Odds are there isn’t a Civil War buff living who hasn’t seen a copy of this remarkable pencil sketch (above) by special artist Edwin Forbes, which Forbes labeled as “William J. Jackson, Sergt. Maj. 12th N.Y. Vol.—Sketched at Stoneman’s Switch, near Fredricksburg [sic], Va. Jan. 27th, 1863.” The young noncom has gazed back at us across the years from countless publications and exhibits. Rendered with camera-like honesty, it is arguably among the best drawings of a common soldier done during the Civil War. Writing about his work in general, Forbes assured viewers, “fidelity to fact is… the first thing to be aimed at.”

In fact, once Forbes completed his drawing of Jackson, the sketch went virtually unseen for more than 80 years. The drawing was among several hundred illustrations Forbes made while covering the Army of the Potomac for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper from the spring of 1862 to the fall of 1864. Approximately 150 of Forbes’ wartime sketches were engraved and printed in the illustrated newspaper during that period, although his drawing of Jackson was not among them.

After the war, Forbes retained most of his original illustrations. Many he reworked into more polished drawings; some into oil paintings. He fashioned scores of them into award-winning etchings. Many appeared in his books, Life Studies of the Great Army (1876) and Thirty Years After: An Artist’s Story of the Great War (1890). Again, the poignant sketch of the beardless sergeant major from the 12th New York Infantry was not included.

Following Forbes’ death in March 1895, his wife, Ida, maintained his portfolio of original artwork, where the Jackson sketch was catalogued, “Study of an Infantry Soldier — The Sergeant Major.” She eventually sold the entire collection for $25,000 to financier J.P. Morgan in January 1901. Eighteen years later, on the heels of World War I, Morgan’s estate donated the collection to the Library of Congress, its current home. The sketch of William Jackson remained out of the public eye for another quarter-century until it resurfaced during World War II, thanks to the efforts of a U.S. Army private.

Private Lincoln Kirstein, however, was not your ordinary ground-pounder. Born into wealth, the Harvard educated Kirstein was well-connected socially, channeling his “energy, intellect, and organizational skills to serve the art world.” By age 36, when he was inducted into the Army in early 1943, Kirstein had already published several books, co-founded The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, and later, The School of American Ballet in New York City with renown Russian choreographer George Balanchine.

Following his basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., Kirstein was posted at Fort Belvoir, Va., charged with writing training manuals. “I am an old man,” he confided to a friend, “and find the going very hard.” To fill his idle hours, he conceived an idea to collect and document American solider-art. “[M]uch of their work is interesting,” Kirstein wrote, “and some of it is beautiful.” He soon expanded his survey to include “U.S. battle art through time.” His plans included a “large-scale exhibit and a book.”

Aided by some influential friends, including Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and then Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, Kirstein gathered material from various sources, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and, of course, the Library of Congress. Thanks to his efforts, Forbes’ sketch of “Sergt. Maj. William J. Jackson” emerged from obscurity.

The efforts culminated in the exhibition of American Battle Art at the Library of Congress staged from July 4 through November 1, 1944. Three years later, the Library of Congress issued the book that Kirstein had envisioned. Titled An Album of American Battle Art, 1755-1918, the heavily illustrated volume “took its origin” largely from the wartime exhibit. Forbes’ portrait of William J. Jackson appeared in print for the first time, captioned “a solemn lad with his arm resting on his rifle…toughened by campaigning.”​

A Perilous Start

Jackson may have been “toughened” early in life. The son of Irish immigrants, he was born in New York City’s Greenwich Village on June 8, 1841, the first of four boys. His father, also named William, worked as a mason. The family grew in time, and moved from tenement to tenement, though always remained in proximity to Washington Square. The surrounding web of narrow streets flanked by a tumble of brick and framed dwellings and small businesses was an Irish enclave in the city’s 9th Ward facing the Hudson River.

It was a tough neighborhood. “Boys were primitive in those days,” wrote one of Jackson’s contemporaries. “They were like the old time warring clans. Every avenue was arrayed against the other.” Tensions bubbled within the city’s growing Irish immigrant population where clashes were common.

One notorious encounter erupted within a stone’s throw of Jackson’s home when he was 12. On July 4, 1853, streets echoed “the popping, fizzing, whirring and banging sounds” of fireworks as crowds of green-clad Irish revelers celebrated Independence Day. They ended up battling one another. “At one time several hundred men were…hurling stones and other missiles…” trumpeted The New York Herald next day. Platoons of policemen from nearby precincts aided by two fire companies “succeeded in subduing the riot…” Nearly 40 Irishmen were arrested, reported the Herald, “all of whom bore the strong evidences of an impression made on their heads by a contact against the policemen’s clubs.”

Battles of another kind rocked William’s world when civil war erupted on April 12, 1861. The 19-year-old left his parents and his job as a clerk a week later, on April 19, to enlist in the 12th Regiment New York State Militia, Company F. A recruiting office was just blocks from his home.

Tendered for immediate service by its commander, Colonel Daniel Butterfield, the regiment also included in its ranks the future Maj. Gen. Francis C. Barlow when it sailed from New York on April 21, bound for Washington, D.C. Though fully armed, the unit lacked enough uniforms to go around. Raw recruits like Jackson wore “their ordinary clothing with military belts and equipment,” giving them, by one account, a “guerrilla like,” appearance. Appearances changed when a new Chasseur uniform was issued to the regiment at Camp Anderson in Washington early in May 1861. The militiamen were also mustered into Federal service for three months while there, and received a “severe course of drilling.” Barlow was mustered in as a first lieutenant in Company F.

One of their Camp Anderson instructors also distinguished himself later in the war. Emory Upton, fresh from graduation at West Point, would achieve the rank of Brevet Maj. Gen., and eventually become superintendent of U.S. Military Academy. Upton found that tutoring the 12th New Yorkers was tiresome. “I do not complain,” he wrote, “when I think how much harder the poor privates have to work.”

Their crash course in soldiering quickly paid off. Before dawn May 24, the 12th New York led Union forces over Long Bridge to occupy Alexandria, Va., and fortify Arlington Heights in the wake of that state’s secession from the Union the day before. Jackson was among the first Union infantrymen to set foot on Rebel soil.

Jackson continued his trek through enemy country when the regiment joined Maj. Gen. Robert Patterson’s army at Martinsburg, Va., on July 7, 1861. The men patrolled and picketed environs of the Lower Shenandoah Valley until their expiration of service on August 2, when the unit returned to New York. Following a march down Broadway and Fifth Avenues on Monday August 5, the regiment formally mustered out at Washington Square, near Jackson’s home.

Quick Return to the Fray

Jackson’s homecoming was brief. He reenlisted October 1, 1861, and mustered into Federal service for three years, a member of Co. F, 12th New York Volunteer Infantry. Dubbed the “Onondaga” Regiment, its ranks had originally been filled with short term volunteers from near Syracuse and Elmira, N.Y., in May 1861. After the Union debacle at First Bull Run in July 1861, the regiment recruited around the state including in New York City where Jackson signed on. Perhaps showing potential from his recent militia service, William was immediately appointed sergeant.

Recruits ferried over the Hudson River from Manhattan to Jersey City, N.J., and boarded trains for the trip south to join the regiment then on duty in defenses outside Washington, D.C. Recalled another New York volunteer who made the trip about the time Jackson did, “the cars were crowded and the ride was slow, cold and tedious.”

From Washington, the novice soldiers crossed Chain Bridge over the Potomac River into Virginia. Union Army engineers had fortified the landscape to defend the Capital. “Every mile is a fort,” marveled Private Van Rensselaer Evringham, Co. I, 12th New York. “There is thousands of acres here that have been cut down & left on the ground to prevent the Rebels coming by surprise…it would take 50 years to bring everything back to its former state.”

The 12th New York, given the moniker “the durty dozen,” according to Evringham, joined scores of other raw regiments manning fortifications throughout the fall and winter 1861–62, while they trained for combat ahead. Jackson’s Co. F, with four other companies from the 12th garrisoned Fort Ramsay, located on the crest of Upton’s Hill, about a half mile east of Falls Church, Va. They also furnished a daily guard “to protect the guns in Fort Buffalo” nearby. The regiment’s remaining companies manned Fort Craig, and Fort Tillinghast. They occasionally traded shots with Rebel forces, “but to little effect,” wrote a New York diarist.

On March 21, 1862, Jackson and tent-mates were ordered off Upton’s Hill to Alexandria, Va. Next morning, boarding the transport John A. Warner to the strains of Dixie, they steamed down the Potomac River to Chesapeake Bay. In a letter to his parents, Private Homer Case, of Co. I, confided: “We did not know where we was a going.”

After two days aboard ship, Jackson and “the durty dozen” landed at Hampton, Va., embarked on Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s offensive to take the Confederate capital at Richmond. Hard marching through steaming pine thickets and swampy bottom lands on narrow, crowded, often rain-mired roads marked the campaign. Private Sid Anderson, Co. H, quipped of “mud clear up to the seat of our unmentionables.” While Private Evringham claimed, “Virginnie is 2/3 woods or swamps.”

Under Brig. Gen. Fitz John Porter’s command during the fruitless Union thrust up the Peninsula, the 12th New York saw action at the Siege of Yorktown, the battles of Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill, and numerous skirmishes in between. Afterward, the New Yorkers languished at Harrison’s Landing until mid-August when they trudged to Newport News. From here they traveled by steamer to Aquia Creek; then by railroad to Falmouth, and on by foot to join Maj. Gen. John Pope’s ill-fated Army of Virginia near Manassas, Va. “We marched thirteen days…with little rest,” wrote Private Robert Tilney, Co. F., “part of the time on half rations…”

At the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Onondagans engaged in bloody afternoon assaults on August 30, against Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s position astride the railroad cut. “We poured volley after volley into the concealed enemy,” recalled one New Yorker. Rebel return fire shredded the Union foot soldiers, “woefully thinning” their ranks. Nearly a third of the 12th New York became casualties.

Facing Lee’s army at Sharpsburg on September 17, Sergeant Jackson likely had mixed emotions while he and his regiment stood in reserve with Porter’s 5th Corps, mere spectators to the bloody Battle of Antietam. The Sharpsburg area remained Jackson’s home through the end of October 1862, when the regiment advanced via Snicker’s Gap and Warrenton, to the Rappahannock River where the Army of the Potomac arrayed opposite Fredericksburg. The boyish-looking sergeant would earn three more stripes during the ensuing battle.

Jackson’s regiment with Brig. Gen. Charles Griffin’s division occupied Stafford Heights when the Battle of Fredericksburg opened on December 13. They crossed the lower pontoon bridge in early afternoon, struggling through debris in Fredericksburg amid what one New Yorker described as “a shower of aimless bullets.” The regiment advanced to a shallow fold in the ground about 500 yards from Rebels posted at the stone wall on Marye’s Heights. “[T]his position,” reported brigade commander Colonel T.B.D. Stockton, “was much exposed to the cross-fire of the enemy’s guns…”

Stockton’s Brigade charged the stone wall just before sundown. The 12th New York missed the bugle signal to advance in the din of battle, though soon recovered, sweeping forward. They met a maelstrom of shot and shell “on both front and side,” wrote Stockton. The New Yorkers piled into the tangled mass of bluecoats already stalled at the foot of Marye’s Heights and went no farther. Ordered to hold their exposed position under enemy fire throughout the night Stockton’s men were bait for Rebel sharpshooters and artillery until relieved about 10 p.m. December 14. It was “all a person’s life is worth to go to or come from there,” wrote a newspaperman. Young Jackson suffered a gunshot wound to his left leg below the knee that day.

When Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside ordered his battered army back to its old camps north of the Rappahannock on December 16, Jackson returned as a sergeant major. He had been promoted the day before, likely to fill a vacancy caused by the battle.

Jackson saw little combat after the Battle of Fredericksburg. The 5th Corps wintered in a small metropolis of timber and canvas huts near Stoneman’s Switch, a supply depot along the railroad several miles north of Fredericksburg, where the 12th New York engaged in an “uneventful round of camp and picket duty.” It’s uncertain whether Jackson’s injured leg kept him from chores, or prevented him from joining Burnside’s inglorious “Mud March” in pitiless wind and rain storms January 20–24.

By January 27, however, the 21-year-old Jackson, with bayonetted rifle, his greatcoat tightly gathered at the waist, was able to stand still long enough for special artist Edwin Forbes to capture him on paper. The artist clearly shows that Jackson placed his weight on his right foot. No evidence has surfaced to indicate Jackson and Forbes knew each other, or ever met again after the drawing was completed, though Forbes remained in the area depicting numerous scenes around the Stoneman’s Switch camps that winter.

In late April 1863, the 12th New York was reduced to battalion-size when five “two-year companies” were mustered out of the army. Jackson and the remaining companies with the 5th Corps followed Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker to Chancellorsville, Va., in early May. During the battle there, the New Yorkers were employed “making rifle-pits and abatis” on the fringe of the fighting. “[I]n this position,” recalled a private in Company D, “we saw the fires in the woods which the artillery had kindled, and heard the cries of the wounded.”

Expiration of service further reduced ranks of the regiment after the Battle of Chancellorsville. Jackson and other “three-year” men were then consolidated in a two-company provost guard. The contingent moved with 5th Corps headquarters when the Army of the Potomac pursued Lee’s Rebels toward Pennsylvania. “Our troops had been on the march for many days,” wrote the Company D soldier, “bivouacking at night in the open air, and were dirty and travel-stained with the heat and sun of late June.” This ordeal ended abruptly for Jackson on June 30. On the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, at a camp near Frederick, Md., Sgt. Maj. Jackson was granted an early discharge from the army “by reason of being rendered supernumerary…” (surplus due to the consolidation).

​​Battle With Postwar Bureaucracy

Jackson returned to New York City and married in 1865. Employed as a clerk/salesman, he and his wife, Maria, set up housekeeping in Brooklyn. Over time, they were blessed with three daughters. Elizabeth, their first child, born in 1866, suffered from an unspecified disability and likely remained homebound until her death in April 1891. Margaret, born in 1869, worked as a file clerk, remained single, and passed away in 1920. Ellen, or Nelly, Jackson, who was born in 1871, was also employed as a clerk, and unmarried. She lived well into the 20th Century, passing away in October 1945.

Outside his family and job, William Jackson had enrolled in the Old Guard Association of the Twelfth Regiment N.G.S.N.Y., and in “The Lafayette Fusileers,” antecedents of the units he served with during the war. The rigors of his army service eventually took a toll on Jackson’s health later in life.

At age 51, Jackson filed his first claim for an Invalid Pension in June 1892. The former sergeant major supplied a laundry list of disabilities on his application form: “[A]lmost constant superficial pain in right chest & some in legs…pain & violent beating in heart…weakness – can’t lift anything.” His “gunshot wound of left leg” was cited. In sum he was “Physically unable to earn a support by manual labor.” Military medical records also show Jackson had been treated for “Gonorrhoia” [sic] on November 13, 1861. (Perhaps the result from a visit to one of the hundreds of brothels around Washington, D.C., while his regiment was on garrisoned duty.)

Jackson’s claim was rejected, “on the ground of no pensionable disability…under Act of June 27, 1890.” It wasn’t until President Theodore Roosevelt had signed an Executive Order for Old Age Pensions declaring all veterans over the age of 62 to be eligible for a pension that Jackson was finally granted $6 per month beginning May 10, 1904.

The reward would be short-lived. On April 11, 1905, following Maria’s death that January, William J. Jackson died. He and his wife rest with their three daughters under a single headstone at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Flushing, N.Y.
​
​George Skoch, a longtime contributor, writes from Fairview Park, Ohio.

On December 18, 1860, John J. Crittenden of Kentucky introduced a compromise plan to the U.S. Senate. Just two days later, South Carolina would become the first state to secede from the Union, and within six weeks, six more Southern states would follow suit. But while Dixie fire-eaters were driving their states pell-mell toward disunion, Senator Crittenden and other moderates were working to broker a sectional adjustment — one that could, they hoped, soothe Southern fears about Abraham Lincoln’s election and stay the secession tide in the South. 

The Crittenden Compromise would be central to these efforts during the winter and spring of 1860-1861. It represented an attempt to settle the slavery question once and for all, drawing on the tradition of grand settlements like the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. Indeed, the cornerstone of Crittenden’s plan was a constitutional amendment that would divide the remaining Western territories along the old Missouri Compromise line, barring slavery above and protecting slavery below the 36º 30’ parallel.  

Moderates like Crittenden hoped that this might be enough to secure the loyalty of the remaining Southern states to the Union. This might, in turn, make Republicans more willing to let the secession crisis play out, and it might eventually make the seceded states more willing to return to the Union. Yet most Republicans, including Lincoln, refused to countenance any further extension of slavery into the territories. Attempts by moderates to push through the Crittenden Compromise repeatedly foundered against this opposition. 

Compromisers struggled, too, against the opposition of Southern secessionists, who argued that it did not do enough to protect slavery from the threat of an empowered Republican Party. Over the course of the secession crisis, it became clear that the leaders of the seceded states had no interest in negotiation or returning to the Union. Southern rights advocates in the states that had not seceded also complicated the project of compromise; their demands for more concessions meant there was no consensus around Crittenden’s or any other compromise measure even in those states.  

One such antagonist was Virginia’s John Robertson, a prominent Democrat and judge from Richmond. The state legislature sent him as a commissioner to the seceded states in early 1861, and he returned with assurances of the new Confederate States’ sympathies with Virginia. They are “bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh,” he reported. 

The outbreak of fighting at Fort Sumter on April 12 provided the push for which many Southern hardliners had been hoping. Abraham Lincoln responded by issuing a call for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion in the South, and in short order Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded and joined the new Confederacy. The start of the war seemed to signal triumph for militants like Robertson and disaster for moderates like Crittenden. Yet neither man would accept this as the outcome of his labors. 

Robertson wrote a letter to Crittenden near the end of April that highlighted just how uncertain the future appeared in that moment. Robertson refused to believe that the collision at Fort Sumter necessarily meant war —and rejected, moreover, the idea that war would accomplish the ends of either side in the conflict. He thus suddenly and unexpectedly found his own goals aligned with Crittenden’s, and Robertson begged the old Kentuckian to renew his efforts at conciliation.  

From Robertson’s point of view, civil war did not seem inevitable, even when armies were massing on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The situation represented a dramatic escalation, to be sure, but in the context of the decades-long sectional crisis over slavery (one that had at other points erupted in violence), observers like Robertson could imagine outcomes other than intestine war. 

John Robertson to John J. Crittenden, April 28, 1861

Dear Sir,
No man could have more earnestly striven than yourself to [resolve] the feuds, whose increasing fury, already advanced to the stage of murderous conflict, threatens to involve thirty millions of men in the horrors of civil war. However I may have differed with you, looking from a Southern view, as to the acceptability of the terms of adjustment you proposed, I never doubted that you regarded them as just, or, at least, as preferable to the evils otherwise to ensue, and as the best which could possibly be obtained. The event has proved that, moderate as they were, the ruling faction [the Republican Party] would be content with none but such as would degrade the South. Wellnigh desperate is the condition to which that faction has reduced this country. The fact now stares them in the face that the Union is dissolved beyond all hope of restoration, at least, in our day. Yet they are threatening to preserve the Union by force. They read the riot act to millions of men, nay, to sovereign States, who are to be coerced into friendship by their foes at the point of a bayonet. But, waving all recrimination, not insisting on the absurdity of the idea, or the impossibility of reducing the South to an ignominious submission, or the certainty that their subjugation, if possible, would defeat the very object their enemies profess to desire (namely, the preservation or restoration of the Union), by converting States into vassal provinces (in that character alone can they remain or enter into it), let us inquire if there are no means by which the anticipated consequence of our family jars (now an accomplished fact), the separation of the States, may be recognized by the ruling faction at Washington, without deliberately repeating the most atrocious crime, and steeping their hands still deeper in the blood of their brethren. A word from the long-eared god [Lincoln], who now holds in his hands (as he imagines) the destinies of the country, would be enough. He has only to say, “Let there be peace,” and there will be peace. But he and the murderous gang whom he consults already cry ‘Havoc!’ And let slip the dogs of war. And yet the star of hope still twinkles in the clouded firmament. Preposterous as is the idea of peaceful union or reunion, there may still be a peaceful separation; and it is to yourself, sir, who, if allowed to do so, I will still regard, notwithstanding the marked difference of our political sentiments, as a valued friend,—it is mainly to you I look for effecting so glorious a consummation. I do not desire that my name should be connected with an effort which you may, most probably, consider utterly idle, and which, should you think worth trying, be more apt to succeed without it. Before going further at present, permit me to inquire whether it will be agreeable to you to entertain the thoughts which, after much anxious reflection, have entered into, and taken firm possession of, my mind.

It is proper to say that my appeal to you is wholly without the sanction or knowledge of any constituted authorities, State or federal. It has been suggested even but to two individuals; in the judgment of one of them you would yourself repose great confidence. I have received decided encouragement to make it.

An immediate answer, if convenient, will greatly oblige me. 

With great and respectful regard, yours,
John Robertson

For all of their disagreements, Crittenden must have found some encouragement in Robertson’s kindred desire for peace. Robertson still seemed to hope that secession could be accomplished peacefully, but Crittenden saw peace as a means to promote compromise and reunion, as well. A month after the former’s letter, Crittenden would preside over a convention in Frankfort, Kentucky, which would renew calls for Crittenden’s compromise as a basis for sectional adjustment. “Whether any such constitutional guarantees would have the effect of reconciling any of the seceded States to the government from which they have torn themselves away we cannot say,” the convention declared, “but we allow ourselves to hope that the masses in those States will in time learn that the dangers they were made to fear were greatly exaggerated, and that they will then be disposed to listen to calls of interest and patriotism, and return to the family from which they have gone out.” 

In the meantime, Crittenden would also be instrumental in the effort to keep Kentucky neutral in the Civil War. He would tour the state advocating this policy, arguing that it would leave Kentucky well-placed to act as a mediator in the conflict. Kentuckians might not be able to stop the ensuing fight, but it certainly seemed a better alternative to him than active involvement in war. 

A week before the Frankfort Conference on May 20, 1861, Kentucky’s governor would issue a proclamation declaring the state’s neutrality; in it, he claimed that this course would help promote peace. Such hopes obviously failed to stop the onrushing war that would rage for four years and kill hundreds of thousands of people. No one could foresee what would come, but Kentucky’s neutrality in 1861 — and the efforts of men like Crittenden and, to some extent, Robertson — stood as a monument to their different visions for the future in that moment. Those different visions informed their behavior during the conflict, and at least in the case of Kentucky, those ideas helped shape the broader contours of the Civil War. 

Jesse George-Nichol is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia.

By the end of the Civil War, it is estimated that surgeons on both sides had conducted roughly 60,000 amputations. With the increased number of disabled veterans, the prosthetic industry saw great advances. Many of these veterans, however, decided not to wear artificial limbs for various reasons, including not wishing to take “charity” from the government (which gave a stipend to veterans for the purchase of a prosthesis), and making their contribution to their cause more visible to the public, by pinning up an empty sleeve or trouser leg instead of hiding the injury with an artificial limb. In addition, depending on the type of injury or how the wound healed, some prosthetic limbs could be uncomfortable to wear. 

As a result, another industry sprang up that made implements for veterans who did not have a prosthesis. Veterans who had lost an arm learned to use specially designed devices with their remaining limb in order to perform everyday tasks.

One of these devices was the “One Armed Man Fork.” This knife and fork combination utensil was also given the name “knork.” While the basic design had been in existence since the 1700s, it was refined and made popular just after the Civil War. One of the companies manufacturing the knork was the Artificial Limbs & Specialties Co. of New York, which partnered with The Press Button Knife Co. to manufacture a switchblade version. The blade was enclosed and could be released by pressing a button. The blade was made of steel and the handle was aluminum. An advertisement for this device states that “a piece of meat can be cut on the plate by a rolling motion given to the knife, and the knife can then be inverted by twisting the hand and food conveyed to the mouth by means of the fork. Butter can be spread upon bread, potatoes mashed, and other services performed. Pressure applied to the press button will release the lock and the knife can be closed and carried in the pocket. Price: $2.00.”

Less elaborate styles of knorks (as shown in the photo) were also available for those on a limited budget.

“No action of the civil war has been so little understood as that of Seven Pines,” Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston would write in his 1874 memoir, Narrative of Military Operations. Ironic, as Johnston’s own actions during and after the critical Peninsula Campaign battle on May 31–June 1, 1862, are certainly a reason why this is so.     

Captain George W. Mindil of the 61st Pennsylvania Infantry, a staff officer in the Union Army of the Potomac that faced Johnston’s Army of Northern Virginia during the battle, later observed that the enemy commander’s “plan was faultless….[H]ad this plan been fully executed…the left wing of McClellan’s army would have sustained irreparable disaster and the retreat of the whole [Union] army would have followed.”

Instead, the outcome of the two-day clash that resulted in more than 11,000 casualties (typically known to Northerners as Fair Oaks) was inconclusive. In addition, controversy and acrimony arose when both Johnston and one of his top subordinates, Maj. Gen. James Longstreet, audaciously asserted that despite a simple “misunderstanding” between the two, victory still would have been possible had it not been for the “incompetence” of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Huger, a division commander in Longstreet’s Right Wing.

The word “misunderstanding” generally implies the commission of an honest mistake or perhaps a communication failure—usually indicating no ill-intent by the participants. The purported miscue at Seven Pines, however, was a well-crafted fabrication designed both to shield Longstreet’s poor decision-​making and insubordinate conduct during the battle and to deflect attention away from Johnston’s own leadership failures.

