by Tim Rowland
STRANGE
and
OBSCURE STORIES
of the
CIVIL WAR
Tim Rowland
Foreword by J. W. Howard, Superintendent (Ret),
Antietam National Battlefield
SKYHORSE PUBLISHING
STRANGE
and
OBSCURE STORIES
of the
CIVIL WAR
Copyright © 2011 by Tim Rowland
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rowland, Tim, 1960-
Strange and obscure stories of the Civil War / Tim Rowland.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-61608-395-3 (alk. paper)
1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Anecdotes. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Biography—Anecdotes. 3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Campaigns—Anecdotes. 4. Curiosities and wonders—United States—History—19th century—Anecdotes.
I. Title.
E655.R87 2011
973.7’3—dc23
2011022880
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1
John Brown Gets a Visitor
Chapter 2
Abner Doubleday Throws the First Pitch of the Civil War
Chapter 3
Happiness is Throwing Senators in Jail
Chapter 4
Looks Could Be Deceiving
Chapter 5
The North Finds Its Hero, Briefly
Chapter 6
Paying For it All
Chapter 7
The North’s Shadow Cabinet Member
Chapter 8
Racing Locomotives
Chapter 9
Civil War Ammunition—A Blast from the Past
Chapter 10
A Foreigner Joins the Fight
Chapter 11
Horses: Backbone of an Army
Chapter 12
An Original, American Piece of Work
Chapter 13
Spare Time
Chapter 14
A Southern Boy Comes Home
Chapter 15
Confederate Hopes Sink
Chapter 16
Chamberlain’s Last Day at the Office
Selected Bibliography
Foreword
For over fifteen years I served with the National Park Service as the superintendent of Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland. I considered this assignment to be a great honor as the battlefield at Sharpsburg is the site of the single bloodiest one-day battle in American history, a place of modern beauty and peace where over 23,000 American soldiers were killed or wounded. This place lends itself to the serious side of war, troop movements, and sacrifice. It cannot be ignored as you look across the beautiful fields surrounding this small Maryland village.
I have learned that this time in American history is often remembered as one of huge movements of blue and gray troops, gallant charges, and victories. Sometimes we forget the individuals who fought these battles, and we think of them as granite statues that dot these cherished sites of American history like Antietam, Gettysburg, and Shiloh. But they are not granite; they were flesh and blood—full of life, laughter, and, on occasion, song. As life was so precious to them they enjoyed what times of peace could be found.
This war, like any other, had its times of irony, times of insanity, and some times of just plain craziness. As long as humans are involved in anything, you will have sorrow and joy and laughter. In the pages that follow you will find the humanity and laughter that were a part of this important time in our history. It is okay to laugh; they did.
—J. W. Howard, superintendent (Ret), Antietam National Battlefield
Acknowledgements
Writing a note of thanks in the Internet era becomes an increasingly abstract task. In previous works I’ve spent hours in the cramped librarial spaces—kindly but firmly watched by white-haired women who will see no document despoiled under their watch. Research depended on many guiding hands, phone calls, interviews, and friendly tips. Today, it’s log on and go. It is no trouble, in literally seconds, to land a gem such as this one, from the diary of Charles Broomhall, 124th Pennsylvania: “South Mountain battle was fought. Sunday. Somewhat cloudy. We were up early. Colonel put (the) Captain under arrest for going into Frederick yesterday taking a number of his men with him and imbibing at the spirit fountain too much.”
Broomhall fought in the Cornfield at Antietam; he had failed to hear his commanding officer’s order to throw all bedrolls in a pile on the way to the field, which was a good thing because when he unrolled his blankets some time later he discovered his protective blankets had been riddled with thirty-eight bullet holes.
This diary was brought to light by Carolyn Ivanoff of Shelton, Connecticut, a woman to whom I am grateful but have never met. It was disseminated through Antietam on the Web, by a person or people known only to me as “Webmaster.”
So I owe a debt to the entire cast of behind-the-scenes scholars, historians, and archivists who have catalogued mountains of material that once upon a time would have been accessible only through long drives and tiring searches of mildewing boxes. Some really incredible information is out there for the picking, and now, even non–classically trained historians such as myself can commit acts of unfettered research that would have been beyond our ken a mere decade ago. Today, we can quote a historian by viewing his YouTube post or see hundreds of old photographs by keywording a Library of Congress search site. Whether this is good or bad, I cannot say. Some elements of the chase have been lost. And so much material is available that deadlines can come and go as one loses himself in thousands of pages of text surrounding the relative meaning of Lee’s Lost Orders. It’s good stuff, I know, and I was happy to take advantage of these scholarly sites.
