Day 50. April 19, 1862. – We Saw a Grate Smoke Raise Up: Letters, Diaries, Wires from the Valley of the Late Rebellion

huge, strange cries, differing from any other….

April Saturday 19

Quite cool and cloudy this morning and looks for rain. Nothing new today and we have put up our large Hospital tent* and got our medicine in it and fixed it up and things are much more convenient. I went into town sent a bundle of canes of 13 to Spruce Creek to Father

Note: “we had to put up our Hospital Tent It was quite a job” Ephraim will write on May 2, as well. George Worthington Adams, in Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War, P. 64-65, describes regimental hospitals: “They varied in size according to the sick lists. They might be housed in tents, dwellings, churches, or even cow barns. Regulations allowed every regiment three “hospital” tents, one “Sibley” tent and one “common” tent. The “hospital” tent was a white wall-tent, fifteen by fourteen feet, and eleven feet high in the center, with side walls four and a half feet high. The “Sibley” was a large, conical affair, resembling a tepee, while the “common” tent was simply an inverted “V” of canvas. But tents were not always available and many hospitals were otherwise sheltered. And, men accustomed to more solid shelter did not always take kindly to tents.

These little hospitals were good or bad according to the intelligence of and sense of responsibility of the regimental surgeons in charge. There was suffering in many because the surgeon did not know how to draw supplies, or how to husband those he had drawn. The Army custom was to issue drugs and other supplies at fixed intervals and in fixed quantities, which meant that a regiment sometimes had an oversupply while at other times it lacked the commonest necessities. Then there was that great Army mystery “the hospital fund” which volunteer surgeons found hard to understand. It was supposed that a sick man ate less than his normal ration and the surgeon was expected to keep account of the difference. This provided a fund which could be used to but delicacies, when obtainable.

From time to time during the war, and especially during its first year, outsiders made horrified inspections of some of the worst regimental hospitals. Inadequate supply and filthy conditions provoked most of their criticisms which were usually summed up in the epithet “pigsties.” In some hospitals the only nurses available were convalescent soldiers, hardly able to drag themselves about and without any training. Clara Barton found a prostrate fever patient in a regimental hospital at Washington whose socks had not been removed for six weeks. “His toes,” she wrote, “were matted and grown together and are now dropping off at the joint: the cavaties in his back are absolutely frightful.’”

Note: This isn’t hyperbole. I worked in an ER at hospital in San Francisco. Toes do drop off. However alarming it is to witnesses, imagine being that man.

Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 54

“7a.m. 62; 2p.m. 62; 9p.m. 57. Peach and cherry blossoms beginning to develop.”

SHERMAN’S ARMY’S JUBILATION—ITS SUDDEN STOPPAGE.

“When Sherman’s armies, (long after they left Atlanta,) were marching through South and North Carolina—after leaving Savannah, the news of Lee’s capitulation having been receiv’d—the men never mov’d a mile without from some part of the line sending up continued, inspiriting shouts. At intervals all day long sounded out the wild music of those peculiar army cries. They would be commenc’d by one regiment or brigade, immediately taken up by others, and at length whole corps and armies would join in these wild triumphant choruses. It was one of the characteristic expressions of the western troops, and became a habit, serving as a relief and outlet to the men—a vent for their feelings of victory, returning peace, &c. Morning, noon, and afternoon, spontaneous, for occasion or without occasion, these huge, strange cries, differing from any other, echoing through the open air for many a mile, expressing youth, joy, wildness, irrepressible strength, and the ideas of advance and conquest, sounded along the swamps and uplands of the South, floating to the skies. (‘There never were men that kept in better spirits in danger or defeat—what then could they do in victory?’—said one of the 15^th corps to me, afterwards.) This exuberance continued till the armies arrived at Raleigh. There the news of the President’s murder was receiv’d. Then no more shouts or yells, for a week. All the marching was comparatively muffled. It was very significant—hardly a loud word or laugh in many of the regiments. A hush and silence pervaded all.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 764-765

Marching with Sherman: Passages from the Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock, Major and Assistant Adjutant General of Volunteers, November 1864–May 1865 (1927) Major Henry Hitchcock P. 266

(To Mrs. Hitchcock)

IN THE FIELD, FAYETTEVILLE, N. CAROLINA

Sunday, March 12^th 1865

“And we have seen and heard more whining, more cowardly talk, more blaming of “the leaders who forced us into this war,” more mean-spirited and abject submission to mere power and less manliness and devotion to even what might be erroneously believed to be principle, in that same State in the South. This is my own observation and experience, and it is that of every other officer and man I have heard speak of the people of South Carolina,—indeed it has been the common talk of this army ever since we got fairly into the State. Of all mean humbugs “South Carolina’s chivalry” is the meanest.”

P. 289-290

IN THE FIELD, GOLDSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA, April 7^h 1865

(To Mrs. Hitchcock)

“This “chivalrous” Southern gentleman; this devil in human shape, who is but a type of his class, and whose polished manners and easy assurance made only more hideous to me the utterly heartless and selfish ambition and pride of class which gave tone to his whole discourse. Day after day we had been listening to the protestations of those whose own ignorance and cowardice have made them the victims, while also in some sense the accomplices, of these “leaders”; day after day we heard the same story in South Carolina just as regularly as in Georgia and in a more whining style. “The people didn’t want this war—they were drug into it by the big men—if the soldiers had their say-so they’d come home mighty quick, but they’s forced to go.” Unluckily a conscript’s bullet kills as quickly as any other. Do you wonder that I say this class must be blotted out?—The class of which Rhett, Jeff Davis, Toombs, and the like, are types?”

