Odds are there isn’t a Civil War buff living who hasn’t seen a copy of this remarkable pencil sketch (above) by special artist Edwin Forbes, which Forbes labeled as “William J. Jackson, Sergt. Maj. 12th N.Y. Vol.—Sketched at Stoneman’s Switch, near Fredricksburg [sic], Va. Jan. 27th, 1863.” The young noncom has gazed back at us across the years from countless publications and exhibits. Rendered with camera-like honesty, it is arguably among the best drawings of a common soldier done during the Civil War. Writing about his work in general, Forbes assured viewers, “fidelity to fact is… the first thing to be aimed at.”

In fact, once Forbes completed his drawing of Jackson, the sketch went virtually unseen for more than 80 years. The drawing was among several hundred illustrations Forbes made while covering the Army of the Potomac for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper from the spring of 1862 to the fall of 1864. Approximately 150 of Forbes’ wartime sketches were engraved and printed in the illustrated newspaper during that period, although his drawing of Jackson was not among them.

After the war, Forbes retained most of his original illustrations. Many he reworked into more polished drawings; some into oil paintings. He fashioned scores of them into award-winning etchings. Many appeared in his books, Life Studies of the Great Army (1876) and Thirty Years After: An Artist’s Story of the Great War (1890). Again, the poignant sketch of the beardless sergeant major from the 12th New York Infantry was not included.

Following Forbes’ death in March 1895, his wife, Ida, maintained his portfolio of original artwork, where the Jackson sketch was catalogued, “Study of an Infantry Soldier — The Sergeant Major.” She eventually sold the entire collection for $25,000 to financier J.P. Morgan in January 1901. Eighteen years later, on the heels of World War I, Morgan’s estate donated the collection to the Library of Congress, its current home. The sketch of William Jackson remained out of the public eye for another quarter-century until it resurfaced during World War II, thanks to the efforts of a U.S. Army private.

Private Lincoln Kirstein, however, was not your ordinary ground-pounder. Born into wealth, the Harvard educated Kirstein was well-connected socially, channeling his “energy, intellect, and organizational skills to serve the art world.” By age 36, when he was inducted into the Army in early 1943, Kirstein had already published several books, co-founded The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, and later, The School of American Ballet in New York City with renown Russian choreographer George Balanchine.

Following his basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., Kirstein was posted at Fort Belvoir, Va., charged with writing training manuals. “I am an old man,” he confided to a friend, “and find the going very hard.” To fill his idle hours, he conceived an idea to collect and document American solider-art. “[M]uch of their work is interesting,” Kirstein wrote, “and some of it is beautiful.” He soon expanded his survey to include “U.S. battle art through time.” His plans included a “large-scale exhibit and a book.”

Aided by some influential friends, including Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and then Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, Kirstein gathered material from various sources, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and, of course, the Library of Congress. Thanks to his efforts, Forbes’ sketch of “Sergt. Maj. William J. Jackson” emerged from obscurity.

The efforts culminated in the exhibition of American Battle Art at the Library of Congress staged from July 4 through November 1, 1944. Three years later, the Library of Congress issued the book that Kirstein had envisioned. Titled An Album of American Battle Art, 1755-1918, the heavily illustrated volume “took its origin” largely from the wartime exhibit. Forbes’ portrait of William J. Jackson appeared in print for the first time, captioned “a solemn lad with his arm resting on his rifle…toughened by campaigning.”​

A Perilous Start

Jackson may have been “toughened” early in life. The son of Irish immigrants, he was born in New York City’s Greenwich Village on June 8, 1841, the first of four boys. His father, also named William, worked as a mason. The family grew in time, and moved from tenement to tenement, though always remained in proximity to Washington Square. The surrounding web of narrow streets flanked by a tumble of brick and framed dwellings and small businesses was an Irish enclave in the city’s 9th Ward facing the Hudson River.

It was a tough neighborhood. “Boys were primitive in those days,” wrote one of Jackson’s contemporaries. “They were like the old time warring clans. Every avenue was arrayed against the other.” Tensions bubbled within the city’s growing Irish immigrant population where clashes were common.

One notorious encounter erupted within a stone’s throw of Jackson’s home when he was 12. On July 4, 1853, streets echoed “the popping, fizzing, whirring and banging sounds” of fireworks as crowds of green-clad Irish revelers celebrated Independence Day. They ended up battling one another. “At one time several hundred men were…hurling stones and other missiles…” trumpeted The New York Herald next day. Platoons of policemen from nearby precincts aided by two fire companies “succeeded in subduing the riot…” Nearly 40 Irishmen were arrested, reported the Herald, “all of whom bore the strong evidences of an impression made on their heads by a contact against the policemen’s clubs.”

Battles of another kind rocked William’s world when civil war erupted on April 12, 1861. The 19-year-old left his parents and his job as a clerk a week later, on April 19, to enlist in the 12th Regiment New York State Militia, Company F. A recruiting office was just blocks from his home.

Tendered for immediate service by its commander, Colonel Daniel Butterfield, the regiment also included in its ranks the future Maj. Gen. Francis C. Barlow when it sailed from New York on April 21, bound for Washington, D.C. Though fully armed, the unit lacked enough uniforms to go around. Raw recruits like Jackson wore “their ordinary clothing with military belts and equipment,” giving them, by one account, a “guerrilla like,” appearance. Appearances changed when a new Chasseur uniform was issued to the regiment at Camp Anderson in Washington early in May 1861. The militiamen were also mustered into Federal service for three months while there, and received a “severe course of drilling.” Barlow was mustered in as a first lieutenant in Company F.

One of their Camp Anderson instructors also distinguished himself later in the war. Emory Upton, fresh from graduation at West Point, would achieve the rank of Brevet Maj. Gen., and eventually become superintendent of U.S. Military Academy. Upton found that tutoring the 12th New Yorkers was tiresome. “I do not complain,” he wrote, “when I think how much harder the poor privates have to work.”

Their crash course in soldiering quickly paid off. Before dawn May 24, the 12th New York led Union forces over Long Bridge to occupy Alexandria, Va., and fortify Arlington Heights in the wake of that state’s secession from the Union the day before. Jackson was among the first Union infantrymen to set foot on Rebel soil.

Jackson continued his trek through enemy country when the regiment joined Maj. Gen. Robert Patterson’s army at Martinsburg, Va., on July 7, 1861. The men patrolled and picketed environs of the Lower Shenandoah Valley until their expiration of service on August 2, when the unit returned to New York. Following a march down Broadway and Fifth Avenues on Monday August 5, the regiment formally mustered out at Washington Square, near Jackson’s home.

Quick Return to the Fray

Jackson’s homecoming was brief. He reenlisted October 1, 1861, and mustered into Federal service for three years, a member of Co. F, 12th New York Volunteer Infantry. Dubbed the “Onondaga” Regiment, its ranks had originally been filled with short term volunteers from near Syracuse and Elmira, N.Y., in May 1861. After the Union debacle at First Bull Run in July 1861, the regiment recruited around the state including in New York City where Jackson signed on. Perhaps showing potential from his recent militia service, William was immediately appointed sergeant.

Recruits ferried over the Hudson River from Manhattan to Jersey City, N.J., and boarded trains for the trip south to join the regiment then on duty in defenses outside Washington, D.C. Recalled another New York volunteer who made the trip about the time Jackson did, “the cars were crowded and the ride was slow, cold and tedious.”

From Washington, the novice soldiers crossed Chain Bridge over the Potomac River into Virginia. Union Army engineers had fortified the landscape to defend the Capital. “Every mile is a fort,” marveled Private Van Rensselaer Evringham, Co. I, 12th New York. “There is thousands of acres here that have been cut down & left on the ground to prevent the Rebels coming by surprise…it would take 50 years to bring everything back to its former state.”

The 12th New York, given the moniker “the durty dozen,” according to Evringham, joined scores of other raw regiments manning fortifications throughout the fall and winter 1861–62, while they trained for combat ahead. Jackson’s Co. F, with four other companies from the 12th garrisoned Fort Ramsay, located on the crest of Upton’s Hill, about a half mile east of Falls Church, Va. They also furnished a daily guard “to protect the guns in Fort Buffalo” nearby. The regiment’s remaining companies manned Fort Craig, and Fort Tillinghast. They occasionally traded shots with Rebel forces, “but to little effect,” wrote a New York diarist.

On March 21, 1862, Jackson and tent-mates were ordered off Upton’s Hill to Alexandria, Va. Next morning, boarding the transport John A. Warner to the strains of Dixie, they steamed down the Potomac River to Chesapeake Bay. In a letter to his parents, Private Homer Case, of Co. I, confided: “We did not know where we was a going.”

After two days aboard ship, Jackson and “the durty dozen” landed at Hampton, Va., embarked on Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s offensive to take the Confederate capital at Richmond. Hard marching through steaming pine thickets and swampy bottom lands on narrow, crowded, often rain-mired roads marked the campaign. Private Sid Anderson, Co. H, quipped of “mud clear up to the seat of our unmentionables.” While Private Evringham claimed, “Virginnie is 2/3 woods or swamps.”

Under Brig. Gen. Fitz John Porter’s command during the fruitless Union thrust up the Peninsula, the 12th New York saw action at the Siege of Yorktown, the battles of Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill, and numerous skirmishes in between. Afterward, the New Yorkers languished at Harrison’s Landing until mid-August when they trudged to Newport News. From here they traveled by steamer to Aquia Creek; then by railroad to Falmouth, and on by foot to join Maj. Gen. John Pope’s ill-fated Army of Virginia near Manassas, Va. “We marched thirteen days…with little rest,” wrote Private Robert Tilney, Co. F., “part of the time on half rations…”

At the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Onondagans engaged in bloody afternoon assaults on August 30, against Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s position astride the railroad cut. “We poured volley after volley into the concealed enemy,” recalled one New Yorker. Rebel return fire shredded the Union foot soldiers, “woefully thinning” their ranks. Nearly a third of the 12th New York became casualties.

Facing Lee’s army at Sharpsburg on September 17, Sergeant Jackson likely had mixed emotions while he and his regiment stood in reserve with Porter’s 5th Corps, mere spectators to the bloody Battle of Antietam. The Sharpsburg area remained Jackson’s home through the end of October 1862, when the regiment advanced via Snicker’s Gap and Warrenton, to the Rappahannock River where the Army of the Potomac arrayed opposite Fredericksburg. The boyish-looking sergeant would earn three more stripes during the ensuing battle.

Jackson’s regiment with Brig. Gen. Charles Griffin’s division occupied Stafford Heights when the Battle of Fredericksburg opened on December 13. They crossed the lower pontoon bridge in early afternoon, struggling through debris in Fredericksburg amid what one New Yorker described as “a shower of aimless bullets.” The regiment advanced to a shallow fold in the ground about 500 yards from Rebels posted at the stone wall on Marye’s Heights. “[T]his position,” reported brigade commander Colonel T.B.D. Stockton, “was much exposed to the cross-fire of the enemy’s guns…”

Stockton’s Brigade charged the stone wall just before sundown. The 12th New York missed the bugle signal to advance in the din of battle, though soon recovered, sweeping forward. They met a maelstrom of shot and shell “on both front and side,” wrote Stockton. The New Yorkers piled into the tangled mass of bluecoats already stalled at the foot of Marye’s Heights and went no farther. Ordered to hold their exposed position under enemy fire throughout the night Stockton’s men were bait for Rebel sharpshooters and artillery until relieved about 10 p.m. December 14. It was “all a person’s life is worth to go to or come from there,” wrote a newspaperman. Young Jackson suffered a gunshot wound to his left leg below the knee that day.

When Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside ordered his battered army back to its old camps north of the Rappahannock on December 16, Jackson returned as a sergeant major. He had been promoted the day before, likely to fill a vacancy caused by the battle.

Jackson saw little combat after the Battle of Fredericksburg. The 5th Corps wintered in a small metropolis of timber and canvas huts near Stoneman’s Switch, a supply depot along the railroad several miles north of Fredericksburg, where the 12th New York engaged in an “uneventful round of camp and picket duty.” It’s uncertain whether Jackson’s injured leg kept him from chores, or prevented him from joining Burnside’s inglorious “Mud March” in pitiless wind and rain storms January 20–24.

By January 27, however, the 21-year-old Jackson, with bayonetted rifle, his greatcoat tightly gathered at the waist, was able to stand still long enough for special artist Edwin Forbes to capture him on paper. The artist clearly shows that Jackson placed his weight on his right foot. No evidence has surfaced to indicate Jackson and Forbes knew each other, or ever met again after the drawing was completed, though Forbes remained in the area depicting numerous scenes around the Stoneman’s Switch camps that winter.

In late April 1863, the 12th New York was reduced to battalion-size when five “two-year companies” were mustered out of the army. Jackson and the remaining companies with the 5th Corps followed Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker to Chancellorsville, Va., in early May. During the battle there, the New Yorkers were employed “making rifle-pits and abatis” on the fringe of the fighting. “[I]n this position,” recalled a private in Company D, “we saw the fires in the woods which the artillery had kindled, and heard the cries of the wounded.”

Expiration of service further reduced ranks of the regiment after the Battle of Chancellorsville. Jackson and other “three-year” men were then consolidated in a two-company provost guard. The contingent moved with 5th Corps headquarters when the Army of the Potomac pursued Lee’s Rebels toward Pennsylvania. “Our troops had been on the march for many days,” wrote the Company D soldier, “bivouacking at night in the open air, and were dirty and travel-stained with the heat and sun of late June.” This ordeal ended abruptly for Jackson on June 30. On the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, at a camp near Frederick, Md., Sgt. Maj. Jackson was granted an early discharge from the army “by reason of being rendered supernumerary…” (surplus due to the consolidation).

​​Battle With Postwar Bureaucracy

Jackson returned to New York City and married in 1865. Employed as a clerk/salesman, he and his wife, Maria, set up housekeeping in Brooklyn. Over time, they were blessed with three daughters. Elizabeth, their first child, born in 1866, suffered from an unspecified disability and likely remained homebound until her death in April 1891. Margaret, born in 1869, worked as a file clerk, remained single, and passed away in 1920. Ellen, or Nelly, Jackson, who was born in 1871, was also employed as a clerk, and unmarried. She lived well into the 20th Century, passing away in October 1945.

Outside his family and job, William Jackson had enrolled in the Old Guard Association of the Twelfth Regiment N.G.S.N.Y., and in “The Lafayette Fusileers,” antecedents of the units he served with during the war. The rigors of his army service eventually took a toll on Jackson’s health later in life.

At age 51, Jackson filed his first claim for an Invalid Pension in June 1892. The former sergeant major supplied a laundry list of disabilities on his application form: “[A]lmost constant superficial pain in right chest & some in legs…pain & violent beating in heart…weakness – can’t lift anything.” His “gunshot wound of left leg” was cited. In sum he was “Physically unable to earn a support by manual labor.” Military medical records also show Jackson had been treated for “Gonorrhoia” [sic] on November 13, 1861. (Perhaps the result from a visit to one of the hundreds of brothels around Washington, D.C., while his regiment was on garrisoned duty.)

Jackson’s claim was rejected, “on the ground of no pensionable disability…under Act of June 27, 1890.” It wasn’t until President Theodore Roosevelt had signed an Executive Order for Old Age Pensions declaring all veterans over the age of 62 to be eligible for a pension that Jackson was finally granted $6 per month beginning May 10, 1904.

The reward would be short-lived. On April 11, 1905, following Maria’s death that January, William J. Jackson died. He and his wife rest with their three daughters under a single headstone at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Flushing, N.Y.
​
​George Skoch, a longtime contributor, writes from Fairview Park, Ohio.

“No action of the civil war has been so little understood as that of Seven Pines,” Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston would write in his 1874 memoir, Narrative of Military Operations. Ironic, as Johnston’s own actions during and after the critical Peninsula Campaign battle on May 31–June 1, 1862, are certainly a reason why this is so.     

Captain George W. Mindil of the 61st Pennsylvania Infantry, a staff officer in the Union Army of the Potomac that faced Johnston’s Army of Northern Virginia during the battle, later observed that the enemy commander’s “plan was faultless….[H]ad this plan been fully executed…the left wing of McClellan’s army would have sustained irreparable disaster and the retreat of the whole [Union] army would have followed.”

Instead, the outcome of the two-day clash that resulted in more than 11,000 casualties (typically known to Northerners as Fair Oaks) was inconclusive. In addition, controversy and acrimony arose when both Johnston and one of his top subordinates, Maj. Gen. James Longstreet, audaciously asserted that despite a simple “misunderstanding” between the two, victory still would have been possible had it not been for the “incompetence” of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Huger, a division commander in Longstreet’s Right Wing.

The word “misunderstanding” generally implies the commission of an honest mistake or perhaps a communication failure—usually indicating no ill-intent by the participants. The purported miscue at Seven Pines, however, was a well-crafted fabrication designed both to shield Longstreet’s poor decision-​making and insubordinate conduct during the battle and to deflect attention away from Johnston’s own leadership failures.

As Colonel Charles Marshall, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s aide-de-camp, would caustically point out, Johnston had the knack of compensating for his deficiencies through his use of the “certain ‘agility’ of explanation.” Regarding Johnston’s post–Seven Pines account, Marshall wrote that “a lie well adhered to & often repeated, will sometimes serve a man’s purpose as well as the truth & better.”

By late May 1862, Johnston’s relationship with Confederate President Jefferson Davis was so strained, had he acknowledged the truth about the battle, it would have tarnished both his and Longstreet’s reputations. That left the unfortunate Huger as the target of an unconscionable attack.

“Misunderstanding” first appeared in Johnston’s June 28, 1862, letter to Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith, his Left Wing commander, in response to Smith’s after-action report. “My Dear Gustavus,” Johnston wrote, “I inclose herewith the first three sheets of your report, to ask a modification, or omission rather. They contain two subjects which I intended never to make generally known. I refer to the misunderstanding [italics added by author] between Longstreet and myself in regard to the direction of his division.”

The relationship between Johnston and Smith had once been close. In August 1861, in fact, Johnston wrote to Davis that “Smith is an officer of high ability, fit to command in chief.” And the following February, Johnston informed Davis: “I regard Maj. Gen. G.W. Smith as absolutely necessary to this army.”

Johnston’s warm tone now belied their recent strain. In addition to sustaining the alleged misunderstanding, Johnston justified his request to omit portions of Smith’s report as “these matters concern Longstreet and myself alone. I have no hesitation in asking you to strike them from your report as they in no manner concern your operations.”

Although Smith complied with Johnston’s request “because of [his] great personal attachment” to his commander, he maintained a copy of his original and entered a note stating that Johnston “is mistaken in supposing that the misunderstanding between himself and General Longstreet did not affect the operations of my division.”

The suppression of Smith’s report would become the cornerstone of the burgeoning “misunderstanding” myth. Smith, however, wisely saved copies of all his communications. In 1884, he published his original report including those previously omitted references.

Plan of Attack

Seven Pines/Fair Oaks would be a definitive battle in Maj. Gen. George McClellan’s ill-fated Peninsula Campaign. On May 20, “Little Mac” had begun moving part of his army across the Chickahominy River, closing to within 10 miles of Richmond. The 12,500-man 4th Corps, under Brig. Gen. Erasmus Keyes, crossed the river near Bottom’s Bridge, followed by Brig. Gen. Samuel P. Heintzelman’s 3rd Corps. Keyes would move his corps to Seven Pines; Heintzelman’s corps, with 15,000 men, remained near the Chickahominy—the two units largely deployed along the Williamsburg Road. Although White Oak Swamp provided protection to their left, their right flank was vulnerable, lacking a natural barrier.

Seven Pines lay approximately six miles east of Richmond at the intersection of the Williamsburg and Nine Mile roads. Approximately one mile north of Seven Pines, along Nine Mile Road and the Richmond & York River Railroad, sat a small depot called Fair Oaks Station. To protect his right flank, Keyes positioned a brigade at the depot.

The Confederate lines began at a point two miles north of the station along Nine Mile Road near an area known as Old Tavern. There were approximately 87,800 men in Johnston’s army, extending in an arc along the Chickahominy to the north down to Drewry’s Bluff.

Johnston fully recognized the vulnerability of the Federal position south of the Chickahominy; however, he also had learned that Brig. Gen. Irwin McDowell’s 1st Corps had left Fredericksburg, heading toward McClellan’s main lines. A strike on McClellan above the Chickahominy was essential before that could happen.

During a council of war on May 28, Johnston proposed an attack on the Union position at Mechanicsville, which would prevent McDowell from linking with Brig. Gen. Fitz John Porter’s 5th Corps. When they learned McDowell’s corps had begun returning to Fredericksburg, Smith advocated calling off the attack. Johnston at first agreed, which infuriated Longstreet, still convinced a turning movement against the Federal position would yield certain victory. Johnston was swayed by his subordinate’s passion.

On May 30, Maj. Gen. D.H. Hill in Longstreet’s Right Wing reported that Keyes’ corps was arrayed in force along the Williamsburg Road but was vulnerable from the Charles City Road. Johnston promptly ordered an attack to take place the following day.

Without Smith in attendance, Johnston met with Longstreet the afternoon of May 30. After designating Longstreet as the commander of the assaulting force, consisting of three divisions, the generals weighed their options on how to best conduct the attack. They determined that at 8 a.m. Hill’s command would open the attack along the Williamsburg Road, striking the 4th Corps on its front.

Hill’s advance, however, required the inclusion of the 2,200-man brigade commanded by Brig. Gen. Robert Rodes, presently posted along the Charles City Road. To address that need, Johnston ordered Huger, in Longstreet’s Wing, to march his 6,250-man division over from Drewry’s Bluff to relieve Rodes’ Brigade prior to the assault. Huger would then occupy a position opposite the 4th Corps’ left flank.

Longstreet would then move his 13,800-man division, commanded here by Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson, east along the Nine Mile Road to Old Tavern, putting it squarely on Keyes’ right flank.

One concern the generals had with this plan was how to bolster the overall strength of Hill’s attacking force. Johnston could move Longstreet’s Division (under Anderson) to support Hill, but complicated logistical factors ruled out that option. Not only would Anderson’s men have to move during the night, it would also necessitate coordination with Huger’s command, as each division would be required to occupy the same stretch of the Williamsburg Road, even if only temporarily.

Another option in supporting Hill was to reposition Gustavas Smith’s six-brigade division (with Brig. Gen. William H.C. Whiting in command). This appeared as the most logical choice, but it also posed an unavoidable complication. Because Smith outranked Longstreet, the movement would place Smith in command of the attack and not “Old Pete.” As Johnston had designated Longstreet as the overall commander of offensive operations, he decided against that option, choosing instead to advance Smith’s Division closer to Old Tavern in support of Longstreet. After considering his options, and with an intense rainstorm now unloading on the area, Johnston determined that rather than move Longstreet or any additional force to the Williamsburg Road, the attack would proceed as followed:

1) Before dawn, General Huger would proceed to the Charles City Road and relieve Rodes’ Brigade, enabling Rodes to join Hill.

2) With Rodes’ arrival, Hill would launch the attack along the Williamsburg Road.

3) Doing so would be the signal for Longstreet’s flank attack down the Nine Mile Road.

4) Smith’s Division would remain in reserve along the Nine Mile Road in support of Longstreet.

“There was…no reason why the orders for march should be misconstrued or misapplied,” Longstreet later wrote. “I was with General Johnston all of the time that he was engaged in planning and ordering the battle, heard every word and thought expressed by him of it, and received his verbal orders; Generals Huger and Smith received his written orders.”

Interestingly, Longstreet never identified or described in his report or postwar writing the specific orders he had received. Nor did Longstreet reveal his division’s own marching orders—although he did provide details of those he had issued Huger, Smith, and McLaws. Furthermore, Longstreet never divulged the subsequent orders he issued to his division, or to Hill.

What, therefore, went wrong? Simply put, Longstreet went rogue. Regardless of his full knowledge of Johnston’s intentions, he willingly altered the attack plans. No “honest mistake” or “failure to understand directions correctly” was involved:

1) Longstreet not only disregarded Johnston’s original order, he never communicated to his commander his movements, location, status, or progress once the attack began.

2) He somehow also ignored the weather, which he fully knew was dreadful, later writing, “While yet affairs were under consideration [on May 30], a terrific storm of vivid lightning, thunderbolts, and rain, as severe as ever known to any climate, burst upon us, and continued through the night more or less severe. In the first lull I rode from General Johnston’s to my head-quarters, and sent orders for [an] early march.”

3) He ignored the importance of Huger’s orders to relieve Rodes on the Charles City Road. 

Because Johnston and Longstreet conferred for some time, it is hard to believe Longstreet was not informed which road he was to use. Longstreet, of course, had long been hoping for an independent command. Choosing to follow the Williamsburg Road was clearly an opportunity for him to flout his orders for an attack plan of his own discretion.

All six of Longstreet’s brigades were positioned near the Nine Mile Road, which required only a short march east to reach Old Tavern. Had Longstreet’s brigades moved out at 3:30 a.m., they would have reached Old Tavern by 6 a.m.

“The tactical handling of the battle on the Williamsburg Road was left to my care, as well as the general conduct of affairs south of the York River Railroad,” Longstreet later wrote, but he never offered to explain why he altered Johnston’s plan or even why he did not communicate with his commander until late in the afternoon—undeniably insubordinate conduct.

As for the weather’s impact, Longstreet had held field commands from First Manassas through the Peninsula Campaign. His experience was extensive enough to realize a “terrific” and “severe” rainstorm would severely hamper the nighttime movement of a 13,800-man division. Had Longstreet followed orders and marched east along the Nine Mile Road, crossing the flooded Gillies Creek would not have been the roadblock it was.

