1862

__________ 

It was probably the worst shot fired by any Yankee during the war.

__________ 

In 1862, you had to go to a circus to see an elephant.

It was a rare and amazing experience - like going into battle.
Photo from the internet.

January 18: Former U.S. President John Tyler is buried. Jefferson Davis ignores his wishes for a simple burial and has his coffin draped in a Confederate flag.

 

* 

February 6-16: Ulysses S. Grant captures Ft. Henry, and then Ft. Donelson, as described by Benjamin Andrews. Henry falls without much of a fight, the garrison of 3,000 escaping safely to Donelson, twelve miles to the east. According to Andrews, Grant had 15,000 men, the defenders numbering 20,000. The Union navy was tasked with bombarding Fort Donelson. 

Commodore Foote, 

steamed up boldly within 400 yards and pounded the opposing works with his heavy guns. He did little damage, however, while the Confederate fire proved very effective against him. His flagship, the Hartford, was struck fifty-nine times. A shot crashed into the pilot-house, destroying the wheel and wounding Foote himself. The boat became unmanageable and drifted down-stream. A shot cut the tiller-ropes of the Louisville. The other boats were also considerably damaged, and after an action of an hour and a half, the entire fleet withdrew.

 

But Grant's army had been reinforced to 27,000. Generals Floyd, Pillow and Buckner now realized they would have to try to break out. On the morning of Feb. 15, they put their plan into action: 

Most of the troops were withdrawn from the rifle pits during the night, and massed on the Union right. The weather had suddenly turned frosty, and the Union men, without tents or campfires, many even without blankets, shivered all night in the intense cold. Before dawn the attacking column from inside, 10,000 strong, rushed through the woods and fell upon McClernand’s division, which formed the Union right. For hours the woods rang with musketry and the southern yell. Slowly the Confederates drove the Unionists before them and gained the road running south to Charlotte, opening to themselves the way of escape.

 

This, however, they had not yet utilized, when, about 1:00 o’clock, General Grant, who had been aboard the fleet consulting with Commodore Foote, came upon the field. Learning that the foe had begun to fight with full haversacks, he instantly divined that they were trying to make their escape, and inferred that their forces had been mostly withdrawn from opposite the Union left to make this attack against the right. General Smith was therefore instantly ordered to fall upon the Confederate right. As Grant had surmised, the intrenchments were easily carried. Meanwhile the demoralized soldiers of the Union right and centre rallied, and drove the Confederates back to their intrenchments. At daybreak Buckner sent to Grant for terms of capitulation. “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted: I propose to move immediately upon your works,” was the answer. The resolute words rang through the North, carrying big hope in their remotest echo. Donaldson surrendered. Floyd and Pillow had sneaked away during the night, the former monopolizing the few boats to transport his own brigade. Fifteen thousand troops remained and were taken prisoners. (4/20-24)

 

* 

“The doom of wooden naval vessels.” 

March 8: The Rebel ironclad, Merrimac, steams into battle. Andrews notes that the housing of the vessel was “pierced for ten guns – four rifles and six nine-inch smooth-bores.” The first Yankee vessel in her way was the Cumberland. 

The Yankee gun crews poured in a broadside from her heavy ten-inch guns, but the balls glanced off the ram’s sloping iron sides like peas. The Merrimac’s iron beak crashed into the Cumberland’s side, making a great hole. In a few minutes the old war-sloop, working her guns to the water’s edge, went down in 54 feet of water, 120 sick and wounded sinking with her. (4/140, 142-143)

 

The U.S. government soon contracted for twenty single-turret monitors, and four double-turreted ones, with fifteen-inch guns. 

(It dawns on me, while typing, that the guns on U.S. battleships in World War II were usually sixteen-inch guns.) 

McMaster, writing in 1907, explains, “This battle marks the doom of wooden naval vessels; all the nations of the world were forced to build their navies anew.”

Painting by Dan Troiani.
Photo from internet.

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned this poem about the destruction of the U.S.S. Cumberland, the day before:

 

The Cumberland 

At anchor in Hampton Roads we lay,
    On board of the Cumberland sloop-of-war;
And at times from the fortress across the bay
        The alarum of drums swept past,
        Or a bugle-blast
    From the camp on the shore.

Then far away to the South uprose
    A little feather of snow-white smoke,
And we knew that the iron ship of our foes
        Was steadily steering its course
        To try the force
    Of our ribs of oak.

Down upon us heavily runs,
    Silent and sullen, the floating fort;
Then comes a puff of smoke from her guns,
        And leaps the terrible death,
        With fiery breath,
    From each open port.

We are not idle, but send her straight
    Defiance back in a full broadside!
As hail rebounds from a roof of slate,
        Rebounds our heavier hail
        From each iron scale
    Of the monster’s hide.

“Strike your flag!” the rebel cries,
    In his arrogant old plantation strain.
“Never!” our gallant Morris replies;
        “It is better to sink than to yield!”
        And the whole air pealed
    With the cheers of our men.

Then, like a kraken huge and black,
    She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp!
Down went the Cumberland all a wrack,
        With a sudden shudder of death,
        And the cannon’s breath
    For her dying gasp.

Next morn, as the sun rose over the bay,
    Still floated our flag at the mainmast-head.
Lord, how beautiful was thy day!
        Every waft of the air
        Was a whisper of prayer,
    Or a dirge for the dead.

Ho! brave hearts that went down in the seas!
    Ye are at peace in the troubled stream.
Ho! brave land! with hearts like these,
        Thy flag, that is rent in twain,
        Shall be one again,
    And without a seam!

* 

March 9:  John Ericsson was a former captain in the Swedish army. In England, he built locomotives, in an attempt to compete with the famous Rocket. Later he invented the screw propellor, and finally, came up with the idea for the revolving gun tower. 

Just then rumors were beginning to reach Europe of a strange new craft which the Confederates were said to be building and so Ericsson traveled to Washington and showed his plans to the construction engineers of the United States government. They were in such a quandary that for once they were willing to listen to an outsider and a civilian and allowed Ericsson to construct his Monitor according to his own foolish notions, in which, to tell you the truth, no one took any stock except honest John himself. He worked with such fury that his vessel was ready for action in less than six months. (124/395)

 

*

 Woodrow Wilson’s father, Joseph Wilson

served as a chaplain in the Confederate army, and one Sabbath morning when a battle was impending, he sent his flock scurrying to the local ammunition factories to roll cartridges. Dr. Wilson kept slaves and had created a Sunday school for Negroes, but he did not venture to defend or to indict the institution of slavery. (10/7)

 

*

April: Slavery is abolished in the District of Columbia, with compensation paid to the owners. Andrews writes, “There were about 3,000 slaves in the District. Upon the day of their emancipation they assembled in churches and gave thanks to God.” (4/177)

 

* 

April 6-7: Andrews describes the opening shock Union forces suffered when the Rebels attack at Shiloh. “There ensued the greatest battle which had up to that time shaken the solid ground of this continent.” 

The Rebels came on in solid ranks, striking at six in the morning. 

Grant in person was nine miles down the river. The Union officers hastily got their men into line, as the attacking columns came sweeping in after the pickets. Three of the five Union divisions were raw recruits, many of whom fled at the first fire. Some colonels led their entire regiments off the field. Later in the day Grant saw 4,000 or 5,000 of these runaways cowering under the shelter of the [river] bluffs.

 

But the bulk of the army made a stubborn resistance. General W.T. Sherman, then comparatively unknown, inspired his division of raw troops with his own intelligent courage. Their gallant and protracted fight around the Shiloh log church made them the heroes of the day. But the Confederates’ onset was impetuous. Step by step they forced their opponents back through the heavy woods, and by noon stood in possession of the Union camps; Grant’s army, badly shattered, being cooped up in a narrow space along the edge of the river.

 

The tide now turned. About 2:00 o’clock, General Johnston was killed, and the Confederate advance flagged. Between the two armies lay a deep ravine. Grant planted some fifty guns upon the edge, and two of the gunboats took positions where they could rake the ravine. By these dispositions Beauregard’s advance was stayed, night fell, and hostilities ceased. (4/28-30)

Johnny Clem, a drummer boy for the 22nd Michigan, has his drum smashed by an artillery round and becomes known as “Johnny Shiloh, The Smallest Drummer.”

He is ten. (See: 1863.) 

* 

April 18-23: Commodore Farragut, commanding the largest U.S. fleet every assembled, sails from Fortress Monroe, bound for New Orleans. He has “16 gunboats, 21 mortar-schooners, six sloops of war, and five other vessels.” 

Thirty miles below New Orleans stood two forts, Jackson and St. Philip. Mounting a combined 100 guns, they, “frowned at each other across the Mississippi.” On April 18, having moored his fleet within range of the forts, Farragut opens fire with his mortars. To disguise his location, sailors have tied branches to the tops of the masts, so the Confederate defenders can’t tell ships from trees in the forest along the banks. As Andrews writes, “An incessant fire was kept up night and day for six days, till nearly 6000 shells had been thrown.” 

As the forts sustained little damage, Farragut decided to run the batteries. A gunboat stole up by night and cut the boom of hulks chained together, which crossed the river just below the forts. Some of the boats were rubbed over with mud to make them invisible, and chain cables hung over the sides to protect the engines. About half past two in the night of April 23d the fleet moved up the river through the gap in the boom. The enemy, on the alert, launched fire-rafts and lit bonfires to lift the cover of night. Old Jackson and St. Philip poured a hot fire into the fleet as vessel after vessel slowly steamed past, answering with its most spiteful broadsides.

 

But the Union craft had more than the forts against them. Once past the boom they were in the midst of a hostile fleet of fifteen vessels, including a dangerous ironclad ram. A fierce water-fight followed. The Union Varuna was sunk; The flag-ship Hartford set on fire by one of the fire-rafts. The flames, however, were soon put out. Other vessels were disabled. But every one of the Confederate ships was captured or destroyed and Jackson and St Philip had to surrender. Farragut then sailed up the river and took possession of New Orleans without resistance. Butler at once occupied the city with his troops, and the Stars and Stripes again waved over the Crescent City. Since that eventful day New Orleans has never been in disunionist hands. (4/34-36.)

 

* 

“All quiet on the Potomac.” 

By spring of 1862, Gen. McClellan had spent eight months preparing to advance. Now with the Yankees finally approaching, Gen. Joseph Johnston, in command of Rebel forces, withdrew from his position at Manassas Junction, burning everything his men were unable to carry. 

