essays does not attempt to completely rehabilitate our 15th president’s negative
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successes in foreign policy and elsewhere. As one might guess, Buchanan’s management of the secession crisis is at the heart of the book, and its bounty of informed views on his role during this seminal moment in American history is refreshingly diverse. The collection might very well come to be regarded as the most comprehensive and useful reconsideration of the Buchanan presidency. ANDREW WAGENHOFFER IS FOUNDER AND EDITOR OF THE WEBSITE CIVIL WAR BOOKS AND AUTHORS (CWBA.BLOGSPOT.COM).
ROBERT K. KRICK image, but rather presents a more nuanced picture of the man and his entire political career. Essays that emphasize Buchanan’s considerable weaknesses are weighed against others that convincingly remind readers of his leadership
Battle monographs of high quality always impress me tremendously. Exhaustive research devoted to untangling the chaotic events reported in fragments by eyewitnesses, when carefully knit together, reveals the unfolding story with Top Pick
more clarity than any contemporary could have managed. Scott Patchan has produced works of that kind in the past—initially a 1996 history of the Battle of Piedmont—and this year, his The Last Battle of Winchester (Savas Beatie) reached print. A vast array of sources—primary and secondary, contemporary and postwar, manuscript and published—provided raw material for a big, important book of 554 pages, illuminated by a sheaf of detailed tactical maps. It belongs on any shelf that features the best books of 2013. HONORABLE MENTIONS: Two books that present contemporary narratives vied for my designation of honorable mention. Keith Kehlbeck’s Gone to God: A Civil War Family’s Ultimate Sacrifice (Windy City Publishers), based on the papers of a family who lost three sons in the 4th Virginia Cavalry, would have been my sole choice
The TopSelling Civil War Titles of 2013 The books pictured here are the 10 bestselling Civil War titles published in 2013. They are ranked in order of copies sold through early October. SOURCE: NIELSEN
BOOKSCAN
1
2
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
The Fall of the House of Dixie
by Allen C. Guelzo
(RANDOM HOUSE) Hardcover, $30
(KNOPF) Hardcover, $35
by Bruce Levine
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B&A maps, though, printed in color and large format (depicting Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Chancellorsville/Salem Church, and Fort Sanders), make this a really striking book.
ent purposes and approaches to the topic, I will not venture to place one over the other. The first of these is Allen C. Guelzo’s Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Knopf). Guelzo makes an excellent effort to provide a new, grand standard history of the campaign, one rooted in a full engagement with both primary sources and the vast literature Gettysburg has inspired, as well as the battlefield and the general military history of the era—the latter something that too many in the field seem, lamentably, to posses little interest in. The book is extremely well written and thorough, though enthusiasts of the retreat and fans of cavalry operations may find his treatment of those subjects wanting. Guelzo also raises questions about the conduct of the campaign and makes some provocative arguments (especially regarding George Meade’s generalship) that
ROBERT K. KRICK, CHIEF HISTORIAN (RETIRED) AT THE FREDERICKSBURG AND SPOTSYLVANIA NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, HAS WRITTEN 20 BOOKS ON THE CIVIL WAR, INCLUDING CHANCELLORSVILLE: LEE’S GREATEST VICTORY (2010) AND STONEWALL JACKSON AT CEDAR MOUNTAIN (2001).
