Day 15. March 15, 1862.
15
next to impossible to find a plantation house still occupied by its old masters….
March Saturday 15
Quite cloudy and damp this morning and looks very much for rain. I was in the house all night and have fine quarters. I eat in mess [illeg.] Co D. We are still at Camp Shields 3 ½ miles north of Winchester and we have no marching orders this day. The 62 Ohio Regt came on and camped near this place. There are at this camp 6 Regt and there will be more some day before long on towards Winchester or some other point. It rained some today and is very unpleasant and damp is quite mudy. Soldiers have to undergo a grate many hardships and provisions and lay out on the ground and eat hard crackers* and pork & mess pork and have coffee and sugar. That is what our meals consists of. The wagons are going all the time and getting provision in as fast as they can
*Some of these crackers were left over from the War of 1812. Hard tack from the Civil War still exists. Some men broke their teeth trying to chew it. They’d cut it apart with their guns or with a nearby rock. Ephraim mentions crackers seventeen times. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/02/198042487/civil-war-soldiers-needed-bravery-to-face-the-foe-and-the-food
Flour, water, salt: https://breaddad.com/hardtack-recipe
This is what the men faced:
Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil George Worthington Adams 1952 P. 208
(See this book P. 206-213 for “The army’s diet as a cause of disease” but try to avoid the section on “salt horse.”)
“Hard bread, or hardtack, was also inferior throughout the first half of the war. Called “worm castles” by the troops, these large, thick crackers were either so hard they had to be soaked to a mushlike consistency before they could be eaten, or wet and moldy from exposure. When moldy they could be replaced by a new consignment; but when infested with maggots or weevils, as was frequently the case, they were consumed. As a veteran put it, “eaten in the dark no one could tell the difference between it and hardtack that was untenanted.’”
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 51
“7a.m. 40; 2p.m. 45; 9p.m. 44. Rained all day, 1.62.”
Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend James I. Robertson, Jr. P. 335-336
Note: Kicked out of Winchester, Jackson moves further up (south) the Valley, as the following describes:
“The aim was to cover Johnston’s flank east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Turner Ashby and his horsemen covered Jackson’s rear and skirmished daily with Federals who ventured too close. In spite of steady rainfall, the Confederates made a leisurely twenty-seven-mile march southward on the double-laned, macadamized surface of the Valley Turnpike. Troops set their own pace, while the long wagon trains moved as smoothly as railroad cars. Locomotives on the Manassas Gap line pulled all rolling stock to the railhead at Mt. Jackson.
As the long column moved along the turnpike, Jackson rode in front and gave sharp attention to an unusual feature of the Shenandoah Valley. Starting at Strasburg, a large and interlocking system of high ridges obscured the Blue Ridge as it stretched fifty miles up the valley before descending into the valley floor east of Harrisonburg. This chain was called the Massanutten Mountain; it was a veritable stone and forested wall imposing enough to split the Shenandoah corridor into two separate passageways. On the west side of the Massanutten was the wider, open ground of the great valley, more adaptable to troop maneuvers. To the east of the imposing ridge was the smaller Luray corridor with its single, rough road.
Figuratively speaking, the Shenandoah Valley from Strasburg to Harrisonburg resembled a capital “H.” The lefthand arm was the main valley; the righthand arm in the “H” was the sole road over the Massanutten in the entire fifty-mile span. That route went through a pass at the halfway point and connected New Market with Luray. Jackson could see that he was vulnerable to an enemy turning movement unless both valleys were adequately defended. He was also aware of another fact: he could use both valleys as avenues for his own offensives.
Federals applied no pressure to the Confederate emcampment. In order to disrupt enemy pursuit, Jackson set Ashby to work burning every bridge between Strasburg and Mt. Jackson. Meanwhile, Shields’s division, which had halted at Strasburg, showed no inclination to pursue farther – particularly since “reliable” estimates put Jackson at New Market with 35,000 men. Moreover, winter still lingered persistently, with blustering winds and low temperatures. It was not a good climate in which to fight.”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 32-34
“Again, the plantation tended to find its center in itself: to be an independent social unit, a self-contained and largely self-sufficient little world of its own. In its beginnings, to be sure, it often required some degree of communal effort, particularly if the would-be planter had few or no slaves. But once the forest was cut and the stumps grubbed up, once the seed were in a few more times and the harvest home a few times, once he had a Negro or two actually at work—once the plantation was properly carved out and on its way, then the world might go hang. The great part of everything he needed could be and was grown or manufactured on the place, and the rest could be, and, as I have said, often was, imported from the North. Thus, freed from any particular dependence on his neighbors, the planter, as he got his hand in at mastering the slave, would wax continually in lordly self-certainty. More and more, as time went on, he would come to front the world from his borders like a Gael chieftain from his rock-ringed glen, wholly content with his autonomy and jealously guardful that nothing should encroach upon it.
