SOLDIERS OF MISFORTUNE
P. 52
MEN OF FAITH
P. 18
VOL. 8, NO. 2
Why did Robert E. Lee turn down command of the Union army and join the Confederacy in 1861? It’s complicated.
The Decision
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
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Contents DEPARTMENTS
VOLUME 8, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2018
FEATURES
Salvo
CLOCKWISE , FROM TOP LEFT: LANPHER PRODUCTIONS, INC.; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BOB ZELLER COLLECTION; NATIONAL NUMISMATIC COLLECTION, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY
{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}
TRAVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A Visit to Yorktown VOICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Big Talk FACES OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Major Hapgood and His Famous Clerk FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Men of Faith
The Decision 30 Why did Robert E. Lee turn down command of the Union army and join the Confederacy in 1861? It’s complicated. By Allen C. Guelzo
PRESERVATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Keeping Seminary Ridge Sacred COST OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A Seized Banner Pays Off IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Shedding Light on a Famous Photo
Columns AMERICAN ILIAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 The Making of a Hero
An Unlikely Battleground 42 Fourth of July observations during the Civil War reflected the country’s thorniest questions— including which Americans could claim the holiday as their own. By Paul Quigley
PUBLIC HISTORY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Whither Public History?
Books & Authors THE BEST GETTYSBURG BOOKS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
WITH ALLEN C. GUELZO, LAWRENCE KORCZYK, BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN, ETHAN S. RAFUSE, LESLEY J. GORDON, AND JENNIFER M. MURRAY
THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
BY STEPHEN W. SEARS
In Every Issue EDITORIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Changes, Big and Small
Soldiers of Misfortune 52
PARTING SHOT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Satterlee’s Saw
Financial motives drove Union recruiting as much as more altruistic incentives. By William Marvel
ON THE COVER: General Robert E. Lee. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress. Colorized by Mads Madsen of Colorized History.
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1 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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editorial
VOLUME 8, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2018
Terry A. Johnston Jr. PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TERRY@CIVILWARMONITOR.COM
Changes, Big and Small
Stephen Berry Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor Matthew C. Hulbert EDITORIAL ADVISORS
roughly seven years ago, as I was planning for the launch of The Civil War Monitor, one of my most important calls was to a longtime acquaintance at the Civil War Preservation Trust. I knew I wanted the Monitor to feature regular updates on efforts to protect Civil War battlefields across the country, and there was no one better versed in those ongoing battles than the folks at the Trust. The result of our discussions was the “Preservation” column that’s appeared in our pages since our first issue, a space that’s been consistently popular with our readers—reflecting their deep interest in the Trust’s important mission. That mission expanded four years ago, when the Trust began helping to protect land relating not only to the Civil War, but also to the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Saving sites connected to these earlier conflicts in American history has in turn helped accelerate the preservation of Civil War battlefield land, the Trust’s original task. In May, the Trust underwent an even bigger change with the creation of a new umbrella organization, the American Battlefield Trust, under which the Civil War Trust and newly formed Revolutionary War Trust will operate. And while the company’s name has changed, its commitment to Civil War battlefield preservation remains ironclad. We hope you’ll continue to support the Trust’s efforts to protect America’s hallowed grounds—an undertaking that’s more important than ever. Learn more about how you can help at their website, battlefields.org. ••• Another change I’m happy to announce is the debut of a new recurring column, “Public History” (p. 28), devoted to issues relating to public history, or the practice of history in museums, parks, historical societies, or anywhere outside of traditional academic settings. In the first installment, The American Civil War Museum’s John Coski writes about the many challenges—some old, some new—facing public historians, in particular those devoted to interpreting the Civil War. For fans of Jenny Johnston’s “Living History” or Megan Kate Nelson’s “Stereoscope” columns, not to worry— you’ll see both again soon.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: letters@civilwarmonitor.com
2
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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 ©2018 by Bayshore History, llc all rights reserved.
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2018
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Can’t get enough
MILITARY HISTORY?
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d i s pat c h e s
GRANT’S CRUEL SUMMER
A. Wilson Greene’s article in the Spring 2018 issue on Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s early actions at Petersburg [“Grant’s Cruel Summer,” Vol. 8, No. 1] is intriguing, but ultimately disappointing because it does not interact with Grant’s personality and history. Greene’s Grant lives in a vacuum, cloistered not only from his own history and character, but from contemporary events unfolding elsewhere. We would scarcely explore General Robert E. Lee’s Gettysburg failure without contextualizing and offsetting it with his brilliant audacity at Chancellorsville weeks before. This article, denying Grant a similar context, leaves readers to wonder why he is counted as the Union’s foremost soldier. We see a strategic vacillator issuing confusing orders, dissembling with his generals, and evincing little interest in crucial operations—one who, instead, dallies in inane personal correspondence and feckless carousing. By 1864, however, Grant had largely demonstrated himself as one unwavering in strategic vision and focus, unflappable in danger, unambiguous in his commands, and uncomplicated in his honesty. It would have been intriguing, therefore, had Greene endeavored to reconcile the early failings at Petersburg with Grant’s established generalship. What led to these deviations? What differed—either in Grant, the architect and victor of the other grand siege of the war at Vicksburg, or else in the present crucible in Virginia—to precipitate these events? Historians have suggest-
AMERICAN ILIAD Travel Special: The Best Civil War Battlefield Parks
P. 10
VOL. 8 NO. 1
In June and July 1864, the Union’s top soldier tried to defeat Robert E. Lee and capture Petersburg, Virginia. It didn’t go so well.
Grant’s Cruel Summer PLUS
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ed that Grant worked to threaten Lee such that he could not dispatch his forces to help foil other Union initiatives. Others see the looming national election as a key component of Grant’s urgency. And certainly we might consider how the mantle of national command compelled Grant to adjust the day-to-day focus of his generalship. Without exploring such motivations and circumstances, I’m afraid this piece will do more to affirm the well-worn convictions of Lost Cause apologists than to further dialogue about the compelling and imperfect and enigmatic figure of Ulysses S. Grant. Josh Linn CARSON CITY, NEVADA
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’m sure that I stand with many readers of The Civil War Monitor when I say that Mark Grimsley’s column in the Spring 2018 issue [“American Iliad: Beyond the White Man’s Iliad,” Vol. 8, No. 1] touched raw nerves. Professor Grimsley obviously has thought long and deeply about this subject, and I respect his viewpoint. Nevertheless, I am compelled to strongly disagree with his conclusions. First, I believe that his rationale for arguing for the removal of almost all statues of Robert E. Lee from public spaces is flawed. Grimsley states that removing statues does not represent the erasure of history, because it does not extend to book burning or Orwellian rewriting of history. However, far too few people read scholarly biographies and histories of the Civil War era. I would bet that, for many people, statues constitute their primary knowledge of the Civil War. On the other hand, how many people are inspired to begin reading about the conflict by viewing statues of Civil War figures? In the 20th and (so far) 21st centuries, we have seen many statues pulled down with the intent of erasing inconvenient history. Let’s not be quick to add to the total. Second, I strongly object to Grimsley’s characterization of the American Iliad, “in its present form,” as “the White Man’s Iliad.” The Civil War certainly is the quintessential American Iliad, but to characterize it in white-only terms is just wrong. I certainly can understand that it may be perceived that way, as a result of, inter alia, the need for
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North-South reconciliation and the “Lost Cause” movement, but this approach ignores the role of the nearly 200,000 former slaves and free blacks who fought, bled, and died for their freedom, as well as the many who fled slavery, both before and during the war. If this story is not well known, if indeed the contributions of black troops have been “made invisible,” perhaps those who teach history should look themselves in the mirror. Yes, Lee fought, and fought well, to preserve the Confederacy. Yes, he abrogated his oath to protect and defend the Constitution. But let’s not think we can solve our social problems by removing his statues from public view. That dog won’t hunt.
Richard Griffin VIA EMAIL
THE BEST CIVIL WAR BOOKS
As someone who enjoys Civil War novels, I concur with James Marten’s selections of The Killer Angels, Cold Mountain, and Widow of the South as among the best Civil War books ever published [“The Best Civil War Books of All Time,” Vol. 8, No. 1]. Two others I would include in this category are E.L. Doctorow’s The March, which describes William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea in beautiful prose, and The Judas Field by Howard Bahr, who takes us on a journey with survivors of the Battle of Franklin who are suffering from PTSD. Given my particular interest in intelligence-related books, I noted none in this category were chosen by any of the three historians who provided their top picks. For the record, I nominate Edwin C. Fishel’s The Secret War for the Union: The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War as the all-time best in the intelligence category, with Grant’s Secret Service: The Intelligence War from Belmont to Appomattox by William B. Feis not far
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behind. Also, as runner-up to these two, I include Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln by William A. Tidwell with James O. Hall and David Winfred Gaddy. Tom Ryan BETHANY BEACH, DELAWARE
WRONG ON PICKETT’S CHARGE?
I enjoyed the statistical data on Pickett’s Charge [“Figures: Pickett’s Charge,” Vol. 8, No. 1] in the Spring 2018 issue. However, there is no way Union forces suffered 2,300 casualties repelling the charge, which would amount to over one third of the estimated number of men listed as awaiting the assault. This would be true even if the losses from the Confederate artillery bombardment are included, as the guns mostly overshot the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. It is commonly agreed that total Union losses on July 3 came to about 3,000, and most of these were incurred in the heavy fighting on the Union right around Culp’s Hill in the morning. The Union losses during Pickett’s Charge probably were in the hundreds, not the thousands. Indeed, as per the provided data, only 2,000–3,000 Confederates managed to reach the Union lines, and I doubt that in the short time they were there they were able to kill or wound over 2,000 Union soldiers.
in American History (2015), in which they place the casualty figure between Union generals John Gibbon’s and Alexander Hays’ divisions at 1,930 men. By then adding in casualties among Union soldiers of other corps who supported these men, including rear echelon soldiers subjected to the Confederate artillery barrage, I view the 2,300 casualty figure as not unreasonable. Of course, we will never know the precise figure, but it’s certainly not in the mere hundreds. The discussion will surely continue!” THE CIVIL WAR ALMANAC
Recently my wife surprised me with a copy of your publication The Civil War Almanac. Kind of funny since she didn’t know I subscribed to your fine magazine, just that I subscribe to several Civil War magazines. Well, I let her know about the Monitor. Ken Lyle VIA EMAIL
Ed. We hope you enjoyed The Civil War
Almanac, Ken. If so, you might also pick up a copy of our latest newsstand-only special, Gettysburg, which is on sale now. You can purchase a copy at most major booksellers or directly from us at civilwarmonitor.com/gettysburg.
Dennis Middlebrooks BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Ed. Thanks for your letter, Dennis. We
reached out to Gettysburg licensed battlefield guide Larry Korczyk, who helped us compile the Pickett’s Charge statistics we published in the spring issue, for clarification. He writes: “I’ve checked my notes and references, particularly Jim Hessler and Wayne Motts’ outstanding book Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg: A Guide to the Most Famous Attack
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LIVING HISTORY
Agenda Your Summer 2018 Guide to Civil War Events
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: KENNESAW HISTORICALSOCIETY.ORG or BACKSTORY@KENNESAWHISTORICALSOCIETY.ORG. LIVING HISTORY
Photography in the Civil War SATURDAY, JULY 14, 10 A.M. – 4 P.M.
Medical Weekend: Giving Aid and Comfort SATURDAY, JULY 14 – SUNDAY, JULY 15 LOWER TOWN, HARPERS FERRY NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK HARPERS FERRY, WEST VIRGINIA
Living-history volunteers and park staff will tell the story of the medical and relief efforts—both civilian and military, national and local—that provided aid and comfort to thousands of sick and wounded soldiers during the Civil War. FREE WITH PARK ADMISSION ($5 PER PERSON ON FOOT; $10 PER SINGLE, PRIVATE VEHICLE); FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS.GOV/HAFE or 304-535-6029. EXCURSION
Fort Huger Walking Tour
CSS NEUSE CIVIL WAR INTERPRETIVE CENTER
COMMEMORATION
On to Chattanooga: A Campaign of Contrasts SATURDAY, JUNE 30, 9 A.M. – 4:30 P.M. STONES RIVER NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD VISITOR CENTER MURFREESBORO, TENNESSEE
Join park rangers and volunteers for a series of programs marking the 154th anniversary of the Tullahoma Campaign. Walk through camps—including those belonging to the Quartermaster Department, Signal Service, Topographical Engineers, U.S. Military Telegraph Service, and U.S. Sanitary Commission—watch an infantry demonstration, and learn how the Union army turned Murfreesboro and the surrounding area into the base from which it launched its campaigns to seize control of Chattanooga and the Confederate heartland.
Visitors are invited to view and handle examples of different types of Civil War-era photographs and to have photographer Harry Taylor take a tintype of them for a fee. Taylor will also give presentations on the history of photography at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. FREE WITH MUSEUM ADMISSION ($5 ADULTS; $4 SENIORS/MILITARY; $3 CHILDREN; CHILDREN 3 AND UNDER ARE FREE); FOR MORE INFORMATION: NCHISTORICSITES.ORG/NEUSE or 252-5269600. EXCURSION
Civil War Van Tour, Hampton’s Cattle Raid SATURDAY, JULY 14, 8 A.M. – 4 P.M.
NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA
JULY
Follow the route taken by Confederate general Wade Hampton and his 3,000 troopers in September 1864 during their “cattle raid” from Coggins Point to Petersburg with historian J. Michael Moore. Bring a bag lunch, drink, and small cooler, and be prepared to do a lot of walking, much of it over uneven terrain. Advanced registration is required. Plan to arrive at least 20 minutes before departure time.
LECTURE
$50 PER PERSON; FOR MORE INFORMATION: LEEHALL.ORG/CIVIL-WAR-BUS-TOURS.PHP or 757888-3371 X306.
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: NPS.GOV/STRI/ or 615-893-9501.
Civil War Prison Camps TUESDAY, JULY 10, 7–8 P.M. ROBERTS SCHOOL COMMUNITY AND EDUCATION CENTER ACWORTH, GEORGIA
Historian Joe Bozeman will share stories of many of the prison camps that were located in both the North and the South, exploring early prisoner exchange efforts and how both the Union and Confederacy were unprepared for the large number of prisoners they held.
Fort Huger Walking Tour
LEE HALL MANSION
Wade Hampton’s cattle raid, as depicted in Harper’s Weekly
SATURDAY, JULY 21, 10–11 A.M. FORT HUGER ISLE OF WIGHT COUNTY, VIRGINIA
Visit this Civil War fort overlooking the James River that helped guard the approaches to the Confederate capital. Visitors will walk into the fort itself, traveling along the original footpath, to see the encampment area, gun placements, flag mound, and remains of the shell house and magazine. Comfortable walking shoes are recommended.
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BILL STALHEIM
JUNE
KINSTON, NORTH CAROLINA
THOMAS R MACHNITZKI, VIA WIKIMEDIA (STONES RIVER); HARPER’S WEEKLY (CATTLE RAID); ISLE OF WIGHT COUNTY MUSEUM
Stones River National Battlefield Visitor Center
FREE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: HISTORICISLEOFWIGHT.COM or 757356-1223.
AUGUST LIVING HISTORY
Commemoration of the Battle of Mobile Bay
FORT MORGAN
$30 FAMILIES; $10 INDIVIDUALS; CHILDREN 5 AND UNDER ARE FREE (WEEKEND PASSES ALSO AVAILABLE); FOR MORE INFORMATION: PIPESTONEMINNESOTA.COM or 507-825-3316.
GULF SHORES, ALABAMA
LIVING HISTORY
Come out for a one-day livinghistory event commemorating the actions that occurred during the Battle of Mobile Bay from August 5 to 23, 1864. Fort Morgan will come to life with drills and artillery demonstrations by historical interpreters.
Battle of Richmond, Kentucky, Reenactment
SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 9 A.M. – 3 P.M.
$7 ADULTS; $4 CHILDREN 6–12; FOR MORE INFORMATION: FORT-MORGAN. ORG or 251-540-7127. LIVING HISTORY
Pipestone Civil War Days SATURDAY, AUGUST 11 – SUNDAY, AUGUST 12 HIAWATHA PAGEANT PARK PIPESTONE, MINNESOTA
This living-history weekend will include cannon demonstrations, vintage baseball, a grand ball,
VisitSpotsy.com
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 – SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 RICHMOND BATTLEFIELD PARK RICHMOND, KENTUCKY
Relive the Confederate victory at the Battle of Richmond, Kentucky, fought in August 1862, the first major battle in the Kentucky Campaign. Battle reenactments occur at 2 p.m. each day; on Saturday night are a dance and cannon firing. Visitors on both days can take a park walking tour or explore living-history camps featuring Civil War telegraphy, a hospital, and topographical engineers. $10 PARKING FEE; FOR MORE INFORMATION: BATTLEOFRICHMOND.ORG or 859-248-1974.
Vintage baseball at Pipestone Civil War Days
BILL STALHEIM
THOMAS R MACHNITZKI, VIA WIKIMEDIA (STONES RIVER); HARPER’S WEEKLY (CATTLE RAID); ISLE OF WIGHT COUNTY MUSEUM
Civil War music, and a battle reenactment. Union and Confederate reenactors will depict an engagement from 1864, with skirmishes throughout the morning and the battle in the afternoon. Also meet Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, see 1860s fashions, and learn about Civil War-era quilting.
Share Your Event
Have an upcoming event you’d like featured in this space? Let us know: events@civilwarmonitor.com
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Salvo Facts, Figures & Items of Interest
In this wartime watercolor by William McIlvaine, Union soldiers mill about the grounds of the historic Moore House in Yorktown, Virginia. The house—in which British terms of surrender were negotiated in 1781 during the Siege of Yorktown—was damaged during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, its wood taken by soldiers for use in campfires. For more on Yorktown, turn the page. 3
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IN THIS SECTION travels 10 A VISIT TO YORKTOWN voices 14 BIG TALK faces of war 16 MAJOR HAPGOOD AND HIS FAMOUS CLERK figures 18 MEN OF FAITH preservation 20 KEEPING SEMINARY RIDGE SACRED cost of war 22 A SEIZED BANNER PAYS OFF
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
in focus 24 SHEDDING LIGHT ON A FAMOUS PHOTO
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Yorktown VIRGINIA
in march 1862, Union general George B. McClellan launched the Peninsula Campaign, his ambitious attempt to capture Richmond by conveying his Army of the Potomac by sea from the vicinity of Washington, D.C., to the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, then advancing on foot toward the Confederate capital, defeating any southern troops in his path. In April, McClellan’s massive force reached the Confederate line of defense that spanned the width of the peninsula, from Yorktown (where the Rebels took advantage of some of the trenches dug by British forces in 1781) to present-day Newport News. Though greatly outnumbered, the Rebels succeeded in stopping McClellan’s advance for weeks before pulling back, in the process buying valuable time for reinforcements to help buttress the capital’s defenses. By early July, McClellan’s forces were in retreat, having been turned away from Richmond by newly minted Confederate army commander Robert E. Lee. The campaign that had seen some of its first fighting at Yorktown was over. Interested in visiting Yorktown? To help make the most of your trip, we’ve enlisted two experts on the area— Homer Lanier and J. Michael Moore— to offer suggestions for what to see and do in and around the historic town.
TYNDALL’S POINT PARK
1 CAN’T MISS
Tyndall’s Point Park (7418 Battery Dr., Gloucester Point, VA; 804-6932355), located just across the York River, contains reconstructed earthworks and interpretive signage that tell the stories of both Revolutionary War gun placements and the Confederate batteries that were erected in 1862 to prevent Union forces from passing upriver and advancing toward Richmond. These shore batteries were key to controlling access to the interior of Virginia. hl Endview Plantation (362 Yorktown Rd., Newport News, VA; 757-8871862), built around 1769, was a silent witness to both the American Revolution and the Civil War. During the 1781 Siege of Yorktown, Governor Thomas Nelson Jr. and the Virginia State Militia marched past Endview during their advance on the British forces at Yorktown. In 1862, Confederate generals Lafayette McLaws and Robert Toombs headquartered at Endview during the initial stages of the Peninsula Campaign. Endview survived this experience, as well as the subsequent posting of Union regiments on its grounds until 1864. A basement gallery provides information on the families who lived at Endview, and tours of the house’s upper floors are available. mm
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY LANPHER PRODUCTIONS, INC.
