Living Hell

by Michael C. C. Adams

  70. Gerald Schwartz, ed., A Woman Doctor’s Civil War: Esther Hill Hawk’s Diary (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986), p. 61.

  71. Stephen B. Oates, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 174.

  CHAPTER TWO. ON THE MARCH

  1. F. Colburn Adams, The Story of a Trooper (1865), quoted in Richard Wheeler, Voices of the Civil War (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), p. 121.

  2. Milo M. Quaife, ed., From the Cannon’s Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus S. Williams (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press & Detroit Historical Society, 1959), p. 159; Albert Castel, Tom Taylor’s Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), p. 67; C. E. Wood, Mud: A Military History (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006), p. 117; Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson, AZ: Galen, 2002), p. 285.

  3. William H. Hastings, Letters from a Sharpshooter: The Civil War Letters of Private William B. Greene, Co. G 2nd United States Sharpshooters (Berdan’s) Army of the Potomac, 1861–1865 (Belleville, WI: Historical Publications, 1993), p. 101; Edward K. Spann, Gotham at War: New York City, 1860–1865 (Washington, DC: Scholarly Resources, 2002), p. 53; Alan Huffman, Sultana: Surviving Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History (New York: HarperCollins-Smithsonian Books, 2009), pp. 51–52; William W. Hassler, ed., The General to His Lady: The Civil War Letters of William Dorsey Pender to Fanny Pender (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 173.

  4. W. C. Holbrook, A Narrative of the Service of the Officers and Enlisted Men of the 7th Regiment of Vermont Volunteers (New York: American Bank Note Co., 1882), p. 219; Gary W. Gallagher, ed., The Second Day at Gettysburg: Essays on Confederate and Union Leadership (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993), p. 128.

  5. C. F. Boyd, “The Civil War Diary of C. F. Boyd,” Iowa Journal of History 50 (1952): p. 58; Geoffrey Regan, Great Military Disasters: A Historical Survey of Military Incompetence (New York: M. Evans, 1987), p. 102; Quaife, From the Cannon’s Mouth, p. 69.

  6. Robert Perry, “Colonel Andrew Jackson May and the Battle of Ivy Mountain,” Journal of Kentucky Studies 13 (September 1996): p. 75; Moxley G. Sorrel, At the Right Hand of Longstreet: Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer (1905, repr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp. 133–34.

  7. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), series III, vol. 1, p. 399; John W. Haley, The Rebel Yell & the Yankee Hurrah: The Civil War Journal of a Maine Volunteer (Camden, ME: Down East Books, 1985), p. 96.

  8. William Camm, “Diary of Colonel William Camm, 1861 to 1865,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 18, nos. 3–4 (October 1925–January 1926): pp. 808–9; Lawrence Van Alstyne, Diary of an Enlisted Man (New Haven, CT: Morehouse & Taylor, 1910), pp. 327, 331.

  9. Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr., The Pride of the Confederate Artillery: The Washington Artillery in the Army of Tennessee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), p. 151; Gerald J. Prokopowicz, All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861–1862 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 148; Susan Williams Benson, ed., Berry Benson’s Civil War Book: Memoirs of a Confederate Scout and Sharpshooter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 36, on the pleasures of eating squirrel; Richard Wheeler, Voices of the Civil War (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), p. 390.

  10. Patricia B. Mitchell, Cooking for the Cause (Chatham, VA, 1988), p. 6; Alto Loftin Jackson, ed., So Mourns the Dove: Letters of a Confederate Infantryman and His Family (New York: Exposition, 1965), pp. 25–26; Gerald Schwartz, ed., A Woman Doctor’s Civil War: Esther Hill Hawk’s Diary (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986), p. 62; W. J. Joyce, The Life of W. J. Joyce, Written by Himself (San Marcos, TX: San Marcos Printing Co., 1913), p. 3.

  11. Joseph E. Crowell, The Young Volunteer: The Everyday Experiences of a Soldier Boy in the Civil War (Paterson, NJ: Joseph E. Crowell, 1906), p. 285; J. I. Robertson, Soldiers Blue and Grey (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), p. 70.

