The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  On the rostrum later, before the veterans of both armies, McClellan delivered his address. Nearly twenty-three years had passed since the battle of Antietam. McClellan had run against Abraham Lincoln in the presidential election of 1864 and lost. He had since been the governor of New Jersey and had led a distinguished career in civil life. He and Nelly now had grown children of their own—like many of these veterans now waiting to hear what he would say on this field where they had fought in the bloodiest single day of the war.

  McClellan looked about him a moment and remembered when he had last stood there. “The smoke of battle still wreathed these hills and filled these valleys,” he reminded the soldiers, “these rocks still re-echoed the harsh sounds of strife, and the ground was all too thickly strewn with the forms of the quiet dead, and of those still writhing in agony.”

  He gazed on the veterans of both armies now sitting beside one another in peace, and spoke to them as one: “Those who fought on either side; men who, clad in grey, followed the noble Lee.…” There was a stir among the Confederates as they uncovered in memory of the name of their old commander. McClellan continued, “… and we who wore the blue.” They were all there now, he told them, with a common purpose—“to testify our reverence for the valiant dead.”

  “Let us bury all animosity, all bitter recollections of the past.…” McClellan urged. “I am glad, inexpressibly glad, that I have been permitted to live until the fame and exploits of these magnanimous rivals have become the common property of our people; when the ability and virtues of Robert Lee, and the achievements of the magnificent Army of Northern Virginia, as well as the heroism and renown of the proud Army of the Potomac, have already become a part of the common heritage of glory of all the people of America.”

  He wished, he confessed to those soldiers of both armies, that just once more he could take Lee by the hand, “that splendid man and soldier,” as he had “in those long past days when we served together in the land of the Montezumas.…” But that could never be. It was too late. Lee was gone.

  When McClellan finished speaking, the veterans of both armies rose and marched together, and he watched them pass in review and took their salutes. As his own soldiers passed the dais they perhaps remembered how he had once so moved on their hearts as the wind sways the rows of standing corn; the men in gray perhaps remembered how they had marched and fought so hard for Old Jack and stormed so willingly into the cannon’s mouth for Marse Robert.52

  Five months later McClellan was also gone. In early October he suffered a severe attack of angina pectoris. On the evening of October 28 he complained again of recurring chest pains. His condition rapidly worsened in the night and at about three the next morning he turned and looked with deepest affection at his beloved Nelly. “Tell her I am better now,” he whispered weakly to his physician, and peacefully passed away. He was 58 years old.53

  On a dark rainy day as mournful as the occasion, they buried him in the McClellan and Marcy family plot in the Riverview Cemetery in Trenton, overlooking the Delaware River. Henry Douglas stood by the graveside and looked across at the sorrowing faces of two of McClellan’s own generals, Winfield Scott Hancock and William B. Franklin. Standing between them, uncovered and as heartbroken as either of them, was McClellan’s old Confederate enemy and friend, Joseph E. Johnston.54

  McClellan had failed to fulfill the shining promise of greatness, but he had not failed these friends. It didn’t matter any more that many of those who loved him the most had been his Confederate enemies. Johnston called him “a dear friend whom I have so long loved and admired.” Dabney Maury would say that “a brighter, kindlier, more genial gentlemen did not live than he.” William Gardner, a Confederate classmate whom the war had made a cripple for life, would remember: “I was one of his intimates at the academy, and I still cherish a tender memory of him.”55

  Memories were all that were left now. The days of war and glory were over—for all of them.

  Epilogue

  For A. P. Hill there would be no life after the Civil War. He was riding to reach the shattered lines of his corps at Petersburg on April 2, 1865, when he was shot and killed by a federal infantryman.