Union troops discover that his lines were defended by “Quaker guns,” trimmed logs painted black. The fact McClellan had not come close enough to have a look or test Confederate strength until then did not enhance his reputation. For months, the watchword of his picket’s had been, “All quiet on the Potomac.” This had become an insult, symbolizing inaction. 

McClellan moved his troops by water, landed on the Yorktown peninsula – and quickly  allowed his army to be bottled up. Gen. John B. Magruder, commanding Confederate forces at Yorktown, fooled the Yankees by marching troops through a clearing in the woods where they could be seen, back the other way along a hidden road, and across the clearing, again and again. McClellan’s scouts warned that enemy forces were present in great strength. 

Writing to Gen. Robert E. Lee, Johnston noted, “no one but McClellan would have hesitated to attack.” (63/109)

 

Bruce Catton describes one famous soldier: 

[George Armstrong] Custer was familiarly known as “Cinnamon” because of the cinnamon-flavored hair oil he used so liberally. He wore long glistening curls and a show-off uniform with a tight hussar jacket and black trousers trimmed with gold lace, and looked, as another staff member remarked, “like a circus rider gone mad.” (62/115) 

Custer was “a flamboyant hell-for-leather horseman…who possessed the great basic virtue of liking to fight.” (63/243) 

Believing in what he came to call “Custer’s Luck,” the young cavalry general who liked to fight proved reckless in the extreme – and lucky – on several occasions during the Civil War. He was just as reckless fighting Native Americans at Washita in 1868 and at the Little Big Horn in 1876. 

Just not as lucky.

General Custer, with wife Libby.
Photo from internet.

 

McClellan was adept at making men feel like real soldiers. The 4^th Michigan had a sharp little fight one day, losing eight killed or wounded. Catton describes the scene as their commander stops to offer encouragement. “‘How do you feel, boys?’ There was a quick chorus of ‘We feel bully, General!’ Still casual, McClellan asked them: ‘Do you think anything can stop you from going to Richmond?’ And the regiment yelled, ‘No!’” (62/116) 

Lincoln tried to prod him to move more forcefully and break the Confederate defenses. McClellan wrote to his wife, “I was very much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.” 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: We used to have good discussions in class about what qualities made for good leadership. You could apply much of it to leadership on the basketball court or soccer field, which interested students, or even within families. I would argue that teachers must have leadership skills, as well. 

Administrators, too!

Photo from blogger's collection.

McClellan’s biggest problem was his use of Allan Pinkerton’s spies to supply intelligence. Pinkerton had contacts with African Americans in Richmond, and they helped move Union spies in and out. Pinkerton would warn that Lee had 180,000 men to wage the Seven Days’ Battles. 

“Almost everything he did and failed to do in this campaign,” Catton says of McClellan, “can be explained by that one fact.” (62/118-123) 

At most, in the spring of 1862 the Confederates had 80,000 men to stop the Army of the Potomac.

 

* 

May 13: Robert Smalls, 23, a slave who has worked aboard the CSS Planter, takes command during the night. With his wife and their two young children, as well as another dozen slaves, he took the vessel out of Charleston harbor and escape to the waiting Union blockading fleet. 

The New York Tribune proclaimed, “This man, though black, is a hero – one of the few History will delight to honor. He has done something for his race and for the world of mankind.” Not long after, President Lincoln made sure to sign a law that awarded prize money to Smalls for turning the vessel and its cargo over to federal authorities. 

Talking to Smalls, and other African American who were anxious to fight, Lincoln’s ideas began to shift. He had, at first, “no confidence”  black volunteers would fight well. Now he came to believe arming such men was “not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force.”

 

Even after they were allowed to enlist, black soldiers were classified as laborers, and paid $10 per month, compared to $13 per month for white soldiers. They also saw their pay cut by $3 per month for a clothing allowance. This led a soldier in the 54th Massachusetts to write to the president. “We appeal to You, Sir: as the Executive of the Nation, to have us justly Dealt with.” 

Not until 1864 did the government agree to equal pay for African American troops, and then only for those who had been free before the war.

 

* 

May 20: In any discussion of the “American Dream, mention of the Homestead Act is merited. You could get 160 acres – for free (as I used to say, similar in impact to being offered a free four years at college). 

In my notes, I have the following numbers (source unknown), that 80,000,000 acres went to 600,000 homesteaders. Since claimants were required to build a cabin on their property, some people cheated. A husband and wife might build a cabin on the line between two quarter sections, and claim both. 

One person claimed to have a cabin, 12 x 12 on his claim. He neglected to tell the land agent it was 12 x 12 inches.

Both photos from blogger collection.

 

The states, according to my notes, got 140,000,000 acres, which they often sold to middlemen, who made tidy profits. Railroads picked up 181,000,000 acres in return for building lines across the arid West. According to my notes that much land would be six times the size of Pennsylvania. (I don’t have the source listed; but I check the math, and the “six times” works out.) New Western states joined the Union in rapid order in the next few years: 

Nevada            1864

Nebraska        1867

Colorado        1876

N. Dakota      1889

S. Dakota        1889

Montana         1889

Washington    1889

Idaho               1890

Wyoming       1890

Utah                1896

Oklahoma       1907

New Mexico   1912

Arizona           1912 

“Between 1862 and 1870,” McMaster writes, “103,000 entries for 12,000,000 acres were made.” (97/399)

 

* 

May 29: With Ulysses S. Grant now under a cloud, having been surprised at Shiloh, Gen. Henry Halleck takes command – and quickly proves his ineptitude. He advances with painful slowness on Corinth, despite a huge advantage in men, 110,000 men in blue vs. P.G.T. Beauregard’s 60,000. The Rebels pull back on May 29, and the Yankees take the city the next day. 

“A few Quaker guns – logs mounted on wagon-wheels – were the only trophies.” As Benjamin Andrews explains, “Halleck lay inactive at Corinth for six weeks, when he was summoned to Washington as a General-in-Chief.” (4/38-39.)

 

* 

“A roaring, shrieking struggling mass of men and horses.” 

These notes come from I Rode with Stonewall by Henry Kyd Douglas (paperback edition, Premier Books, 1961) 

He says of General Jubal Early, that he had “a mind clear, direct, and comprehensive” and his opinion was always valued by Lee; “he was yet on the field of battle not equal to his own intellect or decision. He moved slowly from point to point.” “Arbitrary, cynical, with strong prejudices, he was personally disagreeable; he made few admirers or friends either by his manners or habit…” (20/42)

 

Near Middletown, during the fighting of ’62, Douglas directed a company of infantry to take position behind a stone wall bordering an important road.

 

Just as these hundred men had reached the fence, the cavalry came thundering by, but a deadly volley stopped their wild career. Some in front, unhurt, galloped off, on their way, but just behind them horses and riders went down in a tangled heap. The rear, unable to check themselves, plunged on, in, over, upon the bleeding pile, a roaring, shrieking struggling mass of men and horses, crushed, wounded and dying. It was a sickening sight, the worst I had ever seen then, and for a moment I felt a twinge of regret that I had ordered that little line to that bloody work. (20/61-62)

 

“If this Valley is lost,” Jackson explained in 1862, “Virginia is lost.” Douglas adds: “and the Confederacy could not survive Virginia.”

 

So the Shenandoah Valley had to be held.

 

*

 

“We were never again eager.” 

Gen. John Gibbon’s Iron Brigade clashed unexpectedly with Confederate forces one day, during the Peninsular Campaign. The two battle lines “volleyed away at the murderous range of less than one hundred yards.” After 90 minutes, with dusk coming on, the fight ended with both sides where they were when it began. The Second Wisconsin, which had never been in combat before, took 500 men into the fight and had 298 dead, wounded, or missing. The Sixth lost “only” 74; but the regimental historian later explained that until the end of the war the Iron Brigade was always ready for action, but after this “we were never again eager” for a fight. 

The historian of the Second Wisconsin would note that by war’s end nine of ten men in combat assignments had been shot at least once.

 

* 

May 31-June 1: As far as the Peninsular Campaign goes, Johnston finally decided to gamble and attack McClellan before the Union commander could close in around Richmond and commence siege operations. During the battle of Seven Pines (or: Fair Oaks) Johnston took a bullet in the shoulder and a shell fragment knocked him from his horse. It was probably the worst shot fired by any Yankee during the war. 

Robert E. Lee took command. 

Lee ordered Stonewall Jackson down from the Shenandoah Valley and launched a series of savage attacks. McClellan was frozen by his belief that Lee had an “overwhelming” numerical advantage—and that his repeated attacks proved he must have more men. “Pinkerton’s fantastic reports,” Catton says, “believed like the writ of true faith, were worth a couple of army corps to the Confederacy that week.” McClellan lost his nerve and his troops were ordered to load up on all the salt pork, hardtack and coffee they could carry and set fire to their supply dumps. 

The men sensed “a big skedaddle” was coming. 

McClellan did care deeply about his men. Writing his wife, he admitted, “Every poor fellow that is killed or wounded haunts me.”

 

* 

Near the end of Lee’s life a young mother brought her baby to him to be blessed. She wondered what she could do to ensure her son turned out to be an upstanding man. Lee took the infant in his arms and looked at it and then at her, and slowly said, “Teach him he must deny himself.” (22/588)  

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I felt we could have a meaningful discussion every year, on this idea. “What did Lee mean,” I would ask. Students were usually baffled, but we worked our way to the idea that to be a success you must deny yourself the easy path. I used examples of former students – one who studied six hours for an essay test in my class, and got the only “A,” whereas I dogged it in school, myself, and finished in the bottom half of my graduating class. Great athletes also must deny themselves the easy path, and parents, too. 

When typing this up, I had a new thought. Could Lee also be accused of hypocrisy, since he was happy to have slaves do work for him?

* 

June 27: On the night of the Battle of Gaines Mill, McClellan called in his top commanders. All corps commanders agreed that retreat would be wise. Kearny and Gen. Joseph Hooker, both division commanders, insisted Rebel forces in their front were weak and they could smash a path to Richmond if given permission to turn and attack. Permission was refused. 

Kearny denounced McClellan to his staff later, “in language so strong that all who heard it expected he would be placed under arrest until a general court martial could be held, or at least he would be relieved of his command.” 

A rattled, angry Gen. McClellan (as usual: blaming others) wrote to Secretary of War Stanton after the Gaines Mill fight: 

I feel too earnestly tonight. I have seen too many dead and wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the government has not sustained this army. If you do not do so now the game is lost. If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I own no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.

 

A War Department clerk deleted the last two sentences before passing the message on. (62/142)

  

“If any army can save this country it will be the Army of the Potomac.” 

