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Sweeping Sorrow Why did Elmer Ellsworth’s death devastate yet inspire Northerners the way it did?

By Meg Groeling

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AMERICA’S CIVIL WAR

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY; LOOK AND LEARN/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; PETER NEWARK AMERICAN PICTURES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; COVER: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN WALKER

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Departments 6 8 12 14 18 54 58 60 64

LETTERS Reassessing Stuart, Ewell, and Lee GRAPESHOT! Recognition for forgotten Medal of Honor recipient LIFE & LIMB Bringing order to battlefield wounded care DIFFERENCE MAKERS Unconventional warfare that proved a Southern specialty FROM THE CROSSROADS Dogs of Antietam TRAILSIDE Gettysburg cavalry warm-up in Hanover, Pa. 5 QUESTIONS Confederates and the Choctaw: A true Rebel alliance REVIEWS Indiana’s slave haven; Jubal Early’s near-miss in Washington, D.C. FINAL BIVOUAC Disgraced colonel turned hero

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Stopped Cold

By Fire Had John Gordon secured Wrightsville’s Columbia Bridge as ordered, would Gettysburg ever have been fought?

By Scott L. Mingus Sr. and Jon Guttman

Human Collateral Confederates find unexpected “bounty” in captured Harpers Ferry

By Alexander B. Rossino

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‘We Can Now Rejoice’

A former teacher looks back in awe at Vicksburg’s fall

By James Robbins Jewell

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ON THE COVER: MAJOR GENERAL JOHN B. GORDON OF GEORGIA HAD NO ANTEBELLUM MILITARY EXPERIENCE BUT PROVED TO BE A NATURAL FIGHTER. BY THE END OF THE WAR, HE WAS ONE OF GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE’S MOST DEPENDABLE SUBORDINATES.

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Michael A. Reinstein Chairman & Publisher C E L E B R A T I N G 35 Y E A R S

Vol. 35, No. 2 May 2022

HISTORYNET.com/ AMERICAS-CIVIL-WAR

‘SHELL AWAY’

Baldy Smith’s defiant response to the Rebel demand that he surrender Carlisle, Pa. bit.ly/ShellAway

TARGET VICKSBURG The Hill City controlled the Mississippi River. Taking it wouldn’t be easy. bit.ly/TargetVicksburg

STONEWALL JACKSON AT HARPERS FERRY

Jackson, Johnston, and conflicting interests: The fate of this strategic town hung on the leadership styles of two Southern commanders. bit.ly/JacksonHarpersFerry

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LETTERS

Riders on the Storm J.E.B. Stuart and his cavalry on the prowl, as captured in a 1920 oil painting by French artist Charles C.J. Hoffbauer.

Giving Ewell His Due

Thank you for Scott Hartwig’s objective and concise defense of Army of North-

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ern Virginia’s Second Corps commander Richard S. Ewell at the Battle of Gettysburg, “Tainted Legacy” (November 2021).

On July 1, with Albert Jenkins’ Brigade of Cavalry guarding his corps’ rear and Elijah White’s 35th Virginia Cavalry Battalion then scattered to the east (bringing word of a large Union force approaching from that direction), Ewell was prudent to await the arrival of Maj. Gen. Edward Johnson’s Division before moving against Culp’s Hill. If anything, he was perhaps naïve at first in not assuming that the Yankees would occupy Culp’s Hill before Johnson’s tardy column could get into position, and second for not keeping closer tabs on “Old Allegheny” once the latter did arrive that evening.

I agree with Hartwig that Early was a duplicitous liar, but Johnson too shares some blame for not having adequately reconnoitered Culp’s Hill and its environs prior to ordering his brigades to attack it on July 2-3. Such shortcomings led to costly failures on the Confederate left flank, where their “window of opportunity” was, however briefly, open for exploitation.

Bruce J. Kennedy Naples, Fla.

Lee’s Northern Interview Kevin C. Donovan’s article, ‘The General in Defeat” (November 2021) was distinguished for drawing attention to

General Robert E. Lee’s interview in the April 29, 1865, New York Herald.

Donovan’s argument is apt that the general was hoping to utilize the interview as a means to both influence the North’s postwar conduct and to garner sympathy for the defeated Southern cause. (The article, in fact, was reprinted as far away as Australia, my home country.)

Donovan, however, did not cover what, in my opinion, are a number of key points about Lee’s Herald interview. These include: • Cook reportedly wrote Lee on the day of the article’s publication with a strong implication that the general’s statements had been tampered with: “I [am] feeling that the good work of restoring tranquility to the country… could be greatly advanced by a more free use of…your views and ideas.”

• Lee had believed in the same view of the American Constitution and federalism as the Founding Fathers had articulated in reference to Switzerland in the late 1700s, wherein the cantons were paramount to the republic that bound them; as had led Sam Houston to refer to Tennessee as ‘my country’ upon becoming the 6th governor of that state—predating his time as governor of Texas—and much as the state of Maine would assert of the ‘rights of a sovereign state’ to protect itself from ‘Northern invaders’ by conducting

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Scott Hartwig’s article “An Enduring Myth” in the March 2022 issue does a nice, succinct job of debunking the persistent “urban legend” that Robert E. Lee’s plan for Day 3 at Gettysburg involved a simultaneous assault by his infantry forces from the west and J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry from the east. In addition to the reasons briefly alluded to by Hartwig, I do find baffling a claim in the 2005 book he references in the column (Lost Triumph, by Tom Carhart) that four shots fired by Stuart’s horse artillery were designed as a “signal” to Lee—some seven miles away—that Stuart was ready to commence. The exchanges of fire between two large armies on the intervening battlefield and the possibility of acoustic shadows make this proposition implausible, to say the least. As Eric J. Wittenberg concludes in his book Protecting the Flank at Gettysburg, these four shots were instead a form of reconnaissance by Stuart for purposes of his own action against his Union cavalry opponents on that field. Readers looking to access detailed support for Hartwig’s insightful analysis will find Eric Wittenberg’s book highly informative.

John Foskett Westwood, Mass.

©VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY/ACQUIRED THROUGH MERGER WITH THE CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION/PHOTO CREDIT: DAVID STOVER/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

More on J.E.B. at Gettysburg

hostilities with the British Empire in what is now New Brunswick in the late 1830s.

• Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln had both made the point 16 years apart that all Americans were responsible for American slavery, the former in 1849 to abolitionists in Boston’s Faneuil Hall and Lincoln at both his Hampton Roads Conference and his Second Inaugural Address.

• Insight into Lee’s comments that following Emancipation, “the negroes must be disposed of...,’” can be gleaned from the 1865 Webster’s American Dictionary: “dispose” is defined there as “to arrange/adjust/settle/adapt.”

Lee discussed this topic at great length with Union Maj. Gen. George Meade in Richmond following his army’s surrender at Appomattox, and was a strong advocate for education for Black Americans. A January 24, 1864, letter Lee wrote to his wife provides an outline of these views.

• Lee’s war experiences had, in his view, wrought progressive growth in the place of Black Americans in society, as revealed by the contents of orders he sent on March 27 and March 29, 1865, to Richard Ewell.

Postwar, Lee on several occasions publicly exemplified acts of racial equality and justice, and supported Black American suffrage in the same terms as, for example, Lincoln, Joshua L. Chamberlain, and O.O. Howard.

• To Jefferson Davis, Jubal Early, and many others, Lee after the war would time and again extol for peace and reconciliation between all Americans, “imploring one and all to do their duty to heal the country’s wounds.”

Gerry Lefurgy Sydney, Australia

Gender Identity LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

©VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY/ACQUIRED THROUGH MERGER WITH THE CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION/PHOTO CREDIT: DAVID STOVER/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

LETTERS

In “The Fighting Adams Family” (January 2022, P.10), it is claimed that the picture of Stephen Clinton Adams’ comrade is Thomas F. Adams, and that Thomas F. Adams is really S.C. Adams’ wife Elizabeth Nichols. The latter would come as a shock to the descendants of

Thomas F. Adams, who know him as a man who married, had five children, and is buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Va. See Findagrave for Thomas Franklin Adams (1834-1920). In addition, Elizabeth Nichols was only 13 when Thomas F. Adams enlisted, whereas the unidentified trooper is plainly older than that. In short, there is no way the unidentified trooper is Elizabeth Nichols.

It is possible that the unidentified trooper is Thomas F. Adams, but even that is speculation. In connection with the sale of cavalry boots worn by Stephen Clinton Adams, Perry Adams Antiques offered extensive research on the Adams brothers and states, “always wondered if the other person in the picture was Thomas F. Adams.” If the descendant of Thomas F. Adams cannot say whether the unidentified trooper is Thomas F. Adams, by what authority do others make that identification?

John Braden Fremont, Mich..

Jay Wertz responds: Mr. Braden has expressed his doubt that the ambrotype of Stephen C. Adams’ companion published with my Grapeshot! article in January’s issue (as well as the photograph provided above) is Elizabeth Nichols, Private Adams’ future wife. There are holes in his reasoning, however, as well as misstated facts. He first suggests that the person pictured is Thomas F.

Adams, who was, as I am well aware, on the 6th Virginia Cavalry rolls. That trooper Adams was a 26- or 27-yearold man at the time. In examining the actual ambrotype in person, as I had the chance to do (and as did memorabilia authority Shannon Pritchard), it is evident a woman is pictured. The lack of facial hair, the fair skin of the face, delicate hands, and slight bulge of the blouse in the upper torso indicate a female—even a female 13 years of age, with a degree of maturity seen in other examples of the period.

Mr. Braden further indicates, providing a description of an antiques dealer, a supposition that Stephen C. Adams and Thomas F. Adams were brothers.

They were unrelated, according to documentation from the genealogical authority Family Search (familysearch. org/wiki/en/6th_Regiment,_Virginia_ Cavalry_(Confederate). It is possible that this assertion was circulated within the antique arms community and that is how some accounts identified Elizabeth Nichols as Thomas F. Adams.

I stand by what I wrote: that the person pictured is Elizabeth Nichols, who later married Stephen C. Adams. She may have been a camp follower or a laundress for the 6th Virginia. But the fact that she posed with pistols on not one but two occasions with Adams in these studio portraits would make her a viable candidate for being the female in the photos, even if she never picked up a weapon on any other occasion.

Editor’s note: A few readers wrote in inquiring how they may obtain copies of L. Harris Churchwell’s books on the 12th Georgia that were referenced in a letter to the editor in the March 2022 issue. If interested, please contact Judith K. Churchwell at 478-783-1861.

WRITE TO US Send letters to America’s Civil War, Letters Editor, Historynet, 901 North Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203, or e-mail acwletters@ historynet.com. Letters may be edited.

MAY 2022

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GRAPESHOT!

A Blast of Civil War Stories

Honored Joseph Wayne, at podium, and a fellow Ancient Order of Hiberians member salute during the ceremony for Civil War hero Patrick Monaghan.

New Honors for an Old Hero

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HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; USAHEC

During the 1864-65 Siege of Petersburg, Sergeant Patrick ents nationally without proper burial markers or known Monaghan distinguished himself while serving with Com- burial locations. Johnson and Wayne became acquainted pany F of the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry—the famed in 2020 after Johnson began an inquiry into the cemetery “First Defenders” of Schuylkill County, Pa. Monaghan per- records of the Saint Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church and was given Wayne’s name. Informed of Monaghan’s sonally received a Medal of Honor from President plight, Wayne “rallied the troops,” quickly forming Abraham Lincoln for recapturing the flags of the a committee and launching a campaign to honor 7th New York Heavy Artillery during intense Monaghan rightfully. A contract for a monufighting on June 17, 1864. After the war, ment was awarded by the Medal of Honor SociMonaghan continued his military service, ety, to be placed at Monaghan’s gravesite by serving as a lieutenant colonel in the PennsylSausser Monuments of Ashland. vania National Guard for many years.

On June 12, 2021, local veterans and members In 2021—104 years after his death—Monaghan of the Ancient Order of Hiberians joined forces to not only had his gravesite restored but was also given a memorial for his service in the St. Joseph’s Monaghan give Monaghan a respectful tribute ceremony at the cemetery. The veterans formed an honor guard to Roman Catholic Cemetery in Girardville, Pa. The effort to make that a reality was spearheaded by Joseph lead a public procession to the gravesite, where a wreath Wayne, president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Jack was placed. Girardville AOH historians Thomas Dempsey Kehoe Division #1 of Girardville, with assistance from and Tommy Symons then provided attendees an account American Legion post members of both Girardville and of Monaghan and his storied heroics—gleaned from Ashland, Pa., as well as the Ashland Veterans of Foreign Schuylkill County’s Civil War records. That would be followed by a 21-gun salute and the playing of Taps by Wars and fellow members of Jack Kehoe Division #1.

Raymond Johnson of the Ohio-based Medal of Honor veteran buglers, as well as a touching bagpipe rendition Society identified Monaghan as one of 560 MOH recipi- of “Amazing Grace” by Kristen Egan. —Michael J. Kitsock

COURTESY OF SKOOK NEWS; GAINEW GALLERY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT FINALLY GETS A MONUMENT

South Mountain

QUIZ

Preludes Match the relatively minor engagement to the greater battle it preceded.

Cutting Edge

HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; USAHEC

COURTESY OF SKOOK NEWS; GAINEW GALLERY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

In the 18th and 19th centuries, many illnesses or symptoms were

believed to be caused by an excess of blood. Surgeons would withdraw blood to alleviate the conditions in a process known as bloodletting.

While some surgeons used leeches to do the deed, the most common procedure, known as venesection, involved drawing blood from one of the body’s larger external veins, especially in the arm or neck. Surgeons most often used a fleam, such as the one pictured here, to lance open the vein with its triangular-shaped blade. This Civil War–era bleeder employed a spring-loaded lancet, with a hammer that cocked back and released much like a gun, allowing the operator to inject the blade into a vein without exerting manual pressure. It was paramount bleeder technology for its day. The effectiveness of bloodletting was already being questioned in the medical field by the outbreak of the Civil War and went out of standard practice shortly afterward; however, Civil War surgeons who lacked treatments for many ailments found in hospitals or on battlefields, especially under the pressures of war, certainly resorted to the method. –M.A.W.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Spring Hill Newtown (Stephens City) Brush Creek South Mountain Helena Sailor’s Creek Hanover Valverde Ford Brawner Farm Kolb’s Farm Gettysburg Kennesaw Mountain Franklin Glorietta Pass Second Manassas Antietam Westport First Winchester Vicksburg Appomattox

Answers: A.3, B.8, C.7, D.6, E.9, F.10, G.1, H.4, I.5, J.2.

CONVERSATION PIECE

A. B. C. D. E. F. G. H. I. J.

MAY 2022

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GRAPESHOT! BATTLE RATTLE

“If you can’t feed us, you had better surrender us, horrible as the idea is, than suffer this noble army to disgrace themselves by desertion.”

Wrightsville Salutes

—Confederate soldiers’ message to Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton, June 1863

10

CIVIL WAR ILLUSTRATED While newspapers were the primary outlets for political cartoons during the war, envelopes also served as a canvas for such propaganda, as depicted in the sample above, in which a Confederate hound struggles to get its maw on Washington, D.C. (represented as a pie). The threat that the “gallant” General Winfield Scott would always be there to restrain the dog was typical of Northern early-war optimism.

SCOTT L. MINGUS SR. (2); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; COURTESY OF RICHARD H. HOLLOWAY

nia—such as the June 28, 1863, skirmish at Wrightsville, this issue’s cover story—tends to get downplayed. Although Wrightsville was a relatively bloodless affair, it is associated with two deaths of note that have generated renewed intrigue in recent years. One of those was an unidentified Confederate cavalryman, whose water-logged body was found along the Susquehanna River, a mile north of Accomac Ferry, in late June 1863. The locals who found him buried his body on the spot and Duly Remembered marked the grave, which would New Wrightsville-area be further commemorated by memorials for both an various temporary markers over unknown Confederate the next century until intense cavalryman (above left) and the unidentified Black flooding from Hurricane Agnes home-guardsman killed in washed away the grave, marker, the skirmish (above right). and bones in 1972. Local history buffs would replace the stone at the approximate location, but it was destroyed by a Tropical Storm Lee–produced freshet in 2011. Another marker now recognizes the unknown Confederate, who was perhaps a casualty of a skirmish upriver at York Haven or a scout or deserter who drowned trying to cross the rain-swollen river.

A few miles to the south, a memorial stone erected in 2014 honors the Wrightsville showdown’s only fatality. As described in our article, “Stopped Cold By Fire” [P.20], a company of 53 unpaid Black volunteers joined about 1,500 Pennsylvania militiamen to defend the Columbia Bridge and prevent Georgians under Brig. Gen. John B. Gordon from crossing the river and capturing Harrisburg. One of those Black volunteers died when struck in the head by a Confederate shell fragment.

Unidentified, he was initially buried in the trenches where he fell, an area now lost to development, but his body was eventually reinterred in an unmarked grave in the town’s Mount Pisgah Cemetery. Fifteen decades later, a memorial commissioned by a Black Masonic Lodge in York pays him tribute in Wrightsville’s historic cemetery. –Scott L. Mingus Sr. AMERICA’S CIVIL WAR

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COURTESY OF RICHARD H. HOLLOWAY; PHOTO BY TOM BASTIN

The significance of pre-Gettysburg fighting in Pennsylva-

Très Bon Sabre In 1840, the U.S. Army adopted a new light artillery saber. It was pat-

terned after the French light artillery model manufactured more than a decade before in 1829 and primarily used by field artillery units.

The French version above, known as the sabre de cannonniers, has an undecorated pommel and knucklebow, indicating it is an enlisted model. Also, the grip is wrapped with leather and held in place with wire, whereas the officer’s model was wrapped in ray. The 42-inch-long saber weighed 2 pounds-4.5 ounces and used a metal scabbard.

The curvature of the blade is more pronounced than that of a cavalry sword. It allows the bearer to hack at his opponent with a swinging motion rather than a stabbing maneuver common with a morestraight blade.

Still in use by the Civil War, the French saber was popular among Southerners; however, France restricted any direct trade with the Confederacy. Fearful of a war with the United States, Napoleon III instead sent weapons such as the saber to his troops located in Mexico. Many of those found their way across the border into the Confederacy. Upon his arrival in northern Mexico, the U.S. Counsel shockingly exclaimed, “Matamoras is now the great thoroughfare to the Southern states.”

From September 1, 1862, through January 31, 1863, alone, a single

large weapon and ammunition shipment arrived in the Trans-Mississippi via Havana, Cuba, including 4,990 sabers.

Anxious to obtain more weapons from France, the Confederates entered into contracts with private French mercantile companies to fill the void caused by skittish French governmental authorities. One of the largest contracts with the Confederate government was fulfilled by the merchant house of É. Bellot Des Minières. Bellot avoided risking confiscation of his goods by the French government by entering into an agreement with the French admiralty office, who in turn advised its military vessels stationed in the Gulf of Mexico not to interfere with the company’s shipments.

Produced in large amounts, many of the 1829 French sabers still survive today.

