1. Fremantle landed at the last point where it was possible to enter the Confederate States “legitimately.” All Southern ports were by now under Northern blockade. But by landing in Mexico and crossing the Texas border, Fremantle was able to start his odyssey without violating his sense of protocol. Other less sensitive foreigners were turning the same loophole to great commercial advantage—hence the seventy ships anchored off the Rio Grande. Seven months later, the North closed off this last Southern link with the outside world, and Fremantle would have had either to bury his scruples or forego his trip. On November 2, the Federals landed a force at the mouth of the Rio Grande and took Brownsville four days later. The area was lost to the Confederates for good.
2. Fremantle’s diary is perhaps the best of all sources on what the Confederate soldier actually looked like. He was a far cry from the romantic figure in gray and gold braid that is usually pictured today. Never was there a more motley army—hardly anybody dressed alike and very few even wore gray. Thus, Fremantle finds Duff’s cavalry wearing flannel shirts and high black hats; the 3rd Texas Infantry in an assortment of French képis, wide-awakes and Mexican hats; Pyron’s regiment at Galveston in “every variety of costume”; Walker’s Division in Louisiana wearing ragged civilian clothes; Liddell’s Arkansas brigade marching by their general in shirt sleeves; Pender’s Division in Virginia sporting every shade of gray and brown; Hood’s troops at Chambersburg, ragged and dirty, carrying only old pieces of carpet, in which they rolled up the few odds and ends they used on the march.
The Confederate Army’s crazy-quilt appearance, of course, stemmed from the blockade and the insignificant Southern textile industry. There was some effort to develop a standard uniform at the start of the war, and some units, like the Maryland Line and the Washington Artillery, looked as natty as the Federals, but by the time Fremantle arrived practically the only standard equipment in the Southern Army was the toothbrush, which, curiously, the typical Confederate soldier sported in his buttonhole.
3. In a way, the ambulance was the jeep of the Civil War. As yet, it enjoyed no special status as a conveyance for the wounded, and there was no question of ethics in using one as a sort of all-purpose vehicle. People spoke of “good” and “bad” ambulances, and, as usual, the generals had the best.
4. Brigadier General Barnard E. Bee died in the Civil War’s first big battle at Bull Run, but he made a greater contribution than many a general who lived through Appomattox. As his soldiers retreated in confusion up the Henry House hill before the advancing Union troops, he rushed up to General Thomas J. Jackson, who was standing with his brigade at the top of the hill, backstopping the Confederate line of defense. “General, they’re beating us back!” cried Bee. “Then, sir, we will give them the bayonet,” was Jackson’s reply. Completely inspired, Bee turned to his retreating troops and shouted, “Look! There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!” Bee was shot dead within minutes, but his words gave Jackson an imperishable nickname.
5. The early days of the Civil War found many privates living like generals—and the generals often living like privates. “Gentlemen rankers” of the 1st South Carolina Regiment marched with their personal slaves trotting along in the rear. The 3rd Alabama traveled with one hundred body servants to prepare meals and handle the regiment’s housekeeping chores. At this point, it was often considered poor taste for a well-to-do man even to want to be an officer. In sharp contrast, most of the top Confederate leaders lived in Spartan simplicity. Lee, for instance, usually refused to stay in a house when in the field, insisting instead on an ordinary army tent.
6. The Northern blockade posed some legal ticklers. One was the status of the Rio Grande, which served both the Confederate States and neutral Mexico. About five weeks before Fremantle’s arrival, the Union Navy captured the English-owned Peterhoff, a ship bound for Matamoros with cargo for both Mexico and the Confederacy. British jingoists (and, of course, all Southerners) were indignant, claiming that the Peterhoff was a neutral ship going to a neutral destination. But the British government declined to go to the mat on the issue. Ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Peterhoff should be freed, the goods bound for Mexico should be released, and the material destined for the Confederacy should be kept as legitimate contraband.
7. Fremantle was visiting Mexico at the start of a French experiment in imperialism, which culminated in setting up the puppet Emperor Maximilian. Two years before, internal disorder and financial chaos in Mexico had reached a point where France, Britain and Spain had decided jointly to intervene to safeguard their nationals’ interests. In early 1862 all three countries occupied several ports along the coast. France, however, had far more ambitious objectives than collecting a few debts; Napoleon III was interested in a full-scale colonial venture. By April, the British and Spanish had pulled out, and the French had their fingers in everything. Napoleon III’s troops slowly fanned out over the country, with the Mexicans under Juárez fighting back every inch of the way. The French were checked in 1862 at Puebla, but by the time of Fremantle’s arrival, they were on the march again.
The Mexican “victory” at Puebla, which Fremantle helped celebrate, was insignificant, and by June the French had captured Mexico City and established their own government. The following year, the puppet Maximilian was installed as Emperor, and the French subjugation of the country continued. But the Confederacy’s doom was Maximilian’s doom. As soon as the Civil War was over, Washington demanded that the French withdraw their troops. The idea of facing Grant and Lee’s hardened veterans fighting on the same side was too much, and the French quickly acceded. By early 1867, the last French troops had gone; by May, the deserted Maximilian was captured by the resurgent Mexicans; by June, he was executed.
8. The pre-dinner cocktail may seem out of place as a mid-nineteenth century frontier custom, but actually Washington Irving referred to the drink as early as 1809 in Knickerbocker.
9. Cocktail parties for Fremantle were more than good fellowship; they were good politics. The feeling was growing that the South would never make it without foreign aid, and by now almost any English visitor was hopefully given VIP treatment. Fremantle basked in the favors that flowed. He was serenaded with “God Save the Queen”; he found that everybody toasted the crown; on trains he was allowed to travel in the ladies’ car; in hotels he sometimes could even have a bed to himself. Other visiting Englishmen were treated in the same manner.
Hospitality was especially lavish during these spring days of ’63. Foreign recognition seemed tantalizingly near, so near that perhaps just one more favorable impression might do the trick. U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams had warned Washington that Britain might recognize the South if there was no big Union victory by February. None had occurred; instead there was another Union disaster by May. Lee triumphed at Chancellorsville, and British Foreign Minister Lord Russell was reported to have asked Palmerston, the Prime Minister, whether the time had not arrived for intervention. Gladstone increased the optimism by a speech at Newcastle praising Jefferson Davis for creating a new nation.
All hopes were dashed at Gettysburg. The British government suddenly heard Washington’s protests about the Confederate rams being built in the Laird shipyards. Previously Palmerston had maintained the ships were destined for the Turkish Navy; now the masquerade was tacitly acknowledged, and the British government appeased both Washington and the Laird stockholders by taking over the boats for the Royal Navy. Meanwhile, in France, Napoleon III also recovered his hearing and complied with demands from Washington to stop the construction of some rams that were quietly being built in French shipyards.
Actually, the South was never as close to British recognition as Confederate leaders hoped. The British Liberal Party was in power, and once slavery became the main issue of the war, it could never afford to recognize Southern independence. On the other hand, the Conservative Party, which seemed such a good bet to most Southerners, was certainly nothing to bank on. It contained many Southern sympathizers, but these were never in the saddle, and official party policy was definitely hands-off. The Conservatives were all for strict neutrality (which made them sometimes look pro-South), and all for anything to needle the Liberals in power. But that was as far as it went. As William Devereaux Jones puts it in his penetrating analysis of the Conservative position, “Party policy was not founded on sentiment or bonds of sympathy, but on party tradition and political expediency.” (See “The British Conservatives and the American Civil War,” American Historical Review, April 1953, pp. 527–543.)
10. The life of an English consul in Matamoros at this time could wreck any man’s health—particularly since no pay went with the job. The town swarmed with smugglers and adventurers seeking quick profits in trade across the border with the blockaded Confederacy. Local officials were quick to put the bite on these fly-by-nights, and in an era when the flag followed commerce, the consul was constantly besieged with demands for protection. On the other hand, Don Pablo’s sudden illness must be considered in light of the way he and Fremantle spent the day before: six and one-half hours of wine-drinking at Mr. Maloney’s and a night at the Grand Fandango—all in all, a good foundation for a colossal hangover.
11. Every good Confederate had a pet contempt for Yankee military prowess. It ran this way: the Northern soldier was a clerk, a drudge, a dreary bluenose, who had no spirit or red blood in his veins; the Southern soldier, on the other hand, was a dashing cavalier, equally adept in the art of war or living graciously. Actually, the tables were sometimes completely turned. Take Chancellorsville. The Confederate line-up included Lee, who never had liquor at his mess, Jackson, who wouldn’t touch the stuff, and Stuart, who had promised his father he’d never drink. Opposing this trio was Hooker, with a hard-drinking staff and a headquarters that resembled a brothel.
12. Some Southerners were anything but ardent Confederates. The South, like the North, found many of its citizens cool to the war and some who even favored the other side. Fremantle spotlights the Germans in Texas, but Union sympathizers were numerous in parts of Georgia, in the Appalachians, in western Virginia and in supposedly pro-Southern Maryland. In Tennessee tension reached such a point that Bragg once forbade his men to accept pies from local citizens for fear they were poisoned. Maryland’s coolness was especially galling. Lee had marched in to “liberate” the state in 1862, only to find nobody wanted to be liberated. This was quite contrary to the stirring lyrics of “Maryland, My Maryland,” which went in part:
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb—
Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes—she burns! She’ll come! She’ll come!
Maryland, My Maryland!
The verse was soon parodied by lines which ran:
We can’t stay here to meet the foe.
We might get shot and killed, you know.
But when we’re safe, we’ll brag and blow,
Maryland, my Maryland.
13. The Confederate capture of the U.S.S. Harriet Lane was the climax of perhaps the wildest New Year’s Eve Galveston ever had. It all began when the Federal fleet seized Galveston in the fall of ’62. This was followed up in December when 260 men of the 42nd Massachusetts Volunteers were sent to occupy the town. The force was completely inadequate, and they made matters worse by penning themselves up on the town wharf.
The Confederates quickly struck back. General John Magruder had just taken charge in Texas and was full of ideas. He decided on a joint sea-land operation against the Federal troops and ships in the harbor. Late New Year’s Eve, a large Southern force crept stealthily over the unguarded causeway that connected Galveston with the mainland. Meanwhile, two Confederate gunboats, the Neptune and the Bayou City, edged quietly up the coast from Houston. These were commanded by Major Leon Smith, an old California steamboat skipper flatteringly described by Fremantle as a “seafaring man.” On board were some 360 cavalry sharpshooters hiding behind cotton bales.
Soon after midnight, the Confederates on shore ushered in the New Year with a sudden blaze of gunfire. But it began to look like a Southern fiasco when they discovered their scaling ladders couldn’t reach the wharf where the Massachusetts boys grimly held out. Then, with a crash, the cavalry-manned flotilla joined the fray. While the Harriet Lane literally skipped cannon balls across the water at the onrushing gunboats, the Bayou City ran alongside the Union ship and the Texas cavalrymen swarmed aboard. The Harriet Lane struck her colors, the Union troops ashore surrendered, and a truce was called while Commodore Renshaw of the Federal fleet pondered an ultimatum for the surrender of his other ships.
Renshaw refused and ordered his ships to leave. He may or may not have formally called off the truce, but he was certainly in a hurry. In his haste, he ran his own ship onto a mudflat. He ordered her scuttled. Still overhasty, he set off the charge too soon and blew himself up with his ship. All in all, it was a glorious New Year’s celebration, agreed the Confederate fans who had come up from Houston on a special spectator boat chartered for the occasion.
