In 1976, the “New Wave” of American cinema was in full swing. Heavy-hitting films such as All the President’s Men, Rocky, Network, Taxi Driver, and A Star Is Born dominated theater marquees and Hollywood award ceremonies. For Civil War buffs the highlight of their moviegoing year wasn’t an underdog boxer or a paranoid president. No, it was a squinting, tobacco-chewing, pistol-slinging, pro-Confederate bushwhacker named Josey Wales.

Based on segregationist Asa Carter’s 1972 novel, The Rebel Outlaw, which was itself plagiarized from a 1938 account of bushwhacker William “Wild Bill” Wilson, The Outlaw Josey Wales starred Clint Eastwood as a farmer-turned-guerrilla in wartime Missouri. It was a risky decision to present an irregular combatant, let alone one with a penchant for gunning down Union troops, as a sympathetic antihero in the 1970s. The United States had just finished a humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam after years of struggling against guerrilla tactics. Political wounds notwithstanding, the film did well upon release (grossing more than $31 million on a $3.7 million budget) and then developed a cult following among Civil War and western movie fans. For better or worse, The Outlaw Josey Wales became the historical foundation for how generations of Americans imagined guerrilla violence during the Civil War.

I vividly recall a case in point, in 2010, when I was doing research at the University of Georgia, finding the name “Josey Wales” penciled into a roster of bushwhackers included in Carl Breihan’s 1959 book Quantrill and His Civil War Guerrillas. And Wales’ inclusion wasn’t in jest. Now, on the film’s fiftieth birthday, let’s see what The Outlaw Josey Wales gets right, what it gets wrong, and what falls somewhere in between. Without fact-checking the entire movie, we’ll focus on three major themes and judge how they stack up against the prevailing scholarly wisdom of 2026.

In the film’s opening sequence, a tranquil morning on the Wales farm in western Missouri is interrupted by the rumbling of hooves. A horde of Red Legs (Unionist paramilitaries from Kansas) thunders onto the screen. They rape and murder Wales’ wife, burn his house down with his young son inside, and leave Wales for dead after the band’s leader whacks him over the head with his saber. Back on his feet, Wales soon joins up with a vengeance-seeking company of Confederate bushwhackers led by “Bloody Bill” Anderson and he hunts the men responsible for killing his family. Over the next two-and-a-half hours, viewers see all manner of violent encounters played out in settings, and on a scale, not usually associated with Civil War combat. The killing is hyper-local and hyper-personal. This blurring of the traditional line between battlefront and homefront in the western borderlands is something the movie gets right. For untold Missourians and Kansans, irregular violence constituted their regular Civil War experience—with the war literally waged from within and upon their households.

TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy

Clint Eastwood was the title character in the 1976 movie The Outlaw Josey Wales, a film that, for better or worse, informed many Americans’ views of Civil War guerrilla warfare.

Aside from bloodshed, one constant of The Outlaw Josey Wales is the apparent inability of Union troops to track down and/or capture the renegade bushwhacker. At every turn, the widely hunted Wales outsmarts or outguns the pursuing “blue bellies” with aplomb. In one memorable scene, Wales tricks the Red Legs onto a river ferry before snapping its cable and setting his would-be captors adrift. He then turns to tell a Unionist onlooker, “Well, Mr. Carpetbagger, we got somethin’ in this territory called the Missouri boat ride.” And in one of the movie’s iconic moments, Wales asks a startled group of Federal soldiers with whom he has a standoff in a small frontier town, “Are you going to pull those pistols or whistle Dixie?” before dispatching them with a lightning-fast draw. Catchy as Wales’ one-liners might be, the notion that Union forces were incompetent, even bumbling, guerrilla hunters is something the film gets wrong. Later in the war, the federal government unleashed squads of regular soldiers specifically trained to track down and eliminate notorious bushwhackers. Near Albany, Missouri, one such unit laid low the real “Bloody Bill” Anderson in October 1864. In Kentucky, Union authorities hired former soldier Edwin “Bad Ed” Terrell to lead a band of “special detectives” against high-profile guerrilla leaders. After assassinating Bill Marion and Hercules Walker, Terrell’s men scattered the last of William Quantrill’s followers in June 1865 and delivered the architect of the Lawrence Massacre a fatal wound.

An underlying premise of The Outlaw Josey Wales is the title character’s inability to hang up his guns even after the war is over. He is hounded all the way from Missouri to Indian Territory by the same fanatical Red Legs who murdered his family and now want to rid the entire nation of Rebels. Wales eventually kills the Red Leg captain—a character based very loosely on the aforementioned Edwin Terrell—but stays in the Far West, unable to return to Missouri. In reality, the vast majority of men who fought as guerrillas during the Civil War did exactly the same thing as their regularly enlisted counterparts when the conflict ended: They went home and resumed farming. With this in mind, the movie’s depictions of bushwhackers murdered wholesale while trying to surrender and of Wales forced into outlawry is a push. As illustrated by Pulitzer-winning historian and biographer T.J. Stiles, a select few Confederate bushwhackers, most notably Frank and Jesse James, believed crime was their only postwar option; they couldn’t imagine a world in which Unionist Republicans in Missouri would allow them to swap their weapons for plows. To an extent, they had a point. However, the reason we remember the James-Younger Gang is precisely because they were extraordinary.

In the film’s closing scene, Wales—now using the alias “Wilson”—is recognized in a border town saloon by an ex-bushwhacker-turned-pursuer named Fletcher. Fletcher refuses to expose Wales’ identity to a pair of officers whom he has joined to investigate the wanted man’s whereabouts. When the officers leave, satisfied Wales is dead, Fletcher attempts to convince his former friend that the war is over. Wales replies, “I reckon so. I guess we all died a little in that damn war.” At that, the outlaw, bleeding from a wound received during his last stand against the Red Legs, mounts his horse and rides off. Whatever came next is a mystery. Did Wales die from his wound? Was the ruse of his death exposed, putting bounty hunters back on his trail? Was he killed by Indians? Or did he live happily ever after with the new, ragtag family he acquired over the course the movie? Audiences were ultimately left to imagine their own future for Josey Wales because a planned sequel, again directed by and starring Eastwood, never materialized.

Regardless of what you think happened to “Mr. Chain Blue Lightning” after concluding his feud with the Red Legs, one thing is certain: The Outlaw Josey Wales will continue, still for better or worse, to inform how Americans imagine Civil War guerrilla warfare one squint, one spit, and one .36-caliber lead ball at a time.

Matthew Christopher Hulbert is Elliott Associate Professor of History at Hampden-Sydney College. He is currently writing a narrative history of the Lawrence Massacre and its place in Civil War history and memory. Find him on Instagram @the_outdoor_professor or at matthewchristopherhulbert.com.

Explore Charleston

Aerial view of Charleston, South Carolina.

You have a fine summer’s day to spend in Charleston, South Carolina, taking in Civil War history—but you’ve already been to Fort Sumter. What to do? Consider the following ambitious itinerary for an efficient look at other spots the city has to offer.

Explore Charleston

Guns at Fort Moultrie

9:00 a.m. | Fort Moultrie

1214 Middle Street

Located on Sullivan’s Island, the historic fort offers an illuminating viewshed of Charleston Harbor and the city. You’ll learn about the structure’s Revolutionary War origins and significance and the vital role Moultrie played during the Civil War. If time permits, you might consider a self-guided tour of nearby Battery Jasper, another of the city’s historic defenses.

Explore Charleston

Grave marker at Magnolia Cemetery.

11:00 a.m. | Magnolia Cemetery

70 Cunnington Avenue

Grab a map at the main office and walk—or drive—through the impressive grounds of the historic garden cemetery, which includes the gravesites of a variety of prominent South Carolinians and Confederates, including crew members of the submarine H.L. Hunley and six generals. Note that while the cemetery is open all week, the office operates from Monday to Friday only.

Richard W. Hatcher III

Entrance to The Griffon.

1:00 p.m. | The Griffon

18 Vendue Range

While the city’s dining options abound, The Griffon is a favorite spot for locals and visitors alike. Located in a pre-Civil War building, it offers a family friendly atmosphere and reasonable prices. Its authentic fish and chips are widely considered the best in the city.

Explore Charleston

Edmondston-Alston House

2:00 p.m. | Edmondston-Alston House

21 East Battery

Built in the 1820s and adorned largely with original furniture and decorative arts, this house offers visitors a look at the history of its free and enslaved residents and workers—as well as a stunning view of nearby Charleston Harbor. Open Wednesday through Saturday; its guided tours run every 30 minutes.

Richard W. Hatcher III

The Museum at Market Hall

3:00 p.m. | The Museum at Market Hall

188 Meeting Street

Located on the upper floor of historic Market Hall and overseen by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the museum includes a variety of Confederate military memorabilia, including uniforms, flags, swords, guns, and an array of personal items. Open Thursday through Sunday.

Brian Stansberry/Wikimedia Commons

Monument at Secessionville Battlefield.

4:30 p.m. | Secessionville Battlefield

1231 Fort Lamar Road

On James Island, 30 minutes south of the city, sits the Secessionville Battlefield, where in June 1862 Confederate forces turned back a Union attempt to seize Charleston by land. Now part of the Fort Lamar Heritage Preserve, the grounds include the remains of Fort Lamar, which anchored the Confederate defenses at the battle, as well as a number of preserved trenches. Brochures are available on-site for a self-guided walking tour.

Explore Charleston

Fleet Landing

6:30 p.m. | Fleet Landing

186 Concord Street

Back in the city, have dinner at one of Charleston’s few waterfront eateries. Fleet Landing opened in 2004 in a building and pier built in 1942 by the U.S. Navy for offloading soldiers and supplies during World War II. Enjoy the Lowcountry cuisine and stunning views.

Explore Charleston

Flowers and gazebo at White Point Garden.

7:30 p.m. | White Point Garden

2 Murray Boulevard

This 5.7-acre public park located at Charleston’s southern tip is the perfect place to unwind from your busy day. Enjoy a stroll through the park or along the nearby Battery, the city’s defensive seawall and promenade, while taking in the majestic view of the harbor and distant Fort Sumter—and hopefully a breathtaking summer’s evening sunset.

Harper’s Weekly published this full-page illustration of Benjamin Grierson on the cover of its June 6, 1863, edition. An accompanying article lauded the “famous” colonel’s “magnificent raid through Mississippi.”

On the morning of April 17, 1863, three columns of Union cavalry, some 1,700 men, waited for the order to move out of the village of La Grange, Tennessee. The troopers adjusted equipment, checked weapons, and reassured the nervous mounts. Theirs was a dangerous errand, and at their head sat a former music teacher and multi-instrumentalist, a man rumored to not even like horses.¹

Colonel Benjamin Grierson—wiry, heavily bearded, and soft-spoken—hardly looked the part of a cavalry raider. As a boy in Pennsylvania he had been kicked in the face by a spooked horse, an experience that left him comatose, scarred, and temporarily blind. Though he recovered, Grierson always remembered the incident as a cautionary lesson against recklessness.² Yet on that golden spring morning he was about to lead his brigade of Midwesterners on one of the boldest and most consequential raids of the war, deep into the bowels of Confederate territory.

Over 16 days, the 6th and 7th Illinois and 2nd Iowa cavalry regiments, accompanied by a battery of horse artillery, would ride 600 miles through the heart of Mississippi, tearing up railroads, burning depots, scattering Confederate units, to arrive mud-caked and triumphant at Union lines in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The operation known as Grierson’s Raid would not win the war, but it had the potential to affect an important campaign at a critical moment. It would go down in legend as one of the most daring feats of the conflict and later inspire both a novel and a Hollywood film (1959’s The Horse Soldiers) starring John Wayne. And, most importantly, it did help ensure a major Union strategic victory.

By the spring of 1863, the Union war effort in the West hinged on one place: Vicksburg, Mississippi. Perched on bluffs overlooking a sharp bend in the Mississippi River, the city was the Confederacy’s Gibraltar. As long as it held, the South controlled the continent’s central artery, keeping Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana connected to the eastern Confederacy, along with vital supplies and materiel its armies needed. Cut Vicksburg off, and the Confederacy would be split in two.

Major General Ulysses S. Grant clearly understood this reality. From his perspective, getting at Vicksburg was the problem. Swamps, bayous, failed canal projects, and stubborn Confederate defenses had frustrated him for months. By April, Grant was ready to execute a daring maneuver: march his army down the west bank of the Mississippi, cross below Vicksburg, and attack the city from the south. In order to do that, Grant had to separate from his line of communications; to be successful, he needed the Confederates to be distracted.

The plan had been in the works for some time, and it was deceptively simple: send a large cavalry force deep into Mississippi to destroy railroads and telegraph lines, and thus compel

Confederate general John C. Pemberton to make a decision. If Pemberton believed the raid threatened the state’s interior, he might strip forces from the Vicksburg works to pursue the raiders, and thus weaken the city’s defenses for Grant’s siege and assault there. But cavalry raids in the Civil War were notoriously fragile undertakings. One wrong turn, one encirclement, and an entire column could be swallowed up and destroyed. The Union plan would have to rely not on brute force, but on speed, deception, and uncertainty.

Grierson’s Raid is instructive, because it presents students of the war with clear instances of command decisions yielding measurable and consequential results. The raid’s success would depend largely on Grierson’s ability to keep Confederates off-balance and guessing as to his whereabouts, and throughout the operation, the colonel exercised the art of disappearing.