One evening, a cavalry officer rides up to McClellan’s headquarters. He reports there are empty roads in his front. If the army would halt its retreat Union troops could storm into Richmond unopposed. McClellan replies, “If any army can save this country it will be the Army of the Potomac, and it must be saved for that purpose.” 

(He will display exactly the same kind of hesitancy at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862.)

 

*

 

June 30: Douglas felt Lee’s plan at Frayser’s Farm “would have been fatal to McClellan’s army” if properly carried out. It was not. “General Jackson has not escaped criticism, and he does not seem to have been his very self. There were things, it is true, he could not overcome. He was in the saddle continuously and seemed never to let up. Tired out with work he certainly was and so were his troops.”

 

*

 

“A field of useless slaughter.”

 

July 1: Of the attack at Malvern Hill, Douglas wrote: “I have always felt that it was a criminal blunder. It certainly was a field of useless slaughter, and it certainly was not a Confederate success.” Lee was right to attack.

 

He was too aggressive to let the opportunity pass, and Jackson was of the same vein. But the battle was fought by detachments against an enemy well-posted and ready for the fight. On the part of the Confederate commanders it was not a well-fought battle… (20/112)

 

Jackson found himself seated beside a road, “nearly a mile in rear of his line” as the battle began. He

 

was sitting on the side of the roadside with his back against a tree, writing a note. Troops were passing and raising a cloud of dust which attracted the attention of the enemy, and a shell from a Parrott gun struck the column in front of us and exploded. Five or six men were killed or wounded, and dust was thrown over the General and his paper. Without raising his head he shook the paper to relive it and proceeded with his note….When the message was finished and folded, he arose, gave explicit instructions that the dead be carried out of sight and the wounded cared for, and rode off to the front.  (20/113)

 

“Old troops often know when they are whipped; new ones often do not and are ignorant of the dangers which lurk in flank and rear. More than once have battles, nearly lost by veterans, been restored by the intrepid obstinacy of new soldiers.”  (20/117)

 

One day, Jackson stopped with his staff because he wanted to pick berries. Bullets began striking around them. Jackson paused “with a large, shining berry poised between his thumb and finger.” Then he asked Kyd Douglas, if he were to be shot, where might he prefer to be hit. “I replied that I’d prefer being hit in the clothes bit if it was made a question of body, I’d prefer any place to my face or joint…”  (20/118)

 

In one fierce fight Major Snowden Andrews, a soldier from Maryland, “received one of those fearful wounds from which recovery is thought to be an impossibility.” His abdomen was torn by a piece of shell and his “viscera rolled in the dust where he fell…”

 

…Dr. McGuire, passing and seeing him, stopped to say he was grieved to see he could not be of any help to him.

 

“Yes, that’s what you fellows all say,” said Andrews.

 

Stung a little by this, McGuire, who greatly liked him sprang to the ground to do what he could. He washed off and restored his viscera to their proper place, stimulated him, sewed him up, gave him all the benefit of his skill and sent him to a hospital. Meeting McGuire a few minutes afterwards I said, “McGuire, is Snowden Andrews mortally wounded?”

 

“Well – if the good Lord will let the rest of the world take care of itself for a time and devote his attention exclusively to Andrews, he may be able to pull him through, but no one else can!”

 

“Snowden still lives,” Kyd Douglas wrote after the war. He survived his wound – and another very serious wound a year later – and “got through the war and may be often seen on the streets of Baltimore, with just as positive opinions on all subjects as ever.”  (20/129-130)

 

* 

July 1 (Part 2): Lee’s attack at Malvern Hill, the final act of the Peninsular Campaign, turns out to be a slaughter – and proof that even great generals make terrible blunders. It resulted in the useless death and wounding of thousands of gray soldiers, and what Catton calls a “field day for the [Union] gunners.”

 

* 

“Like ragged carpet that lived and made incoherent sounds.” 

July 2: Rain fell that night. Mist blanketed the battlefield the next morning. Colonel William Averell described the scene: 

[We could see nothing in the gray light and mist] but out of it came a pulsating, endless wave of pitiful sound – the agonized crying and moaning of thousands of wounded boys who had been lying on the ground, unattended, all night long. By and by the sun came up and the mist thinned, and presently he could see the battleground, one of the most horrible sights of the war. Five thousand men lay there, covering the ground like ragged carpet that lived and made incoherent sounds and, here and there moved dreadfully.

 

“A third of them were dead or dying,” he wrote, “but enough of them were alive and moving to give the field a singular crawling effect.” (62/140)

 

*

 

“We can buy our gloves together.”

 

General McClellan is removed from command of the Army of the Potomac. General John Pope is put in charge. Many officers have doubts about the new commander. “I don’t care for John Pope one pinch of owl dung,” says Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis. (62/7)

 

Gen. Kearny, who lost his left arm early in the war, tried to console Gen. Oliver O. Howard after he lost his right. Howard replied, “There is one thing we can do, General: we can buy our gloves together.” 

Kearny invented a red diamond patch for the men of his division to wear on their caps. Later the Army of the Potomac adopted patches for all corps, forerunner of patches troops wear today. (62/31)

Soldiers in Iraq - First Cavalry Division.
Photo from internet.

August 17: Mark Twain was shocked by one incident during the Sioux War in Minnesota in 1862. As he told it twelve warriors broke into a farmhouse at dawn and captured the family. The farmer and his wife were stripped naked, their hands nailed to the wall. Four daughters, aged 14 to 18, were raped in front of them. They, too, were then crucified, and their noses and breasts cut off. Twain would have said more, even worse, but stopped, explaining, “There is a limit...[things so terrible] that the pen cannot write them. One member of that poor crucified family—the father—was still alive when help came two days later.”

 

Sacagawea, herself, had been captured and sold for ransom by other Indians.

 

When the Sioux Indians rose up and attacked the settlers in Minnesota, not all members of the tribe were involved. Some, who had joined Christian churches, herded sixty-two whites into a brick warehouse. There they stood guard for several days. Then they led the people inside to safety. During the fighting many half-breeds signed up with the United States Army. For these men the question, “Who was to blame, settlers or Indians?” had no answer. They were both races. One who did help the Sioux fight: Godfrey, a run- away slave.

 

*

 

About the same time the Indians attacked a log school. Inside, George Hamilton was leading his students in song. A warrior poked his rifle through a crack in between the logs and killed the teacher with one shot.

  

*

 

“Men get killed uselessly because their generals are stupid.”

 

August 29-30: According to Douglas, Jackson’s men marched hard to reach the battlefield at Second Manassas or, as the Yankees called it, the Second Battle of Bull Run. “The leading regiment was turned aside from the big road into a field by a polecat, and the troops that followed, long after they knew the cause for it, followed the same course. Needless to add that the soldiers afterwards called that little beast, ‘one of Pope’s scouts.’”  (20/133) 

The fight opens with Yankee forces attacking Stonewall Jackson and his men. The Rebels are protected by “an unfinished railroad embankment…a position as good as a fort,” Bruce Catton explains.

 

Jackson is outnumbered and pulls back part of his line, which Pope interprets as a sign of impending retreat. He telegraphs Washington to say he has won a great victory! Other officers warn that Rebel reinforcements are fast approaching. Catton explains: “When Pope made up his mind it stayed made up, and there was no room in it this morning for anything but the conviction that the enemy was in flight.” He renews his attacks in an attempt to shatter Jackson’s line. Jackson’s men run out of ammunition at one point and throw heavy stones down the embankment at the Yanks. A Union officer, sword drawn, rides up the embankment alone, trying to encourage his men to follow. Even Rebel defenders shout, “Don’t kill him!” Too late: a volley erupts and when the smoke clears the brave man and his mount are dead. 

Bruce Catton adds: “Jackson’s men behind their railway embankment were in shape to hold their ground for the rest of the summer.” (62/191) 

Pope puts many of his men into marching formation, ready to pursue Jackson when he retreats, just in time for Confederate reinforcements to crash down on their rear. The blue army is routed. 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: My students rarely knew what a “rout” was even though they had heard the word in stories about sports.

 

There was one moment of humor at Second Bull Run. A wounded Union officer was being carried to the rear on a stretcher. A Rebel shell sailed overhead and exploded a few yards away. The wounded man leaped to the ground and ran for the rear on undamaged legs. (62/44) 

Catton says that by the end of this debacle the men in Union ranks had come to “the sickening realization that men get killed uselessly because their generals are stupid, so that desperate encounters where the last drop of courage has been given serve the country not at all and make a patriot look like a fool [emphasis added].” (62/45-48) 

Soldiers who saw combat referred to it as “seeing the elephant.” The phrase comes from a time when going to the circus was cause for amazement and seeing an elephant the most amazing of all. (This comes from readings other than Catton.)

 

A New Jersey man admitted that going under fire the first time was a terrible experience. Some of the men in his company fell to the ground as if shot and picked themselves up later, quite sheepishly, he said. One boy went up to the firing line, as if in a trance, moaning over and over, “O Lord, dear good Lord!” (62/127) 

Gen. John Gibbon, of the famous “Black Hat Brigade,” later nicknamed the “Iron Brigade,” led one of the three-pronged attacks designed to trap Sitting Bull and the Sioux at the Little Big Horn in 1876. 

On rainy days, when soldiers of the Sixth Wisconsin, in Gibbon’s brigade, were hunkered down in their tents, some private with a strong voice would call out, “When our army marched down to [Second] Bull Run, what did the big bullfrog say?” 

Hundreds of men would croak, “Big thing!” Big thing!” (Catton says that phrase was slang for any notable event or achievement.) 

The first soldier would call again, “And when our army came back from Bull Run, what did the little frogs say?” 

The chorus would respond, “Run, Yank! Run, Yank!” 

The first soldier again: “What does the Bully Sixth say?” 

The answer showed the men’s spirits were unbroken: “Hit ‘em again! Hit ‘em again!” (62/18)

 

The men of the Sixth also took “perverse” pride in their regimental band, which one officer described as “that execrable band.” The drum major, William Whaley, however, was adept with a baton.

 

* 

August 29-30: It is estimated that 50,000 limbs were amputated during the war. The New York Times reports on a discovery at the battlefield for Bull Run, probably from the second fight in 1862. The remains of two soldiers are uncovered as well as the partial remains of eleven others. Forensic evidence indicates these were Union men.

 

The Times reports:

 

One skeleton, of a Caucasian male in his late 20’s, still had a .577 caliber Enfield bullet – which was deployed almost exclusively by the Confederate Army during the battle – lodged sideways in his upper thighbone. Scientists believe the bullet slowed and rotated after passing through his cartridge box.