1. Fremantle was probably “taken” when he managed to exchange his gold for Confederate dollars at a rate of only 4 to 1. He himself notes that a month later (when, if anything, the Confederate dollar should have been strengthened by Chancellorsville) he could get 6 to 1 in Charleston. But that was nothing, compared to what he could have had three months later. A week after Gettysburg the exchange rate went to 10 to 1. By December ’64, the rate had deteriorated to 30 to 1. On January 11, 1865, it was 60 to 1; a week later 70 to 1; and after that nobody was interested.
2. Perhaps out of an Englishman’s natural respect for the judiciary, Fremantle never identifies the judge who became his assistant mule driver. Longstreet, however, is not so reticent. In his outspoken memoirs, the General refers to Colonel Fremantle’s magistrate, and identifies him as Judge Hyde, “whom I had met years before while in army service on the Texas frontier.” (James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, 1896, p. 344.)
3. Fremantle was a great booster of Southern womanhood, and judging from his diary, the Confederacy at least had no shortage of belles. At Galveston, he found the ladies “pretty.” At Shreveport, he thought that General Kirby Smith’s wife was an “extremely pretty” woman. At Jackson, he thought the ladies were “pretty,” but some of them were depressingly shy. At Shelbyville, the ladies were “very pretty.” At the Robertsons’ party in Charleston, the ladies were (as usual) “extremely pretty.” At Winchester, he found girls as agreeable as they were “good-looking.” Even in Yankee Chambersburg, the women were “pretty,” although this time they were also “sour” and “disagreeable.”
4. When Fremantle encountered Major General John B. Magruder he was meeting the Confederacy’s most elegant general. Coming from an old Virginia family, Magruder attended West Point, distinguished himself in the Mexican War, and went on to a career of wonderful European junkets. He took to international society immediately. Few U.S. military figures have circulated through more drawing rooms, balanced more teacups, charmed more ladies with more small talk. He was full of foppish mannerisms—and had the clothes to go with them. Usually he wore red-striped pants, a crimson-lined coat and a black cocked hat with a huge plume. Small wonder he was called “Prince John.”
Magruder’s star quickly rose at the start of the war. He won the first Confederate victory at Big Bethel, where his 1800 troops threw back a larger Union force. He did even better early in the Peninsular campaign. At Yorktown, his 12,000 men bluffed 75,000 Union troops, until Joe Johnston’s army could come to his aid. Then his star fell. He was late hitting McClellan at Savage’s Station during the Seven Days’ Battle. He was badly repulsed at Malvern Hill during the same campaign. Worse still, he was rumored to have been drinking.
Magruder was officially vindicated, but he lost his command and was transferred to Texas. There, he died on the vine, although his flair and dash put him briefly back in the limelight when he twice used Confederate soldiers to beat the Union Navy—once at Galveston, later at the Sabine Pass. When the war ended, Magruder experimented briefly with exile in Mexico, but he soon came back—Mexico was obviously no place for elegant, precious “Prince John” Magruder.
5. Of all the Northern generals, McClellan was the leader most liked by the Confederates. Certainly, this was partly because they were never afraid of him. Also, McClellan respected Southern private property and opposed abolition of slavery. In addition, he reminded people of Napoleon, and the French military tradition enjoyed a great vogue in the South at this time. Most of all, McClellan may have appealed to Southerners because he, alone among the Northern generals, thought of war very much the way the Confederates did. He too wanted to fight not a war but a tournament—full of protocol, ritual and little niceties. When he launched his Peninsular campaign, McClellan made a great point of sending Mrs. Lee through the lines by carriage to Richmond. It’s hard to imagine generals like Pope or Sheridan doing the same.
6. As the most enthusiastic party boy in the Confederate Army, General Magruder went in heavily for charades, parlor games and amateur theatricals. These tastes served him well. Early in 1862, his small command at Yorktown suddenly found itself face to face with McClellan’s whole army, which had been brought down the Chesapeake Bay, landed on the Virginia shore, and was advancing on Richmond from the east. The main Confederate Army was miles away, expecting an attack from the north and west. Magruder’s job was to hold off 75,000 men with 12,000 men until reinforcements could arrive. He did it by staging a theatrical masterpiece. His officers shouted commands to imaginary units. A few carts rumbled back and forth over the same hidden stretch of road, looking like an endless wagon train. The same soldiers marched by a clearing in sight of the Union force, went back out of sight to the starting point, then marched by again and again. The Union Army stopped and cautiously laid siege: the Confederate reinforcements arrived in time.
He repeated this stunt on an even larger scale when Lee launched his great counterattack that wrecked McClellan’s campaign. Lee had put his whole strength on the left of his line, leaving at the right end only Magruder and some 20,000 soldiers to discourage 100,000 Union troops from breaking through to Richmond. This time, Magruder used all the old tricks plus meaningless bugle calls, campfires for nonexistent soldiers, and an endless variety of sound effects. In the face of such opposition, McClellan didn’t dare launch a counterattack of his own. He retreated instead to the James River, ending the threat to Richmond. Seen in this light, the talent show Magruder put on for Fremantle must have been very impressive.
7. It’s easy to see why Fremantle found it hard to tear himself away from General Magruder’s party. Magruder was a great Anglophile and liked nothing better than to impress British officers. On one occasion before the war, when entertaining some British officers at his mess, Magruder had begged and borrowed all the gold plate, cut glass and rich furniture he could find for entertaining the Englishmen. However, he assured them that these luxuries were but the debris of the former splendor of his mess. Later, one of the dazzled Englishmen remarked to the general, “We do not wish to be inquisitive, but we have been so much impressed by this magnificence that we are constrained to believe that American officers are paid handsomely. What is your monthly pay?”
“Damned if I know,” sighed Prince John indifferently, and turning to his servant, he asked, “Jim, what is my monthly pay?”
The latter was discreetly silent, perhaps because the problem of remembering $65 a month was hard for him too.
8. Fremantle throws fascinating light on slavery and the way the institution was regarded by both white and Negro during the Civil War. In some respects, the picture seems brighter than might be expected. On several occasions, we see an almost minstrel-show world of Negroes happily parading about in clothes far finer than the white folks wore. We also have the interesting picture of slaves earning good money on the side. For instance, there was John, General Scurry’s body servant, who earned high pay as a barber; and there was Nelson, the slave at Natchez, who even paid his owner $4.50 a week to be allowed to run his own livery stable. In addition, there’s considerable evidence of Negroes who would rather stay slaves than be free. Some expressed hatred of the Yankees, and others even captured their liberators.
But all the good is swamped by the bad. The very idea of slavery so repelled Fremantle that he never could swallow the pill, despite his inclinations to support the South. It was the same story all over the world, and Fremantle shows that the Confederates themselves realized their propaganda handicap. But somehow, with the irony of a Greek tragedy, they struggled along, sensing that “their peculiar institution” might ruin them, yet never knowing to rid themselves of it.
9. Texas at this time abounded with “filibusters”—adventurers who cashed in on chaos south of the border by organizing expeditions within the United States to participate (at a price) in Latin American revolutions.
1. Fremantle arrived just as inflation began to wreck the Confederate economy. The price of a stage ticket wasn’t all that was going up. He found coffee had risen to $7 a pound in San Antonio, and when he sold his trunk in that town he received $32 for a very old pair of boots, $42 for five shirts and $25 for an old overcoat. In an agricultural economy it was natural, but today it seems strange that food still ran very low—he reports that he could get a good meal for a dollar.
All this was just the start of the big toboggan ride. Corn meal was still $17 a bushel when Fremantle made his visit; by January 1865, it had risen to $75 a bushel. In the same period, coal rose from $20.50 to $100 a ton; wood from $30 to $100 a cord; butter from $3.50 to $20 a pound; bacon from $1.50 to $20 a pound. Whiskey ran about $28 to $35 a bottle during Fremantle’s visit; the sky was the limit two years later. Near the end, prices soared at a hideous pace. On January 6, 1865, flour was quoted at $500 a barrel; on January 14 a barrel cost $1000; on January 18, $1250; on March 20, $1500. The whole terrifying picture is vividly depicted in statistics carefully kept by J.B. Jones, an unsung clerk in the Confederate War Department, who with morbid exactness recorded for history the collapse of his own standard of living.
2. The South was magnificently equipped if the war could have been won by singing. No soldiers ever liked to sing more than the Confederates. None ever had more bloodthirsty songs to sing. For instance, take “The Texan Marseillaise,” a little number that Fremantle undoubtedly heard during his San Antonio song-fest. Its somewhat uncompromising chorus ran:
Arm! Arm! ye Southern braves!
Scatter yon Vandal hordes!
Despots and bandits, fitting food
For vultures and your swords.
Another favorite ballad carried the boastful title, “You Can Never Win Them Back.” One verse is enough to show the mood:
We may fall before the fire of your legions,
Paid in gold for murd’rous hire—bought allegiance!
But for every drop that’s shed
You shall leave a mound of dead;
And the vultures shall be fed in our regions.
These songs were typical. In the quiet of an evening campfire, Johnny Reb might softly croon “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” but when stirred to mass singing, he was in no gentle mood. Even “Dixie” took a beating. Most versions were a far cry from those familiar Uncle Remus-type words about being “born in early on a frosty mornin’.” More likely, the Confederates lustily roared out a verse like this:
Strong as lions, swift as eagles,
Back to their kennels hound those beagles!
To arms! To arms! To arms! in Dixie!
Cut the unequal bonds asunder!
Let them hence each other plunder!
To arms! To arms! To arms! in Dixie!
Advance the flag of Dixie!
Hurrah! Hurrah!
For Dixie land we’ll take our stand,
To live or die for Dixie!
3. General Grant said the Confederate draft robbed the cradle and the grave. The law covered all men from 16 to 60; those from 18 to 45 were tagged for regular military duty, and the rest for the home guard. But it wasn’t as tough as it sounds. States Rights governors like Vance, of North Carolina, and Brown, of Georgia, insisted that even the most petty state officials be exempt; doctors handed out certificates of disability by the bushel; local judges were happy to grant writs of habeas corpus, demanding release of draftees. At the time of Fremantle’s visit, only 700 conscripts a month were available even in Virginia, comparatively a patriotic hotbed. In 1864, the Conscript Bureau drafted only 13,000 out of some 150,000 men examined.
But the biggest weakness of the system was a provision in the law which allowed a drafted man to send a substitute instead of himself. This appalling rule led to endless abuses and chicanery. The price of a substitute rose from $500 in 1862 to $6000 by November ’63, and many a seedy character made a handsome profit by selling himself as a substitute, deserting and reselling, and so on. The original draftee escaped service, the substitute made money, but the army suffered incalculable damage. Finally, in December ’63, the substitute law was abolished, but the Confederate draft system was so full of holes by this time that it never performed the job it was designed to do. Nor were matters helped by the attitude of the volunteers; as one put it, “The pride of the volunteers was sorely tried by conscripts, the most despised class in the Army … they could not bear the thought of having these men for comrades and felt the flag insulted when claimed by one of them as ‘his flag.’ ” (Southern Historical Society Papers, November 1876, p. 230.)
4. Most Southerners regarded the war as a crusade against the arbitrary exercise of power by some men over others. They tried to make everything they did conform to this lofty purpose. Accordingly, officers were to be elected rather than appointed, and in this way man’s right to guide his own destiny would somehow be preserved. The result was chaos, and by 1863 the Confederacy had reluctantly buried its scruples and returned to the usual way of running an army.
