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

by C. Brian Kelly

  Trying to slip unseen to the nearby stables where their horses were quartered, they found Union soldiers blocking the way. They retreated to a space beneath a small adjoining church, but the rifle fire was by now heavy, ripping through the air all around. Major Withers joined Morgan and the other staff officer after “creeping through the shrubbery.” Withers then momentarily returned to the nearby house and found, by looking through the windows, that the streets all around were infested with Union troopers. No avenue of escape presented itself.

  He returned to the hideyhole beneath the church and told Morgan he ought to surrender. “As he spoke there was a sudden clatter above them as the Federals smashed in the door of the church,” wrote biographer Holland. Morgan said surrender was out of the question. Once more, for a third time in the past twenty-four hours, he said, “It is useless. They have sworn never to take me prisoner.”

  He was not far wrong. Seconds later, the three officers crept out of their hiding place and started for the house—Morgan thought they might barricade themselves in it and hold out until his troops deployed around the town could come to the rescue. He and his two officers separated for the short passage.

  Then a woman’s voice rang out from across Main Street. “That’s him—that’s Morgan, over there among the grape vines.”

  By the account Withers later provided, Morgan then shouted, “Don’t shoot. I surrender.”

  A Union soldier was sitting astride a horse outside the yard fence, just twenty feet away. His was the third voice. “Surrender and be God damned. I know you.”

  He fired his rifle. Morgan gave a stifled “Oh God!” as he fell forward, fatally wounded.

  The exultant trooper yelled, “I’ve killed the damned horse thief!”

  In seconds, a crowd of Union soldiers rushed to the spot, pressed right through the fence, and draped Morgan’s body on the back of a horse to be paraded through the town. Withers was shocked a while later, after himself being taken prisoner, to have the Yankees show him his chief’s body tumbled into a roadside ditch, nude except for underdrawers and besmirched with mud and blood.

  After Withers protested to a pair of Union commanders, Morgan’s body was finally carried to the Williamses’ home, “where Withers and Captain James Rogers of Morgan’s staff were permitted to wash and dress it.”

  It was a humiliating and unworthy end for one of the Confederacy’s greatest heroes, even if he had fallen a step or two from grace by his own ill-considered decisions. In the inevitable postmortems, it was fairly well established that the younger Mrs. Williams, obviously suspect as an informer, really had been out of town and returned late the next morning unaware that Morgan had been in her mother-in-law’s home once again.

  In the North, the newspapers were predictably exultant, the Chicago Tribune saying, for instance, that the Rebel raider “has suddenly passed unto death, much to the regret of associate horse thieves and peace sneaks.” Predictably, too, but a bit too late, the Southern press mourned the passing of a great hero: “One of the noblest Southern soldiers and gentlemen,” proclaimed the Richmond Examiner.

  A week after funeral services in Abingdon, Mattie attending, Morgan’s body arrived in Richmond encased in a pine box covered with a Confederate flag. Escorted to the State Capitol (also the Confederate Capitol) it was viewed by thousands shuffling past in an attitude of sorrow and respect. Neither Jefferson Davis nor Morgan’s old commander Braxton Bragg was among those who attended the last rites before the box was placed in a vault to await reburial in Morgan’s hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, after the war.

  *Note: Historian James A. Ramage’s 1986 book Rebel Raider offers additional detail on Morgan’s death at Greenville that sometimes conflicts with Cecil Holland’s 1943 biography cited here.

  Parallel Spies

  THE SOUTH MAY HAVE HAD ITS ALLURING FEMALE SPY BELLE BOYD, BUT THE NORTH had a bold beauty of its own whose life story largely paralleled that of Belle Boyd. Both were captured and quite correctly accused of their activities. Of the two, though, the Union’s Pauline Cushman came closer to the hangman’s noose.

