Day 118. June 26, 1862.
118
blood-smuch’d little note-books….
Thursday 26
Pleasant this morning. We went over to old Mr Tusseys. There awhile. We came back to Robert Tusseys. Eat dinner and came home. Uncle and Ant Stoners* here this afternoon. Quite warm all day. I feel unwell my bones all
*Stoners were a family close to the Burkets, like the Neffs, Flecks, Pattons, Harnishes, Kellers, Kauffmans. Some are buried in the Lutheran cemetery where Ephraim rests.
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 123
“June 26, 1862: President issues order combining forces under Gens. Frémont, Banks, McDowell into new Army of Virginia under command of Gen. Pope.”
“Washington, June 26, 1862.
Major-General McClellan.
Your three dispatches of yesterday in relation to the affair, ending with the statement that you completely succeeded in making your point, are very gratifying.
The latter one of 6:15 p. m. suggesting the probability of your being overwhelmed by 200,000, and talking of where the responsibility will belong, pains me very much. I give you all I can, and act on the presumption that you will do the best you can with what you have, while you continue, ungenerously I think, to assume that I could give you more if I would. I have omitted and shall omit no opportunity to send you reinforcements whenever I possibly can.
A. Lincoln.”
**McClellan thought he had no railroad to supply his army, that he might be cut off from his base, then decided he was outnumbered, so withdrew to the James. Truth: He absolutely could have moved up the Peninsula & into the city– only a tiny force was under Magruder, a man who had fooled McClellan once before at Yorktown. Yet another instance the North could have won the war.
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War Tony Horwitz P. 319
“So I abandoned Sherman’s March and headed instead for Andersonville, near Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains in Georgia’s rural southwest. Winding slowly out of upland Georgia and into the fertile prairie beyond, I felt as though I’d been here before. The crops might change, but the roadscape on small highways appeared much the same from southern Virginia to western Arkansas: single-wide trailers with satellite dishes, low brick ranches with home-based businesses (beauty parlor, blade-sharpening, fish taxidermy, towing and recovery), white-frame churches with exclamatory sermon signs (“Presenting Jesus!”), flyspeck settlements– “Welcome to Forkland. Town of Opportunities. Pop 764”– abandoned to time and kudzu vines and men in bib overalls loitering before a faded Gas and Go (“Tank and Tummy– Fill Em Up”). Then a small town with a stone rebel on the square and a “family restaurant” serving plate lunches of chicken and dumplings, candied yams, turnip greens, pear salad and pecan pie. Then fields and woods again.
It was foolish to speak of “one South,” just as it was to speak of one North. The former states of the Confederacy encompassed dozens of subcultures, from the Hispanic enclaves of Florida and Texas, to the Cajun country of south Louisiana, to the hardscrabble hills of Appalachia. Still, the geographic kinship between far-flung stretches of the backcountry South offered some clue to the cohesion and resilience the region displayed during the Civil War, and to the South’s cherishing of Confederate memory ever since.
Nearing Andersonville, I was momentarily blinded by what looked like a snow flurry: bolls of cotton blowing across the road from a just-picked field. This, too, was a reminder of what had once bound the rural South together. Cotton was enjoying a comeback in the South and the crop always came as a small miracle to me. It seemed incredible that these perfect white blobs sprouted straight from nature, and that something so natural could at the same time seem so artificial.
My rural reverie ended abruptly at the gate to the national park at Andersonville. The entrance road ran straight into a sea of white gravestones packed so closely together that they almost touched, like piano keys. Beneath lay the 13,000 Northern soldiers who died at Andersonville, a toll that roughly equalled the combined Union combat deaths in the War’s five bloodiest battles: Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Spotyslvania, Antietam.
I’d arrived on a quiet weekday and a ranger named Fred Sanchez agreed to show me around. Walking through the cemetery, he pointed out that the headstones marking the camp’s earliest casualties were better spaced than the graves of those who died later. Initially, he explained, prisoners were buried in simple pine coffins. Then, as the death toll mounted, bodies were buried in trenches and covered with pine planks. Before long, even this meager covering was abandoned. “The gravediggers also started burying the corpses on their sides so they could pack more in,” Sanchez said.
