Day 72. May 11, 1862.
72
men buried out of that prison pen still alive….
Sunday 11
Quite cool this morning. We are all buissy this morning. We are fixing up things to move as we expect to have a long march. The day was fine and warm and pleasant. We have chaplin and no preaching today. There is no news except Pourtsmouth and Norfolk was taken and our troops are now in in possession of the above places
A Confederate Girl’s Diary Sarah Morgan Dawson P. 28-30
(writing from Baton Rouge May 11, 1862)
“I — I am disgusted with myself. No unusual thing, but I am peculiarly disgusted this time. Last evening, I went to Mrs. Brunot’s, without an idea of going beyond, with my flag flying again. They were all going to the State House, so I went with them; to my great distress, some fifteen or twenty Federal officers were standing on the first terrace, stared at like wild beasts by the curious crowd. I had not expected to meet them, and felt a painful conviction that I was unnecessarily attracting attention, by an unladylike display of defiance, from the crowd gathered there. But what was I to do? I felt humiliated, conspicuous, everything that is painful and disagreeable; but — strike my colors in the face of the enemy? Never! Nettie and Sophie had them, too, but that was no consolation for the shame I suffered by such a display so totally distasteful to me. How I wished myself away, and chafed at my folly, and hated myself for being there, and everyone for seeing me. I hope it will be a lesson to me always to remember a lady can gain nothing by such display.
I was not ashamed of the flag of my country, — I proved that by never attempting to remove it in spite of my mortification, — but I was ashamed of my position; for these are evidently gentlemen, not the Billy Wilson’s crew we were threatened with. Fine, noble-looking men they were, showing refinement and gentlemanly bearing in every motion. One cannot but help admire such foes! They set us an example worthy of our imitation, and one we would be benefitted by following. They come as visitors without either pretensions to superiority, or the insolence of conquerors; they walk quietly their way, offering no annoyance to the citizens, though they themselves are stared at most unmercifully, and pursued by crowds of ragged little boys, while even men gape at them with open mouths. They prove themselves gentlemen, while many of our citizens have proved themselves boors, and I admire them for their comfort. With a conviction that I had allowed myself to be influenced by bigoted, narrow-minded people, in believing them to be unworthy of respect or regard, I came home wonderfully changed in all my newly acquired sentiments, resolved never more to wound their feelings, who were so careful of ours, by such unnecessary display. And I hung my flag on the parlor mantel, there to wave, if it will, in the shades of private life; but to make a show, make me conspicuous and ill at ease, as I was yesterday, — never again!
There was a dozen officers in church this morning, and the psalms for the 11th day seemed so singularly appropriate to the feelings of the people, that I felt uncomfortable for them. They answered with us, though.”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 200-201
“Veterans suffered nightmare reliving of traumatic events or PTSD, a frequent and debilitating complaint that most civilians failed to understand. The quartermaster of the 5th Indiana Cavalry never recovered mentally from his incarceration in Andersonville. Repatriated, he worked obsessively on building a model of the prison in his backyard, then spent the last twenty-five years of his life in the Indiana Hospital for the Insane.”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 110
“Soldiers’ reluctance to be stigmatized by confessing to emotional upset makes it hard to quantify Civil War mental wounds. A lack of bureaucratic precision in describing individual cases compounds the problem. For example, in desertion cases the exact cause often went unexamined, so we cannot know if a subject suffered from mental wounds or had other motives for running. We do know that huge numbers deserted, especially as the destructive fighting ground on. At least 105,000 Rebels and 279,000 Yankees officially absconded, and probably many more did so who were never cataloged. Thirty-four thousand deserted from hospitals, suggesting they were fleeing mental traumas.”
“The Shock of War “ Historynet.com/the-shock-of-war Ron Soodalter
“Many prison camp survivors exhibited stressors of PTSD. Erastus Holmes, a quartermaster sergeant of the 5th Indiana Cavalry, bore the classic symptoms for the rest of his life. He was captured by the Confederates in July 1864. After a brief incarceration in Florence, S.C., he was transferred to Andersonville,*** where he endured terrible hunger and slept in a water-soaked hollow in the ground. Not surprisingly, he suffered from various diseases, and at war’s end, weighed only 85 pounds– around half of what he had weighed when captured. On his return home, he could barely walk, and according to his sister, “was the poorest looking thing I ever saw.” He relived the horrors of his experience over and over, both internally and verbally, constantly talking to himself, gnashing his teeth, tensing his muscles, and suffering “spells” of mental anguish. He created a detailed model of the prison camp in his back yard, repeatedly insisting his neighbors and family tour it. Unable to sleep, he ate obsessively, at all hours of the day and night. According to his daughter, Holmes “would feed all the tramps he could find… it seemed as though he could not bear to see anything that seemed to be hungry.” Twenty years after the end of the war, Holmes suffered a complete breakdown, and could remember nothing of what had occurred in his life after Andersonville. He was admitted to the Indiana Hospital for the Insane, where he remained until his death in 1910.”
