Civil War

A History Lesson about Gettysburg, and More

June 22, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading some of the books in the battle series published by Emerging Civil War. So far, I’ve read about Shiloh (1862), Gettysburg (1863), and the Battle of the Wilderness (1864). It was while reading this third one that the author mentioned something as almost an offhand comment that threw me – and upended something I believed for 50 years.

The book was Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-7, 1864 by Chris Mackowski, but the comment was about Gettysburg. At the time of the battle in 1863, he said, “No one recognized Gettysburg as anything other than a setback, and certainly no one looked at it as the ‘High Water Mark of the Confederacy.’”

John and Elizabeth Bachelder at Gettysburg battlefield in 1888.

How it gained that reputation was due to a marketing-savvy photographer, lithographer, and Gettysburg historian named John Badger Bachelder, who was a tireless promoter of the Gettysburg Battlefield and worked to promote the site as a tourist destination.

In other words, the whole idea of Gettysburg as the turning point in the Civil War came from a promoter for the battlefield, decades after the battle was fought.

I can remember from my primary (and college) education how the Battle of Gettysburg was described – the turning point in the Civil War, the high-water mark of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and the beginning of the end of the Confederacy. And this wasn’t something that was taught and understood half a century ago, and we’ve all gotten a lot wiser since then. No, the belief still has considerable legs. See, for example, how the history site Battlefields.org describes it in the first sentence. The Wikipedia entry for the battle notes it that way as well, but includes a note about “turning points” – that there is widespread disagreement among historians. In fact, historians now point to 13 or 14 turning points in the Civil War, some of them being Confederate victories. Go figure.

Gettysburg was an important battle, to be sure. Coupled with the fall of Vicksburg at almost exactly the same time, it portended a change in the Union’s fortunes. But the war continued for almost two more years, and it still wasn’t finished until Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865 and General William Johnston surrendered two weeks later in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The ”Gettysburg as turning point” story is a reminded that we should never automatically use one event as the critical one in a war, or (even worse) in a nation’s history. Our Constitution, for example, wasn’t invented from whole cloth in a room in Philadelphia one summer, but instead developed through the 1760s, 1770s, the American Revolution, and the 1780s. Elements of our Constitution can be traced back to the Magna Carta and the Roman Republic (especially the writings of Cicero). We have the First Amendment largely thanks to John Milton.

History turns out to be more complicated than we realize, and certainly more complicated than battlefield promoters would have us believe.

Top illustration: Battle of Gettysburg by Thure de Thulstrap.

The Mystery Man in the Family Bible

June 15, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

It’s a two-line reference in the family Bible, first owned by my great-grandfather. The family records section in Bibles in the 19^th century was generally inserted between the Old and New Testaments, and that’s where our family recordings were. All of the entries were in the same hand, the early ones in the same ink, suggesting they were written down at the same time. A friend in book conservation judged the Bible to have been published in the 1870s.

My great-grandfather Samuel Young was born in in 1845, 1846, or 1848 – the handwriting is not clear. Other records, like those found in online genealogy sites, have 1845 and 1846. The handwriting is clear for the birth date of his wife and my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery. That date is 1844. The same handwriting continues after her death in 1887, which tells me it was my great-grandfather making all the entries (and his death in 1920 is not recorded).

The records are filled with Youngs – sisters, brothers, parents, and children. They begin with the birth of Samuel’s father Franklin, in 1802 in Savannah, Georgia. But there is one entry which always mystified my grandmother, my father, and other relatives, that of a Jarvis Seale. The best guess was my father’s – perhaps a distant cousin who was also a good friend? He was the only non-Young noted in the family records. But who was he?

The advent of online genealogy sites has been helpful – but not completely helpful. I tracked down Jarvis Seale and discovered he was the husband of Samuel’s oldest sister Martha. Ancestry.com says they had only one child; Family Search notes six children. Family Search turns out to be more accurate. Their oldest child, Littleton, was close in age to my great-grandfather Samuel, and I suspect they were more friends than uncle and nephew.

