Such destiny was not yet clear even after his unit was taken over by the 2nd New York Cavalry, nor yet when young Dorence managed to survive the fiercely fought battles of Second Bull Run, Cedar Mountain, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, Chantilly, and even Gettysburg.
Right after Gettysburg, though, he was captured while on courier duty. He spent eight slow months as a prisoner in Richmond, then was sent to the Confederacy’s notorious Andersonville Prison, where Zurich-born Commandant Henry Wirz, a doctor, allowed Union prisoners to die of neglect and/or starvation. After two months in the stockade at Andersonville, the Connecticut youth became ill and was transferred to the prison hospital. Upon his recovery, he became clerk to the hospital surgeon.
Dorence now sat at a desk beside Wirz himself. His clerical job was to post the paperwork on the deaths of his fellow prisoners.
Unknown to Wirz and his cohorts, Dorence Atwater maintained a duplicate list that he took with him when he was paroled in March of 1865, less than a month before the Civil War ended. That list eventually allowed the Federal government to identify and mark thousands of Union graves in what is now known as Andersonville National Cemetery. However, the same Federal government in 1865 fought young Dorence Atwater’s attempts to publish his list for the sake of the POW families. Court-martialed and dishonorably discharged, he was briefly sentenced to hard labor in prison for his efforts.
In the meantime, Clara Barton, future founder of the American Red Cross, took up the fight and the graves were marked after all. Journalist Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune published the list in 1866; as happy end to the story, young Atwater was vindicated in his efforts.
Well, not quite. His story does not end there. He managed, for instance, to win appointment in 1871 as U.S. consul in Tahiti. There he became a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson; he even appears in the Scots-born author’s Ebb Tide. They were partners in a small steamship business, but Atwater also compiled a personal fortune in pearls and gold. He married into South Seas royalty as well.
It wasn’t until 1898, however, that the Federal government finally relented and gave him an honorable discharge from military service. A few years later his hometown of Terryville, Connecticut, dedicated a memorial to its native son. He traveled back to New England from his South Sea island to visit the memorial in 1908 and was on his way back to Tahiti when, stricken ill, he suddenly died in California.
Burial was in the islands, where another memorial—a monument—was erected in further tribute to Dorence Atwater, the lad from Connecticut. While he was at Andersonville in those difficult years of the war, who would ever have guessed how his life story would wind up?
Always a Clear Course
IN THE VIEW OF THE UNION GENERAL WHO PROSECUTED THE CIVIL WAR MORE successfully than anybody else, there was one reason for the Civil War and one reason only. “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States,” wrote this ex-general, ex-Union commander, and ex-president many years later, “will have to be attributed to slavery.”
Ulysses S. Grant, on his deathbed (from throat cancer) as he completed his memoirs, minced no words and held back no feelings. “There were two political parties, it is true, in all the states,” he said, but in the South “the slaveowners, even as a minority, governed both parties.”
Not only that, wrote Grant: “The fact is, the Southern slave owners believed that in some way, the ownership of slaves conferred a sort of patent of nobility—a right to govern independent of the interest or the wishes of those who did not hold such property.” Further, “They convinced themselves, first, of the divine origin of the institution and, next, that that particular institution was not safe in the hands of any body of legislators but themselves.”
Grant found it most illogical that supposed states’ righters would insist upon reluctant states joining the Confederacy. In some of the states following South Carolina’s secession course, wrote Grant, “the Union sentiment was so strong that it had to be suppressed by force.” In this vein, Grant listed Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri, “all slave states…[that] failed to pass ordinances of secession…[and yet] they were all represented in the so-called congress of the so-called Confederate States.”
In short, Grant summed up, “the South claimed the sovereignty of States, but [also] claimed the right to coerce into their confederation such States as they wanted, that is, all the States where slavery existed.”
