AFTER THAT TERRIBLE MAULING ON FRIDAY AT MANASSAS Junction, Walter and the fifteen men in his company still fit for duty (out of around fifty who went north as part of Jackson’s corps) could have been forgiven if they thought they had earned a rest. But Lee hoped to deliver a knockout blow against Pope’s army, the bulk of which had withdrawn by August 31 to Centreville astraddle a road that led back to the safety of the Washington defenses. Lee ordered Jackson on a circling maneuver intended to place him at Fairfax Court House, eight miles behind Pope’s army on its line of retreat to Washington. If the maneuver succeeded, Pope’s retreat would be blocked and he would have to come out in the open and fight. However, the element of surprise was lost when a Union patrol detected Jackson’s move around Pope’s right flank. As Pope hurriedly redeployed his army toward Fairfax, Yankees coming up from the south attacked the advanced units of Jackson’s corps at the crossroads of Chantilly, a site also known as Ox Hill.
The battle began around 5:00 P.M. and was fought in a raging thunderstorm. Walter’s company was in the thick of the sharpest engagement at Ox Hill, and he was proud of how his small band was fighting. Later he learned that only three of his men escaped from that battle unwounded. In the two hours of the heaviest fighting they and fellow Carolinians charged across a field, pushed the Federals though woods into another field, and then held back Union counterattacks at the edge of the woods. After two Union generals were killed in rapid succession, the Federals called off the attacks in the gathering darkness.
It was twilight, Walter recalled, and time for a rest. The battle seemed to be winding down. On a slight ridge behind a fence line he was resting on the ground. Leaning back on an elbow, he foolishly stretched out his legs across the line of fire rather than pointing them to the rear. He had just finished talking with Captain Morris and was about to speak to his men when he felt an “awful pain” in his right leg. A minie ball had ripped through it about halfway between his knee and foot, smashing both bones. No sooner had he told Morris that he thought his leg was broken when a second ball, perhaps skipping up from the ground, laid bare the shinbone in the same leg and took off his right toe. Disabled and fearing that he would bleed to death from a severed artery, he began to drag himself toward the rear in the frantic hope of finding members of an infantry corps. Exhausted after crawling for about fifteen feet, he collapsed in a small clearing by the road. As sand was thrown into his face by minie balls striking the ground near his head and Yankee artillery shells exploded all around him, he realized that he was in a more exposed position than the fence line he had just left. He lay hopeless, waiting to die.
On the morning of August 31, the day Walter was wounded, Pope’s army regrouped in Centreville.
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZC4–3259.)
Looking back, Walter marveled at how calm and resigned he had felt. What sustained him was faith in the God he never had acknowledged in a public confession of faith. He felt that he was “in the hands of a good and merciful God and that he would do with me what was right.” His mind wandered. He experienced a strange sense of elation when he realized that he was not about to lose one of his arms. Surely, it would be more convenient to have a leg rather than an arm amputated. Or would it? What about his favorite sport of trout fishing or the other outdoor activities he would have to give up? He fantasized about women and whether he ever again would have sexual relations. True, he had abstained since Nealy’s death, but would he do so in the future out of a sense of inadequacy? Elation gave way to sadness, for he “was not old enough to have given up the thought of a woman. Are men ever?” Sadness then gave way to shame for harboring such “poor unworthy thoughts,” musings on “mere enjoyments,” when he should have been thankful for being alive.
Walter was wounded while resting behind the fence in the foreground
of this 1907 view of the field where he and his men fought at Ox Hill.
(Source: Virginia Room, Fairfax County Public Library.)
Just after dark, one of Walter’s men came across him lying in a bloody heap, soaked by the falling rain. More help arrived, and four Confederates lifted Walter onto a makeshift stretcher put together by draping a blanket over two fence rails. As they moved him, the pain was agonizing, and he allowed himself to scream out for the first time. He was carried in the dark about a quarter of a mile to a farmhouse where he was left, along with several other wounded men, on the narrow front porch. It was so crowded by the time they arrived with Walter that the only available space was at the entryway to the house. Throughout the night he experienced the “great torture” of having his wounded leg inadvertently kicked by Confederate personnel entering and leaving the house. In the morning he was carried about three-quarters of a mile on a stretcher to an old field where a temporary hospital had been set up. Walter had to wait his turn along with several others. Finally, at about ten o’clock on the morning of September 3, some forty hours after he had been shot, he looked up to see a team of surgeons hovering over him.
