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

by C. Brian Kelly

  Hospital Town

  WHEN UNION GENERAL GODFREY WEITZEL’S BRIGADE ENTERED RICHMOND THE morning of April 3, 1865, as the vanguard of an occupying Federal Army, he rode his horse up a hill at the eastern end of the city to encounter one of the most amazing sights in the history of military medicine. There, spread out in tableau atop towering Chimborazo Hill, row upon neat row with straight streets and alleys in between, were the buildings and the tents of the largest military hospital ever known.

  Five hospital divisions collected together, Chimborazo Hospital had the capacity to house eight thousand to ten thousand patients at a time. For nearly four years, the sick and the wounded from such battles as Second Bull Run, the Wilderness, or Spotsylvania had come to Chimborazo by the thousands for treatment, recovery, or death.

  By the end of the Civil War, seventy-six thousand patients had been through the doors of this huge medical facility, seventeen thousand of them wounded soldiers. Of that large number, only a fraction more than 9 percent died.

  As reported to the Association of Medical Officers of the Army and Navy of the Confederacy in 1904, Chimborazo had no equal in military history.

  According to Dr. John R. Gildersleeve, president of the medical veterans’ group, “It was the first military hospital in point of size in this country and in the world, the next largest in this country being the ‘Lincoln’ at Washington, D.C., which reported a total number of 46,000 patients; and the next largest in the world at large was the Scutari Hospital in the Crimea, which reported a total of 30,000 to 40,000 patients.”

  Amazing, too, was the fact that barely four years before General Weitzel’s arrival, the hospital site had been a bare, breeze-swept hill overlooking what Dr. Gildersleeve called “the tawny James on its tortuous seaward way.”

  With the advent of large-scale battle early in the Civil War, however, Confederate authorities realized they would need hospitals—and more hospitals. The capital of the Confederacy soon became the chief medical center of the Confederacy. Chimborazo Hill with its fresh breezes, its view, its forty largely open acres, its water supply, and its natural drainage was an obvious and natural choice for a major medical facility. “And early in 1862, the hospital was opened, and in one week 2,000 soldiers were admitted, and in two weeks’ time there were in all 4,000.”

  While some tents were erected for the convalescing patients, this was not a makeshift city of tents. Instead, 150 single-story buildings one hundred feet long and thirty feet wide sprang up in neat rows to create a grid of streets. With two lines of cots placed in each ward, the long, low structures held forty to sixty patients each. They were divided into five divisions, or “hospitals,” of thirty wards each. In addition, there were one hundred Sibley tents for the convalescent, a guardhouse, five soup houses, five icehouses, an administration building, a cemetery, Russian bathhouses, and a bakery that turned out seven thousand to ten thousand loaves of bread a day. There also was a brewery, and a nearby farm for one hundred to two hundred dairy cows and three hundred to four hundred goats that provided nutritious “kid meat” for the patients. A canal trading boat, the Chimborazo, plied the waterways from Richmond to Lynchburg and Lexington to furnish added provisions for the hospital’s clientele.

  Workers in the vast complex included free blacks, whites, and black slaves. Established as a Confederate Army post, Chimborazo was supervised by Dr. James B. McCaw as Commandant Surgeon. (His doctor-son, Brigadier General Walter Drew McCaw, would later become Chief Surgeon of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.)

  As recalled by Confederate medical veteran Gildersleeve in 1904, “The hospital presented the appearance of a large town, imposing and attractive, with its alignments of buildings kept whitened with lime, streets, and alleys clean, and with its situation on such an elevated point it commanded a grand, magnificent, and pleasing view of the surrounding country for many miles.”

  This, then, was the scene that greeted Union General Weitzel as Richmond fell in the last few days of the war. With him on the ride up the hill was his brigade’s medical director, Dr. Alexander Mott, who spotted the Chimborazo commandant among the awaiting Southern medical officers.

  “Ain’t that old Jim McCaw?” Mott cried out.

  “Yes,” said McCaw, as recalled later by Gildersleeve. “And don’t you want a drink?”

  Mott’s reply was yes. “The General will take one, too, if you will ask him.”

