In later life Holmes rarely volunteered the story of his brush with Lincoln, which may have saved the president’s life but was also deeply embarrassing to the young officer. Holmes eventually did tell the story to both Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and to Professor Harold J. Laski of the London School of Economics and Political Science, if not a few others.
As events turned out, Lincoln himself had eased the colonel’s possibly lasting pain—and made things all right—when upon leaving Fort Stevens, he turned and said a bit wryly, “Goodbye, Colonel Holmes, I’m glad to see you know how to talk to a civilian.”
Sadly, the same General John Sedgwick whom Holmes faithfully remembered for years after the war is most famous today for a wry comment of his own. It happened at Spotsylvania, in May 1864. Warned of Confederate sharpshooters nearby, he said, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this range.” The words were hardly out of his mouth when he was struck down by a sharpshooter’s round.
Perhaps as a result, Holmes was more than commonly sensitive to the effectiveness of unseen snipers when he pulled Lincoln down, out of harm’s way.
Brave Men Spared
THE FIERY, HOT-TEMPERED CONFEDERATE CAVALRY LEADER NATHAN BEDFORD Forrest began his unbending ways early in life—as “man of the house” while still a boy, he had to grow up in a hurry. And he did, skipping school and supporting the family as a farmhand, then as a livestock dealer, and finally as slave trader and cotton planter of moderate wealth.
An incident when he was only ten served notice of what was to come. A neighbor’s bull kept breaking loose and rampaging through the Forrest family’s precious stand of corn, despite repeated pleas and complaints. Finally, young Forrest told the neighbor he could expect to have his bull shot if it wandered one more time.
The neighbor let it be known that anyone shooting his bull would be shot himself.
The bull indeed broke loose one more time and again found its way into the Forrest cornfield. The lad took up his rifle and shot the beast on the spot. The neighbor then appeared with a rifle in his hand and violence in his heart. He started over the fence in between them but the ten-year-old shot again. The round whistled through the neighbor’s clothing, causing him to turn and run for home.
As a full-grown man, the same Forrest was so ornery that he once threatened his own commander, General Braxton Bragg. Amazingly, with no military schooling whatsoever, he rose from enlistment as a private in the future 7th Tennessee Cavalry to general’s rank, with a reputation as a genius at cavalry warfare tactics. His reputation for ferocity in battle also was great—and deservedly so. Still, one Southern woman had it slightly wrong the day he and his unit galloped through town with Union men closely pursuing. “Why don’t you turn and fight, you cowardly rascal?” she shouted. “If old Forrest were here, he’d make you fight!”
This same officer may or may not have ordered the massacre of black Union troops at Fort Pillow. This controversy was never quite settled and was fueled by his apparent postwar role as a founder and possibly the first Grand Wizard of the original Ku Klux Klan.
At least once, though, Forrest showed unexpected softness of the heart. Two Union soldiers—Germans from Wisconsin—had been taken prisoner near Forrest’s headquarters outside of Memphis, Tennessee. Since food rations were short and exchanges of prisoners were difficult to arrange, explained Harper’s magazine in 1871, “orders had been issued to take no prisoners, but execute them on the spot.”
The firing squad assembled, and things looked bleak for the two Union men as Forrest himself strode into sight to command the grim proceedings. Still, to the surprise of the onlookers, Forrest included, the two young Germans merely lit up their pipes and stood chit-chatting with each other, seemingly unconcerned.
Forrest barked his orders. The firing squad formed up and stood at attention. Still the two captives did not flinch or break down, but kept on smoking.
Forrest continued his drill, “Shoulder arms,” he shouted. “Ready. Aim….”
The Rebels took aim, waiting for the final command to fire.
But Forrest then barked, “Ground arms” and “Right about face.”
There would be no execution after all! “Git up and git!” he told the two Yankees. To his onlookers the rarely perturbed Forrest merely explained: “Brave men are too scarce to be shot down like dogs.”
Christmas
WHAT WAS HAPPENING DURING CHRISTMAS 1861, THE FIRST CHRISTMAS OF THE war? In Washington, the Lincolns had guests for Christmas dinner at the White House. He and his Cabinet also met at some length on this Christmas Day—in the White House, as was the custom.
