BEST BOOKS 2018
MONITOR VS. MERRIMACK
P. 26
DISPATCHES FROM HELL
P. 16
VOL. 8, NO. 4
At the height of the war’s epic battle, George Meade convened his senior commanders and posed a critical question: Should they retreat or stay and fight?
Saving Gettysburg WINTER 2018
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
VOLUME 8, NUMBER 4 / WINTER 2018
FEATURES
Salvo {Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to Mobile VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Snowballing FACES OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Dispatches from Hell FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Hardtack
Meade’s Council of War 30 Was it determination or hesitation that motivated Army of the Potomac commander George G. Meade to convene a meeting of his senior commanders as the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg lay in the balance? By Allen C. Guelzo
PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Saving Glendale
MATTHEW COUGHLIN (MOBILE); CLASSICSTOCK / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (COUNCIL); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
COST OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A Thoughtful Gift Pays Off IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Eyewitnesses to History
Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Monitor vs. Merrimack STEREOSCOPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Emancipation on Stage
Books & Authors THE BEST CIVIL WAR BOOKS OF 2018 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 WITH THOMAS E. BARBER, A. WILSON GREENE, BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN, KEVIN M. LEVIN, AND HARRY SMELTZER
In Every Issue EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Meade at Gettysburg PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 A Fitting Tribute
Letters to Julia 40 Ulysses S. Grant’s steady correspondence with his wife throughout the Civil War provides insight into both his experiences at the front and his deep affection for his family.
During the Civil War’s final days, a group of northerners traveled from New York to the city where the war began to mark the conflict’s end—and collect mementos of the crumbling institution of slavery.
Edited by Derick Schilling
By Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle
ON THE COVER: Major General George G. Meade. Image courtesy of the New York State Archives. Colorized by Mads Madsen of Colorized History.
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editorial
VOLUME 8, NUMBER 4 / WINTER 2018
Terry A. Johnston Jr. PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Meade at Gettysburg
Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor Matthew C. Hulbert EDITORIAL ADVISORS
count me among the many fans of Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prizewinning Civil War novel The Killer Angels (1974)—and the Ron Maxwell-directed movie, Gettysburg (1993), based upon it. Both breathe life into their characters—including Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, George Pickett, John Buford, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—and admirably relay the size and ferocity of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg and the decisions, good and bad, that shaped its outcome. Largely absent from both works is George Gordon Meade, the general who assumed command of the Army of the Potomac on June 28, 1863, a mere three days before the epic battle opened, and who didn’t arrive on the field until after the first day’s fighting had ended. Shaara obviously didn’t hold Meade—whom he called “[v]ain and bad-tempered” and “full of selfpity” in the book’s foreword—in high regard. “No decision he makes at Gettysburg will be decisive,” Shaara concludes. In Maxwell’s movie, which runs over four hours long, Meade makes but one 45-second appearance on screen. Meade, of course, had a much larger role to play in the Battle of Gettysburg than either Shaara or Maxwell let on. But even today, historians and buffs debate how large that role was. Was Meade the determined leader who finally outsmarted and outfought Robert E. Lee? Or was he wavering and cautious, preferring to disengage and pull back to ground of his choosing rather than fight the Battle of Gettysburg to a decisive conclusion? Allen C. Guelzo analyzes that question in this issue’s cover story (“Meade’s Council of War,” p. 30), which focuses on the council of war Meade convened with his top commanders on the night of July 2 to decide the army’s next move. Want to share your thoughts on this or other articles in the issue? Send your emails to letters@civilwarmonitor.com.
Jennifer Sturak Michele Huie COPY EDITORS
Brian Matthew Jordan BOOK REVIEW EDITOR BRIAN@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
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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 292336, Kettering, OH 45429 phone: 877-344-7409 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, P.O. Box 292336, Kettering, OH 45429.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: letters@civilwarmonitor.com
Subscriptions: $23.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $33.95 per year in Canada, and $43.95 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 ©2018 by Bayshore History, llc all rights reserved.
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d i s pat c h e s
BUILDING THE PERFECT ARMY
As an annual victim of fantasy hockey drafts, I found “Building the Perfect Army” [Vol. 8, No. 3] insightful, entertaining, and a terrific way to make the Civil War interesting for a wider audience. In short, an innovative take on the usual “best of ” lists. Here’s a team selected by someone who would have picked last in every round: army commander, Samuel Curtis; corps commander, Andrew A. Humphreys; division commander, Emory Upton; artillery commander, Stephen D. Lee; cavalry commander, Wesley Merritt; fighting regiment, the 20th Massachusetts Infantry; utility picks, Robert P. Parrott (superintendent of the West Point Iron and Cannon Foundry) and Jay Cooke (financier). This team has “smarts” with diverse skills, backed up by iron and the money to buy it. Of course, I have no doubt your panel of judges could poke several holes in this analysis. John Foskett VIA EMAIL
***
The fantasy army article was really a lot of fun. I found myself nodding to a few choices and shaking my head at others. Richard Grossman VIA TWITTER
***
Because of the favorable attention Ulysses S. Grant has received recently—as well as the criticism of Robert E. Lee—it’s not shocking to see that Grant was selected before
LINCOLN AND THE MONITOR P. 54 JACKSON THE MAGICIAN P. 26 VOL. 8, NO. 3
the Building rmy Perfect A What if you could create the ideal Civil War fighting force? Five top historians take their shot.
FALL 2018
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One of my favorite magazines is The Civil War Monitor. In the latest issue they did a “mock draft” by five historians who chose their “team” of Civil War commanders. A fascinating read! This is the type of history that teaches people while also making it accessible. Well done! Patrick Henderson VIA TWITTER
KUDOS
Another great issue! I love being able to flip through the magazine’s digital edition before getting my copy in the mail! I really enjoyed the wonderful photo of the 4th U.S. Colored Artillery on guard duty in Columbus, Kentucky [“In Focus: The Sable Arm in Kentucky,” Vol. 8, No. 3].
CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Jim Ambs
Lee by the historians picking their armies in the fall issue. But it’s a head-scratcher that George G. Meade was selected in the first round while Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson are secondround picks. I see that the historian who selected Meade is writing a biography on him so perhaps this explains the baffling pick. But I was also surprised to see that George Armstrong Custer was selected over Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jo Shelby as a cavalry commander, and that one historian selected generals only on the Union side. Given the North’s huge manpower and materiel advantages over the South, the war would have been much shorter if they also had the better generals. James M. Newberry MCLEAN, VIRGINIA
VIA FACEBOOK
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwarmonitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
Ed. Thanks for the kind words, Jim. Not all of our subscribers know that they’re eligible to access the magazine’s digital edition for free. If you’d like to know how, email me at terry@civilwarmonitor.com. GETTYSBURG
I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed your most recent special issue, Gettysburg. What an interesting read! The visuals are stunning—I loved the images and graphics. Keep up the good work! Toni Swift VIA EMAIL
Ed. Thanks, Toni! Folks can purchase a copy of their own at civilwarmonitor.com/gettysburg.
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Agenda Your Winter 2018–2019 Guide to Civil War Events
DECEMBER
$10 (FREE FOR MUSEUM MEMBERS); FOR MORE INFORMATION: LINCOLNDEPOTMUSEUM.ORG or 914-402-4318.
LECTURE
JANUARY
Last Days of the Monitor SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2:30 P.M.
LECTURE
THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM AND PARK
Emerging Scholars Lecture Series Talk by Kate Dahlstrand
NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA
SATURDAY, JANUARY 12, 2 – 3 P.M.
USS Monitor left Hampton Roads, despite the vessel being unseaworthy, under the tow of USS Rhode Island on December 29, 1862. It encountered a fierce storm on the following afternoon. On December 31, heavy seas overwhelmed the ironclad, which sank in the waters off Cape Hatteras. Only 47 of its crew of 63 survived. Hear the full story of the vessel’s final days from historian John V. Quarstein, the USS Monitor Center’s director emeritus. FREE WITH MUSEUM ADMISSION ($13.95 ADULTS; $12.95 SENIORS; $8.95 CHILDREN 4–12; CHILDREN 3 AND UNDER ARE FREE); FOR MORE INFORMATION: MARINERSMUSEUM.ORG or 757-596-2222.
CHICKAMAUGA BATTLEFIELD VISITOR CENTER FORT OGLETHORPE, GEORGIA
The Chickamauga Battlefield Visitor Center is starting a new lecture program led by emerging scholars. The first speaker will be Kate Dahlstrand, a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia, who will talk about Civil War veterans in Reconstruction-era East Tennessee. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS.GOV/CHCH or 706-866-1159.
whole family to learn about the Civil War. Reenactors—including the 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery, the 7th Michigan Cavalry, an army surgeon, and President Lincoln—will offer live demonstrations and be on hand to inform and entertain. Kids’ crafts, live music, and new museum exhibits round out the day. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: LINCOLNSHRINE. ORG or 909-798-7632. LIVING HISTORY
Underground Railroad SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 10 A.M. – 3 P.M. BURRITT ON THE MOUNTAIN HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA
LIVING HISTORY
Confederate Memorial Park Winter Quarters 1862
LECTURE
Lincoln Memorial Shrine Open House
FRIDAY, JANUARY 25 – SUNDAY, JANUARY 27 CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL PARK MARBURY, ALABAMA
Living historians from the Independent Rifles will host a winter quarters where visitors can experience camp life and drill, visit a commissary, and observe other routine duties of the average Confederate soldier.
Learn some of the exciting stories of those who risked their lives to achieve freedom for themselves and for others by traveling on a simulated Underground Railroad. Hear the music from this time and grasp its significance as you learn about the methods these courageous individuals used to escape slavery and build new lives for themselves. Note that programs start at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.; it takes approximately 90 minutes to complete all Underground Railroad activities. $12 ADULTS; $10 SENIORS AND MILITARY; $8 CHILDREN; FOR MORE INFORMATION: BURRITTONTHEMOUNTAIN.COM or 256-536-2882.
FREE (THOUGH DONATIONS ARE APPRECIATED); FOR MORE INFORMATION: FACEBOOK.COM/CONFEDERATEMEMORIAL or 205-755-1990.
Historian Patrick A. Schroeder
Elmer Ellsworth and the 11th New York Fire Zouaves
FEBRUARY
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 13, 7:30 – 9 P.M.
PEEKSKILL, NEW YORK
Historian Patrick A. Schroeder will share the history and story of the 11th New York Fire Zouaves, from the extensive casualties the regiment incurred during the First Battle of Bull Run to the efforts to reorganize the regiment through the summer of 1863.
LIVING HISTORY
47th Annual Lincoln Memorial Shrine Open House SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 11 A.M. – 3 P.M. LINCOLN MEMORIAL SHRINE REDLANDS, CALIFORNIA
The Lincoln Memorial Shrine’s annual open house features fun ways for the
Super Museum Sunday at Fort Pulaski National Monument
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
LINCOLN DEPOT MUSEUM
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OPEN HOUSE
Super Museum Sunday SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 12 – 4 P.M. MULTIPLE SITES GEORGIA
Once a year more than 60 Georgia cultural institutions, historic sites, house museums, art museums, and other points of interest open their doors free to the public. Many of these museums and sites are related to the Civil War era, including Pickett’s Mill Battlefield Historic Site in Dallas and Historic Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: GEORGIAHISTORY.COM or 912-6512125.
weekend in Sanderson features a Civil War-era battle reenactment on Saturday at 3:30 p.m., as well as a reenactment of the Battle of Olustee on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. Other highlights include period music concerts, crafts, and lectures. $12 ADULTS; $6 CHILDREN; FOR MORE INFORMATION: BATTLEOFOLUSTEE. ORG or 386-397-7009. LIVING HISTORY
Lift Every Voice: African Americans in Civil War Navies SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23
VisitSpotsy.com
NATIONAL CIVIL WAR NAVAL MUSEUM COLUMBUS, GEORGIA
LIVING HISTORY
Reenactment of the Battle of Olustee FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15 – SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 17 OLUSTEE BATTLEFIELD HISTORIC STATE PARK LINCOLN DEPOT MUSEUM (SCHROEDER); LINCOLN MEMORIAL SHRINE (OPEN HOUSE); GEORGIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (PULASKI); FLORIDA PARK SERVICE (OLUSTEE)
SANDERSON, FLORIDA
More than 2,000 living historians will present impressions of military and civilian life at the time of Florida’s largest Civil War battle. The living history
Commemorate Black History Month with a guided tour and special programs at the National Civil War Naval Museum. The programs (12–2 p.m. and 2:30–4:30 p.m.) include a variety of stories highlighting the navy experience through the eyes of African-American nurses, pilots, sailors, and engineers. $7.50 ADULTS; $6.50 MILITARY AND SENIORS; $6 STUDENTS; CHILDREN 6 AND UNDER ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: PORTCOLUMBUS.ORG or 706-327-9798.
Reenactment of the Battle of Olustee
A House Divided Dissent, Disagreement & Subversion During the Civil War Era
Shenandoah University McCormick Civil War Institute annual spring conference, Saturday, April 6, 2019, featuring nationally-recognized Civil War scholars Dennis Frye, Jonathan A. Noyalas, Paul Quigley and Jennifer Weber. Share Your Event
Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
Registration information: su.edu/MCWI Registration fee: $50 includes presentation & lunch Location: Shenandoah University 1460 University Drive, Winchester, VA
Additional Questions: contact MCWI's director Jonathan Noyalas 540-665-4501 | jnoyalas01@su.edu
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Salvo Facts, Figures & Items of Interest
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IN THIS SECTION travels 10 A VISIT TO MOBILE voices 14 SNOWBALLING faces of war 16 DISPATCHES FROM HELL figures 18 HARDTACK preservation 20 SAVING GLENDALE cost of war 22 A THOUGHTFUL GIFT PAYS OFF in focus 24 EYEWITNESSES TO HISTORY
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A Union fleet commanded by Rear Admiral David G. Farragut engages with the Confederate defenders of Fort Morgan during the Battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864. The Union victory in effect sealed off the city of Mobile, the last operating Confederate port on the Gulf of Mexico east of the Mississippi River. For more on Mobile, turn the page. 3
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Mobile ALABAMA
in 1861, mobile, Alabama—an important port on the Gulf of Mexico—claimed some 30,000 residents, making it the fourth largest city in the newly formed Confederacy. The shipmakers of Mobile quickly went to work after the war began, producing a number of vessels—from gunboats to blockade runners to the famed submarine H.L. Hunley—most of which would operate against Union ships positioned in Gulf waters. In August 1864, a Union fleet commanded by Admiral David Farragut, who was under orders to capture the city, pushed past the forts—Morgan, Gaines, and Powell—that guarded the entrance to Mobile Bay, in which the Confederates had placed a number of “torpedoes,” or mines. While one of Farragut’s ships was sunk during the fighting, the attack proved successful and gave Union forces complete control over lower Mobile Bay. The following year, after battles at Spanish Fort and Fort Blakeley, Union troops forced the surrender of Mobile, which was the last major Confederate port to be captured—three days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Interested in visiting Mobile? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area—Paul Brueske and Brian DesRochers—to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic city.
Blakeley Cemetery at Historic Blakeley State Park
1 CAN’T MISS
Fort McDermott, the strongest position established by the Confederates in 1864 at Spanish Fort, is a great location to visit. The old battlefield is now enveloped by a housing development called Spanish Fort Estates in the town of Spanish Fort. Fort McDermott is located toward the southern portion of the neighborhood along General Canby Drive. McDermott’s earthen walls are amazingly well preserved, and the high ground from which it’s positioned offers glimpses of Mobile Bay through the trees. pb I’m a bit biased, but I’ll say Historic Blakeley State Park (34745 State Hwy. 225, Spanish Fort, AL; 251-626-0798). There are people who live in Mobile and Baldwin County who have no idea how historically significant the park— which consists of some 4,000 acres, 2,100 of them interpreted—really is. It contains several miles of well preserved Union and Confederate fortifications associated with the Battle of Fort Blakeley, one of the last major battles of the conflict. There are also miles of hiking and biking trails, cabins, campgrounds, and RV hookups, so it’s not just about the war. bd
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USS Alabama at USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park
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BEST KEPT SECRET
Fort Gaines
USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park (2703 Battleship Pkwy.; 251-4332703) is an absolute must-see. The park’s main attraction is USS Alabama, a decommissioned WWII battleship that fought in the Pacific. The park also features the WWII-era submarine USS Drum, numerous military aircraft and land vehicles, and a replica of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley (the original vessel was built in Mobile). All of this sits against a beautiful view of Mobile Bay. pb I’m a fan of outdoor activities. There are world-class golf courses throughout the area, including the Magnolia Grove Golf Course (7001 Magnolia Grove Pkwy.; 251-645-0075), which is located on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail and is PGA-caliber. Fishing is another great option. I’d suggest catching a licensed charter out of Dauphin Island (townofdauphinisland.org), located about 30 minutes south of Mobile. Or, if you obtain a permit, you can fish off the beaches or one of two fishing piers there. bd 3
BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
I’d suggest a visit to Confederate Forts Morgan and Gaines, which each feature a museum and artillery displays. Morgan, now part of Fort Morgan Historic Site (110 State Hwy. 180, Gulf Shores, AL; 251-540-7127), was the principal Confederate fortification during the Battle of Mobile Bay. Just a short ferry ride across the mouth of Mobile Bay is Fort Gaines (51 Bienville Blvd., Dauphin Island, AL; 251-861-6992), a well preserved fort that also played a part in the Battle of Mobile Bay and has an amazing view of the Gulf of Mexico and Mobile Bay. pb USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park is very family friendly. Kids can tour the ships, take a ride on a flight simulator, and view many rare and historic aircraft. The park also has picnic areas—complete with tables, small grills, and dining huts—a fishing pier (license is required), and walking trails. bd
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Admiral Raphael Semmes monument
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Magnolia Cemetery
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BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
It’s difficult to choose one spot, but I’d recommend the statute of Mobile’s most famous Civil War figure, Admiral Raphael Semmes (intersection of Royal and Government streets), who commanded the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama. Nearby is a big columbiad artillery piece used during the Battle of Mobile Bay, as well as the History Museum of Mobile (111 S. Royal St.; 251-208-7569), which features several Civil War-era exhibits. pb Magnolia Cemetery (1202 Virginia St.; 251-432-8672) is a must-see. Established in 1836, the cemetery is the final resting place of more than 1,000 Confederate war dead, including several generals (among them Braxton Bragg) and nurse Kate Cumming. bd
BEST EATS
Spot of Tea (310 Dauphin St.; 251433-9009), conveniently located in downtown Mobile, is a popular spot for breakfast where you’re guaranteed to get a meal with southern flare. For lunch, try the Original Oyster House (3733 Battleship Pkwy., Spanish Fort, AL; 251-626-2188) for a family-friendly atmosphere and location close to where the action of the Mobile Campaign of 1865 took place. Known for its unique oyster dishes, the Oyster House also has great signature dishes, such as Josh’s Shrimp and Grits and (my favorite) Trigger Down on Da Bayou (blackened trigger topped with fried crawfish tails and tasso and Conecuh sausage cream sauce). Felix’s Fish Camp Restaurant (1530 Battleship Pkwy., Spanish Fort, AL; 251-626-6710) offers a great view of historic Mobile Bay as well as truly southern appetizers, such as gumbo, fried alligator, barbecue shrimp, fried crawfish pies, and fried crawfish tails. When eating there for dinner, I usually order the blackened catch of the day. pb Spot of Tea is easily my favorite breakfast spot. I especially like the eggs Benedict. Roshell’s Cafe & Diner (2906 Spring Hill Ave.; 251479-4614), an old Mobile tradition located in midtown, is a great option for lunch. Family owned since the 1940s, they offer great burgers, hot dogs, and fish platters—what more could you ask for? For dinner, try Felix’s Fish Camp. It’s the best food in Mobile, though a bit pricier than other options. You can’t go wrong ordering one of the “fresh catch” options. bd
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Original Oyster House
Spot of Tea 6
BEST SLEEP
For lovers of history, Mobile’s historic Battle House Hotel, now called The Battle House Renaissance Mobile Hotel (26 N. Royal St.; 251-338-2000), hosted a number of prominent guests throughout the American Civil War era, including Stephen A. Douglas, who stayed there the night he lost the presidency to Abraham Lincoln. Later in the war, Confederate troops marched past the hotel en route to board vessels that ferried them across northern Mobile Bay to defend Fort Blakeley and Spanish Fort. And after northern forces took control of the city, many of the Union generals of the XIII Corps checked in. pb Located smack in the middle of downtown, the Battle House Hotel has huge historical significance and played host to many Confederate officers during the war. bd
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The Battle House Renaissance Mobile Hotel (exterior at left)
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS
Paul Brueske, a lifelong resident of the Gulf Coast, founded the Mobile Civil War Round Table and regularly gives talks on Civil War topics. He is currently the head track and field coach at the University of South Alabama.