  Weitzel did, and in perhaps unconscious tribute to the work of the Confederate doctors, he also placed them, their hospital, and all its patients under his immediate protection.

  So Very Personal

  THE WAR HAD BECOME SO PERSONAL BY THE LAST DAYS BEFORE APPOMATTOX THAT as the Union soldiers began their attack on their Confederate counterparts in the Battle of Sayler’s Creek on April 6, 1865, they displayed handkerchiefs as apparent invitation for their brethren in gray to surrender and dispense with any further bloodshed.

  It was an eerie scene that late afternoon in the rural Virginia countryside southwest of Richmond. For their part, the Union men had marched steadily up the incline just beyond the rain-swollen creek to attack the Rebels on the heights above. The Union men were ordered to hold their fire until the last possible moment, and amazingly, they did. They “pressed forward,” said a history of the 37th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment later, “holding their fire till they were in plain sight of the enemy almost face to face.”

  The Southerners, for their part, contributed to the momentary silence by also holding fire until the men in blue were at one hundred yards or even less. They refused, though, to heed the imploring handkerchiefs.

  Battalion commander Robert Stiles, a Confederate Army major, recollected calling out to his men, “Ready!” They then “rose, all together,” he later wrote, “like a piece of mechanism, kneeling on their right knees and their faces set with an expression that meant everything.”

  Stiles then ordered: “Aim!” And before him, “The musket barrels fell to an almost perfect horizontal line leveled about the knees of the advancing line.”

  As he next barked, “Fire!” the first line of Union men went down like tenpins, and the second line visibly wavered. Another Southern volley, and the line broke, the survivors running back to the creek behind them, hotly pursued by Stiles’s men, who had their bayonets fixed and poured on hot fire until meeting some of the Union soldiers at the bottom of the hill or in the creek in hand-to-hand fighting.

  This was only a portion of the Federal center line, however; on both flanks the Federals were advancing. And even here at center, they reformed quickly to mount a counterattack back up the hill, despite a second charge by Stiles’s battalion, which then took position once more in the main Confederate line.

  Now came a second assault by the Federal line, this time in overpowering strength too great for the retreating Rebels to repel. Walter Watson, another Rebel officer on the scene that afternoon, reported that the opposing lines now “mingled in one promiscuous and prolonged melee with clubbed muskets and bayonet as if bent upon exterminating each other.”

  Stiles later said the fight “degenerated into a butchery…[of] brutal personal conflicts.” He saw “men kill each other with bayonets and the butts of muskets, and even bite each other’s throats and ears and noses, rolling on the ground like wild beasts.”

  In one corner of the battlefield, a Rebel officer seemed about to surrender to a Union officer but instead fired his pistol at the blue-clad officer and wounded him. They were so close that the Union man took hold of the Rebel, and they grappled in a rolling struggle that carried them down the slopes of a ravine. Shot a second time by an onlooking Rebel, the Union man was finally overpowered. His original assailant was taking aim again to deliver a final, killing shot when a Union infantryman, Private Samuel Eddy, took aim of his own and fatally shot the Southerner. As Eddy fired, still another Rebel bayoneted him in the chest so fiercely that the point emerged from Eddy’s back, pinning him to the ground. His assailant now t
ried to wrest away Eddy’s rifle. Somehow the Union private not only held on to his weapon, but also managed to place another cartridge in the chamber and fire into the chest of the Rebel, killing him. Eddy then pushed aside the Rebel’s body, pulled the bayonet out of his own chest, and walked away from the scene under his own power.

  The war became personal in another way, too. At one point at the conflict at Sayler’s Creek (as related in Thirty-six Hours Before Appomattox by National Park Service Ranger Historian Chris Calkins), a Union corporal shot and fatally wounded a Confederate officer, then hurried to his victim’s side with the words, “I am sorry I had to shoot you” and “I am a Christian, and if you wish, I will pray for you; it is all I can do for you now.” And so he did, with the stricken Confederate saying “Amen” before he died.

  When George Armstrong Custer’s cavalrymen attacked a Confederate line, a ragged Rebel volley emptied many a saddle, but the Union mounts came on anyway. As they jumped the Confederate defensive works, some of the defenders were killed not by gunfire, but by the hooves of the leaping animals.

