BEST BOOKS 2017
RECOLLECTIONS OF A UNION NURSE
P. 52
BLACK MEN IN BLUE P. 18 VOL. 7, NO. 4
HISTORY OR HATE? Making sense of the debate over Confederate monuments PLUS
BOYS AT WAR P. 42
WINTER 2017
H
$5.99
CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
Salvo
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
V O L U M E 7, N U M B E R 4 / W I N T E R 2 0 17
FEATURES
Of Monuments and Men 30 How do we responsibly remember Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy? By Allen C. Guelzo and John M. Rudy
TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to St. Louis VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Hunger Pangs FACES OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 A Soldier and His “Secess” Cap FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Black Men in Blue PRESERVATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 A New State Park for Virginia COST OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A Confederate POW’s Pipe
JENNIFER GLEASON (TOP LEFT); TRAVELER1116/ISTOCK (TOP); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (BOTTOM LEFT); EDWARD G. MINER LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER MEDICAL CENTER, N.Y. (BOTTOM RIGHT)
IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Manassas Monument
Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 The March to the Sea, Part 2 LIVING HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 The History Seeker
Books & Authors
THE BEST CIVIL WAR BOOKS OF 2017. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
WITH LORIEN FOOTE, A. WILSON GREENE, KEVIN M. LEVIN, GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ, AND ANDREW WAGENHOFFER
In Every Issue
Boys at War 42
“Our hearts ached with pity” 52
EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Whither Confederate monuments?
Images and stories of some of the Civil War’s youngest soldiers
In remarkable newspaper accounts published decades after the war, nurse Maria Hall recalls the suffering of “army boys”
By Ronald S. Coddington
Edited by John Banks
PARTING SHOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 A Goodbye Gift
ON THE COVER: The Robert E. Lee Monument on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Photo by DoxaDigital/iStock
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editorial
VOLUME 7, NUMBER 4 / WINTER 2017
Terry A. Johnston Jr. PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Whither Confederate Monuments? it’s been over two years since the tragic shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine African Americans were killed by a 21-year-old white man who—from evidence that soon came to light, including photos of him with the Confederate battle flag— seemed clearly motivated by white supremacist ideology. That event quickly galvanized a movement to take down the Confederate flag that flew at the South Carolina statehouse. Less than a month later, it was lowered for the last time. “[N]o one should drive by the statehouse and feel pain,” said then-governor Nikki Haley of her support for the flag’s removal. “No one should drive by the statehouse and feel like they don’t belong.” Even hotly contested protests tend to fade from public discourse over time. Not this one. If anything, the debate over Confederate symbols has intensified, broadening from a focus on Confederate flags to include monuments of Confederate politicians, generals, and soldiers. It accelerated after the deadly clash between white nationalists and counterprotesters over the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park last August. Where it is headed next—and where it might end—is anyone’s guess. In this issue’s cover story, “Of Monuments and Men” (p. 30), historians Allen C. Guelzo and John M. Rudy offer their take on the ongoing push to remove Confederate symbols across the country. We hope their clear and sober analysis lends perspective to the current debate. Want to share your thoughts on this or other articles in the issue? Send your emails to letters@ civilwarmonitor.com.
Laura June Davis David Thomson Robert Poister Katie Brackett Fialka CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor Matthew C. Hulbert EDITORIAL ADVISORS
Jennifer Sturak Michele Huie COPY EDITORS
Brian Matthew Jordan BOOK REVIEW EDITOR BRIAN@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Katharine Dahlstrand SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR
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printed in the u.s.a.
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Grant_C
THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY of one of our most compelling generals and presidents, from Pulitzer Prize winner R on Chernow.
Now in paperback
R O N C H E R N O W. C O M
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d i s pat c h e s
tauga County. I should know: I grew up in Prattville in the 1960s and 1970s. But I had never heard about Pruett the blacksmith or his Bowie knives until reading this article. Thank you so much for bringing light to an aspect of my hometown’s history. The Civil War Monitor continues to excel. I have been reading Civil War magazines and books since I was knee-high to a grasshopper and wish you guys were monthly instead of quarterly. But I guess being quarterly gives you more time to craft quality, insightful, offbeat, and well-researched articles.
DESTINED FOR GLORY
I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed Douglas Egerton’s article [“Destined for Glory,” Vol. 7, No. 3] on the depiction of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry in the movie Glory. I have long held that movie in high regard—it having introduced me (and I’m sure many other Civil War buffs) decades ago to the existence of the regiment and its remarkable story. Even though I believe Egerton rightly knocks the film down a few pegs for its errors of fact and interpretation, it still ranks near the top of my list of the best Civil War movies ever made.
Ken Lyle VIA EMAIL
Tom Fitzgerald VIA EMAIL
Ed. Thanks for the feedback, Tom. As it turns out, we recently asked a panel of Civil War scholars what they thought were the 10 best Civil War movies of all time, and Glory came out on top. The full list appears in our latest newsstand-only special issue, The Civil War Almanac, which you can pick up at most major booksellers or from us directly, either by visiting civilwarmonitor.com/almanac or by calling our toll-free customer service line, 877-344-7409.
***
I would point out another historical error in the movie Glory not mentioned in Douglas Egerton’s article in the Fall 2017 issue. In the film’s depiction of the assault on Fort Wagner, the 54th Massachusetts is shown charging southward, with the Atlantic Ocean on its left. In truth,
the regiment charged northward toward the fort, with the ocean on its right.
THE SHERMAN DOSSIER
Al Ferguson
LOWER ALLEN TOWNSHIP, PENNSYLVANIA
PRUETT’S BOWIE KNIFE
The article in your Fall 2017 issue about the D-guard Bowie knife made by T.L. Pruett [“Cost of War: A Fearsome Blade Brings a Handsome Sum,” Vol. 7, No. 3] notes, “In 1861 blacksmith T.L. Pruett was plying his trade in Prattville, Alabama, … creating massive … knives for 39 enlisted men in the local Autauga Guards.” Which makes sense, since Prattville is located in Au-
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwarmonitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
Thank you for the recent article about William T. Sherman, in which you asked a number of historians various questions about the general [“Dossier: William Tecumseh Sherman,” Vol. 7, No. 3]. I wanted to write to recommend a book about Sherman that was not included on the panel’s list of favorites: James Lee McDonough’s William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country, A Life (2016). It’s a great book. Perhaps it didn’t make the list because it was released so recently? Michael Gordon VIA EMAIL
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Agenda Your Winter 2017–2018 Guide to Civil War Events
etery to Meade’s gravesite for a ceremony, followed by a champagne toast and reception. Tours of the historic cemetery will be offered, weather permitting. FREE (A $5 DONATION TO SUPPORT THE CEMETERY IS ENCOURAGED); FOR MORE INFORMATION: GENERALMEADESOCIETY.ORG or 215-204-5452.
JANUARY 2018 EXCURSION
First Day Hike MONDAY, JANUARY 1, 10 A.M.
COMMEMORATION
Annual General George Meade Birthday Celebration SUNDAY, DECEMBER 31, NOON
Court End Christmas at the White House and Museum of the Confederacy
DECEMBER 2017 CELEBRATION
Court End Christmas
LAUREL HILL CEMETERY PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Join members of the General Meade Society as they mark the 202nd birthday of Union general George G. Meade, who led the Army of the Potomac to victory at the Battle of Gettysburg. A parade of Civil War reenactors, civilians in period attire, heritage groups, and others will proceed from the gatehouse of Laurel Hill Cem-
EHRHARDT, SOUTH CAROLINA
Join a ranger at Rivers Bridge State Historic Site—where General William T. Sherman engaged Confederate forces during his northward advance through South Carolina in February 1865—and walk in the footsteps of Civil War soldiers. Visitors will get to see the natural beauty and wildlife of the park on the main trail followed by a description of the battle on the battlefield trail. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: SOUTHCAROLINA PARKS.COM/RIVERS-BRIDGE or 803-267-3675. LECTURE
Our Little Monitor: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17, 5:30 – 6:30 P.M. VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
On March 9, 1862, USS Monitor met CSS Virginia in battle at Hampton Roads, Virginia— the first time ironclad vessels engaged each other in combat. In the weeks after the battle, which ended in a draw, northerners developed their own ideas for improving Monitor or for sinking Virginia. Join historian Jonathan W. White as he discusses some of the inventions devised by northerners as well as the legacy of USS Monitor in American life and culture since its
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, NOON – 5 P.M. WHITE HOUSE AND MUSEUM OF THE CONFEDERACY RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
Bring your family to the White House and Museum of the Confederacy for cider and cookies, holiday projects, and to meet Santa. The White House of the Confederacy, specially decorated for the holidays, will be open for tours. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: ACWM.ORG or 804-649-1861 X122. PERFORMANCE
A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2 P.M. AND 8 P.M. TAPROOT THEATRE COMPANY SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
Catch one of the final two performances of
General George Meade birthday celebration at Laurel Hill Cemetery
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CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT UNIVERSITY
$20–$42 (2 P.M. SHOW), $20–$47 (8 P.M. SHOW); FOR MORE INFORMATION: TAPROOTTHEATRE.ORG or 206-781-9707.
RIVERS BRIDGE STATE HISTORIC SITE
PENELOPE M. CARRINGTON/THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM (LEFT); GENERALMEADESOCIETY.ORG
A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration. It’s a bitterly cold Christmas Eve on the banks of the Potomac River, where the lives of abolitionists, assassins, soldiers, enslaved and free are woven together in an American tapestry. In their darkest hour, when peace seems impossible, the promise of Christmas breaks through despair in this musical celebration of compassion and hope by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel. Note the show is recommended for ages 12 and above; children under 5 are never admitted.
Grand Army Men
Historian Jonathan W. White
sinking on New Year’s Eve 1862. $10 FOR NONMEMBERS; MEMBERS AND CHILDREN 18 AND UNDER ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: VAHISTORICAL.ORG or 804-358-4901.
FEBRUARY 2018
$18.95 ADULTS; $10.95 CHILDREN; FOR MORE INFORMATION: OLDTUCSON.COM or 520-883-0100. LECTURE
David Schultz Book Signing MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 7 P.M.
RANGER PROGRAM
The Georgia African Brigade during the Civil War SAT., FEB. 3, 2 – 3:30 P.M. OCMULGEE NATIONAL MONUMENT MACON, GEORGIA
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: LONNIE_DAVIS@NPS.GOV or 478-7528257 X224. LIVING HISTORY
RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
Join author Dave Shultz for a presentation of his book The Second Day at Gettysburg, an examination of the attack and defense of the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge on July 2, 1863. Based on extensive research, Shultz’s book includes original maps and a self-guided tour of the fight. Copies will be available for purchase and signing. FREE (BOOK COSTS $32.95); FOR MORE INFORMATION: RALEIGHCWRT. ORG or RVPLS00@YAHOO.COM. LECTURE
Slavery and Catholic America in the 19th Century
Civil War Days at Old Tucson
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 4 P.M.
SAT. & SUN., FEB. 10 – 11, 10 A.M. – 5 P.M.
CLINTON, MARYLAND
OLD TUCSON TUCSON, ARIZONA
CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT UNIVERSITY
PENELOPE M. CARRINGTON/THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM (LEFT); GENERALMEADESOCIETY.ORG
As part of Ocmulgee National Monument’s observation of Black History Month, National Park Ranger Lonnie Davis presents information about the history and organization of the last three African-American regiments organized under the Second Confiscation and Militia acts. The program will be presented every Saturday in February 2018.
DANIELS AUDITORIUM, NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF HISTORY
The North and South come together at Old Tucson with encampments, demonstrations, and battle reenactments all weekend long. Learn about life in the Arizona Territory during the Civil War and relive the April 1862 Battle of Picacho Peak, the westernmost engagement of the conflict.
SURRATT HOUSE MUSEUM
Professor Adam Rothman of Georgetown University will trace the history of the Maryland Jesuit slave community and how it was intertwined with both colonial and 19th-century culture in that state and in neighboring Washington, D.C. This slave legacy played a significant part in Maryland’s role during the Civil War and is still felt today. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: SURRATTMUSEUM.ORG or 301-868-1121.
Share Your Event
Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
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Salvo Facts, Figures & Items of Interest
A mob of civilians attacks a group of Union soldiers in the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, on May 10, 1861, angered that they had captured a contingent of pro-secessionist Missouri militia earlier in the day. The troops responded by firing into the crowd, killing or wounding over 100 people. For more on St. Louis, turn the page. 3
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IN THIS SECTION travels 10 A VISIT TO ST. LOUIS voices 14 HUNGER PANGS faces of war 16 A SOLDIER AND HIS “SECESS CAP” figures 18 BLACK MEN IN BLUE preservation 20 A NEW STATE PARK FOR VIRGINIA cost of war 22 A CONFEDERATE POW’S PIPE
HARPER’S WEEKLY
in focus 24 MANASSAS MONUMENT
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St. Louis MISSOURI
the civil war was not yet a month old when an event in St. Louis helped polarize the population of the border state of Missouri. On May 10, 1861, Nathaniel Lyon, the pro-Union commander of the federal arsenal in St. Louis, led some 6,000 soldiers outside the city to Camp Jackson, where a group of pro-secession Missouri militia was training. Fearing the militiamen planned to raid the arsenal, Lyon and his men forced their surrender and marched them back to town. Pro-secession residents of the city were soon hurling insults and rocks at Lyon’s men, who answered by firing into the crowd, killing or wounding over 100 civilians. The Camp Jackson Affair, as it came to be known, forced many previously neutral Missourians to take sides. It also spurred the promotion of Lyon to brigadier general and command of all Union forces in Missouri. Soon after, Lyon would drive Governor Claiborne Jackson and the secessionist State Guard from the state, leaving most of it—including St. Louis—under federal control. Interested in visiting St. Louis? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area—Mark Trout and Frank Aufmuth—to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic city.
Calvary Cemetery
1 CAN’T MISS
Traveling to Old Town St. Charles, Missouri (discoverstcharles.com)— a western suburb of St. Louis—is like stepping back in time. From its cobblestone-covered Main Street to all of the old historic homes and buildings that have been converted to stores, restaurants, and shops, you can spend hours exploring its historic charm. MT Often overlooked by visitors to St. Louis are two historic cemeteries located next to each other: Calvary Cemetery (5239 W. Florissant Ave.; 314-792-7738) and Bellefontaine Cemetery (4947 W. Florissant Ave.; 314381-0750), whose lists of interred include an impressive number of prominent Civil War personalities, including generals William T. Sherman, Sterling Price, Daniel Frost, and Don Carlos Buell. FA
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Forest Park
3 BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
2 BEST KEPT SECRET
Forest Park (5595 Grand Dr.; 314367-7275)—known as the “Heart of St. Louis”—is a real gem that includes the Saint Louis Zoo (Government Dr.; 314-781-0900), the Saint Louis Science Center (5050 Oakland Ave.; 314-2894400), and the Missouri History Museum (5700 Lindell Blvd.; 314-746-4599), as well as numerous sculptures, works of art, and buildings and objects relating to the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. On the north end is the Delmar Loop (visittheloop.com), where numerous shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues are located. MT The National Museum of Transportation (2933 Barrett Station Rd., Kirkwood; 314-9656212), located in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood, consists of a nationally recognized collection of steam and diesel locomotives and cars. The museum also includes a sizable vintage automobile collection and features a variety of events throughout the year, many of them kid friendly. FA
Travelers with children will find many things to do. The Saint Louis Zoo ranks as one of the finest in the nation. Other ideas are a visit to the iconic Gateway Arch (gatewayarch.com; 877-982-1410); the Anheuser-Busch-operated Grant’s Farm (10501 Gravois Rd.; 314-8431700), which is home to a variety of animals and is named after Ulysses S. Grant, who once owned the property (you can visit the two-story cabin he constructed there in 1855); and The Magic House (516 S. Kirkwood Rd.; 314-822-8900), a nonprofit children’s museum that boasts hundreds of activities and exhibits. MT
Gateway Arch
City Museum (750 N. 16th St.; 314231-2489) is an immensely popular playhouse museum located roughly a mile from the Arch. Parents seem to enjoy its quirky attractions, which include multistory slides, as much as the kids. Forest Park, with the zoo, science center, and Missouri History Museum, is another great option. While admission to each of these sites is free, parking is not, and you might have to do a bit of walking. FA
11 PHOTOGRAPHS BY IZAIAH JOHNSON
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National Cemetery
Crown Candy Kitchen
5 BEST EATS
4 BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
The Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis (11 N. 4th St.; 314-655-1700) is my favorite Civil War-era spot in the city. This magnificent building was the site of the first two trials of the pivotal Dred Scott case in 1847 and 1850. It was also where Virginia Minor’s case for women’s right to vote came to trial in the 1870s. Visitors can stop by the restored courtrooms to learn more about our 19thcentury judicial system. Plus, it is conveniently located near the Gateway Arch, the Old Cathedral (209 Walnut St.; 314-2313250), and Busch Stadium (700 Clark Ave.; 314-345-9600). MT
An interpretive sign on the campus of Saint Louis University (near the corner of Grand Blvd. and Laclede Ave.) marks the location of Camp Jackson, where Nathaniel Lyon surrounded and captured the group of the pro-secession Missouri State Militia in May 1861. Another option is a visit south of the city to Jefferson Barracks Park (345 North Rd.; 314-615-8800), where a massive military hospital was created during the war and whose grounds are now home to a number of Civil War attractions, including the Missouri Civil War Museum (222 Worth Ave.; 314-845-1861), located in the former Post Exchange & Gymnasium Building, and the National Cemetery (2900 Sheridan Rd.; 314-845-8320). FA The Old Courthouse
St. Louis has some great burger places, but Fitz’s (6605 Delmar Blvd.; 314-726-9555) is my favorite. If you’re lucky, the bottling line, visible from the main dining room, may be in action while you’re there, filling bottles with craft sodas. Fitz’s also has the best and largest root beer floats in the world! Pizza lovers should try St. Louis’ hometown pizza chain, Imo’s Pizza (imospizza.com), which takes pride in producing true St. Louis thinstyled squared-cut slices. I also regularly visit The Pasta House Co. (pastahouse.com), an Italian restaurant with several locations. Lastly, Italian food aficionados might explore “The Hill,” a colorful and historic Italian neighborhood located just south of Forest Park. Here you’ll find some of the most authentic Italian food in all of St. Louis. MT Uncle Bill’s Pancake & Dinner House (3427 S. Kingshighway Blvd.; 314-832-1973) has a long tradition in the city. Enjoy the usual breakfast fare or “Chocolate Alaska,” pancakes or waffles served with ice cream and syrup. Crown Candy Kitchen (1401 St. Louis Ave.; 314621-9650), billed as St. Louis’ oldest soda fountain, serves lunch and dinner, and its candy store offers homemade sweets. More adventurous visitors might try Crown’s malt challenge (drink five malts in 30 minutes and they’re free) or the “Heart Stopping BLT,” with more bacon than I eat in a month. St. Louis has earned a reputation for barbecue, and my favorite spot is Pappy’s Smokehouse (3106 Olive St.; 314-535-4340). Its Memphisstyle ribs and sweet potato fries are excellent. Note that long lines are likely—and Pappy’s closes after it sells out of that day’s meat, so call first if you’re planning a visit later in the day. FA
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The Lemp Mansion
6 BEST SLEEP
Drury Hotels (druryhotels.com) is headquartered in St. Louis, and there are well over a dozen throughout the city. It’s a chain I recommend over any other, and though they might not be your least expensive option, they offer a free breakfast. MT If you’re looking to avoid the chain hotels, there are several bed and breakfasts you might consider. Among my favorites is The Lemp Mansion (3322 Demenil Pl.; 314-664-8024). Built in 1868 by the Lemps, a pioneering brewing family, the building—considered one of the most haunted houses in the city—also hosts ghost tours and a mystery dinner theater. FA
7 BEST BOOK
The Civil War in St. Louis: A Guided Tour (1994) by William C. Winter is a book I repeatedly go back to. It’s an easy read and very well illustrated. Although it’s now out of print, you can find used copies online. I recommend it highly for exploring St. Louis’ Civil War sites.
