W.T. Sherman on R.E. Lee and U.S. Grant

In 1887 William Tecumseh Sherman published an article in a British magazine responding to an earlier piece in which a British officer held up Robert E. Lee as a military paragon, equal to George Washington as a soldier and a man. Sherman begged to differ. Excerpts:

Lee's sphere of action was, however, local. He never rose to the grand problem which involved a continent and future generations. His Virginia was to him the world. Though familiar with the geography of the interior of this great continent, he stood like a stone wall to defend Virginia against the “Huns and Goths” of the North, and he did it like a valiant knight as he was. He stood at the front porch battling with the flames whilst the kitchen and house were burning, sure in the end to consume the whole. Only twice, at Antietam and Gettysburg, did he venture outside on the “offensive defensive.” In the first instance he knew personally his antagonist, and that a large fraction of his force would be held in reserve; in the last he assumed the bold “offensive,” was badly beaten by Meade, and forced to retreat back to Virginia. As an aggressive soldier Lee was not a success, and in war that is the true and proper test. In defending Virginia and Richmond he did all a man could, but to him Virginia seemed the “Confederacy,” and he stayed there whilst the Northern armies at the West were gaining the Mississippi, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, Georgia, South and North Carolina, yea, the Roanoke, after which his military acumen taught him that further tarrying in Richmond was absolute suicide. . . .

U.S. Grant, by contrast

moved in co-operation with the gun-boat fleet up the Tennessee to Fort Henry, which was captured; to Fort Donelson, where a fortified place with its entire garrison of 17,000 men surrendered without conditions; then on to Shiloh, where one of the bloodiest and most successful battles of the war was fought, which first convinced our Southern brethren, who had been taught that one Southern man was equal to five Yankees, that man to man was all they wanted—then Vicksburg, Chattanooga, everywhere victorious, everywhere successful, fulfilling the wise conclusion of Mr. Lincoln that he wanted “military success.” Then he was called for the first time in his life to Washington to command an army of perfect strangers, under new conditions, and in a strange country. Casting his thoughts over a continent, giving minute instructions for several distinct armies from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, himself assuming the hardest share, he began a campaign equal in strategy, in logistics, and in tactics to any of Napoleon, and grander than any ever contemplated by England. His personal action in crossing the Rapidan in the face of Lee’s army, fighting him in the Wilderness, “forward by the left flank,” to Spottsylvania, to Richmond, and Petersburg, was the sublimity of heroism. Of course, he had a superiority of numbers and resources, but nothing like the disproportion stated by General Wolseley. At Vicksburg he began in May, 1863, the movement with less numbers than Pemberton surrendered to him along with Vicksburg in July. At Chattanooga he attacked his enemy in the strongest position possible; so strong, indeed, that Bragg, a most thorough and intelligent soldier, regarded it as unassailable, and had detached Longstreet’s corps to Knoxville, of which mistake Grant took prompt advantage, and I never heard before that Bragg thought the pursuit after his defeat was not quick and good enough to suit him; and, finally, when Lee was forced to flee from his intrenchments at Richmond and Petersburg by Sheridan’s bold and skillful action at Five Forks, I believe it is conceded that the pursuit by Sheridan and Grant was so rapid that Lee was compelled to surrender his whole army. Grant’s “strategy” embraced a continent, Lee’s a small State; Grant’s “logistics” were to supply and transport armies thousands of miles, where Lee was limited to hundreds. Grant had to conquer natural obstacles as well as hostile armies, and a hostile people; his “tactics” were to fight wherever and whenever he could capture or cripple his adversary and his resources; and when Lee laid down his arms and surrendered, Grant, by the stroke of his pen, on the instant gave him and his men terms so liberal as to disarm all criticism. Between these two men as generals I will not institute a comparison, for the mere statement of the case establishes a contrast.

Civil War buffs have a habit of thinking locally, of focusing on battles and skirmishes. But the Union won the war because of a grand strategy that Grant helped to formulate and put into action.

Free Speech, Slavery, and the Wide Awakes

The Hartford Wide-Awakes

Smithsonian curator Jon Grinspan has a piece in the NY Times. reminding us of the key role the political club known as the Wide Awakes played in the election of 1860.