Like Walter after the battle at Ox Hill, these wounded
Union soldiers in Virginia had to wait their turn for
medical treatment.
(Source: Francis Trevelyn Miller, ed., The Photographic
History of the Civil War, vol. 8, New York:
Thomas Yoseloff, 1959, p. 255.)
Dr. John F. Shaffner of the 33rd North Carolina Regiment headed up the team. His treatment for the wound was a foregone conclusion. Amputation was the only option in treating the vast majority of those wounded by minie balls. Large and heavy at a .58-caliber and relatively slow moving, the soft lead bullets of rifled muskets caused catastrophic injuries. Rather than blowing through a body, they plowed in and produced large, gaping holes as they smashed bones and tore apart muscles and tissues. No medical techniques existed to repair the damage, and amputation offered the best chance to arrest the spread of infection as tissues decayed, pus spread through the blood, and bone marrow swelled from inflammation. Wounds to the head, stomach, or chest were almost always fatal, and those wounded were treated last, if at all. At least Walter had been hit in an extremity, the most common battlefield wound. Army surgeons quickly gained experience in amputating an arm or a leg and survival rates were high.
Dr. Shaffner had an ample supply of chloroform, and Walter was blissfully unconscious during the ten minutes or so of the operation. Most likely, blood from previous operations splattered the doctor’s uniform; the notion of sterile operations postdated the Civil War. Shaffner began by washing out the wound with a sponge or cloth that had been rinsed in cool water after being used on a previous patient. He then used his bare finger to probe the wound looking for debris and the bullet. Once he was certain that Walter was insensible from the chloroform, he made a series of incisions with his scalpel down to the bone, pulled away muscle and skin, and left a flap of skin on one side of the wound. The key decision was where to amputate. In Walter’s case, it was about six inches below his right knee. Normally Schoeffner would have severed the leg with his bonesaw nearer to the knee joint, thereby allowing for an easier, less painful adjustment to a wooden leg in contact with a short stump. He decided not to out of concern that complications might arise were he to amputate at the point where the second minie ball had badly gouged Walter’s shin just below his knee joint. He feared that the damaged shinbone might be so weakened after being cut through that it would be unable to bear the weight of a prosthetic device. Once the amputation was over and he had tossed the severed leg onto a nearby pile of limbs, Shaffner tied off Walter’s arteries with horsehair or perhaps cloth threads. He then carefully scraped the remaining bone on the leg to prevent any sharp edges from pushing through the skin, pulled the flap of skin back across the wound, and sewed it up so as to leave a drainage hole. Just as he finished dressing the wound with a medicinal plaster covered by a bandage, Walter regained consciousness. Little did he realize that his greatest agony lay ahead.
This Confederate field hospital at Antietam was typical of the emergency
medical services provided for the wounded after a battle.
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-cwpb- 00202.)
Within hours of surgery, Walter found himself in the bed of a heavy army wagon pressed into service as an ambulance. Accompanying him were Rufus Holdaway, a private from his company detailed as his nurse, and two friends, his nephew Tom Norwood and Lieutenant Pool. Tom had been shot in his left heel and Pool was still dazed from an exploding shell. Their destination was Middleburg in Loudoun County, Virginia, where a military hospital had been established in an Episcopal church. As the wagon rumbled off in midafternoon, Walter began the worst journey of his life. Equipped with no springs, the wagon did not so much carry him as it bounced him. Every bump on the rough farm road jarred his wound. As bad as the pain had been while he lay in the field waiting for the surgeons, this was infinitely worse. He later wrote that every little jolt of the wagon caused “a pang which felt as if my stump was thrust into liquid fire, and was as fierce as that awful pang which first announced that my leg was broken.” Mercifully for Walter, the driver stopped at nightfall after covering twenty miles in about five hours. Just outside the village of Aldie and still four miles from Middleburg, the men spent the night in the bed of the wagon.
When their journey resumed, so did Walter’s excruciating pain. He was convinced he was going to die. About three miles outside of Middleburg the men flagged down a passing Rockaway carriage, a horse-drawn passenger vehicle that had springs, which carried Walter into town with much less suffering.
