Issue 14

BEST BOOKS 2014

THE RADICALS’ WAR P. 42 REBEL RAIDER OVERSEAS P. 24 VOL. 4, NO. 4

DEFEATING ROBERT E. LEE WAS HIS FIRST PRIORITY IN 1864.

JUST AS CRUCIAL WAS ENSURING LINCOLN’S REELECTION.

Ulysses S. Grant’s Campaign Promise

PLUS

WINTER 2014

H

$5.99

THE CIVIL WAR AND THE SOUTHERN BELLE P. 22 CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

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the war in 1865 GETTYSBURG COLLEGE C I V I L WA R I N S T I T U T E SUMMER CONFERENCE JUNE 19 – 24, 2015

Explore new dimensions of the Civil War in 1865 with lectures, battlefield tours, panels, and group discussions. Topics include the Petersburg Campaign, Robert E. Lee’s retreat to Appomattox, Ulysses S. Grant in 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and the Grand Review. The conference includes an overnight trip to visit the battlefields around Richmond, Petersburg, and Appomattox.

Speakers include James McPherson, Harold Holzer, Joan Waugh, A. Wilson Greene, Gary W. Gallagher, Scott Hartwig, Peter Carmichael, Caroline Janney, and Robert E.L. Krick. www.gettysburg.edu/cwi/conference

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Contents DEPARTMENTS

VOLUME 4, NUMBER 4 / WINTER 2014

FEATURES

Salvo

{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}

TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to Nashville

VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Campaign Promise 30

Last Words

LIVING HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Researcher Mark Dunkelman

FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Defeating Robert E. Lee’s army was only one of the challenges facing Ulysses S. Grant in 1864. Just as crucial was ensuring President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection.

The Minie Ball

PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Another Chapter in Battlefield Preservation

DISUNION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 The Civil War and the Southern Belle

BY BROOKS D. SIMPSON

IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Rebel Raider Overseas

THE FUGITIVES

Columns CASUALTIES OF WAR . . . . . . . . 26 Nathaniel Gordon

For the thousands of Union soldiers who escaped Confederate captivity in South Carolina during the war’s final months, the path to freedom was long and treacherous.

BATTLEFIELD ECHOES . . . . . . 28 The Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid

Books & Authors

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)

THE BEST CIVIL WAR BOOKS OF 2014 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

BY LORIEN FOOTE

WITH A. WILSON GREENE, KATHRYN SHIVELY MEIER, KEVIN M. LEVIN, GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ, LESLEY J. GORDON, AND ANDREW WAGENHOFFER

The Radicals’ War 42

In Every Issue

The story of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, the Republican-led congressional oversight body that hounded generals, pressured the president, and bore witness to atrocities.

EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Looking Back ... and Moving Forward

PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 War Games

54

BY FERGUS M. BORDEWICH

ON THE COVER: General Ulysses S. Grant.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Colorization by Mads Madsen/Colorized History

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EDITORIAL VOLUME 4, NUMBER 4 / WINTER 2014

Terry A. Johnston Jr. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

Looking Back … and Moving Forward

BY THE TIME this issue hits newsstands, we’ll officially have entered the final stretch of the Civil War sesquicentennial, which began in April 2011 with festivities marking the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter and will wrap up next April with remembrances of Robert E. Lee’s surrender and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

From where I sit, the sesquicentennial has gone by in a flash. It’s hard to believe that it’s been over two years since we observed the 150th anniversary of Antietam, or 15 months since the massive anniversary observances at Gettysburg.

It’s also hard to believe that the Monitor is well into its fourth year of publication. We launched soon after the start of the sesquicentennial and it’s been quite a ride ever since. We’ve had the opportunity to work with some of our country’s leading historians and authors, people on the cutting edge of Civil War historical research. And while we have resisted the temptation to fill the pages of each issue entirely with content tied to the conflict’s ongoing anniversary, the 150th has offered us the chance to probe certain topics—such as the clash between USS Monitor and CSS Virginia, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Battle of Gettysburg—at a time of heightened popular awareness.

From what I’ve heard about next spring’s ceremonies, it sounds like we’ll be ending the sesquicentennial on a high note. We have big plans in the near future at the Monitor too, including comprehensive coverage of the ending of the war and the release of our first-ever special commemorative issue, The Civil War: From A to Z (see opposite page for details). As we enter the next phase of our existence, I’d like to thank you, our readers, for your support. It means a great deal to us; we truly couldn’t be doing what we do without you.

Laura June Davis David Thomson Robert Poister CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Jennifer Sturak COPY EDITOR

Matthew C. Hulbert SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGER MATT@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

Brian Matthew Jordan BOOK REVIEW EDITOR BRIAN@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

Katie Brackett Fialka SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR

Patrick Mitchell CREATIVE DIRECTOR MODUS OPERANDI DESIGN (WWW.MODUSOP.NET)

Zethyn McKinley ADVERTISING & MARKETING DIRECTOR ADVERTISING@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM (559)"492"9236

Margaret Collins ADVERTISING ASSOCIATE MARGARET@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

Howard White CIRCULATION MANAGER HWHITEASSOC@COMCAST.NET WEBSITE

www.CivilWarMonitor.com

M. Keith Harris Kevin M. Levin Robert H. Moore II Harry Smeltzer DIGITAL HISTORY ADVISORS SUBSCRIPTIONS & CUSTOMER SERVICE

Civil War Monitor / Circulation Dept.

P.O. Box 567, Selmer, TN 38375-0567 PHONE: 877-344-7409 FAX: 731-645-7849 EMAIL: CUSTOMERSERVICE@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

The Civil War Monitor (ISSN 2163-0682/print, ISSN 21630690/online) is published quarterly by Bayshore History, LLC, 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. Periodicals postage paid at Atlantic City, NJ, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Civil War Monitor, PO Box 567, Selmer, TN 38375-0567.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: LETTERS@civilwarmonitor.com

Subscriptions: $21.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $31.95 per year in Canada, and $41.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Views expressed by individual authors, unless expressly stated, do not necessarily represent those of The Civil War Monitor or Bayshore History, LLC. Letters to the editor become the property of The Civil War Monitor, and may be edited. The Civil War Monitor cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited materials. The contents of the magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of the publisher.

Copyright ©2014 by Bayshore History, LLC

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR WINTER 2014

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SPECIAL PRE-PUBLICATION OFFER! Coming February 2015 …

The Civil War (From A to Z) RESERVE YOUR COPY OF THE FIRST-EVER SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE FROM THE EDITORS OF THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR. Through vivid photography, dynamic graphics, detailed timelines and maps, and gripping articles, The Civil War (From A to Z) provides a comprehensive history of our country’s greatest conflict from Fort Sumter to Appomattox—and beyond. A true collectible for anyone with an interest in the Civil War.

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S A LV O

D I S PAT C H E S

that Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan “had decided to destroy the South” is arrant nonsense, as are his grotesquely exaggerated claims of “total destruction” engaged in by “the U.S. Army,” which in Michel’s view included the widespread burning of houses and villages. He goes on to blame the Union war strategy for a policy of “total destruction” in the Indian Wars and beyond, accounting for the U.S. firebombing of Dresden (which was actually carried out by the British Royal Air Force!), the use of atomic bombs against Japan, and Michel’s claim that in Vietnam and the Middle East “American forces routinely killed civilians and razed villages.” This was never “routine” U.S. policy, and Michel slanders our fighting men and women with these accusations.

Broken Promise

Glenn LaFantasie’s article on Robert E. Lee in your fall 2014 issue [“Broken Promise,” Vol. 4, No. 3] is superb.

The Civil War Monitor just gets better and better.

Tom Lowry VIA EMAIL

* * * Glenn LaFantasie’s article on one of America’s greatest generals, Robert E. Lee, fulfills your motto: “A New Look at America’s Greatest Conflict.” The article also echoes the author’s name: “la fantasy,” or liberal-progressive revisionism.

Stephan Paul Wassel COROLLA, NORTH CAROLINA

About That Letter…

ED. We received a number of

responses to the letter written by W.T. Michel of Dutton, Montana, which appeared in our fall issue. Below are two representative examples.

W.T. Michel complains that the modern American military policy of total destruction began with Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip Sheridan.

I would remind him that this long predated the Civil War and was not exclusive to the North.

It was, after all, future Confederate state Georgia that ignored law and the Supreme Court and confiscated the property

of the Cherokees, banishing them to the Trail of Tears. The first community destroyed during the Civil War was Hampton, Virginia, burned in 1861 by Confederate general John Magruder because it had become a place of refuge for escaping slaves. And the last community torched was Richmond, by order of Robert E. Lee four years later as he evacuated the city.

Bob Huddleston VIA EMAIL

* * * W.T. Michel’s letter in the fall 2014 issue was an example of blatant neo-Confederate historical revisionism. His claim

Dennis Middlebrooks BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Anti-Southern Bias Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwarmonitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.

I had hoped to find a balanced view in The Civil War Monitor, but I was disappointed to see so much denigrating bias against the South in your fall 2014 issue. Glenn W. LaFantasie’s claim in his article “Broken Promise” that Lee was a “traitor” who betrayed the legacy of George Washington is ridiculous. Washington and Lee were both for preserving the Union; however both believed that separation was justified when tyranny prevailed. In Clay Mountcastle’s “Battlefield

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“It is One Thing to Read about a Battle and Quite Another to Learn While Walking the Grounds.’’

Echoes: Saltville’s Dark Legacy,” the estimate of blacks killed at Saltville was between five and 46. Didn’t the Yankees murder and lynch a thousand times that number of southerners? Finally, Craig A. Warren’s “Rebel Yell!” article refers to the Rebel yell as a “screech” or “scream.”

It may be to some Yankees, but it was no worse than the Yankee “hoorah,” which sounded like a tire going flat.

If it wants to publish unbiased history, the Monitor should also print stories of the pro-Union Red Legs’ atrocities on civilians in western Missouri, the malicious destruction of beautiful farms in the Shenandoah Valley by the Union army, the many atrocities committed during Sherman’s March to the Sea, or the death rate of Confederate prisoners in the prison at Elmira, New York, which exceeded the death rate at Andersonville.

Dan Fischer

Your time is valuable, you owe it to yourself to travel with like minded people and professionals who know the ground and can lead you beyond the “what” into the “why” of the event Over 20 years experience and over 300 programs Something for every budget and schedule from “Weekend Warriors to Civil War Field University”

Join the BGES on tour

MANY REGISTRATIONS FOR 2015 PROGRAMS NOW OPEN & ONLINE

UPCOMING PROGRAMS:

LAKE ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI DEC 12-14

Spring Hill and Franklin with Thomas Cartwright and Greg Biggs

Grant’s Height

JAN 14-18, 2015

Kenneth Weisbrode’s article in the fall issue, “An Unlikely Friendship,” included many interesting points about Ulysses S. Grant and James Longstreet.

However, I believe the author erred when he writes “By the time he entered West Point, ‘Pete’ Longstreet was over 6 feet tall, well built, and handsome.

‘Sam’ Grant, when he arrived a year later, stood just an inch over 5 feet….”

To my knowledge Grant was 5’8” tall.

Sherman’s March Through SC & Potter’s Raid with Stephen Wise FEB 6-8, 2015

The Wilmington Campaign with Chris Fonvielle FEB 17-21, 2015

The Red River Campaign Part 2, Retreat from Mansfield and the Camden Expedition with Parker Hills FEB 27-MARCH 1, 2015

Forts Henry & Donelson with Ken Gott & Jim Vaughan MARCH 20-22, 2015

The Battle for New Orleans with Len Riedel MARCH 24-28, 2015

Ralph Mansell VIA EMAIL ED. We asked Grant scholar Brooks Simp-

son, author of this issue’s cover story, “Campaign Promise,” to set the record straight. He confirms your instincts: Grant was indeed 5’8” tall. Nice catch, Ralph!

Grant’s Bayou Expeditions and the Battle of Helena with Parker Hills and Len Riedel

APRIL 13-19, 2015

OCT 2-4, 2015

A Silence at Appomattox: The Retreat The Peninsula Campaign with and Surrender of the Army of Len Riedel Northern Virginia with Neil Mangum OCT 10-18, 2015

APRIL 29-MAY 2, 2015

A Walking Tour of Lexington and Concord with Len Riedel

Founding Father’s Tour: Thomas Jefferson’s World with Neil Mangum and Len Riedel

MAY 27-30, 2015

OCT 28-31, 2015

Sherman in North Carolina with Mark Bradley JUNE 17-20, 2015

Mosby’s Confederacy and Guerilla War in Virginia with Horace Mewborn and Bob O’Neil AUGUST 11-15, 2015

Campaign for Mobile & Surrender at Citronelle with Len Riedel NOV 10-14, 2015

Gettysburg: A Study on How Terrain Dictated the Campaign and Battles with Parker Hills and Len Riedel

Lincoln is Killed: A Study of the Events Leading to the Murder of the President with Gloria Swift, Karen Needles and others

NOV 29-DEC 3, 2015

SEPT 8-13, 2015

A Tactical Walk of the Siege of Chattanooga through Lookout Mountain with Jim Ogden

Lincoln’s Other War: The Great Dakota Sioux Uprising of 1862 with Neil Mangum

A Tactical Walk of Chickamauga with Jim Ogden DEC 3-6, 2015

SEPT 17-20, 2015

Lincoln in Richmond with Bert Dunkerly, Mike Gorman, et. al

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT WWW.BLUEANDGRAYEDUCATION.ORG OR CALL 434-250-9921 BGES is a non profit, tax exempt organization. Donations are deductible from Federal taxes and net proceeds from our educational tours fund other educational projects and programs.

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AGENDA

the burning of Abingdon’s courthouse during Union general George Stoneman’s raid through southwest Virginia, historian Michael Shaffer discusses the Civil War in Abingdon.

FREE. FOR MORE INFORMATION: 276-628-5005 or WILLIAMKINGMUSEUM.ORG.

JANUARY 2015 Your Guide to Civil War Events

EXHIBIT

1865

WINTER 2014-2015

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 14, 5:30 P.M.

The National Civil War Museum Louis Kindt’s study for a once-planned cyclorama on the Battle of Nashville, on display at the Tennessee State Museum during the city’s 150th anniversary commemoration of the battle.

HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

A wine and cheese reception with historian Harold Holzer marks the opening of the museum’s new exhibit, “1865,” which will cover battles, strategies, and civilian lives from the Civil War’s fifth year. $10; FREE FOR MUSEUM MEMBERS (ADVANCE RESERVATIONS REQUIRED). FOR MORE INFORMATION: NATIONALCIVILWARMUSEUM.ORG or 717-260-1861 X1230.

LECTURE

One Bright Moment: The Wedding of Hetty Cary and John Pegram FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, NOON

The Museum of the Confederacy RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

The Gale that Sank the Monitor SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1 P.M.

The Mariners’ Museum

$30 EVENT PASS; SELECT FREE EVENTS. FOR MORE INFORMATION: TNCIVILWAR150.COM or 615-253-0103.

LECTURE

FREE WITH MUSEUM MEMBERSHIP OR ADMISSION. FOR MORE INFORMATION: MOC.ORG or 804-6491861.

History Kitchen: Civil War Recipes

C O M M E M O R AT I O N

NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA

Jay Moore, Mariners’ Museum archivist and manager of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s USS Monitor Collection, discusses how foul weather off the North Carolina coast ultimately led to the famed ironclad’s demise.

FREE WITH MUSEUM ADMISSION. FOR MORE INFORMATION: MARINERSMUSEUM.ORG or 757-596-2222.

C O M M E M O R AT I O N

150th Anniversary of the Battle of Nashville SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13

Multiple locations

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

Ten historic Civil War sites in the Nashville area will host living history demonstrations and special exhibitions to mark the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Nashville, fought on December 15–16, 1864. Par-

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2 P.M.

Anacostia Community Museum WASHINGTON, D.C.

Food writer Tori Avey talks about the eating habits of Union soldiers and shares her recipe for “commissary beef stew,” a dish commonly eaten by Civil War troops.

FREE. FOR MORE INFORMATION: ANACOSTIA.SI.EDU or 202-633-4844.

LECTURE

War Comes to Abingdon

Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Birthday WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, 10 A.M.

Stonewall Jackson House LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA

Celebrate Stonewall Jackson’s 191st birthday with a free tour of the home in which the famed Confederate general lived from 1858 to 1861. Complimentary hot cider and birthday cake will be provided.

Stonewall Jackson House

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 18, 7 P.M.

William King Museum of Art ABINGDON, VIRGINIA

Just days after the 150th anniversary of

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

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FORD’S THEATRE, PHOTO BY SCOTT SUCHMAN

LECTURE

ticipating sites include Belle Meade Mansion, Belmont Mansion, Bicentennial Mall State Park, Fort Negly, The Land Trust for Tennessee’s Glen Leven Farm, Redoubt No. 1, Shy’s Hill, Historic Travellers Rest, Tennessee State Library and Archives, and the Tennessee State Museum.

TENNESSEE STATE MUSEUM (PAINTING); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

DECEMBER 2014

Hailed as the social event of the season, the wedding of one of the most beautiful belles in the South to a dashing brigadier general was one bright moment amid the gloom of 1865. However, ill omens preceded the wedding and tragedy would follow soon on its heels. Join the museum’s Kelly Hancock for this talk on Hetty Cary and John Pegram and events surrounding their wedding on January 19, 1865. Bring your own brown-bag lunch.

Mary Bacon as First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln in The Widow Lincoln.

FREE. FOR MORE INFORMATION: STONEWALLJACKSON. ORG or 540-464-7704.

The New-York Historical Society NEW YORK CITY

PERFORMANCE

The Widow Lincoln FRI., JAN. 23 – SUN., FEB. 22

Ford’s Theatre

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Ridiculed and disdained for her perceived sense of entitlement, Mary Lincoln sparked more controversy than any First Lady before or since. Set during the weeks following Abraham Lincoln’s murder at Ford’s Theatre, The Widow Lincoln portrays a very human Mary in the aftermath of her husband’s death as she mourns the postwar life they will never share.

FEBRUARY 2015 C O N V E R S AT I O N FORD’S THEATRE, PHOTO BY SCOTT SUCHMAN

TENNESSEE STATE MUSEUM (PAINTING); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

TICKETS ARE $20 – $62. FOR MORE INFORMATION: FORDS.ORG/EVENT/ WIDOW-LINCOLN or 202-347-4833.

Great Battles of the Civil War: Fredericksburg MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 6:30 P.M.

Renowned historians John F. Marszalek, James M. McPherson, and Harold Holzer discuss Robert E. Lee’s successful defense of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862, which crushed Union morale and nearly changed history. $34; $20 FOR NYHS MEMBERS. FOR MORE INFORMATION: NYHISTORY.ORG/ PROGRAMS or 212-485-9268.

PERFORMANCE

Letters of Love and War SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21

Historic Dinwiddie Courthouse DINWIDDIE, VIRGINIA

Hear the actual words of a Civil War soldier longing for his home and a local girl while stationed around Petersburg between October 1864 and March 1865. Community volunteers will present a narrative performance based on the letters he wrote to his sweetheart.

FREE. FOR MORE INFORMATION: PETERSBURGAREA.ORG or 804-4695346.

Share Your Event Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space?

Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com

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S A LV O S A LV O

{

FA C T S , F I G U R E S & I T E M S O F I N T E R E S T

}

In this lithograph by Kurz & Allison, Union forces—some of them United States Colored Troops—overwhelm a Confederate position during the Battle of Nashville in December 1864. For more on Nashville, turn the page.

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IN THIS SECTION Travels

A VISIT TO NASHVILLE . . . . . . 10 Voices

LAST WORDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Living History

RESEARCHER MARK DUNKELMAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Figures

THE MINIE BALL . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Preservation

ANOTHER CHAPTER IN BATTLEFIELD PRESERVATION. . 20 Disunion

THE CIVIL WAR AND THE SOUTHERN BELLE . . . . . . . . . 22 In Focus

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

REBEL RAIDER OVERSEAS . . . 24

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T R AV E L S

NASHVILLE TENNESSEE ON DECEMBER 2, 1864, Confederate general John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee—battered two days earlier at the Battle of Franklin, where its repeated attacks against entrenched Union positions had resulted in more than 6,000 Rebel casualties—arrived on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. While his army was in no condition to assault the state capital’s formidable enemy fieldworks, manned by some 55,000 Union soldiers under the command of General George Thomas, Hood hoped that its presence might entice Thomas to leave the protection of his defenses and attack, providing the Confederates their best chance to retake Nashville, which Union forces had occupied two years earlier. Hood soon got his wish—but not the results he had hoped for. On the 15th, Thomas launched an all-out assault, turning the Rebels’ left flank and pushing them southward. Follow-up attacks the next day permanently crippled the Army of Tennessee and effectively ended the war in the West.

Interested in visiting Nashville?

To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area—Jim Hoobler and Jim Kay Jr.— to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic city.

1

Don’t Miss

The Tennessee State Museum (505 Deaderick St.; 615-741-2692) has an outstanding Civil War collection that includes everything from firearms and ammunition to battle flags, uniforms, and portraits of soldiers. Some of the more interesting items on exhibit include General Patrick Claiborne’s hat and cane, the flag from the CSS Alabama, a shirt worn by General John Hunt Morgan, one of General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s pistols, and a battle log riddled with shrapnel and bullets. –JH Travellers Rest Plantation (636 Farrell Pkwy.; 615-832-8197), located two miles from Radnor Lake, is a jewel of a spot that provides an authentic glimpse into life in Civil War Nashville. Tour guides dress in period costumes and are experts on the home (which served as General John Bell Hood’s headquarters during the fighting of December 1864) and the Overton family, who occupied it. Visitors will receive great attention and can also visit the Civil War exhibit there. –JK Travellers Rest Plantation

2

BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT

The surviving earthworks from the first and second days of the battle for Nashville are accessible in many places. Confederate Redoubts One and Four (Benham Lane near corner of Hillsboro Pike and Woodmont Blvd.), two of the five entrenchments Hood placed for heavy cannon on his left flank, and which were overrun by Union troops during the fighting on December 15, are in the Green Hills area and open to visitors. Granbury’s Lunette, located near the state fairgrounds on a commanding hill, was a small infantry and artillery fortification that anchored the right of the Confederate line and was assaulted by several regiments of United States Colored Troops on the battle’s first day. At Shy’s Hill (Battery Lane & Benton Smith Road), farther south of the city, you can get a sense of how Hood’s Confederates misjudged the military crest of the hill and were overwhelmed during the battle’s second day as a result. A detailed driving tour map, available from the Metro Historical Commission (nashville.gov/mhc), helps visitors navigate these and other nearby sites related to the battle. –JH Shy’s Hill, where the Confederate line was broken on December 16, 1864, is worth a visit. While the trail to the top is steep, the hill offers expansive views of the battlefield and of Nashville, especially in the fall and winter. –JK

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOE BUGLEWICZ

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3 Best Family Activity The Adventure Science Center (800 Fort Negley Blvd.; 615-8625160), with its multistory climbing tower, family science lab, and planetarium show, has active children in mind. The remains of nearby Fort Negley (1100 Fort Negley Blvd.; 615-862-8470)—the largest stone fort ever built on the interior of North America—are accessible via boardwalks, with interpretive signage. The views of the city from the hill on which the fort sits are most impressive, and children will love to see the cannon pits and explore the site. An interpretive center with a video explaining the purpose of the fort, as well as what was happening in Middle Tennessee during the Civil War, will set the stage for your visit. –JH

Fort Negley Shy’s Hill

The Adventure Science Center, minutes from downtown, offers a unique experience for kids and adults. The Nashville Zoo (3777 Nolensville Pike; 615-833-1534) is another popular family spot.

