Day 73. May 12, 1862.
73
the officer suddenly lacked half a face….
May Monday 12 1862
Quite frosty this morning and cool. We roused up quite early this morning to get ready to march at 9oclock. The three Brigades took up the line of march. They was five miles South of New Market. The roads was very dusty and the air filled with smoke so it made it very disagreeable We came to New Market and took the road across the South Mountain to Lorain. We marched some 16 miles today and it was very warm. We left the grate Valley of the Shenandoah we was camped in Rockingham Co Va. And tonight we will camp in Page County Va 2 ½ miles from west of the town of Lorain. We have got fine camping ground for tonight. The men all looked very dusty some thousands of men. The 7th Ohio Regt was the rear gaurd today
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 58
“7a.m. 49; 2p.m. 76; 9p.m. 60. Smoky and dustlike all day.”
Stonewall Jackson Valley Campaign Shenandoah 1862 Peter Cozzens P. 278
“In obedience to orders, Shields’s division left Banks at New Market on May 12 to join McDowell. Shields’s route of march led through New Market Gap to Luray, then north through the Luray Valley to Front Royal, where his division bivouacked for two days before continuing on to Catlett’s Station and finally to Falmouth. That morning Banks also put what remained of his corps– two understrength brigades and a smattering of cavalry– in motion for Strasburg. The day was bright and warm, the turnpike dusty. Banks and Strother rode in an ambulance. “We passed the marching army with its spoils of horses, dogs, niggers, and cattle,” Strother wrote. “It reminds me of the advent of a party of mad sailors into a heathen village.’”
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War The Diaries of David Hunter Strother David Hunter Strother P. 34-35
“MAY 12, MONDAY.—Bright and mild…. We packed up and started on the road to Woodstock. I rode in the carriage with the General in the capacity of an invalid. We passed the marching army with its spoils of horses, dogs, niggers, and cattle. It reminds me of the advent of a party of mad sailors into some heathen village. The people look in silence and fear at the doings of these mighty iconoclasts who fear neither God nor Ashby, who think Mason a fool, and who despise power of Jackson. They seize upon a sheep or a nigger as if he were a sheep. They laugh at Southern rights and sacred soil. They are jolly with all and make love to the girls, and they bid fair to impress these as they do the niggers and sheep….”
Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War John R. Kelso Edited by Christopher Grasso P. 41
“I now determined to avoid, as much as possible all public places. Indeed I felt so much safer in solitude than in company that I concluded not to be seen at all while my provisions held out. I acted upon this conclusion, avoiding the roads and making my way, by course alone, through the forests. On the second evening, however, hunger and the coming on of a cold rain-storm compelled me to seek shelter. I stopped with a poor fellow who never could have owned a decent horse, much less a slave, and yet who was almost furious because, as he declared, the abolition Yankees were trying to fre “our niggers.” He seemed to fully believe that, should these abolition thieves succeed in their nefarious undertaking, the “buck niggers” would at once marry off all the white girls and thus force “us” to either do without wives or to put with “she niggers.” And he was a sample of a large portion of the men of the South,—of that portion who did most of the fighting. I afterwards knew men to run their grown daughters away, upon the approach of our army, to prevent those daughters from being married by the “free niggers” who accompanied that army. I am aware that this statement will appear almost incredible to those who never knew any thing of the gross ignorance and the absurd prejudices that prevailed among the poorer classes of the south. The people of these classes were not afraid of losing their negro property, for they had no such property to lose. The great fear that made them so willing to fight was the fear of “nigger equality,”—the fear that, if once freed, the “buck niggers” would successfully compete with us in courting and marrying white girls. About the only arguments advanced upon the subject by these classes of men were: “How would you like for a a big buck nigger to step up by the side of your sister or your daughter and ask her for her company? How would you like a big buck nigger to marry your sister or daughter? &c.” These arguments were always supposed to be, and generally actually were, unanswerable.”
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War James M. McPherson P. 166
Note: May 12, 1864 saw 24 hours of fighting:
“After eighteen hours of continuous combat at the Bloody Angle of Spotyslvania, a Union lieutenant the next morning found enemy soldiers piled three or four deep in the trenches, mostly dead, but “one Rebel sat up praying at the top of his voice and others were gibbering in insanity.”
P. 165
The colonel of the elite 20th Massachusetts went to pieces after Antietam. The next morning he rode away from camp without telling anyone and was later found “without a cent in his pocket, without anything to eat or drink, without having changed his clothes for 4 weeks, during all which time he had this horrible diarrhea…. He was just like a little child wandering away from home.”