Brian DesRochers is a native of Mobile. He has been an avid student of the Civil War since his parents took him to local historic sites when he was in elementary school. He serves as the interpretive ranger for Blakeley State Historic Site.
BEST BOOK
For the Battle of Mobile Bay, I recommend Jack Friend’s West Wind, Flood Tide (2004), a very well researched book. For the 1865 Mobile Campaign, I am a partial to my own book, The Last Siege (2018), which documents Mobile’s logistical importance and capture during the final months of the war. pb
History of the Campaign of Mobile (1867; reprint, 2009) by C.C. Andrews and West Wind, Flood Tide by Jack Friend are both great on the Battle of Mobile Bay and the entire campaign in general. Andrews was a Union division commander who had a bird’s-eye view of the fighting. Friend’s book is detailed and packed with lots of great information. bd
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voices
Snowballing “Capt CH Slocomb lost two front teeth— Lieut Challeron a blackeye—Among the Privates of the 5th Co was 5 bloody noses [and] a Blackeye— all of them more or less bruised....” —Confederate soldier E. Mussence, on a snowball fight between troops from Louisiana and Georgia, in his diary, March 31, 1863
“Both regiments formed in line of battle.... At the signal, the battle commenced; charges and countercharges were made, prisoners were taken on either side, the air was filled with white missiles, and the stentorian cheers went up as one or other party gained an advantage.”
“Snow-ball battles were sometimes fought with such vigor as to disable the combatants. The result of such a fight “Th[e] … officers … was the capture of the defeated party’s cooking utensils, saw that the men and any food that might be contained in them.” were getting too serious with their —Confederate soldier Royall Figg, reflecting in his memoirs on life in camp in January 1863 play. General Knipe moun mounted a stump “There must have been at least and tried to make a ten thousand men engaged in s speech, to quiet the the battle. Snow flew in every v st rb disturbance. He direction…. Captain Reilly y was on was compelled to his horse, and had the appearance beat a hasty retreat of a ‘Lager Beer Dutchman.’ The amid the shower of men piled snow upon him until snow balls that it was almost impossible to tell assailed him from the color of his horse....” a all sides.” —Texas soldier J.M. Polk, on a snowball fight that occurred in the camp of the Army of North Virginia in December 1862, in his memoirs
Sources: The Confederate Soldier and Ten Years in South h America a (1910); Where Men Only Dare to Go! (1885); A Brief History of the Twenty-Eighth Regiment New York State Volunteers (1896); The he Life of Johnny Reb (1943); Three Years in the Sixth Corps (1870). 870).
— —Charles W. Boyce, 28th New Yo Infantry, on a “brigade York ow bal snow ball” in early 1863 in which eir brigade brig their commander, Joseph eph h F.. Knipe (left), becam became entangled, in his memoirs
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (KNIPE); ISTOCK (SNOWBALL); THE MOUNTAIN CAMPAIGNS IN GEORGIA
—George T. Stevens, 77th New York Infantry, on a snowball fight that occurred between a Vermont and a New Jersey regiment, in his memoirs
14 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Chattanooga Battlefield, Tenn. BUDDY SECOR
- Are you passionate about American history? Are you inspired by the places where momentous events occurred? If so, then you should be a member of the American Battlefield Trust. We have preserved more than 50,000 acres at some of the most famous battlegrounds in the annals of warfare. We also encourage interest in Civil War history through online content, animated maps, mobile touring apps, and our award-winning magazine, Hallowed Ground. Join the American Battlefield Trust and help us continue the fight to save our nation’s battlefields. By joining now, you can become a FOUNDING MEMBER of the Trust — demonstrating you are on the cutting edge of the battlefield preservation movement. Become a Founding Member Today! But hurry — this is a limited-time offer. To learn more, please visit:
www.battlefields.org/welcomeCWM
The American Battlefield Trust is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that preserves our nation’s hallowed battlegrounds and educates the public about what happened there and why it matters today. We permanently protect these battlefields for future generations as a lasting and tangible memorial to the brave soldiers who fought in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.
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fac e s o f wa r
Dispatches from Hell p u b l i s h e r , m i l i ta ry i m ag e s
The attempted running of the Vicksburg batteries by a Union convoy on May 3, 1863, ended in fiery vessels, death, and Union men floundering in the Mississippi River. The Confederates scooped survivors out of the water, including three newspaper reporters. ¶ One of these civilians, Junius Henri Browne of the New-York Tribune, already knew that his own side did not care much for journalists. “War Correspondence is a most thankless office. The Correspondent may do, and dare, and suffer; but who yields him credit? If he die in the service by disease or casualty, it is thought and declared by many that he had no business there. The officers frequently dislike him, because they have not received what they conceive to be their meed of praise; and the people do not appreciate him.” ¶ Browne’s Rebel captors disliked him even more than his own people. Papers like Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, openly antislavery and hostile to the rebellion, were roundly despised by the Confederates, who treated Browne and his fellow reporters as prisoners of war. Thus began an odyssey that took Browne from Richmond’s notorious Libby Prison to the POW camp in Salisbury, North Carolina. On December 18, 1864, Browne and another reporter escaped and trekked 340 miles across the snow-covered Appalachian Mountains to Union-occupied Nashville. He posed for this portrait soon after, wearing the clothes he had on during his flight to freedom—complete with an old hat given to him by a sympathetic slave. ¶ In 1865, Brown would tell his story in Four Years in Secessia, a 450-page memoir. He went on to a successful literary career and died at age 69 in 1902. 3 MILITARY IMAGES (MILITARYIMAGESMAGAZINE.COM) IS A MAGAZINE DEDICATED TO SHOWCASING AND PRESERVING PHOTOS OF CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS.
RONALD S. CODDINGTON COLLECTION
by ronald s. coddington
16 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Next upcoming exhibit – The Business of War
THE NATIONAL CIVIL WAR MUSEUM PRESENTS OUR NEWEST EXHIBIT
SWEAT STEAM AND
TRANSPORTATION IN THE CIVIL WAR
OPEN DAILY Mon, Tue, Thurs, Fri & Sat: 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Wed: 10 a.m. - 8 p.m. Sun: 12 p.m. - 5 p.m. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 717-260-1861
www.nationalcivilwarmuseum.org
Saturday, December 1, 2018 @ 1:00 PM
Zouaves: America’s Forgotten Soldiers with Patrick Shroeder. This unique Civil War subject will have a slide show of more than 100 photographs of Zouaves, both North and South. There will be reproduction uniforms brought for display and details will be explained. The 2018 Lessons in History program is free to the public. Regular museum admission applies for entrance to the museum galleries.
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figures
Hardtack Hardtack production and costs at the U.S. military bakery in Jeffersonville, Indiana, between May 1863 and August 1865:
27,500,536 Pounds of hardtack produced
149,429 Barrels of flour used
20,491 3 ⅛″ x 2 ⅞″ x ½″
Bushels of coal used
Dimensions of an average piece of hardtack
5,990.5
1.6–1.8
512,710
Weight, in ounces, of an average piece of hardtack
Barrels and packing boxes used
Cords of wood used
$1,311,609.19 9–10
Jeffersonville bakery’s total operating costs
Pieces of hardtack each Union soldier was to receive as part of his daily “camp” ration
$285,751.57 Jeffersonville bakery’s net profits
3–12
“’Tis the song and sigh of the hungry, / Hard crackers, hard crackers, come again no more! / Many days have you lingered upon our stomachs sore, / O hard crackers, come again no more!” ¶ So went the chorus of a popular army tune about hardtack, the infamous hard bread that was a staple of the Union soldier’s daily ration. Made from a simple recipe of flour, water, and (sometimes) salt, hardtack was, according to U.S. Army specifications, meant to be “white, crisp, light, and exhibit a flaky appearance when broken.” In truth, the crackers that reached the soldiers—whether the result of subpar ingredients, poor preparation, or improper storage—were often moldy, riddled with maggots and weevils, or, most often, “so hard that they could not be bitten,” as one Union soldier put it. Those who did not want to risk their teeth might soak their hardtack in coffee or water, crumble it and add it to soup, or fry it in pork fat (creating a dish called “skillygalee”). By war’s end, civilian and government bakeries had produced untold millions of the inexpensive, easily transportable crackers for the Union army. Above we highlight several figures pertaining to the notorious “teeth dullers,” including statistics related to hardtack production at the U.S. military bakery in Jeffersonville, Indiana.
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PHOTOGRAPH JENNIFER WEAVER CREDIT / COURTESY HERE OF THE GETTYSBURG FOUNDATION
Number of months that properly prepared hardtack was expected to keep
S O U RC E S: H.C. SYMONDS, REP ORT OF A COMMISSARY OF SUBSISTENCE , 1861–5 (1888); JOHN D. BILLINGS, HARDTACK AND COFFEE (1887 ); C.L . KILBURN, NOTES FOR PREPARING STORES FOR THE UNITED STATES ARMY (1863). THE HARDTACK SHOWN IS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE CIVIL WAR MUSEUM OF PHILADELPHIA (CWMP 86.26.56).
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p r e s e r va t i o n
Saving Glendale p r e s i d e n t , a m e r i c a n b at t l e f i e l d t r u s t
I REMEMBER VISITING THE GLENDALE
battlefield decades ago. One acre—a woodsy, nondescript road corner—was guarded by the National Park Service. Over time, Richmond’s suburbs sprawled and menaced the battlefield. Mercifully, history’s advocates stepped in. Now, with three-quarters of this fateful place—724 acres—protected by the Park Service and the American Battlefield Trust, it is one of our nation’s greatest preservation stories. The Battle of Glendale (also known as the Battle of Frayser’s Farm), fought on June 30, 1862, was no small thing. The sixth of the Seven Days Battles that saved Richmond from capture, it left 7,470 Confederate and Union soldiers dead, wounded, or missing. It also cost General Robert E. Lee his best chance to keep the Union army from escaping via the James River. Modernity focused enormous development pressure here. In 2006, three housing subdivisions broke ground beside the battlefield’s core, and three more were planned. The Trust named Glendale as one of the country’s 10 most endangered battlefields. Swiftly, our allies—local, state, federal, and private—rallied to save the heart of the Glendale battlefield. The national effort, spearheaded by the Richmond Battlefields Association and championed by the Trust, took long negotiations, civic-minded landowners, and luck. The result surprised many. “This defies comparison. Never before in modern times had anyone preserved a major battlefield virtually from scratch,” historian Robert K. Krick says. “A few years prior, one could not even find a
safe roadside pulloff at which to pause for basic orientation.” The breakthrough came after the Trust acquired 43 central acres in the mid-2000s, opening doors in the tightknit Glendale community, and encouraging conversation about protecting another 319 acres. In 2012, the Interior Department provided $4 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to save pivotal ground. The Trust has since transferred 623 acres at Glendale to Richmond National Battlefield Park, and continues toiling to preserve the historic scene. Glendale’s narrow, winding roads still look much as they did in 1862. But at the battlefield’s national cemetery, a new NPS visitors
center tells the riveting story of what happened here and why it matters. Glendale and the nearby Malvern Hill battlefield form a three-mile corridor that chronicles the game-changing 1862 campaign. Add the Gaines’ Mill battlefield, and the Trust has saved 2,495 acres at these three Seven Days sites, adding 1,681 acres to the park. “These accomplishments have transformed Richmond from a ‘windshield park’ that visitors just drove through to one where they get out of their cars and explore battlefields on foot,” former Richmond National Battlefield Park Superintendent David Ruth says. “Now, people feel a much greater connection to these meaningful places.”
Because preservationists stepped up, farm crops, not subdivisions, grow today on the Richmond area’s Glendale battlefield— once named one of the nation’s 10 most endangered Civil War sites.
3 THE AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST (BATTLEFIELDS.ORG), A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO BATTLEFIELD PRESERVATION, IS COMPOSED OF TWO DIVISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR TRUST AND THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR TRUST.
MIKE TALPLACIDO
by o. james lighthizer
20 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Start Your Gettysburg Journey at the Heart of the First Day’s Fighting
“Of all Gettysburg museums, this is the one I like best” ~ Katharina S. Visit the site of one of the battlefield’s largest field hospitals Explore award-winning interactive exhibits and displays Experience the stunning 360-degree view of the battlefield Take advantage of special group programs and discounts
www.seminaryridgemuseum.org Tickets: 717-339-1300 Group Tickets: 717-339-1354 111 Seminary Ridge Gettysburg, PA 17325
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c o s t o f wa r
48,400
$
A THOUGHTFUL GIFT PAYS OFF
A solid gold snuffbox presented to Lieutenant John Worden, U.S. Navy, in 1862
CONDITION: Despite minor cosmetic scratching, the snuffbox is in very fine overall condition. DETAILS: On March 9, 1862, the newly constructed ironclad warship USS Monitor was in the waters of Hampton Roads, Virginia. The previous day, the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia had engaged several wooden Union blockading vessels, sinking two and damaging a third, USS Minnesota, which had run aground during the engagement. Monitor was in position to defend the helpless Minnesota when Virginia appeared to renew the fight. For several hours, the two ironclads exchanged fire, neither of them able to inflict serious damage on the other before Virginia withdrew. While it ended in a draw, the first-ever battle of ironclad vessels had ushered in a new era in naval warfare. A month later, on April 8, the citizens of Buffalo, New York, presented Monitor’s commander, Lieutenant John L.
Worden, with a solid gold snuffbox. The box, approximately four inches by two and a half inches, was paid for with $300 in donations and constructed in 18-karat gold by the famed Tiffany & Co. of New York. The gift and its inscription—“To Lieut. John L. Worden, U.S.N. You beat the Merrimac and saved the Minnesota”—reflected not only the citizens’ appreciation for Worden’s conduct at the Battle of Hampton Roads, but also their sense of connection to Monitor, some of whose parts had been made by Buffalo manufacturers. Worden, who had been wounded in the eyes during the battle, would be promoted to captain and command of the ironclad USS Montauk. After the war, he spent five years as superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy and was promoted to rear admiral in 1872. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1897 at age 79. QUOTABLE: A day after its presentation to Lieutenant Worden, the Buffalo
Morning Express described the snuffbox for its readers, some of whom no doubt had contributed money for its purchase: “The edges of the box are ornamented with a solid twist border, representing the ship’s rope-cable. On the lid, a border of the same kind encloses a broad oval, within which is engraved a very spirited engraving of the most extraordinary sea-fight of this, or any other age…. In the corners of the box are pretty little designs in etchings of a naval character. The snuff box is a very fine one though too heavy for use, its preposterous thickness of material happily exemplifying the ironclad Monitor.” VALUE: $48,400 (price realized at Morphy Auctions in Denver, Pennsylvania, in February 2018). “This is one of the most important and historic American Civil War U.S. Navy artifacts to be presented for public sale,” noted Tony Wilcox, firearms expert at Morphy Auctions, at the time of the purchase.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF MORPHY AUCTIONS (MORPHYAUCTIONS.COM).
THE ARTIFACT:
22 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Gifts for the Civil War Enthusiast New from the Kent State University Press
AT THE FOREFRONT OF LEE’S INVASION Retribution, Plunder, and Clashing Cultures on Richard S. Ewell’s Road to Gettysburg
WOMEN AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR North-South Counterpoints
A FAMILY AND NATION UNDER FIRE The Civil War Letters and Journals of William and Joseph Medill
PENITENTIARIES, PUNISHMENT, AND MILITARY PRISONS Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War
CLOTH, $49.95
Edited by Judith Giesberg and Randall M. Miller PAPER, $49.95
Edited by Georgiann Baldino
Angela M. Zombek
ISBN 978-1-60635-354-7
ISBN 978-1-60635-340-0
CLOTH, $34.95
ISBN 978-1-60635-355-4
Robert J. Wynstra
CLOTH, $45.00
ISBN 978-1-60635-336-3
CIVIL WAR HISTORY JOURNAL To subscribe, contact: journals@kent.edu or 330.672.7913
MEADE The Price of Command, 1863–1865 John G. Selby
CROSSING THE DEADLINES Civil War Prisons Reconsidered
CLOTH, $49.95
Edited by Michael P. Gray
ISBN 978-1-60635-348-6
CLOTH, $45.00 ISBN 978-1-60635-341-7
Available from your local bookstores or from www.KentStateUniversityPress.com 800-247-6553
The Kent State University Press 1118 University Library · Kent, Ohio 44242
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Follow us online: @KentStateUPress KentStateUniversityPress 11/4/18 3:25 PM
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in focus
Eyewitnesses to History p r e s i d e n t , c e n t e r f o r c i v i l wa r p h o t o g r a p h y
It was the morning of March 4, 1861—Inauguration Day—in a nation fractured by the institution of slavery and driven to the brink of civil war. Seven southern states had already seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. In the coming weeks, four more states would follow and, in mid-April, the war would begin with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina. In this rarely seen photograph from that fateful morning, a crowd of curious citizens begins to gather in the shadow of the unfinished dome of the U.S. Capitol. Later that day, they would witness frontier lawyer Abraham Lincoln take the oath of office as the country’s 16th president and, afterward, utter some of his most famous words: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” The unknown photographer, perched on a camera platform, most likely captured this view as a test shot. An image taken during the ceremony—by which time the crowd had swelled into a solid mass of humanity—from this same position survives, as do three other photos from two more distant locations. 3 THE NONPROFIT CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY (CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY. ORG) IS DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
by bob zeller
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american iliad
Monitor vs. Merrimack
the war at sea occupies a comparatively minor place in the American Iliad, which consists overwhelmingly of battles, leaders, and episodes associated with land operations. Most general works on the Civil War treat the naval conflict in a single chapter, and many combine that chapter with the conflict’s diplomacy. Its most important element, the northern blockade of southern ports, consisted largely of tedium. There are a few dramatic exceptions—including Admiral David G. Farragut shouting, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” as his flotilla opened the Battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864. One could add Admiral David Porter’s dramatic run beneath the thunderous guns as his flotilla sailed past the batteries atop the Vicksburg, Mississippi, bluffs on the night of April 16, 1863, or the battle between the commerce raider CSS Alabama and sloop USS Kearsage off the coast of Cherbourg, France, on June 19, 1864. But these episodes are known primarily to serious students of the Civil War. In contrast, even those casually acquainted with the war have heard of the duel between the ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (its name during the battle, though it is known to fame as Merrimack). They may know neither the date of the engagement—March 9, 1862—nor its location, Hampton Roads, Virginia. But they have clear mental images of Merrimack, a casemate ram resembling a barn submerged to its eaves, and Monitor, often described as looking like “a cheese box on a raft.” Their battle was not the only one between ironclads during the Civil War, but it is by far the most famous. What gives this episode such outsized importance? An obvious explanation is that this was the first such engagement. But perhaps more importantly, it was one of the few between ironclads alone. Most such encounters also involved land forces. Key to the Battle of Mobile Bay, for example, were the Confederate Forts Gaines and Morgan. But beyond this dis-
tinction, the clash between Merrimack and Monitor involved both high drama and obedience to Aristotle’s dramatic unities of time, space, and action. The story began in April 1861, when U.S. servicemen scuttled the steam sloop Merrimack in the Gosport Navy Yard at Norfolk, Virginia, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Confederates. The effort was only partly successful. Merrimack burned to the waterline, but its hull remained intact, and Confederate engineers were also able to salvage its engines. In the months that followed, the Confederates constructed a 170-foot armored casemate on Merrimack’s 263-foot hull and bolted a seven-foot ram below the waterline. They armed the vessel with 10 heavy cannon as well as two lighter howitzers that would be manned by a crew of about 320 men. By March 7, 1862, Merrimack was ready for action, and the following day it steamed forth to attack the wooden Union warships stationed off Newport News, at the mouth of the James River. She struck first at the frigates USS Congress and USS Cumberland, sending both to the bottom, then forced a third frigate, USS Minnesota, to run aground in order to avoid sinking. Nothing seemed able to stop Merrimack, and President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton peered anxiously down the Potomac River, for fear that Merrimack might be making its way northward via the Chesapeake Bay. In point of fact, Merrimack was only marginally seaworthy and limited in range. The voyage imagined by the Union leaders was out of the question. And in any event, by one of the great coincidences of the Civil War, on March 8 a Union ironclad arrived at Hampton Roads to challenge Merrimack, having made a multiday voyage from Brooklyn Navy Yard. This was of course USS Monitor, perhaps the most unusual warship of its time. Unlike Merrimack, whose case- ☛ } CONT. ON P. 70 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
UNDERSTANDING THE ENDURING ALLURE OF THE DUEL BETWEEN THE FIRST IRONCLADS BY MARK GRIMSLEY
26 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (known to most as Merrimack) exchange fire in this dramatization of the Battle of Hampton Roads by Kurz & Allison. While theirs was not the only battle between ironclads during the war, it remains the most famous.