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AMERICAN REVOLUTION MUSEUM AT YORKTOWN
2 BEST KEPT SECRET
COLONIAL NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK
While its area of coverage predates the Civil War, the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown (200 Water St.; 888-593-4682) is loaded with interactive exhibits that plunge visitors into the story of the entire conflict. Its 4-D Siege Theater places you in the trenches at Yorktown alongside thundering artillery and troops readying for an attack, while the outdoor living-history areas allow you to enlist in General George Washington’s army or help plant crops and feed livestock on a Revolution-era farm to learn about the effects of war on the home front. hl Colonial National Historical Park (1000 Colonial Parkway; 757-898-2410) has been a destination for me since childhood. I enjoy walking across the Yorktown Battlefield and through the historic area. The visitors center has exhibits and a film that cover the 1781 Siege of Yorktown and the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution. mm 3 BEST FAMILY ACTIVITY
Yorktown Beach (425 Water St.; 757-890-3500) has ample opportunities for fishing, swimming, or boating along its beautiful two-acre beachfront, as well as places to have a meal or get ice cream along the shores of the historic York River. Bath houses allow you wash off the sand and salt before you head home. hl
YORKTOWN BEACH
Located on the historic Yorktown waterfront, the Watermen’s Museum (309 Water St.; 757-887-2641) teaches history from a maritime perspective, dating from the early Virginia Indians through modern times. The museum’s exhibits feature displays, models, boats, videos, and much more, including specific galleries about the commercial seafood industry and the 1781 Cornwallis’ Fleet shipwrecks. Its award-winning summer children’s programs are sure to appeal to kids. mm
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LEE HALL MANSION
4 BEST CIVIL WAR SPOT
Located only a few minutes’ drive from Historic Yorktown, Lee Hall Mansion (163 Yorktown Rd., Newport News, VA; 757-888-3371), built in the 1850s, is one of the last surviving antebellum homes on the Virginia Peninsula. It played a central role in the Peninsula Campaign, during which Confederate generals Joseph E. Johnston and John B. Magruder used the mansion as their headquarters. A bit farther away is the USS Monitor Center at The Mariners’ Museum & Park (100 Museum Dr., Newport News, VA; 757-591-7789), where visitors can learn about the ironclad ships that changed naval warfare forever. You can get up close to Monitor’s gun turret and guns that are currently being conserved and spend hours among the exhibits that tell the story of the Battle of Hampton Roads. hl The Yorktown National Cemetery (1000 Colonial National Historic Parkway; 757-8982410), established in 1866, is the final resting place of over 2,000 Civil War soldiers, most of them Union soldiers killed during the Peninsula Campaign, including Private William Scott of the 3rd Vermont Infantry, known to history as the “Sleeping Sentinel.” (He was sentenced to death for being found asleep at his post but pardoned by President Abraham Lincoln.) The cemetery is also located near the spot where British forces surrendered on October 19, 1781, in effect ending the Revolutionary War. mm
YORKTOWN NATIONAL CEMETERY
USS MONITOR CENTER AT THE MARINERS’ MUSEUM & PARK
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY LANPHER PRODUCTIONS, INC.
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HORNSBY HOUSE INN
WATER STREET GRILLE RIVERWALK RESTAURANT
6 BEST SLEEP
The Hornsby House Inn (702 Main St.; 757-369-0200) is a wonderful bed and breakfast located across the street from the Yorktown Victory Monument. Its beautifully decorated rooms offer an at-home feel, and its wonderful porches are a great spot to soak up the breeze coming in off the York River. And it’s within walking distance, or a short free trolley ride, of anywhere in Historic Yorktown. hl
5 BEST EATS
For lunch, the Yorktown Pub (540 Water St.; 757-8869964) is a must-visit local landmark. They have great sandwiches and burgers as well as fresh local seafood (the crab cake sandwich with fries is a personal favorite). During the cooler months, their chili and grilled cheese is a nice pick-me-up. A good dinner spot is the Water Street Grille (323 Water St.; 757-369-5644). Located on the York River, it offers a variety of Virginia craft beers on tap. The food, from fish tacos to brick oven pizza, is excellent too. The live music featured throughout the spring, summer, and fall is a bonus. hl In Historic Yorktown, I enjoy having breakfast at the Duke of York Hotel’s Beach Bakery Café (508 Water St.; 757-898-5270). The food is delicious—especially the omelets, the breakfast sandwiches, and “The York” (two eggs, bacon, pancakes, and potatoes)—and there’s a spectacular view of the York River. A great lunch option is the Yorktown Pub, a Tidewater favorite that’s been named one of “America’s Best Seafood Dives” by Coastal Living magazine. It offers fresh seafood, halfpound burgers, and local microbrews. For dinner, try the Riverwalk Restaurant (323 Water St., Suite A-1; 757-875-1522), a fine-dining spot overlooking the York River that has great daily specials and an excellent wine selection. You can’t go wrong with the she-crab soup, Kentucky bourbon ribeye, or the grilled elk chops. mm
ABOUT OUR EXPERTS
Homer Lanier, a native of Williamsburg, Virginia, serves as the Interpretive Program and Events Manager for the Jamestown–Yorktown Foundation, where he has worked for 32 years.
The Duke of York Hotel (508 Water St.; 757-898-3232) offers a great view of the York River and reasonably priced rooms. The Marl Inn Bed and Breakfast (220 Church St.; 301-807-0386) has beautiful gardens and quiet areas for reading and relaxing. The Hornsby House Inn on Main Street is a Colonial Revival home that overlooks the York River and has a comfortable sunroom. All three are located within easy walking distance of Yorktown sites. mm 7 BEST BOOK
MARL INN BED AND BREAKFAST
Yorktown’s Civil War Siege: Drums Along the Warwick (2012), by John V. Quarstein and J. Michael Moore, both of whom are locals and experts on the American Civil War. The authors paint a portrait of Yorktown, augmented by maps, drawings, and period photographs, that immerses readers in early war events. hl
J. Michael Moore is the curator for Lee Hall Mansion and Endview Plantation in Newport News, Virginia.
John V. Quarstein and I coauthored Yorktown’s Civil War Siege: Drums Along the Warwick in 2012. We combined almost 40 years’ worth of primary research on the Civil War on the Virginia Peninsula, along with two decades of leading countless tours of the area, to produce this work, which I believe provides a good narrative of the events that took place around Yorktown in 1861–1862. mm
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voices
Big Talk “I regard it as a foregone conclusion … that we shall ultimately whip the yankees.” Confederate cavalry general J.E.B. Stuart (right), in a conversation with a fellow officer in early 1862. Stuart would be killed in battle in mid-May 1864, 11 months before Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.
“ My plans are perfect, and when I start to carry them out, may God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.” Army of the Potomac commander Joseph Hooker (below), to a group of Union officers about his strategy for defeating Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, in mid-April 1863. The resulting Battle of Chancellorsville, fought a few weeks later, ended in a demoralizing Union defeat.
“ Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River.” Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston (left) to his staff after riding to the front during the first day of the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862. By day’s end, Johnston would be dead; the following day, Union forces, positioned with their backs facing the river, would drive the Confederates from the field in victory.
“When dey went down, Lor’, how dey did brag. One rebel could kill a hundred Yankees…. But dey come back a heap faster den dey go down. I see dey can fight mighty well with their tongues, but when dey seed you all, dey could run a heap better den fight.”
“We’ll beat these men, fighting for slavery and for wickedness, out of house and home, beat them to death, this summer too.” Major Henry Lee Higginson (right), 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, in a letter to a friend, March 15, 1863. The war would go on for another 25 months. SOURCES: A REBEL’S RECOLLECTIONS (1875); STEPHEN W. SEARS, CHANCELLORSVILLE (1996); MARK GRIMSLEY AND STEVEN E. WOODWORTH, SHILOH: A BATTLEFIELD GUIDE (2006); LIFE AND LETTERS OF HENRY LEE HIGGINSON (1921); LEAVES FROM A SOLDIER’S DIARY (1906).
LIFE AND LETTERS OF HENRY LEE HIGGINSON; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
Connecticut officer George Gilbert Smith, quoting the words spoken to him by a local slave about Confederate troops who recently fled the area as Union forces advanced through western Louisiana, April 22, 1863.
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LIFE AND LETTERS OF HENRY LEE HIGGINSON; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
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Major Hapgood and His Famous Clerk p u b l i s h e r , m i l i ta ry i m ag e s
The sight of a paymaster and his clerk riding through the streets of Washington, D.C., on a summer’s day in 1863 likely attracted little attention considering the usual hustle and bustle of the Union capital. The two men were headed to Mason’s Island (known today as Theodore Roosevelt Island), located in the middle of the Potomac River across from Georgetown. There, the paymaster, with the help of his clerk, would distribute funds to the men and officers of the 1st U.S. Colored Infantry who were encamped on the narrow strip of land. p The paymaster was Major Lyman Sawin Hapgood (pictured above), a 40-year-old Maine native who had settled in Boston and prospered as a banker before the war. He was an ardent abolitionist—“My most earnest desire,” he once wrote, was “for the complete and triumphant success of universal liberty to all men without regard to race, color or condition”—and had helped organize the Republican Party in his adopted city in the 1850s. p And the slightly older clerk who rode with Major Hapgood that day? He was a struggling writer who worked as a part-time copyist in the same building as Hapgood and often accompanied him on his official sojourns in the Washington area to pay the troops. p His name? Walt Whitman. 3 MILITARY IMAGES (MILITARYIMAGESMAGAZINE.COM) IS A MAGAZINE DEDICATED TO SHOWCASING AND PRESERVING PHOTOS OF CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND SAILORS.
RONALD S. CODDINGTON COLLECTION
by ronald s. coddington
16 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2018
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Start Your Gettysburg Journey at the Heart of the First Day’s Fighting
“Of all Gettysburg museums, this is the one I like best” ~ Katharina S. Visit the site of one of the battlefield’s largest field hospitals Explore award-winning interactive exhibits and displays Experience the stunning 360-degree view of the battlefield RONALD S. CODDINGTON COLLECTION
Take advantage of special group programs and discounts
www.seminaryridgemuseum.org Tickets: 717-339-1300 Group Tickets: 717-339-1354 111 Seminary Ridge Gettysburg, PA 17325
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figures
Men of Faith 2,398
Number of Union army and navy chaplains commissioned during the war
I desired to go to the war. I felt that no man has any right to look about him for an excuse to stay home. If blessed with good health, his first duty is to his country; for, without his country’s benignant laws and institutions, he is worth just nothing.” So wrote Boston resident George Hepworth of his decision to go to war in November 1862. In his statement of patriotism and duty, Hepworth expressed sentiments similar to those held by many of the estimated 2.75 million men who joined the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Yet unlike those other volunteers, Hepworth joined the army not as a soldier, but as a military chaplain. Representing a variety of faiths and serving in a number of posts—in hospitals and prisons, on ships, and, most commonly, with army regiments—chaplains provided spiritual comfort and moral guidance to their comrades. Among their duties, they held regular worship services, prayer meetings, and Bible classes; helped care for the sick and wounded (including administering last rites and conducting burials); and often shared in the hardships, and dangers, of military life. By war’s end, nearly 4,000 men on both sides of the conflict had served as chaplains. Here we highlight statistics about Union chaplains, about which much more is known than their Confederate counterparts.
“FROM THE VERY FIRST,
38
Average age of Union chaplains at time of enlistment
19 Average length of service, in months, of Union chaplains
Age of the youngest Union chaplain, George F. Pentecost of the 8th Kentucky Cavalry, at time of enlistment
569
76
13
Number of regimental chaplains who served for six months or shorter
112
Age of the oldest Union chaplain, John Pierpont of the 22nd Massachusetts Infantry, at time of enlistment
SOURCES: JOHN W. BRINSFIELD, WILLIAM C. DAVIS, BENEDICT MARYNIAK, AND JAMES I. ROBERTSON JR., EDS., FAITH IN THE FIGHT: CIVIL WAR CHAPLAINS (2003); BENEDICT R. MARYNIAK AND JOHN WESLEY BRINSFIELD JR., EDS., THE SPIRIT DIVIDED: MEMOIRS OF CIVIL WAR CHAPLAINS, THE UNION (2007); JOHN P. DEEBEN, “FAITH ON THE FIRING LINE: ARMY CHAPLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR” PROLOGUE VOL. 48, NO. 1 (SPRING 2016).
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Number of regimental chaplains who served for three years or longer
Denominational breakdown of Union chaplains:
8% Methodist 3 17% Presbyterian 12% Baptist 10% Episcopalian 9% Congregationalist 4% Unitarian/Universalist 3% Roman Catholic 2% Lutheran All other denominations: 1 percent or fewer of each
17
Number of AfricanAmerican Union chaplains
$100
Union chaplains’ monthly salary
111
Number of Union chaplains who served as enlisted men before or after being commissioned as chaplains
4
Number of Union chaplains awarded the Medal of Honor
15
Number of Union chaplains killed or mortally wounded in action
101 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Number of Union chaplains known to have died of disease
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Keeping Seminary Ridge Sacred 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
while turning to flee during the
Battle of Gettysburg’s first day, a 24th Michigan Infantry captain caught a last glimpse of a wounded soldier clutching the regiment’s colors. Beside him lay an injured sergeant who couldn’t load his rifle but tore open cartridges with his teeth and handed them to the men around him. These men were among the Union troops overwhelmed by the Confederate assault that crested Seminary Ridge on July 1, 1863, and sent remnants of the Army of the Potomac’s I Corps running east toward town. Today, the American Battlefield Trust aims to permanently preserve this sacred ground where outnumbered Union regiments made their last stand in the face of the advancing Army of Northern Virginia. Here, Union cavalry general John Buford deployed a defense that bought time for infantry reinforcements to arrive and later enabled the broken I Corps to escape southeast through town to Cemetery Hill, high ground crucial to the battle’s outcome. When General Robert E. Lee arrived at Gettysburg that afternoon, he quickly coordinated an attack that swept Union troops from their positions north and west of town. That night, Lee slept at Mary Thompson’s house on the Chambersburg Pike, which became his headquarters. In 2016, the Trust preserved Lee’s Headquarters and restored it to its wartime appearance. Now, the Trust has targeted 18 adjoining acres, Seminary Ridge’s largest and most significant undeveloped tracts. Years in the making, this is one of the
most important preservation efforts in American history. By January 31, 2019, our Civil War Trust division plans to raise $3.5 million—without government matching grants—to save this scene of ferocious fighting. Bishop James Dunlop, president of Gettysburg’s United Lutheran Seminary, appreciates that heritage. “This property is a gift from God and we are stewards of this gift,” Dunlop said when announcing the seminary’s agreement with the Trust about the site. “We have a deep love for the property and its unique historic and scenic character.”
The land has been a part of the seminary since 1832. The Trust will acquire 11 acres along both sides of Seminary Ridge Road and conserve a seven-acre easement along the Chambersburg Pike to the east. Like Bishop Dunlop, the Trust feels a sacred responsibility to see this site protected for future generations so that everyone can appreciate and learn from what happened here. It is a privilege to partner with the seminary to forever preserve this iconic landscape. Learn more about this exciting fundraising campaign at battlefields.org/gettysburg18
Confederate prisoners pose for Mathew Brady’s camera shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg on Seminary Ridge, where the American Battlefield Trust is now looking to preserve 18 acres of land.
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.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
by jim lighthizer
20 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2018
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Ships,History
AND
THE
Historic Homes & Earthworks
Great Outdoors USS Monitor Center at The Mariners’ Museum and Park
Battle of the Ironclads
888.493.7386 newport-news.org
Minutes to Williamsburg, A short drive to Virginia Beach.
Have you visited?
The Lincoln Memorial Shrine
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Since 1932, the only museum and research center dedicated to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War west of the Mississippi
Special Attraction! Inaugural Appearance of the Face of Lincoln Animatronic Experience July- December Only
Don’t miss it!
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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 5/30/18 2:06 PM
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57,500 c o s t o f wa r
$
A SEIZED BANNER PAYS OFF THE ARTIFACT:
The captured battle flag of the 45th Pennsylvania Infantry
DETAILS: On September 30, 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant launched simultaneous attacks against the flanks of the Army of Northern Virginia’s defenses outside Petersburg. During the westernmost assault, the Union IX Corps was supposed to support the main attack, but failed to link up with the line of the nearby V Corps, leaving it exposed. A Confederate counterattack hammered the IX Corps and forced the surrender of one of its brigades, which included the 45th Pennsylvania Infantry. While the 45th’s division commander would later report that the regiment had destroyed its flag so that it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands, in truth soldiers from the 9th or 10th Virginia Cavalry had seized the banner. Their commander, Major General W.H.F. “Rooney” Lee, son of General Robert E. Lee, kept it as a trophy. Twenty-five years later, Rooney Lee, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia, gave the flag to Launcelot Blackford, the principal of Alexandria’s Episcopal High School, hundreds of whose students had joined the Confederate army during the Civil War. Upon the staff he had inscribed the words, “May You Ever Inspire Our Southern Boys to Greatness.” The flag, which Blackford passed along
to teacher Patrick Henry Callaway, remained on its staff for years, until Callaway took it down and stored it in a box, where it remained until his death in 1995 at age 100. QUOTABLE: From the regimental history of the 45th Pennsylvania Infantry: “[A]ccording to Sergeant J.D. Strait of Company I, who was with the colors [on September 30, 1864] and ought to know, … [he and] Sergeant Joe Reigle, the color bearer, … became separated from their comrades and were making their way through the brush and timber, as they supposed, into our own lines, [when] they were suddenly confronted at close quarters
by a line of dismounted Rebel cavalry. There was no time or opportunity to destroy the flag or do anything else but surrender when summoned to do so or be shot down, and that, under the circumstances, would have been a useless sacrifice.” VALUE: $57,500 (price realized at James D. Julia Inc. in Fairfield, Maine, in March 2016). Noted John Sexton, longtime consultant and cataloger for James D. Julia, at the time of the sale: “Regulation American battle standards are exceedingly rare outside of museum collections, much less such historical flags with applied battle honors that were thought lost.”
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JAMES D. JULIA INC., A DIVISION OF MORPHY AUCTIONS, WWW.MORPHYAUCTIONS.COM. SOURCE: JAMES D. JULIA, INC. PRESENTS EXTRAORDINARY FIREARMS AUCTION, MARCH 14 & 15, 2016 (CATALOG 2 OF 2).
CONDITION: The flag, which has been professionally conserved and framed, is in very good condition, as is the flagstaff, whose inscription is quite discernible.
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le! b a l i ava Now
Gettysburg THE LATEST SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE FROM THE EDITORS OF THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR Published to coincide with the Battle of Gettysburg’s 155th anniversary, Gettysburg is a special issue packed with information about America’s epic engagement—from interesting facts, figures, and photos to experts’ opinions about the commanders and soldiers whose decisions and performances helped change the course of the Civil War. The result is a must-have for anyone with an interest in the Battle of Gettysburg—or the Civil War in general.
ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY! Go to civilwarmonitor.com/gettysburg or call 877-344-7409 to place your order for only $12.95 (includes shipping and handling).
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JAMES D. JULIA INC., A DIVISION OF MORPHY AUCTIONS, WWW.MORPHYAUCTIONS.COM. SOURCE: JAMES D. JULIA, INC. PRESENTS EXTRAORDINARY FIREARMS AUCTION, MARCH 14 & 15, 2016 (CATALOG 2 OF 2).
WANT MORE CIVIL WAR? Get all four Monitor special issues for only $39.95—that’s a savings of 23%! Go to civilwarmonitor.com/buy4 or call 877-344-7409 to place your order.
