Civil War Times April 2022

TRAGIC HOMEFRONT EXPLOSIONS H STURDY PARROTT CANNONS H

GETTYSBURG CONTROVER SY

DIGGING UP THE DEAD RUFUS WEAVER WAS CONTRACTED TO SEND CONFEDERATE CASUALTIES BACK HOME... AND NEVER GOT PAID

A grim task.

Gettysburg fallen are exhumed for reburial.

April 2022 HISTORYNET.com

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CIVIL WAR TIMES APRIL 2022

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ISLAND OF MERCY

An 1864 scene at a City Point, Va., dock.

The vessel at center appears to display a Sanitary Commission pennant.

ON THE COVER: Samuel Weaver exhumes Union Gettysburg dead from a Hanover, Pa., cemetery in 1864.

His son, Rufus, took over the family’s side business but focused on Confederate dead.

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Features

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28

Collateral Costs

By Janet S. McCabe Rufus Weaver spent years exhuming Gettysburg’s Confederate dead and sending them home.

Why didn’t he get paid in full?

38

Unfriendly Fires

By John Banks

Hundreds of Northern and Southern civilians paid with their lives when explosions tore through their munitions factories.

16

48

‘My Heart Bled for the Poor Sufferers’

By Melissa A. Winn

In newly found letters, a Sanitary Commission worker details his efforts to help Army of the Potomac soldiers and takes pot shots at the Christian Commission.

56

Jersey Boys

By Dan Casella

A move to a new home, headstones in a local cemetery, and a photograph inspire a quest for information about the fates of five Garden State infantrymen.

Departments

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6 8 14 16 20 24 27 62 64 72

Return Fire Colonel Irwin’s Conduct Miscellany They Saved Their Captain Details Rare Harpers Ferry Photograph Insight Abe Strikes a Chord Rambling In John B. Hood’s Footsteps Interview Animals Pay the Price Editorial Post Office Refresher Armament Parrott Rifles Reviews Follow Lee’s Men to Sharpsburg Sold ! That Cracker is Worth Money!

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; THE HISTORIC DAYS OF CUMBERLAND COUNTY; COVER: HANOVER AREA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; INSET: SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND COLLEGE ARCHIVES, MUSSELMAN LIBRARY, GETTYSBURG COLLEGE/PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN WALKER

APRIL 2022 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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Recuperating Union troops in New York City.

MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER

APRIL 2022 / VOL. 61, NO. 2

Major the dog, 10th & 29th Maine

EDITORIAL DANA B. SHOAF EDITOR CHRIS K. HOWLAND SENIOR EDITOR SARAH RICHARDSON SENIOR EDITOR

BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY AUSTIN STAHL ART DIRECTOR

What is your favorite regimental mascot?

Abe the eagle, 8th Wisconsin

THE LAST PATIENTS

A remarkable 1865 photograph captures the staff and residents of a New York City hospital. bit.ly/LastPatients

‘A TERRIBLE EXPLOSION WAS HEARD’ An eyewitness describes the horrible 1862 Allegheny Arsenal Explosion. bit.ly/AlleghenyExplosion

NAMING THE DEAD

Exhaustive research efforts are helping identify occupants of anonymous graves at Fredericksburg. bit.ly/UnknownDead

ADVISORY BOARD Gabor Boritt, Thomas G. Clemens, Catherine Clinton, William C. Davis, Lesley Gordon, Gary W. Gallagher, D. Scott Hartwig, John Hennessy, Harold Holzer, Robert K. Krick, James M. McPherson, Megan Kate Nelson, Sallie the dog, Ethan S. Rafuse, Susannah J. Ural, Phil Spaugy 11th Pa. Douglas the camel, 43rd Mississippi

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Curly the dog, 11th Ohio

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RETURN FIRE

Martin Pritchett’s “Irwin’s Brigade at Antietam” (February 2022) overlooks Colonel William H. Irwin’s serious misconduct at Antietam. When Irwin ordered Major Thomas W. Hyde’s 7th Maine Infantry to make an attack requiring at least a brigade, Hyde realized the Irwin order came “from an inspiration of John Barleycorn in our brigade commander alone.” Hyde obeyed and his regiment was ambushed and only by leadership that earned him a Medal of Honor did he save at least half his men; “I wished I had been old enough, or distinguished enough, to have dared to disobey orders.” A

Author Martin Pritchett replies: During my research for Brigades of Antietam I noticed there were variations to Thomas Hyde’s issues with Irwin, probably due to the passage of time eroding his memory. Given the opportunity to comment on the clash between Hyde and William Irwin, I could not throw shade on an officer’s legacy based on hearsay or innuendo. The charges against Irwin were dismissed, and he was breveted later in the war. There is no proof he drunkenly conjured up the 7th Maine’s attack, which was to support Emory Upton’s artillery that was under fire from Confederate sharpshooters. Hyde’s memoir, Following the Greek Cross, written 32 years after the battle, should be examined against his official report written two days after the battle. In that report, Hyde makes no mention of Irwin’s drinking. Hyde and the 7th deserve all the glory attributed to them, but they were one of many regiments or brigades dashed against unknown odds at Antietam.

Editor’s note: We regret misspelling author Martin Pritchett’s last name as “Prichett” in the February 2022 issue.

because he was instrumental in the abolition of slavery or, worse, because it’s an effort on your part to present his ideology in a more favorable light? In my view you cannot help yourselves.

Rick Huff Sykesville, Md.

Marx

Editor’s note: We objectively pointed out that Marx had an interest in the American Civil War and Lincoln, an intriguing bit of history. To claim those few sentences illustrate some sort of ideology on our part is overreach.

WHY MARX?

PATHBREAKING SURGEON

Of all the historical figures that have been why would you stoop so low as to point out that Karl Marx was a lover of Lincoln? Why would a man who authored the political ideology that brought about the brutal death of tens if not hundreds of millions disgrace the pages of Civil War Times? Was it

I was very surprised when reading the excellent article on Dr. Alexander Augusta in the February issue to see modern political rhetoric weave its way into the narrative. I do not deny that there has always been racism throughout the ages and that unfortunately it exists even today.

6

But I think that it was inappropriate for Mr. Williams to write, “similar indignities followed, all of them constant reminders of the country’s systemic racism” (italics added) in a publication like yours. That is advocating a current political thought into a historical narrative. I greatly enjoy your magazine’s articles. However, I am surprised that you allowed current racial politics onto your pages.

Steve Williams Prescott Valley, Ariz.

Author Michael Williams responds: I’m pleased that Mr. Williams enjoyed the article, but there are subtle but critical differences in contextual interpretation when it comes to the Civil War. The use of the term “racism” when referring to the 19th century is accurate.

Like the Speed of Light, the definitions of such words are constants. Regardless of the time period, they do not change. Racism is any decision, institutional or otherwise,

CIVIL WAR TIMES APRIL 2022

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); THE CIVIL WAR IN TENNESSEE COLLECTION; COURTESY OF DON TROIANI/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

Nice article in the February issue about the image of dead Union soldiers at Antietam! I decided to go and check it out for myself, and I agree with you. It seems likely those men belonged to the 20th New York.

Kevin Pawlak Antietam Battlefield Guide Manassas, Va.

week after the battle, Hyde wrote home, “The Colonel who ordered us in has been severely censured and may lose his commission,” but Irwin, sobered up, and apparently talked his way out of that.

Stephen W. Sears Norwalk, Conn.

USAHEC; IAANDAGNALL COMPUTING/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

ANTIETAM IMAGE

that is made based on race. This goes for White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian. In short, racism is racism in 1862 or 2022.

Under no circumstances, however, should we confuse the use of unchanging definitions like that of “racism” with the dismantling of statues, the removal of names from schools, and other attempts to erase the past. They are examples of imposing 21st-century standards on individuals who were products of a different era.

TENNESSEE COUNTY

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); THE CIVIL WAR IN TENNESSEE COLLECTION; COURTESY OF DON TROIANI/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

USAHEC; IAANDAGNALL COMPUTING/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

“Three for the USCT” in the February 2022 Miscellany section incorrectly stated that the city of Franklin, Tenn., my hometown, was part of “Franklin County.” Franklin is the county seat of Williamson County.

You correctly noted that no USCT troops took part in the Battle of Franklin (November 30, 1864), but they played a prominent role two weeks later in the decisive Battle of Nashville which effectively destroyed the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Huzzah for this long overdue recognition!

Patrick Bray Shaker Heights, Ohio

ARMAMENT THOUGHTS In the February 2022 “Armament,” the carved Minié bullet at the lower left is described as having a “classical motif.” I humbly suggest that perhaps it is a simple, albeit incomplete, rendition of the Georgia state seal. Who knows?

Perhaps the “RGA” inscribed on it is

ONLINE POLL

28.1

71.9 The Results Are In!

Our recent Facebook poll asked which event was a bigger turning point in the war. The 1862 Battle of Antietam or the 1863 surrender of Vicksburg?

Respondents left no doubt that they believe the capitulation of Vicksburg to General Ulysses S. Grant was the more notable event.

Our next poll goes online February 24.

for Rome, Ga., or the initials of a Georgia soldier. Just a thought.

Stuart McClung Hagerstown, Md. Enjoyable reading in the December 2021 “Armament” on the genesis of flintlock muskets converted over the years for use with percussion caps. I had never really thought of the military saving the older muskets, and turning them into “state of the art” weapons.

Thank you for this well-done article to explain how this was accomplished.

In a previous “Armament,” your emphasis on the importance of the soldier’s ammo pouches was extremely motivating for me to acquire a Confederate pouch to add to my collection.

Keep up the good work ! Can’t wait till the next issue!

Dennis Church Durham, N.C.

WORTH A MOVE A photo of the Ellen Glasgow house in Richmond, Va., appeared in the Octo-

ber 2021 “Worth a Move.” While originally built in 1841 for manufacturer David Branch, the house was subsequently owned by Isaac Davenport who perished in the 1865 evacuation fire. Davenport’s nephew, also named Isaac Davenport, was the co-founder in 1863 with Charles Wortham of the investment banking firm that became Davenport & Company, LLC in Richmond. The firm has remained in continuous operation since its founding and Wortham’s great-greatnephew is the chairman of the board. I worked for the company for 17 years.

Sam Ketterman Timonium, Md.

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU ! e-mail us at cwtletters@historynet.com or send letters to Civil War Times, 901 North Glebe Rd., 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203

APRIL 2022 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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MISCELLANY

ONE OF PRICKITT’S MEN

Gemtypes were about 1 inch wide and 1 1/4 inches tall. They were frequently mounted in card frames and placed in albums, as is the one above of Sergeant Hiram White.

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PHOTO BY MELISSA A. WINN; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE (2)

W

hen artist and genealogist Shayne Davidson was working on the family tree of a friend and stumbled upon a miniature photo album with gem-sized portraits of Black soldiers, she unearthed a fascinating story. It was one she felt needed to be shared and, because she’s an artist, also illustrated.

The album had belonged to William Prickitt, the White captain of Company G of the 25th United States Colored Troops, and the great-grandfather of Davidson’s friend. According to family history, Prickitt felt a special kinship for the men of his company after they nursed him through a debilitating illness that nearly took his life in 1864. Prickitt’s album contains locket-sized photos of 17 of the men of his command, each one carefully labeled with the soldier’s name.

“I kept wondering....would it be possible, through research, to discover more about their lives? Because I am an artist, I chose to make a life-sized portrait of each man in the album, based on his tiny photograph and physical descriptions from his military records,” Davidson says. “Since I’m also a genealogist, I decided to research each man’s life and try to build a family tree for him. Once the tree was completed I wrote a short biography of each man, including details about his life before and after the war.”

Her efforts culminated in the exhibit “Seventeen Men: Portraits of African American Civil War Soldiers.” The 17 portraits and biographies were first displayed at the convention center in Grand Rapids, Mich., during ArtPrize 2013. It’s been touring ever since and its next destination is the historic Craik-Patton House in Charleston, W.Va. The exhibit will be on display from March 1 through April 30 during regular visiting hours, Monday–Friday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. (craikpattonhouse.org).

CIVIL WAR TIMES APRIL 2022

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BOB BROWN/RICHMOND TIMES DISPATCH/AP PHOTO; EVA RUSSO/RICHMOND TIMES DISPATCH/AP PHOTO; DANA B. SHOAF COLLECTION

Gems Discovered

. LEE STATUE .

TIME CAPSULE

BOB BROWN/RICHMOND TIMES DISPATCH/AP PHOTO; EVA RUSSO/RICHMOND TIMES DISPATCH/AP PHOTO; DANA B. SHOAF COLLECTION

PHOTO BY MELISSA A. WINN; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE (2)

AFTER MUCH ANTICIPATION and on the second attempt, officials in Richmond found the 1887 time capsule embedded in the pedestal of the Robert E. Lee statue, which was removed from Monument Avenue on September 8, 2021. The copper box about the size of a large hat box harbored some 60 items.

Books, newspaper items, records of Confederate units, a tome from the Grand Lodge of Virginia, Confederate currency and notes, artifacts of battle including several Minié balls, as well as a Bible, Richmond guide, and coins from 1883 and 1853 were included. Soldier badges along with a small intricately carved Masonic flag and the Masonic icon compass and square, made from a tree that had grown over a grave, were also retrieved.

The items were discovered relatively intact, despite fears that water seepage could have liquefied the paper contents. The items are held for conservation at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

A DIFFERENT TIME

A ribbon given to attendees at the cornerstone dedication of Robert E. Lee’s Richmond statue was among the many items contained in the 1887 time capsule.

The copper box, right, remained surprisingly tight and waterproof.

WAR F RA M E WHEN THIS UNION VOLUNTEER went to have his image taken in uniform, he took along a framed print of the nation’s first president, making a symbolic statement that he was going to war to defend the country led

by George Washington. The print appears to be a copy of a painting by Gilbert Stuart, an affordable decoration that would have been in many middle-class homes of the era. Both North and South claimed Washington as an inspiration, and believed they were fighting to keep his ideals alive. This young soldier with a sense of history is unidentified, but he wears a jacket often attributed to New York State issue.

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MISCELLANY

REGISTER of the “devastating impacts” a massive data center campus would pose to Manassas National Battlefield Park, which he called “hallowed ground.”

More information about this new fight at Manasass can be found at growsmartpw.org.

Progress at Franklin’s HQ

Earthworks on the Williamsburg Battlefield.

Millions to Williamsburg Battlefield The National Park Service’s largest battlefield preservation grant ever awarded—$4.6 million—went to the 250-acre site of Williamsburg Battlefield in York County, Va., which has witnessed battles in both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Stories of enslaved African Americans on plantations in York County and their part in these battles will be part of the battlefield interpretation. For example, an enslaved man informed Union Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock that Confederate forces had abandoned redoubts, information that played an important role in the May 5, 1862, fight.

As the following photos prove, the Burkittsville Preservation Association of Maryland has accomplished a great deal at the farm used by Maj. Gen. William Franklin during the September 14, 1862, Battle of Crampton’s Gap. The house and barn were in imminent danger of collapse before the association stepped in to save the structures. To learn more, see the “Mountain View” interview in the February 2022 CWT, or contact the BPA at burkittsvillepreservationassociation.org.

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SHAPING UP

New roofs, clean brick, and fresh pine boards indicate the work done on the farm Maj. Gen. William Franklin used as his HQ.

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COURTESY OF THE BENNINGTON MUSEUM; NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; LIVE AUCTIONEERS; SOLDIERS & SAILORS MEMORIAL HALL & MUSEUM, PITTSBURGH, PA.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the National Park Service and preservationists successfully fought off threats to Manassas National Battlefield Park by commercial development, including a planned Disney theme park that never came to fruition. A new threat could put millions of square feet of data centers against the park’s western and northern boundaries.

The proposed PW Digital Gateway would slate 2,133 acres of agricultural land bordering the battlefield and nearby Conway Robinson Memorial State Forest to allow for data centers—large, boxshaped buildings that house computer systems used to run the Internet. The data centers will impact the historic viewsheds and rural nature of the area that add to the park’s ability to interpret the historic and natural resources of the landscape. In January, award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns penned a letter to Prince William Board of County Supervisors’ Chair Ann Wheeler warning

AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST; PHOTOS BY MELISSA A. WINN (2)

Fourth Battle of Manassas

MEN IN BRONZE ON NOVEMBER 6, 2021, American Legion Post 13 of Bennington, Vt., and the Bennington Museum rededicated their memorial to Civil War soldiers, aided by individual donors and a preservation grant from the Robert Fleming and Jane Howe Patrick Foundation.

The 3- by 6-foot bronze tableau, erected in 1930 on an 8-ton slab of Vermont granite, depicts four officers from Vermont on horseback— Maj. Gen. George J. Stannard of St. Albans, Brig. Gen. Edward H. Ripley of Rutland, Colonel Wheelock G. Veazey of Rutland, and Colonel James H. Walbridge of Bennington—watching troops march by.

TOUGH AS GRANITE Vermont sent 34,000 men Gordon Huff designed the tableau, to fight for the Union. The framed with 342 laurel leaves inscribed monument in Bennington with the name of a soldier. A star beneath the leaves indicates that man commemorates men lost his life in the war., and an 1861 from the local region who fought in the war. quote by Lincoln is also on the monument: “United by a purpose to perpetuate the Union and liberties of the people.” The American Legion dedicated the monument in 1930 on Bennington Battle Day, a Vermont holiday that commemorates when American forces defeated British troops on August 16, 1777, during the American Revolution.

COURTESY OF THE BENNINGTON MUSEUM; NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; LIVE AUCTIONEERS; SOLDIERS & SAILORS MEMORIAL HALL & MUSEUM, PITTSBURGH, PA.

AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST; PHOTOS BY MELISSA A. WINN (2)

UNEARTHED IDs The “dog tag” of a Union soldier from Pennsylvania who served in the July 9, 1864, Battle of Monocacy in Frederick County, Md., has been donated to the Monocacy National Battlefield, where it joins an ID from another soldier who fought in that battle. IDs of this kind were sold to soldiers by sutlers, as no official IDs were issued. This particular dog tag—reportedly of copper alloy—bears the information “Samuel Weigel Bendersville, PA, with Co. G/REGT./PA VOLS on one side; the other side displays the date 1861 with a Union Shield and the inscription “AGAINST REBELLION.” Badly wounded in battle, Weigel spent the rest of the war in the hospital. He died in 1922.

Buried for 159 years, an identification disc was recovered last November near Rappahannock Station, Va. Stamped “R.B. MCaleer Co. D, 11th Reg. P R C Allegheny,” it was most likely lost in 1862 when the 11th Pennsylvania Reserves campaigned in the area. Relic hunter Jimmy Jones generously donated the disc to Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum in Pittsburgh, Pa. (soldiersandsailorshall.org).

Archaeological work on the grounds of the College of Charleston in South Carolina turned a form of ID used to regulate enslaved workers hired for skilled work outside their owner’s home. The badge was found in what had been a kitchen where excavation was being done in preparation for the installation of a solar pavilion.

Such badges were usually diamond shaped, made of copper, and could be worn or sewn into clothes. They bore not a name, but the label “servant,” a registration number, a date, and an occupation. Annual taxes were paid on the badges in Charleston, and that levy became a revenue source for the city. The badges seem unique to Charleston. The artifact bears the date 1853.