Some of these soldiers were clearly suffering from what is today termed post-traumatic stress disorder, the most serious and prolonged form of combat stress reaction. The battles of 1863 produced additional cases. But it was the campaigns of 1864 that caused the greatest toll of psychiatric as well as physical casualties. The opposing armies in Virginia and Georgia were never out of daily contact for months on end. Some portion of these armies fought or skirmished every day and marched or dug elaborate trench networks every night. In the seven weeks from May 5 to June 22, the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia experienced physical casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) equal to 60 percent of their original strength.”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 71-72
“At Second Manassas, Private William Fletcher, 5th Texas, stood gazing at a courier galloping his mount across the field, when “a shell struck them and exploded, and there was a scattering of parts of both men and horse, and I took it to be a percussion shot that exploded when hitting.” Colonel Edward Cross, 5th New Hampshire, fell gravely wounded at Gettysburg after being hit by 12 lb. shell fragments that made a deep wound above the heart and almost caved in his breastbone. Shrapnel lacerated his face, destroying three teeth, and damaging his left leg below the knee. Private Nick Weekes described shells bursting through the ranks of the 3rd Alabama at Chancellorsville. He saw “an arm and shoulder fly from the man just in front, exposing his throbbing heart. The foot of another flew up and kicked him in the face as a shell struck his leg. Another, disemboweled, crawled along on all fours, his entrails trailing behind, and still another held up his tongue with his hand, a piece of shell having carried away his lower jaw.
Such macabre shell wounds unnerved those still living. Private Randolph Shotwell recalled being “horrified at seeing a man running, struck by a shell and his head blown square off at the neck, and tumbling before the corpse as it staggers and falls!” Also at Fredericksburg, Captain James Wren, 48th Pennsylvania, witnessed one of his company sliced apart: “Michael Divine was Cut right in 2 pieces with a shell & his insides Lay on the grass alongside him.” At Gettysburg, a youngster’s corpse startled 1st Virginia Private John Dooley: “the boy’s head being torn off by a shell is lying around in bloody fragments on the ground.”
Joseph E. Crowell, a survivor of the 13th New Jersey, penned haunting recollections. Here he describes the mutilation at Antietam of a 107th New York private, hit by shell fragments that took off both legs at the knee. “None had ever heard such demoniacal shrieks.” But Crowell accounted the sight worse than the screaming: “there protruded from the lacerated flesh the ends of the bones of the legs in a most horrible manner, making a sight that was simply sickening.” At Chancellorsville, Crowell saw the chin and lower jaw of a staff officer snatched off: “In its place was a mass of blood, raw flesh and gore!” A piece of shell had come along and torn away the entire lower portion of his face.” Eerily, the missile had traveled so fast the eye missed it: for no earthly reason, the officer suddenly lacked half a face. Understandably, “I involuntarily shrieked.” Just before, a shell had landed in the ranks. “Two men had been literally torn to pieces.” Their remains were strewn over the roadway from one side to the other. One man’s heart was still throbbing. Pieces of skull and human brains lay here and there!”
Serving the powerful engines of war conferred no immunity to damage. Gunners’ ears bled from the concussion of the cannon, their eardrums often shattering and their hearing permanently impaired. Battery to battery counterfire caused some of the worst injuries. Crowell recounted what happened at Chancellorsville when a shell landed on the ammunition stored in a wheeled artillery caisson: debris from the wagon and the remains of men and horses filled the air. One gunner dropped from the sky to the ground right beside him. “’For the love of God,’ it said, ‘for the love of God, shoot me! Put me out of my misery!’” The sufferer had gone up amid the flames, and fire had roasted off all his clothes, burning the flesh to a crisp. His eyes had been seared away and the ears gone. The ends of his fingers had charred to the bone and a white kneecap protruded through charcoaled flesh. “Such sickening sight was never seen. And yet the thing was alive, and not only alive, but conscious.”
Other eyewitnesses offered similar depictions of ghoulish scenes from hell. Corporal C.F. Boyd, 15th Iowa, remembered seeing after Shiloh twenty-six battery horses lying dead in one small area. The gunners “are torn all to pieces leaving nothing but their heads or their boots. Pieces of clothing and strings of flesh hang on the limbs of the trees around them.” From the Rebel side, Philip Stephenson, 15th Arkansas, related seeing two artillerymen destroyed completely from the waist up. “We found long strips of flesh high up in the trees behind them.” A mutilated battery horse, mad with pain, ran around frantically, finally ramming its head into a tree, the body falling at the base of the trunk in an odd squatting position.’”
