Day 106. June 14, 1862.
106
Some come under the influence of liquor, others in cold blood….
June Saturday 14. 1862
Cool this morning. The nights are very cool and though the day very warm. I did not sleep very well last night as we had no covering and a hard floor to sleep on. We got up in the morning as the sun came up bright. I made some coffee and we eat some dry hard crackers and had to be satisfied as we are in the land where we can’t expect anything good to eat as we are Among the schells. The wounded and sick are all being put in the cars. They are freight cars. There are 304 in all and a lot of prisners 135 in the same train. We got started from Frount Royal Warren Co. Va. at 11½ oclock. P.M. There was a good many had to get on the top of the cars I was on the top. The sun was very warm and the smoke from the Engine made it very unpleasant although we had a good view of the surrounding country the Manasses gap through the mountains. We passed near where the Bull Run fight [note: “fight” is crossed out] Battleground. I saw where the rebels had throwen up Breast works and had a lot of cabins built for winter quarters. There is a very bad stench there. The country looks quite level towards Cattells Station. The Bull run Battleground is roleing and I think the part I saw would not stope the famous Gen Shields Division in case he had men. They must leave their strong holds and flee to other parts of the Country. Over the country is very poor along this Rail Road. There is a grate deal of land woren out and is now a forest again. The land* has been worked out by neglect and for the want of energy ambition but they have found the raising of Negroes more profitable and selling them to the more extreme Southern States and leaving their tilling of the land to Overseers and Negroes for the Productions. We arrived at the Town of Alexandria** below Washington City at sun down and at 8 ½ oclock we arrived in the Town of Washington City. D.C. We came to the Soldiers Retreat*** and went to bed without supper lay on the floor. We were very much fatigued. I feel bad this evening somewhat sick.**** This is the first time I have been in this city the Seat of our Government where all the archives of the nations is recorded and our Ruler or President resides. The time has come when the South needs a new race of people to cultivate the land* and destroy the Selling of Humane Flesh from one state to another or person and I hope the Southern schivelry will soon be wiped out of Existence and men of pure motives settle the land where they can live in peace with their fellow men and may peace soon be restored to our land
Note: I love this entry. He wrote 4 pages today. The first 2 pages are in the entry header picture. This is what Ephraim was looking out over today. Passing through, you could look down several hundred feet, then the next minute, up at rock several hundred feet in the sky: https://www.loc.gov/item/2004661859/
A description of the area from 1896: “Thoroughfare Gap, Va., a pass in the mountains on the Manassas Gap Railroad, near Strasburg, held by General Geary. This famous natural break in that part of the mountain ridge called Bull Run Mountain is about nine miles northeast of Warrenton, forty-seven miles southwest of Washington, and one hundred and twenty-four miles from Richmond. The western side is of granite, covered with soil, on which trees grow up to the summit. On the east side is the Gap, which has been called the Virginia Thermopylae, since a few determined men might hold it against thousands. This splendid defense caught the eye of General Geary, and had there been a necessity to act on the defensive he had resolved there to make his stand. The rocks lie scattered around in such wild confusion as to suggest the idea of being the result of some convulsion of nature. Near the Gap is a spring, issuing from under an immense rock, of the purest and coldest water, which is neither increased nor diminished in any season. It stands on the roadside, and is called by travelers ‘The Diamond Spring in Palestine.’”— Frank Leslie, 1896 https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/11400/11418/thor-gap_11418.htm
And check this out! You can zoom in, too: https://www.fourdeesworld.com/railroad-passing-thru-thoroughfare-gap-virginia/ This was him today, riding atop a train much like this in this remarkable land. Also:
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 62
D.C. at 7a.m. 79 degrees; 2p.m. 91; 9p.m. 78. Richmond sunrise is at 4:43; sunset 7:17.
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 212-213
“Washington, D.C., was not surrounded by seven hills, though some of its architecture possessed Classical pretenses. It was a creature of the swamps, fetid in summer and bone-chillingly damp in the winter. Foreign diplomates considered a posting there a punishment. It was a slave city, odd for the headquarters of a government fighting against slavery. It was a southern city, and Confederate spies and sympathizers abounded. By 1861, many northern cities had made rudimentary attempts to clean and pave their streets and improve the water supply and waste disposal. Washington was impervious to these salutary trends, with many of its streets muddy quagmires– a Union soldier reported watching a mule, albeit a small mule, disappear into the mud up to his ears one morning. Drainage ditches oozed with sewage and dead animals. Pigs rooted in the streets, and droves of cattle marched down thoroughfares as if the city were some displaced Kansas stockyard. At night, fires from the military camps blotted out the stars, and residents slumbered to the incessant roll of drums. A startled visitor from Maine concluded that he had come to “a squalid, unattractive, unsanitary country town infested by malaria, mosquitoes, cockroaches, bed bugs, lice and outdoor backhouses… and no end of houses of ill-fame.”