And what is true of the planter is true also, mutatis mutandis, for the poorer whites under this plantation order. The farmers and the crackers were in their own way self-sufficient too—as fiercely careful of their prerogatives of ownership, as jealous of their sway over their puny domains, as the grandest lord. No man felt or acknowledged any primary dependence on his fellows, save perhaps in the matter of human sympathy and entertainment—always a pressing one in a wide and lonely land.
The upshot of this is obvious. It made powerfully against the development of law and government beyond the limits imposed by the tradition of the old backcountry. There was in that tradition, of course, a decided feeling that some measure of law and government was necessary. When the Southern backlandsman moved out into the new cotton country west of the Appalachians, he immediately set up the machinery of the State, just as his fathers before him had done in the regions wast of the mountains; everywhere he built his courthouse almost before he built anything else. And here in the South, as in all places in all times, the State, once established, inevitably asserted its inherent tendency to growth, to reach out and engross power.
But against this was the fact that the tradition contained also, and as its ruling element, an intense distrust of, and, indeed, downright aversion to, any actual exercise of authority beyond the barest minimum essential to the existence of the social organism. This feeling, common to the American backcountryman in general, had, in truth, reached its apogee in the Southern coon-hunter. On the eve of the Revolution he was refusing to pay, not only the special taxes levied by the Crown but also– very usually at least– any taxes at all. Hence it fell out in this plantation world that, if the State grew, it grew with remarkable slowness. The South never developed any such compact and effective unit of government as the New England town. Its very counties were merely huge, sprawling hunks of territory, with almost no internal principle of cohesion. And to the last day before the Civil War, the land remained by far the most poorly policed section of the nation.
P. 69-70
Turning from the planters to the common whites, we find manner still definitely affected by the Virginia model and the aristocratic ideal. Indeed, I am not sure that the most fortunate result of all in this field is not to be found in the case of the better sort of those yeoman farmers who stood between the planters and the true poor whites. It did not go so far; there was no magnificence of sword and plume here, as there was no claim to personal aristocracy. But therein lay its strength. These men took from aristocracy as much as, and no more than, could be made to fit with their own homespun qualities; and so what they took they made solidly their own, without any sense of inadequacy to haunt them into gaucherie. The result was a kindly courtesy, a level-eyes pride, an easy quietness, a barely perceptible flourish, of bearing, which, for all its obvious angularity and fundamental plainness, was one of the finest things the Old South produced.
And something of the same kind can be said of the poor white himself. All the way down the line there was a softening and gentling of the heritage of the backwoods. In every degree the masses took on, under their slouch, a sort of unkempt politeness and ease of port, which rendered them definitely superior, in respect of manner, to their peers in the rest of the country.
P. 277
“…by 1920 there were great areas in which it which it was next to impossible to find a plantation house still occupied by its old masters.’”
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 Eric Foner P. 399
“I do not believe that the ruin of the French nobility at the first Revolution,” commented a Northern reporter, “was more complete than… that of the proud, rich, and cultivated aristocracy of the low country of South Carolina.”
Note: Again, skipping ahead; this day in 1865:
A Diary From Dixie Mary Boykin Chesnut P. 341
(Note: excerpt from March 15, 1865 entry)
“Lawrence says Miss Chesnut is very proud of the presence of mind and cool self-possession she showed in the face of the enemy. She lost, after all, only two bottles of champagne, two of her brother’s gold-headed canes, and her brother’s horses, including Claudia, the brood mare, that he valued beyond price, and her own carriage, and a fly-brush boy called Battis, whose occupation in life was to stand behind the table with his peacock feathers and brush the flies away. He was the sole member of his dusky race at Mulberry who deserted “ole Marster” to follow the Yankees.
