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

by C. Brian Kelly

  Hill, accompanied by “Jeb” Stuart and Georgia’s John B. Gordon, visited the Confederate capital in early January 1864 to greet the famous Kentuckian. They appeared at a public reception in front of the Richmond City Hall at noontime one day, and the next day Hill and Morgan visited Richmond’s Libby Prison to chat with Union prisoners held there. They attended church with fellow Confederate officers on still the next day at St. Paul’s Episcopal. Morgan next would pay a visit of his own to the Virginia legislature and appear at a ball held in the Ballard House.

  Diarist Mary Chesnut mentioned the Morgan visit, which also included the former vice president of the United States, John Breckinridge, now a Confederate general and soon to be the Confederacy’s secretary of war. She saw Richmond Mayor Joseph Mayo introduce Morgan at the City Hall affair. “These huge Kentuckians fill the town,” she wrote. Shortly after, she added: “The City of Richmond entertains John Morgan. HQ is at free quarters. Tonight [January 12] there will be a great gathering of the Kentuckians. Morgan gives them a dinner.”

  She had known Morgan’s wife, the former Mattie Ready, before the war. “A graceful girl and a Kentucky belle in Washington during the winter of 1859. We were glad to meet again once more under altered skies.”

  All was not so festive that same week in the Jefferson Davis household. Two slaves, a man and a woman, had fled. “The president’s man Jim that he believed in, as we all believe in our own servants—‘our own people’ as we are apt to call them—and Betsy, Mrs. Davis’ maid, decamped last night,” wrote Mary Chesnut on January 9 or 10, 1864. Saying it was a miracle that the pair had resisted temptation so long, Chesnut added: “I do not think it had ever crossed Mrs. D’s brain that these two would leave her.” Richmond during the war was a city under siege, a city of visiting heroes and escaping slaves, of riderless horses and funeral dirges. Said Mary Chesnut’s own maid (and slave) Molly, “I like Mrs. Davis, but Betsy did give herself such airs because she was Mrs. President’s maid.”

  Loyalty Charge Dismissed

  IT WAS “AN EVIL HOUR,” JUSTICE GEORGE M. SAVAGE OF HENRICO COUNTY, Virginia, told the court in adjoining Richmond. An evil hour when, sorely tempted, he did “take the hated oath.”

  But then the circumstances had been mitigating to large degree, and perhaps his fellow Southerners could forgive and forget. He had succumbed to temptation at a moment of great duress involving not only himself but his family.

  It all began, it seems, on Friday, May 23, 1862, the eve of the Battle of Fair Oaks that led to the Seven Days campaign, which in turn ended the Union Peninsular campaign.

  Explained Henrico farmer-citizen-justice Savage: “Two Yankee pickets came to my door and enquired for milk and butter; I told them I had none to spare. They then enquired as to when our pickets left. I replied, I did not know exactly. One was very insolent, remarking that the rebels were cowards and would not stand. I replied that that was a matter on which we could not agree. They very soon left.”

  One thing led to another, as the Yankees very next day arrived in force, “some coming into the house and insulting me and my family.”

  After a skirmish took place about a mile away, the Northern visitors “appeared with their wounded.” Savage told them they could not use his house as a hospital, but they were welcome to his barn.

  On Sunday, May 25, Union Major General Erasmus D. Keyes (and staff) appeared as well. Keyes—polite—said he would like to use the house as his headquarters, and to this Savage did not object. “He then introduced the subject of this war. I replied that on this subject I did not care to converse, as I was sure we would not agree.”

  But Keyes insisted, and Savage then stated his pro-Southern views “frankly and fearlessly as I have over and over again expressed them among my own people.”

  Keyes was so impressed that he turned to his staff and declared, “This gentleman is an honest and candid man, and I wish you to see that his property is thoroughly protected.” Unfortunately, Keyes soon left, only to be replaced by Union Major General Samuel P. Heinzelman.

  Until now, the situation for Savage and his family had not been all bad. His crops and his property “were not much damaged,” and the Union officers, “with some exceptions, were tolerably civil.” At the same time, “I could not at any time go fifty yards from my house without being denounced by the men as a ‘damned rebel and secesh.’”

