Day 103. June 11, 1862.
103
a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp, I say, will never be written….
(note: doodle, 4 sticks smashed together now)
June Wensday 11th 1862
Quite cool this morning and we had some breakfast and got marching orders and we soon was ready to take up the line of march and we all came back to Lieurey. Came on out 2 miles from Town. The road was very mudy. I have been very much woren out and we came through Lieurey. We saw a grate many wounded soldiers looking out of the windows. We have good camping now. There was some shell came in today that was missing. There was a lot of soldier that was taken Prisners at Port Republic out of the 1st Va Regiment. They broke out of the gaurdhouse and made their escape. I don’t see how any of us escaped that we was not all taken Prisners in the Battle as they had some 20,000 of a force against us. We have marched since the 29 of April up to this evening 403 miles and since the 12 of May 343 miles marching nearly every day through rain mud up to our knees wadeing creeks up to our waists and then lay down at night on the wet ground without blankets or tents. I have not sleept in a bed since the 1st of February last. I have saw the hardships of a soldiers life many times not as much as we could eat but had to do the best we could we are among the hills and [illeg. maybe aspens] of the Blue ridge and we have traveled over some awful roads since we have been on this march. I am now give out. I have the Rheumatism and I will soon have to give up as I am entirely woren out and can’t get along much longer. I must soon do something as I have stood it longer than if I had been at home
Note: I don’t like messing with his writing by making words red, but Jesus Christ, he’s going through it. For him to get to the point he actually complains on paper? He was really hurting. And he ends this entry on a solid note; he’s quite clear with himself he is at the end of his tolerance for this whole situation. Notice here he’s not blaming anyone, like we’d do in the 21st century. He’s putting it down to this is just the way life is as a soldier. But now, now I gotta do something. It’s finally intolerable. Honest to god, if this is genetic, I think he passed it down through my father to me. As a character trait, it works in war, but not outside it.
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 60
“A Maine soldier detailed to guard some cattle overnight on June 11 near Richmond marveled in his diary: “During the night an almost total eclipse of the moon took place, the first I ever saw.’”
P. 62
“7a.m. 57; 2p.m. 71; 9p.m. 64.”
Speaking of eclipses: I love this ethereal description of one in 1869, Jasper County, Iowa. My 2x grandparents must have seen this:
Past and Present of Jasper County, Iowa (1912) Vols I James B. Weaver P. 369-370
Jasper county, in common with others in this portion of this country, had a rare– once in a life-time chance– in the month of August, 1869, to view the sublimity of a total eclipse of the sun. It had been foretold by astronomers and they hit the very minute in which it appeared. It appeared as total within a stretch of country more than one hundred and fifty miles in width through lowa. The body of the moon completely hid the sun from view. When the disk of the sun was almost covered and the light began to diminish, a chilliness crept into the air, which during the earlier part of the day had been extremely hot (it being August 7th), and a coolness not experienced even of a summer evening hour seemed to envelop the earth. This approach of cold was instant and almost alarming. Birds and domestic fowls sought their roosts, dogs and horses manifested much uneasiness and in some instances positive terror. Cattle huddled together in fear at the swiftly ap proaching darkness and yet it was scarcely four o’clock in the afternoon. The total width of the corona was figured by scientists at one million six hundred thousand miles.
Every person of any considerable age in this county who was not unfortunate enough to be blind, viewed this wonderful phenomenon in the heavens. It was a sight never to be forgotten by old or young. Some had one impression, some another. It was a wonder to all. Many hundreds having prepared for the sight, had smoked glasses, and with these were enabled to clearly view the eclipse from start to finish. The coming on was beautiful in the extreme. Little by little the light of the brilliant summer’s sun was shut off by the shadows of the silvery moon in its majestic march onward. A few seconds of expectancy and the light was gone entirely. Then came an interval of absolute silence–total darkness covered the earth. Upward, the sight was charming, yet strange to behold. The larger, brighter stars could be seen overhead plainly, as if it were night time. The chickens crowed in many neighborhoods and all business was for the time suspended. All were quiet and awestruck. The astronomer was at his glory. The superstitious feared an impending calamity. The religious were thoughtful and knew that God in heaven reigned over all. After a few seconds, the rift of light began to make its appearance and slowly the sun commenced again to send forth its warm summer rays. It was said that this eclipse would not again occur within four hundred years. It was the subject of much thought, discussion and speculation at the time.
Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia Kathryn Shively Meier P. 126
“Self-care required individuality, reliance on a network of care outside of formal army structures, and, most of all, straggling. In short, self-care an counter to the tenets of military discipline, but in 1862 it also better served soldier health than did the medical systems. While there were many other reasons to straggle, soldiers who self-identified as straggling in pursuit of health did not see themselves as lacking devotion to a cause. They believed they were exemplary soldiers who did not stray because they were weak or cowardly, but in order to return to the ranks healthier and in better spirits. They identified as seasoned veterans who knew how to extract their best chances for survival.
Commanders, on the contrary, did not parse the various motivations behind absenteeism, nor did they recognize self-care as legitimate. They saw instead the typical unwillingness of citizen soldiers to assimilate into military life and bear up under its hardships. As the numbers of those present in the ranks dwindled for a variety of reasons, commanders justifiably believed their armies to be dangerously vulnerable to enemy attack. While they initially recognized that logistical complications contributed to straggling, when conditions began to improve they resolved to terminate what they considered the associated disciplinary problem. Thus, generals increasingly reprimanded stragglers, placing limitations on self-care as 1862 wore on. While subordinate officers tended to remain more sympathetic to their soldiers’ plights, and some War Department officials pushed for furloughs as an antidote for straggling, the command interpretation of the problem and solution won the day. After all, solving straggling by constricting punishment– even associating it with desertion and the corresponding death penalty– was simpler than getting to the complex roots of continued sickness and demoralization. By the end of the year, commanders had at least partially succeeded in forcing soldiers back into the paternalistic medical system, which served military goals and not necessarily the individual’s will to survive.”
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War The Diaries of David Hunter Strother David Hunter Strother P. 57
“JUNE 11, WEDNESDAY.—Fair and cooler. Newspapers report that Frémont had a collision with Jackson near Harrisonburg, losing eight hundred men and that General Ashby was killed on the other side. Went to the War Department and ascertained the condition of my affairs.
Note: Speaking of his meeting at Willard’s Hotel with Francis H. Pierpont (elected provisional Governor of what would become West Virginia when Virginia itself seceded):
Pierpont is a sound, direct thinking man. He desires the abolition of slavery in Virginia and would divide the state to accomplish that object for Western Virginia. He sees the necessity of authorized severity in dealing with the Rebels after the war and fully agrees with me upon that point: that unless the party who made the rebellion is crushed by confiscating and disenfranchising its leaders, the war will have been fought in vain.”
Note: The following story has haunted me since I first read it a couple years ago, because the Real War was also the thousands who went out & never came back, were never seen again, the ones who vanished in mystery. The ones who wandered into a forest to fetch firewood but for some reason or no reason at all went clean off Earth never to be seen again. And the ones who deserted yet never showed their face in their hometowns again because that was all it took. No idea how many that was, but I read of one case. As James M. McPherson says, Civil War soldiers went forward with their comrades into a hail of bullets because they were more afraid of “showing the white feather” than they were of death. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War James M. McPherson P. 77
Carroll County Historical Society (Carroll Co., Arkansas)
Carroll County Historical Quarterly
Vol. 1, No. 2 Jan. 1956
P. 11 Early Berryville Residents faced tragic experiences during Civil War
by Mrs. Grace Molloy
“My great grandfather, Jacob Meek, was a pioneer resident of Berryville. The records show that in 1848 he was given a Certificate of Purchase from the Choctaw grant for a tract of land on the west side of town. This included the land where the Presbyterian Church now stands. He and his wife were later buried in the cemetery behind the church.
During the Civil War, my grandmother, Matilda Meek, later Mrs. S. L. Fanning, and her sister, Louisa, later Mrs. J. W. Freeman, had an experience they never forgot. Berryville, like many of the communities bordering the Mason-Dixon Line, was divided in its allegiance. Some of the families were definitely pro-Southern, while others were ardent supporters of the North. At one time there was a sharp skirmish between Confederate and Federal troops and several men were killed. After the fight my grandmother, who was eleven years old, and her sister went to a barn on their father’s place and found a badly wounded soldier. He asked them not to reveal his hiding place saying that he would be killed if it were known that he was there. They kept the secret and even managed to take food and water to him. The next day they found him dead.