ETHAN S. RAFUSE With all due respect (and
if not for the fabulous original maps in a Georgia memoir. Feed Them the Steel! Being the Wartime Recollections of Capt. James Lile Lemon, Co. B, 18th Georgia Infantry (privately published) suffers from some editing and production anomalies. Captain Lemon’s
Top Picks apologies) to good friends
who have labored for years to convey the importance of other noteworthy events in 1863, it was perhaps inevitable that the two most notable books to appear in 2013 (at least as of this writing) would have Gettysburg as their subject. Given their differ-
3
4
5
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Gettysburg: Turning Point of the Civil War
The Civil War in 50 Objects
The New York Times: Disunion
The Illustrated Gettysburg Reader
by Time Magazine
(VIKING) Hardcover, $36
(TIME HOME ENTERTAINMENT) Hardcover, $29.95
by Harold Holzer
ed. by Ted Widmer
by Rod Gragg
(BLACK DOG & LEVENTHAL) Hardcover, $27.95
(REGNERY HISTORY) Hardcover, $29.95
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ensure this study of Gettysburg will be one that all future students of the war will wrestle with. The other work is Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler’s A Field Guide to Gettysburg: Experiencing the Battlefield through Its History, Places, and People (University of North Carolina Press), which becomes the new standard for Gettysburg battlefield guides. Reardon and Vossler have led hundreds of groups around the battlefield, and their expertise— on both the battle itself and the surrounding community—is evident. While perhaps not the first choice for a novice visitor spending just a day on the battlefield (there are more than 30 stops in the book), it’s terrific for those who want more and do not have a professional tour or staff ride leader to take them around the field. Sir Michael Howard once declared that anyone who was
under the illusion that they could understand World War I without seriously dealing with what happened on the Gettysburg battlefield was “ill-qualified for the task.” Thanks to the efforts of Guelzo, Reardon, and Vossler, 2013 has provided two outstanding studies of the subject. ETHAN S. RAFUSE IS A PROFESSOR OF MILITARY HISTORY AT THE U.S. ARMY COMMAND AND GENERAL STAFF COLLEGE IN FT. LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS. HE IS THE AUTHOR, EDITOR, OR CO-EDITOR OF 10 BOOKS, INCLUDING THE FORTHCOMING GUIDE TO THE RICHMOND AND PETERSBURG CAMPAIGN.
BROOKS D. SIMPSON The Confederacy was a counterproductive experiment, destroying all that white southerners held dear and undermining in practice the principles it was established to preserve. Bruce Levine’s The Fall Top Pick
of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South demonstrates that Confederates did not always give their full support to the cause of winning independence if it came at the expense of their own interests. Meanwhile, enslaved African Americans seized opportunities to help bring down a regime designed to protect the peculiar institution. Levine recounts how military operations wore away at the foundations of southern slave society and tested the will of white southerners, exposing fractures along lines of class, race, and region that shattered the South. This book reminds us of how wars take on their own momentum, follow unintended courses, and test the very values and interests they were supposed to preserve. It skillfully blends political, military, and social history in offering an
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The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It
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by Jeff L. Rosenheim (METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART) Hardcover, $50
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by Howard Coffin
by Earl J. Hess
(COUNTRYMAN PRESS) Hardcover, $35
(UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS) Hardcover, $35
(LIBRARY OF AMERICA) Hardcover, $40
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B&A insightful take on a Confederacy that imploded as much as it fell victim to the actions of United States military forces. HONORABLE MENTION: In Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (University of North Carolina Press), Caroline E. Janney offers a perceptive counterpoint to David W. Blight’s highly influential Race and Reunion (2001). Janney reminds us that the bitterness of war did not vanish quite as easily as the images of former foes shaking hands at Gettysburg 50 years later suggest. For all the talk of forgiveness, blue and gray (and white and black) resisted forgetting altogether why and how they fought. Reunion did not necessarily require reconciliation; surrender on the field did not mean submission across the board. This perceptive study should caution those who have embraced the reconciliationist interpretation to proceed with discernment. BROOKS D. SIMPSON IS ASU FOUNDATION PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY. HE HAS WRITTEN MANY BOOKS ON THE CIVIL WAR, INCLUDING THE CIVIL WAR IN THE EAST: STRUGGLE, STALEMATE, AND VICTORY (2011) AND ULYSSES S. GRANT: TRIUMPH OVER ADVERSITY, 1822-1865 (2000). MOST RECENTLY, HE EDITED THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA’S THE CIVIL WAR: THE THIRD YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT (2013).
