Civil War Times 2017 08

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July 1, 1863

‘LONG SOL’ LEADS

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SHOT ON SEMINARY RIDGE A UNION ARTILLERYMAN’S STORY August 2017 HistoryNet.com

Solomon Meredith’s opponents hated the general’s “brazen impudence,” but Iron Brigade soldiers loved his no-nonsense style.

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CIVIL WAR TIMES AUGUST 2017

60 MOUNTAINTOP WAR The North Carolina Monument at Fox’s Gap on South Mountain, Md. The September 1862 fighting on that ridge took place upon some of the Eastern Theater’s roughest terrain.

ON THE COVER: Badly wounded at Gettysburg, General Solomon Meredith never filed a report for the battle.

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Features

22 30

‘ Long Sol ’ By Lance J. Herdegen Controversial Brig. Gen. Solomon Meredith led the Iron Brigade into its last big fight.

The War’s Biggest Blunder By Theodore P. Savas Why did Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman fail to destroy the Augusta Arsenal?

36

Stonewall’s Greatest Joy By Chris Mackowski The Confederate general had a very short time to enjoy fatherhood’s blessings.

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42 52

War as Landscape By Kim O’Connell In the midst of horrible war, photographers captured America’s beauty.



‘ I Felt a Sharp Sting’ By Tom Huntington

A Union artilleryman describes his wounding at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863.

Departments



6 8 12 14 16 18 21 60 66 72

Letters A John Burns cameo? News! O.O. Howard papers and Nast on the wall Details Dig deep in the earth Insight The irrelevant war Interview Keeping watch on two battlefields Materiel Soldier writing paraphernalia Editorial Go to “right here” Explore Ten miles, three battles Reviews How Lincoln dealt with Democrats Sold ! Pocket-sized war history

AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

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An Iron Brigade soldier’s letters home express frustration with his commanders and hope for the Union war effort.

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More images from the National Gallery of Art’s exhibit “East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography.”

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Do you think it’s possible that the old fellow seated farthest at left in the June issue’s “Details” image of the Gettysburg hospital might be old John Burns, the civilian who fought with the Union on July 1, 1863? Burns favored that style of top hat, and they have the same jug ears and long noses. They also seem to wear similar scowls, but nowadays so do I, at least when I can’t get enough Advil. William Marvel, South Conway, N.H.

A FINAL STATEMENT ON CHAMBERLAIN Diane Monroe Smith’s June 2017 letter to the editor takes issue with my April 2017 “Joshua Chamberlain at Petersburg” dealing with the location of Chamberlain’s June 18, 1864, attack at Petersburg. Smith adamantly believes that Chamberlain attacked Rives’ Salient on that date, simply because Chamberlain claims he did. Smith and I have fundamental differences with respect to the study of this question. She considers Chamberlain’s word sacrosanct, that any conflicting testimony is suspect and must be dismissed. I, however, follow the documentary evidence where it leads, as is apparent in my book Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the Petersburg Campaign: His Supposed Charge From Fort Hell, his Near-Mortal Wound, and a Civil War Myth Reconsidered, and in the Civil War Times article. I encourage every unbiased reader of this magazine to compare the evidence, compare the scholarship, compare the quality of the arguments, and if possible, walk the ground, and then reach their own conclusions. Dennis A. Rasbach St. Joseph, Mich. 6

CIVIL WAR TIMES AUGUST 2017

LIEUTENANT TOMPKINS

LONGSTREET’S WOUNDING

I’d like to correct an error in the outstanding June 2017 article “Confederate Con Artist,” by William C. Davis. He writes “Loreta Velasquez/ Harry Buford…hoped President Davis would commission her as Lieutenant Buford, making her the first woman in American history to become a commissioned officer.” But that honor went to CSA nurse Sally L. Tompkins, who ran the Robertson Hospital in Richmond. President Davis made Tompkins a captain, unassigned, on September 9, 1861, so that she could meet requirements of the Confederate Constitution and continue to run her efficient hospital. Tompkins accepted the commission, but declined its pay. Brian Green Kernersville, N.C.

In the article about Longstreet’s Wilderness wounding, the first illustration caption states that the 12th Virginia Infantry shot the general. I believe you misidentified the 12th for the 41st Virginia. When Longstreet was shot, the 12th Virginia was on the far right, with Longstreet’s group riding behind. The whole corps, including Longstreet and his staff, had been outfitted in new English army cloth uniforms and were sporting new corps flags. Smoke from the fires raging in the woods made the men look like Federal troops, and the 41st opened fire on Longstreet’s party. Troops of that regiment lamented repeatedly to their comrades “we are sorry boys.” This information comes from William D. Henderson’s “Virginia Regimental History Series,” book, the 12th Virginia Infantry. Henry Bouscher Mathews, Va.

KEEP AT IT I really like the format and the articles in Civil War Times. I know it is difficult to come up with new spins on old material, but we need to keep the young Turks like the guys at Chris Mackowski’s blog Emerging Civil War in the loop. So keep up the good work. B.D.K. Brown Fort Wayne, Ind.



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ONLINE O O.O. HOWARD D   Over the course of three years, two dozen students at Bowdoin College in Maine pitched in to produce a searchable online archive of the papers of one of the college’s most famous alumni, career military officer Oliver Otis Howard. Sixty linear feet of documents, amounting to about 80,000 letters, photographs, and diaries, were scanned for the project. Howard served for the duration of the Civil War, lost his right arm after being wounded twice at the Battle of Fair Oaks in 1862, and was later awarded the Medal of Honor. Referred to as “the Christian General” because of his conversion to evangelical Christianity, Howard is now best known for his career in the Freedmen’s Bureau after the war and for his role in the founding of Howard University in

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CIVIL WAR TIMES AUGUST 2017

Washington, D.C. Howard also served as a general in the West after the war, specifically in the Nez Perce War and the capture of Chief Joseph. The letters he wrote following his amputation show a jagged and distinctively back-leaning script, like the example above, at right. Among the documents in the collection is an 1866 letter from William Oland Bourne, publisher of the newspaper The Soldier’s Friend, requesting Howard’s participation in an essay and penmanship contest, called “Left-Armed Soldiers of the Union,” for veterans who had lost their writing hand. Three-quarters of the operations during the war were amputations. The Howard archive launched on March 31, 2017. Visitors can find it at library.bowdoin.edu.

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Mary Boykin Chesnut spent many months in Columbia, S.C. Chesnut is widely known because her extensive diary, published by historian C. Vann Woodward in 1981 as Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, provides scholars with insight into the workings of the Confederate government. Mary’s husband, James, was an aide to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and became a Confederate general. Historic Columbia Foundation is pleased to conserve one of Chesnut’s ball gowns, with funds raised by the local Colonial Dames chapter. Passed down through Chesnut descendants and donated to Historic Columbia in 1981, the 1840s garment has been altered over the years. A blue and pink floral print decorates the white European-made silk weave brocade. The dress, along with James’ conserved silk wedding vest, will be exhibited in 2018 for the 200th anniversary of the Hampton Preston House, where Mary was known to visit the wealthy legislator Wade Hampton and his family. For images and conservation details, go to http://trib.al/ BodwUvG. The wasitband originally measured 21 inches.

of Monitor’s wrought-iron turret has uncovered a clue to one of the manufacturers of the innovative vessel. The discovery occurred during blasting to remove corrosion on wrought-iron artifacts in The Mariners’ Museum collection. Workers could make out the word ULSTER. Museum staff members suspect that it refers to a manufacturing company in Ulster, N.Y. Previous analyses of the components of the groundbreaking vessel had never turned up reference to this company.

CIVIL WAR

SURPRISE

OU NEVER KNOW where the Civil War will turn up. During restoration of his 1810 “Cape Cod” style farmhouse in Newbury, Vt., homeowner Justin Squizzero uncovered this Thomas Nast engraving titled “Christmas, 1863,” which depicts a Union soldier returning home for the holidays to a happy family, still glued to the wall (above). Farmer George Burroughs and his wife and children, along with perhaps a widowed sister, lived in the house during the 1860s. Squizzero is still doing research on the house and occupants, and has not yet connected any Burroughs family member to the Union Army. It’s easy, however, to imagine someone putting up the print during a cold winter day in 1863, and hoping for the safe return of a loved one.

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AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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C IVI L WA R

THE WAR ON THE NET





w w w . fa m i l y s e a r c h . o r g



In spring 1866, the Police Board of Chickasaw County, Miss., visited local Confederate veterans and widows to assess their needs. The state legislature had allocated tax revenue to provide for indigent soldiers and families as early as December 1861, and by 1866, the need was dire. James Brassfield served in the 35th Mississippi Infantry until he lost his leg at the Battle of Corinth in October 1862. By 1866 Brassfield was struggling to provide for his family, which included four young children. Emily Eaton, another Chickasaw County resident, had lost her husband in Confederate service and she found it difficult to provide for her six children. There were so many women like Eaton that the record keeper shifted to using quoily fam ate der Unidentified Confe tation marks to indicate yet another destitute widow or mother. The availability of digitized original source material is a great benefit to Civil War researchers, and the online repository at FamilySearch.org hosted primarily by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is one such resource. FamilySearch’s digitized collections can be more challenging to search than those at Ancestry.com, but the materials are free for public use. If you focus on the “image only” sections of FamilySearch, you will find holdings that are often housed in state or national archives and unavailable elsewhere online. That is where the Police Board records for Mississippi counties in the immediate postwar period are found that contain reports on impoverished people impacted by the war. This is also where a search for Confederate records in Georgia will reveal the collection of the state’s Confederate veteran home records and Andersonville Prison records. A shift in focus to North Carolina reveals images of pension applications of Confederate veterans and widows dating back to the 1880s. State-level searches will also turn up a wealth of collections pertaining to the Freedmen’s Department and the Freedmen’s Bureau, created to help former slaves transition to freedom. These include affidavits about aspects of postwar life. There are various search options at FamilySearch.org, but I prefer to simply click on “Search” and then click on the United States on the map on the upper right portion of the screen. From there, select the state you are studying and scroll down to see a list of the collections relating to that state. Be sure to click on the link that lets you scroll through all collections, and from there, scan the “Image Only Collections” section at the bottom of the page. This is where you can find rich resources from archives and libraries that often are unavailable elsewhere online. The collections offer tremendous opportunities. Teams of scholars, researchers, teachers, and students can visit local archives (we will never get everything online) while others take advantage of technology to work in digitized collections online. When we combine these efforts, as our team is doing here in south Mississippi, we can offer insights into how regions and states responded to the pressures of war and to the opportunities and challenges of the peace that followed.—Susannah J. Ural 10

CIVIL WAR TIMES AUGUST 2017

REFRACTED



roger taney memorials revisited A bust erected in 1931 of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision ruling African Americans were not citizens, will be removed from the city hall grounds in Frederick, Md. At the eastern end of the state, Anne Arundel County executive Steve Schuh is supporting a campaign to erect a statue of Frederick Douglass standing opposite an existing statue, erected in 1867, on the state house grounds in Annapolis of a seated Taney. A monument to Harriet Tubman—like Douglass, a freedom fighter from Eastern Maryland—has also been proposed for that location.



frederick douglass takes on modern slavery In February, mother and son descendants of Frederick Douglass launched “One Million Abolitionists,” a project to distribute the civil rights activist’s bestselling 1845 memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave to a million young readers. The project commemorates the 200th anniversary of Douglass’ birth and encourages activism against modern human trafficking. For information about funding the distribution, go to FD2018.org.



m.l. king and r.e. lee Since 1983, by edict of Governor Bill Clinton, Arkansans have celebrated Robert E. Lee and Martin Luther King Jr., on the same day in January. Now each icon will have his own day: MLK on the third Monday in January, and R.E. Lee on a state holiday that occurs on the second Saturday in October.

QUI Z

VETERAN PAINTS CAMP LIFE

 

PAINTINGS BY UNION SOLDIER and artist Xanthus Smith will be on display at the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in Columbia, S.C., through August 26, 2017. Smith served as a captain’s clerk at Port Royal, S.C., from September 1862 to July 1863. His sketches of ships and camp life at Port Royal drew the eye of the Admiral Samuel du Pont, who later commissioned him to document ships of the Union fleet. After the war, Smith painted tableaus of Civil War naval engagements, including the clash between Monitor and Virginia and six versions of the battle between USS Kearsarge and the Confederate Alabama. The artist did not personally participate in these battles, and collected details from veterans who were there. Raised in a privileged setting in Philadelphia, Smith trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before the war.

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WHO IS BURIED HERE? Send your answer via e-mail to [email protected] or via regular mail (1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA, 22182-4038) marked “Mouldering.” The first correct answers will win a book. Congratulations to the June issue’s winner, B.D.K. Brown of Fort Wayne, Ind. (e-mail) who correctly identified Chatham Manor at Fredericksburg, Va.

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FUEL FOR THE FIRES SOMETIME BETWEEN 1863 AND 1865, at the same time Union and Confederate troops waged ferocious, faraway battles, photographer Thomas Johnson took this image of the Von Storch coal mine near Scranton, Pa. Johnson had moved from New York to northeastern Pennsylvania to document the anthracite coal boom. Anthracite was a harder, denser coal than bituminous, and it burned with more heat and less waste. Coal mines had been in the region since the 18th century, but anthracite was usually buried deep in the earth and hard to reach. It wasn’t until the 1840s that mining and transportation technology made anthracite mining more feasible. By the 1850s, canals and railroads were in place to haul the anthracite, and the Civil War caused a surge in demand for the fuel. Factories contracted by the Union Army pumped out dense clouds of black smoke as they devoured the coal and rendered vast amounts of military materiel. Between 1861 and 1865, the Von Storch mine, which sank its first shaft in 1855, produced 605,000 tons of anthracite coal at about $5.50 a ton. Johnson’s image is a reminder of the North’s industrial prowess, for while the Union sent legions to fight, legions more remained behind to provide labor for the war effort. –D.B.S.

1 2 3 4 5 ES AUGUST 2017

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1. Breaker houses were an essential part of anthracite mining. While soft bituminous coal burned easily, dense anthracite coal was brought out of the mineshaft directly to a breaker house, where the hard fossil fuel was broken into different sizes for industrial and residential applications so that it would ignite evenly. 2. This collection of buildings might contain the mining office or the company store. Miners were sometimes forced to purchase goods at inflated prices at such stores, which served as an instigating factor in strikes. 3. This coalyard “pufferbelly” has its

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steam up, consuming coal no doubt mined on the spot. The engine is ready to chug its way backward up the inclined plane, or elevated railway, to the breaker house to fill its cars with coal.

4. A few employees congregate near this shed. Most of the miners, of course, are deep in the mines. Not every miner stayed at home. In 1864, the 48th Pennsylvania, a regiment composed largely of coal miners from nearby Schuykill County, gained fame when they dug a shaft under the Rebel earthworks at Petersburg, leading to what became known as the notorious Battle of the Crater.

5. Coal cars filled to the brim are ready to transport their cargo, a drop in the bucket of the 20 million tons of both anthracite and bituminous coal mined in Pennsylvania during the war. In the cars you can see the various sizes of coal produced by the breaker. The terms “Egg, stove, nut, and pea,” denoted various sizes of anthracite coal.

6. A great deal of shale and other material was brought up with the coal and separated out in the breaker house. Piles of the waste soon accumulated around the coal mines.

7. It’s hard to tell whether or not this mine shaft and breaker house—similar to the complex on the left labeled “1”—is in working order.

AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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By Gary W. Gallagher

MANY WESTS General William T. Sherman at Atlanta, a pivotal moment in the Western Theater. But were the “other” Western theaters as important?