Pappy’s Smokehouse
MT
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS
Mark Trout, a native of St. Louis and veteran of the United States Marine Corps, is the founder and executive director of the city’s Missouri Civil War Museum.
Frank Aufmuth, a seasonal ranger with the National Park Service, has taught history at a middle school in the St. Louis area for 21 years.
Civil War St. Louis (2001) by Louis S. Gerteis provides a good overview of the events in St. Louis—and Missouri—leading up to and during the Civil War. Gerteis does an excellent job explaining all the intricacies and issues behind what was going on throughout the state during the conflict. FA
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voices
Hunger Pangs “We eat up everything they give us and feel hungry all the time.” Confederate soldier Walter Lee, in a letter to his mother, January 10, 1864
Private Alexander G. Downing (left), 11th Iowa Infantry, in his diary, July 19, 1863
“ Sometimes our men have had practically nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, and I have actually seen them pick up ribs and other very stale bones left where cattle have been slaughtered, and roast them in their little coffee-boiling fires and gnaw them as they resumed the march.” Captain Augustus C. Brown, 4th New York Heavy Artillery, in his diary, June 9, 1864 SOURCES: FORGET-ME-NOTS OF THE CIVIL WAR (1909); DOWNING’S CIVIL WAR DIARY (1916); THE DIARY OF A LINE OFFICER (1906); ARMY LETTERS, 1861–1865 (1903); ARMY LIFE OF AN ILLINOIS SOLDIER (1906); THREE YEARS IN THE CONFEDERATE HORSE ARTILLERY (1911).
“ I could not eat raw pork and dry bread at home, but a fast of twenty-four hours, a ten-mile march, and a bivouac at night sharpens the appetite wonderfully.” Private Oliver W. Norton, 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry, in a letter to his sister, September 30, 1861
“I have been hungry for six months now, and I could and would eat rat or snake on toast if I just had it. Only he who has been hungry for a long period knows what hunger is. I saw a man fish a scrap of beef from a slop barrel and devour it as if it were a morsel from a king’s table.” Confederate POW George Michael Neese, in his diary, February 26, 1865
DOWNING’S CIVIL WAR DIARY (LEFT); BATTLES AND LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR (TOP); HARPER’S WEEKLY
“ We have fine times on picket now…. One of the boys came in with a hundred ears of corn. He roasted fifteen of them in the campfire ashes, ate all of them, and declared that he could eat two or three more.”
Fo by
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DOWNING’S CIVIL WAR DIARY (LEFT); BATTLES AND LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR (TOP); HARPER’S WEEKLY
Lives Remembered are never Lost
STEPHEN AMBROSE HISTORICAL TOURS PRESENTS
T H I S H A L L O W E D G R O U N D : A TO U R YO U W O N ’ T F O R G E T Travel with us on May 19-27, June 23-July 1 or October 13-21, 2018 Relive Civil War history! Walk This Hallowed Ground at Manassas/Bull Run, Gettysburg and Appomattox to experience the beginning and end of the Civil War. Visit Memphis, Shiloh, Vicksburg and New Orleans on our Mississippi River Campaign Tour, to study “the key to the Confederacy.” Explore the rivers, ridges and the battles that raged from Atlanta to Chattanooga to Nashville on our NEW Civil War on the Rivers, Rails and Mountains Tour. Founded by author and historian Stephen E. Ambrose, our American-owned, family-operated company carries on his legacy by offering Civil War, WWII and Lewis and Clark tours that are unparalleled in their historical accuracy.
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A Soldier and His “Secess Cap” p u b l i s h e r , m i l i ta ry i m ag e s
When David Henry Bennett, a corporal in the 28th New York Infantry, decided to have his photograph taken during the Civil War’s first year, he opted for an unconventional choice of headwear. Instead of donning the standard blue kepi worn by most Union soldiers, the 22-year-old native of Canada sported a gray Confederate cap. It’s unclear where he obtained the Rebel headgear: perhaps from a comrade, or maybe on one of the early war battlefields—Winchester, Cedar Mountain, or Second Bull Run—on which he and the 28th fought. Regardless, Bennett had a sense that the hat might rile northerners who saw the photo. To help avoid this, Bennett crafted a note that he inserted into the photograph’s case: “Who Ever sees this note first Will please answer it and remember that it is from A true hearted Union soldier if he has got on A Secess [Secessionist] Cap, true to the union and to all Who he professes to be true to. Farewell, D. H. Bennett.” The young soldier would not live long after having his photo taken. He was killed during the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, and eventually buried in a cemetery in Keswick, Ontario. 3 MILITARY IMAGES (MILITARYIMAGESMAGAZINE.COM) IS A MAGAZINE DEDICATED TO SHOWCASING AND PRESERVING PHOTOS OF CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS.
MATT HAGANS COLLECTION
by ronald s. coddington
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Have you visited?
The Lincoln Memorial Shrine
46th Annual Open House Saturday, February 10th
Since 1932, the only museum and research center dedicated to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War west of the Mississippi Located in Redlands, California Halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs
Featuring New Exhibits, Reenactors, Music, & Activities Don’t miss it!
Open Tuesday-Sunday, 1-5pm Closed most holidays, but always open Lincoln’s birthday Free admission! For more information, please visit www.lincolnshrine.org/civilwar or call (909) 798-7632
OUR STORIES ARE
AMERICA’S
STORIES MATT HAGANS COLLECTION
The Civil War touched American lives in ways that no other conflict has, before or since. At The American Civil War Museum, you can explore this epic struggle that ripped our country apart at the seams, from the viewpoint of all the participants. Soldier. Politician. Merchant. Slave. Freedman. Man. Woman. Child. Hear their stories. Learn their legacies. At The American Civil War Museum. In Richmond and Appomattox.
historic tredegar white house & museum of the confederacy american civil war museum - appomattox 804.649.1861 ACWM.org CWM26-FOB-FacesofWar.indd 17
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Average age of a USCT soldier
Black Men in Blue
5' 6.7"
Average height of a USCT soldier
144.68
Average weight, in pounds, of a USCT soldier
Long prohibited (by federal law dating to 1792) from serving in the U.S. Army, black men were finally granted the opportunity of military service with Congress’ passage of the Second Confiscation Act in July 1862 (which authorized the president “to employ as many persons of African descent as he may deem necessary and proper for the suppression of this rebellion”) and the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 (in which President Abraham Lincoln declared that black men “of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States”). Black men— both free and recently emancipated slaves—flocked to enlistment centers; by war’s end, some 180,000 had served in the Union army, eventually representing approximately 10% of that force. Most served in one of the army’s newly formed United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiments. Here we highlight statistics about African-American men who donned the Union blue.
Percentage of USCT soldiers who were drafted
87.93
Percentage of USCT soldiers who volunteered
9.0
Percentage of USCT soldiers who served as a substitute for a draftee
Percentage of USCT soldiers who were hospitalized during the war
22.0
Percentage of USCT soldiers who died during the war
95.29
Percentage of USCT soldiers who were never arrested COLLECTION OF THE GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK MUSEUM
2.67
53.7
1.64
Percentage of USCT soldiers who were MIA at least once
89.79
Percentage of USCT soldiers who never deserted
2.17
Percentage of USCT soldiers who were AWOL at least once
18
S O U RC E S: BENJAMIN APTHORP GOULD, INVESTIGATIONS IN THE MILITARY AND ANTHROP OLOGICAL STATISTIC S OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS (1869); UNION ARMY DATA (UADATA .ORG). OUR THANKS TO UAD’S SANDRA MASON FOR HER ASSISTANCE .
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ALWAYS LEGENDARY
DISCOVER LEGENDARY “ABE-SPIRATION” IN SPRINGFIELD, IL. Like no other destination, Springfield offers the best of Abraham Lincoln. Walk in his footsteps at the Lincoln Home. Get to know him as a husband, father and politician at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Pay your respects at the Lincoln Tomb. All of this and so much more is waiting for you in Springfield. ORDER YOUR VISITORS GUIDE AND START PLANNING YOUR TRIP TODAY
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800-545-7300
Visit Springfield: Springfield Convention & Visitors Bureau
“Father Abraham” Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, put the final touches on his Gettysburg Address while at the David Wills House and had four sons. The overture to Mozart’s Magic Flute was one of his favorites.
MY HOME ADDRESS IS IN . MY FOUR SONS CALL ME . MY FAVORITE COMPOSER IS .
COLLECTION OF THE GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK MUSEUM
Gettysburg Father Mozart
There are 162,000 stories here. I found mine.
Explore the artifacts. Wonder at the Cyclorama. Understand our shared story. Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center.
To plan your next trip, call 877-874-2478 today!
GettysburgFoundation.org
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A New State Park for Virginia p r e s i d e n t , c i v i l wa r t r u st
History, horses, and families mix well. That’s clear from the enthusiastic reception that more than 200 people gave to cavalrymen in butternut and blue who pounded over the Brandy Station battlefield in Culpeper County, Virginia, on September 30, 2017. Young and old watched raptly as cavalrymen charged and sabers flashed across Fleetwood Hill for the first time since the 14-hour battle fought on June 9, 1863. The engagement, which remains the largest cavalry battle on U.S. soil, opened the Gettysburg Campaign and proved that Union horse soldiers could hold their own against J.E.B. Stuart’s vaunted troopers. When reenactors paraded past spectators last fall, huzzahs and yip-yees rose up from the throng, cheering the 80some living historians on both sides in the faux fighting. Later, at the site where St. James Church once stood, children mingled with the horses, wielded plastic swords, watched horsemen gallop, and wandered through reenactors’ camps in a grove of old oaks. “Cavalry at Brandy Station!” was part of the Civil War Trust’s lively Generations program, which encourages adults to share their interest in history with young family members. The event obviously meant much to both the kids who watched history come to life and the adults enjoying special moments. Facebook Live shared the action in real-time videos. “It’s a great way to get them involved,” said Eric Fullinwider of Manassas, who watched his children practice saber drills under a Vermont cavalry officer’s direction.
Several generations of the family that owns Farley, the battlefield home where Union general John Sedgwick headquartered in the winter of 1863–1864, set out camp chairs to get a prime view of the action at Fleetwood Hill. The Civil War Trust bought the Fleetwood property in 2013, restored the hilltop to its wartime appearance, and created an interpretive walking trail for visitors. Now, the Trust and the Brandy Station Foundation want to transfer the approximately 1,400 acres they helped save at Brandy Station and the nearby Cedar Mountain battlefield to the Commonwealth of Virginia in order to create a Brandy Station and Cedar Mountain state park. Culpeper County, the town of Culpeper, the Culpeper County Chamber of Commerce, and the county’s dele-
gation in the Virginia General Assembly all support the proposal. “The event at Fleetwood Hill was a thrilling hint of what the actual battle must have been like, and it was great to see such a strong turnout,” said Culpeper Town Councilman Keith D. Price, who attended the Generations program. “The fact that it was so well attended is a good indicator of the level of interest in the proposed Brandy Station/Cedar Mountain state park. The park will be a wonderful addition to the area and a real boost to Culpeper tourism. Once fully established, the park is expected to bring in over 100,000 visitors a year.” Learn more about the Brandy Station and Cedar Mountain park plan here: civilwar.org/learn/articles/brandy-station-and-cedar-mountain-state-park.
Civil War Trust history director Garry Adelman holds would-be cavalrymen spellbound during the Trust’s recent Generations program at Brandy Station, Virginia.
3 THE CIVIL WAR TRUST (CIVILWAR.ORG) IS A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION DEVOTED TO THE PRESERVATION OF ENDANGERED CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELDS.
CIVIL WAR TRUST
by o. james lighthizer
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s the fact that little about it is certain. The literature on the subject . This comprehensive re-examination of the facts seeks to correct majo F. Schmutz’s ‘The Bloody Fifth’ evaluate t ifferences of opinion, offer explanations for“Johnunknowns and the author covers the prelude to the war, Booth's accomplices and ping ruse that concealed the intended decapitation of the United Sta key players (Parker, Forbes and Cobb), the assassination escape, the death of the president, the pursuit of the fugitives, the death co-conspirators (except John Surratt) and one innocent man. The sim or in favor of the theory that Booth worked with the complicity of the t and its Secret Service Bureau, whose twofold purpose was retribution a akened and chaotic Federal government.
“John F. Schthoroughly is the most comprehensive, researched account of the 5th mutz’s ‘The Blo ody Fifth’ is the account of the 5 th moststudent comprehen Tex as Infant Texas Infantry and belongs library ofryevery serious ofsivthe e, thoroughly resear and bel Civil War.”in– the ong s in the library of John Michael Pri every serious studen ch Civil War.” est t of t JOHN MICHAEL PRIEST
Recently released Volume 2 of this sweeping histor y begins wit the Gettysburg cam paign, and follows the regim ent to Appomattox Court House and the long journey ho me.
A fine companion to Volume 1, voted best Non-ficti on/Military History by the Ass ociation of Texas Authors, as well as a finalist of the Arm y Historical Foundation 2016 Distinguished Writing Award.
Part of Lee’s celeb rated “shock troops,” he procla imed at the Wilderness: “The Texans always move them.”
C. Fazio, is a member of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtabl ntly speaks on the war before Roundtables and other groups, has e war and teaches Civil War history at Chautauqua Institution. He is a stern Reserve Historical Society, the Cleveland Grays and the Surratt Available from the author at johnschmutz@sbcgl obal.net as well as the publi Savas Beatie LLC, sher, or through Amazo n. with the Volume 2 of this sweeping history begins Gettysburg campaign, and follows the regiment to Appomattox Court House and the long journey home.
A fine companion to Volume 1, voted best Non-fiction/Military History by the Association of Texas Authors, as well as a finalist of the Army Historical Foundation 2016 Distinguished Writing Award.
_________________________________ Available from the author at johnschmutz@sbcglobal.net as well as the publisher, Savas Beatie LLC, or through Amazon.
decapitating the union
“a must-read for Civil War historians and enthusiasts.” azon, CreateSpace, other on-line book sellers, in book stores, or directly fro "... a must read for Civil War historians and enthusiasts." WILLIAM JOHN SHEPHERD, AMERICA’S CIVIL WAR — William John Shepherd, America's Civil War
"Everyone should have this one on their Lincoln bookshelf." — Joan Chaconas
“I found every page an adventure.”
Morris Gilbert Publishing Company the best (book) on the market 3422 S.“…probably Smith Rd. on the American Civil War.” Akron, OH 44333 decapitating "I found every page an adventure." — Joseph Truglio, Civil War News
JOSEPH TRUGLIO, CIVIL WAR NEWS
"...probably the best (book) on the market on the American Civil War." — Amazon Customer
"...very strongly recommended..." AMAZON CUSTOMER — Michael J. Carson, Midwest Book Review
the union
Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and the Plot to Assassinate Lincoln
"A brilliant contribution..." — Frederick Hatch
“…will serve…for decades to come as an essential source for historians.”
440-463-2957
"If you enjoyed Ed Steers's Blood on the Moon, you must read Decapitating the Union..." — Howard G. Anders, Jr. DENNIS LITTRELL, AUTHOR "Decapitating the Union is both educational and entertaining...Give it 5 stars." — Edward Steers, Jr.
“…the most complete and thorough book available
john c. fazio MGP1865@gmail.com on the subject…the standard…” p/1541095383 CIVIL WAR TRUST
Foreword by JOAN L. CHACONAS
"... perhaps the most (significant) work on this topic ever written." — Amazon Customer
AMAZON CUSTOMER
www.creates
More than a hundred books have been written about Lincoln's assassination, yet one of the few certainties Available from Amazon, CreateSpace, other on-line book sellers, in book stores, or directly from the publisher: surrounding his death is the fact that little about it is certain. The literature on the subject is replete with errors, theories and guesswork. This comprehensive re-examination of the facts seeks to correct major and minor errors in the record,Paperback reconcile differences of opinion, offer explanations for unknowns and evaluate theories. Drawing on $24.95 $14.95 Kindle hundreds of sources, the author covers the prelude to the war, Booth's accomplices and their roles in the MORRIS GILBERT PUBLISHING COMPANY conspiracy, the kidnapping ruse that concealed the intended decapitation of the United States government, the S. Smith Rd., Akron, mysteries surrounding key players (Parker, Forbes and3422 Cobb), the assassination itself,OH the 44333 attempted assassinations, Booth's escape, the death of the president, the pursuit of the fugitives, the death of Booth and the trial 440-463-2957 and sentencing of his co-conspirators (except John Surratt) and one innocent man. The simple conspiracy theory is rejected by the author in favor of the theory that Booth worked with the complicity of the highest levels of the www.amazon.com/dp/1541095383 MGP1865@gmail.com www.createspace.com/6782016 Confederate government and its Secret Service Bureau, whose twofold purpose was retribution and snatching Southern independence from a weakened and chaotic Federal government. Retired lawyer, John C. Fazio, is a member of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable and has been its president. He frequently speaks on the war before Roundtables and other groups, has written and published numerous articles on the CWM26-FOB-Preservation.indd 21 war and teaches Civil War history at Chautauqua Institution. He is also a member of the Lincoln Forum, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cleveland Grays and the Surratt Society.