  Then came the Battle of Fair Oaks on May 31, when Joseph Johnston counterattacked the Union’s George McClellan (with Johnston wounded and relieved of command in the process). The Yankee wounded now “came pouring in like an avalanche,” recalled Savage. They just about took over the whole house, and when he appealed to the Union adjutant on the scene, that officer said, “he had no protection to give, nor did I deserve any.” And, “I was a damned secessionist, and had been instrumental in bringing about this state of things and my head ought to be cut off, and the sooner I got away, the better.”

  With that warning, on Monday, June 2, Savage did send away his three children, and the next day his wife “had to leave,” as well. By July 4, the day that Savage petitioned the court in Richmond to forgive him for taking the Union loyalty oath, his family had yet to return home, and the home was still in use as a hospital, although McClellan and his host of one hundred thousand or so had retreated from the Richmond area.

  What had taken place on Savage’s farm in the interim was close to indescribable. Starting with the night of May 31, he said, the Yankees “forced nearly every lock on the place and stole very nearly all my stores, together with crockery and innumerable articles of furniture, forced my corncribs and took all the corn, all long forage, ground and cut all my oats and wheat and hay, burned my enclosures of every description, destroyed my fruit trees, took the boards from my buildings for every use they could apply them, broke up and destroyed my farming implements, stole two horses, about 80 hogs, some sheep and cattle and appeared to try how much they could damage me.”

  Savage’s wife was so distraught she twice was confined to bed, and on June 12 he himself was taken ill. He improved, however, and on June 16 returned home—a mistake, it transpired. “On the night of that day I was arrested on the order of General McClellan, taken to his headquarters, where I remained until the next day, without being able to learn what charge there was against me.”

  He was told on the seventeenth that he would be locked up at Fort Monroe, overlooking Hampton Roads. Savage asked to see his wife first, with Federal officers present, simply to let her know what was happening to him. Otherwise, he said, in her delicate health, his incarceration could have serious impact on her. When the Federals refused Savage’s request, he caved in, “profoundly convinced that to be taken up under these circumstances would kill my wife.” He took the Union oath, but “without kissing the Book” and while declaring his allegiance still lay with the South.

  That apparently satisfied his Yankee tormentors (who had visited similar destruction upon the Henrico County farm of a free black woman named Isabella Adams), but he next had to defend himself before the court in Richmond against the charge of disloyalty to the Confederacy. In his court paper Savage earnestly and formally said: “I do here declare that I have not at any time up to this hour knowingly said or done anything the least prejudicial to the Southern cause, and that all my sympathies, interest and feelings, are today, as ever, with the South and I now hold myself ready and willing to do whatever the interests or laws of the Confederacy may require of me, and in conclusion I do hereby declare upon my honor and conscience that at the time of taking the [Union] oath I did not regard it, nor do I now regard it, as binding upon me, but laboring under a profound conviction that the life of my wife would be sacrificed, leaving three little children in the power of a merciless enemy, I was tempted in an evil hour to take the hated oath.”

  So be it, the charge of disloyalty to the Confederacy dismissed—by order of the court!

  Poignant Moments in Battle

  HERE WAS FIGHTING INDEED. IN TH
E STRATEGIC SENSE, THE CONFEDERATES WERE on the offensive, Union men on the defensive. But tactically, as the men actually did battle in the field, it was the men in blue who were on the attack. Small arms and artillery traded shots. The Confederate mounted infantry at one point climbed down from their steeds—some of them mules—to repel the Union infantry that had crossed the river between the two forces.

  “As we were in the act of dismounting,” wrote Virginia-born Alfred U. Peticolas, lawyer and future judge currently serving his “Victoria Invincibles” as sergeant, “[B. A.] Jones’ horse was shot in the thigh, [Sergeant Charles A.] Wooapple’s was crippled, and a ball tore a small peel of skin from my right thumb, which bled profusely.” But Confederate Sergeant Peticolas hadn’t seen anything yet.

