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

by C. Brian Kelly

  More obvious, look at the navies. At the outset, the North had 90 ships. The South, none. Both forces soon ballooned, naturally. The Federals built or purchased 624 more vessels (not all of the original 90 were actually serviceable), while by the end of the war an estimated 500 vessels had served in the South’s “Lost Cause.”

  Even more crucially, what about manpower? Just as the population of the North (an estimated 31.4 million) was greater than that of the South (an estimated 12.3 million), so were the sizes of their military forces disproportionate. Roughly 1.5 million to 2.2 million men served the Union as soldiers or sailors, to the South’s 750,000.

  Considering the country’s centers of gravity in another way, of the nation’s nine cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants (per the 1860 U.S. Census), only New Orleans was distinctly Southern, although Baltimore and St. Louis were divided in their loyalties. The two Confederate capitals—Montgomery, Alabama, and Richmond, Virginia—by contrast, could claim populations of only 36,000 and 38,000 respectively. Charleston, where the shooting really began, barely outdid those two with 40,578 folk.

  And what about slavery, the divisive and evil institution that caused such heartache all around? Were there really that many slaves in the middle of the nineteenth century? The best estimate is that there were about four million, a sizable number. Oddly, though, while nearly all slaveowners were in the South, sixty-four slaves were counted as living in the North. Furthermore, the South’s slaveowners included a handful who were themselves black, largely in New Orleans.

  Not all blacks in the South were slaves, of course, but most of them were. Free blacks numbered an estimated 262,003 in the South—a few more than the 225,967 free blacks who lived in the North.

  MIDDLES

  Hello, Washington

  THE WASHINGTON OF THE CIVIL WAR PERIOD WAS FAR REMOVED FROM THE beauteous city of today. In fact, it was distinctly primitive—even slovenly to look at—with an unfinished Capitol dome, a half-built Washington Monument, and even worse…

  Even worse, in the words of Ohio’s Representative Albert G. Riddle, it was “as unattractive, straggling, sodden a town, wandering up and down the left bank of the yellow [yellow!] Potomac, as fancy can sketch.”

  Perhaps Riddle exaggerated ever so slightly. But he offered factual observations, too. Pennsylvania Avenue, he later wrote, “twelve rods wide, stretched drearily over the mile between the unfinished Capitol and the unfinished Treasury building on Fifteenth Street, west, where it turned north for a square, and took its melancholy way to Georgetown.”

  Worse, “illy paved” with cobblestones, Pennsylvania Avenue “was the only paved street of the town,” averred Mr. Riddle. “The other streets, which were long stretches of mud or deserts of dust and sand, with here and there clumps of poorly built residences with long gaps between them, passing little deserts of open lands, where their lines were lost, wandered from the highlands north towards the Potomac, and from the Eastern Branch (Anacostia) to Rock Creek.”

  Worst of all: “Not a sewer blessed the town, nor off of Pennsylvania Avenue was there a paved gutter.”

  It sounds unbelievable to us today, but Riddle very firmly stated: “Each house had an open drain from its rear, out across the sidewalk.”

  The result was of course not too pleasant for residents or visitors, to say little of the hygienic aspects. “As may be supposed the Capital of the Republic had more mal-odors than the poet Coleridge ascribed to ancient Cologne.”

  Just for added atmospheric color, Riddle also noted the open canal running from Rock Creek to the Anacostia River, a branch of the Chesapeake and Ohio and a breeding ground for tadpoles, mosquitoes and malaria.

  In another vein, the Ohio Republican found that “politically, the city— the fixed population—was intensely Southern, as much so as Richmond or Baltimore.” Indeed, “very few men of culture, and none below that grade, were Republicans at the advent of ‘Lincoln and his Northern myrmidons,’ as they were called in 1856–61.”

  The new political and social set, ushered into town by Lincoln’s so-called advent, Riddle among them, changed all, it would seem. Fresh blood, heroic deeds, and the inspiration of men facing—and overcoming—hostile forces “excercized [sic] an irresistible influence upon the population, and at once and forever silenced the open utterance of sedition and rebellion.”