As Colonel Charles Marshall, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s aide-de-camp, would caustically point out, Johnston had the knack of compensating for his deficiencies through his use of the “certain ‘agility’ of explanation.” Regarding Johnston’s post–Seven Pines account, Marshall wrote that “a lie well adhered to & often repeated, will sometimes serve a man’s purpose as well as the truth & better.”

By late May 1862, Johnston’s relationship with Confederate President Jefferson Davis was so strained, had he acknowledged the truth about the battle, it would have tarnished both his and Longstreet’s reputations. That left the unfortunate Huger as the target of an unconscionable attack.

“Misunderstanding” first appeared in Johnston’s June 28, 1862, letter to Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith, his Left Wing commander, in response to Smith’s after-action report. “My Dear Gustavus,” Johnston wrote, “I inclose herewith the first three sheets of your report, to ask a modification, or omission rather. They contain two subjects which I intended never to make generally known. I refer to the misunderstanding [italics added by author] between Longstreet and myself in regard to the direction of his division.”

The relationship between Johnston and Smith had once been close. In August 1861, in fact, Johnston wrote to Davis that “Smith is an officer of high ability, fit to command in chief.” And the following February, Johnston informed Davis: “I regard Maj. Gen. G.W. Smith as absolutely necessary to this army.”

Johnston’s warm tone now belied their recent strain. In addition to sustaining the alleged misunderstanding, Johnston justified his request to omit portions of Smith’s report as “these matters concern Longstreet and myself alone. I have no hesitation in asking you to strike them from your report as they in no manner concern your operations.”

Although Smith complied with Johnston’s request “because of [his] great personal attachment” to his commander, he maintained a copy of his original and entered a note stating that Johnston “is mistaken in supposing that the misunderstanding between himself and General Longstreet did not affect the operations of my division.”

The suppression of Smith’s report would become the cornerstone of the burgeoning “misunderstanding” myth. Smith, however, wisely saved copies of all his communications. In 1884, he published his original report including those previously omitted references.

Plan of Attack

Seven Pines/Fair Oaks would be a definitive battle in Maj. Gen. George McClellan’s ill-fated Peninsula Campaign. On May 20, “Little Mac” had begun moving part of his army across the Chickahominy River, closing to within 10 miles of Richmond. The 12,500-man 4th Corps, under Brig. Gen. Erasmus Keyes, crossed the river near Bottom’s Bridge, followed by Brig. Gen. Samuel P. Heintzelman’s 3rd Corps. Keyes would move his corps to Seven Pines; Heintzelman’s corps, with 15,000 men, remained near the Chickahominy—the two units largely deployed along the Williamsburg Road. Although White Oak Swamp provided protection to their left, their right flank was vulnerable, lacking a natural barrier.

Seven Pines lay approximately six miles east of Richmond at the intersection of the Williamsburg and Nine Mile roads. Approximately one mile north of Seven Pines, along Nine Mile Road and the Richmond & York River Railroad, sat a small depot called Fair Oaks Station. To protect his right flank, Keyes positioned a brigade at the depot.

The Confederate lines began at a point two miles north of the station along Nine Mile Road near an area known as Old Tavern. There were approximately 87,800 men in Johnston’s army, extending in an arc along the Chickahominy to the north down to Drewry’s Bluff.

Johnston fully recognized the vulnerability of the Federal position south of the Chickahominy; however, he also had learned that Brig. Gen. Irwin McDowell’s 1st Corps had left Fredericksburg, heading toward McClellan’s main lines. A strike on McClellan above the Chickahominy was essential before that could happen.

During a council of war on May 28, Johnston proposed an attack on the Union position at Mechanicsville, which would prevent McDowell from linking with Brig. Gen. Fitz John Porter’s 5th Corps. When they learned McDowell’s corps had begun returning to Fredericksburg, Smith advocated calling off the attack. Johnston at first agreed, which infuriated Longstreet, still convinced a turning movement against the Federal position would yield certain victory. Johnston was swayed by his subordinate’s passion.

On May 30, Maj. Gen. D.H. Hill in Longstreet’s Right Wing reported that Keyes’ corps was arrayed in force along the Williamsburg Road but was vulnerable from the Charles City Road. Johnston promptly ordered an attack to take place the following day.

Without Smith in attendance, Johnston met with Longstreet the afternoon of May 30. After designating Longstreet as the commander of the assaulting force, consisting of three divisions, the generals weighed their options on how to best conduct the attack. They determined that at 8 a.m. Hill’s command would open the attack along the Williamsburg Road, striking the 4th Corps on its front.

Hill’s advance, however, required the inclusion of the 2,200-man brigade commanded by Brig. Gen. Robert Rodes, presently posted along the Charles City Road. To address that need, Johnston ordered Huger, in Longstreet’s Wing, to march his 6,250-man division over from Drewry’s Bluff to relieve Rodes’ Brigade prior to the assault. Huger would then occupy a position opposite the 4th Corps’ left flank.

Longstreet would then move his 13,800-man division, commanded here by Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson, east along the Nine Mile Road to Old Tavern, putting it squarely on Keyes’ right flank.

One concern the generals had with this plan was how to bolster the overall strength of Hill’s attacking force. Johnston could move Longstreet’s Division (under Anderson) to support Hill, but complicated logistical factors ruled out that option. Not only would Anderson’s men have to move during the night, it would also necessitate coordination with Huger’s command, as each division would be required to occupy the same stretch of the Williamsburg Road, even if only temporarily.

Another option in supporting Hill was to reposition Gustavas Smith’s six-brigade division (with Brig. Gen. William H.C. Whiting in command). This appeared as the most logical choice, but it also posed an unavoidable complication. Because Smith outranked Longstreet, the movement would place Smith in command of the attack and not “Old Pete.” As Johnston had designated Longstreet as the overall commander of offensive operations, he decided against that option, choosing instead to advance Smith’s Division closer to Old Tavern in support of Longstreet. After considering his options, and with an intense rainstorm now unloading on the area, Johnston determined that rather than move Longstreet or any additional force to the Williamsburg Road, the attack would proceed as followed:

1) Before dawn, General Huger would proceed to the Charles City Road and relieve Rodes’ Brigade, enabling Rodes to join Hill.

2) With Rodes’ arrival, Hill would launch the attack along the Williamsburg Road.

3) Doing so would be the signal for Longstreet’s flank attack down the Nine Mile Road.

4) Smith’s Division would remain in reserve along the Nine Mile Road in support of Longstreet.

“There was…no reason why the orders for march should be misconstrued or misapplied,” Longstreet later wrote. “I was with General Johnston all of the time that he was engaged in planning and ordering the battle, heard every word and thought expressed by him of it, and received his verbal orders; Generals Huger and Smith received his written orders.”

Interestingly, Longstreet never identified or described in his report or postwar writing the specific orders he had received. Nor did Longstreet reveal his division’s own marching orders—although he did provide details of those he had issued Huger, Smith, and McLaws. Furthermore, Longstreet never divulged the subsequent orders he issued to his division, or to Hill.

What, therefore, went wrong? Simply put, Longstreet went rogue. Regardless of his full knowledge of Johnston’s intentions, he willingly altered the attack plans. No “honest mistake” or “failure to understand directions correctly” was involved:

1) Longstreet not only disregarded Johnston’s original order, he never communicated to his commander his movements, location, status, or progress once the attack began.

2) He somehow also ignored the weather, which he fully knew was dreadful, later writing, “While yet affairs were under consideration [on May 30], a terrific storm of vivid lightning, thunderbolts, and rain, as severe as ever known to any climate, burst upon us, and continued through the night more or less severe. In the first lull I rode from General Johnston’s to my head-quarters, and sent orders for [an] early march.”

3) He ignored the importance of Huger’s orders to relieve Rodes on the Charles City Road. 

Because Johnston and Longstreet conferred for some time, it is hard to believe Longstreet was not informed which road he was to use. Longstreet, of course, had long been hoping for an independent command. Choosing to follow the Williamsburg Road was clearly an opportunity for him to flout his orders for an attack plan of his own discretion.

All six of Longstreet’s brigades were positioned near the Nine Mile Road, which required only a short march east to reach Old Tavern. Had Longstreet’s brigades moved out at 3:30 a.m., they would have reached Old Tavern by 6 a.m.

“The tactical handling of the battle on the Williamsburg Road was left to my care, as well as the general conduct of affairs south of the York River Railroad,” Longstreet later wrote, but he never offered to explain why he altered Johnston’s plan or even why he did not communicate with his commander until late in the afternoon—undeniably insubordinate conduct.

As for the weather’s impact, Longstreet had held field commands from First Manassas through the Peninsula Campaign. His experience was extensive enough to realize a “terrific” and “severe” rainstorm would severely hamper the nighttime movement of a 13,800-man division. Had Longstreet followed orders and marched east along the Nine Mile Road, crossing the flooded Gillies Creek would not have been the roadblock it was.

A Disputed Crossing

The movement of Huger’s Division was the key to a successful attack. In relieving Rodes along the Charles City Road, Rodes could join Hill as ordered and the attack on Keyes’ position launched. But when the lead elements of Longstreet’s Division descended the steep bluffs toward Gillies Creek, they found it “bank full” and unfordable. To cross the swollen creek, Longstreet’s men placed a wagon in the stream as a trestle and laid planks to both banks, allowing a single-file crossing.

As that began, however, Huger appeared. Despite knowing what was at stake, Longstreet responded that “[a]s we were earlier at the creek, it gave us precedence over Huger’s division…” Hill’s attack would have to wait.

It is also mystifying that Longstreet later insisted he believed Huger had already crossed Gillies Creek. No doubt a division the size of Huger’s certainly would have left evidence of such a crossing.

Finding Longstreet already occupying the creek was just one of a day full of surprises for Huger, who also revealed it was “the first I knew” of a planned May 31 attack. Even if one accepts Longstreet’s “misunderstanding” of his orders, it doesn’t justify his rationale in preventing Huger’s Division from advancing to its assigned Charles City Road position.

Johnston’s responsibility for the attack’s implosion cannot be ignored either. After all, Huger received only two communications from him: one at 8:40 p.m. May 30; the other May 31, with no time indicated. Johnston was directing Huger to relieve Rodes, and that “if you find no strong body in your front, it will be well to aid General Hill.”

Huger interpreted that to mean he was moving to a new position and not into battle, as the only general named in either note was Hill. Neither mentioned Longstreet being in command of the wing, Hill’s expected attack, nor Huger’s role in that attack. He also described the communications from Johnston as being an “autograph note and not an official order.” 

The lack of clarity regarding Huger’s expected role in the upcoming battle is borne out in his statement, “If I would have been notified that Longstreet was to pass, I would have made another crossing.” When he met with Longstreet at Hill’s headquarters, Huger also fully realized: “He was moving to attack the enemy.”

Longstreet Crafts a Narrative

The only general who deserves absolution for the opening attack’s delay is Huger. By June 7, Longstreet had already put the “misunderstanding” myth and the character assassination of Huger in his letter to Johnston. The letter began friendly enough, with Longstreet expressing syrupy concern for the seriously wounded commander before segueing into claims that, despite his division’s heroics, he had been victimized by Huger’s lethargy:

“The failure of complete success [May 31] I attribute to the slow movements of General Huger’s command….I can’t but help think that the display of his forces on the left flank of the enemy…would have completed the affair.”

Longstreet asserted deceitfully that Huger’s ineffectiveness “threw perhaps the hardest part of the battle upon my own poor division. It is greatly cut up….Our ammunition was nearly exhausted when [General] Whiting moved.”      “Altogether,” he concluded, “it was very well, but I can’t help but regret it was not complete.”

On the battle’s first day, however, Longstreet had used only six of the 13 brigades available to him. Four of those belonged to Hill, with “Pete” sending only two more forward—those of Colonels James Kemper and Micah Jenkins—both at Hill’s request for more support. Of the 13,800 men he had present for duty in his division, nearly 9,500 of them never fired a shot.

Facts do not support Longstreet’s claim his division was “greatly cut up” and its “ammunition nearly exhausted.” Kemper’s and Jenkins’ losses were only 7 percent of the division’s overall casualties. By contrast, Hill engaged his entire 10,250-man division and reported nearly 3,000 casualties (29 percent). In fighting later that afternoon, Whiting (handling Smith’s Division) suffered 1,278 casualties (13.7 percent of the 10,590 men present).

The purpose of Longstreet’s letter to Johnston was twofold. First, it launched the narrative that all blame was to be squarely placed on Huger. Second, it signaled a measure Johnston could use in explaining why complete victory had not been not achieved, which would be particularly useful when offered to a increasingly critical President Davis and the Richmond press.

In his after-action report, prepared three days later, Longstreet asserted, “Agreeably to verbal instructions from the commanding general,” which indicates to an uninformed reader that what followed was in accordance with Johnston’s directive. Any “misunderstanding” of verbal instructions could thus be seen as a useful alibi instead of an admission of willful insubordination.

“The division of Maj. Gen. Huger was intended to make a strong flank movement around the left of the enemy’s position and attack him in the rear of that flank….,” Longstreet noted. “[T]his division did not get into position in time for any such attack.”

His brazen distortion of facts did not end there: “I have reason to believe that the affair would have been a complete success had the troops upon the right been put in position within eight hours of the proper time.” Longstreet followed with: “Some of the brigades of General Huger’s division took part in defending our position on Sunday [June 1], but…did not show the same steadiness and determination of Hill’s division and my own.”

This report, and Longstreet’s letter written June 7, put Johnston in an awkward position, as he was now compelled to support this narrative rather than supply a more accurate and truthful account.

Only three of six brigade commanders in Anderson’s ranks issued after-action reports—Colonel Micah Jenkins, Brig. Gen. George Pickett, and Brig. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox—and no officers in the unit’s 23 regiments did so. Plus, the three brigades with no reports issued were not engaged on May 31, and only minimally engaged on June 1, with no reported casualties.

Jenkins’ report detailed the extensive fighting by his portion of Anderson’s Brigade, but only for May 31, and Anderson did not complete a report. Pickett’s report was minimalist at best, with no insight on his initial marching orders or to any subsequent orders from Longstreet before 9 p.m. May 30.     

Only Wilcox mentioned any substantive content of Longstreet’s orders: “On the 30th ultimo[,] orders were received to be prepared with ammunition….for an early march the following morning. At 6:30 a.m. the brigade moved from its camp near the Mechanicsville Pike by by-paths across to the junction of the Charles City and Williamsburg Roads” [italics added by author].

Wilcox’s report clearly indicates no orders involving movement toward Old Tavern on the Nine Mile Road, as would have been Johnston’s expectation. One can presume that each of those in brigade command received similar orders, as the whole division wound up along the Williamsburg Road.

The orders described in Wilcox’s report would have been issued shortly after Longstreet left Johnston’s headquarters at approximately 9 p.m. May 30. In 1896, Longstreet wrote: “There was no reason why the orders for march should be misconstrued or misapplied”—a curious comment considering Longstreet’s June 10, 1862, report, which did not divulge the nature of his orders. It is interesting how Longstreet maintained there was “no reason” for misconstruing his orders, yet his report focuses on Hill and Huger while offering little data regarding his own division’s actions.

A common belief offered on Longstreet’s behalf is the lack of clarity of Johnston’s verbal orders. Johnston, however, clearly intended and expected Longstreet to operate as a commander of three divisions and to engage his division from Old Tavern upon hearing the opening of Hill’s attack. Longstreet failed to do either. Even if one accepts a “misunderstanding,” Longstreet’s battlefield conduct is hard to justify.

In 1877, Longstreet best described his lack of leadership when he wrote to Hill: “I do not remember giving an order on that field other than to send you my brigades as you called for them.” Hill later wrote that “Longstreet was not on the field at all on the 31st of May, and did not see any of the fighting.” And Longstreet’s poor battlefield leadership continued June 1, with Hill recalling he “received no orders from General Longstreet whatever.” Longstreet’s admission and Hill’s verifications certainly do not portray the actions of a wing commander responsible for actively directing and managing the operations of three divisions.

False Statements

By placing his affinity for Longstreet above the truth, Johnston shared equally in crafting the “misunderstanding” and in actively engaging in the character assassination of Huger.

After graduating from West Point in 1825, Benjamin Huger spent the next 35 years primarily as an ordnance officer in the U.S. Army. In 1861, he resigned from Federal service to join the Confederate Army but quickly ran afoul of an investigation conducted by the Confederate House of Representatives for failure to reinforce and supply troops at Roanoke Island, N.C., where he commanded. His reputation sullied, Huger became an easy target for further criticism, whether warranted or not.

Neither Johnston nor Longstreet respected Huger, and Johnston had publicly criticized Huger for abandoning the Norfolk Naval Yards in May 1862 and the subsequent demolition of the ironclad CSS Virginia, even though Huger had simply been following Johnston’s own orders.

Although Huger lacked experience as a field commander, his division was the only one conveniently placed to cover Hill’s flank along the Charles City Road in the attack and, given the overall simplicity of his plan, Johnston had no reason to expect anything but success.

Johnston’s report of June 24, 1862, took full advantage of Longstreet’s narrative and directly conflicted with Smith’s earlier report. Before evaluating Johnston’s report, however, it is important to turn to Smith’s notes and comments about what had transpired on May 31. (Smith entered handwritten comments on his original report while in Macon, Ga., in June 1865.) On the morning of May 31, and throughout much of the day, Smith was with Johnston. They interacted and communicated constantly, and both knew Longstreet had deviated from Johnston’s orders.

The request by Johnston for secrecy perplexed Smith:

“Johnston’s letter indicated a desire to keep back important facts. And he is mistaken in supposing that the misunderstanding between himself and General Longstreet did not affect the operations of my division. And he is mistaken that no one knew of this…

“General Johnston did not know where Longstreet was. But he explained his intentions freely & fully to the effect that the right wing under Longstreet composed of three divisions viz – His own [Anderson’s], D.H. Hill’s and Huger’s were to attack the enemy very early in the morning before eight o’clock. D.H. Hill by the Williamsburg Road…Huger on Hill’s right…and Longstreet’s own division on Hill’s left moving into position on the nine miles road….[All my] staff officers and Generals knew where Longstreet was supposed to be and they knew Genl. Johnston’s intentions and orders in regard to the troops they were to support. I gave them the information and certainly did not dream that there was any occasion for secrecy or ‘reticence’ then, nor do I perceive it now.”

Later in Smith’s 1865 endorsement, he addressed the so-called misinterpretation with: “So much for the misunderstanding between Johnston and Longstreet….My opinion is that it would have been better for both had Johnston stated and explained it.”

What Johnston’s official report had emphasized was that Longstreet’s Division supported Hill’s Division along the Williamsburg Road, and that Longstreet had “the direction of operations on the right.” Huger “was to attack in flank the troops who might engage with Hill and Longstreet,” and “General Smith was to be in position along the Nine Mile Road “to be in readiness either to fall on Keyes’ right flank or cover Longstreet’s left.”

The only factual statement here is that Longstreet possessed command of operations on the right (although he did little commanding). The other statements are all false. “[H]ad General Huger’s division been in position and ready for action…,” Johnston opined, “I am satisfied that Keyes’ Corps would have been destroyed rather than being merely defeated.”

Johnston knew the plan he described in his report is not the one he outlined to Smith and others on May 31. Rather than personally adapting and adjusting to the new situation when the plan unraveled, he became sullen and passive. At 10 a.m., hearing no sounds of musketry or distant cannon fire, Johnston asked a staff officer if there might be a mistake—that his ears had deceived him. When the officer confirmed the silence, the dejected Johnston sighed, “I wish the troops were back in their camps.”

Ironically, it was the success of Jenkins’ Brigade that demonstrated just how successful an attack down the Nine Mile Road could have been. Jenkins’ 1,900-men drove across a portion of the Federal right flank near Fair Oaks Station and then followed a path down and across the Nine Mile Road while cutting behind the Federal lines at Seven Pines.

Jenkins’ attack along a similar path to Longstreet’s, with six brigades, should have been launched from Old Tavern that morning. Given the success Jenkins demonstrated, one can only ponder the success Longstreet’s full division might have attained. An earlier attack down the Nine Mile Road would in all probability have convincingly won the day for Johnston’s army.

Wrote Keyes: “[T]he right was on ground so favorable to the approach of the enemy and so far from the Chickahominy that if Johnston had attacked there an hour or two earlier than he did, I could have made but a feeble defense…and every man of us would have been killed, captured or driven into the swamp or river before assistance could have reached us.

The specifics of Longstreet’s June 7 letter to Johnston remained unknown to Smith, Hill, and others until its publication in the Official Records. Smith and Hill were equally rattled, with Hill penning in a letter to Smith on May 18, 1885: “I cannot understand Longstreet’s motive in coming over to the Williamsburg Road, nor can I understand Johnston’s motive in shielding him.”

Hill and Smith were incensed at Longstreet’s claims that his division had endured “perhaps the hardest part of the battle” and that it had been “greatly cut up….[their] ammunition…nearly exhausted.”

“Longstreet was not on the field at all on the 31st of May and did not see any fighting,” Hill wrote. “He ought to have known that I got no assistance from him except for the brigade of RH Anderson [i.e., Jenkins]….I have not felt kindly to Longstreet since I read that letter of his to Joe Johnston. I can’t understand how he had the brass to write such a letter.”

In his Battle of Seven Pines, published in 1891, Smith expressed his sympathy for Huger, as “the erroneous statements of Generals Johnston and Longstreet, in regard to Huger’s instructions, have been incorporated into history.”

“Too Much Censured”

The only official support Huger received immediately after the battle came in Wilcox’s June 12 report. Wilcox had commanded three of Longstreet’s brigades along the Charles City Road on May 31 and had been in regular contact with Huger. He knew Huger was not at fault for the disruption at Gillies Creek.

An undated addendum in Wilcox’s report, presumably added after Johnston’s report appeared, states: “At Seven Pines, the successful part of it was Hill’s fight. I have thought that General Huger was a little too much censured for Seven Pines by the papers.”

Johnston continued the “blame Huger” theme in a post-war article he wrote for Century Magazine titled “Manassas to Seven Pines,” as did Longstreet in his 1896 account, “From Manassas to Appomattox.”

Huger did not see the critical reports by Longstreet and Johnston about his performance until August 1862 and immediately sought redress from both. Longstreet never responded, and Huger wrote directly to Johnston on September 20 after waiting more than a month for a reply, maintaining: “As you have indorsed his erroneous statements, to my injury, I must hold you responsible.”

Receiving no reply from Johnston either, Huger penned a letter to Davis, along with an extract of Johnston’s Seven Pines report, refuting what the commander had written. Davis referred the remarks to Johnston, receiving a supercilious response. He essentially blamed Huger for not raising the issue sooner and that an investigation was now impossible because Longstreet was unavailable, adding that “the passage in my report that he complains about was written to show that the delay in commencing the attack on May 31 was not by my fault.”

Huger attempted to right the wrong through the Confederate government itself—to no avail. He demanded Davis create a board of inquiry, and though the request was approved, that board never met.

Huger dropped the issue after the war. In 1867, he wrote: “[I]f our cause had been successful, I would have insisted on an investigation; I determined that it was now no time to redress wrongs; that I must continue to bear them and I would not mention a word about Gen. Johnston.” Thus, Huger’s name and character would continue to carry the blame for the failure of the May 31 Confederate attack at Seven Pines.

Mercifully, by late July 1862, Huger no longer held a field command, reassigned to the administrative role of inspector general for artillery and ordnance. Johnston, meanwhile, resumed leading Confederate armies in November.

Perhaps Gustavus Smith provided the best description as to how history should view Longstreet’s lack of ethical credibility when he wrote: “General Longstreet, in command of the three divisions which were to have crushed Keyes corps before it could be reinforced blundered badly from the beginning to the end of the battle; and to say the least, his writings in reference to Seven Pines are no more creditable than his conduct of operations on this field.”

Victor Vignola writes from Middletown, N.Y. This article is adapted from his book Contrasts in Command: The Battle of Fair Oaks, May 31–June 1, 1862 (Savas Beatie, 2023).

In September 1861, while stationed in Paducah, Ky., Private John H. Page of the 1st Illinois Light Artillery received notice that he had been promoted to second lieutenant in the 3rd U.S. Infantry and was to report for duty in Washington, D.C. After packing his belongings, Page caught a boat for Cairo, Ill., where he reported to the general in charge of the District of Southeast Missouri before obtaining transportation for the next leg of his journey.

Page immediately recognized Ulysses S. Grant perched behind a wire screen at a local bank where the general had set up his headquarters. “He looked at my commission and seemed buried in deep thought,” Page recalled. “He looked at me intently and repeated several times, Jno. Page,” apparently lost in reverie. It took a tap on the shoulder by a gray-haired officer in attendance to snap Grant out of his trance.

Assuredly, Grant had been reminiscing about the Mexican War, Page suspected, when he, then a 24-year-old second lieutenant, personally witnessed a Mexican cannonball mortally wound Page’s father, Captain John Page Sr., during the fierce Battle of Palo Alto. “No doubt,” Page concluded in observing Grant’s unusual reaction, “his thoughts, when looking at my commission were wandering back to his early days.”

Grant and Private Page had both lost something special during the U.S. victory at Palo Alto on May 8, 1846: Page ultimately his father, and Grant his innocence.

We, of course, will never know for sure what crossed Grant’s mind when the young private handed him his commission, but the now 39-year-old brigadier had perhaps revisited the senior Page’s disfiguring wound, him writhing in agony on the plains of Palo Alto…the comrade he had lost 15 years earlier.