Note: Sergeant Charles Haynes, 20th Maine, writing from a Richmond prison, Thursday, August 11, 1864: “One of the men in the prison opposite this was looking out the window and the guard shot him through the head.” @SgtMaine
Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volunteers Susie King Taylor docsouth.unc.edu P. 67-68
“There are many people who do not know what some of the colored women did during the war. There were hundreds of them who assisted the Union soldiers by hiding them and helping them to escape. Many were punished for taking food to the prison stockades for the prisoners. When I went into Savannah, in (illeg.), I was told one of these stockades which was in the suburbs of the city, and they said it was an awful place. The Union soldiers were in it, worse than pigs, without any shelter from sun or storm, and the colored women would take food there at night and pass it to them, through the holes in the fence. The soldiers were starving, and these women did all they could toward relieving those men, although they knew the penalty, should they be caught giving them aid. Others assisted in various ways the Union army. These things should be kept in history before the people. There has never been a greater war in the United States than the one of 1861, where so many lives were lost,– not men alone but noble women.
Let us not forget that terrible war, or our brave soldiers who were thrown into Andersonville and Libby prisons, the awful agony they went through, and the most brutal treatment they received in those loathsome dens, the worst ever given human beings; and if the white soldiers were subjected to such treatment, what must have been the horrors inflicted on the negro soldiers in their prison pens? Can we forget those cruelties? No, though we try to forgive and say, “No North, no South,” and hope to see it in reality before the last comrade passes away.’”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 180
“The end of hostilities brought the steady repatriation of POWs. In late April, [sic. Lincoln was killed on the evening of April 14, 1865]1865, Walt Whitman went down to a pier on the Potomac River in Washington to greet a boatload of several hundred returning prisoners. The state of the men appalled him. He estimated that, of the whole contingent, not more than three could disembark unassisted; most had to be carried ashore. “Can those be men?” asked the shocked former hospital attendant, who thought he had become accustomed to seeing the bodies of soldiers wasted by disease, mangled by wounds. The bloodiest battlefields, Whitman said, could not show worse sights: “those little livid-brown, ash-streak’d, monkey-looking dwarfs?—are they really not mummified dwindled corpses? They lay there, most of them quite still, but with a horrible look in their eyes and skinny lips, often with not enough flesh on the lips to cover their teeth.’”
Note: Most Americans have only heard the word Andersonville, not of another horrific prison—Salisbury, N.C. The following is from a letter by “Johnny Bouquet,” in N.Y. Tribune, March 27, ’81:
“I visited at Salisbury, N.C., the prison pen or the site of it, from which nearly 12,000 victims of southern politicians were buried, being confined in a pen without shelter, exposed to all the elements could do, to all the disease herding animals together could create, and to all the starvation and cruelty an incompetent and intense caitiff government could accomplish. From the conversation and almost from the recollection of the northern people this place had dropp’d, but not so in the gossip of the Salisbury people, nearly all of whom say that the half was never told; that such was the nature of habitual outrage here that when Federal prisoners escaped the townspeople harbor’d them in their barns, afraid the vengeance of God would fall on them, to deliver even their enemies back to such cruelty. Said one old man at the Boyden House, who join’d in the conversation one evening: ‘There were often men buried out of that prison pen still alive. I have the testimony of a surgeon that he has seen them pull’d out of the dead cart with their eyes open and taking notice, but too weak to lift a finger. There was not the least excuse for such treatment, as the confederate government had seized every sawmill in the region, and could just as well have put up shelter for these prisoners as not, wood being plentiful here. It will be hard to make any honest man in Salisbury say that there was the slightest necessity for those prisoners having to live in old tents, caves and holes half-full of water. Representations were made to the Davis government against the officers in charge of it, but no attention was paid to them. Promotion was the punishment for cruelty there. The inmates were skeletons. Hell could have no terrors for any man who died there, except the inhuman keepers.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 766-767
Photographic History of the Civil War: Vicksburg to Appomattox William C. Davis and Bell I. Wiley Published by The Civil War Times “Under the Direction of the National Historical Society” P. 401