OUT WEST THE IMPORTANCE, OR LACK THEREOF, OF THE VARIOUS WESTERN THEATERS OF WAR

THE WEST HAS ACHIEVED new prominence in recent literature on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Some authors believe that the war, post-Appomattox events, and the West must be brought together to expand a traditional narrative dominated by the axis of North versus South, slaveholding versus non-slaveholding, and the United States versus the Confederacy. What is needed, they believe, is a more comprehensive analytical framing that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, includes Native Americans as well as black and white residents, encompasses borderlands with Canada and Mexico, and erases the usual chronological limits. Some definitions are necessary. “The West” as understood during the mid-19th century could be expansive. Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant were known as “western” men, and during Washington’s Grand Review in May 1865 many observers drew distinctions between the western soldiers in Sherman’s armies, 14

CIVIL WAR TIMES AUGUST 2017

most of whom hailed from what we call the Midwest, and eastern men in the Army of the Potomac. Similarly, the Iron Brigade, with regiments from Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, proudly embraced its reputation as the only all-Western brigade in the Army of the Potomac. The Western Theater extended from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River and from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico. The Trans-Mississippi Theater, a subset of the larger West like the Western Theater, took in everything from the Mississippi River to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico. What most modern Americans imagine as “the West” would include the Civil War–era territories beyond the 100th Meridian—everything from eastern Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas to the Pacific Coast. Thanks in significant measure to Hollywood’s influence, this is the West associated in popular memory with gold rushes in California

and Colorado, the final conflicts between Native Americans and the U.S. Army, the building of transcontinental railroads, outlaws and lawmen in frontier towns, sodbusters and cattlemen, and the massive migration of white emigrants from eastern to western areas. How should these various “Wests” fit into the history of the Civil War era? No one can dispute the West’s centrality to secession and the coming of conflict in 1860-61. Debates about whether to permit slavery in federal territories provoked crises from the Missouri Controversy of 1820 through the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas–Nebraska explosion of the mid-1850s, and the Democratic Party’s meltdown in Charleston, S.C., and Baltimore in 1861. Indeed, without friction relating to slavery in the Western territories, it is difficult to imagine a secession movement that went beyond rhetorical bluster and posturing. The war’s Western Theater must be an essential part of any discussion of the war. Fighting in that region began in Kentucky, ended in North Carolina, and featured storied military campaigns such as Shiloh and Atlanta. That theater produced the commanders who won Union victory, re-elected the Republicans in 1864, and thereby kept emancipation on the table, and headed the postwar army well into the 1880s. Whether it was as important as the Eastern Theater—in terms of Confederate or United States morale or garnering the attention in European capitals—is another question. The Trans-Mississippi Theater, which included noteworthy military and political action primarily in Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, lagged far behind the Western and Eastern theaters in significance. Neither the United States nor the Confederacy made it a priority when allocating material, troops, or the best generals. And events on the margins of the theater, such as Henry Hopkins Sibley’s quixotic foray into New Mexico in 1862, scarcely rise to the level of inconsequential. What about the trans-100th-Meridian West? It remained peripheral to the fundamental issues of both the Civil



THE 1864 SLAUGHTER OF

CHEYENNE AND ARAPAHO

AT SAND CREEK WAS NOT REALLY A

CIVIL WAR EVENT

War and Reconstruction. Two great goals dominated the war years: The vast majority of U.S. citizens and soldiers sought to restore the Union, while those in the Confederacy sought to establish a new slaveholding republic. Although people on both sides sometimes thought about this West (a number of Confederates hoped to find access to the Pacific in Baja California, for example), their attention almost always displayed a more eastward interest. The Republican Party’s agenda did feature legislation that affected later western development, most obviously

ON THE FRINGE The New Mexico campaign of Brig. Gen. Henry H. Sibley had little impact on the war’s outcome.

the Homestead Act, Pacific Railway Act, and Morrill Act, all passed in 1862. But each of these had antebellum roots, and both their wartime passage and postwar impact can be considered part of a developmental arc that likely would have played out in some fashion absent the war. Similarly, as I argued recently in the April 2017 column, the relocation of the Dakota Sioux from Minnesota after 1862, forced resettlement of the Navajo by U.S. forces under Kit Carson in 1864, and slaughter of approximately 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek in 1864 were not really Civil War events—though they occurred during the war. Ample testimony underscores the degree to which people at the time separated the war over secession from clashes with Indians. As for Reconstruction, it had a very specific meaning in the 19th century that had almost nothing to do with the West. The key Reconstruction documents, among them Lincoln’s proclamation of amnesty and Reconstruction, the Wade-Davis Bill, the 14th Amendment, and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867-68, address the problem of bringing former Confederate states back into the Union and dealing with the longterm consequences of emancipation. Negotiations and treaties between the U.S. government and the “Five Civilized Tribes” in Oklahoma also could be considered part of Reconstruction, which ended, at the latest, with the removal of token Federal forces that remained in the former Confederacy in 1876. But Reconstruction should not be conflated with the larger history of the United States between Appomattox and 1876. In the West, that larger history included, among other things, Indian wars and growth of the reservation system, accelerating white settlement, and construction of the transcontinental railroads. It is always interesting to contemplate what an accurate survey of opinion in the past might reveal. I suspect Americans polled in 1861-65 or in 1876 would not have placed the trans-100thMeridian West anywhere near the center of either the war or Reconstruction. ✯ AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

15

with Brandon Bies

NEW

MAN

AT MANASSAS ALL SMILES Superintendent Brandon Bies is eager to take on Manassas’ challenges. The battlefield park includes one of the oldest Civil War monuments, below.

BRANDON BIES, the

new superintendent of Manassas National Battlefield Park, began his career as an archaeologist 16 years ago at Monocacy National Battlefield. He moved on to increasing levels of responsibility at a number of NPS sites, including George Washington Memorial Parkway, Great Falls Park, and Arlington House, where he shepherded the $12.3 million donation from philanthropist David Rubenstein for the restoration and interpretation of that site. Now at Manassas, he manages issues ranging from too many deer to landscape restoration and land acquisition. 16

CIVIL WAR TIMES AUGUST 2017

CWT: What is your biggest challenge interpreting Manassas? BB: We are in a very urban area with a tremendous amount of development. A lot of people see this as 5,000 acres of open space, and that’s not a bad thing. They see this as a place to recreate, walk their dogs, jog. We have the opportunity to embrace that while sharing the important American history that happened here. One of my greatest challenges will be striking that balance between recreation and respect for these hallowed grounds. We want people to come to the park. CWT: What would attract someone who doesn’t have a strong connection to the war? BB: The themes of freedom, civil war,

conflict—that is not an unfamiliar thing to a lot of more recent immigrants to this country. So even though their great-great-granddad did not fight here, that’s still something we can emphasize to help them make that link. CWT: So is interpretation here changing? BB: It is changing. And we need to change it more. When the visitor comes here, they will learn primarily about the First and Second Battles of Manassas, or Bull Run. There’s much more we can tell, the stories of free and enslaved African Americans who lived here, the story of women who were heads of households or widows like Judith Henry, of the Henry House.

These are stories we need to be telling to get those visitors here. CWT: What has been the biggest surprise? BB: We have a number of applications to run competitive races through the park. How do you balance recreation with respect for the battlefield? In an area of the park called Brownsville, we have a large picnic area, where not a lot of fighting took place. We try to push recreational activities there. CWT: What is the park’s best kept secret? BB: I think visitors learn much more about First Manassas than Second Manassas. Now we’ve opened up the Brawner Farm Center nine months of the year to focus on the story of Second Manassas. My vision longterm is maybe you don’t go to one visitor center for one story and the other visitor center for the other story. That these can be interwoven. Both the battles were the largest engagements in the Western Hemisphere at the time they were fought. There were about 100,000 people at Second Manassas. CWT: What impact did these battles have? BB: Both battles were significant Confederate victories and they legitimized the Confederacy in the eyes of other nations. First Manassas made it very clear this was not going to be a oneoff. Second Manassas was downright frightening. If you read some of the diaries and letters of the soldiers who were in the battle or were stationed at the defenses of Washington, they were terrified. They thought that in a matter of a few days, the entire Confederate army would march into Washington. CWT: What prepared you for this job? BB: I’ve managed cultural resources, historic structures, the cultural landscape. I spent several years studying those and preserving those for the NPS. Then I spent some time as acting site manager for Great Falls Park, and this was a largely natural resource park. Then I went to Arlington

THE BATTLEFIELDS

EMCOMPASS ABOUT

5,000



A C R E S House—very visible, very significant, very layered stories, with connections to George Washington and the huge enslaved population that was there. A complicated story, and a highly visited site in a very small space. So I learned a lot about working with other partners and neighbors, and intergovernment relations. CWT: The most misunderstood feature of Manassas? BB: Some people ask why it’s not like Gettysburg or Antietam where there are monuments all over the place. Some like it more this way, the landscape is more pristine. We have a couple dozen monuments. Unlike other major battlefields that were owned by the War Department and turned over to the National Park Service in 1933, Manassas was entirely private property until 1940. CWT: Why wasn’t this owned by the War Department at the time? BB: I don’t know. It was the site of two major Confederate victories. The core of the battlefield, including Henry Hill, was owned by Confederate veteran and hereditary organizations and it was known as the Manassas Battlefield Confederate Park. We still have a relationship with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. CWT: What do you need to be a superintendent? BB: You need to be externally aware, a good communicator, both internally and externally. You need to be a good listener. It is critical to be able to balance the big picture with day-to-day

operations and internal and external issues. One of my priorities is landscape restoration and having a voice in respect to external pressures. Internally, we have a park partner, the Manassas Battlefield Trust, they support us both financially and programmatically. And the Civil War Trust is a huge partner in terms of land acquisition. CWT: What problems do you face managing the landscape? BB: A previous superintendent removed trees in an area where tremendous fighting occurred, to restore the Civil War landscape. Now the problem is maintaining it. It’s fairly rocky land, so mowing won’t work. You need creative solutions. We’ve talked about goats, and I’m looking at controlled burns. There is an issue of unexploded ordnance, but archaeologists can go in and sweep it first. Once we clear it, then we would go in and do a controlled burn every few years. CWT: You have an enormous traffic problem. BB: Visitors can struggle to experience the battlefield because of the traffic. We have been mandated by Congress to build a bypass around the battlefield and get the traffic out. We have a phenomenal landscape, but we have a major interchange where 12-13 percent of the vehicles are trucks. We have two quarries adjacent, and the Stone House, a historic tavern that was used as a Civil War hospital, is being damaged from the vibrations of commercial trucks. CWT: How big is Manassas? BB: The battlefields encompass about 5,000 acres—just under half of our acreage is open grasslands, we do hay leases. The park provides important habitat too. I’ve had some pretty special moments going out to the park and being up on a ridge somewhere and every bit of green that you can see is preserved by the NPS for everyone, for whatever they can connect to. ✯ Interview conducted by Senior Editor Sarah Richardson AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

17

TEXT MESSAGES WRITING IMPLEMENTS like these helped Civil War soldiers scratch out letters, diary entries, and official army reports whenever they had a free moment. On July 22, 1862, from “Battle Creek,” Tenn., 2nd Ohioan George W. Landrum lamented to his mother, “I only wrote 5 letters this month.” On November 9 that same year, 3rd South Carolinian Tally Simpson boasted to his sister, “I love you and love to write to you.” It is history’s great fortune the armies of scribblers wrote so many documents that survive to provide a wealth of detail about the conflict.–D.B.S.

A soldier could get everything he needed—for a reasonable price, of course—by going to a sutler and buying this “Military Portfolio” that contained everything but the ink. That would be a separate charge, naturally.

The Silliman Company of Chester, Conn., had a contract to provide the Union Army with inkwells, and countless military clerks dabbed their pens into the receptacles that were made with spring-loaded closures to prevent mishaps. But ink was hard to control. A clerk wrote “A windy day” next to a large ink spill in a regimental order book of the 93rd Pennsylvania, held at the National Archives, blaming Mother Nature for the mishap that caused the Rorschach-test-like blot.

Unfortunately for scholars, pencil-written documents from the Civil War are often hard to read, but there is no denying that Lt. Col. Moses Wooster’s silver mechanical pencil was a handsome instrument. Wooster, of the 101st Ohio, was mortally wounded at Stones River on December 31, 1862.

18

CIVIL WAR TIMES AUGUST 2017

Henry Burr of the 35th Massachusetts owned this Hathaway Patent writing kit, which consisted of an oilcloth cover that rolled around a tin cylinder to form a neat 9-inch by 1/2-inch wide bundle (shown rolled up, above). The tin section held pens and an inkwell, while the cover, stiffened by wooden slats, formed an adequate lap desk for writing.

19

Government Melts Over 270 Million Silver Dollars But collectors get an unexpected second chance

LOW AS

$279each5

It’s a crime. Most Americans living today have never held a hefty, gleaming U.S. silver dollar in their hands. Where did they go? Well, in 1918, to provide aid to the British during WWI, the U.S. government melted down nearly half of the entire mintage—over 270 million silver dollars. If all those missing silver dollars could be stacked, they would tower over 400 miles into the sky! If laid in a chain, they would span 6,400 miles— enough to stretch from New York to Los Angeles more than 2½ times! These vanished coins were not just any silver dollar–they were America’s largest circulated coin, the beloved Morgan Silver Dollar. Each Morgan Dollar is struck from nearly an ounce of 90% fine silver and measures a massive 38.1mm in diameter. Morgan Silver Dollars were the engine of the American dream for decades. Created by famed American coin designer, George T. Morgan, they feature Lady Liberty’s radiant profile and a majestic eagle, symbols of American strength and prosperity. Since their inception in 1878, they jingled in the pockets of famous and infamous Americans like John D. Rockefeller and Teddy Roosevelt, and desperados Jesse James and Al Capone. Today, Morgan Silver Dollars are the most collected coin in America.

Lady Liberty takes a Final Bow Just three years after the massive meltdown, the government gave the Morgan Silver Dollar a final chance to shine. In 1921, facing a serious shortage, the mint struck Morgan Silver Dollars for one more brief, historic year. Today, the last-ever 1921 Morgan Silver Dollar belongs in the hands of collectors, history buffs, or anyone who values the artistry and legacy of this American classic.

A Private Vault Gives Up its Secrets Millions more silver dollars were melted over the past ninety years and today, private hoards account for virtually all the surviving Morgan Silver Dollars. We should know—we hunt for them every week. In fact, on one buying trip into America’s heartland, as we were guided into a wealthy owner’s massive private vault, we were thrilled to discover a hoard of nearly two thousand 1921 Morgan Silver Dollars, all having actually circulated in American commerce nearly 100 years ago! We wasted no time in securing the entire treasure trove of silver dollars into our own vault.

Actual size is 38.1 mm

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TRAILS GO EVER ON Take the Appalachian Trail south out of Crampton’s Gap for a history ramble to a gorgeous Potomac River overlook at Weverton Cliffs, on to Harpers Ferry, and then…

RIGHT HERE A BATTLEFIELD HIKE CAN CLEAR YOUR HEAD

IF I FIND MYSELF STUCK on a topic for this column (every issue), or need some inspiration for a headline, I often head up to where the Appalachian Trail cuts through the South Mountain battlefields and get moving. Hiking down the trace of the Woods Road, my imagination conjures up ghostly Confederate infantry double-quicking toward the fight at Fox’s Gap. On one occasion near Turner’s Gap, I ran into a fellow standing in the middle of the trail, head cocked to one side, as if listening. I stopped and asked him if he needed directions or help. “No,” he said, “I’m just soaking up some Civil War vibes.” I get it. On a humid day last summer, I ended my sweaty, salty hike at Fox’s Gap and noticed a father-and-daughter hiking tandem looking over the monument to Union Maj. Gen. Jesse Reno. Despite my damp condition, I couldn’t resist walking over and explaining the circumstances of the general’s fatal wounding. The daughter’s eyes widened. “You mean, he was shot…right here?!,” she exclaimed. Yep. Battlefield hiking season is upon us. Whether it’s South Mountain, Manassas (P. 16), Seminary Ridge (P. 52), or a March to the Sea site (P. 30), grab your water bottle and get out there to see “right here.” I know you get it. –D.B.S.

AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

21

AMBITIOUS Solomon Meredith politicked and fought his way to the command of the Iron Brigade and a brigadier general’s rank. It came at a high cost, however, as his son, Samuel, died from wartime wounds in January 1864.

 THE PUGNACIOUS 6-FOOT-7

Solomon Meredith CAST A LONG SHADOW OVER

the Iron Brigade 

BY LANCE J. H ERDEG EN

P

resident Abraham Lincoln’s grand review of the Army of the Potomac on April 9, 1863, would be remembered fondly by both awed onlookers and the regiments that pararaded before him at Belle Plaine, Va. In many ways, the occasion marked the end of what had been a very troubled winter following the Battle of Fredericksburg—what one Union soldier had called his army’s “Valley Forge.” The men’s morale was on the upswing, and new commander Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, who in just nine weeks had done much to refit and prepare the Union’s principal army, was happy to show them off. As the third summer of the war approached, December’s Fredericksburg disaster and the woeful Mud March of January seemed like distant memories.