Now for our losses at Hermitage. Added to the gold-headed canes and Claudia, we lost every mule and horse, and President Davis’s beautiful Arabian was captured.”
Note: Oh noes, not the Arabian.
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 233-234
Note: In Patriotic Gore, pages 232-234, Wilson compares J.T. Trowbridge’s descriptions of the South in The South: A Tour of its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People (1867) with Frederick Law Olmsted’s writing in The Cotton Kingdom (1861):
“He chronicles the atrocities committed by Federals at the time of Sherman’s invasion as well as the Dachauesque horrors of the Andersonville prison in Georgia. Though he gives way, as Olmsted does not, to occasional passages of rhetoric, his narrative is not melodramatic, and, like Olmsted’s, it carries conviction through its realistic observation and its patient setting-down of detail.
This, we find, is the same semi-feudal society that Olmsted has described in the decade before. Trowbridge talks with the same stupid planters, who tell him that the Negro will never work unless he is driven to it, with the same Negro-hating poor whites, who are now, however, rejoicing in the liquidation of slavery; he is horrified by the same lack of interest in improving or preserving the soil, disgusted by the same log cabins, and even by some of the houses of the relatively well-to-do, in which he finds that in the coldest weather the doors are left open till the sun goes down for the reason that the dim-witted inhabitants have not yet got used to having windows and persist in habits acquired in the days when they depended for light on their doorways; and he is struck, as Olmsted was, by the fewness of schools and churches. But now this whole limping, impoverished, this speculating, pretentious society has been desolated and levelled by war. Where battles have recently occurred, the farmers are now plowing among corpses; the hogs are rooting up old graves; the trees have been shot to splinters, sometimes they have been cut clean off. The houses of the farmers have often been burnt, their stock slaughtered and their household goods stolen; the planters’ big mansions are empty, the glass of their windows smashed and Yankee names scratched on the walls—one house that Trowbridge tried to enter proved to be a mere facade: he met the sky on the other side—and such railroads as the South has possessed are now mostly a litter of rails twisted into horseshoes or wound around trees. Atlanta, Savannah and Charleston have been partly reduced to ruins almost as gruesome, it would seem, as any since achieved by our more modern methods, and the inhabitants, Trowbridge reports, are sheltering in hovels like Indians. He sometimes sees Negroes who have been turned away or have refused to work without wages camping around fires in the fields, but he also sees and hears of many, sometimes with farms of their own, who are upsetting the assumptions of the planters by exhibiting a new energy and initiative.”
Note: Many Black people in this country were here far earlier than the 1820’s, that is, descended from slaves, & that’s many more generations of Americanized Africans than many Americanized Europeans. In 1620, there were 32 Africans living in Virginia, & likely from the Kingdom of Ndongo in West Central Africa, & brought over on the San Juan Bautista, according to Beth Austin in “1619: Virginia’s First Africans” at www.HamptonHistoryMuseum.org/1619. Also, she states that “Most slave trade voyages during this period took 2-4 years to complete….” & “Spanish records indicate that by the time the San Juan Bautista arrived in Jamaica, the ship had many sick aboard, and many had already died.” 143 of the 350 captives died en route.
The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War Mark M. Smith P. 141
“One sight in particular stayed with white Southerners: the sight of the Union flag. Union soldiers ran it up on the state capitols in Georgia and South Carolina, marking their turf, cowing Confederates: “Our degradation was bitter” was the Southern refrain. Emma LeConte saw her beloved Columbia humiliated, degraded by the “horrid sight” of the American flag flown atop the statehouse during Sherman’s occupation of the city. The sights of destruction were so mortifying that LeConte looked away, believing it was “a contamination even to look at these devils.” New sights announced the death of an old way of life, at least for the time being.
And then, eventually, the men would leave. In their wake, the countryside and towns were unrecognizable. Grain fields once proud and tall were now flat, trampled by thousands of feet; animals—hogs, horses, cattle—once carefully penned and contained were now roaming, and those that weren’t lay strewn, carcasses lining the roads. Orderliness had vanished. City buildings, once proudly straight and vertical, were now obscenely jagged, “shattered brick walls” the signature of defeat. Windowpanes, once beautifully demarcating in from out and soundproofing homes, were now sharp, broken, and oddly audible, with winds and gusts whistling grotesque music. Books and papers from ransacked libraries covered streets, the litter in turn blanketed by “a stillness almost Sabbath.’”
