On a cloudless, deep-blue sky afternoon, I drive 45 miles south of Nashville to Columbia for a visit with one of my favorite people, Campbell Ridley. He’s an 80-year-old semi-retired farmer, U.S. Army veteran, rock & roll devotee, and storyteller with a wit and sense of humor as sharp as the tip of a new bayonet.

“How are you feeling?” I ask my friend minutes after arriving at his farm office.

Aside from mourning the recent death of Barney—his nine-year-old barn cat—Ridley feels fine, a fact he attributes to “clean living and cheap beer.” He wears tan Carhartts, brown work boots, a blue-checkered shirt and, appropriately, a baseball cap with the words “Life Is Good” across the front.

Ridley’s roots run deep here in Maury County, one of the wealthiest counties in the state before the Civil War. He’s the great-great-grandnephew of Gideon Pillow, the Confederate brigadier general, Mexican War veteran, politician, lawyer and, before the war, one of the foremost slaveholders in the county. Ridley’s paternal great grandfather, who depended on mules for farming and was one of the county’s leading citizens, earned the nickname “Mule King”—Columbia, in fact, has long been touted as the “Mule Capital of the World.”

When I need my history fix and a good laugh, I visit Ridley. We’ve sat together inside magnificent St. John’s Church—a slave-constructed plantation church built under the direction of Leonidas Polk and his brothers. It stands roughly a mile and a half southwest along Mount Pleasant Pike, across the road from the mostly empty field where Polk—an Episcopalian bishop and future Confederate lieutenant general—lived in a mansion called Ashwood Hall. There, we have admired the two massive gingko trees Polk imported eons ago from Japan and have poked about what little remains of brick kitchen for the mansion, destroyed by fire in 1874 and never rebuilt.

Today, though, we will explore far more humble construction. Near Ridley’s farm office and the east fork of Greenlick Creek stand three ramshackle slave cabins. “The Quarters,” Ridley calls the property, which is owned by his daughter, who lives in New Mexico, and a friend.

“I’ll take care of this until she puts me in a nursing home,” he says, half-jokingly.

In a way, these cabins are as much a part of Ridley as the land he has farmed for decades in Columbia. As late as the 1990s, he tells me, these humble structures served as homes for poor Black farmhands and others. Many of them worked for the Ridleys.

“The woman who raised me lived here,” Ridley says as we examine one of the rickety cabins. Her name was Katie, a “wonderful” lady who had a gift for cooking fried chicken. The Ridley family employed her for more than three decades.

At another cabin yards away, ancient white paint clings to exposed exterior logs. Four modern wooden posts strain to prop up its porch overhang above two large, well-worn walkway stones. On an exterior wall, a half-dozen old hangers dangle from a rusty nail. Above us, a corrugated tin roof keeps nature at bay.

“That’s been there as long as I can remember,” Ridley says.

What a contrast these antebellum structures make with Clifton Place, the brick manor house on the hill 750 yards away. In rich late-fall sunlight, the mansion almost seems to glow. Peek through trees from the road leading to Ridley’s farm office and you’ll spot its imposing Ionic columns and impressive limestone porch.

From 1839 until the early years of the war, when the U.S. Army confiscated the property, the mansion served as centerpiece of Clifton Place, Pillow’s plantation that encompassed hundreds of acres. His slaves—most of whom lived in cabins at “The Quarters”—generated his wealth by planting and harvesting cotton, hemp, corn, and other crops as well as tending to his cattle, sheep, and hogs.

As one of Tennessee’s leading citizens and one of the wealthiest men in the South, Pillow moved in elite social circles. He counted James K. Polk, the 11th U.S. president, among his friends. Following the end of his presidency in 1849, Polk dined at Clifton Place with Gideon and his wife, Mary. Pillow himself dabbled in national politics, opposing secession initially in 1861 before relenting.

As a military man, though, political general Pillow failed to measure up. During the Mexican War, the twice-wounded Pillow angered superiors—including Winfield Scott—for his self-promotion. No surprise, perhaps, given a massive painting of a heroic Pillow in military uniform greeted visitors in the front entrance of Clifton Place.

During the Civil War, Pillow abandoned his post at Fort Donelson in February 1862, sneaking away from the beleaguered garrison under the cover of darkness before the Union Army under Ulysses S. Grant accepted the Confederates’ surrender. At the Battle of Stones River nearly 10 months later, Pillow led a brigade with mixed results. True or not, a story of the 55-year-old officer cowering behind a tree during the battle has stained his résumé ever since.

Unsurprisingly, Scott—overall commander of the U.S. Army when the Civil War broke out—did not count himself among Pillow’s fans. In his 1864 memoirs, “Old Fuss And Feathers” described Pillow as “amiable, and possessed of some acuteness, but the only person I have ever known who was wholly indifferent in the choice between truth and falsehood, honesty and dishonesty; ever as ready to attain an end by the one as the other, and habitually boastful of acts of cleverness at the total sacrifice of moral character.”

As we walk from cabin to cabin, Ridley reflects only briefly on his connection to Pillow and the slaves who toiled for him.

“Just part of history,” he says.

Ridley and I gingerly step into a cabin, home for Pillow’s field slaves. More than a year ago, he had brush and other vegetation cleared from around these remarkable survivors, giving us easy access.

Each cabin is roughly 15-by-15 feet with a small loft accessed by a rickety ladder. Each has a post-Civil War room out back. I’ve visited the site a half-dozen times but see something new each time.

Steps ahead of me, Ridley shines the narrow beam from his flashlight on a fireplace, revealing bricks and small dirt piles in an otherwise barren room. Fragments of newspaper—used as insulation by postwar inhabitants—speckle the walls. A dour-looking baseball player stares from a March 1937 newspaper sports section. A decrepit floor, victimized by time and nature, crunches beneath my feet.

In another cabin, we find more reminders of the 20th century: a swinging blade, peeling wallpaper adorned with blue- and aqua-colored floral designs, a chipped ax handle, and a barren clothes hook on a door. Pasted to the back wall is a fragment of The New York Times from decades ago.

“Life in America,” the partial headline reads.

From the era of slavery, though, we find no visible evidence they were here. No fragments of 19th-century pottery or shards of glass. No messages etched on bare, wooden walls.No privy to mine for secrets. Much is left for our imaginations.

And so, I wonder: Who were these men, women, and children?

What treatment did they receive from Pillow?

What were their names?

Perhaps the 1870 U.S. census provides us hints. “Sarah” and “Randall”—listed as farm hands for the Pillow family in that census—appear on deeds as far back as the 1840s.

I wonder what ultimately became of the slaves who toiled for Pillow. Were they buried in the nearby cemetery in the woods—the remote graveyard at the base of Ginger Hill that Ridley showed me months ago? Or were they buried in St. John’s Church Cemetery, far in the back, away from the final resting places of the White folks? Or perhaps they ended up in one of the scores of family cemeteries that dot the county.

And I wonder what will become of these historic treasures near the east fork of Greenlick Creek. Ridley wants to save the cabins, but that probably would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and more expertise than he has.

What would a professional archaeologist unearth here?

I also wonder what will happen to Clifton Place, where Ridley’s paternal grandfather lived until 1949. It remained part of the Ridley family for years afterward.

“I watched television in there for the first time in my life,” Ridley says. He recalls family gatherings in the 12-room Greek Revival-style mansion and 16-foot-high ceilings.

In 1972, a Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate named John R. Neal purchased the property from the Ridley family. He and his wife, Linda, aimed to restore the mansion, but their yearslong effort proved daunting. “We saw the white columns, the Gone With The Wind atmosphere,” she told a reporter in 1986. “We didn’t see the cracks, the structural problems.”

The Clifton Place grounds include the original detached kitchen, carriage house, ice house, law office, spring house, blacksmith, and quarters for “house” slaves. In the Pillow-era smokehouse stands the original poplar chopping block and “ham logs”—hollowed out poplar logs for the salting of hams. The smoky aroma in the small brick building still tantalizes.

“The most complete 19th-century plantation complex anywhere,” a researcher once called Clifton Place.

John Neal died in 2018, but Clifton Place remains with his family. The mansion, however, has stood unoccupied (and inaccessible to the public) for more than a decade. Like the nearby slave cabins, it too could become nothing but a memory without significant preservation efforts.

Time may not be on the side of people like us who relish places like this. In an empty field across Mount Pleasant Pike from Clifton Place, developers have plans for residential housing. “750 houses on 450 acres,” Ridley says.

Oh my, what will I see here a decade from now?

John Banks is author of three Civil War books. Check out his latest, A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing). He also can be visited on Facebook at John Banks’ Civil War blog.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Civil War Times.

Anyone who explores Civil War–era history should pay close attention to how people at the time understood and used key words. “Freedom” ranks among the most important of such words. Americans of the 21st century almost always address questions relating to freedom within a context of slavery and emancipation. This approach often yields insights regarding mid–19th century people, across racial lines, who found themselves challenged by the war’s life-changing events. Yet such assumptions about how the White population in the free states used “freedom” also can lead us astray. For a broad spectrum of the loyal citizenry of the United States, including almost all Democrats, the word could have conjured images not of ending slavery but of guaranteeing and extending their own liberty and freedom in a nation where, politically and economically, the cards were not stacked irrevocably against common people.

George F. Root’s song The Battle-Cry of Freedom offers an opportunity to explore this phenomenon. Among the most popular compositions for loyal soldiers and civilians, its sheet music sold more than 500,000 copies in the 19th century. Root’s lyrics not only shed light on what mattered to those who sang and listened to them, but they also demonstrate the importance of ascribing contemporary meanings to language deployed by the Civil War generation. “Freedom” is the key word in the song’s title. A reasonable conclusion might be that Root, writing in the summer of 1862, authored a call for White men to enlist and end the practice of human bondage by force of arms. After all, Congress already had outlawed slavery in the District of Columbia and the Federal territories (on April 16 and June 19, 1862, respectively), and discussion of more general emancipation grew increasingly heated inside and outside Congress.

However plausible, such an interpretation fails to account for the origins of the song and its great appeal in the United States. “I heard of President Lincoln’s second call for troops one afternoon while reclining on a lounge in my brother’s house,” Root recalled in his memoirs. “Immediately I started a song in my mind,” he continued, “words and music together: ‘Yes, we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again, / Shouting the battle-cry of freedom!’” Root thought about the piece through the rest of the day and finished it the following morning. “From there the song went into the army,” he remembered with obvious pride, “and the testimony in regard to its use in the camp and on the march, and even on the field of battle, from soldiers and officers, up to generals, and even to the good President himself, made me thankful that if I could not shoulder a musket in defense of my country I could serve her in this way.”

Emancipation almost certainly did not preoccupy Root as he composed what he termed a “rallying song.” Lincoln’s call for the governors of loyal states to supply 300,000 3-year volunteers, dated July 1, 1862, and released to the press the next day, sought to boost volunteering across the United States. National conscription lay many months in the future, as did large-scale recruitment of African Americans, so anything that might help place more White men in uniform during the summer of 1862 would assist the Lincoln administration and the war effort.

For the song’s targeted audience, “Union” provided the hook, with preservation of existing American freedom as one of the obvious benefits of vanquishing the Rebels. The chorus conveyed the principal message: “The Union forever, Hurrah, boys, Hurrah! / Down with the traitor, Up with the star; / While we rally round the flag, boys, / Rally once again, Shouting the battle-cry of Freedom.” Echoing Daniel Webster’s famous call for “Liberty and Union, now and forever,” the chorus supported the idea of a perpetual Union so dear to Lincoln and countless others.

The second verse tied prospective volunteers to White men who had enlisted earlier and suffered casualties that left military units shorthanded: “We are springing to the call / Of our brothers gone before, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom; / And we’ll fill our vacant ranks / With a million free men more, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.”

The third verse invited all classes of men to step forward with a promise of rights within the Union: “We will welcome to our numbers / The loyal, true, and brave, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom, / And although he may be poor, / Not a man shall be a slave, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.” The last verse spoke to a national effort uniting geographical sections: “So we’re springing to the call / From the East and from the West, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom, / And we’ll hurl the rebel crew / From the land we love the best, / Shouting the battle cry of freedom.”

Root’s lyrics brilliantly engaged the pool of military-age White men in the loyal states—“free men” who, by taking up arms, would guarantee continued “freedom” and prevent their domination by southern slaveholders. These words appealed on the basis of a free labor vision of the American nation with a Constitution and representative form of government designed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” Many in the North believed that slaveholding oligarchs denied such a path, and thus real freedom, to non-slaveholding White people in the South, and that the Slave Power’s inordinate influence in the antebellum federal government had presented a continuing obstacle to greater expansion of political and economic opportunity.

Root translated Webster’s soaring rhetoric into a paean to Union with an infectious melody and well-crafted lyrics that spread through army camps and patriotic gatherings on the civilian front. As the war progressed, emancipation joined restoring the Union as a stated national goal, and Black men entered the army in significant numbers. Those striking changes meant that Root’s memorable song could summon thoughts of both preserving freedom long enjoyed by White Americans and expanding freedom to millions of African Americans who had suffered under the tyranny of slavery.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Civil War Times magazine.

On the first page of Conflict of Command, George Rable posits, “People have largely made up their mind about George McClellan—and not in the general’s favor; nor do they seem amenable to rethinking their position.” He then spends 336 pages essentially proving the point. Uninterested in “refighting the military campaigns,” he instead sets out to examine the relationship between Lincoln and his ill-starred general.

The two men, both ambitious, shared a deep commitment to the Union’s preservation and possessed different, but potentially complementary abilities. An adept politician, Lincoln lacked the military know-how of McClellan, who contrariwise proved to be consistently obtuse politically. Although the two men met 57 times over a six-month period early in the war, their potential for an advantageous partnership went unrealized.

On one hand, that failure rested on fundamental strategic disagreements. McClellan advocated one big, meticulously planned campaign to win the war with overwhelming force—hence his Peninsula Campaign of 1862. He opposed emancipation and confiscation, and proved unwilling to spend the number of lives ultimately paid for Union success. Lincoln, pressured by the Radicals for quick military successes, was ever-conscious of the political costs of a general he and many others came to see as far too cautious and secretive.

But the two men, wary and reticent with one another, also failed to connect on a personal level. The well-born McClellan’s frequent excoriations of Lincoln as an uneducated rube in his letters to his wife reveal a deep disdain for his commander-in-chief, as did his frequent refusal to share his military thinking. Lincoln, for his part, was often indecisive, especially early in the war, and nettled the general with his often-unannounced visits to discuss strategy.

But McClellan did some things well. Adept at organizing the Army of the Potomac, he endeared himself to his troops by displaying genuine concern for their well-being. He also insisted on humane treatment for civilians entrapped by the war. Furthermore, Rable notes, whatever his shortcomings, “The replacements for McClellan as both general in chief and commander of the Army of the Potomac proved less than satisfactory.”

The general’s greatest moment may have been the manner in which he accepted Lincoln’s decision in November 1862 to replace him with a reluctant Ambrose Burnside. Rather than accede to credible talk among his junior officers of marching on Washington to force his restoration to command, McClellan quashed such plans and withdrew, amid considerable fanfare, never again to lead Union troops.

Perhaps one of his contemporaries best understood why a man of such promise came to be seen as a failure. “The critics of McClellan do not consider this vast and cruel responsibility,” observed former President Ulysses S. Grant in 1878. “McClellan was a young man when this devolved upon him, and if he did not succeed, it was because the conditions of success were so trying. If McClellan had gone into the war as Sherman, Thomas, or Meade, had fought his way along and up, I have no reason to suppose that he would not have won as high a distinction as any of us.”

Conflict of Command

George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War

By George C. Rable, LSU Press, 2023

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The exploration of unusual subjects—anything from flora and fauna to the effect of weather on the fighting—has increased greatly for Civil War audiences in recent years. Scott Hippensteel, professor of earth sciences at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte, is among those leading this continual growth. After addressing geology in Civil War combat situations in a previous book, Dr. Hippensteel has now delivered a detailed and, yes, fascinating look at how sedimentary rocks and sediment in general affected both combat and combat preparation during the conflict in Sand, Science, and the Civil War: Sedimentary Geology and Combat (University of Georgia Press, 2023). He recently sat down with us to discuss his book in more detail. 

What inspired you to write about geology in the Civil War?

I grew up near Gettysburg and spent countless hours as a youngster hiking around the battlefield and climbing through the boulders. As a little kid, Devil’s Den was like a giant jungle gym, but as I grew older, I became curious about both the military history and the natural history. 

Twenty years later, while working on my graduate degrees in geology at the University of Delaware, I began searching for ancient hurricane deposits in the salt marshes on the southeastern Atlantic coast. This often took me to the most stable portions of the islands, the parts of the shoreline that had best resisted erosion. These were durable sites that also attracted military engineers. I saw an overlap between my research sites and permanent coastal fortifications. 

I started writing about the influence of geology on the Civil War after visiting the Stones River Battlefield on a “family” vacation (my wife and daughter now insist that we travel internationally exclusively to avoid such battlefields). At the center of the Union line there is an outcrop of limestone that formed perfect natural trenches and proved a significant defensive force-multiplier for the Federals. These unusual formations also slowed the Confederate pursuit and hindered their movement of artillery after the position had been abandoned. The link between geology and the battle was quite clear, but it didn’t appear this link had ever been explored in detail, other than by a few geologists at Gettysburg. 

Describe your earlier efforts.

My first book, Rocks and Rifles: The Influence of Geology on Combat and Tactics During the American Civil War, is subdivided based on rock type, and it discusses the geology of different battlefields across the country and how the nature of the rocks influenced the tactics and strategy used in each fight. In 2021, I wrote about the use of science in interpreting history with Myths of the Civil War: The Fact, Fiction, and Science behind the Civil War’s Most-Told Stories. My latest book is more focused on sediments and sedimentary rocks and the fighting along the coastlines and Mississippi River Valley. 

What lessons of sediment and sand were learned during the Civil War?

No military personnel during the war had any training in geology, and no one had ever connected geology, terrain, and tactics. The greatest student of sedimentary geology—and later the greatest proponent of the use of sand in defensive fortifications—was Quincy Gillmore, but it was a costly lesson because he failed to appreciate the value of beach sand before attacking Battery Wagner on Morris Island.

Gillmore combined a massive bombardment from land-based heavy artillery with a cross-fire from naval vessels to greatly weaken (he thought) the fort before launching repeated land assaults, all of which failed. Upon later inspecting the abandoned fortification, he saw that the effects of the thousands of exploding shells were, in his words, “astonishingly slight” and “trifling.” 

To demonstrate the strength of sand, which results from intergrain friction between tiny, hard, sharp quartz fragments, Gillmore ordered “penetration” tests, firing all sorts of small arms at typical defensive material like timber, muddy sod, and sandbags. The sand proved best at slowing incoming projectiles in every case, and sand proved even more effective at diminishing the shock effects of larger exploding shells. Sand also doesn’t lose any effectiveness when repeatedly struck by bullets or shells, unlike wood or brick. 

European countries later began using iron in their shore fortifications to deal with advances in technology and more effective naval artillery. The cash-poor United States couldn’t afford these upgrades and stuck with sand. Massive reinforced concrete structures buried in sand seemed to be the most cost-effective manner to protect our shorelines. 

Tell us about Dennis Hart Mahan. How did his parapet construction assist in warfare?

Mahan was trained as an engineer and instructed many officers from both sides of the conflict while he was chairman of West Point’s Engineering Department. His work on the design and construction of fortifications was a required part of the curriculum for 50 years. Mahan’s greatest contribution was his ability to clearly disseminate many of the lessons taken from European battlefields, including the use of combined arms and the design of permanent and field fortifications. 

His Treatise on Field Fortifications outlines in great detail the proper plans for constructing a parapet for defensive purposes. He stated plainly that all “intrenchments” or fieldworks had three general purposes. First, it was critical that all works provide defensive cover. Second, they should provide improved firing positions for the defenders. Finally, they should prove a hindrance for the attacking force or “present an obstacle to the enemy’s progress.” The simplest way to meet all three criteria was to dig a long ditch and use the excavated sediment to construct an embankment, or parapet. The ditch provides an obstacle, and the parapet provides both an obstacle and protection and, if constructed properly and of the correct materials, an enhanced and raised firing position. 

Mahan thought of his earthen fortifications as both a defensive force multiplier and a structure that could be critical for offensive tactics as well. Sheltered defending troops could provide a decisive counterattack after a failed assault against their works, striking the retreating enemy when their command structure was in disarray. 

From what were most of Mahan’s structures made?

This is a surprisingly complicated question, one that I dedicated about 10,000 words to answer in the book. In short, the ratio of sand, clay, and cobbles in an earthwork can alter everything from how durable the structure is with respect to erosion to how well it resists penetration from enemy artillery shells. For example, a parapet constructed purely from quartz sand can absorb an immense amount of shellfire before losing effectiveness, but it will be especially prone to natural erosion. This is because the sand possesses a great degree of intergrain friction, but little natural cohesion. If clay is added to the sand, it will be more cohesive and erosion resistant, but it loses some of the ability to withstand incoming artillery rounds (and a parapet will be more challenging to repair). If cobbles are added to the superior (outside) slope of the parapet to reduce erosion, you have introduced a new secondary projectile that can be especially dangerous when struck by incoming fire. 

When sand is piled for defensive purposes or when trenches are dug in clay-poor soils, some measure of revetment or reinforcement is needed to keep the sediment in place. Mahan spent almost as much time describing different kinds of revetments, including wood, marsh sod, gabions, and sandbags as he did discussing the proper properties of earth. I’ve always thought it interesting to consider how much military technology has changed from the Civil War to the present day, but sandbags have remained essentially consistent in both construction and use. 

In regard to the Civil War parapets of Mahan’s design, no combination of sand, silt, and clay could survive the mobile firepower available during World War I. The result was that earthworks changed from piling sediment to create a parapet to digging into the earth, essentially providing no visible target for the enemy’s artillery. This introduced all new types of complications from porous and permeable sediments (and groundwater infiltration) and the need for extensive reinforcing and revetting. 

