Living Hell

by Michael C. C. Adams

  9. Paddy Griffith, “Packs Down—Charge! The Frontal Attack,” in Robert Cowley, ed., With My Face to the Enemy: Perspectives on the Civil War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), pp. 239–41; Stephen B. Oates, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 172, 175.

  10. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac, Based upon Personal Reminiscences of the Fifth Army Corps (1915, repr. New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 102; Lee Kennett, Marching through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians during Sherman’s Campaign (New York: Harper, 1996), pp. 151–52; Samuel G. French, Two Wars: An Autobiography of Gen. Samuel G. French, an Officer in the Armies of the United States and the Confederate States (Nashville, TN: Confederate Veteran, 1901), pp. 221–22.

  11. Raleigh E. Colston, “Address before the Ladies’ Memorial Association,” Southern Historical Society Papers 21 (1893): pp. 44–45; C. F. Boyd, “The Civil War Diary of C. F. Boyd,” Iowa Journal of History 50 (1952): pp. 75, 79.

  12. Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), pp. 69–70; Edward E. Leslie, The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 275; Lucien B. Crooker et al., The Story of the 55th Regiment Illinois Infantry in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (Clinton, MA: W. J. Coulter, 1887), p. 124; Timothy B. Smith, Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg (New York: Savas Beatie, 2006), p. 227; John Myers, “ ‘Dear and Mutch Loved One’—An Iowan’s Vicksburg Letters,” Annals of Iowa 43, no. 1 (Summer 1975): p. 53.

  13. William A. Fletcher, Rebel Private, Front and Rear: Memoirs of a Confederate Soldier (New York: Meridian, 1997), p. 28; Milo M. Quaife, ed., From the Cannon’s Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus S. Williams (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press and Detroit Historical Society, 1959), pp. 129–30; Richard Wheeler, Voices of the Civil War (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), p. 153; Noah Andre Trudeau, Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May–June 1864 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), p. 72.

  14. Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South (New York: Warner, 2005), p. 406; McKenzie, Glory, pp. 233–34; 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), p. 11; Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 308; Daniel E. Sutherland, Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861–1865 (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 64; Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), p. 211; O.R., vol. 10, pt. 1, p. 583; Richard A. Baumgartner, Buckeye Blood: Ohio at Gettysburg (Huntington, WV: Blue Acorn Press, 2003), pp. 9, 57.

  15. Alan T. Nolan, Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 80–81; Hal Bridges, Lee’s Maverick General: Daniel Harvey Hill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), p. 226; Henry Woodhead, ed., The Illustrated Atlas of the Civil War (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 1991), pp. 205, 132; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine, 1989), p. 582; Edward H. Bonekemper III, How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War (Fredericksburg, VA: Sergeant Kirkland’s Press, 1998), p. 158.

  16. 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. 127. There were many smoothbore wounds, particularly in the first years of the war. These did great damage to the body. Adam Nicolson, who has carefully studied arms and projectiles of the Napoleonic era, describes the career of a ball through the body as follows. As the ball penetrated the flesh and organs, a high-pressure shock wave developed, spreading out from the path of the bullet. A cavity formed behind the ball track, the flesh or muscle then snapping back into place, starting a pulsing repetition of collapse and re-expansion. This had the effect of a series of explosions within the tissue, like repeated blows of a fist. Finally, blood was drawn into the ruptured body areas, preventing proper cardiac circulation. The victim’s blood pressure dropped because of the internal hemorrhaging, and shock resulted, the combination often proving fatal. See Adam Nicolson, Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson’s Battle of Trafalgar (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), pp. 255–56.

  17. Brooks, Medicine, p. 75.

  18. Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr., ed., The Civil War Memoir of Philip Daingerfield Stephenson, D.D. (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995), p. 234; Mark De Wolfe Howe, Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1861–1864 (New York: Da Capo, 1969), pp. 13–24.

  19. Wilkeson, Recollections, pp. 202–3; 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. 124; Abner Doubleday, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (1882, repr. New York: Da Capo, 1994), p. 147; Gerald J. Prokopowicz, All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861–1862 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 131; Don E. Alberts, ed., Rebels on the Rio Grande: The Civil War Journal of A. B. Peticolas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), p. 86; Sneden, Storm, p. 128.

  20. James A. Mulligan, “The Siege of Lexington,” in Johnson and Buel, eds., Battles, vol. 1, pp. 307, 311; Sutherland, Seasons of War, p. 146, notes the urination in rifle barrels.

  21. We encountered the following soldiers on our virtual tour of the firing line: Corporal James Quick, 38th New York, shot at Fredericksburg, December 1862; Lieutenant William N. Taylor, aide to Union General Oliver Otis Howard, hit at Whippy Swamp Creek, South Carolina, February 1, 1865; Private Keils, 15th Alabama, mortally wounded on July 2 at Gettysburg, dying on the 3rd; Private George W. Walker, 148th Pennsylvania, whose artery was severed at Spotsylvania, 1864; also at Spotsylvania, an unidentified Federal officer blinded in both eyes.

