Civil War Times 2017-06

★ EXPLORE PITTSBURGH, THE NORTH'S WAR FORGE ★

“Ah! Here is Longstreet; here’s my old war-horse!” ROBERT E. LEE AT THE BATTLE OF SHARPSBURG, SEPTEMBER 17, 1862

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London, KY mounts an Authentic Experience for the Civil War Traveler! Battle of Camp Wildcat Reenactment Oct. 20-22, 2017 The Battle of Camp Wildcat was part of the KY &RQIHGHUDWH2ͿHQVLYHFDPSDLJQ,WZDVIRXJKWLQ /DXUHO&RXQW\.<RQ2FWREHU,WZDVRQH RIWKHHDUO\HQJDJHPHQWVRIWKH$PHULFDQ&LYLO :DUDQGLWLVFRQVLGHUHGRQHRIWKHYHU\ÀUVW8QLRQ YLFWRULHV,WZDVDOVRWKHVHFRQGHQJDJHPHQWRIWURRSV LQWKH&RPPRQZHDOWKRI.HQWXFN\7KHEDWWOHZDV PRQXPHQWDOPDQ\ZHUHNLOOHGZRXQGHGRUUHSRUWHG PLVVLQJDIWHUWKHEDWWOHZDVRYHU  7KHEDWWOHÀHOGVWLOOUHPDLQVRQ2OG:LOGHUQHVV 5RDGDERXWQLQHPLOHVQRUWKZHVWRI/RQGRQ.<,W FRQWDLQVDSDYLOLRQZDONLQJWUDLOVDQGWKHRULJLQDO WUHQFKHV7KHUHDUHDOVRLQWHUSUHWLYHVLJQVZLWK LQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKHVLWH

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Visit Camp Wildcat Civil War Battlefield! Located on the old “Wilderness Road” Laurel County, KY A beautiful and well-preserved Civil War Battlefield. It still has many original trenches that are still intact!

Don’t Miss the Reenactment! October 20-22, 2017 London-Laurel County Tourist Commission 1-800-348-0095 www.laurelkytourism.com

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

60 KEEPING WATCH The Allegheny County Ladies Memorial Association erected this 1876 monument in the center of the Grand Army of the Republic plot in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Cemetery.

ON THE COVER: General James Longstreet described his Wilderness wounding as an “honest mistake.”

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Features

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“Longstreet Reeled in His Saddle" By Keith S. Bahannon A gripping eyewitness account of General Longstreet's wounding by friendly fire.

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Heartbeat of the Southern War Machine By Theodore P. Savas Without the Augusta Powder Works, the Confederacy could not have existed.

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44

A Promise Betrayed By Rick Beard Many freedmen never got their “40 acres and a mule.”

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Confederate Con Artist

 By William C. Davis

A mysterious woman became a Confederate media celebrity.

Departments

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6 8 12 14 18 20 25 60 66 72

Letters Where was Chamberlain? News! New Harriet Tubman image Details Gettysburg field hospital Insight A classic Chancellorsville history Materiel The essential cartridge box Interview Working men and the Civil War Editorial “Consecrated dust” Explore Pittsburgh’s war industry Reviews Lincoln and the tumultuous 1850s Sold ! Southern militia flag JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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Unwilling to watch the action from the sidelines, hundreds of women on both sides fought disguised as men throughout the war.

The famed Texas Brigade likely saved Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s life on the second day of fighting at the Wilderness.

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Robert Parrott and the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, N.Y., played a key role in Northern victory.

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the Gladiators Paycheck Roman bronze coins were the “silver dollars” of their day. They were the coins used for daily purchases, as well as for the payment of wages. Elite Roman Gladiators—paid to do battle before cheering crowds in the Colosseum— often received their monthly ‘paycheck’ in the form of Roman bronze coins. But this particular Roman bronze has a gladiator pedigree like no other! Minted between 348 to 361 AD, the Emperor’s portrait appears on one side of this coin. The other side depicts a literal clash of the gladiators. One warrior raises his spear menacingly at a second warrior on horseback. Frozen in bronze for over 1,600 years, the drama of this moment can still be felt when you hold the coin. Surrounding this dramatic scene is a Latin inscription—a phrase you would never expect in a million years!

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 at petersburg 

JO S HUA

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I

THE UNION COLONEL’S

IN HARM’S WAY Artist Dan Nance’s depiction of Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain at Petersburg on June 18, 1864, wielding his brigade’s flag seconds before a Rebel bullet found its mark.

N CLOUDED HINDSIGOW HT

HAS LED TO CONFUS ABOUT HIS 1864 HEROION ICS BY DEN NIS A. RAS BAC H

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UNE 18, 1864, WAS A NOT A THE POTOMAC. Lieutena GOOD DAY FOR THE ARMY OF nt General Ulysses S. Grant another series of assaults had ordered against the Confederate lines at Petersburg, Va., hoping to capture the city before General Robert E. Lee could fully reinforce the thinly held Confederate trenches. Grant had about 67,000 men at his disposal to 20,000 but confusion, miscomm for the Rebels, unication, and the Confede rates’ adept juggling of reinforcements doomed the Union onslaughts. Rank after rank of blue troops faltered under witherin g gunfire. The Second Battle which had opened on June of Petersburg, 15, would end in Northern beginning of a protracte defeat and the d siege that would last for months. Joining the June 18 attacks, on the far left of the Union Charles Griffin’s 1st Division lines in Brig. Gen. of Maj. Gen. Gouverneur a brigade of Pennsylvania Warren’s 5th Corps, was regiments under Colonel Joshua Chamberlain—th 121st, 142nd, 143rd, 149th, e 150th, and 187th. Chambe rlain was already famous in the Army of the Potomac for his Little Round Top heroics at Gettysburg the previous July, and when he returned to active duty in April 1864 after an extended illness, he was given comman d of the Keystone State regiment As the brigade struggled s. ahead, its standard-bearer went down with a wound. Chamberlain grabbed the banner and, as he urged his men forward, a Minié ball

CHAMBERLAIN DISAGREEMENT I am the author of Chamberlain at Petersburg, the book Dennis Rasbach takes issue with in his April 2017 article about Joshua Chamberlain at Petersburg. Rasbach implies that I wrote my book after considering only Chamberlain’s postwar testimony and does not acknowledge the many sources I employed, which included those of numerous witnesses besides Chamberlain. I disagree with Rasbach’s assessment on several counts. Let’s start with his main point, that Chamberlain did not know where he and his brigade fought on June 18, 1864, despite the fact that Chamberlain led his brigade to the position where the assault began, and coordinated and led the attack. Rasbach provides no convincing evidence that causes me to agree with

GUT FEELING

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his premise that Chamberlain didn’t fight at Rives’ Salient, but at the future site of the Crater 1.5 miles away. We are asked to accept other unsubstantiated conclusions: Rasbach insists on placing Chamberlain’s brigade at the Crater, but where does he think the 9th Corps fought that day? Why would Generals Ambrose Burnside and Gouverneur Warren cram two brigades, a division, and the entire 9th Corps in that confined area, while largely ignoring the enemy’s battle line to the left? Also, would Maj. Gen. George Meade have been blind to the pile-up on his front? The map that reflects Rasbach’s theories shows the Federal units stacking up like dominoes, and Brig. Gen. Lysander Cutler’s 4th Division seems to be headed to the same location! Rasbach’s supposition that Chamberlain could mistake the Dimmock Line’s formidable fortifications, like Rives’ Salient, for hastily thrown-together earthworks also seems unreasonable. Rasbach also discards

In the April issue, the image used with my editorial did not portray Joshua Chamberlain, as the caption implied, but was actually General Edward Stoughton. When I first saw the image, I didn’t think it was Chamberlain, but allowed myself to be convinced by the National Archives’ records that identified the image as being of the Maine general. We have contacted the National Archives about the error, and hope it will be corrected.–Dana B. Shoaf, editor

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

Chamberlain’s contention that he pinpointed his position during a postwar visit by using the church steeples on Petersburg’s horizon. Rasbach inexplicably claims that the perspective from where he says Chamberlain fought, 1.5 miles to the right, would be much the same as that at Rives’ Salient. Rasbach insists in his article and book that Chamberlain consulted no one regarding the June 18 attack or gave it any thought for decades. That ignores the fact that Chamberlain was alert enough to write a letter to his wife from the field hospital on June 18, and was visited by a number of 5th Corps commanders who certainly spoke with him about the attack. Then, too, Chamberlain was back at Petersburg by October 1864 with the men and officers with whom he made the attack. Rasbach also knows that in 1865 Chamberlain solicited eyewitness statements from attack participants in preparation for a 5th Corps history that was sidetracked by his busy postwar life. Chamberlain, however, did correspond with veterans for the rest of his life. I discovered Chamberlain’s lost manuscript, “The Charge at Fort Hell,” at Duke University while searching for his correspondence with Confederate General Thomas Munford. Also, Chamberlain spoke before many veterans’ societies, refuting Rasbach’s assertion that Chamberlain didn’t bother to speak with anyone. This spring, an examination of the differences between Mr. Rasbach’s and my conclusions will be posted on my website, dianemonroesmith.com. Diane Monroe Smith Holden, Maine



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CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

This is the face of the young woman who led dozens of slaves to freedom.

A never-before-published image of Harriet Tubman recently turned up in a photo album of 19th-century activist and educator Emily Howland, a close friend of Tubman. Howland met Tubman after she had moved to Auburn, N.Y., not far from Howland’s home in Sherwood, N.Y., where Howland’s family had long been active in the Underground Railroad. Tubman’s biographer Kate Larson told the Auburn Pub that the image was likely taken around the end of the Civil War, when Tubman was in her mid-40s. All other images show Tubman much later in life, a small and bowed figure who hardly seems capable of the daring feats of rescuing, scouting, and spying that have made her a national hero. ¶ Tubman stood barely five feet tall and suffered from what historians believe was temporal lobe epilepsy resulting from a head injury suffered while she was enslaved in Dorchester County, Md. Nonetheless, she gained a reputation for unusual physical strength and, despite never learning to read, possessed a canny intelligence that allowed her to escape slavery, lead groups of fugitive slaves undetected to freedom, serve as a scout and commander in the Union Army, and advocate for the rights for blacks and women in her postwar career. ¶ Tubman struggled to pay her bills and was chastised by friends for too often giving what she had to people in need. Tubman spent decades trying to get a pension for her Civil War service. Eventually it took an act of Congress in 1899 to award Tubman a monthly stipend of $20. She was 77 years old. ¶ The image is slated for auction at Swann’s Galleries on March 30, 2017.

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victims — Pittsburgh Evening Chronicle describes the September 1862 Allegheny Arsenal Explosion



ENTER THE

DRAGON BEER LOVERS GOT SCHOOLED about reformer Dorothea Dix at a recent National Museum of Civil War Medicine event in Frederick, Md. The group gathered to taste Dragon Lady, a new brew created in Dix’s honor. Nicknamed “The Dragon,” Dix became famous for her decision to bring female nurses into Union hospitals, insisting that they be more than 30 years old, unmarried, and not “too rosycheeked”—to avoid any whiff of scandal. Beer was available to convalescing soldiers, and beer recipes of the era sometimes included medicinal herbs such as wintergreen. Flying Dog’s Dragon Lady—a saisson—bears a hint of wintergreen, which was used in the Civil War to soothe indigestion. Milk stouts were also popular for ailing soldiers. Some 10 percent of the Union Army had brew-friendly German roots, and sutlers regularly sold beer at Federal hospitals and camps. The Confederacy had beer-making talent, too. Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond was known to have a 400-keg brewery.

S

OLDIERS AND SAILORS MONUMENT in Indianapolis— the largest of the nation’s more than 200 Civil War memorials—won landmark status on January 11, 2017. Erected in 1902, the monument was so lavish that it cost $598,318 to build, a figure estimated to amount to more than $5 million today. Bruno Schmitz, a German sculptor, came to the United States in 1897 to begin the work, fashioning the 284-foothigh obelisk from limestone and bronze (at the time the Statue of Liberty was the only monument taller). The base bears sculpted figures of Civil War soldiers, and the figures were originally shown bearded, as was customary in Europe. But Schmitz learned that most Civil War soldiers did not have beards and removed them from the figures. The monument was erected to honor not only service in the Civil War but also service in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Frontier Wars, and the Spanish-American War. The base of the monument houses the Colonel Eli Lilly Museum containing exhibits related to Indianapolis history. Eli Lilly, who served in the Civil War, was a pharmacist, and his experience during the war with poor quality drugs like quinine prompted him to found the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly in Indianapolis in 1876. JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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THE WAR ON THE NET

FREDERICKSBURG

ARTIFACTS

w w w . l i b . u m d . e d u /c i v i l w a r w o m e n







WOMEN ON THE BORDER: MARYLAND’S PERSPECTIVE ON THE CIVIL WAR

Following the well-received 2012 symposium on “Women and the Civil War in Maryland,” the University of Maryland Libraries created an online exhibit to highlight the contributions women played in the American Civil War. “Women on the Border: Maryland’s Perspective on the Civil War,” emphasizes the experiences of not just famous Marylanders like Clara Barton, but also the writings, photographs, and other sources tied to lesser-known women who have been relegated to the “borders” of historical learning. The page on Mary Richardson, a free woman of color, highlights the fact that from 1810 to 1860, Maryland had the largest free black population of any slave state. Richardson’s case also underscores the challenges of interpreting the perspective of individuals who left no known records in their own hand. Librarians share four court documents and related ads tied to Richardson’s appeal before a Frederick County court when she was charged with helping a slave runaway. As the page explains, she had little in her power to make a defense, but Richardson or her lawyer seem to have recognized that she could link herself to contemporary ideals of white womanhood. The sources reveal that Richardson insisted that the court refer to her as a free woman, not a free negro or negress, and she argued that her mother was white. While we know little about Richardson’s appeal beyond what these documents reveal, her case emphasizes issues of race, gender, and freedom that are significant to the changes brought by the Civil War. In each section of this site, readers gain insight into a diverse group of largely unknown women whose experiences are representative of significant wartime trends. Visitors can learn about Maryland nurse and spy Emma Edmonds, the divergent opinions of two farm women, the arguments of women activists, or study the limitations of wartime pensions that offered relief to so many widows, but could be kept from enslaved African-American women married to free black Union soldiers. University of Maryland Libraries has achieved their goal of presenting rich materials about “Women on the Border” in Civil War Maryland that includes superb advice on source interpretation. This is an exceptionally useful online exhibit for teachers and students, as well as scholars and general readers.—Susannah J. Ural 10

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

Archaeologists have uncovered Civil War trench lines and Burnside carbine cartridges near Riverfront Park in Fredericksburg, Va., during an excavation for a park project. Among the 14 buildings known to have stood on the site is the 1750 Rowe-Goolrick House, the former home of two of Fredericksburg’s mayors. Indian spear points, pottery fragments, vials that contained medicinal salve, and Union military buttons (above) were also found. Human remains, discovered in the fall of 2015, might belong to soldiers treated at the Rowe-Goolrick House when it served as a Union hospital during the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg. Memoirs from members of the 14th Connecticut Infantry recalled recuperating in the hospital. DNA testing of the human remains is in the works.