  He fell, it was said, “where his gallant spirit was ever found, in the path of duty.” When told he was dead, Robert E. Lee said: “He is at rest now, and we who are left are the ones to suffer.” Pattie Guild, Lee’s doctor’s wife, awoke that night to sounds of sobbing in an adjoining ambulance and was told it was Dolly Hill weeping for her lost husband.1

  David Rumph (Neighbor) Jones did not survive either. Within a month after Antietam where he and Hill had met in the embattled outskirts of Sharpsburg to drive back the Union line together, he was stricken by a heart attack. Three months later he was dead. Some said he died not of an ailing, but of a broken heart. For his brother-in-law, Colonel Henry W. Kingsbury of the Eleventh Connecticut, whom he loved, had been killed at Antietam near the Burnside Bridge—by Jones’s own troops.2

  Neither did another classmate, Confederate Brigadier John Adams, live. He died leading the bloody Confederate charge of the Union works at Franklin, Tennessee, on November 30, 1864. Union soldiers found him under his horse, shot nine times. As he died in their arms he said, “It is the fate of a soldier to die for his country.”3

  Of the two Union classmates whom Neighbor Jones had last seen in the smoking ruins of Fort Sumter, John G. Foster died first. When he was carried to his grave in 1874, all business in Nashua, New Hampshire, was suspended. Mourning badges floated from public and private buildings throughout the city, and the air was filled with the peel of tolling bells, the roar of minute guns, and the beat of muffled drums.4

  Truman Seymour became, like Foster, a Union major general and fought through the war all the way to Appomattox. He retired after thirty years in the army, then he and Louisa moved to Europe, where he became an artist. His drawings, like those he sketched for Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter, had a way of capturing a mood and recording a particular moment in time. He died in Florence, Italy, in 1891.5

  Birkett Davenport Fry, who survived Gettysburg and lived for twenty-six more years after the war, despite all the bullets he had taken, became a cotton manufacturer in Richmond. He was “a most useful and valued citizen,” whose nature, despite his reputation as “a man with a gunpowder reputation,” continued to be “as gentle, his bearing as modest as his life was momentous.”6

  William Montgomery Gardner, who took nearly as many bullets in his body as Fry did, also lived long after the war. His leg was shattered at First Manassas. Despite that, he became a Confederate brigadier general, and in one of the very last small engagements of the war, he met, fought, and was defeated by his Union classmate George Stoneman, who was on another raid. Gardner died peacefully in Tennessee in 1901.

  George Stoneman became a politician after the war. He moved to California, bought a beautiful estate, and became governor. His administration was as stormy as the weather at Chancellorsville had been in April 1863, when he could not get his cavalry across the swollen Rappahannock. He died in his native New York in 1894.

  John Gibbon remained in the army after the war, and in 1876 commanded the column that rescued the living and buried the dead of George Armstrong Custer’s bloody last stand at Little Big Horn. A year later he marched 250 miles to attack the Nez Perce under Chief Joseph. It was typical of Gibbon that afterward Joseph became his dearest friend. Gibbon died in Baltimore in 1896 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetary.

  George Henry Gordon, the classmate who had so courageously parried Tom Jackson’s swift and heavy blows down the Valley in 1862, became a Union major general. After Appomattox, he practiced law in Boston and wrote about the war. He was at John Foster’s bedside when he died in 1874, and died himself twelve years later.

  George Horatio Derby, the class prankster, became one of the army’s best topographical engineers in the American West, where he became nationally famous not as a soldier, but as a humorist. His published w
ritings, collected into two books, foreshadowed the works of a more famous admirer, Mark Twain. But Derby fell ill and died just as the Civil War began and took to the grave with him his two most famous noms de plume—Squibob and John Phoenix. It is probably just as well. The war that was just beginning would have been too serious for the three of them.

  Edmund Lafayette Hardcastle, who manned the cannon at Vera Cruz and saw more of death than he ever cared to in Mexico, left the army before the Civil War and never returned. He became a delegate to the two Democratic national conventions in 1860, and after the war a railroad president and a member of the Maryland House of Delegates. He died in Maryland in the last year of the nineteenth century.

  William Dutton, who wrote such descriptive letters to his sweetheart and did so well at West Point, fell ill after graduation and was forced to resign, never realizing his military potential. He died in New York City on the Fourth of July in 1862.

