This Week in the Civil War: June 29-July 5

Busy Work

Out from under Halleck’s fishy eye and back in command of the Army of the Tennessee, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is busy shaping things up in his new headquarters town, Memphis, Tennessee. Captured a month ago by a flotilla of Federal warships, the city remains determinedly and bitterly Confederate. “Affairs in this city seem to be in rather bad order,” Grant wrote Halleck the day after he arrived (June 23). After a week of observing things close up, he adds, “There is great disloyalty manifested by the citizens of this place.”

But Grant had promised, “In a few days I expect to have everything in order,” and so he has been busy. A provost guard has been given three regiments with which to keep order; Union soldiers have been ordered to behave themselves; local ministers have been told to stop leading prayers for the Confederacy (but prayers for the Union are not required); troops have been dispatched in various directions to protect roads, telegraph lines, and railroad track; cavalry has been sent into the countryside on scouting missions.

But Grant's Army of the Tennessee is spread thin, unable to be everywhere at once. Confederate forces under Nathan Bedford Forrest and others continue to roam western Tennessee, cutting transportation lines, capturing supply convoys, and taking prisoners. Bands of Rebel cavalry are “as thick as thieves,” grumbles Maj. Ten. William Tecumseh Sherman in a letter to his wife, Ellen. One of Grant’s division commanders, Sherman on June 27 is about 40 miles from Memphis, sweating in intense heat and swatting at Confederate raiders like flies.

Like Grant, Sherman has his hands full. His men had only just repaired some railroad bridges destroyed by the Confederates when the Rebels promptly derailed the only locomotive available to the Union forces in the area. “The Secesh” also captured a hundred Union men returning from furlough. And the news keeps getting worse. Confederate forces are said to be massing at Holly Springs, Mississippi, and Sherman will have to attack them.

“You must not suppose the war is at an end or anything like it,” Sherman writes Ellen as he launches into yet another pessimistic lecture on Southern attitudes. “I am always discouraged when I come in contact with the people,” he explains. “They all seem so deeply bitter or indifferent that I see no hope to arise from them.”

Making things worse is the scorching sun of early summer, so debilitating that that many of Sherman’s men collapse and have to be carried away in wagons. “I don’t think one half our force is fit for duty,” he tells Ellen. Sherman himself was so weakened by the sun that he, too, had to take to riding in a wagon instead of on his own horse. He tells Ellen that he has decided to replace the “small military cap” (a kepi) he had worn with a (wide-brimmed) straw hat from Memphis.

ELSEWHERE WITH THE OHIOANS: Col. Rutherford B. Hayes and the 23^rd Ohio continue to roost on Flat Top Mountain in western Virginia, enjoying the view and not doing much except looking for a new camping ground with a better water supply. All week, reports from McClellan’s campaign on the Virginia Peninsula reach Hayes’ isolated camp. The reports are mixed, to say the least: McClellan has entered Richmond, McClellan has been defeated, Richmond is burning, McClellan has lost 15,000 to 20,000 men and has retreated.

“But these reports are so deceptive as to complicated and extensive movements that I must hear further before I give up to gloomy anticipation,” Hayes tells his diary. He adds, “But I am anxious!”

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: On Sunday, June 29, a disorganized Confederate pursuit keeps McClellan retreating, his rear guard fighting furiously. Most of the Federals get away, but 2,500 sick and wounded are left behind at Savage’s Station. The next day, a major battle erupts at Frayser’s Farm and, although Lee loses an opportunity here to split McClellan’s army, there is a larger meaning: a Confederate force has foiled McClellan’s ultimate objective and prevented an attack on Richmond by a larger Union force. Tuesday, July 1, brings the Battle of Malvern Hill, the last of the Seven Days’ battles. From now on, McClellan is in sullen retreat, the Peninsula Campaign a failure.

ON THIS DAY: Tuesday, March 25, 1862

The Unbearable Lightness of…Nothing

A slow day. There’s no combat, aside from those never-ending flashes here and there of pickets and scouts popping off at each other. In Washington, President Lincoln visits the Navy Yard. In Tennessee, Federal reconnaissance missions crisscross Tennessee, which is beginning to slip away from the Confederates.

