Day 77. May 16, 1862.
77
a sense of impending doom pervaded….
May Friday 16 1862
It is quite cloudy this morning. Some appearance for rain but did not rain much some little. We camped near a Grist Mill last night. The boys helped themselves to the flour they had Slap Jacks.* We came in took up the line of march at 6.o.clock. We passed on through Flint hill town. We came on to Gains cross Roads where we was haulted for awhile. The rebel cavalry was scouting around. This morning our cavalry made a scout out. They discovered some 3 to 400 rebel cavalry and came up and attacked our cavalry. Wounded two our men killed one horse our men took two prisners. They belong to the R Cavalry. Co. A. of the 110 went out in time to save our cavalry from being taken Prisners. We moved on about 1 ¼ mile and camped for the night in the woods. The 2 Brigade came up this afternoon
*Otherwise known as flapjacks: flour, water, batter about an inch thick, over a fire, one side then the other. Not unusual this is all men had to eat for weeks at a stretch.
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 119 (Note: William Henry Herndon, 1818-1891, was Lincoln’s law partner & biographer)
“Mr. Lincoln’s perceptions,” said Herndon, in a speech after Lincoln’s death, “were slow, cold, clear and exact. Everything came to him in its precise shape and colour. To some men the world of matter and of man comes ornamented with beauty, life and action, and hence no more or less false and inexact. No lurking illusion or other error, false in itself, and clad for the moment in robes of splendour, ever passed undetected or unchallenged over the threshold of his mind—that point that divides vision from the realm and home of thought. Names to him were nothing, and titles naught—assumption always standing back abashed at his cold, intellectual glare. Neither his perceptions nor intellectual visions were perverted, distorted or diseased. He saw all things through a perfect mental lens. There was no diffraction or refraction there. He was not impulsive, fanciful, or imaginative, but calm and precise.’”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
“August 12th.—I see the President almost every day, as I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town. He never sleeps at the White House during the hot season, but has quarters at a healthy location some three miles north of the city, the Soldier’s home, a United States military establishment. I saw him this morning about 8½ coming in to business, riding on Vermont avenue, near L street. He always has a company of twenty-five or thirty cavalry, with sabres drawn and held upright over their shoulders. They say the guard was against his personal wish, but he let his counselors have their way. The party makes no great show in uniform or horses. Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good-sized, easy-going gray horse, is dress’d in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty, wears a black stiff hat, and looks about as ordinary in attire, &c., as the commonest man. A lieutenant, with yellow straps, rides at his left, and following behind, two by two, come the cavalry men, in their yellow-striped jackets. They are generally going at a slow trot, as that is the pace set them by the one they wait upon. The sabres and accoutrements clank, and the entirely unornamental cortege as it trots towards Lafayette square arouses no sensation, only some curious stranger stops and gazes. I see very plainly ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones. Sometimes the President goes and comes in an open barouche. The cavalry always accompany him, with drawn sabres. Often I notice as he goes out evenings—and sometimes in the morning, when he returns early—he turns off and halts at the large and handsome residence of the Secretary of War, on K street, and holds conference there. If in his barouche, I can see from my window he does not alight, but sits in his vehicle, and Mr. Stanton comes out to attend him. Sometimes one of his sons, a boy of ten or twelve, accompanies him, riding at his right on a pony. Earlier in the summer I occasionally saw the President and his wife, toward the latter part of the afternoon, out in a barouche, on a pleasure ride through the city. Mrs. Lincoln was dress’d in complete black, with a long crepe veil. The equi-page is of the plainest kind, only two horses, and they nothing extra. They pass’d me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully, as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happen’d to be directed steadily in my eye. He bow’d and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 732-734
Note: Lincoln’s eyes were hazel gray. My favorite shot of him is with his arms crossed, taken in 1863 by Lewis E. Walker. This is him. You can see what a determined man he was. Another favorite is the last picture taken, where he sits with a slight smile.
