Day 126. July 4, 1862.

126

thirty million northern and more than six million southern entries….

July 4 Friday 1862

Very warm this morning. We got ready and went out to the Lutheran Sunday school celebration of Hollidaysburg. It was very warm. I was at Mr J.A. Crawfords awhile. We came out to Altoona. The evenning rain stoped. At Pattons* all night. We found them all well

Note: Jackson ran the table, basically. Upshot is a near-total win for Jackson, this campaign, these 3 months.Really, even when he lost he turned it to a win. He played the long game. However, the Union played the longest game.

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. 460

“Jackson’s Valley campaign won renown and is still studied in military schools as an example of how speed and use of terrain can compensate for inferiority of numbers. Jackson’s army of 17,000 men had outmaneuvered three separate enemy forces with a combined strength of 33,000 and had won five battles, in all but one of which (Cross Keys) Jackson had been able to bring superior numbers to the scene of combat. Most important, Jackson’s campaign had diverted 60,000 Union soldiers from other tasks and had disrupted two major strategic movements – Frémont’s east Tennessee campaign and McDowell’s plan to link up with McClellan’s right wing before Richmond. Jackson’s victories in the Valley created an aura of invincibility around him and his foot cavalry. They furthered the southern tradition of victory in the Virginia theater that had begun at Manassas. Summarizing the Valley campaign, a rebel private wrote: “General Jackson ‘got the drop’ on them in the start, and kept it.” The soldier meant this in a military sense, but it was equally true in a psychological sense. Stonewall became larger than life in the eyes of many northerners; he had gotten the drop on them psychologically, and kept it until his death a year later.

Lincoln’s diversion of McDowell’s corps to chase Jackson was probably a strategic error – perhaps even the colossal blunder that McClellan considered it. But if Union commanders in the Valley had acted with half the energy displayed by Jackson they might well have trapped and crippled Jackson’s army. And even if McDowell’s corps had joined McClellan as planned, the latter’s previous record offered little reason to believe that he would have moved with speed and boldness to capture Richmond.”

Note: Time & the wind blew away a lot of the record. And it didn’t help that Richmond–Columbia–Atlanta burned. They could fit only so many pages on the seats of the trains beside the gold. Later, the records came to be known as the Compiled Military Service Records, or CMSR, the 30 million Northern entries and 6 million Southern entries in a room that could not hold all of it sitting on senile oriental rugs, names written on index cards. The weight of the corpus, by 1893, even then was too much when the place undergoes gravitational collapse: Ford’s Theatre claims even more in its broad mouth, as Gilpin notes:

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War Drew Gilpin Faust P. 254-255

“Ultimately nearly thirty million northern and more than six million southern entries– each documenting the appearance of a name on a muster roll, a hospital census, a casualty list, or other official form– were inscribed on index cards and sorted into individual soldiers’ files. The scale of the effort required a small army of clerks, and the literal weight of this history inflicted its own postwar casualties. In 1893 the overcrowding of workers and documents in offices in the ill-fated Ford’s Theatre– the site of Lincoln’s assassination twenty-eight years earlier– caused two floors to collapse and kill twenty-two employees.”

Shelby Foote’s figure is one million ninety five thousand men killed captured, & wounded. Also, 2 million northern men, 800k southern who fought. “This is Civil War Author Shelby Foote- Stars in Their Courses” video on YouTube (minute 9.50) “That need not have been. Something should have stopped it before that. The most regretful thing is that the thing went on for four years with an incredible savagery. Uh, that’s the great shame. There was bound to be a fight, but for it to be the fight that it was, with literally more than a million American casualties is, uh, that need not have been.”

Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War Jonathan W. White P. 175-176

“The trauma of war led to sleepless nights for many veterans in the postwar era. John A. Cundiff of the Ninety-Ninth Indiana Volunteers was haunted by his wartime experiences as he tried to adjust back to civilian life. Affidavits in his pension file revealed his erratic postwar behavior. “He has always claimed that the rebels had spies out to kill him,”stated one affidavit. Cundiff “would take his gun and blanket and stay in the woods for days and nights at a time, and would leave the house at night and sleep in the fence corners.” As the paranoia increased, Cundiff told one person that “two or three of his neighbors were rebels from the south… & that they were going to kill him but that he put his axe under his bed at night to defend himself.’”