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

  GETTYSBURG: see Road to Gettysburg; Love Story; Coincidences at Gettysburg; Old White Oak; Gettysburg Facts, Stats

  LOWER MISSISSIPPI AND NEW ORLEANS: see Head of the Passes; Brave Deed Recorded

  MISSISSIPPI AND VICKSBURG: see Family Affair

  MURFREESBORO: see Soldier A-Courting; Jaws of Death; Bride Left Behind; Audible, Not Visible

  NASHVILLE: see Unlucky John Bell Hood; Bleak Holiday

  PETERSBURG: see Longest Siege; Embarrassing Outing

  SAYLER’S CREEK: see So Very Personal

  SEA BATTLES: see Head of the Passes; Escape from Success

  SECOND BULL RUN: see Miss Kate’s Brief Run

  SEVEN DAYS: see “Granny” Lee; Jackson’s Odd Failure

  SHENANDOAH VALLEY: see Jackson’s Odd Failure; Ugly Blows Exchanged

  SHILOH: see Complete Conquest Required; Battery Disbanded

  VALVERDE: see Poignant Moments in Battle

  MAJOR PERSONALITIES

  BOYD, BELLE: see Parallel Spies

  BRECKINRIDGE, JOHN C.: see Jaws of Death

  CHESNUT, MARY BOYKIN (AND HUSBAND, JAMES, JR.): see Hello, Richmond; Unnecessary Tragedies; What Does a Slave?; Varina: Forgotten First Lady CuSter, george ArmStrong: see Swinging His Arms

  CUSTER, TOM: see So Very Personal

  DAVIS, JEFFERSON: see Portents; Fresh Start Sought; Who the South Was; Social Notice Taken; Hello, Richmond; Davises Everywhere; Close Connections; War’s Sting Delayed; Varina: Forgotten First Lady

  DAVIS, VARINA: see Portents; Social Notice Taken; Hello, Richmond; What Does a Slave?; Close Connections; Varina: Forgotten First Lady

  DOUGLASS, FREDERICK: see Portents

  FARRAGUT, DAVID: see They Also Served

  FORREST, NATHAN BEDFORD: see Injury Added to Insult; Brave Men Spared

  FRéMONT, JOHN C.: see They Also Served

  GARFIELD, JAMES A.: see Hello, Washington; Miss Kate’s Brief Run; Surviving to Serve Again

  GORDON, JOHN BROWN: see “Shot for You”; Coincidences at Gettysburg

  GRANT, ULYSSESS.: see Heart in the Throat; Complete Conquest Required; Sidling Down to Richmond; Longest Siege; Embarrassing Outing; Close Connections; Julia Reads a Note; Always a Clear Course

  HAYES, RUTHERFORD B.; MCKINLEY, WILLIAM; HARRISON, BENJAMIN; CLEVELAND, GROVER; AND ARTHUR, CHESTER A.: see Surviving to Serve Again

  HILL, AMBROSE POWELL: see Hello, Richmond; Two More to Mourn; Final Glimpses

  HOOD, JOHN BELL: see Unlucky John Bell Hood

  JACKSON, THOMAS J. (“StonewAll”): see A “Bear” Installed; Perfect Storm of Bullets; Jackson’s Odd Failure; They Also Served

  LEE, ROBERT E. AND FAMILY: see Portents; Who the South Was; Robert and Mary; A “Bear” Installed; “Granny” Lee; Jackson’s Odd Failure; Hello, Richmond; More Than a Few Ghosts; Antietam; Gettysburg; Lee Family Saga, Continued; Sidling Down to Richmond; Close Connections; Lee’s Final Order; Final Glimpses; An Arlington Postmortem

  LINCOLN, ABRAHAM AND FAMILY: see Portents; Racing to War; Better Angels Invoked; Lincoln Wins Rebel Debate; Sherman’s Threat Appealed; Spank the Boys; Faces in the Crowd; More Than a Few Ghosts; “Down, You Fool!”; Friendly Boost Given; Christmas; Embarrassing Outing; Close Connections; Julia Reads a Note; Final Glimpses; Mary Todd Lincoln: Troubled First Lady; The Lincoln Memorial

