Two Miserable Presidents

by Steve Sheinkin

  These new soldiers realized they would be facing more than enemy bullets and bombs. Fair or not, they would be fighting on behalf of all black Americans. In a letter to the Union general Nathaniel Banks, a group of Louisiana volunteers boldly accepted this challenge: “If the world doubts our fighting,” they wrote, “give us a chance and we will show them what we can do.”

  The soldiers got their chance when Union generals decided to attack the Confederate fort at Port Hudson, Louisiana. Along with Vicksburg, this was the last fort on the Mississippi River still in Southern hands. Captain André Cailloux and his men were assigned a leading role in the attack. When he was given the dangerous job of carrying one of the First Louisiana’s battle flags, a soldier named, Anselmo Planciancios was ready:

  “I will bring back these colors in honor, or report to God the reason why.”

  Anselmo Planciancios

  As soon as the charge toward Port Hudson began, André Cailloux was shot through the left arm. He held his sword high in his right hand and shouted, “Follow me!”—and charged at the guns again.

  “They charged and re-charged and didn’t know what retreat meant,” said a white soldier who fought at Port Hudson.

  But the Confederate fort was just too strong. Cailloux was shot again and killed. Planciancios was hit in the head and died instantly. The attack ended in failure as darkness fell.

  Though the black soldiers had not captured Port Hudson, their bravery and skill changed minds all over the country. “They fought splendidly,” reported General Nathaniel Banks.

  Black soldiers soon saw more action when they were attacked at Milliken’s Bend, a Union supply post on the Mississippi River. In brutal hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets and rifle butts and fists, they helped defeat the Confederate attack.

  Grant was impressed—and convinced he could rely on African American soldiers. And the recent action helped him tighten his grip around the throats of Port Hudson and Vicksburg. Both places started running out of food. A Confederate officer at Port Hudson remembered eating the army mules (“quite tender and juicy”), and then getting even more desperate:

  “Rats, of which there were plenty about … were also caught by many officers and men and were found to be quite a luxury—superior, in the opinion of those who eat them, to spring chicken.”

  Rats may have tasted good, but they wouldn’t last forever.

  Where Are Those Shoes?

  Now back to Pennsylvania for the battle of Gettysburg.

  The whole thing got started when Southern soldiers heard that there was a large supply of shoes in the nearby town of Gettysburg. Thousands of Lee’s men were desperate for a new pair of shoes. One barefoot Confederate named John Hancock had tried to make his own sandals out of raw cowhide. He found the results disappointing. “They flop up and down, they stink very bad, and I have to keep a brush in my hand to keep the flies off of them.” he said.

  On June 30, the Confederate general Henry Heth found his commander, A.P. Hill, and said, “If there is no objection, I will take my division tomorrow and go to Gettysburg and get those shoes.”

  “None in the world,” Hill replied.

  So Heth’s men set out to find those shoes.

  School’s Out!

  The next day, fifteen-year-old Tillie Pierce was sitting in class at the Young Ladies Seminary of Gettysburg. She and the other students were working on their literature lessons when the teacher suddenly announced: “Children, run home as quickly as you can!”

  Everyone jumped up and raced out the door. “Some of the girls did not reach their homes before the rebels were in the streets,” Tillie said. “I had scarcely reached the front door, when, on looking up the street, I saw some of the men on horseback. I scrambled in, slammed shut the door, and hastening to the sitting room, peeped out between the shutters.”

  The Confederate soldiers did not find any shoes in Gettysburg. They did, however, run into a few thousand Union soldiers. No one planned to have a battle here. But when the enemies bumped into each other in town, the men simply did what they had been doing for the past two years—they started fighting, and fighting hard. And that’s how the biggest battle of the war began.

  When the shooting started, one local farmer looked nervously out at his field. He saw his cow chomping grass on what was about to become a battlefield. “Tell Lee to hold on just a little,” he shouted to Southern soldiers, “until I get my cow in out of the pasture.” And he ran off to get his cow.

  John Burns, another local resident, sat in his house, listening to the gunshots growing louder and louder. This seventy-year-old veteran of the War of 1812 took his ancient musket down from the wall and started cleaning it. His wife wanted to know what he was doing.

  “I thought some of the boys might want the old gun,” he said.

  Then a group of Union soldiers marched past his house, and Burns jumped up and headed for the door.

  “Burns, where are you going?” his wife asked.

  “I am going out to see what is going on.”

  And next thing you know, John Burns, wearing his War of 1812 army jacket, was marching into battle with the boys of the Seventh Wisconsin. As they headed into combat, the soldiers gave Burns a new rifle. They offered him an ammunition box, but he said he liked to keep his bullets in his pants pocket.

  “I can get my hands in here quicker than in a box. I’m not used to them new-fangled things.”

  Burns was wounded three times, and when his regiment was driven back he was left lying on the ground. Hours later some kind Confederate soldiers found him and carried him home.