Still, it begs the question of why only the one in-law added to the record? Others could have easily been included; Samuel came from a relatively large family.

Jarvis died when he was 36 in 1862, and it’s the date that might be the first clue – April 6, 1862, the first day of the two-day Battle of Shiloh. When we think of the Civil War, we think of the war in the east – Robert E. Lee, Virginia, or perhaps Sherman’s march through Georgia to the sea. Shiloh, in Tennessee near the Mississippi border, was the first major battle of the entire war, engaging thousands of soldiers on both sides. And the numbers of deaths, casualties, and missing staggered people in both the North and the South. To give some idea of the impact, the North ultimately prevailed and won the battle – and newspapers all over the North, horrified at the carnage, called for the removal of the Union generals, who included both Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman.

Jarvis has one additional mystery attached to him. The genealogy sites claim he is buried in Red River County, Texas, on the Oklahoma border. There’s even a picture of a memorial stone. But I suspect that’s exactly what it is – a memorial and not a grave. The Confederate dead at Shiloh were buried by Union forces in nine mass graves, the location of three of which are still unknown. It is much more likely that Jarvis is buried in one of those mass graves, as there would have been no reason to move his body to a cemetery in Texas. Jarvis’s oldest daughter, Margaret, was 11 at the time of her father’s death, and she herself died in 1937. She was buried in Red River County, Texas. I suspect, and it’s only a suspicion, that she was the one who had the memorial stone for her father placed in the Red River Cemetery. The family wouldn’t know where at Shiloh he would have been buried, and she might have wanted to make sure he had a stone to be remembered by.

I think, too, of Martha, Jarvis’s wife. She was living in Pike County, Mississippi, near Brookhaven (the county was later divided and renamed) with six children, the oldest of which was 13 in 1862. She never remarried. She died in 1884 and was buried in Mississippi. I wonder at her devastation at the news of her husband’s death, how it affected the Seale and Young families, and what my great-grandfather himself experienced. Samuel and Octavia had 10 children, eight of whom survived infancy. One of their daughters was named Martha (Martha was also the name of Octavia’s mother).

I wonder, too, about my great-grandfather. One brother had died in 1860; another (and the oldest) in 1863 in Texas. Samuel was the last living son. His father died in 1870, when Samuel was 24 or 25. I think about him becoming the family patriarch at 25 years old, with several sisters and their children and his own small but growing family to care for. And I think about his own service in the Civil War, serving as a messenger boy, and about what he must have thought about his brother-in-law being buried in a mass grave in southern Tennessee.

And I understand why the name of Jarvis Seale was included in the Young family Bible.

One of the mass graves at Shiloh for Confederate soldiers (National Park Service)

Top illustration: Engraving Of Grant’s charge at Shiloh by Felix Octavius Carr Darley (1822-1888).

“The Real Horse Soldiers” by Timothy Smith

April 13, 2022 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

From April 17 to May 2 of 1863, a group of some 1,700 Union cavalry traveled from LaGrange Tennessee to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In less than three weeks, they cut a swath through central Mississippi surprising Confederate forces, Mississippi’s governor, and a number of cities and small towns along the way. Their goal: disrupt Confederate supply lines and draw attention from General Grant’s crossing of the Mississippi River right below Vicksburg.

The cavalry, under the command of Colonel Benjamin Grierson of Jacksonville, Illinois (and a music teacher in civilian life), were wildly successful. Grierson’s Raid, as it became known, was celebrated in the North and even grudgingly admired in the South. It had pulled off what few thought possible.

One might think that such an event would have been the subject of numerous books. For whatever reasons, possibly including a bias toward the eastern battle front in the Civil War, few book-length accounts are to be found. Dee Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published Grierson’s Raid in 1954. It was not well received by critics, and its reputation has not improved with time. Brown often made fast and loose with his account, inventing conversations and scenes out of whole cloth. Even a non-historian like myself can read it today and see where Brown fudged, or invented, his facts.

