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

by C. Brian Kelly

  Rose O’Neal Greenhow reveled in rubbing elbows with antebellum Washington society, meeting high and mighty figures such as President James Buchanan and South Carolina’s famous John C. Calhoun. She would be a remarkable heroine of the war, too—as a spy for the Confederate cause. It was her information, quite likely, that alerted Southern forces to the approach of Union General Irvin McDowell at the time of First Bull Run in 1861, a significant Confederate victory.

  Rose Greenhow did not travel among the high and mighty of wartime Washington for very long. Once her spying activities came to light, she first was placed under house arrest, then was held in the Old Capitol Prison. Amazingly, she still sent out her information, and at last she was forced to leave town— deported South. Then, leaving her safe place among her compatriots of the Confederacy, the Maryland-born widow traveled to England and France in 1863 to win friends and influence Europeans on behalf of the South. She also published an account of her detention in Washington under the Lincoln administration called My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington.

  In 1864 she returned to her native land and met a tragic end off the coast of North Carolina. Her small boat was swamped as she tried to reach the shore during a storm that roiled the waters. Weighted down by a money belt filled with gold for her beloved Confederacy, she was drowned on the spot.

  Private Franklin Thompson of Company F, 2nd Michigan Infantry, born in Canada in 1841, would go down in history as the only female member of the postwar Union veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic. Startling, yes, but fitting, since Private “Franklin” was really a young woman in soldier’s uniform whose real name was Sarah Emma Edmonds. It seems she had worked on her father’s farm in boy’s clothes as a child, had run off from an “arranged” marriage, had sold Bibles in the United States under the name Franklin Thompson, and subsequently joined the Union army, at first serving as a field nurse.

  She then operated as a spy, passing through enemy lines in Virginia in both male and female guises, as both black and white. When she eventually contracted malaria, she deserted for fear of being exposed as a woman while ill. As a woman once more, she became a civilian nurse for a religious organization. After the war, she married—and shocked her old comrades of the 2nd Michigan by appearing at a reunion as herself, a woman. She joined the Grand Army and also successfully petitioned Congress to forgive her desertion by official action. Most amazing of all, perhaps, she now reported that at the Battle of Antietam she had buried a Union soldier who was a woman! Incidentally, in 1934 another woman’s remains were found in a common grave for nine soldiers killed at Shiloh, all Union.

  Louisa May Alcott, yet to write Little Women, spent time during the Civil War working as a nurse at a Georgetown hospital—the basis for her Hospital Sketches of 1863. Her first novel, Moods, would appear the next year, with her best-known work, Little Women, emerging soon after the war in 1868.

  The idea of Margaret Anna Parker Knobeloch won informal approval from the Union’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, usually an implacable enemy of anything Confederate. Please, proposed this Northern-born, Southern-raised woman, allow her to provide aid for Confederate prisoners held near her home in Philadelphia, the money to be provided by Southerners then living in Europe. Married to a German, John Knobeloch, who had returned home to avoid the Northern draft, Margaret could make the necessary funding arrangements through their European contacts. Stanton allowed her work to go forward in exactly that manner from 1862 through the end of the war. Margaret did her Good Samaritan work among the prisoners held at hospitals in Philadelphia, where she had been born, and at Fort Delaware nearby.

  This next woman’s dream began during the Civil War but would not reach fruition until a tragic anticlimax, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. As an apprentice to the famous sculptor Clark Mills, Vinnie Ream, not yet twenty, was determined some day to render Lincoln in stone. He agreed to sit for the young woman in late 1864. After he was killed a few months later on April 14, 1865, Vinnie Ream was among the artists who competed for the honor of producing a congressionally commissioned life-size, full-length statue of the martyred president. As the first woman ever given a congressional sculpting commission, she won the ten-thousand-dollar contract. Her work, completed in 1870, went into the Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol, where it still may be seen today.