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years Carl Sandburg 1954 P. 399
“From a population of 60,000 the city had gone above 200,000. Among the newcomers were contractors, freed Negroes, blockade-runners, traders, sutlers, office seekers, elocutionists, gamblers, keepers of concert saloons with waiter girls, liquor dealers, candy-criers, umbrella-menders, embalmers, undertakers, manufacturers of artificial limbs, patent-medicine peddlers, receivers of stolen goods, pickpockets, burglars, sneak thieves.
Of the new arrivals of footloose women it was noted they ranged “from dashing courtesans who entertained in brownstone fronts to drunken creatures summarily ejected from army camps.” One observer wrote: “Houses of ill fame are scattered all through the city. With rare exceptions, however, they have not yet ventured to intrude into respectable neighborhoods. A few of these houses are superbly furnished, and are conducted in the most magnificient style. The women are either young, or in the prime of life, and are frequently beautiful and accomplished. They come from all parts of the country, and they rarely return more than two seasons in succession, for their life soon breaks down their beauty. The majority of the ‘patrons’ of the better class houses are men of nominal respectability, men in high public life, officers of the army and navy, Governors of States, lawyers, doctors, and the very best class of the city population. Some come under the influence of liquor, others in cold blood.”
Beer, whisky, performances of nude or scantily dressed women, brought many a soldier boy into saloon concert halls to awake later on the streets with empty pockets. Into his drinks someone had slipped “knockout drops.” At intervals the lower grade of houses were raided by police or provost marshals.”
P. 400
The high-class gambling houses, located mostly on Pennsylvania Avenue, were carpeted, gilded, frescoed, garnished with paintings and statuary for the players of faro and poker. At the four leading establishments, where introductions were necessary, could be found governors, members of Congress, department officials, clerks, contractors, paymasters. In one place there was the tradition of a Congressman who broke the bank in a single night’s play, winning over $100,000. The gambling places shaded off into all styles, ending at the bottom, where smooth-spoken women plied the young infantrymen with drink and played them out of their last payday greenbacks. Colonel La Fayette C. Baker reported to Stanton in the summer of ’63 that 163 gaming houses in full blast required attention.”
DOWN AT THE FRONT.
“CULPEPPER, VA., Feb., ’64.—Here I am pretty well down toward the extreme front. Three or four days ago General S., who is now in chief command, (I believe Meade is absent, sick,) moved a strong force southward from camp as if intending business. They went to the Rapidan; there has since been some manoeuvring and a little fighting, but nothing of consequence. The telegraphic accounts given Monday morning last, make entirely too much of it, I should say. What General S. intended we here know not, but we trust in that competent commander. We were somewhat excited, (but no so very much either,) on Sunday, during the day and night, as orders were sent out to pack up and harness, and be ready to evacuate, to fall back towards Washington. But I was very sleepy and went to bed. Some tremendous shouts arousing me during the night, I went forth and found it was from the men above mention’d, who were returning. I talk’d first with some of the men; as usual I found them full of gayety, endurance, and many fine little outshows, the signs of the most excellent good manliness of the world. It was a curious sight to see those shadowy columns moving through the night. I stood unobserv’d in the darkness and watch’d them long. The mud was very deep. The men had their usual burdens, overcoats, knapsacks, guns and blankets. Along and along they filed by me, with often a laugh, a song, a cheerful word, but never once a murmur. It may have been odd, but I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the American people en masse. It fell upon me like a great awe. The strong ranks moved neither fast nor slow. They had march’d seven or eight miles already through the slipping unctuous mud. The brave First corps stopt here. The equally brave Third corps moved on to Brandy station. The famous Brooklyn 14th are here, guarding the town. You see their red legs actively moving everywhere. Then they have a theatre of their own here. They give musical performances, nearly everything done capitally. Of course the audience is a jam. It is good sport to attend one of these entertainments of the 14th. I like to look around at the soldiers, and the general collection in front of the curtain, more than the scene on the stage.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 740
Make Me a Map of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson’s Topographer Jedediah Hotchkiss P. 56
“Saturday, June 14th. The General has ordered the observance of this day as one of thanksgiving and prayer on account of our victories. Lt. J. K. Boswell, Mr. J. Davis Craig and myself rode over to see the battlefield of Cross Keys. We had a very interesting time; saw the miserable Dutch of Frémont’s army that he had left, wounded, behind him. The enemy did a great amount of damage; plundered the houses of the people near the battlefield and burned up one house in which it is supposed he had put his dead. One citizen dug up and reburied 100 or more Yankees which had been buried too near his house. Our men behaved very gallantly according to the accounts of the people near the action.”