440-463-2957
jcf@neohio.twcbc.com
_____________________________________________________
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$12,000 A REBEL PIPE BRINGS A TIDY SUM
THE ARTIFACT:
CONDITION: The pipe has a few chips, especially near the rims and corners, as well as some surface scratches and spotting. Wear inside the bowl indicates that the pipe was used. DETAILS: Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, Quincy A. Pearson, a native New Yorker who had moved to Missouri by 1860, enlisted with other local supporters of the Confederacy in the Missouri State Guard. While en route in December to join Major General Sterling Price’s Confederate army, Pearson and his approximately 700 comrades in the Missouri State Guard camped at Milton, where on the 19th they were engaged by a larger Union force commanded by Brigadier General John Pope. Soon overwhelmed, the Missourians surrendered en masse and were sent to Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis. In early 1862, they were transferred to Alton Military Prison in Illinois. Pearson carved at least two pipes from stone during his prison stay, both of which
he adorned with Confederate symbols (like the national flag) and expressions (like “State Rights”). One of these he sold to a civilian from upstate New York named Alfred Wilkinson, who visited the prison during what he described as a “Southwestern tour” in March. Pearson would remain at Alton until May 31, when he took the Oath of Allegiance to the Union and was freed. Little is known about his life after his release, other than he continued to live in Missouri after war’s end. QUOTABLE: Upon his return to New York, the Syracuse Daily Standard ran an article about the pipe Wilkinson had obtained from Pearson: “Mr. Alfred Wilkinson … has in his possession a pipe made by one of the rebel prisoners at Alton, Illinois, which is a rare specimen of ingenuity and skill, as well as persevering industry. The material of the pipe is cotton stone, a soft stone found in the south,
easily worked, and susceptible of a fine polish. The bowl of the pipe is square, and is beautifully carved. One of the sides presents the new rebel flag, and the other the Palmetto tree, with the cotton plant and rattle snake, appropriate emblems of the rebellion. The front bears the coat-ofarms of Missouri, with the usual scrolls and mottoes. It is understood that the work was executed with a penknife, by a young man who had no experience in carving, and regarding it in that light the work is a marvel of taste and skill.” VALUE: $12,000 (price realized at Cowan’s Auctions Inc. in Cincinnati, Ohio, in February 2017). “Pearson crafted marvelous stone pipes with impressive designs,” noted Wes Cowan, founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions, at the time of the sale, “and this is the most well documented example of his work.”
SOURCE: LEA CATHERINE LANE , “A MARVEL OF TASTE AND SKILL”: CARVED PIPES OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (MA THESIS, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE , 2015). IMAGE CREDIT: COWAN’S AUCTIONS INC. (COWANAUCTIONS.COM)
A cotton stone folk art pipe carved by Confederate POW Quincy A. Pearson
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civil war Tours 2018 NOW IN OUR 17TH YEAR! The Atlanta Campaign, March 22-25 & May 17-20, 2018
The capture of Chattanooga in November 1863 opened “The Gateway of the South.” Following that victory, General U.S. Grant assigned General William T. Sherman the mission of capturing Atlanta. Following 4 months of maneuvering, sieges, and battles, Atlanta fell, setting the stage for “Sherman’s March to the Sea.” Battlefield historians Ed Bearss & Jim Ogden will lead us on an in-depth, 3-day tour that traces the armies’ movements from Ringgold to Resaca; Kennesaw Mountain and into Atlanta.
The Battle of Gettysburg, April 19-22, 2018
Follow historians Ed Bearss & Jeff Wert for 3 days as we examine the Battle of Gettysburg. We will walk the ground where troops clashed on July 1, 2, & 3. Sites will include: Cemetery Hill, the Wheatfield, Devil's Den, the Peach Orchard, Little Round Top, Culp's Hill, and the opportunity to walk Pickett's Charge.
The Maryland Campaign, May 3-6, 2018
SOURCE: LEA CATHERINE LANE , “A MARVEL OF TASTE AND SKILL”: CARVED PIPES OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (MA THESIS, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE , 2015). IMAGE CREDIT: COWAN’S AUCTIONS INC. (COWANAUCTIONS.COM)
Join Ed Bearss & Tom Clemens as they examine the events that led to the bloodiest day in American history. We will tour Harpers Ferry, and the battlefields of South Mountain and Antietam. Antietam stops will include the Cornfield, the West Woods, Bloody Lane, Burnside Bridge, and the National Cemetery.
Autumn 2018
This fall, we will offer two tours in and around the town of Fredericksburg. A 3-day tour examining the Battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness; and a 2-day tour studying the Battles of Spotsylvania Courthouse and Cold Harbor, including a stop at Guinea Station to see where General Stonewall Jackson died on May 10, 1863.
★★★★★★★
Cost of 3-day tours: $550 pp Cost of 2-day tours: $325 pp. Cost includes evening lecture, lunches, tactical maps & expert battlefield guide(s). Price does not include lodging.
See our 2018 detailed itineraries at www.civilwartours.org
MOST OF OUR 2017 TOURS SOLD OUT SO DON’T DELAY! Civil War Tours -‐ P.O. Box 416, Keedysville, MD 21756 email: info@civilwartours.org
Tel: (301) 676-‐4642
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Be sure to check out our sister company: South Mountain Expeditions 2018 History Tours include: History of W. Arizona including the So. Rim of Grand Canyon
email: tours@smountainexpeditions.com website: www.smountainexpeditions.com
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Manassas Monument p r e s i d e n t , c e n t e r f o r c i v i l wa r p h oto g r a p h y
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
by bob zeller
3 THE NONPROFIT CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY (CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY.ORG ) IS DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
On June 10, 1865—less than two months after the end of the Civil War—a group of Union soldiers put the finishing touches on a monument to their comrades who had been killed at the Battle of First Bull Run on July 21, 1861. Soldiers from the 5th Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery, overseen by Massachusetts artillery officer James McCallum, constructed the 27-foot-high sandstone structure on Henry House Hill, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting at Bull Run, in only four days. The following day, a large crowd of civilians and soldiers attended the monument’s dedication ceremony. Chaplains delivered prayers, several Union generals spoke, and a hymn written for the occasion was performed. Sung to the tune of the well-known church song “Old Hundred,” the hymn honored the fallen at Bull Run before ending sharply: “And so, upon the bloody spot/Where now this monument is raised/Shall rebel bones and memories rot/But patriots’ names for aye be praised.” As the lyrics revealed, although the war was over, not all of its participants were ready to reconcile with their former enemies. Photographer William Morris Smith was there for the ceremony and took at least 10 images, including this one, which shows some of the artillerists who helped build the monument.
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american iliad
The March to the Sea, Part 2
see, which was then in northern Alabama and looked as if it might strike toward Nashville. But Sherman firmly believed that the best move was a march to the coast, and after exhausting the military argument in favor of this course of action, he developed a second, politically based argument. Few recall the first argument. The second is unforgettable. Sherman began making the second argument in a letter to Grant on October 9. “Unless we can repopulate Georgia,” he wrote, “it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.... I can make the march, and make Georgia howl.”5 In point of fact, Sherman’s army came nowhere near the “utter destruction” of the state, but the reality doesn’t matter. The rhetoric does. “Utter destruction” and “I can make Georgia howl” promised exactly the absolute destruction we associate with Sherman’s march. This argument persuaded Grant, but not the Lincoln administration, forcing Sherman to make the political argument again. “If we can march a well-appointed army right through his territory,” he insisted, “it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which [Confederate president Jefferson] Davis cannot resist. This may not be war, but rather statesmanship, nevertheless it is overwhelming to my mind that there are thousands of people abroad and in the South who will reason thus: If the North can march an army right through the South, it is proof positive that the North can prevail.”6 The Lincoln administration relented, and Sherman’s 62,000-man army left Atlanta on November 16, 1864. A week before he had ordered the destruction of all machine shops, factories, and other war resources in the city. The resulting, unintended fire burned down the central business district. The fire damaged only about 25 percent of Atlanta, ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
in the american iliad, Sherman’s March to the Sea is the quintessential act of the North’s brutal war against the South, despite the fact that it was not the conflict’s most destructive episode. Its sequel, the march through South Carolina, was far more devastating, as was the razing of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the autumn of 1864. The paradox cries out for explanation. In my first column on this subject I suggested that the explanation was in two parts. Half derives from songs like “Marching Through Georgia” and films like Gone With the Wind, which helped to create or entrench a memory of the campaign as unique in the annals of the war. But I argued that the other, more important half “hinges on what Sherman said about the march, because in the American Iliad, Sherman’s voice is that of a prophet.”1 The Civil War remains by far the deadliest conflict in American history. It killed 750,000 Americans, over 2 percent of the country’s population.2 More than anyone else, northern or southern, William T. Sherman accounted for this extraordinary cost. His most famous statement—“War is hell”— suggests that the very nature of war involves absolute destruction.3 And the March to the Sea is the focus of his most extensive commentary on this theme. “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman wrote in September 1864. “You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable.”4 Sherman made this argument to the mayor of Atlanta in connection with the forced evacuation of the city’s population, an episode that was not strictly part of the March to the Sea but is strongly associated with it. A few weeks later he informed Ulysses S. Grant that he considered his current supply line untenable; he wanted to take his army to a new base on the coast, preferably Savannah, and he was confident that he could do so by foraging extensively on the countryside. Grant demurred. He wanted Sherman to go after General John B. Hood’s Army of Tennes-
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY
HOW SHERMAN’S OWN WORDS HELPED MYTHOLOGIZE THE DESTRUCTIVENESS OF THE SAVANNAH CAMPAIGN BY MARK GRIMSLEY
“ [ T]he utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.... I can make the march, and make Georgia howl.”
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, COLORIZED BY MADS MADSEN OF COLORIZED HISTORY
William T. Sherman (left), in a letter to Ulysses S. Grant in October 1864, justified his plan to march his army through Georgia in part by the physical and psychological damage they could impose on the state and its residents.
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living h i sto ry
The History Seeker
library launched its own colossal campaign to bring these items out of the attic and into the light, then scan them for posterity? What new insight into the war and those who lived it might that effort yield? The Library of Virginia took the idea to the Sesquicentennial Commission, which came on as a partner in what was soon dubbed the Civil War 150 Legacy Project. One archivist, Laura Drake Davis, had already signed on to help spearhead the effort. But they needed two, so they turned to Savits. “‘You’re either laid off or you can do this job,’ is sort of what it came down to,” Savits recalled. She took the job. It wasn’t a light commitment. Savits and Davis spent the next two years traversing the state, traveling nearly every weekend to a new town or county in search of hidden history. Savits covered the eastern half of the state, while Davis tackled the western half. Before every stop, local sesquicentennial committees put out word they were coming. Still, Savits remembers her nerves at those early events, perched beside her scanner and wondering if anyone would show up. “We had no idea what would happen,” she recalled. People did show up—in droves. At most events the lines were 30 people deep, everyone with 150-year-old paper clutched in their arms. “People want to share their family treasures, but they don’t want to give them up,” Savits explained. By creating an opportunity for these treasures to be seen but not relinquished, the project had unlocked more history than it had either imagined or planned for. Almost no one showed up with just one item. One ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72
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PHOTOGRAPH BY JENNIFER GLEASON
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
in 2010, renee savits faced a dilemma. A career archivist, Savits had been with the Library of Virginia for 11 years, rising to manager of its vast private papers section. The Pennsylvania native was just where she wanted to be: spending every day with her hands on history, organizing and preserving documents and photographs that had long outlived their creators. But budget cuts at the library were frequent, and in 2010 they hit middle management. Savits’ job evaporated. It looked like her time at the library was done—until her bosses floated another option. The Civil War’s 150th anniversary was fast approaching, and the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission was about to launch a colossal statewide commemoration campaign. Banners, parades, plays, and conferences were all in the works. An 18-wheeler with an interactive Civil War exhibit was set to travel the state. The commission had also established local sesquicentennial committees in almost every county or independent city in Virginia, more than 130 altogether. These committees were working furiously to design their own events and experiences that would help bring the war and its legacy back into the public eye. The Library of Virginia had a different idea. What if the sesquicentennial presented an opportunity not just to share Civil War history, but to gather it? Nobody knew how many original wartime documents—from diaries to daguerreotypes—remained in private hands beyond sight of the public record. But one thing was clear: They were out there. What if the
S M AS H T H E I RO N CAG E / W I K I M E D I A C O M M O N S ( L I B R A RY O F V I RG I N I A )
ARCHIVIST RENEE SAVITS AND THE CHANCE JOB THAT SPAWNED A REMARKABLE CIVIL WAR COLLECTION BY JENNY JOHNSTON
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S M AS H T H E I RO N CAG E / W I K I M E D I A C O M M O N S ( L I B R A RY O F V I RG I N I A )
Renee Savits, one of two archivists at the Library of Virginia (opposite page) who spearheaded the Civil War 150 Legacy Project
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of monuments
How do we responsibly remember Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy?
BY ALLEN C. GUELZO AND JOHN M. RUDY
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TRAVELER1116 / ISTOCK
and men
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The Robert E. Lee Monument on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia
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3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
City workers remove the statue of General Robert E. Lee from its pedestal in New Orleans on May 19, 2017. The statue—which stood atop a 60-foot-column—had dominated the city’s Lee Circle since it was erected in 1884.
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But not in a way he could ever have imagined. On May 19, 2017, a 16-foot-six-inch statue of Lee, depicting him with arms crossed and facing defiantly northward, was removed from atop the 60-foot column it had dominated at Lee Circle in New Orleans since 1884, amid highly charged clamor from Lee’s admirers and his critics. It was not the first time the statue had been taken down. In 1953, concerns about the column sagging caused the city to remove it temporarily, and controversy bubbled up even then about whether the statue should return. More recent demands for its removal came in the wake of the fatal mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015. Dylann Roof ’s manic affection for Confederate flags led to the removal of a Confederate flag displayed on the South Carolina statehouse grounds, and reignited the campaign in New Orleans to remove statues of Lee and of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and Pierre G.T. Beauregard, Louisiana’s most noted Confederate general. In August 2017, that continuing debate spilled over into a violent clash over the Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to a violent demonstration on Richmond’s Monument Avenue (where a Lee statue has been a frequent target for removal demands) that made national news. A few days later, the city of Baltimore approved a sudden, late-night removal of a joint statue of Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson and three other Confederate monuments.1 Tributes to Lee abound throughout the South. There are more than two dozen streets and schools named for Lee. One U.S. Army installation in Petersburg, Virginia, bears his name; another, Fort Hamilton in New York City, named a driveway for
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After 157 years, Robert E. Lee is back in the headlines.
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morial to the Donner Party in Donner State Park, for instance, is not a statement about the desirability of cannibalism.) Often they are statements of mourning, and, in a few cases, repentance. But the line between monuments and memorials is not always clear and distinct. What begins as a monument can shift gradually into memorial, and even share the same space. Consider the Lee monument in Charlottesville, which went up in 1924. It is easy to cry, “Aha!
Riot police guard the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, the day farright protesters and counterprotesters clashed over the statue’s proposed removal. Soon thereafter, city officials ordered the statue covered in a black tarp.
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PREVIOUS SPREAD: BOB DAEMMRICH / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; THIS SPREAD: ZUMA PRESS, INC. / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
him. A third, Fort Bliss in Texas, had a Robert E. Lee Road until 2014, when it was renamed Buffalo Solider Road to head off possible controversy. Which, of course, raises the question of why Robert E. Lee is so apparently revered in the first place. After all, Robert E. Lee lost—he surrendered the main Confederate army at Appomattox Court House in 1865, which effectively ended the American Civil War. American culture usually worships success, and rarely do we erect monuments to people who, at least by the constitutional definition, committed treason. “What did Robert E. Lee do to merit his distinguished position?” asked jazz great Wynton Marsalis during the public debate over the Lee statue in New Orleans. “He fought for the enslavement of a people against our national army fighting for their freedom; killed more Americans than any opposing general in history; made no attempt to defend or protect this city…. In the heart of the most progressive and creative cultural city in America, why should we continue to commemorate this legacy?”2 The South for which Lee fought accepted its defeat with embarrassing reluctance, especially concerning the 3.9 million African-American slaves freed by the war, and thus perpetuated a century of toxic racial relations whose effects we live with yet. During the postwar Reconstruction, the defeated South balked at accepting the consequences of the war by trying to legislate “Black Codes” (which effectively turned African Americans’ newly won freedom back into near-slavery). When those were overturned by an infuriated Congress, southerners deployed white supremacist political violence in the form of the White Leagues, the Red Shirts, the White Liners, and the Ku Klux Klan to regain control of southern state governments. And after the federal government abandoned the Reconstruction project in despair, the Black Codes returned in the form of Jim Crow segregation, lynching, and voter disfranchisement. It’s no surprise, then, that monuments to Confederate leaders that were raised in those eras of fraud, lynching, and murder act as little better than a constant poke in the eye—or worse—to modern African Americans. “The monuments themselves are terrorism,” declared Jamil Smith in a Los Angeles Times op-ed on August 14. “The Lee sculpture honors a dishonorable man while encouraging his ideological descendants and expressing to black people that America is not ours, too.”3 But monuments are neither people nor isms. Monuments can be statements of power, but the statements they make rarely remain stable. Monuments invite us to see exemplars; they are about who is (or who is supposed to be) in charge, or what those in charge are supposed to be like. Memorials, in contrast, are simply remembrances that something happened to these people in this place; they are not statements of power. (The me-
PREVIOUS SPREAD: BOB DAEMMRICH / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; THIS SPREAD: ZUMA PRESS, INC. / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
That’s the apex of white supremacy in the South. This is teaching black people about white ascendency.” Partly. But the statue’s dedication speech was delivered by M. Ashby Jones, a Georgia clergyman (and son of Lee’s biographer, J. William Jones) who opposed lynching and segregation and had been targeted by the Klan. Jones spoke not of Lee the white supremacist, but of Lee the reconciler. The statue celebrated the Lee whose decision to surrender at Appomattox averted “scattered
guerilla warfare for many years” and who “in the shadows of the defeat of war” pointed southerners to “the star of hope with its radiant promise and prophecy of the triumphs of peace.”4 Moreover, in 1924, the last generation of Confederate veterans was dying off. (The last reunion of the Blue and the Gray at Gettysburg was in 1938.) For those who had been soldiers in their youth, the Lee monument was a last hurrah for their long-dead commander, and for themselves. Those boys—old men in 1924— 35 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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estate overlooking Washington, D.C. He frankly regarded slavery as an “evil,” but rationalized its continuance on the grounds that blacks in slavery in America were better off than if left to their own devices in Africa. Yet he was a longtime supporter of the American Colonization Society, which advocated emancipation of the slaves, linked to repatriation to Africa. He assumed management of the Arlington slaves as executor for his fatherin-law’s estate in 1857, a task he found frustrating and confusing, and which led to a notorious incident in which Lee whipped a captured fugitive. Yet he carried out his father-in-law’s mandate to emancipate the Arlington slaves, a process Lee was still completing in 1862 while serving as the Confederacy’s most famous commander. Given that status, it is hard to believe that many white Virginians would have balked if he had declined to complete the job. Nevertheless, he did—and also emancipated the one slave family he owned in his own name, which the estate had not required him to do. And he antagonized a number of die-hard
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
were often conscripts, often not slaveholders (or even old enough to own property of any sort), and often not doing much more than what their neighbors and regions expected. And they came back—when they came back at all—maimed, disinherited, and psychologically mauled. The pedestal read only “Robert Edward Lee,” and the statue itself was completed by an Italian-born sculptor, Leo Lentelli, and cast in Brooklyn, New York. To ignore these aspects of the Lee statue is simply inhumane, and ends up repaying the inhumanity of Jim Crow with more inhumanity. Nor is Lee himself quite so simple a symbol. Of all the major Confederate leaders, Robert E. Lee was the least vehement in his attachment to slavery. There is no evidence that he bought slaves, although he inherited one elderly slave from his mother and his will indicates he owned one slave family in the 1840s. On the other hand, he married into a prominent slave-owning family, and whenever he was on leave from the U.S. Army, lived with his in-laws at Arlington, their iconic
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The current push to remove Confederate monuments does not mark the first time citizens have sought to remove statues from the American landscape. Below: John McRae’s depiction of a mob pulling down a statue of King George III in New York City in July 1776.
