Day 96. June 4, 1862.
96
army could be heard, through martial song and sheer vibration, miles before they came….
June Wensday 4 1862
Raining this morning and we have roused up quite early. At 5oclock we took up the line of march from near Lieurey to Columbian bridge. It rained very hard all day. The men have doing that which is wrong in the sight of God and many have been stealling braking into stores shops along the road side. I feel for the women and children and old age men who can’t work. I dislike the way (note: he repeats again “the way”) they in many instances taking* that which is not their own especially from citizens. The roads are very bad we marched 12 miles today. Camped in the woods on the left of the road. It rained on until 5oclock when I quite heard cannon some wheres I know not. I will close. The ground is very soft and the river high and all streams
*Ephraim is clearly referring to Union soldiers robbing the citizens of towns along the way. If these citizens had any Confederate leanings, they were probably swayed over by the time the Union finished passing through. The men like locusts descending, all one color, tearing everything in sight apart with their little teeth. They had so much fun didn’t they, the sheep bleating, the red on the wool, the bleeding bleating beatings. Below, Strother observes the same thieving debacle Ephraim wrote of today. For more on this type of attack on the citizenry in the Valley, see My Will is Absolute Law: A Biography of Union General Robert H. Milroy, P. 50-51, by Jonathan Noyalas.
Note: Strother was “humiliated to have been mixed up in it,” the same scene that Ephraim writes about today:
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War The Diaries of David Hunter Strother David Hunter Strother P. 55-56
“JUNE 4, WEDNESDAY.—Raining hard…. The move was ordered for Winchester. All along the road the remnants of the flight were scattered. The streets of the town looked forlorn in the extreme. From what I can learn here, Jackson is gone beyond pursuit. Thus culminates this disgraceful affair, the most disgraceful to the Federal armies that has occurred during the whole war. I am utterly humiliated to have been mixed up in it. Frémont came around by Moorefield and Wardensville (instead of crossing to Woodstock) and fell upon Jackson’s rear. He is pursuing him with some energy, but without much hope of overtaking his more alert and active enemy.
At supper I sat beside an insignificant, boyish-looking man in citizen dress. Seeing Colonel [Othneil] De Forest opposite, I opened conversation. The little fellow at my elbow was struck with something I said, and with a marked German accent began questioning me closely. His questions showed military knowledge and rare astuteness, so that I guessed who it was. Presently he invited me to come to his room and introduced himself – Major General Siegel. I went up with him and pointed out localities on the map and gave him some other information about the country….”
Note: The Great Flood of ’62 is going on right now in the Delaware River Basin. Lehigh River rose faster than it ever had in recorded history, cresting at 21.80 feet. Afternoon brings disaster. Other accounts have the dates June 5-8, with 27 feet at the dam at Jim Thorpe, 6 feet higher than the 1841 flood. At any rate, PA. floods about 3 hours & change from Ephraim’s farm. 1889 will bring the Johnstown Flood, 128 miles east of him, the worst in America of the 19th century, & if you grew up in PA 70 years later, an hour & a half away, you still heard about that dark vale of murky water that drowned thousands… & then…. nothing was done to mitigate the next major rains. Even Clara Barton showed up, & Russia sent rubles. The photos are really something, unparalleled. In 1911, bodies were still being found…. in Cincinnati. 99 entire families wiped out, according to Wikipedia, with 777 victims never identified, buried in the Plot of the Unknown in town. A Frank Shomo, aged 108, was the final contestant, dying in 1997. 1936, rain again overtook Johnstown, breached dams, killed 2. They took it seriously this time, the Army Corp of Engineers, who don’t exactly have a shining reputation, as you may know, when it comes to, say, water, the environment, & much of anything else. Johnstown hit again with lingering thunderstorms in 1977; his time around the Laurel Run Dam overran. “It was like somebody dropped an atomic bomb on Johnstown.” This flood I remember. This is all to say 1861 through 1862 was insane with rain across the country. Also see California, Nevada, Oregon in this time period.