For instance, very early on Grierson made a critical decision to ignore basic military principles and divide his command. Within days of crossing into Mississippi, he detached men under Colonel Edward Hatch, Captain Henry C. Forbes, and others on several mini-raids and ordered them to ride in all directions, make noise, and draw attention. Grierson decided to focus on speed over destruction; he forbade looting except for necessary supplies and required his troopers to treat southern civilians with restraint, and not to linger long in one place. Their mission was not destruction but deception, and Grierson’s men proved very effective in that regard.³

Missouri Historical Society

Benjamin Grierson

Confederate pursuers struggled to determine the raid’s true direction. Reports conflicted. Some swore the Yankees were headed for the Mississippi Central Railroad, others claimed they were aiming for Jackson, and telegraph lines flickered with the confusion.⁴ The uncertainty the raiders provoked among Confederates was central to Grierson’s strategy. Civilians awoke to rumors that thousands of Union horsemen were galloping through the Mississippi countryside. Wild stories abounded. Militia units formed and dissolved. Slaves watched carefully; some slipped away to join Grierson’s raiders as guides, and others cautiously approached them to help in other ways.⁵

Meanwhile, Grierson veered deeper south, deliberately zigzagging his raiders through small towns like Pontotoc, Starkville, and Louisville to keep Confederate scouts guessing. The Southern Railroad of Mississippi and the Mobile & Ohio line were lifelines to Vicksburg. By tearing up and otherwise destroying rails, Grierson disrupted the Confederacy’s ability to move reinforcements. Each mile of ruined track or cut telegraph line was time stolen from Pemberton, and time bought for Grant.

On April 24, near the town of Newton Station, Grierson faced another pivotal choice. Scouts reported Confederate cavalry closing in. The railroad lay ahead, an attractive target but a dangerous one. To attack it would mean halting in one place and inviting encirclement by the enemy.

Grierson attacked. His troopers overwhelmed a small Confederate force, burned several train cars loaded with ammunition, tore up track, and destroyed telegraph equipment. The destruction was thorough. For hours, smoke billowed over the pine woods.

It was another calculated risk that paid off. Had Confederate forces converged quickly, Grierson’s column, deep in hostile territory, might have been trapped. But he gambled that speed and confusion remained on his side, and he won the wager.⁶ Confederates, receiving fragmentary intelligence, misread the raid’s objective. Convinced that Jackson or Meridian were the true targets, they diverted troops that might otherwise have reinforced Vicksburg.

Still, Grierson’s horsemen were not out of the figurative woods after the Newton Station fight. Spring rains had turned roads into mud, horses went lame, rations dwindled, and soldiers fell ill. The men would often sleep in the saddle, moving at night to evade pursuit and trying not to fall off their horses in their exhaustion.

At one point, with ammunition low and Rebel forces rumored ahead, Grierson convened his officers. Some urged turning west toward the Mississippi River for safety, but Grierson refused. To turn back would signal failure—and allow Confederate forces to claim victory. Worse, it would free Pemberton to concentrate on Grant. Instead, Grierson pressed south, toward Union-held Baton Rouge. It was the longer route to safety, but it also cut across the grain of Confederate expectations. This decision marked the raid’s most daring moment.⁷

By then, Grierson’s raiders had penetrated so deeply into the Mississippi interior that retreat was nearly as dangerous as advance. His quiet confidence helped hold the command together, and his willingness to engage in calculated gambles had seen the brigade through to this point. Pemberton realized the size and scope of Grierson’s raid too late; he ordered Confederate cavalry under Wirt Adams and Robert V. Richardson to track down and defeat Grierson, but to no avail.⁸

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

In this wartime illustration, Colonel Benjamin Grierson and his horsemen are depicted entering Union-occupied Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at the end of their daring diversionary raid.

While Confederate leaders argued over the raiders’ intent, Grant executed his river crossing at Bruinsburg, Mississippi, on April 30. Within weeks, Union forces would isolate Vicksburg entirely. On May 2, muddy and tired but exultant, Grierson’s men rode into Baton Rouge. They had lost fewer than 100 men killed, wounded, or captured. They had destroyed miles of railroad, burned depots, captured prisoners, and tied down thousands of Confederate troops. More than that, they had demonstrated that Union cavalry, long dismissed as inferior to its southern counterpart, could strike deep behind enemy lines and survive. Grant was effusive in his praise for the operation. “Colonel Grierson’s raid from La Grange through Mississippi has been the most successful thing of the kind since the breaking out of the rebellion,” he proclaimed. “The Southern papers and Southern people regard it as one of the most daring exploits of the war.”⁹

In the weeks that followed, the Union army pounded Vicksburg relentlessly. On July 4, Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to Grant. Confederate reinforcements that might have shifted the balance had been delayed or misdirected, in no small part due to Grierson’s ability. At multiple moments—by detaching and dividing his command, attacking Newton Station, refusing to retreat, and cultivating deception—Grierson mixed boldness with careful calculation. Each choice compounded Confederate uncertainty and preserved Union initiative. The raid’s success was not inevitable. A faster Confederate response might have spelled disaster. But war often turns on people like Colonel Benjamin Grierson, leaders willing to make hard decisions under intense pressure.

Andrew S. Bledsoe is professor of history at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. He is the author of Citizen-Officers: The Union and Confederate Volunteer Junior Officer Corps in the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2015); co-editor, with Andrew F. Lang, of Upon the Field of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War (LSU Press, 2019); and author most recently of Decisions at Franklin: The Nineteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battle (University of Tennessee Press, 2023).

Dylan and Patrick Brennan

In this reimagining of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic 1851 painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” several Civil War figures are depicted aboard the Continental Army commander’s lead boat. They are (clockwise, from far left): Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, James Longstreet, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant.

The Last Men

The Civil War Testimony of the Last Revolutionary Veterans

By Allen C. Guelzo

In 1864, the Congress of the United States paused the interminable business of funding and managing the Civil War to pay attention to veterans’ pensions. The sheer size of the war effort was forcing Congress to revisit the extent of its pension system and to invent an enormous new bureaucracy for administering it that would, in the decades after the war, become the single largest agency within the federal government. A comprehensive new pension law had already been passed in 1862, as the number of pensioners was being swollen by the casualties of the war.¹ But this newest pension bill had a very different and specific focus. On March 10, 1864, Congress took the unusual step of increasing by $100 per year the pensions “of each of the surviving soldiers of the Revolution … in addition to the pensions to which they are now entitled.”

Surprisingly, in 1864, there still remained a handful of living veterans of the Revolution. John Law of Indiana, the War Democrat who introduced the new pension legislation, estimated that there were at least 12 who had seen one kind of service or another between 1775 and 1783. In case any budget hawks were bothered by this additional outlay, Law added that the advanced ages of the veterans assured that the increases “will not be paid longer than three years.” And so, with that indelicate sweetening, the bill passed the House and sailed through the Senate with just one small tweak in the wording on March 28. President Lincoln signed it into law three days later, and the Washington National Intelligencer announced it on April 5. A few newspapers, as an act of celebration, took the trouble to publish the names of the 12 Revolutionary pensioners who would benefit from the new Congressional largesse.²

That announcement actually puzzled as many people as it pleased, since only a handful of Americans could have been aware that veterans of the Revolution were still in their midst. Who were these revolutionary soldiers who had survived one great national cataclysm, only to live to see a second? That was the question that nagged at two artistic brothers, Nelson and Roswell Moore, who were operating a successful photographic studio in Hartford, Connecticut. And the answer it suggested to the two brothers involved both a mission and an opportunity. They would record photographically these last living relics of the Revolution—all of them born a century before the Civil War (and 60 years before Joseph Saxton made the first American photograph)—and their faces would provide a living reminder that the Civil War was sharing the lifespans of the Revolution. Meanwhile, the photographs would also—or so they hoped—make the Moore brothers famous.

Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library

During the Civil War, northerners regularly drew connections between the Union cause and the Revolution. Abraham Lincoln himself invoked the Revolution in 1861, on his inaugural journey to Washington, when he described his boyhood reading about the Battle of Trenton (depicted here in an engraving from 1870) as the example of a struggle for “something even more than National Independence.”

This was not the first time northerners had sought to draw connections between the Union cause and the Revolution. Lincoln himself invoked the Revolution in 1861 on his inaugural journey to Washington when he described his boyhood reading about the Battle of Trenton as the example of a struggle for “something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.” A day later, in Philadelphia, Lincoln declared that he had “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”³ The new speaker of the House of Representatives, Galusha Grow, took the Revolution as his guiding star when he was sworn in on July 4, 1861: “Three-score years ago, fifty-six old merchants, farmers, lawyers and mechanics … met in Convention to found a new empire, based on the inalienable rights of man.”⁴ Even Stephen Foster was moved to write a new song in which “an old revolutionary soldier” who had “handled a gun/When noble deeds were done” pledged his loyalty to “my home and my country” in the Civil War as in the Revolution.⁵

Library of Congress

The first Revolutionary War veteran interviewed by Elias Brewster Hillard in the summer of 1864 was Samuel Downing (shown here), a 102-year-old resident of Edinburgh, New York. According to Hillard, the elderly veteran “denounces the present rebellion, and says he only wishes to live to see it crushed out.”

But speeches and songs were, after all, only acts of the imagination. The Congressional statute was not, nor would be the work of the Moore brothers. With addresses supplied by the Bureau of Pensions, the Moores began writing to the surviving pensioners almost as soon as news of the bill was published. They learned that five of the 12 were, in fact, already beyond their reach (Jonas Gates had died on January 14 at 101; John Pettingill was 97 when he departed this life on April 23), while a sixth was somewhere beyond the extent of federal authority in divided Missouri “in the country infested by guerrillas.”

Rather than delay any longer, Nelson Moore set off, photographic equipment in tow, to capture the remaining six, who were scattered in a long arc from Ohio to Maine.⁶ And remarkably, by August, the Moores were able to advertise that they had for sale, as cartes de visite, “likenesses of these few remaining patriots … and among them will be the last survivor of the American Revolution.”⁷

Library of Congress

Reverend Daniel Waldo

Along with the photographs, the Moores announced that they were also planning on the publication of a book “containing a sketch of their lives, together with incidents of the experience,” by a “writer” who “has just returned from a visit to the homes of these men, where he received from their own lips the story of their lives.”⁸ The “writer” was an enterprising Connecticut clergyman, Elias Brewster Hillard, an ardent Unionist who had become pastor of the Congregational church in Kensington, Connecticut, in May 1860. He had no theological scruples about flying his political colors. A United States flag hung from the belfry of the church, and Hillard sponsored “the first monument to the soldiers of the Civil War erected in the country.”⁹ Since Kensington was also the Moores’ old hometown, Hillard was perfectly positioned to suggest taking the photographic record one step further. He would solicit from the lips of this last remnant of the Revolution’s soldiery an endorsement of the ongoing Union war effort, as if it were a blessing from the last apostles.

The first of the six Revolutionary veterans whom Hillard visited “in their homes” was Samuel Downing, 102, of Edinburgh, New York, northwest of Saratoga Springs and 180 wearying miles from Kensington. Even in the oppressive heat of July 1864, Downing was “altogether the most vigorous in body and mind of the survivors” Hillard interviewed. A runaway apprentice who had enlisted in the New York militia, he was part of the American forces that compelled the surrender of “Gentlemanly Johnny” Burgoyne at Saratoga, and “burnt thirteen candles … one for each state … when peace was declared.” But otherwise, his Revolutionary service was remarkably humdrum. What he did not mind telling Hillard, though, was what Hillard wanted most to hear: “He denounces the present rebellion, and says he only wishes to live to see it crushed out.” In fact, he said, “if the rebels come here, I shall sartainly take my gun.”¹⁰

Hillard pushed on from Edinburg to Syracuse, another long westward loop of 130 miles, where he planned to interview the Reverend Daniel Waldo, 101. To Hillard’s disappointment, Waldo had suffered a fall, and the “shock to his nervous system” sent him into coma from which there was no expectation of recovery. But Hillard garnered from Waldo’s family enough details of Waldo’s revolutionary service in the Connecticut militia to assure his readers that “in the present conflict with rebellion, he was intensely loyal, greatly desiring to live till the rebellion should be suppressed.”¹¹

From Syracuse, Hillard headed straight west, past Rochester, to Lemuel Cook, who at 105 was “the oldest survivor of the Revolution.” Cook was the only horse soldier among the Last Men, and served (by his own account) from the onset of the Revolution until his discharge in 1784. Hillard was unsure how much credit to give Cook, since “the old man’s talk is very broken and fragmentary” and “he recalls the past slowly, and with difficulty.” But Cook delighted Hillard at least by exclaiming that, “terrible” as the Civil War was, “the rebellion must be put down!”¹²

It was easier for Hillard to make his fourth call, since Alexander Milliner (who was just six months younger than Cook) lived only 12 miles away. He also had a better memory and better stories to tell, since he had served as a drummer boy in George Washington’s elite personal Life Guard, from Long Island in 1776 to the British surrender at Yorktown. Even better for Hillard’s purpose, Milliner had enlisted in the Navy in the 1790s and even served aboard the frigate Constitution in the War of 1812. “His memory is clear,” Hillard reported, and “though he finds difficulty in giving long, connected accounts,” he had (like Lemuel Cook) no difficulty at all in expressing his disbelief “this country, so hardly got, should be destroyed by its own people.” In 1862, Milliner had even been onstage at a recruiting meeting in Rochester for the 140th New York Infantry.¹³

The clock was running down for the last two Revolutionary veterans, William Hutchings who lived on Penobscot Bay, in Maine, and Adam Link who was living in north-central Ohio (Link, in fact, died in mid-August). Hillard’s accounts of Hutchings and Link are sufficiently coy that it is likely he never interviewed either, but instead relied on notes from the Moore brothers. Link’s “part in the war” was “unimportant” anyway; what was of most interest to Hillard was Hutchings’ declaration that he “was deeply interested in the present conflict, his whole soul being enlisted in the cause of his country.”¹⁴

History of the Town of Plymouth, Connecticut (Hillard); Illustrated popular biography of Connecticut (moore)

Postwar images of Elias Brewster Hillard (left) and Nelson Moore

The Hillard-Moore collection was published in Hartford near the end of January 1865 under the title, The Last Men of the Revolution: Containing a Photograph of Each from Life, Accompanied by Brief Biographical Sketches, and featuring albumen prints of the Moores’ photographs tipped into the book. Although they managed to obtain an endorsement from famed orator Edward Everett, there is no evidence that The Last Men of the Revolution attained any manner of best-seller status.¹⁵ After all, the war ended only four months later, and so the need for patriotic endorsements from Revolutionary centenarians quickly faded.