Confederates in 1865 by advocating for not only the enlistment of slaves as Confederate soldiers, but emancipation as a reward for their service.5 There is an incongruity in a statue that honors someone who, at least de facto, committed treason. But Americans often have convoluted reasons for remembering what they want to remember, and that includes a number of incidents involving treason—there is, after all, a monument to the Whiskey Rebellion in Washington, Pennsylvania; the Dorr Rebellion Museum in Chepachet, Rhode Island; and a bust of Aaron Burr in the U.S. Senate Chamber. The town of Harpers Ferry is almost a monument to John Brown, who was hanged for treason. And there is even a muted memorial to Benedict Arnold on the Saratoga battlefield. And Lee certainly did one thing for which all Americans can be grateful: He adamantly refused all suggestions that, rather than surrender his cornered army at Appomattox in 1865, Confederate soldiers should be directed to take to the hills and wage guerrilla warfare. Considering how much damage the Ku Klux Klan was able to inflict through insurgent tactics during Reconstruction, it is hideous to contemplate what might have resulted if Lee had authorized entire Confederate cadres to take, John Brown-like, to the mountains and sustain an insurgency that could have made other 19th-century insurgencies (like Imam Shamil’s resistance to the Russian Empire in the Caucasus) look faint-hearted. Lee turned down offers to lead Confederate exile communities abroad, and once peace had been declared, his was one of the clearer voices urging reconciliation of the nation’s divisions. “I have done, & continue to do,” he wrote in 1866, “all in my power to encourage our people to set more fully to work, to restore the Country, to rebuild their homes & churches, to educate their children, & to remain with their States, their friends & Countrymen.” And after he assumed the presidency of Washington College, in Lexington, Virginia, in 1865, he publicly rebuked rambunctious students (a number of whom were Confederate army veterans) for harassing black schools and churches and personally expelled a student involved in a harassment incident.6 It was this Lee, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources insisted in 2006, who was the real honoree of the Lee statue in Richmond, stating that the “placement of the statue was intended to perpetuate the memory of Lee’s character as a man of heroic action as well as to herald the emergence of a New South from the adversity of defeat and Reconstruction.”7 And yet, the record remains mottled. That “New South” was also the inventor of Jim Crow. The vigor with which Lee suppressed anti-black student activities at Washington College may have been motivated as much by concern that
federal authorities would seize on such incidents to disband the college as by any urge for racial reconciliation. Lee himself was privately contemptuous of blacks, resenting a Reconstruction in which “the South is to be placed under the dominion of the negroes.” In 1868, he advised his son against hiring blacks. “You will never prosper with the blacks,” Lee warned Robert E. Lee Jr. “I wish them no evil in the world—on the contrary, will do them every good in my power, and know that they are misled by those to whom they have given their confidence; but our material, social, and political interests are naturally with the whites.”8
1 Time is another factor in discussions of monuments to Lee and other Confederates. Statues on the American landscape have been taken down before, and one has only to look at John McRae’s iconic image of a mob pulling down New York City’s statue of George III on July 9, 1776, to recall the most dramatic example. But gestures of that sort usually occur in the immediacy of a political moment—George III was, after all, actively suppressing colonial independence. There is not much immediacy on offer from Robert E. Lee. Earlier this year, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) demanded the removal of Lee’s name from Fort Hamilton, arguing that memorializations of Lee “are deeply offensive to hundreds of Brooklyn residents and members of the armed forces stationed at Fort Hamilton whose ancestors Robert E. Lee … fought to hold in slavery.” The Department of the Army, however, declined Clarke’s request, reasoning that it would be difficult to point to a specific personal harm Lee inflicted while serving at Fort Hamilton; contrariwise, the work he did there continues to pay benefits to national defense (unlike Fort Bliss, which Lee never visited).9 Lee was educated at West Point, served for 32 years as an officer in the Corps of Engineers and in the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, and had been stationed at Fort Hamilton as its chief engineering officer in the 1840s. (The Corps of Engineers still uses Fort Hamilton as a regional headquarters.) The New York Public Library’s special collections include a notebook of drawings and schematics Lee made as he supervised the maintenance and upkeep of the fort, which protected New York Harbor from foreign attack. Airbrushing Lee’s name out of Fort Hamilton’s history because of the offense of slavery would require airbrushing nearly everything in the Army’s history before 1865—starting with its first commander-in-chief, George Washington, and including the man to whom Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Ulysses S. Grant. Like Lee, Grant also owned a slave before the war, and benefited from the labor of slaves owned by his wife’s family. And he, too, suffers from an 37 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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ton even called for the closing of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. If personal failings on slavery are to be the rule of thumb, then we have already slid down the slippery slope and fallen into Alice Liddell’s rabbit hole.11 New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu tried to sidestep the difficulty posed by Lee’s personal history by insisting that Confederate statues in New Orleans were really symbols of an ideology, and that it’s the ideology and not the individuals that has to be dealt with. These “statues were not erected just to honor these men,” Landrieu explained, “but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal—through monuments and through other means—to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.”12 And in a very important sense, Landrieu is right. When the New Orleans Lee statue was returned to its column in January 1954 after extensive repairs, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) identified it in exactly that way: “Today, we of the South are being tried in many ways,” said a UDC official. “There are forces that are doing much to tear down the ideals and traditions of our Southland, but this is where this heritage of courage and dignity comes to the front.”13 (Among those threatened “ideals” she may have had in mind was segregation, since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education was just on the cusp of its announcement five months later.) At the dedication of the Virginia Monument on the Gettysburg battlefield in 1917, Leigh Robinson, a veteran of the battle, proclaimed, “Southern slavery will hold up the noblest melioration of an inferior race, of which history can take note.” It was, the former artilleryman with the Richmond Howitzers remembered fondly, “the government of a race incapable of self-government, for a greater benefit to the governed than to the governors.”14 That same year, those former white “governors” of the African Americans of the South chose to murder over 20 men and women in brutal lynchings with no trial or due process. When Leigh Robinson proclaimed at Gettysburg that “Southern master gave to Southern slave more than slave gave to master; and the slave realized it,” his words were meant to anoint the bronze monument surmounted by Robert E. Lee as a symbolic distraction from the continued
There are those, like New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu (left), who have argued for the removal of Confederate statues not in objection to the individuals they represent, but because of the Lost Cause ideology they perpetuate. Above: Civil War veterans gather on the Gettysburg battlefield in 1917, the year the Virginia Monument was unveiled. “Southern master gave to Southern slave more than slave gave to master,” proclaimed a Confederate veteran during the monument’s dedication.
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US MARINES PHOTO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (LEFT); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
ambiguous record on race, especially as president, when he acted vigorously to suppress the Ku Klux Klan but then refused to use federal troops to protect Reconstruction governments in Mississippi and South Carolina from being overthrown by white supremacists. William Tecumseh Sherman, Grant’s ferocious lieutenant, is even more vulnerable, since he opposed the recruitment and the employment of black soldiers, and in December 1864 abandoned thousands of fugitive slaves to Confederate cavalry at Ebenezer Creek in Georgia. Are the protests against Confederate monuments a slippery slope down which every other aspect of American history that fails to satisfy protestors is doomed to slide? Perhaps. Eight U.S. presidents before Abraham Lincoln were slaveholders, including Andrew Jackson, whose equestrian statue lifts a hat across from the White House, and even Lincoln has been denounced as a half-heart on the slavery issue. Where is the line to be drawn? This sort of “slippery slope” demurrer is often derided, but not, sadly, because it never comes true. The Charlottesville protests, in fact, were followed almost immediately in North Carolina by an “emergency protest” that toppled not a statue of Lee but a generic Confederate monument on the grounds of the old Durham County courthouse.10 Over the following weeks, a nameless image of a Confederate general, somewhat resembling Lee, in a grouping of images over the doorway of the Duke University chapel was defaced with a hammer; a memorial in a Columbus, Ohio, cemetery to Confederate soldiers who died in a nearby POW camp was toppled; and a graveyard plaque commemorating other southern POWs buried in a northern cemetery was removed in Madison, Wisconsin. In a kind of competitive imitation, protesters bid their demands for action higher and higher. A monument of Francis Scott Key in Baltimore was defaced with red paint and a blackpainted accusation that Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a “racist anthem.” Antifa protesters who turned out on Boston Common in anticipation of an alt-right “free speech” demonstration announced that even the American flag was considered offensive. “The flag is a slave symbol,” declaimed one masked activist to bystanders holding a flag. “I have absolutely nothing in common with them. They fly the same flag they flied [sic] with slavery. They preach hate and violence.” Al Sharp-
US MARINES PHOTO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (LEFT); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
violence of the Jim Crow South. But imputing symbolism to inanimate objects is a dicey game. At the same dedication of the Virginia Monument where Leigh Robinson sang the praises of white supremacy, Virginia governor Henry Carter Stuart chose to portray the memorial as a symbol of national unity as the United States plunged into World War I, “tragic in its grief ” but “fruitful in its lessons” of “the generosity of a chivalrous foe in the hour of victory” and “fortitude” in the face of “human adversity.”15 So, to whose message does the Virginia Monument belong? Robinson’s or Stuart’s? In the 1930s, the Communist Party insisted that “Communism is 20th-century Americanism” and tried to appropriate the image of Abraham Lincoln as a compatriot
of Karl Marx, while the pro-Nazi German-American Bund touted George Washington as “the First Fascist” in 1939. Symbolism is malleable, and can cut in multiple directions. Does this brand Lincoln and Washington as genocidal freaks? The “emergency protest” in North Carolina was organized by the Triangle People’s Assembly, the Workers World Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Democratic Socialists of America—all of which might allow counterprotesters to argue that even if Confederate monuments are linked to white supremacy, tearing them down is sympathetic with the even bloodier beliefs of Marxism and Stalinism. Vandals in Chicago and Washington, D.C., defaced a Lincoln bust and the Lincoln Memorial; others in New Orleans spray-painted 39 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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a statue of Joan of Arc as a symbol of “the racist white capitalist establishment in New Orleans, seeking to preserve white supremacy.” Joan of Arc? So much for symbolism.
1 Landrieu’s argument about the toxic message of monuments has frequently been deflected by an appeal away from individual actions toward an individual’s “place” in history—as though having a “place” inures someone to moral scrutiny. No name has been more soaked in blood over the past century and a half than Karl Marx. Yet in Trier, Germany, Marx’s birthplace, proposals by the Chinese government to donate a statue of Marx were met by the city’s mayor with the dubious argument, “Karl Marx is one of the most important citizens of this city, and we should not hide him.”16 A bust of Josef Stalin was installed in the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, in 2010. When protests erupted, the president of the memorial’s foundation, Robin E. Reed, dismissed them. “As a lifelong educator, I believe the Foundation has a responsibility to serve as a catalyst for serious discourse regarding key historical figures and their actions as they relate to the D-Day story and World War II in general,” Reed wrote after the Bedford County Board of Supervisors passed a motion of disapproval. “To do otherwise is a serious disservice to those individuals that lived and died during those historical events.”17 Demands in 2015 that Oxford University’s Oriel College remove a statue of the avowedly colonialist and imperialist Cecil Rhodes collapsed in the face of resistance that replied (in the words of Times Literary Supplement editor Mary Beard) that it is “not the job of the present to tick the past off.”18 But is it not the task of historians to make moral judgments about the past? Certainly, one task of history is to catalog the process by which the present has emerged from the past, and to do so free from polemical or partisan rant; but another must also be to judge which parts of that process are worthy of emulation, lest we heedlessly repeat the follies that exist alongside the triumphs. Otherwise, history becomes exactly the sort of staid chronicle that Henry Ford denounced as “one damn thing after another.” Statue removal has been a significant part of historical judgment, especially when the statue commemorates someone whose evil deeds still have living victims. After Nikita Khrushchev’s expose of the crimes of Josef Stalin, statues of the malevolent Soviet tyrant quickly disappeared from Prague, Yerevan, and Krakow; still more disappeared, after the fall of the Soviet Union, in former Soviet-bloc satellites (including Stalin’s native Georgian Republic). Surprisingly, Adolf Hitler discouraged the erection of statues glorifying himself, so there was no public
Hitler statuary to remove after World War II. But the U.S. Army blew up the gigantic swastika that adorned the Nuremburg stadium where the National Socialists held their hideous pageants in the 1930s.19 And there were still the Hitlerite street and place names, including Adolf-Hitler-Straße and Adolf-Hitler-Platz in Berlin, which were duly renamed Reichskanzlerplatz and Theodor-HeussPlatz. In 2016, the Austrian government finally decided to tear down the house in Braunau am Inn where Hitler was born, out of concern that neoNazi groups would hold rallies there.20 But judgments are not the same thing as polemics; ranting is the province of the Taliban and the Red Guards. It may be someone’s opinion that Lee statues are the essence of white supremacy, but opinions are what mobs have; in a democracy of reason, we are governed by laws, by respect, by due process. And remember the role of time: Whatever offense Confederate statues have to offer has been muted by the movement of American society itself, a movement whose tectonic shifts on race cannot and should not be cast aside to appease claims that are often rooted in harms no more intense than road rage. What we suspect is needed is a set of guideposts that can push us past name-calling and confrontation, a set of questions that, like the following, can allow some patina of reason and lawfulness to interpose itself: 1. Does the statue commemorate an individual who inflicted harms on a living person that would be actionable in a federal court? If so, remove the statue; if not, move to the next question. 2. Did that individual order the commission of treason, capital crimes, slavery, genocide, or terrorism (as defined by the International Court of Justice), or incur direct responsibility for them? If so, remove the statue; if not, next question. 3. Did the individual have a specific connection to the location of the statue? In other words, was the person born or raised there, or did a momentous event in their life happen there? If not, remove the statue. If so, think hard about what kind of event this was and whether it merits a statue, then go to the next question. 4. Is the statue used as an active venue for promoting treason, capital crimes, slavery, genocide, or terrorism? The police data should tell us, but be careful of the malleability of symbolism. It is hard to believe that the Robert E. Lee who rebuked race-baiting students in Lexington would not have gotten down off his horse in Charlottesville and damned the alt-righters. But if there is a bright line connecting the subject of the statue and the actions being conducted around it, then remove the statue. If not, go to the next question. 5. Did the individual undertake specific acts to mitigate the historical harms done? By this point, we are close to concluding that the statue could stay. But
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How to Make Monumental Decisions A proposed framework to help navigate a complex issue
No
Does the statue commemorate an individual who inflicted harms on a living person that would be actionable in a federal court?
Yes
No
Did that individual order the commission of treason, capital crimes, slavery, genocide, or terrorism, or incur direct responsibility for them?
Yes
Yes
Did the individual have a specific connection to the location of the statue?
No
No
Is the statue used as an active venue for promoting treason, capital crimes, slavery, genocide, or terrorism?
Yes
Yes
Did the individual undertake specific acts to mitigate the historical harms done?
No
This monument or memorial likely should remain.
only, after this question, with this caveat: Itemize those mitigations on a plaque on the statue’s base, and do it clearly. Even with this, we are not quite at the end of decision-making, since the removal of a monument is not the end of an action, but the beginning. Next comes the hard work of deciding what deserves to replace it, and where the removed monument should go. In some cases, it might be more powerful to leave a monument in place while reinventing it as an opportunity for judgment and
This monument or memorial should be reinvestigated, readdressed, repurposed, or removed.
evaluation. Just as a plaque noting mitigating circumstances might be affixed to a monument, a plaque noting the historical malfeasances of troubling men like Robert E. Lee might be bolted to the side of the pedestal their memory calls home. Perhaps new monuments, visual counterpoints on the landscape, could be erected next to the originals to help address the trouble in situ. Sometimes simple ignorance is the best solution: Hitler’s refuge in the Obersalzberg today functions as a tearoom, the SSSchule Haus in Wewelsburg ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74 41 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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Elijah Lazarus Anderson
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During the Atlanta Campaign in 1864, 16-year-old Elijah Lazarus Anderson of Gwinnett County, Georgia, enlisted in Company G of the 5th Georgia Militia, also known as “Joe Brown’s Pets,” after the state’s governor, Joseph E. Brown. Anderson fell ill with measles soon after he joined the regiment and was sent home. By the time he recovered the war was over. He married, became a justice of the peace, and lived until 1927.