APRIL 2022 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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1/20/22 8:42 AM

MISCELLANY

WORTH

A

MOVE

REAL ESTATE WITH CIVIL WAR CONNECTIONS

William T. Smith House, Smithville, N.C.

On March 16, 1865, the Battle of Averasboro N.C., raged across the 8,000-acre Smith Plantation in Smithville, N.C. The inconclusive fight successfully stalled Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s sweep through North Carolina, but merely set the stage for his victory at nearby Bentonville, the last major battle of the Civil War. The William T. Smith house, one of three owned by the Smith family that remain, served as an Averasboro field hospital. Two of the six children of William and his wife, Mary, served in the Confederate Army. The stately manor

Many original details remain.

stands on a flat backdrop of fields and plains. It commands your attention as you approach and it could now be yours for $60,000. The 4,000-square foot house requires complete rehabilitation but qualifies for historic preservation tax credits. Its exquisite woodwork and architectural features offer impressive bones to restore. Located within a few miles of the William T. Smith House are the other two restored Smith family plantations (privately owned), and the Averasboro Battlefield and Museum, including the cemetery and several monuments.

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CLOSE UP !

WHERE WOULD YOU FIND this grim evidence of battle? The first correct answer wins a Civil War Times water bottle. Send your answer to dshoaf@ historynet.com, subject heading “Battle Damage.”

12

CONGRATULATIONS to Jeff Triplett of Columbia, S.C., who correctly identified the famous gelding “Little Sorrel.” Stonewall Jackson’s trusty, tiny steed stands stuffed at the VMI Museum in Lexington, Va.

PRESERVATION NC; PHOTO BY SHENANDOAH SANCHEZ; PHOTO BY JOHN BANKS

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HARPERS FERRY NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK, HAFE 168591

1/18/22 1:52 PM

ON SHENANDOAH

STREET

AT A QUICK GLANCE, this could be an interesting street view of any

19th-century American town. But the rarely seen photo actually shows wartime activity along a main street in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., one of the hardest-hit locations during the Civil War. Early in the conflict, Confederate troops destroyed the Federal Arsenal that had been Harpers Ferry’s economic locus, and then the town at the point formed by the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers changed hands numerous times with the ebb and flow of war. Thousands of refugees, White and Black, swelled the town’s population and strained its resources. In August 1863, Charles Moulton of the 34th Massachusetts wrote, “Harper’s Ferry bears quite a lively aspect, considering the war time….Citizens are also flocking into the place in large numbers….” Interestingly, however, in this view of Harpers Ferry, the town doesn’t appear that worse for wear. But looks can be deceiving. War’s hard hand did destroy Harpers Ferry’s vitality, and sent it into postwar decline, hastened by ravaging floods. That neglect, ironically, helped preserve the riverside town and lead to its rebirth and restoration as a fascinating National Park Service site. Today, tourists throng Shenandoah Street, absorbing history where citizens congregated and soldiers marched their posts. —D.B.S.

6

1. A crowd, all White males it appears, seems to be listening to speakers hidden by the shadows of the Master Armorer’s house. If you look very closely, there are two men, wearing what look like military forage caps, addressing the townsmen. One member of the crowd has about-faced to stare down the camera.

2. With polished brass and fixed bayonet,

this U.S. soldier marches his beat at right-shoulder shift on Shenandoah Street.

Today thousands of tourists unknowingly follow his path.

3. Hey, pup!

4. The three buildings on the north side of

Shenandoah Street still stand, and are easily recognizable to visitors. This structure houses the modern gift and book shop on its ground floor.

5. The “Leisenring & Son” sign refers to the dry goods store and warehouse operated by Benjamin and Isabella Leisenring.

Benjamin was a Unionist, which helped him during the occupation. The federal government leased him this building between March 1865 and January 1866.

That helps place the image as being taken at the very end of the war or the opening months of Reconstruction. Restrooms are now located on the street level of the Leisenring building.

6. An NPS display about making gunstocks by machine currently occupies this structure. During the war, the ground floor was occupied by a merchant and the upper floor was a boarding house. A carriage is parked outside the building, and it looks like a man is either reading or installing a broadside or some sort of written notice.

CWT would like to thank Harpers Ferry National Historical Park Ranger Melinda Day for her help with this Details.

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by Gary W. Gallagher

Artists have dramatized the presentation of Abraham Lincoln’s famous November 1863 speech, but the powerful resonance of its message remains constant.

FOR THE

PEOPLE THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS STRUCK A CHORD IN 1863 AND CONTINUES TO RESONATE 16

SIX YEARS AGO, I devoted

an essay in Civil War Times to how Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was received in 1863. I will now focus on the substance of what the president said, beginning with the admonition that sheer familiarity can conspire against serious consideration of his rumination on the meaning of the war.

Lincoln conveyed insights about the value and promise of the republic that struck a chord in 1863 and continue to resonate today. His words illuminate why the nation’s loyal citizenry believed they had a unique political system worth great sacrifice to preserve. Claims that the United States is an exceptional country are currently suspect among many Americans, but the generation that waged our most all-encompassing war fully embraced the idea that they lived in, and profited from, a singular nation that gave individuals a direct say in their governance and offered the possibility of economic advancement. They believed the cherished republic bequeathed by the Founders was at stake and also that the war would settle the future of democracy in the Western world.

They were on to something. Although obviously restrictive by our standards, the franchise extended to almost all White men, which put the United States far ahead of any other major nation in the Western world. As for the economic dimension of what the Founders’ Union promised, Lincoln himself personified how someone could rise from poverty to economic success.

In other words, the United States, unlike the European nations, did not trap citizens in a rigid class framework that barred social and economic mobility.

The failed revolutions of the 1840s demonstrated to lovers of the Union that democracy was in retreat across Europe, with monarchism, aristocracy, and oligarchy on the march. Necessary to protect the work of the Founders, Union victory over the slaveholders’ rebellion also represented, as Lincoln had put it in December 1862, the “last best hope of earth” to save democracy.

Lincoln opened and closed his remarks at Gettysburg with allusions to

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A LIFE OF ITS OWN

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A REASON TO CELEBRATE

Formerly enslaved people rejoice at the announcement of the January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation. Months later in his Gettysburg Address, however, Lincoln avoided a direct mention of ending involuntary servitude as a war aim.

the founding generation. His first sentence, perhaps the most quoted from the address, evoked the Declaration of 1776. His final sentence directed listeners to the preamble of the Constitution of 1787—and thus to “the people” as the source of all power and authority in the United States. “We the people”—not the states—had forged the governing instrument for a new nation, and Lincoln highlighted that foundational reality by repeating the crucial word “people” three times: “of the people, by the people, for the people. . . .”

The heart of the address formed a paean to a subset of “the people”—to the citizen-soldiers who had stepped forward early in the war, donned blue uniforms, shouldered muskets, and taken the field to suppress the rebellion.

Most Union soldiers who fought at Gettysburg had volunteered in 1861 or 1862. In a nation that harbored deep antipathy toward professional armies, the concept of the citizen-soldier evoked nearly universal celebration as an aspect of the nation that set it apart from other countries. Not the wages of a military hireling but a sense of obliga18

tion to the republic that offered so much to its citizens animated those who, in Lincoln’s words, risked everything “that the nation might live.” When the president prophesied that the world would remember what “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here” had accomplished, he meant they would remember a free citizenry who rallied in support of a government that rested, in the end, on their support.

Lincoln closed with a passage that challenged listeners then, and all who read the address now, to acknowledge that the republic always has been a work in progress. Virtually all the loyal Northern populace would have pronounced saving the Union a goal worth vast expenditure of human and material resources. Lincoln certainly understood this and knew as well that he needed support from both Democrats and Republicans to win the war. His allusion to “unfinished work” that would yield a nation enjoying “a new birth of freedom” could mean different things to different people in 1863. Lincoln reached out to a broad spectrum of the loyal citizenry by avoiding any

direct mention of emancipation.

It is worth remembering that the population of the free states in 1860 was 98.8 percent white. For most of these people, Union always remained the paramount focus of the war. Among some of the loyal White population, the phrase “a new birth of freedom” could have conjured images not of ending slavery but of safeguarding and extending their own liberty and freedom.

Victory over the Confederacy would salvage a Union where, in terms of political action and economic promise, the cards were not stacked against common people.

But others could take Lincoln’s language as a call to add a second great war aim—U.S. armies henceforth would fight to save the Union and to end the institution of slavery. In time, most of the White North, even many Democrats, accepted emancipation as essential to defeating the Confederacy, punishing slaveholders who caused the sectional crisis in the first place, and removing the only internal issue that could threaten the Union in the future.

That kind of war not only sustained but also improved the Union through the eradication of slavery, something few people north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers would have predicted in the spring of 1861.

Lincoln’s tribute to an imperfect republic remains as timely today as it was 158 years ago. The Founders provided the mechanism to improve upon their work in Philadelphia, leaving details to the people and their elected representatives. The war, as Lincoln said in July 1861, was “essentially a people’s contest.” As the conflict unfolded, he appreciated its complexity, knew that he had to find a way to yoke ending slavery to preserving the Union without alienating millions of White Northerners who cared little or nothing about Black people. At enormous cost, Lincoln’s generation achieved a victory that ensured that the nation, no longer burdened by slavery, did not “perish from the earth.” It falls to us, as to previous generations, to guarantee that the republic remains an improving work in progress. ✯

HISTORY_DOCU_PHOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

by Gary W. Gallagher

CIVIL WAR TIMES APRIL 2022

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THE

AFRICAN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION N E HWE D!

I S P U B L

B Y

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JON AT H A N W. W H I T E

AN & ROW MF I E L D E L T T LI

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Advance Praise for A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House “This is an intriguing addition to the world of Lincoln scholarship that takes us inside the Executive Mansion at the dawn of the second founding of the nation. It’s more than a record of handshakes; it’s an attempt to size Lincoln up through the eyes of Black Americans who visited the ‘people’s house’ that their people had built and in whose names they were determined to win the fight for freedom and citizenship.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University “In a pioneering work of original scholarship, Jonathan White sheds new light on

Lincoln’s lifelong encounters with Black Americans from his boyhood through his presidency. In our troubled times, A House Built by Slaves makes a brilliant, necessary, and convincing case for Abraham Lincoln’s greatness as a towering American hero and as a valiant martyr to the cause of freedom and civil rights.”—James L. Swanson, New York Times bestselling author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer “A House Built by Slaves continues the discourse regarding Lincoln’s racial views and argues that the president’s treatment of African American visitors to the White House

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was an indicator of his CONFERENCE, SHENANDOAH UNIVERSITY willingness to accept T U E S D A Y, A P R I L 1 2 , 2 0 2 2 Black men and women “In A House Built By Slaves: as equals. Jonathan White has produced an African American Encounters important work that with Abraham Lincoln” offers insight into WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION (ON ZOOM) Lincoln’s response to prevailing racial sensibilities and political fallout while attempting to be president to him to embrace freedom and all the people.”—Edna Greene respect for all Americans as Medford, Howard University redemption of the war’s agony.

This eloquent, humane, and “Jonathan White tells intimate important book helps us stories of Black Americans— understand the crucial role soldier and civilian, men and played by Black Americans women, famous and obscure— in guiding that journey.” often in their own words, who —Edward L. Ayers, author of met Abraham Lincoln during The Thin Light of Freedom: The the tumult of the Civil War. Civil War and Emancipation in Those conversations often the Heart of America challenged Lincoln, leading

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RAMBLING with John Banks

GOING ACROSS THE FIELDS

Guide Neal Pulley knows well the obscure path to Davis Ford, a critical river crossing during the 1864 Tennessee Campaign.

DIRT ROADS, DEER HUNTERS, AND DEAR LORD SAVE ME. I’M GOING TO DAVIS FORD DAYS BEFORE MY VISIT to Davis Ford, a remote Duck River loca-

tion near Columbia, Tenn.,where 22,000 Confederates crossed in the late fall of 1864, guide Neal Pulley shoots me an eye-opening text: “Bring some orange. Don’t want to get shot! ” No fan of becoming an inadvertent target of a deer hunter, I scour a big-box chain store for an orange vest. No luck in sporting goods. But in the men’s clothing section, another quarry is cornered: a gawd-awful, orange sweatshirt.

Poorer by $7.87, I toss my purchase into my duct-taped car and almost immediately suffer from buyer’s remorse. In a plastic box in the trunk rests a fluorescent,

😊

20

A couple miles from where Pulley and I meet south of town, Union officerturned-Confederate cavalry commander Frank Armstrong married President James Polk’s great-niece on April 27, 1863. Confederate Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn, a notorious womanizer and married father of five, attended the nuptials at Rally Hill, a circa-1830s mansion that still stands. So did Brig.

Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the cavalry genius and infamous slave trader.

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PHOTO BY JOHN BANKS; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

ODYSSEY

PHOTO BY JOHN BANKS

DUCK RIVER

yellow cycling jacket—the perfect hiking attire.

This trip feels jinxed before it starts.

Still ornery, I drive the next morning to Columbia, Civil War country about 50 miles south of downtown Nashville, for a rendezvous with Pulley, an expert on obscure Davis Ford and the Battle of Columbia. Fabulous stories linger in the beautiful, rolling countryside a Confederate soldier called “God’s country.”

PHOTO BY JOHN BANKS; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

PHOTO BY JOHN BANKS

Roughly a Napoleon cannon shot away stands the National Confederate Museum at Elm Springs, where the remains of the former Klansman were recently transferred from Memphis for reburial.

Months ago at the museum, I examined the bed Army of Tennessee commander John Bell Hood slept in while Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield’s Army of the Ohio marched past his soldiers in the dead of night in late November 1864—one of the war’s gutsiest moves.

I’m no expert, but the one-legged, onearmed Hood probably didn’t curl up with the Confederate battle flag bedspread on that heirloom.

In the 1920s and ’30s, war relics were plentiful here in Maury County, where ground was trampled, camped on, and fought over by both armies. An acquaintance—a longtime relic hunter—enjoys telling stories of unearthing dozens of rare Whitworth bullets, Confederate belt plates, and thousands of other artifacts from area fields, woods, and construction sites. In the 1930s and ’40s, Pulley’s dad played with Civil War-era Enfield rifles in nearby Giles County, where he grew up. “They used to beat ’em on rocks,” Pulley says. Hunted squirrels with them, too.

Before we depart for the ford, Pulley explains “The Burn Line,” homes torched by Yankees in 1864 to clear a field of fire. Then we ride down the highway in his pickup, turn off on a rutted route with bomb-like craters caused by storm washout, and park near an old road.

Nervous and achy (curses to you, arthritis!), I put on the fluorescent jacket while Pulley dons a vest of orange and yellow. Then he hands me a bottle of bug spray.

“What animals are out here?” I ask.

“Well, skunks. Bobcats, too.”

Damn, I hate cats.

And so we trudge up the road, about a mile from our destination.

A longtime student of the Civil War, Pulley spends spare time researching the Battle of Columbia—a series of skirmishes and sharp fights fought

WRONG SIDE OF THE BED

When General John B. Hood awoke from this bed (displayed with a Confederate quilt?) on November 30, 1864, he learned to his dismay that Maj. Gen. John Schofield’s troops had marched by on the way to Franklin, Tenn. An eyewitness said Hood was as “wrathy as a rattlesnake” when he learned the Union soldiers had marched by his army in the dead of night.

November 24-29, 1864—for a book he plans to write. The Columbia native has multiple connections to the war: One ancestor served under Hood in the 53rd Tennessee while another rode with Forrest. One fought in the U.S. Army, too—“a red leg, a traitor on my mother’s side,” he says, half-kidding. According to family lore, Pulley’s great-greatgrandmother was inadvertently struck in the calf by a U.S. Army bullet while kneading dough in Giles County.

On farmland, in woodlots, and near fords of the Duck River at Columbia,

the armies fought in a prelude to the brutal Battle of Franklin on November 30. Casualties were light—about 10 for the U.S. Army, roughly 25 for the Confederates. But no matter the size of the battle, some family member or sweetheart somewhere mourned when they received news of a loved one’s death.

Eliza Donley, whose son James was a 65th Illinois corporal, was one of them.

At Columbia on November 26, 1864, Donley’s leg was shattered between the foot and knee by an artillery shell. “He bore it bravely like a good soldier as he APRIL 2022 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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RAMBLING after her son’s death. “I was surprised and sorry to hear it.”

After Columbia, Hood aimed to flank Schofield’s army before it made it to Spring Hill. With a good chance to wreak havoc, he couldn’t dawdle. So, in late November 1864, he ordered a pontoon bridge built across the Duck River at Davis Ford.

To get to there, we navigate through a cornfield, deftly avoiding groundhog holes. “Careful,” Pulley says, “you can

FORGOTTEN PATH

Pulley, left, points out the remnants of the road Hood’s men took to the Duck River in 1864, now hidden in the Tennessee woods. Pulley wore blaze orange and author John Banks chose fluorescent yellow to (hopefully) alert hunters the two weren’t deer. Aside from a few distant shots, all went well.

Cloying briars, though, made their presence known during the trek.

22

snap an ankle in those.” No worries. I’m expert at groundhog hole avoidance, having traipsed numerous times through David R. Miller’s Cornfield at Antietam.

We make our way to a rutted, military road on a bluff along the Duck River. The distant sounds of a plane overhead and a hunter’s gunshot do not ruin the greatness of the experience.

Long before Hood’s soldiers, the ancient transportation route was used by 18th- and 19th-century pioneers as well as Creek Indians.

Then we take a circuitous route to the ford, trudging through briars and bushes, over fallen limbs and poison oak, and through muck and whoknows-what-else. “Any rattlesnakes here?” I ask. “Could be.” Pulley says.

Wearing shorts and running shoes, hardly the best hiking attire, I soldier on. “Stupidity,” it’s commonly called.

If it weren’t for the three-inch snail darter, an endangered, freshwater rayfinned fish, Davis Ford may not even exist. In the early 1980s, the feds stopped construction of a $100 million, half-built dam in Tennessee when the endangered fish was discovered in the Duck River. “All this would have been underwater otherwise,” Pulley says after we finally arrive at the ford.

Through a maze of trees to our left, about 50 yards across the Duck River, rises the steep north bank. The water may be three or four feet deep. To the right stand huge mounds of deepbrown earth and remains of a cut in the south bank made by Hood’s engineers—unsung heroes of the war. Not another soul is in sight.

Imagine this scene the night of November 28, 1864, and the following morning: One hundred sappers, miners, and diggers pitch in. Torches flicker as massive, wooden beams are pounded into the gravelly riverbed. By 1 a.m., trusses arrive to lay across the stringers—work that continues into the wee hours. Fifty soldiers dig a cut on the north bank, backbreaking labor done “all night without flinching,” the lieutenant in charge of the operation later recalls.

Near dawn, the trudging of thousands of

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PHOTO BY JOHN BANKS

is,” 65th Illinois 1st Sgt. George Heywood wrote days later to Eliza. “We were driven from the field and out of 19 men in the company 7 were wounded & one killed. It left us so small that we could not bring them off.”