P. 323
A larger museum, at the park entrance, offered videos of former World War II prisoners telling about their wretched treatment by the Germans and Japanese. A short, introductory video on Andersonville– with flabby reenactors farbishly cast as starving prisoners– explained that the South was unprepared for so many POWs, due to the North’s refusal to exchange prisoners midway through the War. A wall exhibit gave the Andersonville tragedy a similar spin, noting that the North “realized it was to their advantage” to end exchanges because the South needed manpower more than the Union. Cited as evidence was a quote from Grant: “It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them, but it is humanity to those left in our ranks to fight our battles.”
This was, at best, a selective and misleading version of events. No mention was made of another reason the North halted exchanges: to protest the South’s refusal to trade the growing number of black soldiers in Union ranks. In May 1863, the Confederate Congress declared that the South would re-enslave captured blacks and execute their white officers. Grant, a grim purveyor of war by attrition, no doubt meant what he said. But he made his infamous statement more than a year after prisoner exchanges had already ended.
This Southernized presentation seemed odd at a park administered by the U.S. Government. Nor did the inclusion of POW stories from other wars strike me as altogether benign. Its impact was to dilute the Andersonville tragedy, and also to sugar-coat its message for Americans; after all, the Confederates hadn’t tortured their prisoners like the Japanese and the Viet Cong had. Unmentioned at either museum was what seemed a crucial distinction: Andersonville lay on American soil and saw the death of 13,000 Americans in American custody.
Heading over to the park office, I shared my reservations with Sanchez and two other rangers. Then men shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. “You’re not the first to come out of there pissed off,” Sanchez said. “I’ve had to break up fights in that museum between Northerners and Southerners.”
Controversy had dogged Andersonville ever since Clara Barton tried to establish it as a shrine to the dead immediately after the War. Southerners fiercely resisted any effort to memorialize the camp, fearing it would be used to demonize the region (or “wave the bloody shirt,” as efforts to exploit sectional passions were known in the late nineteenth century). It wasn’t until 1970 that a compromise was reached; Andersonville would become a national memorial, but only if it commemorated POWs from all American wars.
Even so, when the park set up its first museum, “we took a lot of flak,” Sanchez said. “Southerners felt we were blaming them for what happened.” The park softened its presentation, and later added the small POW museum I’d visited by the stockade. This had caused a different sort of controversy. One exhibit, which mentioned the large number of American POWs who collaborated with the North Koreans, had to be rewritten after complaints by Korean War veterans.
A new, much bigger POW museum was about to be built, and this had sparked yet another round of lobbying. An Alabama woman who headed a group called the Confederate POW Society demanded that half the new exhibits be devoted to Northern prison camps. “She came in here and started ranting about ‘you-all’s government,’ as if the South wasn’t yet part of the nation,” one of the rangers said. The woman had since set up her own Confederate POW museum in the nearby hamlet of Andersonville each year on the anniversary of Wirz’s hanging, a week hence, to honor the captain’s memory with song, speeches and prayer.
When I asked what the ceremony was like, one of the rangers chuckled uneasily. “Very weird,” he said. “I have to live in this community so I shouldn’t say any more.”
As soon as I left the park and drove across the highway to the small community of Andersonville, I saw why the rangers remained so reticent. Andersonville had become a village-sized apologia for the prison camp that bore its name. The counteroffensive began with a roadside historical marker honoring Wirz, erected by the state of Georgia in 1956. It stated: “Had he been an angel from heaven he could not have changed the pitiful tale of privation and hunger unless he had possessed the power to repeat the miracle of the loaves and fishes.”
Just beside the railroad tracks, where Union prisoners had disembarked, stood another marker, erected just a year before my arrival. Andersonville, it said, “honors both the memory of the Union soldiers who suffered and Confederate soldiers who did their duty while experiencing illness and death in numbers comparable to their unfortunate prisoners.” This too, I’d later learn, was very misleading.