The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America Edward L. Ayers P. 251
“The burning did not break the will of the people of the Valley in their support of the Confederacy. Families who saw the work of decades destroyed in a morning turned their hatred on Grant and Sheridan, the men they held responsible for the strategy that led to so much destruction. If Grant had hoped white citizens would grow disheartened enough to lessen their support for Lee, he was disappointed. In fact, the burning seemed only to deepen white Southerners’ hatred for the Yankees and to make them determined to see the war through to whatever end it might bring.
P. 252-253
In his final accounting of what the Federal army captured and destroyed between August and November 1864, Philip Sheridan reported remarkable numbers. The 71 flour mills, 1,200 barns, 435,802 bushels of wheat, 874 barrels of flour, and 2,500 bushels of potatoes could have fed Confederate troops for weeks. Those troops’ starving horses desperately needed some of the 77,176 bushels of corn, 20,000 bushels of oats, 20,397 tons of hay, or 500 tons of fodder burned by the Union army. Any of the 4,000 horses and mules taken away would have been enormously valuable to the Confederates. The woolen mills could have helped clothe some of Lee’s men and the tanneries could have helped cover their freezing feet. The soldiers might have missed most the nearly 11,000 cattle, 12,000 sheep, and 15,000 pigs that could have given physical sustenance.
By one critical measure, however, Sheridan failed. His destruction of the food of the Valley did not force Lee’s army to collapse before the winter descended. Sheridan might have shortened the war by months and thousands of lives if, instead, he had destroyed the Virginia Central Railroad and the Virginia and East Tennessee Railroad; if he had forced Lee to surrender or at least to fight in the open field where Grant was certain he could defeat him. But Sheridan, beleaguered by persistent guerrilla attacks and fearful that he could not sustain his army if he left the Valley, failed to fulfill a major part of Grant’s strategy.
P. 245-247
Sheridan’s victories in the Valley provided something else many people in the North longed for: the destruction of the bountiful landscape that had sustained Lee’s army for so long. Sheridan’s burning of the Valley- months before Sherman’s march through Georgia- demonstrated a new resolve and a new willingness to undermine the material and spiritual resources of Confederate civilians. The Republican paper in Chambersburg published an article- “The Valley of Humiliation” – glorying in Sheridan’s redemption of the Valley with his tactics of systematic burning. Sheridan’s victories marked a triumph over the guerrillas who had bedeviled the Union forces in the Valley for years.
And yet, as with everything else in the Civil War, the people of the North viewed Philip Sheridan’s burning through a partisan lens. The Democrats blasted the policy. What were the people of the North to think of “the wanton burning of twenty-seven hundred barns, filled with wheat, and more than eighty mills for grinding wheat and corn? This was done by soldiers of ‘The Union,’ with the Union flag waving over them.” Chambersburg’s Valley Spirit looked past the victories of Sheridan to write harsh accounts of the burning. “Between Staunton and Strasburg, all barns containing grain, all wheat and hay stacks, all farming implements, granaries and mills, and all subsistence of whatever kind, were burned. All the horses and cattle were driven off.” The paper quoted the correspondent of a New York paper: “The Valley, from mountain to mountain, was consequently the scene of a conflagration, such as has not been witnessed during the Rebellion.” A correspondent from another paper described the scene in evocative (and exaggerated) terms. “The Valley of the beautiful Shenandoah, from near the Natural Bridge to the gallows tree of John Brown, is a desolation.
After reprinting Sheridan’s report to Grant that detailed the thousands of barns burned and stock driven off, the Valley Spirit expressed disbelief. “That an order so desperately wicked, so contrary to the spirit of Christianity, and so revolting to the civilization of this age, should have been issued and executed by officers commanding the armies of a free, civilized and religious nation, is, indeed, almost too incredible for human belief.”
The Democrats’ paper pointed out an inconsistency in the Republican defense of such actions. “If the Republican papers and speakers are to be believed, our cause was never more prosperous, and our success never more certain than now. We are told daily by them that the rebellion is in the throes of dissolution; that the rebels have robbed the cradle and the grave to fill up their depleted armies; that Sheridan has totally destroyed Early’s army in the Valley of the Shenandoah; and that Grant has his hand so firmly fixed upon the throat of Lee and his army at Petersburg and Richmond, that his grip cannot be shaken off.” The Republicans promised “that the war will be over before this year shall end. Now if these things, or even the one half of them, be true, why the necessity for this spoilation and destruction of the subsistence of a whole people? Why resort to arson, rapine and vandalism after the crisis of our fate has been safely passed and all danger is pronounced to be over?”