  Harriet Tubman’s name before she escaped slavery in 1849 was Araminta. Once safe in the North, she could have stayed inactive. But even before the Civil War began, she repeatedly risked recapture to travel south and help guide other runaway slaves to freedom—possibly as many as three hundred, among them her own parents. When war erupted, she again could have remained inactive, her self-appointed duty largely done. But again risking her freedom, and even her life, she joined Union forces on the South Carolina coast as a cook, nurse, and laundress—and perhaps as a spy, too. She was well able, because of her black skin and knowledge of slave life, to operate behind the Confederate lines unsuspected of what she really was—an enemy of all that smacked of slavery.

  A female doctor of the nineteenth century, a suffragette, a divorcée, and a winner of the Medal of Honor, Mary Edwards Walker was thirty years old when the Civil War began. How could all that be? It seems that she graduated from a New York medical school in 1855, but soon found it difficult to build a practice as a recently divorced woman. Along came the Civil War and a post at the Patent Office Hospital in Washington as an army surgeon. But that was not enough for this young woman. She soon had arranged for a field post as an assistant surgeon in an Ohio regiment, the 52nd. She was captured while tending to civilians outside her unit’s encampment and was held prisoner in Richmond for four months. Exchanged, she returned to her Army duties, but no longer operated “in the field.”

  A few months after the war’s end, she was awarded the Medal of Honor for her wartime performance, and she became an active suffragette and reformer, traveling and lecturing, often in male clothing. She didn’t get along with her fellow reformers; she was later fired from a government job for insubordination and wound up making appearances in carnival sideshows. In 1917 Mary Edwards was told to return her Medal of Honor, in accord with new government policy stating that it could only be given for bravery in combat, rather than for meritorious service. She ignored the request, and when she died at eighty-seven, she still had her medal.

  Woman at the Lead

  WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE IN RESPECT TO THE BATTLE OF BRANDY STATION, Virginia (often noted as the largest cavalry engagement in American history), one more thing might be said of the hulking German horseman who fought on one side and of the dashing Frenchman who rode for the opposite side.

  Both officers had earned their epaulets in the armies of Europe. They were among the thousands of foreign-born immigrants (or passing visitors) who took sides for either the Union or the Confederacy. At the time they were among the handful of “furriners” who rose to high rank, created legends, or both.

  For instance, the Confederacy’s brave and esteemed General Patrick Cleburne was a product of County Cork, Ireland. Here was an immigrant who arrived on these shores as a young man and became one of the South’s most astute and beloved generals before he fell in battle at Franklin, Tennessee.

  At Brandy Station, much earlier, the German fighting for the Confederates was Major Johann August Heinrich Heros von Borcke, a staff officer and aide to “Jeb” Stuart of cavalry fame. Easily noticed, Borcke was once described by a Northern journalist as a “giant, mounted on a tremendous horse, and brandishing wildly over his head a sword as long and big as a fence rail.”

  The dashing Frenchman riding opposite the Prussian-born giant at Brandy Station was named Alfred Napoleon Alexander Duffie. A graduate of the St. Cyr military academy and a veteran of the Crimean War, “Nattie,” as friends and comrades called him, was at Brandy Station in command of a Union division.

  Among others, Prussian-born Carl Schurz was an immigrant and a Lincoln politic
al disciple appointed general. He was a division commander at both Second Bull Run in 1862 and at Gettysburg. He was in the lines opposite the Irish-born Cleburne at Chattanooga as well.

  Another German-born general with political clout was the less fortunate Franz Sigel, who sported an impressive array of battle stars, only to ruin it all by emerging the loser in the Battle of New Market despite the superior force he had wheeled up against the Rebels and their VMI cadets.

  Hungarian-born Julius Stahel began his adult life by rising from private to lieutenant in the Austrian army. He turned European revolutionary, then fled to America as a journalist and educator. Here he became, in time, a Union general, a veteran of both Bull Run battles, and winner of the Medal of Honor.

  Perhaps the most romantic of all the immigrant figures who appeared in the ranks of Civil War soldiers, however, was a Russian named Turchin. This, however, was not the Ivan Turchininoff who graduated from the Imperial Military School of St. Petersburg and served on the staff of future Czar Alexander II before renaming himself John Basil Turchin and emigrating to America to become the Union colonel notorious for allowing—indeed, encouraging—his men to sack and pillage Athens, Alabama.