In southwestern Tennessee, Grant is still thinking about a pre-emptive strike against the Confederate forces gathering a few miles away at Corinth, Mississippi. He is wondering where Buell’s reinforcements are. Buell’s Army of the Ohio is moving ever so slowly in Grant’s direction. In St. Louis, the ever-anxious Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck is trying to savor his expanded span of control, which is most troops west of the Appalachians. He, too, worries. Among forces on both sides there’s a sense that something is going to happen—but when? And how?

With Gen. Lew Wallace’s division a few miles from Pittsburg Landing, Pvt. Andrew Altman of the 68^th Ohio begins scratching out, with difficulty, another letter to his family in Henry County, Ohio. “We are expecting a battle,” he writes. “A [Secesh] gave him self up [and said] “they are getting a little down in the mouth.”

After complaining about a lack of mail from home “(I want you to wright to me as son as posible,”) Altman took note of the local weather: “It is very warm and the peach trees are in blossom.”

It was very different in the hills and valleys of western Virginia, where the occupying Ohioans are suffering from boredom and bad weather. No battles seem imminent, although there is hope of aggresive leadership from John C. Fremont, who is taking command of the newly christened Mountain Department, formerly the Department of Western Virginia. The only military activity here is the slow, hard, dangerous search for bushwhackers. The quality of the soldiers' food has degenerated: “Our living is hard, the grub I mean,” Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes of the 23^rd Ohio writes. “and not likely to improve. Salt pork and crackers [the almost inedible hardtack issued by the army]. “The armies have swept off all fresh meats and vegetables. A few eggs once in a great while.”

The weather—blamed on the “equinox,” marking the change from winter to spring—is getting tiresome as well. Hayes notes that it has been snowing since the previous Friday afternoon. On Saturday, it was “still snowing. What a snow-storm is blowing. Whew!” On Monday, “It is snowing still. What a climate!” In a letter that day to his uncle, he adds, “We have had about enough of the snows, winds, and rains of the mountains.”

The snow will end by Thursday, and then the deep mud season will begin. More delays, more tedium. The desperate search for something—anything—to enliven the day as a subject for conversation and letter writing. Fortunately, regimental surgeon Dr. Joseph T. Webb, Lucy’s brother and Rutherford’s brother-in-law, brings back a good story, one that will probably be told and re-told to the accompaniment of much thigh slapping.

Dr. Webb loves children and always stops to talk them and, according to Rutherford, “generally manages to get them on his knee.” Stopping at a farmhouse and spying a three-year-old, he approached the child, who, he soon discovered, could not speak very clearly. “Come, my fine little fellow. I want to talk to you,” the doctor said. The little boy turned, saying something the doctor did not understand. “On a second approach,” Colonel Hayes wrote his uncle, “the doctor made it out ‘Go to Hell, you dam Yankee!’ This from the little codger was funny enough….”

And that, for several days, was the high point of life in the mountains for Colonel Hayes.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Monday, March 3, 1862

Interlude

East and west, warm days alternate with cold days; occasional light snowfalls cover the mud. North and South, armies are stirring, not quite ready to fight, but thinking about it. In the Eastern Theater, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan—after six months of inactivity—is preparing his “Peninsular Campaign,” a scheme to attack Richmond from the south and an idea to which President Lincoln had only reluctantly agreed. In The Western Theater, Grant is organizing his forces for a move up the Tennessee River, aimed at Eastport, Mississippi, as ordered by General Halleck. In Virginia, a little-known Confederate general named Thomas J. Jackson hopes to begin attacking the Yankees in the Shenandoah Valley and nearby mountains.

And in their tents, soldiers are using the interlude to write letters. Capt. Emerson Opdycke of the 41^st Ohio, part of the Union force occupying Nashville, writes wife Lucy on this, their fifth wedding anniversary, that although they are apart, the further he travels “ the nearer I am to home.” Opdycke means that he thinks the backbone of the rebellion is broken and the end of the war may be near.

Opdycke’s candid words to Lucy reveal some of the racism common among even opponents of slavery. Opdycke considers slavery “a curse,” but does not think freeing the slaves now would be practical or beneficial. It’s a problem best solved in “the immeasurably greater yet to be.” He doesn’t even have much confidence in arming “the Darkies” (as he calls free blacks) to fight for the North.

At Fayetteville in western Virginia, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes has time to write his wife, also named Lucy, about a a strange marriage proposal by one of his soldiers. A man named Hegelman has asked permission to marry a girl living near the camp, a young woman who is "good-looking” but of “doubtful reputation.” On questioning, Hegelman admits he does not even know the young women’s name! Finally, the soldier confesses he wants to marry Miss Nameless because $800 has been bequeathed him on condition that he marry! He wants to use the money to make loans that will earn him interest.

