In fact, the story that emerged later was that Meigs had fired on them first, using a pistol hidden under his poncho. He had wounded one Confederate, George W. Martin. The other two, Benjamin F. Shavers and F. M. Campbell, then fired back and fatally wounded Meigs. “Ironically,” added Morris, “Martin, whose own gun misfired, went into hiding for several years after the war, a one-thousand-dollar bounty having been placed on his head by Meigs’s bereaved father, who mistakenly thought Martin had killed his son.”
Still more ugly incidents followed the Meigs affair at Dayton, which for a time was blamed on Mosby’s men. A week later a Union quartermaster officer and an army doctor were “shot dead within Union lines near Newtown,” also in the Shenandoah Valley. Next, the Federals hanged a freshly captured Mosby trooper on October 13. Then, in early November Mosby acted in reprisal for the Front Royal executions of September. Erroneously blaming George Armstrong Custer for those killings, he had been collecting as his prisoners as many of Custer’s men as possible. By Morris’s account, he informed Robert E. Lee in late October, “It is my purpose to hang an equal number of Custer’s men whenever I capture them.” Lee, “without undue gentlemanly hesitation, approved the scheme.”
After seven unfortunates among twenty-seven Yankee prisoners were selected by a drawing for execution, Mosby had them taken to Beemer’s Woods west of Berryville, Virginia, close to Custer’s camp. On the way, one Federal prisoner persuaded a fellow Mason among Mosby’s men to let him go and execute another freshly captured Custer trooper instead—a switch that Mosby only learned of later and severely condemned.
In the early-morning darkness, the unlucky Union prisoners marked for execution were brought forth. Two of them escaped, but the others were executed, their bodies left with a note saying they had been killed “in retaliation for an equal number of Colonel Mosby’s men hung by order of General Custer, at Front Royal. Measure for measure.”
Mosby then sent Sheridan a note saying that in the future he would treat his prisoners with “the kindness due to their condition, unless some new act of barbarity shall compel me to reluctantly adopt a course of policy repulsive to humanity.”
There is no historical record of Sheridan’s response, noted Morris, “but the absence of any Union retaliation, then or later, strongly suggests that he took the message to heart.”
In the aftermath, Sheridan did send his subordinate Wesley Merritt on a “Burning Raid” into “Mosby’s Confederacy,” described as that square of country “bounded on the south by the line of the Manassas Gap Railroad…on the east by the Bull Run Range, on the West by the Shenandoah River, and on the north by the Potomac.” In the effort to drive off Mosby and punish the local residents who put up with his guerrilla band, Sheridan ordered Merritt to “consume and destroy all forage and subsistence, burn all barns and mills… and drive off all stock in the region.” At the same time, perhaps to avoid a new round of unorthodox casualties, Sheridan also told Merritt, “no dwellings are to be burned and…no personal violence be offered to the citizens.”
Merritt did his job with terrible thoroughness, burning barns and other outbuildings, purging the land of all livestock. This time it didn’t matter that many locals were Quakers or Union sympathizers, noted Morris. By his account, Sheridan told one subordinate, “Should complaints come in from the citizens of Loudoun County, tell them that they have furnished too many meals to guerrillas to expect much sympathy.”
While the countryside was devastated, Mosby was not yet knocked out of the contest. By the end of 1864, his 43rd Battalion had grown to eight companies. Indeed, he was still fighting as late as the day after Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865—a final raid conducted just prior to dispersing his troops in a review ceremony at Salem (now Marshall), Virginia. The widely hailed Confederate hero returned to a law practice and then surprised and angered many of his fans and colleagues by turning Republican and even supporting Grant for president in 1868 and Rutherford B. Hayes, also a Union officer, in 1876. Mosby served as a U.S. consul in Hong Kong and as an assistant attorney for the Federal Justice Department. He wrote two books recalling his wartime experiences. He died in 1916 in Washington, D.C., at the age of eighty-two.