  In reality “Pauline” was Harriet Wood, native of New Orleans. Raised in Michigan and a Union loyalist through and through, she began her espionage career as a Union agent nosing about St. Louis, Missouri, for Confederate spies. “She did this with aplomb,” wrote Donald E. Markle in his book Spies & Spymasters of the Civil War.

  She accomplished her missions early in the war in secret, without fanfare. Assigned next to Nashville, again to pinpoint Rebel spies in the Union-held town, she resorted to a safe form of fanfare—as an actress she could appear on stage without creating suspicion. She was always careful to maintain her actress “cover.”

  In the East, Belle Boyd was just the opposite. Arrested several times during the war as a spy for the Confederacy, she was bold and brassy about her activities. She loved the notoriety and left no doubt as to her affiliations. Sent to Baltimore from Virginia after one arrest, she proudly displayed the Confederate flag from her railroad car’s window. In Baltimore, she so dazzled the warden that he set her loose.

  That was her way. Known for her activities, she somehow still got her man among Union soldiers—and his information—time and time again. Arrested another time, she sang “Dixie” from her jail cell at the top of her lungs.

  In the war’s western theater, a much more subtle Pauline Cushman and her spymasters arranged to have her offer a toast to Jefferson Davis on her stage in Nashville (some accounts say Louisville, Kentucky). As a result, she was “thrown out of town”—exactly the cover she sought. Her spying behind Confederate lines followed; she produced much more vital intelligence than Belle Boyd ever did, said Markle.

  In 1863, however, while seeking information on Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, she was captured. Documents on her person proved her true role to the satisfaction of Bragg, who ordered her hanged forthwith. If the sentence had been carried out, noted Markle, “Miss Cushman would have become the only female spy hanged by either side during the entire Civil War.”

  As events turned out, a Union raiding party descended on the area—Shelbyville, Tennessee, and environs. They were just in time to scatter the Rebels holding the brave actress-spy, and she was released.

  Her cover was “blown,” but a grateful Union Army—some of its officers, anyway—gave her the honorary title of “Major.” As “Major Cushman” she continued with her stage career during the last years of the war and afterward.

  Belle Boyd, who had even married and conscripted a Union officer during the war, also pursued a postwar stage career. Both women were able to boast of their wartime spying activities as a drawing card for their audiences, but Pauline’s fortunes gradually declined, and she died in San Francisco—some say a suicide—after stints as a dressmaker’s assistant and charwoman. Her gravestone, supplied by the Union veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, gives a simple but appreciative epitaph: “Pauline Cushman,” it says. “Federal Spy and Scout of the Cumberland.”

  Belle Boyd lived until 1900, six years beyond her Union rival. She died on a visit to Kilborn, Wisconsin, for a stage appearance. By then she had written a book on her wartime exploits and married twice more. Her burial in Wisconsin, wrote Markle, “was funded by the women’s auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Confederacy.”

  Acquiring a New Name

  FREEDOM, SURPRISINGLY, WAS NOT ALL JOY FOR THE SOUTHERN BLACKS WHO HAD been slaves. They were used to being slaves, according to a black man raised on a Virginia plantation and called “Booker” in slavery days.

  One of the first things many newly freed blacks wanted to do, quickly, was to take on a new name—any name other than the master’s. “In some way,” wrote Booker later, “a feeling got among the coloured people that it was far from proper for them to bear the surname of their former owners, and a great many of them took other surnames.”

  Only a boy at the time, Booker recalled the very moment that freedom was announced to the slaves at hi
s plantation in Franklin County, Virginia, where his mother was the cook and where their cabin (he slept there on rags on the floor) was the plantation kitchen. His father was unknown but was thought to be a white man from another farm-plantation nearby, and his stepfather was a slave from a neighboring plantation who came visiting once in a while. His stepfather, in fact, hadn’t been seen for a while, because he had run away and found sanctuary in West Virginia, where he had a job in the salt mines outside Charleston.

  The morning that young Booker and his fellow slaves heard about their freedom, they were told to gather at the “big house.”