Although the entire review was impressive, it was the crisply massed lines and steady step of the 1st Corps’ “Iron Brigade of the West” that brought the loudest murmur of approval and applause from the crowd, with some ladies reportedly fluttering their handkerchiefs as those regiments passed by. The unit, adorned in their splendid black hats, was the army’s only all-Western infantry brigade, made up of the veteran 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin, the 19th Indiana, and the recently added 24th Michigan. “This,” Hooker said, leaning close to the president, “is the famous fourth brigade.” Lincoln smiled and, as was his habit, quipped: “Yes. It is commanded by the only Quaker General I have in the army.” He nodded in the direction of Brig. Gen. Solomon Meredith of Indiana, impossible to miss at 6-foot-7, 250 pounds.



AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

23

RECENTLY PROMOTED, Meredith had entered the war as the 19th Indiana’s colonel and had quickly become a great favorite of the men, who dubbed him “Long Sol” in deference to his imposing height. They enjoyed telling stories of his rustic mannerisms. Meredith was raised a Quaker in his native North Carolina. As a young man, he walked to Indiana to start a new life. He married well there, and prospered as a farmer and in politics. He was Wayne County clerk at the time of Fort Sumter in 1861 and was well known as a Republican political crony of powerful Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton. Always a man who caught eyes because of his height, Meredith had the loud and forceful voice of a stump speaker and was singled out for his colorful use of the English language. He was, a “specimen of the genuine Hoosier,” one of his soldiers wrote home, “who put on no airs and frequently talks to the private soldiers and is therefore very popular with the men but is not much of a military man.” Another veteran said that Meredith took double the risk in battle, as he was twice as big as most men: “Stray scraps of iron running at large over the heads of a regiment are apt to pick out the tall ones.” When Long Sol and his Indiana boys were added to the Midwestern brigade in October 1861, Meredith’s military abilities were questionable, but it was recognized that he had rock solid political connections. Wisconsin men said in solemn tones that Meredith and his regiment were “the pets” of Indiana Governor Morton. The volunteer Badger officers—many of them sharply attuned to the direction of the political winds—made note of the fact. A story circulated about how a political rival quipped that Long Sol was so tall that he should be cut in half and his lower, and better, half be made lieutenant colonel of the 19th. The 19th Indiana left its home state for the front on two trains on August 5, 1861. The new colonel rode in the smaller second train and took along two of his favorite horses. At Harrisburg, Pa., the train halted so that 10 rounds of ammunition could be issued to each soldier in case of trouble at Baltimore where a Union regiment had earlier been fired upon while passing through the city. No violence occurred, however, as they marched through the city to a connecting rail line. Back in the cars and bored, the ammunition in their cartridge boxes tempted the young Hoosiers to try out their muskets on “Rebel” ducks and chickens along the tracks. Soon the cars were ablaze with shooting and filled with smoke. At least one horse was shot dead. Meredith, still much the farmer, was outraged at the slaughter of valuable livestock. He stormed 24

CIVIL WAR TIMES AUGUST 2017

through the cars demanding to know who was shooting. No one, of course, admitted to the deed. At Washington, days wore into weeks, and weeks into months without action. The new volunteers—officers and privates alike—were learning to be soldiers. There was constant drill and some heavy labor constructing fortifications in Virginia beyond the Chain Bridge over the Potomac River. Some excitement finally transpired on September 11 when five companies of the 19th Indiana, along with other detachments, tramped five miles into the countryside. Confederate cavalry soon attacked the reconnaissance force. The shooting lasted about two hours, and Meredith was proud to report that his Indiana companies “behaved with the utmost coolness and gallantry.” IN SPRING 1862, Army of the Potomac commander Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan devised a plan to move his force by water to Fort Monroe, from where it would advance on the Confederate capital of Richmond. The Western brigade soldiers were crestfallen to learn that they and the rest of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell’s 1st Corps would not be part of the main campaign. They would be ordered only to occupy Fredericksburg, where they could be in a position to threaten Richmond and yet still protect Washington. McDowell’s brigades moved from Washington by foot on April 4 in a march hampered by rain and snow. The columns reached Falmouth above Fredericksburg on April 23 and settled into a routine of work details, patrols, and drill. Brigadier General Rufus King, the brigade’s first commander, had been promoted to a division post in late 1861, but it was not until May 8, 1862, that Captain John Gibbon of Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery, which had been assigned to the brigade, was promoted to brigadier general of volunteers and given command of the Western regiments. The change caused only a minor stir as the battery had been associated with the brigade for several months and some infantry volunteers had even been filling the depleted ranks in the battery. Gibbon’s tightening of discipline, however, was not greeted with enthusiasm. The new general was a Regular, after all, and the volunteers distrusted the Old Army manner. No one was more upset than Colonel Sol Meredith, who had long made known his own ambition to win a star. He told anyone who would listen that volunteers should be commanded by volunteer officers, and then began writing letters to his powerful friends

GIBBON’S VISION An Iron Brigade soldier in 1862, wearing Brig. Gen. John Gibbon’s prescribed uniform.

BLACK HATS Non-commissioned officers of the 2nd Wisconsin pose near Washington in spring 1862. Within the next year, Confederates came to fear the sight of the “Black Hats” on the battlefield.

in Indiana and Washington to see what might be done. Some of the Western regiments had marched off to war wearing gray militia uniforms, and even after the issue of the standard blue Union togs, some men still wore their old gray issues. Gibbon disliked the uneven appearance of his regiments, and required that the dark blue wool frock coats and black hats often issued to the Regulars be issued to all his men, along with white linen leggings and white cotton gloves. The Midwesterners grumbled when it was discovered each soldier would pay for the gloves and leggings out of their clothing allowances. Gibbon’s order also called for extra underwear, stockings, and shoes. In making the requisition of his regiment, Meredith, aware of the displeasure in his ranks, slyly asked for four extra mule teams to transport the extra luggage. The request, of course, was denied, but Gibbon and Meredith were now at odds. Tensions escalated when the Indianans threw them away on the first long march and Gibbon sharply ordered they be reissued at additional cost. One morning Gibbon emerged from his tent to find his horse equipped with four leggings. The breach of discipline upset the by-the-book Regular, who looked to the Indiana ranks to find the culprit without success. A more troubling exchange erupted when Gibbon reviewed his brigade and issued a general order that singled out the “marked contrast” in appearance between the Wis-

NO THANKS The Iron Brigade soldiers found the leggings required by General Gibbon to be cumbersome to wear and uncomfortable in hot weather.

consin units and the 19th Indiana. The general also made a sour reference to the clothing discarded on recent marches, and stated that every soldier found without his issued clothing “will be charged the cost of such clothing…and have the amount deducted from his pay.” The order set off a storm, especially in the 19th Indiana, where the leggings and the general were especially hated. Meredith was fed up with Gibbon’s strict rules, and he secured leave to meet with his Indiana political friends in Washington to see about replacing the general or having his regiment transferred to another brigade. Despite the efforts of Meredith and his political cronies, the Indiana regiment was not transferred and Gibbon was not removed. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton told Meredith AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

25

at the double-quick. “Boys,” he called as they advanced, “don’t forget that you are Hoosiers, and above all, remember the glorious flag of our country!” In the next hour of shooting, the 19th “suffered terribly,” and one soldier remembered that the “lines of battle were close enough to do effective work.” Meredith’s horse, Old Roan, was soon hit by a ball and fell, pinning the colonel. Meredith was pulled free by two officers, but was stunned. The colonel’s son, Samuel, a lieutenant in one of the 19th’s companies, was also shot in the neck at about the same time. For 90 minutes, until it was too dark to see, both sides fired at each other at murderously close range during what would evolve into the threeday Second Battle of Bull Run. Gibbon, who’d see much fightTAR HEEL IRON Despite his issues with fellow North Carolina native Meredith, General Gibbon, ing during the coming months, above, was proud of the role he played in building the Iron Brigade into a crack unit, and served said later that “the most terrific for a time as president of the postwar Iron Brigade Association. Gibbon’s requirement that the musketry fire I have ever lisbrigade wear the tall, black Union-issue dress hat, below, helped give it distinction and élan. tened to rolled along those two lines of battle. It was a regular stand up fight during which neither side yielded a foot.” and his friends that the matter was in the hands of 1st Corps As a result of his injury, Meredith missed the remainder commander McDowell, who, despite pressure from Hoosier of the battle, but was back in command when the brigade political forces, refused the request to move the 19th Indiana saw action at South Mountain, Md., on September 14, 1862. from Gibbon’s brigade. When his regiment stalled in the face of steep terrain and Meredith and his soldiers soon had more serious matters heavy opposition along the National Road, he sent his son, on their minds. The real war finally caught up to their brigade Samuel, to Battery B to request that two guns be brought up when the regiments were ordered on a series of marches in to bombard a Confederate strong point. early August 1862 to find Confederate Maj. Gen. Thomas Lieutenant James Stewart was battery commander, and he “Stonewall” Jackson’s forces. With McClellan stalled outside later said that he looked up to see approaching “the youngest Richmond, Jackson had slipped out of the defensive lines and and tallest, as well as the thinnest man I ever saw.” The young headed for central Virginia to cause trouble for the Union. officer saluted and said, “Father wants you to put a shot into Near dusk on August 28, the 1,900-member Western brigade finally found the combat for which they had longed. that house; it is full of rebel sharpshooters.” A native of Scotland, Stewart was a long-serving Regular The column was marching along the Warrenton Turnpike, and in his trademark blunt manner asked, “Who not far from the old First Bull Run battlefield, when it in thunder is your father?” “Colonel Sol Merecame under artillery fire. dith of the 19th Indiana,” was the reply. Gibbon ordered the 2nd Wisconsin forward The veteran looked the young man up to capture what he thought was just a Confedand down. “You go back with my complierate battery positioned near the Brawner Farm. ments to your father, Colonel Sol Meredith, Then, out of the woods on a far ridge line, Jackof the 19th Indiana, and tell him I will require son’s massed lines of infantry swept down on him to give me a written order to shell the lone Wisconsin regiment. that house.” Surprised, Gibbon quickly Young Meredith rode off, ordered the 7th Wisconsin and 19th and returned with his father a Indiana forward. The 2nd Wisconfew minutes later. “I want you to sin was no sooner engaged when shell that house,” Long Sol told the 19th Indiana came up on the the artilleryman. When Stewart left. Meredith brought his men in 26

CIVIL WAR TIMES AUGUST 2017

reiterated he wanted a written order, the colonel responded with “By Jinks, I will give you a written order,” and acquiesced. Stewart rolled two guns forward and threw what Meredith called “several splendid shoots…causing a general stampede.” The Rebels gone, the 19th Indiana again pressed up the hill. “It was a most magnificent sight to see the boys of the Nineteenth going forward, crowding the enemy, cheering all the time,” the colonel would write. Meredith suffered an injury at South Mountain, and left the regiment to go to Washington to recuperate, and also to lobby for a general’s star. While he was away, the Iron Brigade fought at the Battle of Antietam and Lt. Col. Alois Bachman was killed while leading the 19th. Not long after that battle, Gibbon was promoted to division command. The news brightened hopes for a promotion for Long Sol, a wish granted in November when he was named a brigadier general. Now he needed a command to go with his new star and none appealed to him more than the “Iron Brigade”—as the Midwestern regiments had been christened for their hard fighting at South Mountain. Meredith was quick to approach the new Army of the Potomac commander and soon had Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s recommendation. “I have been assigned to this glorious old ‘Iron Brigade’,” he wrote to his friend and patron Governor Morton. He said he considered it “a very high compliment.” Gibbon was outraged that Meredith had been promoted instead of his choice, Colonel Lysander Cutler of the 6th Wisconsin. Gibbon disliked Meredith’s discipline methods, and also thought he should have been present at Antietam. He approached Burnside and tried to have the appointment blocked, but the army commander turned down Gibbon’s request, saying Meredith’s “many strong friends” made such a move impossible. THE NEW BRIGADIER GENERAL and his command escaped heavy fighting at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, but by June 1863 they were on the march to Pennsylvania and chasing Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. On the morning of July 1, Meredith was slow getting his regiments out of camp at Marsh Creek south of Gettysburg. He and his men MODEL SOLDIER were unaware gunfire was already An infantryman of being exchanged northwest of town the 7th Wisconsin between Federal cavalry and Confedposes at “order arms” erate infantry. Infantry musket fire was flaring in front of a canvas north of a fenced road—the Cham- backdrop painted bersburg Pike—as the Western- with a military scene. ers moved through the swale by the Lutheran Seminary Building. The 6th Wisconsin was halted as a reserve, while the four leading regiments advanced up the slope of a ridge to the west. Major General John Reynolds, commanding the advance of the Union army, followed the leading 2nd Wisconsin, shouting “Forward for God’s sake, and drive those fellows out of those woods!” Brigadier General James Archer’s Brigade fired “a most murderous volley,” but the Black Hats surged forward and the surprised Confederates, expecting only cav-

bent Iron

The Iron Brigade was devastated at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863,

SUFFERING MORE THAN 60% casualties. The casualty breakdown was as follows: # OF MEN IN RANKS

REGIMENT

19th INDIANA 24th MICHIGAN 2nd WISCONSIN 7th WISCONSIN 6th WISCONSIN

TOTAL

308 496 302 364 344 1,814

CASUALTIES

210 363 233 175 168 1,152

The Iron Brigade never regained the strength it had before Gettysburg. The 2nd Wisconsin and the 19th Indiana mustered out in 1864, and the 7th Indiana and a New York sharpshooter regiment were patched into the brigade at various times. The brigade was finally dissolved in February 1865. –D.B.S.

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HOOSIER BRAVERY In artist Don Troiani’s “The Black Hats,” Sgt. Maj. Asa Blanchard of the 19th Indiana defiantly uncovers the national flag in Gettysburg’s Herbst Woods on July 1, 1863. Blanchard would soon be shot dead as he waved the banner. alry or militia, retreated. Behind them, Reynolds had been shot and was dying. At the same time, the 6th Wisconsin rushed north of the Chambersburg Pike and caught an advancing Confederate brigade in an unfinished railroad cut, capturing scores of Johnnies and the flag of the 2nd Mississippi Infantry. By noon, the field was quiet as arriving Confederates consolidated for a final push. The 2nd and 7th Wisconsin, 24th Michigan, and 19th Indiana were posted in a thin patch of trees known as Herbst Woods at the western base of McPherson’s Ridge. It was an awkward position, as the line had to curve down to a hollow to reach the 19th Indiana. Colonel Henry Morrow of the 24th Michigan asked three times to better position his line, but Meredith refused. Major General Abner Doubleday, now in command of the field, had ordered Long Sol to hold the woods at all costs, and that was exactly what he was planning to do. The Confederates came in heavier numbers in the early afternoon to clear the two ridges northwest of Gettysburg 28

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and capture the town. The outnumbered Black Hats were suddenly in a desperate fight to delay the Confederate advance so the Union army could concentrate south of Gettysburg. The lines were at times merely 90 feet apart as both sides fired furiously in the smoke-filled woods. The Confederate pressure became too much, and the Union line was flanked on both ends and began a stubborn retreat. Before the Federals backed to the crest of Seminary Ridge, however, Meredith was already down, struck on the head by a piece of shell that fractured his skull. His horse had also been killed and had fallen on him, breaking his ribs and injuring his right leg. The wounded general was taken from the field. A few days later he would return to Indiana to recover. In November, he rejoined the army, but active field service was too much for him. After a time he was appointed garrison commander at Cairo, Ill., and later at Paducah, Ky. There was a happy reunion with his 19th Indiana in January 1864, when the three-year veterans returned to Indianapolis for a 30-day furlough. A special reception was organized at the Masonic Hall, and when Long Sol appeared, his old boys greeted him with cheer after cheer. These men, the tall general told the crowd, shared in all the honors won by the Army of the Potomac and the welcome received “at the hands

of friends at home compensates all they have endured.” It all turned sour the next day, however, when Meredith’s son, Samuel, still troubled by his Brawner Farm wound, fell ill and died. The general buried his son and was then confined to his room with fever and exhaustion. He was still spitting up blood from his Gettysburg injuries. Politics called him again in mid-1864, when at Governor Morton’s urging he unsuccessfully ran for the House of Representatives against incumbent George Julian. Hard words were exchanged during a bitter campaign, which included false claims that Meredith was a Southern sympathizer. When the tall general encountered Julian at the Richmond, Ind., railroad station, he beat the congressman almost unconscious with a livestock whip. Only Meredith’s political influence and the fact he was still in the Army enabled him to have the charges dropped. When the war ended, Meredith returned home to Indiana to resume farming. From 1867 to 1869, he served an appointment as surveyor general of the Montana Territory, and then came home to raise prize-winning livestock. He died in 1875 and is buried in Riverside Cemetery in Cambridge City, Ind. IN THE FINAL TALLY, Meredith was one of those curious political officers tossed up by the Civil War, a man marked by both patriotism and ambition. His feud with Gibbon was carried out with a well-honed politician’s guile using carefully crafted letters and sly whispers to the powerful forces outside the army. His military ability was always regarded as mixed. A soldier in his regiment had hoped for Meredith’s quick promotion to general so the regiment would be rid of his careless day-to-day handling of the command. At Fredericksburg, where his brigade was at the very left of the Union line, his lines became snarled and he was temporarily removed from command. On another occasion, the general was caught out of camp without the proper pass and asked a new colonel to intercede for him with the army commander. But the soldiers always liked Long Sol’s rustic Western style. He was remembered in the ranks for his role in keeping a private found sleeping on guard duty from a firing squad, and for his recognition that another soldier charged with “disloyal language” probably used the words in hot anger and had already proved his loyalty in battle. In some ways, whatever his military successes and failures, or what General Gibbon, Governor Morton, and even President Lincoln said about him, would not matter. He would go down in lore as Long Sol Meredith of Indiana on his big horse, marching the storied Iron Brigade into the hard fighting at Gettysburg.