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AGE AT ENLISTMENT: 16
BOYS AT
WAR
DAVID W. VAUGHAN COLLECTION
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Images and stories of some of the Civil War’s youngest soldiers By Ronald S. Coddington
the figure most often quoted today as the average age of a Union soldier is 25.8 years—a number derived from a comprehensive 1869 study of northern enlisted men by Benjamin Apthorp Gould, the chief number cruncher of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. The average Confederate soldier’s age is generally assumed to be roughly the same, although a larger number of both boys and older men likely served in the southern armies. ¶ The statisticians did not include teenagers or men over 46 in their final study, instead focusing on the 18–45 range that was considered the legal military age. But a deeper dive into the Sanitary Commission data reveals that a small fraction of the just over 1 million soldiers whose information was collected—10,413, or 0.1 percent—enlisted between the ages of 13 to 17. ¶ Because the minimum age to enlist as a soldier was 18, one might assume that these youngsters were “drummer boys,” armed with drumsticks, fifes, and horns. Some were. But others carried rifles, marched in the ranks, and suffered the rigors of camp and campaign with their elders. These adolescents might have lied about their age to enlist, or their recruiters, desperate for men, might have looked the other way. The representative examples here offer a glimpse into the experiences of teen soldiers and sailors who served in the Union and Confederate armies and navies. 43 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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George Leonard Fisher AGE AT ENLISTMENT: 16
KIRK FISHER COLLECTION (FISHER); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (BARNUM); BRYAN WATSON COLLECTION (ROGERS)
Born in Germany and raised in Pennsylvania near the southern border with Maryland, George Fisher (pictured right) answered the call to defend his adopted country in the summer of 1862. He crossed over the border into Washington County and enlisted in the 7th Maryland Infantry. Fisher and his comrades spent much of the next two years on patrol in the county. Then, in the spring of 1864, the regiment was assigned to Major General Gouverneur K. Warren’s V Corps and participated in Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, including the battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. Captured along the Weldon Railroad outside Petersburg in the fall of 1864, Fisher was held at prisoner-of-war camps in Richmond; Danville, Virginia; and Salisbury, North Carolina. He survived the ordeal and the war. In 1866, Fisher returned to the military, first in the regular army with the 2nd U.S. Infantry and later with a local militia unit in Hagerstown, Maryland, and the National Guard. Over the next 45 years, he participated in the Indian Wars and the Spanish-American War. Fisher ended his service in 1911, but interrupted his retirement during World War I to serve as a drill instructor, and again in early 1927 to accept an appointment as superintendent of Antietam National Cemetery. He died later that year at age 80.
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KIRK FISHER COLLECTION (FISHER); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (BARNUM); BRYAN WATSON COLLECTION (ROGERS)
David Barnum age at enlistment: 17
James T. Rogers age at enlistment: 15
As a cadet at the U.S. Naval Academy before the war, Alabama native Davy Barnum racked up hundreds of demerits. The beginning of hostilities saved him from a slide into academic oblivion and prompted him to enlist in the 5th Alabama Infantry. Barnum suffered a serious gunshot wound during the Battle of Seven Pines in 1862. The Yankee bullet remained in his body until a few weeks before the Battle of Antietam, when it unceremoniously popped out. Captured at Turner’s Gap on September 14, 1862, Barnum was held briefly before being exchanged. He returned to his regiment in time to fight at Gettysburg, where he was spotted distributing lemons he had liberated during the first day’s fighting in town. Barnum’s dream was to sail the seas, and he transferred to the Confederate navy in August 1863. The stint lasted less than a year. Confederate authorities ordered him back to his regiment due to manpower shortages. The Alabamians surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, but Barnum was not listed among them. He eventually turned up in Tennessee and, in June 1865, signed an oath of allegiance to the federal government. According to his former captain, Barnum died soon thereafter in St. Louis. The circumstances of his death went unreported.
Born in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, 15-year-old James T. Rogers was living in Rockingham, North Carolina, when he enlisted as a private in Company H of the 13th North Carolina Infantry in May 1861. More than a year later, in August 1862, he was discharged due to his age. The lapse in time between his enlistment and discharge suggests that he had lied about his age and was found out, or perhaps he had run away from home and had finally been tracked down by a concerned parent. Whatever the reason, Rogers was listed as present for duty with his regiment for the Seven Days Battles, the culminating series of engagements of the Peninsula Campaign during the summer of 1862. It is unclear what happened to Rogers after he left the regiment.
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Little is known about George H. Harbaugh, who joined the Stuart Horse Artillery Battalion of Virginia as a private. Only a few official documents about his service survive, and they record two events: his enlistment and his parole. Harbaugh joined the artillery at age 16 in early 1865. By this time, the battalion’s namesake, General J.E.B. Stuart, had been dead for months after being killed during the Union victory at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, Virginia. Harbaugh’s short military career ended when he signed an oath of allegiance and was paroled at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on April 25, 1865. Nothing more about him is known.
In 1862, the Union brig Bohio joined the hunt for blockade runners along the western coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Though powered only by sails, the vessel and its stalwart crew took four prizes. Among those aboard was a sailor’s apprentice, or “boy,” William D. Gregory. The son of a shoemaker, he had recently suffered the death of his mother and dropped out of high school to join the Union navy. He accompanied his uncle and namesake, William Doliber Gregory, who commanded Bohio. Young Gregory remained on duty in the Gulf through the spring of 1866, when he was honorably discharged after working his way up to the rank of master’s mate. He returned to Marblehead, Massachusetts, married, and vowed to stay on dry land for the rest of his days. But the lure of the sea proved too strong and before long he joined the merchant fleet. In February 1876, while serving as chief mate aboard Radiant, Gregory and the rest of the crew encountered a typhoon in the Indian Ocean. They were never heard from again. Gregory was 30.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
William Doliber Gregory II age at enlistment: 15 KARL SUNDSTROM COLLECTION (HARBAUGH); EARL SHECK COLLECTION (GREGORY); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (CONVERSE)
George H. Harbaugh age at enlistment: 16
James Wheaton Converse
The Union victory at New Bern, North Carolina, on March 14, 1862, boosted the reputation of Ambrose E. Burnside, the brigadier general in command of federal forces. It also shone a light on a young sergeant in the ranks of the 24th Massachusetts Infantry. James Converse, who had enlisted in the regiment at age 17 and just celebrated his 18th birthday, impressed everyone with his courage. During the assault on the Confederate position, Converse’s “fearless gaze and steady step … [kept] his men well in hand as they swept forward to the charge,” noted an admirer. Before the end of the year, with the encouragement and approval of staff officers, Converse was promoted to a lieutenancy in a newly organized regiment, the 47th Massachusetts Infantry. He spent most of 1863 in Louisiana and Texas, where he proved his abilities as a leader in various operations against the enemy. Converse returned to Boston after his nine-month enlistment and, in late 1864, helped raise a new regiment. The war ended before it fully formed. Converse went on to become a successful businessman in the family leather company, as well as a husband and father of two daughters. In 1876, he died suddenly after suffering what may have been a stroke. He was 32.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
KARL SUNDSTROM COLLECTION (HARBAUGH); EARL SHECK COLLECTION (GREGORY); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (CONVERSE)
AGE AT ENLISTMENT: 17
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Benjamin Franklin Marshall Jr. AGE AT ENLISTMENT: 17
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PAUL RUSSINOFF COLLECTION (MARSHALL); JEREMIAH T. LOCKWOOD JR. COLLECTION, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, VIRGINIA TECH (LOCKWOOD); THE LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BEVILLE)
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
As the fortunes of the South waned in early 1865, the 15th Confederate Cavalry cast about for recruits in Mobile, Alabama, to fill its depleted ranks. Among the new enlistees was fresh-faced Benjamin Franklin Marshall Jr., the son of a wealthy cotton broker. Marshall joined Company E and served in the vicinity of Mobile. He likely posed for his portrait about this time. The 15th disbanded in April 1865 after its final action against Union forces at Claiborne, Alabama. Marshall returned to his home and family. He died at age 30 in 1878.
PAUL RUSSINOFF COLLECTION (MARSHALL); JEREMIAH T. LOCKWOOD JR. COLLECTION, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, VIRGINIA TECH (LOCKWOOD); THE LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BEVILLE)
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Jeremiah Talcott Lockwood age at enlistment: 16
Francis Bartow Beville age at enlistment: 15
On an August day in 1862, Jeremiah Lockwood Sr. sent his son, Jeremiah Jr., into New York City to pay an insurance bill. Young Lockwood presumably did as he was told—and then stepped into a military recruitment office and joined the army. His parents gave the 16-year-old their blessing, and he went off with the 4th New York Heavy Artillery to the defenses of Washington, D.C. Like many heavies, the men of the 4th were ordered out of the relative comforts of the capital in the spring of 1864 and into the Overland Campaign and the brutal battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. Lockwood survived them all. But on June 17, he volunteered to serve on a skirmish line and suffered a serious wound after a bullet struck him in the chest, passing through his lung and exiting his right side. He eventually recovered and received a disability discharge. Lockwood died in 1925 at age 81. A son, Richard, who served in World War I, survived him.
In May 1861, prominent Georgia politician and Savannah attorney Francis S. Bartow organized a militia company called the Oglethorpe Light Infantry. It was jokingly referred to as “Bartow’s Beardless Boys” because of the unmarried young men and boys in the ranks. One of them was 15-year-old Francis “Frank” Bartow Beville, an orphan raised by Bartow. The company became part of the 8th Georgia Infantry, and Bartow commanded the regiment as colonel. The Georgians suffered heavy losses at the First Battle of Manassas, where Bartow was killed and Beville seriously wounded in the chest. Beville survived his injury and went on to become a navy officer. While serving in this capacity on March 14, 1863, five members of his crew who were intent on deserting overpowered him while on patrol in a small boat. The mutineers surrendered to Union forces. Beville became a prisoner of war and spent a few months at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. Beville eventually wound up in Richmond and was forced to flee the city when it fell to the Union army on April 3, 1865. Three days later, he suffered his second war wound at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek. Beville recovered from this wound too, and lived until 1905. 49 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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According to his military service record, William Henry Magann was 18 years old when he enlisted in the Campbell County Rangers of Bedford, Virginia—which would become Company I of the 2nd Virginia Cavalry—in May 1861. In fact, he was only 15. The eldest of three boys born to a Bedford overseer and his wife, Magann and his comrades would participate in numerous engagements, including the largest cavalry battle of the war, at Brandy Station, Virginia, in June 1863. At Appomattox Court House, most troopers in the regiment eluded capture and avoided surrender by cutting their way through Union lines. Magann likely was among those who escaped, and he did not sign the oath of allegiance to the U.S. government until late May 1865. A veteran at age 19, Magann became a tanner, married in 1875, and started a family that grew to include three boys. (His second son was named Robert Lee Magann.) Around the turn of the century, Magann and his wife, Eliza, moved to Plant City, Florida. Magann died there in 1913 at age 67.
In the summer of 1862, army recruiters in Jamestown, New York, were hesitant about accepting a local orphan, Alexander Lowry, for military service. Small and delicate, the 16-year-old did not fit the picture of a robust recruit. Still, they passed him, perhaps because the demand for volunteers was high. Another factor may have been his late father, who had been a prominent and influential local businessman. Lowry began his service as sergeant major of the 112th New York Infantry. He quickly emerged as a vocal supporter of the rank and file, standing up for the men and routinely confronting the regiment’s colonel, a stern disciplinarian who reportedly pushed the men too hard. Lowry became extremely popular among the regiment’s enlisted men and officers, and received a promotion to first lieutenant and regimental adjutant. Nicknamed “Our Little Adjutant,” Lowry might have gone on to higher rank, but a bout with typhoid fever in the summer of 1863 ended his service. Back in New York, Lowry eventually married, had a son of his own, and entered the world of high finance. His business dealings came under scrutiny beginning in the 1880s. Missing money, a bankruptcy, and high-risk speculations raised questions about his ethics. His name was splashed in sensational headlines in The New York Times. He died in 1924 at age 78.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Alexander Marvin Lowry age at enlistment: 16
BRYAN WATSON COLLECTION (MAGANN); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (LOWRY, WRIGHT)
William Henry Magann age at enlistment: 15
Augustus Hunt Wright AGE AT ENLISTMENT: 16
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
BRYAN WATSON COLLECTION (MAGANN); RONALD S. CODDINGTON (LOWRY, WRIGHT)
Born into a family of Unitarian intellectuals, Augustus H. Wright was raised by his parents to embrace personal responsibility. After the war began, he put his upbringing into action. In the fall of 1863, at age 16, he joined the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry. Typhoid fever attacked him soon after he enlisted, and he received a discharge after only two months in uniform. Wright served two more brief stints in the army. In 1864, as a member of the 42nd Massachusetts Militia, he spent 100 days in the defenses of Washington. In early 1865, he received a commission as first lieutenant in the 24th U.S. Colored Infantry, but the war ended by the time the regiment was ready for action. Wright eventually settled into the life of a farmer in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. He died in 1905 at age 58. His wife, Jennie, and a son survived him.
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In remarkable newspaper accounts published decades after the war, nurse Maria Hall recalls the suffering of “army boys” EDITED BY JOHN BANKS
s h pity”
Union soldiers gather about the grounds of Smoketown Hospital, established near the Antietam battlefield two weeks after the epic clash. Walking alongside the wounded soldier on a stretcher is nurse Maria Hall.
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ground, helpless and maimed, with only a thatch of straw as shelter from the rain and the sun? The army boys who were there know about it, but who that did not see it can tell just what it was? Those who do not know can appreciate neither the suffering nor the courage of those who bore it all. Our hearts ached with pity and with sympathy for the suffering we saw, and wondered daily at the heroism which made light of it, and turned the groan into a jest, and cheated the murmur by a cheery song.” Although Hall’s first-person newspaper ac-
This 1866 lithograph shows the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. Shortly after the Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, officials established a hospital in the building—officially known as Indiana Hospital—where Maria Hall and other women worked as nurses.
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PREVIOUS SPREAD: COLLECTION OF BOB ZELLER; THIS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
hen word came that Union casualties were expected to arrive in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1861, anxiety was palpable at the hospital set up in the massive U.S. Patent Office building only blocks from the White House. As rumors swirled about the number of wounded, orders were given to prepare a ward for 24 soldiers. Twenty-five-year-old nurse Maria Hall, who began taking care of sick and injured solders at her family’s home in Washington before the Battle of Bull Run, mentally prepared to deal with the worst cases. Hours crept by that summer day in 1861. “[W]ho can tell how the excitement grew!” Hall recalled decades later. Shortly after sunset, ambulances arrived. A procession entered Hall’s ward. A surgeon, then a hospital steward, then a ward master—and only one wounded man with a flesh wound in his cheek. “Ah!” Hall remembered, “but that was in the summer of ’61, and we could smile at the want of wounded men then.” Published in The Springfield Republican in the winter of 1886–1887, Hall’s account is part of a remarkable series of her wartime recollections of her service as a nurse in the war’s eastern theater. Under the byline M.M.C. Richards (she married a Connecticut man named Lucas Richards in 1872), Hall provided unique insight into the hardships and horrors faced by a nurse during the Civil War. Besides tending to the needs of soldiers at the Patent Office hospital (its official name was Indiana Hospital) in the summer of 1861, Hall also served at the massive Union encampment at Harrison’s Landing on the James River in Virginia in the summer of 1862, and at Antietam, site of the bloodiest day of the war on September 17, 1862. While caring for wounded at several hospitals outside the village of Sharpsburg, Maryland, Maria (pronounced Mar-AH-ya) became a favorite of soldiers and doctors alike. Even decades after the conflict, her war experiences remained surreal and painful for Hall. In The Republican, she wrote: “I pause to wonder if those who read these jottings of hospital days have an idea of what it was to be in a field hospital—to find one’s self laid all quivering with pain, on the floor of a barn, or on a pile of straw in some shed … to be perhaps on the
PREVIOUS SPREAD: COLLECTION OF BOB ZELLER; THIS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
counts have been edited for length, her words appear below as they did in The Republican more than 130 years ago. Hall’s recollections begin in the summer of 1861, just after the start of her nursing career. She worked closely with a nurse named Almira Fales, who had cared for soldiers since the earliest days of the war.
11 The first volunteer hospital was opened to the sick men of the 19th Indiana regiment, in the un-
finished wing of the United States patent office, by the action of Caleb Smith, secretary of the interior. This was in its beginning a rude affair, and when we entered with Mrs. [Almira] Fales into the rough, comfortless wards we were dismayed. But her cheerful order to “Go to work, girls, wash their faces, comb their hair, do what you can,” —and her salutation to the men, “Now boys, I guess you’ll get well; I’ve brought some young ladies to see you”—lent an atmosphere of cheer to the scene, for the moment at least. The sick boys in their gray state uniforms lie 55 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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on rough boards, or on tiles placed against walls, with or without mattresses as it happens. Surgeons and hospital stewards and women work in a confused way without order or direction. But from the disorder and discomfort came gradually a well-ordered hospital which was opened to patients from various regiments, but called always the Indiana hospital. It was here that we watched the dying of our first young soldier boy; taking the loving message for the mother at home, and cutting off for her a lock of the fair hair she had so lately touched. And here too we waited for our first wounded men…. Tyler of Michigan was brought in, accidently shot through both knees while gathering wood
“Now came a chance to go ‘to the front.’ All the world was crying ‘on to Richmond,’ and on to Richmond we essayed to go, following McClellan’s grand Army of the Potomac.”
