Issue 6

A SUCCESSION OF HORRORS, p. 46 | THE DRUMS OF WAR, p. 12 VOL. 2, NO. 4

BEST BOOKS 2012

{ a n e w l o o k a t a m e r i c a’s g r e a t e s t c o n f l i c t }

THE GENTLEMAN GENERAL HOW A HARVARD-EDUCATED LAWYER BECAME THE HERO OF THE BATTLE FOR ATLANTA

WINTER 2012

H

$5.99

CIVILWARMONITOR.COM CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

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GETTYSBURG COLLEGE C I V I L WA R I N S T I T U T E SUMMER CONFERENCE JUNE 21 – 25, 2013 Discover new dimensions of the Civil War in 1863 through lectures, discussions, and battlefield tours with leading experts – Gary Gallagher, Peter Carmichael, Allen Guelzo, Caroline Janney, Scott Hartwig, Carol Reardon, Kent Masterson Brown, Glenn LaFantasie, and many more.

Conference topics include Cowardice at Gettysburg, the Richmond Bread Riots, the War in the West, and Decisive Moments of the Gettysburg Campaign. Battlefield tours will explore topics such as Little Round Top, Robert E. Lee’s Retreat, and George Gordon Meade at Gettysburg, with staff rides at Gettysburg and Chancellorsville.

photography by hal ardell

www.gettysburg.edu/cwi/conference

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Contents DEPARTMENTS

Salvo

{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}

FEATURES

THE GENTLEMAN GENERAL How Harvard-educated lawyer turned soldier Manning Ferguson Force helped save the day for the Union army in the battle for Atlanta.

TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

VOLUME 2, NUMBER 4 / WINTER 2012

by glenn w. lafantasie

46 PAGE

PAGE

26

A Visit to Chattanooga

VOICES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Fiasco at Fredericksburg

PRIMER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 The Drums of War

PRESERVATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Miracle at Franklin

DISUNION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Killing Time

IN FOCUS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Smoketown’s Saviors

CONVERSATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Actor Cooper Huckabee

Columns

Tens of thousands of Mississippians fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, earning themselves a reputation for unrivaled bravery and tenacity by conflict’s end.

A SUCCESSION OF HORRORS

by jeff t. giambrone PAGE

38

A step-by-step account of the horrific explosion that rocked the U.S. Arsenal in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1864. by brian dirck

CASUALTIES OF WAR. . . . . . . . 22 Andrew J. McConnell

BATTLEFIELD ECHOES. . . . . . . 24

photography by hal ardell

Deception on the Peninsula

Books & Authors THE BEST CIVIL WAR BOOKS OF 2012. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 MUSINGS OF A CIVIL WAR BIBLIOPHILE: CONFEDERATE DIARIES, PRICELESS BUT TERSE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

BY ROBERT K. KRICK

In Every Issue EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Eager Hearts

PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Freedom at Last

PAGE

56

THE ORIGINS OF FREEDOM

While many give Antietam the credit, it was the Union’s failed campaign on the Virginia Peninsula during the spring and summer of 1862 that helped convince many in the North—chief among them Abraham Lincoln— that slavery must be abolished. by glenn david brasher

ON THE COVER: Union general

Manning Ferguson Force (courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society).

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Editorial VOLUME 2, NUMBER 4 / WINTER 2012

editor-in-chief. . . . . . .

Terry A. Johnston Jr.

terry@civilwarmonitor.com

contributing editors

Eager Hearts “back again once more in the old camp, sound as a dollar. Would that 10,000 lying on the field across the river, or stretched on rude soldiers’ beds in pain and some in mortal agony, could say as much!” So wrote Union soldier William Thompson Lusk in a letter to his mother three days after the decisive Union defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, 1862— 150 years ago. A captain in the 79th New York Infantry, Lusk had watched hopelessly from a distance (his regiment was held in reserve during the battle) as Union troops repeatedly, and at great cost, tried but failed to dislodge Robert E. Lee’s men from the formidable defensive positions they occupied on the heights beyond the city.

The loss capped a long year for the Army of the Potomac, whose performance at Fredericksburg marked the latest in a string of failed attempts to destroy Lee’s resolute army. Like countless numbers of his comrades, Lusk struggled to contain his frustration. “Once more unsuccessful, and only a bloody record to show our men were brave. This cannot heal the broken hearts this pitiful record is to cause.” He now openly doubted whether the army’s leaders were up to the vital task at hand. “Alas, my poor country! It has strong limbs to march, and meet the foe, stout arms to strike heavy blows, brave hearts to dare—but the brains, the brains—have we no brains to use the arms and limbs and eager hearts with cunning?” (For additional perspectives on the Battle of Fredericksburg, including a quote from Lusk’s mother, see page 10.)

As Lusk despaired over the state of the Union war effort, 24-year-old Emilie Davis, a free black woman living in Philadelphia, was in high spirits as she awaited the New Year. January 1, 1863, was the date that Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—his executive order declaring all slaves in the rebellious states free—would take effect. Lincoln’s proclamation (which this issue’s article, “The Origins of Freedom,” on page 56, persuasively argues had its roots in General George McClellan’s failed Peninsula Campaign) marked a significant shift in the nature of the Union war effort. It also opened a new chapter in the lives of Emilie Davis and thousands of other black Americans, free and enslaved. (You can read Emilie’s reaction to the news, as recorded in her pocket diary, on page 80.)

As 1862 came to a close, William Thompson Lusk and Emilie Davis— along with millions of other Americans—were each filled with their own blend of hope and trepidation. Neither could know that the war would not end anytime soon. The new year would be marked by many more highs and lows, joys and sorrows, and major turning points.

. . . . . . . . . Laura June Davis

Angela Esco Elder David Thomson Robert Poister

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

editorial advisors . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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C. Hulbert matt@civilwarmonitor.com

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

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IN THIS SECTION Travels

A VISIT TO CHATTANOOGA

. . . . . . . . .

6

Voices

FIASCO AT FREDERICKSBURG . . . . 10 Primer

THE DRUMS OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Preservation

MIRACLE AT FRANKLIN . . . . . . . . . 14 Disunion

KILLING TIME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 In Focus

SMOKETOWN’S SAVIORS . . . . . . . .

18

Conversation

ACTOR COOPER HUCKABEE . . . . . . 20

In this painting by Thure de Thulstrup, Ulysses S. Grant (center, opposite) uses a field glass to observe the Union attack against Confederate positions on Missionary Ridge during the campaign for Chattanooga in November 1863.

FOR MORE ON CHATTANOOGA, TURN THE PAGE.

5 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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Salvo | Travels

Destination: Chattanooga after his defeat against General Braxton Bragg’s Confederates at the Battle of Chickamauga, Georgia, in September 1863, General William S. Rosecrans withdrew his Union army northward to Chattanooga, Tennessee, an important rail hub and manufacturing center on the Tennessee River. Before long, Rosecrans and his troops found themselves surrounded, bottled up in a tight defensive position by Bragg’s Rebels, who had pursued and then established themselves in commanding positions on the heights surrounding the city. The besieged Union troops held out until late October, when reinforcements under General Ulysses S. Grant arrived and opened a supply line to Chattanooga. The following month, Grant’s men attacked and defeated the Confederates on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, driving Bragg’s army back to Georgia and leaving Chattanooga, as well as the state of Tennessee, firmly in Union hands.

Interested in visiting Chattanooga? To help plan your trip, we’ve enlisted a couple of ex-

perts—individuals who live in, work in, or are otherwise intimately familiar with the historic town—to offer their personal suggestions for what to see and do.

BEST SLEEP

| sam elliott | Many Civil War groups visiting Chattanooga enjoy staying at the Sheraton Read House, a 1926 property that was recently renovated.

The hotel is on the site of the Civil War-era Crutchfield House, whose owner’s Unionist brother confronted hotel guest Jefferson Davis there in early 1861, calling the future Confederate president a traitor after he spoke briefly to a group assembled in the lobby. | david a. powell | Definitely the Sheraton Read House. It retains the feel of a grand old hotel of the bygone era, without the extravagant prices that some boutique hotels in other cities charge, making it an affordable indulgence. Its downtown location—and proximity to the city’s dining and nightlife spots—is also a big plus.

BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY

| s.e. | The Tennessee Aquari-

THE EXPERTS

SAM ELLIOTT, a

native of the Chattanooga area, has practiced law in the city for over 30 years. Previously president of the Friends of the Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park, he is the chairman of the Tennessee Historical Commission.

um, which has a unique emphasis on freshwater species, is always a hit for kids (and adults). There’s also the Creative Discovery Museum, a children’s museum that emphasizes science, imagination, and art for kids of elementary school age. | d.p. | The Tennessee Aquarium.

The presentation is extremely well done, and the various kinds of marine life on view are fascinating.

BEST TIME TO BE HERE

DAVID A. POWELL ,

a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute with a degree in history, has published numerous articles and several books—most recently Failure in the Saddle: Nathan Bedford Forrest, Joe Wheeler, and the Confederate Cavalry in the Chickamauga Campaign (2011)— about the Civil War.

| s.e. | In June, the Chattanooga waterfront plays host to a nineday Riverbend Festival, which consists of a variety of musical presentations on multiple stages. On the Monday night of the festival, the venue is moved to Martin Luther King Boulevard, a historically African-American district, for the Bessie Smith Strut, where the emphasis is on blues, barbecue and cold beer. Year in and year out, the Strut is my favorite event in Chattanooga. | d.p. | I’d say March. The temperature is on the cool side but not cold, and the vegetation has not leafed out, so the battlefield appears much more open than in summer.

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CAN’T MISS

| s.e. | Because the National Park Service has broken it into interpretive “reservations,” with few parking areas, Missionary Ridge is often neglected or given short shrift by visitors. Recent clearing of the vegetation at the DeLong and Bragg reservations allows visitors to better understand how Union troops used the uneven geography of Missionary Ridge to their advantage during their assault of Rebel positions there on November 25, 1863.

Clockwise, from above: Moccasin Bend; the entrance to Point Park on Lookout Mountain; and the Sheraton Read House.

| d.p. | The Union artillery earthworks on Moccasin Bend—the peninsula located across the Tennessee River from Lookout Mountain—are not well known, but they are well worth a visit.

They are among the best preserved works I’ve ever seen, and they show clearly how the Union cannon could dominate the road across the northern face of the mountain into Lookout Valley, severely disrupting the ability of Rebel troops there from being adequately supplied. And while

it’s about a 20-minute drive from downtown, the Signal Point Reservation is also worth seeing. Located northwest of the city atop Signal Mountain, it offers spectacular views (on a clear day, anyway) of Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain. The site, which is maintained by the park service, includes a parking area, restrooms, and a viewing platform.

BEST OF THE BATTLEFIELD

| s.e. | Moccasin Bend, where there were three Federal artillery positions that played on the Confederate lines of communication across Lookout Mountain.

Because of their remote locations, the earthworks for two of the positions remain pristine, when the passage of almost 150 years is taken into account. | d.p. | I love visiting the DeLong Reservation on Missionary Ridge, site of the 2nd Minnesota Infantry monument as well as the tablet and guns marking the position of Captain David Waters’ Alabama Battery. I like the style of the 2nd Minnesota monument, and have a fond attachment to this fine body of troops, but I also like the story behind the location. Originally it

7 PHOTOGRAPHS BY AARON SHAPIRO

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Salvo | Travels

was 400 yards farther north, but some veterans disagreed with that placement. Park authorities concurred and moved it and other monuments. A few years later, the veterans changed their minds again, and sued to move the whole kit and caboodle back north. All the other monuments were eventually moved back, but the governor of Minnesota declined to pay up for the 2nd Minnesota monument, saying it was “not on wheels.”

The site reminds me that even the veterans sometimes made mistakes.

BEST-KEPT SECRET

| s.e. | The Chattanooga waterfront. It is the location of the aforementioned Tennessee Aquarium, a pier into the Tennessee River, a walking bridge across the river, an arts district, restaurants, and the Tennessee Riverpark, a paved, eight-mile pathway along the south side of the riverbank, including the spot where Union general William T. Sherman crossed the river to attack Missionary Ridge. | d.p. | Point Park on Lookout

Mountain, which provides stunning views of Chattanooga and the surrounding area. Whether you care about the Civil War or not, the sightseeing alone is worth the trip.

BEST BOOK

| s.e. | Steven Woodworth’s Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns (1998), which is a succinct synthesis of the entire campaign for middle and eastern Tennessee during the summer and fall of 1863, from Tullahoma in June through Knoxville in November. | d.p. | Woodworth’s Six Armies In Tennessee provides an excellent overview of the struggles for Chattanooga from the commanders’ perspectives, in a concise narrative that paints a clear picture of a complex period in the war. For a more detailed look at the campaign, try Wiley Sword’s Mountains Touched With Fire: Chattanooga Besieged, 1863 (1995). Sword’s narrative embraces both the command view of the operations and the common soldiers’ descrip-

CHATTANOOGA NAVIGATOR < PLACES OF INTEREST

8

Creative Discovery Museum (321 Chestnut St.; 423-756-2738) Lookout Mountain Battlefield (110 Point Park Rd., Lookout Mountain, Tn.; 423-821-7786) Riverbend Festival (riverbendfestival.com; 423-756-2211) Tennessee Aquarium (One Broad St.; 800-262-0695) Tennessee Riverpark (4301 Amnicola Hwy.; 423-842-0177) < LODGING

4

Sheraton Read House Hotel Chattanooga (827 Broad St.; 423-266-4121) < DINING

1

Bluegrass Grill (55 East Main St.; 423-752-4020) Boathouse Rotisserie & Raw Bar (1459 Riverside Dr.; 423-622-0122) Canyon Grill (intersection of Hwy. 189 & Hwy. 136, Rising Fawn, Ga.; 706-398-9510)

C

Nikki’s Drive Inn (899 Cherokee Blvd.; 423-265-9015) Sugar’s Ribs (2450 15th Ave.; 423-826-1199)

c

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tions of the fighting.

BEST EATS

| s.e. | A Chattanooga fixture for decades, Nikki’s Drive Inn— located at the foot of Stringer’s Ridge, from which advance Union forces shelled Chattanooga in August 1863—has great hamburgers and seafood, as well as outstanding hand-breaded onion rings. The Bluegrass Grill

Clockwise, from above left: A basket of goodness at Sugar’s Ribs; taking orders at Nikki’s Drive Inn; the Tennessee Aquarium; and the majestic view from Lookout Mountain.

is a relatively new place that the locals enjoy. It’s great for breakfast; I like being able to create my own omelet from a number of fresh ingredients. The Boathouse has a good selection of Gulf seafood, and is a preferred lunch location, especially on Wednesdays, when they offer a very reasonable fried catfish special. If you come to Tennessee, you should eat barbecue,

and Sugar’s Ribs, located on the side of Missionary Ridge, is hard to beat. They feature a variety of sauces, including a Carolina mustard-based sauce for those so inclined. | d.p. | Sugar’s Ribs has excellent barbecue. I especially like their pulled pork plate. The Boathouse, situated on the southern bank of the Tennessee River a short distance from downtown Chattanooga, offers a Florida beachside atmosphere with lots of fresh seafood, and is particularly good for those looking for a quick, casual lunch. For dinner, I’d suggest Canyon Grill, on Lookout Mountain, which serves modern American cuisine with an emphasis on grilling. Though it’s a fine-dining, white-tablecloth restaurant, it maintains a casual style, and the food and service are top-notch.

chattanooga “Gateway to the Deep South”

The battles for Chattanooga changed the outcome of the Civil War. The ChickamaugaChattanooga National Military Park is the nation’s oldest and largest military park. The Chickamauga Battlefield was the bloodiest two-day battle of the Civil War with 36,000 casualties. Relive the last major Confederate victory at Chickamauga Battlefield and the battles of Lookout Mountain that were the beginning of the end for the South.

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Salvo | Voices

Fiasco at Fredericksburg “ Night has come, and the firing has ceased…. I have been amputating and otherwise operating all day … and although the wounded brought to us talk freely of ‘our victory,’ I am strongly inclined to the opinion that we have had the worst of it…. Whatever is the result it has been a terrible day, and I now write amidst the groans of the wounded, just dressed, but not yet had time to be relieved of pain.”

“ FOR THE FAILURE IN THE ATTACK, I AM RESPONSIBLE…. TO THE FAMILIES AND FRIENDS OF THE DEAD I CAN ONLY OFFER MY HEARTFELT SYMPATHIES.”

—NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT CHARLES COFFIN, IN HIS MEMOIRS, ON THE REPEATED UNION ATTEMPT TO BRIDGE THE RAPPAHANNOCK RIVER AND ENTER CONFEDERATE-HELD FREDERICKSBURG DURING THE AFTERNOON OF DECEMBER 12, 1862

—MAJOR GENERAL AMBROSE BURNSIDE

—UNION PHYSICIAN ALFRED LEWIS CASTLEMAN, DECEMBER 13, 1862

COMMANDER OF UNION FORCES AT FREDERICKSBURG, IN A LETTER TO GENERAL-IN-CHIEF HENRY W. HALLECK, DECEMBER 19, 1862

“ Your Soldier’s heart almost stood still as he watched those sons of Erin fearlessly rush to their death.… Why, my darling, we forgot they were fighting us, and cheer after cheer at their fearlessness went up all along our lines.”

—CONFEDERATE GENERAL GEORGE PICKETT, ON THE PREVIOUS DAY’S ATTEMPT BY THE UNION’S IRISH BRIGADE TO PIERCE THE HEAVILY FORTIFIED REBEL LINE WEST OF TOWN, IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE, DECEMBER 14, 1862

“ [A]s I gazed sorrowfully upon them, I thought I could almost hear the slow flap of the grim messenger’s wings as one by one he sought and selected his victims for the morning’s sacrifice. Sleep, weary ones, sleep and rest for to-morrow’s toil!”

—CLARA BARTON, AFTER WALKING THROUGH THE SLUMBEROUS CAMP OF THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC ON THE NIGHT BEFORE THE BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG, DECEMBER 12, 1862

SOURCES: BENJAMIN PERLEY POORE, THE LIFE AND PUBLIC SERVICES OF AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE (PROVIDENCE, RI, 1882); CHARLES CARLETON COFFIN, FOUR YEARS OF FIGHTING (BOSTON, 1866); WILLIAM E. BARTON, ED., THE LIFE OF CLARA BARTON VOL. 1 (BOSTON, 1922); THE HEART OF A SOLDIER: AS REVEALED IN THE INTIMATE LETTERS OF GENERAL GEORGE PICKETT (NEW YORK, 1913); ALFRED L. CASTLEMAN, THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC: BEHIND THE SCENES (MILWAUKEE, 1863); WAR LETTERS OF WILLIAM THOMPSON LUSK (NEW YORK, 1911).

“ When the news of the repulse, with the dreadful loss on our side, reached NewYork, gloom and despondency rested on all who had hearts to feel for anything.

The sickening list of dead and wounded have been read over again and again, by mothers and sisters with tears and groans. Fathers sink their heads in anguish, and for all this distress and agony, we have gained nothing.”

—ELIZABETH FREEMAN ADAMS LUSK TO HER SON, UNION SOLDIER WILLIAM THOMPSON LUSK, DECEMBER 20, 1862

library of congress

“ Brave men not belonging to the engineers came down to the bank, surveyed the scene, … seized planks and boards, ran out on the bridge, but only to fall before the [enemy’s] sharpshooters…. It was soulinspiring to witness such heroic devotion, but heart-sickening to stand on the bank and see them slaughtered.”

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2013

The Future of Civil War History: Looking Beyond the 150th March 14-16, 2013 Gettysburg, Pa. Gettysburg College and Gettysburg National Military Park are pleased to announce an innovative 3-day conference on the frontiers of academic and public history.

The conference will: . Explore new approaches the historical community could pursue in its quest to make the Civil War past engaging, accessible, and usable to public audiences beyond the 150th anniversary commemorations. . Feature a wide variety of panels, presentations, working groups and field experiences designed to provide participants ample opportunity to move the conversation outside the conference room and lecture hall. Several working groups have openings for additional presenters. . Include over 100 featured speakers.

Scholars, public historians, museum professionals, educators, graduate students, and members of the general public are equally encouraged to participate.

Registration will begin September 1, 2012.

For more information, visit www.cwfuture150.com

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Salvo | Primer

writing to his wife about his mornings in the army, New Hampshire officer Jonathan Huntington Johnson unwittingly described one universal truth of the soldier’s life. “[A]s soon as daylight appears, the drummer’s call is beaten. In about ten minutes, the reveille is beaten…. We then wash and get ready for breakfast … [and] the breakfast call is beaten.” Indeed, drum calls sounded a myriad of instructions throughout the soldier’s day, from summoning men to routine camp activities like meals and drills to directing their maneuvers during the disorienting din of battle. So omnipresent were the drumbeats that, in the words of Union soldier David L. Day, “One can scarcely get time to wash his face … before the drum calls to some kind of duty.” As shown here, the instruments that ordered the day were often elaborately ornamented.

Many drummers secured their drumsticks in standard brass buckle holders like this one, which attached to a drum sling for convenience. ▲

The Drums of War

▲ The drummer of the 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery’s Company K carried this painted drum, which appropriately displayed crossed cannons.

▲ Regulation U.S. regimental drums—like this one carried by Almon Laird of the 27th Massa-

chusetts Infantry—were decorated in this standard eagle pattern. Laird, who was captured during the fighting at Drewry’s Bluff, Virginia, in May 1864, died while a prisoner of war.

▲ This patriotic drum, emblazoned with the words “Union and Liberty,” accompanied an unknown regiment during the war.

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▲ This drum bears the likeness of Colonel

Elmer Ellsworth, one of the war’s earliest and most prominent casualties.

It might have been carried by his namesake “Ellsworth’s Avengers,” the 44th New York Infantry.

▲ This brass drum bears the name of its carrier, Henry Galloway, a member of the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, a black regiment. Galloway was presented with the drum while stationed on Folly Island, South Carolina, in October 1864.

▲

This drum not only specified its bearer’s regiment and company (138th Pennsylvania Infantry, Company C) but also that he belonged to the army’s VI Corps, as indicated by the corps’ cross badge.

▲ The New York State arms and the inscrip-

tion “Gettysburg 1863” adorn this colorful drum, from an unknown regiment.

▲

This regimental drum belonged to the 10th Connecticut Infantry, whose men saw action in many campaigns, including General Ambrose Burnside’s expedition to North Carolina and General Ulysses S. Grant’s operations in Virginia.

▲ The drum major of the 1st Minnesota Infantry carried this drum,

which was inscribed with the regiment’s battle honors.

SOURCES: Alden Chase Brett, comp., The Letters and Diary of Captain Jonathan Huntington

Johnson (n.p., 1961); David L. Day, My Diary of Rambles with the 25th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Milford, MA, 1884). Images of the 10th Connecticut Infantry and the 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery drums courtesy of the Connecticut Museum of History; all other images courtesy of the Military & Historical Image Bank (www.historicalimagebank.com).

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Salvo | Preservation

Miracle at Franklin

the entire community, bringing successes that otherwise would have been unimaginable. Franklin has reclaimed historic properties that had once been given up for lost—turning back the asphalt and taking back its legacy.

