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

by C. Brian Kelly

  It would have been quite natural for Lincoln, a constant target of hate mail, vilification, and death threats, to fear assassination on some inner level. Outwardly, he usually appeared calm and unafraid, but he would have been less than human not to have had worries, and they easily could have manifested themselves in a nightmarish dream. Mary Todd Lincoln, however, saw it differently. Hysterical in the aftermath of his fatal shooting, she quickly claimed, “His dream was prophetic.”

  For that matter, another somber moment in the Lincoln White House came with the death of their young son Willie in the winter of 1862 from a severe fever. The boy’s mother went to bed and screamed until exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep. Lincoln, in the meantime, went to his secretary John Nicolay’s office, the “Lincoln Sitting Room” of today, and sobbed and wept.

  During the funeral five days later, it is said, a fierce wind springing up under black skies rolled up tin roofs all over Washington, toppled chimneys, and upset church steeples.

  A half century later, President William Howard Taft was quite annoyed one day when told that a kitchen worker was quitting and other servants might do the same because of a White House ghost. Maids and housemen, it was alleged, had been frightened by sightings of a gossamer figure, even the cold touch of an invisible hand. Nonsense! exploded Taft. But…he did ask whose ghost it was and was told it was the pathetic Willie Lincoln, who had died in the secondfloor Prince of Wales Room—the same chamber where his slain father’s body would be embalmed three years later.

  Taft still didn’t think much of such mewlings: He told his staff never to discuss such happenings again.

  Even so, ghost stories persisted at the White House, and many other odd and ghostly tales related to the Civil War have also emerged from widely scattered sites over the years.

  At Virginia Military Institute, for instance, home of the young cadets who fought the Battle of New Market against heavy odds, they say that Civil War sculptor Sir Moses Ezekiel’s statue of Virginia Mourning Her Dead has been known to moan in grief on some evenings, even to show tears on her finely chiseled face.

  Not far away from VMI’s home in Lexington, Virginia, stands a twenty-room mansion with thirteen fireplaces (one with no accompanying chimney) called “Selma.” The story is that a young Confederate soldier was chased into the Shenandoah Valley home one day by a Union cavalryman and killed in front of its fireplace in the dining room. A bloodstain remained there for years.

  So, it seems, did his ghost. Visitors often asked the owners of the house about the mysterious stranger they had encountered, while servants repeatedly told of a “soldier gentleman” they had seen. According to L. B. Taylor Jr., author of a series of books about Virginia ghosts, no one other than the immediate family was in the house at those odd moments. “Although ownership of the mansion passed through several hands over the years, the apparitional soldier stayed on.” Also according to Taylor, Phyllis Atwater of Charlottesville, Virginia, who said she was “very sensitive” to psychic phenomena, conducted a “release ceremony” at Selma in which she counseled the soldierly ghost to leave the house and find his final peace. He did.

  Another site of “haunted” visitation, writes Taylor, is the Lee family’s ancestral home of Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, east of Fredericksburg, Virginia. This was the magnificent home built by L. Thomas Lee in the 1730s, later to be home to “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, father of Robert E. Lee, and, briefly, for young Robert, too. The ghosts allegedly seen in and about Stratford Hall and its various outbuildings are associated with earlier family members rather than Civil War figures, but there also have been reports of a ghostly boy and dog seen at the brick home in Alexandria, Virginia, where Robert spent most of his boyhood.

  More grim are the visions at sites associated with Mary Surratt, the boardinghouse owner convicted of taking part in the assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln and hanged in the yard at Washington Arsenal Prison (the first woman ever executed for murder in the United States, noted writer Taylor). The old prison site is now Fort Leslie J. McNair, and here a ghostly middle-aged woman dressed in black has been seen “floating through the hallways,” by one officer’s account. Here, too, are heard strange voices, and touchings by unseen hands are alleged. Similar sightings were reported years earlier at the H Street site in Washington where Mary Surratt once operated her boarding house.