A Disputed Crossing

The movement of Huger’s Division was the key to a successful attack. In relieving Rodes along the Charles City Road, Rodes could join Hill as ordered and the attack on Keyes’ position launched. But when the lead elements of Longstreet’s Division descended the steep bluffs toward Gillies Creek, they found it “bank full” and unfordable. To cross the swollen creek, Longstreet’s men placed a wagon in the stream as a trestle and laid planks to both banks, allowing a single-file crossing.

As that began, however, Huger appeared. Despite knowing what was at stake, Longstreet responded that “[a]s we were earlier at the creek, it gave us precedence over Huger’s division…” Hill’s attack would have to wait.

It is also mystifying that Longstreet later insisted he believed Huger had already crossed Gillies Creek. No doubt a division the size of Huger’s certainly would have left evidence of such a crossing.

Finding Longstreet already occupying the creek was just one of a day full of surprises for Huger, who also revealed it was “the first I knew” of a planned May 31 attack. Even if one accepts Longstreet’s “misunderstanding” of his orders, it doesn’t justify his rationale in preventing Huger’s Division from advancing to its assigned Charles City Road position.

Johnston’s responsibility for the attack’s implosion cannot be ignored either. After all, Huger received only two communications from him: one at 8:40 p.m. May 30; the other May 31, with no time indicated. Johnston was directing Huger to relieve Rodes, and that “if you find no strong body in your front, it will be well to aid General Hill.”

Huger interpreted that to mean he was moving to a new position and not into battle, as the only general named in either note was Hill. Neither mentioned Longstreet being in command of the wing, Hill’s expected attack, nor Huger’s role in that attack. He also described the communications from Johnston as being an “autograph note and not an official order.” 

The lack of clarity regarding Huger’s expected role in the upcoming battle is borne out in his statement, “If I would have been notified that Longstreet was to pass, I would have made another crossing.” When he met with Longstreet at Hill’s headquarters, Huger also fully realized: “He was moving to attack the enemy.”

Longstreet Crafts a Narrative

The only general who deserves absolution for the opening attack’s delay is Huger. By June 7, Longstreet had already put the “misunderstanding” myth and the character assassination of Huger in his letter to Johnston. The letter began friendly enough, with Longstreet expressing syrupy concern for the seriously wounded commander before segueing into claims that, despite his division’s heroics, he had been victimized by Huger’s lethargy:

“The failure of complete success [May 31] I attribute to the slow movements of General Huger’s command….I can’t but help think that the display of his forces on the left flank of the enemy…would have completed the affair.”

Longstreet asserted deceitfully that Huger’s ineffectiveness “threw perhaps the hardest part of the battle upon my own poor division. It is greatly cut up….Our ammunition was nearly exhausted when [General] Whiting moved.”      “Altogether,” he concluded, “it was very well, but I can’t help but regret it was not complete.”

On the battle’s first day, however, Longstreet had used only six of the 13 brigades available to him. Four of those belonged to Hill, with “Pete” sending only two more forward—those of Colonels James Kemper and Micah Jenkins—both at Hill’s request for more support. Of the 13,800 men he had present for duty in his division, nearly 9,500 of them never fired a shot.

Facts do not support Longstreet’s claim his division was “greatly cut up” and its “ammunition nearly exhausted.” Kemper’s and Jenkins’ losses were only 7 percent of the division’s overall casualties. By contrast, Hill engaged his entire 10,250-man division and reported nearly 3,000 casualties (29 percent). In fighting later that afternoon, Whiting (handling Smith’s Division) suffered 1,278 casualties (13.7 percent of the 10,590 men present).

The purpose of Longstreet’s letter to Johnston was twofold. First, it launched the narrative that all blame was to be squarely placed on Huger. Second, it signaled a measure Johnston could use in explaining why complete victory had not been not achieved, which would be particularly useful when offered to a increasingly critical President Davis and the Richmond press.

In his after-action report, prepared three days later, Longstreet asserted, “Agreeably to verbal instructions from the commanding general,” which indicates to an uninformed reader that what followed was in accordance with Johnston’s directive. Any “misunderstanding” of verbal instructions could thus be seen as a useful alibi instead of an admission of willful insubordination.

“The division of Maj. Gen. Huger was intended to make a strong flank movement around the left of the enemy’s position and attack him in the rear of that flank….,” Longstreet noted. “[T]his division did not get into position in time for any such attack.”

His brazen distortion of facts did not end there: “I have reason to believe that the affair would have been a complete success had the troops upon the right been put in position within eight hours of the proper time.” Longstreet followed with: “Some of the brigades of General Huger’s division took part in defending our position on Sunday [June 1], but…did not show the same steadiness and determination of Hill’s division and my own.”

This report, and Longstreet’s letter written June 7, put Johnston in an awkward position, as he was now compelled to support this narrative rather than supply a more accurate and truthful account.

Only three of six brigade commanders in Anderson’s ranks issued after-action reports—Colonel Micah Jenkins, Brig. Gen. George Pickett, and Brig. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox—and no officers in the unit’s 23 regiments did so. Plus, the three brigades with no reports issued were not engaged on May 31, and only minimally engaged on June 1, with no reported casualties.

Jenkins’ report detailed the extensive fighting by his portion of Anderson’s Brigade, but only for May 31, and Anderson did not complete a report. Pickett’s report was minimalist at best, with no insight on his initial marching orders or to any subsequent orders from Longstreet before 9 p.m. May 30.     

Only Wilcox mentioned any substantive content of Longstreet’s orders: “On the 30th ultimo[,] orders were received to be prepared with ammunition….for an early march the following morning. At 6:30 a.m. the brigade moved from its camp near the Mechanicsville Pike by by-paths across to the junction of the Charles City and Williamsburg Roads” [italics added by author].

Wilcox’s report clearly indicates no orders involving movement toward Old Tavern on the Nine Mile Road, as would have been Johnston’s expectation. One can presume that each of those in brigade command received similar orders, as the whole division wound up along the Williamsburg Road.

The orders described in Wilcox’s report would have been issued shortly after Longstreet left Johnston’s headquarters at approximately 9 p.m. May 30. In 1896, Longstreet wrote: “There was no reason why the orders for march should be misconstrued or misapplied”—a curious comment considering Longstreet’s June 10, 1862, report, which did not divulge the nature of his orders. It is interesting how Longstreet maintained there was “no reason” for misconstruing his orders, yet his report focuses on Hill and Huger while offering little data regarding his own division’s actions.

A common belief offered on Longstreet’s behalf is the lack of clarity of Johnston’s verbal orders. Johnston, however, clearly intended and expected Longstreet to operate as a commander of three divisions and to engage his division from Old Tavern upon hearing the opening of Hill’s attack. Longstreet failed to do either. Even if one accepts a “misunderstanding,” Longstreet’s battlefield conduct is hard to justify.

In 1877, Longstreet best described his lack of leadership when he wrote to Hill: “I do not remember giving an order on that field other than to send you my brigades as you called for them.” Hill later wrote that “Longstreet was not on the field at all on the 31st of May, and did not see any of the fighting.” And Longstreet’s poor battlefield leadership continued June 1, with Hill recalling he “received no orders from General Longstreet whatever.” Longstreet’s admission and Hill’s verifications certainly do not portray the actions of a wing commander responsible for actively directing and managing the operations of three divisions.

False Statements

By placing his affinity for Longstreet above the truth, Johnston shared equally in crafting the “misunderstanding” and in actively engaging in the character assassination of Huger.

After graduating from West Point in 1825, Benjamin Huger spent the next 35 years primarily as an ordnance officer in the U.S. Army. In 1861, he resigned from Federal service to join the Confederate Army but quickly ran afoul of an investigation conducted by the Confederate House of Representatives for failure to reinforce and supply troops at Roanoke Island, N.C., where he commanded. His reputation sullied, Huger became an easy target for further criticism, whether warranted or not.

Neither Johnston nor Longstreet respected Huger, and Johnston had publicly criticized Huger for abandoning the Norfolk Naval Yards in May 1862 and the subsequent demolition of the ironclad CSS Virginia, even though Huger had simply been following Johnston’s own orders.

Although Huger lacked experience as a field commander, his division was the only one conveniently placed to cover Hill’s flank along the Charles City Road in the attack and, given the overall simplicity of his plan, Johnston had no reason to expect anything but success.

Johnston’s report of June 24, 1862, took full advantage of Longstreet’s narrative and directly conflicted with Smith’s earlier report. Before evaluating Johnston’s report, however, it is important to turn to Smith’s notes and comments about what had transpired on May 31. (Smith entered handwritten comments on his original report while in Macon, Ga., in June 1865.) On the morning of May 31, and throughout much of the day, Smith was with Johnston. They interacted and communicated constantly, and both knew Longstreet had deviated from Johnston’s orders.

The request by Johnston for secrecy perplexed Smith:

“Johnston’s letter indicated a desire to keep back important facts. And he is mistaken in supposing that the misunderstanding between himself and General Longstreet did not affect the operations of my division. And he is mistaken that no one knew of this…

“General Johnston did not know where Longstreet was. But he explained his intentions freely & fully to the effect that the right wing under Longstreet composed of three divisions viz – His own [Anderson’s], D.H. Hill’s and Huger’s were to attack the enemy very early in the morning before eight o’clock. D.H. Hill by the Williamsburg Road…Huger on Hill’s right…and Longstreet’s own division on Hill’s left moving into position on the nine miles road….[All my] staff officers and Generals knew where Longstreet was supposed to be and they knew Genl. Johnston’s intentions and orders in regard to the troops they were to support. I gave them the information and certainly did not dream that there was any occasion for secrecy or ‘reticence’ then, nor do I perceive it now.”

Later in Smith’s 1865 endorsement, he addressed the so-called misinterpretation with: “So much for the misunderstanding between Johnston and Longstreet….My opinion is that it would have been better for both had Johnston stated and explained it.”

What Johnston’s official report had emphasized was that Longstreet’s Division supported Hill’s Division along the Williamsburg Road, and that Longstreet had “the direction of operations on the right.” Huger “was to attack in flank the troops who might engage with Hill and Longstreet,” and “General Smith was to be in position along the Nine Mile Road “to be in readiness either to fall on Keyes’ right flank or cover Longstreet’s left.”

The only factual statement here is that Longstreet possessed command of operations on the right (although he did little commanding). The other statements are all false. “[H]ad General Huger’s division been in position and ready for action…,” Johnston opined, “I am satisfied that Keyes’ Corps would have been destroyed rather than being merely defeated.”

Johnston knew the plan he described in his report is not the one he outlined to Smith and others on May 31. Rather than personally adapting and adjusting to the new situation when the plan unraveled, he became sullen and passive. At 10 a.m., hearing no sounds of musketry or distant cannon fire, Johnston asked a staff officer if there might be a mistake—that his ears had deceived him. When the officer confirmed the silence, the dejected Johnston sighed, “I wish the troops were back in their camps.”

Ironically, it was the success of Jenkins’ Brigade that demonstrated just how successful an attack down the Nine Mile Road could have been. Jenkins’ 1,900-men drove across a portion of the Federal right flank near Fair Oaks Station and then followed a path down and across the Nine Mile Road while cutting behind the Federal lines at Seven Pines.

Jenkins’ attack along a similar path to Longstreet’s, with six brigades, should have been launched from Old Tavern that morning. Given the success Jenkins demonstrated, one can only ponder the success Longstreet’s full division might have attained. An earlier attack down the Nine Mile Road would in all probability have convincingly won the day for Johnston’s army.

Wrote Keyes: “[T]he right was on ground so favorable to the approach of the enemy and so far from the Chickahominy that if Johnston had attacked there an hour or two earlier than he did, I could have made but a feeble defense…and every man of us would have been killed, captured or driven into the swamp or river before assistance could have reached us.

The specifics of Longstreet’s June 7 letter to Johnston remained unknown to Smith, Hill, and others until its publication in the Official Records. Smith and Hill were equally rattled, with Hill penning in a letter to Smith on May 18, 1885: “I cannot understand Longstreet’s motive in coming over to the Williamsburg Road, nor can I understand Johnston’s motive in shielding him.”

Hill and Smith were incensed at Longstreet’s claims that his division had endured “perhaps the hardest part of the battle” and that it had been “greatly cut up….[their] ammunition…nearly exhausted.”

“Longstreet was not on the field at all on the 31st of May and did not see any fighting,” Hill wrote. “He ought to have known that I got no assistance from him except for the brigade of RH Anderson [i.e., Jenkins]….I have not felt kindly to Longstreet since I read that letter of his to Joe Johnston. I can’t understand how he had the brass to write such a letter.”

In his Battle of Seven Pines, published in 1891, Smith expressed his sympathy for Huger, as “the erroneous statements of Generals Johnston and Longstreet, in regard to Huger’s instructions, have been incorporated into history.”

“Too Much Censured”

The only official support Huger received immediately after the battle came in Wilcox’s June 12 report. Wilcox had commanded three of Longstreet’s brigades along the Charles City Road on May 31 and had been in regular contact with Huger. He knew Huger was not at fault for the disruption at Gillies Creek.

An undated addendum in Wilcox’s report, presumably added after Johnston’s report appeared, states: “At Seven Pines, the successful part of it was Hill’s fight. I have thought that General Huger was a little too much censured for Seven Pines by the papers.”

Johnston continued the “blame Huger” theme in a post-war article he wrote for Century Magazine titled “Manassas to Seven Pines,” as did Longstreet in his 1896 account, “From Manassas to Appomattox.”

Huger did not see the critical reports by Longstreet and Johnston about his performance until August 1862 and immediately sought redress from both. Longstreet never responded, and Huger wrote directly to Johnston on September 20 after waiting more than a month for a reply, maintaining: “As you have indorsed his erroneous statements, to my injury, I must hold you responsible.”

Receiving no reply from Johnston either, Huger penned a letter to Davis, along with an extract of Johnston’s Seven Pines report, refuting what the commander had written. Davis referred the remarks to Johnston, receiving a supercilious response. He essentially blamed Huger for not raising the issue sooner and that an investigation was now impossible because Longstreet was unavailable, adding that “the passage in my report that he complains about was written to show that the delay in commencing the attack on May 31 was not by my fault.”

Huger attempted to right the wrong through the Confederate government itself—to no avail. He demanded Davis create a board of inquiry, and though the request was approved, that board never met.

Huger dropped the issue after the war. In 1867, he wrote: “[I]f our cause had been successful, I would have insisted on an investigation; I determined that it was now no time to redress wrongs; that I must continue to bear them and I would not mention a word about Gen. Johnston.” Thus, Huger’s name and character would continue to carry the blame for the failure of the May 31 Confederate attack at Seven Pines.

Mercifully, by late July 1862, Huger no longer held a field command, reassigned to the administrative role of inspector general for artillery and ordnance. Johnston, meanwhile, resumed leading Confederate armies in November.

Perhaps Gustavus Smith provided the best description as to how history should view Longstreet’s lack of ethical credibility when he wrote: “General Longstreet, in command of the three divisions which were to have crushed Keyes corps before it could be reinforced blundered badly from the beginning to the end of the battle; and to say the least, his writings in reference to Seven Pines are no more creditable than his conduct of operations on this field.”

Victor Vignola writes from Middletown, N.Y. This article is adapted from his book Contrasts in Command: The Battle of Fair Oaks, May 31–June 1, 1862 (Savas Beatie, 2023).

“It was either a good line, or a bad one, and, whichever it was, I took it on my own responsibility….I took up that line because it enabled me to hold commanding ground, which, if the enemy had been allowed to take—as they would have taken it if I had not occupied it in force—would have rendered our position on the left untenable; and, in my judgment, would have turned the fortunes of the day hopelessly against us.” So testified Union Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles on February 26, 1864, to the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War about the controversial decision he made, against orders, to reposition his 3rd Corps at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.

As a politician, Sickles understood the importance of getting out in front of a story and shaping how it was perceived. In his view, had he not moved his corps to its advanced position, the battle likely would have been lost—a narrative he pushed on more than one front. Sickles, whose left leg was shattered by a cannonball and amputated during that day’s fighting, eagerly shared his version of the battle with President Abraham Lincoln while recovering from his wound, as well as anyone else in Congress he thought might be of help, particularly those who served on the Conduct of the War committee.

It was no accident Sickles was the first officer to testify before the committee about Gettysburg. In March 1864, he was likely the author, or at least the source, of an article about the battle in The New York Herald, under the pen name “Historicus,” which essentially repeated Sickles’ points from his testimony before the committee.

At the time, Sickles was unsuccessful in his effort to have Maj. Gen. George Meade removed as commander of the Army of the Potomac and for his personal return to the army, which Meade had blocked. But he was successful in muddying the waters of truth and in casting doubt upon Meade’s generalship at Gettysburg. This has echoed through the decades to today, where people still fiercely debate the wisdom or folly of Sickles’ advance, and view Meade’s generalship through the lens Dan Sickles shaped.

In considering the position Sickles occupied and the one Meade ordered him to be in, it is worth pausing a moment to consider the two men’s military pedigree, for in this area they were not equals. Sickles had no antebellum military experience. He was commissioned a colonel on June 26, 1861, principally because he was a well-known Democrat who supported the war and could assist in the raising of troops.

Sickles’ nomination to brigadier general in September 1861 was held up for months, and although he had command of a brigade, when it shipped out for the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, he remained in Washington to fight the political battles needed to secure that promotion. He succeeded but missed the key Battle of Williamsburg, although he was with the brigade at Fair Oaks (Seven Pines) on May 31–June 1, 1862.

Sickles saw further action during the Seven Days’ Battles starting in late June, but then returned home on a recruiting mission, which resulted in him missing both the Second Bull Run and Antietam campaigns.

When Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside assumed command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, Sickles was bizarrely placed in command of the 3rd Corps’ 2nd Division despite his lack of military training and combat experience. His division was lightly engaged at Fredericksburg, however, suffering only about 100 casualties.

Then, in yet another questionable military decision, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker handed Sickles command of the 3rd Corps upon replacing Burnside atop the Army of the Potomac in January 1863.

In describing the general’s performance at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May, Sickles’ biographer, James Hessler, wrote: “[H]e fought aggressively, but demonstrated questionable military judgment.” Shortly after that battle, Sickles left the army again, claiming a shell burst had damaged his health. He did not return until June 28, the day Meade replaced Hooker as the army’s commander.

There is no question Sickles was a brave soldier, but he was a corps commander with relatively little experience who had demonstrated no aptitude to read terrain well. Meade, on the other hand, was a West Pointer with 28 years’ service in the Army, including as a topographical engineer during the Mexican War, where his job was to read terrain. Meade had commanded, with great skill, units from brigade to corps in the Army of the Potomac in every major battle in the Eastern Theater.

When Meade decided where to place each of his corps on July 2, he relied on an early morning reconnaissance he had conducted. Meade sent verbal orders to Sickles early, probably about 5–5:30 a.m., to relieve a 12th Corps division on the northern slope of Little Round Top and to extend his right to connect with the 2nd Corps. Sickles never visited Little Round Top that we know of, and he would later claim the 12th Corps division had no defined position, which was untrue, for some of his troops did in fact spell relief for part of the 12th Corps command.

At 11 a.m., after riding to Meade’s headquarters, Sickles told his commander he was unsure of the position he had been ordered to occupy. Meade reiterated “that his right was to rest upon General [Winfield S.] Hancock’s left; and his left was to extend to the Round Top mountain, plainly visible, if it was practicable to occupy it.”

What then of the advanced position to which Sickles subsequently moved without orders? The reasons why Meade had not deployed the 3rd Corps here soon became abundantly clear for several reasons: 1) the advanced position upset the defensive arrangement of the army commander; 2) it was beyond support distance of the 2nd Corps, or any of the army’s other corps; 3) Sickles did not have enough men to assume the front he chose; 4) he left Little Round Top, the key terrain on the southern end of the field, undefended; 5) the salient at the Peach Orchard was easily hit by a crossfire of Confederate artillery; 6) if the 3rd Corps was driven from its position, it would have to retreat over open ground, likely leading to heavy casualties; and 7) contrary to Sickles’ claim, Meade’s assigned position for the 3rd Corps was a superior one.

To answer Sickles’ rhetorical question of whether his line was a good or bad one: no, it was bad—and it nearly led to the army’s defeat. Colonel E. Porter Alexander was one Confederate certain the battle was won when he placed his guns in the Peach Orchard, with the 3rd Corps driven back. But “when I got to take in all the topography, I was very much disappointed,” he recalled. “It was not the enemy’s main line we had broken. That loomed up near 1,000 yards beyond us, a ridge giving good cover behind it & endless fine positions for batteries.”

It was the original position Meade had assigned Sickles to defend.

Scott Hartwig writes from the crossroads of Gettysburg.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

Although only minor National Park Service signage alerts you to the boundaries of the vast Gettysburg battlefield at its outer edges bleeding into neighboring counties, it’s almost impossible not to know by instinct when you’ve crossed the threshold onto its hallowed, historic ground. It just feels different. You have to wonder if the area’s residents feel the same. It’s little doubt those of 1863 felt it, too, as many bore the burden of the battle while it raged and, likely, for the rest of their lives after.

When the battle broke out in this county seat on July 1, 1863, college classes were interrupted, business stopped, and a bustling railroad town was stilled. If residents hadn’t fled for safety elsewhere, they shuttered themselves in basements and attics, biding their time in terror as the sounds of war erupted around them.

Of the battle’s first-day glimpse of what was to come, 15-year-old Tillie Pierce wrote in her now famously published diary, “Soon the booming of cannon was heard, then great clouds of smoke were seen rising beyond the ridge. The sound became louder and louder and was now incessant. The troops passing us moved faster, the men had now become excited and urged on their horses. The battle was waging. This was my first terrible experience.” It was not her last.

There are many ways to experience a visit to Gettysburg, and often a trip revolves around sites related to the fighting or the soldier stories and personalities popularized by modern culture. The civilian story is lesser told…but certainly not less engaging, or less poignant. The town’s homes and mainstays became lookouts, hideouts, and the command centers of the armies’ top generals. A tour of some of the most iconic spots on the battlefield today encompasses the civilian story, as do several museums and interpretive centers in town, many marked with Civil War Trails signs. It’s an experience you won’t forget.

Meade’s Headquarters
Taneytown Road and Hunt Ave.

Maj. Gen. George Meade made Lydia Leister’s simple frame home his headquarters, holding a council of war there the night of July 2 to decide if the army should stay to fight another day. The widow returned after the battle to find her food stores and two tons of hay gone; the wheat she had planted destroyed; and her barn siding removed for firewood and grave markers. Also gone were her horse and cow, and 17 dead Union horses scattered across her fields and near her spring had fouled the water, rendering it unusable. Despite the challenge ahead, she never backed down. By 1868, she had begun adding onto her modest property.

Seminary Ridge Museum and Education Center
61 Seminary Ridge

The Seminary Ridge Museum and Education Center is housed in the oldest building on the United Lutheran Seminary campus, where all study and worship came to an abrupt halt July 1, as troops from both sides occupied the building and its cupola (used as a lookout post by Brig. Gen. John Buford). Hundreds of wounded soldiers found themselves here, as it served as one of the largest field hospitals in Gettysburg until September 16, 1863. Classes resumed mere days later. For information on tours and programs, visit seminaryridgemuseum.org.

‘The Hero of Gettysburg’
Stone Avenue south ofChambersburg Road

No Gettysburg citizen story is more famous than that of John Burns. A War of 1812 veteran, the 70-year-old resident grabbed his musket and fought alongside Union soldiers west of town—and was wounded—on July 1. Those soldiers were forced to leave him behind, but he convinced Confederates he was a noncombatant after crawling away from his rifle and burying his ammunition. Soon a national celebrity, he would receive personal thanks from Abraham Lincoln, and Congress passed a special act granting him a pension. On July 1, 1903, a monument to Burns was dedicated on McPherson’s Ridge.

Train Depot
35 Carlisle St.

As the fighting raged, this bustling station was not immune to the burden of war. In fact, even before the battle began, Union General John Buford established a hospital here for his sick cavalrymen. Iron Brigade surgeon Jacob Ebersole served here, including for weeks after the battle while the hub facilitated the transport of relief supplies and removal of Federal dead and wounded. On November 18, 1863, an evening train chugged into town bringing President Abraham Lincoln, who delivered his Gettysburg Address the next day at the new national cemetery. Using immersive VR technology, the depot’s Ticket to the Past Museum allows visitors to journey back to 1863.

Shriver House and Museum
309 Baltimore Street

When Hettie Shriver and her children returned to their home in downtown Gettysburg on July 7, they found it had been used as a hospital and Confederates had set up a sharpshooter nest in the attic. All of the Shrivers’ food, clothing, blankets, linens, tools, and any “booty” such as money, silver, or liquor, had been confiscated. Five months after the Battle of Gettysburg, George Shriver was granted a four-day furlough giving him the opportunity to spend Christmas with Hettie and their daughters, Sadie and Mollie. He had been away from home for more than two years. In 1864, he was taken prisoner and sent to Andersonville Prison. He died in August of that year. The Shriver house and saloon have been restored and now operate as a museum, with several rooms depicting the tragic condition the Shrivers found their home in battle’s aftermath.

Beyond the Battle Museum
368 Springs Ave.

