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

by C. Brian Kelly

Once he heard of his father-in-law’s death, Lee—son of the famous Revolutionary War figure Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee—took official leave and hurried home. Once there he was shocked at the state of his wife’s health. As she herself had written to a friend, “I almost dread his seeing my crippled state.” She meant her difficulty in walking unassisted, the pain that kept her sleepless at night, her useless right arm and hand.

  Lee, a former superintendent of West Point, extended his leave indefinitely to become, in essence, a farmer.

  As he took over the reins at Arlington four years before the Civil War began, however, he still was able to accept spot duty with the Army headquartered in nearby Washington. (He crossed the river between—the Potomac—via the low-lying wooden span known as the “Long Bridge.”) His temporary duties usually involved dull service such as a seat on a court-martial, but a startling exception to that rule was the tumultuous and historic moment he spent in October 1859 quelling John Brown’s bloody raid at Harpers Ferry, upstream on the same Potomac that flowed so lazily below Arlington.

  For a time during this period, with Lee at home, the great columned house was busy once again with visitors of all kinds—relatives and friends. In the Federal city below, of course, the final debates over slavery and states’ rights, union versus disunion, were taking place among the solons of Congress and in the salons and saloons of the politically charged capital city.

  After three years at home, Lee finally had to return to Army duty, again posted to Texas. Alone again on the Arlington hillside above, Mary Custis Lee was not unaware of what transpired in the city below and in the country at large. With husband Robert gone, she was managing Arlington again, but also maintaining a wary vigil as the momentous events unfolded. And among them came the day, Monday, January 21, 1861, when five Southern Senate members, Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis among them, announced before a packed audience in the Senate galleries that their respective states had seceded. And with that, each gathered his papers from the schoolhouse desks on the chamber’s floor and departed.

  Not long after, in February, Mary Custis Lee wrote to daughter Mildred: “The papers are now filled with Mr. Lincoln’s arrival in Washington & this week will, I presume, decide our fate as a nation.” She would be slightly distracted from such momentous national events by the arrival of a son, wife, and grandson for a visit—son William Fitzhugh “Rooney” Lee, wife Charlotte, and “the Boy.”

  In the meantime, Texas at last seceded, and Lee was ordered home to Washington to report to the Army’s ranking officer, General Winfield Scott. Lee arrived at Arlington on March 1, and he very shortly faced a momentous personal decision.

  “When my husband was summoned to Washington,” his wife later wrote, “where every motive and argument was used to induce him to accept command of the Army destined to invade the South, he was enabled to resist them all, even the sad parting voice of his old Commander [Winfield Scott].”

  It was almost a week after the fall of Fort Sumter that, by authority of President Lincoln, Lee so famously was offered command of a Federal army charged with subduing the rebellious South. He declined, saying, “Though opposed to secession and deprecating war, I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States.”

  After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lee had been distraught in any case, quite unlike the excited, enthused crowds in Richmond. With the offer to command the Union Army and Virginia’s subsequent vote to secede, the heartfelt sadness at Arlington only deepened.

  The colonel went into nearby Alexandria on business the morning of April 19. He returned with a copy of the Alexandria Gazette reporting Virginia’s secession vote and handed it to his wife. He still held out faint hope—perhaps the report was in error. He knew, though, that it was not, and after their supper together he went alone to his upstairs bedroom. Below, Mary Custis Lee listened as he paced the floor above, then heard a mild thump as he fell to his knees in prayer. Below, she also prayed.

  Hours later, about midnight, he rejoined her. He showed her two letters he had written. In one he resigned his commission in the United States Army. In the other he expressed personal thoughts to General Scott. Later, his wife would write: “My husband has wept tears of blood over this terrible war, but as a man of honor and a Virginian, he must follow the destiny of his State.”

  Later still, she also would write: “It was the severest struggle of his life, to resign a commission he had held for 30 years.” More immediately, though, to daughter Mildred again, Mary Custis Lee wrote of her “sad heavy heart” and said: “As I think both parties are wrong in this fratricidal war, there is nothing comforting even in the hope that God may prosper the right, for I see no right in the matter.”