They Also Served
NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH SECOND COUSIN THOMAS J. JACKSON, BETTER KNOWN as “Stonewall,” this Jackson was also a Confederate officer. Before the war he had been a lawyer, judge, and lieutenant governor of his native Virginia. During the war, he served honorably and rose to the rank of brigadier as a cavalryman. He served as an aide on Stonewall Jackson’s staff in the latter’s famed Shenandoah Valley campaign and saw action in the Seven Days campaign and in the battles of Second Bull Run and Antietam. He returned to Maryland for the Jubal Early incursion, which was finally halted outside Washington. Long after cousin Stonewall’s death, he returned to the valley for resumed fighting at Winchester, Fisher’s Hill, and Cedar Creek.
After the war, he refused to surrender and sought refuge in Mexico for a time, then resumed the practice of law and again became a judge, this time in Kentucky. Not ever to be confused with second cousin Stonewall, this Jackson was known to his contemporaries as “Mudwall.”
This son of Indiana was a Mexican War veteran, state senator, and lawyer when the Civil War broke out. Soon vaulted to the rank of brigadier and then major general, he endured what might be described as an up-and-down military career on behalf of the Union. He won accolades for routing the Rebs at Romney in today’s West Virginia, and he did well as the head of a new division under U. S. Grant at Fort Donelson, but he was criticized for his slow reactions at Shiloh. Soon after, he organized a stout defense of Cincinnati. He fatally slowed raiding Confederates under Jubal Early at Monocacy, Maryland, outside Washington, late in the war. He sat on the court-martial that convicted those who participated in the Lincoln assassination and on the panel that ordered the execution of Andersonville Prison’s commandant Henry Wirz. He dabbled in ventures against Mexico’s Emperor Maximillian, he was governor of the New Mexico Territory, and he once served as an American diplomat in Turkey.
For none of those reasons is he best known today. Rather, the only American writer to be honored with a likeness placed in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, he was Lew Wallace, author of the phenomenally successful novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ.
Father and son John A. and Ulric Dahlgren were an admiral and cavalry colonel, respectively, for the Union. Admiral Dahlgren was the ordnance expert whose eleven-inch Dahlgren gun was put to effective use against Charleston by the Union Navy’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron under his command. Prior to that seagoing posting, he was chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance. He probably could have felt personal pride and satisfaction at war’s end but for the death of his son Ulric in both heroic and controversial circumstances—and the macabre aftermath.
A lawyer as a civilian, Ulric survived several actions unscathed until wounded at Boonesboro, Maryland, right after Gettysburg. Despite his foot injury, he would not quit the battle scene until falling unconscious from loss of blood. He then lost his leg from below the knee to a surgeon’s knife. He recovered to fight again, equipped with a wooden leg, this time leading a five-hundredman detachment from Judson Kilpatrick’s proposed raid on Richmond in early 1864. Equipped with a wooden leg, Dahlgren was killed March 2 in Henrico County next to the city.
The controversy arose when Confederate officials claimed that papers found on his body revealed a plan to assassinate Jefferson Davis and other highly placed members of the Confederate government. The macabre twist was that agents of Union spy Elizabeth van Lew secretly dug up the young officer’s body from its battlefield burial place and spirited it to awaiting Union hands to be carried north for reburial in a family plot.
John Wise and son O. Jennings Wise were another father-and-son pair. John was a Confederate general and Jennings was a member of the Richmond Light Infantry Blues when Ambrose Burnside stormed Roanoke Island, North Carolina, in Febr
uary 1862. The elder Wise had been governor of Virginia before the war, and soon after the hostilities erupted he served as commander of Wise’s Legion in mountainous western Virginia. In command of the Confederacy’s eastern North Carolina sector when Roanoke Island fell, he later served in the Seven Days campaign outside Richmond, fought at Drewry’s Bluff, commanded Confederate elements at Petersburg, and brought his unit through the Battle of Sayler’s Creek hurting but intact. Appomattox came just days later, but Wise never accepted the Union proffer of amnesty, perhaps because his son had fallen with mortal wounds at Roanoke Island.