So much for pure love—trumped by the profit motive in romantic western Virginia.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Sunday, March 2, 1862

What They Are Doing Now

Ulysses S. Grant, now officially a major general because of his triumphs at Fort Donelson, is busy assembling his forces at Fort Henry. From St. Louis, Maj. Gen. Halleck has ordered an advance up the Tennessee River. Orders go out to two of Grant's division commanders, Generals McClernand and Smith, and messages about logistical matters go to Brig. Gen. Sherman, at Cairo, and Flag Officer Foote, at Fort Donelson. Although Grant’s forces have been weakened by sickness, battle casualties, and lack of supplies, and even though he is sick himself with a severe cold that “nearly destroys my energy” (pneumonia?), the Ohio-born commander uncomplainingly goes about following Halleck’s orders.

After three weeks’ home leave, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes is getting re-accustomed to army life with the 23^rd Ohio in winter quarters, Fayetteville, western Virginia. He is enjoying (and probably sharing) the food he brought from home in his haversack. And he is thinking about his beloved wife, Lucy, to whom he wrote yesterday: “Darling, you will be pleased to know, and so I tell you, I never loved you more than I do as I think of you on my late visit, and I never admired you so much.”

At 10 o’clock this evening, Capt. Marcus Spiegel of the 67^th Ohio is writing “My dear dear wife and beloved children,” telling her “it would make you feel good” to see Marcus skillfully leading his men while practicing skirmishing. Spiegel is stationed near the Paw Paw Tunnel, a 3,000-foot brick-lined portion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The canal runs along the Potomac River, which divides Maryland and western Virginia.

Sgt. Thomas F. Galwey of the 8^th Ohio, rusticating elsewhere in western Virginia, is enjoying an unusual treat: “two delightful months” on recruiting duty at Columbus, Ohio—a posting that undoubtedly afforded opportunities for returns home in Cleveland.

In Nashville, Col. William B. Hazen, commander pro tem of Buell’s19^th Brigade, has a challenge in his quest to turn raw volunteers into the best soldiers in the army. It is the 9^th Indiana, newly arrived from western Virginia and assigned to Hazen’s tender mercies. Expecting more from the regiment’s previous commander, Hazen is disgusted to find that not only is the regiment “far behind the others, but seems fixed in many vicious habits, acquired…in western Virginia.” Hazen is up to task, however: soon, “some severity” is being dispensed, for which a few officers will hold a grudge long after the war.

Sgt. Oscar D. Ladley is enduring the cold winter winds sweeping the fortifications Union volunteers had built atop Cheat Mountain in western Virginia. Col. Robert H. Milroy commands the fort. It is Milroy who is responsible for the 9^th Indiana’s sloppy habits, which so dismayed Colonel Hazen.

Pvt. Andrew Altman of the 68^th Ohio remains camped near Fort Donelson, Tennessee, wondering where he will be sent next.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Saturday, Feb. 22, 1862

Letters home

Capt. Emerson Opdycke [pictured] of the 41^st Ohio has a headache. Until yesterday, Opdycke’s regiments and others in Hazen’s Brigade were in steamboats “going up and down the [Cumberland] river,” killing time while awaiting orders. They had arrived too late to participate in the battle of Fort Donelson. Finally coming to rest at Paducah, Opdycke rushes off the boat and into a photographer’s studio.

The captain’s wife, Lucy, has been pestering him for a picture, so a peevish Opdycke spends a frustrating morning at the studio trying to get a good one taken. The best he can get “is so outrageous, I shall have a notion to pitch it into the Ohio [River]; I would do so, only I know I shall never have any peace until you have a picture of some kind.”

Because of all the fussing in the studio, Opdycke returns to his boat with a headache that “came near to sending me to bed.” By evening, he feels better about the picture, so he turns to fretting about something else. “I am sick of doing nothing, while others are doing so much. Our arms are winning glorious triumphs, which are but the beginning of the end of the rebellion,” he concludes, fearing he will lose out on the action.

Others are writing as well. Near Fort Donelson, Pvt. Andrew Altman of the 68^th Ohio uses his knapsack as a writing desk (“It is a poor place for to wright”). He tells a younger brother, Isaac, “You must not cut up” in school and asks him to “tell all the scholars at school that I think of them every day and hope they may do well.”