  LONGSTREET, JAMES: see Hello, Richmond; “Shot for You”; Road to Gettysburg

  MCCLELLAN, GEORGE: see “Granny” Lee; Jackson’s Odd Failure; Loyalty Charge Dismissed; Hello, Richmond

  MORGAN, JOHN HUNT: see Soldier A-Courting; Bride Left Behind; No Opportunity for Surrender

  STUART, J. E. B.(“JEB”): see Two More to Mourn

  TUBMAN, HARRIET: see Women of the Times

  WALLACE, LEW: see They Also Served

  WASHINGTON, BOOKER T.: see Acquiring a New Name

  PORTENTS

  1809

  ON A BED OF CORNHUSKS INSIDE A CABIN WITH ONE DOOR AND ONE WINDOW and a dirt floor, a young frontier woman bore down hard one February morning and squeezed out from her womb a baby…a boy.

  A little later that Sunday, a nine-year-old cousin asked the mother what she was going to name the newborn child. “Abraham,” she said, “after his grandfather.”

  The next morning, the same boy held his new cousin for the first time. But the baby cried, and young Dennis Hanks quickly gave him up. “Take him,” he said. “He’ll never come to much.”

  1810

  ANOTHER FAMILY…A FATHER IMPRISONED FOR OWING MONEY, RELEASED IN THE spring of the year. Mother and father considered their situation and decided they could not afford to remain at the grand family estate in Westmoreland County, Virginia. They traveled north by carriage to take up residence in a small house in Alexandria, across the Potomac from the newly established Federal capital.

  Young Robert was three years old as his parents passed into “genteel poverty.” But not into a gentle life. Two years later, his military-hero father, Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, once governor of Virginia and a congressman, was beaten and mutilated by a mob in Baltimore. Recovering with difficulty, left disfigured, broken in spirit, he made his farewells in 1813 to family, commonwealth, and country…all for a new life in Barbados. He meant to return soon, and after a few years, he was indeed on his way back. But he fell ill aboard ship, went ashore at Cumberland Island, Georgia, and died there March 25, 1818. Son Robert E., by then, was just eleven years old.

  1832

  FOR THE SECOND TIME IN FOUR YEARS, SOUTH CAROLINA ACTED TO NULLIFY tariffs imposed by the Federal government in Washington. Andrew Jackson, president at the time, was on the Federal side of the issue, while his vice president, South Carolina’s own John C. Calhoun, was on the other side—so much so that he resigned the vice presidency to carry on the fight in the U.S. Senate. For months the air was full of impassioned, dangerous words for the still-young Republic: nullification, states’ rights…secession.

  After winning reelection in 1832 with Martin Van Buren of New York as his ticket mate, Tennessee’s “Old Hickory” still had to deal with the South Carolina thorn in his side. By now, the disgruntled state had canceled its earlier nullification actions, only to try another—this time to nullify congressional action authorizing the use of Federal force against the state.

  Here was a most delicate dilemma for President Jackson. In the midst of deliberations with Cabinet members, senators, and others, he called for a faithful comrade-in-arms from old wars against the Creek Indians in Alabama and the British at New Orleans. Closeted in the White House, they shared a decanter of whiskey and talked of old times and new…and new issues. Like the thorny nullification issue.

  To Sam Dale, Jackson said, “They are trying me here; you will witness it; but by the God in heaven, I will uphold the laws.”

  Dale said he hoped things would go right. Whereupon Jackson slammed his hand down on a table so hard he broke a pipe and replied, “They shall go right, sir!”

  It wasn’t long after Dale’s visit that Andrew Jackson sent fighting ships to Charleston Harbor, denounced any state’s pretension to rights of nullification or secession, and on December 10, 1832, issued his Proclamation on Nullification, after which the storm died down for the time being.

  In Illinois, meanwhile, a country lawyer named Abraham Lincoln read Jackson’s Proclamation most carefully. He would read it again when composing his inaugural address of 1861.

  1833

  NEARLY FIFTEEN, FRED WAS HIRED OUT TO A FARMER AND “PIOUS” CHURCHGOER named Edward Covey. This was in Maryland. “I had been at my new home but one week before Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting my back, causing the blood to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as large as my little finger.” Fred was whipped about once a week for the next six months or so, until he fought back. Even then, he remained a slave, and it would be years before he found freedom, his means of escape to the North still a secret when he published his autobiography in 1845.

