The Angel of the Battlefield
P. 14
Rock of Chickamauga
P. 26
VOL. 9, NO. 3
LINCOLN DIDN’T FREE THE SLAVE S …AND OTHER
CIVIL WAR MYTHS… BUSTED Top historians debunk five of the conflict’s most enduring falsehoods
PLUS
Civil War Cinema in New Deal America
CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
FALL 2019
P. 60
+ $6.99
Contents DEPARTMENTS
VOLUME 9, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2019
FEATURES
Salvo
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
“The Real War Will Never Get in the Books” 30 Top historians debunk five of the Civil War’s most enduring myths. TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to Fredericksburg VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 The Angel of the Battlefield
With Gerald J. Prokopowicz, Gary W. Gallagher, Earl J. Hess, Brooks D. Simpson, and William Marvel
PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Transforming the Breakthrough at Petersburg FACES OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Teacher, Nurse, and “Strong, Gentle Girl”
FREDERICKSBURG: JIMELL GREENE; DARLEY: JEFF KRAUS COLLECTION (ANTIQUEPHOTOGRAPHICS.COM)
FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 On the March COST OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A Tragic Image Earns Big IN FOCUS A Tough Job
..........................
24
Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Rock of Chickamauga STEREOSCOPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 History as Imagination
Books & Authors THE B&A Q&A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 WITH KEVIN M. LEVIN
EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 A Big Loss
The Man with the Magic Pencil 48
PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Jack, the Four-Legged Soldier
A look at the Civil War artwork of illustrator F.O.C. Darley
In Every Issue
ON THE COVER: President Abraham Lincoln. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. Colorized by Mads Madsen of Colorized History.
Civil War Cinema in New Deal America 60 During the early decades of the 20th century, Hollywood filmmakers both shaped and reflected the popular understanding of the Confederacy, slavery, and Abraham Lincoln. By Nina Silber
1 FALL 2019
THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
EDITORIAL
VOLUME 9, NUMBER 3 / FALL 2019
Terry A. Johnston Jr. PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
IN THE WAKE OF THE June 2015 murder of nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by a white supremacist—and the subsequent (and successful) push for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse— I had a decision to make. It seemed obvious that the Monitor must cover the event and the backlash against Confederate symbols it almost instantly spurred. But whatever we did had to be thoughtful and judicious, its analysis firmly grounded in historical context—unlike so much of the reportage at the time. Who could take on that assignment? The answer was clear. I emailed Tony Horwitz. It wasn’t my first correspondence with Tony. In the late 1990s, after reading his book Confederates in the Attic—a fascinating and often laugh-out-loud funny account of his travels below the Mason–Dixon line to assess the complicated legacy of the Civil War in the modern-day South—I sent him a note expressing my deep appreciation of his keen insights into the nature of America’s enduring North–South divide (something I was navigating at the time as a Yankee who had recently moved to South Carolina). To my amazement, Tony, who undoubtedly received hundreds of similar messages from equally unfamiliar admirers, responded almost immediately—a pattern that he’d repeat without fail over the years—with an email that read like a message to an old friend. So when I emailed Tony in 2015, I wasn’t surprised to hear from him right away. Thankfully, he accepted the task, and we published his thoughts on the burgeoning controversy over the Confederate battle flag—which I still consult from time to time—in our Fall 2015 issue. Before long, Tony started research on another big book project—he was prolific in the post-Attic years, writing on a variety of subjects that included Captain James Cook and the abolitionist John Brown—this one about the famed American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who undertook a lengthy excursion through the South in the 1850s. Tony followed Olmsted’s path, and wrote, incisively as ever, about his experiences on the road in the resulting book, Spying on the South, published in May 2019. In my last email to Tony, I asked if he’d be interested in taking part in a Q&A about Spying on the South for the Monitor. Within hours, I had his response: If he could have a few weeks to work up answers, he’d be happy to do so. Four days later, Tony died unexpectedly. He was just 60 years old. Tony will be sorely missed by many, including those of us who came to admire—and even depend on—his clever and witty takes on the complex legacy of the Civil War. I will never forget his generosity, his professionalism, or his exceptional ability to tie the lessons of history to the present times.
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The Civil War Monitor (ISSN 2163-0682/print, ISSN 21630690/online) is published quarterly by Bayshore History, LLC, 8008 Bayshore Drive, Margate, NJ 08402. Periodicals postage paid at Atlantic City, NJ, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 292336, Kettering, OH 45429. Subscriptions: $23.95 for one year (4 issues) in the U.S., $33.95 per year in Canada, and $43.95 per year for overseas subscriptions (all U.S. funds). Views expressed by individual authors, unless expressly stated, do not necessarily represent those of The Civil War Monitor or Bayshore History, LLC. Letters to the editor become the property of The Civil War Monitor, and may be edited. The Civil War Monitor cannot assume responsibility for unsolicited materials. The contents of the magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of the publisher. Copyright ©2019 by Bayshore History, LLC ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
2 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. FALL 2019
TONYHORWITZ.COM
A Big Loss
SPECIAL PRE-PUBLICATION OFFER! Coming to newsstands in October 2019 …
Grant vs Lee A SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE FROM THE EDITORS OF THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR Grant vs Lee is a special issue focused on the head-to-head clashes between the Civil War’s top commanders, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. From interesting facts, figures, and photos of the two generals to experts’ opinions about these Union and Confederate leaders whose performances helped change the course of the war, Grant vs Lee is a true collectible for anyone with an interest in America’s greatest conflict.
Limited print run! Pre-order your copy today for only $7.95 — a savings of 20% off the newsstand price—plus free shipping!
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D I S PAT C H E S
SUMMER ISSUE FEEDBACK
tions role, and completely ignore the existence of the Army of the Potomac’s sophisticated intelligence staff, known as the Bureau of Military Information, against which Stuart had to contend in the competition for providing the best intelligence to their commanding officers.
I’ve been reading the Monitor for several years and I think your Summer 2019 issue might be my favorite one yet. Even though I’m mainly interested in the military history of the conflict—its battles and leaders—I was deeply impressed by the cover article by Amy Murrell Taylor on contraband camps and the escaped slaves who inhabited them [“The Refugees,” Vol. 9, No. 2]. I had previously been only vaguely familiar with the camps, so being able to learn more about their inner workings—and the continued hardships and uncertainty that faced slaves who escaped bondage during the war—was a big eyeopener. I’ll definitely be picking up a copy of Taylor’s book on the subject to learn even more.
Tom Ryan BETHANY BEACH, DELAWARE
***
Joseph Collins VIA EMAIL
*** I read with interest the article about J.E.B. Stuart in the Summer 2019 issue of the Monitor [“Dossier: J.E.B. Stuart,” Vol. 9, No. 2] and agree with Eric Wittenberg’s comment about what he most admires about Stuart: “His extraordinary gift for performing the traditional roles of cavalry: scouting, screening, and reconnaissance.” Several years ago, I wrote articles for The Washington Times about Stuart’s intelligence operations role in support of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. As I noted, Stuart’s responsibilities included five basic functions: information collection, counterintelligence operations, maintaining security, 4 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
FALL 2019
deception and disinformation, and field communications. Regarding the question for your historian contributors about when Stuart was at his peak (they voted for Gettysburg as his worst performance), my view is that Gettysburg actually represented Stuart’s best performance of the Civil War. I have just completed a twopart series of articles on Stuart’s involvement in the Gettysburg Campaign in which I argue that Stuart performed as well as could be expected under difficult and confusing circumstances during the march northward toward Pennsylvania, and effectively guided and protected Lee’s army during the harrowing retreat following the Confederate defeat. Unfortunately, existing biographies about Stuart do not emphasize his intelligence opera-
Letters to the editor: email us at letters@ civilwarmonitor. com or write to The Civil War Monitor, P.O. Box 428, Longport, NJ 08403.
I’ve been waiting for someone to do a story about General William S. Rosecrans [“Old Rosy Reconsidered,” Vol. 9, No. 2], who was typical of a lot of Civil War generals—fighting well as he rose through the ranks, and then losing his nerve in a critical battle. It’s interesting to read about both sides of his character. Now I’m reading the summer issue’s other articles on slave refugees and the Baltimore riot. In 40 years of reading about the war, I had never come across that one illustration [on pages 60–61] that captures the intensity of the Baltimore riot in April 1861. The visuals and the writing of all the stories are implemented with a lot of care. This issue brings to life aspects of the Civil War that we didn’t know about as well as we thought. Thanks to The Civil War Monitor’s staff for continuing to publish interesting material that sheds new light on the war. Alan Sewell VIA EMAIL
FROM A NEW SUBSCRIBER
All my life the Civil War has been present. Within walking distance
of my house in Birmingham, Alabama, is the Irondale Furnace, where steel was produced for the Confederacy. Locals called it “the cannonball factory.” I went to college in Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy, and to graduate school in Kentucky, near Forts Donelson and Henry. Then I lived in Atlanta, on the very ground where the Battle of Peachtree Creek was fought. I also have ancestors who served in the Confederate army. I used to be really interested in Civil War history but drifted away from it. I ran into an ad about your magazine and decided to subscribe. It was the name, Monitor (the name of several news organizations and of the famed ironclad of the Union navy), that hooked me. I like the fresh perspective of the magazine, which goes beyond rehashing the same stories and dives into the darker aspects of the conflict, as well as its causes and consequences. Robert Caldwell VIA EMAIL
ANOTHER SPECIAL?
Do you have another special issue in the works? I am a charter subscriber to the Monitor and enjoy the magazine very much. Thank you for publishing it. Bob Conklin VIA EMAIL
Ed. Thanks much for your longtime
support, Bob. Yes, we will be publishing another special issue this fall. Titled Grant vs Lee, it will focus on the lives and head-to-head clashes of the two celebrated commanders. See page 3 to learn more about the issue— and to pre-order a copy at a discounted rate.
The N-SSA is America¶s oldest and largest Civil War shooting sports organization. Competitors shoot original or approved reproduction muskets, carbines and revolvers at breakable targets in a timed match. Some units even compete with cannons and mortars. Each team represents a Civil War regiment or unit and wear the uniform they wore over 150 years ago. Dedicated to preserving our history, period firearms competition and the camaraderie of team sports with friends and family, the N-SSA may be just right for you.
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LECTURE
“Mystery and Myths of Lee’s Lost Orders”
Agenda
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 9 A.M. – 3 P.M. MONOCACY NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD VISITOR CENTER FREDERICK, MARYLAND
Did you know General Robert E. Lee’s army camped on the Monocacy battlefield before it was a battlefield? Park rangers Tracy Evans and Matt Borders talk about this, as well as the infamous “Lost Order” of the 1862 Maryland Campaign, which resulted in the Battles of South Mountain and Antietam.
Your Fall 2019 Guide to Civil War Events
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS.GOV/MONO or 301-662-3515.
OCTOBER CONTEST
N-SSA 140th National Competition FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4 – SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6 FORT SHENANDOAH WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: N-SSA.ORG or SPARTAN70@SBCGLOBAL.NET.
LECTURE
he committed suicide in 1884, an event reportedly brought on by his service on Monitor. Reserving a seat is suggested as spaces are limited.
“Samuel Dana Greene, Hero of the USS Monitor”
FREE WITH $1 MUSEUM ADMISSION; FOR MORE INFORMATION: MARINERSMUSEUM.ORG or 757596-2222.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19
EXCURSION
FOUR OAKS, NORTH CAROLINA
One Vast Adventure— Frederick at War
Bring the family and celebrate fall at Bentonville Battlefield. Activities include wagon rides, Civil War-era carnival games, a corn shucking contest, townball (19thcentury baseball), and more. Interpreters will demonstrate common 19th-century domestic skills, such as open-hearth cooking, sewing, and spinning. Concessions will be available on site.
SEP TEMBER
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2:30 – 3:30 P.M. USS MONITOR CENTER, THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA
Join historian John Quarstein as he discusses Samuel Dana Greene, an 1859 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who was serving aboard USS Hartford when the Civil War erupted. Greene volunteered for service on USS Monitor, where he was named executive officer and commanded the turret during the Battle of Hampton Roads. Greene served as Monitor’s commander for one day but was later replaced; he served in the navy until
Share Your Event
Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
6 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 11:30 A.M. – 5 P.M. CITY HALL OF FREDERICK FREDERICK, MARYLAND
History comes to life all around you during this one-of-a-kind event held throughout downtown Frederick. Play games, scour the city for clues, and solve puzzles, all while chatting with costumed characters throughout the immersive world of Civil War-era Frederick. Tickets include food and drink samples, exclusive specials from participating stores, and access to the entertainment experience and after-party. Note: Tickets can be purchased online in advance; the event’s starting point is outside City Hall. $32; $16 FOR KIDS 12 AND UNDER; FOR MORE INFORMATION: CIVILWARMED.ORG/EVENT/ ONEVASTADVENTURE or 301-695-1864.
LIVING HISTORY
Fall Festival at Bentonville Battlefield BENTONVILLE BATTLEFIELD STATE HISTORIC SITE
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: HISTORICSITES. NC.GOV/ALL-SITES/BENTONVILLE-BATTLEFIELD or 910-594-0789.
Fall Festival at Bentonville Battlefield
ERICKA HOFFMANN (N-SSA); DONNY TAYLOR
A recent North-South Skirmish Association competition
Come and see units of the North-South Skirmish Association compete in live-fire matches with original or authentic reproduction Civil War period muskets, carbines, breech-loading rifles, revolvers, mortars, and cannon. There will be a large sutler area and food service.
Battle of Franklin illumination
TOUR
Voices from the Shadows
$2.50 PER PERSON; FOR MORE INFORMATION: FLORIDASTATEPARKS.ORG/ EVENTS/FIRST-WEEKEND-UNION-GARRISON-9 or 904-277-7274.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 – SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26, 6:30 P.M. AND 8:30 P.M.
CELEBRATION
PAMPLIN HISTORICAL PARK
History’s Home for the Holidays
PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA
Costumed guides portraying “agents of death” will lead participants by candlelight on a spine-chilling tour through the historic park and Breakthrough Battlefield. At each stop, guests will encounter civilians and soldiers who worked, fought, and died at the historic site or in the local area. These and other ghouls will recount their stories and share some of the more macabre and spirit-filled folklore from the past. Flashlights are recommended for all tour participants. Note that space is limited and reservations are required. $12 ADULTS; $6 FOR CHILDREN 6–12; FOR MORE INFORMATION: PAMPLINPARK.ORG/EVENT/VOICES-FROM-THESHADOWS-4/ or 804-861-2408.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 – SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15 SURRATT HOUSE MUSEUM CLINTON, MARYLAND
‘Tis the season to enjoy a Christmas of yesteryear. See seasonal decorations appropriate to the Civil War era in Southern Maryland, combined with displays of antique toys, ornaments, and greeting cards, which provide a charming picture of our ancestors’ celebrations of the holiday. Visitors will also learn of the dramatic history of the Surratt family and the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. Note: Weekday events run from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., weekend events from noon to 4 p.m.
NOVEMBER
$5 ADULTS; $4 SENIORS; $2 STUDENTS; CHILDREN UNDER 5 ARE FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: SURRATTMUSEUM.ORG or 301-868-1121.
LIVING HISTORY
LIVING HISTORY
Civil War Fort Garrison
155th Anniversary of the Battle of Franklin
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 9 A.M. – NOON FORT CLINCH STATE PARK
VisitSpotsy.com
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 5–7 P.M. CARNTON AND CARTER HOUSE
1861-1865
If you are a lineal or collateral male descendant of someone in the Confederate States of America Officer Corps or someone who was an elected or appointed government official in the Confederate States of America, consider joining the
FRANKLIN, TENNESSEE
SHELLEY MAYS
FERNANDINA BEACH, FLORIDA
Travel back in time to 1864, when the Union army’s New York Engineers were in the process of building one of the newest bastions in the federal fort system. Reenactors and first-person interpreters bring history to life with stories of growing up in 1860s America. Learn about day-to-day life, from cooking and cleaning to how news traveled.
The Battle of Franklin Trust will display luminaries at dusk to honor the casualties inflicted during the Battle of Franklin on its 155th anniversary. Visitors are invited to walk throughout the luminaries and tour Carnton and the Carter House, structures around which the fierce fighting swirled. FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: BOFT.ORG or 615-905-0687.
For information on our activities and eligibility requirements, contact us at:
(757) 656-MOSB Or via mail at: MOSB Membership Inquiry P.O. Box 18901 Raleigh, NC 27619-8901
7
www.militaryorderofthestarsandbars.org FALL 2019
THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
Salvo Facts, Figures & Items of Interest
In this wartime lithograph by P.S. Duval & Son, Union troops advance toward heavily fortified Confederate positions on Marye’s Heights during the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862. The lopsided Confederate victory stunned the North, where confidence in the war effort and the Lincoln administration plummeted. FOR MORE ON FREDERICKSBURG, TURN THE PAGE. 3
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IN THIS SECTION TRAVELS 10 A VISIT TO FREDERICKSBURG VOICES 14 THE ANGEL OF THE BATTLEFIELD PRESERVATION 16 TRANSFORMING THE BREAKTHROUGH AT PETERSBURG FACES OF WAR 18 TEACHER, NURSE, AND “STRONG, GENTLE GIRL” FIGURES 20 ON THE MARCH COST OF WAR 22 A TRAGIC IMAGE EARNS BIG
ANNE S.K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION
IN FOCUS 24 A TOUGH JOB
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
S A LV O
T R AV E L S
Fredericksburg VIRGINIA
IN NOVEMBER 1862, Abraham Lincoln— anxious to see Union forces act more aggressively (and successfully) against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia—removed George B. McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac and replaced him with Ambrose Burnside, who soon devised a new offensive against Richmond. Burnside’s plan, which called for a speedy crossing of the Rappahannock River and southward movement through Fredericksburg before Lee suspected his strategy, quickly went awry. Delays in the arrival of supplies slowed the construction of pontoon bridges; by the time Union troops began to build the bridges on December 11, Lee had surmised Burnside’s intentions and had his troops take up defensive positions in and around the city, in particular on the ridge west of town known as Marye’s Heights. On December 13, Burnside’s army crossed the river and attacked the Confederates with disastrous results. By the time the battle was over, the Army of the Potomac had suffered more than twice as many casualties as the Army of Northern Virginia, making the fight one of the more lopsided of the entire war. Interested in visiting Fredericksburg? We’ve enlisted two experts on the area— Scott Walker and John Cummings—to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic city.