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stereoscope
Emancipation on Stage THE PLAY BEN BUTLER SHEDS LIGHT ON THE CREATION OF THE FORT MONROE DOCTRINE. BY MEGAN KATE NELSON
one weekend last october, my husband and I drove several hours to Portland, Maine, to see a play about lawyer and Civil War general Benjamin Franklin Butler. The stage was stacked with moving boxes, a rolled-up rug, several pieces of unhung artwork, and a large desk piled with papers. Brickwork archways soared overhead, bolstering the stage roof. Ben Butler, by playwright Richard Strand and staged by Portland Stage, takes place in Butler’s headquarters at Fortress Monroe, a Union-held installation on the tip of the Virginia Peninsula in Chesapeake Bay. The play is set in late May 1861, mere weeks after Butler was appointed major general in the Union army and sent to command the fort. The play opens with a series of rapid-fire exchanges between Butler (Ron Orbach) and his aide, Lieutenant Kelly (Michael Dix Thomas), which establish Butler’s short temper and quick wit. He objects to his subordinates’ use of the word “demand” when asking for things—noting that only his wife may make demands on him. Butler’s close readings of words and their multiple meanings is one of his skills as a lawyer. And of course, there are several jokes about Butler’s profession. My husband, who is also a lawyer, was grimly amused and not at all surprised. (“Everybody loves a lawyer joke,” he said.) Butler verbally spars with Kelly, and then with Shepard Mallory (Cornelius Davidson), an enslaved man who, with two friends, has rowed over to Fort Monroe to offer his labor and allegiance to the Union. These arguments are a comedic device, but they also reveal that verbal wit can be politically powerful. After seeing the play, Civil War historian Elizabeth Leonard pointed out, “It made perfect sense to have the dialogue be so rich in wordplay, because in the end, one could argue, it was his superiority in wordplay that enabled Butler to launch his contraband policy.” The arrival of Mallory and his friends also enables the introduction of that policy, and Strand writes several scenes in Ben Butler that reflect the turn in
Civil War scholarship toward studies of how enslaved people resisted their enslavement or emancipated themselves in wartime. Mallory not only escapes to Fortress Monroe, he can also read, as he unintentionally reveals to Butler. In a pivotal scene, he shows his back to the major general, whose reaction suggests that Mallory’s back is puckered with whip scars. All of these details, Elizabeth Leonard observed, “provide a respectful artistic substitute for the long, hard history of slaves’ efforts towards self-emancipation.” And yet the play is not entitled Shepard Mallory. Benjamin Butler remains the central figure in this story of the creation of the Union’s contraband policy, and the other three characters—Kelly, Mallory, and Major John B. Cary (Corey Gagne as a Confederate officer who comes to retrieve his commander’s enslaved men)—are his foils. Butler’s interactions with each of them push him toward his Fort Monroe Doctrine: He refuses to return Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend to Cary on the grounds that because Virginia seceded from the Union, he was not bound under the Fugitive Slave Act to turn them over—and that because these enslaved men were used to build Confederate fortifications, the Union army could lawfully confiscate them as war materiel, declaring them “contraband.” It was Butler’s motives for his famous “contraband decision” that first intrigued Richard Strand. After reading books and articles including Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial (2010) and Adam Goodheart’s 1861: The Civil War Awakening (2011), the playwright was not satisfied with their accounts of Butler’s actions. “I created a fictional explanation in the form of my play,” he said. Strand, whose previous theatrical works do not often wander into the historical realm, felt a degree of freedom writing the scenes between Butler and his three foils. “Some playwrights are attracted to historical events about which a great deal is ☛ } CONT. ON P. 71
28 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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PHOTOGRAPH BY AARON FLACKE
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Ron Orbach (left) plays Major General Benjamin Butler and Cornelius Davidson portrays Shepard Mallory, an enslaved man who has taken refuge in Union-held Fortress Monroe, in Ben Butler, a new play by Richard Strand.
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MEADE’S COUNCIL OF WAR
30 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Was it determination or hesitation that motivated Army of the Potomac commander George G. Meade to convene a meeting of his senior commanders as the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg lay in the balance? BY ALLEN C. GUELZO
In this engraving by James E. Kelly, Major General George Gordon Meade (center, standing with hat in hand) listens to senior officers of the Army of the Potomac during the council of war he convened on the evening of July 2, 1863, the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE
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U.S. Army Inspector General Henry Lee Scott’s Military Dictionary defines “council of war” as “an assemblage of the chief officers in the army, summoned by the general to concert matters of importance.” Scott then moved on hastily to the next definition, as though council of war was a subject he preferred not dwelling upon at any length. William Duane’s Military Dictionary (which Scott’s had superseded) was only a little less terse in defining a council of war: “an assembly of great officers called by a general or commander, to deliberate with him on enterprizes and attempts to be made.”¹ THE 1861 EDITION OF
In this painting by Aleksey Kivshenko, Mikhail Kutuzov, commander in chief of the Russian army (seated far left), holds a council of war to decide whether to surrender Moscow to Napoleon in 1812. By the Civil War, the practice of holding councils of war had largely fallen out of favor with American generals.
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No rules, procedures, or examples were recommended in either dictionary—and probably with good reason, since by the time Duane and Scott were writing, the idea of a council of war had become the closest to a confession of military incompetence any field commander could make without actually using the words. English author John Entick, summarizing the lessons of the Seven Years War in 1763, decided that armies could not be commanded by committees, and campaigns could not be managed by joint resolutions. If a military society was to be a hierarchical one, there was no room for sharing decision-making in chummy councils of war. Intelligent, responsible, and skilled generals did not need the advice that councils of war provided; those generals who did call them were simply fishing for endorsements for doing nothing. “When a commander in chief holds such councils to deliberate whether, or not, he shall carry his orders into execution,” wrote Entick, there: is certainly great room to entertain suspicions of his conduct. From such cautious proceedings, we may be led to conclude, that he is either afraid of doing his duty; or that he has received some secret counter-orders to warrant his inactivity; and that, therefore, he chooses to screen himself under the resolutions of a council of war, as a colourable pretext for not pursuing his public and visible orders.
PREVIOUS SPREAD: CLASSICSTOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; WIKIPEDIA
A half-century later, famed Royal Navy admiral Lord Nelson echoed Entick’s scorn for councils of war. Nelson hated “Councils … between Military men; for if a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.” And a half-century on from Nelson, Sir Charles James Napier, the commander in chief of Britain’s Indian forces, stringently warned: Never call a council of war: a general is to command his officers, not to obey them. This need not prevent his receiving the opinion of any officer, or of every officer, in regard to their peculiar duties.… A general publicly avows his embarrassments when he tells inferior officers he does not know what to do, and that they do; the army loses confidence, magnifies every difficulty, and either becomes panic-stricken or despised the chief, or both.2
So we are not surprised, in the decade following Napier, to find that American generals were chary of calling councils of war and, when they did, often disregarded their advice. Winfield Scott called a council of war to prepare for the climactic assault on Chapultepec in 1848, but then overrode his officers’ apprehensions by ordering a direct attack. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson called a council of war after evacuating Winchester in March 1862, confident that his officers would back his decision to retake the town; they didn’t, and “presently he cried out, in a tone almost savage, ‘That is the last council of war I will ever hold!’” Which it was. William Tecumseh 33 WINTER 2018
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The different generals seem to listen rather than to suggest. The General speaks his thoughts aloud, and the words uttered on this occasion disclose the movement that he has in his mind for some day in the future.
Robert E. Lee called a council of war before orchestrating the moves that blunted George B. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, another just before crossing the Potomac River to invade Maryland in September 1862, and yet another after the Battle of Fredericksburg. But in the first case, Lee was disgusted by the ease with which his generals invented excuses for digging and retreating. “Stop, stop,” said Lee, “if you go to ciphering, we are whipped beforehand.” In the second, Lee simply overrode the advice of Stonewall Jackson to keep the Army of Northern Virginia together, and instead divided it into the portions that, unintentionally, nearly destroyed it. The worst example of what a council of war was likely to do occurred in February 1862, when Confederate generals John Floyd, Gideon Pillow, and Simon Bolivar Buckner held a council of war to determine what to do about Fort Donelson. That, of course, became the moment Pillow and Floyd fled to save themselves, and left Buckner to bear the humiliation of surrender.3
ALL OF WHICH CREATE S an unusual and confusing context in which to consider what is probably the best known council of war called during the Civil War, the late-night consultation in the cottage of the widow Lydia Leister, held by Major General George Gordon Meade with the senior commanders of the Army of the Potomac on July 2, 1863. What makes Meade’s council of war even more unusual is the nature of his circumstances. On the evening of July 2, Meade was the not-entirelywilling heir of two catastrophic problems. First, he had only been in command of the Army of the Potomac for a little over four days, two of which had been consumed with a battle he had not particularly wanted to fight, at Gettysburg. When Meade was abruptly handed responsibility for the Army of the Potomac by War Department chief of staff James Hardie in the wee hours of June 28, the then-commander of the V Corps was given a broad authority “to act as you may deem proper under the circumstances.”4 But at the moment, such authority had nothing in it but uncertainty. Meade knew neither the exact location of most of the Army of Northern Virginia nor the location of
much of the Army of the Potomac. What he did know was that the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania, which had spread northward to threaten Harrisburg as well as reaching westward toward York, was generating widespread fear that Lee’s next move would be toward Baltimore or Washington, and he would be expected to give shielding the capital the top priority. Meade also knew that his political connections to George McClellan and the Democratic Party meant that any decision he made would be mistrustfully scrutinized, reviewed, and meddled with by President Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and General-in-Chief Henry Wager Halleck. So to silence any wagging tongues in Washington, as well as to buy the time he needed to get effective control over the Army of the Potomac, Meade opted for laying out a defensive shield north of the capital at Pipe Creek, which flows into the Monocacy River. When Meade discovered, on June 29, that the left arm of Lee’s invasion beyond Harrisburg had turned away from the Pennsylvania state capital, he concluded that Lee was headed his way. He confided to Winfield Scott Hancock (the commander of the army’s II Corps) that he had “made up his mind to fight a battle on what was known as Pipe Creek,” and with that end in mind, he would “form line of battle with the left resting in the neighborhood of Middleburg, and the right at Manchester.” This was not, on the whole, a bad plan; in fact, considering the exactly 48 hours of command under his sash, it is hard to think of a better one.5 It was at that moment, however, that Meade’s second problem intruded. Meade established a temporary headquarters at Taneytown, Maryland, 17 miles south of Gettysburg, and the circular orders to concentrate the widely scattered seven infantry corps of the Army of the Potomac did not get into the hands of all of his corps commanders on June 30. Particularly, the Pipe Creek circular did not reach Major General John Reynolds, commanding the I Corps (and overseeing Dan Sickles’ III Corps and Oliver Otis Howard’s XI Corps as well). And when Reynolds received word on the evening of June 30 that the Confederate army was converging on Gettysburg, he determined to move to meet the Rebels there the next day, July 1. “General Reynolds,” recalled one of his staffers, “intended to move forward on Gettysburg from his own volition” and “without orders” from Meade “either to fight or retreat.”6 Reynolds was killed at the very outset of the fighting. But once he had committed the I Corps and XI Corps to fighting the Rebels at Gettysburg, Meade had little choice but to revoke the Pipe Creek circular and, late in the afternoon of July 1, order a concentration of the Army of the 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Sherman, according to a smart-aleck copywriter in Harper’s Weekly, “holds his councils of war with himself.”
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In this sketch from Harper’s Weekly, Major General John Reynolds, commander of the Army of the Potomac’s I Corps, is shot and killed during the first day’s fighting at Gettysburg. Reynolds’ determination to confront the Confederates at Gettysburg forced Major General George Meade to alter his plan for taking on Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Potomac at Gettysburg instead. Meade did not share Reynolds’ enthusiasm for a stand at Gettysburg. The news that morning “that a battle was raging and that Gen’l Reynolds had been killed ... caused him great annoyance and perplexity for he had just issued an order for a general Retreat of the whole line behind Pipes Creek.” When he arrived there himself between midnight and 2 a.m. on July 2, he would only say that he was glad they had at least held onto Cemetery Hill, “for it is too late to leave it.” It was, according to Major General Abner Doubleday, “an open secret” that Meade privately “disapproved of the battleground.” Still, Meade shrugged to Major General Carl Schurz, “we may fight it out here just as well as anywhere else.” Unhappily, the ensuing day’s fighting offered nothing but confirmation of Meade’s worst anxieties about Gettysburg as a place to fight
Robert E. Lee. The sun went down on what Confederate general James Longstreet hailed as “the best three hours’ fighting ever done by any troops on any battlefield,” and the proof was there for all to see.7 In just two days, Lee’s Confederates had wrecked the I and XI Corps, then proceeded (on July 2) to mangle the III Corps and the V Corps, wrecked another division of the II Corps, and time and again came within inches of a complete Confederate breakthrough. At day’s end on July 2, Meade’s army had been reduced, in operational terms, to the VI Corps (which he relied on as his reserve), the XII Corps (whose two divisions he needed to hold Culp’s Hill), and two divisions of the II Corps (each of which had seen a brigade badly injured). And Meade had no clear idea of what fresh forces Lee might have at hand for the 35 WINTER 2018
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in command of the I Corps by his senior division commander, Abner Doubleday. But Doubleday was renowned for being an arch-Republican and arch-abolitionist, a “very religious man who never drank or used profane language,” and precisely the sort of self-righteous radical on whom Meade laid the blame for the war in the first place. “So great was Gen’l Meade’s animosity to Gen’l Doubleday founded [on] a past political difference,” E V E N B E F O R E L E E ’S A R M Y moved to the atwrote Doubleday’s adjutant Eminel Halstead, tack on July 2, Meade had been growing anx- that Meade, as soon as he arrived at Gettysburg, ious that the position at Gettysburg could not be sent Doubleday back down to division command held. At 3 p.m. he dashed off a message to Henry and replaced him with John Newton, a fellow Halleck, informing the general-in-chief that he Democrat known as “Old Blinky” for the nerhad successfully “concentrated my army at this vous tic of his eyelids, and so Newton would atplace to-day,” but if he detected any movement tend the council for the I Corps.10 by the Rebels to get into “my rear and interpose A similar situation governed the represenbetween me and Washington, I shall fall back to tative of the III Corps. Dan Sickles had been my supplies at Westminster,” which was located struck by a Confederate bullet late in the action conveniently just behind Pipe Creek. “I feel ful- around the Trostle Barn, and was in the process ly the responsibility resting on me, but will en- of having his leg amputated. Normally, comdeavor to act with caution.” In the months after mand of the III Corps would have fallen autothe battle, Daniel Butterfield, the Army of the matically to Sickles’ senior division commander, Potomac’s chief of staff (and a David Bell Birney. But again, man whom Meade loathed as Meade detested David Birney a disloyal holdover from the almost as much as he did SickArmy of the Potomac’s previles. Birney was the son of a faAnd “soon after all firing ous commander, Joe Hooker), mous abolitionist and a zealhad ceased” that would accuse Meade of going a ous one himself, and he and evening, “a staff officer step further—of asking ButterMeade had publicly quarreled from army headquarters” field to draw up a contingency at Fredericksburg when Meade was sent off to all the senior commanders, plan for a withdrawal to Pipe demanded Birney support summoning them Creek, even making “a rough Meade’s command. And so, sketch showing the position of to Meade’s headquarters in not Birney but Winfield Scott the Leister cottage. the corps” and how he wanted Hancock was put in command them detached from contact of the III Corps, and Hancock with the Confederates. Butturned over his own comterfield claimed to have writmand, the II Corps, to his senten the order and shown it to Brigadier Gener- ior division commander, John Gibbon. Birney, al John Gibbon, who happened to be at Meade’s however, was determined to assert himself, and headquarters. Gibbon was alarmed that the order so he reported to the Leister cottage for the even spelled out “the movement of army corps on council, welcome or not—which meant that the specified roads to points in the rear.” “Good God,” II Corps ended up with two representatives at Gibbon exclaimed, “Gen. Meade is not going to the council, Hancock (who thought he was comretreat, is he?”8 ing as commander of the III Corps) and Gibbon. Six hours later, after the hurricane of LongAt least the major generals commanding the street’s attack had struck, Meade’s anxieties had V, VI and XI Corps—George Sykes, John Sedgreceived more than enough in the way of confir- wick, and Otis Howard—showed up without mation. Alfred Pleasonton, commander of the confusing anyone as to why they were there. But army’s Cavalry Corps, found Meade in a state of Henry Warner Slocum, who commanded the XII “so little assurance … in the strength of his posi- Corps, arrived under the impression that he had tion” that he “directed me to gather what cavalry succeeded the fallen Reynolds as overall comI could, and prepare to cover the retreat of the mander of the I, III, and XI Corps. So Slocum army.” And “soon after all firing had ceased” that brought himself in whatever capacity he imagevening, “a staff officer from army headquarters” ined he was operating, and brought with him his was sent off to all the senior commanders, sum- senior division commander, Alphaeus Williams, moning them to Meade’s headquarters in the as commander of record for the XII Corps. GouLeister cottage.9 verneur Warren, Meade’s chief engineer, was also This did not turn out to be as easy a procedure there, along with Daniel Butterfield, the Army of as it sounds. John Reynolds had been succeeded the Potomac’s chief of staff. “These twelve men,”
NATIONAL ARCHIVES (BIRNEY); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (11)
next morning. If there were any criteria that justified suspending judgment about councils of war, Meade clearly had met them on the evening of July 2.