Note: The end of the war saw over ½ billion in worthless IOU’s left in the South.
Lines on the Back of a Confederate Note.
by Major Sidney A. Jonas
Note: Jonas wrote these lines in Richmond, staying at the Powahatain Hotel, as he waited and tried to locate travel back to Mississippi after the war. An actress staying there found a wad of ½ printed Confederate bills so he asked various Rebel guests to “write her a sentiment as a souvenir” on the blank sides of the bills:
“Representing nothing on God’s earth now, and naught in the waters below it, as the pledge of a nation that’s dead and gone, keep it, dear friend, and show it.
Show it to those who will lend an ear to the tale that this trifle can tell, of Liberty born of the patriot’s dream, of a storm-cradled nation that fell.
Too poor to possess the precious ores, and too much of a stranger to borrow, we issued to-day our promise to pay, and hoped to redeem on the morrow.
The days rolled by and weeks became years, but our coffers were empty still; coin was so rare that the treasury’d quake if a dollar should drop in the till.
But the faith that was in us was strong, indeed, and our poverty well we discerned, and this little check represented the pay that our suffering veterans earned.
We knew it had hardly a value in gold, yet as gold each soldier received it; it gazed in our eyes with a promise to pay, and each Southern patriot believed it.
But our boys thought little of price or of pay, or of bills that were overdue; we knew if it brought us our bread to-day, ‘Twas the best our poor country could do.
Keep it, it tells all our history o’er, from the birth of our dream to its last; modest, and born of the Angel Hope, like our hope of success, it passed.”
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Walter A. McDougall P. 456
“The Union war effort as a whole seemed an improvised potlatch. But the Treasury’s issue of unbacked greenbacks to the ultimate sum of $431 million was a gamble that paid off because “funny money” covered just 16.5 percent of the Union budget compared with 61.7 percent of the Confederate budget.”
Note: The Crown: These were people who, as late as 1945, had over 1/4th Earth to themselves. But the English working class was for the North in the Civil War. The U.K. is responsible for 65 Independence Days across the world (“Britain’s Lost Empire”). Queen Elizabeth II is currently the Sovereign of 15 countries. Malachy Postethwayt defined the British Empire in 1745: “A magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power, on an African foundation.” Yes, the ones who invaded all but 22 countries on Earth, the idealized Aryans™ goosestepping their way across the seas still so insecure about authority they don absurd fake blond curls, hair pieces in Court. You can’t make this shit up. It’s recently announced the U.K. plans to launch rockets into orbit in 2022 because Boris Johnson wants to “Create Galactic Britain.” Commentators swiftly suggested launching him into space. Turns out, the 22 countries which exist that Britain never, at any point in history, invaded, according to “All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To,” by Stuart Laycock, are, in alphabetical order, since I know you’re going to ask: Andorra, Belarus, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Ivory Coast, Krygyzstan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mali, Marshall Islands, Monaco, Mongolia, Paraguay, Sao Tome and Principe, Sweden, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Vatican City.
Of course, the U.S. is no better. In 2022, The Intercept reported U.S. forces have tried nine coups, since 2008, & succeeded in eight across five West African countries. Google “United States-led coups around the world.” The Washington Post: “The U.S. tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War.” Or see Salon: 35 countries where the U.S. has supported fascists, drug lords and terrorists.” Or https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/20/mapped-the-7-governments-the-u-s-has-overthrown. Or, anywhere, really, the pot calls the kettle black.
**In 1901 Virginia wipes out Reconstruction gains with a new Constitution– backsliding like a planet in an awry orbit– which then happens in every other Southern State.
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soldiers have to undergo a grate many hardships….
It was funny at first but it needs to stop. They’d had to have known when the last straws were getting drawn, at which point all that could have passed through words was about to get forced into a cartridge box that would then became the only thing left that could fit in a hand. Where for once there’s a language that does not mean more than what it says. Roger and over and out. Rebels said they’d picket their horses on a high line at the White House lawn. Overthrow D.C., be honky tonkin ’round this town in “60 suns.” But their horses were tied a ‘lil short. Because the Northerner doesn’t go down easy, he doesn’t go down at all. Confederates, they were like a go-go ensemble of jackals of their day, strange star-beings in a petroglyph to us now. Under a sun that never rose.
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