  Do people respond to such stories of the macabre? Indeed. So many people wanted to see the reappearing bloodstains on the farm porch near Port Royal, Virginia, where the fatally wounded John Wilkes Booth died, that the owners “finally had to remove the boards and refloor the porch,” reported Taylor.

  Likewise, when Mary Surratt’s specter was reported at the H Street house in Washington, “crowds gathered outside the house daily.” Her daughter sold the house, “but the purchaser was driven away within six weeks because ‘his nervous system was reputedly shattered by what he had seen and heard.’” The Boston Post followed the story and said other proprietors came and went in “swift succession, swearing that in the dead of night Mrs. Surratt walked the hallways clad in her robe of death.” Then, too, Mrs. Lincoln once said that her two dead sons, Willie and Eddie, appeared at the foot of her bed every night! Yours to believe—or not.

  “Shot for You”

  TRULY NOW, HOW BAD WAS IT? SURELY WARFARE IN THAT DISTANT DAY AND AGE was archaic, mere child’s play by today’s grim standards. So, truly, what was it like? When those old-timers fired a gun or a cannon, a fellow could duck, right?

  Well, on occasion, perhaps a fellow could see it coming. James Longstreet, Confederate general of considerable note, once recalled the time at Antietam Creek—Sharpsburg, Maryland—when he, Robert E. Lee, and fellow general D. H. Hill started up a ridge to reconnoiter and Hill insisted on staying on his horse while the other two more wisely dismounted.

  Perhaps jokingly—but prophetically, as it turned out—Longstreet warned Hill he would draw Union fire and added, “Give us a little interval so that we may not be in the line of fire when they open up on you.”

  Minutes later, at the top of the crest with his companions, Longstreet saw a particular puff of smoke from the cannons on the Federal left. The gunner had to be a mile distant, but Longstreet told Hill, still on his horse, “There is a shot for you.”

  Sure enough, seconds later, the cannon shot “came whisking through the air” toward the very spot where the three men waited. It sheared off the front legs of General Hill’s horse…without harming the rider.

  It was rare, however, that a battlefield victim “saw it coming” or could duck away. In the same battle on the same day, in a suicidal charge like Pickett’s at Gettysburg, an overwhelming wedge of bluecoats advanced on the center of Lee’s line—advanced, more specifically, on Confederate General John Gordon of Georgia and his men, with bayonets at the ready. “As I saw this solid mass of men moving upon me with determined step and front of steel,” said Gordon later, “every conceivable plan of meeting and repelling was rapidly considered. To oppose man against man and strength against strength was impossible, for there were four lines of blue to my one of gray.”

  Gordon’s first thought was to open fire the moment the Union men came into range, but he just as quickly realized that would not be enough. “I could not hope to kill and disable a sufficient number of the enemy to reduce his strength to an equality of mine.”

  At the same time, he knew from all visible signs that his Union counterpart (“superbly mounted”) would have ordered the bluecoats to advance with unloaded guns, a familiar battlefield tactic intended to keep a few men from stopping to aim and fire. A scattered few doing so in the front ranks obviously would stop others behind and disturb the solid wall of men assembled to advance en masse. As Gordon could see, it was the Union’s intent “to break through Lee’s center by the crushing weight and momentum of his solid column.”

  The only thought that appealed to Gordon in the few minutes he had to form a battle plan—and sto
p the Union tide—was one he had never tried but could trust to have terrible effect. “It was to hold my fire until the advancing Federals were almost upon my lines, and then turn loose a sheet of flame and lead into their faces. I did not believe that any troops on earth, with empty guns in their hands, could withstand so sudden a shock and withering a fire.”

  And so it was. With difficulty to be sure, Gordon restrained his own men from firing, even when they could see the eagles on the buttons of the blue uniforms, until finally “it would not do to wait another second,” and Gordon shouted with all conceivable lung power, “Fire!”

  At that, “My rifles flamed and roared in the Federals’ faces like a blinding blaze of lightning accompanied by the quick and deadly thunderbolt.”

  No Union man in that front line could have ducked, surely. None who survived would ever say, if alive today, that the firepower of the 1860s was any less frightening than that of today.

