Scapegoat or Scandal? J.E.B. Stuart and the Battle of Gettysburg

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Scapegoat or Scandal? J.E.B. Stuart and the Battle of Gettysburg

The June 12th, 1863 edition of the Richmond Examiner seethed.  Just days before, Confederate cavalry had been caught completely by surprise in a daring strike by their Union counterparts at Brandy Station Virginia, and only after a hard fight with the help of Southern infantry was the enemy repulsed.  “But this puffed up cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia,” the Examiner crowed, “has been twice, if not three times, surprised since the battles of December, and such repeated accidents can be regarded as nothing but the necessary consequences of negligence and bad management.”  Such humiliations were unacceptable, and the Examiner concluded by charging that better organization, more discipline, and greater earnestness among “vain and weak-headed officers” was needed.  Other Southern papers offered more of the same.  The Richmond Sentinel called for greater “vigilance…from the Major General down to the picket.”  The Charleston Mercury thought the affair an “ugly surprise,” while the Savannah Republican thought it all “very discreditable to somebody.”  The commander of Confederate cavalry, James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart, had to be wondering if the Brandy Station fight wasn’t “discreditable” to him...

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Turning the “Gate of Hell” into the “Gate of Heaven”: The Secret Andersonville Death Roll of Dorence Atwater

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Turning the “Gate of Hell” into the “Gate of Heaven”: The Secret Andersonville Death Roll of Dorence Atwater

In late June, Clara received a note from one Dorence Atwater who requested a meeting with her concerning information he had about approximately 13,000 of the missing men she was looking for.  Intrigued, Clara visited Atwater at his Washington hotel.  Atwater had enlisted at the beginning of the war, even though he was only 16.  Captured after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, he was first imprisoned at Belle Isle and then transferred to Andersonville when it opened in February 1864.  Impressed by Atwater’s superior penmanship, the commander of Andersonville, General John H. Winder, assigned him to the surgeon’s office with orders to keep an official record of all union prisoners who died and were buried there.  The Confederates promised they would turn the roll over to the Union government after the war, but Atwater suspected their sincerity as he experienced the cruelty of the prison and recorded over 100 deaths per day.

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A Forgotten Anniversary? The Escape and Capture of Jefferson Davis

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A Forgotten Anniversary? The Escape and Capture of Jefferson Davis

The small town of Irwinville, Georgia would become the setting for one of the greatest and perhaps overlooked episodes of the sesquicentennial story.  In a piece announcing the victorious capture of Davis in Harper’ Weekly, a Union officer commented on the night of May 11, 1865, “a fight ensued, both parties exhibiting the greatest determination…the captors report that he (Davis) hastily put on one of his wife’s dresses and started for the woods, closely followed by our men, who at first thought him a woman, but seeing his boots while he was running, they suspected his sex at once.” And so begins the legend of Davis the cross-dresser.

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History on the Honeymoon: Chincoteague in the Civil War

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History on the Honeymoon: Chincoteague in the Civil War

The cemetery was almost unnoticeable from the road.  Because it is on a dune very close to the water separating the island from Chincoteague, the water and shifting sand had obliterated all essence of an established cemetery.  Most of the grave markings were gone, replaced by official looking plaques marking the location of graves.  It certainly did not look like a Civil War cemetery.  But there was one Civil War-style headstone marked by an American Flag with the words “Thos. Watson, Co. A, Loyal Eastern VA. Vol.” 

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Let’s Talk Openly About Slavery: Interpretation at Monticello

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Let’s Talk Openly About Slavery: Interpretation at Monticello

Ok, so Monticello is not a Civil War site, they don’t interpret the Civil War in any way.  But the home of Thomas Jefferson does have a connection to the story we strive to tell: slavery.  And I was very impressed by the way they shared it.

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Sanitary Measure or Unchecked Despotism? The Fourteenth Amendment, the Slaughter-House Cases, and Radical Reconstruction

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Sanitary Measure or Unchecked Despotism? The Fourteenth Amendment, the Slaughter-House Cases, and Radical Reconstruction

How does the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution relate to a group of disgruntled butchers? In 1873, the United States Supreme Court struggled to answer exactly this question.

Perhaps no image better captured the tumultuous and confused nature of the Reconstruction Era than former Supreme Court Justice John Campbell during the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases. A former slave owner who served as the Assistant Secretary of War for the Confederacy, Campbell oddly found himself arguing against states rights in an attempt to overturn a Louisiana state statute. When the Reconstructionist, Republican-dominated legislature of Louisiana incorporated all the slaughterhouses within New Orleans, giving a single company the exclusive right to slaughter within the city, no one expected the butcher’s protests to lead to the first interpretation of the new Fourteenth Amendment by the nation’s highest court. Campbell, however, quickly saw an opportunity.

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Burnside's Success: The Battle of New Bern

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Burnside's Success: The Battle of New Bern

Many people who visit Fredericksburg have the impression that Ambrose Burnside was an idiot and not fit to command the Army of the Potomac.  While the Battle of Fredericksburg was indeed a hard loss for the Union, the fact is that Burnside was given command for some reason.  That reason lies mainly in his operations in North Carolina.

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In the Shadow of Appomattox: The Significance of Bennett Place

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In the Shadow of Appomattox: The Significance of Bennett Place

Yesterday marked the 150th anniversary of the surrender of Confederate General Joseph Johnston to Union General William Sherman.  While history focuses on Lee’s surrender at Appomattox as the end of the Civil War, Johnston’s surrender at Bennett Place was significantly larger and demonstrates the lack of a definitive end to the war.

