Day 102. June 10, 1862.
102
June Tuesday 10th 1862
the scene with mystic images and unreal shapes….
Quite wet this morning raining. We soon had marching orders and we marched back towards Luray. We came back. It was very mudy and it rained nearly all day. Mud nearly up to our knees and wet. Was haulted for dinner when we got a fire kindled up and we soon had some coffee and crackers. We came back to another 7 miles of Luerey. We had very wet time to camp as every thing was wet. I was very much fatigued and woren out as I never was so near done out and we had some supper and dryed our cloathes. There was 6 out of our Company are missing and we have heard nothing of them. We had to sleep on the wet ground this evenning and our men had not very much to eat now and I hope for better days
Note: Ephraim is still so goddamn upbeat he says he’s hoping for better days. FFS. Who does that at this point? He does, apparently. Holy mother of God. And now 6 men have vanished. Yikes.
Below Brand mentions all that countermarching, too:
Army Life According to Arbaw: Civil War Letters of William A. Brand 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Edited by Daniel A. Masters P. 68
“We moved from Columbia Bridge near where my last letter was written on Saturday June 7th and proceeded leisurely southward on some unknown expedition. Some days previous had been involved in mystery, and the men were getting very tired of performing hard and what seemed to them useless labor. We would march forward three or four miles, remain in bivouac long enough to get comfortably fixed, and then ordered to countermarch and back we would go to our old camp or some place near there.”
Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia Kathryn Shively Meier P. 80-81
“Atop the chain of command, military commanders had to take ultimate responsibility for the survival of their men. From commanders’ perspectives a number of factors contributed to their inability to alleviate soldier suffering in 1862, though they did recognize that environment played some role in poor health and deteriorating morale. A considerable complaint in 1862, particularly in the Shenandoah Valley, was lack of supplies. A dearth of tents and clothes exposed soldiers unnecessarily to the elements, insufficient rations weakened troops’ bodies, and limited medications and hospitals meant that those who inevitably fell ill faced deficient care. Union general John C. Frémont provides an especially instructive example of how a general of eminent experience in wartime environments could consider himself utterly unequal to the task of protecting his army’s health. “The Pathfinder,” who had served as a junior officer in the Army Corps of Engineers from 1842-1853 in five expeditions in the American West, surviving blizzards, frostbite, and starvation, was stunned by the “inclemencies of a spring seldom paralleled for severity in the history of the Virginia Valley.” Thanks to extreme supply shortages, he lamented that “as late as April 19, that so illy provided in other respects were the coming reinforcements that thirty-eight days had been passed by them without tents or other shelter.” According to Frémont, the root of supply paucity was complex: a “want of funds” in the quartermaster’s department, farmers’ refusal to submit their food along Union supply lines, and the impassibility of the water-laden roads for carriages. He knew resultant exposure was compounding a dire health situation. “For the last three days the weather has been terrible; constant blinding storm of snow, mixed with rain, which freezes to trees and limbs to extent as to bend and break them…. Men suffering.” And thus, as the privation and environmental misery wore on through May and June, he was hardly surprised at the near dissolution of the ranks, indicating mass demoralization: “demonstrations among the men, amounting to almost open mutiny.” With less than one full ration left to issue, “upward of 1,000 [sick soldiers] were now at Mount Jackson.” Further, “the hospitals were full, and I was deficient in the necessary medicines, as well as the requisite number of surgeons to give attendance.” In his helplessness, the general expressed typical class-based admiration for his men’s ability to endure what were fast becoming insurmountable odds. “The heroism, the uncomplaining patience, with which the soldiers of my command endured the starvation and other bodily sufferings of their extended marches, added to their never-failing alacrity for duty against the enemy, entitle them to my gratitude and respect.” In short, Frémont’s army was experiencing logistical meltdown, and his men were virtually on their own to make the best of a bleak situation.”
Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War Elizabeth R. Varon P. 146-147
Quoting Alfred Lewis Castleman, surgeon of the 5th Wisconsin, in his diary on the night of September 17th:
“‘So terrible has been the day; so rapid and confused the events, that I find it impossible to separate them, so as to give, or even to form for myself any clear idea of what I have seen.” “I hope it will be different when the mind has accustomed itself a little to thinking over the events and the horrors of the scene.”