Still ahead, however, was the problem of finding accommodations for himself and Tom. About 1,800 Confederate sick and wounded had flooded into Middleburg, and even if the military hospital in the church had not been packed, Walter would have done all in his power to avoid it. Understaffed and filled to overflowing, military hospitals were sites of agony and death. Walter wanted to rent a room in a private residence. Uncertain how to proceed, he waited alone and helpless in the Rockaway. A passerby, Mrs. Samuel A. Chancellor, noticed his plight and offered assistance. For Walter, she was a guardian angel. She spoke to him, he remembered, “in that sweet kind woman’s voice that thrills the heart of the sufferer as nothing else can.” Handled throughout his ordeal by well-meaning but rough men inured to suffering by the carnage they had seen, for the first time he “felt the soft touch of woman’s hand,” and he never forgot how “it soothed and comforted” him. Chancellor’s house was already filled with the wounded, but she procured a room for Walter in the home of a Methodist clergyman, Reverend Richey.
Once settled, Walter wrote to Rufus. His pain was so intense that his trembling hand reduced his normally neat cursive script to the shaky block letters of a child. Not knowing what news or rumors Rufus may have heard, he began with the simple and reassuring statement, “I am alive.” He specified where he was and what he had undergone. His agony had been “terrible” but he now had hopes “that I will live. This morning I had but little.” He reported that Tom Norwood was with him at the Richeys’ and had “fought a very hero’s fight [at Second Manassas] firing twenty four rounds after receiving his painful wound standing the foremost … & never deserting his post.” If Rufus or anyone else from Caldwell would decide to come and bring Tom and himself home, he explained that the best route to Middleburg was via Lynchburg and Gordonsville. In the meantime, he would console himself with the only thoughts that had granted him a “spell of cheerfulness” during his suffering—his belief that if he were to die, it would be “in a most just & righteous cause.” Without a hint of irony, he noted that he was writing on “a Yankee sheet of paper & envelope,” supplies seized as the rebels drove the Yankees off the plains at Manassas Junction. In case Rufus was wondering about the stains on the paper, he explained that he had stuffed the stationery into a pocket “as I lay soaking in the heavy rain & my own blood on the battle field of Manassas.” He closed by stressing that through all his tears “I send you all my love intensified as it never was before.”
His first three weeks brought him limited relief. Although his appetite returned faster than expected, he was unable to sleep. Forced to remain slightly elevated on his back so that his throbbing stump could drain, he could not relax to the point of benefiting from a sound sleep. “The sleep famine,” as he called it, was “horrible. The days were like months.” Finally, his stump healed sufficiently to permit him to turn over on his side, and his exhausted body was able to find the rest it craved. During those endless days he thought constantly of his loved ones at home and was conscious of a “new spiritual strength.” Ever since he had joined the army, and especially once he had known that he would command his own company in Virginia, he had tried to reach out to God and experience the rebirth that would signal his redemption. Surely that was all his mother had ever asked of him since he was old enough to go to college. Now, lying on his bed of agony, desperately needing to find meaning in his terrible wounds, he wrote to his mother that he viewed his suffering “as part of God’s dealings with me as a sinner. And although his chastisements which I have brought upon myself have seemed very fierce, his mercies & his loving kindness which he has at the same time showereth upon me, have seemed more overwhelming still, though, all undeserved.” The world that had turned his heart into stone never seemed farther from him nor God closer. “I loved to think of God and to pray to him and to read and hear his word.” He could not read the Gospel of St. John to Tom Norwood and a fellow convalescing soldier without finding “new meaning” in the familiar words and breaking into tears. He had little doubt, he told his mother, that he would finally join the church when he returned home.
The new identity he would assume as a professed Christian, Walter was convinced, would complete the transformation in his character wrought by the war. This sense of newness, of shedding an old self for a new one, was by no means uncommon among Civil War soldiers. For many, the totality of the war experience made their civilian past seem like an odd relic of their imaginations. Certainly that was the case for Bolivar Christian, Nealy’s brother. Like Walter, he had been a lawyer before the war who found no particular satisfaction in his profession. Also present at the Battle of Second Manassas, he wrote to Walter as soon as he learned of his wounds. In addition to urging Walter to borrow any money he might need and to use the family homestead to rest and to mend, he asked Walter if the war had changed him. “I … am unlike—I hope—what I ever was before in civil life,” he confided. “In Winchester a lady acquaintance asking me so many questions to which I had to answer ‘don’t know’—finally asked me if I knew myself-—I replied hadn’t seen myself for 6 months. I suppose you were as unlikely as myself.”