  John Burns

  Gettysburg: July 1

  Meanwhile, a wild day of fighting was raging all over Gettysburg. Neither army had a plan. Robert E. Lee and George Meade were still on their way to town, and neither commander really knew what was going on. But remember, soldiers on both sides had been expecting a big battle. So they figured this must be it. As a Polishborn Union officer named Wlodzimierz Krzyzanowski (his men called him “Kriz”) explained: “The fate of the nation was at stake. I felt it, the leaders felt it, the army felt it, and we fought like lions.”

  As more and more soldiers from both armies reached town, the battle got bigger and bigger. It actually got so loud that people in Pittsburgh, 150 miles away, heard the explosions.

  General Lee arrived in Gettysburg that afternoon and studied the situation through his binoculars. He was pleased to see that his army was driving Union forces out of the town

  Instead of panicking, though, as they had done in a few previous battles, Union soldiers were gathering in large numbers on the hills just south of town. This was largely thanks to a cool-headed Union general named Winfield Hancock, who took charge on those hills and kept his men calm. “I think this is the strongest position by nature on which to fight a battle that I ever saw,” Hancock said.

  Lee watched all this through his binoculars as the sun went down. He could see that the Union army was now in a strong position. General James Longstreet, Lee’s second-in-command, thought the Confederate army should leave town and find a different place to fight.

  “No,” said Lee, “the enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.”

  “If he is there, it will be because he is anxious that we should attack him,” Longstreet argued. “A good reason, in my judgment, for not doing so.”

  Lee respected Longstreet’s opinion (he called Longstreet his “Old War Horse”). But Lee hadn’t gotten this far by playing it safe. “They are there in position,” Lee said. “And I am going to whip them or they are going to whip me.”

  The Union commander George Meade. finally showed up at about midnight. He met with Hancock and his other generals, who all told him the Union army was in a good spot for tomorrow’s fight. “I am glad to hear you say so, gentlemen,” Meade said, “for it is too late to leave.”

  Both armies tried to get some sleep—but everyone was feeling the pressure. “This is the turning point,” one Union sol
dier said to his friend. “If Lee whips us here the Union is lost.”

  Gettysburg: July 2

  The soldiers of the Twentieth Maine Regiment arrived in Gettysburg on the morning of July 2—and they were already exhausted. These men, mainly young fishermen and lumberjacks, had marched more than 125 miles in the past six days. But there was no time to rest.

  As soon as they got to Gettysburg, the Twentieth Maine was placed on a rocky, wooded hill called Little Round Top. This was a super-important spot because it was the very left end of the entire Union line. If Union soldiers lost control of this spot, Confederate forces could storm around the end of the Union army and surround it—then capture or kill the whole Union force.

  This is exactly what Lee was hoping to do. He ordered a massive attack on the left edge of the Union army.

  When the firing started, Colonel Strong Vincent shouted some last-second orders to Joshua Chamberlain, commander of the Twentieth Maine, “This is the left of the Union line. You understand. You are to hold this ground at all costs!”

  A year before Chamberlain had been a college professor in Maine. Now he had a very different job—he and his men were to die on this spot rather than retreat or surrender.

  Bombs started crashing into the trees on Little Round Top, sending thick branches spinning through the air. Joshua Chamberlain decided his two brothers were standing too close to him. “Boys, I don’t like this,” he told Tom and John Chamberlain. “Another such shot might make it hard for Mother.” The brothers spread out.

  Down at the bottom of the hill, Colonel William Oates, commander of the Fifteenth Alabama, was giving his men a moment of rest. These young farmers were just as tired as the Maine men—they had marched twenty-eight miles in the past twelve hours. “Some of my men fainted from the heat, exhaustion, and thirst,” Oates remembered. And now it was their job to charge up Little Round Top.

  Oates sent a few soldiers off to fill the men’s empty canteens. But while waiting for the water, the regiment was ordered to attack immediately. The men desperately needed something to drink—but orders were orders. They started up the hill.

  “Look! Look!” shouted the men of the Twentieth Maine when they saw the Alabama soldiers coming up through the trees. This was the start of a ferocious fight in which the soldiers slammed together and drove each other up and down the hill.

  “How can I describe the scenes that followed?” wondered Theodore Gerrish of Maine. “Cries, shouts, cheers, groans, prayers, curses, bursting shells, whizzing rifle bullets and clanging steel … . The lines at times were so near each other that the hostile gun barrels almost touched.”

  Both commanders were surrounded by wild fighting and confusion. “At times I saw around me more of the enemy than of my own men,” remembered Chamberlain. “My dead and wounded … literally covered the ground,” Oates said. “The blood stood in puddles in some places on the rocks.” Still, he kept leading charge after charge up the hill.

  Chamberlain’s men were firing so furiously, they ran out of bullets. They grabbed bullets from the wounded and dead, and then ran out of those too. They knew another attack was coming at any minute, and they couldn’t just sit there waiting with no ammunition—but they couldn’t leave. Chamberlain had an idea. “As a last, desperate resort, I ordered a charge,” he said.

  “Bayonet!” Chamberlain shouted.