CORINTH BATTLEFIELD

 EXPANDS  In December, the National Park Service took official ownership of 11 new tracts of land to expand the Corinth (Miss.) Unit of Shiloh National Military Park, according to djournal.com. In September 2000, Congress authorized 900 acres for acquisition, and the Corinth Unit now controls 800 acres, with just 150 more to acquire. The Battle of Shiloh enhanced Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses Grant’s budding reputation as a determined fighter. On April 6, 1862, Grant’s Army of the Tennessee was surprised by Confederate troops under Generals Albert Sidney Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard, but repelled the assault, with the help of reinforcements from Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, and won the battle the next day. Casualties surpassed 10,000 on both sides.



SLAVE JAIL MARKED On January 12, 2017, two plaques recalling the location of one of Washington, D.C.’s most notorious slave jails, where victims were warehoused for sale, were dedicated in a ceremony outside the Federal Aviation Administration building. The research identifying the site, known as the Yellow House, stemmed from passages in Solomon Northrup’s memoir, Twelve Years a Slave. A free musician from upstate New York, Northrup was kidnapped in 1841 during a visit to Washington. He described being imprisoned not far from the U.S. Capitol: “The top of the wall supported one end of a roof, which ascended inward, forming a kind of open shed. Underneath the roof there was a crazy loft all round, where slaves, if so disposed, might sleep at night, or in inclement weather seek shelter from the storm. It was like a farmer’s barnyard in most respects, save it was so constructed that the outside world could never see the human cattle that were herded there.” The plaques were erected between 7th and 8th streets just south of the Smithsonian Institution. The Yellow House, also known as the Williams House, was one of several markets where slaves were traded until the sale of humans was banned in Washington by the Compromise of 1850. William H. Williams owned the building, and his firm also owned two vessels, Tribune and Uncas, used to transport slaves from the mid-Atlantic to the Gulf Coast.

mystery solved In 1861, a free black man named Pleasant Martin in Morgan County, Ill., agreed to be enslaved. Existing records did not provide an explanation. Now Decatur Daily reports that John Allen, a Morgan County archivist, found an 1866 letter in which Martin, who renamed himself Reuben Patterson after the war, explains that he was threatened by whites to surrender his liberty. Martin later served with his owner in the 5th Alabama Cavalry, and his grave was honored with a marker in 1999.

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LANDSCAPE VICTORY

T

he postwar Wilson House on Antietam National Battlefield was torn down on February 6. The dilapidated home stood just east of the historic trace of the Hagerstown Turnpike and south of Cornfield Avenue, in an area that saw heavy fighting on the morning of September 17, 1862. The Save Historic Antietam Foundation and the Civil War Trust combined to purchase the 44-acre property in 2015. Last year SHAF volunteers removed a large nonhistoric treeline, while a CWT contractor removed the postwar barn. Now that the house is gone, the eastern 3½ acres of the property will be replanted with trees to restore its wartime look.

WHERE IS THIS HOME LOCATED? Send your answer via e-mail to dshoaf@ historynet.com or via regular mail (1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA, 22182-4038) marked “Brick Manor.” The first correct answers will win a book. Congratulations to last issue’s winner Duane Carrell of Springfield, Ill. (e-mail), who correctly identified the Carter House on the Franklin, Tenn., battlefield.

JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

11

GETTYSBURG

CAREGIVERS -

Battle of Gettysburg resulted in 26,000 wounded soldiers, and dozens of field hospitals were quickly established in the area to take care of the human wreckage. This image of the Union 2nd Corps hospital located on the Jacob Schwartz Farm next to the Baltimore Pike was taken between July 9-11. Tent hospitals like this were scenes of great suffering as doctors and nurses struggled to care for the injured. Cornelia Hancock, a 23-year-old volunteer nurse from New Jersey who arrived at the hospital on July 7, wrote that as she reached Gettysburg, “A sickening, overpowering, awful stench announced the presence of unburied dead....” After arriving at the field hospital, she noted that a “wagon stood near rapidly filling with amputated legs and arms....” But “every hour brought an improvement,” claimed the relieved nurse, as more workers and supplies rushed in. Union records indicate 3,260 wounded were treated at this hospital, including 952 Confederates who were housed in the Schwartz barn. Nearly 500 men died at the location before it was closed on August 8. In June 1872, 111 Southern soldier remains were exhumed from the Schwartz Farm and transferred to the Confederate section of Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery.

THE JULY 1 3, 1863,

3 2 1 12

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

4 5

1. These two men don’t appear to be 3. Female nurses stand at the soldiers, so they might be Sanitary Commission workers or local civilians hired to help build items for the hospital. The man on the left holds a saw.

2. These civilians are posing with clean bandages, while the Union soldier—who looks exhausted—holds what might be a welcome cup of coffee. Heavy rains fell right after the battle, and a Christian Commission delegate recalled that before the tents were put up, the wounded “were upon the damp ground, many of them with nothing under them....”

entrance of a hospital tent. Note the blankets that form the sides have been let down a bit to allow light and air. The woman in the foreground has been identified as Cornelia Hancock, mentioned in the introduction. She remembered that for a week the rude operating table “literally ran blood.”

4.

Crocks and demi-johns, perhaps filled with medicinal liquor, sit atop a box. Brandy was mixed with milk and corn-starch to provide a tonic for the wounded.

5. The man standing to the left of the tree in the dark coat is Dr. Justin Dwinell of the 106th Pennsylvania, the doctor in charge of the hospital. Dwinell’s companion, the man holding papers, wears a colorful, paisley-decorated banyan—a loosefitting robe.

6.

The wounded men surely would have appreciated the loaves of fresh bread piled on top of the barrels. Such foodstuffs were quickly consumed. On July 22, a nurse named Emily Souder claimed she could not find one loaf of bread at the hospital.

6

JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

13

By Gary W. Gallagher

ACTION FRONT! A Union fieldpiece rumbles into action at the Battle of Chancellorsville.

CHANCELLORSVILLE

CHRONICLE JOHN BIGELOW’S 1910 STUDY OF ROBERT E. LEE’S VICTORY OVER JOE HOOKER REMAINS AN EXEMPLAR

TACTICAL AND OPERATIONAL STUDIES occupy a prominent place in the literature devoted to the Civil War. Admirable examples of well-researched, analytical military narratives published over the past several decades include Edwin B. Coddington’s pioneering The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (Scribner’s, 1968), Richard J. Sommers’s detailed Richmond Redeemed: The Siege at Petersburg (Doubleday, 1981), John J. Hennessy’s graceful Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas (Simon & Schuster, 1993), Albert Castel’s revisionist Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (University Press of Kansas, 1992), and Timothy B. Smith’s gripping Shiloh: Conquer or Perish (University Press of Kansas, 2014). Multiple volumes by authors such as Stephen W. Sears, Peter Cozzens, Earl J. Hess, and Gordon C. Rhea underscore the vitality of this genre of Civil War studies. 14

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

Coddington’s book, which raised the bar for all subsequent campaign treatments, appeared more than halfa-century after John Bigelow Jr.’s The Campaign of Chancellorsville: A Strategic and Tactical Study set a standard so high it retains a place among the very best works of its kind. Published in 1910 by Yale University Press, Bigelow’s 528-page masterpiece was reissued by Morningside Press in a first-rate reprint in the 1990s (all other reprints, which lack the original’s superlative maps, should be avoided). Bigelow brought firsthand military experience to his project. A West Pointer who ranked 46th in the Class of 1877, he served with the 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry in the 1870s and 1880s and received multiple wounds and won a Silver Star at San Juan Hill during the war with Spain. During an assignment to teach military science and tactics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1894, Bigelow chose Chancellorsville as the “theme for a course

BILLY THE KID SHOT DEAD KILLED BY SHERIFF PAT GARRET Shootout in a Dark Room At Old Fort Sumner Who was William H. Bonney, the outlaw known as Billy the Kid? Nearly 140 years after his death we are still asking that question. If you study all the comments from his friends and enemies, a picture of Billy begins to emerge. CALL ME BILLY fleshes out the Kid in the context of the Lincoln County War. The history is accurate and Billy is one of a kind.

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of lectures....because that campaign presented a greater variety of military problems and experiences than any other in which an army of the United States had taken part.” In addition, he added, no other battle approaching Chancellorsville “in importance, has been so imperfectly apprehended and described.” Bigelow mined a range of sources, including regimental histories, memoirs, congressional reports, newspapers, and, most important by far, the Official Records. The recent availability of a mass of reports and correspondence in the Off icial Records, he observed, allowed him to offer “a certain minuteness of detail” about the campaign. Because of these published documents, he noted approvingly, “no war that has been fought admits of such thorough investigation as our Civil War.” The phenomenon of historians across many generations immersing themselves in the rich bounty of the Official Records really began with The Campaign of Chancellorsville. Bigelow sought to evaluate commanders in light of what they knew when making decisions. Appreciating

HISTORIAN IN TRAINING John Bigelow’s West Point portrait. The New York native is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. 16

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

what is often termed the “fog of war,” he pronounced it “a common fault of military narration to fail to give the mental point of view and field vision of the opposing commanders.” He sought “to keep the reader informed as to how much or how little each commander knew about the tactical or strategic situation.” Scrupulously fair in assessing leaders on both sides and meticulous in charting the ebb and flow of the action, Bigelow fully met his stated goals “to tell what was done, but also to show how it was done, to present a characteristic, or typical, view of the conditions and methods of troop-leading that obtained during our Civil War.” Anyone who reads tactical history knows the value of good maps. “I have tried to provide the reader with such maps as he will need,” Bigelow stated with a striking degree of understatement and somewhat obscure phrasing, “but am aware that I have not made his way a royal road.” In fact, the 47 threecolor maps in The Campaign of Chancellorsville constitute one of the book’s great strengths, often depicting the tactical situation in 30-minute increments and permitting readers to follow the action very closely. Bigelow credited the maps of Jedediah Hotchkiss, who had been “Stonewall” Jackson’s cartographer, as especially useful in the preparation of his own. Bigelow’s summary judgments indict Joseph Hooker for fumbling an opportunity to punish Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Hooker repeatedly displayed a lack of aggressiveness and strong purpose. The Federal commander’s “irresolution in this campaign was only partially due to the injury he received at the Chancellor House” on the morning of May 4, insisted Bigelow: “It was exhibited…long before he sustained that injury, and would in all probability have lasted through the campaign had he not been injured at all.” To the end, Hooker might have crafted a victory. “No greater mistake was made during the campaign than Hooker’s final one of recrossing the Rappahannock,” Bigelow asserted. “Lee was about to play into his hands



NO WAR THAT

HAS BEEN FOUGHT ADMITS OF SUCH

THOROUGH INVESTIGATION AS OUR CIVIL WAR

by attacking him on his own ground; the condition on which his plan of operation was based was at last to be realized, when he weakly retired from the contest.” Hooker’s post-battle criticism of 6th Corps chief John Sedgwick for not, in effect, saving the larger part of the Army of the Potomac on May 4 rankled Bigelow. “If Hooker, with the mass of the army, could not safely undertake to join Sedgwick when Sedgwick was moving to join him,” Bigelow commented sharply, “it was hardly to be expected that Sedgwick, with a single corps, would succeed in joining Hooker.” As for Robert E. Lee, Bigelow praised his “brilliant use of interior lines” and pronounced his strategic decisions generally sound and “in accordance with the fundamental principles of war.” Yet the magnitude of the Confederate victory yielded a mixed result. The two months following Lee’s victory marked “the brightest period of the Civil War” for Confederates. “But its brightness,” cautioned Bigelow, “was that of a false and treacherous light. The overconfidence born of the victory at Chancellorsville carried the Army of Northern Virginia against the impregnable front of the Federal lines at Gettysburg.” Very few scholarly books written a century ago stand up against more modern scholarship. Bigelow’s impressive treatment of Chancellorsville meets that test and merits the attention of anyone seriously interested in the compelling action that unfolded along the Rappahannock River frontier in late April and early May 1863. ✯

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It was there! George removed his jeweler’s goggles and handed the watch to the greatgreat grandson of Dillon to do the honors. The inscription read, "Jonathan Dillon April 13 -1861 Fort Sumpter [sic] was attacked by the rebels on the above date J Dillon April 13-1861 Washington thank God we have a government Jonth Dillon." Buried Civil War treasure returns. Today, as our nation observes the Civil War’s 150th Anniversary, the George Chatterton™ Watch Company announces the release of the

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CARTRIDGE BOX

NEARLY EVERY CIVIL WAR INFANTRYMAN, like Private Valerious C. Giles of the 4th Texas (right), went into battle with a leather box full of cartridges for his muzzleloading musket. Millions of cartridge boxes were produced during the war, and while they varied in size and construction, most were approximately 7.5 inches tall, by 6 inches wide, by about 1.75 inches deep. Cartridge boxes were not glamorous pieces of equipment, but the essential accoutrements carried the “forty lead pills,” as a New Jersey private referred to his cartridges, that wrought so much battlefield carnage.

In the implement pouch under the main flap, every sergeant was supposed to carry a mainspring vice; a combination wrench and screwdriver; an extra cone, or nipple; a ball puller and worm for cleaning the barrel; a tompion to place in the muzzle; and a punch to help remove the bands that held on the gun’s barrel. Privates were supposed to carry the same complement with the exception of the vice and band punch, but many did not receive all the tools. Unauthorized articles like letters could end up in the pouch. Two lightweight tins inside each box held and protected the fragile paper cartridges that were a little over 2 inches long. The tins were an improvement over the heavy wooden blocks that had held the ammunition in the cartridge boxes of previous wars. The open bottom portion of the tins held unopened bundles, like the one pictured here produced at the St. Louis Arsenal. The top of each tin was divided into two sections. One side held six individual rounds, the other held four.

18

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

Each bundle contained 10 cartridges and 12 percussion caps. Some soldiers carried an extra two bundles in their pockets.

This rear view of a cartridge box shows how the sling was secured to the box with loops and buckles. Vertical loops that gave the option of carrying the box on a waist belt are just visible behind the sling. Some soldiers preferred that method, but a fully loaded cartridge box weighed about 5 pounds and could cause back discomfort when worn that way. The brass finial and tab that kept the flap closed can also be seen.

This Union pattern of March 1864 cartridge box was made to carry 40 .58 caliber cartridges. Federal boxes were issued with shoulder slings and flaps embellished with brass plates, and the whole set—box, sling, and plates—cost between $3 and $4 in 1860s value. A late-war model omitted the brass decoration to cut costs.

JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

19

with Mark Lause

MANY HANDS U.S. Military Railroad workers manhandle a piece of railroad iron.

THE

WORKERS’

FIGHT labor historian at the University of Cincinnati, published, Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class in 2015. The title plays off the magisterial work by English historian E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class. Lause presents a complex tapestry of what happened to labor unions and strikers throughout the country during the Civil War.

MARK LAUSE,

20

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

CWT: What did unions and the labor movement look like before the war? ML: You have small craft unions going almost back to the Revolution. You get the first labor party in the U.S. in the 1820s. But these are episodic things. In an economic downturn, the first response in the 19th century is to pick up and move. Or you move on to another city where there is more employment. There is a tremendous amount of labor mobility and it destroys any kind of labor organization. CWT: What happens when war is declared? ML: Many existing unions almost dissolved when the war gets underway, and by 1862 a lot of the people who were active in unions are gone off to the war. On the other hand you have radical expansion of the work force because of the war economy.

