Here was an echo of another sad moment, a year and a half earlier. Stuart’s five-year-old daughter had fallen ill. Busy with his war duties, he could not go to her side in Lynchburg, Virginia. “I shall have to leave my child in the hands of God,” he said. “My duty requires me here.” He of course wept when told little Flora had died.
Now Stuart himself was dying. As he applied ice to the wound with his own hand, he said he was resigned to his death. Close to the end, Stuart stated some last-minute bequests. He gave his horses out to his staff, stipulating that the largest horse should go to a large man among his beneficiaries. He said his sword should go to his one surviving son. For Mrs. Robert E. Lee, there were Stuart’s own golden spurs, a symbol of his affection and respect for her husband, Stuart’s commander.
Stuart asked the minister to lead in the singing of a hymn, with Stuart himself weakly joining in. He also took part in a prayer.
Earlier, his delirium had provoked memories of battle and command, old orders and new, imaginary ones. Now, at the end, all was so much more simple and peaceful. “I am going fast now: I am resigned,” he said. “God’s will be done.”
His wife arrived about ninety minutes after he had passed.
In the church service that followed, fellow generals were among the pallbearers who carried his remains to the altar, while President Davis and many other luminaries of the Confederacy looked on from quiet pews. Stuart’s remains then were borne to the waiting grave at Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery in a hearse decorated by black plumes and drawn by four milky-white horses.
On another unfortunate day for the South, the general’s aide, Sergeant George Tucker, had to wonder why they were riding slowly, somewhat aimlessly it seemed, so close to the bluecoats who had broken through the Rebel lines at Petersburg on Sunday, April 2, 1865. A few minutes earlier, Robert E. Lee had also wondered about the condition (mental and physical) of his devoted subordinate, Ambrose Powell Hill.
For months, A. P. Hill, the victim of venereal disease picked up in a wayward moment of his youth, had been showing the effects of the long-term illness. The West Point graduate, one of Lee’s greatest lieutenants, had had to relinquish command of his army corps for a time during the great slugging matches of 1864: the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor. He rode his horse in great pain and hobbled when he walked. While just about everyone in Lee’s command suffered from the hardships of deprivation and fatigue, in A. P. Hill’s case diseases of the prostate and the kidneys were also taking their toll.
When he painfully mounted his steed Champ that morning, wrote James I. Robertson Jr. in his biography General A. P. Hill: The Story of a Confederate Warrior, Lee had been “disturbed” by the “sudden and unexpected fire” he saw in Hill “after weeks of sickness.” He sent an aide after Hill to tell him to be careful.
But he wasn’t. When he and Sergeant Tucker a short while later saw a large cluster of men next to some huts abandoned by the Confederates defending Petersburg, Tucker asked whose men they were. “The enemy’s,” said Hill matter-of-factly.
He seemed in a daze, perhaps induced by uremic poisoning.
As they rode on, skirting the danger zone, the worried Tucker interrupted again. “Please excuse me, General, but where are we going?”
Hill informed him they were going to General Henry Heth’s headquarters. They rode on, the countryside seemingly empty again. Hill “suddenly spoke up,” adds Robertson’s account. “Sergeant,” he said, “should anything happen to me, you must go back to General Lee and report it.”
In moments they came across more Federals and turned aside toward some screening woods, both with their revolvers in hand. In the woods, though, were a half dozen more Union soldiers. “Suddenly two of them ran behind a large tree.” They aimed their muskets at Tucker and Hill. Not twenty yards lay between the two parties. Tucker called upon the two Federals to surrender. So did Hill.
Silence.
Then shots. Private Daniel Wolford of the 138th Pennsylvania missed. Corporal John W. Mauck, a carpenter in civilian life, did not. Struck in the heart, Hill “died instantly.”
Tucker found Lee a short while later, astride his own horse on Cox Road, “handsomely dressed, sword buckled to his waist.” As the sergeant made his sad report, Lee could not hide his sorrowful reaction. Indeed, an aide later said, “Never shall I forget the look on General Lee’s face.” With tears in his eyes, Lee said, “He is now at rest, and we who are left are the ones to suffer.”