  “All of our master’s family were either standing or seated on the veranda of the house, where they could see what was to take place and hear what was said. There was a feeling of deep interest, or perhaps sadness, on their faces, but not bitterness.”

  A stranger, probably a Union officer, “made a little speech and then read a rather long paper—the Emancipation Proclamation, I think.” Next, “we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased.”

  The reaction among the former slaves at first was excitement, joy, and more, which was to be expected. Young Booker’s mother leaned down and kissed her children “while tears of joy ran down her cheeks.” Among the other newly freed slaves, “for some minutes there was great rejoicing and thanksgiving, and wild scenes of ecstasy.” In this case there was “no bitterness,” and in fact “there was pity among the slaves for their former owners.”

  Booker noted that the “wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings.”

  What had happened? “The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them….In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches.” Remarkably, in just a few hours “the wild rejoicing ceased,” replaced in the slave quarters by “a feeling of deep gloom.”

  Many of them realized that being free was a serious thing. The older people, in particular, found it frightening. After all, “their best days were gone.” They had spent their lifetime as slaves. Where would they go? What would they do?

  “Besides, deep down in their hearts there was a strange and peculiar attachment to ‘Old Marster’ and ‘Old Missus,’ and to their children, which they found it hard to think of breaking off.” Was it any wonder then, that “gradually, one by one, stealthily at first, the older slaves began to wander from the slave quarters back to the ‘big house’ to have a whispered conversation with their former owners as to the future?”

  Young Booker and his family did not stay around very long. And he would soon take steps to remedy the fact he had only one name to his name.

  First, though, his mother and her children had to journey to West Virginia to join Booker’s stepfather. They left their Virginia home and crossed over mountains, streams, and valleys on foot; the trip took several weeks. One day in the future Booker would reverse the trek—five hundred miles on foot—to attend school and work as a janitor at Virginia’s Hampton Institute. Then, after other important stops on the way, he would go on to operate Tuskegee Institute in Alabama as its widely esteemed president and become a towering leader among American blacks.

  First, though, before any of these things could come to pass, he had to attend elementary school classes in West Virginia, then settle the issue of his name. At school, “I noticed that all of the children had at least two names and some of them indulged in what seemed to me the extravagance of having three.”

  The youngster from Virginia was ready the first time the schoolmaster called the roll and asked for his full name. “I calmly told him ‘Booker Washington’ as if I had been called by that name all my life; and by that name I have since been known.”

  Well, not quite—for later in life the black educator found out his mother had actually given him another name soon after he was born in 1858 or 1859: Taliaferro. And so, as he recounted in his autobiography, he became Booker T. Washington finally and forever more.

  Close Connections

  RELATIVES AND RELATIONSHIPS (PLUS A WEE BIT OF NEPOTISM) AMONG THE CIVIL War’s principal figures crop up so frequently you would think we were a tiny European principality going through an internal shakeup of the royal court rather than a bloody division that split an entire continent.

  So it was that briefly visiting in the “King’s Palace” in the national capital— the Lincoln White House, that is—was the grieving widow of a recently killed Rebel general. Twice, that is.

  Among the generals still living, a leading “Royalist” commander, George McClellan, was married to the former love of a leading Rebel officer, Ambrose Powell (“A. P.”) Hill. Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson was married to Daniel Harvey (“D. H.”) Hill’s sister. Both men were generals, but at least they fought together, as fellow Confederates.

  For that matter, the South’s great and reliable General A. P. Hill was married to the Southern cavalry raider John Hunt Morgan’s sister Kitty, more fondly known (to Hill, at any rate) as Dolly.

  National division was seen in the familial connections of “Jeb” Stuart, who died at the home of his brother-in-law Charles Brewer, future surgeon general of the Confederacy. Stuart’s wife, the former Flora Cooke, counted a brother as a brigadier in the Confederate Army and a brother-in-law (married to her sister Julia) as a general in the Union Army. For that matter her own father, Phillip St. George Cook, was a Union general.

