That set the landlady off again. “Go away,” she shouted. “I wants no niggers here with pencils—and airs.”
Laurence “fled before the storm”—but not before saying that “Mars Jeems” wouldn’t want his wife staying there if he knew “how you was treated.”
A friend and fellow refugee told Mary Chesnut not to pay attention to people like the Lincolnton landlady. “They will never comprehend the height from which we have fallen,” said Susan Middleton.
Chesnut and her maidservant Ellen were more happily quartered at another rental space in Lincolnton, but it was only temporary. In the end, after the hostilities were over, the Chesnuts returned to a ruined plantation once home to a few hundred slaves and their own large family. The slaves were free now. Some left, and some stayed on. James and Mary Chesnut were left financially strapped for a while, and they never regained the great wealth they had known before the war.
Mary Chesnut’s last diary reference to Laurence the slave came in a letter from James Chesnut dated March 15, 1865, still before Appomattox. James informed Mary that he was sending a Confederate officer and Laurence to Lincolnton to bring her down to Chester Court House, South Carolina, where he had found three vacant rooms with access to half a kitchen for them all. They would go home to the Mulberry family plantation outside Camden later.
There came a time, in the difficult postwar period, when the family’s cash income stemmed from maid Molly’s efforts at selling eggs and butter. Molly swore she would never leave her “Missis.” Ellen, too, would stay. Her husband, Claiborne, one day “asked enormous wages for her,” but Mary Chesnut told him, “You and your child [Ellen’s, too] are living in one of our houses, free of rent. Ellen can go or stay as she pleases.”
And Mary told Ellen, “I have no money, Ellen.”
But Ellen said, “Claiborne is an old fool always meddling and making—I don’t care for money, I gits money’s worth.”
More Staggering Stats
WHAT WERE THE ODDS, ANYWAY, OF BEING WOUNDED? WHAT WERE THE CHANCES of the average soldier or sailor getting by without being hurt—mortally or otherwise? After all, if 8 percent of the Union’s 583 generals—sixty-five— were killed, mortally wounded, or fatally diseased, what chance stood the lower, presumably more exposed, ranks? And in the Confederacy, if 18 percent of that side’s 425 general officers—ninety-two in all—succumbed to one lethal threat or another, what were the average enlisted man’s odds against wounding or death?
Well, statisticians can always play games and sources can be unreliable, particularly when it comes to something as difficult to document as the American Civil War. With all the military action, the confused records, and wanton destruction everywhere, its sometimes loose organization to begin with, and all the time that has passed since then, one cannot always be sure of some of the “facts.” Still, E. B. Long, who compiled the day by day Almanac of the Civil War, can be considered an astute student of such matters. Long said that in the Union Army chances were that one in every sixty-five men would be killed in action, that one of fifty-six would die later of wounds, and that one of every 13.5 men would die of disease. Further, an even greater one in ten would be wounded in action, while one in fifteen would be captured or cited as missing. One of every seven captured men would not survive his status as a prisoner in the hands of the Confederacy.
As Long notes, “disease in the Civil War claimed a far deadlier toll than the battlefield.” The sicknesses to avoid most were those affecting the bowels; diarrhea and dysentery combined to kill at least 44,558 Union soldiers. The next leading killer was fever of various kinds under various names, not always scientifically diagnosed (or expertly treated, for that matter). Mark down 40,656 deaths to fevers, and we have more than eighty-five thousand casualties from those two areas of illness alone—far more than America lost in the twelve-year Vietnam War of the twentieth century.
Another twenty thousand or so Union deaths can be attributed to pneumonia; still others are to be blamed upon sicknesses such as smallpox, measles, and consumption (tuberculosis).
As for Confederate statistics in this area, no such records exist. But Long cites Bell Irvin Wiley’s Life of Johnny Reb as authoritative and reliable enough in concluding that “for every soldier killed in battle or of mortal wounds, there were three deaths from disease.” Once again, the bowels were the average Confederate soldier’s most vulnerable area, but measles, typhoid (which was one of the Northern fevers, too), and smallpox also were prevalent killers.