–Richard H. Holloway

EXTRA ROUND

COURTESY OF RICHARD H. HOLLOWAY; PHOTO BY TOM BASTIN

SCOTT L. MINGUS SR. (2); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; COURTESY OF RICHARD H. HOLLOWAY

The South’s Ellsworth Much like Union Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, whose dramatic death in May 1861 is explored in “Sweeping Sorrow” [P.30], the Confederacy had its own early-war “flag martyr,” courtesy of Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler—William Bruce Mumford of New Orleans. Mumford’s martyrdom was spawned by the fall of the Crescent City in late April 1862. On April 24, Union Admiral David Farragut stormed past Confederate Forts Jackson and St. Philip, leaving lightly defended New Orleans—75 miles to the north—vulnerable to capture. The next day, Mayor John T. Monroe agreed to surrender his city but also refused to take down Confederate flags on public facilities, as Farragut had directed. When a U.S. flag was hoisted atop the city’s U.S. Mint building on April 26, a group of incensed local citizens—led by Mumford—took it upon themselves to take the Yankee colors down.

A native of North Carolina, married father of three, and so-called “best billiards player in the entire city,” Mumford had made New Orleans his home after being wounded in the Mexican War. As crewmen aboard USS Pocahontas watched, Mumford made his way atop the Mint to haul down the U.S. banner, then delivered it to Monroe in City Hall. Mumford and his followers “deserve great credit for their patriotic act,” opined a local newspaper, but incoming Union commander Ben Butler thought otherwise and had Mumford arrested, labeling him a “gambler and undesirable citizen.” Mumford was sentenced by a military tribunal and hanged June 7 on the grounds of the Mint itself. His final words to a gathered crowd were: “[A]ct justly to others, and...raise your children properly, and when they meet death, that they meet it firmly.” Mumford’s body remained aloft for 45 minutes before being cut down and buried. He would now be an unlikely hero to his adopted state and country.

Memorial at New Orleans’ Greenwood Cemetery

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LIFE & LIMB

The Greater Good TRIAGE FOR THE WOUNDED, INSTITUTIONALIZED DURING THE CIVIL WAR, REMAINS FUNDAMENTAL FOR MODERN MEDICAL TEAMS

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At the outset of the Civil War, no organized system of medical care and evacuation existed. This changed on July 4, 1862, with the appointment of Major Jonathan Letterman as Medical Director for the Army of the Potomac. Letterman reorganized the Medical Corps and created a system of medical evacuation designed to care for wounded soldiers from the moment of injury through long-term recovery, which became known as the Letterman Plan. In March 1864, Congress implemented Letterman’s changes across the entire Union Army. They remain today a basis for modern EMS and military combat medicine.

The first stop of Letterman’s plan was the field dressing station, located as close to the battlefield as possible. This is where triage was first performed. Here, the wounded were administered first aid and sorted according to the seriousness of their wounds. Patients were sorted using the following criteria: severe, mild, slight, and mortal. Severe wounds

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COURTESY OF THE SEMINARY RIDGE MUSEUM

The nonprofit NMCWM, based in Frederick, Md., explores the world of medical, surgical, and nursing innovation during the Civil War. To learn more about the stories explored in this and future columns, visit civilwarmed.org. The museum also hosts walking tours to the city’s Civil War hospital sites on Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. from April to October.

THE COLOSSAL HOSPITALIZATION numbers from the COVID-19 pandemic have, at various points, forced hospitals in the United States to make hard choices regarding who receives life-saving treatment and who does not. Especially in the pandemic’s early days, public health officials took steps to establish triage guidelines for hospitals to follow should the number of critically ill patients outweigh, for example, the number of available ventilators. While the guidelines vary by state, they have one common thread: giving priority to those who are most likely to recover if given treatment.

The term “triage” is derived from the French word “trier,” meaning “to sort.” Triage has been practiced in the military at least since the Napoleonic era. Although triage was not used as a medical term until World War I, it was integral to the Civil War–era advancements made by Dr. Jonathan Letterman— advancements that still influence us today.

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

By Rachel Moses

LIFE & LIMB included serious bleeding, arrest (no pulse or spontaneous respiration), injuries compound fractures, missing incompatible with life, and the existence of visible brain limbs, or major trauma to the matter. Keep in mind that triage is to be an ongoing proarms and legs. These were cess that is performed continuously throughout the pritaken by the ambulance corps mary assessment, treatment, transportation, and to the nearest field hospital hospital phases of care. for immediate care. Mild While medical care and knowledge of physiology today wounds included excessive has far surpassed that of the 19th century, triage categobleeding with the patient in ries have remained largely unchanged since the Civil stable condition and were evacuated after all the severely War. Our modern red, yellow, green, and black triage wounded were removed from the battlefield. categories all closely mirror the Civil War-era categories Slight wounds were minor enough to allow patients to of severe, mild, slight, and mortal wounds. In both cases, be sent back to their units. Lowest priority were wounds red (severe) always receives the first priority. Yellow that pierced the trunk of the body or head: what were normally mortal wounds. These patients were made as comfortable as possible and set aside until time allowed—not due to cruelty on the doctors’ part, but because they simply lacked the knowledge and technology to treat those kinds of wounds at the time. Such serious wounds weren’t necessarily a death sentence for soldiers. For example, there were about 200 reported cases of trephining (drilling a hole in the skull to relieve swelling in the brain or remove foreign objects like bullets or bone fragments), which had a 43 percent survival rate!

With the implementation of this system of triage, wounded soldiers were given a better chance of survival and went into battle knowing they would not be left on the battlefield for days waiting for help.

Modern triage closely mirrors its Civil War counterpart and is based on the principle of doing the greatest good for the greatest Portable Care number with the available resources.

This easy-to-carry Model While it is practiced throughout medi(mild) is next, green (slightly) third, 1863 surgeon’s field case was used at Gettysburg by hospital cine by first responders and emergency and then black (mortal wounds) last. steward Jacob Tomer of the 3rd The current COVID-19 pandemic is room personnel, we usually think of triPennsylvania Cavalry. age in terms of mass casualty incidents, the latest tragic example of modernor incidents in which the number of day mass casualty events that highlight casualties overwhelms medical personnel and resources. how the innovations of Civil War medicine continue to In these instances, it is ideally performed rapidly, with benefit us. The measures taken by the medical commu15–60 seconds spent categorizing each patient according nity in response to the pandemic showcase the evolving to the colors red, yellow, green, and black. Red (immedi- nature of triage and the ability of medical personnel to ate) patients are the first priority and include pneumo- adapt to these changing circumstances. Thanks to Dr. thorax (collapsed lung), hemorrhagic shock (significant Letterman and the advancements made in medical evacblood loss), closed head injury, and diminished mental uation during the Civil War, medical personnel have the capacity (unable to follow simple commands). framework they need to use available resources to save Yellow (delayed) patients have major or multiple bone, the greatest number of lives. As our world struggles to joint, back, and spine injuries with an unobstructed air- deal with a deadly pandemic, the changes wrought way. Those placed in the green (minor) category are the during the Civil War remain just as pertinent, if not more “walking wounded”—those who can follow commands so, today. with minor cuts, bruises, painful and swollen deformities, and minor soft tissue injuries. The lowest priority is given Rachel Moses is site manager of the Pry House Field to those who fall in the black (deceased) category. Exam- Hospital Museum in Sharpsburg, Md. She received her ples of this category include undisputed mortality or M.A. in History and Museum Studies from Youngstown death, such as decapitation, blunt traumatic cardiac State University in Ohio.

COURTESY OF THE SEMINARY RIDGE MUSEUM

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Critical Calls Field hospitals were where most Union wounded were treated for the first time. Doctors here often had to choose whom to care for at the expense of others.

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DIFFERENCE MAKERS

Gunning for Goliath The South had the upper hand in underwater warfare. The small but plucky David, below, was technically a semi-sub—unable to fully submerge.

Danger From Below THE DAUNTING HUNLEY EARNED ITS GLORY, BUT THE SUB WASN’T THE SOUTH’S ONLY “INFERNAL MACHINE” TO ANTAGONIZE THE UNION NAVY DURING THE WAR

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ognition—and did indeed manage to sink a Yankee sloopof-war, albeit at the cost of the vessel and its crew—there were several other underwater naval vessels active during the four years of conflict.

Interestingly, many people at the time viewed submarine warfare as a terrorist activity. In fact, Southern submarine technology—which far outstripped that of the North—was overseen, not by the Confederate Navy Department, but by the CSA Secret Service. Sabotage played a large part in the South’s military strategy throughout the war, and the underwater vessels that the Northern papers were referring to as “infernal machines” were seen as one more dirty tool on the Confederate belt.

Credit for the first dedicated effort in submarine warfare almost certainly goes to the South. In the summer of 1861, underwater explosives engineer William Cheeney devised a two-man craft (Hunley required eight crew members) that took in air through a tube held on the surface by a large flotation collar. During a September trial,

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM

TRAVELING SAFELY UNDERWATER in an enclosed airtight capsule had been a dream of man for millennia.

Although various plans and designs for a watercraft capable of accomplishing this were being drawn as early as the 1500s, reportedly the first actual prototypical submarine—a crude, oar-powered rowboat-like affair—was built in 17th-century England. Once the possibility of beneath-the-waves travel seemed feasible, man’s thoughts turned to its application in war. The goal became the creation of a manned stealth weapon that could glide undetected beneath the waves and deliver a killing blow to an enemy vessel.

In America, the first use of a subaquatic vessel in wartime occurred in 1776, during the Revolution. The craft, a one-man wooden structure dubbed Turtle, made several unsuccessful attempts to sink British vessels, and was subsequently retired. During the Civil War nearly a century later, both sides strove to develop an undersea technology capable of crippling the other’s warships. Although the Rebel sub Hunley has received the lion’s share of recAMERICA’S CIVIL WAR

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

By Ron Soodalter

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM

DIFFERENCE MAKERS it submerged in the James River and moved steadily Alligator did not represent the North’s only effort, halftoward a target barge. When it neared the barge, a diver hearted though it was, to introduce underwater technolleft the vessel and—breathing air through a hose con- ogy into the war effort. During the summer of 1863, nected to the sub—attached a charge of explosives to the 41-year-old New Jersey engineer Scovel Merriam conbarge. Backing away from its target, the sub triggered the tacted Rear Admiral John Dahlgren regarding his invencharge, literally blowing the vessel out of the water. tion. Merriam and his partner, Woodruff Barnes, were The test was an unqualified success, with one excep- offering the Union Navy their bulbous, iron-plated undertion: A Union spy—one Mrs. E.H. Baker—had witnessed water vessel—dubbed the Intelligent Whale—for the trithe episode. After subsequently touring a local iron ple purpose of clearing Charleston Harbor of such objects works, Baker also determined that another such vessel as pilings, sunken vessels, and mines, capturing or severwas being fabricated. She promptly reported her findings ing Rebel lines of communication, and sinking enemy to Washington, whereupon the Union Navy Authority ships. If successful, Merriam stipulated that he would be ordered protective anti-submarine nets to be placed paid the staggering sum of $250,000—well in excess of $8 around all Northern ships at Hampton Roads, Va. million today.

Ironically, Cheeney’s tests went much smoother than Shortly after reviewing the proposal, Secretary of the the nameless sub’s performance in action. On its first Navy Gideon Welles authorized Merriam to build his vesattempt on a Yankee ship, the sub became entangled in sel for the purpose of clearing out Charleston Harbor. In the netting, escaping only with difficulty. During a second early August 1864—six months after Hunley sank USS attempt weeks later, Yankee pickets spotted its floating Housatonic—Merriam performed a test of the newly concollar and cut the air hose. What hapstructed submarine before a small pened to the vessel and its crew from panel of Union naval officers. there is unknown.

Apparently the sub was nowhere Ironically, the North could have near ready for testing. The review was launched its own highly effective subdamning, pointing out, among other marine months ahead of Cheeney’s things, that “no attempt was made to endeavor, were it not for institutional navigate the vessel when submerged….In our opinion the vessel ignorance, arrogance, and incompecan only be used as a self-propelling tence. A recently immigrated Frenchman named Brutus de Villeroi diving bell, to make submarine explobrought with him to America what he rations and preparations for removing called his “Sub-Marine Propeller,” a obstructions in comparatively smooth highly sophisticated vessel that he and peaceful waters.” dramatically introduced to the Union Welles promptly rejected Merriam’s forces in mid-May 1861 by surfacing proposal, whereupon the inventor, unannounced off the Philadelphia after actually finishing his submarine, Navy Yard. Its interest piqued, the offered it for demonstrations before Prime Casualty Navy commissioned him to oversee the general public. Many of the vesHunley was indeed an incredible the construction of a larger version, sel’s features—including the ability to invention, but its inspired creator, Horace L. Hunley (above), lost his send forth a diver from inside the sub but de Villeroi proved unbearable and life when it sank during a test run. the Navy inflexible, which led to his without admitting water—were, in removal from the project. fact, remarkable. Reviews were generWhen the 47-foot Alligator, as it was dubbed, was ally favorable. Oliver Halsted, a prominent lobbyist and finally completed a year later, the naval authorities sent close friend of President Abraham Lincoln, immediately it up Appomattox Creek to destroy a railroad bridge—the bought shares in Merriam’s company, and shortly thereantithesis of what it was designed for! Predictably, the after, bought the boat itself.

In early 1865, Halsted convinced both Lincoln and Lt. operation failed, in part because of shallow water. In early 1863, Admiral Samuel F. DuPont ordered Alligator to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant of the efficacy of employing his vesCharleston, with orders to clear the harbor of mines. sel for the uses specified by Merriam—by which time the While it was being towed around Cape Hatteras, a furious war was all but over. The U.S. Navy purchased Whale in storm arose, and Alligator, taking on water at the ends of 1866 and subjected it to several tests over the next its towlines, wallowed in the swells. When one of its two decades before putting it on display at the Brooklyn Navy towlines separated, Alligator was cut loose, whereupon Yard. Today, the Intelligent Whale—the submarine that the most sophisticated and ill-used submarine of the war never went to war—can be viewed at the National Guard went down.

Militia Museum in Sea Girt, N.J. MAY 2022

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DIFFERENCE MAKERS

“A short time after 9 P.M, just as I was turning in, the officer of the deck hailed something. The hail was followed by two or three musket shots and a tremendous crash and explosion, that sounded as if the ship’s timbers were all smashed in. The drum beat to quarters, and as I had not yet been stationed, I [went] on deck to see what was up. The marines were keeping up a heavy fire of musketry on some small object in the water, that in the darkness looked as much like a barrel as anything else. In a few minutes it drifted out of sight or sunk. Many tons [of ] water were thrown on deck by the explosion, but on examination the ship was not injured in the least, beyond having a few storeroom bulk heads demolished...”

Injuries to the crew were minimal. One man suffered a broken leg, while another, as West reported, was “shot through the body, by a musket fired from the nondescript craft, just as he fired at it.” The tremendous surge of water from the explosion flooded the sub’s smokestack, “putting his fires out and entirely destroying his motive power….

Finding they could not get away they all (five in number) jumped overboard to avoid the musketry which we were pelting them with. The other three are supposed to be shot or drowned, and the machine sunk.”

Actually, two members of David’s crew were pulled

16

Plenty of Potential Diagram of USS Alligator, probably the war’s most sophisticated sub, which never had a chance to show its capabilities. It sank off Cape Hatteras in an 1862 storm. from the water by Yankee vessels, and David’s assistant engineer somehow maneuvered it back to port. It would engage in two more actions in 1865, attacking the screw steamers Wabash and Memphis—also unsuccessfully.

At least 20 submarines were active during the war, most belonging to the South (five alone outside Shreveport, La., all sunk late in the war to prevent their capture).

While the Union generally attempted to use them to remove underwater obstacles, the South doggedly went after Yankee shipping in an attempt to break the blockade of its coastlines. All the same, the damage inflicted by submarines from 1861 to 1865 was minimal.

Heading beneath the surface in these largely untested metal-plated vessels required unimaginable courage. The dangers were many, both from the enemy and from the quirks of the vessels themselves. Hunley was the first submarine to sink an enemy ship in time of war, yet the Rebel sub itself sank three times, killing 21 men, including its inventor. Nevertheless, once opened, the door to subsurface warfare would remain so.

Improvements made over the past century and a half are staggering. Whereas Hunley was powered entirely by muscle, modern-day submarines are driven by nuclear reactors. Hunley offered only around two hours of breathable air, provided the circulation system was functioning; today, a nuclear-powered sub can remain submerged virtually indefinitely. In the days of the spar torpedo, operational success relied on the ability to surreptitiously attach a charge directly to the enemy vessel’s hull; modern subs can deliver an accurate, devastating nuclear strike from a distance of thousands of miles. The dream of the ancients—to successfully wage war against the enemy from beneath the sea—has ultimately come to pass.

Ron Soodalter writes from Cold Spring, N.Y.

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

In October 1864, the Confederates launched an attack on the wooden-hulled broadside ironclad USS New Ironsides. Their weapon was a small cigar-shaped, multiplated, steam-powered vessel christened David.

Technically, it was a “semi-sub,” since it could not completely submerge without dousing its fires. It could, however, travel nearly undetected, showing only its upper shell. For the attack, David utilized a “spar torpedo”—a heavy charge mounted at the end of a long spar protruding from the vessel’s bow. The strategy was to plant the charge in the side of the enemy vessel and hope for the best. The “Goliath” that this David faced would prove impervious to the assault.

Lewis H. West, a young seaman aboard New Ironsides, wrote about the attack in a letter to his mother:

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FROM THE CROSSROADS

Grrrrrrr!

Famed mascot Sallie never shied from action, whether in Antietam’s Cornfield or, as seen here, the 11th Pennsylvania’s clash at Gettysburg’s Oak Ridge.

Boundless Devotion THE INCREDIBLE BOND BETWEEN SOLDIERS AND THEIR DOGS PROVIDED A MOVING ADDENDUM TO ANTIETAM’S BLOODY FURY

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shire terrier named Sallie, adopted as a puppy by the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry in the spring of 1861. Many today know Sallie from her sculpture on the front of the regiment’s monument at Gettysburg. Sallie became a favorite with the regiment and a celebrity in the brigade. George Kimball, a soldier in the 12th Massachusetts, wrote how much he enjoyed visiting the 11th Pennsylvania’s camp just to watch Sallie when the regiment performed dress parade. He wrote of observing the “drum corps slowly marching down the front, the colonel [Richard Coulter] with folded arms calmly looking into the faces of the men and Sallie lying at the feet of the color bearer, as if she loved to be in the shadow of the flag.”

It was said that if the 11th experienced a particularly severe march, the unit could be counted upon to be represented at its conclusion “by a colonel, a flag and a dog,”

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WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

GRAYFRIARS BOBBY, a Scottish Skye Terrier known for once guarding his owner’s grave in Edinburgh for 14 years, is an apt reminder of the deep and long connection and affection between dogs and humans throughout history. For as long as there have been soldiers in the earliest formed armies, they have had dogs as pets and mascots.

In a personal, modern example, my son’s Army scout platoon in Afghanistan adopted a female Afghan Kuchi puppy that it named “Scout.” Scout was so special and important that Jason went through considerable effort to have her sent home when he left, and she lives happily with him in the United States today. At Antietam in September 1862, countless units in both armies were accompanied by faithful canine companions, and many of them went into battle alongside their human comrades.

