Day 80. May 19, 1862. – We Saw a Grate Smoke Raise Up: Letters, Diaries, Wires from the Valley of the Late Rebellion

and you have an inkling of this war….

May Monday 19 1862

Cool this morning. We was roused up early this morning. Took up the line of march at 5oclock in the morning for the Rail Road at Cartells Station where we arrived at at 3oclock in the afternoon. We found a Brigade Gen [large blank space takes up half the page]. It is a large Brigade and the ground is fine for camping and along side of the Rail Road it is a very large camp. There is some 25 to 30,000 soldiers at this camp. It makes a very large camp and it looks fine. Gen Shields Division is camped here. The day was quite warm. The water is not very good. We all look as if we have had a hard time this last Winter and this spring. Capt Huyett joined the Regt at this place

Note: They’re getting ready for something.

Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War John R. Kelso Edited by Christopher Grasso P. 180

“During the balance of our journey, which lasted several more days, we suffered a good deal from cold, but never so much as we did on that dreadful night which I have just described. On this night, though I was not at the time aware of the fact, my own toes were severely frosted. Afterwards, my toes became very sore, and the nails of some of them came off. My children had no shoes and were thinly clad. Sometimes they had to walk up long, icy and dangerous hills bare foot, or stand in the snow till I could go back to carry them, after I had driven the team to the top. At last, crossing the Mississippi River at Saint Louis, we reached Illinois, and stopped in a large town called Collinsville, where we found Dr. Hovey and family, and several others of our old friends from Buffalo, who had left there on the first retreat. Here I remained about a week, providing fuel and other necessaries for my family. Then I returned to my regiment. Before I left, however, there was sown in my heart the germ of a great sorrow from which I have never fully recovered.

P. 180-181

But why attempt to describe these things? Language can convey but a faint picture of the terrible scenes through which we have passed; but, the record of those scenes is graven upon our hearts, and, by the deeds of our arms, we will stamp that record in flaming characters, upon the deathless pages of coming years.

And whence, I ask, comes all this wretchedness? What has caused the desolation of our once happy country? Why are the bones of our murdered countrymen bleaching in the sun? The answer is plain. In the midst of our prosperity, the demon Treason was at work. As did Lucifer, of old, plot the destruction of government of heaven itself, so did the leaders of this rebellion plot the destruction of the best government of earth. Deeply corrupted by the fell influences of African Slavery, the wealthy classes of the South came to regard honest labor as disgraceful, wealth as the only necessary virtue, and their own selfish interests as the principal object for which a government should exist.

Their master spirits having long occupied the highest positions in the government, and having luxuriated long in the spoils of office, seeing their rivals, the true sons of freedom, coming into power, resolved to ruin what they could no longer rule. They organized secret societies to secure concert of action, appealed to the low passions of bad men, blinded by misrepresentations the great masses of the poor and the ignorant, united every evil element, blackened the clouds of rebellion, and burst upon us in war’s most terrific storms. You all know the result. We were unprepared. We were driven before the storm, and the ruin we have described came upon us. Buoyed up, however, by a consciousness of the justness of our cause, we have struggled through the darkest hours. We have succeeded in turning back the tide of the rebellion, and again we are in possession of our desolated homes. And now, my fellow countrymen, after all these things, what is our duty? Half a million of our bravest and best comrades have already gone down amid the smoke and the thunders of battle. Shall their blood have been spilled in vain? Shall we now retire from the contest and leave the final great victory to the enemy? Shall we, after all we have suffered, submit to be spurned, with contempt, by the very men who have ruined us? Shall we not rather fall, as our comrades have fallen, on the field of glorious conflict? I believe that I speak to men who feel as I did. We have all suffered too much; and, though some of you are Democrats, while I am a Republican, I am sure we shall not differ in regard to the first great duty that claims our attention– the vigorous prosecution of the war.”

A GLIMPSE OF WAR’S HELL—SCENES.

“In one of the late movements of our troops in the valley, (near Upperville, I think,) a strong force of Moseby’s mounted guerillas attack’d a train of wounded, and the guard of cavalry convoying them. The ambulances contain’d about 60 wounded, quite a number of them officers of rank. The rebels were in strength, and the capture of the train and its partial guard after a short snap was effectually accomplish’d. No sooner had our men surrender’d, the rebels instantly commenced robbing the train and murdering their prisoners, even the wounded. Here is the scene or a sample of it, ten minutes after. Among the wounded officers in the ambulances were one, a lieutenant of regulars, and another of higher rank. These two were dragg’d out on the ground on their backs, and were now surrounded by the guerillas, a demoniac crowd, each member of which was stabbing them in different parts of their bodies. One of the officers had his feet pinn’d firmly to the ground by bayonets stuck through them and thrust into the ground. These two officers, as afterwards found on examination, had receiv’d about twenty such thrusts, some of them through the mouth, face, &c. The wounded had all been dragg’d (to give a better chance also for plunder,) out of their wagons; some had been effectually dispatch’d, and their bodies were lying there lifeless and bloody. Others, not yet dead, but horribly mutilated, were moaning or groaning. Of our men who surrender’d, most had been thus maim’d or slaughter’d.

