THE PATRIOTS

I enjoyed (and appreciated) your Summer 2026 issue’s timely cover story about the enduring connections between northerners and southerners in the 1860s and the American Revolution [“The Patriots,” Vol. 16, No. 2]. I found each of the essays of interest, but two especially: Allen C. Guelzo’s on “The Last Men”—I had no idea that such an effort to track down surviving Revolutionary War vets had occurred during the Civil War—and Anne Sarah Rubin’s on “Southern Yankee Doodles.” It didn’t surprise me that Confederates looked to the Founding Fathers as a motivating force, but rather that they did so, as Rubin outlines, in so many different ways.

Patrick Anderson
Via email

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Thanks to all of the historians who contributed essays to your Summer issue’s coverage of “The Patriots.” I’m primarily a Civil War enthusiast, and this was a good way of getting me to think more about the lasting significance of the country’s founding. It strikes me that Civil War-era Americans invoked the Revolution as much as we do today—and probably even more so. It is an informative article. Thanks again for it.

I also enjoyed the issue’s striking cover image, which made me chuckle. It might be my favorite in recent memory.

S.A. Schmidt
Via email

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The cover of the most recent issue of The Civil War Monitor is both disturbing and disappointing. Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant marching alongside Robert E. Lee … under the banner “The Patriots”? Lee was not a patriot to the United States of America—during the Civil War, he was not even an American citizen! Placing Lee on the same footing (literally on the cover) as Lincoln and Grant is insulting—and would have generated a violent pushback from Americans if published in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Imagine if a cover of a journal today chose JFK, John McCain, and Ho Chi Min similarly touted as American “Patriots”—I wonder how our Vietnam veterans and their families would react?

Gary Christie
Via email

Ed. Thanks for your feedback, Gary. By putting Lee alongside Grant and Lincoln under the heading “The Patriots,” our goal wasn’t to suggest they were equally invested in preserving the United States. Rather, it was a way of noting visually that each of them believed he was fulfilling his patriotic duty based on his interpretation of the Founding Fathers’ actions. As we noted on the cover, this issue looks at “how the American Revolution influenced and inspired both the Union and the Confederacy.” We hope you found our coverage illuminating.

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Your Summer issue brings a fresh view of the Civil War I haven’t seen before, especially Allen Guelzo’s essay about how the last few people who fought in the Revolutionary War in their youth viewed the Civil War as old men.

I know Mr. Lincoln never tired of reminding southerners that George Washington was a staunch Unionist and that Thomas Jefferson was the original abolitionist, when he persuaded Virginia’s Legislature to cede the Northwest Territory (then counties of Virginia) to the national government of the United States upon the condition that “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory….” It’s hard for me to imagine the southern founders of 1776–1787 getting on board the secession bandwagon in 1860–1861.

Another thing I wonder about is how the oldest survivors among the youngest men who fought in the Civil War—those born from 1845 to 1848—viewed the 20th-century world. A few thousand Civil War veterans lived until the 1940s. When young, they fought with muzzle-loaders; as old men, they were familiar with the rockets and atomic bombs of WWII.  How did they manage to process all of that progress in their minds?

Alan Sewell
Via email

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As a Civil War Monitor subscriber since day one, I would like to relay praises and kudos for your Summer 2026 issue. It’s arguably the best you ever produced. Above all, a big “huzzah” for the five essays on “The Patriots” that superbly juxtapose 1776 with 1861. Also the various departments and the article on Gettysburg relic hunters [“Relic-Hunters, Sightseers, and Ghouls,” Vol. 16, No. 2].

Ron Block
Via email

KUDOS

I really enjoy the Monitor and find it so informative as to the people and events of the U.S. Civil War. I thank you and the entire staff for all of your hard work and dedication to keep our history alive.

Elizabeth Courtney
Chief of Staff, CA/NV Daughters of Union Veterans
San Dimas, California

COLD WAR REBS

Matthew Christopher Hulbert’s article “Confederates in the Cold War West” [“Observatory,” Vol. 16, No. 1] makes no mention of two significant movies of the Cold War period. Major Dundee (1965) depicts Confederate prisoners of war recruited by the Union army to fight Indians, reminiscent of the actual “galvanized Yankees” who in reality were recruited for that purpose during the war. The movie even has the Union/Confederate force skirmishing with the French in Mexico and a rebel seizing a U.S. flag that the French briefly grabbed, a topical reference to the tensions the U.S. was having with Charles de Gaulle’s nationalist foreign policy at the time. The Undefeated (1969) has Confederates crossing into Mexico to fight for Maximilian (reminiscent of the actual experience of Jo Shelby and his remaining troops in the summer of 1865) and meeting Union veterans, who aid the rebel exiles in fighting bandits, and who even ransom the rebels with horses when the Mexicans turn on the southerners. The movie ends with Confederate and Union veterans riding back into the U.S. together, a nod toward modern-day Americans reconciling differences to resist common enemies and learning to live together.

Andrew O. Lutes
Erlanger, Kentucky

A REQUEST

While I read every issue of the Monitor cover to cover, I’m especially fond of the book section. I wonder if I may make a request for future coverage: Could you ask Civil War historians what their absolute all-time favorite book about the conflict is? That might make for very interesting reading—as well as offering some good ideas for new books to look into.

Thanks in advance for your consideration. And keep up the great work with the Monitor!

Teresa Kennedy
Via email

Ed. Teresa, thanks for the suggestion and the kind words. In fact, we recently started asking that question—at least a twist on it—in our book section’s author/historian Q&A (which you can find in this issue on page 62): “What’s your favorite Civil War book no one else has heard of?”

Here’s hoping our Books & Authors section continues to alert you to new titles to investigate. Happy reading!

MEASURING THE COST OF WAR

I enjoy the Monitor greatly and the stories you publish about individual participants in the conflict, like Harlan Paige [“The Survivor,” Vol. 16, No. 1], are fascinating.

However, I can’t help thinking about the tremendous disruptions the war inflicted on the country. I wonder if there’s updated data that might form the basis for an article on the actual loss of life caused by the conflict. For example, how many men and boys age 15–40 were in the northern and southern regions of the country at the start of the war, and how many of them were killed or died of disease during it?

While I am fascinated by battles and leaders (indeed, I have walked the same path of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg), the nagging emotion as I read these fascinating stories and learn about the lives of those who served is for death and disease and loss.

Leslie R. Butler
Wilmington, Delaware

Robert Gould Shaw

On March 17, 1863, Robert Gould Shaw wrote his mother with an update on his new assignment as colonel of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, a regiment of black enlisted men and white commissioned officers being raised in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s recently enacted Emancipation Proclamation, which had authorized African-American military service. “The regiment continues to flourish,” he wrote from their training camp outside Boston. “Men come in every day.” Shaw, who had served as an officer in the Union army since May 1861, was clearly proud of the impression his recruits were making on his fellow veteran soldiers: “Yesterday we had several officers out to take a look at the men; they all went away very much pleased. Some were very skeptical about it before, but say, now, that they shall have no more doubts of negroes making good soldiers.”

Shaw’s mother no doubt greeted her son’s report with great pleasure. A staunch abolitionist, she had been thrilled the previous month to learn of his decision to lead the pioneering unit. “God rewards a hundred-fold every good aspiration of his children…. Now I feel ready to die, for I see you willing to give y[ou]r support to the cause of truth that is lying crushed and bleeding,” she wrote him.

In the years since his death in July 1863 at the Battle of Battery Wagner on Morris Island, South Carolina, Shaw has been celebrated as a martyr to the cause of emancipation, a trailblazing young white man whose willingness to lead the first regiment of black soldiers raised in the North was a natural extension of his abolitionist upbringing. Yet, as Kevin M. Levin writes in this issue’s cover story, “Road to Glory” (page 26), Shaw’s path to commanding the 54th was uneven, marked by sharp disagreements with his parents and siblings about the Lincoln administration’s emancipation policies. In short, Shaw’s early war letters home reveal a young man who was not the committed abolitionist his family expected him to be.

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

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I’m pleased to announce that John Heckman’s Civil War Breakthroughs podcast is back this fall with a second season focused on wartime medical practices and innovations. We’ll keep you updated on its release date via The Gazette, our bimonthly e-newsletter. Not yet a Gazette subscriber? Sign up for free here: civilwarmonitor.com/newsletter.

Library of Congress

1865 National Sanitary Cake

An Impressive Dessert

Founded in June 1861, the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) was a civilian-led relief organization whose thousands of volunteer members raised money (an estimated $25 million, in 1865 dollars, over the course of the conflict) and collected supplies to support the treatment of sick and wounded Union soldiers. While the USSC itself held a number of high-profile “Sanitary Fairs” in multiple northern cities to generate funds, the organization also accepted contributions far and wide. One such donation to the cause came from California, where in early 1865 the women of the Humboldt County Soldiers’ Aid Society created the “National Sanitary Cake” shown here. The elaborate confection was auctioned off multiple times at local fairs in the towns of Arcata and Eureka—a popular process where the buyer would donate the cake back to the auctioneer so it might be sold again and again—bringing in approximately $1,000 when all was done. Where the cake ultimately ended up—and how it tasted—is unknown.

The Scottish-American Civil War Monument in Edinburgh, Scotland

For 11 years I was fortunate to teach the American Civil War at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. American friends and colleagues often asked if I found it difficult making the war relevant to students outside the United States. To their surprise, I replied that Edinburgh had its own Civil War landscape if you knew where to look. Before the war, American abolitionists regularly visited the city—long a hotbed of British abolitionism—including William Lloyd Garrison, William and Ellen Craft, William Wells Brown, and Josiah Henson (the inspiration for Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel).

Frederick Douglass spent months in the city in 1846–1847 and 1859–1860, much of it living at 33 Gilmore Place, recently graced with a historical marker and a nearby mural portrait of Douglass. Jefferson Davis visited the city in 1869 after his release from prison, and Ulysses S. Grant visited Edinburgh Castle on his post-presidential Grand Tour in 1877.

The largest and most prominent Civil War site in Edinburgh stands near the city center in Old Calton Hill Burial Ground on Waterloo Place, not far from Waverley Rail Station. Fifteen feet tall, the Scottish- American Civil War Monument sits on a promontory in a Gothic cemetery, next to the grave of philosopher and historian David Hume and facing the Martyrs Monument, a giant black obelisk dedicated to five political reformists from the late 18th and early 19th centuries who were imprisoned and deported for espousing parliamentary reform. Across the street from the graveyard, in what is now Howie’s Restaurant, Douglass addressed Edinburgh abolitionists in 1846. Tourists often pass by the entrance to the Old Calton Hill Burial Ground en route to the summit of Calton Hill, which hosts the Nelson Monument, dedicated to the slain victor at Trafalgar, and the unfinished Scottish National Monument, a memorial to the Scots who died in the Napoleonic Wars.

Erected in 1893, the Scottish-American Civil War Monument is centered on a life-size bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln, standing atop a multistage Scottish red granite pedestal, stoically peering into the distance with the Emancipation Proclamation in his hand. On the four sides of the statue, just below Lincoln’s feet, are the words “Suffrage,” “Union,” “Education,” and “Emancipation.” On the pedestal, a barefoot freedman reaches up, admiring the president who does not meet his gaze. He sits perched awkwardly on the granite, a pair of battle flags beneath him. Wearing an open-necked shirt and rolled up sleeves, he holds a book in his hand, signifying the literacy denied him in slavery. A Hardee hat beside him alludes to black service in the Federal military. A Union crest adorns the front of the pedestal, decorated with Scottish thistles and American cotton flowers. Lincoln’s words, slightly misquoted, are engraved on the granite: “To preserve the jewel of liberty in the framework of freedom,” a phrase from an 1864 letter the president wrote to Michael Hahn, the governor of Louisiana, in which he endorsed black suffrage.¹ The design strongly resembles Thomas Ball’s 1876 Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., which similarly depicts Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

The story behind the monument demonstrates the global reach and consequences of America’s most important conflict. It begins in 1833 with the birth of John McEwan in Blackford, a small town about 40 miles northwest of Edinburgh. McEwan’s father was a textile weaver, a trade he passed to his sons, Peter and John. But the introduction of steam and water-driven mills had devalued what had once been profitable work. Facing limited opportunities, Peter left Scotland for Chicago in 1852. His younger brother joined him five years later, boarding the American passenger ship Cultivator in Liverpool to New York, then going by train to Chicago.

In May 1862, John McEwan enlisted in Company H of the 65th Illinois Infantry, sometimes called the Scotch Regiment because of the high proportion of Scottish immigrants in its ranks. The regiment’s early record lacked distinction: Assigned to guard Harpers Ferry, the 65th was among the units captured there in September 1862 by Confederates under Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Paroled to Chicago, the regiment could not return to active campaigning until exchanged in April 1863. The 65th redeemed itself over the second half of the war, fighting in the western theater under Ambrose Burnside. McEwan, like much of the regiment, reenlisted in March 1864 in Knoxville and was granted a brief furlough to return to Chicago, after which the outfit was dispatched to join William T. Sherman’s army for the Atlanta Campaign. In late 1864, they fought against John Bell Hood’s forces in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign. In early 1865, they participated in the siege of Wilmington, North Carolina, before rejoining Sherman for his push northward through the state. The 65th was stationed in Raleigh when Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his army to Sherman at Bennett Place in April 1865.