In the British model that was brought over to America, electoral politics was always a rough sport. For a contested election to spawn riots was, if not exactly routine, certainly no surprise. One of the arguments regularly advanced for why women should not vote was that the whole business could be dangerous; fueled by liquor their favorite candidates provided, men regularly got into shouting matches and fist fights, and, again, sometimes outright riots.

Another common form of political agitation was shutting down opposition speakers. This could be done by drowning them out with shouting, loud music, or fireworks, or, if that failed, rioting and driving them off the podium. This was a fairly natural development of the way medieval communities had enforced their social norms, using various forms of low-level violence that went under the general heading of "rough music" against oddballs, outcasts, and rule-breakers who annoyed their neighbors.

Which brings me to America in the 1850s and the growing agitation over slavery. Abolitionists began as fringe types who were regularly shouted down, or ridden out of town on a rail, whenever they tried to argue for their views. As abolitionist sentiment spread, they began to have mobs of their own willing to mix it up with pro-slavery men. These ruffians saw themselves as defending, not just abolitionism, but the right to free speech and indeed all democratic rights, which they saw as under attack from pro-slavery forces. As Frederick Douglass warned, “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.”

Wide Awake March in New York City, October 1860

In Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860, some of those anti-slavery men came together and formed a club they called the Wide Awakes, because they were awake to the danger that pro-slavery forces presented to American democracy. They carried torches or lanterns and wore a uniform consisting of a black kepi and a cape made of enameled canvas that protected them from lamp oil. These mostly young men became the foot soldiers of Lincoln's presidential campaign, defending him and other Republican speakers against pro-slavery agitators; later most of them became foot soldiers in the Civil War.

George Kimball was ready for war as soon as the first brick hit his head.

The 20-year-old printer was listening to an abolitionist lecture in Boston’s Bowdoin Square during the 1860 presidential campaign, when a pro-slavery throng tried to shut it down. Kimball was prepared, present as part of a torch-bearing, black-clad bodyguard called the Wide Awakes, who beat the brick-throwers back using their torches as clubs.

As Kimball walked home, blood in his eyes, he wanted “war declared at once.” Years later, having fought his way through from Bull Run to Gettysburg to Petersburg, he still considered that Boston brickbat, “as much a casus belli as was the firing upon Fort Sumter.” For him, it was the embattled right to publicly protest slavery that sparked the conflict — a fight over free speech brought on the war.

Some historians think the Wide Awakes played a key role in the 1860 election, mobilizing support for Lincoln in many districts where Republicans had never been strong. They were especially influential among the young; we don't have any polling data, but newspapermen at the time certainly thought that Lincoln was more popular among the young than the old. They gained support by playing up the danger presented to America by pro-slavery forces. The battle cry of hard core Republican supporters in 1860 was not abolitionism, but opposing the threat that the "slave power" posed to America. Pro-slavery mobs rioting against abolitionist speakers were the most obvious symbol of that threat, and the Wide Awakes represented the North mobilizing against it.

Catherine Anne Devereux Edmondston Bewails the Confederacy's Collapse

Historians have often wondered why the Confederacy abandoned its bid for independence so readily after Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Catherine Anne Devereux Edmondston was a wealthy planter in Halifax County, North Carolina who wrote a detailed diary between 1860 and 1870. This is her entry for May 7, 1865:

What use is there in my writing this record? What profit, what pleasure, do I find in it? None! none! yet altho it is an actual pain to me I continue it from mere force of habit. We are crushed! subjugated! and I fear, O how I fear, conquered, & what is to me the saddest part, our people do not feel it as they ought — like men who have lost their Liberty. The cup has not to them the full bitterness which a once free people ought to find in the draught held to them by a Victor’s hand. They accept the situation tacitly, fold their hands, & say “resistance is vain,” “we have done all that men could do,” we are out numbered, over-run, & have not the where withal to set an army in the field. Their once high spirit, their stern resolve, seems dead within them! “The War is over” & that fact seems to console them. O My God, can the very spirit of Freedom die out thus & leave not a trace behind it? Are the lives laid down in its defence to be but as water spilled on the ground? Is the very memory of one dead to vanish from our minds? One would think so from the conduct of those around us. On Thursday, on our way out to Hascosea, we met crowds of people, almost the whole neighborhood it seemed to me, on their way to a Pic Nic at Hills Mill. The usual preparations for dancing had been made & there they spent the day feasting, dancing, fishing, & merry making in their old familiar way. It seems almost like dancing over their husband’s, brothers, & sons graves. Do they realize what they do, or are they stupefied by the calamity which has befallen them & say “let us eat & drink for tomorrow we die.” O my Country, my Country, I look forward to the future with bitter forebodings when I see your children thus forgetful of your and their own honour, of their own blood! 