At this instant a force of our cavalry, who had been following the train at some interval, charged suddenly upon the secesh captors, who proceeded at once to make the best escape they could. Most of them got away, but we gobbled two officers and seventeen men, in the very acts just described. The sight was one which admitted of little discussion, as may be imagined. The seventeen captur’d men and two officers were put under guard for the night, but it was decided there and then that they should die. The next morning the two officers were taken in the town, separate places, put in the centre of the street, and shot. The seventeen men were taken to an open ground, a little one side. They were placed in a hollow square, half-encompass’d by two of our cavalry regiments, one of which regiments had three days before found the bloody corpses of three of their men hamstrung and hung up by the heels to limbs of trees by Moseby’s guerillas, and the other had not long before had twelve men, after surrendering, shot and then hung by the neck to limbs of trees, and jeering inscriptions pinn’d to the breast of one of the corpses, who had been a sergeant. Those three, and those twelve, had been found, I say, by these environing regiments. Now, with revolvers, they form’d the grim cordon of the seventeen prisoners. The latter were placed in the midst of the hollow square, unfasten’d, and the ironical remark made to them that they were now to be given “a chance for themselves.” A few ran for it. But what use? From every side the deadly pills came. In a few minutes the seventeen corpses strew’d the hollow square. I was curious to know whether some of the Union soldiers, some few, (some one or two at least of the youngsters,) did not abstain from shooting on the helpless men. Not one. There was no exultation, very little said, almost nothing, yet every man there contributed his shot.

Multiply the above by scores, aye hundreds—verify it in all the forms that different circumstances, individuals, places, could afford—light it with every lurid passion, the wolf’s, the lion’s lapping thirst for blood—the passionate, boiling volcanoes of human revenge for comrades, brothers slain—with the light of burning farms, and heaps of smutting, smouldering black embers—and in the human heart everywhere black, worse embers, and you have an inkling of this war.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 748-749

Note: “and you have an inkling of this war.” What a line to end on. At one point in the research I lost track of this piece & who it was by. But that last line haunted me for the minute sense I had of the war despite all the research I’d done. How I’d never really know anything but a barely recognizable glimpse here & there, & that only in unguarded moments when it would hit me, a feeling of horror about it, via reading a piece like this. Just a visceral level that’s beyond me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall any of the words of the piece, just the feeling of unknowingness about the war it transported into my body the second I read it. Had no idea where it was in all my photocopies spread around the house in mountainous piles, nor who wrote that piece that pleaded its point, its argument in a way like a legal brief to land on that final sentence. I looked literally almost all day one day, hour after hour. Never found it again. Why? Because I’d already typed it up, wherever I finally found it in the draft. Of course it was Whitman all along.

Ken Burns’s the Civil War: Historians Respond Robert Brent Toplin P. 70 “Noble Women as Well.” Catherine Clinton

(Mary Vaughn February, 1863, from her plantation named Sunny Side)

“I do not think I am so much more sinful than others that he [God] should clutch my heart strings with his iron hand and tear them one by one asunder. First he took my dear greyhaired Father who had always been so dear and indulgent to me, but Charlie [her husband] was left to me, and well did he fill the place of Father and husband to me. The little Willie [her infant son], still I did not murmur, but now, oh how, can I lift my voice in praise to Him who has taken from me the one hope of my life. I don’t think I have had one thought apart from Charlie since we married. My every wish has been to try in some measure to return his devotion and untiring kindness. I cannot for the life of me realize my forlorn situation. He must come home yet. It cannot be true he has left me to suffer and endure alone. He always would shield me from everything like trouble and annoyance, how I can walk the dark future alone and unassisted by his strong arm of protection. I have but one wish and that is to die. You speak of my baby. Why, sister, will not God smite me there too? Will he not darken my young life to the utter most. I will crush back the love, welling up in the depths of my heart for the little one, so when God lays his chilling hand upon her limbs, it will not craze me. I have not read my bible since Charlie died. My tears and feelings seem frozen. I know, I feel but one thing, I am alone, utterly desolate.”

What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History Edward L. Ayers P. 164

“The righteous invocation of justice, history, and progress on behalf of a purpose that is also a struggle for power is dangerous. It can create a self-righteous terror in opposition that believes itself to be on the side of God, of race, and of history. Conflict can be escalated morally as well as militarily. It was no accident that the Ku Klux Klan clothed itself in the garb of militant Christianity. The claim of the moral high ground by the opponents of black freedom and equality may have done more damage to the United States in the long run than the political and economic failures of the late 1860s and early 1870s. For generations, a false memory associated with racial progress with a deluded dream, with hypocrisy, greed, corruption, and incompetence. That distorted memory has proved to be Reconstruction’s most dangerous legacy.”

we all look as if we have had a hard time….

You can call anything a mystery, tie the visible edges with a bow the size of the corner of a room at Appomattox, a corner that you can’t hold in your arms no matter how far you stretch them out. You can talk around anything that ever existed and call it unknowable. That way it stays unfalsifiable. An event now several feet from history, that half inch humus accumulates on top, and we’re soon several hundred years outside it. Like there was someone, somewhere, N or S of the Mason Dixon who took, then went, with that secret to the grave. A shovel-load of dirt over the body and call it a day. That there’s something out there laying in an unmarked grave…. There, just beyond that copse of trees.

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