HARRY SMELTZER I know it’s a little odd to Top suggest that the best Civil Pick War title of 2013—or any year—is a battlefield guidebook. But Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler’s A Field Guide To Gettysburg: Experiencing the Battlefield through its History, Places, and People is that good. This is a heavy-duty paperback
that’s plenty durable for the field, but light enough to throw in a backpack. At over 400 pages, it’s also substantial enough to be read and enjoyed at home (but you’re going to want to be out on the field with it as soon as you start reading). Numerous photographs, period and modern, put you on the spot if you’re not there in person, and really help to orient you if you are. History purists rejoice: It’s indexed and footnoted, and 47 maps help describe the action. Stops are organized thus: Orientation; What Happened Here?; Who Fought Here?; Who Commanded Here?; Who Fell Here?; Who Lived Here?; and What Did They Say About It Later? It’s presented in classic staff ride format, but with less emphasis on after-action reports
and more on the human experience. True, some actions (like Farnsworth’s Charge) are of logistical necessity not covered, but overall, this is simply the best organized and presented guidebook I’ve ever seen, for any battle. Publishers should take notice and make this a model for all future guidebooks. HONORABLE MENTIONS: Tied for second place is a pair of books from publisher Savas Beatie: Frank P. Varney’s General Grant and the Rewriting of History and Stephen M. Hood’s John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate General. You may not agree with everything presented, argued, and concluded by their authors, but read these books if only to remind you to think critically when reading history—about authors, their motivations, their biases, their work ethic, their purely editorial comments sometimes disguised as fact, their sources, and most importantly, how they use those sources. HARRY SMELTZER, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE SAVE HISTORIC ANTIETAM FOUNDATION (SHAF.ORG), IS CREATOR AND HOST OF THE BLOG BULL RUNNINGS: A JOURNAL OF THE DIGITIZATION OF A CIVIL WAR BATTLE (BULLRUNNINGS.WORDPRESS.COM) AND A DIGITAL HISTORY ADVISOR FOR THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR.
KEVIN M. LEVIN The central event in Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press) takes place west of the war’s western theater. Most Americans don’t identify the 1864 slaughter of Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians as a Civil War battle, but interestingly enough the incident is listed Top Pick
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on a monument dedicated in 1909 to Coloradans who fought in the war. The descendants of the slain, however, always considered what happened at Sand Creek a massacre, not a battle. Kelman skillfully traces the competing memories of Sand Creek along with the heated public debates between Native American tribes, local landowners, the
National Park Service, and Civil War buffs that ultimately resulted in the establishment of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in 2007. He makes a compelling case that the fighting on the frontier and the fate of Native Americans at the hands of the U.S. military must be not be forgotten at a time when Americans have embraced a narrative of the Civil War as a “new birth of freedom.” A Misplaced Massacre is a reminder that Civil War memory studies are far from tapped out. HONORABLE MENTION: As the author of a book on the Battle of the Crater, I am familiar with the first few months of the Petersburg Campaign 1864. The rest of it—up until the April 1865 breakthrough by Union forces—is little more than a blur. That gap has been partly filled by Hampton Newsome’s Richmond Must Fall: The Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, October 1864, an exhaustive study of Ulysses S. Grant’s socalled Sixth Offensive, which included fighting along the Darbytown Road east of Richmond and the Southside Railroad in Petersburg. Newsome’s narrative of the ebb and flow of battle is demanding, but he seamlessly weaves together accounts of soldiers on the ground with the command decisions made in the headquarters of Grant and Robert E. Lee. In doing so, Newsome reveals the difficulties that Grant faced in massing his forces at different points of attack in light of his need to protect his flanks. The upshot is insight into why these offensives never proved decisive. The author also highlights the political implications of the fighting along the Richmond-Petersburg front on the eve of a presidential election. This is a fine military history that is going to satisfy Civil War enthusiasts of all levels. KEVIN M. LEVIN TEACHES HISTORY AT GANN ACADEMY AND IS THE AUTHOR OF REMEMBERING THE BATTLE OF THE CRATER: WAR AS MURDER (2012). YOU CAN FIND HIM ONLINE AT CIVIL WAR MEMORY (CWMEMORY.COM).