“If we commence a system of exchange which liberates all prisoners taken, we will have to fight on until the whole South is exterminated. If we hold those caught they amount to no more than dead men.” General Grant, 1864
Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War David Silkenat P. 172
“Offering little shelter or sanitation, these newly constructed prisons quickly exceeded capacity. Designed to house no more than 10,000 men, Andersonville, the most notorious of this latter generation of prisons, held 33,000 inmates by August 1864. entering Andersonville in May 1864, shortly after it opened, Connecticut soldier Robert Kellogg described the desperation soldiers felt passing through the gates: “As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect;—stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin.” when he first entered Andersonville two months later on July 8, 1864, Pennsylvanian Erza Ripple recalled that “the effect was stunning and very disheartening.” Captured in a failed assault on James Island in Charleston harbor, Ripple estimated that the prison now held about 25,000 prisoners within its twenty-six acre enclosure. “What a sinking feeling of the heart there was when we came to realize that this was to be our home—no one knew how long—perhaps until the end of the war, whenever that might be.” Although Ripple suffered tremendously during his two months at Andersonville (when he was transferred to a new prison in Florence), in a sense he was lucky: of the 41,000 Union soldiers imprisoned in Andersonville between February 1864 and April 1865, only 26,000 lived to recount their experiences.”
“The Secret of Suicide and the Civil War” Brian Hicks Postandcourier.com
“The pressures of war in the 19th century is an area that historically has seen little study. Most historians began to note the mental stress of war during World War I, when troops were said to be shell shocked. And any notion of post-traumatic stress disorder did not come along until the Vietnam War. The first look at this trend came less than 20 years ago, with Eric Dean’s book “Shook Over Hell,” a treatment of PTSD in the Civil War.
Sommerville* said that a study of asylum records, diaries, and newspapers of the day reveal “a virtual epidemic of emotional and psychiatric trauma among Confederate soldiers and veterans.”
In the summer of 1861, just as the war was escalating, Lt. C.E. Earle of the Palmetto Guard of the 4th Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers jumped from the sixth floor of a Richmond hotel, killing himself instantly.
And the Rev. Dr. Robert Woodward Barnwell** served as chaplain for a South Carolina Regiment. In June, 1863, not long after writing “Such a sight as that field of slain I never dreamed of. I counted 100 Yankees and 26 horses in one spot,” Barnwell asked to be committed. After two days in a Virginia asylum, he flung himself out a second-story window.’”
Note: They belonged to the ruin & nothing could pull them forth but the promise of free air, & the height from a free fall, if just for a moment.
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 73
“At Second Manassas, John Worsham, 21st Virginia, saw a single solid shot kill four men. A captain’s corpse remained upright after the head had been knocked off, “with a stream of blood spurting a foot or more from his neck.” The shattering of heads produced harrowing experiences for those in close proximity to the victim. In action at Fort Harrison, Virginia, 1864, Union General Edward Ripley got “dashed in the face with a hot steaming mass of something horrible,” like an unsavory warm pudding. He first thought that his own features had been blown off, as the foul detritus had temporarily blinded him to his situation. But the debris proved to be from the wrecked head of a soldier standing in front of him, blasted backward. Opening his own blouse, the general remembered, “I threw out a mass of brains, skull, hair and blood.” In another incident, Union Major Thomas Hyde found his mouth similarly stuffed involuntarily with brain matter, bone, and blood, when the smashed pulp of a private’s skull smacked him full in the face.
P. 66
The noise of musketry deafened soldiers, veterans likening it to brick buildings collapsing or a hard rain clattering on a tin roof, while artillery fire, like claps of thunder, made the ground shake and fence rails jump. Projectiles mowed down any vegetation standing in the way. General Raleigh Colston observed at Chancellorsville trees cut off a few feet above the ground as if scythed, and brush fractured in every branch. “The bullets seemed to fill the air and to be clipping every little weed and bush and blade of grass around us,” wrote Corporal C.F. Boyd about Shiloh. “Acres and acres of timber such as small saplings and large underbrush were mowed down and trees one foot in diameter were cut down as if a mowing machine had gone through the field and limbs fell like autumn leaves in the leaden and iron storm.’”