Shortly after his wounding, James died, probably in enemy hands as Schofield soldiers headed toward Nashville, their ultimate destination. “I asked them about your son & they told me that he was no more,” wrote Heywood in another letter to Eliza, nearly a month

PHOTOS BY JOHN BANKS (2)

with John Banks

CONFEDERATE CROSSING

PHOTO BY JOHN BANKS

PHOTOS BY JOHN BANKS (2)

A deep cut on the south bank of the Duck River indicates where most of Hood’s Army of Tennessee, about 22,000 strong, crossed the watercourse on a pontoon bridge. More than 6,000 of those men became casualties at the Battle of Franklin.

feet rumble and rustle in the distance as the ragged, smelly Army of Tennessee marches on the narrow military road to the ford.

Patrick Cleburne, Hood’s fiery, Irish-born division commander, chews out the officer in charge of the pontoon operation, peeved the south bank cut is incomplete. “He… abused me shamefully, and threatened to have me arrested and court-martialed for my failure,” remembers the lieutenant, “but I was never arrested.”

I wonder about the thousands of Confederates who crossed here shortly after dawn that frigid day long ago.

Among them was Private Sam Watkins, a Columbia native who was pleased to be on home turf. “We have never forsaken our colors,” he wrote in his classic war memoir, Co. Aytch, about his return home. “Are we worthy to be called the sons of old Maury County?”

By nightfall on November 30 in Franklin, 30 miles north, hundreds of Watkins’ comrades who crossed Davis Ford would be dead. Mathew Andrew Dunn, a 30-year-old sergeant in the 33rd Mississippi, was one of them.

Four months before he was riddled

with bullets at Franklin, Dunn prepared his wife, Virginia—he affectionately called her “Stumpy”—for awful possibilities. “Oh my love,” the father of two young children wrote, “if I could only See you and our dear little ones again what a pleasure it would be. But God only knows whether I will have that privilege or not. I want you to try and raise them up right. Train them while they are young.”

TO THE RIGHT STAND

HUGE MOUNDS OF

DEEP-BROWN

EARTH AND REMAINS OF A

CUT IN THE

SOUTH BANK

MADE BY HOOD’S

ENGINEERS

“And if I am not Spared to See you I hope we will meet in a happier world. . . if I am killed I hope that I am prepared to go.”

Months later, a condolence letter arrived for “Stumpy” in Liberty, Miss.— population a few hundred.

“Dear Friend, though I join you in shedding a tear of grief, let us not mourn as those who are without hope,” wrote 33rd Mississippi Private John Wilkinson, “for we feel assured that our loss is his Eternal gain, that his freed spirit is now singing praises to our Blessed Savior in the Paradise above where all is joy and peace.”

Dunn’s remains probably rest in McGavock Confederate Cemetery in Franklin.

Perhaps his spirit, though, still hovers somewhere here near the banks of remote Davis Ford. ✯ In 2015, John Banks waded the Potomac River from Maryland to West Virginia at Boteler’s Ford, an epic experience. You can read about it on his popular Civil War blog (john-banks.blogspot.com).

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with Earl Hess

FORCED MARCH

TO

CAMELS EARL HESS has added the study of human-animal

relationships and their roles in the Civil War to his long list of scholarship. In his new Animal Histories of the Civil-War Era, he gathers essays on subjects ranging from insects and bees to hogs, dogs, camels, and horses. The war not only exposed the need for an Army veterinarian service, but the scope of suffering and slaughter of millions of animals possibly contributed to the movement toward humane treatment of animals that was gaining ground in the mid-1800s.

CWT: How did you come to the topic of animal histories?

EH: In 2018, historian Joan Cashin hosted a panel on animals and the Civil War at the Southern Historical Association conference. I attended that and had the idea of doing a book length anthology. One of the things I wanted to do was look at what animal studies tell us about the relationship between animals and people.

The other thing I wanted to do was understand animals within warfare, as opposed to peacetime connections with humans.

CWT: You contributed chapters on wildlife, vegetarians, and artillery horses.

EH: Animal literature tends to be mostly about horses and dogs, because they had the most widespread contact with humans. But I read soldiers’ accounts and they 24

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NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

CRICKETS

talk about insects, lightning bugs, and chiggers. Wildlife is part of the animal world, and the soldiers had a lot of contact with animals of a wild nature.

The vegetarian issue is because my wife and I are vegetarians, so we are sensitive to that issue for many different reasons. We don’t think it is a high thing to do for humans to kill sentient creatures just to consume them, and for other reasons too. It struck me that there is a vegetarian perspective of the Civil War. The Army ration was heavily oriented toward meat-eating. Well, a lot of soldiers didn’t like it. They couldn’t eat it without getting sick.

There were very few vegetarians in the Union or Confederate Army. But there were a lot of soldiers who could have benefited from such a diet. Some may wonder what this has to do with animal studies. The field does deal with vegetarianism and with the philosophical and other aspects of the huge industry created to nurture and then kill and eat animals. It’s part of that story of animal history. The essay I wrote on artillery horses as warriors talks about the bond between artillery horses and men. We have to under-

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Jubal Early’s cavalry steal livestock from a Maryland farm in 1864.

Foraging filled empty stomachs and deprived the enemy of food and comfort.

stand that some animals, like dogs and horses, were not just used for military purposes. They were weaponized. They were made into warriors. Did they like it? Some adapted to it; some didn’t.

Some horses liked it and got involved in it and developed very close and loving relationships with the artillerymen assigned to take care of them.

Other horses couldn’t submit to military regimentation. They kicked; they tried to escape. Some died in service because they were so stressed. Horses died by the tens of thousands from disease, combat, and overwork in the field. I think it is important for readers interested in the Civil War to understand all this.

degree of opportunity of animals who have a relationship with humans to kind of affect that relationship or have some influence on setting some guidelines on setting what they are or are not willing to do.

CWT: The book also describes how dogs were used.

EH: Lorien Foote explores how animals were used to control enslaved populations. Some Confederate units used dogs to track down escaped Union prisoners, and in one case they were used in a small skirmish with Black troops. I wouldn’t overemphasize

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

CWT: I was surprised to learn about the absence of veterinarian care.

EH: There were probably only six real veterinarians in America in the 1860s.

The practice was in its very infancy.

Men had to dig into their civilian experience with home remedies to figure things out. Animal care was horrible in the Civil War. CWT: Horses seemed so disciplined on the battlefield.

EH: Horses have a herd instinct and understand a pecking order. They respond to other horses or humans who establish dominance over them.

Not all horses are smart, but many are clever. Not just artillery horses, but cavalry horses. Some cavalrymen said their horse was smarter than some of their comrades. Horses picked up on bugle signals: they associated a particular bugle signal with a particular movement very quickly without being told what to do. That is really an aspect of cooperation between animal and humans. It is not dominance by the human; it is a cooperative venture between the two. The same could be said for dogs, although dogs were much less used than horses in the Civil War. One of biggest things to draw from animal studies is the concept of agency: that animals are not just machines, passive acceptors of what they’re told, but that there is some

DINNER TAKES FLIGHT

A hog flees for its life. Many soldiers on both sides had the skills to slaughter and butcher an animal.

this; they were not used by the thousands. But apparently South Carolina used dogs in this kind of way to enforce slavery and domination of Blacks after the Civil War and during the war itself.

CWT: There was a proposal to kill dogs because they harmed sheep needed for uniform wool.

EH: Joan Cashin found a proposal by a Virginia legislator to propose that all dogs should be killed for the war effort.

People who raise sheep tended to be really angry at dogs. In many Southern states there are so many dogs that they were pretty much out of control. It is an amazing proposition to kill all the dogs, or propose to tax dogs as an alternative way to control them. But most dogs in the 19th century were not

household pets. People kept them for a variety of reasons. They helped them to hunt, or protect their property, or to control Blacks.

CWT: Hogs are also featured.

EH: Southerners ate more pork than anyone else, and the primary meatpacking place in America in the 1860s was Cincinnati, just on the north bank of the Ohio River, just a stone’s throw from Southern territory, so it was a southern-leaning city. An estimated 6.8 millions hogs were eaten during the war, and the Federal Army did a good job of feeding on Southern hogs as they went through the South. The Confederates tried to eat as many as they could.

CWT: Sheridan captured 15,000 hogs in the Shenandoah Valley?

EH: Meat went bad quickly in the 1860s. Spoiled meat was issued to soldiers and then thrown away. The process of providing meat to soldiers was the biggest headache for commissaries and the most expensive task for the government. It created all sorts of environmental problems. If you have a camp of several thousand men camped for a few weeks, a gigantic slaughter yard quickly formed filled with entrails and offal that created a health hazard.

CWT: Obviously, animals were swept into the war, but not on equal footing.

EH: People in the modern world are very much separated from animals. We have no hand in killing the animals that we eat. We pick up the steak ready to cook. We don’t think of it as an animal. Our relationship with animals tends to be focused primarily on pets.

One of the things animal historians try to do is break through all that and demonstrate that animals have been with us on the voyage of life, even if we haven’t recognized that. I think an animal-centered vision of the Civil War gives us a better understanding of the conflict’s history and tends to make us more humble. ✯ Interview conducted by Sarah Richardson.

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PA I N T I N G S B Y

CH A R L E S JOYCE

OR IG I N A L PA I N T I N G S A N D S IG N E D P R I N T S AVA I L A B L E

Accepting commissions for battlefield landscapes, portraits of reenactors, and reenacted battle scenes at Gettysburg, Antietam, and Manassas; as well as Shiloh, Chickamauga, and other Western battlefields.

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by Dana B. Shoaf

Vermont troops formed up in the barnyard of the wartime Arnold Farm before attacking Crampton’s Gap.

GOING TO THE POST OFFICE

PHOTO BY JOHN BANKS; INSET PHOTO BY DANA B. SHOAF

MY DAILY ROUTINE TAKES ME THROUGH CIVIL WAR COUNTRY I LOVE WORKING FROM HOME, but I get antsy by the early afternoon and need to get out of the house. I get in my truck, often with Franklin, my elderly Cocker Spaniel, and head for the Post Office in nearby Burkittsville, Md. Franklin promptly falls asleep, but I always admire sites along the way. By slightly varying my route, I can pass through Fox’s, Turner’s, or Crampton’s Gaps, the site of fighting on September 14, 1862. Or I can just wander South Mountain’s back roads, taking in stone walls that gracefully undulate with the landscape and pre-Civil War houses and barns. And my Burkittsville destination is a gem, a quaint time capsule that has escaped development. Armies marched through here in 1862, 1863, and 1864, and soldiers languished in churches-turnedhospitals after that 1862 fray up on the mountain. After I bend the ear of Kennedy, the postman, I often drive out to see the progress of the restoration of the house and barn where Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin (no relation to my pup) ate lunch as his 6th Corps fanned out in the adjoining fields to attack the mountain wall to the west (P.10). By that time, I’m not so antsy, and I head home. To paraphrase the postal motto, I never tire of this trip no matter if it is in snow, sleet, or under skies gray or blue. The views are my continual Civil War restorative and inspire me to stay hard at work. And Franklin—the dog—enjoys his nap. ✯

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COLLATERAL

COSTS

HUNDREDS OF CONFEDERATES WERE

BURIED IN GETTYSBURG’S FIELDS. ONE MAN’S TASK WAS TO

SEND THEM HOME

BY JA N ET S . M C CA B E

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RUDE BURIAL

Confederate soldiers lie in a shallow grave on the Gettysburg battlefield.

Under magnification, the writing on the headboards indicates these men were from a South Carolina regiment, likely killed on the Rose Farm. It is possible Rufus Weaver exhumed these men.

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F

or three hot summers, Rufus Weaver toiled to retrieve Confederate soldiers’ remains from crude Gettysburg battlefield graves. His efforts to get paid for his hard work proved to be nearly as difficult.

In 1889, Weaver wrote to his friend, Ada Egerton: “Over 16 years have now passed away and today over twelve thousand dollars (including interest) is due me without a line from any of those interested in the debt—debt which you have often truly said is one of ‘Sacred honor.’” Weaver certainly had a right to be aggrieved, for $12,000 in 1889 is the equivalent of more than $350,000 today.

How did this happen? How could an obligation of this size have been created? Weaver was not some Wall Street financier or speculator in land or railroad stocks. He was a physician and a lecturer in human anatomy at a medical school in Philadelphia. Who could possibly owe him a sum of that size?

30

There the graves of soldiers who fought to preserve the Union were protected, cared for, and decorated on the new holiday known as Memorial Day. Once again, Confederate dead were not welcome in those cemeteries. This rankled many Southerners, so the ladies of the South took it upon themselves to care for the fallen as they had cared for the wounded soldiers who had fought for “the Cause.”

A Ladies Memorial Association was established in almost every major city in the South, its purpose being to care for the graves of Confederate dead. In some cases, that was merely a matter of decorating the graves in existing cemeteries, but in places like Winchester, Va., where a great deal of fighting had occurred in surrounding areas, there was more work to do but precious few resources with which to do it. An appeal published in newspapers across the South raised enough money to allow the ladies to buy land and gather the remains of 2,489 Confederate soldiers who had been buried in scattered places across the lower Shenandoah Valley.

With great ceremony, they were reburied in the new Stonewall Cemetery in Winchester, Va., dedicated in 1866. However, the graves of men who had fallen in far-off places like Antietam and Gettysburg were beyond the ladies’ reach, both physically and financially. Some individual families were able to make the trek, but operations on a mass scale would have to wait until the South recovered financially.

Reports began to reach Southern ears in the

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; CHARLES T. JOYCE COLLECTION

ROWS OF DEAD

Confederate soldiers gathered for burial on the Rose Farm and photographed on July 5, 1863. When Weaver began his efforts years later, he found farmer John Rose a hard man to deal with.

LOCAL SON

It is unknown if Rufus Weaver was in Gettysburg at the time of the battle, but he certainly would have heard from family members about the devastation of the battle.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; THIS PAGE: FROM TOP: SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND COLLEGE ARCHIVES, MUSSELMAN LIBRARY, GETTYSBURG COLLEGE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

T

he original obligation was created in the decade following the end of the Civil War, when Southern women sought to provide proper resting places for their fallen husbands, sons, and fathers. At the end of the war, tens of thousands of soldiers’ graves dotted battlefields from Pennsylvania to Louisiana. Soldiers were generally buried where they fell, and any farmer’s field was likely to contain a grave.

The area around Gettysburg, Pa., was no exception. It is estimated that approximately 7,800 men were killed during the three days of that battle.

Nearly all were buried hastily. Some graves were marked, other graves were simply trenches holding dozens of bodies, unmarked except for signs indicating the number of bodies therein. During the nine months following the fight, the bodies of 3,354 Union soldiers were exhumed and reburied in Soldiers’ National Cemetery, dedicated in November 1863. The bodies of Confederate soldiers were left where they lay.

As the U.S. Army advanced over old battlefields during the final year of the war, it discovered that many men had been buried improperly. In some cases, skeletons wearing tattered Union uniforms lay in plain sight. Acting under the authority of an 1862 act of Congress, the War Department began to rebury the Union dead into what became known as “national” cemeteries.

summer of 1869 that the Northern graves of their fallen sons were being obliterated by years of plowing and neglect. The ladies of the South sprang into action, and before the end of the year the Ladies Memorial Associations of Charleston, Raleigh, Richmond, and Savannah were raising funds to pay for the exhumation, transfer, and reburial in their native soil of the fallen soldiers from their states.

The women appealed to a man named Samuel Weaver, who had been responsible in 1863 for transferring the remains of fallen Union soldiers into the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg. Weaver must have been a compassionate man, or perhaps he sensed a future business opportunity, for he made a record of Confederate graves where he found them. His list would be the starting point for those wishing to locate Southern remains.

Unfortunately for the ladies of the South, Samuel Weaver was killed in a railroad accident in February 1871. His list, however, had passed into the hands of his son, Rufus.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; CHARLES T. JOYCE COLLECTION

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R

ufus Weaver was born in Gettysburg in 1841 and graduated from Pennsylvania (now Gettysburg) College in 1862. Upon graduating, Rufus went to Philadelphia to study anatomy, with the goal of becoming a doctor. By the spring of 1871, he was a lecturer in anatomy at Hahnemann Medical College. Besides being in possession of his father’s lists, his knowledge of human anatomy prepared him for the business of recognizing and retrieving human remains.

During the spring and summer of 1871, Dr. Weaver labored for the ladies of the Charleston, S.C., Savannah, Ga., and Wake County (Raleigh, N.C.) Memorial Associations to exhume soldiers from those states and ship them home.

Eighty-four sets of remains were sent to Charleston, where a dedication ceremony was held on May 10, 1871.

The majority of those remains were retrieved from the Rose Farm, across which Brig. Gen. Joseph Kershaw’s Brigade advanced on the afternoon of July 2, and from the cemetery and orchard near the Black Horse Tavern on the Fairfield Road, which served as the field hospital for Kershaw’s Brigade. A dozen more were removed from the cemetery at Camp Letterman, the large general hospital managed by the Army of the Potomac’s medical corps, located on the York Road east of Gettysburg.

Apparently, farmer John Rose was not sympathetic to their mission. According to an article written in 1929, Rose refused to let the bodies be removed unless the ladies were willing to pay for them. The perseverance of the president of the

ALL OVER THE PLACE

Simon Elliot’s map shows the extent of Gettysburg battlefield burials. Weaver exhumed Elijah Amick, above, of the 15th South Carolina from his Camp Letterman grave in 1871. Amick now lies in Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery.

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association, however, “aided by [an unnamed] farmer’s wife,” finally secured his permission without compensation.

Rose was not the only local farmer who saw the efforts to remove Confederate dead as an opportunity to recoup financial losses suffered during the battle. During that summer of 1871, the family of Lt. Col. David Winn of the 4th Georgia contracted with Weaver to collect and return his body, which had been buried on the David Blocher Farm. But Blocher demanded to be paid for allowing the remains to rest in the ground as long as they had.

Weaver eventually succeeded “through dint of persuasion and shaming” to get Blocher’s permission to exhume the bodies, but at some point Blocher discovered that the dead man, Winn, had worn a gold dental plate to which were attached his false teeth. Blocher removed the plate and refused to give it up until he was given $10. He was eventually paid $5. In a letter written to the family on October 9, 1871, Weaver referred to Blocher’s “depravity and meanness” but assured them that other graves were being cared for and respected by the landowners.

Later that summer, 100 sets of remains were sent to Savannah, where they were reinterred with ceremonies in August and September. The last exhumations undertaken that year were of North Carolina soldiers. Of the 137 sets of remains sent to Raleigh and honored with a dedication ceremony on October 1 were 45 soldiers

buried at Camp Letterman and 27 buried at the Jacob Hanky Farm on the Mummasburg Road, which served as a field hospital for Maj. Gen. Robert Rodes’ Division.

To this point, apparently Weaver had been charged only with recovering identified remains (although the North Carolina shipment included 14 sets that were unidentified). In a letter written to Mrs. K.L. Campbell of Savannah on October 9, 1871, Weaver wrote that he hoped the ladies of Savan-

LATER THAT SUMMER,

100 SETS

OF

REMAINS

WERE SENT TO SAVANNAH

nah and Raleigh would be able to procure enough aid to allow them to send for their unknown dead in the spring.

He went on to say that “I have sent South all the State lists and none but you, North Carolina and South Carolina have done anything….It seems very strange to me that Virginia, who is so near and whose known list is not so great as yours does not recall her dead.” He went on to say that “if all could see what I have seen and know what I know, I am sure that there would be no rest until every Southern father, brother and son would be removed from the North.”

