Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War

by Tim Rowland

  It was not the homecoming he had imagined. In the house, his family huddled together in indescribable fear as their half-crazed loved one approached. It was not the homecoming they had imagined either.

  Tod Carter might have been just another forgotten soldier killed in the war had the circumstances surrounding his death not been so bizarre. (Courtesy Williamson County Heritage Foundation)

  For six months in the latter half of the war, fate treated Tod Carter like a rag doll. He had been captured in the Battle of Missionary Ridge in the late fall of 1863. His tacked-up horse had swum the river and made it back to camp sans Tod, leaving his fellows to assume he’d been killed. Instead, Carter was on a prisoner-of-war train heading north toward a camp on Johnson’s Island near Sandusky, Ohio. Word of Carter’s true whereabouts eventually reached his family, although not exactly. They wrote letters to him in Ohio, not knowing that he had never arrived; he’d duped his guards by pretending to be asleep, and jumped—with a turbo boost from a seatmate’s feet—from the train in Pennsylvania. From there, he traveled down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and eventually rejoined his regiment in Georgia sometime in the spring of 1864.

  All things being equal, Carter should have played out the string of the war uneventfully enough, as the Confederate army of Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood dogged Sherman’s march to Atlanta. Gen. William Sherman had just captured the city and had no interest in chasing Hood up and down the Appalachian Mountains. So he headed east; in theory, Hood should have followed.

  Instead, the Southern general cooked up the scheme that historian James McPherson famously described as being “scripted in never-never land.” Even though he would be outnumbered by 20,000 federal troops, he’d go north through Tennessee and Kentucky to the Ohio River and then turn east to join Lee’s army of Northern Virginia. Detractors aside, at this point in the war, there might have been no good choices left for the South. Had he tailed Sherman his army of the Tennessee would have become a construction crew doing little but rebuilding the bridges burned by Union men.

  Hood, with Carter in tow somewhere, started on a long march north under less than ideal conditions. The army had been battered by Sherman. Soldiers tied rags to their feet in lieu of shoes. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner consisted of a curious knot of coarse wheat flour and water that had none of the culinary advantages that shortening, milk, baking soda, or salt might have lent. The men imaginatively called them “sinkers.” Thoughts of the bounties from the Carter’s rich farmland would have certainly grown more intense.

  On November 21, Hood crossed the Tennessee River with 40,000 men, and prepared to chase down a retreating federal force under his former West Point classmate Gen. John Schofield. If he could whip Schofield before the Union had a chance to consolidate its western forces, he could pick off its other detachments at random, while opening supply lines to Lee in the east and preventing Federal reinforcements from reaching Grant. It sounded plausible, and it almost worked. Instead, in less than six weeks time, Hood’s proud, hardened army would no longer exist as an effective fighting force.

  Like chess pieces, the armies of Hood and Schofield played off each other, as the Northerner tried to join friendly troops eighteen miles away in Nashville, while the Southerner tried to keep him from doing it. It made for tense feintings and stare-downs, and one game-changing blunder in which Hood’s men failed to obey orders to attack and in so doing failed to smash a column of Yankee sitting ducks as they marched north. On November 29, Schofield and his 29,000 men tiptoed around Hood’s men at Spring Hill as they slept, a daring move that would have paid off mightily had not the river behind the small town of Franklin not been too swollen to cross. Schofield looked around for promised pontoons on which to build a bridge. They hadn’t arrived. His army, its back to the river, would have to take a stand, and his men began scoping out a defensible position. They settled on a promising height of land with some outbuildings that could be dismantled for breastworks, a hill that was named after its owner—a man by the name of Carter.

  As Hood’s army awakened to find that Schofield had slipped past, Tod Carter was not among the sleepy men. He had decided that it would have been a shame if the war had passed so closely by his home and he had not been allowed to quickly visit the loved ones he hadn’t seen in three and a half years. So the day before, he had been issued a pass, giving him permission to go ahead of the army and see his family. Tod Carter was “filled with ecstasy” that he would “eat breakfast at his father’s house in the morning.” In a family history, Carter’s great-grand-niece Rosalie set the scene:

  At home was his aged father, Fountain Branch Carter, now 67. Here too was his older brother, Col. Moscow Branch Carter, who had been a prisoner of war at home on parole for about a year. Here at home were his four sisters and his beloved sister-in-law. In addition were nine little nieces and nephews, all under 12 years of age. No doubt Tod thought of his father’s fireside that November day, and the hams and bacon that always filled the smokehouse, and the good meals the servants prepare in the little kitchen in the yard … But most of all he longed to sit once more at his father’s breakfast table with all the members of his beloved family.

  Some years later, the story goes, a newspaper reporter from Philadelphia was poking around for interesting stories from the bygone war when his wagon driver, an old African-American, halted in front of the Carter House. He told the heartbreaking story of Tod Carter, who, in the dim morning light, after an odyssey of better than three years and thousands of miles, got to within a few feet, feet, of his front door that morning, when his eye was caught by a member of his family frantically motioning him away from the house. It was awash in sleeping Federals whose hearts were unlikely to be warmed by family reunions.