  On the opposite side, Robert E. Lee was the son of the Revolutionary War hero Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee. Robert E. Lee’s wife, Mary Custis Lee, was the daughter of George Washington Parke Custis, adopted son of George Washington—grandson, actually, of Washington’s wife, the Widow Martha Custis.

  Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union armies late in the war, enjoyed the services of his brother-in-law (and West Point roommate) Frederick T. Dent on his staff. Indeed, Officer Dent later served President Grant in the White House as Grant’s military secretary. Grant’s father-in-law, former Mississippi slaveowner Frederick Dent and father to Julia Grant and her brother, young Fred, was a White House occupant until his death.

  On the south side of the Potomac—in Richmond—not only did Robert E. Lee’s eldest son Custis serve as an aide to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, but so did the president’s nephew Joseph Robert Davis, like Custis also a Confederate brigader.

  The son of a former U.S. president fought on the Rebel side: Louisiana’s Dick Taylor, son of the late Zachary Taylor (once father-in-law to Jefferson Davis during Davis’s first marriage to Taylor’s daughter Knox, who died of a fever shortly after their wedding).

  Robert E. and George Washington Custis Lee, father and son, were not the only members of the Lee family to take part in the Civil War. Robert E. Lee’s other son in Confederate service was cavalry officer William Henry Fitzhugh “Rooney” Lee, while General Fitzhugh Lee was a nephew of Robert. Confederate General Stephen Dill Lee was not a relative, but the Confederacy’s Admiral Sydney Smith Lee was Robert’s brother. Still another distant relative was Samuel Phillips Lee—a Union naval officer.

  Among the “lesser nobility” of the war, many brothers took part on opposite sides—witness Kentucky’s two army generals named Crittenden, Thomas and George, one Union and one Confederate.

  Friends also split along similar lines, especially among the many West Point graduates who served on both sides of the battlefield. Confederate General James Longstreet, for instance, had attended future Union General Grant’s wedding to Julia in 1848. The Jefferson Davises, for that matter, had kept lingering Northern friendships from their antebellum days in Washin
gton and other ties. Mrs. Davis, Varina Howell by birth, was the grandchild of a New Jersey governor.

  It was the Lincolns, though—Mary Todd Lincoln especially—who may have endured the most painful and complex genealogy chart of any principal player in the Civil War. With both Lincolns born in Kentucky, itself a state of competing loyalties, it was inescapable that relatives would land on opposite sides of the conflict. Consider the complications implicit in the number of Mary Todd Lincoln’s Southern-leaning siblings. Born of Robert Smith Todd’s first wife, Eliza, she counted five siblings from that marriage, while another eight siblings (half brothers and sisters) were the result of her widowed father’s second marriage, to Elizabeth Humphreys.

  Not only did Mary Todd, as first lady of the land, have a half sister, Elodie, living in Selma, Alabama, and married to a Confederate officer during the war, but her half sister Emilie was married to a Rebel brigadier general, Benjamin Helm, whom Lincoln had appointed as a paymaster in the Union Army shortly after Fort Sumter. Helm turned down the proffered commission, however, and joined the Confederate Army. A graduate of West Point himself, he advanced to the rank of brigadier general and was killed in the Battle of Chickamauga in September of 1863. At the time Emilie was living in Selma also.

  Not only did the White House mourn the likable Helm, but President Lincoln was left in a delicate spot. Just as George McClellan had once allowed Robert E. Lee’s wife safe passage through Union lines, now Lincoln was asked to allow Confederate General Helm’s widow to pass through Federalheld territory after attending her husband’s funeral in Atlanta. She wished to go home with her children to her mother in Lexington, Kentucky.

  Even more sensitive for Lincoln, she was apparently halted by Federal officers who wanted her to take the Union oath of allegiance. Lincoln had to intervene and order her forwarded to Washington. In Washington the Rebel widow, together with daughter Katherine, stayed for a period of time in the White House with the Lincolns.