 

The second skeleton is of a male in his 30’s, believed to have died from rounds that struck his shoulder, groin and lower leg. Those remains were found with Union Army jacket buttons.

 

Partial remains show cut marks, and shattered bones indicate why surgeons of that era had no choice but to amputate.

 

 “When you’re looking at shattered limbs,” one expert observes, “it takes you out of the overall concept of troop movements and into the personal stories of individual men.”

 

“We’re seeing the trauma of what was undoubtedly the worst moments [emphasis added] of their lives.”

 

* 

For all his faults, McClellan was popular with his men. After Pope was beaten at Second Bull Run, he took command again. One soldier described the euphoria at the news he was back in charge. His unit is marching by starlight when they hear: 

Shout upon shout went into the stillness of the night; and as it was taken up along the road and repeated by regiment, brigade, division and corps, we could hear the roar dying away in the distance. The effect of this man’s presence upon the Army of the Potomac – in sunshine or rain, in darkness or daylight, in victory or defeat – was electrical, and too wonderful to make it worth while attempting to give a reason for it. (62/51)

 

* 

“The terrible, nauseating stench that envelopes a military camp.” 

Soldiers learn on the job, like any workers, except that those who learn too slowly end up dead. Catton writes: 

Officers who had been bright with gold-embroidered shoulder straps, red sashes, and plumed hats [at the start of the war] became more somber-looking; many of them bought privates’ uniforms and sewed their insignia of rank on the shoulders, having learned that in a fight or on the picket-lines the enemy believed in picking off officers first. Regiments that had worn fancy leggings or gaiters began to discard them, the men finding that it was more comfortable to roll the trouser leg snug at the ankle and haul the gray regulation sock up over it. Paper collars had disappeared, and the men in the Zouave regiments, which wore gay red pants and yellow sashes, topped by Turkish-style fezzes, began to wonder if these uniforms were not both unduly conspicuous on the firing line and excessively hard to keep neat. (62/124)

 

Death in combat made at least some sense. More died from disease during the Civil War than bullets or cannon fire. Many Northern soldiers were felled by malaria when they came South. No one knew how typhoid spread and thousands died. The worst affliction may have been camp diarrhea, which hit almost everyone and might become chronic. A Michigan soldier remembered “the terrible, nauseating stench that envelopes a military camp.” In one month, without a single shot fired, seven men died and eight were medically discharged in the 125^th Ohio. 

Army sanitation was often lax in the extreme. One day the surgeon of the 57^th New York complained to his commanding officer that a few careless men were infested with lice. “The whole army is lousy!” his colonel exploded. “I am lousy, you are lousy, General McClellan is lousy!” (62/144) 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Students might be interested in the provenance of the word, “lousy.” That is, to be infested with lice. 

 

The soldiers learned to travel light. The 40^th New York used ten wagons to carry baggage in the early days; by fall of 1862 the men hauled what they needed on their backs. Most experienced soldiers got rid of the knapsack. A man spread out half a pup tent (soldiers paired up when they camped), placed blanket on top, arranged spare clothing, small items of gear on top; rolled tightly, tied with straps from discarded the knapsack, tied two ends close and looped the roll over a shoulder. A Massachusetts soldier joked that one man would carry a towel, the other a cake of soap. 

The bayonet was very rarely used in battle. The men did find the round end, with the point jabbed in the ground, made a good candle holder for reading or writing letters.

 

* 

How to make “shadow soup.” 

Unlike Southern troops, the Army of the Potomac normally had ample supplies. Still, one soldier grumbled about the “shadow soup” served to sick and wounded in the hospital. Catton provides the recipe: “Put a large kettle of water on to boil, then hang a chicken so that its shadow falls in the water, and boil the shadow for half an hour; add salt and pepper and serve.” (62/175) 

(I am reminded of Norman Mailer’s assessment of army cooking during World War II: “When it’s smokin’ it’s cookin’; when it’s burnin’ it’s done.”) 

A veteran described a typical noonday halt while on the march. Each man built a small fire, had a small tin can with a twine handle, filled it with water, and poured in coffee from a little bag. 

At the same time a bit of bacon or pork was broiling on a stick, and in a few minutes the warm meal was cooked and dispatched. Then, washing his knife by stabbing it in the ground, and eating up his plate, which was a hardtack biscuit, the contented soldier lit his laurel-root pipe, took a few puffs, lay down on his knapsack for a pillow, and dozed until the sharp command, “Fall in!” put an end to his nap. (62/178)

 

Catton gives a detailed description of hardtack: three inches on a side, nearly half an inch thick. It was good enough when fresh, nine or ten making a day’s ration. Hardtack could be soaked in water, drained, fried in pork fat, a repast called “skillygalee.” If moldy it was thrown away. If it had weevils it was issued to the troops anyway. Heating it by the fire would drive the weevils out. Salt pork was sometimes eaten raw on hardtack when troops were on the move.   

The men of the Army of the Potomac had plenty of coffee. It was issued as whole beans, which they pounded on rocks with stones or rifle butts. 

Not much thought was given by commanders to organized meals. If beef was issued when troops were in the field, the common soldier usually wrapped a piece on a stick and broiled it over a fire.

 

In settled camps, during winter, most companies did elevate one or two men to the status of company cook. “A company cook is a peculiar being,” one veteran recalled. “He generally knows less about cooking than any man in the company. Not being able to learn the drill, and too dirty to appear on inspection, he is sent to the cook house to get him out of the ranks.” (62/180) 

Escaped slaves who had been plantation cooks sometimes joined up with the troops and were warmly welcomed.

 

*

 

Crossing the Potomac into Maryland, the men of that state were particularly excited to be taking the fight north. According to Kyd Douglas, one Marylander, Captain E. V. “Lige” White, “whose house was near there, threw himself from his horse, among a group of mothers and daughters, and kissed such a lot of them in five minutes that I venture to say the record was never broken…”  (20/148)

 

Jackson had received as a present a new horse. On mounting him for the first time, she rose to her hind legs and went over backwards, throwing the general hard on the ground. “The General was stunned, bruised, and injured his back. He lay upon the ground for more than half an hour before he was sufficiently recovered to be removed. He never mounted the brute again…”  (20/149)

 

One day, Jackson was heading to Lee’s tent for a conference. A carriage from Baltimore, with two young ladies aboard, spotted him. The girls

 

sprang from the carriage, rushed up to him, and talked with wild enthusiasm, both at the same time, until he seemed simply miserable. In a minute or two their fireworks were expended, and jumping into their carriage, they were driven away happy and delighted; he stood for a moment cap in hand, bowing, speechless, paralyzed, and then went to General Lee’s. When he got back to his tent, safe, he did not venture out again until late in the evening.

 

Douglas insists he was with Jackson every inch of the way, as the troops passed through Frederick. There was no incident with the elderly Barbara Frietche and the American flag, as the poet Whittier insisted. “She never saw Stonewall Jackson and he never saw her.” (20/152)

 

He speaks of “Jim, the General’s servant,” a “faithful fellow, “a handsome mulatto, in the prime of life, well-made and with excellent manners…” “He was a great admirer of the General’s temperance views, although they did not apply to himself, for he was fond of liquor and was, it was said, somewhat addicted to cards and a quiet little game.” 

 

One day, he “announced he could always tell the condition of the military atmosphere by the General’s devotions,” that he didn’t mind his daily prayers, but when he got up in the night to pray, “Then I begin to cook rations and pack up for there will be hell to pay in the morning.”   (20/154-155)

 

* 

This poem, by John Greenleaf Whittier, memorializes the supposed defiance of a Maryland woman, in 1862, as she watched Stonewall Jackson’s men march north. 

It was published the next year.

 

Barbara Frietchie 

Up from the meadows rich with corn,

Clear in the cool September morn,

 

The clustered spires of Frederick stand

Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

 

Round about them orchards sweep,

Apple- and peach-tree fruited deep,

 

Fair as a garden of the Lord

To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,

 

On that pleasant morn of the early fall

When Lee marched over the mountain wall,—

 

Over the mountains winding down,

Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

 

Forty flags with their silver stars,

Forty flags with their crimson bars,

 

Flapped in the morning wind: the sun

Of noon looked down, and saw not one.

 

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,

Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

 

Bravest of all in Frederick town,

She took up the flag the men hauled down;

 

In her attic window the staff she set,

To show that one heart was loyal yet.

 

Up the street came the rebel tread,

Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

 

Under his slouched hat left and right

He glanced: the old flag met his sight.

 

“Halt!”— the dust-brown ranks stood fast.

“Fire!”— out blazed the rifle-blast.

 

It shivered the window, pane and sash;

It rent the banner with seam and gash.

 

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff

Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf;

 

She leaned far out on the window-sill,

And shook it forth with a royal will.

 

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

 

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,

Over the face of the leader came;

 

The nobler nature within him stirred

To life at that woman’s deed and word:

 

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head

Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

 

All day long through Frederick street

Sounded the tread of marching feet:

 

All day long that free flag tost

Over the heads of the rebel host.

 

Ever its torn folds rose and fell

On the loyal winds that loved it well;

 

And through the hill-gaps sunset light

Shone over it with a warm good-night.

 

Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er,

And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.

 

Honor to her! and let a tear

Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.

 

Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave

Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

 

Peace and order and beauty draw

Round thy symbol of light and law;

 

And ever the stars above look down

On thy stars below in Frederick town!

 

*

 

After pummeling Pope, President Lincoln gave McClellan a second chance. Lee was headed north to Maryland. The Army of the Potomac followed. Soldiers in the Third Wisconsin remembered being fed “cakes, pies, fruits, milk, dainty biscuits and loaves” passed out by citizens in Frederick. A soldier in the Ninth New York found the streets “filled with women dressed in their best, walking bareheaded, singing, and testifying in every way the general joy.” 

“It seemed like Paradise,” said a third veteran, “this Maryland, and many were the blessed damosels we saw therein.” 

If there has ever been an army disinterested in the opposite sex, historians have not recorded the fact.

 

A few random notes: The Irish Brigade included the 63^rd, 69^th and 88^th New York, Irish to a man, emerald green regimental flags, with gold embroidery, an Irish harp, shamrock and sunburst. Also added: 29^th Massachusetts, mostly Irish. (62/167) 

The “Napoleon” fired a 4.5 inch round shot, could hit a mile away, not accurate past ½ mile, best for firing case shot or canister, which contained 200-300 round bullets. Catton called the field piece “a sawed-off shotgun of enormous size.” The maximum range for canister was 250 yards but infantry could pick off gunners at that range too. (62/190) 

A Minié ball (“minnies” to the men) could kill at half a mile. Effective range was 200-250 yards.