In Cincinnati, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes is enjoying a final day or two of furlough at home. He writes his mother that the “recent victories [meaning Grant’s triumphs at Forts Henry and Donelson] convince everyone that the Rebellion can be conquered. Most people anticipate a speedy end of the war.”

This evening. Grant himself writes his wife, Julia, to tell he has just learned he is being promoted to major general. “There is but little doubt but that Fort Donelson was the hardest fought battle on the continent. I was extremely lucky to be the commanding officer.

“I have no doubt but you have read of Fort Donelson until you have grown tired of the name so I shall write you no more of the subject. Hope to make a new subject soon.”

And he would.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

“Unconditional Surrender Grant”

“Unconditional Surrender Grant”

Yesterday, Brig. Gen. John A. McClernand’s division on the Confederate left had had a blow blasted through it by determined Rebel infantrymen. Grant arrived on the scene to find McClernand’s forces in shambles. He then ordered Brig. Gen. Charles F. Smith to attack the Confederate right at Fort Donelson. “I will do it, General,” said Smith without hesitation, and he personally led the charge on his horse, his ample moustaches streaming out in the breeze. Seeing some of his falter, he barked, “Damn you, gentlemen, I see skulkers. I’ll have none here! Come on, you volunteers, come on! This is your chance! You volunteered to be killed for love of country, and now you can be!” Smith was stopped short of the fort itself, but was able to occupy some of the Confederates’ outer works.

With the whipping of McClernand’s troops, the Confederates had an escape hatch which, amazingly, they did not use. Dismayed by Smith’s attack, fearful Union gunboats would return, and thinking they would soon be overwhelmed, Confederate commanders met last evening to agree to surrender in the morning. But during the night, two of those commanders were planning their own escapes, leaving many of their troops—and Brig. Gen. Simon B. Buckner—behind.

Nathan Bedford Forrest had been given authority to attempt a breakout, with fighting, if necessary—far on the Confederate left. Leading his horsemen and accompanied by a number of infantrymen, Forrest discovered that the area wasn’t guarded by Grant’s men, and he was able to escape and one of the war’s legendary cavalry commanders.

Meanwhile, Floyd and his staff slipped across the Cumberland River in a small boat and when two Confederate steamboats arrived Pillow commandeered them and was able to escape to Nashville—steaming furiously to escape possible pursuit.

This was termed “A Disgraceful Surrender” by modern military historian Kendall D. Gott in his 2003 analysis of the Fort Henry, Fort Donelson campaign, Where the South Lost the War. But what happened made Fort Donelson the first glorious victory for the North and Grant its first hero.

Grant and the Union were unaware of the escapes when a message arrived from the Confederate commander left holding the bag. It promised an armistice while the two side negotiated “terms of capitulation.” Grant looked this over and sent back the reply that made famous for the first time:

Yours this date…just received. No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.

Buckner capitulated in a grumbling reply that he would “accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose. Fort Donelson was a stunning victory: an estimated 15,000 Confederate soldiers surrendered.

News of Grant’s victory and the terms he sent Buckner spread quickly across the North and soon Grant had been given a nickname that played on his initials: “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. (Pictured above: The Harper’s Weekly of March 8, 1862, carried a worshipful article about Grant’s triumph.)

In Ohio, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes, on leave from his duties with the 23^rd Ohio in western Virginia, tomorrow will be returning to his home in Cincinnati after visiting relatives. As Rud and Lucy reach Crestline and Galion, they hear “of the decisive victory at Fort Donelson…Joy and excitement, cannon, flags, crowds of happy people everywhere.”

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Tuesday, Feb. 11, 1862

A “convocation,” not a council

In a “council of war” aboard the steamboat New Uncle Sam, docked at Fort Henry in northwestern Tennessee, Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant sits and smokes silently, “but never said a word,” one of the generals—Lew Wallace (right)—later recalled of the meeting, called to plan the attack on Fort Donelson. “In all probability he was framing the orders of march which were issued that night,” sniffed Wallace, who considered the meeting “a convocation” and not a traditional council, wherein give-and-take was expected.

If General Wallace—better known today for writing Ben Hur than for his generalship—was put out by what he seemed to think was a sham council of war (to be followed in a few weeks by a serious issue between Wallace and Grant), he nonetheless sketched an accurate word picture of Grant the man. “From the first his silence was remarkable,” Wallace wrote of Grant. “He knew how to keep his temper. In battle, as in camp, he went about quietly, speaking in a conversational tone; yet he appeared to see everything that went on , and was always intent on business.”