How did gabions work?

A gabion was constructed of sticks in a basket-form with flexible half-inch twigs used to tie them together. These cylindrical wicker drums were around two to three feet in diameter and three feet high. When filled with sediment they could stop a bullet or offer support for an overly steep slope. Often, for example, the interior slope of a parapet was lined with gabions. By the end of the war the interior of Fort Sumter was held in place by hundreds of large gabions that were filled with brick rubble. 

One major drawback to using gabions occurred when fine dune or beach sand was used as fill. On Morris Island, South Carolina, for example, gabions were replaced by federal sappers with sandbags when the fine sediment was found to leak from between the interlocking sticks.  

The U.S. military still uses gabions extensively, although they are no longer a stick-based defensive measure. The HESCO Mil, essentially a modern gabion, was introduced during the First Gulf War. The HESCO system consists of a collapsible steel wire mesh lined with a polypropylene geotextile and filled with local sediments. These structures offer more protection that the woven basket-of-branches gabions from the Civil War, while also being significantly simpler to assemble and fill. 

Explain what Napoleon’s quote about mediocre troops means?

I included Napoleon Bonaparte’s assessment “With mediocre troops one must shift much soil” as the first quote in the new book because it summarizes so perfectly the need for properly constructed field fortifications when working with inexperienced soldiers. While Union and Confederate infantry certainly did not suffer from a lack of courage, they were, for the most part, far from professional soldiers. In many instances troops entered combat with less than a month of drilling— the very definition of a “citizen- soldier.” In combat, any type of protection, whether a parapet, split-rail fence, linear trench, rifle pit, or preexisting stonewall, would offer some perception of protection, allowing a soldier an amplified sense of security. More confident soldiers performed better when fighting and were more likely to deliver effective rifle fire. They were also more likely to follow the command to counterattack if the circumstances dictated. The length of time required for reloading single-shot muzzle-loader, and the need to stand while doing so, only increased the sensation of vulnerability and increased the value of cover and protection. Concealed and protected soldiers were also, obviously, harder to maim and kill by an attacking enemy. 

I’ve heard that there is an entire 20-minute portion of the new Napoleon film in which Joaquin Phoenix discusses the sedimentology of the battlefield of Austerlitz, but this could be wishful thinking. 

Tell us about the sedimentary rocks and unconsolidated sediments that underlie the battlefields from the Coastal Plain.

There is great variability in the sedimentary geology under the Coastal Plain battlegrounds, and a key factor determining the amount of sand, silt, and clay you will find is the site’s proximity to either the Fall Line, to the west (and north), or the coastline, to the east (and south). The Fall Line is the contact between the hard igneous and metamorphic rocks of the Pied­mont and the Plain’s much less durable sedimentary rocks and sediments. 

Many key cities straddle the Fall Line, including both wartime capitals, so it is no surprise many battlefields are found on or near this geologic contact. Generally, the closer you are to the Fall Line, the more consolidated (rock-like) are the sedimentary layers. Underlying Fredericksburg and the Seven Days’ battlefields are some of the Coastal Plain’s oldest and most durable clay-rich units, resulting in undulating terrain cut by stream valleys and river terraces. Hills and ridges are usually formed by clay-rich, highly compressed mixtures of sand and silt, and are more durable to weathering and erosion. 

For battlefields farther from the Fall Line, like Bentonville or Morris Island, sand reigns; the terrain is especially flat. Entrenching is also fairly easy, though the sand requires much revetting. I argue in the book that the strongest defensive position occupied during the war was not on high, hard rock like Little Round Top or Kennesaw Mountain, but rather Lee’s position at Fredericksburg, where he organized his infantry and artillery along high, but slightly weaker, sedimentary strata (when compared to nearby igneous or metamorphic rock). These layers of sediment are tough enough to resist erosion, so they are elevated and dominate the surrounding landscape, but soft enough to allow digging. The geology allowed excellent sight lines and establishment of rifle pits and protected gun emplacements above a flat river terrace. 

Talk about the “Fiasco at Fredericksburg.”

At Fredericksburg, Ambrose Burnside attacked a strong position across open ground on a flat river terrace a dozen times in piece-meal fashion. If that wasn’t enough of a Federal “fiasco,” what Burnside did less than a month later certainly qualified. 

Fresh off his army’s great defeat at Fredericksburg, Burnside proposed crossing the Rappahannock with a surprise flanking movement and trapping Lee against the river’s west bank. Lee’s geological advantages would be largely mitigated and Burnside would be between the Confederates and their capital. But then it started to rain.  

As the Federal units started moving west, more than three inches of freezing rain fell across the region and onto the absorptive clay-rich soils. This type of soil is called a Ultisol and is known for trapping water near the surface, minimizing deeper infiltration and producing standing water. Fields and roads become exhausting to cross and everything sank into the mud, including wagons, cannons, and mules. Churning by men on the march made things even more difficult. 

On January 22, the rain stopped, yet somehow the situation became even more insufferable. Burnside wavered on whether to continue and it got colder. The mud, lubricated by the addition of massive amounts of rain, rendering it exceedingly slippery, now became more adhesive, sticking to everything. Men lost their boots; wagons became impossible to move; and misery increased. On January 26, with morale at a new low, Lincoln relieved Burnside of his command. 

Tell us about Scott’s Anaconda plan along the Eastern coast.

When General-in-Chief Winfield Scott proposed what would be known as the “Anaconda Plan,” his goal was to isolate the south and divide the Confederacy into two parts by moving down the Mississippi River. The nickname alludes to the image of a giant snake surrounding and suffocating the southern ports. 

There are a multitude of ways that sedimentary geology made the success of the plan and the Union blockade more challenging. For example, from a naval perspective, major trading centers like Wilmington were more difficult to blockade than it might appear. The presence of the Frying Pan Shoals, an unpredictable and treacherous sand body extending from the mouth of the Cape Fear River for more than 20 miles offshore, meant that two different naval squadrons would be required to suppress the city, and these units would not be able to support each other because of the sedimentary obstacle. 

Sedimentary geology also made capture of the “Father of Waters” more difficult. Strongholds like Grand Gulf, Port Hudson, and Vicksburg were all carved into an unusual sediment called loess, a weakly-cemented silt that is ideal for entrenching and erodes into vertical cliffs. These qualities were exploited by the rebels to create massive, complex defensive entrenchments and elevated gun batteries above the river. 

Even Flag Officer David Farragut’s fleet, attempting to move up the Mississippi past New Orleans, was hindered by sedimentary geology. His largest ship, the Colorado, was left behind in the gulf because she drew too much water to pass over the river’s sand distributary bar. In contrast, sediments did help with Farragut’s tactics when attacking Forts St. Philip and Jackson below New Orleans. To prepare his vessels for a night attack, dark Mississippi mud was smeared on the side of the boats for camouflage and sand was spread on the decks for traction in water or, inevitably, blood. 

What was the fate of the fortifications?

In Sand, Science, and the Civil War, I outline the differences in preservation potential between permanent and temporary fortifications. Permanent fortifications like the brick citadels of Forts Pulaski, Morgan, Pickens, and Sumter were constructed during peacetime in (presumably) geologically stable environments. It was anticipated that they would survive natural threats for a century or more, and most have. Fort McRee, constructed to protect Pensacola’s harbor, was an exception, having been eroded into the Gulf of Mexico by beach drift, sea-level rise, and storms. (Note that the later batteries of reinforced concrete from the Endicott Era that protected this same portion of the shoreline were often completely buried in Gulf Coast sand for additional protection.) 

For temporary fortifications, which were constructed expeditiously during the war and lost a great deal of their strategic value when the fighting moved elsewhere, their fate is more perilous. Farmer’s plows and urban sprawl have destroyed many field fortifications. Some of the best soils for constructing earthworks are also, unfortunately, the most fertile. 

Temporary fortifications are constructed of, or dug into, local sediments. Sand piled along the shoreline (Fort Fisher, Batter Wagner) or along rivers and bluffs (Island No. 10, Vicksburg’s batteries) are especially vulnerable to natural erosion. Coastal sand forts were also sited to take full advantage of barrier island geology and were often built very close to sea level to take advantage of ricocheting fire across the water. As a result, almost all have been lost because of sea-level rise, beach drift, storms, and antropogenically derived erosion (from jetty construction, for example). 

Most lower-gradient rivers like the Mississippi also meander through soft sediments, a perfect destructive agent for temporary earthen fortifications that have no possibility of being relocated. As a result, fortifications like Fort Hindman and Island No. 10 have been completely lost to these highly dynamic environments.

One of the many iconic photographs taken on the Gettysburg battlefield by Alexander Gardner’s photographic team was the heartbreaking image of the bloated corpse of a horse. The unfortunate animal was one of the wheel pair, and it died still harnessed to a shattered limber, the deadly contents of the limber chest scattered about. Freshly covered graves are nearby, possibly those of the drivers and artillerymen who manned the light 12-pounder Napoleon cannon.  

Through the haze, a line of army wagons and artillery vehicles are parked behind the wreckage, trees showing just above the white canvas covers. While the appalling destruction of battle remains untouched where it fell, the war goes on as soldiers wait in the background for orders to continue the pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia to the Potomac River.  

Gardner’s photographers took the image on or about July 6, 1863. When Gardner published his Photographic Sketchbook of the War later in 1863, he titled the image “Unfit for Service.” The scene conveys the traumatic image of death and destruction of man and animal alike, and is a stoic reminder of the cost of war.  

Aside from its poignancy, the image leaves some questions unanswered. To what battery did this limber and horse belong? What happened at this location that caused such destruction? How did this wreckage remain untouched for so many days after the battle ended?  

Where Was It?

Though the image was published in the Sketchbook and as a stereoview after the war, this photograph did not receive widespread attention until years later when an overly enhanced version captioned “Shattered Caisson—Gettysburg ‘Peach Orchard’” first appeared in The War Memorial Book (1894). Miller’s Photographic History of the Civil War (1911) published a much clearer view of the scene that revealed the line of vehicles beyond the wreckage, what appears to be part of an orchard, and, upon closer examination, the roof line and chimney of a house.  

But whose house could this be, so close to the fighting? In 2010, several of the Licensed Battlefield Guides at Gettysburg speculated it was the Peter Rogers house that stood along the Emmitsburg Road, but did the remainder of the landscape match the fields and trees? Of the candidate houses that stood along the same road, one alone stands out: the Joseph Sherfy house adjacent to the famous Peach Orchard.  

Sixty-three-year-old Joseph Sherfy and his wife, Mary, had lived on this farm since 1844, where he managed a flourishing fruit business. The enterprising farmer experimented with the best type of peaches and apples to grow in Adams County’s somewhat shallow soil, his large mature peach orchard producing enough fruit to accommodate a canning business in a building behind his brick home. Sherfy had planted new trees north of the established orchard, its trees just ready to produce when war came to their doorstep on July 2, 1863.  

The Sherfys fled their home that day only to return four days later to discover their house damaged by shell fire, personal belongings scattered in the yard, the barn burned to the ground, crops trampled, fences torn down, and most of his peach trees in his recently planted “young orchard” damaged beyond salvage, as he recalled in his 1872 damage claim.  

Graves of the fallen were everywhere, and the bloated remains of more than a dozen dead horses lay where they fell in the wheat and meadow opposite their home. Army wagons and artillery vehicles continually passed through the Sherfy fields, stopping briefly to allow congestion to clear the roads ahead. Details from Union regiments had picked up and stacked discarded small arms and equipment, leaving behind material that could not be reused. In the field opposite their home was a disabled limber chest, shells still lying nearby, as Mrs. Sherfy told a visitor in 1886. Worried of the danger, Mr. Sherfy and a farmhand buried the ordnance in the field, taking care to mark the location.   That disabled limber was most likely the same photographed by Gardner’s team that warm summer morning in 1863. The sad wreckage was left lying in the center of Sherfy’s field on the eastern slope of the ridge from the Emmitsburg Road to Plum Run.  

With the location of this historic photograph identified, a more important question needs to be answered: to whose battery did this limber belong?  

The “Great Artillery Duel”

During the desperate July 2 fighting on this farm, numerous Union artillery batteries were overrun, guns captured, and limbers lost to Confederate hands. Only the arrival of fresh Union troops and ensuing counterattack saved those precious guns, which were drawn off the field after nightfall by exhausted teams of artillerymen and uninjured horses. Only one gun, a 3-inch ordnance rifle and limber belonging to Consolidated Battery C&F, 1stPennsylvania Light Artillery, was left behind and would be captured by Confederates the following day.  

Yet this limber and ammunition in the historic photograph was for a 12-pounder “Napoleon”—the fearful bronze gun favored by many artillerymen for its dependability and stopping power. Obviously, there were unknown circumstances that left this shattered limber on the field. If it was not from a Union battery, which Confederate battery stood at this site?  

Beginning in 1895, the U.S. War Department Commission, composed of veterans of the battle, initiated the masterful and difficult task of marking every unit position in the park with a tablet bearing a brief narrative of their participation at Gettysburg. Commissioner William Robbins, a veteran of the 4th Alabama Infantry who faced the fierce combat before Little Round Top on July 2-3, 1863, struggled to document the activities of Confederate units, especially batteries in Major Mathias W. Henry’s Artillery Battalion of Hood’s Division, Longstreet’s Corps. Reports from many of the battery commanders and Major Henry himself did not survive the conflict and could not be found in U.S. War Department records in Washington, D.C.  

As Robbins later confessed, he constructed battle narratives for some units based on the activities of their fellow units and without those precious reports, narratives on several tablets were woefully incomplete. One of these cases stands out—the July 3, 1863, activities of several batteries in Henry’s Battalion, notably Captain Hugh R. Garden’s South Carolina Battery, the “Palmetto Light Artillery.”  

Born in Sumter, S.C., in 1840, the dashing Hugh Richardson Garden had just completed his studies at South Carolina College when war erupted. He volunteered for service as a private in Company D, 2nd South Carolina Infantry, during which time he was recognized as a model soldier and promotions followed. Through the influence of family and military officials, he received an appointment by the state in 1862 to raise and command a newly formed battery of artillery destined to join the Army of Northern Virginia.  

Garden successfully recruited and organized a full battery and within months was in Virginia, where he was assigned to Major Henry’s Artillery Battalion. Having seen only minimal action prior to the Gettysburg Campaign, the Palmetto Light Artillery of four guns (two 10-pounder Parrott Rifles and two 12-pounder Napoleons)arrived on the battlefield on July 2 but remained in reserve as the fighting raged against the Union left flank centered on the now famous Sherfy Peach Orchard.  

At mid-morning the following day, Garden received orders to march his battery with other sections of artillery from Henry’s Battalion to an impressive line of Southern guns with other artillery battalions of Longstreet’s Corps. The fieldpieces stretched from the Peach Orchard northwesterly to Spangler Woods and Seminary Ridge opposite the Union center on Cemetery Ridge. Tasked with opposing Union artillery strategically placed on Little Round Top, Garden unlimbered his Parrott rifles in the Peach Orchard on the right flank of Major B.F. Eshleman’s Artillery Battalion, the Washington Artillery of New Orleans, and with the report of two signal guns at 1 p.m., Garden’s cannons began their participation in the great barrage that preceded Pickett’s Charge.  

July 3, 1863, would haunt Garden for years to come. “On the day of Pickett’s Charge,” he wrote to Lloyd Collis in 1901, “I was sent about a mile to the left of my first position near the turnpike, immediately on the right of the Washington Artillery, and engaged Big Round Top during the first part of the great artillery duel. While thus engaged the chief of Gen. Longstreet’s staff, who was on the pike observing the effect of the artillery fire, ordered me to cease firing… and to move by section to the left of the peach orchard and advance in echelon across the plain. I obeyed the order, but only one section of my battery, under Lieutenant [Alexander] McQueen, made the advance, for when it moved obliquely to the left and went into position at a point down a gentle descent (as I can never forget) about 200 yards to the left of the peach orchard, and about 300 yards at least in front of our line of artillery, the attention of the opposing artillery was drawn to our fire, and within ten minutes every horse and man was killed—or wounded.”  

After passing through the orchard and down the slope, Lieutenant McQueen’s artillerymen unlimbered the two 12-pounder guns in an open field, loaded, and opened fire on Union infantry of Brig. Gen. George Stannard’s Vermont Brigade sweeping around Pickett’s masses crowding toward the Angle. Though their fire and those of a handful of other pieces from Eshleman’s Battalion that also advanced was at first effective, it also unleashed a torrent of counterbattery fire from Union guns aligned on the well-established line on the lower portion of Cemetery Ridge.  

At his post behind one of McQueen’s guns, artilleryman J. Merrick Reid recalled: “No sooner had flame and smoke gushed after the hurtling shell that Round Top Hill became a veritable seething volcano of destruction, emitting dense volumes of smoke, lurid tongues of flame hurtling metal missile that hissed or shrieked through space and burst with deafening peals. The ground was ploughed and torn and great clouds of dirt and debris thrown up everywhere. Man after man went down with his death hurt…not a horse was left to move a wheel.” Reid was horrified when a single Union shell mortally wounded two comrades in front him, spattering his uniform with blood and gore.   Within minutes, the Union batteries had driven off the Confederate cannoneers from the guns that had been pushed forward from Eshleman’s Battalion and then turned their attention on Garden’s solitary section of Napoleons. From their post on Cemetery Ridge, Captain Patrick Hart’s 15th New York Battery of four Napoleons sent explosive shell after shell at the outnumbered South Carolinians.  

Near Hart’s guns stood Captain Edwin Dow’s 6th Maine Battery, which also focused its four 12-pounder guns on the exposed Southerners. “A light 12-pounder battery of four guns ran some 400 or 500 yards in front of the enemy’s line,” Dow reported soon after the battle, “so as to enfilade the batteries on our right.” After driving off the artillerymen from these guns that belonged to Eshleman’s Battalion, Dow focused his attention on McQueen’s two guns, alone but defiantly firing from their exposed position. “We opened with solid shot and shell…and succeeded in dismounting one gun, disabling the second, and compelled the battery to leave the field minus one caisson and several horses.”  

The sweeping concentration of Union artillery from the summit of Little Round Top to the center of Cemetery Ridge would prove too great for the outnumbered Confederate artillery. “No man flinched his duty,” Merrick Reid recalled many years after. “Exhausted, bleeding, ammunition spent, comrades prone, six horse dead or dying, further effort futile, our gallant officer, the calmly brave McQueen, himself faint and bleeding, ordered the pitiful fragment to seek protection from the infernal death sluice.”  

Aghast at the destruction, Captain Garden raced to the site to confront the seriously wounded Lieutenant McQueen, who could barely manage the orders for his men to seek shelter. Those still able turned and ran to the comparative safety of the Emmitsburg Road, leaving behind guns, limbers, wounded comrades, and horribly wounded horses thrashing about in their harnesses. “I took volunteers and fresh horses in to remove my men and gun(s),” Garden continued. “After two attempts we succeeded, under the same concentrated terrific fire, made more terrible by the explosion of caissons and the fire overhead of our friends in the rear.”  

The Confederate infantry assault failed, and there was little more that could be accomplished. Lee sent orders through Longstreet to withdraw his troops from their advanced position to form a line of defense on Seminary Ridge. Captain Garden’s desperate mission was still underway when those orders arrived.  

As the Southern batteries hurriedly limbered and hobbled to the rear, Garden realized that with Union guns commanding the field and Union skirmishers seen advancing toward the abandoned artillery line, further efforts to bring off additional equipment was fruitless. A shattered limber and chest, horse harnesses and other equipment, all too dangerous to retrieve, remained to mark the location where his guns had fought so deadly a duel.  

The following day, details of Union troops gathered small arms from the field while others buried the dead where they had fallen. Southern ordnance, still dangerous despite the soaking rains that covered the area, remained untouched for others to recover.  

Thus, the scene remained to be captured by the photographer’s camera on or about July 6, 1863, where Hugh Garden’s section of 12-pounder guns from his Palmetto Light Artillery, only a few days before, had made the suicidal stand at Gettysburg. Placed in context with Garden’s description, compassionately penned in a letter years after the war, this place on the battlefield was indeed where “all hell broke loose.”

More important, this photograph provides historians with a more complete evaluation of the somewhat curious story of Major M.W. Henry’s Battalion in the massive bombardment before Pickett’s Charge, its disturbing aftermath, and the shocking cost of war. And while we all strive to further describe and understand the image labeled “Unfit for Service,” perhaps the most suitable sentiment was paid by Garden himself, an attempt to honor the sacrifice paid by his battery day: “I have always thought that as Pickett’s charge marked the high-tide of the Confederacy, the advance of that solitary section in obedience to what I understood to be Gen. Longstreet’s order to advance the artillery marked the high-tide in the greatest artillery duel in history.”  

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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John S. Heiser began his career with the National Park Service in 1976 at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. He transferred to Gettysburg National Military Park in 1980, where he held numerous positions until 1997 when he was appointed as historian to manage the park’s library, website, and other duties, a position he held until his retirement in 2020. He still resides in Gettysburg. The author wishes to gratefully thank Scott Fink and Scott Brown for their research assistance with this article.

In the earliest days of Union enlistment in New York City, anyone willing to volunteer was welcome at recruitment offices—including the foreign-born. Language barriers proved no obstacle, particularly among Germans. After all, German support had helped Abraham Lincoln win the presidency in 1860.  

After the fall of Fort Sumter and the call for 75,000 militia to suppress the rebellion, Lincoln wisely concluded that a war to save the Union must not be an exclusively native-born undertaking. So he launched a concerted effort to lure marquee commanders from various ethnic backgrounds, regardless of their politics (though he did resist abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ early pleas for the enlistment of free Blacks).  

