Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories

by C. Brian Kelly

  Not yet sworn in, Lincoln said in his inaugural speech that while he had no intention of interfering with “the institution of slavery,” he also felt, “No state, on its own mere action, can get out of the Union.” He waxed a bit poetic and was obviously appealing for good will on all sides when he said to a nation not yet one century old (the American Revolution took place only about eighty years earlier): “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” More bluntly, he warned: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it.”

  And so the immediate issue was not slavery but secession. Or, as Lincoln saw it, the Union, the Union, the Union. He was sworn in after his speech, incidentally, by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the jurist famous for his majority opinion in the Dred Scott case, which declared a slave was not a citizen with the right to sue in a Federal court. Taney was from Maryland, a Democrat, and a former slave-owner himself.

  Lincoln had spent the night at Willard’s Hotel, and he rode to the Capitol in an open carriage, accompanied by outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan. Security was tight, and almost everybody knew war was imminent. Just that morning Buchanan had received word that Major Robert Anderson, commander of the garrison trapped on the island of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, could not hold out against the forces arrayed against him unless he was reinforced by twenty thousand men. That word was passed along to Lincoln even before he rose to speak on the wooden platform erected for his inauguration at the East Portico of the Capitol. Begun around one o’clock, the inaugural speech took about thirty minutes, during which time, it is reported, Senator Douglas held Lincoln’s hat for him.

  Social Notice Taken

  SOCIAL NOTES FROM ALL OVER—

  At the recent inaugural festivities for His Excellency Mr. Davis in Montgomery, the noted hostess Aurelia Blassingame Fitzpatrick, wife of the former U.S. Senator, raised more than a few eyebrows when she boldly poked the Confederacy’s newly installed leader in the back with her parasol, merely to gain his attention so that she might have a word with him.

  It is said also that she was not hesitant, whether then or on other occasions, to urge her own husband upon Mr. Davis as a candidate for his Cabinet. The audacious Aurelia shocked some of the other ladies yet again upon telling Mr. Davis that his reference to a possibly long war was “too gloomy” a remark to make.

  Far from gloomy were the bright balls and dinner parties attended by fabulous Southern belles whose encouragement would mean so much to their men at war. One young lady, Ida Rice, was so popular that her countrymen named a cannon in Charleston harbor for her.

  Returning to the inaugural ceremonies themselves, wasn’t it a sight when all those pretty young ladies on a balcony above the swearing-in let loose a cascade of flowers upon Mr. Davis!

  Quite a flutter of attention has been stirred also by adoption of the official Confederate flag—a handsome and eye-catching standard of red, white, and blue (like the Yankee flag in colors only!). How fitting that the flag should be hoisted at the new capital for the first time by Letitia Tyler, granddaughter of the former President and Virginia Governor John Tyler—namesake also of his first wife, Letitia, who bore him seven children before her passing during his presidency.

  Speaking of Washington and things Union, one true Southern lady who would prefer to put true embarrassment behind her is Elodie Todd of Selma, Alabama, half-sister to Mary Todd Lincoln, who sits in the Union White House presently as wife of Abraham. It may be fact that Miss Elodie is engaged to her handsome Captain Nathaniel H.R. Dawson, but that perfectly proper liaison has not protected her from hearing the most ugly sentiments expressed within her hearing about the husband of her sister. Said the future Mrs. Dawson in a letter to her beloved, “People constantly wish he may be hung and all such evils may attend his footsteps.”

  Doing her utmost to bear up, Miss Elodie donated the Captain’s “Magnolia Cadets” of Selma a silken banner to take into battle with them—battle against her sister’s Union, quite naturally.

  All over Alabama in these exciting and turbulent days, the ladies have been making many a wondrous contribution to the cause. Nor have they shirked at patriotically offering their men to the gods of war!

  For instance, Maria Ellington of Russell County recently marched into the field where her own two sons were busy at their work and told them to join the army and serve until whenever the war against the Union should end. Further, an anonymous letter-writer not only told readers of a Montgomery newspaper that mothers should offer their sons to battle, but also advised those same sons “they must die” facing the enemy and entrust themselves “in His care Who is the God of war.”

  In Selma, meanwhile, at least one lady took it upon herself to avoid stepping out with any man who was not in uniform. Another Selma lass broke off an engagement to a young man who had not yet enlisted. Adding deepest sort of insult to injury, she sent him a skirt and ladies’ undergarments, together with her tart advice, “Wear these or volunteer.”

  With activities and sentiments like these, can there be any doubt as to the future prospect of the Confederate cause!

  Indeed, if the ladies could only join their menfolk at the front lines, there would be no lingering doubts whatsoever. For example, word has been received of the confrontation off Appalachicola, Florida, where a Yankee ship had the audacity to stop and board a Confederate blockade-running ship. As the Confederate flag sadly fluttered down from its proud perch, Mrs. F. Holland of Greenville snatched it up before any onlooker, Yankee or Rebel, could move. Wrapping the proud flag about her own body, she told the startled onlookers that she would die rather than surrender the “holy banner.” Even her husband was aghast, but the Yankee officer in charge honored her stand (perhaps somewhat sardonically, true) with a single-gun salute. With heroes, or heroines, like Mrs. Holland, how can the South lose? Truly now?