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DISUNION
CONTINUED FROM P. 17
of games between that city’s crack clubs, the Atlantics and the Eckfords. A 10-cent admission fee was charged at the recently opened Union grounds, with the net proceeds to be donated to Brooklyn’s Sanitary Commission for the benefit of sick and wounded soldiers. The clubs split the first two games; the Eckfords won the low-scoring and deciding third match, 8-3. Reporters estimated the crowd at about 10,000 spectators, but many avoided paying the admission fee (and thus the charitable contribution) by sitting on the surrounding embankment outside of the Union grounds fences. During 1864 the ballplaying fraternity renewed its efforts to raise funds to aid wounded soldiers and assist the families of those who had lost their lives. The
CASUALTIES OF WAR CONTINUED FROM P. 25
his name “to mighty events, to mighty measures, and to an immortal future.” “Public life … in a country like ours,” Keitt said, “is a grand and glorious field. Two hundred years ago Milton said he who would write an heroic poem must make his whole life heroic. This is equally true of our own time, and true of politics, too, for politics now is our epic poem.”4 Time, marriage, and the Civil War transformed Laurence Keitt. By 1861, he had married Susannah Sparks and was serving as colonel of the 20th South Carolina. His letters from the war reflect a man lonely and soul-sick for home; his once florid writing style had become spare and straightforward; his metaphors had given way to simplicity, his posturing to self-revelation. “I feel more keenly than ever my love for you,” he told his wife Sue from Sullivan’s Island in 1862, “and how much you are bound up with my existence…. I don’t think I fear death more than a gentleman ought, I may say I know I don’t—
results were meager. In May in Philadelphia 2,000 people assembled on the Olympic club’s grounds on Jefferson and 25th streets to watch an all-star team from New Jersey towns defeat a picked nine from Pennsylvania, 18-10. This exhibition game earned $500 for the Sanitary Fair, but rain over the next few days washed out the rest of the benefit matches. By the end of the war in the spring of 1865, hundreds of baseball players had enlisted in the Union army and a few had lost their lives or had been wounded in action. Most club members and first nine players remained civilians and did little to assist soldiers, veterans, and their families, but they contributed mightily to the growing popularity of baseball as America’s national pastime. GEORGE B. KIRSCH IS A PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT MANHATTAN COLLEGE AND THE AUTHOR OF BASEBALL AND CRICKET: THE CREATION OF AMERICAN TEAM SPORTS, 1838-72 AND BASEBALL IN BLUE AND GRAY: THE NATIONAL PASTIME DURING THE CIVIL WAR. HIS LATEST BOOK IS SIX GUYS FROM HACKENSACK: COMING OF AGE IN THE REAL NEW JERSEY.