CWT: What was the government’s reaction to wartime strikes? ML: The oddest thing about the Civil War is different rules apply the farther west you go. If you are far away from what’s going on in Washington, as Rosecrans was in St. Louis, and he says all strikes are a blow against contractors and employers and the army has to act against them. But in the East, Navy Yard strikers are sending delegations to meet with Lincoln. Employers are saying workers are on strike, and we can’t meet the deadline on these contracts, so the government has to give us an extension. Lincoln’s position was you don’t get the extension: We’re neutral in these things. That is a more prolabor position from anyone else who had ever been in the White House. CWT: What can you tell me about the New York City Draft Riots?

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ML: From the 1830s on it becomes a very common practice for the Democratic Party to make racial appeals and stir up racial tensions before elections to make sure that you are mobilizing ethnic voters. I’m in Cincinnati, one of the cities that started this in 1829-30, and the riots would be provoked by the gentlemen of property and standing— the mayor, the judges, members of the state legislature, the city council, and so on. It’s said that the New York City Draft Riots simply represented an extension of that. CWT: What happens during the New York City riots? ML: There are protests about the class nature of conscription—the idea that some can afford to pay $300 for a substitute to go to war for them. The Draft Riots are also a response to rumors that runaway slaves are going to be imported to New York to displace dockworkers. This is an issue that is appearing in the press quite a bit; there are meetings about it. When the Draft Riots take place, there are lots of indications that most of the people, or thousands of the people, out in the streets are basically just like people watching a car wreck on the highway. The workers’ organization disassociated themselves from it very quickly. CWT: Were there plans to bring in freed slaves? ML: Employers were definitely using the threat of displacement, but there is no evidence that it was ever seriously contemplated. But Democrats traditionally mobilized ethnic voters in New York using this fear of—I am tempted to say “illegal aliens” for the similarities to contemporary fears. CWT: Was anyone trying to organize the newly freed black slaves? ML: When Richmond falls in 1865, the first real infantry into the city was a black unit. There were complaints that once these troops got into Richmond they were actually explaining to emancipated slaves how you go about negotiating wages and so on. And there were complaints and petitions that 22

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

BY 1863, YOU HAVE A

TRI-RACIAL

UNION



DIVISION went into Washington very quickly in May 1865, that you had to get these people out of Richmond. CWT: You mean there could have been a plan for shifting the economy. ML: Here are some people who actually have a notion of how to make the transition from slavery to freedom, but those particular black soldiers ended up getting sent down to the Rio Grande Valley. That’s why it seems in hindsight that Reconstruction starts falling apart very quickly. You can certainly see that it’s going to be a conflict between the Johnson administration and Congress. CWT: Tell me about the slave strikes. ML: W.E.B. DuBois said that the end of slavery came about because of the mass rolling strike of slaves in the South. Some labor historians have sometimes balked at this, because those workers don’t have recognition of the AFL-CIO or have dues cards? But these were workers who were engaged in mass work stoppages, and they essentially played a decisive role in terms of the war. The Confederacy didn’t just lose territory. It lost population, it lost an ability to have a work force and everything that it lost ended up getting turned against it. CWT: It wasn’t just the slaves? ML: When the Confederacy occupied Union territory and announced mass conscription of military age men in those areas, they created the kind of unity in the Indian country that basically destroyed them. By 1863 you have a tri-racial Union division of the Army of the Frontier. Blacks, Indians

and Southern whites fighting against the Confederates in places like Honey Springs. That was an army led by people who had followed John Brown in the 1850s. Really interesting in terms of what Reconstruction could have been out there. CWT: Were workers better off after the war? ML: Slaves gain their freedom, but ultimately little more than that. But the conditions of the workforce in general are probably worse immediately after the war. You had a lot of labor struggles, you had different ways that people responded to that. I argue at the end of the book that the ethnic stratification of the workforce really generated different kinds of responses. You have the traditional craft union response: Set up a strike go on a picket line. Sit down and have negotiations. But industrial workers were not in a position to do that—what they do is usually described in newspapers as riots. This is usually associated with ethnic groups like the Irish. That’s one mode. The other mode is the African-American general strike. Where riots pop up after the war, they are almost always crushed. Ultimately, you can’t funnel a class response through so-called respectable craft unionism. CWT: Conflict over labor started the war, and blacks get little but freedom. What else happened? ML: You have to think about the potential that comes out of it. Class doesn’t have any meaning unless it is something that people sense and understand and act on. Even though American laborers are talking about the working class all the way back to the 1800s, to actually get them to understand and act on it, you’re going to have to get rid of slavery. There are a series of postwar labor struggles where you see blacks and whites stick up for each other. That would have never been possible without the achievements and changes brought on by the Civil War. ✯ Interview conducted by Senior Editor Sarah Richardson

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It’s Better

HOMEFRONT CASUALTIES This monument in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Cemetery marks the final resting place of 45 victims of the Allegheny Arsenal explosion,

WIDOWS & ORPHANS ARSENAL WORK WAS A DANGEROUS WAY TO EARN SOME MONEY

LAURETTA VELASQUEZ, (story, P. 52), claimed in her dubious memoirs that she

spent some time rolling cartridges in a Union arsenal. Velasquez mocked the girls who worked there as “light-hearted things” more concerned with their boyfriends than work, and declared she would have blown up the arsenal, but didn’t want to cause unnecessary loss of life. But in the Augusta Arsenal (P. 34), the Allegheny Arsenal (P. 60), and other such facilities, catastrophic blasts did take place that killed civilian workers, many of whom were women. The monument to the workers who died at the Allegheny Arsenal during the September 17, 1862, explosions contains a poignant inscription that stands for the dozens of workers who gave their lives on the homefront during the war, and that bears repeating here: “Tread softly, this is consecrated dust. Forty-five pure patriotic victims lie here, A sacrifice to freedom and civil liberty, a horrid moment of a most wicked rebellion. Patriots! These are patriots’ graves, friends of humble honest toil, these were your peers. Fervent, affection kindled these hearts, honest industry employed these hands. Widows and orphans’ tears have watered this ground, female beauty and manhood’s vigor commingle here. Identified by man, known by Him who is the resurrection and the life, to be made known and loved again, when the morning cometh.”–D.B.S. JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

25

The war in their words

A STAFF OFFICER RECALLS

THE MOMENT WHEN FRIENDLY FIRE NEARLY

KILLED ONE OF THE

CONFEDERACY’S TOP GENERALS BY KEITH S. BOHANNON he following article about the wounding of Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet at the Battle of the Wilderness on May 6, 1864, appeared in several Northern and Southern newspapers, including the Savannah Republican and then the New York Commercial Advertiser, in December 1865. The piece is unsigned, but the author was probably Francis Dawson, a captain and ordnance officer on Longstreet’s staff. Dawson’s Reminiscences of Confederate Service, published in 1883, has an account of Longstreet’s wounding that includes two quotes from the ill-fated General Micah Jenkins that are nearly identical to those in the December 1865 newspaper accounts.

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SHOT IN THE DARK Uncertain Confederate soldiers, most likely from the 12th Virginia and confused by the fluid nature of the battle and the gloomy Wilderness region, prepare to open fire on Lt. Gen. James Longstreet and his party on the Orange Plank Road. The bullet that struck Longstreet went through his throat into his right shoulder, temporarily paralyzing his right arm.

THE WITNESS Captain Francis Dawson, above. Lieutenant Colonel Moxley Sorrel, Longstreet’s adjutant-general, described Dawson as a “thoroughly competent” officer who “acquitted himself well under fire.”

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n earlier statement by Dawson describing Longstreet’s injury appears in a June 1, 1864, letter written by the staff officer to his mother, published in the 1980 reprint of Reminiscences, edited by noted historian Bell Wiley. “This was my narrowest escape,” Dawson wrote his mother. “There were about eight of us together, all mounted, Gen. Longstreet and four of his staff officers including myself, Gen. [Micah] Jenkins, a Capt. Dwight [probably Charles S. Dwight, an engineer officer on the staff of Maj. Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw] and a Capt. Dobie [Lieutenant Alfred E. Doby of Kershaw’s staff ]. Without a moments warning, one of our brigades…only 50 or 60 yards distants [sic] poured a deliberate fire into us. Longstreet was badly wounded, Gen. Jenkins, Capt. Dwight & Dobie killed on the spot; I was not even scratched….Gen. Longstreet weighs over 200 lbs. and he was lifted from his horse by Col. [Moxley G.] Sorrel, Col. [Peyton T.] Manning and myself.” Longstreet’s wounding came in the wake of a dramatically successful Southern flank attack described by Dawson. Longstreet had hoped to capitalize on this movement by mounting additional attacks to seize the intersection of the Orange Plank Road and Brock Road. Unfortunately for the Confederates, Longstreet’s wounding and the disordered condition of the Southern forces delayed the attacks for several hours. When the Confederates finally advanced again around 4 p.m., they achieved only temporary success along a stretch of log breastworks where fires drove off Union defenders. After the Civil War, prominent ex-Confederates like Walter Taylor of General Robert E. Lee’s staff and Brig. Gen. Edward Porter Alexander claimed that if Longstreet had not been wounded, continued Confederate attacks would have spread further panic in the Union ranks, ultimately resulting in Grant withdrawing the Army of the Potomac back across the Rapidan River. Modern historians, including Gordon Rhea and Robert E.L. Krick, conclude instead that the Confederates’ chances of achieving a decisive battlefield victory at the Wilderness were slim. While Longstreet’s flank attack initially routed the Union forces under Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, within a half-hour of the attack the Federals had fallen back to a strong entrenched line along the Brock Road. Even if Longstreet had not been wounded, it seems doubtful he could have aligned the mixed-up Confederates in the dense thickets of the Wilderness for further attacks before the Federals had fallen back to their entrenchments on the Brock Road and strengthened the position. Dawson, a native of England born in 1840, emigrated to the Confederacy in the second half of 1861 to enter the Southern army. Initially accepting a commission as a master’s mate in the Confederate Navy with a post on the ironclad Louisiana, Dawson decided not to pursue naval service when he learned of the Louisiana’s destruction on the Mississippi River while defending New Orleans. Instead, Dawson volunteered in a field artillery battery, sustaining a wound in the opening of the Seven Days Battles. Upon recovering, Dawson received a commission as lieutenant and a position on Longstreet’s staff. Throughout the remaining campaigns of 1862 and 1863, Dawson served under Longstreet. Moxley Sorrel of Longstreet’s staff described the young Englishman as a “thoroughly competent” officer who “acquitted himself well under fire.” Following Longstreet’s wounding at the Wilderness, Dawson served for several months under the First Corps commander’s temporary successor, Lt. Gen. Richard H. Anderson. In November 1864, Dawson accepted a transfer to the staff of Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia’s Cavalry Corps. After the surrender of Lee’s army, Dawson became a journalist, first in Richmond, Va., and then in Charleston, S.C. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Dawson was editor of one of the South’s leading newspapers, the Charleston News and Courier. He was shot and mortally wounded on March 12, 1889, during a confrontation with a Charleston doctor whom Dawson had accused of making improper advances against Dawson’s Swiss-born family maid.

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Gen. Longstreet and the Battle of the Wilderness May 6, 1864 The old First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia had but little rest when there was any hard fighting to be done. After the second Maryland [Gettysburg] campaign, we had been sent out to the Army of Tennessee; our corps had maintained the high reputation of the “Virginia troops;” at the bloody battle of Chickamauga the old Sharpsburg sobriquet was set aside, and General [ James] Longstreet, no longer called the “War Horse,” was generally known among the men as the “Bull of the Woods.” Then came the skirmishes of “Le Noir’s” and “Campbell’s” Station, the siege of Knoxville, and the terrible Winter of 1863-4 in desolate East Tennessee. Our men had borne, unceasingly, hardships greater than any to which even they had before been accustomed; they had not complained, although with insufficient food, without blankets, with ragged clothing, and too often without shoes, they had tramped with bleeding feet for many a weary mile. On the march, and in bivouac, during the freezing day and comfortless night, in hunger and in thirst, they had been

BIG MAN An image of a robust Longstreet, taken in 1861. The general endured a painful convalescence after his 1864 wounding, and learned to ride and write with his left hand. He returned to duty in October 1864 even though he could not use his right arm. Longstreet never regained its full use.

VICTORY IN SIGHT? This engraving depicts Confederate troops driving Union soldiers away from their burning log breastworks near the Brock Road on May 6, 1864. JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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BOY GENERAL Brigadier General Micah Jenkins, pictured here as a colonel, was only 28 years old when he suffered his mortal head wound at the Wilderness. Jenkins was sick before his death, and left an ambulance to ride to the front. A bullet from the fatal volley sheared off the tip of the South Carolinian’s sword, above. sustained by the remembrance of their dear Southern homes and dearer Southern land. All things, however, have an end, and in the Spring of 1864 we joyfully returned to Virginia. On the 3rd of May, 1864, we left our camps, near Gordonsville, and on the night of the 5th went into bivouac a few miles from the Wilderness. By daybreak in the morning the troops were again in motion, and marching toward the field of battle! The Federal troops had made a fierce attack upon the right of General Lee’s line, and had been repulsed. Again they came on and in increased force, until at last [General Henry] Heath’s and [General Cadmus] Wilcox’s divisions, in spite of their steady and determined fighting, were driven 30

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back in confusion. With a cheer the Federal troops pushed forward; our exhausted men could do no more; there seemed no hope of further successful resistance; but there was a cloud of dust on the road, and General Longstreet, followed by his column, came rapidly on. [General Joseph B.] Kershaw’s division was in advance; without halting, the men filed into line, and charged with a furious yell. Nothing could stand before them—they were inspired with furious unhesitating valor—the onset of the enemy was checked, and the next moment they were being slowly driven back. Repeatedly did the Federal officers bring up their shattered regiments; reinforcements were put in only to be speedily broken, and the arrival of [General Charles] Field’s division and the magnificent body of men commanded by General Robert [Richard H.] Anderson, enabled General Lee to re-establish his original line. We had lost heavily, many of our most gallant men had fallen; but the reverse of the early morning had been retrieved, and our success was so far complete. It is well known that the section of country usually called the “Wilderness” is covered with a dense growth of pines, the undergrowth of bushes and briars being so matted and tangled that it is very difficult to force a way through it, while at a distance of forty or fifty yards the form of men could scarcely be distinguished by any but a quick-sighted observer. The Federals were now resting comparatively quiet, taking, perhaps, a long breath before “trying it on” again; but they were not to have it all their own way, and we, in turn, became the aggressors. [General William] Mahone’s brigade, with I think, two others, was ordered to move around and attack Grant’s left; Generals Lee and Longstreet, lying on the ground near the plank road, quietly awaited the result. The rapid firing quickly told us that the “boys” were at them; and, before long, a mounted officer rode up to announce the successful completion of the movement. Grant’s left had been routed and driven back on the centre, and the plan now was to make a vigorous assault while the iron was hot, and so finish the work before us. The whole of our corps was in readiness to move, and General Longstreet and staff rode down the plank road where a portion of the corps was already formed in column. We had ridden but a short distance, when Lieutenant Colonel G.M. S[orrell], Assistant Adjutant General of the First Army Corps, joined us. He had accompanied the flanking party, winning the hearts of Mahone’s brigade by a chivalrous gallantry, akin to that which they had shown on many a bloody field; and he now brought us the most encouraging accounts of the position of affairs. General [Micah] Jenkins, a noble son of

WILDERNESS FURY Longstreet’s attack barreled down the Orange Plank Road before his wounding on May 6 and slammed into Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock’s 2nd Corps, driving it back from ground it had taken earlier that day. Hancock admitted the attack rolled up his men “like a wet blanket.” A little more than a year before Longstreet was shot, friendly fire felled Stonewall Jackson about four miles away. JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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A RECENT DONATION TO THE NPS TESTIFIES TO THE OVERLAND CAMPAIGN’S CARNAGE Just days after Longstreet’s wounding, Union Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick fell to a Confederate bullet on May 9, a few miles north of Spotsylvania Court House. He was the highest ranking United States soldier to be killed during the Civil War. Sedgwick, commander of the Army of the Potomac’s 6th Corps, was well liked by his staff. “He was like a kind father to them, and they loved him really like sons,” wrote one observer. No staff member was perhaps closest to the general than his aide-de-camp, Captain Richard F. Halsted, who certainly witnessed the death of his chief. Captain Halsted and two other staff members then accompanied Sedgwick’s body home to Cornwall, Conn. After Sedgwick’s burial, Halsted returned to Virginia and continued to serve at 6th Corps headquarters for the remainder of the war. Halsted died in New York in 1881. Late last year, Halsted’s uniform coat and forage cap surfaced in a private collection. The owners chose to donate them to the National Park Service at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, where Sedgwick’s death is marked by a monument erected in 1884 by 6th Corps veterans. It is impossible to say whether Captain Halsted wore the coat and hat on May 9, but they Captain Richard F. are a personal link to a significant Halsted’s impeccable Civil War episode. The park plans dress coat is in near to clean and conserve the items perfect conditon. before they are displayed. The intitials “RFH,”

are handwritten into the sleeve, and also on the sweatband of his forage cap.