White Oak Civil War Museum
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIMELL GREENE
Gari Melchers Home and Studio
1
CAN’T MISS
Visitors to Fredericksburg should see The James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library (908 Charles St.; 540-654-1043), which is well managed and curated by the University of Mary Washington. Among our country’s early leaders, James Monroe sometimes gets overlooked. Yet he held more elected or appointed local, state, and national offices than any other U.S. president, and he was president at the time of the Missouri Compromise, which arguably represented the opening act of the Civil War. He practiced law on this site in the 1780s, and the museum highlights his early years and overall career. SW The White Oak Civil War Museum (985 White Oak Rd.; 540-371-4234) maintains one of the most fascinating collections, public or private, of Civil War artifacts in the country. Located about seven miles east of downtown, the museum displays items obtained by local relic hunter D.P. Newton from the surrounding countryside of Stafford County, where the Union army wintered after the Battle of Fredericksburg and which it occupied again in the spring of 1864 for use as a logistical hub. JC
Central Rappahannock Regional Library
2
BEST KEPT SECRET
Fredericksburg has a fantastic but sometimes hidden art scene. The streets of the downtown historic district are packed with studios, galleries, and co-ops. (To learn about arts and cultural events there throughout the year, visit Rapp-Arts.org.) Just across the Rappahannock River is the Gari Melchers Home and Studio (224 Washington St., Falmouth; 540-654-1015). Melchers was an American-born, European-trained Impressionist who left New York for Virginia in the early 20th century. It’s a fascinating place to see Melchers’ breathtaking art. SW Doing research at the Fredericksburg branch of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library (1201 Caroline St.; 540-372-1144) is always rewarding. Its Virginiana Room has rotating exhibits and a treasure trove of reference material on over 400 years of Fredericksburg’s history. JC
11
The James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library FALL 2019
THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
4
BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
Chatham Manor (120 Chatham Ln.; 540-693-3200), which overlooks the city from across the river, was built in the 18th century, occupied by Union forces (who referred to it as the “Lacy House”) in 1862, and used as a hospital (where Clara Barton helped tend to the wounded) after the Battle of Fredericksburg. Although it was neglected and falling down for years after the war, Chatham was restored in the 20th century and now serves as the headquarters for the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. While not located on the main battlefield, Chatham is a site that shouldn’t be missed. Its gardens are spectacular, particularly in the spring. SW
Fredericksburg Area Museum
3
BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
There’s much more to Fredericksburg than its link to the Civil War. The city’s been around since the 17th century, so there’s a lot of colonial interest here as well. The Fredericksburg Area Museum (907 Princess Anne St.; 540-371-3037) has activities for kids, as does George Washington’s Ferry Farm (268 Kings Hwy.; 540-3700732), where the first president lived from ages six to 21. For those with kids who love to get wet, try kayaking, tubing, waterboarding, or canoeing on the Rappahannock River. Check with River Rock Outfitter (915 Sophia St.; 540-372-8708) or the Virginia Outdoor Center (3219 Fall Hill Ave.; 540-371-5085) for options. SW Without a doubt, take the kids to Carl’s Frozen Custard (2200 Princess Anne St.; carlsfrozencustard.com). Since 1947, Carl’s has been the local treat that everyone talks about, and it makes a perfect surprise stop during a long day of touring. JC
George Washington’s Ferry Farm
Of all locations in the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park (1013 Lafayette Blvd.; 540-693-3200), the heights west of town and the Sunken Road at its base have to be the most poignant. Atop the hill is the Fredericksburg National Cemetery, where more than 15,000 Union soldiers are interred. (Many of them were killed on the area’s four major battlefields.) Behind the infamous Stone Wall along the Sunken Road, Confederate defenders held back the Union attacks of December 13, 1862. The next spring, the same ground was thinly defended during the Chancellorsville Campaign and was overrun by Union general John Sedgwick’s VI Corps. JC Fredericksburg National Cemetery
Carl’s Frozen Custard
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIMELL GREENE
Mason-Dixon Cafe
Kenmore Inn
Sammy T’s
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BEST EATS
My favorite breakfast spot is the Mason-Dixon Cafe (2100 Princess Anne St.; 540-371-1950). The shrimp and grits are absolutely the best I’ve ever had. Owned and run by second-generation restaurant folks, this simple-looking place turns out delicious food. The Sunken Well Tavern (720 Littlepage St.; 540-370-0911), located next to the Marye’s Heights area of the battlefield park, is a good lunch option. You can get burgers, salads, wraps, or wonderful soups and specials—all at reasonable prices. For dinner, try one of the amazing eateries on the 300–400 block of William Street downtown. My favorite is Ristorante Renato (422 William St.; 540-371-8228), where the fettuccini alfredo is so rich that my doctor allows me to eat it only three times a year! SW The Sunday brunch at Sammy T’s (801 Caroline St.; 540371-2008) is worth waiting for its 11:30 a.m. opening. Located in a historic building with large windows that are perfect for people watching, you’ll enjoy the atmosphere and simple, good food. For lunch or dinner, I have three recommendations. Sedona Tap House (591 William St.; 540-940-2294) has an excellent menu with a cosmopolitan flair—as well as hundreds of craft beers. Castiglia’s Italian Restaurant (324 William St.; 540-373-6650) offers oldstyle favorites made like no others in a brick pizza oven. And The Sunken Well Tavern is a small gem with gastronomic delights, an adequate bar, and live music on Sunday evenings. JC
BEST SLEEP
The downtown historic district, where the street fighting during the Battle of Fredericksburg took place, is home to the Courtyard by Marriott Fredericksburg Historic District (620 Caroline St.; 540-3738300) as well as two inns: The Richard Johnston Inn (711 Caroline St.; 540-899-7606), which still shows visible battle scars, and the Kenmore Inn (1200 Princess Anne St.; 540-3717622). SW My clients often stay at The Richard Johnston Inn or the Courtyard by Marriott. Richard Johnston is a period-style B&B, while the Marriott is a first-class stay with all the modern amenities. Either way, you are within easy walking distance of shopping, restaurants, and historic attractions. JC 7
The best battle book would be National Park Service historian Francis Augustin O’Reilly’s The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock (2003), which, unlike earlier respectable volumes, covers the entire battle instead of emphasizing the Stone Wall–Marye’s Heights–Sunken Road area, where most of the battle’s highly publicized fighting took place. SW
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS Scott Walker, a resident of Fredericksburg for nearly 50 years, is owner of Hallowed Ground Tours (hallowed groundtours. com).
John Cummings, the author of three books on the Fredericksburg region, provides battlefield guide services and research assistance to visitors (spotsylva niacw.blogspot. com).
BEST BOOK
The Richard Johnston Inn
O’Reilly’s The Fredericksburg Campaign is perhaps the best singlevolume treatment of the December 1862 battle. Additionally, Chancellorsville’s Forgotten Front (2013) by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White fills a longstanding void regarding the 1863 battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church. JC
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VOICES
The Angel of the Battlefield “In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield.” —Union surgeon James Dunn, referring to Clara Barton (below) tending to the wounded during the Battle of Antietam, in a letter to his wife
“A ball has passed between my body and the right arm which supported him, cutting through his chest from shoulder to shoulder. There was no more to be done for him and I left him to his rest. I have never mended that hole in my sleeve. I wonder if a soldier ever does mend a bullet hole in his coat?” —Barton, on an incident that occurred while she was treating a wounded soldier during the Battle of Antietam
“I don’t know how long it has been since my ear has been free from the roll of a drum. It is the music I sleep by, and I love it.”
“This conflict is one thing I’ve been waiting for. I’m well and strong and young—young enough to go to the front. If I can’t be a soldier I’ll help soldiers.” —Barton, in an early war letter to a friend
“There lay by hundreds, wounded and bleeding, in the wet salt sands about my little tent, and God in his goodness gave me speed to my feet and strength to my arms through the hours of that fearful night that I might nourish the fainting, slake thirst of the dying, and to staunch the life stream as it ebbes away.” —Barton, remembering the Battle of Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, in a postwar letter to friends
SOURCES: ELIZABETH BROWN PRYOR, CLARA BARTON, PROFESSIONAL ANGEL (1988); NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, CLARA BARTON HANDBOOK (1981); CHRONICLES FROM THE DIARY OF A WAR PRISONER IN ANDERSONVILLE (1904); NEIL KAGAN, ED., EYEWITNESS TO THE CIVIL WAR (2006).
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
—Barton, in a letter to her father, March 19, 1861
COME VISIT THE HIDDEN GEMS near the nation’s Capital
Call us or visit us online for a free Visitor’s Guide!
TourStaffordVA.com
540-658-8681
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P R E S E R VA T I O N
Transforming the Breakthrough at Petersburg P R E S I D E N T , A M E R I C A N B AT T L E F I E L D T R U S T
THE THIRD BATTLE OF PETERSBURG, known as the Fall of Petersburg or the Breakthrough at Petersburg, was fought on April 2, 1865. That fateful day—the end of the 292-day campaign for Richmond and Petersburg—would be critical in clinching the Civil War. Following the Union victory at Five Forks on April 1, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant and Major General George Meade determined to make a frontal assault on the Confederate defenses at Petersburg with four corps of infantry. In the predawn hours of April 2, the men of Major General Horatio Wright’s VI Corps crept out of their trenches and charged across no man’s land, punching a hole in the Confederate line. Elements of the II and IX Corps made similar assaults elsewhere along the siege line. A handful of Confederates at Fort Gregg staved off the Union XXIV Corps’ assault, preventing the Federals from entering the city that night. But the Federals’ main objective— breaking the Confederate line—had been achieved. The Union army now had access to the Appomattox River and was free to cross the next day to threaten General Robert E. Lee’s communications on the north side of the river. Lee would inform Jefferson Davis that he could “hold his position no longer,” and that Petersburg and Richmond must be evacuated. Grant had finally achieved one of the major military objectives of the war—the capture of Petersburg, which led directly to the loss of the Confederate capital at Richmond on April 3. Several years ago, the American Battlefield Trust again saw conflict at the
Between 2012 and 2015, the American Battlefield Trust worked to restore 427 acres of land at the Breakthrough at Petersburg—including the ground shown here—to their wartime appearance.
Breakthrough. The location was littered with modern structures, and woodlands obscured the vistas, severely altering the landscape from its wartime appearance. What became our largest restoration effort to date began in 2012 and spanned two and a half years, witnessed the return of 427 acres to their wartime appearance, and uncovered long-hidden historic resources. It required timbering 152 acres and removing a seven-acre concrete hog farm, a railroad bed, two barns, a machine shop, a residence, and countless wells, water troughs, and electrical installations. Now, visitors are greeted by sightlines witnessed by Civil War forces, enabling an understanding of the action that occurred so many years ago. Last year, The Volgenau Foundation—established in 1994 to foster conservation of natural resources and the education of children—provided the
Trust with a remarkable $1 million grant that will help facilitate the donation of these 427 Trust-held acres at the Breakthrough to the National Park Service. This historic acreage is located entirely within the recently enlarged boundary of Petersburg National Battlefield, which was expanded by more than 7,000 acres through the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. The Trust is forever grateful to The Volgenau Foundation for its assistance in permanently protecting the Petersburg Breakthrough for the education and enjoyment of all Americans, now and in the future. The Trust is currently working to save additional land adjacent to the preserved and restored Petersburg Breakthrough site. Learn more about this critical land preservation opportunity at: battlefields. org/give/save-battlefields/save-226-acres4-civil-war-battlefields.
3 THE AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST (BATTLEFIELDS.ORG), A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO BATTLEFIELD PRESERVATION, IS COMPOSED OF TWO DIVISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR TRUST AND THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR TRUST.
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ROBERT JAMES
BY O. JAMES LIGHTHIZER
Ships,History
AND
THE
Historic Homes & Earthworks Battle of the Ironclads
888.493.7386 newport-news.org
Great Outdoors USS Monitor Center at The Mariners’ Museum and Park
Minutes to Williamsburg, A short drive to Virginia Beach.
Visit Camp Wildcat Civil War Battlefield! Located on the old “Wilderness Road” Laurel County, KY A beautiful and well-preserved Civil War Battlefield. ,W has many original trenches that are still intact!
Don’t Miss the Reenactment! October 18-20, 2019 London-Laurel County Tourist Commission 1-800-348-0095 www.laurelkytourism.com
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FAC E S O F WA R
Teacher, Nurse, and “Strong, Gentle Girl”
A pall of gloom and uncertainty darkened Washington, D.C., in early May 1864 as accounts of horrific fighting in Virginia trickled into the city. As citizens across the capital braced for the arrival of mass casualties, one newcomer, Georgiana “Georgie” Willets, wrangled a pass to go south and aid the wounded closer to the scene of battle. The daughter of a Rochester, New York, railroad conductor and his wife, Willets had arrived in Washington the previous November to teach freed slaves at the city’s Camp Barker refugee camp. When Ulysses S. Grant launched the Overland Campaign six months later, Willets followed. Thus began a half-year stint as a nurse in Virginia. She worked her way from caring for soldiers in a Fredericksburg church to matron in charge of the hospital for the Army of the Potomac’s Second Division, II Corps, at City Point. Willets left the army in December 1864 due to poor health. Her friend, Cornelia Hancock, praised her efforts: “The character of her service was of high grade. It was not spasmodic or sensational but steady and persistent.” Another female acquaintance wrote that “Georgie was not merely handsome. She was grand, queenly…. [N]one was more pure, more noble, than that of this beautiful, refined, strong, gentle girl.” Willets returned to teaching exslaves and, in 1869, married James M. Stradling, a fellow teacher who had served in the 1st New Jersey Cavalry. She died in 1912 at age 71, survived by her husband and two daughters.
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3 MILITARY IMAGES (MILITARYIMAGESMAGAZINE.COM) IS A MAGAZINE DEDICATED TO SHOWCASING AND PRESERVING PHOTOS OF CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
BY RONALD S. CODDINGTON P U B L I S H E R , M I L I TA RY I M AG E S
The final book by the late, beloved, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Tony Horwitz
“This book will be read, remembered, and treasured.” —Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize– winning historian and author of The Soul of America
“Timely. . . . A valuable work that combines biography, history and travelogue.” —John M. Barry, The New York Times Book Review
“He was the rare historian—the only historian I can think of—equally at home in the archive and in an interview, a dedicated scholar, a devoted journalist.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker “In Horwitz’s writing, past and present collide and march together on almost every page, prying our minds open with the absurdity, hilarity and humanity we encounter. . . . His astonishing works of history and journalism about the nation and the world in our time will stand as the creation of one of our great writers.”
—David Blight, The Washington Post
“I’ve been waiting for Tony Horwitz to write another big on-the-road book that crisscrosses the American cultural divide . . . Spying on the South is every bit as enlightening and alive with detail, absurdity and colorful characters as Confederates in the Attic was.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR
T O N Y H O R W I T Z .C O M
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FIGURES
On the March
90
110
Steps per minute when marching in common time
Steps per minute when marching in quick time
165
180
Steps per minute when marching in double-quick time
Steps per minute “under urgent circumstances” in doublequick time
15 minutes Maximum time suggested for marching at double-quick time in one stretch
In his memoir of the conflict, former infantryman Philip Stephenson wrote about a universal truth of Civil War soldiering: “the long stretches of marching” he and other troops routinely endured. “We walked any way we pleased or any where along the road, if muddy…. Caked with dust and perspiration, our clothes a solid brown, panting and dripping, we shuffled along,” he recalled of one particular trek. “Men dropped into sleep walking along, and if the column halted suddenly, as it often did, rank after rank would butt up against its forward fellow.” While a marching army might lose cohesion, suffer stragglers, and step “at will,” both the Union and Confederacy had formal regulations for armies on the march—from the quickness of pace to the arrangement of a column of troops. Highlighted here are figures associated with some of the more fundamental of these rules.
