Blood, Tears, and Glory

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

ON THIS DAY: Wednesday, Jan. 8, 1862

“My Dear Brother”

Three weeks have passed since Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman returned to active duty following a respite at home to calm his rattled nerves. But Sherman is still agonizing over his panicked behavior in Kentucky. In a long letter his brother, Sen. John Sherman (pictured here) in Washington, Cump pours out his heart.

“I am fully conscious that in surrendering that command I confessed my inability to manage it,” he wrote. “This is mortifying but true.”

However, Sherman also describes in great detail all the problems he still believes Union forces have in Kentucky, from lack of troops and supplies to an unfriendly countryside. In doing so, he reveals a problem that will exist for much of the war: a shortage of resources for Western forces. “It is all very well for your politicians to sit and calculate what men should do, but this force in the West has been half armed….”

Washington’s concentration on the Army of the Potomac and the Eastern Theater at the expense of the Western had, of course, a great to do with the paired beliefs that the nation’s capital must be defended at all costs and that if the Confederate capital at Richmond could be seized, the Confederacy might die.

Sherman is almost in physical pain over the disgrace he believes he has brought upon the family:

What distresses me most is that you and Ellen and my children should suffer from my disgrace. Could I alone atone for it there would be some chance of endurance but I know full well hundreds and thousands who have been my friends will attribute to me the most unworthy motives, and then would adjudge against my children.

Also at Louisville I smoked too many segars & drank somewhat because of the nervous anxiety about which seemed to me beyond my control.”

The question now is whether redemption will ever be within Cump’s reach.

THE WAR ELSEWHERE: Same old, same old. Skirmishes here and there in Kentucky (no reports of casualties), Missouri (six Union men killed and 18 wounded), and western Virginia at Dry Fork, on the Cheat River), 6 Union men wounded. No Ohioans involved. And so goes another day of low-intensity combat in the first winter of the Civil War.

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

Monday, January 7, 2008

ON THIS DAY: Tuesday, Jan. 7, 1862

“A medley of hills”

Western Virginia—the region of Virginia that will become the state of West Virginia—is vitally important to the Union, for it holds a major key to the Western Theater.

This part of Virginia is shaped like a wedge and, left in the hands of the Confederates, it could split the Union in two. All that connects the northeastern Union states to the Midwest is a narrow sleeve of land lying along Lake Erie. Pushing its nose against that sleeve like a hungry bear, western Virginia shoulders its way between Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Given half a chance, that bear could rapidly chew through Ohio’s land bridge to the Northeast And, letting the Confederates reclaim western Virginia could cut the Midwest’s direct connections to the nation’s capital: the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, telegraph lines, and turnpikes, all of which run through western Virginia. And the region could turn in to a convenient launching pad for Confederate attacks on Ohio and other Midwest states.

Despite its importance, the Union soldiers occupying western Virginia—and even the Confederate remnants still clinging to its edges—loathe the region. (One Confederate called it “the most God-forsaken country I ever laid eyes on” and another claimed, “This country is not worth fighting for.”) Western Virginia in 1862 is an impoverished, isolated land of steep hills and tiny valleys. It is a land, as Union Brig. Gen. Jacob D. Cox of Ohio would later put it, that is “a succession of ridges and a medley of hills.” Loyalists to the Union may dominate the civilian population here, but scattered among the loyalists are more than enough Confederate sympathizers to provide plenty of bushwhackers and guerrillas. These feared and hated irregulars take advantage of the wild landscape to harass Union forces with lightning-quick attacks on messengers, sentinels, and outposts.

Nobody wants out of western Virginia more than Cox, who is in command of the Kanawha Valley district of western Virginia, with headquarters in Charleston. To an ambitious Union officer like Cox, western Virginia is a backwater in the war with plenty of headaches and few opportunities for glory and promotion.

In December, Cox received orders directly from Washington reassigning him to Kentucky where—presumably—more action is to be had. Cox’s hopes were dashed, however, when his superior, Gen. William S. Rosecrans, commander of the Department of Western Virginia, denied Cox his opportunity, saying he needed him right where he was. “There was nothing to be done but summon philosophy to my aid, and to hope that all would turn out for the best,” Cox concluded glumly.