A Stillness at Appomattox Bruce Catton P. 172
“At times the feeling between the two armies was downright savage. A man in Smith’s corps complained bitterly that long after the June 3 attacks had ended, Confederate riflemen amused themselves by shooting at the wounded men between the lines. Sometimes, he said, they even fired at corpses. There was a wounded New Hampshire officer who lay, helpless, twenty yards in front of the Union trenches, and all day long the Confederate sharpshooters kept anyone from going out to help them. One man was killed in the attempt, and after that the Union soldiers tried throwing canteens of water and bags of hardtack out to the wounded man, but nothing effective could be done for him as long as the Rebels could see to shoot. After dark, men dug a shallow trench out to where the officer lay, and after three hours’ work they managed to get him back to safety. All of the soldiers in the line set up a cheer when the officer was brought in, and the cheer promptly drew a volley from the Confederate rifle pits.”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 174-176
“Shooting men in front of their families became a common terrorist act of guerrilla bands. Several authors have suggested that, in this way, irregulars acted out a symbolic form of rape, demonstrating that wives and daughters could be violated at any time and with impunity. This argument seems persuasive. But, ironically, in trying to expose an underlying motive hidden in this murderous practice, writers have unintentionally contributed to the myth that mock rape largely took the place of actual sexual assault in the Civil War. We frequently hear that very little rape took place in any sector of the fighting at any time during the conflict. However, a wide range of sources suggests otherwise: women suffered sexual assault frequently throughout all theaters of the conflict.
Many sexual assaults failed to be officially reported in part because junior officers colluded with their men in believing that taking advantage of women came as a perk of the uniform. Lieutenant George O’Malley, 115th Pennsylvania, assaulted a Mrs. Whippey, who was tending her wounded son in hospital. Union Major Thomas Jordan routinely threatened gang rape to cow Southern women into forced labor. He told a group in Sparta, Tennessee, that they must cook for six hundred troops or “he would turn his men loose upon them and would not be responsible for anything they might do.” Later, at Selma, he warned women that if they failed to provide food for the soldiers, “they had better sew up the bottoms of their petticoats.”
Soldiers often sympathized with their comrades arrested and punished for sexual assault, indicated again that many in uniform did not consider taking advantage of women a crime. When, on June 28, 1864, General Patrick hanged two men for rape, he felt obliged to harangue the assembled troops on the seriousness of their offense because of “feeling expressed by some of the Troops in regard to the Sentence.” He stood on the scaffold and uttered “such words of warning, of reproof & correction as seemed proper in the presence of… the dead hanging beneath my feet.”
The statistics for officially recorded rapes can sometimes mislead us, contributing to our underestimation of the incidence of sexual assault. Union military archives, for example, note only 350 trials for rape, and less than 10 percent of those convicted received the death penalty. But clearly many cases never went through formal channels, being dealt with summarily in the field, the incidents going unreported. Also, sexual assaults often lie buried under other categories of misbehavior- “conduct unbecoming” (1,506 convictions) or “conduct prejudicial to the service” (11,834). Thus, Captain F.M. Caldwell of the 157th Pennsylvania faced court-martial for drawing his pistol and accosting a woman at a train depot, insisting: “God damn you must sleep with me tonight.” The service dismissed him for conduct unbecoming. A military court tried Lieutenant Francois Wallenus, New York Independent Battery, also accused of attempted rape. He faced the same charge as Caldwell and the service cashiered him.”
The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and its Legacies Victoria E. Bynum P. 50-51
“Typically, lower-class and black women were considered dissipated and potentially dangerous, while women of the white propertied classes were imagined to be timidly reposing in their homes. In forming their policies, Confederate leaders had difficulty imagining the wives, mothers, and daughters of propertied white men on the front lines of home front “battlefields.” But there they were. ….Although no woman accused of disloyalty appears to have been executed by the Confederacy, arrests and tortures of Unionist women were regularly reported throughout the war.”
Note: Cathay Williams (1844-1893), who enlisted as William Cathay, was supposedly the first black female to enlist. https://www.nps.gov/people/cwilliams.htm
The 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry was the first Black Federal Regiment to enter combat in the war, formed 8/62. Lost 344 men total, & at Poison Springs lost 182 out of 438 who fought. Choctaws took Federal scalps after. While we’re at it, the first Black American in space was Guion Steward Bluford, Jr., 1983. Martin Delaney was the first African-American Field Officer in the U.S. Army, & became a Major in 1865.
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Eugene D. Genovese P. 426-429
(Quoting Mary Chesnut)
“[March 14, 1861.] Under slavery, we live surrounded by prostitutes, yet an abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is boiling over. Thank God for my country women, but alas for the men! They are probably no worse than men everywhere, but the lower the mistress, the more degraded they must be.”
