The march had originally begun in Atlanta, as Sherman’s subordinate Major General Henry W. Slocum later recalled: “We were dependent upon the country for our supplies of food and forage, and every one not connected with the army was a source of weakness to us.” And so, “on several occasions… we had been compelled to drive thousands of colored people back, not from lack of sympathy with them, but simply as a matter of safety to the army. The refugee-train following in the rear of the army was one of the most singular features of the march.”
Somehow, by underground communication all their own, slaves and former slaves, escapees, blacks of all stations in life—Southern life—for miles and miles in advance knew the Union column was on its way. “It was natural,” wrote Slocum, “that these poor creatures, seeking a place of safety, should flee to the army, and endeavor to keep in sight of it. Every day, as we marched on we could see, on each side of our line of march, crowds of these people coming to us through roads and across the fields, bringing with them all their earthly goods, and many goods which were not theirs. Horses, mules, cows, dogs, old family carriages, carts, and whatever they thought might be of use to them were seized upon and brought to us.”
Allowing the black refugees to follow behind the blue-clad line, the Union troops found “at times they were almost equal in numbers to the army they were following.” And so, the two columns moved on—the soldiers in front, their liberated followers close behind. “Old stages, family carriages, carts and lumber wagons filled with bedding, cooking-utensils and ‘traps’ of all kinds, with men, women, and children loaded with bundles, made up the balance of the refugee-train which followed in our rear.” And where they all wound up, only their scattered descendants of today may know.
Not so fortunate was a runaway slave named Jake from A. M. Reed’s Mulberry Grove plantation below Jacksonville, Florida. When a group of Reed’s slaves organized a mass escape in hopes of fleeing to nearby Union forces, one of them was shot in the legs and the exodus was halted in its tracks. Two of the men did manage to flee, however, and slaveowner Reed himself made note of the event in a diary: “About 12 p.m. found my negroes preparing to leave. In the melee, Jake and Dave escaped carrying off my boat, the Laura Shaw.”
The two escapees reached friendly Northern shelter in the form of a gunboat, and two days later the Yankees steamed up to Reed’s wharf with the runaway Jake, “to get his family and things,” wrote Reed in an added diary entry. Unfortunately, after the mass escape attempt Reed had acted promptly and began moving his slaves into the “interior,” far from Yankee gunboats and soldiers. Jake’s wife, Etta, was among them.
A bitter Jake could only leave again with his newfound friends, going with them to federally held Jacksonville. When the Yankees temporarily pulled out of Jacksonville that fall of 1862, Jake was among the 276 blacks who went with them for protection. After a second occupation and evacuation by the Federals, Jacksonville again fell to the Union in March 1863—to the all-black First South Carolina Volunteers (many of its soldiers runaways from North Florida), without a shot being fired.
According to History Professor Daniel L. Schafer of the University of North Florida, most of the five hundred civilians living in Jacksonville at the time were whites “who regarded this third occupation by their former slaves to be the ‘last crowning humiliation’ in their wartime experience.” As one result, even the “ladies of the town” insulted and cursed the black soldiers.
Among others, Jake was back, and he wasted no time in searching for planter-banker A. M. Reed, openly “threatening to take vengeance on him.” According to Reed’s daughter Hattie, Jake hoped “to meet Pa face to face to teach him what it is to part man and wife.” Frightened now, Reed wouldn’t stay alone at night at his plantation. Hattie reported, “We are moving away as many things as possible.”
The “bold soldier boy,” as she sneeringly called Jake, was known to have put a gun to the head of one man who had helped thwart the mass escape of Reed’s slaves months earlier, said historian Schafer in the book Civil War Times in St. Augustine. Now, poor embittered Jake went too far: After threatening to burn down Reed’s home, “he was arrested and confined for the duration of the Union occupation.” As for his unfortunate wife, Etta had been sold to new owners “somewhere in Georgia.”