In April 2023, the Adams County Historical Society opened a new 29,000-square-foot complex just north of the Gettysburg battlefield, which showcases civilian accounts from the Battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The Beyond the Battle Museum features some of Gettysburg’s rarest artifacts and uses media and special effects technology to take visitors on a journey through time. Caught in the Crossfire, a 360-degree re-creation of a home trapped between Union and Confederate lines, uses light projections, surround-sound speakers, and special effects to transport visitors back to the battle and the civilian experience. Guests enter a family’s home shortly after their rush to safety in the cellar below, hear their hushed conversations, split-second decisions, and life-or-death encounters with Union and Confederate troops.

The Cashtown Inn
1325 Old Rte. 30, Orrtanna

Built in 1797 as a stagecoach stop, the Inn served as temporary headquarters for many Confederate officers during the Gettysburg Campaign. Today, the Inn is still a bustling stop just west of Gettysburg hosting guests for overnight stays and special dinners.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

On a cloudless, deep-blue sky afternoon, I drive 45 miles south of Nashville to Columbia for a visit with one of my favorite people, Campbell Ridley. He’s an 80-year-old semi-retired farmer, U.S. Army veteran, rock & roll devotee, and storyteller with a wit and sense of humor as sharp as the tip of a new bayonet.

“How are you feeling?” I ask my friend minutes after arriving at his farm office.

Aside from mourning the recent death of Barney—his nine-year-old barn cat—Ridley feels fine, a fact he attributes to “clean living and cheap beer.” He wears tan Carhartts, brown work boots, a blue-checkered shirt and, appropriately, a baseball cap with the words “Life Is Good” across the front.

Ridley’s roots run deep here in Maury County, one of the wealthiest counties in the state before the Civil War. He’s the great-great-grandnephew of Gideon Pillow, the Confederate brigadier general, Mexican War veteran, politician, lawyer and, before the war, one of the foremost slaveholders in the county. Ridley’s paternal great grandfather, who depended on mules for farming and was one of the county’s leading citizens, earned the nickname “Mule King”—Columbia, in fact, has long been touted as the “Mule Capital of the World.”

When I need my history fix and a good laugh, I visit Ridley. We’ve sat together inside magnificent St. John’s Church—a slave-constructed plantation church built under the direction of Leonidas Polk and his brothers. It stands roughly a mile and a half southwest along Mount Pleasant Pike, across the road from the mostly empty field where Polk—an Episcopalian bishop and future Confederate lieutenant general—lived in a mansion called Ashwood Hall. There, we have admired the two massive gingko trees Polk imported eons ago from Japan and have poked about what little remains of brick kitchen for the mansion, destroyed by fire in 1874 and never rebuilt.

Today, though, we will explore far more humble construction. Near Ridley’s farm office and the east fork of Greenlick Creek stand three ramshackle slave cabins. “The Quarters,” Ridley calls the property, which is owned by his daughter, who lives in New Mexico, and a friend.

“I’ll take care of this until she puts me in a nursing home,” he says, half-jokingly.

In a way, these cabins are as much a part of Ridley as the land he has farmed for decades in Columbia. As late as the 1990s, he tells me, these humble structures served as homes for poor Black farmhands and others. Many of them worked for the Ridleys.

“The woman who raised me lived here,” Ridley says as we examine one of the rickety cabins. Her name was Katie, a “wonderful” lady who had a gift for cooking fried chicken. The Ridley family employed her for more than three decades.

At another cabin yards away, ancient white paint clings to exposed exterior logs. Four modern wooden posts strain to prop up its porch overhang above two large, well-worn walkway stones. On an exterior wall, a half-dozen old hangers dangle from a rusty nail. Above us, a corrugated tin roof keeps nature at bay.

“That’s been there as long as I can remember,” Ridley says.

What a contrast these antebellum structures make with Clifton Place, the brick manor house on the hill 750 yards away. In rich late-fall sunlight, the mansion almost seems to glow. Peek through trees from the road leading to Ridley’s farm office and you’ll spot its imposing Ionic columns and impressive limestone porch.

From 1839 until the early years of the war, when the U.S. Army confiscated the property, the mansion served as centerpiece of Clifton Place, Pillow’s plantation that encompassed hundreds of acres. His slaves—most of whom lived in cabins at “The Quarters”—generated his wealth by planting and harvesting cotton, hemp, corn, and other crops as well as tending to his cattle, sheep, and hogs.

As one of Tennessee’s leading citizens and one of the wealthiest men in the South, Pillow moved in elite social circles. He counted James K. Polk, the 11th U.S. president, among his friends. Following the end of his presidency in 1849, Polk dined at Clifton Place with Gideon and his wife, Mary. Pillow himself dabbled in national politics, opposing secession initially in 1861 before relenting.

As a military man, though, political general Pillow failed to measure up. During the Mexican War, the twice-wounded Pillow angered superiors—including Winfield Scott—for his self-promotion. No surprise, perhaps, given a massive painting of a heroic Pillow in military uniform greeted visitors in the front entrance of Clifton Place.

During the Civil War, Pillow abandoned his post at Fort Donelson in February 1862, sneaking away from the beleaguered garrison under the cover of darkness before the Union Army under Ulysses S. Grant accepted the Confederates’ surrender. At the Battle of Stones River nearly 10 months later, Pillow led a brigade with mixed results. True or not, a story of the 55-year-old officer cowering behind a tree during the battle has stained his résumé ever since.

Unsurprisingly, Scott—overall commander of the U.S. Army when the Civil War broke out—did not count himself among Pillow’s fans. In his 1864 memoirs, “Old Fuss And Feathers” described Pillow as “amiable, and possessed of some acuteness, but the only person I have ever known who was wholly indifferent in the choice between truth and falsehood, honesty and dishonesty; ever as ready to attain an end by the one as the other, and habitually boastful of acts of cleverness at the total sacrifice of moral character.”

As we walk from cabin to cabin, Ridley reflects only briefly on his connection to Pillow and the slaves who toiled for him.

“Just part of history,” he says.

Ridley and I gingerly step into a cabin, home for Pillow’s field slaves. More than a year ago, he had brush and other vegetation cleared from around these remarkable survivors, giving us easy access.

Each cabin is roughly 15-by-15 feet with a small loft accessed by a rickety ladder. Each has a post-Civil War room out back. I’ve visited the site a half-dozen times but see something new each time.

Steps ahead of me, Ridley shines the narrow beam from his flashlight on a fireplace, revealing bricks and small dirt piles in an otherwise barren room. Fragments of newspaper—used as insulation by postwar inhabitants—speckle the walls. A dour-looking baseball player stares from a March 1937 newspaper sports section. A decrepit floor, victimized by time and nature, crunches beneath my feet.

In another cabin, we find more reminders of the 20th century: a swinging blade, peeling wallpaper adorned with blue- and aqua-colored floral designs, a chipped ax handle, and a barren clothes hook on a door. Pasted to the back wall is a fragment of The New York Times from decades ago.

“Life in America,” the partial headline reads.

From the era of slavery, though, we find no visible evidence they were here. No fragments of 19th-century pottery or shards of glass. No messages etched on bare, wooden walls.No privy to mine for secrets. Much is left for our imaginations.

And so, I wonder: Who were these men, women, and children?

What treatment did they receive from Pillow?

What were their names?

Perhaps the 1870 U.S. census provides us hints. “Sarah” and “Randall”—listed as farm hands for the Pillow family in that census—appear on deeds as far back as the 1840s.

I wonder what ultimately became of the slaves who toiled for Pillow. Were they buried in the nearby cemetery in the woods—the remote graveyard at the base of Ginger Hill that Ridley showed me months ago? Or were they buried in St. John’s Church Cemetery, far in the back, away from the final resting places of the White folks? Or perhaps they ended up in one of the scores of family cemeteries that dot the county.

And I wonder what will become of these historic treasures near the east fork of Greenlick Creek. Ridley wants to save the cabins, but that probably would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and more expertise than he has.

What would a professional archaeologist unearth here?

I also wonder what will happen to Clifton Place, where Ridley’s paternal grandfather lived until 1949. It remained part of the Ridley family for years afterward.

“I watched television in there for the first time in my life,” Ridley says. He recalls family gatherings in the 12-room Greek Revival-style mansion and 16-foot-high ceilings.

In 1972, a Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate named John R. Neal purchased the property from the Ridley family. He and his wife, Linda, aimed to restore the mansion, but their yearslong effort proved daunting. “We saw the white columns, the Gone With The Wind atmosphere,” she told a reporter in 1986. “We didn’t see the cracks, the structural problems.”

The Clifton Place grounds include the original detached kitchen, carriage house, ice house, law office, spring house, blacksmith, and quarters for “house” slaves. In the Pillow-era smokehouse stands the original poplar chopping block and “ham logs”—hollowed out poplar logs for the salting of hams. The smoky aroma in the small brick building still tantalizes.

“The most complete 19th-century plantation complex anywhere,” a researcher once called Clifton Place.

John Neal died in 2018, but Clifton Place remains with his family. The mansion, however, has stood unoccupied (and inaccessible to the public) for more than a decade. Like the nearby slave cabins, it too could become nothing but a memory without significant preservation efforts.

Time may not be on the side of people like us who relish places like this. In an empty field across Mount Pleasant Pike from Clifton Place, developers have plans for residential housing. “750 houses on 450 acres,” Ridley says.

Oh my, what will I see here a decade from now?

John Banks is author of three Civil War books. Check out his latest, A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing). He also can be visited on Facebook at John Banks’ Civil War blog.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Civil War Times.

Writing home in the early morning hours of July 2, 1863, it likely crossed John Wheeler’s mind that this might be the last letter he would ever write. Wary of the impending combat he and his men were about to face on Gettysburg’s second day, the 20th Indiana Infantry’s colonel could be forgiven for such somber reflection. Two years earlier, as war clouds loomed over the fractured nation, Wheeler had been editor (and co-founder) of his home state’s Crown Point Register, proclaiming on its masthead, “Independent in all things—Neutral in nothing.” It was a supplication he had also lived by as a soldier and commander.

Early in the war, Wheeler—a distant relative of eventual Confederate cavalry general Joseph Wheeler—raised a 100-man company and was elected captain. Among those to enlist were the sons of a family friend: Albert Luther and his brother John, vice president of a local bank.

Spearheading the region’s prolific recruitment effort was Erasmus Corwin Gilbreath, a lawyer and entrepreneur who before the war had helped bring a railroad to the county seat. For his energy and notoriety, he was named a lieutenant in the 20th Indiana.

The 20th’s first assignment was guarding railroads in Maryland. It was then sent to the North Carolina coast, and in January 1862 was stationed at Fort Monroe, Va., under Brig. Gen. Joseph King Fenno Mansfield, later mortally wounded at Antietam. On March 8, the Hoosiers were called to nearby Hampton Roads to help protect the stricken USS Congress from capture by CSS Virginia. Fire from the 20th wounded Virginia’s commander, Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan, and helped drive off Confederate boarding parties.

The 20th, an impressed Mansfield later remarked, “could do without food longer…eat more when they got it; could suffer more without being disabled; get in line quicker; stay there steadier and swear harder than any group of men.” On May 10, 1862, President Lincoln visited Fort Monroe, and while watching his fellow Midwesterners prepare for a move on Norfolk, reportedly cheered, “Bully for the Indiana 20th!”   

Joining the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula Campaign, the 20th was assigned to Maj. Gen. Phil Kearny’s 3rd Division in the 3rd Corps. Kearny raved about the 20th’s fighting ability at Oak Grove, Savage’s Station, and Glendale during the Seven Days’ Battles, labeling them “my 20th Indiana marksmen.”

“If I had 40,000 men like those of the 20th Indiana,” he declared, “I could fight and whip any army in the world.”

After fighting at Second Bull Run and then Ox Hill (where Kearny was killed), the 20th was assigned during the subsequent Antietam Campaign to the defenses of Washington, D.C., but returned to the Army of the Potomac before the Battle of Fredericksburg. On December 13, 1862—a day described by Captain Gilbreath as being of “almost September brightness and warmth”—the Hoosiers saved Captain George Randolph’s artillery in the 3rd Corps by bringing up ammunition and manning the pieces after the battery lost infantry support. A grateful Randolph remarked after the war that the 20th was “the best regiment, volunteer or regular, that I had the fortune to serve with….We were always glad to know [they were] near.”

Gilbreath suffered a severe right leg wound during the fighting that day but bravely spurned amputation—somehow surviving. The wound, however, would require corrective surgery in 1875. Despite having limited use of the leg for two years and suffering a permanent limp, he returned to duty in April 1863.

Intense Fighting at Gettysburg

In the spring of 1863, Wheeler was promoted to colonel and given command. John Luther was made lieutenant, becoming Wheeler’s adjutant. During the Chancellorsville Campaign, the 20th helped lead the 3rd Corps’ advance and captured a horde of prisoners of the 23rd Georgia Infantry in Brig. Gen. Alfred Colquitt’s Brigade, part of Lt. Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s Second Corps.

Later, the Hoosiers were involved in a night action and served in the rear guard for the retreat over the Rappahannock River. Brigadier General John Henry Hobart Ward, their brigade commander, praised the regiment’s “coolness and undaunted courage,” noting it “sustained its well-earned reputation gained on the Peninsula.” Wheeler was proud of how his men performed in “one of the most severe [battles]” and confidently wrote home that “western men are the thing. [The army] could do much more if we had…more men from Maine and the west….we are all well and ready for anything that comes along.”

What came along would prove a severe test. The 20th arrived in Gettysburg after dark on July 1, spending a tense night, sleeping with weapons ready, on the Union left on the south end of Cemetery Ridge. On July 2, the regiment was placed in the Rose Woods on Houck’s Ridge with most of Ward’s 2nd Brigade. With the launch of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s attack at 4 p.m., the Hoosiers (along with the 86th New York) soon found themselves hotly engaged with the 3rd Arkansas. The Union troops had initial success, driving back the Southerners and advancing as Ward had directed, only to be ordered back a short time later.

As he had ominously feared, Wheeler was an early casualty, shot from his horse and falling dead at the distinctive boulder across the road from what is now the 20th’s monument. He was quickly buried by the Luther brothers.

The firing was rapid and intense, and when John rejoined the fight using a discarded rifle, he was hit by a spent bullet and left dazed. Describing the action to his family, Albert wrote: “[We] had to fire slower because [the] gun barrels had got so hot…[we] could hardly hold them.”

Ward’s men resisted the Southern attack for more than an hour, but by 5:30 p.m., with Lafayette McLaws’ Georgians having joined the fight, the Confederates grabbed the upper hand. Gilbreath assumed command of the 20th when Lt. Col. William C.L. Taylor was wounded. Ward, aware his men were low on ammunition, ordered the 20th and his nearby regiments to pull back.

Bristling at how the Rebels laughed when the Hoosiers’ flag fell, Gilbreath took satisfaction in that those colors were immediately recovered and that the struggle had been anything but a rout. The 20th, according to the Official Records, “held the position assigned it until the brigade commenced to retire…[and] fell back in good order.”

Per one account, the 20th “moved three hundred yards to the rear where it halted and re-formed its ranks.” Official reports and recollections from the neighboring regiments, as well as the captured/missing numbers for Ward’s entire brigade, confirm that Ward was able to bring his men back in good order from Houck’s Ridge, contrary to the commonly made assumption that the 3rd Corps simply folded and ran when attacked.

On July 3, the 20th was sent to the center of the line for “clean-up” in the wake of Pickett’s Charge, and later was placed on burial duty.

Gettysburg had been a memorable battle for the Hoosiers. Dudley Chase, an Indiana judge who was wounded at the Rose Woods while serving in the 17th U.S. Regulars, later recalled they were “desperately fighting…out of the jaws of death and the gates of hell…” The cost was high. Of 401 men engaged, the 20th had 32 killed, 114 wounded, and 10 captured/missing. Those totals represented 25 percent of Ward’s deaths during the battle, and 20 percent of his total losses.

Despite the bloodshed, the mood of some of the men was buoyant. Writing home, one Hoosier reported 14 casualties in his company alone but threatened the Rebels with a “whailing [sic]” and a “sound thrashing” if the Southerners did not return to Virginia quickly.

Albert Luther boasted to his family that Lee’s men “got a sound whipping” and that “[w]e are ready and anxious to give them another battle.” The subsequent arduous pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia to the Potomac River rendered some of the Hoosiers shoeless, and the pace diminished Albert’s fervor; in fact, he felt “so tired at night I could hardly stand.” The anticipated showdown with Lee’s defeated army would not occur, as the Confederates were back in Virginia by July 14.

Last Left Standing

In August 1863, the 20th was one of the Western regiments handed the grueling task of keeping order in New York City after the July Draft Riots. Although Gilbreath chose to romanticize the famed metropolis (“Most of us had only dreamed of [this] city”), his regiment was unable to let up for even a moment, at one point meeting “with a howling mob” and “fixing bayonets, marched off, driving the crowd before us.”

As the Overland Campaign approached in the spring of 1864, John Luther expressed apprehension and optimism—“all are dreading the heavy campaign that is staring us in the face”—but he also appraised the Army of the Potomac as being never more formidable. The fighting that May and June left him despondent, however: “After the most hard battle ever fought, I am still alive and that is about all…” Expressing both resignation and relief, he wrote from Cold Harbor, Va.: “It seems a miracle that I am here, that it is my luck to be spared so far…”

In the later reorganization of the Army of the Potomac, the men of the 7th, 14th, and 19th Indiana were consolidated into the 20th, which was renamed the “20th Indiana Veteran Volunteer Infantry.” This was another source of pride for the men of the 20th. “No greater compliment could be paid you,” Chase opined at their 1888 reunion.

The other Indiana regiments, all with memorable service, became members of the 20th. The 20th was the Indiana infantry regiment “last left standing” in the Army of the Potomac. Active through the Petersburg and Appomattox campaigns, it fired its final guns on April 9, 1865. Back in Indianapolis, the 20th mustered out in July.

John Wheeler was buried on July 30, 1863, in Crown Point with nearly a thousand mourners in attendance, including both Luther brothers. To this day, the town has not forgotten the colonel, naming a new school in his honor in 2007, with his uniform and murals commemorating the 20th on display.

The Luther brothers survived the war, with John living until 1924 and fortunate to attend Gettysburg’s 50th anniversary reunion in 1913. Albert was not so blessed, dying before his 30th birthday. The two are buried within feet of Wheeler at Maplewood Cemetery.

Gilbreath made a career of the military and died in 1898 while on active duty. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery alongside his wife and daughter. A family heirloom was a handkerchief stained with Lincoln’s blood (his father-in-law was a friend of the slain president).

In 1889, at the ceremony inaugurating construction of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis, the 20th was the only Indiana unit to have its flag placed in the cornerstone—its soldiers “the last men standing” at home, as well.

Charles J. Rebesco, a first-time contributor, writes from Munster, Ind.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

Anyone who explores Civil War–era history should pay close attention to how people at the time understood and used key words. “Freedom” ranks among the most important of such words. Americans of the 21st century almost always address questions relating to freedom within a context of slavery and emancipation. This approach often yields insights regarding mid–19th century people, across racial lines, who found themselves challenged by the war’s life-changing events. Yet such assumptions about how the White population in the free states used “freedom” also can lead us astray. For a broad spectrum of the loyal citizenry of the United States, including almost all Democrats, the word could have conjured images not of ending slavery but of guaranteeing and extending their own liberty and freedom in a nation where, politically and economically, the cards were not stacked irrevocably against common people.

George F. Root’s song The Battle-Cry of Freedom offers an opportunity to explore this phenomenon. Among the most popular compositions for loyal soldiers and civilians, its sheet music sold more than 500,000 copies in the 19th century. Root’s lyrics not only shed light on what mattered to those who sang and listened to them, but they also demonstrate the importance of ascribing contemporary meanings to language deployed by the Civil War generation. “Freedom” is the key word in the song’s title. A reasonable conclusion might be that Root, writing in the summer of 1862, authored a call for White men to enlist and end the practice of human bondage by force of arms. After all, Congress already had outlawed slavery in the District of Columbia and the Federal territories (on April 16 and June 19, 1862, respectively), and discussion of more general emancipation grew increasingly heated inside and outside Congress.

However plausible, such an interpretation fails to account for the origins of the song and its great appeal in the United States. “I heard of President Lincoln’s second call for troops one afternoon while reclining on a lounge in my brother’s house,” Root recalled in his memoirs. “Immediately I started a song in my mind,” he continued, “words and music together: ‘Yes, we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again, / Shouting the battle-cry of freedom!’” Root thought about the piece through the rest of the day and finished it the following morning. “From there the song went into the army,” he remembered with obvious pride, “and the testimony in regard to its use in the camp and on the march, and even on the field of battle, from soldiers and officers, up to generals, and even to the good President himself, made me thankful that if I could not shoulder a musket in defense of my country I could serve her in this way.”

Emancipation almost certainly did not preoccupy Root as he composed what he termed a “rallying song.” Lincoln’s call for the governors of loyal states to supply 300,000 3-year volunteers, dated July 1, 1862, and released to the press the next day, sought to boost volunteering across the United States. National conscription lay many months in the future, as did large-scale recruitment of African Americans, so anything that might help place more White men in uniform during the summer of 1862 would assist the Lincoln administration and the war effort.

For the song’s targeted audience, “Union” provided the hook, with preservation of existing American freedom as one of the obvious benefits of vanquishing the Rebels. The chorus conveyed the principal message: “The Union forever, Hurrah, boys, Hurrah! / Down with the traitor, Up with the star; / While we rally round the flag, boys, / Rally once again, Shouting the battle-cry of Freedom.” Echoing Daniel Webster’s famous call for “Liberty and Union, now and forever,” the chorus supported the idea of a perpetual Union so dear to Lincoln and countless others.

The second verse tied prospective volunteers to White men who had enlisted earlier and suffered casualties that left military units shorthanded: “We are springing to the call / Of our brothers gone before, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom; / And we’ll fill our vacant ranks / With a million free men more, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.”

The third verse invited all classes of men to step forward with a promise of rights within the Union: “We will welcome to our numbers / The loyal, true, and brave, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom, / And although he may be poor, / Not a man shall be a slave, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.” The last verse spoke to a national effort uniting geographical sections: “So we’re springing to the call / From the East and from the West, / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom, / And we’ll hurl the rebel crew / From the land we love the best, / Shouting the battle cry of freedom.”

Root’s lyrics brilliantly engaged the pool of military-age White men in the loyal states—“free men” who, by taking up arms, would guarantee continued “freedom” and prevent their domination by southern slaveholders. These words appealed on the basis of a free labor vision of the American nation with a Constitution and representative form of government designed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” Many in the North believed that slaveholding oligarchs denied such a path, and thus real freedom, to non-slaveholding White people in the South, and that the Slave Power’s inordinate influence in the antebellum federal government had presented a continuing obstacle to greater expansion of political and economic opportunity.

Root translated Webster’s soaring rhetoric into a paean to Union with an infectious melody and well-crafted lyrics that spread through army camps and patriotic gatherings on the civilian front. As the war progressed, emancipation joined restoring the Union as a stated national goal, and Black men entered the army in significant numbers. Those striking changes meant that Root’s memorable song could summon thoughts of both preserving freedom long enjoyed by White Americans and expanding freedom to millions of African Americans who had suffered under the tyranny of slavery.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Civil War Times magazine.

When 21-year-old Arthur McKinstry left Chautauqua County, N.Y., in early June 1861 to join the Excelsior Brigade being raised by then-Colonel Daniel Sickles, he was better prepared to write than fight. Upon reaching the unit’s camp of instruction on Staten Island, Arthur wrote to his mother revealing that his Uncle Willard had given him “a portable ink stand and all sorts of stationery and writing materials,” to take along, “in order…I might keep him posted as to our movements.”

His uncle had an ulterior motive, however. Willard, and Arthur’s uncle Winthrop, owned and operated the Fredonia Censor, a local weekly newspaper. They intended to publish Arthur’s letters. What better way to enlighten and attract new readers?

Rick Barram, a retired history teacher, brings Arthur’s Censor letters—preserved at the Darwin R. Barker Historical Museum in Fredonia, N.Y.—“into the light,” and also includes a second collection of letters—from Mississippi State University—that Arthur wrote to his mother and other relatives. Dear Uncles presents these letters “in their entirety…,” Barram notes, “to understand the full scope of Arthur’s experiences.”

Arthur’s letters became a staple of the Censor’s war coverage, appearing in a column headed Dear Uncles.

Nearly six dozen additional “letters, reports, and letters not written by Arthur” also appear in Dear Uncles. They pop up as sidebars throughout the book. Barram titles these supplements “Other Voices,” intended “to provide context and otherwise illuminate Arthur’s writings and experiences.”

Arthur was uniquely prepared for his role as correspondent. “Articulate and well read,” at age 15 he entered the U.S. Naval Academy in the fall of 1854. He quickly squandered his time there, however. Amassing demerits for misconduct, and ranking near the bottom of his class academically, Arthur was judged “unfit” and dismissed.

Perhaps as atonement for his failures at Annapolis, Arthur was early to answer the call to arms when Civil War flared. Mustered into the 3rd Regiment of the Excelsior Brigade, later designated the 72nd New York Infantry, the regiment patrolled the Lower Potomac River by the fall of 1861.

Arthur’s letters mirror the youngster’s experiences in the first flush of soldiering. He frequently recounts the relentless grind of drilling and picket duty. He often comments on the weather, and more often about the food. “[T]he average of our men do not get enough to satisfy hunger…,” he writes facetiously. “On the whole, we do not fare quite as well as State prison convicts…”

Arthur occasionally spices his writing with his opinions about camp mates and officers. “Our regiment is a choice one,” he claims, “but over on the right of camp are the ‘roughs’ from the city. They are a rascally set and we keep a constant guard which effectually prevents thefts.”