  The following April Sunday was the last day and night that Robert E. Lee would spend at Arlington—for the rest of his life. Summoned to Richmond by Governor John Letcher of Virginia, he left by train out of Alexandria Monday morning. He would not see his wife for another fifteen months.

  They both knew at parting that their beloved Arlington estate would fall into Union hands as soon as the defenses were organized around Washington. Neither could remotely guess how quickly that would come or what the final outcome might be, but certainly neither had any idea that in the upheaval of war the grand old Custis home would be turned into a Union cemetery and later into a hallowed national burial ground, still crowned by those stately columns overlooking the Federal city.

  Spy with a Future

  THE BAND PLAYED “DIXIE,” AND THE STUDENTS HAULED THEIR WINDOW SHADES up and down as a homemade semaphore system sending messages to eager Confederate onlookers across the Potomac River. And what did their headmaster think of such nefarious goings-on in the middle of the nation’s—the Union’s—capital? Why, he put them up to it in the first place!

  No matter, indeed, to Thomas N. Conrad, headmaster of a boys’ school in town. No matter at all, safe to say, since he also allowed inflammatory, anti-Union speeches on that memorable school-graduation day in June of 1861. The same day he was arrested as prelude to being booted out of town, deported across the Potomac to the rebellious Southland beyond.

  It was not a great beginning, true, to a budding spy career—a Confederate spy operating in the same Federal city of Washington. But Conrad was not a man easily discouraged, even if he was a bit too flamboyant at times for his own good. Typically, he didn’t stay away from Washington for long. After a brief sojourn as a chaplain among “Jeb” Stuart’s cavalry troopers, Conrad made his arrangements with officials in Richmond and headed back for Washington. He made contact with foreign diplomats and escorted them to Richmond—a job that was somewhat risky but not too complicated.

  Conrad changed his appearance for this. He boasted a reshaped beard, a new hairstyle, and machine-made Northern boots instead of Southern handmades; he also chewed his tobacco Northern style rather than Southern. It wasn’t long before he was engaged in real espionage.

  As anyone watching would have noticed, he developed a habit of visiting the War Department around lunchtime. It seems he had cultivated a coterie of Southern sympathizers among the department clerks. His habit was to drop by their desks, and if they had gone to lunch and left important papers out on their desks, all the better.

  It is no surprise, then, that Headmaster and occasional Reverend Thomas Conrad was able to warn Richmond of Union General George McClellan’s Peninsular campaign in the spring of 1862 and of General Ambrose Burnside’s pending attack on Fredericksburg later the same year.

  Conrad would suffer his minor setbacks, sometimes barely eluding capture. Fortunately for him, he had “developed” a double agent on the staff of the Union counterespionage agency, and this man, one Edward Norton, warned Conrad in 1863 that he was under suspicion and about to be arrested again. After again unceremoniously leaving Washington—he had little time to pack—he spent the next few months maintaining a Confederate courier station in Boyd’s Landing, Virginia, about thirty-five miles south of Washington. Working for
the Confederate Secret Service, “he built a hut there and named it ‘Eagle’s Nest,’” reported Donald E. Markle in his book, Spies & Spymasters of the Civil War. “[At] this location he received communiques from agents in the North and with the assistance of two mounted couriers was able to have the information in Richmond within 24 hours.”

  Conrad did not always see things eye to eye with his superiors in Richmond. They once had to reject his proposal to assassinate the U.S. Army’s presiding general, the aging Winfield Scott. Another unfulfilled Conrad plot was to kidnap Abraham Lincoln on one of his trips from the White House to his summer quarters at the Soldiers’ Home on the outskirts of Washington. Oddly enough, just days after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Conrad was arrested because he looked so much like John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin. The head of the Union’s counterespionage service, Lafayette Baker, not only ordered Conrad released, but, with the Civil War over, shook his hand.

  And what does a successful Confederate spy do after the war is over? In Conrad’s case, it was a choice in keeping with his antebellum career: He eventually became a college president. And he married, to a woman named Minnie Ball. (Yes, as in the famous bullet of the Civil War, the so-called “Minié ball,” after its creator, Frenchman Claude Etienne Minié.)

  Swinging His Arms

  “TRIFLING IN RANKS,” READ THE FIRST CITATION CALLING FOR DEMERITS AGAINST the young West Point cadet. That was in 1857. So was, “Highly unmilitary & trifling conduct throwing stones on post.” And 1858 was hardly any better. February 1: “Unauthorized articles in ventilator.” March 8: “Cooking utensils in chimney.” April 3: “Hair out of uniform”—Mark that one! May 14: “Gazing about in ranks. “ And so on, until his graduation from the Military Academy in June of 1861—after the Civil War had begun with the firing on Fort Sumter and a few other clashes.

  As the demerits and behavior pattern might suggest, he graduated thirty-fourth in a class of thirty-four—dead last. And highest of all in total demerits earned.

  And for what further activities had he been cited in those years, beyond gazing about in ranks on May 14, 1858? Well, they found rubbish behind his tent one time. He had a bad four days in January of 1859: late to parade one day, to company formation for dinner another day, to supper itself that same day, and to breakfast still another January day.

  In February, just days later, he was officially chastised for laughing and talking at the wrong time and place, for throwing snowballs (again at the wrong time and place), and in March for throwing bread in the Mess Hall!

  Over the next few months they got him again and again: for boisterous noise in the sink (yes, sink), for idle laughing and talking, for defacing a wall with his pencil, for a room “grossly out of order, bed down & floor not swept.”

  Nor did his demeanor ever really improve, indication of his future pattern in life. He liked to do things his own way. He did not buckle easily before authority. He had bread, butter, potatoes, even plates, knives, and forks in his quarters one day in March 1860—the same day that his room was cited for being such a mess.

  On July 4 that year, not yet abashed, he was spotted swinging arms while marching from dinner. He now gave strong clues to the future man and soldier. February 3, 1861: “Long beard at inspection,” and March 10, 1861: “Long hair at insp.”

  He finished out his career at the Point with once more throwing snowballs (in a rare April snowstorm), sitting at a window in shirtsleeves “with feet on sill, wearing an unofficial ornament on his coat,” packing too much “furniture” in his tent, and finally, twice more swinging his arms while on march.

  Upon his graduation from West Point, the Civil War interceded just in time for him to avoid a court-martial for a minor offense. He was able to report for duty one July morning and fight the Battle of Bull Run later the same day. A lieutenant to start with, he was a brigadier general of volunteers two years later at age twenty-three.

  He finished the war at U. S. Grant’s side at Appomattox with the temporary rank of major general—and a name that already was legend, at least in the North. As a reward, Phil Sheridan presented this bright young officer with the small pine table that was at Grant’s side for the historic surrender ceremony in the Wilmer McLean home at Appomattox.

  An old West Point chum was at Appomattox, too—the Confederate Fitzhugh Lee. They embraced, then fell on the ground and “rassled.” Just like the old days.

  Earlier in the war, things weren’t quite so amicable between this young soldier and the Confederates. Daring, flamboyance, and something more—a real cruel streak—all contributed to his meteoric reputation.

  Daring? At Bull Run he was cited for bravery. In the Peninsular campaign not quite a year later, “Little Mac” McClellan was looking for a place to ford the Chickahominy River east of Richmond. With the Rebels thick on the far side, anyone testing the river’s depth would be a tempting target. Our West Pointer plunged into the water and pushed slowly across. McClellan was so impressed he promoted the young man to captain and made him a staff aide.

  That summer came a battle at White Oak swamp in which the young man killed an enemy officer by chasing him down on horseback, shouting for him to surrender, then shooting him in the back when the Reb continued riding on instead. The West Pointer later came across the victim’s riderless horse. He decided to keep it and the saddle—”a splendid one, covered with black morocco and ornamented with silver nails.” He also garnered a handsome double-edged sword from his unknown Confederate victim.

  It was possibly his first “kill,” said biographer Evan S. Connell, and possibly he didn’t even think of the horse, sword, and handsome saddle at the outset. But George Armstrong Custer did write his sister Lydia Ann, “I selected him as my game.”

  A “Bear” Installed

  FOR AN INTERVAL AFTER THE FIRING ON FORT SUMTER, A VAST, AS YET uncommitted never-never-land stood between the two nations of North and South: Virginia. More populous than any state in the newly formed Confederacy, it was also more heavily populated than all but four states in the Union.

  Extending westward as far as Wheeling in today’s West Virginia—425 miles from Atlantic beaches to western mountains—Virginia would be a latecomer to Confederate ranks. She did not secede until late April of 1861, months after the core states of the Confederacy had formed their new government. Even then, Virginia did not rush pell-mell into Confederate arms. While there was much sentiment in favor of such action, many arrangements had to be made before it would happen.

  Two men who arrived in Richmond in civilian dress were key figures in the scenario that would play out. Traveling from the North by train, hiring a room at the Spotswood Hotel, and then taking his supper before visiting Governor John Letcher on Monday, April 22, Robert E. Lee, late of the U.S. Army, was asked by the governor if he would accept the Virginia Convention’s offer to command the commonwealth’s naval and land forces.

  Yes, he would, and on the morning of April 23 he began his new military career in a temporary office not even staffed by a clerk. His General Order No. 1 announced that he was assuming the Virginia command as a major general.

  The second man who appeared at the state capitol in mufti, with fateful impact to follow, was the new Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander H. Stephens. He had come to seek—and negotiate—Virginia’s alliance with the rebellious South. In the event of such an alliance, Virginia’s military fortunes would, of course, be determined by a higher command—the Confederacy’s.

  Secession fever had certainly gripped eastern and central Virginia since Sumter, especially after Abraham Lincoln’s subsequent call for seventy-five thousand volunteer troops from loyal states to help stamp out the rebellion. Before long Virginia had not only joined the Confederacy, but had invited the government led by Jefferson Davis to sit in Richmond rather than Montgomery, Alabama. The invitation was promptly accepted, although this meant the capital of the new nation would be much closer to Washington and more vulnerable to possible invas
ion from the North.

  It was Robert E. Lee’s job to organize his beloved Virginia’s defenses against possible assault from any direction. To the east, likely invasion routes for the Union were the Chesapeake Bay and major river highways inland such as the James, the York, and the Rappahannock. To the north were the Potomac and Union territory contiguous with Virginia’s borderline. To the west was a vast mountainous land peopled largely by Union loyalists. Only the vista south from Richmond posed no worry for the new commander.

  He began his new work with largely untrained, inexperienced militia at his disposal, few arms, a mere handful of veteran officers and virtually no navy. In just eight weeks, however, Lee had organized a Virginia army of forty thousand or so, found forty-six thousand small arms for his men, and brought in cadets from the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) to drill and train many of the new recruits.

  He did not accomplish his feat with consistently cheerful mien, it seems. “It was an open secret,” wrote one confidant later, “that when he was organizing Virginia’s forces at the beginning of the war he was regarded by the militia and other colonels who brought their regiments to Richmond as a sort of ‘bear’ that when aroused should be avoided by wise people.”

  A good soldier, an honorable man, and soon to be recognized as the South’s great, kindly, and symbolic leader of leaders, Robert E. Lee did not yet look like the legendary figure we all know today. He as yet had no grandfatherly white beard flowing down from chin and cheeks. Only a dark mustache adorned his face in early 1861.

  Certainly, he had much on his mind that might excuse an occasional show of temper. The Union military apparatus, after all, sprawled out from Washington, held the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay, and was entrenched (even after losing Norfolk) at Fort Monroe in a key corner of the Hampton Roads harbor complex, while also crowding Virginia at every foot of its northern and western borderlines. “The war may last 10 years,” Lee wrote to his wife before the end of April.