  “The entire front line,” related Gordon in his later account, “with few exceptions, went down in the consuming blast.” Gordon, himself, considered the effect of his tactic “appalling.”

  The Union commander, he noted, went down, too, but the victim in this case was only the horse, “the rider unhurt.”

  The sudden and massive volley saved Lee’s center for the moment; the blue ranks had to fall back as the Rebels continued to fire into the Union mass. But the unhorsed Union commander was not yet through for the day. “Beyond the range of my rifles he reformed his men into three lines, and on foot led them to the second charge, still with unloaded guns.”

  But again they were repulsed. After that, yet again, four successive charges in all, “in the fruitless effort to break through my lines with the bayonet.”

  At last the Union men loaded their own weapons, drew up in close ranks and within easy range opened a “galling” fire of their own. From that point the battle between “these hostile American lines” waxed “furious and deadly” for some time after. “The list of the slain was lengthened with each passing moment.”

  Indeed, Antietam went down in history as the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, with nearly twenty-six thousand men on both sides counted as casualties. The five thousand or so killed outright obviously didn’t, and couldn’t, duck the fire.

  No Whizz, Bang Heard

  FAR FROM “DUCKING” THE SHOT AND SHELL OF THE CIVIL WAR, THE WAR’S fighting men often couldn’t get away from all the shooting, of all shapes and sizes. One who could later tell you was Prussian-born Heros von Borcke, a staff aide to Confederate cavalry General “Jeb” Stuart. He was placed in a doctor’s home in Sharpsburg, Maryland (Battle of Antietam Creek), the morning of September 16, 1862, with about ten couriers while Stuart rode on a reconnaissance mission up the nearby Potomac River. Von Borcke’s job was to look over the incoming reports and “forward any important information” to Generals Lee, Longstreet, or “Stonewall” Jackson, who was just then approaching from freshly seized Harpers Ferry.

  The Union artillery began to find the range about eleven o’clock in the morning, with a nearby church steeple an obvious reference point. Outside the doctor’s house, the streets of the small village had been full of wagon trains, artillery, ambulances, and galloping riders, but now no one indoors or out could be considered safe. Indeed, as von Borcke sat there, a shell “fell with a terrific crash through the top of the building.”

  About noon, the shelling “became really appalling, and the explosion of innumerable projectiles stunned the ear.”

  Von Borcke remained on a sofa on the first floor to be available as Stuart’s headquarters contact. He was sitting there, writing in his journal, “when a shell, piercing the wall of the room a few feet above my head, covered me with debris, and, exploding, scattered furniture in every direction.” Simultaneously, “another missile, entering the upper part of the house and passing directly through, burst in the courtyard, killing one of our horses and rendering the others frantic with terror.”

  Von Borcke and his couriers hurriedly left the house at last, but the Prussian had a difficult time calming his horse long enough to climb into the saddle for a fast retreat. The streets were now filled with dead and wounded men, overturned wagons and ambulances, and in the village “cannonballs whizzed incessantly through the air, and pieces of bursting shells, splinters of wood, and scattered fragments of brick were whirled about in a dense cloud of powder smoke that enveloped all things.”

  Von Borcke escaped personal harm after leaving the village in “an exciting ride,” but his horse was pinked on a hind leg by a shell fragment.

  Others engaged in the Battles of Antietam and its preliminary at South Mountain often never knew what hit them. Death, maiming, or recoverable injury struck with no warning whatsoever.

  George Smith, a minister from Georgia, was at South Mountain with the Phillips Legion, a regiment commanded by Colonel William Phillips. Smith and his fellows soon encountered the bluecoats while charging into the woods. “I saw a poor fellow fall and heard him say, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ I went to him and said, ‘My friend, that’s a good prayer; I hope you feel it.’ He answered, ‘Stranger, I am not afraid to die; I made my peace with God over thirty years ago.’”

  If Smith found that response surprising, he didn’t have long to ponder it. The bluecoats suddenly appeared on all sides of the Georgians, who were forced into retreat. “Just then I felt a strange dizziness, and fell, my arm dropping lifeless by my side.” Worse, “blood was gurgling from my throat.”