Note: Eating entrails; they’re called “melts”.
Note: On the brutality of war, 2 years from May:
A Stillness at Appomattox Bruce Catton P. 124-128
“The Federals were here in overwhelming numbers, and their very numbers were a handicap. Barlow tried desperately to get the men reformed, so that an organized attack could be resumed. There was no point in trying to go down the open ground in the middle of the salient. The recipe for victory was now to organize an advance that would sweep along the trench lines to right and left, flanking the Confederate defenders and widening the breach until it was past mending. But as fast as Barlow could get a few elements sorted out and put into line a new mass of reinforcements would come lopping in from the rear, and the line would vanish.
Things happened too fast. What sketchy planning there had been was based on the theory that a great deal of sheer muscle would be needed to break the Rebel line. What actually happened, however, was that the line broke at the first touch, and what was needed immediately thereafter was quick footwork rather than brute strength. But the muscle was still coming in and there was no way to stop it and footwork was quite out of the question. There was nothing for it now but for everybody to get together and shove.
Both sides shoving at once, and in the same place, and the result was the wildest, bitterest in-fighting of the entire war.
In effect each side was making a charge and repelling a charge at the same moment and with the same troops. The Confederates were fighting with a last-ditch fury. Far to their rear Lee was building a new trench line across the throat of the salient. It would be an all-day job and until the line was finished the men up front must at any cost whatever either drive the Yankees out or at least keep them from coming in any deeper. That meant close-range fighting carried out without letup. The battle front was a mile wide now, with Burnside’s men fighting their way through the woods on the east and Wright sending his VI Corps in on the west, and in no place along this front were the rival firing lines more than a few yards apart.
It began to rain again, and the men in the trenches stood to their knees in bloodstained water, and the ground outside the trenches, trampled by massed thousands of men, turned into a stiff gumbo in which bodies of dead and wounded men were trodden out of sight. From the rear Barlow could see an immense mass of Federals lying flat in the muck, twenty or thirty ranks jammed together in a formless crowd, the men in the rear passing loaded muskets forward to the men in front. An orderly brought Barlow his horse and the general galloped back to Hancock to beg that no more men be sent forward.
Never before on earth had so many muskets been fired so fast on so narrow a front and at such close range. About all that kept the two armies from completely annihilating each other was the fact that most men were firing too rapidly to aim. A whole grove of trees behind the Rebel line was killed by shots that flew too high, and the logs of the breastworks were splintered and, a Confederate officer said expressively, “whipped into basket-stuff.” Bodies of dead and wounded men were hit over and over again until they simply fell apart and became unrecognizable remnants of bloody flesh rather than corpses. There were big charges and little charges, with bayonet fighting when the men came to close quarters, and at times Union and Confederate flags waved side by side on the parapets, with bullets shredding them into tattered streamers.
A few hundred yards to the east of the blunt tip of the salient there was a place where the Rebel trench line made a little bend to the south, and right at this bend a spirited Confederate counterattack regained part of the breastworks. On the Yankee side of the works there was a ditch, and as the Southerners retook their trench, men of the VI Corps came charging in and occupied the ditch, and for a distance here the rival battle lines were literally face to face with only a log breastwork between them.
Men fired at one another through chinks in the logs, or stabbed through the chinks with their bayonets, or reached over the top to swing clubbed muskets. Where the Vermont Brigade was fighting, men were seen to spring on top of the logs and fire down on their enemies as fast as their comrades could pass loaded muskets up to them. Each man would get off a few rounds before he was shot, and usually when one of these men fell someone else would clamber up to take his place. Dead men fell on top of wounded men, and unhurt men coming up to fight would step on the hideous writhing pile-up.
Emory Upton had his thinned brigade in beside the Vermonters. He was riding his horse back and forth just behind the firing line, the only mounted man in sight, going unhurt by some miracle– every man on his staff was either killed or wounded. He was proud of the way his men were fighting, but he felt that they would do even better if they had the help of some artillery, and he sent back for a section of guns. In a few moments two brass fieldpieces from a regular battery came splashing madly up through the rain, wheeling about to unlimber within literal whites-of-their-eyes range–artillery charging entrenched infantry, as if roles were reversed in this mad war.