A rebuilt train depot beside the tracks had become a museum devoted to local history, and to Wirz, including pictures of the medal of honor awarded him by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1981 for “uncommon valor and bravery involving risk of life above and beyond the call of duty in defense of his homeland and its noble ideals.” The SCV had also passed a resolution designating Wirz’s hanging on November 10, 1865, at 10:32 A.M., “the moment of martyrdom,” an occasion for annual remembrance of the “Confederate Hero-Martyr.”
The rest of Andersonville’s business district consisted of antique shops and a vegetable plant where many of the town’s 247 inhabitants worked waxing and packing cucumbers and peppers. Towering over the main street was a granite shaft, inscribed WIRZ. Erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy** in 1909, its inscription said, “To rescue his name from the stigma attached to it by embittered prejudice.” The obelisk also bore Grant’s quote on prisoner exchanges, praise for Wirz’s “humanity,” and a line from Jeff Davis: “When time shall have softened passion and prejudice, when reason shall have stripped the mask of misrepresentation, then justice, holding even her scales, will require much of past censure and praise to change places.”
I later learned that the UDC had originally composed an even more inflammatory message for the monument. It stated that the U.S. Government, not Wirz, “is chargeable with the suffering at Andersonville” and listed doctored casualty rates at Civil War prisons. But outraged Northern veterans prevailed on Georgia officials to tone down the monument’s language.
Still, local feelings about the camp and its memory remained fierce well into this century. At the town’s bed-and-breakfast, I was escorted to my room by a New York native named Peggy Sheppard who had married a Georgian and lived here for fifty years. On her first visit, she said, her husband’s friends took her for a drive through the prison camp. ‘They said, ‘Here’s where all the good Yankees are– under the ground.’”
That bothered her at the time, but not anymore. An amateur historian, she’d authored a small book sympathetic to Wirz. “The more I learned, the more I realized Northerners have been brainwashed about what really happened here,” she said.
P. 327
Nor did the tragedy of Andersonville end with the camp’s closing in the spring of 1865. Almost three weeks after Appomattox, an overloaded steamship called the Sultana blew its boilers on the Mississippi River, drowning or burning alive an estimated 2,000 passengers in the worst maritime disaster in American history. Most of the casualties were freed from Andersonville, on their way home at last.”
Journal of the Proceedings of the Annual Encampment of the Department of New Hampshire GAR, 1908, pages 57-58; Address by David E. Proctor, Sgt, 13th NH; CPT, 30th USCT
“Among the things interesting the public at the present time is the Wirz monument. While some condemn, others may praise; it depends upon where their sympathies are.but after all the pros and cons, the rights and wrongs, some good may yet come from the agitation. The future historian will find a problem to solve which he can only express in algebraic form; for instance, his first equation might be with truth, the command of the army of Northern Virginia plus being educated by the United States and having taken the oath to be loyal to the same, plus deserting and taking up arms to destroy that which he had pledged his sacred honor to defend and preserve, equals Lee, and Lee equals a monument. The second equation: Educated by the government to which he had sworn allegiance, plus plotting to betray it while secretary of war, plus all the atrocities of Libby, Belle Isle and Salisbury, equals Davis, and Davis equals a monument. The third equation: Selected on account of his low and brutal nature, plus starving defenceless and helpless Union prisoners, plus shooting them down upon no cause whatever, plus glorying in his wickedness and ruffianism, plus devilish cussedness, equals Wirz; therefore, Wirz equals Lee, equals Davis; therefore, these three being equal, the natural corollary is that they were equal in service rendered the Southern Confederacy. Hence Wirz, being equal to either Lee or Davis, therefore stands on the same pedestal of honor that they do, and is entitled to all the honors they are. It is an axiom demonstrated by the ages that “war is hell,” and as these three did so much by murder, starvation and abuse to make this axiom a truth, then it is a perfectly deduction that they were certainly under the direct control of that party whom Milton regarded as a trifle off color. And when the historian has solved this problem his answer will be:. “The rebellion of 1861-’65 was conceived in iniquity, born in deception, nurtured in perjury and hypocrisy, carried on by murder and starvation, its principal hero was Wirz and it died in ignominy and sin, and fifty years later some little virus remaining was fanned into a sickly, flickering light, to feebly lift its hydra head, from which emmanated just a faint sibilant sound in honor of its chief murderer, Wirz, now made the peer of the once peerless Lee. This affair is bringing the wickedness of the rebellion right back into the lime-light, and the honest, sober, loyal, right-thinking people are seeing with a clearer vision than ever before the righteousness of the struggle for the perpetuation of the Union and the freedom of man. It is said that when God wished to punish Ephraim he let him alone. This may be best for us to do, but as an object lesson in loyalty and patriotism I would recommend that every commrade who had any experience with this Andersonville brute be urged to put his experience into writing for his nearest local paper in sympathy with his sufferings.”