Nor did it acquire any great notoriety as a historical resource. Hillard was in search of patriotic celebration, and he was not overly inquisitive about the details of these veterans’ reminiscences if they yielded an encouraging endorsement of the Union war effort. Alexander Milliner might indeed have been a drummer boy in Washington’s Life Guard, but he was probably born in 1770 and only enlisted as drummer in 1780. William Hutchings’ “whole soul” might have been stirred by the preservation of the Union, but his Revolutionary service probably amounted to nothing more than six months in the local militia. Ironically, Lemuel Cook, who had the least to offer Hillard and the Moores in the way of historical memory, turned out to be the last of the group to die, just shy of his 107th birthday.¹⁶

Not that this necessarily hurt the ongoing fortunes of either the Moores or Hillard. Nelson Moore had never wanted to be a photographer only—he had originally studied painting under Daniel Huntington (later the president of the National Academy of Design)—and he “longed to resume his painting full-time.” After the publication of The Last Men of the Revolution, he turned his energies entirely to landscape painting in the style of the Hudson River School artists.¹⁷ Roswell Moore stayed with photography only slightly longer. He had begun as a daguerreotypist in the 1850s, and expanded into tintypes and cartes de visite during the Civil War. But unlike his brother’s, Roswell’s interests turned in more lucrative directions, including “the manufacture of buckles and other light hardware,” and his obituary in 1907 made no mention at all of either photography or The Last Men.¹⁸

Elias Brewster Hillard continued to serve the Congregational Church in Kensington until 1867, then at Plymouth, Connecticut, from 1869 to 1889, and finally in Conway, Massachusetts, until his retirement in 1893. “Thirty-eight years in all he exercised the ministry of the gospel,” declared a brief biographical entry in the Brewster family’s published genealogy, “and with his whole heart, with burning zeal, and the enlistment of every faculty of his being.”¹⁹ But also without any allusion to The Last Men.

Library of Congress

Among the surviving Revolutionary War veterans Hillard profiled were (clockwise from upper left) Adam Link; Lemuel Cook; William Hutchings; and Alexander Milliner.

And yet, The Last Men of the Revolution did not quietly fade into invisibility. In 1948, the celebrated poet Archibald MacLeish (Hillard’s grandson) had published in Life Magazine a lavishly illustrated and generously worshipful article on The Last Men, and from there, the book awoke from its eight-decades-long slumber into a fresh series of reprints.²⁰ It can be read today as a curiosity in mid-19th-century American publishing; or it can be appreciated as a unique effort to connect the turbulence of the Civil War with the nobility of the Revolution. Or perhaps MacLeish had it right when he said that anyone who was tempted at any time to think that the Revolution was an artifact of an “antiquated” past—anyone, in fact, who was “timid and afraid” that the principles of the Revolution “must now be surrendered”—would do well to gaze on the faces captured through the Moores’ photographs. At that moment, MacLeish added, we might “recall to mind Sam Downing’s 13 candles and the hope they stood for. That hope has not gone out.”

Allen C. Guelzo is Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.

Irreconcilable Constitutions

Abraham Lincoln versus Jefferson Davis on the Meaning of Freedom

By James Oakes

On February 9, 1850, Henry Clay, the venerable “Great Compromiser” from Kentucky, rose in the United States Senate to propose a series of statutes and resolutions he believed would put an end to years of sectional wrangling over slavery. Those proposals—among them, to admit California as a free state, strengthen the Fugitive Slave Act, and use popular sovereignty to decide slavery in the new territories of Utah and New Mexico—would come to be known as the Compromise of 1850.

Library of Congress

Jefferson Davis

A few days later, even before Clay could spell out the details of his proposal, Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis took the floor and, for two days, elaborated on the reasons for his opposition. Congress, he said, was not authorized to ban slavery from the territories, it had no power to abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., nor could it regulate the domestic slave trade. Beneath these specific complaints was a deceptively simply claim: Just about all of Clay’s proposals were, in Davis’ mind, unconstitutional. Specifically, they violated the constitutional right to hold “property in man”—that is, slaves.¹

Ten years later, Abraham Lincoln was vying for the Republican nomination for president when he traveled from his home in Springfield, Illinois, to New York City to speak to a gathering of party leaders at the Cooper Institute (now Cooper Union) about the sectional crisis that had barely abated in the decade since Clay’s compromise was adopted. Lincoln had conspicuously failed to support those compromise measures and in the years since had put his antislavery convictions front and center. Yet despite his having endorsed a number of specific antislavery policies, Lincoln’s speech highlighted another deceptively simple proposition: There was no such thing as a constitutional right to hold “property in man.”

The long debate over slavery is scarcely conceivable without these diametrically opposed interpretations of the Constitution. All of Davis’ proslavery politics followed logically from his claim that slaves were a constitutionally protected “species of property.” Similarly, all of Lincoln’s antislavery politics followed logically from his claim that the Constitution nowhere recognized slaves as property.

National Portrait Gallery

Mathew Brady made this photograph of Abraham Lincoln hours before he delivered his famous address at New York City’s Cooper Institute (now Cooper Union) on February 27, 1860.

Comparisons between Davis and Lincoln are nothing new. Scholars have pointed out that whereas Davis was thin-skinned and argued incessantly with his critics, Lincoln had a way of letting criticism roll off his back—even when his detractors angered him. Davis was notoriously authoritarian, whereas Lincoln gave a wide berth to his cabinet officers. Davis, the West Point graduate, mismanaged his generals, even to the point of sidelining some of the Confederate army’s most competent officers, notably P.G.T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston. Lincoln, the military novice, eventually had a clearer conception of appropriate Union strategy, put aside petty squabbles, and made competence in the field his chief criterion for promotion of generals. When critics demanded the resignation of Ulysses S. Grant, for example, Lincoln declared, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”

Here I want to offer yet another comparison of Davis and Lincoln: their profoundly different interpretations of slavery and the Constitution. Where most comparisons focus on the war years, military affairs, and the two men’s management styles, this comparison is highlighted in the 1850s, when American politics were constitutional politics.

Library of Congress

Abraham Lincoln’s and Jefferson Davis’ profoundly different interpretations of the Constitution embodied the core disagreement behind America’s widening sectional divide in the mid-19th century. Above: An early 20th-century work by Henry Hintermeister depicts George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and others at the September 1787 signing of the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia.

The first multivolume collection of Davis’ writings, edited by Dunbar Rowland, was published in 1923 under the title Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist. That Lincoln was no less a constitutionalist was clear in the first public statement he ever made regarding slavery. In 1837, as a young politician and member of the Illinois Legislature, Lincoln argued that Congress could, “under the Constitution,” abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.

Two smart constitutionalists, positing two different interpretations of the Constitution, are led to endorse two profoundly different readings of federal policy regarding slavery. If you want to understand why there was a Civil War, these men’s irreconcilable argument is a place to start.

In interpreting the Constitution, Davis had the tougher job. Though he would occasionally claim—as would Chief Justice Roger Taney—that the Constitution expressly recognized a right of property in slaves, his argument was entirely inferential. Davis cited three clauses—the Fugitive Slave clause, the taxation clause, and the three-fifths clause. None of those referred to slaves as property but Davis insisted that they necessarily implied it. The Fugitive Slave clause guaranteed slaveholders the right to recovery of their slaves who escaped into free states or free territories. Davis inferred from this that the right to recovery of fugitive slaves was by definition a right of property. The Constitution allowed Congress to tax slaves at $10 per head, and here Davis argued that this could only mean that the Constitution recognized slaves as property. Then there was the Constitution’s three-fifths clause (providing that three-fifths of the enslaved population would be counted for determining both taxation and representation in the U.S. House of Representatives), which certainly recognized the existence of slavery and gave the slave states more influence in the House and the Electoral College. Davis believed this clause also recognized slaves as property, despite the fact that the clause referred to slaves as persons.

That reference—to slaves as persons—was central to Lincoln’s claim that there was no such thing as a right of property in slaves. He had been insisting on the fundamental humanity of slaves for several years before his speech on February 27, 1860. In strictly linguistic terms, Lincoln had the better case. The Fugitive Slave clause refers to slaves not as property but as persons held to service or labor. He took the northern position that this clause was a right of recaption (the peaceful, extra-legal act of retaking personal property, goods, or family members wrongfully taken or detained by another), not a right of property. Although Congress was authorized to impose a $10 tax on slaves, that authorization did not refer to slaves as property. Head taxes, poll taxes, or capitation taxes—as they are known—are levied on persons, not property. And the three-fifths clause established the principle that political representation was to be based on population (“numbers”) rather than property. All free persons were counted—men, women, and even children—and “three-fifths of all other persons.”

Lincoln’s speech highlighted this language. Nowhere in the Constitution are slaves referred to as property, he said, and no references to “property” have anything to do with slavery. On the contrary, everywhere in the Constitution slaves are referred to as “persons.”

The language of legal personhood had important implications for the politics of slavery. The Fifth Amendment decrees that “no person … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” As persons, Lincoln reasoned, blacks accused of being fugitive slaves were entitled to the rights of due process.

Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of slavery into the territories also rested on his argument that the Constitution did not recognize slaves as property. This was the central theme of his Cooper Union address. Southerners, Lincoln said, allude “to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property.” But “no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right.”

As to Davis’ claim that the Constitution implied a right of property in slaves, Lincoln flatly repudiated it. Not only is the Constitution silent on the right to hold property in man, he said, but we “deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.” Lincoln declared the Constitution explicitly referred to slaves as persons, never as property.

Lincoln acknowledged that the Fugitive Slave and three-fifths clauses were concessions the Founders made to slavery at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. But these were exceptions in a document that overwhelming favored freedom. Throughout the Constitution, he argued, freedom was the rule, slavery the exception. Slavery was merely a local institution, whereas freedom was national.

If slaves were legal persons a host of antislavery policies were permissible, even under a Constitution that prohibited the federal government from abolishing slavery in a state. Long before he became president, Lincoln endorsed most of those policies. As president, he would sign bills to abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., and ban slavery from the territories. He would protect the due process rights of accused fugitives. He even hinted that he might support regulation of the coastwise domestic slave trade.

Davis, starting from his forceful premise that the Constitution protected slaves as property, rejected all such proposals. The “preponderating majority” of northerners, he complained, would restrict slavery from all federal territories, abolish it in Washington, and “withdraw from it the protection of the American flag wherever it is found on the high seas.”

Because fugitive slaves were property, Davis reasoned, they were not entitled to due process. Congress could not deprive slaveholders of their property by abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. Slaveholders had as much right to carry their enslaved property into the U.S. territories as a northern settler had to ride his horse there. If slaves were property wherever the Constitution was sovereign, they were legally protected as property on slave ships plying the coastwise trade.

Davis denounced the popular antislavery theory that freedom was national, that slavery “derives its existence from municipal [i.e., state and local] law,” that the right to property in slaves was created by individual states, not by the Constitution. If the Constitution treated slaves as property, southern slave law would apply in the territories, in the nation’s capital, on the high seas, and even in the free states. Davis would make slavery national.

It is not too much to say that the cause of the Civil War can be discerned in Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln arguing whether the Founders saw slaves as persons or property. It was an argument that surely had its origins in a Constitution that contained both proslavery and antislavery elements, a Constitution that reflected a conflict over slavery that was already present at the creation of the republic.

James Oakes is the author of The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution. His forthcoming book is “What Has the North To Do With Slavery”: The Antislavery Project and the Civil War.

Loyalists and Unionists

Comparing Internal Dissent in America’s Two Greatest Conflicts

By Gary W. Gallagher

The American Revolution and the Civil War established a fragile new republic and then subjected it to a profoundly disruptive test of national resiliency. Loyalists who retained their allegiance to Great Britain and Unionists in the Confederacy offer a promising comparative approach to the two conflicts. Constraints of space limit the focus of this essay to the respective white populations, though the experiences of enslaved and free African Americans in the two wars invite similar attention.

Loyalists to England and Unionists in the South, though 80 years apart, aligned in many ways. Both occupied some political positions, served in regular and irregular military units, supplied intelligence about local conditions, caused considerable friction that aggravated the opposing side’s leaders, and suffered financial, social, and legal targeting by the more numerous Patriots and Confederates. In the end, neither compromised the other side’s war effort in anything like a decisive way.

As is almost always the case, pinning down numbers can be tricky. Older estimates placed Loyalists at about one-third of the colonial population, but recent scholarship lowers the figure to 15–20 percent of the 2 million white residents in 1776. New York proved a bulwark of Loyalist sentiment, with other concentrations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Georgia. Of the 5.5 million white people in the Confederacy, perhaps 1 in 10 should be considered unconditional Unionists who opposed secession and never embraced the incipient slaveholding republic. They maintained a presence in every state but proved most influential in the Upper South. Mountainous East Tennessee was a leading stronghold, with other concentrations in western North Carolina, the uplands of Arkansas, and the Hill Country of Texas. By far the most spectacular showing by Unionists came in Virginia, where they broke with secessionists in 1861 and engineered the departure of 48 counties to create the loyal state of West Virginia in 1863.

Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library

This 1776 portrait by Thomas Hart shows Benedict Arnold as a Continental Army officer, several years before his defection to the British army and Loyalist cause.