In Walter’s case, the change was experienced as a softening of his heart, a new sensibility of suffering that embraced virtues he had identified with women before the war. The war had opened him up to the “finer feelings” of his nature. As an officer, he found himself in the motherly role of caring for and consoling his men. Their “hard fare, their weary gait, their bare and bleeding feet and parched lips, and their heroic patience” brought him to the point of tears. Hard campaigning effaced his former “life of comparative ease and indolence” and brought him face-to-face with suffering that formerly he had ignored. Even more powerful than this outpouring of concern for his men was the intensified tenderness for his family. “But it was not till the very marrow of my soul had been touched by my sufferings after I was wounded,” he later wrote in his journal, “that my love for my mother and my brothers gushed forth as it had never done before. The slightest mention of any of their names every thought of them caused my tears to start, and my voice to falter and fail. My feelings of love for them had never been so intensified before; will probably never be again, unless it be when I am stretched upon my dying bed.”
While this flood of emotions was reshaping Walter’s sense of himself, his brother Rufus at Fort Defiance was struggling with emotions of a different sort. Although aroused by anger and not by love, these emotions also drew him closer to his mother. Rufus hated nothing more than disciplining a slave. It brought out the worst in him. This particular case involved Delia, a young slave woman who was continually “impudent” toward Selina, his widowed, seventy-eight-year-old mother. He would “thrash her,” Rufus warned, if his mother ever complained of her behavior. He spoke with Andy, Delia’s father, in the hope that he could change her behavior, but to no avail. When Delia “gave Mother impudence again,” Rufus ordered her into the house for a whipping. Crying out that “she could not stand that,” she ran off to the kitchen, Rufus in pursuit. As he struggled to force her back into the house, Selina appeared and remarked that for all she cared Delia might as well be “dead.” That was all the encouragement Rufus needed. Delia’s only choice, he told her, was between a whipping in the house or a thrashing in the kitchen. “And after telling her three times that I would knock her down if she did not go, I gave her a tap which she will probably remember for some time.”
Telling Tom of this confrontation, Rufus made it clear that it was time to be rid of the slaves who were troubling their aged and infirm mother. In addition to Delia, there was Maria, Andy’s wife, “a very trifling hussy,” who, “if she stays here will probably cause me to do something that will make me sorry afterward.” Maria was Walter’s slave, but he had told Rufus he should feel free to hire her out or pay someone to keep her if she ever troubled “his old mother.” Given the unsettled affairs brought on by the war, and convinced that he would not be able to find any local takers for Maria, Rufus decided to ship her out to Haywood along with Andy and Delia. He suggested to Tom that they could be put to work on Walter’s unrented Haywood land. Andy was “a first rate hand & a good servant,” and Rufus knew that he would be more productive for Tom if he was not separated from his wife. He might have to send out two other slaves of Tom’s as well, Polly and Beck, unless they showed more respect. Short of open defiance, he could put up with the slaves’ sauciness, but it was different when his mother was involved. “I can stand a little of it myself but when mother complains I feel like hurting somebody.”
Then Rufus learned of Walter’s devastating wound and of his desire for Rufus to come and bring him home. Always the most rooted of the Lenoir brothers, Rufus was reluctant to leave. All his forebodings regarding the war returned and now he was being asked to abandon his wife and small children and trust that they would be protected in his absence. Still, Walter had virtually pleaded: “Dear Rufus please come to me at once.” He could hardly refuse, but he put off the trip for two weeks and then discovered that the Confederate military was turning back civilians seeking to enter central Virginia via the most direct rail line. Rufus began a detour north and west through East Tennessee and southwestern Virginia to Alexandria. From there he would follow the Blue Ridge south and reach Middleburg by walking and riding. But Rufus encountered an outbreak of smallpox and turned back at Gordonsville. He ran into a member of Walter’s company, who informed him that Walter was doing well and could be moved within a few weeks. Relieved both that his brother’s life was not in immediate danger and that there was no pressing need for him to push on and confront Walter in his distressed condition, Rufus headed back to his family.