Lance J. Herdegen is the author of several books on Civil War topics, including The Iron Brigade in Civil War and Memory. His latest book is Union Soldiers in the American Civil War. Herdegen presently does historical research for The Civil War Museum of the Upper Midwest at Kenosha, Wis. He lives in Walworth County, Wis.

help save solomon ANOTHER FIGHT Solomon Meredith’s statue is losing the battle to a thick layer of moss.

Shortly after Solomon Meredith died, his son Henry Clay Meredith hired local artist Lewis Cass Lutz to design a monument to his father. John H. Mahoney of Indianapolis was hired to do the sculpting, and when he finished the statue it was displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. After the exposition ended, it returned to Cambridge City, Ind., where it was first placed at the original Meredith family gravesite until 1908, when it was relocated to Riverside Cemetery. The Iron Brigade commander’s monument, currently covered with moss that is deteriorating the statue, needs restoration. Cambridge City resident Phil Harris has organized a GoFundMe campaign to restore Meredith’s statue to glory. A professional cemetery restorer will undertake the work, and if the project comes in under estimate, any excess money will be used to clean or repair other 19th Indiana Infantry headstones and markers that need work. For more information, go to 19thindianaironbrigade. com/Meredith_Restoration.html and gofundme.com/ restoring-solomon-meredith-monument.

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THE WAR’S

BIGGEST BLUNDER  William T. Sherman had many opportunities

to capture augusta’s

ordnance complex And didn’t even try BY THEODORE P. SAVAS

In the June issue, we published Part 1 of author Ted Savas’ account of Georgia’s Augusta Arsenal in which he described the arsenal’s founding and operation. Here in Part 2, he argues that Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman could have shortened the war if he had attacked the arsenal in 1864.

T

he Union Army’s failure to capture the Augusta Arsenal was perhaps the greatest strategic mistake of the entire Civil War. The Confederacy could not have survived for any significant length of time without the arsenal’s sprawling ordnance complex, which included the powder works. Few scholars seem to realize that fact, however, despite the passage of more than 150 years and extensive documentary evidence. Colonel George W. Rains, who oversaw the erection of the powder works— the South’s largest industrial project of the war and the Confederacy’s only reliable large-scale source of gunpowder—understood the city’s significance more than any other officer or politician in gray. In what could only have been

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ON HIS SHOULDERS Major General William T. Sherman during the Atlanta Campaign. Could Ulysses Grant’s top subordinate have shortened the war by months?

“I have drawn the attention of the War Department to the defenseless condition of this city and have exerted myself in every possible way... without success.”



– George W. Rains to C.S.A. Secretary of War James Seddon, July 23, 1863

hair-pulling frustration, he spent much of the war pleading with his Richmond superiors to defend it properly. Fortunately for Rains, the Federals inexplicably never targeted Augusta. The Union brass knew of its importance, and Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant empowered Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman with discretionary orders to destroy it during the 1864 March to the Sea. For eight long months, Sherman enjoyed one opportunity after another to raze the powder mills and arsenal and end the war. But he failed to do so.

T

he first hint of Augusta’s vulnerability occurred in November 1861 when Federal troops landed just 128 miles away on Tybee Island at the mouth of the Savannah River. A Union gunboat thrust up the river could have imperiled Augusta, and Rains warned Richmond that the loss of the powder works would be “a matter of no small injury to the state and Government.” Rains immediately conferred with Robert E. Lee, who at that time commanded the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, about blockading the river below Augusta. In February 1862, Rains arranged for the placement of water obstructions 45 miles downriver at Shell Bluff. An 8-inch Columbiad, nearly worthless 6-pounder iron guns, and rifle pits were positioned to fire down the river, but his numerous pleas for troops to man the posts vanished within Richmond’s bureaucracy. Richmond suggested that Rains supply his own men, but the commander retorted that the city of Augusta had “almost exhausted itself in sending volunteers to the war….There is no chance of a force being raised here.” Chief of Ordnance Josiah Gorgas understood and sup32

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ported Rains’ efforts, and George Randolph, secretary of war until November 1862, reluctantly directed that troops be stationed there, but the matter was never acted upon. Forced once again to rely on his own ingenuity, Rains began raising companies of clerks from the Augusta workforce, but despite its importance, Shell Bluff was never routinely garrisoned. Augusta’s vulnerability to a mounted raid became obvious in early May 1863 when Union Colonel Abel Streight’s cavalry raid ended in disaster just west of Rome, Ga. Augusta was not Streight’s objective, but the fact that Union troopers could cover hundreds of miles before being stopped was not lost on Rains. The Union high command, however, ignored the tutorial of possibilities that had galloped unchecked across the Southern landscape. So too did the brain trust sitting in Richmond, which continued to ignore Rains’ pleas for assistance. On July 23, 1863, the perpetually frustrated Rains dispatched a scathing letter to Secretary of War James Seddon. Enemy cavalry was “within striking distance” just 90 miles away in Pocotaligo, S.C., warned Rains, and yet the facility remained essentially unguarded. “The extreme value of the city of Augusta, including the Government works, to the Confederacy is so apparent that it does not require that I should draw attention thereto.” The upset officer continued that he had frequently, “drawn the attention of the War Department to the defenseless condition of this city and have exerted myself in every possible way…without success.” Rains went on to presciently point out that the enemy “has seen the error of operating on the extremities, and are now prepared to strike at the vital organs” in Georgia. The loss of Augusta, he schooled Seddon (and by extension, President Jefferson Davis), “would be fatal to the Confederacy.” When local men refused to organize because they could be called up for service away from Augusta, Rains pleaded once more with the war secretary to exempt the militia from Confederate service. This time Seddon agreed. Rains organized 20 local companies by the end of the year. Most of the men, however, were government clerks, the old and the young, and others unfit for frontline service. Augusta remained essentially defenseless as the calendar slipped into 1864. Other problems mounted. The Army of Tennessee lost a great amount of ordnance during its rout on Chattanooga’s Missionary Ridge in November 1863. Rains supplied that battered army with many complete artillery batteries, hundreds of thousands of artillery and small arms rounds, and tons of gunpowder. Without Rains’ effort, the Army of Tennessee would

RARE SIGHT The Clinch Rifles form up on the Augusta Arsenal’s parade ground in 1861. The unit was soon formed into the 5th Georgia, and sent to serve with the Army of Tennessee. Arsenal commander Colonel George Rains unsuccessfully begged for such protection throughout the war.

not have been able to resist the coming Union spring offensive into Georgia. That offensive began in early May 1864 when Sherman moved his army group in northern Georgia against General Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee. Two days earlier, the Army of the Potomac pushed across the Rapidan River in central Virginia and engaged Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the Wilderness. The dual thrusts, with other associated movements, triggered a nearly ceaseless series of engagements that would not end until the Confederacy’s final surrender. After a bitter summer of fighting, Atlanta fell on September 2. Its capture sent a tidal wave of panic gushing 130 miles eastward to engulf Augusta. Sherman was well aware of Augusta’s importance to the Confederate war effort and on September 20 he wrote Grant that Augusta housed “the only powder-mills and factories remaining in the South.” It seemed to be only a matter of time before he paid the city a visit. Rains meanwhile was frantically trying to replace Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood’s ordnance train that was destroyed at Atlanta. Rains employed women at the Augusta Arsenal to make up for a shortfall of male workers, and turned out 75,000 cartridges a day—in addition to tons of gunpowder, thousands of artillery shells, hand grenades, and other desperately needed items. While Rains toiled, Sherman planned. The Union commander put the torch to Atlanta on November 15 and, with four infantry corps and a large division of veteran cavalry, marched east across a broad front into the bowels of the state. Several important munitions centers, including Augusta and Macon, were now within easy reach. The exterior wings of Sherman’s command could have taken or destroyed both cities with ease. Rains and other Confederate authorities had no way of knowing that Sherman would feint at Macon and Augusta to divide the paltry number of Rebel soldiers available to oppose him, and then drive through the yawning gap to link up with the Union Navy at Savannah. That decision was the biggest strategic mistake of his career, and he would repeat the same mistake under nearly the exact same circumstances three months later.

The consequences would lengthen the war by months and increase the casualty lists by many tens of thousands of men. When Sherman left Atlanta, Augusta remained unprepared to meet the Union threat. The city’s light earthen defenses remained inadequate and unfinished, and they were so ineptly designed that they would not have saved the powder works even had they been fully manned. Few soldiers, however, were available to defend Augusta. Troops of all stripes were being rushed to the city, but by November 20 only 2,000 “locals and convalescents” were present. Augusta’s military commander, Brig. Gen. Birkett Fry, sent a disquieting telegram to Richmond two days later: “I can as yet count only 4,000 for defense here.” He ended his message with the pessimistic observation that the “people show little spirit.” Very few of Fry’s men were veteran frontline troops. Now in a panic, Richmond scrambled to act. The War Department cast a wide net in search of generals, including Braxton Bragg, William Hardee, and Richard Taylor. Davis ordered these men and others to report to Augusta. Veteran infantry, artillery, and cavalry were required, however, not a cabal of squabbling mediocrities and hand-wringing politicians issuing proclamations and prayers. The odds of mustering a successful defense of the city had already passed. AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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MISSED CHANCE Sherman’s chief engineer Brig. Gen. Orlando Poe drew this map of the March to the Sea. The three red lines indicate the routes the Federal armies took, well south of Augusta.

The very real threat of losing the Confederacy’s only reliable source of gunpowder left Rains with two very unattractive alternatives: remain in Augusta or move the mills. Staying put seemed to guarantee the powder works’ destruction. Moving, however, required finding another suitable location not in the path of a roving Union army or a column of cavalry—which was probably impossible at this late date. Rains also had to consider the mill’s delicate and irreplaceable equipment. Southern railroads were notorious for misplacing and damaging machinery. Even if such a move was successful, the entire works would have to be reassembled—a process that would take weeks if it could be done at all. Rains made the decision to mobilize all of his workers for a gargantuan assignment: the dismantling of the Augusta Powder Works and the transfer of its vital machinery via the South Carolina Railroad over the Savannah River to Columbia, S.C. While Rains organized for the move, he also worked to produce as much saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal (the three ingredients of gunpowder) as possible before the evacuation. The disassembling of the machinery began on November 21. Within just a few days the crucial components were inside railcars in Columbia. To the Confederate’s astonishment, Sherman bypassed Augusta and reached the outskirts of Savannah on December 10. Rains and his crew quickly returned to Augusta and began to

REBELLIOUS BULLETS Two of the thousands of cartridge packs assembled at the Augusta Arsenal.

unload and reassemble the machinery. Despite their best efforts, production did not begin again until Augusta had been offline for 34 critical days. Two months later in February 1865 Sherman repeated his error, marching into the Carolinas while once more using two cities—this time Augusta and Charleston, S.C.—to divide meager Confederate forces and march between them. Sherman had again avoided Augusta and tramped northward. The puzzled Rains had spent a few days tearing down equipment, but when he realized Sherman had no intention of visiting, he put it back together a second time.

F

ew historians have seriously questioned Sherman’s strategic decisions from midsummer 1864 through February 1865. Fewer still have deeply researched just what was at stake during the Atlanta Campaign, the March to the Sea, and during the early days of Sherman’s 1865 Carolinas Campaign. Augusta is rarely mentioned in books and articles, and the existence and importance of the powder mills and arsenal are almost never discussed—even in passing. There is no evidence that Sherman’s biographers or authors who have written on his 1864-65 campaigns grasp what Augusta meant to the Confederacy. Nor is there proof they have even cast a glance at Augusta’s voluminous ordnance records, let alone extrapolate their meaning to the war at large to properly judge the consequences of Sherman’s decision-making. After the war, Sherman took some criticism about his failure to destroy Augusta, and he defended himself by claiming that he didn’t want to get bogged down in a fight there. Besides, he argued, there was no need to take Augusta when he left Atlanta because he intended to destroy the railroads Rains needed to ship his gunpowder. Sherman’s casual rebuttal is not only untrue but illogical. First, the destruction of Augusta was well within the objective of Sherman’s orders. A month before the opening of the Atlanta Campaign, Grant wrote to his western general: “You I propose to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources [emphasis added].” Most historians ignore that final highlighted clause. Grant also gave Sherman carte blanche as to how to conduct his operations: “I do not propose to lay down for you a plan of campaign, but simply to lay down the work it is desirable to have done, and leave you free to execute it in your own way [emphasis added].”

Second, Augusta was within Sherman’s reach for some eight months, from summer 1864 through February 1865, while the city was largely undefended with virtually no garrison and few earthworks and forts. The city was just 130 miles east of Atlanta and linked by rail. Sherman was aware of the wide-ranging cavalry thrusts. He ordered one of his own in late July 1864 when he tasked Maj. Gen. George Stoneman to ride around Atlanta, wreck the Macon Railroad, and cut off the city. Stoneman didn’t follow orders and met defeat near Macon—but covered more than 100 miles. By mid-July the Confederate Army of Tennessee was pinned against Atlanta. Knowing Augusta’s fundamental value, why didn’t Sherman detach a mixed-arms strike force and end the war by destroying the powder works? Sherman didn’t even try to use the resources at his disposal to destroy the South’s sole-source gunpowder-producing city, and no record exists that he (or Grant or President Lincoln, for that matter) ever gave it serious consideration. Indeed, Sherman casually dismissed the effort in his memoir: “I had long before made up my mind to waste no time on either [Macon or Augusta].” He went on to make the nonsensical argument that when he left Savannah to march north in early 1865, he again bypassed Augusta because “The enemy occupied the cities of Charleston and Augusta, with garrisons capable of making a respectable if not successful defense.” Sherman seems to have thought it made more sense to expend his efforts from May to September 1864 directly fighting a formidable Confederate army across more than 100 miles of difficult terrain in the hope of capturing the heavily defended and fortified city of Atlanta. Instead he could have launched a faster offensive to Augusta with minimal interference. Third, contrary to his postwar boast, Sherman had no idea when he set out on the March to the Sea in November 1864 that he would be in a position three months later to cut the railroads feeding Augusta. Sherman intended to board ships in Savannah and sail for Virginia! It was not until the Union general was on the coast, and only after a lengthy discussion with Grant, that the plan was settled on to march through the Carolinas. It was only then that the vital railroads leading to the war’s last major battlefields were finally (and sometimes temporarily) cut. Augusta’s central location required the clipping of every line on all points of the compass, and the garrisoning of troops along those broken lines, in order to blockade Rains’ mills effectively. Sherman could not have known exactly where he would be months in advance, and he never developed a plan to isolate Augusta until at least early 1865, if even then. Finally, the day-to-day ordnance records kept from summer 1864 through April 1865 record in painstaking detail that Rains continued to produce and ship gunpowder and other munitions across the South. Rains organized work parties to repair destroyed rail lines, and he reconnected sizable portions of the crucial network west and south of Augusta with repaired rails and wagon routes. The enterprising officer also used wagons to bypass destroyed sections of track. Rains’ efforts kept the Confederate armies in the field and made possible every major battle fought from the fall of 1864 through the end of the war east of the Mississippi River. During this period Rains shipped nearly 100,000 pounds of gunpowder to Richmond where Lee’s besieged army was fighting for its life. The last recorded monthly shipment was as late as January 1865. More Augusta powder almost surely reached Richmond from before and after that date, but those records have been lost. Lee was able to fight to hold Richmond and Petersburg for as long as he did, and then scratch his way west to Appomattox, because Sherman left Augusta standing after July 1864. Some 400,000 pounds of gunpowder were dispatched to other points in the Confederacy during this period, including North Carolina. The powder and some of the munitions used to defend Wilmington at Fort Fisher, for example, and the powder that made possible the Confederate resistance

BUREAUCRAT C.S.A. Secretary of War James Seddon failed to protect Augusta.

in the Carolinas under General Johnston, were shipped from Augusta to those locations long after Sherman could have destroyed the mills.