Note: Wirz: In the future men like him will be flown to undisclosed locations instead of dropping from a rope, then set up a corporation on an island that doesn’t exist. For more on the Sons of Confederate Veterans, see April 13. The SCV have a motorcycle club. Motto: “Ride as you would with Forrest”. For now, as Henry Wirz falls through the chute to his death, men stand in trees to watch. They stand high while Wirz plummets to his death. They balance on limbs, crane their necks. You can see this now because five prints were made from glass plates by Alexander Gardner, one of which is of the noose being placed around his neck. “Wanton cruelty” was the charge four days earlier (11/6/65).
The Best American Essays 2019 Rebecca Solnit, Editor P. 3 “Comforting Myths” Rabih Alameddine
“In one of the most gorgeous passages at the end of Heart of Darkness, Conrad describes at length the suffering of a mass murderer’s widow, though he glossed over that of the murderer’s victims. Conrad did not create the original mold for this kind of writing–from Homer to Shakespeare to Kipling, everyone has done it–but he became the standard because he was so good. We invade your countries, destroy your economies, demolish your infrastructures, murder hundreds of thousands of your citizens, and a decade or so later we write beautifully restrained novels about how killing you made us cry.”
Note: Again. And again.
Again. And again. Again.
Memory and American History David Thelen P. 142 (Quoting unnamed source)
“We have to learn how to be Indian again. First, the whites came and stripped us. Then, they come again and “find” us. Now, we are paid to behave the way we did when they tried to get rid of us.”
Ralph Ellison: “Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good– only ‘they’ were the ones who benefitted. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?”
Lucille Clifton: “They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep remembering mine.”
Audre Lorde: “If I didn’t define myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
Note: Everyone: “We aren’t a costume.”
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Walter A. McDougall P. 546
“…that spiritual censorship which strictly forbids the telling of truth about any American record until the material of such an essay is scattered and gone.”
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 60
“Late on June 26, Richmond citizens who gathered on the city’s high points to look toward the battlefields to northeastward felt “a gentle breeze rising” as darkness fell, revealing “the glimmer of the stars.’”
P. 62
“7a.m. 64; 2p.m. 84; 9p.m. 74.”
Ken Burns’s the Civil War: Historians Respond Robert Brent Toplin P. 112-114 “Ken Burns and the Romance of Reunion” Eric Foner
“It is a failure of historical imagination, not the absence of historical material suitable for television, that explains the structure and subject matter of the final episode.
Let me make myself perfectly clear. The issue here is not, primarily, one of “coverage” but of interpretation. Ignoring the actual history of postwar America (which necessarily distorts understanding of the war itself) arises inevitably from a vision of the Civil War as a family quarrel among whites, whose fundamental accomplishment was the preservation of the Union and in which the destruction of slavery was a side issue and African Americans little more than a problem confronting white society. Even on its own terms, however, the treatment of “reunion” is wholly inadequate, for Burns does not appear to realize that the process involved far more than simply reknitting the shattered bonds of nationhood.