but I do hate to leave you.” Keitt admitted he would miss his daughters too if he were killed, and it was “a sore and terrible anguish” to contemplate never seeing them again. But it was parting from his wife that cracked “every chord of the spirit and soul.” “You have grown a part of my higher and better nature,” Keitt told her, “and have made me a good man. I almost fear that you are my religion.”5 On February 1, 1864, the Confederate blockade runner Presto collided with a partially submerged wreck in Charleston Harbor. The captain of the boat had run off, and Keitt was charged with recovering the ship’s cargo. Hampered by Federal troopers who had taken up positions around the inlet, Keitt was nearly killed when a shell passed within 20 feet of him, but it failed to explode. Over the next few days, Keitt and his company managed to recover the bulk of the shoes, blankets, flannels, pork, and beef the Presto had been carrying. His men were tired, hungry, cold, wet, illshod, and ill-clothed, and Keitt wanted to distribute the supplies to them, but he was forced to return it all to a central depot. The incident was the last straw in a war Keitt was beginning both to hate and to accept responsibility for. “I
had as much to do probably as anyone else in bringing about this revolution,” he noted, “and I must accept its consequences. I see thousands around me who knew nothing about it, who had but little at stake, and who hoped to gain but little. They were carried by us into the war and they are fighting it out. I can do no less.”6 As a congressman, Keitt had dreamed of a titanic struggle in which the sons of the South rose up to erect the last, great glittering civilization on earth. But as it unfolded, the Civil War began to seem more butchery than chivalry; it had become, Keitt said, “hate without manliness; war without generosity; cruelty without courage; rapine without greatness.” “Blood has been poured out like water,” he told his wife. “Undisciplined troops have taken blazing and guarded batteries, but their valor and blood have won” them nothing. And nowhere had anyone “risen up with a star on his forehead” to make the war worthy of the men who were dying. Keitt, of course, had always supposed that in a conflict between North and South he would emerge as just such a man to complete the singing of his epic poem. Instead his Promethean moment came in the salt and the sand of Charleston Harbor when he realized, finally, that his epic had astronomical costs for others. Looking into the faces of his men—tired and hungry, most of them, like himself, just wanting to go home—he understood, perhaps for the first time, that the nameless hosts and hordes of Iliad and Odyssey were composed of men who had lives of their own, poems of their own, shorter, smaller, humbler, but compelling in their very simplicity.7 Keitt had written Sue early in their courtship that as a boy groping his way through the Greek tragedies, he had been “enduringly impressed with a thought which grew out of the web of their fearful stories.” No one who inflicted misery upon others, however accidentally, was deemed wholly guiltless. The Furies hunted down even the unintentionally wicked until “after travail, laceration, and despair” the offender was brought quivering and bleeding to the very “storm throne of the gods.” “Thus inflexibly and unsparingly,” Keitt noted, “did Antique Fate
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pursue all who even unwittingly wronged others.”8 Laurence Keitt was shot from the saddle on June 1, 1864, during some early skirmishing at Cold Harbor. The doctor had some difficulty convincing him that his wounds were mortal; to the end he believed his body would rise to this last, great challenge. His final words were “Oh, wife, wife.”9 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
between civilian and military, combined with a difference in methods and objectives, will always result in some form of friction? Would it be a more serious problem if the two were of the same mind? Of course, we should expect that our uniformed leaders will comply fully with civilian control of the military and, in turn, that civilian leaders wield that authority with prudence. As Robert E. Lee so aptly put it after the war, “the military and political talents are distinct, if not different.”11 Generals and politicians must indeed work together, but they don’t necessary have to like one another. 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).
MYSTERY OF THE CONFEDERATE DEEP CONTINUED FROM P. 57
dust of the streets.... There has evidently been a heavy snow storm not far north of us, and we may get a portion of it before it passes over.”12 Even if Dixon and his crew had survived the attack on Housatonic, their likelihood of reaching the shore of Sullivan’s Island, miles away in the teeth of a rising wind and sea, diminished rapidly with each passing hour. The Confederate military authorities in Charleston would have had no way to know this storm was coming. Weather forecasting was crude under the best of circumstances, and during the war the South lacked access to reports from the northern and western United States that might have hinted at a dramatic change in conditions. As is often the case in military operations, unforeseen conditions can profoundly affect the success of a mission, and the very survival of those involved. AS THE FIRST SUBMERSIBLE to sink an enemy warship, H. L. Hunley’s place in military and maritime history has long been secure. But as these researchers’ efforts make clear, parts of the boat’s final chapter remain elusive. It’s likely that
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Captain Abston (Chris Cooper) returns to confront the Anders family after one of his men is shot and killed.
