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

by C. Brian Kelly

  Finally, a Union sharpshooter’s bullet found the little-known John Davis.

  Others by the same name were better known in their day, though none quite on the scale of Jefferson Davis. Not even the Union’s own Jefferson Davis—the U.S. Army brigadier and Mexican War veteran who, in September 1862, shot and killed fellow Union general William Nelson at the Galt House hostelry in Louisville, Kentucky, as the climax to a personal quarrel.

  Among other Davis nameholders who achieved notice during the Civil War was Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s nephew, Mississippi State Senator and lawyer Joseph Robert Davis, who led a brigade in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and served later at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg, surviving all before returning to more normal life as an attorney. This Davis at first encountered difficulty winning confirmation from the Confederate Congress for his nomination to brigadier general. Opponents charged his uncle Jefferson with nepotism. It was true that he had served his uncle in Richmond as an aide-de-camp for about a year.

  Two Davis men named George served in the war—on opposite sides. George Davis of North Carolina at first opposed secession, but then served in the Confederate Congress as a state senator. He later served the Confederacy as its last attorney general (appointed by Jefferson Davis), and he was in the party of high government officials who had to flee Richmond when their capital fell to the invading Union Army in April 1865. George Davis, later separated from the Jefferson Davis entourage, was captured at Key West, Florida, spent a year as a Federal prisoner, then resumed his law practice, later declining an appointment to North Carolina’s supreme court. (It didn’t pay enough.)

  The other George Davis, a Vermonter and thus a Union man, was one of those ten Medal of Honor winners mentioned earlier. His was earned at the Monocacy River, Maryland, where in July 1864 he helped to hold off Jubal Early’s Washington-bound force at a pair of bridges. Davis was the last man to hurry across a key rail bridge, stepping gingerly on the cross ties under heavy fire as his small delaying force withdrew. He had begun the war as an enlisted man, and he left it as an officer after suffering severe injury from the collapse of a log cabin during the siege of Petersburg.

  Two more Union men, both fine cavalry officers and combat standouts, were Hasbrouck and Benjamin F. “Grimes” Davis—the second a native of Alabama. In September of 1862, just before the Battle of Antietam, both were at Harpers Ferry as Stonewall Jackson enveloped the town and placed it under siege. Coordinating their efforts, they formulated and led a bold breakout by the Union cavalry under the darkness of night, a long file that snaked across the Potomac and into the Maryland heights beyond. In the process they came upon Confederate General James Longstreet’s reserve ammunition train of ninetyseven wagons—opportunity enough for Grimes Davis! Using his Southern accent (and hoping that his uniform couldn’t be discerned in the dark), he ordered Longstreet’s teamsters to fall in with the silent column of horsemen headed north. They did, and in the morning’s light they discovered they were prisoners of the two Davises—Union men!

  Both later served at Chancellorsville, among other engagements of the Civil War. Grimes Davis, unfortunately, did not survive the subsequent cavalry battle of Brandy Station, where he had led a brigade; his Harpers Ferry sidekick Hasbrouck, also a brigade commander before war’s end, did survive the conflict, but disappeared at sea in 1870.

  Let us not overlook still more Davises of Civil War fame. Sam Davis, for instance—Confederate spy and heroic figure who, like Nathan Hale of another day, refused upon capture to divulge what he knew about his Confederates— and was hanged for his efforts.

  Or naval officer Charles Henry Davis, who led the Union forces on the upper Mississippi that captured Memphis. He was a founder of the National Academy of Sciences and a career naval officer until his death in 1877 as a rear admiral.

  Or Florida native Edmund J. Davis. This Texas lawyer and judge, who raised a “Texas” cavalry regiment in Mexico, fought for the Union throughout the war and later became a Reconstruction governor of Texas.