Mrs. Chesnut lived in Charleston, which had arisen as an offshoot of Caribbean plantation society and which boasted a cosmopolitan population that aspired to the stance of the English aristocracy. Only New Orleans and Mobile, and Natchez on a smaller scale, rivaled its sophistication in these matters. Some of its women, much more freely than other southern women, could pour the goose’s sauce over the gander and revenge themselves with love affairs of their own. But even they could not have been wholly immune to the devastation wrought by their men. Husbands who cheated on their wives were nothing new. But, as Chancellor Harper admitted, slavery provided for a special kind of cheating, which converted white women into ethereal beings even as it degraded black women into alleged whores. Winthrop D. Jordan writes: “The dissipation of the white gentlemen was as much a tragedy for his white lady as for him. a biracial environment warped her affective life in two directions at once, for she was made to feel that sensual involvement with the opposite sex burned bright and hot with unquenchable passion and at the same time that any involvement was utterly repulsive.”
The resultant sexual and racial myths did not disappear with slavery. In our own day Willie Morris can write of growing up white in the Mississippi Delta:
“I knew all about the sexual act, but not until I was twelve years old did I know that it was performed with white women for pleasure; I had thought that only Negro women engaged in the act of love with white men just for fun, because they were the only ones with the animal desire to submit that way. So, that Negro girls and women were a source of constant excitement and sexual feeling for me, and filled my day-dreams with delights and wonders.”
With little or nothing in their society to justify sexual aggression, the white men too often succumbed to that impetus toward sadism which accompanies self-contempt and self-hatred. Miscegenation* poisoned southern race relations much less through those acts of violence which lower-class women—and their men—have always had to suffer in hierarchical social systems, than through the psychological devastation it wrought upon white society and black. What the white men might have viewed, even if perversely, as joyous and lusty, they generally had to view as a self-degradation easily projected into hatred and violence toward its victims. The rape and quasi-rape of slave women in a society that condemned sexual irregularity generally and viewed sexual intimacy with blacks as especially degrading represented an acting-out of those essentially childish fantasies to which Willie Morris refers and associated sexual pleasure inextricably with violence. The men may have displayed raucous male bravado when they got together to drink or, more flamboyantly, when they defended the honor of the South and its ladies by challenging hostile northern congressmen to duels, but they could not escape their slaves’ revenge. The planters had good reason to flaunt their prized manhood so ludicrously while worrying about the size of the black man’s penis, for their abuse of black women undermined them as men. And if the shrill tone with which they were forever proclaiming their own masculinity to the world reveals anything, they knew it.”
MOTHER’S PEARLS
Broken shadow gestured winter
trees in Maine, black on white
I thought of my mother’s pearls,
ebony seeds, old as the sea
They lie
suspended from her white ao dai
The color of morning
or of mornings in 1975
unbroken, silent
after a rain of bombs
except for the tears of women
crying for broken temples against green
sky; fallen idols
with carved breasts,
jade, I think, in the black earth,
in the twisted vines.
Last summer, in Washington,
I saw the black wall
My shadow reflected
the names of faceless men.
I traced the ruins
carved in stone but did not find
Mother’s name
or the names of other women
who stood against the wall of a temple
garden, parting leaves, weeping
napalm tears
Sandalwood incense
sweet crooked smoke
they drove all things
out of mind.
And the pearls
forty seeds, black and unruly,
I thought they were beautiful against
my mother’s carved breasts.
They lie now,
I think, on a sloping knoll
father than Maine
or Washington.
American War Poetry Edited by Lorrie Goldensohn Bao-Long Chu P. 332-334
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life Barbara J. Fields, Karen Elise Fields P. 57-58
“Precisely the fear of not knowing has long amplified the dread of “miscegenation,” a dread that even now, as President Obama has put it, evokes “a distant world of horsewhips and flames, dead magnolias and crumbling porticos.”
William Faulkner captured the dread, and the blood fixation behind it, in his novel Light in August (1932). When a mob castrated the “white nigger” Joe Christmas, “the pent black blood seemed . . . to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into [the townspeople’s] memories forever and ever.” Black blood exists only as metaphor. Faulkner’s genius was to convey the metaphor, not by inventing a further metaphor, but literally and realistically. The members of the mob saw and remembered physical evidence that seemed to corroborate what, in fact, they saw only with the mind’s eye. Their own actions created evidence, not of Joe Christmas’s ancestry (which they never ascertained), but for the blood-is-race equation:
“The black blood drove him first to the negro cabin. And then the white blood drove him out of there, as it was the black blood which snatched up the pistol and the white blood which would not let him fire it . . . It was the black blood which swept him into that ecstasy out of a black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood failed him again.”