By all accounts, McEwan did his duty. “John is a good soldier—we had none better—always sober, and always ready for duty. If he knew what fear was, he never showed it,” recalled Melvin Nichols, who served alongside McEwan. “I have seen him in very close quarters several times, but he never shirked or exhibited a white feather.”² By the time he mustered out in July 1865, McEwan had risen in rank to sergeant major, the regiment’s senior enlisted man. But more than three years of hard soldiering had left him eager for home in Scotland.

David Silkenat

A mural to famous abolitionist and familiar antebellum visitor Frederick Douglass is among the various spots in Edinburgh that speak to its American Civil War connections.

Recrossing the Atlantic, McEwan settled in Galashiels, a town in the Scottish Borders, about 30 miles south of Edinburgh, still wearing his “blue army coat with brass buttons.” He found work as a woolen weaver, his father’s profession, and married Margaret (“Maggie”) King, the daughter of Irish immigrants, in November 1866. In 1867, they welcomed the first of six children. Maggie, whom he met in the textile mill, recalled that “little groups would gather about him as he told war stories.” The war had left McEwan with more than stories: Not long after returning to Scotland, his health began to fail, a persistent illness that he attributed to his military service. (Family tradition suggests he had emphysema from wartime exposure.) In 1884, McEwan applied for a federal pension but was denied because he could not “connect his ailment with exposure on the field,” a common experience of ill veterans who engaged with the pension system. After a decade in the Borders, the family moved to Edinburgh, where they lived in cramped accommodations in the Cowgate, a neighborhood known for overcrowding, squalor, and poor sanitation. Eventually, McEwan’s health deteriorated to the point where he could not work, and Maggie and the children had to labor in the mills for five shillings a week to keep them out of the poorhouse.³

McEwan’s illness eventually left him bedridden. According to Maggie, his identity as a Union veteran remained important to him more than two decades after he left the United States. Even in the depth of his illness, “he loved to have the old gun near at hand where he could touch it” and “when the poor soldier, after long months of suffering, died, they found the gun under the coverlet beside him, pressed close to his heart.” With his family unable to afford a proper burial, John McEwan was buried in an unmarked paupers’ grave in 1890. When Maggie McEwan visited the following Sunday “with the bairns,” she “couldna mark the spot” where their father lay.⁴

Fearing destitution, Maggie McEwan visited the United States Consulate, then located on Queen Street in fashionable New Town, hoping that she could obtain help securing a widow’s pension from the consul. In the summer of 1890, Wallace Bruce had only recently arrived in the city, appointed by President Benjamin Harrison. A native of upstate New York, Bruce was a lawyer whose real passion was poetry and who had published several volumes of verse. The poetry of Robert Burns and the novels of Walter Scott were topics he regularly lectured on. Bruce was not at the consulate on the day of Maggie McEwan’s visit and she ended up telling her story to his wife, Annie. Moved by the widow’s story, Annie Bruce asked if she could visit the soldier’s grave, as Decoration (Memorial) Day had just passed, only to be horrified to learn that Maggie McEwan could not pinpoint its location.

National Portrait Gallery (Carnegie); Library of Congress (Hayes)

Andrew Carnegie (left) and Rutherford B. Hayes

When Wallace Bruce returned and heard Maggie McEwan’s story, he determined not only to help her receive a pension, but also to secure a “burial spot in Edinburgh for Scottish-American soldiers” like McEwan. Working with the Lord Provost and Town Council, Bruce secured a nine-foot-square plot in Old Calton Hill Burial Ground. In addition to a final resting place for Civil War veterans, Bruce determined that an appropriate monument should mark the site. He believed that a bronze statue of “Lincoln Freeing the Slave” would be “a fitting monument in Great Britain—this being the final act of Saxon freedom.” He quietly began collecting donations from prominent Scottish Americans and visitors to the consulate. One of the earliest donations came in November 1890 when Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie pledged $200, writing that he had “nothing but praise” for the project.⁵

In early August 1892, Bruce sailed to New York to address the Chautauqua Assembly of the Union veterans’ association Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). There, before an audience of 5,000, including former President Rutherford B. Hayes, he announced his plan to erect a statue in Edinburgh to honor the Scottish Union dead. Bruce embarked on a campaign to raise money for the monument. “It made indeed a long winter of letter-writing and business—a long winter without time for a single poem,” he later noted, “but I am glad that a monument to Lincoln in the most beautiful city in the world and the first monument of the great statesman erected in Europe, is the best poem of my life.” Prominent New York aristocrats followed suit, including William Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William Waldorf Astor. Vice President Levi P. Morton also made a contribution, as did Peter McEwan, who had made a small fortune in Chicago as a hotelier.

Bruce tapped his close friend Henry Roswell Heath to spearhead the fundraising effort. Born in 1845, Heath had lied about his age to join the 20th Massachusetts Infantry in August 1861. Wounded and captured at Ball’s Bluff, he spent the winter in a Richmond prison until he was exchanged in February 1862. Given a medical discharge, Heath attended Claverack Academy in upstate New York, where he met Wallace Bruce, and went on to a career in business in New York City. Heath was active in the GAR, and he used his connections among Civil War veterans to solicit donations to the Edinburgh monument. Through their combined efforts, Bruce and Heath raised $6,300.

Defuniaksprings.net (Bruce), Poughkeepsie Public Library (Bissell)

When United States consul in Edinburgh Wallace Bruce (left) learned Maggie McEwan’s story, he determined not only to help her receive a widow’s pension, but also to secure a “burial spot in Edinburgh for Scottish-American soldiers” like her late husband. Sculptor George E. Bissell (right) wrote that the freedman depicted in his Scottish-American monument was intended to be “a sturdy man; self-reliant, and equal to the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.”

Bruce chose sculptor George E. Bissell to design the monument. The son of a Connecticut quarry master, Bissell had served in the 23rd Connecticut Infantry before joining the Union navy, working as a paymaster in the South Atlantic Squadron. After the war, he worked in his father’s marble business in Poughkeepsie, New York, and began sculpting in clay and bronze. By the 1880s, he had developed a reputation for his Civil War memorials, including monuments in Colchester, Waterbury, Winsted, and Salisbury, Connecticut. Although he maintained a presence in Poughkeepsie, Bissell spent most of his time in Paris, where he lived and worked with other artists.

While Bruce decided on the monument’s theme, Bissell determined its composition and design. Bissell was probably familiar with Ball’s Emancipation Memorial—Ball and Bissell moved in the same social circles—and Bissell’s design for the Edinburgh monument shares many elements from Ball’s Emancipation. In 1915, Freeman H.M. Murray, a Washington, D.C, civil rights activist, journalist, and lecturer, and ally of Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and Ida B. Wells, compared the two statues. He noted that the Edinburgh statue was “somewhat similar to Ball’s,” but argued that Bissell’s work was a “distinct improvement over Ball’s; an improvement both in what it shows and what it omits.” He attributed the interpretative difference between the two monuments to the decades that separated their composition and changing ideas about the nature of emancipation. “In 1893 it could be realized that Emancipation was not wholly the personal work of Mr. Lincoln,” Murray argued. “While Emancipation was in scope an almost unparalleled benevolence,” it was “not so much an immediate and unmitigated blessing as a gradually unfolding opportunity.”

Like Ball’s version, Murray noted, Bissell’s Lincoln “holds the Emancipation Proclamation in his hand and is looking forward with the certitude born in the spirit which knows that the humane and noble cause for which he and the people are ready to make ‘the last great sacrifice of devotion’ would assuredly triumph.” It was in the depiction of the freedman that Murray saw the most significant difference between the two compositions. Murray argued that “Bissell’s Freedman is neither dazed nor exultant. He is, nevertheless, appreciative and thankful.” In his correspondence with the sculptor, Murray concluded that the freedman was “of a somewhat later time” than the Lincoln in the composition. While Lincoln is depicted as he was in 1863, the freedman had lived through the vicissitudes of Reconstruction and understood emancipation’s unfinished promise. Bissell wrote to Murray that the freedman was intended to be “a sturdy man; self-reliant, and equal to the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.” He is “full of gratitude” for Lincoln, who “with an impulsive gesture he calls the attention of the world to the man who was the author of the freedom of his race, and is an exemplar for all the rulers and law-makers that may follow.” Murray, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio, was interested in the Edinburgh statue for more than intellectual reasons. His father had been a Scottish immigrant disowned by his family for marrying a black woman, had enlisted in the Union army, and was killed just before Second Bull Run.⁶

The Forth Bridge (1890)

Sir William Arrol

As a model for the freedman, Bissell hired the services of a man known to art historians as “Salem, Prince de Tombouctou.” Born in Algeria, Salem had joined the French Armée d’Afrique as a young man and subsequently relocated to Paris, where he served as a model for painters and sculptors for more than two decades. One contemporary described him as “a splendid specimen of a man.” The pose Bissell selected strongly resembled that used by his contemporary Adolphe Yvon in his painting Nègre agenouillé, étude de nègre (Kneeling Black Man, Study of a Black Man). Yvon also featured Salem in his painting Genius of America where he appears in the identical pose in a much larger scene.⁷

Having completed the sculptures in clay, Bissell arranged for Parisian founder E. Gruet Jeune to cast the statue and other bronze elements of the Edinburgh monument. Bissell also designed the red granite pedestal, but the job of constructing it fell to the Scottish firm of Stewart McGlashen & Son, the cheapest of the bids submitted for the project. (In 1903, Bissell sculpted a monument of Lincoln for Clermont, Iowa, that draws heavily on the Edinburgh statue, but without the freedman.)

Bissell finished the commission just in time for the monument’s dedication on August 21, 1893, a date selected to coincide with the end of Wallace Bruce’s four-year term as consul. Travel delays prevented the participation of two of the scheduled speakers, New York Republican and former U.S. senator Chauncey Depew and Andrew D. Baird, former colonel of the largely Scottish 79th New York Infantry, the so-called Highland Regiment. At the height of Scotland summer, the weather that day was wet, windy, and cool, but despite the conditions, the crowd spilled out of the cramped burial ground onto Waterloo Place.

The ceremony began with the arrival of the regimental band of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, some 250 strong, marching down from Edinburgh Castle, down the Mound, across Waverley Bridge, and up Princes Street, the bagpipes and drums audible well before they arrived at Calton Hill Burial Ground. Most of the dignitaries and speakers had come from the City Council Chambers on the Royal Mile, where Wallace Bruce had received a solid silver Loving Cup to commemorate his service as the American consul. They arrived to see the statue draped in the British and American flags. Nearby a small speakers’ platform had been erected, decorated with the Stars and Stripes, Union Jack, and Scottish Saltire, and fronted by an edging of heather.

After a benediction by Rev. Robert Christie of Pennsylvania (born in St. Ninian’s, Scotland), a series of speakers addressed the crowd, each of whom articulated a different interpretation of what the monument symbolized. First to speak was engineer Sir William Arrol, famed for his recently completed Forth Bridge across the Firth of Forth. Arrol understood the monument as a symbol of the “great fight for freedom” that he hoped would inspire current and future generations of Scots to keep the flame of liberty alight. “There is one thing in Scotland that we have always been proud of, and that was our readiness to assist with and take part in any efforts for freedom and liberty,” he said. “We in Scotland always considered that we were the freest country in the world” and that “we are and always will be in the van of freedom.” Arrol understood Lincoln as “a great statesman—who stood up for freedom and liberty” and hoped that the monument would serve as “an object-lesson to all of Scotland” to continue the struggle for both.⁸

The Eagle and Brooklyn (1893) [Heath]; From Manassas to Appomattox (1896) [Fremantle]

Henry Roswell Heath (left) and Sir Arthur James Lyon Fremantle

Heath next addressed the crowd. As a representative of the GAR, Heath understood the “first monument erected to Abraham Lincoln in Europe” as testament to the “two hundred thousand [Union] veterans” of “our great American Civil War … now scattered over a great continent, with representatives in every part of the globe.” As historian Damian Shiels had recently demonstrated, federal pension records document a global diaspora of Union veterans and their families in the decades after the conflict. These international veterans had become invisible and forgotten in the monumental landscape stateside, and Heath was glad that their service and sacrifice would now be recognized and honored.⁹

After Heath finished, the time had come for the monument’s unveiling. Clara Bruce, the consul’s daughter, dressed in a flowing white gown and a gold band on her head, removed the American and British flags that draped the statue. As the Highland regimental band played “Hail Columbia” and “Rule Britannia,” Bissell stepped forward to accept the crowd’s accolades.

They cheered not only for the beauty of the monument, but also for the five Union soldiers from Scotland whose names, beginning with John McEwan’s, appeared on the side of the pedestal. Other than McEwan, it is unclear how the names of the other four veterans were selected. The list includes their regimental affiliation and rank, but not their birth and death dates. Like McEwan, they all had been born in Scotland, returned to their native land, and died there. Bruce probably obtained their names from the pension office, as their wives had all applied for and received widow’s pensions. (In 1993, on the monument’s centenary, a sixth name was added on the opposite side of the monument: Alexander Smith of the 66th New York Infantry. He appears to be the only Civil War veteran actually interred at the site.)