  The Maine men attached their bayonets to the ends of their rifles. They jumped up, and with what Theodore Gerrish described as “one wild yell,” started running down the hill. “We struck them with a fearful shock,” Gerrish said.

  The bloodied and exhausted survivors of the Fifteenth Alabama retreated down the hill. The left end of the Union line was safe.

  “There never were harder fighters than the Twentieth Maine men and their gallant Colonel. His skill … and the great bravery of his men saved Little Round Top and the Army of the Potomac.”

  William C. Oates

  If the men of the Twentieth Maine had lost Little Round Top, the whole history of the war—and the whole history of the United States—might have been different. And for the rest of their lives, the veterans of the Fifteenth Alabama insisted that they would have taken Little Round Top, if only they had been allowed to have a drink of water before going into battle.

  Still No Winner

  The fight for Little Round Top was just one part of an enormous battle being fought all over Gettysburg on July 2. For General Lee, it was a frustrating day of near misses. His army kept coming close to breaking through the Union army lines, but they just couldn’t punch through. For the second day in a row, more than 10,000 soldiers were killed or wounded. And no one had won the battle of Gettysburg yet.

  Tillie Pierce, the girl who had run home from school as the fighting began, watched wounded Union soldiers hobbling away from the battlefield.

  “The first wounded soldier whom I met had his thumb tied up,” she remembered. “This I thought was dreadful, and told him so.”

  “Oh, this is nothing,” he told Tillie. “You’ll see worse than this before long.”

  “Oh! I hope not,” she said.

  Then the real wounded started coming. “Some limping,” Tillie wrote, “some with their heads and arms in bandages, some crawling, others carried on stretchers or brought in ambulances.” She went to work, carrying water to the wounded soldiers and tearing up clothing for bandages. And she was amazed at her ability to get used to the sight of operations and amputations and piles of arms and legs—sights she never could have imagined just a few days before.

  A twenty-one-year-old teacher named Elizabeth Myers had a similar experience. She nearly fainted when she saw blood flowing from a young soldier’s head. “I never could bear the sight of blood,” she said. But she decided to stay and help—and she quickly adjusted to the horrible sights. “I was among wounded and dying men day and night,” she wrote.

  “The soldiers called me brave, but I am afraid the truth was that I did not know enough to be afraid and if I had known enough, I had no time to think of the risk I ran, for my heart and hands were full.”

  Elizabeth Myers

  That night the commanders of both armies met with their top generals. General Lee decided to stay in Gettysburg and try one more attack. “There were never such men in an army before,” Lee said of his soldiers. “They will go anywhere and do anything, if properly led.”

  Across the dark battlefield, General Meade also decided to stay and fight.

  Life Under Vicksburg.

  Meanwhile, down in Mississippi, Grant still had Vicksburg surrounded. His plan was simple: let no food enter Vicksburg, and bomb the city night and day.

  “We are utterly cut off from the world, surrounded by a circle of fire,” wrote Dora Miller in her diary. “The fiery shower of shells goes on day and night.” Miller was one of about three thousand residents trapped in Vicksburg. With bombs crashing through their homes, families scrambled to find new shelter—usually underground.

  “Cave-digging has become a regular business,” said Miller, “prices range from twenty to fifty dollars, according to the size of the cave. Two diggers worked at ours for a week and charged thirty dollars.”

  Many of the caves were dug by enslaved men, who were stuck in town along with everyone else. Families that could afford large caves furnished their new homes with tables, rugs, mirrors, and mattresses. Not that this made life comfortable. “We were almost eaten up by mosquitoes,” remembered a young woman named Lida Lord. Then there were the snakes. “A large rattlesnake was found one morning under a mattress on which some of us slept that night,” she said.

  Snakes were bad, but bombs were worse. Day after day, Mary Loughborough and her family heard shells exploding all around their underground home. “Terror stricken, we remained crouched in the cave,” she later wrote. One day a shell actually flew into the cave and crashed into the soft earth inside. The bomb’s fuse was sparking and smoking and the family backed helplessly against the dirt walls. “We expecte
d every moment the terrific explosion,” Loughborough wrote. Then George, a young slave, snapped into action. “Thus we remained for a moment, with our eyes fixed in terror on the missile of death, when George, the servant boy, rushed forward, seized the shell, and threw it into the street.”

  “Very thankful was I for our preservation,” she said. How did she thank George for saving the family? She didn’t say.

  The siege of Vicksburg went on and on—twenty days, then thirty, then forty. The food ran out and both soldiers and residents began to starve. Confederate chaplain William Foster described the changing look of soldiers, saying, “The cheeks became thin, the eyes hollow and the flesh began to disappear from the body and limbs.”

  Hunks of horse and mule meat started showing up in the butcher shops. “Mother would not eat mule meat,” remembered a girl named Lucy McCrae. “But we children ate some, and it tasted right good.” When the mules were gone, dogs and cats began disappearing from the streets of Vicksburg.

  At the end of June, soldiers in Vicksburg wrote a letter to their commander. “If you can’t feed us,” they wrote, “you had better surrender, horrible as the idea is.”