So, yeah, many people at the time also found the complete collapse of southern resistance a little weird. 

My own thoughts on this topic are already recorded here somewhere: that the rebellion was undertaken in hot blood for reasons of honor as much as anything else, and once they had fought hard enough for honor to be served – as shown by the surrender of Lee, the most honorable man in the South – most of the Confederates abandoned the dream of independence and moved on to more important goals, such as maintaining white supremacy and limiting outside interference in how they ran their states.

Blenheim's Civil War Graffiti

This is Blenheim, an 1859 house in Fairfax City, Virginia. A pretty standard plantation house for that time and place.

I visited on a lovely Fall day.

The remarkable thing about Blenheim is that in 1862 to 1864 it served as a hospital for Union soldiers from the Army of the Potomac. And those soldiers, bored and lonely, covered the inside of the house with graffiti. 

More than 150 different signatures have been identified. Several are from soldiers of the 83rd Pennsylvania, which lost more than 400 men fighting in every battle from the Peninsula to Appomattox Court House, including prominent parts at Gettysburg and Saylor's Creek.

Two of the more interesting drawings.

This one was actually preserved by the owners after the war rather than painted over because they took it to be a drawing of Confederate raider John Mosby, a local hero. Which is funny, because Mosby had a swashbuckling reputation but looked nothing like this, and this drawing was almost certainly done by Union soldiers like all the rest.

Some of the drawings are quite visible, while some are not and had to be revealed with multispectral imaging. Most remarkable is a barely visible series written vertically next to a door jamb on the second floor. The first line has a tiny sketch of a man in civilian clothes and says, 

Enlisting, patriotic

Then comes a sketch of a man in uniform:

First month, patriotic

Then a soldier pondering something in his hand:

Second month, hard to be patriotic on hard bread

Then

Third month, payday! can't walk but patriotic again

 Then

Fourth month
No money
No whiskey
No friends
No rations
No peas
No beans
No pants
No patriotism

A Trip to Gettysburg

Across the whole battlefield the woods looked like this, nature mocking the historical sadness of the a place where 8,000 died.

On the way I saw lots of signs like this one.

Here's a type of site that might puzzle future archaeologists.

The abandoned miniature gold course! It occurs to me that since miniature golf first got big in the 1920s some of these will soon be 100-years-old and therefore eligible to be recorded as archaeological sites.

Monument near Little Round Top, looking like a garden.

Colonel Patrick O'Rourke's nose. I meant to ask a ranger if people touch it for good luck but forgot. The defenders of Little Round Top were fighting downhill, which made them harder to charge, but on the other hand meant their officers were constantly exposed to sniper fire, and most were shot.

Aftermath of a controlled burn at Little Round Top. The Park Service does this a lot these days to keep areas that were open pasture during the battles from growing up as forests.

Archaeologists in action.

African American Refugees in Civil War North Carolina

Every once in a while I read a document that makes me feel like I am witnessing history happening. If you've read anything about the US Civil War you know that one of the major themes was the self-liberation of slaves, who took off for Union lines by the hundreds of thousands. The government in Washington did not actually formulate a clear policy about these refugees until 1864, so it was left to commanders on the spot to make decisions. At first a few commanders sent escaped slaves back. But the idea quickly spread that since the Confederates used slaves to build fortifications, they were potential weapons and could therefore be seized under military law as "contraband of war." Hence, they came to be called "contrabands." I've been reading through a collection of documents relating to these refugees and I stumbled across this report from Vincent Colyer, who headed up the effort to employ and assist refugees in New Bern, North Carolina after it was taken by Union forces in 1862:

Agreeably to your request, I give you a brief report of the freed blacks in the department of North Carolina during the time they were under my charge. I received my appointment a few days after the taking of Newbern. . . .

My first order from Genl Burnside under this appointment, was to employ as many negro men as I could get up to the number of five thousand to offer them eight dollars a month and one ration of clothes. They were to work on the building of forts. This order remained standing on my books up to the day I left the Department, July 6th, without our ever being able to fill it. Up to the time I left there were not over twenty five hundred able bodied men within our lines, so that it will be readily understood why the negroes were never a burden on our hands.

