Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War

by Tim Rowland

  Kearny finally got his chance in a pouring rain at Williamsburg, when his division was called up to assist Joe Hooker, who had made a good stand but was now feeling the pressure. Kearny arrived on the battlefield in timely fashion, only after he threatened to burn Union supply wagons if they didn’t move out of his way. He found Union troops dazed and confused in the rain, smoke, and mist. He spotted a brigade standing around under some trees and incredulously asked why they were not engaged.

  Because they did not know where the enemy was, they said. Here’s how you find out, Kearny shouted, as he spurred his horse and rode a hundred yards across an open field and back. White puffs of smoke from rifles tucked in the opposite woods followed his course but only served to give away the Confederate position. Hooker’s beleaguered men witnessed this crazy one-armed man risking it all and they knew the score. A cheer rang across the field, “Car-knee! Car-knee!” Kearny’s presence was an inspiration unlike any other, wrote Kearny biographer Irving Werstein:

  That day every soldier in the division saw Phil at least once, dashing across the battle line, standing in his stirrups, kepi on his sword tip, reins in his teeth—his staff officers close behind him. Somehow the knowledge that his general was running the same risks made a green private feel better.

  His fellow officers, not so much. “Doesn’t Kearny realize he’s a general,” his corps commander exploded. “A general, not a reckless shavetail to lead a bayonet charge.” In part due to his bravado, Kearny’s men would “walk through the gates of hell” for him, but events would demonstrate that the corps commander was not wrong.

  The legend of Kearny grew. Confederate prisoners all wanted to know who the one-armed general was. In the heat of battle, a joyful Kearny would laugh with ease and instruct his men to “go in (to the fray) gaily.” At Seven Pines, in a desperate situation and hemmed in against the Chickahominy River, a colonel asked where his men could do the most good. “Go in anywhere, colonel, go in anywhere,” Kearny blithely retorted. “You’ll find lovely fighting all up and down the line.”

  After capturing a Rebel headquarters, legend has it that a group of Union officers’ action stalled as they contemplated a full bottle of whiskey, speculating as to whether or not it had been poisoned. An impatient Kearny blew into the room, grabbed the bottle, and chugged a few gulps before handing it back and saying that if he was not dead in fifteen minutes they should feel free to pass around the liquor, but in the meantime they better get to work.

  McClellan continued to inch up the peninsula toward Richmond—the “Virginia Creeper,” Kearny called him—until, potentially on the verge of a tremendous victory, he ordered a full retreat. Although this did not fall entirely on McClellan. Pinkerton agents had convinced him the enemy was 200,000 strong, a horrendous overestimate. Even so, McClellan does not get a complete pass; soldiers such as Kearny and Hooker guessed the truth and champed at the bit to advance. But with the Union—and maybe more importantly to him, his reputation and potential presidential run—hanging in the balance, McClellan did not feel as if he had the luxury of losing.

  So with the spires of Richmond within sight, and the church bells within earshot, McClellan backed down the peninsula. The South, with Lee now having replaced a wounded Gen. Joe Johnston, pushed the attack and, even if it lost the battle, kept gaining ground. Disgusted and discouraged Northern soldiers called it “the great skedaddle.” After a clear victory at Malvern Hill, McClellan ordered another retreat, leaving stunned men standing in a downpour, words having deserted them. Words did not desert Kearny. They never did. In perhaps his most famous harangue he threw his hat into the mud and pronounced:

  I, Philip Kearny, an old soldier, protest this order for retreat. We ought instead of retreating to follow up the enemy and take Richmond. And in full view of all the responsibility of such a declaration, I say to you all, such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason.

  But Kearny, along with the others, obeyed the orders and slumped back toward the bay. Two months later, at Chantilly, a Confederate bullet put Kearny out of his misery. He was serving under Pope at the time, whose leadership was even more contemptible than McClellan’s. “Are there only imbeciles to lead us?” he stormed, before galloping out in the dark to scout an enemy position. As usual, he was warned of the risk. As usual, he didn’t listen.