THE FOARD COLLECTION OF CIVIL WAR NURSING
maria hall
The job of a Civil War nurse could be physically and emotionally draining. Reflecting on her wartime service, Maria Hall (left) would later write, “I pause to wonder if those who read these jottings of hospital days have an idea of what it was to be in a field hospital…. Our hearts ached with pity and with sympathy for the suffering we saw.”
for a camp-fire. The surgeon trying to save both limbs waited too long till blood poisoning occurred, and one sorrowful day the nurse found the usually cheerful fellow crying like a child at the decision of the surgeon just made known to him. “My leg has got to be amputated tomorrow, I wish it could be done to-day if it has got to come off,”—and then the thought of going home crippled—it was almost better not to go at all. “But you’ll stay by me, won’t you?” And on the promise given in response to this he relied. The next day stretched upon the rude amputating table, he looked about for the nurse, and taking her hand said he was ready, saying, “Now let me go to sleep,” and so seemed content till the blessed chloroform deadened all thought or care. Though the operation was “successful,” and all the first conditions good, a secondary hemorrhage occurred after the first dressing, and then we could only sit by the poor fellow as his life ebbed away, and the day came for this soldier to die for his country without sight of battle or shout of victory. These first instances are so vivid, and stand forth distinctively, while the years that follow seem filled with shadowy forms going on to death, with here and there individual cases, whose experiences were marked. In the winter, small-pox appeared among us, and many of the boys were sent to Kalorama, the place chosen as the government pest-house. The first case I remember to have seen was a red-headed man who begged to have his hair brushed to
ease the pain in his head. He presently remarked that he guessed that “brush would take the hide off.” The surgeon passing by stopped to examine the pustules that appeared under the manipulations of the nurse, and hastily advised no more brushing. The man was at once removed to an outer hall, and presently the ambulance carried him away.
11 In late June 1862, after the temporary hospital in the Patent Office had closed, Hall eagerly traveled to Harrison’s Landing. There, she helped care for the sick and wounded in General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, recently chased from the gates of Richmond during the Seven Days Battles. In her recollections, Hall wrote of feeding famished soldiers, the perils of sailing on the James River under fire from Confederates— and about a gruesome, and quick, surgery.
In the summer of ’62 Washington had been better furnished with hospital accommodations for the army, and the Indiana hospital was closed, and its workers scattered to other points. Now came a chance to go “to the front.” All the world was crying “on to Richmond,” and on to Richmond we essayed to go, following McClellan’s grand Army of the Potomac. Mrs. Almira Fales, known to so many of the army boys, had already made an expedition to the army at Savage Station, and there distributed to the necessities of the soldiers bountiful supplies furnished so generously from the North. She had near the end of June returned to Washington to replenish her stores, and now proposed to make a second journey. She remarked that “those boys had been fed on lint and bandages long enough, I’m going to take them some goodies.” The writer was to her own great delight allowed to accompany Mrs. Fales as her assistant, and armed with passes from the secretary of war we went to Fortress Monroe, only to learn that no farther could we go at present. A letter [of mine] of June 29, ’62, dated “Hospital ship, Daniel Webster” is before me, and I quote as follows: – “We found we could not go in the direction we expected; for either the army has been repulsed, or the plan of operations materially changed. All sorts of rumors abound, and nothing seems reliable. We have come aboard this hospital transport, and here we find two surgeons, some young men nurses of the Christian commission, and they expect to go to Yorktown for the wounded. We have decided to go with them, using our stores and ourselves as circumstances dictate. A boat has just come in from White House [Va.] bringing the news that the left 57 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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wing of our army is in Richmond, the right wing turned, and the center firm—very likely we shall be in Richmond before we can hear from you— (!) We are lying off Fortress Monroe, in sight of the Rip Raps, a prison for mutinous soldiers, and nearby are the black gun-boats with their
“Our load numbers finally about 300. Mrs. Fales supplies all the provisions we have for the sick, and she deals them out lavishly all day long, forgetting even to eat any dinner herself.”
THE FOARD COLLECTION OF CIVIL WAR NURSING
maria hall on her colleague, almira fales
Hall worked alongside Almira Fales (left) for much of her wartime service. Fales’ encouragement made her popular with the soldiers and her fellow nurses. “Go to work, girls, wash their faces, comb their hair, do what you can” was the “cheerful order” Hall remembered Fales delivering to the nursing staff during their time at the U.S. Patent Office hospital in 1861.
‘peace-makers’ grinning from the port-holes; and off there in the distance the scene of action between the Merrimac and the Monitor. We find no luxuries and few conveniences onboard for sick or well. I sleep on a bunk with no mattress, but a pike of hospital shirts for a pillow.” The next day we were ordered to proceed to the James River, casting anchor about dark alongside the gun-boat Port Royal. A little boat’s crew came to visit us and the crowd on deck are electrified by the news we hear from them. “McClellan cut to pieces, the left wing 23 miles back, and the whole army on the skedaddle.” The captain of the Port Royal gives the parting advice to Capt. Woods of the Daniel Webster to hurry up in the morning as soon as it is light, keep all the ladies below, and don’t be surprised to see a shot across your bows any time. The diary of July 1 says: “Wake early to find ourselves steaming rapidly up the James River. Reach Harrison’s Landing at 7 o’clock. Find crowds of sick, wounded and worn-out men engaged in the recent battles. It is not long before Mrs. Fales and I are among them feeding and questioning. None of these were very seriously wounded, but all were seriously hungry and demolished the rations with skill of veterans. We are at the Landing several hours receiving many to be examined and have wounds dressed, and then to be sent to another boat. Our load numbers finally about 300. Mrs. Fales supplies all the provisions we have for the sick, and she deals them out lavishly all day long, forgetting even to eat any dinner herself. For my own part I am busy all day helping here and there. Some wounds I wash and bandage. One shattered finger I wash and leave covered till a surgeon comes. He takes out his knife and before I know it the finger is left there for me to pick up and throw away! One man was struggling in vain to dress a wound on his shoulder. Offering to help him I
found him so much in need of cleaning up generally that I proposed to him that he should wash his face first. ‘Wash my face,’ said he, as if the idea were new to him, ‘why I haven’t washed my face since the 24th of June!’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘Would you like to try it for a change?’ ‘I guess so,’ he answered; ‘you see we hadn’t any water to spare for our face down on the Chickahominy; we drank water that we wouldn’t give to a dog at home.’ I brought him a basin of water, soap, towel and a clean shirt and left him to these luxuries. You should have heard him laugh when I came again to find him. ‘Don’t know me now I’m so clean, do you?’” This story is good to tell to those who are fond of quoting that other story of the young lady who went one morning into a city hospital and proposed to bathe the head of a sick soldier. The soldier declined her offer with thanks, but she insisted saying, “Let me bathe your head, I want so much to be useful.” “Well,” he sighed, “you can if you want to so bad, but you are the 14th one who has done it this morning.”
11 Ordered to go to Philadelphia in 1862, Hall was impressed with the city’s embrace of wounded soldiers. Philadelphia was home to several military hospitals during the war, including Satterlee General Hospital. Opened in 1862, it was the largest Union hospital of the Civil War, and scores of casualties were cared for there after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.
But was there ever a city that so warmly welcomed the boys to her gates, as did Philadelphia. Our steamer had scarcely touched the wharf before we were taken captive by the wonderfully organized hospital agencies of the city. Policemen lifted the feeble ones in their arms, as if they were brothers, taking special care of the little ones. Women wearing the lovely drab bonnets and gowns, and the lovelier faces of the Friends, came bringing baskets of bread, biscuits and cookies, pails of lemonade, pitchers of milk and bottles of wine, knowing that the boys had come from a barren land, and so welcoming them to plenty and comfort. Our only fear for our patients now was lest they should be killed with kindness. In later years of the war a soldier could not mention Philadelphia without a grateful apostrophe to the kindness of the people, and the ‘good meal of victuals’ we got there. One little boy we saw lifted by a big policeman who said with tears in his eyes, “We’ll take you to a good place.” We had called him a 59 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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11 After the trip to Philadelphia, Hall traveled to Fort Monroe in Virginia before boarding the hospital ship Daniel Webster for another journey up the James to Harrison’s Landing. About 10 miles from her destination, the steamer came under fire from a Rebel battery onshore. When Hall peeked to see the action, she received a rude surprise.
As we rounded a bend of the river at the eminence known as Fort Powhatan, whiz! went the bullets over our heads. A hurried retreat was made by all from the upper deck close by the pilot-house where we had gathered to enjoy the quiet resting time. The boat was skillfully managed by the captain, and as soon as we were out of range, the gun-boat swung round, and with a few forcible remarks shut up the little battery. The Webster was pierced from side to side with four solid shot and two shells were found in its side. More than 100 musket balls were found, and two or three shells burst over our heads. We all had our tale of hair-breadth escapes and I still cherish one bullet which did not hit me as I looked out of the captain’s office to see how the fray was going. We reached Harrison’s Landing in safety, but the Webster was disabled for further use as a transport. After waiting orders and being thrown into great excitement by reports that we were to go to Richmond for our released prisoners, the boat is totally taken as head-quarters of the medical purveyor.
11 Following a brief respite after her service in Virginia, Hall made her way with others to the Antietam battlefield, where thousands of wounded required care. She packed light. “We did not emulate Gen. [Ulysses] Grant, who was said to carry only a cigar and his tooth-brush,” she remembered, “but our personal baggage was contained in a valise of the size of a knapsack.” At Turner’s Gap on the National Pike, near Boonsboro, Maryland, Hall and her party stayed at a small hotel for the night. (The hotel, the Old South Mountain Inn, still stands and is now a popular restaurant.) The next day, some in the group walked the fields where the armies had clashed September 14 at South Mountain, a prelude to a much more severe battle three days later near the banks of Antietam Creek. Months later, Hall recalled visiting the South Mountain battlefield with an ambulance full of Union wounded. The soldiers—some on crutches, others missing an
arm—stumbled on the rocky terrain and pointed out sites on the battlefield. As they walked along the edge of the mountain, Hall saw a harrowing scene, which she recounted in The Republican: “[A] foot touched a snow-white skull half covered by the pitying leaves; in the very center of it, a tiny hole, but large enough to have destroyed the life—all that was left of somebody’s boy, for it was so small and delicate, the surgeon said it was not more than 18 years old, if that—all that was left of a rebel or Yankee boy! Who could tell whether he was climbing or defending the height? Where was the home that mourned him, knowing of him only that he was ‘missing?’” At Antietam, Hall initially cared for wounded at makeshift hospitals at the Susan Hoffman, Stephen Grove, and Otho J. Smith farms. (In October 1862, Grove’s beautiful brick house served as the backdrop for Alexander Gardner’s famous image of President Lincoln, who posed with McClellan and other Army of the Potomac brass.) Unknowingly, Hall provided aid and comfort to a Confederate soldier at the Grove farm, but the encounter left her only momentarily flustered. After that experience, she would often write letters home for the wounded on both sides as part of her nursing care.
The Hoffman farm was given over to hospital services; every barn, wagon-house, shed, stable, strawstack and porch was filled with the suffering ones. Everywhere the surgeons and attendants were busy. I worked with Mrs. Lee (of Philadelphia) whose chief business was making and distributing soup until the approach of night bade me [to] decide the question of an abiding place. Mrs. Lee wished to show me hospitality, but when I saw her accommodation I excused her want of cordiality. Her bed was made in the smoke-house on an inclined plane about three feet wide, and already shared with a lady helper!
“We all had our tale of hair-breadth escapes and I still cherish one bullet which did not hit me as I looked out of the captain’s office to see how the fray was going.” maria hall on being under fire while aboard the hospital ship daniel webster
I was advised to go to Sharpsburg, but again failing to find my chief, I was located for the night at a farm-house called Mt. Airy [also known as Stephen Grove farm], where I was assured the hospitality of the ladies of the family. These ladies, I presume, learning of my being a Union nurse, did not deign to meet me, but I was cared for by an old
HARPER’S WEEKLY
drummer boy, but he resented the idea, and declared that he “carried a musket till—till—it—got so heavy.” He was taken to the Cooper shop, and recovered after a very serious illness.
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Maria Hall was on board the hospital ship Daniel Webster when it came under Confederate fire while steaming up the James River to Harrison’s Landing, Virginia— a scene (above) that was later depicted in Harper’s Weekly.
negro woman, and two rebel surgeons very kindly vacated a room for my use. This farm-house proved to be the head-quarters for the wounded prisoners in our hands, in charge of Dr. [John] Rauch, Dr. [Edward] Vollum, medical inspector, also having his head-quarters here. And here I am invited to stay and work. Dr. Rauch assures me that I shall find enough Union soldiers, as the parlor and hall of the large house are full of Yankees. Deciding it the wisest course to remain, the doctor dispatches a note informing Mrs. Harris of my whereabouts, and I address myself to the business of doing what I can for our boys in the house, mentally resolute against giving aid or comfort to his enemy. I entered the parlor to find the floor like a huge bed full of soldiers lying on their blankets with a little straw beneath, knapsacks for pillows, and not much room to spare. No chance had been found for time to write home, and as they were as comfortably cared for in other respects as possible, I at once attended to the home letters and messages. I sat on the floor to write from the dictation of those who could not use a pencil, or to take addresses and particulars
for those who said, “Oh, you know what to write!” Going thus in order around the room, I found myself listening to a young Vermont boy who was wounded in the foot, and preferred writing for himself. He described at length and with much enthusiasm his experiences of battle, but as I listened to his words I watched the sad face on an older man lying next to him. Turning to him at length, I said, “Would you like to write home, or shall I do it for you?” The look of pain deepened, as he shook his head, saying, “I can’t write home.” “Are you then so badly wounded?” He laid back with his left hand the sheet, showing the right shoulder badly shattered. Again I offered to write, but he shook his head. “Surely,” I urged, “there must be a dear mother or a wife or sweetheart who is longing to know of your welfare?” “Yes,” he said, “my old mother would like to hear from me, but my home is too far off,” and turning away his face, he covered his eyes that I should not see the tears. Still unsuspicious, I urged that Uncle Sam would send letters to any distance for his boys. 61 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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I wrote a great many of them. Under the charge of Dr. Rauch were from 1000 to 2000 prisoners, about 600 at this point and the remainders at other hospitals. I remained here perhaps one week, finding a duty “next my hand” to minister to their necessities. They needed care enough; they were dirty, worn out with their marches, suffering terribly from their wounds, and added to all this, defeated, and in the hands of the enemy. Some of them sullenly accepted our care, almost rebelling against it, when I retained my strong Union sentiments. Others were glad to be under the old flag once more. Many were totally ignorant of the meaning of the war, declaring that they had to enlist to save their homes from the Yankees who were
Maria Hall sits at the bedside of a soldier wounded at the Battle of Antietam in one of the tents at Smoketown Hospital. “Her selfsacrifice is worthy of something more than newspaper notice,” recalled one of the wounded about Hall. “Such noble women as she strips the battle-field of half its terrors.”
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EDWARD G. MINER LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER MEDICAL CENTER, N.Y.
“Ah, but not for me, my home is on the other side!” Not till then did it dawn on me that I was actually sympathizing with a rebel! Just an instant I wavered, and then the good impulse triumphed, and I assured him that a flag of truce would protect even his letter. Ascertaining from Dr. Rauch that this was the fact, I obtained his home address and at once wrote to his mother. He was a lieutenant in a South Carolina regiment, a man of intelligence and always most grateful for any attention or comfort. He never pretended to any loyalty to the old flag, but avoided any discussion of the question, at least in my presence. Letters of one page and unsealed were sent under flag of truce through the lines, and after this experience
EDWARD G. MINER LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER MEDICAL CENTER, N.Y.
coming to desolate their land. One North Carolina man who had an arm amputated by our surgeon declared himself “mightilly skeered when that doctor put him on the table to cut off his arm.” He expected to be “most eaten up alive if the Yankees got him;” but he found out that the doctor was just the best man in the world, and he was surprised every day at the kindness he received. One year later the brother of this man marched through Maryland to Gettysburg. Asking after me, he found a friend of mine in the neighborhood, and sent me a message of gratitude for the kindness shown his brother whom he reported as having died. Another, speaking of “the difference between North and South,” put the whole matter in a nutshell. Said he, “When you ‘uns gets a chance, every one of you ‘uns gets a newspaper, and they all reads it; but when we ‘uns gets a newspaper, we ‘uns has to hunt up somebody to read it, and the rest sets around and listens.” One Sunday morning, Rev. Dr. [James] Karfoot, president of St. James college (since of Trinity college, and later the beloved bishop of Pittsburg), came to hold service at the head-quarters of the 5th army corps—Gen. Fitz-John Porter’s, adjacent to the hospital. He came first with the officers on their inspection of the hospital, and I hoped to follow and join in attending the service. But in a wagon-house nearby lay 12 sufferers whom I had taken as my work for the morning, and if the service for them seemed less divine than that going up from the multitude in the field nearby, it was surely no less merciful. My requisition for changes of clothing and bed-linen for my dozen rebels was filled as it best could be from barrels under the Sanitary Commission tent. The pillows I made by filling pillow-cases with straw and sewing up the ends. But, the poor fellows were washed and combed and cleansed; new straw was put under the blankets of those who could be moved, and all were fed with nourishing food. It was not for long that one North Carolina boy enjoyed the refreshing change, for that night he died. But his last hours were comforted by the promise that his sorrowing mother at home should have his Testament, a lock of his hair, and should know that in the land where he was a prisoner he was cared for with kindly hands. One man to whom I had ministered was seized with hemorrhage in the night. The attendant in the barn begged permission to call me in to help him, but he said no! He would die rather than have any more help from a Union woman and in the morning I heard the pitiful tale of how he had bled to death refusing help. While distributing writing paper one day a boy asked for a sheet of it, saying, “I can write to my mother who is Illinois.” “Oh,” said I, “you are a little rebel then?”
“Oh, no, don’t call me so,” and there followed a story of himself and a school-master with him who were compelled to enlist, and at the battle of Antietam gladly surrendered. They begged for something to take the place of the gray uniform, and to that end I gave them clean shirts and second-hand pantaloons. The young surgeons thank me every evening for what I have done for the “rebels,” and some of them are profuse in gratitude, thinking I am an angel because I give them clean clothes and improve the quality of the rations.
11 Eventually, Hall was assigned to Smoketown Hospital, about a mile from the famous Dunker Church. Soldiers who could not be moved elsewhere because of the severity of their wounds were cared for at the tent hospital, located in a grove of trees in the hamlet of Smoketown. “The dead appear sickening,” a surgeon who toiled at the hospital wrote, “but they suffer no more. But the poor wounded, mutilated soldiers that yet have life and sensation make a most horrid picture.” “Miss Hall,” as Maria became known to soldiers, served at Smoketown until it closed in May 1863. A soldier praised her work there. “Her self-sacrifice is worthy of something more than newspaper notice,” recalled Sergeant Thomas Grenan of the 78th New York, hospitalized at Smoketown for four months with a gunshot wound to his lower jaw. “Such noble women as she strips the battle-field of half its terrors.”
