Day 1. March 1, 1862.
March Quotes:
South Carolina Governor Francis Pickens: Thank God the war is open.
Abraham Lincoln in 1959: The people—the people—are the rightful masters of both Congresses, and courts—not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it—.
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. 277
We must either identify ourselves with the North or the South,” wrote a Virginian, while two former North Carolina unionists expressed the view of most of their fellows: “The division must be made on the line of slavery. The South must go with the South. . . . Blood is thicker than water.
Thomas Corwin to Abraham Lincoln January 16, 1861: I cannot comprehend the madness of the times. Southern men are theoretically crazy. Extreme Northern men are practical fools, the latter are really quite as bad as the former. Treason is in the air around us every where & goes by the name of Patriotism.
Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis Donald E. Reynolds P. 167-168
The Raleigh North Carolina Standard suggested that all would be well if only five-hundred public men from both sections could be “transported or confined in dungeons for six months.”
Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War: 37th Congress, 3rd Session Part One Army of the Potomac U.S. Congress P. 61
A speedy march upon the capital; a speedy overthrow of the legal government; a speedy submission of a people too pusillanimous to maintain their rights; and a speedy subjection of the whole country to the assumptions of the south, were the prominent features of their delusion.
Charleston Mercury April 11, 1861: The North is swollen with pride and drunk with insolence…. The North needs proof of the earnestness of our intentions and our manhood. Experience shall be their teacher. Let them learn.
Letter to the Richmond Dispatch, 1861: Well, let them come—those minions of the North. We’ll meet them in a way they least expect; we’ll glut our carrion crows with their beastly carcasses, and leave their bleaching bones to enrich our soil. Yes, from the peaks of the Blue Ridge to tide-water, will we strew our plains, and leave their bleaching bones to enrich our soil. (Slightly different versions of this letter appear online.)
Note: To get where he is right now, March 1, Ephraim & the 110th would have crossed the Long Bridge, the one built in 1809, the bridge the Union Army walked over entering Virginia as they move into the valley of the damned. The Union crossed it for the first time in July, 1861. Here we go…….
1
the last hours of the United States of America…. Some likened the conflict to Armageddon….
March Saturday 1st 1862
Quite cool this morning and at 4oclock we was called up to cook three days rations* and be ready to march at 7oclock in the morning of the same day. I packed up the medicine and was whole three brigade was to move and at 3oclock in the afternoon the two Battaries of Brass Cannon and one 24 pounder with 8 horses to haul it and 6 Parrot Rifle** cannon followed up. We left Camp Tyler near Paw Paw Morgan County Va. at 4oclock we took up the line of march for Big Capaon River. The 19th Ohio and Ohio 7 Virginia were along. We crossed over a mountain and down a hollow to Capaon River where we haulted for the night and we made coffee and eat some crackers and lay down on the ground and our blankets over us and sleep until morning when we waked up. We sleep in the woods so much for soldiering***
For the end pages, please see July 5th.
*Packing food rations for the march into Winchester: the 110th was told to return to Paw Paw because officials knew General Frederick Lander wouldn’t make it. This is far from the last time soldiers will get fixed for the night but have to pack up & get on the march again. The 110th was set to attack, see if they could retake control of the town on March 3rd but this here’s the end of the line for Lander. He had said he was going to get up behind Jackson to “beat him to death.” Lander’s death tomorrow foils the plan to attack; today he is on morphine for “congestion of the brain”– pneumonia– & had begged Lincoln for at least two weeks to send anyone else to take command from him. Lincoln ignored him. Lincoln will pay him attention, finally, by dropping in at his Church of the Epiphany funeral in D.C.
**Parrott rifles, cannons, ammo: https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-war/?fa=partof:lot+4166&dates=1800-1899&sb=title_s
https://antietam.aotw.org/weapons.php?weapon_id=8
***Here, too, is the question of what Ephraim expected the war would be like. Almost as if he’s asking where’s the wet bar? So much for soldiering. This was not in the brochure. And, too, as time goes on, we’ll see this tiny diary become his confidant, always there to hear him; in fact, he will never skip a day writing until the day…. he doesn’t write again. He is 3 weeks into his 32nd year now, and will die three weeks shy of his (see later).
Note: Paw Paw station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBEDDKwoc5Q (For more on the B&O line, see subsequent days.)