This was a problem. Most of the able-bodied men were away at war. This left every task up to the women and children. Also they were afraid if it became known that the soldier had been in their barn, their family would be suspected of giving comfort to the enemy. They finally decided to make a confidant of a neighbor boy, Allen Hailey, who was an older brother of J.D. Hailey. He readily agreed to help and the three children went to a place where they felt they would not be observed and dug a grave. When night came Allen Hailey, driving a small pony hitched to a sled, met the girls at the barn. They put the dead soldier on the sled and started for the grave. It was very hard for them. The sled was small and in spite of their frantic efforts to prevent it, the man fell off many times and had to be laborously gotten on again before they reached the grave and buried him. I am not sure but I think my grandmother told me this happened in the winter which made it harder for the children.
This story concerns an era in Berryville the average citizen seldom thinks about and is typical of a time that was probably the most critical in the history of the town.”
The Historian’s Craft Marc Bloch (1953) P. 54
“….it is not true that the historian can see what goes on in his laboratory only through the eyes of another person. To be sure, he never arrives until after the experiment has been concluded. But, under favorable circumstances, the experiment leaves behind certain residues which he can see with his own eyes.”
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War Tony Horwitz P. 182-183
“I later learned that Civil War scholars were rethinking numerous battles and questioning the reliability of long-revered sources. After Gettysburg, for instance, Robert E. Lee—presaging the doctored body counts in Vietnam—fudged his report on the debacle and the appalling casualties he sustained. Lee also ordered George Pickett to destroy his scathing report on the disastrous charge that bore his name.
Even pictures could lie. New research revealed that the captions on many well-known photographs were wrong. And some of the War’s most famous pictures were staged, with corpses dragged across battlefields and posed for dramatic effect. Historians had also found previously untapped sources—wartime diaries, unpublished letters, obscure court records—that led to wholly new assessments of familiar subjects. “I could redo my entire three volumes on the Civil War without using one bit of source material I used the first time and probably come to very different conclusions.” But this didn’t bother Foote. Like Stacy Allen, he felt each generation had to reinterpret the Civil War by its own lights. “I don’t think that I could have written what I wrote in less than a hundred years after the war,” he said. “It took that long for North and South to see each other honestly through the dust and flame.” Now, it seemed, a new generation had to cut through some of the dust and flame kicked up by Shelby Foote and his peers.”
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War Daniel Aaron P. 334 this is 1973
“….a body of writing as remarkable for what it leaves out as for what it includes. The noble and shoddy story of those “convulsive” days still lies buried in newspapers, magazines, diaries, memoirs, and official records. American writers have not overlooked its vainglorious features, but none has managed to comprehend a society enmeshed in contradictions and smouldering in sectional, class, and racial hatreds. Nor has literary justice been done to the companies of men, North and South, who purchased their immunity from military service. A bare handful of fictional works have explored with any power or insight the loyal and disloyal opposition in both camps or even suggested the misery of warfare conveyed in the letters of ordinary soldiers. Yet all this too is part of the unwritten war.”
THE REAL WAR WILL NEVER GET IN THE BOOKS.
“And so good-bye to the war. I know not how it may have been, or may be, to others—to me the main interest I found, (and still, on recollection, find,) in the rank and file of the armies, both sides, and in those specimens amid the hospitals, and even the dead on the field. To me the points illustrating the latent personal character and eligibilities of these States, in the two or three millions of American young and middle-aged men, North and South, embodied in those armies—and especially the one-third or one-fourth of their number, stricken by wounds or disease at some time in the course of the contest—were of more significance even than the political interests involved. (As so much of a race depends on how it faces death, and how it stands personal anguish and sickness. As, in the glints of emotions under emergencies, and the indirect traits and asides in Plutarch, we get far profounder clues to the antique world than all its more formal history.)
Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the official surface-courteousness of the Generals, not the few great battles) of the Secession war; and it is best they should not—the real war will never get in the books. In the mushy influences of current times, too, the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of being totally forgotten. I have at night watch’d by the side of a sick man in the hospital, one who could not live many hours. I have seen his eyes flash and burn as he raised himself and recurr’d to the cruelties on his surrender’d brother, and mutilations of the corpse afterward. (See, in the preceding pages, the incident at Upperville—the seventeen kill’d as in the description, were left there on the ground. After they dropt dead, no one touch’d them—all were made sure of, however. The carcasses were left for the citizens to bury or not, as they chose.)
Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutia of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual soldier of 1862-’65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp, I say, will never be written—perhaps must not and should not be.
The preceding notes may furnish a few stray glimpses into that life, and into those lucid interiors, never to be fully convey’d to the future. The hospital part of the drama from ’61 to ’65’ deserves indeed to be recorded. Of that many-threaded drama, with its sudden and strange surprises, its confounding of prophecies, its moments of despair, the dread of foreign interference, the interminable campaigns, the bloody battles, the mighty and cumbrous and green armies, the drafts and bounties—the immense money expenditure, like a heavy-pouring constant rain—with, over the whole land, the last three years of the struggle, an unending, universal mourning-wail of women, parents, orphans—the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Army Hospitals—(it smm’d sometimes as if the whole interest of the land, North and South, was one vast central hospital, and all the rest of the affair but flanges)—those forming the untold and unwritten history of the war—infinitely greater (like life’s) than the few scraps and distortions that are ever told or written. Think how much, and of importance, will be—how much, civic and military, has already been— buried in the grave, in eternal darkness.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 778-779
Note: It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Say it! Whitman is fabulous, isn’t he? I want to shake his hand hard. Please see June 22 for more on the O.R. & the Real War, as well as many other points in the manuscript.
There are one hundred thirty eight thousand five hundred & seventy nine pages of means by which we can know, 138, 579, pages containing words that did as well as any could before heading back out to sea. The 128 volumes worth of the O.R. are like massive blood evidence telling the numbers killed or wounded, the outcomes, dates of battles, names of soldiers & generals, civilians, patriots, names of towns, creeks, rivers, valleys, rail lines, cemeteries, gravestone dates. Yet it’s an impossible standard of evidence to locate where the blood of the land actually lies. If there were one page, one paragraph that would say it all; a line, a word. Something. So we could write our way out of all that remains in the ground, in the documents, all the ingredients, properties, definitions of where the Real War lies, the Real War that will never get in the books.
AFAIK: Upshot of Valley Campaign: 17k against 60k.
2750 Confederate casualties versus 5500 Union, more than half of whom were captured. 650 miles Jackson’s Brigade walked all around the Valley. Jackson stays up like America’s Napoleon in the history books. This is the most-studied campaign of the war, but the least written about from anything but a tactical viewpoint. Here’s one more story.
**In 1998 the United Daughters of the Confederacy moves LaSalle Pickett’s ashes to rest next to General Pickett’s in Richmond. “A fife and drum corps played traditional music and men dressed in Confederate gray escorted the horse-drawn carriage that carried her remains. The ceremony was well attended and reported in newspapers across the country.” Longstreet’s and Pickett’s relatives were there. The Pickett’s great-grandson and great-grandnephew both received the “Order of the Military Cross.” She was the first female allowed buried in the Confederate section of Hollywood Cemetery.
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 176 From “Let the People See the Old Life as It Was.” Lesley J. Gordon
Note: On General Pickett’s wife LaSalle Pickett:
“It was she, Pickett told her readers, who became the embittered rebel, hurt and surprised at her husband’s willingness to forgive and forget the war’s bitterness. She initially refused to welcome her husband’s Yankee friends into their home immediately after the war. She was also a “caged tigress,” defiantly instructing her baby son that when he grew up he must “fight and fight, and never surrender, and never forgive the Yankees.’”
P. 179 (Supposed conversation between General Pickett’s wife LaSalle Pickett and writer Margaret Sangster)
”You have had a wonderfully rich life and you are but a child. You have had the black manny and the little colored playmates. The old atmosphere of the romantic South, and the plantation life that is all over now. You have had the romance of war, the excitement of the battlefield, the love of the soldiers, the nursing of the wounded hospital. You have known a new country, new president and cabinet and all the great changes of South and North alike. You have been the wife of a hero, the mother of children, the mother of an angel and now the greatest of all sorrows has come to chasten you, widowhood, and last, the highest boon that could come with all these things, the necessity for work. It is only through pain and loss that we can gain the joy of effort and the triumph of winning.”
“I have had all and lost all,” Pickett responded.
“You cannot lose what you have had,” Sangster answered, “it is yours always and the joy of reliving it in memory and expression will be the greatest happiness of your life. Pass it on to the world before you forget, and let the people see the old life as it was.’”