One of Lincoln’s first such acts was to order his secretary of war to appoint “Col. Julian Allen, a Polish gentleman, naturalized,” who proposed “raising a Regiment of our citizens of his nationality, to serve in our Army.” After some initial resistance from the War Department, Allen got his commission.  

Army regulations at the time explicitly stated: “No volunteer will be mustered into the service who is unable to speak the English language.” That rule would simply be ignored. From the outset, the restriction hardly stemmed the early enthusiasm of the foreign-born to don the U.S. Army uniform, even if the uniforms themselves reflected more the ethnic background of the recruits than the cohesion of the supposedly united states.  

That spring, German-born New York Herald correspondent Henry Villard seemed “surprised”—but clearly proud—to observe freshly minted “infantry dressed in the genuine Bavarian uniform….Prussian uniforms, too; the ‘Garibaldi Guards’ in the legendary red blouses and bersaglieri [Italian infantry] hats,” as well as “‘Zouaves’ and ‘Turcoes’ [North African infantrymen], clothed as in the French army, with some fanciful American features grafted upon them.”  

Before long, Lincoln granted a request by Carl Schurz, the recently named U.S. minister to Spain, to abandon his post in Madrid and raise a regiment in New York. Although his initial recruitment efforts fell short, Schurz won a military commission anyway, and served in the Army of the Potomac. In 1863, however, he earned damning criticism when his men fled from a Confederate assault at Chancellorsville. Most officers subject to such castigation would have faced demotion or dismissal. But Schurz still exerted enormous influence—over the German-born community as well as Lincoln—for his tireless work in the 1860 campaign. A gifted orator, he managed to convince Lincoln to continue backing him even as he leveled injudicious criticism (privately, at least) on his commander-in-chief.  

Then there was the case of Franz Sigel, a 36-year-old German-born general who notched an even more dubious record in the West. From the outset of the war, however, Sigel proved a magnet for German recruitment. “I Fights Mit Sigel” became a rallying cry among German-speaking soldiers. Each time Lincoln sought to downgrade Sigel, the outcry from Germans proved overpowering. In 1864, when Lincoln briefly faced a third-party reelection challenge, many of those expressing support for the insurgency cited the president’s alleged injustices against Sigel.  

Irish Leaders, Mixed Results

If German Americans contributed the largest foreign-born contingent in the Federal army, Irish Americans proved a close second. Some 150,000 Irishmen took up arms for the Union.  

Such a patriotic response from this overwhelmingly pro-Democratic community could not have been predicted before the shelling of Fort Sumter. Only a week later, at a massive rally at New York’s Union Square, Irish lawyer Richard O’Gormon addressed the crowd of 100,000: “[W]hen I assumed the rights of a citizen, I assumed, too, the duties of a citizen.” Lincoln, he admitted, “is not the President of my choice. No matter. He is the President chosen under the Constitution.” The attack on Sumter was worse “than if the combined fleets of England had threatened to devastate our coast.”  

Not yet completely reassured about Irish loyalty, Lincoln had summoned another prominent New York attorney, James T. Brady, and beseeched him to raise and lead the first Irish brigade. Brady protested that he possessed no experience in such matters. “You know plenty of Irish who do,” Lincoln countered, “…and as to the appointment of officers, did you ever know an Irishman who would decline an office or refuse a pair of epaulets, or do anything but fight gallantly after he had them?”  

Like O’Gormon, Brady was a longtime Democrat, but at Lincoln’s urging, he began successfully recruiting, though he never took up arms himself. The Irish-American newspaper now called on its readers “to be true to the land of your adoption in this crisis of her fate.”  

The overwhelmingly Irish 69th Regiment of the New York State Militia marched to the defense of Washington on April 23, 1861, accompanied by the “stormy cheers” of some half a million onlookers. Lincoln had called for volunteers on April 15, and it had taken only days to muster the 69th. “So great was the anxiety to join the ranks” that three times more men volunteered than could be accommodated in the regiment.  

Leading the regiment downtown that day was 33-year-old Colonel Michael Corcoran. The onetime tavern clerk from County Sligo had led the unit for two years. In 1860, he had aroused both municipal fury and ethnic pride by refusing to assemble his men to welcome the Prince of Wales to New York, arguing that the heir to the British throne represented “the oppressor of Ireland.” Corcoran’s defiance earned him a court-martial that was still pending, only to be shelved once the rebellion began; he was too well-suited to his new role. An active member of the Fenian Brotherhood, which supported Irish independence, Corcoran was also a politically active local Democrat. Above all, New York Archbishop John Hughes believed “Corcoran should be appointed” to lead the Irish defense of the Union, and Lincoln replied that “my own judgment concurs.”  

In an uncirculated, likely misdated, and largely forgotten memorandum he composed sometime that spring, the president identified Corcoran and two other noted Irishmen—James Shields and Thomas Francis Meagher—as ideal Union commanders. Lincoln managed to recruit all three, albeit with mixed results.  

Shields, Lincoln’s onetime Illinois political rival and a former U.S. senator, had been for several years a resident of California. When Fort Sumter fell, he was even farther from home: in Mazatlán, Mexico, on a business venture and extended honeymoon with his Irish-born bride. Shields’ experience in the Mexican War, plus his nativity and status, made him an ideal general, so Lincoln nominated him for a command.  

The gesture was magnanimous on several levels. Not only was Shields a Democrat; he had also opposed Lincoln for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois in 1855 (both men lost). Most noteworthy of all, Shields had once challenged young Lincoln to a duel over a series of incendiary newspaper satires lambasting him in language most modern readers would call anti-Irish. The slander was probably more the work of Lincoln’s fiancée, Mary Todd, than of her future husband, but Lincoln gallantly assumed responsibility and the two men headed to a dueling ground to settle scores.  

Only when Lincoln chose weapons for the contest—broadswords that would have given the long-armed lawyer a distinct advantage over his smaller challenger—did the two call off their fight. Now, 20 years later, the politician whom Lincoln had once publicly mocked quickly “tendered his services to his old friend, now President of the United States”—something of an exaggeration. For a time, in fact, Shields remained frustratingly out of reach.   Claiming he was still hindered by wounds he had suffered in Mexico—which apparently did not limit his prolonged attentions to his young new wife—he delayed his return for weeks. This gave foes who questioned his loyalty ample time to try blocking his appointment. When Shields finally started for home in late November, San Jose newspaperman F.B. Murdock warned Lincoln that “if civil war should break out on the Pacific coast, Gen. Shields would be found on the Rebel side.” Yet the president remained committed to recruiting both Democrats and the foreign-born to fight the enemy—even a former enemy of his own.  

Shields finally reached Washington in January 1862, and on the 8th met with Lincoln at the White House. There, Shields apparently convinced him of his “self-sacrificing cooperation with the government.” The doubtlessly tense reunion ended with the president expressing “hearty and unreserved confidence” in Shields, whose appointment went through as planned. As Lincoln hoped, his commission generated nearly as much enthusiasm in the Irish and Democratic press as Sigel had inspired in the German. In New York, a special committee began recruiting men to serve under Shields as “a distinctive representation of Irish valor and patriotism.”  

Shields’ war, however, did not go as his admirers hoped. Assigned to the Department of the Shenandoah, he suffered a serious wound at the First Battle of Kernstown in March and had to be carried from the field. In his absence, Union forces achieved a modest victory over “Stonewall” Jackson that prompted Shields’ friend to claim he was cheated out of credit for the success. Then in a June rematch at Port Republic, Jackson easily outmaneuvered Shields. Now an aide claimed that were it not for “the blunder of a subordinate,” Shields might have been remembered as “one of the Shermans, Sheridans, and Meades” of the war.” He thereafter earned few command opportunities. In the summer, Lincoln offered some solace by promoting him to the rank of major general, but in an extraordinary rebuff to a onetime member, the Senate refused to confirm him.  

Shields’ army career never rebounded. With no options remaining, the president transferred him to the military Department of the Pacific in San Francisco. Shields thus enjoyed a government-funded transcontinental trip home and then, no doubt by pre-arrangement, resigned from the service. Before him lay yet another stint in the U. S. Senate.  

The third Irish military leader mentioned in Lincoln’s 1861 “Irish” memo was Thomas Meagher, a celebrated resistance fighter in Ireland who earned a devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic. Once banished to a Tasmanian penal colony by the British, he had made a daring escape, reached America, established an Irish newspaper in Boston, and arrived in New York to be greeted as an “apostle of freedom.”  

Meagher had expressed initial sympathy for Southern independence, but after Sumter, advised followers that Union loyalty was “not only our duty to America, but also to Ireland.” Meagher then raised a Zouave company—his slogan was “Young Irishmen to Arms!”—and marched south as part of Corcoran’s 69th, his soldiers’ colorful, Middle Eastern-style regalia a vivid contrast to the drab uniforms worn by the regiment’s other Irish-born volunteers.  

That July, he fought under Corcoran at First Bull Run. The unit lost 38 killed, 59 wounded, and 95 missing, but endured none of the humiliation heaped on the Union Army by the press over its frenzied retreat. New York blueblood George Templeton Strong, no friend of the Irish, acknowledged that “Corcoran’s Irishmen are said to have fought especially well, and have suffered much.” Indeed, even in withdrawing from the field, the 69th helped safeguard the Army of the Potomac’s rear flank. Despite the chaos, Meagher managed to reorganize his men and lead them back to Washington to fight another day.  

Corcoran was not so fortunate. Toward the end of the fray, “standing like a rock in the whirlpool,” he fell into Confederate hands. Taken south as a prisoner of war, he became, in effect, a living martyr. From captivity, he issued a stirring message that sounded at once pro-Union and pro-immigration: “One half of my heart is Erin’s, and the other half is America’s. God bless America, and ever preserve her as the asylum of all the oppressed of the earth.” In Corcoran’s absence, command of the 69th fell to Meagher, who encamped his battered men on Arlington Heights above Washington.  

On July 23, Lincoln rode to the regiment’s headquarters, where the exhausted troops summoned “the greatest enthusiasm” to welcome their commander-in-chief. As Lincoln knew, these and other battle-scarred volunteers were now eligible to leave the service, their original three-month enlistment about to end. According to one newspaper account: “The President asked if they intended to re-enlist? The reply was that ‘they would if the President desired it.’ He announced emphatically that he did…complimenting them upon their brave and heroic work….This was received with cheers and the determination expressed to go in for the war and stand by the government and the old flag forever.” Meagher confirmed that his troops greatly enjoyed Lincoln’s “affable manner and cheerful badinage,” which “made him an especial favorite with these rough-and-ready appreciators of genuine kindness and good humor.”  

Demobilized a few weeks later, the 69th returned to New York. On July 7, thousands of well-wishers massed at Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan to provide the kind of jubilant welcome usually reserved for those who had won battles. Ethnic pride still counted more than martial accomplishment, and sustaining Irish loyalty remained the highest of priorities. As one writer observed: “The entrance of the 69th” produced “a popular ovation…in the hearts of the people.”  

Meagher reemerged for a patriotic rally on Manhattan’s then-rural Upper East Side. There he echoed Lincoln’s recent plea for reenlistment: “I ask no Irishman to do that which I myself am not prepared to do. My heart, my arm, my life is pledged to the National cause, and to the last it will be my highest pride, as I conceive it to be my holiest duty and obligation, to share its fortunes.”  

A few days later, Archbishop Hughes conveyed his undiminished confidence in Meagher to the administration. Lincoln responded by offering Meagher a fresh commission as a major general—as long as he agreed to raise another all-Irish regiment. The president still believed such units provided as much symbolic impact as the German companies Sigel had raised in the West—perhaps more, since most Irish enlistees were Democrats whose loyalty reflected the non-partisan nature of the Union war effort.  

Lincoln’s Legacy on Immigration

Lincoln’s politically wise dependence on foreign-born troops and officers led to mixed results on the battlefield. The reputation of German soldiers fell precipitously after Chancellorsville, and cascaded when Maj. Gen. Alexander Schimmelfennig was widely reported to have sought shelter in a Gettysburg pigsty after the first day of fighting there. Irish troops, meanwhile, won praise for their courage amid carnage not only at Gettysburg, but earlier at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. In the last two years of the war, they became known as the “Fighting Irish,” a sobriquet that, by legend, had been assigned them by none other than Robert E. Lee.   Eventually, the staggering casualty rate among Irish soldiers took its toll—not only on the ranks, but also on the morale of home-front Irish Catholics. Two weeks after Gettysburg, New York Irish rioted, looted, burned, and murdered civilians—predominately Blacks—to protest the new military draft. Irishmen once willing to defend the Union now came to believe they were fighting to liberate emancipated Blacks likely to undercut their already low wages.  

By December, Lincoln responded not with resentment toward immigrants, but with remarkable forgiveness and foresight. He launched an unprecedented effort to woo more European immigrants to the United States to fill the gaps left in home-front industry, mining, and farms by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young men in battle.  

Until then, Lincoln had notched what must be called a mixed record on the issue of immigration. Back in 1844, he had denounced anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia. But with the rise of the nativist, anti-immigrant “Know Nothing” movement, he attempted with only limited success to “fuse” its adherents with the new, antislavery Republicans. Though he had once defended the right of foreign-born noncitizens to vote in local elections if their state constitutions so mandated, he also routinely accused Irishmen of voting illegally (largely because they voted Democratic).  

Meanwhile he developed political alliances with German Protestants who opposed slavery and who, after a few false starts, rallied around Lincoln for the presidency. Following the 1860 election, he rewarded dozens of German supporters with federal jobs. Although he pledged as president-elect to place “aught in the way” of immigrants to America, his vision of immigration remained limited: it did not include people from Asia, and it came with support for the voluntary colonization of blacks and the forced containment of Native Americans.  

Still, few expected that in 1864, Lincoln would reintroduce An Act to Encourage Emigration that, remarkably, proposed federal funding to underwrite the expensive ocean passages of prospective migrants. That idea proved a bridge too far for Congress, which scratched the revolutionary idea from the final bill. Even so, the stripped-down legislation imposed new regulations on passenger ships whose overcrowded holds had long made transatlantic passage dangerous.  

The new law also improved disembarkation facilities at New York’s Castle Garden and elsewhere; created the first federal Office (later Bureau) of Immigration; and encouraged private companies to advance immigrants the fare for their voyages to America.  

Lincoln’s generous initiative opened wide the door to America, gave the federal government a leadership role in regulating and encouraging immigration for the first time, and led directly to the nation-expanding wave of Eastern- and Southern-European immigration that began around 1890.  

As the 16th president and wartime commander-in-chief put it in his annual message of 1864: “I regard our emigrants as one of the principal replenishing streams appointed by Providence to repair the ravages of internal war, and its wastes of national strength and health.” The new birth of freedom would require an influx of new Americans to sustain it.  

Lincoln had lived up to that belief while the war raged. More than a quarter million foreign-born troops served in Union ranks—not only German and Irish, but Swedish, English, Scottish, Hungarian, Polish, and Italian soldiers as well. As one pro-war German American, Reinhold Solger, perceptively noted: before the war, a foreigner had never been treated as “a full citizen…his very accent defeats the most generous intentions…[and] blood is stronger than naturalization papers.” The Civil War changed that calculus. As Solger rejoiced, the foreign-born demonstrated “a sacrificial spirit, shared by all ranks,” adding: “They may all bless the war for that knowledge.”  

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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This article is adapted with permission from Harold Holzer’s new book, Brought Forth on this Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration (Dutton, 2024).

Tour Stop One at Vicksburg National Military Park is the location of “Battery DeGolyer.” Named after its commanding officer, Captain Samuel DeGolyer, the position had the heaviest concentration of guns on the Union lines during the 47-day Siege of Vicksburg—22 in all.  

Though four times the size of a standard Union battery, the position consisted of the 8th Battery Michigan Light Artillery; Yost’s Independent Ohio Battery; Company L, 2nd Illinois Light Artillery; and the 3rd Battery Ohio Light Artillery. Throughout the Siege of Vicksburg, each gun fired two shots an hour daily and, on average, during the siege. The arrangement fired a total of 2,409 projectiles at the Confederate Great Redoubt. But a quick look around Tour Stop One does not indicate who Captain Samuel DeGolyer was, nor does it mention his remarkable performance during the campaign for Vicksburg.  

Who was Sam DeGolyer? Born in upstate New York in 1827, young Sam and his family (pronounced De-Goy-er), moved to Michigan in the 1830s and settled around the Hudson area in the southeastern part of the state. DeGolyer married Catherine Jeffers of Lenawee County and in 1854 their daughter Kate was born. As a young man in Hudson, he was very active in the small farming community and his stout stature and piercing gaze reflected a determined man of action. DeGolyer also held various public posts and positions, owned a spoke-and-wheel production operation, and when war broke out in April 1861, used his popularity with the community to put together a company of volunteers to put down the rebellion.  

Company F, “Hudson Volunteers,” with Captain Samuel DeGolyer in command, was mustered in as the 4th Michigan Volunteer Infantry on June 20, 1861. A month later, DeGolyer and his men eagerly waited on the plains of Manassas, Va., for their turn to get at the “secesh.”  

The First Battle of Bull Run on July 21 was a strange sight. The movement of units on the battlefield was sophomoric at best. Regiments on both sides attempted to flank one another using parade-ground maneuvers, but with the air clogged with lead and metal and, moreover, inconsistencies between weapons, flags, uniforms (the 4th Michigan was dressed in gray) and orders, the efforts to break each line often resulted in a bloody repulse.  

Some units even ran into each other or fired into the backs of their comrades. Many soldiers, stripped to the waist, passed out from paralyzing fear or heat exhaustion. Fortunately, as the green 4th Michigan waited its turn to deploy into the fray, the men probably could not see much. Smoke blocked their view, but what was going on beyond it favored the Union Army. News from aides dashing all over the field projected victory, yet the tide changed as Confederate forces received reinforcements just at the right time. Thomas J. Jackson’s Virginia soldiers and J.E.B Stuart’s cavalry plowed into the exhausted Union lines and scattered the raw citizen-soldiers in every direction.   

Through the thick smoke, the 4th Michigan could hear the shrieks of horrified Union soldiers blended with the yells of oncoming Confederates. Suddenly, groups of panicked federals burst out of the smoke clouds and slammed into the Michiganders’ ranks. A melee erupted and, while searching for a better glimpse of the fight, Southern soldiers captured DeGolyer and sent him off to Richmond. Following the Union disaster at Bull Run, and after hearing of his capture, DeGolyer’s hometown newspaper, The Hudson Gazette, asserted that “the fact is, Sam was spoiling for a fight and he wasn’t born to be shot.” But for a personality such as DeGolyer’s, such a prophecy was bound to be tested.  

On August 13, 1861, Sam DeGolyer escaped Richmond’s Libby Prison, and for a week, DeGolyer and a companion navigated through the swampy Virginia labyrinths, dodging patrols and dueling armies along the way. Eventually, they made it to the safety of a tobacco vessel headed to Baltimore. Weeks later, DeGolyer met with President Abraham Lincoln and General Winfield Scott. Both made sure to acknowledge publicly the heroic escape from deep within the enemy territory (a much-needed story of redemption for a nation reeling following its embarrassing showing at First Bull Run). With public adulation and inflation of ego, DeGolyer headed back to Michigan. He immediately went to work recruiting 100 men for the 4th Michigan and was promoted to major of the regiment upon his return.    

Colonel Dwight A. Woodbury, however, was annoyed with DeGolyer’s promotion. Woodbury, a phlegmatic leader who looked and acted every-part of a regimental commander, thought DeGolyer habitually hasty in his actions, especially following his delinquent escapades at Bull Run and thus judged him a scoundrel and a rogue—indifferent to orders. So, in the winter of 1861 and on a short leash, Major Sam DeGolyer set out on his daily duties as third in command of the 4th Michigan Infantry. It did not last long.   

In December 1861, while bivouacked outside Washington D.C., Colonel Woodbury learned that DeGolyer ordered the home of some defiant Confederate sympathizers to be stripped of all windows and doors. Woodbury wasted no time in cashiering DeGolyer and sent him back to Michigan to await further orders. Fortunately for DeGolyer, he escaped the “Old Fourth”—the regiment evidently had an officer curse. Four colonels were eventually killed in action, including Woodbury, and Dexter, Mich., native Harrison Jeffords, the highest commissioned officer killed by a bayonet during the Civil War.   

DeGolyer returned to Michigan and soon was at work with a new plan: raise an artillery battery. But not just any battery, a ‘flying battery.’ Napoleon used such instruments of war successfully on the battlefield, and so would DeGolyer. Battery H, 1st Michigan Light Artillery (aka the 8th Michigan Light Artillery) was mustered into service on March 6, 1862, in Monroe. The battery consisted of six guns: two 12-pounder howitzers and four 12-pounder James Rifles. These guns were not particularly powerful but were able to quickly discharge rapid salvos while maneuvering around the battlefield with speed. And with that, the 1st Michigan Light Artillery headed to the war’s Western Theater.   

On May 1, 1863, after months of failed probes at the defenses of Vicksburg, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his approximately 70,000 men landed below the bastion on open terrain. His goal: cut off Vicksburg from the supply lines at Jackson, Miss., and coax the Confederates under Lt. Gen. John Pemberton out from their defenses and destroy them in detail. DeGolyer and the 1st Michigan Artillery were part of this massive movement. It was during the Vicksburg Campaign that historian Ed Bearss noted DeGolyer began his evolution into “the greatest artillery officer in Grant’s army.”  

Immediately, DeGoyler and the 1st Michigan found themselves in the middle of a fight. At Port Gibson, Grant sought to secure a lodgment for his army to pressure Vicksburg from the south and east, and in their first test in combat with Grant, DeGolyer’s artillery raked the Confederates unmercifully. Using canister, the battery tore up the surrounding area with precision and speed, opening the road to Jackson. Two weeks later, at the Battle of Raymond, DeGolyer was enthroned as Grant’s point man.   