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Eric J. Mink is historian and cultural resources manager, Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania, NMP. Go to civilwartimes.com to read more about Captain Halsted and General Sedgwick.

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ANOTHER VIEW A comrade reaches toward Longstreet, in the center of this depiction of the shooting, in an effort to steady the stricken general. At left, General Jenkins reels from his fatal head wound, while another officer, either Captain Dwight or Dobie, lies dead at right on the Orange Plank Road.

South Carolina, an admirable officer and courteous gentleman, was also with us, and his face was lit up with joy and confidence as he congratulated the “old chief.” It was now proposed to give three cheers for General Longstreet; and Jenkins, fearing lest his men should appear to be behind time, called out, “Why don’t you cheer, men? Why don’t you cheer?” The air fairly rang with lusty shouts; again and again the men cheered, till the voices were cracked and tears of exhaustion ran down many a dusty cheek. Every heart was confident and gay—and so we moved forward. Suddenly the snapping of a cap was heard in the woods on our right, and then the report of a musket, sounding strangely sharp and clear. Instinctively we turned, and there in the woods, within a few yards of us, was a long line of uniformed men. There was no time for thought; another rifle-shot was heard, and another and another, without an instant’s pause; the red fire flashed along the entire line, and a deadly volley was poured into us. It was unexpected as the crack of doom! Could it be the enemy, or was it our own men? None of us could tell! The troops were for a moment thrown into confusion, but they rallied immediately under the exhortations of their officers. I see it as plainly now as if it were but yesterday. General Longstreet, curbing his horse, which plunged with excitement, calm and inflexible as a statue of bronze, his head turned defiantly toward the firing like some old lion whom

the hunters had brought to bay; and Jenkins, waving his hand to his men, while in loud, clear tones he cried, “Steady, men! For God’s sake, steady!” Poor fellow! The words were scarcely uttered, the name of his God was still upon his lips, when a bullet pierced his head, and rising convulsively in his stirrups, he fell to the ground mortally wounded. Now Longstreet reeled in his saddle; he also was wounded, and, it was feared, fatally. The firing had ceased as suddenly as it had begun. It was our own men who had done us this harm. Jenkins, gallant fellow, was beyond all earthly assistance, and it remained for us but to grieve his loss. Longstreet was lying by a tree at the side of the road, the blood flowing with terrible rapidity from his neck. General Field, the senior division commander, now assumed command, and kneeling by our beloved General received a few words of instruction. The General grew rapidly weaker, but as consciousness gradually left him, he still could summon energy enough to say in deep and earnest tones: “Press them on, General Field: press them on, sir!” A litter was obtained; and General Longstreet was carried slowly to the rear; his hat concealed his features, and the men anxiously asked who was wounded. It was known too soon, and to honor their General, as they thought, for the last time, the men gave a prolonged and enthusiastic cheer. The General heard them; he could not be deaf to their voices, and it was a touching sight as he slowly, faintly, raised his hat, showing, for a moment, that

well-known face, now so ghastly and pale. One incident particularly struck me. When the General was hit, a private soldier took his horse; he had mounted him, and fully equipped with rifle, blanket and canteen was now riding behind a litter. One of our couriers told him to dismount, and his reply was characteristic: “No Sir-ree! Look hyar, man! General Longstreet gave me this hyar horse to mind, and all hell can’t get him from me without his saying so.” Nor shall I ever forget the sad expression on General Lee’s face, when he, too, heard of our disaster; nor his gentle, sympathizing voice, as he said, “I hope, General, that you are not seriously hurt.” At the time that Longstreet was disabled, a combined movement had been commenced which the Federals could not then have well withstood; but new plans and deliberations became necessary, and from ten minutes past 12, the hour of the accident, nothing of importance was done—no advantage was gained.”



Keith Bohannon teaches at the University of West Georgia. His latest essay will appear in Gary W. Gallagher and Caroline E. Janney’s Cold Harbor to the Crater (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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HEART OF THE

SOUTHERN

WAR MACHINE The Augusta Powder Works

was an unparalleled

accomplishment of military industry



BY THEO DO RE P. SAVAS DIXIE’S HEART A downstream view of the Georgia refinery, which was built around the towering smokestack, and the laboratory building with its unfinished clock tower. The flag pole, from which the giant garrison flag once flew, is faintly visible atop the laboratory.

BIRD’S-EYE VIEW This reconstruction of the entire powder works, bisected by the Augusta Canal, offers a complete perspective of the sprawling Augusta Arsenal.

A BEARDED CONFEDERATE COLONEL

walked slowly to a tall flag pole and looked up at the oversized garrison banner snapping in the brisk afternoon breeze. It was late April 1865. President Jefferson Davis was escaping south, and the corpse of Abraham Lincoln was heading by rail to its final resting place in Illinois. With a heavy heart, the officer slowly hauled down his beloved flag. That act and a final order extinguished furnaces and brought the machinery that had run the Augusta Powder Works for more than three years to a disquieting halt. Colonel George Rains stood alone in the silence, gazing down the banks of the empty Augusta Canal that had sent his precious gunpowder to the armies of the Confederacy.

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“To enter a great war without a supply of this essential material was appalling”



W

hen Southern batteries opened on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, the young Confederacy’s entire supply of the gunpowder was barely enough for one month of active operations. The North was well-equipped to produce and supply its armies with gunpowder, but the Confederacy boasted only four small private mills (two each in South Carolina and Tennessee) that could barely keep up with local needs. “To enter a great war without a supply of this essential material,” Colonel Rains would one day write, “was appalling.” Jefferson Davis and his chief of ordnance, Major Josiah Gorgas, unlike so many others, anticipated a prolonged and arduous conflict. But where could the Confederacy get its gunpowder? There was no effective or reliable means to procure it from abroad. The only viable solution was to construct a facility of sufficient magnitude to satisfy the needs of a nation at war. Acting with celerity and sound judgment, Davis made the most important and impactful executive decision of his entire presidency: He selected Rains, then a major, for the thankless task of overseeing the Confederacy’s construction of a massive gunpowder production facility. A firm understanding of Rains’ education and work background is critical to appreciate what he would soon accomplish. George Washington Rains was born in the New Bern, N.C., in 1817, a brother of future Confederate General and torpedo expert Gabriel Rains. He obtained an appointment from Alabama in 1838 to West Point, where he graduated first in scientific studies and third overall in the talented Class of 1842. With a fresh commission as second lieutenant in the Engineer Corps, Rains garnered practical engineering experience constructing Fort Warren in Boston harbor. The monotony of such tasks bored the adventurous officer, who finagled the equivalent of a demotion by transferring to the 4th Artillery in 1843. After a year at Fort Monroe, Rains accepted a position as assistant professor at West Point, where he taught chemistry, geology, and mineralogy. 36

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Rains resigned his position when the Mexican War began and rejoined his artillery regiment. He initially oversaw the Quartermaster’s Depot at Port Isabel, Texas, but spent most of the war serving as aide de camp to General Gideon Pillow. The North Carolina native was brevetted twice for bravery under fire, and was the first American to enter enemy-held Veracruz, where he negotiated the exchange of prisoners. After the war Rains served at Fort Hamilton in New York, where he met and married Francis Ramsdell, the daughter of a wealthy Northern industrialist. Six months later he resigned from the Army to become president and partner (with his father-in-law) of the Washington Iron Works in Newburgh, N.Y. There, he obtained patents relating to steam engines and boilers, managed a large number of employees, and acquired practical manufacturing and inventive experience. Rains’ resumé by the time of the Civil War included combat, staff, quartermaster, and diplomatic experience, together with private sector manufacturing and management knowledge.

S

oon after the fall of Fort Sumter, Rains left New York for Richmond, where he was commissioned major of artillery in early July 1861. Once again he found himself in uniform, only this time it was Confederate gray. Davis placed a nearly impossible task on Rains’ shoulders: Search the Confederacy for a central location upon which to construct a powder mill, “of sufficient magnitude to supply the armies in the field and the artillery of the forts and coastal defenses.” With that carte blanche, Rains left Richmond on July 10, 1861, for what he described as a “rapid rail tour” of the new Confederacy. “I almost lived on the railroad cars,” Rains later wrote, “devising plans, examining the country for a location, hunting up materials…and employing more or less every available machine shop and foundry from Virginia to Louisiana.” He quickly focused on northeastern Georgia, for just 10 days later he settled upon Augusta as the home for his proposed complex. The Powder Works was constructed just west of the city between the Savannah River and the Augusta canal on the grounds of the old U.S. Arsenal. This part of Georgia offered

GEARS, SHAFTS, AND STEAM These color blueprints demonstrate the brilliance of Confederate architects C. Shaler Smith, whom Rains described as “a genius of high order,” and Albert L. West. Smith created the “Details of the Machinery for the Mixing House Turbine, July 9, 1862,” below. West also drafted some of the intricate drawings including “Steaming Drums, C. S. Powder Works, Augusta, GA, March 4, 1865,” above. Both renderings convey the complexity of the facility’s machinery.

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GENIUS George W. Rains wears his Confederate coat over civilian clothing in this image taken soon after the war ended.

gunpowder, the third being charcoal), Rains had nothing to send. Working closely with Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris, Rains contracted with local suppliers of niter to increase the production of saltpeter. He personally visited scores of niter-producing caves, reorganized and extended their mining contracts, and wrote and published a pamphlet titled “Notes on Making Saltpetre from the Earth of the Caves” to more efficiently excavate the precious mineral upon which so much hung in the balance. By October 1861, a Nashville refinery was turning out 1,500 pounds of saltpeter a day, which was produced into gunpowder at the Sycamore mill. Rains utilized this small manufactory as a “school of instruction” for workers he later sent to Augusta. Rains also sent Sycamore’s machinery to Georgia in February 1862 just before the Union occupied the area. His prompt action saved the Confederacy irreplaceable equipment that would otherwise have been permanently lost. Throughout these early months Rains also worked closely with C. Shaler Smith, an architect and civil engineer who Rains described as “a genius of high order.” Smith developed architectural plans based on the various sketches and diagrams Rains mailed him. With an engineer’s eye for precision and in a sound, scientific manner, Rains began construction in September 1861 on what would evolve into a two-mile-long series of buildings along the Augusta Canal that coincided with the manufacturing sequence for gunpowder. The warehouses for the raw materials were first in line, and the refinery next. The magazine that housed the finished product was located at the end of the complex. With the canal as a mode of transportation, the result was one of the earliest examples of an assembly line mode of production on a grand scale.

W RAINS’ prompt action saved the Confederacy irreplaceable equipment



a good central location deep within the Confederacy and safe from attack, and was well served by a river, canal, and the junction of two important railroads. Rains explained that the security aspect was especially important, “since the loss of the Works would have been followed by disastrous consequences.” The course of the war proved the brilliance of this decision. Rains was also tasked with satisfying the needs of Albert Sidney Johnston’s nascent Western army while the mill was under construction. Johnston’s only source of gunpowder was the unreliable and small Sycamore Powder Mill in Nashville that was unable to meet his needs. Other than a small amount of saltpeter and sulfur (two of the three elements composing 38

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ith no prior experience manufacturing gunpowder, Rains relied upon a scholarly English booklet that explained the complicated process. Unfortunately, it did not elaborate on the type of equipment required, or the design of the buildings to house it. As Rains later explained, “I was thrown upon my own resources to supply these deficiencies.” The Augusta Powder Works began producing powder on April 10, 1862, just seven months after construction began. The cost was only $385,000—a bargain by any measure. It was the second largest powder mill in the world, and largest single Confederate industrial project of the entire war. The first and principal structure erected was the refinery. The central portion held the refinery proper, while the eastern and western wings housed, respectively, a 1,500-ton saltpeter and sulfur warehouse and a laboratory for testing gunpowder. This colossal brick structure, 250 feet wide and 275 feet long, also contained machine shops and a charcoal department, complete with equipment for extracting precious saltpeter from damaged gunpowder. As a reflection of its importance, Rains patterned it after the English House of Parliament, complete with four square corner towers housing the mill’s offices. Centered on a 150-foot grandiose obelisk, the refinery looked more like a European castle than a 19th-century manufacturing facility. The mixing house, or as Rains called it, the “Incorporating Mills,” stood directly

GRENADE! Thousands of “Rains Grenades,” designed by George’s brother Gabriel, were produced at the Augusta Arsenal.

A slave works at a cotton gin. Skilled slave labor often proved crucial to the slave system.