  This was war, and war truly is hell. The enemy had approached in strength just six hundred yards away from where Peticolas and his compatriots had taken position lying under the bank of the river. The men in blue were firing most rapidly. The shooting “began to play havoc with our horses.” Sam Hyatt’s went down, Louis J. Berkowitz’s went down, and so did a number of others. And next came the men themselves. “One man on my left…was shot through the back, as he raised to load, by a flank fire, and fell with heart rending groans.” Amazingly, though, the same man directed a companion to load his gun, then he “fired at them again, although he had a wound which proved mortal.”

  Peticolas himself was loading and shooting as fast as he could while taking careful aim at his quarry, though “their balls whistled with deadly intent around my head.” Others nearby were hit. Corporal Al Field took a wound in the arm and exclaimed, “Oh, God, I’m shot.” A man named S. Schmidt was struck in both upper legs by a single Minié ball. But by far the most grotesque casualty was William H. Onderdonk, who was struck in the mouth, “his tongue nearly shot out.” The wounded Onderdonk certainly must have felt desperate. As Peticolas tells the story, “He pulled out a part of it [the mouth, the tongue, or other tissue] which was hanging ragged…and cut it off with his knife.”

  As Onderdonk was carried off the field, the fight went on. The Rebs were shooting with greater accuracy than their Yankee brothers, and soon the Blues were driven back across the river. The Confederate howitzers “opened upon their retiring column with killing effect, and they broke lines and ran back out of range.”

  One of the Confederate soldiers asked his captain’s permission to go forward and kill a wounded Yank who was still shooting from behind a tree. Captain David Nunn assented, but the wounded Union man then “begged so hard” that he was merely disarmed.

  The fight was not yet over. All around were dead and wounded horses. Sergeant Peticolas’s own mule was shivering from the effects of a wound that proved fatal once the battle was over.

  The Confederates now regrouped—both sides in fact spent considerable time simply maneuvering for position. The Confederates present numbered about two thousand, equalling the Union force. Around evening time, the Yankees crossed the river, artillery in tow, and advanced in strength. Their eight guns were heavier than the Confederate force’s four six-pounders, and their small arms were longer-range pieces, too. “As long as we laid behind the sand banks our own lives were in comparative safety,” wrote Peticolas in his journal, but “every few moments some one would be wounded or killed and our horses were being badly shot to pieces.”

  Soon six of the Union guns were brought up within “point blank range of us and began to play grape and shell upon us.” In response, the Reb battery commanded by Captain Travonian Teel moved two guns to within ten yards of where Peticolas was lying and began firing back at the Union guns. “And now the battle was indeed hot.”

  Hot, and on the left the Confederates were slowly but surely being driven back. “In two minutes, a raking fire up our line on the side of the bank would slay the last man of us. The bombs and grape were bursting and flying all around us and [nearby] Colonel [Thomas] Green, and sweeping the trees and the bottom far behind us.”

  It was a critical moment, and Green, a regimental commander, realized it. “We must charge that battery, boys,” he said, and when some of the men before him instead ran for their horses to flee, he chased after them while shouting: “Back, men, back! Would you disgrace yourself and your country here? Remember you are Texans!” (for most of the men there were).

  With other officers sounding the same call to charge, about two hundred of the Johnny Rebs (“a mere handful,” said Peticolas) responded. “[They] started up and with a wild yell dashed forward through the shower of Minié balls and grape toward the belching cannon and solid lines of infantry supporting them [the cannon].” Major Samuel A. Lockridge, “a heart of iron,” led the Confederate charge, with three captains close behind brandishing their sabers and shouting, “Come on my boys, don’t stop here.”

  The short-range Reb guns now were felling the Yankees at such pace that they wavered, then turned and ran, “and we poured in our deadly fire upon them.”

  Then came one of the most poignant moments of the battle. Major Lockridge, reaching a Union cannon, put his hand on it and exclaimed, “This is mine!”

  “At that moment he was shot dead,” wrote Peticolas later. “His last words were: ‘Go on my boys, don’t stop here!’”

  The Yankees had a poignant moment of their own as they defended their artillery battery, “brave to the last,” in the words of Peticolas. So brave were the men of Captain Alexander McRae’s battery that one of them touched off the ammunition in a battery caisson just as the Rebs swept into the battery’s position, sacrificing his own life in the process.