Even Dan Sickles, now a brigadier, fails to escape a double-edged assessment. He “displayed great energy and patriotism in the raising and equipment of the brigade,” writes Arthur. “He has governed it however in a civilian manner…evidently incompetent to personally maneuver the brigade.”

Arthur grew to relish his journalist role. “I find that it is a very nice thing to be the correspondent of the Censor for I notice that the officers had rather have a good word there rather than a bad one,” he wrote. “Take it all together I am about as well off as a private can be.”

His writing would benefit his comrades from time to time. At their urging “to state the facts,” Arthur exposed a sutler who “practices a system of extortion upon the soldiers of the Brigade.”

Little more than a month later, Arthur was able to report, “We have a new sutler here and he is more reasonable than the old.”

Arthur was a keen observer. Little escaped his notice. He could be prescient, writing in December 1861: “I really think, from the present appearance of things, that this war will eventually prove the death blow of Slavery.”

He also wrote with prescience to the Censor on May 4, 1862, beginning his letter, “My time is extremely short…” Hours later, Arthur’s pen was stilled forever when he was killed at the Battle of Williamsburg, “shot through the leg and groin.”  

Arthur was pleased when an officer called him a “writing man.” But even Arthur cautioned his readers, “It would be tedious to tell of all the shifts we soldiers make…” This can be a cautionary tale for readers of Dear Uncles.

There is much here that will appeal to readers; at times perhaps too much. For example, by alternating between verbatim letters Arthur wrote to his uncles, with letters he wrote to his mother and others, typically at or near the same time, his comments are often repeated and duplicated.

To this mix Barram embeds two categories of notes throughout the text. These are meant to define or explain “foreign words” and other references that Arthur is prone to use. Such notes appear repeatedly, and impart a choppiness to the flow of narrative.

In the final chapter, and a concise epilogue, Barram provides a brief history of the Excelsior Brigade with interesting information about “the fate of Arthur’s mates.” Numerous photographs, maps, and illustrations further enhance the text.

Dear Uncles offers a bounty of information particularly to students of the Excelsior Brigade. The book also provides a unique glimpse of the often-overlooked actions along the Lower Potomac River early in the war.

“[R]eaders of the Fredonia Censor,” writes Barram, “were able to follow the adventures of their Chautauqua County boys thanks to Arthur McKinstry and his uncles.” Readers of Dear Uncles are now able to follow Arthur McKinstry’s tales thanks to the efforts of Rick Barram.

Dear Uncles

The Civil War Letters of Arthur McKinstry, A Soldier in the Excelsior Brigade

Edited by Rick Barram, Excelsior, 2023

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When one hears the name of a Civil War general named Bee, the first reaction for most is the Confederate commander from South Carolina who shouted to his men at the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861: “Look men, there stands Jackson like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians!” That Bee was Barnard Elliott Bee Jr., who would be mortally wounded on Henry Hill shortly after uttering that immortal cheer.

But Barnard Bee had a younger brother who also served in the Confederate Army during the war, Brig. Gen. Hamilton P. Bee.

“Ham” had moved with his parents as a teenager to Texas. He later leveraged his father’s political standing in the Texas government to get a spot as a brigadier general of Texas Militia in a 10-county area along the coast. In March 1862, he was elevated to the same rank in the Confederate Army.

In the early stages of the 1864 Red River Campaign, Bee and a large cavalry force were sent to fight in Louisiana. Generals Richard Taylor and Edmund Kirby Smith met at Bee’s campfire the night after the Confederate victory at Mansfield, La., on April 8. The next day, Bee was injured leading a charge at Pleasant Hill.

Although Bee was generally complimented for his personal bravery, he apparently lacked a capacity for military leadership. His ultimate failure came on April 23, 1864, when he pulled his men out of position at Monett’s Ferry, allowing the Federals to escape unchallenged to Alexandria, La.

Taylor soon dismissed him from service. According to one subordinate, Bee was “the poorest excuse for a Gen that I ever saw.”

One of the most iconic paintings to depict the horrors of war is Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808, which depicts an incident during the Peninsular War against Napoleon in Spain.The nighttime scene of a group of Spanish civilians facing execution by a French firing squad was remarkable for its time, being utterly devoid of the patriotic glorification of war that characterized most contemporary war art. Goya based the painting on reprisals the French army carried out against citizens of Madrid in the wake of the Dos de Mayo Uprising against Napoleon’s occupation forces.

When French troops were attacked by supporters of the deposed Spanish royal family, the French commander Marshal Joachim Murat posted broadsides around the city proclaiming: “The population of Madrid, led astray, has given itself to revolt and murder. French blood has flowed. It demands vengeance. All those arrested in the uprising, arms in hand, will be shot.” Because “arms in hand” was interpreted to mean any person found with scissors, pocketknives, or shears, numerous innocent civilians were summarily shot without trial in the roundups that the French carried out in reprisal after the uprising. As many as 700 Spanish citizens were killed in the revolt and its aftermath.

Vengeance in War

Military reprisals against civilian populations have occurred throughout thousands of years of recorded history. Genghis Khan’s Mongols are said to have massacred the entire population of the Persian city of Nishapur in 1221 in reprisal for the killing of the Khan’s son-in-law during the siege. The death toll, according to contemporary chroniclers, may have been more than 1.5 million men, women, and children.

During the Peasants’ Revolt against Egyptian conscription policies in Palestine in 1834, Egyptian troops committed mass rapes and killed nearly 500 civilians when they captured the town of Hebron in their campaign to put down the uprising. When imperial Qing forces recaptured Guangdong province during the Taiping Rebellion in 1853, they massacred nearly 30,000 civilians a day. According to some histories, the total death toll from unrestrained reprisals in that province alone amounted to approximately a million people.

After the Prussian army invaded France during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, territory under Prussian occupation quickly felt the harsh hand of military rule, and reprisals against the local population were part of the Germanic policy of military domination. When the regular formations of the French army went down in defeat, local citizen militias organized as francs-tireurs initiated a low-intensity guerrilla war against Prussian forces. In retaliation, the Prussians not only summarily executed any captured francs-tireurs, but also rounded up and executed numbers of civilians unfortunate enough to reside in the vicinity of those attacks.

20th Century Conflicts

With this experience in mind, at the onset of the First World War the German army was predisposed to harsh treatment of civilians in its area of operations. In 1914, German infantry burned the Belgian town of Leuven and shot 250 civilians of all ages in retaliation for attacks on German soldiers. Hundreds more Belgian citizens in the towns of Dinant, Tamines, Aarschot, and Andenne were killed in of the reprisals.

In military history of the 20th century, Nazi reprisal operations against civilians during the Second World War are frequently cited as extreme examples of reprisal as a war crime, to the point that the very word “reprisal” is almost inextricably linked to the German military in that conflict. However, it remains an undeniable fact that even nations usually regarded as being outspoken champions of lawful warfare have stubbornly resisted the idea of completely giving up the option of carrying out reprisals, even if they did not often resort to such action in practice.

Reprisal was long regarded as an indispensable weapon in the arsenal of a nation’s ability to wage and win wars; near universal condemnation of military reprisals as a legitimate tactic is a relatively recent development in international laws of war. Looking back at Nazi war crimes during the Second World War, it is important to distinguish between the types of war crimes. The Nazi effort to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population was perhaps the most horrific example of state-sponsored genocide. On the other hand, Nazi policies such as the Commissar Order of June 6, 1941, and the Commando Order issued a year later on Oct. 18, 1942, both ordered the summary execution of all enemy combatants of certain specific type and were criminal under international laws of war because they were illegal orders. When it came to reprisals, the German military took a longstanding concept of warfare accepted by most nations and transformed it into something that far transgressed the original idea of mutual restraint articulated in extant laws of war. The way in which German forces conducted military reprisals graphically illustrate the danger that faced any nation that clung to the idea that reprisal was a legitimate tactic of war.

Defining War Crimes

The reasons why reprisals continued to be defended in laws of war as long as they did, even if most nations were careful to describe them as a measure of last resort, was because they were believed to be necessary in two particular tactical situations: to respond to an enemy’s violation of the laws of war, a response in kind in order to force one’s foe back into lawful belligerency; and to retaliate against an elusive, irregular enemy who could not otherwise be engaged by conventional means of combat.       

These were exactly the arguments made in both American and British concepts of laws of war well into the 20th century. As the American Rules of Land Warfare on the eve of the Second World War stated “…commanding officers must assume responsibility for retaliative measures when an unscrupulous enemy leaves no other recourse against the repetition of barbarous outrages.” The British Manual of Military Law of the same era declared that reprisals “are by custom admissible as an indispensable means of securing legitimate warfare.”

What neither code stipulated, however, was any measure of proportionate response. As the German military demonstrated all too often between 1939 and 1945, any doctrine that allowed reprisal without explicitly linking its implementation to limited, proportionate response was a recipe for the worst kinds of atrocity. In 1948 the United Nations War Crimes Commission suggested that one reason why the Second World War saw such flagrant violations of previously existing laws of war was perhaps because “the institution of reprisals which, though designed to ensure the observance of rules of war, have systematically been used as a convenient cloak for disregarding the laws of war…” That accurately described the German use of reprisals during the Second World War. Almost immediately from the beginning of Nazi occupation of conquered territories during the war, it was clear that reasonable restraint and proportionate response would be completely ignored. In German reprisal operations, regardless of whether the action was carried out by the SS or Wehrmacht units, restraint was never in evidence.

When French Resistance operatives assassinated a German naval cadet in Paris in 1941, Nazi occupational authorities put up posters all over the city declaring an official policy stating that 10 French citizens would be executed for every German soldier killed. Even that arbitrary limit was meaningless, because when a senior German officer was killed a short time later, the Germans seized 50 French civilians at random and shot them all, warning that if the assassins were not identified another 50 Frenchmen would be executed. When the deadline passed, the Germans shot another 50 civilians. In that instance, regardless of the stated reprisal policy of ten to one, the ratio of lives destroyed was 100 to one, each an innocent civilian who had no connection to the act that precipitated the reprisal.

Reprisal on the notional scale of 10 to one occurred in other Third Reich reprisals. The same calculation was used after a partisan bomb in Rome on March 23, 1944 killed thirty-two people, most of them members of the SS Police Regiment Bozen. The local German commander, Luftwaffe Generalmajor Kurt Mälzer, ordered that 330 Italians were to be executed in reprisal for the attack, a number that represented 10 victims for every person killed in the bombing (even though five people killed in the incident were themselves Italian civilians). The day after the partisan attack, in an incident remembered as the Ardeatine Massacre, 335 Italian citizens were shot in groups of five by SS officers in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome. The youngest victim was 15; the oldest was 74. The disparity between Mälzer’s chosen number and the additional five people murdered in the operation was because when five prisoners in excess of the expected count were mistakenly delivered to the massacre site, the Germans simply shot them along with the others.

The International Military Tribunal

In an earlier incident that underscored the degree to which the German military could disregard even notional concepts of proportionality, the Germans perpetrated a more savage act of reprisal at Kragujevac, Serbia, in October 1941. After a partisan attack killed 10 German soldiers and wounded 26 others, soldiers of the 717th Infantry Division summarily shot 300 random civilians. Over the following five days a district-wide retaliation resulted in the executions of another 1,755 people, including 19 women. This brutality was possibly prompted by the issuance of the “Communist Armed Resistance Movements in the Occupied Areas” decree, signed a month earlier by Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, who was later tried for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. That order specified that on the Eastern Front, 100 hostages were to be shot for every German soldier killed and 50 were to be shot for every soldier wounded. The resulting Kragujevac massacre caused the deaths of nearly 2,800 Serbs, Macedonians, Slovenes, Romani, Jews, and Muslims. When the initial roundup of hostages did not turn up enough adult males, 144 high school students were seized and shot. German troops had carried out reprisals in earlier wars, but never occured on such a homicidal scale as under the Nazi regime. After 1914 the German word “Schrecklichkeit,” which can be understood as “terror,” entered the lexicon to describe these actions against civilians. The massacres of Lidice in Czechoslovakia, Oradour-sur-Glane and Maillé in France, Wola in Poland, and Sant’Anna di Stazzema in Italy, are only five on a long list of atrocities the Nazis carried out in the name of military reprisals.

The International Military Tribunal and other war crimes tribunals that took place following the Second World War represented a seismic shift in how reprisals were considered under international laws of war. Reprisal continued as an option in lawful warfare, but in much more carefully delineated form. As the Practical Guide to Humanitarian Law explains, “It is important to distinguish between reprisals, acts of revenge, and retaliation. Acts of revenge are never authorized under international law, while retaliation and reprisals are foreseen by humanitarian law.”

The essential distinction in that statement is that reprisals against civilians are now considered to be in the nature of revenge, and therefore never legal. “In times of conflict,” as current legal opinion holds, “reprisals are considered legal under certain conditions: they must be carried out in response to a previous attack, they must be proportionate to that attack, and they must be aimed only at combatants and military objectives.” Limited reprisals against soldiers, however, still remain in the realm of extreme possibility.

The U.S. Civil War

This is not a new idea. During the American Civil War, when the Confederate States threatened to not treat captured Union soldiers as legitimate combatants if they happened to be Black men, the United States issued the Retaliation Order of 1863. “The government of the United States will give the same protection to all its soldiers, and if the enemy shall sell or enslave anyone because of his color, the offense shall be punished by retaliation upon the enemy’s prisoners in our possession,” the Order stated. “It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works and continued at such labor until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war.” The fact that the Retaliation Order specifically provided for reprisals against enemy prisoners, rather than enemy soldiers on the field of combat, is the only part of that order that would violate modern restrictions on military-vs.-military reprisals.

The U.S. Civil War was also the conflict during which the German American jurist Franz Lieber transformed American military law with his revolutionary work General Order 100. As Article 27 of Lieber’s Code stated, “The law of war can no more wholly dispense with retaliation than can the law of nations, of which it is a branch. Yet civilized nations acknowledge retaliation as the sternest feature of war. A reckless enemy often leaves to his opponent no other means of securing himself against the repetition of barbarous outrage.” The point of Lieber’s position was that retaliation was sometimes necessary to prevent greater violations of lawful warfare, but also that careful restraint was indispensable. “Unnecessary or revengeful destruction of life is not lawful,” Article 68 stated, a declaration that 80 years later could have been applied to Nazi practices of military reprisals. In the interim, the U.S. Army used General Order 100 to justify reprisals on the Island of Samar during the Philippine-American War. Brig. Gen. Jacob Smith ordered his troops to “kill everyone over the age of ten [and make the island] a howling wilderness.”  

Civilians and International Laws

A detailed examination of military history shows that reprisals against civilians always exacerbates conflict and heightens resistance rather than eliminating it. The German military never managed to stamp out resistance to its occupation forces during WWII, no matter how savage the reprisals it unleashed against civilian populations. Reprisals also present the risk of an unending cycle of violence as each opposing side responds to the hostile acts. In the words of the U.S. Naval Handbook, “there is always a risk that [reprisal] will trigger retaliatory escalation (counter-reprisals) by the enemy. The United States has historically been reluctant to resort to reprisal for just this reason.”  

Of course, reluctance to engage in an act is not nearly the same thing as an outright policy prohibiting it. As the International Committee of the Red Cross observes, although “favour of a specific ban on the use of reprisals against all civilians is widespread and representative, it is not yet uniform.” Even today, with all of the advances in international conventions on lawful warfare, the United States and Great Britain still have not unreservedly committed themselves to a total ban on the use of reprisals in war.   

The United States “has indicated on several occasions that it does not accept such a total ban, even though it voted in favour of Article 51 of Additional Protocol I and ratified Protocol II to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons without making a reservation to the prohibition on reprisals against civilians contained therein.” Great Britain, for its part, “made a reservation to Article 51 which reproduces a list of stringent conditions for resorting to reprisals against an adversary’s civilians.” Both nations have preferred to hedge their bets and retain the option of a military tactic they might use only in the extreme but are not willing to completely forego.

Current conventions on international laws of war have made great strides in restricting the use of reprisals in war but have never succeeded in eliminating it in practice. It is doubtful that the practice will ever completely disappear from the world’s battlefields, though it is to be hoped that such actions will increasingly be regarded as war crimes rather than legitimate combat.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Passengers riding the Orange & Alexandria Railroad in early 1864 witnessed a bleak landscape disfigured by nearly three years of war. “Dilapidated, fenceless, and trodden with War Virginia is,” Walt Whitman recorded on a trip from Washington, D.C., to Culpeper, Va., that February. “Virginia wears an air of gloom and desolation; no fences, no homes—nothing but the debris of destroyed property and continuous camps of soldiers,” seconded a U.S. Christian Commission representative. “There was nothing,” opined a newspaper correspondent, “absolutely nothing but the abomination of desolation.”

The Union Army of the Potomac’s winter camps surrounding Culpeper depended on the railroad for provisions, munitions, and forage. Keeping the army supplied required 40 locomotives running daily along the 70-mile stretch of tracks that were vulnerable to floods, prone to accidents, and often attacked by Confederate cavalry raiders. Yet such was the efficiency of the U.S. Military Rail Road’s management that when 22 miles had been destroyed by retreating Confederates the previous fall, the line was restored within days, and the high bridge over the Rappahannock River was rebuilt in 19 hours.

On March 10, a special train comprised of a locomotive and two cars chugged its way south. Aboard the first car was a detachment of soldiers, but riding in the other was the United States’ new general-in-chief, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, and a small party that included staff officers, his son Fred, and his principal political sponsor, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne. Grant had formally received his promotion the day before from President Abraham Lincoln in a ceremony attended by the Cabinet. There was awkwardness—Grant was unfamiliar with Washington and nearly all its officials, including Lincoln, whom he had only just met, and the general-in-chief was a stranger to them. More discomfiture lay ahead at his destination—the winter camps of the U.S. Army of the Potomac.

No one recorded details of that six-hour trip aboard a vulnerable train traversing a terrain rendered even sadder by heavy, cold rain, but the trip’s significance could hardly have been lost on Grant. The man who less than three years before had worked as a clerk in his father’s dry goods store in Galena, Ill., now commanded more than 800,000 soldiers in 19 departments in all Union states and several in the Confederacy.

Over the last two years, Grant had won victories at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga and demonstrated tenacity, audacity, ingenuity, and adroitness. But his character was what most impressed his closest friend, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, who had recently told him that he was “as unselfish, kind-hearted and as honest as a man should be.” Sherman added that Grant’s most outstanding quality was his “simple faith in success you have always manifested, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in a Savior.”

Grant would call on those strengths as he faced a more complex challenge than any he had yet faced. He knew he would be directing armies in a year that would see a wartime presidential election that could itself determine the war’s outcome. The new general-in-chief also recognized that winning victories in the coming campaigns would be key to winning at the polls in November.

Rolling Toward Brandy Station

Grant had been promoted to provide a more vigorous prosecution of the war. That Grant, on his first full day as general-in-chief, left Washington to meet the principals of the Army of the Potomac underscored how closely was its success tied to the Union cause. Moreover, Grant’s plans had changed. Whereas he had intended to exercise his new overall command while headquartered in the West, he now understood that he needed to be near Washington to shield the Army of the Potomac from political intrigue and that Lincoln specifically intended that he provide close command oversight. He knew he would soon deliver a mixed message to the army’s leadership.

Grant fully recognized the risks his promotion posed. After his victory at Vicksburg, newspapers had reported that Grant would replace Maj. Gen. George G. Meade as the Army of the Potomac’s commander. The report first appeared in a little-known New York paper, the Express, and might have originated with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. In addition, some, perhaps Congressman Washburne among them, advocated Grant transporting his army to the Eastern Theater and superseding Meade. Talking Stanton out of it was then General-in-Chief Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, Grant’s departmental commander earlier in the war, and Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, who had observed Grant at Vicksburg.

Once it became clear he would not be transferred, Grant expressed relief. It was “a matter of no small importance,” he wrote Washburne, that the change not take place. In that letter and in an earlier missive to Dana, Grant explained the reassignment “could do no possible good.” Noting that the Army of the Potomac was led by “able officers who have been brought up with that army,” the general anticipated that they would resent having an outsider placed over them. Commanding the Army of the Potomac, he continued, meant, “I would have all to learn.”

Even in mid-February 1864, with his promotion to general-in-chief all but certain, Grant remained reluctant, telling a West Point classmate that he was “thankful” that he had not been transferred. Commenting to his wife, Julia, that same week, the general intimated that were he to receive the top command, he would not be confined to Washington. Grant mused they might see more of each other as he would be traveling regularly between his Western headquarters and the Eastern Theater and could stop to see her wherever she elected to live.

But now Grant was about to begin his acquaintance with the most prominent, and unlucky, of U.S. armies. The Army of Potomac was quite unlike the usually victorious forces Grant had led in the West. Still looming over the army that winter was the shadow of its creator, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. Though dismissed 17 months before, McClellan’s influence endured, most notably among the army’s senior generals, nearly all of whom had received their first promotions while under McClellan’s command. To many of these men, McClellan bequeathed his caution and lack of urgency that hampered its operations. He also left an army culture of political engagement with Washington that undermined its effectiveness. Grant’s suspicions were correct—he was bringing a new style, and he and those he brought with him would be regarded as outsiders.

Since McClellan’s dismissal, three men had commanded the army—Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and Meade. Burnside and Hooker were dismissed for their battlefield and command failures and, partly, because their subordinates had lost faith in their leadership. The army had won but one clear-cut victory, and it on the home ground of Gettysburg, and had repeatedly been manhandled by the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia led by General Robert E. Lee.

For his part, Meade had been so criticized after his victory at Gettysburg that he had repeatedly offered to resign. Five days before Grant arrived, Meade had testified before Congress refuting false allegations made by several generals and an array of political opponents who sought to have him replaced. His hold on command was tenuous, and Meade would not have been surprised if Grant was bringing word that he would be sacked.In short, Grant was about to engage an army that was, in the words of Bruce Catton, “badly clique-ridden, obsessed by the memory of the departed McClellan, so deeply impressed by Lee’s superior abilities that its talk at times almost had a defeatist quality.”

At 3 p.m., Grant’s train pulled into rain-soaked Brandy Station, Va., the army’s principal supply depot, described as a “vast domain of smoke, guns, and mud-stained soldiers.” There, on the platform surrounded by barrels of beef piled high around the tracks, were two of the army’s principal staff officers, chief of staff Maj. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys, and quartermaster Brig. Gen. Rufus Ingalls. Humphreys was substituting for Meade, his “slightly indisposed” superior, while Ingalls was presumably along to greet his old friend and West Point roommate. Meade’s absence might have appeared to a more protocol-conscious general like a slight, but there is no record of Grant taking offense.

After the train rolled to a stop, guards disembarked from the first car while officers and civilians detrained from the second. Among them was Grant. The only thing remarkable about him, thought Dr. E.W. Locke, was that he was smoking. “His dress is very plain, eyes half closed, he takes little or no notice of anything,” Locke continued, observing that a “very few officers, and as many men, came, took a hasty glance, and have now gone back to their quarters, most of them shaking their heads, and some saying, ‘Big thing.’”

The party rode a four-horse spring wagon to Meade’s headquarters three miles away, where they were greeted by the camp guard consisting of details from four regiments. One of the army’s finest bands struck up “Hail to the Chief” and other tunes, but rain prevented a more elaborate ceremony, which was just as well. The new general-in-chief never learned how to make an entrance, and if he took note of the welcome, no one noticed. Worse, his hosts could not have known that their new commander was tone-deaf and sometimes found the sound of music excruciating. Grant once confessed—or joked, we know not which—he knew but two tunes, one that was “Yankee Doodle” and one that was not.

Meade, clad in a common soldier’s jacket, opened his tent door to greet his new chief. Exactly what occurred during that meeting is muddled. Most historians have accepted Grant’s account in his Memoirs that Meade offered to step aside in favor of someone Grant knew better, suggesting specifically Sherman. Grant wrote that he was so impressed by Meade’s selflessness that he immediately assured Meade that he had “no thought of substituting anyone for him.” Meade’s more immediate account, written the evening of the meeting, is cryptic, mentioning only that Grant had been “very civil, and said nothing about superseding me.”

But Grant had considered sacking Meade. One of Grant’s aides recorded in his diary on March 10 that Grant had considered replacing Meade with Maj. Gen. William F. “Baldy” Smith, who had impressed the new general-in-chief in Chattanooga, but that there was now to be “no change.” Many published rumors had predicted that Meade would be fired, mentioning several different generals, and Smith was listed as among the leading candidates. Meade, who knew and disliked Smith from their time serving together earlier in the war, could not have been comforted by knowing that Smith had accompanied Grant on his visit to the army.

In Smith’s telling, Grant had found that the War Department preferred to keep Meade in command and that he accompanied Grant to Brandy Station only at the latter’s insistence. He discreetly spent the night not with Grant’s entourage but with old Army friends. Grant had lobbied for Smith’s promotion to major general and would later assign him to lead a corps in the Army of the James.

Grant recalled that there was “prejudice” against Smith in the Senate and that only after he persisted had the promotion gone through. As he ruefully recorded in his Memoirs, however, “I was not long in finding out that the objections to Smith’s promotion were well founded.” Meade continued to fret; as late as March 17, he was still worried that Smith would take his place.

