Actor Joseph Cotten, a Petersburg native whose grandfather’s farmland was a battlefield, narrated the story for a tourism film, saying: “This battle for Petersburg would be the life-and-death struggle for the entire Confederacy.”
He knew so personally because, as he explained, “I was born and grew up in Petersburg, and my brother Whitford still lives here. As boys, we heard a lot of stories about life here in the siege. There are people all over town whose family histories are bound up with Petersburg’s time of trial.”
Cotten recited those memories in the short film, The Echoes Still Remain, premiered in 1978 by Petersburg’s tourism experts of the twentieth century and shown at the city’s Siege Museum, established in an antebellum commodities exchange and bank building.
Says Cotten in his narrative: “It would be a very personal struggle for survival as well. For now Grant’s big guns began to fire directly on the city. They went on for hours that first day [June 9]—and that was only the beginning of almost daily shelling during the next 10 months. By the middle of the summer, both armies had dug in for a prolonged siege.” To those trapped in Petersburg, he said, the countryside for miles around looked like “one enormous camp.”
The Crater, he said, was the “most spectacular battle of the siege,” but he noted also, “All the careful engineering that enabled the Union forces to tunnel under the Confederate line and blow a huge hole in it brought no advantage to either army, and both sides suffered heavy losses.”
The really devastating event for Petersburg—no longer the major Southern trade and industrial center it once was—was the siege, including the daily bombardment by the Union forces outside the walls. Many have written of its effects.
“As soon as the enemy brought up their siege guns, or heavy artillery, which was only a few days after taking their positions, they opened on the city with shell without giving the slightest notice, or without giving opportunity for the removal of non-combatants, the sick, the wounded, or the women and children out of range of fire,” wrote John H. Claiborne, a Confederate doctor here at the time. “To persons unfamiliar with the infernal noise made by the screaming, the ricocheting, and the bursting of the shells, it is impossible to describe the terror and the demoralization which was immediately created.”
Indeed, we can wonder if any American city has ever endured as much. Besieged and starved of supplies, pounded by artillery day after day, with skirmishes and fights on every side, the Confederates were vastly outnumbered by the enemy in the not-so-distant trenches. The brave but dwindling Army, its beloved commander, the women and children—all trapped for ten months. In recent years the city has been largely forgotten, but to U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee it was a prize to be sought—or held—at nearly any cost, for it fed the Confederate capital of Richmond from a hub of far-flung railroad supply lines.
Grant had come at the end of his “sidling” campaign in June. Denied entry, his army encamped outside the city. By the time his siege ended, there were 125,000 Federals assembled to Lee’s 57,000 or so.
The siege dictated a lifestyle for both sides. Deprivation, of course, was the order of the day for those inside the siege—that and a siege mood. Social life carried on, particularly the dances. “While we were in the trenches and matters comparatively quiet,” wrote William M. Owen, a Confederate artillery officer, “we would often slip into town and get the girls together and have a dance.”
If firing broke out, the tattered cavaliers “would have to scamper,” but they’d be back in a hour or so to say:
“You have kept the dance for me, Miss? Only a small affair; one man killed, that’s all.”
“Oh, is that all!” the ladies would reply. “Come, they are forming the set.”
They tell also of Confederate artillery genius Colonel E. Porter Alexander, an innovator who produced bullet-proof wooden shields for his Rebel artillerymen’s guns. Wrote Owen also: “He [Alexander] introduced a system of awards for the men who could collect the largest amount of leaden bullets and fragments of shell fired by the enemy, and [he] would have the men chasing projectiles and fragments even before the former exploded.”
Predictably, Alexander himself was seriously wounded one day collecting bullets in view of the enemy.
The Union side had its own frustrations. General Benjamin Butler, another innovator, seriously proposed a super fire engine that would “squirt water on earthworks and wash them all down,” according to Union Colonel Theodore Lyman.
“By 1864, General Grant knew that to conquer the South he must immobilize this strategic little city,” Cotten gently reminds us in his film. “The closeness of the battlefield made the siege a strangely intimate experience. Especially for the families whose men were part of the defense force. Almost daily, servants carried letters and small gifts—an apple, a bouquet of flowers—between the battlefield and the homes of the city.”