On the morning of my transfer to the new scene of labor, we found Surgeon B. A. Vanderkieft directing the placing of tents, flies, etc. for the “ladies aid.” He was spoken of by the regimental surgeons as “the little dutch doctor who made soup for the boys when they had nothing to eat and nobody else knew what to do.” We learned that his genius was not confined to making soup, but that he was most excellent in every department of hospital administration. A native of Holland, well educated in the medical profession, having seen military service in Europe, he had come to our country to offer himself and his skill to the Union army. His first appointment was that of regimental surgeon with the Burnside expedition to North Carolina. His admirable fitness for hospital organization had brought him to the front at this time, and he had been selected for the charge of what might here continue a winter hospital. And all his energies were instantly required, for the sick and wounded were rapidly brought and the attendants demanded places for them faster than accommodations could be provided. Long rows of tents were pitched on either side of the road on the wooded slopes ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76 63 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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BOOKS & AUTHORS
The Best Civil War Books of 2017 it’s time again for our annual roundup of the year’s best Civil
War titles. As usual, we’ve enlisted the help of a handful of Civil War historians and enthusiasts, avid readers all, and asked them to pick their two favorite books published in 2017. We also gave them a chance to name an additional title or two that they’re looking forward to, books that either were released this year or are coming out in print soon. 65 WINTER 2017 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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B&A A. Wilson Greene I suppose that every contributor to this enjoyable exercise brings a healthy dose of personal bias to identifying 2017’s best books of Civil War history. I freely admit such prejudice in selecting the fifth and final volume of Gordon Rhea’s masterful chronicle of the Overland Campaign as the year’s premier literary contribution to our field. On to Petersburg: Grant and Lee, June 4–15, 1864 (Louisiana State University Press) carries the story of the Ulysses S. Grant–Robert E. Lee confrontation in May and June 1864 to its conclusion on the eastern outskirts of Petersburg. Rhea brings to this effort all of the attributes that have distinguished his previous studies of military operations from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor: extensive and original research in untapped sources; clear and compelling prose; and thoughtful analysis to complement a narrative history of the actions taken by all the armies in blue and gray during the fortnight that marked Grant’s movement to and across the James River. Rhea is the first historian to unravel the complex maneuvers that brought the Union army to the gates of Petersburg in early June. His insightful description of these logistics will stand for generations as the last word on this aspect of the war. As with his earlier studies, Rhea’s On to Petersburg strikes just the right balance to appeal to both specialists deeply interested in the subject and those educated readers merely seeking well-crafted nonfiction writing. My Top Pick
3 honorable mention Historians have badly neglected the Trans-Mississippi theater of the Civil War. To be sure, excellent monographs exist on aspects of that far-flung region—such as the major battles in Missouri and Arkansas during the war’s first year. But until Thomas Cutrer’s outstanding Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861–1865 (Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press), no scholar has attempted to consider the TransMississippi comprehensively. Readers will not only learn about the many underappreciated campaigns that marked the war in the West, but they will benefit from Cutrer’s masterful analysis of the role played by these military actions in the greater context of the war. Everyone interested in tackling a study of any portion of the Civil War west of the Mississippi must start with a careful reading of Cutrer’s brilliant new book. 3 looking forward to Judith Giesberg’s Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality (University of North Carolina Press) is at the top of my to-read list. (For the record, when I was a teenager, I snuck Playboy magazines from my father’s desk drawer strictly to read the articles.) I’m also looking forward to the release of Civil War Places (University of Georgia Press) in early 2018. Editors Gary W. Gallagher and J. Matthew Gallman have assembled several dozen historians to write essays about their favorite Civil War places, accompanied by original photographs. This volume will com-
plement their previous compilation, Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War (University of Georgia Press). A. WILSON GREENE RECENTLY RETIRED FROM A 43YEAR CAREER IN PUBLIC HISTORY. THE FIRST OF HIS THREE VOLUMES ON THE PETERSBURG CAMPAIGN WILL BE PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS IN JUNE 2018.
Lorien Foote I love Jonathan W. White’s Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press) because it is about a daily human experience, dreaming. It takes readers into the very personal experiences of Civil War-era Americans while also showing what dreams can tell us about some important scholarly questions regarding the Civil War. We learn what soldiers and their wives dreamed about and how they shared those dreams with each other. We learn about marriage and about how soldiers coped with the stresses of battle. And we learn about the prophetic dreams that Americans of all races believed in. White likes to debunk My Top Pick
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“ [Rhea] strikes just the right balance to appeal to both specialists deeply interested in the subject and those educated readers merely seeking well-crafted non-fiction writing.” A. WILSON GREENE ON GORDON RHEA’S ON TO PETERSBURG: GRANT AND LEE, JUNE 4–15, 1864
historical myths that scholars have perpetrated, and the final chapter sets us all straight about Abraham Lincoln’s dreams. 3 honorable mention Though it was released at the end of 2016, Matthew Harper’s The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press) deserves mention. In a list of all the scholarly literature on AfricanAmerican history and culture, there is no book quite like this. Harper explores how African Americans conceived of their place in God’s plan for history and how their eschatology shaped their political writings and actions in the age of emancipation. It’s a fascinating book that altered how I think about emancipation and black political activity in the second half of the 19th century.
forward to Mark Neely’s Lincoln and the Democrats: The Politics of Opposition in the Civil War (Cambridge University Press) is one I want to read.
3 looking
derlands, 1861–1867 (University of Oklahoma Press). Like many scholars, I don’t know as much about this region as I should and am intrigued by the author’s approach of “interconnected civil wars.” From presentations I’ve seen on Susannah J. Ural’s research for Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit (Louisiana State University Press), it will be an exemplary example of how to write military history that is connected to social and cultural history. Finally, I’ve been excited about Andrew Lang’s In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America (Louisiana State University Press) since I talked to Lang while he was writing his dissertation at Rice University years ago. He has a new approach, and I believe a vital one, to understanding Reconstruction. All of Neely’s books make me think, even when I don’t agree with him, so I like to check out whatever he writes. There are several others as well, including Andrew E. Masich’s Civil War in the Southwest Bor-
LORIEN FOOTE IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND DIRECTOR OF GRADUATE STUDIES AT TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF THREE BOOKS ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR, INCLUDING THE YANKEE PLAGUE: ESCAPED UNION PRISONERS AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE CONFEDERACY (UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, 2016).
The Top-Selling Civil War Titles of 2017 The books pictured here are the 10 bestselling Civil War titles published in 2017. They are ranked in order of copies sold through mid-October. BASED ON SALES DATA PROVIDED BY NPD BOOKSCAN
1
2
Lincoln’s Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac
Gettysburg Rebels: Five Native Sons Who Came Home to Fight as Confederate Soldiers
By Stephen W. Sears
By Tom McMillan
(HOUGHTON MIFFLIN)
(REGNERY HISTORY)
$38
$29.99
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B&A Gerald J. Prokopowicz Steven E. Sodergren’s The Army of the Potomac in the Overland & Petersburg Campaigns: Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare, 1864–1865 (Louisiana State University Press) accomplishes the rare feat of uncovering something substantially new about a major Civil War military campaign. As the centennial of World War I stirs up images of the horrors of trench warfare, Sodergren’s research leads him to the remarkable conclusion that for Union soldiers, life in the trenches of Petersburg actually came as a welcome improvement over their even more brutal experiences during the Overland Campaign. Other historians including Gordon Rhea, Richard Sommers, and Hampton Newsome have written brilliantly about individual battles during this period, but Sodergren is the first to focus on the ebb and flow of the Army of the Potomac’s morale over the entire 11 months from the Wilderness to Appomattox. Looking at courtmartial records, letters, and diaries, he My Top Pick
finds that the army came closer to collapse in the summer of 1864 than commonly recognized. Even more surprising, he argues that it was the onset of trench warfare that provided sufficient struc-
ture and safety for men to recover their discipline and demonstrate their resilience, even while living in constant discomfort and frequent danger. It’s a book that invites rethinking about the relative
3
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5
6
Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War
On to Petersburg: Grant and Lee, June 4–15, 1864
Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861–1865
By Gordon C. Rhea
By Paul Starobin
(LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS)
(PUBLICAFFAIRS)
$45
$27
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By Thomas W. Cutrer
“Double Canister at Ten Yards”: The Federal Artillery and the Repulse of Pickett’s Charge, July 3, 1863
(UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS)
By David L. Shultz
$40
(SAVAS BEATIE)
$13.95
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“ Sodergren is the first to focus on the ebb and flow of the Army of the Potomac’s morale over the entire 11 months from the Wilderness to Appomattox.” GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ ON STEVEN E. SODERGREN’S THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC IN THE OVERLAND & PETERSBURG CAMPAIGNS
cluding volume of Gordon Rhea’s masterful history of the Overland Campaign. If true to form, it will once again provide just the right level of detail to drive the narrative and support the author’s analysis, without getting lost in the weeds of tactical minutia. I’m also looking forward to the release of Charles W. Calhoun’s The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (University Press of Kansas), a long-awaited entry in the “American Presidency” series that promises to overturn the conventional view of Grant as president.
horrors of mobile and positional warfare, with applications to other conflicts from World War I to the 21st century. 3 honorable mention Two books that pushed the boundaries of Civil War scholarship deserve equal mention here. The first is Judith Giesberg’s Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality. Editor Bennett Cerf supposedly once said the ideal topic for a sure-fire bestseller would be “Lincoln’s doctor’s dog”; Giesberg has updated that by combining the Civil War, soldiers, and sex. More important, her approach is much more sophisticated and nuanced than that of Thomas P. Lowry, author of the only previous book on the topic. The second book is Jonathan W. White’s Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil War. With tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of books written about the Civil War, none until now has focused on the eight (or often fewer) hours when soldiers and civilians slept. White’s examination of their accounts of dreams reminds us
7 Meade and Lee After Gettysburg: The Forgotten Final Stage of the Gettysburg Campaign
GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY. HE IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON A BOOK ABOUT ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN PUBLIC MEMORY.
Andrew Wagenhoffer both of cultural differences and human similarities between their lives and ours. 3looking forward to On to Petersburg:
Grant and Lee, June 4–15, 1864 is the con-
8
By Jeffrey Hunt
All the Fighting They Want: The Atlanta Campaign from Peachtree Creek to the City’s Surrender
(SAVAS BEATIE)
By Stephen Davis
$29.95
(SAVAS BEATIE)
$14.95
In the Civil War historiography, the Desert Southwest regional literature is fairly well developed, although still heavily weighted toward the 1861–1862 New Mexico Campaign. With its unique expansion of the My Top Pick
9 Determined to Stand and Fight: The Battle of Monocacy, July 9, 1864
10 Alabama and the Civil War: A History & Guide By Robert C. Jones
By Ryan T. Quint
(THE HISTORY PRESS)
(SAVAS BEATIE)
$21.99
$14.95
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B&A physical and ethnic geography of the region, Andrew Masich’s Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 is the first truly all-inclusive treatment of the Civil War years in the Southwest. Seeing the war there as distinctly different from the North vs. South Civil War that existed elsewhere on the continent, Masich successfully argues that the conflict in the Southwest is better understood as a series of interrelated “civil wars” fought among and between numerous indigenous groups, U.S. Hispanos, Mexicans, and Anglo-Americans. Historical borderlands, with their physical and figurative barriers as well as their domestic and transnational lines of demarcation, are popular topics among today’s scholars, and Masich’s book is an original contribution to that growing field. Masich’s deep research into international archival resources enriches his work considerably. He succeeds magnificently in establishing the American Civil War period as a critical moment of social, political, and economic transformation in the Southwest. As Masich demonstrates, while pockets of resistance would continue to exist for years to come, U.S. hegemony over the inhabitants of Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas was firmly rooted by 1867. 3 honorable mention John H. Matsui’s The First Republican Army: The Army of Virginia and the Radicalization of the Civil War (University of Virginia Press) is the first scholarly study of the shortlived and hard-luck Union Army of Virginia. It would have proved useful even if it had ended there, but the study blossoms into grander significance with its deft analysis of that army’s high command and its bold claims about the political activism of the men in its ranks. While he may have overreached in his general conclusions, Matsui’s characterization of the Army of Virginia as a uniquely Republican instrument that profoundly reshaped the conduct of the war in the East from limited conflict and conservative war aims toward hard war and emancipation nevertheless exhibits
considerable resonance with the reader. Matsui is a scholar on the rise. 3 looking forward to Serious Civil War students have long yearned for a modern book-length study of Civil War logistics. The fact that the ever-reliable Earl Hess is tackling this topic with Civil
War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation (Louisiana State University Press) only heightens the anticipation. I’m also eager to read Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott’s edited volume, Confederate Generals in the Western Theater: Essays on America’s Civil War, Volume 4 (University of Tennessee Press), the final
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Abraham Lincoln Book Shop Inc. ccluding adapting to life in earthworks, bbut he also considers largely unexplored ttopics such as soldier responses to the work of northern charitable organizaw ttions. Chapters focused on how soldiers ttransitioned from the continuous fighting during the Overland Campaign to in periods of inactivity during the Petersp bburg Campaign are particularly interestiing. The research behind this book is eextensive, and it is beautifully written.
installment in an excellent biographical essay series, one that’s provided fresh perspectives on well-known generals as well as in-depth examinations of the lives and Civil War careers of those generals not likely to ever receive their own full-length biographies. I’ll be sad to see the series end.
3 honorable mention Jonathan W. White’s Midnight in America: Darkness, W SSleep, and Dreams During the Civil War is a reminder that there remain plenty of ttopics in the field of Civil War history tto research and write about. White exaamines the meaning that Union and Confederate soldiers, slaves, and even C ssuch notable figures as Jefferson Davis aand Abraham Lincoln attached to their dreams and how these meanings evolved over the course of the war. For some, sleep was a welcome refuge from the struggles of war; for others, the Civil War years, as the author notes, “might reasonably be considered the most sleepless period in American history.” 3 looking
ANDREW WAGENHOFFER IS THE CREATOR AND EDITOR OF THE NONFICTION BOOK REVIEW JOURNAL CIVIL WAR BOOKS AND AUTHORS (CWBA. BLOGSPOT.COM).
Kevin M. Levin This year I have to give the top prize to Steven E. Sodergren’s The Army of the Potomac in the Overland & Petersburg Campaigns. The book, which functions very much like a companion volume to J. Tracy Powers’ 1998 Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox (University of North Carolina Press), explores the Army of the Potomac during the war’s final year. Sodergren looks at how Union soldiers dealt with the obvious challenges related to the changing nature of the war, inMy Top Pick
forward to I am very
much looking forward to reading Susannah Ural’s forthcoming book, Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit. For those interested in Civil War memory, Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts’ Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Press), scheduled for a spring 2018 release, should be on their reading list. KEVIN M. LEVIN IS A WRITER AND HISTORIAN BASED IN BOSTON. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF REMEMBERING THE BATTLE OF THE CRATER: WAR AS MURDER (UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY, 2012) AND EDITOR OF INTERPRETING THE CIVIL WAR AT MUSEUMS AND HISTORIC SITES (ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD, 2017). HIS LATEST WORK, SEARCHING FOR BLACK CONFEDERATES: THE CIVIL WAR’S MOST PERSISTENT MYTH, WILL BE PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS. YOU CAN FIND HIM ONLINE AT CIVIL WAR MEMORY (CWMEMORY.COM).
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MARK GRIMSLEY, A HISTORY PROFESSOR AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, IS THE AUTHOR OF SEVERAL BOOKS, INCLUDING AND KEEP MOVING ON: THE VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN, MAY-JUNE 1864 (2002) AND THE HARD HAND OF WAR: UNION MILITARY POLICY TOWARD SOUTHERN CIVILIANS, 1861-1865 (1995). HE HAS ALSO WRITTEN MORE THAN 50 ARTICLES AND ESSAYS.