First Impressions

Just when and how Grant decided to retain Meade is elusive. Grant was apparently surprised to learn in their initial meetings that Lincoln and Stanton were not looking for a change. Meade hailed from a politically important state, Pennsylvania, and was the only army commander who had bested Lee, making him difficult to fire.

Given the infighting that had raged for months among many in the Army of the Potomac, the administration must have noted that most Army generals continued to support Meade. Moreover, Grant knew he was an outsider in an army that did not treat outsiders well, and replacing Meade would only compound that problem. Finally, both Lincoln and Grant recognized that much of the effort to oust Meade came from those whose bad-faith motives ought not to be rewarded.

Because Meade’s frequent letters to his wife survive, we know much about his frame of mind during the months preceding Grant’s arrival. Replying to his wife’s late-1863 question, Meade wrote that he knew Grant slightly from the Mexican War, where he was considered a “clever young officer, but nothing extraordinary.” Judging from the then-common usage of the adjective “clever,” the army commander apparently thought of Grant as amiable or well-mannered rather than intelligent.

After explaining that Grant had been compelled to resign his commission because of his “irregular habits”—a reference to Grant’s drinking—he listed Grant’s strength as his energy and “great tenacity of purpose.” Still, he could not resist observing that there was little basis for comparison between the U.S. armies in the East with those in the West, claiming that his army had faced an adversary that was better led and composed of better troops.

Meade followed up his brief March 10 letter four days later. In that missive, Meade gave a longer description, saying he was “much pleased with General Grant,” and that he had shown “much more capacity and character than I had expected.” He told his wife that he had offered to step aside as army commander if Grant wished to replace him with a general he knew better. Meade related that Grant replied with a “complimentary speech,” and disavowed any intention to replace him. Then Grant delivered the less welcome news: He intended to accompany the army during the spring campaign.

“So that you may look now for the Army of the Potomac putting laurels on the brows of another rather than your husband,” Meade concluded, a strikingly prescient prediction. Meade returned to his impression of Grant in a March 16 letter, saying that he was “most agreeably disappointed in his evidence of mind and character. You may rest assured he is not an ordinary man.”

If Meade’s words are condescending, hinting at being pleasantly surprised by Grant’s abilities, that view was shared by top subordinates. “Agreeably disappointed,” although a curious phrase, seems to have reflected a consensus. The army’s senior corps commander, Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, wrote to his sister that he had “spent an evening with [Grant], and was most agreeably disappointed, both in his personal appearance and his straightforward, common-sense view of matters.”

Despite news that Grant might command the army directly, Sedgwick noted, “[G]ood feeling seemed to exist between him and General Meade.” General Humphreys agreed, telling his wife in a March 10 letter that he was “agreeably disappointed in Genl. Grant’s appearance,” describing the new general-in-chief as having “an intellectual face and head which at the same time expresses a good deal of determination.”

Striking a discordant note was Maj. Gen. Gouverneur Warren. Grant, he said, “seems much more vivacious than I supposed and did not look at me with any apparent eye to discerning my qualities in my face.” Warren perhaps did not mean it this way, but he seemed to fault Grant for failing to perceive his brilliance, an early sign of a personal conflict to come.

The weather having not improved, Grant abandoned plans to visit the various corps, and returned to Washington on March 11. He spent much of that afternoon conferring with Halleck, now his Washington-based chief of staff, and then with Lincoln and Stanton. When Grant said he intended to depart for Nashville that evening, Lincoln implored him to stay for dinner at the White House. Grant declined, citing the urgency of returning to the West, adding that he had “enough of the show business.” Besides, he added, “a dinner to me means a million dollars a day lost to the country.” Lincoln ruefully told the gathering of senior generals and Cabinet officials arriving for dinner that Grant had to leave unexpectedly, and therefore, the evening was “the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out.”

Grant had earlier promised to stay the night, so there was something precipitous in Grant’s immediate departure for the West. It may be that after a stressful 48 hours, and now knowing he would soon return to the Army of the Potomac’s camps, Grant urgently wished to see familiar surroundings and subordinates. Ahead, he now knew, lay a complex relocation for his staff and family and the transfer of his departmental command to Sherman. He now had a firmer sense of how much there was yet to learn and do.

Nevertheless, he had achieved a favorable first impression, demonstrating that he was a quick study who had quietly impressed strangers with his intelligence, determination, humility, common sense, and what Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells noted was a “latent power.” In adjusting to Lincoln’s preferences to base his command in the East and accompany the Army of the Potomac still led by Meade, Grant showed a quick willingness to follow without complaint his civilian superior’s priorities. That augured well for their future partnership.

Official Washington seemed not to mind that Grant’s visit was brief, with several observing approvingly that Grant was “all business.” Still, as the train chugged away, Grant, again alone with his thoughts and cigars, could not know that he had taken his first sure steps on a momentous road that would, less than 400 days later, end in a stillness at Appomattox.

William W. Bergen, an independent historian based in Charlottesville, Va., has had essays published in the University of North Carolina’s Military Campaigns of the Civil War series. He also has worked as a paid guide at Monticello.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

On the first page of Conflict of Command, George Rable posits, “People have largely made up their mind about George McClellan—and not in the general’s favor; nor do they seem amenable to rethinking their position.” He then spends 336 pages essentially proving the point. Uninterested in “refighting the military campaigns,” he instead sets out to examine the relationship between Lincoln and his ill-starred general.

The two men, both ambitious, shared a deep commitment to the Union’s preservation and possessed different, but potentially complementary abilities. An adept politician, Lincoln lacked the military know-how of McClellan, who contrariwise proved to be consistently obtuse politically. Although the two men met 57 times over a six-month period early in the war, their potential for an advantageous partnership went unrealized.

On one hand, that failure rested on fundamental strategic disagreements. McClellan advocated one big, meticulously planned campaign to win the war with overwhelming force—hence his Peninsula Campaign of 1862. He opposed emancipation and confiscation, and proved unwilling to spend the number of lives ultimately paid for Union success. Lincoln, pressured by the Radicals for quick military successes, was ever-conscious of the political costs of a general he and many others came to see as far too cautious and secretive.

But the two men, wary and reticent with one another, also failed to connect on a personal level. The well-born McClellan’s frequent excoriations of Lincoln as an uneducated rube in his letters to his wife reveal a deep disdain for his commander-in-chief, as did his frequent refusal to share his military thinking. Lincoln, for his part, was often indecisive, especially early in the war, and nettled the general with his often-unannounced visits to discuss strategy.

But McClellan did some things well. Adept at organizing the Army of the Potomac, he endeared himself to his troops by displaying genuine concern for their well-being. He also insisted on humane treatment for civilians entrapped by the war. Furthermore, Rable notes, whatever his shortcomings, “The replacements for McClellan as both general in chief and commander of the Army of the Potomac proved less than satisfactory.”

The general’s greatest moment may have been the manner in which he accepted Lincoln’s decision in November 1862 to replace him with a reluctant Ambrose Burnside. Rather than accede to credible talk among his junior officers of marching on Washington to force his restoration to command, McClellan quashed such plans and withdrew, amid considerable fanfare, never again to lead Union troops.

Perhaps one of his contemporaries best understood why a man of such promise came to be seen as a failure. “The critics of McClellan do not consider this vast and cruel responsibility,” observed former President Ulysses S. Grant in 1878. “McClellan was a young man when this devolved upon him, and if he did not succeed, it was because the conditions of success were so trying. If McClellan had gone into the war as Sherman, Thomas, or Meade, had fought his way along and up, I have no reason to suppose that he would not have won as high a distinction as any of us.”

Conflict of Command

George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War

By George C. Rable, LSU Press, 2023

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“[Robert E. Lee Jr.] is off with Jackson & I hope will catch Pope & his cousin Louis Marshall,” General Robert E. Lee wrote to his daughter Mildred on July 28, 1862, not long after Maj. Gen. John Pope had been given command of the Union Army of Virginia. Marshall was his nephew, the son of Lee’s older sister, Anne. “I could forgive the latter for fighting against us, if he had not joined such a miscreant as Pope.” (Lee would send a similarly worded letter to his wife, Mary, asking that she tell their son to “bring in his cousin” the next time she wrote him.)

Born in Virginia in 1827, Louis Henry Marshall followed the path of his famed uncle in attending the U.S. Military Academy. Commissioned a second lieutenant with the 3rd U.S. Infantry after graduating in 1849, he served on the frontier, and by 1860 was a captain in the 10th U.S. Infantry. While his uncle, cousins, and other family members in the extended Lee family chose to side with the South, Marshall put his country before kin.

In February 1862, he was appointed an acting aide-de-camp on General Pope’s staff. Brigadier General David S. Stanley recalled that Pope, then commander of the Army of the Mississippi, was “a very witty man and often turned the laugh on his staff officers and others.” He had once poked fun at Marshall’s “demotion” when the soldiers of the Benton Cadets, Missouri Infantry reportedly elected him colonel, then lieutenant colonel, then major after three successive elections. “Why Lou,” Pope remarked in jest, “if those fellows had given you another promotion, they would have landed you in the penitentiary.”

When President Abraham Lincoln appointed Pope to take charge of the Army of Virginia in June 1862, Marshall headed east, pitting him against his uncle and cousins on their home soil.

Marshall was with Pope during that summer’s disastrous Northern Virginia Campaign. In fact, when Captain John Mason Lee, a cousin serving with the Confederate army, encountered Marshall after the Battle of Cedar Mountain, he reported back that he looked to be in a wretched state. Pope had Marshall verbally deliver orders to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks inquiring whether Banks planned to hold or attack during the eventual Confederate victory. When General Lee heard that Marshall was not in the best of spirits, he wrote Mary: “I am sorry he is in such bad company, but I suppose he could not help it.”

Marshall escaped Virginia without being captured but was banished west with Pope after Second Bull Run and spent the rest of the war in the Department of the Northwest. He remained in the U.S. Army postwar, serving in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon—notably at the Battle of Three Forks against the Snake Indians—before resigning in 1868, a major in the 23rd U.S. Infantry.

Marshall followed his father to California and lived a humble life as a rancher until his death in Monrovia on October 8, 1891, at age 63. He is buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

When it comes to George A. Custer and the June 25, 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, everyone seems to be an “expert”. Even those who may never have read a single book on the battle seem convinced they know exactly why Custer lost the western frontier’s most infamous battle and, in the process, got his regiment needlessly wiped out.

Their narrative usually goes something like this: Foolishly declining a last-minute offer to take rapid-firing Gatling guns with him, Custer’s outsized ego, reckless bravery and overly ambitious quest for glory led to his egregiously bad tactical decisions—including dividing his regiment into four smaller “battalions” in the face of the enemy’s known superior numbers—and prompted him to disobey his commander’s written orders by prematurely launching his regiment a day earlier than planned in a doomed attack. They believe overwhelming numbers of enemy warriors annihilated his regiment to the last man in a brilliantly planned, expertly fought and shrewdly executed trap. Capt. Myles Keogh’s wounded horse, Comanche, they always point out, was the only living thing to survive the massacre. 

In short, “everybody knows” that Custer lost because he was a blustering egomaniac with presidential ambitions who was “out-generaled” by the superior tactical skill and battlefield command of Lakota leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Those who think they know for certain that’s exactly what happened to Custer at the Little Bighorn battle should heed this sage advice from an eminent historian: “It’s not what we don’t know about history that leads us astray; it’s what we think we know—but isn’t true—that causes the mischief.”

The truth of what really caused Custer’s defeat in the most famous battle between Indians and the U.S. frontier army during the western Indian wars is best revealed by examining Custer’s critical tactical decisions that long, hot, dusty day in June 1876. His decisions must be evaluated within the context of what Custer actually knew at the time he made them—and, importantly, what he did not know. 

First, it’s important to quickly dismiss some of the Little Bighorn “red herrings” (on the surface seemingly plausible but misleading distractions). The battle’s most important ones include: 

The Myth of “Indian Commanders”

The oft-read claim that “the Lakota and Cheyenne fought under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse,” implying there was an Indian chain-of-command controlling the warriors’ tactics and maneuvers, exposes egregious ignorance of how Native Americans fought. Indians fought as individuals, fighting if they felt their “medicine” was good, opting out if they judged otherwise. No Indian commanders issued orders and exercised command authority (although some warriors voluntarily followed war-proven successful leaders, like Crazy Horse and Gall, who led purely by example). The best description of how the Lakota and Cheyenne fought Custer at the Little Bighorn is to imagine a hornet’s nest suddenly disturbed—within moments, clouds of angry hornets pour out, swarming and stinging whatever disturbs them, their numbers increasing with each passing minute. Furious that Custer’s attack threatened their families, Lakota and Cheyenne warriors simply swarmed their village’s attackers as they confronted, defeated or annihilated each threat in turn.

Gatling Guns Fantasy

Those who claim rapid-firing Gatling guns could have saved Custer know less about those weapons and their limited capability than they do about Native American warfighting. Three main deficiencies would have prevented these early “machine guns” from having any positive impact on the battle: transportation, targets and crew vulnerability. The guns were mounted on heavy, awkward, large-wheeled artillery piece carriages and pulled by 4-horse teams of “condemned” cavalry mounts (horses deemed unfit for troopers’ mounts but capable of dragging heavy loads). On vehicles susceptible to frequent break-downs, the weapons could not possibly have kept pace with Custer’s regiment’s 30-plus-miles-per-day rapid reconnaissance to fulfill his primary mission: find the Indians’ main camp as quickly as possible and prevent the highly-mobile tribes from scattering into the vast landscape. Trying to drag the clumsy guns over rough terrain and still move fast enough to find the elusive tribes would have been impossible. The guns would have moved slower than Custer’s large pack train of cantankerous, stubborn mules which were so slow that they failed to arrive on the battlefield until after Custer was already dead. Even if the Gatlings had miraculously been present on Last Stand Hill, they needed targets to shoot at—moving around the battlefield on fast, agile Indian ponies, the Indians fought mainly on foot once in range of trooper’s weapons, concealing themselves in every fold, depression and gully the broken terrain offered while firing rifles, muskets and bows and arrows at Custer’s trapped troopers. Unlike the famed 1896 Anheuser-Busch lithograph, Custer’s Last Fight, which graced thousands of saloons across the US, the Indians did not foolishly attack in close-packed masses. Thus the Gatlings would have had no targets to “mow down” with rapid fire. Indeed, the “lack of targets” is supported by the low number of Indian casualties in the battle which may be as few as 31 killed plus a few dozen wounded of an estimated 1,500-2,000 Indians who fought! Finally, Gatling crews had to stand upright to fire the weapon, the crews presenting themselves as vulnerable targets to be quickly shot down by hidden Indian marksmen as the tribesmen closed in on the pinned-down troopers.

Terry’s “Coordinated” Tactical Attack Plan

Those who try to force a modern-warfare template onto the 1876 Great Sioux War campaign typically claim that Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry’s three-column advance (Terry-Custer column moving west from Ft. Lincoln in Bismarck, ND; Colonel John Gibbon’s column moving east from Ft. Ellis, MT; and Brig. Gen. George Crook’s column—the campaign’s strongest force—moving northwest from Ft. Fetterman, WY) through central Montana where the main village of “hostile” Lakota and Cheyenne was presumed to be, was intended to be a tactical attack plan for a coordinated military assault on the Indians by all three forces. Yet it’s clear from Terry’s orders to Custer (see “Terry’s Orders to Custer” sidebar) that they are instructions regarding how to find Indians, not a tactical plan on how to fight them once found. It verifies that Terry’s wide 3-column approach was solely intended as a sweep through the vast area to locate the main body of Lakota and Cheyenne and prevent their escape, not a plan of tactical maneuver for a simultaneous, triple-pronged attack. In fact, Terry hoped there would be no fighting and that the Indians—once found, surrounded and prevented from escape—could be peacefully escorted to Dakota reservations. Terry’s hope that Gibbon’s column would arrive north of the Little Bighorn valley on June 26 as Custer arrived from the southeast that day was meant for Gibbon to be a stand-off “blocking force”—not a tactical participant in a coordinated two-pronged assault with Custer’s regiment to attack and destroy the Indians—hemming in the Indians so they could be corralled and escorted to reservations. In the event, the Gibbon column (by then accompanied by Terry) did not even arrive until June 27, further making the “coordinated attack” claim irrelevant. Also Crook’s third column had already turned back, fought to a standstill in the June 17 Battle of the Rosebud by most of the same Indian warriors who—heavily reinforced by hundreds of new arrivals who’d “jumped” their Dakota reservations—defeated Custer on June 25.

7th Cavalry “Wiped Out”

Although certainly most legitimate Indian Wars historians know better, too many historically ignorant “Custer experts” keep repeating the mistaken claim that Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment was “wiped out to a man” in the battle. They mistake the fact that the five companies under Custer’s immediate command (companies C, E, F, I and L), the “battalion” he personally led after reorganizing his regiment into four battalions (see “Custer’s Reorganization for Combat” sidebar) were wiped out (13 officers, 193 troopers and 4 civilians—210 total killed) for his entire 600-strong regiment (31 officers and 566 troopers) being annihilated. Actually, the 7th Cavalry Regiment that day suffered 52-percent casualties: 16 officers and 242 troopers KIA or died of wounds; 1 officer and 51 troopers wounded—horrendous losses, but far from the regiment being “wiped out to a man” in the battle.

Other egregious “red herrings” include the idiotic idea that somehow Custer’s “foolish attack” was because he craved a dramatic victory since he wanted to run for U.S. president—as if any serving officer removed from command because he’d so enraged the Grant administration by his (valid) claims to Congress of the administration’s corruption could ever hope in his wildest dreams to be a valid presidential candidate. Custer not only had to beg for reinstatement to regimental service on the eve of the 1876 Sioux Campaign, but also had to convince his mentor, Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan, to intercede for him with Grant—a request only granted shortly before the campaign began.

Other improbable “red herring” reasons for the defeat include those Custer-contemporary bigots looking for a convenient scapegoat to excuse the disastrous defeat of the cream of the frontier army by so-called “primitive savages” by egregiously inflating the impact of the cavalry’s M1873 carbine’s weak expended-shell casing extractor that caused weapons to jam. The problem was real, but well-known and documented as affecting only as few as about 1-in-300 carbines. That it was not a major problem during the battle is supported by archaeological evidence from Dr. Doug Scott’s extensive 1991 Little Bighorn battlefield excavations which found very few carbine shell casings that evidenced any tell-tale scratches indicating manual extractions. 

When the easily dismissed “red herrings” are wisely ignored, “human error” comes to the fore as the culprit in the 7th’s defeat—the series of command decisions made by Custer himself that determined the 7th Cavalry’s fate. Although he’s pilloried for his decisions based on the battle’s disastrous outcome, an examination of those decisions—assessed within the context of what he actually knew and didn’t know at the time he made them—reveals that most were consistent with what any combat-experienced frontier army officer would have made, and none were irredeemably disastrous…except for the final and ultimately fatal, decision he made at about 3:30 p.m. on June 25, 1876. 

Sunday, June 25, 1876, was a long, hot, dusty day full of crucial decisions Custer faced at critical points during his—and half of the troopers in his 7th Cavalry Regiment’s—final day of life. The day began early. Custer had the regiment begin a night march following a wide, recent Indian trail at midnight—but by 5 p.m. that afternoon, Custer, his brothers Capt. Tom and Boston, his nephew Autie Reed, his brother-in-law Lt. James Calhoun (L Company) and half the troopers in the 7th’s 12 cavalry companies were dead on a bleak Montana hillside or soon to die about four miles southeast behind hastily dug entrenchments on Reno Hill. Hindsight is 20-20, but if the critics knew only what Custer knew—and didn’t know—that day, would their judgments be as harsh? 

Here’s what Custer actually knew. His primary mission was to find the main Indian village and prevent Indians from escaping and “vanishing” into the vast landscape. Plains Indian warfare experience taught that the most difficult problem for frontier army commanders was finding Indians, not fighting them. At the start of the campaign, each of the three Army columns sent against the Indians in 1876 (Custer’s cavalry regiment, Col. John Gibbon’s column of infantry and cavalry, and Gen. George Crook’s cavalry and mule-mounted infantry) on their own was considered sufficient to defeat any Indian force expected to be encountered. The three widely-separated Army columns were intended to locate the Indians, not combine and fight them in a coordinated battle. Only after the full scope of the disaster was realized did Custer’s commander, Gen. Terry, later create the fiction that Custer and Gibbon were to attack simultaneously on June 26. Moreover, when Terry tumbled to the fact that the army would demand a scapegoat for the worst disaster in the western Indian Wars did he then create the self-serving narrative that “glory-hunting Custer rashly attacked prematurely, disobeying his orders.” 

Custer was told he would face, at most, 500 to 800 Indian warriors. The present for duty strength of the 7th that day was about 600 soldiers—31 officers and 566 troopers—plus Indian Scouts, quartermaster employees e.g., mule skinners, and several civilians, including newspaper reporter, Mark Kellogg. Custer had written discretion to move against the Indians as he saw fit. His orders from Terry gave him full latitude in making tactical decisions (see “Terry’s Orders to Custer” sidebar).

Finally, perhaps Custer’s most fatal “knowledge” was that he had successfully attacked a Cheyenne village under Chief Black Kettle on the Washita River (November 1868)—a small part of a much larger combined Indian encampment that may have rivaled in size the June 1876 Little Bighorn village—and he had prevailed against heavy odds by dividing the 7th into several battalions, striking the surprised village from multiple directions and preventing probably overwhelming Indian retaliation during his withdrawal by using captured Cheyenne women and children as hostages.

However, the bloody result of Custer’s command decisions on June 25 was clearly affected by information he did not, or could not, know. Crook’s column, which at over 1,200 Soldiers and hundreds of Crow Indian allies was the most powerful of Terry’s three converging columns, was fought to a standstill by possibly 1,000 warriors at the day-long Battle of the Rosebud, about 30 miles from the Little Bighorn River, the week before on June 17, 1876. Crook retreated without informing the other columns that the Indians were in strength and fighting, not fleeing. 

The number of Indian warriors opposing Custer at Little Bighorn was likely between 1,500 to 2,000 (two to three times more than what he had been told). Their ranks were swollen by new arrivals streaming in from Dakota reservations. Indian reservation agents purposely concealed the number of their “missing” Indians since that knowledge reduced their reservation “head count,” prompting drastic cuts in rations and supplies. The Little Bighorn village—probably, at its peak, about 1,000 lodges—was likely the largest-ever concentration of Plains Indians—a unique congregation lasting only a few days since game, grass for the huge pony herd and local resources would force the village to move after those had been exhausted. This historical accident—a congregation of, perhaps 7,000-8,000 Indians (up to 2,000 warriors) in 1,000 lodges (tipis) is the overriding factor leading to Custer’s defeat.

Terry’s Orders to Custer 

On the morning of June 22, 1876, during their final meeting before sending Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment off on a “reconnaissance in force” mission to locate the main village of Lakota and Cheyenne, Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry, overall campaign commander whose mission was to find the Indians and force them to reservations in Dakota territory, issued written orders to Custer: 

The Brigadier General commanding directs that, as soon as your regiment can be made ready for the march, you will proceed up the Rosebud [i.e., travel south in this region where rivers and creeks run north] in pursuit of the Indians whose trail was discovered by Major Reno [Custer’s second-in-command] a few days since. It is, of course, impossible to give you any definite instructions in regard to this movement, and were it not impossible to do so the Department Commander places too much confidence in your zeal, energy, and ability to wish to impose on you precise orders which might hamper your action when nearly in contact with the enemy.[emphasis added] He will, however, indicate to you his own views of what your action should be, and he desires that you should conform to them unless you shall see sufficient reasons for departing from them. He thinks that you should proceed up [south] the Rosebud until you ascertain definitely the direction in which the trail above spoken of leads. Should it be found (as it appears almost certain that it will be found) to then turn toward the Little Horn, he thinks that you should still proceed southward, perhaps as far as the headwater of the Tongue, and then turn toward the Little Horn, feeling constantly, however, for your left, so as to preclude the possibility of the escape of the Indians to the south or southeast by passing your left flank. The column of Colonel Gibbon is now in motion for the mouth of the Big Horn. As soon as it reaches that point it will cross the Yellowstone and move up at least as far as the forks of the Big and Little Horns. Of course, its future movements must be controlled by circumstances as they arise, but it is hoped that the Indians, if upon the Little Horn, may be so nearly inclosed by the two columns that their escape will be impossible.

The Department Commander desires that on your way up the Rosebud you should thoroughly examine the upper part of the Tullock’s creek, and that you should endeavor to send a scout through to Colonel Gibbon’s column, with information of the results of your examination. The lower part of this creek will be examined by a detachment from Colonel Gibbon’s command. The supply steamer [Far West under captain Grant Marsh] will be pushed up the Big Horn as far as the forks of the river if found to be navigable for that distance, and the Department Commander, who will accompany the column of Colonel Gibbon, desires you to report to him there not later than the expiration of the time for which your troops are rationed, unless in the meantime you receive further orders.

Custer’s Reorganization for Combat

After he was informed that the 7th had been seen by several small Indian parties and therefore assuming the main Indian camp would be warned, Custer abandoned his plan to hide the regiment all that day for a June 26 attack and instead move immediately against the Indian village before it could flee. Therefore, about noon on June 25, at the base of the “Crow’s Nest” peak in the Wolf Mountains from which the 7th’s Indian scouts had seen the main Lakota-Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn 15 miles away, Custer reorganized the regiment for combat by dividing it into four battalions plus 35 Indian Scouts.                    

Custer’s Decisions
re: John Gray’s Centennial Campaign calculated timeline 

9:00 p.m., June 24, final bivouac (near today’s Busby, Mont.)