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in focus
Shedding Light on a Famous Photo by bob zeller
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
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
3 THE NONPROFIT CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY (CIVILWARPHOTOGRAPHY.ORG) IS DEVOTED TO COLLECTING, PRESERVING, AND DIGITIZING CIVIL WAR IMAGES.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE HERITAGE FREDERICK (FORMERLY THE FREDERICK HISTORICAL SOCIET Y)
One of the most interesting and compelling photographs of the Civil War is this candid image of a column of Confederate infantrymen pausing on a street in Frederick, Maryland, while on the march. But who took the image and precisely when and where it was taken have long been matters of speculation. Until now. Exhaustive research by Center for Civil War Photography members Paul Bolcik, Erik Davis, and Craig Heberton has revealed that the photo was taken from the third-floor window of longtime Frederick photographer Jacob Byerly’s studio on the west side of North Market Street between Church and Patrick streets, with the solders facing south. It is unlikely the photo was taken during Robert E. Lee’s first invasion of the North in September 1862, as previously speculated. Among other reasons, there is no evidence Confederate troops marched past this spot during the Maryland Campaign. It is far more likely the photo was taken on July 9, 1864, during Lieutenant General Jubal Early’s incursion into Maryland to threaten the nation’s capital. On that very day, the Battle of Monocacy, during which Union forces successfully delayed Early’s advance toward Washington, was fought just south of town.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE HERITAGE FREDERICK (FORMERLY THE FREDERICK HISTORICAL SOCIET Y)
american iliad
The Making of a Hero JOSHUA LAWRENCE CHAMBERLAIN AND THE DEFENSE OF LITTLE ROUND TOP BY MARK GRIMSLEY
eral Gouverneur K. Warren, recognized the hill’s crucial importance. “If the Rebels ever got Little Round Top,” Catton claimed, “the whole of Cemetery Ridge would have to be abandoned and the battle would be lost once and for all.”4 Warren spotted the danger just in time and was able to send a brigade under Colonel Strong Vincent scrambling up the hill to defend it. “At the extreme left of Vincent’s line was the 20th Maine led by Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,” Catton continued, “who had been college professor and minister of the gospel before the war and who was becoming a good deal of a soldier.” Vincent directed Chamberlain to take his 350 men to the southern end of Little Round Top and “hold the ground at all hazards.” Chamberlain’s 20th Maine did precisely that, repelling several Confederate attacks and then, with its ammunition nearly exhausted, “Chamberlain ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge.” Perhaps it worked because it was so unexpected. The Confederates fell into confusion as the charge hit them—Chamberlain remembered one Rebel officer firing a pistol with one hand while he held out his sword in token of surrender with the other—and the whole first line broke and ran. The second line collapsed a moment later, the Maine regiment swung over the slope of Big Round Top, and Chamberlain at last had trouble getting his men to halt and adjust their line, the men crying that they were “on the road to Richmond.” They sent upward of four hundred prisoners to the rear.5
Yet Catton’s breathless summary nonetheless insisted upon keeping the vignette in perspective. “If that wildly improbable counterattack had saved the army’s flank, it had saved it only for a moment”—and Catton went on to describe several other ☛ } CONT. ON P. 72 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
all great myths are “alive” in the sense that they inspire each new generation and have the ability to surprise those already closely acquainted with them. The American Iliad shares this attribute. But it is alive in another way as well. The characters and stories in Homer’s Iliad were established thousands of years ago and remain unchanging. But the canon of mythic tales embedded in the American Iliad grows and changes over time. One recent example of this process centers on Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who commanded the 20th Maine Infantry at the Battle of Gettysburg. The regiment’s stand on the lower slope of Little Round Top has become familiar to even casual students of the Civil War, and Chamberlain has become one of the conflict’s most famous heroes. This comes thanks to the success of Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prizewinning novel The Killer Angels, published in 1974, and its 1993 film adaptation, Gettysburg. This is not to say that the story was unknown before the publication of Shaara’s novel. It received five pages in Edwin B. Coddington’s 1968 work, The Gettysburg Campaign, widely considered the best single-volume history of the battle.1 Yet it was not so prominent that it required telling. Edward J. Stackpole omitted the entire incident in his popular 1956 history, They Met at Gettysburg.2 Bruce Catton got its perceived significance just about right when he gave it four paragraphs in Glory Road, his 1952 popular history of the Army of the Potomac from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg, and as one of the American Iliad’s great bards, Catton’s retelling is an ideal introduction to the tale.3 On the afternoon of July 2, 1863, the battle’s second day, Little Round Top, a tall hill just beyond the left flank of the Union army, remained unoccupied. The Army of the Potomac’s chief engineer, Brigadier Gen26 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2018
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
Little Round Top, as it appeared shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg. In the 20th century, various popular accounts of the epic engagement helped propel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (opposite page), commander of the 20th Maine Infantry, into being remembered as one of the Civil War’s most famous heroes.
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public h i sto ry
Whither Public History?
every one of you reading this magazine is a member of the public history world: you are a consumer (and possibly a producer) of history outside of a formal classroom setting. Public history is presented in museums and historical societies; at monuments or national, state, and local parks; at commemorative events and programs; and in newspapers, magazines, blogs, and websites. By any measure—the number of books published and sold, the number of visitors to battlefield parks, the amount of grass-roots fundraising for battlefield preservation, or membership in Civil War roundtable groups—the Civil War has long been the chapter in American history with the largest and most passionate public audience. In other words, the state of Civil War public history is healthy. Or is it? Like the rest of the public history profession, those who work in Civil War public history institutions are concerned about the future. They see a lot of white faces and gray hair in their audiences and at Civil War roundtable meetings around the country. When asked about his organization’s strategy for recruiting new members, the now former director of a major state historical society used to quip, “Wait for people to turn 50.” Indeed, the core audience and membership of many history museums are successive generations of seniors. Americans tend to become more interested in history as they become empty nesters with more disposable income. Consumers of public history through traditional sources (museums, historic sites, and print publications) also tend to be white and more affluent than the average American. Several developments have caused public history professionals to doubt whether the time-honored recruitment strategy of waiting for people to age into our world will continue to work. Is the widely publicized drop in visitors and financial resources at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, long a flagship of American public history sites, the proverbial handwriting on the wall?
One reason for the declines is the rise of digital technology. With computers and smartphones, people can access historical sites and information without physically visiting them. Historic sites— led by Colonial Williamsburg—have responded to this challenge by incorporating digital technology into their interpretations and creating “digital classrooms,” but the results have been mixed. Another challenge is changing demographics. America is becoming more diverse—racially, ethnically, and culturally. White people of European ancestry represent a declining percentage of the American population—which means, for instance, that a smaller proportion of Americans trace their ancestry back to either side in the Civil War. Will as many Americans continue to study the Civil War without this genealogical hook? To reach new audiences, Civil War museums and historic sites need to convince people that the subject is worth their time and money. One way to accomplish this is to take history to the people, by offering programs at popular restaurants or bars. More to the point, public history institutions must convince non-visitors that the Civil War story is relevant to their lives and their identity. Specific to the Civil War, public and academic historians have for decades bemoaned and tried to counter the apparent disinterest among African Americans in the Civil War. Ideally, African Americans should be more interested in the Civil War than any other group of Americans. It was, after all, the war that brought freedom to 4 million enslaved African Americans. Yet African Americans generally have avoided Civil War sites, finding them irrelevant or even intimidating. One hopeful sign is the recent sesquicentennial observations, which succeeded in drawing more African Americans to commemorative events at historic sites by coupling the Civil War and emancipation. And what about people whose ancestors weren’t in the country when the Civil War ☛ } CONT. ON P. 73
CLAUDIO VAZQUEZ
ASSESSING THE STATE OF POPULAR INTEREST IN THE CIVIL WAR BY JOHN COSKI
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CLAUDIO VAZQUEZ
Visitors to Gettysburg National Military Park pause during a tour of the battlefield.
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This chromolithograph by William B. Matthews shows Robert E. Lee (ninth from right) alongside other prominent Confederate generals.
WHY DID ROBERT E . LEE TURN DOWN COMMAND OF THE UNION ARMY AND 30 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR  SUMMER 2018
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
JOIN THE CONFEDERACY IN 1861? IT’S COMPLICATED. BY ALLEN C. GUELZO 31 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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There
Lee was recalled from Texas to Washington, D.C., by orders from General-in-Chief Winfield Scott. He arrived at his home at Arlington on March 1 and accepted promotion on March 16 to colonel of the 1st U.S. Cavalry.3 He had one preliminary meeting with Scott “directly after his return” from Texas in which Lee asked Scott “what was going to be done” and warned Scott that “if he (Lee) was to be placed on duty against the South he wanted to know so that he might at once resign.” Scott, however, soothed Lee’s anxieties by indicating that “a peaceful solution would be attained,” and Lee went back to Arlington “much relieved, as he had intended resigning if there were any intentions of putting him on War duty.”4 The second scenario occurred on Thursday, April 18, 1861, after Confederate forces bombarded Fort Sumter into submission and President Lincoln issued a proclamation calling out the loyal states’ militias. In this scenario, Lee was summoned to a meeting with Francis Preston Blair, a veteran political operative, at the Washington townhouse of Blair’s son Montgomery at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue. Blair, with the blessing of Lincoln and Secretary of War Simon Cameron, asked Lee whether he would “take command of the army,” with the implication that Scott would remain as the overall general-in-chief. Lee declined.5 The third scenario occurred “immediately after this interview” on April 18, when Lee sought out Scott.6
Lee’s decision to resign from the U.S. Army in 1861 took place in stages, the first of which began while he was stationed in Texas during the winter of 1860–1861, when he wrote letters about the secession crisis to his wife, Mary Custis Lee (pictured at left in a wartime photo), and other family members. Right: A younger Lee dons his U.S. Army uniform in an image from the 1840s.
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But for all the prominence of Lee’s decision, its mechanics are poorly understood and haphazardly documented. It was, in fact, a decision with at least four separate segments, and descriptions of what happened within those segments only emerged over a number of years, and in an inconsistent and partial fashion, leaving later biographers of Lee to piece them together in an equally haphazard fashion. So, how, exactly, did the most momentous resignation in American history occur? Lee’s decision actually took place in stages, in what we can call a series of “scenarios,” beginning weeks and months before with remarks in Texas and Washington, D.C., followed by discussions with Francis Preston Blair and Winfield Scott on April 18, and then a final, climactic scenario at Arlington, Lee’s Virginia home. The first scenario begins with Lee’s preliminary comments about secession and resignation while he was still stationed in Texas in the winter of 1860–1861 as the lieutenant colonel of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry. In a series of eight letters begun on November 24, 1860 (just after news of Abraham Lincoln’s election reached him in Texas), to his wife, Mary Custis Lee, his adult children, and two relatives, he deplored secession as revolutionary.1 But he qualified that criticism by adding that he would withdraw from the Army if secession broke up the Union, and then tacked on the further qualification that he would stay out of any ensuing conflict unless “honor” demands otherwise.2
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are moments in time when historical processes compress like an accordion to single decisions. One of the most important in the American Civil War was Robert E. Lee’s choice, on April 18–19, 1861, to resign from the U.S. Army rather than “draw my sword” against “my native State” of Virginia.
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11 No word of these “scenarios” seems to have seeped into public awareness before Lee left for Richmond. Lee himself recorded nothing of the details of the decision apart from the allusion, in his April 20 explanation letter to Scott, to the discussions that had taken place beforehand. In
fact, Lee remained mute on the subject during the war. The only comments he allowed himself to make on the decision occurred in two interviews he permitted by an Ohio army chaplain and a New York Herald reporter in April 1865, and even then he did no more than give the sketchiest view of his reasons, and without mentioning an interview with Blair or Scott.13 The first clear (and public) inkling that there was more to Lee’s departure from the U.S. Army than a simple resignation appeared in a letter by Montgomery Blair, written on August 6, 1866, and published in the New York Post. The Post’s readers should understand, Blair insisted, that the war had really been caused by “the ambition of a few political leaders” who aggravated the dissensions of North and South “under the delusion that it was a mere matter of discussion, which would be terminated by peaceful separation, or pass off like other political questions by a collapse of the inflammatory feeling incited by debate.” Southerners were “taken by surprise” when matters came to blows—and no one, Blair added, more so than Robert E. Lee. General Lee said to my father, when he was sounded by him, at the request of President Lincoln, about taking command of our army against the rebellion, then hanging upon the decision of the Virginia [secession] convention, “Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union: but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?” He could not determine then; said he would consult with his friend General Scott, and went on the same day to Richmond, probably to arbitrate difficulties; and we see the result.14
Then, on February 19, 1868, Simon Cameron (by that point a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania) set off an eruption by claiming that Lee had actually initiated the interview with Francis Preston Blair, then “intimated” that he wanted Scott’s command (who acquiesced when the demand was presented to him) and promised to set his Virginia affairs in order and assume the command, and finally “deserted under false pretences” to the Confederacy. General Lee called on a gentleman who had my entire confidence, and intimated that he would like to have the command of the Army. He assured that gentleman, who was a man in the confidence of the Administration, of his entire loyalty, and his devotion to the interests of the Administration and of the country. I consulted with General Scott, and General Scott approved of placing him at the head of the Army. The place was offered to him unofficially, with my approbation, and with the approbation of General Scott. It was accepted by him verbally, with 3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
Several years after the end of the conflict, Simon Cameron (pictured right), who served as Lincoln’s first secretary of war, claimed that Lee had accepted the offer to command the U.S. Army before “desert[ing to Virginia] under false pretenses.” “I should have arrested him in a moment if I had had a chance at him,” Cameron later mused, “and I have always regretted that I never did get that chance.”
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The fourth scenario took place after Lee returned to Arlington that evening. His eldest daughter, also named Mary Custis Lee, who composed an eyewitness description of the decision, remembered that her father did not return from Washington “till late in the evening” and “after dark” on the 18th. This pushed Lee’s deliberations into the daytime and evening of Friday, April 19, which is when he learned, while running errands in downtown Alexandria with his wife and eldest daughter, that the Virginia secession convention had cast its votes for secession rather than cooperate with Lincoln’s proclamation.7 Lee’s own recollection in 1868 was that he composed the resignation letter on Friday, but “kept it by him another night” (the letter itself is dated the 20th). In addition to the resignation letter, Lee wrote explanatory letters to four individuals: Scott; his brother Sidney Smith Lee, a U.S. Navy officer who was also in the throes of deciding about resignation; Ann Kinloch Lee Marshall, his invalid sister and the wife of Baltimore judge William Marshall, a Unionist Republican; and Roger Jones, another relative and a lieutenant in the Regular Army. He also probably wrote at least one other explanatory letter to an unidentified correspondent, which was published in The New York Times in August.8 The decision hung in the air while Lee attended Christ Church in Alexandria with his daughter Mary on Sunday morning, April 21. He afterward huddled with Lee relatives, principally Cassius Francis Lee, and “a delegation of gentlemen come from Richmond on a mission to persuade him to place his sword at the service of his State.”9 The “delegation” may have been headed by judge John Robertson, acting as a “special messenger” from Governor John Letcher. Robertson gave Lee what he later called the first news “officially” about the Virginia secession ordinance and asked Lee to meet with him in Alexandria on the morning of the 22nd and travel on to Richmond.10 This was not in itself unusual, since it was not actually the first time Lee had been solicited by Virginia state authorities for military advice. Lee responded in the affirmative to the messenger, and met Robertson the next day and departed for Richmond on the Virginia Central Railroad.11 Even while he was en route, Governor Letcher was nominating him to the secession convention to be “Commander of the Military and Naval Forces of the State of Virginia.”12
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the promise that he would go into Virginia and settle his business and then come back to take command. He never gave us an opportunity to arrest him; he deserted under false pretenses. I should have arrested him in a moment if I had had a chance at him, and I have always regretted that I never did get that chance.... I think he behaved worse than any of the men who acted so treacherously to the Government.15
Cameron’s accusation triggered at least two direct responses in which an angered and embarrassed Lee finally laid out his own recollections of the details of his resignation. The first response was an agitated interview given on February 25, 1868 (a week after Cameron’s charges), to William
Allan, a former artillery officer in Lee’s army who was then teaching mathematics at Washington College. Allan’s notes describe how Lee “stated to me all the circumstances connected with his resignation from the old army.” Winfield Scott had recalled him from Texas to have Lee on hand as the situation over secession deteriorated. Lee insisted that he “could not go on duty against the South,” but Scott assured him that “there would be no war.” It was not until April 18, when he was summoned to the meeting with Blair, that it became clear that “Mr. L. and Cabinet wanted Gen Lee to be Commander in Chief in [the] field.” Blair was “very wily and keen,” appealing to his “ambition” and his place as “a representative of the Washing35 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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a resignation letter, and “on the second morning thereafter ... forwarded my resignation to General Scott,” intending “to pass the remainder of my life as a private citizen.” It was his expectation that, even then, “some way would have been found to save the country from the calamities of war.” The Johnson letter was not published until 1875 (in John William Jones’ Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee), but Lee added one more significant detail in an interview with William Preston Johnston, a former aide-decamp to Jefferson Davis and, like William Allan, a postwar faculty member at Washington College, on March 18, 1870, two years after the letter was written and just seven months before Lee’s death, in which Lee insisted that the most important influence on his decision had been Scott’s assurances that there would be no war. “General Scott was induced to believe that pacification was intended by Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward,” and had tried to persuade Lee “that Mr. Lincoln would recede.”17 A year later, Blair dictated his own recollection of the interview with Lee, and it conformed
According to Lee, his meetings on April 18, 1861, with Francis Preston Blair and Winfield Scott did not persuade him to accept command of U.S. forces, and his determination to “take no part in an invasion of the Southern States” never wavered. Above: Lee’s letter of resignation, addressed to Simon Cameron. Right: Francis Preston Blair.
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ton family.” But Lee would not budge, even as he “deprecated War” and “Said as far as the negro was concerned he would willingly give up his own (400) for peace.” Lee then went “direct” to Scott, who “expressed his deep regret” over Lee’s decision, “but said he had rather expected it.” Returning to Arlington, Lee “wrote his resignation [the] next day, but kept it by him another night to reflect fully,” and “on Saturday morning [the 20th] enclosed the resignation with a note to Scott” for forwarding to Secretary Cameron.16 Second was a letter, written by Lee the same day as the interview, to Reverdy Johnson, a U.S. senator from Maryland who had challenged Cameron’s veracity on the Senate floor. In the letter, Lee denied that he had ever “intimated to any one that I desired the command of the United States Army,” much less to Blair. The meeting with Blair had “been at his invitation, and as I understood at the instance of President Lincoln,” and Lee had made it clear that “though opposed to secession and deprecating war,” he “could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States.” He composed
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almost entirely to Lee’s refutation of Simon Cameron. Blair wanted it understood that he had acted at Lincoln’s and Cameron’s bidding, not Lee’s. “The matter was talked over by President Lincoln and myself for some hours on two or three different occasions,” and both “expressed themselves as anxious to give the command of our army to Robert E. Lee.” But Blair, acting only as an intermediary, was cautious of approach, intending the discussion with Lee to be not so much an offer as an effort to “sound General Robert E. Lee, to know whether his feelings would justify him in taking command of our army.” For the first time, a go-between was mentioned: Lee’s cousin, Major John Fitzgerald Lee, the judge advocate-general of the Army, who “sent him a note at my suggestion.” But if Blair’s original instinct was caution, in the meeting he was more direct, and he plainly told Lee that “President Lincoln ... wanted him to take command of the army.” Lee’s reply at first sounded encouraging, since Lee professed to be “devoted to the Union” and “would do everything in his power to save it, and that if he owned all the negroes in the South, he would be willing to give them up and make the sacrifice of the value of every one of them to save the Union.” The sticking
point was Virginia, since “he did not know how he could draw his sword upon his native State.” Blair remembered the interview as a long one, lasting “several hours on the political question.” Significantly, Blair insisted that at the end Lee remained undecided and asked for time to consult with “his friend General Scott.” Blair agreed to the delay, and Lee “left the house.” The next Blair heard, Lee had been met “by a committee from Richmond” and “went with them,” although even then, it was only “to consult the Virginia convention as to some mode of settling the difficulty.”18 Later that same year, Lee’s wife, in a letter written for use by former Confederate general Wade Hampton in a memorial address, added one further detail, that Blair urged Lee to “go to see Mr. Lincoln.” But Lee demurred: “that would be useless, but I must go and take leave of Gen. Scott.”19
11 One of the more startling omissions in Winfield Scott’s 1864 autobiography is that he makes no mention at all of his April 18 interview with Lee subsequent to Lee’s meeting with Blair. There are, nevertheless, three eyewitness accounts of the interview, including Lee’s own in his explanatory letter to Scott on April 20. It is a spare letter, thanking Scott for “more than a quarter century” of “uniform kindness and consideration” but informing the old general that “since my interview with you on the 18th inst. I have felt that I ought no longer to retain my commission.” Then, Lee added what had since Texas become a near-standard line: “Save in defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.”20 Two other witnesses were more expansive. Erasmus Keyes was Scott’s military secretary, and in his 1884 memoir relates how “the two Virginians remained alone together nearly three hours.” Keyes “surmised” that Scott had “offered to retire from the service and give Lee the command of the Federal army,” which is not quite the arrangement Blair described. What is unusual is Keyes’ understanding that Scott “desired to see him at the head of a Union force” for the purpose of averting war rather than leading it, “to keep the peace and to prevent civil war, which they equally abhorred.” But Lee somehow “considered war inevitable” and “departed to join the seceders.”21 Edward D. Townsend (who was then serving as an assistant adjutant general) is much more detailed but also prone to misdating events in his Anecdotes of the Civil War (also published in 1884). Townsend has Lee returning to Arlington from Texas, but without reporting to Scott, and provoking the general to declare that “It is time he should show his hand.” A summons is thus sent, not by Blair or a Blair representative, but by Townsend, suggesting Lee “call at the general’s 37 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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proper you should do so at once.” Lee then makes a remarkable plea for understanding, based on the legal vulnerability of the Lee family’s Virginia properties. “General, the property belonging to my children, all they possess, lies in Virginia. They will be ruined if they do not go with their State. I can not raise my hand against my children.” Unmoved, “the general then signified that
While the exact contents, tone, and length of the April 18 discussion between Lee and Winfield Scott (above left) remain unknown, Lee departed the meeting with his fellow Virginian certain in his decision to leave the U.S. Army.