The shortages extended to firewood, clothing, and shoes, but food was the worst problem as Grant’s forces cut one rail line after another of the five radiating from the city.
“Many people actually starved to death during the siege,” said Petersburg’s director of tourism, John R. Elliott, in 1978. “The amazing thing is what Americans did to an American city.”
Cotten also reported: “Eventually the pigeons disappeared from the street. Then the cats and dogs and even the rats. The suspicion grew that most of them had found their way into somebody’s stew pot. It happened in the best of families.”
Soon to come were “starvation” parties and dances, with hosts and guests ignoring the lack of any refreshments. Wrote Army surgeon Claiborne later on: “Ball followed ball, and the soldier met and danced with his lady love at night, and on the morrow danced the dance of death in the deadly trench.”
In all, forty-two thousand Union men and twenty-eight thousand Confederates died or suffered wounds before the siege was lifted.
The end came when Grant captured three thousand Confederates and seized the last remaining rail line into Petersburg on April 1, 1865. After the Rebel lines collapsed on April 2, Lee withdrew, and on April 3 Grant and his troops entered the tired and tattered city.
“We sat all day in the front room,” wrote one Southern survivor, “watching the splendidly equipped host as it marched by on its way to capture Lee. Our hearts sank within us!”
The triumphant Union forces issued a small but real newspaper on the day of their takeover: Grant’s Petersburg Progress.
Headlines:
“Petersburg Ours!”
“We Are Here”
“Hallelujah!”
The lead paragraph in the account that followed showed that the unsigned author’s sense of timing was somewhat off—
“For nearly six [sic] months the Army of the United States has kept watch and ward over the city of Petersburg. Since last June the roar of shells and the whistle of bullets have disturbed the silence of the woods in the vicinity, and today the old flag waves from the Court House. The United States armies and U. S. Grant have foreclosed and entered in possession and Petersburg is ours.”
That pretty well tells it all. Richmond fell the same day as Petersburg. At Appomattox six days later, Lee’s army, the heart of the Confederacy, collapsed. In those six days Abe Lincoln himself had visited Petersburg.
Petersburg’s own Daily Express got back on its feet, and on April 13 it published this temperate advice for its readers:
“Our cause, whatever may have been the varied opinion of its justice or demerits, is now lost—hopelessly, irretrievably lost—and it is no less the part of duty than of wisdom to submit quietly and willingly to the ‘powers that be,’ acknowledge the supremacy of the flag that waves over us and strive, under the blessing of God, to secure all the happiness and prosperity that the symbol of the United States can confer.” Fine thoughts, except that on the next day, April 14, Lincoln was assassinated, and all such fine sentiments of April 13 were suddenly and forever skewed.
Each to His Own Path
way
JAMES MCQUEEN MCINTOSH AND JOHN BAILLIE MCINTOSH WERE BROTHERS-IN-arms. James, born in Florida in 1828, graduated from West Point in 1849—at the bottom of his class. He first served with the U.S. Army’s infantry, and was on frontier duty with the U.S. Cavalry when the Civil War broke out.
Brother John, born in 1829, had seen military service in the Navy during the Mexican War. He was strictly a civilian—a businessman in New Jersey—when the Civil War swept them both up.
Both brothers would reach the rank of general before the war was over.
James served in the western theater, while John, also in the cavalry branch, served in the eastern. John, in fact, collected quite a few major-battle stars. He was at Seven Days near Richmond, at South Mountain and Antietam in Maryland, at Chancellorsville in Virginia again, and at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania; then it was back to Virginia for Petersburg, Shenandoah Valley, and Third Winchester.
John did not survive the war entirely unscathed. After Gettysburg in 1863, he was injured when his horse fell, but a quiet cavalry command in the Washington defenses helped him to recuperate. At Winchester in September 1864 he lost a leg.
His brother, James, had experienced one major battle much earlier—at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, on March 7, 1862. James McIntosh, the West Pointer, fell at Pea Ridge, shot in the heart while leading the mounted troops of Ben McCulloch’s Division—which had been fighting Union troops in Arkansas. James, the brother of Union general John McIntosh, had been a Confederate general.