Key to that success was the formation of Franklin’s Charge, a broad-based coalition dedicated to recapturing Franklin’s Civil War legacy and promoting heritage tourism. The group’s first major effort was purchasing the Franklin battlefield’s eastern

The view from the new Franklin battlefield park, formerly the site of a Pizza Hut. In the distance is the Domino's Pizza that sits upon a parcel of battlefield land currently targeted for preservation by the Trust.

flank, which had spent decades as the Country Club of Franklin’s golf course. The group worked closely with the Civil War Trust, strategizing how to convince friends and neighbors that it was Franklin’s unique history—not its strip malls and subdivisions—that distinguished it from other communities.

Soon Franklin’s Charge and the local government, with the support and guidance of the Trust, began the arduous process of buying up individual

***

Look for regular preservation news and updates from the Civil War Trust in future issues.

To learn more about the organization and how you can help, visit www.civilwar.org

slices of the battlefield, often commercial properties, and restoring them to more closely resemble their wartime appearance. On the battle’s 139th anniversary, I was among those to take a sledgehammer to the Pizza Hut on the field’s epicenter— an area that is now a city park.

Today, Franklin is widely regarded as the greatest battlefield reclamation project in American history. Acre by acre, modern intrusions have been removed to reveal the historic landscape underneath, and tourists now flock to this burgeoning gem of a battlefield park. Working with the community, preservationists have reclaimed 113 acres, including some of the most blood-soaked ground, land once thought lost forever. And we’re not done yet.

Reclaiming historic land is more expensive than purchasing never-developed sites—and for our next project, we’re going to buy and demolish a small strip mall anchored by a Domino’s Pizza. The 1.67 acres (all of which saw heavy fighting) will cost $2.2 million. It’s a daunting sum, but thanks to federal and state matching grants, plus our generous local partners, the Trust’s portion is only $689,360—giving us and our donors the opportunity for a greater than 300 percent return on investment!

Learn more about the ongoing reclamation of this battlefield and how you can be part of the “miracle at Franklin” at www.civilwar.org/franklin.

c i v i l wa r t r u s t

a decade ago, franklin, tennessee, was the poster child for communities that fail to protect their historic resources. Residents of this Middle Tennessee community had long ago largely paved over the Franklin battlefield, scene of the November 1864 Battle of Franklin, which was a devastating and nearly fatal Confederate defeat. The city’s story was a cautionary tale for civic leaders weighing whether to develop or preserve their historic sites. ¶ On a visit to Franklin in 2002, I warned local leaders and community groups of the imminent threats to historic resources in expanding communities like theirs, fearing the message would go unheeded. Since then, however, the banner of preservation, once carried by only a handful of residents, has been embraced by nearly

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Salvo | Disunion

Killing Time by jean huets “the temptations that will beset you will be very great,” a Mississippi man, already a veteran in the Civil War, warned his newly enlisted younger brother. The evil he warned of wasn’t treason or desertion or theft. It was cards. “Of all the evil practices that abound in Camp, gambling is the most pernicious and fraught with the most direful consequences.” ¶ Civil War soldiers, like all soldiers, spent the vast majority of their time in camp, waiting for action and looking for anything they could find to fill the long empty hours. For many, card playing more than met the need, and provided a chance to make a little money besides. “It was a poor hut that could not boast of a pack of well-thumbed cards,” reminisced George Forrester Williams.

The monotony of sutlers’ wares squelched games like taroc, which German and Hungarian immigrants would have played with a 78-card deck. Fortunately for card makers, the 52card deck, like speaking English and playing baseball, quickly became part of the common camp culture among both Rebs and Yanks, native-born and immigrant. That deck, in turn, determined the range of card games they played.

Whist claimed gentlemen, and ladies when available. Seven-up, or old sledge, seemed to have been favored by rustics and roughs. Twenty-one, keno and faro also stood ready to strip soldiers of everything from coin to clothing to “a chicken which had been pressed into service,” as one Union soldier, Napier Bartlett, recalled. New York volunteer Albert Rowe Barlow mentioned euchre as a “standard game”—though for Barlow and other gamblers North and South, poker was the handsdown favorite.

Gaming, combined with alcohol, boredom and any suspicion of cheating, ignited duels and brawls as enthralling as the

game itself, at least to bystanders. But serious gamers played not to fight but to win, and then as now they demanded that the cards be easily recognized, undistracting and clearly denominated.

The standard deck, laid down

by French cartiers in the 16th century, was as familiar to the Civil War soldier as it is today.

The black suits of spades and clubs and the red suits of hearts and diamonds each comprised 10 pips, or numbered cards, and three “face” or court cards. The graphic design that persists to this day had also by then been set: the arrangement of the suit signs, and the oddly stylized court figures, with their stringlike hair, simple color schemes and geometric patterning. So universally known were playing cards that an examiner tested a New York recruit’s vision by walking to the other end of the room and holding up the 9 of clubs and the 10 of hearts.

Not that card makers never dared something new. The Union deck, produced by the American Card Company, featured “national emblems” of eagles, shields, stars and flags in place

This article is excerpted from Disunion, a New York Times online series following the course of the Civil War as it unfolded.

Read more at www.nytimes.com/ disunion.

of normal suit signs. The goddess of liberty, colonel, and major replaced the woefully un-American queen, king, and jack. Despite the maker’s “fullest confidence that the time is not far distant when they will be the leading Card in the American market,” the deck, like most novelties in the card world, died a quiet death. For the most part, card players accepted only changes that made the deck easier to manipulate and harder to cheat with.

One such innovation was indices, the suit sign and value marked in the upper left corner of each card. Before indices were adopted, if Johnny Reb held the four or five of spades, for example, he would have to see nearly the entire card to know its value, since the fifth spade is in the middle. Indices allow a tight fan of cards, easier to hold and hide.

Another design change came with the double-figure court card, which mirrors the top half of the king, queen, or jack. By contrast with the fulllength, single-figure personage, a double-figure is never upside down (though only the most naïve infant—or maybe the craftiest bluffer—would tip his hand by rescuing that queen of hearts from standing on her head). Card faces weren’t the only thing that changed in the mid-19th century. Early decks nearly always had blank backs, making the cards easier to mark and easier to see through. In the Civil War era, back designs be-

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library of congress

came not only standard, but artistic. Patterns of asterisks and dots, wavy lines and dashes, and “pebbles” gave way to intricate images, often with patriotic and military themes.

The most radical change, the joker, pranced into the deck around 1860. Trickster that he is, he stands out as the only major innovation not inspired by convenience or caution. The joker most likely hopped over to American decks via the German immigrants who fought on both sides of the war. Some attribute his name to the German word for euchre, “juker,” a game so engrossing that, as the Rebel soldier David Holt recounted, when hymns wafting through camp forced the men to realize it was Sunday, “We would lay down our cards, even in a game of euchre.”

Like baseball, cards occasionally brought the two lines together. During the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in the autumn of 1864, the Gray and the Blue would “creep into … a neutral cornfield,” one soldier recalled, “for a friendly chat, for a barter, or for a game of cards!” Their money being worthless to each other, a few gamers staked Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis. “The Lincolnite lost.

‘There,’ says the winner, ‘Old Abe belongs to me.’ ‘Well, I’ll send him over by the Petersburg express,’” said the Union soldier, using a nickname for the shells bombarding the city.

Camp gambling became one of the great moral crusades of the war, North and South. General Robert E. Lee was “pained to learn that the vice of gambling exists”—he must have been the last to know—and issued an order forbidding it, to little effect. As the Union soldier David Lane put it, “so far as my

Two Union soldiers pose for the camera with their playing cards. During the Civil War, soldiers on both sides found the allure of card playing hard to resist.

observation goes, nine out of ten play cards for money.”

Players did, under pressure from family, chaplains and commanding officers, occasionally cast off their “evil practices.”

One Confederate soldier, Samuel Hankins, recalled, “When the cannonading became more frequent, you could hear, ‘Boys, we are going to get into it.’ Then there would begin the searching of pockets for gambling goods, playing cards especially. The thought of being killed with such in their pockets induced the soldiers to throw them away.” Once the battle was over, though, the so-called Devil’s Picture Book once again trumped the Good Book, with players so avid that even “the breast of a wounded

comrade” did for a table, wrote Thomas Wise Durham, a Zouave.

For gambling or for simple fun, playing cards are a staple in memoirs of Civil War camp life. All up and down the ranks, men played cards under fire, between battles, and in cornfields, prisons, and hospitals. Far from home, often lacking even the simple diversion of a dime novel, as one soldier put it, “card playing seemed to be as popular a way of killing time as any.” was a senior editor at U.S. Games Systems, a tarot and playing card publisher, and is a co-author of The Encyclopedia of Tarot. She is currently writing a family saga set in late 19th-century America. jean huets

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Salvo | In Focus

Smoketown’s Saviors

By Tktktktktk

Contributed by Bob Zeller, president of the Center for Civil War Photography, a non-profit organization devoted to collecting, preserving, and digitizing Civil War images for the public benefit. To learn more about the CCWP and its mission, visit www.civilwarphotography.org

bob zeller collection

in the days after the Battle of Antietam, Dr. Jonathan Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac, raced to secure adequate treatment for the thousands of soldiers wounded there. In a move that presaged the triage system of the 20th century, Letterman consolidated all nearby farm and field hospitals into two larger, longterm field hospitals—Locust Spring to the south of the battlefield and Smoketown to the north—to treat the most severely injured (most of them amputees) while sending stabler patients to more distant facilities.

This striking image shows convalescing soldiers and medical staff milling about the tents of Smoketown Hospital’s Ward I. At center, nurse Maria M.C. Hall walks beside a patient on a stretcher.

The work was both physically grueling and mentally draining, with the small staff treating over 500 wounded during the eight months between Antietam and the hospital’s closure in May 1863. As Dr. William Child, the 5th New Hampshire Infantry’s assistant surgeon, noted of his early days at Smoketown in a letter to his wife, “No one can begin to estimate the amount of agony after a great battle.

We win a great victory. It goes through the country. The masses rejoice, but if all could see the thousands of poor, suffering, dying men, their rejoicing would turn to weeping.”

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Above: Tktktktk

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Salvo | Conversation

The Courage and Conviction of Cooper Huckabee by jenny johnston if you’re a fan of Civil War films, then you probably know Cooper Huckabee. The seasoned actor, now 61, played Confederate spy Henry T. Harrison in 1993’s Gettysburg, reprised that role in prequel Gods and Generals (director’s cut), and also stars in Quentin Tarantino’s new Civil War-era film, Django Unchained. But Huckabee got his true Civil War start in The Blue and the Gray—the landmark, six-hour TV miniseries celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. In it he played Matthew Geyser, one of four southern brothers wrenched apart by war. Recently, Huckabee dusted off his memories and talked to The Civil War Monitor about his work on the series, what lures him to Civil War films, and his hopes for a Gettysburg sequel.

The Blue and the Gray?

How did you get the role of Matthew Geyser?

That was a very painful-looking death fall.

I remember auditioning for Andrew McLaglen, the director. A few days later he called me to go before the network, so I did another scene on a CBS soundstage with about 20 people watching—and I got the part.

Matthew was the only role that I read for. I was too young at the time for the Stacy Keach role.

And I’m from Alabama originally, so it made sense for me to play a southerner. I fit the part.

Back in 1982, The Blue and the Gray was a big deal.

It was a tremendous production. We had a huge crew and lots of actors coming and going.

It was the first Civil War TV production in a really long time, and there was a lot of excitement. Before it aired, they flew a bunch of us around on a big publicity tour. I remember going to Georgia and Chicago, then on to Washington, D.C., for the grand finale: a big ceremony held at the famous Lincoln Theatre.

They showed a series of clips from the film—including one of my scenes. Afterward, Gregory

Peck, who played Lincoln in The Blue and the Gray, came up to me and was very complimentary.

That was a big night for me.

Gregory Peck was amazing as Lincoln.

You know how he won the Academy Award for To Kill a Mockingbird? Well, my daddy taught Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. He was a studentteacher in his 20s in Monroeville, Alabama, and she was a 15-year-old student. She was a real tomboy and could punt a football about 60 yards. Anyway, on the night that The Blue and the Gray first aired, she called my father from New York and said, “I just saw Cooper on this miniseries with Greg Peck.” She called him Greg. And he said, “Well, why don’t you call Cooper?” So he gave her my number, and she called me.

Do you remember what she said?

Oh, yeah. She said, “I thought you did real good.” But she had a real thing for Gregory Peck.

Mostly she wanted to talk about him.

Do you have any favorite scenes from

COOPER HUCKABEE

WHO:

Film and TV actor DATE OF BIRTH: May 8, 1951 HOMETOWN: Mobile, Alabama FACTOID:

Played football at the University of Southern Mississippi SELECT FILMOGRAPHY:

Django Unchained, 2012 True Blood, 2010-2011 Gods and Generals, 2003 Gettysburg, 1993 The Blue and the Gray, 1982 Urban Cowboy, 1980

Gosh, there were several. My favorite was probably the scene where I confront my brother John on the battlefield, during the siege of Vicksburg. There was also that scene where I got killed defending the Geyser family farm.

Well, it really was. I’ve got a whole back story on that. When I was rehearsing that scene, I got a cramp in my leg from practicing running with a limp; I was supposed to have the limp because my character got shot before he picked up the flag and started running. It was painful.

Then some set guy came over and squeezed my leg and the cramp went away. We shot that scene in slow motion, and we got it in two takes. My adrenaline was really going, so thank God I didn’t get hurt or anything.

Thirty years later, do people still remember you from The Blue and the Gray?

It comes up at the oddest times.

You want to hear a crazy little story? I just worked on a Quentin Tarantino movie, Django Unchained. Early one morning, I’m driving to location with M.C. Gainey, the actor who plays my big brother in Django and who actually had a small role in The Blue and the Gray; he played an Irish soldier sitting by a campfire. And here we both got cast

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in this Tarantino movie. Anyway, during the drive, M.C. turns to me and says, “Cooper, I’ve got a message for you from my friend Bill Paxton. He wanted me to tell you, ‘Bleep you!’” Now, I know who Bill Paxton is, but I don’t know him personally. It turns out Bill wanted the part of Matthew Geyser in The Blue and the Gray—real bad. This totally shocked me at 5:15 in the morning. M.C. had said to him, “Come on, Bill. Are you kidding?

You’ve done Titanic. You’ve got a series. You’ve been in Twister.”

But Bill said, “No, you just tell him, ‘Bleep him.’ I wanted that part.”

photographs courtesy cooper huckabee and melanie sharp

You were also cast in Gettysburg, as the actor turned Confederate spy Henry T. Harrison.

I auditioned for Ron Maxwell, the director, one time, and he said, “Don’t shave and don’t cut your hair.” I had the part, just like that. Filming Gettysburg was a wonderful experience. I was in Gettysburg for 11 weeks.

We had 15,000 reenactors, camping out on the location with their tents and their food and all their utensils. It was like being at summer camp, it really was.

You get caught up in the whole environment and the ambiance of the whole situation. It can do a mind trip on you. Everything was Civil War. It was just fantastic.

A lot of people said, “Man, you got the best part in the movie.” Maybe I did. The character was complex; he used humor to camouflage his angst and sadness over the viciousness of the killing and the war. I think he used his acting as kind of a—I don’t know, it was just my own thinking about it. He was a little more colorful, a little more theatrical, I guess.

Cooper Huckabee as Matthew Geyser in the 1982 miniseries The Blue and the Gray.

A bunch of scenes where Harrison does Shakespeare didn’t make it into the film. At the very end of the movie, in the script, I closed the film with a Shakespearean line, but that was let go. Then I came back in the prequel, Gods and Generals; I’m in the director’s cut. You’ll see me doing scenes from Julius Caesar with John Wilkes Booth. He’s the big stage star, and I’m talking about wanting to drop out of

acting and go fight. Jeff Daniels’ character, Chamberlain, comes backstage with Mira Sorvino to congratulate us on a fine performance. I’m a little cool to him, and when he leaves, I say, “If I were to ever be killed by a man like that, it would be an honor.”

We hear Ron Maxwell wants to do The Last Full Measure, the third part of the trilogy. Are you in?

It’s still in the

☛ } CONT. ON P. 72

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Casualties of War

Andrew J. McConnell

BY STEPHEN BERRY

n april 11, 1861, the day before Rebel batteries fired on Fort Sumter, two close friends—John Albert Feaster Coleman and his brother-in-law Andrew J. McConnell—eagerly left Feasterville, South Carolina, to enlist in the Buckhead Guards, later Company B of the 17th South Carolina Infantry Regiment. “We both enlisted at the same time,” Coleman noted in 1863, “and [we] have been in the same Company, in the same mess, and slept together almost every night [since].” Together the two saw much of the war: They witnessed the bombardment of Sumter and the routing of the Union army at First Manassas; McConnell was wounded at Boonsboro and Coleman at Second Manassas. “We have passed over the greater portion of Virginia,” boasted Coleman, “from the Potomac to the Roanoke, and along the coast of N.C. from Weldon to Wilmington … [and] from Charleston nearly to Savannah…. My constant prayer is that we may live to see this war ended … and [that] we live a useful life after peace is declared.”¹ Military units sometimes describe themselves as a “band of brothers,” and this was often literally the case in Civil War units. Coleman and McConnell were not biological brothers, but they had been friends since boyhood. Coleman’s sister, Sarah, had married McConnell in part

because he already seemed like a member of the family. When she and her baby died in childbirth, McConnell and Coleman became that much closer, grieving for the same woman. They brought that shared history into their war service, and then spent almost every waking and sleeping hour together for more than three years. “I had a pleasant nights sleep last night, notwithstanding it rained very hard,” McConnell noted in his diary on December 28, 1862. “I and my brother JAFC sleep together.

We sleep very warm, have four blankets, two overcoats and a very heavy quilt to lie upon and cover with.”² In late July 1864, Coleman and McConnell’s brigade was sleeping along a promontory known as Pegram’s Salient out-

ANDREW J. MCCONNELL BORN:

February 14, 1838, in Fairfield County, South Carolina DIED: July 30, 1864, killed during the Battle of the Crater DETAILS: Initially interred near the Petersburg battlefield, McConnell’s body was returned to Fairfield County to be reburied next to his wife and child in the Coleman family graveyard.

His brother-inlaw, John Albert Feaster Coleman, sleeps beside him; he died in 1898.

side Petersburg, Virginia. After a summer’s hard fighting, the two sides were entrenched in a stalemate, giving the men a respite. But unknown to them, a regiment of Pennsylvania coal miners had dug a 500-foot tunnel beneath them and packed it with four tons of gunpowder.

The resulting explosion was like nothing the war had ever seen.

A vast column of fire and earth shot 200 feet in the air, bearing men, munitions, and timbers in a fountain of gore. One entire South Carolina regiment was destroyed; another was partially buried. Coleman and McConnell’s regiment was just to the left of the blast. As they recovered their wits, Federal troops, capitalizing on Confederate confusion, advanced on their position, and McConnell was shot and killed.³ John Coleman survived the Battle of the Crater, which ironically proved a Union defeat.

Company business prevented him from attending McConnell’s interment, but he got a pass a couple of days later to visit his friend’s grave and collect his effects from the hospital. Returning dejectedly to camp after sundown, Coleman was touched to find that his men had dug him a comfortable hole to sleep in.

Lying in his hole, thinking of his bedmate of three years lying far away in a hole of his own, Coleman leafed through McConnell’s diary and then took out his pen: “[I] feel very lonely, having to lie by myself,” he wrote in the dead man’s diary. “My old comrade, dear friend, brother in law, had been with me ever since the war began. We had slept togeth-

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( c r at e r ); s o u t h c a r o l i n i a n a l i b r a r y , c o l u m b i a , s o u t h c a r o l i n a ( c o l e m a n ). library of congress

er, eat and fought side beside [each other] till his death, and this night I realized how dear a friend I had lost, and was now as if alone in the world.”⁴ This was the awful price that bands of brothers often paid for their camaraderie. In an instant Coleman had lost a fellow soldier, a family member, and his closest friend. For three years, McConnell’s face had been the last thing he saw at night and the first thing he saw in the morning.

For many, maybe most, Confederate soldiers, this kind of emotional devastation quickly turned into rage at the enemy. “Teach my children to hate [the Yankees] with that bitter hatred that will never permit them to meet under any circumstances without seeking to destroy each other,” wrote one Confederate in what he thought was his last letter home. “I know the breach is now wide & deep between us & the Yankees. Let it widen & deepen

Top: Union soldiers charge forward against the section of the Confederate lines at Petersburg destroyed by an exploded underground mine. During the subsequent fight, known as the Battle of the Crater, Andrew J. McConnell was shot and killed.

Above: McConnell’s brother-in-law and fellow soldier John Albert Feaster Coleman.

untill all Yankees or no Yankees are to live in the South.”⁵ But some Confederates didn’t blame the boys in blue. They blamed the war. Or they blamed themselves. When McConnell died, Coleman lost his ability to feel much of anything, including hate. He served through Appomattox and was paroled on April 12, 1865, almost four years to the day from his enlistment.

He traded his watch for a horse, rode directly home, and started farming. Hard work, he had always insisted, was the proper “perscription” for any malady.

In a last entry in his friend’s diary he summed up his feelings for the war. “[We] are completely subdued.… I hope the damage may prove beneficial to all.” And so it has, forging a stronger nation, untainted by slavery.⁶ is Amanda and Greg Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia.

He is the author or editor of four stephen berry

books on America in the Civil War era, including House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007).

ENDNOTES 1

Andrew McConnell married Coleman’s youngest sister, Sarah, on April 16, 1857. Sarah (and her baby) died in childbirth in 1858.

Andrew J. McConnell Diary, Coleman, Feaster, and Faucette Families Papers, South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, South Carolina, February 14, 1863.

2 McConnell Diary, December 28, 1862.

3 McConnell Diary, August 3, 1864.

4 McConnell Diary, August 2, 1864.

5 Theodorick Montfort to wife, March 31, 1862 in Rebel Lawyer: The Letters of Theodorick Montfort (Athens, GA, 1965).

6 Coleman Diary, November 16, 1849; McConnell Diary, August 22, 1864.

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Battlefield Echoes

Deception on the Peninsula B Y C L AY M O U N T C A S T L E

resident abraham lincoln was livid.

It was early in April 1862 and the Army of the Potomac, nearly 100,000 men strong, was sitting still outside of Yorktown, Virginia. The only thing standing between it and the Confederate capital of Richmond was a thin defensive line manned by a much smaller Rebel force. In a message to the army’s commander, Major General George B. McClellan, Lincoln made his frustration known. “It is indispensable to you that you strike a blow,” he implored, “you must act.” And yet, McClellan chose instead to dig in and prepare for a siege, certain that a Confederate attack was imminent. “It seems clear that I shall have the whole force of the enemy on my hands,” he told the president, “probably not less than 100,000 men, and possibly more.”¹ In actuality, the Confederate force opposing him numbered between 13,000 and 15,000 men. McClellan’s gross overestimation of the enemy was due in part to his notorious operational timidity and a habit of assuming that he was outnumbered. It was also, in this instance, exactly what his opponent, Confederate major general John Bankhead Magruder, wanted him to believe.