  And they weren’t all horses, either. Some, seized at Amelia Courthouse a day earlier, were mules replacing lost Federal horses. One Union sergeant, Francis N. Cunningham of the 1st West Virginia Cavalry, was perfectly happy with the result. “It took my mule just about four jumps to show that he could outclass all others,” Cunningham later said. “He laid back his ears and frisked over logs and flattened out like a jackrabbit.”

  More to the point, “He switched his tail and sailed right over the rebs, landing near a rebel color-bearer of the 12th Virginia Infantry.” What happened next was certainly an oddity of war: The color-bearer was big and brawny, but to Cunningham’s hot-headed mule, no matter. The Reb “put up a game fight, but that mule had some new side and posterior uppercuts that put the reb out of the game.”

  George Custer’s brother, Tom, a young second lieutenant, did his best to seize a Confederate set of colors. He didn’t find it very easy, being shot in the face and neck by the color-bearer and left with a cheek spotted by burned powder. Nonetheless, Tom Custer grabbed and held on to the colors while fatally shooting his adversary, then took fourteen prisoners. Both Lieutenant Custer and Private Eddy, in fact, were awarded the Medal of Honor for their efforts in the Battle of Sayler’s Creek, in which the retreating Robert E. Lee lost seven thousand men, including six generals taken prisoner, to the relatively low Union casualty count of 1,180 men captured, killed, or wounded. (For Tom Custer, incidentally, it would be his second Medal of Honor earned in the Civil War. Like his brother, George Armstrong Custer, he was destined to be killed by the Sioux at the Little Big Horn.)

  So very personal was Sayler’s Creek, just days before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox down the road, that George Custer shared his blanket with newly captured Confederate General Brevard Kershaw that night. Likewise, Union General Phil Sheridan shared his bivouac supper with his Confederate captives.

  Lee, on seeing some of his men streaming to his own headquarters after the battle of Sayler’s Creek, said: “My God! Has the Army dissolved?”

  Back at City Point outside Richmond and Lee’s recently vacated bastion of Petersburg, a visiting Abraham Lincoln was told of a messate from Sheridan to overall Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant that said, “If the thing is pressed, I think that Lee will surrender.” Lincoln replied in that personal way all his own: “Let the thing be pressed.” It was, and three days later, Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

  No Opportunity for Surrender

  HE SAID IT THREE TIMES TOWARD THE END, AND IT WAS TRUE. “THEY’LL NEVER take me alive, they’ve sworn to kill me if they capture me again.”

  After an initial burst of excitement and downright adulation for John Hunt Morgan following his remarkable escape from the Ohio State Penitentiary in late 1863, nothing had gone right for the Confederacy’s famed raider. After months of confinement, he returned to a South clearly running out of steam. Political enemies such as Braxton Bragg had Jefferson Davis’s ear in Richmond, and there were questions as to why Morgan had disobeyed orders and crossed the Ohio River into the state of Ohio, no matter how spectacular or effective the raid that ensued.

  He was now based in southwest Virginia’s rugged and poor mountain country with ill-suited troops and stronger, better-equipped and better-manned Federal forces edging his way. His beloved Mattie awaited his occasional visits—and his many letters—in lovely Abingdon, Virginia.

  In the last year of the Civil War, unfit men often had taken the place of those killed or disabled in the many previous battles. Desperate recruiting measures had dragged in the misfits, and Morgan had to use the personnel assigned to him, even though he could have filled his ranks with many others. Richmond denied Morgan better-suited, eager volunteers who wanted to transfer into his command from their own units.

  Ragged as they were, he and his men mounted an expedition into eastern Kentucky by way of a difficult mountain trek. But this final raid by John Hunt Morgan was marred by the thievery and outright robberies associated with it.

  It is almost certain that when Morgan marched through Mount Sterling, Kentucky, it was his own brigade’s surgeon who robbed the local bank of $72,000 and disappeared, last suspected of fleeing for his native Germany. Then, too, wrote Morgan biographer Cecil Holland, “At least a half-dozen Mount Sterling stores were forcibly entered, and goods valued at several thousands of dollars—goods privately owned and in private hands—were hauled away.”