  Carter scurried back to his regiment and his family scurried to the basement, where they had taken the precaution of burying some of their most select hams beneath the floorboards.

  Many battles have laid claim to being the bloodiest or the most savage of the war. If the Battle of Franklin was not the most violent, atrocious scrap of the war, it should at least be up for an honorable mention. Battlefield guides ask those with weak stomachs to step back from the group before they begin their shtick, saying the fight was “obscene and vile and there’s no way to sugarcoat it.”

  The Battle of Franklin was a compressed head-on collision fought mostly after dark. It’s described as the Pickett’s Charge of the west, as Confederates came at the Union defenses with everything they had. The desperation on both sides was palpable and piercing, every last soldier frantic to gain whatever small advantage might be attained.

  The fight began at four in the afternoon, and for the next five hours straight, a man died every ten seconds—by 9 pm there were 10,000 casualties in all. Six Confederate generals died. Bodies piled up six and seven deep, at such a height that the freshly killed had no place to fall over, and were discovered after the battle standing dead in their tracks. Historian Eric Jacobson described the fight as a “medieval slugfest in the dark.” Soldiers clawed, scratched, gouged, clubbed, bit, kicked, pulled hair, yanked beards, threw rocks and sticks, and rubbed handfuls of dirt in each others eyes. So close were the lines that the crack of rifle volleys were echoed by the crack of men’s bones; soldiers standing in front of cannons were vaporized into clouds of pink mist. On the porch of the Carter house, spent rifles were used as skull-pulverizing clubs. The next day, Moscow Carter grabbed a shovel and a basket and, the story goes, proceeded to scoop up a halfbushel of human brain matter. Even hardened veterans were left stupefied by the brutality that was above and beyond anything they had seen in war.

  Some men, charged with adrenaline perhaps, refused to go down. Arthur MacArthur was knocked from his horse by a shot to his shoulder. As he rose, his attacker shot him in the chest and, satisfied with the quality of his work, turned his attention to other matters—only to be run through by the sword of a very much alive MacArthur. The dying man got off one more shot at MacArthur, which hit h
im in the knee. Still, he somehow survived. But as impressive as his performance might have been, MacArthur was eventually outshone in history by his son, World War II hero General Douglas MacArthur.

  The Carter family was joined in the stone basement by some neighbors, and they listened to the roar of battle above. Moscow later recounted that “While the terrible din of the battle lasted it seemed to the adults that they must die of terror if it did not cease, but when there was a lull the suspense of fearful expectation seemed worse than the sound of battle.” And out there, somewhere, was young Tod.

  As an assistant quartermaster and aide de camp, Tod Carter’s duties generally did not involve combat, but he could hardly be held back from participating in the task of liberating his own house from the enemy. Rosalie Carter described the scene:

  It was on the first charge and when nearest the enemy’s works that Capt. Tod Carter dashed through the lines on his horse Rosencrantz, with drawn sword, reaching as far as his arm would allow toward the enemy. He was leading the charge [when] his horse was seen to plunge and those near him knew he had been struck. Tod was thrown over his horse’s head and when he struck the ground he lay very still. The hour was five o’clock, just as the sun was setting. He had been mortally wounded only about 525 feet southwest of his home, the Carter House.

  The family and friends meanwhile huddled in the basement, children cowering at their feet, but otherwise bearing up fairly well. Shortly after midnight, the Carter family discerned that the Federals had retired toward Nashville and it was safe to come out of hiding. But their relief was short-lived. A soldier arrived with word that Tod was still alive but grievously wounded, lying out in the darkness and in need of help. With cautious urgency, the family climbed over the Federal breastworks and out into the smoky field. His father, brother and sisters held a lantern up to face after ghostly face in searched of their loved one.

  He was found at last, deliriously calling out his commander’s name; the officer’s final instructions to Tod had been to refrain from attacking too soon, an order that the overzealous young man had failed to obey. He was taken back to the house and laid out on the floor among the dead and dying enemy. He didn’t last long. The bullet that lodged in his brain was donated by the family in 2010 to the Battle of Franklin Trust, where it remains on display in the Carter House, in proximity to where Tod Carter breathed his last, surrounded by his sisters as they whispered, “Brother’s come home at last.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Confederate Hopes Sink

  On Sunday June 19, 1864, the town of Cherbourg on the north coast of France was buzzing as it seldom had before—and probably wouldn’t again until the Normandy Invasion. More than 5,000 miles from Richmond, the French fishermen and farmers were about to be treated to front row seats to watch an honest-to-goodness battle in America’s Civil War.

  No one was going to miss this. Some 15,000 spectators jammed the shorelines to see the epic fight.

  It was more a seafaring version of a medieval joust, really, with heavy cannon for lances and European diplomats for damsels, whose hearts were there to be won or lost based on the outcome.

  In the spirit of the times, the captain of the CSS Alabama,

  Raphael Semmes, dropped the captain of the USS Kearsarge, John Winslow a courteous note explaining the program of events.