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28″
3 miles
Length of each step in common time and quick time
Estimated distance covered in one hour at common time in ideal conditions
33″
1.5–2 miles
Length of each step in double-quick time
Estimated distance covered in one hour at common time in less-than-ideal conditions
24″
16″
Space allotted for the width of an individual soldier in line
Space between lines of soldiers (ranks) in a column
12″
22 paces
Space allotted for the depth of an individual soldier in a column
Space between individual units in a column
16 miles
5 miles
Estimated amount of roadway that 40,000 soldiers, with artillery and wagon trains, occupied on the march
Estimated distance covered in one hour at double-quick time in ideal conditions
24–32 miles Estimated amount of roadway this same force would occupy after 10 miles of marching due to elongation, or “tailing out”
10 minutes Length of hourly halts while the Army of the Potomac was on the march, as directed by General George B. McClellan in 1862
30–60 minutes
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Length of the Army of the Potomac’s midday halt
SOURCES: JOHN D. BILLINGS, HARDTACK AND COFFEE (1887); SILAS CASEY, INFANTRY TACTICS, VOL . 1 (1862); EARL J. HESS, CIVIL WAR INFANTRY TACTICS (2015); NATHANIEL CHEAIRS HUGHES JR., ED., THE CIVIL WAR MEMOIR OF PHILIP DAINGERFIELD STEPHENSON, D.D. (1995); UNITED STATES WAR DEPARTMENT, THE WAR OF THE REBELLION: A COMPILATION OF THE OFFICIAL RECORDS 129 VOLS. (1880-1901), SERIES I, VOL . 11, PART 3; ARTHUR L . WAGNER, ORGANIZATION AND TACTICS (1895).
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C O S T O F WA R
$9,600
A TRAGIC IMAGE EARNS BIG
CONDITION: The image, which is set in a paper mat, is in good condition. The frame (not pictured) has some damage. DETAILS: On the night of April 24, 1865— just over two weeks after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House—the steamship Sultana left port at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and headed north. Around 2,100 people—including some 1,400 released Union prisoners of war making the first leg of the voyage home—crowded onboard the wooden vessel, which had a legal capacity of 376. Two days later, a photographer took this image of Sultana, its decks swollen with passengers. At 2 a.m. the next day, when Sultana was seven miles north of Memphis, one of the vessel’s boilers exploded, with two others quickly following suit. An enormous blast
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of steam tore through the ship, destroying the pilothouse. The smokestacks soon tumbled over, starting a fire that engulfed Sultana. Those not killed by the explosion or the flames jumped into the icy waters of the Mississippi, where many of them died from hypothermia or drowned. Only slightly over 700 of Sultana’s passengers survived. QUOTABLE: Sultana survivor Chester Berry, a 20-year-old soldier in the 20th Michigan Infantry who was headed home from Andersonville Prison, wrote of the scene as the ship exploded and began to sink: “[W]hen the terrific explosion took place … I was awakened from a sound sleep…. I sprang to the bow of the boat, and turning I looked back upon one of the most terrible scenes I ever beheld. The upper decks … were a complete wreck…. I went back to where I had lain and found my bunk mate … scalded to death, I then secured a piece
of cabin door casing, about three or four inches wide and about four feet long, then going back to the bow of the boat I came to the conclusion I did not want to take to the water just then, for it was literally black with human beings, many of whom were sinking and taking others with them. Being a good swimmer, and having board enough to save me, even if I were not, I concluded to wait till the rush was over.” Berry would die in 1926 at age 82. VALUE: $9,600 (price realized at Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati, Ohio, in June 2016). “This is a rare whole plate tintype of the Sultana,” noted Wes Cowan, founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions, at the time of the sale. “The vessel’s loss represented the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history, more costly than the sinking of the Titanic and producing almost the equivalent amount of casualties incurred at the Battle of Shiloh.”
COWAN’S AUCTIONS (COWANAUCTIONS.COM)
THE ARTIFACT: A tintype of the ill-fated steamship Sultana
Changing the narrative.
THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM
ACWM.ORG | 804.649.1861
Have you visited?
The Lincoln Memorial Shrine 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 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
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IN FOCUS
A Tough Job
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
Among the countless non-combat duties in the U.S. Army during the Civil War, straightening twisted railroad rails surely ranked among the most mindnumbing. The work was a construction project conjured up by Brigadier General Herman Haupt, the innovative engineer who was chief of the U.S. Military Railroads. Many rails that had seemingly been destroyed—by either Union or Confederate forces looking to disrupt enemy transportation capabilities— apparently could be straightened, as long as they had not been radically twisted into a spiral or corkscrew (like some of those pictured in this image). In his 1901 memoir of the war, Haupt described the lone worker in this photo as “straightening slight bends in a rail by use of [a] Jack-Screw.” The image was taken in Alexandria, Virginia, by Captain Andrew J. Russell, official photographer of the U.S. Military Railroads. Nothing is known about the anonymous laborer, who clearly has his work cut out for him. 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
BY BOB ZELLER
AMERICAN ILIAD
Rock of Chickamauga
IN THE AMERICAN ILIAD, THE CIVIL WAR’S CHIEF victors are well known: Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant and his partner in command, Major General William T. Sherman. Largely eclipsed by these two commanders is Major General George H. Thomas. Yet Thomas not only led one of the North’s main field armies, he was almost alone among Union generals in never losing a battle. If there is a third general with a claim to the highest place in the Union pantheon, many would argue that it belongs to Thomas. A taciturn Virginian who had been a major in the prewar U.S. Army, Thomas was 44 years old when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. Unlike most West Pointers who hailed from the South, he elected to remain loyal to the Union—a choice for which his siblings disowned him. (His brothers eventually reconciled with Thomas; his sisters never did.) Soon elevated to the rank of brigadier general, he achieved one of the North’s earliest victories at the Battle of Mill Springs in January 1862, which cracked the eastern flank of the Confederate defensive line in Kentucky. Thereafter he rose to command a corps, played a key role in several major battles, and in October 1863 was placed in command of the Army of the Cumberland. Under his leadership that army achieved its greatest success. His triumph at the Battle of Nashville in December 1864 was one of the few truly decisive victories of the entire conflict. His success at the Battle of Chattanooga in November 1863 was nearly as great. His troubled relationships with Grant and Sherman, however, frequently led them to damn him with faint praise, and that is perhaps the primary reason he is not especially well known today. Yet Thomas does occupy one prominent place in the mythology of the war: his performance on the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga, when he saved the Army of the Cumberland from likely destruction and earned a lasting nickname—“the Rock of Chickamauga.” Fought in mid-September 1863, Chickamauga was 26 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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the largest battle in the western theater and one of the bloodiest of the war. It came about in the aftermath of the almost bloodless capture of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a major rail center and the gateway into the Deep South. The seizure of the city owed to Major General William S. Rosecrans—“Old Rosy” to his men—who was then in command of the Army of the Cumberland. Rosecrans immediately continued to advance, moving south of Chattanooga into the northern fringe of Georgia. Alarmed by the loss of Chattanooga, the Confederate government heavily reinforced the Army of Tennessee, under General Braxton Bragg. Bragg began planning a counterattack, one that would pin Rosecrans against Lookout Mountain, a massive ridge that overlooked Chattanooga and ran north to south for many miles. Foiled in his initial attempts to ambush the Army of the Cumberland, which for a time was widely dispersed through two gaps in Lookout Mountain, Bragg finally brought Rosecrans to bay in a heavily wooded area only a few miles south of Chattanooga. On its eastern fringe lay Chickamauga Creek, which lent the battle its name. Major combat began on September 19. Bragg attacked, but although his force outnumbered the Army of the Cumberland, its attacks on the first day were uncoordinated. The Federals had little difficulty in fending off the assaults. When Bragg resumed the battle the next day it was much the same story, and the Army of the Cumberland gamely held its ground. Things went well for the Federals until a confusing order by Rosecrans opened a division-wide gap in the Union line. By unfortunate coincidence, the opening was created just as Confederate lieutenant general James Longstreet launched a heavy assault. His troops struck the Union line almost exactly at that opening and routed the northern army’s entire right wing. Recognizing that his only hope was to get the remnants of his army to Chattanooga, ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
GEORGE H. THOMAS AND THE ENDURING IMPACT OF A WELL EARNED SOBRIQUET BY MARK GRIMSLEY
Major General George H. Thomas, whose nickname “Rock of Chickamauga� was in recognition of his performance at the major battle fought in northwest Georgia in September 1863
STEREOSCOPE
History as Imagination
ANYONE WHO HAS SPENT CONSIDERABLE TIME in research libraries or logging onto digital archives knows what it feels like to come to the end of an evidentiary road. A promising file of letters reveals huge gaps in the writers’ correspondence. A tantalizing detail in a census record leads nowhere. A diary entry ends with a page torn out. Historians must make what they can of such incomplete evidence and try to reconstruct the past through its fragments. This is why, as the historian Eric Foner put it, “works of history are first and foremost acts of the imagination.”1 In the author’s note to her new novel, The Tubman Command, Elizabeth Cobbs acknowledges this fact. “Fiction,” she says, “lights the dark corners of evidence.”2 Cobbs, a professor of American history at Texas A&M University, began writing fiction in 2003. “I wanted to write something that would reach a more general audience,” she told me, “especially readers who didn’t normally go for academic nonfiction.” Her goal, she added, “was to pen something my mother would love.” In her novels, Cobbs uses her imagination and the “tools of history” to understand the lives of those who have shaped the past. Cobbs’ subject in this novel is Harriet Tubman, whom Americans know as the most recognizable conductor of the Underground Railroad. A runaway herself, Tubman risked her liberty by plunging back into the swamps and forests of the South to help ferry more than 100 enslaved people to freedom in the 1850s. The Tubman Command, however, focuses on her work as a Union spy in Port Royal and Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1863. That summer, Tubman formulated a plan to sail up the Combahee River, destroy several rice plantations along its banks, and liberate the enslaved 28 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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women and men laboring there. With a team of male scouts, she identified the locations where Confederates had sunk mines in the river and spread the word among the plantations so that women, men, and children would be ready to move once the Union boats appeared at the plantation docks. And she was on the boats during the attack, helping wherever she was needed. It was due to Tubman’s foresight, energy, and leadership that Union soldiers were able to free more than 750 men, women, and children during the Combahee River Raid. It was the largest liberation of enslaved people in American history. Historians have documented Tubman’s role as the mastermind of the raid, as well as her work as a baker, nurse, and advisor to newly freed people in Port Royal. Cobbs has, as she notes, “followed the record as closely as possible while fleshing out bare facts with plausible fictions” regarding Tubman and a host of other “characters”—who were, in fact, real people—in The Tubman Command.3 She includes quotations from historical documents as chapter epigraphs and inserts brief contextualizing sections in the text that reflect the latest scholarship in the history of the war and emancipation. The novel also reflects current scholarship by pushing back against the “white savior” trope so common in Civil War popular culture and depicting a wide range of white characters with whom Tubman interacts. Some are casually racist or blatantly hostile toward Tubman and actively work to undermine her position in Port Royal, Beaufort, and the Union army. There are also several northern white men who are Tubman’s advocates—Colonels ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
LIBRARY OF CONGESS
ELIZABETH COBBS’ THE TUBMAN COMMAND CAPTURES READERS WITH FACT AND FICTION BY MEGAN KATE NELSON
Harriet Tubman, as she appeared in the late 1860s. During the Civil War, Tubman helped free hundreds of men, women, and children from enslavement during the Combahee River Raid, an accomplishment documented in Elizabeth Cobbs’ new novel, The Tubman Command.
Top historians debunk five of the Civil War’s most enduring myths
“THE REAL WAR WILL NEVER GET IN THE BOOKS” with
Gerald J. Prokopowicz, Gary W. Gallagher, Earl J. Hess, Brooks D. Simpson, and William Marvel
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I N 1 8 6 2 , U P O N L E A R N I N G T H AT H I S W O U N D E D soldier-brother had been sent to a Washington, D.C., hospital, Walt Whitman raced from New York to the capital to locate and care for him. Afterward, the famed poet remained so affected by the scenes of suffering he had witnessed that he volunteered as a nurse. In time, Whitman began to worry that the actual story of the war—not the romanticized tales of battlefield glory or heroics, but those of the conflict’s vast human cost and consequences—would not be told. “The real war,” he wrote cynically, “will never get in the books.” 1 Whitman was correct in more ways than one. Many authors papered over the conflict’s controversial or less savory elements, opting instead to tell simplified, sanitized, or sentimental tales of a chivalrous contest fought by strictly honorable men. Others have created or perpetuated misleading or false tales about the war’s participants, conduct, and outcome—myths that have penetrated the popular memory of the Civil War. On the following pages, a panel of top historians attempts to correct the record on five of the biggest of these enduring misconceptions. We hope doing so will help us move closer to acknowledging, as Whitman once hoped, the “real” Civil War.
MYTH
1
The Ineffectual Emancipation Proclamation
THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION IS A complex document that provoked extremes of reaction from the moment it was issued. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” wrote Frederick Douglass, who up to that time had been a stern critic of Abraham Lincoln’s gradual approach to emancipation, while Jefferson Davis called it “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.” In the heat of the moment, neither one took time to 32 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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PHOTOGRAPH LIBRARY OFCREDIT CONGRESS HERE
G E R A L D J. P R O KO P O W I C Z
In this engraving published in 1864, three generations of an enslaved family listen intently as a Union soldier reads the recently enacted Emancipation Proclamation aloud to them in their cabin. From the moment it was issued, the proclamation provoked wildly different reactions across the divided country.
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analyze the subtleties of the document. Rather, they and most Americans responded as though Lincoln had declared the immediate and universal end of American slavery. For generations to follow, that oversimplification would become embedded in the public mind as the belief that “Lincoln freed the slaves.” For at least the past 50 years, historians have challenged that belief, in two ways. Some have pointed out that it was not Lincoln alone who freed the slaves. The agency of the enslaved population was critical in pushing the federal govern3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
WHILE IT’S TRUE THAT THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION DID NOT BRING UNIVERSAL FREEDOM TO THE ENSLAVED, THE MOMENT LINCOLN SIGNED THE FINAL DOCUMENT (A MOMENT DEPICTED ABOVE IN A WARTIME ENGRAVING), EVERY ENSLAVED PERS ON IN THE STATES IT COVERED WAS IMMEDIATELY AND PERMANENTLY A FREE PERS ON.
ment toward an emancipation policy, and brute force, in the form of Union military strength, was necessary to enforce Lincoln’s words. Recognizing the vital role of the armies and the enslaved has obviously contributed to a richer and more nuanced understanding of the process of emancipation. Other historians have argued with the verb instead of the noun: They write that Lincoln didn’t actually free anyone with his proclamation. On its face, there is enough to this claim that the newer myth that “the Proclamation didn’t free anyone” has largely supplanted the old myth that “Lincoln freed the slaves.” It is certainly true that the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, issued on September 22, 1862, had no immediate legal effect. In that document, Lincoln promised that unless certain conditions were met, the proclamation would take effect on January 1, 1863. Those conditions were not met, and Lincoln signed the final Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day, but even then it did not bring universal freedom. The document was an act of war, constitutionally justified by Lincoln’s powers as commander in chief, so its application was limited to places where the end of slavery would contribute to Confederate defeat, specifically “any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States.” The final version of the proclamation named 10 of the 11 Confederate states as being in rebellion, excepting Tennessee and specific parishes and counties in Louisiana and Virginia where United States military forces had reasserted control. The argument behind the “no effect” myth is that the Proclamation applied only to places where Lincoln had no working authority, and thus it did not free anyone at all. In fact, it certainly did. The fact that citizens of South Carolina (for example) were not inclined to obey the proclamation had no effect on its legal authority, any more than the tendency of motorists to drive past my office building on the edge of campus at 60 miles per hour invalidates the 35-mph speed limit posted there. From the moment Lincoln signed the final proclamation, every person in the states it covered was immediately and permanently a free person. To the extent that people who were formerly masters of slaves continued to coerce their labor, they were now kidnappers or worse. It might have been weeks, months, or even years before federal troops were able to enforce the proclamation, but this does not mean that the proclamation failed to change their legal status from enslaved to free. It often takes time for laws that make revolutionary changes to have their full effect. Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 did not cause all remaining slaveholders to immediately relinquish their human “property,” and the spirit of the amendment remained unenforced long into the 20th century in some parts of the
country, yet no one argues that the Thirteenth Amendment failed to free anyone. The myth that the proclamation freed no one is based on the distinction between de jure and de facto freedom, asserting that it may have changed the legal status of the enslaved without making any difference in their day-to-day lives. The myth is wrong here as well, however, because the proclamation had an immediate practical effect on many people, specifically those who had already escaped from their enslavers and were now refugees living in one of the states named in the document. Before the proclamation, their legal status was ambiguous. The Fugitive Slave Act remained on the books until 1864, so until then they were liable to be returned to their former owners. The Confiscation Acts and Benjamin Butler’s “contraband” policy gave United States military forces authority to seize fugitive slaves and prohibited their return, but did that mean that refugees from slavery were now the property of the federal government? If not, who owned them? If they were “contraband of war,” what would happen when the war ended? The proclamation resolved these ambiguities, clearly and definitively: As of January 1, 1863, these people were free. This in turn led more people to freedom. Owners may have been slow to tell their slaves about the proclamation, but word spread anyway. A northern businessman had thousands of miniature copies of the proclamation printed and distributed to soldiers, so that they could be passed along from plantation to plantation as easily concealed tokens of freedom. (The type was almost too small to read, and of course few of the enslaved could read at all, but the tiny pamphlet’s mere existence was enough to convey its powerful message of emancipation.) Knowledge that the president had declared them free surely changed the calculus for many who were trying to decide whether it was worth the risk to try to escape to the nearest Union army camp. Enslaved people might not have believed the tales of horror and abuse that awaited them at the hands of the Yankees, rumors spread by masters anxious to keep hold of their “property,” but word must have gotten back to many of them about the marginal conditions of the refugee camps and the oppressive behavior of some Union soldiers. Once the proclamation was out and the law was clear, an important obstacle was removed from the path of those who sought to gain their own freedom. The myth that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free anyone tends to be repeated by those who resent Lincoln’s lofty reputation. It can be heard from all points of the political compass, from progressives who see him as insufficiently abolitionist, from conservatives who believe it reveals his duplicity, or from libertarians who abhor his use of government power. The
“The argument behind the ‘no effect’ myth is that the Proclamation applied only to places where Lincoln had no working authority, and thus it did not free anyone at all.”
proclamation was controversial in its time, and it is still controversial a century and a half after the country accepted Lincoln’s underlying premise that slavery was wrong. It remains the most revolutionary act of any American president, and it set the pendulum of popular opinion swinging widely, from “Lincoln freed the slaves” to “the Proclamation freed no one.” As long as Abraham Lincoln continues to be a lightning rod for the political currents of the day, it seems unlikely that this pendulum will ever settle into a position of equilibrium, but with increased historical understanding, perhaps the extremes can at least be dampened. GERALD J. PROKOPOWICZ IS THE AUTHOR OF DID LINCOLN OWN SLAVES? (2008) AND ALL FOR THE REGIMENT: THE ARMY OF THE OHIO, 1861–1862 (2001). SINCE 2004 HE HAS HOSTED THE PODCAST “CIVIL WAR TALK RADIO” (IMPEDIMENTSOFWAR.ORG). HE SERVED FOR NINE YEARS AS THE RESIDENT LINCOLN SCHOLAR AT THE LINCOLN MUSEUM IN FORT WAYNE, INDIANA, AND IS CURRENTLY A PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY IN GREENVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA.