When you add it all up—combat, disease, accident, what-have-you—the final Civil War casualty figures are truly staggering. In the North, total Army deaths of all causes were 360,222. Less than a third—110,100 to be exact—were caused by combat. Although the Federal Navy was active throughout the war, its records indicate that only 1,084 died in combat and another three thousand were stuck down by disease or accident.
The comparative Confederate figures are, again, not so easily or reliably obtained, but Long says, “Probably the best and most accepted estimate is 94,000 Confederates killed in battle or mortally wounded, while 164,000 died of disease. Total deaths thus came to 258,000.”
Although the North won the war, it had many more dead and wounded— 107,000—than the South. But then, the North entered the fray with many more men.
Often hidden in such figures are the ways that men died. Not all fell in some neat bookkeeper’s row before a fusillade of bullets. No, war’s actual toll—its pain and suffering—can be much more graphic. The details sting even now.
The U.S. Navy’s losses, low as they were by comparison with the Army’s, included 342 men scalded to death (usually when boilers on their ships were blown open) and 308 men drowned, usually when a ship broken open in combat or, otherwise damaged, spilled them into the sea or a river.
The Army’s losses included executions—267 by the Union and sixty-four by the Confederates. Another 520 Federal soldiers were murdered, while nearly 5,000 were drowned, 391 took their own lives, 31,000 succumbed as prisoners of war, and 313 died of sunstroke.
How do these horrendous figures compare with those of America’s other wars? First, consider that, as Long puts it, “Total deaths in the Civil War for both sides may be placed at least at 623,026, with a minimum of 471,427 wounded, for a total casualty figure of 1,094,453.”
By comparison, Americans counted 13,283 dead in the Mexican War; 2,446 in the Spanish-American War; 117,000 in World War I; 407,000 in World War II; 54,246 in Korea; and 58,000 in Vietnam. In short, more men died in the Civil War than in any other, including the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
ENDINGS
Old Abe the Soldier Bird
SOMEHOW, SAYS THE LEGEND, HE ALWAYS FOUND HIS OWN ARMY—THE BLUE—AND even his own regiment, Wisconsin’s 8th, when he returned from a hunting foray with a chicken, rabbit, or lamb in his clutches.
Allegedly he ranged for miles across the war-torn countryside to find his prey and was sometimes gone for as long as two or three days. When not so engaged, he would go to the nearest stream in the mornings for a splashy bath.
The reality is that he was usually kept on a sixteen-foot leash, but he sometimes broke loose. They say that from their first meeting at Madison, the state capital, he stuck by his Wisconsin regiment throughout the war, whether on the march or in the thirty-seven battles and various skirmishes they fought. He was there for the siege of Vicksburg, for the taking of Corinth, and for Sherman’s march at Red River. The hotter the battle, the more likely and the more frequent his piercing scream.
Once you heard his shrill cry, you never forgot it. Hail Columbia! An apt symbol for the 8th Wisconsin—the “Eagle Regiment.” “Old Abe the Soldier Bird,” the bald eagle, accompanied his Wisconsin boys through their fights and marches, ignoring Rebel taunts of “Yankee Buzzard” or “Owl, Owl.”
Old Abe went through St. Louis with the boys, who turned down one man’s five-hundred-dollar offer for the bird and another’s pledge to swa
p his farm for the still-young but handsome eagle. He had supped on many an unwary chicken, including the time he and his handler were invited to visit a curious farmer’s barnyard and he espied a nearby fowl.
They say he not only loved his boys but their music; a favorite tune was “Yankee Doodle.” He watched carefully over drill and parade, and on the march or in camp knew when to soar and when to perch. It was considered quite an honor to be a regimental eagle-bearer. He became so well known that luminaries such as Grant or Sherman routinely doffed their hat in salute when passing his mobile roost.
You could say he was also popular with the enemy, since Confederate General Sterling Price once ordered his men to capture the symbolic bird. They weren’t successful; Old Abe the Soldier Bird stayed with his regiment until he returned to Wisconsin in 1864—with a somewhat cropped set of tail feathers that had been trimmed by a flying bullet.
