Civil War

“The Battle of the Wilderness” by Gordon Rhea

July 13, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Gordon Rhea is an attorney and Civil War historian. He’s written several highly regarded books about the war, including The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7–12, 1864 (1997), To the North Anna River: Grant and Lee, May 13–25, 1864 (2000), Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26–June 3, 1864 (2002), Carrying the Flag: The Story of Private Charles Whilden, the Confederacy’s Unlikely Hero (2004), and On to Petersburg: Grant and Lee, June 4–14, 1864 (2017).

His books have received a number of awards and recognitions, and he’s served as a lecturer at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command and as a commentator for CNN. I discovered his The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–6, 1864, published in 1994 by LSU Press, when another writer of another Civil War book spoke of the Rhea work in almost reverential tones. I discovered the book was still in print, available in paperback and on Amazon Kindle. The hardcover is also available in used editions.

And what a story Rhea tells.

The Battle of the Wilderness was the first major confrontation between Ulysses S. Grant, newly appointed by Abraham Lincoln to lead the Northern armies, and Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia. It was an effort by Grant to break through the stalemate around Richmond and capture the Confederate capital. Fought over roads, some open fields, and the dense woods known as the Wilderness, the battle pitted the wills of two opposing commanders, both of whom were determined to prevail at almost any cost.

The battle would end in stalemate, with both sides gaining and losing something. The number of casualties places the battle in one of the top five in the Civil War. The Union had between 17,000 and 18,000 dead, wounded, and missing or captured. The Confederacy had between 11,000 and 12,000. But the overall losses were greater in ultimate impact for the Lee’s army, because these were losses that could not be replaced. And both sides experienced the loss of key generals.

Rhea tells the story almost like a novel. It’s an enthralling, riveting read, with the action so immediate that the reader feels a direct part of it. The first day went mostly to Lee’s army; the second day began with a Union breakthrough, but it was soon turned back with the forces of General James Longstreet arriving at the last possible minute and almost too late. Lee would also lose General J.E.B. Stuart, who died of his wounds a few day after the battle ended.

Drawing upon official records, diaries, letters, and news reports, Rhea tells the story not only from the generals’ perspective but also from that of the men fighting on the ground, often face-to-face in woods burning from the artillery fire. And it’s a comprehensive story, made all the more remarkable with how complex this battle actually was. Rhea sorts it out and helps the reader understand exactly what happened. He also includes numerous maps and illustrations to aid understanding.

I’ve read quite a few books about the Civil War, and The Battle of the Wilderness ranks as one of the very best.

Top illustration: Map of the Battle of the Wilderness, made in 1895 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The Music of the Civil War

July 6, 2022 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

If there are any songs the modern ear would associate with the Civil War, it would be one of three: “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe, “Dixie,” and Ashokan Farewell. The first two were actually composed and sung during the Civil War. “Ashokan Farewell,” however, was composed in 1982 by Jay Ungar and his wife Molly Mason. Its plaintive music sounds like it should have been a Civil War song, but it was actually used as the soundtrack for the 1990 PBS television miniseries The Civil War by Ken Burns.

I spent some time looking at the music and songs of the Civil War, and quickly learned that “plaintive” music was not on the agenda of either the Union or the Confederacy. Instead, the music was military marches, rousing fight songs, and music to remind the soldiers (on both sides) what they were fighting for. “Plaintive” only arrived long afterward, as people began to understand what the war had actually cost.

Both sides maintained regimental bands.

Songs really sung or music played during the Civil War include “Southern Soldier,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862), “Battle Cry of Freedom” (1862) “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning,” “Goober Peas,” “Old 1812,” “Gary Owen,” “Kingdom Coming,” “Dixie,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Song of the Confederate Irish Brigade,” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” (1861), also known as “We Are a Band of Brothers.”

“Dixie” had been written and first performed in 1859, but it was adapted into a military quickstep for the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy. It was Davis who said it should be the Confederacy’s official anthem. A number of alternative (and more militaristic) versions were written during the war.