Loyalists and Unionists made noteworthy military contributions. Between 19,000 and 25,000 men served in regular Loyalist units, and numerous others spent at least some time in various militias. Those figures should be compared with the 230,000 individuals who fought for the Patriot cause. Loyalists served in all military theaters, fought in partisan groups that disrupted communications and supply, and accounted for all or most of the British combatants in several engagements. Benedict Arnold, one of the ablest Patriot generals early in the war, ended the conflict as a notorious Loyalist officer in the British army. Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s British Legion, which operated most famously in the southern campaigns, was a Loyalist unit. Because Britain relied heavily on Loyalists in the South between 1778 and 1783, fighting in the Carolinas and Georgia took on the character of a vicious civil war.

Southern Unionists similarly supported United States military efforts against the Confederacy. According to the 1860 census, approximately one million white males of military age lived in what became Confederate states. Of those, the Richmond government mobilized between 850,000 and 900,000. At least 100,000, about 10 percent of the pool, joined regiments recruited from the white Unionist populace, while others formed guerrilla bands in mountainous or upland regions. Tennessee and what became West Virginia each mobilized more than 31,000 Unionists, which together accounted for about 60 percent of the total. Approximately one-third of all Virginians who had graduated from West Point remained loyal to the United States, and of the six Virginian colonels in United States service in the winter of 1861, only Robert E. Lee resigned his commission. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, a Virginia native, was a staunch Unionist, as were two other accomplished U.S. military figures—Admiral David G. Farragut, a Tennessean, and Major General George H. Thomas, another Virginian.

Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection

During the Revolution, Loyalist units played notable roles in many engagements, including at the Battle of Cowpens (depicted above), fought in South Carolina in January 1781.

Relative contributions to important battles illuminate one difference between Loyalist and Unionist soldiers. During the Revolution, Loyalist units played notable roles in many engagements, especially in the Carolinas, where Major Patrick Ferguson proved to be a successful recruiter until his death in battle in October 1780. Loyalists’ participation in military action between March 1780 and March 1781 included fighting at the siege of Charleston, the Waxhaws, Ramsour’s Mill, Camden, King’s Mountain, Cowpens, and Guilford Court House. Preeminent in notoriety among Tory units, Tarleton’s British Legion gained a reputation as an effective, relentlessly brutal outfit that cut a bloody swath through the Carolinas and inspired fear and hatred among the Patriot population.

The Civil War produced no Unionist equivalent of King’s Mountain or Cowpens, where Loyalists played leading roles in strategically significant battles. Neither the western nor the eastern theater featured a major action in which Unionist regiments shaped the outcome in a crucial way. Nor did any of the more than 50 white Unionist regiments from Confederate states match the record or reputation of Tarleton’s Legion. Some Unionists served in units that fought in major U.S. armies, while many others carried out garrison duty, dealt with guerrillas, and protected lines of supply and communication. For example, the 13th Tennessee Cavalry, recruited mostly from white Unionists in West Tennessee, made up more than 45 percent of the garrison at Fort Pillow in April 1864. Excoriated by Confederates as “Tennessee Tories” and “traitors to their race,” they fought alongside United States Colored Troops when Nathan Bedford Forrest’s men captured the fort on April 12. Forrest’s soldiers infamously killed almost two-thirds of the African Americans; nearly 100 of the white defenders also perished, most of them after they tried to surrender. Newton Knight’s anti-Confederate band in Mississippi, often cast as Unionists, has received considerable attention from historians—and Hollywood, in the 2016 movie Free State of Jones and earlier films—though its activities remained utterly marginal to the broader course of the conflict.

New York Public Library (Franklin); Library of Congress

William Franklin (left) and Edmund Ruffin

Cities during both wars offer an interesting comparative dimension. During the Revolution, Loyalists controlled four of the five most populous cities for extended periods. New York, second in size to Philadelphia, became a Loyalist stronghold in August 1776 and remained the hub of Britain’s American operations until the end of the conflict. Loyalist refugees who suffered persecution from Patriots flocked to the city as the war dragged on. For example, William Franklin, son of Patriot stalwart Benjamin Franklin and the last royal governor of New Jersey, remarked that he “removed to New York … from New Jersey where he suffered greatly by the Rebells for his loyalty.” Philadelphia experienced nearly a year of Loyalist domination in 1777–1778, and Newport, Rhode Island, the fifth largest colonial city, experienced nearly three years between December 1776 and October 1779. British forces captured Charleston, the most populous southern city and fourth largest overall, in May 1780 and remained in charge until December 1782. Together with Savannah, which the British seized in December 1778 and held until July 1782, Charleston proved vital as a secure base for operations overseen first by Henry Clinton and later by Charles Cornwallis.

Five of the 10 most populous cities in the Confederacy spent most of the war under Union control. In 1861, tenth-ranked Wheeling, Virginia, proclaimed itself home to the “restored government” of the state under provisional governor Francis H. Pierpont and in 1863 became the capital of West Virginia. Between February and June 1862, U.S. military successes transferred power to Unionists in Nashville (eighth), New Orleans (first), Norfolk (ninth), and Memphis (fifth). All four cities became magnets for white Unionist refugees and enslaved people seeking to escape bondage. Union control of New Orleans, by far the largest city and busiest port in the Confederacy, effectively closed the Mississippi River as an economic artery for the rebellious republic. Not surprisingly Confederates resented Unionists in these cities. North Carolinian Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston wrote in June 1863 about a sister who resided “near to that den of oppression—Memphis. She has suffered severely for the Tories came to her house whilst she was sick in bed, ransacked it from top to bottom, took her silver, such of her clothes as they wished, her husband’s instruments & horses & carried him off a prisoner & threw him into Jail.”

As when Edmondston used the word “Tories,” people on both sides during the Civil War deployed Revolutionary War terms. A few examples illustrate this phenomenon. In early 1865, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase remarked that numerous “loyalists of Texas favor universal suffrage as a matter of safety.” Earlier in the war, New York lawyer George Templeton Strong described one southern man as a “thorough-going loyalist” who welcomed Union men from the North. In June 1861, the old fire-eater Edmund Ruffin complained that parts of Virginia were infested with “many tories” who should be compelled “to serve in the army against their northern friends, or to leave Va. & join them.” A woman in South Carolina commented in March 1863 about the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee: “The people all about there are Tories, thieves & vagabonds, & civilization almost unknown.” Just after the war, former Confederate general Jubal A. Early passed through Alabama while traveling from Virginia to Texas. “Got dinner at Hiram Smith’s a vile old Tory in Fayette,” Early wrote in his diary on June 21: “[W]e passed for Yankees and he charged us no bill…. All of this part of Alabama is for Union.”

The British government and the Lincoln administration tended to overestimate numbers of Loyalists and Unionists. The British most obviously expected too much from southern Loyalists in the last several years of the Revolutionary War. As for Lincoln, he initially believed a mass of Unionists would step forward to oppose secessionists. His First Inaugural Address closed with a hopeful affirmation of latent Unionist sentiment that directly linked events in 1861 to the Revolution’s Patriots: “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Lincoln later accepted the reality of widespread support for the Confederacy and encouraged establishment of alternative Unionist governments in various states that could help suppress the rebellion and serve as a bridge toward reestablishment of the Union. Andrew Johnson, one of the two or three most notable southern Unionists, served in Nashville as military governor of Tennessee from March 1862 until he assumed the vice presidency in March 1865.

The Picture Gallery of Canadian History, Vol. 2 (1945)

Loyalists who emigrated to Canada at the end of the Revolution draw lots for land on which to settle.

Loyalists and Unionists differed markedly in their postwar situations. The former had supported a failed cause, lost much of their property, and sometimes been imprisoned. Perhaps 70,000, about one in six, emigrated to England, Canada, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Unionists in the former Confederacy stood with the winners, and individuals such as Andrew Jackson Hamilton of Texas, who had left the state in July 1862 because of alleged plots against his life, participated in Reconstruction state politics. Elizabeth Van Lew, a Richmonder who created a spy ring that passed intelligence to Union officials during the war, headed the city’s Post Office between 1869 and 1877. Often called Scalawags who had betrayed the white South, the old Unionists endured social ostracism not unlike what they had endured under Confederate rule.

Gary W. Gallagher is the John L. Nau III Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia.

Southern Yankee Doodles

The American Revolution in Confederate Culture

By Anne Sarah Rubin

When the members of the Confederate Provisional Congress arrived at their temporary quarters, the Alabama Senate Chamber, on February 4, 1861, they walked into a “tastefully and beautifully decorated” space. Local residents had donated a variety of pictures and portraits to dress up the room. Among John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and some noted Alabamians, there were no fewer than three images of George Washington. One portrayed him as a general, one delivering his Second Inaugural Address, and the third was the true prize: an original Gilbert Stuart portrait of the first president, given pride of place in the center of the room.¹ Washington, the father of the country that these men had just abandoned, would oversee the creation of their new nation.

University of Georgia Libraries (Cobb); New York Public Library (Marion)

Thomas R.R. Cobb (left) and Francis Marion

But in leaving the United States of America, the new Confederates did not leave their beloved Washington behind. Rather, he was everywhere in the symbols and iconography of the Confederate States of America. His image appeared on a postage stamp and on five different denominations of Confederate currency. On the Seal of the Confederate States he sat astride his horse, right hand raised and pointing south, dressed in his military uniform, complete with epaulets and tricorn hat. Modeled on the statue of Washington in Richmond’s Capitol Square, the image that graces the Seal of the Confederate States is surrounded by a wreath of entwined wheat, corn, rice, tobacco, sugar cane, and of course cotton—the main agricultural products of the new nation. In a burst of literalism, Confederate congressman Thomas R.R. Cobb of Georgia actually proposed that the new country be named the “Republic of Washington,” though he was voted down.² Jefferson Davis scheduled his official inauguration for Washington’s birthday in 1862, claiming the second most important American holiday (after July 4) for the Confederacy.

National Postal Museum

George Washington was everywhere in the symbols and iconography of the Confederate States of America, including on the 20-cent stamp shown above.

Washington was the most prominent Revolutionary figure Confederates invoked, but he was certainly not alone. In the first weeks of the Provisional Congress, Washington was often twinned with General Francis Marion, the legendary Revolutionary “Swamp Fox.” Later, as Robert E. Lee rose to prominence, Confederates made much of both the Revolutionary military service of his father, Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, and his ties to Washington through marriage (and distant ancestors).³ Nor were the connections limited to leaders, whether Revolutionary or contemporary. Even ordinary southerners could draw connections back through the generations, and link, in the parlance of the time, “Seventy-Six and Sixty-One.”

In the American Revolution, Confederates found a recipe for their present-day nation, a language of legitimation. They cast themselves as the true heirs of the Founders, fighting back against supposed northern greed and fanaticism. As Confederates sought first to inspire and later to sustain their people, they drew on the patriotic example of colonists fighting for seven years, surviving material hardship, and eventually vanquishing a more numerous and better-equipped foe, to both inspire people to support the new nation and later to sustain them as their own struggle for independence seemed to break down. In their own minds, Confederates were not destroying the Union; they were restoring it to its earlier glory. They were not rebels, but patriots. Their ancestors had fought a glorious revolution to create a great nation; Confederates would do the same. Rather than representing a challenge to the ideals of the Founders, the Confederacy would be the perfection of their vision.

The Library Company of Philadelphia

Confederates made the case that they were guardians of America’s revolutionary ideals by using the tools of popular culture, including songs like “Southern Yankee Doodle,” which mocked Major Robert Anderson for failing to hold Fort Sumter in April 1861.

Confederates thus used the language of ancestry to emphasize their connection to the past. Whether an individual southern soldier had descended from a Revolutionary fighter was largely irrelevant. What mattered was that Confederates, as a whole, cast themselves as a people apart. They were the Anglo-Saxon Cavaliers to the northern Puritans and immigrants. Indeed, northern Founders like Benjamin Franklin and Samuel and John Adams were rarely mentioned. In this construction, the courage and fortitude of the Revolutionary generation flowed through Confederate veins: those of women as well as men, yeomen as well as aristocrats, Mississippians as well as South Carolinians.

Too, when Confederates cast themselves as the guardians of Revolutionary ideals, they avoided discussing the issue of slavery. The word rarely appeared in southern evocations of the American Revolution, and when it did, it was usually in the rhetorical sense of Confederates fearing enslavement to northern masters. This silence on the subject of racial slavery suggests that Confederates used the Revolutionary War to shift the terms of debate, and to make the war more palatable to conditional Unionists (who were pro-state’s rights but anti-disunion), non-slaveholders, and outside nations.

Confederate leaders made this case to ordinary southerners by using the tools of popular culture. In poems and songs, conversation and letters, northerners and southern Unionists were repeatedly damned as “Tories,” and Union soldiers as “Hessians” (playing on the many immigrants in the northern ranks).⁴ These more popular forms illustrate the tremendous resonance the American Revolution had among the general Confederate public. While comparatively few readers might have been expected to wade through detailed treatises on the true intentions of the Constitution’s framers, even a child could appreciate the significance of a picture of George Washington on a stamp or adorning a broadside, or laugh at a new version of an old song. Revolutionary iconography had been a staple of political culture since the 1790s, and it provided a popular shorthand for expressing loyalty to party, state, or nation. Appropriating the instantly familiar to make the war comprehensible was a sure strategy for securing loyalty, for it meant that the new nation was not so different from the old. Preserving the Revolutionary past made it easier for new Confederates to reject the American present.⁵

“The Star Spangled Banner” became “The Stars and Bars,” which began:

Oh! say do you see now so vauntingly borne,
In the hands of the Yankee, the Hessian and Tory,
The flag that once floated at Liberty’s dawn,
O’er heroes who made it the emblem of glory?
Do the hireling and knave
Bid that banner now wave
O’er the fortress where freemen they dare
to enslave?
Oh! say has the star-spangled banner become
The flag of the Tory and vile Northern scum?