The most famous of these army dogs was a Stafford-

PAINTING BY GREG STUMP

By D. Scott Hartwig

FROM THE CROSSROADS

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

PAINTING BY GREG STUMP

for Sallie never straggled. She also never shirked a battle and went in with the 11th when it marched through David Miller’s Cornfield at Antietam the morning of September 17, 1862.

had a dog as a mascot, but the boldest of the lot was “Scott,” who belonged to Company G and followed it at Antietam during the regiment’s assault on the Sunken Lane. According to Billy, when a solid shot struck near Scott, the dog commenced digging furiously at the spot.

Not far from Sallie, a black-and-white Newfoundland At one point, Scott mounted a charge on the enemy, runbreed trotted along the Hagerstown Pike with its owner, ning up barking to what was probably the rail fence at the Captain Werner von Bachelle of the 6th Wisconsin. The southern edge of Samuel Mumma’s cornfield, where he German-born von Bachelle was somewhat a soldier of “put his paws on it, deliberately gazed at Secesh, then fortune. He had trained at a Swiss military academy and beat a masterly retreat back to the company.” He then saw service in the French army and with Garibaldi in the proceeded to run back and forth along the regiment’s line, war for Italian unification. and although “the bullets rained thick and fast” he A fellow officer described the German as a “tall and escaped unscathed. Scott was exceedingly lucky, as the stalwart soldier” and rigid disciplinarian. Because his 1st Delaware suffered 230 casualties that day—the heaviEnglish was limited and his demeanor reserved and for- est loss of any regiment in Maj. Gen. William French’s mal, he had few friends among the regiment’s officers, but 3rd Division. the soldiers of his Company F developed a fondness for The 6th New Hampshire had what was probably a their captain. Earlier in the summer, when the 6th Wis- Chesapeake breed, an ocher-colored dog they had adopted consin was stationed near Fredericksburg, Va., the black- as a puppy in Elizabeth City, N.C. It became known as the and-white canine wandered into “Sixth Regiment Dog” and accompaCompany F’s camp. The men knew nied the regiment in camp, on the how much von Bachelle loved animals, march, and in battle. On the morning so they gave him the dog as a pet. The of September 17, it joined the regiment when it and the 2nd Maryland two were soon inseparable, becoming made the second attempt to capture the “most devoted friends on earth.”

Von Bachelle trained the creature the Rohrback Bridge. “Dogs generally to give military salutes “and other fear firearms when discharged in volremarkable things”—where he went, leys,” recalled the regimental histohe was always accompanied by his rian, but “this one went fearlessly into dog. That morning of September 17, battle.” Like Scott and Sallie, the Sixth it was with him as they advanced Regiment Dog survived the combat its astride the Hagerstown Pike at the regiment engaged in that day. spearpoint of the Union 1st Corps’ But just like the men they went into attack. Company F stretched directly battle with, there was not a happy across the turnpike in the regimental ending for some dogs. Captain von Bachelle’s Newfoundland loyally line. They passed the David Miller remained by his side when he was Farm and the left of the regiment killed and refused to leave his body entered Miller’s 30-acre cornfield.

The ground sloped up to a slight easteven though urged to do so by some of Who Rescued Whom? the captain’s men. This was one of the west ridge just south of the corn. As German-born Captain Werner the regiment neared this point, a Conmost hotly contested spots on the von Bachelle of the 6th Wisconentire Antietam battlefield and units federate limber and gun suddenly sin bonded immediately with a fought over the area throughout the burst into view and disappeared stray dog given him by his men. morning. The next morning a burial behind the ridge driving south along detail from the 6th Wisconsin found the pike. Von Bachelle’s company was ordered to hustle to the ridge and shoot up the enemy von Bachelle’s beloved pet lying across the captain’s body. gun team. When they reached the crest of the ridge, they They buried them together. And Sallie may have survived were confronted by two small brigades of Confederate Antietam but she did not survive the war. She was infantry lying at their right front. The Rebels quickly rose wounded at Spotsylvania and killed at Hatcher’s Run in and blasted Company F. Hit at least 12 times, von Bach- February 1865. Like Grayfriars Bobby, Sallie and von elle was killed instantly.

Bachelle’s Newfoundland were loyal to their human companions unto death.

A soldier in the 1st Delaware, writing under the pseudonym “Billy,” noted that every company in the regiment Scott Hartwig writes from the crossroads of Gettysburg.

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StopPed cold by fire

A brief but sharp skirmish at Wrightsville marked the easternmost Confederate advance in Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign

By Scott L. Mingus Sr. and Jon Guttman

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COLUMBIA BRIDGE BURNING BY BRADLEY SCHMEHL

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A Bridge Too Far Fire started by local civilians under army orders consumes the western span of the Columbia Bridge on June 28, 1863, foiling Confederate plans to cross the Susquehanna River and capture Harrisburg, Pa. At 1¼ miles, the critical economic lifeline was at the time the longest wooden covered bridge in the world.

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hey were inexperienced in combat. Most were common laborers in a local rolling mill who had recently left their jobs to defend their workplace, homes, and loved ones. Now they were in an unpaid home guard company defending the world’s longest covered bridge against oncoming Confederates. None wore uniforms, but each of the 53 volunteers had army-issued muskets on hand as they wielded pickaxes and shovels to strengthen the horseshoe-shaped earthworks and rifle-pits surrounding Wrightsville, Pa. They ranged from 15-year-old John Aquilla Wilson to several older men who had seen plenty of sunrises. Some feared they might never see the sunset on this day if the Rebels captured them. All were Black.

It was Sunday, June 28, 1863, and the sight of Black men marching to war against Confederate forces was still new in southern Pennsylvania.

Some of the guardsmen had relatives and friends who earlier in the year had left Wrightsville and neighboring Columbia to enlist in the newly organized 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry regiments. Unlike their comrades, the men digging trenches were not a formal military unit but volunteers in the home guard company—the only Black unit among five such amateur organizations from towns along the Susquehanna River.

They made up in courage and determination for what they lacked in martial training. “They presented a motley appearance, attired as they were in every description of citizens’ dress,” wrote an admiring Lieutenant Francis Wallace of the 27th Pennsylvania Volunteer Militia (PVM), a newspaper editor in civilian life. “They were armed with the old musket altered to the percussion lock.”

The Black company from Columbia, under the command of rolling mill

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co-owner Captain William Case, was part of a 1,500-man force hastily assembled in the days before the Rebels were due to arrive. Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin, working with the War Department and Maj. Gen. Darius N. Couch of the Department of the Susquehanna, had called for 50,000 volunteers to defend the commonwealth once news arrived that elements of Robert E. Lee’s vaunted Army of Northern Virginia were crossing the MasonDixon Line. Couch did not have the authority to enroll Black men into the seven for-pay PVM regiments that were mustered into the service, so the Columbians and York Countians served on their own volition, without compensation, uniforms, or equipment, other than the entrenching tools and muskets that the quartermaster of the 27th PVM had distributed.

Their foes were battle-tested veterans, the lead brigade of Confederate Maj. Gen. Jubal Early’s Division that had occupied York, the largest town between Harrisburg and Baltimore, earlier that Sabbath day. On June 27, Brig. Gen. John B. Gordon’s brigade of six Georgia regiments rested in fields near the hamlet of Farmers Post Office, some 10 miles west of York Pennsylvania Showdowns As the Army of Northern Virginia advanced toward Pennsylvania’s state capital, Harrisburg (1), Rebel troops and cavalrymen occupied key locales in the region, including Carlisle (2)—site of U.S. Army barracks—and York (3), whose civic leaders quickly surrendered the town.

After General Gordon was stopped at Wrightsville (4), Lee’s army pulled back, eventually fighting at Gettysburg (5).

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HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE

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THE OFFICIAL MILITARY ATLAS OF THE CIVIL WAR

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HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE

THE OFFICIAL MILITARY ATLAS OF THE CIVIL WAR

on the turnpike to Gettysburg. That evening, General Early rode south from where his three other brigades were camped at Big Mount to meet with Gordon. The tall Georgian informed his commander that a delegation of York’s civic leaders had visited his camp and agreed that the Union troops defending the town would withdraw, leaving the borough of 8,600 people open to Confederate occupation without any resistance. “If that proves true,” Early ordered, “you will pass on through and move rapidly to the river to secure both ends of the WrightsvilleColumbia bridge.”

Early had orders to burn the 1¼-mile-long

Part of Ewell’s Brain Trust Brig. Gen. Albert Jenkins (left) and Maj. Gen. Robert Rodes led Ewell’s push into Pennsylvania. On June 27, Jenkins secured Mechanicsburg and Rodes temporarily occupied Carlisle.

wooden bridge and take his division north‘Shell Away’ west from York to Dillsburg, where he could Union troops under support Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell’s efforts to William F. “Baldy” capture Harrisburg should that prove to be Smith—and at least one practical. When he embarked on his second exuberant young lad— major invasion of the Northern states on assemble in downtown Carlisle in response to June 3, Robert E. Lee, as he had done in his J.E.B. Stuart’s July 1 Maryland Campaign of September 1862, threat to shell the town. hoped to strike a crippling blow to Union morale, either by seizing a major city or drawing the pursuing Army of the Potomac into a battle on ground of his choosing that might end in a decisive Confederate victory. That favorable result might force President Abraham Lincoln’s administration to negotiate an end to the bloody war. One particularly enticing option that Lee considered was to occupy Pennsylvania’s capital. With that in mind, he instructed his Second Corps commander, Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell, “If Harrisburg comes within your means, capture it.” The order left room for Ewell’s discretion, depending on the circumstances he might encounter.

As in his earlier incursion into enemy turf, Lee audaciously divided his army to facilitate achieving his goal. Marching north on June 27 from the Chambersburg area, Maj. Gen. Robert E. Rodes’ Division of the Second Corps seized Carlisle. Well in advance, Brig. Gen. Albert G. Jenkins, commanding Ewell’s mounted infantry brigade, secured Mechanicsburg, from which the Confederates could threaten Harrisburg from the west. There remained a problem, however—Harrisburg was situated on the eastern bank of the Susquehanna River. Any attempt to seize the capital would require a frontal assault on the thousands of New York and Pennsylvania militiamen who defended the heights on the western shore. Thus, Ewell sent Early’s division east through Gettysburg to seize York, a valuable prize with its railroad warehouses, road network, and general prosperity.

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FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE YORK COUNTY HISTORY CENTER, YORK, PA; HISTORIC WHIDBEY

Gritty Georgian Shot five times and grievously wounded during the Sunken Road fighting at Sharpsburg, Gordon somehow escaped death and was back in action at Chancellorsville in May 1863. By the end of the war, he had assumed Second Corps command in Robert E. Lee’s army.

militia “so utterly inefficient” that, on his initiative, he decided to seize the Columbia Bridge instead of destroying it as ordered. So, on Saturday night on the Jacob Altland Farm at Farmers, Early issued his orders to Gordon to secure the bridge. As he later wrote, the crusty Virginian now planned to march across the river into Lancaster County, seize the 1,000 horses rumored to have been taken to safety there, and then march up roads paralleling the eastern riverbank to threaten Harrisburg’s relatively undefended rear.

The Columbia Bridge was a prize worth controlling. A series of ferries had served travelers between Wrightsville and Columbia from colonial days until 1812 when businessmen in the latter town had commissioned a toll bridge. Ice floes had knocked it off its foundations two decades later and partially wrecked it. The replacement bridge, opened in 1832 using much of the wood from its predecessor, spanned 5,620 feet. The massive, 40-foot-wide structure contained a roadway for the Philadelphia–Pittsburgh turnpike, tracks for the Pennsylvania Railroad that intersected the Northern Central Railway at Wrightsville, and a two-level towpath that connected the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal in Lancaster County to the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal along the western riverbank in York County.

The Columbia Bank, the bridge’s owner, made a hefty profit charging tolls to cross the river—$1.50 for a wagon and six horses; 6 cents for each pedestrian. Strategically, it was the only bridge between Harrisburg and Conowingo, Md., and the few viable fords in York County were unusable because recent rains had swollen the river.

Gordon’s Brigade, which Ewell tasked with quick-marching eastward to take the vulnerable bridge, consisted of the 13th, 26th, 31st, 38th, 60th, and 61st Georgia Infantry. York’s Democratic chief burgess, newspaperman David Small, had negotiated with Gordon on Saturday night, so Gordon knew as he marched east from Farmers on Sunday that he likely would take York without firing a shot. Behind a small screen of Virginia cavalry, Gordon’s pioneers and the 50-man vanguard of the Colonel Clement A. Evans’ 31st Georgia arrived in York at 10 a.m as church bells sum-

LANCASTER HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Simpler Times This illustration of the hotly contested Susquehanna River span, titled “View of Columbia–From Wrightsville” predated the June 1863 showdown between John Gordon and Pennsylvania militia, home guardsmen, and other defenders. The canal that lined the river here is seen in the foreground.

FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE YORK COUNTY HISTORY CENTER, YORK, PA; HISTORIC WHIDBEY

LANCASTER HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

moned the citizens to Sunday worship services.

Most rushed into the streets or had already decided to skip church to watch the oncoming procession. Many had hidden or buried their valuables, and the banks had sent their holdings to safety.

Confederate bands played in the distance as Captain William Henry “Tip” Harrison led the first soldiers into town to guard the crossroads and prevent interference with the long column of 1,800 Georgians coming from the west. Some of Gordon’s early arrivers hauled down an 18by-35-foot handmade U.S. flag that flew from a 110-foot-high pole in York’s Centre Square.

Some accounts suggest that Gordon threw it across his saddle; others say he folded it in his saddlebag. One story, likely apocryphal, says he tied it to his horse’s tail and dragged it through the muddy streets. The sight reportedly so enraged a local lad, Adam Spangler, that he ran home to find a gun to kill the Rebel general. His father wisely advised him that such an act could York Submits to Early’s Confederates lead to a massacre of the townsfolk.

Residents of York, pictured almost as if they are enjoying a parade in this A couple of blocks east of the town square, a Confederate-sympathetic illustration, watch as the U.S. flag is lowered girl, who Gordon reckoned was about 10 to 12 and the town is surrendered to Maj. Gen. Jubal Early’s command. years old, handed him a bouquet of red roses. In Shortly after the “ceremony,” Brig. Gen. John B. Gordon marched his it, he discovered a folded piece of paper in “a brigade of Georgians to Wrightsville, about 12 miles to the east. woman’s f lowery handwriting” that gave a detailed description of Wrightsville’s defenses.

“I carefully read and reread this strange note,” Gordon later wrote. “It and five more wounds while defending a portion bore no signature and carried no assurance of sympathy for the Southern of the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg (Antietam). cause, but it was so terse and explicit in its terms as to compel my confiHis promotion to brigadier general was dence.” The girl, Mary Ann Small, likely had received the flowers from a approved in the spring of 1863. He fought well at Chancellorsville in May and again in June at stranger with instructions to give them to the general. Her parents were not known as Southern sympathizers.

Second Winchester, where his spirited attack When other elements of his division arrived to secure York, Early dishad helped break the Union lines on the first patched Gordon’s Brigade on his mission to Wrightsville, marching day of that battle. behind much of Lt. Col. Elijah V. White’s 35th Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, Ahead of Gordon at Wrightsville, Major and the four 3-inch ordnance rifles of Captain William A. Tanner’s CourtGranville O. Haller of the 7th U.S. Infantry led a motley force of some 1,500 men assembled to ney (Va.) Artillery. Gordon proceeded slowly toward the river, pausing to give his men an extended lunch break just east of York. Early’s other three defend the river crossing. The York native had brigades (Brig. Gen. William Smith’s, Brig. Gen. Harry Hays’, and Colocommanded McClellan’s headquarters guard at nel I.E. Avery’s) and his three other artillery batteries remained in the Antietam but had been at home recuperating York area. “Old Jube” demanded that the townspeople furnish $100,000 from illness when General Couch tapped him to in cash and massive amounts of shoes, food, and supplies. He would colcommand the defenses of Adams and York counties. Born in York on January 31, 1819, lect most of the requisitioned provisions and footwear but garner only $28,610 from door-to-door solicitations by civic officials.

Haller was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Gordon, Early’s most reliable subordinate, was a tal4th U.S. Infantry in 1838 and then fought the Seminoles in Florida in 1840–41 and the ented, experienced leader of men. Born in Upson Country, Ga., on February 6, 1832, he had attended Mexicans in 1846–47. He served in the batthe University of Georgia but had not graduated. He tles of Monterrey, Veracruz, Churubusco, was a lawyer and businessman with no military and Molino del Rey, sometimes alongside a training when the war broke out. From his first fight fellow officer in the regiment, 2nd Lt. at Seven Pines on May 31, 1862, Gordon displayed Ulysses Grant. Transferred to the Washingnatural leadership qualities, as well as single-minded ton Territory in 1853, Haller fought the devotion to duty. He also possessed uncanny durability, Yakimas from 1855 to 1856, and was ready to Haller surviving a wound at Malvern Hill on July 1 of that year fight the British, if necessary, during the 1859 MAY 2022

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: DANIEL HASS; PHOTO COURTESY OF MORPHY AUCTIONS, WWW.MORPHYAUCTIONS.COM

Long before it offered the Army of Northern Virginia a gateway to Harrisburg and eastern Pennsylvania, the 1¼-mile covered bridge crossing the Susquehanna between Wrightsville and Columbia was a vital link along the Underground Railroad. It was, in fact, one of the few stretches of the Underground Railroad for which the popular term was more than just metaphor.

In the 1820 U.S. census, 288 free Blacks lived in Columbia. They included William Whipper, born in 1804 the son of an enslaved domestic worker and her White owner. After working on the side in the lumber business to save enough money to buy his freedom, Whipper joined with fellow freedman Stephen Smith to build a commercial empire based on lumber and real estate in Columbia. His assets included rail cars and a steamship. As he prospered, Whipper devoted himself to the abolitionist cause. He joined the Columbia Abolitionist Society in 1818 and helped organize the The Great Escape American Moral Reform Society, whose Downtown Lancaster, a journal he edited between 1838 and 1839. stop on the Philadelphia Although a pacifist, he became person& Columbia Railroad, ally involved in the Underground Railroad. which also was used as a In a letter to abolitionist William Still, he critical thoroughfare for escaped slaves seeking described how escapees from Maryland freedom in the North. were accommodated by William C. Goodridge in York, then sent on, hidden in lumber wagons or in secret compartments in rail cars, across the Columbia Bridge. There, he kept fugitives in his home and connected them with members of the local African Methodist Episcopal Church, who saw that the starving were fed and the naked clothed until the opportunity arose to move them eastward, where Quakers and free Blacks helped them reach Still in Philadelphia.

Although Whipper recommended Canada as the safest final destination to avoid slave catchers, many escapees chose to start life anew in Columbia or on Lancaster County’s rich farmlands. For many, Smith’s and Whipper’s lumberyard offered steady employment, and by 1861 Columbia’s Black population had risen remarkably to nearly 1,000. Many were descendants of two large groups of freedom seekers who had been manumitted in Virginia but forced to leave the commonwealth.