Gettysburg Facts, Stats
WHERE MORE THAN THIRTEEN HUNDRED MEMORIALS AND COMMEMORATIVE markers now stand in one central area, the Union fielded 246 infantry regiments for the famous Battle of Gettysburg, along with thirty-eight cavalry regiments and sixty-eight artillery batteries. Drawn up in opposition on the Confederate side were 167 infantry regiments (plus two small batteries), twenty-eight cavalry regiments (and again a battalion), and sixty-seven artillery batteries.
The Union men came from units representing eighteen states, including Maryland, in addition to the ranks of the Nation’s Regular Army. The Confederate units hailed from twelve states, again including Maryland, whose people were divided in their loyalties.
Accessible to visitors today is a federally owned and maintained national park of 3,874 acres, including the twenty-two-acre national cemetery that Abe Lincoln dedicated with a short speech only a few months after the battle took place. For it, of course, was here that he delivered the Gettysburg Address.
Also heavily trodden—and bloodied, too—during the three-day battle of July 1863 were twelve thousand adjoining acres. Next door to the military park and cemetery is the Eisenhower National Historic Site, the farm to which “Ike” (also of military and battle fame) retired after his twentieth-century presidency.
Thirty miles of paved roads wind through the park among the thirteen hundred–plus markers and memorials, past dozens of Civil War cannons and forty-five historic structures predating the battle. At one end, also maintained by the National Park Service as a “living history” project, is John Slyder’s “Granite Farm” of Civil War vintage.
After Lincoln’s dedicatory remarks in November of 1863, the new national cemetery was available for the reburial of Union men who had fallen in the battle itself. Nearly thirty-six hundred bodies from the battlefields were reinterred in sections set aside by states (with space for the Regular Army men and 979 “unknowns” as well). By far the most “populous” state section in the cemetery holding those early burials was New York’s, with 867 bodies reburied. The smallest such grouping was that of Abe Lincoln’s home state, Illinois, with only six bodies dug up and reinterred.
From its Confederate Avenue to the many Confederate monuments scattered about, the battlefield park also includes tributes to the Confederacy. “Alabamians!” says one of the Confederate memorials, “Your names are inscribed on fame’s immortal scroll.”
Union General Samuel W. Crawford, who had begun the war as an army surgeon posted at Fort Sumter, contributed to the great memorial park by purchasing the terrain where his men of the Pennsylvania Reserves had fought in defense of the Round Top. He held and preserved that ground until it could become a part of the magnificent park that developed adjacent to the original national cemetery.
It was a Pennsylvania outfit, incidentally, the 56th Infantry Regiment, that fired the first volley against Robert E. Lee’s invaders from the South in the opening engagement of the battle, July 1, 1863. So extensive was the aftermath over the next three days that Union men later retrieved nearly twenty-five thousand firearms left on the battleground, plus more than ten thousand abandoned bayonets and 350 sabers.
Still another statistic explains why the nine-hundred-man 151st Pennsylvania Infantry was called the “Schoolteacher Regiment”—113 of those nine hundred had been schoolteachers before the onset of the war.
Pickett’s ill-fated charge on the third day virtually ended the Battle of Gettysburg, with absolutely dismaying, sad loss of life and widespread bodily mayhem even among the living. One wounded general, Lewis Armistead, a brigade commander under Pickett, did not die of his injuries. His death was attributed to just plain exhaustion.
L
ee Family Saga, Continued
LYING ABED FROM HIS BATTLE WOUNDS WAS WILLIAM HENRY FITZHUGH LEE, second son of Robert E. Lee. In two years of wartime service, “Rooney” Lee, a Harvard graduate in his mid-twenties, had accumulated an impressive list of battle stars. He had led the 9th Virginia Cavalry during “Jeb” Stuart’s famous “ride around McClellan” on the Virginia Peninsula between the York and James Rivers. Rooney had served in the Seven Days battles of 1862 that were a part of the Peninsular campaign; he was at Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg, followed by Chancellorsville. Then, in June of 1863, he was wounded at the great cavalry battle known as Brandy Station and was forced out of action for a time.