In 1956, a writer named Harold Sinclair published a novel about the raid, The Horse Soldiers, embellishing history even more. The novel because the basis for the 1959 movie of the same name, starring John Wayne and William Holden. The movie moved the story even farther away from the historical record.

In 2018, Timothy Smith, a professor at the University of Tennessee – Martin, published The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi. Proving that history books do not have to be dry and dull, Smith wrote a historically accurate account that tells the story in an engaging and fascinating way. Having read both the account by Brown and this account by Smith, the historian’s book is far superior and loses nothing in the telling.

Sixty-four-years after Dee Brown’s book, Smith had more sources to draw upon, but he used many of the same sources used by the popular writer. His account provides far more context than Brown’s, especially about Grierson’s background, the politics that was ongoing among the Union army leaders, and the importance of the raid to Grant’s ultimately successful attack on Vicksburg.

Reading about Grierson’s Raid is also personally intriguing. I had ancestors who died at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in 1862, and other relatives who were living in the Brookhaven, Mississippi, area at the time of the raid. They experienced first-hand what I know only as history, and it expands my understand of my family’s life during the Civil War.

Smith has published numerous books about the Civil War, including several on the Battle of Shiloh, the war in Tennessee and Mississippi, and the siege of Vicksburg. He’s appeared on the History Channel and C-Span and spoken widely about the Civil War. A former park ranger for the National Park Service at Shiloh Battlefield, he is currently a professor of history and philosophy at the University of Tennessee – Martin.

The Real Horse Soldiers is a fine book. Smith not only tells a thrilling story; he also tells a historically accurate story.

Grierson’s Raid and “The Horse Soldiers”

April 6, 2022 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

After I started elementary school, I became the movie partner of my mother. My father rarely went to the movies; my mother had been starstruck since she was a child. During the summer months, and on weekends during the school year, I accompanied her to one of the big theaters in downtown New Orleans to watch the latest movie she was interested in. We started with the Disney films – my earliest remembered movie is Bambi, the 1942 film which I would have seen via re-release in 1956 or 1957.

My most vivid memory was going to the Saenger Theatre on Canal Street to see The Last Voyage, starring Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. Released in 1959, it was a tension-filled story about a passenger liner sinking in the Pacific, with rescue boats too far away to reach it before it sank. I cried through most of the movie. My mother felt so bad for taking me to see what was an adult-themed movie that, when it ended, she took me across Canal Street to see Some Like It Hotat the Joy Theatre. It was certainly funny, but it was even more adult-themed than The Last Voyage.

That same year, she took me to see The Horse Soldiers, a Civil War epic starring John Wayne and William Holden. (She liked John Wayne, but William Holden was one of her three favorite actors, with Robert Stack and Clark Gable rounding out the list.) The movie was based upon a 1956 historical novel of the same name by Harold Sinclair. The book itself was based upon a true story generally referred to as “Grierson’s Raid.”

From April 17 to May 2 of 1863, Colonel Benjamin Grierson (a pre-war music teacher in Illinois who happened to hate horses) led a brigade of three cavalry regiments from LaGrange, Tennessee to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, slicing right down through the state of Mississippi. Grierson’s Rad was intended by Gen. Ulysses Grant to be both a diversionary campaign and an effort to disrupt Confederate supply lines leading up to the siege of Vicksburg.

The raid was an unqualified Union success and proved critical to Grant’s ultimate victory at Vicksburg (William Tecumseh Sherman, who rarely said anything complimentary or even kind about other Civil War efforts, called the Grierson campaign “the most brilliant of the war.” Down through the state of Mississippi, train depots were burned (sometimes igniting nearby homes and businesses), railroad tracks were torn up, and stories of food, munitions, and clothing meant for Vicksburg were destroyed.

In 1954, Dee Brown, who years later would win the Pulitzer Prize for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published Grierson’s Raid, a historical account of the campaign. Later historians have offered unflattering critiques of the book; Brown does have a tendency to occasionally invent dialogue which, while based on letters and memoirs, was closer to imagined than real. But his day-to-day account provides the sweep of the raid, the people and towns involved, how it was both resisted and (sometimes) welcomed, how the brigade “lived off the land,” and its rather unqualified success. It does provide the narrative sweep of the story, even if even amateurs like myself can easily spot what clearly Brown had to invent.

