Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Civil War

“The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles” by Michael Ballard

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If there is a state we most associate with the American Civil War, it is Virginia. Numerous battles occurred there; the federal and confederate armies faced each other for four years, most often in a stalemate; and the two enemy capitals ensured that Virginia was a major theater of the war. And it was in Virginia that Robert E. Lee ultimately surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. 

Some have argued that the United States really won the war farther west – the fall of New Orleans and Vicksburg, the battles around Nashville and Chattanooga, the capture of Atlanta in 1864, and Sherman’s March to the Sea. 

And then there was Mississippi, the second state (after South Carolina) to secede from the Union. The Civil War in Mississippi was more – far more – than Vicksburg. Historian Michael Ballard (1946-2016) tells the story in The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles (2011). The book is volume 5 of the Heritage of Mississippi published by the University Press of Mississippi for the Mississippi Historical Society and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Vicksburg (1863) may have been the most important battle in the state; its surrender solidified control of the Mississippi River by the United States and severed the Confederacy in half. But the northern part of the experienced numerous battles. The town of Holly Springs changed hands 57 times. The town of Oxford was burned. The state capital of Jackson fell twice to the federals; Grant took the city and then attacked Vicksburg from the east. Before he marched to the sea in Georgia, Sherman marched from Jackson to Meridian in similar fashion, destroying anything that might be of value to the Confederates. Major Benjamin Grierson led a three-week-long raid with 1,700 cavalry troops from the Tennessee line south, eventually arriving in federally held Baton Rouge in Louisiana. 

The destruction through the years of war was large-scale – plantations, factories, warehouses full of supplies, railroad deports and track, and whole towns in some cases. In his well-written and highly readable account, Ballard succinctly tells the story of all of what happened. 

Michael Ballard

During his lifetime, Ballard published numerous books about the Civil War, including A Long Shadow: Jefferson Davis and the Final Days of the Confederacy (1986); Landscapes of Battle: The Civil War (1988); Pemberton: The General Who Lost Vicksburg (1999); A Mississippi Rebel in the Army of Northern Virginia: The Memoirs of Private David Holt (1995); Grant at Vicksburg: The General and the Siege (2003); U.S. Grant: The Making of a General 1861-1863 (2005); and several others. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Mississippi State University, where he also worked as archivist and director of the Congressional and Political Collection. 

The Civil War in Mississippi is a fine history and a sobering one. By the end of Civil War, the state’s economy was in ruins, its towns and cities had experienced widespread destruction, thousands of its men had died on battlefields across the state and the South, and its social order was turned upside down. Recovery would be a long time coming. 

Top photograph: Artist’s rendering of the Battle of Corinth, Miss.; Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

“Ends of War” by Caroline Janney

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I have an image in my head, likely based on what I remember from American history in college, that when Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant agreed to surrender terms at Appomattox in April 1865, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia went home. Two weeks later, William Johnston surrendered to William Sherman at Greensboro, North Carolina, and Johnstone’s Army of Tennessee went home. And that was end of the Civil War.

Well, not quite.

As Lee’s army fled west from Richmond and then Petersburg, what had been about 60,000 men was losing strength. Some were captured, some took off for points west, and some disappeared into the woods and valleys. By the time Lee and Grant met, Lee’s army was likely between 30,000 and 40,000, and more men were leaving every day.

Grant’s purpose, to which he stuck ferociously through the negotiations and through the coming months, was to bring peace. Lee’s men could go home. They would be issued rations and paroles. A parole was good to obtain rations from Union provosts and to obtain transportation on ships and trains to go home. There would also be no reprisals for having served in Lee’s army. 

McLean House in Appomattox, where Lee surrendered to Grant

Many headed east first – to get to the ports where they could get passage to Mobile, New Orleans, and other ports. Others headed toward rail stations, though those were more problematic; many railroad tracks were not repaired from the war, and men would find themselves alternately riding and walking to the next station.  

But for many in the Confederate army, the war was not over. Some tried to reach Johnston’s army, which was Lee’s army was trying to do in his flight from Richmond. Others decided to try to Texas and the army of General Edmund Kirby Smith. Still others would become guerillas and continue to war effort – something Grant feared almost more than anything. The region of Virginia and North Caroline experienced upheaval, chaos, and disruption that would continue for weeks (see my review of Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar Jr.). 

It looked like peace and an easy reunification might prevail, until the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14 crystalized the desire for vengeance. It would be argued from the man in the street to the highest levels of government that Grant’s paroles of Lee’s men had limited application, and Lee, his officers, and many of his mean should be tried for treason. The wave demanding vengeance could only be stopped, and then incompletely, by Grant himself. 

In Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army After Appomattox, Caroline Janney tells a riveting story of the final days and weeks of Lee’s army, its officers, and its men, how their paroles came almost seen to be worthless before cooler heads, notably Grant’s, prevailed. No peace could be or would be drafted and signed; peace treaties were between sovereign nations, and the United States view the Confederacy as a region of rebellion. A peace treaty would have also hammered out what punitive terms there might be for the defeated nation, its leaders, and its military. In the place of a peace treaty stood only the terms of Lee’s surrender to grant, which were extended by Sherman to Johnston. 

Caroline Janney

But, as Janney makes clear, in those final, chaotic days of confusion, despair, and anger, the idea of what the South called “the Cause” became “the Lost Cause.” The South had not been defeated on the battlefield but by Northern industrial might, foreigners in the army, and the use of freed slaves as troops. Any evidence to the contrary was discounted and dismissed; the South believed its cause had been a righteous one.

Janney is the John Nau III Professor of the American Civil War and director of the John L. Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. She has worked as a historian for the National Park Service and taught at Purdue University. has also published Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (2008) and Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013). She received a B.A. Degree in government and a Ph.D. degree in history from the University of Virginia. 

She recently received the 2022 Gilder Lehman Lincoln Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Gettysburg College for Ends of War. The book was also a joint recipient of the Richard Barksdale Harwell Award of the Atlanta Civil War Roundtable for the best book on a Civil war subject published in the preceding ear. 

The awards are no surprise. The book is an extraordinarily well-researched effort, as demonstrated by the extensive notes and bibliography. Written in non-academic language, it’s difficult to put Ends of War down. She succeeds in making her case, and she’s changed our understanding of the end of the Civil War and how it affected the country for a century afterward.

“War and Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1861-1875” by Charles Mills

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During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the U.S. government’s Works Projects Administration undertook a number of efforts to help the unemployed retain their skills. While critics saw it as creating a huge army loyal to President Roosevelt, the WPA did employ some 8.5 million people in a wide variety of areas. 

One of those efforts was the Writers’ Project, which, among other projects, produced travel guides to cities and states across the United States. Writers also collected oral histories of still-living Americans who had experienced extraordinary events, like the Civil War.

War and Reconstruction in Mississippi 1861-1875 was one such work. It focused on the town of Holly Springs in Marshall County, in the northern part of the state. Holly Springs was noteworthy for a number of reasons, not least of which was that it had changed hands 57 times during the Civil War. Before the war, it had been a prosperous town in a planter- and slave-based economy. During the Reconstruction period, it was occupied by a federal garrison and experienced Republican political control. 

The WPA document assembled a history of the town and its founding, its experiences during the war as recounted by still living inhabitants, the role of Freedman’s Bureau during Reconstruction, and how the former Confederates eventually regained political control by stuffing the ballot box for the Democrats. 

The document was edited and republished by Charles Mills in 2010. While some 60 to 70 years intervened between the events and how people remembered them, it still remains a valuable resource for what people on all sides experienced during the war and what followed.

Charles Mills

Mills is also the author of Gold, Murder and Monsters in the Superstition Mountains, Legends of the Superstition Mountains, Death and Delusion in the Superstition Mountains, Treasure Legends of the Civil War, Love, Sex and Marriage in the Civil War, Civil War Civilian Life: Manassas, Virginia (Battle of Bull Run), and several other works on historical subjects. He is the producer and co-host of Virginia Time Travel, a TV program seen by two million viewers in northern Virginia, which is also where he lives (on land once owned by George Washington). 

Top photograph: The New York Herald of Nov. 7, 1862, describing the expected move of Gen. Grant’s army southward toward Holly Springs. 

How Research Fills the Gaps in a Family Story

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The idea has been in my head for years – a story about my great-grandfather. But I knew only a few facts about him, passed down by my father. Research has filled it in – a little bit.

Too young to enlist as a regular soldier, he’d been a messenger boy in the Civil War. He’d lost two brothers and a brother-in-law in the war, leaving him the youngest and surviving son. When the war ended in 1865, he had been “someplace east,” likely North Carolina rather than Appomattox. He had to walk home to southern Mississippi. When he arrived, he discovered his family was gone, having fled to Texas.

That was as much as I knew. When I finally decided to consider a story about him, I turned first to the family Bible, with its records of births, deaths, and marriages.  The records, written over a period of 50 years, were in the same hand – my great-grandfather’s. They proved more revealing that I’d realized.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

When a Book Won’t Let Go

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Two weeks after finishing it, and I’m still thinking about Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar Jr. (See my review last week.) 