MYSTERY OF THE CONFEDERATE DEEP CONTINUED FROM P. 75
those questions will never be completely answered—and that those who wonder will keep working to resolve them. ANDREW W. HALL, A RESEARCHER LIVING IN GALVESTON, TEXAS, BLOGS AT DEADCONFEDERATES.COM. HIS FIRST BOOK, THE GALVESTONHOUSTON PACKET: STEAMBOATS ON BUFFALO BAYOU, WAS PUBLISHED IN 2012 BY THE HISTORY PRESS OF CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA.
WAR AT THE DOOR CONTINUED FROM P. 65
abuse of her dog, she instructs her son to go report their predicament to the preacher. An enigmatic figure, the preacher is quick to see a biblical analogy. “Pharaoh sent his army to smite Israel and they drowned in the Red Sea,” he declares. “It was wrong what they did to your sister. God’s will is a powerful thing.” It implies that he’ll send help to smite this latest army of oppressors, thus providing the film’s title. That help comes in the form of a sniper, who kills Rody with a single shot and sends the other soldiers racing for shelter in Sarah’s cabin. Only Captain Abston gives chase, and after a prolonged shoot-out in which he ultimately prevails, he discovers the sniper’s identity: The corpse is that of the preacher’s slave, Israel. One could thus say that Abston, like Pharaoh, had smote Israel, but the more interesting twist is that it’s a slave who takes on the role of Confederate liberator (a plot point historian Gary Gallagher calls “an odd and unexplained Lost Cause twist” in an otherwise far more neutrally pitched narrative.8) One of the Yanks comments simply that he was shooting for the wrong side, and when the preacher (ironically nameless, unlike his slave) comes to retrieve Israel’s body, he confronts the captain, saying, “You killed my boy.” The captain replies: “He killed a Federal soldier,” which prompts another of the soldiers to make the final retort: “Next time, don’t send your boy; fight your own battle, you Rebel bas-
“Did you kill Newt? Your mother might tell you it’s all right to kill Yanks, but I just want you to know that that boy had a brother no older than you, and he had a family just like you and he never hurt a fly.”
tard,” suggesting the disapproval of at least one of the group over the racial injustice. Henson himself commented on this key irony he constructed—that “the captain had never killed a man, he joined the army to free the slaves, and yet the first man he kills is a slave.”9 Abston decides it’s time to clear out, and loads the immobile Newt onto the Anderses’ wagon, taking both Sarah’s mule to pull it and her cow, all but a death sentence from her perspective. Before leaving, the captain buries Rody next to the grave of Sarah’s daughter. Sarah’s anger over what she sees as yet another defilement of that grave is compounded by the captain’s retort as they head out. “What do you expect us to eat?” she cries, to which he responds, “Ma’am, tell that husband of yours to come home; maybe your boy can shoot squirrels.” She raises the rifle he’s left her, aims it at his back, and pulls the trigger, only to find he’s taken the powder. The boy, perhaps inspired by his mother’s despair and murderous intent, follows the patrol at a distance, and like the brother of Harry Caudill’s
elderly informant, shoots and kills the last member of the procession—the wagon-bound Newt—then races home unseen. Again, true to the Caudill scenario, Captain Abston returns and confronts the boy. “Did you kill Newt?” he asks. “Your mother might tell you it’s all right to kill Yanks, but I just want you to know that that boy had a brother no older than you, and he had a family just like you and he never hurt a fly.” Sarah is quick to counter: “And he wouldn’t be dead if it weren’t for you bringing him here to steal from us.” Abston at long last loses his cool, and aims his pistol at them both before regaining his selfcontrol and firing two shots in the air. As he departs, he offers his final words: “I just hope whoever killed Newt has the common decency to give him a Christian burial, at least.” As soon as he’s out of hearing range, Sarah orders the boy to “Get that damned Yankee out of our yard.” The voice of the boy as old man chimes in, saying, “The captain asked us to do the decent thing, but I don’t guess the war was about being decent.” Mother and
