Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War

by Tim Rowland

  It might not have been the best choice for Semmes, who could have laid up in port for an extended period or snuck out of port under the cover of darkness rather than take on a warship of equal strength mano y mano. But even though he had taken down a Union fighting ship, Semmes had been publicly labeled a pirate for his attacks on defenseless merchant ships, which hurt his feelings and struck at his sense of Southern honor. Coward would not be added to his perceived demerits. Besides, Semmes thought he could win.

  The Alabama took on a hundred tons of coal, which helped barricade her engines from damage and would keep her low in the water, with less surface area for enemy shells to hit. The crew checked the powder and polished the brass. The Kearsarge likewise took on fuel, sent valuables to shore and put men to work sharpening cutlasses and pikes. Earlier in the war its sailors had seen to one more task that was to generate much chatter in the days and years to come: They lined the flanks of the ship with chains, and then tacked a veneer of wood over top.

  The French, playing the part of referee, shut down communication to the two vessels the day before the fight to prevent any spy-generated dispatches that might offer an unfair advantage. Excitement built, on ship and on shore. At a Saturday night supper in Cherbourg, Southern officers met with French sympathizers to discuss whether the better course would be to sink the Union gunboat or bring her into the Southern fleet. The Alabama had many fans as she steamed out of port. Wrote John M. Taylor in Semmes: Rebel Raider:

  The clash between the two ships was, among other things, pure theater. It seemed that everyone in France wanted to watch what would prove to be the last one-on-one duel between wooden ships. Excursion trains brought the curious, and throngs of small craft hovered outside the breakwater. Painter Edouard Manet was among those present; he would later paint the most famous rendition of the battle.

  Out in the channel, the men of the Kearsarge were starting to think Semmes wasn’t going to show. Then in mid-morning, a steamer was sighted emerging from port, and a spyglass confirmed it was the long-sought-after Northern nemesis. The crews of both ships performed one last customary chore: sanding the decks so the sailors wouldn’t slip in the blood.

  On the Southern ship, Semmes gave a hearty speech. “The name of your ship has become a household word wherever civilization extends [Much cheering]. Shall that name be tarnished by defeat? [Never!] Remember that you are in the English Channel, the theater of so much of the naval glory of our race, [Yes!] and that the eyes of Europe are at this moment are upon you!”

  On the Northern ship, Winslow took a steely and quieter calculation. He turned and sailed further into the channel, so the Alabama would not be able to quickly duck back into a neutral port should events go poorly for it. The Alabama willingly followed. Shortly before 11 a.m., Winslow wheeled the Kearsarge around to face her adversary.

  At about a mile distant, the Alabama began lobbing shells. Aside from some splintered rigging, the Kearsarge was undamaged, and the two ships began to circle each other like heavyweights in a boxing ring. The Alabama kept up a heavier fire, but most of the shots missed. One that didn’t was a shell that screamed into the stern of the Kearsarge and sank into a monolithic piece of timber known as the sternpost, a wooden keystone of sorts that held the aft hull and deck together. The crew held its breath, waiting for an explosion that could have taken down the ship, but the shell was a dud.

  After this and a couple of other close calls, the Kearsarge began to press the advantage. The hull of the Alabama was being pounded, and she was losing men fast. While the firing of the Alabama was rapid and wild, wrote historian A. K. Browne, the fire of the Kearsarge was “deliberate, precise and almost from the commencement productive of death, destruction and dismay.” From shore, all things appeared to be equal. Both ships were putting up a good fight and it was impossible to tell who had the advantage. But for the Confederates, too many things had begun to go wrong.