S

herman’s decision to leave Augusta standing from July through September 1864 was, at best, a strategic oversight. His decision to ignore Augusta a second time as he marched without serious opposition for Savannah, however, must be categorized as an egregious eyeswide-open blunder. His decision to repeat that grand mistake during the last February of the conflict is simply inexplicable. Sherman’s choices lengthened the Civil War and resulted in the deaths and maiming of untold numbers of men on both sides as surely as it extended the suffering of civilians. In light of Sherman’s orders, the importance of Augusta, and the existence of the powder mill’s ordnance records, it is time to reevaluate the true impact of Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign, his March to the Sea, and the early days of his Carolinas operations on the course of the war.



Both this and the June 2017 article on the powder works are adapted from, Never for Want of Powder: The Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia, co-authored by Ted Savas. AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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STONEWALL’S GREATEST JOY  CRUEL WAR ALLOWED THE CONFEDERATE GENERAL ONLY

TWO CHANCES TO SEE HIS BELOVED DAUGHTER

BY CHRIS MACKOWSKI

E

ven as Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson supervised the movement of his Second Corps from the Shenandoah Valley toward Fredericksburg, Va., in late November 1862, his mind was far away, in Charlotte, N.C., where his wife, Mary Anna, was due to give birth any day. Although he did his best to keep his emotions hidden, the famously reserved Confederate commander was particularly anxious because he and Mary Anna had lost one child already—a daughter, Mary Graham, who died of jaundice in May 1858 after only three weeks. Adding to his angst, his first wife, Ellie Junkin, had died during childbirth back in 1854, along with their stillborn son. Jackson had asked Mary Anna not to telegraph him news about the birth, telling her, “It is a joy with which no stranger should intermeddle.” While the devout general waited for a letter bearing good news, he prayed fervently for the well-being of his wife and unborn child.

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SAD FICTION This lithograph was cobbled together from separate images of “Stonewall” Jackson, his wife Mary Anna, and their daughter Julia to create a scene that the general never had the chance to enjoy. He died when his daughter was still an infant.

A

bout November 28, with Jackson’s Corps somewhere between Gordonsville and Orange, news finally arrived. His sisterin-law, Harriet Irwin, informed him that Mary Anna had given birth to a daughter, and that both mother and baby were well. A longer letter arrived shortly thereafter, again written by Harriet. The letter’s salutation, however, suggested a different author: My own dear Father, As my mother’s letter has been cut short by my arrival, I think it but justice that I should continue it. I know you are rejoiced to hear of my coming, and I hope that God has sent me to radiate your pathway through life. I am a very tiny little thing. I weight only eight and a half pounds, and Aunt Harriet says I am the express image of my darling papa…and this greatly delights my mother. My aunts both say I am a little beauty. My hair is dark and long, my eyes are blue, my nose straight just like paper’s and my complexion not all red like most young ladies of my age, but a beautiful blending of the lily and the rose.

According to the letter, Mary Anna had come through the delivery well, and was resting comfortably. But, Jackson would be informed, “She is anxious to have my name decided upon, and hopes you will write and give me a name, with your blessing.”

J

ackson had originally hoped for a son, because, as Mary Anna later explained, he believed “men had a larger sphere of usefulness than women.” But, according to Mary Anna, he abruptly changed his mind: “[H]e said he preferred having a daughter, since God had ordained it.” Jackson left no doubt in a letter to mother and daughter, writing that “he loves her better than all the baby-boys in the world, and more than all the other babies in the world.” He named his daughter Julia, in honor of his mother. “My mother was attentive to me when I was a helpless, fatherless child,” he told Mary Anna, “and I wish to commemorate her now.” Jackson’s youth had been wrought with family tragedy. In 1826, when Jackson was two years old, he lost both his father and his older sister Elizabeth to typhoid fever, and in 1841 his older brother Warren died of tuberculosis. In 1830, Jackson’s mother remarried, but she would die a year later, two months after giving birth to a son, William Wirt Woodson. Jackson and his halfbrother would eventually become estranged. At the time of his mother’s death, Jackson and his little sister, Laura—two years his junior— were being cared for by their father’s brothers in Weston, Va. (modern-day West Virginia). That environment, however, was not appropriate for a

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JACKSON HAD ORIGINALLY



HOPED FOR A SON

young lady, so Laura was soon sent to live with family in Parkersburg. Jackson’s strong bond with his beloved younger sister would gradually diminish, and when the Civil War began, Laura—a staunch Unionist—stopped talking to her brother altogether when he sided with the Confederacy. Jackson nevertheless gave his new daughter the middle name “Laura” in honor of his sister. (Later in life, Julia would change her own middle name to “Thomas” in honor of her father.) Because of repeated losses in Jackson’s family during his life, it is perhaps little wonder he wanted a family of his own probably more than anything else. Surely, word of Julia’s healthy birth was the sort of news for which he had long prayed. Mary Anna later noted that her husband received it “as if his heart trembled at the very thought of so much happiness.” And yet he shared the news with no one. “[H]e kept the glad tidings to himself,” Mary Anna recalled, “leaving his staff and those around him in camp to hear of it through others.” A month passed before they even knew, in fact. To share the joy, Jackson feared, would be to risk calamity. Although a devout Presbyterian, he was at heart a good old-fashioned Calvinist who believed in a jealous and angry God. Jackson believed he had lost his first wife and child, as well as his and Mary Anna’s first daughter, because he had loved them too much and that God had responded by taking them away in piques of jealousy. “We are sometimes suffered to be in a state of perplexity, that our faith may be tried and grow strong,” he once said, trying to make sense of the tragedy in his life and come to grips with his grief. In the spring of 1857, Mary Anna’s sister, Isabella, and brother-inlaw, future Confederate General Daniel Harvey Hill, lost a son. Jackson revealed he was “not surprised” the child had been “taken away” by God. “I have long regarded [D.H. Hill’s] attachment to him as too strong,” he confided in a letter to Mary Anna; “that is, so strong that he would be unwilling to give him up, though God should call for his own.” Jackson was quick to caution Mary Anna about their own child: “Do not set your affections upon her, except as a gift of God. If she absorbs too much of our hearts, God may remove her from us.” Keenly aware that things in Charlotte could have gone far differently, Jackson did not want to risk upsetting the outcome. “I fear I am not grateful enough for unnumbered blessings,” he worried in a subsequent letter. As 1862 stretched into 1863 and winter deepened, Jackson’s responsibilities kept him at the front. “[I]t is important that I, and those at headquarters, should set an example of remaining at the post of duty,” he explained. Yet he longed to see Mary Anna and especially Julia. “I haven’t seen my wife since last March, and, never having seen my child, you can imagine with what interest I look to North Carolina,” he wrote. In another letter he expressed how much he would “love to see the little darling, whom I love so tenderly, though I have never seen her; and if the war were only over, I tell you, I would hurry down to North Carolina to see my wife and baby.” He playfully suggested on another occasion that, since he couldn’t make it south, maybe Julia could come to him. “Can’t you send her by express?” he asked in good humor. “There is an express line all the way to Guiney’s [Guinea Station].” Despite the separation, his frequent letters reflected attempts to parent from afar. “I am grateful at hearing that you have commenced disciplining

FRIENDLY FIRE A crop from a postwar print portrays the moment Jackson was accidentally wounded by members of the 18th North Carolina Infantry on May 2, 1863. Jackson’s left arm was amputated, but he died from pneumonia on May 10. the baby,” he told Mary Anna. “Now be careful and don’t let her conquer you. She must not be permitted to have that will of her own.” Nevertheless, he could not keep himself from doting any more than Mary Anna could—though it continually weighed on his mind. “I am sometimes afraid that you will make such an idol of that baby that God will take her from us,” he would confide to her. “Are you not afraid of it?” In March, they suffered a near-miss. Julia, only four months old, contracted a severe case of chicken pox. Jackson enlisted advice from his own doctor, Hunter Holmes McGuire, which he sent to Mary Anna by letter. “I do wish that dear child, if it is God’s will, to be spared to use,” Jackson added.

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bout this time, Jackson experienced another tragic reminder of the precariousness of young life. During the winter he had grown close to the Corbin family, on whose estate, Moss Neck, he encamped. In particular, the family’s 6-year-old daughter, Janie, took a shine to the general, and she often appeared in his office for play dates. They would frolic on the floor or she would cut out paper dolls, which she called her “Stonewall Brigade.” Jackson, in turn, kept treats in his desk for her. “She was the General’s delight,” a staff officer noted. However, on March 17, just a day after Jackson relocated his headquarters, word arrived that Janie and two of her cousins had died of scarlet fever. Jackson wept openly at the news, then threw himself into fervent prayer. Their early deaths weighed on his mind as he thought of his own daughter hundreds of miles away. Jackson finally had the opportunity to unite with his family on April

20, 1863. Mary Anna and Julia traveled by train from Charlotte to Richmond, then north to the Confederate railhead at Guinea Station, a dozen miles south of Fredericksburg. Awaiting their arrival, Jackson stood on the train platform in a heavy rain, wrapped in his India rubber raincoat. When the locomotive chugged to a stop, he stepped aboard to meet his daughter for the first time. “[H]is rubber overcoat was dripping from the rain which was falling, but his face was all sunshine and gladness,” Mary Anna recalled; “and after greeting his wife, it was a picture, indeed, to see his look of perfect delight and admiration as his eyes fell upon that baby!” “I never saw him look so well,” she continued. “He seemed to be in excellent health & looked handsomer than I had ever seen him, & and then he was so full of happiness at having us with him & seeing & caressing his sweet babe, that I thought we had never been so blest & happy in our lives.” Mary Anna offered to let her husband hold the baby, but “[h]e was afraid to take her in his arms, with his wet overcoat.” Instead, as they stepped off the train together, Jackson held an umbrella over his wife and child as they walked to his waiting carriage, his eyes fixed the entire time on his tiny daughter. Around them, Confederate soldiers at the depot “cheered them loudly when they saw her and him together,” one of Jackson’s staff members recalled. The next nine days were the happiest of Jackson’s life. He, Mary Anna, and Julia finally had the opportunity to be a family. “To a man of his domesticity and love for children this was a crowning happiness,” Mary Anna said. While official duties kept Jackson busy, he devoted as much time as he could to his wife and daughter, “little Julia sharing his chief attention and care.” People remarked on Jackson’s devotion to her—a “happy pair together.” They even performed Julia’s baptism, with General Robert E. Lee among the attendees. The family’s visit, according to staff officer Henry Kyd Douglas, “begat more or less social gayety and everybody called on Mrs. Jackson and little Miss Stonewall. Troops would be brought near for parade and review, and the baby would be carried to where they could get a view of her.”

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espite his often-reserved public persona, Jackson usually was playful with children—such as Janie Corbin—during the war. He didn’t, however, seem to know quite how to handle a child of only five months. “The General took her in his arms and began playing with her—which I confess he did rather awkwardly and as if quite unused to the occupation,” recounted an amused Raleigh Colston, one of AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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DADDY’S GIRL Julia Jackson as a baby, left. In two 1881 photos, center and right, she wears Confederate badges and a brooch with her father’s image.

Jackson’s division commanders, after calling on the family one afternoon. When Julia cried to be lifted from her crib, Jackson tried to break her of the habit by leaving her there until she stopped. “So there she lay, kicking and screaming, while he stood over her with as much coolness and determination as if her were directing a battle,” Mary Anna recalled; “and he was true to the name of Stonewall, even in disciplining a baby!” When Julia stopped crying, Jackson held her, and if she began to cry again, he would lay her back down. “[T]his he kept us,” Mary Anna later said, “until finally she was completely conquered, and became perfectly quiet in his hands.” All in all, Henry Kyd Douglas would attest, “the General was the model of a quiet, wellbehaved first father.” On April 29, the Union Army of the Potomac rumbled to life near Chancellorsville, Va., and word arrived at Jackson’s headquarters that he was needed to help plan the Confederate response. With “a tender and hasty good-by,” he bundled his family onto a train to Richmond, where Mary Anna stayed with friends as they awaited news from the front. By the evening of May 3, however, it was rumor rather than news that arrived: Something terrible had happened to her husband on the battlefield. 40

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JACKSON HAD WANTED NOTHING MORE IN LIFE THAN



TO BE A FATHER

On the evening of May 5, Mary Anna’s brother, Thomas Morrison, who served as an aide on Jackson’s staff, arrived disheveled at the door. After a harrowing trip south, he had come to collect his sister and escort her north. Her husband had lost an arm during the battle, and while the initial prognosis suggested a favorable recovery, Morrison indicated that she was needed by her husband’s sickbed. Once more, Mary Anna and Julia boarded the northbound train to Guinea Station. At the Confederate railhead, she found her husband convalescing at an adjacent plantation, awaiting transport back to the hospitals in the capital. His condition had deteriorated, however, making him too weak to travel—though he did seem to rally at his family’s arrival. “The general’s joy at the presence of his wife and child was very great, and for him, unusually demonstrative,” McGuire noted. Mary Anna stayed by Jackson’s side, leaving only to nurse Julia, who was otherwise tended by Mary Anna’s servant, Hetty, and family friend Susan Hoge. “Thinking it would cheer him more than anything else to see the baby in whom he had so delighted, I proposed several times to bring her to his bedside,” Mary Anna said—but her husband demurred. He did not

STILL ON DUTY General Jackson’s statue keeps watch over the Jackson family plot in the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery in Lexington, Va.

want the baby to see her father in such a state. “Not yet,” he said. “Wait till I feel better.” But by the morning of Sunday, May 10, doctors had become convinced that Jackson would not survive the day. At last, he relented and allowed Mary Anna to bring the baby to him. “[A]lthough he had almost ceased to notice anything,” she recalled, “as soon as they entered the door he looked up, his countenance brightened with delight, and he never smiled more sweetly as he exclaimed, ‘Little darling! Sweet one!’” Mary Anna placed Julia on the bedside next to her dying father, noting that Jackson watched her “with radiant smiles” for a few moments. McGuire later remarked on how Jackson played with the baby, “frequently caressing it, and calling it ‘my little comforter.’” Finally Jackson raised his wounded right hand—which also was struck during the friendly fire incident that had cost him his left arm eight days earlier—over Julia’s head. With closed eyes, he “was for some moments, silently engaged in prayer.” Thomas Jonathan Jackson had wanted to be a father for most of his life, and unfortunately had had a chance to see his daughter only twice— once for a nine-day stretch in late April when she was five months old and once on his deathbed, just hours before he passed away. Shortly after seeing his daughter that final time, he slipped into delirium for good. After shouting out disjointed battle commands (“Order A.P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly! Tell Major Hawks...”), Jackson relaxed and offered in a calm voice, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” With that, the 39-year-old general died.

J

ulia outlived her father by only 25 years. After a childhood as the “Orphan of the Confederacy”—the daughter of a martyred hero— she had the opportunity as a young bride to move to California with her new husband, William Edmund Christian. Eventually growing home-

sick, she wrote to her mother for permission to return. But the day she stepped off the train in Richmond—August 28, 1889—a typhoid epidemic was sweeping through the capital. Julia contracted the disease and died within two days, a few months short of her 27th birthday. Julia left behind a daughter and a son, Julia Jackson Christian and Thomas Jonathan Jackson Christian, whom Mary Anna raised. As the “Widow of the Confederacy,” Mrs. Jackson lived until 1915. Mary Anna and Julia are both buried with Thomas Jonathan in Stonewall Jackson Cemetery in Lexington, Va., their adopted hometown. They now rest together in a memorial plot at the foot of a granite obelisk topped by a bronze statue of Jackson—reunited as a family once more.