On May 12, brutal heat slowed the Union’s advance on Jackson. Grant’s columns only made 1½ miles the day before, and then Confederate forces appeared. Hearing battle, and without orders, DeGolyer spurred his guns up the Utica Road. While deploying into position, he unlimbered amid the lounging 20th Ohio Infantry. The gunners crashed through the Buckeyes boiling coffee pots and immediately poured relentless shot and shell into the advancing 7th Texas Infantry. DeGolyer’s blood was up, and the Confederate attack unraveled in the face of DeGolyer’s guns. The road to Jackson opened and Grant wasted no time in moving on.   

Four days later, Grant’s columns inched closer to the defenses at Vicksburg. On a bald rise, Confederate forces set out to strike at Grant before he could hit them. The collision at Champion Hill was some of the most savage combat of the Vicksburg Campaign. Stubborn Confederate resistance and constant counterattacks during the early morning of May 16 stifled cohesion between attacking Union forces. At 9 a.m., the situation looked bleak for Grant, but fortune smiled on him as his wild card surged onto the battlefield.   

DeGolyer unlimbered behind a rail fence just as another Confederate push threatened to beat back the Union advance for good. Using his keen gunner’s eye, DeGolyer noticed a better position and, according to an unnamed New York World correspondent observing the fight, “made a wide detour to the right…and opened a terrible enfilading fire upon the enemy.” The Confederate pressure subsided, but they came on again in typical fashion. The veteran Alabamians charged pell-mell into the mouths of DeGolyer’s guns. The horrified correspondent looked on as the Alabamians “advanced in solid columns and in magnificent style.” True to his command philosophy, DeGolyer waited “till they had reached a point two hundred yards from the mouth of the cannon…and discharged them, a terrible volley, full in the faces of the advancing columns.” Noticing a more proper undulation for his guns, DeGolyer fell back a short distance to the higher ground and behind a rail fence.   

Sure enough, the Alabamians regrouped “as if by magic” and surged out of the tree line. A rail fence—DeGolyer’s first position—hindered the Confederate advance. The Michiganders waited for the exhausted Confederates to climb or pull down the rails and then unleashed a fierce cannonade that shredded the mob. In awe of the carnage, the New York World observer summed up the destruction: “It is impossible to convey an adequate idea of the slaughter occasioned on the right and centre of the line. The ground was literally covered with the dead and dying. In the ravines, behind trees, on the summit of the hills, lay the unfortunate men of both armies, some of them stiff and cold in death’s icy grasp, others with wounds of every description; here, an arm cut off by cannon balls; there a leg hanging on by the muscles.”  

Indeed, DeGolyer and his elite unit were indispensable to Grant. A few weeks later, the Union Army approached Vicksburg and unleashed a series of bloody attacks that failed miserably. Grant recoiled and settled in for a siege. At the center of his line, he placed Captain DeGolyer and entrusted him with a command of 22 guns.  

The Siege of Vicksburg lasted 47 days, but DeGolyer did not see the end. On May 28, the indispensable Captain Samuel DeGolyer was mortally wounded in the right leg and abdomen while resting in his tent behind his guns. Soon Sam’s wife, Catherine, rushed to his side and brought him home to Michigan, where he lingered for a few months before succumbing to his wound on August 8—just 33 years old.  

Tour Stop One at Vicksburg National Military Park was christened “Battery DeGolyer” following the war, and his guns remain commanding the area to this day.   

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Trace Brusco is a Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama. There, he studies experiences in combat and community during the Civil War.

A gloomy and tragic scene—one with which the inhabitants of the oft-contested city of Winchester, Va., were unfortunately all too familiar—unfolded throughout the night of September 19, 1864, as thousands of casualties from the Third Battle of Winchester were brought to makeshift hospitals throughout the community. “All the wounded,” reported Surgeon James T. Ghiselin, the Army of the Shenandoah’s medical director, were taken to “churches, public buildings, and such private dwellings as were suitable.”  

It did not take long for Ghiselin to realize that the 40 structures transformed into ersatz hospitals would be insufficient to handle the army’s casualties, which exceeded 4,000 troops. Ghiselin also understood these spaces would be further strained with additional casualties as Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah pursued Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s Confederates south toward Fisher’s Hill. Sheridan’s medical director quickly realized that the time had come to implement a plan, developed several weeks earlier, to transport hundreds of tents to Winchester and construct what would be known as the Sheridan Field Hospital—the largest hospital of its kind constructed during the Civil War.  

The day after the battle Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes ordered Surgeon John Brinton “to proceed without delay to Winchester” and supervise the construction of “a large tent hospital…to be of a capacity of four to five thousand beds.” The following night Brinton arrived in Winchester. While erecting “500 tents…was no slight matter,” as Brinton asserted, the task of erecting the Sheridan Field Hospital was completed on September 29, 1864, with the support of approximately 500 troops from Colonel Oliver Edwards’ brigade. After the hospital’s construction, and in the ensuing weeks, a bevy of civilians, including relief agents from the U.S. Christian Commission and nurses arrived to aid in caring for the wounded. Among them was Jane Boswell Moore.  

Moore, a native of Baltimore, Md., who at the war’s outset aided wounded and sick Union soldiers brought to the city, believed that by the late summer of 1862 her talents could be put to better use in the field. After the conflict’s bloodiest day at Antietam, Moore ventured from Baltimore to Sharpsburg. From that moment until the war’s end, she cared for wounded soldiers in the aftermath of the some of the conflict’s fiercest engagements in the East, including Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Petersburg.  

In the autumn of 1864, Moore came to Winchester. During that time Moore aided wounded soldiers in various hospitals throughout the town, including the Sheridan Field Hospital. As had been the case throughout her service, Moore took a special interest in particular soldiers and decided to share their stories and her experiences by sending letters to “a number of religious and secular periodicals.” Moore hoped that publication of these letters would encourage donations of supplies. While difficult to quantify the amount of donations Moore secured, a Congressional report noted decades after the conflict that her published letters prompted “great quantities of donations.”  

During Moore’s stint in Winchester, two of her letters appeared in the Advocate and Family Guardian—a biweekly newspaper published by the American Female Guardian Society in New York City. These letters, printed in early 1865, reveal much about a nurse’s experiences caring for soldiers wounded during Phil Sheridan’s 1864 Shenandoah Campaign, illuminate the sufferings of the wounded, and serve as a powerful reminder of war’s devastating and tragic consequences.  

Moore’s first letter, published on January 16, 1865, includes an account of her encounter with Sophronia Loder, a mother who ventured to Winchester from Indiana when she learned that her son, Sergeant Adam Loder, 18th Indiana Infantry, had been wounded at the Battle of Fisher’s Hill on September 22. Unfortunately, the wounds Sergeant Loder received to his left lung and left arm proved mortal. He died on October 7, 1864, prior to his mother’s arrival. In addition, Moore recounts the difficulties experienced by Private Walter F. Reed, shot in the jaw at the Battle of Cedar Creek, and Corporal Isaac Price, 15th West Virginia Infantry, who lost both arms in the skirmish near Hupp’s Hill, south of Cedar Creek, on October 13, 1864.  

Advocate and Family Guardian  
January 16, 1865  
I rose from a rude bed on the floor of a house in Braddock Street, in the old town of Winchester, Va., where we have spent seven weeks ministering to the wounded in the last great battle [Cedar Creek]….At eight o’clock daily, an ambulance reports for duty… we, away from the home, and standing in the stead of kindred, dedicate this day, by an act of respect, to the dead, who sleep in Virginia soil….On this bright morning, we pluck a sprig of evergreen to send to the loved ones far away from the grave in which their son and brother is sleeping, and our hearts are saddened to think how these mounds are filling loving hearts with anguish and desolation….Every one of these small shingle-boards, with its miserable and almost illegible penciling, has its history, and that of some is heartrending. Shall I briefly allude to those whose names were carved by same hand?  

In this corner lies Sergt. Loder, from Indiana; seven weeks ago, in the ambulance in which we rode from Martinsburg here, we met his mother, and to know her was to love her. In the pages of memory the record of those pleasant hours and interesting conversation will remain, when years have passed away. It is not often you can know the heart of a stranger, yet sometimes, in our journey through life, we meet a gentle, loving spirit whose sympathies with our own, and whose transparency and simplicity of character are as rare as charming. Sad, indeed, was the result that widowed mother’s journey, for ere she left home her son was laid in this burial spot. She waited long, in hopes of taking him to his wife and child, but this, owing to the manner of his burial, was not accomplished; and she returned, leaving us to mark the spot; and on the very day I performed this duty, I received from her one of those warm, affectionate letters that proved ours to be more than common acquaintanceship….Our sad task over, we load the ambulance with soft crackers, pickles, wine, condensed milk, tobacco (needed in the terribly offensive state of wounds), tomatoes, jelly, butter, and eggs, (when they can be obtained). Bay rum, soap, canned fruits, stationery, clothing, &c., and drive over a rough road, up the hill to Sheridan’s field hospital, where snowy tents loom up against the exquisite hue of the peaks of the distant Blue Ridge—tents alas! so full of misery. Here, Wards, three, four, five, six, seven, ten, twelve, fifteen, sixteen, nineteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-six and seven, and the gangrene tents claim our special attention.  

Let us hurriedly glance at some of the more interesting cases. In ward three Walter F. Weed, of the 114th N.Y.V., has long been a candidate for soft food, his mouth and jaw being terribly broken by a minie ball. At first he could not speak, and we brought him fresh milk; but now he is able to tell his wants, chew a little, and is going home. His can of peaches we find he has been saving to eat on the way, so we add other articles, and smile at his provident forethought….Isaac Price of the 15th loyal Va., looks dispirited, as he sits with both arms gone. Perhaps he is thinking of the wife, mother, and nine children at home on whom as well as himself this heavy trial has fallen…  

Well, reader, no doubt you are weary of so much suffering, and so also are we, so we hurry home at half-past twelve, making a very plain and hasty dinner of crackers, beef and as it is Thanksgiving, some canned tomatoes…and then drive to the “front,” with dried fruits, condensed milk, crackers, stationery, needle-bags, little books and papers. We have paid constant attention to other regiments and to-day we will remember Maryland. It is quite disappointing to find the members of the 6th mostly on picket, but amongst those left in camp our stock is decidedly unpopular…  

We pay a visit to the poor soldiers in Camp Convalescent, and they look so sadly into the ambulance, it makes one’s heart ache. After tea, a sick New Yorker sends for something he can eat; so we put crackers, butter, a lemon, loaf sugar and calves-foot jelly on a tin plate, and send to him. At night there are letters to write for the sick, and a head-board to carve for the dead—sad, yet needless duties; and, as I look to remember that not to me has the day passed without bringing its own sad memories.   

One month after Moore’s first letter appeared in the Advocate and Family Guardian, the paper published a second. In addition to describing the grisly scenes that followed the Battle of Cedar Creek, Moore shared the experiences of Private George Hill, 13th West Virginia, who lost his right leg at Cedar Creek, and his interactions with Carrie Fahnestock, the seven-year-old daughter of Gettysburg, Pa., merchant Edward Fahenstock, who sent a brief note and housewife to the U.S. Christian Commission to hopefully brighten the spirits of a wounded Union soldier. In addition to including the text of Fahnestock’s letter, Moore also sent Hill’s response to it. Hill survived his wound but perished 14 years later at the age of 32. Whether Hill’s war wound contributed to his death is unknown.  

Advocate and Family Guardian  
February 16, 1865  
On the twenty-first of October, after the last great battle in the valley, Dr. [James H.] Manown, the kind-hearted surgeon of the fourteenth West Virginia, told me that towards evening a number of wagons would arrive from the “front,” with wounded, on their way to Martinsburg, twenty-two miles further. My orderly was sent to borrow pails, and we were soon busily employed making milk punch. Just about dark, an immense double train of rough army wagons arrived, blocking up the streets, and belonging to the Sixth, Eighth, and Nineteenth Corps, each freighted with mangled, bleeding, yet precious burdens, among whom our work commenced. It was a strange, warlike scene—dark night settling over Virginia roads, mud, cavalry, and wagons, whilst with flaming candles (lanterns were not be to procured) we supplied the wounded in the different wagons, giving to each half a tin cup full, and to others hot tea. The night was raw and chilly, and both then and on the next, our duties being the same, many suffered from the cold, especially the rebels whose clothes were ragged and thread-bare, many having old quilts and spreads around their shivering forms. They were mostly from North and South Carolina, Louisiana, Virginia, Georgia, &c., ours from West Va., N.Y., Mass., Ohio, Ind., Pa., &c, &c. Many had to be lifted up to drink, and two were beyond the reach of all earthly pain. Two whose legs had been amputated, one from N.Y. the other from Pa. implored me to have them left in Winchester, they being unable to endure the rough ride over stony roads, in lumbering wagons, and Dr. Manown had them taken out, with others, for whom a further ride would have been impracticable. Among them was Georgie Hill, who was fearful of being moved lest the stump of his right leg should be jarred, so Dr. M. lifted him tenderly in his arms, and carried him into his own hospital, in the Southern Methodist Church, on Braddock Street, two doors from our quarters…lying in front of the pulpit, I found him. He did not look more than twelve years old, his skin was fair as a girl’s, his hair dark, and his great black eyes, just about as large and full of mischief as any I ever saw. Though I had a great many serious cases in Sheridan Hospital, who were not nearly so well cared for, I generally managed at noon to get a minute to take a can of peaches or cherries, or some other delicacy to the dear little fellow, whose bright eyes sparkled with pleasure…  

One day I thought of a present for Georgie, sent by a little girl in Gettysburg to the Christian Commission, and entrusted to me. It was a needle-book or housewife, made of pretty red, white, and blue merino, or soft flannel, with pins, black-thread, a nice letter, some little bits of candy wrapped in paper, and a sweet carte-de-visite of a dear little girl. So I told Georgie about it, and his face lighted up as he said, “Bring it right in, so that I can see it.” Some days elapsed before I found time to do so, receiving at length a gentle reminder that, “that though promised three days before, he had not seen it yet.” So at noon I hurried into the church, and stooping on the floor, showed Georgie the wonderful contents of the needle-book, and read to him little Carrie’s letter. “Isn’t she a little one!” he exclaimed, his eyes expanding to their utmost capacity. This is Carrie’s letter:  

Gettysburg, February 25th [1864]  
Dear Soldier,—I can’t do much for you, as I am a very little girl—but I think of you, and pray for you too. I hope you are good, and pray for yourself. When we had the battle here, I saw how you had to suffer, and I pity you. I carried things to sick soldiers, and if you were here would do it for you. I send you my picture that you may see how small I am.   
Good-by. Carrie Fahnestock.  

A few days after, I went in to give eggnog to the wounded, and was sorry to see Georgie about to be taken in an ambulance from the church to Sheridan field-hospital. His few worldly possessions lay on his stretcher, and he looked sorry to leave, for it was one of the coldest days we had had. I tried to comfort him, telling him I daily visited Sheridan hospital, and all he had to do in case we did not find him among so many was to let us know the number of his tent. “How can I let you know?” was his doubtful reply. But late in the afternoon, I sent James with some little article for poor Jones, in whom I took a deep interest, and sure enough in “Ward Seven” lay Georgie…  

The next day was intensely cold. The sky was strangely covered with bright, shifting clouds, looking like grotesquely-shaped precipices, the exquisitely-tinted hills of the Blue Ridge forming a framework or border to the picture of the hillside, with its orchard of ruined fruit-trees, through which numberless teams and wagons wended their way to the closely-gathered tents of Sheridan, covering so many suffering and dying souls… I sought out Georgie, and wrote in answer to Carrie’s letter:  

Sheridan Hospital, Ward 7  
Nov. 5th 1864 Winchester, VA   
Dear Little Carrie,—I am quite a little boy, and my name is Georgie Hill, Co. K, 13th West Va. Regiment. I have been a little soldier boy fourteen months, and was wounded in the leg on the nineteenth of October near Cedar Creek, Va., with a minnie ball. I was carried to Newtown and lay in a tent, and on the twentieth the doctor took my right leg off. My father is dead, but I have a mother, three brothers and one sister, and my home is in Mason County, Va. Three of my brothers are dead, all soldiers, one died in the Mexican war, one at the siege of Vicksburg, and one in the hospital in Gallipolis, Ohio….Miss Moore gave me your dear little picture and present. She told me I must keep it as long as I live to remember the time I lay on the church floor in Winchester, after the battle; and I will. Yesterday they brought me to this field- hospital, where all the sick are in tents, and I find mine very cold this windy day. I don’t like it as well as a house, and if I could have stayed, would not have left the warm church [Southern Methodist Church on Braddock Street]. Miss Moore found me to-day right in her ward—she brought me a little puzzle-box, with seven pieces of wood, and if you know how, you can make squares and funny figures. At first I could not put them all back in the box. I am going to play with it when I go home, before I get my wooden leg and am able to run around. I have not been home for fourteen months, and I don’t know when I shall get there. I have not had a letter for two months either, my mother does not get my letters, or I don’t get hers, I don’t know which. I am going to eat candy after dinner, (this arrangement was not made with difficulty) I have had some pudding, brought in by a Winchester lady, but it has lemon in it, and I don’t like lemon, so I keep looking at the candy. Miss Moore asks if there is anything else I want to say, but I never wrote to you before, so you must excuse me. Good-by, Carrie.   
Your little friend, Georgie Hill   

The Sheridan Field Hospital officially closed on January 4, 1865. Whether Moore departed Winchester before or after that date is unclear. Evidence indicates Moore was with Union forces in Richmond at war’s end. Four years of nursing wounded soldiers in hospital and on the battlefield exacted a physical toll on Moore. In 1888, suffering from “extremely poor health, caused by her army service,” the Federal Government awarded Moore a monthly pension of $50.   

After the conflict Moore, who married Jacob Bristor, a veteran of the 12th West Virginia Infantry in 1867, committed herself to aiding the less fortunate at home and abroad. At the time of her death in 1916 The Baltimore Sun reported she contributed “about $150,000 to the foreign and domestic missionary societies of the Presbyterian Church, most of these gifts having been made in the form of property and ground rents in Baltimore.”  

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Jonathan A. Noyalas is director of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute and the author or editor of 15 books.

By 1830, Christian Sharps, born in New Jersey in 1811, had gone to work at the Harpers Ferry, Va., Arsenal, helping to produce firearms for the U.S. Army. In 1848, Sharps received his first breechloadingfirearms patent. By 1851, the gunmaker had struck out on his own and formed the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company in Hartford, Conn., to produce his simple and sturdy weapon design that remained relatively unchanged throughout the Civil War. It featured a breechblock that dropped down when the trigger guard was unlatched and moved forward.

Then, a linen or paper .52-caliber cartridge would be inserted into the breech. As the trigger guard was raised, a sharpened edge on the breechblock would shear off the end of the cartridge, exposing the powder. A common percussion cap was then placed on the cone, and the gun was ready to fire.

The first Sharps carbines were issued to U.S. troopers in 1854, and they remained the most widely issued cavalry shoulder arm throughout the conflict. One admiring Union officer remarked: “A cavalry carbine should be very simple in its mechanisim, with all its…parts well covered from the splashing of mud, or the accumulation of rest and dust. Sharps carbine combines all these qualities.”

Breechloaders allowed soldiers to load easily while lying prone, and the rifle version of Sharps was favored by the marksmen in the 1st and 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters, who used a custom model that included a hair trigger.

A massive amount of correspondence passed between Union armies and the home front. Chaplain Richard Eddy of the 60th New York Infantry, who also served as the regimental postmaster, noted in April 1863 that he “mailed for the regiment 3855 letters during the month.”  

The Army of the Potomac comprised 238 infantry regiments, 29 cavalry regiments, and 65 artillery batteries during the Gettysburg campaign, some two months after Chaplain Eddy made his count. If men in all units wrote home at approximately the same rate as the New Yorkers, more than a million letters probably left the army in a single month. The amount of incoming mail can never be known but swelled the total impressively. These numbers attest to the impact of widespread literacy among a national population caught up in life-defining events.  

Many letters traveled in envelopes, often called patriotic covers, that reveal important information about political and social attitudes across the North. In Hardtack and Coffee, or the Unwritten Story of Army Life (1887), John D. Billings discussed what he termed the “large number of fanciful envelopes got up during the war.” He heard about “a young man who had a collection of more than seven thousand such, all with different designs,” and had “several in my possession which I found among the numerous letters written home during war-time.” Billings mentioned many with patriotic themes, such as one bearing a portrait of George Washington and the text “A SOUTHERN MAN WITH UNION PRINCIPLES.” A second depicted “the Earth in space, with ‘United States’ marked on it in large letters, and the American eagle above it. Enclosing all is the inscription, ‘What God has joined, let no man put asunder.’” Another had “a negro standing grinning, a hoe in his hand,” related Billings. “He is represented as saying, ‘Massa can’t have dis chile, dat’s what’s de matter’; and beneath is the title, ‘The latest contraband of war.’” Union military figures graced numerous envelopes, as did negative treatments of Jefferson Davis and other Rebels. “[T]he national colors appear in a hundred or more ways on a number,” affirmed Billings, who concluded that the envelopes, “in a degree at least, expressed some phase of the sentiments popular at the North.”   

Billings provided an accurate snapshot of patriotic envelopes that circulated in the United States. They reminded citizens of their democratic republic and its Constitution, often deploying Columbia, the 19th century’s feminine personification of the United States, as a symbol of what the founding generation bequeathed to subsequent generations. One envelope placed her opposite Daniel Webster’s ringing phrase “Liberty & Union Now & For Ever.” In another, Columbia employed legalistic wording rather than phrasing likely to make hearts soar: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.” The Founders appeared on envelopes in various ways, most often in the person of George Washington. Other prominent motifs included United States flags, eagles, the Union shield, soldiers and sailors, and famous generals and politicians. Some envelopes were humorous, others serious or even didactic. Many combined multiple popular symbols and texts; one placed Columbia on the left holding a sword and a large U.S. flag, balanced on the right by an eagle, a column with a shield and the word “Union,” a bust of Washington, and a copy of the Constitution.  