And so, during this winter in western Virginia, Brigadier General Cox settles down to weeding out poor performers in his ranks and training the rest. The mixed local population of loyalists and Confederate sympathizers creates endless headaches, between the guerrillas and the runaway slaves seeking sanctuary. “My experience during the winter begot in me a rooted dislike for the military administration of the border districts,” Cox will recall in his memoirs. He will not escape from western Virginia’s “succession of ridges and medley of hills” until August 1862.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

ON THIS DAY: Monday, Jan. 6, 1862

“No prospect of…danger”

From Camp Wickliffe in Kentucky, where the 41^st Ohio and several thousand other Midwestern volunteer soldiers sit, yearning for action, 1^st. Lt. Emerson Opdycke (pictured here) writes “My dear wife,” Lucy, in Warren, Ohio.

Bad news: he will not be granted a hoped-for furlough because of the “exigencies of the service.” Pish-tosh, according to Opdycke, a self-confident man who never minces words: “I see no prospect of immediate danger and I am exceedingly disappointed…I do not believe there will be [a forward movement within 10 days], so I am bound to nurse my ‘disappoint.’” (In fact, there will be no forward movement by stolid Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio for five weeks.)

Opdycke tells Lucy that sickness, “principally measles,” is sweeping the camp, especially Opdycke’s 41^st Ohio. One of his men had died from measles on Christmas eve. The death deeply saddened Opdycke because the captain of a company is “something of a father to his men.”

It is not yet dawn and Opdycke is writing the letter by candlelight. He tells Lucy he is well supplied, with eggs, plentiful at 15 cents a dozen, and “plenty of good fresh beef. ” For a New Year’s celebration, he was able to purchase a can of peaches and some cheese.

“Eggs are frying" for Opdycke’s breakfast and "as soon as this [letter] is folded and directed, they will be ready for a splendid appetite.”

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: President Abraham Lincoln is becoming frustrated with Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s stalling. Lincoln wants him to advance on East Tennessee in support of the Union loyalists there. Buell, however, prefers to advance on Nashville, which neither Lincoln nor General-in-Chief George B. McClellan think is a good idea. Buell’s attempt to justify himself to Lincoln draws the President’s rebuke by wire today: “Your dispatch of yesterday…disappoints and distresses me.” But Lincoln, who at this early stage of the war, is trying to make do with the generals he has, does not order Buell forward, only expresses “the grounds of my anxiety.”

Buell is not Lincoln’s only problem general. Frustration over McClellan’s failure to act is rising as well. Ohio Sen. Benjamin F. Wade, a Radical Republican who is chairman of the (Joint Congressional) Committee on the Conduct of the War, demands Lincoln remove McClellan from command. Preferring to give McClellan more time, Lincoln rejects Wade’s demand.

But the clock is ticking for the careers of both reluctant generals.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

ON THIS DAY: Sunday, Jan. 5, 1862

The War They Didn’t Talk About

The View from 2008: Sometimes it seems to us as if the Civil War, now almost a century and a half past, was a big family argument, using horses and muskets and almost charming in its quaintness.

It wasn’t charming. It was deadly (600,000 lives lost to battle and disease), dirty (the soldiers often lived in squalor and were usually covered with lice), and hard (yes, acts of gallantry occurred, but so did acts of unspeakable horror).

After Lincoln got rid of his most notorious “gentlemen generals”—McClellan and Buell, men who preferred the “soft war” of maneuvers instead of destruction—the conflict settled down to all-out warfare, each side trying to destroy the other’s will and ability to fight.