Renee Savits
woman had three Civil War diaries. Others lugged hundreds of documents. Savits had to enlist volunteers to keep up with the demand. “It was eight- to 10-hour days of constant scanning,” she said. “It was wonderful, but exhausting.” Ultimately Savits and Davis scanned more than 37,000 documents, most in very good condition. “Paper back in the 1860s was actually a lot stronger,” Savits explained. Still, she was amazed that families had kept the documents so well preserved through the generations—and so well guarded. “That was the most exciting part,” she said. “Who has ever seen these before? Nobody. They are not in libraries or historical societies. They are in people’s homes. It opened up a flood of new information that had never been out before.” During the first two years of the project, Savits and Davis were so busy traveling and scanning that they didn’t have time to figure out what they’d collected. Once travel ceased, Savits was given the task of cataloging everything, which took years. There were diaries, daguerreotypes, tintypes, voting and payroll reports, soldiers’ sketches, and thousands of letters. There was also sheet music, reunion memorabilia, cartoons scribbled on the back of envelopes, and broadsheets posted after battles asking for help of one form or another. As Savits put it: “There was all kinds of paper material, and there was just so much of it.” But there were standouts. Like the diary of Frederick Watkins, a soldier in a New York artillery unit who was shot
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
and occurred several days before the March to the Sea began. But in memory Sherman’s army left the city engulfed in flames—a memory that Gone With the Wind indelibly stamped upon the American imagination. In recent years this image was reinforced by the well-known historical artist Mort Künstler, who sought to illustrate the phrase “War is hell.” He hoped to show Sherman’s army departing from a blazing Atlanta. Naturally the depiction had to include Sherman. But as a stickler for accuracy, Künstler was frustrated by the fact that Atlanta had already burned by the time Sherman had left the city. Then he made a happy discovery: On the night of the fire, Sherman was “in the street, directing troops in extinguishing the fires that threatened private homes.”7 And that is what, strictly speaking, the resulting print portrays: Sherman trying to save the city from the flames. But the print looks exactly as if Sherman is leading his army from an inferno. And that is exactly the point. Extensive pillaging—though not the destruction of towns or people—characterized the March to the Sea, and this victimization of Georgia’s population is one of the strongest public memories of the campaign. But after the war Sherman insisted that the Confederate people were not victims at all, but Rebels who got what was coming to them. In 1884 he wrote that he began the war harboring “the old West Point notion that pillaging was a capital crime.” But the effort to protect private property was costly in manpower, wholly unappreciated, and simply
LIVING HISTORY
CONTINUED FROM P. 28
JENNIFER GLEASON
AMERICAN ILIAD
CONTINUED FROM P. 26
made it easier for southern men to leave their homes and families to fight against the Union. So gradually Sherman and many others, “kind-hearted, fair, just and manly ... ceased to quarrel with our own men about such minor things, and went in to subdue the enemy, leaving minor depredations to be charged up to the account of the rebels who had forced us into the war, and who deserved all they got and more.”8 This strongly echoed a number of statements Sherman made during the war, particularly in a long letter to a subordinate charged with the administration of the civilian population while Sherman conducted the Atlanta Campaign. Although his overall instructions emphasized a moderate policy toward civilians, the letter’s most memorable passage promised retribution. “A people who will persist in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many people with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.”9 Sherman thus argued that the war’s destructiveness, mythically embodied in the March to the Sea, was an act of justice. But his dictum, “War is hell,” and his insistence to Atlanta’s mayor that “you might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war,” portrayed war as a hurricane-like force of nature. This combined formulation carried the destructiveness beyond human agency and into the realm of the divine. In mythic terms, the March to the Sea was not just ruthless warfare. It was the hammer of God.
men writing home,” explained Savits, so the fact that the wife’s letters survived was unusual. But it was the everydayness captured within them that gripped her. “Most of his letters to her were things about the farm at home, ‘Sell this horse but don’t sell that horse,’” she said. “It was day-to-day life, which was just so interesting.” Savits’ excitement about the project’s findings has settled into something more like relief. “No matter what happens to the originals, we’ll always have these digital images,” she said. High-resolution scans of all 37,000 documents are now online and accessible to anyone. Researchers and historians are already working to draw out meaning from them. Descendants have found new information about their ancestors. Savits still fields calls from people wanting to talk to the families that shared these treasures, hoping they might have more documents and more stories. Savits knows there is more out there. The Civil War 150 Legacy Project
may be complete, but it has transformed her perspective on just how much history remains concealed, and how much we need to find it. “This project sort of changed my life up,” she admitted. After years of having history come to her, she had stumbled into becoming its seeker. Savits is still with the Library of Virginia, focusing on state records. She loves her job. But she wonders what would happen if the library did another push to find more Civil War history. Or if they launched a campaign to unearth privately held documents from the 18th century. “I would have loved to keep doing it,” she said. Now, when she drives around Virginia, past old houses, she can’t help but wonder what’s behind their doors. “Who knows what might still be out there?” To see the collection, renamed the James I. Robertson Jr. Civil War Sesquicentennial Legacy Collection, visit virginiamemory.com/collections/cw150. JENNY JOHNSTON IS A FREELANCE WRITER AND EDITOR BASED IN SAN FRANCISCO.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
JENNIFER GLEASON
three times at Gettysburg. That diary, tucked in his breast pocket, stopped a bullet that otherwise would have killed him. “He continued keeping the diary afterward and just wrote around the bullet hole,” Savits marveled. Or the heartfelt letter from a Confederate soldier mortally wounded at the same battle. “He writes a letter to his mom as he’s dying. ‘I’m shot, I’m going to die, I love you. Please don’t worry about me,’” said Savits. “It was heartbreaking.” While the Civil War 150 Legacy Project focused on Virginia, it drew out tucked-away history from across the country and beyond. “We got documents from Texas, Canada, New York, Florida, and everywhere in between,” said Savits, because present-day Virginians’ ancestors hailed from all these places. “We weren’t going to say no to any of it.” One of her favorite finds was a collection of 400-plus letters written between a soldier in the 20th Connecticut Infantry and his wife. “Seventy-five percent of the letters we see are from the
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Now MONUMENTS
CONTINUED FROM P. 41
Castle is a tourist site, and the Olympic Stadium that the Nazis used as a propaganda theater during the 1936 Olympics has survived to play host to the World Cup—all without much more notice than the occasional historical footnote.21 Image-smashing conveys a sense of purpose and purity; the problem is that it does not age well and cannot be reversed.
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1 None of our guideposts will yield obvious or easy answers. That is not the point. Instead, the guideposts serve as a public historian’s version of the Hippocratic Oath: Primum non nocere (above all, do no harm). The past is neither full of criminals and oppressors, nor of righteous sisters and valiant brothers, and as David Rieff warned in In Praise of Forgetting, it may be that “a decent measure of communal forgetting” about historical offenses “is actually the sine qua non of a peaceful society.”22 Richmond musician Tim Barry, who called for the removal of the Lee statue on Monument Avenue, complained that Richmond was full of “wellmanicured gravesites for white people” but “The truth “nothing for poor black is in the details, people forced into slavand the details ery.” That statement would come as a great are going to surprise to the Irish imbe messy.” migrant laborers murdered and buried at Duffy’s Cut along the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1832, or the 439 German immigrants who perished in transit to New York when the steamship Austria burned and sank in 1858, or those buried in unmarked pits on the Gettysburg battlefield.23 Suffering, loss, robbery, and the indignity of neglect are not allocated on the basis of race, language, ethnicity, or religion, nor are all intentions that fall short of perfection automatically monstrous. Individual human beings cannot live on revisiting trauma; neither can human societies. The truth is in the details, and the details are going to be messy. We stand on the shoulders of great Americans, but also on the bones of humble ones, and of all races and nationalities. These questions are not a panacea, but they will allow us to discuss the real historical issues, not the emotional and political ones, in a sober and directed fashion, in a world where rewriting the past is of much less worth than writing a better present. And maybe they can allow Robert E. Lee—and us—to enjoy some peace. ALLEN C. GUELZO IS THE HENRY R. LUCE PROFESSOR OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA AT GETTYSBURG COLLEGE, AND CURRENTLY THE WM. L. GARWOOD VISITING PROFESSOR IN THE JAMES MADISON PROGRAM IN AMERICAN IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. JOHN M. RUDY IS A PUBLIC HISTORIAN AND ADJUNCT PROFESSOR AT GETTYSBURG COLLEGE.
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MARIA HALL
CONTINUED FROM P. 63
and crowning the tops of the low hills. The beds were of straw covered with army blankets, except in a few cases cots had been furnished for compound fractures, or surgical cases demanding accessories that could not be placed on the ground. The “ladies aid” establishment was located at a point easily accessible from all parts of the camp, consisting of a small tent for the accommodation of stores in boxes, and two large flies. The small tent was the parlor, the boxes became sofas, and barrels were shortly transformed into chairs.... [A company of] Massachusetts volunteers were on guard and police duty, and to them we shall always be indebted for their cheerful and intelligent assistance every day during their stay. Henry Wright was detailed as chief cook, and a most excellent one he was. Sergt. Grary, George Osgood, Mr. Spinney, “Fatty Bates the old doctor,” who sang sweetly, are among the names I recall, and I am always glad to remember them.
The work here seemed to be for an indiscriminate multitude, but day by day the crowd became more familiar, and the cases of special need or interest more prominent. One day it is a man whose stump is in a frightful condition by the neglect of an inexperienced or drunken surgeon. I was present at the dressing, and the poor fellow appeals to the lady. The case is brought before the surgeon in charge, and becomes the last grievance of that kind. Here it is a young fellow who sent for me to read and talk with him at twilight, his brief day drawing rapidly to its close. As I sit on the ground beside him, waiting for the bayonet candlestick to be prepared for lighting, I unconsciously sing softly to myself. Hearing it an Irishman with his arm amputated says, “Oh, lady, will ye sing to me? If ye do I’ll get to sleep, and it’s sleep that I’m after wanting—not an eye-full of it have I had since I was wounded.” A gently lullaby hymn was sung, and before the close of it the poor fellow has his two eyes full of sleep. The young soldier to whom I had read also “fell asleep” that night, but knew no waking here. Here and there and everywhere the men want pipes and tobacco. One fair, blue-
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eyed boy of 17 lay on a cot with I know not how much of a box for the treatment of a fractured thigh. I found his nurse, “Uncle Til,” one morning filling an old clay pipe, and exclaimed, “Why do you smoke among your patients?” “Oh, I’m filling it for the baby.”
11 While Hall’s remembrances ended with this anecdote, her wartime service did not stop with her time at Smoketown. After Gettysburg, in the summer of 1863, Hall was convinced by Dr. Vanderkieft to join him at the U.S. General Hospital in Annapolis, Maryland. She eventually was named superintendent of nurses at the hospital, where released Union prisoners of war came under her care. Responsible for more than 4,000 patients during one stretch, she worked there until midsummer 1865. After the Civil War, Hall moved to Connecticut, where she married and raised two daughters and a son in a large house in Unionville, near Hartford. Active in the Women’s Relief Corps, an organization formed to honor Civil War veterans, Hall frequently attended gatherings of old soldiers, who never forgot her extraordinary wartime service. At one such event less than a year before she died, Hall recalled men released from Andersonville and Libby Prison in Richmond, who looked more like skeletons than human beings. “My friends,” Hall said as she addressed veterans in Hartford on September 20, 1911, “I never received a silver medal for anything except the days when I was a little girl in school, for spelling.… You have your medals for all time and you have the medal of happiness, of seeing your country saved by your efforts, which is the best medal of all. I am so glad to look into your faces again.” Hall died in West Hartford, Connecticut, on July 20, 1912. She was 76. JOHN BANKS IS AUTHOR OF TWO BOOKS ON THE CIVIL WAR, CONNECTICUT YANKEES AT ANTIETAM (2013) AND HIDDEN HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT UNION SOLDIERS (2015), BOTH PUBLISHED BY THE HISTORY PRESS. HE ALSO BLOGS ABOUT THE CONFLICT AT JOHN-BANKS. BLOGSPOT.COM. HE WISHES TO THANK CLIFFORD T. ALDERMAN, A HISTORIAN FROM UNIONVILLE, CONNECTICUT, FOR HELPING TO RESEARCH THE STORY OF MARIA HALL.
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Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation (required by Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. The Civil War Monitor. 2. (ISSN: 2163-0682). 3. Filing date: 10/24/17. 4. Issue frequency: Quarterly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 4. 6. Annual subscription price: $23.95. 7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor. Publisher: Terry A. Johnston Jr., 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402, Editor: Terry A. Johnston Jr., 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402, Managing editor: n/a. 10. Owner: Bayshore History LLC, 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. 11. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None. 12. Tax status: Has not changed during preceding 12 months. 13. The Civil War Monitor. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: Fall 2017. 15. Extent and nature of circulation: A. Total number of copies printed (net press run). Average number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 41,600. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 40,000. B. Paid circulation. 1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,623. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 9,236. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. 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Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 15,933. C. Total print distribution (line 15f) + Paid electronic copies (line 16a). Average number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 16,695. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 16,579. D. Percent paid (both print & electronic copies) (16b divided by 16c x 100). Average number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 98.2%. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 96.1%. I certify that 50% of all my distributed copies (electronic and print) are paid above a nominal price: Yes. 17. Publication statement of ownership will be printed in the Winter 2017 issue of this publication. 18. Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Terry A. Johnston Jr., publisher. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. 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Notes
5
Sherman to Grant, October 9, 1864, OR, 39, pt. 3, 162.
6
Sherman to Grant, November 6, 1864, OR, vol. 39, pt. 3, 659–660.
7
Mort Künstler’s comments on “War Is Hell!”: mortkunstler.com/html/store-limited-editionprints.asp?action=view&ID=837&cat=158 (retrieved October 16, 2017).
8
Sherman to J.B. Fry, September 3, 1884, Letterbook, William T. Sherman Papers, Library of Congress.
9
Sherman to Roswell M. Sawyer, January 31, 1864, OR, vol. 32, pt. 2, 281.
SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
(Pages 26–27, 72) Mark Grimsley, “American Iliad: Sherman’s March to the Sea – Part 1,” The Civil War Monitor, vol. 7, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 73.
2
This estimated death toll is much higher than the long accepted figure of 620,000. It is based upon J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History, vol. 57, no. 4 (December 2011): 307–348. Hacker’s estimate has already won wide acceptance among Civil War historians. See, e.g., “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll,” The New York Times, April 3, 2012, p. D1.
3
4
The statement comes from an 1880 speech that Sherman made in Columbus, Ohio. It is not precise. Sherman actually said, “There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.” Nonetheless, when asked if he had ever literally uttered the words, “War is hell,” he replied that he had done so many times, before, during, and after the war. See John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (New York, 1993), 477. Sherman to John M. Calhoun, September 12, 1864, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, vol. 39, pt. 2, 418–419. (Hereafter cited as OR. All subsequent citations are to Series I.)
REL to Edward Lee Childe (January 16, 1868), in Lee Family Digital Archive, Jessie Ball duPont Library, Stratford Hall, Virginia; REL to Robert E. Lee Jr. (March 12, 1868), in Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee (New York, 1904), 306.
9 Bob Fredericks, “Army declines request to change Brooklyn streets named after Confederate generals,” New York Post, August 7, 2017. 10 Alex Horton, “Protesters in North Carolina topple Confederate statue following Charlottesville violence,” Washington Post, August 14, 2017. 11 Joseph Bottum, “The Joy of Destruction,” The Weekly Standard, September 25, 2017; Justin W. Moyer, “Memorial to ‘racist’ Francis Scott Key, who wrote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ vandalized in Maryland,” Washington Post, September 13, 2017; “Safe protests and uncomfortable conversations,” The Christian Science Monitor, August 22, 2017. 12 “Mitch Landrieu’s Speech on the Removal of Confederate Monuments in New Orleans,” The New York Times, May 23, 2017.
American Iliad 1
8
13 James Karst, “The leaning tower of Lee: statue of Confederate general was encircled in controversy in 1953,” New Orleans Business News, May 14, 2017.
Of Monuments and Men (Pages 30–41, 74) 1
2
3
“Baltimore Mayor Had Statues Removed in ‘Best Interest of My City,’” The New York Times, August 16, 2017; Michael Patrick Welch, “Removing Confederate monuments gets your Lamborghini burned to the ground,” The Guardian, October 22, 1016; “Richmond protesters surround Confederate statue on Monument Avenue,” WTVR.com, August 13, 2017. Marsalis, “Why New Orleans should take down Robert E. Lee’s statue,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 17, 2017. Jamil Smith, “Why would Charlottesville racists do so much to protect a Robert E. Lee statue?” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2017.
4 M. Ashby Jones, “Robert E. Lee Day” (May 21, 1924), in Proceedings of the 37th Annual Reunion of the Virginia Grand Camp Confederate Veterans, and of the 29th Reunion of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (Chattanooga, 1924), 63–64. 5 Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (New York, 2005), 36, 41, 53. 6 REL to J.W. Brockenbrough (January 23, 1866) and to the Washington College student body (March 30, 1869), Lee Family Digital Archive, Jessie Ball duPont Library, Stratford Hall, Virginia. 7
“It’s 2007: Time to tell the truth about Robert E. Lee,” Richmond Defender, January 13, 2007.
14 “Address by Leigh Robinson,” in “Dedication of the Virginia Memorial at Gettysburg, Friday, June 8, 1917,” Southern Historical Society Papers 42 (October 1917): 127–128. 15 “Address by His Excellency George Carter Stuart, Governor of Virginia,“ in “Dedication of the Virginia Memorial,” 90–91. 16 Melissa Eddy, “Statue of Marx, Funded by China, Will Stand in German City of His Birth,” The New York Times, March 13, 2017. 17 “Why is a D-Day memorial paying homage to Stalin?” Washington Post, June 28, 2010; “D-Day president Issues Statement on Stalin Bust,” WSET.com. 18 Finlo Rohrer, “When is it right to remove a statue?” BBC News Magazine, December 23, 2015. 19 Stephen Brockmann, Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital (Rochester, NY, 2006), 220. 20 George Hahn, “Austria to tear down house where Hitler was born,” Toronto Star (October 17, 2016). 21 Colin Philpott, Relics of the Reich: The Buildings the Nazis Left Behind (Barnsley, South Yorkshire, 2016), 15, 51, 88, 94. 22 David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New Haven, 2016), 57. 23 Abby Phillip, “Unearthing a deadly secret: Were 57 Irish workers murdered in 1832 Pennsylvania?” Washington Post, October 8, 2015.
Sent into Hell: a journey through the American Civil War, is a
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fact filled historical novel based on the service of William Morgan Faux with the storied 16th Iowa Infantry, from enlistment in 1862 to his release from Andersonville prison and return home in 1865. Morgan Faux was my great grandfather.
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A Goodbye Gift
While attending services at St. Paul’s Church in Richmond on Sunday, April 2, 1865, Confederate president Jefferson Davis received word that Confederate forces had begun evacuating Petersburg in the wake of a morning attack by Ulysses S. Grant’s army. Knowing that the fall of Richmond would soon follow, Davis abandoned the capital that night and boarded a train headed for Danville, Virginia. On May 10, Union forces would catch up with and capture the fleeing Davis in Georgia. Before he departed Richmond, Davis left behind a gift for Walter Grant, the young son of a family who lived near the Davises on 12th Street. “I was in St. Paul’s Church when Mr. Davis was called out on that memorable Sunday,” Grant would later recall. “After dinner when the older heads were engaged, I drifted down the gully, and when I returned to the house, was told that Mr. Davis had been to say goodbye and left something for me to remember him by.” That gift was the wood and brass, cannon-shaped desk ornament—including an inkstand, pen holder, and matchbox—shown here. Grant eventually donated the relic to the Museum of the Confederacy—now The American Civil War Museum—in Richmond.
THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM (ACWM.ORG)
pa r t i n g shot
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“Everyone interested in the origins of the American Civil War should read this book. Robinson deftly explains how proslavery Unionists in the border South enlisted to restore ‘the old Union as it was’ without foreseeing the subsequent enlargement of Union war aims to include emancipation.” —Daniel Crofts, author of Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery
“A wide-ranging and fascinating study. . . . Reminds us of the haunting effects war can (and does) have on its participants long after the fighting ends.” —Civil War Monitor
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“Concisely analyzes both the legal “A thoughtful reexamination of a man who has become, unfortunately underpinning of the evolving and unfairly, the South’s ‘chief whip- rules of war and how they were applied in the field.” ping boy’. . . . [A] sharp-eyed profile of the general’s dour personality and —Civil War Times snakebit career [that] will bring much-needed perspective to future studies of the Confederacy.” —The Wall Street Journal
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Best-selling books in one convenient Ebook. Visit www.uncpress.org and search for Omnibus.
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