5. By the time of Fremantle’s visit, the Southern cotton crop was only 500,000 bales a year, as against a normal 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 bales before the war. This was no war shortage; it was deliberate policy. The Confederate government was convinced that cotton made the world go round, that the economic survival of every industrial country depended on a steady supply—after all, 20 per cent of the working people of Britain alone were in the cotton-spinning industry. Therefore, why not force foreign intervention by holding up all shipments? Other countries would have to come in, or be ruined. The argument seemed unbeatable, and the embargo was launched.
Hardship and unemployment followed abroad, as predicted … but no intervention. It was all a hideous miscalculation, and the South was left without the one source of revenue that might have kept Confederate finances on a sound basis. By 1863, thoughtful Southerners winced to recall that just five years before, Senator James H. Hammond had thundered, “You dare not make war upon cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it! Cotton is King!”
6. Confederate railroads were often more perilous than the battlefield. They were usually laid out carelessly, and there were virtually no supplies for maintenance or repair. At the very time Fremantle was rattling across Texas, some Southern railroad presidents gathered in Richmond to appraise the problem. They decided they needed 49,500 tons of rails a year to keep the lines in trim—but total mill capacity in the South was only 20,000 tons, and most of this was needed to make guns. The situation, in short, was hopeless.
7. Brigadier General William R. Scurry (ultimately killed at Jenkin’s Ferry) was one of the readiest extemporaneous speakers in Texas. Once he went to Shreveport driving an ox cart, and arrived there begrimed with the dirt of the road, to find a public celebration going on, and a number of speakers holding forth. Somebody pushed Scurry forward and called for a speech. He poured forth a torrent of eloquence that held the crowd spellbound until some exuberant spirit yelled at the top of his voice, “Go it, Dirty-shirt!” Scurry went it.
8. Sam Houston was deposed as governor of Texas on March 17, 1861, when he refused to take the Confederate oath of allegiance; he claimed the Texas vote for secession simply meant people wanted to leave the Union and as far as he was concerned the Texas Republic lived again. If being thrown out was a bitter blow, he didn’t show it. In fact, he refused Union Army help to reclaim his governorship on March 29. He was resigned to doing whatever the Texas people wanted, and this remained his attitude until his death in July ’63, only ten weeks after meeting Fremantle.
9. The Confederate soldiers liked to dance so much that they solved the partner shortage by dancing with each other. Their favorite was square dancing, which Fremantle calls “an American cotillion,” but a close second, curiously enough, was the waltz. This was so popular that the army’s bands would often play waltzes instead of marches while the army was tramping across the countryside.
10. Major General Nathaniel Prentiss Banks well earned the nickname “Commissary Banks.” During the Valley campaign, this politician-turned soldier lost enormous quantities of desperately needed supplies to Jackson’s ragged Rebels. Included in the booty: all Banks’s medical stores, which filled one of the largest warehouses in Winchester; 100 head of cattle, 34,000 pounds of bacon, flour, salt, sugar, coffee, bread and cheese (plus countless more taken by the troops themselves); $125,185 worth of quartermaster’s stores; 9354 small arms, two cannon and a large amount of ammunition.
In the wake of his defeats in the east, Banks was transferred to the west in late ’62. There, he served first as military governor of New Orleans, then as commander of the forces that took Port Hudson (last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi) and finally as leader of an expedition to restore Texas to the Union. He did all right for a while, but finally was turned back in the Red River campaign during the spring of ’64. This was one defeat too many, and he soon was virtually superseded by General E.R.S. Canby, never to play an important military role again.
It’s probably going too far to say that Brigadier General Godfrey Weitzel was responsible for whatever success Banks had in the west. But it is true that Weitzel was immediately beneath Banks during the only period when the latter looked good, and the conclusion does seem logical when the military careers of the two men are compared. Banks was an ex-governor of Massachusetts without previous military experience. Weitzel was one of those flashing, able twenty-seven-year-old brigadiers, fresh from West Point, tops in engineering experience, altogether the kind of young man that an unsuccessful political general would certainly appreciate having around.
1. Fremantle lived to regret giving away his evening clothes to General Scurry’s slave John. Note that one month and five days later in Charleston, he writes, “Mrs. H —— asked me to an evening party, but the extreme badness of my clothes compelled me to decline the invitation.”
2. The Confederate soldiers’ sense of humor seems to irritate Fremantle, and the suspicion grows that he was upset because the “chaff” he stressed was primarily directed at himself. After all, he did strike an odd figure. With his Texan ten-gallon hat, his English shooting suit and his Turkish lantern, he was an ideal target for that kind of razzing the Rebels enjoyed so much while on the march. They liked, for instance, to tell an officer with a newly waxed moustache, “Take them mice out of your mouth—I see their tails hangin’ out.”
3. The slower and more harmless a Union officer, the better his reputation with the Confederates. So it was with McClellan, and Major General William S. Rosecrans is another example. Rosecrans moved so slowly that at one point Secretary of War Stanton, in his exasperation, offered a Major Generalship as a prize for Rosecrans or Grant, whoever should do something first. Rosecrans replied stiffly that he didn’t believe in auctioning off military honors—and continued to move as slowly as ever. When he finally did get rolling, he committed perhaps the biggest single battlefield blooper of the war. In the battle at Chickamauga, the center of the Union line was held by the divisions of Generals Wood, Brannan and Reynolds, in that order. Noticing a gap between Reynolds’s and Brannan’s command, Rosecrans ordered General Wood’s division to close it. He forgot that the shift left a tremendous hole in the Union line. The Confederates poured through the gap and Chickamauga became a great Southern victory.
4. General Edmund Kirby Smith was severely wounded as he rushed his troops to the Bull Run battlefield just in time to turn the scales for the South. He spent the fall of 1861 recuperating at Lynchburg and courting the lovely girl who enticed Fremantle to go crayfishing. Her name was Cassie Seldon, and she soon succumbed to the wounded hero’s charms. After Kirby Smith’s recovery, he put in an uneventful year, and then in early ’63 was given command of all the forces west of the Mississippi. After Vicksburg cut the South in two, he became virtually an independent ruler, and the huge area he controlled was facetiously called “Kirbysmithdom.”
5. Mr. Edward F. Paine of the Boston Dickens Fellowship agrees with Fremantle that Cairo was the place that Dickens had in mind in Martin Chuzzlewit. Certainly Cairo is more appropriate—Dickens had an investment in land there that didn’t pay off.
6. A kind of romantic feeling that the South must “earn” recognition ran strong, along with more practical considerations, in Britain’s cautious stand on favoring the Confederacy. Little wonder Southerners were now openly asking what had to be done besides winning Bull Run, The Seven Days, Bull Run (again), Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville? They weren’t helped by such views as Lord Stanley of the out-of-power Conservative Party wrote Disraeli:
It is premature to recognize the southern confederacy. We can’t even get at them. The whole coast is in federal hands. It can hardly be argued that a country which has not a port nor means of ingress or egress is in a position to claim recognition of its independence. (Stanley to Disraeli, July 15, 1862.)
To Confederates, this philosophy was depressing indeed. It meant Britain wouldn’t recognize the South until the South had done by herself just what she needed British help to do—break the blockade.
7. Chancellorsville was Lee’s masterpiece—a perfect example of trapping the trapper. All during the early months of 1863, the Confederate Army under Lee and the Union Army under Hooker had lain quiet, sullenly facing each other across the Rappahannock River. Now it was late April, and Hooker decided to spring a trap. Under cover, he marched most of his army upstream. Then he crossed the river well beyond the extreme left flank of the Southern line, and came marching back down the Confederate side of the river, hoping to fall on Lee from behind. Lee was alerted just in time, swung his army around, and set a trap of his own. On May 2, the cream of his troops secretly marched around the extreme right flank of the Union line, and led by Stonewall Jackson, fell on the rear of Hooker’s army.
The uproar that accompanied the Confederate surprise attack was a strange contrast to the quiet intimacy of its planning. Lee and Jackson had hatched the plot late the night before, sitting alone together on a pair of upturned cracker barrels in a small pine grove. No one overheard this conversation, but Confederate staff officers long remembered the sight of the two leaders, caught in the light of a flickering campfire, as they hunched over a map and whispered their plans until nearly 3:30 A.M. After they parted, Jackson lay down on the ground to sleep. A young aide covered him with a cloak, but after the aide himself went to sleep, Jackson quietly arose, spread the cloak over the youthful sleeper and again lay down without it. Before another night could pass, Jackson was fatally wounded by his own men.
1. Confederates everywhere frequently complained about what they considered the injustice of it all. Old Bishop Meade of Richmond was so obsessed with the idea, even as he lay dying, that he called in Robert E. Lee and grimly instructed the general, “Tell your people to be more determined than ever. This is the most unjust and iniquitous war that was ever fought.”
2. Almost as soon as Grant whirled into Jackson, Mississippi, on May 14, 1863, he whirled out again. Fremantle says that the Confederates were astonished, but there was nothing impulsive about Grant’s move. He was being as deliberate and methodical as ever. As his army advanced northeastward between Vicksburg and Jackson, he reasoned out his tactics carefully: “Pemberton was now on my left [guarding Vicksburg]. … A force was also collected on my right at Jackson, the point where all the railroads communicating with Vicksburg connect. All the enemy’s supplies of men and stores would come by that point. As I hoped in the end to besiege Vicksburg, I must first destroy all possibility of aid. I therefore determined to move swiftly toward Jackson, destroy any force in that direction, and then turn upon Pemberton.” (Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 1885 Vol. I, p. 499.)
3. Major General William Wing Loring had better luck in the Egyptian than in the Confederate Army. As one of Jackson’s brigadiers, he started on the wrong foot by going behind his commander’s back and persuading Richmond to call off Jackson’s pet scheme of holding the Shenandoah Valley by occupying Romney, West Virginia. Loring won his point, but Jackson was no man to be crossed. Loring was soon transferred to oblivion. After the Civil War, his military career enjoyed a remarkable rebirth. In 1869, he joined the Egyptian Army as inspector general. In 1870, he was put in charge of all Egyptian coast defenses. By 1875–1876, he was a division commander and did a good job in the Egyptian-Abyssinian War. He capped off his Egyptian career by being made a pasha.
4. Pikes were curiously prominent in the thinking of the Confederate military planners. Nor was the reason merely lack of firearms. In Jackson’s thinking, for instance, pikes played about the role of a tank. He visualized soldiers armed with pikes sweeping away all before them as in closed ranks they charged the enemy lines. Thus in 1862 he recommended that whole companies be equipped with long steel pikes and trained to smash armadillo-fashion into the opposition. Lee went along with the idea and ordered a thousand pikes sent to Jackson.
As the war continued, pikes became the popular home-guard weapon, at least in theory. Governor Joe Brown, of Georgia, thought that if every citizen had a pike, the Union Armies could not survive intact. He had thousands made and stored in arsenals. They were, of course, never used. But so many were turned out that until recently, the pikes confiscated by Sherman’s army could still be bought at surplus outlets.
5. Clothes could betray a Yankee spy in the South. By 1863, most Southerners were reduced to shabby homespun apparel, and good cloth or a decent cut naturally aroused suspicions. Nor were these fears unwarranted. Mary Boykin Chesnut, an indefatigable Rebel diarist, describes a train trip when a Confederate major in the car was unmasked as a Yankee spy, mostly because of his “nice gray uniform.” Seen in this light, patriotic Southerners could be pardoned for their interest in Fremantle’s Saville Row shooting suit.
6. Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton was as unhappy about his superiors as they were about him. Placed in command of the Confederate forces in Mississippi, he found himself receiving some violently conflicting orders. Jefferson Davis told him to hold Vicksburg at all costs, and not to endanger the city by getting too far from it. General Johnston, who commanded the whole military theater, wanted him to cut loose from Vicksburg (which was probably a trap) and link his troops with the other Confederate forces in the area, where they might do some good operating together. Pemberton himself wanted to take a firm stand on the Big Black River, a good defensive position east of Vicksburg, and fight it out there alone. Desperately, Pemberton tried to work out a compromise which would please everybody. The result was a military abortion that failed miserably.
Pemberton didn’t need to guess how his superiors regarded his defeat. The day before Fremantle reported their disgust, Pemberton himself remarked to an aide, “Just thirty years ago I began my military career … and today, the same date, that career is ended in disaster and disgrace.” (S.H. Lockett, C.S.A., “The Defense of Vicksburg,” Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. III, p. 488.)
7. General Joseph Eggleston Johnston was the number two man in the Confederate Army. But unlike Robert E. Lee (who could do no wrong), Johnston was always in difficulties with Jefferson Davis. It seemed almost fate. While students at West Point together, they were rivals for the hand of a tavern keeper’s daughter. One night they fought it out and Davis lost. His humiliation was all the greater, since Johnston was a class behind him. No one knows whether this was one of those little incidents that later make big history, but the fact remains, the two men were in conflict almost from the start of the Civil War.
The feud was intensified when Johnston was put in command of Bragg’s army in Tennessee, and Pemberton’s army in Mississippi late in ’62. Johnston constantly complained that his authority was only nominal, that no one would give him any troops, that Pemberton was incompetent. Davis complained that Johnston was much too cautious. Both were right.
After Pemberton’s surrender at Vicksburg, Johnston got the job of stopping Sherman. All through late ’63 and early ’64, he continued retreating to save his forces—and Davis continued to criticise. Johnston said, well, he at least still had his army; Davis said, yes, but Sherman had the country. When Sherman finally reached Atlanta, Johnston was fired; but he was reinstated when Hood, his successor, did no better. By the end of the war, Johnston was confined to a narrow area in North Carolina.
Despite Johnston’s dilatory tactics, he enjoyed a high reputation in the Confederate Army. He was extremely popular to the end—perhaps because he could honestly say he had never lost a battle; more likely because any soldier interested in self-preservation found his ideas of strategy extremely appealing.
8. Soldiers captured in the Civil War had brighter prospects than prisoners of war today. As Fremantle points out, surgeons were treated as noncombatants. Any prisoner had a good chance of being paroled or exchanged until the last year of the war. If paroled, he signed a paper agreeing not to fight anymore until “regularly exchanged.” He then was free to go home. Grant took the word of 29,000 men at Vicksburg and let them go. If exchanged, a soldier could even fight again. Often prisoners were first paroled and then formally exchanged much later. When this was done, the exchange took the form of a paper releasing the prisoner from his parole and authorizing him to get back into the fight.
The idea of exchanging prisoners developed early in the war. The North liked it because the South had more prisoners. The South liked it because they needed their own men back and Northern prisoners were one more strain on Confederate resources. On July 22, 1862, the two sides accordingly agreed to exchange all prisoners. A regular table of equivalents was established with a private as the “unit measure.”
| Noncommissioned Officer | = 2 privates |
| Lieutenant | = 4 privates |
| Captain | = 6 privates |
| Major | = 8 privates |
| Lieutenant Colonel | = 10 privates |
| Colonel | = 15 privates |
| Brigadier General | = 20 privates |
| Major General | = 40 privates |
| General Commanding | = 60 privates |
To carry out the program, two exchange points were set up. Vicksburg was used in the west and City Point in the east. As the operation wore on, so did the haggling. Two captains and a major might equal a brigadier general—but what if the brigadier was unusually good? Should the special objects of Southern hatred (like James Pope and Butler) and the special objects of Northern hatred (like Confederate prison commandants) be included in the agreement at all? Could a paroled prisoner be used to fight Indians until he was exchanged?
Realizing that release of Southern prisoners simply prolonged the war by stretching out Confederate manpower, Grant cancelled the agreement in April 1864. Exchanges were never again resumed on a large scale, although the South became so anxious to get rid of Northern prisoners that in the final months of the war, many were released without any quid pro quo.
9. Many a Confederate leader swore he’d never live again under the stars and stripes—and lived to eat his words. Fremantle ascribes such feelings to Johnston, Maury and Beauregard. In due course, however, all three came back into the fold. After the war, Johnston was quickly reconciled to an insurance man’s life in Savannah, later to a term in Congress as a Virginia representative, and finally to a Washington job in Cleveland’s administration. Maury also turned out to be an easily reconstructed Rebel, living out a life of genteel poverty in Louisiana and Richmond. And Beauregard, who said he’d rather submit to the Emperor of China than return to the Union, had his bluff called when he was offered command of the Romanian Army in 1866 and the Egyptian Army in 1869. He declined, preferring instead to run the New Orleans, Jackson and Mississippi Railroad.
10. Vicksburg’s defenses proved unexpectedly strong. This last Confederate link with the west held out from May 18 to July 4, 1863. The grim tenacity of the defenders can be seen from their diet during the final stages—mule meat, acorns, cane roots, grass and weeds simmered in water, and, finally, rats. During a truce atone point in the siege, General Sherman handed a Confederate officer some mail that had been entrusted to him by Northern friends of the besieged. The Southerner saucily remarked that the mail would have been old indeed if delivery had depended on Federal capture of the place. “So you think, then, I am a pretty slow mail route?” amiably responded the unruffled Sherman.
11. Stonewall Jackson died before Fremantle had a chance to meet him, but the man was obviously fascinating. Fremantle picked up all the anecdotes he could. And they were endless, as Jackson was so colorful, so eccentric, and such a bizarre combination of qualities. He was so pious that he refused even to open his mail on Sunday—yet, he broke the Sabbath to launch some of his fiercest surprise attacks. (But he would keep his accounts straight by designating some day the following week as “Sunday” instead.) He abhorred delicacies and petty luxuries—yet liked to suck on an inexhaustible supply of lemons, which were unbelievably scarce at the time. (Nobody ever knew where he got them.) He was utterly tireless—could push on when everybody else was exhausted—yet he might suddenly fall asleep like a baby at the most incredible times.
When Jackson forced Harpers Ferry to surrender in 1862, the Union commander found his victorious opponent sound asleep by a log. A.P. Hill shook Jackson and said, “General, this is General White of the U.S. Army.” Jackson made a courteous gesture and nodded away again. “He has come to arrange the terms of surrender,” shouted Hill. Jackson was silent; Hill looked under the old slouch hat and discovered Jackson was once more sound asleep. He was again aroused, raised his head with difficulty, and finally managed to yawn out, “The surrender must be unconditional, General. Every indulgence can be granted afterwards.” Needless to say, he was back asleep within seconds, and there was no more interview.
1. Major General Dabney Herndon Maury was an appropriate companion for Fremantle. He came from an extremely distinguished and scholarly Virginia family. As a young West Pointer, he spent four years of glorious adventure on the Texas frontier, chasing buffalo and Indians over the very land that Fremantle had just traveled. He was a brave and courageous soldier—after losing Mobile harbor to Farragut a year after Fremantle’s visit, he continued to defend the city until three days after Appomattox with only 9000 troops against an opposing army of 45,000 men. And, although penniless at the end of the war, he declined a figurehead job with the Louisiana State Lottery that paid $30,000 a year. On the other hand, he didn’t hesitate to give up a struggling business to serve as a volunteer nurse when New Orleans was stricken by a yellow fever epidemic.
2. Admiral Farragut finally smashed his way through the channel into Mobile harbor on August 5, 1864. His reckless bravery lives on in his famous words, “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!” But another less romantic remark by Farragut perhaps illustrates better the true excitement and confusion of the attack. As Farragut’s flagship, Hartford, led the fleet by Fort Morgan into the bay, she was set upon by the Confederate ram, Tennessee. Both the Hartford and the Union ship, Lackawanna, responded by trying to ram the Tennessee. In the confusion, the Lackawanna rammed the Hartford—backed off and seemed about to do it again. This was enough for Farragut. Turning to his signal officer, Lieutenant John Kinney, he cried, “Can you say ‘for God’s sake’ by signal?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Kinney.
“Then,” snapped the Admiral, “say to the Lackawanna ‘For God’s sake, get out of our way and anchor.’ ”
3. Fremantle was fortunate in meeting four celebrities at Confederate General Hardee’s headquarters in Wartrace, Tennessee. Bishop Stephen Elliott was not only a distinguished clergyman, he was one of the outstanding educators in the South.
Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk was a curious crossbreed of soldier and Episcopal missionary. As Bishop of Louisiana, long before the war he had wandered around the frontier spreading the gospel among the Indians, but his religious inclinations can be traced even as far as West Point, where he astounded the rest of the cadet company by organizing a “praying squad.”
Lieutenant General William Joseph Hardee was the opposite extreme. Tough and virile, he was every inch the ladies’ man depicted by Fremantle. It was typical of him that when he wanted to establish a special reward for the men in his corps who achieved outstanding valor on the battlefield, he decided that the perfect prize was to introduce them to the ladies who turned up on the parade grounds whenever the army was being reviewed.
But Fremantle’s best “catch” at Wartrace was Clement Laird Vallandigham, an ex-Democratic Congressman from Ohio, who was bitterly anti-war. Vallandigham was high spirited in everything he did. At college he quit without graduating after a big fight with the president over some question of Constitutional law. In politics, he was a fiery states’ rights man; and when Burnside announced he would no longer tolerate speeches sympathetic to the South, Vallandigham got himself thrown out of the country by denouncing Burnside’s order. (This was when Fremantle saw him.) In postwar law practice, Vallandigham defended a murderer so vigorously that in showing how the gun really went off, he shot himself to death.
4. Wigwag signaling is one of the Confederacy’s many contributions to warfare. The idea was introduced at the first battle of Bull Run. Early on the morning of the battle, Signal Officer E.P. Alexander was scanning the horizon for any evidence of a Union flanking movement. Suddenly, his attention was arrested by the glint of the morning sun on a brass fieldpiece. Closer observation revealed the glitter of bayonets and musket barrels moving through a forest around the left end of the Confederate line. At 8:45 A.M. he picked up his signal flags and flashed to Evans, the endangered Southern general, the first semaphore message in history: “Look to the left—you are turned.”
5. Major General Ormsby MacKnight Mitchell was a Northern contribution to the Civil War’s notable collection of unlikely soldiers. He had been to West Point, hadn’t done too well, eventually drifted into law. This bored him too, and in 1835, he became a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Cincinnati College. He knew his math, but astronomy was just something that went with the job. Overnight, it entranced him.
During the next twenty-five years, he not only dedicated himself but interested the whole country in astronomy. He was a thrilling speaker and crowds everywhere flocked to hear him lecture about the stars. Mitchell’s enthusiasm was contagious and his listeners donated money for telescopes, observatories and literature on the subject.
Everything ended when war began. Lincoln offered Mitchell a brigadiership. He accepted, but by now he was a pretty rusty soldier and probably never meant to be one anyhow. Stationed in Tennessee, Mitchell ran a sloppy, undisciplined show. He was also far too much of a “character” for the likes of his hard-headed commander, General Buell. In 1862, he was finally transferred to a less crucial post in South Carolina. There, he soon died of yellow fever.