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Attendees at the Council of War J U LY 2 , 1 8 6 3
John Gibbon identified 12 individuals as attending the council: 1 Major General George G. Meade
(COMMANDING) 2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Daniel Butterfield
(CHIEF OF STAFF) 3
Gouverneur K. Warren
(CHIEF ENGINEER) 4 Major General John Newton
(I CORPS) 5 Brigadier General John Gibbon
(II CORPS) 6 Major General Winfield Scott Hancock
(III CORPS) 7 Major General David Birney
(ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT HE WAS REPRESENTING III CORPS) 8 Major General George Sykes
(V CORPS) 9 Major General John Sedgwick
(VI CORPS) 10 Major General Oliver Otis Howard
(XI CORPS) 11 Major General Henry Slocum
(ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT HE WAS THE SUCCESSOR TO JOHN REYNOLDS’ “WING” COMMAND OF THE I, III, AND XI CORPS) 12 Brigadier General Alpheus Williams
(XII CORPS)
Not present: 3 Major General Alfred Pleasonton (CAVALRY CORPS)
3 Brigadier General Henry Hunt (ARTILLERY CHIEF)
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bed, some sitting around in chairs, just as they happened to come in.” At some point, however, matters turned to what John Newton called “the probabilities of the morrow,” sugesting that Gettysburg was “a bad position” and that Cemetery Hill in particular “was no place to fight a battle in.” Butterfield “sugested that it would, perhaps, be well” to “formulate” a series of questions to which everyone present could speak, “and when he had done so he read it off ”: 1. Under existing circumstances, is it advisable for this army to remain in its present position, or to retire to another nearer its base of supplies? 2. It being determined to remain in present position, shall the army attack or wait the attack of the enemy? 3. If we wait [to] attack, how long?13
Newton’s, as it turned out, was the last voice raised in favor of abandoning Gettysburg, for with one consent, Meade’s generals “all agreed” that a retreat was the last thing the Army of the Potomac should consider. “By the custom of war,” wrote Gibbon, “the junior member votes first as on courts-martial,” and Gibbon turned in a polite demurrer—“Correct the position of the army” but do “not retreat.” This became the snowball at the start of the avalanche. Alphaeus Williams was next: “remain the following day, hold a defensive attitude, and await events.” David Birney and George Sykes both seconded Williams, and John Newton, who could now see how the avalanche was accumulating, “These twelve men,” conceded that perhaps it would remembered John Gibbon, “were all be best to “not retreat,” even assembled in a little W E OW E I T TO DAN Butterfield though he added a little trucroom not more than that a set of minutes survives ulently that “if we wait, it will ten or twelve feet square, from Meade’s July 2 council. In give them a chance to cut our with a bed in one addition, John Gibbon wrote a line” of supplies to Westminster. corner, a small table brief reminiscence of the coun“Bob Lee is not a fool to attack on one side, and cil in 1887, and short notes on us in this position,” Newton a chair or two.” the council appear in post-batgrumbled; he “did not believe tle letters and articles by Althat Lee was mad enough to atphaeus Williams, Henry Wartack us in that position we had, ner Slocum, John Newton, and John Sedgwick, when he could turn it so easily.” and in the testimony the generals would give Otis Howard put the discussion back on the the following March to the Joint Congressional stay-put track, and even urged an attack if the Committee on the Conduct of the War. Confederates had not themselves attacked by 4 These accounts differ in some significant the next afternoon. But it was Hancock, Sedgwick, ways: Gibbon remembered that the meeting and Slocum, as the senior major generals, who put “was at first very informal” and consisted of each any idea of retreat beyond the pale. “Let us have no corps commander’s “comments on the fight” and more retreats,” Hancock declared. Hancock, who “what he knew of conditions of affairs.” Alpha- “got mad” at this point, added vehemently, “The eus Williams, writing only four days after the Army of the Potomac has had too many retreats. council, recalled more specifically that Meade Let us have no more flank movements. Let this be asked “for a field return of the number of his our last retreat.” Sedgwick also voted to “remain” troops,” and such a tally appears in Butterfield’s and “await attack”; Slocum went last and, “with minutes, although only at the end. Dan Butter- evident displeasure,” uttered only five determined field remembered that “some were laying on the words that would later be chis- ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
remembered John Gibbon, “were all assembled in a little room not more than ten or twelve feet square, with a bed in one corner, a small table on one side, and a chair or two.”11 They had no notice of what the subject of the council was to be, but a few them had their suspicions. Meade had tipped his hand slightly when he warned Henry Hunt, the Army of the Potomac’s artillery chief, that he was worried that “some corps had left behind parts of their ammunition trains” and that “he would not have enough amn.” to “carry us through the battle.” The impression that Meade was thinking in terms of a withdrawal thereafter took on a life of its own. “Gen. Sedgwick called” his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Martin McMahon, “about nine [p.m.], saying that he had been called to a Council at General Meade’s headquarters” and “that General Meade was thinking of a retreat.” McMahon was aghast: “For God’s sake General, don’t you favor any such move. Why here we have been hunting for Lee for weeks, and now that we’ve got him here, don’t retreat. For if we get away from here, he will follow us.” The same rumor was carried by Major Charles A. Whittier, Sedgwick’s aide-de-camp, to another VI Corps staffer, Thomas Hyde. “Gloomy reports kept coming in,” wrote Hyde, “and near dark,” Whittier told him “that the general was going to the headquarters to a council of war” and that “we were going to march back twenty miles that night.”12
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Meade held his July 2 council of war in the two-room cottage of the widow Lydia Leister on Taneytown Road in Gettysburg, in which he had established his headquarters. The home is pictured here as it appeared shortly after the battle.
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Julia Letters to
ulysses s. grant ’s steady
edited by derick schilling
Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant sits outside his headquarters at City Point, Virginia, in 1864 beside his wife, Julia, and son Jesse.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
correspondence with his wife throughout the Civil War provides insight into both his experiences at the front and his deep affection for his famıly.
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Ulysses S. Grant is no stranger
to the Library of America series, which has been publishing authoritative editions of great American writing since 1982. Almost three decades ago the Library of America published Memoirs and Selected Letters, which includes Grant’s Personal Memoirs along with 174 letters he wrote from 1839 to 1865. Grant’s writing also appears in the four-volume series The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It and in Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality. And he appears and reappears in the works of other writers in the Library of America series. He is the target of a clever put-down in The Education of Henry Adams and an unseen antagonist of the young partisans in William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished. Grant appears in several works by Mark Twain: In “The Babies,” he becomes the subject of one of Twain’s funniest banquet toasts; in Twain’s autobiographical Civil War tale “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” reports of Grant’s approach help convince the narrator that soldiering is not for him; and in a speech called “General Grant’s Grammar,” Twain, now the spectacularly successful publisher of the Personal Memoirs, rightfully praises the book as a “unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece.”1 William T. Sherman writes about Grant in his Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman with a fascinating mixture of gratitude, admiration, rivalry, and disappointment. The letters Abraham Lincoln wrote to Grant included in Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865, begin with the president admitting that “you were right, and I was wrong” about the Vicksburg Campaign, and conclude with Lincoln urging Grant on after the fall of Richmond: “Let the thing be pressed.”2 And with splendid economy Herman Melville offers his own portrait in “The Armies of the Wilderness”: “Like a loaded mortar he is still: / Meekness and grimness meet in him— / The silent General.”3 Not surprisingly, Grant has also been the subject of numerous biographers, most recently Ron Chernow. In light of the renewed public interest in Grant’s life, Library of America decided to supplement its Memoirs and Selected Letters volume with a short special publication that would appeal to readers interested in the private Grant. The result is My Dearest Julia: The Wartime Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Wife, a selection of 85 letters featur-
ing an illuminating introduction by Chernow. Unfortunately, none of Julia Dent Grant’s letters to Ulysses are known to survive—it is possible that she destroyed them after his death, while taking care to preserve the letters he wrote to her. Of the letters collected in My Dearest Julia, 32 were written from June 1844 to February 1854, during Grant’s first stint in the army, and 52 date from May 1861 to April 1865. The Grants had little need to write to each other after the Civil War, when they were rarely apart for more than a few days. A tragic exception provides the coda to My Dearest Julia, in the form of a moving farewell letter Grant wrote on June 29, 1885, a few weeks before his death. The letters in My Dearest Julia record Grant’s love for his wife and children, his brutal initiation into the realities of battle in Mexico, and the miserable homesickness that drove him out of the peacetime army. But what do they tell us about the Civil War? Grant did not discuss military plans in his letters home, nor did he write much about his superiors and subordinates. Nevertheless, as the selection of 12 letters printed here show, his marital correspondence provides valuable insight into his wartime experiences. The texts of the letters in My Dearest Julia are taken from The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, edited by John Y. Simon and John F. Marszalek (32 volumes, 1967–2012), and are reprinted by permission of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. (Citations of their original printings in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant are provided in the reference notes to this article. The texts preserve Grant’s original spelling and punctuation.) Grant’s first army posting after graduating from West Point in 1843 was to Jefferson Bar-
Above: In this postwar print by William Sartain, Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, sit at home surrounded by their children (from left), Ellen, Jesse, Frederick, and Ulysses Jr. Left: Grant as he appeared in October 1861.
3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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racks outside of St. Louis, a few miles from White Haven, the family plantation of his Academy friend Frederick T. Dent. During a visit to White Haven early in 1844 Grant met Julia Boggs Dent, Frederick’s younger sister. They soon became engaged, but were unable to marry until Grant returned from the war with Mexico in 1848. Their first child, Frederick Dent Grant, was born in 1850, followed by Ulysses S. Grant Jr. in 1852, Ellen Wrenshall Grant in 1855, and Jesse Root Grant in 1858. During their 37-year marriage, Ulysses and Julia would spend eight years in the White House, and then travel around the world, but their first decade together was not easy. Sent by the army to the Pacific Coast, Grant became restless, bored, and homesick, and he resigned his commission in 1854. He returned to Missouri and worked a small farm near White Haven, earning money by sell-
ing firewood on the streets of St. Louis. In 1860 the family moved to Galena, Illinois, where Grant went to work as a clerk in a leather goods store managed by his younger brother Orvil. His life was transformed by the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861. Less than a month after the firing on Fort Sumter, Grant wrote to Julia from Springfield, where he was serving as a military aide to Richard Yates, the governor of Illinois. Camp Yates, May 6th 1861 Dear Julia; There is nothing special to write but you will want to hear often from me during my absence. I too would like to hear from you but so far I have not had the scrape of a pen from you. I presume 43 WINTER 2018
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n may 1861 expectations of a rapid Confederate collapse were widespread in the North, and it is not surprising that Grant shared them. What is particularly ironic is his vision of northern armies hastening south to suppress “negro revolts.” Within two years of writing this letter Grant would lead an army of emancipation deep into the lower Mississippi Valley, and within four years he would send a division of African-American troops to occupy the
fallen Confederate capital. Grant was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in August 1861, and his first great victory was forcing the surrender of Fort Donelson, Tennessee, and its 12,000-man Confederate garrison on February 16, 1862. Promoted to major general, he became second in seniority in the western theater to his immediate superior, Major General Henry W. Halleck. Grant wrote to Julia eight days after the fall of Donelson. (“Johnson” was Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, who would be killed at Shiloh; “Gen. Buells Army” was the Union Army of the Ohio under Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell; “Mary” was Grant’s younger sister, Mary Grant.)
Fort Donelson, Feb. 24th 1862. Dear Julia, I have just returned from Clarkesville. Yesterday some citizens of Nasville come down there ostensibly to bring surgeons to attend their wounded at that place but in reality no doubt to get assurances that they would not be molested. Johnson with his army of rebels have fallen back about forty miles south from Nashville leaving the river clear to our troops To-day a Division of Gen. Buells Army reported to me for orders. As they were on Steamers I ordered them immediately up to Nashville. “Secesh” is now about on its last legs in Tennessee. I want to push on as rapidly as possible to save hard fighting. These terrible battles are very good things to read about for persons who loose no friends but I am decidedly in favor of having as little of it as possible. The way to avoid it is to push forward as vigorously as possible. Gen. Halleck is clearly the same way of thinking and with his clear head I think the Congressional Committee for investigating the Conduct of the War will have nothing to enquire about in the West. I am writing you in great haste a boat being about leaving here. I will write you often to make up for the very short letters I send. Give my love to all at home and write frequently. Tell me all about the children. I want to see rascal Jess already. Tell Mary she must write to me often. Kiss the children for me and the same for yourself ulys.5
he optimism Grant displays here is understandable. Who at the time wouldn’t want to believe that “Secesh” was “on its last legs in Tennessee,” or that rapid and decisive maneu-
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
by Thirsday I shall be on duty in Freeport, mustering in a Regiment there, and if so will be within three hours of Galena and of course will go home. How soon I shall be relieved entirely I do not know. There is no necessity for any volunteers who feel the slightest reluctance about going for already near thirty thousand more have offered their services from this state than can be accepted. There is no doubt but the secessionest contemplated making an attack upon this state but the preperations that have been made here will probably prevent it. We expect here that the next few days will develop a decidedly active policy on the part of the Administration, not perhaps in the way of direct attack, but in stoping all communication with the rebels. Evrything has been managed most admirably so far in not bringing on a conflict whilst our troops were entirely without drill and totaly unaccustomed to camp life and the proper use of fire arms.—As people from the Southern states are allowed to travel freely through all parts of the North and cannot fail to see the entire unanimity of the people to support the Government, and see their strength in men and means, they must become soon dishartened and lay down their arms. My own opinion is there will be much less bloodshed than is generally anticipated. I believe there will be an attack made on some of the Southern forts and a few decided victories gained when the masses in the south will lay down their arms and the leaders in the rebelion flee to other parts, for their country’s good. The worst to be apprehended is from negro revolts. Such would be deeply deplorable and I have no doubt but a Northern army would hasten South to suppress anything of the kind.—Kiss all the children for me. Tell Orvil that when I draw pay here it may be better than our currency, at all events I shall not draw anything until I am relieved, and as I did not bring enough with me to pay my board until my return I shall have to draw for from 10 to 20 dollars, depending upon how long I may have to remain. This place, during its present crouded state is more expensive than New York and living abominable. Love to all ulys.4
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In this Kurz & Allison lithograph, Ulysses S. Grant (on horseback at left) directs Union forces in their attack on Fort Donelson on February 16, 1862. Forcing the surrender of the fort’s Confederate garrison represented Grant’s first great victory, which saw him promoted to major general soon thereafter.
vers such as the Fort Henry expedition could save armies from “hard fighting”? And who wouldn’t want to avoid “terrible battles” such as Belmont and the fighting outside Fort Donelson? Letters such as this remind us of an essential truth of history: It is lived forward, but remembered backward. Grant does not know that the war’s first great bloodbath is about to happen at Shiloh, but from our melancholy future perspective, we always will. A month after Shiloh, Grant wrote to Julia from northern Mississippi. (James Casey was the husband of Julia’s sister Emma; “Fred” was their son Frederick, now almost 12; John Dent was Julia’s older brother; “Aunt Fanny” was Frances Gwinn, Julia’s aunt.)
Camp Near Corinth Miss. May 16th 1862 Dear Julia; I do hope all suspense about the approaching conflict will be ended before it is time for me to write you another letter. We are moving slowly but in a way to insure success. I feel confidant myself and believe the feeling is general among the troops. What move next after the attack upon Corinth is hard to predict. It must depend to a great extent upon the movements of the enemy. Jim Casey is here. He arrived to-day. He is very anxious to have you visit them and says that if you come down he will go with you and Emma to St. Louis on a short visit. I have no objections to the arrangement. They also want Fred. to spend his 45 WINTER 2018
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vacation with them. All were very much pleased with Fred. for his modesty and good sense.—Your father sent Emma a bill of sale for the negroes he gave her. To avoid a possibility of any of them being sold he ought to do the same with all the balance. I would not give anything for you to have any of them as it is not probable we will ever live in a slave state again but would not like to see them sold under the hammer. Aunt Fanny is back in Mo. She says that Mo. is a better place than she thought it was until she tried Ohio again. John Dent is going back to the country. Poor John! I pitty him. Dont tell him that I say so though I am anxious to see you and the children once more. I enjoy most excellent health and am capable of enduring any amount of fatigue. But I want to see this thing over. As I have before said I think the hard fighting in the West will end with the battle of Corinth, supposing all the time that we are successful. Of that, our success, I have no doubt. Kiss all the children for me. I know they are all good and well behaved. Does Jess find any one to fight now that I am away? Give my love to all at home. Write often but dont find fault if you do not receive my letters. I write often enough. Remember me to Mrs. Van Dyke and Mrs. Tweed. ulys.6 Kiss for yourself
rant had married into a slaveholding Missouri family, an experience that did nothing to lessen his dislike of slavery. His father-in-law had deeded four enslaved persons to Julia before the war; they were emancipated during the confict. In his memoirs, Grant wrote that until the Battle of Shiloh he had believed a decisive Union victory could bring about a sudden Confederate collapse, but afterward “I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”7 Yet in this letter Grant still holds out hope that the capture of Corinth will end “the hard fighting in the West.” In the short run the Union occupation of the town on May 30, and the onset of brutally hot, dry summer weather, marked the beginning of a lull in the fighting in northern Mississippi that would last until September. Grant wrote to Julia again a few days after the Confederates retreated from Corinth. (“Col. Lagow” was Clark B. Lagow, one of Grant’s aides; William Wrenshall Smith, Julia’s cousin, was a businessman from Pennsylvania who would visit Grant in November 1863 and write a vivid account of the Battle of Chattanooga8; “Jess” is Jesse Root Grant, the Grants’ four-year-old son.)
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Grant had married into a slaveholding family, and the four enslaved persons whom Julia’s father had deeded to her before the war were emancipated during it. Below: Julia Grant sits alongside her father, Frederick Dent, and her children Ellen and Jesse.
Camp Near Corinth, Miss. June 3d 1862 Dear Julia, So confidant was I that I should be starting home by tomorrow or next day, with all my staff, that I let Col. Lagow start last evening with W. W. Smith, your cousin. Necessity however changes my plans, or the public service does, and I must yeald.—In a few weeks I hope to be so stationed that you can join me. Where is hard to say. May be Memphis. I wish Mary would come with you if the latter place should be my destiny and bring all the children to remain until after their vacation. She could then return with the three oldest and let them go to school. As soon as I know definately you will be informed when, where and how to join me. Wm Smith will call to see you on his way to Washington Pa and will deliver Jess’ pistol. Tell Jess he must hurt nobody with it but all the little boys may look at it. I will move up to-morrow into Corinth Corinth is a new town of but about three years growth, neatly built and probably contained about 1500 inhabitants. Now it is desolate the families all having fled long before we got possission, windows broken furniture broken and destroyed, and no doubt the former occupants destitute and among friends but little better off than themselvs. Soldiers who fight battles do not experience half their horrors. All the hardships come upon the weak, I cannot say innofensive, women and children. I believe these latter are wors rebels than the soldiers who fight against us. The latter mostly are heartily tired of the war. This is the evidence of prisoners and deserters who come in at least. It is now pretty certain that we will take near 10.000 prisoners, 20,000 stand of arms and now doubt a greater number of men have deserted and will be lost to the rebel army than the whole number taken. Give my love to all at home. Kiss the children for me and accept the same to yourself. ulys.9
rant’s sympathy for the hardships suffered by the inhabitants of Corinth did not prevent him from adopting “hard war” policies in the years to come. The exact nature and extent of Grant’s drinking problem is a mystery, and likely to remain so. Not surprisingly, his letters to Julia contain very few references to alcohol. Referring to himself and his staff officers, Grant wrote on April 30, 1862: “We are all well and me as sober as a deacon no matter what is said to the contrary.”10 Seven months later he would assume a more de47 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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fensive tone. (“Bowers” was Captain Theodore S. Bowers, one of Grant’s aides.)
Oxford Miss. Dec. 13th 1862 Dear Julia, Bowers is here just returning and I take advantage of the occation to write you a few lines. I did intend moving Hd Quarters south to Springdale to-day but as it looks so much like rain and there is no special necessity for it I will not move until Monday or Teusday next. I have had no letter from home since we left Lagrange nor no letter for you, from any quarter, except one from Ford enclosed in one to me. The bottle of Bourbon sent by Mrs. Davies I sent over to Gen. Sherman. Myself nor no one connected with the Staff ever tasted it. Kiss Jess for me. Remember me to Lagow. ulys.11
hat sherman thought of the bourbon is not known. President Lincoln told Senator Charles Sumner in January 1863 that he now feared “‘the fire in the rear’—meaning the Democracy, especially at the Northwest—more than our own military chances.”12 Grant wrote about Copperhead disloyalty and how it should be treated from his headquarters along the western bank of the Mississippi:
of geting him back. Northern secessionest defend and protect them in their desertion. I want to see the Administration commence a war upon these people. They should suppress the disloyal press and confine during the war the noisy and most influential of the advocates. Kiss the children for me. The same for yourself. I will address my next letter to Covington. ulys.13
ictory at vicksburg in July and Chattanooga in November 1863 elevated Grant to the rank of lieutenant general and the command of all the Union armies in March 1864. Later that month he established his headquarters in the field with Major General George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac in anticipation of the forthcoming spring campaign. While Sherman advanced into Georgia, Grant would remain in the East and oversee the defeat of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. On May 4 the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River and began marching through the scrub forest and dense undergrowth of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania. Grant and Meade hoped to fight Lee in open country where their numerical superiority in men and artillery could be fully exploited. Instead, Lee chose to attack the Union forces in the Wilderness. After two days of ferocious fighting, Grant moved his troops south toward Spotsylvania Court House.
