Day 7. March 7, 1862.
7
in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing….
March Friday 7 1862
It was somewhat cold this morning but now cloudy and the sun shinning some. We have good quarters but don’t know how long we may have them. We are at Paw Paw Station on the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road Morgan Co. Virginia. We fixed up our medicines* and thinking that we might have a good time. It is very mudy here and I don’t care how soon we leave as there is nothing to gain here. We want to move on to some other point. I hope the time may soon come that all things is right and I hope to see our country in peace and harmony again. The troops at this place is leaving for Martinsburg and we expect to go soon
*For discussion on what Ephraim likely carried, see May 7.
Note: B&O rr: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/baltimore-and-ohio-railroad-civil-war
The Civil War, A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian Shelby Foote P. 45
“…the thousand-mile-long firing line that swerved and crooked its way between North and South – westward across northern Virginia, East and Middle Tennessee, North Mississippi, central Arkansas, and thence on out to Texas…”
Terrible Swift Sword Bruce Catton P. 9-10
“For a long time the shape of it would be hard to make out, partly because the pattern would be slow in taking form and partly because it was so easy to look for it in the wrong place. Then as now, the eye was drawn to Virginia, to the legendary country between the Potomac and the James, the floodlit stage where rival governments would have formal trail by combat. The Bull Run frenzy had gone to its limit here, arrogant overconfidence blowing up at last in a froth of pride and shame and panic; and the governments were thought to have learned something by it. They would take their time now, organizing and equipping and drilling with much care, moving (when it was time to move) according to professional plan and not because of pressure raised by “Forward to Richmond!” headlines in an overheated press. Here, it was said, was where the final decision would be reached, and all that happened elsewhere would be secondary.
But the border ran a long way, and eastern Virginia was no more than a fraction of it. Beyond were Allegheny valleys and Cumberland plateau, western Virginia and eastern Tennessee, Kentucky with its rich Bluegrass farmland going west from the mountains all the way to the central artery, to the Mississippi; and beyond them was Missouri, stretching out to the Kansas-Nebraska vastness where the war had had at least one of its beginnings. In each of the related segments of this border the war had a different guise and a different meaning. Here it was a battle in which ill-equipped armies learned their trade in blundering action; there it was a matter of shadows in the dusk, neighbor ambushing neighbor, hayrick and barn blazing up at midnight with a drum of hoofbeats on a lonely lane to tell the story, or a firing squad killing a bridge-burner for a warning to the lawless. The separate scenes were monstrous, confusing, everchanging; put together, they might make something planned neither in Washington nor in Richmond.”
The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 70-71
“In the early stages of the war, the image of an inept enemy coexisted with threat of a barbaric figure. Antebellum stereotypes combined with war enthusiasm and early Confederate victories to depict Northerners as weaklings. Rebels inflated their own resources and underestimated their adversaries’ chances. In this climate, a man who did not boast that he could whip ten Yankees risked being branded unpatriotic or, worse, a coward. Fort Sumter and Manassas convinced many Confederates that pasty Union men were no match for their steel. Federal armies were composed of mumbling immigrants, mill-town boys who had never owned a horse or a gun, urban scum who had enlisted for pay, and New England snobs who polished their buttons and boots but failed as fighters. A Virginia artilleryman considered the enemy “starving Irish who fight for daily bread,” and “Western scoundrels… spawned in prairie mud.” they were unhealthy specimens shrunken by factory work who could not possibly beat legions of Southern men raised in the rustic outdoors.
For many Confederates, the Army of the Potomac embodied this perception of the foe. Lincoln’s prized army was a collection of white-gloved recreants who could march in step and impress Washington socialites but withered before Rebel bullets. The slew of commanders who failed to rival Lee– braggarts such as John Pope and Joseph Hooker; the sadly incompetent Ambrose Burnside; and George McClellan, the blood-shy general who aspired to Napoleonic stature– seemed to prove Northern inadequacies. The portrait of an inept enemy fostered a sense that the Confederacy was unconquerable. As a Georgia private expressed it, the “degraded set of Northern people” could never suppress “a noble and respectable squad of Southerners.”
The most common name used for the Federals, “Yankee,” encapsulated the idea of a pathetic foe. The term lumped all Northerners into a caricature of New Englanders as hypocritical reformers, cold industrialists, money-grubbers, and self-righteous Puritans. Branding men from Maine to Minnesota, regardless of their accent, vocation, or ethnicity, as Yankees perpetuated the Cavalier myth that Northerners were the natural-born adversaries of everything Southern. Only race could discount a Northern soldier from being a Yankee; African American troops were seldom called Yankees or even black Yankees. For Rebels, Yankees were white opponents who represented their mirror opposite, the warped and alien others who had forsaken the Revolution and threatened Southern existence. Some Confederates maintained images of inept Northerners to the very end, underestimating the Union’s power and resolve even as its massive armies overwhelmed them. In this way, cultural perceptions of the enemy varied through time and place, thereby complicating simple narratives of change over time.