America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 349

Note: Re Sherman’s March:

“The verdict among Union troops was clear: “Never in modern times did soldiers have such fun.” In Columbia, some Federals emptied a barrel of molasses, and then tracked it all over a house. They attired their horses in women’s dresses and impaled chickens on their bayonets and marched through the halls of a fine home dripping blood on imported carpets. South Carolinians taunted Sherman that he would encounter a more hostile reception in the Palmetto State than he had in Georgia. As with most Confederate boasts at this stage of the war, the threat was empty air. General Wade Hampton wished Sherman a quick passage through his state. He wrote to his fellow South Carolinian Matthew C. Butler, “Do not attempt to delay Sherman’s march by destroying bridges, or any other means. For God’s sake let him get out of the country as quickly as possible.”

Confederate troops in Charleston, the birthplace of the rebellion, hearing of Columbia’s fate, abandoned the city, as did many of its white residents. The Federals entered Charleston on February 18 to the cheers of the city’s black population. Leading the procession was a black Union soldier on a mule, carrying a banner emblazoned “Liberty.” Black soldiers from the famed 54^th Massachusetts marched behind him singling “John Brown’s Body.’”

Note: Such fun to where it will be 2015 before South Carolina finally takes down its Rebel flag. Still up?

May 10, there celebrated as Confederate Memorial Day, first observed April 26, 1866. Yeah, they got right on that. Still an official State holiday in various other States. States of mind, or something. Lee-Jackson Day was finally, in 2020, snuffed out in Virginia… Back to “but surely, the rebellion will be broken up”:

“The first step to “reconstruction” is to show these “high-bred Southern gentlemen” accustomed to rule as by birth-right, first that they are utterly powerless, and then that nobody cares to solicit their obedience,—that they have got to obey, whether or no. Not to obey us—not at all, but the Government and the laws which we also obey; and that if they don’t they will be crushed like flies on a wheel. This is Gen. Sherman’s “policy,” and it is the kindest and the only one; and he will crush them if need be. Hence this march and its devastation—and now the leading ex-rebels of Savannah are bitterly cursing J.D. & Co., and voluntarily abandoning their hopeless cause. And in seven or eight counties west of this we now have information that Union meetings have been and are being held, that the C.S.A. is openly denounced, and at last accounts the hitherto submissive citizens were attacking and driving out the rebel troops and scouts among them. In this way, not so rapidly as some people probably expect, with the usual foolish haste to thing each success final,—but surely, the rebellion will be broken up. How soon God only knows.”

Note: Hampton (1818-1902) will die at 84 in Columbia, but not before an illustrious career as one of the penultimate Lost Causers (so hard to pick one, as if it’s a beauty contest). He was a Confederate General, S.C. Governor from 1876-1879, S.C. Senator (1879-1891), & Railroad Commissioner (1893-1897). Hitchcock describes him:

(To Mrs. Hitchcock)

IN THE FIELD, RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA

APRIL 15^th 1865

Tuesday 4 P.M.

“Gen. Kilpatrick told me last night,—and I heard the same thing in effect before I left here the other day,—that Wade Hampton declared he did not intend to surrender, anyhow; and that he expressed his intention of going to Mexico to take service with Maximilian. Joy go with him—why not Duke Hampton too? I saw him at the first interview, on the 17^th and stood by for some little time while he and Kilpatrick were talking—out in the yard, where all of us remained while Sherman and Johnston had their private confab in the small frame house where they met. Hampton’s whole demeanor was marked with the easy “well-bred” essentially vulgar insolence which is characteristic of that type of “gentleman”; a man of polished manners, scarcely veiling the arrogance and utter selfishness which marks his class, and which I hate with a perfect hatred. There is nothing of the true man in such “gentlemen”; their external polish and tact, their knowledge of the world, their easy self-possession—qualities which the most finished rascals of foreign gambling-salons share with them,—even the qualities which make them agreeable to their own set or circle,—for a man may be as thoroughly selfish in his apparent generosity, etc., as in the want of it,—count for just as much as the glitter of paste diamonds and no more.”

Note: In the U.S. the largest slaveholder– & South Carolina’s 44^th Lieutenant Governor– was Joshua John Ward, aka “King of the Rice Planters”; died in 1853 at 52 from “an attack of paralysis,” but not before owning 1,092 living, breathing humans on six plantations that in 1850 produced 3.9 million pounds of rice. His Brookgreen Plantation is a National Historic Landmark…. I can’t imagine what they say on the “Oaks Plantation Excursion”; anyone want to report back? It’s $8, & just $4 for kids (make sure they don’t snatch ’em). Can I get sued for that? See. When you’re telling the truth, you can say things like that. When you were the largest slaveholder in America, you have to expect some pushback.