The quiet solemnity of this man who seemed impossible to ruffle and yet was a great noticer of everything around him would be remarked upon again and again by others. To Wallace, Grant seemed supremely inner-directed, issuing orders with calm confidence and so little discussion thatt “his aides were little more than messengers.” There would be occasions as the war progressed when Grant would be more consultative, but Wallace’s description of Grant’s appearance would remain unchanged: “In dress he was plain, even negligent; in partial amendment of that his horse was always a good one and well kept.”

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR:

At home on furlough in Ohio since February 4, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes finally emerges to pay a visit in Columbus to visit his brother-in-law. In Washington, President Lincoln listens to a stenographic report of testimony given in the case of Gen. Charles S. Stone of Massachusetts, suspected of treason in connection with the debacle at Balls Bluff last October. Sen. Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, chairman of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, is one of the bloodhounds dogging General Stone; War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, also of Ohio, is another. However, most of Lincoln’s day is devoted to his deathly ill son, Willie, and son Tad, now ill as well. The White House reception usually held on Tuesdays is cancelled for this reason.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Thursday, Jan. 30, 1862

White Flight

In winter quarters at Camp Union, Fayetteville, western Virginia, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes of the 23^rd Ohio watches white refugees from the Confederacy passing through, on their way west.

They “constantly come…on their way to Ohio, Indiana, or other western states,” Hayes tells his diary. “Many of them are young men who are foot-loose, tired of the war. No employment, poor pay, etc., etc., is driving the laboring white people from the slave states.”

Between the African-American escapees from slavery and the discouraged whites, it must seem to Hayes as if the Confederacy is being drained of its people.

Hayes is especially ebullient today because he has just received permission for a total of 31 days of leave to go home to “Dearest Lucy” in Cincinnati. Two days ago he wrote that, “I am getting impatient to be with you….I am bent of coming as soon as possible….I do want to see you “s’much,” and I love you “s’much.”

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: From his headquarters in Cairo, Illinois, Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is gearing up for a major move against the Confederate enemy. He orders 150,000 rations loaded aboard a steamer which he will take with him for his assault on Fort Henry, which guards passage on the Tennessee River. Several hundred miles to the east, the U.S.S. Monitor, “the cheesebox on a raft” that represents the latest in naval warfare technology, is launched at Greenpoint, Long Island. At Southampton in England, Confederate envoys Slidell and Mason finally arrive, released after a month’s imprisonment in the United States in the Trent affair.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Wednesday, Jan. 22, 1862

Bushwhackers and Prisoners

During winter’s lull in western Virginia, military activity has settled down to capturing guerrilla fighters, called bushwhackers, and trying to hold them. Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes of the 23^rd Ohio tells his diary today how a “great bushwhacker” being held prisoner complained last night to his guards of a bellyache, then sprang up, seized two muskets, and escaped. Not true, his fellow prisoners helpfully say later: when the guards were asleep, they claim, the bushwhacker “merely slipped out, taking two muskets with him.”

But more prisoners come into camp, three arriving last night. One is a “Captain McVey,” a guerrilla leader who had tried to capture a citizen who was a Union loyalist. Catching wind of the plan, the Union man hid behind a log until McVey approached his house, then rose up to order the guerrilla leader to lay down his arms. Then the triumphant citizen marched the chagrined McVey at gunpoint to Hayes’ Camp Union in Fayetteville.

Another prisoner arriving that night was a boy, age about 16. “He carried dispatches when the (Rebel) militia was out…but seems intelligent and well-disposed,” Hayes writes in his diary. Taking pity on the boy, who had been thrust into a crowded guardhouse, Hayes “took him to my own quarters….He talked in his sleep incoherently.”

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: Federal gunboats slip down the Tennessee River, send a few shells into Fort Henry, and depart. It is a testing of Confederate defenses, and a foreshadowing of things to come.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Tuesday, Jan. 21, 1862

Dreaming of Home

Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes , now in winter quarters in western Virginia, is not a professional soldier, but he savors life as a volunteer officer in the 23^rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. On occasion he happily records how he hasn’t shaved in six or seven months and how he sometimes sleeps in his uniform (complete with boots and spurs). He revels in sunny weather and seems to greet each day with gusto. All in all, military service is a grand adventure for Hayes, who sometimes sounds like a Boy Scout on his first hike. But something is not quite right.