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headquarters.” Lee does so (although Townsend misdates Lee’s arrival to April 19), and Scott and Lee proceed to a frosty exchange in which Scott confronts Lee with the demand that he “frankly declare” his intentions. Lee responds evasively, pointing out how other southern officers are making a “fatal mistake” by resigning. But Scott presses relentlessly: “If you purpose to resign, it is
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Two diametrically opposed accounts of the Lee–Scott meeting on April 18 came from Edward D. Townsend (above left), then serving as an assistant adjutant general, and Mary Custis Lee (above right), the general’s eldest daughter. Whereas Townsend characterized the encounter as unfriendly, Mary Custis Lee later wrote of it as marked by heartfelt emotion.
he had nothing further to say,” and the next day, Lee’s resignation came to hand.22 In Townsend’s account, the encounter is formal to the point of chilliness. By contrast, Mary Custis Lee, in her 1871 letter to Wade Hampton, made it more poignant: “This parting was one of great emotion on both sides, Gen. Scott saying: ‘Lee you have made the greatest mistake of your life, but I feared it would be so.’” And an anonymous description that appeared in a brief note in Household Journal four months later has Scott begging Lee, “For God’s sake, don’t resign Lee,” only to have Lee respond, “I am compelled to; I cannot consult my feelings in this matter.” Finally, “while the tears were coursing down their cheeks,” they were “too full of feeling to find utterance for one word.”23 Curiously, the evidence about Lee’s personal turmoil over this interview is conflicting. On the basis of a “very vivid account” given by Mary Custis Lee, John William Jones’ Life and Letters of General Robert E. Lee, Soldier and Man in 1906 has Lee spend the night of April 19 in the throes of depression “after his last interview with General Scott,” and then write an agonized resignation letter. Mary Custis Lee’s 1871 letter is also alive with personal observation, describing that night in terms of a Gethsemane: After a sleepless night, during which he said, “passed the severest struggle of his life,” he determined to resign a commission which he could no longer hold with honor. He would gladly have waited, hoping even then matters might be accommodated without recourse to arms; but this could not be, and on the morning of the 20th he sent over his resignation, which was accepted.
Although the Jones “account” and the Hampton letter are similar in content, Jones reverses the order of events: Lee writes his resignation letter first and then, asking “to be left alone for a time,” paces “his chamber above, and was heard frequently to fall on his knees and engage in ear-
nest prayer for divine guidance.” And he emerges from the struggle, “calm collected, almost cheerful,” and presents his wife with “my letter of resignation, and a letter I have written to General Scott.”24 Lee’s daughter Mary, in a reminiscence composed in 1871 for Charles Marshall, Lee’s wartime aide-de-camp and military secretary, makes no mention of any “struggle” through that night. Lee entertains “two prominent gentlemen of Alexandria” at breakfast. Then, once the visitors had departed, Lee almost casually calls family members into “his private room, where ... we found him seated at his table, with papers before him” and reads them the resignation letter. Lee adds, “I wrote it early this morning when I first came down & dispatched Perry [an Arlington slave] over to Washington with it before breakfast.” The family seems dumbfounded, and Lee has to explain, “I suppose you all think I have done very wrong, but it had come to this, & after my last interview with Gen. Scott I felt that I ought to wait no longer.”25
11 Once the conflicting welter of letters, accounts, and memoirs are sorted out, a reasonably coherent sequence emerges, and with some important implications for the soldier who would become the Confederacy’s greatest living icon. From the first, Lee was deeply unhappy at the prospect of a disruption of the Union over slavery, especially if that disruption in some way endangered Virginia’s position. But Lee never spoke about taking up arms on behalf of the South or the Confederacy, only in defense of Virginia. The peculiarity of that determination is that Virginia had never actually bulked that large in Lee’s life. Lee family members, going back to the 17th century, were significant players in the life of Virginia, but the Revolutionary Lees were national-minded Federalists.26 Robert E. Lee himself was born in Virginia, at Stratford Hall, on the Northern Neck, but lived most of his life someplace else: first in Alexandria, in the District of Columbia, then at West Point as a cadet from 1824–1829, and then in military postings in Georgia, Missouri, New York, and Maryland. His marriage to Mary Custis in 1831 gave him a home in Virginia (although not until Alexandria and Arlington were retroceded to Virginia in 1846), but Arlington was the Custis family home, not his own, and its facing across the Potomac river toward the Capitol was a constant reminder of where the Custis family’s loyalties resided. When Lee’s father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, died, he passed over his son-in-law, leaving Arlington and several other Custis properties to Robert E. Lee’s sons (G.W.C. Lee, W.H.F. Lee, and R.E. Lee Jr.), with Mary Custis Lee retaining only a life interest in 39 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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While the main reason for Lee’s decision to resign from the U.S. Army was his desire to avoid being put in a position to draw his sword against Virginia, it likely was also based in part on his interest in saving Arlington (pictured here in 1864) and other family properties from confiscation.
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Arlington. Lee was left a Virginia-less Virginian. What Lee did have, however, were extraordinarily deep family ties to Virginia. From the various progeny of the Virginia Lees, not to mention the Carter connections inherited through his mother (and the Fitzhughs, to whom he was related through the Carters and his mother-inlaw), Lee inhabited a thick network of cousinage that included at least 80 other individuals and a lifetime of peregrinations from one extendedrelative estate to another.27 But this only raises a second complication, since not all of the Lee cousinage joined the Confederacy, and what was more, Lee did not need, necessarily, to oppose those who did. Lee would have needed only to resign from the Army and sit out the ensuing conflict as a neutral.28 This, however, was the moment when the considerations of family intersected with the obligations of property, for it is unlikely that anyone living at Arlington could have survived for very long as a neutral. Perched high on its bluff over the Potomac, Arlington provided a perfect platform for artillery that could make the entire federal capital untenable. A reporter for The New York Times warned that “Arlington Heights ... command every building and every foot of ground in Washington.” So, even before the news of Lee’s resignation was public, voices in Richmond were calling for “the construction of earthwork batteries on the Va. heights overlooking & commanding Washington—to be defended from assault by musketry until heavy artillery can be mounted.”29 If Lee had decided to cooperate with Blair, Scott, and Lincoln, and taken charge of the federal forces being summoned to Washington by Lincoln’s April 15 proclamation, he would have had to face the prospect that Arlington would be commandeered by Virginia forces, and even, if no further resolution of the stand-off was attempted, that it would be confiscated by Virginia authorities who would, by that point, be beyond any legal restraint by U.S. courts. It is this possibility that throws into unexpected color the plea overheard by Edward D. Townsend during Lee’s interview with Scott: “General, the property belonging to my children, all they possess, lies in Virginia. They will be ruined if they do not go with their State.” Or, as would have been just as likely, if Lee did not cooperate with the Virginia secessionists. What complicates this dilemma still further is the unanswered question of what Lee believed Virginia’s secession from the Union and his own resignation were likely to lead to. If he resigned his commission (and legal obligations) to the U.S. Army and cooperated with the Virginia secessionists, he would certainly save Arlington and the other Custis properties from Virginia confiscation for his children. That would, of ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74 40 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2018
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an unlikely battleground
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Fourth of July observations during the Civil War reflected the country’s thorniest questions—including which Americans could claim the holiday as their own. by paul quigley
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Militiamen march through the streets of New York City on July 4, 1860—the last Fourth of July before the start of the Civil War.
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Although the big Confederate surrenders had taken place more than two months before, it surely didn’t feel like the Civil War was over for the soldiers of the 22nd Iowa Infantry. company, by parading on the Fourth, was staking a claim to equal status as Americans. Their white assailants replied—in the unambiguous language of physical violence—that even after slavery’s end, African Americans were not equal members of the American national community. In this light, the Fourth of July may have been one of the most consequential Civil War battlegrounds of all.2
11 From its beginnings during the American Revolution, the Fourth provided the perfect occasion to debate what America was and what it ought to be. Rival political parties, beginning with the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans in the 1790s, used the holiday to press their own agenda by aligning themselves with the country’s sacred revolutionary heritage. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, so too did reform movements working for all kinds of goals: temperance, Sabbatarianism, and, of course, abolitionism. Antebellum Americans’ disputes over slavery went on year round. They ebbed and flowed and circled back around. But each year they acquired special meaning on the Fourth of July. From our modernday perspective, the nature of the connection is unmistakable. The Fourth commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, with its profession that “all men are created equal” and with its invocation of unalienable rights. But slavery was based on the assumption that black men (not to mention women) were definitely not equal to white men, that their rights were absolutely alienable, if they existed at all. The contradiction seems glaring through our eyes, but for most early Americans with white skin it was not. From the colonial period onward,
In the decades before the Civil War, celebrations of the Fourth of July generally highlighted the colonies’ separation from the British Empire, not issues of racial equality. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass (pictured at left in 1862), however, used the day to underscore the incongruity between slavery and the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Above: Soldiers and civilians celebrate Independence Day in Philadelphia in 1819.
3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
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They were expecting to be mustered out soon, but in early July 1865, they were stuck in sweltering Savannah and would have to spend one more Independence Day away from home. In camp, they celebrated in the same ways Americans had been celebrating the Fourth for decades. Someone read the Declaration of Independence aloud. There was a regimental parade, a short speech, some noisy cheering, the firing of a salute. That evening, the men got to see some fireworks and a grand illumination of the city of Savannah. It wasn’t the same as being home, but at least it was something. Amid the revelry, one incident cast a dark cloud. As Union soldier Taylor Pierce later reported to his wife back home, a local volunteer fire company was planning to parade its engine around town. That in itself wasn’t unusual; fire companies had long taken part in Independence Day celebrations across the country. But this was a black fire company, and it was 1865 in the South. War’s wounds remained raw. Racial tensions churned. The black firemen were violently assaulted by a group that Pierce described as “low white citizens and boys assisted I am Sorry to say by some drunken soldiers and some others who thinks that a nigger has no rights that a man is bound to respect, but who is found on all occasions when they can get into bed with the dirtiest wenches that this dirty southern confederacy can produce.” The rabble “beat them with brick bats drove them off from their Engine tore up their Cloths and run their engines in to a mud hole.”1 What Pierce witnessed that day epitomizes the sizable stakes of Independence Day celebrations in the Civil War era. Throughout America’s history, it’s been a day to celebrate what unites Americans and what sets them apart from the rest of the world. But it’s also been a day when Americans have argued about what it means to be an American, about who is included and who is excluded. And that’s precisely what was going on in Savannah in 1865. The black fire
PREVIOUS SPREAD: BOB ZELLER COLLECTION ; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (DOUGLASS); ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
they separated white equality and black slavery into different intellectual compartments. Moreover, in the decades following the Revolution, the Declaration was held up mostly as a simple act of withdrawal from the British Empire, not an idealistic declaration of universal human rights. Before the Civil War, hardly anyone emphasized the phrase “all men are created equal.” Most white Americans gave little thought to the incongruity between slavery and the anniversary of the Declaration.3 The exceptions were abolitionists, white and black, who embraced the Fourth as an opportunity to expose the inconsistency between lofty American ideals and the despicable practice of slavery. In 1852 Frederick Douglass delivered what is probably the most powerful Independence Day speech of all time, posing the question, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” and re-
sponding with a searing critique of white American hypocrisy: I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
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11 The Civil War transformed the holiday—hardly surprising, given how all-consuming a conflict it became. As July 1861 approached, it was clear to all that the day would be different than usual. But different in what way? In the wake of secession and the creation of the Confederacy, in the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter and President Abraham Lincoln’s call for troops to suppress the rebellion, what would happen to the annual celebration? How would the American people commemorate their national anniversary when the nation was falling apart? The Fourth presented a particular problem for white residents of the Confederate States. They had left the Union, so how should they celebrate the birthday of a nation they no longer considered themselves citizens of ? The question would bedevil white southerners throughout the war. Beginning in 1861 they engaged in a wide-ranging conversation over what to do about the Fourth of July, and revealed a kaleidoscope of attitudes toward the American revolutionary heritage and Confederate identity. A few wished to abandon the Fourth. Yet many others thought it more important than ever. As one orator in Austin, Texas, explained during a Fourth of July celebration in 1861, “We are to-day engaged in the second war for independence, resisting the demands of centralization fighting battles for self-government, and upholding the cause of constitutional freedom.” The American Revolution was about local selfgovernment, not universal liberty, so the Confederacy would naturally cherish the principles of the Fourth. From Louisiana, a newspaper editor wrote, “The Yankees have robbed us of too much already. We have no idea of giving up the national anniversary—not a bit of it. The Fourth of July is ours.”4 The prevailing outlook, though, was pained uncertainty. In the midst of a revolution that quickly turned their world upside down, white southerners simply did not know what to do. Many, in newspapers and private writings alike, wanted the Fourth to be marked in some way—but not in the same way as before. During the first summer of the war, teenaged Louisianan Sarah Lois Wadley had forgotten about the holiday until she wrote “July 4” in
her diary, prompting her to reflect, “I think that the day should have been observed with unusual strictness, but it is natural and right that the feeling should have been more of sober thankfulness and religious prayer than of noisy joy.”5 Of enslaved black southerners’ view of the holiday, we know little. But there are tantalizing hints in the writings of white southerners. In June 1861, Kate Stone confided in her diary, “We live on a mine… [T]he Negroes are suspected of an intention to spring on the fourth next month.” The significance of the date was unmistakable. At least some slaveholders surely recognized that the principles of the Declaration might imply the liberation of slaves. Most, though, would never admit it. On July 4, 1861, Susan Eppes revealed the blinkered perspective that blinded so many southern slaveholders to slaves’ political aspirations: “This day, which was once so filled with merriment and pleasure, is now a thing of the past, where we are concerned. Father and my uncles let the negroes go ahead with the usual Fourth of July barbecue. Father said it would not be right to curtail their pleasures because of our own troubles; so they are having a merry time today.”6 As would become so apparent, whites’ “own troubles” were inextricably bound up with the fate of the slaves themselves. But in 1861, almost everyone involved, North and South, was trying to avoid the Civil War becoming a war explicitly for or against slavery.
11 In most parts of the North, wartime attitudes toward the Fourth were little changed. There was no question as to whether northerners would celebrate, and so they reveled as they always had, lighting fireworks and illuminations, firing salutes, listening to speeches, raising the Stars and Stripes. As The New York Times wrote, the holiday was marked “with all the outward display, and much more of the inward spirit” than in previous years. Indeed, for the Times, Independence Day was the “last link of the Union that treason has spared,” and therefore an apt date to put an end to the rebellion and bring the southern states back into the Union.7 That turned out to be wishful thinking. But northerners continued to commemorate the Fourth with enthusiasm throughout the war, while their enemies continued to wonder whether they should celebrate at all. For Confederates, the escalating hardships of war provided insufficient time, few resources, and precious little reason to celebrate even if they had
While the questions of how and whether to celebrate Independence Day plagued white southerners (like Kate Stone, pictured at left) during the war, most northerners’ attitudes toward the Fourth remained largely the same. Above: This group of scenes showing Fourth of July celebrations in Union army camps appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1861.
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LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS (STONE); HARPER’S WEEKLY
In short, even before war broke out, Independence Day was well established as a holiday of contention—a day to argue over the meaning of the American experiment in the past, present, and future.
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS (STONE); HARPER’S WEEKLY
a mind to do so. Two years later, Independence Day took on added significance, in part because of the twin Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. On July 4, 1863, the same day Robert E. Lee was leading his defeated army from Pennsylvania back toward Virginia, Confederate commander John C. Pemberton was surrendering the city of Vicksburg to Ulysses S. Grant. A native of Philadelphia, Pemberton explained the reason for the symbolic timing to his staff: “I am a northern man. I know my people. I know their peculiar weaknesses and their national vanity; I know we can get better terms from them on the Fourth of July than on any other day of the year.”8 Even without Gettysburg and Vicksburg, July 4, 1863, would have been a turning point in the history of the holiday. The Emancipation Proclamation was in effect, and the Lincoln administration had come to define the ending of slavery as a war goal. Although emancipation policy was framed as a military measure to help the Union
defeat the Confederacy, it also heralded a much further-reaching shift. Adopting emancipation as a war goal opened the door to both an abolitionist vision of Independence Day and a more inclusive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. That is not to say that all white northerners supported emancipation. In fact, dissenters saw the Fourth of July as an opportunity to make their positions clear. Thomas H. Seymour, former governor of Connecticut, gave an 1863 Independence Day speech blaming the war on abolitionist agitators in the North and complaining about the corrupt and tyrannical Lincoln administration’s centralization of power and lack of respect for states’ rights. Because of all this—what he saw as a betrayal of the principles and spirit of the Revolution—Seymour wondered whether Americans would be celebrating the Fourth for much longer. As he explained, “I do not come before you so much to rejoice or congratulate with you upon this occasion as to lament that the day is no 47 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
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MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Independence Day in 1863 took on added significance, not only due to the twin Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, but also because of the recent adoption of emancipation as a northern war goal, which opened the door to a more inclusive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. Below: Victorious Union soldiers march into Vicksburg on July 4, 1863.
longer what it once was.”9 By July 1865 much more was certain. The Union was victorious. As Independence Day neared, white northerners saw an opportunity to celebrate final victory and draw a line under the horrific events of the last four years. With the long process of demobilization underway, what better day than July 4 to fete the returning soldiers who had fought to keep the nation together? In June, Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin recommended that “in every part of the State, on the approaching anniversary of Independence, special observances be had of welcome to our returned defenders, and of commemoration of the heroic deeds of themselves and their comrades who have fallen.”10 Other northern governors issued similar proclamations. One of the most widely noted celebrations was held at Gettysburg, where a cornerstone was laid for a monument in the new Soldiers’ National Cemetery. The nation’s leading dignitaries and many Union veterans convened there on that symbolic day, returning to the place that was already coming to signify the preservation and rebirth of the United States. Jamestown, in western New York, offered a more lighthearted take on the day. Following a grand procession and a free dinner for returning soldiers, other activities included “an ascension of the monster Balloon ‘Union’”; an exhibition by the “‘Jamestown Dead Beats’ in fantasticals, on horseback and so forth”; and a reenactment of the “pursuit and capture of Jeff. Davis in hoops.” The day culminated with an elaborate fireworks display, including “BOMBSHELLS” that were “cast from mortars to the height of 1,000 feet,” and a “POLKA DANCE” that was predicted to be “quite incomprehensible to those unacquainted with the secret of its construction.”11 Oh, to have been in western New York that night. Other northern towns came up with their own quirky ways to mark the Fourth of July. But the old conventions held, too. Northerners paraded and fired salutes. They listened to speeches and to public readings of the Declaration. They picnicked and they went on excursions. They ate and they drank, and then they ate and drank some more. In the minds of many white northerners, Independence Day 1865 was a day not to crow over victory, but rather to extend the hand of reconciliation to their erstwhile foes. The New York Herald expressed just such a sentiment: “In the South, we hope, the nation’s anniversary may be celebrated in a reunion between Unionists and repenting rebels, which will do much to reclaim the old devotion of the Southern people to ‘the old flag.’ North and South, ‘the glorious Fourth’ of the year of grace and peace 1865 ought to be such a jubilee as the world has never known since the occupation of the promised land by the chil49 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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The cover of the July 8, 1865, edition of Harper’s Weekly contained this image, which ran with a simple label: “Peace—Fourth of July, 1865.” While many white northerners viewed the celebrations that year as an opportunity to extend the hand of reconciliation to old foes, others were not interested in forgiving and forgetting so quickly.
“ Here is a fine chance for the people of that testy little State to redeem themselves. If their professions of loyalty are sincere, let them ‘celebrate.’ Let them proclaim their resurrected love for the old Flag through the expressive medium of torpedoes and firecrackers.”