His star did not shine very brightly during the Civil War, but before the hostilities broke out, there was no stopping the great Western adventurer, explorer, and widely ballyhooed “pathfinder” John C. Frémont. His antebellum résumé was so impressive that Abraham Lincoln gave him the Army’s highest rank at war’s start. Indeed, the officer from the Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers had been a real pathfinder as an explorer of the Far West. Apparently acting under secret orders from President James K. Polk, and not averse to intrigue, he had been instrumental in wresting future California from Mexico’s claim. He underwent court-martial for his role in establishing the territory as an American state, but that did not stop him from amassing a fortune, serving as U.S. senator from California, or even running for president in 1856 as the new-born Republican Party’s first nominee for the White House (an election won by Democrat James Buchanan).
During the Civil War, however, Frémont’s star dimmed after he failed to give full support to Nathaniel Lyons at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri and continued his independent ways by issuing an emancipation proclamation of his own for Missouri—months ahead of Lincoln’s emancipation decree. He then eluded delivery of orders sent to relieve him of command until a disguised emissary placed the papers in his hands. Frémont was later given a chance to prove himself against Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, with a predictably dismal result. Assigned next to John Pope’s newly formed Army of Virginia, Frémont refused to take orders from Pope and was again relieved, this time permanently.
After the war, his fortune dwindling, he served as governor of the Arizona territory for ten years. His U.S. Army retirement rank was major general, the rank that Lincoln had granted him at the start of the war.
John and Willie Pegram were sons of Virginia and brave men both. The higher ranking and older was John—West Point graduate, cavalryman, and engineer. He was a major general in the Confederate Army and served with distinction in various battles and many demanding posts in both the east and west. His wedding in Richmond in the winter weeks before Appomattox was a rare bright spot in the city’s declining social life. Three weeks later, his bride, Hetty Cary, and many of the wedding guests were back in the same Richmond church for his funeral. John Pegram had been killed at a place called Hather’s Run.
His brother, Willie, rose in rank from private to colonel and achieved a reputation as an artillerist with an array of impressive battle stars all his own. Just days before Appomattox and weeks after his brother’s death, Willie Pegram was killed at Five Forks.
The adopted son of a ranking U.S. Navy officer, this Civil War figure went to sea as a midshipman at age nine. He briefly commanded a captured prize ship at age twelve during the War of 1812. Born James, he changed his first name to David, apparently in honor of his adoptive father, Admiral David Porter. It was as David Farragut, however, that he became a U.S. naval legend when, subduing the defenses of Mobile Bay, he uttered the famous cry (or something very close to the version known today), “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” (He meant mines, actually.) While Farragut did subdue the bay’s defending forts and drive off or defeat the defending Confederate ships by the end of August 1864, he also should be recalled as the Union’s conqueror of New Orleans (April 24, 1862), vital to control of the Mississippi. He then helped blockade the lower Mississippi and the Gulf waters below and supported Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg higher up on the Mississippi.
Coincidentally, as a child he had lived in New Orleans—the city he later captured for the Union.
Story with a Kick
PROFESSOR JOHN B. MINOR OF THE AUGUST UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA WAS worried on March 1, 1865, as Union troops filtered into Charlottesville and the town’s university precincts. He was just one member of a joint committee of university and town leaders who greeted the incoming Federal officers and asked them to prevent looting by their troops.
General George Armstrong Custer sent word by two staff officers that “no damage to the buildings would be tolerated; and that a squad would be assigned to furnish the amplest protection,” wrote Professor Philip Alexander Bruce in his centennial history of the school (1819–1919).
Hardly had that assurance been conveyed than at the very edge of the university grounds Professor Minor “observed a couple of soldiers desert the main road, and turn in towards the rear of his pavilion [campus residence].”
Hurrying to his house on Thomas Jefferson’s famous Lawn, Minor was relieved to find that his wife had intercepted the pair after they asked the Minor servants if any silver plate was hidden on the premises. “As soon as they were told that a guard was to be stationed on the grounds, the two men remounted their horses, and rode off.”