“Southern Yankee Doodle” mocked Major Robert Anderson for failing to hold Fort Sumter in April 1861, while “The New Yankee Doodle” expressed Confederate contempt for northerners in general:

Yankee Doodle had a mind
To whip the Southern traitors,
Because they didn’t choose to live
On codfish and potatoes.
Yankee Doodle, doodle doo,
Yankee Doodle dandy,
And so to keep his courage up,
He took a drink of brandy.

No longer a symbol of home-grown resistance, “Yankee Doodle” had become a caricature of all that was weak and unmanly about Confederates’ foes.⁶

As Confederates sought to encourage enlistments, spur patriotism, and ultimately fight despair, they called upon Confederate men to live out the patriotism of their more direct ancestors, the common soldiers of the Revolution. Poems, songs, and stories invoked Revolutionary victories on southern soil at Sullivan’s Island and Yorktown, Cowpens and King’s Mountain.⁷ The image of the Revolutionary War soldier spurring on the younger generation pervaded Confederate calls to arms. In a song called “The Spirit of ’76—The Old Rifleman,” an old man put on his buckskin suit and ventured forth to inspire the new crop of soldiers:

We’ll teach these shot-gun boys the tricks,
By which a war is won;
Especially how seventy-six
Took tories on the run!

Another, “Seventy-Six and Sixty-One,” sought to conjure the “spirits of the glorious dead!” to lend their inspiration to their southern sons, while “The Spirit of ’60” referred to a resurgence of “the old spirit of ’76.” When Mrs. Frank Wilson of Raleigh, North Carolina, presented a Confederate flag to the local Oak City Guards in June 1861, her husband read a poem of his own writing, encouraging “Patriots! Warriors! Freedom’s Sons!” to “meet as your fathers met the foe!”⁸ A poem directed at Marylanders called upon the “sons of Sires, of manly deeds, who died for love of right” to emulate their forbears and rise up in revolution against Yankee despotism. Apparently some were moved by the poetry, for the Southern Monthly reported that the Maryland regiments in the Confederate army “have adopted the title of ‘the Maryland Line,’ which was so heroically sustained by their patriotic sires of the first Revolution….”⁹

Confederate women and men both turned to the Revolutionary experience to find comfort in times of trouble. The war went on for much longer than Confederates had expected, and when the people feared that all might be lost, they were reminded of the bleak times in the Revolutionary War that eventually changed for the better. Confederates were repeatedly reassured that their ancestors had been in a much more difficult spot, and had overcome far worse trials than those they were presently experiencing. In January 1862, for instance, readers of the Montgomery Mail were told that “in the Revolution there was more suffering and more destitution than will happen to us if the war should last for fifty years. We are in a better position for carrying on a war than almost every other people, and should not complain of hardship.” A piece in the Charleston Mercury, after the double Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, pointedly argued that “if Generals Lee and Bragg and Johnston were to-morrow beaten in the field, we would not be in as desperate a condition as our fathers were when General Washington, vanquished at Long Island, Germantown, and White Plains, and with a handful of men under his command, attacked Princeton in the dead of winter.” The American Revolution proved that selfless dedication to the cause of liberty could triumph over a more numerous and better-supplied foe, and Confederates were encouraged to keep that lesson before them at all times. “Think of the men of the Revolution,” Confederates were told in an article reprinted around the country in 1863, “when the entire South was overrun by the British and the Tories!… Are we any less than they?”¹⁰

Analogy was not to be destiny. The Confederacy ultimately had to yield to the United States, as the Founders and Revolutionary generation surely would have wished.

Anne Sarah Rubin, a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is the author of several books on the Civil War, including Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March in American Memory (UNC Press, 2014).

Fighting for the Father of the Republic

Celebrating Washington’s Birthday in the Union armies

By Zachery A. Fry

As they huddled around campfires in February 1863, Private Harvey Reid and his comrades in the 22nd Wisconsin Infantry had so far avoided the worst of the war. Assigned to garrison duty in Kentucky and Tennessee since mustering into federal service the previous September, Wisconsin’s “Abolition Regiment” narrowly missed the recent bloodletting at Stones River. Still, the demands of marching, drilling, and confronting a hostile population far away from loved ones conspired to sap the energy of many soldiers, leading to what Reid called “too much ‘croaking’ in the army.” The 22nd was far from alone in this regard. Commanders at every echelon, from regiment to field army, recognized that a drop in morale at the front could imperil an already stalemated Union war effort. Commemorating George Washington’s birthday on February 22 provided an opportunity to refocus commitment, and commanders in each theater of operations directed that elaborate ceremonies be conducted for just that purpose. The fetes that followed, complete with patriotic airs and speeches from field grade officers, “revived our dormant patriotism,” Private Reid wrote home. The 22nd “again feel as we did last summer, and are prepared to enter the field with a proper appreciation of our duties and of the contest in which we are engaged.”¹

Washington’s birthday commanded near-sacred observance in the mid-19th century, making it a touchstone common to every Union field army in the war’s early 1863 nadir. From Virginia to Mississippi and beyond, and often at the insistence of official orders from higher headquarters, regiments gathered to commemorate the nation’s founding and tie their service to that of the Continental Army 80 years earlier. Arriving on the heels of the Emancipation Proclamation, Washington’s birthday that year also provided a moment for introspection about the war’s purpose relative to the founding principles. Even more practically, as a powerful “Copperhead” antiwar movement burned across the North that cold winter, Union soldiers used the day’s activities to rally their resolve at the front and shame lukewarm patriots at home.

National Portrait Gallery

William Rosecrans

At battle-scarred Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on the morning of February 22, Major General William Rosecrans issued orders to the Army of the Cumberland for a “national salute … fired at sunset by one battery of each division” in commemoration of the nation’s first president, “the great representative man of this nation, who fought for its independence, laid the foundation of our freedom, and set up the frame-work of the most free, reasonable and just government for a great nation, that has ever been seen in the tide of time.”² Private Elias H. Whitmer, a soldier-correspondent from the 79th Pennsylvania Infantry, wrote home to the Lancaster Daily Evening Express that Rosecrans’ order and the ensuing ceremonies throughout the army proved that “they were celebrating a grand, magnificent[,] peculiar affection which binds the soldier to the dead heroes who have offered their lives in the establishment or preservation of our Government.” The Cumberland men would need such motivation when the coming campaign season stretched the army and its commander to the breaking point.³

National Portrait Gallery

In February 1863, Union soldiers across the country celebrated George Washington (depicted above in a William Clarke portrait from 1800) on his birthday. The festivities “revived our dormant patriotism,” noted a Wisconsin private.

Midwestern soldiers in Major General Ulysses S. Grant’s sprawling western command held similar ceremonies. Lieutenant Emanuel Giesy of the 46th Ohio Infantry, reflecting on Washington’s birthday and the anniversary of his own enlistment, wrote that he had left home to defend a republic “erected by the great and good men of the Revolution.” To his horror, however, “those with whom we in former days acted, are determined to join hands with traitors and this rebellion; instilling the poison of secession into all by a bold and public attack upon the great and good Washington,” he wrote.⁴ Nearby, officers of the 111th Illinois Infantry turned attention in their ceremony to “the blood of our patriotic fathers … crying to us from every battle field of the Revolution to avenge the insults heaped upon the flag—the emblem of our nation’s greatness and glory.” Part of the vengeance “crying to us from beneath Mount Vernon’s heights,” the officers insisted, must be emancipation. Slavery was “not only the cause of the war” but also the logistical backbone of the rebellion, and Washington’s birthday provided the occasion for the Illinois officers to advocate the “arming” and “officering” of African Americans in Union blue.⁵

Library of Congress

Commemorations of George Washington’s birthday on February 22, 1863, provided members of the Union armies an opportunity to refocus their commitment to the cause. Above: An Edwin Forbes sketch of the birthday ball held the next year by the Army of the Potomac’s II Corps.

In Virginia sat the embittered Army of the Potomac, back from its disastrous “Mud March” and under the new command of Major General Joseph Hooker. The veterans of many hard-fought engagements lazed along the Rappahannock, still dejected from their crushing defeat the previous December at Fredericksburg and lamenting the army’s miserable winter, which some referred to as its “Valley Forge.”⁶ On the 22nd, however, orders went out from headquarters for each corps of the army to render a sharp artillery salute at noon. Some officers supplemented this with their own instructions, such as Major General Daniel Sickles, who enjoined his III Corps to remember that the “anniversary of the birthday of the Father of our Republic—our greatest leader in war and our wisest sage in peace—inspires every true soldier with fresh zeal in the sacred task of maintaining the Union which Washington established.”⁷ A blizzard left 12-inch snowdrifts between Falmouth and Belle Plain, but the icy commemoration continued. “If you had been here yesterday,” Private John Pardington of the Iron Brigade wrote to his wife the next day, “you would have thought there was a big Battle here the way our Batteries fired there guns in Honor of Washington Birthday.”⁸ Theodore Dodge, adjutant of the 119th New York Infantry, scribbled in his diary near Aquia Creek that 68 guns of the army’s XI Corps discharged their salutes “by couplets and very well fired too—regularly as clockwork.”⁹

The XI Corps, of which Dodge and his New Yorkers were a part, performed more than artillery salutes that day. Prompted by Wlodzimierz Krzyzanowski, commander of the 58th New York Infantry, European-born officers of Brigadier General Carl Schurz’s division used the occasion to pen a manifesto to President Lincoln pledging their unflinching loyalty to the war effort. Eleven field officers of the division signed the letter and forwarded copies to the Chicago Tribune, which reprinted it as a direct assault on partisan naysayers at home. Tying “the memory of the illustrious patriot whose birthday we celebrate” to “the blood of the many brave men whom we saw dropping from our ranks on the field of battle,” the letter called on Union soldiers and citizens alike to support “the cause of human liberty and progress.” As immigrants and exiles from the 1848 upheavals, Krzyzanowski and his fellow officers burnished a sense of belonging by attaching their service to the living memory of Washington and the Revolution.¹⁰

Library of Congress

Wlodzimierz Krzyzanowski

Other Army of the Potomac outfits similarly tied their service to the Revolutionary generation. The troopers of the 8th Illinois Cavalry gathered at the insistence of Colonel William Gamble, an Irish-born veteran of the British army, to commemorate Washington’s birthday through the passage of patriotic resolutions. Gamble framed the proceedings by calling for a pledge “to the support of the principles and the Government bequeathed to us by George Washington, and especially so to-day, as that commemorating his birth.” Like the colonel himself, the officers who drafted the resolutions had no intention of settling for mere sentimental celebration. In words excoriating stay-at-home “traitors” to Washington’s legacy and the “laws and glory of our flag,” the cavalrymen promised to cut down secession sympathizers, “wherever found.” Five months later, the 8th Illinois would carry that conviction onto the fields west of Gettysburg.¹¹

The desperation of early 1863 forced soldiers to reexamine fundamental beliefs about the Union cause and war effort. The arrival of Washington’s birthday and its commemorative ceremonies in many camps at the front provided the opportunity to renew solidarity, not just by remembering the sacrifices of the revolutionary generation but also by shaming “Tories” on the home front. Their words, whether penned to loved ones or published in newspapers, proved the potency the War for Independence still possessed during the War of the Rebellion.

Zachery A. Fry is an associate professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the author of A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac (UNC Press, 2020).

The George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon

George Washington embraces Abraham Lincoln and places a wreath over his head in this illustration.

Beyond reflecting the widespread grief over Lincoln’s death, the image also implicitly acknowledged the country’s profound and enduring reverence for Washington. Indeed, the nation’s Revolutionary generation—and founding documents—maintained a special place in the hearts and minds of northerners and southerners during the Civil War. As the essays that comprise this issue’s cover story (“The Patriots,” p. 24) reveal, supporters of both the Union and the Confederacy—from political leaders like Lincoln and Jefferson Davis to rank-and-file troops—looked to the country’s founding, and Founders, as inspiration in, and justification for, their respective causes. With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence nearly upon us, we thought it a perfect time to probe some of the many through lines between two of the most important events in American history.

Have a comment about this or any other article in the issue? Please email us at letters@civilwarmonitor.com.

* * *

We recently learned of the death of Chris Calkins, who passed away April 1 following a years-long battle with Parkinson’s disease. Longtime readers of the Monitor might remember Chris from the profile we published of his career with the National Park Service in our Spring 2015 issue (“Living History: Following Lee’s Footsteps”), which highlighted his dedication to telling the story of the war’s final days in Virginia and the leading role he played in the establishment of the Sailor’s Creek Battlefield Historical State Park in 2008. He was also a devoted advocate for battlefield preservation and interpretation. Our condolences to his family, friends, and admirers.

Library of Congress

Nashville Outer Lines

As the Battle of Nashville raged on December 15—16, 1864, photographer Jacob Coonley was busy behind the Union lines. “As soon as the battle was well under way I had an ambulance with drivers take me as near as possible to make negatives of everything in sight, two days being given to this work,” Coonley wrote in a March 1907 memoir in Wilson’s Photographic Magazine.

At least 10 of the original glass plate stereo negatives that Coonley took on those two days are held at the Library of Congress, including two highly detailed images showing the outer of two Union defensive lines at Nashville. Shown here is the lesser known of the two images.

From a vantage point next to Fort Negley on St. Cloud Hill, Coonley’s camera faces southwest and shows the section of the outer Union line stretching to Fort Casino, visible on a hilltop about 1,000 yards away. The entrenchments are full of soldiers in reserve as well as their tents and lean-tos and campfires.

Halfway to Fort Casino, the Franklin Pike cuts through the line, with the blur of a moving wagon visible in the upper center of the image. The line continued beyond Fort Casino and went for miles around the southern side of the city, almost reaching the Cumberland River.

Coonley sold this and the other stereo negatives to E. & H.T. Anthony & Co. in New York for $5 each. The photos were included in the company’s popular “War for the Union” series of more than 1,100 stereo views issued in the spring of 1865.