One of Cleburne’s Command: The Civil War Reminiscences and Diary of Capt. Samuel T. Foster, Granbury’s Texas Brigade, CSA Edited by Norman D. Brown P. 88.
“…and we have to pass over the dead Yanks of the battle field of yesterday; and here I beheld that which I cannot describe; and which I hope never to see again, dead men meet the eye in every direction, and in one place I stopped and counted 50 dead men in a circle of 30 ft. or me. Men lying in all sorts of shapes and [illegible] just as they had fallen, and it seems like they have nearly all been shot in the head, and a great number of them have their skulls bursted open and their brains running out, quite a number that way. I have seen many dead men, and seen them wounded and crippled in various ways, have seen their limbs cut off, but never saw anything before that made me sick, like looking at the brains of these men did. I do believe that if a soldier could be made to faint, that I would have fainted if I had not passed on and got out of that place as soon as I did.”
[Note: Is this Earl J. Hess? Eric Foner? Embarrassingly, I completely lost track of the author of the following passage except it was out of a White male historian’s book, so that should narrow it down. Going through & double-checking, I realized this is not McPherson, Battle Cry, P. 502, as I had it. I’ve run across this passage a couple times in my research yet can’t find it on Google Scholar. Hopefully someone out there can let me know. It’s beautiful writing. Of course the minute I post it, I’ll run across it again.]
“No one knew the brutality of this day, this night, not unless you were there or found out later from someone present. Then came William Marcus Woodcock’s account, of the 9th Kentucky, a rare account because he was a southern Unionist. You don’t hear often times about the type of misery where men beg to be shot to death like they did May 27, 1864… You don’t need to have been there to know many, if not most, cried for their mothers in their final minutes.”
ambrosebierce.org The ABP Journal Fall 2007, Vol. 3 No. 1 Kenneth Noe (selections) Note: See May 27 for Ambrose Bierce’s story “The Crime at Pickett’s Mill,” which is about May 27, 1864, Pickett’s Mill, Georgia during Sherman’s Campaign.
“Woodcock’s account, written early in 1865 but not published until 1996, confirms Bierce’s remembrance of the Battle of Pickett’s Mill as a confused and ultimately wasteful, murderous affair. Like Bierce, Woodcock began his account by stressing the time-consuming flanking march through impossible terrain, “over rough hills, across deep hollows, and through almost impenetrable thickets of undergrowth.” From the rear, he heard the battle begin. “A heavy skirmishing commenced in our immediate front,” Woodcock wrote, “and soon warmed into all the awfulness of a general battle….Our line was ordered to lie down,” he went on, “and there we remained for a few moments suffering from the most terrible anxieties known to the soldier—viz, the viewing of a bloody carnage and knowing that you will in a moment have to participate in it.
Knefler’s brigade “remained in our position till the other two brigades had spent their strength upon the rebel lines,’ Woodcock continued, “and we saw them come flocking back over the hill in great disorder….We met the gallant but defeated heroes of the front lines just as we commenced ascending the hill. They presented all the marks of a defeated, badly cut up, but unwhipped force; and they met us with cheers and exhortations ans invectives on the rebels.” Woodcock repeatedly stressed that each brigade formed two lines, and thus the “heroes of the front lines” were Hazen’s men, including Bierce. By that time, orders had arrived from Sherman, two hours late, calling off the attack. Gibson’s brigade remained pinned down near the Confederate works, however. Knefler’s assignment now was to move into their position and hold it while the dead and wounded of the other brigades could be removed. Advancing, the brigade soon made contact with the enemy, “victory-flushed and advancing….and thus (a few moments before sunset) was commenced one of the grandest musketry fights I ever witnessed.” After a few minutes, the Confederates fell back to their works as Knefler’s men moved up to the rail fence that already had sheltered Hazen. As darkness fell, the gunfire finally slackened; the Federals realized that they had all but exhausted their ammunition. “Then our ears were greeted with a sound more heartrending than can be conceived,” Woodcock wrote, “viz, the groans of the many wounded that were scattered over the field in our front, between ours and the rebel lines….They were sending up the most pitiful prayers and lamentations that I ever heard from the lips of human creatures, and many of them were begging to be shot.”