MYTH
The War’s Outcome Was Inevitable
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G A R Y W. G A L L A G H E R
MILLIONS OF AMERICANS WHO WATCHED Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War heard Shelby Foote pronounce United States victory inevitable. As the principal talking head in that remarkably successful and influential series, Foote reinforced one of the most persistent myths about the conflict. “I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back,” observed Foote in his soothing Mississippi drawl. “I think that if there had been more southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don’t think the South ever had a chance to win that war.”1 35 FALL 2019
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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THE NORTH’S CONSIDERABLE ADVANTAGES IN POPULATION AND INDUSTRIAL CAPACITY ARE OFTEN USED AS EVIDENCE THAT THE CONFEDERACY FACED IMPOSSIBLE ODDS DURING THE CIVIL WAR. LEFT: A MASSIVE CROWD GATHERS IN NEW YORK’S UNION S QUARE FOR A PATRIOTIC RALLY SHORTLY AFTER FORT SUMTER’S FALL.
Disparate influences have nourished this misleading tendency to frame the Confederate experiment in nation-building as a hopeless struggle against impossible odds. Former Confederates adopted the argument as a crucial tenet of Lost Cause orthodoxy. For example, Jubal A. Early, a significant figure in debates about the memory of the conflict, characterized the campaign Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant waged in 1864 as “a contest between mechanical power and physical strength, on the one hand, and the gradually diminishing nerve and sinew of Confederate soldiers, on the other, until the unlimited resources of our enemies must finally prevail over all the genius and chivalric daring, which had so long baffled their mighty efforts in the field.”2 Similarly, an imposing monument on the capitol grounds in Austin, Texas, erected in 1903, offered a text that reads in part: “The South, Against Overwhelming Numbers and Resources, Fought Until Exhausted.... Number Of Men Enlisted: Confederate Armies, 600,000; Federal Armies, 2,859,132.” Although underestimating Confederate strength by about 300,000 and overestimating that of United States forces by more than 600,000, the Texas memorial left no doubt about why the Yankees prevailed (the exactness of the Union figure lends verisimilitude to the invention).3 This claim of inevitable United States victory constituted a neat and clever way for exConfederates to absolve themselves of responsibility for their catastrophic failure to establish a new slaveholding republic. Their self-serving explanation can be distilled into a single sentence: “Well, we lost, but of course we lost, because we never could have won!” Historians who embraced economic determinism also buttressed the idea of certain Union triumph. For them, a backward-looking agrarian South had no chance against a capitalist powerhouse in the North. Few historians have proved more influential in this regard than Charles A. Beard, whose The Rise of American Civilization, coauthored with his wife Mary R. Beard, reached a wide audience. “The South was fighting against the census returns—census returns that told of accumulating industrial capital, multiplying captains of industry, expanding railway systems, widening acres tilled by free farmers,” stated the Beards. The free states held sway in terms of population, manufacturing, munitions, and control of foreign commerce. “In fact,” continued the Beards, “the real revolution—the silent shift of 37 FALL 2019
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home ground gave Confederates a further edge. Soldiers defending hearth and family typically display greater resolve than those seeking to conquer and occupy an opponent’s territory. In reality, the chances for Confederate success much exceeded those of the colonies against mighty Great Britain during the Revolution— something well understood by people on both social and material power—had occurred before sides. As George Wythe Randolph, Thomas Jefthe southern states declared their independence ferson’s grandson and the Confederate secreand precipitated the revolution of violence. As tary of war in 1862, put it in October 1861, “They [William H.] Seward had warned the planters, may overrun our frontier States and plunder our they could accept the inescapable either in peace coast but, as for conquering us, the thing is an or in battle.”4 impossibility. There is no instance in history of a Scholarship that emphasizes conflict on the people as numerous as we are inhabiting a counConfederate home front similarly undercuts the try so extensive as ours being subjected if true to idea that the Confederacy might have prevailed. themselves.” Former Confederate general Pierre This literature, with roots in the 1920s and 1930s, Gustave Toutant Beauregard, writing after the re-emerged in the 1970s and continues to grow. war, echoed Randolph in claiming that “No Fault lines of race, gender, and especially class people ever warred for independence with more dominate this scholarship, which suggests that relative advantages than the Confederates; and slaveholders who pushed for secession and then if, as a military question, they must have failed, presided over an all-consuming military effort then no country must aim at freedom by means alienated huge numbers of white citizens. Quot- of war.”6 ing a Georgia newspaper editor who wrote that In this struggle between two democratic reby 1863 Confederates were “fighting each other publics, the commitment of civilians would be the harder than we ever fought the enemy,” one his- key—something Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, torian concluded: “That inner civil war made it Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and other percepincreasingly difficult, and ultimately impossible, tive political and military leaders realized. When for the Confederacy to survive.”5 one side’s citizenry reached a breaking point, whatMost people who embrace the “hopeless fight ever the real condition of the armies in the field, against the odds” narrative deploy stark num- the war would end. This meant the Confederacy, bers that favored the United which lacked the resources to States. The loyal states condefeat the United States in an tained nearly 22.3 million absolute sense, could still win people compared to the Conits independence. federacy’s 9.1 million (which Quotations from Lincoln included 3.5 million enslaved and Lee highlight the imand more than 132,500 free portance of civilian morale black people). Manufacin the United States. In midturing in the loyal states April 1863, with northern dwarfed that in the Confednewspapers detailing Coperacy, and the United States perhead activities and no evbegan the war with an army idence of significant Union and navy (both admittedly military progress in any thesmall). But the Confederacy ater, Lee expressed cautious also had important advanoptimism in a letter to his P.G.T. BEAUREGARD tages. Most obviously, condiwife. “I do not think our entions for victory favored the emies are so confident of sucConfederacy. It need only convince the loyal citi- cess as they used to be,” he remarked in a passage zenry that subduing the rebellion would cost too that touched on the Confederate and Union cimuch in lives and money. A tie was thus as good vilian populaces. “If we can baffle them in their as a win and required no projection of Rebel mili- various designs this year & our people are true tary power into the loyal hinterlands, no occupa- to our cause & not so devoted to themselves & tion of U.S. territory. Geography also favored the their own aggrandisement, I think our success Confederacy. Its sprawling 750,000 square miles, will be certain.” Additional fighting and sufintercut with imposing mountain ranges and fering lay ahead, but Lee believed the Army of served by a substandard network of all-weather Northern Virginia could influence the northern roads and railroads, posed massive logistical ob- home front. “If successful this year, next fall there stacles to invading Federal forces. Fighting for will be a great change in public opinion at the
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“In reality, the chances for Confederate success much exceeded those of the colonies against mighty Great Britain during the Revolution—something well understood by people on both sides.”
DURING THE CONFLICT’S FIRST YEARS, S OUTHERN SUCCESSES ON THE BATTLEFIELD, PLUS DIVISIONS AND DIPPING MORALE ON THE NORTHERN HOME FRONT, POINTED TO THE POSSIBILITY OF ULTIMATE CONFEDERATE VICTORY. ABOVE: ANTI-WAR COPPERHEADS THREATEN COLUMBIA—AND, BY EXTENSION, THE UNION WAR EFFORT—IN THIS CARTOON PUBLISHED IN HARPER’S WEEKLY IN FEBRUARY 1863.
North,” he predicted regarding the 1864 elections. “The Republicans will be destroyed & I think the friends of peace will become so strong as that the next administration will go in on that basis. We have only therefore to resist manfully.”7 The following year, with Union armies pressing against Richmond and Atlanta, Lincoln nonetheless feared defeat. His famous blind memorandum to his cabinet on August 23, 1864, suggested loyal citizens had lost their stomach for a protracted war. “This morning, as for some days past,” Lincoln observed, “it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”8 William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan, triumphant at Atlanta and in the Shenandoah Valley, brought a radical change in morale across the loyal states that saved the Republicans in November, ensured emancipation, and guaranteed survival of a new, and improved, American nation.
In summary, the Confederacy by no means faced a hopeless struggle. Other nations had overcome more daunting obstacles, and no one should fall prey to what might be called “Appomattox syndrome.” That common way of looking at the conflict begins with knowledge of U.S. victory, assumes that was the only possible outcome, and ranges backward to identify evidence for why the Confederacy failed. This can lead to a linear understanding of Union victory built on a model of declining Confederate morale undercut by internal tensions and inexorable Federal power sternly applied. Stronger popular will in the United States did win out, but only after Confederate military successes and political strife in northern states brought moments of despair that almost settled the issue in favor of the Rebels. GARY W. GALLAGHER IS THE JOHN L. NAU III PROFESSOR OF HISTORY EMERITUS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. HIS RECENT BOOKS INCLUDE CIVIL WAR PLACES: SEEING THE CONFLICT THROUGH THE EYES OF ITS LEADING HISTORIANS (2019; CO-EDITED WITH J, MATTHEW GALLMAN) AND THE REVISED EDITION OF THE AMERICAN WAR: A HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA (2019; CO-AUTHORED WITH JOAN WAUGH).
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MYTH
3
The Civil War Was the World’s First Modern War
THE CIVIL WAR HAS LONG BEEN CONSIDERED the world’s first modern war by popular historians and buffs. Academic historians, myself included, tend not to agree and argue that it is dangerous to use the term “modern war” too loosely. As they note, most conflicts that have occurred since the beginning of the early modern period (about the 1600s), when scientific, technological, and social change began to occur in Western society, are neither wholly modern nor wholly old fashioned. They contain elements and characteristics of both the future and the past, coexisting side by side. Armed conflict changes slowly over time (along with society itself ) in a never-ending continuum. Wars are among the most complicated topics historians study, and they naturally confound our judgment with nuances and contradictions. The Civil War was no different. It did contain some characteristics that we can identify with modern wars, but it also had many elements that classify it as an old-fashioned conflict. Rather than arguing whether the Civil War was a modern conflict, we should be wondering to what degree it displayed modern traits versus traditional aspects of warfare. The best way to do that is to focus on a few key categories of war making and see how the Civil War measures up compared to the more thoroughly modern conflicts of the 20th century. The most modern aspect of the Civil War lay in logistics, or military transportation. For the first time in history there was full utilization of steam power for the movement of troops and supplies, making the Civil War the first true railroad war. The Federals succeeded far better in this than the Confederates, utilizing some 400 Mississippi River steamboats, dozens of railroad companies, and 400 coastal vessels to support an army of over 1 million men during four years of conflict. Union quartermasters solved many 40 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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problems involved in loading, moving, and unloading mountains of material, thousands of animals, and hundreds of thousands of men over huge expanses of territory. They learned how to conquer space and time in providing support to field armies that deeply penetrated enemy territory and meant to stay there. In the area of manpower mobilization, however, the Civil War was an old-fashioned conflict. Both the Union and the Confederacy relied primarily on volunteers raised by the state governments, a key part of American military history since the Revolution of 1776. While both
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sides created a national draft for the first time in American history, those conscript systems were very different from the selective service system the American government would institute in 1917 and 1940. There was widespread opposition to the draft in both the North and South. With many loopholes and a great deal of draft evasion, Civil War conscription provided no more than about 10 percent of the men needed to fight the conflict. Neither government was able to mobilize manpower for military service as a truly modern state would do in the 20th century. Similarly, Civil War weapons did not repre-
WHILE THE CIVIL WAR CONTAINED S OME CHARACTERISTICS THAT WE CAN IDENTIFY WITH MODERN WARS—INCLUDING MILITARY TRANSPORTATION—OTHER ELEMENTS POINT TO AN OLD-FASHIONED CONFLICT. ABOVE: RAIL LINES CARRIED SUPPLIES INLAND FROM THE WHARF AT THE UNION DEPOT AT CITY POINT, VIRGINIA, SHOWN HERE IN 1864.
sent a significant step toward modern war, despite what many people assume. The conflict did see the advent of rifling in both small arms and field artillery, but this failed to drastically change the nature of combat. There is no evidence that rifle muskets were faster to load, easier to load, or 41 FALL 2019
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(except in the hands of men who had a natural aptitude for them) more accurate than smoothbores. What rifling did do was increase the range of the musket from 100 to 500 yards. Even though Civil War soldiers very much wanted to use the new rifle musket, they also wanted to fire it at short range, believing that would be more effective. And they were right. Several studies have confirmed that the average range of Civil War small-arms fire did not exceed 100 yards. For instance, at the Battle of Franklin, which took place on a largely open field, Union infantry opened fire when the advancing Confederates were 400 yards away, and continued until the Rebels closed on the Federal works. Yet Confederate general Benjamin F. Cheatham later testified that the overwhelming majority of his men had been hit within 50 yards of the Union position. Casualty statistics also confirm that the rifle musket failed to make the Civil War unusually bloody. Smoothbore battles of the 1700s produced loss ratios at the same level as, and even higher than, the Civil War. Only with the development of magazine-fed weapons by the turn of the 20th century, which increased the rate of fire rather than the range of fire, did we see truly significant changes in the nature of infantry combat. Volume of fire delivered by infantrymen became more important during World War I, even though most infantry fighting in 20th-century conflicts remained at short range rather than long. In the area of infantry tactics, little changed during the Civil War. Both Union and Confeder42 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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EARL J. HESS IS THE AUTHOR OF MORE THAN 20 BOOKS, INCLUDING THE RIFLE MUSKET IN CIVIL WAR COMBAT: REALITY AND MYTH (2008), CIVIL WAR INFANTRY TACTICS: TRAINING, COMBAT, AND SMALL-UNIT EFFECTIVENESS (2015), AND CIVIL WAR LOGISTICS: A STUDY OF MILITARY TRANSPORTATION (2017).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES (HALLECK)
LITTLE CHANGED DURING THE CIVIL WAR IN THE AREA OF INFANTRY TACTICS—BOTH SIDES CONTINUED TO USE THE TRADITIONAL, COMPLICATED FORMATIONS AND MANEUVERS UTILIZED DURING EARLIER CONFLICTS. ABOVE: UNION S OLDIERS DRILL NEAR WASHINGTON, D.C.
ate armies used the traditional, complicated formations and maneuvers that worked well for the masses of manpower on the battlefield and the weapons they employed. Units that trained well in those tactics survived and succeeded on the battlefield, and those that did not faltered. Infantry tactics truly began to change in World War I, an evolution that continued through World War II and into the post-1945 era, when the fire team concept—with its emphasis on groups of four soldiers supporting each other with their fire, unlike the should-to-shoulder lines of troops utilized during the Civil War—was fully developed. Attitudes toward warfare also remained largely unchanged during the Civil War. Ever since the American Revolution, mainstream American culture held up war as a noble and just endeavor and sacrifice, and suffering for one’s country was largely valued. The North and the South could not have relied on a volunteer army without those values. Civil War armies certainly targeted civilians, but such actions were not new in global military history. And it has to be pointed out that burning farms and public facilities as Union forces did was a far cry from the deliberate bombardment of residential areas that occurred during World War II. Even the worst that William T. Sherman’s men did during the March to the Sea and through the Carolinas pales in comparison with truly modern wars in terms of exerting military power directly on unarmed civilians. There probably were no more than a few dozen civilians who died as a direct result of enemy action during the Civil War, in comparison to an estimated 1 million Germans and 1 million Japanese who perished under a hail of Allied bombing raids in the 1940s. The last argument for the Civil War as a modern war is that it was a “total war”—with the opposing governments fully mobilizing their resources. Even if total war is indeed a modern strategy, then the Civil War was only in part a modern conflict. Neither government utilized its complete resources as fully as governments in the two world wars did to fight a long, bitter conflict. But there is another definition of total war that is highly applicable to the Civil War. While the Confederates simply needed to fight the Union to a standstill and then negotiate peace in order to win, the Federals needed to destroy the Confederate government and its armed forces. Perhaps that is another reason for Union victory; it is easier to fight when one knows there is a complete victory to be gained rather than a negotiated settlement.