Ubiquitous allusions to “Union” accompanied various symbols. Representative envelopes offered “Union Forever” on an embossed flag, “Union” surrounded by the names of the loyal states, and “Union” in the middle of a large star. Envelopes catered to individual states, typified by one highlighting Columbia, her hands on the U.S. flag and the seal of the state of New York, with “LOYAL TO THE” in white letters behind her and “UNION” in large red, white, and blue letters to her right. On one striking envelope, a locomotive with “Union For Ever” emblazoned on its smokestack smashes through Rebels along a railroad. Should the letter’s recipient miss the obvious message, a caption explained: “The Union locomotive clearing the Secession track.”  

Jefferson Davis turned up frequently as the principal traitor seeking to destroy the Union—sometimes with comical plays on words as part of the message. One example presents the Confederate president dangling from a gallows with text above and below: “Jeff. Davis, ‘President’ of Traitors, Robbers, and Pirates; the Nero of the 19th century.”; and “On the Last ‘Platform’ of the Southern Confeder-ass-y ‘Rope, Beam & Co.,’ Executors.” A second envelope used images in a pair of ovals—on the top, “Jeff the Dictator As He Is,” a booted and spurred figure holding a sword and with a skull-and-crossbones flag behind him; on the bottom, “Jeff the Dig-Tater-er As He Should Be,” a barefoot and shirtless figure digging with a hoe while an enslaved man whips him.   

Relatively few envelopes dealt directly with either emancipation or African Americans, but those that did usually resorted to overtly racist texts and images. Some catered to Democrats who opposed emancipation, including one caricaturing a Black man with large red lips captioned, “The Cause of All Our Troubles.” Others dealt with contrabands (refugees)—a man shining a shoe and alluding to General Benjamin F. Butler, “By golly Massa Butler, I like dis better dan workin’ in de field for old Secesh massa.”; a black couple in grotesque poses with the caption, “Bress de Lor, we am Contraban.”; and a White man holding a Black child, “Him fader’s hope / Him moder’s joy, / Him darling little / Contraband Boy.”  

Surviving evidence does not indicate what percentage of the United States mail traveled in patriotic envelopes. Some political and military figures prominent early in the war appear more frequently than those whose fame came later, which suggests the envelopes declined in popularity as the war dragged on. The Union’s first real martyr, Col. Elmer Ellsworth, was a subject far more often than Ulysses S. Grant or William Tecumseh Sherman. Many of the covers may have been saved rather than used—collected, as with the man with more than 7,000 mentioned by John D. Billings. For current students of the war, the envelopes indisputably offer valuable information about politics and culture in the wartime North.

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Perhaps no place is better to begin an adventure in the footsteps of Samuel “Champ” Ferguson—the most notorious of Confederate guerrilla leaders—than a small brewery near Sparta, Tenn., roughly 100 miles east of Nashville. One’s mind can become a little numbed when pondering Ferguson, who a 19th-century writer called a “thief, robber, counterfeiter, and murderer.”  

Minutes after consuming the first of two Scorned Hooker IPAs at the eclectic Calfkiller Brewery, I meet my Ferguson guide, Craig Capps. He’s a 39-year-old Sparta resident, Tennessee law enforcement officer, U.S. Army veteran, part-time farmer, and ancestry.com aficionado.  

Capps is a distant relative of Ferguson, who the U.S. military hanged in Nashville for war crimes on October 20, 1865. He can also trace his ancestry to “Tinker Dave” Beaty—a Union guerrilla leader and Ferguson’s archenemy—as well as to Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and “Devil Anse” Hatfield of Hatfields and McCoys notoriety.  

Funny how the world works.  

Born and reared in Tennessee, Capps is knowledgeable about the obscure Battle of Dug Hill, in which the villainous Ferguson played a central role. The “battle” was a skirmish, really, fought in the winter of 1864 by Ferguson and his guerrillas and a few Confederate regulars near the Calfkiller River, roughly 10 miles northeast of Sparta.  

Alexander Fontaine Capps, Craig’s great-great-great-uncle—a guerrilla himself—fought under the man one of his 21st-century biographers called a “dim bulb.” John Alvern Capps—Alexander’s brother and Craig Capps’ great-great-great-grandfather—served in the 4th Tennessee Cavalry (CSA) and also fought at Dug Hill.  

We plan to examine the unmarked battlefield out here in the rugged and sparsely populated area near Sparta. But first there’s a trip to Ferguson’s homestead site deep in the woods, less than a mile from the battlefield. Capps has secured permission for us to visit the private property.  

Soon after departing the brewery, my guide parks his pickup on a muddy side road off two-lane Monterey Highway. For about 30 yards we walk along a red-clay trail—“good Tennessee dirt,” Capps says—and there it is.   

No, not Ferguson’s homesite. Instead, we find an abandoned, circa-1920s mansion once owned by a wealthy doctor. Ivy creeps over its sandstone exterior. Wooden boards in the windows and front entrance prevent the curious like me from peering inside. Stephen King would smile.  

“It’s haunted,” Capps says.  

Nearby, Capps points out a large wild hog trap, a contraption I never deployed while growing up in suburban Pittsburgh. After a circuitous walk through the woods, we arrive at Ferguson’s homestead site, an unremarkable, flat piece of ground among cedars and beech near the Calfkiller River. No visible trace remains of the place where Ferguson lived with his wife and children.  

It was here, shortly after the war, that the U.S. Army came for the notorious guerrilla leader, who had expected to be paroled. Instead, U.S. authorities put Ferguson under arrest in Nashville.  

Dark-skinned with curly black hair and black eyes, the Kentucky-born Ferguson weighed roughly 180 pounds, “without any surplus flesh.” A gambler, hard drinker, and a bully, he had a “tremendous voice” that could be “heard a long distance when in a rage”—which apparently was often. Ferguson had a rabid hatred for U.S. soldiers and enjoyed terrorizing Union sympathizers. Some say the hostility was fueled by the rape of his wife and daughter and death of his young son at the hands of Union soldiers, which Ferguson himself would deny occurred.  

In all, Ferguson may have killed as many as 120 men—all self-defense or acts of war, he claimed. But in actuality, he murdered dozens. In cold blood, Ferguson shot and killed a man bedridden with measles—a former friend of Champ’s whom he suspected of visiting a Union recruiting center—while his five-month-old child lay in a crib nearby. In the aftermath of the First Battle of Saltville, Va., in early October 1864, Ferguson took out his wrath on captured White and Black soldiers alike, shooting some of them dead.  

“We can’t judge those of the 19th century from the mindset of today,” Capps says. “But there’s no doubt Ferguson was a murderer.”  

John Alvern Capps—Craig’s great-great-great-grandfather—and his brother, Alexander, testified at Ferguson’s trial in Nashville. Both witnessed killings by the dastardly guerrilla.  

“They told the truth as they saw it,” Capps says of his ancestors.  

While a brief drizzle offers a respite from the heat, Capps talks about the guerrilla war in White County and beyond. He has a condition I call the “1,000-yard Civil War stare”—a single-minded focus on everything associated with 1861-65. It’s endearing and not uncommon among us kindred souls.  

“The war out here was truly brother versus brother, neighbor versus neighbor,” Capps says in a distinctive Upper Cumberland Appalachian twang.  

Many families who lived in isolated towns in the Cumberland Plateau intermarried. Few here—several worlds away from the state capital in Nashville—owned slaves. Many simply wanted to be left alone but took up sides anyway. The war divided Ferguson’s family, too. His brother, James, served in the 1st Kentucky Cavalry (U.S.). In 1861, a Confederate sympathizer killed him.  

Before visiting the Dug Hill battlefield site, Capps and I make our way to France Cemetery, where Ferguson’s remains lay beneath a comb grave. In 1909, an Oklahoma man claimed the guerrilla leader was alive, and, like similar stories about Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, had somehow escaped justice. But my guide and I agree that’s poppycock.  

Although some believe the site is farther down the Monterey Highway, Capps believes the battlefield—our next stop—is less than a quarter-mile from the cemetery. Capps bases his conclusion on years of studying the fighting and hundreds of visits to the site. Decades ago, a local found battle relics here in the woods near our stop.  

“Look how steep that is,” Capps says after our arrival. He points to a thickly wooded hillside of mostly beech and cedar. Behind and well below us flows the Calfkiller River.   

At Dug Hill on February 22, 1864, from behind trees ideal for concealment, dozens of Ferguson’s guerrillas awaited two companies of 5th Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.). Fearing a surprise attack on his headquarters in Sparta, their colonel had sent 80–110 soldiers to rid the nearby woods of guerrillas.  

Serving as the tip of the cavalry’s spear, John W. Clark—a private in the 1st Tennessee Mounted Infantry riding with the 5th Tennessee Cavalry—advanced up a narrow mountain road with two comrades. Then, about 100 yards away, Clark spotted two guerrillas astride their horses—bait to lure the cavalrymen into a trap.  

“I sounded the double-quick charge signal, and lit out after them, and about the time the company caught up we spied two lines of battle formed,” Clark recalled years later. “One line was up to our right on high ground about 300 feet above us. We were in the Dug Hill road, which ranged around the mountain about 600 yards from where we entered it. At the loose end of a thin hill was another line of battle. By this time another line had formed behind us, and the johnnies were cross-firing on us three ways.”  

Dozens of U.S. soldiers tumbled from their saddles.  

“The smoke was so dense,” Clark remembered, “that you could not tell one man from the other.”  

“One of the most ridiculous battles ever fought,” a Rebel fighter recalled.  

Some U.S. soldiers scrambled down the hillside to the Calfkiller River. One hid in a log until the battle had ended before making his way back to Sparta. Others surrendered to a Confederate officer, who passed them to the rear to Ferguson, “who shot them in cold blood,” according to a U.S. soldier. Some of the cavalrymen had their throats slit.   Later, in a vacant storehouse, a local claimed to have examined the bodies of 41 U.S. Army dead—38 with bullet wounds in the head, three with crushed skulls. But the exact death toll is unknown. The guerrillas suffered far fewer casualties, if any. Months afterward, skeletons are said to have turned up by the road and in the woods.  

Although unmarked and largely forgotten, the battle site holds a power over those of us who relish walking in the footsteps of long-ago soldiers. For Capps, a U.S. Army veteran, the place is surreal.  

“When I learned my great-great-great-grandfather had fought here,” he tells me, “it was like a child going to Normandy with a D-Day veteran. If he had been killed here, I wouldn’t be here.”  

At Nashville State Prison in the fall of 1865, Ferguson posed for a photo with 11 of his guards. It reminds me of an image taken of Lee Harvey Oswald—another notorious figure in American history—while Dallas police held him in custody in 1963.  

Before his execution by hanging, Ferguson said he wanted his body sent to his family for burial in White County. “Don’t give me to the doctors,” the 43-year-old mass murderer said excitedly. “I don’t want to be cut up.”  

As he is today, Ferguson was a polarizing figure in 1865. A reporter at the guerrilla’s execution questioned citizens about him.  

“One man thought him a martyr, hunted down by his enemies and about to become a victim of a judicial murder,” the correspondent wrote. “Another was assured that a direr villain never went to the gallows, and declared that he ought to be hung when he was a little boy.”  

Before our adventure concludes, Capps shows me the trace through the woods that he believes is the wartime road used by U.S. cavalrymen at Dug Hill. But I steer our conversation to Ferguson, who, along with Andersonville commander Henry Wirz, was one of two men hanged by the United States for war crimes committed during the Civil War.  

“Do you think he got what he deserved?” I ask.  

“Idda hanged him, too,” his distant relative says with a smirk.

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John Banks is author of three Civil War books. His latest, A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing), includes stories about the Battle of Dug Hill. E-mail him at jbankstx@comcast.net with your own story ideas. 

No larger collection of artillery had ever been brought to a war’s battlefields in the Western Hemisphere before the Civil War. More than 200,000 men, trained and educated like no other subset of soldiers in this war of amateurs, handled and operated these big guns.

The story continues that the Civil War changed the standards, rules, and results of artillery use, advancing technological, tactical, and other norms forward from the Napoleonic wars, with their smoothbore guns and inaccurate round shot, toward a present and future determined by rifled guns that could be expected to hit their targets with regularity. Artillery would dominate from here on, and the side that figured out how to use it best would surely be victorious.

Not so fast, says Earl J. Hess. The professor emeritus of history at Lincoln Memorial University and author of 30 books on the Civil War argues in his 2022 study Civil War Field Artillery: Promise and Performance on the Battlefield that these advances were overrated in determining the war’s outcome as well as the proper place of its artillery on the timeline of military history.

Let’s get right to the heart of it: The Civil War is often considered the “first modern war.” You argue that it was mostly a traditional one. Please explain. 

Anyone who views the Civil War as the first modern war has a very hard case to prove. In my view it overwhelmingly was closer to warfare during the Napoleonic era 50 years before than to World War I 50 years later. A Napoleonic soldier would have been quite comfortable on a Civil War battlefield, while a Civil War soldier would have been stunned by the battlefield created by the Great War of 1914–18. 

In light of that, what were the differences between the artillery forces of previous wars and those of the Civil War? 

Civil War artillery saw only relatively slight improvement over that used in the Napoleonic era. The biggest difference was rifling, which applied to only about half the pieces used during the Civil War. Yet, because mostly of problems with igniting long-range ordnance and problems with seeing targets at great distances, there is no proof that rifled artillery produced any noticeable results on Civil War battlefields other than the odd long-range shot that hit its target because the gun crew happened to be particularly good. 

What were the main improvements over the past? 

Another difference between Civil War artillery and that of previous decades was adding heavier ordnance to the mix. Six-pounders were phased out during the first half of the Civil War in favor of 10-pounders and 12-pounders. Also, the trend was toward eliminating all decorations and handles on the artillery tube because they caused weak points that could not resist the stress of firing as well. Sleek-looking designs, heavier ordnance, and lighter pieces for easier moving around were the trends evident by the 1850s and 1860s. All this amounts to an improvement on the age-old system of artillery, but not a revolutionary break from it. 

What were the greatest disappointments of Civil War artillery? 

Probably the greatest disappointment was the failure of rifled pieces to prove their worth on the battlefield. Their limitations became apparent to many. That is why about half the pieces used by both sides during the war still were smoothbore. Many gunners were convinced they were at least as good as the new rifles, or better. 

How much did the improvements and disappointments have to do with winning and losing the war? 

Civil War artillery failed to achieve more than a supporting role to infantry. It did not come to dominate the battlefield as would happen along the Western Front during World War I. Even in static campaigns like that at Petersburg, and despite the heavy concentration of artillery pieces along the 35-mile-long trench system at Petersburg and Richmond, the guns failed to provide a campaign-winning edge for either side. That does not mean they were unimportant, by any means. They could and did on occasion elevate their role on the battlefield to something like a decisive edge under the right circumstances. One could argue that Union guns did so on January 2, 1863, at Stones River, and Confederate guns did so at the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh, for example. But far more common was their accomplishment in helping infantry hold a position, a much less prominent, though important, role. 

One of the issues you cover in your book is the conflict over control of the artillery between the artillery itself and the infantry. How important was that, and how did it resolve? 

Artillery was a supporting arm of the infantry, and to a lesser extent of the cavalry. It did not have the ability to operate independently, always needing support from foot or mounted troops. That is one of the reasons army culture considered it best to vest infantry commanders with the authority to command artillery. Batteries were assigned to infantry brigades and were under the infantry brigade commander’s orders and relied on his infantry brigade staff for their supplies as well. 

Some artillery officers complained of this arrangement for several reasons. The most prominent one was that it inhibited the concentration of artillery on the battlefield and thus robbed it of its potential to play a decisive role in combat. But more importantly, they complained that infantry brigade staff simply did not know how to supply batteries very well. Another important reason for their complaint was that dispersing the batteries to infantry units greatly limited advancement for artillery officers, most of whom could look forward to holding nothing higher than a captaincy of a battery. 

While historians have widely accepted the opinion of artillery officers without question, I argue that their complaint has only limited validity. The complaint about the inability to concentrate the guns to play a prominent role on the battlefield does not hold water. The most visible concentrations of guns, at Shiloh and Stones River, took place in armies that practiced dispersion of batteries to infantry brigades. The system was flexible. If infantry officers wanted to, they had no difficulty concentrating batteries for a specific job on the battlefield.

There must have been something to their complaints…

Their complaints were quite valid when it came to administrative control, rather than battlefield control. They needed their own staff to supply the batteries and to constantly train the men. 

By the midpoint of the Civil War, the major field armies of both sides began to group field artillery into units of their own, called artillery brigades in some armies and artillery battalions in others. Between battles, these units were under the control of an artillery officer appointed to his position, and he was responsible for supply and training. But during a battle, control of those units reverted to infantry commanders at the division or corps levels. This was not everything the artillery officers wanted, but it was more than they ever had before in American military history. Moreover, it essentially was the system used during the 20th century wars as well.

In the Civil War this arrangement improved the administration and upkeep of the artillery force, but it did not noticeably improve its battlefield performance, which was as good early in the war as it was later in the conflict. Even though some infantry officers foolishly ordered the guns about even though they knew nothing about how to use them, an equal number were keen students of artillery practice and could use the guns well on the battlefield.

There was a third group of infantry officers who knew little if anything about how to use artillery but were wise enough to allow their battery commanders a completely free hand in operating under fire. In other words, there is not such a clear-cut difference between the dispersion policy of 1861–62 and the concentration policy of 1863–65.

How should we think of the Civil War as it occupies the space between Napoleonic warfare and World War I? 

I do not see the Civil War as a transitional conflict between the Napoleonic wars and World War I so much as a minor variation on the Napoleonic model. The things that made the Great War the first truly modern conflict were largely or wholly absent in the Civil War. If that is transition, then one could say there was a huge leap across a big chasm between 1865 and 1914, but an easy step back from 1861 to 1815.

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The Confederate Congress met in 11 sessions from February 1861 to March 1865. The last seven volumes of the Southern Historical Society Papers, published intermittently from 1923 to 1959, reprinted proceedings of the body’s sessions from February 1862 through March 1865. This book thus fills the void, reprinting proceedings of the first five sessions: February 1861–February 1862.

Following the U.S. precedent, the Confederate Constitution prescribed two senators per state. In the House, population-based representation gave Virginia 16 seats, Georgia and Alabama 12 each, and so forth.

On February 5, 1861, the second day of the Confederate Provisional Congress convened in Montgomery, Ala., Vice President Stephens declared, “This is a Congress of States.” He was being more than metaphorical. First it was a unicameral house (it split into House and Senate in February 1862). Moreover, in floor votes each state delegation got just one to cast.

One of Congress’ first tasks was to devise a plan for a national government, that the people’s “rights and social institutions may be forever maintained,” in the words of Georgia’s Francis Bartow. Congressional members in the first year were essentially delegates to the states’ secession conventions; elections were held in November 1861.

From the start, Congress allowed stenographers and reporters to attend and record sessions. This allows Dr. Carlson to draw not just from the congressional journal (scanty in detail), but also from Confederate newspapers, which frequently carried actions on the floor word for word. Accordingly, in compiling this book the editor has drawn on daily press reports in the Richmond papers as well as The Charleston Mercury, Montgomery Weekly Advertiser, and a few others.

Congress of States concludes with Howell Cobb’s address to the Congress, predicting the viability of the Confederate government, “relying on the harmony of our people; upon the justice of our cause; upon our own strong arms, and the smile of a kind and protecting Providence.”

Congress of States

Proceedings of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America

Edited by R. David Carlson, University of Alabama Press, 2023

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The Civil War kicked off a demand for firearms just as industrial technology allowed gunsmiths to tinker with various designs, and numerous handguns were developed with the hopes of obtaining military contracts. Some of those weapons were sleek and well-balanced. And then there was the poorly balanced and odd-looking Navy revolver produced by the Savage Revolving Firearms Company of Middletown, Conn., which had a reputation for producing unusual and unique weapons.

The two triggers sported by the revolver were its most distinctive feature. The lower “ring” trigger was in reality more of a lever that rotated the cylinder and cocked the hammer at the same time. The upper trigger’s purpose was conventional in that it fired the weapon.

Though clumsy in appearance, the Savage Navy was a step toward double-action—meaning a revolver could be repeatedly fired simply by pulling its trigger. Revolvers at the time were single-action in that the user had to manually cock the hammer between each shot to rotate the cylinder.

The U.S. government first contracted with Savage on October 16, 1861, to buy some of the revolvers, and eventually purchased 12,000 of them. They were issued to 26 Union cavalry regiments, including units from Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Vermont, and the Potomac Home Brigade. Even some Confederate cavalry regiments from Texas and Virginia were issued Savage Navys privately bought and secretly shipped south.

Fifty Savage revolvers were even sent for use aboard the famous USS Constitution in 1861. That ship was used as a training vessel for at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. 

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Warships with powerful cannons patrol the waters just off Mobile Bay. It is the summer of 1864, and Union sailors are bristling for a fight, ready to take on any vessel tempted to run the blockade in order to reach one of the last Gulf of Mexico ports still defended by the Confederacy.

Suddenly, the Northern sailors observe an unfamiliar object hovering in the sky above the Alabama coastline. Using whirring airscrews to defy gravity, the bizarre contraption emits a loud noise and belches smoke as it moves slowly toward the Union ships.

The men watch in stunned silence as the monstrous machine slowly drifts in their direction before stopping in midair and dropping a heavy object. The small dark shape falls swiftly, then strikes a Union warship, triggering a huge explosion. Bursting into flames, the vessel quickly sinks.

The Confederate “helicopter” has scored its first victory of the war.

Ancient Inspiration

That scenario is clearly imagined, but it illustrates an incredible case of what-might-have-been history. What if Confederates had invented a helicopter capable of dropping bombs?