Chris Mackowski is a writing professor at St. Bonaventure University and editor-in-chief of the blog emergingcivilwar.com. He is the author of a number of books on the Civil War, including The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson: The Mortal Wounding of the Confederacy’s Greatest Icon, co-authored with Kristopher D. White. AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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BATTLE FIELD OF NEW HOPE CHURCH, GA. 1866 GEORGE N. BARNARD



George Barnard, a daguerreotypist who had worked for Mathew Brady, did not shy away from capturing the difficult aftermath of the war in his landscape photography. The broken earth and felled trees left behind by Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign convey the melancholy that hung over the South long after the war ended.

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W AR AS LANDSCAPE



LUSH PHOTOGRAPHS PROVIDE   A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THE CONFLICT BY KIM O ’CO N N ELL

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East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., through July 16, 2017 New Orleans Museum of Art, October 5, 2017 - January 7, 2018

A

STEAMER PRINCESS 1858-59 JAY DEARBORN EDWARDS



Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, Civil War photographers brought the war home and opened people’s eyes to its realities. This new exhibit—called East of the Mississippi—puts Civil War-era photography into the broader context of the American landscape. Through daguerreotypes, albumen prints, cyanotypes, stereographs, and other methods, early photographers captured the growing country in all its lush abundance—including terrain, machinery, technology, and industry. Although later imagery of the American West would gain wider attention and acclaim (consider the large-scale paintings of Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt) this exhibit illustrates how images of the Eastern United States were essential to American place-making, documenting a pivotal century as it unfolded. Given what we know about the Civil War as both catalyst and crucible, it should come as no surprise that the wartime images are among the most powerful in the collection. Note: Except for the Steamer Princess, which was printed on salted paper, all the photographs in this portfolio are albumen prints. The methods are similar in that they employ a combination of sodium chloride and silver nitrate in the development process, but the addition of albumen from egg whites creates a slightly glossier finish.

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B A

Just as steam powered the Steamer Princess as it traveled up and down the Mississippi River, cotton powered the economy of the South. Between 1858 and 1861, Jay Dearborn Edwards made a series of photographs of New Orleans that capture the bustle of the port city’s levees and docks. His works are among the earliest extant paper prints of that city. What this photograph leaves unsaid is the slave labor that resulted in those piles of cotton bales in the foreground.

MILITARY BRIDGE, ACROSS THE CHICKAHOMINY 1862 DAVID B. WOODBURY



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The title of this photograph and its subject are at immediate odds; although this is a military bridge meant for the movement of materiel and men, the image is one of tranquility, repose, and reflection. After the war, Alexander Gardner would choose this image as one of 100 that would be published together as Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, in which Gardner’s accompanying text often emphasized the beauty of the surroundings.

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C

The expansion of the railroad system was one of the most transformative developments of the 19th century, growing up alongside the burgeoning field of photography. Although James F. Ryder had been commissioned by the Atlantic & Great Western Railway to photograph its expanding business, in this photo at least, it’s not the company, the train, or its cargo that matters, as they are not shown. Rather, it’s the railroad track itself that Ryder captures in all its elegant simplicity, signaling the path forward for the nation.

D

This bridge over the Potomac River was an essential connection between the Union capital of Washington, D.C., and Confederate Virginia. A captain in the Union Army, Andrew Russell developed hundreds of infrastructure photographs for Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, honing his eye for perspective and composition. With the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal keeping course alongside the river, this photo offers a window into the topography and industry of the nation’s capital.

E

The simplicity of Russell’s photograph of government hay barns belies its importance, since these utilitarian storage areas (and many others like them) were part of the Union’s vast and vital supply network for the war. Yet even in such a utilitarian image, Russell has carefully composed the shot—striking a stark visual balance between the building and track on the left and the barns on the right.

C ATLANTIC & GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY 1862 JAMES RYDER



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D AQUEDUCT BRIDGE, GEORGETOWN 1863-65 ANDREW J. RUSSELL



E GOVERNMENT HAY BARNS 1863 ANDREW J. RUSSELL



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F LULAH FALLS, LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA 1863-65 ISAAC H. BONSALL



F

Like Andrew Russell, Isaac Bonsall was a government-hired photographer who trained his camera on soldiers, camps, bridges and the like. But he also took time around Lookout Mountain to photograph the stunning falls at Lulah Lake (now more often spelled Lula Lake), capturing a rare moment of leisure for a group of Union soldiers.

G

For 19th century artists steeped in the painting tradition, photography often represented a natural progression. John Moran, the brother of landscape painter Thomas Moran, brought an artistic eye to his photography, helping to elevate the form. During the Civil War, he made several photographs of the famed Mower Army Hospital in Philadelphia, whose elliptical design lent itself to interesting geometric photography.

H

Joel Whitney was a daguerreotypist who turned his attention to landscape photography before the outbreak of war. Fort Snelling in St. Paul, Minn., was a frequent subject as he made his rounds along the Mississippi River and in the Midwest. The fort had served as a detention center during the bloody Dakota Uprising of 1862, which ended in the largest mass execution in American history. Here, Whitney has composed a far more serene image, with the man on the stone wall alone in his contemplation, a metaphor for all of us who look back on the war.

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G FROM THE OBSERVATORY LOOKING SOUTHWEST, MOWER ARMY HOSPITAL 1863 JOHN MORAN



H FORT SNELLING 1865 JOEL E. WHITNEY



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HIGH BRIDGE CROSSING THE APPOMATTOX, NEAR FARMVILLE, ON SOUTH SIDE RAILROAD, VIRGINIA 1865 TIMOTHY O’SULLIVAN



Because of their powerful geometries and vanishing points, and their capacity for instant metaphor, bridges make desirable photography subjects. This is particularly true in wartime. Before renowned Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan captured this photograph at the end of the war, the Confederates had attempted to burn down this bridge, but it remained standing. By the time O’Sullivan took the picture, it had been repaired like the nation itself, a bridge between the past and the future.

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The war in their words



A MAINE ARTILLERYMAN DESCRIBES HIS JULY 1, 1863 GETTYSBURG WOUNDING

 BY TOM HUNTINGTON  hen Charles O. Hunt, a lieutenant in Captain Greenlief Stevens’ 5th Maine Light Artillery, marched into Gettysburg, Pa., with the Army of the Potomac’s 1st Corps in the summer of 1863, it must have felt like a homecoming. Hunt was from Gorham, Maine, but after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1861 he had spent time in Gettysburg visiting his sister, Mary Carson. From September through the end of 1861, Hunt stayed in the Pennsylvania crossroads town with Mary and her husband, Thomas, a clerk for the Bank of Gettysburg on York Street. Hunt contemplated his future as he became familiar with the town and the surrounding countryside. He hiked the Round Tops, rode across the yet-to-be-bloodstained Wheatfield, and collected hickory nuts on Culp’s Hill. Hunt’s contemplations led him to decide to fight for the Union, and he returned to his home state and joined the 5th Maine Artillery, then under the command of George Leppien, a Pennsylvanian who had received military training in Germany. On December 16, 1861, Hunt was promoted to quartermaster sergeant of the battery. After Leppien was mortally wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 52

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1863, Stevens was promoted to captain and took command of the battery; Hunt was promoted to 2nd lieutenant. He was one of three lieutenants in the 5th Maine, each responsible for a section, or two cannons, of the six 12-pounder Napoleons that made up the battery. As the 5th Maine marched north to Pennsylvania on July 1, Hunt joked to Stevens that if he were to get hit, he hoped it would happen in Gettysburg, as he knew the people there would take good care of him. The Maine gunners were quickly sent to Seminary Ridge after reaching Gettysburg and deployed in two locations. One was on a ridge just south of the Chambersburg Pike in the vicinity of the C.P. Kranth house. Stevens’ battery was heavily engaged at that point, with Brig. Gen. Alfred Scales’ North Carolinians having the misfortune of charging against the belching muzzles of the 5th Maine’s Napoleons. The Pine Tree State artillerymen lobbed case shot and then blasted 57 rounds of canister at the Tar Heel mob struggling toward the western face of Seminary Ridge, and Scales noted in his official report that his brigade weathered a “most terrific fire of…grape…in our front. Every discharge made sad havoc in our line….” Scales’ Brigade suffered 545 casualties during the attack.

FIRST JOB Charles O. Hunt, a few months out of Bowdoin College, poses in the uniform of his first true employer: the Union Army. Hunt wears quartermaster sergeant chevrons, his rank in the 5th Maine Light Artillery until he was promoted to 2nd lieutenant.

s the battle continued to roar and their guns continued to deal out destruction, Hunt and the rest of the 5th Maine’s gunners had a hard time seeing the enemy approach through a thick layer of gunsmoke that had settled into the swale at the western foot of Seminary Ridge. That literal fog of war caused Hunt to move forward for a better look, and a Rebel bullet found the lieutenant just after he returned to his guns, as he described in the following account.

On July 1st,

at an early hour, we marched with the rest of the 1st Corps towards Gettysburg. [Brig. Gen. John] Buford, with his cavalry, was having an unequal fight with the enemy’s advance, and [Maj. Gen. John] Reynolds hurried the 1st Corps up to his relief. As we approached Gettysburg we turned off from the Emmittsburg road to the left towards the Seminary ridge. At first we went into position some distance south of the Seminary buildings but we were not engaged at this place. Later we were moved to the North side of the seminary buildings. By the time we were in position the enemy were coming over the ridge which runs parallel with the Seminary ridge. We opened with case shot at first, firing over our Infantry who were in front of us on lower ground. As they fell back to the line of the guns we used canister. While we were using case shot I found it very difficult, on account of the smoke, to see whether they were exploding in the right place. To get out of the smoke, I climbed over a fence at the left of my section and went behind the house. I remember very well the sound of the bullets on the brick house, reminding me of a shower of hail on the roof. Soon after I returned to my position with my section, I was wounded in the upper part of the right thigh. I did not at first realize what had happened. I felt a sharp sting, as if I had been struck a slight blow with a light cane. On looking down I saw a jagged hole in my pistol holster, which was on my belt. On trying my leg I found, to satisfaction, that the bone was not broken. Feeling that the wound was too serious to admit of my doing any further service in that fight, I limped to the capt. and reported, and asked permission to go to town to see my sister while I was able to do so. In the morning, before going into action, I had remarked jokingly to the capt. that if I was ever going to be hit I hoped that it would come there, for I would be sure of being well taken care of. So my wish was granted. With help I was able to mount my horse and I rode slowly into town. Even then the enemy’s shells were beginning to rake the road, and the ride

UNLUCKY SHOT Lieutenant Hunt carried some type of “Colt’s revolver,” and this Colt Army model illustrates the “iron rammer” visible under the barrel that a bullet shattered and drove into his wound like shrapnel. 54

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was anything but a pleasant one. On my arrival at Mary’s, I think Tom and Dr. Charles Herner were at the door, and I found that the rest of the family, with many neighbors had sought shelter from the enemy’s shells in the bank vault. The bank adjoined the house, with a private door from the hall for the convenience of the cashier. Some time before this a recently spent shell had come in through an attic window and, after going through the stairs, had dropped down the well of the staircase to the front hall. This had frightened them not a little and had caused their retreat to the vault. The contents had been sent to Philadelphia when it was found that Lee was to invade Pennsylvania. I believe there were nineteen women and children and two dogs in the vault when I arrived. Soon after this our lines fell back, retreating through the town towards Cemetery Hill. While they were passing through the town, the

enemy’s shells came down the streets and overhead in great numbers. There was much excitement among the occupants of our house. The women and children went to the vault, and for my safety they carried a mattress to the cellar and I lay there for some time. While I was there the rebels occupied the town and, soldier-like, the first thing they thought of was something to eat. Through a crack in the door, I saw two Rebs come into the back cellar and strip the pantry of everything eatable. I did not care to remonstrate. But in a very short time the town was quiet and my friends came out of their hiding place and soon had me put to bed in the front chamber where Dr. Herner dressed my wound. When I had first arrived he had recovered with his fingers a flattened ball from the superficial part of the wound. But on probing he found that there was something more there, which, on extraction, proved to be about an inch and a quarter of the

iron rammer of my Colt’s revolver. The ball had struck the pistol between the barrel and the rammer, knocking out this portion of the latter and bending the barrel (this pistol is one of my relics). On account of this piece of rammer being driven into my thigh, the wound was a large and jagged one. While the doctor was engaged in dressing the wound, two Rebel officers came into the house. Mary saw them coming up the stairs. They asked her if there were any soldiers in the house. Mary, with many misgivings, had to confess that she had a brother there. They said they were sorry, but they would have to take him. Then she mentioned the fact of my being wounded. This altered the case, and they said they wanted to see me. So Mary brought them into the chamber. They were very courteous and expressed regret for my hurt. One of them said to the other, “Had we not better parole

DAY 2 By the time Alfred Waud sketched the 5th Maine Battery firing into Confederate assaults on Cemetery Hill on July 2, 1863, Hunt was lying wounded in his sister’s downtown Gettysburg house.

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BLOODY OPENING The fighting on July 1, 1863, is often overshadowed by the drama of the Battle of Gettysburg’s last two days, but the combat was hellacious in its own right. Of about 23,500 Union troops engaged, there were nearly 9,000 casualties. The Confederates suffered about 6,000 casualties out of 28,300 men. The 5th Maine Battery spent most of July 1 just south of the Chambersburg Pike. 56

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him?” To which the reply was, “We can do that some other time. There will be plenty of time.” From which I judged that they thought they had come to stay. On leaving they said to Mary “Take good care of your brother and don’t let him fight us any more.” Mary replied that she would take good care of me but she could not promise as to the rest of it. This first night I spent in the front chamber. There was an occurrence in the street below my window which illustrates the rigid discipline they maintained while they were in possession of the town. Across the street was a grocery store, and the owner also carried quite a large stock of liquors. Sometime in the night I was awakened by hearing someone sternly command “come out of there.” Then—“Throw it down” which was succeeded by a crack on the pavement, and this was repeated over and over again. I could imagine the procession of disappointed “Johnnies” coming out of the cellar, each with his bottle, jug, or demijohn, which he was obliged to smash on the pavement. I will say right here that there was surprisingly little disorder during the two days and a half that they held the town. I think they cleaned out provisions and grocery stores pretty generally, but the private houses were not disturbed. The men were not allowed to get at the liquors, and I never heard of any drunkenness. On the evening of the 3d[,] a man came to the front door and rather roughly demanded food. Mary refused on the ground that she had very little in the house—a very short supply for her own family. He was quite abusive and tried to enter the house, but Mary managed to get the door shut and locked it in his face. He swore he would come back and burn the house down before morning. My recollections of the details of the events of July 1st, 2d & 3d are not very distinct on this late day, but there are certain features that can be recalled very vividly. One was the horrible crash of musketry at the time of the attack on Culp’s hill near the close of the 1st. As that was quite near our part of the town, it came to us with great distinctness. The sound of musketry is always more apalling [sic] than the roar of artillery. The great artillery fight, which preceded Pickett’s charge on the 3d, was also something not to be forgotten. As the town lay, in a sense, between the two fires, the uproar seemed more terrible to us than it would if we had been on either line. At that time I was lying on a mattress in the dining room, as houses in our immediate vicinity had been occasionally struck by shells, and it was felt that it would be safer there. The house was an old fashioned brick

SEMINARY RIDGE TO STEVENS KNOLL

The 5th Maine Battery kept up its July 1 fight on Seminary Ridge for several hours after wounded Lieutenant Hunt went to the rear. But Union resistance west of Gettysburg finally collapsed late in the afternoon, and the Maine gunners hitched up their cannons and moved to a knoll to the “right and rear of Cemetery Hill,” as it was described in the battery’s official report. The Maine soldiers restocked their empty limber chests and to protect their Napoleons threw up earthworks with the help of infantrymen. On July 2, some of the roaring artillery that Lieutenant Hunt undoubtedly heard while confined in his sister’s house came from his batterymates, who were engaged throughout the day. That included a fierce bombardment against Brig. Gen. Harry Hays’ and Colonel Issac Avery’s Confederates as they attacked the eastern face of Cemetery Hill after sunset. Captain Greenlief Stevens had been wounded by a sharpshooter, leaving Lieutenant Edward N. Whittier in command. Whittier later wrote that his battery unleashed blasts of “spherical case and shell, and later…solid shot and canister” as the Confederates swept toward the Union defenses on Cemetery Hill. The rapid fire emptied “the entire contents of the limber chests,” he recalled, and after the Rebel attack had been repulsed, he temporarily pulled the battery back to acquire new ammunition. In his report, Whittier thanked the soldiers of the 33rd Massachusetts and the Iron Brigade’s 24th Michigan for helping serve the cannons and running ammunition when some of the artillerymen became “temporarily exhausted” by the hours of prolonged firing on July 2. The battery also sparred with Confederate artillery the morning of July 3, but otherwise had a comparatively quiet day. The 5th Maine would suffer 23 casualties at Gettysburg, and fired a whopping 979 rounds—mostly on Days 1 and 2. Captain Stevens would heal and rejoin his command, and later served on the state of Maine’s Gettysburg Monument Commission. His name forever became part of the battlefield’s lexicon when the hillock the 5th Maine sternly defended on July 2 was renamed “Stevens Knoll.” –D.B.S.

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DEADLY HAIL Canister was effective against infantry, but so was case shot, illustrated here. Such bombs were filled with lead balls, and when a fused powder charge exploded, the fragments rained down upon hapless, tightly packed ranks.

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house of solid construction but it trembled to the very foundation. The earth literally shook. History tells us that Gen. [Henry] Hunt, Chief of Artillery for our army, after this artillery duel had been kept up for a considerable time, ordered our batteries to cease firing in order that the guns might cool, and all things be made ready for the Infantry charge, which he knew must soon come. The rebels also ceased firing very soon after thinking that they had silenced our batteries. The suddenness in the cessation of the tumult filled us with apprehension. The silence was awful. “What can it mean?” was the question that everyone asked, but none could answer. We had not long to wait before it all began again, and soon to the roar of artillery was heard the crash of musketry. The most trying feature of our situation was our ignorance of how the battle was going. I could generally know that our guns were still in position by noting the explosion of shell, but beyond that we could learn nothing. During the whole period of the battle we were oppressed with the most intense anxiety. On the morning of the 4th, as soon as it began to be day light Mary’s old servant went out to a neighbors on some errand, and soon came back saying that she believed the rebels had gone; that not one was to be seen in the streets. The good news was soon confirmed and the strain of the anxious three days gave way to rejoicing. Before long cavalry came in and occupied the streets, and they were followed by infantry, and we knew that the battle of Gettysburg had been won. Before very long it was discovered that, although the enemy had left the town, they had not taken their departure for good. They had a strong line of artillery posted on the Seminary ridge facing the town. In some way the rumor was circulated that they proposed to shell the town and destroy it. This caused greater excitement among the citizens than there had been during the fight. A great many started at once for the country in the opposite direction, carrying in their hands what seemed to them most valuable. Many amusing stories were told of the curious selection that some made in their excitement. What to do with me, worried Thomas and Mary more than it did me. I did not believe the rumors, and even if it should be true, I felt that we would be quite safe in the cellar. But I could not convince them. The only conveyance they could find was a wheelbarrow, owned by their next neighbor Mr. Creasy, and I believe he volunteered to do the wheeling. I protested against such an undignified exit and persuaded them to postpone the start till there was some certain

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evidence that the enemy would carry out their supposed threat. It is needless to add that the wheel-barrow was not called into requisition. n July 4 Hunt wrote a letter to his mother, also named Mary. “Here I am lying on my back in Mary’s back parlor making myself as comfortable as possible,” he wrote. “I suppose before this reaches you, you will have heard that I was one of the victims of the great fight of Gettysburg, but I hope you have heard an exaggerated account. My wound is very slight and I shall be about again in two weeks at most....I think I shall be just comfortably convalescent in time for commencement at Brunswick. I think I am the luckiest dog that ever lived. To think that I should have been wounded here! I have managed to get here every time that anything has been the matter with me.” Lieutenant Hunt recuperated in Gettysburg until July 28. After healing, Hunt returned to Maine and rejoined his battery in the fall. On June 18, 1864, he was captured outside Petersburg. With the exception of an escape attempt from Columbia, S.C., in November 1864, he remained in Confederate prisons until he was paroled in February 1865. Hunt became the Maine General Hospital’s superintendent after the war and married Cornelia Carson. Together they raised a daughter, Helen. But his old leg wound never let him forget July 1, 1863. He received a military invalid pension in 1869, and his pension file at the National Archives contains several surgeon’s certificates that describe the deleterious impact of his wound. One claimed his thigh “was very painful at times....” Hunt was awarded a pension of $7.50 a month. In 1904, a surgeon said the injury had left a scar “one inch in diamerter [sic]….There is loss of tissue around the scar, and much anesthesia,” or nerve loss. Hunt’s pension was increased to $10 a month. In 1909, Hunt “dropped dead” at a Portland, Maine, railway station, according to a local newspaper, 46 years after he suffered his Gettysburg wound. He was 70 years old. Hunt’s handwritten memoirs and the transcriptions of his letters fill two bound volumes in the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives at Bowdoin College.



Tom Huntington is the author of Searching for George Gordon Meade: The Forgotten Victor of Gettysburg, and numerous magazine articles. His newest Civil War book The Guns of Maine will be published by Stackpole Books in 2018.

 A MOTHER’S PLEA  Mary G. Hunt, 2nd Lt. Charles O. Hunt’s mother, had already lost a spouse and two sons before the Civil War. Her husband, also named Charles, had died in 1844, and two of her four boys had died as infants, leaving her with sons Charles and Henry, and a daughter also named Mary. After Charles was taken prisoner at Petersburg, mother Mary wrote the following letter, found in Charles’ service record file at the National Archives, to Maine Senator and Secretary of the Treasury William Pitt Fessenden (above), hoping to obtain his release. Mary had no way of know-

ing that her son was actually in the midst of an escape attempt from his Columbia, S.C., prison when she was writing her plea. After more than two weeks on the run, Hunt and his two fellow escapees were recaptured and sent to a prison in Danville, Va. In her letter to Fessenden, Mary frets over her son’s health, and claims he was one of the prisoners the Confederates had deliberately quartered in the path of incoming artillery fire at Charleston, using them as human shields against incoming Union bombs. Lieutenant Hunt’s service record also contains a second letter written to Fessenden by a family friend, the content of which mirrors Mary’s letter. Fessenden sent Mary’s letter on to Maj. Gen. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the “Commissioner for the Exchange of Prisoners,” who scribbled some notes on the missive that a subordinate polished into a response to her, also in Lieutenant Hunt’s file and transcribed below. While she was undoubtedly disappointed by the answer, Mary would have many postwar years to spend with her sons before she died in 1893. Charles was finally paroled, according to a prisoner memorandum in his service record, on February 22, 1865, at “James River, Va.,” and his brother Henry, who served as a private in the 5th Maine Battery, and who spent much time detailed as a hospital steward, was discharged at war’s end.–D.B.S.



Gorham, Me., Nov. 9th 1864 Hon. Wm. P. Fessenden Dear sir you will excuse a widowed mother for taking the liberty of addressing you, in behalf of her son. Lieut. Charles O. Hunt of the 5th Battery Maine Vols. who is now a prisoner in Columbia S.C. He was captured last June near Petersburg taken to Macon, then to Charleston, to be placed under fire, together with other officers where he remained until Oct 6th. They were then removed to Columbia and there turned into an enclave like so many cattle, without shelter from storms and the chills of night-and supplied with food both poor in quality and scanty in quantity. He was never very strong, unused to hardships, and I fear he will sink under this double exposure. I have only two sons both graduates of Bowdoin. Charles in 61 and his brother in 62. Then both entered the service of their country. They are both on their third years service, Charles third year expires next month, but he intends to remain in the service till this conflict is over if his health is [illegible]. He has been in many battles, had typhoid fever, was wounded at Gettysburg, but my heart aches for him now as never before. I would earnestly request if there is any influence you can exert on his behalf you will use it to bring about an exchange. He writes me that especial exchanges are going on continually some going out by every flag of truce lost in this way. Dear sir I say once more excuse me for this liberty. But I do feel assured that you have the power to bring this about in some way, and I do hope you will speak a word for him. May the blessing of Heaven rest upon you in all your arduous duties. Yours very respectfully, M. G. Hunt War. Dep’t, W.C., [Washington City] November 18th, 1864 Madam: With reference to your letter of the 9th instant, addressed to the Hon. W.P. Fessenden, requesting a special exchange for your son, Lieutenant Charles O. Hunt of the 5th Maine Battery, now a prisoner to the rebels. I am instructed to state that special exchanges are not made except for reasons of public character, but that the Department is using every means in its power to effect a general exchange of prisoners of war, and that arrangements are in process to send supplies of all kinds to the Federal prisoners of the South. Due attention will be given to the case of Lieutenant Hunt, with a view to his release at the earliest possible period. Very Respt, [respectfully] Yr Obd Svt [Your Obedient Servant] L.H.P. Mrs. M.G. Hunt Gorham, Maine

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SIGNAL STATION Begin your hike at Maryland’s Washington Monument State Park (dnr2.maryland.gov) and check out the 1827 stone monument erected to George Washington by the residents of nearby Boonsboro. Union signalers used the tower, which was then partially a ruin, in 1862. The rebuilt structure now offers views of the distant Antietam National Battlefield.

TEN MILES OF

HISTORY WANT A DIFFERENT WAY to experience Civil War battlefields? The Appalachian

National Scenic Trail (appalachiantrail.org), the footpath that wanders from Maine to Georgia, follows the rocky spine of South Mountain through Maryland and passes through Turner’s, Fox’s, and Crampton’s gaps, where the Army of the Potomac fought the Army of Northern Virginia on September 14, 1862. The important battles had a significant impact on the subsequent Battle of Antietam. The AT is well marked by white blazes, and you can plan a multi-day hike and camp along the way, or use trailheads for short day hikes. It is a mountain trail, so there are elevation changes and rocky footing, but if you are in decent shape, wear appropriate clothing, and take your time, you should be fine. Your reward will be impressive natural beauty and an up-close look at some of the Eastern Theater’s most rugged terrain. Scarlet tanagers or wood thrushes might serenade you, while stretches of deep sylvan silence will allow you SOU TH to contemplate the fighting that made the woods ring with gunfire. And you’ll gain M O U N TA I N bragging rights when you describe your hike through history on the AT. –D.B.S. CWT would like to thank battlefield guide Jeff Hayes for his help with this Explore. 60

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MOUNTAINTOP CHURCH Dahlgren Chapel in Turner’s Gap is a dramatic postwar Gothic Revival building with a Civil War connection. Madeleine Dahlgren, widow of Rear Admiral John Dahlgren, the inventor of the “Dahlgren” cannons used on many Union warships, bought the nearby stone inn to use as a summer home in 1876, and she had the chapel built in 1881. The Central Maryland Heritage League protects and rents the church (cmhl.org).

HIKE, PART ONE The two-mile AT section from the state park to Turner’s Gap, left, is mostly downhill. After about 1.25 miles, you’ll begin your descent to the gap and see a prominent old stone wall on your left. Confederate troops retreated westward through this area on the evening of September 14 as the Turner’s Gap fighting drew to a close.

TURNER’S GAP Heading south from Washington Monument

SHOT UP A relic Union canteen found at Fox’s Gap. Fighting at the three South Mountain gaps on September 14, 1862, resulted in 5,000 casualties.

As you come into Turner’s Gap, you’ll enjoy an eastward view of the Catoctin Creek Valley. Interpretive markers in the gap describe what happened when the Union 1st Corps collided with Maj. Gen. D.H. Hill’s Division. Fighting occurred in this vicinity until about 9 p.m. on the 14th. AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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“We then lay down behind a stone fence and they turned their batteries on us. Their fire knocked the limbs from the trees and the limbs fell on us. We had to help one another to get out from under them.” Corporal Charles Brown of the 50th Pennsylvania describes late-day fighting at Fox’s Gap.

HIKE, PART TWO Turner’s and Fox’s gaps are just over a mile apart, and the AT follows the trace of the historic Woods Road over which D.H Hill sent troops to fight at Fox’s Gap. You’ll pass the Dahlgren Backpacker Campground (open AprilOctober, with restrooms and camping facilities) on the west side of the AT.

ALMOST THERE An open field lies to the east as you approach Fox’s Gap. Captain James W. Bondurant’s Rebel battery occupied this field, which the 17th Michigan crossed to flank the Southern line late in the struggle for the gap.

FOX’S GAP The Old Sharpsburg Road cuts through Fox’s Gap, and there is much to see, including monuments to Union Maj. Gen. Jesse L. Reno and Confed62

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Correspondent’s Arch, Crampton’s Gap

erate Brig. Gen. Samuel Garland Jr., both mortally wounded during the fighting. From here, take the side trail back to the North Carolina monument.

BATTLE ROAD The blacktop road that heads south at Fox’s Gap parallels, and at times follows, the trace of the historic Ridge Road. The Union 9th Corps and D.H. Hill’s men fought in the fields east of the road and along the stone walls that paralleled it, some of them still standing. You can walk down the road, but it’s best not to drive, as it is a dead end.

HIKE, PART THREE The 7-mile hike to Crampton’s Gap is challenging. The AT leaves Fox’s Gap by the rail fence bordering the parking area, and soon climbs the 1,800-foothigh Lamb’s Knoll. Just past the summit, you’ll enjoy a southeastward view

 HELP YOUR HIKE  It’s wise to carry one of the official AT maps with you, available at the Harpers Ferry AT headquarters, and at outfitter stores nationwide. Author Bradley Gottfried’s The Maps of Antietam will help you understand how the fighting flowed through the craggy gaps, and John D. Hoptak’s The Battle of South Mountain is a well-done overview of the combat.

Stone walls crossed the fighting fields of all three gaps. The 20th North Carolina sheltered behind this wall at Fox’s Gap as they decimated Union Lieutenant George Crome’s two cannon crews.

CRAMPTON’S GAP At Crampton’s Gap, the 13,000-man 6th Corps faced a thin force of 1,000 Confederates. Wayside signs explain the Federals’ bungled opportunity to split Robert E. Lee’s scattered army, and how the fighting surged up the mountain’s eastern face.

WHY GATHLAND?

LOCAL COLOR The South Mountain Inn, has served travelers through Turner’s Gap since the 1700s, and D.H. Hill located his headquarters there. Go to oldsouthmountaininn.com to check out a current menu and learn more.

George Alfred Townsend, a Civil War correspondent, built the postwar structures at Crampton’s Gap. Townsend used a mashup of his initials, “GATH,” as his pen name, hence Gathland State Park, which now protects the grounds.

HONORING HIS OWN from White Rock. On a clear day, you can see Virginia. It’s all downhill from there, about 3.75 miles, to Crampton’s Gap. You can also stage a car at Fox’s Gap and drive to Crampton’s Gap.

Townsend built a 50-foot-high arch in 1896 to honor his fellow Civil War correspondents. The unusual monument is now known as the National War Correspondents Memorial. AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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HERITAGE TRAVEL & LIFESTYLE SHOWCASE

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Join us for our Civil War Anniversary Commemoration including attractions and tours, exhibitions, memorials and a selection of artifacts from Fort Fisher.

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North Little Rock, Arkansas, is one of only two places to have two vessels that bookend World War II: tugboat USS Hoga and submarine USS Razorback. www.AIMMuseum.org

A vacation in Georgia means great family experiences that can only be described as pretty sweet. Explore Georgia’s Magnolia Midlands.

Experience the Civil War in Jacksonville at the Museum of Military History. Relive one of Arkansas’ first stands at the Reed’s Bridge Battlefield. jacksonvillesoars.com/museum.php

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H I S T O R I C

Roswell, Georgia

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With a variety of historic attractions and outdoor adventures, Tishomingo County is a perfect destination for lovers of history and nature alike.

History surrounds Cartersville, GA, including Allatoona Pass, where a fierce battle took place, and Cooper’s Furnace, the only remnant of the bustling industrial town of Etowah.

Relive history in Hopkinsville, Kentucky and explore Jefferson Davis’ birthplace, the Trail of Tears Commemorative Park and the vigilante rebellion of the Black Patch Tobacco War.