It was not long before Weaver heard from the Virginians. In November 1871, Mrs. E.H. Brown, secretary of the Hollywood Memorial Association (HMA) of Richmond, wrote to Dr. Weaver, who by then had returned to his academic post in Philadelphia, and asked that he meet her in Gettysburg in order to “enter into arrangements and make contracts for the removal of the Confederate Virginia soldiers from Gettysburg to Richmond.” She was accompanied by Captain Charles Dimmock, formerly of the Confederate Corps of Engineers, at that time city engineer of Richmond.

ONE OF MANY

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; PHOTO BY MELISSA A. WINN

DANA B. SHOAF COLLECTION

Numerous Gettysburg-area barns became hospitals, including the Martin Shealer barn east of town along the Hunterstown Road. In 1932, a local paper wrote, “Forty-four Confederate soldiers...died in this building, and their bodies were buried within 100 feet of the structure.”

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; PHOTO BY MELISSA A. WINN

DANA B. SHOAF COLLECTION

The visit must have proved satisfactory to all parties, for in February 1872 Weaver supplied Dimmock with a list of the remains he intended to collect and apparently suggested that the ladies apply to the state of Pennsylvania for financial assistance with the project. Dimmock replied that “the suggestion contained in your last [letter] is scarcely available, as our ladies could not ask the aid you propose. They feel assured that in an economical way they can meet all the expenses incident to the removal, and while they would not put aside such voluntary assistance as your Legislature might extend, still they cannot consent to invoke it.” In other words, the proud ladies of Virginia would not ask for aid from any Northerner in this project except Weaver, whom they were paying to do the work.

By April 20, the HMA had forwarded funds so that work could commence as soon as Dr. Weaver could go to Gettysburg. The funds were deposited at Brown Lancaster & Co. of Baltimore, paid to the order of Mrs. A.D. Egerton of that city. Ada Egerton, sometimes referred to as Adeline, came from a family of Southern sympathizers. Her husband was born in Virginia, and his brother, C.C. Egerton, was imprisoned at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry in late July 1862 for suspected pro-Southern activities.

Ada was active in efforts to provide aid to Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout in Southern Maryland during the war, and after the war was very involved with the Southern Relief Society. A great Southern Relief Fair was held in Baltimore in April 1866, the proceeds of which were intended to help recovery efforts in the still devastated South. She was a member of the three-woman committee appointed to distribute funds allocated for the relief of Virginia.

Mrs. Egerton would act as intermediary between Dr. Weaver and the HMA for the next 30 years. While it is probable that she became acquainted with the ladies of the HMA through her association with the Southern Relief Fair, it is unclear how she became acquainted with Weaver. An article in The Baltimore Sun, published shortly after her death in 1906, provides a clue. The article states that Egerton kept a boarding house in Baltimore after the war, and “nearly every distinguished man who came to Baltimore to lecture at the Hopkins [ Johns Hopkins University] either stopped with her or visited her house.” In the absence of any other explanation for the connection, it is possible that Weaver might at some point have visited the medical community in Baltimore and been a guest at Mrs. Egerton’s house.

At some point, the ladies of the Hollywood Memorial Association expanded the scope of the enterprise to include all unidentified remains, in

CEMETERY CENTERPIECES

The Hollywood Memorial Association raised money in 1869 to erect a 90-foot pyramidal structure in Hollywood Cemetery made of James River granite, top. The simpler North Carolina monument at Winchester’s Stonewall Cemetery, above, honors 452 Confederate dead from that state.

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WEAVER CALCULATED

INTEREST

ON THE

UNPAID DEBT

OF

MORE THAN $6,000

Stiles and Dr. Hunter McGuire, and members of the now-revived HMA. The documents she presented caused quite a stir among the ladies of the association. Kate Pleasants Minor, the new secretary of the HMA, referred to it as “thunder in a clear sky.” Many who were members in 1871-73 had died or moved away. Others, when solicited, claimed to have no memory of any such obligations.

After two years spent soliciting former members for information—and, it must be assumed, simply dithering—the ladies finally wrote to Weaver to tell him they had turned the matter over to their all-male advisory board to determine the legitimacy of his claim. Weaver was asked to travel to Richmond to meet with the board, which included such influential members as

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

D

espite the money still owed to him, Weaver commenced work again in the spring of 1873, shipping 333 sets of remains on May 17 in time for the Memorial Day celebration on Gettysburg Hill. He sent another 256 in June and a final 73 in early October. He was pushing the work as he knew that if it were put off much longer there would be little left to retrieve. “The constant farming over the graves, the remains were generally yielding to decay or absorption, and hence the work had to be done then or never,” he wrote years later. During the summer of 1872, at least, he employed what he referred to as a “full force” of laborers in order to complete the work as quickly as possible, and Weaver was paying the men out of his own pocket. He billed the ladies $2,151 for these shipments, for which he received payments totaling $880.

Why did Weaver continue the job in 1873 when he hadn’t been paid for his labors of 1872?

He might have assumed that, based on his prior experience with the ladies of Savannah, Raleigh, and Charleston, that he had no reason to worry, for those associations had paid their bills in full.

He had also been assured by Captain Dimmock in early 1872 that the ladies had $4,000 “in hand for the Gettysburg dead.”

Unfortunately for Weaver and the ladies of the HMA, their funds had been deposited with Maury & Co., a Richmond banking house that fell victim to the Panic of 1873. In June 1873, however, Colonel W. C. Carrington, a member of the Southern Cross Brotherhood in Richmond (a fraternal organization of former Confederate officers), informed Egerton that Mrs. Brown had told him that “she had enough Gettysburg funds to finish removing all our dead from that point but they were in the hands of a banker who will finally pay out but [has] suspended and thus locked the money up for the present.” Carrington told Egerton that Weaver could “safely rely on eventual payment of all due on that score.”

The ladies of the HMA certainly attempted to collect what was due them from Maury & Co. In March 1874, Major Robert Stiles, a Richmond attorney, wrote to Mrs. Egerton that one of the notes due from Maury had come due on March 1. Mrs. Brown went to the bank early that day, he reported, “but nothing could be done. Mr. Maury Stiles has given landed security and the matter is eventually secured and Dr. Weaver will certainly secure funds when realized.” Unfortunately, Major Stiles was wrong.

It appears that Weaver received no payments from the HMA between July 1873 and December 1878, at which time he must have again asked Egerton for help. In a December 25, 1878, letter written apparently to Mrs. Brown, Egerton complained that she had “written you from time to time for the past three years on this subject without one word of reply” and informed her that she had asked Stiles and Judge J.H.C. Jones to “see you on this subject.”

It is not known whether Egerton received a reply from any of these parties. Once Confederate dead had been retrieved, and lacking funds for any other enterprises, the HMA essentially dissolved. In early 1889, however, Weaver urged Egerton to make another effort. In addition to the $6,356 of unpaid principal, Weaver calculated interest on the unpaid debt of more than $6,000. “Every now and then I read in the papers of work going on in raising money for the erection of monuments etc. in memory of the Confederate dead, and yet there remains this unpaid debt….My dear Mrs. Egerton, may I urge you to another effort in this long delayed matter which causes me serious embarrassment?”

Egerton responded by calling upon a number of people in Richmond whom she thought might have some influence in the matter, among them

VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND CULTURE

addition to the known Virginia dead. Weaver began work in April 1872, writing to Mrs. Egerton, “The farmers are now getting their land ready for corn and I want to do all I can before the fields are planted.” On June 13 a first shipment of 708 remains was sent to Richmond. One week later, the boxes containing the remains were unloaded from steamers at the wharves in Richmond and solemnly escorted through the streets.

The wagons were draped in black bunting, and were accompanied by more than a thousand former Confederate soldiers, among them Generals George Pickett, John Imboden, and James Lane, as well as bands playing mournful dirges. The streets were lined with weeping spectators, and when they were laid to rest on what would become known as Gettysburg Hill in Hollywood Cemetery, the Rev. Dr. Moses D. Hoge thanked God that “our sons and brothers” had been returned from their “graves among strangers.”

A second shipment of 882 remains was sent August 3, and a final shipment of 683 remains was sent September 10 for that year. The agreedupon price was $3.25 for each set of remains.

Weaver billed the HMA $7,385 for these shipments, but by the end of the year had received just $1,300.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND CULTURE

Robert Bryan, attorney, financier, and newspaper editor; W.E. Cutshaw, who succeeded Charles Dimmock as Richmond city engineer; and Robert Stiles. On December 31, 1891, the Board gave the ladies the unwelcome news that Weaver’s claims were legitimate. They suggested that the ladies sign over to Dr. Weaver their claim against R.H. Maury & Co., amounting to about $3,800 at that time, acknowledging that that amount fell far short of the approximately $12,000 owed.

The ladies sprang into action, but argued that they “could not morally be held responsible for the delay in the payment of a debt of whose existence [they] had all been ignorant” and therefore should not be obliged to pay interest on that debt. Weaver agreed to forgo the interest if the original principal of $6,356 could be paid. The difference between that and the amount expected to be recovered from the Maury bankruptcy amounted to about $3,000. To cover that, the ladies wanted to petition the Virginia legislature for the funds, but the advisory board advised against that.

The ladies ignored the board and immediately went to work. They petitioned influential members of the legislature, and Board member Joseph Bryan presented their claim before the state Finance Committee. It worked.

A payment of $3,000 to Weaver was included in the general appropriations bill. The ladies seemed to feel that the matter was settled, leaving them with no further responsibility.

When notified of the legislature’s action, Weaver wrote a heartfelt letter of thanks to Robert Stiles in which he reveals the level of care and compassion he devoted to the task for which they had engaged his services. “It engaged my time from April 19th to Sep 10th 1872, & from April 9th to Oct 3rd 1873 with the exception of seven weeks which I spent in Washington, D.C. obtaining data and copying over 14,000 names etc from the original records of the Confederate dead. I not only superintended the general work on the field, but personally did the most important part myself, viz

PAYING RESPECTS

United Daughters of the Confederacy members at Arlington National Cemetery in 1923. The UDC superseded state associations in leading Confederate memorial events and initiatives.

picking up the bones for, in the absence of boxes, it required one with Anatomical Knowledge, to gather all the bones; (which workmen could not do) and, regarding each bone important and sacred as an integral part of the skeleton, I’ve moved them so that none might be left or lost.”

“Had I followed the 8 or 10 hour system for a day’s work, it would have taken twice as long to have completed the work….My custom was by, and very often before, daybreak to start out on the field with my men and would not reach home, with precious freight, until dark, & after supper I would arrange, in proper place and order, and Label every remain or lot of remains, and then by the time I had written out the record etc. of each remains it would be midnight & after, for invariably I arranged the records for each day’s work as I went along before retiring, thus generally being engaged from 18 to 20 out of the 24 hours…for the work had to be done then or never….”

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asking if she would again go to Richmond, either with him or on her own. By this time, During the postwar Egerton was more than 70 years old and years, Southern women Weaver was 60. He also wrote to Kate drove the popular Minor, asking what progress had been made movement to form in the settlement of the Maury claim. It is memorial associations not clear what prompted this letter. Perhaps to bring Confederate dead back to their native it was nothing more than the approach of states for reburial. another year’s end that made him want to resolve this matter at last. Whatever the cause, he allowed more than a hint of frustration to seep into this letter.

“Well on to nine years have elapsed since I have received any communication from the Association,” he told her. “During this long interval, I have been waiting and hoping most patiently, as I did for twenty years prior to the present Association’s assumption of the responsibility for the debt.

Being previously disappointed, and most desirous to know what progress is being made in the settlement of the Maury claim, will you please inform me…what the prospects are for an early payment of the balance ($1196.34) on the principal of the original debt?”

Minor’s response was also less courteous than before. In fact, she was downright dismissive. “We have relinquished to you all our assets [and] have ever since felt that our responsibility was at an end. I am therefore somewhat at a loss to understand why you have been waiting for us to move in the matter. We never undertook to collect anything from the Maury estate….Of course if any of this money had been paid to us we would have

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COURTESY OF JANET MCCABE

WOMEN AT WORK

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, SOUTH CAROLINA LIBRARY; CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION

nied each shipment, Weaver made careful notes about the original burial location for each set of remains. Notations like “east of Mr. E. Pitzer’s house in meadow under peach tree” and “under walnut tree at bend of the road on Mr. Crawford’s farm 3½ miles from Gettysburg on Marsh Creek” are common.

Weaver praised the ladies for their efforts but stopped short of calling the debt settled. “When I learn that the Maury estate will yield any adequate percentage of the original debt to warrant my doing so, I will without complaint release all claim for interest, although I have suffered seriously by long waiting for the principal,” he told Kate Minor in a letter dated April 18, 1892.

Weaver was far less sanguine than the ladies about the prospects of recovery from the Maury estate. The ladies accepted without question their male advisors’ assurances that the funds would be recovered. Weaver in fact received three small payments from the Maury estate over the next 12 months totaling $1,250.81. Those were the last payments he would receive.

He did not give up, however. Eight years later, in December 1901, he wrote again to Egerton,

WRITE-OFF

needed no reminder from you that we had agreed to turn it over to you.”

This letter was written in pencil, and the thickness with which some words were written conveys the extent of her irritation. “There is absolutely no money to get and no legal steps by which you could secure it if there were” is written in thick strokes.

Two weeks later, Weaver wrote Egerton again, asking her to inquire among her friends in Richmond if there was anything more to be had from the Maury estate. He wrote that he had been told in May 1893 that some land was to be sold in the very near future, yet he “had not had a copper nor a word” since that date.

It appears that Egerton might have taken a different tack this time, for in 1902 a member of the Richmond chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy reported to the HMA that an appeal had been made to UDC chapters across the South for the funds needed to pay the remaining debt owed to Weaver. Once again, the ladies of the HMA reacted angrily, demanding the UDC cease its efforts in that regard because the matter “is entirely between the HMA and Dr. Weaver.” Their reaction might have stemmed from the growing rivalry between the ladies of the HMA and the newer, larger organization.

The UDC was a product of the 1890s, and its membership and influence were beginning to eclipse that of the older memorial associations. While the ladies of the HMA primarily were concerned with honoring the dead, the younger members of the UDC were focused on influencing the future by shaping the minds of the young. Weaver’s legitimate claim unfortunately fell victim to the animosity of the HMA toward the UDC. Why didn’t Weaver sue the HMA for the money he was owed? The clue to that lies in a comment made in a draft letter written by a member of the HMA in late 1891. “Having been first organized when Virginia was under military rule, [the HMA] had never been incorporated.” Having no corporate body to sue, his only recourse would be to sue the ladies individually or continue to rely on their sense of honor.

AN APPEAL HAD BEEN MADE TO UDC CHAPTERS

ACROSS THE SOUTH FOR THE FUNDS NEEDED TO PAY THE REMAINING DEBT

COURTESY OF JANET MCCABE

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, SOUTH CAROLINA LIBRARY; CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION

In a 1901 letter, a Hollywood Memorial Association member wrote this letter to Weaver, emphasizing, “There is absolutely no money....” Weaver would never fully collect what he was owed for his work.

If Weaver ever received another “copper” from the Maury estate or the HMA, there is no record of it. Although he wrote that their failure to reimburse him had caused him “serious embarrassment,” his medical career appears to have provided him with enough income to live comfortably. He continued to feel, however, that he had been used poorly by the ladies of the HMA. “In a moral respect,” he wrote to Egerton in April 1889, “the debt is one of honor, so sacred that any individual or organization should blush for shame one would think to permit it to go unpaid. All the lawyers in the

land cannot wipe out the sacred obligation imposed on the Association for its liquidation.”

“You can inform them,” he goes on to say, “that my confidence was so implicit in them (Virginians!)” he emphasized, “that I suggested to the association per Capt. Dimmock that you should be the ‘go between’ them and me,” feeling that her involvement—“one of their own,” he called her—would make them more comfortable in their dealings with him, a stranger.

Ada Egerton died four years later at age 77.

Rufus Weaver lived to the ripe old age of 95, passing away peacefully in 1936. His obituary in The Philadelphia Inquirer lauds his long career as a professor of anatomy at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, where he became famous for being the first person to successfully dissect the complete cerebrospinal nervous system of a human being. That dissection contributed greatly to medical education and is still on display at Drexel University College of Medicine. The obituary says nothing, however, about his selfless efforts to return the Confederate dead at Gettysburg to their native soil, efforts that went largely unrewarded.

His tombstone in Mount Vernon Cemetery in Philadelphia is a simple affair, engraved only with his name, date of birth, and date of death. In recent years, however, Weaver has begun to receive the recognition he deserves. His efforts are noted on a beautiful monument erected in Raleigh’s Oakwood Cemetery in 1997, where 137 sets of remains that Weaver recovered were reinterred in 1871. In 2014, a bronze marker honoring Weaver was erected on Lefevre Street in Gettysburg, and in 2015 a similar plaque was placed in Hollywood Cemetery, on Gettysburg Hill, “acknowledging a debt of honor owed by all Southerners, and recognizing his generosity and humanity.” Perhaps, after all, it’s better to be memorialized in bronze than to be paid in coppers.

Janet S. McCabe volunteers at the George Spangler Farm & Field Hospital at Gettysburg and is a lifelong student of Civil War history. She holds a B.S. in Economics from the University of Virginia and an MBA from Dartmouth College.

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UNFRIENDLY FIRES EXPLOSIONS FROM CONNECTICUT TO MISSISSIPPI

KILLED OR MAIMED HUNDREDS OF MUNITIONS WORKERS

BY JOHN BANKS

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BLASTS, FLAMES, GORE

Chaos reigns at the site of Samuel Jackson’s cartridge factory on Tenth Street in Philadelphia. The March 1862 explosion killed 18 people and maimed dozens more.

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And, on June 17, 1864—a sweltering day in the U.S. capital—21 women and girls died in an explosion at the Washington Arsenal. Most victims were young Irish immigrants. President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton attended their huge, public funeral.

The Confederacy wasn’t immune to these disasters. On March 13, 1863, a massive blast at a Richmond munitions factory on Brown’s Island, in the James River, resulted in 64 deaths. The factory employed about 600 workers, roughly half women or girls.

But bigger stories pushed the tragedy at Jackson’s factory in Philadelphia—as well as deadly munitions industry explosions in Hazardville, Conn.; Springfield, Mass.; and Jackson, Miss.—to the margins of history.

Each calamity underscored dangers faced by civilians supplying their military forces during an era of few safety regulations and standards.

“It is a solemn and terrible warning to those working in similar establishments,” a New York newspaper wrote after the Philadelphia disaster, “and we trust that its effect will be to make [munitions workers] more careful of their own safety by the strict observance of those cautions, the neglect of which may consign hundreds to untimely graves and carry suffering and desolations into many homes.”

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PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER; ACW RELICS; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

BILINGUAL DISASTER

The above illustration from a Philadelphia GermanAmerican newspaper depicts the tragedy at Jackson’s ammunition factory. The flying bodies were not the product of exaggerated illustration.

Numerous eyewitnesses described such ghastly human projectiles.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: “EXPLOSION AND BURNING OF THE CARTRIDGE FACTORY, COR. TENTH AND READ [SIC], MARCH 2[9]TH 1862.” [BB 83 C 328], HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA; THIS PAGE: FREE LIBRARY OF PHILADELPHIA

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t about 8:45 a.m. on March 29, 1862, neighbors of Professor Samuel Jackson’s fireworks-turned-munitions factory heard a low rumble like the sound of distant thunder.