It came closer to happening than many people realize. An innovative inventor in Alabama saw the potential for such an aircraft and actually drew up plans for how it might fly. Those drawings are preserved today in the archives of the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

By January 20, 1862, Union ships had managed to prevent most vessels from entering or leaving the major Confederate port of Mobile Bay. While certainly not a complete cordon, the blockade cut off delivery of supplies and, more important, the export of cotton to other nations—a much-needed source of income for the Southern war effort.

William C. Powers believed he had the answer to breaking the blockade: a motorized airship capable of bombing the Northern fleet. Known today as the Confederate helicopter, his idea offered a revolutionary look at solving a bothersome military problem.

“Mr. Powers sees what’s going on,” said Thomas Paone, museum specialist at the National Air and Space Museum. “The federal blockade is choking off the South. He’s living in Mobile, which is dependent on seaborne trade. He starts thinking, ‘We can’t break the blockade, so what do we do? Let’s try something different.’ That thought process is fascinating to me.”

And to many historians as well. Powers’ plans and a small-scale model he built were donated by his family to the Smithsonian Institution in 1941. Since then, researchers and aeronautical engineers have pored over his design to determine the scope and feasibility of his idea.

“Powers realizes this is something that could have a military purpose,” said Roger Connor, curator of the museum’s vertical flight collection. “He was definitely laying the groundwork for something that would fly through the air.”

Powers’ concept is intriguing—especially considering it was devised 40 years before the Wright brothers succeeded in manned powered flight with a fixed-wing aircraft in 1903. He drew upon the ideas of earlier inventors, including ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci.

For propulsion, Powers used the rotational features of the Archimedean screw—originally developed to remove water from the hold of a ship. Da Vinci had also incorporated a version of the invention into his sketches for his helicopter. 

But the Confederate chopper was different. Instead of one screw, Powers included three with his design: a single twin-screw system on the top for upward motion and two separate screws on the sides to drive the airship forward. Building something that could fly up and over other things was a dream for many inventors in the 19th century.

“Vertical flight as a concept is more dominant than fixed-wing flight—essentially airplane-style flight—at this time,” Connor said. “Inventors are starting to understand that air acts similarly to fluid. There’s certainly a carryover from nautical construction to the vision for how an aircraft might perform.”

That maritime influence is evident throughout the plans and model. Paone pointed to several aspects of the design that have a distinct nautical style rather than the aviation appearances aviation enthusiasts expect to see today. 

“If you look at the drawings of the helicopter, it’s definitely got some ship-building roots,” he said. “It has a ship’s body and smokestacks like a steamer would. It has much more of a feel of a nautical craft than an aircraft.”

Other Flying Machines

Powers’ helicopter came at a time of incredible innovation. Technological improvements exploded from drawing boards as inventors on both sides sought to support the war effort. Mobile was also the home of H.L. Hunley, the first operational submarine to attack a warship in combat. It sank in 1864 shortly after destroying USS Housatonic outside Charleston, S.C.

“Unfortunately, warfare inspires innovation,” Paone said. “In addition to the Hunley, there are all sorts of improvements in the railroad, telegraph, weapons, and ironclads. They come about because of the Civil War and ripple throughout the world stage.”

At the time, Powers was not the only one thinking about taking to the air. Edward Serrell, a colonel in the Union Army, also conceived of a flying machine. As chief engineer for the Army of the James, he demonstrated how aerial reconnaissance could be accomplished by using a windup toy that flew upward of 100 feet.

Major General Benjamin Butler liked the idea and ordered Serrell to build a full-sized flying machine. He constructed a 52-foot, cigar-shaped prototype with wings and four fans for lift and propulsion. Called variously the Valomotive and Reconoiterer, the aircraft was waiting for the development of a lightweight steam engine for power when the war ended.

Serrell abandoned his plans with the cessation of hostilities and the whereabouts of his prototype are lost. His papers are conserved in the archives at the National Air and Space Museum. Serrell’s invention is detailed in the book Smithsonian Civil War: Inside the National Collection in a chapter written by Tom Crouch, curator emeritus at the museum.

Amazingly, these were not the only plans in the works for flying machines during the war. Other inventors had conceived of building motor-powered crafts capable of delivering explosive payloads on enemy positions.

Richard Oglesby Davidson of Virginia had his sights set on building an “aerostat,” an aircraft in “the form of an American eagle,” he wrote in his 1840 book on aviation theory. It featured a beak, legs made of spring and feathers painted on the fuselage. The “conductor,” or pilot, sat in a compartment inside the eagle, where he operated the wings for motion. According to the 2016 book Astride Two Worlds: Technology and the American Civil War by Barton C. Hacker, Davidson even considered installing a carbonic acid gas engine for supplemental power.

No one knows today what happened to those plans, though Davidson—who was nicknamed “Bird”—does turn up again during the Civil War. Crouch reports in his chapter in Smithsonian Civil War that the inventor made a tour of the trenches in Petersburg, Va., in 1864, where he showed Confederate troops a wooden model of his concept. He reportedly asked enlisted men to donate $1 and officers $5 so he could construct his flying machine. What happened to those plans—or the donated money—is anybody’s guess.

In 1863, Richmond dentist R. Findlay Hunt proposed building a steam-powered “flying machine intended to be used for war purposes” to Jefferson Davis. The president of the Confederate States of America was so impressed with the idea that he referred Hunt to General Robert E. Lee. After review by his engineers, the concept was deemed unworkable.

After the war, Hunt petitioned the U.S. Patent Office for protection of his design until he could perfect his idea. He purportedly built a model two years later but never applied for a patent.

Perhaps the most ambitious plan for an aircraft of war was developed by Solomon Andrews, a New Jersey physician and inventor. He actually built and tested a working model that was flown over Perth Amboy, N.J., in 1863 in an attempt to attract the attention of Union military leaders.

Called Aereon, Andrews’ flying machine was essentially an unpowered dirigible. It consisted of three large balloons tied together with a rudder for steering and gondola for passengers. It had no motor and relied solely on wind for forward movement, though Andrews claimed he could power the aircraft by using “Gravitation,” according to John Toland in the 1972 book Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs and Disasters.

The balloons were approximately 80 feet in length and 13 feet wide. Each included 21 cells to prevent the gas from sloshing back and forth. In between the balloons and gondola was a 12-foot-long basket that featured a ballast car on tracks. The airship was controlled by moving the basket forward to dive and backward to ascend.

Andrews wrote several letters to President Abraham Lincoln and other officials about his flying machine. He even demonstrated how it would fly using a small model at the Capitol Building and Smithsonian Institution. By that time it was late in the war, however, and Union victory seemed imminent, so Congress opted not to fund the proposal.

Following the war, Andrews formed the Aerial Navigation Company and built a second airship that in 1866 twice flew over New York City. The firm went bankrupt during the postwar economic recession and the Aereon #2 never flew again.

“Ahead of His Time”

While all of the ideas were certainly uplifting, few of them appeared capable of getting off the ground. The dynamics of powered flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle were not well understood in the 1860s and really wouldn’t be deciphered until the Wright brothers took off from Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina at the dawn of the new century.

As for the Confederate helicopter, most aviation experts agree Powers’ design had fundamental flaws that would have prevented it from taking to the air as designed. The airscrews likely would not have generated the necessary lift, while the craft itself was too heavy for the simple steam engine Powers proposed for it.

“The propulsion aspect was not viable,” Connor says. “Powers is not on the leading edge of developing this technology. Others make further inroads than him at the time. However, he is a standout in the concept of application by understanding that it has a military purpose.”

That’s not to say that Powers wasn’t on the right flight path. Some of his ideas held promise, and one even predicted an innovation that would come about some 80 years later. According to Paone, Powers’ plans called for
lattice-style construction of wood in the aircraft’s fuselage to give it added durability. That concept was used by the British in World War II in the wings of the Vickers Wellington bomber.

“This provides incredible strength without adding lots of weight,” Paone said. “Perhaps Mr. Powers was just ahead of his time.”

Little is known about Powers. According to his family, he was an architectural engineer living in Mobile during the war. When Powers realized the South did not have enough ships to break the Union blockade, he started tinkering with vertical flight. It is believed the Confederate military was aware of his idea but was unwilling to finance something it likely perceived as an out-of-this-world scheme.

Once Powers realized his dream would not become a reality, he hid the plans and model so they would not fall into Northern hands, according to family lore. They remained largely unknown until his granddaughter, Clara McDermott, donated them to the Smithsonian for further study more than 80 years ago.

Since that time, historians and scientists have speculated about what might have been. Had Powers been given the money to test his idea, would he have eventually succeeded? That answer will never be known for certain, but Paone is excited just thinking about what was being dreamt of more than 150 years ago.

“What fascinates me is that you have people who are legitimately looking at pushing the envelope with flight,” he said. “Would this have worked? Probably not, but he’s going down this path thinking maybe he could make something fly.”

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Massachusetts-based author Dave Kindy is a self-described history nerd and remembers the centennial celebration of the Civil War. He is a frequent contributor to several HistoryNet publications, as well as Air & Space Quarterly, National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Smithsonian.

On September 14, 1862, fighting broke out on South Mountain, Md., as portions of the Army of the Potomac clashed with Army of Northern Virginia troops holding passes over the mountain. On the 15th, the day after particularly heavy fighting at Fox’s Gap, Ohio troops were assigned to a burial detail on that contested cleft. As it was a task they did not particularly like, they sought a shortcut by dumping a number of Confederate bodies down a well in front of a cabin.

The cabin and well belonged to an old farmer named Daniel Wise. Realizing his well was ruined and being a shrewd codger, Wise made the most of a bad situation by contracting with 9th Corps commander Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside to continue the process for $1 a body. After depositing several more bodies, Wise sealed the well, earning himself a tidy sum.

Or so goes the legend.

Some versions of the tale claim that no damage was done because the well was dry or abandoned. Others claim farmer Wise was caught and made to put things right by removing the dead Confederates and giving them a decent burial. All accounts agree, at least, that Wise was paid for his troubles.

Most modern authors of books on the battle use the same source when relating the tale: History of the Twenty-First Massachusetts Volunteers. It was authored 20 years after the Battle of South Mountain by Charles F. Walcott, a member of the 21st. Since Captain Walcott was at Fox’s Gap on September 14 and 15, some historians presume that he witnessed the event. It is from the following account that most authors have based their narratives concerning Wise: 

“The burial of a portion of the rebel dead was peculiar enough to call for special mention. Some Ohio troops had been detailed to bury them, but not relishing the task, and finding the ground hard to dig, soon removed the covering of a deep well connected with Wise’s house on the summit, and lightened their toil by throwing a few bodies into the well. Mr. Wise soon discovered what they were about, and had it stopped: and then the Ohioans went away, leaving their work unfinished. Poor Mr. Wise, anxious to get rid of the bodies, finally made an agreement with General Burnside to bury them for a dollar apiece. As long as his well had been already spoiled, he concluded to realize on the rest of its capacity, and put in fifty-eight more rebel bodies, which filled it to the surface of the ground.”

So now, let’s establish some facts.

The Fight at Fox’s Gap

Daniel Wise was a real person. He was born in Brunswick, Md., in 1802. On June 24, 1824, he married Mary Milly and together the couple had at least three children, a son named John, and two daughters named Matilda and Christiana. The census records for 1860 lists Daniel, Matilda, and John as residents of a modest, 1½-story whitewashed log cabin that stood at the intersection of the Old Sharpsburg Road (modern Reno Monument Road) and two mountain roads that more or less followed the mountain crest in a north-south direction.

Daniel’s wife seems to have perished (she was not listed in the 1850 census) and Christiana married and moved to start a family of her own. Among Christiana’s children was one of Daniel’s grandchildren, 5-year-old Anne Cecilia. Christiana often returned to visit and brought her children with her. At the time of the battle, Daniel Wise was 60 years old.

It seems that neither Wise nor his children were especially well off. In addition to farming, both Daniel and John eked out a living as day laborers and for a time as potters. Daniel Wise also earned a living as a “root doctor,” a local expert in folk medicine. According to the family’s oral history, on the morning of the battle the Wise family fled their cabin to seek safety elsewhere.

The fight at Fox’s Gap resulted in horrendous slaughter. The section of the Old Sharpsburg Road that passed over the ridge crest near Wise’s cabin would come to be known to the veterans as the Sunken Road. Regarding Confederate casualties, square foot per square foot, the Sunken Road at Fox’s Gap is proportionately every bit as bloody as its famous counterpart at Antietam.

One of the battle’s Confederate combatants, 1st Lt. Peter McGlashen of the 50th Georgia Infantry, later wrote: “When ordered to retreat I could scarce extricate myself from the dead and wounded around me. A Man could have walked from the head of our line to the foot on their bodies.”

This is borne out by a New York veteran of the battle. Remembered William Todd, the regimental historian of the 79th New York Infantry:

“Morning of the 15th dawned at last, and on such a sight as none of us ever wish to look upon again. Behind and in front of us, but especially in the angles of the stone walls, the dead bodies of the enemy lay thick; near the gaps in the fences they were piled on top of each other like cord-wood dumped from a cart. The living had retreated during the night and none but the dead and severely wounded remained….About noon we moved off the field, and on our way saw many more evidences of the battle. At one angle of the stone walls fourteen bodies of the enemy were counted lying in a heap, just as they had fallen, apparently. We referred to that spot as ‘Dead Man’s Corner.’”

The Wood Road, which ran southerly from Turner’s Gap to Fox’s Gap, was bordered on the east by a “stone and rider” fence near the intersection with the Old Sharpsburg Road. This type of fence consisted of a combination of stone wall with split rail fence over the top. William Todd may have referenced the intersection as “Dead Man’s Corner” as he was one of many who noticed a dead Confederate soldier hung up on the fence. “A curious sight presented itself in the body of a rebel straddling a stone wall,” wrote Todd, “he must have been killed while in the act of climbing over, for with a leg on either side, the body was thrown slightly forward stiff in death.”

Captain James Wren of the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry had some time to view the battlefield on September 15 before his regiment headed for Sharpsburg. He not only noticed the dead Confederate on the fence, but another truly horrific sight. The following is from his personal diary:

“Just to the right of my skirmish line of yesterday were two Cross roads…and on our front there was a stone fence & behind that fence & in this cross road the enemy lay very thick. One rebel, in crossing the fence was Killed in the act & his Clothing Caught & he was hanging on the fence….At this place being the top of South Mountain, the Hospital was an awful sight, being a little house, by its self, & in the yard there was 3 or 4 Large tables in it & as the soldiers was put on it (that was wounded), the surgical Core Came along & the head of the Core had in his hand a piece of white Chalk & he marked the place where the Limb was to be Cut off & right behind him was the line of surgeons with their instruments & they proceeded to amputate & in Looking around in the yard, I saw a Beautiful, plump arm Laying, which drew my attention & in looking a Little at it, and seeing another of the same Kind, I picked them up & Laid them together & found that they are right & one a Left Arm, which Convinced me that they war off the one man & you Could see many legs Laying in the yard with the shoes & stocking on.”

Burial details began their gruesome work. Because Burnside’s 9th Corps occupied Fox’s Gap, the Union dead were buried first. By the end of the 15th, most of Burnside’s troops were off the mountain. Very few dead Confederates, if any at all, were buried on that day and, consequently, the bulk of the dead Southerners still lay above ground.

Burying the Dead

Many of the survivors of the fight at Fox’s Gap took the opportunity to tour the field, and many of the local citizenry came by to watch and collect curios. The Wise family’s well was located between Wise’s cabin and the Old Sharpsburg Road in plain sight of everyone using the road.

It is not unreasonable, then, to presume that had a 60-year-old man been occupied dumping dead Confederates down his family’s well, there would have been someone around to take notice. The truth is, no bodies were thrown down the well on September 15, 1862. That would instead happen on September 16, and farmer Daniel Wise had nothing to do with it.

It seems there was a witness to the event, Private Samuel Compton of the 12th Ohio Infantry, who wrote: 

“On the morning of the 16th I strolled out to see them bury the Confederate dead. I saw but I never want to another sight. The squad I saw were armed with a pick & a canteen full of whiskey. The whiskey the most necessary of the two. The bodies had become so offensive that men could only endure it by being staggering drunk. To see men stagger up to corpses and strike four or five times before they could get a hold, a right hold being one above the belt. Then staggering, as the very drunk will, they dragged the corpses to a 60 foot well and tumbling them in. What a sepulcher and what a burial! You don’t wonder I had no appetite for supper.”

Obviously, conditions at Fox’s Gap on September 16 were much different from what they had been the day before. The area was definitely less crowded. One of the soldiers on burial detail was Private Michael Deady of the 23rd Ohio Infantry, who recalled that there were 75 men on burial detail at Fox’s Gap, a mixture of soldiers from several different regiments. It certainly seems that the Ohio men had a hand in dumping the bodies down the well.

If Private Deady’s veracity is trustworthy, the numbers of Confederates requiring burial was tremendous. After helping to bury 33 Union troops on September 15, Deady noted on the next day, “Buried 200 rebs, they lay pretty thick.” On September 17, he was till at the grim work, “bury 250 today.” Remarkably, the burial details at Fox’s Gap were still at it as late as September 18. As Deady noted: “Same old work awful smell to work by. To day finish and glad of it.” On the same day, Private John McNutty Clugston of the 23rd Ohio noted, “Finished the burying of the dead at 4 P.M. and proceeded to Boonsboro and camped in a barn.”

The burial details at Fox’s Gap spent three days, apparently on their own with little supervision, burying more than 450 dead Confederates. Many of the soldiers were using alcohol to numb their senses. These unfortunate Union soldiers rejoined their regiments at Antietam just as the burial details of that momentous battle began the grisly task of burying the dead in the fields around Sharpsburg.

58 Bodies

As far as the well is concerned, the intoxicated men may have simply viewed the well as a convenient receptacle. Or, it may have started by someone dumping amputated limbs into the well on September 15, and then naturally continuing with whole bodies the next day. For the burial details it would have seemed that the well was already ruined and therefore it was only natural to continue. This brings up another aspect of the legend, that the well was not ruined because it was abandoned and dry. Once again there is evidence in the family history that indeed the well was dry, not because it was abandoned, but because as Anne Cecilia (Daniel’s granddaughter) remembered, it was under construction at the time.

Whatever the spark of origin, or condition of the well at the time, at least 58 dead bodies ended up in Wise’s Well on September 16. Samuel Compton’s account was verified in both a remarkable and roundabout manner by someone else associated with the 12th Ohio Infantry. Eliza Otis, the wife of 2nd Lt. Harrison G. Otis. Eliza noted the incident in her journal. It was occasioned by the visit in June 1863 of some fellow officers that served with her husband. In the course of the evening’s conversation, some incidents and “personal observations” of previous battles were discussed: 

“In one place, near South Mountain, I think, they said it was, sixty dead bodies were thrown into a deep old well– that was their only sepulcher– they were those of the rebel soldiers, and were placed there by our men who were three days in burying the dead, and time and their various duties gave them no opportunity to afford the fallen foe a better mausoleum.”

It is appropriate at this juncture to clarify that Captain Charles F. Walcott, whose account of the incident became the basis in popular Civil War history, was not there when the incident happened, because he marched off the mountain with his regiment on September 15. Walcott received his information second-hand, and footnoted his account by saying that the story as he described it was told originally to a member of the Sanitary Commission by Daniel Wise: 

“This account of the burial of the rebels was given by Mr. Wise himself, a few weeks after the act. to a gentleman connected with the Sanitary Commission, who noticed that the well had been filled up, and asked him how a man’s hand came to be projecting through the sunken earth, with which it had been covered.”

The Sanitary Commission was a civilian organization whose basic object was to better the living conditions of the Union Army. Walcott did not name the source, only that it was a “gentleman” connected with the commission, but his anonymous second-hand account in his 1882 regimental history has been accepted over others written by those who observed first-hand what actually transpired at Wise’s farm.

It must have been a very frustrating couple of days for the Wise family. Not only were they unable to immediately get back into their home because it was being used as a field hospital, but they most likely had to wait several more days until the burial details had finished their work. According to the Wise family history, “there were bodies in the well when they came back.”

Bowie’s List

Sometime around 1869, Moses Poffenberger and Aaron Good were employed by the state of Maryland to inventory Confederate burial places and visited Fox’s Gap. Although most of the Union soldiers who perished in Maryland had already been re-interred at the Antietam National Cemetery by then, the Confederates mostly remained buried on the battlefields. Both Poffenberger and Good visited, identified, and cataloged every trench and grave they could find. Under the auspices of Governor Oden Bowie, their list was published with the title: A Descriptive List of the Burial Places of the Remains of Confederate Soldiers, Who Fell in the Battles of Antietam, South Mountain, Monocacy, and other Points in Washington and Frederick Counties in the State of Maryland. Today it is simply known as “Bowie’s List.”

Poffenberger and Good listed 47 unknown “In Wise’s lot on east side of house and lot on top of South Mountain.” They also listed 23 unknown “In Wise’s lot on west side of house and stable on top of South Mountain.” On page 51 of Bowie’s List is the succinct entry, “58 unknown, In Wise’s Well on South Mountain.” 

In 1874, 12 years after the Battle of South Mountain, the Confederate dead were finally removed and re-interred at the Washington Confederate Cemetery in Hagerstown, Md. Incredibly, for 12 years the Wise family lived with the graves of 128 unknown Confederate soldiers in the immediate vicinity of their home. The work of removing the Confederate dead was contracted to Mr. Henry C. Mumma of Sharpsburg. He was paid $1.65 “per head.” As noted in the local Hagerstown Mail, June 26, 1874:

“Mumma has been most successful in his work and is at this time continuing its prosecution with vigor…Some of these bodies we have heretofore noticed as having been taken from the historical well on South Mountain battle-field, where they were thrown by Gen. Reno’s command.” 

General Burnside’s 9th Corps was commanded by Maj. Gen. Jesse Lee Reno, who was mortally wounded at the close of battle and perished within hours. What is germane to debunking the accepted narrative of the well is to note that the Hagerstown newspaper attributed the act to “Reno’s command,” not Daniel Wise.