That something is the anxiety his beloved wife, Lucy, home in Cincinnati, is suffering over his safety. Like most wives, sweethearts, and mothers, Lucy Webb hated seeing her husband leave for the war and she continues to be frightened over what might happen to him. Moreover, she has been left to manage a household on a shoestring, raise the children—including a newborn—by herself, and cope with loneliness. And all the while her husband is enthusing about life in the army.

As much as he may try to avoid confronting Lucy’s anxieties, Hayes cannot. Today, he tells his diary about a disturbing dream he had last night (and which might have something to do with a snack of canned peaches he consumed before bedtime). In his dream, Lucy came to stand by bedside, “not very affectionate in manner. I tried to [awaken] and succeeded in telling her how much I loved her. She was kind but not ‘pronounced.’”

Hayes also dreamed that Lucy was holding their little son, Joe, while seeming hurt that he had not noticed the boy before. Finally, Hayes wrote, “I also dreamed during the night of being at home.”

It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that Hayes is feeling guilty about Lucy’s unhappiness. He feels reproved, albeit in a dream. Within a few days he will write Lucy that he has applied for leave to visit her at home.

ELSEWHERE IN THE WAR: It is the “day after” for Union forces, east and west. In Ulysses S. Grant’s District of Cairo, a force is returning from a successful “demonstration” and reconnaissance against the Confederate base at Columbus, Kentucky. In southeastern Kentucky, Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas’s Union division is poring over the spoil of wars left by fleeing Confederates after their defeat at the battle of Logan’s Cross Roads (a.k.a. Mill Springs). In the Eastern Theater, a Union force under Brig. Gen. Ambrose Burnside has arrived off Cape Hatteras by ship and is threatening invasion of the North Carolina coast. is in position threatening invasion of the North Carolina coast. And, near Charleston, South Carolina, Union sailors are celebrating the successful blockading of the port’s shipping channel.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Sunday, Jan. 19, 1862

The Battle of Many Names

At the beginning of 1862, the region claimed by the Confederacy stretched 3,000 miles from the Atlantic Coast to the eastern boundary of California. The lower edge of Kentucky and the bottom third of Missouri fell within Confederate lines. All in all, the Confederacy controlled an impressive portion of the continent, its northern boundary, long, smooth, and uninterrupted from the Appalachians westward.

But in the area lying between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, that boundary is tissue-paper thin. The Confederacy simply has not placed enough troops in the area to securely hold it. Instead, like the Union, the Confederacy is obsessed with what could happen to Virginia, and especially to the Confederate capital of Richmond.

In January, a Confederate force led by Brig. Gen. Felix K. Zollicoffer perched near Mill Springs in southern Kentucky and appeared threatening to the Union area of Kentucky. But Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas spent 18 days slogging through rain and mud leading a Federal force, from Buell’s Army of the Ohio, south and by Saturday, January 18, was dug in, waiting for Zollicoffer to make the first move.

Early today, on a foggy, rainy landscape a few miles north of the Cumberland River, the two forces collide, Zollicoffer attacking, Thomas counterattacking. Then, early in Thomas’s counterattack, one of the war’s strangest stories unfolds. Moving through a foggy, smoky, and rainy landscape, Confederate General Zollicoffer and Col. Speed Smith Fry of the loyalist 4^th Kentucky Infantry, part of Thomas’s force, approach each other on horseback, coming so close the two riders could have shaken hands. The men, who are wearing long coats that cover their uniforms, do not recognize each other. Assuming Fry was one of his own officers, Zollicoffer gives him an order and Fry turns to carry it out.

Apparently realizing Fry is an enemy commander, one of Zollicoffer’s officers fires at him, hitting his horse. Fry fires back, hitting Zollicoffer, and then a Union soldier shoots the general in the side. Zollicoffer falls from his horse, dead.

Meanwhile, the rain is making it difficult for the Confederate soldiers to fire their primitive muskets. With their commander dead and their weapons failing, the larger Confederate force (about 5,900 men) is routed by the Thomas’s 4,400 men. On the south side of the Cumberland River, Zollicoffer’s superior, Maj. Gen. George B. Crittenden, orders Zollicoffer’s men to abandon the battlefield and most of their equipment and retreat across the river.