As Robertson also pointed out, it was only hours later that Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia abandoned Petersburg and “began its death march to Appomattox.”
The army left chaos in its wake. Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, also fell that day. The city was engulfed in fire, and thousands fled the doomed city, their exodus a one-way tide across the James River bridges. Against this flow some hours after A. P. Hill’s death, a ramshackle Army wagon carrying his body struggled to enter the city. “The family wish was to bury Hill in Hollywood Cemetery, the capital’s ‘Place of Heroes,’” wrote Robertson. But they were to be frustrated since “every road leading out of town was packed with soldiers, civilians, wagons, carriages and horses.” Only the wagon carrying Hill’s remains was pointed toward the city.
Family members—a pair of cousins—tried again about 1:00 a.m. on April 3. Finally succeeding in crossing the river, they found “the downtown stores were deserted and in shambles as a result of widespread looting.” They needed a coffin, and after searching “from building to building,” they came across “a small plain pine coffin” in a funeral home. They washed Hill’s face, wrapped him in his Army coat, and placed him in the pine box. With no one available to arrange burial at Hollywood and Union troops expected to march into town at any moment, the two cousins carried their burden back to the Chesterfield County estate of A. P. Hill’s uncle, Henry Hill. During an illness-imposed furlough only two weeks earlier, Hill and his wife, Dolly (the former Kitty Morgan, sister of John Hunt Morgan), had stayed there. Now this would be the slain general’s burial place, at least for the time being. His body later was re-interred at Hollywood, then—and finally—beneath a monument erected in his memory in Richmond.
Prophetically, reported biographer Robertson, the forty-eight-year-old Hill had said while on a visit to Richmond with his uncle Henry in March, just the month earlier, “that he did not wish to survive the fall of Richmond.” And he didn’t.
Embarrassing Outing
WHEN MRS. LINCOLN WAS ON ONE OF HER JEALOUS STREAKS THERE WAS HARDLY any way to hide the embarrassing fact. On one occasion when a general’s wife was given special permission by the president himself to remain at a Union encampment near Petersburg, Mrs. Lincoln was beside herself when she heard of it.
“What do you mean by that, sir?” she expostulated. “Do you mean to say that she saw the President alone? Do you know that I never allow the President to see any woman alone?”
General Adam Badeau probably didn’t know. On the scene as an aide to Ulysses S. Grant and escorting officer for Mrs. Lincoln and Julia Grant as they visited the troops outside Petersburg just before the war’s end, he was taken aback at the outburst, never suspecting that even worse was yet to come.
“I tried to pacify her and palliate my remark [about the special permission], but she was fairly boiling over with rage,” he wrote later.
It was only with great difficulty that Julia Grant persuaded Mrs. Lincoln against stopping their carriage to go ask her husband if he had been alone with the woman in question.
The next day, the visit to the Union encampments at City Point, (Hopewell, Virginia, today), with Grant himself showing Lincoln the sights, ran aground on even more vicious shoals of jealousy. The fit began when Mrs. Lincoln, again in her carriage, saw that another general’s wife, Mrs. Edward Ord, was mounted on a horse and riding next to Lincoln himself. That was only polite since she was the wife of the commander of the Army of the James—and the ambulance carrying the ladies was full i
n any case.
Mrs. Lincoln soon reacted. Again the raconteur is General Badeau, whose account some historians consider rather embellished.
“What does the woman [Mrs. Ord] mean,” cried Mary Todd Lincoln, “by riding by the side of the President and ahead of me? Does she suppose that he wants her by the side of him?”
That was only the beginning, and this time Julia Grant was unable to pacify the president’s wife, who in moments turned her wrath against even Julia herself. Badeau and another escorting officer were concerned “to see that nothing worse than words occurred.” For one thing, they were afraid that Mrs. Lincoln would leap from her carriage “and shout to the cavalcade,” she was so agitated.
It was at this point, apparently, that she angrily said to Julia Grant, “I suppose you think you’ll get to the White House yourself, don’t you?” Julia Grant maintained her calm and merely replied that she was quite satisfied with her present position; it was far greater than she had ever expected to attain.
Mrs. Lincoln wouldn’t let the matter go. “Oh!” she declared. “You had better take it if you can get it. ‘Tis very nice.”
Four years later, Julia and Ulysses Grant indeed would occupy the White House, although one has to wonder how many people seriously thought that a likely prospect before Lincoln’s death. In any case, having dispensed with Julia Grant for the moment, Mary Todd now turned her blazing light once more on the unfortunate Mrs. Ord.
Stumbling into the fray just then was Secretary of State William Seward’s young nephew, a major in the Union Army. He rode up to the ladies’ ambulance-carriage to exchange pleasantries, only to say exactly the wrong thing considering the circumstances. “The President’s horse is very gallant, Mrs. Lincoln,” he began. “He insists on riding by the side of Mrs. Ord.”
When Mrs. Lincoln reacted by crying out, “What do you mean by that, sir?” related the onlooking General Badeau later, “Seward discovered that he had made a huge mistake, and his horse at once developed a peculiarity that compelled him to ride behind, to get out of the way of the storm.”
Before the day’s unhappy episode was over, Mrs. Ord herself innocently approached Mrs. Lincoln’s carriage. By General Badeau’s account, “Mrs. Lincoln positively insulted her, called her vile names in the presence of a crowd of officers, and asked what she meant by following up the President.”
The publicly branded Mrs. Ord was reduced to tears before one and all, “and everybody was shocked and horrified.” Mrs. Lincoln railed on, “‘til she was tired.”
That evening, still unappeased, Mrs. Lincoln was hostess at a dinner for the ranking officers on hand, including the Grants, General Grant’s staff, and General Ord. She took occasion at this gathering aboard the president’s steamer in the James River to “berate” General Ord “and urged that he should be removed,” once again creating an ugly scene. “He was unfit for his place,” she said, to say nothing of his wife. General Grant sat next to and defended his officer “bravely.”
Later in life, Julia Grant refuted much of Badeau’s gossipy report, but she and others did leave the impression that something unpleasant took place at City Point. From all reports of this and other scenes, it seems fair to say that Mrs. Lincoln’s husband had his burdens aside from the crushing weight of the Civil War itself.
Surviving to Serve Again
THE REMARKABLE THING ABOUT OHIO’S BATTLE-SCARRED COLONEL HAYES WAS not so much that one day soon he would secretly be sworn in as president while attending dinner one night at the White House of Ulysses S. Grant, but the added circumstance that on the Colonel’s staff was another young officer, William McKinley, also destined to serve one day as president. Still another future president, James A. Garfield—four Union officers in all—hailed from the state of Ohio.
The nation, unaware at the moment, came ever so close to doing without the future services of President Hayes. At South Mountain on the eve of Antietam in September 1862, he was badly wounded above the left elbow while leading a charge by elements of his 23rd Ohio. Although the injury was severe, he rose to his feet and urged his men onward until he finally became so weak and faint that he fell helplessly to the ground again. There, between the battle lines, he was trapped, possibly to be captured by the enemy or, worse, left to die of his wound.
Despite the Rebel fire, his men dashed forward and pulled him back to their own lines. Even so, it was possible that his arm would have to be amputated because of the damage from the musket ball. Fortunately, Rutherford B. Hayes was able to avoid that radical step—often fatal to the wounded of the Civil War era—and after recovering, he continued to serve.
Truly a war hero by any definition, Hayes, an attorney in civilian life, began his Civil War service as a major in the Ohio Volunteers. He ended the war as a brigadier general—and a member of Congress who had eschewed the safety of the legislative corridors to remain in uniform.
Before the shooting was over, he had survived several battles and four woundings. The first came in Virginia in a skirmish on May 10, 1862, a minor injury inflicted by an artillery shell—his right knee, he later said, was “scratched.”
After escaping the surgeon’s knife at South Mountain later in 1862, he was shot in the head and shoulder at Winchester, Virginia, in September 1864. He was able to rebound quickly enough to appear at nearby Cedar Creek a month later, there to have his horse shot out from under him and to suffer a wound in the ankle.
By that time Hayes had been nominated for Congress by fellow Ohio Republicans, and in the fall of 1864 he was elected to the seat. He had accepted nomination but declined to actually campaign, saying, “An officer fit for duty, who at this crisis would electioneer for a seat in Congress, ought to be scalped.”
Once elected, he stuck to his brave talk and refused to serve until leaving the Army in June 1865—after the shooting had stopped—as a brigadier. His political career then led to two terms as governor of Ohio and finally to election as president in the U.S. Centennial year of 1876—not by popular vote, but only by a last-minute switch in electoral votes that gave him an edge of one electoral vote over his opponent, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden.
In the controversy that followed, the Hayes election was disputed until confirmed by an official commission just two days before he was scheduled to succeed U. S. Grant on March 4, 1877. (During the nineteenth century, March 4 was the traditional inaugural date for incoming U.S. presidents.) In this particular and touchy year, the date fell on a Sunday. With the Sabbath considered no proper day for the inauguration of a president, it was decided to wait until Monday, March 5. That would leave the nation with no president, at least technically, for a day.
The final decision was to install Hayes as president twice in two days— secretly on Sunday at a White House dinner for the incoming president and publicly the next day at the usual inaugural ceremonies.
So it was that the distinguished guests proceeding from the East Room reception area in the White House to the State Dining Room that evening momentarily “lost” the leading luminaries of their number—Grant and Hayes. Those two, it seems, had ducked into the Red Room, where Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite quietly and quickly administered the oath of office to Rutherford B. Hayes—without benefit of the customary Bible, since that item had been overlooked by all those present.
Thus, the president who sat down to a twenty-course dinner in the State Dining Room a few minutes later was not Grant, as the general public would have thought, but Hayes—who was sworn in public, with all the usual trappings, the very next day.
The new president was neither the first nor the last of the six Union officers who eventually occupied the White House in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Grant was the first. Succeeding Hayes was fellow Ohioan James A. Garfield, who had also fought well during the Civil War and had reached the rank of major general.
Garfield’s best-known Civil War feat was his return to the scene of battle at Chickamauga after his superior, General William Rosecrans, retreated in dis
order. Some critics said that Garfield used that occasion to undercut his commanding officer and point to his own battlefield prowess. Be that as it may, Garfield, like Hayes, had been elected to Congress during the war but chose to remain in uniform at least until after Chickamauga, which took place in September 1863.
Coming along a bit after Garfield, President Benjamin Harrison had been an officer with the 7th Indiana Volunteers. His outfit took part in Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, among other activities, and Harrison left the Union Army as a brigadier general in 1865. He became a U.S. senator before reaching the presidency.
After Harrison came William McKinley in 1897, the once-young officer who had joined Hayes’s staff at Antietam. Originally a private in the 23rd Ohio Volunteers, he had reached the post of commissary sergeant by the time he and his unit appeared at Antietam. He won promotion there to lieutenant and assumed command of the 23rd’s Company D, serving until war’s end and leaving the conflict as a major who had earned his decorations. He was only twenty-two at the time.
Finally, Chester Arthur, the vice president who succeeded popular White House occupant Garfield, held a desk job during the Civil War in the quartermaster corps of his state, New York.
Grover Cleveland was yet another Civil War–era president. Drafted for the Union Army just as he plunged into law as his lifetime vocation, he paid another man (quite legal at the time) to serve in his place.
As fate would have it, two of the men who survived combat during the Civil War and became president died in office at the wrong end of a gun. Both Garfield and McKinley were fatally wounded by gun-wielding assassins.
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 30