  Smith thought he was mortally wounded—and was close to correct, since the ball had “entered my neck, and, ranging downward, came out near my spine, paralyzing my arm.” The men with Smith were not overly encouraging. “‘Yes, parson,’ they said, ‘it’s all up with you.’” Obviously, they were incorrect, and he lived to tell the tale.

  Likewise, Union Sergeant A. F. Hill witnessed—and soon enough felt—the random danger of the battlefield. Marching with George Meade’s division, Hill and his men came under Rebel artillery fire. At the command to lie down, Hill instead took a seat on a stump. Just then “a large ragged fragment of a shell whizzed savagely past the top of my head and struck the ground a few paces in [the] rear with a fierce splat. It must have struck my head had I been a moment later in sitting down.”

  Moments later, another shell—“Whizz, bang!”—burst ten or fifteen feet above Hill and his comrades, but with no apparent ill effect. The next day, though, Hill ran into more Rebel fire—this time, “a regiment of rebels who had lain concealed among the tall corn arose and poured on us the most withering volley we had ever felt.” And then another and another. “The slaughter was fearful. I never saw men fall so fast. I was obliged to step over them at every step.”

  Minutes later, Hill saw a pair of Rebels helping a wounded comrade from the field, their backs turned to him. “I was going to fire, but…I could not. I sought another mark; and seeing a rebel in the act of loading his gun just at the edge of the cornfield, I fired at him.”

  There was no mention of the outcome, but the battle continued to rage in any case. Minutes later, Sergeant Hill had organized his men, and all opened fire at a line of Confederates. Hill tried to bring down the enemy’s color-bearer. “I aimed every shot at the point over which the flag waved. At every fire I looked eagerly to see it fall.”

  Someone was apparently looking at Hill. “I had fired a dozen rounds at the rebel flag when I suddenly became conscious of a most singular and unpleasant feeling in my left leg. I was in the act of ramming down a ball at the time, and I would have finished, but my left foot, of its own accord, raised from the ground, a benumbing sensation ran through my leg, and I felt the hot blood streaming down my thigh. The truth flashed upon me—I was wounded.”

  That’s often how it happened—out of the blue; not even a whizz, bang. And that was the end of the war for Hill, who was carried from the front by his comrades, then trundled over a rough cornfield in a wagon. Soon he was told the bad news.
The bone in his upper thigh was “all smashed,” and the leg would have to come off. He protested, but the doctors were firm.

  He had been left with other wounded men outside a small schoolhouse serving as a field hospital. “It was evening when my turn came. I had lain during the whole afternoon…listening to the horrible screams which came from within and occasionally, to kill time, gazing upon a heap of men’s arms and legs which lay piled up against the side of the house. The sound of battle could still be heard.”

  Then he was carried inside, and again he asked if his leg absolutely had to be taken off. The doctor “coolly thrust his finger into the wound and felt the pieces of shattered bone. ‘That bone,’ said he, ‘is shivered all to pieces, and if you value your life—’

  “‘Can my life be saved only by—?’

  “‘Yes, and even then I doubt—I—’ He hesitated.

  “‘You think it a doubtful case, even then?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “I said no more. Chloroform was administered. I sank into unconsciousness, and when I awoke—it was all over.” So it was over—except that Hill was another one who survived to tell the tale, in a book published nearly thirty years later. He had been fortunate after all.

  Women of the Times

  HERE ARE STORIES OF A FEW WOMEN OF THE TIMES.

  Not all were like Bridget Fury, born in Cincinnati under the name Delia Swift, but long since removed to New Orleans as a prostitute, pickpocket, mugger, and murderess. She moved on to become a madam after being freed from prison by the Federal authorities occupying the city in 1862. Born in 1837, she would have been in her late twenties during most of the Civil War. She had her own street gang at one time. After her release from prison under a general Union pardon, she again had to serve behind prison walls, this time for robbery. It is believed she died at age thirty-five or thirty-six, unsung by decent folk but thoroughly notorious in the South for her life of crime.