The truth was we never could get enough of them, and although for a little while there were a few more at Roanoke Island than were wanted there after the fort was completed.

There were in all in the department 10,000 of them, 2,500 were men, 7,500 women and children.

They were at the following places: at Newbern and vicinity 7.500; at Roanoke Island and posts adjacent 1,000; at Washington, Hatteras, Carolina and Beaufort 1,500.

In the four months that I had charge of them the men built three first class earthwork forts: Fort Totten at Newbern, a large work. Fort Burnside on the upper end of Roanoke Island & [. . .] at Washington N.C. These three forts were our chief reliance for defence against the rebels. in case of an attack. have since been successfully used for that purpose by our forces under Major Genl Foster.

The negroes loaded and discharged cargoes for about three hundred vessels, served regularly as crews on about forty steamers, and acted as permanent gangs of laborers in all the Quatermasters, Commissary and Ordnance offices of the department.

A number of the men were good carpenters. blacksmiths coopers &c. and did effective work at bridge building, ship joining &c. The large railroad bridge across the Neuse was built chiefly by them [see photo at top] as was also the bridge across Batcholors & other creeks & the docks at Roanoke Island & elsewhere. Upwards of fifty volunteers of the best & most courageous were kept constantly employed on the perilous. but most important duty of spies, scouts and guides. In the work they were invaluable and almost indispensable. They frequently went from thirty to three hundred miles within the enemy's lines; visiting his principle camps and most important posts and bringing us back important reliable information.

They visited Kingston Goldsboro. Trenton Onslow Swansboro, Tarboro of points on the Roanoke river; after these errands barely escaping with their lives. They were pursued on several occasions by blood hounds and two or three of them were taken prisoners; one of these was shot; the fate of the others not known. The pay they received for this work was small but satisfactory. They seemed to think their lives were well spent, if necessary in giving rest, security, and success, to the Union troops, whom they regarded as their deliverers. They usually knelt in solemn prayer before they left, & on their return, from that hazardous duty. . . .

Those in the neighborhood of Newbern were ordered to report at my office as soon as they arrived within our lines. They obtained quarters in the out-houses, kitchens and poorer classes of dwellings, deserted by the citizens on the taking of Newbern. They attended our free schools & churches regularly and with great earnestness. They were peaceable, orderly, cleanly, & industrious. There was seldom a quarrel known among them. They consider it a duty to work for the U.S. government & though they could in many cases have made more money at other conditions; there was a public opinion among them that tabooed any one that refuses to work for the Government. The churches & schools established for their benefit, with no cost to the government, were of great value in building up this public opinion among them.

As I have previously related, that the men frequently led foraging parties, to places where supplies necessary for the department were obtained. In this way we obtained boat-loads of pine and oak wood for the hospitals and government offices, a steam boat load of cotton bales for the protection of the gunboats, a number of horses and mules for the Quarter Master Department, and with forage for the same. Sheep were obtained at no other cost than the small wages of the men. Without doubt property far exceeding in value all that was ever paid to the blacks, was thus obtained for the Government. 

One of the issues historians have recently studied is the gendering of the relief effort. On plantations, women labored in the fields beside the men. African Americans considered this one of the stigmas of slavery and protested bitterly when Union officers tried to make refugee women dig ditches and the like. Now that they were free, they expected that the divisions between men's and women's work would be honored for them as for all other free people. So I was interested to see that at New Bern, the Union army respected this demand:

The women and children supported themselves with but little aid from the government by washing, ironing, cooking, making pies, cakes &c. for the troops The few women that were employed by the government in the hospitals received $4 a month, clothes and one ration.

One "ration" meaning food for one person over time.

Vincent Colyer spent the rest of the war in other humanitarian pursuits, founding the United States Christian Commission to aid refugees and educate freedmen and freedwomen. It strikes me that one of the mainsprings driving the modernization of the world has been the proliferation of people like Colyer, who when told about a daunting problem – a million refugees in a war zone, say – immediately set to work building an organization to meet the need.

And another has been the desire of people to be treated as human, and the enormous efforts they will put into achieving that goal.

Gettysburg in the Snow

Early on a dim morning, view of the line where Hancock's II Corps stopped Pickett's Charge.

66th Ohio Monument, with a view down the rough slope of Culp's Hill.

Another early morning shot, Gouverneur Warren standing guard over Little Round Top

Beaver dam on Plum Creek. Poor beavers are no doubt oblivious to the row their dam is going to cause between the natural and historical wings of the park staff.

View of Little Round Top from the Devil's Den, the first sight many Confederates got of their objective.

And of the Devil's Den from inside the 44th New York monument on the hilltop

View from Little Round Top in the afternoon sun. Behind Warren's statue you can make out the line of monuments marking the Union line on Cemetery Ridge.

On the second day the Confederates of McLaws' and Hood's Divisions attacked the southern end of the Union line. They pretty much destroyed the Union III Corps, but by the time they were ready to move on the Federals had already formed a second line on Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge. To reach Little Round Top the Confederates advanced up the valley of Plum Creek, passing between the rocks of the Devil's Den and a hill called Big Round Top. Union artillerymen had had time to zero in on the spot where this gap was narrowest; one later said, "Once we had the range, we never missed." Confederates remembered this as the Valley of Death, or the Slaughter Pen.

Manassas Burial Pit Follow-Up

The Park Service now has a good web page up on the Civil War burial pit I helped excavate in 2015, with a short video and several pictures, including one of me.

Los Confederados

In the Washington Post, Terrence McCoy calls our attention to the growing ferment over the commemoration of Brazil's Confederate past:

To Marina Lee Colbachini, it was a family tradition. Each spring, she would join the throngs who descended on a nondescript city in southern Brazil, don a 19th-century hoop skirt and square dance to country music.

The theme of the annual festival: the Confederate States of America.

It’s one of history’s lesser-known episodes. After the Civil War, thousands of defeated Southerners came to Brazil to self-exile in a country that still practiced slavery. For decades, their descendants have thrown a massive party that now attracts thousands of people to the twin cities of Americana and Santa Bárbara d’Oeste to celebrate all things Dixie. The Confederate flag? Everywhere. 

At least 8,000 former Confederate citizens, some say 20,000, emigrated to Brazil after 1865. They sought cheap land, distance from the hated Yankees, and above all to own slaves again and bring back the world they had just lost. The newspapers called it “Brazilian fever.” The exodus ceased in 1888, when Brazil abolished slavery.

Brazil has different racial traditions than the US, and of course Los Confederados were a lot less important in Brazil than they had been in the US. So the issue of their flag has been pretty much ignored. Until now:

Brazilians in recent weeks have demanded the removal of the notorious statue in São Paulo of a 17th-century settler who enslaved indigenous people. Protests for black equality have rumbled through several cities. And in Americana and Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, the cities founded by the Confederates, Brazilians who have never been to the United States are increasingly asking questions piercingly familiar to Americans: Where should the Confederacy be remembered — on a flagpole, or in a museum?

Interestingly one activist told McCoy that she began to think about the flag after the murders committed by Dylan Roof, which led to the flag being taken down in South Carolina. The argument over the flag is just getting under way, so there is no resolution, but I think it an increasingly globalized world it is not likely to remain flying on public property anywhere.

John Richards' "Battle of Fredericksburg"

John Richards was a private in the Union Army and one of the very few ordinary soldiers from the Civil War to memorialize his experiences in paint. This remarkable painting was part of the collection of Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, and it is scheduled to be sold at Sotheby's on January 18.

Here is Richards, done up in his veteran's regalia, I imagine for some reunion event. Richards was born in 1833 in Switzerland and emigrated to the US in 1854. He became a citizen and when war broke out in 1861 he enlisted in the 59th New York Volunteer Infantry. The 59th fought at Antietam, where Richards was wounded. It was while recuperating from that wound at a hospital in Philadelphia that Richards began to draw. The 59th next came under heavy fire at Gettysburg, where they had a part in stopping Confederate attacks on both the second and third days. After the war Richards settled in Germantown, and his only publication was a book of etchings of Germantown's older buildings.

So far as we know Richards did only sketches during the War, so this oil painting must have been made afterward.