Near Spotsylvania C. H. Va. May 13th 1864 Before Vicksburg Miss Feb.y 14th 1863. Dear Julia, I have written two or three letters in the last two days and therefore have but little to add now. One thing however was suggested by the letter you forwarded to me from home that I forgot to mention in my letter to you. They say that $82 00 has been received for the children and you speak of sending more by express. Do you not remember that I put fifty-two dollars in a letter that was to have been taken by Col. Carpenter? What ever became of that? I am remarkably well. Hope in the course of ten days more to be making a move. My confidance in taking Vicksburg is not unshaken unless if our own people at home will give their moral support. At present however they are behaving scandalously. A soldier now geting home to Illinois, Indiana or Ohio there is no way
Dear Julia, The ninth day of battle is just closing with victory so far on our side. But the enemy are fighting with great desperation entrenching themselves in every position they take up. We have lost many thousand men killed and wounded and the enemy have no doubt lost more. We have taken about eight thousand prisoners and lost likely three thousand. Among our wounded the great majority are but slightly hurt but most of them will be unfit for service in this battle. I have reinforcements now coming up which will greatly encourage our men and discourage the enemy correspondingly. I am very well and full of hope. I see from the papers the country is also hopeful. Remember me to your father and Aunt Fanny. Kisses for yourself and the children. The world has never seen so bloody or so protracted a battle as the one being fought and I hope never will again. The enemy were really whipped yesterday but their
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
On the heels of his victories at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Grant was elevated to the rank of lieutenant general in March 1864 and headed east to take command of all Union armies and oversee the defeat of Robert E. Lee. Top: Union trenches as they appeared during the siege of Vicksburg. Below: Grant (center, standing against tree) and his staff during the Army of the Potomac’s campaign against the Army of Northern Virginia in the summer of 1864.
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situation is desperate beyond anything heretofore known. To loose this battle they loose their cause. As bad as it is they have fought for it with a gallantry worthy of a better. ulys.14
rant wrote this letter the day after the mass Union assault on the “Mule Shoe” salient in the Confederate lines near Spotsylvania Court House began a nightmarish close-quarters struggle that ended 22 hours later in a renewed stalemate between the two armies. He seems in awe of the ferocity of the battle, almost as if he has unleashed a force unto itself that he can no longer control. Grant’s remarks on the “gallantry worthy of a better” prefigure the Appomattox chapter of his memoirs,
where he described the Army of Northern Virginia as “a foe who had fought so long and valiantly” for a cause Grant believed was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”15 Nineteen days later Grant wrote to Julia as he awaited news from the front lines, which had moved south to Cold Harbor. Few of his Civil War letters carry such a sense of the immediacy of battle as this one, which characteristically shifts between the sound of gunfire and family news. (Little “Nellie” is their eight-yearold daughter, Ellen, who had accompanied her mother to the recent New York Sanitary Fair. Alexander Sharp was the husband of Julia’s sister Ellen; “Fred.” was Julia’s brother Lieutenant Colonel Frederick T. Dent, who was serving on Grant’s staff; Grant’s brother Orvil was at the Union supply depot at White House, Virginia.)
“We have lost many thousand men killed and wounded and the enemy have no doubt lost more,” Grant wrote to his wife the day after the bloody Union assault on the “Mule Shoe” salient in the Confederate lines near Spotsylvania Court House (depicted above) on May 12, 1864. Still, he continued, “I am very well and full of hope. I see from the papers the country is also hopeful.”
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June 1st 1864
By Telegraph from Hd Qurs A P Mar 30 1865
Dear Julia, There has been a very severe battle this afternoon and as I write, now 9 O’clock at night firing is still continued on some parts of the battle line. What the result of the days fighting has been I will know but little about before midnight and possibly not then. The rebels are making a desperate fight and I presume will continue to do so as long as they can get a respectable number of men to stand. I send pay accounts for May to Washington by Col. Bowers, who starts in the morning, with directions to send you $800 00 of it. April pay I sent all to Jones in liquidation of my indebtedness. In June I hope to pay all up.—I see by the papers dear little Nellie acquitted herself very handsomely at the Sanitary Fair. I would like very much to see you and the children but cannot hope to do so until this Campaign is over. How long it will last is a problem. I can hardly hope to get through this month.—With the night booming of Artillery and musketry I do not feel much like writing so you must excuse a short letter this time. Dr. Sharp is with me apparently enjoying himself very much. Fred. has been suffering intensely for several days with rheumatism. He has to lay upon his back in the ambulance unable to turn himself. I think he will be well in a day or two. Orvil Grant is at the White House and will probably be here to morrow. My love to all. Kisses for yourself and the children. ulys.16
To Mrs Grant I wrote to you today—Tell Mrs Rawlins that the Genl is not going much in the rain. This weather is bad for us but it is Consoling to know that it rains on the enemy as well u s grant Lt Genl17
ne wonders if the former Army of the Potomac commander George B. McClellan would have made the same observation about the rain falling on both sides. Grant’s passing remark calls to mind the passage in his memoirs where he recalled discovering an abandoned Confederate encampment in Missouri in July 1861 and realizing that his opponent “had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him.”18 Part of what made Grant a great commander was his awareness that the afflictions and difficulties of war are shared by both sides. Grant did not write to Julia about Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, probably because he anticipated that he would see her in person in the near future. This letter, written the day Petersburg finally fell to the Army of the Potomac, gives us a glimpse of Grant in a moment of triumph:
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Apl. 2d 1865 he union offensive at Cold Harbor on the evening of June 1 gained some ground at the cost of 2,000 casualties, but failed to break through the Confederate defensive positions. Grant would write to Julia again from Cold Harbor, but did not mention the failed assault on June 3, which cost the Union another 7,000 men killed, wounded, or missing and became the only attack he expressed regret for ordering. Unable to break Lee’s lines at Cold Harbor, Grant moved the army south toward Petersburg, a vital Confederate rail depot and supply center, and succeeded in pinning the Army of Northern Virginia down in a siege of the city. For months, the opposing sides dug miles of trench lines and periodically clashed in battles that brought no decision. In late March 1865 Grant sent this telegram to Julia as the Army of the Potomac prepared to launch another offensive against the western flank of Lee’s Petersburg defenses. (“Mrs. Rawlins” was Mary Rawlins, the wife of John A. Rawlins, Grant’s assistant adjutant general since 1861.)
Dear Julia, I am now writing from far inside of what was the rebel fortifications this morning but what are ours now. They are exceedingly strong and I wonder at the sucsess of our troops carrying them by storm. But they did do it and without any great loss. We have captured about 12,000 prisoners and 50 pieces of Artillery. As I write this news comes of the capture of 1000 more prisoners. Altogether this has been one of the greatest victories of the war. Greatest because it is over what the rebels have always regarded as their most invincable Army and the one used for the defince of their capitol. We may have some more hard work but I hope not. Love and kisses for you and Jess. ulys.19 few weeks later Grant would be sent to North Carolina on an “important duty,” as he calls it in the next letter: ordering Sherman to withdraw the surrender agreement he had made with General ☛ } CONT. ON P. 75 51 WINTER 2018
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During the Civil War’s final days, a group of northerners traveled from New York to the city where the war began to mark the conflict’s end—and collect mementos of the crumbling institution of slavery. BY B L A I N RO B E RTS A N D E T H A N J. K Y T L E
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The ruins of Charleston, South Carolina, as viewed from the Circular Church on Meeting Street. The northern abolitionists who visited the city in April 1865 got an up-close look at the widespread destruction.
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the streets; gray haired ‘uncles’ and turbaned ‘aunties,’ grinning and giggling children, and ‘picaninnies,’ all manifesting joy to see us,” reads an account written later by several Oceanus passengers. Even some white Charlestonians found the scene irresistible, though they were drawn out by “curiosity” rather than “patriotism.”3 Like many other opponents of slavery that spring, the Oceanus passengers had traveled to
This article is adapted from Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts. Copyright © 2018 by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts. Used with permission of the publisher, The New Press. All rights reserved.
THE TRIP OF THE STEAMER OCEANUS TO FORT SUMTER AND CHARLESTON (1865)
On the evening of April 13, 1865, the steamship Oceanus neared its destination of Charleston, South Carolina, after a three-day trip from New York City. Passing by Fort Sumter, the island fort where the Civil War had begun four years earlier, the ship’s nearly 200 passengers, most of whom were members of antislavery minister Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn congregation, broke out into song. “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow! / Praise Him, all creatures here below!” they bellowed. Darkness was settling in, and without a single light reaching beyond the wharves, Charleston looked dead to the passengers aboard Oceanus. After suffering an enormous fire in late 1861, and then a lengthy Union siege that left gaping holes in the buildings across the lower peninsula, the city resembled the ruins at Pompeii.1 But Charleston, occupied by Union forces since February, quickly came alive as the New York ship brought welcome news: General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9. “Oh! the shouts from the blue-jackets,” when they heard that the Civil War was finally coming to a close, wrote Theodore Cuyler, a Brooklyn pastor who was aboard Oceanus. “How the dark, sullen city beyond gave back the echoes! How they rang through the ruined mansions of the man-stealers!”2 The celebration lasted late into the evening and began again the following morning, which happened to be Good Friday. American flags flapped in the breeze, making “a novel scene” in the Deep South city. New arrivals—including northerners and abolitionists who arrived on Oceanus and similar ships, Union soldiers, missionaries stationed in the South Carolina Sea Islands, and no doubt some freedpeople—wandered the city triumphant, some claiming spoils from the vacant homes and offices. Locals were up early, too. “Negroes of every shade thronged
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SUMTER AND CHARLESTON (1865)
The steamer Oceanus at dock in Charleston, South Carolina. The ship, which arrived on April 13, 1865, carried nearly 200 passengers, most of them members of antislavery minister Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn congregation who were eager to bear witness to the end of the city’s slave regime.
Charleston to bear witness to the demise of the peculiar institution in its American capital. No city in the United States rivaled Charleston in terms of the role that slavery had played in its formation and success, nor in the political, economic, and ideological support that the city had provided for the expansion of slavery in the young republic. Although Charleston was in shambles in early 1865, abolitionists could not pass up an opportunity to see remnants of, and perhaps secure relics from, the city’s slave regime before they disappeared for good.
Friday, April 14, 1865, was an especially auspicious time for such a venture. That was the day the United States planned to officially return the American flag to Fort Sumter in an elaborate ceremony. Four years earlier, on April 14, 1861, Major Robert Anderson had lowered the national banner, surrendering the federal installation at Fort Sumter to Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard and inaugurating four bloody years of civil war. Now, Anderson, accompanied by a host of dignitaries, was returning there to raise the very same flag. Many Americans viewed Charleston as the 55 WINTER 2018
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Northerners and abolitionists had been flocking to Charleston since the Confederate army retreated from the city in mid-February 1865. The first to arrive were war correspondents who accompanied the Union troops who occupied the city beginning on February 18. In the weeks that followed, reporters from newspapers including the New-York Tribune, the Boston Daily Journal, and the Philadelphia Press published moving columns documenting Charleston’s emancipation as well as accounts of their search for the remains of the city’s slaveholding culture. Inspired by such stories, scores of antislavery northerners began making similar pilgrimages to the capital of American slavery. They toured its holy sites—the slave-trading district, the Work House (where disobedient slaves were confined and tortured), the Citadel (a military academy founded to police the enslaved population), and the offices of the Charleston Mercury (the city’s leading secessionist newspaper)— often picking up a keepsake or two to take back home. These excursions reflected the popularity of memento collecting in the 19th century. It was common for middle-class Americans to travel to historical sites to gather relics that they believed would help them forge a deeper connection with the nation’s past. This phenomenon reached its apex during the Civil War, during which soldiers and civilians in the North and South saved objects that reminded them of the conflict, from fragments of battle-scarred trees to bullets that had pierced loved ones.5 Even before the conflict was over, northern prisoners of war in Charleston had secretly gathered mementos of slavery. While imprisoned at the Work House, Union engineer Warren Lee Goss tucked away “a bundle of documents” about the punishment meted out there. “July 10, ’58. Master of the Workhouse,” read one. “Receive the girl, Mary, give her (15) fifteen paddles and return to me. SAM’L WATSON.” Goss held on to these documents throughout his confinement and carried them north when he was paroled.6 The memento gathering accelerated after the Union army took control of Charleston. The passengers on Oceanus spent the better part of their brief excursion combing the city for souvenirs of
slavery and the Civil War. They headed home to New York on Sunday, April 15, with fragments from a Blakely gun, a pair of slave manacles, and bushels of Confederate currency, among many other items. Other northern visitors set their sights on artifacts associated with John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s great defender of slavery. During his April visit, New York editor Theodore Tilton stopped by Calhoun’s tomb in St. Philip’s Church Cemetery, which, though spared by Union shells, had “been hacked by relic-seekers.” No fan of Calhoun, Tilton was nonetheless disturbed by the destruction. “I have no sympathy with hammerers at tombstones. The dead have a right to undisquieted ashes.” Tilton had no way of knowing that Calhoun’s ashes, in fact, remained as secure as ever. Several years earlier, a group of Charleston gentlemen had secretly moved the statesman’s remains for fear that local blacks—or, worse yet, northern fanatics—might dig them up. Regardless, Tilton chose a less destructive method to acquire his memento of Charleston, plucking some clover growing near the ruins of Institute Hall, where the South Carolina ordinance of secession had been adopted in 1860.7 New-York Tribune reporter James Redpath, for his part, had grabbed a keepsake from the offices of the Charleston Mercury. When Redpath toured the battered Mercury headquarters in late February, he found some printer’s type that editor Robert B. Rhett Jr. had set up for the secessionist paper’s final issue. Redpath absconded with it “for posterity.” The Scottish-born abolitionist concluded his first story on liberated Charleston by noting that “the irrepressible spirit of radicalism” still seemed “to inhabit” the Mercury’s editorial room, though it is “on the right side now.” Above the room’s mantelpiece, someone had scribbled in pencil a message that would have made Rhett’s blood boil: “For President in 1868, wendell phillips, of Massachusetts; For Vice-President, frederick douglass, of New-York.” Redpath also joined with a number of other northern visitors who pillaged Charleston’s slavetrading district for what he called “relics of barbarism.”8 After Charleston outlawed the sale of slaves on public streets in 1856, most auctions had been conducted in the buildings and offices clustered on Chalmers and State streets. Boston Daily Journal correspondent Charles Coffin recorded a detailed account of his visit to Ryan’s Mart, the most prominent of such venues. Coffin entered the Chalmers Street complex through an iron gate, above which sat the word “Mart” in gilt letters. Behind the gate, 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
PHOTOGRAPH BOSTON PUBLIC CREDIT LIBRARY HERE (TILTON); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
birthplace of secession. Hereafter, predicted Cuyler, the city would be known as “at once its cradle and its grave.” The passengers of Oceanus would be there when slavery, and the Confederate nation created to perpetuate it, were symbolically laid to rest.4
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Many of the northern visitors to Charleston in April 1865 combed the destroyed city for remnants of slavery and the war. Among them was New York editor Theodore Tilton (opposite page), who plucked some clover growing near the ruins of Institute Hall (seen in the right of this photo), where the South Carolina ordinance of secession had been adopted in 1860.
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Pictured here is the April 14, 1865, ceremony—attended by more than 3,000 people, including the Oceanus passengers—at Fort Sumter during which the American flag that had been taken down four years earlier when the fort’s U.S. garrison surrendered to Confederate forces was raised again. As part of his hourlong keynote address, Henry Ward Beecher (opposite page) exclaimed, “No more war! No more accursed secession! No more slavery, that spawned them both!”