  Not John Turchin, but rather his Russian-born wife. Mrs. Turchininoff— Turchin, that is—allegedly took command of her husband’s regiment for several days while he was ill, and may have led that same regiment in battle (minor though it was) one day in Tennessee. She is also credited with rushing to Washington, gaining entrance to the White House, and persuading Abe Lincoln to void the court-martial verdict against her husband for the rape of Athens—and even to promote him to brigadier general.

  Road to Gettysburg

  SEEN AND HEARD ON THE ROAD TO GETTYSBURG—AT THE POTOMAC RIVER on June 23, 1863, Colonel Abner Perrin of the 14th South Carolina Infantry Regiment: “I do not suppose that any army ever marched into an enemies’ [sic] country with greater confidence in its ability…and with more reasonable grounds for that confidence.” Likewise, British Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Freemantle, a friendly, self-appointed observer traveling with Robert E. Lee’s northbound columns, was moved to call the troops marching before him “a remarkably fine body of men…[who] looked quite seasoned and ready for any work.”

  The next day, on the Maryland side of the Potomac, a famous Confederate threesome gathered at Robert E. Lee’s tent for a conference: Lee himself and A. P. Hill and James Longstreet, his two corps commanders. In came a youngster named Leighton Parks, an acquaintance from Lee’s invasion of Maryland the previous year. The small boy appeared this time with a bucket of raspberries for Lee, who picked him up, kissed him, and invited him to stay for lunch. The child then took turns on the great commander’s knee, on Longstreet’s knee, and on a horse ordered forward by A. P. Hill.

  Soon after, Lee’s march northward resumed.

  Seen and heard on the road to Gettysburg as the Maryland countryside fell behind—British observer Freemantle on the Pennsylvania Dutch: “They are the most unpatriotic people I ever saw, and openly state that they don’t care which side wins, provided they are left alone. They abuse Lincoln tremendously.”

  Confederate division commander Dorsey Pender, in a letter to his wife on June 28: “I never saw troops march as ours do; they will go 15 or 20 miles a day without leaving a straggler and hoop and yell on all occasions.”

  Also seen and heard—Cincinnati Gazette reporter Whitelaw Reid wrote that the Union Army “had done surprisingly little damage to property along their route.” Breaking off the fruit-laden boughs of cherry trees was the army’s worst offense. But Yankee stragglers and drunks were another matter altogether. Approaching Gettysburg on July 1, the first day of the watershed battle, Reid found “drunken loafers in uniform” in every farmhouse. “They swarmed about the stables, stealing horses at every opportunity and compelling farmers to keep up a constant watch.” Further, “In the fence corners groups of them lay, too drunk to get on at all.”

  Back with the invading Confederate force, British observer Freemantle, on the other hand, was impressed by the lack of Rebel stragglers and the order from on high forbidding indiscriminate foraging in the enemy country. Even so, “in such a large army as this there must be many instances of bad characters, who are always ready to plunder and pillage whenever they can do so without being caught.” Stragglers left behind no doubt would do their harm, thought Freemantle. “It is impossible to prevent this,” he later wrote, “but every thing that can be done is done to protect private property and non-combatants, and I can say, from my own observation, with wonderful success.”

  At Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, he also noted, some Texans were ordered to break up a few barrels of whiskey “liberated” in or near the town. The order was a “pretty good trial for their discipline…[but] they did their duty like good soldiers.”

  Freemantle, like Pender, was impressed by the good marching order of the Rebel soldiery. As the Confederates closest to the Brit drew near Gettysburg on July 1, they heard firing ahead and began to see the wounded carried back from up front, stripped “nearly naked” and displaying “very bad wounds.” Even so, the men moving forward did not flinch.

  “This spectacle, so revolting to a person unaccustomed to such sights, produced no impression whatever upon the advancing troops, who certainly go under fire with the most perfect nonchalance,” wrote Freemantle. “They show no enthusiasm or excitement, but the most complete indifference. This is the effect of two years’ almost uninterrupted fighting.”