MYTH
by his civilian superiors, including Lincoln. Nowhere was this more evident than when Grant advanced his plan for the eastern theater in 1864. In response to an invitation by then general-inchief Henry Halleck, Grant set forth an entirely new approach to addressing the problems posed by Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia operating in its namesake state. He argued for a reduction to Union forces confronting Lee’s army in north central Virginia, reasoning that numerical parity would be sufficient to shield Washington. Meanwhile, a second army would strike through southeast Virginia and into North Carolina, threatening Richmond’s supply lines southB R O O KS D. S I M P S O N ward, encouraging the growing alienation that many white North Carolinians had toward the Confederacy due to disgust with Jefferson Davis’ W I L L I A M T. S H E R M A N O N C E S A I D O F administration, and liberating thousands of enUlysses S. Grant, “to me he is a mystery, and I be- slaved African Americans. lieve he is a mystery to himself.” Mysteries in turn Grant’s innovative plan broke with previous beget myths, and until recently Grant’s reputa- proposals that sought a direct confrontation with tion suffered from tales of his alcoholism, polit- Lee in Virginia. He set aside the Confederate capiical incompetence, butchery on the battlefield, tal at Richmond as a prime objective, although his and lack of intelligence. All of these ideas have proposed strike southward, if successful, would been challenged by a series of Grant biographers have severed it from the Confederate heartland. and scholars stretching back to Louis A. Coolidge, Targeting Confederate civilian morale and shatA.L. Conger, and J.F.C. Fuller, to say nothing of tering slavery in the Tar Heel State demonstrated Lloyd Lewis and Bruce Catton, as well as other the breadth of Grant’s strategic vision. Lee would balanced studies dating back to 1991. Yet despite have had to choose between mounting an offensive this revival in Grant’s reputation, some myths die against Federal forces in Virginia, leaving Richhard. One of the more notable concerns whether mond and points south vulnerable to the Yankee President Abraham Lincoln gave his new general- invaders, or abandoning his beloved Virginia altoin-chief a free hand as Grant took charge of the gether to counter the Union thrust, which in turn armies of the United States in March 1864. would have allowed Union forces in Virginia to To some extent, Grant himself is responsible march southward and threaten Richmond. for the origins of the myth. As Grant later recalled, Halleck quickly threw cold water upon Grant’s Lincoln told him that it was idea, claiming that there was only due to the failures of not nearly enough Union Grant’s predecessors that the military strength to carry president had meddled in milout such an ambitious plan. itary affairs: “All he wanted or (Grant’s plan would have rehad ever wanted was some quired between 120,000 and one who would take the re130,000 men, about the size of sponsibility and act, and call the Army of the Potomac, the on him for all the assistance Army of the James, and Amneeded, pledging himself to brose Burnside’s IX Corps in use all the power of the govthe spring of 1864.) Although ernment in rendering such Halleck conceded that Grant assistance.” Indeed, in wishmight reverse Halleck’s vering Grant well in the spring dict in the near future (an of 1864, Lincoln assured him implicit reference to Grant’s HENRY HALLECK of his “entire satisfaction with impending elevation to overwhat you have done up to this all command), Grant took time, so far as I understand it. The particulars of the hint. The authorities at Washington were your plans I neither know, or seek to know.” not ready for a radical departure from previous Yet the plan of campaign that Grant eventu- efforts, especially in an election year when Linally devised in 1864, as well as the generals who coln’s probable opponent, George B. McClellan, would be in charge of executing important parts was best known for his rejection of an overland of that plan, show that the newly minted lieu- approach in favor of an operation not all that diftenant general all too often found his hands tied ferent from Grant’s proposal.
Ulysses S. Grant Had Free Rein
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“Yet the plan of campaign that Grant eventually devised in 1864 … show[s] that … [he] all too often found his hands tied by his civilian superiors, including Lincoln.”
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
Ulysses S. Grant (left) greets Abraham Lincoln outside the Wallace House in Petersburg, Virginia, on the morning of April 3, 1865—the day the city fell to Union forces. While Grant’s plan to win the war was ultimately successful, he needed to modify it along the way to accommodate political reality.
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One sees traces of Grant’s North Carolina proposal in his spring 1864 approach to the eastern theater. Multiple Union thrusts would threaten Confederate logistics, force Lee to choose to fight or fall back, and employ Union control of the coastal waters in Virginia and North Carolina. However, as Grant modified his plan, he encountered two more challenges that forced him to accommodate political reality. Grant’s trip to Washington in March 1864 to accept his commission as lieutenant general exercising supreme command over the armies of the United States opened his eyes to Washington politics. To be sure, Grant was no novice when it came to the politics of civil-military relations, but he saw firsthand just how much Union generals in Virginia had to deal with interference and inquiries from both the executive branch and Congress. Much is made of Grant’s initial meeting with George G. Meade at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, but at least as important was that the two men traveled together back to Washington, where Meade had to face the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to answer for his supposed shortcomings at Gettysburg. That Meade counted among his chief critics Joseph Hooker, who had made a poor impression on Grant during the Chattanooga Campaign, only made the new lieutenant general a supporter of the beleaguered hero of Gettysburg. After all, hadn’t Grant had to put up with the same sort of nonsense during his campaigns in the West? Two decades later, Grant recalled in his memoirs, “It had been my intention … to remain in the West … but when I got to Washington and saw the situation it was plain that here was the point for the commanding general to be. No one else could, probably, resist the pressure that would be brought to bear upon him to desist from his own plans and pursue others.” That meant that he would use Meade, who was familiar with the officers and men under his command, to direct the campaign against Lee. It would be left to Sherman to oversee operations in the West, where Grant would otherwise have been. Washington politics also played havoc with Grant’s planning. Although he had long favored an offensive against Mobile, Alabama, the Lincoln administration preferred that the army that would have undertaken that operation, headed by Massachusetts politician Nathaniel P. Banks, advance in the opposite direction toward Texas to secure that area against possible French intrusion from Mexico. Grant wanted a Union offensive to drive south through the Shenandoah Valley, damaging Confederate logistics and forcing Lee to keep an eye on his westward flank, only to be told that the German-American leader Franz Sigel would command that column, regardless of his mixed military record. After all, retaining Sigel in
command might persuade some of his naturalized fellow countrymen to vote for Abraham Lincoln. Much the same reasoning pointed to having Massachusetts Democrat-turned-Republican Benjamin F. Butler take charge of the Army of the James, which was to threaten Richmond from the east in a move that echoed Grant’s North Carolina plan. Whatever his administrative abilities and political importance, Butler was not skilled at directing military operations. Grant’s decision to assign him two West Point graduates as corps commanders to mitigate Butler’s inexperience backfired when none of them could work together. Ironically, Banks, Sigel, and Butler—three men who owed their positions to their supposed political clout—failed in their missions, damaging Grant’s chances for success and thus Lincoln’s prospects for reelection. For no one, least of all Lincoln and Grant, forgot that 1864 was a presidential election year. Grant was under pressure to reassure northern voters that ultimate victory was not far off. However, with the failure of Sigel and Butler to execute their parts of the overall plan in Virginia, Grant found himself facing Lee in what soon evolved into a bloody slugfest, with the Confederate commander able to concentrate on the foe before him. As the body count rose and the hopes for a quick victory faded, Lincoln expressed his hope that Grant would be more mindful of his losses—and exhaled in relief when Jubal Early’s strike against lightly defended Washington in July 1864 did no more than throw a scare into northern hearts and minds. In the end, Grant’s overall plan reaped its victories elsewhere, while he rested content with nullifying Lee’s ability to launch a telling counterpunch. Yet even then Grant had to humor Lincoln’s reluctance to allow Sherman to cut loose from Atlanta and plunge into the Confederate interior, and did so by delaying the operation until after Election Day. It would not be until later that the commanding general could pluck the thorns of politically useful generals from his hide, although eventually Banks, Sigel, and Butler found their way to the sidelines. Try as he might in later years to protect Lincoln from charges of meddling and interfering, Grant would never quite erase the evidence that in 1864 he did not always get to do what he wanted to do with the people he trusted. That Lincoln trusted Grant more than he did Grant’s predecessors, and thus allowed him opportunities he denied to others, is true—but that he offered Grant a free hand to do as the general wished is simply not supported by the record, even if Grant, always the loyal subordinate, contributed to that myth. BROOKS D. SIMPSON IS ASU FOUNDATION PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY. AT PRESENT HE IS ENGAGED IN PREPARING THE CONCLUDING VOLUME OF A BIOGRAPHY OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, COVERING THE LAST TWO DECADES OF HIS LIFE.
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MYTH
side would have seen Yankees digging into their own haversacks to feed the Rebels, and at least a couple of thousand Union soldiers should have noticed that they were asked to salute their enemies. Such an unexpected tribute would have been equally evident to Confederates at the head of the column as they marched in to surrender, but no surviving diary or letter from that time specifically describes either incident. Both stories surfaced and proliferated 15 years afterward, amid the rapturous mythologizing of the reconciliation era. These touching details emanated from the Union army’s V Corps, and primarily from Joseph WILLIAM MARVEL Bartlett’s division, first appearing in Frank Parker’s history of the 32nd Massachusetts Infantry late in April 1880. Parker, who left the regiment in 1862, THE SURRENDER OF CONFEDERATE FORCES had to rely on comrades for Appomattox stories, at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 in- including one of Union soldiers agreeing to “divide spired a host of myths, many of which encapsu- the contents of their haversacks” with the Rebels lated a couple of decades of history to symbolize on April 10. Misdating the surrender ceremony the protracted reunification of a divided nation of Lee’s infantry as April 11 (it was actually April in convenient vignettes. Two of them are appar- 12), he also described the Confederates “appreciatently too appealing to abandon, despite abundant ing the compliment implied” by the Union troops evidence that they were deliberately cultivated standing at shouldered arms as they passed.9 after the fact. Some men from the V Corps did wander into As the story goes, Robert E. Lee’s army arrived Confederate lines after the surrender, in curiosat the last ditch in a starving ity and in the common pickcondition. After the surrenet-line pursuit of trade. A few der, Union soldiers swarmed may have shared or traded into the Confederate camps food, but most had none to and shared their rations with exchange, and orders from their hungry enemies. Not V Corps headquarters soon satisfied merely to befriend stopped such fraternizing. their errant erstwhile brethArmy of the Potomac comren, the Yankees also saluted mander George G. Meade them as they marched in for and three staff officers enthe formal surrender of arms tered Confederate lines the and flags, transforming that next morning, finding the humiliating ritual into somepickets there maintaining thing of an honor. strict segregation between For decades those two the armies. They rode to the JOSHUA CHAMBERLAIN scenes have been as integral far end of Lee’s camp, but to the story of Appomattox mentioned no visiting Union as the conference in Wilmer McLean’s parlor. soldiers in the accounts they left.10 Like the apocryphal tale of Lee offering his sword Like most of the Yankees who confronted the and Ulysses S. Grant returning it, they artificially head of Lee’s column on April 9, Bartlett’s troops truncate a long and unpleasant period of politi- had marched far beyond their supply trains and cal tension, simplifying the tedious journey from went without food all that day, drawing only fratricide to fraternity. one day’s ration late on the morning of April 10. The fatal problem with both accounts is the By then, 25,000 rations of beef, hardtack, sugar, complete absence of reliably original contempo- and coffee were being distributed to Lee’s army rary documentation. Thousands of men on either on Grant’s orders. That official issue planted the seed for the legend of individual generosity when some Confederates mentioned the delivery of that food, although they usually noted that it came from the “yankee Govt.” or “Federal Army.” “The surrender of Confederate forces at Appomattox Most of those provisions were, however, probably Court House … inspired a host of myths…. Two of them taken from a trainload of Confederate commisare apparently too appealing to abandon….” sary stores captured at Appomattox Station the
5
The Storybook Ending at Appomattox
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NATIONAL ARCHIVES (CHAMBERLAIN); WEST POINT MUSEUM, UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY
night of April 8, which were the nearest at hand and may have fed both armies that morning.11 Nor had the Confederates any cause to feel complimented by the Federals standing with their arms at a shoulder. That position did not constitute a salute, as was later alleged, but merely reflected the 1865 equivalent of “attention,” at which the soldier remained stationary and silent. Generals on both sides strove to avoid unpleasant confrontations that might mar the peace of that last meeting of the opposing armies, and pickets had been posted to keep them apart during the four-day encampment.12 Bringing the parallel ranks of Union troops to “shoulder arms” as the Confederates marched between them prevented muttered exchanges that might have led to trouble. Confederates certainly did appreciate the quiet and respectful attitude of their opponents, but none of them mentioned anything like a salute until decades later. The officers who provided Parker’s Appomattox material were well acquainted with Joshua Chamberlain, who commanded their brigade at the surrender and participated prominently in their V Corps veterans’ association. The tale of the vague “compliment” to the defeated enemy came from Chamberlain, who had been publicly narrating a romantic story of the surrender since 1867, and Parker’s peculiarly passive phrasing echoed his. Yet on the day after the surren-
ABOVE: ARTIST KEN RILEY’S 1965 PAINTING REFLECTS THE MODERNDAY—BUT INACCURATE—UNDERSTANDING OF THE SURRENDER OF THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA AT APPOMATTOX: UNION S OLDIERS STANDING AT ATTENTION AS A SIGN OF RESPECT AS CONFEDERATE TROOPS SURRENDER THEIR ARMS.
der Chamberlain saw nothing complimentary in holding his men “at a shoulder,” and in his early lectures he specifically denied having ordered a salute. Incidentally, neither did he mention any sharing of rations.13 Theodore Gerrish, who had served under Chamberlain in the 20th Maine Infantry, would have been familiar with his Appomattox lectures. By the 1881 Army of the Potomac reunion in Portland, Maine, Gerrish was writing a memoir of life in the regiment, and his old commander corresponded with him about details in the book, which was published in the autumn of 1882. In his chapter on Appomattox, Gerrish contradicted contemporary diary accounts by insisting that his comrades retrieved three days’ rations from their regimental baggage wagons to share with the Confederates, implicitly on April 9. Gerrish’s book, far more than Parker’s, sparked the legend of the victorious Yankees feeding the vanquished Rebels.14 Memoirs and regimental histories from the V Corps published between 1865 and 1878 make no allusion to sharing rations (or ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76 47 FALL 2019
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The Man with the Magic Pencil
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
A LOOK AT THE CIVIL WAR ARTWORK OF ILLUSTRATOR F.O.C. DARLEY
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
JOHN SARTAIN BASED THIS 1866 ENGRAVING OF A LONE UNION SOLDIER, TITLED THINKING OF HOME, ON A SKETCH (SHOWN ON PAGE 51) BY F.O.C. DARLEY.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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PREVIOUS PAGES: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; LEFT: JEFF KRAUS COLLECTION (ANTIQUEPHOTOGRAPHICS.COM); RIGHT: GRAPHIC ARTS COLLECTION, DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
“One of the first things that strikes you about his sketches is their wonderful clearness of idea…. Nothing is left to chance; all is certainty. He never guesses, he knows.” So wrote The National Magazine in an 1850s profile of artist Felix Octavius Carr “F.O.C.” Darley. Born in Philadelphia in 1822, Darley taught himself to sketch at an early age, and his work soon became known among the city’s publishers, who hired him to illustrate a number of volumes. In 1848, the young artist moved to New York, where his reputation continued to grow as his illustrations appeared in a variety of notable magazines and books, including the novels of Washington Irving and James Fennimore Cooper. By the outbreak of the Civil War, Darley was widely considered to be the finest illustrator in the country. Q Unlike fellow artists like Winslow Homer, Alfred Waud, and Edwin Forbes, Darley did not head to the front lines in 1861 to sketch the Union armies and their battles. The conflict did, however, become a prominent subject of his work, and his dramatic depictions of the struggle and its participants—examples of which are highlighted on the following pages—appeared widely, from the pages of Civil War histories to soldiers’ certificates and bank notes. Taking in Darley’s work, it is easy to understand why one 19th-century art critic thought the illustrator must have sketched with a “magic pencil.” Darley died at his home in Delaware in 1888.
SOURCES: THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE VOL. IX (JULY–DECEMBER 1865); GRAHAM’S AMERICAN MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE AND ART VOL. XLV (1854); MARK D. TOMASKO, IMAGES OF VALUE: THE ARTWORK BEHIND US SECURITY ENGRAVING, 1830S–1980S (NEW YORK, 2017).
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THE WAR WITH THE SOUTH (4)
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ENGRAVINGS BASED ON DARLEY’S SKETCHES OF EARLY WAR BATTLE SCENES ADORNED THE PAGES OF THE MULTIVOLUME WORK THE WAR WITH THE SOUTH, THE FIRST VOLUME OF WHICH WAS PUBLISHED BEFORE THE CONFLICT HAD ENDED. SHOWN HERE ARE DARLEY’S RENDITIONS OF (CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT) THE DEATH OF UNION BRIGADIER GENERAL NATHANIEL LYON AT THE BATTLE OF WILSON’S CREEK; THE DEMISE OF CONFEDERATE BRIGADIER GENERAL FELIX ZOLLICOFFER AT THE BATTLE OF MILL SPRINGS; THE CHAOTIC UNION RETREAT AT THE BATTLE OF BULL RUN; AND THE RESCUE OF UNION COLONEL EDWARD BAKER’S BODY DURING THE BATTLE OF BALL’S BLUFF.
