Day 74. May 13, 1862.
74
literally carried the smells of war on their bodies….
May Tuesday 13
Quite cool this morning but was very warm all day. We took up the line of march at 9oclock this morning for on the road to Frount Royal* and we marched on over the dusty roads and over hills and through the hollows. We did not see much fine country today. This Valley is not such prime land as the other Valley. The roads is awful dusty. The woods are all on fire in places and awfull smokey. We passed through the Town of Lorain. It is in a fine situation. The town is situated on a hill and commands a fine view of the Valley for a short distance around. We camped in the woods this evening. Some little but not very much the water is not very good. The 29 Ohio was the rear of guard today
*Front Royal: The town was chartered 1788. Known now for Dinosaur Land that sits along Stonewall Jackson Hwy, 70 miles west of D.C. You can find 50 life-size dinosaurs, plus a 20-foot King Kong.
Note: Full moon & Supermoon at 11:00:30p.m. (moonposition.com)
Note: Below, Strother questions the fate of people and land; that it was time other people possess the land was a common Northern sentiment at this time in the country. Hands would have to change over at some point soon. See Ephraim’s entry June 14th plus his May 27 letter for similar observations.
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War The Diaries of David Hunter Strother David Hunter Strother P. 35 F
“MAY 13, TUESDAY.—Bright and warm. Started in the carriage with the General for Strasburg…. we saw a Negro family with bundles following the army, and this started a discourse as to the probable fate of Virginia. This state must be ruined utterly and partially depopulated, and its resuscitation must be owing to a new population emigrating from the North. The people that I have seen since the army came in seem to be besotted and incapable of grasping the new order of things which must inevitably follow this war. Perhaps when the danger is over and peace established they may revive a little, but my belief is they will not live to any practical appreciation of the change and hence a new people must possess the land.”*
Service With the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers Rufus R. Dawes P. 268
“The mud was half boot top deep and filled with the dead of the battle, over whom we stumbled in the darkness. Upon reaching my position I ordered the regiment to open fire.
We stood perhaps one hundred feet from the enemy’s line, and so long as we maintained a continual fire they remained hidden in their entrenchments. But if an attempt to advance was made, an order would be given and they would all rise up together and fire a volley upon us. They had constructed their works by digging an entrenchment about four feet deep, in which at intervals there were traverses to protect the flanks. This had the effect of making a row of cellars without drainage, and in them was several inches of mud and water. To protect their heads, they had placed in front logs which were laid upon blocks, and it was intended to put their muskets through the chinks under the head logs, but in the darkness this became impracticable and the head log proved a serious obstruction to their firing. For eighteen hours without cessation our troops aimed their muskets at these head logs, some of which were destroyed, and the bullets passing beyond in this plane cut off the tree, the stump of which may now be seen in the ordnance Museum of the War Department at Washington. This tree stood behind the enemy’s works. This is the true explanation of that phenomenon…
During the early hours of the night the rain poured down in torrents. Sometime in the night I suspected that the enemy were retreating, and I crawled up with one man and satisfied myself that they had gone. I then ceased firing and my exhausted men lay down as best they could, and some laid their heads upon the dead and fell asleep.
In the morning the rebel works presented an awful spectacle. The cellars were crowded with dead and wounded, lying in some cases upon each other and in several inches of mud and water. I saw the body of a rebel soldier sitting in the corner of one of these cellars in a position of apparent ease, with the head entirely gone, and the flesh burned from the bones of the neck and shoulders. This was doubtless caused by the explosion of a shell from some small Cohorn mortars within our lines. The mortar shell is thrown high in the air, and comes down directly from above. On the morning of May 13th, the men were in a deplorable condition of exhaustion, and I marched the regiment away from the horrible scenes at the “Bloody Angle” and allowed the men to lie down and rest in the woods near at hand.”
The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War Mark M. Smith P. 187 Footnote 43
“Sherman’s men literally carried the smells of war on their bodies. The smell of burnt pine infused their blankets and uniforms. Smoky blankets helped contain lice; burnt cities helped contain rebels; both must have lent the Union troops a burned air, almost sulfurous to the noses of Confederate civilians.”
Note: Imagine the roar of them coming, the fire smells on the wind, how it might have resembled being out on an Iowa plain when the air changes with the coming tornado that you can feel in your body and ears but you don’t know which direction it’s coming in from then bearing down. Then imagine one coming through in the night….
Marching with Sherman: Passages from the Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock, Major and Assistant Adjutant General of Volunteers, November 1864–May 1865 (1927) Major Henry Hitchcock P. 305-306
(Excerpts of letter to Mrs. Hitchcock)
IN CHESAPEAKE BAY
ON BOARD DISPATCH BOAT “M. Martin”
Sat: April 22/65—12 M.