  Down in the mud, a few yards away, a slave girl trying to cross into Federal territory under the cover of dark heard the shots and watched the gallant general fall from his saddle. Except this wasn’t a slave at all, but the Union’s mistress of disguise Sarah Edmonds. “When I learned who was their victim, I regretted that it had been me instead of him whom they had discovered and shot,” she wrote. “I would willingly have died to save such a great general … but he was taken while I, a poor insignificant creature was left.”

  The Southern shooters whooped and hollered and then fell silent. When he saw the officer fall, Confederate Gen. A. P. Hill scrambled to the site and held up a lantern. There was no joy in his voice as he said, “You’ve killed Phil Kearny; he deserved a better fate than to die in the mud.”

  Exactly how close he was to that better fate will never be fully known. Werstein wrote, “Almost at the moment when Kearny pitched to the ground, Secretary of War Stanton was signing papers promoting him to the rank of major general. In Washington a rumor was being started that Kearny was to replace McClellan as the Commanding General of the Army of the Potomac.”

  Thanks to Kearny’s own impudence, he was finally gaining the respect he deserved, although he would never get the chance to employ it for the benefit of the Union.

  CHAPTER 6

  Paying For it All

  Everyone has a pet “turning point” in the Civil War, the time when the South’s momentum flagged in the face of the North’s unrelenting industrial machine. For many, it’s Gettysburg, when Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s infantry was blown to bits during an unshielded attack on the Federal’s center. For others, it’s the death of Stonewall Jackson, or a set of misplaced orders that gave away the Confederate’s battle plan prior to Antietam.

  But for The Ascent of Money author Niall Ferguson, the true and little-celebrated turning point occurred relatively early on, in the spring of 1862, when Union Flag Officer David Farragut’s gunboats blasted their way past two Confederate forts at the mouth of the Mississippi River, then sailed into New Orleans unopposed. From that point, the South’s finances, and the South itself, were doomed.

  Of all the celebrated causes of the Civil War, cotton might be the most overlooked. The labor-intensive crop necessitated great numbers of slaves; its hunger for nutrients necessitated great amounts of land. Cotton was a political as well as an agricultural phenomenon. It was an economic powerhouse that fed the mills (and the hardscrabble laborers) of the industrial North and of Europe; three-fourths of France and Britain’s cotton came from the South, and the textile industry supported as much as a quarter of Britain’s population. Some assumed cotton made the South bulletproof. “You dare not make war on cotton,” James Henry Hammond, a senator from South Carolina famously snapped at New York’s William Seward. “No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.”

  Provided it could get to market, of course.

  As a champion of decentralization, the South had no unified taxing authority, so it needed to seek out creative financing alternatives. Its own people somewhat voluntarily paid for the early part of the war by purchasing $115 million worth of bonds, but Southern liquidity was rather quickly tapped out. Southern financiers waved war bonds under the noses of European investors as well, with little result until, Ferguson writes, the South came up with an “ingenious trick:” It would back up its bonds with its most valuable possession—a fluffy, white form of collateral.

  The bearer of the “cotton bond” might have his doubts about the validity of the Confederate States of America, but this was immaterial if he could redeem the paper for cotton at a low prewar price.

  Of cours
e the South needed land not just for cotton, but to grow food for hungry soldiers, so planters were encouraged to cut back on cotton in the name of grain production. This was not necessarily a detriment to the cotton-financed war, because the less cotton that was produced, the more it (and its bonds) was worth. Supply and demand never fit a cause so neatly. Indeed, the South, hoping to pressure Europe into the war, moved to restrict cotton exports altogether, an act that prompted mill closures and food riots in Britain.

  Had all gone according to plan, Britain might have capitulated and thrown its power behind the South, and foreign investors might have jumped into the market for cotton bonds with both feet. The South, Ferguson observed, was one cotton harvest away from glory.