The aftermath of battle often brought a physiological crash to earth and deep despondency, as the fears that were banished during combat came rushing back, and as soldiers confronted the scale of the slaughter. For General George Henry Gordon, a Union brigade commander, the “field of carnage” was a sight “too horrible to be real, and yet too real to forget.” Nightfall on the seventeenth “filled the scene with mystic images and unreal shapes.” “If phantoms from the spirit world could ever come forth to bewilder mortals,” Gordon wrote, “sure never was there a time or place so sensible.” Eighteen-year-old corporal Samuel B. Mettler of the 16th Connecticut, who survived the brutal fighting of the cornfield, walked the battlefield the next day, finding its “piles of bullet-ridden corpses” too “horrid” to describe. Worse still were the hospitals, where he saw “heaps of arms and legs cut off.” “Oh, such groaning—it is enough to make me cry to think of it….’”
Note: Whitman on the Grand Review:
SOME SAD CASES YET. (1865)
“June 9-10.—I have been sitting late to-night by the bedside of a wounded captain, a special friend of mine, lying with a painful fracture of left leg in one of the hospitals, in a large ward partially vacant. The lights were put out, all but a little candle, far from where I sat. the full moon shone in through the windows, making long, slanting silvery patches on the floor. All was still, my friend too was silent, but could not sleep; so I sat there by him, slowly wafting the fan, and occupied with the musings that arose out of the scene, the long shadowy ward, the beautiful ghostly moonlight on the floor, the white beds, here and there an occupant with huddled form, the bed-clothes thrown off. The hospitals have a number of cases of sun-stroke from exhaustion by heat, from the late reviews. There are many such from the Sixth corps, from the hot parade of the day before yesterday. (Some of these shows cost the lives of scores of men.)” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 772
To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign Stephen W. Sears P. 161
“Another flag-of-truce meeting resolved the problem of Mrs. General Lee, as she was known to both armies. After leaving White House in May ahead of the invaders, Mrs. Lee had taken up residence at Marlbourne, the Pamunkey River plantation of Edmund Ruffin. Before long the Yankee army occupied that property as well, and guards were posted around the house. The general’s wife, whose manner was imperious, took outspoken offense at this and the matter became an embarrassment to General McClellan and his sense of gallantry. Arrangements were made to pass her through the lines. On June 10, in a plantation carriage flying a makeshift white flag from its whip stand, Mrs. General Lee was brought to McClellan, who greeted her with due ceremony and sent her on her way with an escort of well-turned-out cavalry from the headquarters guard. She was driven across Meadow Bridge between the two armies and into the Confederate lines, where she was welcomed by her husband and cheered by his troops.”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 87
“Torrential storms frequently fell after major battles, blackening the sky and turning the field to mud, impeding salvage work. Explanations for the rain varied. Perhaps reverberating cannonades disrupted cloud systems. Or hot air from gunfire condensed in the upper atmosphere to be precipitated as rain. The fanciful opined the storms represented angels weeping over the slaughter. Whatever the cause, rain lashed down after New Market, Malvern Hill, Shiloh, Second Manassas, Chancellorsville,** Gettysburg, Murfreesboro, and more. Grant noted how downpours stopped him following up Shiloh. Again, in Virginia, May 1864, he recorded “five days of almost constant rain without any prospect of clearing up. The roads have now become so impassable that ambulances with wounded men can no longer run between here and Fredericksburg.’”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 86-87
“As late as December 1862, Walt Whitman wrote grimly of “the wounded lying on the ground” with “No cots; seldom even a mattress. It is pretty cold.”
Nevertheless, by late 1862, medical attention by both sides showed a perceptible improvement. Bigger, four-wheeled, sprung ambulances became available. Field hospitals increased in number and equipment. Rational procedure had been established. The wounded might hope for a temporary field dressing immediately behind the firing line: a tourniquet, rudimentary wound cleansing, and bandaging. Then, alone or supported, they looked for an ambulance pickup point, to be driven to a field hospital for diagnosis, treatment, and emergency surgery. Whenever possible the medical services located these facilities in sheltered houses, barns, under trees, and by a deep well or brook. Red flags identified them.