BLACK LABOR

AND

BLACK POWDER A LARGE ENSLAVED BLACK WORK force toiled at the Augusta Powder Works with little or no white supervision to help produce and distribute gunpowder. Their contribution to the Confederate war effort was enormous. Surviving records kept by William Pendleton, the superintendent of the powder works, begin on November 7, 1862, seven months after the mill began operating. The records explain the type of daily work performed and the number of workers in the mill, but do not differentiate between enslaved and free until August 28, 1863. In April 1862, white men comprised about two-thirds of all workers and held the vast majority of skilled positions (machinists, coopers, masons, etc.). African Americans held nearly all the unskilled positions (grading roads, hauling powder, work in the stables, etc.) By late August 1863, when the first records to mention race appear, 53 men worked at the mill (27 white and 26 black). Of the latter, 93 percent performed unskilled labor. The most demanding physical assignments were done exclusively by blacks. White unskilled mill workers, who at no time numbered more than four

hands per day, were assigned to clean and oil engines, ship powder, or work in the stable. As the war continued, the Conscription Bureau routinely picked off Rains’ skilled white men. That left Rains with no choice but to fill the skilled positions with African American men. By the end of 1863, black workers performed 48 percent of the skilled positions. During the first quarter of 1864, an average of 26.2 percent of black labor was utilized in skilled jobs, but that number shot up once more to nearly 42 percent during the second quarter of 1864, and nearly 47 percent for the third quarter. The approach of Sherman’s armies and consequent dismantling, transfer, storage, and rebuilding of the mill consumed much of November and December, which skewed the end-of -year percentages, but in October, 40 percent of all the skilled artisans were black. A look at the last months of the war in 1865 also proves instructive. In January, skilled black artisans comprised 45 percent of the labor force. The mill was stopped and partially packed again in February, but surviving records put the number of skilled blacks at 38 percent,

and in March it was still at 37.5 percent. The number fell to 21 percent during April, the war’s final month. The declines were the result of the assignment of African-American workers in large numbers to repair destroyed rail lines and build roads so Rains could ship gunpowder. Many of the skilled tasks required a hands-on role in the production of gunpowder. For example, black workers often spent the day “burning charcoal,” which meant operating the critical Charcoal Refinery. That required filling a metallic slip cylinder with a precise amount of wooden sticks, heating them for a specific length of time to a certain temperature, operating cranes to place the hot cylinders into large cooling retorts, submerging them into water baths, and carefully sorting the finished product. According to Pendleton’s conscientious daily entries, white laborers were never assigned to this department, which means these important functions were performed without any white supervisors. During the last days of January 1864, blacks were assigned for the first time to run the difficult and delicate Saltpeter Refinery. Again without direct white supervision, these men boiled the saltpeter in large copper kettles, cooled down the “mother liquor,” and crystallized and washed the mineral in multiple complex steps. Other black workers used scales to precisely weigh saltpeter and repair machinery. Rains usually turned to his black labor force for assistance with the mill’s vital oak rail track system. These men made the nails and bolts that held the track together, and worked on the wooden track or push trucks themselves. There is no mention or record of the system ever having failed, even for a single day. Nor was there a single act of sabotage or destruction recorded anywhere within the sprawling facility. The records are indisputable. Black workers assumed the place of absent skilled white artisans in large numbers, and played a vital role in producing the gunpowder intended to keep them in shackles.—T.P.S.

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RAINS’ BOSS Major Josiah Gorgas, the Confederacy’s chief of ordnance.

Ordnance chief JOSIAH GORGAS hailed Rains’ mill as ‘far superior to any in the United States’



east of the refinery. This 296-foot rectangular building held a dozen separate mills, each consisting of an iron circular flat bed seven feet in diameter, upon which massive rollers ground (“incorporated”) the powder. A subterranean archway extending along the entire mixing house held an immense iron shaft nearly 300-feet long. This engineering marvel, together with its spur wheels and gears, was powered by a 14-ton 130-horsepower steam engine and boiler system built in the North before the war. The sulfur-saltpeter-charcoal mixture was ground under the huge mill rollers for one hour, at which time it was “brought to the condition of finished mill cake, ready to be cooled and granulated.” The Incorporating Mills were ingeniously constructed to minimize the damage of a chance explosion. Three sides of each mill were constructed of brick and stone, but the fourth was made of light wood and glass. Each mill 40

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faced in an alternate direction so a blast in one would blow out the wood and glass side easily and contain the damage to a single mill. Rains also installed a forerunner of the modern sprinkler system: 12 large containers of water, one in each mill, all connected by a single iron shaft. “Thus,” wrote Rains, “on an explosion in one mill, its bed plate was instantly drenched with water, and this caused the same to take place at the same moment with all the others.” An ingenious oak rail trolley car system shuttled the mixed powder through the next steps of the manufacturing process. On the opposite side of the canal 100 yards from the mills were four cooling magazines, where the warm damp blackish gray mill cake cooled and hardened. A permanent cooling magazine was later built on the same side of the canal 500 yards east of as the mills. All of the permanent buildings were built mainly of brick and stone because the damp atmosphere surrounding the canal speedily decayed other materials. Next in line was the Press House, where the hardened powder was stamped into solid cake with the aid of a large pair of hydraulic presses manufactured in Richmond. This step was eventually bypassed when it was discovered that the weight of the mill rollers adequately pressed the powder mixture. After the cooling stage, the gunpowder was sent across the canal to the Granulating Building, where the mill cake was broken into fragments by bronze toothed cylinders and vibrating wire screens. This separated the grains according to size and delivered them into their respective receptacles. The larger grains were used for artillery pieces, while the smaller grains were processed for shoulder arms and pistols. The drying phase was the next step in the process. Rains’ ingenuity reduced the complicated three-step process into one. The use of revolving cylinders and blasts of hot air to dry, dust, and glaze the grains in a single operation saved an enormous amount of time and labor. With an emphasis on safety, the furnace and boiler were housed in a brick building 200 yards from the drying facility. The chimney was another 100 yards removed so sparks would have to travel 300 yards in order to reach the fireproof metal roof of the Drying House. This was especially important because gunpowder was at its most explosive state at this stage of the process. The finished high quality gunpowder was weighed and packed for shipping in a building 500 yards farther down the canal. In dire need of a safe mode for transportation, Rains used a strong wooden box of his own design. “These powder boxes,” he explained, “were superior to barrels, being stronger, occupying less room, standing transportation better and safer in use.” The boxes were stored in a 100-ton magazine another three quarters of a mile up the canal. Ordnance chief Major Josiah Gorgas, never easy to please, hailed Rains’ mill as “far superior to any in the United States and unsurpassed by any across the ocean.” The first element necessary to produce gunpowder is saltpeter (niter). The raw niter from the limestone cave mining industry contained impurities that absorbed moisture and weakened the gunpowder. To combat this, Rains developed a method to refine it to nearly absolute purity. Instead of successive crystallizations and washings, he boiled, cooled, crystallized, and washed it in one long step with the use of special equipment instead of numerous workers. This

RECIPE These copper cups were used to measure gunpowder for artillery shells.

speedy method enabled the Augusta mill to refine between 8,000 and 10,000 pounds of saltpeter per day. The next essential element is sulfur, which also must be chemically pure to make reliable gunpowder. Unlike every other powder mill of its day, the Augusta facility utilized a two step distillation process. Rains boiled the sulfur and poured it into wooden boxes five-feet tall and 10-inches square. The impurities sank to the bottom, leaving the top three feet pure. The top “cone” was broken off and distilled, which resulted in sulfur “a beautiful citron yellow when cold, and entirely pure.” Charcoal is the third and final element needed to produce gunpowder. Once again Rains employed a distillation process. Unable to procure enough willow wood, from which charcoal was usually produced, Rains experimented with cottonwood, which was readily available in northeastern Georgia. The wood was heated for two hours in huge iron cylinders and pul-

HANDSOME EDIFICE A drawing of the laboratory building. The arsenal’s buildings were constructed in the Norman style, also exemplified by the 1855 Smithsonian Institution building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Construction of the arsenal began on September 13, 1861, but construction of the laboratory did not begin until 1863, and was still underway when the war ended. Architects estimated that the building required 467,000 bricks. verized into a fine powder in barrels filled with bronze balls. The charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur were then shipped to the Weighing House, where the three elements were commingled in a proportion of 45 pounds of saltpeter to 9 pounds of charcoal to 6 pounds of sulfur. The mixture was moistened and ready for the next step of the manufacturing process previously JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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WHAT’S LEFT A modern view of where the Augusta Powder Works once stood. The land was sold and the buildings were demolished in the 1870s, and the Sibley Mill was erected on the site. Only the chimney was saved. That tall, silent obelisk is marked with a marble plaque that commemorates Colonel Rains and his grand accomplishment.

described—the Incorporating Mills. Once finished, the powder was shipped via railroad to all points of the Confederacy. Heavy expenditures of gunpowder, including coastal operations and routine skirmishing, together with the steady loss of the niter caves to advancing Union armies, compelled Rains to devise better manufacturing techniques to maximize the quantity and quality of his powder. One example was a new process for combining charcoal and saltpeter. Rains placed a piece of charcoal under a microscope and discovered that the particle was riddled with tiny pores. As he later explained, “the charcoal by its combustion with the oxygen of the saltpetre supplied the expanded gasses which produced the explosive force.” Rains boiled the mixture for eight minutes in copper cylinders, which filled completely each tiny pore with saltpeter. The result was astonishing: The quality of the gunpowder increased, and the timely incorporating mill process was cut from four hours to only one—practically quadrupling the mill’s capacity. Rains also commanded the August Arsenal and its various machine shops, making the Augusta mill complex the heart of the Confederate war machine and the most indispensable of the South’s limited number of manufacturing centers. If it was captured or destroyed, the effect on the Southern war effort would have been almost instantly fatal. If his duties were not enough, Rains also commanded the 42

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1st Regiment Georgia Local Defense troops, essentially old men and young boys arranged into infantry companies, plus a battalion of cavalry and a battery of artillery. Those troops were trained as early as 1862 to man the light earthworks constructed around the city. The power mill wasn’t seriously threatened with capture or destruction until the opening of the Atlanta Campaign in May 1864. The hazard of an internal disaster was much more likely. Rains widely separated the buildings and left in place shock-absorbing pine trees. He posted sentinels in key locations and mandated workers wear rubber-soled shoes. Still, the facility suffered four explosions of varying magnitude. Three occurred in the Incorporating Mills. The most devastating blast, however, took place in a temporary building near the canal a few months after the works began operating. Rains described the explosion with cool detachment: “There were seven men within the structure, a sentinel outside, and a boy with a mule in a shed adjoining. The bodies of the seven men and the boy, with the debris, were carried up with the ascending column, and by its revolving action, reduced mainly to small fragments and dispersed. The sentinel was killed by the shock, but his body was not otherwise disturbed.” The deadly blast was the work of a single match carelessly dropped by one of the workers who was known to smoke on the job when the foreman was absent, as he was that fatal day.



Another threat to the smooth operation of the powder mill was the fluctuating stability of the local labor supply, both skilled and unskilled. Faced with cutthroat wage bargaining as a result of the severe labor shortage, Rains combed hospitals for workers while exhorting the authorities in Richmond for furloughed soldiers unable to stand the rigors of the field. These labor problems, coupled with the deterioration of the South’s railroad system, dramatically worsened in the spring of 1864, when William T. Sherman moved out against Joseph E. Johnston in northern Georgia. The Atlanta Campaign signaled the beginning of the end of the smooth operation of the Deep South’s ordnance network, and posed an immediate existential threat to the Augusta Powder Works and the Confederacy.



In the August issue of Civil War Times, Ted Savas will continue his examination of the Augusta Powder Works, and argue that William T. Sherman’s failure to target Augusta between July 1864 and early 1865 was perhaps the Union’s major strategic blunder. Savas writes from California and is the managing director and co-owner of Savas Beatie, LLC, a publishing house that specializes in Civil War books.



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A PROMISE BETRAYED  RECONSTRUCTION POLICIES PREVENTED

FREEDMEN FROM REALIZING

THE AMERICAN DREAM BY RICK BEARD

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A NEW DAY Recently liberated slaves, who had belonged to Thomas F. Drayton, pose in 1862 on the Magnolia Plantation in South Carolina.

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O

N JANUARY 16, 1865, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, which one admiring biographer lauded as “the single most revolutionary act in race relations in the Civil War.” The order promised thousands of freedmen 40-acre parcels of land located in a 30-mile wide swath from Charleston south along the Atlantic coast to the St. Johns River in Florida. But Southern-sympathetic Northern politicians and even Sherman himself would come to betray the famous order that gave freedmen “40 acres and a mule,” and former slaves would be forced off the land their families had worked for generations. That Reconstruction betrayal drove many impoverished blacks from the South to Northern cities. The nation’s postwar leaders’ inability to possess the will, the wisdom, and the imagination to provide the black men and women, freed by the deaths of more than 750,000 Americans, with the means to rise economically affected American race relations for decades to come.

NOT HIS PROBLEM Major General William T. Sherman issued the “40 acres” order partially because it absolved him of the responsibility for the “Negro problem.” 46

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Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15 was an aggressive response to two issues that had bedeviled the Lincoln administration for nearly four years—the federal government’s confiscation of Rebel-owned property and the relocation of the thousands of contrabands who had found their way to Union Army camps. Repeated attempts to resolve these issues through legislation had collapsed in the face of the inflexible partisan positions staked out by Democrats and Republicans. The first attempt to resolve the issue came in August 1861, with the First Confiscation Act declaring that all property used in aiding, abetting, or promoting the insurrection was “to be seized, confiscated, and condemned.” Fearful that the legislation might appear a desperate response to the Union defeat at First Bull Run, and might also be unconstitutional, Lincoln reluctantly signed the bill, and then immediately ordered Attorney General Edward Bates not to enforce its provisions. Lincoln’s timidity angered the more radical members of his party. The following summer Lincoln again found himself at odds with several Republican members of congress. Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull’s Second Confiscation Act authorized the government seizure of “all the estate and property, money, stocks, credits, and effects” of anyone in rebellion against the United States. Furthermore, “all slaves of persons... engaged in rebellion…that [come] under the control of the government of the United States...shall be forever free of their servitude.” The Second Confiscation Act lacked provisions for enforcement and proved no more effective than its predecessor. Confiscation by the Union military, however, proved to be an altogether different matter. Commanders on the front lines seized abandoned Southern plantations and their slaves. But Congress and the Lincoln administration proved unable to dispel the uncertainty surrounding experiments in free labor by agreeing on policies for the seized lands. Black leaders, wary of Congress and the administration, had put forth their own ideas regarding possible land redistribution. In November 1861, the Anglo-African newspaper published an editorial titled “What Shall Be Done with the Slaves?” that argued when the war ended “there will be four million free men and women and children, accustomed to toil” who should be awarded the confiscated land. The growing likelihood that a Union victory would bring an end to chattel slavery led many black leaders to join the frequent calls for land redistribution. For tens of thousands of freedmen, ownership of the land they had labored on as slaves promised economic self-sufficiency and a path to citizenship. Nowhere was that promise more eagerly embraced than in Savannah in January 1865. Sherman and his army had occupied that city following their sevenweek march from Atlanta through northern Georgia. “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah,” he telegraphed the president on December 22. But controversy had tainted Sherman’s gift. On December 9, Brig. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis had ordered a pontoon bridge over Ebenezeer Creek, near Savannah, disassembled before the freedmen traveling in the army’s wake could cross. The result, in the words of one Union cavalry officer, caused hundreds of blacks to rush “by the hundreds into the turbid stream,” where many drowned. Confederate forces captured those who remained on land. On January 9, 1865, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton arrived in Savannah to investigate the incident. The secretary of war asked Sherman to arrange a meeting with leaders from Savannah’s black community. On Thursday evening, January 12, Stanton and Sherman got together with 20 ministers and lay leaders from the city’s black churches; at least 15 of the attendees had at one time been enslaved. In response to a question about how freedpeople could take care of themselves, 67-year-old Garrison Frazier, a former slave and the group’s spokesman, remarked that the best way was “to have land, and turn it and

UNION COMMANDERS ON THE FRONT LINES

SEIZED ABANDONED

SOUTHERN



PLANTATIONS

AND THEIR

SLAVES

till it by our own labor….” All but one of the group wanted to live separately from whites, “for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.” Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15 four days after the meeting. It “reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States…the islands

from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida.” Subject to several bureaucratic strictures, “each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground…in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection, until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title.” The order encouraged the enlistment of “young and able-bodied negroes” in the service of the United States, and guaranteed anyone enlisting the right to “locate his family in any one of the settlements at pleasure.” Finally, the order provided that “no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority and the acts of Congress.” Michael Fellman argues in his book Citizen Sherman that Sherman solved a number of problems bothering him by issuing Special Field Orders No. 15, as the general had washed his

EXODUS A newspaper sketch artist portrayed a small number of the former slaves that followed Sherman’s armies as they marched across Georgia to Savannah.