  Or a politician, Abraham Lincoln’s fellow Illinois attorney, presidential campaign manager, and later U.S. Supreme Court appointee, David Davis. Ironically, this Davis could have wound up president himself. In 1877 he left the bench and entered the U.S. Senate, where he eventually became the body’s president pro tempore. He held that post when Chester Arthur, as vice president, succeeded the assassinated Civil War veteran James Garfield as president. With no vice president actually in place during the time that Arthur served in the White House, David Davis would have been next in line if Chester Arthur died. As it happened, and as yet unknown to most, Arthur suffered from a terminal kidney disease, but he served out his term and died a year later (1886) at the age of fifty-six.

  Capitalism at Andersonville

  “WE HAD NOT LONG BEEN PRISONERS,” WROTE A SURVIVOR OF THE NOTORIOUS Confederate prison called Andersonville. Not long at all, he later said, in those conditions of deprivation and near-starvation before he discovered a remarkable fact of prison life: Free enterprise flourished, even in an appalling prison!

  “We had not long been prisoners before we discovered that men here, as in other conditions of life, in order to ‘get on’ and preserve life, must adopt some trade or business,” wrote Warren Lee Cross. Business? Trade! Yes, indeed. Even in a prison so bad that ration time was like a gathering of wolves. “These rations consisted of Indian meal, and sometimes of bacon. As a whole there was a large quantity, but when subdivided among 20,000 or 30,000 men it gave to each one but a small quantity.”

  The rations arrived via the North Gate. “A street or path, to which was given the name of Broadway, led from the gate through the stockade from east to west. Here, at ration time, was gathered a motley crowd. With eager, hungry eyes, they watched each division of the food, the sight of which seemed to have a strange fascination for the hungry wretches, long unused to full stomachs. They crowded to the wagons to get a sight of each bag of meal or piece of meat.”

  These were searing scenes, hard ever to forget. “The attempt to grasp a morsel which sometimes fell from the wagon, the piteous expression of disappointment on their pinched and unwashed faces if they failed, the involuntary exclamations, and the wistful hungry look, had in them a pathos not easily described.”

  Then came the moment of trade. “After the drawing of rations, a dense throng of prisoners always gathered near the North Gate to trade. One with tobacco cut in pieces not larger than dice might be seen trying to trade it for rations. Another could be heard crying out, ‘Who will trade a soup-bone for Indian meal?,’ ‘Who’ll trade cooked rations for raw?’ ‘Who’ll trade beans for wood?’ While others with small pieces of dirty bacon an inch or two in size, held on a sharpened stick, would drive a sharp trade with someone whose mouth was watering for its possession. But for its misery, the scene would often have been intensely comical.”

  It was far from comical, naturally. But the fact is that trade—business, if you wish—apparently did flourish. Necessity, wrote Gross, produced ingenuity, which produced amazing adaptation: “Some [men] set up as bakers, and bought flour, and baked biscuits which they sold to such as had money to buy. The ovens which were built showed such ingenuity as to extort expressions of surprise from the Confederates who occasionally visited us. The soil contained a red precipitate of iron, which was very adhesive. This was made into rude bricks by mixing the earth with water, and the oven was built of these over a mould of sand. After being left to harden in the sun for a few days, the sand was removed, a fire was kindled, and the oven was ready for use.”

  Other entrepreneurs made wooden buckets to hold water, “whittling out the staves and making the hoops with a jackknife.” Still others managed to obtain from mysterious “outside parties” sheet tin, “generally taken from the roofs of railway cars, and, with a railway spike and a stone for tools, made small camp kettles, without solder, by bending the pieces ingeniously together.” These remarkable
containers were popular with “those who had money.” And they were badly needed. “As no cooking utensils were possessed by the prisoners, except such as they brought into prison with them, these tinmen were benefactors.”

  Some prisoners tinkered with broken-down watches, “the object of their owners being simply to make them ‘go’ long enough to effect a trade [often with the purchaser a Confederate].”

  Then there was the crowd who “fried flapjacks of Indian meal, and sold them hot from the griddle for ten cents each.” One real success story—call it survival—came from “the camp beer made of Indian meal soured in water.” The beer, “proclaimed by the vendors to be a cure for scurvy,” was considered a refreshing drink. As for that success story, “a certain enterprising prisoner added ginger and molasses to the compound, and made, as he termed his success, a ‘boom’ by selling it. He became so rich as to buy food, and so regained his health and strength.”