When the Army of the Potomac debarked at Fort Monroe on March 22, 1862, the first step of its intended move up the Virginia Peninsula, Magruder found his Army of the Peninsula

outnumbered by more than three to one, and burdened with the seemingly impossible task of delaying the massive Union advance toward Richmond until Confederate reinforcements under the command of Joseph E. Johnston could arrive from northern Virginia. Magruder understandably found the numbers daunting, and took up his defensive preparations, in his words, “without the slightest hope of success.”² Nevertheless, aided by a spell of hard rain that turned the lower peninsula’s roads to mush and slowed the Army of the Potomac to a crawl, he went to work getting ready to face McClellan.

Called “Prince John” by his colleagues for his flamboyant style and love of the theater, Magruder decided to put on a pageant of his own. Although

SIEGE OF YORKTOWN DATE:

April 5-May 4, 1862 LOCATION: Virginia Peninsula

COMMANDERS:

John B. Magruder (CSA, above), George B. McClellan (USA) QUOTABLE: “With an irrepressible spirit of restless energy, instinctively susceptible of the charm of danger, full of health and physical force, it was evident that nature made him a soldier.”

—Confederate officer Baker Perkins Lee on Major General John B. Magruder

Confederate reinforcements were days away, he seized upon presenting the illusion that they had already arrived. Behind a rather unimposing series of earthworks that crossed the width of the peninsula, Magruder’s men placed wooden, painted decoy cannons, dubbed “Quaker guns.” Magruder then openly paraded his troops in a continuous circuit.³ Some Confederate regiments marched back and forth across the entire length of the front line more than five times in a few days, creating the spectacle of a massive, neverending flow of Rebels.⁴ Drums and trumpets blared for hours on end. Artillery and musketry boomed up and down the line.

Union reconnaissance elements witnessing the sights and sounds of an aggressive defensive force sent messages to the rear of “a severe resistance.”

Fifteen thousand had magically become 100,000, or perhaps even more. An alarmed McClellan reported to the War Department that the Rebel defenses were “formidable” and that “The enemy are in large force along our front, and apparently intend making a determined resistance.”⁵ He settled in for a siege, leaving Washington in a state of irritated dismay.

Ultimately, McClellan spent an entire month besieging Yorktown. Magruder could hardly believe his ruse’s success—even if McClellan was perhaps the only Union general who would have believed it—and was relieved when Johnston’s Army of Northern Virginia arrived in mid-April to bolster the defense.⁶ The theatrics of the “Prince John

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Players” had worked, setting the stage for a summer of fighting that would end with Richmond untouched and the Army of the Potomac withdrawing completely from Virginia—McClellan’s seaborne invasion to capture the Confederate capital an utter failure. the peninsula Campaign may have been the most noteworthy Civil War example, but deception operations were by no means uncommon. In fact, attempts to trick, deceive, or oth-

A Union soldier pretends to fire one of the “Quaker guns” left behind in the abandoned Confederate defenses at Centreville, Virginia, in March 1862.

Confederate general John B. Magruder would use such “weapons” to good effect during his defense of Yorktown on the Virginia Peninsula.

erwise mislead the enemy have found a place in all of America’s wars. In the tradition of Quaker guns, World War II saw wide use of decoy tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces made from simple fabric that were sometimes inflatable. But it was at the strategic level of war that deception truly made its mark. In preparation for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, the Allies launched an intricate deception plan code-named Barclay to draw German strategic attention and resources toward

the Balkans. The British Twelfth Army, a complete fabrication, was reported to be planning an assault on Fortress Europe at Crete and the Peloponnese in late May.⁷ This rumored assault was then “postponed,” keeping the German intelligence network guessing all summer until American and British troops surprised them on the shores of Sicily the night of September 9.

The ensuing hard fight for the island would have been even harder, and Allied victory in doubt, had the Germans ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72

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How Harvard-educated lawyer turned soldier MANNING FERGUSON FORCE helped save the day for the Union army in the battle for Atlanta.

THE GENTLEMAN GENERAL

w i s c o n s i n h i s t o r i c a l s o c i e t y , w h s - 72591

B Y G L E N N W. L A F A N TA S I E

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photograph credit here

27 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

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e was not made to be a soldier. Manning Ferguson Force did not graduate from West Point or any of the plentiful military academies across antebellum America. Nor was he among the many political figures who gained high rank in the Union army for the votes they could deliver rather than the battles they could win. But Force, a cultured Harvard graduate and the son of a prominent man of letters, became a regimental colonel, brigadier general, and breveted major general during the Civil War—and won a Medal of Honor for his role in the 1864 siege of Atlanta. Though his story is largely forgotten, even

by Civil War historians, it is a compelling reminder that greatness sometimes strikes quiet notes rather than blaring chords.

Force was born in 1824 in Washington, D.C., to a family of high station and literary renown. His father, Peter Force, was a veteran of the War of 1812, a talented political journalist (a Federalist who later supported the Whigs), printer, city councilman, and historian. At age 10, Manning Force enrolled in the same Virginia boarding school that Robert E. Lee had attended. Bookish and bright, Force was a model student. His father hoped to get him an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy, but Manning went to Harvard instead. He graduated with distinction in August 1845 and immediately entered Harvard Law School, where he gained a reputation as a scholar.

Cannily, Force recognized that he could best make his mark as an attorney in the West. He moved to Cincinnati in January 1849 and accepted a position with the prestigious law firm Walker & Kebler. Within a year, he became a full partner. In 1850, after publishing some learned essays in the North American Review, he joined Cincinnati’s illustrious Literary Club. There, he met some the city’s most prominent men: Salmon P. Chase, a noted attorney and antislavery advocate; John Pope, who would become his brother-in-law decades later; and Rutherford B. Hayes, who would become his dearest friend.

Force spent most of his days—and many evenings— at his office, although he occasionally attended dinner parties, weddings, concerts, theatrical performances,

and public lectures, including some given by luminaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott. He taught Sunday school at the Unitarian Church, and once played Santa Claus at a church Christmas party.

He worked diligently as an attorney, but he held his fellow lawyers—except for his partners— and judges in low regard, calling them ignoramuses and dismissing those who had trained as apprentices in firms rather than graduating from law school. One particular justice earned his contempt for having received his training, as Force put it, “on the cobbler’s bench.” Nor did he like the courthouses in which he was forced to practice.

He described the one in Cincinnati as being on “the fourth story of a pork house.” A new courthouse, built in 1851, did satisfy him, however, since it was “as well built as any structure in Boston, and more showy than any.”¹ A good number of Force’s clients were steamboat owners who were accused of lacking proper licenses to operate their vessels in Cincinnati’s harbor or who filed claims against other steamboat companies for damages caused by collisions on the Ohio River. He was

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l i b r a r y o f c o n g r e s s (2)

Above: A prewar rendition of Cincinnati, as viewed from across the Ohio River. Opposite page: Peter Force, Manning Ferguson Force’s father.

often so busy that he complained to his father that there was “not much breathing time.”² Nevertheless, he enjoyed his practice and warmed up to Cincinnati over time. Though he sometimes found casework drudgery, he acknowledged that “the study of an important and difficult case” gave him “much pleasure” and did not seem like work.³ By 1856, he and John Kebler handled most of the cases for the firm, since Judge Walker, the senior partner, had become “thin and pallid” and nearly “a wreck.”⁴ He got along extremely well with Kebler, a German immigrant who had graduated from Harvard. Kebler’s wife, Lucy, was the sister of Force’s Harvard friend, Samuel Eliot, a descendant of John Eliot, the famous Puritan missionary. Though the old lawyer Judge Walker died in early 1856, Force and Kebler’s partnership would endure through the Civil War. Force’s time in Cincinnati turned him into something of a Westerner. He lived comfortably with two roommates and a black servant who did all the housekeeping and prepared the meals.

Slowly, he learned to tolerate the cold winters that froze the water mains, nearly buried the city in snow, and occasionally brought everything, including commerce, to a dead stop. Sometimes he

walked to the river at night and marveled at its beauty. “It reflected the moonlight as finely as a lake,” he wrote on one occasion, “and Covington and Newport [Kentucky] lying in the shadow, the wooded outline of the hills beyond, suggested that the banks were woody hills” rather than sooty, muddy banks he knew them to be in the daylight.��������������������������������������������������������� ⁵�������������������������������������������������������� The riverboats intrigued him. “They move with such certainty,” he observed, “[and] land and cast off with such accuracy and so gently, that they seem to move themselves.”⁶ Beyond the city, he liked exploring the Indian mounds that dotted the landscape in the Little Miami Valley. One Independence Day, he and some friends walked up Mount Adams to the observatory and watched the fireworks light up the city below. Although he enjoyed Cincinnati, he missed Washington and “home,” and wrote weekly to his father and rejoiced over occasional visits from his younger brothers, Henry Clay Force and Edward Leggett Force.⁷

in october 1860, Rutherford B. Hayes introduced Force to the Republican Party in Ohio by inviting him to attend a political meeting in Newtown, a Democratic stronghold 15 miles east of Cincinnati.

Hayes addressed the local citizens first, and Force followed with his own remarks. “I talked to these simple, earnest countrymen just as I would to the bench,” Force told his father. While some boys in the audience walked out, “the men listened with especial attention.” There is no record of what Hayes and Force spoke about, but Force made plain in a letter to his father that they were campaign-

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ing for Abraham Lincoln. A few days later Force again accompanied Hayes, this time to Colerain, a village in the highlands southwest of the city. He claimed proudly that after their speeches, two men in the crowd promised to switch their votes to Lincoln in the upcoming election. Force enjoyed these small-town audiences, and his speeches did not resemble typical stump harangues. No doubt his friend Hayes had convinced Force to support Lincoln, but the real motivation for this move onto the political stage was the Buchanan administration’s move against his father. It had ceased publication of Peter Force’s American Archives, a multi-volume history of the American Revolution, because the elder Force was an old-style Whig who opposed Buchanan’s policies. “I confess I felt indignant and foot loose when you told me that,” Manning wrote his father.⁸ Although Lincoln won the election on November 6, 1860, Force felt somewhat let down by the lack of enthusiasm from his fellow Ohioans. “I have never known a presidential election in which there was so little commotion or turbulence or so little hurrahing & bonfires,” he wrote one of his brothers. It was a record turnout, said Force, but the voters seemed sedate and did not linger around the polling places. Even more concerning was South Carolina’s “ridiculous” threat to secede in response to Lincoln’s election. For years, Force said, southern planters had been looking for an excuse to leave the Union and create their own cotton confederacy. “It would not pay” to try to stop them, he wrote.⁹ When South Carolina did secede on December 20, Force realized, as he later wrote, that “the time had arrived when every one had to take his side.”¹⁰ Without hesitation, he sided with the Union, but two of his younger brothers enlisted in separate Alabama regiments, both of them steadfast supporters of the Confederacy. For the Forces, as for so many other families, the Civil War truly became a war of brother against brother.

n manning force’s estimation, the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 “was [an] act of open war upon the United States, and the loyal nation, roused like a strong man from his slumber, sprang to its feet.”¹¹ With his strong political connections, he received a commission as major of the 20th Ohio Infantry in August. It was not until February 1862, however, that Force and his regiment saw action on the fringes of the fight for Fort Donelson along the banks of the Cumberland River. Two months later, Force—who had been quickly promoted to lieutenant colonel and given charge of the 20th—gained even more military experience in the bloody combat on Shiloh’s second day, when Major General Ulysses S. Grant threw back a Confederate advance along the Tennessee River. Force later wrote his father that he had survived “the severest engagement probably this continent has seen.”¹² Force and the 20th Ohio went on to guard Pittsburg Landing and then spent the summer and fall of 1862 near Bolivar, Tennessee, going out on reconnaissance patrols and skirmishing occasionally with the enemy. Force concentrated on training himself and his men to be better soldiers. The 20th Ohio’s rank and file regarded him as a stern taskmaster and something of a martinet. One private, Henry Otis Dwight, described Force as “a spare grave man with an eye that penetrated to the spine of the culprit” during drill.

Nevertheless, wrote Dwight, “we all respected him for his justice and manliness.” Those feelings were reciprocated. Force developed

a strong affection for his men. “Nothing in the war impressed me more,” he later recalled, “than the conduct of the enlisted men; my feeling towards them grew into something like veneration.”¹³ As a regiment in the Army of the Tennessee, the 20th Ohio accompanied General Grant on his campaign to reduce the fortified Confederate city of Vicksburg, whose frowning battlements stood on high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. Grant failed in his early efforts: first when he attempted to follow the Mississippi Central Railroad into the heart of Mississippi, hoping to capture Jackson, the state capital, and cut west to take Vicksburg, and later when he tried to approach the city—but avoid its hammering guns and intimidating defenses—by cutting canals between bends in the river, or sending troops to slosh through the swamps, or squeezing gunboats into the narrow banks of the bayous. Nothing worked until Grant finally dared to let Union gunboats and transports run past the Vicksburg bluffs. With alacrity, Grant moved his army—including Force and his boys in the 20th Ohio— down the western bank of the river to a place well below the city. There, he and his relentless army crossed the relentless Mississippi. Once on the eastern side, Grant again did the unexpected.

Rather than storm Vicksburg directly from the south, he led his army overland to the northeast, fighting a series of battles, capturing Jackson, and then moving due west to force the Confederates, commanded by Lieutenant John C. Pemberton, back into their arc of defenses that protected the “Gibraltar of the South.”¹⁴ Two frontal assaults on these defenses failed. During the second attack, on May 22, 1863, crossfire trapped Force and his men beneath the enemy’s fortifications. Facing a hail of bullets, Force told his men to sit with their backs pressed against the embankment so that “the balls whistled by just outside of our knees.”¹⁵ Terrible terrain made fighting all the more difficult. “The land is … a labyrinth of sharp ridges, and deep precipitous ravines, covered with a tangle of cane and brush,” Force later told his father.¹⁶ Eventually, the Union troops were ordered to withdraw from their forward positions. Three days later, Grant began siege operations by settling his army into the realities of trench warfare: enveloping lines and the long, dreary weeks of routine that produced gains measured in inches and feet.

Force and his men soon learned that siege warfare consisted largely of keeping one’s head down as bullets whizzed above. After the war, Force remembered one soldier in the trenches.

“Under a canopy of exploding shell,” he recalled, “I found a youth, a boy, lying on his back on the ground. He was pale and speechless—there was a

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Union soldiers advance against an entrenched Confederate position at Vicksburg, Mississippi, in June 1863. It was around this time that Manning Force, who saw heavy fighting during the lengthy siege of city, assumed command of his own brigade.

crimson hole in his breast. As I knelt by his side, he looked wistfully at me. I said: ‘We must all die some time, and the man is happy who meets death in the discharge of duty. You have done your whole duty well.’ It was all he wanted. His eyes brightened, a smile flickered on his lips, and I was kneeling beside a corpse.”¹⁷ When his brigade commander was ordered to take charge of the First Brigade, XVII Corps, Army of the Tennessee, under the overall command of Major General James B. McPherson, Force was given command of the Second Brigade—an indication of the high respect he had earned. The tedium of the siege, however, became almost unbearable. “Few things,” he told his father, “are more monotonous than a siege. The persistent digging, the constant sharp-shooting, the intermittent cannonade … make the days pass one much like another.” But his spirits remained high.

“Nobody troubles himself about to-morrow, content with doing now what Genl Grant orders to be done to-day,” he remarked.¹⁸ On July 4, Pemberton surrendered the city

to Grant, but Force and the Second Brigade had been moved to protect the army’s rear near the Big Black River. Eventually Force’s command was ordered back to Vicksburg for the remaining months of 1863. By early September, Force had been promoted to brigadier general. “I don’t feel quite equal to the title,” he modestly told his father. He also received a gold medal, issued by a Board of Honor, for “acts of special gallantry, in the war up to that time.”¹⁹ In November, Force was placed in command of the much larger First Brigade after Brigadier General Mortimer D. Leggett’s promotion to division command. Taking up his new command, Force and his brigade participated in an expedition in the early winter of 1864 led

by Major General William T. Sherman to destroy the rail center of Meridian, Mississippi.

After Meridian, Force went home to Cincinnati on leave, although he was ill with an “intermittent fever” for most of the time.

During his convalescence, he realized he had become a true soldier, uncomfortable among civilians. “Looking back,” he wrote, “I now see that without knowing it, I felt my uniform was a placard announcing to every body that here was an idler, a thousand miles away from where he was needed to work.” He liked the army life and the muck of soldierly responsibilities, a life of action, decisions, challenges, and meaning. “Amid all the luxuries of Cincinnati,” he confessed to Kebler, his law partner, “and with all the kindnesses

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lavished upon me, there was a feeling of undefined restlessness, discomfort.”²⁰ Not only did he truly believe in the cause, and that he was doing his part to save the country, but in less than two years of war, he had become a willing member of a band of brothers—a fraternity that gave him more pleasure, satisfaction and support than his biological family ever had. Manning Force did not love war, but he had come to love the army.

As soon as he arrived at First Brigade headquarters in Nashville, he felt better. “Here I am in place, and sleep, and eat, and move with ease,” he wrote home in spring 1864. But he would not feel comfortable around civilians again until the war was finished and victory achieved. “When the war is ended,” he said, “and this uniform can be doffed with propriety, and Cincinnati shall be my working place, then all its happiness can be drunk with out alloy.”

Walking along the wooden sidewalks of the brigade camp, he reported that his “blood began to flow more briskly, my limbs braced up, [and] I felt a man again.”²¹ After a grueling march through Alabama, Force and his First Brigade reached Rome, Georgia, 70 miles south of Chattanooga, in June. There it linked up with Sherman’s combined force of three armies—the Army of the Tennessee, the Army of the Cumberland, and the Army of the Ohio—that had already begun to push Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston’s much smaller Army of Ten-

nessee back some 90 miles from Dalton, Georgia, to the defenses of Atlanta. A pivotal phase of the Union’s army push for Atlanta was about to begin.

On June 8, Force’s brigade moved to the extreme left flank of Sherman’s offensive lines.

Almost at once, skirmishing broke out. Over the next week, the First Brigade, digging and fighting, moved closer to Kennesaw Mountain as Johnston’s Confederates fell back to the strong earthworks along the ridge line northwest of Atlanta. On June 27, Force led his brigade forward as part of a general advance, capturing enemy works in their front. To Force’s right was the battle’s major action, with Sherman’s troops failing to take the Confederate positions on Kennesaw and suffering a total of 3,000 casualties.

Skirmishing went on until July 2, when Sherman decided, after the folly of his frontal assault on the Confederate lines, to resume moving around the flank of the enemy. Over the next three weeks, Force’s brigade fought and dug its way into an advanced position, still on Sherman’s

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Union pickets pose for the camera at their post outside Atlanta shortly before the Battle of Bald Hill on July 22, 1864.

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THE BATTLE FOR BALD HILL | GEORGIA | JULY 1864 On July 21, 1864, Confederate general John B. Hood, commander of the Army of Tennessee, directed elements of his command to attack the Union force— Major General James B. McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee—threatening the city of Atlanta from the east. In the early afternoon of the 22nd, Rebels from General William J. Hardee’s corps advanced against McPherson’s left flank, exploiting a gap between the Union XVII and XVI Corps and killing McPherson during the fighting. The XVII Corps bent back in defense, anchoring its new line on an elevation known as Bald Hill. Renewed Confederate attacks later in the afternoon were repulsed after heavy fighting. By day’s end, Union forces were victorious, having held their ground. The struggle for Atlanta would continue until September 2, when the city surrendered to Union forces.

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extreme left. In the meantime, Johnston pulled back across the river into the city’s defenses, a movement that prompted Confederate president Jefferson Davis to replace him with General John Bell Hood.

On July 20, Sherman ordered all three of his armies to advance at once against the enemy trenches. A roiling battle resulted as Sherman’s blue-coated troops drove forward. After the fighting, Hood pulled back his lines, leading Sherman to incorrectly assume that the Confederate general was evacuating Atlanta. Meanwhile, Force’s brigade—and the entire XVII Corps of the Army of the Tennessee—advanced against Hood’s right

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and easily drove back enemy skirmishers, getting to within two and a half miles of the city. On a “bald hill” manned by Confederate infantrymen, a sharp fight broke out between the Rebels and the Yankee troops who hoped to gain the high ground. By sunset, Force’s First Brigade reached the foot of Bald Hill with instructions to prepare for an attack the next morning. As evening fell, Leggett, Force’s division commander, told him point-blank: “I want you to carry that hill, General.”²² Before dawn, Force instructed his skirmishers to push forward and get as close as possible without being seen. Delays along the Union lines, however, let the early morning hours tick away. Just before sending his men into battle, Force reassured the brigade: “Boys, now be cool and firm; don’t waver, don’t falter; just make up your mind to drive the enemy from yonder hill, and you’ll do it. Be

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cool and determined, boys, and it will be all right.” Despite the uncertainty and tension, a Wisconsin private found comfort in Force’s leadership. “Though we had not been long in General Force’s brigade,” he recalled after the war, “we had learned to have entire confidence in him, and his quiet talk made us more determined than ever to plant our colors on the hill in our front.”²³ Then, in a booming voice, Force gave the order to advance: “Right shoulder shift arms! Forward, March!” No longer silenced, the skirmishers sprang forward, with Force’s entire brigade emerging behind them from the woods that ran along the base of the hill.

Some confusion resulted from a stream in their path, but once the soldiers splashed through or hurled themselves across, they realigned and continued their march. Flags waved as the blue lines moved out of the woods, fixed bayonets gleaming in the sun. Soon the brigade overtook the skirmishers and steadily advanced up the slope. Near the top, Force’s men met with hot, deadly musket fire. “Our men fell in bunches,” remembered one of Force’s officers.

“Still came the charging column on; faster and faster it pressed forward.” Behind the second line of battle, Force rode on horseback, urging his men to the hilltop. Finally, he judged that the moment had arrived. “Forward, men!” he shouted out above the tremendous noise of battle. The blue-clad men, as with one mind and soul, prepared to move. Then Force yelled yet another command: “Charge

bayonets! Forward, double quick, March!”²⁴ On the hilltop, the Confederates wavered and broke; the attack was too much. Their lines shattered, the Rebels scattered and ran for the rear, back to Atlanta. Nevertheless, the fight was not over. Under the command of the capable Major General Patrick R. Cleburne, the Confederates launched a counterattack to retake the hill.

Force’s men beat back the attempt with heavy fire and fierce determination, then spent an uneasy night on the summit, listening to the unnerving moans of the wounded who lay between the lines and the unsettling bursts of desultory musket fire.

As the sun rose on July 22, Force and Leggett learned that the enemy was swinging to the left in an attempt to flank the Union troops on Bald Hill.

But General McPherson was uncharacteristically indecisive about whether the Confederates intended to attack. The morning passed quietly. In Force’s brigade, the men settled down for a quiet lunch. It looked like they would spend the day reversing trenches, digging new earthworks, and

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Union general James B. McPherson (on brown horse), commander of the Army of the Tennessee, receives a mortal wound in this dramatization of the fighting outside Atlanta on July 22, 1864.