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INTRODUCING son proceed to dig up Rody’s body and float it down the creek, and then, in his voice-over narration, he finishes the story by recounting what they did with Newt’s still-warm corpse: “We drug the skinny Yankee up the hill to a sinkhole and throwed him in, and throwed some dirt on him; Pap never made it back; that war was a widow-maker. Ma told me to never, never tell anyone what we done, and I don’t guess I ever did, except maybe once, or twice.” In this simple story of militarily authorized confiscation gone wrong, it is another more potent and emotionally laden issue that resonates—both in the memory of a 90-year-old Kentucky farmer in 1941 and a young Kentucky filmmaker in 1995. The desecration of a daughter’s grave by Union soldiers becomes an obsession for her mother, who ultimately takes vengeance by refusing to give two of their number a proper burial. Far more than a framing device, the treatment of the dead becomes a compelling symbol of what this war meant to so many Americans on both sides of the struggle. Given that women seemed to be especially offended by violations of proper, even sacrosanct burial rites, it is ironic that this mother should join forces with her child to make desecrations of such rites her final and most blatant act of defiance. Henson’s depiction of these atrocities fully captures the essence of eastern Kentucky’s intensely personal war as it played out between soldiers and civilians in the first half of 1862. It is no wonder that, well after the film’s release, Robby Henson admitted his continued attachment to his original title: Sinkhole.10 JOHN C. INSCOE, THE ALBERT B. SAYE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, IS THE AUTHOR AND EDITOR OF SEVERAL BOOKS ON 19TH-CENTURY APPALACHIA. THIS ESSAY IS ADAPTED FROM A WORK IN PROGRESS, TENTATIVELY TITLED APPALACHIA ON FILM: HISTORY, HOLLYWOOD, AND THE HIGHLAND SOUTH.
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The History Press Civil War Sesquicentennial Series offers thoroughly researched, accessible accounts of the war rarely covered outside the academic realm. SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
CASUALTIES OF WAR (Pages 24-25, 74-75) 1
2
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This account of the Keitt-Grow confrontation is cobbled together from Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan and Party Chaos, 1857-1859 (New York, 1950), 287-288; Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948), 164165; and John Holt Merchant Jr., “Laurence M. Keitt: South Carolina Fire-Eater” (dissertation, University of Virginia, 1976), 160-173. All quotations can be found in Merchant Jr. William Gilmore Simms to James Henry Hammond, June 26, 1858, in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms (Columbia, SC, 1982), vol. IV, p. 72; William Henry Trescot to William Porcher Miles, February 7, 1858, William Porcher Miles Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
3
Keitt to Sparks, May 29, 1856, Lawrence Massillon Keitt Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University (hereafter Keitt Papers).
4
Harper’s Weekly, December 22, 1860, p. 802; Keitt to Sparks, June 6, 1855, Keitt to Sparks, July 11, 1855, Keitt to Sparks, undated June 1855, Keitt Papers.
5
Laurence Keitt to Susan Keitt, May 1, 1862, Keitt Papers.
6
Laurence Keitt to Susan Keitt, February 11, 1864, Keitt Papers.
7
Ibid.
8
Laurence Keitt to Susan Sparks, May 9, 1855, Keitt Papers.
9
Dr. Theodoric Pryor to Susan Keitt, June 17, 1864, Keitt Papers.
BATTLEFIELD ECHOES (Pages 26-27, 75) 1
Quoted in Robert D. Heinl, ed., Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations (Annapolis, 1978), 244.
2
McClellan described Lincoln as “the original gorilla”—an expression Stanton had been using to describe the president—in a letter to his wife in 1862. See Ethan S. Rafuse, McClellan’s War (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 158.
3
James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York, 2008), 44.
4
As recalled by Horace Porter in Campaigning with Grant (New York, 1992), 26.
5
As quoted in T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York, 1952), 148.
6
Sherman to Philemon B. Ewing, July 14, 1862, Sherman to Ellen E. Sherman, May 8, 1865, in Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds., Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860-1865 (Chapel Hill, 1999), 254, 892-893.