Wisconsin was his original home. A Chippewa Indian had found him as a wee eaglet, then sold him for a bushel of corn to a white man who carried him into Eau Claire just as its men were gathering to march off to war. “An eagle!” the men shouted. “Let him enlist!”
Eau Claire’s Company C then took him to Madison mounted on a perch with bunting in the colors of the Stars and Stripes. State officials gave him a new perch, and the 8th Wisconsin took him on as both a mascot and an inspiration for its name, Eagle Regiment.
Old Abe was so much a part of his soldiering outfit that he even went home on furlough—with his boys, of course. On one such visit, he took part in a fund-raising affair sponsored by the Ladies Aid Society of Chippewa Falls. That evening, Old Abe and fellow members of the regiment’s Company C sat by as a minister from Eau Claire delivered a patriotic sermon.
It is also reported in the Wisconsin Historical Society’s handsome book Old Abe the War Eagle by Richard H. Zeitlin, that, on the way back to their duty station, the eagle and his last eagle-bearer of the war period, a German immigrant named Burkhardt, encountered a train conductor who said the soldier would have to buy a ticket for the eagle “who, after all, occupied a seat.” When Old Abe’s bearer objected, the conductor said, “Pay for that thing or I’ll put you out!” The Union soldier then stammered in his best English, adds Zeitlin, “that Old Abe was a free American eagle and, therefore, should ride for free.”
Even though that didn’t impress the resolute conductor, he finally backed down when Burkhardt’s compatriots and other passengers in the car turned a bit stormy in his defense. Old Abe traveled for free.
About four years old by now, the bald eagle returned to duty with his head and tail feathers turned white—a mark of full and proud maturity for the species.
With the end of the war near in 1864, the question of Old Abe’s peacetime future was raised. The men of his regiment debated the choices before them— send him to Washington as a gift to the Federal government, present him to the state of Wisconsin, or send him back to Eau Claire with its Company C? “The entire regiment participated in the decision-making process,” reported Zeitlin, “voting unanimously to present Old Abe to the state authorities in Madison.”
Thus Victor Wolf, Company C’s commander, officially passed along Old Abe, who then took up residence on the grounds of the state capitol while his compatriots of the Eagle Regiment went back to war for almost another year.
Officially classified a “war relic” after the hostilities ended in 1865, Old Abe became more than a local curiosity. “As the years passed, Old Abe’s fame grew,” noted Zeitlin. In the meantime, he lived in a two-room “apartment” in the basement of the capitol. “He had access to a specially constructed bath tub, was fed fresh rabbits and had several sawhorses to roost upon. The ‘Eagle Department’ never lacked for visitors.”
He escaped a couple of times, but was always recaptured. He did some traveling in the postwar years as well, appearing at various patriotic exhibitions and at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876. Old Abe lived on until 1881, when, his lungs damaged by smoke from a fire in a nearby storeroom, he died in the arms of his last attendant.
Debate immediately arose over what should come next—a dignified burial or a trip to the taxidermist’s bench. As Zeitlin said, “Taxidermy won out over burial.” Although the result “did not look especially life-like,” Old Abe was displayed in the capitol’s Grand Old Army Memorial Hall (and was once “visited” by Teddy Roosevelt). A fire in 1904 destroyed the building, together with the eagle’s remains.
Still, Old Abe did not entirely fade away. A six-foot likeness in bronze sits atop the Wisconsin memorial at the Vicksburg Wartime Military Park. Many other Old Abe likenesses appear in Wisconsin itself, and even in the Atlanta (Georgia) Cyclorama and as the logo for at least one large manufacturing company. Further, reported author Zeitlin, Old Abe’s likeness is on the shoulder patch of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division—“The Screaming Eagles.”
Bleak Holiday
CONFEDERATE REPRESENTATIVE WARREN AKIN OF GEORGIA ARRIVED IN Richmond on November 27, 1864, to take his seat in the second session of the Second Confederate Congress. Arriving three weeks late due to the birth of a daughter at home, he entertained high hopes of returning to Georgia for Christmas.