Then came the roar of an explosion, followed by an even louder blast, as gunpowder and cartridges ignited in the south Philadelphia factory across the street from a prison.

Many of the 78 factory workers, mostly women and girls, never had a chance to escape the conflagration. Jackson’s 23-year-old son, Edwin, was among the 18 employees who died. Dozens of survivors suffered from burns or other injuries in the catastrophe—the war’s first munitions factory accident involving a major loss of life.

Other more deadly—and more well-known— munitions industry explosions rocked the home fronts during the Civil War. On September 17, 1862—the same day as the Battle of Antietam—78 workers, mostly women, died in an explosion at the Allegheny Arsenal near Pittsburgh (Civil War Times, June 2021).

ike a scene from an Edgar Allan Poe horror story, dazed, burned, and blackened survivors stumbled from the flaming and smoking ruins of Samuel Jackson’s factory on Tenth Street. Others writhed in agony. Several female victims, “their clothes all aflame,” ran about “shrieking most pitifully.”

Heard a great distance away, the explosions shattered windows, damaged shutters and sashes, blew doors off hinges, wrecked plaster, and toppled furniture in nearby homes. A blast tossed a man cleaning a lamp in front of a tavern headfirst through a doorway. He survived, but the lamp was “broken to atoms.” The explosions even rattled inmates in gloomy Moyamensing Prison—the castle-like structure nearby where Poe supposedly slept off a drinking spree years earlier.

After the war broke out, the U.S. government had contracted Jackson to make “Dr. Bartholow’s solid water-proof patent cartridges,” a “peculiarly made” ammunition for cavalry pistols. In the three weeks prior to the accident, Jackson—a 45-year-old pyrotechnics wizard—was under intense pressure to produce cartridges for the Army of the Potomac.

The factory, which produced thousands of cartridges a day, consisted of frame structures and a one-story, brick building about 10 x 12 feet. Boards covered a powder magazine, “merely a large hole dug in the ground.” In moulding and finishing rooms, Jackson stored thousands of completed cartridges. Elsewhere in the tight quarters, workers stashed thousands of pounds of black powder loosely and in kegs.

After the explosions, hundreds of curiosity-seekers rushed to the site, followed by firefighters, who extinguished the blaze. Alerted by telegraph, the mayor soon arrived with the police chief. The city had not seen such an “intense state of excitement,” the Philadelphia Press reported, since a huge fire at the Race Street wharf in 1850.

Frantic parents and friends of factory workers searched for loved ones among the crowd or in the ruins—“looking shudderingly,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “among the fragments of clothing which still clung to the almost quivering remains of the mutilated dead.” Responders commandeered milk and farm wagons for use as ambulances. To keep gawkers at bay, police roped off the scene.

Some injured received care in nearby tenements, but most were sent to the city’s Pennsylvania Hospital. Several suffered from bullet wounds from exploding cartridges. A young white worker, severely burned and covered

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER; ACW RELICS; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

PREVIOUS SPREAD: “EXPLOSION AND BURNING OF THE CARTRIDGE FACTORY, COR. TENTH AND READ [SIC], MARCH 2[9]TH 1862.” [BB 83 C 328], HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA; THIS PAGE: FREE LIBRARY OF PHILADELPHIA

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KILLER PRODUCT

Robert Bartholow, ironically a U.S. Army surgeon, patented his cartridge on May 21, 1861.

The rounds featured a collodion-soaked paper cartridge attached to the bullet by a silk strip.

The flammable paper was consumed upon firing.

READ BETWEEN THE LINES

Newspapers in Philadelphia chronicled the human cost of the blast for weeks following the disaster. Unsettling to modern values is the young age of many of the killed or injured workers. Due to their dexterity, young women were preferred for the task of cartridge making.

with soot, was taken to the segregated hospital’s area for Black patients. “... it was some time,” the Inquirer reported, “before the mistake was discovered and rectified.” He died the next day.

At least five of the victims were teenagers; one was 12. When the blast rocked the building, 14-year-old John Yeager was carrying a box of bullet cartridges that also exploded, knocking out his eyes. His sister, Sarah, also was hurt. Both had helped to support a widowed mother.

Twenty-two-year-old Richard Hutson spent the last hours of his life at the house of Margaret Smith, who lived on Wharton Street, near the factory. His face was as “black as a man’s hat” because of severe burns. “He seemed to be troubled with the idea that he had caused the mischief,” recalled Smith, “but we tried to comfort him.”

The tragedy rocked widows Margaret Brown and her sister, Mary Jane Curtin. Five of Brown’s children who worked in the factory were badly injured. Blown across the street into a wall of APRIL 2022 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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TWO DAYS AFTER THE DISASTER,

HUNDREDS

OF

PEOPLE SOUGHT ADMISSION

TO PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL

TO CHECK ON

THE

INJURED

“Heads, legs and arms were hurled through the air, and in some instances were picked up hundreds of feet from the scene,” the Inquirer reported.

“Portions of flesh, brains, limbs, entrails, etc. were found in the yards of houses, on roofs and in the adjacent streets.” A policeman filled a barrel with human remains.

In the ghastliest news from this awful day, a man told a reporter that he saw a boy going home with a human head in his basket. The lad said it was his father’s.

Two days after the disaster, hundreds of people sought admission to Pennsylvania Hospital to check on the injured. “Such a rush to this institution,” the Press wrote, “was never before known.”

Authorities worked quickly to determine the cause of the explosions. The fire marshal convened a coroner’s jury, which examined mangled remains of victims at the First Ward police station, among other grim duties.

The day after the disaster, the six-person jury also stopped at the home of Jackson, who wasn’t present at the disaster. Before Edwin’s burial in Odd Fellows Cemetery, the jury examined his battered body in Jackson’s Federal Street house.

The fire marshal concluded the first explosion occurred in the moulding room, where the strike of a mallet may have caused the spark that set off a 30-second chain reaction of death and destruction. But he couldn’t know for sure—all the witnesses in that area were dead or too badly injured to aid the investigation.

The jury determined the detonation of a scale of dry powder caused the catastrophe. “[M]any obviously essential precautions to prevent [the] accident,” it concluded, “seemed to have been entirely neglected.” But authorities never charged anyone with a crime.

Weeks later, Jackson’s factory re-opened in nearby Chester, Pa., along the Delaware River. Black powder for the operation was stored on a boat offshore, a safe distance from the factory. Despite the deadly south Philadelphia accident, Samuel Jackson had no trouble employing female workers, who made only 40 cents per thousand cartridges made. “[T]hey would rather earn a living salary, at risk of their lives,” the Inquirer wrote in a sad commentary of the era, “than endure the indignities and hardships to many forms of female occupation.”

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ENFIELD PUBLIC LIBRARY; COURTESY OF JOHN BANKS (2)

WELL NAMED

Making gunpowder was fraught with peril, and the industry risks increased with the pressure of wartime production. The Hazard Powder Company of Connecticut suffered a catastrophe on July 23, 1862, when 10 tons of gunpowder ignited. But the company’s undamaged buildings stayed in production.

woman’s explosion-battered tenement on Austin Street, a block or so from the blast. A ragpicker offered fragments of clothes from the explosions for 25 cents.

When two victims sought aid at a residence in the neighborhood, the lady of the house indignantly slammed the door in the women’s faces, telling them she “did not keep a house for working girls to enter.” The local newspaper chastised the door-slammer: “Was the woman insane, or a fiend, or was it merely an instance of what utter vulgarity is capable of ?”

Other grisly discoveries put an exclamation point on the horror show.

Blood streaked the walls of houses in the vicinity. A cheek stuck to a building on Tenth Street. A portion of a thigh plopped in a yard, near where it left a bloody mark on the wall of a tavern. A severed arm hit a woman in the head, knocking her down, and a scorched and fractured skull with gray hair landed in the street.

HN ARCHIVES

Moyamensing Prison by the blast, Curtin—the superintendent of children at the factory— somehow escaped physical injury. But three of her children, also munitions workers, suffered severe burns. Curtin also lost the $60 in gold she carried.

Rescuers discovered Edwin Jackson’s body, “shockingly burned and mutilated,” among charred ruins. The previous evening, he had said he was unafraid of any explosion there. Samuel Jackson’s daughters, 20-year-old Josephine and 18-year-old Selina, also suffered terrible burns.

Heroes emerged to aid the sufferers: A woman cut her shawl in two, wrapping the pieces around two “half-naked” victims. A court officer put his coat around a burning girl, putting out the flames; and a U.S. Army cavalry officer, who happened to be riding past the factory, picked up a horribly burned victim and dropped him off at a drug store for medical aid. When the soldier returned to his camp, he found a detached hand in his carriage.

The catastrophe brought out the worst in people, too. Scoundrels snatched clothes from a

t about 3 p.m. on July 23, 1862, five massive blasts rocked the Hazard Powder Co. mills in Hazardville, Conn., killing 10 people, nine of them employees. Among the dead was a man taking a bath and another walking his mule. “Blown out of existence,” the Hartford Daily Courant described victims of the disaster.

In the immediate vicinity of the mills, the explosions of tons of gunpowder produced an otherworldly landscape of dead cows and horses, uprooted trees, toppled fences, and acres of grass that looked “as if heavy rollers had passed over it.”

The blasts shattered windows and damaged roofs on houses at least two miles away. In Springfield, Mass., 10 miles away, “houses were jarred as if by an earthquake.” The rumble was “distinctly heard” as far as Northhampton and West Brookfield, Mass., roughly 50 miles distant.

Thousands came to view the horrific scene.

“One of the most appalling calamities that has occurred in this vicinity for many years,” the Boston Journal reported. The cause of the blasts was a “mystery,” newspapers said.

The company was owned by 60-year-old Augustus George Hazard, a politically well-connected businessman whose friendship with Confederate president Jefferson Davis raised eyebrows in the North. Colonel Hazard’s mills produced thousands of tons of gunpowder for the U.S. war effort—more than any other northern company except the duPont factories in Delaware. Confederate artillerists used Hazard’s gunpowder in the pummeling of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861—the opening salvos of the war.

Born in Rhode Island in 1802, Hazard was the son of a sea captain. After his family moved to Connecticut, he worked on a farm in Columbia there until he was 15, learned the trade of house painting, and eventually settled in Savannah, Ga., where he became a dealer in paints and oils.

While in his adopted state, Hazard may have even joined the Georgia militia, earning the rank of colonel—a title that stuck with him the rest of his life. Extraordinarily successful, he became part-owner of a coastal shipping company that did a brisk business between New York and Savannah. The colonel was especially interested in one product: gunpowder.

By 1843, Hazard had assumed full ownership of a gunpowder company in Enfield, Conn., naming himself president and general manager.

“Shrewd, energetic” and with deep interest in politics, the ardent Democrat became one of the state’s wealthiest men. Hazard and his wife, Salome, settled in Enfield, where he raised a family and built a mansion on Enfield Street, a few miles from his rapidly growing company.

ENFIELD PUBLIC LIBRARY; COURTESY OF JOHN BANKS (2)

HN ARCHIVES

A

WEALTHY OWNER, DEVASTATED FAMILY

Gunpowder magnate Augustus G. Hazard lived in the Italianate home in Enfield, Conn., pictured above. It burned in 1969. Two members of the Beach family died in the July 1862 explosion at Hazard’s factory.

The death of 40-year-old Arthur left seven children without a father.

A boulder flung in the air by the blast killed his younger brother James.

By the outbreak of the war, the sprawling Hazard Powder Co. in Enfield covered over 400 acres and included massive infrastructure: rolling and granulating mills, woodworking, ironworking, and machine shops, packing houses, magazines, hydraulic presses, and more. In all, there were nearly 125 buildings—an operation that dwarfed Jackson’s in Philadelphia.

Power to operate the mills’ 25 water wheels and three stream engines came from the nearby Scantic River. Canals carried water to the complex, where Hazard also made gun cartridges and fireworks. Hazard’s employees voted to change the name of the industrial village to “Hazardville” in the colonel’s honor.

Work at Hazard’s company was difficult and often dangerous. In April 1855, Hazard’s eldest son, 23-year-old Horace, was mortally wounded by a gunpowder explosion at his father’s mill. Later that year, a wagonload of powder exploded, killing a teamster and his two horses, injuring a young girl, and damaging the roof of a powder mill. The next year, three horribly burned workers died following an explosion. In a blast in September 1858, APRIL 2022 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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ASHES AND DUST

Civilians and soldiers investigate Washington Arsenal building ruins after the June 1864 disaster.

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press room victim, had only recently been married.

The initial explosion triggered four more at surrounding buildings. To escape injury, panic-stricken workers in the cartridge-making building burst through doors and leaped through windows.

The catastrophe could have been worse. A building packed with coarse, unground gunpowder was damaged, but it didn’t explode. Enough gunpowder was in another building “to have destroyed the whole village” if it had exploded, the Courant reported.

En route home via train from New York, Hazard received word of the disaster at a stop in Berlin, Conn. His financial losses were estimated at $15,000—$12,000 for the roughly 10 tons of gunpowder that exploded, $3,000 for five wooden buildings destroyed. But that was merely a dent in Hazard’s booming business.

“The loss will not interfere with the operations of the company,” the Courant reported, “as there are 75 mills left.” Hazard, who began re-building almost immediately, continued to fill U.S. Army orders. By January 1864, his company was producing 12,500 pounds of gunpowder daily. t 3:30 p.m. on November 5, 1862, sisters Lucy and Nancy Gray were toiling in the small munitions factory on College Green, on the northern outskirts of Jackson, Miss. Roughly 40 people, mostly women and girls, worked in the two-story brick building that formerly housed a school for boys. Workers made artillery shells on the first floor, cartridges for small arms on the second.

Kaboom!

A blast of unknown origin at the arsenal rocked the buildings of Jackson—the state capital and a center for manufacturing, munitions production, and military hospitals.

Hundreds ran to the blast site. Firefighters quickly arrived, but they didn’t have access to water. They discovered a gruesome tableau of mangled

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JOHN DEFERRARI COLLECTION

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

the superintendent and three workmen were instantly killed.

The company mandated some safety rules.

Fearful of sparks setting off gunpowder, Hazard banned iron and steel tools as well as pipes and matches for obvious reasons. Workers wore shoes made with wooden pegs instead of iron nails.

Large, stone blast walls separated buildings.

Even Hazard, though, couldn’t plan for unexpected mischief by Mother Nature: In late April 1861, a lightning strike on kegs of powder produced an explosion heard as far away as Hartford. Remarkably, no one was injured.

Fifteen months later, however, the human toll of the accidental explosions was heart-rending.

James Beach, who worked in the fireworks building, was washing in a brook after his shift when blasts rocked the grounds. Responders found the 28-year-old’s body in the water, partially covered by a large rock. Beach had started work at the company only days earlier.

The only remains found of the six men who worked in the 20- by 30-foot press room, where the disaster probably originated, was a detached foot discovered about a quarter-mile from the blast zone. Arthur Beach, James’ 40-year-old brother and the married father of seven children, worked there. So did luckless Patrick Fallon, who was on his first day on the job, and Henry Clark, a married father of five. Leno Monsean, another

bodies and charred flesh. Dangling from a tree was the body of a girl, her clothes still aflame.

The explosion tossed workers like rag dolls, 50 to 150 yards from the factory.

“The sight was horrible,” reported the Memphis Commercial. “But there was another scene still more horrible, if that was possible, than the work of death—it was the sight of screaming women and maddened men calling aloud for their children! The loved one that had left them at the noon meal, rejoicing in their youth and in the attractions of beauty, like a holocaust of maidens, offered in impious sacrifice to the Moloch of war.”

None of the four Confederate officers in charge of the operation were in the building when the explosion occurred. One was “providentially absent,” sick in his room.

No employee survived the disaster—the Confederacy’s second-worst munitions factory catastrophe. For the Grays’ widowed mother, the tragedy was searing. Less than three months later, her son would die in a gruesome train accident.

“The unparalleled fact of the greater portion of the victims being helpless women is dreadful indeed,” a Mississippi newspaper wrote.

Perhaps a higher power spared a young man who made cartridges. He repeatedly complained about safety procedures but was ignored by a foreman. The morning of the disaster, he noticed gunpowder scattered about—a dangerous sign.

FIRST RESPONDERS

DISCOVERED

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GRUESOME TABLEAU OF MANGLED BODIES AND CHARRED FLESH

JOHN DEFERRARI COLLECTION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Powder grains would stick to a pan and “flash”— suddenly burst into flame—when placed over a wick to melt wax to seal cartridges.

Less than five hours before the catastrophe, he nearly leaped through a window after a flash. But his supervisor again ignored his complaints.

Incensed, the young man quit on the spot—and thus became the last employee to leave the building uninjured. s soon as he heard the blast, Charles M. Atwood knew—oh, my, he knew. “There goes Leet’s cartridge factory,” the young man said to himself. Then he sprinted from his boarding house toward his former place of employment blocks away, in the heart of Springfield.

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Washington Arsenal

WOMEN’S

WORK

In 1864 the Washington Arsenal was the largest federal arsenal creating and storing ammunition for the Union Army. Because women often had slenderer fingers, they were better able to roll, fill with gunpowder, and pack cartridges into crates. Seated at their long benches, the women were not allowed to talk while at their tasks and their full, flowing dresses were made of flammable material. Hundreds of young women and girls were employed by the arsenal to create ammunition for the war effort. On June 17, 1864, fireworks left in the sun outside a cartridge room ignited, and a resulting spark caused thousands of cartridges to flare in a massive explosion. When the room at the Washington Arsenal set ablaze after the explosion, the women were mostly trapped. Twenty-one women and girls were killed.

“One young lady ran out of the building with her dress all in flames, and was at once seized by a gentleman, who, in order to save her, plunged her into the river. He, however, burned his hands and arms badly in the effort. Three others, also in flames, started to run up the hill and the upper part of their clothing was torn off by two gentlemen nearby, who thus, probably saved the girls from a horrid death, but in the effort, they too were badly injured,” The Washington Evening Star reported a day later.

“The scene was horrible beyond description. Under the metal roof of the building were seething bodies and limbs, mangled scorched and charred beyond the possibility of identification,” another local newspaper reported.

President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton attended funeral services three days later, and Stanton told army authorities, “You will not spare any means or expense to express the respect and sympathy of the government for the deceased and their surviving friends.” A tall marble monument in honor of the girls was carved by Irish American sculptor Lot Flannery and stands today in the Congressional Cemetery near Capitol Hill. It is simply titled “Grief.” The names of all 21 of the victims are inscribed on the base. —Melissa A. Winn

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At 2:30 p.m. on March 16, 1864, a series of explosions at the C.D. Leet & Co. cartridge factory on Market Street reverberated in town.

Leet’s employed 24 women and girls and 24 men at the factory, which made metallic cartridges for Joslyn and Spencer carbines and other weapons.

Small explosions and accidents were common at the three-story factory leased by 40-year-old Charles Dwight Leet. A week or two earlier, Atwood—as others also had recently—quit his job there because he dreaded the potential for something much worse. Perhaps he was pushed over the edge by an accident at Leet’s factory the previous month, when roughly a half-pound of gunpowder blew up—

frightening more than a dozen female employees, burning five of them, and filling a room with smoke.