  Be that as it may, another visitor to the beleaguered capital city of the 1860s was James A. Garfield, a young Union officer and future congressman, and president of the reunited United States. In an outing with Kate Chase, daughter of Lincoln’s treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase, in October 1862, Garfield saw that “the city is surrounded by a nearly complete circle of hills.” They had a choice of spans over the Potomac River. “In crossing over into Virginia there are three famous bridges, the Long, the Aqueduct, and the Chain Bridge—the last being furthest upstream, and around which there have been many skirmishes during the past year. The great [Chesapeake and Ohio] canal which comes in here from the west, formerly crossed the Potomac and made its southern and eastern terminus at Alexandria. The water has been let off and it is now used as a bridge from Georgetown to Virginia. Hence the name [Aqueduct Bridge].”

  The Union troops had been busy since their rout at First Bull Run. “The heights around Washington are all crowned with formidable fortifications, mostly heavy earthworks and are called Forts. We passed through Georgetown and over the Aqueduct Bridge and went via Arlington Heights, the home of Lee, the rebel General in Chief. He owns a large tract of land there and has a quaint old pillared residence on it with a touch of the Norman Castle style about it. He married a Custis, one of the Washington family.”

  So much for the grand Arlington House, it seems. “From there we went by Bailey’s Cross-Roads to Fairfax Court House, about 18 miles through a country completely devastated, it having been in turn held by both armies several times during the last eighteen months. Fairfax is an old town built mainly of stone and brick, and seems to be nearly or quite one century old.”

  And from a tour later the same year, more Garfield observations on the future site of today’s Arlington National Cemetery:

  “We took the carriage and went across the Potomac to Arlington Heights, thence to Alexandria, then to Fairfax Seminary, back to Alexandria, drove the carriage on board a steamer and came back to Washington by water. General Lee’s House at Arlington Heights was built by George Washington Custis whose daughter Lee married. It is a quaint old building, built in the castle style, and the walls of the main hall are ornamented with the skull and antlers of stags and paintings of the chase, also several battle pictures of the Revolution. It is now the headquarters of General Heintzelman. [General Samuel P. Heintzelman, at the time commander of Union defenses in northern Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington proper.]”

  No Panacea for Politicians

  IMAGINE A MEMBER OF CONGRESS RIDING T O THE NATION’S CAPITAL IN AN unheated railroad boxcar, a national legislator wearing his unlaundered shirts and socks for days at a time and foregoing a Christmas recess. Imagine a capital where the seasonal turkey would cost $125 whole…where the legislative pay at any time of year barely covered the cost of a boarding house.

  Imagine—but know that such were the experiences of Georgia’s Warren Akin and other members of Congress during the Civil War—the Confederate Congress sitting in Richmond, that is.

  The Confederate States of America enjoyed three Congresses in all: the Provisional Congress that first met in both Montgomery, Alabama, and Richmond, Virginia, to draw up the new Confederate government, plus two more Congresses meeting exclusively in Richmond. Members of the “Provisional” were selected at the secession conventions held by their respective states. This body was unicameral—one deliberative chamber only. The next two Congresses were bicameral with an elected membership.

  The Provisional body, for the record, first convened in Montgomery on February 4, 1861. It assembled for five sessions over the next year, then dissolved i
tself with final adjournment in Richmond on February 17, 1862. The next day, the First Congress took over.

  Meeting in Richmond, it held four sessions, then faded away in February 1864 to make room for the Second (and last) Confederate Congress, which met in two lengthy sessions from May 1864 to March 1865.

  After that, it was all over. In fact, the last Southerner elected to the legislative body never assumed his seat. Nathaniel W. Townes of Texas had won the right to take the House seat of a deceased Confederate congressman, but Townes’s special election of March 13, 1865, came too late—Appomattox was just weeks ahead.

  Of the 267 other men who collectively made up the Confederate Congress, about one-third had been U.S. congressmen before the Civil War changed their lives and political careers. A clear majority, for that matter, had political experience on federal, state, or local levels.