Woodcock soon numbered himself among the wounded. “About sundown,” he remembered, “I was struck on the right thigh by a ball which penetrated the flesh about one inch, and then bounced out again without cutting my clothes. I looked down and saw my pants were stuffed into the incision, thinking that I was not much hurt, but the blood immediately began to flow.” He fell back to the rear, lay down behind a tree, and vomited. After dark, the Confederates launched another counterattack, intending to clear the woods before them. This time they were completely successful. Battered and nearly out of ammunition, Knefler’s men offered little resistance. “The enemy bore down on with a fury that was in our circumstances, simply unresistable,” Woodcock wrote, “and therefore giving them our last shot we hastily fell back across the hill.”
For Bierce, Pickett’s Mill was little better than a murder, a useless, poorly planned and coordinated battle that yielded nothing except unsurprising results, the loss of a third of his brigade. Many of Hazen’s men concurred that they had been “sold out.”
Woodcock woke up the next morning in pain and caught an ambulance to the nearest field hospital, four miles in the rear. He found there “a beautiful grove of timber” that contained “over a thousand maimed, crippled, and otherwise shockingly mangled soldiers [who] had been brought from the battlefield….I alighted from the ambulance near an amputating table, and the sight that greeted my eyes turned me perfectly sick. Arms and legs, hands and feet, fingers and toes, that had just been detached from their quivering stumps were recklessly strewn on every side.” Other casualties lay dying in agony or silence as gravediggers buried the already expired.
Woodcock remained at the field hospital until May 30. when Sherman began to shift his army east toward Marietta, however, he determined to move his wounded in the rear. For two days, Woodcock and many others rode in wagons to Kingston, Georgia, where they were placed on freight trains bound for Nashville. They did not arrive there until June 4. the trip was “miserable.” The men received little food or water, and saw no doctors or nurses other than other wounded men. Woodcock’s narrative ends abruptly with a passage that Bierce easily could have written. “three of the occupants of our car had been so nearly helpless as to be compelled to lie down during the whole trip,” he wrote, “and when they were lifted from their blankets the floor of the car under them was found to be literally covered with maggots, although we had rendered them every possible attention.”
The war, of course, affected Bierce differently. After Pickett’s Mill, according to biographer Richard O’Connor, “Bierce’s patriotism would not be unalloyed by cynicism. He would be a military buff all his life, but he had a low opinion of generals who didn’t even try to find out what they were sending their troops against. Undoubtedly the event contributed to his lifelong contempt for those established in power….and his willingness to be always an outsider, a highly vocal and caustic critic of all in positions of authority.” For Woodcock, in other words, Pickett’s Mill was a tragic day, but one that could be noted and left in the past. For Bierce, it became a turning point and a touchstone for a lifetime.”
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 58
“7a.m. 59; 2p.m. 68; 9p.m. 56. Dim stars.”
***The highest civilian death rate was in contraband camps– 50k– & it was behind Union lines. At some point down the road, nearly all White southerners thought Black people should be free but not made citizens.
Note: Andersonville 30%, or 12k died in this environs where you could die from a mosquito bite. Roll the dice, throw some salt over your shoulder, it was all the same, but that scratch was going to be fatal. About 56k– one in seven nonbattle deaths– were in prison. bored prisoners made jewelry out of bone to sell to civilians who pay to stand on a landing and gawk at them. Over 100 a day in the summer died. Andersonville packed into 26 acres 33k men in like an equinoctial gale. There is some kind of knowing that comes along with being here. And if you survive it? PTSD leaves ghostlike hollow forms behind, complete desquamation. Some of them break early, some of them break late. But it’s coming for you.
Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry
DARK MEMORIES OF OLD ANDERSONVILLE.
(Civil History of the Confederate States.)
“Let us look into the prison history of the Confederacy.
On July 22, 1862, the cartel was adopted. All prisoners were to be released in ten days after their capture. The very day after this cartel exchange was signed Major-General John Pope, on July 23, 1862, issued orders that allowed his soldiers to shoot as spies and as enemies of the United States government all Virginia farmers who were found tilling the soil or sowing grain or cultivating crops on farms within his rear, and even inside his lines. Hundreds were shot down in the field before the Confederate government could arrest such conduct and get Pope’s order rescinded. America, in later years, became incensed even to making war on Spain because General Weyler took his cue from General Pope, that illustrious example that so pleased Weyler that he ordered his own walk along the same path.