  A perfect shot from the Kearsarge knocked out the Alabama’s steering. Meanwhile, her own gunners were struggling to get the range. Some blamed inexperience; some blamed stale gunpowder which was going on a year old. Many Confederate shells failed to explode because gunners had failed to properly expose the fuses. And the big guns of the Kearsarge were taking a horrific human toll on the Alabama’s decks. Wrote Browne:

  Terrific was the effect of the eleven-inch shell upon the crew of the doomed ship: many were torn asunder by shell direct, or horribly mutilated by splinters. Her decks were covered with blood and the debris of bodies. One gun (after-pivot) had its crew renewed four times, fourteen out of nineteen men being disabled during the action. The carnage around this gun was more frightful than elsewhere; so great was the accumulation of blood and fragments of limbs, that a removal was required before the gun could be worked.

  Men grabbed shovels and plowed the human remains off the side of the ship and into the sea. In another vivid scene, the ship’s physician was treating a wounded soldier when a Union shell blew the patient off the operating table and out from under the doctor’s scalpel.

  Nothing the Confederates tried worked, from concentrating fire on one particularly troublesome gun to going after the North’s officers with sniper fire. And Semmes was noticing something strange. The Alabama’s shots that did hit home did not seem to be having much of an effect. He couldn’t understand why.

  It was over in an hour. The Alabama made a break for neutral waters, but was so badly battered it was a hopeless gambit. She went down, stern first, but her officers—rescued by a British ship—avoided capture. The spectators on shore several miles away knew that one ship had gone down, but didn’t know which, until the Kearsarge came within range of a spyglass. It was not cheered the way the Alabama had been when leaving port that morning.

  When Semmes learned after the fact that the Union ship had been protected by chains along its sides, he was ready to fight the battle all over again, taking great offense that such a dishonorable advantage had been secreted away by the Kearsarge. Winslow shrugged. The anchor chains had to be stored somewhere, after all. And the wood that shielded them from sight? Just keeping the chains dry. (In truth, scholarship since the battle has indicated the armor played little part in the battle one way or the other.)

  The sinking of the Alabama and Florida didn’t end the exploits of the Confederate commerce raiders, and neither did the end of the war. The CSS Shenandoah remained at sea, and even after Appomattox had no way of knowing the war was over. She was at the Arctic Circle off Alaska two months after the surrender when an understandably miffed captain of one of her victims produced a San Francisco newspaper detailing Lee’s surrender. Choosing not to believe everything they read in the papers, the Shenandoah’s crew kept on capturing whaling boats in the Aleutian Islands until a British captain confirmed the veracity of the report in August.

  It was fitting, perhaps, that it was one of these renegade raiders that traveled the globe with such daring and aplomb and so often played by their own rules that would wind up firing the last shot of the Civil War—four months after it was over.

  CHAPTER 16

  Chamberlain’s Last Day at the Office

  The North’s Maj. Gen. Joshua Chamberlain might at the same time be the best-known and least-known officer of the war. In Civil War pop culture and beyond, Chamberlain’s undermanned 20th Maine has been well publicized as having been the last wisp of a defense between the Confederate army and Washington, D.C., during the tide-turning Gettysburg campaign. He is a hero in Michael Shaara’s novel Killer Angels, leading a memorable bayonet charge at a surprised enemy and capturing twice as many men as he had under his own command.

  It was indeed a memorable if fleeting moment worthy of its press clippings.

  Historian James McPherson wrote that the accolades were certainly deserved, but in a way, unfortunate. Because focusing on Gettysburg “does ironic injustice to Chamberlain. Shaara’s novel ends with Lee’s retreat at Gettysburg and thus ends most readers’ knowledge of Chamberlain. Y
et he went on to become one of the most remarkable soldiers of the Civil War—indeed, in all of American history.”

  For example, few might know that it was Chamberlain, the icon of Gettysburg, who accepted the Confederate’s surrender with a gesture that echoed through history. Or that Chamberlain wrote perhaps the most telling Northern chronicle of the war’s final days. It can be argued that he put the last nine months of the war into a perspective as no one has been able to replicate; the horrible, eye-averting end of the war might be best seen through Joshua Chamberlain’s eyes.