Besides helping hundreds of slaves find freedom, Whipper, who died on March 5, 1876, attended all six of the early national conventions of Black men who would lay the philosophical groundwork for the 13th and 14th amendments. Several of the 53 men who helped defend the bridge were descendants of these formerly enslaved families; a few may have been fugitives themselves, including the man who died in the Wrightsville trenches. —S.L.M. and J.G.

THE READING ROOM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

A Literal Stretch of the Underground Railroad

border standoff on San Juan Island known as the “Pig War.” Haller had arrived in Wrightsville on Saturday evening on the last train out of York, bringing the stunning news that the borough’s leaders would surrender the town to Early. One of his first acts was to convince the bridge’s owners to suspend the collection of tolls. Massive lines of refugees crowded the streets, anxiously waiting their turn to pay to cross the Susquehanna to presumed safety. Haller wanted the avenues left clear for troop movement. It would prove to be a wise decision.

About 650 of the defenders of Wrightsville were from Colonel Jacob G. Frick’s 27th PVM, augmented with elements of the 20th and 26th PVM that had earlier retreated from Hanover Junction and Gettysburg, respectively. In addition, Haller had at his disposal some 200 ambulatory patients from the U.S. Army General Hospital in York (mostly wounded or ill veterans of the Army of the Potomac); about 50 refugees from the 87th Pennsylvania of the 8th Corps who had fled to York after that regiment was dispersed at the Second Battle of Winchester; the 53 Black home guardsmen; Captain Robert Bell’s Adams County Independent Cavalry; and the First Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry.

Colonel Frick had considerable previous experience in battle. Born in Pottsville, Pa., on January 23, 1825, he entered military service in June 1846 as a 3rd lieutenant in the 3rd Ohio Infantry during the Mexican War. He subsequently received a Regular Army commission and, when the Civil War erupted, he became the lieutenant colonel of the 96th Pennsylvania. He performed well during the Seven Days Campaign.

On July 29, 1862, Frick took command of the 129th Pennsylvania. During the ill-fated Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, he led the regiment in an uphill advance until finally driven to the ground near the stone wall. Frick distinguished himself again at Chancellorsville.

Confederates seized the regimental flag, but Frick countercharged and recovered it. He would receive a Medal of Honor in 1892 for his valorous leadership at the latter two battles. He and his men mustered out in May 1863 when their terms of service expired.

Now, with the Confederates threatening Pennsylvania, Frick and many of his officers and surviving men enlisted in the new 27th PVM, bringing some stability to the largely inexperienced recruits. Arriving on June 22, he set about strengthening the crescent-shaped line of earth-

works west of Wrightsville. Railroad workers, civilian volunteers, and college students had begun work on the entrenchments and rifle-pits a week earlier. Now, his men from north-central Pennsylvania set aside their weapons and worked to expand and deepen the works. Haller and Frick ordered men to roll railcars to the bridgehead, where soldiers overturned them to barricade the entrance. They left just enough room to pass between the cars in a single file. That should stop the Confederate cavalry, which is all they thought would attack the bridge. No one at that time imagined a full-scale invasion with an enemy infantry brigade as the opponent.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: DANIEL HASS; PHOTO COURTESY OF MORPHY AUCTIONS, WWW.MORPHYAUCTIONS.COM

THE READING ROOM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

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nce reports arrived on June 26 that Early’s entire division had turned eastward and now was in Gettysburg, with the bridge possibly in their crosshairs, Haller and Frick knew they had little chance with their relatively untrained force to defeat the Rebels.

Together, they worked out a contingency plan involving a swift retreat across the bridge. Haller had three artillery pieces in Columbia with which to blow holes in the bridge deck in the event of an enemy advance, but his men lacked ammunition. Hence, carpenters and volunteers from Columbia bore holes in the bridge’s superstructure; Frick envisioned blowing up the fourth section from the Wrightsville side with charges of gunpowder, dropping the 200-foot span into the water. If that did not work, he planned to Gold Touch have barrels of coal oil rolled on the bridge Colonel Jacob Frick and from a Columbia merchant. Soldiers, in that his Model 1850 Officer’s case, would douse the bridge deck and stacks Sword. Frick devised a of kindling. Because the bridge was privately plan that eventually led to torching the Columbia owned, Frick and Haller decided to have Bridge. He was awarded civilians associated with the Columbia Bank a Medal of Honor for apply the torch, not government soldiers. gallantry at the battles At 5:30 p.m. on June 28, Wrightsville’s of Fredericksburg and defenders saw a long line of Confederate Chancellorsville. skirmishers cautiously approaching across the unfamiliar wheat and cornfields. As the 31st Georgia began probing the defenses, Gordon sent two strong columns on each side of the enemy lines to turn their flanks if possible. He ordered Captain Tanner to unlimber his artillery pieces, sending sections to hills on either side of the turnpike. They would fire some 40 shells into Wrightsville over the next hour. By then, Haller had retired to Columbia to wire an update to General Couch in Harrisburg, leaving Frick in tactical command of the field.

Frick, knowing the position was rapidly becoming untenable, began disengaging his forces. He conducted a hasty withdrawal through Wrightsville and across the bridge. Nearly all of his men reached safety, except for a lieutenant colonel and 19 militiamen who were taken captive before they could cross. A fragment of one of Tanner’s shells decapitated one of the Black defenders from Columbia, making the unidentified man the only fatality of the skirmish at Wrightsville. Gordon reported only one of his infantryman wounded. “The regiment held out well,” bragged Private Joseph B.W. Adams of Company D, 27th PVM, in a July 9 letter to The Pittston Gazette, “till the rebels were seen to be out flanking them, with the intention of occupying the bridge, cutting off our retreat and capturing all hands. On this, Colonel Frick led the Regiment over the bridge, amid fire of the enemy’s cannon, and then set fire to the bridge.”

Once most of his troops were safely in Columbia, Frick ordered the powder charges detonated, but they

only splintered some portions of the support arches and blew holes in the roof and sidewalls, leaving the bridge deck still passable. As Gordon’s troops approached the riverside, Frick ordered the oil and kerosene–soaked timbers set alight. “I myself being on guard on this side of the river, was safe from the shells, but I could see them dropping in the river,” observed Private Adams. “The fire from the burning bridge was a splendid sight rolling up the fiery clouds toward the heavens. It was a sad necessity to destroy this beautiful structure, but it was our only course, to prevent the destruction of our regiment.” He concluded, “None killed, and all in good spirits, ready for them again. The boys say they were fired on during the retreat, by the

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he black, oily smoke from the bridge fire could be seen for miles.

The sight alarmed Early, who, with some staff officers and his headquarters guard, rode out from York to check on Gordon’s progress, later writing that he “had not proceeded far before I saw an immense smoke rising in the direction of the Susquehanna.” Gordon informed him of the skirmish and the burning bridge, the last section of which collapsed some six hours after Frick had ordered it to be torched.

Disappointed at his failure to secure the river crossing, Early rode back to York in the darkness.

Grateful for the Georgians’ role in saving the town, Mary Jane Rewalt, the newlywed daughter of Chief Burgess James F. Magee, offered to cook

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breakfast for Gordon and his staff on the following morning. The Georgian, after establishing his campsite for the evening, retired after a long day to his headquarters near the Detweiler farm.

On Monday morning, Gordon arrived at the Magee house, where Mrs. Rewalt fed him and his officers a tasty breakfast. When Gordon inquired “as to whether her sympathies were with the Northern or Southern side,” she replied, “You and your soldiers last night saved my home from burning, and I was unwilling that you should go away without some token of my appreciation. I must tell you, however, that, with my consent and approval, my husband is a soldier in the Union Army, and my constant prayer to Heaven is that our cause may triumph and the Union be saved.” An admiring Gordon later deemed her “the heroine of the Susquehanna.”

After breakfast, Gordon returned to York and

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PICTORIAL PRESS LTD./ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

copperheads of the town, and that one lady (or female, rather) displayed a small Confederate flag.”

The fire, once started, spread quickly. The wind shifted, blowing embers into the eastern edge of Wrightsville. “I called on the citizens of Wrightsville for buckets and pails, but none were to be found,” Gordon later wrote. “There was, however, no lack of buckets and pails a little later, when the town was on fire.” Long lines of his men passed water uphill from the river and canal into Wrightsville, limiting the destruction to a few houses, the post office, a millinery, two lumber yards, and a foundry. Later, after reading Northern newspaper accounts describing how his men had burned Wrightsville, Gordon fumed at what he called the “base ingratitude of our enemies.”

HARPER’S WEEKLY; PHOTO BY JON GUTTMAN

Then and Now This illustration of the Columbia Bridge in flames appeared in Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (1866). The concrete Veterans Memorial Bridge crosses here today, erected adjacent to the rebuilt Columbia Bridge, which was razed in the 1960s.

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD./ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

HARPER’S WEEKLY; PHOTO BY JON GUTTMAN

camped along the road to Carlisle. That afternoon, a courier sent by Ewell located Early and informed him that General Lee was concentrating the army and that he was to march his division to Heidlersburg, some 23 miles west of York in Adams County.

June 28, 1863, marked a momentous day in the Gettysburg Campaign. Major General George Gordon Meade assumed command of the Army of the Potomac after Joseph Hooker resigned. While the bridge was burning at Wrightsville, Confederate spy Henry Thomas Harrison arrived at Lee’s headquarters near Chambersburg, Pa., with news that Meade was now in charge and, more alarmingly, the Union army was closer than Lee believed.

Today, a monument at the intersection of North 3rd Street and Hallam Street (the former Lincoln Highway and York Turnpike) commemorates Wrightsville as the easternmost point that Confederate forces reached during the Gettysburg Campaign, although much of the battlefield has recently been lost to development. Four new Civil War Trails markers help the public visualize what happened on June 28. A new bridge was built on the same piers as the burned structure in 1868, but it was destroyed by a heavy windstorm in 1896. The piers were strengthened and rebuilt, and an iron-and-steel bridge then serviced the river crossing until the Pennsylvania Railroad razed it in the early 1960s. The Veterans Memorial Bridge, completed in 1930 as the longest concrete multiple-arch bridge in the world, now connects Wrightsville and Columbia.

Several hundred yards to the north, the newer Wright’s Ferry Bridge conveys traffic along U.S. Route 30 into Lancaster County. In between, adjacent to the Veterans Memorial Bridge, are the piers of the world’s longest covered bridge, which Union forces sacrificed to prevent Jubal Early from achieving his goal of investing Harrisburg from the rear.

Scott Mingus, a retired patented scientist and executive in the global pulp and paper industry, is the author of 28 books on the Underground Railroad and the Civil War. Two of his books, Flames Beyond Gettysburg: The Confederate Expedition to the Susquehanna River, June 1863, and Beyond the Burning Bridge: Wrightsville, Pa., in the Civil War, deal with the defense of the river crossing.

Jon Guttman is the research director for Historynet, as well as a frequent contributing writer for several publications.

The Strategic Importance of the Columbia Bridge During the Civil War Centennial in the 1960s, some observers in Wrightsville and Columbia declared that the destruction of the bridge had prevented the capture of Harrisburg and thereby changed history. If the Confederates had crossed the river, they believed, there would not have been a battle at Gettysburg. Was that opinion valid, however?

Robert E. Lee, on the evening of June 28, had no way of knowing that Early was trying to cross the bridge, not burn it as ordered, or that the Pennsylvanians defending it had instead torched it. The spy Harrison had given him the disconcerting news that the Union army was much closer than believed.

At the time, Gordon’s Brigade was at Wrightsville, the rest of Early’s Division in York, Jenkins was at Mechanicsburg, Ewell at Carlisle, and the bulk of the First and Third Corps were in the Chambersburg region, some 65 miles west of Wrightsville.

With or without the destruction or seizure of Ambitious Game Plan the Columbia Bridge, Lee Beginning June 3, 1863, Robert E. needed to concentrate his Lee’s trek into Pennsylvania was his widely scattered Army of second invasion of the North. He Northern Virginia to had hoped for an extended stay and prevent the Federals from at least capture of the state capital. defeating it in detail. The locations were in the shape of a wide arc. The most obvious place to reconstitute his forces was in Adams County; hence, the orders to reverse course and march to Heidlersburg and Cashtown. The destruction of the bridge had no bearing on that necessity. He could not afford to move his army any farther eastward and canceled plans to have A.P. Hill join Early in the York area.

In the event Gordon had secured the bridge, Early would have marched his 6,600 men into Lancaster County and farther away from the point of concentration. As it was, Early marched from York to Heidlersburg and arrived on the Gettysburg battlefield in the early afternoon of July 1 in time for Gordon and Hays to launch sweeping attacks on the Union 11th Corps. Had he marched into Lancaster County on an intact bridge, he likely would have not arrived at Gettysburg until July 2. So, in that aspect, the destruction of the bridge directly led to the outcome of the fighting on Day 1 north of Gettysburg. —S.L.M.

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SwEeping sORrow

The impact of Elmer Ellsworth’s untimely death in May 1861 had yet to be seen in our nation’s history, a harbinger of four years of horror ahead

By Meg Groeling

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as the 11th was popularly known—arrived in Washington, D.C., the former firemen were called to put out a massive blaze at the Willard Hotel. Across the state line in Alexandria, Va., a large Confederate flag was raised above the Marshall House after Virginia seceded from the Union. This was no small irritant to Lincoln, as he could see the standard via a spyglass from the White House. Sending a flag of truce to prepare the now-Confederate town for their impending visit to capture that place, Ellsworth informed his men that they were under intense scrutiny and that very little bloodshed was anticipated.

Ellsworth wrote his parents the night before leaving Washington extolling the “sacred duty” upon which he was embarking. The colonel was not planning to order his men to take down the large Confederate flag; he wanted to remove it himself and personally present it to Lincoln. Pistol in hand, Ellsworth climbed a ladder to access the hotel’s roof through a trap door. His task accomplished, Ellsworth made his way back down the ladder, dragging the huge standard. As they descended the stairs, they came upon the hotel’s owner, James Jackson, his shotgun leveled at the young colonel. Ellsworth fell instantly after the discharge of the weapon, his blood falling on the flag. One of Ellsworth’s men, Private Francis Brownell, returned fire with his own rifle, killing Jackson. It was too late, however.

Ellsworth was already gone.

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ven as a young boy, Elmer Ellsworth had a high appreciation for American military history. Ellsworth spent hours studying the United States’ martial figures. He had drawn images of two of the most heroic generals, George Washington and Andrew Jackson, and wanted to transform them into a painting. Unfortunately for the enthusiastic nine-yearold, Ellsworth used his mother’s window shade material as the canvas for his latest masterpiece.

After a hard life as a young man, Ellsworth’s job failures led him to where he belonged in the first place, a militia unit known as the “Chicago Cadets of the National Guard.” A chance meeting with Frenchman Dr. Charles A. DeVilliers helped guide Ellsworth to the unit. An expert swordsman, DeVilliers tutored Ellsworth in fencing and enthralled him with stories of his service during the Crimean War as an officer in a French Zouave regiment. Learning enough French to understand the complex Zouave drill manual, Ellsworth also replaced the shabby uniforms with the colorful attire of the French Algerian style. The young man eventually rose to lead the group. From this moment forward, Ellsworth “knew that God had made him a soldier.”

A confidant of President Abraham Lincoln, Ellsworth curried enough favor to become commander of the 11th New York Volunteers as the war began.

Just a week after the First New York Fire Zouaves—

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Martyred Hero In death, Ellsworth instantly became synonymous with patriotism. The brass mat framing this handtinted ambrotype is imprinted with American flags, military symbols, and “The Union Now and Forever.”

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I ascended the stairs. Stepping over the body of Jackson, who still lay where he had fallen, I entered the room where all that was mortal of my beloved friend and commander lay silent in death. I will not attempt to describe my emotions while gazing upon that sad scene. I could scarcely credit my own senses.

There lay one whom I had seen only a few minutes before full of life and the vigor of early manhood, cut down without a moment’s warning by the hand of the assassin. His face wore a very natural expression, and, excepting its pallor, his countenance looked the same as in life.

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he death of Elmer Ellsworth immeCrime Scene diately plummeted the North into a Ellsworth’s death was state of shared mourning. Flags reimagined widely in flew at half-staff, and church bells art, song, and poetry. tolled their sorrow. There were, This Currier & Ives however, two distinctly different points of illustration dramatically view about what had happened at the Mardepicts Jackson shooting shall House that day—that of the Union, and a stunned Ellsworth, that of the Confederacy. The one detail upon while Brownell readies his aim to shoot Jackson which both sides could agree was that two in retaliation. dead men were lying in pools of blood on the hotel’s floor. The description by journalist Ned House, an eyewitness, of the actions after both guns were fired is the same in almost every detail as the one given by Lieutenant Henry J. Winser and Private Francis Brownell in later accounts.

Many of those who lived at the hotel peeked out their doors, but no one stepped forward to attempt to help Jackson. The distressed men who had accompanied Ellsworth turned toward their colonel. Ellsworth had fallen

on his face, and the blood flowing from his chest was copious. The Rev. George W. Dodge turned him over gently, and House called his name.

There was some confusion in later accounts as to whether Ellsworth answered, but House eventually decided that the colonel had not uttered a thing since the shotgun blast had struck him.

House acknowledged that, in his initial report, he had claimed Ellsworth had spoken the words, “My God!” but he changed this to suggest that it may have been Brownell or Dodge instead, as both men were physically close to him.

House and Winser carried Ellsworth’s limp body to a nearby vacant bedroom, bringing with them the flag Ellsworth had died to cut down.

They placed the dead colonel on the bed. Using the flag, both men attempted to clean the blood from Ellsworth’s face, then they laid it at his feet, “purified by this contact from the baseness of its former meaning…” They crossed Ellsworth’s hands over his chest in the classic death pose and gazed sadly upon his young face. House wrote that “his expression in death was beautifully natural. The Colonel was a singularly handsome man, and, excepting the pallor, there was nothing different in his countenance now from what his friends had so lately been accustomed to recognize gladly.”

At that moment, the detachment of Zouaves that Ellsworth had ordered up when he first passed the Marshall House could be heard arriving. None of the soldiers had heard the shotgun blast, or Brownell’s return shot, so they were not aware of the terrible scene inside the old boarding house. Ellsworth’s friend from the Chicago Zouave days, Lieutenant Edwin B. Knox, was put in charge of the unit while their captain went inside to see what had happened.

The captain returned quickly. In a low voice, he spoke to Knox, telling him the awful news.

Knowing that Ellsworth and Knox had been friends, the captain suggested that he go inside:

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Knox returned to his unit, ashen-faced and shaken. He asked another Zouave to find the regimental surgeon, Dr. Charles Gray, presumed to still be at the wharf with Lt. Col. Noah Farnham. Knowing that Ellsworth had wanted to destroy the Western Union cable between Alexandria and the Confederate forces, House went with two Zouaves a bit farther up King Street to the wire service’s office. Finding several persons inside the small office, House and the Zouave soldiers made enough noise to convince the Confederate telegraph operators to vacate the premises quickly.

When House returned to the Marshall House, Mrs. Jackson was kneeling next to her husband’s body, crying with heart-rending agony. Flinging her arms in the air, seemingly abandoned to her grief, she did not appear to notice the Union men in the hallway. Lieutenant Winser finally helped her understand that neither she nor her daughters were in any danger and that they would be left alone.