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LABOR AND LAND In the engraving above, black laborers work on Federal earthworks near Savannah. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, right, tried to broker land use agreements for the freedmen, but when Andrew Johnson, far right, gained the presidency, he rolled back many of the land provisions of the previous administration.

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hands of his “negro problem” by purging his columns of large numbers of black camp followers and passing them onto a man he despised, Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton, the Union commander stationed at Port Royal, S.C. Saxton, as inspector of settlements and plantations, was responsible for assigning each family 40 acres of land and furnishing a “possessory title” (which granted the right to use but not own the land, subject to the president’s approval). He sought and received assurances from Stanton that the federal government would not renege on its promise of land. Under Sherman’s orders,

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the Union Army also provided the freedmen with mules no longer fit for military use to work the land. Saxton efficiently processed thousands of requests for land, and by June 1865, approximately 40,000 blacks had settled on 400,000 acres. Despite the enthusiastic response of the freedmen, the settlement of Sherman’s Reservation quickly encountered problems. One was largely practical. Many of the freedmen received their plots too late for spring planting. This created the need for temporary relief—the provision of food, clothing, and shelter—that the government was ill-prepared to meet. Of greater long-term significance was the change in political circumstances, as Sherman’s order was out of sync with the Lincoln administration’s evolving Reconstruction policy. On March 3, 1865, less than two months after Sherman issued his order, the formation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands added a new, often confusing layer of administrative oversight to the Sherman land grants. Although Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard,

commissioner of the Bureau, immediately ordered Saxton to continue his work, the heretofore autonomous venture in land redistribution was quickly caught up in larger political currents in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination. Andrew Johnson’s ascendancy to the presidency in April 1865 marked the beginning of a bitter struggle over the seized lands, as he instituted a lenient policy of special pardons that restored most of the rights of former Confederates who swore an oath of allegiance to the United States. Simultaneously, Howard was putting the infant Freedmen’s Bureau on a collision course with the new president. His “Circular No. 13” issued on July 28, 1865, instructed bureau agents that land redistribution was the official policy, despite the president’s emerging amnesty program. Had Howard’s policy stood, as many as 900,000 acres of plantation lands previously belonging to slave owners might have been redistributed. But on August 16, the president countermanded Howard’s circular and said that if Southern whites obtained a pardon and paid their taxes, they could reclaim their land. In September, in response to a direct presidential order, Howard accepted strict new criteria for designating a property as “officially confiscated,” which in many places had the effect of ending land redistribution. By September 1865, many former owners of the land in the Sherman Reservation had begun demanding the return of their property based on the special presidential pardons. An order from President Johnson to Howard supported these claims. Saxton’s sympathy for the freedmen virtually guaranteed that he would refuse to comply. “Thousands of them are already located on tracts of forty acres each,” he wrote Howard. “Their love of the soil and desire to own farms amounts to a passion—it appears to be the dearest hope of their lives.” Furthermore, Saxton argued in a second letter, “the faith of the Government is solemnly pledged to these people who have been faithful to it and we have no right now to dispossess them of their lands.” Johnson’s second order to restore the lands also instructed Howard to negotiate a mutually satisfactory agreement between the freedmen and the former owners. The bureau commissioner’s first stop was Edisto Island, one of the Sea Islands off South Carolina. There he tried to get the freedmen to quit the land in return for guarantees that they would be hired by the land’s former owners. Edisto’s black residents refused and in response gave Howard a petition to deliver to Johnson. The freedmen argued they were not truly free without the land. The petition remains a painful reminder of the sense of betrayal among the former slaves. “You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island,” wrote the petitioners. “You only lost your right arm [Howard had been wounded at the Battle of Fair Oaks in 1862] in the war and might forgive them. The man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes; who stripped and flogged my mother & sister & …who combines with others to keep away land from me…that man, I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me,” asked the petitioners, “since he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?” Howard reported the refusal to Stanton. The secretary of war, whose animosity to the new president would eventually lead to his dismissal and Johnson’s subsequent impeachment, suggested that Howard’s only obligation was to try to get an agreement. If an understanding was not forthcoming, the blacks could stay. The Edisto petition, however, fell on deaf ears in Washington, and on January 15, 1866, Johnson ordered Saxton removed from his position. Two weeks later, William Henry Trescot, who was in Washington to lobby on behalf of those South Carolinians whose lands had been confiscated, met with Sherman and other officers to discuss the genesis of Special Field Orders No. 15. Sherman told the group that his intention was to offer a temporary solution. In a follow-up letter to the president, he wrote, “I knew of course we could not convey title and merely provided ‘possessory’

FREEDMAN’S

FRIEND

Rufus Saxton was an excellent choice to implement Sherman’s Field Orders No. 15. The Massachusetts native and West Pointer was an outspoken abolitionist and recipient of the Medal of Honor for his command of the Union defenses at Harpers Ferry in the spring of 1862. After his reassignment to South Carolina, Saxton was instrumental in the organization of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first official black regiment.

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SAXTON’S REMOVAL MARKED THE



DEATH KNELL FOR LAND REDISTRIBUTION

titles, to be good as long as War and our Military Power lasted. I merely aimed to make provision for the Negroes who were absolutely dependent upon us, leaving the value of their possessions to be determined by after events or legislation.” As one historian has argued, “What the general had managed in No. 15 was a strategist’s version of bait and switch, at once a magnetic distraction for black people and sufficiently high-minded to leave the secretary [Stanton]…‘cured of that Negro nonsense.’” Saxton’s removal in early 1866 sounded the death knell for land redistribution to the freedmen. Ordered by the president to return the confiscated land in a way that was mutually agreeable to the original owners and the freed people who had claimed it, Howard set out to do the impossible. White Southerners’ resistance to land ownership by blacks proved intense. The “feeling against any ownership of land by negroes is so strong,” wrote one Alabamian, “that the man who should sell small tracts to them would be in actual personal danger.” The restoration of confiscated lands to their antebellum owners proceeded at a breakneck pace. On January 31, 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau controlled 223,600 acres; within 18 months that total had shrunk to 75,329 acres. In July 1866, the congressional reauthorization of the Freedmen’s Bureau included a provision returning all the lands included in the Sherman Reservation to their original owners. Those freed people continuing to occupy confiscated land were generally given a choice: Sign work contracts, thereby accepting peonage, or leave. Most left. The Johnson administration’s determination to restore the antebellum patterns of landownership alarmed many in Congress who continued to seek a means of offering freedmen their own land. Signed into law on June 21, 1866, the Southern Homestead Act opened 46 million acres of public lands in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi to settlement. Until June 1868, the land was divided into 80-acre parcels; thereafter the size of the par50

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cels doubled to 160 acres. Homesteaders could not purchase the property. They had to occupy and improve the land for five years before acquiring full ownership. Ex-Confederates were banned from obtaining land, but only until January 1, 1867. George Julian, an Indiana congressman and longtime opponent of slavery, had drafted the most important provision of the law. “No distinction or discrimination shall be made in the construction or execution of this act on account of race or color,” he wrote. The law failed, however, because Southern bureaucrats frequently failed to inform blacks of their exclusive right to file land claims, the land was often of poor quality, and impoverished black settlers generally had little to invest in their homesteads. The program registered fewer than 4,500 homestead claims before the law was repealed in 1876. By the end of the Civil War, the federal government controlled 850,000 acres that had been confiscated from Rebel Southerners under wartime provisions. Nearly half the acreage was located in the Sherman Reservation, where thousands of freedmen had claimed 40-acre plots along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida. Thousands more lived on leased properties at Norfolk, New Bern, and Roanoke Island. For a time, writes historian Douglas Egerton, “It appeared that federal policy was about to enable the birth of a black landowning class.” Freedmen shared an almost universal belief that they had a right to the lands they had been working, many for several years. “Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon,” argued Bayley Wyat, a freedman living in northern Virginia. But, Egerton continues, it was simply too “baffling and revolu-

FRUSTRATION Five generations on a South Carolina plantation at war’s end. Many such families felt the frustration voiced by an unidentified freedman in 1865: “Wha’s de use of being free if you don’t own enough land to be buried in?”

IMPOVERISHED BLACK SETTLERS

HAD LITTLE



TO INVEST IN THEIR HOMESTEADS

tionary” an idea that “those who had produced the region’s wealth should now benefit from it.” Following the Civil War, public discussions about compensating former slave owners far outnumbered those about compensating former slaves. A proposal that slaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation be paid for labor after January 1, 1863, fell on deaf ears. The Johnson administration’s decision to return the confiscated land quickly disabused freedmen of any notion that they might be rewarded for their wartime loyalty, as demonstrated by the valiant

service of more than 180,000 black troops and the work of thousands more on Southern plantations under the Yankee army’s control. Within a year of the war’s end, the Freedmen’s Bureau had returned more than 400,000 acres to their antebellum owners. By the middle of 1867, all but 75,000 acres were in the hands of their original owners. Few decisions have had a more long-lasting and deleterious impact on American society than the Johnson administration’s decision to force the freedmen off confiscated lands. “Could the nation have been induced to listen to those stalwart Republicans, Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner,” Frederick Douglass lamented in 1880, “some of the evils which we now suffer would have been averted. The negro would not today be on his knees…supplicating the old master class to give him leave to toil….[And] he would not now be swindled out of his hard earnings.”



PEACEBROKER A period engraving presents an idealized view of the federal government’s role in protecting former slaves from angry ex-Confederates.

Rick Beard, an independent historian, author, and museum consultant, writes from Harrisburg, Pa. JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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SELF MARKETER The title page for “Loreta” Velasquez’s book contains her image as Confederate Lieutenant Harry Buford. Velasquez’s claims about her many adventures strain credulity, to say the least. The illustrations on the following pages orginally appeared in her memoir.

 CONFEDERATE

CON ARTIST



A MYSTERIOUS WOMAN

OF MANY NAMES AND DUBIOUS MERIT BECAME A SOUTHERN MEDIA

CELEBRITY

F

 BY

WILLI AM C. DAVI S

or 140 years, historians have puzzled over a book published in 1876 titled The Woman in Battle, the memoir of a woman calling herself Loreta Velasquez, one of her many names, who claimed to have dressed in a Confederate uniform, adopted the name Harry Buford, and fought in the ranks at First Manassas, Ball’s Bluff, Belmont, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and more, until she put aside her uniform and spent the rest of the war as a Confederate blockade runner and spy in the North. Were her fantastic claims really true? The debate still goes on. New evidence, much of it compiled from previously unexamined newspaper accounts, casts considerable light on this enigmatic woman’s real life. She reveals herself to be a prototype of the modern “media celebrity,” a master at manipulating the press to achieve publicity. Her real name at birth remains unknown. She used several aliases during her 80 years, first appearing on the record as Ann Williams in New Orleans in 1860, working as a teenaged prostitute. Just how or why she got the idea of posing as a Confederate soldier is unknown, but it is certain she deliberately courted discovery as a woman to attract attention and press coverage, which she probably hoped to parlay somehow into economic advantage. She first did so in the fall of 1861 when she got off a train at Lynchburg, Va. Though she went by the name Mary Anne Keith at the time, she introduced herself as



“Lieutenant Buford,” parading the city streets attracting attention as a woman in “uniform,” until she was arrested and sent to Richmond. Taken before Provost Marshal General John H. Winder for examination, she was soon released. She claimed to be a veteran of the First Battle of Manassas, fought that July. She next showed up in New Orleans in April 1862, just before its capture by Federal forces, when she appeared before the mayor and voluntarily reported herself as Buford. After the Yankees occupied the city, she apparently returned to her old profession until the fall, when she conned a sympathetic couple into giving her lodging in their home. Shortly thereafter, she stole and pawned their jewelry and fled to the camp of the 13th Connecticut Infantry where she lived as the wife of a Private John Williams until she was arrested for larceny. Her day in court brought her renewed press attention in November 1862, and she expanded her Buford claims to include being wounded in battle at Shiloh serving the Confederacy. She was sentenced to six months in the Orleans Parish prison, where she identified herself as “Lauretta Clarke Williams,” born in Nassau, Bahamas. Released in May 1863, she was ejected from New Orleans along with other suspected or undesirable people, and made her way to Jackson, Miss. She soon revealed that she had spent those months in prison crafting and honing a more detailed persona for herself and her Buford

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alias, as well as a plan on how to use her wits and experience to catapult herself into the spotlight as the Confederacy’s first media celebrity. The town of Jackson afforded Velasquez a good platform from which to reinvent and launch herself. Robert H. Purdom, a 25-yearold bachelor and member of the state legislature until he resigned in 1861, edited the Jackson Mississippian. She called on Purdom on June 4 or 5, and found him an eager listener. She emphasized that what she told him now was “a true account of her remarkable career.” First there was her name, which he wrote down as Mrs. Laura J. Williams, though she probably told him Lauretta. Gone were the other aliases. She told Purdom that when the war broke out she was living in Arkansas, married to a man of Northern birth devoted to the Union, who left for his family’s home in Connecticut and, as she afterward learned, joined the Yankee army. That established her surname Williams as one by marriage and also refuted the claims in the New Orleans press that she had been sinfully cohabiting with John Williams of the 13th Connecticut. Outraged at her husband’s betrayal of her and the South, she vowed to “offer her life upon the altar of her country” and become a soldier. She explained to Purdom that was when she donned a Confederate uniform and assumed the name Buford. Now for the first time she gave her creation a given name, Harry, and implied that “he” was an officer. As Buford—Purdom’s handwriting made the name look like “Benford,” and so it would appear in print—she went to Texas to raise an independent company of infantry that she subsequently took to Virginia. She said she led it in the engagement at Ball’s Bluff on October 21, as well as in other skirmishes, but when authorities attached her company to the 5th Texas Infantry, its surgeon discovered her sex and forced her to return to Arkansas. Purdom’s account contains no mention of any service at the First Battle of Manassas, service in western Kentucky, the fight at Belmont, or her experience as Mary Ann Keith, episodes that Velasquez would describe in her 1876 memoir The Woman in Battle. Velasquez was remarkably cavalier about omissions and contradictions as she retold her adventures. Connecting herself with the 5th Texas, for instance, was probably just a random choice. In fact, there were no Texas units or independent companies at Ball’s Bluff, and the 5th Texas organized in Richmond on October 22, the day after that engagement. Continuing to spin her story to Purdom, Velasquez said she stayed home in Arkansas until shortly before the Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862. That filled in the period from November 54