But there were times, of course, that I was grateful for the bricks and mortar of a local library or two, such as the one in my backyard at the Hagerstown Community College (HCC). LuAnn Fisher and Karen Giannoumis were always ready and willing to find needed (uncomputerized) material. HCC is also blessed to have on staff Thomas Clemens, whose knowledge of the war is legend and whose recent work on the writings of soldier-historian Ezra Carman is of incredible value. Tom, his dog Bomber at his feet, was always there when I’d come bursting through his door with embarrassing questions such as, “What’s the difference between a caisson and a limber?”
And many have helped along the way, from Tim Johnson who took me on innumerable battlefield tours many years ago (leaving me with the distinct impression that the South had actually won), to Art Callaham, who has recently served as an excellent sounding board. I would also li
ke to thank Skyhorse editor Steve Price, who was always quick and accurate in pointing out what mattered and what didn’t, and always awarded me just the right amount of rein.
Finally, this is really the work of two people, even if there is only one name on the cover. My wife Beth was the first reader of each chapter, which is work that might be more closely associated with minesweeping in Third World nations. She discovered and defused many potential problems, and was kind on the occasions that I needed to go back to the drawing board.
Introduction
Adecade before video games came on the scene, the Civil War was about all a few of us ten-year-old boys had. Men were going to the moon, it was true, but some of us felt safer putting our trust in things that had actually happened, rather than in books of science fiction filled with unproven events that might one day fail to materialize. So in my circle, we read books by Bruce Catton or Shelby Foote about men named Grant and Lee. The Civil War, baseball, and peanut butter sandwiches were about as good as it got. So why not World War II? Or World War I? Or the Revolutionary War? I don’t know. For us, the Civil War resonated, maybe because we Americans were fighting ourselves. That was different.
What I remember of those books by Catton and Company fascinates me to this day. I vividly remember stray fragments of prose: “Lee loved his Texas troops” and Grant arriving on the scene “riding furiously in his mud-spattered pants.” But I remember remarkably little of the actual battles that were exhaustively depicted page after jelly-stained page.
Today I understand why that was so. I was fated to grow up to become a journalist with no skill at remembering names and no talent for numbers of any sort. So even back then, when I would read that “Brig. Gen. Elijah Bedliner led the 45th New Jersey against the 15th Mississippi under Maj. Gen. Massentauk Corpussle … ” the ole peepers would glaze over into casts normally associated with rock candy.
Had I stopped to think about it at the time, I might have surmised that in life I was destined to be a color analyst, seeing that I had no ability at calling the play-by-play.
As a teen, the Civil War succumbed to Space Invaders and was lost to me for many years. I would visit battlefields, it is true, but I kept banging my head into that confounded Brig. Gen. Bedliner and his bloody 45th. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the more I learned about the Civil War the less I understood, but my journey lay somewhere along those lines. My wake-up call came when I realized I could dutifully recite which brigade had done battle with which regiment—but if you had put a Springfield rifle to my head and asked which was bigger, a brigade or a regiment, the jig would have been up.
This book includes plenty of battle scenes to be sure, but they are battle scenes in context of the men, and yes, women, who were behind them, and the strange and often absurd circumstances that contributed to their roles in the fight. It is a book that tips its hat to the fact that very little of what hap-pened in America in the years 1861 to 1865 involved actual battles. There were stupendous conflagrations here and there, but life did go on.
It is also true that I am a humor writer by trade, which might seem counterintuitive for a work such as this. Yet that is the angle I have approached this book from and why it will hopefully contribute a worthwhile, minority perspective in a sea of Civil War literature.
My first fear was that there wouldn’t be enough material for a book of Civil War irony and wit; a couple of months into the project, my fear was that there was no room for it all. So many aspects of this war were just so damn strange.
At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, James Longstreet and Jesse Reno were fast friends. But they fought on opposing sides during the Civil War, and Reno was killed by Longstreet’s command at the Battle of South Mountain. Lewis Armistead, meanwhile, was booted from West Point after he brained his nemesis Jubal Early over the head with a supper plate. These two men wound up fighting on the same side.