Note: In 2021, a group calling itself “White Lies Matter, Inc.” will claim to have stolen the $500k Jefferson Davis Memorial Chair from a Selma cemetery; the ransom was for the UDC to hang an Assata Shakur banner on its building, headquartered in Richmond, from 1pm April 9th to 1pm April 10th. “Failure to surrender to this request by the aforementioned time will result in the chair being carved into a toilet. See enclosed photograph.” On the banner, Shakur’s quote: “The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives.” The theft was confirmed by Selma police and the D.A., but a woman answering the line at headquarters called it “fake news.” Of course she did. 3 feet tall, weighing several hundred pounds of stone, it was “presented” in 1893 by “The Ladies of Selma.” All that remains in its place is a slab with a historic marker like a haint removing a curse no one can fathom what the cause of was.
Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture Karen L. Cox P. 65
P. 160-161
“By the 1920s most southern states had adopted pro-Confederate textbooks. Public schools created curricula that included the study of the Confederacy. Students were released from classes to attend Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies, and their classrooms often included a portrait of Robert E. Lee next to that of George Washington. As late as the 1970s, neither textbooks nor curricula veered far from Lost Cause interpretations. Especially in the Deep South. In his study of civil rights in Mississippi, historian John Dittmer argues that as recently as the 1990s, most whites in the state still believed in the Lost Cause myths of Reconstruction, which he attributed to “an interpretation drilled into the minds of generations of schoolchildren.”
White supremacists during the period of massive resistance to desegregation revived many of the tactics once used by the UDC. Just as the Daughters had fought to ensure that white students were not unduly influenced by “biased” texts, segregationists screened the curricula of the South’s public schools, as well as the content of books in school libraries. Following the example set by the early UDC, white supremacists sought to eliminate material that denigrated southerners or “the southern way of life.” In 1956 the Mississippi House of Representatives even passed a bill requiring the State Library Commission to purchase books that promoted white supremacy.
Although the intentions of the UDC and white supremacists were to preserve and instill their values among the region’s white youth, the sad reality is that those textbooks eventually made their way into the hands of black students, since they received the cast-off books of the white schools. Thus, young African-Americans were also exposed to a Lost Cause narrative, which included assertions about the inferiority of their race.
The generation of children raised on the Lost Cause and Confederate culture in the early decades of the twentieth century is also the generation that was actively engaged in massive resistance to desegregation at mid-century.”
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War Daniel Aaron P. 333
“The defeat of the Confederacy, however, removed an embarrassing stigma for old antislavery men. The filthy institution now expunged and the Negro legally free, writers in good conscience could trivialize him in pseudo-epics featuring the “Blue and Gray,” or in plantation romances in which black menials expatriated on a spurious past. Although black slavery was the root cause of the War, it is hard to name one War novel containing a fully realized Negro character. Given black invisibility and the almost total ignorance of the Negro’s inner and outer history, it is not surprising that few writers of any literary stature dealt with him at all. The notable exceptions—Melville, Mark Twain, Cable, and Faulkner—were haunted by racial nightmares in which Negroes necessarily figured. Even for them the Negro served primarily a symbolic function and seldom appeared from behind his various masks.”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 92-95
“And over and behind these considerations lies the fact that the South far overran the American average for (white) illiteracy—that not only the great part of masses but a considerable number of planters never learned to read and write, and that a very great segment of the latter class kept no book in their houses save only the Bible.
But put this aside. Say that the South is entitled to be judged wholly by its highest and its best. The ultimate test of every culture is its productivity. What ideas did it generate? Who were its philosophers and artists? And—perhaps the most searching test of all—what was its attitude toward these philosophers and artists? Did it recognize and nurture them when they were still struggling and unknown? Did it salute them before the world generally learned to salute them?
One almost blushes to set down the score of the Old South.
In general, the intellectual and aesthetic culture of the Old South was a superficial and jejune thing, borrowed from without and worn as a political armor and a badge of rank; and hence (I call the authority of old Matthew Arnold to bear me witness) not a true culture at all.