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A New York newspaper editor’s reaction to news that South Carolina would celebrate the Fourth of July in 1865—but only by order of a U.S. general.
dren of Israel.”12 Not all northerners wished to forgive and forget so quickly. On the contrary, there is much evidence of lingering bitterness in 1865 and for a long time thereafter toward former Confederates. Perhaps reconciliation should not be so easy, some seemed to feel, not after four years of devastating warfare. One Albany, New York, newspaper reported that the Fourth would be celebrated in South Carolina—but only by order of a U.S. general. There would be salutes, a parade, and readings of the Declaration and the Emancipation Proclamation. The paper’s editor wrote, “Here is a fine chance for the people of that testy little State to redeem themselves. If their professions of loyalty are sincere, let them ‘celebrate.’ Let them proclaim their resurrected love for the old Flag through the expressive medium of torpedoes and firecrackers.” The barbed humor made it perfectly clear that the conflict was not yet settled.13 For their part, African Americans and their allies were glad of Union victory and saw July 4 as a prime opportunity to consolidate its benefits. Perhaps the biggest black celebration of the Fourth of July that year was in Washington, D.C., on the grounds of the White House. As the organizers put it, this was the first time African Americans had “attempted any celebration of a national character”—on Independence Day or any other day of the year. The speakers made the most of the historic occasion. But even as they celebrated the gains they had made, they acknowledged that the battle wasn’t over. At this point, the Thirteenth Amendment had not yet been ratified, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments had not yet been proposed. There was much left to fight for every day of the year.14 Still, 1865 was another turning point in the meaning of the Fourth of July. The promise of 1776 seemed more real than ever. One AfricanAmerican newspaper described the Civil War as having completed the unfinished work of the revolutionary generation: “This second birth is as great if not greater, than the first, in the light of Christianity. The glorious work of liberty, which was commenced more than eighty years ago, has just been finished. They left the superstructure unfinished. It was for us to complete it, and make it perfect.”15 In an Independence Day speech in Illinois, a
white abolitionist lawyer told his audience that the Fourth had previously been a sad day, one that had exposed what he called “the utter falsity of our national life to the national ideas, embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” But Union victory in the Civil War had ended that hypocrisy. The orator, Edwin Larned, did not see emancipation merely as a side result of the Civil War but as its central significance. And he drew a direct line between the principles of 1776 and the abolition of slavery in the 1860s, referring to the Emancipation Proclamation as “the child of the Declaration of Independence.”16 It would be difficult to overstate the significance of that first Fourth of July after the end of the war. Throughout the slowly reuniting nation, black Americans celebrated Independence Day, some of them for the first time. In Augusta, Georgia, for example, thousands of African Americans, mostly former slaves, paraded beneath three banners: one commemorating the martyred Lincoln, another rejoicing over the death of slavery, and a third celebrating the principles of freedom and equality. Such a spectacle would have been unimaginable just a few years before.17 To white southerners, such celebrations were a betrayal of everything America stood for. Whether or not they had owned slaves, they had lived in a society structured by white supremacy and black enslavement. That world had been overturned. The plantation mistress Mary Chesnut grumpily recorded the day in her diary as “Black 4th of July—1865.” And in Columbia, South Carolina, Emme LeConte wrote, “The white people shut themselves within doors and the darkies had the day to themselves—they and the Yankees. I could have listened to the roar of cannon at our very doors all day and thought it music were we celebrating our independence and—but well, well—what is the use of talking about it.”18 African-American assertiveness on July 4, 1865, sparked new kinds of racial tensions, strains that would shape the long process of Reconstruction. Even in northern cities, whites reacted strongly. When an Independence Day orator in Hudson City, New Jersey, celebrated the end of slavery and all it implied, he was interrupted by hecklers. One former aldermen went so far as to run up to the stage and stop the speech.19 But it was in southern towns ☛ } CONT. ON P. 75 51 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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s o l d i e rs of
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m i s f o rt u n e
FINANCIAL MOTIVES DROVE UNION RECRUITING AS MUCH AS MORE ALTRUISTIC INCENTIVES
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BY WILLIAM MARVEL
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training camps after the attack on Fort Sumter have always been regarded as the most selflessly patriotic of all those who served in Mr. Lincoln’s armies. Contemporary newspaper accounts, regimental histories, and the veterans’ own memoirs often depict them as tossing down their tools and marching instantly to their country’s defense. For over a century, secondary histories of the war reflected that image, but a closer look at the economic conditions of 1861 reveals that vast legions of those early recruits were desperate for any kind of remunerative employment. They and large proportions of those who followed them into uniform in 1862, well before the advent of lavish bounties, were lured as much by money as by patriotic sentiment. The question of whether the Civil War was a “poor man’s fight” has been long debated but never satisfactorily resolved. Statistical studies have compared the wealth of soldiers from single communities with that of their fellow citizens, but the conclusions have been broadly contradictory. Most of those studies also had to rely on average wealth, which is easily skewed by a few extremely rich families. Quantitative analysis of soldiers’ writings, meanwhile, depends on the candor of the soldier, the interpretation of the analyst, the breadth of material examined, and the degree to which that material represents the overall population of Civil War soldiers.
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the men who flocked to Union
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PREVIOUS SPREAD: NATIONAL NUMISMATIC COLLECTION, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY; NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
The men of the 7th New York State Militia march through the streets of Manhattan to great fanfare on their way to war in April 1861. While it has been long thought that such early war volunteers were motivated largely by patriotism, financial incentives played a significant factor in volunteerism, even during the war’s first months.
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support themselves. A Rhode Island paper supposed that three-quarters of that heavily industrialized state’s labor force lacked steady work before the local economy began to recover. Democratic sheets tended to emphasize such malaise while their Republican competitors leaned toward exaggerated optimism, but abundant contemporary testimony corroborates the reports of “hard times.”2 The more agrarian economy of the states in the West might have afforded them some insulation from that recession in manufacturing had it not been for the impact of secession on southern bonds and river traffic. Individual banks were the source of most currency at that time, and the farther west one went, the more common were banks that secured generous proportions of the notes they issued on southern bonds. With most of the southern states considering themselves out of the Union, including Louisiana and the trade center of New Orleans, confidence in those bonds promptly plummeted. Money from banks heavily invested in them was quickly discounted in the marketplace, and those discounts spread through the Ohio Valley and the watershed of the upper Mississippi. Illinois and Wisconsin bank notes were among the most deeply depreciated, and by the time the guns opened on Fort Sumter it was difficult to pass Wisconsin money anywhere. Farmers in that region had enjoyed successive years of bumper yields in crops and livestock, but such abundance depressed prices generally. With a soft market and currency scarce, it was a lucky man who could sell his crop or herd at all, let alone for cash, the face value of which might evaporate before he could find a bank to accept the deposit. Great Lakes lumber producers faced similarly low demand. Banks that managed to survive the currency contraction refrained from lending, which brought an abrupt halt to construction and contributed further to the decline in commerce. Riverboats began tying up for lack of freight or passenger traffic, although no blockade actually closed the Mississippi until a few weeks after hostilities opened. St. Louis, Quincy, Alton, Hanni3 To view this article’s reference notes, turn to page 78.
A substantial majority of Union recruits during the Civil War came from the poorer half of society, and the 90-day volunteers raised under Abraham Lincoln’s first call for troops on April 15, 1861, were the poorest of them all. Left: James Fuller Queen’s patriotic 1861 lithograph of early war recruits titled “The Volunteers in Defence of the Government Against Usurpation.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A relatively new survey of the 1860 census from the University of Minnesota finally allows a determination of each state’s median wealth for that year.1 Median wealth neatly divides any cohort in two, with half below the median and half above it. Using that measure, I conducted my own examination of the economic status of thousands of Union soldiers in the various northern states at each recruiting period, and found that a substantial majority of them came from the poorer half of society. Units that were raised for short enlistments with some expectation of easier or safer duty frequently attracted solid majorities of recruits from the wealthier strata, but by a margin of more than two to one, the men who did most of the fighting were from the poorer classes. The 90-day troops raised under Lincoln’s first call on April 15, 1861, were the poorest of them all. Virtually forgotten now, amid all the memorable political and military distractions from late 1860 and early 1861, is the severe economic downturn of that winter. Serious discussion of secession began immediately after the election of Abraham Lincoln, with South Carolina’s formal declaration coming at the outset of winter and the entire southern tier of states pulling out of the Union over the next six weeks. That division precipitated a decline in trade between the sections, with some southern boycotting of northern goods and southern repudiation of sometimeslongstanding debts to northern creditors. State and railroad securities dropped in value anywhere from 20 to 40 percent within a fortnight of the election, at the first hint of secession. Those reactions, along with a cotton embargo, hit the industrialized states of the Northeast especially hard. Reduced demand subjected New England’s perennially impecunious shoemakers and textile workers to production slowdowns by Christmas, and their situations only worsened in the spring and summer. One New York City newspaper estimated that 25,000 New York factory workers had lost their jobs before November ended, and by early January, New Hampshire editors were describing a stagnant business climate. By the third week of February the Philadelphia Inquirer calculated that 40 percent of that city’s industrial workers had either been laid off or had their workweeks cut so short that they could not 56 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2018
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bal, and well-known towns farther upstream lay eerily quiet; those who did travel the river described those places as “grave-yards,” “deserted,” “prostrated,” and “grown over with grass.” Journalists as far west as Kansas acknowledged that “thousands engaged in trade and commercial pursuits, are thrown out of employment by the general derangement of business.”3
11 Amid such economic disarray, it should be no surprise that when President Lincoln demanded 75,000 three-month militia after the attack on Fort Sumter, the poorest segment of society produced the lion’s share of the volunteers. In most states, at least two-thirds of the men in the first companies to enroll came from the poorer half of their state’s population. In New Jersey, 89 percent of the first organized company hailed from families with less than the median wealth; in Minnesota the figure was 83 percent; in New Hampshire, 81 percent; and in New York, 80 per-
cent. In the first regiment recruited in Kansas (which happened to be a three-year regiment), the poorer half of that state supplied 87 percent of the surveyed company. The cumulative average of poorer men in that first call came to 71 percent—nearly two and a half times the proportion of volunteers from the upper economic strata. That percentage is the result of conservative calculation, and many of those enumerated above the median lay barely above it. Additionally, significant numbers of men who had claimed median wealth during the summer census of 1860 had endured serious economic setbacks in the subsequent recession. The truly rich man, or his son, was a relatively rare character in the Union army anytime during the war, but especially among those who enlisted at the outset. As a reporter for the Dubuque Herald, Franc Wilkie accompanied the 1st Iowa Infantry on its campaign into Missouri. In a memoir of the experience written over a quarter of a century later, he portrayed that regiment not as a phalanx of determined patriots but as a diverse collection of
A Poor Man’s Fight?
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A survey of wealth reporting on the 1860 census conducted for the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series at the University of Minnesota now allows for calculation of the median family wealth in each state that year. Those state medians are listed below. Establishing median wealth makes it possible to gauge the relative economic standing of Civil War soldiers’ families within the populations of their states. The second table—of the percentages of men in each state whose family’s wealth was less than the median—was developed by searching the census for volunteers in the earliest companies to answer Lincoln’s first militia call in 1861. MEDIAN FAMILY WEALTH BY STATE, 1860
PERCENTAGE OF SAMPLED 90-DAY UNION VOLUNTEERS FROM FAMILIES WITH BELOWMEDIAN HOUSEHOLD WEALTH, 1861
Connecticut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $500
Connecticut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73%
Illinois . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $815
Illinois . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68%
Indiana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $300
Indiana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63%
Iowa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $295
Iowa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66%
Kansas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $550
Kansas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64%
Maine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $900
Maine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68%
Massachusetts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $300
Massachusetts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71%
Michigan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $900
Michigan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66%
Minnesota . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $675
Minnesota . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83%
New Hampshire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1,100
New Hampshire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81%
New Jersey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $500
New Jersey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89%
New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $325
New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80%
Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $750
Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76%
Pennsylvania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $500
Pennsylvania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68%
Rhode Island* . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $0
Rhode Island . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64%
Vermont . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1,300
Vermont . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69%
Wisconsin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $700
Wisconsin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62% • Cumulative average of all listed states . . . . 71%
* IN RHODE ISLAND, MORE THAN 50% OF HOUSEHOLDS REPORTED NO REAL ESTATE OR PERSONAL PROPERTY
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month militia call. Towns and cities from Maine to the Missouri River formed their own committees to collect donations for distribution to the wives, children, or parents of men who marched away. That level of compensation appealed even to many men with steady employment; it exerted a particular attraction on those who had been without work—or without enough work— for weeks or months. The desperate, the unemployed, and the underemployed therefore poured into the army in disproportionate numbers. With its limited scope, the militia call came nowhere near exhausting the mass of idle workmen, failing businessmen, and cash-strapped farmers. On May 3 Lincoln made his first appeal for three-year volunteers and expanded the Regular Army, adding the promise of a $100 bounty to be paid at discharge, and three months later Congress raised the monthly pay of private soldiers to $13. In their letters home, recruits often revealed the importance of the money they would earn, including some who cast their enlistments in the most extravagant patriotic metaphor. Some wrote covetously of the discharge bounty as though it were already in their pockets, especially when they anticipated the war ending within months. The effectiveness of pecuniary inducements was evident in the size of the type they were accorded on recruiting posters. As the pool of poorest men was depleted, those inducements grew larger, as did their font. In regions particularly hard hit economically, the only visible recruiting effort might consist of the list of pay and allowances for all ranks in the army, repeatedly published in local newspapers. Innumerable editors also made the unauthorized promise
As the pool of the North’s poorest men became depleted, financial inducements for enlistment grew larger—and more prominent on recruiting materials, as evidenced by these wartime broadsides.
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COWAN’S AUCTIONS INC. (COWANAUCTIONS.COM)
adventurers, dreamers, and idlers, most of whom were financially embarrassed. “I knew the young men who responded to the call,” Wilkie wrote, “—knew them by hundreds. They were clerks on small salaries; they were lawyers with insufficient business; they were young men with no occupation and anxious for employment.” He saw toilworn farm lads in search of excitement, husbands in flight from shrewish wives, and opportunists hoping to enhance their station with military rank or the political advantage it might bring, but most of them mainly needed money. They included “physicians with limited practice” as well as “clergymen with unappreciative parishes, small incomes, and unsympathetic social environments,” and none of them expected the Rebels to put up a fight. “It was a picnic, ... with all the pleasure of a free excursion, new faces and places, and pay, food, and clothing during their absence.”4 Wilkie’s portrait of the 1st Iowa comported with the financial standing found in that regiment’s Company A, two-thirds of which was composed of men from families that did not even own the Iowa median of $295 in real and personal property. The men who volunteered in the ranks that spring earned $11 a month, plus keep. That was a few dollars less than the average farmhand was paid at the time, but most of the public appeals for volunteers were accompanied by fundraising drives for the support of soldiers’ families. April had not ended when the Vermont legislature passed a bill authorizing a $7 monthly supplement to the pay of every volunteer who went into federal service from that state. Rhode Island initially paid its troops an additional $12 a month. Maine offered a one-time bounty of $22 for the three-
COWAN’S AUCTIONS INC. (COWANAUCTIONS.COM)
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An improving wartime economy, along with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s decision to halt recruiting in April 1862, played a large part in cutting off reinforcements to the Union army. Stanton reversed course in May, but heavy casualties incurred during the Seven Days Battles, which ended July 1, contributed to the continued lethargy in Union army recruiting. Above: Doctors treat Union soldiers wounded at Savage’s Station, one of the Seven Days Battles. Right: Edwin Stanton.
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equally honest pitch to farmers in the hardscrabble farm country of central Vermont, conceding that “no business pays so well as soldiering now days [sic]. Twenty dollars per month from the date of enlistment, and all expenses paid, is not to be despised in these hard times.” Vermont’s $7 monthly pay supplement helped that state meet its apportioned quotas of volunteers with a surplus exceeded only by Rhode Island, which offered still more generous state bounties and local support.7 From the spring of 1861 through the succeeding winter many a young man, as well as some who were not so young, wandered up and down the East Coast or followed the river corridors in search of steady work. They recounted their travels and their disappointments in letters to their loved ones, often concluding their correspondence with the announcement that they could
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
of 160 acres in bounty land to all volunteers, even if the war ended that summer. A young New Yorker who had failed to prosper in Iowa took their bait, enlisting finally because “everything was dull and promised to remain so untill [sic] after the war.”5 Often, those who were begging men to enlist abandoned patriotic pretense and openly argued that in such a crippled economy the army was the best possible solution for a man who had nothing else to do. In Beardstown, Illinois, commerce on the Illinois River had ground to a halt, and the local editor candidly addressed the men lounging about the wharf. “There is a great many men out of employment who might as well take a little trip as not,” he reminded prospective recruits for the army, adding “there is now more clear money in that business than any other that we know of.”6 The editor of the Rutland Herald made an
find no means of supporting themselves except by enlisting. A survey of the three-year volunteers from the conflict’s first summer confirms that such tales were common, yielding an average of 70 percent who fell below median wealth.8
PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
11 One year into the war, the demand for military supplies had reinvigorated both the industrial and agricultural sectors of the national economy, sharply reducing the number of men who might enlist from financial need. That factor played a prominent role in cutting off reinforcements to the army—as did Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s incomprehensible halt to recruiting on April 3, 1862. The deadly fighting of that spring and early summer further dampened martial enthusiasm. If the nation’s forces were to be replenished, the ante was going to have to be increased. In May, Stanton sheepishly reversed his recruiting decree, asking state governors for a few dozen new regiments. He added a frantic addendum to that appeal a couple of weeks later, when Stonewall Jackson led a small Confederate army on a rampage in the Shenandoah Valley, but the enlistment frenzy of 1861 was not repeated. “The war fever has pretty generally subsided,” wrote a young man attending college in Iowa, adding that he knew no one who was enlisting or even talking about it.9 The governors had authorized the formation of new regiments as requested, but most of those organizations still languished incomplete in camp in mid-July, usually with only a fraction of their regulation enrollment. Between the spring of 1861 and that of 1862 gainful civilian employment had become much more readily available, while the euphoric holiday atmosphere of the war had been replaced by fierce brutality. Those combined factors explained most of the lethargy in recruiting. Far fewer potential soldiers viewed military service as their only hope for basic subsistence, while most of those who might have gone to war for other reasons found the danger too daunting to assume with so little compensation. That slow response, combined with the tactical reverses and extensive casualties of the Seven Days Battles, which ended on July 1, 1862, led President Lincoln to issue a proclamation for 300,000 new three-year troops. Although it was carefully disguised as an unsolicited offer of troops from the governors, it carried the mandatory quotas of an executive demand. How that demand would be enforced no one really
knew, but rumors of impending conscription had begun circulating in conjunction with congressional debate over amendments to the Militia Act. On July 17 those amendments took effect, allowing the president to call up state militia for as much as nine months of service to the general government, and giving him the authority to require a draft for any deficiencies. Recognizing the importance of money in attracting men, Stanton acceded to gubernatorial suggestions of offering a month’s advance pay of $13 and a quarter of the $100 discharge bounty. The army had long paid a premium of $2 to anyone who recruited a soldier, and Stanton also agreed to assign that to the volunteer himself, which would give each man a total of $40 cash in hand as soon as he mustered in. Where the aftershocks of recession still reverberated, $40 in greenbacks had some persuasive effect, but confusion over federal conscription may have indirectly played a greater role by encouraging relatively generous local bounties. Coming so soon after the president’s July 2 call for 300,000 three-year men, passage of the militia draft created widespread misunderstanding that shortfalls in the three-year quotas might also be supplied by conscription. Newspaper accounts documented that confusion, and sometimes seemed to deliberately cultivate it, to further spur recruiting efforts. The confusion only worsened when the War Department also demanded 300,000 nine-month militia on August 4, threatening to impose a draft by the impossible deadline of August 15. The troop quotas were assigned by state on the basis of the 1860 census, and the states further apportioned them to their counties, cities, or towns. If a community failed to provide as many soldiers as required, the balance would be drafted directly from that town. With that first direct risk that citizens might be forced into uniform, the relatively rare phenomenon of town bounties to volunteers suddenly became very popular. In the East most of the bounties were authorized by officially posted public meetings and funded by taxes, but privately raised subscriptions proved popular west of the Alleghenies, where balking county commissioners often held sway. Communities that were effectively competing for each others’ able-bodied men started bidding against each other in a way that demonstrated how relatively few citizens wished to serve. From paltry provincial offers of $10 the bounties quickly rose to $50 and $75, and before the end of July they reached $100 in the larger towns and cities in the East, on top of the federal money. The approach of the August 15 draft deadline for the militia call prompted further escalation in local bounties. In mid-August the city of Hartford, Connecticut, advertised a bounty of $175, 61 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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by a solid majority of men from the bottom half of the economic spectrum, amounting to 57 percent of the surveyed samples. That fell 10 percent below the results for the three-year men who had just preceded them, but poor men were still providing the lion’s share of the soldiers.