  12. George M. Blackburn, ed., “Dear Carrie—” The Civil War Letters of Thomas N. Stevens (Mount Pleasant: Central Michigan University Press, 1984), pp. 89–90; Peter Messent and Steve Courtney, eds., The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell: A Chaplain’s Story (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 206.

  13. Bollet, Civil War Medicine, pp. 337–52.

  14. Michael A. Palmer, Lee Moves North: Robert E. Lee on the Offensive (New York: John Wiley, 1998), p. 25; Mary B. Mitchell, “A Woman’s Recollections of Antietam,” in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence C. Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: Century, 1884–1888), vol. 2, pp. 687–88.

  15. Thomas B. Buell, The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997), p. 115; Bernard Potter, “All about the Beef,” London Review of Books, July 14, 2011, p. 31.

  16. Timothy B. Smith, Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg (New York: Savas Beatie, 2006), p. 361. Stephens belonged to General William H. Loring’s division.

  17. Prokopowicz, All for the Regiment, p. 161; Eric T. Dean Jr., Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 52; Noah Andre Trudeau, Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May–June 1864 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), p. 33.

  18. Camm, “Diary of Colonel William Camm,” p. 885; C. W. Kepler, History of the Three Months’ and Three Years’ Service (Cleveland, OH: Leader Printing, 1886), p. 287.

  19. Lee Kennett, Marching through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians during Sherman’s Campaign (New York: Harper, 1996), p. 153; Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–1865 (Spring-field, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1968), p. 10; Jerry Thompson, ed., From Desert to Bayou: The Civil War Journal of Morgan Wolfe Merrick (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1991), pp. 30–31.

  20. Emil Rosenblatt and Ruth Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), p. 227; Henrietta Stratton Jaquette, ed., South after Gettysburg: Letters of Cornelia Hancock from the Army of the Potomac, 1863–1865 (1937, repr. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1971), pp. 114–15.

  21. Mills Lane, ed., “Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve about Me; If I Get Killed I’ll Only Be Dead”; Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah, GA: Beehive, 1977), p. 215; Robert Hunt Rhodes, ed., All for the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 125; Messent and Courtney, Civil War Letters, p. 79.

  22. Susan Leigh Blackford, Letters from Lee’s Army (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), p. 220. Guy R. Everson and Edward W. Simpson Jr., eds., “Far, Far from Home”: The Wartime Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson, Third South Carolina Volunteers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 163.

  23. Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, p. 90; John William DeForest, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867, repr. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1969), p. 276.

  24. Gary W. Gallagher, Lee and His Army in Confederate History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 29; John David Smith and William Cooper Jr., eds., A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky: The Diary of Frances Peter (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), p. 30; Joseph L. Harsh, Taken at the Flood: Robert E. Lee and Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999), p. 171; Bauer, ed., Soldiering, p. 143.

  25. Allan Nevins, ed., A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, 1861–1865 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), p. 33; Stewart Brooks, Civil War Medicine (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966), p. 31.

  26. Mary E. Kellogg, ed., Army Life of an Illinois Soldier: Lette
rs and Diary of Charles W. Wills (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 232; Evans, Horsemen, p. 378.

  27. William A. Fletcher, Rebel Private, Front and Rear: Memoirs of a Confederate Soldier (1908, repr. New York: Meridian, 1997), pp. 8, 19; Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), “Near the Front,” p. 3.

  28. Donald S. Frazier, Blood & Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), p. 142; Sam R. Watkins, “Co. Aytch”: A Side Show of the Big Show (1881, repr. New York: Collier, 1962), p. 55.

  29. W. C. Ford, A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), vol. 1, pp. 171, 247; vol. 2, pp. 78–79; Otto L. Bettmann, The Good Old Days—They Were Terrible (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 3.

  30. S. Walkley, History of the Seventh Connecticut Volunteer Infantry (1905), p. 226; Everson and Simpson, Far from Home, p. 134; Evans, Sherman’s Horsemen, p. 189.