For many of the more than 500 Mexican War veterans who became Confederate or Union generals during the Civil War, battle deaths evoked strong emotional reactions. Those traumatic experiences had introduced them to the dreadful lessons of war: that it was terrible, that loss and grief were normal, and how to cope with them. Inevitably, death in battle played a significant role in shaping their identities.

Dr. Nigel C. Hunt, who studies war trauma and memory, stresses that most individuals who go through such ordeals react with intense memories or emotions when recalling what they witnessed, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they will suffer from long-term or debilitating problems. Even with these memories indelibly etched into their minds, most continue to live normal lives. Grant and his comrades never forget what they saw or how they felt when confronted with death on the battlefield in Mexico.

“I cannot feel exultation”

Mexican War battles were bloody affairs, especially for U.S. Army officers. They made up 8 percent of the war’s battle deaths, which surpassed the mortality rate of other U.S. 19th-century conflicts. Renowned historian James M. McPherson says that in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War, the proportion of officers killed in action was about 15 percent higher than that of enlisted men. During the Mexican War, the proportion of officers killed in action or who died of their wounds was more than 40 percent higher than the rank and file.

During Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott’s 1847 Mexico City Campaign, for instance, his army lost 61 officers killed to roughly 703 soldiers (8 percent). In comparison, during the Seven Days’ Battles in 1862, the Army of Northern Virginia lost 175 officers killed to 3,494 soldiers (5 percent). If the losses sustained among Confederate officers during the spring and summer of 1862 were staggering, as Dr. Joseph T. Glatthaar suggests, the mortality rate among Scott’s officers in Mexico was catastrophic.

Major Edmund Kirby, who lost many dear friends and cherished companions, including his nephew, during Scott’s campaign, wrote to his wife, Eliza: “Blood. Blood. Blood. Enough has been shed to excite the worst enthusiastic joy throughout our dear country. Enough to cause tears to flow sufficient to float a ship of war.”

The Mexican War was an emotionally taxing experience for its soldiers, especially its officers, who witnessed a disturbing proportion of their comrades die in battle. When Scott’s army seized Mexico City, 1st Lt. John Sedgwick wrote his sister, Olive, that “were it not for the loss of so many near and dear friends,—friends with whom we have enjoyed all the pleasures of a long peace, and with whom we have shoulder to shoulder encountered and vanquished the enemy…our situation would be pleasant.”

Captain Isaac I. Stevens, also with Scott’s army, told his wife, Margaret, that while he was alive and healthy, he could hardly celebrate. “I cannot feel exultation,” he admitted. “We have lost many brave officers and men, some my personal friends; streams of blood have in reality flowed over the battlefield.” Both generals were later killed while serving in the Union Army during the rebellion—Sedgwick at the Wilderness in May 1864, and Stevens at Chantilly (Ox Hill) in September 1862.

After the August 1847 Battle of Contreras, Captain Robert E. Lee, eventually the Confederacy’s most famous general, best captured the emotional distress it caused many when he declared: “It is the living for whom we should mourn, and not the dead.”

Studies that address Civil War generals and their role in the Mexican War typically concentrate on the military lessons they took away from their service and how they applied them on Civil War battlefields. That is important, but what is often overlooked is the emotional impact the war, especially battle deaths, had on them during the short but costly struggle. The sickening sights on battlefields or in hospitals, and the sudden and violent loss of comrades, friends, or relatives, evoked a flood of intense emotions such as grief, horror, shock, melancholy, guilt, loneliness, helplessness, and numbness. The deeper the bond with the deceased individual, the more emotionally impactful the loss. To better understand the individuals who fought in Mexico before the Civil War, we must begin to look beyond the war as merely a “training ground” or a jovial gathering of friends-turned-enemies and recognize the emotional impact battlefield deaths had on them.

Distress and Detachment

Second Lieutenant Henry M. Judah, a Union brigadier general who commanded a division during the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, found it unsettling to recollect to his mother, Mary, what he had experienced at the Battle of Monterrey in September 1846.

“Their cries and groans, the terrible hissing of the cannon and musket balls, which filled the air, added to the roar of artillery in every direction, made an impression that I could never describe,” he wrote to her three days after Brig. Gen. Zachary Taylor’s army captured the city.

During the battle, several musket balls had grazed his cheeks, and had his sword knocked from his hand by a cannonball. An 1843 West Point classmate and fellow lieutenant fell dead mere feet away from him. Dazed and dirtied, Judah hunkered down behind a mound of earth as a shower of artillery and musket fire passed just feet above his head. “[E]very face looked blank—all were exhausted—and the wounded and the dead were mixed with the living,” he recalled.

When Mexican soldiers began to advance on their position, a feeling of indifference overtook the young lieutenant. The emotional callousness alarmed him more than anything else he felt that day. “My feelings at this moment were more horrible than those of death,” he admitted to his mother. “I began to feel reckless, and cared not how soon it came.”

Within only a short period, Judah experienced a surge of fear, excitement, anxiety, horror, dread, and detachment.

The emotional highs and lows of combat, as Judah experienced, can be overwhelming for a soldier, but the battle’s aftermath can be equally—and arguably more so—distressing emotionally.

The first two battles fought during the Mexican War, on May 8-9, 1846, left both fields littered with death and destruction. Mutilated men and horses, abandoned wagons, discarded weapons, and everything of which an army is composed carpeted the landscapes at Palo Alto and, the following day, Resaca de la Palma. Steel, lead, and iron inflicted horrific wounds—mangling limbs, crushing heads, and severing bodies and trunks. Most Civil War generals who fought at these two battles were exposed to the butchery of war for the first time in their lives.

“Such a field of carnage never was before witnessed by any of us,” 1st Lt. William H.T. Brooks, who commanded a 6th Corps division during the Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville campaigns of 1862-63, wrote home after the battle.

Second Lieutenant John J. Peck, who for a time during the Civil War commanded all Union troops in Virginia south of the James River, told his father that while the two armies battled at Resaca de la Palma, the American soldiers paid little attention to the dead Mexican soldiers. “[B]ut after the excitement of battle has passed away,” he admitted, “our sympathies were aroused, and I felt keenly all the horrors of war.”

Judah, who provided his mother with a vivid account of his Monterrey ordeal, admitted that the mutilated bodies on the Resaca battlefield were a terrible vision. He couldn’t find the words to describe the horror.

A day later, he remained haunted by the experience, writing her: “The cries of the wounded still ring in my ears.”

Processing Trauma

Battlefield death left a lasting impression on the survivors. “I was somewhat affected by the sight,” said 1st Lt. Charles S. Hamilton, later a Union major general, after coming upon the mangled bodies of Mexican soldiers killed at Monterrey, “but ere the night of that day had closed I learned to look upon the dead with as little emotion as I would regard a stone.”

Consciously or subconsciously, Hamilton was using repression as a defensive mechanism. According to Dr. Dillon J. Carroll, who studied and wrote about mental illness during the Civil War, soldiers used emotional desensitization or “hardening” to cope with death—as did Mexican War soldiers.

In his memoirs, Hamilton confessed the sight of those dead Mexican soldiers at Monterrey “affected me more than any other scene during the entire war.”

When Hamilton arrived at Bishop’s Palace the morning after the battle, he witnessed additional horror, later providing a graphic account. He watched a Mexican soldier struck by a shell that had burst and obliterated him as it passed through his body. “If you imagine a human being ground by two avalanches crushing him between them,” Hamilton would write, “you would have a similar sight.”

The other soldier had been hit in the forehead by a musket ball. His brain oozed from a hole in the back of his head and dried foam clung to his lips as he had taken his last gasping breaths. “Enough of these descriptions,” Hamilton would note. “[Y]ou will little like them, while I have become callous to the most ghastly sights.”

Dr. Carol Acton, who has studied wartime grief, says that, for soldiers, writing about a traumatic experience offers them the means to express and cope with emotional distress and grief. Conceding that his loved ones might wince at his graphic descriptions, Hamilton shared what he saw and felt anyway, likely as a way to process the trauma.

Returning to a particular battlefield often triggered emotions many years later. Lew Wallace, a second lieutenant in Mexico who would hold important Civil War commands at both Shiloh (1862) and Monocacy (1864), said that, despite all his subsequent experiences in war, one section of the Buena Vista battlefield was the most horrible after-battle scene he had witnessed. “The dead lay in the pent space body on body, a blending and interlacement of parts of men as defiant of the imagination as of the pen,” the future author of the famed novel Ben-Hur would write.

Wallace made three pilgrimages to the Buena Vista battlefield over a seven-year-period. On one of his visits, he noticed a Mexican farmer with a hoe casually digging a path in the dirt and leading a stream of water to irrigate a wheatfield. It was the same field he had described above. Wallace wondered if the healthy-looking wheat had been nurtured by the blood of the American soldiers struck down there in February 1847.

Eternal Camaraderie

It is one thing for a soldier to observe the death of another with whom he had no intimate relationship than to watch a mentor, messmate, or close friend die in combat. The emotional bond formed among soldiers is distinct, as they suffer and face dangers together, risk their lives for one another, and rely on each other for emotional support and survival.

For many of the U.S. Army’s junior officers who served in the Mexican War, they had spent years together before the conflict, as West Point classmates or for long periods at isolated frontier outposts. When a comrade was killed in battle, this eternal camaraderie understandably brought forth intense emotions comparable to the loss of a family member.

Ulysses Grant became familiar with shattered friendships and loss in Mexico. Even though Palo Alto was Grant’s first battle, it was not the fear of death that most affected him, but the sight of a colleague (especially a friend) suffering a horrific wound.

For Grant, that had been “the ghastly hideousness of his visage” as Captain John Page, his face shot away by an enemy cannonball, “reared in convulsive agony from the grass.” As he wrote his friend John W. Lowe about Captain Page’s disfiguring wound: “The under jaw is gone to the wind pipe and the tongue hangs down upon the throat.”

In his memoirs, written nearly 40 years later, Grant relived the detail of that enemy cannonball that had decapitated one soldier and then mutilated Page, splattering nearby American soldiers with brain matter and bone fragments.

Page was the first of many of Grant’s comrades killed during the war, but he was the closest with 2nd Lt. Robert Hazlitt, a fellow Ohioan and graduate of West Point’s Class of 1843, one of 18 U.S. officers killed or mortally wounded at Monterrey. Hazlitt regularly accompanied Grant on his visits to the White Haven Plantation near St. Louis when he began courting Julia Dent.

Grant tended to internalize his emotions, but, having lost so many friends at Monterrey, finally broke down. “How very lonesome it is here with us now,” he wrote to Julia a month after the battle. “I have just been walking through camp and how many faces that were dear to the most of us are missing now.”

Three other lieutenants in the regiment had been struck down storming the city besides Hazlitt, and remained constantly on Grant’s mind: Charles Hoskins, Richard H. Graham, and James S. Woods.

Was Grant experiencing bereavement overload, survivor’s guilt, or both? To drive away “the Blues,” Grant retrieved some old letters and a journal he kept while stationed at Jefferson Barracks, Mo., and reminisced about happier times.

Grant expressed his close friendship with Hazlitt in a November letter to Hazlitt’s brother, James, assuring him that only his dear friend’s family could feel his death more deeply. Monterrey, Grant wrote, “will be remembered by all here present as one of the most melancholy of their lives.”

As Grant’s fame grew during the Civil War, he used his influence to assist the relatives of one of the officers he mourned in 1846. In late 1863, Charles Hoskins’ widow, Jennie, wrote to Grant from New Rochelle, N.Y., imploring him to help her 17-year-old son, John Deane Charles Hoskins, secure an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy. Grant had lent the boy’s father his horse shortly before he was killed at Monterrey.

In January 1864, Grant had Illinois Rep. Elihu B. Washburne deliver a note to President Abraham Lincoln asking him to appoint the boy to West Point. On a military telegraph approving Hoskins’ appointment, Lincoln scribbled the words “Gen. Grant’s boy” next to the cadet’s name. A month after Grant was appointed to the rank of lieutenant general, Jennie Hoskins wrote him reporting that her son had received the appointment. (He would graduate in 1868, serve for 40 years, and retire as a brigadier general.)

Family Bonds

Captain Robert E. Lee’s eyes stayed glued on his older brother, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Sydney Smith Lee, when the American guns opened on the Mexican defenses at Vera Cruz in March 1847. Robert’s brotherly instinct kicked in, and he was determined to shield Sydney from danger, even though there was little he could do to protect him from the enemy’s shells. The thought of Sydney being wounded or killed, however, petrified him. As he would write his wife, Mary, afterward: “[W]hat would I have done had he been cut down before me!”

Fortunately for Lee, he did not have to find out. But there were a handful of other Civil War generals who experienced Lee’s worst fear and more when a blood relative was killed.

Difficult to comprehend perhaps, the subsequent U.S. assault at Molino del Rey would eclipse anything Grant and other U.S. soldiers had experienced at Monterrey. On September 8, 1847, General Scott ordered an attack on a cluster of stone buildings and earthworks to capture a foundry in which he believed the Mexicans were melting church bells to cast cannons. In only two hours, however, Brig. Gen. William Worth lost nearly 25 percent of his force, and 17 U.S. officers were either killed during the battle or would die of their wounds.

When Ethan Allen Hitchcock, acting inspector general to Scott, visited the field after the debacle, he came upon Captain William Chapman of the 5th U.S. Infantry. In a moment jarringly similar to the one Confederate Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett famously had on July 3, 1863, after Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, Chapman pointed to the regiment’s survivors—now reduced roughly to the size of a company—and exclaimed with tears rolling down his face: “There’s the Fifth.”

Among the mortally wounded was Captain Ephraim Kirby Smith of Chapman’s regiment. A musket ball had struck him in the face under the left eye and passed through his head, exiting near the left ear. Smith’s uncle, Major Edmund Kirby, had Ephraim (“Kirby” to family members) taken to his quarters in Tacubaya.

Second Lieutenant Edmund Kirby Smith, the fallen warrior’s brother, would become famous as a Confederate lieutenant general and commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department during the Civil War. Known by family members as “Ted,” he would visit his mortally wounded sibling several times, but when he arrived on September 11 to the hospital where “Kirby” had been moved, Ted learned his brother had died.

Having lost his father, Joseph Lee Smith, in May and now his older brother just four months apart was deeply distressing, and Ted also feared for his brother’s three young children—Joseph, Emma, and George—left to grow up without their father.

The young lieutenant was also pained by his sister-in-law’s financial welfare, as no pension system existed in the Army at the time for soldiers’ widows. How would she and her children cope? Among the eerie thoughts plunging through his anguished mind was that it would have been better had he been killed and not his brother.

“Burned into the Soul”

When Captain John W. Lowe arrived in Mexico City in the spring of 1848, he noted that his friend Ulysses Grant had undergone a transformation, writing to his wife: “[H]e is a short thick man with a beard reaching half way down his waist and I fear he drinks too much but don’t you say a word on that subject.”

While some writers believe that Lowe’s statement was an early indication of Grant’s alcoholism, they overlook what he might really have been trying to convey: that Grant was battling his traumatic war experiences.

The lieutenant had been in Mexico for two years, away from Julia for three, and had participated in nearly all the war’s major battles without an opportunity to take leave. He had witnessed much death and many close friends die. After the death of Sidney Smith, a friend and second lieutenant in the 4th U.S. Infantry, in 1847, he told Julia that out of all the officers that left Jefferson Barracks with the 4th, only three, including himself, remained. In fact, 21 percent of the officers who started the war in Grant’s regiment were killed or died of their wounds, and 11 percent of the 4th’s battle deaths consisted of officers. The high fatality rate among officers in Grant’s regiment led to the nickname “the Bloody 4th.”

In 1884, the year before Grant died of throat cancer, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Grant retained vivid recollections of his pre-Civil War years: “[T]he Mexican War seems more distinct to him than the Rebellion,” the newspaper declared, and also maintained that the war’s battles were “burned into the soul of Grant as with a brand of fire.”

In his memoirs, Grant claimed that he greatly benefited from the “many practical lessons it taught,” but he omitted his more private experiences. As he was hesitant to openly express his inner feelings, particularly when he expected them to be published and shared with the public, it is not surprising Grant decided to omit the grief and loneliness he had experienced with the death of comrades in Mexico. Those emotions, however, are evident in his private letters.

Grant wasn’t alone in expressing this inner turmoil. Many Mexican War veterans who became Civil War generals likewise expressed their deepest feelings in private journals, letters home, and postwar memoirs. Certainly, both Union and Confederate generals gained valuable military experience in Mexico that they would apply in the Civil War. It is important, however, to recognize that the Mexican War also served as an emotional training ground for these leaders. The deaths they witnessed taught them harsh lessons about the realities of war, triggered powerful emotional responses, and left a lasting impact on their character and values long before the Civil War.

Frank Jastrzembski, a regular America’s Civil War contributor, writes from Hartford, Wis.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

Arthur James Lyon Fremantle left Great Britain aboard a ship on March 2, 1863, headed for the northern border of Mexico. After a long voyage, the young British army officer finally arrived on April 1 “at the miserable village of Bagdad” on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. Despite considerable speculation at the time, Fremantle was in America only as a tourist and not as an official governmental observer of the United Kingdom—the widespread uncertainty of his status undoubtedly caused by Fremantle’s choice of daily attire, a full British military uniform resplendent with a corresponding bright red jacket.

Initially, Fremantle was inclined to side with the North in the Civil War, as were many of his fellow English citizens because of an inherent disapproval of slavery. He would soon switch his allegiance to the South, however, partly because he admired the Southern reputation of gallantry and determination, and also because “of the foolish bullying conduct of the Northerners.” As Fremantle would note: “I was unable to repress a strong wish to go to America and see something of this wonderful struggle.”

As he attempted to cross onto Texas soil, Fremantle was briefly detained and questioned by a half-dozen Confederate officers. Ever the keen observer, the British citizen noted that the troopers—all from Colonel James Duff’s “Partisan Rangers,” the 33rd Texas Cavalry—were similarly attired in “flannel shirts, very ancient trousers, jack-boots with enormous spurs and black felt hats ornamented with the lone star of Texas.” Despite their unkempt appearance, the Texans treated Fremantle with inestimable kindness.

While conversing with Fremantle, Duff’s troopers lamented that they were currently unable to visit some friends across the Rio Grande, alluding to a clandestine foray they had made about three weeks earlier that now put them in jeopardy. One particularly boastful Texan excitedly divulged that “he and some of his friends made a raid over there three weeks ago and carried away some ‘renegadoes,’ one of whom named [William W.] Montgomery, they had left on the road to Brownsville.”

Fremantle could tell by the smirks on the Texans’ faces that something disagreeable had clearly happened to this individual named Montgomery.

Meeting “Ham”

About noon, Fremantle left the officers and, along with a companion, headed toward Brownsville. The foreigner noted the country was mostly flat and contained an abundance of mesquite trees. Everyone they met, it appeared to Fremantle, carried a six-shooter, although he felt there seldom seemed a need for one. The duo had traveled about nine miles when they encountered an ambulance. They were informed that one of the passengers was Confederate Brig. Gen. Hamilton P. Bee, commander of Brownsville, to which Fremantle handed over his letter of introduction originally intended for Maj. Gen. John Magruder. Upon perusing the papers, Bee disembarked from the vehicle and formally presented himself to the British subject.

Bee had a famous brother, Barnard E. Bee Jr., who had been killed at the First Battle of Manassas and immortalized by giving then-Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson the sobriquet “Stonewall.” The younger Bee, “Ham,” had accompanied his parents to the Lone Star republic decades before, and his father became part of the fledgling Texas government.

Seeing limited military service in the Mexican War, “Ham” used his political connections to secure the rank of brigadier in the Texas Militia and subsequently the Confederacy not long after the Civil War began. Bee plied the two travelers with “beef and beer in the open.” Fremantle recalled that they all talked politics for more than an hour while getting further details on the Montgomery affair. Bee elaborated that the episode was conducted without his authorization and that he was regretful it had happened.

Soon, Fremantle and his companion were on their way and, not quite 30 minutes later, came upon Montgomery’s final resting place. The victim, Fremantle wrote, “had been slightly buried, but his head and arms were above the ground, his arms tied together, the rope still around his neck, but part of it still dangling from quite a small mesquite tree. Dogs or wolves had probably scraped the earth from the body, and there was no flesh on the bones. I obtained this my first experience of Lynch law within three hours of landing in America.”     

A Cross-border Conflict

The origins of the raid across the river into Mexico began with feuding Texans. Montgomery, along with Texas transplant Edmund J. Davis, had fled south of the border to start a cavalry unit composed of Unionists from the Lone Star State. Located in a foreign country, they could safely recruit members under the protection of the Mexican authorities. The Unionists became emboldened that the Texans could do nothing without illegally crossing the border to apprehend them. The Yankee sympathizers, The Tyler Reporter noted, “had just stood over the river” and “begun a series of indignities which were very provoking” and eventually “their cowardly natures—prompted them to peer at and insult our brave boys.”

Davis’ exodus to Texas had come in 1848, after the Mexican War. Ironically, one of his earliest friends was Hamilton Bee. They both sold cattle to the U.S. Army, and the future Southern general was the best man at Davis’ wedding. Before the Civil War, Davis had been elected district attorney and then district judge. His popularity and organizational skills helped get him duty as a colonel and then brigadier general of cavalry in the Union Army, followed by a postwar stint as governor of Texas.

Montgomery’s background was more shady, and he had even been acquitted in a shocking murder trial—his lawyer none other than Andrew Jackson Hamilton, future military governor of Texas during the war. Montgomery had started out as a horse and sheep rancher before elevating his portfolio to capital crimes.

Meeting in Union-held New Orleans, Davis and Montgomery were assigned to send loyal men from Matamoros to the Crescent City as recruits for the proposed Federal cavalry unit.

In 1864, when Fremantle had his notes published in a book, he identified the leader of the murderous gang who had captured Montgomery and Davis and had killed the former. And though his publisher refused to print the name of the culprit in the text, Fremantle’s details about the perpetrator were included in the volume. A few days after his discovery of Montgomery’s remains, the Englishman jotted down: “We were afterwards presented to ________, rather a sinister-looking party with long yellow hair down to his shoulders. This is the man who is supposed to [have] hang[ed] Montgomery.”

Frustrated by the “despicable” behavior the Unionists had displayed, the Confederates vowed revenge. One of Duff’s men, a self-described Mexican-American Confederate named Santiago Tafolla, recalled, “about midnight, Col. [George William] Chilton came from Brownsville with a small group of men. They immediately woke us up and told us to go across the Rio Grande to capture certain men there who had been harassing us daily.” The Southerners secreted themselves across the river in three small boats after receiving specific instructions from Chilton that they were not to harm anyone, especially Mexican nationals. With Chilton in the lead, the small group stormed the customs house along the riverside and pulled out Davis and “a man named Montgomery who, according to what people said, was an evildoer.”

Another of Duff’s Partisan Rangers, an Englishman named R.H. Williams, remembered that on their way to Bagdad, Chilton explained to the group that their mission was to capture Davis and other leaders of the 1st Texas Cavalry (U.S.). Noted Williams: “Now these deserters and their boasting talk…had riled the boys very much, and they were ‘blue mouldy’ to get at them.”

A correspondent accompanying the insurgents wrote: “Surrounding the house in which Col[onel] Davis was said to be, [they]…ordered [him] to surrender, and I regret to say, he did so.” But Montgomery “fought like a wild cat and wounded two of the men badly with his bowie-knife before he was overpowered.”

The Yankee sympathizers being hunted had been alerted by the accidental discharge of a Confederate’s weapon. As Tafolla revealed:

“The day was dawning and at the sound of the shot, we saw men pop up from different directions. As it was now daylight and we were on Mexican soil, we were ordered back. To do that we had to pass through the village, which by this time had been totally alarmed. So as we approached the houses, we were greeted by a rain of bullets from the houses, from the windows and from the doors. But we had received orders not to fire. Before we could reach the Rio Grande, the local judge came out to ask us why we had crossed over to Mexico. We told him we were supposed to take certain Americans prisoner, but that we had strict orders not to violate any Mexican laws.”

At the time, Chilton was swiftly moving his force back across the Mexican border; the Kentucky native was serving as Bee’s brigade ordnance officer. He gave orders to transport the prisoners to Brownsville with Montgomery’s hands tied behind his back astride a horse, while Davis was allowed to mount his ride unrestrained. To his captors, Montgomery stated, “All I ask is that I be treated as a prisoner of war.” Chilton replied that he would be treated as he deserved, a foreshadowing of Montgomery’s deadly fate. Along the route back to Brownsville, the despised Montgomery was hanged, or as The San Antonio Herald documented, “immediately went up a tree.”

De-escalation

Davis’ wife had swiftly contacted the Mexican governor, Albino Lopez, who was in the area, and explained that her husband had been abducted. Lopez immediately called for the men’s return. Bee found himself amid a potentially major international incident and feigned ignorance of the incident. A month before, Bee and Lopez—together with Confederate agent Jose Quintero—had negotiated an extradition agreement. The particulars of the accord assured the extradition of persons accused of murder, embezzlement, theft, and robbery of cattle or horses without any previous notification of the authorities on the other side of the border. Furthermore, if a pursuit of a criminal began on one side of the border and continued on the other side, the posse had permission to continue to follow them.      Unfortunately, these kidnappings were not covered in the aforementioned document. The news of the situation provoked great rage in Matamoros. Groups of protesters paraded down its streets angrily shouting anti-Confederate slogans. When it was discovered that Montgomery had been killed, the Mexicans became even more upset. Lopez was so furious that he threatened to close the border and arrest all Confederate officers currently in Matamoros. Lopez followed up on his stance in a missive to Bee complaining not only about the Davis kidnapping but other less publicized incidents. He also requested a battalion of sharpshooters from the military and began organizing his own local militia in case of a martial confrontation with the Texans.