After the unveiling, Consul Bruce delivered the day’s longest speech. He situated the monument in the millennia-long struggle for freedom. “The course of individual liberty has been onward and upward,” he argued, “from Marathon and Plataea to the last struggle for human rights.” A proper historian, Bruce claimed, “traces the torch of liberty from country to country, from century to century.” Eventually Bruce highlighted what he saw as the specific meaning of the new monument. First, it was a “monument in memory of Scottish soldiers … brave who fought there for freedom.” Second, it was a monument to Lincoln, “last great martyr in the cause of Saxon freedom—an honest man, who saved us in the hour of our peril.” He was proud of the “happy location for this monument—the first ever erected to Lincoln in Europe—in the most beautiful city in the world.” Bruce had intended to read his own 16-verse poem, “Columbia’s Garland,” but was prevented by the inclement weather.¹⁰

Accepting the monument on behalf of the City of Edinburgh, Russell the Lord Provost (the equivalent of mayor) thanked Bruce, praising the statue and the nation it honored. “It is a monument to freedom,” he said. “We are deeply interested in the United States; we are materially interested in the United States; we are morally interested in the United States.” He promised that “we shall guard it carefully and see that it suffers no loss.” Once the Lord Provost had finished, the Highland regimental band played “Auld Lang Syne.”¹¹

Among the last to speak was General Sir Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, who had toured American battlefields in 1863 as a military observer. Thirty years later he commanded the British forces in Scotland and was stationed at Edinburgh Castle. Fremantle praised Arrol, claiming that “our friends in America will appreciate the fact of so great and good a man” participating in the monument’s dedication. With a few final words by Arrol and Bruce, the event concluded. The dignitaries retired to the Waterloo Hotel immediately next to Calton Hill Burial Ground for an evening of drinking, toasts, and singing.¹²

If Margaret McEwan or any of their children attended the dedication, newspaper accounts did not mention it. After receiving her widow’s pension in September 1890, Maggie and her children continued to live in Edinburgh, where she found work as a confectioner. Her meagre wages, supplemented with her widow’s pension, barely kept her out of the poorhouse. At the time of the monument’s dedication, she was planning to leave Scotland. In October 1893, she and her youngest children boarded a ship in Glasgow bound for New York. They lived in the Chicago area for a few years before moving to San Mateo, California. Maggie died in San Francisco in 1913.

The Lincoln Monument (1893)

A crowd of onlookers and dignitaries views the Scottish-American monument after its unveiling in Edinburgh on August 21, 1893.

During my time teaching in Edinburgh, I often brought students to the monument at the end of the semester, telling them the story of its origins. Although most of them had studied in the city for several years before taking my class, few had visited the site before, despite its proximity to the city center and campus. The monument and the story behind it provided a wonderful opportunity to connect many of the major themes and topics we had studied all year: the importance of emancipation, the experience of soldiers and veterans, the Civil War’s international dimensions, and historical memory and commemoration, among others. For many students, especially those who had never visited the United States, seeing the monument brought the conflict to life in a way that the classroom cannot.

David Silkenat is the Richard J. Milbauer Chair of Southern History at the University of Florida. He is the author of four books, including Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War (2019) and Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (2022).

Patrick Brennan

Cyrena Stone, or Miss Abby, writes in her diary.

One day in the spring of 1864, a friend came to Cyrena Stone’s Atlanta home and told her to burn all her papers. The swirl of rumors around town held that local officials suspected her of supporting William T. Sherman’s invading Union army. “For you know they say you have been corresponding with the enemy,” her friend warned, “& if we are all arrested, your house will certainly be searched.”¹ The rumors were unfounded. Stone had not been corresponding with the Yankees. But she did have a secret. For the past four years, she had been a Unionist, a southerner loyal to the United States instead of the Confederacy, and as the war raged on, she expressed her sympathies in the pages of her diary, an incriminating document among those her friend advised burning.

Stone had already taken steps to protect herself. She wrote in the diary using a pen name—“Miss Abby”—and referred to friends using pseudonyms. Her methods of deception were effective enough that in 1976, when the University of Georgia bought the diary’s only surviving fragment (an 80-page document written from January 1 to late July 1864), no one knew who had written it. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that Thomas G. Dyer, a professor of education at the university, identified Stone as the author of the anonymously written “Miss Abby Diary.”²

Dyer’s original work with the diary produced a wonderful book about an entire “circle” of likeminded Unionists living in Atlanta during the Civil War. But while Stone’s diary serves as a window into the secret world of southern Unionists, it also illustrates another critical, if sometimes overlooked, aspect of the war: the steady deterioration and total collapse of the Confederate home front.³

It is an interesting question: Did the Confederacy lose the war on the battlefield or on the home front? It most certainly suffered serious losses on the battlefield. Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Atlanta and others were all decisive Union victories of real strategic importance. But in recent years, historians have been highlighting the many ways in which issues related to the home front undermined the Confederate war effort. From the experiences of southern women to slave resistance to the failings of the southern economy, these issues and many more all worked to weaken the Confederacy from within. Some historians have even called into question the very distinction, suggesting that what happened on the battlefield and at home were so intertwined that it doesn’t make sense to see them as two separate spaces. The experience of someone like Stone helps explain why.⁴

A native of Vermont, Stone came south with her husband, Amherst Stone, in 1850. They settled first in Fayetteville, Georgia, before moving to Atlanta in 1854, where Amherst established himself among the city’s business community. He wasn’t alone. Among southern cities, Atlanta, a growing rail hub, had a reputation for attracting northern-born businessmen, with one Alabama newspaper describing the city as possessing the “slight perceptible odor of Yankeedom” as a result.⁵

Despite their new ties to Atlanta, the Stones, one-time owners of at least six enslaved people, opposed secession. During the winter of 1860–1861, as secession fever swept through southern statehouses, the two stood by their allegiance to the U.S. government. But when Georgia voted to secede from the Union in late January 1861, their politics marked them. They became outcasts and generally kept their voices down, their sympathies suppressed. And for good reason. The mood in Atlanta soured during the early stages of the war. Where it was once open and hospitable to outsiders like the Stones, roving groups of pro-Confederate radicals soon started policing the city, promising to root out disloyal elements. Newspapers ranted and raved about spies and traitors living within the city’s limits. The tipping point for the Stones came in 1862 when Atlanta imposed a temporary state of martial law. This allowed the city’s provost marshal—basically, the chief of police—wide latitude when it came to arresting suspected Unionists.

It was an ominous sign of what was to come. In August 1862, with the city under martial law, local officials detained perhaps as many as a dozen residents suspected of harboring unpatriotic loyalties. One of them, a local dry-goods dealer, died of a beating he received on the day of his apprehension. Dyer speculated that Cyrena Stone was likely among those arrested before securing her release.⁶

Not long afterward, Amherst Stone fled north. While the recently imposed state of martial law hung in the back of his mind, he was also looking to make good on a business deal involving southern cotton. Whatever his true motive, he traveled alone. Conditions were such that whole families fleeing the Confederacy raised suspicion, leading Confederate authorities to clamp down on escapees. Men could often travel freely, but women could not, forcing Stone to leave his wife behind.

Unfortunately for Stone he could not escape suspicions about his loyalty—even in the land of his birth. While traveling through St. Albans, Vermont, local authorities arrested him on suspicions of blockade running on behalf of the Confederacy. He spent the next three months imprisoned alongside other suspected traitors at Fort Lafayette, located at the entrance of New York Harbor. Upon his release, he tried but failed to arrange for his wife to join him. Heading back to Atlanta was simply out of the question. Cyrena had apparently written earlier that year explaining that it was far too dangerous for him to do so, that he would face arrest and imprisonment should he return. As a result, Cyrena experienced the rest of the Civil War alone, with only her diary and a small circle of Unionist friends to lean on for support.

Library of Congress

As secession fever swept through southern statehouses in the winter of 1860–1861, Atlanta residents Amherst and Cyrena Stone stood by their allegiance to the U.S. government. Above: Residents of Savannah raise a “flag of independence” on November 8, 1860, days after Abraham Lincoln’s election as president.

“The sun breaks through the clouds so goldenly, after these many days of darkness and storms—I half believe it is a bright omen of good things in store for us this year—which perhaps will be a New Year indeed, in the history of our Nation,” Stone wrote on January 1, 1864, the start of the diary’s surviving fragment. By then, Atlanta’s mood had changed once more. The paranoia of suspected spies and traitors living in the city had not abated. Local officials still sought to root out dissent. But Confederate morale had already begun to sink and would sink even further as Sherman’s invading army began its long, thunderous march on Atlanta later that spring.⁷

Yet Sherman’s invasion merely exacerbated problems already afflicting southern society. One was the basic material deprivation of life in wartime. By 1864, the federal blockade of southern ports had effectively stifled the Confederate economy. The flow of goods came to a screeching halt, which led to serious food shortages, especially among the poor. The lack of food—made worse by high rates of inflation as well as the refusal of large planters to grow anything of scale besides cotton—led scores of hungry women to riot in the streets of cities across the South, most famously in Richmond in March and April 1863. Georgia’s towns and cities were no exception. Also that year, groups of desperate women looted storefronts in places like Columbus, Milledgeville, and even Atlanta.

“Rare sport is … now to go shopping. No purse is large enough to hold all the ‘needful’ that is needed to make more than one purchase,” Stone wrote in early March, jotting down the high price of goods for her own future “amusement.” Stone, though shielded from severe hardship because of her wealth, nonetheless witnessed the South’s pauperization first hand. It appeared most often on the faces and in the sad stories of the women who came to collect items Stone wanted sewn, one of the few opportunities for women to earn extra cash in the wartime economy. These women were tired and hungry. They “rarely wore stockings,” went without shoes, and fashioned homespun clothes from flour sacks. Although they worked their fingers to the bone, the money they made from sewing could not keep up with the soaring price of goods. “O, I wish the Yankees would ever get here, before we are all murdered and starve to death!” one woman exclaimed to Stone.⁸

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

As the war ground on, high inflation and shortages of vital goods, including food, caused by the Union naval blockade of Confederate ports, prompted desperate civilians to riot in various cities across the South, including Atlanta. Above: A depiction, published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, of the “Bread Riots” that took place in Richmond, Virginia, in 1863.

For many of these women, their indigence dovetailed with a related problem plaguing the southern home front: a lack of men. When the war began, the Confederate army relied on volunteer spirit to fill its ranks. Following the firing on Fort Sumter, eager young men rushed to join the Confederate army in droves. But that spirit didn’t last. It waned as the realities of the war began to hit home, which forced the Confederate government to come up with more coercive methods of raising troops. In the spring of 1862, the Confederate government passed its first conscription act, which made southern males ages 18 to 35 eligible for mandatory military service. Critically, the government also passed a spate of exemptions to the law, including one, the infamous “Twenty Slave Law,” that exempted from service overseers of plantations of 20 or more enslaved people. Common southerners howled at this and other exemptions, believing they satisfied the interests of rich planters at the expense of the poor.

The Confederate government would ultimately pass two additional conscription bills, each of them further expanding the age range of potential draftees. The third and final bill, passed in February 1864, authorized drafting males between 17 and 50 for an unlimited term of service. Among the working women that Stone spoke with, the demands of Confederate conscription emerged as their chief complaint. Most had sons and husbands who had already been conscripted; some had sons and husbands who had been away for a few years; others had sons and husbands who would never return. Aside from the heartrending emotions of having loved ones off at the front, conscription became so acute for these women because it compounded their penury. With fewer men at home, the burden of household labor fell on their shoulders. Moreover, fewer men in the household meant fewer opportunities by which families could earn an income, making their wartime circumstances that much more difficult.

Thus the mournful laments from the women who visited Stone. “How can I get bread for my children!” cried one, whose husband was away at the front. For Stone, this became a common refrain. The women rued the war, damned the army, and had given up the Confederate cause. “They said their rich neighbors persuaded their husbands to volunteer in the first of the war, promising that their families would never suffer,” Stone wrote, recalling the women’s complaints. “But the promise was forgotten, & the little sewing they could get, hardly kept them alive.”⁹

These issues of hearth and home had a real impact on the Confederate war effort—in part because the complaints of their mothers and wives gave men a reason not to reenlist or keep fighting. In one particularly powerful instance, Stone came to the aid of a woman whose husband’s army furlough had come to an end. The woman, whom Stone described as “poor” and in “distress,” arrived at Stone’s home and asked if she had a little blue ink. She told Stone that it nearly “kills” her husband to think of leaving his family with nothing to eat, so if she could just get a little blue ink, she would change the word “June” to “July” on her husband’s furlough papers. By then, the woman imagined Sherman’s army would have arrived in Atlanta and the war might well be over, saving her husband from ever having to return to the front. Struck by the woman’s story, Stone scraped together a little indigo and turned a faded June into the “fairest” July for her.¹⁰

Elsewhere across Atlanta, conscription wrought havoc upon families. Women complained to Stone of having even their youngest sons enlisted. Men who believed they were far too old to fight were suddenly being impressed into military service. All the while, support for the war lagged. Stone herself knew that desertion had become a serious problem in the Confederate army. She also knew that conscripted men were now going to great lengths to avoid service, including simply taking flight. Indeed, all throughout the diary, Stone commented on meeting men who were on their way out of town, fleeing at a rapid pace to avoid having to serve.