In addition to “Dixie,” many of the popular songs were updated versions of older military and war music. And it’s not surprising to see the number of Irish tunes sung by both sides, given the presence of Irish immigrants in the armies. Many of the songs were originally sung in the 18^th century; “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning” was composed in the late 1700s and its composer is believed to have been not an Irishman but a Scot.

“Battle Hymn of the Republic” has an interesting history. It began its life as a religious camp meeting hymn, “Oh, brother, will you meet us on Canaan’s happy shore.” Then it evolved into “John Brown’s Body,” the song about the famous (or infamous) abolitionist who staged the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. In 1861, Julia Ward Howe wrote a poem for The Atlantic Monthly, for which she was paid $5. The magazine gave it the title of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” and the rest is history.

Music on the Confederate side followed the progress of the war. Initially, with a string of Southern victories, songs were written to celebrate each battle. After the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg, no more specific battle songs were composed. Instead, songs like “Goober Peas” (also known as peanuts) appeared, with lyrics about the dietary privations of both military and civilian life in the South. Music to support the war was reproduced and distributed widely by both Northern and Southern music publishers. But after 1863, music distribution in the South was increasingly hampered by a shortage of paper.

The only new field music composed during the war was “Taps,” by Union general Dan Butterfield, who wrote it after the Seven Days Battles.

A number of familiar hymns were composed and sung during the war. These include “He Leadeth Me” (1862), “My Jesus, I Love Thee” (1864), “Shall We Gather at the River” (1864), “Day by Day” (865), and many more.

Top illustration: The federal 8th Regiment Band during the Civil War.

Encounter in the woods: A Story

June 29, 2022 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Sam woke with a crick in his neck and a sore backside. He stretched, trying to ease the hurt in his muscles. In the past two years, he’d slept more nights with a tree canopy for a roof than anything manmade, and he still wasn’t used to it.

With a group of soldiers bound for South Carolina, he’d followed the main road into Chatham, a small Southern town typical of its kind a day’s walk from Appomattox. The smithy and stable, the general store, and a few other establishments lined the town’s main street. Also lining the street had been townspeople with rifles and pistols.

“Just keep on moving through,” said a large man in clothes worn but still presentable. “We don’t mean to be inhospitable, but we’ve had too much trouble with soldiers and others. Keep moving and we’ll all get along just fine.”

A few soldiers had looked as if they were ready to be less than accommodating but were stopped by others. Sam kept walking, wondering if this is what returning soldiers would find everywhere – frightened people trying to protect what little they had left.

They were five miles south of the town when the rain began. At first, it was light, no more than a sprinkle. Sam and the others were used to worse than this, so everyone kept walking. And then the heavens opened up, and the light rain became a proper storm. They rushed for the nearby woods to get some protection. Nearly a hundred men took refuge among the trees.

The rain continued. Sam and the rest made what shelters they could, but they were all soaked. The storm abated, but a steady rain continued through most of the night.

Sam had wakened early; the others were still asleep. It was still dark but beginning to edge toward dawn. He made his way through the woods to find a place to relieve himself. It was then he heard a kind of muffled singing. Curiosity got the better of him and he followed the sound. Going deeper into the woods, he could see a small light as he got closer to the sound. He stepped into a clearing and saw some 20 people clustered around a campfire. They stopped singing as soon as they saw him.

Freed slave often accompanied federal troops in the Civil War.

Sam’s father hadn’t owned any slaves, but Sam could tell these people had been slaves. There were men, women, and children of varying ages. They’d been singing “Go Down, Moses” when Sam stepped into the clearing.

Three of the younger men stood and faced Sam.

“What you want here, Reb?” one said, pointing to Sam’s uniform, slightly the worse for wear but still recognizably tan-colored.

“I heard the singing,” Sam said. ‘We’d been sleeping under the trees because of the rain.”

“There are more of you?”

Sam nodded. “About 100 of us, heading home.”

The group around the fire exchanged glances.

“I mean you no harm,” Sam said. “I just head the singing.”

An older man stood. “We are having worship before we go on our way,” an older man said. “You are welcome to join us.”

Of all the decisions Sam would make on his journey home, this was the first and, as it happened, the most important. It set into motion all that would follow.

“I would like that, sir,” Sam said. He walked to the group and sat down next to an older woman. Her hair was gray; her skin was a soft, light brown.

She nodded as he sat. “You’re a young man,” she said, looking at him closely, “younger than you first appeared.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sam said. “I’m 15.”

She said no more; the group continued its worship service around the campfire. The older man who’d welcomed him gave a short message from the Book of Exodus, which was Sam’s first solid evidence that this was a group of slaves who’d left their master.

They sang a few more spirituals and a hymn that Sam knew, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” He knew the words, and the group sang as if the music was coming from their souls.

They finished in prayer, yet no one moved when the worship ended. They were waiting for something, Sam thought.

“Are you headed to, or from, the war?” the older man asked.

“From,” Sam said. “I’m headed home to Mississippi.”

The man nodded. “Discharged or deserted?”

“Mustered out,” Sam said. “The army was disbanded yesterday.” The entire group, including the children, stared at Sam. “General Lee surrendered to General Grant, and his army has been sent home.”

The group broke into excited chatter. “Praise God!” the older man said. “Praise God! We are free!”

People were hugging each other. Two of the women were crying.

“General Johnston’s army is still in the field,” Sam said. “Somewhere in South or North Carolina. They’re headed this way, thinking to join up with General Lee. But they’ll likely surrender as well.”

“We will eat,” the older man said. “You will eat with us. What is your name?”

“My name is Sam McClure, sir,” Sam said. “But I only have a little food to share, and it has to last me some time.”

“You already shared the blessing with us, Mr. McClure,” the older man said. “You gave us the news. We left where we lived four days ago, to walk north to the federal troops. There are many like us, leaving to find the troops. We are not going back. Do you have a cup for soup?”

Sam nodded. He pulled his tin cup from his back, and soon it was filled with a soup so thick that it was more a stew than a soup. A woman handed him a piece of bread.

Sam ate slowly, savoring each sip of soup and bite of bread.

The older man did most of the talking for the group. “We were slaves on a plantation nears Greensboro,” he said. “The master had died in a battle. The mistress died in childbirth, leaving behind a baby boy. Her mother had come from down Alabama way to help with the birth, and she had a granddaughter and young grandson with her. They and the baby were all who were left. Food was getting poor. The field hands left first. We stayed until the baby was weaned, and then we left as well. The grandmother wants to go home, but the railroads have stopped. She is sick, though she will not speak about it, I think because it would frighten the children.”

The story pained Sam, but he supposed it was being duplicated all over the South. Dead masters, workers leaving, fields lying fallow. It was a world in ruins, made up of thousands of stories like this one.

When they finished, he could see they were starting preparations to leave.

“Thank you,” he said, standing up. “Your soup is the best thing I’ve eaten in a year. It’s the closest I’ve found to my mama’s soup since I’ve been gone. Thank you.”

The older man walked up to him. “You may know this, but if you’re headed south, travel with others, or travel in the woods by the road. Satan is walking these roads, and sometimes he looks like a white man, and sometimes like a black man. And sometimes both. We promise to pray for you, the young man who brought us the news.”

Sam nodded hi goodbye andre-entered the woods, making his way back toward the place he and others had slept to get out of the rain.

He walked quickly through the woods. The pale sun made it difficult to determine, but he thought it must be about 7 a.m. The soldiers would be stirring and preparing to leave.

When he reached where they had camped, he saw it was empty. Everyone was gone. He was alone.

Top photograph: Federal soldiers at Appomattox, April 1865.

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.

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