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

by C. Brian Kelly

  His son Henry, a congressman from Illinois, later authored the bill that authorized the Federal government’s fifty-thousand-dollar purchase of the Osborn Hamilton Ingham Oldroyd collection of Lincolnia destined to become the nucleus of the Lincoln museum at the restored Ford’s Theatre in Washington.

  Incidentally, Oldroyd was such a dedicated collector of Lincoln memorabilia that he once rented Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois, for ten years, married a woman from Springfield, became custodian of the same home when it was acquired as a historical site by the state of Illinois, and then somehow arranged to move his collection—and himself—into the Peterson House in Washington where Lincoln died and Rathbone fainted from loss of blood.

  After slowly riding his horse, Traveller, home to Richmond and to the house on Franklin Street where Mary Custis Lee awaited him, Robert E. Lee had a few days to think. He then wrote to a friend, “I am looking for some little, quiet home in the woods, where I can procure shelter and my daily bread….I wish to get Mrs. Lee out of the city as soon as practicable.”

  The city was ruined and occupied by Federal troops. Mrs. Lee herself had made note that it was a dreary place. “Gen’l Lee,” she wrote to cousin Mary Meade on April 23, “is very busy settling up his army matters & then we shall all probably go to some of those empty places in the vicinity of the White House [their son “Rooney’s” plantation on the Pamunkey River, which had been turned into a Union supply depot early in the war].”

  Richmond, she said, “is an utter scene of desolation.”

  There had been excitement when Lee first appeared, approaching the city on his horse with an escort of five companions a few days after the surrender at Appomattox. He had hoped to slip into town without fanfare, but people spotted the familiar figure, and news of his return flew ahead of the slow-moving party. By the time he reached the borrowed house on Franklin Street, a crowd had gathered. People cheered and waved handkerchiefs, pushing forward in hopes of shaking the great man’s hand.

  He mounted the front steps of the row house, turned to salute his wellwishers with a tip of the hat, then went inside to greet his invalid wife and other family members.

  The Robert E. Lee who came home to his wife that April day was the same highly principled man she had known before, always calm and supportive, but quieter than ever. And he was worn, both emotionally and physically. Neither one’s health was what it once was. She was now an invalid confined to a chair; he had heart problems dating back at least to the weeks before Gettysburg. Then he had been fifty-six; now he was only fifty-eight.

  They couldn’t go home to their Arlington House, which had been seized by the government and turned into a cemetery by then. They didn’t want to stay in Richmond, and Lee thought he should set an example for his compatriots in defeat by finding work and beginning a new life.

  A savior now stepped forward. Mrs. Elizabeth Randolph Cocke offered refuge in a small cottage on her Derwent estate in Powhatan County, a short drive today from Richmond. The Lees were glad to accept and escape the torn capital city. They traveled together by slow canal boat in early June. Their packet left one evening and arrived at dawn the next day, putting in at Pemberton Landing on the James River canal system above Richmond.

  Their eldest son, Custis, had ridden the faithful Traveller out from the city. He and the son of their patron, Captain Randolph Cocke, were waiting to greet the Lees as they arrived—just in time for breakfast at Mrs. Cocke’s nearby home of Oakland. They stayed there a full week, then moved into the fourroom cottage, accompanied by daughters Agnes and Mildred.

  In the wake of her final weeks in war-battered Richmond, Mrs. Lee wrote that she and her family now encountered “a quiet so profound that I could even number the acorns falling from the splendid oaks that overshadowed the cottage.”

  As Lee rebuilt his strength at Derwent, all kinds of offers came to him. He was less a defeated general than the general of a defeated South. Said one daughter: “They are offering my Father everything but the thing he will accept; a place to earn honest bread while engaged in some useful work.”

  One useful work that Lee heartily endorsed was education, and it was at Derwent that he received the offer to come to Lexington, Virginia, as president of Washington College, for an annual salary of fifteen hundred dollars and housing in the President’s House—on the campus of today’s Washington and Lee University. Lee accepted, arriving to take his place as head of the small school on the afternoon of September 18.