Still, immediate retrieval of the wounded continued to be hamstrung by factors beyond the medical services’ control. Many casualties remained lying in no-mans’– land while the conflict ebbed and flowed over them, making retrieval hazardous. Sharpshooters targeted relief parties, even if under a white flag as they attempted to bring in enemy casualties. The piteous cries of the suffering, clearly audible after firing died for the night, haunted soldiers waiting for the next day’s combat. Major Samuel Hurst, 73rd Ohio, recalled being unable to sleep nights at Gettysburg: “It was the most distressful wail ever listened to. Thousands of sufferers upon the field, and hundreds lying between the two skirmish lines, who could not be cared for, through the night were groaning and wailing or crying out in their depth of suffering and pain.” As late as 1915, Major Wilbur Crummer, 45th Illinois, could still hear the night sounds of the wounded begging for water at Shiloh and Vicksburg.”
Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command Volume 1 Douglas Southall Freeman Scribner, 1942 P. 462-463
“Jackson did not stop to count all his losses. He believed that Shields was defeated, but he did not wish the Army to be exposed simultaneously to a possible attack from the direction of Conrad’s Store and a turning movement by Frémont. The wagon train already was high up the Blue Ridge in Brown’s Gap. Without any longer delay than was necessary to get the weary but exultant troops together, Jackson started the infantry and the artillery up the mountain. Before daylight on June 10, he was fairly astride the Gap and was fully protected, except for supplies, against any movement from either side of the Blue Ridge.
In that position the Army was resting when, on the 10th, word came that Frémont had not attempted to cross the North River at Port Republic or to turn it by countermarch, but, instead, had started a retreat down the Valley. Jackson at once sent out his cavalry who, on the 12th, occupied Harrisonburg and advanced their outposts to New Market. Some loot, 200 of Frémont’s sick and wounded, and 200 small arms were found in Harrisonburg. To be near at hand in event Frémont was attempting to deceive him, Jackson that same day came down the mountain, crossed South River again, and established his camps between that stream and Middle River, near Weyer’s Cave and Mount Meridian. Another consideration in making this movement may have been the comfort of his Army.”
The War that Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters James McPherson (2015) P. 140
“Five times in the war Lincoln tried to get his field commanders to trap enemy armies that were raiding or invading northward by cutting in south of them and blocking their routes of retreat: during Stonewall Jackson’s drive north through the Shenandoah Valley in May 1862; Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in the Gettysburg campaign; and Jubal Early’s raid to the outskirts of Washington* in July 1864. Each time his generals failed him, and in most cases they soon found themselves relieved of command: John C. Frémont and James Shields after failing to intercept Jackson; McClellan after letting Lee get away; Buell after Bragg and Kirby Smith for safely back to Tennessee; and David Hunter after Early’s raid.”
We Are In For It! The First Battle of Kernstown Gary L. Ecelbarger P. 233-234
“Stonewall Jackson’s victory at Port Republic demoralized an already frustrated Federal force that had marched so proudly after Kernstown only seventy-eight days earlier. This division, once united, now resorted to finger pointing and bickering about their poor handling during the past two months. They felt unappreciated after their Kernstown victory and had physical proof to attest to the claim. Kimball’s brigade had marched toward Stanardsville while two other brigades fought at Port Republic. He claimed that 1,100 men in his force marched barefoot and more than 200 men were without pants! Similar lack of provisions can be claimed for the eight infantry regiments, three batteries, and one cavalry regiment that lost on June 9. That force had more than 1,000 battle losses to add to the complaint list.