  Chamberlain is a fascinating study, but difficult to classify. With Chamberlain, appearances were always deceiving. He sported one of those classic Civil War moustaches that look as if a bat hit him in the face at high speed. His eyebrows hunkered down over a piercing gaze that could be disarming, yet slightly hard to take seriously due to the unfortunate outgrowth on his upper lip. A scholar, politician, and theologian with a keen eye for detail and sentiment, he noticed things others didn’t, and with an intellect no other could match. He took his work seriously, yet his writings, like his moustache, betray a wit that—given the overall gravitas of his subject matter—probably seemed a bit funnier than it was.

  He could read ancient Greek, but had no schooling in military matters. Thin and bookish, his appearance was deceptive in that he proved to be impossible to kill. He was hit by enemy fire multiple times and had three horses shot out from under him. On three separate occasions, Chamberlain’s obituary was printed in Northeastern newspapers; only the last one, in 1914, was accurate.

  Joshua Chamberlain is best remembered for his desperate defense of the Union left at the Battle of Gettysburg. But his military career, at that point, was just getting warmed up. (Courtesy National Archives)

  Like so many of his fellows, Chamberlain became cannon fodder for Southern guns. Unlike so many of his fellows in Grant’s final push to Richmond, he survived.

  The year of 1864 was horror for all concerned—not that the other war years were a cakewalk, but the last Federal push south through Virginia was a heartbreaking meat grinder of slaughter in a war that was all over but the shooting. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee would certainly have suspected as much. So would the Confederate soldiers in the field, even if they couldn’t admit it (of the ones who could, many simply tossed aside their haversacks and walked away). The only issue left to be settled was the number of men who would die before the formality of surrender occurred. This number would prove to be unthinkable. Thousands of lives were chucked into the furnace of battle in a war that was over a year before it was done.

  For the men, it might seem as if fighting had become just a job. Some surely could have been characterized as being institutionalized without the walls. Hell and this freakish campaign were all they knew. At night, if the two sides were camped close enough, the Southerners might begin to sing and the Northerners on the other side of the breastworks would join in, culminating in, as one soldier wrote, a “mighty and thrilling chorus.”

  In the morning the men who had been singing hymns together the night before would wake up and begin killing each other. Nothing about it made sense. It was death by assembly line. Grant hammered away, correctly enough counting on the North’s ever-superior numbers. From May through October of Grant’s 1864 Virginia campaign, the Federal’s chief field-hospital officer counted 68,540 men who were either killed, wounded, incapacitated by illness (often fatally), or simply disappeared.

  “The striking fact is thus established,” Joshua Chamberlain observed, “that we had more men killed and wounded in the first six months of Grant’s campaign than Lee had at any one period of it in his whole army. This hammering business had been hard on the hammer.” So dreadful and unfathomable were the losses, he added, that morning calls went unreported because “the country would not stand it if they knew.” For all that, Lee’s army was losing even more men as a percentage of his total troops. Marching into Chambersburg on a raiding mission, Southern soldiers had been astonished to see men of fighting age in the North attending to civilian business as usual. In the South, there were no more men; for the South, the war was unsustainable.

  It almost wasn’t sustainable for Chamberlain either, given his talent for interfering in the path of Southern projectiles. The first time Chamberlain “died” was outside of Petersburg during the siege of 1864. Chamberlain was shot through both hips, a wound that was typically not survivable. As he lay bleeding, Grant promoted him to brigadier general, so he would have the small comfort of dying at that rank. Instead, Chamberlain recovered and went on to lead a division, one step below that of corps commander. Of his wound, he commented, in his Maine way, that he did not have any Virginia blood in him, but Virginia had his.

  It needn’t necessarily have been that way. Richmond was on every Northern tongue and its capture would have excited headline writers, but it was Petersburg that mattered. It was a center of railroads, supply centers and manufacturing. After absorbing a crippling body blow at Cold Harbor on the outskirts of Richmond in early June (both a personal and a PR disaster for Grant; the South reported eighty-four men killed, the North, 1,844) Grant replaced blunt force with sleight of hand.