Unlike Rufus, Tom Lenoir moved quickly when he learned of Walter’s fate. Tom reached Middleburg on September 23, a day after Yankee cavalry had passed through. He stayed with Walter until he was well enough to begin the journey home. They journeyed first to Richmond, where Walter checked into an army hospital and filled out the forms for his medical furlough. By mid-October he and Tom were back at Fort Defiance.
Walter returned home as a war hero. His niece Louise Norwood echoed the sentiments of family and friends when she spoke of his wound as “an honor” which “renders you dearer to us than ever, & we will always be proud of the gallant conduct which cost you so dear … You will not even be crippled,” she added comfortingly, “for I am told that an artificial leg can be put on below the knee, which will ‘act’ … almost as well as the natural limb.”
Walter’s wound also provided him a safe conduct from the horrors of combat. Although (or perhaps because) he was now surrounded by women who wanted nothing more than to care for him and nurse him back to health, his thoughts drifted back to the battlefield and the bonds forged with the men serving under him. His reentry into civilian life threatened to undo that newfound sense of himself as a manly warrior enduring hardship and sacrifice for God and country. Initially, he thought he would never again desire a return to battle. But reports of the upcoming confrontation at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862, stirred up emotions. “Strange to say I … found myself growing restless at the thought that my old companions in arms were to be in another great battle, and I found myself actually longing to be with them in the fight.”
In yearning to recapture the intoxicating sense of combat, to reexperience the most intense, passionate feelings he had ever known, Walter was of course fantasizing. He sent in his medical resignation from military service to take effect on December 18, and it was officially approved. God, as well as the peculiar ardor of combat, was also slipping away. Walter was unable to recapture that otherworldly sense of closeness to God that overwhelmed him as he lay helpless in Middleburg. As his health slowly returned at Fort Defiance, he lamented that “the vivid religious impressions which I felt during my period of great suffering seem to be giving way to too much of the coldness and apathy which have for, alas! so many years attended my religious course.” His confession of faith would have to wait.
Of more immediate concern were Walter’s fading hopes that his amputation could be easily overcome with a prosthetic device. His stump healed by mid-December, and he was able to hobble about on level ground with a clumsy wooden leg made by Rufus. But progress was slow. He first expressed his frustration in late December when he learned that his brother Tom was confined to bed after an ill-fated expedition into Tennessee. A month earlier, Tom and his North Carolina militia had been ordered to round up plundering bands of deserters and Tories (i.e., Unionists) in the mountains of East Tennessee. Tom thought they numbered anywhere from 800 to 2,000 and were “very bitter in their feelings toward the Southern men.”
He had to be careful not to lead his men into an ambush. Earlier in the fall, three Confederates had gone into the mountains searching for what they had been told was a band of three Tories. The woman guiding them broke out in a song signaling their arrival to the waiting Tories. There were about ten of the enemy, not three, and they killed one of their pursuers and forced the others to flee for help.
Tom’s cavalry unit aimlessly thrashed around East Tennessee for a week. Apart from killing one deserter and taking a couple dozen prisoners, the mission was a failure. Two nights without shelter in a drenching rain left Tom with a debilitating cold, and he returned home feverish and weak. When Walter heard of his condition, he felt helpless over his inability to assist his brother. Never before, he wrote Tom’s wife Lizzie, had he so keenly felt the loss of his leg. Even if he could make it to Haywood, “I have so poor a use of myself,” he wrote Lizzie, “that I would only be in the way if I were with you.”