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VELASQUEZ WAS REMARKABLY CAVALIER ABOUT OMISSIONS

CONTRADICTIONS AS SHE RETOLD HER AND

ADVENTURES

1861 to February 1862, which she had left blank in her earlier accounts of her war service. In the great battle at Shiloh, she told Purdom she saw her father, a Confederate soldier she did not name, on the battlefield but he did not recognize his daughter. A head wound, she claimed, sent her to the rear on April 7. After sending a note to her father, she went south to Grenada, Miss., to wait for him to come to her. Hearing nothing from him, she went on to New Orleans, where she fell ill and was still unwell when the Federals occupied the city. Once recovered, she escaped the occupied city and went to the Louisiana coast, where she spent the ensuing months carrying letters in and out of the city for Confederate sympathizers and running drugs and uniform cloth through the Union naval blockade. After a black person informed on her, the Federals arrested her and took her to Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler. She appeared in woman’s attire but defiantly told him that she “gloried in being a rebel,” refused to take an oath of allegiance, and proudly declared that she “had fought side by side with Southern men for Southern rights” and would do so again. She told Purdom that Butler had denounced her as “the most incorrigible she-rebel he had ever met with” and sent her to prison for three months. Following her release, she kept corresponding with Confederates outside Federal lines, and again the Yankees arrested her. Butler sent her to a “dungeon” to languish a fortnight “on bread and water,” after which the Federals put her in the state prison as “a dangerous enemy.” Coincidentally, the 13th Connecticut was in the city, and her Yankee husband, Williams, whom she now said was a lieutenant not a private, sent to ask if she would see him. She refused so long as he wore the hated blue, but he came to her cell nevertheless and insisted that she rejoin him, promising to secure her release if she would just take the oath. Then he said he would resign his commission and take her home to Connecti-

AMONG THE BLUECOATS Velasquez claimed that she easily slipped in and out of the Union lines surrounding New Orleans, until she was betrayed and brought before Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler.

 

VELASQUEZ CONTINUED TO CREATE CLOUDS TO OBSCURE THE FACTS

GETTING AROUND Amazingly, Velasquez claimed she made it all the way to the Northern reaches of the Union, and was involved in a scheme to free Confederate prisoners held on Johnson’s Island in Ohio’s Lake Erie.

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cut. When she refused, he left her to her fate, and when Butler’s successor, Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks, assumed command in New Orleans, he kept her in confinement until May 17, then he sent her away with other registered enemies. Velasquez continued to create clouds to obscure the facts. In her trial for theft before the provost court in New Orleans in November 1862, she had put her name as Lauretta Williams on record and described her wholehearted support for the Union. At that time she represented her liaison with Private Williams as a respectable marriage and evidence of her Union patriotism, and the press had made note of it. To Purdom she spurned Williams as a Yankee brute, proving her Confederate solidarity. And she credited her arrest to her Confederate activities rather than to stealing. Thus, she separated herself from that traitorous Ann Williams imprisoned for larceny.

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

As for those embarrassing six months in the parish prison, she cleverly changed the cause and made herself a martyr to Butler’s wrath, the bit about a bread and water diet being an inspired embellishment. Confederates universally demonized Butler after his famous general order in May 1862 that any New Orleans woman who behaved rudely to a soldier would be treated as a “woman of the town plying her avocation,” coded words for prostitution. Southerners had immediately dubbed him “Beast Butler,” and Velasquez shrewdly calculated her story of victimization by the “Beast” to gain even more credence and sympathy. She might present herself as a victim, but never as weak or helpless. In closing her account, Velasquez told Purdom that on arriving in Jackson, she joined the surgeons’ staff of an infantry brigade and intended to “render all the assistance in her power” to Confederate wounded in the forthcoming struggle for Vicksburg. That meant acting as a nurse or caregiver, which implied that she would not resurrect Harry Buford in the immediate future. Purdom swallowed her story completely and offered it to his readers in the June 6, 1863, edition of the Mississippian. He called her “a lady whose adventures place her in the ranks of the Mollie Pitchers of the present revolution,” and claimed “her whole soul was enlisted in the struggle for independence,” also admitting that he found her “good looking and in speech and manner a perfect lady.” Purdom’s article was the first interview Velasquez gave directly to the press. If Lauretta hoped to get her own version on record, while countering damage done by the New Orleans papers covering her trial the past November, she estimated the press brilliantly. Disseminated through newspaper coverage, Velasquez’s creation was available to a quarter million or more Confederates either by reading or by word of mouth. It would gain even more circulation in 1864, when Felix G. DeFontaine published his

Marginalia; or, Gleanings From an Army Notebook, a compilation of newspaper articles in which he included an edited version. Velasquez and Harry Buford were soon back in public notice on a scale vastly larger than before, even though Purdom misprinted her alter ego’s name as Benford. Though she spent the next two weeks in Jackson, there is no evidence of any effort to become a nurse with the army. Her claim of caring for the wounded, like her protest of being persecuted by Butler, was just another calculated tug at the sympathy of potential benefactors. Rather, she had now framed a plan to capitalize on past publicity and the more fully realized story appearing in the papers. She hoped President Jefferson Davis would commission her as Lieutenant Buford, making her the first woman in American history to become a commissioned officer. She acquired gray fabric and shiny brass buttons, with which she made something approximating military pantaloons and perhaps a short uniform-style jacket. Velasquez left Jackson as soon as she finished her “uniform,” probably with copies of the Mississippian article in hand to show, and traveled first east to Meridian, and then south by rail to Mobile, arriving on or before June 16, 1863. The Mississippian interview had appeared in the local press three days earlier, so the city was primed when she donned her gray suit and paraded its streets just as she had in Lynchburg in 1861, identifying herself the famed Lauretta Williams. For the rest of the summer she deliberately called attention to herself, proof enough that discovery was always her goal. She gained nothing if her masquerade succeeded but much attention if it did not. From Mobile she wrote to the War Department in Richmond soliciting a commission and evolved her identity further by signing as “Mrs. Lauretta Jennett Williams.” She also mentioned that she already used the alias “H.T. Buford” and gave a return address in Mobile. She soon returned to Jackson, however, perhaps to inspire more press coverage in the Mississippian, but she left troubling questions behind. A woman dressed as a man aroused suspicion, and impersonating an officer was a serious matter. The local provost marshal felt uneasy about her, and shortly after she left Mobile he issued an order for her arrest and notified Richmond as well. Unaware of the trouble brewing, Velasquez displayed herself and her new uniform back on Jackson’s streets on June 24. One local man described her that day on the sidewalks walking with “a very perceptible strut, and a trifle of a swagger,” and later that day called her “a rara avis,” adding that she was “a well made, but not pretty, Confederate lieutenant, of the genus

femina.” He and everyone else in Jackson knew her story by now, and though it was certainly romantic, he for one did not like the imposture. “We admire angels in calico, but we never could see the charm of dressing up ‘the last and best gift of heaven’ in pantaloons, though the trowsers were of nice Confederate gray, with brass buttons thrown in,” he wrote. “It may be a splendid opportunity for showing a well turned ankle, but ‘while it makes the unthinking laugh, it cannot but make the judicious grieve.’” Coincidentally, the next day the War Department in Richmond received her application, which immediately aroused suspicion, and a clerk docketed her letter with the notation “alias H.T. Buford Lt. C.S.A.” Within hours a telegram sped west ordering her detained and sent to Richmond for investigation. Thus, when she returned to Mobile, the provost marshal arrested

DIVERSE SKILLS She was successful, claimed Velasquez, in riding roughshod into battle dressed in men’s clothes and then reading intercepted dispatches in fashionable parlors.

JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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CONFEDERATES READ OF “A FEMALE LIEUTENANT” IMPRISONED IN THE CAPITAL

STOLEN VALOR? Whether in her incarnation as Lieutenant Buford, or a lowly soldier in the ranks, Velasquez claimed to have survived the ravages of battle and was at the fights of Ball’s Bluff and Shiloh. Her claim that she fought at Ball’s Bluff with the 5th Texas, however, is rendered suspect by the fact that no Texas units were in that fight.

her and put her on a train for Virginia, still in her uniform. They reached Richmond on the morning of July 1, when her guard took her immediately to the office of Brig. Gen. John H. Winder, who apparently did not connect her to the incident of 1861, when she had appeared before him as Mary Anne Keith, aka “Buford,” in military uniform. The Mississippian story had appeared in Richmond’s city papers a dozen days earlier, so editors—and surely Winder’s office—ought to have known her as Laura J. Williams, but when notice of her arrival hit the press, the Richmond Enquirer misidentified her as Alice Williams. The rest of the capital newspapers copied the Enquirer’s mistake, and Velasquez apparently did nothing to correct them. Given her appetite for publicity, Velasquez may have allowed the erroneous Alice to stand when she saw how much press coverage she got. With Winder, she again eschewed trying for sympathy and instead adopted what someone in the War Office regarded as “an independent air,” warning that if he tried to press charges against her, she would “claim foreign protection” as a British subject over whom Confederate authorities had no authority. Thus, for the moment at least, she persisted in her claim that she had been born in the Bahamas. The bluff failed, however, for Winder concluded that “there was something wrong about her” and ordered her sent to Castle Thunder, the city’s prison for suspected disloyal citizens, spies, and political prisoners. Meanwhile, the press learned of her arrival, not doubting that she was the Mississippian’s Laura J. Williams, as she claimed, for she seemed, in the Enquirer’s words, “not of the build to be frightened easily by either gun or goblin.” The next day, newspaper coverage of her stay in Richmond commenced unsympathetically with that same paper’s observation that she was “not quite as pretty as the romance of her case might admit.” Still, so far as anyone knew, no

SANS ‘STACHE Lauretta Velasquez without her male disguise.

specific charges faced her other than posing as a man and officer. Within days Confederates read of “a female Lieutenant” imprisoned in the capital. The appellation began to stick. “The female lieutenant” was soon out of prison, and became an object of curiosity to press and public alike. For a few more months she remained a Confederate celebrity before she married a man just as mysterious as she was, went north with him when he deserted to the Yankees, and developed entirely new adventures working in a Union ammunition factory, selling life insurance, and even trying to become a Union spy. When the war ended she still had almost 60 years ahead of her, years that she filled with entirely new masquerades and schemes that made her the most ambitious female con artist of her time, all the while enhancing and evolving her fictitious war history, even after her book The Woman in Battle appeared in 1876.



William C. Davis is a former editor of Civil War Times, a prolific Civil War scholar, and the former director of programs for the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech. This article is excerpted from his most recent book, Inventing Loreta Velasquez: Confederate Soldier Impersonator, Media Celebrity, and Con Artist, published in 2016 by Southern Illinois University Press, and here published by permission. Copyright © 2016 by William C. Davis. JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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NO EXPENSE SPARED Union veterans built Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, completed in 1910. Corps badges are cleverly worked into the design of the building’s lavish interior, and the deep collection of Civil War items on display is astounding (soldiersandsailors.com).

INDUSTRIAL

HUM PITTSBURGH’S IRONWORKERS turned molten ore into plates

for ironclads and cannons and projectiles that created battlefield mayhem, while hundreds of other workers sewed accoutrements and rolled cartridges. The city where the Allegheny and the P I T T S B U RG H Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio River pulsed with hot metal, the reverberations of shipyards building brownwater steam rams, and trains and steamboats hauling ordnance to the front. Pittsburgh was the North’s war forge. The Fort Pitt Foundry, which was located just across the street from where the Heinz History Center stands today, alone produced 2,281 artillery pieces during the war, including powerful “Rodman process” cannons. In June 1863, hundreds of citizens turned out to build 37 earthwork forts in case Robert E. Lee’s army turned to the west to threaten Pittsburgh’s industry. That industrial heritage carried well into the 20th century, but the Steel City has transformed itself into a popular technological, medical, and education center. Nineteenth-century buildings that once housed workers for the Allegheny Arsenal now contain pubs and fashionable shops. Pittsburgh is vibrant and proud of the interesting locations that showcase its Civil War heritage.–Dana B. Shoaf CWT would like to thank Michael Kraus, curator at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, for his help with this Explore. 60

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ALLEGHENY CEMETERY The Butler Street gatehouse, a section of which dates to 1848, welcomes visitors to Allegheny Cemetery, laid out in 1844 on a series of rolling hills as one of the country’s first landscaped rural cemeteries (alleghenycemetery.com). A number of Civil War notables, including Generals Alexander Hays and James S. Negely, are buried here, and the solemn Grand Army of the Republic section holds the remains of 298 Union veterans and five Confederates, likely prisoners who died while being transported through Pittsburgh. A monument marks the mass grave of many of those killed in the Allegheny Arsenal explosion of September 1862 and includes a compelling inscription honoring their sacrifice.

PITTSBURGH PATRIOT Brig. Gen. Alexander Hays helped repulse Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and became a hero in his Western Pennsylvania homeland. Pittsburgh residents mourned Hays’ death at the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5, 1864, and Mayor James Lowry Jr. closed down the city on the afternoon of May 14 in his honor. According to The Daily Pittsburgh Gazette, “Thousands of citizens, of both sexes and of every condition in life” paid their respects to Hays’ body as it lay in state before the general was buried in Allegheny Cemetery in a plot surrounded by inverted cannon barrels.

DEADLY WORK The Allegheny Arsenal sprawled over 30 acres from Penn Avenue to the Allegheny River between 39th and 40th streets in the city’s Lawrenceville section, and buzzed with activity

SHOT TORN

BANNER Col. Jacob B. Sweitzer’s brigade flag, displayed at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, bears battle scars from Gettysburg and the Wilderness. JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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“Now Western Pennsylvania is the most tempting and most vulnerable point....Look out Pittsburgh, for your workshops! Keep your lamps filled with oil!” Major John I. Nevin, 93rd Pennsylvania, in a letter written to his sister on June 2, 1863, warning that a Confederate invasion might come her way.

Mexican War Streets from 1861-1865. Dozens of Pittsburgh contractors who made everything from infantry accoutrements, to artillery implements, to cavalry saddles, brought their wares to the arsenal for inspection. The arsenal’s own workforce included many women and produced an immense amount of ammunition. For example, 76,878,560 .574-caliber cartridges alone were made during 62

CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

the war at the arsenal. Tragedy struck on September 17, 1862, when explosions ripped through two buildings where cartridges were made, killing 78 workers, mostly women. Grisly newspaper accounts described body parts and smoldering bits of clothing found blocks away from the blast. It was the North’s largest homefront disaster, but it was largely overshadowed by the Battle of Antietam fought on the same day. Arsenal Park between 39th and 40th streets preserves about nine acres of the arsenal grounds, and one of the original powder magazines remains. The arsenal’s stone wall, though lowered, surrounds the park.

cast during the war, greets you in the lobby of the Heinz History Center (heinzhistorycenter.org). An exhibit displays Allegheny Arsenal items and “From Slavery to Freedom” chronicles African-American lives through the Civil War. The expansive museum is a great place to start your Pittsburgh visit.