A nation is not merely a form of government, a material entity, or a distinct people, but, in Benedict Anderson’s celebrated phrase, an “imagined community.” Its boundaries are internal as well as external, intellectual as well as geographic. And the process of “imagining” is itself contentious and ultimately political. Who constructs the community, who has the power to enforce a certain definition of nationality, will determine where the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion lie, who stands within or outside them. If the Civil War created the modern American nation, the specific character that reunion took helped to define what kind of nation America was to be. Reunion represented a substantial retreat from the Reconstruction ideal of a color-blind citizenship. The road to reunion was paved with the broken dreams of black Americans, and the betrayal of those dreams was indispensable to the process of reunion as it actually took place. This was why Frederick Douglass* fought in the 1870s and 1880s not only for civil rights, as the final episode mentions, but to remind Americans of the war’s causes and meaning. Douglass dreaded the implications of reunion, if it simply amounted to “peace among the whites.” Yet Burns seems unable to understand reunion in any other way.”
MEMORANDA, &c.
“Following, I give some gloomy experiences. The war of attempted secession has, of course, been the distinguishing event of my time. I commenced at the close of 1862, and continued steadily through ’63, ’64 and ’65, to visit the sick and wounded of the Army, both on the field and in the hospitals in and around Washington city. From the first I kept little note-books for impromptu jottings in pencil to refresh my memory of names and circumstances, and what was specially wanted, &c. In these, I brief’d cases, persons, sights, occurrences in camp, by the bed-side, and not seldom by the corpses of the dead. Some were scratch’d down from narratives I heard and itemized while watching, or waiting, or tending somebody amid those scenes. I have dozens of such little note-books left, forming a special history of those years, for myself alone, full of associations never to be possibly said or sung. I wish I could convey to the reader the associations that attach to these soil’d and creas’d little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fasten’d with a pin. I leave them just as I threw them by after the war, blotch’d here and there with more than one blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting ready for it, or a march. Most of the pages from 20 to 75 are verbatim copies of those lurid and blood-smuch’d little note-books.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 689-690
Note: Says James –if-the-Confederacy-had-raised-proportionately-as-many-soldiers-as-the-postwar-South-raised-monuments,-the-Confederates-might-have-won-the-war– McPherson. (Fahs, P. 64) The truth is neither side ran out of ammunition. This is haunting. Haunting & explanatory. Because if you have one question that once its found out, everything else falls apart, then the show can’t go on, like Twin Peaks. During battle, Davis rides up, asks “General, what is all this army and what is it doing here” to which Lee says “I don’t know, Mr. President. It is not my army and this is no place for it.”
Life on the Mississippi (1883) Mark Twain
Note: The Battle of Beaver Dam Creek today, 1862 (Mechanicsville), was the first major engagement of the Seven Days Battles, & the day Jackson cracked out of turn; 4 hours behind, late; he hears the battle but supposedly can’t find the two hill commanders. Many of the South’s 11k men had never seen battle before today. The 44th Georgia lost 225 men & most of its officers out of 514 men. 65% casualty rate. The 1st North Carolina lost 50%. North had 15,631 in the fight, South 16,356. North with 361 casualties– 49 killed. Rebel losses at 1,484.
Note: 1863: June 26 Jubal Early gets to Gettysburg and demands ransom. No one ponies up. Confederates take the town.
I feel unwell my bones all….
Again, Ephraim’s silence except for the chilling, phenomenal line “Unwell my bones all” foreshadowing Gettysburg, how he will hear it from his farm soon enough, Gettysburg, the sacks of horse bones sold to Richmond after, the lead & iron in the ground too sold for scrap, & the fact it’s all still haunting the ground there as you read this. He was remembering with his blood more than anything else, unwell my bones all, all that he’d seen that would course through his blood for all the days & nights he had left, & all he kept in his soul we can’t know now, or ever.
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