In the field this first Christmas, Union and Confederate shooting—skirmishing, they call it—took place near Frederick, Maryland. Union ships stopped and seized a Reb blockade-runner off Cape Fear. A minor Union expedition was in motion in Missouri—no great results to report.
It was a Wednesday, and just days before there had been consternation in the Lincoln White House over Mary Todd Lincoln’s spendthrift ways. She had already exceeded her congressional appropriation for interior refurbishment, and she was in tears over the embarrassing issue. Husband Abraham was upset, too, saying none too prettily, “It would stink in the nostrils of the American people” to know he approved expenses “overrunning an appropriation of $20,000 for flub dubs for this damned old house, when the soldiers cannot have blankets.”
In any case, the presidential home did look much better for the holidays, and despite the tragedies of war there was momentary joy and warmth for the Lincolns in being all together one last time. Eldest son Robert was down from Harvard, and his young brothers Willie and Tad were on hand as well. Two months later, Willie, only eleven, would be dead, a victim of fever. After that shock, Mary Todd Lincoln, already subject to emotional swings, would never be the same again.
Christmas Day of 1862, the second Christmas of the war, came to a nation far more war-weary. The Lincolns marked their holiday by visiting the wounded in Washington hospitals. Fighting—no major battles, but real fighting—took place at widely scattered sites. William T. Sherman was moving down the Mississippi from Memphis to Vicksburg, and there was fighting near Brentwood and on the Edmonson Pike in Tennessee; at Ripley, Mississippi; and near Warrenton, Virginia; and at Green’s Chapel and Bear Willow in Kentucky. Few could be happy with the state of the divided nation this day.
On Christmas Day of 1863, a Friday, little change in the inclinations of the belligerents would have been apparent to the unacquainted spectator looking down from on high. Except, perhaps, for more naval action. In South Carolina’s Sono River, Federal gunboats dueled with Confederate shore batteries, with severe damage to the Union’s Marblehead. A similar exchange took place between the USS Pawnee and shore guns at St. John’s Island near Charleston. Ashore, Union troops destroyed Rebel salt works at Bear Inlet, North Carolina, and fought the Johnny Reb at Fort Brooke, Florida.
By Christmas Day of 1864, a Sunday (since 1864 was a leap year), the obvious end was now in sight—obvious except that the Union suffered ignominious defeat in its attempt to land sixty-five hundred troops, supported by nearly sixty warships, at Fort Fisher, North Carolina.
The entire assemblage had to sail back to Hampton Roads in Virginia to round after round of recriminations among the Federal commanders. The amphibious assault would be repeated three weeks later, on January 13, 1865, with far greater success.
Elsewhere on Christmas Day, John Bell Hood’s shattered Army of Tennessee was hurrying as well as it could out of Tennessee, with skirmishing at Richland Creek, Anthony’s Hill, and White’s Station. Petersburg, Virginia, was under tight siege by the Union forces commanded by U. S. Grant. And in the western theater Sterling Price’s Rebel forces were in retreat from Missouri. The Confederacy was shrinking in size and spirit day by day. What would the next Christmas Day hold for all?
By Christmas Day of 1865, a Monday, there was little joy, but the heartrending war was over. It had been over for several
months, but its stark images would linger and haunt for generations. By now the Confederacy had fallen; Jefferson Davis was a prisoner; Henry Wirz, commandant of the notorious Andersonville Confederate Prison in Georgia, had been hanged; Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated; and Tennessee-born Andrew Johnson was president. Four alleged conspirators in the Lincoln assassination, including a woman, Mary Surratt, had been hanged. And, in an interesting postscript, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—abolishing slavery—had gained final ratification, with Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, and Oregon all voting for it since December 1.
What Does a Slave?