A more historical account of the campaign can be found in the 2018 book by Timothy Smith, entitled The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Raid Through Mississippi, published in 2018 (more on that book next week).

It’s strange that this campaign, so critical to the Union victory at Vicksburg, one of the two turning points of the Civil War in 1863 (the other being Gettysburg), is rarely mentioned in American or Civil War history classes, at least in pre-college education. Perhaps the paucity of solid historical accounts is one reason.

But there are historical records. Brown cites five primary sources he used for his 1954 book: Grierson’s manuscript autobiography and papers in the Illinois State Historical Library; Grierson’s privately printed Record of Services Rendered the Government; the journals of Stephen Alfred Forbes and his family letters; Griersons Raids, an account published by Richard Surby, a sergeant who took part in the raid; and the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.

The 1959 movie Horse Soldiers changed names, invented scenes that never happened, and added a romantic interest with the Southern plantation owner Hannah Hunter who deliberately eavesdrops on campaign discussions and is taken along for the raid. The movie was fairly popular at the time but never broke even; the two top stops were each paid $750,000.

What neither my mother nor I knew at the time was that Grierson’s Raid was part of our family history, with the Youngs’ home being in the Brookhaven, Mississippi area at the time. The raiders discovered pocket allegiance to the Union among some Brookhaven residents; the town had been established by a New Yorker and named for a town in that state. And when the burning of the train deport threatened to spread to the town itself, Grierson ordered his troops to help the town’s citizens fight the fire. My the 61-year-old great-great-grandfather would have likely been there. His youngest son and my great-grandfather would have been 16 at the time and might have been there or might have already enlisted.

“Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier” by Louis Leon

March 9, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

In 1861, Louis Leon was 19, a clerk in a dry goods store in Charlotte, North Carolina. He joined the Charlotte Grays, Company C, First North Carolina Regiment to fight for the South. His brother Jacob joined up at the same time. Louis was a private, and he would remain a private through the duration of the Civil War.

Fifty-two years later, now an old man, Louis decided that if generals and other officers could publish their diaries about the civil War, he could, too. In 1913, his war-time diary was published as Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier.

Rather than grand strategy and the description of great battles, Leon’s diary focused on what the vast majority of soldiers were focused upon during the war: food, marching back and forth, action during battles, the discomfort of riding a troop train, and kindnesses by local citizens (especially young ladies). As his words indicate, much of the war was tedium – waiting, marching forth only to be called back, chores around camp.

Yet Leon was in major battles, including Gettysburg (July, 1863) and the Wilderness (May, 1864). The Wilderness was the first major effort by the newly appointed general-in-chief, Ulysses S. Grant, to take the Confederate capital at Richmond. It didn’t succeed but neither side could really claim victory. For Leon, however, the battle had a major impact: along with hundreds of others, he was taken prisoner and eventually sent to a prison in the North. His accounts of prison life are terse and sometimes funny; it doesn’t appear that he unduly suffered, like many other prisoners of both sides did at different prisons and prison camps.

Leon, being Jewish, makes note of Jewish holidays like the Day of Atonement and the occasional anti-Semitic comment, which he did not seem to take personally. His fellow soldiers didn’t seem to care about his religion or background, if he was ready and willing to fight. He was able to get letters to his parents in New York, usually through the help of a friendly Union picket. (Leon offers no explanation as to why his parents were in New York while he and his brother fought for the South, but it does make one realize how the Civile War often split families.) And he speaks of Robert E. Lee is almost saintly terms; the general was revered by his soldiers.

Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier is the Civil War as seen from the bottom. Leon was a soldier who followed his orders, no matter how non-sensical. He maintained his sense of humor and his sense of stoicism, reporting the death of friends in short, factual statements. The book is an articulate look into the daily life of the soldier during the Civil War.

Top illustration: Battle of the Wilderness by Kurz and Allen, via Wikipedia.