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years Carl Sandburg 1954 P. 401
“A New York lawyer, George Templeton Strong, wrote in his diary of hearing Lincoln say “thar” for “there,” “git” for “get,” “ye” for “you,” “heered” for “heard,” “one of ’em” for “one of them,” “wa-al” for “well,” once hearing the sentence, “I haint been caught lyin’ yet, and I don’t mean to be.” Strong wrote of hearing the President read to a group of men a victory telegram from Pea Ridge, Missouri, and with an undignified elation, the preface: “Here’s the dispatch. Now, as the showman says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this remarkable specimen is the celebrated he-goat of the mountings, and he makes the following noise, to wit.’” Strong wrote, too: “He is a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, a gorilla, in respect of outward polish, but a most sensible, straightforward old codger. The best president we have had since old Jackson’s time.” Strong asked mercy for a seaman he believed wrongfully convicted of manslaughter and heard the President: “It must be referred to the Attorney General, but I guess it will be all right, for me and the Attorney General’s very chicken hearted!”
One Englishman wrote of his meeting in Lincoln “two bright dreamy eyes that seem to gaze through you without looking at you.” Hay said of Lincoln’s gaze at one suspicious character, “He looked through him to the buttons on the back of his coat.’”
P. 402
Gustave Koerner wrote, “Something about the man, the face, is unfathomable.” Congressman Henry Laurens Dawes of Massachusetts said early in the administration: “There is something in his face which I cannot understand. He is great. We can safely trust the Union to him.” And later he would remember Lincoln’s face as “a title-page of anxiety and distress.” His counselors found him “calmer and clear-sighted” than they. “The political sagacity of no other man was ever equal to that which enabled him to gather around him in earnest support of his administration, rivalries, opposing purposes, conflicting theories, and implacable enmities, which would have rent asunder any other administration. He grew wiser and broader and stronger as difficulties thickened and perils multiplied, till the end found him the wonder in our history. I could never quite fathom his thoughts. But as I saw how he overcame obstacles and escaped entanglements, it grew upon me that he was wiser than the men around him, that the nation had no other man for the place to which he was assigned by the Great Disposer.’”
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 123
“When we put ourselves back into the period, we realize that it was not at all inevitable to think of it as Lincoln thought, and we come to see that Lincoln’s conception of the course and the meaning of the Civil War was indeed an interpretation that he partly took over from others but that he partly made others accept, and in the teeth of a good deal of resistance on the part of the North itself. If you are tempted to suspect that the Lincoln myth is a backward-reading invention of others, a closer acquaintance with the subject will convince you that something like the reverse is true.”
Note: May 15, 1862, Drewry’s Bluff Battle on the James River:
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. 427
“Frequent rains had impeded operations during April, even heavier rains bogged down the armies during May. The only significant action took place on the water. With Johnston’s retreat, Norfolk and its navy yard were no longer tenable. The Confederates blew up everything there of military value– including the Virginia– and pulled out. The Monitor led a flotilla of five gunboats up the James River. Their captains dreamed of emulating Farragut by running the river batteries and steaming on to level their guns at Richmond. Confederate officials began packing the archives and preparing to leave the city. But they soon unpacked. On May 15 the batteries at Drewry’s Bluff seven miles below Richmond stopped the gunboats. The Monitor proved ineffective because her guns could not be elevated enough to hit the batteries on the ninety-foot bluff. Rebel cannons punished the other boats with a plunging fire while sharpshooters along the banks picked off Yankee sailors. The fleet gave up; Richmond breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Despite the gleam of cheer afforded by the battle of Drewry’s Bluff, a sense of impending doom pervaded the South. McClellan’s army approached to within six miles of Richmond, while reports of defeats and retreats arrived almost daily from the West. In the crisis atmosphere created by these setbacks during the spring of 1862, the southern Congress enacted conscription and martial law. Internal disaffection increased; the Confederate dollar plummeted. During these same months a confident Union government released political prisoners, suspended recruiting, and placed northern war finances on a sound footing. In contrapuntal fashion, developments on the homefront responded to the rhythm of events on the battlefield.”