The war wasn’t going well, prices in the Confederate capital were greatly inflated, and his legislator’s salary might not match his expenses, he soon noted in letters to his wife, Mary. But there was the Christmas recess to anticipate. Recently introduced Senate legislation called for adjournment on December 20, a recess that was to last until January 10. That would give Akin three weeks for the difficult journey home and the return to Richmond.
True, he also wrote on December 11, “we are getting on slowly with the business of Congress.” In any case, the Georgia lawyer, farmer, and slaveholder instructed his wife that he would telegraph immediately once the Christmas recess won congressional approval. She should then send their slave Bob to meet him partway home with a wagon. “The rail roads will often fail to make connections, and I may be behind time,” Akin warned. (He had ridden in a boxcar partway to Richmond the previous month.)
Three days later, on December 14, he wrote with bad news: The resolution passed by the full Senate would allow only an eight-day Christmas recess. It seemed there would not be enough time for Akin to spend any time at home.
There was one hope, however. Possibly his House chamber would amend the Senate’s resolution and allow a longer Christmas break. “You know not how anxious I am to go home,” this father of seven children wrote to his wife.
On December 16 Akin wrote that the House was still debating a bill to try to stabilize Confederate currency. “We are getting on very slowly.” Then more bad news: “I am sorry I cant [sic] go home Christmas, but must bear it as well as I can. The Senate agreed to a recess of only eight days, and the House refused that, so the matter, I presume, is at rest.”
Two days later, Akin mentioned that the food at his boarding house was fairly plain, far from hotel standards but ample. Akin and two Virginia state legislators were staying with the George Washington Gretter family, whose home at Fifth and Leigh Streets was a “pleasant walk” of about a quarter-mile to Capitol Square.
The war news was worse than ever as the last Christmas of the Civil War approached. Akin cited the recent November 30 debacle of John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee at Franklin, with six Confederate generals among the dead. “The loss of Generals at Franklin in Hood’s army was awful…and I have no doubt when we hear the truth, our loss in officers of the line and men was awful.”
The disaster at Nashville, which took place about two weeks later, would be even worse—Hood’s army was shattered. The battle began December 15, but in Richmond, three days later, Akin had heard only “a rumor…that Hood had another fight and has been terribly beaten.”
The Georgia congressman was afraid the rumor was true, and, if so, Hood’s “whole army is lost, I fear.” Indeed, Hood would cross into Mississippi on Christmas Day and would soon resign his command, his army n
o longer an effective force.
By December 21, meanwhile, Akin again was writing home, this time with Christmas only four days away. “There will be no recess at Christmas, and I do not expect to get home until Congress adjourns, and I fear that will be March or April, and may be May.”
As always seems the case, the legislative pace was slow. One important issue to the Confederacy in its final months was the proposal to open the ranks to blacks, a notion dismissed early in the war. By now, however, the South was desperate, and the prospect of additional manpower was a serious matter. The Second (and last) Congress would authorize President Jefferson Davis to ask the member states for three hundred thousand black soldiers, but not until mid-March 1865, too late to induct more than a few, much less deploy them.
Sitting at his desk in the House on December 22, Akin again wrote his wife: “O how glad I would be to eat dinner with you and my dear children Christmas.” The next day he lamented the course of the war and the suffering throughout the Confederacy rather than dwelling on the yuletide, except to write at one point: “One more day and then it will be Christmas. O how glad I would be if I could go home tomorrow.”
He also reported that a turkey in Richmond by now cost $125.
Finally the House decided there would be a brief Christmas recess after all, an adjournment for two business days.
It was the day after Christmas before Akin wrote his wife again. He reported that he had spent the day with “Anderson’s Brigade” (probably Georgia’s General George T. Anderson). “Rode out…[on horseback] and felt the effects of it last night.” Akin, a good Methodist and occasional lay preacher, wrote that he preached a bit, and “I was very tired and did not get back until dark.”
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 26