The Battle of Fredericksburg was a dismal affair, showing how incompetence of a hundred kinds stymied the Union war effort in the east. General Burnside, then in command, had the clever idea to slip away from Lee's army, which was guarding the Rappahannock River upstream where it was fordable, march rapidly to Fredericksburg and cross the deep river on Pontoon bridges, seizing the high ground on the south bank before Lee's army could react. But due to some military snafu the pontoons did not arrive until a week later than scheduled, so the army could not cross until the Confederates had all made the trip themselves and taken positions on those formidable heights.

Burnside then compounded the error by attacking anyway, despite the awful terrain, which led to the deaths of more than a thousand of his men. But it might have gone differently if not for yet another twist of fate. Burnside assigned the attack to two subordinates. One of them drew the assignment to assault a massive bluff known as Marye's heights, and he threw charge after charge at its unshakable defenders until the fields were covered with corpses. The other, facing less formidable terrain, made a very tentative advance that blundered into a gap in the Confederate line that might have been blown wide open by a vigorous attack, but this leader chose to quickly cut his losses and pull back. Switch the commanders and things might have gone very differently. But of course they did not, and Lee famously exulted, "It is well that war is so terrible or we should become too fond of it."

Richards and the 59th New York avoided the carnage this time; they were positioned "in support," as you can probably tell from the distant view in this painting. It is certainly not a great painting, and there was a real artist (Alfred Waud) as close to the fighting as Richards ever got, and he left some fine sketches. But Richards was a private who had been shot at Antietam and would take his stand on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. He was a real soldier, and this is a soldier's view of war. The Rockefellers were big collectors of American folk art, so it is easy to see why they bought and loved this painting.

A Reporter Covers Gettysburg

From the New York Times, July 6, 1863:

Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly absorbing interest — the dead body of an oldest born, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay? . . .

The Battle of Gettysburg! I am told that it commenced, on the 1st of July, a mile north of the town, between two weak brigades of infantry and some doomed artillery and the whole force of the rebel army. Among other costs of this error was the death of Reynolds. Its value was priceless, however, though priceless was the young and the old blood with which it was bought. The error put us on the defensive, and gave us the choice of position. From the moment that our artillery and infantry rolled back through the main street of Gettysburg and rolled out of the town to the circle of eminences south of it, we were not to attack but be attacked. The risks, the difficulties and the disadvantages of the coming battle were the enemy’s. Ours were the heights for artillery; ours the short, inside lines for maneuvering and reinforcing; ours the cover of stone walls, fences and the crests of hills. The ground upon which we were drive to accept battle was wonderfully favorable to us.

Lee’s plan of battle was simple. He massed his troops upon the east side of this position and thundered on it obstinately to break it. The shelling of our batteries from the nearest overlooking hill, and the unflinching courage and complete discipline of the army of the Potomac repelled the attack. It was renewed at the point of the shoe – renewed desperately at the southwest heel – renewed on the western side with an effort consecrated to success of Ewell’s earnest oaths, and on which the fate of the invasion of Pennsylvania was fully put at stake. Only a perfect infantry and an artillery educated in the midst of charges of hostile brigades could possibly have sustained this assault. Hancock’s corps did sustain it, and has covered itself with immortal honors by its constancy and courage. The total wreck of Cushire’s battery – the list of its killed and wounded – the losses of officers, men and horses Cowen sustained – and the marvelous outspread upon the board of death of dead soldiers and dead animals – of deal soldiers in blue, and dead soldiers in gray – more marvelous to me than anything I have ever seen in war – are a ghastly and shocking testimony to the terrible fight of the Second corps that none will gainsay. That corps will ever have the distinction of breaking the pride of the rebel invasion. . . .

My pen is heavy. Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburg have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied! I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battlefield with his feet and reaching fraternally and lovingly up to heaven. His right hand opens the gates of Paradise — with his left he beckons to these mutilated, bloody, swollen forms to ascend.

– Samuel Wilkeson

The Limb Pit

The most exciting archaeology I've done in the past three or four years has finally made it through all the layers of National Park Service review and analysis and so on and been released to the public: a burial pit and limb pit on the Bull Run/Manassas battlefield. The pit contained two nearly complete skeletons, both probably Union soldiers, and seven amputated legs.

This tickled me:

Scientists have uncovered a pit of human bones at a Civil War battlefield in Virginia. The remains are the amputated limbs of wounded Union soldiers.

Yes! I'm a real scientist now! NPR says so! Because it wasn't anyone mentioned in these news stories who actually found this pit and figured out what was going on, it was my crew. Along with a couple of people from the Park Service who also remain unmentioned in these stories.

If you read between the lines of the news, you can see that the Park Service is still being extremely cautious about this story. They had to say something, because they have handed the skeletons over to the Army for burial at Arlington, but they have said as little as possible. So I guess I shouldn't say very much, and all my wonderful photographs of the dig are still embargoed. So for now, only images that I pulled from news sites. One day maybe I'll be able to post the good stuff.

This is one of the best finds, a bullet embedded into the leg bone of the man it killed. The press haven't passed on my favorite bit of this story, which came when the bullet was first inspected. The Park Service historian standing nearby said, "that's an Enfield bullet, and that means Second Manassas since the Confederacy didn't issue Enfields until April '62." Ok, sure. If you say so.

I occurred to me later that as historian at a park where two different battles were fought over the same ground 11 months apart, he has probably made a particular study of the ways to distinguish them, but at the time I was floored by this casual display of arcane knowledge.

One of the best things about this project was that we worked closely with Doug Owsley and Karin Bruwelheide (above) of the Smithsonian, two of the world's leading forensic anthropologists. They were a fountain of knowledge and it was a real joy to spend a week with them.

I've always liked this picture of me taking notes on the excavation as it progressed, by the Smithsonian photographer. Since there aren't any bones and you can't tell exactly where this was taken, it should be safe for me to publish here.

Gettysburg, Snow Falling

Union artilleryman's view of the route of Pickett's Charge, which started from the distant tree line. Stone monument just over the wall marks the farthest point that the men of Pettigrew's North Carolina brigade reached before these guns blasted them out of existence. Since all the officers of the 1st Rhode Island artillery were by then dead or wounded it was a sergeant who told the gunners to hold their last rounds until the Rebels were only 20 yards away. "The gaps blown in their line," one gunner wrote, "were terrible to behold." The Confederates advanced not a step farther, not here or anywhere else, not then or ever.

If you wondered why I haven't been posting much lately, well, my Gettysburg thing is just one of the twenty-odd projects I'm juggling, scattered from South Carolina to Maine.

Civil War Combat

Watching some Civil War battle in a movie, you may have seen lines of men banging away at each other from thirty yards apart and wondered, how did anyone survive such combat?

No need to wonder! This is a question that has a well-known answer: because in battle conditions, soldiers are terrible shots.

For Gettysburg we have a Confederate Ordnance estimate that each man fired an average of 25-26 rounds. . . . these numbers seem to reflect the rounds presumed fired during the whole week in which the battle fell, by all 75,000 Rebel troops in the general area. If they are accurate, we can set them beside Union casualties of some 23,000 men and arrive at a figure of 81 shots fired to inflict each casualty, or maybe nearer to 100 infantry shots per casualty if we also count in the contribution of the artillery.

This estimate has to be corrected for all the bullets that were dropped rather than fired; we know soldiers dropped a lot of bullets because you can locate any Civil War firing line by mapping all the unfired bullets you find with a metal detector. But even if they dropped half their bullets, that's still 50 shots fired for each casualty. And the performance of Confederate troops in the biggest part of this battle was praised by Longstreet as "unquestionably best three hours' fighting done by any troops on any battle-field."

As for the Union troops, for whom we have better records:

We find that Meade's 90,000 men were issued a total of 5,400,000 rounds at Gettysburg, giving an average of 60 rounds per man, although not all of these may actually have been fired. . . .  If we estimate the overall average actually fired as lower than the number of round issued, we can guess that the average Union solider really fired only 40 rounds in the three days of the action. These calculations give a notional 180 rounds fired for every casualty inflicted by Federals, although this is without counting the artillery's contribution. . . . This is higher than the rather unreliable figures for the Confederate side, but consistent with the order of magnitude recorded for the Napoleonic Wars.

This is from Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Civil War (2001). But you shouldn't imagine that contemporary soldiers are any better; automatic weapons allow them to fire thousands of rounds for each casualty inflicted. There is a great scene in Black Hawk Down in which a squad of American rangers patrolling Mogadishu blunders into a squad of Somali militia, and they proceed to blaze away at each other until their magazines are empty without hitting a thing.

It is just very, very hard to take careful aim when you are being shot at.