Early, a man “fluent in profanity,” was the heartless fiend who burned residents in several Northern towns out of house and home, yet when a severely wounded Yankee in the Shenandoah Valley complained that the Rebels had stolen his canteen, Early personally got it back, filled it, and allowed the enemy boy to quench his thirst.
It was thirsty Confederate officers in the West who indulged in a little too much Tennessee sippin’ whiskey and were too drunk to lead a point-blank attack on a Federal column that slipped by under their noses to the town of Franklin, where a young Confederate soldier wound up leading a charge on his own father’s house.
Sitting in his own house during the hostilities of Bull Run, a Virginia man quickly determined that the middle of a battlefield was no place to live life, so he packed up and hightailed it to a small town in the western part of the state, where the war would never touch him again—a nice little place that went by the name of Appomattox. He wasn’t the only one forced out of his home; in Virginia, a relaxing Union army was suddenly deluged by a veritable torrent of wild-eyed rabbits, flushed, it would turn out, by Stonewall Jackson’s fast-closing troops.
For sport in between battles, bored soldiers would chase rabbits, both for a good laugh and a good stew. Rabbit stew would be a break from the infamous hardtack biscuits that were so brittle that one soldier reported finding a “soft spot” in one of the crackers. Curious, he pulled the partially masticated biscuit from his mouth and discovered “the soft spot was just a ten penny nail.”
Who says the Civil War gods didn’t have a sense of humor?
This book is not intended as a work of scholarship; those who wish to learn of regimental troop movements or previously undiscovered battle details will be disappointed. Nor is it a random smattering of trivia suffering a disconnect from anything meaningful. Those seeking “fun facts” will be disappointed as well.
Instead, this book seeks to tell the story of the Civil War in a way that we can easily relate to today—especially if we believe in the maxim that truth is stranger than fiction and that it is frequently the story behind the story that ultimately defines the truth. Included here are sixteen eclectic vignettes (and multiple vignettes within the vignettes), some better known than others, that are intended to expand upon not what we know about the war, but what we think about the war.
This was a war filled with some uproariously funny moments; with men and women getting themselves into impossibly tight spots; with startling coincidences; with moments both terribly bitter and unexpectedly sweet; and with entire courses in history altered by the path of a conical nugget of lead, when the difference of a few inches in one direction or the other might have held sway over generations.
Plenty of facts are known about the war, but these facts also leave no shortage of room for new thought. That was happening, of course, even before war’s end.
Despite all the talk of slavery and state rights, for example, a Congressman and a General named Dan Sickles sincerely thought the real cause of the war was whiskey.
A product of Tammany Hall, Sickles knew a thing or two about knocking back the sauce, but even he was impressed by the degree of drunkenness in Congress. There could be no civil debate or compromise, because half of the players were liquored up to the point that they believed they could lick any man in the room. Come to think of it, Sickles might have had a point about the role of whiskey in the war. Similarly, it’s hard to read some of the outrageous, fire-breathing prose of newspaper editors North and South and not conclude that they hadn’t just returned from a three-Mason-jar lunch. And if there were any sober people stalking the pier in Charleston and shaking their fists at Fort Sumter, they kept their dry rationality well-hidden.
Can a beverage really turn the tide of history? What the South had in terms of sour mash, it was sorely lacking in Folgers. Southern soldiers might capture Federal stores of coffee on occasion and when they did, they would grab for it like an airline passenger would grab for the oxygen mask in a decompressed cabin. But for the most part they were relegated to engaging in coffeelike experiments, which included
roasting and grinding okra seeds. The Union, in contrast, was satisfactorily caffeinated, and it is hard to think that this little extra boost didn’t sometimes provide the telling edge. It seems strange to think that a company might repair to the back of the line for a coffee break in the middle of battle, but it happened. The aforementioned Sickles was outraged that a division marching to support him at Gettysburg stopped to boil some coffee before coming to his rescue.
In assembling this work, it’s my belief that if we stop to think about how we feel toward people we dislike after we’ve had a couple of belts, or consider what we personally are like in the morning prior to that first cup of Joe, we might find that we can relate just a little bit more to our ancestors a century and a half back.