Bob Zeller is president of the nonprofit Center for Civil War Photography, which is devoted to collecting, preserving, and digitizing Civil War images.

Harper's Weekly

Soldier fires a Coehorn Mortar in a Harper’s Weekly illustration.

“The effect was excellent, and in about half an hour the rebels ceased to fire entirely. The position was such that the damage caused by the explosion of the shells was plainly discernible; and it was reported furthermore by our skirmishers that great execution ensued and the utmost consternation was visible among the enemy.” So wrote Captain James H. Wood, 4th New York Heavy Artillery, in July 1864, reporting on the effectiveness of his battery of six Coehorn mortars during the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia.

Named after its inventor, Menno, Baron van Coehoorn, a 17th-century Dutch military engineer, the Coehorn was a small smoothbore mortar that employed high-arcing “vertical” fire to lob fuse-detonated explosive shells at fortified enemy troops. Unlike bulkier siege weapons, the Coehorns were easily transported and allowed their users to quickly change their direction of fire, so that “a single mortar, moved from place to place, might to the enemy appear to be a whole battery,” noted one Union artillerist. The Union weapon was made of brass, the Confederate one of cast iron.

Both sides relied more heavily on Coehorns as the opposing armies increasingly dug in over the war’s final year. Shown here are statistics associated with the 24-pounder model 1838 Coehorn, the standard version employed by Union forces.

Coehorn Mortar by the Numbers

Total length of the Coehorn: 16.32″

Length of the bore: 13.07″

Diameter of the bore (caliber): 5.82″

Length of the powder chamber: 4.25″

Number of Coehorn shells ordered by the federal government in October 1864: 20,000

Weight of the Coehorn: 164 lb

Suggested number of men needed to transport the Coehorn and its bed by hand: 4

Number of men necessary to service a Coehorn (one gunner and two cannoneers): 3

Additional men needed to prepare and transport its ammunition: 2

Weight of the Coehorn’s wooden mortar bed: 132 lb

Elevation of the Coehorn: 45°

Number of Coehorns ordered by the federal government from February 1862–January 1865: 248

Price paid for these Coehorns, or an average of $132 per Coehorn: $32,806.57

Paul Reeder Collection

John Wesley Duren

In Navarro County, Texas, in the first summer of the war, 87 men formed a militia company, the Navarro Rifles, which mustered into Confederate service as Company I of the 4th Texas Infantry. One of the volunteers was John Wesley Duren, who was born in 1842 and as a boy had moved to the Lone Star State from Mississippi with his parents—part of an influx of white settlers following the Mexican War. Shown here early in his service, Duren wears a trimmed jacket and cap with a star and holds what may be an Allen & Wheelock Bar Hammer revolver.

The 4th showed its mettle with the Texas Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia, participating in most of that army’s major engagements, including Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg. Duren proved a capable soldier, rising through the ranks to second lieutenant by February 1864. He suffered minor wounds to his right thigh and knee at the Battle of the Wilderness and received a parole after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.

Duren returned to Navarro County, where he married, raised a family of seven, and worked various jobs, including as a cotton yard clerk and a boardinghouse proprietor. He died in 1925 at 83.

Ronald S. Coddington is publisher of Military Images, a magazine dedicated to showcasing and preserving photos of Civil War soldiers and sailors.

This image made by Timothy O’Sullivan shows a portion of the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, not long after the epic battle there in July 1863.

The people came in droves. Despite the unbearable stench from fresh graves and unburied matter, they slowly combed the battlefield in search of artifacts, relics, and trophies.¹ The Army of the Potomac had just won a major victory at the Battle of Gettysburg and thousands of citizens flocked to the fields in the weeks and months that followed. Unlike the scores of nurses, doctors, and worried families who rushed to the small Pennsylvania town to offer aid and succor to the wounded, these everyday Americans came to bear witness, to slake their own curiosity—or, at worst, to loot. And loot they

did, in scenes that beggar description: They took away shot and shell, uniforms and caps, buttons and bullets, and even bones. These early battlefield sightseers blurred the lines between “genteel visitors” and “tasteless gawkers.” One contemporary observer called them “pestiferous sight-seers.” Indeed, the gawkers and ghouls who descended on Gettysburg can be considered among the earliest audiences to engage in behavior we might liken today to dark tourism.²

Civil War Americans’ fascination with the aftermath of battle has been matched only by scholars’ limitless curiosity about why people came to the killing fields and how they understood them.³ The late public historian Gregory A. Coco offered perhaps the most perspicacious account of battle’s aftermath in his foundational 1995 work, A Strange and Blighted Land. Seeking to explore “the bitter truth of war and all of its unspeakable and damnable horrors,” Coco’s often gruesome study uncovered the conflict’s darkest corners.⁴ All accounts of the Gettysburg battlefield—both during the fighting and in its aftermath—are indeed difficult to read, being as they are replete with unspeakable scenes of suffering. But Americans were living in a time of transition. A clear-eyed pragmaticism would eventually replace an idealistic romanticism.⁵ And the boundaries separating the battlefield’s gawkers, ghouls, and guests were blurry at best. Ultimately, although a culture of sentimentalism pervaded how Americans understood their civil war, the throngs of visitors who came to the conflict’s killing fields in the aftermath of Gettysburg force us to consider also the emergence of a grim realism. Their sensibilities were not ours. And their reactions may surprise modern-day audiences.

Gettysburg was forever changed after the Fourth of July 1863. It became a destination for tens of thousands of visitors during the war years alone. That number eventually increased to the millions each year. The space became at once sacred and profane, or, as historian Jim Weeks observes, “a site of commemoration and an object of commerce.”⁶ As plans were being developed for the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in 1863, a cottage industry quickly grew for relics and artifacts from the battlefield. Efforts to preserve portions of the battlefield competed with the development of lodgings and restaurants for tourists. Rival groups of sightseers and pilgrims descended on Gettysburg to engage in activities that ranged from the voyeuristic to the solemn.⁷

While opinions about Gettysburg’s earliest visitors varied, their inclinations were not unusual. In America, the years between the early Republic and the antebellum era saw the transportation revolution, national ardor, and aesthetic romanticism propel and compel people across the American landscape.⁸ Tourists to the battle sites of 18th-century conflicts formed, in historian Thomas A. Chambers’ estimation, “their own emotional, patriotic memories based on romantic ideals of the picturesque, melancholy, and nostalgia, as well as a generic Revolutionary War history.”⁹ Nineteenth-century observers were critical of those who visited the fields close to the time of fighting but applauded later pilgrims who were driven by a sacred obligation to honor and remember the dead.¹⁰ The quest to seek out battlefields was not confined to the United States: Europeans, too, were known to visit sites associated with the Napoleonic Wars and other conflicts. Famously, many went to Waterloo and robbed the dead of their teeth.¹¹

Library of Congress

Charles J. Tyson made this image of Gettysburg’s Stratton Street—where Union troops retreated on July 1, 1863—sometime after the battle. Before long, throngs of civilians flocked to the now famous town in search of relics of the epic fight.

The Civil War fundamentally altered the ways in which Americans interacted with their battlefields. By the summer of 1863, citizens were a regular feature on the war’s contested fields. Infamously, crowds of spectators gathered at Bull Run to witness the war’s opening battle. It was a huge event: numerous politicians and notable citizens endured the long ride by horse and by carriage from Washington City to Centreville, Virginia, on July 21, 1861. Because of the considerable distance, many packed picnics. While mostly safe from the actual fighting, civilians became entangled in the chaotic Federal retreat. The scene became the stuff of legend. Countless scholarly and popular histories have used the episode to illustrate the holiday-like atmosphere of the conflict’s early days to suggest that civilians had learned their lesson and would steer clear of all subsequent battles and battlefields. In fact, many northern and southern noncombatants regularly appeared on battlegrounds, returning over the course of the war as collectors and sightseers. As one New York Times correspondent succinctly concluded after revisiting the Bull Run battlefield to relic hunt with colleagues in March 1862, “Beyond a doubt, Manassas will supersede Saratoga and Sharon [Springs] during the coming Summer. A trip to Bull Run and beyond, will be considered the thing.”¹²

As great battles like Gettysburg unfolded, word quickly spread—and galvanized audiences. A teenage civilian of Gettysburg named Liberty Hollinger remembered how the “town began to fill with friends and strangers, some intent on satisfying their curiosity, and others, alas! to pick up anything of value to be found.”¹³ Hollinger’s observation isolated the tensions between the curious and the collectors. Detritus lay scattered for miles. Discarded boxes, fouled guns, canteens, and knapsacks were strewn across the fields. Scores of dead lay unburied. Their sunburnt bodies had rotted in the heat and were now soaked by pouring rains. People trembled at the horrifying sights they encountered. One soldier recounted, “No pen can paint the awful picture of desolation, devastation and death that was presented here to the shuddering beholders who traversed these localities…. Festering corpses at every step…. It was a hideous and revolting sight.”¹⁴ Hogs rooted among the dead. Cultivated fields were in ruins. The hand of war had cruelly altered the picturesque countryside. Another young local resident, Tillie Pierce, described Gettysburg and its environs as “a strange and blighted land.”¹⁵

Adams County Historical Society

Liberty Hollinger

And yet, the contorted landscape inexorably drew visitors. Michael Jacobs, a professor at Gettysburg’s Pennsylvania College, recounted, “Scarcely had the booming of cannon and the rattling of musketry ceased before anxious crowds of visitors began to throng the town of Gettysburg and the surrounding hills and valleys which had so recently been the scenes of slaughter and death.”¹⁶ Another visitor to Gettysburg noted: “Today the people from the surrounding country began to come into the town. Hundreds of wagons and carriages from every direction filled the place.”¹⁷ As one chagrined townsperson lamented: “Where the late thousands wrestled in wrath … those who now traverse the field” were intent on plunder.¹⁸ Many of those who came to nurse the wounded or to find lost loved ones chafed at the curious visitors and relic-hunters who descended on the area in droves. The Rev. E.W. Hutter of Philadelphia’s St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, who visited the battlefield in early-to-mid July with fellow Philadelphians to succor the wounded, noted encountering “the morbid sight-seers, whom curiosity impelled to tread a field of battle when the guns were silent.”¹⁹ Warming to the subject, Hutter went on to call this group the “greatest croakers conceivable.”²⁰

Although the boundaries between curious visitor and voyeuristic sightseer blurred, certain behavior explicitly defied social convention. One man, who has gone down in lore as the “Ghoul of Gettysburg,” was accused of robbing soldiers’ dead bodies. A surviving stereo view depicts the purported figure and is captioned: “A Battle-field Vulture, Godfor by name—one of those inhuman creatures who follow in the wake of armies, robbing the field of blankets, clothing, turning the pockets of the dead, &c.”²¹ Little else is known about this shadowy man. Yet, those quick to censure him might have been surprised to learn that troops themselves peddled in plundered souvenirs. A soldier from the 148th Pennsylvania Infantry complained, “It was a rare occurrence to find one who had not been robbed by the battlefield bandit or robber of the dead.” These soldiers cut open the pockets of the fallen and rifled through the contents. “The battlefield robbers,” he continued, “were well known by the large amounts of money they had, and the watches, pocketbooks, pocket knives and other valuable trinkets they had for sale after the battle.” He concluded, “All regiments had them.”²²

Practices beyond the pale continued in the months after the battle. Augustus Shriver, a Maryland citizen, traveled to Gettysburg in the fall of 1863. In a letter to his family, he wrote that near the Round Tops he had come across the “remains of Rebel sharpshooters which have never been buried, laying, with the bones bleaching in the sun, where they had fallen.” While Shriver had been saddened by witnessing the effects of battle, a “Boston lady” he came across horrified him. The woman had been using a stick to smash the “teeth out of a rebel skull to take home as relics.”²³ On that same battlefield a local citizen picked up a dried hand and took it home as a “relic.” This person’s family found nothing repulsive about it but instead “remarked on the smallness of the fingers.”²⁴ While most Victorian Americans upheld the sanctity of the dead, others clearly showed no remorse as they crossed over the boundaries of socially acceptable relic hunting and collecting.

Adams County Historical Society

The behavior of some battleground visitors clearly defied social convention, such as by the man known as the “Ghoul of Gettysburg” (pictured here), who was accused of robbing soldiers’ dead bodies.

Far from flinching at the continued disruptions to their little town, Gettysburg’s youth reveled in the holiday-like atmosphere in the days after battle’s end. Having just celebrated a massive Union victory and the Fourth of July, the youngsters roamed the area’s forests and fields looking for treasures. Charlie McCurdy remembered traveling around with “other boys looking for relics of various kinds.” They gathered piles of bullets—and prized those deformed into “grotesque shapes” because they had hit stones or trees. “It was,” McCurdy concluded, “a busy and exciting summer that followed for thousands of visitors [who] flocked to Gettysburg; our relics were in great demand, for everybody wanted a souvenir.”²⁵ Young Gettysburg resident Albertus McCreary agreed, noting that he and others had found bullet-in-wood pieces to be highly popular with collectors. Thus, he wrote, every “boy went out with a hatchet to chop pieces from the trees in which bullets had lodged.”²⁶

The thousands of early visitors to Gettysburg seemingly all desired memory tokens. McCreary offers the best description of how the burgeoning business in relics developed. In the days, weeks, and months after the great fight, McCreary noted, visitors came to “see the battle-field, and all wanted relics.”²⁷ McCreary himself, along with other local boys, were only too happy to oblige. They started a veritable industry selling “bullets and pieces of shell,” and found that pieces of tree with bullets embedded became a “great prize and a good seller.”²⁸

It is worth pausing at McCreary’s remark because the bullet-in-wood souvenirs are deserving of distinction and discussion. These artifacts proved immensely popular. They were a visceral testament to the ferocity of the battle. The damage done to forests and the destruction of trees reflected the power of massed small arms and cannon fire, which could be both deadly accurate and wildly erratic. “The ruination of forests” as the result of the war, writes historian Megan Kate Nelson, “created novel scenes” that transformed the natural environment.²⁹ Contemporary Americans looked on with horror and awe. The peculiar mixture of reactions can, in a sense, be seen in the battle-scarred wood. Around Culp’s Hill, musket and cannon fire destroyed a “thick forest.”³⁰ Union general Oliver O. Howard was amazed to go over the ground five years later and still encounter “marks of the struggle.” “The trees,” he noted, were “cut off, lopped down, or shivered,” and “stumps and trees were perforated with holes where leaden balls had since been dug out.”³¹

Harper's Weekly

As depicted in the above illustration from Harper’s Weekly, many of Gettysburg’s younger residents were eager collectors—and sellers—of battlefield souvenirs. “[Every] boy went out with a hatchet to chop pieces from the trees in which bullets had lodged,” reported one local youth.