Nonetheless, a close study of Confederate letters and diaries shows a pattern: as the war intensified, the enemy appeared more frequently (to Rebels and in their writing) as invading hordes.”
The Civil War Archive: The History of the Civil War in Documents Henry Steele Commager P. 33
“Above all, the generations that fought the war had that quality which Emerson ascribed pre-eminently to the English– character. It is an elusive word, as almost all great words are elusive– truth, beauty, courage, loyalty, honor– but we know well enough what it means and know it when we see it. The men in blue and in gray who marched thirty miles a day through the blistering heat of the Bayou Teche, went without food for days on end, shivered through rain and snow in the mountains of Virginia and Tennessee, braved the terrors of hospital and prison, charged to almost certain death on the crest of Cemetery Ridge, closed the gap at the Bloody Angle, ran the batteries of Vicksburg and braved the torpedoes of Mobile Bay, threw away their lives on the hills outside Franklin for a cause they held dear– these men had character. They knew what they were fighting for, as well as men ever know this, and they fought with a tenacity and courage rarely equaled in history.”
The War that Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters James McPherson (2015) P. 165
“Many in the North shared Lincoln’s conviction that democracy was on trial in this war. “We must fight,” proclaimed an Indianapolis newspaper two weeks after Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter. “We must fight because we must. The National Government has been assailed. The Nation has been defied. If either can be done with impunity neither Nation nor Government is worth a cent…. War is self preservation, if our form of Government is worth preserving. If monarchy would be better, it might be wise to quit fighting, admit that a Republic is too weak to take care of itself, and invite some deposed Duke or Prince of Europe to come over here and rule us. But otherwise, we must fight.’”
The outbreak of war brought hundreds of thousands of Northern men to recruiting offices. A good many of them expressed a similar sense of democratic mission as a motive for fighting. “I do feel that the liberty of the world is placed in our hands to defend,” wrote a Massachusetts soldier to his wife in 1862, “and if we are overcome then farewell to freedom.” In 1863, on the second anniversary of his enlistment, an Ohio private wrote in his diary that he had not expected the war to last so long, but no matter how much longer it took, it must be carried on “for the great principles of liberty and government at stake, for should we fail, the onward march of Liberty in the Old World will be retarded at least a century, and Monarchs, Kings, and Aristocrats will be more powerful against their subjects than ever.’”
Note: Langston Hughes (to see the handwritten copy at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/langston-hughes-papers). Hughes crossed out the word “Freedom” in the 5th line then replaced it with “Liberty.” At page’s top, the words in quotation marks, “Fields of Wonder.”
Refugee in America
There are words like Freedom
Sweet and wonderful to say
On my heart-strings freedom sings
All day everyday.
There are words like Liberty
That almost make me cry.
If you had known what I knew
You would know why.
Note: “tenacity and courage rarely equaled in history” brought to mind a letter I ran across from the War of 1812:
Soldiers of Blair County Pennsylvania: Military and Genealogical Records 1940 Floyd G. Hoenstine P. 83
Note: A letter by Captain Robert Allison, of the Huntingdon Light Infantry, to his wife Polly during his march to the Canadian border. Huntingdon is Ephraim’s area of PA. Hoenstine writes that Allison’s letter & diary “is presented as not being an exception to that experienced by the companies recruited in this section of the state, but rather is typical of the trials and privations endured by the soldiers of the war of 1812, who enlisted from this part of Pennsylvania….”
Wednesday, November 25, 1812
“My Dear Polly: I commence this letter, my dear wife, with feeling which by me cannot be described. Your ever reading it depends entirely on my fate. Should I fall in Canada, then you must read this to me, distressing and melancholy, last assurance of my unbounded and unalterable affection for you. For my own fate, I am somewhat careless, for your situation my dear little children and my friends to whom I might be of some assistance, I feel the keenest regret. My pen trembles in my hand, and the tears trickle from my eyes on the paper while I write, at the idea of the pain and distress which you will feel at reading this. Perhaps it would have been better had I desisted, but my feelings would not permit me. I deemed it proper to make a will, which is herein enclosed. I can write no more. Kiss each of the children for me. Tell them that their father’s lips are cold, and that his prayer was for you and them. farewell alast—a long farewell. I hope to meet you in heaven. Your affectionate husband.”