It is said that John decided to join up on the Union side when his brother, James, joined the Confederacy. They never met in combat.
Squint to His Eye
HE WAS A JOLLY PRANKSTER, THIS HANCOCK, AND ONE COULD WONDER IF ON THIS day he had anything more than still another trick in mind. As his fellow prisoners held at Richmond knew all too well, he was likely to cut up, to mimic, to “put on” remarkable facial expressions at the slightest provocation or excuse.
He had been a Union scout under Grant, but in 1864 he was captured and accused of being a spy. As a prisoner, he had ample reason to use his diverting talents to relieve the cheerless prison life with merry song and dance. One evening, though, even as he sang for fellow prisoners, he suddenly stopped, threw up his hands, staggered, and fell like a bag of sand to the floor.
He didn’t stir, and remarkably few, if any, of the onlookers thought it was a joke. The guards were solemnly told, and then the post surgeon. The man looked dead, but of course the post surgeon would make that determination
As Hancock could not have known in advance, the post surgeon was quite out of sorts, having just returned from a lengthy outing on horseback. Tired and anxious to go to his quarters for the night, he might not have looked too closely before his hasty pronouncement that Hancock was indeed dead.
In just twenty minutes, the recumbent Hancock was placed in a wagon to be sent to the hospital for preparation for burial.
The driver set off dutifully, but found upon his arrival that he was quite alone; nobody—that is to say, no body—remained in the wagon. Frantic, he retraced his path to see if the corpse had bounced out of the wagon. But…no luck there, either. He asked a few people if they had noticed a body by the roadside. Not really.
In fact, though, Hancock was entirely alive and still in Richmond. Indeed, where else could he go? If he plunged into the countryside beyond, he could run into a Rebel patrol.
Had the Union scout planned his escape? Surely not with a doctor’s unexpected acquiescence. Yet he had money hidden away in his clothing, and now he simply walked through the streets of Richmond to a good hotel, checked in, and plunged into a clean bed for the night.
The next day he bought fresh clothes and wandered freely, speaking to various persons he met in his bold travels. To some he said he was in the Confederate capital as a businessman securing a government contract; to others he imparted the news that he was a Confederate secret agent.
After dinner, however, he was arrested on Richmond’s Main Street. Provost troops, the equivalent of today’s military police, spotted him as the man who exactly fit their fugitive’s description. But he was detained for only a moment since on closer examination it appeared their prisoner was cross-eyed and his mouth pulled to one side.
With his accosters confused, Hancock then drew on the good offices of his hotel clerk. Incredibly, the clerk was passing by at the moment, and he spoke up for Hancock, who then was allowed to go free.
So far so good, but not for long. In four days, the escapee was broke. At the post office he was arrested once more, and again he resorted to his contortions. His mouth pulled, his left eye squinted, and he pretended to be deaf. He was taken in this time and returned to his former abode, once more a prisoner.
But neither the guards nor his fellow prisoners could say with any real certainty that he was the man who had escaped—that he was Hancock. They were thoroughly confused by his remarkable squint.
Every story, or course, has its end, and Hancock’s was fast approaching.
“For seven long days the scout kept his mouth twisted around and his eye on the squint, and then he got tired of it and resumed his accustomed phiz,” says the nineteenth-century book Stories of the Civil War, adapted by Albert F. Blaisdell. The minute he let go the squint, everyone recognized him as Hancock.
Back in custody and accused of spying, he all too soon would have been executed, as others in the same circumstance often were. It was his good fortune that Appomattox was close at hand, even though, during his moment of freedom, Richmond had not quite yet fallen. “The close of the war gave him his liberty with the rest, but 10 days longer would have seen him shot as a spy,” says Blaisdell’s book.
Ugly Blows Exchanged
SCUFFLEBURG WAS THE MEETING PLACE. HIDDEN AWAY IN A HOLLOW OF THE BLUE Ridge Mountains in Virginia, it was “a place peculiarly adapted to the meeting of partisan rangers to transact business pertaining to their system of warfare.” So wrote one of Mosby’s Rangers, J. Marshall Crawford.