  Not many were so fortunate at Andersonville, where many Union prisoners met their death.

  Jaws of Death

  HIS COMMANDING OFFICER, BRAXTON BRAGG, HAD ORDERED IT DONE, AND SO the division commander led his men into the jaws of death. It was the Charge of the Light Brigade all over again, but this advance was at the Stones River outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and the guns on the high bluff opposite were Union.

  On foot, John Cabell Breckinridge’s division, “with guns loaded and bayonets fixed, marched with steady step to the assault,” wrote a perceptive Northern onlooker.

  A proud Confederate agreed. “A more imposing and thoroughly disciplined line of soldiers never moved to the attack of an enemy than responded to the signal gun stationed immediately to our rear.”

  On the high bluff on the west side of the river, Union artillerymen stiffened behind their fifty-eight guns.

  On the eastern ground opposite, the advance continued. “Every man vied with his fellow man in steadiness of step and correct alignment,” recalled the Confederate participant, “with the officers giving low and cautionary commands, many knowing that it was their last hour on earth.”

  Then came the explosions. “Suddenly the ground shook as if rocked by a fearful earthquake, and the fifty-eight cannons emptied their doubleshotted contents on this living human mass in front of them; but a few seconds intervened, and again and again the fifty-eight cannons spread death into Breckinridge’s men.”

  It was too much, and in minutes the Rebels were streaming back in rout.

  Before his assault of January 2, 1863, Breckinridge had argued in vain with his commander, Bragg, that they faced a trap. Moments before the assault, the Kentuckian told a fellow general that the attack was being made “’gainst my judgment.” He asked that if he should be killed, “I want you to do justice to my memory and tell the people that I believed this attack to be very unwise, and tried to prevent it.”

  Now, with the assault over, riding to the rear past the dead and the dying, many from his native Kentucky’s “Orphan Brigade,” “with tears falling from his eyes, he was heard to say in tones of anguish, ‘My poor Orphans! My poor Orphans!’”

  This was John Cabell Breckinridge in an hour of agony outside of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The same officer who hated committing the youthful cadets of the Virginia Military Institute to the Battle of New Market. In triumph or tragedy, such a unique soldier there hardly was, even in the fratricidal American Civil War.

  Stones River came as 1862 passed into 1863. Only a few months earlier Breckinridge had served the Union as vice president under James Buchanan. He ran for president against Abraham Lincoln in 1860 as the nominee of the Southern Democrats. He then took his seat as a U.S. senator from Kentucky, but after joining the Confederacy was expelled, posthaste, from the Senate.

  His gallantry, however, rarely failed him or his men, and few generals of either side attended so many of the war’s major battles—Shiloh, the defense of Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Baton Rouge, Chattanooga-Missionary Ridge, Cold Harbor. In most, as at Stones River, he appeared in a subordinate command role. But as an overall commander, he prevailed over the enemy at New Market, at the second Battle of Kernstown, and again in Virginia at Lynchburg.

  Later, as secretary of war, he was a mainstay for the Confederacy in its dying hours, helping to direct the evacuation of Richmond and to organize Jefferson Davis’s flight south. Davis was captured, but Breckinridge made his way to Florida and escaped to Cuba in an open boat.

  He returned to America from England under amnesty in 1868—still and well remembered for the fairness with which he had presided over the Senate in those difficult years just before the Civil War.

  Bride Left Behind

  THE BRIDE WORE LACE, AND THE GROOM WORE HIS GENERAL’S UNIFORM, AS DID the clergyman performing the wedding ceremony in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in December 1862. Actually, the clergyman, one Leonidas Polk, also wore his Episcopal bishop’s vestments, with his own general’s uniform peeping out from beneath.