11 President Lincoln recognized that economic incentives contributed significantly to filling his armies, although he seemed to play down that less-admirable motivation even as he admitted it. He named patriotism as the first of seven reasons a man might enlist, and he included “ambition” and a “love of adventure” in the list, but he ended it with a “want of employment, and convenience.” A lack of employment specifically indicated economic need, and “convenience” strongly suggested it, since military service could hardly have been considered convenient for anyone who had a better means of supporting himself. In a manuscript that he evidently intended as part of a speech, but never used, the president concluded sometime in 1863 that all of those personal stimuli had ceased to have any effect. “We already have,” he contended, “... substantially all that can be obtained upon this voluntary weighing of motives.”13 He appeared to be correct in assessing the declining influence of patriotism, ambition, or the desire to test one’s courage in perilous undertakings, but he was clearly mistaken if he thought money had lost its allure. Lincoln’s meditation on why men enlisted was obviously composed as a brief in defense of more efficient conscription at the federal level, bypassing the states and the militia they raised. Congress provided the authority for a nationwide draft in March 1863 with the Enrollment Act, and the Union army would realize no significant reinforcements until that law was implemented the following July. The most prominent reactions to that first draft call demonstrated that Lincoln had accurately judged the decline in patriotism and most other personal motivations, but that men would still enlist if they were paid enough money. Riots shook New York and Boston as the first draft lotteries began, but when the violence subsided the most common response to conscription was avoidance. Any drafted man could pay a $300 commutation fee for a one-time deferment, or obtain a permanent exemption by hiring another man to serve as his substitute. Most conscripts escaped through one of those two means. Of nearly 300,000 men whose names were chosen at random nationally in that first levy, barely one in 30 was required to enter the army himself. In Massachusetts only one conscript
HARPER’S WEEKLY
while the state paid $50 in advance and $30 more after each year of a three-year enlistment. State supplements of up to $16 per month had meanwhile been appropriated for soldiers’ families. A supportive editor hastened to calculate that, with such offers in addition to his regular pay and clothing allowance of $3.50 a month, a Hartford recruit could earn up to $495 a year for a threeyear commitment. That seemed a small fortune in an age when day laborers might earn $300 in a year, and towns that were more affluent or more desperate began offering $300, $400, and even $500 bounties for each recruit. The bounties rose so quickly that some who might once have been tempted to enlist for less hung back, waiting for them to go higher still.10 That magnitude of municipal largesse attracted an entirely new type of volunteer. The man down on his luck could still be found, or the teenaged boy from an indigent family, but the sudden surge in bounties presented a great many young and middle-aged men with visions of a lifetime stake. Most who entertained that notion were employed, and some already owned farms, albeit often with heavy mortgages. Many were married and had families. Vast numbers of bachelors used their enlistment windfalls to get married, which sometimes earned them additional bounties and usually made their brides eligible for a few more dollars of regular community support. In the fall of 1862 a Massachusetts fisherman observed that “everybody is geting [sic] married and going to the war,” and when the bounties rose high enough that fisherman would follow them.11 Still, fully two-thirds of the surveyed three-year volunteers from the summer of 1862 represented the poorer half of their respective states’ populations. The nine-month militia, the preponderance of which was recruited after the three-year organizations had been completed, attracted volunteers from noticeably more comfortable backgrounds. In most cases the bounties for nine-month men fell below those offered for three-year enlistments, but in proportion to the length of service, they were frequently even more generous. The shorter term naturally seemed more desirable to men reluctant to neglect their affairs, particularly after newspapers across the country published an unfounded rumor that the militia would remain in camp near home, as a reserve. The timing of the militia recruiting implied that the earlier regiments’ terms would roughly match the academic year, so some regiments boasted disproportionate numbers of college students and professors. The 44th Massachusetts Volunteer Militia teemed with men of Harvard affiliation, and Governor John Andrew directly lobbied Edwin Stanton to have his elite militiamen assigned to the safe and salubrious coast of North Carolina.12 The nine-month levy was nevertheless filled 62 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2018
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HARPER’S WEEKLY
For decades, historians have pointed to the success of the reenlistment program aimed at Union veterans as evidence of their patriotism and determination to see the war through. In truth, financial incentives factored prominently in their decisions. Above: A Harper’s Weekly sketch that captures the “enthusiasm” of reenlisting veterans from the Army of the Potomac’s XVII Corps.
in 40 went into uniform, and in New Hampshire one in 44.14 If more altruistic motives had ever eclipsed mercenary incentives in Union recruiting, such overwhelming draft avoidance suggested that the appeal of cash had vastly overshadowed those motives by the third year of the war. The fees demanded by most substitutes started in the range of the more extravagant bounties of 1862, and soon surpassed them. Section 4 of the Enrollment Act implied that anyone “now in the military service” would not be included in either of the two categories of draft eligibility. Whether that was intended as an exemption or not, thousands of former soldiers who had still been in the army on March 3, 1863, were later excused on those grounds when they were drafted. The War Department instead prevailed on those old soldiers to reenlist, beginning in June 1863 with an offer of a $402 federal bounty (including the $2 “premium”) to the two-year and nine-month veterans who were discharged that spring, summer, and fall. This was followed later that year by a similar offer to the three-year volunteers still on duty: after completing all but one year of their enlistments they could reenlist for three more years from that date for the same $402 bounty, plus their original $100 discharge bounty, besides enjoying a 30-day furlough. Local bounties usually augmented that federal payoff.15 For six decades the success of this reenlistment program has been cited as evidence of the unparalleled patriotism of the early Union vol-
unteers. By misinterpreting how many veterans could take advantage of the offer, Bruce Catton calculated that the 136,000 who did reenlist represented more than half of those eligible, and subsequent historians have followed his lead. Catton also asserted that money was the least motivating factor in those reenlistments, relying on a single regimental history and ignoring his only other source on that point—the contradictory wartime letters of a Union soldier. Seemingly on faith alone, Catton opined that most of the veterans reenlisted mainly from “a simple desire to see the job through.”16 The reenlistment program ran from June 1863 until the end of the war, embracing tens of thousands who had completed only nine months of service and hundreds of thousands who had finished two years. Most able-bodied soldiers or veterans who had enlisted from May 1861 until April 1863 could have taken advantage of it, including the two-year and nine-month men. The provost marshal general estimated 1,360,000 enlistments through that period, but by the time the reenlistment program started, a large percentage of those men had died, deserted, gone home permanently disabled, or been discharged before serving nine months. The rest, many of whom had recovered from disabilities for which they had been discharged, became eligible for reenlistment at one time or another. Even if only half of the original soldiers met the requirements, they amounted to 680,000 men, and 136,000 reen- ☛ } CONT. ON P. 76 63 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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2 NEW D LSU PRESS 2
AMBIVALENT NATION
How Britain Imagined the American Civil War HUGH DUBRULLE 5 b&w images • $49.95 cloth
TWO CHARLESTONIANS AT WAR The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist BARBARA L. BELLOWS 24 b&w images, 2 maps • $38.00 cloth
THE CIVIL WAR AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
ON TO PETERSBURG
PAUL D. QUIGLEY
Grant and Lee, June 4–15, 1864 GORDON C. RHEA
$47.50 cloth
11 b&w images, 19 maps • $45.00 cloth
New in Paper
A BROKEN REGIMENT
The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War LESLEY J. GORDON 14 b&w images, 2 maps $35.00 paper
COURTESY OF JASON MINICK, PHOTOGRAPHER, AND THE GETTYSBURG FOUNDATION
AVA I LA B LE I N B OOKSTOR E S & O N L IN E AT WWW. L S U P R E S S .O R G
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COURTESY OF JASON MINICK, PHOTOGRAPHER, AND THE GETTYSBURG FOUNDATION
BOOKS & AUTHORS
The Best Gettysburg Books for our latest newsstand-only special issue, Gettysburg, we asked a number of Civil War historians for their opinions on a variety of topics, including the battle’s most overrated and underrated performances, best photos, and most compelling monuments. Space constraints prevented us from including the answers to one of the questions we posed: What are the five best books about the Battle of Gettysburg (nonfiction or fiction)? Here are their responses.
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B&A maps), and he breathes a gentle but definite spirit of admiration for the Army of Northern Virginia, and especially for James Longstreet. Tucker’s sympathetic portrayal of Longstreet was the background for Michael Shaara’s depiction of Longstreet in The Killer Angels, and the foundation for much of the modern rehabilitation of Longstreet’s reputation. 3 PICKETT’S CHARGE—THE LAST ATTACK AT GETTYSBURG (2001)
EARL J. HESS
Allen C. Guelzo THE GETTYSBURG CAMPAIGN: A STUDY IN COMMAND (1968) 1
EDWIN B. CODDINGTON
Coddington’s work has become the touchstone book for understanding the full scope of Gettysburg, treating the campaign and not just the battle, from Robert E. Lee’s preparations to the crossing of the Potomac River at Williamsport and Falling Waters. Its great strength is its thoroughness, and it was the first to use in full the papers, letters, and testimonies assembled by John Bachelder from the battle’s participants. Its weakness is its plodding, tedious style, which often makes it a book more recommended than read. 2
HIGH TIDE AT GETTYSBURG (1958)
GLENN TUCKER
High Tide at Gettysburg is a journalist’s rather than a historian’s work, and for sheer readability, there is no other singlevolume history of the battle to match it. Tucker is long on personalities (which interested him the most) and short on military chitchat (there are, for instance, no
Hess’ study is the model of a Gettysburg micro-history. It’s done with a passion for completeness, and it’s also the first book that took notice of the significance of the fence rails on either side of the Emmittsburg Road—a point that got me thinking about the larger meaning of the fences in the whole Gettysburg battle. The judgments about the most famous attack in American history are careful and judicious; Hess is not in love with Longstreet, and, on the whole, he does not consider the attack to have been some ghastly error on Lee’s part. 4 RETREAT FROM GETTYSBURG (2005)
KENT MASTERSON BROWN
Retreat from Gettysburg does not at first seem like it ought to be on anyone’s topfive list for any battle book, since (as Winston Churchill said about Dunkirk) evacuations are not victories, no matter how successful. Brown, however, has managed to write a wonderfully compelling, highly readable book about a subject that he never allows to lapse into dreariness. He is precise on timings, locations, and even heads of cattle brought off, and he is remarkably generous in estimating that while Lee may have lost the Battle of Gettysburg, he salvaged a good deal from the campaign (including 45 road miles’ worth of captured stores). GETTYSBURG: THE FIRST DAY (2001) 5
HARRY PFANZ
This is the first of three books that Pfanz, a longtime presence with the National Park Service staff at Gettysburg and the NPS chief historian, wrote about Gettysburg. Actually, any of the three (the other two are Gettysburg: The Second Day, which was the first of the trio, in 1987, and Gettysburg: Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill in 1993) would be a good nominee for this slot, since they all follow the same meticulous pattern: scorchingly detailed accounts of troop movements and encounters and microscopic focus on individuals and good personal stories. Pfanz tries to steer middle courses through some of the first day’s controversies (especially between Oliver Otis Howard and Winfield Scott Hancock). It may take longer to read Pfanz’s accounts of the various actions that made up the battle than it did for them to occur, but the rewards for the Gettysburg-obsessed are wonderful. ALLEN C. GUELZO IS THE HENRY R. LUCE PROFESSOR OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA AND DIRECTOR OF CIVIL WAR ERA STUDIES AT GETTYSBURG COLLEGE, AND IS CURRENTLY THE WM. L. GARWOOD VISITING PROFESSOR IN THE JAMES MADISON PROGRAM IN AMERICAN IDEALS & INSTITUTIONS AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. HIS BOOK ON THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG, GETTYSBURG: THE LAST INVASION, WAS A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IN 2013.
Lawrence Korczyk 1 THE GETTYSBURG CAMPAIGN: A STUDY IN COMMAND (1968)
EDWIN B. CODDINGTON
Any study of the Gettysburg Campaign should begin with Coddington’s brilliant book. His work is not just a retelling of the battle but a critical analysis of the leadership and command decisions of the officers of the Union and Confederate armies. Among Gettysburg’s Licensed Battlefield Guides, Coddington’s work is considered one of the definitive studies of the campaign—one to be read, understood, and thoroughly
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analyzed. 2 GETTYSBURG: THE SECOND DAY (1987)
with photos in hand, reinterpreting the story of the epic engagement. 5
GETTYSBURG (2003)
HARRY PFANZ
STEPHEN W. SEARS
Pfanz, onetime chief historian at Gettysburg National Military Park, has written the definitive volume on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Pfanz’s thorough understanding of the topography, exhaustive research, and clear writing has produced an outstanding micro-history of the fighting on July 2. Pfanz examines all of the tactical movements of the two armies in detail while also supplying valuable vignettes of the men in battle. His book is the battle narrative by which all others are measured.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stephen Sears’ remarkable book is another mustread for any student of the Battle of Gettysburg. The volume is exhaustively researched and beautifully written, and contains critical and deep insights into the command decisions of the two armies. It is simply one of the finest single volumes written on the battle.
3
LAWRENCE KORCZYK, A GETTYSBURG LICENSED BATTLEFIELD GUIDE SINCE 2013, WAS RECENTLY ELECTED VICE PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION OF LICENSED BATTLEFIELD GUIDES. HE IS CO-AUTHOR OF THE BOOK TOP TEN AT GETTYSBURG (2017).
2 GETTYSBURG: THE SECOND DAY (1987)
HARRY PFANZ
The former National Park Service historian’s command of source material and knowledge of the ground itself combines to produce a stellar narrative of the fighting on July 2, conveying its complexity while sacrificing nothing of clarity. 3 A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTYSBURG (2013)
CAROL REARDON AND TOM VOSSLER
This dazzling guidebook is an essential battlefield companion for new students and veteran campaigners alike. Reardon and Vossler enrich superb narratives of the action with human color mined from careful spadework in pension files and other sources.
THE KILLER ANGELS (1974)
MICHAEL SHAARA
One of the most compelling and vivid accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg is not a work of nonfiction but of fiction. Florida State University professor Michael Shaara, with imagination and beautiful writing, brings the battle to life with breathtaking character development and historically accurate detail. Shaara’s work, which was developed into the 1993 movie Gettysburg, has inspired tens of thousands of Americans to make the journey to Gettysburg to relive those three epic days in July 1863.
4 GETTYSBURG: A JOURNEY IN TIME (1974)
WILLIAM A. FRASSANITO
Once described as “Gettysburg’s Lieutenant Columbo,” William Frassanito produced a meticulous study of Gettysburg battlefield photography that has permitted generations of historians to— literally—see the events of July 1–3, 1863, from new angles.
4 GETTYSBURG: A JOURNEY IN TIME (1974)
WILLIAM A. FRASSANITO
The publication of Frassanito’s groundbreaking Gettysburg: A Journey in Time produced an entirely new genre in Civil War historiography. For the first time, photographs of the Battle of Gettysburg were systematically analyzed and new information about them uncovered, altering our understanding and interpretation of the battle. Frassanito’s work created new generations of photographic detectives who wander the battlefield
that roiled the high commands, and ability to approach his subject from oblique angles render this book one of the finest Civil War battle studies ever written.
5 THE COLORS OF COURAGE (2004)
Brian Matthew Jordan GETTYSBURG: THE LAST INVASION (2013) 1
ALLEN C. GUELZO
Guelzo’s keen attention to the texture and experience of the battle for ordinary soldiers, perceptive analysis of the politics
MARGARET CREIGHTON
With a rich sense of character development and good storytelling, this beautifully written book integrates the experiences of immigrant soldiers, women, and African Americans into the tale of the war’s most storied battle, offering a profound meditation on its legacy. 67 SUMMER 2018 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR
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B&A BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT SAM HOUSTON STATE UNIVERSITY. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF MARCHING HOME: UNION VETERANS AND THEIR UNENDING CIVIL WAR (2014), WHICH WAS A FINALIST FOR THE 2016 PULITZER PRIZE FOR HISTORY.
visit Little Round Top than, say, Culp’s Hill. Shaara might have gone overboard in his rehabilitation of the performance of James Longstreet. Still, anyone who skips this book is doing themselves a terrible disservice.
Ethan S. Rafuse
ETHAN S. RAFUSE IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE U.S. ARMY COMMAND AND GENERAL STAFF COLLEGE AND THE AUTHOR, EDITOR, OR CO-EDITOR OF 11 BOOKS. IN 2018–2019 HE WILL BE THE CHARLES BOAL EWING VISITING PROFESSOR AT THE U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY.
1 THE GETTYSBURG CAMPAIGN: A STUDY IN COMMAND (1968)
EDWIN B. CODDINGTON
Excellent recent books about the battle by Stephen Sears and Allen Guelzo beat Coddington in terms of readability, and I would probably recommend them to anyone beginning their study of Gettysburg. For the truly serious, though, Coddington remains the outstanding, classic study of the campaign.
Lesley J. Gordon 1 GETTYSBURG: A JOURNEY IN TIME (1974)
WILLIAM A. FRASSANITO
This hugely influential study demonstrating the power of imagery in war was a game-changing book for me when I first read it as a teen.
PICKETT’S CHARGE IN HISTORY AND MEMORY (1997) 2
CAROL REARDON
Reardon’s study is one of the best and most influential books on any Civil War topic to appear in the past few decades. It takes a much-studied and unquestionably important subject and offers the sort of compelling re-examination of what we know— and think we know—that only a truly outstanding scholar and student of history can deliver. Her compelling look at Pickett’s Charge and how history is made inspired a legion of folks to jump on the history and memory bandwagon. 3
THE KILLER ANGELS (1974)
MICHAEL SHAARA
While The Killer Angels might not be an essential work for understanding the battle (although it is pretty good in that respect), the novel certainly made stars of Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine Infantry, and helps explain why today so many more people
center of the Confederate campaign, drawing on fresh research to provide important insights. It is extremely difficult to make logistics the central component of a campaign study and produce a work that is not just informative but also interesting and compelling reading, but Brown pulls it off with great skill.
4 A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTYSBURG (2013)
CAROL REARDON AND TOM VOSSLER
Visiting a battlefield and immersing yourself in the terrain is the best way to gain an understanding of what happened there, and a good guide to assist you as you explore the large and complex Gettysburg battlefield is essential. I am a big fan of Mark Grimsley and Brooks Simpson’s 1999 guide, but changes to the battlefield since its publication have rendered it long overdue for revision. Even a revised edition of that work, though, would be hard pressed to knock Reardon and Vossler’s book from the top spot among battlefield guides. RETREAT FROM GETTYSBURG (2005) 5
KENT MASTERSON BROWN
This fascinating study places, as its title suggests, logistical considerations at the
2
LONG REMEMBER (1934)
MACKINLEY KANTOR
One of my favorite novels of the Civil War, Kantor’s book is set in Gettysburg as the battle rages. At its center, the novel explores questions of loyalty, pacifism, love, and heroism. 3
THE COLORS OF COURAGE (2004)
MARGARET CREIGHTON
This innovative and insightful book reminds us that battles never happen in isolation. 4 THE GETTYSBURG CAMPAIGN: A STUDY IN COMMAND (1968)
EDWIN B. CODDINGTON
Edwin Coddington’s well written and engaging study of the Battle of Gettysburg is a classic that endures. I still find myself consulting it 50 years after its publication.
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5 THE GETTYSBURG NOBODY KNOWS (1999)
ED. BY GABOR BORITT
A wide-ranging and useful collection of essays based on lectures given at Gettysburg College’s Civil War Institute, this volume is an excellent reminder that Gettysburg is not entirely exhausted as a topic for new and original scholarship.
math and its indelible imprint on the landscape and locals. Exploring the process of burying the dead, caring for the wounded, treatment of prisoners, and impact on civilians, A Strange and Blighted Land offers a significant contribution to Gettysburg scholarship and continues to define the conversation of the battle’s aftermath.
LESLEY J. GORDON IS THE CHARLES G. SUMMERSELL CHAIR OF SOUTHERN HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA. HER PUBLICATIONS INCLUDE GENERAL GEORGE E. PICKETT IN LIFE AND LEGEND (1998), INSIDE THE CONFEDERATE NATION: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF EMORY M. THOMAS (2005), AND A BROKEN REGIMENT: THE 16TH CONNECTICUT’S CIVIL WAR (2014). FROM 2010 TO 2015, SHE WAS EDITOR OF THE ACADEMIC JOURNAL CIVIL WAR HISTORY.
