Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War

by Tim Rowland

  This time, the atmosphere was not as casual. Most of the town’s cash and wares had already been shipped out, in consideration of Chambersburg’s proximity to the Mason Dixon line. The town elders said that not only did they not have the requested funds, it was rather ridiculous to ask for such an amount. The response was swift. Southern soldiers barged into private homes, piled up the furniture, and applied the torch. “The burning was executed in a most ruthless and unrelenting manner,” wrote eyewitness Benjamin Shroder Schneck. Every building in the downtown went up in smoke, save for the local Masonic lodge, which survived out of the professional courtesy of Southern Masons. For the North, this was an act of terrorism, plain and simple, never mind that it had been provoked. Vivid accounts of screaming men, women, and children, along with photos of the smoldering city, made the rounds in Northern newspapers. Elderly and infirm residents had to be dragged to the safety of nearby fields. Soldiers swilled all available liquor and robbed individual citizens. When McCausland died more than sixty years later, Northern newspapers still referred to him as “the Hun of Chambersburg.”

  Early, for his part, had no regrets when he recalled the raid in 1887. “The act was done in retaliation for outrages committed by Gen. David Hunter in the Valley of Virginia … This was in strict accordance with the laws of war and was a just retaliation.”

  But these raids were not the most bizarre of the Southern money grabs. That honor goes, oddly enough, to Confederate attacks on one town in eastern Maine, and on another in northwest Vermont, so far from Southern territory that there are only about four frost-free months in the year.

  Canada was in the awkward position of being a refuge for runaway slaves and slaveholders alike. It wasn’t uncommon for escaped Confederate prisoners in the North to make a run for Ontario, where, in theory, they might freely walk the streets with the same men they had owned prior to the war. Canada was also home to Confederate spies and desperadoes with little to do but draw up crackpot schemes against the Union. At this point, Sherman was thundering toward the sea, a muddy-trousered Grant was en route to Richmond, the Confederacy was broke, and the Southern cause was desperate, if not hopeless. The time for first downs had passed; the situation called for a Hail Mary, one last dramatic game-changer. If peaceful, sleepy towns more than five hundred miles north of the Mason-Dixon line could be sacked, it might cause a nationwide panic, it might force the North to relocate its troops, it might … well, it was worth a shot.

  On a late-July morning in 1864, a tall, rough-looking character named William Collins stuffed a Confederate flag into his pants, the idea being to fly it over Calais, Maine, once the far-afield Yankee outpost had been captured. Whether or not there would be a town left to fly the flag over was a bit up in the air, since his gang planned to burn it to the ground, but that detail could be worked out later. Collins and two accomplices began the raid by hitting the Calais National Bank, with the expectation that as many as fifty comrades would arrive shortly thereafter by sea. If this band of brothers existed at all, they never showed. Worse for the bank robbers, the secret of the attack had been poorly kept, and Calais had armed men waiting on every street corner. When Collins made a move for his pistol, the teller sounded an alarm, and state guardsmen rushed to the rescue.

  Another one of these Southern soldiers active in the North was a fresh-faced young man named Bennett Young, who didn’t turn twenty until a couple of years into the war. After escaping from an Ohio Federal prison camp and scampering to Canada, Young hatched a plan to attack the unsuspecting town of St. Albans, Vermont, on the northern shores of Lake Champlain. Young’s force of twenty fellow Kentuckians burst into the town on October 19, much to the initial amusement of townsfolk who had trouble believing their eyes. Rebel gunfire convinced them of the seriousness of the matter, and the town mounted a counterattack that chased the bandits out of town, but not before they had killed a local citizen and heisted $200,000 from St. Albans’s banks. Writing for America’s Civil War magazine, Ron Soodalter said the Confederates brought with them bottles of an incendiary fluid known as Greek fire that was peddled as the napalm of its day. Lobbed against wooden buildings, it was supposed to set the city afire and provide cover for Young’s company as they retreated back to Canada. It did neither. Nor was the Canadian border any meaningful deterrent to the visibly agitated residents of St. Albans, who spurred their horses right through this international stop sign and apprehended Young at a Canadian farmhouse. Young protested to the mob that it was in violation of British neutrality law, a theory the angry men saw as interesting but not of any particular relevance to the matter at hand. Young was beaten and tossed in a wagon for transport back to Vermont, saved only by a passing Canadian officer who convinced the mob to follow traditional channels. At the end of the day, most of the Confederates and about half of the cash were recovered— although not before Canada’s policy of protecting Rebels nearly touched off an international incident.