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Through personal stories, interactive exhibits and a 360° movie, the Civil War Museum focuses on the war from the perspective of the Upper Middle West. www.thecivilwarmuseum.org

The National Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus, GA, tells the story of the sailors, soldiers, and civilians, both free and enslaved as affected by the navies of the American Civil War.

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Charismatic Union General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick had legions of admirers during the war. He just wasn’t much of a general, as his men often learned with their lives.

Sandy Springs, Georgia, is the perfect hub for exploring Metro Atlanta’s Civil War sites. Conveniently located near major highways, you’ll see everything from Sandy Springs!

Treat yourself to Southern Kentucky hospitality in London and Laurel County! Attractions include the Levi Jackson Wilderness Road State Park and Camp Wildcat Civil War Battlefield.

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Just 15 miles south of downtown Atlanta lies the heart of the true South: Clayton County, Georgia, where heritage comes alive!

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Cleveland, TN

Near Chattanooga, find glorious mountain scenery and heart-pounding white-water rafting. Walk in the footsteps of the Cherokee and discover a charming historic downtown.

Alabama’s Gulf Coast

If you’re looking for an easy stroll through a century of fine architecture or a trek down dusty roads along the Blues Trail, you’ve come to the right place. www. visitgreenwood.com

Southern hospitality at its finest, the Classic South, Georgia, offers visitors a combination of history and charm mixed with excursion options for everyone from outdoorsmen to museum-goers.

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CIVIL WAR MUSEUM of the Western Theater

Vicksburg, Mississippi is a great place to bring your family to learn American history, enjoy educational museums and check out the mighty Mississippi River.

Follow the Civil War Trail in Meridian, Mississippi, where you’ll experience history first-hand, including Merrehope Mansion, Marion Confederate Cemetery and more. www.visitmeridian.com.

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Hundreds of authentic artifacts. Voted fourth finest in U.S. by North & South Magazine. Located in historic Bardstown, Kentucky. www.civil-war-museum.org

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Historic Bardstown, Kentucky

Destination

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History, bourbon, shopping, sightseeing and relaxing—whatever you enjoy, you’re sure to find it in beautiful Bardstown, KY. Plan your visit today. www.visitbardstown.com

London, KY–The reenactment of the Battle of Camp Wildcat, Camp Wildcat Historic Site, Wilderness Road Trail & Boones Trace Trail, & antique and flea market shopping. www.LaurelKyTourism.com

STEP BACK IN TIME at Camp Nelson Civil War Heritage Park, a Union Army supply depot and African American refugee camp. Museum, Civil War Library, Interpretive Trails and more.

THE LOYAL

OPPOSITION REVIEWED BY LOUIS P. MASUR

M

ARK E. NEELY JR. invites us to look anew at the role of Northern Democrats during the Civil War. Challenging widely accepted views of the two-party system as indispensable to keeping Lincoln on message and helping the Union to win the war, Neely argues that both parties “behaved very badly and turned in an unimpressive performance.” Neely portrays the Democrats during the war not as racists, subversives, and conspirators, but as loyal opponents who sought electoral gains. In the important areas of mobilization and finance, “nonpartisan support was the norm.” The Northern Democrats during the Civil War would not make the mistake of the Federalists during the War of 1812 and Whigs during the Mexican War who voted against supplies for troops and in doing so helped ensure their extinction. A chapter devoted to the understudied elections of 1862 disputes the idea that Democratic gains resulted from racist entreaties in the aftermath of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued on September 22, 1862. Rather, Neely reminds us that Lincoln did little to support Republican candidates or publicly defend the Proclamation (that would come after January 1). In the end, Republicans lost seats in Congress not so much because of emancipation, but because the war was not going well. Neely challenges the belief that the Democrats evolved into a peace party. To be sure, strident voices called for peace, but a close look at gubernatorial nominations in 1863 shows that neither Clement Vallandigham of Ohio nor George Woodward of Pennsylvania was nominated because of his peace stance. Only Thomas Seymour of Connecticut was nominated on purely peace principles, and he went down in defeat. According to Neely, he was the only candidate for governor nominated because he advocated peace in 1863, or “indeed in the whole Civil War.” The final chapters of the book are devoted to constitutional questions. Neely reminds us that “Constitutional history 66

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Lincoln and the Democrats: The Politics of Opposition in the Civil War By Mark E. Neely Jr. Cambridge University Press $24.99 (Paperback)



in that era was just another branch of politics.” He finds the constitutional thinking of Democrats “erratic and irresponsible” and points out they could not simultaneously denounce secession and believe in states’ rights. But in certain cases, such as the opposition to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, they made critical points about executive power and individual liberty. In the end, Neely argues, the Democrats did little to slow Lincoln on his own intellectual journey in which he “helped eventually establish a Constitution in service to human rights.” Neely writes in the introduction that Lincoln and the Democrats is his last book on the Civil War. All students of the era owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for a body of work that has transformed our understanding of Lincoln and the era of Civil War.

FIGHT TO LIVE FREE



Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America Douglas R. Egerton Basic Books, $32

REVIEWED BY GORDON BERG obert Gould Shaw, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, and Fort Wagner outside Charleston Harbor are inexorably bound in one of the iconic events of the Civil War. Less well known are the officers and soldiers of the state’s two other black regiments, the 55th Massachusetts Infantry and the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry. Fortunately, Douglas Egerton has provided a scrupulously researched, engagingly written account that links all three to a societal sea change that transformed the war into a liberation movement for millions of African Americans, both enslaved and free. While the monograph’s subtitle may contain a bit of publisher hyperbole, Egerton argues that the officers and men of the black regiments from Massachusetts understood, from the beginning, that they were a national test case. They “sought to transform a white man’s war into a revolutionary struggle

R

for freedom, and then ventured their lives on the battlefield in pursuit of that dream.” Egerton’s work highlights the formation, training, and battlefield experiences of these interconnected regiments through the eyes of 14 men, some born to privilege, some born into slavery, and some living free but unequal. The perspective they provide allows Egerton to personalize their struggle and connect it to events that still roil our society. Making extensive use of letters, diaries, pension records, and the leading African-American newspapers, Egerton brings to life James Henry Goodling, a slave in New Bedford, Mass., who became a sailor and wrote letters to his hometown newspaper; Lewis Henry Douglass (above), the son of famed abolitionist Frederick who wrote letters to his family and to the Weekly African American; Stephen Swails, a reckless youth from upstate New York; 45-year-old Peter Vogelsang, a hotel clerk from New York City; William Carney, an escaped slave from Virginia who would later be awarded the Medal of Honor; and others whose names have been lost to history until now. Most accounts of the 54th end with the charge at Fort Wagner and ignore the 55th and 5th, but Egerton includes later actions at Olustee, Fla.; Honey Hill, S.C.; Baylor’s Farm, Va.; as well as the operations that took Richmond and occupied Charleston. Egerton also provides demographic and occupational information about the soldiers. Most of the men in the 54th came from states other than Massachusetts, the largest group

coming from Pennsylvania. A quarter of the men of the 55th had been born into slavery and a third were illiterate. The 55th’s white officers spent much of their free time teaching their eager troopers to read. Egerton also discusses the postwar lives of the survivors. “A majority of soldiers from the three Massachusetts regiments traveled home,” Egerton informs us, “to states that denied them the right to vote.” Most important, however, “they had proven their manhood to themselves and their communities.” During Reconstruction, Swails became the first black commissioned officer in the U.S. Army and later was elected president pro tem of the South Carolina Senate; Lewis Douglass returned to Rochester, N.Y., to teach and later moved to Washington, D.C., where he prospered in the city’s booming real estate market. Sadly, the postwar lives of many of the men were much less successful. The poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose father fought with the 55th and the 5th, wrote a poem honoring the men who served in the three regiments. It contains the lines “For their blood has cleansed completely/ Every blot of slavery’s shame.” Sadly, Dunbar’s words remain unfulfilled. AUGUST 2017 CIVIL WAR TIMES

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REPUTATION MALIGNED REVIEWED BY ETHAN S. RAFUSE

espite the best efforts of Ulysses Grant, Philip Sheridan, and their many admirers to convince posterity otherwise, there is little doubt that the removal of Gouverneur K. Warren from command of the 5th Corps on April 1, 1865, was a grave injustice to a man who had served the Union cause faithfully and well. It was the rare man who could endure the level of scrutiny that came with exercising corps command in the Army of the

D Confederate Waterloo: The Battle of Five Forks, April 1, 1865, and the Controversy that Brought Down a General Michael J. McCarthy Savas Beatie, $32.95

Potomac; indeed, Warren was the rare officer who was able to survive more than a year in that position. Moreover, he demonstrated real skill at Bristoe Station, moral courage and good judgment at Mine Run, and won the battles that secured Union control of the Weldon Railroad. During the Overland Campaign, though, Warren earned the unshakable animus of Grant, Sheridan, and their cronies with his willingness to express concerns—and well-founded ones at that—about their conduct of operations, sowing the seeds for what happened at Five Forks.

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The story of Warren’s downfall and the events and personalities that produced it are, of course, familiar subjects to anyone who has spent significant time studying the last two years of the war in the East. Nevertheless, Michael McCarthy demonstrates this is a story worth retelling. First, despite the importance of the engagement, with the exception of the fine account Chris Calkins and Ed Bearss produced for H.E. Howard in 1985, there has been little scholarship focused on Five Forks—although A. Wilson Greene did provide a fine account of the engagement in his outstanding study of the final phase of the Petersburg Campaign. The focus of McCarthy’s study, though, is Warren’s successful effort to have his conduct leading up to and during the engagement at Five Forks subjected to a court of inquiry—which mostly vindicated his take on what had happened, though tragically not until after General Warren had died— and the contemptible efforts of Sheridan and his band of supporters to ensure that his treatment of Warren did not receive the scrutiny and condemnation it deserved. McCarthy presents all of this clearly and effectively in a work that draws from a solid research effort and whose chronicle of events is clearly presented and supported by well-constructed maps. In the process, McCarthy joins a growing list of Civil War and military history scholars who have found that it was not just in stature that the word “small” could be properly applied to “Little Phil.”

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CAPITAL PLACE TO VISIT REVIEWED BY JON GUTTMAN For the truly devoted Civil War buff taking his or her first tour of the District of Columbia, Thomas Power Lowry offers a parallel supplement in A Tourist Guide to Civil War Washington, D.C. Based on the provost marshal’s detailed report in 1863, it allows one to compare what one finds on practically every part of town with what one would have found as a serviceman on leave during the “Late Unpleasantness.” For the cultured set, this would have included at A Tourist Guide to Civil War Washington D.C. least five theaters, of which two former “friendly rivals” are still in business By Thomas Power Lowry today. Far more numerous were the Idle Winter Press, $9.95 bars, oyster saloons, gambling dens, and bordellos, for which the author seems to revel in providing ample firsthand accounts, generally related to courts martial. On a related note, there were hospitals, including one, established by French authority Philippe Ricord, exclusively devoted to treating sexually transmitted maladies. After itemizing all that Washington had to offer, described by genre and supplemented where possible on contemporary maps, the author returns to the present to give the 21st century tourist examples of what once existed at particular spots. The block on which the Trump International Hotel currently stands, for example, “was a cornucopia of concupiscence, with five whorehouses,” which he itemizes by proprietor (all women) and sex workers within each. In all fairness, though, it should be noted that the next block, housing the Postal Service in 2017, had nine bordellos and 46 prostitutes in 1863. For those who might not believe what they read, Lowry devotes his last chapter to where one can find the original records he researched, and how to seek them out. In any case, one gets a different perspective on the capital that Senator Warren Magnuson described as “A city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency,” and may then draw one’s own conclusions as to how much or little has changed since then.



The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts During the Civil War Edited by Brian D. McKnight and Barton A. Myers Louisiana State University Press $49.95



REVIEWED BY GORDON BERG The literature on guerrilla warfare has come a long way since Bruce Catton called it a “largely unimportant side issue.” Recent scholarship has shown it to be an integral part of the conflict and especially vicious inside the war’s contested borderlands where authority and economic conditions had deteriorated and traditional blood feuds proliferated across class and racial boundaries. Attempts to counter its increasingly disruptive effects led Union authorities to develop the first formalized rules of warfare and spurred the “hard war” tactics adopted in the field by increasingly frustrated Northern officers. Brian McKnight and Barton Myers make an important contribution to this genre with 16 original essays from upcoming scholars and distinguished historians that “move beyond the traditional and outmoded notions of a single compartmentalized irregular war and into a place where guerrilla conflicts [can] stand alongside the conventional battle narrative…rather than being seen as simply an ancillary result of conventional operations.” These well-researched essays expand the geography of guerrilla activity, deepen our understanding of the genre’s most proficient practitioners, and shed new light on familiar incidents and individuals.

CREDITS Cover: National Archives/Photo Illustration: Brian Walker; P. 2: Shenandoah Sanchez; P. 3: From Top: Library of Congress; Steve Rogers Antique Arms; Granger, NYC; P. 4: Photo by Education Images/UIG via Getty Images; P. 6: From Left: Special Collections and College Archives, Musselman Library/Gettysburg College; Heritage Auctions, Dallas; P. 8: Oliver Otis Howard Papers, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine; P. 9: Left: Courtesy Historic Columbia; Courtesy Justin Squizzero; P. 10: Photo by Buyenlarge/Getty Images; P. 11: Google Earth; P. 12-13: Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg, Courtesy National Gallery of Art; P. 14: Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo; P. 15: Kentucky Digital Library; P. 16: From Top: Melissa A. Winn; Library of Congress; P. 18: From Top: Heritage Auctions, Dallas; Chester Historical Society; Heritage Auctions, Dallas; P. 19: Steve Rogers Antique Arms (2); P. 21: Shenandoah Sanchez; P. 22: The Civil War Museum, Kenosha, Wisconsin; P. 24: Troiani, Don (b.1949)/Private Collection/ Bridgeman Images; P. 25: From Top: Wisconsin Historical Society; Private Collection/Photo ©Don Troiani/Bridgeman Images; P. 26: Top: National Archives; Bottom: Private Collection/ Photo ©Don Troiani/Bridgeman Images; P. 27: Courtesy Brian Boeve; P. 28: Troiani, Don (b.1949)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images; P. 29: Courtesy Phil Harris; P. 30-31: Library of Congress; P. 33: Niday Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo; P. 34: From Top: Library of Congress; Heritage Auctions, Dallas; P. 35: nsf/Alamy Stock Photo; P. 37: Granger, NYC; P. 39: Stocktrek Images Inc.; Alamy Stock Photo; P. 40: From Left: Courtesy Virginia Military Institute; Confederate Veterans, Vol. 8, No. 4; Courtesy Virginia Military Institute; P. 41: Photo by Education Images/UIG Via Getty Images; P. 42-43: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired by exchange with the Library of Congress; P. 44: Courtesy National Gallery of Art; P. 45: Library of Congress; P. 46: National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund; P. 47: Library of Congress (2); P. 48: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Celia Tompkins Hegyi Gift, 2007 (2007.392); P. 49: Top: The Library Company of Philadelphia; Bottom: National Gallery of Art, Washington, Clinton and Jean Wright Fund; P. 50: Library of Congress; P. 53: Courtesy the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine; P. 54: Heritage Auctions, Dallas; Library of Congress; P. 57: NPS Photo; P. 58: Heritage Auctions, Dallas (3); P. 59: National Archives; P. 60: Shenandoah Sanchez; P. 61: From Top: Shenandoah Sanchez (2); Heritage Auctions, Dallas; P. 62-63: Shenandoah Sanchez; P. 67: Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; P. 72: Heritage Auctions, Dallas.

KEEPING TIME  $7,767.50 

THIS BEAUTIFUL POCKET WATCH,

sold by Heritage Auctions, served as a personal service record for Lieutenant Ward B. Frothingham of the 22nd and 59th Massachusetts Infantry. The front is engraved with Frothingham’s battles, prison terms, promotions, and “Richmond,” “Libby,” and “Petersburg.” A 9th Corps badge and Masonic insignia embellish the back, and details of the veteran’s 1862 and 1864 woundings at Gaines’ Mill and Pegram’s Farm are engraved on the inside of the back cover. Frothingham had only to hold the timepiece’s smooth, silver case in his hand to relive memories of crossing bullet-swept, debatable ground. Time is fleeting.-D.B.S.

72

CIVIL WAR TIMES AUGUST 2017

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