  Their stories are in Ira M. Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 210; Richard Harwell and Philip N. Racine, eds., The Fiery Trial: A Union Officer’s Account of Sherman’s Last Campaigns (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), p. 210; Glenn LaFantasie, ed., Gettysburg: Colonel William C. Oates and Lieutenant Frank A. Haskell (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 100; Trudeau, Bloody Roads South, pp. 147, 174.

  22. Continuing along the firing line, we also met an unidentified Rebel shot at Belmont, Missouri, 1862, seen by Union surgeon John H. Brinton; an unidentified private, 48th Pennsylvania, shot in the knee at Fredericksburg, December 1862; Frank Hersey and Henry Stockwell, both New Hampshire soldiers from Newport; and an unidentified Union 12th Corps enlisted man observed lying with his brains oozing out, Chancellorsville, May 1863.

  For their stories, see John H. Brinton, Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, Civil War Surgeon, 1861–1865 (1914, repr. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 80; John Michael Priest, ed., Captain James Wren’s Civil War Diary (New York: Berkley, 1991), p. 122; Maris A. Vinovskis, ed., Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 43; David Herbert Donald, ed., Gone for a Soldier: The Civil War Memoirs of Private Alfred Bellard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), p. 214.

  23. Rufus R. Dawes, Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers (Marietta, OH: Alderman & Sons, 1890), p. 88; Terrence Winschel, “The Gettysburg Diary of Lieutenant William Peel,” Gettysburg Magazine, no. 9 (July 1993): p. 105.

  24. Fletcher, Rebel Private, Front and Rear, p. 55; Wheeler, Voices of the Civil War, p. 216; Ernest B. Furgurson, Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 230.

  25. J. G. D. Hamilton and Rebecca Cameron, eds., The Papers of Randolph Abbott Shotwell (Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, 19
29–31), vol. 1, pp. 193–95; H. F. Christy, “The ‘Reserves’ at Fredericksburg,” National Tribune, September 19, 1901; Priest, Wren’s Civil War Diary, p. 121; Joseph T. Durkin, ed., John Dooley, Confederate Soldier: His War Journal (1945, repr. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), p. 102.

  26. Joseph E. Crowell, The Young Volunteer: The Everyday Experiences of a Soldier Boy in the Civil War (Paterson, NJ: Joseph E. Crowell, 1906), pp. 130–31, 402, 372.

  27. Crowell, Young Volunteer, p. 421.

  28. Boyd, “Civil War Diary,” p. 81; Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, ed., The Civil War Memoir of Philip Daingerfield Stephenson, D.D. (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995), pp. 214–15.

  29. William Wheeler, Letters of William Wheeler of the Class of 1855, Yale College (Cambridge, MA: H. O. Houghton, 1875), pp. 409–11; Boyd, “Diary,” p. 80.

  30. John H. Worsham, One of Jackson’s Foot Cavalry (1912, repr. New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 112–13; Hess, Union Soldier in Battle, p. 28; Trudeau, Bloody Roads South, p. 66.

  31. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), pp. 61–62; John Gibbon, Personal Recollections of the Civil War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1928), pp. 83–84.

  32. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 330. Doubleday, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, p. 210.

  33. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 662; Nolan, Lee Considered, p. 85; John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), p. 157.

  34. Griffith, “Packs Down—Charge!,” p. 240.

  35. William C. Davis, The Battle of New Market (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), p. 112; Bridges, Lee’s Maverick General, p. 108.

  36. John D. Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press 1995), pp. 13–14, 44.

  37. John B. Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Scribner, 1903), pp. 89–92; Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, pp. 83, 40–41; Craig L. Symonds, Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), p. 93.

  38. Thomas B. Buell, The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997), pp. 120, 229, 303; Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson, AZ: Galen, 2002), p. xviii.

  39. Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, pp. 63–65; O.R., vol. 33, pp. 1095–96. Donald C. Pfanz, a Ewell biographer and editor of the general’s letters, defends him against charges of being incompetent and psychotic. Unfortunately, Ewell’s correspondence for critical periods in 1863, which might have proved helpful in the case, appears sporadic. Pfanz, Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Pfanz, ed., The Letters of General Richard S. Ewell, Stonewall Jackson’s Successor (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012).

  40. Hood, Advance and Retreat, pp. 59–61, 64; McMurry, John Bell Hood, p. 132; Symonds, Cleburne, p. 254.

  41. Bollet, Civil War Medicine, p. 354; Arthur Herman, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 163–64, 260; Russell Duncan, ed., Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Robert Gould Shaw (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 377.

  42. Herman Melville, White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War (1850, repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 178, 319; Alvah Folsom Hunter, A Year on a Monitor and the Destruction of Fort Sumter (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), p. 20.

  43. Philip Van Doren Stern, The Confederate Navy: A Pictorial History (New York: Da Capo, 1992), p. 180; Wheeler, Voices of the Civil War, p. 65.

  44. Melville, White-Jacket, p. 21; Stern, Confederate Navy, pp. 25, 83.

  45. Hunter, A Year on a Monitor, p. 53; Stern, Confederate Navy, p. 139.

  46. Stern, Confederate Navy, pp. 104, 219.

  47. Stern, Confederate Navy, pp. 205, 102; Edwin C. Bearss, Hardluck Ironclad: The Sinking and Salvage of the Cairo, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 99.