“The Confederate Surrender at Greensboro” by Robert Dunkerly

March 2, 2022 By Glynn Young 5 Comments

I’m trying to learn what kind of experience my great-grandfather, Samuel Young, went through in the Civil War, and so I read a book which might, or might not, reflect that experience.

My great-grandfather, according to the story handed down in the family, enlisted in a Mississippi unit about 1863. I’ve found a record for an S.F. Young (right initials) in E Company, 2^nd Mississippi Cavalry. The problem is that the company was formed in a county in northeastern Mississippi, near Tupelo. My grandfather was from Pike County in southwestern Mississippi, near the border with Louisiana. The 2^nd Mississippi Cavalry became part of a corps under Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor, which surrendered in Alabama on May 4, 1865 (nearly a month after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox).

The family story put my great-grandfather farther east, with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia or Gen. Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, which surrendered two weeks after Lee at Greensboro, North Carolina. The story says that Samuel, employed as a messenger boy because of his age (18 at the end of the war), had to make his way home to Mississippi mostly on foot. When he finally arrived home, some months after the end of the war, he found his family gone. They’d moved to eastern Texas to escape Federal control (in case you might wonder, they were small farmers who owned no slaves, at least according to census records). Samuel trekked across Louisiana to Texas, where he found them in the late fall of 1865.

We know what happened afterward. Samuel married a local Mississippi girl, they had seven surviving children (the youngest of whom was my grandfather), and he died in 1920. He’s buried in a small town near Alexandria, La. He was also the youngest in his own family, and the only one of three brothers who survived the Civil War.

I was familiar with Lee’s surrender; most Americans likely think it was the event that ended the war. But Johnston’s army was still in the field in North Carolina, with Gen. William Sherman’s army after him. I didn’t know much on Johnston’s surrender two weeks after Lee’s, until I happened across a book.

The Confederate Surrender at Greensboro by Robert Dunkerly, published in 2013, is an in-depth account of the last days of the Army of Tennessee. Dunkerly draws upon some 200 individual accounts, from soldiers, officers, and civilians, to tell an immediate and compelling story of the last days of the 40,000-man army.

Johnston’s movement up from South Carolina to Raleigh, the North Carolina state capital, and then to Greensboro happened to coincide with the Confederate government’s flight from Richmond to Danville, Virginia, and then to Greensboro. Jefferson Davis and his cabinet would continue south until their eventual capture at Irwinville, Georgia. Part of Dunkerly’s story of Johnston’s surrender is also the story of the last days of the Confederate government.

The final days were anything but calm. Rumors abounded among the soldiers about surrender, about Lee’s army, and about plans to continue the war. Stragglers, deserters, and eventually soldiers paroled from Lee’s army were making their way south and began to make contact with units of Johnston’s army. Confederate government stories of provisions were looted by soldiers and civilians alike. The economy was non-existent, social order had broken down, and people were doing what they could to defend themselves, their families, and their homes. Desertion was a growing problem; many soldiers were simply leaving to go home. Johnston might have lost up to a fourth of his army to desertion.

Imagine a society in which currency is worthless, banks have failed, necessities are scarce, and bands of soldiers, deserters, and former slaves are ravaging the countryside, looking for food (and sometimes plunder). Dunkerly tells this enthralling story, with the army at its heart.

Dunkerly is a historian, speaker, and author actively involved in historic preservation and research. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from St. Vincent College and his master’s degree in historic preservation from Middle Tennessee State University. He’s worked at nine historical sites and published some 11 books, including Redcoats on Cape Fear: The Revolutionary War in Southeastern North Carolina. He’s currently a park ranger at Richmond National Battlefield Park.

Whether my great-grandfather was part of Lee’s army or Johnston’s, he would have been making his way home through a society in which nothing was the same, nor would be again, civil order was in shanbles, and food was what you could shoot or forage. And thousands of former soldiers were in exactly the same situation. Somehow, Samuel Young made it.

Top photograph by Scott Umstattd via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Civil War

Footer

Meet the Man