Grant, the gentlest of men personally—he loved children, refused to hunt, was repelled by dead bodies, and even adjured rare meat—understood this intuitively. After the capture of Fort Donelson, Grant surveyed the bloody battlefield and said, “Let’s get away from this awful place. I suppose this work is part of the devil that is left in us all.” After the Battle of Shiloh a few weeks later, Grant (he later recalled) “gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”

So the battles by regular soldiers turned into hammer-and-tongs affairs, reported in newspapers, recorded in diaries and letters and memorialized in thousands of books, but there was another side of this war that is almost never mentioned. It was the ugly side and it involved both soldiers and irregular forces, some of them loosely organized guerrillas and some free-lancing “bushwhackers.” Both sides engaged in it, the Confederates by necessity relying more than the Federals on irregulars and guerrillas, some of the soldiers of the Union side reacting by suspending—without sanction by the high authority--the rules of warfare. (Pictured above: A Civil War guerrilla.)

One of worst regions for this was western Virginia, which was dominated by the Union side for most of the war but which saw unceasing brutality, especially by Confederate bushwhackers who ambushed Union messengers, outposts, and sentinels, slipping out of the woods to poison springs, shoot unarmed or lightly armed men, or slit throats, then to melt into the civilian population.

Violence begets violence and soon some of the Union soldiers were dishing out the own acts of brutality, especially to bushwhackers. It is hard to find information about this, but author William H. Armstrong included some in his account of a future president’s war record (Major McKinley, Kent State University Press, 2000). (There is no record McKinley was involved in such acts.)

Homes and property of suspected bushwhackers were plundered and burned, while all too often captured bushwhackers were apt to be shot “while trying to escape.” Col. George Crook of the 36^th Ohio told his men to take no more prisoners. Returning from scouting, his officers would report that a captive had “slipped off a log while crossing a stream and broke his neck, or …was killed by the accidental discharge of one of the men’s guns.” A member of the 36th who disagreed with these acts could never forget how a young prisoner was encouraged to attempt escape, then shot and—when he fell—was shot again amidst his “heart-rendering…screams.”

If some of these events were recorded in soldiers’ letters or memoirs, one wonders how many more were deliberately forgotten. Such was some of the romance of the Civil War.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

ON THIS DAY: Saturday, Jan. 4, 1862

Jackson is coming!

Thomas J. Jackson, nicknamed “Stonewall” for his role in the Battle of Bull Run, was a strange man, a former professor at a military school where the students called him “Tom Fool” and “the worst teacher God ever made.” Jackson had peculiar ideas about diet and health, sometimes pumping an arm in the air to aid circulation, and his religiosity was unbending, moved by the demanding God of the Old Testament. Jackson memorized his lectures, meaning he had to re-start a lecture from the beginning whenever he lost his place. He had no sense of humor.

But Jackson quickly won respect in the Confederate army, was promoted to major general in October 1861, and in November was assigned command of the Confederacy’s Shenandoah Valley district. The Shenandoah bordered on Union-held western Virginia, meaning that Jackson could leave the security of the Valley and easily attack the Federals, causing considerable mischief, if he so chose.

An attacker by nature, Jackson so chose, believing he could re-take the western third of Virginia that Union troops had dominated since June. In January Jackson left Winchester, Virginia, with 9,000 men. He began a series of attacks on the panhandle that formed the dangling, extreme eastern region of western Virginia, destroying dams on the Potomac River and breaking up the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad that connected Washington to the West.

Yesterday, Jackson’s Confederates approached Bath, a resort town known for its mineral waters, and today they occupy the little town. Confederates also skirmish nearby with the Federals at Slane’s Cross Roads, Great Cacapon Bridge, Sir John’s Run, and Alpine Depot. These little engagements involved, on the Union side, a hodgepodge of regiments from Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. At Bath, the Federals lost three killed and eight captured. Only a few Confederates were wounded.

So began Stonewall Jackson’s so-called "Romney Campaign." It looks promising. Will he be able to take western Virginia back from the Federals?

ELSEWHERE: Increasingly concerned about the plight of Unionists in East Tennessee, President Lincoln wires Don Carlos Buell in Kentucky. He asks if the general has forwarded weapons to the Union loyalists, who Lincoln is desperate to help. But, like his friend McClellan, Buell has other ideas about what needs to be done next, when, and where, so--like McClellan-- he stalls. His inaction on this will not be the last time he will frustrate Lincoln’s desires.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

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.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

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)