Scouts report finding a fresh Indian trail, making it all but certain the main village is in the Little Bighorn valley.

Custer decision

Launch the 7th along that trail just past midnight, June 25.

Assessment

The decision is totally consistent with Custer’s primary mission to find the hostile Indians’ village as quickly as possible. 

9:00 a.m., June 25, Crow’s Nest vantage point (15 miles from Little Bighorn village)

Accepting his scouts’ word that they can see the village’s huge pony herd (although neither he nor his chief of scouts, Lt. Charles Varnum, could make it out), Custer now knows the camp’s location.

Custer decision

Hide the regiment all day in the Wolf Mountains, concealed by the rough terrain, then move at night to strike at dawn, June 26 (the day he was told by Terry that Gibbon’s column should reach a blocking position north of the Indian village). 

Assessment

Hiding the regiment for a dawn surprise attack on the unsuspecting village the next morning was prudent, consistent with Terry’s orders and confirming Custer’s plan conceived the night before. (Gibbon’s blocking force was intended to intercept fleeing Indians after Custer’s attack, not to participate in the 7th’s assault as an element in a coordinated attack as often erroneously assumed and as Terry falsely claimed afterwards—revealingly, when Terry wrote his orders, he of course had no idea Custer would decide to attack the village on June 25. Terry wanted the Indians found and kept from escaping.)

10:30 a.m., base of the Crow’s Nest

Custer learns that three separate small Indian groups had recently spotted elements of the regiment.    

Custer decision

Do not risk waiting, make an immediate attack on the village before it can be alerted and escape the approaching army columns. 

Assessment

Since experience taught that Indians invariably scattered and disappeared into the landscape if warned of an enemy’s approach, any experienced frontier army officer likely would have made this same decision. Custer could not have known that the Indians that spotted him were on their way to other distant locations and therefore none had alerted the village.

12:00 p.m., one mile north of Crow’s Nest

The approach to the village prompts reorganizing the 7th regiment’s companies for combat.                  

Custer decision

Divide the regiment into 4 battalions (see “Custer’s Reorganization for Combat” sidebar). 

Assessment

Sub-dividing a cavalry regiment into battalion-sized maneuver elements was a common Plains warfare army tactic. Custer successfully fought this way at the Washita (1868) and Crook used similar tactics at the Rosebud (June 17). Notably, Col. Ranald MacKenzie, who usually fought his regiment as a single unit, used such “battalion” tactics in his most famous victory—Palo Duro Canyon, Texas vs. Comanches and Kiowas (1874), where MacKenzie’s stunning victory ended Comanche power forever and forced the tribes onto reservations.

2:30 p.m., 4 miles east of Little Bighorn River 

While Capt. Frederick Benteen’s battalion continues to scout for any Indians who might be south of the Little Bighorn valley, Custer’s and Maj. Marcus Reno’s battalions surprise a few Indians who immediately flee in panic toward the still-unseen main village. Scout/interpreter Fred Gerard shouts to Custer, “Here are your Indians! Running like devils!”  

Custer decision

Assuming these Indians certainly will alert the village, Custer immediately launches Reno’s 3-company battalion to directly attack it from the south while flanking the village by leading his own 5-company battalion to the high bluffs towering over the east bank of the river. Via messenger, Custer orders Benteen’s 3-company battalion to quickly rejoin the command. 

Assessment

Taking immediate action now that the village is certain to be warned likely would have been any frontier army commander’s decision. Still unaware of the village’s unprecedented size, attacking it unexpectedly from two directions (while summoning reinforcements—Benteen’s battalion) seemed tactically-feasible given what Custer—who had not yet seen the huge size of the village—then knew regarding Indian numbers. 

3:30 p.m., atop bluffs east of the river 

Seeing Reno’s attack begin to bog down and becoming hotly engaged by warriors in the valley and with Benteen’s battalion still missing, Custer faces his most crucial decision—ride directly to Reno’s aid—which likely would have ended with Custer, Reno and eventually Benteen and the Pack Train, in effect the entire regiment, besieged on Reno Hill—wait for Benteen, or continue his attack from another direction.

Custer decision

Maneuver against the village from another, unexpected direction by leading his battalion farther north where the Indian women and children were fleeing, with the possibility of—like at the Washita battle—capturing them as hostages to dissuade Indian attacks. 

Assessment

None of Custer’s command decisions—up to this point—had put the 7th on an irreversible course to disaster. Options that would have led to his gathering the entire regiment on defensible high ground still remained possible. However, his decision at about 3:30 p.m. to continue north finally sealed his and his regiment’s fate. Recent scholarship suggests Custer had still not seen the huge size of the entire village when he made this decision (he had likely viewed the valley from further east—probably Sharpshooter Ridge—and not from the better (higher) vantage point known as Weir Point). Lacking this vital intelligence, still thinking the opposing Indian force was only one-half to one-third its actual size and denied critical knowledge about the Indians not fleeing but standing and fighting from Crook’s Rosebud battle, Custer made his last—fatal—decision.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Debate about the importance of the loss of Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 to the outcome of the September 1862 Maryland Campaign has long revolved around the response of Union Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan upon reading the document found by a Federal soldier outside Frederick, Md., on September 13. To those in agreement with the thesis proposed by authors such as Stephen W. Sears, the so-called “Lost Orders” provided McClellan with potentially war-winning intelligence that he duly squandered through excessive indecision. Conversely, to those who prefer fellow historian Joseph L. Harsh’s interpretation, McClellan gained little useful information in the Lost Orders, principally because the Federal commander had already begun pushing troops west from Frederick in pursuit of Lee’s army before the document passed into his hands.

The merits of these arguments notwithstanding, neither takes into account the impact that McClellan’s actions had on Confederate operations from September 14 onward. When considered from this point of view, it becomes clear that McClellan’s assault on the South Mountain gaps had three significant effects: It ruined Lee’s plan for the campaign after the capture of Harpers Ferry, Va.; it forced Lee to take up a less than favorable ad hoc defensive position at Sharpsburg; and it weakened the Army of Northern Virginia’s combat strength in the days leading up to the clash there on September 16-17.

According to Paragraph IX of Special Orders No. 191, Lee desired that following the fall of the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry, “The commands of Generals Jackson, McLaws, and Walker, after accomplishing the objects for which they have been detached, will join the main body of the army at Boonsborough or Hagerstown.” Why Lee envisioned reassembling his army in the middle of Maryland’s Washington County is explained by his overall strategy for waging war in the state. After initially seeking to instigate a popular rebellion north of the Potomac River, Lee learned from Confederate sympathizers in Frederick City that it was likely no uprising would take place until martial law in the state had been lifted. The arrest of prominent Secessionists and the seizure of private property by Federal authorities had convinced those aligned with the South that they could never successfully resist the national government’s occupation forces unless Lee’s army could defend them. The general noted this belief in his August 1863 campaign report, writing, “The difficulties that surrounded them [Maryland’s Secessionists] were fully appreciated…[and] we expected to derive more assistance…from the just fears of the Washington Government than from any active demonstration on the part of the people, unless success should enable us to give them assurance of continued protection.”

A second source echoes Lee’s statement, this one penned by British army officer (and later Field Marshal) Garnet Joseph Wolseley. Visiting the Army of Northern Virginia in mid-October 1862, Wolseley wrote: “It is generally stated that the Confederate authorities calculated upon a rising in Maryland directly [when] their army entered that state. Everybody to whom I spoke on the subject ridiculed the idea…that any such rising would take place, until either Baltimore was in their hands, or they had at least established a position in that country.”

Wolseley’s comment confirms two things. First, it reinforces the conclusion that the policy of entering Maryland to test the strength of secessionist sentiment came from “Confederate authorities” in Richmond. This means that Robert E. Lee did not act on his own when he took his army across the Potomac. He was carrying out an official policy of the Confederate government. Second, Wolseley’s comment makes it clear that many of the officers with whom he spoke shared Lee’s belief their army could encourage an uprising in Maryland only if it won a victory (i.e., “established a position in the country”) or if it marched on and seized Baltimore.

In response to the reluctance of Maryland’s people to rise up, Lee took steps to reassure those who might be inclined to support the South. He instructed Charles Marshall to compose a proclamation explaining the reasons for the Army of Northern Virginia’s presence in the state and, after learning on September 8 that the Federal garrison remained in place at Harpers Ferry, he designed Special Orders No. 191 to capture it. Lee also learned on September 8 that a new army under the command of McClellan had begun advancing toward Frederick.

In view of this oncoming threat, Lee hoped that Jackson and the others detached for the operation could quickly seize the ferry and then rejoin Longstreet’s command for a decisive battle with McClellan’s force. A slight alteration Lee made to this plan on September 11 included marching a portion of the army toward Hagerstown (and Pennsylvania) to “induce the enemy to follow” west of South Mountain. This maneuver substantiated a statement attributed to Lee that appeared in the September 12 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer which held that “the battle ground must hereafter be in Maryland” if the state’s people failed to rebel.

Once he arrived west of South Mountain, Lee intended to confront McClellan on ground of his choosing. There he could crush the Army of the Potomac far from the protection of the Washington defenses and achieve the potentially war-ending victory that had eluded him at Second Manassas. Lee therefore chose the heights along a small watercourse called Beaver Creek as his preferred battleground. Anchored in the southwest by rough terrain along Antietam Creek, and ranging as tall as 560 feet in elevation, this undulating ridge line runs east-northeast nearly to the base of South Mountain. The Beaver Creek heights offered Lee a strong position that would be difficult, although not impossible, for an enemy to flank if it was occupied by a determined defender.

Wrecked Plans

Multiple sources confirm the general’s desire to defend the Beaver Creek line. These include a dispatch Lee sent to Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws on the evening of September 13, after he learned from Maj. Gen. D.H. Hill that a powerful enemy column had appeared at the eastern foot of South Mountain. Telling McLaws, “General Longstreet will move down [from Hagerstown] to-morrow,” Lee added that Longstreet’s men would “take position on Beaver Creek this side of Boonsborough.”

The following morning, according to the war reminiscences of Angela Kirkham Davis, a New York–born woman residing in Funkstown, Md., Lee issued a warning to the people of her village, located some four miles behind Beaver Creek. Lee advised them to flee from the fight he believed was about to take place in their midst. Then Lee spoke to his artillery chief, Brig. Gen. William N. Pendleton, about the Beaver Creek position later that day. Pendleton recalled this in his campaign report, stating that on “Sunday morning, 14th, we were summoned to return toward Boonsborough, the enemy having advanced upon General D.H. Hill. When I arrived and reported to you [General Lee] a short distance from the battle-field, you directed me to place in position on the heights of Beaver Creek the several batteries of my command.” Pendleton’s report demonstrates that even as the Battle of South Mountain raged Lee hoped to fall back to his chosen position along Beaver Creek.

Sources also show that contrary to claims made by Lee and Longstreet after the campaign about departing from Hagerstown at daybreak to reinforce Hill atop South Mountain, Longstreet’s reduced command of eight brigades (Brig. Gen. Robert Toombs’ brigade remained at Hagerstown) and the independent brigade of Brig. Gen. Nathan “Shanks” Evans did not get on the road until after the fighting at South Mountain began around 8 a.m. Lee clinging stubbornly to his Beaver Creek plan would account for this delay because, as the general himself later wrote, “It had not been intended to oppose [the Federal army’s] passage through the South Mountains, as it was desired to engage it as far as possible from its base.”

McClellan’s army “advancing more rapidly than was convenient from Fredericktown” wrecked these plans for Lee by forcing him to defend the South Mountain passes. Doing so placed the Confederate commander in a difficult position. Unfamiliar with the terrain atop the mountain, and too disabled by injuries incurred during an accident at the end of August to ride a horse, Lee could not personally direct his army’s defense of the mountain passes. The situation five miles south at Crampton’s Gap proved even more headache-inducing as its defense remained entirely beyond the general’s control.

Consequently, three major outcomes resulted from McClellan using the information he learned in the Lost Orders: He attacked the South Mountain gaps; he forced Lee to abandon the favorable defensive position he had chosen; and he compelled Lee to defend ground on South Mountain that the Confederate general neither knew nor planned on defending in the first place.

A Less Favorable Position

The rapidity of McClellan’s unexpected advance knocked Lee off balance. Not only did the defeat at South Mountain then force Lee to fall back in the direction of Virginia, but it also called into question where, or even if, the general could salvage his plan to fight north of the Potomac. After all, Jackson’s siege of Harpers Ferry remained underway with Lee ignorant of when it might be concluded. The hope expressed by Special Orders No. 191 was that Jackson could compel the garrison’s surrender by Sunday, September 14, at the latest. On the morning of September 15, however, Lee found himself still oblivious to Jackson’s progress. For a short time overnight on September 14, Lee even considered returning to Virginia, writing to McLaws after learning of the Federal victory at Crampton’s Gap: “The day has gone against us and this army will go by Sharpsburg and cross the river.”

Then, at about 8 a.m. on September 15, a note from Jackson finally made its way to Lee, stating that he anticipated the enemy would surrender Harpers Ferry in short order. Receiving this note in the vicinity of Keedysville breathed new life into Lee’s faltering operation and he quickly sought ground on which to fight the battle he had envisioned fighting at Beaver Creek. This ground he found on the far side of Antietam Creek, and although Lee did not say it, the terrain there resembled the Beaver Creek position to a degree. With heights as tall as 500 feet above sea level between the creek and Sharpsburg, Lee found a position closer to Jackson in (West) Virginia that was on the flank of Lafayette McLaws’ position in Pleasant Valley, and which looked similar to the one he had originally intended to occupy several miles to the north.

Yet unlike the Beaver Creek position, Antietam Creek and the heights in front of Sharpsburg anchored only the center and far right of the Confederate line. Rolling countryside bisected by low ridges and peppered with woodlots characterized the terrain on the Confederate left flank. This ground proved to be defensible, but South Mountain did not hem in the position there as it did along Beaver Creek. Putting numbers to this equation, the distance between the eastern end of the Beaver Creek heights and the western slope of South Mountain near the small community of San Mar is approximately 1,056 yards or 0.6 miles—equaling a battlefront just under three Civil War–era brigades in length.

North of Sharpsburg, the distance from the creek to farmer David Miller’s soon-to-be-immortal cornfield—where the bulk of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s attack fell the morning of September 17—is 2,816 yards or 1.6 miles. That equaled a front line more than two divisions long, meaning McClellan could maneuver a larger number of troops against the Confederate left than he would have been able to had Lee managed to defend the Beaver Creek heights. The resulting stand-up fight at Sharpsburg thus proved to be less to the benefit of the smaller, numerically weaker Army of Northern Virginia and more to the advantage of the larger Army of the Potomac.

Fighting at the Beaver Creek position also would have provided Lee with a battlefield accessible by multiple entry and exit points to the rear. With only a single road and a rocky ford across the Potomac behind him at Sharpsburg, even Lee judged the position to be “a bad one” by comparison. Arguably, therefore, this secondary field on which Lee chose to fight proved to be substantially less favorable to his army and more favorable to the enemy than the position he had initially hoped to take. Although he did not know it, McClellan’s attack at South Mountain, informed by what he had learned in Special Orders No. 191, effectively negated the battlefield advantage that Lee had sought to achieve in Washington County.

Depleted Strength

McClellan’s attack on the South Mountain gaps created yet another knock-on effect detrimental to the Army of Northern Virginia—it compelled Lee to reassemble his army before either he or it was prepared. This resulted in a loss of combat strength when the fight at Sharpsburg broke out. The experiences of Longstreet’s command on September 14 and, to a lesser extent, of McLaws’ command on September 16-17 are instructive here. Informed estimates put Longstreet’s effective strength at approximately 7,800 men when his command made its forced march from Hagerstown on the morning of September 14. This march, made mostly on the quick, and even the double-quick (i.e., jogging), proved too taxing for many men to take, particularly those of Old Pete’s troops who lacked footwear. Consequently, when Longstreet reached the top of South Mountain, D.H. Hill estimated that his command “did not exceed four thousand men.” It is unknown how many of these men later caught up with the army on its march to Sharpsburg, but they were not available for at least the defense of Turner’s and Fox’s Gaps, clashes that caused significant casualties and resulted in a decisive Confederate reverse. Their experience illustrates the chaos into which McClellan’s sudden advance threw the Army of Northern Virginia.

McLaws’ situation provides a similar example. Detached from the rest of the army with Richard H. Anderson’s Division to besiege Harpers Ferry on the Maryland side of the Potomac River, McLaws’ Division suffered severe losses from straggling in the run-up to Sharpsburg. According to one strength estimate provided by John Owen Allen, 7,337 men comprised the four brigades of McLaws’ Division as of September 2. By September 13, this number had dropped to an estimated 3,778 men available for duty, meaning that while in Maryland, and even before the engagement at Crampton’s Gap the following day, 48.5 percent of McLaws’ men had abandoned the army.

The fights atop Maryland Heights and at Crampton’s Gap further depleted McLaws’ strength by another 929 men and officers killed, wounded, or missing/captured. Then, on the afternoon of September 16, Lee, scrambling desperately to reassemble his scattered army so that he could fight above the Potomac and achieve the “military success” that he hoped would encourage Marylanders to rebel, called McLaws from Harpers Ferry to Sharpsburg. The Georgian made a forced march that night which further reduced his strength by another 7.7 percent, or 220 men (probably an underestimate), leaving McLaws with only 2,629 effectives for the battle on September 17.

This overnight march must have been severe. To quote McLaws himself, “The straggling of men, wearied beyond further endurance, and of those without shoes and of others sick was very great, which accounts for the small force carried into action. But by the evening of the 18th most of the absentees had joined and my force was nearly as large as that I had carried into action on the 17th, although I had lost heavily in killed and wounded.” Brigadier General William Barksdale, whose four regiments of Mississippians marched with McLaws, recalled similarly, “a portion of my men had fallen by the wayside from loss of sleep and excessive fatigue, having been constantly on duty for five or six days, and on the march for almost the whole of the two preceding nights…I went into the fight with less than 800 men.”

Brigadier General Joseph Kershaw, a South Carolinian commanding a brigade in McLaws’ Division, reported that his men “were also under arms or marching nearly the whole of the nights of Monday and Tuesday, arriving at Sharpsburg at daylight on Wednesday morning, September 17…[M]any had become exhausted and fallen out on the wayside, and all were worn and jaded.” An unidentified soldier with the 8th Alabama, a part of Col. Alfred Cummings’s brigade in R.H. Anderson’s division agreed, calling the march to Shepherdstown “trying in the extreme.” Lastly, recalled James Dinkins of the 18th Mississippi:

“About daylight we reached Shepardstown [sic] on the Potomac river, and crossed over to the Maryland side, but we crossed with a small proportion of the command which began the march. We remember that Company ‘C,’ Eighteenth Mississippi, left Harper’s Ferry with over sixty men and three officers, but we went into the battle of ‘Sharpsburg’ with sixteen men and one officer. Other companies, of course, suffered similar dimunition. The march was one of the severest ever made by infantry troops.”

One cannot help but wonder what a difference it would have made to the Battle of Antietam if Lee had possessed more time to reassemble his army. Licensed Antietam battlefield guide Russell Rich argues in a 2022 study of Confederate straggling during the campaign that the loss of so many troops prior to Antietam did not diminish the combat effectiveness of Lee’s army on the battlefield. This conclusion seems to say more about the fighting prowess of veteran Confederate troops than it does about the army’s thin ranks. It cannot be ignored that Lee sought multiple times to launch an attack on the Federal right flank both during and after the fight at Antietam. A lack of available space due to a bend in the Potomac River and McClellan’s massing of artillery on that flank contributed to the maneuver’s failure, but Lee scarcely being able to muster 5,000 men for the endeavor also proved to be a key deficiency.

At no point on September 17 were Lee’s men able to recover the ground they lost in the early hours of the struggle. Counterattack certainly, and this Lee did, but recover their original lines or drive the Federals back to Antietam Creek, never. The battle thus ended as a Confederate defeat precisely because Lee did not have the men he required for an effective offensive, and he did not have the men because straggling significantly reduced the number present for action. This material weakness then persisted until the following day when Lee retired to Virginia because McClellan’s army had received reinforcements while Lee’s had not. The general summarized this situation in his campaign report, writing, “As we could not look for a material increase in strength, and the enemy’s force could be largely and rapidly augmented, it was not thought prudent to wait until he should be ready again to offer battle.” Systemic weakness caused by straggling, and exacerbated by high combat losses, forced Robert E. Lee to abandon his campaign and the effort to bring Maryland into the Confederate fold.

Even before McClellan’s unanticipated advance on September 13-14, Lee had complained to Jefferson Davis about straggling’s devastating effect on his army: “One great embarrassment is the reduction of our ranks by straggling, which it seems impossible to prevent with our present regimental officers. Our ranks are very much diminished I fear from a third to one-half of the original numbers.” The threat posed by McClellan’s advance then intensified the problem by causing Lee’s men to engage in a series of forced marches to rejoin the army in Maryland. By the time the clash erupted at Sharpsburg, Lee’s army—numbering between 50,000 and 70,000 men at the campaign’s outset, according to some estimates—had lost a crippling number of stragglers.

Straggling during the campaign angered Lee so much, in fact, that he complained about it in a missive to Jackson and Longstreet on September 22. Implementing a series of reforms at this point, including daily roll call, the creation of a permanent provost guard, and increased efforts by field officers to observe and account for the presence of their men, General Lee made sure that service in the Army of Northern Virginia became much more rule-bound after Sharpsburg than it had been to that point.

Quantifying the full extent to which men falling out of the ranks weakened the Army of Northern Virginia is probably impossible, although we can arrive at a reasonable estimate. To quote Darrell L. Collins’ summary of Confederate strength on September 30, less than two weeks after the epic battle, Lee’s army counted 52,189 men in its ranks. Compared to the fewer than 40,000 men with which Lee and others claimed to have fought the battle, one can only imagine what the outcome might have been had the Confederate commander possessed this additional 12,000 troops on September 17. It is doubtful that elements of the Union 2nd Corps would have penetrated the Confederate center as they did at the Sunken Road if Longstreet had another 5,000 men to throw into the fight. Similarly, Ambrose Burnside probably would not have been able to drive in Lee’s right flank if Jacob Cox’s 9th Corps had faced 3,000 men defending the heights above Antietam Creek instead of Colonel Henry L. Benning’s “little over four hundred.” Possessing an additional 4,000 men would have also given Lee the men he needed for the attack on the Federal right for which he ached so badly.

“At Great Disadvantage”

The examples of Longstreet on September 14 and McLaws on September 17 suggest that the hard marches forced by McClellan’s rapid advance contributed to reducing the number of combat effectives available to Lee by a sizable margin. D.H. Hill shared this viewpoint, stating, “Had all our stragglers been up, McClellan’s army would have been completely crushed or annihilated.” Combine the army’s decimation with it being compelled to fight on ground more favorable to the Federals than the position Lee first chose and a more urgent sense of the damage caused to the Confederate operation by the loss of Special Orders No. 191 becomes clear. Writing to Hill in February 1868, Lee referred to the loss of the orders as “a great calamity and subsequent reflection has not caused me to change my opinion.” From ruining Lee’s plan to fight along Beaver Creek and forcing him to defend the South Mountain passes, which itself caused significant casualties, to giving the Federals a more advantageous place to fight and reducing Confederate strength by pressing the army to reassemble on the quick, one cannot help but agree with Lee’s characterization of the orders’ loss as a disaster.

On February 15, 1868, the general himself told William Allan, an Army of Northern Virginia veteran and one of its earliest historians: “Had the Lost dispatch not been lost, and had McClellan continued his cautious policy for two or three days longer, I would have had all my troops reconcentrated on [the] Md. side, stragglers up, [and] men rested.”

Charles Marshall echoed this sentiment, writing in his war memoir that “Instead of being united and fresh as it would have been had General McClellan continued his slow rate of advance for twenty-four hours longer, as there is reason to believe he would have done but for the loss of the order…[the army] had to engage the enemy at great disadvantage.”

Longstreet’s men and those under D.H. Hill, Marshall continued, “went into the battle [at Sharpsburg] under the disheartening effects of the disaster at Boonsboro,’ and considerably reduced in number by that engagement, while those of General Jackson had to make a long march in intensely warm weather and go into battle without opportunity for necessary repose and refreshment.

“In considering the Maryland campaign, it is proper to take into account the effect of the accident of the lost order upon the result—a misfortune that was not incident to the plan of campaign, although it had a most important influence upon the result….The effect of the loss of that order does not show any want of wisdom or prudence in the policy of the invasion of Maryland in 1862. But for that, no battle need have been fought at Sharpsburg, or at South Mountain, or anywhere except at a time and upon terms of General Lee’s own selection.”

Supposing Marshall is correct, and taking into account Robert E. Lee’s own estimate of the harm caused to his operation by the loss of Special Orders No. 191, one cannot reasonably conclude other than to say that the discovery of the mislaid document by Private Barton Mitchell about noon September 13 contributed mightily to the Confederate defeat in Maryland. For that the credit must go to George McClellan, whose actions forced Lee into a difficult situation for which he was ill prepared, and who by doing so saved the republic when it faced the possibility of a terrible defeat that might have ended it for good. 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Alexander Rossino writes from Boonsboro, Md. This article is adapted from his latest book, Calamity at Frederick (Savas Beatie, 2023).