More disappointing news followed from Bolivar Christian, who had vainly searched for a manufacturer of wooden legs in Richmond. “I can hear of no foot or leg factory,” he reported. “The demand as yet is but for crutches. The wounded being all too proud of their lameness to conceal it.” Instead, Walter enlisted the services of a local carpenter, Samuel Montgomery. In late January, the two men examined the contrasting styles of wooden legs used by two amputees, a Mr. Wakefield and a Mr. Stockton. Palmer of Philadelphia manufactured the most commonly used wooden leg, one designed for amputees with a short stump. Stockton used this model, folding back his stump at the knee and resting it directly on the artificial limb. Wakefield, who had a longer stump that could not easily be folded back, opted for the model made by Ord of Philadelphia. His device had a ring into which he inserted his stump, so that it was supported at the point where his leg bones swelled below the joint of his knee. Without the ring, he never could have withstood the pain of folding over his long and tender stump and having it press down on a wooden leg. The major drawback was that the Ord required considerable time and effort to use with any degree of balance and confidence. Neither model impressed Walter. Yet he now knew that with a stump six inches long, the only option for “his Montgomery leg” was a ring attachment. He would “have to make up my mind to be a worse cripple than I had hoped for,” he concluded.
While Montgomery worked on his leg, Walter forged ahead with his plans to move out to land he owned near Tom’s farm in Haywood County, a mountainous and isolated region in the southwestern corner of the state. That course of action was the only way he knew to regain the manly independence he had come to value so highly as a Confederate soldier. To remain at home a cripple under the care of women only heightened the fears of emasculation he first sensed when visions of sexual inadequacy swirled through his mind as he lay helpless in the crossroads near Ox Hill. The shock and then anger expressed by his mother and sister upon hearing of his decision confirmed in his mind that he had to get away.
Walter followed Rufus’s suggestion of sending Andy and his family out to Tom’s farm in Haywood. In addition to providing Walter with his household labor, they would serve as the backbone of the labor force he needed for his own mountain farm. In urging Tom to put Andy to work as soon as possible, Walter praised his reliability and noted that Rufus had paid Andy $48 for the crops he produced in his family garden. Like many slave owners, the Lenoirs allowed their slaves to farm small plots of land set aside for their use and sell the produce to their masters. This was shrewd management, for the cash purchases reduced the temptation on the part of the slaves to engage in illicit trading with poor whites.
Walter also turned to his slave property to raise cash for his move and pay off debts. In February 1863 he sold Judy and her two youngest children, slaves he had inherited from his brother William’s estate, for $1,700. He entered the slave market at a propitious time. Measured in Confederate currency, slave prices turned sharply upward beginning in the summer of 1862. Some of this increase reflected growing confidence in Confederate victory brought on by a string of military successes, but most of it tracked the accelerating depreciation of Confederate currency. The cheapening of the government’s paper money inflated prices throughout the economy. Although many sellers wondered if the money they were receiving would soon be worth less than the slaves whose labor they were losing, the temptation to sell at high prices was often irresistible.
Rufus joined Walter in selling some of his estate slaves a few weeks after hearing from James Gwyn of the high slave prices in neighboring Wilkes County. Although Gwyn kicked himself for selling too soon back in January, he received what he characterized as “exorbitant” prices for two of his slaves. He was glad to be rid of both. Although he “disliked very much” separating Polly, a young slave girl, from her parents, he defended her sale by noting that “she got too far along in the slight of hand to keep.” Lark, the other slave and a “No. 1 boy” in the classification scale of the slave trade, “had taken it into his head to engage in speculation & of course to succeed must travel about a good deal. I am opposed to that business generally & I thought he & I would not agree so well in the future & I sold him.”
Walter intended to use some of the proceeds from his sales to reimburse Tom for money owed him from William’s estate. By the winter of 1862–1863, however, the Southern backcountry was lapsing into a barter economy as more and more Confederates refused to accept their government’s money. What Tom wanted from Walter wasn’t depreciating money but goods like leather, cloth, and bolts of yarn that Tom could use to pay farm help reluctant to accept Confederate dollars. “I could sometimes get work for such articles,” he explained, “when folks won’t look at money.”
Tom, like other Confederate civilians, was feeling the pinch of war-induced shortages in labor and consumer goods. Demand for iron goods from his blacksmith shop had never been greater, but he lacked the labor to meet it. He had half a mind to close the shop except on rainy days. Even before Yankee raiders swept down from East Tennessee in early January and burned the bridges to the nearest saltworks, he and Lizzie were making do with less than half of their normal supply of salt, which was essential for preserving meat. Only a favored few families in Haywood still had access to the cotton cards needed to prepare cotton for spinning in domestic manufacturing, and waits of up to six months for cotton to spin into clothing were now common.