  But at the critical point in time when the South needed to restock European ports with fiber, ships found themselves blocked at New Orleans. For Confederates, it was a financial disaster. British mills began to find other cotton sources to the east and recalled hungry workers to their looms.

  In turn, investors became skeptical of the South’s ability to deliver the goods as promised by its bonds. “The Confederacy had overplayed its hand,” Ferguson contends. “They had turned off the cotton tap, then lost the ability to turn it back on.” The South’s chief financial instruments were tagged with that dreaded term “speculative.” The South needed the support of Britain and France—but more desperately needed the support of Britain and France’s bond houses, and that didn’t happen.

  Still, money had to be raised somehow. Aside from lives lost, the financial costs of the Civil War were astounding. By 1863, the U.S. government estimated it was costing $2.5 million a day. It did not escape notice in Washington that for the money spent on the war, it might be cheaper for the government to buy up and free all the slaves in the border states. All told, the South’s costs would top $2 billion, the North’s more than twice that (pensions paid to soldiers eventually totaled more than the war itself).

  The South printed its own money, of course, with ultimately poor results. When Southern armies were attempting to win the hearts and minds of Marylanders in 1862, they graciously offered to pay farmers in “graybacks” for the crops and livestock they consumed. The parsimonious people squinted at the strange looking Confederate bills, wrinkled their noses, and indicated, thanks anyway, but they would be happier to be paid in gold. It was sound judgment. While inflation affected the North to a degree, in the South hyperinflation whittled the value of a Confederate dollar to a few pennies or less. The North was more than happy to help in this inflationary spiral (estimated at 4,000 percent) by printing up counterfeit greybacks and dumping them in the South. By the time of the Battle of Gettysburg, the Maryland farmers’ suspicions had been realized. A Pennsylvania shopkeeper complained mildly that raiding Rebels had paid him for his wares, but “it was in Confederate scrip, which now has a value chiefly for purposes of curiosity.”

  From a sketch by a Union prisoner of war, southerners auction off a scarce $25 gold piece, a response to hyper-inflation and metal shortages in the Confederacy. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

  The war affected currency, and currency affected the war in other, more curious ways as well. With all metals going into the war effort (or being hoarded by citizens and speculators) there was a serious shortage of coin. So pressed were New York City grocers to make change that they began substituting two-penny ferry tickets for legal tender. In response, government and private enterprise alike printed the equivalent of paper coins known as “shinplasters,” so named on the grounds that the script was so cheap it was more productive to add a fillip of starch and water to the paper and stuff the biomass into one’s socks to warm the ankles. One irate reader of the New York Times smelled a rat. He saw a time when millions of dollars worth of shinplasters would be printed, but not redeemed by dishonest establishments. “And who will be the losers of these millions? Who but the innocent?” he stormed. Indeed—some manufacturers liked the idea of printing their own money so much that—until labor and government got involved—they began printing up payroll. The North and South might have differed on slavery, the territories, and state rights, but on the matter of shinplasters they spoke with one voice. The Richmond Whig railed against the “uncouth and ridiculous looking” notes from Southern banks, necessitated by the hoarding of actual silver, nickel, and copper change. Papers in both the North and South offered the same advice: Refuse to accept the shinplaster.

  By 1864, nerves were understandably frayed from the hostilities, and money played a central part in the tensions. With elections at hand in the North and the Lincoln administration’s discomfort with a growing stalemate, the Federals became more malicious in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Soldiers were given permission, if not encouraged, to burn and pillage private homes, which enraged, among others, Confederate Gen. Jubal Early. The Virginia farmers, Early decided, were in need of financial compensation, and Early was happy to take his traveling marauding show on the road. He began to turn to Northern towns in search of either cash or fiery acts of retribution. He didn’t particularly prefer one over the other.