  Beyond his own experiences, h
is book presented quite an indictment. As a young child he saw a black woman, “Aunt Hester,” beaten with hands tied above her head and the rope looped over a joist above. He told of an overseer named Austin Gore who shot a slave named Demby in the face for refusing to stand still for a whipping. Another white man, Thomas Lanham, killed two slaves, “one of whom he killed with a hatchet, by knocking his brains out.” A Mrs. Giles Hicks, angered at a slave teenager who fell asleep while babysitting, hit the girl with a stick and injured her fatally. An old black man oystering on the Chesapeake Bay strayed over a neighbor’s property line…and was shot by the neighbor.

  And so on. Mere whippings are hardly worth mention, there were so many. The Reverend Rigby Hopkins, for instance, “always managed to have one or more of his slaves to whip every Monday morning.” There was always some excuse.

  It would astonish one, unaccustomed to a slave-holding life, to see with what wonderful ease a slaveholder can find things, of which to make occasion to whip a slave. A mere look, word or motion—a mistake, accident or want of power—are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied? It is said, he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he speak loudly when spoken to by his master? Then he is getting high-minded, and should be taken down a buttonhole lower. Does he forget to pull off his hat at the approach of a white person? Then he is wanting in reverence, and should be whipped for it. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct, when censured for it? Then he is guilty of impudence—one of the greatest crimes of which a slave can be guilty. Does he ever venture to suggest a different mode of doing things from that pointed out by his master? He is indeed presumptuous and getting above himself, and nothing less than a flogging will do for him. Does he, while plowing, break a plow? or while hoeing break a hoe? It is owing to his carelessness, and for it a slave must always be whipped. Mr. Hopkins could always find something of this sort to justify the use of the lash, and he seldom failed to embrace such opportunities.

  Fortunately, Fred found his way out of slavery. On his personal journey to freedom, he secretly learned to read and write. He learned so well, in fact, that he later became a famous orator, abolitionist, and diplomat. A leader among blacks, he was known by his later name, Frederick Douglass.

  1843

  NEAR CHRISTMAS TIME THE SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD PLANTER’S DAUGHTER WAS ON her way to a festive visit at the plantation of one Joseph Davis. His niece came for her, “accompanied by a servant-man leading a horse with a lady’s sidesaddle.” The young visitor’s “impedimenta” went along in a carriage, and in short order they rode over “rustling leaves” and through “thick trees” to the Davis home, known as “The Hurricane.”

  There the young lady became acquainted with the owner’s younger brother, then thirty-six…and the real object of the visit.

  Her impression was that he looked closer to thirty than thirty-six, that he was “erect, well-proportioned, and active as a boy.” Moreover: “He rode with more grace than any man I have ever seen and gave one the impression of being incapable of either being unseated or fatigued.”

  That very day, the impressionable but sophisticated young woman wrote to her mother that she couldn’t tell if he was “young or old.” She added: “He looks both at times; but I believe he is old, for from what I hear he is only two years younger than you are.”

  Even so, he impressed her “as a remarkable kind of man, but of uncertain temper, and [he] has a way of taking for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which offends me.” To his credit again, he had a winning manner of expressing himself and a “peculiarly sweet voice.”

  She went on to write that he was the “kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk, but to insist upon a stoical indifference to the fright afterward.”

  But then again, “I do not think I shall ever like him as I do his brother Joe.” And, a real shocker—“Would you believe it, he is refined and cultivated and yet he is a Democrat!”

  So wrote the little miss from a staunch Whig household of Joe’s young (but, oh, so old!) brother. Even so, the next month Varina Howell became engaged to her host’s graceful sibling. The next year, February of 1845, they were married—Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson Davis.

  1858

  IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, WASHINGTON, D.C., GALUSHA GROW OF Pennsylvania uttered a few antislavery remarks, then wandered over to the Democratic side of the aisle to talk to a colleague. From there he responded to still another member’s remarks, even though he was not at his seat…or even among his fellow Republicans.

  None of this was lost upon South Carolina’s Democratic representative, Laurence M. Keitt, who told the Pennsylvanian to “go back to your own side of the hall.”

  Grow replied: “This is a free hall and every man has a right to be where he pleases. I will object when and where I please.”