  Their lot in the more permanent Confederate capital of Richmond was not so enviable, noted history professor Bell Irvin Wiley in his book Letters of Warren Akin: Confederate Congressman (University of Georgia Press, 1959). The legislators were asked to do their job in a fragile house of glass in the midst of wide-ranging war against a powerful enemy. “The ultimate result,” wrote Wiley, “was frustration and failure; and in the long time that intervened between the hopeful beginning and final defeat, most congressmen were subjected to considerable abuse by journalists, members of other departments of government, state authorities, constituents, and the public in general.”

  To make matters worse, their home districts were being overrun by the dreaded Yankees. Many a congressman’s family “at home” no longer was at home—they were refugees living elsewhere, in exile. One member with exactly that problem was a former U.S. senator from Alabama, Clement C. Clay Jr. Now a Confederate senator, Clay was forced to flee from home base of Huntsville. As he plaintively wrote to a fellow senator: “My home & parents & most of my kindred [are] in the hands of the enemy & I an exile wandering about like a troubled spirit seeking rest.” (Fortunately for the rest of the Confederacy, Clay’s earlier efforts to have Huntsville picked as the permanent Confederate capital had been to no avail!)

  House member Warren Akin’s experience was strikingly similar. A lawyer and state legislator from Cassville in northern Georgia, Akin at first kept to a relatively normal course despite the outbreak of war in 1861. By early 1864, however, he and his family had moved to Oxford, southeast of Atlanta, in anticipation of Federal incursions. But they then had to beat a hasty retreat farther east to Elberton in his native Elbert County. The Yankees, meanwhile, burned down Akin’s home and law office in Cassville in May 1864, then returned six months later to set fire to the rest of the town (except for three houses occupied by persons too infirm to flee). Atlanta, of course, fell to the invaders, and Akin himself was fortunate to escape capture by George Stoneman’s cavalry raiders.

  By this time—the summer of 1864—the fifty-two-year-old Akin was serving in the Second Confederate Congress that began its sessions in Richmond in May 1864. This meant Akin had to leave wife Mary Verdery, their seven small children (and six or seven slaves) on their own in a troubled, besieged land. Nor was he very well compensated for his lengthy absences from home and law practice. His monthly pay of $690 in Confederate money, he once wrote, would cover his boarding-house costs and other basic needs, with only “a little left to take home.” And the $690-a-month sum did not even come until almost the end of the Civil War. At first, noted historian Wiley in his book of Akin letters, the Southern congressmen received only eight dollars a day and ten cents a mile as a travel allowance. An 1862 increase gave them $2,760 per annum in legislative salary, plus twenty cents a mile for official travel. Finally came the $690 a month—still no panacea.

  Lodging and meals were high-cost items during congressional sessions, which customarily lasted for weeks at a time. “Some of the congressmen stayed in hotels,” noted Wiley, “and a directory published in 1864 shows that the Exchange, the Ballard House, and the Spotswood were favorite places of abode. A few legislators bought or rented houses in the capital. But the majority of them lived in boarding houses or private homes.”

  And not always happily. A. M. Branch of Texas wrote home in May 1864 that he was paying six hundred dollars a month for his lodging and two meals a day, “which is pretty high board.” Likewise, Missouri’s Thomas A. Harris once lamented that his pay of ten to eleven dollars a day fell far short of his actual needs. “Board alone,” he wrote in April 1864, “without washing, clothing or incidentals of any kind, is at hotels, $30 and at the most mediocre boarding houses from $8 to $12 per day. With my family, my absolute expenses average $50 per day & you know that I live plainly & with rigid economy.”

  Speaking of laundry, Akin often mentioned that subject and his enforced frugality. His letters reveal he wore his shirts for three or four days at a time and his socks for a week, to save laundry costs. He seemed always to be darning his own socks, and he once commented: “I carry and use my handkerchiefs until they are soiled so much I am ashamed to use them.”

  As the conflict wore down all elements of Southern society, Richmond became a dangerous place for the average citizen—even a legislator, it seems. One reason the Confederate House voted against extending its meeting time into the evening hours was the members’ fear of muggings in the streets of the capital city.