“Gen. Grant is in almost every respect a very unlike man to Gen. Sherman, in demeanor as well as appearance. I have had some conversation with him, partly to deliver some verbal messages to Gen. S. Sent by me in addition to the written dispatches, partly also informing him of details of our march from Goldsboro to Raleigh not included in those. He is very quiet and taciturn, with none of Sherman’s vivacity of appearance or manner and none of his off-hand, ready, entertaining conversation. That is, I see nothing of that, and though I do not doubt his mind is just now fully occupied with the gravest questions of the day, which would explain unusual thoughtfulness in any man, yet it is evidently also habitual. The current pictures of him give a very correct idea of his face, except that I find him a younger looking man than I expected, also better dressed, thanks to a new or nearly new uniform, and his expression is also something sterner than I imagined. He has asked me very few questions, but listened quietly, though closely, to what I had to say,—which I made as brief as possible,—and but once or twice made any comment, and then but a word or two.”
Army Life According to Arbaw: Civil War Letters of William A. Brand 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Edited by Daniel A. Masters P. 62
Note: In a May 19 letter from Catlett’s Station, Brand writes of these same woods on fire:
“At 6 o’clock Monday morning the entire division moved to the pike and commenced the march toward New Market. At New Market we filed to the right of the New Market and Luray Turnpike. We entered the pass through the Peak Mountain two miles east of Luray, and marched through the burning woods– the dense smoke and the dust making the march for a mile or so very unpleasant. The road across the mountain is serpentine but easily traveled and there were but few obstacles to our rapid movement. We bivouacked Monday night two and a half miles west of Luray in Page County.”
Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac (book, 1898) Frank Wilkeson, A Survivor of Grant’s Last Campaign P. 58
“Near Spotsylvania I saw, as my battery was moving into action, a group of wounded men lying in the shade cast by some large oak trees. All of these men’s faces were gray. They silently looked at us as we marched past them. One wounded man, a blond giant of about forty years, was smoking a short briar-wood pipe. He had a firm grip on the pipe-stem. I asked him what he was doing. “Having my last smoke, young fellow,” he replied. His dauntless blue eyes met mine, and he bravely tried to smile. I saw that he was dying fast. Another of these wounded men was trying to read a letter. He was too weak to hold it, or maybe his sight was clouded. He thrust it unread into the breast pocket of his blouse, and lay back with a moan. This group of wounded men numbered fifteen or twenty. At the time, I thought that all of them were fatally wounded, and that there was no use in the surgeons wasting time on them, when men who could be saved were clamoring for their skillful attention.
P. 205-206
None of these soldiers cried aloud, none called on wife, or mother, or father. They lay on the ground, pale-faced, and with set jaws, waiting for their end. They moaned and groaned as they suffered, but none of them flunked. When my battery returned from the front, five or six hours afterward, almost all of these men were dead. Long before the campaign was over I concluded that dying soldiers seldom called on those who were dearest to them, seldom conjured their Northern on Southern homes, until they became delirious. Then, when their minds wandered, and fluttered at the approach of freedom, they babbled of their homes. Some were boys again, and were fishing in Northern trout streams. Some were generals leading their men to victory. Some were with their wives and children. Some wandered over their family’s homestead; but all, with rare exceptions, were delirious.
At the North Anna River, my battery being in action, an infantry soldier, one of our supports, who was lying face downward close behind the gun I served on, and in a place where he thought he was safe, was struck on the thighs by a large jagged piece of a shell. The wound made by this fragment of iron was as horrible as any I saw in the army. The flesh of both thighs was torn off, exposing the bones. The soldier bled to death in a few minutes, and before he died he conjured his Northern home, and murmured of his wife and children.
In the same battle, but on the south side of the river, a man who carried a rifle was passing between the guns and caissons of the battery. A solid shot, intended for us, struck him on the side. His entire bowels were torn out and slung in ribbons and shreds on the ground. He fell dead, but his arms and legs jerked convulsively a few times. It was a sickening spectacle. During this battle I saw a Union picket knocked down, probably by a rifle-ball striking his head and glancing from it. He lay as though dead. Presently he struggled to his feet, and with blood streaming from his head, he staggered aimlessly round and round in a circle, as sheep afflicted with grubs in the brain do. Instantly the Confederate sharp-shooters opened fire on him, and speedily killed him as he circled.”
Tennessee Ernie Ford
Virginia’s Bloody Soil Stanza 8
“But above that din of battle,
what was that dreadful
cry?
The woods are all afire, where
our dead and wounded
lie.
The sight to behold next morning
would make the
stoutest heart recoil,
To see the charred remains of
thousands on Virginia’s
bloody soil.”
Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause Ty Seidule P. 213-215
“Lee the military commander was first-rate. Daring and innovative, for many years he intimidated and defeated opponents like George McClellan, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph Hooker. He honed the Army of Northern Virginia into a formidable fighting force. The U.S. political leadership understood Lee’s importance to the entire southern cause and fixated on defeating him. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton believed “peace can be had only when Lee’s army is beaten, captured, or dispersed.” The Republican senator Charles Sumner said much the same: “When Lee’s army is out of the way, the whole rebellion will disappear.”