In 1876, six years before the publication of Walcott’s regimental history, Daniel Wise died. He never knew of the legend that grew from Walcott’s storytelling, published in 1882. John Wise sold the property in 1878, two years after his father’s death, and moved to West Virginia. When Walcott’s book was published, the Wise family had left Fox’s Gap.

Excavation and Discovery

In the early 2000s, the National Park Service purchased the site of Wise’s well for incorporation into the Appalachian Trail. During the summer of 2002, a collaboration of archaeologists, historians, and trail volunteers explored the site and accomplished some meaningful archeology for the first time. They discovered a rectangular brick and mortar shaft feature in the vicinity of the suspected cabin site. A visual examination of the interior revealed a half dome-shaped concrete vault structure under the shaft. It was interpreted to be the top of a concrete cistern, that is, an underground tank for holding water. This was consistent with conversations of former residents who insisted there was no well, but a cistern instead, perhaps constructed by later residents as an alternate water source.

That theory, however, was debunked. Upon further excavation the bell-shaped concrete vault was found to be sitting on at least four courses of dry laid stone that undoubtedly surrounded an open shaft that was consistent with a hand-dug stone-lined 19th-century well or cistern. The feature was filled with debris, most of which looked to be from the mid- to late-20th century. No other stone-line underground structure that could have been used as a well or cistern was found near the cabin site that summer. Although not entirely conclusive, it does appear that the archaeologists found Wise’s famous historical well. It also appears that it was later used for a time as a functioning cistern.

Setting the historical record straight is often condemned as “revisionism.” The story of Daniel Wise’s well has become cemented as fact in the history of the Maryland Campaign and, unfortunately, much of it is legend. The campaign has more than ample drama and human interest that is well documented and so its history should not include incidents that have no basis in the historical record.

To “revise,” by definition, implies correction and improvement. I have attempted to correct the Wise’s well story; not demolish it. The intent has always been to exonerate Daniel Wise from blame for an onerous act he never committed. Without doubt the well became a mass grave for at least 58 dead Confederate soldiers. What I have done is merely correct the narrative behind how they got there and, in the process, expose some of the true horror of warfare.

The 58 unfortunate Southerners were not put in the well on September 15, but rather the next day, September 16. Daniel Wise did not put them there, a drunken Union burial detail did; and there is no evidence that Wise, or any member of his family, got $1 per body, or any compensation for damages done.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Steven R. Stotelmyer writes from Hagerstown, Md., and is the author of The Bivouacs of the Dead: The Story of Those Who Died at Antietam and South Mountain and Too Useful To Sacrifice, Reconsidering George B. McClellan’s Generalship in the Maryland Campaign. He is a National Park Service Volunteer as well as a Certified Antietam Battlefield and South Mountain Tour Guide.

In her day, Elizabeth Oakes Smith was a national figure. Born in Maine in 1806, she and her family moved to New York City in the late 1830s, where she joined literary circles and emerged as a prominent feminist essayist, lecturer, and poet. By the 1850s, she was living with her family on Long Island. The forces of the Civil War, however, led to her downfall. In 1861, her favorite son, Appleton Oaksmith, was arrested for outfitting old whaling ships for the slave trade. After spending several weeks imprisoned at Fort Lafayette in New York and Fort Warren in Boston, Oaksmith was transferred over to civil authorities and convicted in the federal court in Boston in the summer of 1862. Before he could be sentenced, though, he escaped from jail and exiled himself in Havana, Cuba, where he became a Confederate blockade-runner.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith spent the war years seeking a presidential pardon for her son. She wrote to Abraham Lincoln and met with Secretary of State William H. Seward, but nothing ever came of her efforts. As the war continued, she became increasingly embittered toward the Union and believed that Appleton was the victim of a malevolent administration in Washington, D.C. Although she had shown sympathy for African Americans and abolitionism before the war, her Democratic politics became increasingly evident in her diary by the midpoint of the war. She grew to especially hate Seward.

In the summer of 1863, Oakes Smith experienced one of the greatest terrors of her life—the New York City Draft Riots. For several days in mid-July, working-class men, women, and children—mostly Irish Democrats—lashed out against Lincoln’s conscription and emancipation policies. At least 105 people died during the five days of rioting, many of whom were African Americans who were viciously targeted by the mob. During this ordeal, Oakes Smith saw a dense crowd standing around a lamppost, upon which hung the body of Colonel Henry O’Brien, the Irish commander of the 11th New York Volunteers, who had ordered his troops to fire above the crowd the previous day in order to disperse them.

Sadly, O’Brien’s men had killed a mother and her 2-year-old child in the process. Now the rioters would exact their revenge. She also encountered Jeremiah G. Hamilton, a 56-year-old African American millionaire on Wall Street. Her diary, which is held with her papers at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, is one of the most remarkable accounts of this period. The following excerpts trace her reaction to the Gettysburg Campaign and then the horrific events that transpired in New York City shortly afterward.

June 17
The whole country is in a ferment because of the movement of General Lee north—Harrisburg is threatened—the Govenor [sic] of New York has been called upon for troops by the Govenor of Pennsylvania. The people have responded generously to the State call, but desired guarantees of the Govenor that they shall go only on short service—to defend the north—not fight the South—they will not trust the authorities at Washington.

June 18th
The excitement still continues. The people call for Gen. McLellon [McClellan] to head the army of the Potomac. We are now reaping the bitter fruits of the imbecility, and treachery of this Administration. I sometimes wonder how the historian will deal with this period. The Abolitionists have anticipated time by publishing their own version of events, called a History of the Rebellion by [John S.C.] Abbott, which suppresses facts and misrepresents them.

I am startled and distressed at events, and find how little I have understood the world—how far off the ideal seems now—that once was so near: but to one thing I still cling, the intrinsic worthiness of our humanity—the wholesomeness, and upwardness of its attributes—and then comes the question whence comes all this distortion?….

June 19
….Noon. The papers have come—and the panic is subsiding—it seems that Lee is on the retreat. I do not think all this demonstration is for nothing—I believe he designs to attack Washington, and dictate a peace from the Capital….

June 24th
A day of heavy work—found myself worn in body and spirit—cross and miserable.

The country is in a state of ferment, and yet it is suppressed—no faith in our rulers—I see the Govenor of New Jersey has directed the Malitia which was collected for the defense of Pennsylvania, to be disbanded, judging that there will be no occasion for their service. They refused to serve under the Administration….

Lee’s army within 18 miles of Pittsburg. 10 o’clock P.M. Going to bed—dissatisfied with myself—oppressed with a terrible sense of weariness and despondency. I am indeed cast from my moorings, drifting—drifting—whither?

June 25
The Confederates in large force in Pennsylvania—the papers contain some terrible records of savage cruelty and atrocious crime perpetrated by the Black soldiers. The negro in our cities and villages also has started upon a career of crime unparrallelled in our history. We are threatened with a war of races, in which the poor Negro must and will be the great sufferer….

June 27 
[Discussion of Lee’s invasion and Confederate privateers omitted.]

I believe this treacherous Administration designs to allow the Confederates to take Washington—having no capacity to manage our national affairs—finding themselves hopelessly involved, they design to let matters take very much their own way, and then under plea of necessity, acknowledge the Southern Confederacy:—then will come the contest for northern supremacy, when the wily Seward hopes to ride into the Presidency of the North….

June 30th 
….The Confederates are within four miles of Harrisburg. Gen. Meade has been called to the command of the army of the Potomac—Gen. Hooker relieved probably because of his interference. This is bad, people say, in the face of the enemy—but the Administration will not care to give battle—they wish for a general disruption in public affairs. They have inaugurated the reign of falsehood.

July 1st 
….The Confederates are within ten miles of Washington—they do not seem inclined to battle—with a grim wit they say they have come North to hold Peace meetings. So disgusted have the people become with the present Administration that they seem rather disposed to receive, than repel the invaders. Many say openly that the prospect of restoring the Constitution would be better under Jefferson Davis, than under Abraham Lincoln. Immense Peace Meetings prevail through the country, and resistance to the enrollment is the common sentiment….

July 3d
Great anxiety about the expected battle—I am by no means sure that our arms are successful against Vicksburg. The repulse of our troops at Port Hudson was a shocking, and bloody disaster….

July 6th
A terrible battle has been fought at Gettysburg. The Union army is said to be triumphant, with a loss of twenty thousand men—Good God! what horrible carnage—I am sick at the record—my whole soul revolts at this sanguinary conflict. Such a victory is as ruinous as defeat. There must be a compromise—for neither party will yield, and each seems an equal to the other in point of courage and persistency….

July 20th
The past week has been one replete with anxiety and not without incident. On Monday 13th inst. I took the early train for the City, where the most appalling scenes awaited me. Our fool-hardy, despotic rulers in spite of the warning of observant men, and the indication of the masses, that revolt would come, have persisted in enforcing the Conscription Act. On Saturday the action of Draft created no disturbance, although much jeering and derision followed. The City was greatly excited through Sunday—On Monday I went to the City, and what I now describe, I saw myself. I had occasion to visit the offices of several lawyers upon business—as I passed along the streets large bodies of people thronged the corners—a great crowd was about the Tribune Office, and the white faces of the workmen within, with their little paper caps upon their heads now and then appeared at the windows—but retreated at a sort of growl from the crowd which beset them.

I was obliged to call upon places in this vicinity, and was not unwilling to learn by my own observation the exact spirit of the crowd. I saw a respectable working-woman threading her way through the living mass, as I was doing myself, and found it convenient to use her and her basket as an entering wedge. Sometimes it would cross my mind, that if paving stones should take wing my position would be a dangerous one—but I had little anxiety for myself—indeed! let me confess it: own to the truth.

I was intoxicated—drunk with excitement. I said of myself—“Oh thou drunk, but not with wine.” I had seen the people submit to so many arbitrary measures—seen them go like sheep to the slaughter in this stupidly managed war—seen them die without a word for measures repugnant to them—seen the encroachments upon our liberties made daily by this corrupt Administration, and yet the people were silent—bitter—cursing deep, not loud, and I began to lose all hope—I wished I could do…something to rouse them—but nothing seemed able to do this—the people tamely cowered under oppression—the radical Editors lied and deceived them as did the rulers at Washington, and I despaired for American freedom. I knew the draft was repugnant to the genius of the country—I knew that the…burden of the war fell upon our working men, and the clause of exempting those who were able to pay the $300 threw all the burden upon the poor men, still it seemed as if the people would submit—

But now there was a recoil—five thousand men were up in arms—there was a perfect howl of rage and indignation from the masses. I said to my pioneer of the basket—“what is the matter? what are the people about?”

She gave me a fierce look—“They wont be carried off to the war—that’s what is the matter.”

“Well, would you have your husband carried off in this way?”

“If they do, they ve got to fight me first,” was the prompt reply. She went on with a hard sneering laugh—“Eh! you ladies can pay the $300 and keep your men to home.”

I said no more—passing into Broadway the shops were nearly all closed—the stages had been stopped or converted into conveyances for the insurgents—I walked up to the University building where I found Dr. Elliott, and Edward, on my way I passed several police men, haggard, dusty—exhausted—I said to myself—the mischief works—these insolent ruffians, who have lately fairly trod upon the people—knocking them down, firing upon them in mere wantonness, will now find a check—I grew ruthless in my indignation—for their insolence and cruelty had become a public cry.

About three o clock P.M. Capt Ellott invited us to a dinner at Delmonico in 5th Avenue: scarcely were we seated when the waiters rushed in barring the doors and closing the windows, and there came that great sound as of the sea—the tumult of the people. The rioters had burned down the colored orphan asylum and several other buildings—they paused and for a brief space it was doubtful whether they would not force the building. Soon there was a cry—“there goes a n—–,” and the cruel, remorseless multitude, three thousand strong were in pursuit of the unhappy fugitive. He was without doubt torn in pieces. As we made our way up to 36th street, all was dire confusion—mad uproar—police men, Military, citizens and rioters, in one vast conclave. I was shocked and ashamed to hear these well to do and luxurious people—the denizens of that vicinity urge the fire of the military—there was no expression of pity—no sympathy for the poor laborer, who in his mad vengeance sought a sort of justice—a wild revenge one most true.

Early on tuesday morning I was obliged to go to Wall Street. Before noon the outbreak had assumed such proportions that all business was suspended—stages and cars could not run, and the frequent discharges of the military told that hot work was in progress. I tried to make my way up town—I could not get across the City to take the train for home—nearly exhausted I was struggling onward when a carriage stopped in front of me, and J.G. Hamilton Esqr asked me to ride home with him—I did so and remained long enough to rest, and obtained information that struck me to the heart, and which I inwardly resolved to impart to the people.

While resting in the Hamilton parlors, which opened upon 29th st. down which masses of people were constantly passing with the debris of the insurgents, I observed a demonstration which was quite touching. I ought to say that Mr Hamilton is I think an eastern Indian—his complexion is darker than that of a mulatto, but his features are Caucassian [sic]—and he is a highly cultivated man—his children also are dark, but with fine black eyes, and long hair in ringlets—not at all [illegible word]. Two of these stepped out upon the balcony as they probably have always been in a habit of doing to watch the passers by in the street. Mr H. sprang from his chair—took them in and closed the window—He understood the hazard growing out of their dark complexions. I shall never forget the expression of anguish upon his face.

Soon after I took my leave, and my Host advised me to get at once into Lexington Avenue as a safer retreat from the crowd. I followed his advice—but made a circuit which brought me into the midst of the insurgents. Oh! my soul—what a sight presented itself! Masses of infuriated women, tossing their arms wildly—weeping women and children, and pale desperate men—pools of blood—broken furniture burning ruins. In a low calm voice I began to talk with the people—I told them what I had just heard that five thousand men would reach the City in the five o’clock train, and they had orders to march at once to this Avenue [2nd] and rake the whole length of it with grape shot—no warning given—the first round would be this iron hail. I went from group to group and told this and urged them to go to their houses. A poor, lank boy of thirteen kept close to me—at length I said to him, “My poor boy—go home—keep out of these dreadful scenes.”

The child burst into a perfect paroxysm of tears and sobbed out—“I have’nt got any home”—a woman explained that his Mother had been for some time dead—the father had been killed in the army—and the child lived upon the kindness of others. Observing a pale desperate looking man leaning against a wall I assayed a word with him—“Madam, (he said in good accent) it may be easy to tell us what to do—but I will not obey this draft. I may as well be shot here as anywhere. Look here—(pointing to blood upon the walk)—the soldiers fired upon us—not a word—no warning—and I took a child up—shot through the head—covered with blood—I looked at him—it was my own child—I will have revenge.”

At length a great burly fellow eyed me with a savage frown—and muttered between his teeth—“I know what you are—you are one of them aristocrats from the fifth Avenue—you’re a Spy”—looking round upon his followers—“she’s a Spy—sent here from the Black Republicans!” I saw I was in some danger—but I did not flinch—I do not think I turned pale—I repelled the charge in a calm, firm voice, and went on—he following and muttering—but I did not fear—a superhuman strength seemed mine. I knew better than to leave them—so I kept on talking in [a] low calm manner, advising them as seemed best. I had now reached 33d street, the disorder rather increasing. A short distance from me was a dense mass surrounding a lamp post, upon which the infuriated multitude had suspended the body of Col O Brine, an Irish officer, who had commanded his troops to fire into the crowd. It was a sickening sight—for four hours they tortured the unhappy man—prolonging his sufferings with a fiendish fury. I expressed compassion for him—but they justified their conduct on the ground that he was a traitor to his countrymen—

The deep shadows began to overspre[a]d the neighborhood—and waving my hand I turned up fourth street, quite a group following me and thanking me for what I had done.

The people everywhere repelled the imputation that their object was plunder. It was only opposition to the Draft, they said, and disgust at that clause in the act by which the rich man could exempt himself by paying $300 while the poor man was compelled to go.

It is not generally known what gave the first impetus to the Riot against the draft. I was told several times by the people with whom I talked, the Rioters—and they all told the same story.

It seems that somewhere in the vicinity was a widow woman—Irish, who had six sons. Of course the six were enrolled for the Draft, and by a singular fatality—the whole six were drafted—the young men were aghast—a crowd followed them to the Mother’s door; when the announcement was made to the Mother—she uttered a wild cry—“a yell,” the people called it, and rushed shrieking into the street, tearing her hair and tossing her arms above her head. The effect was electrical—and the fierce passions of the people broke out at once, sweeping all before them.

I returned home on wednesday morning. In the cars I found Mr Hamilton—looking haggard and internally excited, but outwardly calm, and determined. I said at once go home with me. He remained nearly a week….Oh how anxiously we waited returns from the great City.

The Radicals have done their utmost to exasperate all classes—in order to have martial law proclaimed in the City. God save us from such calamity—the streets of New York would run blood—and the prisons be filled with men and women suffered to be obnoxious to the powers that be.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Jonathan W. White is professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. In August 2023 he published a biography of Appleton Oaksmith titled Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade with Rowman and Littlefield.

Major General John Pope’s actions with the Army of Virginia resonated far beyond the battlefields of August 1862. Often dismissed as a blustering incompetent who supposedly announced his headquarters would be “in the saddle,” he experienced ignominious defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run and then exile to the backwater of Minnesota. Few army commanders on either side inspired more scorn from contemporaries and subsequent historians. Yet Pope’s record in Virginia deserves serious attention as crucial to the shift from a restrained to a more all-encompassing style of war in the Eastern Theater. This shift, in turn, lessened the likelihood of a brokered peace that would restore the nation to anything resembling the prewar status quo.

Pope entered the Virginia theater at a pivotal moment. Orders creating his Army of Virginia on June 26, 1862, consolidated the commands of Maj. Gens. John C. Frémont, Nathaniel P. Banks, and Irvin McDowell, which had faced Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. Charged with defending Washington, Pope also was “in the speediest manner [to] attack and overcome the rebel forces under Jackson and [Richard S.] Ewell, and render the most effective aid to relieve General [George B.] McClellan and capture Richmond.” Less than a week after issuance of these orders, McClellan’s unforced retreat following the Seven Days’ Battles changed everything, persuading Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. Congress that the war would continue much longer and require more drastic measures to crush the Confederate military resistance. Pope soon found himself a leading actor amid a tectonic shift in the nation’s war aims and policies.

McClellan’s failure escalated debates about emancipation, the limits of “civilized” warfare, and the relationship between armies and civilians and their property. Such controversial topics had arisen earlier in Missouri, where Frémont had tried to confiscate slaves owned by pro-Confederates, and anti-Union depredations by irregular forces had prompted discussions between Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck and the German-born scholar Francis Lieber. Prompted by his exchanges with Halleck, Lieber later in the war codified the rules of war in a document signed by President Lincoln and issued as General Orders No. 100 in April 1863. Controversy in Missouri, a secondary military arena, was one thing—controversy in Virginia, where the most famous armies campaigned in proximity to the rival capitals, proved more explosive.

Within three weeks of McClellan’s withdrawal from Richmond to Harrison’s Landing on the James River, both Congress and Abraham Lincoln acted regarding emancipation. The Second Confiscation Act of July 17, 1862, freed slaves held by Rebel owners, authorized seizure of property from several categories of individuals, and empowered the president “to employ as many persons of African descent as he may deem necessary and proper for the suppression of this rebellion.” Senator Charles Sumner, a Radical Republican from Massachusetts, observed that “the Bill of Confiscation & Liberation, which was at last passed, under pressure from our reverses at Richmond, is a practical Act of Emancipation.”

Four days earlier, according to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, the president discussed “the subject of emancipating the slaves by Proclamation in case the rebels did not cease to persist in their war on the govt’ and the Union, which he saw no evidence.” Lincoln believed “the reverses before Richmond, and the formidable power and dimensions of the insurrection which extended through all the Slave States…impelled the administration to adopt extraordinary measures to preserve the National existence.” At Cabinet meetings on July 21-22, 1862, Lincoln discussed emancipation and his intention to issue a proclamation.

These policies contrasted starkly with McClellan’s ideas. Shortly after the Battle of Malvern Hill, “Little Mac” offered the president a gratuitous tutorial about how to conduct the war. The United States should adhere to the “highest principles known to Christian Civilization,” insisted McClellan in what came to be called the “Harrison’s Landing letter.” The conflict “should not be, at all, a War upon population; but against armed forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.”

On August 1, while still ensconced at Harrison’s Landing, McClellan wrote to General-in-Chief Halleck. “I believe that together we can save this unhappy country and bring this war to a comparatively early termination,” he stated, “the doubt in my mind is whether the selfish politicians will allow us to do so. I fear the results of the civil policy inaugurated by recent Acts of Congress and practically enunciated by General Pope in his series of orders to the Army of Virginia.”

New Orders

Pope issued three general orders between July 14 and 23 that drew on his prior experience in Missouri and signaled a sharp departure from McClellan’s conciliatory approach. The first, General Orders No. 5, instructed Union troops to “subsist upon the country in which their operations are carried on” without reimbursement to pro-Confederate owners. Next, General Orders No. 7 held people “throughout the area where the Army of Virginia campaigns” responsible for any damage to railroads, roads, and telegraph lines at the hands of “lawless bands of individuals not forming part of the organized forces of the enemy nor wearing the garb of soldiers.” Anyone connected to “such outrages, either during the act or at any time afterward, shall be shot, without awaiting civil processes.”

Finally, General Orders No. 11 instructed Union officers “immediately to arrest all disloyal male citizens within their lines or within their reach in rear of their respective stations.” Those who refused to take the oath of allegiance would be sent south beyond the pickets of the army and if subsequently found “within our lines or at any point in rear they will be considered spies, and subjected to the extreme rigor of military law.” Anyone who took the oath and later violated it “shall be shot, and his property seized and applied to the public use.”