WHAT EXACTLY DOES A SLAVE DO? A CIVIL WAR–ERA SLAVE IN THE SOUTH, THAT IS? Far from field hand or typical household servant, but a slave nonetheless, was one Laurence, a personal valetto James Chesnut (onetime U. S. senator, briefly Confederate senator, general-rank Confederate officer, and aide to President Jefferson Davis) of Mulberry Plantation, Camden, South Carolina. Laurence and Mrs. Chesnut—the famous Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut—lived for a time right across the street in Richmond, Virginia, from Jefferson and Varina Davis.
Laurence appears often in Mary Chesnut’s wartime musings. For instance, early on—during the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor—the cannon boomed night and day. War had come. Slavery was such a keen issue. Mary Chesnut wondered what the slaves themselves thought.
She observed no change in their manner. “Laurence sits at our door, as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent (as all the blacks in general).” No reaction to the shelling, and as for the whites—well, “people talk before them [the slaves] as if they were chairs and tables. And they make no sign. Are they stolidly stupid or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?”
A few weeks later, Mary’s husband had to pass through the newly named Confederate capital of Richmond. Here all was confusion—a crowded city, unbearable heat, overflowing hotels. The former senator had to share his hotel bed with a Confederate congressman from Louisiana, while also sharing the room with still others.
Traveling with four slaves, Chesnut had left his horse overnight in Petersburg, just below Richmond. The dependable Laurence stayed with the animal until it could be transported to Richmond the next morning. “My hands were so full with the four negroes, all green except Laurence,” wrote Chesnut to his wife, “that I had no time to take a meal from the time I left Kingsville [South Carolina] until I got here.”
That was in June 1861. By mid-July the two Chesnuts, husband and wife, had openly discussed the issue of Laurence’s true loyalties. Laurence was in charge of his master’s personal items, some of them valuable—his watch and “two or three hundred gold pieces [that] lie in the tray of his trunk.” Laurence was supposed to take those things to Mary Chesnut if anything happened to her husband, then an officer in the field.
She wondered if this expectation would hold true. “Maybe he will pack off to the Yankees—and freedom—with all that.”
“Fiddlesticks!” said her husband. “He is not going to leave me for anybody else. After all, what can he ever be better than he is now—a gentleman’s gentleman?” To which she replied, “He is within the sound of the enemies’ guns, and when he gets to the other army, he is free.”
But Laurence did not run off to freedom. By August of the same year it was recorded that “[he] does all our shopping.” Mrs. Chesnut was worried about the gold, however; and so she had sewn it into a money belt with her diamonds for safekeeping during an emergency.
Laurence’s reaction? “Laurence wears the bronze mask.” Whenever she left her trunk open, “Laurence brings me the keys and tells me, ‘You oughten to do so, Miss Mary.’” And when her husband left money in his pockets, “Laurence says that’s why he can’t let anyone but himself brush Mars Jeems’ clothes.”
By October of the same year, the Chesnuts had discovered that Laurence made “an excellent tailor,” and, former Alabama senator Clement Clay’s wife, Virginia, “never tired of laughing at the picture he made seated cross-legged on Mr. Chesnut’s trunk darning.”
Laurence did have a mind of his own, as the saying goes. Chesnut’s second cousin, Mary Stevens Garnett, once said, “I thought Cousin James was the laziest man alive until I knew his man Laurence.” To this, Mary Chesnut added that Laurence would “not move an inch or lift a finger for anyone but his master.” One time a friend, British-born Ellen Middleton, “politely sent him on an errand—and he was very polite about it too.”
Except that hours later she spied him sitting on the front yard fence. When she asked if he had gone on her errand, he replied, “No, Ma’am. I am waiting for Mars Jeems.”
His master, “Mars Jeems,” had taken to calling Laurence “Adolphe,” after the dominating valet in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Chesnut defended Laurence as “simply perfect as a servant for him.” And he was indeed most dependable, as he himself would assure Mary Chesnut during the winters of 1862 and 1863. Richmond was feeling the deprivations of war, but a certain amount of entertaining was called for nonetheless. “You give me the money, I’ll find everything you want,” he told her. There was “no such word as ‘fail’ with him.”
This was a time when turkeys cost $30, “but Laurence kept us plentifully supplied,” she wrote.