 

* 

After Pope’s defeat, Catton notes: 

The Prime Minister of Great Britain, having compared notes with the Foreign Secretary, was getting ready to propose to the British Cabinet that England take the lead in inducing a concert of powers to step in and bring the Civil War to an end – which, of course, could only mean independence for the Confederacy….The two men were waiting now to see how the invasion of Maryland turned out before taking final action.

 

McClellan helped restore optimism and the armies marched north, toward their clash at Antietam. “Homesick boys with muskets on their shoulders would finally have to say which way American history henceforth would go,” says Catton. (62/209)

 

* 

September 12: Most history teachers know about Special Orders No. 191. Catton provides good detail. Two soldiers from an Indiana regiment, Corporal Barton W. Mitchell and First Sgt. John McKnight Bloss, were lying in grass in a fence corner beside the road, enjoying a brief halt. They noticed an envelope. Mitchell rolled over and opened it, finding three cigars inside, wrapped in Special Orders No. 191. Catton says that nowhere in history does anyone explain “what happened to the cigars.” 

The orders prove: “Lee’s army was at this moment completely scattered, and McClellan, his own army united, was closer to the scattered pieces than those pieces were to each other.” If he struck hard Lee’s army would have no chance. “There was just one catch in it. McClellan would have to move fast.” 

McClellan was well aware that this was his great opportunity: “Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home….Tomorrow we pitch into his center,” he told his corps commanders, “and if you people will only do two good days’ marching I will put Lee in a position he will find it hard to get out of.” (62/215-217)

 

* 

September 14: Unfortunately, McClellan did not move decisively enough. A relatively small Rebel force on South Mountain blocked his path the better part of a day. Storming up South Mountain that day, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes of the Twenty-Third Ohio, was wounded. Sgt. William McKinley was not hurt.

 

* 

McClellan lets a chance to crush Lee slip. 

September 16: McClellan was in view of Sharpsburg on September 16, when Lee’s army was still scrambling to reunite. He was excited, having pushed the enemy off South Mountain, writing his wife, “If I can believe one-tenth of what is reported, God has seldom granted an army a greater victory than this.” 

He wrote to Lincoln in the same vein, telling him, “General Lee admits they are badly whipped.” (62/251) 

All day McClellan studied the situation in his front. “He was going to have everything ready before he opened the fight, and nothing was going to be lost through overhasty action. Or gained either,” Catton explains. At that moment, Lee had about 25,000 men present. 

The famous Dunker Church, a landmark in the battle to come, was home to a sect which believed steeples were a vanity and killing a sin. 

There was a brisk little fight around what would later become famous as the “East Wood.” But both armies went to sleep that night, with a tension in the air. Guards reported the mysterious sound of muffled tramping of men unseen. Union General Joseph K. Mansfield spread a blanket in a fence corner and lay down to sleep. A lot of the boys in the Tenth Maine were awake and talking round nearby fires. Mansfield rose, “went over to shush them,” but he was nice about it, and not like a major general. At midnight the camps died down and soldiers slept. 

“And whatever it may be that nerves men to die for a flag or a phrase or a man or an inexpressible dream was drowsing with them,” Catton writes, “ready to wake with the dawn.” (62/261) 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: It might work to ask students: What is it that makes people willing to die for an idea or a country, etc.? 

 

The devil’s playthings littered the camps. 

It rained in the night. At dawn in the mist and half-light pickets saw movement and opened fire, the armies lying close. By six a.m. the air shook with the thunder of heavy artillery fire. Many camps were littered with decks of cards (card playing being considered sinful and no sense carrying the devil’s playthings into a fight). Gen. Joseph Hooker’s artillery began blasting what would forever after be known as “The Cornfield.” 

Thick clouds of smoke made it impossible for men to know what was going on other than in a small area round them: 

The black powder used in those days left heavy masses of smoke which stayed on the ground or hung at waist level in long tattered sheets until the wind blew it away, and this smoke deposited a black, greasy film on sweaty skins, so that men who had been fighting hard looked grotesque, as if they had been ineptly made up for a minstrel show.

 

The intense fire shredded cornstalks, splintered rifles, punctured canteens and tore haversacks and human beings to shreds. (62/269-271) 

Those who fought at Antietam remembered bullets as thick as hail in a storm. The men advanced, bending their heads, as if facing a driving rain. A Union officer was heard shouting, “This fire is murderous!” 

Gen. John B. Hood’s gray troops had just sat down to cook their first real meal in days when they were ordered forward. A blue attack had broken the main Rebel line and the Yankees would almost surely win the battle unless stopped. Hood’s men formed in time, met the Federal attack, and delivered a volley which was “like a scythe running through our line,” said one stunned Yankee survivor. Union forces broke and ran, Hood’s men following and jeering.

Barton helped nurse the wounded at Antietam
and greatly improved medical care for the soldiers.
Blogger's collection.

Painting "Playing Old Soldier" by Winslow Homer.
I always asked students if they could figure out what the soldier in the middle
was doing (faking sick, I think Homer meant to show).

Zouave uniforms - Union Army - copied after the French.
Both paintings from the internet.

 

Gen. John Gibbon noticed that several Union gun crews had let the elevation screws on their field pieces run down. So they were firing over the heads of Hood’s men. He leaped from his horse, adjusted one screw himself, and the battery was soon firing double-canister at a range of fifty feet. Catton says that the charging Confederate line melted away under this fire. 

As always, there were those who could not stand the strain. Catton describes the fields and woods behind the lines being filled with: 

The skulkers and the unabashed cowards who always ran in every battle…the men who could stand something but not everything, the men who had stood fast in all previous fights but found this one too terrible to be borne; the men who helped wounded comrades to the rear and then either honestly got lost…or found that they could not quite make themselves go back into it. (62/272-275)    

 

Gen. Mansfield rode down his battle line, shouting, “That’s right, boys, cheer – we’re going to whip them today!” In the smoke and confusion he rode forward for a look at enemy positions. “Those are Rebels, General!” a soldier shouted warning. Confederate troops opened fire. Mansfield’s horse was hit. The general took a bullet in the stomach, a mortal wound. Gen. Hooker took a bullet through his boot, which filled with blood, and had to ride to the rear. The men of the Twenty-Seventh Indiana shot up all their ammunition, 100 rounds per man, and had to retrieve cartridges from the dead and wounded. Corporal Mitchell, who had found the cigars and Lee’s orders, was badly wounded. 

Fresh Union attacks went forward. The 19^th Massachusetts had been a “fancy-Dan” outfit, electing not only its officers, but its men, at the start of the war. Their division advanced across “The Cornfield,” stepping over dead and wounded. Shells that passed over their first line hit the second or third. A survivor later grumbled, “We were as easy to hit as the town of Sharpsburg.” Union and Confederate infantry exchanged fire at a distance of fifteen paces. Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (later Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) was wounded for the second time during the war. He would be wounded six times before the war ended. (62/277-289) 

(Catton is not my source for that number; and since I can’t remember the source, I’m not sure I’m correct.) 

 

The bees win a battle. 

There was heavy fighting around the Roulette farm. Rebel artillery blasted a row of beehives. One Pennsylvania regiment, new to combat, had been facing bullets well enough, but bees drove them back. 

The focal point of Union attacks, now led by Gen. Edwin V. Sumner’s corps, shifted to the “Sunken Road.” Catton explains: 

The men who defended it were almost wholly protected; the men who tried to take it would have to advance in the open, exposed to a crippling fire. It was as nasty a strong point as the army ever ran up against: the famous sunken road, know forever after (for sufficient reason) as Bloody Lane.

 

The Yankee attackers stopped at the top of a low rise, the road slightly below. The men in gray could hear shouted commands.

 

Down they came, four ranks deep.

 

Rebel artillery concentrated on the blue infantry, knowing if the Sunken Road was taken there was nothing to stop the Union army from capturing Sharpsburg and cutting off Lee’s retreat. Yankee artillery concentrated on the enemy guns. Rebel crews ever after remembered this day as “artillery hell.” The Irish Brigade drove the Confederates back from a position to the right of the lane. Half of the men in the Sixty-Third New York were killed or wounded. Gen. Thomas Meagher’s horse took a bullet in full gallop and both horse and rider went down. Meagher was knocked cold. Two blue regiments finally got into position where they could enfilade the road. The battle, says Catton, “had come to a moment of supreme crisis.” Gen. D.H. Hill grabbed a musket and led the last of his gray reserves in a counterattack. 

A Federal battery withdraws to a safer spot. A civilian gentleman in a two-horse carriage appears out of nowhere, alights, and begins handing out ham and biscuits. Then he takes several wounded men to an aid station. 

At this point, Lee’s line was a “frayed thread.” “Many years later Longstreet confessed that at that moment ten thousand fresh Federals [emphasis added] could have come through and taken Lee’s army and all it possessed.” (62/292-298)

* 

The fury of the fight is encapsulated in the experience of the commander of the Sixth Alabama, John B. Gordon. He had been in battle several times before, but had had only close calls, and no harm done. His canteen was punctured by Yankee fire and drained of its contents during one attack, but Gordon was unscathed. 

He later wrote, 

My extraordinary escapes from wounds in all the previous battles had made a deep impression upon my comrades as well as upon my own mind. So many had fallen at my side, so often had balls and shells pierced and torn my clothing, grazing my body without drawing a drop of blood, that a sort of blind faith possessed my men that I was not to be killed in battle. This belief was evidenced by their constantly repeated expressions: “They can’t hurt him.” “He’s as safe one place as another.” “He’s got a charmed life.” If I had allowed these expressions of my men to have any effect upon my mind the impression was quickly dissipated when the Sharpsburg storm came and the whizzing Minies, one after another, began to pierce my body.

 

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine picks up the story: 

The first volley from Union troops sent a bullet through Gordon’s right calf. A short time later, he was hit higher up in the same leg, but no bones were broken, so he was able to continue walking along the firing line and encouraging his men. Another bullet ripped through his left arm, “tearing asunder the tendons and mangling the flesh,” and causing blood to drip down his fingers. The soldiers, witnessing this, begged their colonel to go to the rear, but Gordon refused, stating that: “The surgeons were all busy at the field hospitals in the rear, and there was no way, therefore, of stanching the blood, but I had a vigorous constitution, and this was doing me good service.”

 

A fourth bullet then hit Gordon in the shoulder, leaving a fragment and wad of clothing in the wound. The shock and loss of blood began to take its toll, and Gordon struggled to remain on his feet. He was attempting to move to the right of his line to order his men to stand fast, when a fifth bullet struck him in the left cheek, passing out his neck and just missing the jugular vein. He fell forward face down into his cap, unconscious.