Pope’s thinking aligned with political leaders seeking harsher treatment of Confederates and their property. Lieutenant Colonel David W. Strother, who served on Pope’s staff, and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase recorded impressions of the general in July. Although not an abolitionist, Pope told Strother “the war had necessarily given the death blow to slavery. Wherever the Union armies move, the old system of master and slave falls.” Describing Pope’s ideas as “clear and strong,” Strother added that his chief believed enslaved people “ought to be taken and used remorselessly whenever needed….They will not make soldiers but as laborers they might be extensively used.” Chase summarized Pope’s thinking about employing Black laborers in almost identical terms, while also observing that the new commander “expressed himself freely and decidedly in favor of the most vigorous measures in the prosecution of the war.”

Divided Opinion

Pope made no effort to disguise his low opinion of McClellan. “[H]e regarded it as necessary for the safety and success of his operations that there should be a change in the command of the Army of the Potomac,” noted Chase, because “Genl. McClellan’s incompetency and indisposition to active movements were so great….” Pope’s widely quoted message to the Army of Virginia on July 14, 1862, can best be read as a critique of McClellan’s type of warfare. “I have come to you from the West,” he began bluntly, “where we have always seen the backs of our enemies; from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary and to beat him when he was found; whose policy has been attack and not defense.” In a direct slap at McClellan, Pope inveighed against a preoccupation with “‘taking strong positions and holding them,’ of ‘lines of retreat,’ and of ‘bases of supplies.’” Discard such ideas, he counseled, and instead “study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Let us look before us, and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.”

Many people in the loyal states responded favorably to Pope’s orders and attitude. William Swinton, a correspondent for The New York Times, believed Pope’s actions were popular in the loyal states. “[T]here is no doubt,” he wrote shortly after the war, “that the declaration of a more vigorous war-policy quite met the views of the mass of the people.” Representative quotations from newspapers in the summer of 1862 buttress Swinton’s view. In this vein, the Republican Chicago Tribune printed and endorsed the orders on July 22: “We like Gen. Pope and the way he falls to work in the Shenandoah . . . . [H]is orders have the right tone, and are based on the right principles of conducting the war. It has been severe enough upon loyal men; it is now proposed to render it unpleasing to the rebels.” 

Two New York papers took similar stances. The largely Democratic New York Herald claimed the “commonest complaint from our soldiers…has been, that while standing guard over rebel property they have been liable to be shot down by rebel bushwhackers.” The measures Pope learned in fighting guerrillas in Missouri “appear to be working very well among the same customers in Virginia.” The New-York Daily Tribune, a Republican sheet, made the same point with greater emphasis from a special correspondent near Warrenton. “I cannot describe too strongly the intensity of the feeling among the soldiers of this Virginia army,” he wrote, “—how clearly they see, and how strongly they feel that they are fighting in an enemy country. They needed to be convinced that their commanders and the Government also appreciated their situation, and they find in these orders the assurance they have sought.”

Michigan’s Lansing State Republican will have the final word here. Under the heading “New Life in the Army,” its editor cheered: “There is no longer to be that extreme carefulness of the rights, and tenderness at the feelings of rebels, but they are hereafter to be treated as rebels….General Pope intends to make clean work as he goes. This policy will give new life and vigor to the army, and to the people of the loyal States. This looks like putting down the rebellion. Hurrah for General Pope!”

Many Union soldiers echoed such opinions. A New Yorker deployed near Warrenton, Va., who complained that nothing “is more galling to a patriot and Union loving man than to be compelled to guard the property of his enemies,” celebrated Pope’s orders as “a very important step toward ending the war. Until the rebels are made to feel the severity of the war, but little permanent success will be won by our arms.” Lieutenant John Meade Gould of the 10th Maine Infantry praised Pope’s policies as overdue. “It is positively proven that an easy policy is a poor one,” he insisted from near Chester Gap, Va., “the natives laugh at us, jibe us, and when we are gone, pick up our stragglers and sick….WAR is a great and terrible game….Let the terror be with our enemies and not among ourselves.”

Disgust and Anger

McClellan’s loyalists, in contrast, lambasted Pope. They often opposed emancipation and tougher policies regarding Confederate civilians, while also bridling at what they deemed sneering allusions to the Army of the Potomac’s passivity. None vented more fulsomely than Brig. Gen. Marsena R. Patrick, who served as military governor of Fredericksburg in May–June 1862 and later led a brigade in the field. Pope’s orders “demoralized the Army,” the New Yorker noted in his diary on July 18, “& Satan has been let loose” among soldiers who pillaged at will. 

About a month later, Patrick pronounced himself “so utterly disgusted that I feel like resigning & letting the whole thing go—I am afraid of God’s Justice, for our Rulers & Commanders deserve his wrath & curse—” Lieutenant Charles Francis Adams Jr., whose family boasted two presidents and the current U.S. representative to Great Britain, spoke in Washington with members of McClellan’s and Halleck’s staffs and concluded “that Pope is a humbug and known to be so by those who put him in his present place.” “I still believe in McClellan,” affirmed Adams, “but I know that the nearest advisers of the President…distrust his earnestness in this war.”

Criticism emanated from within the Army of Virginia as well. Brig. Gen. Alpheus S. Williams castigated Pope after Second Bull Run: “It can with truth be said of him that he had not a friend in his command from the smallest drummer boy to the highest general officer. All hated him.” Reaching a hyperbolic crescendo, Williams spewed “that more insolence, superciliousness, ignorance, and pretentiousness were never combined in one man.” Lieutenant Robert Gould Shaw of the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, who like Williams served in Banks’ 2nd Corps, also took a scolding position. “Pope criticizes and abuses McClellan with a will,” he observed on August 3, “showing in a man in his position no better taste than appeared in his proclamation and some of his orders….He looks just what we have always understood he was,—a great blow-hard, with no lack of confidence in his own powers.”

George B. McClellan refused even to wish for Pope to succeed against the Rebels. “I have a strong idea that Pope will be thrashed during the coming week—& very badly whipped he will be & ought to be,” McClellan wrote on August 10 in language that flirted with disloyalty, “—such a villain as he is ought to bring defeat upon any cause that employs him.” Two days earlier, he had denounced Pope and the war’s new direction. “I will issue tomorrow an order giving my comments on Mr. Jno Pope,” he told his wife, “—I will strike square in the teeth of all his infamous orders & give directly the reverse instructions to my army—forbid all pillaging & stealing & take the highest Christian ground for the conduct of the war—let the Govt gainsay it if they dare.”

Confederate reactions underscored the powerful ramifications of Pope’s short tenure with the Army of Virginia. On July 22, the United States and the Confederacy agreed to a cartel stipulating “that all prisoners of war hereafter taken shall be discharged on parole till exchanged.” Nine days later, an indignant Jefferson Davis wrote to Lee regarding the “general order issued by Major General Pope on the 23rd of July.” Because of that directive, the Confederate government recognized “General Pope and his commissioned officers to be in the position…of robbers and murderers, and not that of public enemies entitled if captured to be considered as prisoners of war.” For the present, the Confederacy would forego retaliation against Pope’s enlisted soldiers and treat them as prisoners of war. Should the United States continue its “savage practices,” however, “we shall reluctantly be forced to the last resort of accepting war on the terms chosen by our foes, until the outraged voice of a common humanity forces respect for the recognized rules of war.”

On August 1, Davis instructed Robert E. Lee to seek details from the Union general-in-chief about “alleged murders committed on our citizens by officers of the U.S. Army”—including one in Missouri supposedly ordered by Pope. Lee was instructed to allow Halleck 15 days from receipt of the query to reply; failure to do so would set in motion “retributive or retaliatory measures which we shall adopt to put an end to the merciless atrocities which now characterize the war waged against us.”

The Confederate War Department issued General Orders No. 54 that same day. It quoted part of Pope’s General Orders No. 11 and another authored by Brig. Gen. Adolph von Steinwehr on July 13 to show that the United States had “determined to violate all the rules and usages of war and to convert the hostilities hitherto waged against armed forces into a campaign of robbery and murder against unarmed citizens and peaceful tillers of the soil….” If captured, Pope, von Steinwehr, and their subalterns would not be treated as the recent cartel mandated but held in “close confinement so long as the orders aforesaid shall continue in force and unrepealed by the competent military authorities of the United States….” Should the Federals murder any unarmed Confederate civilians under Pope’s orders, whether with or without trial, an equal number of U.S. officers held in custody would be hanged.

On August 18, Davis sent a message to the Confederate Congress accusing the United States of “Rapine and wanton destruction of private property, war upon noncombatants, murder of captives, bloody threats to avenge the death of an invading soldiery by the slaughter of unarmed citizens, [and] orders of banishment against peaceful farmers.”

That Pope did not enforce his orders on a grand scale made little difference. Perception rather than reality held sway, as is almost always the case, and Confederates reacted with a spasm of anger to the threats inherent in the orders and to specific instances of Federal arrests and confiscation. Meanwhile, the increased movement of enslaved refugees toward Pope’s lines inflamed fears of the consequences of emancipation. Confederates coalesced with an outraged sense of purpose, determined to resist a foe who threatened every aspect of their social and economic structures.

Newspapers across the Confederacy engaged in a carnival of outrage that instigated popular fury directed at Pope. Two examples illustrate this phenomenon. On July 24, the Richmond Daily Dispatch printed Pope’s three orders under the heading “GEN. POPE’S ARMY / VIRGINIA TO BE LAID WASTE.” In early August, this paper expressed a hope “to see this execrable villain and his lieutenant[s] expiate their crimes on the gallows.” In North Carolina, Winston’s Western Sentinel deprecated Pope and his “execrable order which exposes all sexes and ages to the severest cruelties of ruffian Yankee troops.” The editor further observed that “North Carolina has hitherto been exempt from the operations of these brutal military decrees . . . only because the minions of Lincoln in this State have not had the force at command to enforce their execution.”

Robert E. Lee joined countless Confederates who read the texts of Pope’s orders in newspapers. He related that his son Rob was “off with Jackson & I hope will catch Pope & his cousin Louis Marshall. I could forgive the latter for fighting against us, if he had not have joined such a miscreant as Pope.” Lee’s use of the word “miscreant” bears close attention. Its mid-19th century meanings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, included “Misbelieving, heretical; unbelieving, infidel” and “A vile wretch; a villain, rascal.”

Others selected comparably harsh epithets for Pope and his troops. A Catholic priest with the 14th Louisiana Infantry deplored “Pope’s abolition robbers,” while a British-born soldier stated that “our men heartily hated him for his ruthless cruelty to the inhabitants of the country, and his extraordinary amount of vanity and bombast.” Colonel Josiah Gorgas, the Confederate chief of ordnance, called Pope the “morally worthless” author of “infamous orders holding citizens responsible for the shooting of his men by guerrillas, or rangers.”

Women left ample testimony about the impact of Pope’s orders, much of which alluded to what newspapers decried as the “uncivilized” and “savage” conduct of Union soldiers. For Lucy Buck, living near Front Royal, the reality of General Orders No. 11 exceeded her worst imaginings. “This is what I have all the time been dreading,” she wrote on July 26, “and now it had come in a more hideous shape than I had ever anticipated.” Neighbors agreed: “We met Mr. Hope and Mr. Hainie and the former had been weeping and seemed to be utterly bewildered by the shock. Oh how intensely I did hate the whole race of Yankees.”

A diarist from outside Virginia reflected the national interest in Pope and his orders. Kate Edmondston clipped the texts of General Orders No. 5 and No. 7 from a newspaper and pasted them in her journal. “Gen. Pope has issued an order…monstrous in its cruelty and contrary to the practices of all civilized warfare,” she commented with obvious anger, “but this is not civilized warfare, nor do our enemies show either the genius of Christianity or the spirit of Civilization.”

Anyone interested John Pope’s impact in Virginia must look beyond the battlefield. His inept tactical performance and defeat at Second Bull Run, however embarrassing, shaped Union military fortunes in only a transitory way. Campaigning in Maryland almost immediately seized the spotlight, relegating operations in July and August to a secondary position they hold to this day. The ratcheting up of animosities during those two months proved far more consequential.

Pope’s orders and conduct played a crucial role in this process, evident in the Eastern Theater and on the respective home fronts, which heralded a kind of war that could engulf untold noncombatants. Lincoln’s preliminary and final proclamations of emancipation, the sack of Fredericksburg by Union soldiers during the Fredericksburg campaign, and other episodes left little doubt that George B. McClellan’s sort of war had ended. The stakes had been raised, hatreds stoked, and the stage set for elemental social, cultural, and ideological disruptions.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Archivist of the United States Dr. Colleen Shogan announced in June that the National Archives will place the Emancipation Proclamation on permanent display in the Rotunda of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. 

The intent is for the Emancipation Proclamation to be permanently displayed in the Rotunda along with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights. 

“When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he wrote that ‘all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free,’’’ Shogan quoted. “Although the full privileges of freedom were not immediately bestowed upon all Americans with Lincoln’s order, I am proud that the National Archives will enshrine this seminal document for public display adjacent to our nation’s founding documents. Together, they tell a more comprehensive story of the history of all Americans and document progress in our nation’s continuous growth toward a more perfect Union,” she said.

The National Archives will commence an assessment to determine the best display environment considering the condition and importance of the original document. The current plan for display calls for showing one side of the Emancipation Proclamation, a double-sided five-page document, alongside facsimiles of the reverse pages. The original pages on display will be rotated on a regular basis to limit light exposure.

As we ascend beastly Rocky Face Ridge on a sultry afternoon, my battlefield guide Bob Jenkins—a 59-year-old lawyer, humorist, and Mississippi-born descendant of Confederate soldiers—stops and ponders which trail to take next.

Straight ahead we see what Jenkins calls the “idiot trail.” It’s especially steep and covered with loose rock, but it’s a more direct route to the crest of a ridge covered with hickory, oak, poplar, pine and silver and red maple. To our right is an easier but longer trail to the summit.

“Do you want to take the ‘idiot trail’?” Jenkins asks.

Not blessed with a particularly high IQ, I figure this one is a no-brainer. Yes, the “idiot trail” it is.

And so we trek onward on our excellent adventure, two sweaty Civil War enthusiasts eager to examine stone works and earthworks that snake throughout this ridge in northwestern Georgia. “America’s best-kept secret,” Jenkins says of the Rocky Face Ridge battlefield, “the crown jewel of the Atlanta Campaign.” Here, in the Crow Valley near Dalton, soldiers clashed from May 8-12, 1864, in an opening act of the campaign between Union Maj. Gen. William Sherman and Confederate General Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee.

Now, I’ve visited Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Harpers Ferry, and other battlefields with earthworks. But my gawd, I’ve never seen any as impressive—and as numerous—as those at Rocky Face Ridge.

Thirty yards or so off a trail, Jenkins pointed to mounds of earth piled high—the remains of an Arkansas battery position, he believes—and a deep and lengthy trench for Confederate infantry. The artillery earthworks look as if you could still roll cannons behind them, as the Rebels did in spring 1864. 

“In Dalton and Whitfield County there are more undisturbed Civil War earthworks than anywhere else in the country, and that’s not just Bobby Jenkins saying that,” my guide says. “That’s coming from the people in the green hats”—National Park Service rangers.

These remarkable Civil War defenses have survived through a series of fortuitous circumstances, Jenkins says. For one, Whitfield Country isn’t densely populated, and over the years good stewards of the land have recognized the importance of the earthworks and stone works. The chief reason, however, may be that they are so hard to get to and thus have eluded destruction by humans.

This isn’t my first encounter with 1,435-foot Rocky Face Ridge. Weeks earlier, following a bike ride at nearby Chickamauga battlefield, I drove to Rocky Face Ridge Park, a few miles from dreaded Interstate 75 and a world away from Atlanta far to the south.

Short on time, I walked a trail a thousand or so yards into the woods but turned back and returned home. To fully absorb this unheralded battlefield, you need at least five or six hours and a great guide like Jenkins—the author of two published Atlanta Campaign books.

Opened unofficially in spring 2021, the 1,000-acre park is a result of remarkable work by preservation groups, including Save the Dalton Battlefields, as well as county commissioner Mike Babb. Once farmland, the park is now popular with hikers and history and nature lovers. With avid mountain bikers, too.

A sign in the parking lot warns them about the “extremely dangerous” double orange diamond trail. Months ago, a friend of mine left his broken mountain bike on the far side of the ridge and blazed a trail back to civilization. If luck is on my side, maybe I’ll find the bike’s rusty carcass.

“Are we having fun yet?” While Jenkins and I trudge along a stony, serpentine trail, he wonders about my welfare. My calves and knees ache. So do my toes in a cheap pair of hiking boots. My Fitbit registers 130 heartbeats a minute. But what an epic experience this is. Jenkins brought an 80-year-old battlefield tramper with a heart condition up here once. Lord, how did that man endure? This is a haul.

Jenkins and I limbo dance underneath a fallen tree blocking our path. Then, as we continue our march to the crest, he invites me to take the lead.

“I want you to see what’s next,” he says.

An untimely haze prevents a perfect view to the south, but it’s special, nonetheless.

“On a clear day you can see 65 miles,” Jenkins insists, “all the way to Kennesaw Mountain.” That’s where 4,000 soldiers—3,000 Union, 1,000 Confederate—became casualties in an especially bloody Atlanta Campaign battle on June 27, 1864.

To our right, Jenkins points to the craggy face of Rocky Face Ridge, jutting out like the jaw of a prizefighter among greenery. In a field far below, 14 soldiers from the 58th and 60th North Carolina (CSA) paid the ultimate price for desertion on May 4, 1864.

I wonder how much more trudging we have before we reach the far side of the ridge. “Not much farther,” he says.

Then, Jenkins, an asthmatic, pauses briefly to catch his breath.

“But don’t trust me,” he says. “I’m a lawyer.”

Finally, we arrive at Buzzard’s Roost. The steady roar of traffic on I-75 way below can’t spoil this moment. True to the name of the place, a solitary buzzard circles in the near distance. On a clear day from our lofty perch, we could see all the way to Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga—roughly 28 miles away as a buzzard flies.

“From up here,” Jenkins says, admiring the view, “we can see how the Atlanta Campaign unfolded.”

In the near distance stands Blue Mountain, where Sherman eyeballed Confederate defenses on Rocky Face Ridge before returning to his headquarters near Tunnel Hill. That’s off to our right, in the far distance. To our left, beyond a #! @*&% cell phone tower, is Dug Gap, where the armies clashed on May 8, 1864.

“This is where the ball opened,” Jenkins says of the Atlanta Campaign.

After a brief rest at the former site of a Confederate signal station, we reach the narrow spine atop Rocky Face Ridge. Alas, I have no time or energy to find whatever remains of my friend’s bike—if it’s still there.

Up here, where 2023 seems a distant memory, I marvel at stone works built by the Confederate Army. Some look as if the soldiers created them days ago. Stretches of the defenses are covered by summer growth and would be more visible in the fall.

“Aren’t 10 people in a month who see this,” Jenkins says as we walk along the spine, “and you’re one of them.”

A bear or two occasionally wander up here. Sometimes a fox, deer, and bobcat, too. And after a rainfall, it can get a “little snaky,” says Jenkins—venomous copperheads, maybe a timber rattlesnake or three. But we’re the only humans in sight advancing along the spine.

Sam Watkins, the famous Confederate memoirist, served on Rocky Face Ridge with the 1st Tennessee. I try to imagine the 24-year-old private piling rocks with his comrades and preparing for battle.

“We form a line of battle on top of Rocky Face Ridge,” he wrote in Company Aytch, his memoir, “and here we are to face the enemy. Why don’t you unbottle your thunderbolts and dash us to pieces? Ha! Here it comes; the boom of cannon and the bursting of shell in our midst. Ha! Ha! Give us another blizzard. Boom! Boom! That’s all right, you ain’t hurting nothing.”

On May 9, 1864, up here where the buzzards fly, Alabama infantry and artillery mowed down soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, and Kentucky who charged four abreast along the narrow spine of the ridge.

“One of the hardest places I ever saw,” a 64th Ohio corporal said of this battlefield.

In less than 30 minutes, 40 U.S. Army soldiers were killed and 110 wounded. Benjamin McCoy, a 21-year-old corporal in the 64th Ohio, fell with a mortal wound through the lungs. He lingered for more than a week.

“Benjamin, as a soldier, was free from the many vices that constantly beset the path of young men in the army, and knew only his duty in the cause which he so early espoused, and for which he offered up his youthful life,” a lieutenant in McCoy’s regiment wrote the soldier’s parents.

We reach the site of the high water mark of the U.S. Army’s advance. It’s the most remote battlefield I have ever visited. For several yards we see palmettos, each about two feet high, sprouting from the ground. Jenkins likes to think they symbolize where the bluecoats fell.

“You are standing right now in no-man’s land,” he tells me. “This is a killing zone.”

We briefly rest on a huge boulder. Then Jenkins tells the story that for me at least speaks to the futility of war. Following the doomed charge of Brig. Gen. Charles Harker’s brigade on May 9, a wounded Union soldier cried out from the unforgiving terrain.

Alexander McIlvaine, the 45-year-old colonel of the 64th Ohio, ordered a captain to rescue the soldier in no-man’s land.

“Colonel, it will be certain death to any man who attempts to pass between those rocks,” the officer said. “If you order me to go, I will obey, but I will not send any one of my men. If you wish to put me in arrest, here is my sword.”

“I will go myself!” McIlvaine replied.

As the colonel walked along a narrow path between boulders—the path we had just followed—a bullet crashed into his bowels, mortally wounding him.

Our descent becomes a blur of more stone works—including those for Union artillery this time—and slips and slides along the trail. A mountain biker rumbles up our path, destination unknown.

More than four hours after we had begun, Jenkins and I spy our starting point in the Rocky Face Ridge Park lot. Our epic 8.5-mile hike is on the cusp of completion.

“Hallelujah,” he says.

Hallelujah, indeed.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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John Banks, a longtime journalist, is the author of three Civil War books and a popular Civil War blog. His latest book is A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing).