Civil War 1
Texas and The Civil War
Script for KWBU-FM and Texas NPR Stations
By Van Darden
HOST (Mary Landon Darden)
The diaries, journals and letters kept by the men and women who lived during the American Civil War are among the most dramatic and uncompromising reads in Baylor University’s Texas Collection.
Austin freelance writer Van Darden sifted through the sands of those archives to find some priceless treasures. And, he is here today to share some of the most fascinating stories taken straight from the pens of those who survived the infamous War Between the States.
Welcome, Van.
Van Darden
Thank you for having me.
Tell us what you found in your research on Texas and the Civil War.
WRITER (Van Darden)
There are literally thousands of pieces of paper at the Texas Collection dealing with the Civil War. Some contain gripping accounts of battle-won bravery. Others reflect private longings for a far-away love. Many are merely scattershot collections of random thoughts, disjointed dates or cryptic codes – their meanings lost to a century and a half of dying memories. Regardless, these un-edited, first-hand accounts make for compelling storytelling.
The American Civil War is known as one of the bloodiest eras in our collective history. And while that’s certainly true, within that pain and loss there must have been some better moments.
Oh, absolutely. A member of General John Bell Hood’s famous Texas Brigade, a Joseph Polley of Company F, Fourth Infantry, was stationed at a camp near Fredericksburg, Virginia. He wrote letters to his “charming wife,” Nellie.
He tells one funny story in an April 5, 1862 letter to Nellie. A member of his company, whom he named “Jack” in the letter, “disdainfully rejected the munificent offer of the Confederate States Government” to furnish him with a standard – if strictly military – five-dollar overcoat on credit. Instead, Jack spent twenty-five dollars of his own money on a beautifully tailored coat “of a quality and fashion to commend itself to the most fastidious aristocrat.”
The first night in camp, Jack wore his overcoat to sleep. The night was intensely cold and the men gathered around a huge fire for the night. About midnight, Jack was awakened by other members of their company to find his coat on fire, lit by a stray coal. The pristine garment, he writes, was transformed into a nondescript - and open in the back - apron, held together only by the collar.
The next morning, a crestfallen Jack tried to repair the damage by sewing the burned edges together, but that heroic remedy rendered it impossible to button up the front and kept him so busy during the day answering questions about it that when night came he was too hoarse to talk.
That must have given the troops some much needed entertainment and was probably a lesson in humility for “Jack.” Did any more amusing events like that one pop up?
Yep. Robert Campbell, a member of Company A, in the Fifth Texas Infantry Regiment, writes in his journal about a funny way soldiers kept camp.
His company was making camp near Richmond in the summer of 1862, after the May 7 Battle at Eltham's Landing. It was hot, and camp conditions were miserable. Campbell writes that soldiers mostly dedicated themselves to “skirmishing” – or hunting “War bugs.” Today, we call them lice.
Yikes. I’m not sure we want to hear the details on the lice hunt, but perhaps you could tell us about some of the other forms of entertainment?
Campbell also talked at length about what they did when they weren’t fighting during those hot, humid months spent in the swamps outside of Richmond. Within about two weeks after setting up camp, no less than four gambling tents had been established, all devoted to the soldier’s favorite card game: poker. “When we won money,” he writes, “rest assured we spent it well.” Campbell said the men founded a black market network for food and other essentials, and poker winnings were often spent on fresh vegetables, butter, milk, chickens, turkeys or eggs. The going rate for a pound of butter in a Confederate soldier’s camp in 1862? One dollar. Chickens were a dollar-fifty apiece.
What about some of the famous Generals that led during the Civil War.
Well, given the Texas Collection’s nature, there are not a lot of documents about Union soldiers. Most of the Civil War-related materials deal with the Confederacy and its soldiers and generals, the most famous of whom is, naturally, Robert E. Lee.
In another letter to Nellie, Joseph Polley tells a story on Lee, who was, of course, enormously popular among Confederate soldiers. They loved him enough to die for him unquestioningly. The story Polley tells takes place during the bloody Battle of the Wilderness in May of 1864. Both sides had taken heavy losses, with Union General Ulysses S. Grant entrenched in battle against weary Confederate forces. Ultimately, after days of fighting, 12,000 men from Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s First Corps finished their 25-mile hike to the battlefront. Exuberant that Confederate reinforcements had arrived, Lee attempted to lead the 800-man Texas Brigade against the Union line. He galloped up on his famous dapple-gray horse, Traveler. The Yanks are only 300 yards away.
He gives his orders to General Gragg to advance: "The Texas Brigade always has driven the enemy, and I expect them to do it today!"
Gragg wheels on his horse and orders the Texas Brigade forward.
Just then, Lee -- still trying see through the smoke and trees -- rides up on the Fifth Texas, as if intending to lead the charge into the Union ranks himself.
Because he was so loved and generals like Lee were too valuable to risk on the front lines, a roar immediately went up from the Texans. They are shocked that their beloved general has put himself in harms’ way. One Texan leapt up, grabbed Traveler's reins and led him to safety, just as a barrage of gunfire splintered the trees and shook the ground beneath them.
All the while, the Texans are shouting, “Lee to the rear! Lee to the rear!”
So, during this time, what was happening on the home front back here in Texas?
Well, despite the heavy losses suffered by Hood’s Brigade – and other Texas infantry brigades – the state itself was not as affected by the events of the war as its eastern cousins since the state was far removed from the major theaters of the War. However, Texas did endure a Union blockade at Galveston Harbor and a persistent threat of invasion along the coast.
But still, life must have changed pretty drastically for the families and communities.
Oh, yes. With fathers and older brothers gone at war, the burden of keeping up farms and households was suddenly thrust upon the shoulders of the women left behind. Some fared better than others with the changes.
One young woman who managed to weather the storm fairly well was Sallie McNeill of Brazoria County. A Baylor University alum, she kept a journal during these years. She chronicled the details of daily experiences, worrying about the threat of measles and possible sugar and paper shortages. McNeill was well-educated, read Dickens and was single by choice –a bold act of self-definition when social mores of the era saw single women as stigmatized spinsters.
Although she describes herself as “not very remarkable for anything,” Sallie’s diary is remarkable for the fact that it survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, hurricanes and house fires. The private nature of her journal allowed her to write candidly about her life, her health, her friends and neighbors and her opinions of slavery and the War.
Please, do tell.
For instance, in an undated entry in December of 1861 she called the war “horrid” and stuck several exclamation points after to the word. She writes:
There is a vague report to the effect that we will be abandoned to the depredation of the vandals. Coastal residents must retreat to the interior. Why will we waste this short life in such unholy strife?
A year later, Union troops had taken up residence in Galveston, following the blockade of the harbor. McNeill wrote that Yankee troops destroyed Mr. Winston’s salt-works.
McNeill said that the sacrifice during four long years of bloodshed has all been in vain: “All is lost save honor.” She writes. “We are mourners: for the dead and for the living. For the miserable past and hopeless future.”
Wow. Strong words. But, of course the Civil War was by no means a war where only men became heroes. There were many strong women who emerged during this era, as well.
That’s right. Not all women relegated themselves to merely keeping house or managing the plantation. A select group of brave and enterprising women -- taking inspiration from heroes like Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton and Dorthea Dix -- literally put themselves in the line of fire to give aid and care to wounded soldiers. Many worked as nurses.
Like who?
One of the many unsung heroic women was Kate Cumming, a Scottish immigrant in Mobile, Alabama. In her journal, she describes the war’s effect on her adopted hometown and, later, the experience of going off to war:
Battles and wounds and defeats and deaths changed the gaiety of men going off to war into dread and fear. Everything in their lives was arranged for sudden flight in to the woods. The effects of the war were making themselves felt.
What happened to Kate?
One Sunday morning, the Reverend Benjamin Miller of Saint John’s Church in Mobile, called on the ladies of the church to accompany him to the war’s front lines to serve as nurses to the sick and wounded. Cumming’s family initially disapproved of her involvement, which she limited at first to collecting blankets, quilts and delicacies for the troops. Later, she writes that Reverend Miller returned to Mobile to implore her and about forty other women to rush to the Battle of Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee to help the over-taxed field doctors.
Did she go?
Yes. And in her diary she wrote:
I had never been inside a hospital and was wholly ignorant of what I should be called upon to do, but I knew that what one woman had done another could do.
That “one” woman, Maine’s Dorthea L. Dix, was appointed by Union brass as Superintendent of Female Nurses of the Army of the United States on June 10, 1861. Dix was responsible for assembling and training a corps of army nurses. Despite blatant public and medical prejudice aimed at the women, there were many eager volunteers and soon the Union had organized and trained the rudiments of a nursing corps of more than 2,000. The South was slower in recognizing the worth of women as regular members of the army’s medical department, as nearly a full year passed before the Confederate Congress granted them official status.
What did Kate write about her time serving in battle?