  By late 1864, various societal amenities—such as passenger train service— had deteriorated so much that Georgia Congressman Akin, once Speaker of the House in his own state legislature, had to travel in a railroad boxcar for the last leg of a trip back to Richmond. “I was just 9 ½ hours going from Greensboro, N.C., to Danville, Va.,” he wrote, “a distance of 48 miles [I] travelled in a box car in the night and slept on some corn sacks, but as it was not very cold I made out pretty well.”

  Although he exhibited a cheerful and spartan attitude regarding his travel difficulties, Akin at the same time did despair over the larger portent of his plight—and that of the Confederacy. “I don’t know how long I am to support my family, if this war continues long,” he wrote to his wife. “Everything I have been working hard for so many years will be eaten up and in my old age myself, family and children will be left without the means of support.”

  The only answer, he added, was to trust in God—“and do the best I can.”

  Brave Deed Recorded

  BEFORE THE UNION FLEET BULLED ITS WAY UPRIVER AND SET THE STAGE FOR THE fall of New Orleans, how were things ashore in the Big Easy? What were the local conditions after a year of War Between the States in this multicultural town?

  In a word or two, pretty sad. A city of futile images and yet determined to go on.

  George W. Cable—call him a young man or an old boy—was there, and he saw with keen eye. He saw at the Coliseum Place the daily dress parade of the Confederate guards. And so well turned out! “Long, spotless, gray, whitegloved ranks that stretched in such faultless alignment down the hard, harsh turf of our old ball-ground.”

  Except that these were not exactly frontline troops. Those fellows, the young men of the city, had long since passed on to distant fields. This was the home guard—“Gray heads, hoary heads, high heads, bald heads.” These, bravely turned out as they might be, were “the merchants, bankers, underwriters, judges, real estate owners and capitalists of the Anglo-American part of the city.”

  Not that the Anglos held any monopoly on local patriotism, either. Elsewhere, down at the famous Levee (or steamboat landing) drilled “a superb body of Creoles in dark-blue uniforms.” Their commands and their manual were in French.

  Other ethnic groups were also vital, since, “as a gendarmerie they relieved just so many Confederate soldiers of police duty in a city under martial law, and enabled them to man forts and breastworks at short notice whenever that call should come.”

  The city had lost its normal bustle. People hid their valuables. “Gold and silver had long ago disappeared.” Commerce slowed, and where business had been conducted or
goods manufactured there now was armament…or nothing. For a short while after war began, even after the Union clamped on its blockade outside the mouth of the Mississippi, the Levee kept busy. But no longer. “Its stir and noise had gradually declined, faltered, turned into the commerce of war.”

  And even more of the young men had gone off to war. “The brave steady fellows,” said Cable, “who at entry and shipping and cash and account desks could no longer keep a show of occupation, had laid down the pen, taken up the sword and musket and followed after the earlier and more eager volunteers.”

  From those early days, too, had come the sad and dismaying returns. The town “had never been really glad again after that awful day of Shiloh.” They “had sent so many gallant fellows to help Beauregard, and some of them so young.”

  And now, in the spring of 1862, war was coming nearer and nearer. “For now even we, the uninformed, the lads and women…knew the enemy was closing down on upon us.”

  Still, was not every gray-haired man and boy ready to do his duty? Were not the fortifications ready? “But there was little laughter. Food was dear; the destitute poor were multiplying terribly…. The Mississippi was gnawing at the levees and threatening to plunge in on us. The city was believed to be full of spies.”

  Finally the day came that all had expected and feared. Heralded by alarm bells, the Union warships were moving up the river. Mobs gathered at the levees. They watched—and waited—as local firemen threw burning bales of cotton into the river, cast loose ships and boats of all kinds, and sent them burning into the jaws of the Federal monster.

  To no avail, according to Cable. “‘Are the Yankee ships in sight?,’ I asked of an idler. He pointed out the tops of their naked masts as they showed up across the huge bend of the river…. Ah, me! I see them now as they come slowly round Slaughterhouse Point into full view, silent, grim, terrible; black with men, heavy with deadly portent; the long-banished Stars and Stripes flying against the frowning sky.”