HEINZ HISTORY CENTER A full-size replica of the Fort Pitt Foundry’s gargantuan 20-inch Rodman gun, the largest cannon

Heinz History Center

The Allegheny River, left, and the Monongahela River, right meet at the “Point” in Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. Fort Pitt once occupied that critical real estate.



DOO DAH MAN Pittsburgh native Stephen Foster didn’t fight in the Civil War, but thousands of homesick soldiers on both sides sang his songs, such as “Camptown Races” and “Beautiful Dreamer,” around their campfires. The Stephen Collins Foster Memorial at the University of Pittsburgh holds Foster archives and artifacts. He is buried in Allegheny Cemetery.

STREETSCAPES Several city neighborhoods have kept their 19th-century buildings. In addition to Lawrenceville, check out the Mexican War Streets

(mexicanwarstreets.org) and the lesserknown Deutschtown neighborhood (deutschtown.org).

LOCAL COLOR

GREEN SPACE

acclaimed restaurant in a former Catholic church (churchbrew.com). Arsenal Cider House, located next to Arsenal Park, offers ciders named after Civil War generals, like Fighting Elleck, named after Alexander Hays (arsenalciderhouse.com).

The large 1867 Allegheny Commons park on the North Side contains a Soldier’s Monument that honors the 4,000 men from Allegheny County who died in the war, and the Hampton Battery Memorial (alleghenycommons.org). The latter pays tribute to the unit raised by Captain Robert Hampton, killed at Chancellorsville, Va.

The ChurchBrew Works, below, is an

NAMESAKE FORT Detour into the 18th century and visit the Fort Pitt Museum in Point State Park (heinzhistorycenter.org). A 1760s blockhouse, operated by a local DAR chapter, and the outline of the French Fort Duquesne, which predated Fort Pitt, are also in Point State Park. JUNE 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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LINCOLN FINDS HIS FOE REVIEWED BY LOUIS P. MASUR

I

N 1849, where Sidney Blumenthal’s second volume of his multi-volume Political Life of Abraham Lincoln begins, Lincoln languished without elected office. Having turned down an appointment as governor of Oregon Territory, the one-term Congressman headed back to Springfield, Ill., to practice law. By 1856, where this volume concludes, Lincoln had found his political voice and identity, as well as his antagonist, Stephen Douglas. Lincoln’s opposition to Douglas is at the heart of this detailed and insightful study of the conflicts of the first half of the 1850s. But readers expecting Lincoln on every page should be warned. The Springfield lawyer, who spent these years expanding his home, enduring the death of two children while celebrating the birth of another, and traveling the 8th Circuit for weeks on end, disappears for scores of pages at a time. Blumenthal explains why: “To do Lincoln justice, the history must be done justice.” That means providing detailed chapters on the presidencies of Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and Franklin Pierce. It also means offering what feels like an insider’s view of the wrangling over such momentous issues as the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. No doubt Blumenthal’s own political experience as a top adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton gives him a feel for political strategizing that applies equally well to the 19th century as our own. Typical of his insights, after unpacking the various positions of Whigs, Free Soilers, anti-Nebraska Democrats, and Know-Nothings, Blumenthal concludes that “[P]olitics had entered into a fugue state…where people suddenly lost their bearings and identities….In the chaos, there was no center to hold.” Lincoln emerged out of his own fugue state. “I was losing interest in politics,” he said in 1860, “when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again.” Lincoln found his voice and perspective in speeches delivered in Springfield and Peoria in October 1854. They began as an attack on Douglas (“I can show that his facts are not facts”), and they concluded by dissecting the proslavery argument to denounce the injustice of slavery, to prove that blacks were men, and to make a larger point about American democracy as opposed to European tyranny. Blumenthal rightly concludes that the

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Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, 1849-1856 By Sidney Blumenthal Simon & Schuster, $35



speeches established the foundation for Lincoln’s political beliefs until the secession crisis. The following year, Lincoln would first use the formulation that the nation could not survive permanently half-slave and half-free. Blumenthal brings a vast cast of political characters to life, and seems to have something smart and pithy to say about each one. Of Cassius Clay, “his vision was of the future, but his virtues of the past.” Of Millard Fillmore, “his vanity exceeded his mediocrity.” Of Daniel Webster, “he had fallen from his magnificence into near decrepitude with his ambition wholly intact.” Lincoln between 1849 and 1856 is also parsed by Blumenthal, who writes, “he entered his wilderness years a man in pieces and emerged on the other end a coherent steady figure.” If we can never know why this occurred, Blumenthal, in this exceptional volume, does show us how.

BEGINNING OF THE END



EDITOR’S PICK

Being a random book favored by the editor

Grant Invades Tennessee: The 1862 Battles for Forts Henry and Donelson By Timothy B. Smith University Press of Kansas, $34.95

REVIEWED BY GORDON BERG he vigorous research and persuasive narrative style of Grant Invades Tennessee proves that Tim Smith remains the go-to historian for the Civil War in western Tennessee. His comprehensive tactical evaluation provides a broader perspective on the two battles that many historians, including Smith, believe ensured the defeat of the Confederacy even though the war continued for another 39 months. Strategists on both sides understood that the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, protected by the two forts, were aquatic highways into the Confederate heartland. Controlling those waterways would allow Union forces to transport large numbers of troops and massive amounts of equipment needed to conduct operations in hostile territory. Fortunately for the Union, it had two capable officers ready to conduct a joint riverine campaign. That Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote worked well together helped ensure a Union success. Operations didn’t always run smoothly. One problem, Smith argues, was the dearth of capable sailors to man Foote’s brown water fleet. Grant had to assemble a sufficient force of mostly untested regiments and officers and arrange transport for them to the battle front. It also had to be a winter campaign to ensure sufficient water in the rivers for Foote’s vessels. Although the fighting around Fort Donelson has been the focus of most historical studies, Smith maintains that “the opening of the Tennessee River [was] actually more important in the larger Union operational and strategic efforts.” By concentrating on the fight for Fort Henry, Smith can persuasively declare that the February 6 operation “portended a major change in larger American and even world history” because, for the first time in the Western Hemisphere, ironclad warships would battle against fixed land fortifications. “It did not take long for history to be made,” he concludes. Smith’s use of contemporary letters, diaries, and newspapers allows him to do history from the “bottom up.” He also provides ample coverage of both Union and Confederate land-based soldiers and cavalrymen who participated in the campaign. They played a vital role in the attack and defense of both fortifications, even though the Fort Henry operation was strictly a Union Navy show. Twenty simple but informative maps are a welcome complement to Smith’s descriptive narrative.

T

The Confederate General, Volumes 1-6 William C. Davis, editor Julie Hoffman, assistant editor The National Historical Society Confederate generals were, as editor William C. Davis argues in his introduction, some of the most “romantic characters in American military history,” and this sixvolume set is a great way to get to know them. It’s true that The Confederate General, published in 1991, is out of print, but it can be purchased online for about $100 or possibly available at your local library. The volumes contain interesting thumbnail biographies written by Davis, Ed Bearss, Jeffry Wert, Robert K. Krick, and other fine historians, and deliver information on hundreds of commanders. Some, of course, are household names like Lee, Longstreet, and Hill. But so many others, like Brig. Gen. Patrick T. Moore and Brig. Gen. James M. Goggin, also get great ink. Readers will also enjoy the photographs that accompany each entry. There are multiple images for many of the generals, and in some cases you can see how the conflict aged or incapacitated them. The photograph of glum, emaciated Brig. Gen. Laurence S. Baker, a cavalry hero at Brandy Station and Gettysburg, sitting with his shattered arm in a sling is a prime example of the latter. You might not want to sit down and read from Daniel W. Adams to Felix K. Zollicoffer, but the series is the type that encourages random entry points to help you understand the leaders of the Lost Cause. –Dana B. Shoaf

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AMERICAN HISTORY


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A GOOD GENERAL DONE WRONG

REVIEWED BY ETHAN S. RAFUSE

AS THE SECESSION

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crisis tore the country apart in the winter of 1860-61, the security of Washington, D.C., surrounded by slave states and with a good percentage of its residents sympathetic to the cause of Southern independence, was a serious concern for the commanding general of the army, Winfield Scott. Thus, Scott was immensely gratified when Charles P. Stone accepted the task of organizing and rallying the loyal elements in the District of Columbia for its defense. Thanks in large part to Stone’s dedication and skill, Abraham Lincoln was able to assume power peacefully, and Washington’s ability to serve as the base for the Union war effort in the East was preserved. If Stone had done nothing else in his life, his service during this critical period would have made him a worthy subject for a full-length biography. Yet, as Blaine Lamb effectively demonstrates in this admirable book, there was considerably more to Stone’s life and career. Indeed, it is hard to finish this book without wondering why it has taken so long for a good modern study of the general’s life to appear. An 1845 West Point graduate, Stone turned in a respectable performance in the Mexican War and had

notable experiences in and out of uniform in California and Mexico afterward. Of course, Stone is best known as the victim of one of the war’s most disgraceful episodes. Unwilling to believe that Senator Edward Baker, serving as a colonel, was responsible for the Union disaster at Ball’s Bluff, Republicans in Congress and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton made Stone the scapegoat. Their malicious campaign against Stone culminated in his arrest and 189-day imprisonment, which ended only when Congress passed legislation requiring Stanton to actually file charges and try Stone, which he could not possibly do successfully. Stone then returned to the field only to find himself caught

up in the Red River fiasco of 1864. He was at least able to distinguish himself in Egypt after the war and in overseeing construction of the Statue of Liberty’s foundation and pedestal. Drawing on a respectable research effort, Lamb provides readers with a well-written and informative account of Stone’s fascinating life and career. His analysis of the various controversies in which Stone figured prominently is admirably both balanced and persuasive. Though it might not appeal to those who still have a positive opinion of Secretary Stanton, these qualities make The Extraordinary Life of Charles Pomeroy Stone an effective and welcome addition to scholarship.

The Extraordinary Life of Charles Pomeroy Stone: Soldier, Surveyor, Pasha, Engineer By Blaine Lamb Westholme Publishing, $29.95

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Civil War Museum

A HARD YET MORAL WAR

of the Western Theatre In Historic Bardstown, Kentucky

REVIEWED BY GORDON BERG Can a war be waged that is both hard and humane? That conundrum faced Union military and political leaders throughout the Civil War. By chronicling the evolution of the Union’s war-making policies, D.H. Dilbeck seeks to understand how those leaders reconciled these seemingly polar opposites. He concisely analyzes both the legal underpinning of the evolving rules of war and how they were applied in the field. Dilbeck looks at a wide array of the legal, religious, cultural, and political ideas A More Civil War: that “both inspired immense violence and How the Union imposed restrictions” on a war that reached Waged a Just War unanticipated levels of violence against By D.H. Dilbeck both military and civilian populations. University of According to Dilbeck, the policies that North Carolina Press, evolved during the conflict came about $34.95 mainly through the efforts of two Union intellectuals: Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck and legal scholar Francis Lieber, each of whom possessed a distinct “moral vision of war.” The evolution of Union war policies began in Missouri, where the military confronted the problem of guerrillas almost from the beginning of the war. It was further refined in New Orleans and Memphis, where Union occupying forces had to contend with hostile civilians who often aided and abetted the enemy. The situation in both areas was further complicated by an ambiguous policy of dealing with runaway slaves before Abraham Lincoln revealed his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Dilbeck considers it remarkable “that even as Federals fought to preserve their Union, they continued to earnestly consider their moral obligations as a warring people responsible to God.” Would that contemporary leaders held themselves to the same principles.



The finest collection of Western Theatre Civil War artifacts in the United States! Plus! s Women’s Civil War Museum s War Museum of Mid America s Historic Pioneer Village

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Beyond Gettysburg

george meade’s Complex Legacy

CREDITS Cover: Library of Congress/Photo Illustration: Brian Walker; P. 2: Courtesy Allegheny Cemetery; P. 3: From Top: Library of Congress; Heritage Auctions, Dallas; Library of Congress; P. 4: Library of Congress; P. 8: Courtesy Swann Auction Galleries; P. 9: Left: Melissa A. Winn; Right: Don Klumpp/Alamy Stock Photo; P. 10: Harper’s Weekly; Dovetail Cultural Resource Group; P. 11: From Top: Library of Congress; Courtesy Tom Clemens; Google Earth; P. 12-13: Special Collections and College Archives, Musselman Library/Gettysburg College; P. 14: Niday Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo; P. 15: 1877 U.S. Military Academy Class Album, Special Collections, U.S. Military Academy Library; P. 18: Clockwise From Left: Army of Tennessee Relics; Heritage Auctions, Dallas (3); P. 19: Heritage Auctions, Dallas (2); P. 20: Library of Congress; P. 25: AP Photo/Keith Srakocic; P. 26-27: Campfires and Battlefields; P. 28: Francis Warrington Dawson Family Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University; P. 29: From Top: Photo Researchers Inc./Alamy Stock Photo; North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy Stock Photo; P. 30: Civil War Archive/Bridgeman Images; Library of Congress; P. 32: Melissa A. Winn; P. 32-33: Courtesy NPS; P. 34: Library of Congress; P. 35: Augusta Museum of History; P. 37: Top: American Civil War Museum; Bottom: Blanchard Family Collection; P. 38: Augusta Museum of History (2); P. 39: Photo by: Photo12/UIG via Getty Images; P. 40: Tria Giovan; Bottom: Augusta Museum of History; P. 41: Augusta Museum of History; P. 42-43: Image Courtesy Edward McCranie; P. 44-45: Library of Congress; P. 46: ClassicStock/Alamy Stock Photo; P. 48: Clockwise From Top: Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo; Library of Congress (2); P. 49: Library of Congress; P. 50: Library of Congress; P. 51: The Granger Collection, New York; P. 52-59: The Woman in Battle (8); P. 60: Tony Pitts/Alamy Stock Photo; P. 61: Clockwise From Top: Amy Cicconi/Alamy Stock Photo; Soldiers & Sailors Museum & Memorial Trust Inc. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Courtesy Allegheny Cemetery; P. 62: From Top: Jennifer Santolla/Alamy Stock Photo; Daniel Borzynski/Alamy Stock Photo; Senator John Heinz History Center; P. 63: Kenin Bassart, theconstantrambler.com; P. 72: Heritage Auctions, Dallas.

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WINDS OF WAR

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noted that a “balmy south wind” made December 2, 1859, unseasonably warm in Charles Town, Va., now W.Va. That same breeze no doubt animated this silk flag carried by the 55th Regiment of Virginia Militia, as the militiamen served as crowd control at the hanging of anti-slavery crusader John Brown. A flagbearer had also carried the banner, sold by Heritage Auctions, the previous October when the 55th responded to Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. The flag bears 33 stars for every state in the Union in 1859, but the events it witnessed would help to sunder that constellation. 2 A NEWSPAPER REPORTER

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CIVIL WAR TIMES JUNE 2017

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