The fact that Tyler fought Jackson’s overwhelming force without support infuriated Shields’s men. Earlier, they pointed accusing fingers at General Shields as the guilty party for their sickness, fatigue, half-rations, and lack of clothes and provisions. “Shields boasts that his division can do more hard marching than any other in the service,” wrote an Ohio officer in June, adding, “He, I suppose, thinks he is marching to a seat in the U.S. Senate while the soldiers are marching to their graves.” Although not solely responsible for the discomfort suffered by his men, General Shields was criticized as incompetent by his soldiers for not supporting Tyler at Port Republic, thereby sacrificing his exposed force unduly. One particularly livid officer in the hard-hit 7th Indiana suggested “that the responsible General have his head decapitated.” Another Hoosier linked Shields’s troubles with his post-Kernstown exaggerations:
When General Shields first resumed command of this division the soldiers and men all liked him. After the battle of Winchester (23 March) and the publication of his report of that battle, wherein he gave such a glowing description of the manner in which he fooled Jackson,– of the trick he “played off” on the rebels, &c., &c., his command began to think something was wrong, and when he sent his handfull of men, who had become completely worn out from extreme exhaustion and privations, to Port Republic the whole Country knew that something was wrong….
Major R. Morris Copeland, General Banks’s assistant adjutant general who aided Shields during the Battle of Kernstown, happened to be in Washington in May where he witnessed seven officers in Shields’s division “using every effort to get transferred to some other command.” Generals Tyler and Sullivan, and Colonels Mason and Carroll headed this contingent. Knowing that Banks had earlier predicted what was unfolding in front of him, Copeland was quick to acknowledge Banks’s foresight. “General Shields has cut his own rope without any aid from you or any opposition,” he wrote to Banks, “And I am compelled to admit that your theory, when one has the patience to wait, is conclusive.” Continuing to explain to Banks about Shields’s careless tactics and abusive behavior. Copeland relayed to Banks the officers’ collective opinion: “They think he must at times be crazy.’”
Note: The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War met on May 22, 1862, where two colonels, a general, and a doctor testified about Shields’ role, or lack thereof, at Kernstown:
We Are In For It! The First Battle of Kernstown Gary L. Ecelbarger P. 235
“Their testimony clearly indicated that: a) Shields did not believe Jackson was anywhere near Kernstown on the morning of the battle; b) Shields was unaware that Jackson was not on the battlefield until after 3:00p.m.; c) Nathan Kimball directed the forces on the field; and d) no particular strategy by upper command had led to the victory. The witnesses confirmed the prevailing sentiments of the foot soldiers in claiming that the spirited fighting of the men superseded any tactics in gaining the victory on March 23.
The testimony was particularly damning because it contradicted General Shields’s claims of luring Jackson into battle and then directing the winning tactics from his bed. Surgeon McAbee’s testimony embarrassed Shields; he stated that the General refused to allow him to care for the wounded after the battle, insisting that the doctor remain at his bedside instead. The final questions put forward to Dr. McAbee unveiled Shields as an officer who had no right to claim responsibility for his division’s success at Kernstown:
Q: “What time did he (Shields) become aware that Jackson was there in force?”
A: “I think somewhere along between 3 and 4 o’clock in the afternoon.”
Q: “What did he do when he ascertained that fact?”
A: “He could send no more forces on the field, for they were all there then.”
Q: “Did he assume the command then?”
A: “Not in any other sense than he had done before.”
Through it all, Brigadier General Shields sought a promotion. President Lincoln put Shields’s nomination for major general to the Senate during the late spring of 1862. Shields apparently felt the procedure to be an inevitable formality; he signed his dispatches with the rank of major general and reportedly wore two stars on his coat. The Senate was et to vote on the nomination on July 14, 1862. By then, Shields’s failure at Port Republic had been informally reviewed; this, in combination with the committee’s investigation of Kernstown, determined Shields’s fate. His nomination was rejected and Shields was shelved. His former division was already dispersed at the end of June: two brigades sent to the Army of the Potomac at Harrison’s Landing on the Peninsula, and two brigades sent to a new army– the Army of Virginia**– under the command of Major General John Pope. Strengthened and molded under Lander, fought and marched under Shields, victorious under both– the Western division was dissolved.”