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boiling in the Georgia heat.

A brisk ripple of musket fire changed their plans. Every man in the Army of the Tennessee knew the Confederates were about to make a new effort to push them off Bald Hill. General John Bell Hood, known to both sides as a bold warrior, had stolen a flanking march that hurled his Confederates into the Union defenses of the XVII and XV Corps from the west, including Force’s position atop Bald Hill. As the musket fire intensified, officers up and down the lines could be heard shouting to their men, “Fall in! Fall in.”²⁵ In 15 minutes or so, the woods bristled with movement as waves of Rebel soldiers rushed the Union lines.

McPherson, startled by the rifle fire, mounted his horse and rode toward the front for answers, only to meet Cleburne’s advancing troops, who shot him down. It took little time for word of McPherson’s death to cascade through the ranks of the Army of the Tennessee.

Two separate Confederate commands hit the Union line at the same time, driving the bluecoats back to the defensive works on Bald Hill during a deadly fight that lasted two hours. In the meantime, Hood ordered other Rebel troops to attack nearly all of the fortifications held by the Army of the Tennessee. At the summit, confusion, fear, courage, and resolution all worked together to help the Union troops stay steadfast and hold their ground, perhaps for fear that moving at all, either forward or backward, would imperil them.

They could not know for certain where the enemy was; the chaos and smoke of battle hid the attacking troops coming up on their rear and flank. In Force’s brigade, as some of his troops were hit from behind and from the front, someone in the ranks remarked that friendly fire might be piercing through the dense smoke that encircled the hill; whatever its source, the buzzing minié balls were cutting them to pieces. Force made a splitsecond decision and shouted for a flag. A junior officer, believing Force meant to surrender, ran to find a piece of white cloth. When he returned, Force exploded in disgust: “Damn you, sir! I don’t want a flag of truce; I want the American flag!”²⁶ Finally someone found the Stars and Stripes, and Force displayed it from the hilltop for everyone— friend and foe alike—to see.

It was Force’s finest hour. Decades later, the War Department would declare him a hero and bestow the Medal of Honor for the courage he showed on Bald Hill that day. Gripping the flag in one hand and waving his sword in the other, Force stood as a symbol of cool bravery for his men and utter defiance to his enemies. His actions on that summer day, on a small hill on the outskirts of Atlanta, showed the true grit possessed by a bookish attorney from Cincinnati.

As the Confederates closed in on his lines from the rear, Force readied his troops for the impact. “The men,” he said in a speech after the war, “leaped over the works to the side next to Atlanta” and waited for the assault. Through the woods, they could hear the “unearthly” Rebel yell above the deafening muskets and cannon. A steady, crippling volley fire greeted the approaching Confederates, damaging enough to halt their advance.

The Rebels—mostly Texans—reformed and stormed the Union breastworks again, but the repeated blasts of Federal volleys forced them back. Force’s flag—with staff on the ground, gripped in his closed fist—fluttered in the breeze. His First Brigade held on with iron resolve and sheer grit. In front of the Union works, beneath the billowing musket smoke, wounded and dead Confederates littered the ground. When a new enemy attack came from a different direction, the brigade’s original front, Force’s men, “again leaping over their works,” repelled the Confederate assault.²⁷ Enemy advances on his front and rear challenged Force and his troops to leapfrog from one position inside and outside of their breastworks, knowing they might be hit again from the opposite direction. The battle dragged on into the afternoon, with Force’s brigade sometimes fighting fire from their front, flank, and rear simultaneously. This continued until their ammunition began to run low—one more crisis to reckon with.

In the midst of these grim circumstance, as Force “stooped down to assist in applying a tourniquet” to the leg of a wounded officer, a minié ball struck him in the face. Penetrating his left cheekbone below his left eye, the lead ball passed straight through his face, and exited about an inch in front of his right lower jaw bone beneath the right ear, “carrying away pieces of the upper jaw” with it. A nearby artillerist, who watched as Force fell to the ground, described how “blood gushed from his eyes, nose, and mouth.” Yet, said the gunner, Force “uttered no moan, nor a word of complaint.” His face shattered, Force was still conscious and fully aware as he was carried to a field hospital. Despite his absence, Force’s brigade held firmly on the crest of Bald Hill and sent the enemy scurrying back toward Atlanta. When the battle was over, General Leggett praised Force for his “coolness, sagacity, and bravery” under fire.²⁸ It is a wonder that Force did not lose consciousness; his wound was excruciatingly painful. The minié ball not only shattered bone, but also smashed some of his teeth, and rendered him unable to speak. If the bullet had hit an inch higher, it might have penetrated his skull. And even though the bullet did miss his brain, he could have died from blood loss. His prompt removal from the battlefield no doubt saved his life.

In late July, Force was transferred to a hospital in Nashville, then to a general hospital for officers in Louisville. He soon regained his ability to speak, although only with great effort and difficulty. By the beginning of August, he arrived by train in Cincinnati, where he lodged at a friend’s house and received excellent care. He recuperated quickly without needing surgery beyond what the army doctors had done to mend his face and mouth. By August 15, Force wrote to his father, “I am now gaining strength rapidly as well as advancing well in the healing of the wound.”²⁹ The final weeks of his leave were spent recovering and resting at his father’s house in Washington. While he was there, grateful for the comfort of his childhood home, he learned that Atlanta had fallen to Sherman on September 2.

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orce returned to active duty with remarkable speed. In early October 1864, he rejoined Sherman’s army just in time to lead his First Brigade through Georgia in the March to the Sea. How he kept in the saddle for the long trek to Savannah is not entirely clear, although he seemed to be strong and in relatively good health. But his wound did bother him, sometimes erupting without warning in waves of pain that radiated through his jaw. On one occasion, he wrote in his diary that “a bit of bone from the wound discharged through the nose into [my] mouth today.”³⁰ Even so, Force—by now a more than tough and capable field officer—performed admirably in the march across Georgia. He led his brigade all the way to Savannah, and then even assumed command of the Third Division of the XVII Corps of the Army of the Tennessee when Leggett, who had fallen ill, went home in January 1865. Force and his men continued with Sherman on his famous march into the Carolinas, which proved to be a greater challenge than the sweep to the sea. The Rebels defended every crossing with batteries, forcing the Union columns to find passable fords. “Sometimes,” Force said, “we were fortunate enough to find a place where all the streams united in one channel, with a firm bank on our side and swamp beyond. There we could lay pontoons and cross.”³¹

At Bentonville, North Carolina, Sherman’s army fought one last battle against the Confederates on March 21, but Force and his division played practically no role in the fight. General Joseph Johnston was back in command of the Rebels, but he retreated as the Union troops marched into Goldsboro. On April 10, Sherman’s army learned that Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. “The men were wild with joy,” wrote Force. A universal shout went up from the men: “Lee has surrendered, and we are going home!” Force was ready for it all to be over. He had reached the apex of his military experience.

“It seems I could never be so happy again in the army,” he wrote in his journal. Four days later, Sherman’s troops reached Raleigh. That same day, Johnston informed Sherman he was prepared to surrender the ragtag remnants of his Confederate army. In Force’s First Division, the men “flung their hats in the air … [and] tossed their knapsacks at each other.” Everyone hugged one another. To Force, the soldiers almost “seemed crazy.” He issued a half ration of whiskey, which, no doubt, made them even crazier. “We feel like

library of congress

Soldiers of the XVII Corps, Army of the Tennessee—in which Manning Force served—march through the streets of Washington, D.C., as part of the Grand Review of the Armies on May 24, 1865.

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the war is over,” Force rightly observed. Then, as the euphoria died down, word arrived of Lincoln’s assassination. In utter despair, Force exclaimed: “Gloom covers everything; wrath flashes through the gloom.”³² In the Union camp, the men sat in their tents or around smoky fires, “somber, brooding, silent,” as Force later described the scene.

“The stillness,” he said, “was appalling.” Slowly, the shock wore off, and the men’s grief turned to rage. When Sherman returned from his negotiations with Johnston, soldiers gathered at the train depot called out, “Don’t let him surrender. Don’t let him surrender.” Wanting revenge, the army strained “to be let loose again.”³³ To prevent an outbreak of violence, Sherman confined everyone

to camp that night.

As Sherman negotiated surrender terms with Johnston, Force looked forward to saying “good bye to war.” Looking back, he thought that “all seems a dream.” To Kebler, he wrote: “What a lifetime has been crowded within three weeks! A War ended. Armies dispersed. A rebellion collapsed. A country restored. In all this blinding and delirious whirl, one fact overshadows all. The delirium of joy, the pride of victory, were silenced in the gloom of the assassination of the President. We cannot shake it off.” Force found it difficult “to get used to the new state of things.”³⁴ He kept thinking that marching orders would arrive at any moment, waking him from his prolonged dream.

Much to his regret, the surrender did not end his military career or allow him to go home. His army marched with pride and exuberance to Washington, where on May 24, it participated ☛ } CONT. ON P. 78

ENDNOTES 1

Manning Ferguson Force (MFF) to Horace Gray, July 23, 1851, Horace Gray Papers, Library of Congress (LC), Washington, D.C.

2 MFF to Peter Force, October 8, 1855, Force Papers (FP), Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

3 MFF to Peter Force, June 16, 1856, MFF Papers, University of Washington (UW), Seattle, Washington.

4 MFF to Peter Force, January 7, 1856, MFF Papers, UW.

21 MFF to John Kebler, April 30, 1864, MFF Papers, UW. 22 Gilbert D. Munson, “Battle of Atlanta,” in Sketches of War History, 18611865, Papers Prepared for the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, 1888-1890 (Cincinnati, 1890), 3: 214.

23 Hosea W. Rood, Story of the Service of Company E, and of the Twelfth Wisconsin Regiment (Milwaukee, 1893), 308.

5 MFF to Peter Force, May 19, 1856, MFF Papers, UW.

24 Munson, “Battle of Atlanta,” 215-216; Rood, Story of the Service, 309310.

6 MFF to Peter Force, December 21, 1856, MFF Papers, UW.

25 Munson, “Battle of Atlanta,” 221.

7 MFF to Peter Force, April 12, 1857, MFF Papers, UW.

26 MFF, “Remarks by General Force,” in Wood, comp., History, 24.

8 MFF to Peter Force, October 7, 1860, FP.

27 Ibid.; Richard S. Tuthill, “An Artilleryman’s Recollections of the Battle of Atlanta,” in 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, 1891), 1: 305-306; Henry O. Dwight, “The Battle of July 22, 1864,” New York Times, August 12, 1864.

9 MFF to Brother, November 23, 1860, MFF Papers, UW. 10 Manning F. Force, General Sherman (New York, 1899), 19.

11 Ibid., 22.

12 MFF to Peter Force, April 8, 1862, Peter Force Papers, LC. 13 Henry Otis Dwight, Four Years Relics, n.d., Henry Otis Dwight Papers, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio; MFF, “Response by General Force,” in D. W. Wood, comp., History of the 20th O.V.V.I. Regiment, and Proceedings of the First Reunion at Mt. Vernon, Ohio, April 6th, 1876 (Columbus, 1876), 52.

14 MFF to Peter Force, June 18, 1863, MFF Papers, UW. 15 MFF, “Personal Recollections of the Vicksburg Campaign,” Sketches of War History: Papers Read Before the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, 1883-1886, 8 vols. (Cincinnati, 1888-1893), 1: 304.

16 MFF to Peter Force, June 18, 1863, MFF Papers, UW. 17 MFF, “Personal Recollections,” 1: 305-306.

28 William E. Soule to Peter Force, July 31, 1864, MFF Papers, UW; Samuel R. Adams to John Kebler, July 23, 1864, ibid.; Jack D. Welsh, Medical Histories of Union Generals (Kent, OH, 1996), 117; Tuthill, “An Artilleryman’s Recollections,” 306; Mortimer D. Leggett to A. J. Alexander, July 25, 1864, in OR, Ser. 1, 38 (Pt. 3), 564-565.

29 MFF to Peter Force, August 15, 1864, MFF Papers, UW. 30 MFF Journal, November 4, 1864, MFF Papers, UW. 31 MFF, “Marching Through Carolina,” Sketches of War History: Papers Read Before the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, 1883-1886, 8 Vols. (Cincinnati, 1888-1893), 1: 2.

32 MFF, General Sherman, 296; MFF Journal, April 14, 15, 17, 1865, MFF Papers, UW.

18 MFF to Peter Force, June 18, 1863, MFF Papers, UW.

33 MFF, General Sherman, 297; MFF Journal, April 18, 1865, MFF Papers, UW.

19 MFF to Peter Force, September 4, 1863, ibid.; MFF, “Remarks by General Force,” in Wood, comp., History, 22-23.

34 MFF to John Kebler, April 20, 1865, MFF Papers, UW; MFF to Sarah Perkins, April 21, 1865, ibid.

20 MFF to Peter Force, April 30, 1864, MFF Papers, UW; General Orders No. 13, April 4, 1864, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1880-1901), Ser. 1, 52 (Pt. 1), 544 (hereafter OR); MFF to John Kebler, April 30, 1864, MFF Papers, UW.

35 MFF to Peter Force, September 4, 1865, ibid.

36 MFF to Peter Force, April 30, 1866, FP. 37 Medal of Honor Citations, U.S. Army Center of Military History, http:// www.history.army.mil/html/moh/civwaral.html.

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photograph credit here

Josiah A. Lee DESOTO COUNT Y

Lee served in the “Pettus Rifles,” Company I, 17th Mississippi Infantry.

At Gettysburg, Lee was badly wounded in the fighting at the Peach Orchard.

Captured by the Federals, he was sent to Point Lookout, Maryland, prisoner of war camp. Exchanged in 1864, Lee’s wounds kept him from returning to his regiment.

THE CIVIL

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opposite: courtesy of becky lee muska photograph credit here

Tens of thousands of Mississippians fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, earning themselves a reputation for unrivaled bravery and tenacity by conflict’s end.

BY JEFF T. GIAMBRONE

39 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

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The Confederate States of America existed as a nation for four years, fighting against a foe that was larger, better equipped, and superior in almost every category except one: the determination and fighting spirit of its soldiers. ¶ The southern battle for national survival lasted as long as it did largely because Rebels by the thousands were willing to lay down their lives and defend their homes to the last man and last cartridge. Many of these soldiers—approximately 78,000 in all—were from Mississippi. Men from the Magnolia State served in all theaters of the war: 12 regiments of Mississippians fought with Robert E. Lee in Virginia, while the majority of the state’s soldiers remained in the West, serving in the Army of Tennessee or the Army of the Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana. ¶ On the following pages are the images and stories of a small cross-section of these soldiers, volunteers determined to fight to the end for their cause—and their home state. jeff t. giambrone,

a native of Bolton, Mississippi, works as an historic resources specialist at the Mississippi Department of Archives & History. His latest book, Remembering Mississippi's Confederates, was released by Arcadia Publishing in October 2012.

library of congress

Some of the first military companies to leave Mississippi were sent to Pensacola, Florida, in March 1861. Photographer J.E. Edwards of New Orleans took this image of soldiers from the “Home Guards,” Company B, 9th Mississippi Infantry, in their Pensacola camp.

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7Mississippi adopted a distinctive uniform for its troops, as illustrated in this image. State regulations called for a gray frock coat and pants, trimmed in red for infantry, yellow for cavalry, and orange for artillery; and a black felt hat, looped up on three sides to form a tricorn, which the men often adorned with horsehair pompoms.

3Pinson enlisted in the “Joe Matthews Rifles,” Company D, 2nd Mississippi Infantry, on May 1, 1861. Wounded in his left leg at the Battle of Antietam, Pinson was never able to return to the regiment.

He carried the bullet in his leg until his death in 1922.

Unknown

William H. Pinson

UNKNOWN

TIPPAH COUNT Y

Fairfax Washington

Abel E. McAlpin

c l o c k w i s e f r o m t o p l e f t : l i b r a r y o f c o n g r e s s ; c o u r t e s y o f d av i d p i n s o n ; c o u r t e s y o f pa u l r u s s i n o f f ; c o u r t e s y o f a r t m c a l p i n

HARRISON COUNT Y

SMITH COUNT Y

7Washington served as the regimental ordnance sergeant of the 38th Mississippi Infantry.

He was wounded and captured at the Battle of Iuka, Mississippi, and died on October 2, 1862.

3McAlpin joined the “Yancey Guards,” Company G, 37th Mississippi Infantry, in April 1862. (This image was probably made about the time of his enlistment.) He served with the regiment during the siege of Vicksburg and was taken prisoner when the city’s Confederate garrison surrendered on July 4, 1863.

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7This Mississippian was photographed with his “Maynard” breechloader. A columnist for the Oxford Intelligencer wrote of this weapon: “Nothing to do with [the] Maynard rifle but load her up, turn her North, and pull trigger; if twenty of them don’t clean out all Yankeedom, then I’m a liar, that’s all.”

3Adams, a wealthy planter before the war, enlisted in October 1861 as colonel of the 1st Mississippi Cavalry.

One of the best cavalry commanders the state produced, Adams was promoted to brigadier general in 1863. He survived the war only to die in a gun battle with a political opponent in the streets of Jackson on May 1, 1888.

Unknown

William Wirt Adams

UNKNOWN

HINDS COUNT Y

Preston Brent

James M. Tynes 7Brent, colonel of the 38th Mississippi Infantry, was struck in the face by a bullet that passed through both cheeks during the siege of Vicksburg.

He cauterized the wounds by running a silk handkerchief through both openings. After the siege ended he went on sick leave and never returned to the regiment.

3Tynes enlisted in the “Jake Thompson Guards,” Company K, 19th Mississippi Infantry, on May 26, 1861. Wounded on June 26, 1862, at the Battle of Beaver Dam Creek, Virginia, he had this photograph made while recovering from his injury.

c l o c k w i s e f r o m t o p l e f t : l i b r a r y o r c o n g r e s s (2) ; c o u r t e s y o f pa u l r u s s i n o f f ; c o u r t e s y o f b r e n t va s s e u r

ITAWAMBA COUNT Y

PIKE COUNT Y

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7Conner enlisted in the 9th Battalion Mississippi Sharpshooters in May 1861.

During the Battle of Atlanta in 1864, he was severely wounded in the head and blinded for life. One of his children was Major General Fox Conner, chief of operations for the American Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War I. 3Wright enlisted in the 45th Mississippi Infantry in March 1862. Wounded in the leg at the Battle of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, he was unable to march afterward and was discharged from the service. Wright later joined the 18th Mississippi Cavalry, in which he served until war’s end.

Robert H. Conner

John Benjamin Wright

CALHOUN COUNT Y

HINDS COUNT Y

Hezekiah George David Brown

William Blake HOLMES COUNT Y

c l o c k w i s e f r o m t o p l e f t : c o u r t e s y o f b o b c o n n e r ; c o u r t e s y o f d av i d h o x i e ; 1861 t o 1865 b y a n o l d j o h n n i e ; c o u r t e s y o f s u z a n n e b r o w n

COPIAH COUNT Y

7Brown was the younger brother of Mississippi congressman Albert Gallatin Brown. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he enlisted as captain of the Seven Stars Artillery on September 1, 1861.

3Blake enlisted in the “Burt Rifles,” Company K, 18th Mississippi Infantry, on April 4, 1862, when he was 17 years old.

Out of action after losing a leg at Gettysburg, Blake continued to serve the Confederacy, taking a position in the commissary department at Mobile, Alabama.

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7An unidentified private from the “Jake Thompson Guards,” Company K, 19th Mississippi Infantry.

Most of the men in this company were from Itawamba and Tishomingo counties, and they were some of the first men from Mississippi to volunteer for service during the war.

3Beall enlisted as a private in the “Madison Rifles,” Company I, 10th Mississippi Infantry, in June 1861.

He advanced in rank quickly, and by August 1863 was a major serving as quartermaster on the staff of Brigadier General William F. Tucker. Beall later served as quartermaster on the staff of Brigadier General Patton Anderson.

Unknown

Thomas B. Beall

UNKNOWN

MADISON COUNT Y

Edwin Augustus Garrison

Samuel George Fitten Jayroe WINSTON COUNT Y

7Garrison enlisted as a private in the 48th Mississippi Infantry in September 1861.

In mid-1863, Garrison, a licensed Methodist Episcopal preacher, was appointed the regimental chaplain.

Captured at Sailor’s Creek in April 1865, he spent the war’s final days as a prisoner at Johnson’s Island in Ohio.

3Jayroe enlisted in the “New Prospect Grays,” Company D, 5th Mississippi Infantry, at Enterprise, Mississippi, on October 18, 1861. He survived the war despite being wounded twice: in the hand at Shiloh and the foot at Murfreesboro.

c l o c k w i s e f r o m t o p l e f t : l i b r a r y o f c o n g r e s s (2) ; c o u r t e s y o f j o r h o d e s ; c o u r t e s y o f d av i d p i e r c e

CL AIBORNE COUNT Y

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7As a teenager, Dinkins attended the North Carolina Military Institute, where he had this picture made of himself in his cadet uniform. After the war began, he returned to his native state and joined the 18th Mississippi Infantry. Dinkins survived the conflict, after which he wrote extensively about his wartime service.

3Moore enlisted in the “Meridian Invincibles,” Company H, 14th Mississippi Infantry, in May 1861. Here, he sports a tricorn hat decorated with what appears to be a secession cockade, a patriotic symbol worn by many southerners in 1861. Moore, who was captured twice during the conflict, ended the war at a prison camp in Illinois.

James Dinkins

John A. Moore

MADISON COUNT Y

L AUDERDALE COUNT Y

James Wiseman Honnoll

Thomas E.D. Traxler R ANKIN COUNT Y

c l o c k w i s e f r o m t o p l e f t : 1861 t o 1865 b y a n o l d j o h n n i e ; c o u r t e s y o f j i m m o o r e ; c o u r t e s y o f e d wa r d t r a x l e r ; c o u r t e s y o f d a n n y h o n n o l l

TISHOMINGO COUNT Y

7According to one of his parishioners, Honnoll, a Methodist minister, decided to join the army after the Confederates evacuated Corinth in 1862: “He immediately rose and said, that retreat means that I must become a soldier.”

Honnell served as an officer in “Yates Company,” Company C, Ham’s Regiment of Mississippi Cavalry.

3Traxler enlisted in the “Price Rebels,” Company G, 39th Mississippi Infantry, in May 1862. He was captured when Port Hudson, Louisiana, surrendered on July 9, 1863. Traxler returned after being exchanged and was killed in action during the Atlanta Campaign in 1864.