Grant was afraid of civil war as early as 1856, when the presidential election of that year gave him his first opportunity to vote even though he was already in his thirties. He voted for a Democrat, despite the Republican Party’s reputation as the party of abolition. Throughout the country, he later wrote, “Treason to the Government, was openly advocated and was not rebuked.” He feared the election of a Republican as president would mean “the secession of all the Slave States, and rebellion.”
Reluctantly, Grant cast his ballot for James Buchanan. “Under these circumstances [the probable secession of Southern states] I preferred the success of a candidate whose election would prevent or postpone secession, to seeing the country plunged into a war the end of which no man could foretell. With a Democrat elected by the unanimous vote of the Slave States, there could be no pretext for secession for four years.” Over that period, Grant hoped, “the passions of the people would subside.”
But they didn’t, and in 1860 the Republican Abraham Lincoln was voted into office. This time Grant couldn’t vote (and would have voted for Lincoln’s opponent, Stephen Douglas) because he had also recently moved to Galena, Illinois, to help operate his father’s leather-goods store there. Grant’s hope for declining passions regarding slavery were unrequited.
Even so, Grant felt that most people expected the more extreme Southern states to pass “ordinances” of secession but stop there. “The common impression was that this step was so plainly suicidal for the South, that the movement would not spread over much of the territory and would not last long,” he said.
Even in the South itself, he was convinced many years later, “the prevailing sentiment” was against actual secession. But the slave-owners and demagogues held sway, and unnecessary tragedy was the result, he clearly felt.
Grant did not directly criticize Buchanan for any of his actions—or inactions—in the last months of his presidency. He merely said that the Buchanan administration “looked helplessly on and proclaimed that the general government had no power to interfere [with secession]; that the Nation had no power to save its own life.”
Grant saved his heat especially for a key Cabinet member under Buchanan— his Secretary of War, a “secessionist” who, in Grant’s view, acted treasonably.
War Secretary John B. Floyd (former governor of Virginia and later a Confederate general), Grant said, “scattered the army so that much of it could be captured when hostilities should commence.” He shifted cannon and small arms from Northern arsenals to supply centers in the South “so as to be on hand when treason wanted them.” The Navy “was scattered in like manner,” and Buchanan did nothing to stop his Cabinet from “preparing for war upon their government, either by destroying its resources or storing them in the South until a de facto government was established with Jefferson Davis as its President and Montgomery, Alabama, as the Capital.”
By that time, the two Southern sympathizers had left the Cabinet—“Loyal men were put in their place. Treason in the executive branch of the government was estopped.”
But “the stable door was locked after the horse had been stolen.”
Grant didn’t mention that Floyd was found innocent by a congressional committee on the charge that he dispersed arms to the South in anticipation of the coming hostilities. The Virginian (his middle name Buchanan) later met Grant himself in battle at Fort Donelson, Tennessee, a famous Grant victory over the Rebels. But Floyd escaped capture at Fort Donelson (as did Confederate Generals Nathan Bedford Forrest and Gideon Pillow). A good thing, too, in Grant
’s strongly held view. “Well may he have been afraid to fall into the hands of National troops,” Grant wrote. “He would no doubt have been tried for misappropriating public property; if not for treason, had he been captured.”
As events unwound, Floyd died of natural causes in August 1863 before the charge could be put to the test and before the war itself was over.
In the meantime, Grant’s victory at Fort Donelson was a major battlefield success for the Union. He had yet to weather the public clamor over casualties incurred at Shiloh (Never mind, said Lincoln afterward. “He fights.”), but his reputation grew with his victories at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, and during his relentless, casualty-strewn campaign, from spring 1864 to the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, to wear down Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Whatever personal resources he drew upon to withstand the truly staggering losses in men that were the price of his victory, Grant’s memoirs leave no doubt as to his motivation: The South had rebelled, and its rebellion was treason so far as he was concerned. The Civil War had been “a fearful lesson,” he wrote at the end of his memoirs and close to the end of his life, but still, “It is probably well that we had the war when we did.”