But that accident paled when compared with this disaster. The final death toll was nine—four in the explosions and subsequent fire, five afterward. About a dozen suffered injuries.

Atwood and 10th Massachusetts Lieutenant Lemuel Oscar Eaton and Private John Nye—who just happened to be in the neighborhood—dashed into the burning factory to aid victims. To avoid an even greater disaster, Atwood helped remove kegs of gunpowder. As Eaton tossed cases out of harm’s way, another explosion rocked the building, briefly knocking the officer senseless. He was due to return to his regiment the next day.

After removing four cases, Atwood and Eaton were moving another when it exploded. Somehow both escaped without serious injuries. (Two months later, Eaton was badly wounded in the leg at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse.) Nye recovered from burns to return to his regiment.

OCCUPATIONAL

HAZARDS

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A TIME TO DIE

Hanging on a hook, Laidley’s coat still had a cigar in a pocket. Unconscious but remarkably unscathed, Clayton lay against a nearby post.

What remained of Laidley was gathered and placed in a metallic coffin at a house behind the cartridge factory. His family held a funeral the next afternoon.

In the account of Laidley’s death, the Dispatch also referenced the demise weeks earlier of fellow chemist Finch. “Both gentlemen were working for the benefit of the Southern States,” the Dispatch wrote. “Peace to their ashes.” —J.B.

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HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS (3)

Joseph Laidley, above, was killed in the explosion of his munitions factory. His watch was found in the debris with the minute hand missing and the hour hand pointed to noon.

COURTESY OF JEFFREY S. EVANS & ASSOC.

Midway through 1861, well-known Richmond chemists Edward T. Finch and Joseph Laidley lent their expertise to the Confederacy in a risky venture: percussion cap and gunpowder production. Work with highly combustible material may have been out of the comfort zones of the respected chemists.

Finch lived with his wife, five small children and an enslaved Black female in a two-story brick house on Clay Street, near a Methodist church.

Laidley ran a drug store on North Main Street. The 32-year-old Irishman, who married into a prominent Virginia family, was an 1850 graduate of the prestigious Philadelphia College of Pharmacy.

At about 8 a.m. on June 6, 1861, Finch was working in his house with highly explosive fulminating powder for use in percussion caps for the Virginia Ordnance Department.

Assisted by his Black slave, Finch spread some of the moistened powder on a newspaper for drying in a second-floor room, then placed it on a hot grate near a wood fire. Moments later a massive explosion cracked the house’s walls, blew out a rear wall, tore off window sashes and sent the rest of Finch’s family in a room below into a panic amid fallen timbers and bricks.

“A complete wreck,” the Richmond Dispatch called the Finch dwelling.

Buried under the debris with the 38-year-old chemist, the enslaved woman was initially feared dead. But she was revived, treated for serious cuts on her legs at a hospital, and expected to recover.

In a neighbor’s house, four doctors examined the bruised, blackened and burned Finch. The forefinger and thumb of his right hand were torn apart.

Finch died a week after the explosion.

Weeks before Laidley officially began work for the Rebel government, he was making percussion caps of “unsurpassed quality,” the Dispatch wrote. He became a chemist at the Confederate Labs cartridge factory.

Confederate authorities constructed a wooden outbuilding for Laidley’s percussion cap work on the slope of a hill behind the Richmond Arsenal. The popular Irish-born chemist and a young assistant named Robert B. Clayton were making cap powder there the day before the Fourth of July 1861. Some saw Laidley smoking a cigar, a risky activity to say the least.

Sometime between noon and 1 p.m., a huge blast at the shed reverberated in the Confederate capital. Little remained of the demolished structure.

HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS (3)

COURTESY OF JEFFREY S. EVANS & ASSOC.

Upon their arrival shortly after the first blast, Springfield firemen discovered a grim scene: flames leaping from shattered windows, huge columns of smoke, wailing victims, scores of gawkers, and friends and family searching for loved ones employed at the factory.

Fourteen screaming girls leaped from the third floor onto the roof of the shop next to the factory. They “were removed by ladders,” the Springfield Republican reported, “after the most frantic threats” to keep them from jumping to the ground.

“The appearance of those who were worst injured was shocking beyond description,” the Republican reported. “Every garment of their clothing was blown or burnt off, and some of them were literally a blistered and blackened mass from head to foot. So badly were they burnt that it is surprising that they were not instantly killed.”

Calista Evans, a widow from New York, was burned over her entire body and died the next day at her sister’s house in Springfield. She was on her second day on the job. Laura Bishop, who only recently had returned to work after an accident at the factory, also died.

John Herbert Simpson, a 27th Massachusetts veteran, was standing near the loading room when the first explosion rocked the building. “Shockingly burnt,” the 19-year-old died the next morning. His 15-year-old sister, Anna, also suffered injuries.

Willard Hall and Horace Richardson, Leet’s business partners, also died the day after the explosions. Hall, who supervised 20 men and women, suffered severe burns on his head and chest; Richardson fell through a set of stairs and into the cellar after the final explosion. He was attempting to save girls on the second floor.

Intense heat and fire caused the discharge of bullets from completed cartridges. Two put holes in the hat of contractor Jesse Button, who aided victims inside the factory and escaped with minor injuries. Another narrowly missed the head of a woman at her workplace on Main Street. Yet another zipped into a nearby dental office but caused no injuries.

Underscoring the horror, depraved onlookers picked up ghastly souvenirs: pieces of burnt flesh and fingers of victims. The following day, a

PRIMED FOR DISASTER

The U.S. Army contracted the C.D. Leet & Co. to make the Civil War era’s high-tech ammunition, metal cartridges that did not need percussion caps to detonate. Each round contained its own primer in the raised rim at the base of the cartridge. The ammunition allowed breechloading weapons like the Spencer to fire quite rapidly.

A FRENCH CONNECTION

Leet’s factory also made unusual pinfire cartridges that were needed for the Lefaucheux Model 1854 revolver made in France. The U.S. Army had some 10,000 of those revolvers in its inventory when the war began. When the trigger was pulled, the hammer drove the brass pin that contained an explosive mixture.

crowd gathered to examine the disaster area.

Some of the ghouls among them snatched “any piece of a partially burned dress, or other scrap the Republican reported, “as a memento of the terrible scene.”

A coroner’s jury of inquest determined the chain-reaction catastrophe began in the second-floor loading room. A flame from an exploding cartridge apparently caused another blast fueled by fulminate and gunpowder. A massive explosion momentarily lifted the third floor.

In the chaos, panic-stricken employees descended the stairs, their burning clothes igniting cases of gunpowder.

Authorities reprimanded Leet, who was not in the factory when disaster struck, for woeful safety procedures. “Hazardous,” “highly censurable,” “highly reprehensible,” the coroner’s investigation called his operation.

In a subsequent U.S. government investigation, an inspector called Leet’s copper cartridges, and the compounds used inside them, “exceedingly dangerous for magazines and transportation.” But Leet, who wasn’t charged with a crime, re-opened his factory weeks later.

And so the war—and cartridge-making— dragged on.

John Banks, who lives in Nashville, is author of a popular Civil War blog (john-banks.blogspot.com).

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The war in their words

‘MY HEART BLED FOR THE

POOR SUFFERERS’ A SANITARY COMMISSION WORKER DESCRIBES

THE DIFFICULT TASK OF CARING FOR THE

UNION’S SICK AND WOUNDED SOLDIERS

BY MELISSA A. WINN

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YEOMAN’S WORK

Richmond refugees receive care on board a United States Sanitary Commission boat at City Point, Va., where letter writer Homer Anderson was stationed during part of the war. Tending to the civilians and soldiers, was “no easy task,” he lamented in letters to a friend.

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

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Anderson, right in a postwar view, was assigned to the 5th Corps of the Army of the Potomac. He sketched a floor plan of his living quarters, which he teasingly referred to as a “mansion” in this January 19, 1865, letter. He also “hastily scribbled” a front view, with the black spot representing “the door through which goods are issued and looks into the store room.”

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

PROLIFIC PEN PAL

He remained steadfast in his desire to serve the country, however, and soon after secured an appointment with the United States Sanitary Commission.

The USSC was a civilian relief organization created by federal legislation in June 1861 with the purpose of supporting sick and wounded soldiers in the U.S. Army. A central office was located in Washington, D.C., and received reports from sanitary inspectors of regimental camps and hospitals. The USSC arranged for staffing at hospitals and operated about 30 soldiers’ homes or lodges for traveling or disabled Union soldiers.

As part of the USSC, Anderson was stationed at City Point, Va., and Washington, D.C., where he penned the following letters.

COURTESY OF SCOTT SENFT (2); COURTESY OF THE FIELD LIBRARY, PEEKSKILL, NY

J

ust 15 years old when the Civil War erupted, Homer Anderson of Lancaster, Ohio, was aflame with patriotism and determined to aid the Union cause. Although serving as a corporal in the Lancaster Cadets militia, he was denied the opportunity to answer President Abraham Lincoln’s call for volunteers in April 1861 because of his age. Anderson persisted, however, and was finally able to enlist in Company I of the 90th Ohio Infantry on August 20, 1862. Within a week of his enlistment, Anderson and the 90th Ohio were sent to counter Confederate General Braxton Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky. Anderson participated in the Battle of Perryville on October 8, 1862, and then marched 450 miles across Kentucky and Tennessee.

“During that march,” he later recalled, “I saw men apparently stronger than myself simply wear out and die, so that I often asked myself: ‘Why should I be allowed to finish this march when hundreds of better men will be left by the wayside?’”

Anderson never recovered his full health from the arduous march and was discharged due to disability in December 1862.

5th Corps Ax. C. City Point Virginia

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

COURTESY OF SCOTT SENFT (2); COURTESY OF THE FIELD LIBRARY, PEEKSKILL, NY

January 19th 1865

My Dear Friend Harrington, I write again this early partly to express my disappointment at not having received a letter from somebody yesterday, if for nothing more than a birthday present, and partly because I do not know when I will again have time. On Tuesday night upwards of 125 sick men were brought down from the front, and more expected tonight.

Thirty-two of the number brought were placed in my ward. They are the sickest lot of men I ever saw. Some of them will not leave this hospital except to go to their last long home. About 8 o’clock on the night they were brought in I went to see them. They had just got settled after a rough ride from the Division Hos. at the front. I had seen men suffer, but never before did I see so much suffering as on that night. I will not attempt to describe it. My heart bled for the poor sufferers, but I could do nothing for them. I watched the surgeon perform an operation on one poor fellow. I have often wondered what sensation one experienced when fainting. While watching this operation I came

so near experiencing this sensation that I IN NETWORK CARE had to leave the ward and ’twas some time City Point’s sprawling before I recovered from it. Yesterday and hospital complex today were busy days for me. These poor consisted of 452 tents, fellows were apparently unaccustomed to including those pictured here, and 90 wooden receiving kindness in the hospital, and all buildings sufficient to that I did for them was received with gratehouse more than 5,400 ful hearts. They at first did not know what men. In 1865, 29,000 to make of my presence among them and patients were admitted. they all watched me closely. After ascertaining that I was there to relieve their wants and was willing to do anything to comfort them, I was called & beckoned to from nearly all sides. Some of the uninitiated would call out “Oh Chaplain!” I felt quite flattered, Ahem! The day was spent in talking with, reading to, and writing letters for the suffering heroes. Several gave me a short sketch of their lives and some of them made startling revelations.

One lad of 16 who was deeply affected by a tract which I read to him, stopped me in the middle of the reading, and gave me, in a trembling tone, his history. It is very interesting and I will communicate it to you some time. Today has been spent in the same manner. If we receive more tonight I will have my hands full for some time. I tell you H. it is no easy task, dull pains in my head, and (there is a call to go and write a letter for a young fellow who will doubtless soon be where the “wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.” “Oh!” the poor fellows. H., it is not a blessing to have a heart.) Aching bones call up visions of a comfortable bed in the corner of my tent, but no bed while I can do anything to relieve these miserable men. I cannot help contrasting this last lot of new with my first charge. The latter were never content with what was done for them, always complaining and dissatisfied. Never a word of thanks, but APRIL 2022 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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FUNDRAISING EXPO

Civilians across the United States organized fairs to raise money for the Sanitary Commission’s efforts. The June 1864 Great Central Fair in Philadelphia depicted here was the largest. Held in Logan Square, it ran June 7–28, 1864, and raised more than $1 million.

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Occasional Firing along the line kept up all day. We scarcely notice it anymore.

Tis 4 o’clock & I have “lots” to do yet. Respects to all, Mrs & Miss, &c, &c, &c, &c.

While we are surrounded by misery, you are surrounded by friends, true friends, and are enjoying yourself in many ways, such, for instance, as skating. Think of us occasionally. I miss such enjoyments very much. A couple evenings ago Rev. Corse & Livere speaking of the sacrifices we had made and wound up with the conclusion that in such a noble work we could well afford to make the sacrifices. With Friday night’s course thoughts of the meeting of friends at the societies. Many long weeks have passed since I had the pleasure of attending one of them. Many will be the long months ere I can again meet with those friends again, and I doubt very much if I will spend another so pleasantly as the last.

I must away to my duty before pleasure. My thanks to all for your kind wishes. Respects to all inquiring. Best regards to Read & Mrs. & Miss G. Homer This happens to be one of our cold days. I am sitting on my bed writing. This room is always cold and my fingers are getting very numb, which accounts for this miserable writing.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

BANNER AD

Red flags with white lettering marked the site of Sanitary Commission operations in the field and in cities. This one flew in Washington, D.C.

and I finally gave up trying to please them. Now how different! Every man has his “thank you!” “much obliged!” “God bless you!” or when I ask them if they wish anything “if not too much trouble,” “if you please,” &c, &c. For all the duties are so arduous and trying, yet it is a pleasure to do for these men. But enough. Pardon me for dwelling wholly upon these matters. “Where a man’s heart is, there is his mind also.” Please do not show this to anyone. Dinner call. Good bye. Please write soon and let a fellow know what is going on at home. Don’t all act as though you did not know a fellow.

H. Anderson

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

frequent fault findings, and I sometimes had long arguments with some to convince them that I was giving all I had. Those, too, who found most fault, and is generally the case, were the ones who received the most goods from the San. Comm. I tell you it was sometimes really disheartening when thinking to please them with some little luxury, they would get angry because they had not enough or someone else had more. Just like children. Had they been sick men I could have reasonably expected nothing else, but they were all convalescents,

San. Com. Wigwam

Sunday February 12th 1865

MEDICAL STATION

USSC workers served as nurses, cooks, and caregivers. They also arranged for improved living conditions such as at this convalescent camp in Virgina, once nicknamed Camp Misery.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

My Dear Friend Harrington, Miss G’s letter with enclosed note from you was received this morning while on my way North. (I started, got as far as City Point, could not make necessary arrangements, in other words could not break through red tape, so had to return. Will try again on Wednesday with better success.

Wed. is pay day and all must be on hand at that time. The Supt. (Sperry) tried to get me off, but “twas no go,” so he told me to return to the Wigwam and make myself comfortable until that day. I told him I regretted the delay only so far as it would prevent an early return to duty. He told me not to worry about that. I had done all in my power, so they had none but themselves to blame. Being unable to do anything else will the time in writing. Keep Mum.) You are indeed entitled to a good long letter, and a long one you shall have (at least 2 feet). You must be your own judge of its merits. (The wind threatens us with destruction).

I have met with disappointments, bitter disappointments, until I have learned to take them as a matter of course. I was disappointed this morning in not getting started for the north, but I believe ’tis all for the best.

Sun. morning a gale has arisen and the shrieking winds threaten to carry the Wigwam from over our heads. Such a flapping of canvas, and shrill whistling, screaming, roaring, and moaning of the winds I never before heard. The tempestuous weather, and a ride up the Appomattox, on a little “tug,” from City Point to this place, has made me quite content to spend a few more days in the Wigwam….

Monday evening. Now for another half hour’s talk. I am puzzled to know what to talk about. There is enough, but whether it would be interesting to you is the question. In your next please tell me what to write about. I could tell you that which would make you see ghosts for a month

to come and for that you would not thank me.

Oh, I know what to tell you. It may not be interesting to you but ’twas to me. Yesterday morning, on my return from City Point, I met an angel in the Wigwam. I mean that was my first impression. Said angel was in company with Mrs. Spalding (the lady in charge of light diet kitchen) (must stop and write an application for furlough, for a soldier in distress. That is the third application for today. Excuse me one moment.) This is really writing under difficulties. It is now 9 o’clock. Time all honest folks were abed. She who first struck me as being an angel or a fairy, was introduced as Mrs. Major Beaumont. She is a little lady, and handsome, beautiful hair done up a la mode, and oh such eyes! And what a talker! I came near falling in love with the little Southern witch (she is native of the south,) but happened to think she was introduced as Mrs. And I since learned also that her husband is here with a serious wound in the leg, which member ‘tis feared he will lose. And more than that, from her conversation I have discovered her to be a vain domineering little piece of femininity, so she did not gain a very

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CHURCH AND STATE

The USSC collaborated with the Christian Commission to provide medical services. Anderson complained, however, the Christian Commission’s extravagant chapel at City Point, illustrated here, was used more for religious conversion than to provide sick soldiers any sanctuary.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

long letter, and you have it. I had intended describing our situation and the manner in which the Sanitary is conducted, but could not find a map of this section of the United States, and without such a map I cannot describe the situation. In my next will endeavor to do so.

Have not written what I wanted to at all. Have been distracted so much ’twas next to impossible. When I return from ___ will write another long one. Please give my compliments to No. 8 School. Also to Mrs. & Miss G. My kindest regards to Mrs. Hart if you see her. A good word for me to all inquiring friends and an interest in all your prayers. You may rest now.

Please write soon and accept [………] kindness to me. Witness my hand and seal MEMENTO of Office.

One letter contained Lieut. Homer Anderson (ahem) a holly leaf used to decorate for a sociable Direct as before. The leaf at the head of this that weather delayed, to sheet was taken from our decorations. It is Anderson’s delight. “I do holly and came from the banks of the not feel much in the mood Appomattox. for anything of its kind.”

NPS PHOTO; COURTESY OF SCOTT SENFT

strong hold on my, well I was going to say heart.

I used to have one but now you might doubt whether I possess one. I rather disbelieve it myself….

Glory! Here is the last page. On this I must say a word about the so-called Christian Commission. I am not going to speak from a feeling either of prejudice or of envy. Will simply present a plain statement of facts and leave you to draw your own conclusions. On consideration think it best not to speak at length on the subject this time, but will do so ere long. I will, however, relate one Christian act of theirs.

They have erected a chapel at City Point Hospital at the cost of four thousand dollars ($4,000.00). This was, of course, paid for by the people. Last week the wounded were being brought in by the hundreds. The weather was awful. A portion of the hospital tents had been taken down so that some of the poor wounded soldiers had to lie on the damp ground. An effort was made to have some of the men removed to the chapel. The Christian Commission positively refused to have the chapel used for that purpose; giving as their reason “if they did it once they would do it again.” I have much to say about this Christian body, but time and paper are getting scarce and you will please excuse brevity.