  Banks, or course, were not the sole purveyors of cash—Union soldiers could often be counted on to have a couple of bucks; Confederates capturing a Union soldier might not ask questions about the enemy’s position, but would instead query as to whether the soldier had recently been paid. On the same day that Young had attacked St. Albans, a Yankee soldier by the name of Thomas Douglas had been shot in the face and thigh at Cedar Creek in Virginia. As he lay immobilized on the battlefield, men under the command of the aforementioned Jubal Early approached and, Douglas later wrote to Early in appreciation, “asked how long since I had been paid off.” Finding no currency on him, they stole his canteen just as Early himself approached the group. “I looked earnestly at you and said to you, ‘Do you allow a man to rob another of the last drop of water he possesses?’ Straightaway you rode up to [the thief], made him give up my canteen, and filled it yourself with water for me. ‘Now,’ said you, ‘Get away to your command.’” At least one of the Huns of Chambersburg could be a teddy bear.

  CHAPTER 7

  The North’s Shadow Cabinet Member

  For the anti-slavery North, the dawn of 1862 did not represent morning in America. Abolitionists had been hanged, the government had been booted from its own property at gunpoint, its armies had been routed, and its generals seemed incapable of organizing a two-horse parade.

  Even some early, trifling victories in 1861 in what would become the state of West Virginia served to do little but elevate the career of Gen. George B. McClellan, the commander who was to come to set the gold standard for treading water.

  Perhaps the most meaningful event the North had managed by early 1862 was a naval victory at Cape Hatteras that served to reinforce its Atlantic blockade of Southern ports. Otherwise there was little to cheer, and those who predicted that it would get worse before it got better would prove to be correct.

  Winds of confusion buffeted all levels of government, civilian and military; the Southern child that the North believed was in need of a good, quick spanking had itself unexpectedly risen up and wrested the rod from the parent. For days after the First Battle of Bull Run, Federal soldiers had straggled back into Washington, D.C., where the country’s leaders watched them stretch out in front of the White House and commence to get drunk—an appropriate if temporary response to events. No one seemed to have any good answers or operative plans.

  Out of this mess rose an individual with a keen legal and tactical mind, a clear vision of what the Union represented, and, as Mark Twain would have characterized it, “a pen warmed up in hell.” A former slaveholder, this patriot helped beat back the secessionist movement in Maryland and wrote opinions that legitimized President Lincoln’s handling of the national emergency before venturing out West and hatching a military scheme that gave the Union its first meaningful land victories and ultimately turned the tide of the war.

  The timing was fortuitous, even critical. Bumbling Federal forces were giving Europe no good reason to stay neutral and refrain from throwing its lot in with the South, which its mills depended upon fo
r the South’s prodigious cotton crops. A desperate Congress—not sold on Lincoln’s martial leadership—created a Committee on the Conduct of the War and named a firebrand senator from Ohio, Ben Wade, as its chairman. Wade was an indelicate specimen and a fierce abolitionist who believed that Lincoln’s tepid views on freeing the slaves exposed the president’s “white trash” (his words) roots. Possessor of a sharp scowl and sharper tongue, he was not shy in his criticism of the Union’s military leadership, which in 1861 was ineptly clawing at air like a cat being held by the scruff of the neck. Wade’s committee impatiently reviewed plan after plan as proposed by the military, none of which had any prayer of providing the required immediate battlefield gratification.