Wrapped in one of the Zouave Cadets’ famous red bedrolls, Ellsworth’s body was tenderly carried out of the Marshall House on a stretcher improvised from rifles to the wharf, and eventually transported to the White House. Gray and Winser endeavored to keep Ellsworth’s death from the ears of the Fire Zouaves, but the news inevitably spread, leaving many of these “rough men” devastated, vowing to avenge his murder. As church bells tolled and flags were lowered to half-mast, Western Union telegraphs began alerting the entire North to the sad event.

Deadly Day Ellsworth was wearing this uniform frock coat when killed—note the shotgun blast hole in the left breast. His dear friend, Lieutenant Edwin B. Knox (above left), arrived at the Marshall House (above) shortly after the shooting.

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hree families were devastated by this news. On the morning of May 24, in upstate New York, Ephraim Ellsworth had walked through the streets of Mechanicville to the post/telegraph office. He guessed his son might be involved in the movement into Alexandria expected of the army; so he sat, waiting. The telegraph clicked throughout the early morning, then one of the operators suddenly gasped and burst into tears.

In this unfortunate way, Ellsworth learned of the loss of his son. He walked home slowly and broke the sad news to his wife. Much of the happiness of their lives was extinguished at that moment. They would not mourn alone, however. The entire North would support them in their sorrow.

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Solemn Salute Ellsworth was honored with one of the largest funerals in the nation’s capital to that time. As drawn here by famed artist Alfred Waud— using pencil and Chinese white on brown paper— the colonel’s body lies in state in the East Room of the White House.

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The Herald reporter recorded his impressions:

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llsworth would be laid out in an iron “window” coffin for the White House funeral.

It was painted to look like rosewood, and the upper half of the coffin’s lid contained an oval glass window to view the top part of the remains. He was dressed in his formal Zouave uniform—his jaunty red cap, formal sword, and kidskin gloves placed on top of the casket. The

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He [Lincoln] walked up and down the room for some moments, and we stepped aside in silence, not a little moved at such an unusual spectacle in such a man and in such a place.

After composing himself somewhat, Mr. Lincoln sat down and invited us to him. ‘I will make no apology, gentlemen,’ said he, ‘for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard. Just as you entered the room, Captain Fox left me, after giving me the painful details of his unfortunate death. The event was so unexpected, and the recital so touching, that it quite unmanned me.

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In Rockford, Ill., Ellsworth’s fiancée, Carrie Spafford, had arrived home from school for the summer. The day before, she had severely turned her ankle in a riding accident, so perhaps she was still in bed when the awful news arrived. She was so stricken by grief that she was unable to leave the house for several weeks, and then clad only in widow’s black. All of Rockford mourned the loss of Ellsworth, along with the Spaffords.

The third family devastated by Elmer’s death occupied the Executive Mansion. On the morning of May 24, naval Captain Gustavus Fox was detailed to bring the tragic news to Lincoln personally. He spoke with the president in the second-floor library, telling what he knew of the sad details. Lincoln, who loved Ellsworth as part of his presidential family, as a son, and as a special friend to his wife and children, burst into tears.

No one had ever seen Lincoln cry publicly, but he cried for Elmer Ellsworth.

Just as Fox left the White House, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and an unnamed reporter from The New York Herald, entered the library. They were there on “a pressing matter of public business,” and John Nicolay, one of Lincoln’s personal secretaries, did not yet know of Ellsworth’s death and gave them access to the president. As the two men entered the office, Lincoln was standing with his back to the door, looking out a window toward the Potomac River. As the men drew close he turned, his eyes filled with tears and his whole countenance one of profound grief.

He extended his hand, uttering, “Excuse me, but I cannot talk.” The men thought a cold had roughened his voice, but then Lincoln pulled a large handkerchief out of his pocket and again burst into tears.

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captured Confederate flag, stained with Ellsworth’s blood, was folded across the foot of the coffin, as it would be in subsequent services.

Lincoln asked the Rev. Dr. Smith Pyne of St. John’s Episcopal Church to give the funeral oration. Near the head of the casket stood Private Brownell, the Springfield rifle with which he had “avenged” Ellsworth’s death on his shoulder. After several hours, a full military cortege, complete with muffled drums, furled flags, and Ellsworth’s riderless black horse, escorted the colonel’s remains to Union Station. There, with an eight-member guard of New York Fire Zouaves, his body was put on a special funeral train for New York City.

There, in City Hall, Ellsworth’s coffin lay in state. More than 10,000 mourners filed past to pay their respects. Later in the day, a private service was held for him at the Astor House, where his devastated parents took custody of his body before escorting it, along with his honor guard, on a steamer up the Hudson River to Albany.

Church bells tolled and a cannon saluted as the steamer docked in the state capital the morning of May 27. The Albany Zouaves, a local militia unit organized just after Ellsworth’s 1860 Zouave tour had performed in their city, escorted the coffin to the capitol, where they placed it on a large catafalque prepared in the State Assembly’s chamber. Thousands of mourners streamed past, remembering that bright “Zouave” summer less than a year ago, and thinking of the sons, brothers, and husbands they had sent to Washington in response to Lincoln’s first call for troops. Brownell left the coffin only once, to speak to Governor Morgan and tell him, firsthand, the story of what had happened that day in Alexandria.

Ellsworth’s body was eventually taken by train to Mechanicville to complete the sad journey. The distance from the railroad depot to the hilltop burial ground was a little over a mile. In the funeral procession were Ellsworth’s parents, the Black-Plumed Riflemen of Stillwater (at least those who had not joined the Army), most of the local townspeople, and Ellsworth’s Zouave honor guard, still marching together in sad cadence. A late May afternoon thunder-

storm erupted in the middle of the procession, referred to as “tears from God himself.” It finally cleared up, and mourners filed past the casket for three hours.

Private Brownell sat on the wooden platform, holding the flag that had started it all. The crowd asked to see the flag, so he stood and unrolled it, to groans at the sight of Ellsworth’s bloodstains. Brownell then dropped the flag to the wooden floor and stomped on it with his booted foot. At 5 p.m., ropes finally lowered the coffin into the ground. The Zouave honor guard fired three volleys in salute, then put down their rifles and picked up shovels. Those eight men buried their little colonel, each saying a final, private goodbye.

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he 19th-century world viewed death very differently than people do today. When he was killed, Ellsworth had already experienced the death of his brother from typhoid. He lived at a time when infant mortality was so high that parents knew to prepare themselves for early loss. What might seem unnatural to many today—that a parent might bury a child—was the natural order of things in antebellum America.

The Avenger Wearing a makeshift mourning band and a variety of pendants and cockades on his Zouave jacket, Private Brownell plants a foot on the notorious Confederate flag. It took more than a decade for him to receive his Medal of Honor.

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one died epitomized the life just ended, and predicted the quality of life everlasting. The battlefield deaths of Civil War soldiers, dying unattended by family and unable to atone for improper actions, was going to be exceedingly difficult for Americans both North and South to accept, but that terrifying reality was still about two months away.

Ellsworth was the last public figure of the time to be given the honor of a Good Death, and the North followed as many of the prescribed rituals as possible. For a historical moment, the esteemed colonel became the Union’s brother, son, and loved one.

Music, poetry, and art were ways in which Americans celebrated the life and death of the deceased, as these things kept the image of the fallen hero always visible. The North was quick to capitalize on the patriotic spirit created by everything Ellsworth had ever done. The nationalistic music industry was invigorated, with compositions written to honor Ellsworth providing a large part of the energy.

One effort, the “Zouave Cadets’ Quickstep,” had been composed by A.J. Vaas, conductor of the Light Guard Band that had accompanied the U.S. Zouave Cadets on their Chicago tour. It was not a dirge or memorial piece—the Cadets had used it in their tour performances. Root and Cady, a Chicago publishing firm, produced a piano version that sold well. “Messrs. Root and Cady…are daily receiving orders by the hundred, from all the principal cities of the Union.”

In general, the steady stream of patriotic music became a flood.

Memorialized At least nine different musical The French Algeriantributes can be found in various inspired uniforms the library collections nationally, and Cadets wore graced the published sheet music of these are completely written and an Ellsworth tribute song inscribed. Funeral marches, (above). The colonel’s dirges, and ballads bear witness image was a common to the national outpouring of feature on envelopes early grief and mourning that took in the war (left). place for Ellsworth.

Death poetry as part of the outpouring of grief in the rituals of the Good This idea was especially significant to parents of a young man heading Death had long been a staple in antebellum off to war. Ellsworth himself was highly aware of this. Before heading to Alexandria, Va., the colonel wrote letters to his parents and fiancée, CarAmerica, but the Civil War brought a new perrie Spafford. Although soldiers did not necessarily court death, it was mutation—the “Dying Soldier Poem.” It was a always present in their lives. Ellsworth wanted his loved ones to know stylized type of verse that sought to give heroic he was ready to make this final sacrifice, as this would help them mourn, significance to individual war deaths, which in if necessary. reality may have occurred en masse, or from dis“The Good Death”—a concept concerning the understanding of morease rather than in battle. This poetry brought tality—presented an ideal death experience for both the dying and the livthe reader directly to the point at which the death occurs, where the soldier fearlessly coning. Drew Gilpin Faust, in her book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, defines a “good death” as a set of rituals for dying fronts the inevitable while keeping his thoughts based on Victorian beliefs. In mostly Christian America and Britain, how on the heavenly rewards which were surely his

The Beat Goes On Ellsworth’s image was painted on this 44th New York regimental drum. The 44th was known as Ellsworth’s Avengers or the People’s Ellsworth Regiment, with former 11th New York officer Stephen Stryker its first colonel.

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due. In a “Dying Soldier Poem,” every death was beautiful and heroic. Today such works might be considered painfully formulaic and maudlin, but they served a specific purpose: to help the living remember their soldier and to realize that no war death was in vain, no matter what the actual circumstances of that death. So many memorial poems appeared after Ellsworth’s death that it is almost impossible to catalog them.

Because Ellsworth was the first Union “hero” to fall in a time when the war was more an idea than a reality, he became a cult-like figure in the eyes of the Union.

Poems, songs, sermons, and memorial envelopes lamented his loss, thousands of parents named their babies after him, and streets and towns still bear his name. Memorial images of Ellsworth’s death appeared in every Northern city’s news publications. The best of these is the painting by Alonzo Chappel, who also painted Lincoln and other prominent American historical figures. Copies of the painting were made in the years following Ellsworth’s death. The print firm of Currier & Ives rushed to their presses a stylized version of the event, which included Francis Brownell and James Jackson. Although this print is less historically

accurate than Chappel’s painting, it was the most widely distributed of all the images created. Many remain in existence today.

Both Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s were lavishly illustrated papers, and their artists returned to the topic of Ellsworth many times after his murder. Newspapers created drawings of Ellsworth’s carte de visite images as well as other images made by photographers of the day.

Both Brownell’s image, as well as that of 11th New York Lieutenant Stephen W. Stryker, was copied from his portrait sitting, after Ellsworth’s

“Pet of the Family” Gone

Mary Lincoln, grief-stricken that the “pet of the family” was gone, was the first to arrive at the Navy Yard to pay her respects. She would speak with Brownell, learning all she could.

Ellsworth was the first Union soldier to be embalmed. Washington specialist Dr. Thomas Holmes, whose services Mrs. Lincoln had personally requested, was already at work with his assistants and the First Lady was unable to view the remains. Considered the “father of American embalming,” Holmes offered to do the work for free, using arterial embalming, a technique he had devised.

Ellsworth’s right carotid artery, along with his right internal jugular vein, were used.

When Mrs. Lincoln later returned with the president, the two sat quietly with Ellsworth’s body. According to John Hay, one of President Lincoln’s two personal secretaries, they “gazed long and tearfully on the still face which had so often brought sunshine with it, into the Executive Mansion.” Lincoln was heard to say, “My boy! My boy! Was it necessary this sacrifice should be made?” The president specifically requested that a guard of honor transport the remains from the Navy Yard to the East Room of the Executive Mansion, where the funeral would be held. —M.G.

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Eyewitness to Murder Lieutenant Stephen W. Stryker was part of the 11th New York honor guard to accompany Ellsworth’s remains from Alexandria to his burial in Mechanicville. Here, he poses—as did Francis Brownell—with the flag in Mathew Brady’s Washington, D.C., studio.

death, at the Mathew Brady Studio in Washington, D.C., as well as a photograph of him taken in Albany during the funeral procession. All these images were widely distributed throughout the North and helped to arouse the feelings of national mourning that engulfed the region.

Elmer Ellsworth did not die at home, his hand held lovingly by Phebe or Carrie. He was killed in a Virginia hotel, bleeding out on worn wooden

floorboards. He was the first of many denied a Good Death by a war that would quickly become known as “cruel” by all concerned. Reconstructing the Good Death when a loved one had died far away from home was one of the greatest challenges of the Civil War. The best solution, North or South, was a letter of condolence—a “letter home” from a comrade or a commander.

All soldiers struggled within themselves to make sense of the slaughter, but even more so, they struggled to communicate the circumstances of a death to those eager to know the fate of the men so dearly loved and missed.

Knowing the deceased might never be found and moved to a home cemetery, the letter of condolence assumed an importance it had never enjoyed before. Homage given to the dead was offered not only out of respect; it was a way of reclaiming a sense of selfhood in a situation where individuality barely existed. The sanctity and integrity of human life, so obviously absent from a pile of severed limbs or corpses, could be reaffirmed in a personal letter. Most soldiers hoped that, if they were killed, someone would do the same for them, recognizing and honoring their existence.

Receiving a condolence letter from Abraham Lincoln himself honored Ellsworth’s family. Lincoln was famous for his elegant words in speeches and writings, and his letter of condolence to Ellsworth’s parents is one of his most famous pieces of personal correspondence. It was written the day after the East Room funeral and had remained lying on Lincoln’s desk for several days. With deep compassion, Lincoln

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It would take more than a decade for a fitting memorial to be placed at Ellsworth’s gravesite in Mechanicville, N.Y., but finally in 1873, the New York State Legislature erected a tall, imposing granite obelisk in Hudson View Cemetery. Subscriptions and a donation from the First Regiment Zouaves helped cover the cost of the marker, which was eventually topped by a black iron eagle. The money from the First Regiment had come from the $500 gift Ellsworth was given by the Willard brothers in gratitude for the heroism the First New York Fire Zouaves displayed in dousing the fire at the Willard Hotel in April 1861.

In 1997, the iron eagle was stolen from atop the memorial, compelling the Albany-based Col. George L. Willard Camp #154, a Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War group, to begin a concentrated campaign to recover it. Finally, a December 1997 Internet posting paid off. An antiques dealer in Sangamore, Mass., realized the eagle was in his collection and had it returned to authorities in Mechanicville, allowing it to be reinstalled atop the memorial. —C.K.H.

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praised his friend Ellsworth to his grieving parents. It is easy to picture the still-distraught president sitting at his desk, the telegram to his left: Washington, D.C. May 25, 1861 To the Father And Mother of Col. Elmer E. Ellsworth: My dear Sir or Madam, In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own. So much of promised usefulness to one’s country, and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall. In size, in years, and in youthful appearance, a boy only, his power to command men, was surpassingly great. This power, combined with a fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste so altogether military, constituted in him, as it seemed to me, the best natural talent, in that department, I ever knew.

And yet he was singularly modest and deferential in social intercourse. My acquaintance with him began less than two years ago; yet through the latter half of the intervening period, it was as intimate as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit. To me, he appeared to have no indulgences or pastimes; and I never heard him utter a profane, or intemperate word. What was conclusive of his good heart, he never forgot his parents. The honors he labored for so laudably, and, in the sad end, so gallantly gave his life, he meant for them, no less than for himself.

In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address you this tribute to the memory of my young friend, and your brave and early fallen child.

May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power.

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Sincerely your friend in common affliction, A. Lincoln Why did the Union embrace the death of Ellsworth so completely? Did Lincoln’s grief set the tone, or was there some indescribable something, realized only in the atoms of Union bone marrow, that whispered the promise of a long, sad war? Politicians and the military on both sides had predicted a short war, and an end to the “unpleasantness” before it was fairly begun; but then, Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman knew better: “[Y]ou might as well attempt to put out the flames of a burning house with a squirt gun. I…think it is to be a long war—very long—

Personal Grief Lincoln did not hold back in his letter to Ellsworth’s parents: “So much of promised usefulness to one’s country, and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall.”

much longer than any politician thinks.”

In a nation used to adhering to rigid customs regarding the body of the deceased and its burial, and mourning, the Civil War would create many changes in form, although not in underlying attitudes. Ellsworth’s elaborate multi-state funeral was the last of its kind, until that other terrible death—Lincoln’s—in April 1865. In between, two nations sought ways to ease the grief of broken bodies and broken hearts. Resting in peace was impossible while the war still ripped the country apart. Many Union families were quickly exhausted by their personal experiences with loss, which could not be appropriately honored or remembered in the old ways.

The memory of one soldier’s grand funeral would have to suffice. It must have given comfort to forlorn families, as many of them simply never saw their loved ones again.

“Never,” it was opined in The New York Times, “has a man of Ellsworth’s age commanded such national respect and regard in so short a space.”

Adapted with permission from First Fallen: The Life of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, the North’s First Civil War Hero (Savas Beatie, 2021). Meg Groeling, a teacher for more than 30 years, writes from Salinas, Calif.

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‘We can NOw rEjoice’

An Ohio teacher got his first true taste of battle as Vicksburg fell in the summer of 1863.

Two arduous but fulfilling years in uniform followed

By James Robbins Jewell

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n May 20, 1863, Thomas L. Evans, a lieutenant in the 96th Ohio Infantry, lamented in a letter to his brother: “We are still stationed here guarding this post while the army is taking Vicksburg.” The “here” was Louisiana’s Sommerset Plantation, which belonged to ardent secessionist John Perkins Jr., a member of the Confederate Congress.

Evans’ regiment was part of the force detached at Sommerset while the bulk of Maj. Gen. John McClernand’s 13th Corps pressed on toward Vicksburg. Fearful he would miss the capture of the Mississippi River bastion, he felt “exceedingly confident that it must fall in a day or two if it is not already ours. So we will not be in the fight.” His optimism for a quick end to the siege was premature.

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By Any Means To break through the formidable Southern defenses during the Vicksburg siege, mines were dug beneath several redans and packed with explosives. Depicted here is the June 25 Union attack through the crater left by one of those explosions at Fort Hill.

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After two attempts to batter through the tasted nothing but medicine for 48 hours and ate but Vicksburg defenses were bloodily repulsed little for two or three days before [that] so I am getting pretty weak.” on May 19 and 22, Union commander Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant informed his To assuage his parents’ concerns, he penned a corps commanders to “immediately short note two days later, promising to write often, commence the work of reducing the “at least till I get right stout again so you need not enemy by regular approaches.” To conhave any uneasiness about me.” By the next day, duct the siege phase of his campaign to he was able to eat full meals and walk about camp capture the city and open the Mississippi for up to a quarter mile at a time, news that cerRiver, Grant needed to gather all his forces. tainly reassured his parents. Although he was on the Evans and his comrades moved to join the mend and would be out of the hospital within two rest of their brigade, commanded by days, he shared news that many others were not Brig. Gen. Stephen Burbridge, already so fortunate: “[T]here is a good deal of sickness Determined Volunteer in the siege lines facing the city. The in camp now [and] much of it very serious.”