The despised Yankees, he added, “imagined it a second Gibraltar, filled with all kinds of infernal machines and implements of warfare, and believed that none of them who got there ever returned.” And so: “The foot of no Yankee soldier ever trod its magnificent thoroughfares, or reposed his wearied form under the stately oaks and chestnuts…while the mountain breeze refreshed his burning cheek with the perfume of the wild honeysuckle, and the air was musical with the songs of birds.”
Whether or not a Yankee ever intruded, Scuffleburg remained a rendezvous point typical of Mosby, the University of Virginia graduate, lawyer, and onetime cavalryman under “Jeb” Stuart who conducted harassing raids against the Union occupiers of northern Virginia. Typically, Mosby and his partisanlike troop struck, then dispersed, only to meet again by prior arrangement at hideaways like Scuffleburg.
So successful was this master of the hit-and-run attack that his hunting ground, with all its hidden lairs, became known as “Mosby’s Confederacy.” As the war wound down, however, it became more and more ugly for the often-romanticized Mosby and his proud rangers. Life was no lark, and the air was no longer “musical with the song of birds.” Instead, in those last months, death was on the wing.
West of the Blue Ridge in the fall of 1864, Union cavalry commander Phil Sheridan was the latest target of Mosby’s harassment. The “Grey Ghost’s” officially titled 43rd Virginia Battalion “had been having a generally bang-up time throughout October, sniping at [railroad] workers, derailing locomotives, lobbing howitzer shells into Union camps, and helping themselves to enemy paymasters’ strongboxes,” wrote Roy Morris Jr. in his biography, Sheridan: The Life and Wars of Phil Sheridan. In one such raid, they grabbed $173,000, and in another they grabbed a nice hostage, a brigadier general named Alfred Duffie.
Instead of trading purely military blows, however, the Union and Confederate antagonists often exchanged executions.
“Several members of the Fifth Michigan Cavalry, surprised tha
t fall by Mosby’s men while looting a farmhouse, were shot or hanged,” writes Morris; “hams were tied to the victims’ legs, along with a card promising other foragers a similar fate.” In another “hardcase” incident, a Union straggler was evidently surprised while skinning a stolen sheep. He was killed, and a hoof was jammed into his mouth. A note left with the body said: “I reckon you got enough sheep now.”
This all came at a time when Sheridan was torching his way northward through the Shenandoah Valley, laying waste to fields, barns, food stores; a time for years after to be called “the Burning.” Too, Ulysses S. Grant had ordered that Mosby’s troopers should be treated as partisans rather than soldiers serving their cause honorably. The back-and-forth executions had been going on for weeks.
“A self perpetuating cycle of atrocities, reprisals, and counter-reprisals,” Morris called it, and rightly so.
An incident in late September had inflamed feelings on both sides. When a Union lieutenant’s horse bolted into a knot of Rebels, the Union man was shot and killed. His compatriots thought he was shot while trying to surrender, so they then took six newly captured rangers (one a seventeen-year-old who was not a member of Mosby’s group) and executed all six in Front Royal, Virginia. Mosby “bitterly vowed retribution.”
In another incident, John Meigs, son of the Federal quartermaster general, Montgomery C. Meigs, was killed in another questionable episode. Outside of Harrisonburg, Virginia, one rainy day, Lieutenant Meigs and two orderlies encountered three Rebs (all six men in ponchos covering their uniforms). Shooting broke out, and Meigs was left dead.
Told that his young officer had simply been shot down execution style, a furious Sheridan “resolved to punish the unoffending residents of Dayton, the site of the shooting, on the wrong-headed assumption that the ‘murderers’ lived in the area and had been visiting their homes prior to the deed.” He issued orders to burn down every house within a five-mile radius. Fortunately, “cooler heads prevailed,” and the order was canceled, a welcome respite for the pacifistic Mennonites who lived in the area. They had nothing to do with the three Rebs in question, all privates with Brigadier General Thomas Rosser’s cavalry.
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 28