  Also on July 1, Northern reporter Reid reached the village of Taneytown, Maryland, just eighteen miles from Gettysburg. Here, he was clear at last of the stragglers and drunks seen earlier. Here, all was abustle. “Army trains blocked up the streets; a group of quartermasters and commissaries were bustling about the principal corner; across on the hills and along the road to the left, far as the eye could reach, rose the glitter from the swaying points of bayonets as with steady tramp the columns of our Second and Third Corps were marching northward.”

  Robert E. Lee, meanwhile, had learned on June 29 of George Meade’s ascension to command of the Union Army that was catching up to Lee’s own Confederate force. The distinguished Rebel commander saw that events were leading him to a small town to the east, just above the Maryland-Pennsylvania line. “Tomorrow, gentlemen,” he told a group of officers taking a walk with him, “we will not move to Harrisburg, as we expected, but will go over to Gettysburg and see what General Meade is after.”

  As for Meade’s possible actions: “General Meade will commit no blunder in my front, and if I make one he will make haste to take advantage of it.”

  For that matter, how did either of the two commanders drawing close to Gettysburg strike the unacquainted observer? Freemantle first met Lee the morning of June 30 and was most impressed. “General Lee is almost without exception the handsomest man of his age I ever saw. He is 56 years old, tall, broad-shouldered, very well made, well set-up—a thorough soldier in appearance; and his manners are most courteous and full of dignity. He is a perfect gentleman in every respect.”

  The Southern commander didn’t smoke, drink, chew tobacco, or swear. He usually wore a “high black hat,” along with his lengthy gray uniform jacket, blue trousers, and Wellington boots. Neat in dress, “in the most arduous marches he always looks smart and clean.”

  Whitelaw Reid, meanwhile, found Union commander Meade early on July 1 at a headquarters half a mile east of Taneytown (named for U.S. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the famous Dred Scott case). “In a plain little wall tent, just like the rest, pen in hand, seated on a campstool and bending over a map is the new ‘General Commanding’ of the Army of the Potomac,” wrote Reid later. Meade, the correspondent also noted, was a slender, dark-haired, bearded man of middle age, neither handsome nor graceful, “who impresses you rather as a thoughtful student than a dashing soldier.”

  While Reid was at Meade’s headquarters, another reporter, Lorenzo Crounze
of the New York Times, galloped up with news of a fight developing to the west, near Gettysburg. “Mount and spur for Gettysburg is, of course, the word,” wrote Reid later.

  A little earlier Robert E. Lee had heard the distant thunder of artillery. His advance elements obviously had found the enemy, but how many—how serious was the meeting? Lee hurried to Cashtown, just west of Gettysburg, to confer with his Third Corps commander, A. P. Hill, who looked pale and ill. He didn’t know much yet, and Lee rushed on blindly toward the sound of the guns, until he reached Dorsey Pender’s division, three miles outside of Gettysburg. From there, with open country lying before him, he could see the action ahead through his binoculars. The battle had been joined.

  Love Story

  HARRY AND BOB WERE PALS IN COLLEGE, AND NOW EACH WAS A SOLDIER. AND Bess Marl was the love of Harry’s life.

  And also the love of Bob’s life!

  Bess lived on a farm outside Gettysburg, where the two young men went to school. Before the war, Bob used to pay calls on pretty young Bess, but he didn’t always tell everybody back at the school. They might kid him too much.

  Harry was smitten, too. He kept up with the young woman’s family. He knew that her father and brothers had joined the Union Army once the war broke out. And so did he.

  Bob also joined the army—the Confederate Army.

  With the menfolk all scattered, Bess and her mother stayed at the farm outside Gettysburg.

  In early July of 1863, the war suddenly turned and came right at them—like a tornado touching down, with their farm in its path. That July 1 a young Confederate officer on horseback emerged from a thicket outside Gettysburg, dismounted, and climbed to the top of a rise to scan the terrain ahead with his field glasses. It was Bob.