They were not alone taking flight. By the start of the summer, as Sherman’s army advanced closer and closer to Atlanta’s outer limits, the city entered a state of panic. Residents packed their bags, loaded their wagons, and made hurried escapes. It started slow, but eventually it seemed that the entire city moved with a tidal-like force for the safety of points farther south. “This has been a wild day of excitement. From early morning until now—engines have screamed—trains thundered along; wagons laden with government stores, refugees, negroes, and household stuff have rattled out of town. Every possible conveyance is bought, borrowed, begged or stolen,” Stone wrote in late May, just as the fear of Sherman’s nearing army gripped Atlanta.¹¹

Amid these frenzied scenes, some of the basic structures of southern society fell apart. None proved as brittle as its self-professed cornerstone. While many of the fleeing families forced enslaved people to accompany them, these harried flights out of town nevertheless undermined slavery by shattering the systems of security and control that had long underpinned it. Stone herself noted that after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, city officials stepped up efforts to police the activities of enslaved people. They imposed curfews and monitored forms of public assembly. But the specter of Sherman’s army marching down from the mountains weakened these efforts, especially once the evacuations began and the city emptied out. On an individual level, too, these evacuations shattered the illusion of slaveholder power. In the case of Dan, an enslaved man whom Stone sometimes hired for his labor, his enslaver simply freed him rather than try to take him along as he fled the city. To Dan’s enslaver, the institution was as good as dead.¹²

One place slavery was still thriving, however, was in the Confederate army. In the lead-up to the Battle of Atlanta in late July, the Confederate army impressed scores of enslaved men into service, putting them to work digging trenches, building breastworks, and otherwise fortifying the city. Here, Stone did her own part to undermine the institution and the Confederacy by harboring, in the safety of her cotton house, four enslaved men who had been impressed into service as laborers. And this was just the beginning. Later in the year, after Atlanta fell and as Sherman swept across the state toward Savannah, thousands of enslaved people would flee plantations in an attempt to reach the presumed freedom of Union army lines. These movements struck like a dagger at the heart of the institution while hollowing out what was left of the framework of the Confederate home front.¹³

Meanwhile, the war continued to rage. By midsummer, it had practically arrived on Stone’s doorstep, which brought to the fore another issue sapping support for the Confederacy: As the Confederate army retreated, its soldiers proved just as destructive as their Union counterparts. Nothing was safe. Soldiers seized goods and supplies. Stone had her horse, Zephyr, taken and worked to death. Her turkey, George, had been appropriated earlier in the spring, which she found ironic considering he had been named after Union general George B. McClellan. “Last night they [the Confederate soldiers] called at ‘our house’;–broke into the kitchen—carried off two tubs of linen—took every implement lying about the yard—and more than all, they stole my beautiful George—my Turkey gentleman, the last of his tribe, I had permitted to live,” she wrote. Many of her neighbors reported similar interactions with retreating troops.¹⁴

Library of Congress

As William T. Sherman’s army approached Atlanta in the summer of 1864, many residents hurriedly fled farther south, often creating frenzied scenes. Above: This George Barnard photograph shows civilians on boxcars ready to depart after the city’s fall.

By the time Confederate soldiers had begun falling back through Stone’s yard, the military situation in and around Atlanta neared a crisis point. For most of the spring, the war loomed far to the north. The only whiff of fighting arrived by way of wild rumors about massive battles and terrific Confederate victories. But around the start of summer, Stone’s own ears were hearing a different story. The low rumble of heavy guns firing in the distance told her that Sherman’s army remained on the move and that her liberation might well be nigh.

As the sound of those booming guns roared louder and louder, Stone cheered them on. She poured out her long-held hope of a Union victory in the pages of her diary and clung tightly to the American flag she had hidden away at the start of the war. Ominous news from the front that caused neighbors to fret and worry represented welcome, celebratory news for her, and she fought hard to suppress her excitement at the thought of Sherman’s arrival. “A little nearer each day, and each day the cannons are heard more distinctly,” she wrote on June 1.¹⁵

With the fortunes of war now falling in her favor, Stone became less of an outcast with every passing day. “Strange changes are taking place, and it is beautiful to note the contrast between things now & then,” she wrote, recognizing her rehabilitation back into society. Friends who had previously shunned her on account of her suspected loyalties now begged her for help. At least two old friends asked to stay with her when the city inevitably fell. They were sure Stone’s presumed loyalties would protect them as Sherman’s soldiers swooped into town. In another instance, an old acquaintance called in to see how she was “getting along.” He apologized that their “sociabilities” had been interrupted and promised to visit again. But Stone saw through it. While she “acquiesced” in person, she privately knew too much had changed, that these acts of reconciliation were too little, too late. She also recognized them for what they were: mere exigences of the war, a result of Sherman bearing down on a doomed city.¹⁶

On June 27, the two armies tussling about in northern Georgia collided 25 miles north of Atlanta at a wooded rise known as Kennesaw Mountain. Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston mounted a stiff defense of the city, repulsing successive Union attacks from the base of the mountain. And yet, Sherman kept his army moving. Within days of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Sherman’s flanking movements forced Johnston to fall back, which triggered a change in leadership atop the army. President Jefferson Davis, angry with Johnston for continuing to withdraw, relieved him of command in favor of a bold Texan named John Bell Hood.

It was a poor, fateful choice. Where Johnston moved cautiously, if sometimes to a fault, Hood went on the attack. On July 20, nearly a month after the fight at Kennesaw Mountain, Hood threw his beleaguered Confederate force against a stout section of Sherman’s front situated along Peachtree Creek, just six miles north of Atlanta. For several hours in the summer heat, Hood’s men clashed with Sherman’s lines, but the attack failed, forcing Hood’s men to fall back into town.

Stone’s quiet home suddenly became a war zone. The following morning, she woke to a Confederate hospital division setting up shop on her property. Soon afterward, soldiers flooded her home asking for food and supplies. “We are getting accustomed to the continued roaring of cannons & rattle of musketry, surrounding us with the fiery guerdon of war,” she wrote. Then at noon, the heavy firing began. A shell burst over the house. Then came another and another, both screeching through the air just over her home. And on it went for the rest of the afternoon, with the guns growing stronger by the hour and a thick layer of belching black smoke blanketing the horizon.¹⁷

Library of Congress

“We are getting accustomed to the continued roaring of cannons & rattle of musketry, surrounding us with the fiery guerdon of war,” Cyrena Stone wrote as her home suddenly became a war zone in July 1864. Shown here: A portion of the elaborate Confederate defenses of Atlanta.

As evening approached, Stone couldn’t believe what she was seeing: Gray-clad soldiers were throwing up breastworks not far from her house, and artillery units were building batteries and wheeling in cannons. By midnight, the scenes surrounding her once peaceful abode had turned downright apocalyptic. “Words cannot picture the scenes that surround me—scenes & sounds which my soul will hold in remembrance forever. Terrific cannonading on every side—continual firing of musketry—men screaming to each other—wagons rumbling by on every street or pouring into the yard,” she wrote.¹⁸

Thus far, Stone had refused to evacuate. She did not want to give up her home and the comforts that came with it. She also wanted to be there to welcome Sherman’s soldiers when they arrived. But it was no longer safe for her to stay. The cannonading had come too close. The firing had reached a fever pitch. “They are falling back & will soon fight at the breastworks. It will not be safe for you to remain here madam,” a Confederate officer told her that evening.¹⁹

At this, Stone’s emotions welled up. The reality of her situation—alone, in danger, and surrounded by soldiers—began to hit home. As she wandered aimlessly about trying to collect her valuables, a few soldiers stepped in to help gather her things. She decided to wait through the night, hoping for a break in the action. “So here we are watching out this fearful night—waiting for a still more fearful morning,” she wrote, describing the “lurid light from the fires dotting the yard & grove” and how it “revealed groups of soldiers here and there—some asleep on the earth, & some leaning against the trees in a listless way—as if life had no longer any gladness for them.”²⁰

The next morning, Stone moved in with a friend who lived in a place of greater safety. She left behind her piano, packed her books away in a locked closet, and gave her pigs—including one named after General Grant—to the soldiers. “A strong feeling came over me as I passed down the shaded walk,” she wrote, “but I looked not back, for I felt as if leaving those pleasant scenes forever.” Through it all, she remained mostly undaunted, buoyed by the belief that victory sat near at hand. “If such upheavings—such sunderings & losses, were to be the entrance gate into the large life of liberty for which I had sighed … I would go fearless, casting back no look of regret and longing for what I left behind,” she wrote in one of the diary’s final lines.²¹

As she rode away from her home, reflecting on all she had seen and heard, the guns opened up again. It was July 22. Over on the city’s eastern edge, the Battle of Atlanta had just begun.

National Portrait Gallery (Sherman); South Caroliniana Library (Hood)

William T. Sherman (left) and John Bell Hood

While the Battle of Atlanta, a brutal, daylong fight that claimed some 9,000 casualties, marked the end of Stone’s diary, it did not end the campaign for Atlanta. After the battle, the two armies clashed once more before Sherman decided to lay siege to the city. For roughly the next month, Sherman hoped to wrench surrender from Hood. Instead, the Texan opted to flee. On the evening of September 1, he withdrew his army back into northern Alabama, leaving the city open to Sherman’s men. Atlanta, one of the Confederacy’s last great centers of modern industry, had officially fallen, paving the way for Lincoln’s reelection in November and an eventual Confederate defeat.

Stone survived the siege and ultimately the war. She reunited with her husband later in the year before resettling in Vermont. She remained there until 1868, when she succumbed to an unknown illness at 38 years old.

Yet Cyrena Stone’s diary, all 80 hand-scrawled pages of it, lives on. Although only a fragment survives, the “Miss Abby Diary” nevertheless tells an important story about the final days of the Confederacy and the southern home front. She watched them both collapse before her eyes.

Bennett Parten is an Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Southern University. He is the author of Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation (2025) and holds a Ph.D. in History from Yale University.

Allen C. Guelzo is professor of humanities at the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, and lives in both Gainesville and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

What are you currently reading?

I’m midway through Dan Bannister’s opus Lincoln and the Common Law (Human Services Press, 1992), which compiled summaries of common-law cases handled by Abraham Lincoln during his career as a trial lawyer. I don’t need to explain to you that this is tedious reading, and much of it is written by a lawyer who expected that the book’s readership would be other lawyers. For instance: It will help you to know the difference between a capias and an assumpsit before you begin. I’m forcing my way through it because I want to understand as much as I can about Lincoln’s law career. I think it will also help me to explain to myself why I didn’t become a lawyer.

What drew you to this book?

Until the debut of the Lincoln Legal Papers in the 1990s, we had little practical idea of what Lincoln’s professional practice looked like. Roy P. Basler’s groundbreaking edition of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln Association, 1953) excluded all but the most marginal papers from Lincoln’s law practice. And no wonder, since most of the case materials were squirreled away in the cobwebbed basements of central Illinois county courthouses, and in many of them, it was not clear what role Lincoln actually played. Bannister’s book, and the subsequent publication of The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases (UVA Press, 2008), along with Mark Steiner’s marvelous book about Lincoln’s practice, An Honest Calling (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), dramatically lifted the curtain on what were, after all, the 24 central years of Lincoln’s life.

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

Looking back no further than 2022, I’d put my finger, for “great” books about the Civil War era, on Matt Gallman’s The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War (UVA Press), which is a really wonderful exposition of the northern Democratic political opposition. (Bear in mind that I have a high level of interest in the politics of the war, rather than just its battlefields.) But if we’re talking about books specifically about the war as “the war,” I’d select Scott Hartwig’s inexhaustibly detailed second volume on the 1862 Maryland Campaign, I Dread the Thought of the Place: The Battle of Antietam and the End of the Maryland Campaign (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023).

What was your favorite book as a child?

Donald Sobol’s Two Flags Flying: Fifty True, Dramatic Stories of The Civil War (Platt & Munk, 1960), a gift of my maternal grandmother for my seventh birthday. Why a favorite? Read it and you’ll find out. Especially read the chapter on David Dixon Porter and his mystery ironclad. If more children read books like this, we wouldn’t be wondering why they’re growing up on Facebook instead.

What kind of reader were you?

Incessant. I began keeping reading lists when I was in seventh grade, and have done so ever since, and they will stand as proof of incessant. The lists are probably evidence of a hard-core OCD problem on my part, but it’s the sort of thing later historians are so grateful for, since they are—most of them—OCD themselves.

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

Brian Matthew Jordan, Jonathan White, and Howell Keiser for the Civil War, Walter Russell Mead and Jane Kamensky for general American knowledge, Joe Horowitz for American music, and my old teachers Mike Zuckerman, Alan Kors, Janet Hirt, and Bruce Kuklick because they ask the most interesting questions. I might invite my oldest friend and now co-author James Hankins, but only if he promises to open the group with a quotation from Petrarch.

Where do you like reading?

Anywhere. I’d be reading on the way to my first job interview, or in the tumbrel to the guillotine.

Do you have a favorite bookstore?