Jennifer M. Murray
GREGORY COCO
Years before academic historians considered the war’s “dark turn,” Gregory Coco, a Gettysburg National Military Park seasonal ranger and Vietnam veteran, offered a pioneering study that expanded the Gettysburg narrative beyond July 3, 1863. Coco’s work addresses the battle’s after-
This three-volume set (edited by David and Audrey Ladd and published by Morningside Press) is indispensable for any researcher or student of the battle. John Bachelder traveled to Gettysburg after the battle to interview Union and Confederate soldiers about their experiences in the fight. The Bachelder Papers includes these interviews and correspondences that helped to define Bachelder as the battle’s first historian. Few individuals have worked to shape the history and memory of the battle and the origins and preservation of the battlefield as much as John Bachelder. His work should be on the shelves of all students of the engagement.
WILLIAM A. FRASSANITO
EDWIN B. CODDINGTON
2 A STRANGE AND BLIGHTED LAND (1995)
JOHN BACHELDER
5 GETTYSBURG: A JOURNEY IN TIME (1974)
THE GETTYSBURG CAMPAIGN: A STUDY IN COMMAND (1968) 1
Although numerous campaign studies have been published since the release of The Gettysburg Campaign, none have equaled or surpassed Coddington’s, whose work is impeccably researched and offers nearly 200 pages of footnotes. Coddington is consistently my “go-to” book for any questions on the battle. He offers a comprehensive narrative of the Gettysburg Campaign and insightful analysis on leadership and decision-making. This book must be on the shelves and referenced often for any student of the battle.
GETTYSBURG IN THEIR OWN WORDS (1994)
3 GETTYSBURG: CULP’S HILL AND CEMETERY HILL (1993)
HARRY PFANZ
Pfanz’s work remains the definitive standard on the fighting along Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. While often overshadowed in light of the fighting on the southern end of the battlefield on July 2, this work provides an excellent narrative of the action along the pivotal right flank of the Union line. Well-researched and written, Pfanz’s book offers a comprehensive narrative at both the strategic and tactical level, as well as insightful analysis on command decisions that remain debated by Civil War enthusiasts today. 4
THE BACHELDER PAPERS:
Because the Civil War was the nation’s first extensively photographed war, photographs prove an invaluable window into understanding the conflict itself and the visceral consequences of combat. Frassanito meticulously researched dozens of battlefield images to identify their photographers and the dates and locations they were taken, and to provide contemporary photos of the same vistas. Although his works do not redefine historiographical debates or challenge interpretations of the campaign or the battle, Frassanito has produced a subgenre of battlefield photography books (his Early Photography at Gettysburg, published in 1995, is also a standard) that advance an understanding of the engagement through images. JENNIFER M. MURRAY IS A HISTORY PROFESSOR AT OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY, WHERE SHE TEACHES COURSES ON THE CIVIL WAR, RECONSTRUCTION, AND MILITARY HISTORY. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF ON A GREAT BATTLEFIELD: THE MAKING, MANAGEMENT, AND MEMORY OF GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, 1933–2013 (2014) AND IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON A BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE GORDON MEADE.
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B&A
i had the exceptionally good fortune to meet and work for the author of three of the “books that built me” before I had even read them. It was August 1954. I was 22, fresh out of Oberlin, newly employed as editorial assistant at the fledgling American Heritage magazine, four months before its scheduled first issue. The new magazine’s editor was Bruce Catton, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for A Stillness at Appomattox (1953), and by extension for the earlier volumes in his trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951) and Glory Road (1952). It took me a couple or three paychecks to scrape up enough disposable income to buy these books, but when I did, they hooked me on the Civil War. American Heritage proved a publishing success, and Catton proved a kindly boss, always willing to answer a Civil War tyro’s questions. These years produced
the next book that formed me, The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (1960), in which I had a role. I collected many of the pictures and wrote many of the text blocks and captions that accompanied Catton’s narrative. It was a rich lesson in book-building. My stay at American Heritage Publishing ended in 1978, when its book division folded, but Catton, in that last year of his life, launched me into the free-
Stephen W. Sears
JERRY BAUER
The Books That Built Me Stephen W. Sears
lance-author world with a boost. His trilogy comprising The Centennial History of the Civil War, The Coming Fury (1961), Terrible Swift Sword (1963), and Never Call Retreat (1965), have ever since served me as foundational Civil War historiography; furthermore, Catton let me copy hundreds of his original-source notecards compiled by the Centennial History’s research director, E.B. Long. Finally, Catton encouraged me to tackle Antietam as my first Civil War book, pointing me to untapped sources I utilized in Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (1983). Thirty-four years later I dedicated my latest Civil War book, Lincoln’s Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac, to Bruce Catton, “for his many kindnesses, and for showing how it’s done.”
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JERRY BAUER
Other books have influenced me in making the best use of sources, Benjamin P. Thomas’ Abraham Lincoln (1952) being one of them. Thomas was the first Lincoln biographer to make use of the Robert Todd Lincoln Collection, a treasure trove of the president’s papers preserved by his son and only opened to the public in 1947. Thomas wove all this new material into his narrative so seamlessly that (as I wrote in an introduction to a later edition) its subtitle could have been “The Biographer as Master of his Sources.” Another masterful lesson in using sources is Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington: 1860–1865 (1941), a wonderfully varied but always relevant biography of the Civil War-time capital. What Washingtonians read in their newspapers and heard in their bars and in the halls of government and over back fences is all here. Two women with connections have enlightened me on life behind the wartime lines. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (1981), edited by C. Vann Woodward, presents the acute observations of the wife of a member of the Confederate government. Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee (1991), edited by Virginia Jeans
Laas, gives an inside look at the Yankee capital in the letters of a Blair family member to her sailor husband. Evaluating historical sources is a process requiring mastery, and one place to learn is Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (1996), compiled and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher. The Fehrenbachers applied an old-fashioned school-grading system, A-B-C-D-F, to those who claimed to be quoting the president, a methodology that can be applied more widely to utterances of all sorts to see who was naughty and who was nice in Civil War times. Grading with D’s or F’s can inspire one to do better one’s self. In writing on Antietam in Landscape Turned Red, I felt hampered by the available biographical material on General McClellan—certainly no “books that built me” there. I offered my own take on the general in 1988 in George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon, and a year later published The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865, the latter as sources support for the former. My particular Civil War reach does not extend west much beyond the Shenandoah Valley or south much beyond Appomattox, so I close with three titles that have shaped my thinking about the two eastern armies. Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman (2007), edited by David W. Lowe, offers an intimate insider’s look at the Army of the Potomac’s final 22 months by a member of General Meade’s staff. One only wishes Lyman had signed on earlier. I find blunt, straight-talking John Gibbon’s Personal Recollections of the Civil War (1928) to be the best memoir of any Potomac army general. Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (1989), edited by Gary W. Gallagher, is the equivalent, refreshingly candid look at the fortunes of the Army of Northern Virginia. STEPHEN W. SEARS IS THE AUTHOR OR EDITOR OF A BAKER’S DOZEN OF CIVIL WAR TITLES.
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AMERICAN ILIAD
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“An illuminating, ambitious and unsentimental history.” —Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal
“A genuinely fresh, persuasive perspective on the Civil War. . . . [A Savage War] will make even readers with a strong knowledge of the war think about how it was fought and why it ended as it did. A winner for Civil War history buffs.” —Kirkus, starred review “For those who want to understand the key decisions that determined the outcome of the [Civil War], the organization of the opposing armies and their deployments, the role of logistics and intelligence, and the moments of inspired generalship (and missed opportunities), it is hard to imagine a better book than this.” —Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs Paper $19.95
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feats of valor at Gettysburg in terms just as stirring.6 It was Michael Shaara, a Korean War veteran and professor of English at Florida State University, who elevated Chamberlain’s defense of Little Round Top to the status of legend. The Killer Angels, his novel of the Battle of Gettysburg, highlighted two characters, Confederate general James Longstreet and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, with Longstreet portrayed as a world-weary realist and Chamberlain as an idealist who embodied and espoused all that was best in the American character. While Shaara treated both men sympathetically, Chamberlain was clearly the novel’s hero and the focus of its most compelling passages. Early on, when Shaara has Chamberlain explain what the Union cause is all about, he focuses on human freedom, a freedom that goes beyond the emancipation of slaves. “The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it.”7 To understand the impact of The Killer Angels, one needs only to visit Gettysburg National Military Park. The regimental monument to the 20th Maine is not located on the popular boulder-strewn western face of Little Round Top, with its panoramic view of the battlefield, but rather on an obscure wooded spur on the far-from-dramatic southern slope. When I first visited Gettysburg in 1973, only an expert could have located the monument. But after the publication of The Killer Angels, so many visitors clamored to see it that the National Park Service installed a sign directing them to it—“the only sign on the battlefield that directs visitors to a specific regimental marker,” writes historian Jennifer Murray.8 Workers also constructed a small parking lot next to the monument and a paved pathway leading from Little Round Top down to the monument. Gettysburg’s cadre of
Licensed Battlefield Guides began to receive constant requests to visit the site of the 20th Maine’s defense, and it soon became a standard part of the basic twohour auto tour. In addition to popularizing the story of the 20th Maine’s defense, The Killer Angels helped inspire a new generation of scholarship about Little Round Top, particularly Thomas A. Desjardin’s Stand Firm Ye Boys From Maine: The 20th Maine and the Gettysburg Campaign (1995).9 This new attention enlarged upon the story and improved its historical accuracy, but also added needed context that contradicted the novel’s claims about its importance. The loss of Little Round Top, most historians now agree, would not inevitably have forced the entire Union army to retreat. At best, the Confederates could have wrestled only two cannon onto the restricted northern face of the ridge, and the Union army could—and surely would—have counterattacked to retake the ridge from its exhausted occupiers. But this is not the way most visitors see it. Gettysburg is itself a major myth within the American Iliad. The battle marked the high tide of Confederate fortunes, and in popular imagination a southern victory there would have meant victory in the war as a whole. (As Chamberlain says early in the novel, “I think if we lose this fight the war will be over.”)10 If Little Round Top was the vital key to the Union position on July 2, and the 20th Maine’s stand was the action that saved Little Round Top, then the 20th Maine won the Battle of Gettysburg—and perhaps even the Civil War itself! (I have met more than one Civil War buff who has made this argument.) That’s extravagant, of course, but it points us in the direction of Chamberlain’s mythic significance. Most of us live anonymous lives in which events control us. We are always hungry for tales that affirm the opposite: that a single person, or a small group, can seize control of history. 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.
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2018
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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2018
SUMMER 2018
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PUBLIC HISTORY
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was fought? Tony Horwitz begins Confederates in the Attic (1998) with an anecdote about his great-grandfather Isaac, a Jewish immigrant who arrived from Russia in 1882 and for whom a tattered copy of a Civil War book represented the essence of what it meant to be American. In promoting a recent airing of Ken Burns’ landmark series The Civil War, PBS featured a JapaneseAmerican man explaining how he did not realize what it was to be an American until he watched the powerful documentary. Indeed, the Civil War has always resonated in contemporary American life. Just consider the coincidence of the Civil War centennial occurring during the civil rights movement, which echoed so many issues of the century before. And just in the last three years, the legacies of the war have become more prominent than ever, with the Charleston, South Carolina, church murders and the ongoing national debates over Confederate monuments that resulted in the violent confrontations in Charlottesville, Virginia. The hyper-relevance of the Civil War in the last few years represents both a problem and an opportunity. Public history, by definition, mirrors our public interests and debates. And, as we all know, the American public is badly fractured along demographic, political, and ideological lines. But that very polarization offers museums and parks an opportunity to underscore their value as trustworthy sources for objective and constructive background and perspective. Many public history institutions and popular publications (including this one) have engaged the debates head on. And rather than defend the status quo of the inherited commemorative landscape, public historians have showcased diverse, conflicting voices on hot-button issues. Professional organizations such as the National Council on Public History and the American Association for State and Local History have endorsed a formal statement from the American Historical Association (the flagship academic historical organization) that is severely critical of Confederate monuments and other vestiges of the Lost Cause narrative of Civil War history. In short, public history professionals are seeking to make the Civil War more attractive and more politically palatable for people who have not been interested in the subject as it was taught in schools and presented at historical sites until recent decades. Obvious questions must occur to those of you reading this column—you who have, after all, proven willing to pick up a printed magazine and voluntarily read about Civil War history: What about us, the people who don’t need to be convinced that the Civil War is interesting and important? What about those of us who grew up with Douglas Southall Freeman, Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote, and Robert Penn Warren waxing poetical on America’s “Homeric Period”? Aren’t we part of the “public” in “public history”? The ways that public historians are trying to attract new audiences—including emphasizing non-military aspects of the conflict and repudiating the Confederate side of the story—may seem hostile to the more traditional ways of ☛ } CONT. ON P. 74
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USS Galena (1862-1872). Photograph looking forward along the ship’s port side, shortly after her May 15, 1862 action with Confederate batteries at Drewry’s Bluff, on the James River, Virginia. NH 53984 courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command. Image colorized by Nick Edwards.
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studying the Civil War. Yes, of course, the Civil War’s most significant results were the preservation of the Union and emancipation of 4 million enslaved African Americans. And 200,000 AfricanAmerican troops fought for the Union. And southerners were not as unified behind the Confederacy as we once believed. But what about the majority experience? What about the millions of white Americans on both sides who fought and endured the Civil War? Is it no longer possible to study the war as a military contest between two sides whose leaders and soldiers exhibited all the noble and ignoble characteristics of human beings? Does emphasizing “relevance” mean that the only legitimate way of studying the war will be as a morality play? The virulent backlash against Confederate symbols and monuments and to the Lost Cause version of Civil War history is also a rejection of Civil War history that accords respect to the fighting men on both sides. Does this represent a fundamental assault on the traditional study of the Civil War? We have been here before. Twenty years ago, the Civil War community was abuzz about the National Park Service’s mandate that battlefield parks’ interpretation must include slavery as a major cause of the war. Beyond the predictable charges of political correctness run amok, there was concern among traditional students of the war that the new policy would dilute battlefield parks’ original mandate to commemorate the actions of the men who fought and died on their grounds. The world as we knew it did not end with this expanded interpretation of battlefield parks. In the years since, these parks have continued to educate visitors on the actions of the soldiers and leaders who fought the war—as well as the conflict’s causes and consequences—and scores of new books have appeared on its military aspects. There is nothing fundamentally incompatible between the study of Civil War military history and the critical evaluation of the war’s causes and consequences. What might be different today is the
JOHN COSKI IS A SEASONAL VETERAN OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE AND THE COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG FOUNDATION, AND, SINCE 1988, HAS WORKED FOR THE MUSEUM AND WHITE HOUSE OF THE CONFEDERACY (NOW PART OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM) IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.
THE DECISION
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course, not protect them from federal occupation and confiscation. But the assumption was, in fact, that there would be no such occupation, because there would be no war. Scott even assured Judge Robertson on April 19 that “none of the troops now called into service would be used against the seceded States, unless the Government was attacked, and this the people of Virginia might rely on.”30 Hence, Lee’s impression (in his 1870 interview with William Preston Johnston) that Scott believed “that pacification was intended by Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward” and “that Mr. Lincoln would recede.” By accepting an invitation to take a role in determining Virginia’s military response, Lee might be in the perfect position to ensure that peace would be the result rather than war—and save the Custis properties from molestation by either federal or Virginia authorities. This certainly seems to have been the
seed planted in the mind of Cassius F. Lee during his after-church conference with Lee in Alexandria on April 21. Putting Lee “in command of the Virginia troops,” Cassius Lee hinted in a letter he wrote to Lee two days later, “might lead to a peaceful settlement of our difficulties.” Citing other Virginians, Cassius Lee wanted his cousin to understand that he would now be in a position to “bring about, at least, an armistice, preparatory to a National Assembly for peaceful settlement of our troubles.” After all, “Virginia from her geographical position ... has it in her power ... to come in as mediator, rather as an Putting Lee “in command of the Virginia troops might lead to a peaceful settlement of our difficulties.”
umpire & settle the question.” In such a role, Robert E. Lee would “be a leader in this matter” and “have an honor never reached by Napoleon or Wellington.”31 But events were galloping far away from any likelihood that they could be steered toward reunion negotiations. Virginia officially joined the Confederate States of America on May 7; on June 8, Virginia’s forces were transferred to the jurisdiction of the Confederate States, and in August, Lee would be commissioned as a senior general of the Confederate army. Lee would soon evolve into an ardent defender of secession and the Confederate cause, so much so that, together with his war record as the Confederacy’s premier general, it is easy to conclude that this was the attitude with which he made the initial decision to take sides against the United States. But the actual record of the decision is more complicated, and the Lee who resigned from the U.S. Army on April 20 may have seen his decision and the following fateful meeting in Richmond as part of a nascent peace plan. Considering its eventual outcome, few Civil War choices could be more ironic or tragic. ALLEN C. GUELZO IS THE HENRY R. LUCE PROFESSOR OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA, AND DIRECTOR OF CIVIL WAR ERA STUDIES AT GETTYSBURG COLLEGE, AND IS CURRENTLY THE WM. L. GARWOOD VISITING PROFESSOR IN THE JAMES MADISON PROGRAM IN AMERICAN IDEALS & INSTITUTIONS AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF A NUMBER OF BOOKS, INCLUDING LINCOLN: REDEEMER PRESIDENT (1999) AND LINCOLN’S EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION: THE END OF SLAVERY IN AMERICA (2004).
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breadth and depth of anger aimed at the Confederacy, Confederate symbols, and all perceived vestiges of Lost Cause thinking. That hostility is rife among not only activists but also scholars and public history professionals. Pent-up frustration over the stubborn grip of Lost Cause thinking seems to have produced a widespread willingness to vilify anything associated with the Confederacy as “racist.” Labeling is becoming a surrogate for understanding. Scholars and professional public historians counsel a presentation of our country’s past that emphasizes inclusiveness, tolerance, empathy, and an acceptance of complexity. If they—we—live up to our own values, we will always include and empathize with people who want to understand all of the actors in the Civil War in the context of their times. If we do, we will retain the largest actual Civil War public history audience, one that does not need to be enticed or induced to be engaged with our subject.
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Territorial Capital of Kansas, 1855 – 1861
Union veterans present 200 “battle-flags” to the governor of New York on July 4, 1865.
and cities that racial conflict boiled over most forcefully. On the same sweltering Fourth of July when Iowa soldier Taylor Pierce saw the assault on the black firemen in Savannah, another Iowa soldier named William Clayton was waiting to be mustered out in Mobile, Alabama. There wasn’t much of a celebration in Clayton’s camp—only a regimental review and a speech from an officer. But in a letter home he reported that several thousand African Americans had gathered in town, along with some black Union troops. As the large celebration wore on, tensions with some of the white troops in town began to mount. As Clayton told it, the African Americans “scratched one or two soldiers with their bayonets, and two or three of the ‘nigs’ were killed and thus ended the celebration.” Once again, the struggle for the Fourth of July had resulted in violence, and this time fatalities ensued.20
Lecompton KANSAS
Two museums and numerous historic sites
I-70 EXIT 197 BETWEEN TOPEKA AND LAWRENCE
785-887-6148 www.lecomptonkansas.com
362 Yorktown Road Newport News, VA
(757) 887-1862 www.endview.org
11
HARPER’S WEEKLY
In the years following 1865, the Fourth of July continued to be an ideological battleground—literally and symbolically—to define who belonged in America. Throughout the Civil War era, the holiday focused Americans’ attention on the biggest questions of the time. Was the South part of the United States? Were African Americans really Americans? What did the American Revolution properly mean in the 1860s? Like every generation of Americans, those who fought the Civil War thought it vital to connect themselves to the memory of the Revolution. The year 1776 has always been the great touchstone of American life. It’s been the subject of conflict and reinterpretation at every stage of American history—but never more so than when Americans did battle against Americans between 1861 and 1865. PAUL QUIGLEY IS DIRECTOR OF THE VIRGINIA CENTER FOR CIVIL WAR STUDIES AND THE JAMES I. ROBERTSON JR. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CIVIL WAR STUDIES AT VIRGINIA TECH. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF SHIFTING GROUNDS: NATIONALISM AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1848–1865 (2011) AND CO-CREATOR OF THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE MAPPING THE FOURTH OF JULY: EXPLORING INDEPENDENCE DAY IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA (JULY4.CIVILWAR.VT.EDU).
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Explore one family’s 400-year connection to Endview Plantation. Daily house tours offer a peek at the Civil War era history of the 1769 home. A nature trail, reenactments and living history programs are offered throughout the year.
163 Yorktown Road Newport News, VA (757) 888-3371 www.leehall.org Completed in 1859, Lee Hall offers a glimpse into the lives of its residents in the years before, during and after the 1862 Peninsula Campaign. In addition to guided tours, festivals exhibitions and programs are offered throughout the year.