  Captain Winslow:

  Sir—I am undergoing a few repairs here which, I hope, will not take longer than the morrow. Then I will come out and fight you a fair and square fight.

  Most respectfully yours,

  Captain Semmes

  The chivalry wouldn’t last.

  Much of the Civil War’s nautical publicity begins and ends with the Monitor and the Merrimack, the two ironclads that pinged and doinked each other to a draw off the coast of Virginia. But United States and Confederate naval intrigue truly spanned the globe, from the coast of Brazil to the English Channel to the Arctic Circle.

  Men of the USS Kearsarge allowed the CSS Alabama to do its worst before taking the offensive. In the end, the fight was one-sided, but the Alabama’s captain later cried foul. (Courtesy National Archives)

  The CSS Alabama never spent any time in Southern ports, and in her two-year career only caught a glimpse or two of the Confederate coast. Her job was specifically to terrorize Union merchant ships, and she, along with a handful of other cruisers of her class, was quite effective.

  Unable to match the shipbuilding prowess of the North, the Confederate’s idea of a Navy was a network of gunboats and booby traps to guard its harbors at home, and a fleet of daring pirate ships on the high seas to put pressure on the Federal economy.

  Both practices had their moments, good and bad. When the South floated defensive mines (called torpedoes back in the day) in Southern harbors there were indeed effective, but rapidly corroded.

  Much of the South’s shipping commerce had been more or less put out of business by one of the last great acts of one of the Union’s last great pre–Civil War generals, Winfield “Old Fuss and Feathers” Scott, the hero of the Mexican War. Like Robert E. Lee, Scott was a Virginian, but unlike Lee he remained loyal to the Union; he was well into his seventies by that time and pretty much committed. Scott could barely hoist his three-hundred pounds on gout-riddled feet at war’s outbreak, but his mind was sound. Scott was one of the few who foresaw a lengthy war, and his “Anaconda Plan” called for surrounding the South like a snake and choking away its life-giving commerce. The press made wicked fun of strategy plan from the man whose nickname it amended to “Old Fat and Flabby.” McClellan and his supporters hounded Scott out of office in 1861, but he lived long enough to see the war through and watch history prove him to be right on just about all accounts.

  Both the Union blockade and the Confederate cruisers sought economic destruction; but while the blockade waited for ships to come to it, the South took the battle to wherever Union merchant ships might take them.

  Like her sister ships, the Alabama was built in British shipyards (Confederate agents could sometimes take advantage of their ties to cotton brokers who had connections in the shipping industry) under an assumed name and civilian dress. These sloops were powered by both steam and sail and were fast and agile. Once they were out of sight of the neutral British, they were fitted with guns and fighting crews and took on new personas. The Oreto became the Florida, the Sea King became the Shenandoah, and the Enrica became the CSS Alabama. The crews were often British, and finding enough of them was often a problem, but upping pay and grog allowances was always helpful in these matters.

  The Alabama quietly set sail in the summer of 1862 and within two months she was capturing and burning Northern merchant ships. For two years the Alabama terrorized Northern commerce, crisscrossing the Atlantic and venturing as far afield as the Indian Ocean and South Pacific. For two years the United Stated Navy tried to track her down without success. She took 2,000 prisoners and captured or destroyed sixty-five ships. Her fellow raiders were not too far behind in their conquests, which not only affected the Northern economy, but also kept Northern warships busy on the high seas, and out of the South’s hair near their home ports. Further, the cost of insurance on shipping skyrocketed as a result of the danger presented by the raiders. The U.S. Navy was not amused.

  In October 1864, the CSS Florida slipped into the neutral port of Bahia, Brazil, with the USS Wachusett under command of Napoleon Collins in pursuit. The crew of the Florida breathed a sigh of relief and many of them felt it was safe to go ashore, seeing as how the United States ship had no authority in foreign ports. Or so it was assumed. Instead, the scene that played out was almost identical to the movie cliché in which the outlaw believes he is safe from capture because he has crossed the Rio Grande—only to see the U.S. cavalry splash across the river and grab him anyway.

  The Wachusett, operating under the naval doctrine of “port schmort,” steamed right up and opened fire on the Florida, which was forced to surrender after token resistance, leaving the Wa
chusett free to tow it back to the states. Brazil filed a formal protest against Collins, who was court-martialed for violating international neutrality and sentenced to be dismissed. The court also ruled that the Florida was to be taken back to Brazil where it would in all likelihood be returned to the Confederate Navy.

  This is what was supposed to have happened. In point of fact, however, Collins earned a promotion and the Florida, worst luck, accidentally sank off the coast of Virginia before it could be sailed back to Brazil. So the Florida joined the Alabama, which was already at the bottom of the sea, but had arrived there under more violent circumstances.

  It had been four months earlier that a cheer had gone up on the decks of the Federal raider-chaser Kearsarge, then moored at a port in Holland. News had arrived that the Alabama had limped into a French port for repairs, meaning a lengthy nautical hunt was finally over. In two days, the Kearsarge was perched like a hawk off the Cherbourg breakwater, and the note from Confederate Captain Semmes to Federal Captain Winslow confirmed that it was game on.