Another account from Federal officer Frank Haskell noted that the trees at Culp’s Hill “were almost literally peeled, from the ground up some fifteen or twenty feet, so thick upon them were the scars the bullets had made.”³²

Civilians flocked to the area’s damaged woodlands. With pocketknives and hatchets, they cut out pieces and lopped off limbs. By so doing, they excised the plant’s wounds and created jarring objects composed of manmade projectiles and natural elements. The wood now marked a moment in time. The objects were used to cope with the violence enacted upon the natural environment. And they reflected the vagaries of war. Some were rendered into anonymous blocks, whereas others were deliberately curated and marked. They carefully cataloged provenance. Large pieces were publicly displayed while others were transformed into personal walking sticks and baseball bats. The consequences of the relic-hunters’ work were profound. As early as 1869, The New York Times recorded that Culp’s Hill was ruined: “The trees are scarred and mutilated all around, and what war has spared, the chisel and the knife of the relic-hunter have destroyed, so that the whole place is a perfect wreck. These relics, in the shape of bullets and broken pieces of shells, are becoming very scarce, and if the demand continues it will be necessary, as in other similar cases, to manufacture them to order.”³³

The wave of collectors and sightseers who spread across the Gettysburg battlefield prompted government action. On July 6, 1863, Army of the Potomac commander George G. Meade ordered Major General William F. Smith to the town to protect the hospitals and secure the countryside.³⁴ Meade recognized the chaos that would surely descend upon south-central Pennsylvania once his army departed the next day. Medical personnel soon cared for the wounded, small detachments of troops policed the battlefield, and some semblance of order was restored. Yet, what of those relic-hunters and throngs of tourists? While the minie balls, shell fragments, and battle-scarred wood that so many collected were of some interest, droves of peoples also carried away discarded leather equipment, rifled muskets, live ordnance, and other materiel not only essential to the war effort but also government property. Two men, Captain W. Willard Smith, an aide-de-camp on the staff of General-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck and acting provost marshal, and Captain Henry B. Blood from the Quartermaster Department, were put in charge of the massive reclamation operation. The 2nd Pennsylvania Cavalry soon joined to help as did the 36th Regiment Pennsylvania Militia.³⁵

Battlefield collectors and local residents soon frustrated military personnel. Less than a month after the battle, Smith complained to Montgomery C. Meigs, the army’s quartermaster general, that “three to five thousand persons” came to the battlefield daily. “Most of them,” he opined, “carrying away trophies.”³⁶ In many cases the “trophies” were government property and Smith, along with Blood, labored to find and seize the items. Smith quickly posted broadsides throughout town warning citizens against carrying away government property.³⁷ Chief Quartermaster Rufus Ingalls complained to Meigs on July 8: “I saw citizens carrying off arms, and doubt not it will require coercive steps to recover them…. The people there are doubtless loyal, but they seemed to be very simple and parsimonious, and evinced but little enthusiasm.”³⁸ By July 10, Smith and his men had arrested 75 citizens for the theft of property. In punishment, he tasked them with burying the dead horses on the battlefield.³⁹

Smith and Blood ordered parties to go out into the countryside to locate and recover stockpiles of stolen militaria. Writing to Meigs, Smith reported that his men traveled five to 15 miles from Gettysburg. They picked up “some very good Horses, Sabres, & Guns.” With that said, he lamented, “I occasionally find parties who positively refuse to give up the property, in two instances persons have drawn revolvers to frighten us away, in both instances we got a wagon load of property.” The troops had grown frustrated. Smith continued, “I am not very careful how I treat such parties, yesterday, I took from George & Wm. Keefauver, Guns, Blankets, Axes, Picks, &c. I left with him two axes, one Pick, Shovel, Forks, & one Gun, claimed by one of the women as their property.”⁴⁰ Some locals took umbrage at such treatment. Nathaniel Lightner, whose farm was two miles from Gettysburg, recalled an unhappy encounter with Captain Blood, whom he deemed to be “the meanest man in the world,” as he sounded out citizens about government property. Blood ultimately had Lightner arrested.⁴¹ In other cases, the encounters went better but remained tense. The young Gettysburg resident Tillie Pierce kept a musket as a souvenir of the battle. Before long, she wrote, soldiers called. “They replied that the Provost Marshal had sent them after it, and that they would have to take it.” Pierce indignantly replied that if they were “mean enough to take the gun they can have it,” but she remained firm that it was hers.⁴² They eventually relented, and thus she kept her prized keepsake, though she did apologize to the men for her brusque behavior.

Most visitors came to Gettysburg seeking souvenirs. Some treated the artifacts as sacred relics. The term souvenir was relatively new at the time, first appearing in the mid-18th century. But its usage greatly increased throughout the mid-to-late 19th century.⁴³ Souvenirs were used as a form of remembrance and kept as a reminder of place.⁴⁴ With these changing attitudes toward what might be collected came the need for new words to give meaning to the collections. While countless individuals sought items as souvenirs, some accorded their artifacts a higher value. The word relic immediately conjures to mind pieces of the true cross or the bones of saints. Indeed, the Old French relique (derived from the Latin reliquiae) “refers specifically to the remains of a martyr or other deceased person.”⁴⁵ Thus, the most familiar reference point for most audiences was, and remains, the holy relic.

Woman’s Words (January 1878)

During her time tending to the wounded in Gettysburg, United States Sanitary Commission volunteer Almira Lincoln Phelps collected a few battlefield keepsakes she came to cherish, including a damaged New Testament she referred to as a “holy relic.”

Almira Lincoln Phelps, an acclaimed American scientist, educator, and author, worked for the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War and in 1864 published a description of her experiences titled Our Country, In Its Relations to the Past, Present and Future. The book contains a moving chapter titled “A Visit to the Battle-field of Gettysburg: The Four Relics.” Her account once again calls into question the line between genteel visitor and tasteless gawker. Phelps traveled to Gettysburg after the battle and soon visited the Theological Seminary, which housed a massive field hospital. Before setting about the important work of tending to the wounded, the women toured the battlefield and collected relics. Nearby the Seminary they encountered a party of soldiers gathering items—likely part of the massive military-led clean-up previously discussed. The women obtained, or viewed, a series of objects, which Phelps referred to as relics. She described a bowie knife, taken from one of the Louisiana Tigers, as being “such as any gentleman would like to own and keep as a parlor ornament, to be handed down to posterity as a memento of a civil war destined to be memorable through all coming time.”⁴⁶ The soldiers also took a button inscribed with South Carolina’s motto, “Animis opibusque parati” (“prepared in mind and resources”). Insightfully, Phelps wrote: “Such things may seem to many the merest trifles,—but they are trifles which tell.”⁴⁷ It was this concept of telling that attracted her to a slip of coarse yellow paper, folded and refolded countless times, shown to her by a fellow collector. “It told its own story much more forcibly than any poor words of mine can do. It was evidently a communication from a young wife to a young husband, the father of their two small children.”⁴⁸ The owner of the paper only showed the women his great prize but would not surrender it. Phelps transcribed the letter for her own keepsake. She and her companions then traveled to Cemetery Hill and the surrounding area. They perused the grounds in search of another memento. They settled on a severed New Testament—their fourth and final relic. Once home Phelps stored the broken book in a private space. “I drew from a drawer in which I had carefully laid it, the holy relic, and read the whole of it attentively from beginning to end.”⁴⁹ The object transported her back to the fight in powerful terms.

Phelps’ account is particularly revealing because of how evocative the relics she collected became. The items clearly spoke to her. And had power. While souvenirs certainly conjured responses, relics held deeper meanings and produced fuller emotions. They were, moreover, often linked to a specific individual. Although Phelps did not personally know the owners of the items she came to cherish, she did possess broad biographical details, especially with the letter fragment, that created a more meaningful narrative and connection. Phelps’ activities as a nurse and her quest to obtain relics powerfully illustrates the reigning tensions between the sacred and the profane, the pilgrim and the gawker.

Gettysburg would remain as a place for tourism and commemoration. As historian Jennifer Murray observes, “within weeks after the battle, local residents began to preserve key areas of the battlefield to further commemorate the Army of the Potomac’s grand victory.”⁵⁰ Soon, the tourists became something more. Many styled themselves pilgrims who traveled to hallowed ground. The Soldiers’ National Cemetery featured prominently for such travelers. As did the battlefield. But so, too, were taverns, hotels, relic museums, and souvenir stands prime destinations. John Rosensteel, whose first artifact was a Confederate rifle picked up on the battlefield, created a private museum in 1888 near Little Round Top.⁵¹ The throngs of tourists prompted new businesses and tourism increasingly became a commercial enterprise.⁵² From railroad excursions to personalized battlefield tours, audiences clamored to see the fields over which the epic battle was fought. Businesses would now always be part of Gettysburg.⁵³ But it all started in early July 1863 with the thousands of tourists, sightseers, and spectators who descended on the small Pennsylvania town to collect relics and gather artifacts. They pushed the boundaries of sentimentalist culture and understood the war differently. Their macabre fascination with the dead and eagerness to take items from the field forces us to consider how the Civil War produced a clear-eyed realism and a crass commercialism that rejected any competing tropes of romanticism.

James J. Broomall holds the William Binford Vest Chair in the Department of History at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Kevin M. Levin

Kevin M. Levin is a historian and educator based in Boston. He has written or edited four books on the Civil War era, including most recently, A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Shaw. He is online at his newsletter, Civil War Memory.

What are you currently reading?

Nicholas Lemann, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries (Liveright, 2026).

What drew you to this book?

I’ve recently been interested in stories of self-exploration that are centered around family history. Lemann investigates a past he barely knew growing up in a secular Jewish family in New Orleans. The book traces his roots back four generations to his great-great-grandfather Jacob Lemann, a German immigrant who built a series of successful businesses that were passed down through the family. Lemann follows the family’s journey from arriving in America in the 1830s as peddlers, to becoming plantation owners and merchants in Donaldsonville after the Civil War, to their ascent into the privileged but never fully accepting world of New Orleans aristocracy. He ultimately rejects his family’s assimilated, religiously muted world and embraces the rites of Judaism. It’s a wonderful reminder of the challenges often associated with learning to live with the past. Lemann is also the author of Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

What’s the last great Civil War book you read?

It’s incredibly difficult to single out one book, but Michael Vorenberg’s Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End The American Civil War (Knopf, 2025) is compelling and beautifully written. I love books that force you to rethink simple questions that most people wouldn’t consider asking. Rather than explore the question of when the Civil War ended, Vorenberg asks readers to question what it actually means to “end” a war. Lincoln’s Peace is an eye-opening account of the many ways the forces that ignited the war retained destructive energy long after Appomattox, resisting and ultimately thwarting the dream of a just and lasting peace. I recently selected this title for a book group that I host through my newsletter and everyone thoroughly enjoyed it. Lincoln’s Peace is a must read.

What was your favorite book as a child?

While many of my Civil War enthusiast friends grew up with The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (Doubleday, 1960), I cherished my copy of The American Heritage Book of the Revolution (American Heritage Publishing, 1958) with text by Bruce Lancaster. I don’t remember how much of the narrative I read, but I certainly could sit for hours transfixed by the illustrations, especially Howard Pyle’s painting of the British charge up Bunker Hill.

What kind of reader were you?

Not a very good one. I read for school and that was about it. I grew up on the South Jersey Shore and was much more interested in skateboarding, surfing, and baseball. One early exception in middle school, in addition to the book mentioned earlier, was the discovery of the Time-Life series on WWII that I found in the school library. I devoured those books during lunch.

You’re forming a new book group. Who would you invite and why?

I am already a member of a wonderful book writing group in Boston called Book Squad, which includes some incredibly talented historians and writers. We meet monthly to discuss books we’ve read, but the real focus is on critiquing one another’s writing. I’ve benefited immensely from their tough love and suggestions. I wouldn’t change this lineup for anything.

Where do you like reading?

I used to really enjoy reading in cafes before patrons turned them into their own home office space. My favorite place to read is in my home office/library, where I am surrounded by roughly 1,500 Civil War books from floor to ceiling. The only thing that can disturb me is Otis, our 115-pound Bernese mountain dog.

Do you have a favorite bookstore? What about it appeals to you?

Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts. It has a great selection of history books and the staff is incredibly helpful. It’s a pillar of the community. I love exploring independent and especially used bookstores in towns and cities for the first time. You never know what you might find.

What’s your favorite Civil War book no one else has heard of?

Paul Buck’s The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 (Little, Brown and Company, 1937) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Though Buck’s central claim—that reconciliation and national unity triumphed by the early 20th century—has been challenged by historians in recent years, the book anticipates many of the issues that historians of Civil War memory continue to explore.

What’s next on your reading list?

I recently purchased a wonderful collection of letters from a Mississippi veteran who spent time in a Union prison camp. The letters were sent to a young girl in North Carolina between 1897 and 1911. I am looking forward to reading A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War (W.W. Norton & Company, 2026) by W. Fitzhugh Brundage to better understand his POW experience.