A Stillness at Appomattox Bruce Catton P. 31
“The provost general of the army, in a report written at the end of the war, said flatly that “the bounty was meant to be an inducement to enlistment; it became, in fact, an inducement to desertion and fraudulent re-enlistment.” He
pointed out that the states paying the highest bounties were precisely the ones with the largest proportion of deserters, and emphasized that desertions all through 1864 reached the astounding average of 7,300 each month. Not only was this a prodigious rise over all former figures; it meant that in the long run the army lost nearly as many men through desertion as it lost in battle casualties.”
The Civil War: The Final Year Told By Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 624
Note: George Templeton Strong, in March, 1865:
The rebel hosts continue to be seriously drained by desertion. Not less than fifty deserters have taken refuge within Grant’s lines every day for many weeks past, and their average number is probably nearer one hundred than fifty. Companies come in, led by their company officers. All tell the same story of compulsory service, hardships, failure of pay and of clothing and of rations, and of general despondency. The Confederacy has “gone up,” they say. “We all know it is useless to fight any longer.” Lee’s soldiers would throw away their arms and disband tomorrow if they dared, and so on. Such statements made by deserters are worth much “less than their face.” But when made by hundreds, and corroborated by the actual desertion of thousands, at imminent risk of life and with certain and conscious loss of honor, they are worth a great deal. It is likely, moreover, that for every rebel who flees within our lines, two flee the other way and take sanctuary in the hill country or the “piney woods,” supporting themselves by levying contributions on all and sundry as sovereign powers so far as their own personal sovereignty can be made practically available, and thus carrying out the doctrine of secession to its ultimate results. Many counties of Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Gulf States are said to swarm with these banditti, and they are admitted to be even more savage and reckless than the vandal hordes of the North.
The Rebel Congress seems to have reconsidered its refusal to arm the slaves and to have decided, reluctantly, and by a very close vote, that there is no help for it and that Cuffee must be conscripted and made to fight for his chivalric master. So much for the visions of glory the South saw in 1860. this sacrifice of the first principles of the Southern social system is a confession of utter exhaustion, a desperate remedy and a most dangerous experiment. And the experiment is tried at least a year too late. It will take six months to drill and equip any considerable corps d’Afrique, and Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, and Grant are likely, with God’s blessing, to give rebellion its death blow within that time.
But the measure has its immediate effects. It disgusts and alienates many slaveholders and many fanatical theorists about slavery, and it is received as an affront by the rebel rank and file—an affront that justifies desertion. They will feel it not only as an affront, but as a disheartening surrender of the principle for which they have fought. They learn that niggers are now to be armed and put into the field as the allies of Southern gentlemen; “that it will depend on the nigger’s pluck and muscle and endurance how far he is to share with white men the glory of upholding the Southern cause. It will depend on that and nothing else. Moreover, he is to be rewarded for good service by freedom.” But the first of all Southern axioms has been for thirty years past that freedom was a punishment to the slave, servitude his normal condition, and that he loved and looked up to and depended on his owner as a good dog does on his master, and that he despised and rejected emancipation just as a good dog would dislike being discharged from his duty of guardianship and kicked into the street to go get his own living as best he could.”
*July 11, 1864 Early & 10k troops sit 6 miles north of the White House like a red tide din of plankton grown too numerous near shore deciding whether to inch its way up the center of the blossom. July 12, Lincoln stood where Rebels were firing, & the soldier standing next to him got shot. The Battle of Fort Stevens is thus far the only time a sitting president has been under military fire.