The bookstores I loved are almost all now gone, destroyed by the double-whammy of the internet and Amazon. But as a Philadelphia boy, there was no bookstore quite like William H. Allen’s dimly lit second-hand book-cathedral at 2031 Walnut St. in Philadelphia—not even Leary’s at 9th and Market, nor Charles Sessler’s at 1314 Walnut. I could have lived there, and George Allen quite possibly would have allowed it. A vigorous second is a survivor of that Golden Age, Baldwin’s Book Barn of West Chester, Pennsylvania. It was from Old Man Baldwin that I bought Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Doubleday, 1959) for a few bucks in 1980, took it home, stayed up most of the night reading it, and became a convert to the idea that Lincoln was a man of ideas. It was the O.M. who saw me ogling the five volumes of Samuel P. Bates’ History of Pennsylvania Volunteers (B. Singerly, 1869–1871) that he kept on the shelves behind the counter. “How much,” I asked. “One hundred dollars,” the O.M. replied. “I haven’t got that,” I replied. “Here,” he said, “take ’em and send me a check when you can.” There hasn’t been a deal like that since the Louisiana Purchase. Right after Baldwin’s, I’d give a prize to the Paul family’s Prairie Archives in Springfield, Illinois. If there’s a book on Lincoln they don’t have, you probably don’t need it.

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

Amos Judson’s History of the 83rd Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, published in 1865 before the genre of regimental memoirs had hardened into self-praise and self-congratulation. Chapters 18 through 20 are, without peer, the most poker-facedly hilarious descriptions in the entire literature of the Civil War of why young adolescent males decided to become soldiers. It rivals Twain and exceeds Ambrose Bierce, Charles Farrar Brown, and David Locke. Judson died in 1913, after a long and otherwise utterly unnoticed career in the Treasury Department, so it was a one-off literary performance.

What’s next on your reading list?

That would be telling.

One important caveat: I have intentionally set aside works centrally concerned with the politics of emancipation, a topic that richly deserves a list of its own.

A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac

By Zachery A. Fry
(University of North Carolina Press, 2020)

If lay students of the conflict believe that they can ignore its politics, that was scarcely true of the men who fought it. In 1997, James M. McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades made clear that both Union and Confederate soldiers understood the war’s political stakes and were intensely concerned with the major issues it generated. Since then, a number of historians have explored this phenomenon more deeply, among them Zachery A. Fry, the author of the first book on this list.

“The Army of the Potomac,” said one veteran, “was the people in arms. It mirrored the diversified opinions of a free and intelligent democracy.” Given that Major General George B. McClellan created the Army of the Potomac, did more than anyone to shape its organizational culture, and enjoyed the enduring admiration of the common soldier, one might suppose that Little Mac’s increasing embrace of the Democratic Party would have drawn much of the army along with him. That did not happen, despite the fact that McClellan tended to favor senior generals whose political views aligned with his own. Nor were soldiers greatly influenced by the infighting between generals sympathetic to the Democrats and those drawn to the Republican Party. Rather, the soldiers sorted things out for themselves, assisted by junior-level officers who did much to articulate the political views of the men, and who gradually acquired a perspective that aligned with that of the Lincoln administration.

These officers, like many of their soldiers, became disgusted at the sight of slavery. They believed that political disunity harmed the Union cause, laid the blame for that disunity at the feet of the Democratic Party, and drew scant distinction between Democrats who disagreed with some of the Lincoln administration’s specific policies but supported the war, and the faction of antiwar Democrats derided as “Copperheads.” By 1864, these discussions had converted most soldiers into well-informed, committed Republican adherents.

The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War

By J. Matthew Gallman
(University of Virginia Press, 2021)

Because the Democratic Party was the dominant party in the South, secession dealt it a severe blow and left northern Democrats scrambling to create a coherent new identity that came to center mainly on opposition to emancipation as a war aim. For analytical convenience, historians have often stove-piped Democrats into three types: “War Democrats,” who believed that for the duration of the war, party rivalries must be set aside; “legitimist” Democrats, who functioned as a kind of loyal opposition; and “Peace Democrats,” who viewed the war as a tragic mistake and favored a negotiated settlement.

The reality, of course, was not so simple, hence Gallman’s use of the term “cacophony” to describe Democratic politics during the war years. True, the party devised a slogan—“the Union as it was, the Constitution as it is”—as a way to delineate its core beliefs while countering Republican charges that the party was disloyal to the Union. But Democrats, whether political leaders or members of the rank-and-file, struggled to agree on the slogan’s exact meaning, yielding a spectrum of beliefs rather than clearly defined camps. Gallman respects this complexity and presents it in clear, lucid prose.

The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War

By Heather Cox Richardson
(Harvard University Press, 1997)

Most students of the conflict know that the Republican Party came to embrace the destruction of slavery and the resort to conscription as military necessities. But they are probably much less aware of the party’s expansive economic vision—ideas that Republicans and their Whig antecedents had supported in the 1840s and 1850s but that the prewar Democratic Party had easily blocked. The departure of the southern Democrats at the war’s outset, however, opened the door to the realization of this vision. Republicans made the most of the opportunity, passing some of the most consequential economic legislation in American history. They created a coherent financial system, based on an artful combination of national banks, legal tender, bonds, and income and excise taxes, which not only enabled the federal government to pay for the war without ruinous inflation, but had an impact that endured far beyond the conflict’s end.

The Homestead Act of 1862 hastened the settlement of the West. Sales of federal lands underwrote the founding of the public universities created by the Land Grant College Act of 1862. Other legislation made possible the construction of the first transcontinental railroad and a system of protective tariffs that assisted industrialization during and after the war. The impetus for these measures, Richardson writes, was a desire to create “a new nation based on an economic ideal that promised everyone the opportunity to advance while fueling growth.” Ironically, however, in the decades after the war, these measures instead yielded the Gilded Age, in which this anticipated American paradise “turned into the very world of wealthy monopolists and farmers that the Republicans most abhorred.”

The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics

By George C. Rable
(University of North Carolina Press, 1994)

The founders of the Confederacy seceded to protect slavery against the feared designs of Abraham Lincoln and the “Black Republicans.” But in establishing their own government, they wanted to avoid the problems that, from their perspective, had left the U.S. political system gravely flawed. The original Founders had feared the rise of political parties and, to varying degrees, deplored the possibility that the new republic might become a democracy. The creators of the Confederate government shared these reservations. Although they largely adopted the U.S. Constitution as their own, they made key modifications intended to forestall these problems and thereby perfect the work of the Founders.

Under the Confederate constitution, for example, the president could not be reelected but would serve a single six-year term, an alteration intended to place him above partisan politics. To curtail pork barrel, he received expanded budgetary authority, such as the line item veto. And although he could remove Cabinet members at will, he could not fire lower-ranking officials except for dishonesty or incompetence—a move toward civil service reform inspired by revulsion at the Jacksonian spoils system. Fears of corruption led to provisions that rejected protective tariffs and forbade expenditures for most internal improvements.

The new republic’s early military successes established its legitimacy, the 1861 elections confirmed its anti-party political culture, and if the Civil War had ended quickly, the vision for a Confederate republic might have worked as its founders intended. But because the war dragged on, requiring ever more economic and military sacrifice, the intentional lack of an opposition party had the unintentional consequence of creating a president whose authority was almost unchecked. It is not too much of a stretch to call Jefferson Davis, as did some of his critics, a military dictator. All important strategic decisions were made by him, either alone or in concert with a few select political allies and generals. This sweeping presidential power was a major factor in the ferocity and persistence of Confederate resistance. But it also guaranteed that the war would last months beyond the point where the Confederacy had any remaining chance of victory.

The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy

Edited by William E. Gienapp and Erica L. Gienapp
(University of Illinois, 2014)

Anyone interested in Civil War politics should give themselves a firsthand look at its day-to-day workings. For this purpose, one can do no better than to read the prolific diary of Gideon Welles, a Connecticut newspaper editor and prominent Republican whom Lincoln appointed to be his secretary of the navy. Starting in mid-1862, Welles penned almost daily entries in a series of gilt-edged, red-leather volumes that eventually included between 750,000 and 800,000 words. The entries are detailed, astute, and written in an acerbic style that is often entertaining and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Welles kept an eye on the political scene in general, but the diary is, of course, most valuable for its insights into Lincoln, his Cabinet, and the conduct of the war.

Mark Grimsley is a military historian and the author of numerous books and articles on the Civil War.

A prewar image of Robert Gould Shaw

The morning after the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Second Lieutenant Robert Gould Shaw picked his way across ground strewn with the dead and the wreckage of combat. The fight had come on August 9, 1862, when Shaw’s 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, part of Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia, clashed with Confederate forces in the hills of central Virginia, in a defeat measured in blood. Shaw’s regiment suffered especially; roughly one-third of the men, including 16 of its 22 officers, were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.

Walking the field alongside Brigadier General George Gordon, Shaw was unprepared for what he found. Writing to his mother, he described the quiet devastation of recognizing, one by one, the faces of comrades with whom he had served since June 1861. Captain Robert Cary was the first. Shaw found him on his back, his head resting on a piece of wood, his expression so composed that he seemed simply asleep. “His face was beautiful,” Shaw wrote, “and I could have stood and looked at it a long while.”¹ Shaw didn’t have long to linger. The field gave up its dead quickly: Captain William B. Williams, Captain Richard Chapman Goodwin, Captain Edward Gardner Abbott, Lieutenant Stephen George Perkins. Friends, all of them, found in the space of minutes.

Library of Congress (2)

George Gordon (left) and Edward Gardner Abbott

Shaw accompanied his comrades’ bodies into Culpeper, helping to pack them in charcoal for the journey to Washington and, eventually, home. He cut a lock of hair from each man, keepsakes for their families, many of whom he knew personally, which made the grief harder to contain. He wept. “Oh! It is hard to believe that we shall never see them again,” he wrote, “after having been constantly together for more than a year.”²

This moment, like much of Shaw’s early war service, has been largely forgotten, crowded out by the story that came to define him: his decision to command one of the war’s first black regiments, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, and his death, at 25, in battle while leading them in the dramatic assault on Fort Wagner on Morris Island, South Carolina, in July 1863. Films like Glory and earlier biographies tend to compress or skip over Shaw’s years with the 2nd Massachusetts entirely, treating them as mere prelude to an inevitable fate.

While Shaw commanded the 54th Massachusetts for roughly six months, he spent nearly 19 months with the 2nd Massachusetts, largely in Virginia, where his understanding of the war was formed. In the Shenandoah Valley he encountered escaped slaves for the first time and ran up against the hostility of Confederate civilians. At Front Royal and the First Battle of Winchester he saw what combat looked like. And throughout he was pressed to reckon with issues that would follow him forever: emancipation, the arming of blacks as soldiers, the discipline of men under his charge, and the politics surrounding command of the Army of the Potomac.

Indeed, the period between Cedar Mountain and the end of 1862 presented Shaw with his most severe test of the war. While the fighting continued to intensify, forcing Shaw to confront the loss of even more of his close friends in the regiment, President Abraham Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which would place emancipation as a central wartime goal. The question of military emancipation had long divided Shaw from his abolitionist parents, but the president’s proclamation now pushed their relationship to the breaking point. By the end of 1862, Shaw was left disillusioned about the purpose of the war and contemplating leaving the regiment for another assignment. More importantly, he doubted he would ever have the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the war’s successful conclusion.

Known affectionately as “Rob” by his family, Robert Gould Shaw was born on October 10, 1837, into a wealthy and prominent Boston abolitionist family deeply committed to social reform. Raised under the strong moral influence of his parents, Frank and Sarah Shaw, Rob absorbed their fervent antislavery convictions from an early age—yet came to resist following in their footsteps. Educated partly in Europe and briefly at Harvard, Rob developed an independent, pragmatic temperament that would put him at odds with his family’s more idealistic vision of the war. While his parents saw the conflict from the outset as a crusade for emancipation, Shaw viewed it in narrower terms, as a fight to preserve the Union, and was skeptical that the army should be used as an instrument of radical social change.

Frank Leslie’s illustrated History of the Civil War (1895)

The period between the Battle of Cedar Mountain (depicted above in a wartime illustration) and the end of 1862 presented Robert Gould Shaw, a bright young 2nd Massachusetts Infantry officer—and future commander of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry—with his most severe test of the conflict, a time when his understanding of the war was formed.

Despite having “undisputed possession of the battle-field” after their victory at Cedar Mountain, Confederates abandoned the field and continued their northward march, leaving many wounded soldiers in farmhouses and other buildings.³ Army of Northern Virginia commander Robert E. Lee had learned that Union general George B. McClellan, whose Peninsula Campaign against Richmond had recently failed, was in the process of transferring troops from his Army of the Potomac, presumably to link up with Pope’s force in northern Virginia. With Richmond now safe, Lee began moving the rest of his troops north to unite with Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s men and defeat Pope before he could be reinforced by McClellan.

Shaw struggled to maintain contact with his family as Pope’s army stumbled through a series of humiliating retreats. From Culpeper, the 2nd Massachusetts advanced to the Rapidan River only to fall back behind the Rappahannock by August 20, another Federal withdrawal that handed Lee the initiative.

The next nine days dissolved into a nightmare of constant movement, with the regiment rarely camping anywhere for more than a day. “We have been drenched with rain & scorched by the Sun,” Shaw recalled, “have slept much of the time on the ground with blankets & have lived principally on green apples & corn.”⁴ The army was disintegrating through exhaustion and hunger while Lee maneuvered his forces for another devastating blow.