  Confederate Gen. Jubal Early engaged in epic missions of revenge for damage to civilian property in the Shenandoah Valley perpetrated by northern commanders Phil Sheridan and George Custer. After the war he packed up and went to live in Canada. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

  In Hagerstown, Maryland, the rumors got there long before the Confederates did. Said the Hagerstown Torch and Light:

  “Rumor succeeded rumor, and the last was always more alarming than its predecessor, and no two of them were exactly the alike, but the fact that the Rebels were on their way to pay us a huge visit was sufficient in itself to cause alarm.”

  Everything that was valuable and portable was shipped out of town. By newspaper accounts, the waiting seemed to cause more angst than the actual Confederate occupation. When Early’s surrogate, Gen. John McCausland, and his troops finally arrived on July 6, “The council was politely told by this polished representative of our ‘Southern brethren’ that if the demand was not was complied with, within a limited time, the town would be laid in ashes.”

  Southern soldiers set up shop in front of the court house and demanded clothes and $20,000 in cash. Townsfolk immediately complied with the clothing part, and if the Confederates ever got around to wearing the wardrobe in total it must have been quite a show based on the multiplicity of styles and patterns and colors that were forthcoming. As it was, something of an orgy of haberdashery broke out, with grinning Rebels trying on elegant hats and flannel shirts and rather disappointing Hagerstown civilians who, frankly, had been expecting more élan. “There was none of that ‘modest dignity’ in the man of which we have heard so much—none of that polish and Southern refinement so peculiar to the man of the South,” sniffed a disappointed Torch and Light.

  Still, there was the matter of the cash and on this point Southern honor ruled the day. The Hagerstown Council, while certainly aggrieved and all, seemed a bit curious about the $20,000, which the papers said was “a feather” compared to the mischief that could have been done. Indeed, this was less than $300,000 in today’s dollars, barely what it might cost the parks department to install some new tennis courts. It was later determined that Hagerstown was the beneficiary of a typo and that Early’s agents were supposed to demand $200,000. Any potentially delicious private conversations afterward in the Southern camp (“You asked them for how much?”) have of course been lost, but to a good Southerner word was bond and Early would not be so dishonorable as to break an agreement by demanding another $180,000.

  After leaving Hagerstown, Early’s men plundered Boonsboro and Middletown before they pressed up against the outskirts of Frederick, Maryland, and menacingly delivered a grocery list to the town fathers, who offered up supplies of bacon, flour, salt, and coffee. Not only did the Confederates uncharacteristically fail to pay for the goods, Early followed up with a ransom note demanding—having learned from past mistakes—$200,000, which t
he town bankers willingly delivered in baskets to a waiting Southern wagon. Meticulous to a fault, the Confederates gave the bankers a receipt. (The city repaid this sum to the banks in 1951 and has been trying unsuccessfully to get reimbursed by the federal government ever since.)

  After briefly threatening Washington, Early next sent a raiding party north to Chambersburg, a small Pennsylvania city a few miles across the Maryland border, with the orders that its residents should pony up $100,000 in gold or $500,000 in currency as payment for Union damage in the Shenandoah Valley. If Chambersburg didn’t pay, it was to be burned.

  The raid was led by McCausland, who brushed aside light Union resistance and entered Chambersburg’s square on the morning of July 30. He took breakfast at a local hotel and ordered his men to fetch the town leaders, including a prominent attorney named J. W. Douglas, who read over Early’s orders and commenced to deliver the news to the townsfolk—many of whom laughed at him for his trouble. “When I spoke earnestly about the terrible alternative they said [the Confederates] were trying to scare us and went into their houses,” Douglas later recalled. He tried another street, with the same result. The Pennsylvanians by this time were used to, if not entirely comfortable with, Southerner encroachment. Several other forays, including the march to Gettysburg, had not left Chambersburg particularly the worse for wear. In 1863, one woman—getting her first glimpse of Robert E. Lee in person—asked the great general for his autograph. “You want the autograph of a Rebel?” a perplexed Lee replied. Confederate boys were likewise puzzled to see young men their own age in Pennsylvania who were not in uniform. They chatted with their counterparts, telling them that back home, anyone who could serve did.