  “Just at that time,” Wade later wrote, “Colonel (Thomas) Scott informed me that there was a plan which, if executed with secrecy … would save the national cause.”

  Wade burst into Lincoln’s office and demanded to know if such a plan did indeed exist. Well, yes, Lincoln said, but it wasn’t a military plan; it had in fact been sketched out by a civilian. Wade was about to shear a pin. If it was a good plan, he wanted to hear it, forthwith. But there was a bigger stumbling block, Lincoln said, for “it is not only the work of a civilian, it is the work of a woman.”

  This juicy vignette plays out in a 1952 biography by Sydney and Marjorie Greenbie titled Anna Ella Carroll and Abraham Lincoln. Could it possibly be accurate? Could the great War Between the States really have been won by a girl? There is certainly a good case to be made, whether or not it’s in the hands of a decidedly pro-Carroll biography as the Greenbies’ work must be categorized.

  Getting to the bottom of the mystery that is Anna Ella “Anne” Carroll is no easy chore. Her critics, assuming they bother giving her the time of day at all, discount her contributions and suggest that her talents largely began and ended with a flair for self-promotion. Even in this century, historians have wrinkled their noses at her perpetual harping for pay and for being “shrilly and tiresomely” (the words of historian E. B. Long in 1975) championed by suffragettes and even by relatively modern-day feminists. But if Carroll had not stood up for herself, it’s fairly certain that no nineteenth-century male historians would either. Today, it is difficult not to conclude that she was a remarkable woman by historical standards, not just the standards of her day. Scholar, schemer, law student, diplomat, writer, tactician—Anne Carroll is something of a Hillary Clinton in a hoopskirt. Carroll’s acknowledged accomplishments should by all rights put her at least at the level of a Mary Chesnut or a Clara Barton, war-era women of great merit who were polite enough to confine their activities to the male-approved-worlds of writing and nursing. In a time when women were denied the vote, Carroll’s modern sympathizers suggest that men were fully capable of wiping her record from historical records, helped out by, as the Greenbies put it, “wicked and malicious historians” who—it gets dicey here—have failed to question documentation that doesn’t exist.

  Carroll’s detractors suggest that no record of her more controversial (alleged) accomplishments can be found. Carroll’s supporters say that this proves their point; we know enough of Carroll to know that she should show up (in letters and documents) where she doesn’t, which is evidence of a conspiracy.

  But what we do know is intriguing enough. Carroll was born in 1815 and grew up the daughter of a planter on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The family owned slaves, but the operation was more of a commune than a business; profits suffered because the family could not bear to sell any of the expanding slave family to the infamously cruel Southern cotton fields. Her father, Thomas Carroll, served as governor in 1830–31, and as a child she soaked up law, politics, and current events at her daddy’s knee. “As soon as she really knew her letters he turned her loose in Coke and Blackstone,” the Greenbies wrote. “She learned to assist him by taking down the big law books and finding the passages he wished to use in one of those interminable arguments about the law and the Constitution which were meat and drink to Southern legislators.”

  By the time she was ten years old in 1825, Anne was acting as her father’s secretary, sorting his mail and scanning newspapers for articles that demanded his attention. Visitors with business before her dad would chortle merrily as she spouted some passage from a law book, much as they might be amused with a dog balancing a biscuit on its nose. But the laughter began to fade as they learned she could be trusted to recount an important issue to her father if he was away when they came calling.

  Carroll’s spare time was spent not so much with needle and thread, but in poring over maps, learning the rivers of the region, and waiting on the wharf for news of foreign military adventures. To grow up in a border state was to grow up in a field of gray—there were no clear answers about slavery or federalism as there were farther to the north or south. Therefore it’s understandable that Carroll’s views did not evolve along predictable lines. Tyranny was to be fought, but loyalty demanded faith in the Union. Slavery was wrong, but so was freeing slaves into a world in which they were ill-prepared to cope (it was illegal to simply free slaves in Maryland prior to the war, so Carroll went into personal debt so that she could buy freedom for her own slaves).