While Pope’s men stumbled through their exhausting retreat, Lee executed a masterpiece of strategic deception. On August 25, he launched Jackson’s corps on a daring flanking maneuver—a wide clockwise arc around Pope’s right that would sever Federal supply lines and trap the Union army between the Confederate forces. Between August 28 and 30, the two armies clashed on or near the old Bull Run battlefield resulting in another decisive Confederate victory. The 2nd Massachusetts was spared, as their corps, commanded by Major General Nathaniel Banks, was held in reserve.

The loss at Second Bull Run was made worse by the knowledge that the 2nd Massachusetts was, in Shaw’s mind, “just where we started from” six months earlier. Shaw fell back on a well-worn explanation to rationalize the army’s most recent defeat. “We shall never do much until we get a very different army from what we have now,” he wrote his father. “Until the government finds that it is worth their while to get competent officers & attend themselves to the organization of the army & not allow it to be made a private speculation for Governors of States.” The army’s lack of discipline was apparent to Shaw. “In every battle a part of the men skulk & after a day’s march the roads are lined with stragglers,” he wrote his father.⁵

National Archives (Pope); Library of Congress (Mills)

John Pope (left) and Charles Mills

On September 2, the news that McClellan had been appointed to reorganize the troops around Washington, D.C., was greeted by cheers of joy among the soldiers—one of the few bright spots at such a low point for the Union cause. Shaw remained in favor of McClellan, consistently praising him for “doing wonders” to build discipline throughout the Army of the Potomac.⁶ His support stood in sharp contrast to the concerns, expressed by many in Washington and in the ranks, that the general had intentionally delayed the transfer of his army to support Pope against Lee’s offensive.

In just eight weeks, Lee’s bold leadership had shattered Union strategy, driving Federal forces from Richmond’s gates back to Washington’s defenses. Now, he was poised to invade the United States. On September 4, Lee led his army across the Potomac into Maryland, believing a decisive Confederate victory in that state—or even in Pennsylvania—could shatter northern morale just weeks before the November midterm elections. Moreover, he hoped further battlefield success would convince Britain to recognize Confederate independence and intervene militarily against the Union.

Along with the news of McClellan’s return, Shaw learned that the 2nd Massachusetts, now under the command of Colonel George L. Andrews, had been assigned to Gordon’s Third Brigade, First Division, of the newly formed XII Corps under the command of Major General Joseph K. Mansfield. In addition to the 3rd Wisconsin and 27th Indiana, the Third Brigade was bolstered by the 13th New Jersey and 107th New York infantry regiments. Officers in the 2nd Massachusetts were horrified to learn that the New Jersey boys had been rushed into the field and not properly drilled in the loading and firing of their weapons. What mattered most to Shaw, however, was that his regiment was now officially part of the Army of the Potomac.

Shaw welcomed a respite at Rockville, Maryland, after weeks of brutal marching. The arrival of regimental wagons reunited soldiers with personal belongings they had not seen in more than three weeks of constant movement. Men eagerly washed and changed into clean clothes. Campfires crackled with renewed life as soldiers enjoyed proper meals and caught up on long-delayed correspondence with families who had received no word during the chaotic retreat from Virginia. Shaw finally slept under canvas rather than sharing corners of threadbare blankets with his fellow officers.

By September 11, the Army of the Potomac was moving west toward Frederick to confront Lee’s advancing army. The men were impressed with the rolling hills, patches of wood, and well-kept farms of central Maryland. One of Shaw’s fellow officers, Charles Mills, described it as “paradise compared with Virginia.”⁷ Shaw probably heard the news that just outside of Frederick a soldier nearby in the 27th Indiana Infantry had come across a paper wrapped around some cigars intended for one of Lee’s commanders; the papers provided the Union army with valuable information concerning the Army of Northern Virginia’s movements and campaign plans.

National Portrait Gallery

Shaw was among the many Union soldiers who cheered the news of the appointment in September 1862 of George McClellan (above) to reorganize the troops around Washington, D.C.

Believing he would have plenty of time to maneuver unmolested by McClellan, Lee divided his already outnumbered army by sending Jackson’s entire corps of 25,000 men to capture Harpers Ferry and secure a Confederate line of retreat, if needed. The remaining Army of Northern Virginia continued west toward Hagerstown, leaving Lee dangerously exposed should McClellan move quickly enough to exploit the separation. McClellan was, in fact, on the move. By September 15, the 2nd Massachusetts had passed through South Mountain’s gaps, where Lee had tried unsuccessfully to block Union pursuit the previous day. War debris littered the mountainside—abandoned equipment, bloodstained rocks, hastily dug graves—clear indications that a battle was imminent. The regiment bivouacked near Keedysville that night, then moved closer to the sleepy village of Sharpsburg along Antietam Creek, where Lee was desperately trying to concentrate his scattered forces. Shaw could see Confederate positions on the ridgeline across the creek, close enough to distinguish individual enemy soldiers preparing defensive works.

That evening Shaw sought out his friend William Forbes, stationed nearby with the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. They shared letters from home by firelight. Shaw read aloud ones from his sisters Josephine and Nellie, who were enjoying an oceanside family vacation while their brother prepared for battle. “We lay on his blanket before the fire, until 10 o’clock, and then I left him, little realizing what a day the next was to be; though a battle was expected, and I thought, as I rode off, that perhaps we shouldn’t see each other again,” Shaw later noted.⁸

Battles and Leaders of the Civil War

At the Battle of Antietam, in Sharpsburg, Maryland, Shaw and the 2nd Massachusetts fought Confederates in the fields of David Miller’s farm. Above: A postwar depiction of Union soldiers advancing through Miller’s cornfield.

There was little opportunity to sleep. Overnight, the Third Brigade was marched roughly three miles across Antietam Creek and came to a rest in a wheat field. “Our pickets fired all night, and at daylight we were waked up by the artillery,” Shaw recalled.⁹

Lee’s army clung to undulating ridgelines west of Antietam Creek, his forces still dangerously divided and outnumbered. With Jackson’s corps racing north following the Union surrender at Harpers Ferry on September 15, Lee desperately needed time to reunite his scattered forces around Sharpsburg before McClellan could exploit the Confederate weakness. McClellan’s battle plan was simple—a simultaneous three-pronged assault that would prevent an outnumbered Lee from shifting reinforcements along his interior lines to threatened sectors—and promised a decisive victory if executed properly. McClellan was well aware that the Potomac River, located behind Lee’s position, eliminated any easy retreat options. Any significant Union breakthrough could trap and destroy the entire Army of Northern Virginia.

The battle that unfolded on September 17, 1862, eventually enveloped the entire area around Sharpsburg and turned the cornfields, apple orchards, and farm lanes red with blood; but for Shaw and his regiment, the battle occupied a small area of farmland north of town. At around 8 a.m., the 2nd Massachusetts received orders to march south along Hagerstown Pike as part of a broader movement involving two Union corps to gain a plateau around Dunker Church, the religious home of a group of German Baptist Brethren. Shaw’s regiment held the Third Brigade’s right flank, with the 3rd Wisconsin and 27th Indiana extending the line leftward. The 2nd Massachusetts moved briefly through David Miller’s apple orchard before advancing into his ripening cornfield to support the other regiments, whose casualties were mounting fast. Inside the corn rows, visibility dropped to mere yards as stalks higher than a man’s head created a maze of green tunnels. While Shaw could hear the Wisconsin and Indiana regiments being torn apart by Confederate volleys, he could see almost nothing through the dense crop. When Georgia and Alabama brigades counterattacked into the cornfield, the battle became a deadly game of cat and mouse.

For 30 minutes, Shaw and his men fought an invisible enemy in the agricultural labyrinth. Muzzle flashes erupted from corn rows without warning, men screamed and fell among the stalks, and officers shouted contradictory orders while trying to maintain unit cohesion in terrain that fragmented every formation.

The results were evident to Shaw as the regiment advanced through the cornfield. “It was full of their dead and wounded, and one of our sergeants took a regimental colour there, belonging to the Eleventh Mississippi,” he wrote. “Beyond the cornfield was a large open field, and such a mass of dead and wounded men, mostly Rebels, as were lying there, I never saw before; it was a terrible sight, and our men had to be very careful to avoid treading on them; many were mangled and torn to pieces by artillery, but most of them had been wounded by musketry fire.”¹⁰ Lieutenant Colonel Wilder Dwight eventually got hold of a captured Confederate banner and rode with it to cheers from along the line of the 2nd Massachusetts. Shaw’s friend and fellow officer Charles Morse recalled, “The whole field before [us] was literally covered with dead and dying.”¹¹

Shaw watched his men stop to share their canteens with wounded Confederates and place them in “easy positions.” “There are so many young boys and old men among the Rebels,” he observed, “that it seems hardly possible that they can have come of their own accord to fight us, and it makes you pity them all the more, as they lie moaning on the field.”¹²

These feelings of sympathy quickly passed as the regiment was ordered to a position at the edge of an area known as the East Woods. As the 2nd Massachusetts shifted to its new position, Major General John Sedgwick’s division swept across their front to assault the nearby West Woods. “It was a grand sight,” Shaw recalled, “and they looked as if they couldn’t be repulsed.” “They were in three lines,” wrote Morse, “and looked splendidly.”¹³

Shortly thereafter, Sedgwick’s division “received … a most terrible musketry-fire, and finally had to fall back.” The Third Brigade was ordered to march toward Hagerstown Pike to support what Sedgwick believed to be friendly troops that had reentered the West Woods. Elements of the 2nd, along with the 13th New Jersey to their right, just south of the Miller cornfield, scaled the fences along the pike, but the site of the brigade’s colors caught the enemy’s attention. Instead of coming to the support of their comrades, Shaw and the rest of the Third Brigade had marched straight into Brigadier General Robert Ransom’s North Carolinians, who were lying in wait in the woods. A hail of Confederate bullets forced Shaw and the rest of the brigade to abandon their position. The 2nd Massachusetts’ Lieutenant John A. Fox later wrote how he watched “man after man fall dead or wounded, while we inflicted but little injury upon the enemy.”¹⁴ Morse was hit by a spent ball, which “laid me on my back for a moment, and raised a pretty black & blue spot.”¹⁵ At about this same time, Shaw too was struck by a “spent ball in the neck, which bruised, but didn’t break the skin.”¹⁶

USAHEC (Fox); Medford Historical Society (Dwight)

John Fox (left) and Wilder Dwight

The scale and ferocity of the fighting in the first few hours could have constituted an entire battle unto itself, but it was just its first phase. By late morning the fighting shifted south around a farm trail that is remembered today as “The Bloody Lane.” Later in the afternoon, the Union’s IX Corps, under the command of Major General Ambrose Burnside, crossed a bridge that would eventually bear his name and advanced within sight of the town of Sharpsburg, only to be pushed back by the timely arrival of the balance of Lee’s army from Harpers Ferry. By day’s end, fewer than 12 hours of fighting had cost the Army of the Potomac over 12,000 killed, wounded, and missing, while the Confederate losses numbered roughly 10,000. Shaw later characterized the Battle of Antietam as “the greatest fight of the war,” and it remains the bloodiest day in American history.

As was the case following Cedar Mountain, Shaw experienced his own regiment’s lengthy casualty list—12 killed, 56 wounded, and 2 missing—through the loss of or injury to close friends. The growing tally now included Charles J. Mills, Francis W. Crowninshield, and James Francis, all of them wounded. The toughest loss for Shaw was Wilder Dwight, who fell during the regiment’s support of Sedgwick’s assault in the West Woods. Dwight had started the day writing to his mother, only to be interrupted by orders to advance. Following his fatal wounding, Dwight continued his now bloodstained letter: “Dearest mother, I am wounded so as to be helpless. Good bye if so it must be[.] I think I die in victory. God defend our country…. Give love to father & all my dear brothers.”¹⁷

Once darkness overtook the battlefield, Shaw noted that the “crickets chirped, and the frogs croaked, just as if nothing unusual had happened all day long, and presently the stars came out bright.” Morse and Shaw found a spot on the field to lay down to rest. They talked about their homes and families “among the thousands of dead about us.”¹⁸ Morse recalled that he and Shaw “slept within fifty feet of a pile of fourteen dead rebels, and in every direction about us they were lying thick.”¹⁹

Shaw awoke the next morning fully expecting the battle to continue. But orders to renew the attack never came, providing the Army of Northern Virginia the opportunity to recross the Potomac River later that evening. Lee’s uncontested withdrawal left Shaw perplexed. On the one hand, his confidence in McClellan’s leadership remained high. That the soldiers, Shaw asserted, “will fight under him better than under any one else, is proved by the difference between this battle and those about Manassas.” But he found it hard to believe that retaining “possession of the field” and allowing Lee’s army to leave “undisturbed” was all McClellan had “wanted.”²⁰ In fact, control of the battlefield was all McClellan apparently needed to claim victory. Although Lee had failed to achieve all his goals for the campaign, he managed to refocus the seat of war away from Richmond; and although severely battered, his army remained intact. McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee allowed Confederates to gather stragglers, rest, and recross the Potomac to continue with offensive operations.

McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee also resulted in a widening of the gulf between Shaw and his family. Frank and Sarah Shaw had grown disgusted with McClellan’s Democratic politics and opposition to emancipation; they directly questioned their son about why his commander appeared to be incapable of destroying Lee’s retreating army. Shaw’s response revealed the length to which he would go to defend his commander. He dismissed his parents’ criticisms, falling back on familiar complaints about army discipline, citing the “thousands of stragglers between here and Alexandria” as evidence of Union weakness—one he still believed McClellan was well-suited to address. Shaw urged his mother to judge McClellan purely on his ability to “obey orders and carry out plans,” not on whether he was “inspired with the same faith in [abolitionist] principles that you have.” “If we have a man of military ability,” he asserted, “we have what we need.”²¹ Political convictions, moral commitments, and the war’s deeper purpose were irrelevant to Shaw as long as generals could deliver battlefield victories.

The Philanthropic Work of Josephine Shaw Lowell (1911) [Shaw]; USAHEC (Quint)

Josephine Shaw (left) and Alonzo Quint

To his abolitionist parents, Shaw’s response to Lincoln’s September 22 issuance of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation raised clear questions. Lincoln had announced to his cabinet in July that he was planning to issue a proclamation that would give the Confederate states until the end of the year to conclude the rebellion and return to the Union. If they failed to do so, slaves (with a few exceptions) would be freed throughout the Confederacy—in areas not yet occupied by the Union army. Lincoln had agreed to wait for a military victory before announcing the new policy rather than risk looking politically desperate. Five days after Antietam, the proclamation was made public.

Though abolitionists like the Shaws lamented the fact that the proclamation would not be applied immediately—that it gave the rebelling states the opportunity to return to the Union with slavery largely intact; that it only applied to states still in rebellion; and, finally, that it reiterated support for the long-held conservative policies of compensation and colonization—the family was thrilled with the news. The proclamation, wrote Sarah to a correspondent overseas, “is in God’s providence that we shall never rest until Slavery is entirely destroyed, & that this is the first step towards it.”²² “God bless Abraham Lincoln,” Josephine wrote in her diary; but she also noted that her mother believed the proclamation did not go far enough.²³

Robert, however, was much more skeptical about the proclamation’s likely impact. “For my part, I can’t see what practical good it can do now,” he said to his mother shortly after the news broke. “Wherever our army has been, there remain no slaves, and the Proclamation will not free them where we don’t go.” Just as concerning to him was the likely response of the Confederate government, which he believed would “issue a proclamation threatening to hang every prisoner they take”—black and white—and quickly turn the conflict into a “war of extermination.” As for the proclamation’s impact on the enslaved population, Shaw worried that their “condition … will not be ameliorated … if they are suspected of plotting insurrection, or trying to run away.” Shaw knew his response would disappoint his mother, so he was quick to reassure her that he believed Lincoln’s proclamation was “the right thing to do, but that, as a war measure, the evil will overbalance the good for the present.”²⁴

National Portrait Gallery

Whereas his family was thrilled that President Lincoln had issued a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation days after Antietam, Shaw was skeptical of its impact. Above: Alexander Hay Ritchie’s 1866 painting depicts Lincoln reading the proclamation to his Cabinet.

In short, Shaw acknowledged the Emancipation Proclamation’s moral justification but remained fixated on strategic calculations rather than humanitarian imperatives. His primary concern was military efficiency. The question that ultimately mattered to him was whether emancipation would accelerate Union victory or prolong an already devastating conflict. Shaw’s pragmatic evaluation revealed how completely his soldier’s mind had trumped the moral considerations embraced by his civilian parents.

Shaw’s concerns about the proclamation were shared by many in the Union army, including his fellow officers in the 2nd Massachusetts. Initially, Morse maintained “that no change would be produced by” the proclamation; but he eventually admitted that Lincoln’s order was the “beginning of a great reform.” European nations would be less likely to officially recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation, Morse believed, while the Union army was likely to benefit from Confederate soldiers abandoning the army to protect their homes and families from “servile insurrection” that they believed would follow as news of the proclamation spread throughout the South.²⁵ Earlier in the year, the 2nd’s regimental chaplain, Alonzo Quint, had opined that “if ‘general emancipation’ were now made the object of this war, I fully believe that our armies would melt away.” “Our men are fighting for the flag, not for the abolition of slavery,” he continued. “General emancipation would add untold horrors to what already has horrors enough—war.” Though the chaplain’s views eventually softened—“The more I see, the more I believe in the feasibility of emancipation,” he later wrote—he maintained that any such measure would be accompanied by numerous “obstacles.”²⁶

Frank and Sarah Shaw should not have been surprised by their son’s position. He had never expressed much interest in the welfare of escaped slaves when his regiment was stationed in the Shenandoah Valley, nor did he ever explicitly state that he believed the war was being fought primarily to end slavery. Shaw’s focus from the beginning of his enlistment had been on preparing himself and his men for battle, defeating the Confederacy, and, in the process, advancing his own prospects through promotion. Though the fighting at Antietam had resulted in a Union victory, there was no indication that the war was any closer to being over. Shaw had no doubt that more fighting was in his future and, perhaps more importantly, he understood the war could still be lost.

Heritage Auctions

Shaw attempted to explain his stand on military emancipation to his family, as he did whenever their views diverged, which was not rare. “You must have thought, from my late letters, that I was degenerating sadly from the principles in which I was brought up,” he wrote to his mother, Sarah, in October 1862. Above: Robert’s father, Frank Shaw.

In an attempt to reassure his mother, Shaw in mid-October again tried to explain his position on Lincoln’s proclamation. “You must have thought, from my late letters, that I was degenerating sadly from the principles in which I was brought up; but an ordinary mortal must be somewhat affected by his surroundings, and events which you look at in one way from a distance, often seem very different when you are in the midst of them. The man at a distance is more apt to be impartial.”²⁷ Shaw pleaded for his mother’s understanding, insisting that he had not abandoned the antislavery principles taught to him as a child, but that from his perspective it was anything but clear on how best to prosecute the war and bring it to a successful conclusion. He wanted his mother to appreciate the confusion, uncertainty, and mortal danger that clouded every military decision.

More than anything, Shaw wanted his parents to cease discussing the president’s proclamation with him, and he characterized as “sensible” McClellan’s “order cautioning officers and soldiers to refrain from discussion of the President’s acts.”²⁸ In a letter written at the end of October, Shaw pleaded with Josephine to refrain from “making any more remarks on the conduct of the War.” The “subject is one, of which I am heartily sick.”²⁹

Heritage Auctions (Shaw); USAHEC (Morse)

Charles Morse (left) and Charles Russell Lowell

A few days after Antietam, the 2nd Massachusetts was ordered to take up a new position at South Mountain, near Harpers Ferry. The once familiar and picturesque landscape now looked desolate; Shaw noted how the “trees had all been cut down and the old paths obliterated” by the recent movement of armies.³⁰ The new encampment took them away from the work of treating the thousands of wounded—and burying the dead—in and around Sharpsburg. Shaw, along with Morse and a few other officers, organized a mess and managed to find a “good cook, who can make a good coffee … can cook eggs in any way very nicely, and can also make pies and pudding, to roast and broil a stew is child’s play for him.”³¹ Shaw used the lull to catch up on paperwork and the drilling of new recruits.

News that Lincoln removed McClellan from command the day after the congressional midterm elections on November 4 was welcome in the Shaw home; but throughout the Army of the Potomac there was little confidence in his replacement, Ambrose Burnside. Still, concerns on the home front that the Army of the Potomac’s rank and file would fight only under McClellan were quickly dispelled. Quint, the 2nd’s regimental chaplain, responded that such notions were “perfectly foolish.” “Our men fight for their country, not for a man.”³² Shaw would have agreed, yet he failed to see what Burnside had “ever done to merit the position.”³³ The change in command, along with deteriorating weather, convinced Shaw that the army’s post-Antietam inactivity would continue indefinitely.

Shaw began considering—not for the first time—a transfer out of the regiment. He had long been on the lookout for a command, and related responsibility, befitting his elevated class. In early October Shaw had been offered and rejected a position on the staff of his former tutor Frank Barlow, now a brigadier general and rising star in the Army of the Potomac. More enticing was the prospect of joining a cavalry unit being organized in Massachusetts, something Shaw had heard about through his cousin John Murray Forbes. Another friend, Charles Russell Lowell, was purportedly going to command the unit, with Caspar Crowninshield (Shaw’s former Harvard roommate currently in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry) serving as its major. Life in the cavalry would present a number of challenges, given Shaw’s lack of experience in such a unit, but his biggest consideration was rank. Promoted to captain after Antietam, Shaw was now one of the more experienced officers in the 2nd Massachusetts and was unwilling to “accept any position below that of 4th Captain” in a new unit, something he doubted the new cavalry regiment could “guarantee … to me.”³⁴

The return to the regiment of a familiar face, Shaw’s friend Harry Russell, who had been confined at Richmond’s Libby Prison after his capture at Cedar Mountain, made his decision to stay put much easier. Even though many friends had been wounded or killed, Shaw was still attached to the 2nd. “A man is or should be very loath to leave a regiment in which he has gone through as much as we have in this,” he explained to his sister. “I have had a great many discontented moments, when I have thought I wanted to change, but when it came to deciding, I never went—Excepting on to Gordon’s staff & then I was delighted to be back.”³⁵

The regiment’s celebration of its second Thanksgiving away from home proved to be a “very quiet affair” due to the absence of “so many faces.” Shaw could not help but reflect on the fates of his friends. “It is very strange and unfortunate,” he observed, “that the officers that have been killed were the very best we had, both as comrades and as military men…. No doubt, after a man is dead his virtues only are remembered, but in our case the dead ones really were the best.”³⁶ Shaw’s melancholy was magnified by a lingering concern that their deaths would ultimately prove to be in vain, given the continued inaction of the Army of the Potomac and the broader state of military affairs.

Shaw’s skepticism about Burnside’s qualifications were proven all too true, when on December 13 the new commander launched wave after wave of assaults against prepared Confederate positions overlooking the town of Fredericksburg along the Rappahannock River. By battle’s end, the Army of the Potomac had suffered roughly 12,500 casualties, the Confederates roughly half that number, with little gained for Burnside.³⁷ Shaw learned of the defeat while encamped 45 miles north of Fredericksburg at Fairfax Station with much of the rest of the XII Corps, which had been sent there and held in reserve. The 2nd Massachusetts had left their comfortable winter quarters to face “some very hard weather” that included “rain, snow, and cold” with little more than their tents and a couple of blankets that Shaw and Russell fastened together to stay warm.³⁸ Shaw likely worried about his friends in the 20th Massachusetts Infantry, which had taken part in the street fighting in Fredericksburg on December 12 before joining the failed main assault the following day.

But it was the loss of his cousin Theodore Parkman days later, on December 16—the result of friendly fire during a skirmish at Whitehall, North Carolina—that hit Shaw hardest. “It must be all chance; for if he had lived,” Shaw believed, “he would probably have done more good in the world than I ever shall.”³⁹

There was little more Shaw could say about his cousin’s loss in a minor, inconsequential fight other than to acknowledge that it was a “terrible thing that so many lives should have been lost for nothing.”⁴⁰ Shaw was feeling disillusioned as 1862 came to a close. He had witnessed too many military setbacks and mourned the loss of too many friends. In a letter to his sister on December 23—about a week before the Emancipation Proclamation was to take effect—Shaw expressed his frustrations with the war’s lack of progress:

They say that “Uncle Abe” is on the verge of lunacy. I don’t wonder at it. I am afraid now there is a danger of the government backing down. I had rather stay here all my life (though in this case, I should pray for a short one) than give up to the South. The most satisfactory ending to me, would be to have them brought to their knees, and then kicked out, and allowed to set up for themselves within certain limits. I would have them hemmed in on all sides by free States, and not allowed a chance of extending.⁴¹

Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection

A wartime depiction of the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg

Shaw must have known that his parents would read or at least hear about the content of this letter. After reassuring his mother that he had not abandoned his abolitionist principles, the question of emancipation appeared to be of little concern to him as the year came to an end. Shaw was willing to see the war end with a defeated, but independent, Confederacy left to govern itself with slavery still largely intact. His conviction that slavery could be contained by a cordon of free states harkened back to a position embraced by many Republicans before the war; to people like his parents, however, such a view represented a surrender of principles. Perhaps Shaw recognized that his was an untenable position, and perhaps he was simply using the opportunity to vent his frustrations.

The previous 12 months had been transformative for Robert Gould Shaw and the rest of the nation. Through it all, Shaw struggled to come to terms with the shifting landscape of the conflict. He had experienced the chaos and violence of battle, and although he stood the test well, he mourned the loss of friends whose comradeship he had relied on for support. He had witnessed thousands of African Americans flock to the Union army along the roads and pathways of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, forcing Republicans in Congress to approve policies that gradually eroded the institution of slavery. Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation moved the issue to the center of the nation’s wartime agenda, but it also widened the significant gulf between Shaw and his parents over how the war should be conducted. The war would assume a revolutionary character in the new year, one that would continue to undermine the institution of slavery, in part, through the recruitment of African Americans into the Union army. The only question that remained was whether, and how, Shaw would embrace achieving these new wartime goals.

Kevin M. Levin is the author of numerous books and articles on the Civil War, including Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. This article is based on his latest book, A Glorious Cause: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. You can find Levin at Civil War Memory.

Library of Congress

Workers stand on 2,000 boxes of hardtack being delivered.

