Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

“Lee’s Miserables” by J. Tracy Power

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As the Civil War dragged on, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, like Lee himself, came to symbolize the South’s hopes and dreams. Ultimately, Lee and his army symbolized the Confederacy itself, which partially explains why so many want Confederate monuments removed.

The soldiers in that army were fiercely loyal to their commander, but they also referred to themselves as “Lee’s Miserables.” Army conditions continued to deteriorate in the last year of the war, with growing shortages of food rations, medicine, uniforms, and more. A constantly hungry army will not fight as well as one that has at least minimum sustenance. And food was a signal factor in the rising numbers of desertions.

In 1998, J. Tracy Power published Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox. It may be almost 25 years old, but the work is still up-to-date, and it is so largely because Power told a very different kind of story that most Civil War histories up to that point.

For many decades after the conflict, books focused on battles, military strategy, generals and leading political figures, and military memoirs. It wasn’t until the 1980s that many historians began paying attention to the daily life of soldiers in the war. And that included Power. He examined thousands of letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and other sources to create a picture of how the soldiers in Lee’s Army fared during the war’s last year, how they experienced various battles, and what drove an increasing number to desert. 

And, yes, it was the soldiers who called themselves “Lee’s Miserables,” a title immediately suggests Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, first published in 1862. 

Power organizes his account by the battles, beginning with the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in May, 1864. That’s followed by Cold Harbor, Shenandoah Valley, the siege of Petersburg (with the famous explosion created by Union miners), the Richmond front, a number of smaller battles, and finally Appomattox. He allows the soldiers to describe their experiences, how they understood battle outcomes, and the growing toll of shortages.

When Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865, it was the soldiers themselves who experienced the first and most immediate psychological blow. They had been considered, and likely considered themselves, the last best hope for the Confederacy, and now it was all at an end.

J. Tracy Power

Power is an associate professor of history at Newberry College in Columbia, South Carolina, and director of the Newberry College Archives. He received his B.A. degree from Emory University and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of South Carolina. He taught history at several colleges and served as a historian in the State Historic Preservation Office of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. He’s a past president of the South Carolina Historical Association and has received a number of awards for his academic teaching and his publications. In addition to Lee’s Miserables, he’s also published Stonewall Jackson: Hero of the Confederacy and served as co-editor of The Leverett Letters: Correspondence of a South Carolina Family 1851-1868. He’s lectured and written widely on the Civil War and South Carolina’s history from the American Revolution to the Civil Rights Movement.

Lee’s Miserables is history from the ground up. The men who were the soldiers in the Civil War’s most famous army tell their story and their stories of victory, defeat, daily life, and eventually surrender.

Top photograph: Three members of the 4th Georgia Infantry Regiment in the Army of Northern Virginia: Capt. Eugene Hawkins, Col. William Willis, and Capt. Howard Tinsley.

“The Story of Camp Douglas” by David Keller

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One Civil War prison has tended to receive most of the attention from historians, and with some justification. Andersonville in Georgia was a POW camp that housed up to 45,000 Union soldiers, and nearly 13,000 died from disease, overcrowding, or exposure. After the war, its commandant, Austrian-born Captain Henry Wirz, was arrested, charged, tried by a military tribunal, and hanged.

I’d heard of the POW camp in Elmira, New York, which imprisoned Confederates referred to as “Hellmira.” In 2020 Civil War historian Derek Maxfield published Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp—Elmira, NY. Almost 3,000 prisoners died at Elmira. And I’d heard of the prison at Alton, Illinois, which housed up to 1,900 Confederate prisoners at any given time and at which some 1,500 died. If you add the totals for all prisons, more Confederates died in Union prisons than Union soldiers in Confederate prisons. But the numbers can be deceiving; the totals on both sides were likely higher.)

But a prison camp in Chicago, which started life as an army base near the present campus of the University of Chicago, holds the dubious honor of being the Union prison where more Confederates died than any other. Officially, about 4,400 Confederate prisoners died at Camp Douglas, the highest number of deaths of any Union POW camp.  And the number is likely higher because of poor recordkeeping and the destruction of records in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

With its dismantling after the war and development that came later, the prison almost disappeared from popular history. But David Keller (1940-2022), who spent his working career as a banker, had a passion for Camp Douglas. He founded the Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation in 2010, served as a docent at the Chicago History Museum, and was a popular speaker on the prison camp and the Civil War. The foundation has conducted four archaeological excavations of the Camp Douglas site.

Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas; Library of Congress

In 2015, Keller published The Story of Camp Douglas: Chicago’s Forgotten Civil War Prison. The book includes Keller’s extensive studies and investigations, and it sheds considerable light on a long-forgotten story in Civil War and Chicago history.

Camp Douglas, named after Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas (the Douglas family owned land nearby and may have donated some for the army base), opened first as an army base. But by late 1862, prison space was needed for captured Confederate POWs, and the army base soon was accepting prisoners. Overcrowding happened almost immediately, and the site was in a swampy area near Lake Michigan – a disaster waiting to happen for poorly-clothed POWs.

David Keller

Keller provides both details and context. He explains Chicago’s role in the Civil War and how Camp Douglas was created as a reception and training center for Union troops. He then gives a short but fact-filled overview of how prisoners of war had been treated in America up until the time of the Civil War, pointing out that no one had much experience in housing and dealing with thousands of POWs. He details how the camp was selected as a prison and how the problems of prison life were exacerbated by the eventual ending of prisoner paroles and exchanges.

The author draws upon both what official records exist as well as the memoirs of several prisoners. He looks at prisoner health and medical care, deaths, the reasons for the conditions and deaths at the camp, and how Camp Douglas compared to other prison camps on both sides of the war. Keller also includes a chapter on the Conspiracy of 1864, a plot devised by Southern sympathizers to free the POWs.

The Story of Camp Douglas is an important contribution to a little-known chapter of Civil War and American history, as well as to the history of POW camps in the 19th century. It was Keller’s passion to shine a light on a chapter of Chicago and Civil War history that had long been forgotten. 

Related:

The True Story of the Andersonville Prison by James Madison Page.

Top illustration: A drawing of the general layout of Camp Douglas.

“From Western Virginia with Jackson to Spotsylvania with Lee” by Peter Luebke

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St. Joseph Tucker Randolph was 17 when the Civil War began in April 1861. He did what most young Virginians did and immediately signed up with a newly formed regiment. For a time, he participated in drills and preparations, but he also had time to continue working in the bookstore operated by his father.

The Randolphs had a storied heritage, one of Virginia’s first families with the Lees, Carters, and Tuckers. By the time of the Civil War, however, they had fallen on harder times, operating stores and other middle-class endeavors. Perhaps it was the influence of his father’s bookstore, or his own solid education, but Tucker, as he was called in the family, began keeping a diary from April 9 through about 1863. He also wrote letters to his parents and other family letters, and he showed himself a fairly astute observer of military operations, battles, officers, and his fellow soldiers.

Tucker’s regiment was eventually assigned to Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s army, operating in western Virginia. At one point, Tucker was wounded, but what looked initially serious turned out to be flesh wound. After Gettysburg, his unit was transferred to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and it’s here that his observational talents truly shone. 

He went through the Battle of the Wilderness, experiencing from the ground level Ulysses S. Grant’s military strategy of keep hitting at Lee’s army without respite. The Battle of the Wilderness was followed by Spotsylvania Courthouse, and Tucker’s account is still considered one of the best first-hand accounts of that battle.

Shortly after, however, at what is known as the Battle of Bethesda Church (a prelude to Cold Harbor), Tucker died in action. His death was confirmed, with no actual eyewitnesses (or ones who left any account), by his commanding officer, who wrote to Tucker’s parents that he had died during a desperate charge at the church. (The battle is also known as Totopotomoy Creek.)

Tukcer’s diary entries and letters have been published before, but a new edition has just been published, From Western Virginia with Jackson to Spotsylvania with Lee. Edited by Peter Luebke, it includes diary entries, letters, the letter announcing his death, and an account of Tucker’s military life written by another soldier and published in 1901.

The market for the Battle of Bethesda Church.

Luebke received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. He has deep experience in the field of public history and he worked as a historian with history highway market program. He’s also written or co-edited numerous articles and books, including an edition of The Story of a Thousand by Albert Tourgee. For this work on Tucker Randolph, Luebke has arranged the chapters chronologically and provided helpful context for each. He’s also included an extensive notes section, bibliography, and an index. And the book is full of illustrations, especially of the people cited in Tucker’s narrative.

From Western Virginia with Jackson tells a story of a young man who, like many young men of his generation, fought a war against fellow Americans. Tucker Randolph didn’t survive that war, but he left behind an articulate and insightful account of his experiences.

Top illustration: a drawing of the Battle of Bethesda Church.

“The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It”

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It’s last of the four volumes of Civil War, told in the words of people who lived it. The Civil War: The Final Year covers the year from March of 1864 through June of 1865, and it’s every bit as somber and thought-provoking as its three predecessors.

The volume is edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Fred C. Frey Professor and History Department Chair at Louisiana State University. The Final Year covers some of the final major battles of the war, including Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Atlanta, and Petersburg, as well as Ulysses S. Grant taking control of the Union army and William Sherman’s march across Georgia to the sea. 

Using letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, official orders and directives, newspaper reports, and much more, the book provides a broad telling of how civilians and soldiers on both sides lived that final year. You get the good and heroic, and you read the bad and the cowardly. You also see how newspapers on both sides, but especially those in the Union, helped fan the flames of hatred and desire for retribution.

You read the experiences of women and children in the path of Sherman’s army in Georgia, and how troops routinely ignored Sherman’s directive not to touch private homes (barns, stables, smokehouses, sheds, and henhouses were fair game). You read how a Louisiana woman deals with both Union troops and slaves who’ve freed themselves. You read letters full of hope and heartbreak. You see communications between generals and their subordinates. And you experience the presence of Abraham Lincoln, and what happens when the president is assassinated at Ford’s Theatre. 

Aaron Sheehan-Dean

You can also read what was already emerging as the postwar sentiment on both sides, from radical Republicans and unrepentant Southerners, including and sometimes especially the women. It’s the Civil War in all its glory and terror, and the Confederacy in its death throes.

At LSU, Sheehan-Dean teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, history of the New South, nd a graduate readings seminar on 19th century America. He received his B.A. degree from Northwestern University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia. In addition to the numerous articles he’s written on the Civil War and related topics, he’s also edited or co-authored several books on the war, including Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia and Concise Atlas of the U.S. Civil War. 

The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It is a fitting conclusion to the entire series. It’s the history of an event, a time, and the people who lived it whose effects we are still experiencing and living with today.

Related:

The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It

The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It

The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Top photograph: the McClean House in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, where Lee and Grant met to discuss surrender terms. 

“The True Story of Andersonville Prison” by James Madison Page

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Andersonville is a name that conjures up a dark history. It was a prison camp for Union soldiers, placed in the Georgia countryside about 100 miles south of Atlanta. It was operated for slightly more than a ear, from 1864 to 1865. Some 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned there; 13,000 of them died. It’s now operated as a historical site by the U.S. National Park Service. 

For comparison, the prison at Elmira, New York operated by the Union at roughly the same time, housed 12,000 Confederate prisoners, of which almost 3,000 died. The Union prison at Alton, Illinois housed Confederate soldiers, Union soldiers, and civilians; of the 11,000 prisoners, some 1,534 are known to have died. (Alton was noted for outbreaks of smallpox and measles.)

Andersonville remains the Civil War prison with the worst, and largely well-deserved reputation. It’s also known for one other event – its commandant, the Swiss born Major Henry Wirz, was executed after the war for the crimes he allegedly committed at the prison. The immediate post-war period was a time of outrage and demands for retribution, and what had happened at Andersonville was exhibit No. 1.

In the years after the war, a number of its soldier-inmates wrote memoirs of their wartime experiences and especially Andersonville. James Madison Page, a Pennsylvania-born man who had moved to Michigan and enlisted with a regiment there, and he’d been captured after a battle in 1863. He and his fellow prisoners were moved around, but eventually they found themselves sent to Andersonville. Every move raised the hope of a prisoner exchange, which happened only very late in the war.

Major Henry Wirz

In 1908, Page published his own memoir, setting in motion a controversy that still exists after more than a century. In The True Story of Andersonville Prison: A Defense of Major Henry Wirz, Page said that many of the witnesses at Wirz’s trial had lied; that, contrary to testimony, Wirz had never shot prisoners; that Wirz had intervened many times on the prisoners’ behalf and to their benefit; and that the prisoners received the same food ration as the soldiers guarding the prison.