By persistent effort of our commissioner, the cartel lasted one year. The Confederacy, seeing the emaciated condition of such prisoners as had returned, was intense in her desire for exchange, and the Confederacy was unprepared for the action of Stanton, order No. 209, breaking the cartel. By this order Federal prisoners were not to be exchanged or even paroled. The cemetery at Andersonville was founded on this order. It was like passing sentence upon Federal prisoners, for the North knew that the Confederacy was without medicines and doctors and not equipped to care for the prisoners. Hence Mr. Davis and Colonel Ould, the commissioner of exchange, put forth every effort to get rescinded order No. 209, and Colonel Ould was given the largest authority in dealing with Major Mulford, United States agent of exchange. Everything was done to emphasize the fact that we were scant of food, of doctors, of medicine – indeed, absolutely unprepared to hold captives.
A deaf ear was turned to it all.
It is an interesting history to follow the Confederate authorities in their effort to abate prison suffering. Colonel Ould, from the day the cartel was disregarded, pleaded for medicines and physicians, offering to pay the Federals in cotton for them, as the Federal captives needed these. No replies were made to Commissioner Ould.
In 1864 prisoners increased fearfully at Andersonville, and to care for them became serious. No medicines for sick, no proper food. To relieve the prisoners and acquaint the Lincoln cabinet with prison conditions and the need of exchange and medicines and physicians, a delegation of prisoners was sent to Washington at urgent request of Captain Wirz. These Federal soldiers and prisoners went on that mission of mercy and came back and reported “failure.” They told the prisoners their own government had abandoned them and exchange or medicines they would not get from Stanton. This created despondency among the prisoners. It is to be hoped the fate of those who went on that mission was such as should befall heroes and brave men. A monument should be erected to them, thus illustrating the efforts of the Confederacy on the side of humanity.
These heroes met the same answer as Alexander H. Stephens, who was sent on a mission of mercy in behalf of the prisoners authorized by Mr. Davis to plead for exchange, and in failing in that to secure medicines and needful supplies for such as were kept in confinement. But Mr. Stephens was not allowed to see Lincoln as he hoped. Mr. Stephens always declared his mission in behalf of the prisoners had not been a failure had he been allowed to see Mr. Lincoln. Stanton stopped him at the “outer guard,” to use Mr. Davis’s language. Admiral S.P. Lee, U. S. N., commanding the blockage squadron at Newport News, communicated with the Washington government, stating the object of Mr. Stephens’s mission. To quote President Davis’s own words, “Your mission is simply one of humanity, and has no political aspect.” Most pathetic picture that – the Vice-President of the Confederacy, himself feeble, but for humanity’s sake on a rugged tour to Washington to appeal to Lincoln’s cabinet to save life.”
Note: Above was Phillip Hattle after Andersonville. Died June 26, 1865. I think the cause of death is clear. To Phillip’s long dead left is Alexander Stephens, who got to live to at least 1875, when his likeness was preserved, but not along with the identity of the man he’s propping himself up with.
Note: Confederate soldiers scuttle the the Merrrimac (C.S.S. Virginia) near Norfolk. Portsmouth and Norfolk now in Union hands. Surrender of the Northern sub-district of Arkansas May 11, 1865.
no news except Pourtsmouth and Norfolk was taken….
To fight them until hell freezes over, then fight them on the ice. Reconstruction was the ice. All along, they’ve been in the back room counting cash, the Washington & Richmond men, the fifteen to twenty who ran this thing, then ran it into the ground, detaching ground from sky under every last horizon from where they wanted an honorable wound, a scar more than they wanted the whole and complete body of others to exercise the right to vote.
The ones who started this then saw this thing through didn’t even have a plan to remove wounded off Bull Run. Some laid there 3 days in another’s gold coin tossing game, Battle-Cry, the Milton Bradley best-seller by Centennial that came out in 1961: “Civil War has significantly more terrain, but the battles and strategies resemble those of the Civil War only accidentally, due to rules borrowed from an entirely abstract game, Niuechess. The real historical lesson from Battle-Cry comes in the form of a thirty-one page booklet, a vastly boiled-down version of one of the landmarks of centennial-era popular history, The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War.” The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning Kreiser and Allred, editors. P. 178)
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