One of the many iconic photographs taken on the Gettysburg battlefield by Alexander Gardner’s photographic team was the heartbreaking image of the bloated corpse of a horse. The unfortunate animal was one of the wheel pair, and it died still harnessed to a shattered limber, the deadly contents of the limber chest scattered about. Freshly covered graves are nearby, possibly those of the drivers and artillerymen who manned the light 12-pounder Napoleon cannon.  

Through the haze, a line of army wagons and artillery vehicles are parked behind the wreckage, trees showing just above the white canvas covers. While the appalling destruction of battle remains untouched where it fell, the war goes on as soldiers wait in the background for orders to continue the pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia to the Potomac River.  

Gardner’s photographers took the image on or about July 6, 1863. When Gardner published his Photographic Sketchbook of the War later in 1863, he titled the image “Unfit for Service.” The scene conveys the traumatic image of death and destruction of man and animal alike, and is a stoic reminder of the cost of war.  

Aside from its poignancy, the image leaves some questions unanswered. To what battery did this limber and horse belong? What happened at this location that caused such destruction? How did this wreckage remain untouched for so many days after the battle ended?  

Where Was It?

Though the image was published in the Sketchbook and as a stereoview after the war, this photograph did not receive widespread attention until years later when an overly enhanced version captioned “Shattered Caisson—Gettysburg ‘Peach Orchard’” first appeared in The War Memorial Book (1894). Miller’s Photographic History of the Civil War (1911) published a much clearer view of the scene that revealed the line of vehicles beyond the wreckage, what appears to be part of an orchard, and, upon closer examination, the roof line and chimney of a house.  

But whose house could this be, so close to the fighting? In 2010, several of the Licensed Battlefield Guides at Gettysburg speculated it was the Peter Rogers house that stood along the Emmitsburg Road, but did the remainder of the landscape match the fields and trees? Of the candidate houses that stood along the same road, one alone stands out: the Joseph Sherfy house adjacent to the famous Peach Orchard.  

Sixty-three-year-old Joseph Sherfy and his wife, Mary, had lived on this farm since 1844, where he managed a flourishing fruit business. The enterprising farmer experimented with the best type of peaches and apples to grow in Adams County’s somewhat shallow soil, his large mature peach orchard producing enough fruit to accommodate a canning business in a building behind his brick home. Sherfy had planted new trees north of the established orchard, its trees just ready to produce when war came to their doorstep on July 2, 1863.  

The Sherfys fled their home that day only to return four days later to discover their house damaged by shell fire, personal belongings scattered in the yard, the barn burned to the ground, crops trampled, fences torn down, and most of his peach trees in his recently planted “young orchard” damaged beyond salvage, as he recalled in his 1872 damage claim.  

Graves of the fallen were everywhere, and the bloated remains of more than a dozen dead horses lay where they fell in the wheat and meadow opposite their home. Army wagons and artillery vehicles continually passed through the Sherfy fields, stopping briefly to allow congestion to clear the roads ahead. Details from Union regiments had picked up and stacked discarded small arms and equipment, leaving behind material that could not be reused. In the field opposite their home was a disabled limber chest, shells still lying nearby, as Mrs. Sherfy told a visitor in 1886. Worried of the danger, Mr. Sherfy and a farmhand buried the ordnance in the field, taking care to mark the location.   That disabled limber was most likely the same photographed by Gardner’s team that warm summer morning in 1863. The sad wreckage was left lying in the center of Sherfy’s field on the eastern slope of the ridge from the Emmitsburg Road to Plum Run.  

With the location of this historic photograph identified, a more important question needs to be answered: to whose battery did this limber belong?  

The “Great Artillery Duel”

During the desperate July 2 fighting on this farm, numerous Union artillery batteries were overrun, guns captured, and limbers lost to Confederate hands. Only the arrival of fresh Union troops and ensuing counterattack saved those precious guns, which were drawn off the field after nightfall by exhausted teams of artillerymen and uninjured horses. Only one gun, a 3-inch ordnance rifle and limber belonging to Consolidated Battery C&F, 1stPennsylvania Light Artillery, was left behind and would be captured by Confederates the following day.  

Yet this limber and ammunition in the historic photograph was for a 12-pounder “Napoleon”—the fearful bronze gun favored by many artillerymen for its dependability and stopping power. Obviously, there were unknown circumstances that left this shattered limber on the field. If it was not from a Union battery, which Confederate battery stood at this site?  

Beginning in 1895, the U.S. War Department Commission, composed of veterans of the battle, initiated the masterful and difficult task of marking every unit position in the park with a tablet bearing a brief narrative of their participation at Gettysburg. Commissioner William Robbins, a veteran of the 4th Alabama Infantry who faced the fierce combat before Little Round Top on July 2-3, 1863, struggled to document the activities of Confederate units, especially batteries in Major Mathias W. Henry’s Artillery Battalion of Hood’s Division, Longstreet’s Corps. Reports from many of the battery commanders and Major Henry himself did not survive the conflict and could not be found in U.S. War Department records in Washington, D.C.  

As Robbins later confessed, he constructed battle narratives for some units based on the activities of their fellow units and without those precious reports, narratives on several tablets were woefully incomplete. One of these cases stands out—the July 3, 1863, activities of several batteries in Henry’s Battalion, notably Captain Hugh R. Garden’s South Carolina Battery, the “Palmetto Light Artillery.”  

Born in Sumter, S.C., in 1840, the dashing Hugh Richardson Garden had just completed his studies at South Carolina College when war erupted. He volunteered for service as a private in Company D, 2nd South Carolina Infantry, during which time he was recognized as a model soldier and promotions followed. Through the influence of family and military officials, he received an appointment by the state in 1862 to raise and command a newly formed battery of artillery destined to join the Army of Northern Virginia.  

Garden successfully recruited and organized a full battery and within months was in Virginia, where he was assigned to Major Henry’s Artillery Battalion. Having seen only minimal action prior to the Gettysburg Campaign, the Palmetto Light Artillery of four guns (two 10-pounder Parrott Rifles and two 12-pounder Napoleons)arrived on the battlefield on July 2 but remained in reserve as the fighting raged against the Union left flank centered on the now famous Sherfy Peach Orchard.  

At mid-morning the following day, Garden received orders to march his battery with other sections of artillery from Henry’s Battalion to an impressive line of Southern guns with other artillery battalions of Longstreet’s Corps. The fieldpieces stretched from the Peach Orchard northwesterly to Spangler Woods and Seminary Ridge opposite the Union center on Cemetery Ridge. Tasked with opposing Union artillery strategically placed on Little Round Top, Garden unlimbered his Parrott rifles in the Peach Orchard on the right flank of Major B.F. Eshleman’s Artillery Battalion, the Washington Artillery of New Orleans, and with the report of two signal guns at 1 p.m., Garden’s cannons began their participation in the great barrage that preceded Pickett’s Charge.  

July 3, 1863, would haunt Garden for years to come. “On the day of Pickett’s Charge,” he wrote to Lloyd Collis in 1901, “I was sent about a mile to the left of my first position near the turnpike, immediately on the right of the Washington Artillery, and engaged Big Round Top during the first part of the great artillery duel. While thus engaged the chief of Gen. Longstreet’s staff, who was on the pike observing the effect of the artillery fire, ordered me to cease firing… and to move by section to the left of the peach orchard and advance in echelon across the plain. I obeyed the order, but only one section of my battery, under Lieutenant [Alexander] McQueen, made the advance, for when it moved obliquely to the left and went into position at a point down a gentle descent (as I can never forget) about 200 yards to the left of the peach orchard, and about 300 yards at least in front of our line of artillery, the attention of the opposing artillery was drawn to our fire, and within ten minutes every horse and man was killed—or wounded.”  

After passing through the orchard and down the slope, Lieutenant McQueen’s artillerymen unlimbered the two 12-pounder guns in an open field, loaded, and opened fire on Union infantry of Brig. Gen. George Stannard’s Vermont Brigade sweeping around Pickett’s masses crowding toward the Angle. Though their fire and those of a handful of other pieces from Eshleman’s Battalion that also advanced was at first effective, it also unleashed a torrent of counterbattery fire from Union guns aligned on the well-established line on the lower portion of Cemetery Ridge.  

At his post behind one of McQueen’s guns, artilleryman J. Merrick Reid recalled: “No sooner had flame and smoke gushed after the hurtling shell that Round Top Hill became a veritable seething volcano of destruction, emitting dense volumes of smoke, lurid tongues of flame hurtling metal missile that hissed or shrieked through space and burst with deafening peals. The ground was ploughed and torn and great clouds of dirt and debris thrown up everywhere. Man after man went down with his death hurt…not a horse was left to move a wheel.” Reid was horrified when a single Union shell mortally wounded two comrades in front him, spattering his uniform with blood and gore.   Within minutes, the Union batteries had driven off the Confederate cannoneers from the guns that had been pushed forward from Eshleman’s Battalion and then turned their attention on Garden’s solitary section of Napoleons. From their post on Cemetery Ridge, Captain Patrick Hart’s 15th New York Battery of four Napoleons sent explosive shell after shell at the outnumbered South Carolinians.  

Near Hart’s guns stood Captain Edwin Dow’s 6th Maine Battery, which also focused its four 12-pounder guns on the exposed Southerners. “A light 12-pounder battery of four guns ran some 400 or 500 yards in front of the enemy’s line,” Dow reported soon after the battle, “so as to enfilade the batteries on our right.” After driving off the artillerymen from these guns that belonged to Eshleman’s Battalion, Dow focused his attention on McQueen’s two guns, alone but defiantly firing from their exposed position. “We opened with solid shot and shell…and succeeded in dismounting one gun, disabling the second, and compelled the battery to leave the field minus one caisson and several horses.”  

The sweeping concentration of Union artillery from the summit of Little Round Top to the center of Cemetery Ridge would prove too great for the outnumbered Confederate artillery. “No man flinched his duty,” Merrick Reid recalled many years after. “Exhausted, bleeding, ammunition spent, comrades prone, six horse dead or dying, further effort futile, our gallant officer, the calmly brave McQueen, himself faint and bleeding, ordered the pitiful fragment to seek protection from the infernal death sluice.”  

Aghast at the destruction, Captain Garden raced to the site to confront the seriously wounded Lieutenant McQueen, who could barely manage the orders for his men to seek shelter. Those still able turned and ran to the comparative safety of the Emmitsburg Road, leaving behind guns, limbers, wounded comrades, and horribly wounded horses thrashing about in their harnesses. “I took volunteers and fresh horses in to remove my men and gun(s),” Garden continued. “After two attempts we succeeded, under the same concentrated terrific fire, made more terrible by the explosion of caissons and the fire overhead of our friends in the rear.”  

The Confederate infantry assault failed, and there was little more that could be accomplished. Lee sent orders through Longstreet to withdraw his troops from their advanced position to form a line of defense on Seminary Ridge. Captain Garden’s desperate mission was still underway when those orders arrived.  

As the Southern batteries hurriedly limbered and hobbled to the rear, Garden realized that with Union guns commanding the field and Union skirmishers seen advancing toward the abandoned artillery line, further efforts to bring off additional equipment was fruitless. A shattered limber and chest, horse harnesses and other equipment, all too dangerous to retrieve, remained to mark the location where his guns had fought so deadly a duel.  

The following day, details of Union troops gathered small arms from the field while others buried the dead where they had fallen. Southern ordnance, still dangerous despite the soaking rains that covered the area, remained untouched for others to recover.  

Thus, the scene remained to be captured by the photographer’s camera on or about July 6, 1863, where Hugh Garden’s section of 12-pounder guns from his Palmetto Light Artillery, only a few days before, had made the suicidal stand at Gettysburg. Placed in context with Garden’s description, compassionately penned in a letter years after the war, this place on the battlefield was indeed where “all hell broke loose.”

More important, this photograph provides historians with a more complete evaluation of the somewhat curious story of Major M.W. Henry’s Battalion in the massive bombardment before Pickett’s Charge, its disturbing aftermath, and the shocking cost of war. And while we all strive to further describe and understand the image labeled “Unfit for Service,” perhaps the most suitable sentiment was paid by Garden himself, an attempt to honor the sacrifice paid by his battery day: “I have always thought that as Pickett’s charge marked the high-tide of the Confederacy, the advance of that solitary section in obedience to what I understood to be Gen. Longstreet’s order to advance the artillery marked the high-tide in the greatest artillery duel in history.”  

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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John S. Heiser began his career with the National Park Service in 1976 at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. He transferred to Gettysburg National Military Park in 1980, where he held numerous positions until 1997 when he was appointed as historian to manage the park’s library, website, and other duties, a position he held until his retirement in 2020. He still resides in Gettysburg. The author wishes to gratefully thank Scott Fink and Scott Brown for their research assistance with this article.

This elaborate sword was presented to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War on April 23, 1864 by the U.S. Sanitary Commission Metropolitan Fair. The fair was a fundraiser for the Union Army and supported hospitals for wounded soldiers. Grant “won” the sword in a voting contest against competitor Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan.

The sword is rich in symbolism. The silver grip displays the head of a Greek soldier and military trophies; the gilt knuckle guard bears the head of Medusa, and the counterguard shows Hercules slaying the Nemean lion. The pommel is the head of Athena, goddess of warcraft, and set with rubies, diamonds and a sapphire.

Grant’s name is engraved on the sheath, along with the words, “Upon your sword sit laurel victory.” This phrase is taken from William Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Scene III: “Upon your sword sit laurel victory! And smooth success be strew’d before your feet.”

Grant would go on to take the Confederate Army’s surrender at Appomattox and become U.S. President in 1869.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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In the earliest days of Union enlistment in New York City, anyone willing to volunteer was welcome at recruitment offices—including the foreign-born. Language barriers proved no obstacle, particularly among Germans. After all, German support had helped Abraham Lincoln win the presidency in 1860.  

After the fall of Fort Sumter and the call for 75,000 militia to suppress the rebellion, Lincoln wisely concluded that a war to save the Union must not be an exclusively native-born undertaking. So he launched a concerted effort to lure marquee commanders from various ethnic backgrounds, regardless of their politics (though he did resist abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ early pleas for the enlistment of free Blacks).  

One of Lincoln’s first such acts was to order his secretary of war to appoint “Col. Julian Allen, a Polish gentleman, naturalized,” who proposed “raising a Regiment of our citizens of his nationality, to serve in our Army.” After some initial resistance from the War Department, Allen got his commission.  

Army regulations at the time explicitly stated: “No volunteer will be mustered into the service who is unable to speak the English language.” That rule would simply be ignored. From the outset, the restriction hardly stemmed the early enthusiasm of the foreign-born to don the U.S. Army uniform, even if the uniforms themselves reflected more the ethnic background of the recruits than the cohesion of the supposedly united states.  

That spring, German-born New York Herald correspondent Henry Villard seemed “surprised”—but clearly proud—to observe freshly minted “infantry dressed in the genuine Bavarian uniform….Prussian uniforms, too; the ‘Garibaldi Guards’ in the legendary red blouses and bersaglieri [Italian infantry] hats,” as well as “‘Zouaves’ and ‘Turcoes’ [North African infantrymen], clothed as in the French army, with some fanciful American features grafted upon them.”  

Before long, Lincoln granted a request by Carl Schurz, the recently named U.S. minister to Spain, to abandon his post in Madrid and raise a regiment in New York. Although his initial recruitment efforts fell short, Schurz won a military commission anyway, and served in the Army of the Potomac. In 1863, however, he earned damning criticism when his men fled from a Confederate assault at Chancellorsville. Most officers subject to such castigation would have faced demotion or dismissal. But Schurz still exerted enormous influence—over the German-born community as well as Lincoln—for his tireless work in the 1860 campaign. A gifted orator, he managed to convince Lincoln to continue backing him even as he leveled injudicious criticism (privately, at least) on his commander-in-chief.  

Then there was the case of Franz Sigel, a 36-year-old German-born general who notched an even more dubious record in the West. From the outset of the war, however, Sigel proved a magnet for German recruitment. “I Fights Mit Sigel” became a rallying cry among German-speaking soldiers. Each time Lincoln sought to downgrade Sigel, the outcry from Germans proved overpowering. In 1864, when Lincoln briefly faced a third-party reelection challenge, many of those expressing support for the insurgency cited the president’s alleged injustices against Sigel.  

Irish Leaders, Mixed Results

If German Americans contributed the largest foreign-born contingent in the Federal army, Irish Americans proved a close second. Some 150,000 Irishmen took up arms for the Union.  

Such a patriotic response from this overwhelmingly pro-Democratic community could not have been predicted before the shelling of Fort Sumter. Only a week later, at a massive rally at New York’s Union Square, Irish lawyer Richard O’Gormon addressed the crowd of 100,000: “[W]hen I assumed the rights of a citizen, I assumed, too, the duties of a citizen.” Lincoln, he admitted, “is not the President of my choice. No matter. He is the President chosen under the Constitution.” The attack on Sumter was worse “than if the combined fleets of England had threatened to devastate our coast.”  

Not yet completely reassured about Irish loyalty, Lincoln had summoned another prominent New York attorney, James T. Brady, and beseeched him to raise and lead the first Irish brigade. Brady protested that he possessed no experience in such matters. “You know plenty of Irish who do,” Lincoln countered, “…and as to the appointment of officers, did you ever know an Irishman who would decline an office or refuse a pair of epaulets, or do anything but fight gallantly after he had them?”  

Like O’Gormon, Brady was a longtime Democrat, but at Lincoln’s urging, he began successfully recruiting, though he never took up arms himself. The Irish-American newspaper now called on its readers “to be true to the land of your adoption in this crisis of her fate.”  

The overwhelmingly Irish 69th Regiment of the New York State Militia marched to the defense of Washington on April 23, 1861, accompanied by the “stormy cheers” of some half a million onlookers. Lincoln had called for volunteers on April 15, and it had taken only days to muster the 69th. “So great was the anxiety to join the ranks” that three times more men volunteered than could be accommodated in the regiment.  

Leading the regiment downtown that day was 33-year-old Colonel Michael Corcoran. The onetime tavern clerk from County Sligo had led the unit for two years. In 1860, he had aroused both municipal fury and ethnic pride by refusing to assemble his men to welcome the Prince of Wales to New York, arguing that the heir to the British throne represented “the oppressor of Ireland.” Corcoran’s defiance earned him a court-martial that was still pending, only to be shelved once the rebellion began; he was too well-suited to his new role. An active member of the Fenian Brotherhood, which supported Irish independence, Corcoran was also a politically active local Democrat. Above all, New York Archbishop John Hughes believed “Corcoran should be appointed” to lead the Irish defense of the Union, and Lincoln replied that “my own judgment concurs.”  

In an uncirculated, likely misdated, and largely forgotten memorandum he composed sometime that spring, the president identified Corcoran and two other noted Irishmen—James Shields and Thomas Francis Meagher—as ideal Union commanders. Lincoln managed to recruit all three, albeit with mixed results.  

Shields, Lincoln’s onetime Illinois political rival and a former U.S. senator, had been for several years a resident of California. When Fort Sumter fell, he was even farther from home: in Mazatlán, Mexico, on a business venture and extended honeymoon with his Irish-born bride. Shields’ experience in the Mexican War, plus his nativity and status, made him an ideal general, so Lincoln nominated him for a command.  

The gesture was magnanimous on several levels. Not only was Shields a Democrat; he had also opposed Lincoln for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois in 1855 (both men lost). Most noteworthy of all, Shields had once challenged young Lincoln to a duel over a series of incendiary newspaper satires lambasting him in language most modern readers would call anti-Irish. The slander was probably more the work of Lincoln’s fiancée, Mary Todd, than of her future husband, but Lincoln gallantly assumed responsibility and the two men headed to a dueling ground to settle scores.  

Only when Lincoln chose weapons for the contest—broadswords that would have given the long-armed lawyer a distinct advantage over his smaller challenger—did the two call off their fight. Now, 20 years later, the politician whom Lincoln had once publicly mocked quickly “tendered his services to his old friend, now President of the United States”—something of an exaggeration. For a time, in fact, Shields remained frustratingly out of reach.   Claiming he was still hindered by wounds he had suffered in Mexico—which apparently did not limit his prolonged attentions to his young new wife—he delayed his return for weeks. This gave foes who questioned his loyalty ample time to try blocking his appointment. When Shields finally started for home in late November, San Jose newspaperman F.B. Murdock warned Lincoln that “if civil war should break out on the Pacific coast, Gen. Shields would be found on the Rebel side.” Yet the president remained committed to recruiting both Democrats and the foreign-born to fight the enemy—even a former enemy of his own.  

Shields finally reached Washington in January 1862, and on the 8th met with Lincoln at the White House. There, Shields apparently convinced him of his “self-sacrificing cooperation with the government.” The doubtlessly tense reunion ended with the president expressing “hearty and unreserved confidence” in Shields, whose appointment went through as planned. As Lincoln hoped, his commission generated nearly as much enthusiasm in the Irish and Democratic press as Sigel had inspired in the German. In New York, a special committee began recruiting men to serve under Shields as “a distinctive representation of Irish valor and patriotism.”  

Shields’ war, however, did not go as his admirers hoped. Assigned to the Department of the Shenandoah, he suffered a serious wound at the First Battle of Kernstown in March and had to be carried from the field. In his absence, Union forces achieved a modest victory over “Stonewall” Jackson that prompted Shields’ friend to claim he was cheated out of credit for the success. Then in a June rematch at Port Republic, Jackson easily outmaneuvered Shields. Now an aide claimed that were it not for “the blunder of a subordinate,” Shields might have been remembered as “one of the Shermans, Sheridans, and Meades” of the war.” He thereafter earned few command opportunities. In the summer, Lincoln offered some solace by promoting him to the rank of major general, but in an extraordinary rebuff to a onetime member, the Senate refused to confirm him.  

Shields’ army career never rebounded. With no options remaining, the president transferred him to the military Department of the Pacific in San Francisco. Shields thus enjoyed a government-funded transcontinental trip home and then, no doubt by pre-arrangement, resigned from the service. Before him lay yet another stint in the U. S. Senate.  

The third Irish military leader mentioned in Lincoln’s 1861 “Irish” memo was Thomas Meagher, a celebrated resistance fighter in Ireland who earned a devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic. Once banished to a Tasmanian penal colony by the British, he had made a daring escape, reached America, established an Irish newspaper in Boston, and arrived in New York to be greeted as an “apostle of freedom.”  

Meagher had expressed initial sympathy for Southern independence, but after Sumter, advised followers that Union loyalty was “not only our duty to America, but also to Ireland.” Meagher then raised a Zouave company—his slogan was “Young Irishmen to Arms!”—and marched south as part of Corcoran’s 69th, his soldiers’ colorful, Middle Eastern-style regalia a vivid contrast to the drab uniforms worn by the regiment’s other Irish-born volunteers.  

That July, he fought under Corcoran at First Bull Run. The unit lost 38 killed, 59 wounded, and 95 missing, but endured none of the humiliation heaped on the Union Army by the press over its frenzied retreat. New York blueblood George Templeton Strong, no friend of the Irish, acknowledged that “Corcoran’s Irishmen are said to have fought especially well, and have suffered much.” Indeed, even in withdrawing from the field, the 69th helped safeguard the Army of the Potomac’s rear flank. Despite the chaos, Meagher managed to reorganize his men and lead them back to Washington to fight another day.  

Corcoran was not so fortunate. Toward the end of the fray, “standing like a rock in the whirlpool,” he fell into Confederate hands. Taken south as a prisoner of war, he became, in effect, a living martyr. From captivity, he issued a stirring message that sounded at once pro-Union and pro-immigration: “One half of my heart is Erin’s, and the other half is America’s. God bless America, and ever preserve her as the asylum of all the oppressed of the earth.” In Corcoran’s absence, command of the 69th fell to Meagher, who encamped his battered men on Arlington Heights above Washington.  

On July 23, Lincoln rode to the regiment’s headquarters, where the exhausted troops summoned “the greatest enthusiasm” to welcome their commander-in-chief. As Lincoln knew, these and other battle-scarred volunteers were now eligible to leave the service, their original three-month enlistment about to end. According to one newspaper account: “The President asked if they intended to re-enlist? The reply was that ‘they would if the President desired it.’ He announced emphatically that he did…complimenting them upon their brave and heroic work….This was received with cheers and the determination expressed to go in for the war and stand by the government and the old flag forever.” Meagher confirmed that his troops greatly enjoyed Lincoln’s “affable manner and cheerful badinage,” which “made him an especial favorite with these rough-and-ready appreciators of genuine kindness and good humor.”  

Demobilized a few weeks later, the 69th returned to New York. On July 7, thousands of well-wishers massed at Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan to provide the kind of jubilant welcome usually reserved for those who had won battles. Ethnic pride still counted more than martial accomplishment, and sustaining Irish loyalty remained the highest of priorities. As one writer observed: “The entrance of the 69th” produced “a popular ovation…in the hearts of the people.”  

Meagher reemerged for a patriotic rally on Manhattan’s then-rural Upper East Side. There he echoed Lincoln’s recent plea for reenlistment: “I ask no Irishman to do that which I myself am not prepared to do. My heart, my arm, my life is pledged to the National cause, and to the last it will be my highest pride, as I conceive it to be my holiest duty and obligation, to share its fortunes.”  

A few days later, Archbishop Hughes conveyed his undiminished confidence in Meagher to the administration. Lincoln responded by offering Meagher a fresh commission as a major general—as long as he agreed to raise another all-Irish regiment. The president still believed such units provided as much symbolic impact as the German companies Sigel had raised in the West—perhaps more, since most Irish enlistees were Democrats whose loyalty reflected the non-partisan nature of the Union war effort.  