Finally, Bee relented and returned Davis to Mexico, which at least de-escalated the tensions. Quintero fired off a dispatch to the Confederate capital in Richmond, Va., informing his superiors of the peaceful resolution. He also notified Santiago Vidaurri, another governor in northern Mexico, of the incident crossing the border. Vidaurri had treasured his alliance with the Confederacy, as it greatly assisted his impoverished area.

“The bitter enemy of our cause,” Quintero reported, had been removed to Brownsville, where Montgomery would be “permanently located.” Vidaurri only seemed curious as to why it had taken the Confederates as long as it did to act on the situation.

Blame for the hanging of Montgomery continued to be debated on both sides of the river. Davis identified Sergeant H.B. Adams of Duff’s command as the person in charge of the lynching detail, and a Unionist in Mexico, Captain William H. Brewin of Yager’s Texas Cavalry Battalion, as a participant, though that accusation could not be confirmed by a corroborating witness. The Confederates tried to justify their actions in hanging Montgomery by claiming he led the forces that had killed a citizen named Isidro Vela, along with some cotton teamsters. This raid, carried out under a U.S. banner, happened in December, however, while Montgomery was busy recruiting in New Orleans.

Other Southerners accused Montgomery of murdering two men near Corpus Christi. They described Montgomery as being “of Kansas notoriety” and was considered a “noted jayhawker and murderer.” In all likelihood, Montgomery’s only true crimes were antagonizing the Confederates across the river and wounding two Confederates during his abduction.

Months later, the Federals controlled the area in which Montgomery’s remains were located. One member of the burial crew remembered: “I found the bones of Capt. Montgomery interred about one foot in the ground, except his right arm, which I found in the fork of a tree, some distance from the tree on which he was hanged.” At 3 p.m. December 19, 1863, Montgomery was given a proper military funeral in Brownsville. A soldier with the 19th Iowa Infantry witnessed the funeral procession and a stirring eulogy by Hamilton, Montgomery’s former attorney and now governor. He recalled a list of those condemned as having a part in Montgomery’s death, including Bee, Philip N. Luckett, Chilton, Brewin and Richard Taylor, who was field commander of Confederate forces in Louisiana.

Chilton was later publicly condemned for actually joining in Montgomery’s hanging, but his true crime was commanding the expedition, and in ordering the heinous execution that caused such a fiasco with the Mexicans. Both Fremantle and Tafolla positively identified Chilton as the ringleader of the hanging. Although Fremantle didn’t mention Chilton specifically by name, a glance at Chilton’s photograph would confirm he certainly matches the description the British soldier had made.

Fremantle returned to England after having achieved the adventure he sought by his travel through Texas and by witnessing the Battle of Gettysburg. His account of his trip was published the ensuing year. Seeing the writing on the wall with Vicksburg’s surrender, Tafolla deserted the Confederate Army in March 1864 and headed for the safety of Mexico. His memoirs were not published until 2010.

Richard H. Holloway, who writes from Alexandria, La., is a senior editor of America’s Civil War.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

“It was either a good line, or a bad one, and, whichever it was, I took it on my own responsibility….I took up that line because it enabled me to hold commanding ground, which, if the enemy had been allowed to take—as they would have taken it if I had not occupied it in force—would have rendered our position on the left untenable; and, in my judgment, would have turned the fortunes of the day hopelessly against us.” So testified Union Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles on February 26, 1864, to the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War about the controversial decision he made, against orders, to reposition his 3rd Corps at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.

As a politician, Sickles understood the importance of getting out in front of a story and shaping how it was perceived. In his view, had he not moved his corps to its advanced position, the battle likely would have been lost—a narrative he pushed on more than one front. Sickles, whose left leg was shattered by a cannonball and amputated during that day’s fighting, eagerly shared his version of the battle with President Abraham Lincoln while recovering from his wound, as well as anyone else in Congress he thought might be of help, particularly those who served on the Conduct of the War committee.

It was no accident Sickles was the first officer to testify before the committee about Gettysburg. In March 1864, he was likely the author, or at least the source, of an article about the battle in The New York Herald, under the pen name “Historicus,” which essentially repeated Sickles’ points from his testimony before the committee.

At the time, Sickles was unsuccessful in his effort to have Maj. Gen. George Meade removed as commander of the Army of the Potomac and for his personal return to the army, which Meade had blocked. But he was successful in muddying the waters of truth and in casting doubt upon Meade’s generalship at Gettysburg. This has echoed through the decades to today, where people still fiercely debate the wisdom or folly of Sickles’ advance, and view Meade’s generalship through the lens Dan Sickles shaped.

In considering the position Sickles occupied and the one Meade ordered him to be in, it is worth pausing a moment to consider the two men’s military pedigree, for in this area they were not equals. Sickles had no antebellum military experience. He was commissioned a colonel on June 26, 1861, principally because he was a well-known Democrat who supported the war and could assist in the raising of troops.

Sickles’ nomination to brigadier general in September 1861 was held up for months, and although he had command of a brigade, when it shipped out for the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, he remained in Washington to fight the political battles needed to secure that promotion. He succeeded but missed the key Battle of Williamsburg, although he was with the brigade at Fair Oaks (Seven Pines) on May 31–June 1, 1862.

Sickles saw further action during the Seven Days’ Battles starting in late June, but then returned home on a recruiting mission, which resulted in him missing both the Second Bull Run and Antietam campaigns.

When Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside assumed command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, Sickles was bizarrely placed in command of the 3rd Corps’ 2nd Division despite his lack of military training and combat experience. His division was lightly engaged at Fredericksburg, however, suffering only about 100 casualties.

Then, in yet another questionable military decision, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker handed Sickles command of the 3rd Corps upon replacing Burnside atop the Army of the Potomac in January 1863.

In describing the general’s performance at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May, Sickles’ biographer, James Hessler, wrote: “[H]e fought aggressively, but demonstrated questionable military judgment.” Shortly after that battle, Sickles left the army again, claiming a shell burst had damaged his health. He did not return until June 28, the day Meade replaced Hooker as the army’s commander.

There is no question Sickles was a brave soldier, but he was a corps commander with relatively little experience who had demonstrated no aptitude to read terrain well. Meade, on the other hand, was a West Pointer with 28 years’ service in the Army, including as a topographical engineer during the Mexican War, where his job was to read terrain. Meade had commanded, with great skill, units from brigade to corps in the Army of the Potomac in every major battle in the Eastern Theater.

When Meade decided where to place each of his corps on July 2, he relied on an early morning reconnaissance he had conducted. Meade sent verbal orders to Sickles early, probably about 5–5:30 a.m., to relieve a 12th Corps division on the northern slope of Little Round Top and to extend his right to connect with the 2nd Corps. Sickles never visited Little Round Top that we know of, and he would later claim the 12th Corps division had no defined position, which was untrue, for some of his troops did in fact spell relief for part of the 12th Corps command.

At 11 a.m., after riding to Meade’s headquarters, Sickles told his commander he was unsure of the position he had been ordered to occupy. Meade reiterated “that his right was to rest upon General [Winfield S.] Hancock’s left; and his left was to extend to the Round Top mountain, plainly visible, if it was practicable to occupy it.”

What then of the advanced position to which Sickles subsequently moved without orders? The reasons why Meade had not deployed the 3rd Corps here soon became abundantly clear for several reasons: 1) the advanced position upset the defensive arrangement of the army commander; 2) it was beyond support distance of the 2nd Corps, or any of the army’s other corps; 3) Sickles did not have enough men to assume the front he chose; 4) he left Little Round Top, the key terrain on the southern end of the field, undefended; 5) the salient at the Peach Orchard was easily hit by a crossfire of Confederate artillery; 6) if the 3rd Corps was driven from its position, it would have to retreat over open ground, likely leading to heavy casualties; and 7) contrary to Sickles’ claim, Meade’s assigned position for the 3rd Corps was a superior one.

To answer Sickles’ rhetorical question of whether his line was a good or bad one: no, it was bad—and it nearly led to the army’s defeat. Colonel E. Porter Alexander was one Confederate certain the battle was won when he placed his guns in the Peach Orchard, with the 3rd Corps driven back. But “when I got to take in all the topography, I was very much disappointed,” he recalled. “It was not the enemy’s main line we had broken. That loomed up near 1,000 yards beyond us, a ridge giving good cover behind it & endless fine positions for batteries.”

It was the original position Meade had assigned Sickles to defend.

Scott Hartwig writes from the crossroads of Gettysburg.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

Although only minor National Park Service signage alerts you to the boundaries of the vast Gettysburg battlefield at its outer edges bleeding into neighboring counties, it’s almost impossible not to know by instinct when you’ve crossed the threshold onto its hallowed, historic ground. It just feels different. You have to wonder if the area’s residents feel the same. It’s little doubt those of 1863 felt it, too, as many bore the burden of the battle while it raged and, likely, for the rest of their lives after.

When the battle broke out in this county seat on July 1, 1863, college classes were interrupted, business stopped, and a bustling railroad town was stilled. If residents hadn’t fled for safety elsewhere, they shuttered themselves in basements and attics, biding their time in terror as the sounds of war erupted around them.

Of the battle’s first-day glimpse of what was to come, 15-year-old Tillie Pierce wrote in her now famously published diary, “Soon the booming of cannon was heard, then great clouds of smoke were seen rising beyond the ridge. The sound became louder and louder and was now incessant. The troops passing us moved faster, the men had now become excited and urged on their horses. The battle was waging. This was my first terrible experience.” It was not her last.

There are many ways to experience a visit to Gettysburg, and often a trip revolves around sites related to the fighting or the soldier stories and personalities popularized by modern culture. The civilian story is lesser told…but certainly not less engaging, or less poignant. The town’s homes and mainstays became lookouts, hideouts, and the command centers of the armies’ top generals. A tour of some of the most iconic spots on the battlefield today encompasses the civilian story, as do several museums and interpretive centers in town, many marked with Civil War Trails signs. It’s an experience you won’t forget.

Meade’s Headquarters
Taneytown Road and Hunt Ave.

Maj. Gen. George Meade made Lydia Leister’s simple frame home his headquarters, holding a council of war there the night of July 2 to decide if the army should stay to fight another day. The widow returned after the battle to find her food stores and two tons of hay gone; the wheat she had planted destroyed; and her barn siding removed for firewood and grave markers. Also gone were her horse and cow, and 17 dead Union horses scattered across her fields and near her spring had fouled the water, rendering it unusable. Despite the challenge ahead, she never backed down. By 1868, she had begun adding onto her modest property.

Seminary Ridge Museum and Education Center
61 Seminary Ridge

The Seminary Ridge Museum and Education Center is housed in the oldest building on the United Lutheran Seminary campus, where all study and worship came to an abrupt halt July 1, as troops from both sides occupied the building and its cupola (used as a lookout post by Brig. Gen. John Buford). Hundreds of wounded soldiers found themselves here, as it served as one of the largest field hospitals in Gettysburg until September 16, 1863. Classes resumed mere days later. For information on tours and programs, visit seminaryridgemuseum.org.

‘The Hero of Gettysburg’
Stone Avenue south ofChambersburg Road

No Gettysburg citizen story is more famous than that of John Burns. A War of 1812 veteran, the 70-year-old resident grabbed his musket and fought alongside Union soldiers west of town—and was wounded—on July 1. Those soldiers were forced to leave him behind, but he convinced Confederates he was a noncombatant after crawling away from his rifle and burying his ammunition. Soon a national celebrity, he would receive personal thanks from Abraham Lincoln, and Congress passed a special act granting him a pension. On July 1, 1903, a monument to Burns was dedicated on McPherson’s Ridge.

Train Depot
35 Carlisle St.

As the fighting raged, this bustling station was not immune to the burden of war. In fact, even before the battle began, Union General John Buford established a hospital here for his sick cavalrymen. Iron Brigade surgeon Jacob Ebersole served here, including for weeks after the battle while the hub facilitated the transport of relief supplies and removal of Federal dead and wounded. On November 18, 1863, an evening train chugged into town bringing President Abraham Lincoln, who delivered his Gettysburg Address the next day at the new national cemetery. Using immersive VR technology, the depot’s Ticket to the Past Museum allows visitors to journey back to 1863.

Shriver House and Museum
309 Baltimore Street

When Hettie Shriver and her children returned to their home in downtown Gettysburg on July 7, they found it had been used as a hospital and Confederates had set up a sharpshooter nest in the attic. All of the Shrivers’ food, clothing, blankets, linens, tools, and any “booty” such as money, silver, or liquor, had been confiscated. Five months after the Battle of Gettysburg, George Shriver was granted a four-day furlough giving him the opportunity to spend Christmas with Hettie and their daughters, Sadie and Mollie. He had been away from home for more than two years. In 1864, he was taken prisoner and sent to Andersonville Prison. He died in August of that year. The Shriver house and saloon have been restored and now operate as a museum, with several rooms depicting the tragic condition the Shrivers found their home in battle’s aftermath.

Beyond the Battle Museum
368 Springs Ave.

In April 2023, the Adams County Historical Society opened a new 29,000-square-foot complex just north of the Gettysburg battlefield, which showcases civilian accounts from the Battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The Beyond the Battle Museum features some of Gettysburg’s rarest artifacts and uses media and special effects technology to take visitors on a journey through time. Caught in the Crossfire, a 360-degree re-creation of a home trapped between Union and Confederate lines, uses light projections, surround-sound speakers, and special effects to transport visitors back to the battle and the civilian experience. Guests enter a family’s home shortly after their rush to safety in the cellar below, hear their hushed conversations, split-second decisions, and life-or-death encounters with Union and Confederate troops.

The Cashtown Inn
1325 Old Rte. 30, Orrtanna

Built in 1797 as a stagecoach stop, the Inn served as temporary headquarters for many Confederate officers during the Gettysburg Campaign. Today, the Inn is still a bustling stop just west of Gettysburg hosting guests for overnight stays and special dinners.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

Writing home in the early morning hours of July 2, 1863, it likely crossed John Wheeler’s mind that this might be the last letter he would ever write. Wary of the impending combat he and his men were about to face on Gettysburg’s second day, the 20th Indiana Infantry’s colonel could be forgiven for such somber reflection. Two years earlier, as war clouds loomed over the fractured nation, Wheeler had been editor (and co-founder) of his home state’s Crown Point Register, proclaiming on its masthead, “Independent in all things—Neutral in nothing.” It was a supplication he had also lived by as a soldier and commander.

Early in the war, Wheeler—a distant relative of eventual Confederate cavalry general Joseph Wheeler—raised a 100-man company and was elected captain. Among those to enlist were the sons of a family friend: Albert Luther and his brother John, vice president of a local bank.

Spearheading the region’s prolific recruitment effort was Erasmus Corwin Gilbreath, a lawyer and entrepreneur who before the war had helped bring a railroad to the county seat. For his energy and notoriety, he was named a lieutenant in the 20th Indiana.

The 20th’s first assignment was guarding railroads in Maryland. It was then sent to the North Carolina coast, and in January 1862 was stationed at Fort Monroe, Va., under Brig. Gen. Joseph King Fenno Mansfield, later mortally wounded at Antietam. On March 8, the Hoosiers were called to nearby Hampton Roads to help protect the stricken USS Congress from capture by CSS Virginia. Fire from the 20th wounded Virginia’s commander, Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan, and helped drive off Confederate boarding parties.

The 20th, an impressed Mansfield later remarked, “could do without food longer…eat more when they got it; could suffer more without being disabled; get in line quicker; stay there steadier and swear harder than any group of men.” On May 10, 1862, President Lincoln visited Fort Monroe, and while watching his fellow Midwesterners prepare for a move on Norfolk, reportedly cheered, “Bully for the Indiana 20th!”   

Joining the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula Campaign, the 20th was assigned to Maj. Gen. Phil Kearny’s 3rd Division in the 3rd Corps. Kearny raved about the 20th’s fighting ability at Oak Grove, Savage’s Station, and Glendale during the Seven Days’ Battles, labeling them “my 20th Indiana marksmen.”

“If I had 40,000 men like those of the 20th Indiana,” he declared, “I could fight and whip any army in the world.”

After fighting at Second Bull Run and then Ox Hill (where Kearny was killed), the 20th was assigned during the subsequent Antietam Campaign to the defenses of Washington, D.C., but returned to the Army of the Potomac before the Battle of Fredericksburg. On December 13, 1862—a day described by Captain Gilbreath as being of “almost September brightness and warmth”—the Hoosiers saved Captain George Randolph’s artillery in the 3rd Corps by bringing up ammunition and manning the pieces after the battery lost infantry support. A grateful Randolph remarked after the war that the 20th was “the best regiment, volunteer or regular, that I had the fortune to serve with….We were always glad to know [they were] near.”

Gilbreath suffered a severe right leg wound during the fighting that day but bravely spurned amputation—somehow surviving. The wound, however, would require corrective surgery in 1875. Despite having limited use of the leg for two years and suffering a permanent limp, he returned to duty in April 1863.

Intense Fighting at Gettysburg

In the spring of 1863, Wheeler was promoted to colonel and given command. John Luther was made lieutenant, becoming Wheeler’s adjutant. During the Chancellorsville Campaign, the 20th helped lead the 3rd Corps’ advance and captured a horde of prisoners of the 23rd Georgia Infantry in Brig. Gen. Alfred Colquitt’s Brigade, part of Lt. Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s Second Corps.

Later, the Hoosiers were involved in a night action and served in the rear guard for the retreat over the Rappahannock River. Brigadier General John Henry Hobart Ward, their brigade commander, praised the regiment’s “coolness and undaunted courage,” noting it “sustained its well-earned reputation gained on the Peninsula.” Wheeler was proud of how his men performed in “one of the most severe [battles]” and confidently wrote home that “western men are the thing. [The army] could do much more if we had…more men from Maine and the west….we are all well and ready for anything that comes along.”

What came along would prove a severe test. The 20th arrived in Gettysburg after dark on July 1, spending a tense night, sleeping with weapons ready, on the Union left on the south end of Cemetery Ridge. On July 2, the regiment was placed in the Rose Woods on Houck’s Ridge with most of Ward’s 2nd Brigade. With the launch of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s attack at 4 p.m., the Hoosiers (along with the 86th New York) soon found themselves hotly engaged with the 3rd Arkansas. The Union troops had initial success, driving back the Southerners and advancing as Ward had directed, only to be ordered back a short time later.

As he had ominously feared, Wheeler was an early casualty, shot from his horse and falling dead at the distinctive boulder across the road from what is now the 20th’s monument. He was quickly buried by the Luther brothers.

The firing was rapid and intense, and when John rejoined the fight using a discarded rifle, he was hit by a spent bullet and left dazed. Describing the action to his family, Albert wrote: “[We] had to fire slower because [the] gun barrels had got so hot…[we] could hardly hold them.”

Ward’s men resisted the Southern attack for more than an hour, but by 5:30 p.m., with Lafayette McLaws’ Georgians having joined the fight, the Confederates grabbed the upper hand. Gilbreath assumed command of the 20th when Lt. Col. William C.L. Taylor was wounded. Ward, aware his men were low on ammunition, ordered the 20th and his nearby regiments to pull back.

Bristling at how the Rebels laughed when the Hoosiers’ flag fell, Gilbreath took satisfaction in that those colors were immediately recovered and that the struggle had been anything but a rout. The 20th, according to the Official Records, “held the position assigned it until the brigade commenced to retire…[and] fell back in good order.”

Per one account, the 20th “moved three hundred yards to the rear where it halted and re-formed its ranks.” Official reports and recollections from the neighboring regiments, as well as the captured/missing numbers for Ward’s entire brigade, confirm that Ward was able to bring his men back in good order from Houck’s Ridge, contrary to the commonly made assumption that the 3rd Corps simply folded and ran when attacked.

On July 3, the 20th was sent to the center of the line for “clean-up” in the wake of Pickett’s Charge, and later was placed on burial duty.

Gettysburg had been a memorable battle for the Hoosiers. Dudley Chase, an Indiana judge who was wounded at the Rose Woods while serving in the 17th U.S. Regulars, later recalled they were “desperately fighting…out of the jaws of death and the gates of hell…” The cost was high. Of 401 men engaged, the 20th had 32 killed, 114 wounded, and 10 captured/missing. Those totals represented 25 percent of Ward’s deaths during the battle, and 20 percent of his total losses.

Despite the bloodshed, the mood of some of the men was buoyant. Writing home, one Hoosier reported 14 casualties in his company alone but threatened the Rebels with a “whailing [sic]” and a “sound thrashing” if the Southerners did not return to Virginia quickly.

Albert Luther boasted to his family that Lee’s men “got a sound whipping” and that “[w]e are ready and anxious to give them another battle.” The subsequent arduous pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia to the Potomac River rendered some of the Hoosiers shoeless, and the pace diminished Albert’s fervor; in fact, he felt “so tired at night I could hardly stand.” The anticipated showdown with Lee’s defeated army would not occur, as the Confederates were back in Virginia by July 14.

Last Left Standing

In August 1863, the 20th was one of the Western regiments handed the grueling task of keeping order in New York City after the July Draft Riots. Although Gilbreath chose to romanticize the famed metropolis (“Most of us had only dreamed of [this] city”), his regiment was unable to let up for even a moment, at one point meeting “with a howling mob” and “fixing bayonets, marched off, driving the crowd before us.”

As the Overland Campaign approached in the spring of 1864, John Luther expressed apprehension and optimism—“all are dreading the heavy campaign that is staring us in the face”—but he also appraised the Army of the Potomac as being never more formidable. The fighting that May and June left him despondent, however: “After the most hard battle ever fought, I am still alive and that is about all…” Expressing both resignation and relief, he wrote from Cold Harbor, Va.: “It seems a miracle that I am here, that it is my luck to be spared so far…”

In the later reorganization of the Army of the Potomac, the men of the 7th, 14th, and 19th Indiana were consolidated into the 20th, which was renamed the “20th Indiana Veteran Volunteer Infantry.” This was another source of pride for the men of the 20th. “No greater compliment could be paid you,” Chase opined at their 1888 reunion.

The other Indiana regiments, all with memorable service, became members of the 20th. The 20th was the Indiana infantry regiment “last left standing” in the Army of the Potomac. Active through the Petersburg and Appomattox campaigns, it fired its final guns on April 9, 1865. Back in Indianapolis, the 20th mustered out in July.

John Wheeler was buried on July 30, 1863, in Crown Point with nearly a thousand mourners in attendance, including both Luther brothers. To this day, the town has not forgotten the colonel, naming a new school in his honor in 2007, with his uniform and murals commemorating the 20th on display.

The Luther brothers survived the war, with John living until 1924 and fortunate to attend Gettysburg’s 50th anniversary reunion in 1913. Albert was not so blessed, dying before his 30th birthday. The two are buried within feet of Wheeler at Maplewood Cemetery.

Gilbreath made a career of the military and died in 1898 while on active duty. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery alongside his wife and daughter. A family heirloom was a handkerchief stained with Lincoln’s blood (his father-in-law was a friend of the slain president).

In 1889, at the ceremony inaugurating construction of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis, the 20th was the only Indiana unit to have its flag placed in the cornerstone—its soldiers “the last men standing” at home, as well.

Charles J. Rebesco, a first-time contributor, writes from Munster, Ind.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

When 21-year-old Arthur McKinstry left Chautauqua County, N.Y., in early June 1861 to join the Excelsior Brigade being raised by then-Colonel Daniel Sickles, he was better prepared to write than fight. Upon reaching the unit’s camp of instruction on Staten Island, Arthur wrote to his mother revealing that his Uncle Willard had given him “a portable ink stand and all sorts of stationery and writing materials,” to take along, “in order…I might keep him posted as to our movements.”

His uncle had an ulterior motive, however. Willard, and Arthur’s uncle Winthrop, owned and operated the Fredonia Censor, a local weekly newspaper. They intended to publish Arthur’s letters. What better way to enlighten and attract new readers?

Rick Barram, a retired history teacher, brings Arthur’s Censor letters—preserved at the Darwin R. Barker Historical Museum in Fredonia, N.Y.—“into the light,” and also includes a second collection of letters—from Mississippi State University—that Arthur wrote to his mother and other relatives. Dear Uncles presents these letters “in their entirety…,” Barram notes, “to understand the full scope of Arthur’s experiences.”

Arthur’s letters became a staple of the Censor’s war coverage, appearing in a column headed Dear Uncles.

Nearly six dozen additional “letters, reports, and letters not written by Arthur” also appear in Dear Uncles. They pop up as sidebars throughout the book. Barram titles these supplements “Other Voices,” intended “to provide context and otherwise illuminate Arthur’s writings and experiences.”

Arthur was uniquely prepared for his role as correspondent. “Articulate and well read,” at age 15 he entered the U.S. Naval Academy in the fall of 1854. He quickly squandered his time there, however. Amassing demerits for misconduct, and ranking near the bottom of his class academically, Arthur was judged “unfit” and dismissed.

Perhaps as atonement for his failures at Annapolis, Arthur was early to answer the call to arms when Civil War flared. Mustered into the 3rd Regiment of the Excelsior Brigade, later designated the 72nd New York Infantry, the regiment patrolled the Lower Potomac River by the fall of 1861.

Arthur’s letters mirror the youngster’s experiences in the first flush of soldiering. He frequently recounts the relentless grind of drilling and picket duty. He often comments on the weather, and more often about the food. “[T]he average of our men do not get enough to satisfy hunger…,” he writes facetiously. “On the whole, we do not fare quite as well as State prison convicts…”

Arthur occasionally spices his writing with his opinions about camp mates and officers. “Our regiment is a choice one,” he claims, “but over on the right of camp are the ‘roughs’ from the city. They are a rascally set and we keep a constant guard which effectually prevents thefts.”