  While antebellum society blocked a career as a lawyer, Carroll discovered that a woman could still be an advocate before the bar of public opinion, and she became a pamphleteer and publicist for causes that ranged from political careers to the plight of downtrodden sailors. Her books included anti-Catholic screeds, for which the Know Nothing party was famous, but also advocated scientific and industrial missions, including proposals for a railroad to the Pacific.

  Anna Ella Carroll was, by necessity of the day, a player behind the scenes. But because she remained behind the scenes it is difficult to tell how much of her story is valid—or if there may be even more to her tale that can never be revealed. (Courtesy Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame / Maryland Commission for Women and Women Legislators of Maryland)

  Carroll gets credit for helping elect Thomas Hicks, a friend of her father’s, governor of Maryland—an act that just might have been more important for the Union than anything she did or didn’t do later on. Despite Southern sympathies, Hicks was solidly pro-Union and as we have seen, helped prevent Maryland from seceding, assisted by Carroll’s pro-Union propaganda.

  There is also no question about the collective pedigree of Carroll’s friends and confidants, which included presidents Pierce, Tyler, Fillmore, and Buchanan, as well as Henry Clay, Salmon Chase, Stephen Douglas, Edwin Stanton, Jefferson Davis, Winfield Scott, and a host of others. So Carroll was either a political mover and shaker, or one of the nation’s more impressive gadflies.

  But for all this, it was the events of 1861 that stirred the pot.

  Carroll informed Thomas Scott, by then assistant secretary of war, that she was bound for St. Louis to visit relatives and research a paper on presidential war powers. Scott, she wrote, “urged me to go” and survey events in the war’s Western Theater. Like everything else for the North at this point in time, events were not positive. Military leaders, according to the Greenbies, were involved in little more action than aimless shoulder-shrugging as they tried to cook up a plan that would split the Confederacy in two. Conventional wisdom held that this was best accomplished by control of the Mississippi River, but there were clear problems. As Carroll sat in a St. Louis library doing her research, Southern sympathizers—unaware of her employer, it seems—bragged about Southern defenses along the river in detail specific enough to convince Carroll that a Northern assault would be suicide. She also winced when she saw the North assembling a flotilla of low-slung gunboats that, if disabled, as they almost assuredly would be, would float helplessly on the Mississippi’s powerful current straight downstream into the Confederate’s hands. Carroll needed a river that flowed north. She began to ask around. And the sources she sought out were the same sources that taught her about river navigation many years before in Maryland: steamship pilots.

  Relying on
her life long fascination with geography, watercourses and railroads, Carroll began to cobble together a plan. The Tennessee River did indeed flow “up,” and the Tennessee/Cumberland River watersheds were lightly defended. Even better, a pilot named Charles Scott—who confirmed Carroll’s fears about the Mississippi—said gunboats would be able to navigate the Tennessee River all the way to Muscle Shoals in Alabama. From there, it would be a relative hop to the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers that flowed south to the sea. Such an offensive, Carroll wrote in a detailed report to Scott, would also cut the legs out from under Southern defenses on the Mississippi, threaten Memphis and Nashville and disable the key railroads running west that supplied Confederate armies with food.

  Those who saw the plan, Lincoln included, were said to be ecstatic, and with good reason: Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers were indeed captured by a relatively uncelebrated officer whose demand of total capitulation earned him the nickname “Unconditional Surrender” (U.S.) Grant. The successful implementation of Carroll’s plan, or whoever’s plan, was reason enough to set church bells to ringing throughout the North. In the West, the Yankee nose was under the tent. Kentucky was saved for the Union, Tennessee was opened to attack and Southern supply lines suffered a crippling blow.