One day not long afterward, Union gunboats stole up the Pamunkey River, an offshoot of the York near West Point, Virginia. Rooney Lee was convalescing at his wife Charlotte’s family home—Hickory Hill in Hanover County. To the northwest, his famous father was on his way to destiny at a place called Gettysburg.
Disembarking at young Lee’s own White House plantation on the Pamunkey River June 25 were one thousand Union cavalrymen who quickly mounted up and rode for the Virginia Central Railroad bridge across the South Anna River, thirty miles from White House. Their raid resulted in the destruction of the bridge and the capture of 360 horses and mules, plus one hundred Johnny Rebs, with only eight Union casualties: overall, it was a success. The real goal, though, turned out to be Rooney Lee, who was surprised and captured at Charlotte Wickham Lee’s nearby Hickory Hill home.
Rooney was carried off on his mattress before the eyes of his remonstrating mother and his frail, pregnant wife. The Federal raiders also took his fatherin-law’s carriage and horses—used to convey the prized prisoner back to their own lines. He was taken to Fort Monroe, Virginia, a hostage held as counter to Confederate threats to execute two Union officers.
His capture was a blow to his arthritis-stricken mother and to his wife, Charlotte. It was decided that both women should seek the quiet solace of a spa in Hot Springs, Virginia. But with the elder Mrs. Lee confined to crutches and any travel subject to the vicissitudes of war, the journey to the western part of Virginia wouldn’t be easy. The solution arrived at was a slow train, with the women traveling in a freight car outfitted like a bedroom. The train traveled so slowly the ladies could leave the big sliding door open and enjoy the scenery passing them by.
At Hot Springs, however, Charlotte’s health didn’t improve, and so they moved on to nearby Warm Springs. There, Mrs. Lee Sr. wrote, they settled into “a delightful cottage with a portico all around, covered with beautiful vines & roses & looking upon a meadow full of haycocks & a clear stream running thro it & very near the bath…mountains all around.”
They had taken the cottage for a month, and soon Robert E. Lee’s wife was happy to hear that her prisoner-son Rooney was on his feet and beginning to use crutches as he continued to recover from his wounds. She wrote his sister Mildred that she hoped his prospects for exchange could be considered real, since Charlotte’s health was “very delicate.”
By October 1863—long after General Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg in July and with his son still held as a prisoner—the Lee ladies had returned to Richmond. There Mrs. Lee Sr. and her two daughters, Agnes and Mildred, moved into a small house on Leigh Street—too small, it is said, to accommodate Charlotte as well.
Rooney’s wife found quarters some distance away, and General Lee soon wrote that he was “sorry” the Leigh Street abode wasn’t large enough to include Charlotte. “It takes from me half the pleasure of your accommodation,” he wrote to his wife, Mary Custis Lee, “as I wish to think of you all together; and in her feeble condition and separation from her Fitzhugh, none can sympathize or attend to her as yourself.”
One comfort for the family during this period was the presence of eldest son George Washington Custis Lee, an 1854 West Point graduate serving as an aidede-camp to Confederate President (and fellow West Pointer) Jefferson Davis. Like many other deskbound soldiers, however, Custis was unhappy at being kept away from the battlefield by his posting in the capital. Diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that he earlier “offered himself to the Yankees in place of his brother, as he was a single man with no wife and children to be hurt by his imprisonment or made miserable by his danger.” The Yankees, though, “preferred Rooney.”
Soon came the Christmas season, and Rooney was still in captivity. Some onlookers, such as diarist Mary Chesnut, complained that Charlotte had been foolish to take Rooney so close to Union lines for his recuperation rather than to the comparative safety of Richmond. Still, all were saddened on her behalf to know she had lost the child she was carrying.
General Lee, meanwhile, was able to visit at the Leigh Street house for a short time, but Mary Lee was shocked by his appearance—his hair and beard had turned white. She also worried over the severe pain he occasionally suffered in his left side.
By now it was clear that the Lee family had lost the magnificent Arlington House. Under a Federal law passed by Congress the previous year, the government imposed real estate taxes on property in “insurrectionary districts.” It could—and would—confiscate said properties when the said taxes went unpaid. The added catch was that the taxes had to be paid in person by the property owner or owners.
In the case of Robert and Mary Lee, that was impossible. General Lee obviously couldn’t pass through the Federal lines outside Washington to pay the tax for his wife, rightful owner of the estate. Nor was she physically able to try passing through those lines herself, although she did consider the attempt. Instead a cousin went on her behalf and tried to pay the real estate tax levied on the Arlington property. Federal officers rejected the cousin, and the government then “legally” confiscated Arlington House, its grounds now destined to be a mass burial ground.
General Lee was able to repeat his Richmond visits almost until Christmas Day of 1863, but he returned to his troops for Christmas Day itself. Rooney was still a prisoner, not to be released until an exchange was finally arranged in March 1864. On the day after Christmas 1863, Charlotte Wickham Lee, not yet twenty-three, died.
Three Generals Named Winfield
TWO GENERALS NAMED WINFIELD SCOTT SIMULTANEOUSLY TOOK TO THE FIELD— on opposite sides—for at least two of the Civil War’s major campaigns. Neither one was “Ole Fuss and Feathers” himself. That one, the original Winfield Scott—Mexican War hero, general in chief of the U.S. Army, and the country’s military idol for the past two decades—was in his mid-seventies and too corpulent to mount his horse when the Civil War broke out. Not yet disposed to step aside entirely, he realized he was not physically able to lead in the field; thus, it was probably Winfield Scott’s idea to offer field command of the Union armies to his chief of staff and fellow Virginian, Robert E. Lee.
After Lee declined and remained loyal to his seceding native state, Scott remained on duty and directed Union forces from Washington until shortly after the embarrassing Union defeat at First Bull Run, virtually on the doorstep of the capital. With George “Little Mac” McClellan, then brought to the fore and reporting directly to President Lincoln, Scott saw his duty and retired—with full pay and rank.
Out in the field, two far younger men, both born in the 1820s and both named for the hero of the War of 1812 (even before his feats of the Mexican War in the 1840s), were leading their troops against each other’s forces. One of them, Confederate Winfield Scott Featherston, was at First Bull Run with his 17th Mississippi in the summer of 1861.
By spring of the following year, both Featherston and his Union counterpart, Winfield Scott Hancock, were commanding troops in the Peninsular campaign, George McClellan’s abortive drive against Richmond. Both brigadiers commanded brigades at the Battle of Williamsburg, where Hancock earned his first plaudits of the war by leading a vital flank attack against the Rebels.
Both men appeared at Fredericksburg in late 1862, with Hancock now leading a division. After that, their wartime careers took them on widely divergent paths.
Featherston also took part in the defense of Atlanta under Joseph E. Johnston’s overall command before serving under John Bell Hood as the latter moved into Tennessee for his sequential disasters at Franklin and Nashville. Not yet bowed, Featherston was with Johnston again in the final days in North Carolina, surrendering finally at Greensboro.
The war’s other Winfield Scott—Hancock, that is—carved out an illustrious career after commanding a Union division at Fredericksburg, a debacle for the North. As 2nd Corps commander, Hancock appeared at Chancellorsville and at Gettysburg in 1863. He then served as a major general under Ulysses S. Grant during Grant’s final drive on Richmond and Petersburg in 1864. Hancock led his troops at the high-casualty battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor.
His contribution at Spotsylvania was vital to Grant’s victory there, but his corps took significant losses at Cold Harbor. During the siege of Petersburg, Hancock was embarrassed at the minor clash known as Reams Station, where Confederate Generals A. P. Hill and Wade Hampton exacted twenty-four hundred casualties among the eight thousand in Hancock’s command.
Both of the Winfield Scotts serving in the field during the Civil War suffered combat wounds—the Confederate Featherston at Glendale during the Seven Days campaign outside Richmond in 1862, and Union officer Hancock at Gettysburg. Both also had political interests. Featherston, a Tennessee native and an attorney in Mississippi before the war, had served two terms in the U.S. House in the 1840s and 1850s. After the war, he served in the Mississippi legislature. He lived until 1891.
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 23