Kate Cumming’s first experience on the front was at Corinth, about 120 miles east of Memphis. On April 11, 1862, and still as a volunteer, Cumming vividly describes the scene of the hospital ward: “Nothing I had ever heard or read had given me the faintest idea of the horror witnessed there.”
She describes “gray-haired men, in the pride of manhood, and hairless boys, mutilated in every imaginable way,” many of whom were lying on the floor, “just as they were taken from the battlefield, so close together that it was impossible to walk without stepping on them.”
“I will never forget the poor sufferer’s gratitude, for every little thing done to them,” she writes. “A little water to drink, or the bathing of their wounds, seemed to afford them the greatest relief.”
In the days following the April 6 Battle of Shiloh, Cumming makes notes in her journal about her time in a blood-stained medical field-tent. I’d like to read some entries from it, verbatim, because they are particularly compelling:
Please do.
April 12: I sat up all night, bathing the men’s wounds and giving them water. Every one attending to them seemed completely worn out. Some of the doctors told me that they had scarcely slept since the battle.
April 13: Finally enjoyed a night’s rest upon some boxes. I slept so soundly that I did not dream.
April 17: I was going round as usual this morning, washing the faces of the men, and had got half way through with one before I found out he was dead. He was lying on the gallery by himself, and had died with no one near him. These are terrible things and, what’s more heart-rending, no one seems to mind them.
Civil War doctors must have been under considerable amounts of pressure.
Indeed.In another collection of letters, this time from Dr. Nathaniel Morgan of the Second Battalion, First Confederate Regiment, Georgia Volunteers, a field camp is described in vivid detail.
Morgan, who incidentally is the great-grandfather of long-time Waco icon Judge Bill Logue, writes to his wife Frances about the gritty details of the hospital. In the December 7, 1863 letter, he tells of wounded and dying men lying stretched out on bits of straw or blankets, calling for water. The operating table was a sawhorse and wood planks, covered in blankets. Blood lay everywhere, he writes. It was certainly not for the faint of heart.
Another doctor, Senior Surgeon John M. Bronough, of the Fifth Regiment, Texas Mounted Volunteers, was attached first to Green’s Brigade in Louisiana and later to Hardeman’s Brigade. His day-books of orders, communications and reports, and the hospital register he kept for his regiment, represent one of the more complete depictions of medical realties faced by Civil War soldiers.
What does he write about?
In a July 29, 1864, letter to a Captain W.S. Moore of Hardeman’s Brigade, Bronough mentions that fevers have run rampant throughout the camp. Poor diet and constant exposure to the elements have left the soldiers weakened and susceptible to diseases like Anemia. Recent rains in the area of their camp dramatically increased the number of mosquitoes, and many men contracted malaria, to which Bronough attributed much of their sickness.
Just as the battlefields were chaotic and brutal during the Civil War, the enemy lines were not often easily distinguishable in a land where friends were enemies, brother turned against brother and spies were everywhere. This must have made for some intriguing tales of espionage.
You bet. The Collection has a copy of a journal kept by a Private Ephraim Shelby Dodd of Company D, Eighth Texas Cavalry, better known to us today as “Terry’s Texas Rangers.”
Dodd kept a diary that was little more than a register of names and places and its value comes in the form of an accurate account of the life and hardships of an enlisted Confederate cavalryman: continually on the move, foraging for food, avoiding conflict as well as seeking it. Unfortunately for Dodd, his diary also served as evidence against him at his trial as a spy.
Do we know what happened to Dodd?
He was captured in December of 1863 by Confederate forces after becoming separated from his company and losing his horse in the Middle Tennessee Raid. Un-mounted and unwilling to remain in the wagon camp, he followed his company through East Tennessee. After procuring a horse, he was making his way through the lines of the enemy, towards his company, when he was picked up by another Confederate squad.
In a prison in Sevier County, Tennessee, Confederate authorities confiscated that journal, the one detailing the day-to-day locations of the Rangers. Freezing, hungry and exhausted, he was captured in threadbare Union blue pants and overcoat, but Dodd plead with his captors that he had worn them out of necessity. The clothes and journal were enough to condemn Dodd to death by hanging.
Wow.
“I am as innocent of the charge of being a spy as an angel of light,” he wrote in letters to his father and grandfather.
The last entry in his journal that he was allowed to keep in jail, dated one week before his death, described some gifts of charity given to him and other prisoners by Knoxville women. It ends with a cryptic reference to his supposed execution site:
Friday, Jan. 1, 1864 -- Received one pair of drawers from Miss Nannie Scott, two shirts from Mrs. House. One hundred and fifty of the prisoners start today for Strawberry Plains. We go tomorrow.