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photograph credit here

THE WASHINGTON ARSENAL FIRE OF JUNE 17, 1864窶ィ 46 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR WINTER 2012

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photograph credit here

“ The fire spread down rapidly, blinding the girls and setting fire to their clothes. Many of them ran to the windows wrapped in flames…”

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ohanna connor probably kept her fingernails trimmed and unadorned. Decorated nails had only become fashionable for American women in the 1840s—and the trend applied more to ladies of leisure than to Irish working girls like Johanna. Her supervisors at the U.S. Arsenal in Washington, D.C.—known as the Washington Arsenal—discouraged overtly feminine attire like hoopskirts, so they probably would have required short fingernails, both as a statement of appropriate military frugality and a matter of practical need. Johanna and the hundreds of other women employed at the arsenal were recruited precisely because their slim fingers were well adapted to packing and repacking paper musket cartridges—round paper tubes containing the gunpowder and bullet necessary to fire a round from a Civil War-era rifle.¹ Every workday morning Johanna entered the largest federal arsenal in the United States, a collection of buildings spread over nearly 70 acres at Greenleaf’s Point on the Potomac River. “Here are foundries, work-shops, magazines, laboratories, and every thing necessary for the manufacture of implements and materials of war,” noted a correspondent for Harper’s Weekly who visited the Washington Arsenal in 1861. At that time it held an estimated 76,000 weapons of various shapes and sizes, along with all the requisite support material and machinery. By the summer of 1864 it had expanded substantially. Some period photographs show long rows of cannon, parked hub to hub along the arsenal grounds; others focus on the buildings: severe, unadorned brick and stone structures, grimly towering over those endless rows of guns.² Impressive as it was, the Washington Arsenal was only one part of the almost unimaginably complex war machine created during the conflict by the Union, a vast network of arsenals, foundries, powder mills, assembly plants—the necessary facilities of America’s first modern war. By the summer of 1864 that war machine was a cold, ruthlessly efficient thing, emptied of the gushing emotion that characterized the war’s early days. Now it was pitiless and automatic, from the bullets and shells themselves as they whistled and roared on battlefields across the country, down to Johanna’s nimble fingers, deftly jamming those paper tubes with gunpowder and conical lumps of lead bearing the arsenal’s telltale star symbol on their base.

The northern war machine efficiently supplied the largest, best equipped army in the world, but it was not perfect. And for one terrifying day in June 1864 the machine’s fallibility became horribly clear. Even the North, accustomed to the hard sights of a hard war, paused and took note. It even took note of Johanna Connor.

friday, june 17, dawned warm and clear, a typical early summer day for Washington. Johanna and her fellow employees filed through the arsenal’s front square and its iron gate and separated to their own buildings and assignments. The arsenal was far more than a

weapons warehouse. Johanna may have walked by test sites for artillery carriages or devices used to evaluate the properties of explosive ordinance.

One building housed a machine called a “ballistic pendulum,” used to measure the velocity imparted to bullets by various types of gunpowder. Elsewhere, workers compared the relative merits of breechloading versus muzzleloading rifles. It is not difficult to imagine a young woman like Johanna, with perhaps limited education but ample curiosity, staring wide-eyed at the bewildering variety of military machinery and equipment.³ She faced a long, hard day in the arsenal—but she was probably grateful for the opportunity. Her father had died from sunstroke while working at the arsenal earlier in the war, and Johanna helped

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h a r p e r ’ s w e e k ly

The Washington Arsenal, as sketched in 1861.

support her mother and family.⁴ Thousands of northern women entered the work force during the war, as the battlefront siphoned male labor away from the homefront. But these women usually found harsh conditions punctuated by low pay.

A seamstress sewing uniforms in New York, for example, could expect to earn only around $1.50 for a week of 14-hour workdays. Arsenal workers like Johanna earned more (though still less than any male laborers at the arsenal), so their jobs were sought after.⁵ Johanna and her fellow laborers’ extra pay, however, came with added danger. The Washington Arsenal was packed with threats: machinery that could maim, weapons that could wound or kill if carelessly discharged, toxic or flammable

chemicals, and above all, gunpowder—a lot of gunpowder. Powder mills all over the country ground out tons of the stuff, and if a mere 50 grains was ignited, it was enough to blow a hole the size of a fist in someone. Entire ships filled with powder docked at the Washington Arsenal’s wharves, feeding the endless need for artillery shells, musket cartridges and other battlefield explosives. A small mistake—a stray ember from a tobacco pipe, a spark from metal striking metal on some machinery part—could have disastrous consequences.

Those who managed the powder mills, arsenals, and other such facilities weren’t oblivious to the dangers (though they had a tendency to blame supposedly careless workers for accidents). They tried to maintain some semblance of worker safety by cordoning large amounts of gunpowder away from places like weapons testing ranges and other areas involving explosives or fire, and by cautioning their employees to keep anything flammable away from powder

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h a r p e r ’ s w e e k ly

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storage areas and munitions dumps. But Americans were generally new to the problems posed by a large-scale military-industrial base. By 1864 the Union’s war capacity was a marvel of the modern world, but equally astounding were the number of industrial accidents, big and small, that injured and killed northern laborers.⁶ Johanna Connor’s little corner of this industrial landscape was a long, rectangular, single-story brick building with a tin roof near the riverfront. Divided into four rooms, it was devoted to constructing and labeling the wooden boxes that held the cartridges, assembling shell canisters and cylinders, and “choking” the cartridges, or using a device that gummed and mated the musket balls with the paper tubes after they were charged. Approximately 30 women, including Johanna, were choking cartridges that morning, seated on benches at long tables and supervised by officers including Major E.M. Stebbins, the arsenal’s military storekeeper. Containers of gunpowder were everywhere, including the benches upon which the girls sat.⁷ The morning began with the reading of a letter of thanks from a committee in Pittsburgh. In September 1862—on the very same day as the Battle of Antietam, in fact—an explosion at Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Arsenal had killed 70 workers, including quite a few young women. The government had been happy to employ these women at bargain rates, but it balked at providing any sort of monetary compensation to the survivors or the families of the dead. In a quiet display of solidarity, Johanna and her fellow Washington Arsenal employees had donated more than $170 toward a monument to commemorate the victims.⁸ Then, work commenced. Over 100 young women were spread through the four crowded rooms. The day quickly grew very hot. By 10 a.m.

the girls and their supervisors were probably mopping their brows in an almost unbearably stuffy atmosphere, the heat mixing with the stench of sweat and the acrid smell of gunpowder. It’s understandable that the windows were open to allow in cooler air from the nearby Potomac River.

A few yards away stood an arsenal building devoted to manufacturing pyrotechnic devices called “stars” or “rockets.” Used as signal flares or for battlefield illumination, they came in white or red varieties.

The “pyrotechnist” in charge of manufacturing these stars, Thomas Brown, had worked at the arsenal since before the Mexican War. He was an expert who enjoyed a solid reputation in Washington. In October 1860 his fireworks spectacular near the White House had caused a local newspaper to describe him as a man “who has always met with remarkable success in his displays of pyrotechnic works.”⁹ Brown was well aware of the combustible nature of the materials he daily handled. Strict orders kept him from placing stars anywhere near gunpowder, and he later claimed to have created his own compound recipe to eliminate any chemicals that could be ignited by a sudden jarring or concussion.¹⁰ Once mixed, the star compound needed to dry. On the morning of the 17th, Brown followed his simple procedure for doing so: He placed the chemicals in metal pans—he was creating red stars that day—and carried them outside to dry in the sun. The pans were big, holding over 100 stars each, and they were black—perfect for conducting the sun’s rays and baking the pans’ contents. Brown believed he had set the pans at a safe distance from the cartridge building next door.

It is not entirely clear what went wrong. Some later speculated that embers from a nearby laboratory chimney landed in a drying pan. Others guessed that the summer heat had ignited the chemicals in those black pans—though Brown claimed he had used this same drying process even during the hottest of August days without incident.¹¹ Whatever the cause, at approximately 11:50 a.m. one of the pans detonated near the southeast corner of the cartridge building, sending a shower of bright red sparks through a window and right

M i l i ta r y & H i s t o r i c a l I m a g e B a n k ( w w w . h i s t o r i c a l i m a g e b a n k . c o m )

The Delicate Task of Cartridge Making The Washington Arsenal’s female employees spent long hours packing paper musket cartridges—round paper tubes containing the gunpowder and bullet necessary to fire a round from a Civil War-era rifle. The process, known as “choking,” required a gentle touch. Opposite page: Male and female employees of the U.S. Arsenal at Watertown, Massachusetts, fill cartridges under conditions similar to those at the Washington Arsenal. Left: A .58-caliber rifle musket cartridge, containing bullet and powder. Right: One of the crates into which such cartridges were packed for shipment to the front.

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into the room where Johanna and the other women sat choking cartridges. Sparks peppered the workers and the gunpowder containers scattered on the benches, creating a chain reaction of explosions that rolled through the room like an artillery barrage.

The stout brick walls contained and magnified much of the force, creating a bone-cracking, split-second concussive bubble that expanded out and up toward the somewhat weaker metal roof. But even the roof held fairly firm, lifting about a foot and then crashing back down. The sturdiness of the structure worked against the occupants, compressing and magnifying the tremendous blast. It even muffled the sound. “The explosion did not occasion a loud report,” noted one observer.¹² Few of the unfortunate souls in that room could have known what was happening. The explosion would have crushed the life from many of them before their senses could adequately react. Girls on benches in the south side of the room in particular were, according to eyewitnesses, blown to bits before they could even stand.¹³ “Under the metal roof of the building were seething bodies and limbs, mangled, scorched, and charred beyond the possibility of identification,” noted a reporter. The blast caused a wrench-

ing torque on the weaker points—the joints at the shoulders, elbows, wrists, knees, and hips, as well as the neck—rending and tearing away body parts. “In nearly every case only the trunk of the body remained, the arms and legs being missing or detached,” reported those who sifted through the rubble afterward.¹⁴ The calamity that wrecked the cartridge room (one witness likened it to “a sudden flash of lightening”) was only the beginning.¹⁵ The entire place—littered with gunpowder, paper and wood—was a firetrap. It also included hundreds of cartridges, most of them pointed straight up toward the workers. The cartridges fired, sending star-stamped lead balls into a crossfire as lethal as any battlefield action. Stebbins later said that many of the women were riddled with bullets never shot from any gun.¹⁶ There was a slight delay between the explosion in the cartridge room and the tsunami of fire, bullets and debris roaring down the building’s length—a gut-wrenching pause when the rest of the building’s occupants scrambled to save themselves. Many injured themselves diving out of windows. One unidentified girl broke her arm, a woman named Maggie Eckloff badly lacerated her back, and another woman named Julia Mahoney was only vaguely described as having been “badly hurt” as she jumped through a window.¹⁷ They were fortunate, because fire became the real killer for those still trapped. According to Stebbins, “the fire spread down rapidly, blinding the girls and setting fire to their clothes.

Many of them ran to the windows wrapped in flames, and on their way communicated the fire to the dresses of others.” Stebbins shoved workers through open doors, and in one case wrapped a girl in a tarpaulin to extinguish the flames burning her body. Three girls who escaped ran, clothes aflame, up a nearby grassy hill. Two men grabbed them and tore the burning cloth away, “probably sav[ing] the girls from a horrid death.” Another man seized a burning girl and plunged her into the Potomac River; “he, however, burned his arms and hands badly in the effort.” Others clambered aboard boats moored at the arsenal’s wharf, thinking perhaps that a boat on the water would provide a safe refuge.¹⁸ Those who had ignored the warnings against wearing hoopskirts now paid a heavy price. Flames lapped underneath their skirts and were trapped, the hoops containing and magnifying the scorching heat. And dropping and rolling on the ground could not have helped those whose hoopskirts were ablaze. One observer later noted that “these bodies seemed more badly burned than those not enveloped in hoops, and it is probable that the expansion of the dress by the hoops afforded facili-

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l i b r a r y o f c o n g r e s s (2)

After hearing the explosion from their nearby offices, U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (this page) and General Henry W. Halleck (opposite) rushed to the arsenal to help direct the rescue and firefighting efforts.

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ties for the flames to fasten upon them with fatal effect.”¹⁹ A desperate, frenzied panic seized even relatively unhurt workers. Some escaped through windows and then, according to eyewitnesses, immediately fainted (or perhaps were overcome by smoke inhalation). Some fled the burning building, the arsenal grounds, and simply kept going. Sara Gunnell ran to her home several blocks away, and then, according to a reporter, “swooned away and died instantly, it is supposed by fright.” (Apparently the “swoon” was not fatal after all, however, because the newspapers reported the next day that she was “slowly improving.”) Another girl ran screaming into a local cellar, where she remained for over an hour until she could be coaxed out.²⁰ At first there was concern that the fire could overtake and destroy the arsenal, or perhaps even a good portion of the city itself.

Arsenal authorities were especially concerned about a magazine barge moored at the arsenal’s dock with several tons of gunpowder aboard—if fire reached it, it could become a gargantuan floating bomb. Local firefighting companies rushed in with steam engines and equipment. Two high-ranking government officials, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and General Henry W. Halleck, came from nearby offices to direct the firefighting and rescue efforts. They all did their work well; the blaze apparently never came near the barge, and one reporter estimated that in less than two hours, the disaster was under control and bystanders, arsenal staff and distraught family members were searching the debris for remains and survivors.²¹ Many of the arsenal’s workers lived nearby, so their family and friends knew something was amiss when they saw a pillar of smoke rising from the wrecked cartridge building or heard fire crews rac-

ing through the streets. “An agonized crowd of relatives rushed to the spot to learn tidings of their daughters or sisters who were known to have been in the fated building,” noted a reporter. Many survivors who had fled or fainted soon returned, searching for friends and trying (often in vain) to identify the charred bodies that rescue workers were carrying out of the smoking wreckage on planks. As the workers lowered each corpse to the ground, people crowded around, looking for telltale bits of clothing or some other familiar mark. At one point the press of the crowd—some of whom were merely curiosity seekers—was so great that authorities placed an armed guard around the remains.²² Eventually the army pushed the people away from the building’s ruins and out of the arsenal’s main gate into the square, where a crowd milled around into the late afternoon and “a few females and those outside gave vent to their feelings in bitter wailings distressing to hear.”

The chaotic conditions made a precise body count difficult to ascertain. The fire destroyed the workers’ roll books, so no one knew exactly who was in the building at the time of the disaster. Some, like the swooning Sara Gunnell, were reported dead, only to turn up unharmed. Two Webster sisters, Ada and Willa, both worked at

h a r p e r ’ s w e e k ly

Many feared that the arsenal fire might spread to the facility's dock, pictured here in 1861. A magazine barge loaded with several tons of gunpowder was moored there when the blaze began.

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the arsenal, and neither could be found in the immediate aftermath. They must have closely resembled each other—perhaps they were even twins—because bystanders identified a corpse as either Ada or Willa, but could not be sure which.

That “one of the sisters is dead appears beyond doubt,” dryly noted a reporter. Eventually it was ascertained that Willa had remained home from work that day.²³ And Johanna Connor? When her body was dug from the ruins it presented a particularly gruesome sight, burned beyond recognition, her head so badly mangled that the brains were exposed. But her brother-in-law, Charles Curtain, recognized a small shard of dress, as did another arsenal employee. Someone thought to place upon the corpse a placard: “This is Johanna O’Connor.”

(The sign itself or the newspaper account that mentions it may have misspelled her surname.)

She was 20 years old.²⁴ Other workers lingered in their agony. Annie Bates survived the initial blast but was probably

caught in the desperate press of people struggling to claw their way out. It was a cruel lottery, and those close to a window stood the best chance of escape. Annie was not so fortunate. She was pulled from beneath a deep pile of wreckage, barely alive and severely burned, and taken with two other similarly injured workers to the arsenal hospital. Surviving records do not indicate the exact nature of her burns, but they were bad enough that even the earliest newspaper reports listed her as “mortally injured,” leaving little hope for her parents, Sara and Robert. Exactly when she died is unknown.²⁵ The following day, even as cleanup continued, members of a coroner’s inquest saw a succession of horrors: bodies and body parts in wooden boxes (one box, only five feet square, held the remains of six women), propped on boards, and piled in pans. One observer was struck by the oddity of a young girl who had been entirely burned except her gaiter shoes, which somehow “had singularly escaped a touch of the flames.” When officials removed the canvas covering several corpses, a bystander recognized the remains of her daughter, “fainted away at the ghastly sight, and was carried into a nearby building.”²⁶ It is hardly surprising that the inquest was keen to pin responsibility on someone. Pyrotechnist Brown, with his black pans and supposedly safer formula for stars, bore the brunt ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76

ENDNOTES 1

See Clayton R. Newell, Charles R. Shrader, and Edward M. Coffman, Of Duty Well and Fathfully Done: A History of the Regular Army During the Civil War (Lincoln, NE, 2011), 126.

2 Harper’s Weekly, March 6, 1861; J.E. Kaufmann and H.W. Kaufmann, Fortress America: the Forts that Defended America, 1600 to the Present (New York, 2004), 233.

3 For example, see references to these devices and activities in United States Army Ordinance Department, Ordinance Memoranda, Issue 2 (Washington, DC, 1863), 15-16; James W. Ripley to Ordinance Department, January 29, 1863, in United States Army Ordinance Department, Circulars (Washington, DC, 1863), 28; William Castle Dodge, BreechLoaders versus Muzzleloaders, or How to Strengthen Our Army and Crush the Rebellion (Washington, DC, 1864); Edward Simpson, A Treatise on Ordinance and Naval Gunnery (New York, 1862), 181.

4 What little biographic information we have on Johanna Connor appears in the account of the explosion found in the The Washington Star, June 18, 1864.

5 Phillip S. Paludan, “A People’s Contest”: The Union and the Civil War, 1861-1865 (New York, 1988), 182-183.

6 Richard F. Selcer, Civil War America, 1850-1875 (New York, 2006), 29.

15 Washington Chronicle, June 19, 1864.

16 The Washington Star, June 18, 1864.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Washington Daily National Intelligence, June 18, 1864; Washington Chronicle, June 19, 1864.

21 Washington Daily National Intelligence, June 18, 1864.

22 Ibid., June 18, 1864; Washington Star, June 17, 1864.

23 Washington Chronicle, June 19, 20, 1864.

24 The Washington Star, June 18, 1864.

25 Ibid.; Bates listed in 1860 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Ward One, p. 148.

26 Washington Daily National Intelligence, June 18, 1864; Judith Ann Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Homefront (Chapel Hill, 2009), 89.

7 The Washington Star, June 17, 1864.

27 On black antimony’s flammable properties, see a contemporary article, [author unknown] “Lucifer Matches,” Scientific American 3 (1860): 101.

8 Louise Shipley Slavicek, Women and the Civil War (New York, 2009), 74-75; New York Times, June 17, 1864.

28 The proceedings of the coroner’s inquest were taken from the transcript found in Washington Star, June 18, 1864.

9 The New York Times, October 4, 1860.

29 Ibid.

10 Washington Star, June 18, 1864.

30 Ibid., June 20, 1864.

11 Ibid.; Washington Daily National Intelligence, June 18, 1864.

31 Duncan S. Walker, Celebration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Laying of the Cornerstone of the Capitol of the United States (Washington, 1896), 129.

12 Washington Star, June 18, 1864.

13 This is Stebbens’ observation; see ibid., June 18, 1864.

14 Washington Daily National Intelligence, June 18, 1864; Washington Star, June 18, 1864.

32 Washington Star, June 20, 1864; Lincoln’s last funeral attendance was for the death of Stanton’s infant son, in July 1862; see www.lincolnlog. org, entry for July 13, 1862.

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THE ORIGINS OF FREEDOM

Ever since Abraham Lincoln decided to issue in the wake of the Union victory at the Battle events. Scholarly works, textbooks, and even association over the years. Yet this connection that actually influenced Lincoln’s decision: summer of 1862. Indeed, it was General George insula—not the clash at Antietam—that helped sity to free African Americans in the seceded states

photograph credit here

In Cumberland, Virginia, a group of escaped, “contraband” slaves poses for the camera in May 1862, during the Peninsula Campaign.

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th of mo ob th Mc co an

the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of Antietam, history has connected the two movies such as Glory have strengthened the obscures the importance of the military event the Peninsula Campaign of the spring and McClellanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s failed offensive on the Virginia Penconvince many northerners of the military necesand employ them in the fight to save the Union.

photograph credit here

ue tle en on on: ge ed tes

By Glenn David Brasher

57 PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES F. GIBSON

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as laborers on their fortifications. Because this “property” was being used to wage war against the United States, Butler famously reasoned, the slaves could be confiscated as “contraband of war.” Lincoln approved, and further allowed Butler to shelter the families of the enslaved laborers.

Slaves soon began fleeing to Union lines throughout the South.

At the same time, Congress was working on legislation that would allow the Union army to confiscate Rebel property. After the Federal defeat in July at Bull Run, Radical Republicans used reports that the Confederacy had impressed slaves into building fortifications and perhaps even forced them into combat roles to convince most of Congress that slaves should be liable for confiscation. The bill’s sponsor, Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, insisted that “Negroes who are used to destroy the Union and to shoot down the Union men by the consent of their traitorous mas-

photograph credit here

t the start of the war, even Lincoln himself was far from such a realization. Before and after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, the new president repeatedly disavowed that he was waging a war for emancipation, assuring the country that his only aim was preserving the Union, a sentiment in line with the majority of northern opinion. As the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s official newspaper, grudgingly noted on May 18, “The war is not an anti-slavery crusade of the North against the South. Had this so much as been hinted at in the President’s [call for troops] not a regiment would have volunteered.”¹ Of course, while Lincoln’s early public pronouncements about a war for the Union, not emancipation, were largely designed to keep the border states from joining the rebellion, they were consistent with positions that he and the Republicans had long promoted. Party leaders’ ultimate goal was the extinction of slavery, but they understood that the Constitution granted protection in states where it existed. Therefore, their anti-slavery strategy was to prevent the institution from spreading to the new western territories and to use the federal government to encourage gradual and compensated emancipation.

This hands-off commitment in the seceded states faced an early challenge in Virginia. At Union-held Fort Monroe, three slaves fled to northern lines in May 1861. When their master tried to reclaim them, General Benjamin Butler refused to relinquish the slaves, pointing out that Virginia secessionists had been using the men

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p r e v i o u s s p r e a d : l i b r a r y o f c o n g r e s s ; l i b r a r y o f c o n g r e s s (2)

steps like emancipation.⁵ This sentiment was widely praised across the North, where most still believed that the Union could defeat the Confederacy, regardless of whether their slaves were aiding the war effort.

The Radical Republicans in Congress, however, were unwilling to wait for the president. In early December, they proposed a second confiscation act that would make slaves owned by Confederates liable for confiscation even if they had not been used to militarily support the rebellion. That would be hotly debated in Congress over the next six months, but it was the Peninsula Campaign that would soon have a grander impact in causing northerners to embrace the military necessity for emancipation.

uring the fall of 1861, Lincoln promoted George B. McClellan to overall command of Union forces, and the young officer began planning a campaign to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond. He decided to float his Army of the Potomac down the Potomac River around the Rebel defenses in northern Virginia and land the troops at Urbanna. Upon learning that Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston, in early March 1862, had pulled his army away from its position at Manassas and re-concentrated it south of the Rappahannock River, McClellan decided to land his force farther south at Fort Monroe, located at the Virginia Peninsula’s southern tip. At the end of the month, the Army of the Potomac began its amphibious shift to the Virginia Peninsula.

Meanwhile, Confederate general John B. Magruder had overseen the construction of a defensive line that stretched the entire width of the peninsula. These works were built largely by slaves from local farms and as far away as Richmond and Petersburg. By April 4, McClellan had enough men on hand to advance his army up the peninsula, but his plans quickly unraveled. Poor roads and bad

photograph credit here

ters [should be confiscated].”² Once passed, it was known as the Confiscation Act. Thus, even at this early stage of the war, anger at the South’s use of slaves for military purposes was helping to alter the government’s commitment not to touch slavery in the southern states.

During the fall of 1861, abolitionists tapped into this lingering anger, and argued that beyond the moral imperative to free the slaves, emancipation was a “military necessity” under the government’s constitutionally granted war powers. If the war went on, they maintained, the South would only continue to use their slaves for labor or possibly even combat in ever-growing numbers. “We must fight them, or free them,” one abolitionist newspaper insisted.³ Furthermore, if the federal government did free the slaves, it would both weaken the Confederacy and strengthen the Union cause. Such arguments received much attention, as newspapers heavily reported on speeches by abolitionists and radicals in Congress. Several abolitionists spoke at the Smithsonian Institution, and even Lincoln heard Below: An 1861 some of the “military necessity” cartoon’s depicdiatribes.⁴ tion of how General Yet Lincoln’s December Benjamin Butler’s “contraband of war” 1861 address to Congress indideclaration affected cated that he was not ready to rebellious masters accept the “military necessity” and their slaves. argument. “We should not be in Left: Fort Monroe, Virginia. haste,” he argued, to take radical

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of Negroes who show a good bit of ability in the use of a rifle.” U.S. Sanitary Commission Treasurer George Templeton Strong made a similar observation, noting in his diary, “The best rebel sharpshooters are niggers.” Soldiers also spread such stories. On April 22, Brigadier General John W. Davidson reported that 100 to 200 Confederates had attacked his pickets. They were quickly repulsed, but the general noted “quite a number of negroes among the enemy in their advance.”

Massachusetts officer Charles Harvey Brewster informed his mother that the men on picket duty “all agree that lots of the enemys Pickets are negroes.” Union sharpshooter Harrison Delong observed, “It is a notorious fact that the rebels have any quantity of [negroes] in their service, our pickets have seen and shot them.” Soldiers also frequently claimed to see African Americans being forced at gunpoint to load and fire cannon.⁷ Both The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer claimed that blacks were seen “uniformed and armed” at Yorktown, and the Baltimore American insisted they were “keeping guard as other soldiers.” The Times also noted that the Rebel batteries “are manned altogether by negroes, or at least the work of swabbing, loading, and shifting is done by them, with white

l i b r a r y o f c o n g r e s s (2)

weather stalled the movement, and one column ran into slave-built fortifications on the Warwick River. Reconnaissance showed that the Warwick unexpectedly bent northward and that the Confederates had works behind the river stretching all the way to Yorktown.

Faced with such obstacles, McClellan decided that a siege of Yorktown was his best option.

The siege lasted a month, during which the Confederates shifted troops from the Rappahannock to their Yorktown lines. Northern newspapers, knowing that the home front was hungry for news about the unfolding campaign on the Peninsula, informed the public that the delay was allowing the Rebels to strengthen their entrenchments and prepare for a defense of Richmond. “The inquisitive reader,” the New York Herald asserted, “may here interpose the question, ‘How does it happen that General McClellan finds himself near Yorktown in front of such a labyrinth of rifle pits, forts and batteries?’” The paper explained that Magruder had overseen the construction of Below: A small porthe Confederate defenses on the Peninsula “with tion of the massive, his army and his trench digging negroes.”⁶ well-equipped force Slaves were seen continually by northern solthat accompanied General George diers and reporters improving the Confederate McClellan on the works, and most shockingly, an ever-increasing Peninsula Camnumber of stories reported blacks being used as paign. Opposite: An artist’s rendition of sharpshooters, on picket duty, and as artillery the young general gunners. New York Herald correspondent George shortly before he Alfred Townsend told his readers, “there are embarked for the among the rebel sharpshooters a large number Virginia Peninsula.

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61 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

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blacks serving the Confederacy in combat roles.

But to fully understand these claims, we must consider them in historical context. It served emancipationists’ purposes to exaggerate reports that the South was using slaves in combat, thus maintaining that it was necessary to deprive the Rebels of their help. And in Congress, the reports helped the radicals push for the Second Confiscation Act. They repeatedly emphasized that the Confederates were using slaves to build forts and to defend them. “A vital element of the strength of the rebels consists in their slaves,” California representative Aaron Sargent observed. Bondsmen “dig their entrenchments, drag and load cannon, and as has been known in several recent instances, [they are used] as soldiers to shoot down the defenders of the Union.” Abolitionist New Hampshire representative Edward H. Rollins reminded Congress that “thousands of negro slaves are forced to dig trenches before our lines, exposed … to shot and shell, or to stand upon the ramparts and man the guns, while their masters skulk behind the works.” Republican representa-

a n n e s . k . b r o w n m i l i ta r y c o l l e c t i o n , b r o w n u n i v e r s i t y l i b r a r y

McClellan’s Army men to oversee and direct them.” Harper’s Weekly of the Potomac described white southern officers using pistols on the move during to force blacks to load Rebel cannon when Union the Peninsula sharpshooters made the job too deadly for white Campaign. soldiers. A Philadelphia paper exaggerated that “fifteen or twenty thousand combatants against us on the Peninsula … have been doing work in the trenches, manning the guns [white Rebels] dare not man, and otherwise aiding the rebellion as so many full able-bodied men.”⁸ While the veracity of such sightings—especially the more exaggerated of them—is still debated, there do exist a number of solid primary sources from the Yorktown siege in which people claimed to have seen blacks fighting for the Rebels, contrary to official Confederate policy not to enlist them as soldiers. Most of these sightings were likely of slaves whose soldier-masters brought them along to serve as body servants—some of whom undoubtedly found themselves in combat situations, during which they might have picked up weapons and shot at the Yankees. Other slaves were forced into service at gunpoint, or were deceived by their masters about the intentions of northern soldiers. White southerners repeatedly misled their slaves with claims that the Yankees intended to capture and ship them to Cuba as laborers.

Still, the northern rumor mill clearly inflated the reports of

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tive John Hickman of Pennsylvania was even more direct: “Does not every man see,” he told Congress, that when the Confederates “are at liberty to employ their slaves, not only in the erection of fortifications, but … in the defense of [these] military works, it is a matter of necessity to deprive them of these auxiliaries?”⁹ On the peninsula, McClellan continued with his plans to besiege Yorktown. At the end of April, however, slaves came into Union lines warning that the Rebels were evacuating. On May 4 these reports were confirmed by aerial (balloon) reconnaissance, and Union soldiers advanced into the Rebel entrenchments at Yorktown without firing a shot. Joseph Johnston had ordered the withdrawal because he believed his flanks would eventually get turned by the superior Union naval forces, and he wanted to get into Richmond’s stronger defenses, stretching Union supply lines and trapping the Yankees in the swamps outside of Richmond.

As McClellan’s army resumed its forward movement, northern newspapers began reporting how Virginia’s slaves were proving useful to the Union cause. Blacks provided road directions in an increasingly unfamiliar and hostile environment, corrected faulty Yankee maps, and delivered other valuable military intelligence. During the Battle of Williamsburg on May 5, for example, slaves provided information that helped General Winfield Hancock turn the Confederate flank, leading to the Army of the Potomac’s first capture of a Rebel flag. The New York Times pointed out, “Our armies have hardly taken a step without reliance upon the reports of the faithful black fellows, whose accuracy has been remarkable. The country will owe much to its African allies by the time this war is ended. Shall it pay the debt by giving them up to their vindictive masters and leave them in hopeless slavery?”¹⁰ Congressional radicals ratcheted up this argument, pointing out that the slaves were not only providing military intelligence, but in many cases feeding and sheltering tired and wounded men.

Yet the only legal way to provide emancipation was as a war measure, and thus it would have to be deemed a military necessity. Was it? McClellan’s newly invigorated advance up the Peninsula, coupled with consistent Union successes in the war’s western theater, made the “military necessity” argument questionable at best. During spring 1862, northern troops were everywhere advancing, and the Confederates were seemingly falling back to their last ditch.

But had Lincoln’s thoughts changed since December? The president had recently supported several emancipationist endeavors: the prohibition of slavery in Washington and in the western

territories, as well as a treaty with Britain to more effectively suppress the international slave trade. Perhaps most dramatically, he was aggressively pressuring the border states to accept compensated emancipation and had convinced Congress to fund it.

Nevertheless, none of these things indicated a shift in Lincoln’s thinking about slavery in the seceded states. In fact, they were consistent with what he had always believed: that the government should stop slavery’s spread, withdraw support for it, and promote compensated emancipation—but not touch slavery in the southern states. Indeed, on May 19, Lincoln overruled General David Hunter, commander of a military district that included the coastal areas of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida, who had issued an order freeing the slaves in his jurisdiction. The president argued that he alone could decide “whether at any time it shall become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government” to move against slavery in the seceded states.¹¹ In Lincoln’s judgment, that time had not arrived. With the successes in the West, and the Army of the Potomac moving toward Richmond, why should he think otherwise?

y the end of may, McClellan and his massive army had reached the outskirts of Richmond.

Many Union soldiers complained that slaves had largely built the city’s formidable defenses, and now the Yankees had to construct their own lines in the unrelenting heat and humidity. They were well aware that the slaves were overjoyed to see them and eager to help. Pennsylvania soldier J.R. Sypher later recalled that Union troops grew frustrated with digging “knee-deep in the mud after exhausting marches … while all around them” were slaves willing to labor on the lines.¹² “Thousands and thousands of [black] men are anxious to aid our army in making entrenchments,” the Chicago Tribune pointed out, “and yet while every division of the army is suffering, and rendered comparatively inefficient” by the hard labor on the fortifications, the government still had not passed the second confiscation bill. The Washington Sunday Morning Chronicle argued that “it will be rather hard to convince the masses” that the government should do nothing to stop the Confederacy from using slaves to built fortifications that would ultimately inflict “carnage and death” on Union soldiers.¹³ Fighting broke out again on May 31 when Joseph Johnston finally struck McClellan. The two-day Battle of Seven Pines did not drive away the Yankees, but it did have two major results: Johnston was wounded and replaced by Robert E. Lee, and McClellan shifted troops to his left, leaving General Fitz John Porter’s V Corps disconnected from the rest of the army by the Chickahominy River. On June 13 Lee sent General Jeb Stuart’s cavalry to reconnoiter McClellan’s position north of the river, resulting in the famous “Ride Around McClellan” that revealed the V Corps’ isolated position.

The aggressive Lee decided to depend on his largely slave-built fortifications to keep Richmond secure while most of his army crossed the Chickahominy River to strike at the V Corps. Thus began what would become known as the Seven Days Battles.

Just before these climactic battles in late June 1862, Lincoln was still not convinced by the “military necessity” argument. On

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Orville Hickman Browning

June 20, a delegation of Quakers visited the president to request he use his war powers to free the slaves; Lincoln gently rebuffed the group and indicated that he was not sure that a presidential decree of emancipation could even be effective. On July 1, Lincoln’s old friend Senator Orville Hickman Browning of Illinois came to discuss the Second Confiscation Act, which was rapidly moving toward a final vote in Congress. Browning’s diary indicates that Lincoln agreed with him that the government could not touch slavery in the seceded states and that “so much of slavery that remains after the war is over, will be precisely the same condition it was when the war began.” Further, Browning noted that Lincoln had said that while they would not return slaves already behind Union lines, the army should not encourage others to come because it was too difficult to handle the ones already there.¹⁴ Clearly, Lincoln was not ready to move against slavery in the seceded states.

Yet some historians insist that by June, Lincoln had already privately decided on an emancipation decree on moral grounds (although, it must be noted, few people understood Lincoln as intimately as Browning did). Regardless, the “military necessity” now hinged on the outcome of the Peninsula Campaign. How could emancipation be necessary if McClellan took Richmond, especially with all the western successes? On June 24, Salmon Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, wrote Benjamin Butler and expressed his belief that Lincoln was indeed grappling with moving against slavery in the seceded states, and he suspected that a “contingency” could impact his decision. “My conviction is that that contingency will soon ar-

rive,” he wrote.¹⁵ Two days later, the Seven Days Battles began.

Lee’s army began its offensive by crossing the Chickahominy and launching a poorly supported assault against the Union V Corps at Beaver Dam Creek and was repulsed. Still, Lee’s aggressiveness caused McClellan to believe that his army was heavily outnumbered, and he decided to withdraw from the north side of the river. Abandoning the north of the river meant giving up the railroad and the York River as a supply line and required moving the whole army south to the James River.

McClellan had surrendered the initiative to Lee. The rest of the Seven Days Battles saw McClellan trying to reach the James, and Lee seeking to intercept him. Before crossing the Chickahominy River, the V Corps took another defensive position near Gaines’ Mill. Lee hurled nearly 60,000 men in frontal assaults at Porter’s 30,000 and by nightfall succeeded at taking the field. By this time the Army of the Potomac was in full flight. Still, a rear guard action at Savage Station helped hold off the Rebels, and Lee’s army missed its best chance to bag the whole Yankee army at the Glendale crossroads. The battles culminated at Malvern Hill on July 1, where federal artillery repulsed yet more Rebel frontal assaults. Having held off savagely aggressive Confederate attacks, the Union army eventually made it to safety at Harrison’s Landing on the James.

In the letters and diaries they wrote immediately after the campaign had ended, Union soldiers repeatedly commented on the worn down, dispirited, and fatigued condition of the Army of the Potomac. They also expressed anger. In their minds, the Rebels had hit them so energetically because the Confederacy had been using their slaves to build entrenchments, leaving their soldiers rested. Massachusetts officer Daniel G. Macnamara, for instance, complained that his men were exhausted from building fortifications while “the same kind of work in the Southern army was performed by negro labor almost wholly.” J.R. Sypher believed that it was “insane absurdity” to let this situation continue. The Indianapolis Journal printed a letter from one Hoosier soldier who decried the fact that they had been worn out digging fortifications, yet “the Rebels use [their slaves] for such purposes, why should not we?”

The soldier insisted, “Fighting and marching does not wear the soldiers half so fast as ditching and fatigue duty, and the prevalent opinion in the army is in favor of negroes doing that kind of work.” The editors agreed: “There is neither justice nor mercy” in not using willing black laborers so that “our men may have the rest and comfort they so much need. This is the opinion of soldiers everywhere, and in every rank.”¹⁶

(3)

Salmon Chase

library of congress

Thurlow Weed

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Politicians also took up the argument. “I want to strike while the iron is hot,” New York’s conservative Republican political boss Thurlow Weed proclaimed in a widely published editorial.

“The public mind is now taking the right direction in regards to the contrabands.” If the government had only emancipated the slaves when the war started, he believed, “at least a half a million of slaves who have been at work in the rebel armies, would have been relieving our worn-out troops from exhausting drudgery—thus weakening the enemy, and strengthening ourselves in corresponding degree.” Reprinting Weed’s letter, the Washington Chronicle added, “There is no resisting such an argument as this.”¹⁷ Even some Democratic editors agreed. “Our troops have been overworked on the Peninsula and elsewhere by their military labors,” the Philadelphia Public Ledger explained. “It is this excessive labor down in the swamps of Virginia which has

decimated the ranks of McClellan’s army and left it in a condition inviting attack.” The Boston Herald concurred: “We were not beaten by the arms of the enemy, but by the picks and spades in the hands of our own soldiers, with which they have wasted their vigor.”¹⁸ As the failed campaign ended, Congress entered its last round of debate on the Second Confiscation Act. Radical Republicans continued to point out that slaves had been used on Confederate fortifications in Virginia, and insisted they had been used in combat. They also argued that the dependable military intelligence that blacks had given to the army deserved to be rewarded with freedom, and that the new confiscation act would bring even more help. Many moderates and conservatives were now joining the Radicals in such arguments. Democratic senator Henry Rice, for example, admitted that he had once opposed the use of blacks in the military. Now he “would not hesitate for a moment.” The senator insisted that the South had “brought the slave into the service,” and there was no reason why the North should not fully avail itself of these men who would voluntarily and passionately serve the Union cause. Reporting on the debates, the Illinois State Journal noted the “remarkable indications of the rapid change in sentiment ☛ } CONT. ON P. 73

ENDNOTES 1

National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 18, 1862.

2 Congressional Globe [hereafter cited as CG], 37th Congress, First Session, 218-219.

3 New Bedford Mercury, quoted in National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 24, 1861.

4 James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 72-81.

5 Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols., ed.

by Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, 1953-55), 5:48-52.

6 New York Herald, April 23, 1862.

7 George Alfred Townsend, Rustics in Rebellion: A Yankee Reporter on the Road to Richmond (Chapel Hill, 1950), 52; New York Herald, April 30, 1862; George Templeton Strong, Diary of George Templeton Strong 4 vols., ed. by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York, 1952), 3:216; United States War Department, The Official Records of the War of Rebellion 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series 1, Volume 11, Part 1, 382 (hereafter referred to as OR); Charles Harvey Brewster, When This Cruel War is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster, ed. by David Blight (Amherst, 1992), 118; E. L. Murray, ed., Letters From Berdan’s Sharpshooters (New York, 2005), 21; Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1862.

8 Philadelphia Inquirer, April 25, 29, 1862; The New York Times, April 22, 27, 1862; Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser, April 30, 1862; Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1862; North American and United States Gazette, May 7, 1862.

9 CG, 37th Congress, Second Session appendix, 178; CG, 37th Congress, Second Session, 2302, 1801.

10 The New York Times, quoted in Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1862.

11 Lincoln, Collected Works, 5:222.

12 Josiah Rinehart Sypher, History of the Pennsylvania Reserve Corps (Lancaster, 1865), 156-157.

13 Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1862; Washington Sunday Morning Chronicle, June 22, 1862.

14 Lincoln, Collected Works, 5:278-279; Orville Hickman Browning, Diary of Orville Hickman Browning 2 vols., ed. by Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall. (Springfield, 1925-33), 1:555.

15 Salmon P. Chase, Salmon P. Chase Papers 4 vols. (Kent, 1993), 3:219.

16 Robert G. Macnamara, Story of the Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Infantry (Boston, 1899), 174, 271; Sypher, History of the Pennsylvania Reserve Corps, 156-157; Indianapolis Journal, July 28, 1862.

17 The New York Times, July 14, 1862; Boston Daily Journal, July 12, 1862; Washington Chronicle, July 13, 1862.

18 Philadelphia Public Ledger, July 11, 1862; Boston Herald, July 18, 1862.

19 CG, 37th Congress, Second Session, 3207; Illinois State Journal, July 15, 1862.

20 CG, 37th Congress, Second Session, 3198-99, 3229-3230.

21 Chicago Tribune, July 10, 11, 1862; New York Commercial Advertiser, quoted in Cincinnati Gazette, July 15, 1862; Philadelphia Press, July 31, 1862.

22 Charles Sumner, The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner 2 vols., ed. by Beverly Wilson Palmer (Boston, 1990), 2:122.

23 Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., Correspondence Between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (New York, 1894), 156-157.

24 Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson 3 vols. (Boston, 1911), 1:70-71; Gideon Welles, “History of Emancipation,” in The Galaxy 14 (December 1872): 842-43.

25 Ibid.

26 Edwin Stanton, “The Cabinet on Emancipation, July 22, 1862,” Edwin M. Stanton Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 27 Lincoln, Collected Works, 5:423-24.

28 Lincoln, Collected Works, 7:506-07; Francis Bicknell Carpenter, Six Months in the White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1866), 77.

29 Lincoln, Collected Works, 6:409.

30 Ibid.

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Books & Authors

THE BEST CIVIL WAR BOOKS OF 2012 with the end of 2012 nearly upon us, we thought it a perfect time to take stock of the year’s best Civil War books. We enlisted the help of five Civil War historians and enthusiasts, avid readers all, and asked them to share their favorite and an honorable mention.

Megan Kate Nelson Top Pick: When I started reading Yael A. Sternhell’s Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Harvard University Press), I felt that special combination of exhilaration and envy, that sense of encountering an argument that is completely original. By focusing on what she terms the “geography

of flight” in Civil War Virginia— not only roads, but also the byways, forests, and swamps that bordered them—Sternhell sees southern communities forming in new ways during wartime.

Here, eager young men retrace the steps they took migrating to the South and West in the antebellum era, marching northeast toward Richmond in 1861 and creating the Confederacy in the process. Here, fugitive slaves, absentee soldiers and deserters, and wealthy white refugees edge past one another warily on dusty southern roads, creating a wartime “world of departures and captures.” Here, the Confederacy “disintegrates in motion” during the Appomattox campaign and after. Sternhell writes beautifully and convincingly, arguing that the road can be a place of liberty, of opportunity—but also of failure and fear. It can be a place obscured by shadows; in the years after the war, Sternhell reminds us, whites return to their homes and reassert the social order of motion through black codes and vagrancy laws.

Honorable Mention: It is this darker vision of freedom that Routes of War shares with Jim Downs’ Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford University Press). By detailing how slaves fled bondage and, as a result, contracted a host of diseases including yellow fever, smallpox, and cholera, Downs completely changes the way we think about emancipation. Both his and Sternhell’s innovative research into wartime mobility suggests fresh ways of thinking about the wartime experiences of black and white southerners; in doing so, they forge new intellectual pathways in Civil War studies. megan kate nelson,

a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University, is the author of Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia, 2012) and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Georgia, 2005).

Matthew C. Hulbert Top Pick: Megan Kate Nelson’s Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (University of Georgia Press). In recent years, more than a few notable historians have attempted to guide us through the gradually shrinking gap that still separates Civil War battle front from Civil War home front—and none has proven more capable than Nelson. As suggested by the book’s subtitle, Nelson makes good on her promise to chronicle the staggering tolls paid

by Americans in support of the Union and the Confederacy: bodies mangled by lead and saw, homes violated, cities sacked, and entire forests stripped down

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to the root. But Nelson also exposes the intricacies of how such unprecedented destruction was—and still is—remembered by much of American society.

Unlike the antiquated remnants of the Roman Forum or a European castle, Civil War ruins were created and began disappearing almost simultaneously. As a result of this rapid “ruinification” process and Americans’ deep attachment to the ruins that remain, Nelson challenges readers to reinterpret the individual meanings and consequences of total war and how much of that story has been selectively misremembered.

Honorable Mention: Yael A. Sternhell’s Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South might just be 2012’s sleeping giant. Many nonacademics are likely not familiar with it—and that’s unfortunate. The book explores the role of people migrating within the bounds of the Confederacy, from fugitive slaves to Union occupi-

ers, and how their overlapping paths reshape much of what we know about the southern Civil War experience. matthew c. hulbert

is The Civil War Monitor’s book review editor. His articles on guerrilla warfare and Civil War memory have appeared in The Journal of the Civil War Era, The Journal of the West, and The Essential Civil War Curriculum.

Harry Smeltzer Top Pick: It is fitting that this, the year of the 150th anniversary of the event, saw the publication of D. Scott Hartwig’s To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign of September 1862 (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Hartwig, a well-known National Park Service historian at Gettysburg, has spent much of the past 20 years working on a tactical study of the Maryland Campaign.

This 794-page tome is the first of two planned volumes, and takes readers to the eve of the Battle

of Antietam. With any work of this scope, there will be criticism; the author makes calls on controversies and not everyone will agree with his judgments, or even with his process. Traditionalists may cry heresy at points, while revisionists likely will feel he did not go far enough. However, To Antietam Creek continues the recent scholarly trend of re-examining and adjusting the narrative of a campaign that had seemed etched in stone since the Civil War’s centennial, and that bodes well for the future. Look for the second volume in about three years.

Honorable Mention: At the opposite end of the doorstop spectrum, at 126 pages, is Guy R. Hasegawa’s Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs (Southern Illinois University Press). The author mined a variety of archival sources, including those of the Hanger Orthopedic Group, a company founded by an early-

TOP-SELLING CIVIL WAR TITLES 2012

The books pictured here are the 10 best-selling Civil War titles published in 2012. They are ranked in order of copies sold through October. source: Nielsen

BookScan

1

2

Shiloh 1862

The Long Road to Antietam

by Winston Groom (random house) Hardcover, $30

by Richard Slotkin (norton, ww) Hardcover, $32.95

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war Confederate amputee that remains a leader in the field of prosthetics to this day. This is a fascinating look at how governments and industry dealt with the massive and sudden increase in the demand for artificial limbs during the war. harry smeltzer,

vice president of the board of directors of the Save Historic Antietam Foundation (SHAF.org), is creator and host of the blog Bull Runnings: A Journal of the Digitization of a Civil War Battle (bullrunnings.wordpress. com) and a digital history advisor for The Civil War Monitor.

Ethan S. Rafuse Top Pick: Carol Reardon, With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North (University of North Carolina Press). Most Civil War

students are familiar with the name Antoine-Henri Jomini and the considerable popularity that his theories on the conduct of war enjoyed during the 19th century. What Reardon uncovers in this outstanding book is that Jomini was by no means the only contributor to the understandably vigorous dialogue that took place in the North over how to conduct the Civil War. She does a superb job explaining and analyzing the forces and writers that contributed to this exchange of ideas and ably connects these debates to (or, more accurately, underlines their disconnect from) the horrific ordeal the men at the proverbial tip of the spear experienced during the Overland Campaign of 1864. That Reardon is able to address these subjects so thoroughly in less than 200 pages is nothing less than amaz-

When General Grant Expelled the Jews

Fateful Lightning

by Jonathan D. Sarna

(oxford university press) Paperback, $19.95

(random house) Hardcover, $24.95

by Allen C. Guelzo

The Civil War: The Second Year

by Stephen W. Sears (penguin group usa) Hardcover, $40

ing. For anyone interested in military history that goes beyond—without losing sight of—battles and leaders and engages big issues in Civil War military history in a way that is provocative, insightful, and compelling, Reardon’s book is an essential addition to their library.

Honorable Mention: Ezra A. Carman, The Maryland Campaign of September 1862: Volume II, Antietam, edited by Thomas G. Clemens (Savas Beatie).

The Maryland Campaign was arguably the critical event of 1862, and the appearance of the second volume in Antietam Battlefield Board member Ezra Carman’s legendary study of the campaign is unquestionably one of the most important events in Civil War scholarship this year. In addition to making Carman’s work accessible

War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861-1865

by James M. McPherson (unc press) Hardcover, $35

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to anyone, Clemens did yeoman work tracking down Carman’s sources. He also provides insightful commentary on those sources and the campaign, underlining the fact that despite its unquestionable importance, Carman’s work is not free of biases or flaws. ethan s. rafuse

is a professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the author of McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union (2005) and Robert E. Lee and the Fall of the Confederacy, 1863-1865 (2008).

Gerald J. Prokopowicz Top Pick: Glenn David Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign & the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans & the Fight for Freedom (University of North Carolina Press). It’s a provoca-

Born to Battle: Grant and Forrest: Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga

by Jack Hurst

(perseus books) Hardcover, $32

The Civil War in the West

by Earl J. Hess (unc press) Hardcover, $40

tive, well-written monograph that advances the discussion of African American participation in the southern war effort to a more sophisticated level.

Rather than say more about it, I will refer to my in-depth review on the Monitor’s website (www. civilwarmonitor.com/book-shelf/ brasher-the-peninsula-campaign-2012) and take advantage of the space saved to name three honorable mentions.

Honorable Mentions: David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, & Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina (University of North Carolina Press). If you think you have it bad, reading this book will remind you that it could be worse. More important, it shows how fundamentally the Civil War affected every aspect of life in North Carolina (and by extension, the whole country), and how surprisingly

Decided on the Battlefield

by David Alan Johnson (prometheus) Hardcover, $27

different its effects were on black and white North Carolinians.

Keith A. Erekson, Everybody’s History: Indiana’s Lincoln Inquiry and the Quest to Reclaim a President’s Past (University of Massachusetts Press). It’s not really about the Civil War, or even about Lincoln.

It’s the story of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society’s “Lincoln Inquiry,” an obscure early 20th-century research project carried out by people with no formal historical training, but plenty of passion for the past.

From this prosaic subject matter, the author raises fascinating questions about who “owns” history, questions that will resonate with professional and amateur scholars, teachers, genealogists, reenactors, and anyone who cares about the past.

Kevin M. Levin, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War

Civil War Sketch Book: Drawings from the Battlefront

by Harry L. Katz and Vincent Virga (norton ww) Hardcover, $50

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gerald j. prokopowicz

is a professor of history at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, and host of the long-running podcast Civil War Talk Radio (www.impedimentsofwar.org). His most recent book is Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln (Pantheon, 2008).

MUSINGS OF A CIVIL WAR BIBLIOPHILE: CONFEDERATE DIARIES, PRICELESS BUT TERSE ROBERT K. KRICK officers who answered to the stern, exacting “Stonewall” Jackson found the duty annoying at best. Most of them eventually became uncomfortable enough to yearn for assignment elsewhere. On the other side of the prickly equation, Jackson’s

inflexible standards also made him dissatisfied with virtually every subordinate. Brigadier General Charles S. Winder, commanding Jackson’s own pet Stonewall Brigade, proved an exception to that tendency.

Jackson approved of Winder’s performance, probably more comprehensively than he did of any other general officer in his command.

Winder’s diary, which survives in Baltimore, demonstrates how desperately the Marylander rued his lot, despite Stonewall’s favor. On June 5, 1862, as Jackson’s renowned Shenandoah Valley campaign approached its climax, Winder wrote: “Jackson is insane.” Two days later: “growing disgusted with Jackson.”

The morning of June 8, which dawned to a startling surprise attack that came near to capturing Jackson, Winder scribbled in his diary: “wrote note to Genl.

Jackson requesting to leave his command.”

General Winder’s entries sometimes run to several lines, but a great many others stop quickly. On August 1-6, 1862, for example—during the last week of his life—the general exceeded 14 words just once.

Winder’s wonderful diary obviously supplies a priceless insight on the high command in the Valley, despite its brevity.

The rich virtues of a contemporary narrative, written on the spot, at the moment, with no chance for revisionism, stand clear and beyond argument.

Most Confederate diaries, however, exhibit the slender content typical of the genre without offering a perspective on high-

General Charles S. Winder

profile subjects—or on much of anything else.

As a result, Civil War diaries frustrate modern students of the war more regularly than they supply worthwhile details. Bartlett Yancey Malone saw much of the war from the ranks of the 6th North Carolina of General Robert F. Hoke’s brigade. On the eve of the Civil War Centennial, Bell I. Wiley produced a new version of Malone’s diary based on a 1919 edition, skillfully introducing the diary and adding useful illustrations. Malone’s Whipt ‘Em Everytime (1960) sold well and remained in print for years. Its colorful anachronistic language makes the document interesting, but in fact it conveys very little actual knowledge. A scant entry for Gaines’ Mill says little more than “...from that time untell dark we had a wright warm time of it But we whipt them.”

Over nearly a half-century of Civil War research, I cannot remember ever citing Malone as a source. Years ago, I quit even looking at it.

Women’s diaries frequently

f r a n k t . m i l l e r , t h e p h o t o g r a p h i c h i s t o r y o f t h e c i v i l wa r

as Murder (University Press of Kentucky). From the first reunion of Mahone’s Brigade in 1875 and the opening of the Crater Golf Club course in 1925, to portrayals of the battle in the film Cold Mountain (1993) and Don Troiani’s painting Mahone’s Counterattack (2003), the Battle of the Crater has long been the focus of contested interpretations. While examining the various depictions, the author implies that the process is far from over.

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rise far above the level of importance of notes scribbled by soldiers in the field. Circumstances obviously gave them better means to write in diaries, extensively and at leisure. They operated far from the screeching of boisterous sergeants, with access to paper and ink more readily than their soldier kin, and indoors out of reach of the elements.

In consequence of those advantages, some wonderful diaries by southern females have reached print. Two Winchester, Virginia, women wrote spectacular volumes that shed invaluable light on the home front in the lower Shenandoah Valley: Cornelia McDonald (whose diary was published in 1934) and Mary Greenhow Lee (published in 2011).

Two Fredericksburg women wrote far less extensively than the Winchester ladies, but their published diaries between them afford an invaluable look at civilians beset by war on the military frontier: Jane Howison Beale (1979) and Betty Herndon Maury (1938)—the latter book being one of the rarest and most famous of Virginia Confederate titles.

Catherine Ann Devereux Edmonston of North Carolina wrote so extensively, day after day during the war, that her published diary (1979) takes up as much shelf space as any single volume in most Civil War libraries. The bulk is a virtue, because what Mrs. Edmonston wrote often conveys interesting and important sentiments.

The glittering cachet of contemporary diaries, penned at the moment of great events, makes published versions highly

appealing to collectors—even when their thin entries do not offer much substance. A few weeks ago, one of the greatest rarities came to market at auction. John Henry Grabill’s Diary of a Soldier of the Stonewall Brigade (1909) consists of only 10 unnumbered leaves, printed on both sides, in gray wraps, with entries from June 6, 1861, to June 6, 1862. The author left the 33rd Virginia at that point and embraced the popular option of cavalry service.

The allure of rare published diaries is such that the slender Grabill pamphlet fetched nearly $3,000, and that from a dealer who obviously will expect to realize considerably more at retail.

Despite the disappointment engendered by many insubstantial diaries, genuine clas-

sics exist. Jedediah Hotchkiss, Stonewall Jackson’s civilian cartographer, kept a fat diary, published in 1973 under the title Make Me a Map of the Valley.

Hotchkiss’ book has a towering reputation, and deserves every bit of it. Stonewall bluntly told Hotchkiss—a garrulous New Yorker—that he talked too much. That trait served posterity well when it produced long diary entries of great importance.

Other fine diarists and their published works include John Walters of the Norfolk Light Artillery, Norfolk Blues (1997); and William S. White of the Richmond Howitzers, A Diary of the War, Or What I Saw of It (1883).

A wonderful diary in production at the University of North Carolina Press by Oscar Hinrichs, edited by Rick Williams, surely will become a classic. Hinrichs, a German engineer who served on the staffs of Jackson, Richard S. Ewell, and others, wrote extensive entries from a position with a close perspective on significant events.

A future column in this space, devoted to Confederate memoirs, will emphasize the importance of diaries in preparing those postwar narratives. As aides memoire for those later, larger, better-focused literary sallies, diaries played a vital role far beyond their merits when standing alone in slender isolation. robert k. krick,

General Robert F. Hoke

chief historian (retired) at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, has written 20 books on the Civil War, including Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain (2001) and The Smoothbore Volley That Doomed the Confederacy (2004).

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CONTINUED FROM P. 21

I certainly have an interest in it, though I am not a scholar or a historian. I don’t know all the facts. But the Civil War pulls me; I feel gravitated to it. People always tell me I have this look about me that makes me suited for Westerns and Civil War films. I seem to just fit right into those genres.

works—but I am chomping at the bit for it to happen.

I’m really hoping to do it, or if not, then something else Civil War with Ron. He just did another Civil War movie with Peter Fonda up in Canada called Copperhead.

It’s a lower-budget movie, but it looks beautiful. Ron knows everything about the Civil War. All he wants to do is Civil War stuff.

And now you’re starring in Django Unchained, playing a serious bad guy this time—a slaver. How did that role come about?

My agent pitched me to a casting director, who brought my name up to Quentin Tarantino, who then sent me his script.

When I went to meet him,

If you could just dream up a Civil War role for yourself, what would it be?

as soon as I walked in, he said, “Cooper, I’ve been a fan of yours since the ’70s,” and he rattled off three movies. But working with Quentin was really a high.

It was a thrill. He’s very creative.

When I see it, I know it. But maybe just an amalgamation of the roles I’ve done. I’ve done actor-spy, enlistee, fighter. I’ve done the young southerner who wants to defend his property and fight for what he believes in. I mean, without being artistically greedy, what more can I ask for?

How about playing Lincoln?

Actually, I went up for the role of Lincoln’s father in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter—but I never heard back. But play Lincoln himself? I don’t know if I’m quite gaunt enough.

Has being in so many iconic Civil War films shaped your thinking about that period?

Absolutely. I think I’m more appreciative of what my ancestors and the people who came before me went through: the passion they had for this country and what they believed in, the price they paid, the suffering they endured. It’s also made me more thankful for the freedoms I have. It’s a privilege to be able to portray people of courage and conviction. is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. jenny johnston

BATTLEFIELD ECHOES CONTINUED FROM P. 25

not spread themselves thin to cover potential invasion points in the Mediterranean.

In the century and a half since the Peninsula Campaign, military deception has grown into an integral part of American military doctrine. Modern information operations are designed to inform and direct the U.S. military’s message around the globe. They also serve to misdirect, coerce, or confuse potential threats or adversaries. In such cases, duplicity trumps sincerity. It is just as true today as it was when McClellan’s Army of the Potomac began its slow

ENDNOTES 1

Quoted in Richard Wheeler, Sword over Richmond: an Eyewitness History of McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign (New York, 1986), 122-123.

2 Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign (New York, 1992), 36.

3 Peter S. Carmichael, “The Great Paragon of Virtue and Sobriety: John Bankhead Magruder and the Seven Days,” in The Richmond Campaign of 1862: The Peninsula and the Seven Days, Gary Gallagher, ed. (Chapel Hill, 2000), 100-101.

4 Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, 37-38.

5 Quoted in Wheeler, Sword over Richmond, 121.

6 Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, 50; Carmichael, “Magruder and the Seven Days,” 101.

7 Charles Cruickshank, Deception in World War II (Oxford, 1979), 51-54.

photograph credit here

CONVERSATION: COOPER HUCKABEE

Given that you land in a lot of Civil War-era films, do you have a special interest in that period of U.S. history?

72 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR WINTER 2012

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11/14/12 3:07 AM

THE ORIGINS OF FREEDOM CONTINUED FROM P. 65

march toward Yorktown in the spring of 1862: When dealing with the enemy, honesty is not the best policy. clay mountcastle,

a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, currently serves as the Professor of Military Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Duke University and is the author of Punitive War: Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals (University Press of Kansas, 2009).

General George B. McClellan

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has t ent Grea sid ce his n as the on pre know nal views nth blic sin -Lein , ln is Linco sixtee pu roeder al his his death his perso the a’s , braham tor, yet ted. Since mystery ate R. Sch medic dicine eric cin Emancipa been deba wed by the . While Me hty of Amto fas enna on the long and rly eig life hites shado tro he tinued w, Gl ume coln nonw slavery race have d has been nea con cal vol Lin ost Americans have considered, and still toward ns to fight usly con th. No ng ng ily. J.t inWI his legen stance FR t famo uriLLIAM agi AN physi thaS actio jec dea true consider, Abraham Lincoln to be a heroic fam K r, his end lth, s many sub caree gic an eng coln of his d in differ tra the most l hea dition and figure. From his humble beginnings to his leaderls prete oln took political nal Lin unvei of the rk on the menta con before with Linc ghout his can be intersuggest perso an ship of a divided nation during the Civil War to tes p y s wo ds like tor first estiga coln’s n; the both onshi th as throued speeches his word his early efforts in abolishing slavery, Lincoln’s tio en, ati s he soun Richard times r, bo el. craft inv ut Lin ina the ldr at time : rel Race, ass rs, Wa lev legacy is one of deep personal and political courchi n’s ways other ln and sensitive subyea s abo ass and col Civil sonal since ent ry, but at e sie age. In this unique and concise retelling of many ring s. In Lincothe most sed bigot ver y, and wif and Lin g the a per chers racist y, explo ngs of tor d his of the key moments and achievements of Linon resear diagno een enemy of his th; durin on one writi ln’s legac e icte ent d and coln’s life and work, Frank J. Williams explores affl his deaal fiel chief s, and 5 hav n sev lure,Striner takes ham Linco d record and er aft medic er-in- torian in 186 er tha rt fai poi-jects of Abra ln’s mixe iling in detail what it means to be a hero and how n ry two preva adic- Lincoln embodied the qualities Americans tio no few tive hea rcu utiny depth Linco race. the mand rs, his look of ng to ina me scr in scontr heari issue a com cto assass sident conges and ingly my the ive fair fight for in their heroes.

Do , ect dical onthe ln’s seem Lincoln pre ing n’s er gives me nal Lincoln as Hero shows how—whether it was col len lud t Linco dro ers obj me with Strin as m fal abou actions: Did Lin his perso cals, inc n syn in off ns and ated , fro toies ome a president, lawyer, or schoolboy—Lincoln extolled rfa lth theor in thedition A words and gle to overc comments Ma der-Le culatio associ l hea DNtory ning t the foundational virtues of American society. Wilcon sy, strug and his racis tion? Begin xt lep . Schroe s spe to be menta coln’s nts, term conteliams describes the character and leadership traits long- n were epi decep rical years ing merou tinue and g Lin accide Lincolm? Or political the histo son nu con cal racis the define American heroism, including ideas tin in the that t tes sions, yea rs. dy of edn’sact of n of amof the tha physi st in ly stu culatcol exploratio toward race ls theand res beliefs, willpower, pertinacity, the ability to ies ent’s ere detai anby des Lin en cipater p dep his ear keen attitu y, Striner int sid ’s particommunicate, and magnanimity. Using both celing with ln’s ed pre recent the dee gued kes a nd fight episodes denc softakLinco ow presi politicianand hisebrated l and lesser-known rou anecdotes of from ion the pla all . his ma t t e efu unding the lysis o West life ment s sur act thabefor fat by tha the Lincoln’s and achievements, Williams presents s the ana esses ine als stance the typtssurro izaSoil move ding into ort erbigui ing colon a wide-ranging analysis of these traits as they were illn Medic cum lud the eff aft attemin the Free from expan sal of slaves espou demonstrated in Lincoln’s freed and al cir n, inc ent, e hours and tion life, starting derry with slave his a oln’s that as dic tio keeproe alLinc me self-education as a young man and moving on to ina pond for nin eatre, sy. to , Sch res ial idea gn land— dic ass res v- overs me contr le who and experience He explo ass first live rd’s Th autop himself his training del tled in a forei peop as a lawyer, his entry the the r anaty en, reset tion— the coln to in Fo m an man k at autho ldr ani for blackTheonto the political stage, and his burgeoning grasp ed ins ium, ure chi ld be Lin oting perfor the ng loo shou charg tactics ctive. of lly and gedtaryitarmeas and leadership. n, attra racia military sho rs to g beyond tivati wife s volun alle San prosp dent ial ow ect ln’s most presi Williamsed also examines in detail how Lincoln ce the docto vin a cap coln’s Mary’ Pla founds breakdof Linco ls Linc oln’s the hotb Mo es embodied heroism s in standing against secession and tak s of Lin es as llevue lyzes vou some and detai race and American ner an fighting to preserve America’s great demohes Lein dition h issu to Be ies on Afric s life. and speec polic s for craticdent’ con into suc tment ubles experiment. With a focused sense of justice s and word voting right of the presi ing commi tro 4 PM a great respect for the mandates of both and of the eye 12:3 issue the last years and t’s /12 g Declaration of Independence and the Constituber 7/26 durin Ro tion, Lincoln came to embrace freedom for the enslaved, and his Emancipation Proclamation led the way for the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Lincoln’s legacy as a hero and

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“A richly detailed account of civilians in uniform beset by uncertain leadership and fractious political divisions amidst a sea of hostile Confederates.”

–William L. Shea

secular saint was secured when his life ended by assassination as the Civil War was drawing “From a lifetime of studying Abraham Lincoln, Frank Williams to a close. has distilled an analysis of the qualities of courage and leadership Touching on Lincoln’s humor and his quest that marked America’s sixteenth president as a genuine hero. This for independence, justice, and equality, Williams book offers a sensitive appreciation of Lincoln’s character.”

R outlines the path Lincoln took to becoming a IN E —james m. mcpherson, author of Tried by War:S TR great leader and an American hero, showing readAbraham Lincoln as Commander HAinRD Chief ers why his heroism is still relevant. True heroes, RIC Williams argues, are successful not just by the “We all need heroes in these perilous times, and INFrank Williams standards of their own time but also through LE remindswritus of what a good political biography achievements that transcend their own eras and R - once was—concise, hes and dentrevealing, commanding, D Eand reminiscent—minus the speec anecdotal, resonate throughout history—with their words a Presi ng s the drawbacks of hagiography. Abraham for O E Lincoln comes alive in this mine case er and actions living on in our minds, if we are Strin and abidi HR elling e vivid introduction to the a comp had a long lity befor imaginative, and in our actions, if we are wise.Richard S C sixteenth president’s legal mind and casion, reer, and Williams equa to make belief, Rs . reminds readers of his flaws and achievements also to as a politician erly preci president mporary but A lawy and wartime president.

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Linco edito ever t notfoundLinco cates known expert on Abraham Lincoln, n, staff most what itmenis themen, —catherine ly vindi of his clinton, Queen’s University Belfast of ay rise comm right all a board ing chair of the Lincoln sis xt.

Forumforand —cl into one er forth law al analy ical conte look member of the Abrahamthe textu Lincoln Bicentennial t. Strin t Abra and polit bing “Frank Williams their cogen gh a close s abou evasive has done serious Lincoln scholars and Lincoln Foundation. He is the author or editor of more g, and but absorquandarie tion to oyed into the averya great admirers brief s inprosl general nchin racism throu ul atten service. He has thought carefully and delve ly empl rica’s than a dozen books, including Judging This ntiou rs to of his making e, unfli Lincoln, by caref consistent ering conte ina of of Ame systematically “Ters le abouthiswhat the term ‘hero’ means, and he has aps reade stigm -Le and hes and Lincoln The Emancipation Proclamation: Three theViews, l pand nce. Whi the most ln invite ves of one rs. from der plied his trademark am dice of skills as an analyst and Lincoln expert to inial speec s how m the racia Linco and moti audie roe lex leade preju oversGreatest Lincoln Lessons: Reflections on America’s rah ly show t iples. ham , comp disar fears of his ible racia l how Sch of Abasive vestigating ren the theme n princ , heart a contr ry at Leader. g and ble of heroic behavior worked itself out in tage to nt cur y mind histo natin egalitaria bes recalcitra tor persuy, al langu the inflex core Lincoln’s life andpensa career. As a result, this book is a valuable resource, Glenn hisHe fasci ssor of ns to ld st ition the the most was indis climate al cond dy, dolog a profe tertown, Mary ers andmo craft well argued and r is concessio subtly uphe ical dic tho ilingwritten.”in stu off ine nents ca’s rtant he has r Ches ss ose preva me ed str me polit ested in lar, e oppo d eri impo ge ry, st the ne inter ent o the nd autho Am —brian r. dirck, author of Lincoln the Lawyer e thele scho har t. Th ln r ic turnone ician whos om again n Colle plina ry al histo re, sou ly inglyoinLinco seem for anyo lectu ingto documtion int ing ent, the uab at-polit freed disci app nce, prema -read and race.”

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Lincoln and Medicine Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein

in the

by Rhonda M. Kohl Delve into the regiment’s service in the lower Mississippi Valley and learn how internal friction shaped soldiers’ wartime experiences

Lincoln and the Constitution Brian R. Dirck

Printed

CWM06-BOB-Jump-REV.indd 73

“Military history at its finest.

Woodworth and Grear have assembled an outstanding group of military scholars who give us a sweeping and engaging overview of one of the West’s most crucial Civil War campaigns.”

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New in the Concise Lincoln Library: The Prairie Boys Go to War: The Fifth Illinois Cavalry, 1861-1865

and Race Lincoln

“An interesting, detailed description of the personalities and the medical and administrative problems that arose during and after the Civil War because of the need to supply artificial limbs to soldiers and sailors.”

–Alfred Jay Bollett, M.D.

Follow Ulysses S. Grant and Braxton Bragg from Wauhatchie to Missionary Ridge and Ringgold Gap in 1863

edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear

Striner

Explore the wartime provisions made for amputees in need of artificial limbs

Civil War Campaigns in the Heartland Series

The Vicksburg Campaign, March 29–May 18, 1863

icine d Med oln an Linc

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Edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear

Michael B. Ballard

in der-Le Schroe

Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs

The Chattanooga Campaign

Grant at Vicksburg: The General and the Siege

Williams

Southern Illinois University Press

Guy R. Hasegawa

edited by Harold Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard

by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear

Le

the union and confederate programs to supply artificial limbs

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1863: Lincoln’s Pivotal Year

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he four years of the Civil War saw bloodshed on a scale unprecedented in the history of the United States.

Edited Thousands of soldiers and sailors from both sides who survived the horrors of the war faced hardship for the rest of their lives as amputees.

Now Guy R. Hasegawa presents the first volume to explore the wartime provisions made for amputees in need of artificial limbs—programs that were the forebears of modern government efforts to assist in the rehabilitation of wounded service members.

With more than sixty thousand military amputations, the demand for artificial limbs— and the need for the funds and manufacturing to provide them—escalated dramatically during the years of the Civil War. Union amputees often fared better than their Confederate counterparts, as the stability and availability of the program for Northern fighters demonstrated the immense economic and industrial gulf between the two sides. In the Federal government artificial-limbs program, major limb-manufacturing companies bid competitively for contracts, and Federal money was used to finance provisions. Although the aims of programs in both the North and the South were identical and their administrators often arrived at similar means to meet their challenges, the particular difficulties faced by the Confederacy—the lack of a prewar Southern limbs industry and the Union naval blockade, for example—made for obstacles that could never be completely overcome. In addition, aid for Confederate amputees was distributed by the privately run Association for the Relief of Maimed Soldiers. ARMS was funded through the benevolence of citizens who donated money despite the hardships of living in a war-torn area. Occasionally officers like Robert E. Lee pledged their own money as well.

In addition to illuminating the differences between the Union and Confederate programs, Hasegawa draws upon numerous sources of archival information to offer a comprehensive

es

Mending Broken Soldiers

The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs

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er of technological innovations occurred during and shortly after merican Civil War. Among these were significant improvements in mbs and the means of providing them to soldiers who needed them. wa has thoroughly researched the subject and shown how clever deative use of the available materials transformed artificial limbs from es such as peg legs to lightweight, strong, multifunctional prostheses. s of the social and political revolution that provided the means to distribute them, usually at little or no cost to the maimed soldiers. on, this book is the definitive reference on Civil War artificial limbs.”

F. Terry Hambrecht, M.D., senior technical advisor to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine and former head of the Neural Prosthesis Program, National Institutes of Health (U.S.A.)

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segawa’s book is an interesting, detailed description of the personaliand the medical and administrative problems that arose during and vil War because of the need to supply artificial limbs to soldiers and ny remarkable characters, several who were amputees themselves, ccasion, and artificial limbs became available to injured soldiers all ntry. The book illuminates this rarely mentioned aspect of the care wounded men as a result of the war. I highly recommend it.”

—Alfred Jay Bollet, M.D., author of Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs

ion: Private Columbus G. Rush, 21st Georgia had both legs amputated at the thigh by ns. National Museum of Health and Medicine P1216).

because the Peninsula Campaign defeat had resulted in this new momentum for the emancipation cause, Congress decided to couple the confiscation bill with a new militia act authorizing the president to recruit African Americans as military laborers, and possibly as soldiers, with freedom as the reward. “The question must now be decided whether [blacks] shall be employed only to aid the rebels,” Ohio’s conservative senator John Sherman told Congress. The “rebels fight side by side with them….

Now, shall we avail ourselves of their services, or shall the enemy alone use them?” Moderate Wisconsin senator James Doolittle agreed: “I think we can not be mistaken,” he argued. The Confederacy “have employed negroes not only upon intrenchments and in camp service, but have ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74

From Southern Illinois University Press, Publisher of the Papers of Ulysses S. Grant

f the great medical and humanitarian accomplishments of the Civil was the way mutilated soldiers were given a way to get back into ay of artificial limbs. Dr. Hasegawa’s scholarly and well-researched he reader from the crude beginning of the artificial-limb program North and the South to a system whereby so many men were helped e. It is especially relevant today as we help our ‘wounded warriors’ oducts and devices that enable them to have a productive and active ing has a beginning, and what was begun in 1862 was the precursor s to mend the lives of our military men and women today. I highly this work.”

—Gordon E. Dammann, D.D.S., founder and board chairman, National Museum of Civil War Medicine

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11/14/12 3:07 AM

THE ORIGINS OF FREEDOM CONTINUED FROM P. 73

organized and put arms in their hands to shoot down our sons and our brothers on the field of battle.” Because of this “fact,” he insisted that the government should “employ the same class of persons to fight against the rebels which they employ against us. If it be wrong, they alone are guilty.”²⁰ Such sentiments from unexpected sources thrilled the radical editors of the Chicago Tribune, who credited the “startling” change “to the recent reverse to our arms before Richmond.”

The conservative New York Commercial Advertiser agreed, arguing that rising emancipation sentiment in Congress had “made a greater advance since the Army of the Potomac found its new base on the James, than during the whole fifteen months since [Fort] Sumter fell.” Secretary of the Senate John W. Forney also believed the campaign’s failures were causing many to see emancipation as a military necessity: “Reading our reverses in this light, we must accept them as admonitions and instructions,” he proclaimed at the end of July. “Every day educates us for a higher destiny.”²¹ Indeed, the Peninsula Campaign’s failure turned out to be the last push Congress needed to pass the Second Confiscation Act. Massachusetts’ radical senator Charles Sumner was one of the bill’s leading supporters, and he recalled that Congress passed it “under pressure from our reverses at Richmond.”²² The law mandated that all slaves owned by Rebels were free, whether they had been used in Confederate service or not. Unfortunately, this opened the door for masters to possibly reclaim their slaves if they could prove in court that they were never disloyal to the Union. This had the potential to clog the courts, and made the act fairly unworkable. As a result, it freed few slaves.

The act’s true importance lay in how the debates surrounding it had brought about a perceptible shift in public opinion for the military neces-

74

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sity argument. While home in Ohio, Senator Sherman wrote his brother, “You can form no conception at the change of opinion here as to the negro question. Men of all parties now understand the magnitude of the contest … and agree that we must seek their aid and make it the interest of the negroes to help us.”²³ This included the president. As late as July 1, Lincoln believed that slaves should not even be encouraged to enter Union lines. But by July 13, Lincoln’s opinion had drastically changed, especially when border state congressmen seemed ready to reject his latest attempt at compensated emancipation. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles later described a carriage ride he took with Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward.

According to Welles, Lincoln said that he “had about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity, absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” Welles maintained that Lincoln said this was the first time he had mentioned it to anyone. The secretary also believed that the failed Peninsula Campaign had swayed the president into this new course of action.²⁴ Welles indicated that Lincoln said “slaves were undeniably an element of strength” to the Confederacy not only because they worked the land, but also “because thousands of them were in attendance upon the armies in the field…. And the fortifications and entrenchments were constructed by them.” Lincoln concluded that “we must decide whether that element should be with us, or against us.”²⁵ Four days later, Lincoln signed the Second Confiscation Act into law.

He had reservations, but he was now much closer to agreement with Congress on the direction the war should take. He soon issued an order proclaiming his intention to enforce the act’s measures and instructing commanders to begin enrolling slaves as military laborers.

But he also had something bigger in mind. On July 22 Lincoln informed his cabinet of his intention to release the Emancipation Proclamation. Such

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a step would get around the weaknesses and court proceedings of the Second Confiscation Act because it would free all slaves in states that were in rebellion, whether their masters were Rebels or not. However, Seward convinced Lincoln to wait to announce the proclamation until after a military victory to avoid a look of desperation. Lincoln agreed, and that victory would not come until September at Antietam.²⁶ This reading of events seems to challenge historians who argue that Lincoln’s decision to move against slavery in the seceded states was based primarily on his moral objections. Supporters of such an interpretation tend to reduce the military necessity argument to two things: an important legal justification for Lincoln’s moral decision, and propaganda for northerners who did not want to accept emancipation on humanitarian grounds. The problem with this view is that the war almost becomes a sideshow, with the results of the Peninsula Campaign only determining when the moment was right, rather than inspiring the decision itself.

But the war was Lincoln’s overwhelming concern, and its events and

contingencies determined and shaped his thinking above all. Just before Antietam, a delegation of ministers asked the president to use his war powers to emancipate the slaves so that it would ennoble the Union’s cause.

Lincoln quickly rebuffed such a notion and reminded the men that the Union already had a noble cause in the preservation of the country. He also explained that emancipation would “unquestionably” be an effective military measure because it would weaken “the rebels by drawing off their laborers, which is of great importance.”²⁷ Of course many northerners continued to reject the military necessity argument even after the Peninsula Campaign, and Lincoln’s enemies later accused him of engineering and conducting the war primarily as an emancipationist crusade. (In praising Lincoln, some recent historians have made similar claims.) His response was clear: “It is and will be carried on so long as I am president for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the emancipation lever as I have done.” As for the timing,

Lincoln reportedly told his friend, the painter Francis Carpenter: “Many … urged emancipation before I thought it was indispensable.” Thus, the timing of his decision seems to indicate that it was the Peninsula Campaign that convinced him it was “indispensable.”²⁸ This interpretation does not discount Lincoln’s deep and long-held moral objections to slavery, and acknowledges his and the Republicans’ aggressively anti-slavery politics that had helped lead to the war. Yet the president’s commitment to not use the federal government to directly touch slavery in the seceded states changed largely because of the Peninsula Campaign. His moral views meant that he embraced the decision with his whole heart, and in fact Lincoln seemed to believe that God had worked out the military events in favor of the slaves.

(Such sentiments would be most famously expressed in his second inaugural address.) They also propelled him to push, in the war’s final months, for a constitutional amendment that went beyond “military necessity” to end slavery even in states and regions that had not rebelled. ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76

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THE ORIGINS OF FREEDOM CONTINUED FROM P. 75

Yet in August 1863, Lincoln publicly responded to critics who argued that the Emancipation Proclamation was mostly the result of his moral objections to slavery, and that it was not an effective military measure. Here again, Lincoln was direct: “I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid … in saving the Union.” In order to deprive the South of the services of their slaves and to add their strength to the Union cause, Lincoln insisted,

A SUCCESSION OF HORRORS CONTINUED FROM P. 55

of both the public’s need for a scapegoat and the army’s need to affix fault to someone expendable.

Brown was the inquest’s first witness, and his desire to avoid blame was obvious. He told the panel that he had placed the pans containing the stars a good 30 to 35 feet away from the cartridge building, and that in nearly a quarter-century as a pyrotechnist, he had never known the sun’s heat to detonate stars. He tried to demonstrate his exhaustive knowledge of this type of ordnance by relating in detail the chemicals he used for red stars.

One ingredient he named was black antimony. A juryman named Taylor interrupted to point out that black antimony contained sulfur— which might indeed be vulnerable to the sun’s rays. Brown quickly backtracked, claiming he used a formula different from the one in the army’s ordnance manual, one with no black antimony, and hence no sulfur.²⁷ Yet Brown could not convince the inquest panel—and in all likelihood, most of the onlookers—that the tragedy had not been the result of something gone badly awry with his drying process. Damaging testimony came

the slaves “must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom.”²⁹ After the Peninsula Campaign, Lincoln decided to make that promise, and he announced it on September 22, 1862, five days after the Battle of Antietam. “The promise being made,” he insisted, “it must be kept.” And so it was, and the Union was saved.³⁰ is a history instructor at the University of Alabama, a former seasonal park ranger at the Richmond National Battlefield Park, and author of The Peninsula Campaign & the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans & Fight for Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). glenn david brasher

from another key witness: James Benton, the arsenal’s commandant, stated his opinion that “the stars, lying on a black metallic surface, which naturally absorbs heat, were exploded by spontaneous combustion.”

Benton sounded almost apologetic, noting that he “considered Brown a careful man,” but nonetheless that “it was certainly imprudent to place any quantity of stars together on the pans.” Lest anyone wonder whether Benton was culpable for allowing Brown’s imprudence, the commandant added that he “had frequently examined the building to see that all was right, and had frequently cautioned Mr. Brown, not because he was careless but as a precautionary measure, knowing the great importance of being careful.”

Brown’s guilt seemed a foregone conclusion when Benton pointed out that the pans should exhibit some white powdery residue on their blackened surfaces, had their contents detonated. A pan was produced and, as shown to the jury, did have such a white powder. At that point, not even Benton’s friendlier, somewhat contradictory observation that he had always found Brown to be “a good practical chemist [and] a very competent man in his business” could salvage Brown’s cause. The inquest found him to be “guilty of the most culpable carelessness and negligence … indicating a most reckless disregard for

life, which should be severely rebuked by the Government.”²⁸ Legally, the coroner’s inquest required a clear subject, a definitively identified person upon whose behalf they would affix their judgment. But at that point only two corpses had been identified: a young woman named Margaret Horan (recognized by her sister from remnants of clothing and jewelry) and Johanna, with that “This is Johanna O’Connor” sign upon her body. And so it was that to Brown’s errors were attributed not the deaths of 21 souls (the final, official body count), but rather just two.²⁹ Public opinion followed the inquest’s lead, and Brown was excoriated in the Washington press. “He is an unlettered man, we hear,” sniffed a writer in The Washington Star, and “that he should spread these fireworks to dry in the immediate vicinity of the open windows of the building where these young women were at work handling deadly powder, shows a degree of indifference to human life hard to believe in.” Whatever Brown did in the future, the editorialist continued, “we do sincerely trust that his skill may hereafter be exercised in some department where no such disaster as that of Friday, may be again connected with his name.”³⁰ The fate of the arsenal’s chief

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library of congress

The grounds of the Washington Arsenal

pyrotechnist is unclear. If he was rebuked or punished by arsenal authorities or the government, there is no record of it; perhaps his superiors decided there was no sure way to know what had caused those drying pans to detonate. Nor did the accident do any apparent harm to Brown’s reputation as a purveyor of fine fireworks extravaganzas. Many years later, in 1896, he was hired to arrange a grand fireworks display honoring the centennial anniversary of the laying of the Capitol building’s cornerstone.³¹ It’s unknown if Brown attended the massive funeral procession in Washington on June 20, though it seems that nearly everyone else in the city did. Huge crowds gathered to witness 15 coffins (the six other victims were buried in private services) born alternately by ambulance wagons and hearses, “it being found impossible to procure a sufficient number of hearses for them all.” The mourners included Abraham Lincoln, who rode with Secretary Stanton in one of the 150 or so accompanying carriages. This in itself was unusual; the president had not attended a funeral in nearly two years.³² The Washington Arsenal fire represented only a small bit of the mass bloodshed that defined the American Civil War. It was not even the worst industrial accident of the war, a distinction that probably belongs to the

1862 Allegheny Arsenal fire in Pennsylvania. And just five days prior to the explosion, forces under Ulysses S. Grant concluded their campaign to breach the Confederate defenses at Cold Harbor, Virginia, an attempt that brought on over 11,000 Union casualties. Even this bloody affair represented but a small portion of the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded the war had produced, on both sides.

Johanna Connor and her fellow workers were not famous or noteworthy, and it cannot be said that the Washington Arsenal disaster had any significant effect on worker safety in wartime factories. But the fire provides a revealing window into what the war had become by the summer of 1864.

Death was commonplace, particularly soldiers’ deaths. People mourned their battlefield losses, of course, but they bore those losses as a function of the war’s stern requirements of victory and duty. But there was still a sense that some people did not have to die. Some deaths still possessed the power to shock and dismay.

We may ascribe this sensibility in large part to the gendered lenses through which Civil War-era Americans viewed themselves—women do not deserve to die as a result of war—but we should also recognize Americans’ desire to preserve some sense of normality in an abnormally deadly time. The Americans of 1864 saw the Washington Arsenal fire as abnormal, something that should not have happened—a young woman like Johanna Connor should not die in her workplace. Cold comfort, surely, to Johanna’s family, and the families of the other unfortunate victims of June 17, 1864—but the very fact that Americans would pause to bow their heads in sorrow and dismay, even in that awful time, says some small thing about the nation’s ability to preserve its sense of humanity. is a professor of history at Anderson University. His latest books, both published in 2012, are Lincoln and the Constitution (Southern Illinois University Press) and Abraham Lincoln and White America (University Press of Kansas). brian dirck

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WANT MORE CIVIL WAR?

THE GENTLEMAN GENERAL CONTINUED FROM P. 37

in the Grand Review of the Armies before thousands of joyful citizens and grateful government officials. Then, orders took Force and his division to Louisville, where the men were mustered out of service. But the process was lengthy, and by July, Force was still engaged in the business of releasing troops. After a brief leave, he spent the next six months mostly in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in command of Union occupation forces during Reconstruction—an assignment he found frustrating and unfulfilling. Coping with the confusing complexities of Reconstruction, Force tried to make the best of his situation. But, he emphatically informed his father, “I … would rather be in a law office in Cincinnati.”³⁵������� He ������ finally received his discharge in January 1866, turning down an offer to remain in the regular army as a colonel. Force gladly doffed his uniform, donned his civilian clothing, and went home.

In Cincinnati, Force did not feel entirely comfortable. The city had

photograph credit here

Stay connected with The Civil War Monitor wherever you are! @CivilWarMonitor

78www.facebook.com/

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changed, and so had he. After witnessing terrible and jarring things, it was difficult to adjust to the rhythm of civilian life. Clients came slowly, mostly referrals from the courts, and he was grateful for every one. In the spring of 1866, he took heart with the bursting flowers and foliage. “Spring never was more beautiful,” he said. But things still seemed strange and foreign. At a party, he recognized only a few friends and acquaintances, and even those stood in shadowy corners or along the edges of the room. The new Cincinnatians dressed and wore their hair differently. “A young lady’s head all white with powder, or glistening with diamond dust, is to me, quite a novelty,” he remarked.³⁶ Force now lived in a strange world that he—and thousands of other soldiers—had unwittingly helped to create. The Civil War had transformed the nation, uprooted its citizens, and redefined social relationships. The antebellum America of personal relationships and face-to-face bonds had given way to a society that functioned along impersonal lines. Although he was hardly aware of it then, Force was one of thousands of men—most of them younger than Force, many of them vet-

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erans—who would rise to positions of government power or corporate influence in the Gilded Age and beyond. In the North, these new men flocked to the Republican Party.

In Cincinnati, Force’s fame as a general helped him enter local politics, although he did so reluctantly, unsure how he could wear the robes of justice when the law’s details and procedures seemed irrelevant compared to the life-and-death exigencies of war. But the people called, just as the nation had done in 1861. He was elected to a judgeship on the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas in 1866 and remained on that bench for a decade.

In time, he fell into the routine of civilian life, helped in no small part by the rigorous regiment of his court’s docket. In 1874, his personal life also broadened when he abandoned bachelorhood and married Frances Dabney Horton. Together they had one son, Horton Caumont Force, born in 1878.

His old friend, now President Hayes, offered him a White House job as secretary to the president, but Force turned him down. Instead, he became a professor of equity and criminal law at the Cincinnati Law School and, in 1877, won election as a justice of the Manning Force served as director of the Soldiers’ Home in Sandusky, Ohio (pictured here), during the later years of his life.

Ohio Superior Court. But in 1888, when his war wound caused his health to fail, he resigned from the court and spent a brief time recovering at President Hayes’ home in Fremont, Ohio.

Tired and weak from illness, he accepted a position as commandant of the Ohio Soldiers’ Home in Sandusky.

Given his long activity in veterans’ affairs, the directorship of the soldiers’ home was the perfect job for him. His soldier’s pride swelled on March 31, 1892, when he received a Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic actions at Bald Hill.³⁷ Nearly seven years later, on May 8, 1899, Force died at the Soldiers’ Home in Sandusky. Three days later, he was buried at Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, where 38 other Union generals and four other Civil War recipients of the Medal of Honor rest in peace. Like so many other Civil War soldiers, Force could not put the war behind him in the decades following his discharge. He never walked without it accompanying him, never spoke without uttering its echoes, never moved outside of its light and shadows. For Manning Ferguson Force, the Civil War was his moment. For this very civil and cultivated man, the Civil War had been an uncivil and almost unendurable experience, one that challenged him and changed him as he fought through its brutality and malevolence. Yet above all else, the Civil War’s painful incivilities made Force understand that life was precious—a frail and fragile thing that could never be taken for granted. And it also gave him the opportunity to prove to himself that courage is something not only to be found on a bloody battlefield, flagstaff in hand with bullets flying everywhere, but also in the very silent depths of one’s own soul.

photograph credit here

glenn w. lafantasie

is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History and director of the Institute for Civil War Studies at Western Kentucky University. He is the author of several books, including Twilight at Little Round Top (2005), as well as a contributing writer for Salon.com. He is presently at work on a major study entitled One More River to Cross: The Story of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

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on thursday, January 1, 1863, many northern cities celebrated more than the dawn of a new year. It was also the day that Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in the rebellious states free, took effect. Emilie Davis, a 24-year-old free black woman, worked as a domestic servant in Philadelphia, where people crowded into the city’s black churches to observe the occasion. She noted the historic event in the small pocket diary she kept. “To day has bin a memorable day,” she wrote, “and i thank god i have bin sperd to see it.” While brief, Davis’ sentiment reflected those of other free blacks in the North—that the dream of full and permanent freedom for all was now within reach.

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