A similar metaphysics led to a clash between natural and metaphorical blood under the Nazis’ Nuremberg Blood Law of September 1935. The law forbade blood mixing but said nothing about transfusion. An unsettling practical question rushed almost immediately into that silence. A Jewish doctor had used his own blood to give an Aryan patient an emergency transfusion. Having a compatible blood type, he saved the Aryan’s life. The question was “Did the life-saving blood reclassify his Aryan patient?’”
P. 59
In the words of a Louisiana politician of the succeeding generation, when his state’s blood-segregation law came under attack: “I would see my family die and go to eternity before I would see them have a drop of nigger blood in them.’”
P. 60
“The insane logistics ranged from designating separate refrigerators (or labeled shelves therein) and separate days for black donors, to “do you mind” queries addressed to transfusion patients.”
Note:The writers go on to explain it was not until 1950 that the Red Cross ceased segregating blood.
Note: Legacy continues in maternal mortality rates for Black women, in healthcare in general. Note too the “Mississippi Appendectomy.”
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Eugene D. Genovese P. 153
“Union troops raped black women with an impunity that would have outraged the white South, had it not had so uneasy a conscience on this matter. Even more shocking—if only because assaults on women are, however sickeningly, to be expected from occupying soldiers—was the looting of the slave cabins. That did shock the white South. The spectacle of a liberating army’s stealing the meager possessions of poor blacks made a deep impression on all who witnessed it. But one soldier put it all in perspective. Rebuked by a slave woman for stealing her quilts when he was supposed to be fighting for the freedom of black people, this gallant shouted, “You’re a goddamn liar. I’m fighting for $14 a month and the Union.’”
Note: Of the 180,000 Black Americans who fought for the Union, only 13 were Black surgeons. This statistic is from Jill L. Newmark at the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War Elizabeth R. Varon P. 454 Footnote 12
“Historians have traditionally argued that sexual violence by Union troops against white Southern women was rare, but more recent scholarship stresses that the “threat of sexual violence and the fear of rape were common to southern women and central to how they experienced the Civil War” and that there were more cases of sexual crimes than previously thought.”
The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War Mark M. Smith P. 139
“Many white Southern women were indeed “frightened…out of their senses” by rumors about what the troops might do to them. Even rumor of the arrival of the scythelike phalanx changed the soundscape of Southern towns. At Milledgeville, “the excitement increased,” men and women ran around madly, “dogs howled and yelped, mules brayed, Negro drivers swore, while Negro girls giggled.”
Rumor was followed by the awesome sound of a massive army moving ever closer, the ground between them and the civilians being eaten up at an impressive and relentless pace.
Sherman’s army could be heard, through martial song and sheer vibration, miles before they came into view, the sound of feet and voice an aural vanguard sending shivers through white Southerners. The sound of musket fire sometimes announced the approach of the men. AT other times, as during their approach to Winnsboro, South Carolina, it was the “lowing of driven cattle, the squawking of poultry, and the squealing of pigs” that signaled the coming of the army. Often, it was the sound of axes chopping—the customary sound of civilization, ironically enough—that announced the coming. Retreating Confederates hacked down southern pines and left them strewn on roads, a pathetic attempt to slow the inevitable.”
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 59
“A Fredericksburg woman woman wrote in her diary on June 4: “All the Yankee bridges were washed away today by the freshet.” The same woman headed south on June 25 but ran into the aftermath of another downpour: “We were out in a dreadful storm, and got wet through and through….All the bridges have been destroyed, and we can only cross by fording.”
P. 62
7a.m. 64; 2p.m. 82; 9p.m. 66. Last night and today 1.93.”
Note: Northerners especially thought they’d forfeit being Americans if they couldn’t stand up for their country. Besides “liar,” the worst insult you could hurl at a man was “coward.”
Note: 6/4 to 9/2/62 the Union has Winchester back. Jackson departs Winchester & goes up the Valley so Banks re-enters town & keeps his force there until 9/2.
Note: December 9, 1864: Ebenezer Creek Massacre on Sherman’s March. Ugly.
have been doing that which is wrong in the sight of God….
They’re still figuring out when humans started & stopped interbreeding with Neanderthals & Denisovans. 700K years ago?
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