But we are not dealing with the cotton South alone, of course. As we have sufficiently seen, it was the Virginians, too. Here was the completed South, the South in flower- a South that, rising out of the same fundamental conditions as the great South, exhibiting, with the obvious changes, the same basic pattern, and played upon in the first half of the nineteenth century by the same forces, had enjoyed riches, rank, and a leisure perhaps unmatched elsewhere in the world, for more than a hundred years at least; a South, therefore, which, by every normal rule, ought to have progressed to a complex and important intellectual culture, to have equaled certainly, probably to have outstripped, New England in production, and to have served as a beacon to draw the newer South rapidly along the same road. And if it did none of these things, why, then, we shall have to look beyond the factor of time for a satisfactory explanation, not only of its barrenness but, to a considerable extent, of that of the great South also.”
Note: 1861: Today delegates gather in Wheeling, VA. to start the process of breaking off western VA. from VA.
Note: General Lee writes to Jackson from Richmond today (6/11/62): “Your recent successes have been the cause of the liveliest joy in this army as well as in the country. The admiration excited by your skill and boldness has been constantly mingled with the solicitude for your situation.”
Note: And today Lee writes Stuart:
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Prepared, Under the Direction of the Secretary of War, By Lieut. Col. Robert N. Scott, Third U.S. Artillery, and Published Pursuant to Act of Congress Approved June 16 1880. Series I—Volume XI—In Three Parts. Part III. CORRESPONDENCE, ETC. WASHINGTON: GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 1884. P. 590-591
HEADQUARTERS,
Dabb’s Farm, Va., June 11, 1862.
Brig. Gen. J. E. B. STUART,
Commanding Cavalry:
GENERAL: You are desired to make a secret movement to the rear of the enemy, now posted on Chickahominy, with a view of gaining intelligence of his operations, communications, &c.; of driving in his foraging parties, and securing such grain, cattle, &c., for ourselves as you can make arrangements to have driven in. Another object is to destroy his wagon trains, said to be daily passing from the Piping Tree road to his camp on the Chickahominy. The utmost vigilance on your part will be necessary to prevent any surprise to yourself, and the greatest caution must be practiced in keeping well in your front and flanks reliable scouts to give you information.
You will return as soon as the object of your expedition is accomplished, and you must bear constantly in mind, while endeavoring to execute the general purpose of your mission, not to hazard unnecessarily your command or to attempt what your judgment may not approve; but be content to accomplish all the good you can without feeling it necessary to obtain all that might be desired.
I recommend that you only take such men and horses as can stand the expedition, and that you take every means in your power to save and cherish those you do take. You must leave sufficient cavalry here for the service of this army, and remember that one of the chief objects of your expedition is to gain intelligence for the guidance of future operations.
Information received last evening, the points of which I sent you, lead me to infer that there is a stronger force on the enemy’s right than was previously reported. A large body of infantry, as well as cavalry, was reported near the Central Railroad. Should you find upon investigation that the enemy is moving to his right, or is so strongly posted as to render your expedition inopportune—as its success, in my opinion, depends upon its secrecy—you will, after gaining all the information you can, resume your former position.
I am, with great respect, your obedient servant,
R. E. LEE,
General.
Note: For more all things Lee, see the Lee Family Digital Archive at leefamilyarchive.org, “Hundreds of letters, essays, and papers written by the Lees of Virginia, long association of the Lee family and the Washington family, nearly three hundred years of primary source materials” says the flashing red banner, “working hard to maintain the most comprehensive collection of Lee family documents ever assembled. Do you own Lee family papers that are not available to the public? Would you like to share them on our online repository, where they can be used by students, scholars, and genealogists? If so, please contact the archive project’s editor.” They’re on Great House Road, Stratford, sixthhighestincomecountyinAmerica, Virginia. Of course they are. You didn’t think they’d be along Slave Cabin Avenue or Plantation Street, did you? Log Cabin Hovel Hut Mud And Plaster Shack With No Foundation Earthfast Dirt Floor Boulevard doesn’t roll off the tongue as easy as Big House Drive. Nor does the Great House Road 10,000 Enslaved Ran Down In 1862 Headed North, To Cross The Rappahannock Toward Union Lines And Freedom At Last Expressway, now termed “The Trail of Freedom” with markers the only thing left to show they were ever there. Markers. “Do you have a rare item that you would like to donate or share with us?” Perhaps your existence, someone out there, reading this.
I don’t see how any of us escaped that we was not all taken Prisners….