This photograph of Thomas regiment arrived in early June; not only Evans was fully recovered when the 96th Evans is undated, but it was likely taken during his had Evans badly miscalculated how marched out of their encampment in mid-Octo12-day stay at Camp long the Confederates would hold out, ber, pressing to catch Confederate forces under Delaware after he joined the he was also there to witness—and Brig. Gen. Humphrey Marshall near Lexington.

96th Ohio in August 1862. record—the surrender.

Although the Ohioans did not confront Marshall’s forces, they did gather up Confederates who became separated from Smith’s and Bragg’s retreating columns. native of Marysville, Ohio, Evans had turned 23 on April 17, 1861—just three During the remainder of the fall, Evans encountered increasing numbers days after the surrender of Fort Sumof slaves who freed themselves when Union forces arrived. “Some of them,” he told his sister, were “pretty bright looking and well enough ter—but he decided to go into teaching dressed, others ragged and forlorn looking beings.” Being in one of the rather than fight. In 1861, he earned a degree from Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, slave states that had not seceded placed Union officers in a difficult position regarding those slaves who fled, something Evans and his comrades a progressive university that opened its doors in 1847 as a coeducational institution and was on saw firsthand. Some “owners went to the Col. [Joseph W. Vance] and a stop along the Underground Railroad. In wanted him to hunt them up for them but he told them he did not do that August 1862, however—the outcome of the war kind of work nor allow any other man to search his camp”; however, he still in doubt—Evans joined Company C of the did tell the slaveowners “where they could find them.”

96th Ohio Infantry as a second lieutenant.

Despite having encountered mostly secession supporters during his first During the regiment’s 12-day stay at Camp months in Kentucky, he and his comrades appreciated the reception they Delaware, the religious Evans reported, with received in Paris in late October. There, despite arriving after dark on a apparent relief, that his “fellow officers are indeed not very pious but they are truly moral and addicted to no vices which is indeed very fortunate for me and you may all rest assured that when I return, I will still be the same boy, at least I hope no worse.” Picking up bad habits from his comrades would be the least of his worries during his nearly three years of service.

After the brief stay at Camp Delaware, the regiment was sent to Kentucky in response to offensives by Confederate forces commanded by General Braxton Bragg and Maj. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith. Although the 96th did not partake in the major fighting in Kentucky, in particular the Battle of Perryville, it was part of the Union forces left in the state during the fall.

Like many Civil War soldiers, Evans became Bluegrass State Brigadiers sick quickly after the regiment began its Union Brig. Gen. Stephen Burbridge (left)—Evans’ first brigade commanextended encampment, probably with dysender—and Confederate Brig. Gen. Humphrey Marshall. The Kentucky tery. Since most Civil War deaths were the natives were engaged in the commonwealth in the fall of 1862. Marshall result of disease and not battle wounds, his parwas not at Vicksburg; Burbridge served in John McClernand’s 13th Corps. ents must have been distressed to read, “I have

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OHIO HISTORY CONNECTION

THE DECATUR HERALD; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

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OHIO HISTORY CONNECTION

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Impressive Resume Primary engagements in which the 96th Ohio served are listed on its regimental flag—from Fort Hindman (Arkansas Post) in January 1863 through the Siege of Vicksburg to Alabama’s Spanish Fort, part of the 1864-65 Mobile Campaign.

cool mid fall night, “The town was well illuminated and [United States] flags waved everywhere and shouts for the union arose from every point but the colored population was the more numerous and the more exultant part.” They saw “heads out of the upper story windows and candles before their face showing a broad grin that seemed to say Old Abes proclamation [the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had been issued on September 22] is made good. (The army says Amen to that.)” The regiment remained in Kentucky until mid-December, at which time the regiment boarded the transport Hiawatha for transfer to Louisiana.

It is unlikely local White residents were as receptive to the Union forces as the supporters in Kentucky when they reached Youngs Point, La.—across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg—in late January 1863. The Ohioans remained across from the fortified Confederates, watching, for three months before being sent north to Milliken’s Bend in mid-March. Used primarily as a reserve force, the 96th spent a month there before moving to Perkins Plantation, where it remained for yet another month.

The 96th continued to sit on the sidelines as Grant isolated Vicksburg in late April and May through a series of battles in Mississippi at Grand Gulf, Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, and Champion Hill before encircling the city. With the siege finally at hand, Evans and his comrades got the chance to join the front lines.

In his first letter home after the 96th reached the Vicksburg lines, Evans regaled his father with a description of the bombardment of the city: “It is indeed beautiful to see the shelling and would be more so were it not so moonlight. To see the mortars throwing the shells up up up so high then rool [sic] down and when near the ground the quick bright flash followed by a roar that seems to pass with one continued bound from one rugged hill to another and before it dies away followed by others and grand as we sit on the hills or in the rifle pits and watch them.”

With more than a little satisfaction, he also boasted he and his comrades “have almost quit dodging at the crack of a cannon or whiz of a shell.”

Arriving at the siege after Grant’s May 19 and 22 attacks on the Confederate defenses, Evans and the rest of the 96th Ohio spent the next month working on their lines, making them “much stronger by making improvements in our rifle pits and planting cannons along them,” and watching the systematic destruction of the Confederate positions by Union

artillery. While few men around him were lost to Confederate fire, the heat and humidity of the Mississippi summer began to take a toll.

Although he withstood it, “quite a number of the boys have the chills and fever.”

Grant’s decision to settle into a siege meant Vicksburg was subjected to heavy and frequent bombardment. On June 20, “at 4 o’clock the guns along our whole line opened on them until 10 o’clock it was one continuous roar of cannon

“I have tasted nothing but medicine for 48 hours and ate but little for two or three days before [that] so I am getting pretty weak.” from the little 6 pound field piece to the 220 pound mortars.” To Evans, it looked “like it would not be a very healthy place to live,” still “the rebs did not say quit once so we just kept on until we got tired and quit of our own accord.”

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setting up shop in Vicksburg

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PETER NEWARK AMERICAN PICTURE ARCHIVE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

DANA B. SHOAF COLLECTION; MELISSA A. WINN COLLECTION; EVERETT LIBRARY/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

After the fall of Vicksburg, two photographers traveling with Ulysses S. Grant’s army—D.P. Barr and J.W. Young—established a gallery in town to photograph prominent landmarks as well as soldiers and officers, including Grant and his chief of staff, John A. Rawlins. In the photograph here of Grant, taken in August or September 1863, the rising star wears his new shoulder boards. Grant had been promoted to a major general on July 7, 1863, and Rawlins to brigadier general on August 11, 1863. Perhaps to commemorate the promotions, the two visited the photographers, maybe even together.

For unknown reasons, Barr and Young ended their partnership the following year. In June 1864, Barr bought out Young’s portion of the Vicksburg studio, and it appears the two engaged each other with a competitive spirit thereafter. Young opened his own gallery, the Washington Photograph and Ambrotype Gallery, on the 3rd floor of the Odd Fellows Hall. He advertised his shop as “Guaranteed to Give Satisfaction” and made sure to note that he had hired J.E. Joslyn, formerly of Anthony & Brady’s Galleries of New York, to “execute work in the most beautiful and desirable manner.”

Barr opened his own Vicksburg studio, “Palace of Art,” and a second one in Paducah, Ky. On June 11, he announced in the local newspaper that he had the entire interest in the In the Studio firm formerly known as Barr & Young, and was Barr & Young photographed Generals Grant (top) and ready to make photos “of every description with Rawlins (left) in 1863. neatness and dispatch.” He also noted that “all Young opened his own negatives made by the late firm are in my possesVicksburg photo studio, sion.” Barr marked his CDVs, “D.P. Barr, Army below, after the two went Photographer, Palace of Art, Vicksburg, Miss.” separate ways in 1864.

—Melissa A. Winn

the heat, one monotonous day after another, Evans finally got the chance to participate in the action. On June 26, he wrote his father “We went up to the front 200 yards from the reble works and laid there from three o’clock until 5,” when “the rebles opened on us.” The Union forces responded and “in five minutes there was a perfect roar of musketry and cannon all along our lines for miles from the river above to the river below….The shells were bursting over them thick and our troops were firing rapidly with their muskets.” The firing kept up until dark, at which time his command returned “to camp with not a man hurt.”

Despite the pyrotechnics, Evans and his comrades were part of the secondary front. The day before, Grant’s sappers exploded a mine under an earthen fort known as the Louisiana Redan, on the northern shoulder of the Confederate defenses, several miles to the right of the 96th Ohio’s position. The mine was detonated at 3:30 p.m., lifting clouds of earth and destroyed equipment into the air and covering the field in smoke and dust.

However, it did not have as devastating an impact as Grant had hoped.

The Confederate commander in the redan had realized Union sappers were tunneling under the fort, pulled the Louisiana men out of the fortification, limiting the mine’s impact. Union troops rushed into the breach but were turned back after a costly 36-hour struggle.

With Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton’s men firmly holding a defensive line beyond the crater, most of Grant’s force, including Evans and his comrades, returned to their monotonous daily routine. For Evans that meant, “The work of digging rifle pits near the reble forts is still progressing.” The sapper units, however, kept busy digging tunnels underneath the Confederate position facing the crater left by the June 25 explosion. On July 1, Evans informed his sister that he anticipated being ordered out on an attack before the end of the day, in conjunction with the next detonation.

While the mine was exploded, the attack never materialized. Grant chose

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DANA B. SHOAF COLLECTION; MELISSA A. WINN COLLECTION; EVERETT LIBRARY/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

Relentless Fire Federal sharpshooters, such as these in Battery Hickenlooper, near the Shirley House, were used to harass their Rebel counterparts, charged with killing members of work parties operating in the Union trenches.

Lucky Abraham Fortune found Abraham, a slave used to dig countershafts as a defense against Union mine efforts. In one mine explosion, he was literally blown into the Union lines—and freedom.

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to avoid a repeat of the bloodbath of the 25th.

Evans was relieved when no attack order came, admitting, “I am not very anxious to move toward Vicksburg until the rebs in that direction become a little more tame.”

Although Evans did not know it, the siege was nearly over. On July 3, he witnessed the beginning of its last day when Confederate Maj. Gen. John Bowen and Lt. Col. Lewis M. Montgomery, one of Pemberton’s staff officers, approached the 96th Ohio’s lines under a flag of truce. Fortunately, Evans recorded what transpired in a letter to his mother: Battle Field near Vicksburg, July 3rd, 1863

that is they all disappeared in the same way that they appear[ed] in the morning. In about an hour we receive the following note “The rebles this day offered to surrender Vicksburg on conditions but Gen. Grant refuses anything but an unconditional surrender.” As this was official we know it is so but of course know nothing of what the conditions are. That was about three hours ago. Now there is another flag of truce over and the Reble Officers are in consultation with Gen. Grant at his Head Quarters. Thus thing[s] stand & tomorrow is the 4th & I shall wait till then to finish.

July 4th Vicksburg is ours. That is all I can say No other words can express my feelings.

More than six months ago we left Memphis to take Vicksburg & now it LOOK AND LEARN/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

Dear Mother: The weather has been very warm the past two or three days & things have been very monotonous as usual about camp but the monotony was broken this morning. About 8 o’clock this morning the cry was there is a flag of truce coming.

In a few minutes we were up on the rifle pits and all the reble works & ours were covered with men. They lined up out of the pits & came into sight as if by magic.

In a few minutes here came Gen. Bowen & Col. Montgomery Reble bearers of dispatches from Gen. Pemberton to Gen. Grant. They passed us each blindfolded and led by a Federal officer.

They the Rebs remained on their works while we remained on ours in many places only a few yds apart but no conversations was allowed.

However they would stray off from both sides and get together & we have some curious specimens of conversation between them. Curiosity was on tip toe now. What was up? Did the rebles want to surrender? A thousand rumors were afloat not one of which was believed. Thus things remained until about noon when the dispatch bearers returned to their own works & Both Armies Hunted their holes, as we say here

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Cease Fire at Last Union troops watch from the trenches as Confederates march past during the formal July 4 surrender. Note the gabions, cylindrical baskets filled with earth and used for added protection.

is ours & though it has cost terribly we can now rejoice in triumphant success. What would I not give to day to whisper in your ears Vicksburg is ours. But before you get this you will know the truth.

After six months such as we have spent well may we rejoice. But of the 80 of us who left Memphis only 40 are here to witness our success & when we look around for our friends & miss them our pleasure is mared by their absense. But they have fallen in a good cause & not in vain. Thus we are deeply impress[ed] with the conflicting emotions of joy & sorrow joy for our success & sorrow for the fallen.

The 4th of July has a new meaning to me now. I have rejoiced & spent many happy hours on the 4th But never before felt as I did when I saw the rebles hoist the white flag on the row of forts in our front at ten o’clock this morning. The terms of surrender are unconditional [actually, Grant did assent to Hot Potatoes a few concessions] and the details are Opposite: Invented in arranged between the generals. Quinbies 1861, Ketchum grenades [Brig. Gen. Isaac F. Quinby’s] Division of were part of the Union the 17th Army Corps are to go into town & arsenal, to be hurled at close range from take charge of the prisoners. Where we will the trenches. Though go or what we will do of course we know not. designed to land shell There will of cours be a force left here to first and detonate, they hold the plase. Where the rest will go I know were often caught with not. Some may [think] so to Port Hudson blankets, allowing Rebels some North & some after Jackson in our to throw them back. rear hear. I would rather go to Port Hudson

than stay here. If all the people in the North were loyal & would rejoice with us, and rush to our support and crush Lee’s forces in the East now is the time to crush this Rebellion, speedily and effectively but if the North are divided and stand still and let Lee go on as he has started I can see no end to this war – nothing but a continued war from year to year but I still have faith in and rely on the loyalty of the North.

My health continues good and the health of the Co. has improved. With love to all I remain Your affectionate son, Thomas

T

here was little time for Evans and the rest of Smith’s division to savor the great victory. After just one day, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman headed east to attack Confederate forces under Gen. Joseph Johnston, gathered at Jackson. The move to capture the Mississippi state capital proved costlier to Evans than had his time in the siege lines at Vicksburg. During an initial assault on the city on July 10, teenager Ashbury Turner—“one of the best boys we had and as good and brave a MAY 2022

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James Jewell, a frequent America’s Civil War contributor, teaches history at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

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EASTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY’S JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Confederate port city, Mobile, Ala., on April 12.

The 96th remained in Mobile until June, then disbanded. Evans was mustered out on July 7, 1865, in Decatur, Ill. Once mustered out of the Army, Thomas Evans returned to Marysville, where he married Anna E. Childs less than six months after his discharge, on January 3, 1866. He returned to the education field, first as a principal for numerous schools in Lafayette, Ind., before eventually moving to Illinois to help organize a high school in the town of Paxton, roughly 110 miles south of Chicago. In 1880, he left Paxton to become principal of the public school in Sangamon, a position he held for six years, before being elected to one term as the superintendent of all Sangamon County, Ill., schools. Defeated for reelection, he immediately returned to Paxton as superintendent, where he remained until stepping down in 1904. The couple had two children.

Evans died May 10, 1916, nearly 53 years after he sat outside the rifle pits at Vicksburg, watching two Confederate officers pass, blindfolded, to initiate the surrender of the city.

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soldier as ever lived”—was hit by a solid Prison Time artillery shot. “He fell with a shriek,” Evans Captured at the Battle wrote. “His left hip and leg shot off with a of Mansfield on April 8, cannon ball and bowels gushing out.”

1864, Evans was Although Evans wished he could remain sent to Camp Ford with the dying boy, he knew he had to catch in Tyler, Texas, the up to the advancing regiment as it closed on Confederates’ largest the Confederates. This assault, and a larger prisoner-of-war camp west of the Mississippi one two days later, failed to carry the ConRiver (above). He was federate works. Realizing he could not exchanged that October endure a siege and that his escape would and returned to action. soon be cut off, Johnston abandoned Jackson on July 16. After helping to tear up railroad tracks, the regiment, including a sick Evans, returned to Vicksburg on July 24, remaining there for a month.

The campaign to capture the key Mississippi River port city had ended, but Evans had two more years of active service ahead of him. Those years proved more challenging than the first with his regiment. After a fall spent in Louisiana and a winter in eastern Texas, Evans next participated in the early stages of the Red River Campaign. He was captured at the April 8, 1864, Battle of Mansfield, La., where his regimental commander, Colonel Vance, was killed. Eventually the Confederates forced the Union prisoners captured at Mansfield to march 125 miles to Camp Ford in Tyler, Texas.

Three weeks after being captured, he warned his parents, “We may be exchanged in a month or two and may not for a year so it is doubtful you will hear from me.” It was neither; his exchange took place on October 23, 1864. After processing, he returned to his regiment, now with the rank of captain. The following spring, he served during the surrender of the key

EASTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY’S JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS LIBRARIES, THE PORTAL TO TEXAS HISTORY, CREDITING STAR OF THE REPUBLIC MUSEUM

An Untapped Resource The Thomas L. Evans Papers, including his wartime letters, a copy of his diary, and a photocopy of an image of him, are housed in the Archives and Special Collections Department at Eastern Washington University’s John F. Kennedy Library in Cheney, Wash.

The manner in which they got there was not typical of the many Civil War collections held at archives throughout the West, ending up there because many veterans moved westward after the war to raise their families. Evans, however, returned to Ohio, then in 1871 moved to Illinois, where he lived for the remainder of his life. His daughter, Mattie Wiley, and her family moved to Waterville, Wash., sometime between 1900 and 1905.

Despite living so far away, she was the oldest child and inherited her father’s papers. The letters and diary eventually passed from Mattie, who died in 1958, to her daughter, Alice M. Dickie.

In 1972, Alice Dickie donated the Evans Papers to Eastern Washington University, while living in Richland, Wash. Why she chose what was then Eastern Washington State College is unclear. She was a teacher, however, and perhaps she had a soft spot for what had been, until 1937, Cheney State Normal School, a teacher’s college.

Like many other Civil War manuscript collections in the West, Evans’ writings have remained almost entirely forgotten. Other Civil War material housed at EWU includes another set of letters from a Union soldier who served at Vicksburg, and a large collection of

John S. Mosby family letters— Mosby’s son, Beverly, lived for many years in nearby Spokane, Wash. He left the collection behind when he moved, as collateral for a loan he never repaid.

While the concentration of first-person material does not equal what can be found in libraries in the East, there are important collections spread from the Huntington Library in Southern California to Cheney, and many places in between. Civil War scholars should begin to look west of the Rocky Mountains for “forgotten” first-person accounts of service during the war. —J.R.J.

Secure Home This photo of Evans and pages from one of his wartime letters can be found at Eastern Washington University’s Archives and Special Collections Department.

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Human ColLAteral

African American refugees sheltering at Harpers Ferry faced an uncertain future when the town fell to Stonewall’s Confederates in September 1862

By Alexander B. Rossino

STONEWALL JACKSON AT HARPERS FERRY BY MORT KÜNSTLER 1992 MORT KÜNSTLER, INC., WWW.MORTKUNSTLER.COM

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Calm Between the Storms Stonewall Jackson leads his staff down Shenandoah Street after capturing Harpers Ferry on September 15, 1862. The next day, Jackson led his Left Wing to Sharpsburg, Md., leaving A.P. Hill’s Light Division to secure the city.

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he principal story of Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s victory at Harpers Ferry on September 15, 1862, is already well-known. Two days before the epic Battle of Sharpsburg, Md., Jackson succeeded in capturing the key twinriver Union bastion in nearby Virginia, forcing 12,500 Federal troops to surrender while losing barely 300 killed and wounded of his own. Typically overlooked is that, in the process, Jackson’s men also seized thousands of refugee slaves and freemen who were sheltering with Colonel Dixon Miles’ Harpers Ferry command.

No official Confederate report on the Harpers Ferry operation made mention of these prisoners, which Northerners and Southerners alike called “contrabands” due to their legal status as property. Fortunately for posterity, The Richmond Dispatch covered their capture and transportation to the Confederate capital in some detail, mentioning the prisoners for the first time in an article that appeared on September 18, 1862. Stating “The whole garrison…surrendered on Sunday morning,” the Dispatch noted how “our forces captured about one thousand negroes.” Seven additional reports then appeared in the Dispatch and The Richmond Enquirer over the next five days outlining the story of what happened to these unfortunate human spoils of war after they fell into Rebel hands.

Following the Federal garrison’s surrender, Jackson assigned Maj. Gen. A.P. Hill to parole enemy soldiers and collect captured property for transportation to the rear. Hill commenced these tasks on September 15, and by September 16 thousands of Union prisoners began the long march from Harpers Ferry to Frederick, Md., and points beyond. At the same time, some of Hill’s men scoured the town for all the Blacks they could find, rounding them up for transfer south.

A witness to these events named Abba Goddard described them in her journal, writing, “Every nook, cranny, barn, and stye has been searched and men, women, and little children in droves have been carried off…our hospital laundresses, and our men servants, without a word of warning, were seized upon” and taken.

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some of these individuals returned to their masters. “I met to-day hundreds of negroes taken at Harper’s Ferry going home with their owners,” the report’s author wrote from Winchester under the pseudonym ACCOMAC. “Most of them seemed in fine spirits, singing ‘Carry me back to Old Virginia,’ &c.” Major Andrew Wardlaw of the 14th South Carolina had a similar personal experience while enjoying the hospitality of the local Bell family, who “were delighted to see the Southern Army [and] had fifteen negroes at Harpers Ferry.” No fewer than “1200 negroes were captured & restored to their owners,” confided Wardlaw to his diary, including the helpful “Mrs. Bell [who] got 10 of hers.”

Still other contrabands ended up being confiscated by the Confederate army rather than returned to their owners. According to The Richmond Dispatch on September 24, this occurred because their “masters propose to offer them for sale in Richmond, not deeming them desirable servants after having associated with the Yankees.” Finally, on that same day, the Dispatch noted how “[t]wo car loads of negroes arrived in this city yesterday by the Central Railroad.” The men responsible for completing this task belonged to the brigade of Colonel Edward L. Thomas, according to A.P. Hill’s Maryland Campaign report. Noting that he “remained at Harper’s Ferry until the morning

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between the major and Colonel William H. Trimble of the 60th Ohio Infantry. Trimble had secured a pass for the Black non-combatants in his regiment, but when they tried to leave town the Confederate major attempted to separate them from the column anyway. Trimble pulled his sidearm in response and compelled the officer to step aside at gunpoint, saving the Black personnel in his command from being seized.

By September 20, according to The Richmond Dispatch, the number of contrabands Hill collected had ballooned to as many as 2,500—many of whom were marched to Winchester, Va., along with the guns, ammunition, and other materiel captured at Harpers Ferry. Additional details of the operation began to appear in the Dispatch by September 22, which reported that “a large number of contrabands…had taken refuge with the Yankee thieves…[including] negroes [who] belonged to citizens of Jefferson and adjoining counties. A letter before us states that one gentleman from Clarke [County], who had lost 31 negroes, found 28 of them in this lot.”

Subsequent reports on September 23 and 24 also noted that the contraHe Turned the Tide bands were captured “slaves” and Maj. Gen. A.P. Hill left Harpers “negroes, whom the Yankees had Ferry the morning of September stolen.”

17, reaching Sharpsburg in time According to one report that to foil a probable Union victory. appeared in Southern newspapers,

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

Freedom Seekers This Edwin Forbes sketch for Harper’s Weekly depicts a familiar wartime sight: enslaved people fleeing to Union territory.

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of the 17th…at 6.30 a.m., I received an order from General Lee to move to Sharpsburg. Leaving Thomas, with his brigade, to complete the removal of the captured property, my division was put in motion at 7.30 a.m.”

A wealthy planter before the war, Thomas commanded four regiments of troops from Georgia, including the 14th, 35th, 45th, and 49th Infantry, so it was likely these men who oversaw the transfer of the contrabands from Harpers Ferry to Richmond.

There is evidence that others in the Army of Northern Virginia knew about these events at Harpers Ferry. For instance, a letter written by Colonel Francis H. Smith of the 9th Virginia to Virginia Governor John Letcher on September 16 also appeared in the Dispatch on September 20. Writing that the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry had surrendered unconditionally, including “10,000 men, with all the arms, fifty pieces of artillery, ammunition, 100 wagons, quartermaster and commissary stores, and many cars, some of which were loaded,” Smith counted “600 negroes” among those seized.

Smith’s regiment belonged to Brig. Gen. Lewis Armistead’s Brigade in Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson’s Division of Longstreet’s command.

As such, the 9th Virginia passed through Harpers Ferry on the way to Sharpsburg. It did not participate in the processing and removal of prisoners and materiel after the Federal garrison’s surrender. Thus, Smith either saw for himself, or received word from others, that a significant number of Blacks had been captured.

A commissary sergeant with the 13th Georgia, part of Brig. Gen. Alexander Lawton’s Brigade in Jackson’s command, also wrote home about the event, informing his fiancée that after Jackson had compelled the Federals “to surrender

Finishing the Job Union commander Dixon Miles (right) would be mortally wounded during Harpers Ferry’s capture. Colonel E.L. Thomas (left) handled the Rebels’ transfer of contrabands to Richmond.

on the 15th September….We took 11,700 Temporary Haven prisoners & small arms, 76 cannons, 3000 When Confederates ‘contrabands’ and many stores of all kinds.” entered Harpers Word also traveled through the civilian Ferry, they found this populace, as noted by Joseph Addison Wad“contraband camp” on dell, a former newspaper editor and wartime Washington Street, one clerk in the army quartermaster’s office in of several established by escaped slaves seeking Staunton, Va. Recording in his diary that protection within United “Maj[.] Yost has just arrived from Harper’s States lines.

Ferry,” Waddell confirmed “that…Gen. Jackson…had captured at Harper’s Ferry 11,000 prisoners and 1500 negroes, 50 pieces of artillery, all their ammunition, commissary and Quartermaster’s stores.”

Similarly, a brief mention of “1000 negroes” captured at Harpers Ferry made it into the local newspaper of Camden, S.C., in late September 1862, proving that some in the South far from the front heard about the event.

The matter-of-fact language used in the article indicates, however, that it raised no special interest.

This remarkable incident demonstrates how at the same time they were fighting a war for Southern independence, General Robert E. Lee’s men also enforced standing state property laws concerning captured contrabands. The removal and sale of the Harpers Ferry captives would prove to be a foreshadowing of events to come when, during the Gettysburg Campaign, Maj. Gen. Richard Ewell’s Second Corps seized and shipped south Black men, women, and children in Pennsylvania with little regard for their legal status.

Alex Rossino writes from Boonsboro, Md. He is the author of Their Maryland: The Army of Northern Virginia From the Potomac Crossing to Sharpsburg in September 1862 (Savas Beatie, 2021), from which this article is adapted.

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eral victory, and the town remained in Union control. More important, the action in Hanover stalled Stuart’s reunion with Lee until late on July 2, the Battle of Gettysburg's second day. His absence, Lee famously griped, deprived him of “the eyes and ears” of his army, which many have mused contributed greatly to the Confederate loss in the epic three-day battle.

Today, the town square of Hanover is a bustling intersection occupied by shops and eateries. Interpretive plaques and signs on nearly every corner convey the history of the once-quiet hamlet, including an overnight stay by George Washington during his presidency. A monument to the Battle of Hanover commemorates the action that ripped through the streets here in 1863 and critically impacted Gettysburg's outcome. Civil War enthusiasts will find nearly a dozen sites of interest around the town that Union Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton famously pronounced “saved the fate of the nation.” —Melissa A. Winn

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PHOTO BY MELISSA A. WINN; VESPASIAN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; PHOTOS BY MELISSA A. WINN (2)

Trailside is produced in partnership with Civil War Trails Inc., which connects visitors to lesserknown sites and allows them to follow in the footsteps of the great campaigns. Civil War Trails has more than 1,400 sites across six states and produces more than a dozen maps. Visit civilwartrails.org and check in at your favorite sign #civilwartrails.

On the morning of June 30, 1863, chaos erupted in the town square of Hanover as Confederate cavalry commanded by Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart attacked Brig. Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick's rear guard, driving the Federals through the streets. Brigadier General Elon J. Farnsworth counterattacked with the 5th New York Cavalry, forcing the Rebel troops to abandon their brief hold on the town. Colonel William Henry Fitzhugh Payne, commander of the 2nd North Carolina, was captured after his dying horse pitched him into a tanning vat and a Union soldier pulled him out.

Fighting continued south of Hanover until noon, when Stuart and his men withdrew and moved north to link up with General Robert E. Lee’s army moving toward Gettysburg. Kilpatrick reported 19 Federal troops killed, including two officers, and 178 wounded or missing. Confederate casualties included more than 150 wounded and 20 killed.

The engagement was considered a Fed-

PHOTO BY MELISSA A. WINN

FIERCE FIGHTING THROUGH THE STREETS OF THIS HAMLET STALLED J.E.B. STUART’S ARRIVAL AT GETTYSBURG

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Battle of Hanover 1 Center Square This monument of a Union cavalryman rests atop a granite pedestal in Hanover’s town square, marking the sight of the furious showdown between Confederate and Union forces June 30, 1863. A dog at the base of the statue, known as “Iron Mike,” was originally in Hanover’s Mount Olivet Cemetery. In another corner of the square, two Parrot Rifles indicate the movement of Union artillery through the streets of Hanover en route to Gettysburg July 1, 1863.

Union Mills

3311 Littlestown Pike, Westminster, Md.

Thousands of Confederate and Union soldiers passed through the crossroads at Union Mills in the days prior to Gettysburg. Major General J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry arrived at the home of William Shriver here late on June 29. They camped overnight on the grounds and headed toward Hanover after a breakfast of pancakes. Just a few hours later, troops from the Union army’s 5th Corps arrived and Brig. Gen. James Barnes, 1st Division commander, made it his headquarters for the evening. The historic landmark is now a museum, offering tours and hosting special events. unionmills.org

Kilpatrick’s Headquarters

PHOTO BY MELISSA A. WINN; VESPASIAN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; PHOTOS BY MELISSA A. WINN (2)

PHOTO BY MELISSA A. WINN

7 Center Square General H. Judson Kilpatrick took headquarters in this building after the fighting June 30. Known as the Central Hotel during the war, it is one of the only antebellum buildings still standing in town. It now hosts shops and restaurants.

Winebrenner House

234 Frederick St.

By about 10 a.m. June 30, the 18th Pennsylvania Cavalry halted on Frederick Street near this house, owned

by Henry Winebrenner. When the first shots of the engagement were fired about a half-mile away, the rear guard of Kilpatrick’s cavalry division galloped into the area. Confederate artillery shells were fired toward the town, and the southwest side of Winebrenner's home. An artillery shell penetrated the balcony door, went through a chest of drawers, and ended up in a first-floor room where most of the family were huddled. The shell struck a brick wall but did not explode. Mr. Winebrenner grabbed the shell and threw it outside into the yard.

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1. Town Square 2. Kilpatrick’s Headquarters 3. Winebrenner House 4. Pleasant Hill Hospital 5. Reformed Cemetery 6. Utz Factory 7. Hanover Junction 8. Union Mills

Pleasant Hill Hospital 305 Baltimore Street After the Battle of Hanover, local doctors and citizens treated more than 60 wounded soldiers in Center Square. About 40 of them ended up here when Pleasant Hill Hotel was converted to a makeshift hospital. After the nearby Battle of Gettysburg, the government rented the building as an official army hospital from July 10 to August 15, 1863, to treat the wounded. Dr. Perrin Gardner, the surgeon in charge said, “A heartier response to the calls of humanity never came from a more generous people than we have witnessed here.” Today the building houses the Hanover Historical Society.

Reformed Cemetery School Avenue and Walnut Street By 9 p.m. June 30, the nearly 40 Union and Confederate dead of the Battle of Hanover were placed in caskets and buried here. The Reformed Church’s Reverend W.K. Zieber performed ceremonies for the deceased. The men were later reinterred, but the cemetery remains as one of the oldest of Hanover’s burial grounds.

Hanover Junction

Utz Potato Chip Factory 900 High Street No trip to Hanover is complete without a tour of the over 600,000-square-foot factory that produces Utz potato chips and products!

Tours run Monday–Thursday, and the factory outlet store is open 7 days a week.

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Besides being a critical railroad junction, Hanover Junction served as a major telegraph dispatch station during the war. Confederate cavalry, the 35th Battalion, Virginia Cavalry (“White’s Comanches”) occupied Hanover Junction on June 27, and destroyed some railroad property before moving north to York. On November 18–19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln traveled through Hanover Junction to and from dedication ceremonies for the Gettysburg National Cemetery. The station now houses a museum with Civil War images, memorabilia, and displays devoted to the history of the junction and the town.

PHOTOS BY MELISSA A. WINN (4)

2433 Seven Valleys Road

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can’t-miss books Visit savAsbeatie.com to order toDAY!

PHOTOS BY MELISSA A. WINN (4)

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THE SUMMER OF ’63: GETTYSBURG Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives From the Historians at Emerging Civil War

edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch A compilation of anthologized, revised, updated, and new pieces from Emerging Civil War.

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THE SUMMER OF ’63: VICKSBURG & TULLAHOMA Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives From the Historians at Emerging Civil War

by Alexander B. Rossino

A compilation of anthologized, revised, updated, and new pieces from Emerging Civil War.

A well-documented reassessment of Lee’s march to Sharpsburg in September 1862 sheds new light on old subjects.

edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch

THEIR MARYLAND The Army of Northern Virginia From the Potomac Crossing to Sharpsburg in September 1862

THE BOY GENERALS George Custer, Wesley Merritt, and the Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac

by Adolfo Ovies

THE GREAT “WHAT IFS” OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR Historians Tackle the Conflict’s Most Intriguing Possibilities

Examines the strategy, tactics, and relationships of the leading Union army’s mounted arm and their influence on the course of the Civil War in the Eastern Theater.

A collection of fourteen thoughtful essays by the historians at Emerging Civil War.

edited by Chris Mackowski and Brian Matthew Jordan

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5 QUESTIONS

Interview by Sarah Richardson

Rebel Warriors

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Civil War. The reason for that goes back to the removal [of Native Americans from their homelands in the American Southeast from 1830 to 1832]. The American Civil War amplifies these older fault lines. What appealed to the Choctaw Nation, Choctaw legislators, and Choctaw citizens about Confederate ideology? Why were they so committed to the Confederate cause, especially when they had been pushed out of their homelands by some of these same Southerners?

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What made you decide to focus on the alliance between Choctaws and the Confederacy?

I began some preliminary research on a Choctaw project and found in the legislative records that the Choctaw were very supportive of the Confederacy, so supportive in fact that they had legislation to declare speaking against the Confederate Army as a crime of treason. And I thought: Wow, that is unexpected, and a firmer commitment than I imagined they would have. My first book was about the Cherokee Nation, which had its own internal civil war because of disagreement on whether to participate in the American

The Ties That Bind Choctaw warriors perform the Eagle Dance, an annual celebration to the War Eagle, whose feathers were used to honor the tribe’s “brave.” Warrior pride was a factor in the Choctaw’s Southern kinship.

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM COLLECTION

To piece together a history of the Choctaw Nation’s surprising Civil War alliance with the Confederacy, cemented by a treaty in 1861, Fay A. Yarbrough meticulously sifted through archives at the Oklahoma Historical Society and the University of Oklahoma. The exhaustive effort led to her book Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country (UNC Press, 2021), which describes the culture of the Choctaw, the interests they shared with Confederates, and why they supported the South rather than the Union. Roughly 3,000 Choctaw filled the Choctaw Mounted Rifles’ ranks; 100 would die in service.

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What did each group think it was getting from the other?

The Confederates were very concerned about Indian Territory and the possibility that if the nations in Indian Territory sided with the U.S. government, they could make inroads into the South. There would be a strategic advantage given to Union forces if they were allowed to amass in Indian Territory and then launch attacks from Indian Territory. So the Confederate government is very concerned, and very early on some folks from Arkansas and Texas quickly go to Indian Territory and attempt to convince Native nations to ally with them. The Confederate government offers all kinds of inducements.

They offer to honor all the treaty obligations that the federal government quite frankly hadn’t. They offer to pay all the debts, the financial obligations from the federal government to the Choctaw Nation and the Chickasaw Nation, and offer to pay for the cost of raising a military force among them. The Choctaw negotiated for the right to control their own forces so they couldn’t be ordered outside of Indian Territory without their own approval.

The are offered a very enticing arrangement to gain their support.

you think about it as a percentage of the population (about 20 percent), it’s pretty large. They complain later that they aren’t getting what they need from the Confederacy. The Confederate Army is having trouble supplying and uniforming and feeding troops—White Confederate troops—so you can imagine that racism is still alive and well, and they aren’t going to make provisioning Native troops a priority. Even one of the White generals complains to the Confederate authorities that “you haven’t done these things that you promised to these native troops. If you lose their loyalty, it would be your own fault.”

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What happened after the war to those formerly enslaved by the Choctaw, compared to those who had been enslaved in the South?

The big difference was access to land ownership.

The Choctaw held land communally, which is not what happened in the American South, so granting freed people Choctaw citizenship gave them access to land in a way that citizenship for freed people in the South did not give them access to land.

That difference is where you see some advantages for Choctaw freed people that you don’t see for the newly freed in the South. Another way to read that is that the Indian Territory undergoes What influence did the role a kind of Reconstruction in the way of the warrior have in the that the Confederate South does, and Choctaw Nation? that Reconstruction is going to be the Perhaps one of the things that basis for making inroads on Native was drawing Choctaw men to serve sovereignty. So you can read that was because they had begun to lose distribution of land to Choctaw freed this ability to serve as warriors to reach people as an attempt for the federal full manhood. The federal government government to divest the Choctaw of was discouraging them from fighting more land, because it’s divided and with other Native groups—which in the you might be able to purchase land past gave you the opportunity to from those freed people. It goes to the demonstrate your ability and your unevenness of how the federal daring to earn your name, to marry and Native American Paeans government applies what’s going to all those things. The war provides an Fay A. Yarbrough is professor of history at Rice University. Her happen in Reconstruction. They don’t opportunity to reclaim these older ways first book was 2013’s Race and the demand that White Southerners in of asserting manhood. But the Native Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in Georgia, Alabama, or Texas give land tradition involved quite short skirthe Nineteenth Century. to their formerly enslaved people. mishes, not mass death on the battleAnd they know very well that access field. What you see in the Civil War is to land is a consequence of giving citizenship to freed striking in terms of casualties, because the technology of people in the Choctaw Nation or Cherokee Nation. So it the weaponry is improving while the medical care was not works to the advantage of freed people that the Choctaw making leaps and bounds the same way. I think at this follow this traditional practice of owning land communally. point they were seeing what war looked like, and it didn’t It doesn’t come from the place of magnanimity on the part look the way they had fought war in the past. of the federal government. It’s a part of divesting Native people of their land.