For anyone looking for it, my goal here is to provide an entry point to the Lincoln world. There are so many excellent studies of Lincoln that I’m not sure I could pick a top 10, let alone a “best 5.” My list (I sincerely tried not to cheat) is limited to books that came out in this century and so are easier to find. To those of you ready for deeper dives, here are two among the myriad good options: The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, a nine-volume compilation of his personal papers (Rutgers University Press, 1953) accessible online via The Abraham Lincoln Association, and Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (University of Illinois Press, 1998), a collection of primary source material compiled by Lincoln’s last law partner, William H. Herndon. So, with the table-setting done, here are my chosen entrees:

And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

By Jon Meacham
(Random House, 2022)

Pulitzer-winner Jon Meacham has an established reputation for crafting readable but complex biographies of American historical figures, and he hits that same balance in this look at Lincoln.

For the past 160 years, biographers have been telling many of the same Lincoln stories. Meacham hits those familiar notes but enlivens them so they feel fresh. What’s more, he elegantly weaves in an examination of Lincoln’s moral leadership, resulting in a book that holds Lincoln up as a flawed but model leader who still has lessons to teach us today.

If you’re searching for an entry point to the broader Lincoln world or “just” a highly readable and meaningful retelling of Lincoln’s story, Meacham has you covered.

The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln

By Kenneth J. Winkle
(Taylor Trade Publishing, 2001)

Once aspiring Lincoln buffs have tackled his story, the best next step is to expand their focus to include Lincoln’s world. Kenneth J. Winkle’s The Young Eagle does just that—recounting Lincoln’s rise from his birth in 1809 to his election as president in 1860 by contextualizing him within the localities, economic forces, and political movements of his time.

Lincoln is such a revered figure that his biographies can sometimes be myopic. Winkle takes the opposite approach, providing an invaluable examination of how Lincoln fits into broader narratives, such as Illinois’ settlement patterns, the urbanization of Springfield, and the complicated rise of antislavery politics.

If you want to dig deeper, seek out Winkle’s follow-up, Lincoln’s Citadel: The Civil War in Washington, DC (W.W. Norton, 2013), which similarly places the Lincoln administration within the broader context of the nation’s capital in the Civil War era.

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

By Eric Foner
(W.W. Norton, 2010)

Although seemingly all aspects of the Lincoln story—ranging from mental illness to food to legal history—have been analyzed by scholars, the most salient and contentious continues to be his relationship with slavery and African Americans. What’s more, debates on this topic often become reductive, producing questions like “Was Lincoln racist?” or “Was the Emancipation Proclamation meaningless?”

In this Pulitzer-winning volume, Eric Foner convincingly parses the contours of Lincoln’s views on American slavery and how they shaped and were shaped by his attitudes toward African Americans. Eschewing the simple labels of “Great Emancipator” or “cynical politician,” Foner rescues Lincoln’s humanity and places him within the broader attitudes 19th-century white Americans held toward African Americans.

Like many people of his era, Lincoln could at times succumb to those prejudices or transcend them—or even espouse both at the same time, as he did with his longtime pro-colonization position. Foner takes all this into account, making The Fiery Trial an excellent starting point for the extensive literature on Lincoln and race.

Mrs. Lincoln: A Life

By Catherine Clinton
(Harper, 2009)

Anyone seeking immersion in Lincoln scholarship must also engage with the contentious literature on Mary Todd. Almost as soon as biographies of Lincoln started to appear, authors began painting conflicting, often negative, portrayals of his wife, the first lady.

William Herndon, Lincoln’s last law partner and first major biographer, was especially virulent, arguing that Lincoln never got over the death of an early love interest, Ann Rutledge, and thus did not truly love Todd. This division persists today, with opposing camps interpreting Todd as an insane shrew or proto- feminist. This Mrs. Lincoln skillfully navigates these arguments with lively prose and a discerning use of sources. Catherine Clinton reveals Todd as a highly intelligent woman plagued by the traumas she endured over the course of her life. Especially intriguing are the later chapters, in which Todd seeks refuge in Chicago and later self-isolation in Europe as a means of escaping the public eye and the world that had caused her so much grief.

What emerges is a fair account of Todd’s life, showing she was often brilliant but emotionally troubled in a world that was unforgiving of both in women.

The Concise Lincoln Library

(Southern Illinois University Press, 2011–2022)

Beg pardon, here is my “5 Books” cheat. The Concise Lincoln Library encompasses no less than 29 books, but their brevity and readability make them perfect for delving into various corners of Lincoln literature. Each doubles as a primer for its subject but also carries the expertise of its authors and the vast historiographies behind them.

Titles range from those that dominate the field—Edna Green Medford’s Lincoln and Emancipation and Lucas E. Morel’s Lincoln and the American Founding—to areas less explored but still revealing—Glenna Schroeder-Lein’s Lincoln and Medicine and Richard Carwardine’s Lincoln’s Sense of Humor.

What’s more, The Concise Lincoln Library’s full bibliographies and robust endnotes provide useful roadmaps for further reading. In a field that often seems exhaustingly large, these little books are perfect signposts.

Christian McWhirter is a public historian and author of Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War. He serves as the Historical Initiatives Consultant for the Lincoln Presidential Foundation and editor of the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. He previously served as Lincoln Historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Harper’s Weekly

Jefferson Davis steals from Uncle Sam in this illustration.

On June 1, 1861, Harper’s Weekly published this cartoon mocking Jefferson Davis and, by extension, the nascent Confederacy he led as president. Davis is depicted as a thief in the night, his attempt to steal property from a house interrupted by its owner Uncle Sam.

Among Davis’ bounty is Fort Sumter, which had fallen to Confederate bombardment six weeks earlier, and a lighthouse, a reference to the seizure and darkening of federal lighthouses in southern states as a means to thwart operations by the Union navy. “Hallo there, you Rascal!” says an angry Uncle Sam in an accompanying caption. “[W]here are you going with my Property, eh?” Davis, almost out the door, replies, “Oh, dear Uncle! ALL I WANT IS TO BE LET ALONE!”—a play on a phrase he famously used in an April 29 address to the Confederate Congress, in which he justified secession and accused the newly elected Lincoln administration of acting aggressively and in bad faith.

Harper’s Weekly was one of many northern publications to highlight what was considered the hypocrisy of southern actions and words: forcefully seizing federal forts and property while publicly calling for a peaceful separation from the United States.

Heritage Auctions (ha.com)

J.E.B. Stuart’s gold pocket watch.

Timepiece of a Confederate Cavalier

The Artifact

J.E.B. Stuart’s gold pocket watch

Condition

The watch is not in running condition and is missing the key. The case is in very good condition with minor dents and a small chip on the dial at the four o’clock position.

Details

By the start of the Civil War, James Ewell Brown (“Jeb”) Stuart had compiled a diverse military résumé. An 1854 graduate of West Point, he had experienced frontier conflict with Native Americans and, as a U.S. Army peacekeeper, the violence of “Bleeding Kansas” before participating in the capture of John Brown after the abolitionist’s failed Harpers Ferry raid. When his home state of Virginia seceded in 1861, Stuart resigned his commission and joined the Confederate army, where his reputation and responsibilities steadily grew as a cavalry commander. Promoted to brigadier general that September (he had fought as colonel of a Virginia cavalry regiment at First Bull Run), Stuart was put in command of the Army of Northern Virginia’s newly unified cavalry brigade, which he led throughout the Peninsula Campaign. In June 1862, Stuart pulled off a daring reconnaissance that saw him and some 1,200 troopers ride entirely around the massive Army of the Potomac, a feat that embarrassed his enemies and earned him the praise of comrades—including a promotion to major general the next month.

By May 1864, when he was mortally wounded at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, Stuart, 31, had played key roles at a number of the war’s largest and most consequential engagements, including Second Manassas, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, and Gettysburg. Along the way he actively cultivated the image of an ideal (bold, dashing, chivalrous) southern cavalryman, his outgoing personality and personal flamboyance—including a trademark resplendent uniform accented with red-satin-lined gray cape and ostrich-feather-plumed hat—becoming legendary. Among the personal items he regularly carried was this triple-cased gold pocket watch, the case crafted by the prestigious Paris clockmakers E. Maurice and Company and the movement by London watchmaker John Cragg. The watch’s case is inscribed with Stuart’s initials (“JEBS”), which are surrounded by a belt-and-buckle symbol meant to convey his family’s Scottish heritage, and its gold chain bears an eagle-head terminal and fob.

Quotable

Stuart’s distinctive flair made a deep and lasting impression on comrades. “[N]ever have I seen such a magnificent looking soldier,” wrote a Georgia soldier upon seeing Stuart in 1862. “Faultlessly dressed, grandly mounted, with long, silky auburn locks curling beneath his plumed hat.” Years after the war, Confederate veteran John Esten Cooke, who had served on Stuart’s staff, wrote of his former commander: “Everything about Stuart was broadly and vividly defined. There were no half tints or negative colors either in his personal appearance or his character, and he stood out from the great war canvas like a prominent figure in some painting, brilliant and imposing, catching and holding the eye.”

Price

$131,450 (realized at Dallas, Texas, in December 2006). “Stuart’s dashing cavalier style of dress uniform was completed with this beautiful gold watch,” a Heritage Auctions representative noted then.

Library of Congress

In May 1863, when the Battle of Chancellorsville was being fought, photographer Andrew J. Russell made this image of Union soldiers entrenched along the Rappahannock River awaiting orders to advance from Fredericksburg, Virginia.

“I know of no horror so terrible as the period just preceding the shock of battle.”

Pennsylvania soldier Frank Holsinger, in a postwar account of his experiences in combat

Life of Osborn H. Oldroyd (1927).

Osborn H. Oldroyd

“The boys … were busy divesting themselves of watches, rings, pictures and other keepsakes, which were being placed in the custody of the cooks, who were not expected to go into action. I never saw such a scene before, nor do I ever want to see it again.”

Osborn H. Oldroyd (above), 20th Ohio Infantry, on his comrades’ behavior before receiving an expected order to attack the Confederate works at Vicksburg, in his diary, May 22, 1863

Library of Congress

Civil War soldiers holding rifles with bayonets lined up in formation.

“It was the first time that I had ever been called upon to face death. I felt that in a few moments some of us standing here, vainly trying to jest and appear careless, would be in eternity. Would it be this friend, or that one, or myself?”

Edmund DeWitt Patterson, 9th Alabama Infantry, in his diary during the Peninsula Campaign, May 6, 1862

National Portrait Gallery

Colonel Edward E. Cross

“Men, you are about to engage in battle. You have never disgraced your State; I hope you won’t this time. If any man runs I want the file closers to shoot him; if they don’t, I shall myself. That’s all I have to say.”

Colonel Edward E. Cross (above), 5th New Hampshire Infantry, to his men before they entered the Battle of Antietam, as recorded by Thomas Livermore, a lieutenant in the regiment, in his memoir of the war

“[O]ne second you want to dash forward; the next, you want a rock or a tree to dash behind…. At times your heart is jumping a thousand times a minute; at other times it dont seem to move at all; your knees begin to tremble; your hair to stand up so stiff that you are unable to tell if you have hair or hazel brush on your head….”

Ohio soldier William Henry Younts, on his feelings before the Battle of Winchester, in his wartime reminiscences

The fight against a data center complex controversially approved for land alongside Manassas National Battlefield Park (shown here) might be headed to Virginia’s supreme court.

For a brief time, it looked like the five-year fight to prevent a massive data center complex controversially approved for land alongside Manassas National Battlefield Park might be successful. Instead, preservationists are gearing up to possibly argue before the highest court in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The American Battlefield Trust, the Oak Valley Homeowners Association, and local landowners had challenged the fast-tracked rezonings because the board and the center’s developers violated state code and local ordinances when they failed to properly advertise the hearing and make the full and final proposal text available to the public.

In late March, the Virginia Court of Appeals unanimously upheld our position, invalidating the rezonings. This was followed by a unanimous vote by the Prince William County Board of Supervisors to end its proactive defense of the illegal 2023 votes and cooperate with court orders. As the 30-day appeal window drew to a close, one of the two developers chose likewise. But at the 11th hour, the other company, QTS, filed its petition to have the case heard by the commonwealth’s supreme court.

The massive Prince William Digital Gateway was hastily pushed through by a lame-duck board, against the recommendation of county planning staff, on a 4-to-3 vote (with one abstention); since then, voters have elected supervisors who have expressed concerns about the impropriety of the process. A recent poll conducted by The Washington Post and George Mason University found the percentage of Virginians who would support a data center in their community has fallen from 69 to 33 percent across the same time period.

Meanwhile, on March 27, a hearing was held in the Trust’s case against the 2,600-acre Wilderness Crossing residential and data center mega-development. In its latest legal maneuver, the developer is seeking to leapfrog a trial at the circuit court level and go straight to appeal, despite a ruling against a similar request last fall. It is part of a pattern damaging to the developer’s credibility with the bench and it strongly suggests the developer knows it holds a losing hand. The developer has requested a settlement meeting with the Trust this spring. Should the case proceed to trial, it would be expected at the end of the calendar year.

We remain confident in our legal arguments in both cases and increasingly optimistic that we may win both. But because the suits focused on the process by which the projects were approved and not on the fundamental suitability of building such facilities on battlefields, any courtroom triumph may be temporary, should the developers retool and resubmit their plans to be considered anew.

Stay abreast of these evolving situations by visiting battlefields.org/speak-out. Please continue to support the Trust’s advocacy work, which enables us to lead these fights without diverting money from our critical land preservation mission.

David Duncan is president of the nonprofit, nonpartisan American Battlefield Trust, which is dedicated to preserving America’s hallowed battlegrounds—Revolutionary War, War of 1812, and Civil War—and educating the public about their significance.