  31. Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” p. 114.

  32. Bollet, Civil War Medicine, pp. 272–78.

  33. Wood, Mud: A Military History, pp. 95–96. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War, pp. 6, 73–74, 139, 143–44; Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History (New York: Berkley Books, 2006), pp. 2, 38–39, 70–72.

  34. Fiammetta Rocco, The Miraculous Fever-Tree: Malaria and the Quest for a Cure That Changed the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), pp. 18, 35, 171, 174–75, 178–79, 206; Bollet, Civil War Medicine, p. 289. See also the recent comprehensive study, Andrew McIlwaine Bell, Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever, and the Course of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

  35. Kellogg, ed., Army Life of an Illinois Soldier, p. 275; A. D. Albert, History of the Forty-Fifth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry (Williamsport, PA: Grit Publishing, 1912), p. 530; W. Dwight, Life and Letters of Wilder Dwight (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868), p. 349; J. R. C. Ward, History of the One Hundred and Sixth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers (Philadelphia: McManus, 1906), p. 455; Alan S. Brown, ed., A Soldier’s Life: Civil War Experiences of Ben C. Johnson (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1962), pp. 48–49.

  36. Harry Barnard, Rutherford B. Hayes and His America (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), p. 216; DeForest, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, p. 276.

  37. Carol Reardon, Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 19; Everson and Simpson, Far from Home, pp. 61–62; Priest, Diary, pp. 109–10.

  38. Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” p. 38; J. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, at the Confederate States Capital (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866), vol. 2, p. 393; Blackford, Letters from Lee’s Army, p. 220.

  39. Boyd, “Civil War Diary,” p. 59; Bollet, Civil War Medicine, p. 308; Jean V. Berlin, ed., A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada W. Bacot, 1860–1863 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 104–5, 117; R. Gregory Laude, Madness, Malingering, and Malfeasance: The Transformation of Psychiatry and the Law in the Civil War Era (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2003), pp. 137–38; Steiner, Disease, p. 10.

  40. Francis Augustín O’Reilly, The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), p. 293; Kellogg, Army Life of an Illinois Soldier, p. 328.

  41. David S. Sparks, ed., Inside Lincoln’s Army: The Diary of Marsena Rudolph Patrick (New York: Yoseloff, 1964), e.g., pp. 22–23, 34, 125, 140, 154, 414, 423, 432, 453. On the therapeutic effects of electrical treatments, Andy Dougan, Raising the Dead: The Men Who Created Frankenstein (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008).

  42. Hal Bridges, Lee’s Maverick General: Daniel Harvey Hill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), pp. 15, 162, 227; Jack D. Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), pp. 100–101.

  43. Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, p. 23; Judith Lee Hallock, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), vol. 2, p. 271.

  44. Jeffry D. Wert, The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 34–35; Evans, Sherman’s Horsemen, p. 383.

  45. Evans, Sherman’s Horsemen, pp. 48, 325–26; Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, pp. xii, 76–77.

  46. Edward G. Longacre, Pickett: Leader of the Charge (Chambersburg, PA: White Mane Publishing, 1995), pp. 4, 18, 160–61.

  47. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (New York: Norton, 1984), pp. 214, 248; Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, pp. 239–40; William C. Davis, The Battle of New Market (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), p. 38; Steiner, Disease, p. 73.

  48. Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, p. 196; Frazier, Blood & Treasure, p. 149; Gallagher, Lee and His Army, p. 128; Joseph Lancaster Brent, Memoirs of the War between the States (New Orleans, LA: Fontana, 1940), p. 192.

  49. Clifford Dowdey, Robert E. Lee (London: Gollancz, 1970), p. 238; Regan, Disasters, p. 42; William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 170; Paul D. Casdorph, Lee and Jackson: Confederate Chieftains (New York: Paragon House, 1992), p. 283.

  50. Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 49–50; Davis, The Cause Lost, p. 167; Earl Schenck Miers, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary (New York: Sagamore, 1958), p. 92.