The Valley Spirit emphasized the dangers in Grant’s orders and Sheridan’s execution of them. “There is no distinction made among the citizens of the Valley; all are doomed to the same common ruin; all are marked out as victims, to gratify the savage ferocity which now characterizes the conduct of this war.” The burning seemed a direct violation of the spirit that Lincoln claimed drove his and the nation’s purpose. “This was to be a war, whose object should be to bring back the citizens of the seceded States to their allegiance to the Government. Mr. Lincoln declared that he intended to prosecute the war for this purpose and no other. Does any man of sane mind think that the Southern people can be conciliated and brought back into the Union, by such acts of cold blooded barbarity as Gen. Sheridan relates in his official report?’”
Note: Grant orders Sheridan directly to “burn barns, wheat and hay-stacks, to drive off or kill all live stock and to carry off the negroes– in fact to make the Valley a ‘barren waste.”
Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War Elizabeth R. Varon P. 241
“‘A few hot-headed demagogues have dragged the State of Virginia almost into beggary and turned their once beautiful country into a desert,” Private John Haley lamented to his diary on June 15, 1863, as the Army of the Potomac geared up to take on Robert E. Lee again. “There was never anything so near akin to despotism in this country as is now being enacted in the so-called Southern Confederacy.” A week later, Philip Hamlin of the 1st Minnesota struck a similar chord in a letter home. Deploring how the Old Dominion had been “marred by the hand of war,” he added that no state “possesses more numerous or varied resources than Virginia and it would be a glorious sight to see a young and free civilization springing up here where slavery has wrought ruin.’”
*That a new people must possess the land was a quite common Northern sentiment at this time in the country. See Strother, May 13, & Ephraim June 14, plus Ephraim’s May 27 letter.
Note: If the crops weren’t rotated, or soil fertilized, nothing would grow. They were expensive. Whether a new people have possessed the land is debatable; in 2020, the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol Building has 8 Rebel statues. Ephraim is walking right past the future that this city holds today. And the dome isn’t even up yet on the White House (1863).
**In Alexandria, VA. the sunset time today day is 7:37pm. In D.C. it’s at 7:38pm. So it took about 53 minutes for him to to travel from Alexandria to D.C.
***Ephraim may sleep at the Soldiers Barracks, which may be the same as the “soldier retreat.”
****Dead mules, entire whole horses sinking in the deep-mudded streets. Many had typhoid fever– or typhus– both civilians & soldiers, in D.C.
Note: One year ago today, Jackson blew up the Harper’s Ferry railroad bridge, taking dozens of locomotives and traincars, & ripped tracks up. By the end of 1861, 23 B&O railroad bridges were burned, & close to 40 miles of track damaged or taken off the land. Jackson succeeded in cutting D.C. off from the line for over 6 months.
the Southern schivelry will soon be wiped out of Existence….
Ephraim is moving somewhere toward a last point today. Somewhere at the edge of nowhere with 30 days left to find out where the farthest he can go is without heading back, starting back around. Distance to the closest stretch of the Mason-Dixon? Just 50 miles off his farm in crow-fly-miles. But now both hands reach beneath the sky to replace his heart he can’t wait to live with again. We all go back to where we’re from, if we were there once.
The farthermost point he could go on Earth without turning back, the outermost city away from him right now, the exact opposite side of the world, the outermost location he can head the direction of without turning right around, back toward where he started from, would be landfall ½ way across the world at Augusta, Australia. His antipodal point, continent Oceania. A direct flight would take 21 hours.
Because if he walks in that direction today he will be the freest he’s ever been. Noone’d have any idea where he is, maybe for the first time in his life.
Right now, though, he’s figuring out that we’re moved around in ways that just don’t add up. Before the bone-like white sky we will all turn into takes him back. If there is a trick, that’s the only one.
“Almost heaven, West Virginia,
Blue Ridge Mountains,
Shenandoah River.
Life is old there, older than the trees,
younger than the mountains,
blowin’ like a breeze.
All my memories gather ’round her, miner’s lady,
stranger to blue water.
Dark & dusty painted on the sky,
misty taste of moonshine
teardrop in my eye.
I hear her voice in the morning hour,
she calls me,
radio reminds me of my home far away.
Drivin’ down the road
I get a feelin’ that I should have been home
yesterday,
yesterday.”
John Denver
156k comments. One comment, 119k likes: “This makes me miss West Virginia but I’ve never left Nigeria.”
.
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.