And so, they missed the mule—Professor Minor’s balky, temperamental, difficult female mule.
She might have been a bit elderly for her kind, but she was still dear to the Minor household, and no bluecoat was to grab her! “Her keeper and companion, an old servant of the house, had at the first alarm solemnly led her off to the wooded fastness of Observatory Mountain.”
That sanctuary close by the university should have been safeguard enough, but it seems the stubborn mule didn’t care for a stay in the rough. She let loose her strident bray and thus revealed her hiding place to one and all.
The Federal officer in charge of the campus guard—“a plain illiterate man, but courteous in his deportment and kindly disposed in spirit”—suggested it would be safer to bring her back to the campus she was so used to “as the only way to keep her out of the clutches of Federal stragglers.”
Still worried, Professor Minor went the officer one better—he brought the mule back in the dark of night and without telling his Federal guardian installed the recalcitrant animal in his cellar.
She didn’t care much for this arrangement either, “and soon showed a disposition to kick with great violence, and to make many strange and alarming noises at unexpected and ill-considered moments.”
Still, she was in Minor’s cellar, and the outside world did not hear the hullabaloo.
The next evening, the unsuspecting Federal officer (a captain from Michigan, it is believed) came to dinner at the Minors. He was seated without incident, and prevailing among all at the table was an atmosphere of “peace and serenity, in spite of the depression of the times.” With the war very nearly over, it could be called a moment of reconciliation. “The captain was gracious and conciliatory, and the professor courteous and agreeable.”
But the mule down below, quiet until now, was not to be ignored any longer. “In the midst of their conversation, there came suddenly the sound of some extraordinary commotion that was happening beneath the floor of the dining room.”
It is not recorded whether the Federal officer actually leaped to his feet in alarm, but, “disturbed and suspicious,” he did at least rise from the table. After all, “the uproar was so loud and so confused that it was impossible to distinguish its cause.”
For a tense moment, the captain from Michigan “seemed to be apprehensive of a personal attack from without,” but Minor, convulsed with laughter, was finally able to gasp out that it was only the old mule hidden in the cellar below. The meal was resumed, we are told, “amid hearty laughter over the one humorous episode which lit up the dark clouds that enshrouded the hour.”
Two More to Mourn
FOR THE SOUTH, MAY 11, 1864, WAS ONE MORE UNFORTUNATE DAY TO
MARK. Two days earlier Phil Sheridan had set out with ten thousand hard-riding Union troopers against Richmond itself, and on this day at Yellow Tavern, six miles north of the capital city, J. E. B. Stuart threw himself into the breach.
A hard-riding, legendary, ballad-singing man’s man in an era of many brave heroes, Stuart had only forty-five hundred cavalrymen when he began the conflict. He then divided the forty-five hundred men, sending James Gordon after one prong of the Federal attack and taking the remainder to block the bluebellies at Yellow Tavern.
There a Union private named John Huff got off a lucky pistol shot, and Stuart was struck in the stomach while in the saddle. Reeling from the blow, he managed to turn his horse about and ride for his own lines.
Aided by his men, he was carried to Richmond, to the home on Grace Street of his brother-in-law, Charles Brewer, a doctor, it so happened. There he would linger for another day.
He was attended during his painful passage from life by several doctors and visited by fellow officers, by the Episcopal minister who would soon be burying him, and even by President Jefferson Davis, who knew him well.
Word had been sent to Stuart’s wife, Flora, who was off in the country and would have some distance to travel before reaching his side. “I would like to live to see my wife,” said Stuart upon being told that his wound was a mortal one. “But God’s will be done.”
In the meantime, Jefferson Davis spent about fifteen minutes with the Confederacy’s famous cavalryman. He took Stuart’s hand and gently asked, “General, how do you feel?” and Stuart answered, “Easy, but willing to die if God and my country think I have fulfilled my destiny and done my duty.”
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 29