  51. Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee (New York: Norton, 1995), pp. 148, 184–85, 241, 277–78; John D. McKenzie, Uncertain Glory: Lee’s Generalship Re-examined (New York: Hippocrene, 1997), pp. 24–25, 155; John M. Taylor, Duty Faithfully Performed: Robert E. Lee and His Critics (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1999), p. 161; Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York: Random House, 2000), pp. 152, 165.

  52. Edward H. Bonekemper III, How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War (Fredericksburg, VA: Sergeant Kirkland’s Press, 1998), p. 139; Palmer, Lee Moves North, pp. 99, 116; Gallagher, Lee and His Army, p. 212.

  53. O.R., series I, vol. 5, “McClellan’s Report,” p. 26; Rocco, “Malaria,” pp. 176–78.

  54. F. D. Williams, The Wild Life of the Army: The Civil War Letters of James A. Garfield (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964), p. 325; T. C. Smith, The Life and Letters of James Abram Garfield (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925), vol. 1, p. 650; Robert Stiles, Four Years under Marse Robert (New York: Neale, 1903), p. 232.

  55. Joseph T. Durkin, ed., John Dooley, Confederate Soldier: His War Journal (1945, repr. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), p. 96. Blackford, Letters from Lee’s Army, p. 177; Rosenblatt and Rosenblatt, Hard Marching Every Day, pp. 105–6; Jaquette, ed., South after Gettysburg, p. 146.

  56. Rosenblatt and Rosenblatt, Hard Marching Every Day, p. 41; A. J. Long, Memoirs of Robert E. Lee (New York: Stoddart, 1887), p. 205; John H. Worsham, One of Jackson’s Foot Cavalry (New York: Neale, 1912), p. 243.

  57. Smith and Cooper, eds., A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky, p. 77; Prokopowicz, All for the Regiment, p. 77; Glenn LaFantasie, Gettysburg: Colonel William C. Oates and Lieutenant Frank A. Haskell (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 87; Craig L. Symonds, Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), p. 228; Watkins, “Co. Aytch,” p. 43.

  58. Abner Doubleday, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (1882, repr. New York: Da Capo, 1994), p. 73.

  59. Marli F. Weiner, ed., Heritage of Woe: The Civil War Diary of Grace Brown Elmore, 1861–1868 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 34.

  60. John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), pp. 22–24. Neff is excellent on Victorian commemoration conventions.

  61. Blackford, Letters from Lee’s Army, pp. 167–68; Lane, Dear Mother, p. 5
1.

  62. Berlin, A Confederate Nurse, p. 71.

  63. Louise Porter Daly, Alexander Cheves Haskell: The Portrait of a Man (Norwood, MA: Plimpton, 1934), p. 76; also, George Michael Neese, Three Years in the Confederate Horse Artillery (New York: Neale, 1911), p. 112.

  64. Camm, “Diary of Colonel William Camm,” p. 825.

  65. Jackson, So Mourns the Dove, p. 39.

  66. Castel, Tom Taylor’s Civil War, p. 19.

  CHAPTER THREE. CLOSE-ORDER COMBAT

  1. Paddy Griffith, Forward into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to the Near Future, rev. ed. (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1992), p. 78.

  2. Michael C. C. Adams, Echoes of War: A Thousand Years of Military History in Popular Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), pp. 161–62.

  3. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), series 1, vol. 4, chap. 7, pp. 228–30; Gary W. Gallagher, ed., The First Day at Gettysburg: Essays on Confederate and Union Leadership (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1992), p. 133.

  4. Richard Harwell, Lee (New York: Scribner, 1961), p. 340.

  5. Carol Reardon, Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 5.

  6. Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of Gen. Edward Porter Alexander (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 111.

  7. O.R. series 1, vol. 47, pt. 2, p. 910. Sherman may seem here at odds with his view of civilian suffering.

  8. Richard M. McMurry, John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), pp. 196, 50, 55, 139, 152, 176; J. B. Hood, Advance and Retreat (1880, repr. Secaucus, NJ: Blue and Grey Press, 1985), pp. 130–31.