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the Civil War: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/baltimore-and-ohio-railroad-civil-war (No author cited.)
“The Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad was the first railroad chartered in the United States and was the backbone for transportation in the early 1800s. The line’s construction began on July 4th, 1828. From 1828 to 1861, the B&O had expanded into thirteen states. The B&O dipped into portions of Northern Virginia, such as Winchester and Strasburg,Virginia, with Harper’s Ferry serving as the main junction to the Shenandoah Valley.
In 1859, the abolitionist John Brown led a small group of men to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, (modern day West Virginia). They wished to seize the federal arsenal in the town, while sparking a slave uprising in the area. Their initial actions led to the seizure of a B&O Railroad bridge leading into Harper’s Ferry. Brown and his men seized an express locomotive while the capture of the bridge was underway. Amidst Brown’s actions, an African American porter was mortally wounded, the first victim of John Brown’s Raid. John Brown’s Raid was the beginning of many attacks and raids that affected the B&O throughout the Civil War era.
As a largely east-west rail line, at this time, the B&O was an important line for both the Union and Confederacy. Both sides each claimed the line as their own. Throughout the course of the war, a total of 143 raids, skirmishes, and battles directly involved the B&O Railroad. On April 18th, 1861, Union forces severed the rail line at Harper’s Ferry. Union troops in Harper’s Ferry set fire to an armory, arsenal, and a rifle factory before withdrawing from the town. Later that same evening, Virginia State Militia regained control of the area and salvaged any useful supplies.
In the Spring of 1861, Col. Thomas J. Jackson attacked portions of the B&O Railroad that dipped into the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson devastated the rail line by destroying rails, burning freight cars, and sequestering locomotives to replenish supplies for the Confederacy. By the end of 1861, 23 B&O railroad bridges were burned, 102 miles of telegraph wire had been cut down, 36.5 miles of track was torn up or destroyed, 42 locomotives were burned, 14 locomotives were captured, and 386 rail cars were stolen or destroyed. This resulted in the B&O being shut down for ten months. Restoration of the railroad continued until March of 1862, and still, the line was subjected to numerous raids, skirmishes, and battles. This resulted in the garrisoning of Union troops along the railroad to prevent any further damage to the line, as well as keep supplies in Union hands.
During the second half of the war, the B&O railroad suffered from nearly continuous raiding by Confederate forces. Poor Union leadership caused the line to suffer greatly at the hands of Confederate forces. The B&O was a strategic target for the Confederacy due to its rapid ability to transport soldiers and supplies quickly in and out of Washington, DC. Confederate leaders such as Lt. Col. John Singleton Mosby was one such leader that repeatedly took part in skirmishes along the B&O railroad.
In the summer of 1864, John Garrett, the owner of the B&O railroad, provided key intelligence to Union command on the whereabouts of Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s army that was encroaching on Washington, DC. Garrett, along with railroad workers, reported intelligence that led to the Battle of Monocacy on July 9th, 1864. The Battle of Monocacy ended in a Confederate victory, however, the battle was considered by the Union to be the “Battle That Saved Washington,” as Early was delayed in assaulting Washington, DC. After the battle, Garrett was in correspondence with President Abraham Lincoln, who named Garrett, “the right arm of the Federal Government” for his commitment to the war effort.
The B&O railroad served as the Union’s lifeline and supply chain. The B&O provided the Union army with much-needed supplies and ushered the United States in a new industrial age that saw the rapid advancement of industrial growth that the South could not produce. Despite impossible odds against constant raiding from Confederate soldiers, the B&O served the Union efficiently and helped play a crucial role in the Union’s ultimate victory.”
Note: The 110th movement today:
Journal of the Shenandoah Valley During the Civil War Era: A Publication of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute Volume IV 2021 Jonathan Noyalas Footnote 5 in piece by Cheyenne Nimes titled “May Peace Soon be Restored: The 1862 Diary of Ephraim Burket, 110th Pennsylvania” P. 37
“On March 1, 1862, the 110th Pennsylvania, along with other units in General Frederick Lander’s division, moved toward Winchester. According to Ross Miller, a private in Company B, 110th Pennsylvania, Lander’s troops departed from Paw Paw, Virginia (now West Virginia) around 5:00 p.m. Lander’s command marched approximately seven miles and halted near Big Cacapon Creek.”