“Rough and bumpy terrain. Dress accordingly” so please, no open-toed shoes, as the blood still seeps out our manicured lawns on occasion, but rest assured the houses full of minie holes are a quick stroll away, so look well around. You’ll be staying here a while in our diorama of the crime scene. We think you’ll find it was all a grand misunderstanding, a verdict of misadventure in the abyss that surrounds the brochure’s totalizing ideologies. Don’t miss our 250 year old Oak trees planted in the 1700s that swung some, & watch, here is another random act glistening through the trees, a reclining skeleton, flesh with the sun glinting off it, the worst you can imagine, covered in dry mummified tissue like the bones a body is seen in & carried around long past.

“Ride along with an interpreter and hear about the history of the prominent Alston family that lived here during the colonial and antebellum eras. Visit the location of the plantation house, the Alston family cemetery, grounds of the slave village, and other archaeological sites. Along the trail, you will also see the natural beauty of a protected Long Leaf Pine forest” for the drift of the sinistral premasticated history of the criminal class, a collection of the same stories over & over like a special door constructed to carry out the dead. Gentilities like these do require linguistic contortions, the ways & means to the unreconstructed whitewashed Devil apocrypha begun from birth, larval, a vector to spread vitiated by nothing because most people can be made to believe anything. Epidemically.

“PLEASE ARRIVE AT BROOKGREEN’S FRONT GATE AT LEAST 30 MINUTES BEFORE YOUR TOUR TIME!” which gives staff enough time to scope you out, find the likeliest ones, the most extraditable, so do arrive at the expected hour; stand out where the trick light can obscure, & we can cleave you from the herd there & then.

“14 seats per door” which is the perfect number to traffic you all at once, under management’s discretion. A body is a body is a body. A witty Britishism for our matchless collective indifference set against the backdrop of the entire estate’s screams mixed with the sound of our gardens’ silty soil rubbed against a coin. Just right for the cake to make it into the mouth.

“Purchase tickets at Keepsakes gift shop at least 10 minutes before tour time” to subsidize as a precious lost relic our brand, applique logos & defactualizations & the holdover sense of the era, all exterminationist, like an arterial spurt on our walls but don’t look for it, the line down it like the residuum of the Middle Passage, a dark bull shark shape off the Carolina coast coming up for you.

“If you are late and miss your tour, tickets are not refundable” & you’ll miss enscorcellment by indefensible plantation romance nostalgia, a valorization that takes colossal nerve from a purebred dynasty created by inheritance, through ancestral attributes now with the old world order in scattered stratus clouds, where the sun moves behind the camera & the ancient serpents become complete in what they are while you run off into blank coordinates, with zero sense of where to escape, just a star in a northerly direction tacked on a sky you can’t find for the cloudcover, so you seek for holes in the sky, a drifting moon dot in the sky up over voices draped around long white Corinthian columns, a mad dog bite on the way.

Don’t miss, like shooting an arrow in the air to kill a hovering spirit, the not so quiet part, incredibly loud: “Can we have our family/engagement/pregnancy/senior/prom photos taken at Brookgreen?” Why yes, at this late date, just like a gaze fixed post-mortem on a slave for $250; $300 gets you the “Proposal Package.” Adds up. And Gift Shop, check, sells “plantation rice, $13.50.” Yes, a rationale for the rationale in a video with an out-and-out Get Out vibe that has to be seen to be believed. Sit transfixed at the audacity of the “watch our history video”: http://brookgreen.org/history-gardens (scroll, then scroll more, because it seems they may not want you to actually view it). Just say you’re White & go.

Only think across the 400+ years of all the all the all souls enslaved by a transnational crime syndicate, then to have these reptilian skin White women in those feigned Trans-Atlantic affectation accents lounge there on the verandah to the camera talm bout their “fighting stallions” sculpture garden, & how “Clark Gable came in one time on his yacht.” And then try their best to get mileage out of the White male “Hispanic Scholar” tale as the back-up plan. Are their sculptures this transparent?

But then this: “Washington Allston inherited Springfield Plantation and sold the land to pay for his art education in England. Today, Washington Allston is considered America’s first great Romantic painter. His dark mystical style may show the influence of stories told to him by enslaved Africans when he was a boy.” How do you fix your mouth to say this?

Just call it what it is: that’s the markings of a savage.

The “watch our history video” plays on, more passing down of the slavemaster legend, along with all the vanishing points of the story they think we should all agree to predicated on a liberty show trial: “In 1860, they avidly supported secession from the Union. In 1862, Union gunboats sailed up the Waccamaw from Georgetown, raided the rice plantations, & freed the slaves. Planter families fled, abandoning their homes & farms rice growing had depended on slave labor. After emancipation, many former slaves left the plantations.”

So there it is.

You guessed it: 1865 comes, the slaves high-tail it out of there, so the plantations all died. Because survival is the purest form of revenge. By 1910, no one left to grow rice in the whole darn town… <shocked_pikachu.jpg> By the 1920s, the center mass caving in, & the dark obscured centers like a conviction vacated when former slaveholder properties in the area go for bargain basement prices to hordes of strange animals attracted by another iteration, mutatis mutandis. Then as it was, then again it will be. JUST IN: No comment on what happened to all the Black people who made the White family lewdly rich. Just a segue to the art. And a shot of an old mansion, with the description of it, “a reminder of the elegant lifestyle enjoyed by the rice planters.” Enjoyed by the rice planters. No pause, then right then into something about a French Bull Terrier named Geisha. Wow, that’s something to see, that segue.

Segue to the fusilade, which is where they wanted to go in the first place; cue the Poor Picaninny photo ops, the clinic & school they hired Black people– assuredly at peonage wages– see them in those pictures– to build, “two buildings that left a lasting impression on the locals….” Quite. We can wager that family dynasty left quite the impression on “locals.” It’s not as if it’s a crime scene just minutes old. It’s centuries gone. And still, still the denial. The throwback.

So, in review: it’s

slaves off The Love Boat straight to a gold lamé village, like a set on Dallas
small dog apropos of nothing
all we have done for you ingrates? you can blame us for nothing now. Love Boat soon will be making another run/the Love Boat promises something for everyone.

That’s in fast secession so “our history video” narrator can get back to more on the sculptures, look at these sculptures! in an oh so gentile, preening, wasted voice that concludes “our history video” with the last two words, “the gardens.” “our history video.” There’s no “our” in the “history,” but stop in for that $13.50 fly-specked rice in the shoppe. Don’t ask after who grew it, the indispensable broken backs of those present off-screen & long dead. And never you mind the intergenerational trauma of descendants still residing in this area. Run along now. You have rice to cook.

Where’s the timelapse footage of a few flecks of greenery, the slave cabins, the clouds streaking across the sky as they make a run for it off the property 160 years ago? They got everything else on tape, no?

It is Google, not Brookgreen’s website or sad little video, where we learn it took all the way to 2018 for college students to drop in & dredge up the grounds. Lo & behold, they discover the “enslaved African rice plantation worker’s Slave Village area.” This is what’s left of the house. This is it. Broken up bits of 19^th century glass, some brick, & “cut nails” that give themselves up, at last, on the ground in blood where “….there was likely a building or a house right here a century ago.” Ya think? wpde.com/news/local/dig-at-brookgreen-gardens-reveals-artifacts-from-slave-village.

Then Joshua John Ward returns from the dead to (have a slave?) run his own Twitter account; here’s one: “While I don’t personally believe in slavery (jk), I sure believe the government should keep its hands off other people’s human-property.” 5/21/19, @ltgovjjward

Let’s get back to the burning of South Carolina, shall we? It’s 108.94 miles in a southeast direction if you run it. Ready, set, GO.

The Burning of Columbia: South Carolina, February 1865

Diary of Emma LeConte: Saturday Afternoon, 18^th. (Excerpt)

“Slocum’s Corps remained over the river and I suppose Davis’ also. The devils as they marched by looked strong, and well clad in dark dirty-looking blue. The wagon trains were immense.

Night drew on– Of course we did not expect to sleep but we looked forward to a tolerably tranquil night. Strange as it may seem we were actually idiotic enough to believe Sherman would keep his word!– A Yankee-and Sherman! It does seem incredible, such credulity– but I suppose we were so anxious to believe him– The lying fiend! I hope retributive justice will find him out one day. At about 7 o’clock I was standing on the back piazza in the third story. Before me the whole southern horizon was lit up by camp-fires which dotted the woods. On one side the sky was illuminated by the burning of Gen Hampton’s residence a few miles off in the country, on the other by some blazing buildings near the river. I had scarcely gone down stairs again when Henry told us there was a fire on Main Street. Sumter Street was brightly lighted by a burning house so near our piazza that we could feel the heat. By the red glare we could watch the wretches walking– generally staggering– back and forth from the camp to the town. Shouting hurrahing cursing South Carolina swearing blaspheming, singing ribald songs and using such obscene language that we were forced to go indoors. The fire on Main Street was now raging and we anxiously watched its progress from the upper front windows. In a little while however the flames broke forth in every direction. The Drunken devils roamed about setting fire to every house the flames seemed likely to spare. They were fully equipped for the noble work they had in hand– each soldier was furnished with combustibles compactly put up– they would enter houses and in the presence of helpless women and children pour turpentine on the beds and set them on fire. Guards were rarely of any assistance– most generally they assisted in the pillaging and firing. The wretched people rushing from their burning homes were not allowed to keep even the few necessaries they gathered up in their flight– even blankets and food were taken from them and destroyed. The Firemen attempted to use their engines but the those were cut to pieces and their lives threatened. The wind blew a fearful gale wafting the flames from house to house with frightful rapidity. By midnight the whole town (except the outskirts) was wrapt in one huge blaze. Still the flames had not approached sufficiently near us to threaten our immediate safety and for some reason not a single Yankee soldier had entered our house. And now the fire instead of approaching us seemed to recede. Henry said the danger was over and sick of the dreadful scene worn out with fatigue and excitement we went down stairs to our room and tried to rest. I fell into a heavy kind of stupor from which I was presently aroused by the bustle about me. Our neighbour Mrs. Caldwell and her two younger sisters stood before the fire and the great sea of flame had again swept down our way to the very campus walls. I felt a kind of sickening despair and did not even stir to go and look out. After awhile Jane came in to say Aunt Josies house was in flames– then we all went up to the front door– My God! what a scene! It was about 4 o’clock and the State House was one grand conflagration. Imagine night turned to noonday only with a blazing, scorching glare that was horrible– a copper coloured sky across which swept columns of black rolling smoke glittering with sparks and flying embers, while all around us were falling thickly showers of burning flakes. Everywhere the palpitating blaze walling the streets with solid masses of flame as far as the eye could reach– filling the air with its horrible roar– on every side the crackling and devouring fire while every instant came the crashing of timbers and the thunder of the falling buildings. A quivering molten ocean seemed to fill the air and sky. The library building opposite us seemed framed by the gushing flames & smoke while through the windows gleamed the liquid fire. This we thought must be Aunt Josie’s house. It was the next one for although hers caught frequently it was saved. The college buildings caught all along that side, and had the incendiary work continued one half hour longer than it did they must have gone. All the physicians and nurses were on the roof trying to save the buildings and the poor inmates left to themselves such as could crawled out while those who could not move waited to be burned to death. The Common opposite the gate was crowded with homeless women & children– a few wrapped in blankets and many shivering in the night air. Such a scene as this with the drunken fiendish soldiery in their dark uniforms, infuriated cursing, screaming, exulting in their work, came nearer realizing the material ideal of hell than anything I ever expect to see again. They call themselves Shermans “hell hounds.’”

The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War Mark M. Smith P. 141-142

“Confederate noses could smell Sherman’s army miles before it arrived and for days after it left. Houses, whole cities, were cindered; decades of settlement, of carefully cultivated society, were left drifting on the air, the impressive physicality of a civilization reduced to an evaporating smell.

Deliberate torching was deemed the most efficient means of achieving destruction. “Old Sherman’s Smokehouse Rangers” had one mantra: Burn. Nights in Atlanta were made so bright some soldiers could read their newspapers from the fuel of Southern civilization. South Carolina generally, the capital of Columbia in particular, was left so charred, the scale of the burning so great, that even federal soldiers were choked, almost suffocated by the consuming blazes. And so in the wake was left behind “a howling wilderness,” not unlike the one the first settlers had encountered hundreds of years before.”

The South: A Tour of its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People, 1867 J.T. Trowbridge, J.H. Segards, Editor P. 546-548

“The march of the Federals into our State,” says a writer in the “Columbia Phoenix,” “was characterized by such scenes of license, plunder, and conflagration as very soon showed that the threats of the Northern press, and of their soldiery, were not to be regarded as a mere brutum fulmen. Daily long trains of fugitives lines the roads, with wives and children, horses and stock and cattle, seeking refuge from the pursuers. Long lines of wagons covered the highways. Half-naked people cowered from the winter under bush-tents in the thickets, under the caves of houses, under the railroad sheds, and in old cars left them along the route. All these repeated the same story of suffering, violence, poverty, and nakedness. Habitation after habitation, village after village,—one sending up its signal flames to the other, presaging for it the same fate,—lighted the winter and midnight sky with crimson horrors.

“No language can describe, nor can any catalogue furnish, an adequate detail of the wide-spread destruction of the homes and property. Granaries were emptied, and where the grain was not carried off, it was strewn to waste under the feet of the cavalry, or consigned to the fire which consumed the dwelling. The negroes were robbed equally with the whites of food and clothing. The roads were covered with butchered cattle, hogs, mules, and the costliest furniture. Valuable cabinets, rich pianos, were not only hewn to pieces, but bottles of ink, turpentine, oil, whatever could efface or destroy, were employed to defile and ruin. Horses were ridden into the houses. People were forced from their beds, to permit the search after hidden treasures.

“The beautiful homesteads of the parish country, with their wonderful tropical gardens, were ruined; ancient dwellings of black cypress, one hundred years old, which had been reared by the fathers of the Republic,—men whose names were famous in Revolutionary history,—were given to the torch as recklessly as were the rude hovels; choice pictures and works of art from Europe, select and numerous libraries, objects of peace wholly, were all destroyed. The inhabitants, black no less than white, were left to starve, compelled to feed only upon the garbage to be found in the abandoned camps of the soldiers. The corn scraped up from the spots where the horses fed, has been the only means of life left to thousands but lately in affluence. The villages of Buford’s Bridge, of Barnwell, Blackville, Graham’s, Bamberg, Midway, were more or less destroyed; the inhabitants everywhere left homeless and without food. The horses and mules, all cattle and hogs, wherever fit for service or for food, were carried off, and the rest shot. Every implement of the workman or the farmer, tools, ploughs, hoes, gins, looms, wagons, vehicles, was made to feed the flames.’”

Note: Toni Morrison: You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

Hearts Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Edited by Harold Holzer P. 1070-1075

SHERMAN’S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE.

Henry W. Slocum, Major-General, U.S.V.

“Having effectually destroyed over sixty miles of railroads in this section, the army started for Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, each corps taking a separate road.

During the night of February 17 the greater portion of the city of Columbia was burned. The lurid flames could easily be seen from my camp, many miles distant. Nearly all the public buildings, several churches, an orphan asylum, and many of the residences were destroyed. The city was filled with helpless women and children and invalids, many of whom were rendered houseless and homeless in a single night. No sadder scene was presented during the war. The suffering of so many helpless and innocent persons could not but move the hardest heart. The question as to who was immediately responsible for this disaster has given rise to some controversy. I do not believe that General Sherman countenanced or was in any degree responsible for it. I believe the immediate cause of the disaster was a free use of whisky (which was supplied to the soldiers by citizens with great liberality). A drunken soldier with a musket in one hand and a match in the other is not a pleasant visitor to have about the house on a dark, windy night, particularly when for a series of years you have urged him to come, so that you might have an opportunity of performing a surgical operation on him.

We were delayed several days in vain efforts to effect a crossing, and were finally compelled to await the falling of the waters. Our pontoon-bridge was finally constructed and the crossing commenced. Each regiment as it entered South Carolina gave three cheers. The men seemed to realize that at last they had set foot on the State* which had done more than all the others to bring upon the country the horrors of civil war. In the narrow road leading from the ferry on the South Carolina side torpedoes had been planted, so that several of our men were killed or wounded by treading upon them. This was unfortunate for that section of the State. Planting torpedoes for the defense of a position is legitimate warfare, but our soldiers regarded the act of placing them in a highway where no contest was anticipated as something akin to poisoning a stream of water; it is not recognized as fair or legitimate warfare. If that section of South Carolina suffered more severely than any other, it was due in part to the blundering of people who were more zealous than wise.

About February 19^th the two wings of the army were reunited in the vicinity of Branchville, a small village on the South Carolina Railroad at the point where the railroad from Charleston to Columbia branches off to Augusta. Here we resumed the work which had occupied so much of our time in Georgia, viz., the destruction of railroads.

Having thoroughly destroyed the arsenal buildings, machine-shops, and foundries at Fayetteville, we crossed the Cape Fear River on the 13^th and 14^th and resumed our march. We were now entering upon the last stage of the great march which was to unite the Army of the West with that of the East in front of Richmond. If this march could be successfully accomplished the Confederacy was doomed.”

Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1^st S.C. Volunteers Susie King Taylor (1902) docsouth.unc.edu P. 42

“On February 28, 1865, the remainder of the regiment were ordered to Charleston, as there were signs of the rebels evacuating that city. Leaving Cole Island, we arrived in Charleston between nine and ten o’clock in the morning, and found the “rebs” had set fire to the city and fled, leaving women and children behind to suffer and perish in the flames. The fire had been burning fiercely for a day and a night. When we landed, under a flag of truce, our regiment went to work assisting the citizens in subduing the flames. It was a terrible scene. For three or four days the men fought the fire, saving the property and effects of the people, yet these white men and women could not tolerate our black Union soldiers, for many of them had formerly been their slaves; and although these brave men risked life and limb to assist them in their distress, men and even women would sneer and molest them whenever they met them.”

“WHAT WERE WE FIGHTING FOR”:

NORTH CAROLINA, APRIL-MAY 1865

The Civil War The Final Year: Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 712 Diary of Samuel T. Foster, of the 34^th Texas Cavalry had joined the Army of Tennessee, and wrote this entry near Greensboro, North Carolina.

“April 19,

Moved 1/2 mile today and camp in regular order to remain until the armistice ends. We hear it reported on very good authority that the President of the U S Mr Lincoln was killed a few nights ago in Washington, and that about the same time Seward was shot at and mortally wounded.

It is also reported that the United States has recognized the Confederacy, and agrees to give us all our rights [and slavery] if we will help them to fight all their enemies whatsoever.

Another report is that we go back into the Union and free all the slaves in — years– some fill up the blank with 5 years some 10 and some 20 and so on. All hands talking politics and making peace.

Soon after we arrive at our new camp today some of our men found two barrels of Old Apple brandy burried under the root of an old pine tree that had blown down. One barrel of it was brought to Our Brigade and tapped– Every one helped themselves, and of course some get funny, some get tight some get gentlemanly drunk and some get dog drunk, of this latter class are all the officers from our Maj. up. Kept up a noise nearly all night, but no one gets mad– all in good humor.”

Note: Security meant men were sent forward to test the rails & the tracks ahead at the whistle stops where Lincoln would stop & make speeches.

But fast forward: Lincoln’s funeral train will leave D.C. April 21st, 1865 with 300 aboard, retracing the route he traveled in 1861 after he won the presidency. Called The Lincoln Special, it will travel 1,654 miles in 13 days with his likeness on the cowcatcher. Lincoln’s son Willie, who died in 1862 (2/20), was also aboard. The schedule lists train stops & time, & reads at the bottom, “This Train and Pilot will have the right to the track over all other trains, and no train will run within 30 minutes of their time.” This means trains were not to use the tracks both 30 minutes prior to & 30 minutes after Lincoln’s train had passed through each & every town. He moves across the country in a kind of ghost ship, with a silence in the sky lingering as the train shadow bisects the north from south. 25 million Americans were directly involved in the funeral procession in some way, & over 1 million saw him as he lay in state in the cities, & 1 in 4– or 7 million– Americans witnessed the train as it passed along right before them in its 13 day journey to Springfield. It’s said when bystanders threw roses at his casket as it passed through it was the first time Americans did so at caskets. Lilacs, too. 444 communities, 180 cities, 7 States.

Wednesday, April 26, 1865: some stops were short, others longer. For instance:

Tribes Hill 5:40 then onto

Fonda at 5:55

Johnsville 7:00

East Creek 7:07

Ilion 8:56

Frankfort 8:02

Lincoln’s train arrives at Harrisburg** at 8pm April 21^st, & he’s carried by hearse to the State House of Representatives. People begin walking by him at 9pm. Ephraim’s Huntingdon Station is 95 miles northwest of Harrisburg, so he may have been there. Did Ephraim think to find where he stashed his diary & write an entry about Lincoln’s death? The train leaves for Philadelphia*** the next day at 11:15am. In Philadelphia, it’s said 300,000 people pass by his remains in the room where the Declaration of Independence was signed. The lines are wild, yet by invitation only, & one woman has her arm broken. People started tearing at their clothes during the five hour queue. 500,000 waited in Jersey City. At City Hall in NYC, a photographer sneaks the one & only likeness of dead Lincoln. He looks very dead, though far off, in the likeness, with two men standing, both with arms crossed, at the casket. Edwin Stanton reportedly gets ahold of the picture & hides it.

From April 18 to May 3, 2015, the National Park Service commemorated the anniversary in each major city that originally held a funeral for Lincoln as his funeral train passed through, from D.C. to Springfield. At the Illinois state capitol building, on the 150^th anniversary, a list of local events included a replica of Lincoln’s coffin on display at the capitol, & “Lincoln actor” Fritz Klein (from Springfield) took questions in & out of character as Lincoln. The flyer said that he would “say some of Lincoln’s thoughts on the nation as it moved past the Civil War.”

Three to four thousand visit Lincoln’s tomb at Springfield per day. A slow day is 1,000. The Europeans come, the Japanese come with questions, to Oak Ridge Cemetery, just 2nd to Arlington in visitors.

A funeral hearse drawn by 6 white horses moves past 100,000k to the Capitol & from reports, we know a profound silence descends 4/19/65 over Pennsylvania Avenue but for one funeral drum that sounds in the street. They stand in silence & watch him go by. In the East Room of the White House, 25k file past him. The coffin was mahogany, covered with black cloth & lined with lead, the lead covered in white satin.

On April 26, 1865, Roosevelt, age 6, & his brother are standing at the large open 2^nd floor window of their grandfather’s NYC mansion & see Lincoln pass by in the procession, which takes four hours. One million bystanders stand as silent witness to “the sound of pipes and muffled drums.” Edith, age 3, FDR’s sister, was also at the window but “when she saw “’all the black drapings,’” she started to weep: “’They didn’t like me crying. They took me and locked me in a back room.’”

One photograph gets the boys staring down at Lincoln’s coffin. There’s actually a picture of the memorial parade passing the Roosevelt mansion at the NYT: “When T.R. Saw Lincoln.” According to the article (2014) by Michael Beschloss, FDR’s father was friends with Lincoln & Mary during the war, & FDR himself had always emulated Lincoln who was “my great hero” and meant “more to me than any other of our public men.”

In Cleveland, at an outdoor pavilion in a driving rain, 10,000 each hour file by. The train covers 1,662 miles to get the body to Springfield. 180 cities in seven States. It never goes over 20mph.

Lincoln had on him, among other items, a $5 Confederate bill when shot. That & an ivory pocketknife with silver mounting, a watch fob, a brown leather wallet lined in purple silk with 8 newspaper clippings about himself, an oversize white Irish linen handkerchief with “A. Lincoln” embroidered in red cross-stitch. Passed down for seventy years, his granddaughter, Mary Lincoln Isham, in 1937 finally donates the items to the Library of Congress.

Note: (12/11/24) Saw NYT article the flag covering his coffin is for sale. If you’re El Rico, you get to have you own slice of American history all to yourself. A small Florida museum’s selling it off after never apparently having displayed it, having received it in 1996 from some family in whom the flag floated all these generations. The museum didn’t even know it was on their premises. Be real careful who you give what to, & it you want it to have at least a chance at lasting in the public domain, don’t ever pawn it off on a place like this. Give it to a government archive, at the least. https://archive.ph/2024.11.26-203625/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/22/nyregion/flag-lincoln-coffin-auction.html

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years Carl Sandburg 1954 P. 737

“Baltimore wore mourning everywhere and paid reverence; the human outpouring was unmistakable. More than surface changes had come to Maryland in the four furnace years. As the funeral train moved slowly over Pennsylvania soil, at lonely country crossroads were people and faces, horsemen, farmers with their wives and children, standing where they had stood for hours before, waiting, performing the last little possible act of ceremony and attention and love– with solemn faces and uncovered heads standing and gazing as the funeral car passed. In villages and small towns stood waiting crowds, sometimes with a little silver cornet band, often with flowers in hope the train might stop and they could leave camellias, roses, lillies-of-the-valley, wreaths of color and perfume. At York in a short stop six ladies came aboard and laid a three-foot wreath of red and white roses on the coffin.

Through heavy rains at Harrisburg came 30,000 in the night and morning to see the coffin in circles of white flowering almond. At noon on Saturday, April 22, in Philadelphia a half-million people were on hand for the funeral train. In Independence Hall stood the coffin. Outside the line of mourners ran three miles. “A young lady had her arm broken,” said the New York Herald, “and a young child, involved in the crush, is said to have been killed. Many females fainted with exhaustion, and had to be carried off by their friends.” Besides doors, through two windows in a double column a third of a million people entered and passed by the casket. A venerable Negro woman, her face indented and majestic as a relief map of the continent of Asia, laid evergreens on the coffin and with hot tears filling the dents and furrows, cried, “Oh, Abraham Lincoln, are you dead? Are you dead?” She could not be sure.”

Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman P. 765

NO GOOD PORTRAIT OF LINCOLN.

“Probably the reader has seen physiognomies (often old farmers, sea-captains, and such) that, behind their homeliness, or even ugliness, held superior points so subtle, yet so palpable, making the real life of their faces almost as impossible to depict as a wild perfume or fruit-taste, or a passionate tone of the living voice—and such was Lincoln’s face, the peculiar color, the lines of it, the eyes, mouth, expression. Of technical beauty it had nothing—but to the eye of a great artist it furnished a rare study, a feast and fascination. The current portraits are all failures—most of them caricatures.”

Note: “The Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana,” 11,100 items, is housed at the Library of Congress; much has been digitized, with more to come. 206 items are classified under “ephemera,” & 24 in “realia,” which both sound intriguing. http://loc.gov/collections/alfred-whital-stern-lincolniana/about-this-collection. Further Lincolniana: Jay Monaghan’s Lincoln Bibliography: 1839-1939, in 2 volumes.

AND VISIT FORD’S THEATRE AT:

https://rememberinglincoln.fords.org/node/364

“Graduation Speech Part 1” video on YouTube (minute 4:47) Shelby Foote

“American history is absolutely amazing in its combination of glory and shame. It’s one of the things that makes it so interesting. Uh, they keep talking about the politicians are slick, you should really look back into the Civil War if you want to find some slick politicians and one of the slickest of them all was Abraham Lincoln, for the good side. You see, there’s this mixup between things in American history, you’ll always run into that.”

**Ephraim’s Huntingdon Station is 95 miles northwest of Harrisburg. 2017 was observed as the 250^th anniversary of Huntingdon, PA.

***Lincoln lay at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. On 2/22/61–Washington’s birthday– Lincoln had first arrived in Philadelphia & stood under a giant flag which was 34 stars at 6 a.m. when he spoke here– Independence Hall– “I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.” And he will be back to lay right there, dead: America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 197

“The atmosphere was still tense, however, as death threats had followed Lincoln’s train. Outside this hallowed hall, the president-elect grasped a rope and hoisted a large Star-Spangled Banner. As he pulled on the halyards the flag rose, slowly unfurling in the gentle wind, revealing the colors radiant in the brilliant sunshine. A crescendo of cheers followed the flag upward as if….”

For a stunning account of the brewing plot to assassinate Lincoln before he took office, see: https://sites.google.com/view/feltonnarrative/home

Note: This day in 1865 Sherman & Johnston sign the surrender. 90K Southerners put their guns down. They either stack them or hide them on their persons or elsewhere.

Note: It rained 28 out of 45 days, the worst rains in 20 years. Sherman’s men “….waded through water up to their armpits, brushing aside alligators and snakes, and drove the rebels away.” Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. 828

things are much more convenient….

All we can do is go to the original records, the physical artifacts, the maps drawn before, then after, battle. The Real War levitates in the spaces between that which words can’t rescue, not even under a trick light– (where men fall down playing dead in a field reenacting, trying to get it back, as if they needed to know it again, didn’t get it down right the first time)– & that which is left of the founding documents, what was left outside their scope when we all have the same 26 letters to go from? (Please see June 22 for ideas where at least some Real War records can be located.)

All words gave out at 3am in a Columbia fire wind so in the end the Devil tricked us not to speak of the Real War. Maybe, after all, it was simpler than that. There’s the old saying If you’re going to prosecute the Devil, you have to go to hell for your witnesses.

But then we’d have to qualify who the nation consisted of, & agree what the war was fought for– liberty– by then & still now a word whose meaning has extended to include its opposite. African-Americans won’t get citizenship until 1866 & even then, the cotton counting room still fully operational. The right to vote not had until 1870 in the country with the light that causes each word to be the shadow of its opposite, two kinds of realities hinged together like a mixed blood.

And now what’s left of the Real War is a petrified version, the same Don’t Tread On Me viper coiled 3x up like a High Sheriff out to pick the bones by the 1870s, out to get back to the State-directed terror, & the bones slip right out easy. Heritage not Hate as they continue using a symbol from the worst 48 months out of four centuries in the history of White folk since they Columbused in to either talk them out of it or take it from them. We all have our reasons, don’t we. See also: “Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.” Faulkner.

They knew what the war was, they knew you can’t translate it into words because those moments are beyond the world’s eye but then, they always were. Unless you were in the part of the world where the war happened, were there, present & accounted for as a live witness or participant, all you have to go from is what those there left behind. Even then, interpretations of reality vary. Every battle has discrepancies in the recollections of the various principals. Yet the word unknowable itself does not appear across the years in the pages here. Both sides were clear on who they were. It’s only us who are left confused.

There is nothing to consult but relics and records. You can dig up what bodies are left, see how they were buried, wearing what, you can do that. Were the hands crossed in front of the heart? Arms laid in an X over the chest? Or was it more a face down situation. You can dig them straight out of the ground, all that’s left beyond the written record. Centuries later historians will still get it wrong, the same way scientists so often get it wrong now, and that 800k will shapeshift to a million and more. More records will be discovered, uncovered from the dust of centuries in a trunk in an attic, or buried in a crypt, or a basic diary like this one some family has sat on over the centuries.

As Nancy Pelosi said in a 2020 letter to the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library requesting removal of statues from the grounds of the U.S. Capitol: “Their statues pay homage to hate, not heritage. They must be removed.”

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner.

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