Even Dan Sickles, now a brigadier, fails to escape a double-edged assessment. He “displayed great energy and patriotism in the raising and equipment of the brigade,” writes Arthur. “He has governed it however in a civilian manner…evidently incompetent to personally maneuver the brigade.”

Arthur grew to relish his journalist role. “I find that it is a very nice thing to be the correspondent of the Censor for I notice that the officers had rather have a good word there rather than a bad one,” he wrote. “Take it all together I am about as well off as a private can be.”

His writing would benefit his comrades from time to time. At their urging “to state the facts,” Arthur exposed a sutler who “practices a system of extortion upon the soldiers of the Brigade.”

Little more than a month later, Arthur was able to report, “We have a new sutler here and he is more reasonable than the old.”

Arthur was a keen observer. Little escaped his notice. He could be prescient, writing in December 1861: “I really think, from the present appearance of things, that this war will eventually prove the death blow of Slavery.”

He also wrote with prescience to the Censor on May 4, 1862, beginning his letter, “My time is extremely short…” Hours later, Arthur’s pen was stilled forever when he was killed at the Battle of Williamsburg, “shot through the leg and groin.”  

Arthur was pleased when an officer called him a “writing man.” But even Arthur cautioned his readers, “It would be tedious to tell of all the shifts we soldiers make…” This can be a cautionary tale for readers of Dear Uncles.

There is much here that will appeal to readers; at times perhaps too much. For example, by alternating between verbatim letters Arthur wrote to his uncles, with letters he wrote to his mother and others, typically at or near the same time, his comments are often repeated and duplicated.

To this mix Barram embeds two categories of notes throughout the text. These are meant to define or explain “foreign words” and other references that Arthur is prone to use. Such notes appear repeatedly, and impart a choppiness to the flow of narrative.

In the final chapter, and a concise epilogue, Barram provides a brief history of the Excelsior Brigade with interesting information about “the fate of Arthur’s mates.” Numerous photographs, maps, and illustrations further enhance the text.

Dear Uncles offers a bounty of information particularly to students of the Excelsior Brigade. The book also provides a unique glimpse of the often-overlooked actions along the Lower Potomac River early in the war.

“[R]eaders of the Fredonia Censor,” writes Barram, “were able to follow the adventures of their Chautauqua County boys thanks to Arthur McKinstry and his uncles.” Readers of Dear Uncles are now able to follow Arthur McKinstry’s tales thanks to the efforts of Rick Barram.

Dear Uncles

The Civil War Letters of Arthur McKinstry, A Soldier in the Excelsior Brigade

Edited by Rick Barram, Excelsior, 2023

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When one hears the name of a Civil War general named Bee, the first reaction for most is the Confederate commander from South Carolina who shouted to his men at the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861: “Look men, there stands Jackson like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians!” That Bee was Barnard Elliott Bee Jr., who would be mortally wounded on Henry Hill shortly after uttering that immortal cheer.

But Barnard Bee had a younger brother who also served in the Confederate Army during the war, Brig. Gen. Hamilton P. Bee.

“Ham” had moved with his parents as a teenager to Texas. He later leveraged his father’s political standing in the Texas government to get a spot as a brigadier general of Texas Militia in a 10-county area along the coast. In March 1862, he was elevated to the same rank in the Confederate Army.

In the early stages of the 1864 Red River Campaign, Bee and a large cavalry force were sent to fight in Louisiana. Generals Richard Taylor and Edmund Kirby Smith met at Bee’s campfire the night after the Confederate victory at Mansfield, La., on April 8. The next day, Bee was injured leading a charge at Pleasant Hill.

Although Bee was generally complimented for his personal bravery, he apparently lacked a capacity for military leadership. His ultimate failure came on April 23, 1864, when he pulled his men out of position at Monett’s Ferry, allowing the Federals to escape unchallenged to Alexandria, La.

Taylor soon dismissed him from service. According to one subordinate, Bee was “the poorest excuse for a Gen that I ever saw.”

Passengers riding the Orange & Alexandria Railroad in early 1864 witnessed a bleak landscape disfigured by nearly three years of war. “Dilapidated, fenceless, and trodden with War Virginia is,” Walt Whitman recorded on a trip from Washington, D.C., to Culpeper, Va., that February. “Virginia wears an air of gloom and desolation; no fences, no homes—nothing but the debris of destroyed property and continuous camps of soldiers,” seconded a U.S. Christian Commission representative. “There was nothing,” opined a newspaper correspondent, “absolutely nothing but the abomination of desolation.”

The Union Army of the Potomac’s winter camps surrounding Culpeper depended on the railroad for provisions, munitions, and forage. Keeping the army supplied required 40 locomotives running daily along the 70-mile stretch of tracks that were vulnerable to floods, prone to accidents, and often attacked by Confederate cavalry raiders. Yet such was the efficiency of the U.S. Military Rail Road’s management that when 22 miles had been destroyed by retreating Confederates the previous fall, the line was restored within days, and the high bridge over the Rappahannock River was rebuilt in 19 hours.

On March 10, a special train comprised of a locomotive and two cars chugged its way south. Aboard the first car was a detachment of soldiers, but riding in the other was the United States’ new general-in-chief, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, and a small party that included staff officers, his son Fred, and his principal political sponsor, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne. Grant had formally received his promotion the day before from President Abraham Lincoln in a ceremony attended by the Cabinet. There was awkwardness—Grant was unfamiliar with Washington and nearly all its officials, including Lincoln, whom he had only just met, and the general-in-chief was a stranger to them. More discomfiture lay ahead at his destination—the winter camps of the U.S. Army of the Potomac.

No one recorded details of that six-hour trip aboard a vulnerable train traversing a terrain rendered even sadder by heavy, cold rain, but the trip’s significance could hardly have been lost on Grant. The man who less than three years before had worked as a clerk in his father’s dry goods store in Galena, Ill., now commanded more than 800,000 soldiers in 19 departments in all Union states and several in the Confederacy.

Over the last two years, Grant had won victories at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga and demonstrated tenacity, audacity, ingenuity, and adroitness. But his character was what most impressed his closest friend, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, who had recently told him that he was “as unselfish, kind-hearted and as honest as a man should be.” Sherman added that Grant’s most outstanding quality was his “simple faith in success you have always manifested, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in a Savior.”

Grant would call on those strengths as he faced a more complex challenge than any he had yet faced. He knew he would be directing armies in a year that would see a wartime presidential election that could itself determine the war’s outcome. The new general-in-chief also recognized that winning victories in the coming campaigns would be key to winning at the polls in November.

Rolling Toward Brandy Station

Grant had been promoted to provide a more vigorous prosecution of the war. That Grant, on his first full day as general-in-chief, left Washington to meet the principals of the Army of the Potomac underscored how closely was its success tied to the Union cause. Moreover, Grant’s plans had changed. Whereas he had intended to exercise his new overall command while headquartered in the West, he now understood that he needed to be near Washington to shield the Army of the Potomac from political intrigue and that Lincoln specifically intended that he provide close command oversight. He knew he would soon deliver a mixed message to the army’s leadership.

Grant fully recognized the risks his promotion posed. After his victory at Vicksburg, newspapers had reported that Grant would replace Maj. Gen. George G. Meade as the Army of the Potomac’s commander. The report first appeared in a little-known New York paper, the Express, and might have originated with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. In addition, some, perhaps Congressman Washburne among them, advocated Grant transporting his army to the Eastern Theater and superseding Meade. Talking Stanton out of it was then General-in-Chief Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, Grant’s departmental commander earlier in the war, and Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, who had observed Grant at Vicksburg.

Once it became clear he would not be transferred, Grant expressed relief. It was “a matter of no small importance,” he wrote Washburne, that the change not take place. In that letter and in an earlier missive to Dana, Grant explained the reassignment “could do no possible good.” Noting that the Army of the Potomac was led by “able officers who have been brought up with that army,” the general anticipated that they would resent having an outsider placed over them. Commanding the Army of the Potomac, he continued, meant, “I would have all to learn.”

Even in mid-February 1864, with his promotion to general-in-chief all but certain, Grant remained reluctant, telling a West Point classmate that he was “thankful” that he had not been transferred. Commenting to his wife, Julia, that same week, the general intimated that were he to receive the top command, he would not be confined to Washington. Grant mused they might see more of each other as he would be traveling regularly between his Western headquarters and the Eastern Theater and could stop to see her wherever she elected to live.

But now Grant was about to begin his acquaintance with the most prominent, and unlucky, of U.S. armies. The Army of Potomac was quite unlike the usually victorious forces Grant had led in the West. Still looming over the army that winter was the shadow of its creator, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. Though dismissed 17 months before, McClellan’s influence endured, most notably among the army’s senior generals, nearly all of whom had received their first promotions while under McClellan’s command. To many of these men, McClellan bequeathed his caution and lack of urgency that hampered its operations. He also left an army culture of political engagement with Washington that undermined its effectiveness. Grant’s suspicions were correct—he was bringing a new style, and he and those he brought with him would be regarded as outsiders.

Since McClellan’s dismissal, three men had commanded the army—Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and Meade. Burnside and Hooker were dismissed for their battlefield and command failures and, partly, because their subordinates had lost faith in their leadership. The army had won but one clear-cut victory, and it on the home ground of Gettysburg, and had repeatedly been manhandled by the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia led by General Robert E. Lee.

For his part, Meade had been so criticized after his victory at Gettysburg that he had repeatedly offered to resign. Five days before Grant arrived, Meade had testified before Congress refuting false allegations made by several generals and an array of political opponents who sought to have him replaced. His hold on command was tenuous, and Meade would not have been surprised if Grant was bringing word that he would be sacked.In short, Grant was about to engage an army that was, in the words of Bruce Catton, “badly clique-ridden, obsessed by the memory of the departed McClellan, so deeply impressed by Lee’s superior abilities that its talk at times almost had a defeatist quality.”

At 3 p.m., Grant’s train pulled into rain-soaked Brandy Station, Va., the army’s principal supply depot, described as a “vast domain of smoke, guns, and mud-stained soldiers.” There, on the platform surrounded by barrels of beef piled high around the tracks, were two of the army’s principal staff officers, chief of staff Maj. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys, and quartermaster Brig. Gen. Rufus Ingalls. Humphreys was substituting for Meade, his “slightly indisposed” superior, while Ingalls was presumably along to greet his old friend and West Point roommate. Meade’s absence might have appeared to a more protocol-conscious general like a slight, but there is no record of Grant taking offense.

After the train rolled to a stop, guards disembarked from the first car while officers and civilians detrained from the second. Among them was Grant. The only thing remarkable about him, thought Dr. E.W. Locke, was that he was smoking. “His dress is very plain, eyes half closed, he takes little or no notice of anything,” Locke continued, observing that a “very few officers, and as many men, came, took a hasty glance, and have now gone back to their quarters, most of them shaking their heads, and some saying, ‘Big thing.’”

The party rode a four-horse spring wagon to Meade’s headquarters three miles away, where they were greeted by the camp guard consisting of details from four regiments. One of the army’s finest bands struck up “Hail to the Chief” and other tunes, but rain prevented a more elaborate ceremony, which was just as well. The new general-in-chief never learned how to make an entrance, and if he took note of the welcome, no one noticed. Worse, his hosts could not have known that their new commander was tone-deaf and sometimes found the sound of music excruciating. Grant once confessed—or joked, we know not which—he knew but two tunes, one that was “Yankee Doodle” and one that was not.

Meade, clad in a common soldier’s jacket, opened his tent door to greet his new chief. Exactly what occurred during that meeting is muddled. Most historians have accepted Grant’s account in his Memoirs that Meade offered to step aside in favor of someone Grant knew better, suggesting specifically Sherman. Grant wrote that he was so impressed by Meade’s selflessness that he immediately assured Meade that he had “no thought of substituting anyone for him.” Meade’s more immediate account, written the evening of the meeting, is cryptic, mentioning only that Grant had been “very civil, and said nothing about superseding me.”

But Grant had considered sacking Meade. One of Grant’s aides recorded in his diary on March 10 that Grant had considered replacing Meade with Maj. Gen. William F. “Baldy” Smith, who had impressed the new general-in-chief in Chattanooga, but that there was now to be “no change.” Many published rumors had predicted that Meade would be fired, mentioning several different generals, and Smith was listed as among the leading candidates. Meade, who knew and disliked Smith from their time serving together earlier in the war, could not have been comforted by knowing that Smith had accompanied Grant on his visit to the army.

In Smith’s telling, Grant had found that the War Department preferred to keep Meade in command and that he accompanied Grant to Brandy Station only at the latter’s insistence. He discreetly spent the night not with Grant’s entourage but with old Army friends. Grant had lobbied for Smith’s promotion to major general and would later assign him to lead a corps in the Army of the James.

Grant recalled that there was “prejudice” against Smith in the Senate and that only after he persisted had the promotion gone through. As he ruefully recorded in his Memoirs, however, “I was not long in finding out that the objections to Smith’s promotion were well founded.” Meade continued to fret; as late as March 17, he was still worried that Smith would take his place.

First Impressions

Just when and how Grant decided to retain Meade is elusive. Grant was apparently surprised to learn in their initial meetings that Lincoln and Stanton were not looking for a change. Meade hailed from a politically important state, Pennsylvania, and was the only army commander who had bested Lee, making him difficult to fire.

Given the infighting that had raged for months among many in the Army of the Potomac, the administration must have noted that most Army generals continued to support Meade. Moreover, Grant knew he was an outsider in an army that did not treat outsiders well, and replacing Meade would only compound that problem. Finally, both Lincoln and Grant recognized that much of the effort to oust Meade came from those whose bad-faith motives ought not to be rewarded.

Because Meade’s frequent letters to his wife survive, we know much about his frame of mind during the months preceding Grant’s arrival. Replying to his wife’s late-1863 question, Meade wrote that he knew Grant slightly from the Mexican War, where he was considered a “clever young officer, but nothing extraordinary.” Judging from the then-common usage of the adjective “clever,” the army commander apparently thought of Grant as amiable or well-mannered rather than intelligent.

After explaining that Grant had been compelled to resign his commission because of his “irregular habits”—a reference to Grant’s drinking—he listed Grant’s strength as his energy and “great tenacity of purpose.” Still, he could not resist observing that there was little basis for comparison between the U.S. armies in the East with those in the West, claiming that his army had faced an adversary that was better led and composed of better troops.

Meade followed up his brief March 10 letter four days later. In that missive, Meade gave a longer description, saying he was “much pleased with General Grant,” and that he had shown “much more capacity and character than I had expected.” He told his wife that he had offered to step aside as army commander if Grant wished to replace him with a general he knew better. Meade related that Grant replied with a “complimentary speech,” and disavowed any intention to replace him. Then Grant delivered the less welcome news: He intended to accompany the army during the spring campaign.

“So that you may look now for the Army of the Potomac putting laurels on the brows of another rather than your husband,” Meade concluded, a strikingly prescient prediction. Meade returned to his impression of Grant in a March 16 letter, saying that he was “most agreeably disappointed in his evidence of mind and character. You may rest assured he is not an ordinary man.”

If Meade’s words are condescending, hinting at being pleasantly surprised by Grant’s abilities, that view was shared by top subordinates. “Agreeably disappointed,” although a curious phrase, seems to have reflected a consensus. The army’s senior corps commander, Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, wrote to his sister that he had “spent an evening with [Grant], and was most agreeably disappointed, both in his personal appearance and his straightforward, common-sense view of matters.”

Despite news that Grant might command the army directly, Sedgwick noted, “[G]ood feeling seemed to exist between him and General Meade.” General Humphreys agreed, telling his wife in a March 10 letter that he was “agreeably disappointed in Genl. Grant’s appearance,” describing the new general-in-chief as having “an intellectual face and head which at the same time expresses a good deal of determination.”

Striking a discordant note was Maj. Gen. Gouverneur Warren. Grant, he said, “seems much more vivacious than I supposed and did not look at me with any apparent eye to discerning my qualities in my face.” Warren perhaps did not mean it this way, but he seemed to fault Grant for failing to perceive his brilliance, an early sign of a personal conflict to come.

The weather having not improved, Grant abandoned plans to visit the various corps, and returned to Washington on March 11. He spent much of that afternoon conferring with Halleck, now his Washington-based chief of staff, and then with Lincoln and Stanton. When Grant said he intended to depart for Nashville that evening, Lincoln implored him to stay for dinner at the White House. Grant declined, citing the urgency of returning to the West, adding that he had “enough of the show business.” Besides, he added, “a dinner to me means a million dollars a day lost to the country.” Lincoln ruefully told the gathering of senior generals and Cabinet officials arriving for dinner that Grant had to leave unexpectedly, and therefore, the evening was “the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out.”

Grant had earlier promised to stay the night, so there was something precipitous in Grant’s immediate departure for the West. It may be that after a stressful 48 hours, and now knowing he would soon return to the Army of the Potomac’s camps, Grant urgently wished to see familiar surroundings and subordinates. Ahead, he now knew, lay a complex relocation for his staff and family and the transfer of his departmental command to Sherman. He now had a firmer sense of how much there was yet to learn and do.

Nevertheless, he had achieved a favorable first impression, demonstrating that he was a quick study who had quietly impressed strangers with his intelligence, determination, humility, common sense, and what Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells noted was a “latent power.” In adjusting to Lincoln’s preferences to base his command in the East and accompany the Army of the Potomac still led by Meade, Grant showed a quick willingness to follow without complaint his civilian superior’s priorities. That augured well for their future partnership.

Official Washington seemed not to mind that Grant’s visit was brief, with several observing approvingly that Grant was “all business.” Still, as the train chugged away, Grant, again alone with his thoughts and cigars, could not know that he had taken his first sure steps on a momentous road that would, less than 400 days later, end in a stillness at Appomattox.

William W. Bergen, an independent historian based in Charlottesville, Va., has had essays published in the University of North Carolina’s Military Campaigns of the Civil War series. He also has worked as a paid guide at Monticello.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 entirely upended society in the American South, enfranchising Black men across the states of the former Confederacy and placing those states (except Tennessee) under the authority of the U.S. military. The acts created five military districts in the South, requiring new state constitutions to be drafted and the 14th Amendment ratified. While Black Southerners rejoiced at their citizenship status and set about exercising their newly won rights, federal occupation and Black suffrage was widely opposed by the region’s White population. Seeing Blacks casting ballots, negotiating labor contracts, and bearing arms panicked many former slaveowners. But even while residents branded federal occupation as “bayonet rule,” they were quick to seek U.S. troop intervention when feeling threatened by freedmen engaging in politics.

In 1867, Whites in St. Landry Parish, La., were rattled by the emergence of a well-regulated Black militia, which engaged in public drills, marches, assorted military pageantry and, perhaps most important, guarded Republican meetings from local belligerents (the Ku Klux Klan, etc.) and safely escorted Republican voters to the polls for elections. No doubt, St. Landry’s White citizens wouldn’t have resisted a return to the antebellum status quo, with Black Southerners essentially returned to a state of bondage—something they believed was unattainable as long as a Black militia remained mobilized.

Serving as commander of the Fifth Military District, which consisted of Louisiana and Texas, was Civil War hero Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock. In December 1867, planters in St. Landry petitioned Hancock to send them an entire company of U.S. Cavalry “under the command of a prudent and discreet officer.” White Democrats across Louisiana railed against federal occupation in newspapers and in public speeches, but they nonetheless fully recognized that most U.S. soldiers harbored only a tepid commitment to Reconstruction.

In their petition, the planters claimed they had been satisfied with their previous post commander, Captain William W. Webb. Men like Webb—and White officers in general—had reservations about occupying what they considered domestic soil populated by American citizens. Few were willing to involve themselves in strife between the parties, even when clashes would turn violent and deadly.

The petition below, signed by hundreds of local citizens, was just one of dozens sent to Hancock in the fall of 1867.     

Parish of St. Landry, LA
Opelousas, December 27, 1867

Sir: The undersigned citizens…impressed with the importance and necessity of the pacific influence of a small organized military force in our midst, respectfully request the commanding General to station at this place, a Company of U.S. Cavalry, under the command of a prudent and discreet officer.

During the time that Capt. W.W. Webb of Co. E. 4th U.S. Cavalry, was stationed at Opelousas, there were no disturbances; quiet reigned everywhere, and the community felt a sense of perfect security. [He] was eminently qualified for his positions. His firmness, justice and discretion, to say nothing of his affable manners, and conciliatory deportment, rendered him generally acceptable, and gave him a commanding influence, which he used for the promotion of the general good. When, several weeks ago, Gen. [Joseph A.] Mower, then commanding, thought proper to remove Capt. Webb’s command…our citizens respectfully protested, in a written memorial, of which no notice seems, so far, to have been taken…

In point of numbers, this is the most important rural population in the State. This Parish alone has registered about five thousand voters; and there are probably one thousand more male adults, who could not, or were not permitted to register. This large population is sufficiently compact to admit of easy and rapid concentration. It is about equally divided between the two races, who, under the influence of artful demagogues and designing men, are daily placed in positions of more decided antagonism. The failure of the crops of the past year, and the great difficulty of engaging situations for the future, have rendered the colored population restless, dissatisfied and uneasy. They are taught to believe, by unscrupulous leaders, that great injustice is done to them, and that the whites are their enemies. They are becoming more idle and vagrant under these influences, and consequently less obedient to the law. Larceny is becoming epidemic among them….They are just now in that condition when a few incendiary leaders could excite them to deeds of violence and great outrage. This is what we wish to avoid; and we think we are not mistaken in the remedy we suggest.

Such is the general respect for the authority of the U.S. Government, particularly as administered by the able and patriotic Commander of the Fifth Military District, that the mere presence of a Company of U.S. Cavalry, under a proper officer, would impart a…feeling of security, and effectually prevent the outbreak of public disturbance.     We beg leave to assure [you]…that it is not from a mere sense of personal fear, as to the result of such an outbreak…that we invoke the presence of the military arm of the Government; but it is because we think the general interests of the Parish, the State, and the nation, would…be materially injured by any collision between the races….          

In forwarding the petition to Hancock, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent, Oscar H. Violet, insisted there was no cause for alarm and that the “armed assemblages” of freedpeople were peaceable and used their arms to withstand coercion into unfair labor contracts. Violet acknowledged the validity of the Black militia but nevertheless urged Hancock to dispatch a cavalry unit without delay. He complied, and the troopers began disarming and demobilizing the militia after arriving.

In February 1868, this force, accompanied by Violet, disrupted a meeting of the Opelousas Republican Club, proclaiming it illegal and ordering the freedpeople in attendance to disarm. Chafing at “garrison duty,” the unit’s commander was vocal in opposition to armed meetings of freedpeople and ordered them to cease. Black Republicans could no longer carry their arms in public. The local Black militia had been so weakened, in fact, it prompted one of the most horrific massacres in U.S. history.

In September 1868, the beating of a local freedman’s school teacher by White assailants spiraled into a clash between Black militiamen and St. Landry citizens. Disarmed and demobilized, with no federal troops willing to come to their aid, the militiamen were simply outgunned. White extremists, some of whom even had signed the 1867 petition, combed the parish capturing or killing any freedperson unfortunate enough to cross their path.

In what was known as the Opelousas Massacre, 21 captured militiamen were marched to a mass grave in a nearby woods and killed by firing squad, spawning weeks of racial violence and the slaying of an estimated 200 freedmen. In many ways, the 1867 petition and demobilization of St. Landry’s Black militia had made that possible.

J. Jacob Calhoun is a UVa. Ph.D. candidate.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

“[Robert E. Lee Jr.] is off with Jackson & I hope will catch Pope & his cousin Louis Marshall,” General Robert E. Lee wrote to his daughter Mildred on July 28, 1862, not long after Maj. Gen. John Pope had been given command of the Union Army of Virginia. Marshall was his nephew, the son of Lee’s older sister, Anne. “I could forgive the latter for fighting against us, if he had not joined such a miscreant as Pope.” (Lee would send a similarly worded letter to his wife, Mary, asking that she tell their son to “bring in his cousin” the next time she wrote him.)

Born in Virginia in 1827, Louis Henry Marshall followed the path of his famed uncle in attending the U.S. Military Academy. Commissioned a second lieutenant with the 3rd U.S. Infantry after graduating in 1849, he served on the frontier, and by 1860 was a captain in the 10th U.S. Infantry. While his uncle, cousins, and other family members in the extended Lee family chose to side with the South, Marshall put his country before kin.

In February 1862, he was appointed an acting aide-de-camp on General Pope’s staff. Brigadier General David S. Stanley recalled that Pope, then commander of the Army of the Mississippi, was “a very witty man and often turned the laugh on his staff officers and others.” He had once poked fun at Marshall’s “demotion” when the soldiers of the Benton Cadets, Missouri Infantry reportedly elected him colonel, then lieutenant colonel, then major after three successive elections. “Why Lou,” Pope remarked in jest, “if those fellows had given you another promotion, they would have landed you in the penitentiary.”

When President Abraham Lincoln appointed Pope to take charge of the Army of Virginia in June 1862, Marshall headed east, pitting him against his uncle and cousins on their home soil.