Note: Back to the start of war: For now, it takes just 15 minutes from the moment of secession for the Charleston Mercury to hawk its special edition on the street:
1:30pm, 12/20/60: “Passed unanimously at 1.15 o’clock, P.M. December 20th, 1860.
EXTRA: THE UNION IS DISSOLVED
AN ORDINANCE To dissolve the Union between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her under the compact entitled “The Constitution of the United States of America.”
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 181
“In December 1860 the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger referred to it all as “the last hours of the United States of America” “the election to the Presidency of a candidate pledged to the ultimate extinction of a domestic institution which is the foundation stone of southern society.’”
Black Reconstruction in America W.E.B. DuBois P. 23
“The South was fighting for the protection and expansion of its agrarian feudalism. For the sheer existence of slavery, there must be a continual supply of fertile land, cheaper slaves, and such political power as would give the slave status full legal recognition and protection, and annihilate the free Negro. The Louisiana Purchase had furnished slaves and land, but most of the land was in the Northwest. The foray into Mexico had opened an empire, but the availability of this land was partly spoiled by the loss of California to free labor. This suggested a proposed expansion of slavery toward Kansas, where it involved the South in competition with white labor: a competition which endangered the slave status, encouraged slave revolt, and increased the possibility of fugitive slaves.
It was a war to determine how far industry in the United States should be carried on under a system where the capitalist owns not only the nation’s raw material, not only the land, but also the laborer himself; or whether the laborer was going to maintain his personal freedom, and enforce it by growing a political and economic independence based on widespread ownership of land.
This brings us down to the period of the Civil War. Up to the time that the war actually broke out, American labor simply refused, in the main, to envisage black labor as a part of its problem. Right up to the edge of the war, it was talking about the emancipation of white labor and the organization of stronger unions without saying a word, or apparently giving a thought, to four million black slaves. During the war, labor was resentful. Workers were forced to fight in a strife between capitalists in which they had no interest and they showed their resentment in the peculiarly human way of beating and murdering the innocent victims of it all, the black free Negroes of New York and other Northern cities; while in the South, five million non-slaveholding poor white farmers and laborers sent their manhood by the thousands to fight and die for a system that had degraded them equally with the black slave. Could one imagine anything more paradoxical than this whole situation?”
Note: @blackintheempir, 8/22/21: “America is a land where people with no capital vote for people with capital who help those with even more capital acquire more capital by exploiting the people with no capital and they accept it because they hope to one day have capital too.”
In Their Own Words: Civil War Commanders Collected and Edited by T.J. Stiles P. 10
By General P.G.T. Beauregard
Note: Writing of July 21 1861, First Bull Run like it’s a blood sample about to get collected, which it is:
“There was much in this decisive conflict about to open, not involved in any after battle, which pervaded the two armies and the people behind them and colored the responsibility of the respective commanders. The political hostilities of a generation were now face to face with weapons instead of words. Defeat to either side would be a deep mortification, but defeat to the South must turn its claim of independence into an empty vaunt….”
Robert Toombs (Georgia), Davis’s Secretary of State: “Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death.”
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864 Edward Ayers P. 257
“On April 17, 1862, the first anniversary of Virginia’s secession, Waddell offered a meditation: “Just a year ago to-day, the two companies left this place for Harper’s Ferry. Then the war began, so far as our community was concerned. What events have taken place since then! How many battles in Virginia… how many lives lost in battle and from sickness! At this time there are nearly a million of men in the field, on both sides; the enemy are coming nearer and nearer to us at Staunton; large portions of the State are devastated.” Waddell agreed with a newspaper from down the Valley in its bleak assessment of the situation. It argued that “conquest of the South by the North is impossible, that success on either side is impossible, that peace is impossible, that a continuation of the war as at present and restoration of the Union are both impossible, and the only possibility is that we shall have a military dictator before many years.” Waddell, like many other people, simply could not imagine how the vast machinery of war could be stopped once it began.”
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 207
“What is striking about the diaries and letters of the young men and of the families that they left behind is how much they had absorbed the cultural ideals of their generation. Each side persisted in the belief that the other threatened liberty and the Lord, and that only the fire of battle could save these ideals for now and for all time. The Civil War was not about territory per se; nor was it about wealth; nor was it about forms of government– remarkably few southerners mentioned states’ rights at all in their correspondence. Rather, the war was about God and the fulfillment of His plan to complete the American Revolution. Some likened the conflict to Armageddon or identified it as Armageddon itself. This perspective presaged a brutal and lengthy war, for the stakes were as high as heaven.”