  Sam Bell Maxey, who had graduated only one file removed from George Pickett at the bottom of the class, ably commanded the Indian Territory for the Confederacy in the last year of the war. Afterward he became a two-term U.S. Senator from Texas and a member of West Point’s board of visitors. He died honored and distinguished in 1895.

  Samuel Davis Sturgis, who had saved his cavalry regiment from the buffalo stampede in the Indian wars, became a Union brigadier, and was spectacularly defeated by the fierce-fighting Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest, at Brice’s Cross Roads in Mississippi in 1864. After Appomattox he went back to doing what he did best, fighting Indians. He died in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1889.

  Dabney Herndon Maury became a Confederate major general and commanded at Mobile in the last year of the war. One of his men said of him that he was “ ‘every inch a soldier,’ but then there were not many inches of him. The soldiers called him ‘puss in boots,’ because half of his diminutive person seemed lost in a pair of immense cavalry boots of the day.”7 After the war he continued to serve the memory of the Confederacy with his heart and his pen as a founder of the Southern Historical Society and as an editor of its Papers. Before he died in the first year of the twentieth century in Peoria, Illinois, he said that there must be no pomp at his funeral: “Let the services be simple. Let the coffin be hauled to the railroad station on a caisson, followed by a few of my old comrades. I want my body to be sent to the old family burying ground, at Fredericksburg, that I may sleep with my people.” And it was done.8

  George Pickett married his beautiful LaSalle in old St. Paul’s Church in Petersburg on September 15, 1863, to the salute of a hundred guns, chimes, cheers, bells, and bugles. But he never recovered from the trauma of the charge at Gettysburg. An excellent brigade commander, he never proved he could handle a division. Lee would blame him for the army’s defeat at Five Forks and ostracize him, and Pickett would later say bitterly of Lee, “that old man … had my division massacred at Gettysburg.” George McClellan said of Pickett that “perhaps there is no doubt that he was the best infantry soldier developed on either side during the Civil War.” He became an insurance agent in Richmond and died in Norfolk in 1875, but a single tragic charge had made his name immortal.9

  Jesse Reno, who died on South Mountain in 1862, was immortalized in a very different way when Reno, Nevada, was named for him. He said before he died, “Tell my command that if not in body, I will be with them in spirit.”10

  And Cadmus Wilcox, who fought from the day the war opened until the day it closed in such a workmanlike manner—always punctual, always present, always popular—never did meet a bullet. The four Confederate and four Union generals who carried him to his grave in Washington, after a natural death in December 1890, never did anything they hated to do more than that—except fight against one another in the war of brothers.

  Darius Couch, the competent and acerbic New Yorker, rose to the highest echelons of the Union army, but had the misfortune to serve under incompetent generals in chief. He lived to write the obituaries of many of his classmates before dying himself in 1897.

  James Oakes, who also became a general in the Union army, though never a star, saw his greatest days of military glory in the Mexican and Indian wars, where he was a star. Although desperately wounded in Texas fighting Indians in the 1850s, he lived until 1910.

  Charles Seaforth Stewart, finishing first in this class of such enormous talent, also never became a star, rising only to the rank of colonel of engineers—and that not until after the war. He died on Nantucket Island in 1904.

  In 1917, when yet another war was just beginning, Francis Theodore Bryan, sixth ranked in the class of 1846 and the last living, died in St. Louis.

  They were all gone then, those who were touched by the fire of fame and immortality, and those who were not. But of them all it might be said, as James Longstreet said of George Pickett:

  Green be the turf above thee,

  Friend of my better days!

  None knew thee but to love thee,

  Nor named thee but to praise.11

  In Appreciation

  It takes a number of things to write a book. Aside from time and solitude, these things tend to become people, primarily librarians, a sensitive editor, a good agent, and numerous friends, cohorts, and relatives.