 

“It would seem that I might have been smothered by the blood running into my cap from this last wound but for the act of some Yankee,” Gordon later said, “who, as if to save my life, had at a previous hour during the battle, shot a hole through the cap, which let the blood out.”

 

Gordon would later recall that it felt like the top of his head had been removed and that only part of his jaw and tongue were left. He was taken on a litter to a field hospital, where he was revived with stimulants later in the evening. He found his surgeon at his side, and immediately asked what his prospects of survival were. Seeing the surgeon hesitate, Gordon replied, “You think I am going to die; but I am going to get well.”

 

Gordon was evacuated from the battlefield and taken across the Potomac River to Virginia, where his wife was sent for. He was concerned that his appearance would frighten her. “My face was black and shapeless – so swollen that one eye was entirely hidden and the other nearly so. My right leg and left arm and shoulder were bandaged and propped with pillows.”

 

Indeed, his wife upon seeing him, had to stifle a scream, but after overcoming her initial shock, she never left his side, nursing him for several months. Because his jaw had to be wired shut, and because of the constant drainage from his wounds, Gordon was given brandy and beef tea to sustain him. When he developed erysipelas (a bacterial infection of the upper layer of the skin) in his left arm, the doctors told his wife to paint the arm three to four times a day with iodine. This was a lucky decision for Gordon. Most doctors during the Civil War were unaware of germ theory and did not understand the benefits of using antiseptics.  Iodine was considered a remedy for a variety of ills but was not understood as an antiseptic. Gordon’s wife complied with the doctor’s instructions by applying the iodine, in Gordon’s estimate, three to four hundred times a day. He credited her treatment with saving not only his arm, but his life as well.

 

*

McClellan blows his chance to win and settles for a tie. 

On this terrible day, McClellan had 87,000 men present for battle. 

Lee had 41,000. 

Sumner, stunned by the carnage he had already witnessed, refused division commanders permission to press their attacks. A staff officer arrived from McClellan’s HQ to urge Sumner to advance if he could. “Go back, young man,” he told the messenger, “and tell General McClellan I have no command! Tell him my command, Banks’ command and Hooker’s command are all cut up and demoralized. Tell him General Franklin has the only organized command on this part of the field!” (62/299)

 

McClellan had it in his power at that moment to shatter Lee’s army, and very possibly win the war. Failing to see it, he upheld Sumner’s decision not to continue the attack. 

Meanwhile, a planned Union advance on their left never got going. Antietam Creek could have been crossed in most places without men getting their belt buckles wet. Yet it “was treated that day as if it were quite impassible, a veritable Rhine River, not to be crossed except dry-shod on a bridge.” McClellan sent several messages urging his left wing to attack. Yankee troops scheduled to lead the way across the bridge used up their ammunition banging away at Rebel defenders on a line of hills across the stream. 

Another unit would have to go first. Two hours were wasted shuffling troops into position. All morning, Lee kept stripping men from this part of the line to plug holes elsewhere. When the Federals got across and got up on the plateau behind the bridge, around 3 p.m., only 2,500 Rebels barred the path to Sharpsburg – which meant Union troops were in perfect position to cut Lee’s escape route. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, leading Union forces on this wing, had one division restocking ammunition, one division in reserve, and a third looking for a ford which wasn’t needed. (62/301) 

Union troops had a hard time crossing this bridge.

Antietam Creek isn't all that hard to wade across.
Blogger's collection.

 

The last desperate hour of the Confederate Army visibly at hand. 

Catton describes the situation: “Slowly the Rebel line of defense faded away – brigades up front all cracked, Sharpsburg filled with demoralized stragglers looking for shelter, the last desperate hour of the Confederate Army visibly at hand.” 

Gen. A.P. Hill arrived just in time to knock Burnside’s advance back on its heels, having marched so hard to reach the scene that half his men fell out on the way. Burnside reported that he could hold his ground, but needed reinforcements. 

A Union brigade lay down halfway up a hill, under heavy fire. A veteran recalled “the most vehement, terrible swearing I have ever heard.” “The mental strain was so great,” said another, “I think, in the life of Goethe on a similar occasion –the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.” (62/309) 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: By this time each side had lost 10,000 men. I always found it interesting to ask students what that meant. 

My classes tended to see it as a tie. It was necessary to prod them before someone realized: Lee was in worse shape than ever. Now he had 31,000 men left to face 77,000 troops under McClellan. When I asked questions like this I sometimes ignored students if they seemed to know the answer. I wanted to get more kids involved in any discussion and a variety of answers never hurt.

 

Several officers urged McClellan to send Gen. Fitz-John Porter’s corps, held in reserve, to renew the attack. Porter was hesitant. “Remember, General – I command the last reserve of the last army of the Republic,” he told McClellan. 

The fighting ended for the day. (62/314-315)

 

* 

 

*

 

September 17 (Part 2): The Battle of Antietam: Henry Kyd Douglas could not believe Burnside and his 13,000 men never tried to cross Antietam Creek, even when there was a stone bridge they could have used.

 

Why the bridge? It was no pass to Thermopylae. Go look at it and tell me if you don’t think Burnside and his corps might have executed a hop, skip, and jump and landed on the other side. One thing is certain, they might have waded it that day without getting their waist belts wet in any place.

 

He wonders if the bridge is named after the Yankee general out of sarcasm.  (20/170)

 

The night after the battle of Sharpsburg was a fearful one. Not a soldier, I venture to say, slept half an hour. Nearly all of them were wandering the field, looking for their wounded comrades, and some of them, doubtless, plundering the dead bodies of the enemy left on the field. Half of Lee’s army were hunting the other half.  (20/172)

 

Riding over the field at Antietam, Douglas describes the gory scene:

 

It was a dreadful scene, a veritable field of blood. The dead and dying lay as thick over it as harvest sheaves. The pitiable cries for water and appeals for help were much more horrible to listen to than the deadliest sounds of battle. Silent were the dead, and motionless. But here and there were raised stiffened arms; heads made a last effort to lift themselves from the ground; prayers were mingled with oaths, the oaths of delirium; men were wriggling over the earth; and midnight had all distinction between the blue and the grey. My horse trembled under me in terror, looking down at the ground, and sniffing the scent of blood, stepping falteringly as a horse will over or by the side of human flesh; afraid to stand still, hesitating to go on, his animal instinct shuddering at this cruel human mystery. Once his foot slid into a little shallow filled with blood and spurted a little stream on his legs and my boots. I had had a surfeit of blood that day and I couldn’t stand this. I dismounted and giving the reins to my courier I started on foot into the wood of Dunker Church.  (20/173)

 

“As General Palfrey says of the day before, if Lee had been in McClellan’s place, with Jackson and Longstreet and the Hills, the Army of Northern Virginia would have ceased to exist that day.”  (20/177)

*

September 18: Darkness brought an end to the carnage. Reinforcements joined McClellan all day on September 18, while he and his corps commanders planned fresh attacks. That night, however, his men could hear Lee’s troops pulling out of the lines and heading for the Potomac River to escape. 

Catton notes that burial duties were handed over to regiments that had fallen out of the good graces of brigade or division commanders. The body of one soldier, draped over the fence at Bloody Lane, was found to have been struck by 57 bullets. Capt. George Freeman Noyes saw an officer carrying a large piece of salt pork, just issued to feed his men. He cried out that he was the only survivor of his unit and had no idea what to do with the food. 

McClellan himself was thrilled by his success, writing his wife, “You should see my soldiers now! You never saw anything like their enthusiasm. It surpassed anything you ever imagined.” “Those in whose judgment I rely tell me that I fought the battle splendidly and that it was a masterpiece of art.” (62/320-321) 

They were wrong.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: My classes used to have a great discussion on the topic: That human beings are most often defeated by their attitudes, like McClellan, imagining obstacles in their paths to be insurmountable. I had been in the Marines myself and had some amusing stories about “attitude adjustments” administered at my expense at Parris Island. I had also seen a guy named Tim Traylor running the Cincinnati Heart Mini-Marathon with steel arm braces/crutches (he had cerebral palsy). We used an article from the Cincinnati Enquirer, about Bruce Jennings, who bicycled across the USA with one leg. The question I liked to pose was, “How could Jennings do it? How could he make it when most people with two legs assumed they couldn’t?  

Later I pedaled across the country myself.

  

Lincoln decided the time was finally right, after the Battle of Antietam, to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The next month the Emperor of France proposed that his country, Russia, and England step in and bring about an armistice. The British cabinet rejected the idea. Now that Lincoln had acted, no one wanted to be known as an “apologist for slavery.” (62/322)

H.L. Mencken will later focus on the limitations of the Emancipation Proclamation, saying, Lincoln “free the slaves in only a part of the country: all the rest continued to clank their changes until he himself was an angel in Heaven.” (49/79)

 

 

*

 

Douglas asked for leave to go see if he could find out about his father, who had a farm (or plantation?) in Shepherdstown, just across the Potomac. Looking from cliffs on the far shore, he describes the scene:

 

From there just over the Potomac on an equal eminence I saw rifle pits on the lawn and a piece or two of light artillery, and soldiers in blue lying sunning themselves on the stone wall and in possession generally. I saw my father come out of the house and walk down toward the burned barn. It was not a cheerful sight and turning away I rode down to the high road and thence into the Potomac to water my horse. As I did so several cavalrymen rode in on the other side, and, after saluting, invited me jestingly to “come over.”

 

Douglas and a courier with him found a small boat and met the Yanks, six or eight of them, in a ferry boat in the middle of the river. They talked a little - the enemy realized Douglas was the son of the man who lived on the bluff nearby - and then the courier burst out, “Yes, and a beastly business it is for a man to get this near home and not be able to see his father and mother.”

 

The soldiers in blue invited him to come over and visit. Douglas hesitated. “I declined, saying they had no right to ask me, and as they were not officers their safeguard would amount to nothing if I was arrested. They protested their officers were in Sharpsburg at dinner.” They promised to return him safely to the other shore. Finally, “one bluff fellow roared out, ‘I wouldn’t give a d--- for a Union that can be broken up by a man seeing his mother!” 

 

With that, Douglas was convinced to visit. His father was on parole and could not leave the property. His mother hurried down to meet him.