  “Two guns were loaded when we took them,” wrote Peticolas. “A gunner was just about to touch one off. One of our men, who had just killed one of the artillery men, was up on the caisson. He leveled his pistol at the gunner, who in an instant thrust his fuse into the caisson box, which blew up with a dread explosion.”

  By other accounts of the same action, McRae, himself Southern-born, saw and heard Major Lockridge and supposedly shouted at his Union troops, “Shoot the son of a bitch!” which someone quickly did. Then, too, a Union soldier from Colorado recalled the second part of the battery incident narrated by Peticolas: “When the battery was gone,” wrote the Union survivor, “one of the battery boys sprang up on a magazine which was near, cried ‘Victory or death’ and then coolly fired his pistol into the ammunition. One long, loud crash and all was over for that brave boy.”

  So it went in the fighting of the Civil War, not only in the East or along the Mississippi and in adjoining states, but also in the far Southwest. For in the Battle of Valverde of February 21, 1862, the river in question was the Rio Grande, and the territory being fought over was New Mexico. There was no particular winner of this moment in the New Mexico campaign, mounted by the South’s hard-drinking, blustering adventurer-general Henry H. Sibley. The losers, though, were the 170 killed and 310 wounded, casualties distributed about equally on each side.

  Unnecessary Tragedies

  MURDERS THREE

  IT WAS LATE SEPTEMBER 1862, AND IN THE GALT HOUSE HOSTELRY IN LOUISVILLE, Kentucky, a coterie of Federal flag rank officers was astir between seven and eight o’clock in the morning. Their overall commander, Don Carlos Buell, had not yet gone downstairs for breakfast, reported Roy Morris Jr. in his Sheridan: The Life and Wars of General Phil Sheridan. Among those staying at the Galt House was a longtime U.S. Navy officer turned Army general, William “Bull” Nelson, who had led a reinforcing division at Shiloh the previous spring. Another general on hand, brooding over running clashes with his superior, Nelson, was the lesser-ranking brigadier general Jefferson Columbus Davis.

  “Bull” was an apt nickname for the hulking, sharp-tongued Nelson, described by Civil War historian Morris as “coarse, profane, and physically imposing.” He could easily offend, it seems, “neither noticing nor caring what impression he left in his bullish wake.”

  The North’s Jefferson Davis had also enjoyed a lengthy military career starting wit
h the Mexican War of the 1840s, although at low rank for most of the time. He had been vaulted from lieutenant to colonel at the outset of the Civil War by his good friend in high office, Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana. Serving in the battles of Booneville, Missouri, and Pea Ridge, Arkansas, he then joined Buell’s command in defense of Louisville—a series of confrontations with Bull Nelson soon followed. Their dispute had led Nelson to order Davis “out of town” toward the end of summer 1862, recalls Morris in his biography of their fellow Union officer Phil Sheridan (uninvolved in the unhappy affair).

  But Davis was very much in town the early morning of September 29. “At the prompting of his close friend, the ubiquitous Governor Morton,” writes Morris, “Davis had approached Nelson that morning and demanded an apology.”

  Nelson, although unarmed, was not to be cowed in the least. “Go away, you damned puppy,” he bellowed. “I don’t want anything to do with you.” Davis reacted immediately. He had “nervously” been crumpling up a calling card in one hand, and now he “angrily flipped it into Nelson’s face.” Nelson reacted by smacking Davis in the face, sending his fellow general reeling backward.

  “With the imprint of Nelson’s hand still visible on his cheek, Davis borrowed a pistol from an obliging bystander and shot Nelson once in the chest.”

  For all his bulk and imposing physique (six feet five and more than three hundred pounds), Nelson was human: one bullet at close range was all that was needed to bring him down. “Tom,” he said to another Union general, Thomas Crittenden, “I am murdered.” These were his last words, and they were true.

  Davis was placed under house arrest, but he won his release by Christmastime with the posting of a five-thousand-dollar bond in Louisville. As events turned out, Davis never would be tried for the slaying of fellow Union general Nelson, thanks to the intercession of his good friend Governor Morton and the press of wartime events. Davis went on to serve in the battles of Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Atlanta, Savannah, and the Carolinas campaign as both a division and corps commander. He remained in the Army until his death in 1879 at age fifty-one.