There’s a lot to see; it’s a great place to spend a carefree afternoon. –JK Adventure Science Center (here and below)

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T R AV E L S

Best Sleep

The Hermitage Hotel (231 6th Ave. N; 615-244-3121) or Union Station Hotel (1001 Broadway; 615-726-1001)—both are downtown, both are historic structures, and both are within walking distance of many popular sites. –JH Hotel Indigo (301 Union St.; 615891-6000) is located one block from the historical district and within walking distance of all Civil War sites downtown. –JK

Union Station Hotel (here and left)

5

BEST KEPT SECRET

Ryman Auditorium

While in Nashville you must see the Ryman Auditorium (116 5th Ave. N; 615-889-3060), home of the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974.

The “Mother Church of Country Music” houses the stage where Patsy Cline, Minnie Pearl, Hank Williams Sr., Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Chet Atkins, and so many other country legends performed. The Opry still uses it from November to January, and concerts are held there all year long. –JH The Grand Ole Opry (2804 Opryland Dr.; 1-800-733-6779) is country music at its best, and still a lot of fun. –JK

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Noshville Delicatessen (1918 Broadway; 615-329-6674) is a great option for breakfast or lunch. I enjoy their omelets and sandwiches, in particular the authentic New York deli-style Reuben. Another good lunch spot is Monell’s Restaurant (1235 6th Ave. North; 615-2484747) in Germantown, which offers boarding-house seating at long tables and bowls of all-you-can-eat food. For dinner, try The Hermitage Hotel’s Capitol Grille (231 Sixth Ave. North; 615-345-7116). The hotel is over 100 years old and an elegant setting for a memorable meal. Its beef, locally raised, is excellent, as is the quail, pork, and lamb. Don’t leave, however, without trying the incredible sweet onion bisque, made with grilled Brie, bacon, and chives. It’s a must-have. Margot Café (1017 Woodland St.; 615-227-4668), which uses local produce, meats, and dairy products, has excellent chilled corn soup, grilled pork chops, and pork tenderloin. Every meal I’ve had there has left me wanting to come back. –JH

$42.50 cloth

Best Book

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOE BUGLEWICZ

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Jim Kay Jr., a native Nashvillian and longtime student of the Battle of Nashville, is director of the Battle of Nashville Preservation Society, Inc.

PRESS

ABOUT OUR EXPERTS

Jim Hoobler, senior curator of art and architecture at the Tennessee State Museum, is the author of A Guide to Historic Nashville, Tennessee.

LSU

Guide to Civil War Nashville (2004), by Nashville local Mark Zimmerman, identifies and describes the area’s best wartime sites. –JK

www.lsupress.org

Walter Durham, former Tennessee state historian, wrote two excellent, in-depth studies of Civil War Nashville: Nashville: The Occupied City: The First Seventeen Months, February 16, 1862 to June 30, 1863 (1985) and Reluctant Partners: Nashville and the Union, 1863– 1865 (1987). My book, Cities Under The Gun: Images of Occupied Nashville and Chattanooga (1995), gives a good visual depiction of the war in the area. –JH

$49.95 cloth

7

$45.00 cloth

Wholly Chow (2948 Sidco Dr.; 615-823-8362) is a great breakfast spot. It’s near downtown and has the best omelets and biscuits around. For lunch try Arnold’s Country Kitchen (605 8th Ave. S; 615-256-4455), where you can dine with the locals on pure southern food. Get the classic “meat and three,” then take a nap. For a quick bite, the Granny White Market (5301 Granny White Pike; 615-373-1395) is the perfect place to pick up fresh sandwiches before touring the battle’s second-day sites along the Granny White Pike. Bricks Café (6448 Nolensville Rd.; 615-941-7044) offers service with a smile, regular specials on the owner’s favorite wines, and excellent pizza. –JK

$39.95 cloth

Best Eats

WN`IRWIYJYN[I I $24.95 paper

6

NEW from LSU PRESs

Wholly Chow, and one of their specialties (inset)

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S A LV O

VOICES

/ LAST WORDS

“Let us cross over the “ TELL MY river and rest under the COMRADES shade of the trees.”

TO TAKE WARNING FROM ME.”

AN UNNAMED PRIVATE IN THE 12TH UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS, JUST BEFORE BEING EXECUTED BY FIRING SQUAD IN 1863 FOR SHOOTING AND KILLING A COMRADE.

“Hallo, Sam, I’m dead! … Yes, yes, I’m dead—good-by!”

UNION GENERAL JESSE RENO (RIGHT), UPON SEEING FELLOW GENERAL SAMUEL STURGIS WHILE BEING CARRIED BY STRETCHER FROM THE BATTLE OF SOUTH MOUNTAIN ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1862. RENO HAD BEEN SHOT THROUGH THE BODY BY A CONFEDERATE SHARPSHOOTER, AND DIED MINUTES LATER.

“TAKE ME FROM THE FIELD, BENEDICT.” UNION MAJOR GENERAL HIRAM G. BERRY (RIGHT), SPEAKING TO CAPTAIN L.G. BENEDICT ON THE CHANCELLORSVILLE BATTLEFIELD BEFORE DYING FROM A BULLET WOUND ON MAY 3, 1863.

“No; and tell my wife I died for my country.”

CONFEDERATE PRIVATE JAMES DRURY, 2ND TENNESSEE CAVALRY, REFUSING AN OFFER FROM ANOTHER SOLDIER TO TAKE HIS PLACE IN THE FIGHT AT TUPELO, MISSISSIPPI, ON JULY 14, 1864.

DRURY, WHO HAD TOLD HIS COMRADES OF A PREMONITION THAT HE WOULD DIE IN THE REGIMENT’S NEXT ENGAGEMENT, “FELL WITH THE FIRST VOLLEY, IN THE FRONT RANK.”

“Why, what are you dodging for?

They could not hit an elephant at that distance.”

UNION GENERAL JOHN SEDGWICK TO HIS SOLDIERS DURING THE BATTLE OF SPOTSYLVANIA COURT HOUSE, MAY 9, 1864. MOMENTS LATER, A CONFEDERATE SHARPSHOOTER’S BULLET HIT SEDGWICK BENEATH THE LEFT EYE, KILLING HIM INSTANTLY.

SOURCES: “DEATH OF STONEWALL JACKSON,” SOUTHERN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PAPERS VOL. XIV (JANUARY–DECEMBER 1886); SOLDIERS’ LETTERS, FROM CAMP, BATTLE-FIELD AND PRISON (1865); MAJOR-GENERAL HIRAM G. BERRY (1899); MEADE’S HEADQUARTERS, 18631865 (1922); STEPHEN W. SEARS, LANDSCAPE TURNED RED (1983); HANCOCK’S DIARY, OR, A HISTORY OF THE SECOND TENNESSEE CONFEDERATE CAVALRY (1887).

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (JACKSON AND BERRY ); NATIONAL ARCHIVES

CONFEDERATE GENERAL THOMAS J. “STONEWALL” JACKSON, AS RECORDED BY DR. HUNTER MCGUIRE BEFORE THE GENERAL SUCCUMBED TO PNEUMONIA ON MAY 10, 1863. JACKSON (ABOVE, DEPICTED ON HIS DEATHBED) CONTRACTED THE DISEASE AFTER THE AMPUTATION OF HIS ARM DUE TO A WOUND RECEIVED AT THE BATTLE OF CHANCELLORSVILLE.

14 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR WINTER 2014

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S A LV O

LIVING HISTORY

BY JENNY JOHNSTON

Witness to the 154th R E S E A R C H E R M A R K D U N K E L M A N’S L I F E LO N G Q U E ST TO T E L L T H E STO RY O F T H E “ H A R DTAC K R EG I M E N T ”

THIS PAST SEPTEMBER, an email arrived in Mark Dunkelman’s inbox. Attached to it was the transcribed diary of Allen Williams, a Civil War soldier who fought with the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry. Williams had distinguished himself at the May 1864 Battle of Dug Gap, the 154th’s first fight of the Atlanta Campaign, when he ran through a hail of Confederate bullets to save the regiment’s colors.

The diary was sent by Mark Williams, Allen Williams’ great-grandnephew. Soon after, Dunkelman received another email, this one bearing a photograph taken of Allen Williams and his family in 1900, sent by the soldier’s great-granddaughter, Cynthia Whited. ¶ It wasn’t the first diary of a 154th soldier to come into Dunkelman’s possession. In fact, it was the 27th. It wasn’t the first image of Williams to land in his hands, either. And it certainly wasn’t his first correspondence with 154th descendants. Over the years, Dunkelman has connected with no less than 1,230 descendants of the men who fought with the regiment.

Thirty of them—including Williams and Whited—were added to his rolls just this year.

Mark Dunkelman, 67, is not a formally trained historian.

Back in the 1960s, he attended the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design with every intention of becoming an illustrator. But his life—and his life’s work—took a different course.

His relentless, even Holmesian efforts to track down everything knowable about the men of the 154th New York have made him the leading authority on the unit—and produced one of the most complete records of a Civil War regiment ever compiled.

Dunkelman’s connection to the 154th is personal. His greatgrandfather, John Langhans, emigrated from Germany with his family in late 1857, when John was 14 years old. They

settled in Cattaraugus County, New York, an area in the western part of the state known for its picturesque landscape—a combination of rolling farmlands and rugged peaks and

Mark Dunkelman holds a postwar photo of his greatgrandfather and fellow 154th New York veterans.

valleys carved out long ago by glaciers. Eight of the 154th New York’s 10 companies were raised in Cattaraugus County.

In September 1864, John Langhans joined one of them.

Many decades later, Langhans would spend hours recounting the regiment’s exploits to his grandson—Dunkelman’s father—at the family’s Cattaraugus County farm.

“During his childhood, my father imbibed the stories his grandfather told of marching with Sherman through Geor-

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gia,” says Dunkelman. “In turn, when I was a child, he passed these stories along to me. They gripped me in a way that just never let go.”

Dunkelman read the memoirs of William Tecumseh Sherman before he turned 10, and his father drove him from their suburban Buffalo home to the main library downtown so he could cull the 154th New York’s official reports.

The 154th had participated in some of the war’s most brutal fighting, including Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, and suffered terrible losses. The more he read about their experiences, the more he wanted to know. “That became my goal, to find out as much as I could about this unit and what had happened to it,” Dunkelman explains. Later, while he was still in art college, he set another goal: to write a history of the 154th New York before he turned 50. “I figured I’d give myself 30 years to pull it off.”

He didn’t need it. He published that book, co-authored with fellow 154th enthusiast Mike Winey, with whom he would partner on research for years, in 1981, when he was 34 years old. They called it The Hardtack Regiment—the nickname given to the 154th for their reputed fondness for the standard-issue military cracker. But what he’d thought would be the culmination of his fascination proved just the beginning. “I had accom-

plished my goal, but I hadn’t finished the work,” he says.

In part, that’s because of 154th descendants like Mark Williams and Cynthia Whited.

Back in the 1970s, Dunkelman figured that the best way “It’s a thrill to be able to send somebody a picture of their great-grandfather that they’ve never seen before.” to unearth new material on the soldiers of the 154th was to find their progeny—the holders of their relics and their stories.

So he went hunting for them.

He worked every Cattaraugus County lead that he had until it yielded either a descendant or a dead end. He tacked “wanted” flyers to post-office bulletin boards across Western New York, and persuaded a handful of small-town newspaper editors to run articles about his search.

Soon, the phone started ringing. “I’ve got a series of letters that my ancestor wrote,” “I’ve got a tintype,” “I’ve got my ancestor’s canteen.” Says Dunkelman: “I started meeting all these folks and transcribing their letters, photographing their photographs, taking pictures of their relics.” Year after year, Dunkelman tacked up fliers and put notices in the same newspapers. And year after year, he turned up new material and new descendants.

Among them was David Laing, a funeral director from Eden, New York, whose great-grand-

father, William Laing Jr., was the tentmate of Dunkelman’s great-grandfather.

Then came the Internet.

Once his website devoted to the regiment (hardtackregiment.com) went live, Dunkelman started hearing from a new descendant pretty much every week. Before he knew it, he’d raised his own sort of regiment—hundreds of descendants armed with a staggering amount of primary source material.

“They’ve shared with me more than 1,700 wartime letters,” says Dunkelman. “I’ve got photographs of more than a quarter of the regiment, and some of them I have in multiple poses. I’ve got more images of a soldier who became an officer named Alexander Bird than I have of my own ancestor.” In turn, whenever a new descendant contacts him, he sends them everything he’s got on their ancestor. “It’s a thrill to be able to send somebody a picture of their greatgrandfather that they’ve never seen before,” he says.

Dunkelman has cataloged and indexed all that he’s collected—“My office is literally like a museum to the 154th New York,” he says—and incorporated much of it into the now six books he’s written about the regiment, all highly regarded.

(His latest book—about Patrick Henry Jones, the 154th’s longtime colonel and one of only 12 native Irishmen to become generals in the Union army—will be published } CONT. ON P. 72

17 PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHAN BELLER

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S A LV O

FIGURES

The Minie Ball REFLECTING UPON THE fierce fighting at Fair Oaks, Virginia, during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, one memory stood out to New Hampshire soldier Thomas Livermore: the harrowing sounds of bullets fired at him and his comrades. They “whiz[zed] over our heads in piping tones,” he remembered.

“Sometimes they sounded like a very small circular saw cutting through thin strips of wood, and sometimes like great blue flies.”

Livermore was referring to the projectile popularly known as a minie ball. The cylindrical-conical bullet, based on the one developed by French army captain Claude-Étienne Minié in the late 1840s, was engineered for use in rifle muskets, the grooved-barreled weapons that widely supplanted their older, smoothbore counterparts during the Civil War. The hollow-based leaden minie expanded when fired, allowing it to engage the spiral rifling and exit the barrel in a tight spin.

This greatly increased the weapon’s range and accuracy; in fact, minie balls inflicted 76% of the war’s battlefield injuries.

While the grooved bullets came in various sizes for different caliber weapons, on this page we present statistics about a minie ball for the .58-caliber Model 1861 Springfield, the conflict’s most widely used rifle musket.

470,851,079 The number of rounds of .58-caliber ammunition purchased or made by the U.S. Ordnance Department from January 1, 1861, through June 30, 1866.

AVG HEIGHT: 1" AVG WEIGHT: 1.1 oz 40 ROUNDS = 3 LBS Infantrymen usually carried 40 rounds of ammunition in their cartridge boxes, though this quantity was often exceeded. Soldiers in the Army of the Potomac en route to the Battle of the Wilderness, for instance, reportedly carried 80 to 100 rounds each, “stowed away in knapsacks, haversacks, or pockets, according to the space afforded,” noted Union veteran John D. Billings.

AVG WIDTH: .57"

COATING Balls were dipped in a mixture of wax and tallow; the grooves held the lubricant, which helped keep black powder residue from fouling the bore.

SOURCES: THOMAS L. LIVERMORE, DAYS AND EVENTS, 1860-1866 (1920); JOHN D. BILLINGS, HARD TACK AND COFFEE (1887); BRENT NOSWORTHY, THE BLOODY CRUCIBLE OF COURAGE (2003); JOSEPH G. BILBY, CIVIL WAR FIREARMS (1996); JAMES E. THOMAS AND DEAN S. THOMAS, A HANDBOOK OF CIVIL WAR BULLETS & CARTRIDGES (1996); EARL J. HESS, THE RIFLE MUSKET IN CIVIL WAR COMBAT: REALITY AND MYTH (2008).

18 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR FALL 2014

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PHOTOGRAPH PHOTOGRAPHBY BYERIC JOHN KULIN DOE

11/10/14 9:51 PM

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WHY DID LEE GET ALL THE CREDIT? AND DAVIS ALL THE BLAME? A powerful new reckoning with the president of the Confederacy from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom

“Provocative . . . persuasive . . . Embattled Rebel will not alter Davis’s place in history; he will always be associated with the misguided Southern cause. But it will move readers to rethink his role in its defeat.� —THE

WALL STREET JOURNAL

“To this day it is difficult for many Americans to view Davis with dispassion, but McPherson has made a noble attempt to do so. . . . [A] fine study of Davis’s military leadership.� — T H E W A S H I N G T O N P O S T

CWM14-FOB-Figures.indd 19 EmbattledRebel_NYTBR.indd 3

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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

Another Chapter in Battlefield Preservation

irreplaceable links to this country’s founding.

The mission of this subsidiary project is simple: to save the battlefields where America was forged. We will bring to this project the same passion and the same formula—landbased private fundraising leveraged with government matching grants—that has made the Civil War Trust the national model for preservation of historic landscapes.

Patriots who fell on those fields in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey deserve to have their sacrifices remembered and honored just as much as those who took up arms “four score and seven years” later in Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri. All of these battlefields are hallowed ground, living memorials to this nation’s brave soldiers.

In deciding to protect Revolutionary War and War of 1812 battlefields, the Civil War Trust answered the call of its most important ally, the National Park Service. After the NPS gave us a full briefing on the imminent dangers confronting these battlefields and the stark

reality of their likely fate should we demure, we felt duty-bound to explore the feasibility of such an undertaking.

Since then, we have thoroughly analyzed the logistical aspects of a Revolutionary War preservation campaign.

We have surveyed our members, spoken with our most generous donors, vetted the plan with our board of trustees, and talked earnestly with historians and trusted asso-

LOOK FOR REGULAR PRESERVATION NEWS AND UPDATES FROM THE CIVIL WAR TRUST IN FUTURE ISSUES. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION AND HOW YOU CAN HELP, VISIT CIVILWAR.ORG

ciates. Because we were met with overwhelmingly positive responses, we resolved to bring our unrivaled expertise in heritage land preservation to this earlier chapter in American history.

Our careful planning has resulted in a campaign that will not diminish our efforts to identify, protect, and interpret the battlefields of the Civil War. Any donations made to the Trust specifically for the purchase of Civil War battlefield land will be used only for that purpose, and the same promise holds true for any Campaign 1776 donations.

The opening salvo in this exciting undertaking is the preservation of 4.6 historic acres at the Princeton Battlefield, where on } CONT. ON P. 72

The Civil War Trust’s first project in its new initiative, Campaign 1776, targets 4.6 acres of Revolutionary War battlefield land in Princeton, New Jersey. Its preservation would mark the first addition to Princeton Battlefield State Park (pictured here) since the early 1970s.

ROB SHENK

FOR NEARLY THREE DECADES, the Civil War Trust has led the charge to protect the endangered battlegrounds of America’s bloodiest conflict. We have secured millions of dollars in donations from the private sector, while also engaging partners from all levels of government. This unique public-private partnership has resulted in the permanent protection of 40,000 acres of hallowed ground at 120 battlefields in 20 states. ¶ Unfortunately, there has never been a comparable national effort to protect the battlefields of two other defining American struggles, the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. That is about to change. ¶ On November 11, the Civil War Trust launched Campaign 1776, the first-ever national initiative to preserve

20 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR WINTER 2014

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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.

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S A LV O

DISUNION

BY KAREN ABBOTT

The Civil War and the Southern Belle

rules regarding chaperoning and coquetry, which one prominent lecturer called “an artful mixture of hypocrisy, fraud, treachery and falsehood” that risked tarnishing a girl’s reputation. The girls themselves relinquished the anticipation, instilled since birth, that they would one day assume their positions as wives, mothers, and slave mistresses, that their lives would be steeped in every privilege and comfort. The war ultimately challenged not only long-held traditions of courtship and marriage, but the expectation that one might wed at all.

At least in cities where the Confederate army established a base of operations, young women were overwhelmed by the number of prospective suitors. Thousands of men flocked to the Confederate capital of Richmond, prepared to work in one of the government departments or to train for duty in the army. The Central Fair Grounds just west of the city were transformed into “Camp Lee,” where the new recruits set up tents and conducted military drills. “Between eight

THIS ARTICLE IS EXCERPTED FROM DISUNION, A NEW YORK TIMES ONLINE SERIES FOLLOWING THE COURSE OF THE CIVIL WAR AS IT UNFOLDED. READ MORE AT WWW.NYTIMES.COM/ DISUNION.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

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HARPER’S WEEKLY (OPPOSITE PAGE); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

cowering beau, insisting, “Either you or I, sir.” One Alabama schoolgirl spoke for many of her peers when she declared, “I would not marry a coward.” At balls and parties girls linked arms and sang, “I Am Bound to Be a Soldier’s Wife or Die an Old Maid.” One belle, upon hearing that her fiancé refused to enlist, sent her slave to deliver a package enclosing a note. The package contained a skirt and crinoline, and the note these terse words: “Wear these, or volunteer.” He volunteered.

In the sudden absence of husbands, fathers, brothers, and beaus, white southern women discovered a newfound freedom—one that simultaneously granted them more power in relationships and increased their likelihood of heartbreak. Gone were the traditions of antebellum courtships, where family connections and wealth were paramount and a closed circle of friends and neighbors scrutinized potential mates, a process that could last for years.

The war’s disruptions forced elite southern parents to loosen

and ten thousand men went down Main St. this afternoon,” wrote a 16-year-old Richmond diarist. “It was very tantalizing to me to hear the drum and the cheering and to be able to see nothing but their bayonets and the tops of their heads. It is wicked in me to wish that I had gone out so that I might see them, and not to wish that I had gone to church, but I love the soldiers so much, that I forget almost everything else when I get to thinking about them.”

Troops marching through the capital blew kisses to the Richmond belles, who returned the attention with unprecedented abandon, waving handkerchiefs and tossing pocket Bibles and pincushions. In the antebellum years, new acquaintances required a formal letter of introduction, but the war allowed for association with complete strangers. The women took unchap-

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

IN THE BEGINNING OF the war, southern women wanted their men to leave—in droves, and as quickly as possible. They were the Confederate army’s most persuasive and effective recruitment officers, shaming anyone who shirked his duty to fight. A young English immigrant in Arkansas enlisted after being accosted at a recruitment meeting. “If every man did not hasten to battle, they vowed they would themselves rush out and meet the Yankee vandals,” he wrote of southern women.

“In a land where women are worshipped by men, such language made them warmad.” ¶ Newspapers printed gender-bending cartoons that drove the point home.

In one, a musket-wielding woman dressed in trousers and a kepi looms over her

HARPER’S WEEKLY (OPPOSITE PAGE); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

eroned trips to Confederate campgrounds, going on horseback rides and picnics, allowing uniformed men to serenade them and plant lingering kisses on their hands—all activities once restricted to engaged couples. Even their style of banter changed, turning aggressive and overtly political, a rebellion against their old identities as genteel southern ladies. “I confess myself a rebel, body and soul,” declared a Louisiana girl, adding, “Confess? I glory in it!” Union soldiers occupying southern towns complained of “she-rebels” who spat at them and emptied the contents of chamber pots on their heads.

The relaxed wartime atmosphere led to increased physical intimacy, although in letters and diaries southern women admitted only to flirting. Casual relationships, and even casual engagements—“slight, silly love affairs,” as one woman called them—flourished. Both women and men kept engagements secret, sometimes specifying that each was still free to see others. “Neither of us is to consider this engagement binding,” wrote a Georgia belle to her betrothed, a Confederate lieutenant. “If another is loved, no sense of honor will prevent our immediately letting the other know of it—so you are still at liberty to fall in love with whom you please, without considering me at all in the way.” One Georgia cavalryman predicted, “If we Stay heare much longer

In the Civil War South, the absence of men— due to the enlistment of potential suitors in the Confederate army and, later, the deaths of husbands and sweethearts at the front—impacted the romantic lives and expectations of southern women. Above: An unidentified woman holds the image of a Confederate soldier. Opposite: A “southern belle” in wartime Baltimore attracts the attention of Union soldiers.

in about 9 months from now thare will be more little Gorgians [sic] a Squalling through this contry then you can Shake a Stick at.” Such liaisons could endanger elite women’s reputations and, in some cases, their lives. One Richmond woman, who became pregnant after an affair with a married Confederate officer, died as a result of complications from a self-induced abortion.

Southern women in rural areas grappled with entirely different concerns: the dearth of suitable men—or any men at all. By the summer of 1863,

in New Bern, North Carolina, only 20 of the 250 white people remaining in town were men. The war was on its way to claiming one in five white southern men of military age (leaving behind more than 70,000 widows), a situation that prompted frantic letters to the editor. “Having made up my mind not to be an old maid,” an 18-year-old Virginian wrote to the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, “and having only a moderate fortune and less beauty, I fear I shall find it rather difficult to accomplish my wishes.” } CONT. ON P. 72

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S A LV O

IN FOCUS

Rebel Raider Overseas

BY BOB ZELLER PRESIDENT , CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY

THE CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY IS A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES FOR THE PUBLIC BENEFIT. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CCWP AND ITS MISSION, VISIT CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY. ORG

THE ROBIN STANFORD COLLECTION

ONE OF THE CIVIL WAR’S most remarkable naval photographs was taken not in U.S. or Confederate waters but off the coast of Portugal.

It depicts CSS Florida, the large vessel in the center of the image, sitting in the neutral harbor at Funchal, Madeira, on February 27, 1864, while USS St. Louis, the three-masted sloop in the background to the right, keeps watch.

Florida, built by a British firm during the war’s first year, had departed England for the Bahamas in March 1862, the first leg of what would prove a very effective career as a Confederate commerce raider, attacking Union commercial vessels at sea and capturing their cargo as “prizes.” As the Union navy’s blockade of southern ports tightened, Rebel raiders increasingly relied on foreign ports to refuel, make repairs, and sell their captured goods. It was such a reason that brought Florida to Madeira, where it hoped to secure food, water, and coal before resuming its profitable business.

Though he had requested 60 tons of coal, Florida’s commander, Lieutenant Charles M. Morris, received only 20, along with a note informing him that while “the necessary biscuit, water, and 20 tons of coal may be loaded,” the “Governor expects you to quit this port by tomorrow evening.” Resupplied, Florida slipped out of the port under cover of darkness, eluding St. Louis. While the Union vessel, which had pursued the feared raider overseas in hopes of capturing or sinking it in international waters, would eventually give chase, it could not catch up with the speedy Florida, which was powered by a combination of sail and steam.

Florida’s career would come to an end later that year. Caught by Union forces in October while docked in a Brazilian port, it was rammed and sunk near Hampton Roads, Virginia, in November, allegedly at the request of Admiral David Dixon Porter. By the time of its demise, Florida had captured 37 Union prizes, second only to the famed CSS Alabama among Confederate raiders.

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

A SLAVE SHIP CAPTAIN PAYS THE PRICE FOR THE NATION’S CHANGING VIEWS. BY STEPHEN BERRY

N JANUARY 1, 1808, free blacks from New York City packed into the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Lower Manhattan to hear Peter Williams Jr. deliver “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave-Trade.” The congregation had waited 20 years for this moment, ever since the U.S. Constitution had been ratified in 1788. Article 1, Section 9, of the Constitution reads, “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.” While written in the kind of obfuscating language the Founders preferred when talking about slavery, the meaning is clear: The right to traffic in slaves from Africa shall not be abridged until 1808; after that, all bets are off.

As 1808 drew near, antislavery forces had every reason to be sanguine. On December 2, 1806, President Thomas Jefferson had delivered his annual message to Congress congratulating his “fellowcitizens on the approach of the period [at which] the United States [will withdraw] from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa.” Responding to his call, Congress had passed “An Act to prohibit the importation of slaves,” to take effect on January 1, 1808, and Jefferson had signed it into law the same day. The president of the United States, though a slaveholder, had every intention of fulfilling a promise made 20 years before.1 Thus could Williams and the congregation feel on January 1 that what dawned that morning was not merely a new year but a new era.

“At this auspicious moment,” Williams told the assembly, “I felicitate you on the abolition of the Slave-Trade. This inhuman branch of commerce [is] this day extinguished. An event so important, so pregnant with happy consequences, must be

NATHANIEL GORDON

extremely consonant to every philanthropic heart.”2

WHO

A ship captain engaged in the African slave trade BORN

February 6, 1826, in Portland, Maine DIED

February 21, 1862, by hanging in New York, New York QUOTABLE

“Make short work of it now, Bill.

I’m ready.”

—Nathaniel Gordon’s last words

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

IN EARLY JULY 1860, the American slave ship Erie steered into the mouth of the Congo River and sailed 45 miles into the African interior before weighing anchor. Captain Nathaniel Gordon assembled his crew on the main deck and confirmed what most of his men already suspected—they had shipped out on a slaver. Some grumbled a little, but they were mollified when Gordon promised “one dollar a head” for every slave that made it alive to Cuba.

Within a few weeks, at various stops along the river, Gordon had traded 150 hogsheads of whiskey for 897 Africans, the majority of them children.

They were stowed below deck in what one witness called “scarcely [enough] space to die in,” and Erie steered out of the river and into the Atlantic Ocean.3 Erie’s voyage to this point had been business as usual. For 52 years, Americans like Captain Gordon had been deeply engaged in the African slave trade, despite the congressional ban. It is one thing to make a law, another to enforce it. In 1820, Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford complained that in the 12 years since 1808 his office had

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O

Nathaniel Gordon

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never received any “particular instructions” on how to fund any effort toward “prohibiting the introduction of slaves into the United States.”4 Forty years later not much had changed. The U.S. Navy had established the so-called Africa Squadron and tasked it with suppressing the slave trade, but the fleet was tiny, the crews lackluster, and the naval secretaries uninterested or worse. The problem, as all knew, was the ridiculous amount of money to be made in the trade. A single slave could be bought in Africa for $10 and sold in America for $1,000; a single slave run could net hundreds of thousands of dollars— the equivalent of more than $1 million today—to be distributed among not only captain and crew but also New York shipbuilders and government

A group of soldiers and civilians gathers on February 21, 1862, to witness the execution of Captain Nathaniel Gordon, the only American ever hanged for involvement in the African slave trade.

functionaries who looked the other way. In 1853, the British ambassador to the United States, John F.T. Crampton, simply threw up his hands.

“The difficulty of getting Slavers condemned by Admiralty Courts when captured and brought into American ports is [actually] ... much greater in the Northern States which profess Abolitionism, than in the South where Slavery exists. This arises from the Shipbuilders of the North being interested in the prosperity of the Trade.”5 When Gordon and his crew sailed into the Atlantic, then, they had little fear of being caught or tried or punished.

Certainly Gordon had no idea that he would be caught and tried and hanged. Even so, he must have felt a small flash of panic as he spied in his glass what appeared to be a steam-

powered sloop of war moving quickly to intercept him. He took her at first for a British vessel, but she was actually USS Mohican, one of the newer ships in the Africa Squadron, headed by an experienced captain, Sylvanus William Godon.

When Godon boarded Erie, he demanded to speak to the captain, but no one stepped forward. Confronted as the captain of record, Nathaniel Gordon claimed that he had sold the vessel to one of his Spanish hands upriver and was now just a passenger. Godon saw through the ruse and ordered Gordon arrested and sent to New York to await trial. (The slaves were shipped off to Liberia on a journey almost as miserable as the Middle Passage would have been.)

Gordon’s first trial resulted in a hung jury, } CONT. ON P. 74

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B AT T L E F I E L D ECHOES

A BUNGLED UNION OPERATION LEADS TO ACCUSATIONS OF A SINISTER PLOT. BY CLAY MOUNTCASTLE

N THE COLD, early darkness of March 2, 1864, a Union officer lay dying in the middle of a muddy road near Stevensville, Virginia. He was Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, and a fold of letters later found on his body would set off a public and political firestorm in both the North and the South.

Brigadier General H. Judson Kilpatrick, a Union cavalry commander, had developed the bold raid that led to Dahlgren’s death. Kilpatrick, known for his brashness (his nickname, “KillCalvary,” was a nod to his recklessness with his men), planned to deal a shocking blow to the heart of the Confederacy and deliver some sorely needed strategic momentum for the Union. A force of nearly 3,500 cavalry under Kilpatrick’s command would advance on Richmond from the north, doing as much damage to the Virginia Central Railroad and telegraph lines as their rapid approach would permit. Meanwhile, a supporting force of some 500 cavalrymen commanded by the 21-year-old Dahlgren was to move farther to the west (toward Goochland Court House), cross the James River, and enter the Confederate capital from the southwest. Once the two detachments met in Richmond, they would free Union soldiers in the city’s prisons before making a rapid withdrawal east to the safety of Union lines. An excited Dahlgren predicted in a letter to his father, Rear Admiral John Dahlgren, that “If successful,” the raid would be “the grandest thing on record.”1 The raid began grand enough on the night of February 28, with Kilpatrick and Dahlgren moving their detachments quickly across the Rapidan River, racing past Spotsylvania Courthouse, and splitting up at Mount Pleasant to drive into the heart of Central Virginia. Dahlgren’s force sped south, doing damage to the railroad and telegraph lines on February 29. As he neared the James River, however, Dahlgren lost momentum. His guide, an escaped slave, couldn’t find the ford where they planned to cross, and

“AN EXCITED DAHLGREN PREDICTED IN A LETTER TO HIS FATHER THAT ‘IF SUCCESSFUL,’ THE RAID WOULD BE ‘THE GRANDEST THING ON RECORD.’”

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

Dahlgren found himself stuck on the north side of the river.

News of the Yankee invaders had spread quickly, and with the Confederate cavalry under Wade Hampton bearing down on him, the entire mission was suddenly in peril. After ordering the immediate execution of the hapless guide (Colonel Dahlgren was as pitiless as he was brave) he moved quickly east, hoping to link up with Kilpatrick’s force.2 Meanwhile, “Kill-Cavalry” was also experiencing problems after two days of initial success. Despite having over 3,000 anxious cavalrymen behind him ready to charge, the normally ambitious Kilpatrick inexplicably called off his attack just north of Richmond. Instead, he delicately probed the sparse Confederate defenses and, perhaps worrying about the whereabouts of Dahlgren’s force, hurried east, away from Richmond—and any chances of fame or advancement.3 Dahlgren and Kilpatrick would never make their rendezvous, and many of their raiders were captured trying to reach the Union lines.

Dahlgren’s detachment was ambushed late on March 2 by a force of home guards and Confederate cavalry from Major General Fitzhugh Lee’s outfit. Dahlgren was among

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I

The Daring and Tragic Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid

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those shot dead. Orders for the raid were found on his body and turned over to Confederate commanders, who discovered that the papers revealed a much deeper and darker mission than a mere freeing of Union prisoners—including a plot to set Richmond ablaze and kill President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet.

Newspapers in the South published the orders, setting off a flurry of accusations and denials, with northern newspapers declaring the papers a forgery and everyone from Kilpatrick on up divorcing themselves from any knowledge of or responsibility for the scheme. To this day, the authenticity of the orders published in Confederate newspapers has never been proven.

The calamitous KilpatrickDahlgren raid was hardly a boon for the Confederacy. It did nothing to improve the military or political situations in Richmond. It did, however, add to an already growing dissatisfac-

Union officer Ulric Dahlgren (above, standing) was 21 years old when he co-commanded the ambitious raid against Richmond in March 1864. The ill-fated offensive cost him his life and provoked nationwide controversy.

tion with the war effort in the North. And therein lies the true significance of such military fiascos. They encourage doubt in those who are uncertain of a war’s success, and fuel dissent in those who already oppose it.

American military history is rife with examples of bold plans gone awry, often ending in tragedy. Loss of nerves, miscommunication, or simple bad luck can lead to such disasters.

As the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid demonstrates, military and political officials are prone to finger-pointing and scapegoating, and the public quick to criticize, when things go bad.

Operations from years past underscore this point: the failed invasion of Canada in 1812, the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, and the disastrous April 1980 attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. In October 1993, 18 U.S. Army Rangers and Special Operations troops were killed and over 70 wounded in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, a place that

few Americans had heard of.

A daring daylight raid into the middle of the city ended with a downed helicopter and frantic attempts to rescue the crew, one of whom was captured by the Somali militia and held for weeks. In the words of one historian, “Covered in bloody detail by foreign TV crews, the battle felt like a defeat.”4 The American death toll could have been much higher, but the political fallout still forced the United States to abandon the mission in Somalia within a few months. While it did not attract the public hue and cry seen after the Dahlgren papers were published, the Battle of Mogadishu would result in a U.S. military that is still wary of similar high-risk missions.

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).

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

30

Defeating Robert E. Lee’s army was only one of the challenges facing Ulysses S. Grant in 1864.

Just as crucial was ensuring President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection.

BY B RO O K S D . S I M P S O N

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Campaign Promıse

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That came as a relief to Ulysses S. Grant, who had thought that the Confederates, aware that many of Grant’s men had gone home to vote in the presidential election, might seize the opportunity to attack Union lines outside Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia.1 And so the general waited throughout the day, wondering about what would happen at the ballot box.

The result would be the voters’ verdict not only on Abraham Lincoln’s presidency but also on Grant’s performance as general-in-chief. ¶ It had been precisely eight months since Grant had arrived in Washington to assume command of the armies of the United States. In years to come, critics of his 1864 campaigns would claim that Lincoln had given him a free hand and limitless resources with which to crush the Confederacy in what turned out to be a grinding war of attrition marked by less than distinguished generalship.

Victory, when it came, was won by others. There was just enough truth in this portrayal to make it persuasive as well as pervasive, for neither the Overland Campaign in May and June nor the ensuing siege of Richmond and Petersburg was a masterpiece of the operational art. And yet more informed observers knew that Grant had overcome obstacles that might have deterred a lesser man. It was his ability to persevere despite limitations and setbacks that marked the campaigns of 1864, which resulted in Union victory on the battlefield and at the polls.

Grant had not been eager to come east. In 1863 he had been glad to see an attempt to name him as George G. Meade’s replacement in command of the Army of the Potomac fizzle. He knew the capabilities of the officers and men in his command, he explained, but if he went east he would be thrust into an unfamiliar setting. It was not until he came to Washington in March 1864 that he decided to remain in the eastern theater, in part to block the political meddling that characterized life in the Army of the Potomac. Generals and politicians conversed freely about matters, while the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Congress’ means of overseeing military operations (often with political ends in mind), pried into military affairs, encouraging generals to make their cases for themselves and against others. Grant arrived in the capital just as the committee was second-guessing Meade’s generalship at Gettysburg. Having experienced his share of political intrigue in the West, Grant preferred to concentrate on the enemy in his front rather than worry about taking fire from the rear. No sooner had he assumed command than he ordered all correspondence on military matters to remain within army channels.2

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY

Things were quiet at City Point, Virginia, on November 8, 1864.

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Army of the Potomac commander George Gordon Meade (fourth from right) and his staff in March 1864, the month that newly appointed general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant arrived in Virginia from the West. Grant’s decision to remain in the eastern theater was partly an attempt to stay ahead of political second-guessing.

Grant was also smart enough to realize that as general-in-chief he would not have a free hand in planning campaigns. Back in January he had proposed an offensive into North Carolina, where an invading force would rip apart the Confederate rail net, emancipate thousands of slaves, and promote war weariness and resurgent unionism in the state. However, he learned that Henry W. Halleck, then general-inchief, would have nothing to do with any plan that did not include a major overland thrust in Virginia against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia—and certainly nothing that looked like a return to George B. McClellan’s failed campaign along the James River in 1862. That Grant offered his plan in part to force Lee out of his home state, where he had fought so well, escaped Halleck’s notice, as did the fact that Halleck’s

claims that the Union lacked the manpower to undertake Grant’s plan were belied by the number of men put into action in the spring of 1864.3 Grant came to understand that political as well as military considerations required him to confront Lee in Virginia south of the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, where Lee had driven back the Yankees at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and deterred an attack at Mine Run. He adjusted his plans accordingly.

While his intentions in the western theater remained the same—the capture of Mobile, Alabama, and a two-pronged advance upon Atlanta—in the east he devised a campaign composed of multiple thrusts designed to pin Lee in place while threatening Richmond and hacking away at Confederate logistics in the Shenandoah Valley and southwest Virginia. “So far as practicable,”

he told Meade, “all the Armies are to move together and towards one common center.”4 Even then, however, he was not to get his own way, for he had to deal with several generals, Lincoln appointees from early in the war who owed their stars to their supposed political influence, including Nathaniel P. Banks, Franz Sigel, and Benjamin F. Butler. Grant would have to find jobs for each of them. In the campaign that followed, each of these generals muffed their assignments, hampering Lincoln’s bid for reelection. Only when it came to his old command in the West did Grant prevail, with the appointment of William T. Sherman as his replacement in charge of three armies in northwest Georgia. Sherman would undertake the campaign Grant had once envisioned as his own, pressing southward toward Atlanta while seeking to defeat Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee.

Make no mistake about it: Ballots and bayonets were intertwined in 1864, with popular support for the war at stake in both the Union and the Confederacy. Grant’s assignment was deceptively simple. If he could not defeat the Confederate forces in the field outright, then he needed to at least make enough progress to convince a majority of northern voters to endorse Lincoln’s bid for a second term. Time was of the essence: The sooner he could achieve victory, the better. Moreover, Grant labored under tremendous expectations that, as savior of the Union, he would quickly dispose of Lee through a decisive battlefield triumph.

There was one great obstacle to Grant’s plan: the Army of the Potomac. Its men had seen generals come and go, each one promising victory and most suffering defeat or displacement. People questioned whether the army’s valiant victory at Gettysburg had been incomplete, for in the spring of 1864 it found itself a short distance west of where

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would drain Lee’s manpower by the time they met in battle south of the Rapidan at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. Instead, he learned that Union failures elsewhere allowed Lee to receive reinforcements and continue what was turning into a bloody struggle of attrition. Nor did Grant find the Army of the Potomac (or Burnside’s corps) responsive to his touch, although at times he expected his generals to do too much too quickly. Reports of Sherman’s success in Georgia were tempered by the missed opportunities.

By the third week of May, the general who had pledged “to fight it out

on this line if it takes all summer” at Spotsylvania was moving repeatedly around Lee’s right flank toward the outskirts of Richmond. As the two armies confronted each other again along the North Anna River, Grant placed Burnside under Meade’s command, ridding himself of one unnecessary obstacle. However, frustrations continued to mount. At the beginning of June Grant thought he was in place to deliver a telling blow at Cold Harbor, just east of the Confederate capital. Instead, the June 3 assault met with disaster, although the impact of the costly setback has grown in the retelling.

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it had been 12 months earlier, with little more than tens of thousands of casualties to show for it. Of the army’s three-year men recruited in the spring of 1861, just over half had declined to re-enlist for another three years, and they looked forward to going home. Conscripts, recruits, and substitutes could not make up in quality or quantity the manpower about to be lost, and it was reasonable to assume that with mere weeks left in their enlistments, many soldiers might think twice about giving their all to the cause one last time. Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps, which commenced the campaign as a separate command directly under Grant’s supervision, contained a division of newly enlisted AfricanAmerican soldiers, but these raw recruits would not see front-line service for months, as commanders pondered whether they could trust them in battle. Even Grant, who should have known better from his previous experience with black soldiers in the Mississippi Valley, was not quite color-blind.

Still, Grant was optimistic that he would bring Lee to decisive battle that spring, although he understood that in the end he might find himself compelled to cross the James River and threaten both Lee and Richmond from the south.5 To him, the notion of either going after Lee or targeting Richmond, as if these objectives were mutually exclusive, made little sense, for Lee was committed to defending his capital, in part to maintain his logistical links with the Confederate heartland.

Take Richmond, and Lee was in trouble; defeat Lee decisively, and Richmond would be in danger.

Within the first month of campaigning, however, Grant’s plan unraveled. The offensive against Mobile was put on hold while Banks invaded central Louisiana and came close to losing his command along the Red River. Sigel bungled his assignment in the Shenandoah Valley, while Butler’s Army of the James failed to seize the opportunity to threaten Richmond and its sister city to the south, Petersburg. Grant had expected that these thrusts

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greater sacrifice of human life than I am willing to make all cannot be accomplished that I had designed outside the city,” he admitted.6 The general had honored the president’s preference to confront Lee in central Virginia, and it was now time to return to the concept Grant had broached at the beginning of the year: going south of Richmond to sever its logistical links to the Confederate heartland. As he explained to Halleck, “My idea from the start has been to beat Lee’s Army, if possible, North of Richmond, then after destroying his lines of communication North of the James river to transfer the Army to the South side and besiege Lee in Richmond, or follow him South if he should retreat.”7 With that in mind he ordered Philip Sheridan to sweep north of Richmond to break up its rail connections with central and northern Virginia. David Hunter would make his way south through the Shenandoah Valley, take Lynchburg, unite with Sheridan, and then join the Army of the Potomac.

Once more things did not work out as planned. Sheridan’s raid was Grant (seated under the trees at left) gathers with his generals on May 21, 1864, to consider their next move after failing to defeat Robert E. Lee’s army at Spotsylvania. To his frustration, Grant had not found the Army of the Potomac responsive to his touch during the initial phase of the Overland Campaign.

Lost in the tale was evidence that Meade and his corps commanders mismanaged the operation, and that his officers and men were worn out by a month of combat. The repulse convinced Grant that nothing more could be done north of the James River. Going by his right flank north of Richmond would simply separate Meade’s and Butler’s armies while failing to threaten Confederate logistics and giving an unwanted appearance of retreat. Yet staying east of Richmond would achieve little.

Lee was now firmly entrenched, and there would be no repetition of the June 3 frontal assault. “[W]ithout a

cut short when Confederate cavalry blocked his progress at Trevilian Station. He was unable to tear up the railroad or link up with Hunter, who was beaten back by Jubal Early at Lynchburg on June 17. Most important, although Grant had stolen a march on Lee in crossing the James, initial efforts to take lightly defended Petersburg failed. Some of this was due to bungling among the generals, including Grant, but after 40 days of near-continuous combat and heavy losses, the Army of the Potomac was also showing serious signs of wear and exhaustion, with many veterans thinking only of making it home safely upon the expiration of their enlistments. There was nothing left to do but entrench and commence siege operations, a process Grant acknowledged would prove to be “tedious.”

He decided to concentrate all his efforts against the two main Confederate field armies.8 He had full faith in Sherman’s ability to make progress.

As for Richmond, as he told his wife, “The task is a big one and has to be performed by some one.”9 It had indeed become quite a task. When Lincoln visited his commander, seeking reassurance, Grant provided it, telling the president, “You will never hear of me farther from Richmond than now, till I have taken it. I am just as sure of going into Richmond as I am of any future event. It may take a long summer day, but I will go in.” Pleased, the president nevertheless expressed the hope “that all may be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible.”10 Long casualty lists disheartened voters; so did the impression that nothing was being achieved.

Grant addressed continued friction among his generals. He dissuaded Meade from securing Gouverneur K. Warren’s removal; placated Meade, Burnside, and Winfield Scott Hancock when those generals grew irritated with critical newspaper reports; and struggled to reassign Benjamin Butler to a desk job. The orders framed by Halleck to secure Butler’s reassignment botched matters, and in the end Grant was compelled to relieve William F. Smith after the latter’s criticisms of his peers proved to be too much to bear. It was not a good time to take on Butler: Lincoln had just vetoed a congressional plan for Reconstruction, the Wade-Davis Bill, on the heels of accepting the resignation of Radical favorite Salmon P. Chase from his cabinet. Best to leave things be with Butler under such circumstances. Besides, Grant found Meade’s temper a challenge to handle. If he was chafing under Grant’s supervision and snapping at his subordinates, perhaps he would be happier somewhere else. Maybe Grant should have taken a subordinate’s advice to let staff officer Ely S. Parker, a Seneca chief, go after several generals with a scalping knife just to send a message.11 Besides, there were the Confederates to consider. After defeating Hunter, Jubal Early headed north,

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unmolested. This was partly due to the confused state of affairs in Washington. “Gen Halleck will not give orders except as he receives them,” Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana informed Grant. Nor would Lincoln, he went on, “and until you direct positively and explicitly what is to be done everything will go on in the deplorable and fatal way in which it has gone on for the past week.”14 Indeed, rumor had it that Halleck had crumbled in the face of crisis and had taken to the bottle for relief.15 It seemed that no one was in charge, and something had to be done.

If Early’s raid and the friction between his subordinates were bothersome, Grant still believed that on the whole his plan had already achieved much. The two major Confederate armies were now pinned down at Richmond and Atlanta. The Confederates were running out of men.

“If the rebellion is not perfectly and thoroughly crushed,” he concluded, “it will be the fault and through the weakness of the people North. Be of good cheer and rest assured that all

will come out right.”16 The general had identified the chief obstacle to Union success.

With the election of 1864 approaching, it was essential to convince voters that the war was progressing toward a triumphant climax. Yet it was the unrealistic expectations for the past spring that most hampered Grant’s current progress. The public had assumed that he would triumph in one swift decisive blow. No one was prepared for the lengthy casualty lists and slow if steady advances against enemy strongholds. Early’s raid had proven an embarrassment, although the panic was short-lived.

If Grant could straighten out his subordinates, rectify the confused command situation around Washington, and continue to keep the pressure on the Confederates across the board, sooner or later he would achieve a breakthrough—perhaps not in Virginia, but somewhere. By mid-July he was contemplating securing his position in front of Richmond and Petersburg to enable him to reinforce other fronts.17

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

crossing the Potomac in early July.

His target was Washington, D.C. At first surprised by Early’s advance, Grant soon saw in it an opportunity to catch the enemy forces outside entrenchments and “crush out and destroy” them.12 He diverted to Washington reinforcements intended for him and sent along a corps from the Army of the Potomac to head off Early. He decided not to go to Washington himself, although Lincoln asked him to consider coming; “[I]t would have a bad effect for me to leave here,” he told the president.13 Doubtless he was right. The northern public would see Early as an even more serious threat should Grant need to direct matters in person, and it would have been difficult for Grant to leave the Richmond-Petersburg front while his commanders were bickering.

The reinforcements did block Early’s path to Washington, but the opportunity Grant glimpsed for battle outside fortifications slipped away when the Confederates made their way back across the Potomac

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attack despite his doubts about their ability to conduct offensive operations or to work together. In this case delegation had led to disaster.

More bad news followed. Confederate forces dashed across the Potomac once more, with commanders demanding that northern townspeople pay tribute or face the destruction of their towns. The latter fate befell Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., was in a confused state of affairs in the summer of 1864, partly due to panic about Confederate general Jubal Early’s July raid toward the capital. Opposite: Union troops at Fort Stevens, part of the force that prevented Early from entering the city.

Left: Lincoln as he appeared in February 1864, nine months before the presidential election.

Chief among his concerns was the progress of William T. Sherman. Although Sherman had done a fine job of maneuvering Joseph E. Johnston’s army out of one defensive position after another, his efforts to bring the Confederates to decisive battle had failed, and at Kennesaw Mountain on June 27 he had suffered a serious setback. Still, by mid-July Sherman was approaching the outskirts of Atlanta. Alarmed that Johnston might go so far as to abandon the vital city altogether, Jefferson Davis replaced him with John Bell Hood, who immediately moved to contest Sherman’s advance. In a series of battles around Atlanta between July 20 and July 28, the Confederates did little more than keep Sherman out of the city for the time being, and even that came at significant cost. Nevertheless, by month’s end Sherman’s situation resembled Grant’s, albeit without the long casualty list. Both generals were confronting an entrenched enemy protecting a city.

It promised to be a long, hot summer. Anticipating a request from

Grant for additional manpower, Lincoln issued a call for 300,000 more men. That was two months after the president had held back a similar call, embarrassed that several newspapers had published a fraudulent proclamation claiming that more men were needed in the wake of military disasters. To issue a call for new recruits then would have appeared to confirm the cry for help.

But now those men were needed, regardless of appearances. By month’s end, however, matters looked dim indeed. At the end of July, Grant launched another offensive. Union forces attacked north of the James, but were soon checked, and an attack against Petersburg, initiated by the explosion of a mine under Confederate lines, proved an embarrassing disaster. “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war,” he told Halleck. “Such opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.”18 Part of the blame, however, rested on his shoulders for allowing Meade and Burnside to manage the

on the same day as the Union defeat south of Petersburg. Coming on top of Early’s raid against Washington and Sherman being stalled outside Atlanta, these setbacks dimmed prospects for military victory and bolstered Democratic criticism of the war effort. Spring’s promise of victory had dissolved into a frustrating summer stalemate.

It was time for Grant to do something. On July 31 he travelled to Hampton Roads to meet once more with Lincoln. Although he was disappointed that he could not bring good news from the front, Grant impressed the president with the need to reorganize his command structure. The president, however, had his own ideas. He set aside Grant’s request to place the forces around Washington under either Meade or William B. Franklin, who had been Grant’s West Point classmate and who impressed Grant far more than his actual performance on the field seemed to merit. In turn the two men discussed, then dismissed, the idea of directing none other than George B. McClellan to take charge of matters around the capital.

At last the president and the general hit upon a solution. Feisty Phil Sheridan would take the field in David Hunter’s department. Sheridan, Grant told Halleck, was “to put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.”19 Once Sheridan cleared the valley, he

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will peg away, however, and end this matter, if our people at home will be but true to themselves.” Yet it was the wavering of popular support at home that was the problem.23 Frustrated with his inability to work with Halleck, Grant proposed transferring him to the Pacific Coast, a request that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton deflected.24 Perhaps Halleck himself had inspired the request when he suggested to Grant that it might be time to cease offensive operations (and perhaps abandon altogether his stranglehold on Richmond and Petersburg) in favor of dispatching troops northward, where they might be needed should rumors of civil unrest back home materialize. Grant rejected the idea outright, saying that northern governors could mobilize local militia to keep the peace. Giving up his campaign against Lee would leave Sherman vulnerable. Lincoln endorsed staying where he was when he returned Grant’s telegram: “Hold on with a bull-dog grip, and chew & choke, as much as possible.”25 The response cheered Grant, who observed that Lincoln had more backbone than any of his advisers.

This was truer than he knew, for at the same time Lincoln was resisting

William T. Sherman’s stalled advance against Atlanta, coupled with the burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, by Rebel forces at the end of July, served to further dim Union prospects for military victory in 1864. Right: Civilians assess the damage done to Main Street in Chambersburg shortly after the Confederate assault.

those who wanted him to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation and accept peace and reunion while tolerating slavery’s preservation. Such proposals reflected a belief that support for Lincoln was eroding every day without battlefield success. Grant was well aware of the flagging nature of morale in the North. He reminded visitors to headquarters of the Confederates’ dwindling troops and assured them “that all we want now to insure an early restoration of the Union is a determined unity of sentiment North…. A man lost by them cannot be replaced. They have robbed the cradle and the grave equally to get

their present force…. [T]he end is visible if we will but be true to ourselves.” Only dissent in the North kept hope alive in the Confederacy, where all eyes were looking toward that fall’s presidential contest. “They have many hopes from its effects.

They hope a counter revolution.

They hope the election of the peace candidate…. [T]hey hope something to turn up.”26 Grant stood firm amid the waning public support. Although many were

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should target the Virginia Central Railroad, severing yet another of Lee’s supply links.

It did not take long to encounter problems. Halleck raised objections and proposed several alternatives.

Grant, tired of all the wrangling, gave way at first, but was jolted back into action by a strongly worded telegram from Lincoln. The president agreed with Grant’s original instructions, but no one seemed willing to implement them: “[D]iscover if you can, that there is any idea in the head of anyone here, of ‘putting our army South of the enemy’ or of [‘]following him to the death’ in any direction. I repeat to you it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour, and force it.”20 Grant, who had fallen ill (an aide speculated it was in reaction to this series of setbacks, especially the failed Petersburg assault), responded immediately.21 He hurried up to Washington, saw Lincoln briefly, and then made his way out to Monocacy, Maryland. There he learned that Hunter had no interest in a desk command, opening the way to appoint Sheridan to take charge of the newly created military division with orders to defeat Early and strip the Shenandoah Valley of its resources.

Returning to City Point on August 9, Grant was fortunate that he was not a victim when an ordnance boat exploded, rocking the docks along the James River. During the next several weeks the general waited for word of successes elsewhere, convinced that he could no longer rely on a decisive triumph on his front.

At least he could make sure that Lee did not send more men to either the Shenandoah Valley or Atlanta.22 News of Admiral David G. Farragut’s triumph at Mobile Bay on August 5 did little to raise spirits. In addition, Grant was disappointed in his own failure to achieve more in Virginia. “I regret not having made better progress in whipping out the rebellion,” he told childhood friend Daniel Ammen, now a commander in the navy, “but feel conscious of having done the best I know how.” The army had fought hard, but it had failed to crush the Confederates. Nevertheless, “we

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alarmed by stories of deprivation, disease, and death among Union soldiers held captive in Confederate prisons, the general refused to reopen prisoner exchanges. “It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them but it is humanity to those left in the ranks to fight our battles,” he explained to Benjamin F. Butler. “Every man released, on parole or otherwise, becomes an active soldier against us at once either directly or indirect-

ly.” That meant that “we will have to fight on until the whole South is exterminated.”27 He knew that such a decision appeared heartless and inhumane, but he believed it would ultimately shorten the conflict.

Days after the Democratic Party nominated George B. McClellan for president upon a platform that declared the war a failure, the telegraph wires transmitted a different message. Finally able to move without fear that the foe might be reinforced,

on September 2 William T. Sherman’s men entered Atlanta. It was just the sort of battlefield triumph that brightened prospects in the minds of voters. True, Hood’s Confederates escaped to fight (and die) another day, but to a public acclimated to associating victory with the occupation of cities, even cities that had already lost their value as logistical centers (Sherman had seen to that by tearing up the railroads around Atlanta), the news was most welcome.

Sherman’s triumph meant the success of Grant’s plan. Where the Confederacy had given way was not nearly as important as the fact that it gave way somewhere. However, the commanding general knew that one could make too much of how well he and Sherman had coordinated operations. “Our movements were co-operative but after starting each have done all that we felt ourselves able to do,” he explained to his father.28 Before long he pressed Sherman to embark upon a new campaign. “We want to keep the enemy continually pressed to the end of the war,” he told his friend. “If we give him no peace whilst the war lasts the end cannot be distant.”29 Grant waited to hear how Sherman would respond.

Back came the roots of the concept known as the March to the Sea. Grant paused; he would have preferred that Sherman first deal with John Bell Hood’s battered Army of Tennessee. For weeks the generals exchanged ideas on the proposal.

Military triumph elsewhere vindicated Grant’s choice of a general to close out Jubal Early and secure the Shenandoah Valley. Sheridan had spent five weeks getting matters under control in his new command. By September some people were growing impatient. Unable to restrain himself, Lincoln asked Grant about reinforcing Sheridan to “enable him to make a strike,” although he added, “This is but a suggestion.”30 Grant understood, and he replied that he was planning to pay Sheridan a visit.31 At Harpers Ferry on September 17 Sheridan explained his plan, and Grant, satisfied, returned to City Point, where he soon heard that Sheridan had sent Early whirl-

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an eye on Confederate movements, convinced that the Rebels might do something to recoup their losses, perhaps by moving to oust Sherman from Atlanta.35 But Grant knew what was most important at the moment: Lincoln’s reelection. Aware of the approaching presidential contest, he endorsed the notion of soldiers voting in the field. After all, soldiers “have as much right to demand that their votes shall be counted … as those citizens, who remain at home; Nay more, for they have sacrificed more for their country.”36 News soon came that Republicans scored major victories in October elections in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio.

This was far from the doomsday scenario that Lincoln had envisioned just 10 days before the fall of Atlanta.

Grant also offered a powerful statement as to what the war to save the Union had now become.

After the September offensive outside Richmond, Robert E. Lee had requested a prisoner exchange.

Whether he was seeking to raise

once more an issue that left the Lincoln administration open to criticism is not known, but Lee’s request came in advance of the critical October elections. Grant was more than a match for his counterpart at playing politics. Any negotiations, he told Lee, would concern only prisoners captured during recent operations; moreover, as black soldiers were among those in Confederate hands, he inquired “if you propose delivering these men the same as white soldiers.”37 When Lee declined to include black soldiers in the exchange, citing Confederate policy, Grant responded that the United States government “is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.”38 In reminding Lee of the reason why prisoner exchanges had broken down, Grant was not unaware of how the system's collapse had affected Confederate manpower. He had pointed out several times that a resumption of exchanges would favor the Confederacy by allowing it to replenish its ranks. However,

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)

ing through Winchester on September 19.32 Elated, Grant declared, “I hope Sheridan will wipe out all the stain the Valley of the Shenandoah has been to us heretofore before he gets through.”33 Within a few days Grant had even more cause to smile: Sheridan followed up his victory at Winchester with one at Fisher’s Hill, dealing another blow to Early’s rapidly retreating forces. At long last the valley seemed secure.

Still, Grant was not satisfied. In late September he launched an offensive against Richmond and Petersburg, although he warned his generals to refrain from costly frontal assaults against fortified positions. After the triumphs at Atlanta, Winchester, and Fisher’s Hill, there was no reason to undertake an offensive that might result in disaster and depress morale at home. Although he entertained hopes that Richmond would fall, he would take what he could get, going so far as to assure an anxious Lincoln that the offensive was intended only to ensure that Lee could not reinforce Early.34 He kept

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Victories by William T. Sherman in Atlanta and Philip Sheridan (opposite page) against Jubal Early (below) in the Shenandoah Valley brightened northern morale—and Lincoln’s prospects for reelection—considerably. Left: Sheridan’s men pursue Early’s Confederates in this sketch by Alfred R. Waud.

by forcing Lee to restate Confederate policy, Grant made sure that everyone understood the reason why exchanges were no longer taking place—and that they could not take place until the Confederacy relented on its policy concerning formerly enslaved black Union prisoners of war.

The issue emerged again a few weeks later in the wake of the October elections. Grant learned that Lee was putting black prisoners of war to work on Confederate fortifications within range of Union fire. He approved Benjamin F. Butler’s decision to employ Confederate prisoners of war in the same fashion in retaliation. Even as he negotiated with Lee about providing relief supplies to prisoners on both sides, he waited until Lee withdrew the laboring prisoners before agreeing to do the same with the Confederate prisoners under Butler’s control. Again Lee defended Confederate policy;

once more Grant reminded Lee that it was “my duty to protect all persons received into the Army of the United States, regardless of color or Nationality.” To Grant it was the color of the uniform—and not the color of the person wearing it— that mattered.39 Within hours of this exchange, news of a major battle at Cedar Creek gave Grant more cause to celebrate. Although surprised by a dawn attack, Union forces rallied, in part due to Sheridan’s return from Washington, and that afternoon launched a counterattack that shattered the Confederate line. Coming in the wake of Atlanta and Winchester, Cedar Creek provided a dramatic reminder that the tide had turned.

Grant intended to keep the pressure on the Confederates. Although he had hoped that Sherman would take care of Hood’s army after Atlanta, he soon realized that the job

was easier said than done. Moreover, demands in other theaters made it impossible for Grant to organize an expedition to help Sherman advance through Georgia.

Thus he came to agree with Sherman’s proposition to abandon Atlanta and—after leaving George H. Thomas with sufficient force to keep an eye on Hood—cut through Georgia, wreaking havoc upon Confederate supplies and the southern civilian psyche as he marched toward the Atlantic coast at Savannah. Having approved the plan, he hastened to reassure a worried Lincoln that Sherman would succeed. Sherman would have to bow to political reality, however: He could not commence marching until after election day. There was no reason to risk defeat at this late hour.

As October drew to a close Grant launched a final offensive against Richmond and Petersburg. Once more he curtailed the risk of a bloody defeat by reminding his commanders not to assault entrenched positions.40 Once more the gains were not what he might have hoped, but no matter. At a time when offensive operations required manpower, he approved a request from Stanton to furlough several regiments from Delaware so that the men could go home and vote in the November contest. That was a battle the Union needed to win.41 It is true that between June and November 1864 Grant failed to take Richmond; he also failed to take Petersburg, which would have led to Richmond’s fall. Although he had stretched Confederate lines and severed several supply routes, as the fall chill came he was still confronting Lee and conducting siege operations. “I will work this thing out all right yet,” he assured his wife.42 Yet the truth is that he had still accomplished much. He had pinned Lee against his capital and deprived him of the chance to re} CONT. ON P. 76

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The Radicals’ War

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U.S. Senators Benjamin Franklin Wade (opposite) and Zachariah Chandler, original members of and driving forces behind the congressional oversight committee known as the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

The story of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, the Republican-led congressional oversight body that hounded generals, pressured the president, and bore witness to atrocities.

BY F E RGUS M . B O R D E W I C H

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Wade and Chandler couldn’t stop the panic. They too were eventually swept back toward Washington in the demoralized throng. However, they would soon convert their disgust at the Federal debacle into a legislative weapon to drive forward the Union war effort. Over the next four years, their righteous rage would test constitutional doctrine, strain relations between Congress and the president, end the careers of prominent military officers in the Union army, and leave a legacy that stretched

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

After a day’s fighting at Bull Run, the Union army collapsed. Soldiers threw away their packs and guns and raced off on mules, in commandeered ambulances, or on foot, ignoring any shocked officers who were still left to give orders. Among the onlookers were tourists from Washington, who had come expecting to see the Rebels trounced, as well as several appalled members of Congress. One of them, Ohio Senator Benjamin Franklin Wade, jumped out of his carriage, and with the help of his friend Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, pushed it over to form a barrier, bellowing at the fleeing soldiers, “Boys, let’s stop this damned runaway!”1

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

On July 21, 1861, the unımaginable happened.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

The widespread alarm that gripped Washington after two early Union defeats—at Bull Run in July 1861 (depicted here) and three months later at Ball’s Bluff (where senator turned general Edward Baker, above right, was killed)—helped spur the creation of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

forward to the Second World War. Most northerners, and their congressmen, had expected the Union—with its immense resources and advantages in manpower—to overwhelm the South in a matter of weeks. No one had been prepared for a defeat, much less one on this scale, with nearly 3,000 Federals killed, wounded, or missing. (The Confederates lost about two-thirds as many.) In the months that followed Bull Run, Union and Confederate troops faced each other warily

across the Potomac. In the North, public frustration at the army’s inactivity mounted. At last, on October 21, 2,000 Union troops crossed the Potomac River and attacked a Confederate camp near Ball’s Bluff, 38 miles up the Potomac from Washington. The result was another debacle. Half the Union force was killed, wounded, or captured. Among the dead was Senator Edward Baker of Oregon, a friend of President Abraham Lincoln and the only sitting U.S. senator ever killed in battle.

Ball’s Bluff had no military significance; it was little more than a skirmish measured against the prodigious bloodletting to come.

Politically, however, its impact was momentous. Along with the military passivity of the previous months, this second defeat spurred widespread fears among members of Congress, the press, and the public that the army was infiltrated with southern sympathizers and that high-ranking officers had traitorously failed to do their duty at the cost of lives.

It is axiomatic that in wartime, Americans—and citizens of other nations as well—hunt for traitors in their own ranks. One needs only to think of the harassment of German Americans during World War I and Japanese Americans during World War II, not to mention the persistent hostility to Muslim Americans since 9/11. During the early months of the Civil War, Yankees had plenty of reasons for such anxiety. “Copperhead” southern sympathizers were numerous, especially in the Midwest. Democratic newspapers ranted against the Union war effort, and encouraged their readers to resist it. Hundreds of U.S. Army officers had defected to the Confederacy, and many of those who remained with the Union were conservative Democrats with southern family connections. When Union generals seemed to shy from battle, it stoked northern suspicions, sometimes to the point of paranoia.

On December 5, 1861, Chandler— a former Detroit mayor, dry goods merchant, and Underground Railroad activist—called for the creation of a congressional committee to investigate the catastrophes at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff. Radical Republicans such as Chandler, who were defined by their commitment to the immediate emancipation of slaves, civil rights for all African Americans, and a so-called “hard war” policy that aimed to crush southern resistance, not just repel thrusts by Confederate armies, were a minority in their own party. However, with the departure for the Confederacy of every southern senator and congressman except Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, their leverage sharply increased. By late 1861, Republicans controlled the Senate by more than two to Edward Baker one, holding 31 of that body’s 44 occupied seats, to the Democrats’ 13. There was no doubt that Chandler would get his committee, but the debate was sharp, as senators advanced arguments that still resonate today.

Republican Senator Lafayette Foster of Connecticut opposed any investigation of the army, asserting that war was best left to the generals, even when their actions seemed incompetent to civilians. “I believe in letting the military authorities manage the Army. If they manage it badly we shall make a bad matter worse by tampering and interfering,” Foster protested.2 In reply, William P. Fessenden of Maine declared that Congress’ duty to the voters required it to monitor how military appropriations were spent, and to investigate the army’s failures if it was not willing to investigate itself. “What are we to do?” he demanded. “Sit idle during all the period that this war is to progress; or are we manfully to do our duty, and when the occasion presents itself in the progress of the war, inquire in what manner it is conducted?”3 On December 10, Chandler’s

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Union soldiers stand at attention outside the U.S. Capitol in 1861. By the time the Joint Committee began to meet there toward the end of the year, the building had become as much army camp as seat of government.

almost every major Union military figure, including George McClellan, Henry Halleck, Ulysses Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, David Porter, and many others, hundreds in all. Not surprisingly, the committee irritated military men by asking embarrassing questions. Why, for instance, had the Rebels been allowed to blockade the Potomac River below Washington in the autumn of 1861? How feasible was it to move an army overland into eastern Tennessee, and by what route? Why had McClellan advanced so slowly on Richmond during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862? Had the Army of

the Potomac’s III Corps been needlessly put at risk during the Battle of Gettysburg? Could the Confederate army have been destroyed in the days after that battle, and why wasn’t it?

The committee also considered many other subjects: alleged Confederate atrocities, the abuse of Union prisoners, dishonest military contractors, the development of turreted ironclad ships, cannon manufacturing, and even the slaughter of friendly Cheyenne Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado. From the beginning, the committee championed the enrollment of black troops into the Union army, an initiative that

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resolution was passed, creating the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. The bill stipulated that the committee would be composed of five Republicans and two Democrats, reflecting the balance of power in Congress. It gave the committee a free-ranging mandate to examine all aspects of the conflict, one that the committee would exercise with vigor for the next three and a half years.

None of the committee members had a military background, a shortcoming even for those who became, as most did, diligent students of strategy and tactics. Its chairman, “Bluff Ben” Wade, was regarded by friends and foes alike as one of the most energetic personalities in the Senate: He was square-built, profane of tongue, and utterly committed to both the war effort and the liberation of the South’s slaves. In an era of intense religiosity, he was an outspoken freethinker. His enemies called him just about everything from a demagogue and “political scavenger” to a “Robespierre” and vulgarian.4 At the end of 1861, the Capitol was as much army camp as seat of government. Rooms had been turned into barracks and sometimes hospitals.

(Zouaves in red pantaloons were once seen swinging from ropes hung from a cornice of the dome.) Building materials had been seized to erect barricades.

Mountains of bacon and hams were dumped on the marble floors, and 14 roaring ovens beneath the west terrace baked a thousand loaves of bread daily. “The Senate Chamber is alive with lice; it makes my head itch to think of it,” Capitol architect Thomas Walter complained. “The building is like one grand water closet—every hold and every corner is defiled.”5 It was in this atmosphere that the Joint Committee met. It held 272 sessions in all (in a room off the nowfamous Brumidi Corridors, where the Italian artist Constantino Brumidi worked on his frescoes as the committee interrogated witnesses a few yards away) and would eventually produce some 2,000 pages of reports, probing in often remarkable detail the practice of generalship from First Bull Run in 1861 to Fort Fisher in 1865. It would interview

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voking, and occasionally insulting him. It was particularly impatient with his conciliatory attitude toward the South, his reluctance to embrace a harsh war policy, and his gradualist approach to equality for blacks. Wade at one point dismissed Lincoln’s leadership as a “rose-water war.”7 He later

“ T H E S E N AT E C H A M B E R I S A L I V E W I T H L I C E ; I T M A K E S M Y H E A D I T C H T O T H I N K O F I T. T H E B U I L D I N G I S L I K E O N E G R A N D WAT E R C L O S E T — E V E RY H O L D A N D E V E RY C O R N E R I S D E F I L E D.” T H O M A S W A LT E R , C A P I T O L A R C H I T E C T

called for total war, including harsh measures against the South until “there is no source from which they can derive revenue or means for the maintenance of the war, except by depriving the people of their property, day after day, year after year, so long as the war shall continue, thus reducing them to poverty and want.”8 (In 1864, Lincoln’s veto of postwar reconstruction measures advocated by the Radicals would so incense them that for several months they considered replacing Lincoln at the head of the Republican ticket with either Benjamin Butler or John C. Fremont.)

HE COMMITTEE issued its first report on April 3, 1863.

Its investigation of the Ball’s Bluff debacle, in particular its targeting of General Charles P. Stone, gave rise to accusations of witch-hunting. The Massachusettsborn Stone was a Democrat and career army officer who in the first weeks of the war had been lionized for successfully organizing Washington’s defenses. As a division commander, he had ordered the crossing of the Potomac River at Ball’s Bluff.

The committee’s investigation revealed shocking ineptitude and miscommunication among a number of senior officers, including Stone. It also found, among other things, that only three leaky boats were on hand to transport the 2,000 Federal troops across the river, which virtually guaranteed that they would be trapped and butchered on

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T

conservative officers long resisted.

The committee operated with remarkable independence. Its relations with President Lincoln were often fraught. Almost from its inception, Lincoln’s initial reluctance to challenge his generals—particularly the battle-averse George B. McClellan—spurred the committee to demand more forceful action. Indiana Republican George W. Julian later recalled a meeting with Lincoln and members of his cabinet in early 1862: “The most striking fact revealed by the discussion was that neither the president nor his advisors seemed to have any definite

information respecting the management of the war, or the failure of our forces to make any forward movement. We were greatly surprised to learn that Mr. Lincoln himself did not think he had any right to know.”6 Lincoln was often annoyed by the committee’s pressure, but in keeping with an era of legislative dominance that had existed since the republic’s founding, he never refused to cooperate with it and regularly complied with its requests for meetings and information.

Almost from its inception, the committee leaned hard against the president, nudging, prodding, pro-

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to take charge of the Army of the Potomac following two small victories in western Virginia. After Bull Run, anyone who could win a battle looked like a potential savior; newspapers extravagantly dubbed him the “Young Napoleon.” He amassed troops around Washington and then marched, drilled, paraded, built forts, dug trenches—and then marched and drilled more. As month bled into month, he demanded more time and more troops, always pointing to overwhelming enemy numbers, when in fact their forces were often only a fraction of his own. When he finally crept a little farther into northern Virginia, its was revealed that the Confederate fortresses that McClellan had deemed to be impregnable were armed with only “Quaker guns”—wooden logs painted to look like cannon. No matter how hard Lincoln and the congressional Radicals pushed McClellan through the autumn of 1861 and the winter of 1862, he simply refused to move. Wrote George Julian, “It

seemed like a betrayal of the country itself to allow him to hold our grand armies for weeks and months in unexplained idleness, on the naked assumption of his superior wisdom.”10 At last, under intense political pressure, McClellan struck at the Confederate capital in May 1862 by landing his army on the peninsula that extends between the James and Rappahannock rivers, and then marching on Richmond from the southeast, entrenching virtually every mile of the way, apparently dreading an attack by the enemy. Despite a huge numerical advantage, McClellan was repeatedly outmaneuvered during the Seven Days Battles in June, and was forced to ignominiously re-embark his men for the North, having given up hope of driving back the Confederates, who were now led for the first time by Robert E. Lee. “This is called strategy!” Zachariah Chandler roared on the Senate floor. “One hundred and fifty-eight thousand men, ably handled, can

Union general Charles P. Stone, who commanded a division at Ball’s Bluff, was among the Joint Committee’s first investigative targets.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

the Virginia side.

Witnesses from various Union regiments told the committee that for weeks before the battle Stone had sent “packages” and letters across the river, personally visited with Rebel officers, permitted the enemy to erect fortifications when he could have prevented it, returned fugitive slaves to their masters, and cultivated the friendship of secessionists on the Maryland side of the river.

Lieutenant Philip J. Downey of the 2nd New York Infantry, for one, testified that he thought Stone “was more of a Secesh than anything else.”9 Stone himself, when he was called to testify, loftily blew off his interrogators, declaring, “If I had any plans, I should not wish to tell them, even to my aide-de-camp.” Stone’s commander, George McClellan, testified that some of the charges—mainly that Stone was well liked by the Confederates—had been corroborated by a refugee from Leesburg who said he had heard Rebel officers talking favorably about him. Stone was placed under house arrest and ultimately spent six months in a military prison. Although the charges against him were later dropped and he was restored to active service in 1864, his reputation never recovered.

As an example of character assassination, Stone’s treatment has rarely been equaled. Hearsay evidence was both solicited and accepted, and Wade made it clear that he did not consider the Fifth Amendment valid when it came to testimony before any congressional committee. Stone was never allowed to face his accusers, or to see their testimony until 1863. Ball’s Bluff demanded a scapegoat, and Stone was made to order.

By that time, however, Ball’s Bluff had been far eclipsed by the killing fields of Shiloh, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and many less famous but terrible battles. The committee’s first report also investigated those engagements and took direct aim at the man the committee deemed most responsible for the Army of the Potomac’s worst reverses: McClellan. The wealthy, arrogant, West Point-trained McClellan had been tapped in August 1861

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defeat any force the Confederates can raise; and that is the force that went down to the Peninsula. But, sir, it lay in ditches, digging, drinking rotten water, and eating bad food, and sleeping in the mud, until it became greatly reduced in numbers and, of those that were left, very many were injured in health.”11 In assessing the developments on the peninsula, the committee

Bull Run; for failing to crush Robert E. Lee’s army at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, and then for allowing Lee to escape across the Potomac after the engagement.

On the floor of Congress, George Julian further excoriated McClellan, declaring, “Every man who loved negro slavery better than his country, and would sooner see the Republic in ruins than the slaves set free, is

“IF I HAD ANY PLANS, I SHOULD NOT WISH TO TELL THEM, EVEN T O M Y A I D E - D E - C A M P.”

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

G E N E R A L C H A R L E S P. S T O N E I N H I S T E S T I M O N Y T O T H E J O I N T C O M M I T T E E

collected scathing criticism from McClellan’s subordinate officers.

The testimony delivered by General Joseph Hooker, who commanded a front-line division during the campaign, was typical.

Q: “To what do you attribute the failure of the Peninsula Campaign?”

A: “I do not hesitate to say that it is to be attributed to the want of generalship on the part of our commander.... General McClellan showed a great indisposition to go forward.”

Q: “Is it your judgment that you could have gone into Richmond then?”

A: “I think we could have moved right on, and got into Richmond by the second day after that battle [of Williamsburg] without another gun being fired.”12 Although Hooker was selfinterested—he had been removed from command of the Army of the Potomac and hoped to be restored to its leadership—he was also pretty much right.

The committee’s 1863 report, in the words of the Daily Pittsburgh Gazette, “utterly pulverized General McClellan,” blaming him for failing to advance into Virginia in the winter of 1861; for fumbling the Peninsula Campaign; for repeatedly exaggerating the numbers of the enemy; for failing to reinforce General John Pope in the summer of 1862, thus contributing to the Union defeat at Second

the zealous advocate and unflinching champion of McClellan.”13 After Antietam, McClellan was replaced as chief of the Army of the Potomac by IX Corps commander Ambrose Burnside, who considered himself unready and initially tried to decline the appointment. In December 1862, he proved his instincts correct by mismanaging the Battle of Fredericksburg, which cost the Union more than 12,000 casualties.

(Confederate casualties numbered 5,300.) Burnside was followed in January 1863 by I Corps commander Hooker, who was crushed in turn

by Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville in May 1863, resulting in another 18,000 Union casualties. (The Confederates lost about 13,000.) In June, Lee launched the Army of Northern Virginia northward to invade Pennsylvania. On the 28th, Hooker was abruptly removed from the command of the Army of the Potomac and replaced by the surprised V Corps commander, George G. Meade.

Meade, though a Democrat, was regarded as an apolitical professional.

Less than a week after his appointment, Meade led the army to victory at Gettysburg. The euphoria was brief: Despite Meade’s overwhelming numbers and his troops’ high morale, he failed to vigorously pursue Lee, who managed to escape to Virginia with his battered army. “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude

of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape,” Lincoln wrote to Meade on July 14 in a letter he never sent. “Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”14 So were the Radicals on the Joint Committee. The squandering of what had seemed like the longawaited destruction of Lee’s army now led to a repeat of George McClellan’s cautious tactics of 1861 and 1862.

From then on, Ben Wade and his colleagues, most of whom regarded the bombastic but battle-hungry Hooker’s dismissal as a mistake, believing that he would have pursued Lee aggressively after the battle, put Meade in the political hot seat and kept him there for the rest of the war.

The committee collected extensive testimony about Meade’s behavior before, during, and after Gettysburg. The hearings were dominated

by Daniel E. Sickles, one of the most colorful Union generals of the war, and exactly the sort of aggressive citizen-soldier that the committee liked. Though devoid of military experience, Sickles had raised a regiment through his Tammany Hall connections, and steadily ascended to brigade, division, and finally corps command, under Hooker and Meade.

Unfortunately in Sickles’ case, rank was not congruent with competence.

Sickles had nearly lost the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union on July 2, when he impulsively advanced his III Corps beyond the main Union line, leaving it dangerously exposed to Confederate attack. In the subsequent fighting, Sickles was severely wounded, resulting in the amputation of his leg. Despite his disability, and his costly misjudgment at Gettysburg, he was eager to return to service, and was furious when Meade declined to restore him to command of his corps later in 1863.

When called to testify before the Joint Committee in February 1864, Sickles declared that he “considered it a misfortune to the army” that Meade replaced Hooker in the first place.15 He also came close to claiming credit for the victory at Gettysburg, asserting that he had begged Meade to concentrate the army at Gettysburg, while Meade seemed

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afraid to confront Lee head-on. With better justification, he bluntly criticized Meade for failing to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia when the Confederates were trapped for several days with their backs against the flooding Potomac. “If we could whip them at Gettysburg, as we did, we could much more easily whip a running and demoralized army, seeking a retreat which was cut off by a swollen river,” he told the committee.16 What Meade had described as maneuver for topographical advantage during the months after Gettysburg, the committee characterized as a “retreat,” collecting testimony from disgruntled officers such as Abner Doubleday, whom Meade had declined to give corps command after Gettysburg; David Birney, who had briefly commanded the III Corps after Sickles was wounded, but was then required to yield it to William French; the Hooker loyalist Daniel Butterfield, whom Meade carried over as his chief of staff during the Gettysburg Campaign; and Alfred Pleasonton, who had commanded the army’s cavalry at Gettysburg, and was known to be unfriendly to Meade.

Pleasonton was exceptionally caustic: Q: “What effect is produced on the men by the constant shrinking from an engagement?”

A: “It discourages them very much.”

Q: “And the spirit of the commanding general usually diffuses itself through the whole army?”

A: “Yes, sir.”17 The committee struck hard at Meade again after the Battle of the Crater during the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in July 1864. After Ulysses S. Grant’s failure to capture the city and turn Lee’s flank in May, the opposing armies had settled into a stalemate. In an effort to break it, the colonel of a Pennsylvania regiment from that state’s coal mining districts proposed digging a mine under the Rebel fortifications, filling it with powder, and blowing a hole in the Confederate line so Union troops could pour through. Meade scoffed that it would never work and offered no logistical support. Burnside, from whose lines the mine would extend, embraced it, however. While the miners dug, Burnside drilled his African-American division to exploit

the anticipated breakthrough. Just before the mine was to be detonated, however, Meade ordered Burnside to replace the black division with a white one that had received no training for the assault. The mine blew an entire Confederate redoubt into the sky. But the assault was a disaster, with the Federals pouring into the crater and milling around in it until the Confederates regrouped, restored their line, and killed and captured the hapless Federals in droves. The Union lost nearly 4,000 men, the Confederates fewer than half that number.

The committee’s report flayed Meade. “[T]he cause of the disastrous result of the assault of the 30th of July last is mainly attributable to the fact that the plans and suggestions of the general [Burnside] who had devoted his attention for so long a time to the subject, who had carried to a successful completion the project of mining the enemy’s works, and who had carefully selected and drilled his troops for the purpose of securing whatever advantages might be attainable from the explosion of the mine, should have been so entirely disregarded by a general [Meade] who had evinced no faith

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

Radicals on the Joint Committee made Union general George Gordon Meade (pictured here) a particular target of their criticism. The Radicals blamed Meade, who assumed command of the Army of the Potomac shortly before the Battle of Gettysburg, for not aggressively pursuing Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia after the Union victory. Opposite page: General Daniel Sickles, vocal Meade critic and favorite of the Joint Committee.

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“ W H AT W E N E E D I S AC T I O N — I N S TA N T, D E C I S I V E , D E F I A N T AC T I O N — S C O U R G I N G FA I T H L E S S M E N F R O M P O W E R , S W E E P I N G AWAY O B S TAC L E S , A N D K I N D L I N G I N T H E P O P U L A R H E A R T T H E F I R E S O F A N E W C O U R AG E A N D H O P E .”

JOINT COMMITTEE MEMBER GEORGE JULIAN

in the successful prosecution of that work, had aided it by no countenance or open approval, and had assumed the entire direction and control only when it was completed, and the time had come for reaping any advantages that might be derived from it.”18 HE COMMITTEE consistently valued loyalty to Radical Republican principles, sometimes above actual fighting ability. While the committee worked to undermine McClellan, and made clear its unhappiness with Meade, it offered steady support for several generals whose performance on the battlefield was less than lustrous. Among these were John C. Fremont, Benjamin F. Butler, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph Hooker. While it is difficult to generalize about these men, they all shared a willingness to accept emancipation, a minority view in the military until fairly late in the war.

Members of the committee often waxed enthusiastic over their favored generals long after their limitations had become manifest, typically blaming their problems on cabals of Democratic officers within the army.

Zachariah Chandler, for instance, wrote to his wife that Hooker “would fight if he could have a chance but that he cannot have at present as the McClellan men in the Army are down upon him & they are today too powerful for him.”19 As late as 1863, George Julian was still calling Fremont “a man of genius and dauntless courage,” and suggesting him as a model for the rest of the army. The committee also favored officers, most notably Hooker, who deliberately fed the politicians’ romantic notion that élan and “dash” counted for more in battle than careful planning. As Julian put it, “What we need is action—instant, decisive, defiant action—scourging faithless men from power, sweeping away obstacles, and kindling in the popular

T

heart the fires of a new courage and hope.”20 On the other hand, Butler, one of the committee’s pet officers, was a shrewd politician, but hopeless when he actually plodded into the field. The only time the committee seriously undertook an investigation of one of his misadventures—his fumbled attempt to capture Fort Fisher, Georgia, in December 1864— he “left the committee not only convinced of his innocence in the Fort Fisher attack, but even impressed by his presumed military brilliance,” in the words of congressional historian Joan Doyle.21 Critics of the Joint Committee typically tended either to omit or to treat as an afterthought the members’ fierce, uncompromising commitment to the rights of African Americans. To the Radicals themselves, however, the destruction of slavery was not an ancillary concern but central to the war’s purpose. From the early months of the war, they worried that generals such as McClellan, who had no interest in black rights, would prevent or reverse the liberation of African Americans, or conspire with the defeated Confederates to strip them of their hard-won gains.

One of the committee’s most forceful reports, and by far the most chilling, details its investigation into the cold-blooded massacre of hundreds of unarmed Union soldiers, most of them black, at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, by Confederate forces under Nathan Bedford Forrest on April 12, 1864. Forrest, a dynamic cavalry commander and a prewar slave trader—he would later help establish the Ku Klux Klan—led a bold raid as far north

as Paducah, Kentucky, and continued to sow disorder as he returned south. Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi River, was poorly designed for defense from the land. It was occupied by about 550 men from two black regiments, the 6th U.S. Heavy Artillery and the 2nd U.S. Light Artillery, and a white Unionist regiment, the 13th Tennessee Cavalry. The garrison waged a spirited defense, but was quickly overwhelmed.

What followed was by far the worst war crime of the Civil War. Confederate forces had murdered black Union soldiers before, but nothing approached the scale of what happened at Fort Pillow. Shouts of “No quarter!” were heard as soon as the Confederates penetrated the fort. Soldiers attempting to surrender were shot, hacked with sabers, or beaten to death with rifle butts.

Wounded men were slaughtered indiscriminately where they lay.

Several were burned to death in huts. Others were thrown into pits with the dead and buried alive.22 Ben Wade and Massachusetts Representative Daniel Gooch of the Joint Committee traveled to Tennessee two weeks after the battle to interview survivors. Their observations still make painful reading: “We found evidences of this murder and cruelty still most painfully apparDaniel Sickles ent,” they reported.

“We saw bodies still unburied of some sick men who had been fleeing from the hospital and beaten down and brutally murdered, and their bodies left where they had fallen. We could still see the faces, hands and feet of men, white and black, pro-

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A

“A number of investigations were simply a waste of time, energy and resources,” wrote Tap, who further charged the committee with abandoning objectivity and failing to offer “practical advice” on how to avoid repeating the mistakes it highlighted.29 The committee’s partisanship was indeed unabashed: The officers on the receiving end of its wrath were usually Democrats, and those it favored were often Republicans.

“Not only is it that rebels are Democrats, but so are rebel sympathizers, whether in the North or the South,” George Julian declared in February 1863. “Loyalty and Republicanism go hand in hand throughout the Union,

NATIONAL ARCHIVES; HARPER’S WEEKLY

truding out of the ground.”23 committee: “It was often hasty and A white hotelkeeper told the two unjust in its judgment, but always investigators that he saw the Confedearnest, patriotic and honest; on the erates trap about 100 soldiers at the whole it must be merited more praise bottom of the bluffs along the river. than blame.”25 In later years, the comWhen they begged to be allowed to mittee’s reputation sank in tandem surrender, “The rebels would reply, with that of the Radical Republicans ‘God damn you, why didn’t you surgenerally. During the Jim Crow era, it render before?’ and shot them down became a cynosure of political like dogs.” John Hogan, an Africanmeddling for revisionist historians.

American corporal, testified: “I saw Writing in 1939, the southern-oriCaptain Carson [a white officer], and ented historian T. Harry Williams heard some of the enemy ask him condemned the committee for if he belonged to a nigger regiment. pressuring Lincoln to embrace He told them he did. They asked him emancipation, and for allegedly how he came here. He told them he fostering a “war psychosis” in the was detailed there. Then they told North.26 When Senator Harry him they would give him a detail Truman formed his own Special and immediately shot him dead.”24 Committee to Investigate the Without the committee’s efforts to National Defense Program on the eve record the facts, the Fort Pillow masof World War II, he personally studied sacre might well have been scrubbed the Joint Committee’s reports, but he from history. Even so, it was played was also guided in his thinking by down, and sometimes discredited Robert E. Lee biographer Douglas entirely, during the long years of Southall Freeman, who lambasted its Jim Crow historiography, when the work as “most unpatriotic.” Truman role of African-American troops was later wrote, “I became familiar with largely airbrushed not its mistakes and was just from the southdetermined to avoid ern record but also the same errors.”27 the nation’s memory.

Every American The Joint Commitconflict has caused tee’s leaders clearly friction between Consaw political dangress and the execugers that the genertive over the presials did not notice, or dent’s war powers. at least didn’t care Ambiguity was writabout. They feared ten into the nation’s with good reason that founding document.

Congressman and what had been won on Although the ConJoint Committee the battlefield would stitution declares member Daniel Gooch be surrendered by the president to be politicians who were commander in chief, in a hurry to yield authority to their it empowers Congress to “provide former Confederate enemies, and for the common defense,” declare that the feral violence that occurred war, and raise and support armies. at Fort Pillow would thrive in the It also specifies that Congress pospostwar South unless Reconstrucsesses the authority “to make all tion was carried out with determinalaws which shall be necessary and tion and a sustained commitment proper for carrying into execution to the rights of African Americans. the foregoing powers.” Even Harry Truman recognized the importance of congressional oversight, writSSESSMENTS OF the commiting, “The power to investigate is tee have generally fallen along necessary to the intelligent exerideological lines. Lincoln’s cise of the powers of Congress.”28 biographers and former secretaries, The most thorough study of the John Hay and John G. Nicolay, Joint Committee is Bruce Tap’s Over writing after the war, said of the Lincoln’s Shoulder, published in 1998.

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“ W E F O U N D E V I D E N C E S O F T H I S M U R D E R A N D C R U E LT Y S T I L L M O S T PA I N F U L LY A P PA R E N T … . W E C O U L D S T I L L S E E T H E FAC E S , H A N D S A N D F E E T O F M E N, W H I T E A N D B L AC K , P R O T R U D I N G O U T O F T H E G R O U N D.” B E N JA M I N WA D E A N D DA N I E L G O O C H I N T H E I R J O I N T C O M M I T T E E R E P O R T O N F O R T P I L L OW

The Joint Committee’s investigation of the killing of surrendered Union troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, on April 12, 1864 (depicted here), helped ensure that the event would not be scrubbed from history.

as perfectly as treason and slavery.”30 No one can imagine that the Union war effort would have fared better if Fremont or Butler had been given more important field commands. But the latter-day indictment of the committee is based in part on a number of arbitrary assumptions: that unity between civilian politicians and the military was achievable; that consensus between Republicans and Democrats was possible; that the results of a given investigation could somehow be known before it was undertaken; that “objectivity” was easy to achieve; that the committee members’ lack of military experience was a fatal flaw that should have barred them from

questioning serving generals; and that they had a duty to offer remedies for the military’s shortcomings. It is doubtful that any committee could have met these standards.

One of the committee’s stated goals was to bequeath to posterity a detailed record of military operations. In this it certainly succeeded.

In its reports, we hear soldiers, strategists, and eyewitnesses only months or even weeks after the events. We hear the real-time voices of heroes and scoundrels alike— some authoritative, others defensive, unreliable, or vengeful—speaking from within the fog of war.

The precise nature of the relation-

ship between Lincoln and the Joint Committee remains hard to define.

Some historians, notably Ben Wade’s biographer, Hans Trefousse, have argued that Lincoln strategically used the committee to prod cautious generals such as McClellan and Meade into action. Tap and others believe that the president regarded it as more of a hindrance than a help.

As Lincoln’s early war naiveté gave way to hard reality, however, he needed no committee to tell him how to think about the conflict. By 1862, he had concluded, as the Radicals had long argued, that the war must also bring about the emancipation of the slaves. And } CONT. ON P. 76

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FOR THE THOUSANDS OF UNION SOLDIERS WHO ESCAPED CONFEDERATE CAPTIVITY IN SOUTH CAROLINA DURING THE WAR’S FINAL MONTHS, THE PATH TO FREEDOM WAS LONG AND TREACHEROUS.

BY LORIEN FOOTE

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A group of nine Union soldiers, two Confederate deserters, and a 14-year-old boy pose for the camera upon their arrival in Knoxville, Tennessee, on July 1, 1865. The Union soldiers, escapees from Confederate prison in Columbia, South Carolina, had made for the mountains of Tennessee, where they were joined by the ex-Rebels and the boy, who helped guide the group safely to Union lines.

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But where to send them? Ulysses S. Grant was smothering Confederate forces along the Richmond-Petersburg lines in Virginia, the Federal South Atlantic Blockading Squadron was besieging Charleston, and Union troops occupying the Sea Islands regularly probed the Georgia and South Carolina coasts. At the same time, undermanned state militias had lost control of much of the Appalachian counties to roving bands of Confederate deserters. There seemed to be no feasible location to house and guard thousands of Federal prisoners in the eastern portions of the Confederacy.

Confederate general John H. Winder, in charge of the prisoner evacuation, only made the situation worse. His bureaucratic missteps included never notifying military commanders in Charleston about his exact intention to send thousands of prisoners there, and thus having them arrive in a city that was wholly unprepared to receive them.

Major General Samuel Jones, commander of the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, was furious, and decided to return the favor. Without informing Confederate prison authorities or consulting officials in Richmond, Jones sent batches of Union prisoners from Charleston to Florence between September 12 and 18 and turned them out into an open field under minimal guard. More than 400 of

the prisoners, veterans of a summer in Andersonville and unwilling to enter another Confederate stockade, promptly ran into some nearby woods, then pillaged the countryside and attempted to destroy the railroad. Next came the opening of Camp Sorghum: On October 5 and 6, Jones’ guards marched another 1,500 Union prisoners down King Street in Charleston, put them on a train to Columbia, and turned them out into the “camp,” in reality an open field.

Glazier and Lemon were among the 500 who escaped from either the train or the camp.

The fugitives soon found that although they were outside prison walls, it would be no easy task to escape the Confederacy. Confederate

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Located two miles outside of South Carolina’s capital city, the camp lacked two essential elements for containing prisoners: buildings and a fence. Yankees walked out of Sorghum almost with impunity; nearly 500 of the 1,500 officers sent to the prison seven weeks earlier were already on the loose when a lazy sentinel passed Glazier and Lemon and assumed they had a parole to gather wood for their fire. And the Camp Sorghum runaways were not the only prisoners-ofwar skulking through the cold November night on a desperate quest to escape the Confederacy.

Of the approximately 14,000 Federal prisoners moving through South Carolina between September 1864 and February 1865, around 2,500 escaped. Some jumped from trains; others bolted from the stockade in Florence, the county jail in Columbia, or makeshift prisons that dotted the state, mostly around Charleston.1 The mass prison escapes were part and parcel of the progressive collapse of the Confederate military effort during the Civil War’s final year.

After William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta on September 2, 1864, desperate Confederate officials in Richmond ordered the removal of prisoners of war in Andersonville and Macon, Georgia, in order to keep the Union army from rescuing the thousands of hungry, sick, and ill-clad Federals held there.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (2)

At twilight on November 26, 1864, Union army lieutenants Willard Glazier and M.W. Lemon moved out of their hiding place in the woods near Columbia, South Carolina, and struck out for the road toward Lexington. The two New Yorkers had just escaped from Camp Sorghum, a Confederate prison for Federal officers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MILLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (2)

During the war’s final year, lax conditions and bureaucratic missteps led to an environment in which Union prisoners escaped in droves from Confederate prisons in the Deep South. Above: Guards count Union captives walking across a bridge at the prison camp at Florence, South Carolina. Opposite page: Confederate generals John H. Winder (top) and Samuel Jones, whose poor communication and hasty decisions pushed the South’s already tenuous prison system further into collapse.

military authorities mobilized the citizens who lived in the area surrounding Florence, and many joined the chase for the 400 escaped Federals, in some cases tracking them as far as the North Carolina border. Within a few weeks, citizen patrols re-captured all but 23 of the Florence escapees. For the 500 Federal officers who escaped from the trains to Columbia or from Camp Sorghum, the nearest Union lines were off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, but in between were deadly swamps and the Confederate forces defending Charleston and Savannah. A longer option was to walk the 264 miles to Knoxville, Tennessee, through the Appalachian Mountains. This route avoided a Confederate army, but still

contained formidable obstacles— including hostile civilians, roaming Confederate guerrillas, and treacherous winter conditions—for soldiers who were weak or ill after months of incarceration. A third option was to head for Augusta, Georgia, a city that fugitives and Confederate authorities mistakenly believed would be a target of Sherman’s March to the Sea. The Columbia escapees chose all three of these options.

Most fugitives had only one plan for getting out of South Carolina: seek help from blacks, most of whom were convinced that a Union victory would bring them freedom, and avoid all white men. Glazier and Lemon counted on getting food and directions from slaves as they moved

toward Augusta, Georgia. But as the two New Yorkers walked toward Lexington on their first night out, they heard voices behind them and realized with horror that their plan had a potentially fatal flaw: They could not tell if the voices belonged to black or white men. “Their manner of conversation is precisely alike in many portions of the South,” Glazier later wrote in a published account of his adventure. Northern soldiers expected southern blacks to speak in the typecast vernacular of novels and minstrel shows, and were disconcerted when they did not.

Glazier boldly faced the situation. “A pleasant evening, gentlemen,” he said. “Indeed it is,” came the response. This answer offered no clue as to the race of the men, so Glazier and Lemon quickened their pace in anticipation of running for their lives. The astute slaves behind them, guessing they were escaped Yankees by this suspicious behavior, revealed themselves and agreed to guide the fugitives that night. But once the guides left them, Glazier and Lemon struggled to navigate through a South that did not look or sound like their expectations. Two weeks later, they saw a plantation with a collection of houses that they assumed were slave cabins. Glazier knocked on the door and someone inside yelled out, “Whose thar?” Frustrated that yet again he could not guess someone’s race, Glazier yelled out, “Are you black or white in there?” Faced with an offended white occupant, Glazier pretended to be an injured Rebel soldier who needed food.2 Captain Daniel Langworthy and the four other men in his escape party, all New Yorkers who absconded from Camp Sorghum and headed to Knoxville, had similar problems finding friendly slaves in South Carolina. After several exhausting days on the march, the fugitives risked a small fire in a patch of woods. A woman approached with three young girls. Her plain cotton apparel, hanging loosely from her shoulders, looked like a nightdress to the Yankees, and in the darkness they all assumed she was black.

Rather than run or hide, they greeted

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group of slaves on their way to pick cotton stumbled upon them and ran away in a fright before the fugitives could say a word.4 As prison escapes escalated in November and December, slaves and free blacks learned to recognize the Yankees. After Captain Milton Russell of the 51st Indiana and his companions escaped from Columbia in mid-December, they knocked on the door of a slave cabin en route to Hilton Head. They said they were Confederate soldiers on furlough and demanded food. The woman inside told them that she knew they were Yankees because of their jacket buttons. She fed them and arranged for a series of guides to assist them for the next several days.5 Many African Americans viewed their acts of assistance as a means by which they might disrupt or bring down their masters’ states. “I wanted to be free and wanted my race to be free. I knew this could not be if the rebels had a government of their own,” one slave who aided fugitives later said.6 Slaves, already used to helping their own people escape, knew which paths and woods were least likely to be patrolled and had contacts with

“The negroes did everything. We trusted over a hundred and were not betrayed. We were chased by dogs but the negroes hid us in a swamp.”

CAPTAIN JAMES MORGAN, 17TH MICHIGAN INFANTRY

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ALBERT D. RICHARDSON, THE SECRET SERVICE, THE FIELD, THE DUNGEON, AND THE ESCAPE (1865)

her, “Hello, Auntie.” They soon learned that she was the white landowner, and that they were not the first escaped prisoners to trespass on her land that week. The Federals pleaded with her not to report them and frantically described their wives and daughters. As her girls cried in sympathy for the men’s families, the widow said, “Mister, we will not tell on you uns today.” Langworthy and his friends eventually made it safely to Union lines.3 Such miscues reinforced fugitives’ belief that they needed the help of slaves to survive in these unfamiliar surroundings. But even when they could identify slaves, asking for help was not always easy. When the first wave of escapees from Columbia flowed into the Carolina countryside in early October 1864, slaves were frightened to see white men prowling their woods and fields. Captain J. Madison Drake of the 9th New Jersey and four comrades leapt from the train transporting them from Charleston to Columbia just after it passed Branchville, South Carolina.

While sneaking through an open wood, the party came across a black man chopping wood, who assumed they were kidnappers. As they tried to convince him they were not, his master approached and they had to flee. The next day, the Yankees spotted a garden of corn and beans and crawled through a large cotton field to get there. As they shelled beans, a

WILLARD WORCESTER GLAZIER, THE CAPTURE, THE PRISON PEN, THE ESCAPE (1870)

Escaped Union POWs relied heavily on local blacks for food, shelter, and guidance as they made their way to freedom, but making contact and asking for help could be difficult. Above: Fugitives Willard Glazier and M.W. Lemon, escapees from Columbia’s Camp Sorghum, are fed in a swamp by sympathetic slaves.

sympathetic whites—those who had remained secretly loyal to the United States or who had turned against the Confederacy—who could provide hiding places and food. But the presence of so many escaped prisoners and the knowledge that the Confederacy was collapsing encouraged more overt and organized forms of aid. When the townspeople of Jalapa, South Carolina, formed a picket on the road to intercept fugitives, slaves in the area formed a counter-picket on the road below to alert the Yankees and guide them around the trap.7 The 101 fugitives from South Carolina prisons who successfully reached the Union lines at Hilton Head between October and December gave credit where it was due. “The negroes did everything,” Captain James Morgan of the 17th Michigan Infantry reported to the provost marshal who took his statement. “We trusted over a hundred and were not betrayed. We were chased by dogs but the negroes hid us in a swamp.” Captain John L. Paston of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry put it succinctly: “We could not have got along without them.”8 The assistance of slaves was crucial because loyal Confederate citizens were constantly on the lookout for fugitives. The state of South Carolina had no resources to hunt down hundreds of escaped prisoners (the bulk of military-aged men were with Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia, and the state’s Confederate Reserve force was either guarding prisoners at Florence and Columbia or defending against Sherman’s movements on the state’s borders), so it was up to ordinary Carolinians to provide their own security and recapture the Yankees prowling across their property. Men and women who spotted an escaped prisoner either grabbed a gun and nabbed the unarmed Yankees themselves or sent for neighbors who would rally to the hunt with lanterns and dogs. Citizens then took

FUGITIVE ESCAPE ROUTES

COLUMBIA & FLORENCE, SOUTH CAROLINA

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SEPTEMBER 1864 - FEBRUARY 1865

Of the approximately 14,000 Federal prisoners either held in or being transferred through South Carolina between September 1864 and February 1865, around 2,500 escaped—the result of lax conditions at the state’s military pens and poor decision-making by Confederate prison officials. The 500 Union officers who escaped while being transferred by train to Columbia or from that city’s Camp Sorghum between October and December headed in three general directions in their quest for freedom: 1 northwest toward Union lines in Knoxville, Tennessee, a route that avoided the Confederate army but was full of other obstacles, including hostile civilians, Rebel guerrillas, and the Appalachian Mountains; 2 southwest toward Augusta, Georgia, a city mistakenly believed to be a target of General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea; and 3 south or southeast, either directly to Union-occupied Hilton Head or down the Santee River to the coast, where fugitives were picked up by Federal gunboats and transferred to Hilton Head. The approximately 400 prisoners who escaped from captivity in Florence in September 1864, by contrast, largely struck out for the North Carolina border 4 .

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WILLARD WORCESTER GLAZIER, THE CAPTURE, THE PRISON PEN, THE ESCAPE (1870)

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who headed toward Knoxville traveled through regions of the Carolinas where it would be impossible to move without the help of whites. In mid-November, a wave of fugitives washed over the South Carolina upcountry as they headed toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. Confederate deserters, numbering more than 500, roamed the mountain terrain in bands of 20 to 30 men, stole livestock and household items from loyal Confederate citizens, and fortified buildings to defend themselves.

With this advantage, they had easily defied the small detachments that Major General Samuel Jones had sent to arrest them back in June and by the late fall were largely in control of the districts of Greenville, Anderson, Pickens, and Spartanburg. Only two companies of the South Carolina state militia patrolled the Anderson and Spartanburg districts, and the wives of deserters developed signals to alert their husbands in the woods on the rare occasions that patrols approached them.

Black South Carolinians had contacts among these deserters and their wives—often based on prewar relationships formed in local taverns or secret gambling venues—and handed fugitive Federals off to them for assistance. Isaiah Conley, a captain in the 101st Pennsylvania Infantry, escaped from a train ferrying officers from Charleston to Columbia on October 5. Two weeks later, on October 19, Conley and his companions reached the outskirts of Spartanburg, where they enlisted the aid of a free black man named Henry Martin, who appealed to the wife of a Confederate deserter named Ray. Martin moved the Federals to the woods near his brother-in-law’s farm and returned with Ray’s wife and sister, who feared the Federals were actually Rebels trying to entrap deserters with a false story. The women were eventually convinced the Yankees were indeed escaped prisoners and they left with a promise to send Ray to the fugitives’ hiding place. This would be one of the most danger-

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DANIEL AVERY LANGWORTHY, REMINISCENCES OF A PRISONER OF WAR AND HIS ESCAPE (1915)

their prisoners to the local jailhouse to await transfer: The jail in Edgefield, South Carolina, held 24 of these recaptured Yankees during the first week in December.

Dogs proved to be the terror and bane of the fugitives. It seemed that every farm and plantation had dozens of dogs who exploded into a cacophony of barks and yaps when they smelled Yankees silently treading along moonlit roads or fields.

They alerted the entire neighborhood to the presence of strangers and often gave chase and cornered fugitives without waiting for a human to accompany them. When citizens organized search patrols, they used bloodhounds trained to track down runaway slaves. The slaves who aided fugitives helped them throw canines off the scent by offering tips—such as rubbing turpentine on their shoes or scattering pepper behind them—or guiding them to swampy areas where water disguised their trail.

Although slaves were an essential source of aid to the fugitives, those

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Dogs were a constant fear for Union fugitives as they made their way through the South Carolina countryside. Their barking often alerted locals to the presence of strangers, and pro-Confederate civilians also used them to track down escaped POWs. Above: “Caught by the Dogs,” a dramatic depiction of the recapture of an escapee from the prison in Florence.

DANIEL AVERY LANGWORTHY, REMINISCENCES OF A PRISONER OF WAR AND HIS ESCAPE (1915)

ous moments of their journey. The mutual distrust between deserters and fugitives did not make for an easy or safe exchange of information, as Conley discovered when he walked from his hideout to a nearby stream. A man in Confederate uniform sitting on a log brought his gun to the ready, pointed it at Conley, and called out “Halt! Who are you?” After a few tense words, Conley invited Ray to meet the other fugitives, and as the two men walked, Ray enforced distance between them with his weapon. When they arrived at the hideout, Ray trained his gun on the other two Federals and told them not to come any closer. During the ensuing conversation, Ray’s wife arrived, and the deserter agreed to pilot the fugitives the next 50 miles of their journey in exchange for Conley’s silver-cased watch.9 Conley’s party, like hundreds that came after it, crossed the border into North Carolina and faced the monumental task of traversing the mountains. Once again fugitives found that their assumptions about the South were too simplistic. In South Carolina, where all white faces were supposedly enemies, they had found numerous white friends. The Appalachians, they assumed, was a safe zone en route to Union lines, with no slavery (and thus no Rebels) and plenty of Union-loving whites.

Instead, they encountered numerous slaves and plenty of Rebels in a terror-filled journey through guerrilla-infested mountains where entire families and neighborhoods were mobilized to fight. The most hazardous leg of the Knoxville route was in western North Carolina and East Tennessee, where Confederate guerilla bands preyed on their Unionist neighbors and North Carolina Home Guard units were tasked with arresting deserters and the disloyal.

In this unpredictable South, women and children were vital to the chaotic combat. Wives, sisters, daughters, and young sons served as suppliers, messengers, and spies for men engaging in guerrilla warfare or resisting the Confederate draft. As the trickle of escaping prisoners of war became a stream in the late fall

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Captain Daniel Langworthy (seated, center) and the four officers with whom he escaped from Camp Sorghum in Columbia. The men, wearing the mismatched clothing typical of fugitives, were photographed shortly after reaching Union lines.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF UNIFORM FUGITIVES WORE AN ARRAY of startling and often indecent outfits as they traveled

through the southern countryside. Some had next to nothing because the uniforms they were captured in years earlier had nearly disintegrated; others, usually officers who could purchase or trade clothing in prison, mixed pieces of their Federal uniform with civilian clothing. A few impersonated Confederate soldiers in uniforms that they obtained by bribing guards. In many cases, the outfits they cobbled together astounded observers. Typical was the escape party composed of Union officers John V. Hadley, Homer Chisman, Simon Baker, and Thomas Good, who made their way to Union-occupied Knoxville on December 10, 1864, after escaping from Camp Sorghum on November 4. Hadley later wrote of his group’s appearance: Chisman stood upon the uppers of a pair of Southern army brogans, bound to his feet with bark. His trousers were knicker-bockers composed in equal parts of Yankee blue, brown jean, and North Carolina linsey, artificially bound at the knees to give pleasing effect to his calves. His sack-coat was rather good, and his cap tolerable…. [Good] had begged the legs of a pair of trousers, which he had swaddled around his feet. His trousers were gray, but like Chisman’s, had been repaired “fore and aft.” One day as we lay in the woods in North Carolina (and for which I never did forgive him), he took my Columbia towel, and without my advice or consent, made an important addition to one of the legs. He had on a buttonless gray jacket, out at the elbows, and fully two inches too short….

Baker, he was the best-dressed one of the party, having had a coat given him in North Carolina and been an adroit financier in prison.

As the men marched down the streets of Knoxville, Hadley recalled, their fellow Union soldiers could not resist greeting the escapees with catcalls and insults. One shouted at Chisman, “Say, uncle, your calves are out!” Another yelled, “It’s the last of the Mohicans!” Still another, “It’s a menagerie.” “There were no replies,” Hadley wrote. “For we all knew too well the end of a soldier’s tongue to make retort.” –L.F.

11/11/14 2:28 AM

expected from a woman. She walked up to the fugitives and demanded, “What are you doing here?” When Drake launched into the story about Kentucky, the woman firmly but politely told him that she did not believe a word. She knew they were Yankees and assured them that she hated the Confederacy and all who supported it. “I am not afraid of you, be you Yankee or rebel,” she said. “For I can by lifting my hand have you killed where you are now standing. A dozen true rifles are at this very instant leveled upon you.”

She demanded proof that Drake and his friends were not Confederate spies. “We had met a great many women in our time, but none like this one before us. She was the bravest woman I had ever seen,” Drake recorded in his diary. When Drake produced his commission, travel diary, and sketches made in prison, Mary Estes shook his hand and introduced herself. She then waved a white handkerchief around her head three times. At that signal, more than 20 men dressed in full Confederate uniform and carrying long rifles descended from the mountain and surrounded the Yankees.

Mary Estes was a 41-year-old wife and mother with five children between the ages of six and 15. Her much younger husband, Bill Estes, led a gang of deserters, but officials

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ALBERT D. RICHARDSON, THE SECRET SERVICE, THE FIELD, THE DUNGEON, AND THE ESCAPE (1865)

of 1864, these same women and children—some of them die-hard Unionists, others having turned against the Confederacy due to economic hardship, the draft, or the idea that the government favored slaveholders over struggling farmers—fought against the Confederate cause by choosing to guide fugitive Federals toward Union lines and thus back to the front lines. The shocked fugitives learned that women had become co-leaders of their families and were protecting their men instead of being protected by them.

Captain J. Madison Drake of the 9th New Jersey Infantry, who leapt from a train on its way to Columbia, was among the first of the fugitives to stumble upon this disorienting truth.

By October 29, Drake and his comrades had reached Caldwell County, North Carolina. As they walked along a mountain ravine, they came across two women cutting sorghum grass and a 15-year-old boy using a sled to deliver the sorghum to a small mill a short distance away. Pretending to be Confederate deserters on the way to their homes in Kentucky, the fugitives offered the women a ring in exchange for rations. The women agreed, and the boy, named Joseph, rode off to get his mother.

Joseph returned quickly with a large woman whose bold and fearless demeanor was unlike anything he

J. MADISON DRAKE, FAST AND LOOSE IN DIXIE (1880)

Some Union fugitives heading toward Knoxville through the Appalachians received assistance from whites who were either ardent Unionists or had soured on the Confederate cause. Above: Captain J. Madison Drake and his comrades encounter Mary Estes, who fed and sheltered the Yankees before her husband guided them through the remote mountains of Caldwell County, North Carolina.

considered his wife to be just as dangerous. Like other Appalachian wives of deserters or guerrillas, she did not carry arms herself, but it was clear that without her, the men hiding in the mountains could not continue the fight against Confederate authority. She supplied the men with food and clothes, carried messages so they could coordinate raids and ambushes, and guided men through remote mountain areas. Her activities were so important that North Carolina Home Guard units watched her for days at a time, periodically conducted searches of her house, and targeted her children. They tortured Joseph in front of her to no avail. “I taught him the value of his father’s safety and Joe would have died sooner than reveal his father’s hiding place,” she told Drake.10 Drake and his party stayed with the Estes family for two days while Bill made preparations to lead the Yankees into Tennessee. During this pause, Mary’s sisters and female cousins and neighbors brought copious amounts of chicken, pork, biscuits, and potatoes for the fugitives to feast upon. After dark, Mary and two young girls led the fugitives by the hand to a deep ravine. The three women left briefly, and returned with their own feather beds and heavy quilts. They spread them upon a flat rock and, with a motherly touch, tucked the men into their makeshift beds. The men slept soundly for the first time since their escape, confident in the care of the women they now termed their “guardian angels.”

Such intimate contact with the women of the mountain South, common for this stage of the journey out of the Confederacy, aroused conflicting feelings in the Yankee fugitives. On one level it could be titillating. After all, most of them had been confined to prison for more than a year. This probably explains the reaction of Captain Charles Porter Mattocks, a reserved, aristocratic scion of a wealthy Maine family, to the sight of a bare foot. Three weeks after escaping from Camp Sorghum on November 3, he wound up with 20 other Yankees in a one-room farmhouse in the Balsam Mountains of North

“We had met a great many women in our time, but none like this one before us. She was the bravest woman I had ever seen.”

ALBERT D. RICHARDSON, THE SECRET SERVICE, THE FIELD, THE DUNGEON, AND THE ESCAPE (1865)

J. MADISON DRAKE, FAST AND LOOSE IN DIXIE (1880)

CAPTAIN J. MADISON DRAKE, 9TH NEW JERSEY INFANTRY

Carolina. There were five beds in the room, and one of them contained two young ladies who kept up a stream of conversation with the fugitives. “To our New England ideas of propriety this seems horrible, but here every night we have had similar experiences,” Mattocks scribbled into his diary. “I was gently aroused from my slumbers by a gentle damsel who very naively informed me that she was hunting for her stocking which had been lost during the night. Taking pity on the fat, plump foot, which I could not fail to see peeping out from a dress not too long according to Paris styles, I at once rallied myself and tried to find the missing article.”11 On another level, intimate encounters with southern women cultivated the fugitives’ sense that they were living out an epic romance.

Many of the Yankees were educated officers whose imaginations had been formed around the chivalric Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, the sentimentality of the popular Charles Dickens, and the sublimity of the romantic poets. Tired, sick, and on edge as they were, they also believed that their quest was a grand adventure worthy of immortalization. And everyone knew that such a story needed a heroine. Thus, when a fugitive encountered a woman who engaged in valiant feats on his behalf, he idolized her according to Victorian conventions. When Drake later reworked his diary for publication, he drew on courtly language to describe Mary Estes. She had a “comely form” and was “robed in a green dress.” She offered them food “with a gracious smile, worthy of a queen.” Before he parted from her, he gave her the heavy gold seal ring that he always wore on his finger.12 Fugitive Federals deeply admired the Appalachian women whose loyalty and devotion to their families epitomized the feminine virtues, even if such virtues were displayed

in the unconventional manner of supplying food to heavily armed gangs in mountain caves. But conflicting with this idealization was a deep disdain for nearly all facets of southern culture. Yankee prejudices infused their reaction to the intimate moments they shared with these southern women, whose tobaccostained teeth, lack of education, and hardscrabble life did not correspond to the Yankee feminine ideal. In fact, no part of these women’s lives measured up to many fugitives’ definition of “civilization.” Civilized societies, according to many of the Federal officers and soldiers, produced refined and literate women with artistic taste and sensibilities. In contrast, the mountain regions of the South were barbaric, places where people were generous and kind, but “ignorant in the conventionalisms of life,” as New York fugitive John Collins Welch put it.13 Such thinking ended one fugitive’s intimate encounter with the heroine of his story. Junius Henri Browne was a New York Tribune war correspondent who escaped from Salis-

bury prison in North Carolina on December 18, 1864. A witty, sardonic womanizer who distrusted women and scorned marriage, Browne was a member of the self-styled Bohemian set of journalists who valued skepticism and a literary sensibility over conventional thinking and behavior. Early in the war he wrote articles about the barbarous condition of Arkansas and Missouri, whose “brown and brawny women offended his taste … chilled his gallantry … and repressed his chivalrous sentiment.”14 Three years later he was in the mountains of western North Carolina, hiding in a small cabin with Confederate guerrillas hot on the trail of his escape party. When riders on horseback approached the cabin, Browne and a 16-year-old girl ran out the back door and into the woods. A lightning storm blazed around them, but the girl would not leave him, despite his pleas. Overcome by her bravery and loyalty, Browne kissed her as she clung to him. Later that night, in the one-room cabin filled with sleeping family members and fugitive Federals, Browne dreamed that the girl was a princess in disguise, and that a winged dragon flew Browne and his lady to New York City for an elegant supper at a French restaurant. He awoke to the sight of the mountain girl in } CONT. ON P. 76

Many Union fugitives came to idealize the Appalachian women who provided them assistance. Above: The daughter of a local Unionist family guides a band of fugitives through eastern Tennessee.

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A GRIPPING NEW CIVIL WAR DRAMA The nation is divided, and a bloody Civil War looms on the horizon.

Two young men enlist, each with very different strengths, weaknesses, and reasons for service.

They end up on opposite sides of the conflict and, in the end, learn largely the same lessons about honor, human nature, and the horrors of war.

“ With wonderful attention to historical detail, Michael Smith tells the bracing story of two young men caught in the vortex of bloody civil war.”

MICHAEL T. BERNATH, PH.D., PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

“ Michael K. Smith’s debut novel, Home Again, skillfully merges both fact and fiction, creating for the reader a satisfying tale that is at once historically accurate and dramatically true; no small feat.”

RAFAEL LIMA, WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES DRAMA CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN DRAMATIC WRITING

HHHHH Amazon 5-Star Rated CWM14-BOB-Books.indd 64

H Paperback, Kindle and audio editions available at Amazon.com H Or, order through the purchase link on the author’s website: www.MichaelKennethSmith.com SEE BOOK TRAILER HTTP://VIMEO.COM/102590524

11/11/14 12:39 PM

BOOKS & AUTHORS

The Best Civil War Books of 2014 IT’S TIME AGAIN FOR OUR annual roundup of the year’s best Civil War titles. As usual, we’ve enlisted the help of a handful of Civil War historians and enthusiasts, avid readers all, and asked them to pick their favorite and second favorite books published in 2014. This time we also gave them the chance to name an additional title or two that they’re looking forward to, books that either were released this year or are coming out in print soon.

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B&A A. WILSON GREENE Essay collections rarely win literary honors over sweeping studies or finely honed monographs. The genre is, almost by definition, uneven in quality and focused on topics often too narrow or trivial to garner broad attention. The 10 articles in Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns (Louisiana State University Press), superbly edited by Evan C. Jones and Wiley Sword, stand as an exception to conventional wisdom.

Jones and Sword have assembled a who’s who of historians of the war around the Scenic City to write about aspects of Chattanooga’s story that will interest anyone ready to move beyond the essential campaign studies. The essays challenge traditional understanding on subjects ranging from the origins of the Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park to the generalship of Leonidas Polk and Thomas Wood on September 20, 1863.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, Don Carlos Buell, and Ulysses S. Grant, among others, receive persuasive scrutiny that is sure to surprise many students of these operations. Beautifully produced, elegantly written, and buttressed by useful maps, this is a book that should be devoured by any reader interested in mid-war military operations in the West.

HONORABLE MENTION: In Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (Oxford University Press), Top Pick

Elizabeth R. Varon offers a new way to look at the meaning of the surrender at Appomattox and the competing agendas of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. This book, which comes out of the academic tradition but is eminently accessible to general readers, stands as perhaps the most influential Civil War study of the year. Tourism officials in Appomattox County may wish to reconsider their slogan, “Where our Nation Reunited,” after reading this outstanding monograph.

LOOKING FORWARD TO: Richard J. Sommers’ Richmond Redeemed: The Siege at Petersburg, The Battles of Chaffin’s Bluff and Poplar Spring Church, September 29-October 2, 1864 (Savas Beattie) was one of the best campaign studies ever written when it first appeared in 1981.

I can’t wait to read the revised edition on a critical aspect of the Petersburg Campaign.

In addition, I’m not sure if Gordon Rhea’s fifth and final volume on the Overland Campaign will be published in the coming year, but I certainly hope so.

A. WILSON GREENE HAS BEEN THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF PAMPLIN HISTORICAL PARK AND THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE CIVIL WAR SOLDIER NEAR PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA, SINCE 1995. HE IS AT WORK ON A THREE-VOLUME HISTORY OF THE PETERSBURG CAMPAIGN FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS.

KATHRYN SHIVELY MEIER As an historian of common soldiers, I’ve waited a long time for a book to challenge the traditional narrative that most Union soldiers converted to Republican Party doctrine as Top Pick

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“For anyone with an interest in how northerners—including all three branches of government, military officers, clergy, the press, and average citizens— constructed notions of treason, this important book should not be missed.”

KATHRYN SHIVELY MEIER ON WILLIAM A. BLAIR’S WITH MALICE TOWARD SOME

the war progressed, allegedly confirmed by their overwhelming support of Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election. Jonathan W. White’s Emancipation, The Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Louisiana State University Press) accomplishes that and much more. By tracing state-level elections throughout the war, it also explains the uneven reception of wartime policies, particularly emancipation, with special attention to Democratic soldiers silenced by accusations of disloyalty and by courts-martial. In the wake of emancipation and black enlistment, many disgruntled Federals deserted, tendered their resignations, or were summarily dismissed, teaching those who disagreed with Republican policies to

choose silence. Fear of the public nature of voting as well as discontent at the Copperhead movement resulted in at least 20 percent of the eligible Union soldiery refraining from casting ballots in 1864, inflating ostensible support for Lincoln. While White gives ample attention to slavery and emancipation, he maintains that “for many northern soldiers, restoring the Union was the only true goal of the war from beginning to end.”

Furthermore, for any scholar interested in using court-martial records, White’s methodology and research demands admiration. I haven’t been this excited about a soldier study since Frances Clarke’s War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

HONORABLE MENTION: In With Malice

Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press), William A. Blair asks a question I ponder at the end of each Civil War course I teach: “How can one reconcile … a heartfelt hatred of the rebels … with the demonstrable record of leniency?” For anyone with an interest in how northerners— including all three branches of government, military officers, clergy, the press, and average citizens—constructed notions of treason, this important book should not be missed.

Of particular note is Blair’s nuanced approach to how ideas, framed in legal terms and in international context, intersected with practical needs in waging the war, resulting in manifold contradictions.

LOOKING FORWARD TO: Colleagues have been telling me for at least

The TopSelling Civil War Titles of 2014 The books pictured here are the 10 bestselling Civil War titles published in 2014. They are ranked in order of copies sold through early October.

SOURCE: BASED

ON SALES DATA PROVIDED

BY NIELSEN BOOKSCAN

1

2

Malice Toward None

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson

by Jack E. Levin (THRESHOLD EDITIONS) Hardcover, $18

by S.C. Gwynne (SCRIBNER BOOK COMPANY) Hardcover, $35

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B&A a year to keep my eye out for Graham T. Dozier’s recently released collection, A Gunner in Lee’s Army: The Civil War Letters of Thomas Henry Carter (University of North Carolina Press). A senior artillerist, Carter wrote some of the most eloquent and perceptive letters from Lee’s army published to date, and Dozier is a reliably excellent editor.

One I’m eagerly awaiting is Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press). Civil War historians may not be familiar with English professor Stephen Cushman, but they really should take note of his careful examinations of how texts and their writers interact with history and historical memory. Time and again, I’m

drawn back to his ruminations on the Battle of the Wilderness, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (University of Virginia Press, 1999).

KATHRYN SHIVELY MEIER IS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY AND AUTHOR OF NATURE’S CIVIL WAR: COMMON SOLDIERS AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN 1862 VIRGINIA (UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, 2013).

SHE IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON A BIOGRAPHY OF CONFEDERATE GENERAL JUBAL A. EARLY.

KEVIN M. LEVIN Jennifer M. Murray’s On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933–2013 (University of Tennessee Press) serves as a reminder that the interpretation and even physical appearance of our Civil War battlefields is Top Pick

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Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

The Presidents’ War

The Half Has Never Been Told

The Wars of Reconstruction

by Karen Abbott

(LYONS PRESS) Hardcover, $28.95

(HARPER) Hardcover, $27.99

by Chris DeRose

by Edward E. Baptist

by Douglas R. Egerton

(BASIC BOOKS) Hardcover, $35

(BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING) Hardcover, $30

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“[A] hard-hitting book that will challenge those who continue to view the Old South as a peaceful agrarian society in sharp contrast with the capitalistic North.”

KEVIN M. LEVIN ON EDWARD E. BAPTIST’S THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD

constantly evolving. Gettysburg enthusiasts and scholars alike will enjoy reading about park superintendent James R. McConaghie’s idea to cover battlefield monuments with bushes in the 1930s and plans to scrap the Virginia Monument during World War II. Unlike many books that explore the history of Civil War battlefields, this one continues the story to the present day, right up to the demolition of the divisive Gettysburg National Tower and the controversy surrounding the destruction of the old visitors center and construction of the new one. Readers interested in Civil War memory, public history, tourism, and popular culture will enjoy and profit from this book.

HONORABLE MENTION: Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the

Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books) is a hard-hitting book that will challenge those who continue to view the Old South as a peaceful agrarian society in sharp contrast with the capitalistic North. Baptist reveals a labor system that generated profits for owners and investors while exploiting slaves as little more than commodities. Some readers will view the author’s use of imaginative vignettes to highlight the lives of slaves and ex-slaves as a distraction; others may find it a helpful literary device. Either way, this is a book that must be reckoned with by anyone interested in the history of capitalism in the United States.

LOOKING FORWARD TO: I learned about The Rebel Yell: A Cultural History (University of Alabama Press) by Craig A. Warren through his article in

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Bloody Spring

The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War

Lincoln’s Gamble

by Michael C.C. Adams

ed. by Aaron Sheehan-Dean

(JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV. PRESS) Hardcover, $29.95

(SCRIBNER BOOK COMPANY) Hardcover, $27

by Joseph Wheelan (DA CAPO PRESS) Hardcover, $27.50

(LIBRARY OF AMERICA) Hardcover, $40

by Todd Brewster

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B&A the fall 2014 issue of The Civil War Monitor. I’m especially interested in reading more about how the Rebel cry was utilized, and by whom, during the postwar period. It is hard to believe that this is the first scholarly book on the subject.

Coming next year is Brian Matthew Jordan’s Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (Liveright, 2015). The book is based on Jordan’s doctoral dissertation, which he wrote under the direction of David Blight at Yale University. It will likely take its place alongside recent work on veterans by such historians as James Marten, Caroline Janney, and Barbara Gannon.

KEVIN M. LEVIN TEACHES HISTORY AT GANN ACADEMY NEAR BOSTON. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF REMEMBERING THE BATTLE OF THE CRATER: WAR AS MURDER (2012) AND BLOGS AT CIVIL WAR MEMORY (CWMEMORY.COM).

GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ Robert E. Lee had the corpse-strewn battlefield of Fredericksburg to show him that war is terrible and keep him from growing too fond of it. The Civil War community today is fortunate not to have to see such sights, and to have instead a book like Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press) by Michael C.C. Adams to remind us of the ghastly human cost of the conflict.

What makes this my choice for best book of the year is that Adams accomplishes his goal without preaching. Few of us who derive meaning, satisfaction, and even pleasure from studying, teaching, or reenactTop Pick

ing the Civil War are unaware that the real war was a tragic experience, but Adams deepens our understanding and exposes us to the full range of the war’s victims, from civilians who lost their homes to veterans who were rejected by their communities when they came home.

His writing is sensitive but not maudlin; he describes wounds and death unflinchingly but without reveling in gore. It’s a book that contributes thoughtfully to the current wave of neo-revisionism by giving us a clearer picture of the war’s cost, and leaving it to the reader to weigh that cost when reconsidering the traditional triumphalist interpretation of the war’s outcome.

HONORABLE MENTION: Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 (Globe Pequot Press) by James B. Conroy and the movie Lincoln were produced independently of one another, but both focus on the political drama of early 1865. They share a cinematic quality, with strong emphasis on well-developed characters and effective pacing as the scenes shift between the White House, the Capitol, Richmond, the military front, and Hampton Roads. Unlike the movie, the book doesn’t have to take historical shortcuts to reach its destination, and has the research apparatus to prove it. Instead of trying to break new interpretive ground, the author simply tells one of the war’s lesser-known stories, and succeeds brilliantly.

LOOKING FORWARD TO: The Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College has published a new edi-

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Abraham tion of The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles (University of Illinois Press), edited by Erica Gienapp and the late William Gienapp. Based on Welles’ original manuscripts from his time as secretary of the navy, this is sure to replace previous editions that contain Welles’ postwar revisions.

GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ IS PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF HISTORY AT EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY, AND THE HOST OF CIVIL WAR TALK RADIO (IMPEDIMENTSOFWAR.ORG).

LESLEY J. GORDON In Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (University of North Carolina Press), Anne Sarah Rubin looks at this famed military maneuver from the perspective of Union soldiers, southern white women, AfricanAmerican slaves, and William T. Sherman himself. Contending that these disparate groups have appropriated the march for their own (often contradictory) purposes, she says the event has come to symbolize “the war in microcosm.” Rubin has also created a companion website that maps the march from multiple perspectives. The result is an exceptionally creative and ambitious study, like nothing else that I can think of in the field of Civil War history.

HONORABLE MENTION: William A. Blair’s With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era focuses on a topic that, surprisingly, has merited little scholarly attention. Blair examines it expansively and thoughtfully, proving that treason is a basic concept for understanding not just secession and war, but Reconstruction.

I expect this will become the seminal book on this important subject.

LOOKING FORWARD TO: I have several on my list. The first two are Michael C.C. Top Pick

Adams’ Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War and Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. It strikes me (based on reviews and other things I’ve read about them) that neither book necessarily offers anything “new” to the historiography, but each certainly adds to ongoing conversations about the centrality of slavery in American culture (Living Hell) and the dark, traumatic side of war (The Half Has Never Been Told). I plan to put both on my grad seminar’s reading list. I’m also excited to read Chris Walsh’s long anticipated study, Cowardice: A Brief History (Princeton University Press).

This topic relates to my next book project, and Walsh promises to examine the subject in the broadest possible terms, historically and culturally.

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Civil War books that purport to challenge orthodox views rarely enjoy the level of success that Jonathan W. White’s Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln achieves. Urging readers to move beyond the superficial assessments found in the current literature and delve deeper into the meaning of the soldier vote in 1864 (which ran 78% for Lincoln), White offers a strongly argued counterpoint to the prevailing scholarly wisdom that the election’s outcome signaled resounding approval of the administration’s war and social aims by the men in the ranks. The author points persuasively to a variety of factors, including voter turnout, the drumming out of the } CONT. ON P. 72 Top Pick

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LIVING HISTORY

service of Democratic fighting men in the post-Emancipation Proclamation years, rampant intimidation in camp and at the army polls, and the circumstances of the 1864 nonpresidential elections, that together significantly complicate the issue.

The view that army elections were free and fair takes a large hit. White also ably traces the evolution of how the Union army defined disloyalty among its officers and men. By the middle of the war, any kind of criticism, public or private, of Lincoln or any administration war policy often led to harsh punishment.

One might reasonably contend that White’s analysis overreaches in places, but the overall thrust of the book’s many themes is incredibly powerful.

HONORABLE MENTION: Deserving of greater recognition than it’s received thus far, Bruce Nichols’ monumental project documenting in four thick volumes all known Civil War guerrilla and counterguerrilla actions within the state of Missouri finally came to a successful end this year with the publication of Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri, Volume III, January–August 1864 and Volume IV, September 1864–June 1865 (McFarland). Nothing remotely approaching the scale of this undertaking has been attempted before on this topic, and these meticulously researched tomes will almost certainly stand the test of time as essential reference tools.

LOOKING FORWARD TO: The Early Morning of War: Bull Run, 1861 (University of Oklahoma Press) by Edward Longacre is on my list. The subject of many quality overviews, First Bull Run has long deserved the kind of “no stone unturned” military microhistory treatment that already exists for many of the war’s most iconic battles.

next spring.) Eventually, all of his files and all of the artifacts, photographs, and relics he’s gathered will be housed at Saint Bonaventure University in Cattaraugus County. All of his correspondence from 1964 to 2010 is already there, and the collection will be officially inaugurated next year.

After the war, the surviving soldiers of the 154th would gather every year for a reunion, as many regiments did. In 1986, Dunkelman reestablished that ritual among their descendants.

About 100 show up every year. Each reunion includes a presentation on some aspect of the 154th’s service and ends with a roll call. “Every descendant present stands up and says who they are, where they’re from, and who their ancestor was,” says Dunkelman.

“I call it representing and remembering. That’s what it’s all about.”

The reunions, and the bimonthly newsletter that Dunkelman sends out, have given many descendants new opportunities to represent and remember. One descendent, a geographer by trade, recently created an interactive map of the regiment’s entire service, and several descendants collaborated on a CD called A Song For Our Own: Songs By, For, and About the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry. Their biggest collective achievement thus far, says Dunkelman, was raising funds for a 154th New York monument at Chancellorsville, where the regiment lost 240 out of 590 men.

Dunkelman never did become an illustrator as he planned. But in his tireless efforts to discover all that can be known about a group of men so long gone, he has become an illustrator of a different sort. He has managed to reanimate the men of the 154th, adding shades of color to lives and stories that might otherwise have remained black and white. He won’t stop searching, either, for new descendants, new photographs, new stories—anything that helps bring the men and the exploits of the 154th that much further into the light.

CONTINUED FROM P. 71

ANDREW WAGENHOFFER IS THE FOUNDER AND EDITOR OF CIVIL WAR BOOKS AND AUTHORS (CWBA.BLOGSPOT. COM), AN ONLINE BOOK REVIEW JOURNAL.

CONTINUED FROM P. 17

JENNY JOHNSTON IS A FREELANCE WRITER AND EDITOR BASED IN SAN FRANCISCO.

PRESERVATION CONTINUED FROM P. 20

January 3, 1777, General George Washington scored his first victory over British regulars in the field, marking a turning point in the conflict. The Trust has the opportunity to assist the state of New Jersey and the Princeton Battlefield Society in the first addition to Princeton Battlefield State Park since 1971.

We know it will be the first of many meaningful Campaign 1776 projects in the months and years to come. Please visit campaign1776.org to learn more.

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(Nevertheless she hopefully listed her skills, which included making brandy peaches and “throw[ing] socks in a corner.”)

Widowed women in their 30s faced stiff competition for available men in their age group, and suffered constant reminders of their grim odds. The editor of the Petersburg (Va.) Daily Register took pity on older eligible women during the social season of 1864, helpfully warning them against using rouge. “Bachelors are a shy game,” he pointed out, “and when convinced of one deception imagine many more.” As if strategizing over how to thwart younger rivals wasn’t taxing enough, the widows were also national laughingstocks— punch lines to the endless “old maid” jokes that became a staple of American humor. If you were alive during the Civil War, chances are you heard the one about the schoolboy who

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BEST BOOKS OF 2014

“Every day I check my email, thinking I might hear from somebody or that something new might turn up,” he says. “It keeps you going, that’s for sure. You just never know.”

threw a stone at a dog; he missed the pooch, but hit seven old maids.

As time passed and casualties mounted, some women grew resigned to the idea of life without a husband, while others compromised on acceptable partners. “One looks at a man so differently when you think he may be killed tomorrow,â€? one South Carolina woman mused. “Men whom up to this time I had thought dull and commonplace ‌ seemed charming.â€? One in 13 soldiers returned home missing limbs, and the press, pulpit, and politicians reminded southern women that it was their patriotic duty to marry disabled veterans. The “limping soldier,â€? argued the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, should be treated as aristocracy after the war: “To the young ladies I would say when choosing between an empty sleeve and the man who had remained at home and grown rich, always take the empty sleeve.â€?

There was, of course, a third option that some women took: the unspeakable faux pas of marrying a Yankee.

A Nashville girl wrote her brother in

the Confederate army that the local belles were “dropping off into the arms of the ruthless invader.�

Toward the end of the war, many southern women who were widowed or had never married sustained themselves with female friendships (or “Boston marriages,â€? as they came to be called in the North). They proudly proclaimed their independence, asserting that they preferred the freedom of single life to the entanglements of marriage—a risky “lottery,â€? in the words of a Louisiana diarist, that subjected women to the “despotism of one man.â€? While they certainly mourned the deaths of male suitors— as they did the deaths of male relatives—they no longer considered spinsterhood a tragedy. “Clara ‌ thinks we’ll all be old maids yet,â€? wrote a South Carolinian, recording a friend’s predictions. She added, “I don’t doubt it, neither do I care very much.â€?

By 1865, all Southern women—the happily and regrettably single, the perpetually engaged, the wives and widows—had tired of the war. The Union blockade had sent the cost of goods and food sky} CONT. ON P. 74

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rocketing. They were starving; they feared the terrors of Yankee occupation; they had exhausted both their patriotism and their patience. “Oh my dear husband how shall I live without you?” wrote one Mississippi woman.

“When will this cruel war end?” It was time, at last, for the surviving husbands, fathers, brothers, and beaus to lay down their arms and come home.

KAREN ABBOTT’S LATEST BOOK, LIAR, TEMPTRESS, SOLDIER, SPY: FOUR WOMEN UNDERCOVER IN THE CIVIL WAR, WAS PUBLISHED IN SEPTEMBER. HER WEBSITE IS KARENABBOTT.NET.

CASUALTIES OF WAR CONTINUED FROM P. 27

a pattern typical at the time. International slave trade cases were enormously difficult to prosecute: Jury tampering and bribery were endemic; chains of evidence

were hard to establish in a clandestine trade; witnesses were always conveniently at sea and in no hurry to incriminate themselves; and few cared to see justice done because, as Gordon’s lawyer put it, if “it is lawful to carry a child born in Virginia to Louisiana and there to sell him to perpetual slavery—is it an offence then deserving death to bring a barbarian from Africa to the same place?”6 But by the time Gordon was retried in the fall of 1861, attitudes had changed.

President Abraham Lincoln had been elected on the argument that the Slave Power had to be checked and contained; in response, seven slave states had bolted the Union (four others would later join them). For many Americans, slavery was now associated with treason and enough was finally enough. “New York has long enough borne the disgrace of being the greatest depot of the slave trade in the world,” noted the Christian Intelligencer.

“Here scores of ships have been fitted out yearly on the negro stealing business.

Men have been convicted but slipped their necks from the noose of the law by the connivance of our authorities.”

Nathaniel Gordon would not be so lucky.

On November 9, 1861, he was convicted

and sentenced to death by hanging.

As the date of the execution approached, Lincoln was besieged by Gordon’s lawyers and friends and by political shills still loyal to slavery. Gordon’s wife and mother visited the White House to beg for mercy. Letters poured in to condemn the rank unfairness of a law that had suddenly lurched to life after remaining a “dead letter” for decades.

But others urged Lincoln to be firm.

Attorney General Edward Bates told his chief that while he had the power to commute the sentence, he should not do it. “It is not pretended that Gordon is not guilty,” Bates wrote, “nor that he had not a fair trial. But it is insisted that it is hard to punish him, because his is the first conviction under the Statute. I do not perceive the force of that argument— Some one must be first; nor can I understand why the first … should be spared.”7 Lincoln agreed. The Gordons, husband and wife, were together at the jail when they received the news that the president’s decision was final. Gordon bore it well at first, but the notice came as a “tangible death-blow to the deceitful hope with which his poor wife had deluded herself,” and she collapsed.

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Gordon then broke down himself and “cried like a child.” Later that night, after Mrs. Gordon had gone home, the jailors noticed that Captain Gordon seemed to be convulsing in his bed.

They entered his cell, turned him over, and saw that his features were “horribly contorted,” his eyes were bloodshot and protruding, and he seemed insensible to anything except the excruciating pain. When he finally realized that they were staring at him, he cried, “I’ve cheated you! I’ve cheated you!”8 Gordon had taken more than enough strychnine to kill him. He would later admit that he had carried the little paper packet on his person since his first arraignment. But in taking such a large dose he had almost instantly thrown up the poison, and doctors were gradually able to revive him. Worried they might not have a live man to hang, the jailors rescheduled the execution for two hours earlier.

Gordon was now truly trapped, and he sat down to compose his last letters to his family and the public. “Had I committed a murder, I should have said that I deserved no mercy,” he wrote. “But my hand is not stained with the blood of any man. I have no feeling that I have done any wrong action, and I die perfectly easy, so far as that is concerned.

I have not injured any man knowingly through the whole course of my life.”

Such a sentiment seems impossible to understand. Over the course of his life Gordon had captained at least four slave ships where the mortality among the Africans had been staggering. The blood of hundreds of men was on his hands—but he purely, perfectly did not recognize them as men.9 Gordon claimed that he was not afraid to die, but he did resent the way he would go out of the world. “To have perished in a shipwreck, or in the natural way, would have been nothing,” he noted, “but such a death my very soul abhors…. It is a very true saying that at about the time we are ready to live, we die; but … a man must fulfill his destiny, no matter what it is.” At 12:20 p.m on February 21, 1862, Captain Nathaniel Gordon fulfilled his destiny as the only American ever hanged for his involvement in the African slave trade.10 Much has been written about the diplomatic effect of Lincoln’s Prelimi-

nary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. But months before that, in the case of Nathaniel Gordon, Lincoln had sent a message to the world that he intended to strike at slavery.

On March 8, the London Daily News remarked upon the magnitude of the change. “Under Pierce, Buchanan and Presidents of their stamp,” noted the paper, “[Gordon’s] condemnation would not have caused his friends any serious alarm…. Those who knew President Lincoln well said that he would not lose the precious opportunity to strike a blow at a system which costs hundreds of lives yearly…. They were right, and from the Bight of Benin to the Coast of Cuba the man-stealer will tremble.”11 Certainly Nathaniel Gordon was an anomaly, a uniquely unlucky man, a symbol and a scapegoat for an entire inhuman system that had implicated so many for so long. But his hanging was more than symbolic; it did not just mark the turning of the tide but helped to turn it. For decades, Americans had acquiesced in the African slave trade because there was money to be made, because they were indifferent to the suffering of blacks, and because it seemed that there

was nothing they could do. But once someone actually did something, public opinion began to change. Suddenly what had seemed impossible for so long now seemed imminently likely, and two years after Gordon’s hanging, Americans could marvel at how far they had come in so short a time. “It is extraordinary how completely the idea of gradual emancipation has been dissipated from the public mind everywhere, by the progress of events,” marveled The New York Times in 1864. “Before the rebellion, it was accounted the very extreme of Anti-Slavery fanaticism to believe in the possibility of immediate emancipation without social ruin…. But all these gradual methods are now hardly more thought of than if they had been obsolete a century.”

From their relocated church in Harlem, the congregation of the late Rev. Williams must have raised a rousing “Amen!”12 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).

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verse the progress of Union operations. He had kept Lee from sending forces southwest to reinforce Hood at Atlanta, and ensured that Sheridan had cut off Lee’s Shenandoah Valley passageway to threaten Washington.

At the same time Grant had kept his boss happy, listening as the president offered advice. When Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton wavered one more time about Sherman’s planned march as October turned to November, Grant reassured them.

They let him have his way.

All that remained was whether the president would prevail at the polls on November 8. By the morning of the 9th, Grant had a good idea of how the election had gone.

The returns from the Army of the Potomac showed overwhelming support for four more years of Mr. Lincoln.43 But it was not until November 10 that he knew Honest Abe would have a second term. Pleased, Grant telegraphed Stanton. “Congratulate the President for me for the double victory. The election having passed off quietly, no bloodshed or riot throughout the land, is a victory worth more to the country than a battle won. Rebeldom and Europe will so construe it.”44 In the end, Grant accomplished the task he had set out to do. No, it was not the complete victory he had hoped for that spring, but it was enough. Thwarted here and hampered there, he made adjustments and improvised in response to circumstances, determined to persevere in pursuit of his objective. His achievement was to see things through so that Lincoln could as well, and it was no mean accomplishment. Appomattox was but six months away.

by the following year, he had come to accept that victory required the leadership of hard and aggressive men such as Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip Sheridan. In short, Lincoln’s views and the committee’s ultimately converged.

How much impact did the committee have on the war effort? Its pressure may have contributed to Lincoln’s firing of McClellan, but despite its lobbying the president held on to Meade until the end of the war. The committee’s demands for more aggressive generalship may also have influenced Burnside’s decision to launch repeated suicidal assaults against Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. And its support for Hooker may have helped secure him the job as Burnside’s replacement, but it couldn’t keep him in the job after his ignominious defeat at Chancellorsville. There is no evidence that the committee forced the removal of any commander who exhibited such battlefield brilliance that the war would have ended sooner had he been kept in command.

In a democracy, government is rarely unified. The Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War—not to mention more recent conflicts—all produced deep and long-lasting fissures among Americans. The committee’s partisanship must be seen against the backdrop of a widespread and (in some states) politically powerful antiwar movement that threatened to undermine the northern war effort. As late as the summer of 1864, Lincoln believed that he could not be re-elected, and that the Democratic Party was likely to make peace with the Confederacy on the South’s terms. There were plenty of loyal northerners who fairly begged Wade and his colleagues to pursue their duties aggressively.

“Nothing that you could do would be of more benefit to your country or self than that of unraveling the mysteries of our defeats and protrac-

CONTINUED FROM P. 41

BROOKS D. SIMPSON IS ASU FOUNDATION PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY. HE HAS AUTHORED, CO-AUTHORED, OR EDITED 15 BOOKS, INCLUDING ULYSSES S. GRANT: TRIUMPH OVER ADVERSITY, 1822-1865 (2000) AND THE CIVIL WAR IN THE EAST: STRUGGLE, STALEMATE, AND VICTORY (2011).

CONTINUED FROM P. 53

tion of this war,” wrote Edgar Conkling, an officer of the National Union Association in Cincinnati.31 The absence of close oversight in wartime is a recipe for corruption, incompetence, and failure. Generals and presidents lie, obfuscate, manipulate, and suppress or deny unwelcome truths. Would the war in Vietnam have had a better result without aggressive congressional oversight?

Or the war in Iraq, with its parade of federal officials and beribboned commanders telling Americans year after year that victory was at hand? Would the Civil War ever have been won had the Joint Committee rallied support behind George McClellan in the name of national “unity,” instead of exposing him as the fatally unimaginative and dilatory commander that he was? And would the United States have been better off with conservative Democrats’ notion of victory, which might well have left slavery intact? We can thank the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, along with hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers, that we do not know the answer to those questions.

FERGUS M. BORDEWICH’S MOST RECENT BOOK IS AMERICA’S GREAT DEBATE: HENRY CLAY, STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, AND THE COMPROMISE THAT PRESERVED THE UNION (2012). HE RECENTLY COMPLETED A HISTORY OF THE FIRST FEDERAL CONGRESS, WHICH WILL BE PUBLISHED BY SIMON & SCHUSTER IN 2015. READ MORE BY MR. BORDEWICH AT FERGUSBORDEWICH.COM. THIS ARTICLE IS BASED ON A LECTURE THAT HE DELIVERED TO THE UNITED STATES CAPITOL HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

THE FUGITIVES CONTINUED FROM P. 63

her homespun dress sitting in the chimney corner preparing cornbread for breakfast. Reality hit: Of course she “was no princess,” he later wrote, and his dream left him “longing after the Ideal” that could not be fulfilled in the uncivilized girl before him.15 OF THE 2,500 ESCAPEES in South Carolina between September 1864 and February 1865, about 1,900 made it to “God’s Country,” as they called the Union lines. And while the fugitives often assumed cultural and

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INTRODUCING racial superiority over the southerners who helped them, those who reached safety made thanking their southern friends, both black and white, a life’s work. Benjamin Hasson of the 22nd Pennsylvania Cavalry could not forget Ben Foster, a slave who carried him from hiding place to hiding place when Hasson was too weak to walk. Years after the war, at great personal expense, Hasson traveled south and searched out the freedman. Foster did not recognize the Yankee when he approached, but then his expression changed to surprise and happiness, and the two men had a joyful reunion. It took J. Madison Drake until 1880 to find the postwar address of Mary and Bill Estes. He wrote and asked if he could come visit them. Their son Joseph replied that there was “no man I want to see more than you.” Mary responded, “Absent Friend – I have often wondered what became of you. I very well remember the Sabbath morning I brought you your breakfast and the feather beds we brought you to sleep upon, but I hope I can give you a good bed to sleep on in the house when you come down. The ring you gave me I have yet, and will keep it as long as I live, as a memento of you.”16 Other Yankees were in a position to offer more tangible rewards for the friendship they received during the desperate flight out of the Confederacy.

Daniel Langworthy and 10 other fugitives sent money to a North Carolina sheriff who hid them and procured a guide. In July 1865, Hannibal John-

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son’s battalion occupied Anderson, South Carolina, where he had traveled as a fugitive seven months before. In his role as assistant adjutant general, Johnson wrote the labor agreements that replaced slavery, and he was proud that the planters hated his contracts because they provided so many benefits for the freedmen. “It was the only known means at my disposal by which I could reach the entire number of negroes who had been my only friends when they were most needed, and return a small portion of the great debt and obligation I was under to the loyal black men and women,” he explained.17 The interaction between fugitive Federals and the southerners who helped them was simultaneously epic—several thousand Federal prisoners successfully escaped the Confederacy during the last two years of the war— and intensely personal. So were the wartime memories that bound J. Madison Drake to Mary Estes.

When he located her again after his 16-year search, he sent her his photograph.

She found that his face was inextricably linked in her mind with the maelstrom of war. “It resembles you much,” she wrote, “and reminds me of terrible times in the past.”18

BEHIND THE LINES A N E W V I D E O I N T E R V I E W S E R I E S F E AT U R I N G C O N V E R SAT I O N S W I T H P R O M I N E N T M E M B E R S O F T H E A M E R I CA N C I V I L WA R C O M M U N I T Y

PRESENTED BY

WATCH NOW AT: CIVILWARMONITOR.COM/BEHIND-THE-LINES

LORIEN FOOTE IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY. HER MOST RECENT BOOK, THE GENTLEMEN AND THE ROUGHS: MANHOOD, HONOR, AND VIOLENCE IN THE UNION ARMY (2010), WAS A FINALIST AND HONORABLE MENTION FOR THE 2011 LINCOLN PRIZE. SHE IS CURRENTLY MAPPING THE MOVEMENT OF 3,000 UNION PRISONERS OF WAR WHO ESCAPED THE CONFEDERACY AS PART OF A PROJECT WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA’S CENTER FOR VIRTUAL HISTORY (EHISTORY.ORG/PROJECTS/ FUGITIVE-FEDERALS.HTML).

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4

Allan R. Millet, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012 (New York, 2012), 615.

ibid., 11:425n.

26 Grant to Washburne, August 16, 1864, PUSG, 12:16-17.

27 Grant to Butler, August 18, 1864, PUSG, 12:27.

CAMPAIGN PROMISE

28 Grant to Jesse R. Grant, September 5, 1864, PUSG, 12:130.

1

29 Grant to Sherman, September 10, 1864, PUSG, 12:144.

(Pages 30–41, 76)

SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES

31 Grant to Lincoln, September 13, 1864, PUSG, 12:163n.

32 Sheridan quoted in John D. Stevenson to Edwin M. Stanton, September 20, 1864, PUSG, 12:177-178n.

3

Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822-1865 (Boston, 2000), 248-253.

34 Grant to Lincoln, September 29, 1864, PUSG, 12:228-229.

4

Grant to Meade, April 9, 1864, PUSG, 10:273.

35 Grant to Stanton, September 28, 1864, PUSG, 12:224-225.

5

Grant to Butler, April 19, 1864, PUSG, 10:327328.

36 Grant to Stanton, September 27, 1864, PUSG, 12:213.

The Addresses and Messages of the Presidents of the United States, from 1789 to 1839 (New York, 1839), 120.

6

Grant to Halleck, June 5, 1864, PUSG, 11:19.

37 Grant to Lee, October 2, 1864, PUSG, 12:258.

7

Grant to Halleck, June 5, 1864, PUSG, 11:1920.

38 Grant to Lee, October 3, 1864, PUSG, 12:263.

Peter Williams Jr., “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave-Trade,” in Philip Foner and Robert J. Branham, eds., Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787-1900 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1998), 66-67.

8

Grant to Halleck, June 23, 1864, PUSG, 11:111.

9

Grant to Julia Grant, June 22, 1864, PUSG, 11:110.

2

(Pages 26–27, 74–75)

2

30 Lincoln to Grant, September 12, 1864, PUSG, 12:163n.

Grant to Halleck, March 25, 1864, PUSG, 10:222; Halleck to Grant, March 26, 1864, ibid., 10:232n; Grant to Halleck, March 28, 1864, ibid., 10:231-232; Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Boston, 1969), 145.

CASUALTIES OF WAR 1

Ulysses S. Grant to Alfred H. Terry, November 7, 1864, John Y. Simon, et al., eds, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant (Carbondale, IL, 19672009), 122:394-395 (hereafter PUSG); David W. Lowe, ed., Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman (Kent, OH, 2007), 294.

10 Simpson, Grant, 342.

33 Grant to Halleck, September 21, 1864, PUSG, 12:181.

39 Grant to Lee, October 20, 1864, PUSG, 12:323324.

40 Grant to Butler, October 20, 1864, PUSG, 12:331-332; Grant to Meade, October 24, 1864, ibid., 12:343-344.

3

Ron Soodalter, Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader (New York, 2010), 19.

11 Ibid., 348.

4

Ibid., 6.

13 Grant to Lincoln, July 10, 1864, PUSG, 11:203.

42 Grant to Julia Grant, October 28, 1864, PUSG, 12-362-363.

5

Patience P. Barnes, ed., Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries in London, 18441867 (Selinsgrove, PA, 1993), 74-75.

14 Charles A. Dana to Grant, July 12, 1864, PUSG, 11:229-230n.

43 Grant to Stanton, November 9, 1864, PUSG, 12:395.

6

Soodalter, Hanging Captain Gordon, 201.

15 Charles A. Dana to John A. Rawlins, July 12, 1863, PUSG, 11:230-232n.

44 Grant to Stanton, November 10, 1864, PUSG, 12:398.

7

Edward Bates to Abraham Lincoln, February 19, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

8

Soodalter, Hanging Captain Gordon, 209-211.

9

Ibid., 214-215.

12 Grant to Halleck, July 5, 1864, PUSG, 11:170.

16 Grant to J. Russell Jones, July 5, 1864, PUSG, 11:176.

17 Grant to Sherman, July 16, 1864, PUSG, 11:262-263.

18 Grant to Halleck, August 1, 1864, PUSG, 11:361362.

41 Grant to Stanton, October 27, 1864, PUSG, 12:353.

THE RADICALS’ WAR (Pages 42–53, 76) 1

Benjamin Wade to Caroline Wade, July 22, 1861, reel 3, Benjamin F. Wade Papers (hereinafter BW), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

10 Ibid.

19 Grant to Halleck, August 1, 1864, PUSG, 11:358.

11 London Daily News, March 8, 1862.

20 Lincoln to Grant, August 3, 1864, PUSG, 11:360n.

2

Congressional Globe (hereinafter CG), Vol. 37, No. 2 (December 5, 1861): 16-17.

21 Theodore S. Bowers to James H. Wilson, August 2, 1864, PUSG, 11:363n.

3

Ibid.

4

Hans L. Trefousse, “The Motivation of a Radical Republican: Benjamin F. Wade,” Ohio History 73 (1964): 63-74.

12 The New York Times, February 25, 1864.

BATTLEFIELD ECHOES (Pages 28–29)

22 Grant to Sherman, August 16, 1864, PUSG, 12:16.

1

Rear-Admiral John A. Dahlgren, Memoir of Ulric Dahlgren (Philadelphia, 1876), 211.

23 Grant to Daniel Ammen, August 18, 1864, PUSG, 12:35-36.

5

The Senate’s War (Pamphlet, U.S. Senate Historian’s Office, Benjamin Wade file).

2

Duane Schultz, The Dahlgren Affair: Terror and Conspiracy in the Civil War (New York, 1998), 119-120.

24 Grant to Stanton, August 15, 1864, PUSG, 11:421-422.

6

George W. Julian, Speeches on Political Questions (New York, 1872), 201-203.

3

Schultz, The Dahlgren Affair, 123.

25 Grant to Halleck, August 15, 1864, PUSG, 11:424, and Lincoln to Grant, August 17, 1864,

7

Elizabeth Joan Doyle, “The Conduct of the Civil War, 1861-65,” in Roger A. Bruns, David L.

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Hostetter, and Raymond W. Smock, eds., Congress Investigates: A Critical and Documentary History 2 vols. (Shepherdstown, WV, 2011), I: 199.

8

Ibid., 226.

9

Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War [hereinafter JCC] (Washington, 1863): Part 1, 9-18, 295-301, 373.

ers Who Escaped (RG 249, Entry 31, No. 45); and Letters Received Relating to Union Naval POW’s, Reports from Officers and Seamen of the U.S. Navy who were Prisoners of War in the South (RG 45, Entry 56).

2

Willard Worcester Glazier, The Capture, the Prison Pen, and the Escape [1865] (New York, 1870), 202, 246.

3

Daniel Avery Langworthy, Reminiscences of a Prisoner of War and His Escape (Minneapolis, 1915), 43-45.

4

J. Madison Drake, Narrative of the Capture, Imprisonment, and Escape of J. Madison Drake, Captain Ninth New Jersey Volunteers, S.I., 1866, pp. 19-20, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

5

Milton Russell, “Reminiscences of Prison Life and Escape,” March 29, 1887, War Sketches and Incidents as Related by Companions of the Iowa Commandery Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (Des Moines, 1893), I: 47-48.

6

Testimony of Alonzo Jackson in Ira Berlin et al, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, (Cambridge, 1985), Series I, Vol. 1, 817.

20 CG, Vo. 37, No. 1 (February 18, 1863): 10671069.

7

A.O. Abbott, Prison Life in the South (New York, 1865), 230-231.

21 Doyle, “The Conduct of the Civil War,” 184.

8

“Statement of James Morgan, November 21, 1864” and “Statement of J.L. Paston, November 14, 1864,” Office of the Provost Marshal General, Hilton Head, South Carolina, RG 393, Entry 4295, National Archives.

9

“An Account of Captain Conley’s Escape from Prison,” pp. 15-18, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

10 Julian, Speeches, 201-203.

11 Walter Buell, “Zachariah Chandler,” Magazine of Western History 4 (1886): 271-278.

12 Doyle, “The Conduct of the Civil War,” 195-197.

13 Quoted in Bruce Tap, Over Lincoln’s Shoulder: The Committee on the Conduct of the War (Lawrence, KS, 1998), 163.

14 Abraham Lincoln, unsent letter to George G. Meade, July 14, 1863, in Harold Holzer, Lincoln on War (Chapel Hill, 2011), 199-200.

15 JCC (Washington, 1865), Part 1, 34ff.

16 Ibid., 295-297, 300-301.

17 Ibid., 360ff.

18 JCC (1865), Part 2, 11-12.

19 Doyle, “The Conduct of the Civil War,” 178.

22 JCC (Washington, 1864), Part 1, 14.

23 Ibid., 6-8.

24 Ibid., 30-32.

25 Quoted in Mary Land, “‘Bluff’ Ben Wade’s New England Background,” The New England Quarterly XXVII (1954).

26 Harry Williams, “Benjamin F. Wade and the Atrocity Propaganda of the Civil War,” The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly XLVII (1939): 33-43.

27 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs: 1945, Year of Decisions (New York, 1955), I: 168.

28 Ibid., 172.

29 Tap, Over Lincoln’s Shoulder, 255-259.

30 CG, Vol. 37, No. 1 (February 18, 1863), 10641065.

31 Edgar Conkling to Benjamin Wade, May 21, 1865, reel 6, BW.

THE FUGITIVES

(Pages 54–63, 76–77) 1

Lorien Foote, “Fugitive Federals and the Collapse of the Confederacy,” www.ehistory.org.

This database, on which all the numbers about successful escapes provided in this article are based, was compiled from the following documents in the National Archives: Federal List of Prisoners Who Escaped (RG 249, Entry 109); Provost Marshal Records from Hilton Head, South Carolina (RG 393, Part I, Entries 4318 and 4294) and Knoxville, Tennessee (RG 249, Entry 32, Box 1); Registrar of Federal Prison-

CWM14-BOB-Notes.indd 79

10 Drake, Narrative of Capture and Escape, 41-46; 1860 Census of Caldwell County.

11 Philip N. Racine, ed., “Unspoiled Heart”: The Journal of Charles Mattocks of the 17th Maine (Knoxville, 1994), 242.

12 J. Madison Drake, Fast and Loose in Dixie (New York, 1880), 152.

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13 John Collins Welch, “An Escape from Prison During the Civil War – 1864,” typescript, ca.

1868, Manuscripts, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.

14 Junius Henri Browne, Four Years in Secessia: Adventures Within and Beyond the Union Lines (Harford, 1865), 32, 113-115.

15 Ibid., 383-384; Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis; A Mirror of New York (Hartford, 1869), 150-151.

16 B.F. Hasson, Escape from the Confederacy (n.p., n.d.), 27-28, Huntington Library; Drake, Fast and Loose, 302.

17 Langworthy, Reminiscences, 74; Hannibal A. Johnson, “The Sword of Honor,” Papers Read Before the Rhode Island Soldiers and Sailors Historical Society (Providence, 1903), 50-55.

18 Drake, Fast and Loose, 302.

The

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War Games Sometime in 1862, two enterprising Philadelphians, John Charlten and Thomas Althrop, debuted a board game based on the year-old Civil War. The Game of Secession, or Sketches of the Rebellion challenged players to complete a lighthearted and considerably pro-northern journey through a snake-shaped, 135-square grid. By throwing either two dice or a “tee-totum,” players landed on squares that either helped or hindered their advance. For instance, those who landed on square 11, which bore the visage of Union general George McClellan, were instructed to move forward 20 spaces; those who had the misfortune to land on 127, the “Jeff. Davis” square, were sent back to square 91. While it’s not known how well the game sold, Messieurs Charlten and Althrop might at least be credited with attempting to help civilians find the lighter side of the burgeoning conflict.

COLLECTIONS OF THE NEW YORK STATE LIBRARY, MANUSCRIPTS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, ALBANY, NEW YORK

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“A valuable exploration of the myriad ways Americans—from Union soldiers to freepeople to white southern women—have struggled to interpret Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Carolinas, serving up a provocative assessment of its cultural legacy to the present time.”

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