 

Very soon my mother was seen descending the hill….My mother came to me, pale, trembling, breathless—thinking I was a prisoner and she the victim of a cruel joke. As she came across the canal and over the towpath, the hilarious cavalrymen were almost hushed and taking my courier with them they passed her with uncovered heads and went and sat on the banks of the canal out of hearing. Marvelous delicacy; a strange family meeting. My mother’s alarm and anxiety were too great for long endurance, for she would not believe they would let me go. Her kiss chided my rashness, and the interview was brief. A few words about the family and that was all. She seemed ashamed of her impatience to have me go and yet she could not help it. She left and as she went up the bank the boys came streaming down, and still she could not believe, for she tarried on the towpath.

 

The men gathered about me. I tried to thank them but did not know how—sometimes words are so stupid. I wrote my name on slips of paper with the date and told them if caught and in prison to send that paper to Jackson’s Headquarters; he’d honor it.

 

“Then,” said one jolly fellow, “I’d rather have it than a life insurance policy.”

 

As I got into my skiff the Sergeant said, “Captain, while I’m here I’ll keep an eye on your home and do what I can for your people. Good-by.”  (20/184-185)

Douglas remembers one particular night in camp. Tattoo has just sounded “and the rolling drums scattered it through the camp.” He was tired himself.

 

Suddenly out upon the beautiful night there broke forth that wild and joyous yell for which the Stonewall Brigade was famous. Other brigades and divisions took it up and it sprang from camp to camp with increasing vigor, until the bright arch of Heaven seemed to resound with the thundering acclaim. The mingled roar was grand, peculiar, impressive in the extreme. When it was at its height I saw the General come out, bareheaded, from his tent, walk to the fence and lean his elbow upon the topmost rail. Resting his chin upon his hand he waited in silence the climax, fall, and conclusion of this strange serenade. The shouts decreased, the noise became fainter and fainter, and when it had almost ceased to be audible, he lifted his head to catch the last note and its last echo. When it was over he returned slowly to his tent and said in soliloquy as he entered, “That was the sweetest music I ever heard.”  (20/193-194)

 

“In 1862 every beautiful house proffered its hospitality for the General’s Headquarters, but he rarely ever broke his rule of camping in his tent.”   (20/196)

 

*

 

November: Lincoln fires Gen. McClellan for the second time. Around the campfires one night, soldiers of the Seventeenth Michigan discussed events. They agreed that the president should retire all the generals “and select men from the ranks who will serve without pay, lead the army against Lee, strike him hard, and follow him until he fails to come to time.” (62/331)

 

* 

December 11-15: In the wake of Northern defeat at Fredericksburg, Gladstone suggested that England recognize “the nation which that great statesman, Jefferson Davis, has so successfully founded on the other side of the ocean.” (124/392) 

England hesitated, according to Van Loon, for fear of Russia. 

England was forced to keep a watchful eye on Russia, which only a few years before had been badly defeated in the Crimean war and which now had concentrated the greater part of her fleet in the harbors of San Francisco and New York, not out of any profound love for American democracy, but because she hoped, in case of a conflict with Great Britain, to use those ports as convenient naval bases against England. (124/392)

 

* 

December 13: Andrews describes the debacle known as the Battle of Fredericksburg. In particular he mentions the attack on rebel lines on a slight ridge, protected by a stone wall: 

About noon an attack was made by Hancocks’s and French’s corps against the Confederate left. They advanced over the plain in two lines, one behind the other. Suddenly the batteries in front, to left, to right, pored upon them a murderous fire. Great gaps were made in their ranks. Union batteries, replying from across the river, added horror to the din, but helped little. Still the lines swept on. They grew thinner and thinner, halted, broke, and fled.

 

Again they advanced, this time almost up to the stone wall. Behind it, hidden from sight, lay gray ranks four deep. Suddenly that silent wall burst into flame, and the advancing lines crumbled away more rapidly than before. Three times more the gallant fellows came on, bayonets fixed, to useless slaughter. That deadly wall could not be passed. (4/90-91)

 

* 

Anthony Trollope’s North America was published in 1862. Here are a few observations on American life:

 

“The government and social life of the people there…afford the most interesting phenomena which we find as to the new world; – the best means of prophesying, if I may say so, what the world will next be, and what men will next do. (Introduction; p. 13; Penguin Classics, paperback, 1992)

 

He compares society in Great Britain with society in America:

 

With us there is no level of society. Men stand on a long staircase, but the crowd congregates near the bottom, and the lower steps are very broad. In America men stand upon a common platform, but the platform is raised above the ground, though it does not approach in height the top of our staircase. If we take the average altitude in the two countries, we shall find that the American heads are the more elevated of the two. (Introduction; p. 18; modern printing)

 

 

“This plan of sending back the Negroes to Africa did not reach me only from one or two mouths [in Boston]; and it was suggested by men whose opinions respecting their country have weight at home and are entitled to weight abroad.” (32) 

 

There is excellent bathing for those who like bathing on shelving sand. I don’t. The spot is about half a mile from the hotels, and to this the bathers are carried in omnibuses. Till one o’clock the ladies bathe; – which operation, however, does not at all militate against the bathing of men, but rather necessitates it as regards those men who have ladies with them. For here ladies and gentlemen bathe in decorous dresses, and are very polite to each other.

 

 

He was repeatedly asked what position England would take. Would her need for cotton cause her to recognize the Confederacy? “‘Ah, that’s what we fear,’ a staunch patriot said to me, if words may be taken as proof of staunchness. ‘If England allies herself with the Southerners, all our trouble is for nothing.’” (47)

 

 

“There is an independence which sits gracefully on their shoulders.”

 

“Such an animal as a beggar is as much unknown as a mastodon. Men out of work and in want are almost unknown.” (79)

 

“The laboring Irish in these towns eat meat seven days a week, but I have met many a laboring Irishman among them who has wished himself back in his old cabin.” (82)

 

“Wages in these regions are what we should call high. An agricultural labourer will earn perhaps fifteen dollars a month and his board and a town labourer will earn a dollar a day.”  (82)

 

“The complaint that wages are held back and not even ultimately paid is very common.” (83)

 

Regarding German immigrants, he says, “they form a great portion of the population of New York, making the German quarter of that city the third largest German town in the world.” (83) “…on all hands I heard praises of their morals, of their thrift, and of their new patriotism.” (84)

 

A man of the frontier:

 

Visit him, and you will find him without coat or waistcoat, unshorn, in ragged blue trousers and old flannel shirt, too often bearing on his lantern jaws the signs of ague and sickness; but he will stand upright before you and speak to you with all the ease of a lettered gentleman in his own library…He is his own master, standing on his own threshold, and finds no need to assert his equality by rudeness…You will always fines in his cabin some newspaper, some book, some token of advance in education.

 

..I defy you not to feel that he is superior to the race from whence he has sprung in England or in Ireland. To me I confess that the manliness of such a man is very charming. He is dirty and perhaps squalid. His children are sick and he is without comforts. His wife is pale, and you think you see shortness of life written in the faces of all the family.

 

But over and above it all there is an independence which sits gracefully on their shoulders, and teaches you at the first glance that the man has a right to assume himself to be your equal. (87)

 

 

[Minnesota] …this infant State with its huge territory and scanty population is called upon to send its heart’s blood out to the war, and it has sent its heart’s best blood. Forth they came – fine, stalwart, well-grown fellows, looking to my eye as though they had as yet but faintly recognized the necessary severity of military discipline. … I could find but one fault with them. Their average age was too high. There were men among them with grizzled beards, and many who had counted thirty, thirty-five and forty years. They had, I believe, devoted themselves with a true spirit of patriotism. (89)

  

“A western man is not a talking man. He will sit for hours over a stove with his cigar in his mouth, and his hat over his eyes, chewing the cud of reflection. A dozen will sit together in the same way, and there shall not be a dozen words spoken between them in an hour.” (91-92)

  

[Cleveland] …One of the streets is a mile in length, and throughout the whole of it, there are trees on each side – not little paltry trees as are to be seen on the boulevards of Paris, but spreading elms – the beautiful American elm which not only spreads, but droops also, and makes more of its foliage than any other tree extant. (100)

 

“No men love money with more eager love than these western men, but they bear the loss of it as an Indian bears his torture at the stake.”

 

I cannot part from the West without saying in its favour that there is a certain manliness about its men, which gives them a dignity of their own…It has seemed to me that no race of men requires less outward assistance than these pioneers of civilization…Intelligence, energy and endurance are his virtues. Dirt, dishonesty, and morning drinks are his vices. (199)

 

The Irishman when he expatriates himself to one of those American States … becomes more of a man. He assumes a dignity which he never has known before. He learns to regard his labour as his own property. That which he earns he takes without thanks, but he desires to take no more than he deserves … It seems to me that such a man must feel himself half a god, if he has the power of comparing what he is with what he was…

 

…Men and women do not beg in the States – they do not often offend you with tattered rags; they do not complain to heaven of starvation; they do not crouch to the ground for halfpence. If they are poor they are not abject in their poverty. They read and write. They walk like human beings made in God’s form. They know that they are men and women, owing it to themselves and to the world that they should earn their bread by their labour, but feeling that when earned it is their own. If this be so – if it be acknowledged that it is so – should not such knowledge in itself be sufficient testimony of the success of the country and her institutions? (217-218)

 

And as to schools, it is almost impossible to mention them with too high a praise. I am speaking here specially of New York, though I might say the same of Boston, or of all New England…The female pupil at a free school in New York is neither a pauper nor a charity girl. She is dressed with the utmost decency. She is perfectly cleanly. In speaking to her, you cannot in any degree guess whether her father has a dollar a day, or three thousand dollars a year. Nor will you be enabled to guess by the manner in which her associates treat her. As regards her own manner to you, it is always the same as though her father were in all respects your equal.

 

As to the amount of her knowledge, I fairly confess that it is terrific.

 

[A girl is delegated by the teacher to explain the hypotenuse to Trollope; he later watches the class talk about the rape of the Sabine women] That the lads and girls in these schools are excellently educated comes home as a fact to the mind of anyone who will look into the subject.

 

…in New York every boy and girl, let his parentage be what it may can attend these schools without any payment. Thus an education as good as the American mind can compass, prepared with every care, carried on by highly paid tutors, under ample surveillance, provided with all that is most excellent in the way of rooms, desks, books, charts, maps, and expensive implements, is brought actually within the reach of everybody. (121-122)

 

 

[The taking of Slidell and Mason] “To me it seemed to be the most suicidal act that any party in a life-and-death struggle ever committed.” (138-139)

 

 

[He notes that the cost of Harvard, all expenses included, and with some luxuries, is about $500-900] “It is required that every student shall attend some place of Christian worship on Sundays…” (143-144)

 

 

“Lowell is the realization of a commercial Utopia.”