6. Fremantle’s week at Shelbyville was the most pleasant break in his long odyssey from Brownsville to Gettysburg. For a change, he was comfortable. As General Polk’s guest, he stayed at Beechwood, the estate of Mrs. Andrew Erwin, which served as a headquarters for many of the officers in Bragg’s army. But Beechwood was more than a military headquarters, it was a social center where the company of charming Southern belles was readily available. Best of all, Fremantle enjoyed the camaraderie of Polk’s cultured, aristocratic staff. Their gentle kidding was far easier to take than the coarse humor of Confederate soldiers on the march, and he thoroughly enjoyed it when they assured him that “the gumbo filet for dinner would be ‘quite au fait’ … made from the tender twigs of a young sassafras bush embellished with the photograph of a chicken that had done service in days gone by.” And would he want champagne? Yes, and they had the best—“made in an old molasses barrel containing about three parts water to one part corn and molasses sufficient to sweeten, when, after a few days of fermentation, it could be drawn and served minus the effervescence.”
7. More than one high-ranking Confederate exchanged a cassock for a sword. Stonewall Jackson’s chief of staff was Major, the Reverend R.L. Dabney, D.D., former professor of Presbyterian Theology. Lee’s chief of artillery was General W.N. Pendleton, D.D. The latter made the switch easily, and even found his background helpful in his new job. As captain of the Rockbridge artillery at First Bull Run, young Pendleton had sighted his guns and cried, “Fire, and may God have mercy on their guilty souls!”
8. Confederate General Braxton Bragg won no popularity contests. As a general, he was disappointing; his attacks at Murfreesboro, Perryville and Chickamauga all looked like wasted blood baths. As a person, he was even more disappointing. Hard-working and a tough disciplinarian, he was harsh, sour, irascible, and had an utter lack of tact. Once, during a public dinner, Confederate General Dick Taylor asked Bragg about one of his top men. The answer was snapped back, loud and typical: “That general is an old woman, utterly worthless.”
9. Major General Earl Van Dorn was a glamorous, if disappointing, Confederate leader. As an old Indian fighter before the war, he had been wounded twice by bow and arrow on the frontier. During the war, he was involved with Indians again—this time they were on his side at the battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas in 1862. Northern General Curtis protested the use of these savages, but Van Dorn (with amazing blandness for a man who had taken a couple of arrow wounds) assured him that his Indians were a highly civilized people.
The Federals won Pea Ridge anyhow and General Van Dorn, after a good victory at Vicksburg, took another licking at Corinth. He now lost his command and had a comparatively minor post when Dr. Peters surprised him and Mrs. Peters in a private room at headquarters. After he was shot, about the only people who remained true were his staff officers. They showed their loyalty by inserting an ad in the local newspaper, suggesting that it was all a big mistake and Dr. Peters had other reasons for murder, merely concocting the story about Mrs. Peters to justify his crime. The ad wasn’t too convincing.
1. Murfreesboro was a crucial test of strength as the Northern and Southern Armies jockeyed for the advantage in Tennessee. It was like a fight between a couple of circling alley cats—the South attacked the Northern left and the North attacked the Southern left at the same moment on New Year’s Day of ’63. When the fur stopped flying, the Confederates slowly and sullenly withdrew, leaving the field to the Union forces. The Union victory was marred by at least one incident. Federal General Ellis McDowell McCook was shaving when the fight opened. Hearing gunfire before he expected the Union cannonade to start, he dropped his razor and cried, “That’s contrary to orders!” Calling for his horse, he turned to the owner of the house and inquired, “Who is opposing me today?” The answer came, “Major General Cheatham.” At this, General McCook turned ashy pale and trembling, rejoined, “Is it possible that I have to meet Cheatham again?” Without waiting for an answer, he mounted his horse and rode off. The Chattanooga Daily Rebel happily reported that he was so unstrung he never returned to pick up his razor.
2. For the South, Shiloh was a frustrating affair. As Grant felt his way southward in Tennessee during the spring of ’62, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston bided his time. Then, on April 6, he suddenly struck back, almost hurling the surprised Federals into the river at Pittsburg Landing. But just when victory seemed certain, Johnston was killed. Two hours of leaderless confusion followed. Finally Beauregard took over, but the momentum of the attack was gone. Grant rallied, reinforcements arrived from Buell, and the following day the Confederates were thrown back, losing all their gains.
The South was bitter, especially at Beauregard, who had apparently frittered away a victory almost won. Stories multiplied—that Beauregard had been sick, in a daze, out of his mind, completely mad. Reports spread that he had even spent the battle in his tent, stroking a pet pheasant which he held in his lap. Actually, Beauregard was as sane—and as uninspired—as usual. As for the pheasant, yes, a soldier had brought one to his tent during the course of the battle; but Beauregard hastily assured the world that he had hardly noticed the bird, and certainly had no idea what had become of it.
3. Foreigners far more belligerent than Fremantle flocked to both sides in the Civil War. Fremantle was much taken with the dashing soldier of fortune Colonel St. Leger Grenfell, but there were others equally colorful in the Confederate service. Perhaps the most renowned—and certainly the visitor who made fair hearts beat fastest—was Major Heros von Borck, a huge Prussian serving as “Jeb” Stuart’s adjutant. First in either a cavalry charge or a drawing room, he was all that the South wanted in a soldier—brave, bold, handsome and gay. Even a neck wound at Gettysburg didn’t stop him. With the bullet stuck in his throat, von Borck wheezed about Richmond, still the best social catch in town. He stayed on the scene until after Stuart’s death in 1864, when he was sent abroad on a mission aimed to get foreign help for the Confederacy.
4. For a man “enervated by matrimony,” Major General John Morgan had plenty of life in him yet. The great Confederate raider made the boldest of all his excursions less than five weeks after Fremantle reported Colonel Grenfell’s pessimistic views on Morgan’s future usefulness. On July 2, Morgan took 2000 men and four cannon on a raid into Union territory that carried him through Kentucky and into Southern Indiana and Ohio. This time he went too far and got trapped. His command was scattered and Morgan himself was finally captured on July 26.
After his capture, Morgan and thirty of his officers were not handled like prisoners of war, but were sent to the Ohio State Penitentiary. There, he showed he was still not enervated by matrimony. Using table knives from the prison dining room, he and several other officers dug a hole through two feet of concrete floor and tunneled under the prison yard to the outer wall. This they scaled with a rope of bedding and fled, leaving a courteous note to the warden.
Morgan finally reached the Southern lines, and in 1864 he was back as a cavalry raider. Finally, his luck caught up with him and that September he was trapped at Granville, Tennessee. This time the Federals made sure. As he tried to hide behind some vines in a garden, he was shot through the heart.
5. No wonder that time passed swiftly when Morgan was amusing himself with wire tapping. His operator, a Mr. Ellsworth, later described this exchange of messages with an unknown Federal station signing itself “Z”
Z: What news? Any more skirmishing after the last message?
MORGAN: No. We drove what little cavalry there was away.
Z: Has the train arrived yet?
MORGAN: No. About how many troops will be on the train?
Z: 500, 60th Indiana, commanded by Colonel Owens.
MORGAN (beginning to wonder who “Z” was): A gentleman here in this office bets me two cigars you can’t spell the name of your station correctly.
Z: Take the bet. L-E-B-A-N-O-N J-U-N-C-T-I-O-N. How did he think I would spell it?
MORGAN: He thought you would put two “b’s” in “Lebanon.”
Z: Ha! Ha! Ha! He is a green one!
MORGAN: Yes. He certainly is.
6. Major General Patrick Cleburne was one of those military figures who could incite the deepest devotion among his men. It’s hard to separate fact from legend, but a story told during the battle at Franklin, Tennessee, is typical of his reputation. While riding along the lines encouraging his men, Cleburne saw a captain of his command, barefoot, with feet sore and bleeding. He dismounted at once, and asked, “Captain, will you pull off my boots?” The captain did so and the general then asked, “Captain, will you see if they fit you?” The captain complied; the general remounted his horse and rode off, saying, “Captain, I am tired of wearing those boots and can do well without them.” When Cleburne was carried mortally wounded from the field several hours later, he was barefoot.
7. When Fremantle heard the sound of a Confederate soldier being shot for desertion, he was hearing something quite unusual in the South. The Confederate authorities tended to take a kind view of desertion, which would be rare indeed today. For instance, in the last six months of the war, Lee’s army executed only 39 of some 245 convicted deserters. The soldiers took full advantage of this kind of leniency—some 103,400 deserted, according to Ella Lonn, the best authority on the subject. Far more likely punishment was a good stiff term in the guardhouse followed by dishonorable discharge.
8. The Confederate soldiers had firm convictions about who could—and who couldn’t—fight on the Northern side. As Fremantle points out, men from the Northwest generally rated high, the German units very low. This view could be expanded to cover most foreign-born troops fighting for the Union. But by ’63, the enemy’s poor fighting qualities were no longer much consolation. More than one Confederate pondered over “the English, Irish, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swiss, Portuguese and Negroes, who swelled the numbers of the enemy. … True, there was not much fight in all this rubbish, but they answered well enough for drivers of wagons and ambulances, guarding stores and lines of communication, and doing all sorts of duty, while the good material was doing the fighting.” (Southern Historical Society Papers, November 1876, p. 229.)
1. More than one forerunner of the WACs turned up in Confederate service. Fremantle’s discovery may have been Madame Loreta Janeta Velasquez, who posed as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford and served in a Louisiana regiment under Bragg about this time. Certainly, the time and place seem about right, and there couldn’t have been too many girls fighting beside the Louisiana boys. Another lady in arms was Captain Sally Tompkins, who ran a hospital and held the highest rank the Southern Army ever gave a woman. Still another was Mary McCarty, a fabulous tomboy who was ultimately captured and sent to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington.
2. Colonel G.W. Rains was as fine an appointment as Jefferson Davis ever made. The colonel was one of the few people in the South who were really at home in a factory, and Davis lost no time giving him the job of building a Southern munitions industry. Rains pushed niter mining in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. He built a saltpeter plant at Nashville. He designed and built the magnificent powder plant at Augusta, which impressed Fremantle so much. By the end of the war, this plant had turned out 2,750,000 pounds of powder. The quality was top-flight; there was plenty of it; and it cost only 35 per cent of the going price for English powder.
3. On April 7, 1863, the Union Navy made its great bid to force Fort Sumter and Charleston to surrender. Nine new, supposedly invincible, ironclads were assembled for the effort. At Admiral S.F. du Pont’s signal, they moved slowly in single file towards the channel, guarded by Sumter, that led into the harbor. In the lead went the Weehawken, pushing a curious raftlike contrivance designed to clear away obstructions. And there were plenty—hawsers and cables stretched across the channel, torpedoes, mines (including one loaded with 5000 pounds of powder), piles, stakes and even nets calculated to ensnarl enemy propellers. There was plenty of warning too, and as the Union ships advanced, the Confederates held their fire, chivalrously dipped their colors, and had their garrison band play “Dixie” from a parapet.
Then all hell broke loose. As the ironclads moved slowly through the obstructions, the Charleston defenses opened a tremendous fire—160 shots a minute, 3500 during the engagement. The Yankee Keokuk, which was closest to Sumter, took go hits. The warships did their best to reply; pumped hundreds of shells into Sumter. But the Confederate pounding began popping the bolts that held the ironclads together, and the Union gunners found themselves dodging a hail of metal that flew about inside the turrets. Finally the squadron withdrew; the Keokuk sank the next day from its wounds, and the Charleston garrison celebrated another successful defense.
