by Rick Beyer
A total of seventy-eight camels were brought from the Middle East to Texas. They quickly proved their worth. The camels could carry more than a thousand pounds on their backs, go days or weeks without water, move faster than horses, and eat desert vegetation that other animals wouldn’t touch. Along with their humps, though, camels also came with downsides. Their powerful aroma drove horses and mules crazy, while their screeching, spitting, and biting made army drivers absolutely hate them.
Nonetheless, in 1858 a new Secretary of War, John Floyd, was so enthusiastic about the use of camels that he asked Congress to embrace the idea on a grand scale, and import a thousand camels for military use. Floyd believed the superiority of the camel would convince Indians they could never escape the cavalry, and encourage them to give up raiding.
But Congress had other things on its mind. The call for camels fell by the wayside as rising tensions between North and South consumed the country. After the Civil War broke out, the army’s dabbling in dromedaries was all but forgotten; the camel cavalry never made it over that initial hump.
The hump of a camel is fatty tissue that absorbs water and stores it. Normally a camel will drink every three days, twenty to thirty gallons at a time, but camels have been known to go an extraordinary ten months without water.
After the war, the remaining army camels were sold off. Eventually many of them were turned loose in Arizona, Texas, and Nevada, where they reverted to a wild state. The last sighting of wild camels was in 1905, in Arizona.
Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who would one day become president of the Confederate States of America, was so enthralled by the possible military uses of camels that he and his wife translated a book on the subject from French into English.
1857
BITE THE BULLET
The revolutionary weapon that triggered a revolution.
For 150 years, the British East India Company ruled India through an army of native soldiers (known as Sepoys) commanded by British officers. In the 1850s, the officers began distributing a state-of-the-art firearm to their men: the Enfield rifle.
It was a decision that would soon backfire.
Instead of old-fashioned musket balls, the Enfield fired the new conical Minie bullet, giving the rifle increased range and accuracy. Bullet and powder were contained in a paper cartridge, which was heavily greased to keep the powder dry. Loading the rifle required biting off the end of the greased cartridge to expose the gunpowder.
Big problem.
Word spread among the troops that the grease contained fat from pigs and cows, meaning that biting the cartridge was a sacrilege for both Hindus and Moslems. In May of 1857, eighty-five Sepoys in the town of Meerut refused to use the new rifles. They were stripped of their uniforms and sentenced to ten years at hard labor. Outraged by what they saw as religious persecution, fellow soldiers rose up and killed their British officers, then freed their comrades.
India was already seething with discontent, and this mutiny launched a full-scale rebellion. Violence quickly spread as Indian princes and oppressed peasants joined the revolution. Thousands died, with atrocities on both sides.
In the end, the British government brutally suppressed the rebellion, and took direct control of the country. But as costly and unsuccessful as it was, the mutiny triggered by a new kind of rifle planted the seeds of a nationalist movement that would eventually make India independent one hundred years later.
Sepoys massacred British soldiers and their families at Cawnpore, hacking them to death even after they had surrendered. When the British retook the town, they forced their prisoners to lick the blood off the floor before taking them out and hanging them.
The British indulged in their own cruelties, inventing a punishment known as the “Devil’s Wind.” They would lash a man to a cannon and fire a cannonball through his body, blowing him to bits, and thus demolishing his hope for an afterlife.
Like so many culture clashes, this one was born of ignorance and mistrust. The British believed they were showing faith in the men by giving them their newest rifle, while many Sepoys believed the greased cartridges were part of a plot to force them to become Christians by first making them outcasts from their own religions.
1859
RED CROSS
The bloody battle that gave birth to a mission of mercy.
More than forty years later, Dunant was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
Little remembered today, the Battle of Solferino was one of the most terrible in history. On June 24, 1859, French and Italian forces under Napoleon III attacked an Austrian army. Three hundred thousand men engaged in furious fighting for more than fifteen hours.
A Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant who was trying to arrange a meeting with Napoleon III found himself a witness to the battle. He was shocked by the horrifying carnage. “Every mound, every rocky crag is the scene of a fight to the death,” he wrote later. “It is sheer butchery.”
What came next was even worse. A staggering forty thousand were left wounded on the field of battle, and medical care for them was totally inadequate. Dunant threw himself into the effort to help the wounded, despairing when many died for lack of care. He recalled one wounded soldier who spoke bitterly of his fate: “If I had been looked after sooner I might have lived, and now by evening I shall be dead.” And he was.
Terribly moved by what he had seen, Dunant wrote a book about his experiences, and called for the formation of an international organization to provide aid. His work led to the First Geneva Convention and the formation of an international relief agency.
To protect doctors and nurses on the battlefield, the nations who formed the agency also agreed on a symbol that would proclaim its neutrality. In a fitting tribute to this compassionate Swiss businessman, they reversed the colors of the Swiss flag to create:
The Red Cross.
At the time of the Battle of Solferino, the French army had more veterinarians than it did medical doctors.
“IS IT NOT A MATTER OF URGENCY, SINCE UNHAPPILY WE CANNOT AVOID WAR, TO PREVENT, OR AT LEAST TO ALLEVIATE, THE HORRORS OF WAR.”
— HENRY DUNANT
1859
THE PIG WAR
The United States and Great Britain on the brink of war . . . over a dead pig?
In 1859, the last bit of territory in dispute by the U.S. and Great Britain was the San Juan Island chain, in the waters between Canada and the Oregon Territory. Both countries claimed the islands, and both had settlers there who eyed each other with suspicion and hostility.
That was the status quo the day Lyman Cutlar, an American living on San Juan Island, shot a pig that was rooting around in his potato patch.
A British pig.
British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar if he didn’t make restitution. After Americans on the island turned to the U.S. Army for help, a hotheaded general named William Harney responded by sending a company of men from the Ninth Infantry. The governor of British Columbia, in turn, ordered a warship to the scene. Both sides escalated. Soon four hundred American soldiers were dug in on the island, while a fleet of British ships carrying thousands of armed men waited just offshore.
The possibility of war seemed very real.
At this point, cooler heads prevailed. British naval officers refused orders to land Royal Marines on the island, thus avoiding a confrontation. The U.S. government, horrified that the actions of one irate farmer could precipitate a war, sent General Winfield Scott, Commander of the U.S. Army, to calm things down. Both parties eventually agreed to a joint occupation of the islands, bringing an end to a military confrontation in which the only casualty was a pig.
The pig shot by Lyman Cutlar was actually a Berkshire boar.
“RESIST ALL ATTEMPTS AT INTERFERENCE BY THE BRITISH AUTHORITIES.”
— INSTRUCTIONS TO THE U. S. TROOPS OCCUPYING SAN JUAN ISLAND
Ten years after the events of the “Pig War,” the U.S. and Britain referred their dispute over the i
slands to a neutral third party: Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. He eventually ruled in favor of the United States, and today the islands are part of Washington State.
“We’ll make a Bunker Hill of it,” said the army captain who commanded the U.S. troops sent to occupy San Juan Island. But George Pickett’s moment of glory would come four years later, as a Confederate general, when he lent his name to the most famous—and futile—charge in American history, at the Battle of Gettysburg.
1861
NATIVE GUARDS
The extraordinary military unit that served on both sides in the Civil War.
The Louisiana Native Guard was a militia regiment formed by eager volunteers in the early days of the Civil War to fight for the South. What made it unique among Confederate military units was the origin of its men.
They were all free blacks living in New Orleans.
Why were they willing to fight for the South? Some saw it as a way to gain equality. Others owned property they were afraid of losing if they refused to fight. Many were mulattoes who identified more with Southern whites than with slaves.
The South didn’t permit the Native Guards to go into battle, and used it more for propaganda than anything else. This treatment quickly dampened the unit’s enthusiasm for the Confederate cause.
But the men of the Native Guards still desperately wanted to prove themselves. After New Orleans was occupied by the Union, many of the officers and men volunteered to fight for the Union. They were joined by runaway slaves also anxious to take up arms.
And so the Native Guards, reconstituted as three Union regiments, became the only unit to serve both the South and the North during the Civil War.
They were the first black units in the Union Army, and they fought bravely at the Battle of Port Hudson. In spite of their performance, they were not well treated by the army. Black officers were replaced with whites, and the men were used primarily for guard duty and manual labor.
Despite their willingness to work and fight, the Native Guards were orphaned by two armies. As one of their officers observed: “Nobody really desires our success.”
Robert E. Lee suggested recruiting slaves as soldiers in the late days of the Civil War, but the South’s view of black troops was summed up by Confederate general Cobb Howell: “If slaves make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
“THEY FOUGHT SPLENDIDLY! SPLENDIDLY! EVERYBODY IS DELIGHTED THAT THEY DID SO WELL.”
— GENERAL NATHANIEL P. BANKS ON THE NATIVE GUARDS AT PORT HUDSON
One of the officers of the Native Guards, P.B.S. Pinchback, served briefly as governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction, making him the state’s first and only black governor. Pinchback was one-quarter African-American: the son of a Louisiana planter and his mulatto mistress.
The three Native Guards regiments serving in the Union Army were also known as the “Corps D’Afrique.”
1862
TWENTY-FOUR NOTES
The Civil War general who whistled his way into history.
Dan Butterfield was a New York businessman turned Union general. People seemed to love him or hate him. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for rallying his brigade under withering fire, but he had a bad temper that irritated fellow officers. One wrote that he was a man of “blemished character.”
Perhaps so. But he also had poetry in his soul.
One night in July of 1862 he called the brigade bugler to his tent. Butterfield wasn’t happy with the regulation bugle call played at the end of the day to signal “lights out.” It wasn’t sufficiently musical, he said.
The general had something different in mind. Since by his own admission he couldn’t write a note of music, he whistled it for bugler Oliver Norton. When Norton played it back, the result wasn’t quite what Butterfield wanted, and they went back and forth for a while, the general whistling, the bugler blowing, until they had something Butterfield was satisfied with.
Norton used the new call that night. Buglers from other brigades camped nearby were so struck by it that they began using it as well. Soon the call spread throughout the army, and to the Confederate army as well.
And so a collaboration between a general and a bugler on a warm July evening led to twenty-four notes that have gone down in history: a haunting melody known to all that announces the end of day for soldiers and graces the air at military funerals.
Taps.
Butterfield seems to have gotten the idea for the new bugle call from parts of an older call no longer in use, revising it to capture the mood he sought.
Bugler Oliver W. Norton recalled that Butterfield wanted a call that in its music should carry some suggestion of putting out the lights and lying down to rest in the silence of the camp.
Soldiers began making up words to the song as soon as bugler started playing it. These are some of the earliest.
1862
THREE CIGARS
The South might have won the Civil War . . . but for three cigars.
September 13, 1862, was a Saturday, but for the soldiers of the Twenty-seventh Indiana Regiment it was just another day of marching. Like the rest of the Union Army under General George McClellan, they were moving down the dirt roads of Maryland, trying to come to grips with Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army, which had invaded the North.
It was a critical time in the war. A decisive victory by Lee could pave the way for a settlement that would lead to recognition of the South as a separate nation. McClellan, slow and overcautious, seemed ill-suited to stop him.
The Twenty-seventh stopped to rest in a field that had been occupied by Confederates just days before. Three soldiers sprawled out on the ground noticed something lying nearby: three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper. Delighted, the soldiers decided to split the cigars. They were about to throw out the wrapper when one of them, Corporal Barton W. Mitchell, thought to take a look at it.
At that moment, the unwitting corporal may have been the most important person on the planet, with thousands of lives and the fate of nations riding on his curiosity.
What Mitchell found in his hands was a copy of the marching orders for Lee’s army, apparently lost by a Confederate officer. He promptly passed his discovery up the chain of command. Galvanized by this captured information, McClellan promptly went on the attack.
The result: the Confederates were turned back at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history. More than five thousand men died in the fighting that day.
All because of three cigars.
Another one of the soldiers who found the cigars, Sergeant John Bloss, survived the battle by more than forty years and ended up becoming a much beloved president of Oregon State University. (He’s in the front row, second from the right.)
This is the paper found by the soldiers, Special Orders 191. They were written out by Lee’s assistant adjutant general, R. H. Chilton. By sheer coincidence, one of the Union officers who examined the orders happened to know Chilton before the war and so was able to verify that it was his handwriting, thus convincing General McClellan the document was genuine.
“HERE IS A PAPER WITH WHICH IF I CANNOT WHIP BOBBY LEE I WILL BE WILLING TO GO HOME.”
— GENERAL GEORGE MCCLELLAN
1863
UNLEADED ZEPPELIN
How did the Civil War change the course of aviation history?
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was a young Prussian military officer when he was sent to the United States in 1863 as a military observer attached to the Union Army. The enthusiastic young lieutenant rode along on several missions with Union cavalry, and was almost captured by the Confederates a week before the Battle of Gettysburg.
Having come so far, von Zeppelin set out to explore the breadth of the United States. And so it was that he ended up in Minneapolis, where he ran into something that changed his life:
A ride in a balloon.
The balloon was being operated by John Steiner, who had spent a year as an aeronaut for the Union Army. On August 1
9 he let von Zeppelin go up on a tethered ascent. The young nobleman rose six hundred feet into the air. He was hooked.
Steiner regaled von Zeppelin with tales of doing military reconnaissance over Confederate lines, noting that the biggest problem was the inability to steer the balloon. The answer, Steiner thought, would be to create a cigar-shaped balloon with a rudder that could be easily guided through the air.
Von Zeppelin was soon on his way back to Germany, but he never forgot that balloon ride, or Steiner’s idea. Twenty-five years later, after he retired from the army, he set out to build a rigid, steerable ballon. The first Zeppelin made its maiden flight on July 2, 1900, launching a new age of lighter-than-air travel that owed its birth to the War Between the States.
Aeronauts from the Balloon Corps performed valuable reconnaissance for the Union Army. The best known among them was Thaddeus Lowe, whose efforts are credited with helping the Union win the Battle of Fair Oaks.
The ascent of the LZ-1, the first Zeppelin, in 1900. More than a hundred Zeppelins were used by the Germans during World War I.
Zeppelins carried passengers back and forth across the Atlantic in the 1930s, until the Hindenburg exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, killing thirty-seven people. With that, the age of the airship was over.
1864