The gunners sent double charges of canister plowing through the Confederate ranks, and at this close range the effect was fantastic. Inspired by it, the gunners laid hands on their pieces and ran them forward until they touched the very parapet, and then they resumed firing and kept it up as long as the guns could be manned, which was not very long. When the guns at last fell silent they could not be removed because all of the horses were dead, and of the twenty-four men who came on the field with them only two were on their feet unwounded.
There had been hand-to-hand fighting before, but it invariably reached a quick climax and then ended, one side or the other breaking and running away. Here nobody broke and nobody ran. The fighting did not stop for a moment, and the unendurable moment of climax hung taut in the air and became fixed, a permanent part of some insane new order of things. Some regiments sent details a dozen paces to the rear to clean muskets; men were firing so continuously that their weapons became foul with burnt powder and could not be loaded. Amazingly enough, as the day wore on exhausted men from time to time would stagger a few feet away from the firing line, drop unhurt in the mud, and fall sound asleep. Now and then men had to stop fighting and lift the bodies of dead and wounded comrades out of the wet ditch and drop them in the mud outside. There were so many bodies they interfered with the fighting.
This was the Bloody Angle, the place where a trench made a little bend, and where the two armies might have clasped hands as they fought; and it was precisely here that the war came down to its darkest cockpit. It could never be any worse than this because men could not possibly imagine or do anything worse. This fighting was not planned or ordered or directed. It was formless, monstrous, something no general could will. It grew out of what these men were and what the war had taught them–cruel knowledge of killing, wild brief contempt for death, furious unspeakable ferocity that could transcend every limitation of whipped nerves and beaten flesh. There was a frenzy on both armies, and as they grappled in the driving rain with the smoke and the wild shouting and the great shock of gunfire all about them this one muddy ditch with a log wall running down the middle became the center of the whole world. Nothing mattered except to possess it utterly or to clog it breast-high with corpses.
There was no victory in all of this and there was no defeat. There was just fighting, as if that had become an end in itself. A Massachusetts soldier wrote that the firing continued “just so long as we could see a man,” and a Pennsylvanian agreed that “all day long it was one continuous assault.” A man in the Iron Brigade probably spoke for every man in the army when he called this fight at the Bloody Angle “the most terrible twenty-four hours of our service in the war.” An officer in the VI Corps, trying to describe the fight afterward, wrote that he had only confused memories of “bloodshed surpassing all former experiences, a desperation in the struggle never before witnessed.” Trying to sum up, he concluded: “I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania, because I would be loath to believe it myself were the case reversed.”
The fighting went on all day long and it continued after dark–there were men on the firing line who said that they had fired more than four hundred cartridges apiece, from start to finish. Finally, somewhere around midnight, it died out. The Confederates had at last finished the cutoff line at the base of the salient, and they slipped quietly back to it, and in the darkness the entire salient disappeared. The exhausted Federals got a drugged sleep in the rain, and in the morning they went cautiously forward to take a look at the ground they had won.
There was nothing remarkable about it, except that the region around the Bloody Angle offered the most horrible sights of the war. In places, the trenches held corpses piled four and five deep, and sometimes at the bottom of such a pile a living wounded man would be found. The firing had been so intense that many bodies had been hit over and over again and were mutilated beyond any chance of identification. One of Wright’s staff officers remembered that once during the previous day he had ordered some guns up to an advanced position, and he could not remember having heard anything from them thereafter, so he went out to look. The two guns, he found, had reached the designated position, and each piece and caisson was wheeled halfway around, but the guns had never got into battery. A burst of Rebel fire had caught them in mid-turn and every man and horse had been killed, “and lay as if waiting the resurrection.”
Clearly, the ground that had been won was not worth what it cost, either from an esthetic or a military standpoint. The Rebel line had been broken but it had been mended again, and the armies were just about where they were before. The Federals had gained a square mile of quite useless territory at the price of nearly 7,000 casualties. Rebel losses, to be sure, had been heavier, but that was cold comfort. The big push had been made and it had not quite worked.”
Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Harold Holzer P. 426
THE INVASION OF MARYLAND.
James Longstreet, Lieutenant-General, C.S.A.