4. The North maintained a successful blockade of the Confederate coast throughout the war, despite spirited Southern efforts to offset the effects. Generally, these efforts were directed at either building ingenious torpedoes and mines to wreck the blockaders, or building ingenious vessels to run the blockade. The resulting give-and-take fighting along the blockade was always colorful, but perhaps the best incident occurred in 1863, when the brigantine J.P. Ellicott was captured by the Confederate privateer Retribution. The Ellicott’s officers and crew were taken aboard the Retribution and a prize crew put in charge of the Yankee ship. But the mate’s wife was left on board the Ellicott, and this was a fatal mistake. A few days later, she succeeded in getting the Rebel crew intoxicated, locked them up, took over the vessel, and piloted it into St. Thomas, where she delivered it and the Rebels to the U.S. Consul.
5. The Union forces tried every conceivable method of taking Charleston, including the idea General Ripley gave Fremantle, but nothing worked. The Confederates hung on and on. Finally, they voluntarily abandoned both the city and Fort Sumter on February 17, 1865. Sherman was sweeping through the Carolinas to join Grant in Virginia; the Confederates realized that if they held Charleston any longer, they’d be cut off from the rest of the South.
So ended three years of successful defense against a harrowing variety of attacks. The record ran like this:
June ’62—Union Army is stopped trying to get in “the back door” at Secessionville, about eight miles south of the city.
April ’63—Union Navy tries to force the harbor with nine ironclads, and is thrown back as Fremantle describes.
July 11, ’63—Union Army switches to the tactics suggested by Confederate General Ripley to Fremantle: Land on Morris Island south of the harbor, work north and seize Fort Wagner at the harbor’s entrance and turn its guns on Sumter and Charleston. The idea doesn’t work—Union forces fail to take Fort Wagner.
July 18, ’63—Another Union attack on Fort Wagner is smashed.
August 17–23—New tactics: Seven-day Union bombardment designed to crush Fort Sumter. Sumter pretty well smashed, but Charleston hangs on.
August 21—Another shift. Terrorize Charleston into surrender by long-range bombardment. Gun called the “Swamp Angel” hurls 36 incendiary shells at the city and then explodes.
September 6—Another try at Fort Wagner, this time using siege tactics. Fort Wagner captured, but Confederates have prepared new defenses and Charleston holds on.
September 8—Union Navy tries to land a force on Fort Sumter and take place by storm. Attackers slaughtered.
Thereafter, all fighting simmered down until finally on the morning of February 18, 1865, the Union soldiers marched triumphant but unopposed into a shattered Charleston.
6. The Confederates were obsessed by the idea of submarine warfare. Like the Germans a generation later, they faced overwhelming surface ship superiority, and their only chance was to offset this superiority through inventiveness and ingenuity.
Their submarines, to say the least, were ingenious. The Hundley, for example, was twenty feet long, four feet wide, five feet deep, and was run by a propeller worked by hand. With her seven-man crew, she was meant to “swim” to the side of an enemy vessel and deposit a torpedo (like an egg). The charge, theoretically, would go off as the Hundley “swam” away again.
All this required a lot of practice. On one experimental trip down Mobile Bay in early ’63, the Hundley tried a dive and never came up again; all seven men were lost. She was eventually raised and shipped to Charleston. While preparing to attack the Federal fleet, one night the Hundley was swamped by a passing Confederate steamer and sank again—this time with a loss of six men. Shortly afterwards they pulled her up again, she was swamped again, and sank again—this time with a loss of four men. The resurrected Hundley made another experimental dive in Charleston harbor—seven men lost this time. Once more the Hundley was raised; once more she tried an experimental dive and this time got tangled in the anchor chain of a ship in Charleston harbor—all seven men lost.
For a fifth time, the Hundley was pulled up. Volunteers in the city enthusiastically responded to calls for one last try. To the wonderment of all, the Hundley finally moved out of the harbor and towards the blockading Federal squadron. In the dead of a moonlit night, she crawled alongside the U.S.S. Housatonic and turned to scoot away.
With a shattering crash, the Housatonic exploded and sank beneath the waves—taking the Hundley with her as she went. All seven men were lost.
7. General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was in one of the dips of a roller coaster career when Fremantle ran into him. As the man who fired on Fort Sumter, Beauregard’s stature soared at the start of the war. As the victor of Bull Run, he soared even higher. Then came months of idleness, which saw the army’s organization and morale—and Beauregard’s reputation—sag badly. Early in 1862, he was transferred from Virginia to the West, where he became Number 2 man under Albert Sidney Johnston in the fight to keep the Mississippi open. Johnston was killed leading the Confederate attack at Shiloh, and Beauregard took over in mid-battle. When he lost the battle that Johnston had seemingly won, his stock fell to a new low.
Beauregard was then transferred to Charleston, where Fremantle found him in the comparatively unimportant job of garrison commander. But his fortunes rose again the following year. Grant’s ’64 plan was to squeeze Richmond between himself attacking from the north and General Butler attacking from the southeast. While Lee parried Grant, Beauregard was assigned the job of stopping Butler. He did a great job, bottling up Butler completely at Bermuda One Hundred. When Grant also was halted north of Richmond, and swung around to an attack from the southeast, Beauregard held him too, until Lee could reform his lines. Beauregard was then placed under Lee, but once again he fell short of expectations and was shifted to an administrative job in the West. When the war ended, he had just been shifted back to Number 2 post under Joe Johnston—exactly where he was when Bull Run had been fought nearly four long years before.
1. Judah P. Benjamin was the smiling enigma of the Confederacy. It seems incredible that so little is really known of the man who served successively as Jefferson Davis’s Attorney General, Secretary of War and Secretary of State—the man who was openly acknowledged to be “the brains of the Confederacy.”
His childhood in Charleston, South Carolina, remains a mystery—there are no authentic details. His career in the class of 1829 at Yale was suddenly interrupted by expulsion—nobody knows why. His move from Charleston, where he had excellent opportunities, to New Orleans, where he had none and couldn’t even speak the language, is inexplicable. His marriage to a French girl from a distinguished Creole family is equally mystifying. The couple lived together for only a few years, before his wife and daughter moved to France, never to return. Yet it was no breach. Benjamin visited his family in France every summer; he lavished money and attention on them all his life; and he never seemed particularly upset by the situation.
Benjamin himself did his best to perpetuate the mystery. He was a charming writer and a delightful conversationalist, but he wrote little and said less, where the subject was himself. He spent much of his last years destroying letters and files. He was so successful that only one biographer, Pierce Butler, has had the courage to tackle him as a subject.
Yet in some respects, there’s no mystery about Benjamin. Everybody agreed that he was the period’s most remarkable combination of a taste for elegance and a taste for back-breaking work. Everybody agreed on his devotion to the Cause. Everybody agreed about his charm and his persuasiveness. Everybody agreed that he smiled all the time—although there was considerable disagreement as to what it meant.
2. The Mason-Slidell affair was the only time during the Civil War when Washington really lost face. Late in ’61, the Confederate government named James Murray Mason as its diplomatic representative in England and James Slidell for a similar job in Paris. The two “commissioners” ran the blockade to Havana and then caught the British ship Trent for Europe. One day out, the U.S.S. San Jacinto stopped the Trent, removed Mason and Slidell, and took them to jail in Boston.
The British claimed that the incident violated their rights as a neutral and demanded that Mason and Slidell be released. London followed up this demand by rushing troops to Canada “for defense” and ordering the British Ambassador in Washington to come home if the North didn’t back down. Lincoln was in no position to take the challenge, and on December 26, 1861, Secretary of State Seward announced that Mason and Slidell were both “cheerfully liberated.”
3. “Bull Run” Russell, the ubiquitous correspondent of the London Times, succeeded in making himself thoroughly unpopular with both sides in the Civil War. Northern sensitivities were disturbed by the way he belittled the Union military effort. His account of the Federal rout at Bull Run was a classic of scorn for the soldiers he was writing about; in fact, it gave him his nickname. In the South, Russell stirred far more than Judah Benjamin’s resentment. He presented a picture of plantation life which had the lady of the house bawling at field hands hundreds of yards away. After he was through with Charleston, people said he had come away with a thorough knowledge of the three P’s—pen, paper and prejudices. Desperately, the Southerners tried in vain to appease this scathing observer. Mary Boykin Chesnut told in her diary of one poor man who studied Thackeray for hours in order to be able to talk to Russell on even terms. Russell yawned his way through such occasions as well as he could. (See Ben Ames Williams, ed., A Diary from Dixie, p. 39.)
4. Jefferson Davis could put on a smooth courtesy that was initially a godsend in handling the collection of prima donnas that came to Richmond to launch the government. It seemed that almost everybody had his own ideas on how to run the country, and with the Confederacy’s weak constitution, endless courtesy and patience were necessary to get concerted action. Davis had the courtesy but not the patience. He could put on a great show of tact, but he couldn’t keep it up. As a result, the harmony that marked the early stages of his dealings with people all too often disintegrated into wrangling and bitterness if agreement wasn’t quickly reached.
Once trouble began, it was quickly compounded by other weak traits. Davis was basically stiff and cold. He had no humor whatsoever. Above all, he was obstinate. It took some time for many people to perceive these dangerous weaknesses, but his wife saw them right away. On the very first day they met, she wrote her mother, “He impresses me as a remarkable kind of man, but of uncertain temper, and has a way of taking for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which offends me. … The fact is, he is the kind of person I should expect to rescue me from a mad dog at any risk, but to insist upon a stoical indifference to the fright afterward.” (Eron Rowland, Varina Howell, Wife of Jefferson Davis, Vol. I, p. 48.)
5. Men like Milroy, Butler and Hunter were tough occupation generals, but no tougher than would be expected today. In fact, they often put up with insults and abuse that no self-respecting occupation authority would now tolerate.
Once in New Orleans a woman doused Admiral Farragut with a pail of filthy water. Another lady carefully trained her children to spit on Union officers. A New Orleans belle named Mrs. Phillips stood on her balcony and howled with glee at the funeral of a Northern officer. A Mr. Mumford cut down the U.S. flag flying over the New Orleans Custom House. Butler’s patience was exhausted—Mumford was executed and occupation order Number 28 was issued, which declared that any woman who insulted or showed contempt for any U.S. soldier would thereafter “be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.”
Southerners had always regarded Butler as the worst of these occupation commanders. Shortly after he went to New Orleans, the story quickly spread that he took the spoons whenever he was invited out to dine and he soon became known as “Spoon” Butler. After order Number 28, he became known as “Beast” Butler.
6. Secretary of War Seddon had a full “in-basket” the day Fremantle found so much trouble getting to see him. That morning reports were coming in from Winchester on the results of its recapture by the Confederates (the news was good—9000 men and 50 guns taken; only 100 Southerners lost). Colonel Gorgas, Chief of Ordnance, had submitted a paper proposing that the army discontinue issuing 20 extra cartridges to each man; instead, he suggested that each be given only three cartridges a month with the rest going to the commanding general on requisition whenever a battle was pending. There were also reports that the navy had lost an ironclad at Savannah. Other memoranda called the secretary’s attention to the careless issuance of passports. There was a discouraging report that a man named Jackson had turned in important military secrets to the Federals, enabling them to raid Northern Neck. Another report, which was of greater interest to the President than the War Department, described the destruction of Jefferson Davis’s furniture in Mississippi. (See J.B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, 1866, pp. 352–353.)