Once, too, Mary Chesnut wanted to entertain Varina Davis and a mutual friend. Laurence had produced a basket of cherries, but wouldn’t it be nice if they had some ice, too?
“Respectfully Laurence said—and also firmly, ‘Give me money and you shall have ice.’”
Somehow he knew of an icehouse on the other side of town across the James River. “In a wonderfully short time we had mint juleps and cherry cobblers.”
But there came a time when Laurence slipped up, with embarrassing consequences. He had gone to one of Richmond’s “negro balls,” as Mary Chesnut called them. He had forgotten his mandatory pass as he changed his coat for the affair. When a fight broke out at the ball, the police came. Those present were ordered to show their passes. Laurence “was taken up as having none.”
A household maid and cook named Molly delighted in telling Mary Chesnut the next day why Laurence was missing. (Molly and Laurence often argued, it seems.) And so Molly appeared before their mistress in tears from laughing. “Come and look,” she said. “Here is the fine gentleman, tied between two black niggers and marched off to jail.”
Apparently she and Mary Chesnut were looking at Laurence from a window. “Laurence disregarded her and called to me at the top of his voice. ‘Please Ma’am—ask Mars Jeems to come take me out of this. I ain’t done nothing.’”
Master James did go to his rescue, a never-forgotten moment in the Chesnut household. “He was terribly chopfallen when he came home, walking behind Mr. C. He is always so respectable and well behaved and stands on his dignity.”
Laurence didn’t hesitate to offer his protection when the dread Yankees came close to a lightly garrisoned Richmond in 1863, but it must also be reported that on January 4, 1864, he was drunk. He and Molly “had a grand row.”
In the next month, there was further mortification for Laurence. Drunk again when told to move a chair at breakfast, he lifted it high over his head and it “smashed” the chandelier above. Chesnut was so furious that he told Mary to send Laurence away, all the way back to their plantation home in South Carolina. So there he went, “gone back ignominiously,” although not for long. “He will soon be back, and when he comes he will say, ‘Shoo! I knew Mars Jeems could not do without me.’ And indeed he cannot.”
Laurence did return, but the Chesnuts had to excuse a former landlady’s report that both Molly and Laurence were apt to be a bit noisy when the Chesnuts were away from home. “They went about the house, quiet as mice when we were at home,” it was said. “Laurence sat at the door and sprung to his feet if we passed. When we were out they sung, laughed, shouted, danced.”
Laurence nonetheless was back in the family’s good graces by the time the Chesn
uts entertained the Jefferson Davises at dinner in Columbia, South Carolina, in October of 1864. The Confederate dream was slipping away fast.
“Our world, the only world we cared for,” wrote Mary Chesnut, was now “literally kicked to pieces.” Everything would change.
She spent the last weeks of the Civil War in search of safe places to stay—out of the Yankee path. One of those unhappy stops, ironically, was at Lincolnton, North Carolina, where the unfortunate Laurence ran into an angry buzzsaw of a landlady in Mary Chesnut’s entourage.
“Refugees in Lubberland,” she called this section of her memoir diary, and Lincolnton’s chief attraction was that it was “a thoroughly out-of-allroutes place.”
Still, by Chesnut standards also it was thoroughly miserable. “Here I am brokenhearted—an exile,” wrote Mary Chesnut later. “Such a place [where she had rented rooms]. For a feather bed, a pine table, and two chairs I pay 30 dollars a day. Such sheets!—but I have some of my own.”
They had arrived—Mary Chesnut, a house servant named Ellen (taking Molly’s place for a time), and Laurence—and “before I was well out of the hack,” Laurence had encountered “the woman of the house.” She attacked the startled black man. She said “she would not have him at any price.” She said “his clothes were too fine for a nigger—‘his airs indeed!’ Poor Laurence was as humble—and silent.”
He did plead, “Miss Mary, send me back to Mars Jeems.” When “Miss Mary” looked for a pencil to write a note to her husband (who had remained in South Carolina with his command), it was Laurence, unfortunately, who brought forth a gold pencil case.
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 25
