Civil War

“Hospital Sketches” by Louisa May Alcott

November 8, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In 1862, Louisa May Alcott decided she would do her duty for the Union effort on the Civil War and volunteered to become a nurse. She eventually found herself at an army hospital in Georgetown, part of Washington, D.C. She wrote letters to her family in Massachusetts, describing her experiences. And eventually, the letters became the basis for Hospital Sketches, published in 1863.

You would expect an account of Civil War hospital experiences to be extremely serious. And for the most part, Hospital Sketches is. But it is also laugh-out-loud funny, especially in the early chapters.

Alcott turned her experiences into a fictional account. While Massachusetts is the same starting place and Washington, D.C. the destination, the account of traveling from one to the other is close to hysterical. But nothing will dampen the enthusiasm of our intrepid heroine, Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle (Alcott might have been reading too much Charles Dickens to come up with a name like that). Known affectionately to her family as Trib, she will conquer railroads, shipping lines, army bureaucracy, and hospital assignment changes as calmly as the most dedicated Stoic. Well, sort of.

An example is the sailing part of the journey. It is a brand-new ship. Nurse Periwinkle, having two close drowning calls as a child, is convinced that the ship will inevitably pick her journey as the occasion to sink. Sharing a large sleeping room with several other women, and realizing there are no life preservers, she determines that one of the ladies has the best chance for floating on the open sea, and her plan is to latch on to her when the boat sinks. The poor woman doesn’t understand why Nurse Periwinkle becomes so attached to her.

The account of the journey to Washington is filled with anecdotes like that. Once our heroine arrives, however, she will do her duty for her country. It takes her a while to get used to the sights and smells of a Civil War hospital, not to mention the needed washing of the patients. But here the story takes a serious turn, because Nurse Periwinkle will face men dismembered, disfigured, and dying.

Alcott (1832-1888) is best known for her novels and short stories. Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys are American classics. She grew up associating with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a well-known adherent of Transcendentalism. She was an abolitionist and a feminist. She also wrote numerous gothic thrillers under a pen name.

Hospital Sketches is funny, sad, and poignant. Alcott had more latitude in adapting her letters into a fictional account rather than a non-fiction memoir, but the work still provides insights into the hospital experiences of doctors, nurses, and patients in the Civil War years.

Top photograph: A Civil War nurse, about 1864.

“Belligerent Muse” by Stephen Cushman

November 1, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” One hundred and fifty-eight years after the last battle and the final surrender, it seems we’re still living with the effects of and trying to understand the American Civil War.

Poet and English professor Stephen Cushman has been fascinated with the Civil War since childhood. He understands that any historical event, like a war, is understood generations later through the writings of those who lived it and then those who wrote about it. The subtitle of his 2014 book explains what he was about when he wrote it – Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Out Understanding of the Civil War.

The ”belligerent muse” in this case is war. Cushman points out that “war destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates.” The Civil War brought destruction, especially in the southern states, but it continues to be the source of an enormous outpouring of memoirs, reports, journals, historical texts, biographies, and fiction. In this book, Cushman says that we should not simply see these writings as “transparent windows opening into the past, but also as literary engagements with the momentous events of the war itself. In other words, they were writing to understand themselves the events they were living through.

He uses five writers, all connected to the Union side, to explore. And he uses some of their specific texts to examine as opposed to their writings as a whole. The five are Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William T. Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

For Lincoln, Cushman examines the account of his meeting with Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Gettysburg address, and the Second Inaugural Speech. For Whitman, it’s his Memoranda During the War. He tackles Sherman’s Memoirs of General William T. Sherman. Bierce, famous for his short stories, wrote about the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga, which he fought in as a soldier, and he wrote about it in articles, fiction, and letters. Chamberlain, a Union brigadier general who became something if a Civil War legend in his own lifetime, wrote a memoir that he often revised about the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox.

If you only have a general knowledge of the Civil War and its major personalities (count me in that number), Belligerent Muse contains some surprises. Ambrose Bierce fought in some of the war’s most horrific battles (like Shiloh and Chickamauga), and he kept writing about his experiences throughout his life, almost in an effort to make sense of what he went through. And he never quite succeeded. Sherman described the war almost like a stage play, not entirely unexpected from a man who loved the theater and was perhaps a frustrated actor. Through about four revisions of his memoirs over the year, Chamberlain became more and more specific about what happened at Appomattox, and that included enlarging (or fully acknowledging) his own role. Whitman’s concrern with slavery was less about its brutality or treatment of human beings and more about how slavery competed against the working class.

In addition to his own poetry and historical writing, Cushman serves as general editor of the fourth edition of Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. He’s served as co-editor of Civil War Witnesses and Their Books: New Perspectives on Iconic Works and Civil War Writing 1866-1989. He’s also published numerous articles on both poetry and the Civil War. He received a B.A. degree from Cornell, his M.A. and D. Phil. Degrees from Yale, and a Ph.D. from Yale.

Belligerent Muse benefits from Cushman’s extensive factual knowledge about the war and its battles, a historical grasp that you would expect from a history professor other than an English professor. It’s that singular perspective he brings to the writings of these five major players, and he delivers a fascinating and instructive account.

Bloody Promenade by Stephen Cushman.

Top illustration: The Battle of Chickamauga (1863) depicted in a painting by James Walker about 1870.

“Lee’s Miserables” by J. Tracy Power

October 25, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

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.

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 4^th 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

October 18, 2023 By Glynn Young 6 Comments

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.

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 19^th 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

September 20, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

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 True Story of Andersonville Prison” by James Madison Page

September 6, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

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.

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.

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.

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