  Wrote a student: “I went to the window and saw riding by on his old warhorse Traveller the great soldier. Slowly he passed, raising his brown slouch hat to those on the pavement who recognized him, and not appearing conscious that he more than anybody else was the center of attention.”

  Not only that, he wore a military coat, but with all signs of rank, even the military buttons, removed. “He doubtless would have laid it aside altogether, but it was the only one he had, and he was too poor to buy another.”

  Mrs. Lee waited until the campus residence was ready later that fall, then made the journey to Lexington by canal boat again, a trip that took several days. Lee greeted her while seated on Traveller, and at her new home their youngest son, Robert, carried the invalid Mary Custis Lee up the stairs to her room—the only room in the house completely furnished. The furniture had been made by a one-armed Confederate veteran of the Civil War.

  Both Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson called upon another legendary Confederate general on their respective deathbeds. That man was A. P. Hill. Not only did Jackson call for Hill as he died in 1863, so did Lee years later—in 1870—in his home on the campus of Washington College. Fading now, Lee said: “Tell Hill he must come up.” And then those famous, final words that Lee uttered as, like so many others before him, he passed: “Strike the tent.”

  An Arlington Postmortem

  Final Visit to the Old Homestead

  STOOPED AND GNARLED BY ARTHRITIS, THE AGING WOMAN STOPPING BY THE OLD estate could see it never would be the same again. They could restore shrubs, trees, lawns and drives all they wanted, but it still could never be the home she and the “Gen’l” once had known so well.

  “It was so changed,” she later wrote, “it seemed but as a dream of the past—I could not have realized that it was Arlington but for the few old oaks they had spared and the trees planted on the lawn by the Gen’l and myself which are raising their tall branches to the Heaven which seems to smile on the desecration around them.”

  It was June of 1873, the only time Mary Custis Lee, Robert E.’s widow, ever saw their beloved Arlington estate after the Civil War had driven her from it. And “they” of course was the Federal government that had taken possession and turned it into a gigantic cemetery.

  And so, she left, and with her an old order was gone, never to return.

  But there were others left at Arlington from the old days—former slaves, among them “Uncle Jim” James Parks, a former slave not only born and raised at Arlington but also destined to live out his whole life there, even to die and to be buried there.

  In the 1830s, Parks was born a slave to the Arlington mansion’s first owner, George Washington Parke Custis, adopted grandson of George Washington— and Mrs. Robert E. Lee’s father. Choosing the now-familiar bluff across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., Custis built Arlington House in 1802 as a living memorial to the first president. Custis, in fact, once planned to name the imposing, eight-columned structure “Mount Washington,” but instead settled on Arlington, from a Custis ancestral home on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

  Born just a few years after Mary Anna Randolph Custis’s marriage in 1831 to Robert E. Lee, the young slave Jim Parks in effect grew up on the Arlington estate with the Lee children—three sons and four girls.

  In later life, he often recalled the pre–Civil War days of the 1840s and ’50s. “We used to go to Washington ’cross the long bridge, or we’d dress up and row across,” he liked to relate. “People would look at
us and say: ‘Who’s them fine folks?’ Then some’d say: ‘They’s the Custis coloreds. They have their own horses an’ cows, an raise their own stuff.’ Some [of the Custis ‘coloreds’] owned houses in Washington when they were slaves.”

  The plan back in those pre-war days apparently was for Parks and his fellow slaves to expect their freedom just ahead. “Maj. Custis left his will in 1857,” Parks also recalled, “saying we was to be free in five years—everyone, from the cradle up, was to be given $50 and be free. Col. Lee [Robert E. himself] was to administer the estate, but when the five years were up, they [Union troops] were here, and there weren’t no estate; but Col. Lee give us our freedom.”

  What happened, of course, was the intrusion of the Civil War. Lee left, first to command Virginia’s military forces, then to take over his vaunted Army of Northern Virginia on behalf of the Confederacy. His wife Mary left her beloved ancestral home soon after, and the Union troops moved in. They erected military installation at various points around the 1,100-acre plantation, among them Fort Whipple, nowadays known as Fort Myer.

