★ EXPLORE THE BORDER TOWN OF WILLLIAMSPORT, MD. ★
GETTYSBURG ★ CRITICAL PONTOON BRIDGES ★ ELECTRIC MAP REBORN
TEXAS SOLDIER’S UNHAPPY WAR
GOOD
JOB GENERAL PICKETT! EVERYONE LIKES PRAISE FROM THE BOSS “General Pickett...wears his hair in
ringlets, and is altogether rather a desperate-looking character.” — BRITISH OBSERVER ARTHUR J. FREMANTLE
OCTOBER 2016
Immerse yourself in America’s Civil War with a visit to Tupelo, MS. he Battle of Brice’s Crossroads, the Battle of Tupelo/Harrisburg, and the Battle of Old Town Creek were the last stands of the Confederate cavalry in Northeast Mississippi, during the summer of 1864. Today, visitors can walk in the footsteps of soldiers who defended this land and delve deeper into these decisive battles that occurred in and around Tupelo. he Mississippi’s Final Stands Interpretive Center serves as a guide to enthusiasts interested in Mississippi’s place in the Civil War. he center’s many interpretive exhibits explain the state’s role in the Civil War and how the battles fought here were signiicant to the progress of the war. A ilm also chronicles the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads and its signiicance to the war and military history. Located just minutes from the center is Brice’s Crossroads National Battleield where guests can walk the1,600-acre hallowed ground. A one-acre site maintained by the National Park Service at the site of the Brice house contains a monument and two cannons which commemorate the
Battle of Brice’s Crossroads. Adjacent to the monument is Bethany Historic Cemetery which contains a mass grave of Confederate soldiers and markers for ninety-six Confederate soldiers who were known to have been killed during the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads. he Tupelo National Battleield site is marked in the heart of town. he irst day of the Battle of Tupelo/Harrisburg was fought here with over 20,000 soldiers and was the last time that Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s renowned cavalry fought Union infantry during the Civil War. Across town, the Battle of Town Creek interprets the second day of ighting during the Battle of Tupelo/Harrisburg. Tupelo’s Civil War history is further preserved through the Heritage Trails Enrichment Program, marking signiicant sites throughout town. From makesh*t hospitals and prisons to homes where famous generals stayed, visitors can gain a deeper understanding of what life was like for soldiers and residents of Northeast Mississippi during the war. Paid Advertorial by Tupelo Convention and Visitors Bureau
CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
60 LENGTHY SHADOWS Town founders and Revolutionary and Civil War veterans are buried in Williamsport, Md.,’s Riverview Cemetery.
ON THE COVER: Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s name is synonymous with one of the Confederacy’s worst defeats.
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54
Features
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Faint Praise for Pickett
32
One Last River to Cross
42
The Twinkle of Battle
46 54
Crooked Cameron?
By Richard Selcer After an 1864 battle, Robert E. Lee complimented George Pickett for the first time.
By Steven Trent Smith Union pontoniers raced against time during the Gettysburg Campaign to build bridges at Edwards Ferry.
By Kim O’Connell and Natasha Magallon Two entrepreneurs have refurbished the Electric Map from Gettysburg’s old visitor center to educate a new generation.
By Paul Kahan Reassessing Secretary of War Simon Cameron’s lousy reputation.
‘Goodbye Dear Sister’ By William A. Palmer Jr. Doubts about soldiering plagued Riley Scherer soon after he volunteered for the 5th Texas Infantry.
Departments
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6 8 12 14 18 20 23 60 66 72
Letters Changing Antietam’s signage News! Stained-glass Rebels Details Shipping out mortars at Yorktown Insight So far from glory Materiel 5 Confederate wood canteens Interview The war on agriculture Editorial A river flows through it Explore Williamsport, Md. Reviews Thomas Francis Meagher, revolutionary Sold ! General Zook’s boots
OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
EDITORIAL DANA B. SHOAF EDITOR NAN SIEGEL MANAGING EDITOR CHRIS K. HOWLAND SENIOR EDITOR SARAH RICHARDSON SENIOR EDITOR STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR JENNIFER M. VANN ART DIRECTOR MELISSA WINN SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR/SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR SHENANDOAH SANCHEZ PHOTOGRAPHER AT LARGE ADVISORY BOARD Edwin C. Bearss, Gabor Boritt, Catherine Clinton, William C. Davis, Gary W. Gallagher, Lesley Gordon, D. Scott Hartwig, John Hennessy, Harold Holzer, Robert K. Krick, Michael McAfee, James M. McPherson, Mark E. Neely Jr., Megan Kate Nelson, Ethan S. Rafuse, Susannah Ural
CORPORATE
‘KILLERS IN GREEN COATS’ During the Peninsula Campaign, Hiram Berdan’s green-coated marksmen of the 1st U.S. Sharp Shooters made life miserable for Confederates near Yorktown, Va.
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LEE ESCAPES FROM GETTYSBURG The Confederate commander’s retreat after the three-day-long battle was followed by a series of deadly but undecisive skirmishes north of the Potomac.
‘NOTHING BUT GLORY GAINED’ For the Confederates who managed to briefly hold onto the Bloody Angle during Pickett’s Charge on July 3, 1863, the casualty rate would rise to 70 percent.
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A DIFFERENT
NEW DIRECTION Our August cover story might lead to changes at Antietam National Battlefield.
WORLD
RUDE AWAKENING A depiction of young Abe Lincoln, at left wearing white trousers and widebrimmed hat, watching his first slave auction during a trip down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.
ABE LINCOLN’S
HARDSCRABBLE UPBRINGING TAUGHT
HIM TO VALUE
IMMIGRATION BY JASON H. SILVERMAN Methodist Bishop
Matthew Simpson quoted his friend Abraham Lincoln frequently during the assassinated president’s funeral on May 4, 1865, in Springfield, Ill. One quote in particular conjured up an evil threat that Lincoln had perceived in the United States back in 1839, when he said in a speech: “Broken by it I too may be; bow to it I never will. The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause which we believe to be just; it shall not deter me.” Bishop Simpson’s message was clear: Here was testament to the fact that even in his youth the beloved martyr had dedicated himself to the great struggle against the Slave Power. Actually, however, Lincoln’s 1839 speech had said nothing explicit about slavery, focusing instead on banking, industry and immigrant labor. ¶ We shouldn’t find that surprising, since in his more than three decades of public life Lincoln probably talked more about economics and labor than any other issue, slavery included. The majority of those comments preceded his time in the limelight and have since gone largely unnoticed. But they make it clear that long before he became the Great Emancipator, Lincoln was the Great Immigrant Advocate— during an era when immigration was just as controversial as it is today. ¶ Between 1840 and 1860, 4½ million newcomers arrived in the United States, most of them from Ireland, the German states and Scandinavian countries. Many more crossed back and forth across the border with Mexico, newly drawn in 1848.
AUGUST 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
LINCOLN, THE GREAT IMMIGRANT ADVOCATE
CHANGE THE SIGNS! Editor’s note: The letter excerpted below was sent to the Antietam National Battlefield regarding the recent article on General McClellan’s Antietam headquarters. “Carman Papers” refers to a collection of primary source material on the Battle of Antietam compiled by Union veteran Ezra Carman, recently edited and published by article author Tom Clemens.
I have read with interest the article by Tom Clemens in the June 2016 issue. This is because of my interest in Antietam dating to a three-week detail… to that park in June 1961. I walked the park, familiarized myself with the importance of the Carman Papers and prepared documentation for the Carman maps in the NPS Master Plan Format. This was a learning experience. Accordingly, I was deeply impressed by Clemens’ monograph titled “In Search of McClellan’s Headquarters.”…I was impressed to learn that the Pry House’s role as “Little Mac’s” headquarters was far more abbreviated than heretofore believed by Civil War scholars and buffs….Consequently, I believe that the trailside markers identifying the Pry House as McClellan’s headquarters should be modified to refer to it as McClellan’s command post, not as his headquarters. Edwin C. Bearss Historian Emeritus, National Park Service
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CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
I enjoyed Jason Silverman’s article on Lincoln and Immigration (August), especially the influence of New Orleans on his views. But it omitted Lincoln’s most famous quote on the subject. In an 1855 letter, Lincoln wrote: “As a nation, we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it that ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” These powerful words still resonate today. John K. Dirlam Wellesley, Mass.
PRAISE FOR THE COMMON SOLDIER Benjamin E. Myers’ August article “An Uncommon Look at the Common Soldier” is absolutely fascinating! This demographic profile of Company D of the 46th Pennsylvania Infantry is captivating. I have now reread it three times. This type of article makes those men who fought in that war “real.” I just love it. Jim Forcum Beavercreek, Ohio The piece on the common soldier was absolutely superb and eye-opening. Frankly, I was surprised that so many of the soldiers survived the war. John Grady Fairfax, Va.
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COMMEMORATING THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CIVIL WAR Meticulously designed by American Mint – in conjunction with The National Civil War Museum – for the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, this magnificent bowie knife was created from a single piece of tempered 420 stainless steel. The hand-polished blade features a laser-etched portrait of Robert E. Lee with the names of the battles he fought. The coldcast handle is inlaid with a solid brass nameplate laser-etched with Lee’s signature and features a 24k gold-plated guard and pommel with designs from an original American Civil War officer’s sword. This impressive bowie knife begins the Generals of the Confederacy bowie knife collection which is limited to only 9,999 complete collections worldwide. • Officially endorsed by THE NATIONAL CIVIL WAR MUSEUM
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STAINED-GLASS REBELS
WHAT IS THEIR FATE?
Amidst the debate over Confederate symbols, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., announced on June 8, 2016, that two panes of stained glass depicting the Confederate battle flag would be replaced with clear glass. The banners, which appear in memorials to Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, were paid for in 1953 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, the Cathedral’s member of a task force on the issue, explained that “Instead of simply taking the windows down and going on with business as usual, the Cathedral recognizes that, for now, they provide an opportunity for us to begin to write a new narrative on race and racial justice at the Cathedral.…” Private funds will pay for the removal. A decision on the windows honoring the generals will be made over the next two years. ¶ For a list of Confederate memorials and monuments counted in “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” visit www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf.
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CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
PRECIOUS ARTIFACTS PRE S E RVE D
AT GETTYSBURG THE CIVIL WAR MUSEUM of Philadelphia has turned over some 3,000 artifacts to the Gettysburg Foundation, which partners with the National Park Service. Founded by Union officers after the Civil War, the organization was then called the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. The collection—already in storage at Gettysburg—was used in the Sesquicentennial exhibit there, and some items will be displayed in a new exhibit on art in the Civil War. Items in the collection include Maj. Gen. George Meade’s dress spurs, below, and rare battle flags. Under a separate agreement, the museum’s archive of documents—letters, diaries, books and photographs—are housed at the Union League in Philadelphia, where they are available to researchers.
QUOTABLE
horrors war and its
and yet i sing
and whistle — George Pickett to wife Sallie, May 1864
APPOMATTOX CELEBRATES
BANJO INNOVATOR
N MAY 13-15, 2016, early banjo enthusiasts gathered at Appomattox Historical Court House Park for performances and lectures commemorating local musical legend Joel Sweeney. Taught by black neighbors, Sweeney is the first white man documented to play the banjo, which was derived from stringed gourd instruments in Africa. He is also credited with popularizing a style of banjo with a circular wooden frame rather than a gourd resonator, and making the music acceptable to white Americans in the 1830s. By 1843, Sweeney was so renowned that he was touring Britain. He died in 1859, but his cousin Samuel Sweeney became General J.E.B. Stuart’s favorite banjo player. Joel Sweeney’s gravestone is on the family plot at the Sweeney Cabin on the grounds of Appomattox Court House Historical Park. The cabin is also the spot where General Fitzhugh Lee and his staff reputedly stayed the night before the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The 1865 Appomattox Foundation is raising funds to restore the cabin and make concerts and tours there possible. For more information, visit Appomattox 1865 Foundation: www.appomattox1865foundation.org.
O
The Sweeney Cabin near Appomattox Court House. Soon banjo music will once again fill the old home. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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THE WAR ON THE NET h t t p : //c i v i l w a r g o v e r n o r s . o r g
CIVIL WAR GOVERNORS OF KENTUCKY DIGITAL DOCUMENTARY EDITION
In January 1864, “ loyal citizens of Christian County who have always been and expect ever to be for putting down the rebellion,” warned Kentucky Governor Thomas E. Bramlette that he must stop enslaved peoples from leaving the county. Farms were failing, work could not be completed, and the problem was increasing with each month. “In a word, our County is ruined if the evil is not stopped,” E.H. Hopper and 24 fellow citizens told him. They asked, “Shall we take the law in our own hands?” Surely, they argued, “loyalty & protection Should be inseperable [sic].” This letter is part of the “Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition” website (CWG-K) hosted by the Kentucky Historical Association. To date, about 10,000 documents are available at the site, though 23,000 have been selected for the project. They are restricted to documents received, sent or acted on by one of the five men who served as Kentucky governors (three Union, two provisional Confederate) between November 1, 1860, and December 31, 1865. The sources are drawn from three major Kentucky repositories—the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, the Military Records and Research Branch of the Kentucky Department of Military Affairs, and the Kentucky Historical Society—as well as one document from the Mary Todd Lincoln House and another from the Maker’s Mark Distillery. The diversity of the source material has visitors eagerly awaiting the CWG-K’s release of more digitized items. There are collections related to Kentucky regiments, state militia units, guerrilla operations and muster rolls that offer insights into local military operations. Joining these are petitions from local women who are not pleased with the influx of refugees into their communities as well as detailed accounts of Caroline Dennant, a young woman who escaped from slavery and arrived in Louisville in the fall of 1862. Each document in this “Early Access” version of the CWG-K digital collection appears in high resolution with a typed transcription, though site creators advise against relying entirely upon the transcriptions. Easily explored by browsing or keyword search, this superb site is an excellent resource for those whose reading, research and writing interests lie at the crossroads of the battlefield and the home front.—Susannah J. Ural 10
CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD STOP
REMEMBERED An Underground Railroad stop in York, Pa., the William Goodridge Freedom House, opened for a sneak preview on May 21, 2016. William Goodridge was a freed slave who hid fleeing slaves in an underground compartment (shown above) in his home. He is also likely the “good Samaritan” in York that Osborne Perry Anderson recalled in his 1861 memoir A Voice From Harpers Ferry. Anderson joined John Brown’s failed 1859 insurrection at Harpers Ferry and was the only African-American raider to survive. William Goodridge likely helped Anderson move from York to Philadelphia. Anderson eventually reached Canada and joined the Union Army.
ROCKS AND WAR How battlefield geological features helped shape the course of the Civil War is the topic of a recent paper by Scott Hippensteel, a geology professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The erosion pattern of rock at Stones River, Tenn. (above) created natural trenches used by Union troops. Rocky formations on the Gettysburg battlefield created difficult-to-climb ridge fortifications, such as positions held at Cemetery Hill and Little Round Top. And land underlain by limestone produced soil that was not suitable for farming, thus leaving forested areas that could conceal advancing troops.
N.C. & N.Y.
On January 15, 1865, 1,121 Confederate soldiers were captured at Fort Fisher near Wilmington, N.C., and sent to a POW camp in Elmira, N.Y. That winter proved to be unusually cold, and within five months, 518 of the Fort Fisher POWs had died. Union sentries died too. William Robert Greer of the 25th South Carolina, for example, wrote that one morning three guards were found dead of exposure. In February the Friends of Fort Fisher and the Friends of Elmira Civil War Prison Camp announced they are collaborating on a database that can connect descendants of those who fought for Union or Confederate forces in the Wilmington Campaign. Union guards at the Elmira camp are also included in that database. Between July 1864 and September 1865, the Elmira camp housed more than 12,000 Confederate POWS, and a nearby graveyard holds the remains of 2,970. The Friends of Elmira Civil War Prison Camp are working on raising funds to reconstruct the camp from structures dismantled and stored long ago. For more information on the project, visit: http://www.elmiraprisoncamp.com
UNITE
Q U I Z
WHAT 1864 FIGHT OCCURRED AT THIS WESTERN THEATER STATE BATTLEFIELD PARK? Send your answer via e-mail to [emailprotected] or via regular mail (1600 Tysons Blvd., Suite 1140, Tysons, VA, 22102-4883) marked “Howard.” The first correct answer will win a book. Congrats to last issue’s winners, Dave Mollineaux, Sun Valley, Idaho (regular mail), and Robert Detweiler, Pinellas Park, Fla. (email), who correctly identified Cherbourg Harbor, in France.
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3
2
ON THE WATERFRONT MAJOR GENERAL George B. McClellan’s spring 1862 Peninsula Campaign required nearly 400 vessels to haul more than 120,000 men and hundreds of artillery pieces of the Army of the Potomac from Washington to the peninsula formed by the York and James rivers. But Little Mac’s advance on Richmond from the east was slowed by the protracted April 5 to May 5 Siege of Yorktown. Convinced that the Colonial port was strongly held, the Union commander laboriously deployed 101 siege cannons and mortars. “Will the enemy be fools enough to wait...until we open fire from all the batteries?” wondered Union soldier Robert Sneden. The answer was no. The overmatched Confederates wisely withdrew from the town before most of the bomb throwers fired a shot in anger. McClellan took advantage of Yorktown’s deep harbor on the York River to turn it into a port for his force. In this image, Union artillerymen guard dissasembled siege cannons and pass the time while they wait to be hauled back to Washington or shuttled up the York, to the mouth of the Pamunkey River (see related story, P. 54).
7
1.
A number of 10-inch mortars are visible, just a few of the 40 siege mortars McClellan deployed in the Union earthworks that ringed Yorktown, Va.
2. An artilleryman, with loaded knapsack at his feet, wears cumbersome brass “shoulder scales” on his uniform, meant to ward off saber blows. He’s perched on portions of the large iron carriages, turned upside down, that were used in forts to support heavy cannons.
5 4
3.
Two gunners, one of whom is stripped down to his shirt, chat with a comrade who is stuck on guard duty. The triangular sections known as “cheeks” that complete the iron cannon carriages can be seen behind the men.
4.
A group of soldiers—perhaps a detail commanded by the officer at far right, with his back to the camera—waits at the end of a dock. Will they be boarding a vessel to go back to D.C. or headed up the York River to the front?
5.
6
The sidewheel steamer Robert Morris was a private vessel contracted by the federal government off and on throughout the war. During the Peninsula Campaign, it was used as a troop transport.
6. It’s not easy to say for sure, but this pile of bombs likely went with the 10-inch mortar tubes. They would have to wait to add their din and destruction to the storm.
7. Someone is missing a shoe!
OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
13
By Gary W. Gallagher
WORTH 1,000 WORDS An 1865 image of a bloody Confederate corpse in the Petersburg, Va., trenches.
THE DARK TURN SOME SEEK TO REVITALIZE CIVIL WAR HISTORY BY FOCUSING ON BRUTALITY
IT HAS BECOME FASHIONABLE AMONG scholars to emphasize the “dark side” of the Civil War. Troubled by what they consider a literature gone stale with old questions and topics, these historians seek to revitalize the field by examining the conflict’s often disturbing underside. Among the genres that come under fire as repetitive and unfruitful are books that revisit storied campaigns and commanders, especially ones that deploy words such as “heroism” or “gallantry” in narrating tactical events. That kind of drums and bugle history too often cloaks the war in romantic trappings, insist the dark side advocates, as do studies that find a soaring purpose in a war for union or even one for union and emancipation. The overlooked war, they counter, featured brutality, atrocities, cowardice, vicious guerrilla activity, and physical and psychological wounds that left veterans profoundly damaged. A striking example of how succeeding genera14
CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
tions fashion their own interpretations of seismic historical events, the turn toward the dark side reflects the impact of the American military experience in Vietnam and, more recently, in the Middle East. Late in the 19th century, a handful of authors anticipated some of the directions this new scholarship has taken. Frank Wilkeson and Ambrose Bierce, both Union veterans, illustrate this point. A New Yorker whose father wrote for The New York Times, Wilkeson lost older brother Bayard to a mortal wound at Gettysburg. Frank subsequently enlisted as a teenager and saw action with the 11th New York Light Artillery in the Overland Campaign and at Petersburg. His Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac (Putnam’s, 1886; reprinted as Turned Inside Out, Nebraska, 1997) opens with an unsparing portrait of men who accepted bounties to enlist. “If there was a man in all that shameless crew who had enlisted from patriotic motives,” he writes dismissively,
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“I did not see him. There was not a man of them who was not eager to run away.” Yet “dishonest Congressmen who desire to secure re-election by gifts of public money and property to voters,” continues Wilkeson, “say they were brave Northern youth going to the defence of their country.” An entire chapter deals with severe wounds. During action on May 5 in the Wilderness, a young soldier’s “head jerked, he staggered, then fell, then regained his feet.” Wilkeson noticed that a “tiny fountain of blood and teeth and bone and bits of tongue burst out of his mouth.” A round had passed through the man’s jaws, and “the
MACABRE MESSAGE Ambrose Bierce is remembered for his bitter and misanthropic works on the war. lower one was broken and hung down.” Adopting an almost clinical tone, Wilkeson adds: “I looked directly into his open mouth, which was ragged and bloody and tongueless.” At the North Anna River, an infantryman passed between the guns and caissons of the 11th New York battery. “A solid shot, 16
CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
intended for us, struck him,” recalls Wilkeson. “His entire bowels were torn out and slung in ribbons and shreds on the ground. He fell dead, but his arms and legs jerked convulsively a few times. It was a sickening spectacle.” Wilkeson also chronicles how the war’s destructive hand crushed civilians. Deployed to the Tennessee/ Alabama border area later in the war, he encountered white refugees who had suffered from guerrilla activity. “Defenceless women and children… starved out of their homes” had been given shelter in camps set up by the Union army. “Their features were as expressionless as wood” and “their eyes lustreless.” Gaunt, unwashed and infested with vermin, “All were utterly poor. It seemed that they were too poor to ever again get a start in life.” Ambrose Bierce also enlisted while in his teens, joining the 9th Indiana Infantry and seeing action in many of the most famous battles in the Western Theater. Badly wounded in the head at Kennesaw Mountain, he later served as a staff officer before leaving the Army in early 1865. Bierce achieved considerable postwar fame as an author and wrote both fiction and nonfiction pieces about the war. Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War, edited by William McCann (Regnery, 1956), offers a convenient selection of his work that reveals why Bierce has been described as, among other things, sardonic, bitter, cynical, disenchanted and misanthropic. Bierce offers a fascinating discussion of why “brave troops could retreat while their courage was still high.” Referring to action at Pickett’s Mill in May 1864, he explains that where both sides fight without cover “each has its ‘dead-line,’ and between the two is a clear space—neutral ground, devoid of dead, for the living cannot reach it to fall there.” At Pickett’s Mill, Union corpses littered the ground in front of the enemy’s line, “a third were within
‘IF THERE WAS A MAN IN ALL THAT
SHAMELESS CREW WHO HAD
ENLISTED FROM
PATRIOTIC MOTIVES, I DID NOT SEE HIM’
fifteen paces, and not one within ten.” The perception on the part of the “still courageous soldier” that he cannot cross that last bit of ground explains why he would withdraw without coming into actual contact with his foe: “He sees, or feels, that he cannot.” Bierce also takes occasion to describe terrible deaths. In his short story “Chickamauga,” a soldier comes upon a dead woman—“the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of blood.” Close inspection reveals that the “greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.” Grimly humorous passages abound in both Bierce’s fiction and nonfiction pieces. Two examples will suffice. The Battle of Franklin, where the Army of Tennessee lost a dozen generals, proved “a great day for Confederates in the line of promotion.” And in the midst of chaos at Chickamauga, when Bierce offered to guide General James S. Negley to the action, the general rejected him “a little uncivilly.” “His mind, I think,” remarks Bierce, “was in Nashville, behind a breastwork.” Anyone who explores the dark side of the war should consult Wilkeson and Bierce. Yet even they occasionally slip into a different voice, as when Bierce, recalling fallen comrades at Chickamauga, confesses that for all who struggled there “the place means much.” ✯
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5 CONFEDERATE
CANTEENS
OF WOOD UNION SOLDIERS
went to war with canteens made of sturdy tin, but thousands of Rebel troops depended on wooden canteens, most often fashioned from cherry or cedar, to carry water. These vessels might seem quaint and outdated in a war where railroads and rifled guns made their mark, but they illustrate the hard-pressed nature of the South’s efforts to supply its troops, and also Confederate resourcefulness.
Federals coveted unique wooden Rebel canteens as souvenirs. Many of those captured and brought North ended up as decorations in GAR halls. This one, which served as a canvas for a landscape painting, was outfitted with a new spout and stopper.
In March 1863, the Richmond Arsenal requested 30,000 wooden canteens for the Army of Northern Virginia. This canteen, carried by John H. Bowman of the 2nd Georgia, was likely one of that lot. Bowman was mortally wounded during Pickett’s Charge. 18
CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
Alabamian James T. Nuckolls developed a variant that consisted of two sides turned out on a lathe, then nailed together with copper pins. As with Francis Gardner’s version (below), keeping water in the canteen would cause the wood to swell and seal, keeping it from leaking. “ES” is scratched on this canteen—not for its original Rebel owner, but for Egbert Sinsabaugh of the 141st Pennsylvania. Sinsabaugh was wounded when his regiment was decimated in Gettysburg’s Peach Orchard on July 2, 1863, but he managed to hang onto this keepsake, captured from an 8th South Carolina soldier, and later chronicled his adventures in the label pasted onto the canteen.
Richmond Arsenal worker Francis Gardner developed this style of canteen, about 8 inches in diameter and 2 1/2 inches thick, with staved sides held in place by iron bands. A mouse wreaked havoc on this example, which had been carried by John Cathey of the 20th Tennessee, who was killed in 1862.
OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
19
with R. Douglas Hurt
DISEASE FACTORY The concentration of horses at the Giesboro Depot near Washington, D.C., set the stage for the spread of disabling infection.
THE SOUTH’S
ACHILLES
HEEL HOW DID THE SOUTH’S
agricultural strength become a devastating weakness? R. Douglas Hurt, head of the history department at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., tackled that question in his 2015 book Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South (UNC Press). His research is the first comprehensive look at the topic since 1965. Hurt has also written about agricultural technology, the Dust Bowl, the Midwest and American Indian agriculture. 20
CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
CWT: The South was confident that agriculture would help them prevail. Why? RDH: Because the South traded a lot of sugar and cotton to the North, they believed that Northerners would see the foolishness of their ways and settle the conflict. They also believed the war would be very short. CWT: Cotton was king. What happened? RDH: By 1861, you have the Confederate Congress and states telling people to plant less and less cotton and dedicate their acreage to food crops. But planters and farmers really didn’t want to plow under their crop. They saw that as a bad risk. Most of the cotton had been planted on credit anyway. It was a tough issue that planters, farmers and politicians really wrestled with, and they never got control of it. CWT: Turns out the South had too much cotton and too few tools. RDH: Southerners really depended upon the Northern agricultural implement industry. And when the war begins they are at the mercy of what they have. Those industries that were
producing agricultural implements converted fairly rapidly to wartime production from contracts from the Confederate government. It had been easier and cheaper to buy from the North, and then you get the matter of keeping people busy all year. You have a large investment in slave labor, so maybe it’s best to let people do things by hand with simple instruments rather than invest in a reaping machine that would complete a task very quickly. CWT: What happened to the market for slaves during the war? You mention one planter saying, “The Negro is of no value and much expense.” RDH: It’s surprising that slave owners and planters didn’t realize this sooner, but they really didn’t need slaves: What they needed was agricultural labor. And you could certainly amortize your investment costs easier by the development of the sharecropping system that we see occurring in fits and starts during the war. To a large extent Southern agriculture—in the absence of the official institution of slavery— reverts to its prewar status, with black labor being regulated very similarly to the Black Laws/Black Codes of the antebellum period. CWT: How did this happen? RDH: The Union government didn’t want to support or take care of these freed men and women. They put them back on the plantations, where they could make a rudimentary livelihood for themselves even though they were property-less. You see this sharecropping system developing in the course of the war in Union-occupied areas. CWT: Why was the loss of the border states such a blow to the South? RDH: Confederate farmers and planters relied for their mule supply on Kentucky and Missouri, which had a national reputation for producing mules of great strength and reliability. Once that was gone, Southern planters began to feel the pinch fairly quickly, but even more so the Confederate military, because there was really no
THERE WAS REALLY
NO REPLACEMENT
OF HORSES AND MULES ONCE THE NORTHERN SUPPLY WAS CUT OFF
replacement of horses and mules once the Northern supply was cut off. By the time the war ended, the average life of a horse pulling artillery or wagons was about seven months. Sometimes cavalry horses lasted less than that. There’s also the problem of very serious disease among horses, particularly with glanders [a contagious bacterial disease], and that took its toll as well. CWT: There wasn’t even food for the horses they had. RDH: Union horses received, on the books at least, 14 pounds of grain and 10 pounds of hay a day or forage. Toward the end, Lee’s horses for wagons, caissons and cavalry had five pounds of grain a day. By Appomattox, Lee’s horses were just starving.
on for generations. Much is made, for example, of Grant allowing Lee and Confederate soldiers to go home and take their horses with them because they needed them to plow. In point of fact, many of those Southern horses had been infected by glanders, and their lifespan was pretty limited anyway. When Confederate soldiers went home and took their horses with them, it spread disease across the South, creating a problem that would linger and leave a footprint of the war that really didn’t go away. CWT: What were other effects? RDH: Cotton production doesn’t return to pre–Civil War production until the late 1870s. Sugar doesn’t return until the 1890s. In some states livestock production, particularly beef cattle, doesn’t return until the early 20th century. Rice production moves from the Sea Islands [off South Carolina and Georgia] to the Mississippi Delta. That’s in large part because of the war. There are important structural changes that are going to be cultural as well.
CWT: How did the armies spread disease among horses? RDH: Lee, for example, sent some tired and worn-out horses to farmers who contracted to let them rest and restore their energy in their fields, but the infected horses spread glanders to the farmers’ animals. The spread of disease was exacerbated by wartime conditions, in which thousands of horses were jammed together. The center of export of glanders can be traced to Giesboro Depot, near Washington. These horses were going south, and the contamination spread with them. The disease among Union cavalry horses spread quickly into the Confederacy.
CWT: What was most surprising? RDH: That the Confederate Congress didn’t make an effort until early 1865 to try to get a handle on the mobilization of agriculture to support the war, and by that time it was too late. The Confederate Congress never created a department of agriculture. There was too much volunteerism and too much consideration for states’ rights. The other thing that surprised me was how resistant so many cotton farmers were to cutting production. A lot of planters thought if they could produce cotton and store it and keep it in good shape, and keep Confederate or Union forces from burning it, sooner or later they were going to have a market. That could be when the war ended, or when the Union forces got close enough they could sell to Union speculators and make a lot of money. ✯
CWT: Explain the long-term impact. RDH: The consequences of the war go
Interview conducted by Senior Editor Sarah Richardson OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
21
A
B LL Bu ig -NE tt ge W on r s
s o N act r nt Co
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MOONLIT MARCH Edwards Ferry served as a Potomac River crossing throughout the war. Here, Union soldiers cross a pontoon bridge at that site on a cold, windy night in October 1861. The mouth of Goose Creek can be seen on the Virginia bank.
THE MURMUR OF WATER A POWERFUL FORCE FLOWS THROUGH THIS ISSUE ON JUNE 27, 1863, AS THE GETTYSBURG CAMPAIGN
was drawing toward its denouement, Major John I. Nevin of the 93rd Pennsylvania led his soldiers to a pontoon bridge at Edwards Ferry, Va. (P. 32). His men tramped onto the span and began singing what Nevin called “our brigade song,” a ballad titled “In the Old Virginia Lowlands” that had been reworked with lyrics about the 1862 Peninsula Campaign. Inspired by the river that gave “our army its name,” recalled the major, the soldiers literally changed their tune halfway across to a rendition of “Maryland, My Maryland.” ¶ Water forms an underlying connection throughout the stories in this issue. Witness Union soldiers loitering on the wharves of Yorktown, Va. (P. 12), and schoolteacher-turned-Confederate-soldier Riley Scherer falling in a battle named for a York River landing (P. 54). It’s possible that Scherer carried a wooden canteen (P. 18) with him into battle. “Water is the driving force in nature,” as Leonardo da Vinci pointed out, but it can also be the driving force in war, blocking or aiding troop movements. At the end of the Gettysburg Campaign, Robert E. Lee struggled to get his men back across the Potomac (P. 60). Reflecting on the challenges the Confederate commander faced, we can speculate how different the map of Gettysburg (P. 42) might have looked if the Federals had taken too long to cross their namesake river on their way to Gettysburg. –D.B.S. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
23
POMADE AND DASH Wounded at Gaines’ Mill in June 1862, George Pickett didn’t see much action until his division was famously devastated at Gettysburg. In 1864 he was anxious to prove himself.
FAINT PRAISE
ONLY ONCE DID LEE HAVE KIND
TRYING TIME Robert E. Lee, seen here in a postwar image, and his Army of Northern Virginia were confined to fighting mostly a defensive war by June 1864.
FOR PICKETT
WORDS FOR GEORGE PICKETT
BY R I CH ARD SELCER
OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
25
MYSTERIOUS Lee indirectly thanked Pickett for defending Bermuda Hundred in this brief dispatch. The copy shown here is referenced as “Version No. 1” in the article.
More than 150 years after the war, historically significant documents continue to turn up. One long held by the family of former Confederate Maj. Gen. George Pickett—a dispatch from Robert E. Lee to Lt. Gen. Richard H. Anderson dated June 17, 1864, that praises Pickett—was recently acquired by a researcher who wishes to remain anonymous. The body of that message is a mere 58 words, but in those few words, as the saying goes, hangs a tale.
T
HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN Robert E. Lee and Maj. Gen. George Pickett is most curious. Lee is remembered as the “Marble Man” who could do no wrong; Pickett was the eponymous leader of the Pennsylvania charge that marked a devastating defeat for the South. Both were Virginia aristocrats, and Pickett served almost exclusively under Lee during the war years. Yet Lee hardly knew his subordinate. Of the major battles fought by the Army of Northern Virginia under Lee, Pickett missed out on Antietam, never got into action at Fredericksburg, and missed Chancellorsville altogether. Pickett’s first real chance to shine came on Gettysburg’s third day, and after that disastrous charge he was banished to departmental command in southeast Virginia, called back to the army only during the latter stages of the Overland Campaign. The last recorded orders he got from Lee were to hold Five Forks “at all hazards,” which he failed to do. A week later Lee surrendered to Grant, and there is evidence to suggest that he dismissed Pickett from the army one day before Appomattox.
26
CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
Before Gettysburg, the only official notice Lee took of Pickett was to chide him in January 1863 for not taking better care of his men. In June, before the start of the Gettysburg Campaign, Lee stopped Pickett and his men from shuttling between camp and Richmond for R&R. On the afternoon of July 3, as Pickett’s men streamed back to Confederate lines, the two generals had an emotional exchange. And when Pickett wrote up his after-action report, Lee ordered it rewritten—which Pickett never did. Their acrimonious relationship makes Lee’s complimentary June 1864 note all the more remarkable. The incidents leading to it began in May 1864, when the Army of Northern Virginia was desperately fighting to keep Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s forces out of Richmond. While hammering Lee in the Wilderness, Grant sent Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler and 22,000 men on an end-run up the James River to attack the Confederate capital from the southeast. They landed at City Point, on the south side of the James, just eight miles from Petersburg
TWO COMMANDERS Lt. Gen. Richard H. Anderson, top, capably led Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s Corps while the latter recuperated from a wound at the Battle of the Wilderness. LaSalle Corbell Pickett, above, outlived George by 56 years and spent much of that time forging a romantic revision of her late husband’s Civil War career. Today her book Pickett and His Men is regarded as a classic of the Lost Cause genre.
and 15 from Richmond, and pushed toward Drewry’s Bluff. Pickett was then in Petersburg, commanding a small force of garrison troops, home guard militia and some artillery that he moved forward to block Butler at Bermuda Hundred, while frantically wiring Richmond for help. General P.G.T. Beauregard reached Petersburg on May 10, relieved Pickett and launched an abortive attack on Butler in front of Drewry’s Bluff, then pulled back into Petersburg’s defenses. Butler retreated to Bermuda Hundred and strengthened his lines. Around that same time, Lee was begging for reinforcements north of the James. The Confederate high command was misled by Beauregard’s assurances that he was not only on the scene but also would soon “take the offensive.” Braxton Bragg, President Jefferson Davis’ general-in-chief, had already ordered Pickett on May 4 to rejoin his brigades at Hanover Junction in anticipation of their returning to the Army of Northern Virginia. That was put on hold while Beauregard made his leisurely way to Petersburg, but on May 18 Pickett’s scattered regiments began assembling at Hanover Junction. They did so without their commander, who was suffering from nervous exhaustion after turning things over to Beauregard, and was being nursed by his wife, LaSalle “Sallie” Pickett. He caught up with his men on May 19, and around May 20 Lee chastised the major general for not being with his division and reporting to Hanover Junction as instructed. Pickett responded testily—and there things stood while the army went into action again. On May 6 in the Wilderness, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet had been severely wounded, and command of the First Corps devolved upon Lt. Gen. Richard H. Anderson. Pickett reported to him on June 1, just in time to participate in the Battle of Cold Harbor with the First Corps. On June 4, both sides licked their wounds and maneuvered for the next round. Meanwhile, Lee was in a quandary. He had no idea what Grant’s next move might be, but was alarmed by the threat Ben Butler posed to Petersburg. On June 15, he ordered Pickett’s and Charles Field’s Divisions of the First Corps to cross the James and reinforce Beauregard at Bermuda Hundred— apparently unaware that Beauregard had already pulled back to Petersburg. On June 16, Pickett’s and Field’s troops crossed the James at Drewry’s Bluff accompanied by Lee. At 4 a.m. the commanding general informed Bragg in Richmond that he had just arrived at Drewry’s Bluff “with Pickett’s division” and set up his headquarters in the Widow Clay’s house. Lee would spend the next two days trying to juggle his forces on both sides of the river. He sent out a flurry of couriers and telegrams to every commander in the area, relying on Assistant Adjutant-General Walter Taylor and aide-de-camp Charles Venable to write up orders, but also dashing off personal notes to Beauregard, Bragg, Wade Hampton, Fitzhugh Lee, A.P. Hill and Anderson to direct their movements. The usual formal procedure for communicating up and down the chain of command was put on hold while dealing with the crisis. At 9:40 a.m. on the 16th, Lee informed Beauregard, who was then under heavy attack at Petersburg, that Pickett’s Division was “in [the] vicinity of your lines and in front of Bermuda [Hundred].” At 3 p.m. he told Beauregard that the last of Pickett’s men had passed Drewry’s Bluff. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
27
Late that day Pickett and Field reached Bermuda Hundred to find the position lightly held by Butler’s forces. Lee initially ordered them to attack—but then reconsidered, deciding he did not want to bring on an engagement just yet, and countermanded his original instructions. The new orders failed to reach Pickett in time, however, as he had already sent his men in against the Federal left and driven them off, reoccupying the Bermuda Hundred lines. Field, who had received the countermanding orders, held back. By midnight Pickett’s men had retaken the rest of the position. The Federals counterattacked twice after midnight and again at first light, but the Virginians held. Word went back to the Clay House, and at 6 a.m., Lee wired Beauregard expressing frustration that he was “cut off from all information” regarding Grant’s movements and therefore in the dark about what to do next. Unknown to Lee, Grant’s main force had crossed to the south side of the James on the 16th and was now bearing down on Petersburg. With all his orders and counterorders, Lee had come very
HOME SWEET HOME This image shows a portion of the Confederate trenches of the Howlett Line. Pickett’s Division spent nine months in that series of earthworks after June 1864.
close to making a bad situation worse, though he didn’t realize that until later. What had persuaded him to cancel his original attack orders? Perhaps it was George Pickett. Lee might have felt the same doubts earlier expressed by Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon when Pickett was all that stood between Butler and Richmond: “I confess some distrust of Pickett’s adequacy to the load upon him.” But this time Pickett had risen to the occasion. By 4 p.m. on the 17th, Lee felt he had things well enough in hand to inform a worried Davis that Confederate forces under Pickett had assaulted the Federals on the Bermuda Hundred lines and “drove [them] from it.” Walter Taylor (writing for Lee) added at 5 p.m. that the entire line was now in Confederate hands. On June 18 at 6:30 p.m., Pickett finally got around to informing his corps commander, Anderson, of the results of his actions on the 16th and 17th: “General, I have the honor to state that I occupy with my division the [Bermuda Hundred] line….I have given orders to strengthen the entrench-
ments in every possible way.” Pickett settled into what was now officially known as the Howlett Line, where he would stay for the next nine months. For three days the situation on the south side of the James had tottered on the brink of disaster for the Confederates. Richmond had not been in this much danger since the spring of 1862. This time the masterful Lee had not been the man of the hour—yet he was not too proud to admit his mistakes and give praise where praise was due. At 5:30 p.m. on June 17, he penned a note of commendation regarding his least-favorite general. Lee did not convey his praise SAVE THE CITY A period lithograph of some of the fighting around Petersburg during to Pickett directly, however, but the last year of the war. The siege began in June 1864 and lasted until March 1865. through the chain of command. Whether he did so due to military protocol or because he couldn’t bring himself to write to Pickett is But the dispatch was so well-known to the impossible to say. Given the wording of his message, the normally taciCivil War generation that it could hardly be turn Lee seems almost jocular in his delight that Butler had been driven called “lost.” When Walter Harrison, George back to City Point. Yet his kudos were not for Pickett but for his men. Pickett’s assistant adjutant and inspector genHis dispatch is reproduced here as he wrote it to Anderson: eral, published his memoir Pickett’s Men in 1870, for example, he not only provided a verClay’s House, 5½ pm, 17th June 64 batim transcription of the note, he also quoted from Lee’s words on the book’s flyleaf. Charles Lt Gen R.H. Anderson, commanding Longstreet’s Corps Pickett, George’s brother and a member of his General: I take great pleasure in presenting to you my congratulations staff, indirectly referred to the note when he upon the conduct of the men of your corps. I believe that they will wrote to Henry T. Owen in 1881, referring to carry anything they are put against. Lee’s words as “one of the highest compliments We tried very hard to stop Pickett’s men from capturing the General Lee ever paid to a command.” breastworks of the Enemy but could not do it. The dispatch is also quoted proudly by Sallie I hope his loss has been small. Pickett in her book Pickett and His Men (1899). I am with respect Historians have long assumed that Mrs. PickYour obedient Svt, R.E. Lee, Gen. ett lifted it straight from Walter Harrison, and some scholars even accused her of shamelessly plagiarizing Pickett’s Men in her own writing. We know that one copy of Lee’s note found its way into Pickett’s hands Based on recent developments, we need to reasand survived the war—despite the fact that Federal troops burned the sess that judgment. general’s headquarters wagon during the Appomattox retreat. In addition Modern scholars have referenced the Lee to how Pickett retained that copy, another question arises: A second copy Dispatch cautiously. Douglas Southall Freeman exists that contains slight differences in wording. Who wrote it? cited it in his four-volume biography of Lee, What we will refer to as “the Lee Dispatch” never made it into the listing Walter Harrison as his source. Lesley massive collection of Confederate documents ultimately published as The J. Gordon, George Pickett’s latest biographer Official Records, Union and Confederate Armies. But it did surface again. (General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend, In 1866 Brig. Gen. Edward Porter Alexander, an artillery officer under 2002), quotes it but references Pickett and His Longstreet, began contacting former comrades, including Pickett, to ask for help in preparing his memoirs, including any documents, maps, etc., Men, which is interesting because Gordon other wise dismisses Sallie Pickett’s biography that they might be willing to loan him. This is apparently how Lee’s note wound up in Alexander’s Papers at the University of North Carolina. as unreliable. Pickett’s other modern biographer, Edward G. Longacre (Leader of the Charge, The dispatch was referenced in the Southern Historical Society Papers 1995), leaves out any reference to the dispatch. in 1876 (Vol. II, No. 6, p. 269). Curiously, however, it never made it into The story might have ended there had not Alexander’s recollections, Military Memoirs of a Confederate (1907), or another copy of Lee’s dispatch—with a very difinto his more personal recollections, originally written for his family and ferent provenance—recently turned up, a copy published in 1989 as Fighting for the Confederacy. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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that had long been held by Sallie Pickett. To keep the players straight, let’s call Alexander’s copy Version No. 1 and Sallie’s copy Version No. 2. The contents of both are essentially the same. Neither of the scrawled messages is on official letterhead; both were written on 4½-by-6-inch sheets of plain paper. Both have the same dateline: “Clay’s House, 5½ pm,” and both are addressed to “Lt. Gen. R.H. Anderson.” They are in very different hands, however, with some minor differences in spelling. For instance, Version No. 1 is addressed to “Lt Gen” Anderson,” while Version No. 2 spells out “Lieut. Genl.” Version No. 2 also includes a cryptic notation. Sallie never remarried after George Pickett’s death in 1875. In the late 1920s, she became acquainted with California railroad entrepreneur Henry E. Huntington, who was also a collector of art and ephemera. When he repeatedly asked her for any documents she might be willing to give him for his collections, Sallie explained she had already given almost everything away over the years. But she did send him a few items, including—I believe—Version No. 2 of the Lee Dispatch. Placing the single page, which was already crumbling, on a sheet of white paper, Huntington’s library staff photographed it, then returned the original document to Sallie. After Huntington’s experts closely examined the dispatch, somebody decided that it was not a real “R.E. Lee document.” One of them wrote in the photocopy margin: “Not in Lee’s hand. Not worth keeping.” But the photocopy was still in the Huntington’s collections in 1991—when I saw it. Unknown to scholars, the original of Sallie’s Version No. 2 passed down through four generations of descendants, until it was finally acquired by a researcher who prefers to remain unidentified at this time. Who wrote the two almost-identical dispatches? Since they both bear Lee’s signature, we have to wonder if perhaps the commanding general himself penned one of them and then an aide wrote out the other, copying Lee’s words. The signatures are very different—one scrawled and barely legible, and the other neatly written, with carefully formed letters. There is an even bigger mystery than the handwriting, however. The only significant difference between Versions No. 1 and No. 2 is a notation at the top of Version No. 2:
SIT TIGHT Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s Bermuda Hundred headquarters. After the June 16, 1864, defeat, Ulysses S. Grant quipped that the Confederate forces held Butler in place like he was a stuck “in a bottle.”
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“Date of Expedition against Newbern, N.C. Feb. 1st 1864 No Report of Newbern Expedition by Genl. Pickett found in files. Lines in front of Bermuda Hundred taken 17th June 1864—crossed James River on 16th.”
Key to understanding the added notation on Version No. 2 is the fact that, after Gettysburg, George Pickett was less than conscientious about writing the after-action reports required of senior officers. He did not submit reports of his attack on New Bern, N.C., in February 1864, or Sailor’s Creek on April 6, 1865. The last after-action report he wrote, for the April 1, 1865, Battle of Five Forks, was not completed until after Appomattox. Here is the most likely scenario to explain the two dispatches. Late on the afternoon of June 17, 1864, General Lee hastily scrawled his congratulations to Pickett’s men for taking and holding the Bermuda Hundred lines. He handed that note to one of his headquarters staff to send to General Anderson, and that man wrote out a copy to send to George Pickett, since the dispatch concerned his men. At the top of his copy, the staff officer added a notation asking Pickett where his New Bern report was before sending out both versions. Lee’s original was still in Anderson’s possession after the war, when Porter Alexander was seeking documents. Anderson sent it to Alexander, who never returned it; that is Version No. 1,
HARD PRESSED Confederate troops near Petersburg spent much of May 1864 fending off attacks from Maj. Gen. Ben Butler’s Army of the James. In mid-June the situation worsened for the Confederates when the Army of the Potomac slipped south of the James River. General Pickett’s aggressive June 16 attacks helped relieve the pressure.
which remains in the University of North Carolina archives. Version No. 2’s provenance is more problematic. The only way it could have survived the war in George Pickett’s possession was if he had entrusted it to Sallie. That is possible because in June 1864 Sallie Pickett was living in Richmond, and it would have been easy for George to ride to the capital for a visit, taking along Lee’s dispatch to show her. Why might he have done so? Because in three years of war Pickett had never before been complimented by the Army of Northern Virginia’s commanding general. A single word of praise from Marse Robert was golden to the officers of Lee’s army. Fortunately, Sallie held onto everything by or about her husband. She still had Lee’s dispatch in 1899 when she
wrote her history of her husband’s service, and in 1925 when she sent it to Huntington. After they returned the hastily written note to her, it subsequently remained with the rest of the Pickett family papers. How significant is the dispatch? It is the only time in Lee’s field correspondence where he seems to display a sense of humor. Also, reading between the lines, it looks as if the commanding general might have been obliquely admitting his own error in issuing conflicting orders on June 16 that could have cost the Confederates the Bermuda Hundred position, Petersburg and ultimately Richmond 10 months before it finally fell. Finally, the dispatch is significant because of whom it is about. The Lee–Pickett relationship had been broken nearly from the war’s outset. Pickett seems to have been something of a romantic, perhaps even a dilettante, fun-loving and self-absorbed to a fault. Lee expected his officers to put duty first and be serious and responsible. Whenever their paths crossed, sparks apparently flew—a scenario that was repeated even after the war, when they chanced to meet in a Richmond hotel in 1870. Of all the officers Lee might have cracked wise about, Pickett is not the first name that comes to mind—nor the second or the third. And on the one occasion when Lee did give the Virginia general praise, it was faint at best.
Richard Selcer, who teaches at Weatherford College, Texas, has written 10 books in Western and Civil War history, and published more than 40 articles in magazines and journals. He also owns and operates Fort Worth Tours & Trails. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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Union engineers scrambled to avoid a crisis during the
gettysburg campaign BY STEVEN TRENT SMITH ASSEMBLING THE PUZZLE No images of the pontoon bridges that carried the Army of the Potomac across its namesake river in 1863 are known to exist, but this photo provides a fascinating look at Union engineers and workmen laboring to complete a similar bridge across the Potomac Creek in Virginia during 1864.
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eneral Robert E. Lee’s stealthy pullback of his troops from their positions along the Rappahannock River triggered a sudden flurry of activity at the Washington Navy Yard in June 1863. On the 16th of that month, Lee’s actions resulted in a message from the Army of the Potomac’s assistant adjutant-general, Seth Williams, to General Henry W. Benham: “The commanding general wishes the pontoons...be put in order; and directs that you have all your trains in readiness for service at the earliest possible moment.” ¶ Fresh off his resounding victory at Chancellorsville in May, the Rebel commander hoped to march northward up the Shenandoah Valley and use the Blue Ridge Mountains to mask his movements from prying enemy eyes. Once on Union soil, the main body of his Army of Northern Virginia would be in a position to threaten Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia. The Confederates’ feints were so skillful that it took the Federals three weeks to ascertain Lee’s purpose. ¶ At some point during Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s quest to track the Rebels, his Army of the Potomac would have to cross its namesake river. The responsibility for making that happen would fall upon General Benham, commanding the Army’s engineering brigade, and his crack pontoniers of the 15th and 50th New York Volunteer Engineers. It would be their task to build a sturdy, reliable pontoon bridge capable of crossing 90,000 men, 23,000 horses, 370 artillery pieces and 35 miles of heavily laden supply trains. It was a tall order.
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THEORY AND PRACTICE A schematic, below left, shows how a pontoon bridge was constructed. Horizontal “balks,” or stringers, hold togther the pontoons. Vertical “chesses,” or planks, form a roadway, with additional balks forming a curb at the edges. This detail from an image of a bridge over the Rappahannock illustrates how those plans were executed by engineers, some of whom pose on the finished span.
At 2 a.m. on Wednesday, June 17, just hours after Benham began preparing his pontoons, Hooker sent him orders to immediately move 1,200 feet of bridging equipment up the Potomac River to Noland’s Ferry, 15 miles north of Leesburg, Va., and construct a floating bridge there by noon the next day. Benham detailed one of his best Regular Army officers, Captain Charles N. Turnbull, to that task, and the young captain had his equipage through the canal locks at Georgetown by 6 a.m. that morning. Early Thursday morning Turnbull and his men reached the mouth of the Monocacy River, two miles shy of Noland’s Ferry, halting there because of skirmishing farther up the Potomac. Later the same day Turnbull was joined at the Monocacy by two smaller bridge trains commanded by Majors Ira Spaulding and Wesley Brainerd. One had traveled via the C&O Canal, the other overland. The trio of engineers were told not to lay the bridge, but—as Brainerd noted in his diary—to “await further orders,” because Hooker still had no clear idea about Lee’s intentions. On June 19, things began to change when XII Corps commander Maj. Gen. Henry W. Slocum proposed another crossing point. At 10:40 a.m. he messaged Hooker: “A pontoon bridge should be thrown across the river, near Edwards
Ferry….The material for a bridge, with a party to build it, should be sent at once.” That place was 12 miles downstream from the mouth of the Monocacy, just south of Leesburg. Hooker’s chief of staff, Maj Gen. Daniel Butterfield, wired straight back to Slocum, asking: “What advantages are to be gained by putting a bridge at Edwards Ferry?” In his reply Slocum reiterated that a pontoon bridge at Edwards Ferry was the best choice because it was the “most accessible, and is covered by a strong redoubt.” Late that night, after consulting with Hooker, Butterfield directed all three of the bridge trains to be at Edwards the next morning, but reiterated that the bridge was “not to be laid until ordered from here,” but should be held in readiness. Brainerd, Spaulding and Turnbull began their march back down the Potomac from the mouth of the Monocacy River and, once more, awaited orders. Pontoon bridge equipment was a formidable affair. There were 34 trucks carrying the pontoon boats and “balks,” the stringers used to tie the boats together, each pulled by eight mules; 22 wagons loaded down with “chesses,” the cross planks that formed the roadway, four full of trestle parts, and four wagons bearing myriad tools, including a pair of stanOCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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RULES OF THE ROAD Union pontoniers position the final section of a bridge. The sectional nature of spans meant that infantry had to be careful not to march in step, which could set up dangerous oscillations that might pitch the troops into the water. Cavalrymen were told to dismount and lead their horses across at a walk. At right, a pontoon on its truck, with balks stowed underneath.
dard army forges. Six mules were employed to haul each of those. Manpower levels varied, but a typical pontoon complement usually consisted of 120 or more engineers. When the trains reached Edwards Ferry early Saturday morning, June 20, Spaulding and Brainerd were ordered back to Washington, leaving the bridge equipment in the capable hands of Captain Turnbull. Charles Nesbit Turnbull, then 30, was the son of William Turnbull, a well-known army engineer. A West Point graduate like his father, Charles had ranked sixth out of 46 cadets in his West Point Class of 1854. On receiving his commission, 2nd Lieutenant Turnbull joined the team of topographers tasked with surveying the United States’ border with Mexico, afterward accompanying Captain George G. Meade on the Federal survey of the Great Lakes. He started the war on the staff of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, transferring to the Army of the Potomac in the spring of 1863. Orders to start building the Potomac bridge finally came in at 5:20 p.m. that Saturday evening, with Butterfield commanding Turnbull to “Lay one bridge at Edwards Ferry.” Two hours later Turnbull replied: “Will commence laying bridge just as soon as possible. It will probably take all night to get 36
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all the boats into the river. I was ordered here with 60 boats— 1,200 feet of bridge. I brought 65 boats. I found on measuring the river the width is 1,400 feet, if not over. Since morning the river has risen 2 feet. General Benham has telegraphed me that he would send extra boats at once. They cannot reach here before to-morrow evening. Will go ahead and do the best I can.” The captain’s message about the Potomac’s width caused some anxiety at Hooker’s headquarters. At 9:20 p.m. Saturday Butterfield telegraphed Turnbull asking again about other potential crossing points between Edwards Ferry and Noland’s Ford. Butterfield also expressed concern about the length of the bridge: “If 1,400 feet, general [Hooker] does not want bridge laid yet at Edwards Ferry.” Lay it. Don’t lay it. The chaos must have frustrated the bridge builders. But undaunted, Turnbull started construction at Edwards, confident he could successfully span the Potomac with the materials at hand and en route. The first task in building a floating bridge was to get the pontoons into the water, and to organize all the other components so they were speedily accessible. The boat wagons were
specially constructed with sloping platforms, so pontoons could be slid easily down the extended balks to the ground. Twenty men then carried or dragged the 31-foot boats into the water. While that was going on, a nineman section set to work building an abutment for the bridge, using a sill 14 feet long, by 8 by 6 inches. A second team rowed across the river to set the opposite abutment. Once those foundations were prepared, the boats were wrangled into position. For every second pontoon a 100-pound anchor was placed upstream to secure the bridge. Five longitudinal balks were then strung from pontoon to pontoon and lashed securely to the gunwales. Next the chesses, 13-foot-by12-by-1½ inch white pine planks that served as the roadbed, were laid down across the balks. Finally side rails were lined up along the length of the bridge and lashed tightly in place. Turnbull’s engineers worked all night and well into Sunday morning to complete the bridge. They had done so on
their own initiative, since there is no record that headquarters ever sent clarifying orders to lay it. Turnbull wired Butterfield at 11:45 a.m. on June 21 that the “bridge has been finished two hours and reported to General Slocum. Bridge, 1,340 feet long. Please send instructions as to who is to cross.” Thirteen hundred forty feet—well shy of Hooker’s 1,400-foot limitation. But Captain Turnbull wisely fudged the length; in reality, the Edwards bridge was 1,580 feet long. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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‘IF IT AIN’T BROKE’ In 480 BC, Phoenicians construct a bridge across the Hellespont that would have looked very familiar to the Blue and the Gray.
The earliest recorded use of a pontoon bridge to move troops over a body of water occurred about 800 BC, during China’s Zhou Dynasty. According to Greek historian Herodotus, a bridge of boats was built across the Bosporus for Persian emperor Darius the Great around 490 BC. He got his troops over—only to see them decisively defeated at the Battle of Marathon. A decade later, Darius’ son Xerxes tried again to conquer Greece, moving 100,000 soldiers across a pair of mile-and-a-quarter long pontoon bridges at the Dardanelles. Son fared little better than father, and the combined forces of the Greek City States expelled the Persians in 479 BC. ¶ The Romans were great believers in the tactical advantages of floating bridges. Caesar laid one over the Rhine in 55 BC, and in 172 AD, Marcus Aurelius had one thrown across the Danube during his campaign against the Marcomanni confederation. By that time pontoon bridges had evolved into the form still used today: a series of floats supporting a roadbed. ¶ It wasn’t until the Mexican War that the U.S. Army first organized its pontoon bridge capability. During that conflict a pair of trains were put together, with boats made from India rubber. But it turned out that sharpshooters could easily puncture the rubber skins, which were not easily repaired. So in 1858 the army began a systematic study of “bridge equipages” from other countries. After two years of experimentation, including testing corrugated iron boats, the U.S. Army settled upon the French system, based on sturdy wooden pontoons. ¶ With the outbreak of the Civil War, the Army Corps of Engineers realized temporary bridges would soon become an operational necessity. Over the winter of 1861-1862 the Corps assembled five complete “reserve” pontoon trains, each capable of building a bridge 700 feet long. A second type of bridge train, the “advance-guard,” was developed to accompany rapidly moving forces, like the cavalry. These units deployed Russian-style lightweight canvas boats.—S.T.S.
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The important thing—the critical thing—was that there was now a secure, sturdy crossing of the Potomac River. Though the Edwards Ferry bridge had been completed on Sunday morning, June 21, General Hooker wasn’t quite ready to put it to use yet. The majority of his corps were still marching north toward the Potomac. That gave Turnbull and his regiment little to do except bail the pontoons and tweak the lashings. Things got very busy again for the young captain at about noon on June 24, when he received an urgent wire from General Hooker himself: “Another bridge has been sent for, and when it reaches Edwards Ferry, please stop it, and have it thrown over the river near your present bridge.” Turnbull shot back: “Your dispatch just received, and orders will be executed. The bridge is not expected to reach here before sometime to-night.” Later that same afternoon Turnbull sent a query to Hooker: “Which side of Goose Creek do you wish the second bridge—north or south? The present bridge is on the north side. Please answer at once.” Busy with critical strategic matters, Hooker never responded. At 5 a.m. on June 25, Turnbull tasked engineer Major Edmund O. Beers with laying the second bridge. Beers telegraphed Hooker’s assistant adjutant-general, Seth Williams, about placement. “Inform me immediately,” the major pleaded. But Williams’ reply was short, testy and did not address the pressing question: “The commanding general directs that the bridge be laid forthwith at Edwards Ferry, at the best place for crossing the troops. He supposed the bridge was already laid. You should have obeyed his order communicated through Captain Turnbull.” Chastened by that curt message, Beers replied: “As soon as train arrived I commenced getting the boats into the river. I have the bridge started at both ends and shall push it with all possible dispatch.” Apparently that response wasn’t acceptable, for a few minutes later Williams upbraided Captain Turnbull, saying Hooker was surprised to learn the second bridge was not operable and directed that the bridge be “put down forthwith. He wishes to know why this bridge has not been laid.” Turnbull answered immediately, “All the boats only arrived an hour ago. Having received no instructions I have put the second bridge on the south side of Goose Creek. General Howard’s corps crossed this morning; his baggage wagons are still crossing. Am pushing the second bridge all I can.” Turnbull had chosen the placement wisely. The bridges were set far enough apart to facilitate a smooth flow of traffic across the spans, with minimal bottlenecks on both the Virginia and Maryland sides. Finally, at 2:30 p.m. on the 25th a much relieved Major Beers telegraphed: “The second bridge is completed and in use. The bridge was put down in three hours. It consists of sixty-five boats.” By that time Oliver Howard’s XI Corps had finished crossing on the original bridge and the III Corps had started over. Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds’ I Corps was the first to use the lower bridge. On Saturday evening, June 27, Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick’s VI Corps was the final unit to use the spans. Over the course of 65 hours, the entire Army of the Potomac—Hooker’s col-
DESERVING OF THE RANK Henry W. Benham was a brilliant engineer, first in his West Point Class of 1837. He was promoted to brigadier general in 1861, but after disobeying orders at the June 1862 Battle of Secessionville, he was court-martialed and demoted to lieutenant colonel. Benham officially held that rank through the end of the war, but his contemporaries habitually addressed him as “general” in person and in correspondence during his 1863-1865 leadership of the Army of the Potomac’s Engineer Brigade. He was brevetted a major general at war’s end.
umn, from vanguard to stragglers, was estimated to be over 76 miles long—crossed the pair of pontoon bridges at Edwards Ferry without mishap or significant delay. It marked a herculean effort by the 15th and 50th New York. Late on June 27, General Benham gave orders to Turnbull to take up the bridges. After that task was completed the next morning, most of the bridge equipage was sent back to the Washington Navy Yard for repairs, though some of it—what Benham referred to as his “land pontoon”—was sent to follow the troops, in case a bridge was needed somewhere up the line on the road to Gettysburg. Following that three-day battle, when General Lee began his retreat southward on July 4, he faced getting his army back across the Potomac. As the Federals had destroyed his only pontoon bridge, he began ferrying his wounded over the rapidly rising river in a pair of flatboats. Heavy rain delayed mass crossings for nearly a week, so Lee ordered his troops to dig fortifications around Williamsport, Md., to fend off an expected attack by the Army of the Potomac, then commanded by Maj. Gen. George Meade. Lee then set his small engineering corps to work building pontoon boats from materials at hand. By July 13, they had completed a floating bridge, and by 9 a.m. the next morning the remains OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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Two weeks before laying the span at Edwards Ferry, Union bridge builders had to undertake a much more dangerous crossing of the Rappahannock River. Once it became apparent that Lee’s army was on the move, Hooker ordered the VI Corps to make a reconnaissance in force. On Friday, June 5, Captain Turnbull and Major Wesley Brainerd were directed to lay a 400-foot span at Franklin’s Crossing (below), two miles downriver from Fredericksburg and opposite a heavily defended Rebel redoubt. Late that afternoon Union artillery opened a withering fire on the Confederate positions as the engineers rushed to get their pontoons in place. But the shelling did not knock out enemy riflemen. As Brainerd later recalled, “One after another of my men dropped.” He watched as Regular Army Captain Charles E. Cross was instantly killed while attempting to rally his boatman. “His head drooped and then his body seemed to wilt away.” Soldiers from the 5th Vermont and 26th New Jersey piled into 10 of the pontoon boats and made an amphibious assault on the far shore. The Federals pushed the Rebels back, buying time for the engineers to throw their bridge. The fight for the bridgehead proved costly for the engineers: Brainerd tallied the pontoniers’ losses at two officers and 22 men killed or wounded.
TO MARYLAND The Edwards Ferry bridges were placed just above and below of where Goose Creek enters the Potomac on the river’s south bank. Engineers were issued dress coats, as shown at right, piped in yellow, and NCOs wore yellow chevrons. Most of the time, however, these specialized troops did their work attired in plain fatigue uniforms.
of the Army of Northern Virginia had crossed and were marching back down the Shenandoah Valley. To facilitate the pursuit, General Benham had his brigade throw two bridges over the Potomac, one at Harpers Ferry and the other downstream at Berlin, Md., modern-day Brunswick. But there was to be no further collision between the two armies during that campaign. Union forces used pontoon bridges to great effect during the conflict’s remaining two years. In the spring of 1864, the 50th New York laid 38 bridges during Ulysses Grant’s two-month Overland Campaign, not including the longest span of the war, the 2,200-foot James River bridge. The portable causeways gave Union armies unprecedented mobility in both the Eastern and the Western theaters. And though tactical by nature, the pontoon bridges gave the Union high command a new tool to support strategic operations that might otherwise have been considered too risky or even impossible. The U.S. Army currently deploys the improved ribbon bridge, which is carried by giant eight-wheeled prime movers, with pontoons built of aluminum and steel. They support a 22-foot section of two-lane highway, complete with yellow lane markers. It’s a far cry from a Civil War bridge train. But despite all the fancy hardware, the 21st-century equipage would still be readily recognizable to Captain Charles Turnbull, because in the end it all boils down to the two fundamental components that floating bridges have shared for three millennia: a boat and a roadway.
Steven Trent Smith is a five-time Emmy-award winning television photojournalist with a passion for military history. A frequent contributor to World War II and Civil War Times, he writes from northwest Montana. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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THE TWINKLE
OF BATTLE
GETTYSBURG’S FAMED ELECTRIC MAP
REOPENS IN HANOVER, PA., READY FOR A
NEW GENERATION OF CIVIL WAR ENTHUSIASTS BY K IM O ’CO N N ELL AND NATASHA M AGALLON Scott Roland and Marc Charisse are bent over a network of wires, making connections, testing things out and adjusting their computer records. Sprawled before them is a green expanse about the size of half a tennis court. Instead of being flat, however, it is uneven, with discernible ridges and sharp bumps, and punctuated by a patchwork of colors. This is the beloved Gettysburg Electric Map, a ghost of the battlefield being brought back to life in Hanover, Pa. ¶ As the men tinkered with the wiring, the map’s June reopening to the public was only a few days away. “Hold on,” Roland said, then turned off the bright overhead lighting. At that point, with a flip of a switch, dozens of small lights came on across the map, creating their own firmament in the darkened room. Although the Electric Map has been upgraded and the whole display is now tied to a sophisticated new system, the exhibit still retains its wholesome, low-tech charm. Turned on and off in succession, these points of light help tell the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, pinpointing important landmarks and showing the movement of troops during three crucial days in July 1863. ¶ But the map’s reopening, like the outcome of the battle itself, was by no means assured at the project’s outset.
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GETTYSBURG FROM 6 FEET The Electric Map landscape once again blinks out the story of the July 1863 battle. Blue lights indicate Federals, while Confederates are yellow. Red lights show campfires, while white signifies structures and green marks places of interest. This view looks to the northeast, with Big and Little Round Tops on the far right.
CREATED IN1962 TO COINCIDE WITH
THE BATTLE’S
CENTENNIAL, the electric map once formed the centerpiece of the old visitor center at Gettysburg National Military Park, which was located on the Taneytown Road across from the Gettysburg National Cemetery (the site of Lincoln’s famous speech in November 1863). Old National Park Service brochures touted visiting the Electric Map as an essential first step in understanding the battlefield. The NPS had acquired the 29-by-29-foot map from private owners when the old visitor center opened in 1972. Constructed from steel I-beams, a wood and plywood platform, plaster molding and paint, the map employed more than 600 miniature light bulbs and weighed 12 tons. A 22-minute audio program narrated the history of the battle for park visitors, who viewed the
CENTENNIAL TECH The Electric Map was a hit when it opened in its custom theater. How many readers can remember this?
presentation from above, in a 554-person stadium-seating theater from the early 1970s until April 2008. The Electric Map was once regarded as a technological and interpretive marvel. Updating an earlier version of an electrified map that he had created decades before, local historian Joseph L. Rosensteel painstakingly created a new version for the battle centennial, molding and painting it to demarcate farms, roads and railroad lines, and turning the Pennsylvania countryside into a bucolic, multicolored quilt. According to a history published in The Baltimore Sun, the Rosensteel family were longtime artifact collectors and history buffs, and for many years it was Rosensteel’s own voice heard on the narration (the NPS rerecorded it in the 1980s). Family legend has it that Rosensteel’s children could all recite his narrative by heart, and one son even gave dramatic presentations of it at the dinner table. The elder Rosensteel died in 1964, only a year after his map opened. The narration begins by orienting visitors and explaining the relative location of the town of Gettysburg. In many ways, it is a relic of its time, leaving out more minor characters and nuanced stories that might be included in a battle description today. The narrative is strictly a military history, told in broad strokes. As the lights show the Union and Confederate armies converging across the battlefield, the narrator points out famous landmarks such as the Peach Orchard and Devil’s Den—even the locations of campfires as night fell. The Day 2 narration highlights the leadership of Union Brig.
Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren in defending Little Round Top. Joshua L. Chamberlain’s valiant defense of the rocky hill, made famous in the 1974 book The Killer Angels, is not mentioned. Day 3 focuses on what the narrator calls “one of the greatest infantry charges in history,” when the advancing “butternut” troops faced “a roaring volcano” on Cemetery Ridge. “Brothers fighting brothers, each for the cause he thought was right,” the narrator intoned. “Fifty minutes—50 minutes—and the greatest infantry charge in our history…was history.” For millions of visitors, it was the rolling plaster topography of the map, the sequencing of the lights, and the sonorous narration that first enabled them to understand the significance of the battle and its major players: Lee, Longstreet, Meade and Warren. It undoubtedly helped to orient them when they went out and toured those landmarks on the sprawling battlefield—places like Little Round Top, Devil’s Den and Seminary Ridge—for themselves. Yet as time went on, the map increasingly generated headaches for the Park Service. The plaster cracked and showed its age, and it contained crumbling asbestos, a health hazard. Audience expectations changed. The blinking lights that had drawn oohs and aahs from one generation of children seemed to pale in comparison to the personal computers and handheld devices favored by the next one. The conventional wisdom was that visitors now expect more interactivity from their museums. Stadium seating was too distant; the map too static. “From an architectural standpoint, it takes up an immense amount of space,” former Superintendent John Latschar told The Baltimore Sun in 2008. “And we have consistent problems with school kids falling asleep.” When the NPS was planning its new visitor center and Cyclorama complex located on the Baltimore Pike, a process that included demolishing the old visitor center and Richard Neutra–designed Cyclorama building, the Electric Map became a casualty too. In its place, the NPS installed the Cope Map, a 10-by-10-foot topographic map of the battlefield created in 1904 by military engineer Emmor B. Cope, in the new visitor center. The Electric Map was shut down, unplugged, cut into four pieces and put into long-term storage, its future decidedly uncertain. lthough the old exhibit was gone, it was far from forgotten. On the review site TripAdvisor, someone recorded sentiments that have been echoed by others. “I first visited Gettysburg in the 1970s and the best single tool for understanding what happened was the electric map that used electric lights to show the movement of troops over the three days of the battle,” wrote that visitor. “Now the old visitor center and map are gone. The new visitor center is fancier and bigger, but the electric map is in storage somewhere (I was told). That was a HUGE disappointment. Bigger is not always better. Bring back the map!” Private citizens formed a “Save the Electric Map!” website, advocating that the map be reinstalled or reused in some fashion. In 2012 Roland, a Pennsylvania developer and businessman, took the first major step toward that outcome by purchasing the map at auction for just over $14,000. His intention was to move the display to Hanover, 14 miles east of Gettysburg, with the goal of increasing heritage tourism to
A
ALL IN Hanover, Pa., resident Scott Roland, who bought the map and helped to restore it, tinkers with some of its 7 1/2 miles of wiring in this image.
the town and linking it more solidly to the Gettysburg story. Hanover was the site of a cavalry clash just prior to the Battle of Gettysburg when, on June 30, 1863, Confederate troopers under J.E.B. Stuart were met by Union Generals Judson Kilpatrick’s and George Custer’s men. Today the dream of preserving and reopening the Electric Map has been realized. The exhibit has been reassembled, rewired (including an estimated total of 7½ miles of wiring), relit (with LED bulbs), and replastered and repainted (where needed) in the Hanover Heritage and Conference Center at 22 Carlisle Street, right in Hanover’s downtown. Visitors can get much closer to the map than before and also walk around it as they listen to the original narration. Charisse, the center’s director and an adjunct professor at York College of Pennsylvania, also hosts walking tours focusing on Hanover’s wartime heritage and is planning future exhibits in the center (now open only on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays). He admits that the map isn’t completely accurate geographically; the Big and Little Round Tops seem a bit out of scale, among other quibbles. (He points out that the map used to be viewed from above rather than ground level, after all.) But overall, he contends, the map still offers a valuable history lesson. “This is an icon to people,” he says. “Nowhere else can you get, in one quick look, this kind of overview. This is the big picture of Gettysburg. Then people can go out on the battlefield to learn more of the details.” People can also learn how a casualty of the battlefield— not a soldier, not a monument, but a beloved and historic map—was saved so that an old story could be told to new generations, who still long to hear it.
Kim O’Connell, based in Arlington, Va., saw the Electric Map in the old visitor center during her first trip to Gettysburg, nearly 25 years ago. She has written about the Civil War for The New York Times, National Parks, National Geographic News, Preservation and other publications. Natasha Magallon is a writing student at the New School in New York City. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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MALLEABLE MAGNATE Born at the close of the 18th century, Simon Cameron made money in canals and railroads, and was associated with the Whig, Democratic, Know-Nothing and Republican parties during his rise to power.
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CROOKED CAMERON
?
Lincoln’s first secretary of war was no more corrupt than other politicians BY PAU L KAH AN
Contemporaries called Simon Cameron the “greatest of wire-pullers” and “corrupt as a dunghill.” Historians have since branded him a “crafty manipulator with few scruples” and “a deadweight, an embarrassment.” Cameron has become shorthand for corruption and graft, but as one historian has noted, “Cameron’s reputation has stood in the way of an objective appraisal” of his life and tenure as secretary of war. Many of his actions will strike modern readers as unprincipled, but my goal is to put his actions into a larger historical context by demonstrating that many politicians of the time (including Abraham Lincoln) used similar tactics. When Fort Sumter fell on April 13, 1861, Secretary of War Cameron faced unprecedented challenges: He had to navigate the demands of an administration that desired peace but needed to plan for war, as well as demands from Cabinet members, the military, governors and the president. Historians have argued that he failed to meet those challenges, but when he left his post in January 1862, the War Department and the Army were in fact better organized and provisioned than a year before. One of the most serious challenges facing Cameron at the conflict’s outset was the abysmal state of America’s military, which Allan Nevins has described as “hardly strong enough to deal
with a sizable Indian [uprising].” The U.S. Army numbered approximately 16,000 men when Lincoln was inaugurated, many of whom were in the West fighting Native Americans. There were only about 50 soldiers in Washington at the time, most of them senior officers. Following Lincoln’s inauguration, more than a dozen forts in Texas surrendered to the Confederacy, and Louisiana gave the Rebels $500,000 held at the New Orleans mint. Worse, almost one third of the Army’s officers defected to the Confederacy. Cameron wondered if there was some “radical defect” in the education at West Point that could explain what he called this “extraordinary treachery.” For their part, the Regular Army officials
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reciprocated Cameron’s antipathy. Lincoln’s Register of the Treasury, Lucius E. Chittenden, noted that he and his clerks encountered “one obstruction which [they] could not overcome. It was contempt of the officers of the regular army for the appointments from civil life. At that time every head of a bureau in the War Office was an officer of the regular army, with a very limited experience in the field….These men never openly opposed efforts at improvement….But, somehow, it always happened that when it was proposed to carry a new rule into practice…it could not be done.” Another big problem was the War Department’s confused chain of command: In addition to Cameron there was General of the Army Winfield Scott. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase noted: “Gen. Scott gives an order, Mr. Cameron gives another. Half of both are executed, neutralizing each other.” The War Department itself was divided into eight bureaus in addition to the office of the Secretary of War: Adjutant-General, Engineer, Medical, Ordnance, Paymaster, Quartermaster, Subsistence and Topographical Engineer. At the head of each bureau was a senior military officer—with an average age of almost 65. Andrew Carnegie, who worked with Assistant Secretary of War Thomas Scott, described the bureau chiefs as “martinets who had passed the age of usefulness,” adding, “Long years of peace had fossilized the service.” The War Department had only 90 employees when Lincoln won the election in 1860, and by the summer of 1861, Cameron had only 56 employees managing the largest military expansion in American history to that point. He packed the department with clerks and typists until they
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CAMERON HAD ONLY 56 EMPLOYEES MANAGING THE LARGEST MILITARY EXPANSION IN AMERICAN HISTORY
were sitting nearly elbow-to-elbow, but despite 24-hour shifts, they could not keep up. Cameron never turned into an administrator. He seldom delegated work and failed to create procedures to protect his time and maximize his effectiveness. Making matters worse, he was disorganized, frequently losing papers and failing to follow up on promises. An acquaintance of George McClellan’s complained: “[He] is unfit for the place. Apart from the reputation for corruption, he is always ‘too busy’ to attend to
military matters. Officers on the most important business are kept cooling their heels day after day in his lobby while d—d politicians get every access to him.” But Cameron was no guiltier of playing politics than Chase or Lincoln, a fact reflected in Representative Henry Dawes’ complaint in mid-July 1861 about the “corruption with which every Department seems reeking here.” Cameron actually fired a smaller percentage of his department than either Chase or Secretary of State William Seward did in theirs; for that reason, historian Brooks M. Kelley has called Chase, rather than Cameron, the “greatest spoilsman of all” Lincoln’s cabinet members. Cameron rewarded some political cronies, and he undoubtedly showed favoritism toward Pennsylvanians in hiring (more than a quarter of War Department employees hailed from the Keystone State). Cameron also punished his enemies. Ethan A. Hitchco*ck, who in the late 1830s had claimed Cameron defrauded the Winnebagos, asserted that the war secretary blocked his promotion to general. Cameron did realize that any apparent
ATTACKS IN INK Cameron served as the editor of Pennsylvania newspapers before the war, so he would have been aware of the power of political cartoons. The one at left mocks Cameron’s decision to take the Secretary of Russia post as a means of sidestepping controversy. Above, Lincoln frets as the military demands more money and his accountant explains none is to be had.
abuses of his power would lead to controversy. So while he was in favor of hiring pension agents who would be responsible for directing government funds to wounded soldiers or the families of those killed, he refused to do so, noting “‘there would be a howl’ about increasing the patronage of the department,” which led one Republican to conclude, “I don’t know whether Cameron is corrupt or not, but is certainly a most cowardly caitiff.” Thus Cameron never enjoyed carte blanche in appointments, as some critics have claimed. In reality, Pennsylvania actually received fewer commissions in the army than the commonwealth was entitled to, a point that Cameron raised in a letter to Seward when complaining that he had only interfered in military appointments on a single occasion, “when I asked the President to select one and only one [general] from Pennsylvania.” Cameron also wrote Chase, “I am desirous that no Pennsylvanian shall receive the highest military office in the gift of the Government, except as a reward of merit achieved in the field.” Chase used his influence to reward generals from his home state of Ohio, notably Irvin McDowell and George B. McClellan, and Seward convinced Cameron to appoint his son Augustus as a paymaster. Lincoln requested that Cameron assign his former law clerk Elmer E. Ellsworth to special duty as adjutant and inspector general of the Militia for the United States, though Cameron was unable to do so. Lincoln’s request shows he too sought to reward his friends and allies with plum military appointments, a point reinforced in June when Lincoln justified the appointment of a Paymaster General because “we owe Rhode Island & Gov. Sprague a good deal because they give us such good troops & no trouble.” Political appointments became so common that Lincoln requested Cameron forward to the Senate blank nominations, since the president couldn’t remember all his appointees’ names. As historian Thomas J. Goss has noted, “The administration fully comprehended the potential benefits of such spokesmen for the Union cause and was more than willing to risk the dangers of military inexperience for the known dividends of political support.” By far the biggest problem Cameron faced early on was the fact that the army put into the field was a hodge-podge force: Regular or career army, volunteers (individuals who enlisted directly into federal military service) and state militia. Northern governors were responsible for recruiting volunteers, so from the beginning Lincoln’s call for troops was problematic because of the ambiguous status of state militias. These units were overseen, drilled and
UNION TRUE Accusations of impropriety aside, no one could doubt the Cameron family’s Union loyalty. James Cameron, above, Simon’s younger brother, could have remained at his comfortable home, but he sought active command. He was shot dead on July 21, 1861, at First Bull Run as colonel of the 79th New York Infantry.
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TWO PLAYERS William Seward, secretary of state, frequently clashed with Cameron. Montgomery Meigs, right, was disliked by Cameron. Meigs, however, became a very successful quartermaster general. commanded by governors but subject to being called into federal service by the president. At that point state militias came under Regular Army authority and were transferred to the federal payroll—and subject to federal control. State officials were responsible for raising and organizing the militia units even though these men were explicitly destined for federal service. Then there were the independent units formed in the border states, whose governors did not respond to Lincoln’s call for men. Volunteers were paid recruits raised by the individual states but put into federal service. A key difference between volunteers and the state militias was that the former were not legally prohibited from serving outside their states or for long periods of time, as state militias typically were. One consequence was that the federal government went through a period of uncertainty and confusion, resulting in a series of missteps that laid the groundwork for later criticisms of Cameron. The governors frequently accepted more troops than their quotas mandated, straining their abilities to train and equip the men. Lincoln’s call for three-year troops in May asked for 55 regiments, but by early July the federal government had accepted nearly four times that number into service. Convinced the war would be brief, the Lincoln administration had issued short-term requests for a small force that proved incapable of meeting needs—but the president almost immediately began asking Cameron to accept additional men for political reasons. The flood of new recruits quickly overwhelmed state authorities’ ability to provision militiamen, and governors tried to pass that problem on to the federal government. The rapidly swelling army quickly became a bureaucratic nightmare for the War Department, which was in no position to accept 75,000 men, let alone the extras sent by the state governors. One witness described troops in Philadelphia on the brink of starvation, while others were begging in the streets in Ohio. 50
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OHIO’S SON Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase used his influence to get officers from his native state promoted, but managed to avoid criticism. Half the federal government’s 500,000 or so muskets were antiques, and the states’ armories were not much better. When Pennsylvania tried to arm its volunteers, officials discovered some weapons dated to the Revolutionary War. At the war’s outbreak, the federal government owned a single armory, with maximum production capacity of 3,000 weapons per month. More alarming, the government did not own a single foundry, so all cannons had to be purchased from private companies. The War Department purchased all uniforms from a single arsenal in Philadelphia that was incapable of quickly producing all the garments needed. When Cameron balked at accepting and equipping the extra men, governors flooded the War Department with telegrams demanding uniforms, weapons and other materiel. Most of the time Cameron could not accede to their wishes. Some governors even sent agents to Europe to buy weapons and uniforms, inflating prices and making commodities even scarcer. In short, the federal government found itself in competition with the states—and the Confederacy—for materiel. Consequently Cameron directed the governors to equip recruits and bill the War Department, a decentralized approach that ensured war profiteering on an immense scale. As early as July 1861, Cameron estimated
the states were due $10 million for money they had already spent, and within a year Congress appropriated another $15 million to reimburse states for additional costs. It would take the War Department nearly two years to gain control of the system and arm its troops. In their zeal to meet their states’ initial quotas, governors and state legislatures often passed laws that contradicted administration directives. On May 3, 1861, Lincoln called for volunteers to enlist for three-year terms, resulting in new problems. In the first place, Lincoln’s call for troops signaled a change from the state militia system in place since the Militia Act of 1792; under his new call, volunteers would augment U.S. Regulars directly, as opposed to being mustered into the state militias. Shortly thereafter Cameron told governors that he wanted 90-day recruits to be converted into three-year commitments, causing additional problems. New York, Maine and Vermont had passed laws authorizing two-year enlistments; when the War Department announced that the federal government wanted only men who enlisted for three years, the governors balked, saying they were not legally allowed to extend the terms an extra year. Vermont Governor Erastus Fairbanks informed Cameron that if the federal government did not see fit to accept the two-year volunteers, he would have to call an extra session of the legislature to comply with the War Department’s requests. In mid-May Pennsylvania’s legislature passed a law prohibiting volunteers who had not been accepted by Governor Andrew Curtin from leaving the state, a clear attempt to prevent the War Department from usurping the governor’s authority. The president’s informal management style also challenged Cameron. Lincoln often ignored the chain of command, and tacitly encouraged subordinates to do the same. Other Cabinet members also intruded on War Department
matters, especially Seward. Charles Francis Adams wrote the secretary of state considered Lincoln a “clown” and sought to separate the new president from the rest of the Cabinet by holding as few meetings as possible. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles later claimed, “The understanding that existed between Mr. Seward and Cameron at the organization of the Cabinet and not a very high appreciation of the abilities of Mr. Cameron led Mr. Seward to believe he might make himself familiar with the War Department, and assume as occasion required some of the duties of the Secretary of War….” The most egregious example of Seward’s meddling occurred in late March 1861, when—without consulting the secretaries of war or the Navy—he implemented a plan to resupply Fort Pickens, in Pensacola, Fla. On March 29, Seward introduced Lincoln to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, arguing that he should lead an expedition to resupply Fort Pickens. On March 31, Lincoln authorized that expedition, without either Cameron or Welles being informed. Meigs telegraphed the Brooklyn Navy Yard and ordered the commandant to make ready the steam frigate USS Powhatan—followed by an order not to mention the operation to the Navy Department. But Cameron and Welles had expected to use Powhatan to resupply Fort Sumter around that same time. When Welles ordered Captain Samuel Mercer to command the resupply fleet and use Powhatan as his flagship, the Navy Yard commander referred the matter to Seward, who confronted Welles. They both appealed to Lincoln, who ordered that Powhatan be made available for the Sumter mission. Seward, unhappy with the outcome, sent the order over his own signature—which Lieutenant David D. Porter refused to obey because the original order had been signed by the president. Thus Seward got Powhatan, thoroughly alienating Cameron and Welles. Welles later wrote: “I was unwilling to believe that my colleague Mr. Seward could connive at, or be party to, so improper and gross an affair as to interfere with the organization of my department, and jeopardize its operations at such a juncture.…Mr. Cameron was greatly incensed; complained that Mr. Seward was trying to run the War Department, had caused Captain Meigs to desert.” Cameron threatened to court-martial Meigs for being absent without leave and spending War Department funds without his approval. Cameron also issued a pass to Henry Johnston, an acquaintance, to cross the Union lines, which Johnston used numerous times to travel to Richmond. When Johnston tried to return to the North in October 1861, he was arrested on Seward’s orders. A furious Cameron ordered Johnston released, but Seward countermanded his order. Though the situation
PENNSYLVANIA OFFICIALS DISCOVERED SOME WEAPONS DATED TO THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR
Hall carbines, experimental breechloaders dating to 1819 like the one shown above, were some of the outdated weaponry Cameron purchased for the U.S. Army at seemingly exorbitant prices. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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was eventually resolved, resentment lingered. At one point the normally soft-spoken Cameron flew into a rage, yelling at Seward, “You are always meddling in that which does not concern you!” Cameron’s distress was compounded by the war profiteers swarming the capital. He initially relied for procurement on Alexander Cummings, editor and founder of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and the New York World, who had pressed Lincoln to appoint Cameron to the cabinet. Cummings, however, was totally unqualified for the job, and his brief term in office was characterized by a bizarre spending spree: He spent $21,000 for, among other things, straw hats and linen pantaloons, also overpaying for shoes and using government funds to buy alcohol, herring and pickles. By the end of that first summer, Cummings had spent $250,000, and though he himself did not receive any pay, in at least one case he sent business to a firm whose owners had lent him money. No evidence has ever surfaced to prove Cameron was personally enriched by his activities as war secretary—aside from using his influence to route government traffic onto the Northern Central (which saved the federal government money). But he was involved with at least 96 percent of War Department contracts. He would later claim ignorance of the specifics of most of those contracts. By far the most infamous example of procurement malfeasance was the Hall Carbine affair. In June 1861, Cameron approved the sale of 5,000 obsolete Hall carbines to Arthur M. Eastman for $3.50 each. Eastman made minor alterations that cost between 75 cents and $1.25 per gun, then sold them to Simon Stevens for $12.50 each. Stevens, a friend of Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, sold the modified guns back to the War Department for $22 each—apparently with Cameron’s approval. But Cameron and his clerks were not the only ones who inked questionable deals in the war’s chaotic first year; Thurlow Weed, New York Governor Edwin Morgan, Maj. Gen. John Frémont and others were also linked to questionable contracts. For instance, the administration delegated authority to spend $2 million on its behalf to former Secretary of the Treasury John A. Dix and former New York state legislators Richard M. Blatchford and George Opdyke. That was in addition to another such committee closely allied with Governor Morgan, which reportedly exercised “practically the full authority of the War and Navy Departments” in recruiting, organizing and provisioning troops. Governor Curtin, accused of war profiteering by Pennsylvania’s Democratic press, was forced to appoint a committee to investigate the charges. Furthermore, the heads of the War Department’s various bureaus were accustomed “…to make contracts without regard to the ability of the Treasury to meet their payments [which] more than once brought the Treasury to the verge of bankruptcy.” The procurement effort was so confused that in November 1861 Cameron begged Lincoln to prevent Joshua F. Speed (one of the president’s friends) from purchasing arms in New York because, as the war secretary noted, “the only result of his efforts to purchase, is to enhance the price and to defeat the endeavors of the government to procure arms.” Historian Mark R. Wilson, who wrote the most comprehensive study of federal purchasing, noted that state officials typically went out of their way to buy from local firms, often without bothering to advertise for bids. Many complaints came from individuals denied contracts. Lincoln’s secretary John Hays cited one instance where “A leather dealer who came here the other day, full of righteous indignation that no contract had been awarded him, and profoundly impressed with the belief that there was cheating around the board, after several days of diligent investigation, having learned that every contract had been let on lower terms than he could afford to work for, went back to his tan-yard, and has not since called Cameron a thief.” When a group of businessmen from New York and Boston called on the president to demand Cameron’s removal, the 52
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NO EVIDENCE HAS EVER SURFACED TO PROVE CAMERON WAS PERSONALLY ENRICHED BY HIS ACTIVITIES
president responded, “Gentlemen, if you want General Cameron removed, you have only to bring me one proved case of dishonesty, and I promise you his ‘head.’ But I assure you I am not going to act on what seems to me the most unfounded gossip.” Because Cameron was clearly overwhelmed, however, Lincoln increasingly delegated responsibility to Secretary of the Treasury Chase, which Cameron seems to have appreciated. By May, Cameron had asked Chase to assume full responsibility for the department when he (Cameron) was out of Washington. It was Chase who drafted the War Department’s orders for
POINT OF CONTENTION USS Powhatan was at the center of a controversy between Cameron and Seward, who disagreed over whether it should be used to resupply Florida’s Fort Pickens or South Carolina’s Fort Sumter.
enlarging the Regular Army and the creation of a volunteer army in early May, and he was partially responsible for McClellan’s appointment to general in chief. Chase oversaw the recruitment of new regiments and handled the governors. As a result, congressmen and officials frequently wrote to both Cameron and Chase. Voices inside and outside the Cabinet pressured Cameron and Lincoln to bring some order to procurement procedures by filling the Quartermaster Generalship, and the leading candidate became Seward’s favorite, Montgomery Meigs. Cameron strongly opposed Meigs, in part because he was still angry about the Fort Pickens debacle. It was not until several months later, after much back and forth, that Cameron offered Meigs the position. Over the next few months, some semblance of order was established over procurement. As historian Mark Summers noted, “…after the end of the first year [of the war], the complaints about procurement of supplies diminished as [soldiers] found themselves newly clad.” But while Meigs is due some credit for formalizing and regularizing Army procurement, his reforms were not universally applauded. Many
depot quartermasters found that formal contracting cost the government more money than it saved. State governors, who feared Meigs would stop spending money in their states, said they preferred to continue purchasing locally and have the federal government reimburse them. Even if Cameron had been capable, his conduct would have been criticized. But for all his missteps, the War Department was far better equipped to meet the war’s challenges at the end of Cameron’s tenure than when he had started. As late as October 28, Lincoln expressed unqualified support of Cameron’s judgment, noting in a letter to him about a proposal for managing the military telegraph system: “I have not sufficient time to study and mature an opinion on this plan. If the Secretary of War has confidence in it, and is satisfied to adopt it, I have no objections.” A few months later, Lincoln would force Cameron out of office, but it was not due to incompetence or corruption. The War Secretary had touched the “third rail” of Civil War politics—slavery—and advocated that African Americans, including escaped slaves, be enlisted in the Union Army. Cameron was just ahead of the curve.
Excerpted from Amiable Scoundrel: Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s Scandalous Secretary of War, by Paul Kahan, by permission of Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2016 by University of Nebraska Board of Regents. Available wherever books are sold or from the Univ. of Nebraska Press 800.848.6224 and at nebraskapress.unl.edu OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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DOUBTFUL WARRIOR Riley Scherer, right, wasn’t sure the Confederate Army was the right place for him. This flag was made in Richmond for his regiment, the 5th Texas.
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The war n their words
‘ GOOD BYE DEAR SISTER’
THE UNHAPPY WAR OF A TEXAN WHO WAS
THE LAST TO ENLIST AND THE FIRST TO FALL
by william a. palmer jr. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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On April 7, 1862, new Confederate recruit Riley Luther Scherer wrote a letter from Houston, Texas, to his 16-year-old sister, Mary Ellen, some 80 miles away in his hometown, Columbus, Texas:
After arriving n this place I walked about through this City & I suppose looking rather meloncolly. A sweet little girl call o me and asked me f I would have some flowers. (She ws n a eautiful garden.) I told her Yes indeed & tht I loved flowers very much. When she gave them o me you may guess how thankful I felt—I told her I would send some of them o my sister....I love tht little girl tht give me these presents of flowers.
R
iley Scherer was the son, grandson and nephew of Lutheran pastors. A decade before the war his father, Gideon, had left his pulpit in Virginia and moved the family to the Texas frontier to minister to the growing number of German Lutheran immigrants in the Lone Star State. Gideon and his brother, John Jacob, would also establish Colorado College in Columbus. In addition to ranching in Columbus, Riley taught school before the war. He never married, and seems to have been deeply affected by his widowed father’s death in June 1861. He spent the next several months acting as co-executor, along with his uncle, in settling his dad’s estate. By the spring of 1862, the 5th Texas Infantry, part of John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade, was in desperate need of replacements. The regiment had suffered greatly from illness during the previous winter near Dumfries, Va. When recruiters from the 5th arrived in Columbus in March 1862, 27-year-old Riley Scherer volunteered. By the time he reached camp in Houston, however, the former schoolteacher was already having second thoughts. “We have some bad fellows along with us,” he confided to his sister. Even before the 37 men who joined up in Columbus had left town, new enlistee William Ryan was stabbed to death, reportedly “by a man named John A. Pierce.” Riley closed his letter with a benediction and a confession: “May the Lord bless and keep you from all harm. I will be without a friend all the way to Va.” His sense of isolation and foreboding clearly worsened during 18 days of train trips between Houston and Richmond, Va. Hungry and exhausted, he admitted to Mary Ellen: This morning I have almost given away to dispondency. I want to be at home, there is no place like home. If I had a 56
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good Christian friend with me or even one that respected morals I would be much happier. But O the wickedness, the wickedness that is carried on. Imajaneation cannot paint the blackheartedness & the desperate wickedness that is going on....I feel so solitary & lonesome. Sometimes I get about half asleep and imajine that some of you steped in and fell upon my neck. I cannot discribe the joy I felt....I jumped up on the bench and wakened and saw my sad disappointment. I do not know if any the boys seen me jump or not.
Scherer did not share the optimism of some of his comrades, writing: “I still entertain the same opinion about the war as I had before I left. I still cannot but think that the South will be subjugated.” Despite being homesick, Scherer was determined to honor his soldierly obligations. He wrote: Our regiment is at Yorktown about 60 m. from Richmond.... Tomorrow I think we will start to our regiment. Ever body says that there will be a desperate fight there or at Fredericksburg in a few days. We will have to go right into it probably as soon as we get there....We will have to stand up to the rack hay or no hay....Sister you may get this letter and it may be the last one God only knows. Before you have time to get this probably I will be a wounded souldier or a corps upon the field of blood. I have given myself and body up into the hands of God and feel satisfied that he will do what is best for me. If it is his will that I should be numbered among the slain, I say his will be done not mine.
In that same letter, he also sent a message to his aunt that offers a glimmer of humor, a clue that in other circ*mstances our picture of him might be far different: “Tell Aunt Leah that I would much rather ride over the prairie after cows.” But his final words confirm Scherer’s gloomy outlook:
RIVERSIDE FIGHT Riley Scherer was killed after the 5th Texas seperated from the rest of its brigade and advanced eastward along the “blind road” at the May 7, 1862, Battle of Eltham’s Landing. This map depicts the fight after Hampton’s Legion had pushed back the 95th Pennsylvania skirmish line.
Every Friday I spend particularly in prayer and supplication to God for you, that is you 4 girls. I hope you will not forget me....Good bye dear Sister may God bless you all, and if we never meet on earth again I hope we will all see each other in heaven. And now dear Sister do not forget your Afectionate Brother Riley.
Scherer evidently shared a premonition that he would be wounded or die in combat with others in his unit. James Daniel Roberdeau, a former lieutenant in his company, later recalled that several comrades had presentiments that proved to be uncannily accurate. After relating a story about a soldier killed at Second Manassas, Roberdeau noted that man was the fourth he knew to have made similar predictions: “Denny and Sherer [sic] at Eltham’s Landing, Gaines at ‘Gaines Farm,’ and Pinchback at [Second] Manassas.”
Scherer and his fellow recruits had joined the 5th Texas at Yorktown just as General Joseph Johnston was issuing an order for the withdrawal of Confederate forces. On May 5, Union forces caught up with the Southerners just east of Williamsburg. A confused fight in a driving rainstorm bought Johnston’s forces time to continue their withdrawal. Even while the fighting was raging near Williamsburg, Maj. Gen. George McClellan was supervising the loading of Brig. Gen. William Franklin’s division onto transports at Yorktown. His plan was to undertake an amphibious landing near West Point, at the head of the York River, at which point Franklin’s division could fall upon the retreating Confederates’ flank. Since there were insufficient transports to move the entire division in a single trip, Franklin was ordered to establish a bridgehead and wait there until all his forces arrived. Johnston, however, was aware that McClellan might make such a move. Early on the afternoon of May 6, as Franklin’s first wave began disembarking on the south bank of the York, the Southern commander ordered the division of Brig. Gen. W.H.C. Whiting, along with the infantry component of Colonel Wade Hampton’s Legion, to interpose their commands between the Confederate line of withdrawal and the Union bridgehead. The Union bridgehead around Brickhouse Landing was certainly defensible. Mill Creek ran from left to right in front of Franklin’s semicircular bridgehead before emptying into the York River upstream from the landing. Bakers Creek protected Franklin’s left. Offering an additional measure of protection, Mill Creek was impounded by two dams that created substantial millponds on Franklin’s front. Bassetts Pond, the larger body of water downstream, was named for the colonial owners of nearby Eltham Plantation. Narrow roads traversed both the dams and offered the only access to the bridgehead area on Franklin’s front and right. On Franklin’s left, the main road between Brickhouse Landing and the village of Barhamsville, about four miles away, skirted the headwaters of Bakers Creek. At BarhamsOCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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WINTER’S CHILL 1st Texas soldiers at their Dumfries, Va., hut during the winter of 1861-62. Illness swept through the Texas Brigade’s camp during that season, killing many. Scherer was part of a batch of troops enlisted to help replenish the Lone Star units. ville this road intersected with the road between Williamsburg and New Kent Court House, which the Confederates were using for their withdrawal. The Confederates took the initiative. Whiting ordered Hampton’s Legion, which was at Barhamsville, and the Texas Brigade, in bivouac just north of that village, to advance on the Union bridgehead. They moved out at daybreak on May 7, just as the final elements of Franklin’s force were arriving at Brickhouse Landing. Because both Hood and Hampton would be approaching the Union position through poorly mapped and densely wooded terrain, the Confederate commanders were concerned about the potential of friendly fire. Hood instructed the Texas Brigade to advance with unloaded muskets. Hood also decided to divide his force. Leaving the 18th Georgia and brigade artillery in reserve, he led the 4th and 1st Texas toward Franklin’s center. The 5th Texas was sent along a “blind road” that would intersect with the main road from Barhamsville to Brickhouse Landing. They would link up there with Hampton’s Legion. At daybreak two companies of the 16th New York passed over the dam impounding the upstream pond on Mill Creek and entered what was described as a “stumpy field,” where 58
CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
pine trees had recently been harvested. Near the Robert Timberlake House they ran into the 4th and 1st Texas, most of whom were carrying unloaded weapons. In the ensuing exchange Hood, riding at the head of his column, narrowly escaped being killed when fired on by a New Yorker. But one 4th Texas soldier—who had disobeyed orders and loaded his weapon—quickly dispatched the Federal shooter. Around that same time the 95th Pennsylvania was moving toward Barhamsville via the main road. As the Federals emerged from a densely wooded stretch of the highway into a cleared area, the regiment formed a line of battle, with one battalion on either side of the road. Colonel James J. Archer of the 5th Texas was concerned about connecting with Hampton’s Legion as he approached the main road from Barhamsville—as was Colonel Hampton, at the head of the unit bearing his name. Hampton subsequently reported that “Fearing a collision between my command and that of General Hood, should they be thrown together in the deep woods, I acceded to the request of Colonel Archer, and allowed him to precede me....” Thus the Texans reached the intersection first, to find the 95th Pennsylvania waiting. Lieutenant Campbell Wood, the Texans’ adjutant, later recalled:
We marched down the road...in column of four ranks. Colonel Archer and Captain Denny rode at the head of the regiment, and I trudged along on foot, immediately behind Archer. Archer and Denny rode slowly, and the men kept close up, talking a little as was usual on the march. Just as we approached quite near to an old shack of a house, a federal sergeant and eight men jumped from behind it and fired a volley at us. All their bullets excepting one went wild, but that one struck and killed Captain Denny.
Shocked by the death of a fellow officer right in front of him, Wood probably did not notice that the Pennsylvanians’ Lorenz rifle-muskets had actually exacted a greater toll. Others would report that Captain W.D. Denny, the company’s original first sergeant who had been promoted and transferred to regimental headquarters, was not the only man lost in that fusillade. Riley Scherer also lay dead in the mud of the “blind road.” Ironically Scherer, the last man to enlist in his company, had been the first to die. He and Denny were among a dozen Confederates lost that day as part of the Battle of Eltham’s Landing, all of whom would be buried at or close to where they fell. General Hood reported that “at 2:30 P.M.,” he “gathered up the killed and wounded and returned in perfect order to the bivouac I left in the morning.” Because Hood was with the 1st and 4th Texas regiments throughout the battle, it seems likely he’s referring to the dead and wounded of those regiments. Their remains were placed in a common grave north of Barhamsville, where the Texas Brigade had camped the night before the battle. But according to locals the bodies of Scherer and Denny, who had been killed on another part of the field, might have been buried elsewhere. Scherer’s siblings and relatives would later try to figure out exactly where his remains lay, questioning surviving members of the 5th in the decades after the war. In 1915,
WHERE DO THEY REST? The remains of Private Riley Scherer and Captain W.D. Denny may remain somewhere in a shady Virginia tidewater grove.
for example, Scherer’s nephew, Jacob Gideon Wirtz, began writing to Albert Harrison Carter, who had served with his uncle in Company B. Carter, then 73, demonstrated his remarkable memory of the May 7 incident—though he could not resolve the family’s most pressing question: I was in a few steps of Riley Scherer when he was shot but we passed on into the fight and never came back that way. I do not know where he was buried. Generally there was a detail made to burie the dead where they fell[.] If I ever knew where he was buried I have forgotten....There was two killed that morning Doc Denny and Riley Scherer....I do not remember the name of the roads[.] I remember the place distinctly[.] I will make a little diagram on the back of this page.
Carter’s diagram accurately depicts the intersection where the 5th Texas collided with the 95th Pennsylvania. It also shows the Texans’ line of march along the blind road, which Carter labeled “just a country road,” that intersects on the perpendicular with the Barhamsville to Brickhouse road, about which he wrote, “this was a larger road.” Across the intersection he drew an “old field” and at its back an “old house,” no doubt Lieutenant Wood’s “old shack of a house,” where some of the Pennsylvanians opened fire. He also drew arrows to show fire coming from the Texans’ left, where the 95th Pennsylvania’s battalion on the near side of the road would have been in a position to fire into the Texans’ flank. If Denny, at the head of the column, was hit by fire coming from close to the old house, the arrows on Carter’s map suggest that Scherer was killed by flanking fire from the left. Carter wrote at the bottom of his map: “Where the cross is is about where they were killed a short distance from the cross road[.] Cannot remember the distance probably one or two hundred yards.” The roads on Carter’s map still exist today. They are paved, but little else has changed. Not far away a private farm road climbs from the blind road straight up a shallow grade and, near the top, makes a peculiar bend to the left and back to the right. Within that bend is a small copse of trees, and locals claim that graves lie in their shade. Years ago those graves were visibly sunken, and therefore easier for visitors to find; today they’re harder to detect, and must be pointed out. As long as anyone in the area can remember, the site has been protected by neighbors. Maybe this spot is indeed the final resting place of Riley Luther Scherer and Captain W.D. Denny. For all who still remember those two Texans who died at a crossroads so far from home, there is perhaps some comfort to be found that they rest in peace in a shady grove.
William A. Palmer Jr. is the author of The Battle of Eltham’s Landing. He resides in West Point, Va., where he serves as publications chairman of the Historical Society of West Point. Palmer is grateful to Janice Bonds of El Paso, Texas, the great-granddaughter of Mary Ellen Scherer, who gave permission to publish her family’s letters. OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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EYES ACROSS THE RIVER Cannons atop Doubleday Hill still point south from the outskirts of Williamsport, Md., although the threat of a Confederate advance passed long ago.
JUST INSIDE THE
OLD LINE STATE THE GETTYSBURG CAMPAIGN did not end on July 3, 1863, but in a series of fierce clashes that marked the Confederate retreat back to Virginia. The Potomac River was a formidable obstacle, and troops faced the threat of being washed downstream while fording the waterway—as terrifying an option as being shot by the enemy. Williamsport, Md., had become a center of transportation due to the presence of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, and troops moved across the river there several times during the war. On July 14, 1863, Union and Confederate forces collided in the Battle of Falling Waters only two miles from the river crossing. Outnumbered Confederate troops under Maj. Gen. Henry “Harry” Heth and Brig. Gen. James Johnston Pettigrew fought Union Brig. Gens. Judson Kilpatrick’s and John Buford’s troopers. The Southerners repelled the Federals long enough to escape across the river, but Pettigrew suffered a mortal wound. Today Williamsport looks much like it did 150 years ago, with a quiet downtown, W I LLI A M S P O RT pretty countryside and several canal structures. Located southwest of Hagerstown, Williamsport can be reached via I-81 north from Martinsburg, W.Va., or from I-70 west to I-81 from Frederick, Md. Free parking is available at the C&O Canal visitor center, with street parking also available in town.—Kim O’Connell
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NORTH CAROLINA’S
FAVORITE SON
HOUSE IN A HOT SPOT
The Daniel Donnelly House, located just 2 1/2 miles south of town at 15834 Falling Waters Road, is a good place to start your Williamsport trip. This handsome 1830s brick house stands at the center of the Falling Waters battlefield. Adjacent farms are also private property; please heed posted signs. George Franks, who owns the Donnelly House, has published the Battle of Falling Waters 1863: Custer, Pettigrew, and the End of the Gettysburg Campaign. To acquire a copy, contact [emailprotected]. To tour the property, contact Franks at battleoffallingwaters1863foundation.wordpress.com.
SHORT BUT BLOODY
COAL AND THE CANAL
Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick, principal Union commander at the Battle of Falling Waters, reported 105 Federal casualties and said that “125 dead rebels” were found on the battlefield, along with 50 wounded Confederates.
In Williamsport, the Cushwa Basin visitor center, part of the C&O Canal National Historical Park, is a must-see. The turning basin for canal boats and part of an aqueduct can still be seen, along with the historic coal warehouse. Learn how Williamsport became the crossing point for Stonewall Jackson on his way to Harpers Ferry in 1862 and how Robert E. Lee’s armies used this site in 1863.
HEADING HOME To see where Confederate troops accessed the C&O Canal during their retreat, head west down Falling Waters Road from the Donnelly House to the private Potomac Fish and Game Club. You may be able to request access to the canal and walk a half-mile north on the towpath to an interpretive marker and remnants of an old bridge. You can also hike south to the site via the towpath from the Cushwa Basin Visitor Center.
Only days after BRIG. GEN. JAMES PETTIGREW’S division fought at Gettysburg— where he was severely wounded in the hand—Pettigrew was shot at close range by a Michigan cavalryman during intense fighting around the Donnelly House. He succumbed to his injury three days later in Bunker Hill, W.Va., where a monument to the lost general now stands on US-11 near I-81. His death inspired a statewide day of mourning in North Carolina.
TOWN DIVIDED Just down W. Potomac Street from the Cushwa Basin, at the corner of N. Conococheague Street, a historical marker tells the story of how Border State Maryland fueled both sides of the war effort. Williamsport’s sons joined both Union and Confederate units, with
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“ The people of Williamsport say that Lee’s infantry crossed the river in four ranks arms interlocked like a Macedonian phalanx, to prevent the swollen waters from carrying them away.” Major John I. Nevin, 93rd Pennsylvania, July 13, 1863
The Potomac River, seen from the crest
a major contingent joining the Potomac Home Brigade (1st Maryland Cavalry and 3rd Maryland Infantry) in particular.
AN ACCOUNTING OF THE DEAD Riverview Cemetery, located within sight of the Potomac, is the final resting place of many Civil War dead. Take time to read the historical marker that details the “Bowie List,” a painstaking accounting of Confederate burials in Williamsport and the surrounding areas. The list is named for Maryland Governor Oden Bowie, who oversaw a massive effort to locate the burials and have them reinterred in proper national cemeteries, such as the Washington Confederate Cemetery in Hagerstown. 62
CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
HIGH GROUND Climb up to Doubleday Hill, at the northern end of Riverview Cemetery, to get a nice view of the Potomac. Maj. Gen. Abner Doubleday, as a captain with the 17th U.S. infantry— who did not invent baseball, by the way—claimed the hill and mounted three siege guns there to defend the river crossing. New interpretive signage and three original cannons add interest.
BATTLEFIELD SURVIVOR To the east of downtown, on Springfield Lane, is a majestic white wooden barn that dates to 1755 and was used as a field hospital during the war. Considered one of the largest barns in Maryland, it houses the town museum, open Sunday afternoons.
WATER BRIDGE The 1835 aqueduct at Williamsport carried the C&O Canal over Conococheague Creek. John S. Mosby’s Rangers damaged the canal during the Civil War, and its north wall collapsed in 1920. In February 2016, funding was announced to restore the aqueduct.
Cushwa Basin Visitor Center
Williamsport Museum
of Doubleday Hill
LOCAL COLOR Desert Rose Café “Hello, I’m June, July and August,” a server cheerfully announced as he took a lunch order at this cozy Williamsport eatery. The menu features affordable sandwiches, as well as nachos, soups and salads. Vegetarians will find plenty of choices too, from veggie sandwiches to black-bean burgers. The café tips a hat to a common canal activity by naming one of its sandwiches (turkey, provolone, spinach, and tomato on wheat) the “Bicycler’s Best.” OCTOBER 2016 CIVIL WAR TIMES
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HERITAGE TRAVEL & LIFESTYLE SHOWCASE
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A vacation in Georgia means great family experiences that can only be described as prety sweet. Explore Georgia’s Magnolia Midlands.
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he Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area highlights the historic, cultural, natural, scenic and recreational treasures of this distinctive region. www.mississippihills.org
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Over 650 grand historic homes in three National Register Historic Districts. Birthplace of America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams. he ultimate Southern destination—Columbus, MS.
Six major batles took place in Winchester and Frederick County, and the town changed hands approximately 72 times— more than any other town in the country! www.visitwinchesterva.com
Home to more than 400 sites, the Civil War’s impact on Georgia was greater than any other event in the state’s history. Visit www.gacivilwar.org to learn more.
Greeneville, TN Founded in 1783, Greeneville has a rich historical background as the home for such important igures as Davy Crocket and President Andrew Johnson. Plan your visit now!
Richmond, Kentucky
H I S T O R I C
Roswell, Georgia
Tishomingo County, MS Fayeteville/Cumberland County, North Carolina is steeped in history and patriotic traditions. Take a tour highlighting our military ties, status as a transportation hub, and our Civil War story.
Whether you love history, culture, the peacefulness of the great outdoors, or the excitement of entertainment, Roswell ofers a wide selection of atractions and tours. www.visitroswellga.com
With a variety of historic atractions and outdoor adventures, Tishomingo County is a perfect destination for lovers of history and nature alike.