Note: So the reader isn’t too distressed, I’ll mention the next day Allison writes Polly, this time banally discussing a half loaf of bread, the two boiled tongues, & one pair of stockings he hopes to haul with him pronto in the conquest of the country, but that 400 of the Pennsylvanians didn’t wish, after all, to cross into Canada today (or the next, the next, the– ) so have been shooed down the Niagara to build a fort… He will resign in a month. 200 Pennsylvanians will have deserted by then.
December 16, 1859 The Liberator
A WOMAN’S LETTER TO JOHN BROWN.
“The following is a copy of a genuine letter received at our post-office. The letter is authentic beyond question, as the main facts can be corroborated by a number of persons now here. It will be read to John Brown this morning:—
To John Brown, Commander of the army at Harper’s Ferry, Charlestown, Jefferson Co., Va. Care of Jailor, Charlestown. (12/16/59 The Liberator. The letter was supposedly read to John Brown)
CHATTANOOGA, (Tennessee,) Nov. 20, 1859.
JOHN BROWN : Sir—Although vengeance is not mine, I confess that I do feel gratified to hear that you were stopped in your fiendish career at Harper’s Ferry with the loss of your two sons. You can now appreciate my distress in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight, and arrested my husband and two boys, and took them out of the yard, and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing. You can’t say you done it to free our slaves ; we had none, and never expected to have ; but it has only made me a poor disconsolate widow with helpless children. While I feel for your folly, I hope and trust you will meet your just reward. Oh, how it pained my heart to hear the dying groans of my husband and children ! If this scrawl gives you any consolation, you are welcome to it.
MATILDA DOYLE
N. B.—My son, John Doyle, whose life I begged of you, is now grown up, and is very desirous to be at Charlestown on the day of your execution ; would certainly be there if his means would permit it, that he might adjust the rope around your neck, if Gov. Wise would permit.
M. D.”
Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia Kathryn Shively Meier P. 16
“In their wartime journals and correspondence, soldiers fixated upon cataloging their natural environments. Pvt. William Randolph Smith of the 17th Virginia, for example, wrote in March 1862, “There is the finest pine timber on the road I ever saw…. The farms are also fine and fertile…. From Robison River to the Rapidan is the finest country I ever saw. The land is easily cultivated and is splendid.” He also recorded the weather with painstaking precision: “We had some fine weather on the march, but some very bad. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the 11th, and 12th, and 13th were very fine. Then it was rainy and quite disagreeable camping out without any protection, from the rain until the 16th when we had some fine days until the 19th when the Equinoctial rains commenced and continued without remissions until the 2nd when it cleared away, and the weather is now clear and cool.” On March 28, he lowered his keen gaze earthward. “The ground is full of stumps but lays well, and have an abundance of water, which is so essential to the soldiers health.” Such fastidious (even tedious) detail is not simply an idle soldier’s Civil War Era small talk– it presents continuity with his farming roots. Smith identified land that could be easily cultivated, catalogued the exact dates of precipitation, and connected environment to human health. Like Smith, the majority of soldiers were farmers with extensive experience observing nature, because environmental circumstances shaped their livelihoods and, they believed, their health. They connected the visible changes in nature, which governed their planting and harvesting, to the invisible worlds of their bodies and minds. Even the smaller population of Americans who grew up in cities was accustomed to the idea that environment– the crowds with filth by which urbanites were surrounded– contributed to diseases.
Explaining disease origins based on observation and experience made more sense to average Americans than parsing out new, often conflicting scientific theories. While most Americans were literate and could read about the scientific debates raging among orthodox physicians and middle-class reformers, they exhibited a clear preference for self-reliance typical of the Jacksonian era. After all, the 1840s push toward medical professionalization, epitomized by the establishment of the American Medical Association in 1847, did not mean doctors proved better at rescuing Americans from the clutches of death. Historian Mark Schantz estimates that the quarter century preceding the war actually brought a dip in life expectancy; average Americans only lived to their mid-forties. Doctors provided diagnoses and medications but left comfort and care to one’s family members. Furthermore, access to professional physicians was limited, particularly in rural and developing areas, such as the South and the West. For these reasons, antebellum laypeople interacted infrequently with medical experts and developed their own means of transmitting medical knowledge, but the Civil War would usher in a cultural shift that pushed common soldiers into contact with physicians, reformers, and hospitals.”
Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia Kathryn Shively Meier P. 24
“Before the war, laypeople had relatively few interactions with traditional (or orthodox) doctors, except when it came to surgery or more complex causes of illness that required professional diagnosis. Yet because professional physicians would soon have profound impacts upon survival during the Civil War, as they constituted the majority of surgeons, it is important to realize that traditional medical authority was in a period of decline. This resulted in many orthodox doctors re-entrenching in therapeutic philosophies that overvalued dramatic medical interventions, made assumptions about the health of the lower classes, and excluded preventative techniques.
In the antebellum period, the traditional physician’s identity derived from experience rather than a special claim to scientific expertise. Medical colleges and universities were sparse and lacked standardization, thus apprenticeship remained an accepted means of acquiring training. In medical historian John Harley Warner’s assessment, a physician’s reputation was built upon his practical knowhow, personal character, and interaction with patients. In short, his personal reputation was his professional identity. This is an important distinction to make from modern physicians, who might be measured by the success of their treatments. As scholar Stephen Halliday has stressed, virtually no universal understanding of disease, save smallpox, existed in the period. One might also add scurvy to the list of hazily understood and treatable illnesses, as most professionals recognized that adding vegetables and fruits to the diet could help to prevent and cure the disease, though medical literature from the Civil War demonstrates lingering confusion on the topic. Further, cinchona bark and its synthetic cousin quinine were widely regarded as effective treatments for malaria*** when properly administered; however, they were hardly the only substances proscribed for fevers.”
Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes Hannah Ropes P. 37
“But if problems between women nurses and medical officers were frequent, the medical service, completely unprepared in 1861 for the magnitude of difficulties which soon appeared, needed whatever assistance the volunteers could provide. Army strength prior to the war had been but about thirteen thousand men; and the buildup following the Fort Sumter crisis, together with the need to care for sick and wounded among the ever-increasing number of Federal soldiers, rendered the peacetime medical establishment totally inadequate in terms of manpower, training, and facilities. Personnel from the “old army” included Surgeon General Thomas Lawson, thirty surgeons, and eighty-four assistant surgeons. Of this number, several went with the Confederacy while three were dismissed from service for disloyalty. And Lawson, who first came to office during the presidency of John Quincy Adams, was over eighty years old. Among the surgeons the average length of service ranged from twenty-three to thirty-two years; some were incapacitated; and around half were unfit for field service. Moreover, peacetime activity had involved for the most part assignment to isolated military posts, and the initial medical contingent therefore had no real experience in hospital duty and administration.
Before 1861 the army had no general hospitals. “
It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan Jerri Bell and Tracy Crow P. 37
“Union doctor Mary Edwards Walker wrote the unpublished “Incidents Connected with the Army”.
[During her tenure at Indiana Hospital, Walker encounters Superintendent of Army Nurses Dorothea Dix]
I was somewhat amused when Dorothy [sic] Dix visited the hospital….I did not understand at that time why she seemed in such a troubled mood about something when she first saw me but afterwards learned that a part of her mission was to try to keep young and good looking women out of the hospital.
She had stated that no women less than thirty years old ought to be allowed to go into a hospital where there were soldier patients but as she could not possibly have any control over myself she walked through the hospital in a manner that is hard to describe. When she saw a patient who was too ill to arrange the clothing on his cot if it became disarranged and a foot was exposed she turned her head the other way seeming not to see the condition while I was so disgusted with such sham modesty that I hastened to arrange the soldier’s bed clothing if I chanced to be near when no nurses were to do this duty. I was not able to understand and am not to the present day of what use any one can be who professes to work for a cause and then allows sham modesty to prevent them from doing what little services that chance to come in their way.”
Americans Remember Their Civil War Barbara A. Gannon P. 115-116
“The grim demographics of death had been known, but not emphasized, partly because people did not want to remember that most soldiers did not die a glorious death in battle, but instead, a less romantic death, sickened in a hospital bed. This amnesia might explain why it took a long time for someone to write a comprehensive medical history of the Civil War. Margaret Humphreys in Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (2013) described this conflict in “the greatest health disaster that this country has ever experienced, killing more than a million Americans and leaving others invalided or grieving.” In her memory, “the war, for those who fought it, was less about heroism and more about the daily grind of disease, hunger, death, and disability.” If any memory was lost, it was these types of medical issues. Humphreys also focused on gender issues including the central role played by women who healed the sick and treated the injured. Jane E. Schultz in Women at the Front: Hospital workers in Civil War America (2004) assessed the role of women health-care workers. She did not focus solely on nurses who were usually elite or middle-class women. Most of the women who did hospital work were from the lower classes and included former slaves because most of the work that needed to be done was “domestic drudgery.” These women “built fires to cook soup, washed patients’ faces, irrigated noxious wounds, cleaned effluvia from the floors, changed bedding and scrubbed undergarments.