Of the eleven major engagements he fought, Lee was outnumbered in every one. He won six. Two were a draw in which he won a tactical victory but lost strategically (Frayser’s Farm and Antietam), while three were definitive losses (Malvern Hill, Gettysburg, and Sayler’s Creek/Appomattox). In 1862, he took command of a force close to defeat and regained the initiative, forcing the United States to fight on his terms. At Chancellorsville, he created one of the great victories of any war by splitting his force not once but twice. During the war, he was seen by white southerners as the indispensable man. They were right. For the Confederate states, he was the most important person bar none.
As a strategist, Lee kept trying to go on the offense, a policy the Confederate people demanded. As one soldier said, “The people have called for an active campaign and Gen. Lee has certainly given it to us.” His raid into Maryland did result in the capture of eleven thousand U.S. soldiers at Harpers Ferry, his largest haul of the war. However, the fight at Antietam, a tactical draw, meant that he had to abandon Maryland without affecting northern political sentiment, one of his chief aims. Nor did he succeed in convincing the British to recognize the Confederacy.
Going into Maryland for the Antietam campaign, Lee thought the people would rise up to meet him as liberators. Maryland was, after all, a slave state. Most white Marylanders, however, saw him not as a liberator but as the leader of an invading army ready and willing to plunder. Moreover, his ragtag army failed to impress potential recruits.
He then tried the same offensive strategy in 1863, and it failed again. As one Georgian said after the Gettysburg campaign, “I think they fight harder in their own country, than they do in Virginia. I had rather fight them in Virginia then [sic] here.” In Pennsylvania, U.S. soldiers fought to protect their homes, while Lee’s army, despite his orders against thievery, plundered with abandon.
Yet Lee’s strategy based on battlefield victory, especially in Virginia, was essentially sound. As one of his lieutenants later described it, Lee hoped that the “desperation of [Confederate] resistance would exact…such a price in blood and treasure as to exhaust the enthusiasm of the population…for war.” Lee made grave mistakes at Gettysburg, but so too did the best general in the war, Ulysses S. Grant, who also conducted frontal assaults at Vicksburg and Cold Harbor that he came to regret.
Lee’s strategy failed primarily because U.S. strategy and leadership were even better. The U.S. cause was also better. As the war continued, the United States gained forces from emancipated African Americans, while the South lost their enslaved workers. Lee lost because his opponent was better and the southern cause awful.
Over the course of the war, Lee mostly fought well. Both U.S. and Confederate soldiers and civilians would have agreed. Even after the defeat at Gettysburg, white southerners called him “the Invincible Lee.” An artillery officer in 1864 called Lee “one of the few great men who ever lived.” In fact, because Lee fought so well, for so long, the South stayed in the war for four years, ensuring the destruction of the South’s infrastructure, not to mention the horrific bloodletting.
The historian Joseph Glatthaar showed that nearly one in four of Lee’s soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia died in battle or of disease. Nearly three out of four of Lee’s soldiers either were killed, died of disease, were wounded, were captured, or were discharged as disabled, numbers the Confederate states could not replace. Lee knew that, and so did Grant.
We know that Lee’s success on the battlefield prolonged the war and led to more suffering for the South. Of course, that’s not how I saw it as a child. I saw Lee’s battlefield success and dignity in defeat as signs of his high character. Yet as a child and well into my army career, I failed to look at the two issues that today sear my soul: treason and slavery.”
P. 216-217
No other enemy officer in American history was responsible for the deaths of more U.S. Army soldiers than Robert E. Lee. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia killed more than one in three and wounded more than half of all U.S. casualties. In the last year of the war, Lee’s army killed or wounded 127,000 U.S. Army soldiers.
Note: May 13, 1865, at the last land battle of the Civil War, Battle of Palmito Ranch, Union soldier John Jefferson Williams of the 34th Indiana becomes the final soldier killed in the Civil War. Recognized as the last casualty of the war, while other claims say soldiers died later that month.
In February 2008, in a suburb of Richmond, Sam White is trying to clean a 140 year old Civil War cannonball with a wire brush. He has 18 other cannonballs in his driveway at the time. A spark makes the gunpowder go off; the blast sends shrapnel through a roof a ¼ mile away, straight through someone’s front porch. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms evacuated a couple dozen houses for two days while they took everything else he had around the house & detonated it.
The final count is ongoing. September 2019, cannonballs were found along Folly Beach, South Carolina after Hurricane Dorian, just laying there in the sand. In 2016 after Hurricane Matthew 16 cannonballs were found at the same location.
Note: Robert Smalls sails to freedom today in 1862.
woods are all on fire in places….
For now, a tree caught in flames becomes a horizon. Dead center into a sky where nothing else goes. How you can see all around a thing then down the center. At its center lay darkness. Sometimes it’s better to look around a thing, not directly at it– that way you can get the edges of the thing to see where the center is.
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