How the South Could Have Won the Civil War: The Fatal Errors That Led to Confederate Defeat Bevin Alexander P. 59-60
“By May 1862 Jackson’s little army in the Shenandoah Valley represented the only ray of hope for the Confederacy. At the end of April, New Orleans, the South’s largest city and most important commercial center, fell to the U.S. Navy. Earlier in the month the Confederacy had lost a great battle at Shiloh in Tennessee. The upper portion of the Mississippi, along with Memphis, had fallen to Union troops. Nashville and most of Tennessee had been lost. The senior commander in the West, Albert Sidney Johnston, had been killed at Shiloh. British Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley wrote that by the time the Confederacy lost Memphis and the battle of Shiloh, “the Confederate cause in the West was doomed.”
In the East the situation seemed just as bleak. Union General George McClellan had finally advanced to within twenty miles of the Confederate capital. Meanwhile, the South had abandoned Norfolk and scuttled the ironclad Virginia, freeing Union gunboats to steam up the James. Only batteries on Drewry’s Bluff, six miles below Richmond, barred passage of the gunboats right up to the capital’s docks. Military stores were removed from Richmond; the archives were packed and ready to go.
Thus Robert E. Lee wrote Jackson with urgency on May 16: “Whatever movement you make against Banks, do it speedily, and if successful drive him back towards the Potomac, and create the impression, as far as possible, that you design threatening that line.”
Jackson was already moving to do just that. Banks had withdrawn to Strasburg, where he posted 7,400 of his men to build strong entrenchments facing the Valley Pike, down which he now feared Ewell or Jackson, or both, might attack. Banks placed 1,000 men at Front Royal, ten miles east of Strasburg on the Manassas Gap Railroad. Jackson had ordered Ewell to follow Jackson down the Valley, but now he needed to deal with General Johnston, who wanted Ewell to reinforce the defense of Richmond. Jackson wired the senior commander that Banks was fortifying the Strasburg and that the Confederates were moving down the Valley to attack him. Johnston responded that it would be too hazardous to attack in such a situation and that Banks should be left “in his works.” Ewell, Johnston said, should come eastward while Jackson remained to observe Banks.
This was not remotely what Jackson had in mind. He telegraphed Lee: “I am of opinion that an attempt should be made to defeat Banks, but under instructions from General Johnston I do not feel at liberty to make an attack. Please answer by telegraph at once.” Lee responded by authorizing Ewell to remain.
Following Jackson’s orders, Ewell sent his Louisiana brigade– commanded by Richard Taylor, the only son of President Zachary Taylor– from from Conrad’s Store around the base of Massanutten Mountain to New Market. Meanwhile, Jackson’s force moved onto the Valley Pike and marched through Harrisonburg north to New Market.
Note: In a year, the Battle of Champion Hill (or Baker’s Creek, with 32k Union versus 22k Confederate) during the Vicksburg Campaign. Writes Thomas Manning Page, a drummer of the 83rd Ohio & stretcher bearer today observed of a field hospital, “’When I looked in, a man with the chevron of a sergeant was lying pale and motionless on the extended table. On the floor, near the table, stood a wash-tub half full of blood-red water. Beside the tub lay a naked, hairy, blood-stained leg. A number of strange looking tools were scattered over one end of the table, across which ghastly implements, beyond a litter, in one of the chimney corners, I saw a heap of limp, meaty-looking arms and legs. Two surgeons and an assistant were busy over a fresh, quivering stump. One held a bottle and a sponge; another grasped a pair of pincers; the third seemed to be tying a ‘hard knot’ in a piece of thread.”’ Bohemian Life; Or, the Autobiography of a Tramp (1884) Thomas Manning Page P. 58 Hathitrust Digital Library Record 100189419
Captain of Co. A, 97th Illinois on the aftermath of Champion Hill: “We killed so many of the rebel’s horses at Champion hill that we could not move near all their cannons, so today we sent back horses and got them.”
Transcribed from mimeograph copies of the typewritten memoirs of William R. Eddington, found at macoupin.illinoisgenweb.org/military/civilwar/eddingtonwilliamr
in time to save our cavalry from being taken Prisners….
His candyass comes with his candyman roving white slat-boarded van with the inside-only locks, the candy heart shaped blank rounds, the tricked-out shag, mirrored dicso ball, no windows & the rope, tape, & tarp kit. He ticks down the time, waits, ticks, tocks posted up in town, name a town, a field, at a river, pick the river, McClellan does nothing.
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