And so the Confederates depart in confusion, but not without leaving behind some confusion for the history books. Originally, the Union referred to the site of the battle as Logan’s Crossroads, while the Confederates referred to it as Fishing Creek. Later, the battle came to be better known as Mill Springs, although the fighting took place nine miles away from that location.

There are at least eight other names by which the battle has been known.
Whatever its name, this relatively small battle (pictured above) has a much larger significance. It opened a hole in the Confederate defense line in Kentucky—and it foreshadowed even more serious problems for the Rebel nation.

(Ohio units participating in the Battle of Many Names and the pursuit of the fleeing Confederates on the second day, include the 9th, 14th, 17th, 31st, and 38th Infantry, Batteries B and C of the 1st Ohio Light Artillery, and the 9th Ohio Battery.

ELSEWHERE IN THE WAR: In winter quarters in western Virginia, Col. Rutherford B. Hayes yearns for news of Union successes. Unaware one is occurring at Logan’s Cross Roads, he impatiently writes in his diary, “What we need is greater energy, more drive, more enterprise….”

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Saturday, Jan. 18, 1862

Marching with (a) Custer

Nineteen-year-old Pvt. Liberty Warner of Company H, 21^st Ohio Volunteer Infantry, keeps up a steady correspondence with the folks at home in Tontogany, a farm village in northwest Ohio. Like other soldiers, he yearns for letters from home, and to encourage responses, he sometimes resorts to crude sketches to fill out his own epistles.

Sometime this month (Liberty occasionally loses track of dates) he fills out a letter to his brother listing fellow occupants of his tent, complete with a diagram of where in the tent the 12 men slept. The 12 men constitute a “mess” or grouping for feeding purposes. All the members of this mess are from Tontogany; all are members of Company H.

They occupy a Sibley Tent, a conical structure resembling a large wigwam. A single pole in the center holds it up, and guy ropes about two feet apart around the perimeter steady it. Arrayed in a clock-like circle, the men sleep two to a bunk, feet to the center of the tent. Crowded into the tent with them are a gun rack, a “dish box” for eating utensils, and various tools. (Warner doesn’t include it in his diagram, but there’s a stove in there somewhere. Keeping stoves like Warner’s fed always causes the denuding of areas around army camps: not only trees, but wooden structures are apt to disappear.)

After the war, the surviving members of this mess can look back on the time they were only two degrees of separation from one of the most famous and flamboyant figures in the war, and, after the Battle of Little Big Horn, one of the most famous figures in the Indian wars.

One of the 12 men from Tontogany is Thomas Ward (“Tom”) Custer, younger brother of none other than George Armstrong Custer. Born in eastern Ohio, the Custer family came to Tontogany in 1860. George graduated from West Point in 1861, entered the war immediately, and, for his remarkable leadership skills, in June 1863 will be named brigadier general, age 23. Thanks to demerits for his conduct, he had graduated last in his class at West Point, but he will become one of the war’s most outstanding cavalry commanders.

Tom Custer entered the war as a mere private but in late 1864 will join his brother’s staff as an aide, with the rank of lieutenant. (Lt. Tom Custer, is pictured above, standing behind brother George and his wife, Libbie.) A daring fighter, Tom will win two Medals of Honor and repeated promotions. An admiring George will say of him, “Tom should have been the general and I the lieutenant.” Tom and another Custer brother will die with George at Little Big Horn.

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: Cooped up in winter quarters in western Virginia, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes complains to his diary, “How impatiently we look for action on Green River [and] at Cairo.” Green River lies within Don Carlos Buell’s command in Kentucky; Cairo refers to Brig. Gen. Ulysses s. Grant’s command further west. Both commands will see action soon, first of all in Kentucky, where Union forces under Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas are approaching Confederates in the vicinity of Mill Springs.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Friday, Jan. 3, 1862

“An honest-looking contraband”

“Charles”—his only name, as if to symbolize how slavery diminishes a man—arrived today, with ten others runaway slaves, at Camp Union in Fayetteville, western Virginia. He had walked more than 50 miles to escape his master in Confederate territory. Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes of the 23^rd Ohio looked Charles over and decided he is “an honest-looking contraband—six feet high, stout-built, thirty-six years old.” (A different group of escaped slaves is shown here.)

An intelligent and observant man, Charles brings a trove of information about the Confederate enemy along with some insights into the plight of slaves. Charles had lost his wife five years ago when their owner, a farmer near the town of Union in western Virginia, ”sold [her] South.” Slaves were property, after all, and owners could treat them like farm livestock, breaking up families with no concern for their feelings.

