Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Read online

  BEST LITTLE STORIES FROM THE CIVIL WAR

  MORE THAN 100 TRUE STORIES

  By C. BRAIN KELLY

  WITH

  INGRID SMYER

  Copyright © 1994, 1998, 2010 by C. Brian Kelly and Ingrid Smyer

  Cover and internal design © 2010 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by The Book Designers

  Cover images courtesy of The Library of Congress; © nicoolay/iStockphoto.com; Shutterstock.com

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems— except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.—From a Declaration of Principles Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kelly, C. Brian.

  Best little stories from the Civil War : more than 100 true stories / by C. Brian Kelly; with Ingrid Smyer.—2nd ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Anecdotes. I. Smyer-Kelly, Ingrid II. Title.

  E655.K25 2009

  973.7—dc22

  2009042114

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Other Books by C. Brian Kelly & Ingrid Smyer

  BEST LITTLE STORIES

  FROM THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  BEST LITTLE STORIES FROM THE LIFE AND

  TIMES OF WINSTON CHURCHILL

  BEST LITTLE STORIES

  OF THE BLUE AND THE GRAY

  BEST LITTLE IRONIES, ODDITIES & MYSTERIES

  OF THE CIVILWAR

  BEST LITTLE STORIES

  FROM THE WHITE HOUSE

  BEST LITTLE STORIES

  FROM THE WILD WEST

  BEST LITTLE STORIES

  FROM WORLD WAR II

  BEST LITTLE STORIES FROM VIRGINIA

  For our children,

  Beth, Charlie, Fran, Hal, Jimmy, Katheryn, Sid

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  SELECT GUIDE TO BATTLES & PERSONALITIES

  PORTENTS

  BEGINNINGS

  First Time Out

  Fresh Start Sought

  Who the South Was

  Fate Makes a Choice

  Racing to War

  Better Angels Invoked

  Social Notice Taken

  Lincoln Wins Rebel Debate

  Sumter’s Silence

  Stomach Pumping Questioned

  Robert and Mary

  Spy with a Future

  Swinging His Arms

  A “Bear” Installed

  Death of a Congressman

  Most Famous Shooter

  Perfect Storm of Bullets

  At Every Shot a Convulsion

  First Postmortem

  Sherman’s Threat Appealed

  Head of the Passes

  Heart in the Throat

  Good Times…and Bad

  Staggering Stats

  MIDDLES

  Hello, Washington

  No Panacea for Politicians

  Brave Deed Recorded

  Complete Conquest Required

  Secession from Secession

  Soldier A-Courting

  Battery Disbanded

  “Granny” Lee

  Stirring Words Found

  Jackson’s Odd Failure

  Hello, Richmond

  Loyalty Charge Dismissed

  Poignant Moments in Battle

  Unnecessary Tragedies

  Knights of the Realm

  Six-Year-Old’s Flight

  Davises Everywhere

  Capitalism at Andersonville

  Jaws of Death

  Bride Left Behind

  Audible, Not Visible

  Spank the Boys

  Injury Added to Insult

  Family Affair

  Miss Kate’s Brief Run

  Escape from Success

  Faces in the Crowd

  Red Shirt, White Shirt

  More Than a Few Ghosts

  “Shot for You”

  No Whizz, Bang Heard

  Women of the Times

  Woman at the Lead

  Road to Gettysburg

  Love Story

  Coincidences at Gettysburg

  Old White Oak

  Black Faces in the Crowd

  Gettysburg Facts, Stats

  Lee Family Saga, Continued

  Three Generals Named Winfield

  Cat Parties Ended

  The Fighting McCooks

  Sidling Down to Richmond

  Friendly Boost Given

  “Down, You Fool!”

  Brave Men Spared

  Christmas

  What Does a Slave?

  More Staggering Stats

  ENDINGS

  Old Abe the Soldier Bird

  Bleak Holiday

  Unlucky John Bell Hood

  “On, Wisconsin…On!”

  Longest Siege

  Each to His Own Pathway

  Squint to His Eye

  Ugly Blows Exchanged

  They Also Served

  Story with a Kick

  Two More to Mourn

  Embarrassing Outing

  Surviving to Serve Again

  Hospital Town

  So Very Personal

  No Opportunity for Surrender

  Parallel Spies

  Acquiring a New Name

  Close Connections

  Lee’s Final Order

  Julia Reads a Note

  Freedom Still Denied

  Surprisingly Kind Fate

  Always a Clear Course

  War’s Sting Delayed

  Pair for Two

  Final Glimpses

  An Arlington Postmortem

  The Lincoln Memorial: A Postscript

  THE CIVIL WAR’s TWO FIRST LADIES

  Varina: Forgotten First Lady

  Mary Todd Lincoln: Troubled First Lady

  THE CIVIL WAR—a SHORT CHRONOLOGY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Introduction

  HERE’S OUR PREMISE: HISTORY CAN BE TOLD IN LITTLE BITS AND PIECES AS WELL AS in heavyweight and multi-volume tomes.

  All too often, even the best recitals of great events can overlook the basic human story lurking behind those same great events. And that’s where our series of Best Little Stories historical books comes into the pict
ure. That’s us— history as short, narrative bits.

  But…can that work?

  Reviewer Craig. K. Allen seemed to think so, seemed to catch both the intent and flavor of our approach in the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph when he described our Best Little Stories from the White House as “a genre not quite practiced by anyone else” and said the book’s stories “possess the immediacy of a front-page newspaper article.”