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listments reflected only one fifth of them, rather than one half. Furthermore, notwithstanding the self-serving reflections in memoirs and regimental histories, money seems to have been the primary element in most men’s decisions to reenlist. Through outright admission or indirect inference, contemporary correspondence provides abundant evidence of how irresistible veterans found the bounty offer. The most telling indication that the reenlistments were economically driven came in the spring of 1864, when the War Department eliminated the special veteran bounty. With that, reenlistments all but stopped.17 In the summer of 1864, after Congress abolished the alternative of commutation, substitute prices in the East abruptly soared to $1,000, and occasionally much higher. Local bounties for volunteers rose commensurately as communities strove to fill their quotas before the draft deadline. By September of that
year, even one-year volunteers in small communities often realized $1,000 in federal, state, county, and town bounties. Such munificence predictably drew some men from a little higher up the economic ladder. Of the surveyed three-year recruits from late 1863 and early 1864, 70 percent came from households below median wealth. Only 62 percent of the one-year volunteers from late 1864 fell into that category, partly
go into debt for substitutes, which may explain the slightly smaller majorities of poor among the war’s last volunteers.
11 Scholars in recent years have closely scrutinized the motivation of Civil War soldiers on both sides. Patriotism has been minutely examined, as has the impulse to defend the homeland, wander-
Furthermore, notwithstanding the self-serving reflections in memoirs and regimental histories, money seems to have been the primary element in most men’s decisions to reenlist. because the economically vulnerable classes had already been picked over and partly because bigger bounties interested a broader market. In many regions so many enrolled men had already been recruited or exempted that the remainder faced greater likelihood of being drafted. That moved some potential conscripts of slightly better resources to accept the war’s largest bounties rather than
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 specific Civil War regiment or unit and wears 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 76 for you.
lust, the thirst for adventure, and the individual’s desire to prove his courage and manhood to himself and others. Meanwhile, economic incentives have received little attention outside the context of the exorbitant bounties in the last 20 months of the conflict. The concept of mercenary motivation in the Union army is generally ignored except in regard to the bounty jumpers who flourished after the summer of 1863. Bounties never rose high enough to seduce the more prosperous, but they appealed tremendously to the lower classes, and from their beginning in 1862 they may have compounded the tendency for poorer men to opt for military service. Yet money played a significant role in Union recruiting long before bounties became the principal alternative to the imposition of compulsory service. From the first beat of the drum Lincoln’s armies were flooded with the chronically and acutely indigent in proportions that patriotism could not account for— unless patriotism is presumed to decline in direct proportion to wealth. That most Union soldiers sprang from such humble circumstances demonstrates that theirs was a poor man’s fight. Their great need for the money they earned shows, in turn, that in large measure it was also a mercenary’s war. WILLIAM MARVEL IS AN INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR FROM NORTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE WHO FOCUSES ON MID-19TH-CENTURY AMERICAN HISTORY. HIS MOST RECENT BOOKS INCLUDE LINCOLN’S AUTOCRAT: THE LIFE OF EDWIN STANTON (2015) AND LINCOLN’S MERCENARIES: ECONOMIC MOTIVATION AMONG UNION SOLDIERS DURING THE CIVIL WAR, DUE FOR RELEASE THIS FALL FROM LSU PRESS.
THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2018
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In 1861, sixteen year old William Henry Huffman enlisted in the Union Army.
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JAY PAISLEY has edited over 22 Civil War letters into a unique book. Although Civil War letters are very numerous, the letters from William Huffman to his family are special in several respects: • Very few Civil War veterans lived, as Huffman did, to the age of 92. He participated on over 20 major battles. • His war experiences took place in both the Eastern and Western Fronts. • He vividly describes, in non-politically correct terms, what he experienced in combat. • Huffman was a Confederate Prisoner of War for over 6 months. • The author has thoroughly researched the Huffman family and gives the reader a detailed description of the soldiers relatives. The cost of THE HUFFMAN LETTERS is $20.00 + $5.00 Postage
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ed. Avery Craven (Cambridge, 1933), 58. The others are in Francis Ray Adams, An Annotated Edition of the Personal Letters of Robert E. Lee, April, 1855–April, 1861 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1955), 2:693-697, 701-704, 721-722, 723-725, 727-731, and 735-739.
Notes SOURCES & CITATIONS FROM THIS ISSUE’S ARTICLES
American Iliad (Pages 26–27, 72)
1. Edwin B. Coddington, The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (New York, 1968), 390–394. 2. Edward J. Stackpole, They Met at Gettysburg (Mechanicsburg, PA, 1956). 3. Bruce Catton, Glory Road: The Bloody Route From Fredericksburg to Gettysburg (New York, 1952). 4. Ibid., 291. 5. Ibid., 293. 6. Ibid. 7. Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (New York, 1975), 27–28. 8. Jennifer M. Murray, On a Great Battlefield: the Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933–2013 (Knoxville, 2014), 150. 9. Thomas A. Desjardin, Stand Firm Ye Boys From Maine: The 20th Maine and the Gettysburg Campaign (New York, 1995). 10. Shaara, The Killer Angels, 31.
2. D.S. Freeman, R.E. Lee (New York, 1934), 1:425426 and Jonathan Horn, The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee’s Civil War and His Decision That Changed American History (New York, 2015), 98-99. 3. “Special Orders No. 16” (February 4, 1861) in United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, 1:586; General Orders of the War Department, Embracing the Years 1861, 1862 & 1863, Adapted especially for the Use of the Army and Navy of the United States, eds. T.M. O’Brien and O. Diefendorf (New York, 1864), 1:23. 4. William Allan, “Memoranda of Conversations with General Robert E. Lee,” February 25 & March 10, 1868, in Lee the Soldier, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Lincoln, 1996), 9-10, 12. 5. See “Letter from Montgomery Blair,” New York Evening Post, August 8, 1866, and “Letter from Hon. Montgomery Blair,” Daily National Intelligencer, August 9, 1866; Mary Custis Lee also provided Wade Hampton with a letter describing the Blair interview for Hampton’s for his 1871 oration, Address on the Life and Character of Robert E. Lee, in Baltimore. 6. Eleanor Agnes Lee to Mildred Childe Lee, April 19, 1861, Lee Family Papers, Virginia Historical Society; John William Jones, Life and Letters of Robert Edward Lee, Soldier and Man (New York, 1906), 127. 7. “Local Items,” Alexandria Gazette, April 19, 1861; Margaret Sanborn, Robert E. Lee: A Portrait, 1807-1861 (Philadelphia, 1966), 1:312. 8. Allan, “Memoranda,” February 25, 1868, in Lee the Soldier, 10. 9. Mary P. Coulling, The Lee Girls (Winston-Salem, NC, 1987), 82-83; Sarah L. Lee, “War Time in Alexandria, Virginia,” South Atlantic Quarterly 4 (July 1905): 235; Constance Cary Harrison, Recollections Grave and Gay (New York, 1916), 25; “Cazenove Lee Remembers Robert E. Lee,” Alexandria History 3 (1981): 21. 10. Journal of the Acts and Proceedings of a General Convention of the State of Virginia (April 20, 1861),169; Allan, “Memoranda” (February 25, 1868), in Lee the Soldier, 10. 11. Lee to T.P. August, December 20, 1859, in Adams, ed. Personal Letters of Robert E. Lee, 2:554-555; Robertson to Letcher, April 20, 1861, 98. Letcher had dispatched an earlier messenger, David Funsten, who failed to reach Alexandria due to disruptions in train schedules.
The Decision (Pages 30–41, 74)
1. Robert E. Lee to George Washington Custis Lee (November 24 & December 14, 1860, January 23 & January 30, 1861), to Annette Carter (January 16, 1861), to Martha “Markie” Williams (January 22, 1861), to Mary Custis Lee (January 23, 1861) to Eleanor Agnes Lee (January 29, 1861), and to R.W. Johnson (February 13, 1861). The Annette Carter letter is in William Franklin Chaney, Duty Most Sublime: The Life of Robert E. Lee As Told Through the “Carter Letters” (Baltimore, 1996), 61-63; the letter to “Markie” Williams is in “To Markie”: The Letters of Robert E. Lee to Martha Custis Williams,
12. Letcher to ‘Gentlemen of the Convention,’ April 22, 1861, in Journal of the Acts and Proceedings of a General Convention of the State of Virginia, Assembled at Richmond (Richmond, 1861), 184. 13. Thomas M. Cook, “The Rebellion. Views of General Robert E. Lee,” New York Herald, April 29, 1865; “A Talk With General Lee,” The New York Times, August 12, 1879. 14. “Letter from Montgomery Blair,” New York Evening Post, August 8, 1866. 15. “Senator from Maryland” (February 19, 1868), in Congressional Globe, 40th Congress, 2nd session, 1270. 16. Allan, “Memoranda of Conversations with General Robert E. Lee” (February 25, 1868), in Lee the Soldier, 9-10.
17. Jones, Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee (New York, 1875), 141-142; “Memoranda of Conversations Between Gen. Robert E. Lee and William Preston Johnston: May 7, 1868 and March 16, 1870,” ed. W.G. Bean, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 73 (October 1965): 483. 18. Blair’s account of the interview, made on April 14, 1871, but not published until 1895 as a long footnote in the third volume of James Ford Rhodes’ History of the United States. See Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (New York, 1895), 3:365. 19. MCL, in Wade Hampton, Address on the Life and Character of Gen. Robert E. Lee, Delivered on the 12th of October, 1871, before the Society of Confederate Soldiers and Sailors, in Maryland (Baltimore, 1871), 16. 20. Robert E. Lee to Winfield Scott, April 20, 1861, Archives of the Robert E. Lee Memorial Foundation, Papers of the Lee Family, Box 3, M2009.250, Jessie Ball duPont Library, Stratford Hall, VA. See also Jones, Life and Letters, 132-133, Freeman, R.E. Lee, 1:441-2, and Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, eds. Clifford Dowdey & L.H. Manarin (Boston, 1961), 8-9. In his 1868 letter to Reverdy Johnson, Lee alludes briefly to going “from the interview with Mr. Blair to the office of General Scott,” where he “told him of the proposition that had been made to me, and my decision.” 21. Erasmus Keyes, Fifty Years’ Observation of Men and Events, Civil and Military (New York, 1884), 207. Freeman, to the contrary, believes the meeting Keyes describes to have occurred in March (R.E. Lee, 1:433-4). 22. Townsend, Anecdotes of the Civil War in the United States (New York, 1884), 30-31. 23. “Virginia News,” Alexandria Gazette, April 30, 1861; MCL, in Wade Hampton, Address on the Life and Character of Gen. Robert E. Lee, 16; “General Lee and General Scott,” Household Journal of Popular Information, Amusement and Domestic Economy, August 10, 1861, 295. One other witness to Lee’s interview with Scott, William Woods Averell, left a record of his impressions of the encounter, but they were limited only to Averell’s observations of Lee’s agitation in Scott’s anteroom before the meeting. “After handing in my report I went to the office of General Scott to inform him of the action I had taken, fearing the information, being of an unimportant character, might not reach him through the Adjutant-General’s office.... While waiting alone a few minutes in the General’s anteroom, Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived. It was the last time I ever saw him. He was wearing an officer’s overcoat as the morning was quite chilly. We shook hands and exchanged some inquiries and remarks about health and the weather. I saw that he was greatly troubled. He did not stand still but kept slightly lifting one foot and then the other as if they were cold. His impassible face did not conceal an expression of keen distress.... When I came out from my brief audience with the General in chief, I stopped and said, ‘Good bye, Colonel Lee.’ He stared, extended his hand and his voice dropped almost to a whisper as he said, ‘Good bye, Mr. Averell.’” Ten Years in the Saddle: The Memoir of William Woods Averell, eds. E.K. Eckert and N.J. Amato (San Rafael, 1978), 247248. 24. Jones, Life and Letters, 132; MCL, in Wade Hampton, Address on the Life and Character of Gen. Robert E. Lee, 16. 25. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, “‘Thou Knowest Not the Time of Thy Visitation’: A Newly Discovered Letter Reveals Robert E. Lee’s Lonely Struggle with Disunion,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 119 (September 2011): 290 and “The
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General In His Study,” The New York Times, April 19, 2011.
The Southwestern, in Mobile Advertiser and Register, July 4, 1861.
26. Burton J. Hendrick, The Lees of Virginia: Biography of a Family (Boston, 1935), 373-374; Stanley Elkins & Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993), 632; The Debates, Resolutions, and Other Proceedings, in Convention, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, ed. Jonathan Elliott (Washington, 1828), 2:60-61.
5. Sarah Lois Wadley Diary, July 7, 1861, Sarah Lois Wadley Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
27. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 2007), 110. 28. Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace (Chapel Hill, 2009), 109-110 and “’I Owe Virginia Little, My Country Much’: Robert E. Lee, the United States Regular Army, and Unconditional Unionism,” in Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration, eds. E.L. Ayers, G.W. Gallagher & A.J. Torget (Charlottesville, 2006), 45-46. 29. Diary entry for April 21, 1861, in The Diary of Edmund Ruffin: Volume One, Toward Independence, October, 1856–April, 1861, ed. W.K. Scarborough (Baton Rouge, 1972), 1:609; “Views of Current Events—The Town of Alexandria and Its Present Condition,” The New York Times, June 3, 1861. 30. “From Washington,” Alexandria Gazette, April 20, 1861; Timothy D. Johnson, Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory (Lawrence, 1998), 222-225. 31. Cassius F. Lee to Robert E. Lee, April 23, 1861, Lee Family Digital Archive, Jesse B. DuPoint Library, Stratford Hall, VA.
6. Entry for June 19, 1861, Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868, ed. John Q. Anderson (Baton Rouge, 1955), 28; entry for July 4, 1861, Susan Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years (Macon, 1926), 155. 7. “Independence Day,” The New York Times, July 4, 1861. 8. S. H. Lockett, “The Defense of Vicksburg,” Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, eds. Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, vol. 3 (New York, 1888), 492. 9. “The Day,” New York Herald, July 6, 1863. 10. “Address from Gov. Curtin,” New York Tribune, June 12, 1865. 11. “Celebration of Independence and Welcome to Returned Soldiers,” Jamestown Journal, June 30, 1865. 12. “The Coming Fourth of July—Our Union Soldiers,” New York Herald, June 12, 1865. 13. “The Fourth Of July In South Carolina,” Albany Evening Journal, June 30, 1865. 14. Celebration by the Colored People’s Educational Monument Association in Memory of Abraham Lincoln. On the Fourth of July, 1865, in the Presidential Grounds, Washington, D.C. (Washington, D.C, 1865), 3. 15. “Fourth of July,” Christian Recorder, July 8, 1865. 16. Edwin C. Larned, The Great Conflict: What has been Gained, and what Remains to be Done (Chicago, 1865). 17. James Lynch, The Mission of the United States Republic. An Oration Delivered by Rev. James Lynch, at the Parade Ground, Augusta, Ga., July 4, 1865 (Augusta, 1865). 18. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, 1981), 832; When the World Ended: The Diary of Emma LeConte, ed. Earl Schenck Miers (New York, 1957), 113-114
An Unlikely Battleground (Pages 42–51, 75)
1. Dear Catharine, Dear Taylor: The Civil War Letters of a Union Soldier and his Wife, ed. Richard L. Kiper (Lawrence, KS, 2002), 415-417.
19. “Disgraceful Proceedings,” The Liberator, July 14, 1865. 20. William Henry Harrison Clayton, A Damned Iowa Greyhound: The Civil War Letters of William Henry Harrison Clayton, edited by Donald C. Elder III (Iowa City, c1998), 172-174.
2. Hartford [CT] Weekly Times, November 24, 1860; Journal of Commerce, quoted in William K. Scarborough, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin (Baton Rouge, 1972), 1:504; Daily Morning Chronicle (Portsmouth, NH), December 22, 1860; Cheshire Republican (Keene, NH), January 2, 1862; Dover [NH] Sentinel, January 4, 1861; Philadelphia Inquirer, February 22, 1861; Providence Post, August 3, 1861. 3. Fort Dodge [Iowa] Republican, February 28, 1861; Weekly Racine [WI] Advocate, February 27, March 6, 1861; Bureau County [IL] Republican, February 28, 1861; Red Wing [MN] Sentinel, December 19, 1860; Mankato [MN] Semi-Weekly Record, February 8, 1861; Alice Cayton to “My Dear Brother,” May 12, 1861, Badger Collection, Missouri Historical Society; Daily Gate City (Keokuk, Iowa), June 1, 1861; Lawrence [KS] Republican, June 6, 1861. 4. Franc B. Wilkie, Pen and Powder (Boston, 1888), 14-15. 5. Ottumwa Courier, May 1, 1861; Waterloo Courier, May 7, 1861; Daily Gate City (Keokuk), May 21, June 1, August 16, 1861; Schuyler Coe to “Dear Mother,” September 18, 1861, Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA. 6. Beardstown Democrat, August 22, 1861. 7. Rutland Herald, September 26, 1861; United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series 3, 1:383384 (hereafter cited as OR). 8. See, for example, Thomas McDermott to “Dear Mother and Brothers,” December 10, 1861, Balch Memorial Library, Leesburg, VA; Alfred Wheeler to Alonzo Wheeler, April 4, “1860” [1861], and to “Dear Mother,” August, 1861, Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA; John C. Ellis to “Dear Sister,” May 23, 1862, and to “Dear Nephew,” undated, Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA. 9. Thomas Blanchard to Sarah Walker, June 15, 1862, Notre Dame University. 10. Hartford Courant, August 22, 1862; Daily Morning Chronicle (Portsmouth, NH), August 14, 15, 1862; Sarah Fales to Edmund Fales, August 6, 13, 1862, Rhode Island Historical Society. 11. Lewis Caswell to “Dear Brother,” October 14, 1862, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. 12. OR, Series 3, 2:595. 13. Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953), 6:445. 14. OR, Series 3, 5:730.
2. The history of the Fourth of July can be traced in Diana Karter Appelbaum, The Glorious Fourth: An American Holiday, an American History (New York, 1989); Matthew Dennis, Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An American Calendar (Ithaca, 2002); Adam Criblez, Parading Patriotism: Independence Day Celebrations in the Urban Midwest, 1826–1876 (DeKalb, 2013); Paul Quigley, “Independence Day Dilemmas in the American South, 1848–1865,” The Journal of Southern History Vol. 75, No. 2 (May 2009): 235-266. The website “Mapping the Fourth of July” (july4. civilwar.vt.edu) allows users to explore the thousands of primary sources for themselves.
15. OR, Series 3, 3:89, 414-416, 785. 16. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, NY, 1956), 35, 394-395, n.26. 17. OR, Series 3, 4:190.
3. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997); David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, 2007).
Soldiers of Misfortune
4. Alexander Watkins Terrell, Oration Delivered on the Fourth Day of July, 1861, at the Capitol, Austin, Texas (Austin: Gazette Office, 1861); “The Fourth of July at Shreveport,” excerpt from
1. Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 (University of Minnesota, 2015).
(Pages 52–63, 76)
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pa r t i n g shot
Satterlee’s Saw
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE , PHOTO BY MATTHEW BREITBART (DISCLOSURE: THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN CROPPED TO EMPHASIZE THE SUBJECT.). SOURCE: ALAN J. HAWK, “RICHARD SATTERLEE’S BONE SAW,” ARTIFACTS VOL . 475, NO. 9 (SEPTEMBER 2017).
By the end of 1861, it had become painfully clear to the Union army that its medical personnel needed better equipment to treat serious wounds, and in particular to amputate limbs, a procedure that had been rare before the war. It would go on to purchase nearly 5,000 surgical kits during the conflict, many of them manufactured by George Tiemann & Co. in New York. One of the more popular Tiemann-produced instruments (pictured here) was an amputation saw with a pistol-gripped handle that would come to be known as “Satterlee’s Saw,” named after the influential commander of the Medical Purveyor’s Office, surgeon Richard Satterlee. Due to its widespread use during the war—many of the approximately 17,000 physicians to tend to Union army wounded developed their surgical skills using this style of instrument—the Satterlee would become, in the words of the National Museum of Health and Medicine’s Alan J. Hawk, “a quintessentially American orthopaedic saw,” one that is still employed by surgeons in remote locations or extreme circumstances today.
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NATIONAL MUSEUM OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE , PHOTO BY MATTHEW BREITBART (DISCLOSURE: THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN CROPPED TO EMPHASIZE THE SUBJECT.). SOURCE: ALAN J. HAWK, “RICHARD SATTERLEE’S BONE SAW,” ARTIFACTS VOL . 475, NO. 9 (SEPTEMBER 2017).
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