  Standing by as the groom’s very proper groomsmen were a corps of Confederate generals—Braxton Bragg, William Hardee, John C. Breckinridge, and Benjamin Cheatham—while many other officers and two regimental bands filled the bride’s happily bedecked home. Outside, hundreds of soldiers filled the streets, built bonfires, sang, and cheered.

  The bride’s father, a former U.S. congressman fresh from a prison cell in Nashville, held nothing back in providing a memorable wartime affair for his daughter and her guests. Their supper ranged from turkey to ham, chicken, duck, and various delicacies, plus plentiful bottles of wine for toasts to the happy couple.

  For cavalry raider John Hunt Morgan, his marriage to Mattie Ready was the culmination of a heady week that had begun with his signal victory over a large Federal force at Hartsville, Tennessee, followed by his award of a brigadier’s star from President Jefferson Davis in person, and an unusually warm commendation from the usually reserved Bragg. “To the brave officers and men composing the expedition the General tenders his cordial thanks and congratulations,” Bragg’s official orders had read. “He is proud of them and hails the success achieved by their valor as but the precursor of still greater victories.”

  The site of Morgan’s wedding, Murfreesboro was in the eye of a storm that swept back and forth—buffeted by Confederate, then Union, then Confederate forces. (The townspeople were largely Southern in their loyalties.) Just eight months earlier, Morgan had been forced by Yankee occupation to quit his courting of Mattie Ready in person. Now he and his fellow Rebs were back, but who could tell for how long? Whatever the case, he would marry her while he could.

  In his absence of eight months, Morgan’s future father-in-law, Colonel Ready, once a member of the U.S. House in Washington, had been imprisoned for refusing to take the Federal oath of allegiance. Now he was free again, and the Rebs were in town. On December 14 they had themselves a spectacular wedding as Morgan and Mattie became man and wife to the words intoned by Confederate Lieutenant General Polk, an Episcopal bishop in civilian life.

  The circumstances allowed no time to linger. War still called, and in six days Morgan was off again on his Christmas Raid of 1862-63. It lasted for fourteen days and covered more than five hundred miles of snow—four engagements and countless skirmishes. In total, two thousand Union prisoners were taken, and four bridges, twenty-five miles of railroad tracks, and five million dollars in Federal stores were destroyed.

  As one result of this excursion, however, Morgan missed the big Battle of Stones River at Murfreesboro over New Year’s—a defeat that meant Bragg’s Rebels must move out as William S. Rosecrans and his Union legions moved in.

  While Mattie persevered under the Federal occupation that now resumed for the better part of a year, Morgan was kept busy fighting the war in other quarters. His most spectacular foray of all was about to take place: his famous (and unauthorized) summertime raid of 1863 into Ohio, an incursion that took Morgan and a steadily dwindling band to a point one hundred miles south of Lake Erie, with the Federals in hot
pursuit.

  He was captured subsequently, but the story didn’t stop there. A few months later, he and a handful of his men further electrified an admiring public in the South by escaping from their confines in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Morgan then worked his way back to Confederate territory and to his anxious Mattie, still more a bride than a wife.

  Audible, Not Visible

  WAS THERE EVER A STORM LIKE THAT AT STONES RIVER, NEAR MURFREESBORO, Tennessee? From the accounts of those who survived, you could wonder.

  Acting as his unit’s sergeant major, for instance, was Union Private Henry A. Castle, deployed for the moment with his regiment—the afternoon of December 31, 1862—in a railroad cut oblique to the front line. He saw a Confederate officer spot exactly where Castle and his compatriots were located “and then gallop off” to fetch his artillery. Sure enough, in short time a Rebel battery came within Castle’s view.

  It would not be long before the Rebel guns began firing down his rail cut; so Castle, as acting sergeant major, hastened off to notify his regiment’s commander, a major. But the major had been wounded and carried off the field. Castle then sought out his next in command, the adjutant, but he, too, had been carried off.

  With no one to give him orders for the moment, Private Castle then marched his company “double quick out of the defile, trusting the rest to follow.” They did, and just in time, “as just then the shells came shrieking through the straight and narrow gorge with a venom that would have left few unscathed in five minutes more.”