  Also gratifying was the reaction of Bill Ruelhmann, Books columnist at the Norfolk (Virginia) Virginian Pilot, back in 2002 to our newly published Best Little Stories from the Wild West. Our digging for “historical gold” in “mundane earth,” he wrote at that time, had enabled us to “prise forth glittering nuggets of nifty narrative that, packed tight in the thick treasure boxes of their paperbound anthologies, make for truly priceless reading.”

  Thanks of course to Craig and Bill. But how does it work, you may be asking. Best Little Stories, we say? Exactly what does that mean? Well, as I wrote in an earlier edition of this, the first of our three Best Little Stories Civil War books, I once was a newspaperman. I always looked for the good, i.e., the best, story. Be it cheerful, light and frothy, or hard-hitting, sad, poignant—it didn’t matter. Just the good story. The kind the reader would read. No “message,” just the unusual, the obscure, the fascinating…the gripping, the touching human story.

  When I turned to history as the first editor of Military History and World War II magazines, I was inclined from the start to treat history as journalism—to look for the little nuggets gleaming with pathos, cheer, tragedy, irony—the human-interest stories in history.

  Together with my wife and book collaborator Ingrid, I came to call them Best Little Stories in this and our companion historical books (there are nine total as of this writing). Little in part because, yes, the stories may be shorter than historical accounts. But also because in most cases, they focus more on the individual person at, say, Gettysburg, rather than simply report the size of the armies, who won the battle and how they did so.

  Rather than write a straightforward, fact-filled—but potentially dull—short biography of U. S. Grant as the Union general who finally won the Civil War for Abraham Lincoln, it’s far more interesting to recall the little moment when he led his troops toward his first conflict of the entire Civil War with very human fear and trepidation: “[M]y heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois.”

  And then, delicious irony, the enemy he expected to meet just over the brow of the next hill was gone, decamped.

  In like fashion, it’s one thing to take note that the landscape of the Civil War was often peopled by black slaves (keyword: peopled), but it’s important also to cite their own individual experiences, whether it’s Booker T. Washington recalling his first moments of freedom, Frederick Douglass reciting his brutal treatment before escaping to freedom, or other, far lesser-known slaves telling their own stories. Or, for that matter, the tale of how the young, newly freed black youth named Booker finally acquired a last name.

  But this isn’t a book all about soldiers and slaves, which, to judge by many historical accounts, were the principal parties of the Civil War. Instead, our Civil War stories often are about the average civilian, sometimes even special groups. For instance: Congress.

  Or, more precisely, read in the pages to follow about a member of Congress who had to ride to his nation’s capital in an unheated freight car, then had to wear unlaundered shirts and socks for many days at a time, while his wife and children remained at home under constant threat of invasion. Such was life, not all that unusual a case, actually, for a member of Congress from Georgia—the Confederate Congress meeting in Richmond, that is.

  Were conditions that much better in Washington, D.C., the Union capital and home to the United States Congress? Undoubtedly, yes. But it’s easy for us to forget that the Federal capital was an incomplete, even primitive urban center by modern standards. “Not a sewer blessed the town, nor off of Pennsylvania Avenue was there a paved gutter,” wrote Ohio Congressman Albert G. Riddle, albeit with perhaps some exaggeration.

  Meanwhile, First Bull Run in the first July of the Civil War was a rout of the Federal forces defending the same Washington, D.C., correct? Quite so, and so easy to recite today as part of any listing of the major battles of the Civil War. But the real sense of the panic among the retreating Union forces comes through from the onlooking Congressman Riddle’s own eyewitness account of the retreat.

  As he later recalled, “The poor, demented, exhausted wretches, who could not climb into the high, closed baggage wagons, made frantic efforts to get onto and into our carriage.”

  The same terrified soldiers grabbed at every handhold they could find, he added with little apparent sympathy. “We had to be rough with them and thrust them out and off.” Even so, one of the fleeing “wretches”—a Union major at that—managed to pull himself aboard the congressman’s carriage, “and we lugged the pitiful coward a mile or so.”

  And then? “Finally I opened the door, and he tumbled—or was tumbled out.”

  Women, too, make up the annals of history, along with history’s best little stories, to be sure. So it is that my wife and collaborator Ingrid has written the twin biographies appearing at the end herein of the Civil War’s twin First Ladies, Mrs. Jefferson Davis (Varina: Forgotten First Lady, page 266) and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln (Mary Todd Lincoln: Troubled First Lady, page 279).

  As indicated a few lines ago, this is not the first edition of Best Little Stories from the Civil War but rather the third—with brand new material added—thanks to a kind reception by the reading public for which we, the authors, are exceedingly grateful.

  While hoping our latest set of readers will enjoy our approach to history, I can still wonder, as I did in the introduction to our 1998 edition: Is journalism but a facet of history, or is history but another form of journalism?

  C. Brian Kelly

  Charlottesville, Virginia, 2010

  Select Guide to Battles & Personalities

  BATTLES

  ANTIETAM AND SOUTH MOUNTAIN: see “Shot for You”; No Whizz, Bang Heard

  ATLANTA: see Fate Makes a Choice; Unlucky John Bell Hood

  CHATTANOOGA: see “On, Wisconsin…On!”

  FAIR OAKS: see “Granny” Lee; Hello, Richmond

  FIRST BULL RUN: see Death of a Congressman; Most Famous Shooter; Perfect Storm of Bullets; At Every Shot a Convulsion; First Postmortem; Sherman’s Threat Appealed

  FORT STEVENS: see “Down, You Fool!”

  FORT SUMTER: see Portents; Lincoln Wins Rebel Debate; Sumter’s Silence; Stomach Pumping Questioned; Most Famous Shooter

  FRANKLIN, TENNESSEE: see Unlucky John Bell Hood; Bleak Holiday