“During the progress of the battle of Sharpsburg General Lee and I were riding along my line and D.H. Hill’s, when we received a report of movements of the enemy and started up the ridge to make a reconnoissance. General Lee and I dismounted, but Hill declined to do so. I said to Hill, “If you insist on riding up there and drawing the fire, give us a little interval so that we may not be in the line of the fire when they open upon you.” General Lee and I stood on the top of the crest with our glasses, looking at the movements of the Federals on the rear left. After a moment I turned my glass to the right- the Federal left. As I did so, I noticed a puff of white smoke from the mouth of a cannon. “There is a shot for you,” I said to General Hill. The gunner was a mile away, and the cannon-shot came whisking through the air for three or four seconds and took off the front legs of the horse that Hill sat on and let the animal down upon his stumps. The horse’s head was so low and his croup so high that Hill was in a most ludicrous position. With one foot in the stirrup he made several efforts to get the other leg over the croup, but failed. Finally we prevailed upon him to try the other end of the horse, and he got down. He had a third horse shot under him before the close of the battle. That shot at Hill was the second best shot I ever saw. The best was at Yorktown. There a Federal officer came out in front of our line, and sitting down to his little platting table began to make a map. One of our officers carefully sighted a gun, touched it off, and dropped a shell into the hands of the man at the little table.”
Note: “A Horse misus’d upon the Road/Calls to Heaven for Human blood.” William Blake, from “Augeries of Innocence.”
Note: 1865 on this day:
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/southindefeat.htm
This eyewitness account appears in The Private Journal of Henry William Revenal, 1859-1887 (1947) Robinson Charles Arney, ed.
Note: Henry William Revenal was a plantation owner living near Aiken, South Carolina.
May 12 (1865)
“Yesterday I went over to Augusta to purchase a few supplies. Specie and green backs (U.S. currency) is the only money now available… Yankee force stationed in the town and I saw a number of the soldiers strolling about the streets, chatting and laughing with our men. They seem to feel quite at home …. A large number of idle Negroes are about the streets coming in from the country and leaving their masters. The Military authorities decline to interfere in any way. They do not tell the Negroes they are free, but refuse to return them to their owners. They say they have received no instructions upon the subject. If this state of things continue it is virtually emancipating them, as there is no power or authority in the civil powers to act, whilst the city is under military rule…”
*Orange & Alexandria Railroad was extremely strategic to both sides, & was repeatedly destroyed & rebuilt. The O&A was the sole link between Richmond & D.C. The PA. 110th had to responsibility to guard it. Note: In April, 1861, the entire state had just 1600 miles of railways.
Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command Volume 1 Douglas Southall Freeman Scribner, 1942 P. 683
“As the railroads of Virginia were single-tracked, trains often had to wait long on sidings for the passing of traffic from the opposite direction. In the entire State, these sidings and turnouts, including the main terminals, had a gross mileage of only sixty-eight. The R.F. & P. had no more than four and one-half miles of second track of all descriptions and locations, the Manassas Gap barely three and one-quarter, and the Orange and Alexandria a scant four miles. These three railroads, in case of invasion from the North, would be those subjected to the heaviest strain and the greatest congestion.”
Note: A common 19th into the early 20th century newspaper headline read: “Another Railroad Horror.” Many were operator error, including the Malbone Street Wreck, & the Great Train Wreck of 1918. Scores of people would die, more would perish, rinse & repeat, along the same lines sometimes, & no safety changes would occur, like along the Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western Railroad lines. It was truly carnage. All aboard!
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Walter A. McDougall P. 147
“In retrospect, one is tempted to say that the irrationality attending the railroad boom exposed the inadequacy of federalism in the Jacksonian era even more than did the rift over slavery. If the nation was going to grow in the manner everyone thought destined, then the role of the federal government would have to grow whether the proponents of states’ rights liked it or not.’
P. 149
“Last, but not least, the railroads filled their managerial pyramids with salaried professionals who might own no company stock, but who expected promotion in return for their experience, performance, and loyalty. The divorce between ownership and management begun by railroad corporations soon characterized large corporations in most other sectors of American industry.”
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some thousands of men….
But— it can stand one more repetition—
Salt, seeds, fish hooks, sugar, flour, coffee, shoes, shirts, pants, blankets, newsprint the South ran out of. Never bullets.
The South never ran out of bullets, minie balls, or men —we know that— that they were supposed to have is a widely marketed dream, a dying declaration, a narrative collapse. The post hoc rationalizations carry their own elaboration of the legend because they have nothing else. Nothing but the shame of defeat. This is why. The cause cause cause of the outright half-wits with rival explanatory models, the god-given fate-ladies in the come-hither pose with the outright deniability, white-gloves digging at Stonewall’s hand-arm to shake it in the holy ground, as they do.
It is worth rerunning: they had the bullets. Had the bullets. Bullets.
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