**Today the PA. 110th goes into the Army of Virginia.
Note: Today Lee writes Jeb Stuart (in command of the Army of Northern Virginia’s cavalry brigades since March 1862), requesting he take a whirl around McClellan’s Army & see if the right flank was in the air (it was); from June 12 to June 15, with 1200 men on horseback behind him, Stuart finds Union doesn’t have the land between the Chickahominy & Totopotomy rivers. He ringed, rounded, & circumnavigated the largest army ever assembled in the Western Hemisphere, taunting Federals chasing him, but never catching him. The cavalry who couldn’t catch him were commanded by his father-in-law Colonel Cooke. Stuart & his men return in 5 days after having gone 100-150 miles, capturing 165 Yankees, 260 mules, plus 125 wagon’s worth of supplies & various ordnance. The information Stuart tells Lee: McClellan only has one corps north of the Chickahominy, & McClellan’s right flank is unprotected, or “open.” Stuart carries a .40 caliber 9 shot LeMAT Revolver that has an 18-gauge shotgun barrel underneath as he circles thousands of men like Ephraim. Afterward, Stuart sends a telegram to Quartermaster Meigs, bemoaning the quality of the mules he stole from the Union Army. His delay of arrival (he couldn’t find Lee’s army) at Gettysburg, some say, lost the South the battle. Ultimately, his reconnaissance enabled Lee’s Mechanicsville attack, which began the Seven Day’s battles, which prevented the taking of Richmond (for now). Stuart’s last words after being shot at Yellow Tavern in 2 years: “I am going fast now; I am resigned; God’s will be done.” The man who killed him was never identified. Stuart was just 31 years old. Schools in the South named after him are being renamed: Justice High School, Barack Obama Elementary. Stuart still sits atop his horse on Monument Avenue in Virginia. On quartermaster.com you can purchase a likeness of his “Shelljacket” starting at $589. At dixierepublic.com, there’s a, oh nvm.
Note: The renaming continues. Lee & Jackson Parks renamed then named back: Emancipation and Justice Parks to Market Street and Court Square Parks. Betty Cracker Rutherford in the grave turning over, wearing a 1994 black gold Texas tea limited edition Scarlett O’Hara Barbie Doll Gown in 2017 as Yale finally renames Calhoun College because men like this get you from the grave, even 86 years later, didn’t he, when in 2016 Yale President Salovey declined the name change from “Calhoun College” to pretty much anyone else not a slavery proponent… Protests work: a year later an actual (White) woman: Grace Murray Hopper, Navy admiral, gets Calhoun College named after her (of the 5200 statues in the U.S., less than 400 depict women; the erasure is so complete, of course, we don’t even notice it, & a reminder: women fight & die for a constitution we aren’t in & which doesn’t guarantee us equal justice under the law). “Calhoun’s legacy as a White supremacist and a national leader who passionately promoted slavery as a ‘positive good’ fundamentally conflicts with Yale’s mission and values” said Salovey. He passed, however, on removing all Calhoun “reminders” from campus. He had first said, “Teaching it, confronting it, and using it as a guide for thinking about racism and a better future strongly outweigh changing a name and no longer having this salient reminder of the stain of slavery on our nation’s history and our own university’s participation in it” because to a White male, without a monument– without a former slavemaster’s name & stone likeness up in his face– he doesn’t remember slavery & racism. That he discourse he pays no attention to which repeatedly & negatively affects people in systematic & predictable ways is White code now for the old Black codes then, dog whistles. Whistling Dixie. He can’t hear it because he can not imagine what it is to be a black student at Yale living with a hostile reminder of your place each time you walk past. Because apparently a Yale president only learns about history by standing in the middle of a traffic circle & staring up at a bronze dead man on a longer-dead bronze horse.
I never was so near done out….
He has reached his limit here. This is the day. He’s about done, with 10 complaints.
FIVE TIMES WAR COULD HAVE BEEN WON. (As if anyone can predict human behavior.)
Were you born to resist or be abused?
Is someone getting the best the best the best the best of you?*
Characters in high histrionics, a self-imposed grandly operatic drama: Shields throws a rock then hides his hand while Jackson’s in the end zone doing the icky shuffle though he doesn’t own anything that hits the light but a Confederate flag adult-sized onesie by 1870 the color of red/white/blue only then the colors run in the wash, the crossbars mush & he gets a clean walk on the whole charge &c. He had enough spark on him to carry it through clear up the Valley this whole time but now it’s over, & Stuart himself has just under two years before he comes back in the cargo hold.
Again, so what crosses here should know what lives here, the hoof prints left in the mud, circling still. In some cemeteries nearly all the Union dead are unknown. At Salisbury National Cemetery in N.C., all that’s there, started in a cornfield west of the Salisbury Prison– besides 1,700 anonymous soldiers just thrown in trenches– is a 50-foot obelisk called the Unknown Dead. The identities of only 85 soldiers have survived time.
*Dave Grohl
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