Lincoln’s Legacy on Immigration

Lincoln’s politically wise dependence on foreign-born troops and officers led to mixed results on the battlefield. The reputation of German soldiers fell precipitously after Chancellorsville, and cascaded when Maj. Gen. Alexander Schimmelfennig was widely reported to have sought shelter in a Gettysburg pigsty after the first day of fighting there. Irish troops, meanwhile, won praise for their courage amid carnage not only at Gettysburg, but earlier at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. In the last two years of the war, they became known as the “Fighting Irish,” a sobriquet that, by legend, had been assigned them by none other than Robert E. Lee.   Eventually, the staggering casualty rate among Irish soldiers took its toll—not only on the ranks, but also on the morale of home-front Irish Catholics. Two weeks after Gettysburg, New York Irish rioted, looted, burned, and murdered civilians—predominately Blacks—to protest the new military draft. Irishmen once willing to defend the Union now came to believe they were fighting to liberate emancipated Blacks likely to undercut their already low wages.  

By December, Lincoln responded not with resentment toward immigrants, but with remarkable forgiveness and foresight. He launched an unprecedented effort to woo more European immigrants to the United States to fill the gaps left in home-front industry, mining, and farms by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young men in battle.  

Until then, Lincoln had notched what must be called a mixed record on the issue of immigration. Back in 1844, he had denounced anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia. But with the rise of the nativist, anti-immigrant “Know Nothing” movement, he attempted with only limited success to “fuse” its adherents with the new, antislavery Republicans. Though he had once defended the right of foreign-born noncitizens to vote in local elections if their state constitutions so mandated, he also routinely accused Irishmen of voting illegally (largely because they voted Democratic).  

Meanwhile he developed political alliances with German Protestants who opposed slavery and who, after a few false starts, rallied around Lincoln for the presidency. Following the 1860 election, he rewarded dozens of German supporters with federal jobs. Although he pledged as president-elect to place “aught in the way” of immigrants to America, his vision of immigration remained limited: it did not include people from Asia, and it came with support for the voluntary colonization of blacks and the forced containment of Native Americans.  

Still, few expected that in 1864, Lincoln would reintroduce An Act to Encourage Emigration that, remarkably, proposed federal funding to underwrite the expensive ocean passages of prospective migrants. That idea proved a bridge too far for Congress, which scratched the revolutionary idea from the final bill. Even so, the stripped-down legislation imposed new regulations on passenger ships whose overcrowded holds had long made transatlantic passage dangerous.  

The new law also improved disembarkation facilities at New York’s Castle Garden and elsewhere; created the first federal Office (later Bureau) of Immigration; and encouraged private companies to advance immigrants the fare for their voyages to America.  

Lincoln’s generous initiative opened wide the door to America, gave the federal government a leadership role in regulating and encouraging immigration for the first time, and led directly to the nation-expanding wave of Eastern- and Southern-European immigration that began around 1890.  

As the 16th president and wartime commander-in-chief put it in his annual message of 1864: “I regard our emigrants as one of the principal replenishing streams appointed by Providence to repair the ravages of internal war, and its wastes of national strength and health.” The new birth of freedom would require an influx of new Americans to sustain it.  

Lincoln had lived up to that belief while the war raged. More than a quarter million foreign-born troops served in Union ranks—not only German and Irish, but Swedish, English, Scottish, Hungarian, Polish, and Italian soldiers as well. As one pro-war German American, Reinhold Solger, perceptively noted: before the war, a foreigner had never been treated as “a full citizen…his very accent defeats the most generous intentions…[and] blood is stronger than naturalization papers.” The Civil War changed that calculus. As Solger rejoiced, the foreign-born demonstrated “a sacrificial spirit, shared by all ranks,” adding: “They may all bless the war for that knowledge.”  

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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This article is adapted with permission from Harold Holzer’s new book, Brought Forth on this Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration (Dutton, 2024).

Tour Stop One at Vicksburg National Military Park is the location of “Battery DeGolyer.” Named after its commanding officer, Captain Samuel DeGolyer, the position had the heaviest concentration of guns on the Union lines during the 47-day Siege of Vicksburg—22 in all.  

Though four times the size of a standard Union battery, the position consisted of the 8th Battery Michigan Light Artillery; Yost’s Independent Ohio Battery; Company L, 2nd Illinois Light Artillery; and the 3rd Battery Ohio Light Artillery. Throughout the Siege of Vicksburg, each gun fired two shots an hour daily and, on average, during the siege. The arrangement fired a total of 2,409 projectiles at the Confederate Great Redoubt. But a quick look around Tour Stop One does not indicate who Captain Samuel DeGolyer was, nor does it mention his remarkable performance during the campaign for Vicksburg.  

Who was Sam DeGolyer? Born in upstate New York in 1827, young Sam and his family (pronounced De-Goy-er), moved to Michigan in the 1830s and settled around the Hudson area in the southeastern part of the state. DeGolyer married Catherine Jeffers of Lenawee County and in 1854 their daughter Kate was born. As a young man in Hudson, he was very active in the small farming community and his stout stature and piercing gaze reflected a determined man of action. DeGolyer also held various public posts and positions, owned a spoke-and-wheel production operation, and when war broke out in April 1861, used his popularity with the community to put together a company of volunteers to put down the rebellion.  

Company F, “Hudson Volunteers,” with Captain Samuel DeGolyer in command, was mustered in as the 4th Michigan Volunteer Infantry on June 20, 1861. A month later, DeGolyer and his men eagerly waited on the plains of Manassas, Va., for their turn to get at the “secesh.”  

The First Battle of Bull Run on July 21 was a strange sight. The movement of units on the battlefield was sophomoric at best. Regiments on both sides attempted to flank one another using parade-ground maneuvers, but with the air clogged with lead and metal and, moreover, inconsistencies between weapons, flags, uniforms (the 4th Michigan was dressed in gray) and orders, the efforts to break each line often resulted in a bloody repulse.  

Some units even ran into each other or fired into the backs of their comrades. Many soldiers, stripped to the waist, passed out from paralyzing fear or heat exhaustion. Fortunately, as the green 4th Michigan waited its turn to deploy into the fray, the men probably could not see much. Smoke blocked their view, but what was going on beyond it favored the Union Army. News from aides dashing all over the field projected victory, yet the tide changed as Confederate forces received reinforcements just at the right time. Thomas J. Jackson’s Virginia soldiers and J.E.B Stuart’s cavalry plowed into the exhausted Union lines and scattered the raw citizen-soldiers in every direction.   

Through the thick smoke, the 4th Michigan could hear the shrieks of horrified Union soldiers blended with the yells of oncoming Confederates. Suddenly, groups of panicked federals burst out of the smoke clouds and slammed into the Michiganders’ ranks. A melee erupted and, while searching for a better glimpse of the fight, Southern soldiers captured DeGolyer and sent him off to Richmond. Following the Union disaster at Bull Run, and after hearing of his capture, DeGolyer’s hometown newspaper, The Hudson Gazette, asserted that “the fact is, Sam was spoiling for a fight and he wasn’t born to be shot.” But for a personality such as DeGolyer’s, such a prophecy was bound to be tested.  

On August 13, 1861, Sam DeGolyer escaped Richmond’s Libby Prison, and for a week, DeGolyer and a companion navigated through the swampy Virginia labyrinths, dodging patrols and dueling armies along the way. Eventually, they made it to the safety of a tobacco vessel headed to Baltimore. Weeks later, DeGolyer met with President Abraham Lincoln and General Winfield Scott. Both made sure to acknowledge publicly the heroic escape from deep within the enemy territory (a much-needed story of redemption for a nation reeling following its embarrassing showing at First Bull Run). With public adulation and inflation of ego, DeGolyer headed back to Michigan. He immediately went to work recruiting 100 men for the 4th Michigan and was promoted to major of the regiment upon his return.    

Colonel Dwight A. Woodbury, however, was annoyed with DeGolyer’s promotion. Woodbury, a phlegmatic leader who looked and acted every-part of a regimental commander, thought DeGolyer habitually hasty in his actions, especially following his delinquent escapades at Bull Run and thus judged him a scoundrel and a rogue—indifferent to orders. So, in the winter of 1861 and on a short leash, Major Sam DeGolyer set out on his daily duties as third in command of the 4th Michigan Infantry. It did not last long.   

In December 1861, while bivouacked outside Washington D.C., Colonel Woodbury learned that DeGolyer ordered the home of some defiant Confederate sympathizers to be stripped of all windows and doors. Woodbury wasted no time in cashiering DeGolyer and sent him back to Michigan to await further orders. Fortunately for DeGolyer, he escaped the “Old Fourth”—the regiment evidently had an officer curse. Four colonels were eventually killed in action, including Woodbury, and Dexter, Mich., native Harrison Jeffords, the highest commissioned officer killed by a bayonet during the Civil War.   

DeGolyer returned to Michigan and soon was at work with a new plan: raise an artillery battery. But not just any battery, a ‘flying battery.’ Napoleon used such instruments of war successfully on the battlefield, and so would DeGolyer. Battery H, 1st Michigan Light Artillery (aka the 8th Michigan Light Artillery) was mustered into service on March 6, 1862, in Monroe. The battery consisted of six guns: two 12-pounder howitzers and four 12-pounder James Rifles. These guns were not particularly powerful but were able to quickly discharge rapid salvos while maneuvering around the battlefield with speed. And with that, the 1st Michigan Light Artillery headed to the war’s Western Theater.   

On May 1, 1863, after months of failed probes at the defenses of Vicksburg, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his approximately 70,000 men landed below the bastion on open terrain. His goal: cut off Vicksburg from the supply lines at Jackson, Miss., and coax the Confederates under Lt. Gen. John Pemberton out from their defenses and destroy them in detail. DeGolyer and the 1st Michigan Artillery were part of this massive movement. It was during the Vicksburg Campaign that historian Ed Bearss noted DeGolyer began his evolution into “the greatest artillery officer in Grant’s army.”  

Immediately, DeGoyler and the 1st Michigan found themselves in the middle of a fight. At Port Gibson, Grant sought to secure a lodgment for his army to pressure Vicksburg from the south and east, and in their first test in combat with Grant, DeGolyer’s artillery raked the Confederates unmercifully. Using canister, the battery tore up the surrounding area with precision and speed, opening the road to Jackson. Two weeks later, at the Battle of Raymond, DeGolyer was enthroned as Grant’s point man.   

On May 12, brutal heat slowed the Union’s advance on Jackson. Grant’s columns only made 1½ miles the day before, and then Confederate forces appeared. Hearing battle, and without orders, DeGolyer spurred his guns up the Utica Road. While deploying into position, he unlimbered amid the lounging 20th Ohio Infantry. The gunners crashed through the Buckeyes boiling coffee pots and immediately poured relentless shot and shell into the advancing 7th Texas Infantry. DeGolyer’s blood was up, and the Confederate attack unraveled in the face of DeGolyer’s guns. The road to Jackson opened and Grant wasted no time in moving on.   

Four days later, Grant’s columns inched closer to the defenses at Vicksburg. On a bald rise, Confederate forces set out to strike at Grant before he could hit them. The collision at Champion Hill was some of the most savage combat of the Vicksburg Campaign. Stubborn Confederate resistance and constant counterattacks during the early morning of May 16 stifled cohesion between attacking Union forces. At 9 a.m., the situation looked bleak for Grant, but fortune smiled on him as his wild card surged onto the battlefield.   

DeGolyer unlimbered behind a rail fence just as another Confederate push threatened to beat back the Union advance for good. Using his keen gunner’s eye, DeGolyer noticed a better position and, according to an unnamed New York World correspondent observing the fight, “made a wide detour to the right…and opened a terrible enfilading fire upon the enemy.” The Confederate pressure subsided, but they came on again in typical fashion. The veteran Alabamians charged pell-mell into the mouths of DeGolyer’s guns. The horrified correspondent looked on as the Alabamians “advanced in solid columns and in magnificent style.” True to his command philosophy, DeGolyer waited “till they had reached a point two hundred yards from the mouth of the cannon…and discharged them, a terrible volley, full in the faces of the advancing columns.” Noticing a more proper undulation for his guns, DeGolyer fell back a short distance to the higher ground and behind a rail fence.   

Sure enough, the Alabamians regrouped “as if by magic” and surged out of the tree line. A rail fence—DeGolyer’s first position—hindered the Confederate advance. The Michiganders waited for the exhausted Confederates to climb or pull down the rails and then unleashed a fierce cannonade that shredded the mob. In awe of the carnage, the New York World observer summed up the destruction: “It is impossible to convey an adequate idea of the slaughter occasioned on the right and centre of the line. The ground was literally covered with the dead and dying. In the ravines, behind trees, on the summit of the hills, lay the unfortunate men of both armies, some of them stiff and cold in death’s icy grasp, others with wounds of every description; here, an arm cut off by cannon balls; there a leg hanging on by the muscles.”  

Indeed, DeGolyer and his elite unit were indispensable to Grant. A few weeks later, the Union Army approached Vicksburg and unleashed a series of bloody attacks that failed miserably. Grant recoiled and settled in for a siege. At the center of his line, he placed Captain DeGolyer and entrusted him with a command of 22 guns.  

The Siege of Vicksburg lasted 47 days, but DeGolyer did not see the end. On May 28, the indispensable Captain Samuel DeGolyer was mortally wounded in the right leg and abdomen while resting in his tent behind his guns. Soon Sam’s wife, Catherine, rushed to his side and brought him home to Michigan, where he lingered for a few months before succumbing to his wound on August 8—just 33 years old.  

Tour Stop One at Vicksburg National Military Park was christened “Battery DeGolyer” following the war, and his guns remain commanding the area to this day.   

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Trace Brusco is a Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama. There, he studies experiences in combat and community during the Civil War.

Colt-Paterson Model 1836 Revolver

Patented on Feb. 25, 1836, Samuel Colt’s five-shooter—the world’s first commercially practical revolver—took its name from the factory where it was mass produced, the Patent Arms Co. in Paterson, New Jersey. It met with a lukewarm reception until 1839, when Colt added an integral loading lever and capping window that made reloading far easier and faster.

The U.S. Army purchased a limited number of Colt’s revolving pistols, rifles and shotguns for field testing in Florida during the 1835–42 Second Seminole War, but rejected them as too fragile and prone to malfunction. Colt improved the breed. By 1843 the Republic of Texas Navy had bought 180 rifles and shotguns and a roughly equal number of revolvers. When the Texas Army and Navy were disbanded that year, the republic’s remaining armed force, the 40 men of the Texas Ranger Company, bought up the surplus revolvers.

Ranger Capt. John Coffee Hays heaped praise on the weapons for their relative ease in loading from virtually any position and their effectiveness against larger numbers of Indians. By 1861 Colt’s continually improving revolvers had won their way back into the U.S. military, whose officers would soon be trading shots with each other.

Minié Bullet

In 1847 French armorer Claude-Étienne Minié developed a conical bullet with cannelures around the sides that would expand upon firing. This feature allowed a line infantryman to quickly secure the round within a musket barrel—even one with rifling—after which the hot gasses of the powder explosion caused the bullet to expand as it spun out the rifled barrel. This gave the bullet or “Minié ball” greater speed, range and accuracy than the older musket ball yet could be loaded/reloaded just as fast.

A further refinement was introduced by Capt. James H. Burton of the Harpers Ferry Armory in western Virginia, in the form of a conical concavity at the rear, aiding the bullet’s expansion. Britain’s army first took full advantage of the Minié bullet with its Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle, which entered service during the Crimean War. The American variant was incorporated into the Model 1855, whose Maynard tape primer was replaced by a copper cap in the Model 1861 Springfield, so named because most (but by no means all) were produced in that Massachusetts town. The rifled Minié bullets were devastating in both wars. Their users still clung to Napoleonic Era century doctrine, facing off in lines and at distances for which casualties to more efficient rifles increased exponentially.

Dévastation Class Ironclad Floating Batteries

The ironclad warship harkens back to the Korean “turtle ships” that helped defeat the Japanese navy during the latter’s invasion attempt of 1592 to 1598. The concept was revived when France deployed three floating batteries of the Dévastation class to the Crimean War. With their 4.3-inch-thick iron sides, 16 50-pounder smoothbore and two 12-pounder guns, the vessels weighed more than 1,600 tons each and although powered by a 150-hp Le Creuzot steam engine each or the wind against three auxiliary sails, the best speed they could produce was 4 knots. Consequently, in practice the vessels had to be towed to their targets by sidewheeler steam frigates: L’Albatros for Dévastation, Darien for Tonnante and Magellan towing Lave. The trio had their combat debut against the Russian fortress of Kinburn on the Black Sea on Oct. 17, 1855, performing well as Dévastation hurled 1,265 projectiles on the fort (82 of them shells) in four hours, sustaining 72 hits, 31 of which struck its armor and suffering the only fatalities of the three: two crewmen—plus 12 wounded. All three batteries saw further service against the Austrians in the Adriatic Sea in 1859.

That year the French commissioned Gloire, the first seagoing ironclad, ushering in a new era in warship design, which would next see practice in earnest when the Confederate ironclad ram Manassas defended New Orleans on Oct. 12, 1861 and—vainly—on April 24, 1862.

USS George Washington Parke Custis

In August 1861 Col. Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe, self-styled master of balloons, purchased a coal barge which he, in collaboration with John A. Dahlgren, commander of the Washington Navy Yard and chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, modified with a flat deck, 120 feet long and 14 feet, 6 inches in beam, capable of accommodating an observation balloon, hydrogen-generating apparatus, related equipment and tools and crewmen drawn from the Army. Although previous ships had carried balloons, Lowe’s vessel, christened USS George Washington Parke Custis, was the first designed from the hull up to maintain and launch them.

The one thing it lacked was its own means of propulsion. After trials on the Potomac River, on Dec. 10 the balloon carrier was towed downriver by the steamer Coeur de Lion, accompanied by Dahlgren and a detachment of troops led by Brig. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, anchoring at Mattawomen Creek. The next day Lowe ascended to observe Confederate activity in Virginia, three miles away, reporting on enemy batteries at Freestone Point and counting their campfires. George Washington Parke Custis accompanied the Army of the Potomac up the York and James rivers in spring 1862. Modest though its achievements were—limited by dependance on external propulsion—it was the first aircraft carrier.

Gatling Gun

The American Civil War coincided with the development of several automatic weapon designs, of which that of Dr. Richard Gatling, involving six rotating barrels cranked by hand, proved to be the most effective. Although patented on Nov. 4, 1862, the Gatling gun was not officially adopted by the U.S. Army until 1866…which is not to say it saw no action until then. On July 17, 1863 city authorities purchased some Gatlings to intimidate anti-draft rioters in New York. During the siege of Petersburg (June 1864-April 1865) Union officers bought 12 Gatling guns with their own money to install in the trenches facing the Confederate defenses, while another eight were mounted aboard gunboats.

Although large and heavy, Gatlings made a growing post-Civil War presence in Japan’s Boshin War of 1877, the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War and the American charge up San Juan Hill in 1898. Eclipsed by gas-operated machine guns like the Maxim by the end of the century, the Gatling gun’s principle was revived in the late 20th century in electrically operated weapons such as the Vulcan minigun.

Spencer Repeating Rifle

In 1860 Christopher Miner Spencer patented the world’s first bullet contained in a metallic .56-56 rimfire cartridge. Using a lever action and a falling breechblock, it could quickly fire off seven rounds from a tubular magazine within the buttstock. The Union Army was hesitant to adopt the Spencer because of the logistic headaches entailed in supplying weapons that virtually invited rapid, potentially wasteful firing, but eventually Spencer persuaded President Abraham Lincoln that the advantages outweighed the problems. Its earliest appearance was with Col. John T. Wilder’s “Lightning Brigade” of mounted infantry, whose privately-purchased Spencer rifles were a factor in the Army of the Cumberland’s victory at Hoover’s Gap on June 26-28, 1863.

Back East, Brig. Gen. George A. Custer equipped half of his Michigan Brigade with Spencer rifles in time for the battles of Hanover on June 30 and Gettysburg’s East Cavalry Field on July 3. The first of the shorter, handier Spencer carbines appeared in August and made an immediate hit among the cavalrymen. If logistics constituted a problem for the Union troops, it was worse among the Confederates whenever they obtained stocks of what they called “that damn Yankee gun that could be loaded on Sunday and fired all week.” Their shortages of copper and overall industrial capacity for reverse engineering rendered the captured Spencers a limited asset at best. A total of 200,000 Spencer rifles and carbines were produced before the state of the rifleman’s art advanced ahead.

Submarine H.L. Hunley

On Sept. 7, 1776 a curious little vessel called “Turtle,” designed by David Bushnell and manned by Continental Army Sergeant Ezra Lee, made history’s first submarine attack on the British 64-gun Eagle. The attempt failed and the next submarine attack on a warship had to wait until 1864. Under siege by land and by sea, Confederate-ruled Charleston, South Carolina used all manner of ingenious inventions to counter the overwhelming numbers of U.S. Navy blockaders, including the ironclad casemate rams Chicora and Palmetto State, small semisubmersible torpedo boats called Davids and a fully submersible vessel designed by Horace Lawson Hunley.

Propelled by a screw propeller turned by an eight-man crew and armed with a spar torpedo (explosive mine mounted at the end of a wooden pole), the latter was built in Mobile, Al. and shipped by rail to Charleston on Aug. 12, 1863. During testing on Aug. 29, the vessel, named H.L. Hunley for its inventor, swamped, drowning five of the crew. Raised and tested further, it sank again on Oct. 15, killing all eight crewmen including Hunley himself. Raised again, H.L. Hunley set out on its first operational sortie on Feb. 17, 1864 and detonated its spar torpedo against the side of the 1,260-ton screw sloop of war USS Housatonic, which sank. H.L. Hunley did not return, but in 1995 its remains were found and in 2000 it was raised, revealing it had ventured closer to its target than intended and swamped for the last time.

Although it took a heavier toll on its crews than on the enemy—a total of 21 killed compared to two officers and three crewmen slain aboard Housatonic—the precedent had been set by the world’s first successful submarine attack. The ill-starred H.L. Hunley is on display at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center on the Cooper River.

Dreyse Needle Gun

Developed by Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse and patented in 1840, the first breech-loading bolt-action rifle used a needle-like firing pin to pierce through a paper cartridge to strike a percussion cap at the base of the bullet. British testers were impressed by its accuracy at 800 to 1,200 yards, but dismissed it as “too complicated and delicate” to stand up to battle use—and in fact many Prussian infantrymen carried extra “needles” in case they broke. Despite the critics, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV ordered 60,000 for his army.

The Dreyse needle gun proved its mettle in the German wars of reunification, while evolving from paper to metal cartridges in 1862. The rifle was first used against fellow Prussians in the May uprising in Dresden during the Revolution of 1848, but truly proved itself against Danish muzzle-loaders in the Second Schleswig-Holstein War of 1864. The Prussians had 270,000 Dreyses for the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, where the average Prussian infantryman could get five shots off lying prone in the time it took an Austrian standing to reload his Lorenz rifle musket. The Dreyse met its match in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 against the superior French Chassepot, but with 1,150,000 needle guns, the better-led Prussian forces prevailed.

Whitehead Locomotive Torpedo

In the Austrian port of Trieste in 1860, naval engineer Robert Whitehead, was inspired by Fiume-based engineer Giovanni Luppis’ “coast savior,” a small self-propelled vessel run on compressed air. He designed a compressed air-powered “Minenschiff” also called a “locomotive torpedo,” patented on Dec. 21, 1866. Unlike previous stationary torpedoes, Whitehead’s was not only self-propelled, but had a self-regulating depth device and a gyroscopic stabilizer. Equally important, Whitehead devised a launching barrel, making his invention not a merely a weapon, but a weapons system. After being test mounted on the gunboat Gemse, Whitehead’s torpedo was purchased or licensed by 16 naval powers, undergoing constant refinement.

Its essential nature in one role was expressed by Adm. Henry John May in 1904 when he declared, “but for Whitehead the submarine would remain an interesting toy and little more.” The first wartime torpedo attack allegedly occurred during the Russo-Turkish War on Jan. 16, 1878 when torpedo boats from the Russian tender Velikiy Knyaz Konstantin captained by Stepan Osipovich Makarov sank the Ottoman steamer Intibah. After all the improvements the original underwent, its last combat use came in Drobak Sound, Norway on April 9, 1940 when two Whitehead torpedoes from a Norwegian coastal battery struck the shell-damaged German heavy cruiser Blücher and sank it.

Maxim Machine Gun

Prolific polymath inventor Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim is best remembered for a three-year project begun in 1882 that led to a machine gun with a recoil-operated firing system that fired 250 .303-inch rounds at a rate the Gatling could not match, plus a water-cooling system to allow sustained fire. Its durability and murderous efficiency led to its use by 29 countries between 1886 and 1959. It also earned American-born Maxim a British knighthood. The Maxims’ effect on history first manifested itself in Africa, where the British used them in their 1887 expedition against rebellious Yoni in Sierra Leone and the Germans used them against the Abushiri of their East African colony in 1888.

Its first major battle was during the First Matabele War in what is now Zimbabwe. At Shangani on Oct. 25, 1893, 700 British and South African troops, backed by Maxims, took a fearsome toll on 5,000 Matabele enemies. In 1898 the weapon’s role in European and American imperialism was archly summed up by Hilaire Belloc in The Modern Traveler: “Whatever happens, we have got, the Maxim gun, and they have not.” The European powers would be forced to revise their view in 1914, however, when they had to face the consequences of using Maxim’s invention against one another.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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