3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY (BEECHER)
he found a sizable hall, with an auction table running the length of the structure and ending at a locked door. With the help of a freedman, Coffin broke through the wooden door, gaining entry to the rest of the property. At one end of the yard, which was walled in on all sides, was the four-story brick prison known as Ryan’s Jail. Next to the hall was a small room—“the place where women were subjected to the lascivious gaze of brutal men.” Coffin focused his gaze on “the steps, up which thousands of men, women and children have walked to their places on the table, to be knocked off to the highest bidder.” The journalist decided to take the steps back with him to New England. “Perhaps,” he reasoned, “Gov. Andrew, or Wendell Phillips, or Wm. Lloyd Garrison … would like to make a speech from those steps.” Coffin also secured two locks and the gilt letters from the front of Ryan’s Mart. Other accounts suggested that Coffin and his colleagues acquired a slave market bell, manacles, and slave trade records. Abolitionist raiders like Coffin did not sweep Charleston’s slave markets clean, however. Among the items they left behind, reported James Redpath, was a slave trader’s desk on which someone had inscribed antislavery “texts for the day” from William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown.9 Many slavery relics eventually found their way into the hands of northern reformers. Wendell Phillips was reported to have received a slave market bell as a gift from a Massachusetts man, most likely James Redpath, while a secession banner was to be sent to “a Massachusetts society.” Philadelphia Press correspondent Kane O’Donnell gathered papers from several slave marts. His newspaper subsequently published excerpts from these documents, which included correspondence between Charleston slave dealers and prominent public figures, including former South Carolina governor James Henry Hammond and the Confederacy’s first two secretaries of the treasury, Christopher Memminger and George Trenholm.10 A few weeks after he toured the slave-trading district, on March 9, 1865, Charles Coffin officially presented his relics to the Eleventh Ward Freedman’s Aid Society at the Boston Music Hall before a large audience. In a striking display, the auction block steps from Ryan’s Mart were placed on the very stage from which antislavery minister Theodore Parker once rained invective down upon the Slave Power in his Sunday sermons. The lock to the slave pen was placed on the music hall’s desk and the gilt “Mart” letters were suspended from the organ. Coffin regaled the crowd with stories about the Charleston slave trade, reading from a broker’s papers. Later, fulfilling the wish Coffin had expressed
when he salvaged the auction block steps, William Lloyd Garrison mounted them in order to put “the accursed thing under his feet.” Standing atop the steps—portals into the enslaved past— the abolitionist editor sought to enhance his connection to the people for whom he had fought so long. The crowd erupted in thunderous applause, waving white handkerchiefs in celebration, before Garrison offered a lengthy lecture. Over the next few weeks, Garrison, British abolitionist George Thompson, and other antislavery colleagues recreated this scene at Freedmen’s Aid Society meetings in Lowell and Leicester. One month after Garrison mounted the auction block steps in Boston, he and Thompson set sail for Charleston.11
William Lloyd Garrison and George Thompson traveled from New York City to Charleston aboard the steamship Arago along with several other leading antislavery figures, including minister Henry Ward Beecher, newspaperman Theodore Tilton, and Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. They went south not just to see the capital of American slavery for themselves but also, at the behest of the White House, to participate in the flag-raising festivities at Fort Sumter. President Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet understood the symbolic significance of the occasion. While the flag-raising ceremony itself signaled political and military victory, they made sure to include individuals who would underscore the revolutionary social changes wrought by the conflict. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton asked Beecher, a renowned orator and vocal critic of slavery, to give the ceremony’s keynote address. Stanton also invited Garrison—the most famous abolitionist in America, a man who had once publicly burned the Constitution—and Thompson to attend the ceremony as official guests of the government. Among the homegrown abolitionists who took part in the ceremony were Robert Smalls, the former slave who had dramatically seized his freedom by commandeering the Confederate ship Planter in Charleston three years earlier, and Robert Vesey, son of Denmark Vesey, who was executed for plotting an 1822 slave insurrection in the city. At 10 a.m. on April 14, boats began ferrying people—northern and southern, soldier and civilian, white and black, all now free—out to Fort Sumter. Some made the short journey in steamships, while a number of the freedpeople ventured into the water in flats and dugouts, hoping that they might be picked up by a larger vessel, perhaps the legendary Planter. Still captained by Smalls, 59 WINTER 2018
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of the authorities at the Capital, and of all the nation, but would pass from that hour into history.” The minister was also determined to strike a magnanimous note, which disappointed some of the partisans in his audience. Laura Towne, a Pennsylvania abolitionist who had come up from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where she taught ex-slaves, wondered why he had bothered to reach out to white Charlestonians when “there were not a dozen there.”15 Although Beecher approached his address in a spirit of Christian forgiveness, he pulled no punches in assigning blame for the war—to “the ambitious, educated, plotting, political leaders of the South”—or in praising its radical results. “The soil has drunk blood, and is glutted,” he admitted, but the time has come “to rejoice and give thanks.” In unfolding the flag at Fort Sumter, the assembled were restoring the peace and sovereignty of the nation. “No more war! No more accursed secession! No more slavery, that spawned them both!” he intoned to great applause.16 That evening Major General Quincy A. Gillmore, commander of the army’s Department of the South, hosted a banquet at the Charleston Hotel. Attendees marveled not just at the “sumptuous dinner” but also at the presence of Garrison and Thompson. A New York Times correspondent observed that the life of either reformer “would not have been worth, the price of the rope which would have served to hang him, if he had simply ‘put in an appearance’” in Charleston a few months earlier. After dinner, the guests offered up a series of toasts. President Lincoln was on the mind of many that night. Perhaps most moving were the words of Garrison, who had been a longtime critic of the president. “Of one thing I feel sure,” announced the editor, “either he has become a Garrisonian Abolitionist or I have become a Lincoln Emancipationist.” Whatever the case, Garrison concluded that Lincoln’s “brave heart beats for human freedom everywhere.” Little did he or anyone else in Charleston know that the president’s brave heart would not beat much longer. For that same night, as abolitionists and federal officers cheered the maintenance of the Union and the end of slavery, Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth made it clear that for some Confederates the war was not over.17
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY (GARRISON)
the ship ferried ex-slaves to Fort Sumter under an overcast sky. Like Charleston, the tiny man-made island at the mouth of the harbor was a bombed-out shell of its former self. “Fort Sumter is a Coliseum of ruins,” Theodore Tilton wrote. “Battered, shapeless, overthrown, it stands in its brokenness a fit monument of the broken rebellion.” More than 3,000 people, including the Oceanus passengers and members of a black army regiment commanded by Beecher’s brother James, filled the fort, some spilling out onto its crumbling walls.12 The ceremony opened with a song, a short prayer, and recitations of several psalms as well as Major Anderson’s 1861 dispatch of surrender. Next, the former commander of Fort Sumter came forward. As Anderson and his old staff sergeant removed from a leather mailbag the enormous flag that had been taken down four years earlier, the crowd roared. Three sailors attached the flag to the halyards, and then Anderson began to speak. “After four long, long years of war, I restore to its proper place this flag which floated here during peace, before the first act of this cruel Rebellion,” he said, before thanking God that he had lived to see this day. Next, with the aid of a dozen men, including George Thompson, Anderson lifted the banner high into the air. As “the old smoke-stained, shot-pierced flag,” rose, so too did everyone in the fort.13 Waving hats and handkerchiefs, the spectators erupted with shouts, laughter, and tears when the flag reached its peak. Their noisy cries were drowned out by the sound of six cannon fired from Sumter and many more that answered from the forts and batteries surrounding the harbor. “It was the most exciting moment in my life when the flag went up,” wrote Brooklyn pastor Theodore Cuyler.14 Beecher’s keynote address, which followed soon after, failed to match the emotion of the flagraising exercise. With an eye toward the future, the minister had decided to read formal remarks rather than talk extemporaneously. His hour-long address “lacked the peculiar magnetism of his less studied efforts,” according to one eyewitness. Beecher “seemed deeply impressed with the consciousness that he was speaking, at least, semi-officially, and that his utterances would be regarded, not only as the voice 60 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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On April 15, the day after the flag-raising ceremony at Fort Sumter, Henry Ward Beecher joined a group of fellow northerners (including, pictured on the opposite page from top to bottom, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Wilson, and George Thompson) on a visit to the gravesite of John C. Calhoun (pictured right). “All this great crop of war,” noted Beecher, “is from the dragon-toothed doctrines that were sowed by the hands of that dangerous man.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Charleston still had its fair share of unreconstructed Rebels, too. Writing from her residence on South Bay Street on April 14, Maria Middleton Doar fumed over the “crowds of Negro women accompanied by men in uniform parading on the battery” while they waited for the flag to be raised at Fort Sumter. “There is to be a ball tonight at Cousin W[illiam Middleton]’s house,” she told a cousin. “Would you believe that some Charleston ladies are going[?]” Doar was happy to report that “most of those who have been insulted by invitations have indignantly refused.”18 Outside the city, Confederate sympathizers also stewed. In May, Emma Holmes, an elite young Charlestonian who midway through the war had moved to Camden, more than 100 miles inland, wrote in her diary that the word from home was that a “grand Union glorification” had taken place on Good Friday. Among the fooleries of the day, she complained, were the flag-raising ceremony, a parade of the city’s black residents, and a “promiscuous ball” held at the Middleton residence— the same ball that troubled Maria Doar. Holmes found a measure of satisfaction in reports out of Charleston that “the really respectable class of free negroes, whom we used to employ as tailors, boot makers … etc., won’t associate at all with the ‘parvenue free.’”19
Early Saturday, April 15, the morning after the flag-raising ceremony, Henry Ward Beecher
strolled through Charleston, seeing reminders of slavery—and its demise—all over town. At one point, he called on former governor William Aiken Jr., who lived in an imposing home in the city’s northern section and had owned close to 1,000 slaves before the war. Beecher hoped to talk about the future with Aiken, a prominent Unionist, but the governor seemed drawn incessantly back to one point: “The President ought not to have issued his Proclamation.” Aiken spoke of his relationship with his slaves in “couleur de rose,” added Beecher. The governor’s tales were familiar. “There is a liturgy on the subject,” he wrote. “You take a thousand Southerners at Saratoga and Newport, and they will all repeat the same story of their care and nurture of the slaves, and of the addiction of the slaves to them.” The next day, Beecher spoke directly to Aiken’s former slaves, who gave him an altogether different impression. “We shall never know what slavery is,” he concluded, “until the slaves tell us.” Later that morning, Beecher joined Thompson, Wilson, Tilton, and Garrison on a visit to John C. Calhoun’s gravesite. “All this great crop of war,” maintained Beecher, while standing over the (unbeknownst to him) empty tomb, “is from the dragon-toothed doctrines that were sowed by the hands of that dangerous man.” In what one eyewitness described as among the most striking scenes of the extraordinary weekend, Garrison put his hand on the simple marble slab, inscribed with just a single name: Calhoun. “Down into a deeper grave than this slavery ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76 61 WINTER 2018
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Civil War Studies from LSU Press Available in bookstores and online at www.lsupress.org
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CIVIL WAR LOGISTICS
Economic Motivation among Union Soldiers during the Civil War
A Study of Military Transportation
THE MAN WHO PUNCHED JEFFERSON DAVIS
WILLIAM MARVEL
EARL J. HESS 27 b&w images, 2 maps
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LEE’S TIGERS REVISITED
Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War
The Louisiana Infantry in the Army of Northern Virginia
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The Political Life of Henry S. Foote, Southern Unionist BEN WYNNE $47.50 cloth
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Grant and Lee, June 4–15, 1864
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Days of Destruction Augustine Thomas Smythe and the Civil War Siege of Charleston Edited by W. Eric Emerson and Karen Stokes One soldier’s eloquent, descriptive letters to his family offering a personal view of the devastating assault 200 pp., 21 b&w illus., hardcover and ebook, $29.99
For Church and Confederacy
A South Carolina Upcountry Saga The Civil War Letters of Barham Bobo Foster and His Family, 1860‒1863 Edited by A. Gibert Kennedy Collected letters of a Confederate officer and his family detail daily life and loss on the battlefield 392 pp., 24 b&w illus., hardcover $49.99
The Lynches of South Carolina Edited by Robert Emmett Curran An Irish Catholic family settled in the upcountry and helped shape mid-nineteenth century South Carolina 456 pp., 19 b&w illus., hardcover and ebook, $69.99
The Best Gun in the World George Woodward Morse and the South Carolina State Military Works Robert S. Seigler A thoroughly researched account of weapons innovation and industrialization during the Civil War
Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South Marie S. Molloy A broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in the slaveholding South 240 pp., 11 b&w illus., hardcover and ebook, $39.99
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Available from USC Press or local and online booksellers
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800-768-2500 www.uscpress.com
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BOOKS & AUTHORS
The Best Civil War Books of 2018
ISTOCK
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 two favorite books published in 2018. We also gave them a 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
released book on Grant during the Vicksburg Campaign, The Decision Was Always My Own: Ulysses S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign (Southern Illinois University Press), is anything like his other works, it deserves a wide readership. Two books coming out this fall are also on my radar: William Glenn Robertson’s River of Death: The Chickamauga Campaign: Volume 1: The Fall of Chattanooga (University of North Carolina Press), a study the author has been working on for decades, and William Marvel’s Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation Among Union Soldiers During the Civil War (Louisiana State University Press), which should offer a persuasive corrective to the idea that patriotism alone drove Union enlistment.
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I lead tours on Civil War battlefields all across the country and know too well how strategy, operations, and tactical decisions tend to dominate my narratives. Jonathan M. Steplyk’s innovative and entirely original new book, Fighting Means KillTOP PICK
ing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat (University Press of Kansas), has
reminded me that Civil War battlefields are, at their root, all about the ugly business of countrymen killing countrymen. Steplyk has employed extensive research in primary sources to offer insights into how citizen soldiers reacted and adapted to the reality of deadly combat in all of its Civil War forms. Soldiers dispatched each other in a variety of ways—sharpshooting, hand-to-hand encounters, and the more typical experience of near-anonymous general combat. There were massacres as well as acts of battlefield mercy. This is simply a brilliant book, and after reading it, I wondered why no one had tackled such an important topic years ago. Fighting Means Killing bridges the gap between the military and social history of the war and explains better than anything I’ve previously read how and why a quarter of a million Americans died at the hands of their domestic enemies. HONORABLE MENTION: I would have highly recommended Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia (University of North Carolina Press), a collection of nine essays edited by Caroline E. Janney, even if my personal focus was not on the Petersburg Campaign and its consequences. Janney has picked up where her mentor, Gary W. Gallagher, left off in editing thoughtful and original scholarship on a variety of topics. Among the contributors to this volume, which deals with the closing chapter of the war in the East, are many of our field’s leading historians, including Peter Carmichael, who writes about the Battle of Five Forks, and Elizabeth Varon, who reviews African Americans’
A. WILSON GREENE RETIRED FROM A 44-YEAR CAREER IN PUBLIC HISTORY IN 2017. HIS MOST RECENT BOOK, A CAMPAIGN OF GIANTS: THE BATTLE FOR PETERSBURG (UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS), IS THE FIRST OF THREE PROJECTED VOLUMES ON THE PETERSBURG CAMPAIGN.
HARRY SMELTZER
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TOP PICK
My choice for the “best” Civil War book of 2018 is not a traditional narrative, but a four-volume set of
rosters for the regiments of George “Tige” Anderson’s brigade— the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 11th Georgia Infantry—compiled by Richard Michael
perspectives on Robert E. Lee’s surrender. There is not a weak entry in this must-read anthology. LOOKING FORWARD TO: Timothy B. Smith has become the leading chronicler of military campaigns in the war’s western theater. If his recently
Allen (Savas Beatie). The result of many years of painstaking research, these volumes equate to about 5,000 minibiographies, which are alternately heartwrenching and surprising. In addition to the books’ substantial value as a database, this work is representative of the new “tip of the spear” of Civil War research, driven by individuals with low-cost access to increasing volumes of material and the time to process it all. It remains to be seen whether this type of scholarship will be financially rewarding to the authors or publishers, but it is certainly priceless to the rest of us. HONORABLE MENTION: The first book of A. Wilson Greene’s planned
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“This is simply a brilliant book, and after reading it, I wondered why no one had tackled such an important topic years ago.” A. WILSON GREENE ON FIGHTING MEANS KILLING: CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND THE NATURE OF COMBAT BY JONATHAN M. STEPLYK
three-volume study of the Petersburg Campaign, A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume One: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater (University of North Carolina Press), is an impressive achievement. The operations around Petersburg are staggering in their volume and complexity, and few have studied them as closely or for as long as Greene. I’m already eager for the third volume to see if the action at Fort Mahone during the Breakthrough (where my great-grandfather was wounded) gets the attention it has lacked. LO O K I N G FO RWA R D TO:
Although it was released in very late 2017, John F. Marszalek’s The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition (Harvard University Press) is one I still want to take a look at. Not so much for Grant’s writings, which I’ve read several times, but for Marszalek’s commentary. Sticking with Grant, I’m also looking forward to reading My Dearest Julia: The Wartime
Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Wife (Library of America). I find the real-time reflections of Grant’s letters revealing in a way that differs from those contained in his recollections. HARRY SMELTZER IS THE HOST OF THE WEBSITE BULL RUNNINGS (BULLRUNNINGS.WORDPRESS. COM), THE AUTHOR OF NUMEROUS CIVIL WAR ARTICLES AND BOOK REVIEWS, A FREQUENT PRESENTER AT CIVIL WAR ROUNDTABLES, AND A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE SAVE HISTORIC ANTIETAM FOUNDATION.
THOMAS E. BARBER
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TOP PICK
Erik Mathisen’s The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America (University of North
Carolina Press) took me by surprise this year with its focus on political fidelity. In Mathisen’s telling the Civil War shattered the antebellum consensus that citizenship was reserved for white men only. Using the Mississippi Valley as his focal point, Mathisen charts how loyalty, or disloyalty, to the state became the litmus test for
American citizenship. During the war, the Confederacy worked tirelessly to wrangle loyalties away from local militias, while the Union used disloyalty as an excuse to
THE TOPSELLING CIVIL WAR TITLES OF 2018 The books pictured here are the 10 bestselling Civil War titles published in 2018. They are ranked in order of number of copies sold through mid-October. BASED ON SALES DATA PROVIDED BY NPD BOOKSCAN.
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Rising in Flames: Sherman’s March and the Fight for a New Nation
Lincoln and the Irish: The Untold Story of How the Irish Helped Abraham Lincoln Save the Union
By J.D. Dickey (PEGASUS BOOKS) $29.94
By Niall O’Dowd (SKYHORSE PUBLISHING) $24.98
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B&A censor the press and individuals, as when Major General Benjamin Butler had Confederate sympathizer William Mumford executed for removing the U.S. flag from a public building in New Orleans in June 1862. Moreover, wartime loyalties transformed into postwar rights. African Americans used wartime service as a foundation for securing political, property, and familial rights. White southerners saw the opposite happen—loyalty to the Confederate state resulted in weaker claims to national citizenship and property rights. Concisely written, The Loyal Republic is well worth your time. HONORABLE MENTION: Prisons remain an understudied topic in Civil War studies. In Penitentiaries, Punishments, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis During the American Civil War (Kent State University Press), Angela M. Zombek compares wartime prisons to their antebellum forebears and their postwar progeny. In doing so, she demonstrates that peniten-
itentiaries tried to create productive citizens. This insight is important because it reminds us that for all of the change wrought by the Civil War, many facets of American life remained constant.
tiaries and military prisons, before and after the war, were far more alike than they were different. Military prisons sought to create loyal subjects just as pen-
LOOKING FORWARD TO: Buzzing just outside my periphery is Caitlin Rosenthal’s Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press). The book offers fresh insights into the relationship between capitalism and slavery by examining how the quantitative practices used by planters made slavery’s violence palatable, or rendered it invisible, through fiscal abstraction. I’m also excited about Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s forthcoming The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (Harvard University Press) because it promises to be iconoclastic. Rather than generalizing about the war’s violence as “total” or “soft,” Sheehan-Dean considers destruction from the victims’ perspective, where factors such
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A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Vol. One
Reconstruction: A Concise History By Allen C. Guelzo
Lincoln’s Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency
By A. Wilson Greene
(OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS) $18.94
By Dan Abrams and David Fisher
The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860–1865
(HANOVER SQUARE PRESS) $26.98
Ed. by Janet Elizabeth Croon
(UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS) $45
(SAVAS BEATIE) $34.95
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as race, region, or class dictated conditions of martial restraint or excess.
has always been contentious. The African-American community in Charleston, for example, protested the dedication of the John C. Calhoun monument in 1892 in Marion Square even as its members held tight to their own memory of the war that was centered on emancipation and their service in the Union army. On the other side of the racial divide, the dedication of new monuments and other forms of Confederate memory was never far removed from concerns surrounding the maintenance of white supremacy following Reconstruction and through the Jim Crow era. Kytle and Roberts bring their story right up to the 2015 murders. In doing so they have produced a book that is both timely and helpful in pulling back the many layers of what Americans have chosen to remember and forget about the Civil War and the history of slavery. This book is a must-read.
THOMAS E. BARBER IS EDITOR OF CIVIL WAR BOOK REVIEW (DIGITALCOMMONS.LSU.EDU/ CWBR/) AND A GRADUATE STUDENT AT LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY. HIS DISSERTATION, “THE VALUE OF BENEVOLENCE: PATRONAGE, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLICE POWER BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR,” EXAMINES HOW CHARITABLE ACTION BECAME INTERTWINED WITH STATE POWER.
KEVIN M. LEVIN
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In June 2015 Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Since then the country has been embroiled in a contentious debate about the public display of Confederate flags and monuments and the broader question of how the Civil War should be remembered and commemorated. Denmark Vesey’s TOP PICK
Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Press) by
Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts is the
perfect book for anyone interested in better understanding the historical roots of this debate. The authors demonstrate that the battle over Civil War memory
HONORABLE MENTION: A. Wilson Greene is the undisputed authority on the Petersburg Campaign. His
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The 10 Biggest Civil War Blunders
Women of the Blue & Gray
Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality
A Fierce Glory: Antietam—The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery
By Edward H. Bonekemper III
By Marianne Monson
(REGNERY HISTORY) $29.98
(SHADOW MOUNTAIN) $19.98
Ed. by Brooks D. Simpson
By Justin Martin
(LIBRARY OF AMERICA) $40
(DA CAPO PRESS) $28
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B&A
new book, A Campaign of Giants, clocks in at roughly 700 pages and is the first of a planned three-volume series. Greene offers detailed coverage of this first stage of the campaign, from the crossing of the James River to the Battle of the Crater, which will satisfy any military enthusiast. At the same time the book explores how the campaign impacted the residents of the city of Petersburg, the political decisions made on both sides, and the overall course of the war. This is how military history should be written. LOOKING FORWARD TO: Peter Carmichael’s The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (University of North Carolina Press) promises to recast the scholarly discussion about Civil War soldiers from what they thought to how they thought about their service and other topics. This descriptive or pragmatic approach should provide important insights into how individual soldiers adjusted over time to the exigencies of war. I’m also looking forward to Stephanie McCurry’s Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (Harvard University
Press), which looks to be another mustread and a worthy follow-up to her 2010 book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press). KEVIN M. LEVIN IS THE AUTHOR OF REMEMBERING THE BATTLE OF THE CRATER: WAR AS MURDER (UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY, 2012) AND EDITOR OF INTERPRETING THE CIVIL WAR AT MUSEUMS AND HISTORIC SITES (ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD, 2017). THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS WILL PUBLISH HIS NEXT BOOK, SEARCHING FOR BLACK CONFEDERATES: THE CIVIL WAR’S MOST PERSISTENT MYTH, IN 2019. YOU CAN FIND HIM ONLINE AT CIVIL WAR MEMORY (CWMEMORY.COM).
BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN
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TOP PICK
In The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux),
Joanne B. Freeman—an accomplished historian of early U.S. politics and political culture—fixes her gaze on Congress in the three decades before the Civil War. By Freeman’s accounting, this period witnessed “more than seventy violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers.” Revealing the canons and cadence of antebellum political combat, she explains anew
the “emotional logic of disunion.” Southern “words, deeds, and fists” intimidated congressmen from north of the MasonDixon for years. But in the mid-1850s— newly encouraged by their incensed constituents back home—members of the Republican Party determined to confront the “Slave Power” directly. Federal lawmakers armed themselves with weapons and Bowie knives, bracing for open violence. Teeming with three-dimensional characters rendered in vivid human color, Freeman’s carefully drawn history allows us to see the oft-rehearsed political crises of the 1850s “as they were lived.” The book does not—as J.G. Randall and the “revisionist” historians of the early 20th century did—accuse politicians of starting the Civil War. Quite to the contrary, it suggests that what happened in the halls of Congress reflected the culture of fear, conspiracy, and “distrust” that tore the Union apart. Informed by deep research, this is a vital, timely, and sobering reminder of the costs of political brinksmanship. HONORABLE MENTION: A. Wilson Greene’s A Campaign of Giants is the most important operational histo-
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ry of a Civil War military campaign to appear in at least a decade. Informed by the author’s impressive research (the notes and bibliography extend nearly 200 pages) and intimate knowledge of the ground (he spent many years as director of Pamplin Historical Park), this study takes readers from the crossing of the James through the July 1864 Battle of the Crater. The narrative supplies keen assessments of leadership and command decisions on both sides, but it never loses sight of the ordinary foot soldiers who endured this intricate and complex campaign. Enlivened with compelling anecdotes and illustrated with Edward Alexander’s easy-to-follow maps, this volume makes a major contribution to the literature on the war’s eastern theater. LOOKING FORWARD TO: I am especially eager to read David W. Blight’s recently released biography of Frederick Douglass—Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster)—which has been more than a decade in the making. No one knows Douglass’ mind and soul better than Blight; the author’s sparkling prose and
spadework in new sources will bring one of the Civil War’s most important figures to life. I am also eager to crack open Joan E. Cashin’s War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press), which will help us reach beyond the textual and into the too-often-overlooked realm of Civil War-era material culture. Scheduled for a release in early 2019 is Brian R. Dirck’s The Black Heavens: Abraham Lincoln and Death (Southern Illinois University Press), which promises to say something fresh and original about our 16th president—no small feat. How did the enormous human toll of the Civil War personally affect Abraham Lincoln? What was Lincoln’s larger relationship with death? Dirck promises to deliver some important answers. BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN IS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CIVIL WAR HISTORY AND DIRECTOR OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN HISTORY AT SAM HOUSTON STATE UNIVERSITY. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF MARCHING HOME: UNION VETERANS AND THEIR UNENDING CIVIL WAR (LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION), WHICH WAS A FINALIST FOR THE 2016 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY. HIS LATEST EFFORT, ENDURING WAR: LIFE, DEATH, AND SURVIVAL IN A UNION REGIMENT, IS EXPECTED IN 2020.
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AMERICAN ILIAD CONTINUED FROM P. 26
mate hull was fairly orthodox in design, Monitor was a bizarre-looking affair, the brainchild of Swedish-born inventor and engineer John Ericsson. It was 179 feet in length, with a freeboard barely above water level, and it carried only two 11inch smoothbore Dahlgren guns. These were mounted on a massive turret capable of turning 360 degrees. Critics called it “Ericsson’s folly.” According to legend, it might not have been constructed at all but for Lincoln’s endorsement. Looking over a model of Ericsson’s design, he reportedly remarked, “All I have to say is what the girl said when she stuck her foot into the stocking. It strikes me there’s something in it.” It took about 100 days to construct Monitor, whose crew of 49 was far smaller than that of Merrimack. But it was more nimble than Merrimack, whose guns were mounted in the traditional broadside fashion. The fact that Monitor’s guns could swivel in any direction gave it a substantial advantage.
Both vessels were equivalent in speed—about six knots per hour—and when Monitor sallied forth to engage Merrimack, the two ironclads circled one another, each trying to achieve a decisive advantage. But Monitor’s armor was eight inches thick, and Merrimack’s was four inches thick and slanted at a 36-degree angle so that Monitor’s solid shot simply bounced off it. It also took
“IT IS QUITE A WASTE OF AMMUNITION TO FIRE AT HER.... I FIND I CAN DO THE MONITOR AS MUCH DAMAGE BY SNAPPING MY FINGER AT HER EVERY FIVE MINUTES.”
a great deal of time to load and fire the immense cannon. During the four-hour battle Monitor fired just 41 shots, scoring 20 hits. No one kept track of the rounds fired by Merrimack, but it is known that 23 shells hit Monitor. Neither vessel could get the better of the other. A Confederate officer said ruefully of the rival warship, “It is quite a waste of ammunition to fire at her.... I
find I can do the Monitor as much damage by snapping my finger at her every five minutes.” Eventually Merrimack drew off toward the sheltered waters of the Elizabeth River, and for the next two months neither ironclad could get at the other. What, then, had this duel between the first ironclads accomplished? Clearly, the timely arrival of Monitor had saved the wooden Union flotilla from further destruction. But perhaps more importantly, the very presence of Merrimack rendered the James River too dangerous for passage by wooden Union warships and transports. As a result, until Merrimack was scuttled on May 11, the day after the Federals’ capture of Norfolk, it prevented Major General George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac from bypassing the Confederate fortifications at Yorktown. As significant as this might be, however, it did not live up to the dramatic expectations one might expect from such a novel clash. A 1959 book for young readers tried to grasp at it. Thanks to Merrimack, it claimed, “Billy Yank came within a whisker of losing the contest for control of the sea.” This fate of course was unlikely. Even had Monitor not materialized, Merrimack was not seaworthy
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enough to enter the open ocean and sweep aside the Union naval blockade of the southern shore. The reason for the battle’s fame lies elsewhere. To begin with, most Civil War naval engagements were asymmetrical in nature, consisting largely of fights between Union warships and Confederate fortifications. These might generate drama of a kind, but nothing like a duel between two vessels. Second, the Civil War is widely considered the world’s first modern war, owing to the presence of the railroad, telegraph, and extensive field fortifications like those of World War I. And the battle between Monitor and Merrimack—the first ironclads ever to clash in battle—surely smacks of modernity. Indeed, when one lists the hallmarks of the Civil War as a modern war, Monitor and Merrimack are often the first items mentioned. If a key element in the American Iliad is the conflict’s modernity, then the duel between Monitor and Merrimack constitutes Exhibit A. MARK GRIMSLEY, A HISTORY PROFESSOR AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, IS THE AUTHOR OF SEVERAL BOOKS, INCLUDING AND KEEP MOVING ON: THE VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN, MAY–JUNE 1864 (2002) AND THE HARD HAND OF WAR: UNION MILITARY POLICY TOWARD SOUTHERN CIVILIANS, 1861-1865 (1995). HE HAS ALSO WRITTEN MORE THAN 50 ARTICLES AND ESSAYS.
STEREOSCOPE CONTINUED FROM P. 28
known,” he explained. “Some playwrights are attracted to incidents where little has been reliably recorded. I fall into the latter category. I can’t see that anyone knows what, if anything, transpired between Shepard Mallory and Ben Butler. That opened up a lot of space for me to create the bulk of my play.” Although almost all of the dialogue in Ben Butler is fictionalized, much of it rings true, according to accounts of that early period of the war and Butler’s reports of his actions. There were audience members, however, who were not sure what was fact and what was fiction. “Did any of this really happen?” one woman asked her brother while waiting in line for refreshments at intermission. I could not help but intervene, of course, and the ensuing conversation suggested that Ben Butler could have done with a little more contextualization. The front page of the play’s program reveals only that the time is “May 1861” and the place is “General Butler’s
office inside Fort Monroe, Virginia.” For most Americans—even theatergoers in Portland, Maine—neither of these details is wholly suggestive of the status of the war at that moment, or the question of slavery and emancipation in the upper South. There is material that explains some of this context later in the program, but audience members clearly wanted to know more. The family from the refreshment line sought me out after the play and peppered me with more questions about Butler, Virginia, and the war itself. In the end, Ben Butler is an engaging and edifying play. It is also a comedy about emancipation, which can be a hard sell and makes the play’s moments of seriousness—the revelation of the whip scars and two instances in which white men point guns at an unarmed black man—even more unsettling. Ultimately, Ben Butler reveals both the possibilities and the challenges of both fictionalizing history and staging the rich and complex process of emancipation. MEGAN KATE NELSON IS A WRITER LIVING IN LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS. HER BOOK ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR IN THE DESERT SOUTHWEST, WHICH WON A 2017 NEH PUBLIC SCHOLAR AWARD, WILL BE PUBLISHED BY SCRIBNER IN 2020.
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MEADE’S COUNCIL OF WAR CONTINUED FROM P. 38
eled onto his Gettysburg monument: “Stay and fight it out.”14 Just what Meade thought of this poll is not clear. “Gen. Meade, himself, said very little except now and then to make some comment,” recalled Gibbon, “but I cannot recall that he expressed any decided opinion upon any point.” Gibbon, in the years after the war, “emphatically denied that General Meade made a single suggestion of utterance indicating that he thought of retreat.” John Sedgwick, only two months before his death at Spotsylvania, insisted that: At no time in my presence did the General Commanding insist or advise a withdrawal of the army, for such advice would have had great weight with me, and I know the matter did not engage my serious attention. I am positive that the General commanding could not have insisted, much less have given the order to withdraw the army from its position.
Others remembered a very different response. Hancock believed that “Gen.
Meade did not care or think it advisable to continue the battle on that ground.” Dan Butterfield, with no love lost between himself and Meade, informed Abner Doubleday that “General Meade arose” from where he had been sitting at Lydia Leister’s table, and grumpily conceded, “Have it your way, gentlemen, but Gettysburg is no place to fight a battle.” Henry Slocum agreed with Butterfield. Meade “thought it better to retreat with what we had, than run the risk of losing all,” and there was no doubt in Slocum’s mind that “but for the decision of his corps commanders,” Meade and the Army of the Potomac “would have been in full retreat … on the third of July.”15 The council broke up near midnight, just as Henry Hunt rode up to the Leister cottage. He quickly learned that “the question had been spoken of as to what they should do … about falling back,” but “there was no person at all in favor of leaving the ground we had then.” Meade, at some point, telegraphed Halleck that he would now “remain in my present position ... but am not prepared to say, until better advised of the condition of the army, whether my operations will be of an offensive or defensive character.”16
M E A D E N O T O N LY D I D not withdraw on July 3, but the Army of the Potomac staged a do-or-die defense of Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge that broke the Army of Northern Virginia and forced the Rebels to do the retreating. Victor’s laurels, not a loser’s disgrace, now covered George Gordon Meade’s brow. But so did mutterings that he had nearly forfeited the battle through bad nerves—or perhaps, warned conspiracyminded Radical Republicans in Congress, through disloyal designs. What was worse, Meade called not one, but two more councils of war to deliberate on the pursuit of Lee, the last of them over the direct orders of Henry Halleck on July 13, “Act upon your own judgment and make your generals execute your orders. Call no council of war.”17 In both of these post-battle councils, the result was that Meade played for caution, and in the end, the Army of Northern Virginia escaped across the Potomac and brought the entire Gettysburg Campaign to an unsatisfying end. “A great general,” sighed Captain Henry Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts Infantry, who was no Meade-hater, “would have intercepted Lee and fought another successful defensive bat-
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tle decisive in its results,” but “Meade ... makes no pretensions to be a great general.”18 The following March, Meade was called before the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, fully aware that Washington was teeming with rumors, innuendo, and accusations about his management of the Army of the Potomac. If Meade had had his way, charged Minnesota senator Morton Wilkinson on the floor of the Senate, “the whole army would undoubtedly have been retreating, broken, and ineffectual before the powerful forces of General Lee.” I wish to say with regard to General Meade, that I believe he is a patriotic man. I believe he is as pure a gentleman as there is in the country. I believe he has the honor of his country at heart. I believe that he means and wishes to do his duty; but he has none of that “blundering audacity” of Grant, which will enable him to win battles and crown his army with glory.19
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Three times, Meade appeared before the committee for grilling, and the issue of the alleged withdrawal order and the July 2 council of war became the chief point of contention. Meade was adamant that he had issued no such order, nor intended to (he wrote to John Gibbon on March 15, 1864, that “as true as there is a God in Heaven before whom I believe all men will be judged, and the secrets of the world made known I do solemnly aver that I have not the remotest remembrance of having given Butterfield any such directions”). On the final appearance, Meade’s temper (never his most winsome feature) fractured:
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I utterly deny, under the full solemnity and sanctity of my oath, and in the firm conviction that the day will come when the secrets of all men shall be made known—I utterly deny ever having intended or thought, for one instant, to withdraw that army, unless the military contingencies which the future should develop during the course of the day might render it a matter of necessity that the army should be withdrawn.20
And this, in large measure, is where the matter has been allowed to rest for a century and a half. “The charge of a desire to retreat,” insisted Meade’s friends and defenders, consisted of nothing but “groundless aspersions,” ginned up by envious bitter-enders like Dan Sickles (who launched his own covert attack on Meade in the New York newspapers under the penname Historicus) and Abner Doubleday, both of whom either wanted cover for their own sins or revenge for imagined slights. But the hearings generated ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
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MEADE’S COUNCIL OF WAR CONTINUED FROM P. 73
more than simply the sour vintage of Sickles and Doubleday. Albion Howe, who commanded a division in the VI Corps, frankly told the Joint Committee that Meade lacked “earnestness of purpose in the war to make every use of the means at his command to injure the enemy and carry on the war successfully” and “that there is copperheadism at the root of the matter.”21 In Meade’s defense, no one with any pretense to fairness can fault someone who seeks wisdom in a multitude of counselors. By July 2, Meade had enjoyed only four days in command of the Army of the Potomac, and was fighting in a position he had not chosen. What this does not deal with, though, is the fundamental question posed by Meade himself in calling such a council of war in the first place. Had Meade already made up his mind to stay and fight at Gettysburg, he certainly did not need a council of war to confirm his decision,
and he could have limited himself merely to receiving verbal reports and casualty figures. Given the reputation of councils of war for recommending the least aggressive options, Meade’s council suggests at best a certain lack of confidence on his part. This would not be entirely irrational, either. Four of these officers—Hancock, Howard, Slocum, and Sedgwick—had been Meade’s peers as major generals and corps commanders only a few days before, and Meade was hardly in a position to assume any toplofty attitude toward them. And calling a council of war would also have been consistent with the widely assumed notion that Meade had been appointed to command the army only as a placeholder until Lincoln did in 1863 as he had done a year before, and yielded the army once more to George McClellan. That Lincoln would have probably preferred poison to reappointing McClellan is clear to us now, but it may not have been then to the Army of the Potomac, where rumors swirled that “the administration was reformed, and that McClellan was in Halleck’s place.... The story was sent round that McClellan was actually coming in
person at the head of reinforcements.”22 Meade may simply have wanted to avoid making any unilateral decisions that McClellan might later disapprove— and, as he did to Charles Stone and John Pope, leave Meade to dangle for. But helpful as these suppositions are for sympathizing with Meade, we also know that Meade certainly had not wanted to trigger a battle at Gettysburg. He had, until almost the last minute, been preparing for a defensive fight at Pipe Creek, and there would have been nothing illogical, from a military point of view, in pronouncing the stand at Gettysburg a mistake for which he was not responsible, and falling back to a line that was at once more defensible and more accessible to his supply base at Westminster. If this was Meade’s overall mindset, then Butterfield’s and Pleasonton’s accusations that Meade was planning a fallback as early as midafternoon on July 2 take on a new strength, and the council of war itself acquires the darker, more suspicious hues painted by Slocum and Butterfield, that Meade intended to use the council, and its presumed agreement with him, as the cover un-
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der which to execute a prudent evacuation—cover, in this case, from the hail of radical political darts sure to fall on his head. For this, Meade might have quite truthfully said that the politicians, from Lincoln and Stanton on down to Thaddeus Stevens, had only themselves and their meddlesome ways to blame when, after trying to micromanage generals from afar, the generals took the path of least resistance.
the 19th century understood them, are now obsolete; command is itself, in the 21st century, virtually an ongoing council of war, connected by high-tech communications. But the purpose has less to do with shared decision-making than with the gathering of awareness of situations out of sight of the officers responsible for decision-making. Actual councils are still called from time to time, but they are no more likely to be an occasion for joint questioning and an open floor of discussion than they were for Nelson or Napier. If they were, they would be seen as harmful to the principle of chain of command. Meade’s council of war might on those terms seem like an abdication of command responsibilities, although it ought to be borne in mind that he was a commander with no particular seniority to render his decisions non-questionable, and on ground that he himself had not been responsible for choosing. Nor was it clear that he ever intended for the result of the council to be anything but his own decision. Yet, the calling of the council jarred 19th-century military sensibilities that had been shaped by the Nelson–Napier example, and his use of two further councils of war between Gettysburg and Williamsport only reinforced the suspicion that it was indecision, and not collegiality, that was governing Meade’s impulses. What injects a final complication is the ques tion of politics: Was Meade’s default to a council of war solely a military decision, or was it intermixed with political anxieties? Much as American soldiers passionately profess the principle of the subordination of the military to civilian authority, and the exclusion of political calculation from military duty, the intrusion of politics into solCOUNCILS OF WAR, AS
diering remains as current as Douglas MacArthur and Stanley McChrystal. Even John Gibbon acknowledged that “political considerations” had “an important bearing, not only upon appointments in the army, but also upon operations and movements of armies on the field, and it was not until the last year of the conflict that these last almost entirely ceased.... Generals commanding our armies in the field were judged, not by their military capacity but by their opinions upon the slavery question.”23 That George Meade had political opinions, and that they inclined more in the direction of George McClellan than Abraham Lincoln, is beyond doubt. “All the soldiers and officers are still strong McClellanites,” wrote John Reynolds’ staff officer, Stephen Minot Weld, in the days before the Battle of Gettysburg, “and General Meade among the number.”24 That Meade did not hesitate to make those sentiments known is also beyond doubt. When Pennsylvania’s Republican governor, Andrew Curtin, visited the Army of the Potomac in August to make a formal presentation of a “handsome testimonial” to Meade, Meade responded that it was “Sad, that in this country, a land flowing with milk and honey, and in which we are all brothers, we should raise our arms against each other, and such scenes should be enacted as I have been a participant in.”25 The question is whether Meade’s politics—or rather, the reputation his politics had earned for him—were making him hesitant to risk his neck on a battle, and at a place, where the fortunes of war seemed to be running against him and where defeat would be immediately chalked up to a career-ending McClellanism. If those fears inclined him toward playing safe, then a retreat to Pipe Creek would not be a surprising result, and the endorsement of his senior generals would be a very convenient device—as in fact it proved to be at the congressional hearings eight months later. But whether it was politics, or simply the sheer practicality of the Pipe Creek alternative, the preponderance of the evidence points toward the possibility that George Gordon Meade really did think that “Gettysburg is no place to fight a battle.”
LETTERS TO JULIA CONTINUED FROM P. 51
Joseph E. Johnston that offered major political concessions to the Confederates. Before leaving Grant reflected on the Union’s ultimate victory.
Apl. 21st 1865 Dear Julia, It is now nearly 11 O’Clock at night and I have received directions from the Sec. of War, and President, to start at once for Raleigh North Carolina. I start in an hour. Gen. Meigs, Maj. Leet, Capt. Dunn, (Dunn is Capt. and Asst. Adj. Gn.) and Major Hudson go with me. I will write to you from Morehead City or New Berne.—I do hope you will have moved to Phila by the time I return. I can run up to Philadelphia easily; but to get to Burlington I have to give notice of my going to secure a train to take me the last end of the way. I find my duties, anxieties, and the necessity for having all my wits about me, increasing instead of diminishing. I have a Herculean task to perform and shall endeavor to do it, not to please any one, but for the interests of our great country that is now begining to loom far above all other countries, modern or ancient. What a spectacle it will be to see a country able to put down a rebellion able to put half a Million of soldiers in the field, at one time, and maintain them! That will be done and is almost done already. That Nation, united, will have a strength which will enable it to dictate to all others, conform to justice and right. Power I think can go no further. The moment conscience leaves, physical strength will avail nothing, in the long run. I only sat down to write you that I was suddenly required to leave on important duty, and not feeling willing to say what that duty is, you must await my return to know more. Love and kisses for you and the children. u. s. grant20
ALLEN C. GUELZO IS THE HENRY R. LUCE PROFESSOR OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA AND DIRECTOR OF CIVIL WAR ERA STUDIES AT GETTYSBURG COLLEGE.