When I read it, I expected to read about the final convulsive moments of the surrender of the Confederate armies and the immediate aftermath. And that’s the thumbnail description. But it’s about a lot more.

It’s the story of the civilians in north central North Carolina, roughly Raleigh to Greensboro, who found themselves in the path of two defeated armies and one victorious one.

It’s the story of the soldiers in those armies, who had to live with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One thing you don’t read in the general histories of the Civil War period in the rather startling increase in soldier suicides and commitments to insane asylums in the years and decades after the war.

It’s the story of some of the atrocities inflicted on the civilian and military population. In generally, Confederate soldiers were focused on finding food, shoes, and clothes, and they didn’t care where they found them. Confederate soldiers and civilians alike were often desperate for food, and together they were raiding government warehouses and supplies. 

The Union soldiers had food. What they were looking for was loot and revenge. There were too many reports of pillaging and looting, and more than a few of rape. Women and often children were brutalized. Houses were burned. It wasn’t only soldiers who developed PTSD. Some of the federal soldiers were disciplined and a few executed for their crimes (especially after the armies surrendered; that meant the civilians were no longer members of a foreign and hostile country).

My great-grandfather was somewhere in that convulsion. Even at war’s end, he was (chronologically) a boy. Too young to take up arms officially, he had enlisted and became a messenger boy for the Confederate army.

What I don’t know is what did he do to stay alive. Did he participate in the looting of government warehouses? Did he steal from civilians? Those questions will never be answered. What we do know is that he had to walk home to southern Mississippi – hundreds of miles across a landscape destroyed in many places and in complete social upheaval everywhere. 

When he finally reached home, he learned his family had fled to Texas. So, his trek continued across Louisiana and into east Texas, where he found them. He also discovered that he was the sole surviving son, the youngest child in the family. When his father died four years later, my great-grandfather became the head of the family, which included a widowed sister, two widowed sisters-in-law, and a number of nieces and nephews. And his only family, too – he had married in 1867, and he and his wife had a little boy. He had to take care of that extended family through the rigors of Reconstruction.

My great-grandfather was made of some stern stuff, and that book, Hearts Torn Asunder, helped me understand just how stern it was.

Top photo: My great-grandfather, Samuel Franklin Young, and my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young. 

“Hearts Torn Asunder” by Ernest Dollar Jr.

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It’s April 1865, the last month of the Civil War. Richmond has fallen. The Confederate cabinet is fleeing. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Lee’s soldiers are paroled and dispersed, most heading south (and on foot) into North Carolina and toward home in the rest of the former Confederacy. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army is chasing that of Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston, and the chase is ending near Raleigh and Greensboro. As Johnston meets with Sherman to discuss surrender terms, he learns that President Lincoln has been assassinated in Washington. 

The final convulsion of the war and the Confederacy is happening in central and north central North Carolina. And it its path are the people who live there, in cities and towns, and on farms, people who see both armies strip the countryside bare of food and provisions. One army’s soldiers experience sorrow and despair, while those of the other feel jubilation. Soldiers of both, after four long years of war, are experiencing what today we recognize as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. It isn’t called that then; it isn’t even recognized. 

But citizens and soldiers are experiencing its effects – and the effects of hunger. The hunger was at times so great that soldiers and civilians alike began attacking warehouses and trainloads of provisions meant for the Confederate army.

Horrors and atrocities happened on both sides. Rage, fed by deaths and maiming of friends and fellows and fueled by alcohol, could make otherwise kind men do terrible things. Civilians – men, women, and children, free and slave – bore the brunt of that rage. And it was rage coming from both Union and Confederate soldiers.

Ernest Dollar Jr.

The story of that month and that place is told, and told well, by Ernest A. Dollar, Jr. in Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina. It’s a somber, sometimes shocking story that shows a side of war we rarely see in the movies or are taught about in school. But it happened, and it happens. And it doesn’t simply change people; it also changes cultures and societies. The effects of what happened in North Carolina in April 1865 were felt for generations.

Dollar graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with B.A. degree in history and a B.F.A. degree in design, and an M.A. degree in history from North Carolina State University. He’s worked at historic sites in both North Carolina and South Carolina. He’s currently the Executive Director of the City of Raleigh Museum, and he and his family currently live in Raleigh.

Hearts Torn Asunder makes for hard reading. But it’s a story that needs to be told.

Top image: Engraving of the meeting of Gen. Joseph Johnston and Gen. William T. Sherman at the Bennett Homeplace, April 1865.