7
Sherman to Halleck, May 7, 1865, ibid., 892.
8
Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York, 2008), 90-91, 98-103.
9
Thomas E. Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (New York, 2012), 197.
10 The most notable example being the article by Michael Hastings from the June 2010 edition Rolling Stone titled “The Runaway General,” which reported a series of unflattering comments and behavior directed toward the Obama administration by Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal and his staff. McChrystal was subsequently removed from command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and retired soon after. 11 Robert E. Lee to B.H. Hill, quoted in Peter G. Tsouras, ed., The Greenhill Dictionary of Military Quotations (London, 2006), 366.
HUNLEY
(Pages 48-57, 75) 1
Tom Chaffin, The H.L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy (New York, 2008), 73-76; Mark K. Ragan, Union and Confederate Submarine Warfare in the Civil War (New York, 2001), 53.
2
Chaffin, Hunley, 95-97.
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3
Ragan, Submarine Warfare, 123-124, 127-28; Chaffin, Hunley, 139-140.
4
Chaffin, Hunley, 150-151, 155.
5
Ibid., 162-166.
6
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington, 1902), Series I, Vol. 15, 328 (hereafter cited as ORN).
7
ORN, Series I, Vol. 15, 332-333.
8
C. L. Stanton, “Submarines and Torpedo Boats,” Confederate Veteran 22 (April 1914): 398.
9
Donald W. McLaurin, “South Carolina Confederate Twins,” Confederate Veteran 33 (September 1925): 328.
insightful, but very different, analyses of Pharaoh’s Army in their respective books on Civil War films. Gallagher sees it as evidence of the breakdown of the Lost Cause’s long-time hold on Hollywood depictions of the war (though he credits it with a stronger anti-Union strain than I see in it); Wills sees it as part of a genre of fairly recent films focusing on home-front struggles in the southern backcountry and on the psychological impact of the war at a personal level. See Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost & Forgotten (Chapel Hill, 2008), 62-66; and Wills, Gone With the Glory (New York, 2007), 57-60. 3
Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (Lexington, KY, 2006), 26-28; and Earl J. Hess, The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi (Chapel Hill, 2012), 30-32. Toward the end of 1862 and into 1863, it would be Confederate forces that became the more aggressive and abusive force in terms of informal foraging and more official impressment of mountain civilians along the Kentucky-Virginia border, leading to formal complaints made to the Confederate Secretary of War in Richmond. See McKnight, 19-20.
4
McKnight, Contested Borderland, 78-83.
5
Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, 41. Caudill acknowledged the limited presence of slaves along the Cumberland Plateau, but seemed too quick to attribute the primary differences between the area’s Confederate sympathizers from its majority of Unionists to those who owned slaves and those who didn’t (pp. 37-38). See also, McKnight, Contested Borderland, Chapter 1.
10 ORN, Series I, Vol. 15, 358-359. 11 Larry L. Murphy, ed., H. L. Hunley Site Assessment (Santa Fe, New Mexico: National Park Service Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, 1998), 92-93. 12 Charleston Mercury, February 19, 1864.
6 Frank Wilkerson, Recollections of a Private Soldier (New York, 1887), 232-33, quoted in Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville, 1981), 21. 7
Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, 40-41. For a similar such killing of a Confederate home on furlough in Ashe County, NC, and his widow’s perpetual retelling of the incident to her children and grandchildren, see John C. Inscoe, “Guerrilla War and Remembrance: Reconstructing a Father’s Murder and a Community’s Civil War,” in Inscoe, Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South (Lexington, KY, 2008), 322-49.
8
Gallagher, Causes Lost, Won, & Forgotten, 65. Interview with Robby Henson by John Hartl, The Seattle Times, 1996, www.pbs.org/pharaoh/seattle.htm
WAR AT THE DOOR (Pages 58-65, 76-77) 1
Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston, 1962), 41-42.
9
2
Both Gary Gallagher and Brian Wills offer
10 Ibid.
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