7. During McClellan’s Peninsular campaign in the spring of ’62, the Union Navy tried to co-operate by sending a fleet up the James River to bombard Richmond. The move caught the Confederates unprepared. They had counted on the ironclad Virginia to hold off the whole Union Navy, but the Virginia had to be scuttled, and now the river lay wide open. Working frantically for two rain-swept days, the Confederates sank boats in the channel, fortified the best defensive position at Drewry’s Bluff and stationed sharpshooters along the banks of the river. When the Union flotilla appeared on May 15, they were ready. Five guns (not three, as reported by Fremantle) poured such a crushing fire on the two ironclads in the lead that after four hours’ firing, the Federals returned back down the river.
1. At the end of April ’63, Hooker sent Stoneman’s Federal cavalry on a raid designed to wreck Lee’s communications and soften him up for Hooker’s Chancellorsville campaign. Through bad timing, most of the raid was carried out after Hooker had already been repulsed, and to make matters worse, the foray left Hooker without any cavalry when he needed it most to scout the Confederate movements.
But the raid did give Richmond a terrific scare. The alarm bell clanged steadily for several days early in May. Home-guard units, government clerks and bottom-of-the-barrel reserves dashed out to repel the advance. Federal units actually got as close as John R. Young’s farm, just two miles from the city limits, before veering off and returning to the main army. It was a close call and nerves were still on edge when Fremantle turned up six weeks later.
2. Fremantle was quite justified if he felt puzzled by the kaleidoscopic changes in the Confederate flag. Few banners have ever changed so much so often. The flag that Fremantle saw with Lee was but one in a series of experiments. The first flag was turkey red with a white star in the middle and a crescent in the upper left-hand corner. It was sewed together by some Charleston ladies when the state seceded in 1860, and flew briefly from the Charleston Custom House.
As secession spread, the Confederate flag became a solid blue banner with a single white star. This was well plugged by an Irish minstrel named Harry McCarty, who toured the Deep South singing a rousing war song called “The Bonny Blue Flag.” This was the flag Fremantle saw with Bragg’s army, and it remained popular throughout the general area where McCarty did his trooping.
Next came the Stars and Bars, which resembled the U.S. flag, except that there were only eleven stars and three stripes. The resemblance proved too close. Mistakes easily arose in the confusion of battle, and after first Bull Run, General Joe Johnston designed the famous red battle flag with its blue Saint Andrew’s cross.
Richmond next adopted the battle-flag design for a new national flag. This was an all-white banner with the battle-flag emblem in the upper left-hand corner. It was the flag Fremantle saw at Fort Sumter.
But this wasn’t the end. The new national flag could be easily confused with a white flag unless a stiff breeze was blowing. As Confederate defeats multiplied in the later stages of the war, this resemblance became embarrassing. To avoid confusion, a vertical red bar was added to the edge of the white field. Before any more variations could develop, Appomattox made the matter academic.
3. Lee faced a tough choice in September ’62—whether to rest his army, which was exhausted by ten weeks of steady marching, or push on while the enemy was on the run in hopes that one more victory might bring foreign intervention, or discourage the North from fighting any more. He took the gamble.
As the army moved northward into Maryland, thousands of Lee’s soldiers fell out. Ragged, hungry, barefoot, these stragglers were simply unable to take it any longer. They trailed along ten, twenty, a hundred miles behind the army. Many couldn’t or wouldn’t cross the Potomac, and a huge tent city grew up along the banks, while the soldiers waited to regain their strength. For the most part, they weren’t shirkers; they were just too tired to go on.
General Hill’s corps lost 2000 stragglers in three days. Whole regiments disintegrated—the 8th Virginia dwindled to 34 men; the Hampton Legion to 77; and so on. At the start of the Maryland campaign, Lee had some 55,000 men; seventeen days later at the battle of Antietam he had only 35,000. The effect of this straggling contributed heavily to the stand-off fight which forced Lee to return again to Virginia.
1. Everybody behaved like Barbara Frietchie except Barbara Frietchie. When Southern soldiers marched through Northern towns, the local girls outdid each other in tossing jeers and taunts. Usually the Confederates took it in their stride. When Stonewall Jackson passed through Middletown, Maryland, two pretty girls with red, white and blue ribbons in their hair rushed out of the house and with much laughter waved little Union flags in the face of the general. Jackson bowed, raised his hat and smilingly remarked to his staff, “We evidently have no friends in this town.”
But one lady who didn’t show the Confederates her colors was Barbara Frietchie. Later on, she waved her flag in welcome as the Union troops passed through Frederick, but she never came into contact with the Rebels. The lady in town who did wave the Stars and Stripes at the Confederates remains unsung—her name was Mrs. Mary S. Quantrell.
2. The nameless Austrian officer discovered by Fremantle in Chambersburg was Captain Fitzgerald Ross of the Hungarian Hussars. Ross had recently entered the South by slipping across the Potomac from Maryland. By now, he was a fixture in that odd assortment of foreign “guests” tagging along with Lee. He stayed on after Fremantle went home, and finally attached himself to “Jeb” Stuart, who made a point of collecting characters. Stuart’s entourage already included a Prussian adjutant and a banjo player named Sweeney. Ross fitted in well, and spent a lot of time with Stuart until he returned home in April 1864.
3. Robert E. Lee was worshiped and adored throughout the South. The populace gladly accepted a story that once when he fell asleep exhausted by a roadside, 15,000 men marched by on tiptoe so as not to disturb him. The man’s obvious virtue and nobility proved quite a problem for Northern propagandists—particularly in explaining him to children. How to square the wickedness of secession with this leader, who was so clearly everything you wanted a child to be? Hard, but Fremantle is wrong when he says no Northern critic ever accused Lee of the “greater vices.” At least one magazine made a good try:
“General Lee—the man who neither smokes, drinks nor chews tobacco; who has, in short, none of the smaller vices, but all of the larger ones; for he deliberately, basely and under circumstances of unparalleled meanness, betrayed his country, and, long after all hope of success was lost, carried on a murderous war against his own race and kindred.” (Our Young Folks Magazine, September 1865, p. 603.)
4. Longstreet’s wartime devotion to Lee is ironic in the light of his later bitterness. While the war lasted—in fact, as long as Lee lived—they remained on good terms. But once Lee was gone, the carping began. Lee’s admirers blamed Gettysburg on Longstreet—said he was too slow. Longstreet blamed the defeat on Lee—said Lee should never have attacked in the first place.
As time passed, the breach widened. Longstreet became a Republican; the other Confederate leaders remained Democrats. Longstreet grew rich; the others stayed poor. By the nineties, Longstreet found himself pretty much alone. But being outnumbered was an old story with him, and he fought back as stubbornly as in any of his campaigns. Finally, he really turned against Lee in his Memoirs, harping on Lee’s “nervous condition,” “uneven temper,” “desperate mood painfully evident.” At one point, Longstreet even said that Lee at Gettysburg was “off balance and labored under that oppression until enough blood was shed to appease him.” (From Manassas to Appomattox, pp. 358, 359, 361, 384.)
People will argue forever whether or not Lee should have attacked at Gettysburg. Less arguable is the question whether in choosing his plan, Lee failed to weigh factors and considerations perceived by Longstreet. General Dick Taylor, who knew them both, summed it up pretty well when he said, “That any subject involving the possession and exercise of intellect should be clear to Longstreet and concealed from Lee, is a startling proposition to those having knowledge of the two men.” (Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction, 1879, p. 231.)
5. Longstreet learned that Meade had been made Union commander from his trusted scout Harrison, who had just slipped through the Union lines. Harrison also brought some far more disquieting news—the Union Army was dangerously close at hand; it had chased after Lee much more quickly than anybody expected.
Up to this point, Lee had no idea where the Federals were. At the start of the invasion, he had sent Jeb Stuart’s cavalry to screen his movements and keep an eye on Hooker’s forces. But Stuart wandered off chasing wagon trains and let the Union Army get between Lee and himself. To rejoin Lee in Pennsylvania, he had to make a huge looping circle around the Federals, and this took time. Meanwhile, Lee was “without his eyes.” He could only guess where the enemy was.
As matters turned out, Lee underestimated the marching speed of the Union Army, and Longstreet’s scout warned him just in time. But for this, there would probably be no chance to argue over Gettysburg, for Meade could have caught the scattered Confederate units by surprise and beaten them piecemeal before a major battle could develop.
1. The firing at Gettysburg had begun some eight hours before Fremantle first heard the rumble of guns. Early that morning, a corporal, Alphonse Hodges, of the 9th New York Cavalry, had been reconnoitering on the Chambersburg road, a few miles west of Gettysburg. In the early light of dawn, he saw some men approaching about a mile away. He sent his own companions back to notify headquarters and advanced himself to see what was up. He soon saw that the men were Confederates and as he turned to go back, one of the enemy shot at him. The first gun at Gettysburg had been fired.
2. On the whole, both Federals and Confederates were quick to praise any piece of exceptional bravery shown by their enemy. When A.P. Hill told Fremantle that he was sorry to see a gallant Yankee meet his death, his reaction was quite typical. Not so Jackson. Once during the Valley Campaign, Confederate Colonel Patton told Jackson about a charge by three Union cavalrymen, declaring that he admired the gallantry of the participants and wished his troops had not fired upon them.
“Why would you not have shot these men, Colonel?” asked Jackson curtly.
“I should have spared them, General,” answered Patton, “because they were brave men who had gotten into a desperate situation where it was as easy to capture them as it was to kill them.”
Jackson’s reply was brief. “Shoot them all. I don’t want them to be brave.”
3. Even on such a historic occasion as Gettysburg, Fremantle’s Austrian roommate Ross seems unbearably ebullient for so early in the morning. Fremantle makes him look pretty poisonous, waxing his mustache at 3:30 A.M. Ross’s own Memoirs make him look worse. He happily recalls that as the sound of cannon aroused him from sleep, he bounced out of bed and gaily sang out, “C’est le sanglant appel de Mars!” (Fitzgerald Ross, A Visit to the Cities and Camps of the Confederate States, 1865, p. 49.)
4. While Fremantle perched in his tree, the Confederate leaders beneath him reached a momentous decision on this second morning of Gettysburg. The question was whether to attack the strong Union position on Cemetery Ridge, or try to lure the Federals into making an attack instead. Just out of Fremantle’s hearing, Lee made his big point: “The enemy is here, and if we do not whip him, he will whip us.” Longstreet thought it better to wait until Pickett’s division arrived. In an effort to get some backing, he took Hood aside and said: “The General is a little nervous this morning. He wishes to attack; I do not wish to do so without Pickett. I never like to go into battle with one boot off.” But the die was cast, and Lee remained fixed in his determination to attack. (Southern Historical Society Papers, October 1877, p. 148.)
5. Fremantle, like everybody else, was fascinated by the Rebel yell—and also like everybody else, found it almost impossible to describe. Attempts to put it down on paper have resulted in a frightening collection of syllables—a high-pitched “Woh-who-ey!” according to one version; “Yai, yai, yi, yai, yi!” according to another; “Y-yo yo-wo-wo!” according to a third. Even Bell Irwin Wiley gave up after a brave effort to pin it down in his wonderfully detailed Life of Johnny Reb.
There’s equal disagreement as to the yell’s origin. But it was standard Confederate “equipment” at least as early as First Bull Run, when Stonewall Jackson shouted to his men, “When you charge, yell like furies!”
Students of the yell, however, do agree on three points: (1) it was a shrill, high-pitched whooping and yipping; (2) it was completely informal, not remotely like an organized cheer; (3) it sent chills down the spine of even the stanchest Yankee defender.