  It almost worked. His army withdrew from north of Richmond, and in a brash and daring move crossed the James River, moved to the south of lightly defended Petersburg and then—nothing. The officers entrusted to crush Petersburg’s meager defenses lost their nerve at a time when speed was critical. By the time they had overcome the cumulative knot in their throat it was too late, and Petersburg’s breastworks were now heavily populated with Confederate soldiers. What should have been a quick victory turned into a nine-month siege.

  So the war dragged on, and it was in the spring of 1865, not quite a year since his first death, that Chamberlain’s next death occurred. It happened on an attack of the Confederate’s right flank, as Grant probed for some chink in Petersburg’s armor. For the bullet, it was an interesting trip. A Confederate took aim at Chamberlain’s chest and fired. But just before the hammer dropped, Chamberlain was having a disagreement with his horse. He buried his heel in the horse’s flank, and rather than obey, it rose up on its hind feet. This proved to be good for the officer, but bad for the horse. The bullet entered its neck and passed through before hitting Chamberlain square in front of his heart. But a leather-bound packet of field orders deflected the projectile, and a brass mirror hampered its velocity. It still had enough oomph left to rattle around Chamberlain’s rib cage before exiting the back of his coat and striking the aid riding next to him in his sidearm, knocking him from his horse. All in all, it was quite the shot, and whoever fired it never received proper credit.

  Chamberlain awoke some time later to the consoling words of Brig. Gen. Charles Griffin, telling him that he was dying. It was an honest mistake. Chamberlain was lying in enough blood to drown a horse, but most of the blood was indeed from the horse. Griffin’s words of condolences were interrupted by a Rebel yell, and Chamberlain saw his line about to break. With all the dignity he could muster in his condition, he and his wounded horse, Charlemagne, returned to the field where, “I was astonished at the cheers which marked my course. Strangest of all was that when I emerged to the sight of the enemy, they also took up the cheering. I hardly knew what world I was in.”

  The world got stranger still. Weak from the loss of blood, Charlemagne gave out at an inopportune time that found Chamberlain in advance of his line, where he was soon surrounded by three Confederate soldiers preparing to take him prisoner at bayonet point. Chamberlain’s hat was gone. His coat was bloodied and soiled beyond recognition—a policy of deception was worth a shot: “What do you take me for?” he bellowed. “Don’t you see these Yanks right onto us?” With a flourish, he led them back toward the federal line. “They did follow me like brave fellows—most of them too far, for they were a long time getting back.” In a more somber mood that evening as he surveyed the field fresh with death he mused darkly over the “men made in the
image of God, marred by the hand of man … Was it God’s command we heard, or his forgiveness we must forever implore?”

  Eventually, the South was pried out of its position. Lee, his supply lines cut, prepared to move west in a desperate attempt to consolidate his army with what Confederate troops remained under Gen. Joseph Johnston.

  Grant relentlessly followed, dogging Lee at every stop, and capturing what little his army had in the way of food and supplies. All but cornered on April 9, Lee had one slim hope. He saw a soft spot in the Federal lines and hit the cavalry of Gen. Phil Sheridan, pushing it back enough to generate some optimism of escape.

  At that moment, however, Lee’s men looked up to the brow of the hill and were stunned to see a solid line of Chamberlain’s infantry and the rest of the 5th Corps—a wall of blue that by all rights had no business being there. Chamberlain, it turned out, had been awakened in the middle of the night and told that Sheridan was in trouble. Shaking sleep from his head, he roused his men and ordered a frantic, forced march in support of the fellow officer. If his men moved fast enough they could slam the door on Lee, and this could finally be it.

  No one needed to be told twice. They raced to the source of the Appomattox River in a wide valley that formed something of a natural amphitheater. There, they looked down to see their foe looking back up at them.