Just a week after finishing his work, he was dead, succumbing finally to cancer of the throat. He had fought off death to finish his memoirs, which raised $450,000, money badly needed by his estate to pay off his debts and provide for his surviving family.
War’s Sting Delayed
THE CIVIL WAR SPARED DANVILLE, VIRGINIA, ANY REAL GRIEF UNTIL THE VERY end—past the end, if you count Appomattox as the penultimate moment of all.
To be sure, the war took the lives of some Danville boys. But the community was spared, for there was little fighting here on the Dan River at the borderline of Virginia and North Carolina. Danville was a part of the overall picture; in the Confederate government’s last days, it stopped here in its flight from Richmond and made a third capital out of Danville—but only for a week. Richmond fell on April 3, 1865, and Lee surrendered at Appomattox, not seventy miles from Danville, on April 9. On April 10 Jefferson Davis and his government, what was left of it, took to the rail lines again and headed farther south and into history (after one more stop at decidedly unwelcoming Greensboro, North Carolina).
All of this left Danville alone again, shaken and still agog at what had passed so suddenly. The small city had no idea, no inkling, that the wartime tragedies scarring so many communities over the past four years, especially in the South, were about to leave scars on Danville as well.
It may have been children, small boys at play.
The arsenal was located at the low end of Craighead Street, against the river and below the Richmond and Danville railroad station. Here, carefully stored away and usually well guarded, were gunpowder, cartridges, and various other munitions and explosives. Not the sort of thing, normally, to concern two local women who left home that morning fully expecting to return later to hearth and family.
“No one knows how the powder was ignited,” said L. Beatrice W. Hairston in her 1955 book, A Brief History of Danville, Virginia: 1728–1954, “but suddenly a tongue of flame gushed up and a tremendous explosion shook the town. Crash followed crash as one after another the explosives went off, and the building itself leaped into the air, to fall in pieces.”
The shame was that at least fourteen persons were killed, including the two local women—“drowned when they flung themselves into the river to extinguish the flames in their clothing.” Fourteen bodies, “terribly mangled,” were recovered on the site and nearby, and still others injured in the explosion died later.
Just one day earlier Danville had heard of the war’s probable end with Lee’s surrender to Grant on April 9—and now this!
Few outside of Danville heard or spoke of the city’s terrible loss, so intent was the nation on the larger events that were quickly unfolding. In Mobile, Confederates were leaving their fortresses. In North Carolina, Sherman was still advancing northward, but he and Confederate General Joseph Johnston soon would come to terms. In Washington, Abraham Lincoln made a speech at a White House window stressing reconciliation—his last public speech, it so happens.
There were many in Danville, Virginia, the night of April 11 who didn’t care for a moment what was going on elsewhere. While it seemed that everywhere else the war was ending or had ended, in Danville, Virginia, its sting had just been felt.
Pair for Two
A FEW MORE STATS ILLUSTRATE THE EXTENT OF VIRGINIA’S ROLE IN THE CIVIL WAR before all the shooting ended. As reported by editor Kenneth H. Phillips in the magazine Great Battles, Virginia furnished the site of the first real (albeit small) battle of the war—at Phillipi, on June 3, 1861. The Old Dominion was the location for the war’s first major land battle, First Bull Run. It was the scene of the world’s first engagement between ironclads at Hampton Roads. And while Petersburg may have been under siege longer than any other American city in history, is there any place other than Winchester, Virginia, that changed hands more than seventy-two times?
As Phillips noted, Virginia led the way in several other wartime departments as well. “Thirty-eight percent of all battalion-size units of the Southern army hailed from Virginia,” he wrote. “More men, Northerners and Southerners alike, spilled their blood on Virginia’s terra firma than in any other state involved. Of all the railroad lines in the South—a major mode for moving men and supplies—Virginia dominated, with 1,771 miles of track, 20 percent of the total in the Confederacy. Virginia also led the way in producing war products, with a resounding 32 percent of all manufactured goods used to support the war effort.”