6. Nothing seems more incongruous than Fremantle’s description of a Confederate band playing polkas and waltzes while stationed almost between the lines during the battle of Gettysburg. But bad as their music was, the Confederates loved to have bands around, and they were kept playing whenever possible. General Dick Taylor describes how his Louisiana Creoles pulled up after a long march to support Stonewall Jackson, and immediately started their band going with a waltz. They were newcomers or they probably wouldn’t have tried such levity directly in front of Jackson, who was perched on a fence watching them and, as usual, sucking a lemon. “Thoughtless fellows for serious work,” was his only remark.
7. Longstreet, like most generals in the Civil War, exposed himself under fire to a degree that now seems incredibly rash for a top commander. He was in his tightest jam at Antietam, where alone with a single cannon and a few gunners, he held the Confederate center against the whole Union advance for a few decisive moments. The wonder is not that the Jacksons and the Reynoldses were ultimately killed, but that so many generals survived. Joe Wheeler, for instance, had sixteen horses killed under him, and even this was small potatoes to Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, who loved hand-to-hand fighting. Forrest once fought six Union troopers single-handed. During four years of war, he killed some thirty individual opponents and liked to say that he had done better than even the score for the number of horses shot under him. (They numbered only twenty-nine.)
8. Exotic uniforms were rapidly disappearing by the time of Gettysburg, but earlier they had been quite the fashion on both sides. At the start of the war little thought was given to a standard, distinctive dress. Many regiments were raised and equipped by private individuals, or from local contributions, and they were clothed according to the tastes of those who organized them. In the North, Colonel Ellsworth turned up with Zouaves, reflecting the current infatuation with French military tradition. Colonel Cameron had a unit of Highlanders, complete with kilts. Colonel d’Utassy went in for Garibaldi Guards, appropriately costumed. The Confederates too had their Zouaves (especially the Louisiana Tigers), and the privately equipped Maryland Line arrived in bright blue and orange.
Among other problems, this haphazard policy produced tragic cases of mistaken identity. At Big Bethel in ’61, one Union regiment fired on another, because it was dressed in gray. At Bull Run a month later, another Union regiment failed to fire in time, because the Confederates were dressed in blue. And when both sides used Zouaves, there was invariable confusion—from 200 yards, any soldier in a fez, a huge sash and flowing plus fours looks the same.
9. A battle in the back yard is naturally exciting to any small boy, and the children of Gettysburg were no exception. With strange indifference to the danger, they innocently wander on stage in many scenes, adding an incongruous touch to the greatest battle ever fought on American soil. Billy Bailey, a twelve-year old at the time, later reminisced how he and his friends stopped berry-picking and sat on a fence to watch A.P. Hill’s men charge across the fields. Another child played more than a spectator’s role when Sickle’s Union troops were feeling for the enemy during the second day. As the Federals cautiously advanced, a small boy rushed out from behind a barn, pointed to a nearby woods, and warned, “There’s lots of Rebels in there! In rows!”
10. Longstreet is rather fatherly about Fremantle’s ill-timed congratulations on the “success” of Pickett’s charge. Recalling the incident years later, Longstreet remarked: “Colonel Fremantle, only observing the troops of Pickett’s command, said to me, ‘General, I would not have missed this for anything in the world.’ He believed it to be a complete success. I was watching the troops supporting Pickett and saw plainly they could not hold together ten minutes longer. I called his attention to the wavering condition of the two divisions of the Third Corps, and said they would not hold, that Pickett would strike and be crushed and the attack would be a failure.” (Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 1884, Vol. III, p. 346.)
11. Lee was outwardly cheerful, but inwardly crushed as Pickett’s men reeled back at Gettysburg. That night Confederate General Imboden dropped by the general’s headquarters. What he saw shows how Lee really felt.
It was one A.M., and when Imboden first arrived, Lee had not yet returned from the battlefield. Soon the general appeared, riding alone, slowly, deep in thought. He reined in his horse and tried to dismount. The effort to do so exhausted him completely and Imboden rushed forward to help him. Once on the ground, Lee threw his arm across the saddle to rest and leaned in silence, almost motionless upon his weary horse. “The moon shone full upon his massive features,” recalled Imboden, “and revealed an expression of sadness that I had never before seen upon his face.
Awed by his appearance, I waited for him to speak until the silence became embarrassing, when, to break it and change the silent current of his thoughts I ventured to remark … ‘General, this has been a hard day on you.’ He looked up and replied mournfully, ‘Yes, it has been a sad, sad day for us,’ and immediately lapsed into his thoughtful mood and attitude.”
It was a trying experience for Imboden. His efforts at sympathetic small talk fell flat. At one point, Lee could only say in a loud voice, in a tone almost of agony, “Too bad! Too bad! OH, TOO BAD!” (Battles and Leaders, Vol. III, pp. 420–421.)
12. Longstreet’s supposed capture at Gettysburg was a case of mistaken identity. When his troops were forced back in their attack on July 2, among the wounded left behind was a Colonel Powell of the Texas 5th Regiment. Powell was a short, stocky man with a full beard and looked very much like Longstreet. The report quickly spread among the Union troops that the general himself had been taken, and it was some time before the mistake was cleared up.
13. In later years, Longstreet was heavily blamed for the failure of Pickett’s charge—especially the delay in its start. As criticism mounted, so did his estimates of how many men he should have had in order to carry it off. When he talked with Fremantle the day after the battle, he felt 30,000 men would have sufficed. By 1895, he was saying, “40,000 men could not have carried the position at Gettysburg.” (From Manassas to Appomattox, p. 404.)
1. While the Confederate wagon train began its slow, weary retreat from Gettysburg, the infantry stayed behind to hold off any Union pursuit. Miserable as Fremantle found conditions in the wagons, life was even worse for the unprotected forces covering the retreat. Ross, Fremantle’s Austrian tentmate, was among those who stayed behind and he paints a vivid picture of that wretched, stormy night: “When it was dusk we went on a mile or two farther on the Fairfield road, and presently came on a blazing fire, around which were Generals Lee and Longstreet, with all their staff. We were to remain there till the train had passed, when the main body of the army would be withdrawn from its position and join the retreat. … It was certainly a dismal night. The fire was kept up and protected from the rain by continuously piling on fresh wood. … It lighted the scene with a strange glare.
“Lee and Longstreet stood apart engaged in earnest conversation, and around the fire in various groups lay the officers of their staffs. Tired to death, many were sleeping in spite of the mud and the drenching rain; and I well remember one long log of wood, a fence rail, which was much coveted as a pillow. … By eight o’clock next morning the whole wagon train had got past us, and the troops began to move.” (Ross, pp. 71–72.)
2. Getting the Confederate wagon train safely out of Pennsylvania was a back-breaking job. When Lee’s army first entered Maryland, the wagon train alone, exclusive of artillery, was 42 miles long. Now the wagons and carts confiscated from Pennsylvania made the train much longer, while mud and exhaustion simultaneously made it harder to move. Under the conditions, a loss of only 38 wagons was a miracle.
3. Most of Fremantle’s Confederate friends feared for the worst when he set out to cross the lines into Union territory. Some were afraid he’d be treated as a spy; others viewed him simply as a mascot who’d be helpless without the protection of Southern hospitality. But not Longstreet. The general heartily assured his staff, “A man who has traveled all through Texas as successfully as the Colonel, is safe to get through the Yankee lines all right.” (Ross, p. 80.)
1. Major General Benjamin F. Kelley contributed little at Gettysburg. Handling the Union defense of West Virginia, he was pretty well isolated from the battle; and during Lee’s subsequent withdrawal, Kelley’s single division could do little but hover off to the west, while the main Union Army tried to organize pursuit on the other side of the retreating Confederates.
Kelley, however, contributed a great deal to the Union cause early in the war. In the preliminary skirmishing over West Virginia, his small force beat the Confederates at Philippi on June 3, 1861. The Rebels were so completely routed that the action was called the “Philippi races” and did much to cement Union spirit in the region. The only Northern casualty—and one of the first of the war—was the wounding of General Kelley.
2. Many a Southern sympathizer kidded himself that Gettysburg was not so bad after all. Fremantle’s Austrian tentmate Ross, for instance, wrote: “It is obvious that the campaign has not been a fruitless one. The war has not only been carried on in the enemy’s country, but enormous supplies have been obtained, which will maintain the army for several months to come. Wagons and horses, which were very necessary, have also been secured in incalculable numbers. The men, whose meat ration for several months past has been a quarter of a pound of bacon, now get a pound and a half of beef. Fifteen thousand cattle have been driven to the rear for the use of the army, which at present requires about 300 head a day. Then, the enemy has had to evacuate a large portion of Southern territory, upon which they were pressing heavily, and that, too, just in time for the harvest to be secured to the Confederacy. There is no doubt, however, that the North will claim Gettysburg as a glorious victory, and there will be great rejoicing over it in Yankee-doodledom.” (Ross, pp. 75–76.)
3. Nothing but the best for Fremantle. He could rough it, but when he came to New York, naturally he stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, newest, plushest hostelry in the city. Its luxuries even included a new convenience hitherto unknown in hotel living—“a perpendicular railway intersecting each story.”
4. “Grayback” wasn’t as innocuous a description as it now sounds, when applied to the dirty, ragged Confederate soldiers. It was also the current slang for lice.
5. “Remember this: that the bloody, treasonable and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government!” These dangerously inviting words came from Horatio Seymour, New York’s Democratic governor, who considered the war an outrageous Republican plot. He was denouncing the first draft in American history, which was scheduled to start in New York City on July 11, 1863. No words could have appealed more to the strong antiwar, anti-Republican, anti-Negro sentiments of the immigrants who at this time were pouring into New York from Europe. No words could have been better calculated to start a riot.
It started on July 13—Fremantle’s first morning in New York. Mobs wrecked the draft offices, and then began wrecking the town in general. With weapons seized in their looting, they fought first the police and then the army. Order was finally restored after five days of pillage, during most of which the governor and other antiwar Democrats were smugly silent or absent from town. Meanwhile, some 1200 people had been killed.
Fremantle was in the heart of the uproar. The fire he saw was probably the enrollment office at Broadway and 28th Street; it went up in flames along with the rest of the block about that time. The Negro he saw chased could have been any one of countless thousands. At one point, the mob even stormed and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum, some 200 Negro children escaping just in time.
1. Three months and thirteen days after landing in America, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur James Lyon Fremantle set sail again for England. As he pondered his experiences in the snug cabin of the Cunarder China, Fremantle came to a conclusion that today seems startling—sooner or later the South was bound to win the Civil War.
How could this intelligent, observant Englishman be so wrong? True, there were many signs of strength—the resourcefulness that produced a tannery in the wilderness, the fighting skill of Lee, Johnston and their tough resilient men, the fiery spirit of those indomitable women.
But there were also many seeds of weakness. These, Fremantle saw and recorded as faithfully as the strong points. He noted how selfish local interests constantly bucked all central authority. He saw the blockade. He noted the evils of weak conscription, electing officers, straggling, poor discipline and rampant politics in the army. He marveled at the South’s overconfidence.
Why, then, did Fremantle discount these weaknesses and smoke his pipe dreams? Most probably because three months in the Confederate States were enough to unhinge any romantic Victorian. By the time he left, he was hopelessly under the spell of frontier days, rattling trains, river boats, campfires and close escapes. He had succumbed to the threadbare graciousness of Charleston, the thunder of Gettysburg, the soft breeze of a starlit night at Shelbyville. Fremantle, in short, was in love with the South, and his heart now ruled his mind.