  The librarian most important in the life of this book has been Charley Hively, the research specialist at the Harrison County Public Library in Clarksburg, West Virginia, my hometown. It would also have been young Stonewall Jackson’s library had he not been born 175 years too soon, for Clarksburg was also his hometown. Gifted with an industry and inventiveness that Jackson would have admired, Charley was able to find any book anywhere and get it on loan. He repeatedly did this throughout the research and writing phase. I am likewise indebted to Charley’s predecessor, Cathy Culp, who suffered me for a shorter time, but was also of great help.

  The archivists and librarians at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point opened their manuscript treasures most graciously. I am particularly indebted to Suzanne Christoff at the academy archives, and her assistants at the time, Dorothy Rapp and Kathy Boyd. Judith Sibley in the academy’s special collections division was most helpful, together with her director, Alan Amone, and another of his staff, Dawn Crumpler.

  Kathleen E. Beldsoe, of the special collections department at the James E. Morrow Library at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, which often contained materials available nowhere else in the state, accommodated more than one of my irregular trips to see her. I am also indebted to the book and archival collections and librarians at the University of Maryland, West Virginia University, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the United States Army Military History Institute at the Carlisle Barracks, the library at the Gettysburg Military Park, and the Museum of the Confederacy and the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.

  Mauro DiPreta, my editor at Warner Books, was the soul of sensitivity, attacking my manuscript when it grew long and diarrhetic not with a machete, but a scalpel. My agent, Michael J. Hamilburg, a gentle and loving man whose nature shatters all of the stereotypes about agents, matched Mauro in sensitivity and consideration.

  Edwin C. Bearss, chief historian emeritus of the National Park Service and a walking encyclopedia of the Civil War, caught errors in the manuscript that a lesser mind, such as mine, might never have caught. James M. McPherson, the much esteemed Civil War scholar, was more than generous in his comments. To both I am heavily indebted.

  Linda C. Durkee, a friend and fellow-writer in Washington, reviewed early parts of the manuscript for stylistic, literary, and organization faults before they got too far out of hand.

  And my family has been the model of patience and longsuffering while their husband, father, and in-law was off all those months in the nineteenth century. They always did suspect that he lived in the past. Now they are certain of it.

  Notes

  PART 1 WEST POINT

  From Every Degree of Provincialism

  1. Details in the
opening paragraphs are from Roy Bird Cook, The Family and Early Life of Stonewall Jackson, 5th ed. (Charleston, WV: Education Foundation, 1967), pp. 83–86.

  2. Andrew Jackson to Andrew Jackson Donelson, 5 March 1823, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, ed. John Spencer Bassett, 7 vols. (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1926–1935), vol. 3, p. 191.

  3. For a discussion of West Point’s standing as an engineering school in the antebellum years, see Sidney Forman, West Point: A History of the United States Military Academy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), pp. 88–89.

  4. Cook, Family and Early Life, pp. 84–85. A slightly different version of how Jackson answered this question is in Mary Anna Jackson, Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson (1895; reprint, Dayton: Press of Morningside Bookshop, 1985), p. 31; and R. L. Dabney, Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson (Stonewall Jackson) (1865; reprint, Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1983), p. 31.

  5. Jackson’s trip to Washington is mainly from Cook, Family and Early Life, p. 85. For years afterward, a widely accepted version of the journey—retold with poetic embellishment by the “old citizens” of Clarksburg—had him walking the entire three hundred miles and arriving road-weary and travel-stained. For this romantic version see John G. Gittings, Personal Recollections of Stonewall Jackson, Also Sketches and Stories (Cincinnati: Editor Publishing Co., 1899), pp. 11–12.

  6. Cook, Family and Early Life, p. 84. For a thumbnail sketch of Hays see James Morton Callahan, History of West Virginia Old and New and West Virginia Biography, 3 vols. (Chicago and New York: American Historical Society, 1923), vol. 3, p. 203.

  7. Gibson Butcher to Samuel L. Hays, 14 June 1842, Cook, Family and Early Life, pp. 85–86.

  8. Smith Gibson to Samuel L. Hays, and Evan Carmack to Samuel L. Hays, 14 June 1842, Cook, Family and Early Life, pp. 86–87.