Finally, Virginians still boast that their seventy-nine generals outnumbered— almost two to one—the number of generals from any other Southern state.
Himself Virginia-born and -raised, Phillips had another sort of stat to report— more a tale than a stark fact, but true nonetheless.
Two Virginians served in Stonewall Jackson’s fabled “Stonewall Brigade.” In time each was wounded in the leg, and each then lost his injured leg.
They went home, and by the turn of the century, “having become related by marriage,” they were living in the same Nelson County home. For one, it was his father’s home. For the other it was his father-in-law’s home.
“Once a year they traveled by train to Lynchburg to buy supplies they were unable to raise on the farm. The two Rebel veterans would buy one pair of shoes—one man wore the left and the other wore the right.”
How would Ken Phillips know such an intimate detail? “They were my great-grandfathers.”
Final Glimpses
OVER THE “SMOKE-BLACKENED” STREETS OF RICHMOND, WROTE “MRS. GENERAL Pickett” in Lippincott’s magazine of May 1906, right up to the front door of “the old Pickett house” in that dramatic April 1865, came a surprising figure— Abraham Lincoln. He was looking for Confederate General George Pickett’s uncle, an old friend and law associate. On the same visit to the freshly defeated city, Lincoln had passed through the White House of the Confederacy and walked the downtown streets with crowds of cheering blacks around him and his soldier escort.
To be sure, “Mrs. General Pickett” was surprised to see the Union president at her doorstep. He asked for her husband, famous for Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, “perhaps wishing,” she wrote forty years later, “in his generous heart to offer the comfort of a cordial handshake to the soldier he had once known in his ambitious youth, whose hopes had gone down with the pride and glory of Richmond.”
When Lincoln was told neither gentleman was in, he asked for Mrs. Pickett. “The inquiry was answered by a lady who came forward with a baby in her arms and saw at the door a tall, strong-visaged stranger, with earnest, careworn features and a kindly look in his tender, melancholy eyes.”
She spoke. “I am George Pickett’s wife, sir.”
He spoke. “And I am Abraham Lincoln.”
“The President?”
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p; “No; Abraham Lincoln. George’s old friend.”
They chatted, and before Lincoln turned to go he held the baby, “Little George” by name, and submitted to “a dewy baby kiss.”
Handing the child back, Lincoln spoke again “in that deep and sympathetic voice which was one of his greatest powers over the hearts of men.” Pretending to address “Little George,” he said, “Tell your father, the rascal, that I forgive him for the sake of your mother’s sweet smile and your bright eyes.” And then he was gone.
A little-known hero of the Lincoln assassination on April 14, 1865, was Lincoln’s guest in the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre, Major Henry Riggs Rathbone. He and stepsister Clara Harris, daughter of U.S. Senator Ira Harris of New York, had agreed to join the Lincolns after General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant and others declined the presidential invitations.
When John Wilkes Booth entered the Lincolns’ booth and shot the president, Rathbone jumped to his feet, trying to stop him. He was stabbed in the arm for his efforts but struggled with Booth anyway—and may have been responsible for Booth losing his balance in the leap to the stage that broke the assassin’s leg. In any case, the combat veteran of Antietam and Fredericksburg is credited as the man who shouted, “Stop that man!” and thus gave the alarm at Ford’s that night.
Rathbone then helped the nearly prostrate Mary Todd Lincoln to the Peterson House across the street, where the dying Lincoln had been taken. Rathbone had lost so much blood by now that he fainted.
Two years later, Rathbone and his step-sister married. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. After moving to Germany as a U.S. consul in 1894, a now-insane Rathbone, said to be jealous of their children, murdered his wife, Clara. He was convicted and committed to an asylum for the rest of his life.
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 34