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THE WAR WITH THE SOUTH
ALSO APPEARING IN THE WAR WITH THE SOUTH WAS THIS ENGRAVING OF A DARLEY SCENE DEPICTING THE MOMENT ATTACKING FORCES UNDER THE OVERALL COMMAND OF BRIGADIER GENERAL AMBROSE BURNSIDE OVERRAN THE CONFEDERATE DEFENSES DURING THE FEBRUARY 1862 BATTLE OF ROANOKE ISLAND, A DECISIVE UNION VICTORY.
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DARLEY NOT ONLY PRODUCED CIVIL WAR ARTWORK TO ILLUSTRATE VARIOUS HISTORIES OF THE CONFLICT; HE ALSO CREATED VIGNETTES OF WAR SCENES FOR USE ON A VARIETY OF BANK NOTES AND STATE-ISSUED UNION VETERANS’ CERTIFICATES. OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM: THIS DOCUMENT—A “TESTIMONIAL OF HONOR IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF THE COURAGE AND PATRIOTISM … DISPLAYED IN THE LATE WAR FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF REBELLION AND THE PRESERVATION OF CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY”—ISSUED TO RHODE ISLAND CIVIL WAR VETERANS INCLUDED ENGRAVINGS OF DARLEY’S WORKS VOLUNTEER’S RETURN (UPPER LEFT) AND VOLUNTEER’S DEPARTURE (UPPER RIGHT). BELOW: DARLEY’S THE TROPHY (TOP), IN WHICH A UNION SOLDIER SHOWS HIS SWORD TO A PAIR OF BLACKSMITHS, WAS ENGRAVED FOR USE ON BOTH A UNION MILITARY SCRIP PRODUCED BY THE CONTINENTAL BANK COMPANY (BOTTOM) AND—WITH A SIGN THAT READS “PROCLAMATION OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC” ADDED TO THE UPPER LEFT—AN IRISH NATIONAL BONDS CERTIFICATE ISSUED BY THE FENIAN BROTHERHOOD (OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP).
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COLLECTION OF MARK TOMASKO (4)
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DARLEY’S ILLUSTRATIONS— MANY OF THEM DEPICTING NONMILITARY SCENES—APPEARED THROUGHOUT MY STORY OF THE WAR, CIVIL WAR NURSE MARY LIVERMORE’S 1888 MEMOIR OF HER EXPERIENCES DURING THE CONFLICT. ABOVE: AFRICANAMERICAN REFUGEES IN SEARCH OF FREEDOM PASS BY A UNION SOLDIER TO BOARD A BOAT ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER IN 1862. BELOW: FAMED NURSE MARY ANN BICKERDYKE COMFORTS A WOUNDED SOLDIER BY LANTERN LIGHT ON THE BATTLEFIELD OF FORT DONELSON.
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LEFT: MY STORY OF THE WAR (2); RIGHT: A SELECTION OF WAR LYRICS
THIS DARLEY ILLUSTRATION APPEARED ALONGSIDE A POEM TITLED “THE LITTLE DRUMMER” IN THE 1864 BOOK A SELECTION OF WAR LYRICS. ONE VERSE READS: “UPON HIS COMRADE’S SHOULDER/THEY LIFTED HIM SO GRAND,/WITH HIS DUSTY DRUM BEFORE HIM,/ AND HIS DRUM-STICKS IN HIS HAND!/TO THE FIERY FRONT OF BATTLE,/THAT NEARER, NEARER DREW,—/AND EVERMORE HE BEAT, AND BEAT,/ HIS RAT-TAT-TOO!”
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CIVIL WAR CINEMA IN NEW DEAL AMERICA
During the early decades of the 20th century, Hollywood filmmakers both shaped and reflected the popular understanding of the Confederacy, slavery, and Abraham Lincoln.
Detail from a poster for the 1939 movie Gone With the Wind, which—when adjusted for ticket price inflation—ranks as the highest-grossing film ever released in the United States.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
BY N I N A S I L B E R
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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In 1939 Hollywood glamour and Civil War history came together in two unlikely cities.
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costume. Greeted warmly by the Illinois crowd, Anderson appeared as a serious and respected performer paying tribute not to the antebellum plantation South but to Lincoln the Emancipator.2 Both Gone With the Wind and Young Mr. Lincoln, and each of their premieres, reflect the conflicted ways Hollywood was thinking about the Civil War in the New Deal era. The two movies showcased distinct, sometimes overlapping Civil War narratives, both of which had deep roots in American culture: one heavily focused on celebrating the Old South and the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, the other building on the often reverential stance taken toward Lincoln as the nation’s Civil War president. Over the course of the 1930s, those two points of view underwent important transformations and planted even deeper roots in the American psyche. The movies of this era provided a crucial arena for reshaping and further amplifying those traditions.
The Depression decade was not, of course, Hollywood’s first foray into the turbulent terrain of the blue and the gray. Cinema’s first blockbuster, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, immortalized a white supremacist version of the Civil War and Reconstruction, replete with heroic Ku Klux Klan members rescuing helpless whites from malicious, newly freed blacks. This story was still influential 15 years later, when Birth was reissued with a synchronized musical score and a hokey introductory conversation between Griffith and actor Walter Huston, in which the director re-
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In December, Hollywood appeared in all of its glitziest glory in Atlanta, Georgia, for the world premiere of the film Gone With the Wind. For three days, white Atlantans took in a whirlwind of parties, parades, and movie stars. Based on local writer Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, largely set in Atlanta and other parts of Georgia, the film shone a spotlight on the region’s Civil War history, although the premiere events devoted far more space to the movie’s magical re-creations than to genuine historical artifacts. At one point in the festivities, the organizers of a grand ball unveiled a movie-like set featuring a re-created antebellum plantation house, along with a “Negro choir” dressed in slave garb, intoning Negro spirituals. With the Atlanta events adhering strictly to segregation protocols, these singers were some of the only black residents in attendance.1 Earlier that year Hollywood had also brought some of its magic, albeit with a bit less glitz, to Springfield, Illinois. In May, John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln debuted in the city most associated with Abraham Lincoln’s early life. The events included a gathering of the film’s stars, as well as reflections from local politicians and Lincoln scholars. The highlight was a nationally broadcast concert by African-American contralto Marian Anderson, who had made headlines just a few weeks earlier when, after being barred from singing in the Washington, D.C., hall owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, she performed at the Lincoln Memorial before a crowd of 75,000. In Springfield, Anderson sang “America” and “Ave Maria,” in addition to two spirituals; she wore modern dress, not a slave
During the Depression era, Civil War cinema reflected longstanding pro-Confederate biases that had been featured prominently in the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation, which promoted a white supremacist version of the Civil War and Reconstruction and portrayed the Ku Klux Klan (as shown above in a still from the film) as a heroic force out to save helpless whites from malicious, recently freed blacks.
vealed his family ties to both the Confederate army and the KKK. The 1920s saw a few films with Civil War themes, Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) being one of the more memorable. But the devastating images Americans saw from World War I may well have dampened public interest in sentimentalized Civil War movies. In the decade that followed, with memories of World War I fading, film studios returned to the Civil War, offering movies on such themes as the life of Lincoln, the death of Lincoln, and the wartime destruction of southern plantation life. Civil War movies were not usually among the most popular pictures of the 1930s—with Gone With the Wind as the one big exception—but the genre itself was
an important staple of the burgeoning film industry.3 Civil War cinema in the Depression era hewed closely to longstanding pro-Confederate biases, often referred to as the “Lost Cause” narrative, predominant among both historians and in the culture at large. Although the KKK received less prominence, many fallacies from the Birth of a Nation storyline reappeared: The South’s system of plantation slavery had spawned happy relations between masters and slaves; white southerners went to war not to defend slavery but for constitutional principles or for their “quaintly” way of life; those white southerners, in turn, suffered unjustly at the hands of a vengeful North 63 FALL 2019
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in both war and Reconstruction. There were no stories depicting the brutal conditions of chattel slavery or the barbaric tendencies of southern plantation owners and certainly none showing enslaved people heroically throwing off their bondage. One difference in this decade, though, was how much more spectacular and cinematically enhanced the Civil War became. Like other movies in Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” Civil War movies showcased improved sound technology as well as more intensely rendered colors. With bigger budgets to draw on, movies also featured sumptuous sets and elaborate costumes. Those spectacular effects, coupled with Hollywood’s celebrity-obsessed culture, seemed to make filmmakers a bit less earnest or didactic about history and a bit more attuned to glamour and showmanship. Whereas D.W. Griffith had embraced the idea of “writing history with lightning,” 1930s filmmakers thought more about the lightning than the history.4 One of the first big Civil War movies of the 1930s, Paramount Studio’s So Red the Rose (1935) provided later filmmakers with a cautionary tale 64 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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in Civil War movie-making. Based on a bestselling novel by the Mississippi writer Stark Young, the film spotlights the turmoil that engulfs a plantation family as they face the invasion of Union troops, the death of a son at the Battle of Shiloh, and a slave uprising. Although it had the traditional Lost Cause story, it did poorly at the box office, partly because it took its history too seriously. The film, Variety observed, gave “an accurate and sometimes shocking cross-section of war conditions,” seeking to “remove the audience from the present and transplant them into the struggle as it occurred.” Yet such features, this reviewer contended, did not make for “palatable cinematic merchandizing”: The film’s sober rendering of its historical material lacked the frivolity movie viewers desired. Too much vitriol, the Variety reviewer explained, and not enough of the “Dixie gallants romancing the Yank sweeties.”5 Over time, filmmakers recognized that “palatable cinematic merchandizing” came more from movie magic and less from history. In John 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
While the 1930s saw the release of such favorites as Gone With the Wind and Young Mr. Lincoln, not all of the decade’s Civil War films—including the 1935 movie So Red the Rose, which follows a southern plantation family during the conflict— were hits. Above: A scene from So Red the Rose. Opposite: A poster for the 1934 John Ford film Judge Priest, in which the residents of a Kentucky town confront their community’s Civil War legacy.
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Ford’s 1934 Judge Priest, residents of a small Kentucky town in the 1890s confront their community’s Civil War’s legacy and how best to honor their aging veterans. Will Rogers, Hollywood’s top earner at the time, played the title role, presiding over the assault trial of an ex-Confederate. The film’s most dramatic moment comes when Henry Walthall, the actor who played the Little Colonel in The Birth of a Nation, makes a surprise appearance to testify on behalf of the defendant. That knowing wink at an earlier Hollywood classic would be just the thing, explained the screenwriter, to make viewers “rise and shout.” In the 1935 film Steamboat Round the Bend, the principal character, again played by Will Rogers, takes over an old wax museum, and knowing he will need to market the museum to southerners, turns the figure of Ulysses Grant into one of Robert E. Lee. We might think of Steamboat as Hollywood’s open acknowledgement of its new strategy: to self-consciously take liberties with history in the interest of creating appealing, and marketable, illusions.6 Perhaps no one proved more adept at marketing illusions than producer David Selznick, who made Gone With the Wind the most profitable of all Civil War movies. From the outset, viewers were assured that no history lesson would unfold; as writer Ben Hecht’s opening scroll explained, this was just a story about “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here, in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave.” To enhance the legend’s appeal, Selznick ditched the idea of showing the kind of rudimentary homes that Margaret Mitchell had depicted in her novel, realistic as they might have been for 1850s middle Georgia, and turned instead to elaborate sets of grandiose plantation homes. He had his historical consultant, Wilbur Kurtz, gather samples of Georgia’s red clay, less for the realism it imparted and more for the Technicolor effects. All this, a writer for Time maintained, revealed fable making taken to new heights: a legend “told without subtlety, subjective shadings, probings or questionings.” Read as a spectacularly rendered legend, Gone With the Wind also made viewers more willing to accept the film’s pro-South bias, including its tendency to make the Confederate cause seem worthier than the Union’s. Even in the North, audiences cheered Scarlett O’Hara
for shooting a Yankee intruder and sympathized with Rhett Butler when he finally cast his lot with a bedraggled Confederate army. A New York Times reporter put the problem this way: “occasionally some bewildered child Yankee,” having seen the film, “remembers what he was taught in school and asks, confusedly, if it wasn’t all right for us to have won the war.” Savvy audiences, however, who understood the magic of the movies, were untroubled by this history. “Nearly every one has the right Confederate spirit,” the Times reporter explained. “They applaud the Confederate flag and say of Scarlett, ‘Isn’t she gorgeous?’”7 Current events also helped promote the “Confederate spirit” during the Depression. The dramatic reversal of fortune experienced by Confederates during the Civil War period suddenly seemed unusually relevant for people facing the devastating economic crisis of the 1930s. “During the depression of 1932,” wrote the southern journalist Ben Robertson, “I said to myself I need not worry too much if I lost my job—what my grandfather could do in 1865, I could do in 1932.” If anyone knew how to stare down poverty and hunger and unemployment, Robertson implied, it was defeated Confederates. When the biographer Douglas Southall Freeman gave a radio address about Robert E. Lee, he took as his theme “How a Great Leader Met Adversity,” drawing out the parallels between Lee’s challenges and those of the present day. And perhaps no character epitomized the southern struggle for survival as starkly as Scarlett O’Hara. Although Margaret Mitchell had written most of the original novel in the 1920s, when the book, and later the film, debuted in the 1930s, the American public responded eagerly to a story that spoke to present-day tribulations. Readers who took up Mitchell’s book wrote of the strong connection they felt to Scarlett’s suffering, including one Iowa fan who saw in Scarlett someone who “wanted only what so many of us want now. Material security for our families that life may hold something but the endless drudgery of a bare existence.” One reviewer summed up the appeal this way: “The real stroke of genius is in the story of Scarlett’s struggles to survive— it is the story of thousands of young (& older) women during the depression.” When Scarlett finally made her way back to her former plantation and uttered what may be the movie’s most famous line—“As God is my witness, I’ll never be 65 FALL 2019
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The staggering appeal of movies like Gone With the Wind tells us only part of the story about Civil War cinema during the 1930s. The decade also witnessed a new surge of popularity for the man leading the fight against the Confederacy and its slave system. In hugely popular biographies by Carl Sandburg, a plethora of images found in New Deal murals and posters, musical compositions, as well as motion pictures like Young Mr. Lincoln and Abe Lincoln in Illinois, the Civil War president emerged as the single most important historical persona of the New Deal era. Lincoln, of course, had been in movies before, including The Birth of a Nation. In that film, though, Lincoln had been incidental to the movie’s story and often appeared helpless and sad. In contrast, the Lincoln who emerged over the course of the 1930s became a star, and a powerful one at that, capable of vanquishing foes with both wit and physical strength. In Young Mr. Lincoln, Henry Fonda’s Lincoln tells a lynch mob that he can lick anybody there and later verbally eviscerates the prosecution’s chief witness in a murder trial. Surely Lincoln’s new prestige bore some relation to the popularity enjoyed by New Deal president Franklin Roosevelt: Both Lincoln and FDR were celebrated for their strong national leadership in moments of national crisis and their obvious concern for the marginalized and dispossessed. With Americans, both North and South, demonstrating renewed appreciation for Honest Abe, and with some even championing his work as the Great Emancipator, it’s not hard to imagine some “bewildered child Yankee,” and perhaps a few adults as well, feeling a bit confused about all the gushing over southern slaveholders and their secessionist goals. Some of that confusion, though, may have been mitigated by the way audiences in the 1930s encountered Lincoln. Movies and popular Lincoln plays of the era mainly told stories about Lincoln in his pre-presidential days: His New Salem romance with the ill-fated Ann Rutledge was one of the most popular threads in the Lincoln tale. By showing only the antebellum Lincoln, directors and producers could avoid 66 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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imagining Lincoln waging war on white southerners or advocating the end of chattel slavery. At the same time, many southern-themed films gave more emphasis to post-Civil War events or prewar conditions than to the conflict itself, again avoiding anything that might have pit Lincoln against southern whites. The Prisoner of Shark Island, a 1936 movie about the trial and imprisonment of Dr. Samuel Mudd for his role in Lincoln’s assassination, and the 1938 plantation romance Jezebel both followed that formula. So Red the Rose, released in 1935, provided the lesson on how not to make a Civil War movie: Because the war was so central to the story, it made viewers uncomfortable with its denigration of “the uncouth legions of Mr. Lincoln” who seemed all the more uncouth because of the movie’s obvious idolizing of the southern aristocracy.9 Lincoln, of course, received praise for his benevolence, but he was more often shown coming to the aid of whites than blacks. In a popular 1936 play written by Howard Koch, who would later be a screenwriter for Casablanca, a reincarnated Lincoln comes to Harlan County, Kentucky, to help white coal miners fight their own brand of “slavery.” Striking miners parade across the stage holding a sign that reads, “Free the Whites.” When Lincoln appears in the Shirley Temple film The Littlest Rebel (1935), his task has nothing to do with helping black slaves. He’s there, instead, to grant Shirley Temple’s plea for freedom for two imprisoned white men, one her Confederate father and the other a kindly Union officer. In Young Mr. Lincoln, Henry Fonda’s Lincoln likewise has virtually no contact with black characters. But in the film’s most dramatic moment, he comes to the defense of two white brothers, falsely accused of murder, who face the wrath of a lynch mob. The young Lincoln turns back the mob and later mounts a successful defense of the brothers, again breaking the chains of confinement for white men. These types of story lines helped mask real racial conflict, both historical and contemporary: They muted the tensions between slave masters and the enslaved as well as the racial hostility that had driven angry whites to lynch thousands of African Americans in the post-Civil War era. Hollywood studios were particularly keen to avoid those tensions, partly to appease southern white audiences and also to circumvent possible black protest. Mindful of the controversy associ-
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hungry again”—those words felt deeply relevant in 1930s America.8
Abraham Lincoln figured in a number of 1930s movies that focused largely on his antebellum life and portrayed him as strong, witty, benevolent, and a natural leader. Above: Henry Fonda portrays the future 16th president as a young lawyer in a scene from Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Opposite page: A poster for the 1940 film Abe Lincoln in Illinois, in which Raymond Massey plays Lincoln in a portrayal of his life up to the time of the presidential election of 1860.