  Even private homes were stripped of valuables, noted Holland. “The riffraff and the criminals out of the backwash of the South who had found their way into Confederate uniforms were showing their stripe.” Some soldiers reportedly took jewelry from local women at gunpoint. “A Mrs. Hamilton, riding into Mount Sterling with delicacies for the wounded, was robbed of her money and horse.” Then, too, at nearby Lexington, another bank lost $10,000, more stores were broken into, and more individuals were robbed.

  Morgan was outraged by such behavior, but, intent on confronting nearby Federal forces, unwisely put off his own investigation and discipline measures until later. This mistake gave his enemies in Richmond and in the North fresh ammunition to undermine his reputation.

  At the same time, Morgan did not really concentrate on the military situations ahead of him. Failing to fully assess his enemy’s capabilities, he was taken by surprise near Cynthiana and, due to poor tactical planning, was badly defeated. Morgan and his men then limped back to their base in Virginia.

  The summer of 1864 came and went, with the Confederacy as a whole limping visibly by now. For Morgan, the clouds left by his last raid would not blow away. Subordinate officers of his command were demanding investigation by higher authority, and once again—as in the case of his Ohio raid in 1863—a burning issue was Morgan’s authority for setting out on the ill-fated Kentucky raid to begin with. Morgan promised to cooperate after his Richmond superiors decided to look into the excesses attributed to the foray. There is strong evidence that at the outset of the raid he “had issued strict orders…against depredations and had made his subordinate officers responsible for the good conduct of his men,” wrote Holland.

  Before an investigation could get under way, however, Morgan moved south from Abingdon to counter a Union move northward from Knoxville, Tennessee. Taking a train to Jonesboro, where the rail line stopped, Morgan led his sixteen hundred cavalry troopers into Greeneville, Tennessee, home before the war of Abe Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson. Greeneville, and indeed, much of eastern Tennessee, was pro-Union territory.

  Morgan’s plan was to stay at the spacious residence of Mrs. Catherine Williams, whom he knew to be pro-Southern herself, even though she had a son serving in both of the opposing armies and the wife of her “Union son” was living with her. Morgan should have used better judgment. On a previous visit, he had had a run-in with Mrs. Joseph Williams, the daughter-in-law whose husband was a Union soldier. At the time, a wounded Yankee had been staying at
the Williamses’ home, and despite being on parole, he’d tried to send information on Morgan’s force to the Federals at Knoxville via a letter in a prayer book carried by the younger Mrs. Williams. Morgan had revoked the man’s parole and sent him to Abingdon under guard. The younger Mrs. Williams had been furious.

  The old episode did not stop Morgan from now choosing the same overnight abode. He sent a subordinate ahead to clear the way with the elder Mrs. Williams while he sat astride his horse on a road leading into town, his men filing by on their own mounts. “Much of the glory and prestige of Morgan’s old command was gone,” wrote biographer Holland, “but Morgan’s presence was still inspiring. Cheer after cheer rang out as the wearied troops marched by; unknown to them they were taking farewell of their beloved commander.”

  To the north in Abingdon, Mattie awaited her husband’s return from yet another combat. She carried his child in her womb.

  That night rain fell in torrents on Greeneville and on the outposts Morgan had established all around the town. With the younger Mrs. Williams absent, ostensibly visiting a family farm not far away, Morgan and members of his staff slept comfortably in the big brick house on Main Street (Andrew Johnson’s homestead is also located on Main Street).

  Earlier in the day Morgan had told his staff officer Major A. C. Withers that he didn’t expect to be taken alive by the Federals again. That evening, while his compatriots talked or sang songs in the Williamses’ parlor to pass the time, Morgan was not himself. He was moody and again remarked, “Do you know that they have sworn never to take me prisoner again?”

  It was early the next morning, right after daybreak, that the Union troopers struck; slipping into town under cover of the rain and darkness, they had surrounded the Williamses’ house. When rifle fire was heard nearby, Mrs. Williams alerted Morgan, who pulled on a few clothes and hastily retreated to the garden with another staff officer.