  Lincoln Wins Rebel Debate

  WEEKS BEFORE THE FIRING ON FORT SUMTER, ABE LINCOLN SAW THAT WAR WAS inevitable. He did not wish it, but he was girded for it. It would be a calamity for the nation, but it must be. After all that had passed since the time of his inauguration March 4, 1861, there seemed no other way to preserve and protect the Union. Secession had frozen in place; a new Confederate government had sprung into being in Montgomery; and at Charleston, the guns were aimed at Major Robert Anderson’s Fort Sumter. The fireeaters were dancing in impatience.

  Lincoln had only to say the word, to touch fire to fuse, and it would begin: War!

  But Lincoln was wiser than that. And in the South, it took a fireeater to see “Old Abe’s” strategy and to warn against falling into his trap.

  The fireeater was Georgia’s former U.S. Senator Robert Toombs, who only weeks before had risen in the august Senate chamber at Washington to castigate the Republicans as “black” and “perfidious,” to denounce the newly elected Lincoln as “an enemy of the human race…who deserves the execration of all mankind.” The same Georgian dared the North to make the Southerners stay in the Union. Like a schoolboy thumbing his nose at a potential adversary, he cried: “Come and do it!” Georgia, he declared, was on the warpath. “We are as ready to fight now as we will ever be! Treason? Bah!”

  Those hot words marked his swan song as a senator, for minutes later, in January 1861, Toombs was gone, resigned to join his state in secession (but not before visiting the U.S. Treasury to collect the remainder of his Federal salary and mileage compensation funds for his return home).

  Oddly, it was the same Toombs who just a few weeks later, as the newly installed Con
federate secretary of state, stood alone to beg Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet to forbear rather than allow guns to open fire in Charleston Harbor. This surprising but astute reaction from Toombs took place April 9 (an auspicious date for any Civil War calendar!). Word had just been received of President Lincoln’s message to Governor F. W. Pickens of South Carolina that he, Lincoln, felt constrained to supply the isolated garrison at Fort Sumter. It was a courteous message with serious implications.

  In fact, it was a gauntlet. Lincoln knew the South must act…or back down. And if it be war, Lincoln needed the South to strike the first blow in order to have a unified Union behind him. If only war could resolve the crisis, it must be war initiated by the other party—who, indeed, had already fired upon a supply ship once in December 1860 and who had already cut off and trapped the garrison of men on the island of Fort Sumter.

  It was Toombs, then, who saw what Lincoln was about. All the Rebel Cabinet was ready to back Jefferson Davis, the new Confederate president, in giving the order to allow force against Fort Sumter—all but Toombs, who came to the meeting late on April 9, but not too late to warn that “firing on Fort Sumter would inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has ever seen.”

  He stalked about the room, then suddenly faced Davis. If the South attacked, he declared, “it is suicide, it is murder, and it will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from the mountains to the ocean; and legions, now quiet, will swarm out to sting us to death.” And an epitaph that also was true: “It is unnecessary, it puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.”

  Despite the Georgian’s entreaty for caution, Lincoln “won” the debate in the Confederate Cabinet meeting, for the word that went out by a messenger boy to a telegraph office across the street suited Lincoln’s sad purpose very well. Pierre G. T. Beauregard’s forces at Charleston were authorized to proceed with the seizure of Fort Sumter. The firing began three days later.

  Sumter’s Silence

  BOTH DOUBLEDAY AND BEAUREGARD WOULD LATER AGREE THAT THE FIRST SHOT fired at Fort Sumter came from a Confederate mortar battery at Rebel-held Fort Johnson. Abner Doubleday was the Union captain of artillery, and General Pierre G. T. Beauregard was, of course, the colorful Confederate commander of Rebel forces gathered at Charleston.

  Here are their running accounts, spliced together for parallel perspectives:

  Doubleday: The first shot came from the mortar battery at Fort Johnson. Almost immediately afterward a ball from Cummings Point lodged in the magazine wall.

  Beauregard: The peaceful stillness of the night was broken just before dawn. Fort Johnson’s mortar battery, at 4:30 a.m., April 12, 1861, issued the first and, as many thought, the too-long-deferred signal shell of the war. It sped aloft, describing its peculiar arc of fire and, bursting over Fort Sumter, fell with crashing noise in the very center of the parade.

  Doubleday: In a moment the firing burst forth in one continuous roar, and large patches of both the exterior and interior masonry began to crumble and fall in all directions.

  Beauregard: Thus was “reveille” sounded in Charleston and its harbor on this eventful morning.

  Doubleday: Nineteen batteries were now hammering at us, and the balls and shells from the 10-inch Columbiads, accompanied by shells from the 13-inch mortars which constantly bombarded us, made us feel that the war had commenced in earnest.

  Beauregard: In an instant all was bustle and activity. Not an absentee was reported at roll call. The citizens poured down to the battery and the wharves, and women and children crowded each window of the houses overlooking the sea—rapt spectators of the scene.

  Doubleday: When it was broad daylight, I went down to breakfast. I found the officers already assembled at one of the long tables in the mess hall. Our party was calm and even somewhat merry.

  Beauregard: At ten minutes before five o’clock all the batteries and mortars which encircled the grim fortress were in full play against it.

  [At Fort Sumter, meanwhile, an unfortunate waiter in the mess hall was visibly terrified, Doubleday noted. The meal itself was “not very sumptuous.” Then came time to respond to the Rebel fire. Doubleday had a historic role at this point.]

  Doubleday: In aiming the first gun fired against the Rebellion, I had no feeling of self reproach, for I fully believed that the conflict had been inevitable. My first shot bounded off from the sloping roof of the battery opposite without producing any apparent effect. It seemed useless to attempt to silence the guns there, for our metal was not heavy enough to batter the work down.

  [Ashore, Beauregard and his compatriots had been surprised by Sumter’s absolute silence for two hours or more. But, as noted by Doubleday and now by Beauregard, the silence didn’t last.]

  Beauregard: At last, however, near seven o’clock, the United States flag having previously been raised, the sound of a gun, not ours, was distinctly heard. Sumter had taken up the gage of battle, and Cummings Point had first attracted attention. [Beauregard and his fellow Rebels were almost happy to see Sumter astir and shooting back.]

  Beauregard: It was almost a relief to our troops—for gallantry ever admires gallantry, and a worthy foe disdains one who makes no resistance.

  Stomach Pumping Questioned

  THERE WAS NOTHING PRO FORMA ABOUT THE FIRING ON FORT SUMTER. IN thirty-four hours, the little island fortress in Charleston Harbor was shelled into submission. A few words from its commander, Major Robert Anderson, effectively give the picture. He described quarters “entirely burned, the main gates destroyed by fire, the gorge walls seriously impaired, the [powder] magazine surrounded by flames and its door closed from the effects of the heat.”

  By then, April 13, 1861, the Federal garrison’s sole provision was pork, and only “four barrels and three cartridges of powder” were accessible because of the jammed door to the fort’s magazine. Outside the inner harbor the Federal resupply ships whose deployment had finally triggered the war’s start merely stood by as Sumter suffered bombardment, their commanders unwilling to sacrifice ships or men to a now-hopeless rescue mission.

  It was on the evening of April 13 that Anderson agreed to surrender. “The fort was a scene of ruin and destruction,” wrote its U.S. Army surgeon Samuel Crawford later. “For 34 hours it had sustained a bombardment from seventeen 10-inch mortars and heavy guns, well placed and well served.”

  The moment of the inevitable at last had come, he noted. Pierre G. T. Beauregard, later hailed as the hero of Charleston, wrote of the end in calm, simple terms: “The flag over Fort Sumter at last was lowered, and a white flag substituted for it. The contest was over. Major Anderson had acknowledged his defeat.”

  While no one on either side was killed in this first real exchange of gunfire in the Civil War, former U.S. Representative Roger A. Pryor of Virginia—now a Confederate colonel—almost became a casualty. Sent to Sumter as one of Beauregard’s surrender negotiators, Pryor took a seat at a table in the dark dispensary and, feeling quite thirsty, poured himself a drink from a black bottle on the table without thinking much about what he was doing.

  As it turned out, he gulped down a poisonous compound, iodide of potassium. Doctor Crawford quickly pumped his stomach and probably saved Pryor’s life, which raises a few questions.

  “Some of us,” wrote Union Captain Abner Doubleday, “questioned the doctor’s right to interpose himself in a case of this kind.” The thought was, “If any Rebel leader chose to come over to Fort Sumter and poison himself, the Medical Department had no business to interfere.”

  Crawford, though, had a well-nigh unassailable response, according to Doubleday. Since the good doctor was responsible for all his medicine as Federal government property, “he could not permit Pryor to carry any of it away.”

  Robert and Mary

  THEY LIVED IN A COLUMNED MANSION ON A HILLSIDE OVERLOOKING WASHINGTON from the south banks of the Potomac, 1,100 gorgeous acres with an unparalleled view of the Federal city. Unparalleled, too,
were their historical ties to the generation that fought and won the American Revolution, the very event that created the city spread before them. Off and on over the years, theirs had been a household bustling with visiting children, kissing cousins and other such relatives, friends, and associates. For here was an abode known for warm, gracious living—a wondrous stopping place for the visitor to Washington or the traveler to South or North.

  But time had taken its usual toll. People died, children grew up and went their ways, other events intervened. And soon, managing her late father’s plantation estate was an aging woman crippled by arthritis and often left alone by her husband’s U.S. Army duty assignments elsewhere.

  It was then that Robert E. Lee decided he had better take leave and stay home to help his wife, Mary Custis Lee, manage the inherited Arlington estate built by her late father, George Washington Parke Custis (the grandson of the widowed Martha Washington and her first husband, later adopted by Martha’s second husband, George Washington. With the death of Custis in 1857, the mantle of ownership had passed to only child Mary. The Lee children by then were scattered, with two sons serving in the Army like their father, and Robert E. Lee himself stationed far away at San Antonio, Texas.