 

Trollope visits Lowell, Massachusetts and comes away greatly impressed with the town and its manufacturing works

 

The following extract is taken from the hand-book to Lowell: 

Mr. F. C. Lowell had in his travels abroad observed the effect of large manufacturing establishments on the character of the people, and in the establishment at Waltham the founders looked for a remedy for these defects. They thought that education and good morals would even enhance the profit, and that they could compete with Great Britain by introducing a more cultivated class of operatives. For this purpose they built boarding-houses, which, under the direct supervision of the agent, were kept by discreet matrons.

 

I can answer [Trollope writes] for the discreet matrons at Lowell:

 

…mostly widows, no boarders being allowed except operatives. Agents and overseers of high moral character were selected; regulations were adopted at the mills and boarding-houses, by which only respectable girls were employed. The mills were nicely painted and swept.

 

I can also answer for the painting and sweeping at Lowell:

 

…trees set out in the yards and along the streets, habits of neatness and cleanliness encouraged; and the result justified the expenditure. At Lowell the same policy has been adopted and extended; more spacious mills and elegant boarding-houses have been erected.

 

As to the elegance, it may be a matter of taste, but as to the comfort there is no question:

 

…the same care as to the classes employed; more capital has been expended for cleanliness and decoration; a hospital has been established for the sick, where, for a small price, they have an experienced physician and skilful [sic] nurses. An institute, with an extensive library, for the use of the mechanics, has been endowed. The agents have stood forward in the support of schools, churches, lectures, and lyceums, and their influence contributed highly to the elevation of the moral and intellectual character of the operatives.

 

Talent has been encouraged, brought forward, and recommended.

 

For some considerable time the young women wrote, edited, and published a newspaper among themselves, called the Lowell Offering:

 

And Lowell has supplied agents and mechanics for the later manufacturing places who have given tone to society, and extended the beneficial influence of Lowell through the United States. Girls from the country, with a true Yankee spirit of independence, and confident in their own powers, pass a few years here, and then return to get married with a dower secured by their exertions, with more enlarged ideas and extended means of information, and their places are supplied by younger relatives. A larger proportion of the female population of New England has been employed at some time in manufacturing establishments, and they are not on this account less good wives, mothers, or educators of families.

 

Then the account goes on to tell how the health of the girls has been improved by their attendance at the mills, how they put money into the savings-banks, and buy railway shares and farms; how there are thirty churches in Lowell, a library, banks, and insurance offices; how there is a cemetery, and a park, and how everything is beautiful, philanthropic, profitable, and magnificent.

 

Thus Lowell is the realization of a commercial Utopia. Of all the statements made in the little book which I have quoted I cannot point out one which is exaggerated, much less false. I should not call the place elegant; in other respects I am disposed to stand by the book. Before I had made any inquiry into the cause of the apparent comfort, it struck me at once that some great effort at excellence was being made.  

…The houses themselves belong to the corporations…

 

The doors are to be closed at ten o’clock. Any boarders who do not attend divine worship are to be reported to the managers.

 

It is expressly stated by the Hamilton Company – and I believe by all the companies – that no one shall be employed who is habitually absent from public worship on Sunday, or who is known to be guilty of immorality.

 

It is stated that the average wages of women are two dollars, or eight shillings, a week, besides their board…The board included washing, lights, food, bed, and attendance…

 

Now let me ask any one acquainted with Manchester and its operatives, whether that is not Utopia realized. Factory girls, for whom every comfort of life is secured, with 21 pounds [$104] a year over for savings and dress! (147-150)

 

* 

“The President’s house [the White House] is nice to look at, but it is built on marshy ground, not much above the level of the Potomac, and it is very unhealthy. I was told that all who live there become subject to fever and ague, and that few who now live there have escaped it altogether.” (168)

 

*

 

“It is vain to say that slavery has not caused secession, and that slavery has not caused the war. That, and that only has been the real cause of this conflict, though other small collateral issues may now be put forward to share the blame.” (178-179)

 

* 

 

Trollope’s prejudice revealed in comments on slavery.

 

“The southern gentry have been “Uncle-Tommed” into madness. It is no light thing to be told daily by your fellow citizens, by your fellow representatives, by your fellow senators, that you are guilty of the one damning sin that cannot be forgiven.” (179)

 

A farm in that part of the State depends, and must depend, on slave labour. The slaves are a material part of the estate, and as they are regarded by the law as real property an inheritor of land has no alternative but to keep them. A gentleman in Kentucky does not sell his slaves. To do so is considered to be low and mean, and is opposed to the aristocratic traditions of the country. A man who does so willingly, puts himself beyond the pale of good fellowship with his neighbors. A sale of slaves is regarded as a sign almost of bankruptcy. [If a man cannot pay his debts, his creditors can step in and sell his slaves; but he does not himself make the sale. This is dropped from my copy.] When a man owns more slaves than he needs, he hires them out by the year; and when he requires more than he owns, he takes them on hire by the year. Care is taken in such hirings not to remove a married man away from his home. The price paid for a Negro’s labour at the time of my visit was about a hundred dollars or twenty pounds, for the year; but this price was extremely low in consequence of the war disturbances. The usual price has been fifty or sixty percent above this. The man who takes the Negro [small “n” in 1862, I believe] on hire feeds him, clothes him, provides him with a bed, and supplies him with medical attendance.

 

I went into some of their cottages on the estate which I visited, and was not in the least surprised to find them preferable in size, furniture, and all material comforts to the dwellings of most of our own agricultural labourers. Any comparison between the material comfort of a Kentucky slave and an English ditcher and delver would be preposterous. The Kentucky slave never wants for clothing fitted to the weather. He eats meat twice a day, and has three good meals; he knows no limit but his own appetite; his work is light; he has many varieties of amusement; he has instant medical assistance at all periods of necessity for himself, his wife, and his children. Of course he pays no rent…and knows no hunger. I would not have it supposed that I conceive slavery with all these comforts to be equal to freedom without them; nor do I conceive that the Negro can be made equal to the white man. But in discussing the condition of the Negro, it is necessary that we should understand what are the advantages of which abolition would deprive him, and in what condition he has been placed by the daily receipt of such advantages. If a Negro slave wants new shoes, he asks for them, and receives them, with the undoubting simplicity of a child. Such a state of things has its picturesquely patriarchal side; but what would be the state of such a man if he were emancipated tomorrow? (189-190)

 

Charming pictures are drawn for you of the Negro in a state of Utopian bliss, owning his own hoe and eating his own hog; in a paradise, where everything is bought and sold, except his wife, his little ones, and himself. But the enfranchised Negro has always thrown away his hoe and eaten any man’s hog but his own – and has too often sold his daughter for a dollar when any such market has been open to him.

 

I confess that the cry of abolition has been made particularly displeasing to me, by the fact that the northern abolitionist is by no means willing to give even to the Negro who is already free that position in the world which alone might tend to raise him and make him fit for freedom. The abolitionists hold that the Negro is the white man’s equal. I do not. I see or think that I see, that the Negro is the white man’s inferior through laws of nature. That he is not mentally fit to cope with white men – I speak of the full-blooded Negro – and that he must fill a position simply servile. But the abolitionist declares him to be the white man’s equal. But yet, when he has him at his elbow, he treats him with scorn which even the Negro can hardly endure. (181)

 

An American abolitionist would not sit at a table with a Negro…He will not sit with him in a public carriage if he can avoid it. In New York I have seen special street cars for coloured people. The abolitionist is struck with horror when he thinks that a man and brother should be a slave; but when the man and brother is made free, he is regarded with loathing and contempt.

 

The slave as a rule is well treated – he gets all he wants and almost all he desires. The free Negro as a rule is ill-treated and does not get that consideration which alone might put him in the worldly position for which his advocate declares him to be fit. It is false throughout – this preaching. The Negro is not the white man’s equal by nature.

 

But there was among them a general – not a fighting, or would-be fighting general of the present time, but one of the old-fashioned local generals – men who held, or had once held, some fabulous generalship in the State militia.

 

…As a matter of course everybody present was for the Union. In such a place one very rarely encounters any differences of opinion. The General was very eager about the war, advocating the immediate abolition of slavery, not as a means of improving the condition of the southern slaves, not as a means of improving the condition of the southern slaves, but on the ground that it would ruin the southern masters. We all sat by, edging in a word now and then, but the General was the talker of the evening. He was very wrathy, and swore at every other word. (197)

 

* 

December 31: The Battle of Murfreesboro, or Stone River commences. One of the bloodiest fights of the entire war, it is generally forgotten today. Confederate forces under General Braxton Bragg had been enjoying the holidays, as best soldiers can. General William S. Rosecrans move his army close to the town and prepared to attack. Bragg moved first. As Benjamin Andrews explains, 

At dawn, December 31st, the gray-colored columns emerged from the fog that overhung the river, and spiritedly beat up the Union right. Two divisions were swept back. Sheridan’s men, inspired by their dashing leader, held their ground for awhile, but fell rearward at last, and, forming a new line, stood at bay with fixed bayonets. Rosecrans recalled the troops who had crossed the river to make a similar attack upon the Confederate right, and massed all his troops at the point of assault. Six times the southrons charged, six times they were tumbled back by the Union batteries double-shotted with canister. Night fell on a drawn battle. (4/48-50)

 

(See: Year 1863, when the battle is renewed.) 

Standing guard in winter would never be much fun.

(Even on nice days, guard duty is almost always boring.)
Photo from the internet.

*

Snippets from Elizabeth Mardin’s diary, noting a few ordinary events in a Kansas settler’s life (from PrairyErth, 100/203): 

Sunday, May 4: was home all day reading a book it was a very plesant day

 

Friday, May 9: Molly and I ironed all day  Elijah went to town [Emporia]  I am so lonsome it is a plesant day

 

Saturday, June 21: I went a goosebarrying in the fore noon and I went to see the soldiers drill in the after noon  it was a plesant day

 

Tuesday, June 24: I cut carpet raggs  there was to gentlemen here for dinner  it was a plesant day  they commenced the seller

 

Thursday, July 3: we baked some cakes and roasted a pig to take to the fourth  it was a plesant day

 

Friday, July 4: we went to the dinner  we had a good dinner a good speach  there was a good menny folks there

 

Saturday, August 16: I don the ironing I picked the grapes for pies

 

Friday, December 12: we cleaned some of the [hog] guts for soap grease  it sprinkled rain

 

Friday, December 19: I baked ten pies and fore kakes  it was a very plesant day  we had rain in the evening