Confederates promised $500,000 to the Choctaw for arms and supplies. How many enlisted?

For the rest of our exclusive interview with Fay Yarbrough, The database that I compiled has about 3,000 troops. It might seem like a small number, but when go to bit.ly/ChoctawConfederates

COURTESY OF FAY YARBROUGH

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM COLLECTION

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Sanctuary The state of Indiana purchased the eight-room, Federal-style Coffin House in 1967. Restored, it reopened to the public in 1970, with an interpretive center added in 2016.

The Levi and Catharine Coffin House in Fountain City, Ind., may

seem off the beaten path for Civil War aficionados, but that was not the case for thousands of enslaved people in antebellum America, for whom it was a symbol of incredible hope—appropriately labeled the “Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad” in the 1840s.

Today the restored house and its barn are part of the Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historic Site, which also features an exceptional interpretive center that helps put in perspective the vital role the Coffin family played during the buildup to the Civil War. Originally from North Carolina, Levi Coffin and his wife, Catharine, were Quakers who strongly opposed slavery and eventually moved to Indiana, where they would live for 20 years in what was known at the time as Newport. The small town of Fountain City is not far from the Indiana–Ohio state line in Wayne County, about 93 miles northeast of Indianapolis via Interstate 70.

Abolitionist and slavery themes are present as soon as you enter the Interpretive Center. A dual-purpose timeline on the first floor provides a look at the IN PERSON history of slavery and the law and also examines the rich Coffin family history. One Levi and Catharine of the first things you will see is a telling Coffin House State quote by Levi: “I date my conversion to AboHistoric Site litionism from an incident which occurred 201 US-27, Fountain when I was about seven years old. It made a City, IN 47341 deep and lasting impression on my mind, Wed.–Sun., 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and created that horror of the cruelties of

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slavery which has been the motive of so many actions of my life.”

Despite the peril, Levi and Catharine were fully committed to assisting freedom seekers make their way to Canada. They would help liberate more than 1,000 freedom seekers while they resided in Newport.

The Interpretive Center’s second floor has a self-guided exhibit gallery titled “Souls Seeking Safety,” where the challenge of telling such a rich story in a relatively small space is more than met. Photographs, graphics, text, and interactives in the gallery blend seamlessly for a rewarding experience.

The interactives adopt both a physical and passive approach. Visitors, for instance, learn the story of Henry “Box” Brown by lifting the lid of a reproduction of the crate that Brown used to ship himself to freedom, a journey lasting 27 hours. Another exhibit looks at Catharine’s sewing circle as its members discuss abolitionism. The most powerful interactive, however, is a cutaway reproduction of a false-bottomed wagon used to transport freedom seekers to and from the Coffin House. Placing your head in

STAN ROHRER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Hoosier State Gem

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REVIEWS the concealed rider’s space, you can hear the sounds of the road, including a conversation between a wagon driver and bounty hunter.

Another nice feature is a lighted map showing key cities and the confluence of three major routes near the Coffin House that freedom seekers used to cross the Ohio River: Cincinnati, Ohio; Jeffersonville, Ind., and Madison, Ind. Nearby Quaker settlements providing further support are shown.

As is the case in many such house tours, there is great focus on the Coffin House’s architecture and furnishings. The spaces and voids tell a key story, as they provided freedom seekers refuge—spaces in which they could hide, eat, sleep, and dream of freedom until the next leg of their journeys.

Notably, visitors enter the house through a side door, the same threshold that freedom seekers crossed in the 19th century.

The furnishings are primarily of the period. The first floor has a kitchen, a guest room, and a sewing/sitting room where Catharine’s sewing circle made clothes for the freedom seekers. The kitchen area has a discreet curved staircase that visitors can use to enter an upstairs bedroom under the roof ’s eave. The short door in the shortest wall of the room provides access to a garret, space capable of housing up to 14 freedom seekers. Visitors can peer through the doorway to see that precarious hiding place.

Tours of the Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historic Site are a powerful experience, well worth your time. To date, reservations are required for tours and numbers are limited due to pandemic-related guidelines.

The Interpretive Center is ADA-compliant; however, the Coffin House does pose challenges for visitors with limited mobility.

The staff makes every effort to provide full access to the house, offering visitors with mobility issues alternate ways to gain access to certain rooms, including an alternate wider staircase to the upper floor and alternate entryways to the basement.

For those confined to wheelchairs, the first floor is readily accessible. Upon request, staff will provide visitors photographs or a link to a virtual tour exploring the second floor.

To find out more about the Levi and Catharine Coffin House State Historic Site, go to indianamuseum.org/historic-sites/levicatharine-coffin-house. –Terri Sinnott

THE CONFEDERACY’S THIRD and final invasion of the North in June-July 1864 culminated with a ragtag collection of about 9,000 or so tired and thirsty soldiers under Lt. Gen. Jubal Early in front of Fort Stevens, a mere seven miles from the U.S. Capitol. Did Early really have a chance to capture, plunder, and ransack Washington D.C., and perhaps change the outcome of the war? Probably not.

Why then did Robert E. Lee send his “bad old man” on what would be an almost 900-mile jaunt when two previous excursions into Union territory by Lee in 1862 and 1863 had ended in defeat?

James Bruns, an independent historian, sets out to answer these questions and offers new insights and reasoning not explored in-depth by previous chroniclers. His robust narrative commences with the stealthy withdrawal of Early’s Army of the Valley from the trenches in front of Petersburg, and then follows it up the Shenandoah Valley to the lightly manned defenses of Washington, and concludes with its seemingly preordained retreat back to the Old Dominion. As Bruns points out, quoting Early, “Lee never expected his troops to enter Washington.” According to Early, Bruns notes, “Lee was satisfied with him merely threatening the Federal City,” that capturing it “would be impossible.’”

Bruns writes that Lee intended this incursion primarily as a food raid on the Crosshairs on the rich agricultural bounty of Northern Capital: Jubal Early’s farms, but he also maintains that Lee Raid on Washington wanted to turn the tables on the FederD.C., July 1864— Reasons, Reactions, als for the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid of Richmond in February-March 1864. and Results Although that raid failed, Bruns mainBy James H. Bruns tains that Lee considered Early’s raid Casemate Publishers, “worthy pay back” and asserts that “Ear2021, $34.95 ly’s action outside Washington likely prolonged the war by as much as a year and a half because of the food he rustled up.”

There was purportedly another objective to the raid. Early was to detach most of his cavalry under Brig. Gen. Bradley Johnson to Point Lookout, Md., site of a Union prison camp holding 10,000 or so Confederates captured at Gettysburg. This would be a joint operation with a naval component headed up by John Tyler Wood.

The combined Confederate forces would free the prisoners, arm them with rifles brought by Wood, and march them back to Washington to join up with Early’s army in attacking Washington. The raid never materialized, aborted by Jefferson Davis himself. Bruns’ detailed analysis shows that this aspect of the raid would have been impossible to fulfill, that it was doomed from the start.

In Bruns’ opinion, Early’s raid was a success, stressing that “he’d done what he came for.” Other historians and readers might disagree; nevertheless, Bruns’ monograph has added new fuel to a long smoldering story. —Gordon Berg MAY 2022

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A New Order From the moment Abraham Lincoln was elected president, both

enslaved and free African Americans held high expectations that he would ease their burdens. Jonathan White’s selection of letters offers glimpses of what many Blacks hoped for and how they viewed Lincoln—unlike any of his predecessors—as an approachable friend.

White has divided his book into three parts: Chief Executive, Commander in Chief, and Chief Citizen. Each consists of several chapters with explanatory introductions, several letters that retain their original spelling and grammar, and brief summaries of their outcomes. Because only an estimated 5 to 10 percent of enslaved people could read, and fewer still write, many of the letters were written down for the correspondents by northern missionaries, literate Blacks or, in rare instances, by Union officers.

Most of the 200 to 300 letters Lincoln received each day never reached him.

His personal secretaries Nicolay or Hay sifted through them and forwarded those To Address You as requiring a response to a cabinet memMy Friend: African ber, government official, or military Americans’ Letters to leader for disposition. Most of the letters Abraham Lincoln included in this book were considered of Edited by Jonathan sufficient importance to merit a recomW. White mendation to be forwarded to the presiUNC Press, 2021, $29.95 dent for his final decision.

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Although the relief Lincoln’s correspondents sought varied considerably, their letters shared common characteristics: a fulsome acknowledgment of the president’s high station, his assumed special relationship with African Americans, and the many demands on his time and energy, all of which presaged requests that he nevertheless consider the matter at hand. In an 1864 letter for instance, George Rodgers requests equal and timely pay from “My Dear and Worthy Friend/Mr. President,” who has “Proven A friend to me and to all our race.”

Eleven days before Lincoln was murdered, James Wilson requested equal pay for his work in a government lumber mill. “I believe you are a good friend to the colored people and wish to have them treated as they should be,” wrote Wilson, “but I suppose you have many cares and cannot attend to everything, but if you can, let us share equally with the white workers.”

A letter from A.P. Smith in the September 5, 1862 Liberator, stands out as the rare instance of a writer taking Lincoln personally to task, in this instance for advocating colonization in Panama. Dripping sarcasm, Smith asks “Pray tell us, is our right to a home in this country less than your own, Mr. Lincoln....Is it any more selfish than your own determination to stay here?” As to the plan for the émigrés to mine coal, Smith asks. “[W]hy should we, why should anybody dig coal? Do tell…. And then, good sir,” he concludes, “if you have any nearer friends than we are, let them have that coal-digging job.”

To Address You as My Friend gives life to the unique connection African Americans felt with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Although their “Dear and Worthy Friend” proved unable or unwilling to respond positively to many of their requests, the letters in this volume suggest that Black Americans’ trust in the president didn’t waver. Implicit in this relationship was the possibility that, had Lincoln lived, the efforts to integrate the freedmen and women into the postbellum United States might have been far more successful. –Rick Beard

FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED

Heaven-Sent Abraham Lincoln is greeted joyfully by former slaves in the streets of newly freed Richmond, Va., on April 4, 1865.

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UNIT HISTORIES IN THE SUMMER OF 1862, with Union forces menacing the Confederate capital, the 61st Georgia Infantry arrived in Virginia as part of a brigade commanded by Brig. Gen. Alexander Lawton. Attached to Stonewall Jackson’s force in the aftermath of its victory at Port Republic, Lawton’s men accompanied Jackson’s command to Richmond and first saw major combat in the Seven Days Battles. In the years that followed, the Georgians saw distinguished service as part of Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, and with Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley. By the time it surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865, G.W. Nichols boasted in his history of the unit’s service, “Our little command of never over twelve hundred men had marched about two thousand and five hundred miles; had killed, wounded, and captured about twenty-two thousand Union soldiers...invaded Pennsylvania and Maryland; had been to the very walls of Washington; had been in thirty-five hard battles and skirmishes, and had lost about five thousand men, killed, wounded and captured.”

It was indeed a remarkable unit and in his account of its history, which he began work on in 1887 A Soldier’s Story and published in book form 11 years of His Regiment later, Nichols provides both an (61st Georgia) and informative and highly readable Incidentally of the chronicle of the role it played in the Lawton-GordonEvans Brigade, Army Confederate war effort. (In 2011, a Northern Virginia new edition was published by the

By G.W. Nichols University of Alabama Press with an Jesup, Ga., 1898 invaluable introduction by Keith S. Bohannon.) Among the many highlights are Nichols’ account of the advance to Gettysburg and the evidence he offers of the energy with which the Army of Northern Virginia liberated the livestock of Pennsylvania farms during the campaign. While his battle accounts are of somewhat uneven quality and value, Nichols does provide quotable accounts of life in camp, as well as his experiences working in a hospital. In addition, A Soldier’s Story offers a good sense of the degree to which writers on their war experiences in the 1890s were animated by a desire to advance the cause of sectional reconciliation, which makes this a work not only useful to students of the military history of the war, but those with an interest in how participants wanted it and their experiences to be remembered as well. —Ethan S. Rafuse

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FIRST MONDAYS AN ORIGINAL VIDEO SERIES

Editor Dana B. Shoaf and Director of Photography Melissa A. Winn explore off-the-beaten path and human interest stories about the war, and interview fellow scholars of the conflict.

Live broadcasts begin at noon on the first Monday of each month.

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FINAL BIVOUAC

COLONEL

Alfred Warren Taylor “I was with Colonel Taylor when he by a single act or rash of poor choices was restored to his regiment. His men over a certain period, but it is often cheered him as he entered camp.

When he left for New York on businecessary to examine an entire life to gauge one’s true character. That was ness, the whole 800 men ranged along the case for Colonel Alfred Warren the road and gave him three cheers.”

Taylor, who was cashiered for drunkNevertheless, less than three enness in 1862 and, nearly two years months later, on July 7, 1862, Taylor later, attempted suicide. For the citiresigned his commission, apparently zens of Memphis, Taylor fortunately because of friction among his officers. didn’t succeed. In 1873, the onceHe relocated to Memphis and opened disgraced colonel turned hero by a shop selling military goods. single-handedly saving a neighbor’s On the evening of May 24, 1864— home engulfed in flames, likely predays after informing his friends that venting a fire from spreading throughhe intended to commit suicide—Taylor shot himself in the left breast. He out the city. Five years later, during the city’s devastating yellow fever epiwas found lying senseless in his home, demic, he was “conspicuous” in prothe pistol at his side. Despite a serious viding relief to his sick and dying wound to his left lung, he recovered. fellow citizens, even at risk to his own Taylor took advantage of the second health and livelihood. Indeed, his selfchance at life. On May 13, 1873, when lessness during the crisis ultimately a fire broke out at his neighbor’s killed him in October 1878 when he home, he single-handedly began to douse the f lames with buckets of contracted the deadly disease.

A Mexican War veteran, Taylor had water and subdued the conflagration before fire engines arrived. a promising start in the Civil War, appointed a captain in the 4th New When yellow fever ravaged MemYork Infantry (1st Scott Life Guards) phis in 1878, Taylor’s friends urged him to leave the city. In September, on April 24, 1861. A little more than roughly 200 people were dying per two weeks later, he was promoted to colonel. That August, however, he was day. Taylor joined the Citizens’ Relief reportedly so drunk during a parade Committee, which distributed food, in Baltimore that he was unable to soap, candles, bedding, etc., to those drill his regiment or communicate in need. “He was conspicuous as a with his superior, Maj. Gen. John Dix. member of the...committee, and was A New Life Some of Taylor’s fellow officers came zealous and punctual in the disA suicide attempt nearly brought to his defense and testified during his Alfred Taylor’s ignoble Civil War to a charge of [his] duties,” declared The court-martial that he hadn’t been as tragic end. Given a second chance, he Memphis Daily Appeal. “To the last became a hero in Memphis. inebriated as the reports suggested. he did his duty and stood by his fated But reports of earlier drunken escafellow-citizens of Memphis so long as pades in New York City helped seal his fate. The court he had health and life.” recommended that Taylor be cashiered out of the Army.

Taylor became sick and succumbed on October 5. He Taylor’s lawyer successfully appealed to President Abrawas buried along with other yellow fever victims in Memphis’ Elmwood Cemetery. –Frank Jastrzembski ham Lincoln to have the colonel reinstated, recalling, Final Bivouac is published in partnership with “Shrouded Veterans,” a nonprofit mission run by Frank Jastrzembski to identify or repair the graves of Mexican War and Civil War veterans (facebook.com/shroudedvetgraves).

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COURTESY OF THE ROBERT MAYER III COLLECTION; PHOTO BY FRANK JASTRZEMBSKI

Sometimes a man is judged entirely

AMERICA’S CIVIL WAR

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2/22/22 11:01 AM

Field Dress For Success The hunt for the perfect outdoorsman knife is over. There’s only one tool you need: the Whitetail™ Hunting Knife—now ONLY $49!

T

he consummate outdoorsman never goes on deep woods hunting trips without the essentials. Not just the basics for every hunting trip, but the items he’s come to depend on over the years.

Our new Whitetail™ Hunting Knife will quickly become your go-to blade for every expedition. The Whitetail™ is a premium fixed-blade hunting knife that’s perfect for skinning. With the Whitetail at hand, you’ll be ready for field dressing in only seconds, and you’ll never need a separate gut hook tool ever again. The Whitetail™ boasts a mighty 420 high carbon, full tang stainless steel blade, meaning the blade doesn’t stop at the handle, it runs the full length of the knife. According to Gear Patrol, a full tang blade is key, saying “A full tang lends structural strength to the knife, allowing for better leverage ...think one long steel beam versus two.”

The comfortable handle is made from pakkawood—moistureresistant and more durable than hardwood. If hunting is your life, then the Whitetail™ Knife was designed to make your life easier.

With our limited edition Whitetail™ Hunting Knife you’re getting the best in 21st-century construction with a classic BONUS! Call today and you’ll also receive this look inspired by legendary American pioneers. What you won’t get is the trumped up price tag. We know a thing or two about heavy duty sheath! the hunt–– like how to seek out and capture an outstanding, collector’s-quality knife that won’t cut into your bank account.

This knife can be yours to use out in the field or to display as the art piece it truly is. But don’t wait. A knife of this caliber typically cost hundreds. Priced at an amazing $49, we can’t guarantee this knife will stick around for long. So call today!

Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. What customers are saying Feel the knife in your hands, wear it on about Stauer knives... your hip, inspect the craftsmanship.  If you don’t feel like we cut you a fair deal, send it back within 30 days for a “Good value. Great looking. complete refund of the item price. But we Sufficiently sharp. Overall believe that once you wrap your fingers around an “A” purchase and the Whitetail’s handle, you’ll be ready to carve I ordered three.” your own niche into the wild frontier.

— B. of Maryland

Whitetail™ Hunting Knife $79*

Offer Code Price Only $49 + S&P Save $30

1-800-333-2045

TAKE 38% OFF INSTA NTLY! When you use

Your Insider Offer Code: WHK337-02 You must use the insider offer code to get our special price.

Stauer

® 14101 Southcross Drive W., Ste. 155, Dept. WHK337-02

Burnsville, Minnesota 55337

www.stauer.com

your

INSIDER OFFER CO DE

Not shown actual size.

*Discount is only for customers who use the offer code versus the listed original Stauer.com price.

Rating of A+

• 5 ¼” 420HC stainless steel blade • Full-tang design with gut hook • Pakkawood handle with brass pins • Bonus heavy duty nylon sheath

Stauer…Afford the Extraordinary.

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