Closer to transportation and textile factories, Caldwell County residents were able to meet most of their consumer needs. Still, it took Walter several weeks to stockpile the goods Tom and Lizzie had asked him to bring out to Haywood, and he had to settle for much less than they wanted. For Walter, these difficulties simply confirmed his belief that Southerners would have to sacrifice to gain their independence. Like most of his friends and associates, he believed in early 1863 that Confederate victory was only a matter of time. The successful defense of Richmond in the summer of 1862, followed by Confederate offensives into Maryland and Kentucky, the stabilization of the lines in the West, and the Union debacle at Fredericksburg, had bolstered morale on the home front and left many expecting an end to the war in 1863. Joe Norwood felt that “if the Yankees give us a chance, I think they will be badly whipped every where. And that will precipitate them into revolution or peace.” Walter’s cousin William Bingham boasted in March, “We are stronger than we have ever been since the war began. We make an abundant supply of arms & powder, have men enough, notwithstanding the Yankee conscription; and the Lord of Hosts is on our side.” Although less strident, Walter was just as confident when he wrote Tom in February that “our cause is brighter and more hopeful than it has ever been before, but the greatest and fiercest battles of the war have still to be fought before the Yankees will be convinced.”
For most of the remainder of the war, Walter waited for the Yankees to be convinced while he lived in a cramped cabin with his slaves in the mountain remoteness of Haywood County. In early April, he finally took delivery of his new Montgomery leg. By offering a hundred dollars, he was able to secure a hauler to bring his supplies out to Haywood. Walter went ahead on his horse Rip and three days later on April 17 reached Tom’s place. He was brimming with hope. He proudly wrote home that he had “stood the journey so well as to feel gratified by it, and more in hopes that I may yet manage to be of some account.”
For a full account of the battle in which Walter was severely wounded, see David A. Welker, Tempest at Ox Hill: The Battle of Chantilly (New York: Da Capo, 2002). Perhaps because the memory was so painful, Walter did not attempt to recall in writing what had happened to him at Ox Hill until he resumed his diary on January 10, 1863. He did not think he’d be able “to give as vivid an account of my feelings and impressions upon going into battle as I might have done immediately afterwards,” and he was right. His account of his reaction to the battle at Cedar Mountain in a letter to Rufus on August 19, 1862, is more vivid and detailed than the recollection of the battle he included in his long diary entry of January 10 relating his experiences from late July to the moment he woke up from his leg amputation. The final entry a week later describes his harrowing wagon trip to Middleburg and the first months of his recuperation. Fittingly, the diary concludes with a note that effective December 18, 1862, he resigned from the army and “ceased to be a soldier.”
The 37th North Carolina regiment lost fourteen men killed and ninety wounded in the fighting at Second Manassas and Ox Hill. Walter’s Company A, which was especially hard hit, continued to see some of the heaviest fighting of the war. Twenty percent of the 206 men who served in the company throughout the war died of combat wounds, a rate of battlefield deaths nearly twice that of the average in Confederate armies. For a roster of the men who served in the company and a summary of their war service, see Louis H. Manarin and Weymouth T. Jordan Jr., North Carolina Troops, 1861–1865: A Roster, vol. 9, Infantry (Raleigh, N.C.: Division of Archives and History, 1983), pp. 471–85.
At least 50,000 wounded soldiers shared Walter’s experience of having a limb amputated during the war. The conditions they faced in the often hastily constructed field hospitals are examined by Horace Herndon Cunningham in Field Medical Services at the Battles of Manassas (Bull Run) (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968). On the broader topic of Civil War medical care and knowledge, see Frank F. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998); and Ira M. Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine (New York: Random House, 2005).
Ansley Herring Wegner, Phantom Pain: North Carolina’s Artificial-Limbs Program for Confederate Veterans, Including an Index to Records in the North Carolina State Archives Related to Artificial Limbs for Confederate Veterans (Raleigh, N.C.: Office of Archives and History, 2004) includes a brief history of amputation and discusses the special problems confronting amputees. North Carolina’s artificial limb program, the first of its kind in the South, offered amputees an artificial limb free of charge and a commutation fee of $70 to those who wished to purchase their own artificial leg. Wegner’s index reveals that Walter submitted a request for the commutation fee on May 15, 1866.