ated with The Birth of a Nation, especially the protests organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People when the movie opened and that were renewed with each reshowing, later filmmakers sought a more harmonious racial portrait. Birth’s focus on violent interracial conflicts, especially scenes of vicious, marauding blacks, was a particular source of ire for NAACP leaders and had even led to court injunctions against the film. During the 1930s, Hollywood’s infamous Production Code, adopted by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, may have further discouraged films with any interracial antagonism. Although code enforcers showed little concern for the sensibilities of black audiences—there were no rules against portraying black people as lazy or slow or comical—they did worry about upsetting white
southerners by showing either too much racial intimacy or too much racial hostility.10 Additionally, showing interracial contact, especially anything antagonistic, became more complicated in the 1930s, when studios began employing increasing numbers of black men and women, not just white men in blackface, to play black parts. Griffith strictly adhered to Jim Crow protocol and pointedly cast only white men and women in roles that involved close contact with white characters. In 1930s Civil War movies, black men and women took those parts, which included playing slaves who might occasionally have complicated interactions with whites. Recognizing the potentially explosive nature of these scenes, many in the movie industry tried to control what viewers saw and how they interpreted it. The problem was particularly acute for 67 FALL 2019
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Crow in the U.S. and anti-Semitism abroad, mobilizing against Adolf Hitler’s racism required some acknowledgement of American problems. Some movie executives, along with members of the Roosevelt administration, recognized that opposing Nazis might affect the way they reckoned with American racial problems. For David Selznick, an understanding of these “fascist-ridden times” meant excising the Ku Klux Klan from Gone With the Wind, even as he kept the basic elements of Mitchell’s pro-Confederate plot in place. Lincoln, too, began to look different once Americans began talking more explicitly about racial hostility, whether abroad or in the U.S. When Marian Anderson was barred by the DAR from singing in their whites-only concert hall, members of the Roosevelt administration saw an opportunity to take a stand against racial bigotry, both in Nazi Germany and on American soil. Oscar Chapman, the assistant secretary of the Interior who helped organize the event, compared the ban against Anderson to the shunning of Jewish singers in Nazi Germany. But, Chapman insisted, America had something the Nazis lacked: a tradition of racial enlightenment, symbolized by Anderson singing before “a shrine for Abraham Lincoln.” Given that context, Anderson’s performance at the premiere of Young Mr. Lincoln a few weeks later helped spotlight not only Lincoln’s role in emancipating black slaves, but also his place as an icon in a global fight against bigotry. Additionally, her concert lent a more pointed racial overlay to John Ford’s movie, even though the film itself played it safe by imagining Lincoln only as a liberator of white men.12 Even during World War II, Hollywood films, including those with Civil War themes, leaned more toward avoiding racial conflict than confronting it. It was easier to simply take black characters out of a film altogether than risk spotlighting troubling racial tension. After all, to show African Americans in any type of conflict with white southerners might end up alienating one of these groups, both of whose support was needed in the current military effort. MGM studios dealt with precisely this problem in the production of Tennessee Johnson, a 1942 film on the life of Andrew Johnson. Worried about the NAACP criticism swirling about the film even before its release, filmmakers chose not to portray racial conflict in the Reconstruction South. Instead, they focused on the
COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
the producers of So Red the Rose, who dubbed this new interaction between black and white actors a “sociological experiment.” Because that film showcased a plantation rebellion led by disgruntled slaves, publicists were particularly anxious to explain that scene, especially to southern white audiences. Paramount, the film’s studio, issued a statement telling audiences that because the director, King Vidor, was a southern white man, he knew how to handle a black “mob” and could properly motivate his actors with “a simple word picture of negro life during the period of slavery.” Hoping to reassure audiences who might be alarmed at seeing an uprising of blacks, Paramount explained that Vidor had to push the black actors to go against their “native” comedic tendencies.11 Other filmmakers, as well as local censorship boards, likely looked at Vidor’s movie and concluded that interracial conflict was best left on the cutting-room floor. Filmmakers shied away from racial tension, whether in the form of white men punishing black slaves, black slaves attacking white owners, or black men suffering at the hands of white lynch mobs. What viewers got instead was a story that white Americans had always been more comfortable with: the traditional Lost Cause narrative about the extreme benevolence of slavery. Few films featured the angry slaves of So Red the Rose. Far more showcased the happy, contented slaves of Gone With the Wind, Jezebel, Rainbow on the River (1936), or The Littlest Rebel. And since plantation slavery fostered only kindness and good feelings in this alternative narrative, the act of emancipation had virtually no significance for most of Hollywood’s black characters. When The Littlest Rebel begins, and a children’s birthday party quickly becomes a scene of white families preparing for war, Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson (playing the part of the loyal butler) take a moment to ponder what the war is all about. Robinson’s character says he has heard about a white gentleman up north who wants to “free the slaves.” Both Temple and Robinson express confusion about what that even means. Yet, as the Depression decade drew to a close and war, specifically a war against a global fascist menace, became an ever more likely possibility, it became harder, even in Hollywood, to present a totally benign picture of America’s racial history. With many African Americans already drawing parallels between Jim
Civil War films of the 1930s largely avoided the depiction of interracial tension, opting instead to tell stories that emphasized the Lost Cause narrative about slavery, one characterized by kind owners and contented slaves. Above: A scene from Gone With the Wind, in which Hattie McDaniel’s performance as a loyal slave won her an Oscar. Opposite: A poster for The Littlest Rebel (1935), one of several Civil War films of the era in which emancipation was downplayed.
political struggles in Washington, drawing critical portraits not of black characters but of white politicians like Thaddeus Stevens, an adjustment that hardly appeased black leaders.13 Which is not to say that Lincoln, or Lincoln’s spirit, was totally absent in these films. The message he conveyed was not always made explicit, but his symbolic significance unquestionably assumed increased importance. During World War II, recalled the author Robert Penn Warren, “it was the image of Lincoln, not that of Washington or Jefferson, that flashed ritualistically on the silver screen after the double feature.” Sometimes, as in Tennessee Johnson, Lincoln was recalled as a great unifier, a leader celebrated for his commitment to bringing all parts of the nation
back together. Sometimes, Lincoln was recalled as a great emancipator, a leader who championed not just abolition but even racial justice. And sometimes Lincoln appeared in subtle forms, his presence folded into films that had little to do with the Civil War or even Reconstruction. We might, for example, find him in a particularly unusual place: the most iconic World War II movie of all, Casablanca.14 In Michael Curtiz’s 1943 film, there is a hint, early on, that the Civil War has a certain relevance for those caught up in the current conflict. “I remember every detail,” Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman, remembering their time together in Paris. “The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.” By invoking this ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76 69 FALL 2019
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This postwar depiction of a Confederate army camp shows both soldiers and the slaves who served them while at war.
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The B&A Q&A: Kevin M. Levin IN HIS LATEST BOOK, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (to be published this fall by the University of North Carolina Press), Boston-based historian and educator Kevin M. Levin tackles the enduring claim that tens of thousands of African Americans willingly fought as soldiers in the Confederate army. We recently sat down with Levin—founder of the award-winning blog Civil War Memory (civilwarmemory.com)—to learn about his work on the controversial subject.
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B&A
I wrote my first blog post about the black Confederate myth back in 2008. Over the years these posts have generated hundreds of comments and often heated discussion. At its core the question is not simply whether blacks served as Confederate soldiers, but how we think about and remember the place of slavery in the American Civil War. The subject bridges my interests in the history and memory of the Civil War, digital media literacy, and history education. From the beginning I was struck by the wide discrepancy between what Confederates themselves had to say about the status and role of enslaved people in the war effort and the wild claims Kevin M. Levin
made today about the existence of tens of thousands of loyal black Confederate soldiers. These claims can be found on thousands of websites, in history textbooks, National Park Service exhibits, and monuments, and even in the writings of two Harvard scholars. I wanted to better understand why some people insist on defending this narrative in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary and why others who have a sincere interest in the history of the war fall victim to this myth. How did the idea of black Confederates become, as you note in the book’s subtitle, “the Civil War’s most persistent myth”? What I find so striking is that during the
very vocal debate over whether to allow enlistment of black men as soldiers in the southern armies—a debate that occurred throughout the Confederacy beginning in 1864 and continuing right up to the final weeks of the war—is that not a single person pointed to African Americans already serving as soldiers in the Confederate military. Regardless of their position on slave enlistment, no one in the army, in the Confederate capital of Richmond, or on the home front used the fact of existing black soldiers to bolster their position. Even in the decades following the war the white southerners who fought the conflict recalled the presence of blacks in the army, either as body servants or impressed slaves, but not as soldiers. This changed only in the mid1970s as the memory of the war shifted in response to new research and the influence of the civil rights movement. Slavery, emancipation, and the service of black men in the Union army finally took center stage, and this did not sit well with members of the Confederate heritage community, particularly the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The SCV soon insisted that blacks were not only loyal to the Confederacy but had in fact “served” as soldiers. They commissioned books and used Confederate Veteran magazine to highlight these stories, but it was the internet that helped to spread these tales to a wider audience. Many of the websites that contain these false claims are cut and pasted from one another. Readers untrained in how to search and assess online content are easily misinformed. The ease with which new websites and social media pages can be created makes it next to impossible to challenge the black Confederate myth on a broad scale. In Searching for Black Confederates, you also investigate the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army. What were these? And did you learn anything that surprised you?
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MICHAELA LEVIN
How did you come to write a book about so-called black Confederates?
“I wanted to better understand why some people insist on defending this narrative [of the existence of black Confederates] in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” KEVIN M. LEVIN, AUTHOR OF SEARCHING FOR BLACK CONFEDERATES: THE CIVIL WAR’S MOST PERSISTENT MYTH
Enslaved labor was vital to the success of the Confederate war effort. Tens of thousands of impressed slaves worked in hospitals, constructed earthworks, repaired and extended rail lines, and helped manufacture artillery in places like the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. Impressed slaves also performed a wide range of important roles in the armies. Confederate armies also included thousands of body servants (what I refer to in the book as camp slaves), who accompanied their masters to the front. These men functioned outside the military hierarchy entirely. They tended to their masters’ every need, including cooking, tending horses, foraging, cleaning, and serving as messengers with families back home. This mobilization of black bodies helped to offset the population difference between North and South and made it possible for the Confederacy to maximize the number of white men that could shoulder a rifle in the ranks. General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia may have included anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 enslaved men in the summer of 1863. Their presence—and the important roles they played—helped to place the preservation of slavery at the center of the Confederate war effort. Regardless of whether a Confederate soldier owned a single slave, he was reminded on a daily basis that the army could not function without the assistance of enslaved labor. Confederate armies were an extension of a society that depended almost exclusively on enslaved labor. Understanding just how pervasive enslaved people were in the armies can help us to appreciate what Vice President Alexander Stephens referred to as the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. What sources did you find particularly useful or important in your research? Some of the most misunderstood sources today are Confederate pensions that
the midst of danger. The brief responses to specific questions and longer accounts provided by these elderly men can be read as claims to their own martial manhood—feelings that during wartime had probably been denied or dismissed every time they were referred to as “uncle” or “boy.” How hopeful are you that the black Confederate myth will ever be completely debunked? Do you see it as growing or waning in strength?
were issued decades after the war to a small number of former camp slaves. Scans of these documents are found on websites today as purportedly clear evidence that African Americans served as soldiers in the Confederate army—even though the documents themselves indicate that they were issued to former slaves, not to soldiers. The pensions tell us very little about the war itself and much more about how white southerners at the beginning of the 20th century used the loyal slave narrative to maintain a Jim Crow culture at a time of increased racial tension. The loyalty and obedience of former camp slaves stood in sharp contrast to a younger generation of African Americans who pushed for civil rights during the period and especially after having returned from World War I to make the world “safe for democracy.” Applicants for these pensions clearly understood that as a condition of approval they were expected to offer testimony of their loyalty to their former masters and the Confederacy, but they also likely used the process to demonstrate their bravery and steadfastness in
You can still find hundreds of websites that support the black Confederate myth. This will continue as long as we neglect to teach students how to search for information online and assess the content of websites. That said, there is reason to be optimistic. During the Civil War sesquicentennial, state commissions, the National Park Service, and other organizations highlighted a narrative that included the service of black Union soldiers and asked the public to consider difficult questions related to the history of slavery and race in America. Black Confederates were hard to find beyond events sponsored by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In the wake of Dylann Roof ’s murder of nine churchgoers in Charleston in 2015 and subsequent calls to remove Confederate flags and monuments from public spaces, the SCV once again trotted out the black Confederate narrative to argue that the war had nothing to do with the preservation of slavery. These calls fell on deaf ears. A proposal made by two South Carolina Republican state legislators in October 2017 to erect a monument to black Confederates on the statehouse grounds also failed to attract serious attention. It is safe to assume that as long as we continue to debate the cause and legacy of the Civil War we will continue to see appeals to fictitious black Confederates. 73 FALL 2019
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Old Rosy left the battlefield to organize the city’s defense. Thomas, who led the army’s XIV Corps, took charge of the troops still organized and able to fight. The bulk of them took up a position on Snodgrass Hill, in what had been the center of the Union line. Thomas inspired the beleaguered troops with his confidence and indomitable spirit. Periodically he “would jump off his horse,” one officer recalled, “swing his hat, rush among the men and encourage them by his own acts of valor.”1 Brigadier General James A. Garfield, Rosecrans’ chief of staff (and future president of the United States), rode to Snodgrass Hill during the heaviest fighting, saw Thomas’ determined stand, and that evening sent a dispatch to the army commander: “General Thomas has fought a most terrific battle and has damaged the enemy badly”—so much so, he believed, that if Rosecrans sent the balance of the army to reinforce Thomas, it could still win victory the next day.2 That message appears in the Official Records. In the lore of the battle, however, Garfield is credited with sending another dispatch during the height of the fighting. It read simply: “Thomas standing like a rock. Seven divisions intact.”3 Numerous historians point to this dispatch as the origin of the “Rock of Chickamauga” sobriquet, and some of them claim that the northern press quickly seized upon it. This was not the case: A computer search for the phrase in dozens of newspapers returns no hits for “Rock of Chickamauga” prior to 1869. However, evidence does suggest that by then Thomas was commonly known by that nickname. For example, at a reunion of the Army of the Cumberland in November 1870, a few months after Thomas’ death, Garfield gave a memorial oration in which he declared, “He was, indeed, the ‘Rock of Chickamauga,’ against which the wild waves of battle dashed in vain. It will stand forever in the annals of his country, that there he saved from destruction the Army of the Cumberland.”4 The statement presumes that his listeners were already familiar with the phrase. Although Thomas amply deserved 74 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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the moniker, it has a larger significance because of the light it casts on Rosecrans. For a time Old Rosy was considered one of the North’s best generals, and until the fall of Vicksburg he was arguably more successful than Grant. Grant and Rosecrans despised each other, however, and in his memoirs Grant performed a deft but merciless hatchet job on his rival— one that has influenced our understanding of Rosecrans to this day.5 But “Rock of Chickamauga” makes the case far more economically. It tacitly draws attention to Rosecrans’ departure from the battlefield. In the wake of the Confederate breakthrough Rosecrans was understandably shaken; still, when viewed objectively his decision to organize Chattanooga as
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James Montgomery and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in particular. These men understand Tubman’s worth as a leader of men and women, and trust her instincts and expertise. But even these progressive characters must sometimes be forced to act on behalf of enslaved people. In the novel, when a feud between commanders threatens to scuttle the Combahee River Raid, Tubman manipulates General David Hunter’s ambitions to get him to do the right thing after she decides that “she didn’t need to convince General Hunter that the plan was foolproof. She just needed to convince the old paymaster that he had one last chance for glory.”4 Because The Tubman Command is a novel and not a history book, Cobbs is able to turn from the historical record and create her own version of Harriet Tubman’s private life. Her Tubman is often thirsty and hungry and exhausted, frustrated and angry. She is attracted to one of her scouts, Samuel Heyward, and they have a (fictionalized) sexual relationship that Cobbs imbues with moving honesty. Heyward ultimately chooses to stay with his wife and children, and Tubman’s sense of betrayal almost overwhelms her at a critical point in the raid. Through Cobbs’ evocative descriptions of her protagonist’s inner life and physical reality, the reader comes to understand Harriet Tubman
a rally point makes sense, and he did the job effectively. Yet the choice appears fatally weak when contrasted with Thomas’ epic stand on Snodgrass Hill. In view of the fact that he held Rosecrans in high regard, then and later, this juxtaposition would have dismayed Thomas. Nonetheless, “Rock of Chickamauga” helps to frame Rosecrans in the American Iliad as a badly flawed commander, a reputation that has clung to him ever since. 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.