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Caught in the Crossfire: Civilians at Fredericksburg

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Caught in the Crossfire: Civilians at Fredericksburg

In December 1862, the city of Fredericksburg found itself in the crossfire of the armies of Lee and Burnside.  For several months that summer, residents were forced to deal with the indignities and inconveniences of living in an occupied city.  Now the Union army was back once more and this time General Robert E. Lee and his army were in place to contest their presence.  With armies on either side of it, Fredericksburg braced itself for the storm.

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"Yankee Candy Would Choke Me": Fredericksburg Occupied!!

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"Yankee Candy Would Choke Me": Fredericksburg Occupied!!

On April 18, 1862 it was the Union army that came into Fredericksburg.  That Good Friday morning the Confederates left town, burning the bridges over the Rappahannock River, making way for the Federals to arrive that afternoon.  Mayor Montgomery Slaughter and a delegation from the town surrendered Fredericksburg on April 19 under the agreement that local citizens and private property would not be harmed.  Union soldiers under General Irvin McDowell built bridges, crossed on May 2, and settled on the outskirts of town for a four month stay.

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The Red Badge of Courage and the 124th NY

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The Red Badge of Courage and the 124th NY

Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage borders between classic literature and Civil War battle narrative.  In his unique style, he writes stories of battle without specifying names.  In The Red Badge of Courage most characters are not distinguished by name, nor does Crane specify what part of the battlefield, what troops, or what actions he is writing about.  He purposely avoids using real characters and creates a fictional regiment (the 304th New York Infantry) in order to focus the audience’s attention on the experience of the protagonist, Private Henry Fleming, and his comrades as they face their first battle.  The purpose of the books was to engage readers in the chaos, emotion, and uncertainty of battle and the experiences of a common soldier within the maelstrom.

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The Twilight Between War and Peace: Lincoln’s Assassination One-Hundred and Fifty Years Later

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The Twilight Between War and Peace: Lincoln’s Assassination One-Hundred and Fifty Years Later

April 14, 1865 dawned as a good day in Washington, D.C., not merely because of the religious importance of Good Friday to the city’s Christians, but more due to the events of the past eleven days. In just over a week and a half the Civil War began to rush towards a momentous finish. On April 3, Richmond, the Confederate capital, fell to the Army of the Potomac. Less than a week later, roughly seventy-five miles to the west and south, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, retiring the Confederacy’s most formidable fighting force. Despite this bevy of success, the war was not yet over. Joseph E. Johnston continued to elude Union forces in North Carolina, Jefferson Davis and most of the Confederate government remained at large, and scattered pockets of resisted still stood across many rural reaches of the South. Yet, for many in Washington, including Abraham Lincoln, the final act of the conflict was near at hand. As Richard Carwardine noted in his biography of Abraham Lincoln, these were “twilight days between war and peace.” Indeed, by the end of Good Friday, a day which began so promising in the nation’s capital, that twilight would seem all the more deeper.

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Sesquicentennial Spotlight: After Appomattox

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Sesquicentennial Spotlight: After Appomattox

Now that the 150th anniversary of Appomattox has passed, the Civil War sesquicentennial is over, right?  Not quite.

Most Americans consider Appomattox the end of the war; that was certainly what I was taught in school when I was younger.  However, Robert E. Lee’s surrender is only the beginning of the end.  When Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox he surrendered only the men under his command, not the entire military force of the Confederate States of America. 

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“To See What Freedom Meant:” April 9, 1865 (Sesquicentennial Spotlight)

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“To See What Freedom Meant:” April 9, 1865 (Sesquicentennial Spotlight)

Much has been made of the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865. Historians note that myth surrounds those final bedraggled days of the Army of Northern Virginia, the magnanimity with which Union soldiers welcomed their fellow Americans back into a nation at peace, and the causes won and lost in the subsequent years. Though it took months for the rest of the remaining Confederate forces to surrender their arms, no moment stands more clearly in historical memory as marking the end of the United States’ most costly war than the meeting in which Robert E. Lee surrendered his forces to Ulysses Grant. While myth may obscure some of the more concrete realities of that day – what was with Wilmer McClean anyway? – the peace wrought by those two great generals was nothing short of remarkable both for what it ended and what it began.

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Sesquicentennial Spotlight: Destruction at Sailor's Creek

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Sesquicentennial Spotlight: Destruction at Sailor's Creek

The Battle of Sailor’s Creek, many will argue, was a final death knell for Lee’s army.  In the day’s engagements Lee lost about a quarter to one-third of his army (depending on which casualty report you look at), 8,800 men out of the roughly 30,000 effectives he had that morning.  Of these casualties, around 7,700 were captured or surrendered—one of the largest surrenders without terms during the war.  Among this number was almost the entire corps of Richard Ewell—3,400 of his 3,600 men were among the dead and captured.  Ewell himself was taken prisoner, along with seven other Confederate generals: Joseph B. Kershaw, Montgomery Corse, Eppa Hunton, Dudley M. DuBose, James P. Smith, Seth Barton, and Robert E. Lee’s son, George Washington Custis Lee.  Anderson’s corps lost around 2,600 out of 6,300 and Gordon’s casualties numbered at 2,000.

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Sesquicentennial Spotlight: Richmond Occupied!

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Sesquicentennial Spotlight: Richmond Occupied!

The Union army broke the Confederate lines at Petersburg early on April 2 after the engagement at Five Forks the previous day.  Lee knew the position was lost, and the army’s only hope was to move west to find reinforcements and supplies.  With the Confederate army moving west, Richmond was now exposed to the Union army.  That night the Confederate government and the troops left in the city evacuated in haste, taking the last open rail line to Danville, VA, which would be the last seat of the Confederate government.  Throughout the night into April 3, retreating Confederates set fire to portions of the Confederate capital, hoping to destroy supplies before the Union soldiers could reach them. 

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