  Going beyond mere military occupation, the Federal government soon confiscated the Custis-Lee estate when Mrs. Lee couldn’t cross the lines and pay her property taxes in person, as required by law. A tax commissioner seized the property in early 1864 for “government use,” and later that very year, Union Brig. Gen. Montgomery Meigs, commander of the garrison at Arlington House, appropriated its grounds for use as a military cemetery. His goal, no secret about it, was to make the onetime Custis-Lee home uninhabitable, in case the Lee couple ever hoped to return.

  The first burial—in May 1864—was that of Private William Henry Christman of the 17th Pennsylvania Infantry, but the first battlefield casualty buried there was Private William Blatt of the 49th Pennsylvania Infantry, interred the day after Christman. Since the very first graves at today’s Arlington National Cemetery were reportedly dug by former slave James Parks, it’s likely that he dug both of their graves.

  By now in his thirties, he had chosen to stay on at Arlington even after he was given his freedom. Not only did he dig graves and do other odd jobs for the Army, he helped to build Fort Whipple.

  Park is also associated historically with another little known facet of today’s Arlington National Cemetery: its Civil War–era Freedman’s Village, home to an estimated 1,500 to 3,000 former slaves and other blacks, some of them runaway slaves, others former slaves freed as a result of Union incursions in the South. No longer visible, it was located in the southeast section of the cemetery, according to the Arlington National Cemetery website.

  Meanwhile, the fate of the Lee couple’s onetime home had been sealed by the construction of a stone and masonry burial vault in their rose garden. The vault became final destination for the remains of 1,800 men as just “one of the first monuments to Union dead erected under Meigs’s orders,” says the same website. Meigs, himself would later be buried “within 100 yards of Arlington House with his wife, father and son.”

  The property, by now irreparably become a vast cemetery, did briefly return to Lee family ownership in 1882, thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a claim by General Lee’s son Custis that the property had been illegally confiscated. Indeed, the court said, it had been seized without due process. Custis then quickly sold the property back to the U.S. Government for $150,000.

  “Uncle Jim” Parks, however, would be staying on…and on. During his ninety-three years at Arlington, he would outlive slavery, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. In the meantime, too, he outlived two wives while fathering twenty-two children—with five of his sons serving in World War I.

  It was not until 1929 that he would finally pass from the scene…but not entirely from Arlington. While it’s rare for a civilian with no military or governmental background to earn the right to burial at Arlington, “Uncle Jim” Parks was granted that exception by the secretary of war. And there he lies, still at Arlington: Grave Number 2 in Section 15.

  Additional note: In more recent years, of course, Arlington National Cemetery has become known as a hallowed burial ground for America’s greatest heroes, both political and military—a reputation only enhanced with the interment of Senator Edward M. (“Ted”) Kennedy (D-Mass.) in August 2009 close to the final resting places of his two assassinated brothers, President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.). Possibly surprising to some, however, only one other president is buried there, William Howard Taft, who also served as chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court.

  Until the burial in 1963 of the slain John F. Kennedy on the hillside just below the old Custis-Lee mansion, across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial, the best known memorial at Arlington was its Tomb of the Unknowns, final resting place of unidentified American war casualties. In all, the cemetery in recent times held the remains of more than 300,000 persons, among them nearly 3,800 former slaves like “Uncle Jim” Parks.

  The Lincoln Memorial: A Postscript

  BY NOW, HE HAS BEEN THERE SO LONG, WE TEND TO THINK HE’S BEEN AN essential piece of Washington, D. C. forever. And indeed, there he sits, day after day, at one end of the national mall stretching from the banks of the Potomac to the great, domed Capitol. There he has been, there will be, belonging to the ages, inseparable from the Federal city and capital overall.

  Simply, stolidly there…immutable, eternally wise, strong, and yet so kindly looking. Obviously too, a man who had suffered.

  At nineteen feet high, Lincoln in his Memorial.

  What contrast with a day only a few generations ago, when the newly seated, real-life Abraham Lincoln presided in the same Federal City…but then, in 1861, a city and capital isolated, cut off from the Union he extolled so mightily.

  Can we today recall mid-April of 1861, just days after Fort Sumter in that watershed year that began the Civil War?

  To the south, just across the Potomac River, Virginia had voted to join the secession states in leaving the Union. Loyal son Robert E. Lee, offered command of the Union armies, would go with Virginia instead, loyal to his state rather than to Lincoln’s ideal of Union above all. But seemingly more of a threat to Washington at the moment was Maryland, immediately to the north of the city. For here was another slave state rife with Southern sympathizers; here, too, was the pathway for Northern armies coming to the defense of Washington by rail.

  “Ringed by rebellion,” was how Margaret Leech so aptly described the Federal city’s plight in her book Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865.

  Imagine the fear and consternation that April 19 as the Massachusetts 6th Infantry Regiment’s anxiously awaited troop train pulled into town, only to discharge four dead and thirty-one wounded, many carried off on stretchers. What had happened? Needing to go from one rail station to another, they had marched through the streets of Baltimore. A mob hurling stones, even firing guns, had greeted them.

  Still, it shouldn’t have been a total surprise. The night before, but far less famously, a Pennsylvania volunteer contingent and a company of Union regulars from Minnesota also had been assaulted by the Baltimore hooligans.

  No lives were lost in their case, and they joined the local District of Columbia militiamen bedded down in the Capitol itself for the night, while over at the White House, the newly ensconced Lincolns slept on the second floor with citizen volunteers camping out in the East Room one floor below.

  Nothing was certain. Not with the Federal city itself teeming with Southern sympathizers. By contrast, Southern-born Regular Army and Navy officers were leaving in droves, headed back to their home states. One such officer was the quartermaster of the entire U.S. Army, General Joe Johnston. He would turn up later, fighting for the Confederacy but wounded outside Richmond, to be replaced and then eclipsed in fame by Robert E. Lee. Months later, even after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Joe Johnston would command in the last major battle of the Civil War, against one William Tecumseh Sherman. Still later, supposedly while attending Sherman’s funeral, th
e same Joe Johnston would catch cold—fatally.

  Even with the men of the Sixth Massachusetts now sleeping in the Senate chamber of the Capitol, the city was wide open to attack that Friday night, April 19, 1861.

  No more troops appeared Saturday the 20th. No trains from the North, either. No mails or newspapers from above Maryland. Only a Baltimore delegation pleading against any further troop deployments passing through their aroused city. By Sunday night, even the telegraph link through Baltimore would fail.

  On Monday the 22nd, Lincoln exploded in anger when presented a fresh request to have any further troops bypass Maryland altogether. “You would have me break my oath and surrender the Government without a blow,” he protested. ‘There is no [George] Washington in that—no [Andrew] Jackson in that—no manhood nor honor in that.”

  In case anyone hadn’t noticed, “Our men are not moles and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air.”

  Go home, he told his Maryland visitors. “Go home and tell your people that if they will not attack us, we will not attack them; but if they do attack us, we will return it, and that severely.”

  Empty words? Return an attack severely. Really?

  In Maryland, the rail bridges from the North were destroyed, telegraph lines were cut as well.

  In Washington, Lincoln anxiously paced the White House, biographer David Herbert Donald noted in his Lincoln. “A Confederate assault from Virginia was expected daily. And everyone predicted that it would be aided by the thousands of secessionist sympathizers in the city.” Peering down the Potomac, hoping to see ships carrying troops, Lincoln repeated, “Why don’t they come, why don’t they come?”

  On Wednesday the 24th, he visited the Sixth Massachusetts’ wounded and said—only half-jokingly, one supposes—“I don’t believe there is any North. The Seventh Regiment is a myth…You are our only Northern realities.” He was talking about the Seventh New York, supposedly on its way to Washington also.