as not just a revered historical figure, an icon to be depicted on the $20 bill (at some point), or the subject of one of the funniest episodes of the Comedy Central show Drunk History to date, but as a human being. This is one of the benefits of historical fiction: Readers come to know people who lived in the past in a granular way. They are immersed in the protagonists’ lives, and in their worlds. This is why so many were drawn to Civil War history after reading The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Battle of Gettysburg. Perhaps a new generation of readers will become similarly interested in the complexities of the war after reading The Tubman Command. There has been a lot of talk recently among historians about how to popularize nonfiction history books. Perhaps using the “tools of fiction” would help historians write in more compelling ways. The people who took part in the Civil War were as real as Harriet Tubman was. Why not tell readers what they looked like, where they lived, what they did when they weren’t writing diary entries or giving orders or thinking big thoughts? These are not meaningless details. They are the real stuff of history. And why not think about the arc of a history book as a plot, rather than a collection of thematic chapters? “Writing novels has improved my dramatic instincts in nonfiction,” Cobbs told me. “There, one must absolutely stick only to known (or newly discovered) facts, but how the story is told makes a big difference.” History—particularly Civil War history—is ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76
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WILLIAM MARVEL IS THE AUTHOR OF 18 BOOKS, INCLUDING TWO ABOUT APPOMATTOX. HIS MOST RECENT BOOK WAS LINCOLN’S MERCENARIES: ECONOMIC MOTIVATION AMONG UNION SOLDIERS DURING THE CIVIL WAR, AND HE HAS JUST COMPLETED A BIOGRAPHY OF FITZ JOHN PORTER.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
sharing of rations, so the editors ran an il- “little courtesy” caught the attention lustration of it by their staff artist, Alfred of Major General John B. Gordon, who Waud—ostensibly from a sketch he made purportedly offered a reciprocal gesture. STEREOSCOPE at the time. That scene remains central A sudden thirst for reconciliation stories CONTINUED FROM P. 74 to the condensed reconciliation theme prompted both northern and southern emphasized at Appomattox.15 newspapers to reprint Chamberlain’s replete with good stories that have larger Gerrish’s depiction discourse for months meanings. Historians can tell those sto- of the surrender, meanthereafter, making it a ries without abandoning the arguments while, garbled Chamstaple of the Appomatthat usually drive nonfiction books. berlain’s anecdote, for tox saga.17 Gordon’s There remain many dark corners in Civil he described the Union own aide-de-camp deWar history, and historians should illumi- troops already standing scribed the surrender nate them however they can. at “shoulder arms” as the with no such honor as Confederates marched late as 1885, but GorMEGAN KATE NELSON IS A WRITER AND HISTORIinto the village. Then, don—a U.S. senator AN LIVING IN BOSTON. HER BOOK, THE THREE-CORonce their line halted who knew the politiNERED WAR: THE UNION, THE CONFEDERACY, AND NATIVE PEOPLES IN THE FIGHT FOR THE WEST, WILL and faced to the left, he cal value of such senBE PUBLISHED BY SCRIBNER IN FEBRUARY 2020. claimed that Chambertimentality—started lain redundantly “gave acknowledging ChamJOHN B. GORDON the command ‘shoulder berlain’s “tribute” at arms,’ and we thus saleast by 1893.18 “THE REAL WAR WILL NEVER…” luted our fallen enemies.” The Rebels, he By use of the passive voice, ChamberCONTINUED FROM P. 47 added, returned this “salute.”16 lain still did not overtly claim to have orWith a new series of lectures late in dered the movement that passed for a saluting the Confederates), but those 1882, Chamberlain quickly offered an salute—or to have commanded Union published after the mid-1880s usually do. explanation to salvage the surrender troops at the surrender ceremony. In 1867 Sometimes that generosity is attributed narrative from Gerrish’s discrediting he said in local lectures that he was “seto the entire Union army. Century Maga- muddle: Union soldiers came to “carry lected” for that duty, but with a broader zine published a recollection of the sur- arms” at a bugle signal as the Confed- audience in 1882 he backed away from that render in 1887 that failed to describe the erates approached, he said, and that assertion: Bartlett’s entire division had been present, after all, and Bartlett was on the field, in command. After Bartlett died, Chamberlain worked those details back into a more “Gettysburg—the place and the battle—is offered here in a elaborate story with a cumbersome, unkind of fifth dimension, a remarkable assembly of haunts, convincing explanation of how he asgripping and moving, that is very hard to put down.” sumed command of the whole division. —Stephen W. Sears, author of Gettysburg In a 1901 interview he maintained that Grant personally selected him to oversee the ceremony, and that it was his own idea to have his men salute—although the motion he described was not a salute. In a 1903 address he changed the wording of his command slightly and called it “the marching salute,” but that conveyed no salute, either, because his men were not marching. Gordon nevertheless responded with a flourish of his sword, Chamberlain said, and he chose this histrionic version for his eloquent memoir on the closing scenes of the war.19 That heavily embellished rendition of an imagined exchange is now the signature tableau of the entire Appomattox idyll.20 Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead Kent Gramm | Photographs by Chris Heisey
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Civil War color scheme, the filmmakers indicate who fights for freedom and who does not. Central to Casablanca’s story, though, was not a simple dichotomy between freedom and slavery, but the evolution from indifference to commitment, in this case the process by which Rick, Humphrey Bogart’s character, dedicates himself to the anti-Nazi cause. In some ways, Rick’s journey reflects a larger American journey: how it became necessary to break with the hesitations and isolationism of the interwar period and accept the need, again, to fight a new war. One critical step in that journey involved giving the new war a strong moral overlay, to make it clear that the fight in Europe was about principles, not material gain. And no figure better symbolized deep moral conviction in wartime than Abraham Lincoln. In Casablanca,
nothing illustrates this quite so clearly as the moment when Rick’s saloon-owning competitor asks if Rick’s Café Americain and the saloon’s black piano player, Sam, are for sale. It’s a critical moment in the film that signals Rick’s budding alliance with the anti-fascist fight. Rick gives a response that reverberates with Lincolnian morality: “I don’t buy or sell human beings.” We can feel even more certain that Lincoln’s spirit stood behind this line when we consider that the onetime Lincoln dramatist Howard Koch was the likely author. During the 1930s, Hollywood’s Civil War movies walked gingerly across a Civil War landscape. Several motion pictures not only brought the Confederate tradition to life; they also found ways to make it even more compelling and appealing. Increasingly, though, Depression-era filmmakers also responded to the growing power of the Civil War president, whose influence deepened as the 1930s drew to a close and global conflict loomed on the horizon. Unlike Confederates, Honest Abe was entwined with opposi-
tion to racial bigotry, making him an ideal symbol for the kind of moral outrage that could help turn indifferent Americans into committed anti-fascists. Surely these were images that simplified Lincoln’s own attitudes about race and racial justice, erasing the complicated twists and turns that finally led the real Lincoln to issue a proclamation of emancipation. But Hollywood has always excelled at simplifying complicated historical circumstances. During the New Deal years, Hollywood, as it gradually shifted away from one simplified narrative about the Confederacy, helped create a new but still uncomplicated storyline, one that would have considerable staying power in the movies: the story of the powerful and crusading Civil War president who maintained a firm and consistent commitment to freedom and racial justice. A PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND AMERICAN STUDIES AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY, NINA SILBER CURRENTLY SERVES AS THE PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY OF CIVIL WAR HISTORIANS. HER BOOKS INCLUDE THE ROMANCE OF REUNION: NORTHERNERS AND THE SOUTH, 1865–1900 (1993) AND DAUGHTERS OF THE UNION: NORTHERN WOMEN FIGHT THE CIVIL WAR (2005). HER WORK HAS ALSO APPEARED IN THE WASHINGTON POST; THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION; AND HISTORY NEWS NETWORK. THIS ARTICLE DRAWS FROM RESEARCH FOR HER RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOK, THIS WAR AIN’T OVER: FIGHTING THE CIVIL WAR IN NEW DEAL AMERICA (2018).
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brary, University of North Carolina; Channing Smith and George Griggs Diaries, Confederate Memorial Literary Society Collection, Virginia Museum of History and Culture (all entries April 10, 1865).
“THE REAL WAR WILL NEVER...” (Pages 30–47, 76) 1.
2. Jubal A. Early, “The Campaigns of Gen. Robert E. Lee. An Address by Lieut. General Jubal A. Early, before Washington and Lee University, January 19th, 1872,” in Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Lee the Soldier (Lincoln, NE, 1996), 65.
Notes SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
AMERICAN ILIAD (Pages 26–27, 74) 1.
Quoted in Christopher J. Einolf, George Thomas: Virginian for the Union (Norman, OK, 2007), 177.
2. Garfield to Rosecrans, September 20, 1863, United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901), Series I, vol. 30, pt. 1, 145. 3. The alleged dispatch appears nowhere in the Official Records. The earliest source I can find for the claim is Byron A. Dunn, On General Thomas’s Staff (Chicago, 1907), 344. 4. “Oration of General James A. Garfield, on the Life and Character of General George H. Thomas,” Society of the Army of the Cumberland, Fourth Reunion (Cincinnati, 1870), 84. 5. All of Rosecrans’ biographers make this case, and it is argued at length in Frank P. Varney, General Grant and the Rewriting of History: How the Destruction of General William S. Rosecrans Influenced Our Understanding of the Civil War (El Dorado Hills, CA, 2013).
STEREOSCOPE (Pages 28–29, 74, 76) 1.
Geoffrey C. Ward, The Civil War: An Illustrated History (New York, 1990), 272.
Jay Parini, “How Historical Fiction Went Highbrow,” The Atlantic (May 2009): theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2009/05/how-historical-fiction-went-highbrow/307378/
2. Elizabeth Cobbs, The Tubman Command (Arcade, 2019), 320. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid, 138.
12. Lowe, Meade’s Army, 370.
4. Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 1-vol. ed. (New York, 1930), 54–55.
13. Chamberlain to Sarah B. Chamberlain, April 13, 1865, Box 1, Chamberlain Papers, Bowdoin College Library; Portland (ME) Daily Press, December 9, 11, 12, 13, 1867; Daily Journal (Augusta, ME), January 6, 1868. Parker’s primary informants for the Appomattox episode, Colonel James Cunningham and Isaac Kingsbury, both attended veteran gatherings with Chamberlain, whom they accompanied when he called on Confederate generals: see, for instance, Memorial of the Society of the Fifth Army Corps, May 1, 1874, Reel 4, Fitz John Porter Papers, Library of Congress; Parker, The Story of the Thirty-second Massachusetts, 254.
5. David Williams, Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War (New York, 2008), 8.
14. Theodore Gerrish, Army Life: A Private’s Reminiscences Of The Civil War (1882), 259–260.
6. Randolph quoted in Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, 1983), 18; P.G.T. Beauregard, “The First Battle of Bull Run,” in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols. (New York, 1887-88), 1:222. Beauregard blamed Jefferson Davis for Confederate defeat.
15. Horace Porter, “Grant’s Last Campaign,” Century, Vol. 35, no. 1 (November 1887): 147. Even if Waud did draw the sketch at the time, the caption reflected an 1887 interpretation of what may have been a picket-line meeting during the truce.
3. For similar texts on other Confederate monuments, see Timothy S. Sedore, An Illustrated Guide to Virginia’s Confederate Monuments (Carbondale, 2011) and Gould B. Hagler Jr., Georgia’s Confederate Monuments (Macon, GA, 2014).
7.
Lee to Mary Anna Custis Lee, April 19, 1863, in Robert E. Lee, The Wartime Letters of R. E. Lee, ed. by Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin (Boston, 1961), 437–438.
8. Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. by Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953), 7:514–515. 9. Francis J. Parker, The Story of the Thirty-second Massachusetts Infantry (Boston, 1880), 254– 255. 10. Phillip R. Woodcock Diary, April 10, 1865, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center; United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901), 46(3):674; David W. Lowe, ed., Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman (Kent, OH, 2007), 370–372; George Meade, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, 2 vols. (New York, 1913), 2:270. 11. William L. Livermore Diary, April 9, 10, 1865, Virginia Museum of History and Culture; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (New York, 1886), 2:494–495; James Eldred Phillips and John Bell Vincent Diaries, Virginia Museum of History and Culture. See also J.W. Warr Diary, Appomattox Court House National Historical Park; William D. Alexander and J.E. Whitehorne Diaries, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Li-
16. Portland Daily Press, August 24, 25, 1881; Gerrish, Army Life, 261. 17. Brunswick (ME) Telegraph, quoted in the Morning Journal and Courier (New Haven, CT), December 30, 1882; Oxford Democrat (Paris, ME), December 26, 1882, and January 9, 1883; National Tribune (Washington, D.C.), January 11, 1883; Wheeling (WV) Sunday Register, January 14, 1883; Clarksville (TN) Weekly Chronicle, January 20, 1883; Wichita (KS) City Eagle, February 22, 1883; Orleans County Monitor (Barton, VT), March 5, 1883. 18. Richmond (VA) Dispatch, November 18, 1893; Memphis (TN) Daily Appeal, April 11, 1885. 19. “The First Complete Detailed Story of the Surrender,” Boston Sunday Journal, April 28, 1901; “Appomattox,” Personal Recollections of the War of the Rebellion: Addresses delivered before the Commandery of the State of New York, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, 4 vols. (New York, 1891–1912), 3:275; Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies (New York, 1915), 260–261. 20. In Belligerent Muse (Chapel Hill, 2014), 157– 158, Stephen Cushman somehow reasoned that Chamberlain’s inconsistencies, contradictions, and backtracking might actually reflect an attempt at authenticity; apparently even such obviously imaginative additions as his supposed selection by Grant do not “negate the reliability” of Chamberlain’s claims. Untroubled by the lack of contemporary eyewitness testimony, and unaware of the sudden proliferation of Chamberlain’s story in 1882–1883, Cushman missed the obvious reconciliation-era genesis of the tale.
CIVIL WAR CINEMA (Pages 60–69, 77) 1.
For more on the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind see Leonard Leff, “Gone With the Wind and Hollywood’s Racial Politics,” Atlantic Monthly 284 (December 1999): 106–114.
2. Bosley Crowther, “Lincoln’s Gala Night: Twentieth Century-Fox Haunts a Ghost at Midnight in Springfield, Ill.,” The New York Times, June 4, 1939. 3. The best account of the making, showing, and
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legacy of The Birth of a Nation is Melvyn Stokes, D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation�: A History of “the Most Controversial Motion Picture of all Time� (New York, 2008); for more on Civil War films in the 1920s and after see Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (New York, 2001). 4. Chadwick, Reel Civil War, 122. 5. Review of So Red the Rose, Variety (December 4, 1935). 6. Matthew Bernstein, “A ‘Professional Southerner’ in the Hollywood Studio System: Lamar Trotti at Work, 1925–1952,� Deborah Barker and Kathryn Mckee, eds., American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (Athens, GA, 2011), 122–148. 7.
On plantation architecture in the book and film versions of Gone With the Wind, see Darden Pyron, Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York, 1991), 370–371; Time Magazine, December 25, 1939; Jane Cobb, “Living and Leisure,� The New York Times, January 17, 1940.
8. Ben Robertson, Red Hills and Cotton: An Upcountry Memory (New York, 1940), 28; Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows, God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge, 1995), 125; Marion Fritz to Margaret Mitchell, December 14, 1936, box 96, Margaret Mitch-
ell Papers, University of Georgia; Pyron, Southern Daughter, 325.
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9. Review of So Red the Rose, The New York Times, November 28, 1935.
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10. Ellen Scott, “Regulating ‘Nigger’: Racial Offense, African American Activists, and the MPPDA, 19281961,� Film History 26 (2014): 1–31.
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11. Arthur Draper, “Uncle Tom, Will You Never Die?� New Theatre and Film Magazine (January 1936): 30–31. 12. Hollywood had a complicated history with Nazism, with some studios making compromises so they could retain a German market, while others took a more critical approach. For more on this see Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (New York, 2013). David Selznick, Memo From David O. Selznick (New York, 1972), 152; “Southern Intolerance Years Ago Inspiration for Anderson Recital,� Chicago Defender, April 15 1939. 13. Thomas Cripps, “Movies, Race, and World War II: Tennessee Johnson as an Anticipation of the Strategies of the Civil Rights Movement,� Prologue 14 (Summer, 1982): 49–67. 14. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 79.
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Jack, the Four-Legged Soldier When members of the Niagara Fire Insurance Engine Company of Pittsburgh went off to war in the summer of 1861, they brought along the stray dog (pictured above) who had wandered into their firehouse sometime before the outbreak of the conflict. “Jack,” as the firemen—now soldiers in Company F of the 102nd Pennsylvania Infantry—had named him, was quickly embraced by the men in the regiment. He accompanied them through some of the war’s largest engagements, including the Seven Days Battles (during which Jack was shot through the shoulder and back), Antietam, Fredericksburg (where he was slightly wounded), Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor. According to the men of the 102nd, Jack came to understand various bugle calls and would search for the regiment’s wounded and dead in the wake of battle. After Confederate troops captured him during the fighting at Salem Church in May 1863, Jack spent six months at the POW camp at Belle Isle, Virginia, before his release that fall. He returned to the regiment but went missing on December 23, 1864, never to be seen again. Some in the 102nd speculated he might have met a violent end, perhaps being killed by some “mercenary person” for the silver collar the men had bought him after his release from captivity.
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