Formerly enslaved women who performed these tasks were likely sickened by the disease endemic to wartime. Civil War memory neglected disease among soldiers, though people remembered it had occurred. Until Jim Downs documented black women and men’s illnesses in Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012), enslaved men and women had not been included in the war’s toll. Not only did these men and women sicken and die like soldiers, Downs explains, but “disease and sickness had a more devastating and fatal effect on emancipated slaves than on soldiers.’” The next step in Civil War studies may be to remember the Civil War’s long-term health consequences for all Americans, black and white, men and women, soldiers and civilians.”
Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson S.C. Gwynne P. 192
“On March 7, 1862, General Grant writes to General Halleck:
“I have done my very best to obey orders, and to carry out the interests of the service. If my course is not satisfactory, remove me at once. I do not wish to impede in any way the success of our arms…. I respectfully ask to be relieved from further duty in the Department.”
The Civil War, A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian Shelby Foote P. 218-219
Note: A NY. reporter describes Grant, as do others:
“‘He confines himself to saying and doing as little as possible before his men.’” “Another described him as “a man who could be silent in several languages,” and it was remarked that, on the march, he was more inclined to talk of “Illinois horses, hogs, cattle, and farming, than of the business actually at hand.” In general he went about his job, as one observer had stated at the outset, “with so little friction and noise that it required a second look to be sure he was doing anything at all.” One of his staff officers got the impression that he was “half a dozen men condensed into one,” while a journalist, finding him puzzling in the extreme because he seemed to amount to a good deal more than the sum of all his parts, came up with the word “unpronounceable” as the one that described him best. Grant, he wrote, “has none of the soldier’s bearing about him, but is a man whom one would take for a country merchant or a village lawyer. He had no distinctive feature; there are a thousand like him in personal appearance in the ranks…. A plain, unpretending face, with a comely, brownish-red beard and a square forehead, of short stature and thick-set. He is we would say a good liver, and altogether an unpronounceable man; he is so like hundreds of others as to be only described in general terms.” The soldiers appreciated the lack of “superfluous flummery” as he moved among them, “turning and chewing restlessly the end of his unlighted cigar.” They almost never cheered him, and they did not often salute him formally; rather, they watched him, as one said, “with a certain sort of familiar reverence.” Present discouragements were mutual; so, someday, would be the glory. Somehow he was more partner than boss; they were in this thing together. “Good morning, General,” “Pleasant day, General,” were the usual salutations, more fitting than cheers or hat-tossing exhibitions; “A pleasant salute to, and a good-natured nod from him in return, seems more appropriate.” All these things were said of him, and this: “Here was no McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar on theirs, or inquiring to what regiment that exceedingly fine-marching company belonged…. There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain businessman of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command over the river in the shortest time possible.’”
Note: March 7-8 was the Pea Ridge Battle: Yankees (10,500 against 16,500 Confederates) gain control of most of Missouri & north Arkansas. 2500 Cherokees fought for the Confederacy.
I hope to see our country in peace and harmony again….
When was the country ever in harmony?
The Neo-Confederates down to this writing insist they get the last word. The Lost Cause alibi like marked money, bait bills, like they can just speak truth into existence, & that puff of smoke will be drawn into the room when a Lost Causer is talking; it takes shape as an empty shell, a CONFEDERATE LIVES MATTER plane banner flown high out over Daytona beach on a July 4th, people waving at angles of trajectory calculated to keep the lie going in the ash-gray uniform light of the South, as nowhere else but here, a modern mock-up that uses Heritage Not Hate as the tagline, the stand-in explanation for continuing to use a symbol from the worst 48 months out of four centuries in the history of the White folk here. Unmarked plane, dark tinted windows, fly low. There’s something there they just don’t want you to see; it’s for the same reason people scratch the eyes out of photographs. They use not remembering to not be who they are. David Blight calls the Lost Cause “a set of beliefs in search of a history.” The finest first families, the inherited-honor folks wedged up against the Gideons lit by a colonial lamp. Noblesse oblige. How all this happened after the Mayflower got sold for scrap. The silver spoon with the monogram filed off, the gun long past tracceable, the once fat shape of the barn now flattened out like a single white gravestone. Why? You know why. Everyone reading this sentence knows why. Slavery. 3.5 billion dollars in the 4 million five hundred thousand Black (up to 6 million) men, women, children & the 4 million cotton bales, & sugar, the rice, that tobacco all sitting right there the night the Star of the West got fired upon. Who fired? The ones with all that.
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