☛ } CONT. ON P. 76 75 WINTER 2018
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next 12 years, as commanding general of the army and then as president, Grant would struggle with the war’s legacy, a struggle that continues to this day.
LETTERS TO JULIA CONTINUED FROM P. 75
hich nations did Grant envision dictating “conform to justice and right” to? An obvious candidate is the France of Napoleon III, whose opportunistic intervention in Mexico, which had begun in 1862, Grant considered unjust and outrageous. Once in North Carolina, Grant found time to write to Julia about conditions in the South. It is not hard to see in this letter the general who, at Appomattox Court House, had permitted the soldiers of Lee’s army to take their horses and mules home for the planting.
In the Field Raleigh Apl. 25th 1865 Dear Julia, We arrived here yesterday and as I expected to return to-day did not intend to write until I returned. Now however matters have taken such a turn that I suppose Sherman will finish up matters by to-morrow night and I shall wait to see the result. Raleigh is a very beautiful place. The grounds are large and filled with the most beautiful spreading oaks I ever saw. Nothing has been destroyed and the people are anxious to see peace restored so that further devastation need not take place in the country. The suffering that must exist in the South the next year, even with the war ending now, will be beyond conception. People who talk now of further retalliation and punishment, except of the political leaders, either do not conceive of the suffering endured already or they are heartless and unfeeling and wish to stay at home, out of danger, whilst the punishment is being inflicted. Love and Kisses for you and the children, ulys.21
he next day Johnston signed surrender terms similar to those Grant had given Lee. And for the
from a sales records book that someone had recovered from a slave-trading firm, as well as a recent newspaper advertisement for “an active boy about fourteen years old.” Looking out at the black massDERICK SCHILLING IS AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR AT es before him, the abolitionist editor LIBRARY OF AMERICA. asked, “Have any of you got such a boy to sell?” The crowd began to sway back and forth, scream, cry, and shout, “No!”21 Later in the program, the entire WHEN THE ABOLITIONISTS... CONTINUED FROM P. 61 crowd sprung to its feet when someone invoked the name of the “great Emancipator” and “hats and ‘kerchiefs, swung to has gone,” he said, “for it there is no res- the wildest cheers!” (Word of Lincoln’s urrection.”20 assassination—he died not long before The abolitionists stood in silence as the exercises had begun—would not arGarrison’s pithy obituary hung in the air rive in Charleston until the following before walking the short distance over to week.) The meeting closed after the asthe Citadel Green. Thirty years earlier, sembled determined to follow up on the thousands of white Charlestonians had weekend’s events by inviting Wendell gathered on that parade ground to burn Phillips, Frederick Douglass, and other antislavery tracts and an effigy of Garri- northern reformers to join them in celson in a large bonfire. ebrating the Fourth But on April 15, 1865, of July in Charleston. the Citadel Green Afterward, the black played host to thoucitizenry escorted the GARRISON CONFESSED sands of black Charlesabolitionists back to THAT HE THOUGHT tonians who were listhe Charleston Hotel, THAT THIS DAY tening to the words forming a procession WOULD NEVER COME. of black reformer and that seemed a mile “THANK GOD Union officer Martin long.22 THIS DAY YOU Delany. On Monday, April ARE FREE!” That afternoon, 17, as Beecher, GarriHE PROCLAIMED a vast crowd packed son, Thompson, and TO GREAT CHEERS. into Zion Presbyterian company prepared to Church, adjacent to leave Charleston, the the green on the corcrowds were even largner of Calhoun and er. “The streets were Meeting streets, to listen to speeches by full of colored people,” wrote Beecher, Garrison, Thompson, and Henry Wil- who noted that Union soldiers, includson, among others. At the start of the ing Garrison’s own son George Thompprogram, an ex-slave named Samuel son Garrison, had been busy liberating Dickerson came forward with his two thousands of slaves from nearby plansmall daughters, each of whom carried tations. Though desperately poor, the a bouquet of flowers. Dickerson, who freedpeople who joined Garrison and his would become a lawyer and Republi- colleagues at the wharf offered whatevcan activist in the decade that followed, er tokens of gratitude they could spare. welcomed Garrison with moving words. Some carried roses, others honeysuckles. The Massachusetts abolitionist replied Samuel Dickerson offered another elothat he was incapable of expressing the quent speech, and black children belted overwhelming emotions he felt as he out songs. At 10 a.m., the abolitionists listened to Dickerson and looked into sailed out of Charleston, watching as the faces of the enormous audience. Re- Dickerson knelt at the wharf ’s edge, one minding them that he had been fighting arm draped around his daughters and the slavery for nearly four decades, Garri- other holding the American flag.23 son confessed that he thought that this day would never come. “Thank God this BLAIN ROBERTS AND ETHAN J. KYTLE, PROFESday you are free!” he proclaimed to great SORS OF HISTORY AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FRESNO, ARE AUTHORS OF DENMARK VESEY’S cheers. “And be resolved that, once free, GARDEN: SLAVERY AND MEMORY IN THE CRADLE you are free forever.” Garrison also read OF THE CONFEDERACY (THE NEW PRESS, 2018).
76 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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4
Halleck to Meade (June 27, 1863), in United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series one, 27(pt. 1), 61 (hereafter cited as OR); Herman Haupt, “The Crisis of the Civil War,” Century Magazine 44 (September 1892): 795.
5
“Testimony of General Henry J. Hunt” (April 4, 1864) and “Testimony of Major General W.S. Hancock” (February 26, 1864) in Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (Washington, 1865), 4:403, 452; Curt Anders, Henry Halleck’s War: A Fresh Look at Lincoln’s Controversial General-In-Chief (Carmel, IN, 1999), 447; George Meade, Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade (New York, 1913), 2:3-4; Henry J. Hunt, “The Second Day at Gettysburg,” Battles & Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1884-7), 3:291; Peter C. Vermilyea, “The Pipe Creek Effect: How Meade’s Pipe Creek Circular Affected the Battle of Gettysburg,” Gettysburg Magazine 42 (July 2010): 24.
Notes SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
6
E.P. Halstead, undated manuscript in James S. Wadsworth Papers, Library of Congress (my thanks to Zachery Fry for bringing this document to my attention).
7
E.P. Halstead, undated manuscript in James S. Wadsworth Papers, Library of Congress; O.O. Howard interview with Alexander Kelly (April 15, 1899) in Generals in Bronze: Interviewing the Commanders of the Civil War, ed. W.J. Styple (Kearney, NJ, 2005), 176–177; O.O. Howard, Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard (New York, 1908), 1:423–424; C.H. Howard, “First Day at Gettysburg,” Military Essays and Recollections: Papers Read Before the Commandery of the State of Illinois, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (Chicago, 1895), 4:264; Abner Doubleday, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (New York, 1882), 156; The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, ed. F. Bancroft and W.A. Dunning (Garden City, NY, 1917), 3:21; David Gregg McIntosh, “Review of the Gettysburg Campaign,” Southern Historical Society Papers 37 (JanuaryDecember 1909): 127.
American Iliad (Pages 26–27, 70–71) 1
Quoted in James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill, 2012), 210.
2
Quoted in William C. Davis, Duel Between the First Ironclads (Garden City, NY, 1975), 20.
3
Quoted in Davis, Duel Between the First Ironclads, 127.
4
Earl Schenck Miers, Billy Yank and Johnny Reb: How They Fought and Made Up (New York, 1959), 43.
8
“Testimony of Major General Daniel Butterfield” (March 25, 1864), “Testimony of General John Gibbon” (April 1, 1864), and Meade to Halleck (July 2, 1863) in Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 4:424, 442, 488; John Gibbon, Personal Recollections of the Civil War (New York, 1928), 139.
9
Alfred Pleasonton, “Report of Major General A. Pleasonton” (October 15, 1865) in Supplemental Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (Washington, 1866), 2:10; Gibbon, Personal Recollections, 140.
Meade’s Council of War (Pages 30–39, 72–75) 1
2
3
H.L. Scott, Military Dictionary (New York, 1861), 202; William Duane, A Military Dictionary: Or, Explanation of the Several Systems of Discipline (Philadelphia, 1810), 732. John Entick, The General History of the Late War: Containing It’s Rise, Progress, and Event, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America (London, 1763), 3:40; Letters and Despatches of Horatio, Viscount Nelson, K.B., Duke of Bronte, Vice Admiral of the White Squadron, ed. J.K. Laughton (London, 1886), 291; William Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, G.C.B. (London, 1857), 1:236. Timothy Johnson, Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory (Lawrence, 1998), 201–202; “Address of Colonel William Allan” (October 30, 1878), in Army of Northern Virginia Memorial Volume, ed. J.W. Jones (Richmond, 1880), 267; G.F.R. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (London, 1900), 1:230; “General Sherman’s Campaign,” Harper’s Weekly, September 30, 1864; Jefferson Davis, “Robert E. Lee,” Southern Historical Society Papers 17 (January–December 1889): 369; Joseph L. Harsh, Taken at the Flood: Robert E. Lee and Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862 (Kent, OH, 1999), 80–84; Bradley T. Johnson, The First Maryland Campaign: An Address by Gen. Bradley T. Johnson of Maryland (Richmond, 1884), 7; Yankee in Gray: The Civil War Memoirs of Henry E. Handerson, ed. C.L. Cummer (Cleveland, 1962), 54.
10 E.P. Halstead, undated manuscript in James S. Wadsworth Papers, Library of Congress; Joann Smith Bartlett, Abner Doubleday: His Life and Times: Looking Beyond the Myth (XLibris, 2009), 20; Henry P. Goddard, journal entry for October 23, 1862, in The Good Fight That Didn’t End: Henry P. Goddard’s Accounts of Civil War and Peace, ed. C.G. Zon (Columbia, SC, 2008), 78. 11
John Gibbon, “The Council of War on the Second Day,” in Battles & Leaders, 3:313; Alphaeus Williams to H.W. Slocum (December 1863) in The Bachelder Papers, eds. David and Audrey Ladd (Dayton, OH, 1995), 1:69; “Testimony of Major General W.S. Hancock” (March 22, 1864) and “Testimony of Henry J. Hunt” (April 4, 1864) in Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 4:407, 452.
12 Martin McMahon, interview with Alexander Kelly (October 11, 1879), in Generals in Bronze, 84; Thomas W. Hyde, Following the Greek Cross Or, Memories of the Sixth Army Corps (Boston, 1894), 150–151. 13 Gibbon, “The Council of War on the Second
Day,” Battles & Leaders, 3:313, and Personal Recollections of the Civil War, 140–141; “Minutes of council, July 2, 1863,” in OR, Series one, 27(pt. 1), 74; John Newton, “Further Recollections of Gettysburg,” North American Review 152 (March 1891): 276–277; Butterfield interview with Alexander Kelly (September 18, 1879) in Generals in Bronze, 71; Alpheus S. Williams, “My Dear Daughters” (July 6, 1863) in From the Cannon’s Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus S. Williams, ed. M.M. Quaife (reprint edition: Lincoln, NE, 1995), 229. 14 “Minutes of council, July 2, 1863,” in OR, Series one, 27(pt. 1), 73; Newton, “Further Recollections of Gettysburg,” 276–277; Newton interview with Alexander Kelly (October 13, 1879) in Generals in Bronze, 76; Charles Elihu Slocum, The Life and Services of Major-General Henry Warner Slocum (Toledo, OH, 1913), 109; In memoriam: Henry Warner Slocum, 1826-1894 (Albany, 1904), 32. 15 Hancock interview with Alexander Kelly (April 6, 1885) in Generals in Bronze, 66, 68; Gibbon, Personal Recollections, 141; Henry P. Goddard, “Reminiscences of Major-General John Gibbon,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States 36 (January–February 1905): 147; Sedgwick to Seth Williams (March 10, 1864) in Correspondence of John Sedgwick, Major-General (New York, 1903), 2:176; Doubleday, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, 184; Slocum to L.H. Morgan (January 2, 1864) in William P. Fox, “Life of General Slocum,” in In Memoriam: Henry Warner Slocum, 1826–1894 (Albany, 1904), 84-85. 16 “Testimony of General Henry J. Hunt” (April 4, 1864) in Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 4:452; Meade to Halleck (July 2, 1863) in OR, Series one, 27(pt. 1), 72. Since this telegram is clocked in the OR as being sent at 8 p.m., ahead of the council’s meeting, it has sometimes been seized upon by Meade’s partisans as evidence that he had already made up his mind and was only calling the council for informational purposes. See Richard Sauers, “‘Rarely Has More Skill, Vigor, or Wisdom Been Shown’: George G. Meade on July 3 at Gettysburg,” in Three Days at Gettysburg: Essays on Confederate and Union Leadership, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Kent, OH, 1999), 234. But the telegram contains information (e.g., about the death of Samuel Zook) and makes claims (“the enemy attacked me about 4 p.m. this day, and, after one of the severest contests of the war, was repulsed at all points”) that Meade could not have known at 8 p.m. Significantly, George Meade Jr. changed the clock on his father’s message to “11 P.M.” See Meade Jr. in Did General Meade Desire to Retreat at the Battle of Gettysburg? (Philadelphia, 1883), 25. 17 Halleck to Meade (July 13, 1863) in OR, Series one, 27(pt. 1), 92. 18 Henry L. Abbott to John C. Ropes (August 1, 1863) in Reports, Letters, and Papers Appertaining to 20th Mass. Vol. Inf. (Boston, 1868), 1:83. 19 “Army of the Potomac,” Congressional Globe, 38th Congress, first session (March 2, 1864), 897-898. 20 Bruce Tap, Over Lincoln’s Shoulder: The Committee on the Conduct of the War (Lawrence, KS, 1998), 183; Meade to Margaretta Meade (March 6 and April 2, 1864) in Life and Letters of George G. Meade, 2:169-173, 177; “Testimony of MajorGeneral George G. Meade” (April 4, 1864) in Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 4:436; “Gen. Meade and the Battle of Gettysburgh,” The New York Times (March 7 and April 4, 1864); Richard Sauers, A Caspian Sea of Ink: The Meade-Sickles Controversy (Baltimore, 1989), 46; Gibbon, Personal Recollections, 187.
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21 Freeman Cleaves, Meade of Gettysburg (Norman, OK, 1960), 156; George Meade Jr., Did General Meade Desire to Retreat at the Battle of Gettysburg? (Philadelphia, 1883), 23–25; Richard M. Bache, Life of General George Gordon Meade: Commander of the Army of the Potomac (Philadelphia, 1897), 315–316; Edwin B. Coddington, The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (New York, 1968), 451–453; “Testimony of General A.P. Howe” (March 4, 1864) in Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 4:328. 22 Henry L. Abbott to John C. Ropes (August 1, 1863) in Reports, Letters, and Papers, 1:95.
When the Abolitionists Went to Charleston (Pages 52–61, 76) 1
3
New-York Tribune, April 18, 1865; Trip of the Steamer Oceanus, 39.
16 Trip of the Steamer Oceanus, 67, 58.
4
Theodore Cuyler, “A Trip to Fort Sumter and the Doomed City,” Liberator, May 5, 1865.
17 The New York Times, April 20, 1865; “Banquet in Charleston,” Liberator, May 12, 1865.
5
See Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2013), 21–23, 50–105; Joan E. Cashin, “Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War Era,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (September 2011): 339–367; and Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens, 2012), 154–157, 229–232.
18 Maria Middleton Doar to Maria H. Middleton, April 14, 1865, Folder 8, Box 161, Doar-Middleton Families Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC.
6
Warren Lee Goss, The Soldier’s Story of His Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle, and Other Rebel Prisons (Boston, 1867), 207.
7
Theodore Tilton, “The Excursion to Fort Sumter,” Independent, April 27, 1865.
1
Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1852–1890, ed. by Louis J. Budd (New York, 1992), 907.
2
Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859– 1865, ed. by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York, 1989), 478, 696.
8
New-York Tribune, March 2, 1865.
9
The New York Times, March 6, 1865; New-York Tribune, March 2, 1865.
3
Poets of the Civil War, ed. by J.D. McClatchy (New York, 2005), 59.
10 Philadelphia Press, March 30, 1865.
4
Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. by John Y. Simon, volume 2 (Carbondale, IL, 1969), 23–24.
5
Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. by John Y. Simon, volume 4 (Carbondale, IL, 1972), 284.
6
Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. by John Y. Simon, volume 5 (Carbondale, IL, 1973), 123–24.
7
Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters, ed. by Mary Drake McFeely and William S. McFeely (New York, 1990), 246.
8
The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, ed. by Brooks D. Simpson (New York, 2013), 569–581.
9
Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 5: 137–138.
11
Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. by John Y. Simon, volume 7 (Carbondale, IL, 1979), 23–24.
12 Simpson, The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 39. 13 Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 7, 324–325. 14 Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. by John Y. Simon, volume 10 (Carbondale, IL, 1982), 443–444.
15 McFeely and McFeely, Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters, 735. 16 Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. by John Y. Simon, volume 11 (Carbondale, IL, 1984), 5. 17 Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. by John Y. Simon, volume 14 (Carbondale, IL, 1985), 272–273.
18 McFeely and McFeely, Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters, 164. 19 Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 14, 330. 20 Ibid., 428–429. 21 Ibid., 433.
CWM30-BOB-Notes.indd 79
14 Cuyler, “Trip to Fort Sumter.” 15 Trip of the Steamer Oceanus, 55; Laura M. Towne, The Letters and Diaries of Laura M. Towne, ed. Rupert Sargent Holland (1912; reprint, New York, 1969), 161.
(Pages 40–51, 75–76)
10 Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 5: 102–103, reprinted in My Dearest Julia (New York, 2018), 109–111.
12 Tilton, “Excursion to Fort Sumter.” 13 Trip of the Steamer Oceanus, 51–52.
Theodore Cuyler, “Etchings at Fort Sumter,” Independent, April 27, 1865.
25 “From the Army of the Potomac,” The New York Times, August 31, 1863; Josiah Rhinehart Sypher, History of the Pennsylvania Reserve Corps (Lancaster, PA, 1865), 492.
Letters to Julia
“An Immense Meeting in Music Hall,” Liberator, March 17, 1865.
2
23 Gibbon, Personal Recollections, 21-22, 242. 24 Stephen Minot Weld, diary entry for June 28, 1863, in War Diary and Letters of Stephen Minot Weld, 1861–1865 (Boston, 1979), 228.
[Justus Clement French], The Trip of the Steamer Oceanus to Fort Sumter and Charleston, S.C. (Brooklyn, 1865), 25.
11
19 Emma Holmes, diary, May 1, 1865, in The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861-1866, ed. John F. Marszalek (Baton Rouge, 1979), 441–442. 20 Henry Ward Beecher, “Narrative of His Trip to South Carolina,” Independent, May 11, 1865; A.P. Putnam, “Abolitionists in Charleston,” Independent, April 27, 1865. 21 Trip of the Steamer Oceanus, 99; Elizabeth G. Rice, “A Yankee Teacher in the South,” Century Magazine 62 (May 1901): 154. 22 Esther Hill Hawks, diary, April 15, 1865, in A Woman Doctor’s Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks’ Diary, ed. Gerald Schwartz (Columbia, 1984), 132. 23 Beecher, “Narrative of His Trip.”
Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation (required by Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. The Civil War Monitor. 2. (ISSN: 2163-0682). 3. Filing date: 11/01/18. 4. Issue frequency: Quarterly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 4. 6. Annual subscription price: $23.95. 7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor. Publisher: Terry A. Johnston Jr., 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402, Editor: Terry A. Johnston Jr., 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402, Managing editor: n/a. 10. Owner: Bayshore History LLC, 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. 11. 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I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subjected to criminal sanctions and/or civil sanctions.
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pa r t i n g shot
Sometime in 1865 W.H. Pratt of Davenport, Iowa, produced this impressive calligraphic portrait of Abraham Lincoln by skillfully shading the text of what arguably was Lincoln’s most famous declaration, the Emancipation Proclamation. A number of copies of the work—which Pratt is thought to have designed as a tribute to the 16th president in the wake of his assassination—survive today, a sign of its widespread popularity among Americans at the time of its creation.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A Fitting Tribute
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