Page went further. He saw the true villain as being Edward Stanton, the U.S. Secretary of War. It was Stanton, Page maintained, who refused to allow prisoner exchanges, resulting in overcrowded soldier prisons. Stanton defended his decision at the time by saying the Confederates would get well-fed soldiers while the Union would get emaciated and sick men. Page also pointed to the Union blockade of Southern ports, which did hurt the Confederacy in many ways, including the blocking of food and medicine, but that also applied to the Confederacy’s prisoners.

At least some of what Page reported turned out to be true, especially about the conduct of Henry Wirz. The major was away from the camp recuperating from an old battle wound (received at the Battle of Seven Pines in 1862) during the entire month of August, 1864, which was the period alleged to be when he personally had shot prisoners. 

James Madison Page

During Wirz’s trial in 1865, Page had been called as a witness but was not called to testify; he claimed it was because the military tribunal didn’t want to hear anything that contradicted what they had already pre-determined.  

Reading The True Story of Andersonville Prison today is eye-opening. Page never denies the harsh conditions with regard to food and medical assistance. He reports the deaths of friends. But he draws a picture of Wirz that is markedly different from the “devil incarnate” depicted in Union newspapers. From Page’s perspective, it was a very bad situation made worse by Stanton’s refusal to exchange prisoners, guaranteeing overcrowded conditions.

Page’s account isn’t a whitewash of Andersonville; it was a horrible chapter in Civil War and American history, and Page doesn’t dispute that. But he does call attention to exaggerations, and he especially defends the conduct of the man who came to personify the prison and paid with his life for it.

Top photograph: A scene of Andersonville Prison.

“The Civil War: The Third Year Told by the People Who Lived It”

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The year 1863 was likely the critical one in the Civil War, largely because of two battles. Both were fought about the same time, in July. Gettysburg happened over three days, while Vicksburg had been considerably longer and far more complex, with Grierson’s Raid, the Battles of Jackson and Port Gobson, and the long siege that saw town citizens hiding in caves from the shelling and subsisting on whatever food sources might be available.

But the year saw far more than only two battles. The Emancipation Proclamation went into full effect; former slaves were forming into Union regiments; the Union instituted a conscription act, which resulted in days of draft riots in New York City; Knoxville was occupied by Union forces; the Confederates experienced a great victory at Chancellorsville; and more.

It is one thing to read the accounts of battles, new military weapons, the privations brought by blockades. It is quite another to read the personal accounts of the people who lived this era. That’s what this Library of America series on the Civil War does (four volumes in all), and the third volume, The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, is just as good as its two predecessors. 

Edited by Arizona State University professor Brooks Simpson, the work makes the war personal in a way that history books usually can’t. You read the letters of Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Regiment (the first all-Black regiment) and who died with so many of his men in the assault on Battery Wagner outside Charleston. You read the accounts left by Kate Stone, a young Louisiana woman as slaves and Union troops overran her family’s plantation. You read about inflation and food riots in Southern cities. You read the letters home written by soldiers who didn’t know whether or not they would survive the coming battle. 

And you read the correspondence between commanding generals and their presidents, and the letters that William Sherman and Ulysses Grant wrote home. One of the most moving letters was written by Grant to Sherman, explaining that Lincoln had put him in charge of the Union armies and what Grant owed to his commanding generals like Sherman. You learn that anti-war northern Democrats long agitated against Lincoln and the war, to the point where a former Ohio congressman was arrested for treason, tried, convicted, and then expelled to the South. 

Brooks Simpson

This was never just a story about battles.

Simpson (born 1957) is a history professor at Arizona State. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s written or co-written numerous books about the Civil War and related areas, including accounts of emancipation, Ulysses Grant, Lincoln, the collapse of the Confederacy, the eastern theater, Reconstruction, and an illustrated history of the war.

The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It makes the war personal and immediate. You experience the full scope of people’s responses and experiences – the fear, anger, horror, grief, and, sometimes, even hope.

Top photograph: Some of the caves that Vicksburg residents lived in during the siege by Union forces.