  48. James Tertius deKay, Monitor: The Story of the Legendary Civil War Ironclad and the Man Whose Invention Changed the Course of History (New York: Walker, 1997), pp. 162–63; Wheeler, Voices of the Civil War, pp. 67–69, 411.

  49. Melville, White-Jacket, pp. 72–73, 320.

  50. Melville, White-Jacket, p. 320.

  CHAPTER FOUR. CLEARING THE BATTLEFIELD

  1. Richard Slotkin, The Crater (New York: Atheneum, 1981), p. xiv.

  2. Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode with Stonewall (1940, repr. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1961), p. 173; John Keegan, Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (New York: Knopf, 1996), pp. 242–43; Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson, AZ: Galen, 2002), p. 7.

  3. Bollet, Civil War Medicine, p. 103; Robert Knox Sneden, Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey (New York: Free Press, 2000), p. 69.

  4. Sidney Lanier, Tiger-Lilies (1867, repr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 169; Sneden, Eye of the Storm, p. 138.

  5. Mark H. Dunkelman, “Key to a Mystery,” American History 32, no. 2 (May–June 1997): p. 18; Charles J. Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1868), pp. 146–47; George Templeton Strong, Diary of the Civil War, 1860–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 230; Walt Whitman, Memoranda during the War: Civil War Journals, 1863–1865 (1875, repr. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010), p. 6.

  6. Bollet, Civil War Medicine, pp. 3, 103.

  7. Samuel H. Hurst, Journal-History of the Seventy-Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry (Chillicothe, OH, 1866), pp. 72–73; Wilbur F. Crummer, With Grant at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg (1915, repr. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2008), pp. 69–70.

  8. 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. 36, pt. 3, pp. 600, 638–39, 666–67.

  9. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York: C. L. Webster, 1885), p. 425.

  10. Jonathan P. Stowe Diary, 15th Massachusetts, Antietam National Battlefield Park, quoted in Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), p. 231; Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), pp. 19–20.

  11. Report of the Proceedings of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee, Second Annual Meeting, November 13–14, 1867 (Cincinnati, OH: By the Society, 1868), p. 102; John N. Edwards, Shelby and His Men (Cincinnati, OH: Miami Printing Co., 1867), pp. 94–104, 125–27.

  12. R. L. Dabney, Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson (1865), quoted in Peter Svenson, Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 196; Wirt Armistead Cate, ed., Two Soldiers: The Campaign Diaries of Thomas J. Key, C.S.A., December 7, 1863–May 17, 1865 and Robert J. Campbell, U.S.A., January 1, 1864–July 21, 1864 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), p. 182; Albert Castel, Tom Taylor’s Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), p. 90.

  13. 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. 144; C. F. Boyd, “The Civil War Diary of C. F. Boyd,” Iowa Journal of History 50 (1952): p. 80.

  14. Milo M. Quaife, ed., From the Cannon’s Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus S. Williams (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press and Detroit Historical Society, 1959), p. 219.

  15. Sneden, Eye of the Storm, p. 72; 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), p. 10.

  16. Henry Wilburn Stuckenberg, I’m Surrounded by Methodists: Diary of John H. W. Stuckenberg (Gettysburg, PA: Thomas, 1995), pp. 83�
��84.

  17. Ira M. Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 8; Larry M. Logue, To Appomattox and Beyond: The Civil War Soldier in War and Peace (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), p. 69; W. W. Keen, “Surgical Reminiscences of the Civil War,” Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, series 3, vol. 27 (1905): pp. 95–114.

  18. Joseph E. Crowell, The Young Volunteer: The Everyday Experiences of a Soldier Boy in the Civil War (Paterson, NJ: Joseph E. Crowell, 1906), pp. 414, 417, 432.

  19. Timothy B. Smith, Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg (New York: Savas Beatie, 2006), p. 371.

  20. F. Llewellyn, “Limbs Made and Unmade by War,” America’s Civil War 8 (September 1995): p. 40.

  21. J. J. Chisolm, A Manual of Military Surgery for Use of the Surgeons in the Confederate Army, 3rd. ed. (1861, repr. Dayton, OH: Morningside, 1992), pp. 358–60.

  22. Bollet, Civil War Medicine, pp. 192, 153; Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Touchstone, 1995), p. 128; Allie Patricia Wall, “The Letters of Mary Boykin Chesnut,” Master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 1977, p. 24.

  23. Steven E. Woodworth, ed., The Loyal, True, and Brave: America’s Civil War Soldiers (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), p. 39; Whitman, Memoranda during the War, p. 5; Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), p. 83; Crowell, Young Volunteer, p. 150.

  24. James A. Mulligan, “The Siege of Lexington,” in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence C. Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: Century, 1884–1888), vol. 1, p. 311.

  25. S. Weir Mitchell, Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences (1872, repr. New York: Dover, 1965), p. 309; Jacquette, ed., South after Gettysburg, p. 85; Strong, Diary of the Civil War, p. 462.