His voice seemed to be dragged from it, the air of someone tired of pretending: I don’t see how any of us escaped that we was not all taken Prisners in the Battle as they had some 20,000 of a force against us (doodle). We have marched since the 29 of April up to this evening 403 miles and since the 12 of May 343 miles marching nearly every day through rain mud up to our knees wadeing creeks up to our waists and then lay down at night on the wet ground without blankets or tents I have not sleept in a bed since the 1st of February last I have saw the hardships of a soldiers life many times not as much as we could eat but had to do the best we could we are among the hills and pspurs [?] of the Blue ridge and we have traveled over some awful roads since we have been on this march I am now give out I have the Rheumatism and I will soon have to give up as I am entirely woren out.
I think he has no intention whatsoever of going back there but he will begin, after today, to let himself down easy. It will take time before he decides to sit out the remainder of the war but he’ll deny it to himself. He won’t address it directly in writing. He will write around it. He will address quitting by not addressing it. This must have been the hardest decision of his life. I can hear in the space surrounding his words not said a bewilderment, a guilt, & a sorrow.
Because Ephraim’s had it here. A certain slant to his voice suggests defeat, but it’s a medical defeat, which must have been torturous for him, both in his body & spirit. ….soon have to give up means he is forced to leave. He knew it was considered shameful to get conscripted so you had to enlist if you were going to go, in a way. They’d enlist with friends & relatives & neighbors from their hometown, so it had to be death before dishonor for most of them. Now he had to go North & face everybody. What’d he tell them when he walked in? Did he in some small or large way think himself no longer “loyal” to his town, or his State?
The kicking and the gouging and the mud and the blood and the beer. The death. The helping saw limbs off. The body parts & bones everywhere. His friends dying. The remains sticking out of the Earth. He thinks about the hastily buried. Fingers in dirt trying to grab onto his own. Starvation. The empty stomach yet the diarrhea. The haunting rheumatism. The lice crawling all over his rheumatoid body. The picking them off him. The insectile territorium. The flies, fleas, chiggers, jiggers, squitters, the blood-sucking gnats in the night, weevils, inch long black-headed worms crawling out of crackers, the pine tree tar sticking to everything, & the only way to sleep for the noise was to tie something to a donkey’s tail. Typhus. Malaria. Fever. Infection. The no hot bath. The rheumatism pain in my hip and breast, & never felt more woren out then I do at this present time and I don’t think I can stand soledering much longer, & we had no crackers and we had orders to march this morning at 6oclock were countermanded, & repeat we had orders to march but it was countermanded again. And again the weevils in the hardtack, the drippy cornmeal, the rain wet raining wet wet, & god, the mud, oh I am afraid some of our chaplins are rather careless and I think that some of them don’t think much about the future wellfare of their fellow men, & the no blankets & now the heat, the forced marches, we march 20 miles today, the doctors, they do not do as much as they are bound to do by their solemn vows and I hope the day may soon come that all such may be attended to and the needs relieve of their pains, & the boys all wrong in the sight of god, I may soon be well and live in peace and happiness at home with my family, I wish I was home with my dear family where I could spend the day & the lack of sermons, & the no Preaching to day as our chaplin has not been with the Regt for a mounth, & the amputations, it looks hard to see mens have their limbs taken off, & the danger, the shells came very close to me today the destruction of Life was grate, & the hills marched all night on towards Frountroyal we haulted after the sun was up & the baggage train of the 4 Brigade did not get in to camp, & the schells, & we had quite a mud tramp & scarcely any part of the soles of their shoes on & the lack of care, & no wonder that there so many sick or will be in a few days & doctors do not do their duty or as much as they have a right to do and many a poor soldier die for the want of proper attention oh, & the regiment lost 180 in all, & only going downhill, & I have been unwell for some time and I hope we may soon be where the Sabbath day is respected, & I did not sleep very well, & I received a letter- it was written May 3 Finished on Saturday it was mailed the 12th, so for god’s sake does his family even remember him now. All while a cheerio-sized shot to his gut will very well kill him.
Almost a week later he makes it home. The mail was as fast then as now, even faster. So what was his motivation to surprise them? He could have warned his family by letter & had them know he was, in 2 days, walking through the front door. Picture him walking with his farm in sight. The anticipation. Did he run.
He ran.
.
.
FAIR USE NOTICE. Terms of Use. This non-profit, non-commercial, for educational purposes only website contains copyrighted material for the purpose of teaching, learning, research, study, scholarship, criticism, comment, review, and news reporting, which constitutes the Fair Use of any such copyrighted material as provided for under Section §107 of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.