Marshall was with Pope during that summer’s disastrous Northern Virginia Campaign. In fact, when Captain John Mason Lee, a cousin serving with the Confederate army, encountered Marshall after the Battle of Cedar Mountain, he reported back that he looked to be in a wretched state. Pope had Marshall verbally deliver orders to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks inquiring whether Banks planned to hold or attack during the eventual Confederate victory. When General Lee heard that Marshall was not in the best of spirits, he wrote Mary: “I am sorry he is in such bad company, but I suppose he could not help it.”

Marshall escaped Virginia without being captured but was banished west with Pope after Second Bull Run and spent the rest of the war in the Department of the Northwest. He remained in the U.S. Army postwar, serving in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon—notably at the Battle of Three Forks against the Snake Indians—before resigning in 1868, a major in the 23rd U.S. Infantry.

Marshall followed his father to California and lived a humble life as a rancher until his death in Monrovia on October 8, 1891, at age 63. He is buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

Debate about the importance of the loss of Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 to the outcome of the September 1862 Maryland Campaign has long revolved around the response of Union Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan upon reading the document found by a Federal soldier outside Frederick, Md., on September 13. To those in agreement with the thesis proposed by authors such as Stephen W. Sears, the so-called “Lost Orders” provided McClellan with potentially war-winning intelligence that he duly squandered through excessive indecision. Conversely, to those who prefer fellow historian Joseph L. Harsh’s interpretation, McClellan gained little useful information in the Lost Orders, principally because the Federal commander had already begun pushing troops west from Frederick in pursuit of Lee’s army before the document passed into his hands.

The merits of these arguments notwithstanding, neither takes into account the impact that McClellan’s actions had on Confederate operations from September 14 onward. When considered from this point of view, it becomes clear that McClellan’s assault on the South Mountain gaps had three significant effects: It ruined Lee’s plan for the campaign after the capture of Harpers Ferry, Va.; it forced Lee to take up a less than favorable ad hoc defensive position at Sharpsburg; and it weakened the Army of Northern Virginia’s combat strength in the days leading up to the clash there on September 16-17.

According to Paragraph IX of Special Orders No. 191, Lee desired that following the fall of the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry, “The commands of Generals Jackson, McLaws, and Walker, after accomplishing the objects for which they have been detached, will join the main body of the army at Boonsborough or Hagerstown.” Why Lee envisioned reassembling his army in the middle of Maryland’s Washington County is explained by his overall strategy for waging war in the state. After initially seeking to instigate a popular rebellion north of the Potomac River, Lee learned from Confederate sympathizers in Frederick City that it was likely no uprising would take place until martial law in the state had been lifted. The arrest of prominent Secessionists and the seizure of private property by Federal authorities had convinced those aligned with the South that they could never successfully resist the national government’s occupation forces unless Lee’s army could defend them. The general noted this belief in his August 1863 campaign report, writing, “The difficulties that surrounded them [Maryland’s Secessionists] were fully appreciated…[and] we expected to derive more assistance…from the just fears of the Washington Government than from any active demonstration on the part of the people, unless success should enable us to give them assurance of continued protection.”

A second source echoes Lee’s statement, this one penned by British army officer (and later Field Marshal) Garnet Joseph Wolseley. Visiting the Army of Northern Virginia in mid-October 1862, Wolseley wrote: “It is generally stated that the Confederate authorities calculated upon a rising in Maryland directly [when] their army entered that state. Everybody to whom I spoke on the subject ridiculed the idea…that any such rising would take place, until either Baltimore was in their hands, or they had at least established a position in that country.”

Wolseley’s comment confirms two things. First, it reinforces the conclusion that the policy of entering Maryland to test the strength of secessionist sentiment came from “Confederate authorities” in Richmond. This means that Robert E. Lee did not act on his own when he took his army across the Potomac. He was carrying out an official policy of the Confederate government. Second, Wolseley’s comment makes it clear that many of the officers with whom he spoke shared Lee’s belief their army could encourage an uprising in Maryland only if it won a victory (i.e., “established a position in the country”) or if it marched on and seized Baltimore.

In response to the reluctance of Maryland’s people to rise up, Lee took steps to reassure those who might be inclined to support the South. He instructed Charles Marshall to compose a proclamation explaining the reasons for the Army of Northern Virginia’s presence in the state and, after learning on September 8 that the Federal garrison remained in place at Harpers Ferry, he designed Special Orders No. 191 to capture it. Lee also learned on September 8 that a new army under the command of McClellan had begun advancing toward Frederick.

In view of this oncoming threat, Lee hoped that Jackson and the others detached for the operation could quickly seize the ferry and then rejoin Longstreet’s command for a decisive battle with McClellan’s force. A slight alteration Lee made to this plan on September 11 included marching a portion of the army toward Hagerstown (and Pennsylvania) to “induce the enemy to follow” west of South Mountain. This maneuver substantiated a statement attributed to Lee that appeared in the September 12 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer which held that “the battle ground must hereafter be in Maryland” if the state’s people failed to rebel.

Once he arrived west of South Mountain, Lee intended to confront McClellan on ground of his choosing. There he could crush the Army of the Potomac far from the protection of the Washington defenses and achieve the potentially war-ending victory that had eluded him at Second Manassas. Lee therefore chose the heights along a small watercourse called Beaver Creek as his preferred battleground. Anchored in the southwest by rough terrain along Antietam Creek, and ranging as tall as 560 feet in elevation, this undulating ridge line runs east-northeast nearly to the base of South Mountain. The Beaver Creek heights offered Lee a strong position that would be difficult, although not impossible, for an enemy to flank if it was occupied by a determined defender.

Wrecked Plans

Multiple sources confirm the general’s desire to defend the Beaver Creek line. These include a dispatch Lee sent to Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws on the evening of September 13, after he learned from Maj. Gen. D.H. Hill that a powerful enemy column had appeared at the eastern foot of South Mountain. Telling McLaws, “General Longstreet will move down [from Hagerstown] to-morrow,” Lee added that Longstreet’s men would “take position on Beaver Creek this side of Boonsborough.”

The following morning, according to the war reminiscences of Angela Kirkham Davis, a New York–born woman residing in Funkstown, Md., Lee issued a warning to the people of her village, located some four miles behind Beaver Creek. Lee advised them to flee from the fight he believed was about to take place in their midst. Then Lee spoke to his artillery chief, Brig. Gen. William N. Pendleton, about the Beaver Creek position later that day. Pendleton recalled this in his campaign report, stating that on “Sunday morning, 14th, we were summoned to return toward Boonsborough, the enemy having advanced upon General D.H. Hill. When I arrived and reported to you [General Lee] a short distance from the battle-field, you directed me to place in position on the heights of Beaver Creek the several batteries of my command.” Pendleton’s report demonstrates that even as the Battle of South Mountain raged Lee hoped to fall back to his chosen position along Beaver Creek.

Sources also show that contrary to claims made by Lee and Longstreet after the campaign about departing from Hagerstown at daybreak to reinforce Hill atop South Mountain, Longstreet’s reduced command of eight brigades (Brig. Gen. Robert Toombs’ brigade remained at Hagerstown) and the independent brigade of Brig. Gen. Nathan “Shanks” Evans did not get on the road until after the fighting at South Mountain began around 8 a.m. Lee clinging stubbornly to his Beaver Creek plan would account for this delay because, as the general himself later wrote, “It had not been intended to oppose [the Federal army’s] passage through the South Mountains, as it was desired to engage it as far as possible from its base.”

McClellan’s army “advancing more rapidly than was convenient from Fredericktown” wrecked these plans for Lee by forcing him to defend the South Mountain passes. Doing so placed the Confederate commander in a difficult position. Unfamiliar with the terrain atop the mountain, and too disabled by injuries incurred during an accident at the end of August to ride a horse, Lee could not personally direct his army’s defense of the mountain passes. The situation five miles south at Crampton’s Gap proved even more headache-inducing as its defense remained entirely beyond the general’s control.

Consequently, three major outcomes resulted from McClellan using the information he learned in the Lost Orders: He attacked the South Mountain gaps; he forced Lee to abandon the favorable defensive position he had chosen; and he compelled Lee to defend ground on South Mountain that the Confederate general neither knew nor planned on defending in the first place.

A Less Favorable Position

The rapidity of McClellan’s unexpected advance knocked Lee off balance. Not only did the defeat at South Mountain then force Lee to fall back in the direction of Virginia, but it also called into question where, or even if, the general could salvage his plan to fight north of the Potomac. After all, Jackson’s siege of Harpers Ferry remained underway with Lee ignorant of when it might be concluded. The hope expressed by Special Orders No. 191 was that Jackson could compel the garrison’s surrender by Sunday, September 14, at the latest. On the morning of September 15, however, Lee found himself still oblivious to Jackson’s progress. For a short time overnight on September 14, Lee even considered returning to Virginia, writing to McLaws after learning of the Federal victory at Crampton’s Gap: “The day has gone against us and this army will go by Sharpsburg and cross the river.”

Then, at about 8 a.m. on September 15, a note from Jackson finally made its way to Lee, stating that he anticipated the enemy would surrender Harpers Ferry in short order. Receiving this note in the vicinity of Keedysville breathed new life into Lee’s faltering operation and he quickly sought ground on which to fight the battle he had envisioned fighting at Beaver Creek. This ground he found on the far side of Antietam Creek, and although Lee did not say it, the terrain there resembled the Beaver Creek position to a degree. With heights as tall as 500 feet above sea level between the creek and Sharpsburg, Lee found a position closer to Jackson in (West) Virginia that was on the flank of Lafayette McLaws’ position in Pleasant Valley, and which looked similar to the one he had originally intended to occupy several miles to the north.

Yet unlike the Beaver Creek position, Antietam Creek and the heights in front of Sharpsburg anchored only the center and far right of the Confederate line. Rolling countryside bisected by low ridges and peppered with woodlots characterized the terrain on the Confederate left flank. This ground proved to be defensible, but South Mountain did not hem in the position there as it did along Beaver Creek. Putting numbers to this equation, the distance between the eastern end of the Beaver Creek heights and the western slope of South Mountain near the small community of San Mar is approximately 1,056 yards or 0.6 miles—equaling a battlefront just under three Civil War–era brigades in length.

North of Sharpsburg, the distance from the creek to farmer David Miller’s soon-to-be-immortal cornfield—where the bulk of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s attack fell the morning of September 17—is 2,816 yards or 1.6 miles. That equaled a front line more than two divisions long, meaning McClellan could maneuver a larger number of troops against the Confederate left than he would have been able to had Lee managed to defend the Beaver Creek heights. The resulting stand-up fight at Sharpsburg thus proved to be less to the benefit of the smaller, numerically weaker Army of Northern Virginia and more to the advantage of the larger Army of the Potomac.

Fighting at the Beaver Creek position also would have provided Lee with a battlefield accessible by multiple entry and exit points to the rear. With only a single road and a rocky ford across the Potomac behind him at Sharpsburg, even Lee judged the position to be “a bad one” by comparison. Arguably, therefore, this secondary field on which Lee chose to fight proved to be substantially less favorable to his army and more favorable to the enemy than the position he had initially hoped to take. Although he did not know it, McClellan’s attack at South Mountain, informed by what he had learned in Special Orders No. 191, effectively negated the battlefield advantage that Lee had sought to achieve in Washington County.

Depleted Strength

McClellan’s attack on the South Mountain gaps created yet another knock-on effect detrimental to the Army of Northern Virginia—it compelled Lee to reassemble his army before either he or it was prepared. This resulted in a loss of combat strength when the fight at Sharpsburg broke out. The experiences of Longstreet’s command on September 14 and, to a lesser extent, of McLaws’ command on September 16-17 are instructive here. Informed estimates put Longstreet’s effective strength at approximately 7,800 men when his command made its forced march from Hagerstown on the morning of September 14. This march, made mostly on the quick, and even the double-quick (i.e., jogging), proved too taxing for many men to take, particularly those of Old Pete’s troops who lacked footwear. Consequently, when Longstreet reached the top of South Mountain, D.H. Hill estimated that his command “did not exceed four thousand men.” It is unknown how many of these men later caught up with the army on its march to Sharpsburg, but they were not available for at least the defense of Turner’s and Fox’s Gaps, clashes that caused significant casualties and resulted in a decisive Confederate reverse. Their experience illustrates the chaos into which McClellan’s sudden advance threw the Army of Northern Virginia.

McLaws’ situation provides a similar example. Detached from the rest of the army with Richard H. Anderson’s Division to besiege Harpers Ferry on the Maryland side of the Potomac River, McLaws’ Division suffered severe losses from straggling in the run-up to Sharpsburg. According to one strength estimate provided by John Owen Allen, 7,337 men comprised the four brigades of McLaws’ Division as of September 2. By September 13, this number had dropped to an estimated 3,778 men available for duty, meaning that while in Maryland, and even before the engagement at Crampton’s Gap the following day, 48.5 percent of McLaws’ men had abandoned the army.

The fights atop Maryland Heights and at Crampton’s Gap further depleted McLaws’ strength by another 929 men and officers killed, wounded, or missing/captured. Then, on the afternoon of September 16, Lee, scrambling desperately to reassemble his scattered army so that he could fight above the Potomac and achieve the “military success” that he hoped would encourage Marylanders to rebel, called McLaws from Harpers Ferry to Sharpsburg. The Georgian made a forced march that night which further reduced his strength by another 7.7 percent, or 220 men (probably an underestimate), leaving McLaws with only 2,629 effectives for the battle on September 17.

This overnight march must have been severe. To quote McLaws himself, “The straggling of men, wearied beyond further endurance, and of those without shoes and of others sick was very great, which accounts for the small force carried into action. But by the evening of the 18th most of the absentees had joined and my force was nearly as large as that I had carried into action on the 17th, although I had lost heavily in killed and wounded.” Brigadier General William Barksdale, whose four regiments of Mississippians marched with McLaws, recalled similarly, “a portion of my men had fallen by the wayside from loss of sleep and excessive fatigue, having been constantly on duty for five or six days, and on the march for almost the whole of the two preceding nights…I went into the fight with less than 800 men.”

Brigadier General Joseph Kershaw, a South Carolinian commanding a brigade in McLaws’ Division, reported that his men “were also under arms or marching nearly the whole of the nights of Monday and Tuesday, arriving at Sharpsburg at daylight on Wednesday morning, September 17…[M]any had become exhausted and fallen out on the wayside, and all were worn and jaded.” An unidentified soldier with the 8th Alabama, a part of Col. Alfred Cummings’s brigade in R.H. Anderson’s division agreed, calling the march to Shepherdstown “trying in the extreme.” Lastly, recalled James Dinkins of the 18th Mississippi:

“About daylight we reached Shepardstown [sic] on the Potomac river, and crossed over to the Maryland side, but we crossed with a small proportion of the command which began the march. We remember that Company ‘C,’ Eighteenth Mississippi, left Harper’s Ferry with over sixty men and three officers, but we went into the battle of ‘Sharpsburg’ with sixteen men and one officer. Other companies, of course, suffered similar dimunition. The march was one of the severest ever made by infantry troops.”

One cannot help but wonder what a difference it would have made to the Battle of Antietam if Lee had possessed more time to reassemble his army. Licensed Antietam battlefield guide Russell Rich argues in a 2022 study of Confederate straggling during the campaign that the loss of so many troops prior to Antietam did not diminish the combat effectiveness of Lee’s army on the battlefield. This conclusion seems to say more about the fighting prowess of veteran Confederate troops than it does about the army’s thin ranks. It cannot be ignored that Lee sought multiple times to launch an attack on the Federal right flank both during and after the fight at Antietam. A lack of available space due to a bend in the Potomac River and McClellan’s massing of artillery on that flank contributed to the maneuver’s failure, but Lee scarcely being able to muster 5,000 men for the endeavor also proved to be a key deficiency.

At no point on September 17 were Lee’s men able to recover the ground they lost in the early hours of the struggle. Counterattack certainly, and this Lee did, but recover their original lines or drive the Federals back to Antietam Creek, never. The battle thus ended as a Confederate defeat precisely because Lee did not have the men he required for an effective offensive, and he did not have the men because straggling significantly reduced the number present for action. This material weakness then persisted until the following day when Lee retired to Virginia because McClellan’s army had received reinforcements while Lee’s had not. The general summarized this situation in his campaign report, writing, “As we could not look for a material increase in strength, and the enemy’s force could be largely and rapidly augmented, it was not thought prudent to wait until he should be ready again to offer battle.” Systemic weakness caused by straggling, and exacerbated by high combat losses, forced Robert E. Lee to abandon his campaign and the effort to bring Maryland into the Confederate fold.

Even before McClellan’s unanticipated advance on September 13-14, Lee had complained to Jefferson Davis about straggling’s devastating effect on his army: “One great embarrassment is the reduction of our ranks by straggling, which it seems impossible to prevent with our present regimental officers. Our ranks are very much diminished I fear from a third to one-half of the original numbers.” The threat posed by McClellan’s advance then intensified the problem by causing Lee’s men to engage in a series of forced marches to rejoin the army in Maryland. By the time the clash erupted at Sharpsburg, Lee’s army—numbering between 50,000 and 70,000 men at the campaign’s outset, according to some estimates—had lost a crippling number of stragglers.

Straggling during the campaign angered Lee so much, in fact, that he complained about it in a missive to Jackson and Longstreet on September 22. Implementing a series of reforms at this point, including daily roll call, the creation of a permanent provost guard, and increased efforts by field officers to observe and account for the presence of their men, General Lee made sure that service in the Army of Northern Virginia became much more rule-bound after Sharpsburg than it had been to that point.

Quantifying the full extent to which men falling out of the ranks weakened the Army of Northern Virginia is probably impossible, although we can arrive at a reasonable estimate. To quote Darrell L. Collins’ summary of Confederate strength on September 30, less than two weeks after the epic battle, Lee’s army counted 52,189 men in its ranks. Compared to the fewer than 40,000 men with which Lee and others claimed to have fought the battle, one can only imagine what the outcome might have been had the Confederate commander possessed this additional 12,000 troops on September 17. It is doubtful that elements of the Union 2nd Corps would have penetrated the Confederate center as they did at the Sunken Road if Longstreet had another 5,000 men to throw into the fight. Similarly, Ambrose Burnside probably would not have been able to drive in Lee’s right flank if Jacob Cox’s 9th Corps had faced 3,000 men defending the heights above Antietam Creek instead of Colonel Henry L. Benning’s “little over four hundred.” Possessing an additional 4,000 men would have also given Lee the men he needed for the attack on the Federal right for which he ached so badly.

“At Great Disadvantage”

The examples of Longstreet on September 14 and McLaws on September 17 suggest that the hard marches forced by McClellan’s rapid advance contributed to reducing the number of combat effectives available to Lee by a sizable margin. D.H. Hill shared this viewpoint, stating, “Had all our stragglers been up, McClellan’s army would have been completely crushed or annihilated.” Combine the army’s decimation with it being compelled to fight on ground more favorable to the Federals than the position Lee first chose and a more urgent sense of the damage caused to the Confederate operation by the loss of Special Orders No. 191 becomes clear. Writing to Hill in February 1868, Lee referred to the loss of the orders as “a great calamity and subsequent reflection has not caused me to change my opinion.” From ruining Lee’s plan to fight along Beaver Creek and forcing him to defend the South Mountain passes, which itself caused significant casualties, to giving the Federals a more advantageous place to fight and reducing Confederate strength by pressing the army to reassemble on the quick, one cannot help but agree with Lee’s characterization of the orders’ loss as a disaster.

On February 15, 1868, the general himself told William Allan, an Army of Northern Virginia veteran and one of its earliest historians: “Had the Lost dispatch not been lost, and had McClellan continued his cautious policy for two or three days longer, I would have had all my troops reconcentrated on [the] Md. side, stragglers up, [and] men rested.”

Charles Marshall echoed this sentiment, writing in his war memoir that “Instead of being united and fresh as it would have been had General McClellan continued his slow rate of advance for twenty-four hours longer, as there is reason to believe he would have done but for the loss of the order…[the army] had to engage the enemy at great disadvantage.”

Longstreet’s men and those under D.H. Hill, Marshall continued, “went into the battle [at Sharpsburg] under the disheartening effects of the disaster at Boonsboro,’ and considerably reduced in number by that engagement, while those of General Jackson had to make a long march in intensely warm weather and go into battle without opportunity for necessary repose and refreshment.

“In considering the Maryland campaign, it is proper to take into account the effect of the accident of the lost order upon the result—a misfortune that was not incident to the plan of campaign, although it had a most important influence upon the result….The effect of the loss of that order does not show any want of wisdom or prudence in the policy of the invasion of Maryland in 1862. But for that, no battle need have been fought at Sharpsburg, or at South Mountain, or anywhere except at a time and upon terms of General Lee’s own selection.”

Supposing Marshall is correct, and taking into account Robert E. Lee’s own estimate of the harm caused to his operation by the loss of Special Orders No. 191, one cannot reasonably conclude other than to say that the discovery of the mislaid document by Private Barton Mitchell about noon September 13 contributed mightily to the Confederate defeat in Maryland. For that the credit must go to George McClellan, whose actions forced Lee into a difficult situation for which he was ill prepared, and who by doing so saved the republic when it faced the possibility of a terrible defeat that might have ended it for good. 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Alexander Rossino writes from Boonsboro, Md. This article is adapted from his latest book, Calamity at Frederick (Savas Beatie, 2023).

They came for Wyatt Outlaw in the dark of night. Burning torches lit their white robes and hoods, masking their identities but illuminating the evil intentions in their hearts. They snatched Outlaw from his home in front of his family, dragged him down Main Street in Graham, N.C., mutilated his body, and hanged him from a tree in the courthouse square. His “crime” was being a Black man active in the Union League and holding public office in Alamance County. His death was recorded as “misadventure” at the hands of persons unknown. 

Depredations like this and worse occurred by the thousands throughout the violent South against newly freed African Americans in the years after the Civil War, perpetrated by White supremacist groups collectively known as the Ku Klux Klan. In Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction (Knopf, 2023), Fergus M. Bordewich chronicle this devastating chapter in American history and the determined efforts by President Ulysses Grant to break the violent grip of the Klan during Reconstruction. Hard-won legislation, championed by Grant, and the dedicated efforts of resilient federal judges and juries backed by the gleam of Union Army bayonets broke the power of the Klan. But unlike Grant’s Civil War campaigns, the victory was not decisive. The seeds of domestic terrorism cultivated after the war have periodically found fertile ground in American society during times of social and political turbulence. Bordewich’s book is excellent history and a timely warning.

Why did you decide to do a book about Grant’s war against the Klan?  

“Klan War” evolved naturally from several of my previous books in which I wrote about the significance of slavery and race in the Early Republic, the development of the Underground Railroad, the Compromise of 1850, and most recently in the Civil War, in “Congress at War.” I wanted to show what homegrown American terrorism looked like, how it was defeated by Grant, and what its consequences were. 

Much ink has been spilled about the supposed failures of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidential administrations. Should the efficacy of his presidency be reevaluated in light of his war against the Klan? 

Definitely, it should. Grant’s deep personal commitment to the extension of full citizenship and human rights to Black Americans made his one of the most ambitious and consequential presidencies in our history. Overall, his presidency was mixed: as is well known, some members of his administration were corrupt, his efforts to acquire Santo Domingo did not succeed, and his enlightened Indian policy did not ultimately prevail. But after Reconstruction, his reputation was ruthlessly destroyed both by resurgent advocates of the Lost Cause and their Democratic allies, who disdained him precisely because of his commitment to Black civil rights and Reconstruction.

How important was Nathan Bedford Forrest in the formation, organization, and spread of the Ku Klux Klan? 

Forrest was a wealthy prewar slave-dealer and a war criminal as well as a talented cavalry commander. But he was not the founder of the Klan. He was recruited by its early organizers to serve as its first “Grand Wizard.” Traveling around the South, he served as a sort of reactionary Johnny Appleseed: wherever he went, new Klan “dens” sprang up behind him, and violence soon followed. Most probably, he also encouraged the Klan to develop the guerilla cavalry tactics that were its trademark. Of course, those tactic were used not against soldiers but against unarmed, helpless, and isolated freed people and white Republicans. 

How does Grant’s war against the Klan equate to a battle to save Reconstruction? 

Without Grant’s decisiveness, both military and legal, the Klan would have continued to overwhelm the embryonic two-party system in the former Confederate states. The Klan’s political goal was to destroy biracial democracy in the South; Grant’s was to protect it. When the Klan was finally faced by federal soldiers instead of hapless civilians, it caved.  

Most people associate Klan depredations being inflicted against poor, rural, uneducated Blacks. You argue that the opposite is true. Explain. 

Many rural freed people were certainly victims of the Klan. But the Klan’s primary target was the new class of (mostly) once-enslaved men who rose to positions of local and later county and statewide political leadership. Their “ignorance” is a racist trope. Many were at least as well educated as their white neighbors. Some had university educations. White Republicans were also targets of the Klan. The last thing that southern reactionaries wanted to see was viable biracial government in which Blacks exhibited equal or even superior talent to white men. 

What was it about the Klan that attracted prominent White community leaders to its ranks? 

There’s a common idea that the Klan was made up of hoodlums, louts, and thugs. Such men did join the Klan, along with poor white farmers and other workingmen. But it was founded and almost everywhere led by the so-called “better class” of men in their communities, commonly former Confederate officers, landowners, lawyers, doctors, even journalists and ministers. Such men saw themselves as the “natural” leaders in their communities. Their stated goal was to permanently enshrine white supremacy, a term which Klan members proudly embraced. 

You argue that by 1872 the organized Klan was in retreat. Why wasn’t its defeat decisive?  

Once Grant broke the Klan as an organized movement, northern interest in the South’s problems rapidly waned. Especially after 1874, funding for both occupation troops and federal prosecutors shriveled, as white supremacist “redeemers” steadily recaptured state governments. With reactionary Democrats in control, terrorism was no longer necessary to subvert the rights of the freed people. That would now be done mainly by political means.  