The Field of Blood: Violence In Congress and the Civil War Joanne Freeman P. 10
“Today, we take the Union for granted as a structure of government. In antebellum America, it was more of a pact, grounded on conceptions of rights, fairness, and equal membership. Pacts are inherently vulnerable and unstable, open to reinterpretation by different peoples at different times; western expansion and the spread of slavery exposed and intensified those tensions. Thus the shared sense of political crisis throughout this period as the nation’s founding compact was questioned and renegotiated time and again.
P. 4-5
These were violent times. There was the expulsion of Native Americans from their native lands and sweeping massacres of their people. There was rampant mobbing for a whole host of reasons: anti-abolitionism, racism, nativism. Between July and October of 1835 alone, there were 109 riots nationwide.
….between 1830 and 1860, there were more than seventy violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers or on nearby streets and dueling grounds, most of them long forgotten.
P. 130
So regular was congressional bullying that it was frequently condemned as a “system” of intimidation, beginning as early as the 1820s and continuing through the 1850s.
P. 259
In a sense, America was backing its way into civil warfare. The fireeating rhetoric, the threats and dares, the talk of bloodying the Capitol, the pervasive guns and knives, and now the group fights on the floor: they were clear signs of a nation being torn in two. They were also blunt reminders of a lack of faith in the institution of Congress, even on the part of congressmen; a body of armed legislators is a body of men with no confidence in the power or practices of their own institution. The implications of this loss of faith were profound. If the nation’s representative body couldn’t function, could the nation long survive? Where else but in Congress could the interests of America’s many regions and constituencies be addressed through debate and compromise? As Illinois Republican E.W. Hazard wrote shortly after Sumner’s caning, “If we can no longer look to Congress…what remains to us but a resort to the means given us by the God of nature for self-defence?’”
Note:
And by the 1850s, boxing was the number one U.S. sport.
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Walter A. McDougall P. 340-341
“By the 1850s the hustling, expanding North and West were clearly impatient with sectional strife that hampered the nation’s growth (especially the deadlock over western railroads). So the South devised a new strategy based on new guarantees and new slave states. Secession was always a last resort. Southern kingpins really spent half a century searching for ways to remain in the Union with their honor intact.
Later historians had trouble comprehending this. They assumed proslavery propagandists must have been wicked reactionaries, scribblers pandering to the planters, or else crazy. One scholar confessed to being “astonished” by their ideology.”
Note: Most indentured servants labored for years to buy passage across the ocean, then toiled as indentured servants for 2 to 3 years (another stat is 4-7) once there paying off that steerage. The first Africans to come to the U.S. were likely indentured servants, but in 1641, Massachusetts law made the colony the first to “authorize slavery through legislation.” See April 17 for more re indentured servitude.
A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America Jacqueline Jones P. 43
“Late-seventeenth-century legal developments thus signaled that justifications for slavery remained fluid, and that neither legal authorities nor planters were deploying the notion of racial differences as a rationale for the subordination of black people. Indeed, the light-skinned offspring of masters and enslaved women mocked the very notion that slavery was created as, or remained, a “racial” institution.”
P. 44
“Most Chesapeake planters were were neither ideologues nor idealists; they were entrepreneurs bent on making money and thus willing, if reluctantly so, to cohabit with suspect and even menacing peoples. In the late seventeenth century, a shortage of English indentured servants, combined with more favorable mortality rates for seasoned Africans, made slavery more profitable for colonial householders, even those of modest means. And the fact that enslaved women could reproduce the plantation workforce helped to shift the economic calculus from servitude to bondage.
Eventually, planters would justify the system of slavery with theories of racial difference, theories that their colonial forebears had no incentive to create or invoke. British North American slavery evolved from a struggle for empire and a quest for mastery in the fields, and racial prejudice was more of an afterthought than a cause.”
P. 299
“Subsequent laws decreeing that the offspring of an enslaved woman would remain enslaved signaled that bondage was never a “race-based” labor system; for over the generations, many white owners and overseers fathered children by black women, meaning that an indeterminate number of slaves would be as white as black, or, in some cases, more white than black.”
Hearts Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Harold Holzer P. 43
Jacob D. Cox, Major-General, U.S.V. Ex-Governor of Ohio, Ex-Secretary of the Interior
“The wonderful outburst of national feeling in the North in the spring of 1861 has always been a thrilling and almost supernatural thing to those who participated in it. The classic myth that the resistless terror which sometimes unaccountably seized upon an army was the work of the god Pan might seem to have its counterpart in the work of a national divinity rousing a whole people, not to terror, but to a sublime enthusiasm of self-devotion. To picture it as a whole is impossible. A new generation can only approximate a knowledge of the feelings of that time by studying in detail some separate scenes of the drama that had a continent for its stage. The writer can only tell of what happened under his eye. The like was happening everywhere from Maine to Kansas. What is told is simply a type of the rest.”
Note: “A type of the rest”:
The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat Earl J. Hess P. 94
J. Spangler Kieffer, Pennsylvania Militia:
“I saw enough to sicken the heart in the scores of blackened and bloated dead, and in the hundreds of wounded…. The scenes which I witnessed were enough to overthrow all imaginations concerning the glory of war; but, dreadful as they were, I hope and believe that I would be willing to suffer the worst, to die, if necessary, and leave my body to blacken on the field, rather than prove a traitor to the trust which our country reposes in all her sons. There is something glorious in the death of a soldier, when he dies defending principles such as our soldiers fight for.”
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. 332-333
“In 1861 many Americans had a romantic, glamorous idea of war. “I am absent in a glorious cause,” wrote a southern soldier to his homefolk in June 1861, “and glory in being in that cause.” Many Confederate recruits echoed the Mississippian who said he had joined up “to fight the Yankies – all fun and frolic.” A civilian traveling with the Confederate government from Montgomery to Richmond in May 1861 wrote that the trains “were crowded with troops, and all as jubilant, as if they were going to a frolic, instead of a fight.” A New York volunteer wrote home soon after enlisting that “I and the rest of the boys are in fine spirits… feeling like larks.” Regiments departing for the front paraded before cheering, flag-waving crowds, with bands playing martial airs and visions of glory dancing in their heads. “The war is making us all tenderly sentimental,” wrote southern diarist Mary Boykin Chestnut [sic] in June 1861. So far it was “all parade, fife, and fine feathers.’”
Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis Donald E. Reynolds P. 207
“Newspapermen who, a few weeks before, had defended the Union dropped their pens and rushed off to war in such numbers as to jeopardize the operations of the press. The editor of North Carolina’s Wadesborough Argus wrote: “Our partner, our son, and our pressman, have gone to the war. Until their return, we shall be compelled to issue the Argus, in its present reduced form…. While we write the shrill notes of the fife are sounding in our ears, and the spirit-stirring drum makes us feel as, when we were younger we were wont to feel.” The Harrisonburg (Virginia) Rockingham Register and Advertiser said that half of its office force had “deserted us and joined the standard of its country.” A scarcity of help contributed to the collapse of many newspapers. About six weeks after the war began, the Hillsborough (North Carolina) Recorder wrote: “In consequence of the absence of Editors or Workmen, or both, who have volunteered in defence of our homes, and the discouragements thrown in their way by the prostration of business, we miss from our table several of our Exchange papers.” The Recorder then listed seven journals in North Carolina alone that had recently discontinued publication.
P. 209
The intrastate struggles over secession were over; the tension was broken. Alienated friends could be friends once again. And the excitement of martial spectacle overcame the reservations that many had professed about the wisdom of secession. A Tennessee newspaper must have expressed the feeling of many when it wrote: “The Agony is Over.’”
Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson S.C. Gwynne P. 168-169
“…by December 1861 Union morale had been brought to its lowest point since the days immediately after the defeat at Bull Run. The international community, meanwhile, so crucial to the fate of the Confederacy, was beginning to sound more and more convinced of the South’s viability as an independent nation. In the late fall, the correspondent for the Times of London in Washington made an astonishing diary entry that read, “All the diplomatists (foreign diplomats), with one exception, are of the opinion that the Union is broken forever, and the independence of the South virtually established.”
Note: Forward to present day, 1862:
Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861– 1865 Richard R. Duncan P. 43
“The cold winds of March 1862 were nothing in Winchester compared to the chill of a prospective evacuation by Jackson. News on February 27 that Union troops occupied Charles Town, some twenty-four miles to the northeast, struck fear. Rumors of pending threat had circulated for several weeks. Some residents, as Dr. Abram Miller observed, were leaving. He also noted that those who hoped “the south may be conquered” were in “fine spirits” about Jackson’s possible departure. Angrily he lashed out, “Such people ought to be shot.” Most people refused to countenance the idea of an evacuation. They believed that Winchester was “the key that locked the door to Richmond.” To imply anything else was to question Stonewall’s infallibility. Many regarded the general as “a Moses who was divinely appointed to lead us out of the wilderness.” Despite such faith, speculation created uneasiness and, among some, panic.’”
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War The Diaries of David Hunter Strother David Hunter Strother P. 6
“MARCH 1, SATURDAY.—The amount of pig and chicken stealing was very considerable and all the way from the Ferry I saw soldiers with slaughtered sheep and hogs, carrying their whole or quarters upon their bayonets. There was also a good deal of fence burning but besides the seizing of food and fire there was no mischief done, no wanton acts of destruction. The sight of this beautiful valley, its rural wealth and improvements, seemed to have softened the hearts of officers and men.”
The Boys War: Confederate and Union Soldiers talk about the Civil War Jim Murphy P. 29-30 From the diary of John Delhaney
“I felt strange enough, lying down this my first night in camp. The strange Faces [sic] and forms, the near and distant sounds of an army of men talking, shouting, singing, and all upon different subjects; the croaking frogs, cries of the Whip-poor-Will, the glare of the camp fires and the neighing of horses and the deep shadows of a dark night overhanging all; all these were not calculated to allay my uneasiness of mind or lighten my heart of its cares.”
We Are In For It! The First Battle of Kernstown Gary L. Ecelbarger P. 28-29
“Meanwhile, it’s in the air thousands of Southerners are coming to reinforce Winchester (March 12–25 Union has the town, then they have it back June 4–September 2); Jackson had first arrived at Winchester November 4, in the afternoon. So Union soldiers crossed a mountain range, crossed the Big Cacapon River via pontoons, then “bivouacked in a pine forest on the ascent of the Shenandoah mountains late that night. Mysteriously, the next day, the men were ordered back to Camp Chase at Paw Paw. A heavy snow storm hit the area which angered the men as much as the countermanded orders.’”
Note: In all those 1861 Virginia secession debates– 3000 pages worth– tariffs were mentioned 81 times. Slavery? 1,432. There you have it. Georgia’s mentions slavery 35 times. South Carolina says it 18 times. Remember these repetitions, incantations, that repeating word for real humans, men, women, & children: slaves. Virginia forced civilian non-slaveholders join slave patrols; this was compulsory & men were forced to guard routes of escape. Some forget that Virginia, for 250 years, had slavery. Then the war came. Others forget that 6k Black men fought for the Continental Army, Navy, & in State Militias from 1777 on, were 1/5th of the total of revolutionary soldiers in North, & helped destroy that statue of George the III in 1775. In 2007, the Virginia General Assembly will declare their “profound regret” for slavery’s past in the state.
Just so we’re clear about this here “Scorpion War,” Black males held in bondage did not fight to keep those manacles around their limbs & necks. Any labor on the Confederacy’s behalf was coerced out of them. One cannot be both held in bondage & free to go. They were not free to go. And the way to see yourself clear to this basic fact is to look at the original, primary source documents. The archival record. Newspapers of those years. The O.R. On & on. Find it. Find any Rebel primary source, a scrap of paper, saying how he stood there too.
“Black Confederates” consisted of “body servants,” or they were free Black men paid for labor (like transporting, digging, constructing defenses, maintaining animals, carrying all manner of loads, cooking, as musicians, etc.), &/or they were the enslaved, rounded up then away from lands Army regiments passed across, aka those slaves got kidnapped. Camp slaves.
Confederate soldiers would indeed have been shocked as shit to turn around in the heat of battle to see Uncle Tom pouring powder down the barrel of a Springfield. Oh HELL nah. The only close equivalent morale-killer would’ve been if RE LEE himself got iced right in from of these white Rebels. As Kevin Levin says of his 10 years on the topic, he did not locate a single account where anyone stated Black men were already serving as soldiers. The 1864–1865 Rebel debate about whether to get them to serve, that would have been a fine time to say hey, they’ve already proven they can stand up to fire a rifle. That new military regulation no one thought to mention had Uncle Tom *a bonafide combat soldier,* all a sudden standing beside Johnny Reb loading up to aim at the side guaranteeing his freedom, depending which way this war wind blew.
3/24/65 In a letter written by Robert Toombs:
“In my opinion, the worst calamity that could befall us would be to gain our independence by the valor of our slaves, instead of our own… The day the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers, they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced. But if you put our negroes and white men into the army together, you must and will put them on an equality; they must be under the same code, the same pay, allowances and clothing… Therefore, it is a surrender of the entire slavery question.”
They’ll have to wait till March 13, ’65 for that statute. A *few weeks before the end.* Nothing like closing the barn door after the horse bolted. Still, they had to themselves, these Rebel personnel, a whole 25 days left to shore up their army numbers as they faced defeat. Yet even at that juncture, zero Black soldiers served in the soldier role that any official military record can prove to this day, despite the ‘Heritage not Hate’ contingent, contingent on no evidence..
Note: Like an animal whose body is at rest, this was a war where “The Army of the Potomac, in the first 2 years of war, saw just 30 days of actual fighting.” But two weeks ago Fort Donelson, in Tennessee, falls. Shelby Foote has said the Confederacy lost the war here, at Fort Donelson (2/16/62), that this was already the end. I’ve read that theory a few times now. Confederate losses were 13,846; 12,392 of which had simply gone missing. See: Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War U.S. Congress 1863 Part One: Army of the Potomac. P. 62 “By the capture of Fort Donelson Kentucky was permanently redeemed, the capital of one of the largest revolted States seized, her great rivers laid open to our flotillas, and the war carried to the borders of the Gulf States. The rebel strongholds on the Mississippi, Columbus, Island No. 10, Fort Pillow, together with Memphis, the most important commercial city of the State, fell into our hands.”
Note: At Bull Run neither army had a plan what to do with the injured or how even to get them off the field. Some men waited up 3 days, others (dead) a week to be removed.
Note: Stanton & Lincoln keep peering out the White House windows in the direction of the Potomac at the enemy outposts within sight of the river; only the Potomac stood between them & Dixie. Don’t forget Confederate pickets were within sight of D.C. for over 6 months. Those Southerners camped just 25 short miles from D.C. & they even partially blocked the Potomac from commercial shipping. “A national humiliation,” this was major trolling (trawling?) back in the day. Also: Rebels appeared in front of D.C. defenses five miles north of the White House on July 11, 1864. Grant got there right before Early gets there & stakes him. D.C. had no troops but was “fortified,” & supposedly the “most fortified city in the world” at that time. Later, there is the question whether McClellan– or even Sherman– might pull off a coup & take over D.C. Some historians maintain had Rebels enough firearms, they could have taken the capitol. Right now it’s getting so that Lincoln’s with Stanton on the bat phone about the matter of the wood. They’re going to split the wood they’re going to burn McClellan on. Why?
7/25/24 published by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, at https://presidentlincoln.illinois.gov/News/105/Lincoln-Presidential-Library-launches-online-Picturing-Lincoln-project/news-detail/
How the South Could Have Won the Civil War: The Fatal Errors That Led to Confederate Defeat Bevin Alexander P. 70
“The North could be in an almost impossible dilemma. The Confederates could cut off Washington’s rail communications and food supply, seize Baltimore and perhaps other cities, and spread panic. If Washington was isolated, there could be intense pressure to evacuate the government for fear members would be captured. Britain and France would likely recognize the Confederacy.”
Note: “I hope, therefore, that all constitutional means will be exhausted before there is a resort to force. Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for “perpetual union,” so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution or the consent of all the people in convention assembled.” – Robert E. Lee, January 23, 1861
Note: Jefferson Davis, 8 days back, gave his inaugural address in Richmond… “The impartial and enlightened verdict of mankind will vindicate the rectitude of our conduct, and He who knows the hearts of men will judge of the sincerity with which we labored to preserve the Government of our fathers in its spirit.” But today, Davis suspends the writ of Habeas Corpus. He enacts martial law in a 10-mile radius around Richmond.
Note: A hundred years from today I’m 29 days old, in a bassinet in Strafford, PA., 175 miles down Route 76 from Ephraim’s farm.
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so much for soldiering….
The Real War will never get in the books. It’s the distance between a weapon and a wound. It is all the distance in the world.
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