  Whereupon Keitt said, “Sir, I will let you know that you are a black Republican puppy.”

  Grow then said the hall belonged to the American people, he could stay where he pleased, “and no slave driver shall crack his whip over my head.”

  Seconds later, the fists flew in the House chamber. Keitt went down, knocked out cold by Grow’s punch to the jaw. But the fight didn’t end there…or with them.

  It wasn’t as shocking as the time, in 1856, that South Carolina’s representative, Preston Smith Brooks, strode into the Senate chamber and broke his gutta-percha cane beating on stridently abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, but the Keitt-Grow tiff was a bona fide fight on the House floor all right. Others immediately plunged into the melee. It is said that knives and even pistols were in evidence. Someone hurled a large spittoon, and Representative William Barksdale of Mississippi lost his wig to a Wisconsin member. When Barksdale got it back, he put it on backward. The levity that resulted helped restore order to the House.

  In 1863, Barksdale was killed at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In 1864, Keitt was killed at Cold Harbor, Virginia.

  1859

  FOR SALE, HEADLINED THE ADVERTISEMENT IN MAJOR SOUTHERN NEWS PAPERS. LONG COTTON AND RICE NEGROES.

  Followed by:

  A gang of 460 Negroes, accustomed to the culture of Rice and Provisions, among whom are a number of good mechanics and house servants. Will be sold on the 2nd and 3rd of March next, at Savannah, by

  JOSEPH BRYAN

  TERMS OF SALE—One third cash; remainder by bond, bearing interest from day of sale, payable in two equal installments, to be secured by mortgage on the Negroes, and approved personal security, or for approved city acceptance on Savannah or Charleston. Purchasers paying for papers.

  The Negroes will be sold in families, and can be seen on the premises of Joseph Bryan, in Savannah, three days prior to the day of sale, when catalogues will be furnished.

  How much for a good, strong Negro male in 1859, on the eve of the U.S. Civil War? According to a story appearing March 9, 1859, in the New York Tribune, the figure was $1,600.

  Slaves, though, did not wish to be sold at top price. Not at all. They would rather be, or at least appear to be, less than physically perfect, since at top price they had little hope of earning and saving the money needed to purchase freedom. Said the Tribune account of Bryan’s sale: “But let him [the slave] have a rupture, or lose a limb, or sustain any other injury, that renders him of much less service to his owner, and reduces his value to $300 or $400, and he may hope to accumulate that sum, and eventually to purchase his liberty.”

  The advertised sale, the largest slave sale in the South for several years, “went on for two long days, during which time there were sold 429 men, women and children.” They generated a total take of $303,850.

  They were sold by an absentee owner, a recently divorced man from Philadelphia who afterward, the Tribune said, was seen “solacing the wounded hearts of the people he had sold from their firesides and their homes by doling out to them small change at the rate of a dollar a h
ead.”

  1860

  IT WAS NO ACCIDENT THE BLUE COCKADES WERE S E E N ON THEMEN’S HATS OUTSIDE A meeting hall in Charleston, South Carolina, on the twentieth day of December. The blue cockade deliberately recalled the nullification controversy that had upset President Andrew Jackson three decades earlier. Only now the movement that was in the air was secession!

  The hall was the gathering place for the South Carolina Convention, which by a vote of 169 to 0 adopted an ordinance cutting the state’s ties with the Union. The reaction in Charleston was jubilation: parades, bonfires, pealing church bells, even cannons speaking their piece. After the fateful document was signed that evening, wrote elderly Virginia agronomist (and avid secessionist) Edmund Ruffin, “Every man waved or threw up his hat & every lady waved her handkerchief.”

  Another onlooker was Samuel Wylie Crawford, a U.S. Army doctor recently assigned to duty in Charleston. Outside the hall, he wrote, “the whole city was wild with excitement as the news spread like wildfire through its streets.” Indeed, “old men ran shouting down the streets.”

  To be sure, not everyone in Charleston looked with favor upon the action making South Carolina the first state to quit the Union. Judge James L. Petigru understood better than most of his fellow citizens the trials ahead. “I tell you there is a fire,” he warned. “They have this day set a blazing torch to the temple of constitutional liberty, and, please God, we shall have no more peace forever.”