Who were the front-line heroes in Grant’s war against the Klan? 

While many federal soldiers and law officers struggled heroically against the Klan, two stand out. Major Lewis Merrill of the 7th Cavalry led the crackdown on the most Klan-infested counties of South Carolina. A West Point graduate with legal training and a sterling record hunting down Confederate guerrillas in Missouri during the Civil War, he was the perfect man for the job. Keeping the Klan on the run with his veteran troops and penetrating it with spies, he secured thousands of arrests. On the legal side, Grant’s attorney general, Amos Akerman, a passionately committed Georgia Republican, brought immense energy to the prosecution of the Klan. 

You warn that the Klan bequeathed to America a model for using terrorism as a means of social control. Are we hearing echoes of the 1870s in our current social and political discourse? 

My book is one of history, not present-day politics. But a few conclusions are inescapable. The United States is not so exceptional that it is somehow absolved from the potential for organized terrorist violence of the type we have seen in other countries. The story of Reconstruction and the Klan war further demonstrates that rights that we take for granted—as freedmen did in the 1870s—can be taken away again. There are forces in today’s America that have the potential to undermine our most basic democratic processes and institutions, as we saw on January 6, 2021. We must remain vigilant if we are not to let our democracy slip through our fingers.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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As it is today, entertainment was an important part of life in the 19th century—and for soldiers stationed far from home, even the smallest distraction from homesickness was essential. Limited options were readily available, however. Antebellum audiences in some regions, for example, could enjoy a visit by the traveling Zouaves of Inkerman—French Zouaves who had teamed with their British allies during the Crimean War to defeat Imperial Russian forces at the November 1854 Battle of Inkerman. Those Gallic troops donned exotic uniforms patterned after ones worn by French Algerian soldiers, a style of dress that found immediate favor among military forces on both sides in the upcoming Civil War.

In early 1861, a newspaper in Memphis, Tenn., touted the arrival of the Zouaves of Inkerman in a newly built theater, enticing audiences with notice that the shows were to run for only two days and would be a “grand military spectacle in five and seven Acts Tableaux,” that the performance would “commence with the French Vaudeville of La Corde Sensible” and that “Zouave Frederick” would perform La Marseillaise. At the time, such live-action shows involving military drill, fancy costumes, and historical recitations by dramatic actors were cutting-edge entertainment.

Prior to the Civil War, technology known as “polyoramas” catapulted to fame as a feature at Niblo’s Garden in New York City. Founder William Niblo had emigrated from Ireland to New York in the early 19th century, and after a short stint working at a small tavern, he bought his own facility and dubbed it Bank Coffee House, eventually expanding his empire to include the Columbian Gardens, an all-weather entertainment facility. Both locales would host plays, concerts, and eventually polyoramas.

Polyoramas enjoyed increased exposure as the century progressed. Often called “Moving Panoramas,” they were 360-degree panoramic paintings to be shown in cylindrical buildings constructed specifically for that purpose. Special equipment would maneuver the painting in a circle before a seated audience.

What caused the medium’s popularity to grow was an owner’s ability to transport the apparatus to other cities across the nation, and innovations that eliminated the need to operate only in a round structure. Replacing the larger viewing area was a box-like window behind which the canvas would rotate. Long strips of painted canvas would be moved across the stage horizontally using a cranking mechanism, visible through the “window” opening. To not be distractions, the device and musicians were secreted away. 

Initially, polyoramas portrayed signature battles from across the ocean, such as Waterloo or the 1805 naval battle of Trafalgar. Wagons would transport the large paintings and corresponding hardware, along with a small crew, to each venue. Because of Niblo’s widespread name recognition, each traveling group would tout a partnership with him, whether real or not. Viewings in a particular city would usually last about a week.

A New View of War

Once the Civil War began, the subject matter of the polyoramas increased substantially. The variety of battles available for display with a war in their backyard allowed viewers more opportunity to learn what had really transpired at the event. As one such demonstration beginning May 11, 1863, in Cleveland, Ohio, was advertised:

“This is the Most Complete Exhibition Now Before the Public! Accurate, Authentic & Comprehensive, from the First Dread Signal at Sumter to the Battle of Fredericksburg, Profuse with Dioramic Effects, entirely new and on a scale magnificent and surprising The Thunder of Artillery and The Din of the Battle Field are realized with a vividness so nearly approaching Reality that the audience seem to realize the work of carnage as if the scene of life and death was Actually Before Them.”

The group would play “popular and appropriate music” that would accompany each painting, in addition to a “Patriotic Descriptive Lecture” delivered by “Mr. John Davies (late of the Boston Museum) whose delineations of these pictures have won for him the appreciation of many thousands in the cities of New York, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Chicago, where they have been exhibited with great success and pronounced unrivaled and unapproachable.” This particular polyorama company would occasionally be accompanied by Miss Viola, the “highly celebrated Patriotic Ballad Singer” and Mrs. Hattie Pomeroy, the “Popular Songstress.”

Traveling shows were a success across the nation and beyond during the war. In January 1864, for example, “Honolulu residents learned about the Civil War by viewing J.W. Wilder & Co.’s Polyorama depicting ‘The Terrible Rebellion.’ Narration and music accompanied a series of interlocking painted images drawn across the stage of the Royal Hawaiian Theater.”

Advertisements promised a survey of the war, east to west, land and sea, including the “Great Naval Combat between the Iron-Clad Monsters, The Monitor and The Merrimac!” Viewers would be informed of “key political figures, comic scenes in camp life, and sad and mournful events, all for just $.50.”

Some portrayals made a strong impression on the audience. One such individual was Lewis Josselyn, a shoemaker-turned-private in the 38th Massachusetts Infantry stationed in Baton Rouge, La., who wrote a letter to his mother after seeing a polyorama presentation in town. The 21-year-old Josselyn provided a wonderful blow-by-blow account of the legendary March 9, 1862, naval battle at Hampton Roads, Va:

“Last night Butt and I went to a show that is now here for a few nights. It was a Poly[o]rama (they call it) of the war from New York. It was paintings the same as a panorama or I could not see any difference in it. It was the best show of the kind that I ever saw. The paintings were as natural as life. One of the pieces was a fight between the Monitor and Merrimack. It first showed the Cumberland (the one that Hugh was in) and Congress in the Hampton Roads rocking in the water. The waves looked as if it was the sea itself. Then in steamed the Merrimack, going up to the Congress as if to run into and sink her, but the Congress then was aground and she dare not venture up to her, so she turns upon the Cumberland and runs into her, and then runs back and tries it again, this time making a hole in the Cumberland, and she sinks, with her colors still flying at the mast.

“The Monitor now comes in, and engages the Merrimack. She finally finds the Yankee cheese box too much for her and she has to retreat. As she does so, she fires a shell at the Congress and sets it on fire and is destroyed. This was done the best of anything of the kind I ever saw. I go to the theater every few nights. They now have it closed to us and our boys go as guard. I could go every night if I wanted to, but I don’t want to go every night unless they are going to play something pretty good – better than generally is for it is a poor theatre.”

Some shows became semi-permanent fixtures in large cities. Cutting’s Polyorama of the War was so popular in New Orleans that the manager of the St. Charles Theatre announced that Mr. Cutting would be giving presentations there “until further notice.”

Not all the viewers, however, were enamored with these shows, such as this mixed review in the Tunkhannock, Pa., newspaper in 1865:

“Hasty & Twombly spread what they called a Polyorama of the War, before a crowd of the curious, on Wednesday and Thursday evening last. It was evidently meant to represent a fight of some kind, but whether some of the great battles of our civil war, of the Crimean war or a Tunkhannock plug muss, we could not determine. Their closing scene, ‘Unnamed Heroes,’ was good, and worth the price of admission; the rest was a bore.”

While polyorama shows like the one Private Josselyn saw in Baton Rouge were captivating, others were duds for assorted reasons, or only partially interesting like the aforementioned Tunkhannock presentation. To offset potentially dull shows with poorly skilled narrators, uninspiring music, or ineffective paintings, additions were sometimes included to augment interest—though some demonstrations echoed a P.T. Barnum sideshow. For example, Morton & Co.’s “Polyorama of the Rebellion” offered viewing of “The Famous Little Zouave Twins”—an infant drummer and fifer “who led the decisive and immortal charge of the 19th Illinois at Murfreesboro, Tenn. They appear in full costume and go through the Zouave drill at the bugle call. Bayonet, small broad-sword exercise, and at one time play upon the instruments which compose a full band…” This presentation in Red Wing, Minn., was promoted heavily by the local press as “highly spoken of” and urged citizens to “Go and see it!” Viewings in a particular city would usually last about a week.

Rise of the Cycloramas

After the war, audience attendance waned as people grew tired of seeing reminders of the hardships of war. The lull did not last too long, however, with a resurgence in the 1880s. New and old companies rose to the occasion and started traveling the country again. Traditional round buildings also reappeared, but now audiences would stand at the center as the painting rotated before them.

The basic premise of the display slightly changed along with the name of polyorama being switched to cyclorama, although they were very similar in nature. A cyclorama did have the addition of dioramas of the contested battle areas to bolster the visual effects.

In 1885, the Philadelphia Panorama Company constructed a cyclorama of the Battle of Chattanooga in both Philadelphia and Kansas City, Mo. A few years later, a cyclorama was constructed and painted of the devastating 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn focusing on the loss of George Armstrong Custer and his command.

Over the next decade, hundreds of cycloramas were created, of which only about 30 survive today. The most realistic cyclorama was probably the re-creation of the classic story of Ben-Hur, written by former Union Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace. Real horses and chariots were used within the background of a cyclorama painting. This method exceeded all previous incarnations to the medium and allowed the pubic to experience the best example in lieu of actually being at the dramatic fictional event written in the book.

Two cycloramas depicting Civil War events still exist today and are open to the public: one representing the monumental July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, the other the July 1864 Battle of Atlanta. The painting of the Gettysburg conflict was the work of French artist Paul Dominique Philippoteaux, who concentrated his efforts on the climactic Confederate attack famously known as Pickett’s Charge. Once the Frenchman finished his artwork, the painting stood 22 feet high and 279 feet in circumference.

Among veterans of the battle whom Philippoteaux interviewed to provide more realistic scenes were Union Generals Winfield S. Hancock, Abner Doubleday, O.O. Howard, and Alexander S. Webb. For further detail, Philippoteaux also took photographs of the terrain upon which the charge took place. Realism was considered essential, as the cyclorama included artifacts and sculptures, including stone walls, fences, and trees. Recently restored, it is currently on display at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitors Center.

The Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama, 49 feet high and more than 100 yards long, was also recently restored. Augmented by modern technology, it is on display at the Atlanta History Center.

The American Panorama Company of Milwaukee hired 17 German artists with a penchant for beer to create the painting. It took the painters nearly five months and many cases of beer to complete the detailed painting. It debuted in Minneapolis in 1886. Due to its initial location in Minnesota and the efforts to attract Northern tourists, the focus of the events during the Battle of Atlanta concentrated on the Northern perspective, with highlighted Union military personnel and the Confederate side painted a bit more shadowy and vague. When the massive painting was relocated to Atlanta, it was billed locally as “the only Confederate victory ever painted” to appeal to audiences in its new Southern venue, although the original battle was certainly not victorious for the boys in gray. 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Richard H. Holloway is a frequent ACW contributor. Check out his article on George Custer at historynet.com/east-west-rivalry-civil-war.

In the anxious days that followed the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, Illinois Governor Richard Yates worried in particular about a disease-ridden little town jutting into the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Flood-prone Cairo (pronounced “Kay-row”), located at the far southern end of Illinois in a region of the state nicknamed “Egypt,” didn’t amount to much. After a visit in 1842, famed author Charles Dickens called it a “destestable morass,” a “breeding-place of fever, ague, and death.” A mere 242 hardy souls called Cairo home at the beginning of 1850. The arrival of the Illinois Central Railroad in 1856, connecting Cairo to Springfield and Chicago, improved the little town’s prospects, but it was still a flyspeck compared to the prominent nearby river cities of Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. The 1860 Census listed Cairo’s population at 2,188 (2,141 White residents, 47 African American).

Cairo’s days as a sleepy, stunted port city ended the moment Confederate cannons opened fire in Charleston Harbor. War meant that the little community flanked by the Ohio and Mississippi suddenly assumed enormous strategic importance. Not wanting Cairo to fall into Rebel hands, the Kentucky-born Yates, an ardent Unionist and friend of President Abraham Lincoln, looked to the other end of the state for help.

On April 19, the Illinois governor ordered Brig. Gen. R.K. Swift, commander of a Chicago militia brigade, to “have as strong a force as you can” ready to deploy “at a moment’s warning.” A messenger who arrived the next day from Yates in Springfield stressed that its destination “must be kept a profound secret,” Augustus Harris Burley, chairman of a pro-Union Chicago citizens committee, wrote in 1890.

Six hundred ill-armed volunteers equipped with squirrel guns, antique pistols, and muskets obtained from a Milwaukee armory boarded a train at the Illinois Central terminal in Chicago on April 21. At 11 p.m., amid cheers and the sound of screeching steam whistles, the train departed with the well-wishers waving goodbye and its mission a mystery to the troops onboard.

Secrecy was essential. Organizers of the expedition “were surrounded by traitors in Chicago, and a large proportion of the people in Southern Illinois sympathized with the South,” Burley wrote. A lengthy wooden railroad trestle spanning the Big Muddy River in southern Illinois offered an inviting target for saboteurs. “There was also fear that the rebels would seize Cairo, being a point of great strategic importance.”

Illinois Central and telegraph officials acted to ensure stealth while the troop train was en route. Telegraph lines went quiet while the railroad permitted a regularly scheduled 7 p.m. train to leave Chicago with orders to pull over to make way for the troop transport. To all appearances, operations along the line seemed normal. “With this arrangement,” Burley wrote, “the military train passed unheralded the length of the State, and rolled into Cairo to the astonishment of all and the rage of many of its citizens.”

The transformation of tiny Cairo into an unlikely citadel of Union military operations in the West had begun.

The “Western Flotilla”

As Governor Yates acted to secure the strategic town, war planners in Washington, D.C., eyed Cairo’s strategic position along the Mississippi. In a letter to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles written in late April, St. Louis engineer James B. Eads proposed making Cairo the linchpin of a river blockade that would interrupt Confederate commerce. Eads’ missive set the wheels in motion turning Cairo into an inland naval base.

On May 16, Welles named naval Commander John Rodgers to oversee the establishment of an armed blockade of the Mississippi. Four days later, he ordered Navy Constructor Samuel M. Pook to leave Washington for Cairo, where he was to report to Rodgers “for special duty under his direction.” Shuttling between Cairo, Mound City, Ill., and Carondolet, Mo., Rodgers and Pook designed and outfitted seven flat-bottomed, iron-armored gunboats for the Union’s “Western Flotilla” to navigate the Mississippi and other inland rivers and pound Confederate positions along the waterways.

A month after the Chicago troops arrived in Cairo, the woebegone river port bustled with activity. A report in The New York Herald detailed newly constructed artillery batteries along the Mississippi, barracks, and hospitals. Union sympathizers fleeing western Kentucky poured across the river in search of safety. “The town is full of strangers and newspaper correspondents are almost as plentiful as soldiers,” the Herald correspondent reported. Major General George B. McClellan, on an inspection visit in June, praised the ardor of Illinois troops and promised they would lead the way when Union forces moved south.

By the end of June, 3,000 Union troops garrisoned Fort Defiance at the tip of the peninsula, part of a force between Cairo and Bird’s Point, Mo., estimated at 8,000.

Nevertheless, doubts about the security of Cairo lingered. The hostility encountered by the Chicago troops when they arrived reflected pro-Southern sympathies that remained pronounced even after the fall of Fort Sumter. With some residents of Egypt enlisting with the Confederates and nightriders crossing the countryside to disparage the Union, guards were posted at railroad bridges as though Illinois were a border slave state, Ulysses S. Grant recalled. John Logan, the region’s immensely popular Democratic congressman, worked to rally Egypt to the Union cause and soon became a Union general and outspoken Radical Republican. Sympathy for the South remained, however, sometimes taking on menacing form. In late June, Harper’s Weekly reported from Cairo about the capture of “an organized band of rebels” by Union Brig. Gen. Benjamin Prentiss. Of the 20 seized by Prentiss’ troops, only three agreed to swear loyalty to the Union. The rest dug ditches until they could be tried for treason in St. Louis.

Residents who kept a close eye on river traffic worried that steamboats were being blockaded by Confederates to keep Union troops in the dark about a pending attack. Major General John C. Frémont, the Western explorer and 1856 Republican presidential candidate known as “the Pathfinder,” shared those anxieties. Picked in late July to command Union forces in the West, Frémont feared that Confederate Maj. Gen. Gideon J. Pillow was advancing on Cairo with 12,000 troops, later writing, “The waterways and the district around Cairo were of the first importance.”

To meet the threat, Frémont left St. Louis at the end of July for Cairo with 3,800 troops—“all my available force”—billeted on a flotilla of sizable transports to create the impression the force was bigger than it was.

Cairo presented a sobering sight to the Pathfinder. “I found the garrison demoralized,” he recalled. “From the chief of artillery I learned there were only about six hundred effective men under arms,” and their enlistments had expired. “The reinforcement I brought, and such assurances as I was able to give, restored confidence,” Frémont wrote, “and I was able to prevail on one of the garrison regiments to remain.” The maneuver deterred Pillow from attacking and put Cairo “effectually beyond the reach of the enemy” for the duration of the war, according to Frémont.

Another foe posed a more persistent threat. The fetid conditions described by Dickens proved a fertile breeding ground for disease. “A more fearful enemy than diarrhea, or even than a hostile force, has appeared in the form of typhoid fever!” the Chicago Tribune breathlessly reported in early June. Frémont, who considered Cairo “the most unhealthy post within my command,” turned one of the largest steamboats from his convoy into a floating hospital where some of the injured benefited from shade, refreshing breezes, and improved drainage. The battle to keep Cairo’s unhealthy environment from sickening Union troops would last for the remainder of the war.

Base of Operations

Despite the challenging conditions, new arrivals kept pouring in. On August 12, a trio of commercial paddle-wheel steamboats—Tyler, Conestoga, and Lexington—outfitted for combat in Cincinnati docked at Cairo. At the end of August, pious and hard-working Navy Captain Andrew Hull Foote succeeded Rodgers and assumed command of naval operations on the Mississippi and nearby rivers. Grant, a brigadier general, moved to Cairo on September 4 and set up his headquarters at Cairo’s St. Charles Hotel. He wasted little time taking the battle to the enemy.

A day after coming to town, Grant loaded two regiments and an artillery battery into steamboats and sailed to Paducah, Ky., seizing the town and forestalling a Confederate advance. On November 7, relying on a convoy of steamboats and gunboats to move his troops, Grant inflicted heavy losses on Confederate forces at Belmont, Mo., before withdrawing. Cairo was evolving from a heavily defended strategic point into a base of operations against the Rebels.

As Grant battled Confederates, he confronted an enemy behind the front lines with which he was personally acquainted. Cairo’s ample quantities of alcohol threatened to corrode discipline in the ranks. Whiskey “was as plentiful as the yellow flood of the river,” New York Times correspondent Franc B. Wilkie recalled. It “overflowed everything, filled everything, pervaded everything, like an irrepressible inundation.”

Responding to reports that officers and enlisted men “quarrel, curse, drink, and carouse generally on the lowest level of equality” in Cairo’s saloons and dance halls, Grant ordered that such fraternization cease. “Such conduct is totally subversive of good order and discipline, and must be discontinued,” he declared.

“It is hoped,” the Tribune’s Cairo correspondent sniffed, “we shall have no more lazy, drunken officers lounging about the St. Charles, and what is even worse, visiting the lowest dens in the city.” The campaign against ennui-induced boozing continued into the fall. The Missouri Republican reported in late October that a crackdown on drunkenness in the ranks was working, but intoxicated soldiers were still “frequently seen,” noting, “Not a day passes but that sundry barrels, kegs, and bottles of rot gut, kill devil, or chain lightning, are summarily destroyed and their contents deposited in the gutter.”

While Grant drilled and disciplined his troops, Foote, now a flag-officer whose naval rank made him the equivalent of a major general, worked to get his gunboats ready for action. “He was personally very active, and could be seen at all times, either at his office in a wharf-boat at Cairo, or on one of the iron-clad boats of that day, superintending the equipment and armament of his flotilla,” Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman remembered. The once-sleepy riverfront hummed with activity as gunboats and tugboats crowded wharves and channels and workers filled the air with the “sound of hammer and chisel and saw.”

Outwardly, according to Sherman, Foote exuded “frankness and heartiness.” Privately, the hard-working naval officer admitted he was dismayed by Cairo’s makeshift facilities and a meddlesome inspection board of Army and Navy officers reviewing the arming of the gunboats. “Weary days are my lot,” he wrote his wife in December. “If I could be fitted out at a navy yard I would not care; but this fitting out vessels where no one knows anything is discouraging.”

But Foote persevered. Work on the gunboats continued into January, and they were finally certified as ready for combat in the middle of the month. The vessels would be put to immediate use. At the end of January, Grant and Foote saw an opportunity to move south.

On February 2, the first of 17,000 Union troops, accompanied by seven of Foote’s gunboats, left Cairo bound for Fort Henry on the Tennessee River just south of the Kentucky border. Four days later, Foote reported to Secretary Welles that his seven gunboats captured the Confederate stronghold and its commander, Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman, after a “severe and rapid fire.” One of the Union boats, Essex, suffered a direct hit on its boiler that scalded 29 sailors, killing one, but Foote was in all pleased by the performance of his squadron.

“The steamers were admirably handled by their commanders and officers,” Foote informed Welles. “In fact, all the officers and men gallantly performed their duty, and, considering the little experience they have under fire, far more than realized my expectations.” The assault on Fort Henry opened Grant’s push south from Cairo. Fort Donelson, guarding the Cumberland River, fell soon thereafter. In April, Union forces led by Grant rallied following a surprise morning attack to record a monumental victory at Shiloh in southeastern Tennessee. Finally, in July 1863, the last remaining Confederate strongholds on the Mississippi—Vicksburg and Port Hudson—surrendered following extended sieges. Foote, however, did not live to see the Union triumphs. He died suddenly in New York on June 26, a week before the Rebels capitulated at Vicksburg.

Cairo became an embarkation point for Union troops heading south to join Grant’s advance. Bound for Rienzi, Miss., with his Wisconsin artillery regiment in 1862, Private Jenkin Lloyd Jones arrived in Cairo in the predawn hours of August 30. “We were astir early to catch sight of the far-famed city,” he wrote in his diary, “and certainly, an unhappy surprise we found it; the combined medley of filth and disorder, the streets rough, the sidewalks torn and tattered, rendering it dangerous to travel, lest they should throw one headlong to the ditch.”

Jones’ observations matched those of other Cairo visitors. The Union buildup had done little to improve conditions. A day after Grant and Foote departed Cairo for Fort Henry, British author Anthony Trollope, touring the country for a book on the United States, arrived in Cairo. Like Dickens 20 years earlier, Trollope had little good to say about what he saw. Disease was prevalent. The city was populated by adults with “lantern faces like spectres” whose children appeared “prematurely old.” Empty carts pulled by “floundering horses” struggled to navigate the viscous mud that overflowed in the streets. After two days, Trollope had seen enough. “To whatever period of life my days may be prolonged, I do not think that I shall ever forget Cairo,” Trollope wrote.

George Boutwell arrived in Cairo in the spring of 1862 as part of a commission investigating allegations of corruption involving the quartermaster department at Cairo. Working conditions, the future Republican congressman and treasury secretary found, were less than ideal. Cairo sweltered with nightly thunderstorms offering the only respite from the heat and humidity. Flood waters overtopped the levees and engulfed the streets. “Much of the refuse of the army, including some dead animals, had been left on the surface of the ground,” he wrote. Like Trollope, Boutwell was eager to leave: “Our life at Cairo was disagreeable to an extent that cannot be realized easily.”

While most everyone was happy to leave the squalor and sickness behind, Cairo represented something other than a muddy military outpost for one group of people. As early as the summer of 1861, newspapers reported the presence of escaped enslaved Black people in the Missouri woods opposite Cairo looking to cross the river to freedom. More than a year later, according to The New York Herald, as many as 1,000 once-enslaved Blacks—more than 20 times Cairo’s prewar Black population—inhabited the town. “They are suffering intently for the want of necessary clothing and bedding,” the Herald reported.

Their numbers—and misery—increased as the war continued. In February 1863, an estimated 1,700 crowded into barracks built by the Army, according to The New York Times. Pneumonia and other diseases flourishing in the cramped confines of the barracks claimed scores of lives. “Their quarters are in the midst of mud, always from one to two feet in depth during moist weather.” By some estimates, as many as 3,000 Black migrants passed through Cairo during the war. Many left to work for farmers in southern Illinois or made their way to Chicago.

White civilians regarded the influx of formerly enslaved people with horror. In December 1863, Democratic Rep. Joshua Allen, who succeeded Logan as Egypt’s congressman, told the House that his constituents wouldn’t tolerate the presence of the Black refugees. “They are willing to compete with each other, but will never consent to competition with stolen negroes,” Allen said. “Southern Illinois must either be the home of white men or black men—they cannot dwell together.”