Slavery’s apologists like to claim how slaves are happy with their lot. Apparently not: Southerners at this time are trying to scare slaves out of escaping by telling them (Hayes recorded) that “Yankees cut off the arms of some negroes to make them worthless and sell the rest in Cuba for twenty-five hundred dollars each to pay [the] cost of the war.”

Charles also tells Hayes how Confederate authorities exploit inequality among the whites. They take the horses of poor people but not the rich, give sons of rich men discharges from military service, and force poor people to mount patrols to keep rich people’s slaves from running away.

When the fleeing Charles and his party were halted by Federal picket guards, they feared they would be mistreated. However, a blue-clad soldier lowered his gun and said to the other soldiers, “Boys, these are some of our colored friends” telling the blacks ‘come on, not to be afraid,’ that they were safe.

Charles exclaimed to Hayes, “Oh, I never felt so in my life, I could cry, I was so full of joy. And…all [the soldiers] I have seen [have been] so friendly—such perfect gentlemen, just as we hoped you were, but not as they told us you were.”

ELSEWHERE: From Camp Chase in Columbus, where the 67^th Ohio Volunteer infantry is training, Marcus M. Spiegel, captain of Company C, writes his wife with enthusiasm for his new life. “The new colonel is very favorably disposed to me and I think would do anything to please me,” he tells her with relish, adding, “I drilled the boys all day & am getting to be quite a soldier. My men love me & are willing to swear by me.”

Captain Spiegel is falling in love.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Thursday, Jan. 2, 1862

“Slavery is Getting Death-blows”

“The United States itself was born with the birth defect of slavery,” political economist Francis Fukuyama has said. The only way the Founding Fathers had thought the states would ratify the desperately needed Constitution was if it dodged the slavery issue. Later, Abraham Lincoln called slavery “the double-refined curse of God upon his creatures,” but he went into the Civil War believing it had been “grandfathered” by the Constitution. Slavery, he assured the South at first, would not be touched.

But the irresistible force of events would gradually break down slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished it everywhere after the war ended. (The Emancipation Proclamation, effective Jan. 1, 1863, outlawed it only in those states still in a state of rebellion.) Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes may have had an almost irritatingly sunny disposition, but he also had a future president’s keen sense of politics, events, and human nature, and on New Year’s Day 1862 he wrote this insightful prediction in his diary:

Time and the progress of events are solving all the questions arising out of slavery in a way consistent with eternal principles of justice. Slavery is getting death-blows. As an “institution,” it perishes in this war. It will take years to get rid of its debris, but the “sacred” is gone. {Emphasis added]

And that’s just about what happened to slavery, though we are still working on getting “rid of its debris.”

(Pictured above: a group of escaping slaves approaching Union lines)

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 1, 1862

“I…so signally failed”

It is New Year’s Day. From western Virginia, Capt. Tom Taylor of the 47^th Ohio sends his wife, Netta, a picture of himself as a “New Year’s gift.” Also in western Virginia, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes of the 23^rd Ohio is his usual cheery self, noting the weather was windy and threatening “as if a storm were brewing, but no rain or snow. I set it down as a pleasant day.” In Kentucky, Col. William B. Hazen prepares to take command of a brigade—6 regiments—as well as his own regiment, the 41^st Ohio. Elsewhere, it is business as usual for Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at his headquarters in Cairo, Illinois. He wrestles with problems with army bread, writes an order regarding transport of sick soldiers to and from a hospital, and wonders how to handle with “delicacy” a change of staff in his quartermaster’s department.

And at Benton Barracks, St. Louis, Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman is suffering the miseries of the damned as he thinks back to the emotional flame-out in Kentucky which caused him to relinquish command.

I am here in a subordinate place whilst others occupy posts I ought to. I cannot claim them for having so signally failed in Kentucky and here I could not demand a higher place….The idea of having brought disgrace on all associated with me is so horrible to contemplate that I cannot really endure it.

Cump writes this to wife, Ellen (pictured above), in Lancaster, Ohio, to whom he now clings desperately as his emotional anchor…but he does not mention exactly what he means that he “cannot really endure it.” Three days later he tells his brother:

I am so sensible now of my disgrace from having exaggerated the force of our enemy in Kentucky that I do think I should have committed suicide were it not for my children.

How can Cump and his military career be saved?

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg