Day 61. April 30, 1862.
61
dilapidated caricatures of that elegance….
April Wensday 30 1862
Quite cool this morning. I found myself in camp near Strausburg. I slept in the ambulance last night. The sun came up bright and at 7oclock we took up the line of march. We passed through Strausburg on towards Woodstock which was 12 miles from Strausburg.* I saw some splendid grain and land. We came up on this side of Edinburg where we camped for the night. I saw where they destroyed several bridges on the turnpike* and also the Rail Road.** We stoped at 4 ½ oclock for the night. Some of the men put up the tents and others boards sheds. It commenced to rain at dusk. Rained nearly all night. We march 20 miles today
*Looks like the 110th is walking down present-day Interstate 81, which runs 325 miles through VA.
**David Hunter Strother describes this same railroad and train car damage on 4/17.
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 54
“7a.m. 62; 2p.m. 62; 9p.m. 56. Heavy dew, drizzle from 3.”
Make Me a Map of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson’s Topographer Jedediah Hotchkiss P. 34
“Wednesday, April 30th. We saw plainly the enemy’s encampments around and below Harrisonburg but no movement was made to meet our advance.
The rain was falling in torrents and the mud was very deep. The troops cheered the General as we rode along their line of march, especially when the General and staff took to riding across a sandy field to flank them and get to the head of the column. The General on the Little Sorrel rode at full gallop and we had a rather ludicrous staff race across this field. We rode, at a rapid pace, through the rain, mud and darkness, some 13 miles, to Lewiston the home of Gen. Lewis, where we were quite hospitably received.”
“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. 716-717 Diary of Samuel T. Foster, of the 34th Texas Cavalry had joined the Army of Tennessee, and wrote this entry near Greensboro, North Carolina.
April 30th
“It seems curious that mens minds can change so sudden, from opinions of life long, to new ones a week old.
I mean that men who have not only been taught from their infancy that the institution of slavery was right; but men who actually owned and held slaves up to this time,– to see that for man to have changed in their opinions regarding slavery, so as to be able to see the other side of the question,– to see that for man to have property in man was wrong, and that the “Declaration of Independence meant more than they had ever been able to see before. That all men are, and of right ought to be free” has a meaning different from the definition they had been taught from their infancy up,– and to see that the institution (though perhaps wise) had been abused, and perhaps for that abuse this terrible war with its results, was brought upon us as a punishment.
These ideas come not from the Yanks or northern people but come from reflection, and reasoning among ourselves.
This evening a circular from Head Qurs. announce that Rev. J B McFerrin Our Army Chaplain will preach his farewell sermon to the Texas and Ark. troops tomorrow at 10 O’Clock A.M.”
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Eugene D. Genovese P. 111-112
“But for many, especially those whose spirit had shaped the old ruling class, the defection of so many blacks had spelled the end. No matter that 80 percent or more had stood fast. More would have gone if they had had the chance or the courage. Many others wisely waited for the end of the war to go their own way. They were faithless. The “loyalty” of the many could never, in any case, have compensated for the “betrayal” of so many trusted others. Betrayal! For that was the point. The slaveholders had been deserted in their time of need. Abandoned. Octave Mannoni was right about a dependency complex in traditional, patriarchal societies, but he failed to notice that that dependency worked in both directions.
The old paternalistic sensibility, in its best and basest manifestations, withered. In some cases it died quickly, with screams of most foul and bloody murder; in others, it declined slowly, with brave attempts to forget and forgive or with pathetic groans. To a decreasing extent it lingered on well into the twentiesth century, but for the most part after emancipation the John T. Morgans and Hoke Smiths would surrender to the harsher racists, while the Wade Hamptons, enfeebled and torn, would be dragged by the vicissitudes of political realities down the same road.
The temper of the times may be discerned in a deposition filed by a Louisiana planter with the Union army: “When I owned niggers, I used to pay medical bills. I do not think I shall trouble myself.” It may be discerned in the caustic but soul-searching recollection of John S. Wise:
Were not the negroes perfectly content and happy? Had I not often talked to them on the subject? Had not every one of them told me repeatedly that they loved “old Marster” better than anybody in the world, and would not have freedom if he offered it to them? Of course they did—many and many a time. And that settled it.
And above all, it may be discerned in a letter to the New York Tribune, written in 1865 by Augustin L. Taveau of Charleston, South Carolina, whom Manigault described as “a gentleman known to our family & a planter.” For Manigault, Taveau’s analysis was “correct.”
Apart from religious considerations, by the loss of the cause and the institution, I have suffered like the rest, yet am I content, for the conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs has convinced me that we were all laboring under a delusion. Good masters and bad masters all alike, shared the same fate—the sea of the Revolution confounded good and evil; and, in the chaotic turbulence, all suffer in degree. Born and raised amid the institution, like a great many others, I believed it was necessary, to our welfare, if not to our very existence. I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters. But events and reflection have caused me to change these opinions; for if they were necessary to our welfare, why were four-fifths of the plantations of the Southern States dilapidated caricatures of that elegance and neatness which adorn the Country-seats of our people? If as a matter of profit they were so valuable, why was it that nine-tenths of our planters were always in debt and at the mercy of their factors? If they were content, happy and attached to their masters, why did they desert him in the moment of his need and flock to the enemy, whom they did not know; and thus left their, perhaps really good masters whom they did know from infancy?”
P. 130
“Mr. Chesnut’s Negroes,” noted Mary Boykin Chesnut in 1862, “offered to fight for him if he would arm them. He pretended to believe them. He says one man cannot do it.” During 1863, she discussed with Mr. Venable the question of arming the slaves. As she summarized their discussion: “Would they fight on our side, or desert to the enemy? They don’t go to the enemy now, because they are comfortable where they are, and expect to be free anyway.” By November, 1864, she was noting how her husband had told his drivers, who previously had expressed a great desire to fight for the Confederacy in return for freedom, that they might have their chance. “Now,” she mused, “they say coolly that they don’t want freedom if they have to fight for it. That means they are pretty sure of having it anyway.”
P. 140
Felix Haywood, an ex-slave of Texas, reflected:
Did you ever stop to think that thinking don’t do any good when you do it too late? Well, that’s how it was with us. If every mother’s son of a black had thrown ‘way his hoe and took up a gun to fight for his own freedom along with the Yankees, the war’d be over before it began. But we didn’t do it. We couldn’t help stick to our masters. We couldn’t no more shoot them than we could fly. My father and me used to talk ’bout it. We decided we was too soft and freedom wasn’t goin’ to be much to our good even if we had a education.
As if to offer one possible answer, Benjamin Russell, an ex-slave from South Carolina, described how the slaves on his plantation received the news of their emancipation. “Some were sorry,” he said, “some hurt, but a few were silent and glad.” That a few were silent and glad requires no comment, nor even that some, timid and confused, were sorry. That some were “hurt” does. Freedom brought a newly felt strength along with new fears, and it provided the slaves with the means to contain their own sense of having been betrayed. Yet the sense of betrayal did not appear. Not merely some but many felt “hurt,” for they felt in danger of being abandoned by those, kind or harsh, on whom they had always relied. The whites’ trauma had its parallel among the blacks, for they too accepted a doctrine of reciprocity. Silas Smith, also of South Carolina, caught the positive and negative sides of the moment. “It was the awfulest feeling dat everything in dem quarters laid down wid dat night, de feeling dat dey was free and never had no marster to tell dem what to do.’”
**Gary W. Gallagher says of Mary Boykin Chesnut’s diary: “It’s what she’d wished she’d written during the war.” (Civil War Turning Points YT video minute 31) C. Vann Woodward will win the Pulitzer for his edition of her diary. A heart attack will kill her at 63. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2SUHIwtxrc
Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War Richard Taylor New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1879 P. 44-47
“Ewell’s division reached the western base of Swift Run Gap on a lovely spring evening, April 30th, 1862, and in crossing the Blue Ridge seemed to have left winter and its rigors behind. Jackson, whom we moved to join, had suddenly that morning marched toward McDowell, some eighty miles west, where, after uniting with a force under General Edward Johnson, he defeated the Federal general Milroy. Some days later he as suddenly returned. Meanwhile we were ordered to remain in camp on the Shenandoah near Conrad’s store, at which place a bridge spanned the stream.
The great Valley of Virginia was before us in all its beauty. Fields of wheat spread far and wide, interspersed with woodlands, bright in their robes of tender green. Wherever appropriate sites existed, quaint old mills, with turning wheels, were busily grinding the previous year’s harvest; and grove and eminence showed comfortable homesteads. The soft vernal influence shed a languid grace over the scene. The theatre of war in this region was from Stanton to the Potomac, one hundred and twenty miles, with an average width of some twenty-five miles; and the Blue Ridge and Alleghanies [sic] bounded it east and west. Drained by the Shenandoah with its numerous affluents, the surface was nowhere flat, but a succession of graceful swells, occasionally rising into abrupt hills. Resting on limestone, the soil was productive, especially of wheat, and the underlying rock furnished abundant metal for the construction of roads. Railway communication was limited to the Virginia Central, which entered the Valley by a tunnel east of Staunton and passed westward through that town; to the Manassas Gap, which traversed the Blue Ridge at the pass of that name and ended at Strasburg; and to the Winchester and Harper’s Ferry, thirty miles long. The first extended to Richmond by Charlottesville and Gordonsville, crossing at the former place the line from Washington and Alexandria to Lynchburg; the second connected Strasburg and Front Royal, in the Valley, with the same line at Manassas Junction; and the last united with Baltimore and Ohio at Harper’s Ferry. Frequent passes or gaps in the mountains, through which wagon roads had been constructed, afforded easy access from east and west; and pikes were excellent, though unmetaled roads became heavy after rains.
But the glory of the Valley is Massanutten. Rising abruptly from the plain near Harrisonburg, twenty-five miles north of Staunton, this lovely mountain extends fifty miles, and as suddenly ends near Strasburg. Parallel with the Blue Ridge, and of equal height, its sharp peaks have a bolder and more picturesque aspect, while the abruptness of its slopes gives the appearance of greater altitude. Midway of Massanutten, a gap with good road affords communication between Newmarket and Luray. The eastern or Luray valley, much narrower than the one west of Massanutten, is drained by the east branch of the Shenandoah, which is joined at Front Royal, near the northern end of the mountain, by its western affluent, whence the united waters flow north, at the base of the Blue Ridge, to meet the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry.
The inhabitants of this favored region were worthy of their inheritance. The north and south were peopled by the scions of old colonial families, and the proud names of the “Old Dominion” abounded. In the central counties of Rockingham and Shenandoah were many descendants of German settlers. These were thrifty, substantial farmers, and, like their kinsmen of Pennsylvania, expressed their opulence in huge barns and fat cattle. The devotion of all to the Southern cause was wonderful. Jackson, a Valley man by reason of his residence at Lexington, south of Staunton, was their hero and idol. The women sent husbands, sons, lovers, to battle as cheerfully as to marriage feasts. No oppression, no destitution could abate their zeal. Upon a march I was accosted by two elderly sisters, who told me they had secreted a large quantity of bacon in a well on their estate, hard by. Federals had been in possession of the country, and, fearing the indiscretion of their slaves, they had done the work at night with their own hands, and now desired to give the meat to their people. Wives and daughters of millers, whose husbands and brothers were in arms, worked the mills night and day to furnish flour to their soldiers. To the last, women would go distances to carry the modicum of food between themselves and starvation to a suffering Confederate. Should the sons of Virginia ever commit dishonorable acts, grim indeed will be their reception on the further shores of Styx. They can expect no recognition from the mothers who bore them.
Ere the war closed, the Valley was ravaged with a cruelty surpassing that inflicted on the Palatinate two hundred years ago. That foul deed smirched the fame of Louvois and Turenne, and public opinion, in what has been deemed a ruder age, forced an apology from the “Grand Monarque.” Yet we have seen the official report of the Federal general wherein are recounted the many barns, mills, and other buildings destroyed, concluding with the assertion that “a crow flying over the Valley must take rations with him.” In the opinion of the admirers of the officer making this report, the achievement on which it is based ranks with Marengo. Moreover, this same officer, General Sheridan, many years after the close of the war, denounced several hundred thousands of his fellow citizens as “banditti,” and solicited permission of his Government to deal with them as such. May we not well ask whether religion, education, science and art combined have lessened the brutality of man since the days of Wallenstein and Tilly?’”
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I saw some splendid grain and land….
The sky falling with whatever is over-classified and illicit like an ex-parte conversation. The Civil War: How it Never Got in the Books. Facts change within stories after any war but not like this one. The prosecution calls that motive. Some commentators understood at the time how they were crossing under the yellow tape & onto the crime scene to propagandize formulaic historical writing from 1870 on, like someone attempting to clean out the bloodstain & what was left unsaid in the record, the margins of the story, notes written on small scraps of paper left in a casket.
Turns out the story was in the telling as much as the event told about.
So the Real War decomposed right alongside what got etched into forest slat boards that, for a time, indicated a man was there unseen, unseen but still there & something said so if you passed by, so you knew, & the dead knew too that their name, or a cross, or an x was above saying they laid below for the men lucky enough to get a marker, to even get a grave, because most were never found. Most were never returned home. Or the marker was left blank, just a white slatboard the living picked up off a nearby property & carried it over, stuck it on the mound. The prosecution gets the last word, of course, except when it doesn’t.
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