Naval officers reacted differently. Struggling with manpower issues, they employed African Americans, both free and formerly enslaved, as gunboat firemen and coal heavers. Writing to Welles from Cairo, Acting Rear Adm. David D. Porter explained that he “reduced expenses” by employing 40 in place of Whites and that he had instructed naval officers down the Mississippi to do likewise.

The war receded from Cairo as Union victories piled up, but danger remained. A raid by Confederate Maj. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest into western Kentucky in March 1864 briefly threatened Cairo and its store of ammunition and other provisions but was turned back at Paducah. Cairo’s defenders in blue proved more effective than its champions in Washington.

Three months after Forrest was repulsed, Congress debated whether to make Cairo a permanent naval yard. Cairo’s waterlogged reputation proved too much for its Illinois advocates to overcome. When Representative Elihu Washburne asked Missouri’s James Sidney Rollins about the “depth of water” at Carondolet, another prospective site for the naval yard, Rollins was quick with a rejoinder that brought laughter from the House: “Not quite so deep as at Cairo, especially on shore, but a good deal purer.” Congress turned the decision over to a commission that selected Cairo’s neighbor, Mound City, as the site for the yard.

Cairo rejoiced with the rest of the Union in the aftermath of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The little town celebrated with a fervor that might have surprised those who remembered the hostility that greeted the arrival of armed volunteers four years earlier. Music, oratory, and ringing bells heralded the triumph. “Cairo was a blaze of light and the citizens turned out in great numbers, manifesting their joy over the news of our late victories by loud, long, and earnest cheers,” The Chicago Tribune informed its readers.

The little river town had good reason to celebrate. Despite floods, mud, and disease, Cairo played a critical role in the Union victory. 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Robert B. Mitchell is the author of Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age. He is finishing a book about James G. Blaine and Roscoe Conkling.

In 1866 Private Alexander Hunter, formerly of the 17th Virginia Infantry’s famed “Alexandria Riflemen,” wrote an illuminating personal account of his Civil War experiences, “Four Years in the Ranks.” That account was later used for Hunter’s popular “novel” Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, published in 1905, and was the source of the article “Crossing the Rubicon” in America’s Civil War’s September 2021 issue, which recounted the experiences of the cocky, daring “High Private” at Second Manassas, Ox Hill (Chantilly), and during the Army of Northern Virginia’s march to Sharpsburg, Md., in August–September 1862.

The pages from Hunter’s 1866 manuscript on his time with the Alexandria Riflemen (Company A) are mostly missing for the Battle of Antietam (known better to Southerners as the Battle of Sharpsburg). Possibly the relevant pages were taken out to be used, and then misplaced, for Hunter’s articles in the Southern Historical Society Papers in 1882-83 (“A High Private’s Sketch of Sharpsburg,” Volumes 10–11) and later a shorter version, titled “The Battle of Antietam,” in SHSP for 1903’s Volume 31. His colorful writings of the Army of Northern Virginia’s attempted liberation of Maryland from Federal control ranged from humorous to horrific.

As with many veterans, story details could change over the years. Hunter was no exception, as he wrote in the decades following the war mildly conflicting accounts about the combat south of Sharpsburg late on September 17. Published below is an assortment of Hunter’s writings of that period, with paragraph breaks added in places to help readability.

The night of September 14, 1862, in the wake of a bloody day of fighting at South Mountain, the worn-out and famished Alexander Hunter could do little more than collapse at an old sawmill on the side of the Sharpsburg Road. He would be awakened the following morning by his 17th Virginia comrades, marching to the west from Boonsboro. The 17th had become a shell of itself: just 46 muskets and nine officers from a regiment that only a year earlier had boasted 880 men. These enduring veterans were part of James Longstreet’s old “First Brigade,” now commanded by Brig. Gen. James Kemper—a brigade, Hunter would write, whose strength had fallen to merely 320 effectives from 2,800 or so men four months earlier.

[T]he brigade marched toward Sharpsburg. Squads from the different companies obtained permission to forage for themselves and comrades. Being the only private left in my company, I joined two expert foragers of Company H….

On our way across the field we stopped at a fine looking mansion… [and] knocked at the door—there was no response, and then after waiting awhile…we walked in…to our astonishment [it] was entirely deserted….Not a thing had been taken away, the parlor door was open, and all the elegancies of the drawing room were scattered about, and not a soul near[.]

[I]f I had been skeptical before of an early battle, this hasty abandonment would have convinced me of that fact….[T]here sat the cat on the window-sill; indeed the home-life had been so recent within the house that it was difficult to realize that our hostess’s step would not at any moment sound upon the stairs and her voice be heard in greeting.

We had no time to linger, the warning notes of the cannon reverberating in our ears while we were in search of something to eat. The cupboard, like that of an ancient miser, was empty; so was the kitchen, hence we went to the spring and filled our canteens with ice-cold water, glad to get it if nothing more substantial….

I went to the dairy, inside was…several buckets and cans of milk, over which the rich yellow cream had already risen…that had been placed there in the morning. Up in the loft were ranged barrels of cider and Brandy—having about half a dozen canteens with me I filled them equally with the three fluids, after drinking as much as I could….An animated discussion took place. The whole squad, except the sergeant, wanted to carry the barrel and leave everything else behind….

The discussion waxed high, and to end the matter the sergeant stove in the head of the barrel with the butt of his musket, and the precious liquid that would have made glad for a time at least, the whole brigade, poured in a useless stream upon the floor….[I] pursued my course onward considerably stimulated. I could not help wondering, what in the world made those persons leave so suddenly. I looked around, no enemy in sight, and they certainly weren’t leaving on our account, for we had had possession of this part of the country for the last three days. Anyhow I felt deeply grateful for there [sic] leaving their Brandy & milk, to say nothing of the luscious grapes, which hung in clusters from their vines, and I hereby thank them—be they Yank, or Reb….

Long and lovingly were many lips glued to the mouths of those canteens, and honestly the owner’s health was drunk [to], not asking or even caring whether he was friend or foe; our Colonel [Montgomery] Corse blessed us as he took a long, lover-like kiss from the mouth of my canteen, I intended saving some in case I was wounded in the coming battle, but when the vessel was returned to me there was not a drop left.

Recalled Brig. Gen. David Rumph Jones, Hunter’s division commander: “[O]n the morning of the 15th….My command took possession of the heights in front of [facing east] and to the right [south side of the Boonsboro Pike] of the town being the extreme right of our whole line…my entire command of six brigades comprised only 2,430 men.”

Late in the evening the column halted near Sharpsburg, a little village nestling at the bottom of the hills, a simple country hamlet that none outside, save perhaps the postmaster, ever heard of before, and yet which in one day awoke to find itself famous, and the hills around it historic. This tiny town was a quiet, cool, still place—like the locality where Rip Van Winkle lived his days….

The hamlet was deserted now…not a soul was to be seen, the setting sun tinged the windows with its glowing rays, and made more vivid the dark background of the high hills beyond…ah, many eyes, all unconscious, looked their last upon the glowing incandescence as they stood on the crest watching the bright luminary go down.

Jones’ brigades commanded by Kemper and Brig. Gen. Thomas F. Drayton moved into the vicinity where Jacob Avey’s farm sat, on the southeast edge of town. The 80-acre Avey Farm had an orchard of more than 30 trees, pastureland, and to the west a cornfield (about 100 yards wide and 300 yards long) that was on high ground near the Harpers Ferry Road.

The Avey residence was the only home on the south side of Sharpsburg’s southernmost street. The Avey home sits on the west side of the Rohrersville Road; the thoroughfare that runs out of town through a slight valley to the southeast to Burnside Bridge—the modern-day road has been altered substantially from the original roadbed.

Running somewhat perpendicularly from, and generally south out of the ravine to higher ground, was a long fence, roughly 300 yards of stone. As the ridge crested southward, the fence changed to post-and-rail, continuing another 200 yards. Drayton’s Brigade was positioned behind the stone portion of the Avey Farm fence, and to its right Kemper’s Brigade had the post-and-rail section.

The 17th of September was a bright & beautiful, sweet, morning,…the sun arose in cloudless brilliancy, and all nature appeared to have donned her gaudiest colors, so rich…in the autumn robing…its beauties were soon lost on us though, for as the morning advanced, and as we felt our limp haversacks, the sole absorbing thought crossed each man’s mind of where is our breakfast coming from? …Had we been well fed, and with nothing to do, there were none that could not have lain at ease, and enjoyed the fine view—with the fair garden country spreading out all around, looking at its best.

But sentiment could find no place in a man who had nothing but the memory of what he had eaten to fill his stomach…a painful fact that unless something was done at once, we would all have to fight on empty stomachs. The men began to grumble…and a long line of famine-drawn faces and gaunt figures sat there in the ranks, chewing straws merely to keep their jaws from rusting and stiffening entirely.

The storm so long gathering was about to burst, but the men having become callous and indifferent from extreme hunger, thought that only in case of a victory they would find plenty of the enemy’s haversacks to satisfy the cravings….

At last as our patience was becoming rapidly exhausted, and the animal in our nature was becoming fearfully developed….Just about this time a cow—a foolish, innocent, confiding animal…with a pathetic look in her big eyes…—not knowing soldiers’ ways, came grazing up to our lines; a dozen bullets crashed through her skull, and a score of knives were soon at work….Everything was eaten, even her tail, that was but an hour ago calmly and easily switching the flies from her back. Some soldier skinned it, burnt it over the fire, and picked it clean in a few minutes….

The Yankees were preparing for their battle. On the heights, some two thousand yards away, fresh batteries would take their position and open; ours would reply, and so, as the hours of the forenoon wore on, the war clamor grew greater, and soon on our left the splashes of musketry, and then the steady, rattling discharges showed the battle was fairly joined.

The order was given to “Fall in” and our skeleton brigade took up their position on top of a high hill behind a post-and-rail fence…we slept like logs, though the fight at the Dunker Church on our left was raging in all its fury.

We moved several times in the course of the day, but at noon the final position was selected behind a post-and-rail fence near where we first stopped.

The reports of the cannon were incessant and deafening: at times it seemed as if a hundred guns would explode simultaneously, and then run off at intervals into splendid file firing. No language can describe its awful grandeur. The thousand continuous volleys of musketry mingle in a grand roar of a great cataract, and together merging, seemed as if the earth was being destroyed by violence, the canopy of the battle’s fume, from this vast burning of gunpowder, rising above the battle-field in such thick clouds, that the sun looked down gloomy red in the sky, while the dust raised by the mass of men floated to the clouds…it seemed as if Hades had broken loose….

The 17th Virginia was positioned in view of Brig. Gen. Robert Toombs’ defense of the Rohrbach Bridge over Antietam Creek, which Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s 9th Corps finally broke through about 1 p.m.

Toombs’ brigade came rushing back, its lines broken, but its spirit and morale all right. The enemy are silent, but it is the calm that is but a prefix to a hurricane.

We made ready and expected to see the victorious Yankees following hard upon the heels of the retreating Rebels, but to our astonishment an hour or two of absolute inaction followed; no advance nor demonstrations were made in our front, but on the left the battle was raging as fiercely as ever. What could it mean, we asked each other, but none could solve the question….

It was now getting late in the afternoon, and the men were becoming cramped from lying in their constrained position; some were moving up and down, some stretching themselves, for there was a cessation of firing in our front—an interval of quiet. It was but a short time, for the guarded, stern, nervous voice of our commanding officer, calling, “Quick men, back to your posts!” sent every soldier into line. And then, as we waited, each man looked along the line—the slight, thin, frail line—stretched out beyond that crest to withstand the onset of solid ranks of blue, and felt his heart sink within him. Yet who could but not feel pride in such soldiers as these….They had kept up in this campaign solely by an unquenchable pride and indomitable will. As dirty, as gaunt, as tattered as they looked, they were “gentlemen.”

My! my! What a set of ragamuffins….It seemed as if every cornfield in Maryland had been robbed of its scarecrows and propped up against that fence. None had any underclothing. My costume consisted of a ragged pair of trousers, a stained, dirty jacket; an old slouch hat, the brim pinned up with a thorn; a begrimed blanket over my shoulder, a grease-smeared cotton haversack full of apples and corn, a cartridge box full and a musket. I was barefooted and had a stonebruise on each foot…but there was no one there who would not have been “run in” by the police had he appeared on the streets of any populous city, and would have been fined next day for undue exposure. Yet those grimy, sweaty, lean, ragged men were the flower of Lee’s army. Those tattered, starving, unkempt fellows were the pride of their sections….

All at once, an eight gun battery, detecting our position, tried to shell us out, preparatory to their infantry advance, and the air around was filled by the bursting iron.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Our battery [Captain James S. Brown’s Virginia “Wise Artillery” of four 6-pounders] took its place about twenty steps on our right; for our right flank was totally undefended. [The 7th and 24th Virginia Infantry were to Hunter’s right, but apparently out of his sight.]

Oh those long minutes that we lay with closed eyes, expecting mutilation and a shock of the plunging iron, with every breath we drew—would it never end? But it kept up for fully fifteen minutes, and the men clenched their jaws tight and never moved; a line of corpses could not have been more stirless.

The shells begin to sail over us as we close behind the fence, shrieking its wild song, a canzonet of carnage and death. These missiles howled like demons, and made us cower in the smallest possible space….But what is that infernal noise that makes the bravest duck their heads? That is a “Hotchkiss” shell….It is no more destructive than some other projectile, but there is a great deal in mere sound to work on men’s fears, and the moral effect of the Hotchkiss is powerful.

…a shell burst not ten feet above where [we] lay…and literally tore poor Appich, of Company E, to pieces, shattering his body terribly, and causing blood to spatter over many who lay around him. A quiver of the form, and then it remained still. Another Hotchkiss came screeching where we lay, and exploded, two more men were borne to the rear; still the line never moved or muttered a sound. The shells split all around, and knocked up dust until it sprinkled us so, that if it intended to keep the thing up, it threatened to bury the command alive.

At last! at last! the firing totally ceases, then the battery with us [Brown’s] limbered up and moved away, because, as they said, their ammunition was exhausted; but murmurs and curses loud and deep were heard from the brigade, who openly charged the battery with deserting them in the coming ordeal.

At 3 p.m., 8,500 Federals deploy in lines over three-quarters of a mile wide. On Hunter’s front are 940 troops from Colonel Harrison Fairchild’s New York brigade.

An ominous silence followed premonitory of the deluge….the infantrymen, who had lain there face downward, exposed to the iron hail, now arose….[Their] faces are pale, their features set, their hearts throbbing, their muscles strung like steel.

Soon came the singing of the minnies overhead. There is a peculiar tuneful pitch to the flight of these little leaden balls; a musical ear can study the different tones as they skin through space. A comrade lying next to me, an amateur musician of no mean merit spoke of this. Said he, “I caught the pitch of that minnie that just passed. It was a swell from E flat to F, and as it retrograded in the distance receded to D—a very pretty change.”

The hill in our front shut out all view, but the advancing enemy were close on us, they were coming up the hill, the loud tones of their officers, the clanking of their equipments, and the steady tramp of the approaching host was easily distinguishable….We could hear the rat-a-plan of their drums…

Then our Colonel [Corse] said in a quiet calm tone that was heard by all, “Steady lads, steady! They are coming. Ready!”

The warning click of the hammers raised as the guns are cocked, ran down the lines, a monetary solemn sound—for when you hear that the supreme moment has come.

We heard the commanding officer of the unseen foe give the order “Forward, march! Dress to the colors! Double-quick!”

Each man sighted his rifle about two feet above the crest, and then, with his finger on the trigger, waited until an advancing form came between the bead and the clear sky behind.

As we lay there with our eyes ranging along the musket barrels…we saw was the gilt eagle surmounted the pole, then the top of the flag, next the flutter of the Stars and Stripes itself slowly mounting—up it rose; then the tops of their blue caps in sight; still rising, the faces emerged; next a range of curious eyes appeared, then such a hurrah as only the Yankee troops could give broke the stillness, and they surged toward us. It was the only battle in which I ever engaged where the forms and faces of the foe were plainly visible.

“Keep cool, men—don’t fire yet,” shouted Colonel Corse; and such was their perfect discipline that not a gun replied. “Don’t fire men until give the word,”

Less brave, less seasoned [Federal] troops would have faltered before the array of deadly tubes leveled at them, and at the recumbent line, silent, motionless and terrible, but if there was any giving away we did not see it….Not until they were well up in view did Colonel Corse break the silence, and his voice was a shriek as he ordered: “Fire!”

[T]he forty-six muskets exploded at once, and sent a leaden shower full in the breasts of the attacking force, not over sixty yards distant. It staggered them—it was a murderous fire—and many fell; some of them struck for the rear, but the majority sent a stunning volley at us, and but for that fence there would have been hardly a man left alive. 

The rails, the posts, were shattered by the balls; but still it was a deadly one—fully one-half of the Seventeenth lay in their tracks; the balance that is left load and fire again and again, and for about ten minutes the unequal struggle is kept up….

Every man in our line began to load his musket with frenzied haste…and lay silent and expectant; we could easily hear the [Federal] officers expostulating and urging the men to reform, and they made a rush a second time, but it was without heart, and when we poured in a close fire, they broke in panic and disappeared, officers and men, over the brow of the hill. We had no time to feel jubilant, for the rattling of drums in our front, the measured tread, the clanking of accouterments showed that the Yankee reserves were coming up. We braced ourselves for the shock, and every man looked backward, hoping to see reinforcements, but not a soul could be seen between us and the village….

We had barely loaded and capped the muskets when the blue line came with a rush….

Before we could load a third time[,] the two lines of battle of the Federals, now comingled as one solid bank of men, poured a volley into us that settled the matter….

I can never forget that moment; it was photographed indelibly on my mind; the sun glanced and gleamed on the level barrels, and the black tubes of the muzzles, not over twenty feet away, turned on us with deadly meaning. I crouched to the ground, and fortunately I was behind a post instead of a rail; I shut my eyes; a second of silence, then a stunning volley, the crash of splintered wood, a purple smoke, smell of sulphur, the spat and spud of the bullet, and the Seventeenth Virginia was wiped out….Our Colonel falls wounded; every officer except five of the Seventeenth is shot down; of the forty-six muskets thirty-five are dead, dying or struck….

Fairchild’s Federals suffer heavy casualties during the engagement, too, with total losses reaching nearly 50 percent. Also of note was the capture of the 103th New York’s regimental flag by a 17th Virginia lieutenant—reportedly the only Union flag captured at Sharpsburg.

Just as the bluecoats were climbing the fence I threw down my musket and raised my hand in token of surrender….Two of them stopped…the rest of their line hurried towards the village. As we turned to leave we saw our whole brigade striking for the rear…and the enemy swept on triumphantly, with nothing to bar his progress…

There was but one of our regiment who was taken prisoner besides myself, [Charles A.] Gunnell [of D]….Two of our victors…kindly allowed us to walk up our line to see who was killed. It was a sad, sad sight; Colonel Corse lay at full length on his face, motionless and still; I thought at the time he was dead; I stepped across the dead body of our brave color-sergeant [color-corporal Washington Harper], and near him with a bullet through his forehead, lay that gallant, handsome soldier, Lieut. Littleton, of the Loudoun Guards….

My guard said to me: “It’s all up with you Johnnie; look there.” I turned and gazed on the scene. Long lines of blue were coming like the surging billows of the ocean. The bluecoats were wild with excitement, and their measured hurrah, so different from our piercing yell, rose above the thunder of their batteries beyond the bridge. I thought the guard was right, that it was all up with us, and our whole army would be captured…. it seemed to us as if Sharpsburg was to be our Waterloo.

The sudden arrival of Maj. Gen. A.P. Hill’s Light Division completely changes the narrative. Hill and his men had left Harpers Ferry early that morning and had traversed roughly 17 miles to reach the endangered Confederate right flank beginning about 2:30 p.m.

We, Yank and Reb, were sitting down taking a sociable smoke when all at once we were startled as if touched by an electric shock…a change takes place in this panorama; a marvelous change, before our very eyes…we saw emerging from a cornfield a long line of gray, musket barrels scintillating in the rays of the declining sun and the Southern battle flags gleaming redly against the dark background. They seemed to have struck the Federal advance on the flank.

It appeared to us as if all the demons of hell had been unloosed—all the dogs of war unleashed to prey upon and rend each other; long volleys of musketry vomited their furious discharges of pestilential lead; the atmosphere was crowded by the exploding shells; baleful fires gleamed through the foliage…while the concussion of the cannon seemed to make the hills tremble and totter.

The disordered ranks of blue come rushing back in disorder, while the Rebels followed fast, and then bullet-hitting around us caused guards and prisoners to decamp. 

“What does this mean?” we asked.

At last a prisoner, a wounded Rebel officer, was being supported back to the rear, and we asked him, and the reply came back: “…those troops fighting the Yankees now are A.P. Hill’s division.” How the Southerner’s face glowed as he told us this; what a light leaped into his eyes, wounded as he was.

Still forward came the wave of gray, still backward receded the billows of blue, heralded by warning hiss of the bullets, the sparkling of the rifle flashes, the purplish vapor settling like a veil over the lines, the mingled hurrahs and wild yells, and the base accompaniment over on our left of the hoarse cannonading. Back we went, stopping on…every rise of the ground to watch the battle….We were thinking of that line of motionless comrades lying on the crest of the hill down beside the fence; and wondering if the sun was lighting up their pallid faces.

Night came at last, stopping the carnage of the dreadful day, and the tender, pitiful stars shone in the vast dome above and looked down upon the scene of desolation and death. 

Robert Lee Hodge writes from Old Hickory, Tenn. He can be reached via robertleehodge.com

The train still rolls through Thomasville, N.C., several times a day. When it approaches, the howl of its horn is met with bells and flashing red lights. The streets rattle briefly, and it’s not hard to imagine the small railroad town bustling with excitement in its heyday. A large chair sculpture stands sentinel next to the tracks. It’s the centerpiece of town, paying homage to the furniture industry that sustained it for decades.

It was industry, as well, that made Thomasville, established in 1852, a vital contributor to the Civil War effort. Shelly Brothers & Company Boot Factory stood directly across the tracks from the spot on which “The Big Chair” stands today and supplied boots to the Confederate Army. Governor Zebulon Vance exempted its 24 male workers from conscription because of their importance to the war. Its competitor, Lines Shoe Factory, operated out of nine buildings a few blocks away. Its owners and many of its employees enlisted in the Confederate Army at the outset of war. John W. Thomas, the city’s founder, helped keep the factory running in their absence and contracted with the state for that outlet to produce and supply shoes for Confederate soldiers, as well. The town’s Pinnix Tobacco Factory also chipped in and made twists of chewing tobacco for civilians and soldiers until the building was converted for use as a makeshift hospital for wounded men after the nearby Battle of Averasboro.

Just a few square miles in size, historic Thomasville is walkable, and recent revitalization efforts have given visitors much to peruse. The abandoned Thomasville Furniture Industries mill has been restored, renovated, and converted to lofts. Many of the storefronts that line Main Street and its intersecting avenues have been repopulated with boutique shops, antique stores, breweries, and eateries—including an ice cream shoppe! Civil War Trails signs and other markers scattered along the avenue share the city’s history for all its enthusiastic visitors.

The Depot 
44 W. Main St.

Established in 1852, Thomasville was a relatively new community with just more than 300 residents when the war broke out. Many of its men enlisted in the Confederate Army and rushed off to war. The railroad carried vital supplies through town, and toward the end of the war it brought wounded soldiers sent here to convalesce. The station house is one of the oldest frame depot buildings left in the state. Construction on it began just after the Civil War, and it functioned as a depot until 1912. Today it serves as the town’s visitors center.

Thomas Statue
28 W. Main St.

John W. Thomas, who represented the area in the state legislature, laid out Thomasville in 1852 on the proposed route of the North Carolina Railroad. Three years later, the line was completed to the new town, and the first train passed through on January 20, 1856. Thomas contributed greatly to the town’s growth, and at the outset of the Civil War it had 308 residents, a female seminary, a tobacco factory, and two shoe factories. The statue here to Thomas was erected in 2002, and a time capsule was placed in its base to be opened at the town’s bicentennial celebration in 2052.

Clocktower and Fountain
Main Street and Salem Street

The fountain and park, across the street from The Big Chair, serve as a town center, which includes a Civil War Trails sign, memorial to military veterans, and one to local resident Nona Ingram Welborn who oversaw the park and fountain’s creation. During the Civil War, the L.L. Thomas Hotel stood across the tracks from this spot and served as a makeshift headquarters for the hospital system setup in Thomasville after the March 1865 Battle of Averasboro and the subsequent Battle of Bentonville.

Baptist Church
11 Randolph St.

After the battles of Averasboro and Bentonville in March 1865, Thomasville was transformed into a hospital depot. Wounded Confederate soldiers and some Federal prisoners were brought here by train. Hospitals were established in the tobacco warehouse and in several local churches, including the Baptist Church. Dr. Simon Baruch of South Carolina, later an authority on hygiene and water therapy, treated the men.

Thomasville Cemetery 
205 Memorial Park Dr.

The makeshift hospitals in Thomasville treated hundreds of wounded and sick soldiers with much success, and only 34 patients died in the city—among them 26 Confederates, four Federals, and four unknowns. All were buried in a common plot in the city cemetery. In 1908, a Georgian who had served in the hospital depot led a successful fundraising effort to provide headstones for those who had died, as a tribute to the sacrifices of the soldiers and the dedication of the community that served them.

Antiques and Eats
12 Commerce St.

No Civil War road trip is complete without local eats…and antiques. Thomasville has both, including a multi-level antique emporium that also houses JJ’s Side Street Deli, which serves a Hawaiian ham and jam sandwich with a reputation that precedes itself. Enjoy!

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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