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Seven museums, an 1890 railroad, a British fort and an ancient trade path can be found on the Furs to Factories Trail in the Tennessee Overhill, located in the corner of Southeast Tennessee.
hrough 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
here’s a place where a leisurely stroll might lead to an extraordinary historic home, a beautiful monastery or a lush peach orchard. hat place is Georgia. ExploreGeorgia.org/HistoricHeartland
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Williamson County, Tennessee, is rich in Civil War history. Here, you can visit the Lotz House, Carnton Plantation, Carter House, Fort Granger and Winstead Hill Park, among other historic locations.
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Join us as we commemorate the 150th anniversary of Knoxville’s Civil War forts. Plan your trip today! www.knoxcivilwar.org
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! Atractions include the Levi Jackson Wilderness Road State Park and Camp Wildcat Civil War Batleield.
Hip and historic Frederick County boasts unique shopping and dining experiences, batleields, museums, covered bridges, and abundant outdoor recreation. Request a free travel packet!
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 Chatanooga, ind 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 ine 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 inest, the Classic South, Georgia, ofers visitors a combination of history and charm mixed with excursion options for everyone from outdoorsmen to museum-goers.
Relive the rich history of the Alabama Gulf Coast at Fort Morgan, Fort Gaines, the USS Alabama Batleship, and the area’s many museums. Fort-Morgan.org • 888-666-9252
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 irst-hand, including Merrehope Mansion, Marion Confederate Cemetery and more. www.visitmeridian.com.
Fitzgerald, Georgia...100 years of bringing people together. Learn more about our story and the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s conclusion at www.itzgeraldga.org.
Hundreds of authentic artifacts. Voted fourth inest in U.S. by North & South Magazine. Located in historic Bardstown, Kentucky. www.civil-war-museum.org
Come to Cleveland, Mississippi—the birthplace of the blues. Here, you’ll ind such legendary destinations as Dockery Farms and Po’ Monkey’s Juke Joint. www.visitclevelandms.com
Historic Bardstown, Kentucky
Dstination Jessamine, KY Prestonsburg, KY - Civil War & history atractions, and reenactment dates at PrestonsburgKY.org. Home to Jenny Wiley State Park, country music entertainment & Dewey Lake.
Search over 10,000 images and primary documents relating to the Civil War Batle of Hampton Roads, now available in he Mariners’ Museum Library Online Catalog! www.marinersmuseum.org/catalogs
History, bourbon, shopping, sightseeing and relaxing—whatever you enjoy, you’re sure to ind it in beautiful Bardstown, KY. Plan your visit today. www.visitbardstown.com
London, KY–he reenactment of the Batle of Camp Wildcat, Camp Wildcat Historic Site, Wilderness Road Trail & Boones Trace Trail, & antique and lea 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.
AMERICAN HERO FROM
IRELAND REVIEWED BY LOUIS P. MASUR
S
TUDENTS OF THE Civil War are no doubt familiar with the military exploits of Thomas Francis Meagher and the Irish Brigade, which suffered the third-highest number of casualties of any Union brigade. Nearly 4,000 of its 7,700 men were killed or wounded. Timothy Egan’s lyrical biography of Meagher (pronounced “Mar”) devotes less than 100 pages to his Civil War service, but allows readers to understand more fully the general who gained a reputation for fearlessly leading his men into battle with the cry “Faugh-a-Bellagh” (“Clear the way”). It is remarkable that Meagher ever made it to America. Born into an affluent family in 1823 in Waterford, Ireland, Meagher was sent to England to be educated at Stonyhurst College. On his return home in 1843, he became radicalized when he saw starving Irish peasants. His speeches roused the nation. The Crown tried him as a leader of the Young Ireland movement and commuted his death sentence to banishment for life. Meagher survived a 14,000-mile journey aboard a prison ship to the penal colony Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). He soon yearned for freedom, and executed a daring escape to New York in 1852. Meagher felt at home there, given the multitudes of Irish immigrants in the city. But while the rise of a nativist movement led most Irish to support the Democratic Party and sympathize with the South, Meagher expressed devotion to the Union. He raised a unit of Irish Zouaves, who would serve in the 69th New York State Militia. The Zouaves performed well at First Bull Run, though Meagher was thrown from his horse—and an English newspaper started the rumor that he had been drunk at the time. Though Egan acknowledges that at times Meagher drank to excess, that was not one of those occasions. In the aftermath of that battle, Meagher formed an Irish Brigade, recruiting men who would seal “their oath of American citizenship with their blood.” In time the unit comprised several mostly Irish regiments, including the 69th, and Meagher accepted a commission as brigadier general.
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The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero By Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28
Meagher became a hero at the Battle of Fair Oaks, and his men fought fiercely throughout the Seven Days Battles, at Antietam and at Fredericksburg. There is no doubt as to Meagher’s heroism, but there is also no doubt that he tried unsuccessfully to drown his grief with whiskey. He lost half his men in the assault upon Marye’s Heights, where he had not participated in the charge due to an injured knee. Meagher resigned his commission in May 1863. He would return briefly to service at war’s end and accept the territorial governorship of Montana. Egan makes a compelling case that political opponents assassinated Meagher in 1867, pushing him out of a boat on the Missouri River. He had lived to liberate Ireland, but as The Immortal Irishman makes clear, he gave his service and life to freedom in America.
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Based on the change in gold’s price from September 6, 2001 ($272/oz.) to September 6, 2011 ($1,923.70/oz.) *Special offer is strictly limited to only one lifetime purchase of 10 at-cost coins (regardless of price paid) per household, plus shipping and insurance ($15-$35). Prices may be more or less based on current market conditions. The markets for coins are unregulated. Prices can rise or fall and carry some risks. 7KHFRPSDQ\LVQRWDIŰOLDWHGZLWKWKH86 *RYHUQPHQWDQGWKH860LQW Past performance of the coin or the market cannot predict future performance. Price not valid for precious metals dealers. All calls recorded for quality assurance. Offer void where prohibited. Coin dates our choice. 1/10-ounce coins enlarged to show detail. ©2016 U.S. Money Reserve.
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The Waste of War
A tale of love and devotion amid the havoc of a war that changed their country. Nurse Mary Mathewson will risk everything to stay by the side of her husband. Union surgeon Harley P. Mathewson wants her to remain a safe distance from battlefields. Wiling her way to his side, the two set off on a life-changing path, caring for the wounded and dying.
Available on Amazon Kindle & Paperback
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BATTLE’S GRISLY COST REVIEWED BY JACK TRAMMELL eg Groeling’s book is the latest release in the “Emerging Civil War” Series, which addresses a seldom-covered topic: the burgeoning industry and technology that emerged aimed at the preservation, identification, return to home and burial of the dead after the armies had moved on. From refrigerated coffins to dog tags, the story is compelling given the enormous number of casualties, as well as the way it affected later wars. Each of Groeling’s chapters focuses on a specific battle or story. One, for example, focuses largely on Dr. Jonathan Letterman, the “father of modern battlefield medicine,” while another deals with the aftermath at Shiloh. The narrative is designed for a general readership, and like other titles in this series, includes URLs, travel tips and information on geographic and park sites. This approach is in keeping with an attempt to make history more readily accessible for those who might want to bring the book along on tours. There is no index, however, so anyone looking for a specific subject may have difficulty locating it quickly. The book also wanders thematically at some points, and there are a few minor errors— though they don’t detract from the main focus (for example, it states that 51,000 men died at Gettysburg; in fact, there were 51,000 total casualties, including wounded and captured). Overall, The Aftermath of Battle is a quick, worthwhile read. Considering its focus on travel and providing easy access to the historic underpinnings of an unusual topic, many readers will find it a valuable addition to their libraries.
M
The Aftermath of Battle: The Burial of the Civil War Dead By Meg Groeling Savas Beatie, $14.95
LAST DITCH AT THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY
ANZIO
Allied soldiers foil fierce German counterattacks
Greece’s Uncivil War The Man on the Flying Tank Marc Mitscher: Carrier-War Champion SUMMER 2016
HistoryNet.com
MHQP-160700-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
4/7/16 9:50 AM
COPPERHEADS, GUERRILLAS AND RACE REVIEWED BY GORDON BERG f his exhaustive bibliography is any indication, Christopher Phillips can rightly claim to be the Sage of the Middle Border. He has consolidated years of research and analysis into a comprehensive history of six states that experienced significant cultural, political and economic change during the war era. Those changes still influence the lives of residents today. In so doing, Phillips has carved out a unique “western” Civil War that adds texture and insight into the conflict’s historiography. Phillips defines the Middle Border as the free states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kansas and the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri, and the rivers referred to in the title are primarily the Ohio and the Missouri. His goal is to show “how a traditional western political culture of accommodation over slavery was transformed by the era of the Civil War—its coming, its lived experience, and its memory—into the cultural politics of region.” Phillips emphasizes the cultural and economic bonds that linked whites living on both sides of the Ohio and east of the Missouri before the war, noting they “occupied a middle ground between the ideological extremes that would emerge nationally” over the issue of slavery and its spread into the western territories. “Far more prevalent in the early years of these young western states,” he concludes, “were those who saw slavery as a negotiable issue in American politics and society.” But the passage of the KansasNebraska Act in 1854 began to change this laissez-faire attitude. When the war began, Phillips writes, “the spectrum of political understandings that once defined the middle border quickly began to collapse into exclusivist identities, northern and southern, under new, war borne definitions.” By 1862, the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and the November mid-term elections helped harden those evolving exclusivist identities and paved the way for the “hard war” campaigns that were commonplace in the region. Copperheadism and racial antagonism grew stronger in the states north of the Ohio, and vicious guerrilla warfare prevailed in Kentucky, Missouri and Kansas. Phillips concludes that Reconstruction, “the war after the war,” helped create a new regionalism now based on political ideology, economic progressivism and Lost Cause memorialization, vestiges of which can be found today. The rivers that once were permeable membranes for cultural comity had become formidable, exclusivist borders that are only now being bridged. Phillips’ views are meticulously argued, though his prose can sometimes be tough going for anyone who is not a war expert. But his book rewards readers with a deeper understanding of the transformation of the American Middle Border and the war’s continuing legacy.
I
The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border By Christopher Phillips Oxford University Press, $34.95
CREDITS Cover: Library of Congress/Photo Illustration: Brian Walker; P. 2: Shenandoah Sanchez; P. 3: Clockwise from Top: ©The Granger Collection, New York/ The Granger Collection; Courtesy Janice Bonds; American Civil War Museum; Harper’s Weekly, February 1, 1862; P. 4: Private Collection/Peter Newark Military Pictures/Bridgeman Images; P. 6: Jennifer Vann (2); P. 8: Courtesy National Cathedral; P. 9: Clockwise from Top: Scott Sandberg (2); Civil War Museum of Philadelphia; P. 10: Clockwise from Left: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images; Bill Kalina, The York Dispatch; Scott P. Hippensteel and Geosphere; P. 11: Library of Congress; Terra Metrics/Google Earth; P. 12: Library of Congress; P. 14: Library of Congress; P. 16: Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, CA, USA/©The Huntington Library, Art Collections & Botanical Gardens/Bridgeman Images; P. 18: From Left: American Civil War Museum; Heritage Auctions; P. 19: Clockwise from Top: Courtesy James D. Julia Auctioneers, Fairfield, Maine, USA, www.jamesdjulia.com; Heritage Auctions (2); P. 20: Library of Congress; Purdue University photo/Charles Jischke; P. 23: Buyenlarge/Getty Images; P. 24: Library of Congress; P. 25: Library of Congress; P. 26: Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2); P. 27: Cook Collection, Valentine Museum; Virginia Historical Society; P. 28: Library of Congress; P. 29: ©Niday Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo; P. 30: Library of Congress; P. 32: ©The Granger Collection, New York/The Granger Collection; P. 34: The Official Military Atlas of the Civil War; P. 35: Western Reserve Historical Society; P. 36-37: Library of Congress (2); P. 38: ©Classic Image/Alamy Stock Photo; P. 39: Library of Congress; P. 40: Library of Congress; P. 41: The Official Military Atlas of the Civil War; West Point Museum Collections; P. 42-43: Melissa Winn (2); P. 44: Gettysburg National Military Park; P. 45: Central Penn Business Journal; P. 46: Library of Congress; P. 48: Harper’s Weekly, February 1, 1862; P. 49: From Left: The Cartoon Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images; Library of Congress; P. 50: Library of Congress (3); P. 51: NRA Museums, NRAmuseums.com; P. 52: Library of Congress; P. 54: Texas State Library and Archives Commission; P. 55: Courtesy Janice Bonds; P. 58: Museum of the Confederacy; P. 59: William Palmer; P. 60-62: Shenandoah Sanchez (5); P. 63: From Top: Shenandoah Sanchez (2); Thinkstock; P. 72: Skinner Auctions.
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CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
EDITOR’S PICK Being a random book favored by the editor
Echoes of Battle, The Atlanta Campaign: An Illustrated Collection of Union and Confederate Narratives Edited by Larry M. Strayer and Richard A. Baumgartner, Blue Acorn Press, $35
For four grueling months, from May to September 1864, three Union armies and one Confederate army twisted, turned and shot at each other over the rough north Georgia countryside during the Atlanta Campaign. Places like Resaca, New Hope Church, Pickett’s Mill, Kennesaw Mountain, Utoy Creek and Dalton may not be as familiar as Eastern Theater fights, but they helped seal Atlanta’s fate and the war’s outcome. Echoes of Battle: The Atlanta Campaign compiles a large number of fascinating first-person accounts of the Georgia war marathon, most from the battle-worn rank and file. The soldiers recall humor, hunger and camaraderie, but most of their words describe gripping accounts of battle. “I could hear the blood from my wound pattering on the ground,” recalled Sergeant James Cooper of the 20th Tennessee of being shot at Resaca. “I felt so weak, so powerless, that I did not know whether I was dead or not.” Private Daniel Shideler of the 93rd Ohio watched as a brave lieutenant was shot and staggered backward onto a log at the Pickett’s Mill bloodbath. “Lieutenant, are you badly hurt?” screamed another Union soldier. “Scarcely had the words been spoken when he fell, killed outright,” recounted Shideler. Gary Gallagher discusses the “Dark Turn” that the study of Civil War history has taken in his column on P. 14 of this issue. But that dark war has been there all along in soldier accounts, as you’ll find when you read the powerful tales, many accompanied by rare photographs, in this book.
‘I could hear the blood from my wound pattering on the ground’ -Sgt. James Cooper, 20th Tennessee
LAST STEPS
$4,613 Brigadier General Samuel K. Zook wore these boots, recently sold by Skinner Auctions, on July 2, 1863, when he led his New York and Pennsylvania infantrymen onto the “stony hill,” just next to Gettysburg’s notorious Wheatfield. A Rebel bullet slammed into Zook, and the mortally wounded officer was hauled to a field hospital. On July 3, an aide told Zook that Pickett’s Charge had been repulsed and the Union had won the battle. “Then I am satisfied,” declared Zook, “and am ready to die.”
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CIVIL WAR TIMES OCTOBER 2016
Festivals and fun. Grand historic homes. Birthplace of America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams. Run or bike along the scenic Riverwalk, winding around and over the Tombigbee River. Shop, dine, and savor in the ultimate Southern destination. Columbus, Mississippi.
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RALPH PETERS RETURNS WITH THE FOURTH INSTALLMENT IN HIS AWARDWINNING SERIES ON THE CIVIL WAR
A LSO AVAILABLE LE
“Surpasses Michael Shaara’s classic The Killer Angels… Winner of the William Young Boyd Literary Award for “Excellence in Military Fiction”
BRILLIANT.” —Booklist starred review on Cain at Gettysburg
“ENTHRALLING
HISTORICAL FICTION OF THE HIGHEST ORDER.”
of the Winner yd Young Bo William r Award fo Literary e in nc le el “Exc n” io Fict Military
—Gordon C. Rhea author of The Battle of the Wilderness and Cold Harbor on Hell or Richmond
“A MUST In desperate battles, such as the Crater, Deep Bottom, Globe Tavern, and Reams Station, soldiers on both sides were pushed to the last human limits—but fought on as their superiors struggled to master a terrible new age of warfare. The Damned of Petersburg revives heroes a plenty—enriching our knowledge of our most terrible war—but above all, this novel is a tribute to the endurance and courage of the American soldier, North or South.
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Winner of the William Young Boyd Literary Award for “Excellence in Military Fiction”
READ FOR CIVIL WAR HISTORY FANS.” —Kirkus Reviews starred review on Valley of Shadow
RALPH PETERS brings to bear the lessons of his own military career, his lifelong study of this war and the men who fought it, and his skills as a bestselling, prizewinning novelist to portray horrific battles and sublime heroism as no other author has done.
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