I wonder if you are not getting tired. I am sure I would weary reading such a mess of nothing. You must not grumble. You wanted a

Among the Boxes Tuesday Night

May 30th / 65 Dear Harrington, Learning today that the flag flaunting over the hill, in full view from our tent door, was in front of Maj. Bush’s quarters, I thought of my friend H, and tonight called to see the jolly fellow. Being pushed with business I had to steal away from our station and consequently had but a few minutes to spend with your friend. He wondered much why you had not written to him, saying he wrote you last. The last rec’d from you was dated Oct. He wrote you in reply joking you about some young lady. You not answering his letter led him to believe that his joke had offended you.

He then wrote you a letter asking pardon for any offense, and your continued silence led him to fear the offense was unpardonCOMMAND POST able. He would be delighted to hear from The Central Office of the Sanitary Commission, you, spoke highly of “Jim” and said he was in Washington, D.C., above, fielded reports from always much pleased with his letters. He inspectors at hundreds of regimental camps. sends his compliments and may call to see Orders and receipts for medical supplies, you some time. His Regt was mustered hospital beds, and even board games for infirm out of service today and expects to start soldiers came to this office. Right, field workers sometimes wore a badge like this one. for home tomorrow. So much for Maj. Bush. My comrades are carrying on terribly, endeavoring now and then to convince me I am writing a love letter. The idea! I write a love letter? Do you believe I could? nderson remained with the Sanitary Just imagine yourself in my position for one night, bounded on the Commission until the close of the war, north and south by boxes, on the east by a bed, and on the west by the after which he moved to Peekskill, N.Y., tent door, sleeping on a stretcher—things used for carrying disabled men to work at his father’s machine shop. He upon. The first night upon it I dreamed of standing by the death bed of later worked for the Western Union Company some of my friends and up following others to the grave. Last night I and the Hall Typewriter Company. Anderson indulged in the luxury of a sheet and the consequence was horrible remained devoted to Union soldiers for the rest dreams and broken slumbers, with a headache this morning. Never did a of his life and was involved with the Grand short campaign so use me up as has this one. Exposure & laborious duties Army of the Republic, including organizing have almost worn me out. A severe cold and diarrhea (have forgotten how Peekskill’s Abraham Vosburg Post, No. 95. to spell it) have been telling upon me. The latter I attribute to bad water, “He held every office in the post more than which cannot be drank in quantity without the addition of lemon. I today once, was its commander at different times and visited the Regiments of 3rd Division, 5th A.C. and “have the honor to again held such office from 1922 until the time report” more sickness that was ever before known in the Army. Causes too of his death,” his 1925 obituary in the Highland numerous to mention. Am awful tired and having obtained but little rest Democrat read, adding, “The work done with the last night am terribly sleepy.

[Sanitary] commission, Mr. Anderson considYou must pardon my miserable scrawls. Do not know whether I can do ered the most important of his whole life.” better or not, has been so long since an opportunity offered for trial.

Co with address H. Anderson Care A. M. Sperry Melissa A. Winn is the Director of Photography for 244 “J” Street Civil War Times magazine, a writer, and a Washington D.C. collector of Civil War photographs.

Remember me to all my friends, particularly to Owen Hill & No 8.

H.A. Letters Courtesy of Scott Senft.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS

NPS PHOTO; COURTESY OF SCOTT SENFT

A

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JERSEY BOYS

A cemetery walk and

an obscure photograph

trigger a search for the fate of

five Union soldiers

BY DAN CASELL A

Editor’s note: The Civil War is well-plowed ground. This article, however, proves there are new discoveries to make if one only looks. Every headstone of a Civil War veteran; every image of a stiffly posed soldier, civilian, or enslaved person of the era; every document in an archive, museum, or historical society holds a unique story waiting to be unlocked by curiosity and research. And the Jersey Boy who wrote this article is not much older than the men he researched when they enlisted. That’s a good sign for Civil War history.

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PHOTO CREDIT

THE HISTORIC DAYS OF CUMBERLAND COUNTY

I

n early December 1861, a group of newly minted infantrymen walked into a Washington City photographer’s studio dressed in their freshly issued sky blue overcoats and arranged themselves to have their likeness taken. The five men were either directly related to each other or were friends before they answered Abraham Lincoln’s call for volunteers and enlisted about a month earlier. Their overcoats were unstained from the rigors of any campaign and their cloth forage caps were stiff from the warehouse. As they waited for the photographer to lift the cover off his lens, they made last-minute adjustments to those coats and caps, the position of their hands, and the expression on their faces. None of these men had any idea of the trials and tribulations that lay ahead during the course of their three-year enlistment.

The green soldiers were a part of Company H of the 7th New Jersey Infantry, a regiment recruited out of Cumberland and Gloucester Counties in southern New Jersey.

Cedarville and Fairton, where these men hail from, are small towns close to Delaware Bay. The area is interlaced by tidal rivers and streams, and many buildings from as far back as the 1750s to the turn of the early 20th century remain. The vacation destination of Cape May is not far away.

GAZING AT HISTORY

PHOTO CREDIT

THE HISTORIC DAYS OF CUMBERLAND COUNTY

This photograph of five friends inspired a quest that still continues. Of the group, only three made it home from the war.

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Capt. Benj. F Ogden, Aug 27th, 1839-Dec 20th, 1915 Co. H. & Regt. N.J. Vol 3rd Corp 2nd Division He fought a good fight This was the start of an incredible journey. I brought my findings to the next historical society meeting and the members were delighted by my discovery and went on to inform me that all the family surnames mentioned in the photo still had living relatives in the immediate area, including one of the attending members.

A few short weeks after our February meeting, Covid-19 brought a temporary end to visiting archives. Fortunately, I still had the Internet. So, with free time and the keys to the Historical Society building, I was eventually able to dig through the Francis A. Stanger Civil War Collection. It didn’t take long to find an important primary source.

S NEW JERSEY Cedarville

A QUIET JERSEY SHORE

The First Presbyterian Church in Cedarville can trace its roots back to the late 17th century, when White settlers moved to the area from Connecticut. Because of the town’s location close to Delaware Bay, a number of men in the 7th New Jersey made their living on the water.

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itting on a shelf was a piece of paper encased in glass, and written in faded pencil, I was able to make out the words:

“Washington D.C. Campe Cassee, Meridian Hill October 22th 1861” This was a letter from the very beginning of the war, when no one knew what the next four years held for the nation. It was signed, “Joseph Burte.”

A light went off ! Joseph Burt was one of the names in the photo. I sat down, and after a few hours learning this man’s handwriting and spelling habits (e.g., putting extra letters into words that shouldn’t have them, particularly “e” and “n”) I was able to transcribe the whole thing. Burt’s letter to his Aunt Susan talks about missing home, and mentions two more men in the photo: Elmer B. Ogden and Lorenzo Paynter.

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COURTESY OF THE NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM

would quickly find out that Cedarville and Cumberland County have a rich and proud Civil War history. On my first exploration around the cemetery behind the handsome First Presbyterian Church, I kept my eyes peeled for Grand Army of the Republic insignia that mark the graves of Civil War veterans. I started out just walking down the rows and snapping photos of headstones of these veterans and was immediately moved by what I was reading.

“Died of Typhoid,” “Killed at Williamsburg,” “Musician,” “Assistant Surgeon” were some of the designations on the grave markers. I’ve been passionate and interested in history my whole life and knew the inscriptions on those aging stones were going to send me down some research rabbit holes. Shortly after, I shared my findings with some friends online and started down the path to try to find who these soldiers were.

One friend alerted me to findagrave.com, and another sent me a link to the New Jersey state library website, which has the official record of almost every soldier, sailor, marine, and member of the U.S. Colored Troops to come from the Garden State. The sites would become key tools in my search for answers to what these men had seen and done.

And then I really got involved. In January 2020, the Lawrence Township Historical Society had its yearly elections. I gave a little speech about some ideas I had and a plan to get the people of Cedarville involved with the society, such as preservation, fundraising, and networking in the historical community. A member nominated me as president and I was elected to that role. I was taken aback to say the least.

To learn more about my new home and better prepare me for my role with the society, I followed a link and found a book called The Historic Days of Cumberland County. I was going through the book online when I found, on page 53, the photo of those five soldiers with fresh uniforms accompanied by the words “Group Fairfield Boys Co. H, Seventh N.J. Reg. Inf. Vols.” And then it stated their names: “Joseph H. Diver. Benjamin F. Ogden. Joseph Burt. Elmer B. Ogden. Lorenzo D. Paynter.”

I was captivated by the faces staring at me, and the name Benjamin Ogden also seemed familiar. I followed my hunch and went back to the Brick Church Cemetery, and there was his stone. It read:

PHOTO BY DAN CASELLA

Some 160 years after it was taken, that image would send me on a quest to learn all I could about these men. The journey started in the spring of 2017 when I moved to Cedarville with my wife and son to start a new chapter in our lives. After the first few days of settling and organizing the house, we started to explore our new little town. It didn’t take long at all for me to find the historical society, surrounding cemeteries, and fall in love with the dozens of old homes that we walked by.

Burt wrote his Aunt, “[W ]e have started a prayer meeting in oure tent and have good meetings…we hold them foure times a week and they are very well attended but we can heare them onn each side of us...some swareing and some playing cards and all other kinds of wickednefs that was ever thought off.” The 7th was in Brig. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s division, and Burt described going on parade and being inspected by “Olde Abe and his Lady.”

Shortly after I finished Burt’s letter, I went looking for his grave on Find a Grave, and saw he had a stone in town.

After a short walk to locate it, I found it snapped in half and lying on the ground.

It was originally put up by Burt’s oldest son, William, in the 1880s and broken in the late 1980s.

In the days that followed, I continued my search in the historical society for more information on the five area men and came across a pile of “scrapbooks.”

These books, however, are in fact ledger books from the 1820s and ’30s in which someone in the 1980s started gluing newspaper articles from two local papers, The West Jersey Pioneer and The Bridgeton Chronicle. The Pioneer has most of its issues online and many existing originals are housed in the library of the Cumberland County Historical Society in Greenwich, N.J. I found more information in these ledgers than I expected. There were dozens of firsthand accounts from local South Jersey men during the

CEDARVILLE

AND

CUMBERLAND COUNTY

HAVE

A

RICH

AND

PROUD

COURTESY OF THE NEW JERSEY STATE MUSEUM

PHOTO BY DAN CASELLA

CIVIL WAR HISTORY

early part of the war, especially about the May 5, 1862, Battle of Williamsburg, fought during Maj. Gen. George McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign. Right away I found an obituary of Elmer Ogden, another of the men in the photograph.

As I flipped the pages, I found that these men and several others from Cedarville had received a box from home while at a place called Camp Revere in Lower Potomac, Md. Further along in the book I found an article published in the Pioneer by the first man I found from the photo, Benjamin Ogden. Here are some of the quotes

from his letter titled “Camp CorresponTHREE YEARS dence,” dated May 18, 1862, in which he The national flag of the described the engagement at Williamsburg, 7th New Jersey bears which was fought in a rainstorm from daythe battle honors the break until nightfall. By the end of the day, regiment won during every man in the 7th was soaked, and most three years of hard campaigning with the had lost their knapsacks. They had been Army of the Potomac. engaged for so long they had fired every cartridge they were issued.

The 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th New Jersey formed the 3rd Brigade in Hooker’s 2nd Division of the Army of the Potomac’s 3rd Corps—a unit that went by the nickname “Second New Jersey Brigade.” At Williamsburg, Hooker’s men attacked a strong line of Confederate redoubts anchored by Fort Magruder guarding the eastern approaches to Virginia’s colonial capital. The battle would be one of the worst fights of the war for the 7th and other Jersey Blue regiments—a rude awakening of what the war was like.

“I must speak of our contest,” Ogden wrote, “although it makes me feel sad every time, I mention it; for it renews the recollection that one of our number still lies beneath the battle ground…when the battle commenced, six of us Cedarville men were in the front rank. At night, one lay dead on the field, and two in hospital wounded. Three came out without a scratch, although I had three bullet holes in my overcoat cape....”

He continued: “I had not seen any of them except Jos. Burt. He told me that Elmer B. Ogden had been killed, for he saw him fall; and that A. Bateman was wounded before he fired a gun and L. Paynter was also wounded....Sergeant Stiles and myself dug the grave and buried [Elmer].

This was hard to do. The rebels had taken everything out of his pockets and even the rings on his fingers. The only thing they left was a pair of gloves, which I sent to his mother.”

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o continue my search, I decided to look through the Library of Congress to find old maps of Cedarville and Fairton, and located some that were updated every 10 years or so. I was able to find most of the homes these men owned. Many are standing to this day. Along with that, I bought a subscription to ancestry.com to try to find as much out about the men and their families as I could. Here is what I was able to come up with about each man.

Joseph Diver was born in Maryland in 1843 and moved to Cedarville with his father, a Presbyterian minister, and Amanda, his mother. The 1860 census lists Joseph as 17 years old and the oldest of seven children. He

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COURTESY OF THE CAPE MAY COUNTY MUSEUM; PHOTO BY DAN CASELLA

Hooker says we were whipped three times yesterday but did not know it; he says we are not Soldiers, but Bulldogs! We do not stay in one place long but keep closing on Richmond.”

served with the regiment through its formation in September 1861 to the end of his enlistment in October 1864. Diver was present at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness. After he mustered out of service, records trace him to Salem, N.J., where he would marry Sarah Stretch and settle down. They would go on to raise three children together. Diver passed away in 1892 at the age of 49.

Benjamin Ogden, the first name I recognized from the photo, was born on August 27, 1839, to George and Mitilda Ogden. He was the youngest son listed in the family’s 1850 census record.

His father and older brother Joseph are listed as laborers while Benjamin is listed as attending school. An original copy of his account of Williamsburg is housed in the collection of the Lawrence Township Historical Society. He and his friends would see more than two dozen engagements including one on his 23rd birthday in 1862, the little-known Battle of Kettle Run, Va., just prior to the Second Battle of Bull Run. Benjamin would survive the war and in the 1880 census would be listed as “Head of House” who worked as a “Waterman.” The census also lists his wife, Martha, and their five children.

Ogden passed away December 20, 1915, at the age of 76. He is buried in the Brick Church Cemetery in Cedarville. It is unclear why he has the rank of “Captain” on his headstone, for he was a private during his term of service. A mystery yet to be solved.

Joseph Burt was born sometime in 1831 in Fariton. He wed Mary Ogden on March 11, 1852, and by 1860 they had six children together.

The 1860 census lists Burt as a “House Carpenter.” His handywork still likely exists to this day in the local area. He would be promoted twice during his service. On February 10, 1863, however, Burt passed away in camp from disease. It is doubtful that his body was ever returned to Cedarville. His oldest son, William, placed a cenotaph on his own headstone to honor his fallen father.

Elmer Ogden was one of eight children of David and Martha Ogden of Fairton, and was born in 1841. Elmer and Benjamin were cousins.

Elmer was struck in the forehead and killed instantly at Williamsburg while standing in the front rank, shoulder to shoulder with his friends.

He would be buried on the field, and it is unlikely his body was ever brought home. His father would pass away in 1866 and had a cenotaph for Elmer on his own headstone in Brick Church Cemetery. Elmer was 22 years old when he died.

Lorenzo Dow Paynter was born in 1842 to Lemuel, a shoemaker, and Susan Paynter. Known as “Lore,” he was probably named after the Evangelical minister Lorenzo Dow, who wrote a

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

FIGHT IN THE RAIN

Alfred Waud drew Union General Phil Kearney leading troops at the May 5, 1862, Battle of Williamsburg. The map below shows the location where Brig. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s division incurred heavy casualties while attacking Fort Magruder.

THREE YEARS OF

SACRIFICE

The 7th New Jersey Infantry mustered in as a three-year regiment in September 1861. After drilling at a military camp in Trenton, the 7th joined what became known as the Second New Jersey Brigade in the Army of the Potomac. During its service, the regiment lost 485 men killed and wounded fighting in all the major engagements in the Eastern Theater.

Its five most costly engagements were: LOCATION

DATE

KILLED AND MORTALLY WOUNDED

WILLAMSBURG, VA. GETTYSBURG, PA. PETERSBURG, VA. CHANCELLORSVILLE, VA. SPOTSYLVANIA, VA.

May 5, 1862 July 1-3, 1863 June 18, 1864 May 1-3, 1863 May 8-21, 1864

40 24 15 10 10

COURTESY OF THE CAPE MAY COUNTY MUSEUM; PHOTO BY DAN CASELLA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

In December 2020, the American Battlefield Trust purchased 29 acres of the Williamsburg battlefield’s “Bloody Ravine”—ground hallowed by the sacrifice of the 7th New Jersey, among others—from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. The Lawrence Township Historical Society plans to work with Civil War Trails to place a historical interpretive marker telling the story of the Second New Jersey Brigade and the men from Cedarville.

CLOSE CALL AT PETERSBURG

Corporal Swain Reeves of the 7th New Jersey was struck by a bullet at Petersburg in June 1864. The round first hit his canteen, above, and he kept the memento of his brush with death as a souvenir.

very popular religious tract and who gave a sermon at the Historic Stone Church in Fairton and again in Bridgeton, just up the road from Fairton.

In the 1860 census, he was 17 years old and had only one sibling, Susan.

Lorenzo was wounded in the arm at Williamsburg, and participated in every fight of the 7th. In 1877, he married a woman named Lynda, became a waterman, and fathered two children. He is last recorded in the 1910 census as “Head of House” at 67 years old. He passed away in 1912 at the age of 69 and is buried at the Old Stone Church in Fairton.

To quote The Historic Days of Cumberland County, “Cumberland County rose as one man in unison with the people of other States to aid the Government to the last man and last dollar for the suppression of the rebellion.

No county in the republic furnished more volunteers for the Union Army in proportions to its population than did this good old commonwealth named in honor of the Duke of Cumberland for his heroic conduct on Collondon Field.”

I’m glad my move to a new home helped lead me to retell the stories of five of those brave volunteers. The Lawrence Township Historical Society is currently building a display to showcase this story in full details to share with the community and the world at large.

BROKEN, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

The Lawrence Township Historical Society raised more than $1,700 to repair the broken grave marker that honors Joseph Burt. The stone will be replaced, and the original displayed at the society with Burt’s letter.

Dan Casella writes from Cedarville N.J. A chef by training, he spends many weekends interpreting the Civil War to the public as a member of Liberty Rifles living history organization. President of the Lawrence Township Historical Society since 2019, he hopes to compile dozens of accounts in the society’s collections into a book about Cedarville men in the war.

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ARMAMENT

ROBERT PARROTT’S

BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

Members of the 3rd Massachusetts Heavy Artillery at Fort Totten outside of Washington, D.C. Their massive 100-pounder Parrott cannon could fire a “Hollow Shot” nearly five miles, and the shell would stay in flight for an astonishing 36 seconds.

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THE ADVENT OF RIFLED BARRELS caused abrupt changes in the manufacture of cannons. In 1861, the U.S. Army needed rifled cannons and contracted with Robert Parrott to have his West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, N.Y., manufacture the unique cast-iron guns that carry his name. Parrott developed a process whereby a red-hot forged reinforcing band was forced onto the breech of a watercooled, previously cast barrel. The band reinforced the breech to withstand the pressure caused by firing rifled shells. It wasn’t foolproof, as Parrott Rifles were known to crack just in front of the band. Nonetheless, his design gave Mr. Lincoln’s armies and navy an adequate, quickly produced rifled cannon. Parrott’s foundry employed 1,400 workers during the war and cast about 2,000 Parrott Rifles of various calibers by 1865. The guns were proofed by firing across the Hudson River into the slopes of Storm King Mountain.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A FOUNDRY OWNER DESIGNED ONE OF THE CIVIL WAR’S MOST COMMON CANNONS

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: WEST POINT MUSEUM; SUPERSTOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; PHOTO BY MELISSA A. WINN

GUN

BORN IN FIRE

In this dramatic painting, foundry workers pour molten iron into a Parrott vertical cannon mold dug into the factory’s earthen floor. A tube, not yet fitted with its breech band, cools at right.

CANNON MAN

Robert Parrott graduated from West Point in 1824, and served in the Army until 1836, when he left the service to become superintendent at the West Point Foundry. Today, a trail takes visitors through the ruins of the once-massive foundry complex along the Hudson River.

VARIETY PACK

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: WEST POINT MUSEUM; SUPERSTOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; PHOTO BY MELISSA A. WINN

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Excavated shells fired by Parrott cannons. The iron guns ranged from 10-pounder fieldpieces to 200-pounder fortification behemoths. Parrotts fired solid bolts; exploding shells; case shot, a projectile filled with iron or lead balls as shrapnel; and canister.

IT’S SWELL

Parrott rifles are common scene-setters on battlefields. This one is located along the Union artillery line on Gettysburg’s Cemetery Ridge. Model 1861 Parrotts had a swell at the muzzle as seen here.

The Model 1863 variant did not have the muzzle swell.

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OF LEE

AND

MARYLAND

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nterpretations of historical events evolve over time, driven by the discovery of new evidence and the introduction of fresh ideas,” Alexander Rossino opines in the introduction to his deep dive into the Antietam Campaign from the viewpoint of the Army of Northern Virginia and its commanding general, Robert E. Lee. “Thus, it benefits us every so often to reexamine subjects that may be considered settled in the historical literature.”

How much benefit the reader may derive from Rossino’s meticulously researched analysis will depend on his ability to follow the author’s minutely detailed investigations.

For the novice reader, it poses a challenge that is well worth accepting. Relying on a rich repository of primary source material, Rossino hopes “my interpretations of these

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Their Maryland: The Army of Northern Virginia From the Potomac Crossing to Sharpsburg in September 1862

By Alexander B. Rossino Savas Beatie, 2021, $32.95

sources enhances our knowledge on some subjects, and corrects the record on others.”

Rossino begins by asking what Lee hoped to accomplish from the Confederacy’s first foray into Maryland, a slave state that did not secede. Was it a massive food raid to feed his hungry army? Did Lee believe he could challenge the security of Washington, D.C., or Baltimore? Did he expect that a second dramatic victory over a much larger Federal force, hard on the heels of his overwhelming success at Second Manassas, would impress foreign governments enough to recognize and aid the Confederacy? Rossino argues, convincingly, that September 6 was a pivotal date in the evolution of Lee’s thinking.

While initially believing that the mere presence of his army would foment an uprising from thousands of sympathetic Marylanders,

TROIANI, DON (B.1949)/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

REVIEWED BY GORDON BERG

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THE CONFEDERATE CENTER

General Robert E. Lee, banged up from a fall from his horse after Second Manassas, passes by Colonel John B. Gordon’s 6th Alabama line in Antietam’s Sunken Road. Ensuing battle would rechristen it Bloody Lane.

STOPPING TIME

TROIANI, DON (B.1949)/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

REVIEWED BY RICHARD H. HOLLOWAY

on that date Lee became convinced that only a battlefield victory on Northern soil could arouse the overwhelmingly apathetic citizenry his army encountered.

Rossino goes on to discuss various expectations voiced by soldiers in the ranks as they arrived in Maryland and their subsequent interactions with the locals. He then proceeds to locate the encampments of the Rebel army, noting that they were more widely situated than concentrated around the Best Farm south of Frederick, as most historians document. Identifying specific units and where they camped is critical when seeking to answer the many questions surrounding Special Orders No. 191—one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the entire war. Another chapter is devoted to identifying the timing of a rare photograph showing Rebel soldiers in the streets of Frederick. The final two chapters assess Lee’s strategy during the Battle of Antietam and his personal conduct during the fighting.

Rossino’s appendices are an integral part of the narrative. One of them discusses the author’s investigation into who probably lost Special Orders No. 191, Lee’s battle plans that found their way into the hands of Union commander Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. Rossino also provides an extensive bibliography, and Savas Beatie does scholars a distinct service by putting footnotes at the bottom of the page rather than at the end of chapters or, worse yet, at the end of the narrative.

The different takes offered in Their Maryland challenge many long-accepted paradigms. Readers may not agree with all of Rossino’s conclusions, but inviting new debates into old topics may be the most important aspect of this intriguing collection of essays.

A

uthor Lawrence Lee Hewitt has assembled a massive collection of images by myriad cameramen in Port Hudson: The Most Significant Battlefield Photographs of the Civil War. The lion’s share of work was done by photographic partners, William D. McPherson and A.J. Oliver. McPherson achieved some acclaim as an officer in the 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters, but later turned to the lucrative vocation of photography. The clarity of the pictures is astounding in some cases, with the viewer able to see the lettering on ammunition boxes in one. Even when objects are blurred, it is still amazing to make out a cat deftly navigating a rail fence at Captain George B. Halsted’s quarters.

An anomaly among the subjects Port Hudson: The Most photographed at Port Hudson were Significant Battlefield several images made during the winter Photographs of the Civil War of 1864 that showed soldiers and their

By Lawrence Lee Hewitt families atop horse-drawn sleds in the University of Tennessee Press, snow. Having the white powder that 2021, $49.95 far south in Louisiana was a rare occasion, but it doubtless allowed Northerners far from home to feel more at ease and enjoy the frigid temperatures. These are bolstered by multiple fascinating photographs taken of U.S. Navy batteries and USCT troops. Of course, the most rare and spectacular image is that of the surrender of Confederate Maj. Gen. Franklin Gardner’s garrison to Union Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks’ forces taken on July 9, 1863. No other wartime photographer captured such an important occasion.

Hewitt’s detailed and informative prose is very complementary to these delightful images. Not only does the reader have access to a lengthy collection of rare photographs, but it also works in perfect conjunction with Hewitt’s earlier work, Port Hudson: Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi.

This volume is certainly worthy of a spot in a historian’s Civil War library as well as that of the average enthusiast.

Though often overshadowed by the events to the north at Vicksburg, Miss., the Union siege of Port Hudson, La., was a grueling affair that lasted 48 days, from May 22-July 9, 1863. The Federals needed to capture the town to have unfettered access to the Mississippi River, but the Confederate defenders tenaciously hung on until the surrender of Vicksburg made their situation untenable.

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NATIVE ENSLAVERS REVIEWED BY GORDON BERG

everal American Indian nations officially sided with the Confederate States of America. Fay Yarbrough’s deeply researched and cogently written history of one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” investigates the reasons behind the Choctaw decision to ally with the South, the fighting in Indian Territory done by Choctaw soldiers, and the reintegration of the Choctaws during Reconstruction.

Yarbrough explores “the ways Choctaw Indians saw the Civil War as connected to their own survival as a separate, sovereign nation.” Fortunately, she has a treasure trove of primary source documents to work with, including legislative and legal records, journals, correspondence, and slave narratives collected by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Yarbrough’s empathetic use of anecdotal material from the Indian Pioneer History Collection allows readers to experience events of the period through Indian eyes.

The Choctaws were fully removed from their homes east of the Mississippi River by 1837 and had been enslaving people of African descent for more than a century. The 1860 Census showed slaves made up 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation. Choctaws had a reputation of being kinder enslavers, often using their bound people as interpreters.

Yarbrough describes in detail the legislative framework that the Choctaws developed to maintain and retain their human property.

When it became clear that neutrality during the war was impossible, Yarbrough concludes that more than the preservation of slavery influenced the Choctaws to side with the Confederacy.

Their leaders “imagined that southern states that proclaimed the sovereignty of states’ rights over federal authority would respect the sovereign rights of Indian nations.” Confederate emissaries actively sought alliances with the tribes, several entering into a treaty with the Confederacy in July 1861.

Yarbrough amply describes Indian Territory fighting and how the war enhanced Choctaw Confederates: the Choctaw image of masculinity by The American Civil allowing the tribe’s young men to reclaim a War in Indian Country warrior identity. How many Choctaws

By Fay A. Yarbrough fought for the Confederacy is difficult to UNC Press, 2021, $32.95 ascertain. Yarbrough estimates about 3,100 troops can be identified in the records, an astounding 20 percent of the Choctaw population, not including their enslaved.

Reconstruction brought changes unique to the Indian Nations.

“Lost Cause” mythology never took root among the Choctaws. “Most Choctaws seem to have wanted freed people removed from the nation,” Yarbrough informs, “at precisely the moment when white southerners were going to great lengths to keep their former bondpeople tied to the land.” Not until 1883, however, did the Choctaws’ 3,500 freed people gain their rights within the Choctaw Nation.

S

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CLARK “BUD” HALL VIETNAM VETERAN, FBI AGENT, PRESERVATIONIST, AND SAVIOR OF BRANDY STATION BATTLEFIELD

What Are You

Reading?

“The best way to get a clear concept of a military engagement is to study it on the ground.” Professor Wilbur S. Nye so described his basic research process while writing this threshold book that details the movement of Lee’s army to Adams County during the Gettysburg Campaign.

The professor’s methodology is highlighted as it has been my experience as a Culpeper County, Va., historian that few authors show up here to conduct field research. And in doing so, they neglect performing fundamental “ground-truthing” in a battle venue more heavily fought over, marched, and camped upon than any county in Virginia. So, I am again reading Wilbur Nye’s superb book to remind myself (and others) how it should be done.

Here Come the Rebels!

By Wilbur Sturtevant Nye Louisiana State University Press, 1965

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Gina Elise’s

Tes, USAF Veteran

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EDUCATION IS POWER

An 1866 engraving of a Freedman’s Bureau school in Richmond, Va. Harriet Buss taught in similar schools.

SHE WENT ALL OUT “

wish you could just look into my school-room some day…”; “You should look in and see me manage, you might learn something…”; “I wish you could come in and see how I live….” Enthusiastic sentiments like these appear throughout the many letters Harriet Buss sent home to her parents in Sterling, Mass., while she lived and worked among the newly freed people in South Carolina, Virginia, and North Carolina during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

After uneventful years teaching in several schools in Massachusetts, Buss headed south to Beaufort, S.C., in March 1863 to participate in the Port Royal Experiment. In Beaufort and later on Hilton Head Island, she taught classes of Black children and adults, including Robert Smalls and his daughter. “I have become much interested in my scholars,” she boasted, “and I intend they shall yet show to the world that colored children can learn something.”

Buss’ letters are packed with descriptions of her life, events around her, and the people she met. Buss comments on the bombardments of Charleston, the arrival of the 54th Massachusetts and its raids with Harriet Tubman under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, whom she admired. She mentions her acquaintance with Generals David Hunter (whom she disMy Work Among the Freedmen: liked) and Rufus Saxton (of whom she approved).

The Civil War and Buss was sent to Hilton Head in November Reconstruction Letters 1863 and opened a school of her own on an of Harriet Buss abandoned plantation, where “nearly forty chilEdited by Jonathan W. dren” and “seven young men from the lightWhite and Lydia J. Davis house” came in the evenings to learn to read. “Of University of Virginia course, I shall teach them,” she writes.

Press, 2021, $39.50

By August 1864, Buss began to experience significant health issues and returned to Massa-

I

68

chusetts to recuperate. Unlike many White women who volunteered only briefly, Buss was determined to return to the South, which she did in January 1868. Her new destination was Norfolk, Va., where she taught at the Coan School, a model institution for African Americans founded in 1863 by William I. Coan, a missionary with the American Missionary Association.

Her letters from Norfolk and later from Raleigh, N.C., are filled with details about local events and her enthusiasm for organizing and teaching her students. While teaching at the Raleigh Baptist Institute, a school that eventually became Shaw University, a letter home in November 1869 admits, “I did not want to come to Raleigh…but since my arrival here, I am more and more convinced that this is just the place; there is a field here for an immense amount of good to be done.”

The good Harriet Buss accomplished permeates her amazing letters. She returned to Massachusetts in June 1871 to care for her ailing father.

After her mother died in 1887, Buss returned to Shaw University and worked tirelessly teaching and fundraising for her scholars. She died in October 1895.

The editors of her letters conclude, “Harriet M. Buss’s long career as a teacher in the South sets her apart among the vast majority of white teachers of African Americans during the Civil War era and the Gilded Age.” Her letters bring to life her motto: “I will have no halfway ground.”

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

REVIEWED BY GORDON BERG

CIVIL WAR TIMES APRIL 2022

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TODAY IN HISTORY JULY 17, 1918 TSAR NICHOLAS II OF RUSSIA AND HIS FAMILY WERE EXECUTED. YEARS LATER, CONSPIRACY THEORIES EMERGED, AND IMPOSTORS BEGAN TO SURFACE. AN EASTERN EUROPEAN WOMAN NAMED ANNA ANDERSON CLAIMED TO BE GRAND DUCHESS ANASTASIA ROMANOV, SPARED DEATH IN 1918 BY A SYMPATHETIC GUARD. TEN YEARS AFTER HER DEATH IN 1994, DNA TESTING CONCLUDED SHE WAS NOT ANASTASIA BUT A MISSING POLISH FACTORY WORKER. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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Hold At All Hazards: Bigelow’s Battery at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863

By David H. Jones Casemate, 2021, $22.95

FOR

BEACH AND BOOKSHELF REVIEWED BY STEVE DAVIS

C

ivil War Times doesn’t usually review historical novels, but this one is a bit different.

First, it’s fixed on a particular event, and on a single day: Gettysburg, July 2. It’s also set within an individual unit, Captain John Bigelow’s 9th Battery, Massachusetts Light Artillery (six 12-pounder Napoleons), fighting with Dan Sickles’ 3rd Corps near the Trostle Farm.

The author has found and included a dozenand-a-half illustrations from the Library of Congress representing Bigelow’s battery officers, as well as the guns in action, and also commissioned a cartographer to make four maps showing the battery’s positions on the battlefield. Appendices include the 9th’s casualties at Gettysburg, after-battle photographs of the Trostle Farm, and the recollections of Confederate Brig. Gen. Benjamin Humphreys, who succeeded to brigade command after Brig. Gen. William Barksdale was mortally wounded. The 21st Mississippi took four of Bigelow’s guns and fought in Humphrey’s Brigade. There’s even a bibliography.

Most important is Jones’ narrative, which reads as much a battery history as a tale of characters such as Bugler Charlie Reed, farmer Abraham Trostle’s family, and Captain Bigelow.

My one quibble is that Jones dances around the capture of Bigelow’s guns. I had to turn to Noah Trudeau’s Gettysburg to learn their fate.

As always, the immediacy of events is conveyed in characters’ conversation. “Sam,” Longstreet declares, “you will move your division…until you are on the left flank of the Federal line. Then, face left and drive them toward Gettysburg.” I felt like I was re-reading Shaara’s The Killer Angels.

You get the point. Historical novels can be more than beachside diversions. This one’s place is on your Gettysburg bookshelf.

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ALSO

ON THE

SHELF

In the Center of the Storm: the 139th Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the Civil War, by Arthur B. Fox, John Haltigan, Jeane H. Stetson, and Diane J. Rosell; 2021, Mechling Bookbindery. To order, send $40.00 (includes tax and postage) by check, money order, or cash to Arthur B. Fox, 2627 Broadway Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15216 Regimental histories, when done well, provide a ground-level view of the war. This locally published, well researched, and informative book on the history of the Pittsburgh-area 139th Pennsylvania, a 6th Corps regiment that saw heavy fighting, fits the bill.

Readers will appreciate how the authors followed the regiment’s veterans into the postwar years. Numerous images, informative maps, and concise rosters, including burial locations, add value to the volume.

Grant’s Left Hook: The Bermuda Hundred Campaign, May 5-June 7, 1864, Emerging Civil War Series, by Sean Michael Chick, 2021, Savas Beatie, $39.95 How much do you know about this Virginia campaign along the James River? Probably not much. The Bermuda Hundred fighting is some of the most overlooked of the Eastern Theater, but General Ben Butler’s efforts to have his Army of the James advance on Richmond had a direct bearing on the war’s outcome. This well-illustrated book provides a succinct look at the fighting, personalities, and after-effects of the Bermuda Hundred campaign. There is no large preserved battlefield regarding Bermuda Hundred, thus an included driving tour weaves together interesting and obscure campaign sites that lets those interested trace the maneuvering.

An Illustrated History of the Civil War: The Conflict that Defined the United States,

by Brooks D. Simpson, 2021, $19.99 Simpson gives the reader a concise overview of the politics and social disruption that initiated and underscored the Civil War and includes a broad look at some of the major battles. A worthy synopsis of the larger themes and actions of the war. The book’s highlight, however, is its compendium of illustrations, photographs, maps, and artifacts that offer the reader a rewarding sample of the many visual ways to experience the context of the conflict.

Historic Washington, D.C.: A Tour of the District’s Top 50 National Landmarks, by Lori Wysong, Globe Pequot, 2021, $19.95 Any list of top sites to see in Washington, D.C., should include the capital city’s icons—the White House, the Capitol Building, the Supreme Court, etc. Wysong’s guide also puts you on the path to some of the city’s more uncommon historic sites. Civil War enthusiasts will enjoy discovering some of them anew, including the General Oliver Otis Howard House, Historic Congressional Cemetery, and the U.S. Soldiers’ Home and Lincoln Cottage site, where Lincoln penned a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

CIVIL WAR TIMES APRIL 2022

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1/19/22 1:22 PM

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.

JOIN T O D AY !

T H E

LINCOLN FORUM

What began as a modest proposal to bring Lincoln enthusiasts together for a small East Coast-based yearly history conference at Gettysburg has blossomed into one of the leading history organizations in the country.

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

FACEBOOK.COM/CIVILWARTIMES

Our yearly November symposium is attended by scholars and enthusiasts from all over the nation and abroad.

It attracts speakers and panelists who are some of the most revered historians in the Lincoln and Civil War fields.

Visit our website:

thelincolnforum.org for more information

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9/10/21 11:06 AM

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1/19/22 1:22 PM

HARD CASH HARDTACK FOR

$2,500 of the 2nd Minnesota Infantry spoke for thousands of Union soldiers when he wrote, “there was a common belief among the boys that our hard-tack had been baked long before the beginning of the Christian era.” Soldiers reviled the (very) hard crackers, a common nickname for them was “sheet-iron biscuits,” but they also depended on hardtack to fill their bellies and provide needed calories. Hungry soldiers smashed, boiled, or fried the ration to make it more palatable. This 3 x 3 inch example was sold by Hindman’s Auctions accompanied by a note that read, “This Hard Tack was Ishued to D.K. Bunnell at the Battle of Fredericks[burg], Va. / Saturday Dec 13 1862 / Co. K, 23 NY Vols.” Fortunately for Bunnell, the cracker wasn’t part of his last meal. He mustered out in May 1863, taking his durable nosh with him as a souvenir. —D.B.S.

72

HINDMAN’S AUCTIONS

PRIVATE WILLIAM BIRCHER

CIVIL WAR TIMES APRIL 2022

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