This image provides a sense of the massive effort required to feed the Union army during the Civil War. Fourteen supply workers stand on the top of a mountain of more than 2,000 boxes of hardtack while another group of 18 stand on a similar mountain of boxes in the background on the right. Between them, more workers stand atop hundreds of barrels of salt pork. The photograph was made in the summer of 1864 at Cedar Level, Virginia, on the crucial 21-mile line—known as “Grant’s Railroad”—connecting the massive Federal supply depot at City Point and the Union forces besieging Petersburg. An army of 100,000 on the move required 2,500 supply wagons, consumed 600 tons of supplies each day, and relied on three different supply departments—the Commissary Department for food, the Quartermaster Department for supplies and horses, and the Ordnance Department for arms and munitions.

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

Library of Congress

Civil War Union soldier and a horse.

I will come directly to the point by saying that the horse was a hero.” So wrote former Union artillerist John D. Billings in his memoir of the war, Hardtack and Coffee, on the importance of horses to Civil War armies. Throughout the conflict, both sides maintained a nearly insatiable need for the versatile and vital animal that, as Billings put it, “was good for any kind of service,” from cavalry mounts to pullers of artillery, supply wagons, and ambulances. (Whereas the Confederacy called for cavalrymen to supply their own horses, and Union officers were required to do the same, the Union army usually purchased horses for its cavalry directly.)

Though nearly 4.7 million horses were in the loyal states at the beginning of the conflict, a number of factors—including hard usage, disease, exposure to battle, and, in the words of Union quartermaster general Montgomery Meigs, “[i]gnorance and carelessness of raw soldiers”—led to their increasing mortality (an estimated half of all horses employed for army service died during the war) and scarcity. Horses killed or wounded required quick replacement, while those otherwise worn down were sent to depots for rest, treatment, and, it was hoped, recovery.

The cycle of loss and replacement was such that, in September 1864 alone, the Union army saw 500 new horses supplied to it per day. Shown here are statistics associated with that army’s procurement and treatment of the animal Meigs called “essential to the efficiency of the troops.”

Civil War Army Horses by the Numbers

(All dates midyear to midyear, unless otherwise noted. Expenditures are rounded to the nearest dollar.)

57,576: Number of horses “condemned and sold, died, lost by capture, destroyed, worn out, etc.” (1862–1863)

50%–60%: Approximate number of “disabled and broken down” horses treated at depots that returned to military service

635,685: Horses purchased for the Union army during the war

30,277: Number of horses that died at depots (1864–1865)

28,091: Horses captured by the Union army (1862–1864)

$100/$185: Low and high wartime prices paid for army horses

$102,864,915: Money spent on the purchase of army horses

$65,625: Amount spent on hiring veterinary surgeons (1861–1864)

$27: Price charged by railroad companies to transport one carload of (approximately 14) army horses 50 miles by rail

4 Months: Average service time of a cavalry horse (before its loss) in the war’s final year

$216,442: Amount spent on medicines for horses and other animals during the same period

53,794: Number of army horses sold by the government after war’s end (May–October 1865)

26: Pounds (14 of hay and 12 of grain) of forage, or food, a horse required per day

$51,153,170: Spent on forage by the army (1861–1864)

$292,569: Spent on straw by the army during the same period

$357,275: Amount spent on forges, blacksmiths, and shoeing tools during the same period

Ronald S. Coddington Collection

Charles Alexander Macy Jr.

On June 1, 1861, the 7th New York State Militia arrived in New York City to a hero’s welcome. The men had just completed a six-week deployment to the imperiled nation’s capital. These first defenders were met by cheering throngs as they marched through the city to their home armory.

More than 1,000 strong, clad in gray uniforms and the finest trappings, the regiment had earned national attention as one of the best organized and best drilled military bodies in the country.

The regimental historian commented: “Every on-looker noted some change which six weeks’ service had wrought—the bronzed and hardy look of the men; or their uniforms, neat, but worn and travel-stained; or such little fantastic emblems of campaigning as the black and battered pipes worn in the caps.”

Charles Alexander Macy Jr. (1840–1902) posed for this portrait about a month after the regiment’s grand return, sporting one of these “fantastic emblems.” His meerschaum pipe with a wood stem is secured by an improvised holder formed by twisting and looping the cotton elastic chin strap on his hat’s brim. The arrangement is visible on the lower portion of the pipe stem.

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

Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History

“Butternut” clothing—its distinctive brown-gray color the product of dye from the nuts of butternut trees—was a common sight among Confederate soldiers and sympathizers during the war. This butternut frock coat was worn by a Confederate soldier in the 26th South Carolina Infantry.

but•ter•nuts | noun | A term applied to the Confederate soldiers during the late Civil War, so called from the color of their clothes, a cinnamon color, which color is obtained from the skins of the butternut.¹

American Beech. White Ash. Eastern Hemlock. Northern Red Oak. Sugar Maple. Each one standing tall as a silent sentinel in America’s woodlands and mountainsides. A towering force known to grow up to 100 feet tall, the butternut or white walnut tree is often found in the well-drained soils of streambanks, coves, and hillsides. Native to North America, its range extends west from New Brunswick to Minnesota and southward into northern Alabama and northern Arkansas. Each spring, the tree produces small yellow-green blossoms, which give way to lemon-shaped, green-hulled nuts that fall to earth in late summer or early autumn. Squirrels, birds, and deer nibble on its nuts. And the tree has long been valued by indigenous peoples as a source of food, dye, and medicine, and, later, by wave after wave of European settlers. Prized by generations of American furniture and cabinet makers, the butternut’s wood has a rich, warm, golden color that is soft yet durable. The tree’s edible nuts are rich, oily, and buttery in flavor. When simmered in warm water, the nut’s hulls release a dark brown substance that can be used to dye wool, cotton, or flax a yellow-brown or brown-gray color. In the early 19th century, that color was a familiar sight across parts of the Ohio River Valley, where dresses and shirts dyed this plain and serviceable yellow-brown tone—often called “butternut”—were worn by many of the region’s poor farmers.

In the decades following the American Revolution, Americans had streamed westward across the Appalachian Mountains and into the vast interior of the continent. Pushing out indigenous peoples, white families and whole communities set off from New England and upstate New York, making their way along the rugged roadways toward the Great Lakes and into the Old Northwest. Transplanting the cultural geography of the Northeast itself, they founded new towns that echoed the names of old Yankee settlements, sowed wheat, and planted apple orchards. At the same time, ambitious young men, newly married couples, and small farming families—often of Scotch-Irish decent—left the Upper South in search of a new life in the Ohio River Valley. The colder climate rendered cotton cultivation impractical, yet these southern migrants recreated much of the agricultural world they had known by planting corn, raising hogs, and imagining the western territories as possible ground for the expansion of slavery. With their iconic yellow-brown homespun clothing, these southern migrants soon earned the nickname Butternuts. The new settlers of the Ohio River Valley were different from the start. As historian Daniel Walker Howe wrote, “Yankees and Butternuts spoke with different accents, ate different foods, and practiced agriculture differently…. Yankees believed in public education; Butternuts, in individualism and low taxes. Yankees thought the Butternuts lazy; the latter resented Yankee condescension.” And, of course, they had diametrically opposed views on the institution of slavery.²

The division only intensified as the country drifted toward civil war. In Ohio, residents split sharply between pro-Union factions and the anti-war Copperheads, the latter led by Clement  Vallandigham, a state legislator from Dayton who became a two-term member of Congress. A fiery advocate of states’ rights and outspoken opponent of President Abraham Lincoln, Vallandigham pronounced congressional Republicans “belligerent” during an 1861 speech before the U.S. House of Representatives, and firmly advocated “a choice of peaceable disunion upon the one hand, or Union through adjustment and conciliation upon the other.”³ Later, in 1863, he dismissed the Emancipation Proclamation, saying a “war for the Union was abandoned; war for the Negro openly begun…. With what success? Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer.”⁴ Such political views garnered widespread sympathy among the southern-leaning, Scotch-Irish descendants who had made their home in the Ohio River Valley at the start of the 19th century. Covering a July 1863 event at which Vallandigham spoke, a startled New York Times reporter wrote, “when the day arrived, there were enough ‘butternuts’ here to make even Jeff Davis turn pale, had they not been his fast friends. They came prepared and bragging that they were going to whip every Union man out of the place.” A “few boys” from the 3rd Ohio Infantry in attendance, however, confronted their political foes and “tore off their butternut coats.”⁵ Immersed within this divisive political climate, pro-secessionists and anti-Unionists became known throughout the nation as Copperheads or Butternuts.

Heritage Auctions (ha.com)

A Confederate officer’s butternut-dyed forage cap

To publicly display their political allegiance, Vallandigham supporters donned clothing dyed with butternut or black walnut, which produced a color reminiscent of Confederate soldiers’ brown-gray uniforms. Women showed their political allegiance by wearing decorative brooches and pins made from butternut hulls and other nuts, pits, and seeds. As one early 20th-century academic theorized: “In cutting a butternut transversely and removing the kernel, there were found the outlines of two perfect hearts joined together. Wearing the butternut badges, they explained that they represented the Northern heart and the Southern heart which could not be torn asunder by war.”⁶ The brown-gray color of butternut hulls became forever associated with the Confederacy, and the term Butternut  or Butternuts  began to appear in many late-19th-century dictionaries. Published in 1890, John S. Farmer’s Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present wrote, “the sympathisers with the South in the North and the Middle States during the American Civil War; the term was derived from the colour of the uniforms worn in the early part of the war by Confederate soldiers in the West, which, being homespun, were dyed brown with the juice of the Butternut….”⁷

In 1915, as the nation faced the prospect of yet another protracted war—this time, with Germany—the United States Department of Commerce issued an alarming report predicting an acute shortage of “aniline,” or synthetic, dyes. “Since August 1, 1914, in consequence of the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, this foreign supply has been interrupted and constantly threatened with nearly complete cessation…. Some important dyes are totally unobtainable. Prices have mounted from 25 to 50 per cent on such dyestuffs as can be delivered,” reported Secretary of Commerce William C. Redfield.⁸ Encouraging American manufacturers to “fall back upon its own resources,” the American Leather Chemists Association reminded the nation “of our neglected forest supplies” and the people who once “peeled bark, dug roots, chipped wood and made dyes.” Although more subdued in color than the modern aniline dyes popular with consumers, yellow oak, black walnut, Osage orange, yellow wood, mesquite, staghorn sumac, alder, red gum, locust, bluewood, and dogwood could be used to produce dye. Butternut, or Juglans cinerea, the association noted, “was formerly a valuable dye material…. The tree is found in all northern states east of the Mississippi River, and even westward, and it grows also in most of the southern states.” Explicitly connecting the tree to its earlier Civil War history, the report wrote, “the ‘Confederate jeans,’ the cloth much used for Confederate uniform[s] in Tennessee and Kentucky during the Civil War, was with the bark of this tree. It was not the historic ‘confederate gray.’”⁹ Despite the logistical challenges of importing aniline dyes between 1914 and 1918, the Great War did not spur a resurgence of butternut gray among fashionable or patriotic Americans.

Today, the butternut tree is becoming increasingly rare and is considered a “species of concern” or a “sensitive species” in several states. Facing habitat destruction and highly susceptible to a fungal pathogen known as butternut canker, the United States Forest Service estimated that 77 percent of the butternut trees in North Carolina and Virginia have died in recent decades. Since the 1980s, the number of butternut trees has declined 44 percent across its range.¹⁰ Despite its reduced numbers, the United States Department of Agriculture still includes butternut on its list of “Native Plant Dyes” and expressly connects the brown-gray color back to the “famous gray coats that the Confederate Army wore during the Civil War.”¹¹

Tracy L. Barnett is a visiting assistant professor of history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She has a doctorate in American history from the University of Georgia. Firearms—their meaning to men and their availability in 19th-century America—are the center of her scholarship.

This Kurz & Allison chromolithograph depicts the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, where a bold decision by Confederate general Benjamin McCulloch led to his death.

The first shot that struck Brigadier General Benjamin McCulloch at Pea Ridge on the morning of March 7, 1862, would have sounded no different from the thousands already echoing through the Arkansas woods. The battlefield had dissolved into chaos, with confused lines of men who often had only the faintest idea where friend or enemy stood. McCulloch was on horseback, peering through the trees to discover what Federal forces lay before him. A Union skirmisher raised his rifle and fired. Within moments, one of the Confederacy’s most experienced officers lay dead.

McCulloch’s death may be thought of as a random moment of battlefield chance. Bullets have no conscience, and generals in the wrong place at the wrong time can stop a bullet as readily as a private. Yet chance alone cannot explain why McCulloch exposed himself so completely. His death emerged from a series of human decisions, each one understandable by itself, yet devastating when connected. Those choices were made by McCulloch, his fellow commanders, and by the officers who struggled to command armies across terrain that made certainty impossible.

The Life and Services of Gen. Ben McCulloch (1888)

Benjamin McCulloch

Ben McCulloch hardly fit the image of a polished military commander. He was born in Tennessee and, as a child, idolized his neighbor Dave Crockett. In his 20s he followed Crockett to Texas, where he hunted, surveyed, filibustered, mined, served as a Texas Ranger, fought during the Texas Revolution, battled Native Americans, and gained national fame during the Mexican-American War. By the outbreak of the Civil War, he was a rising star.

All of that shaped McCulloch, who distrusted rigid systems of command, disliked hierarchy, and refused to wear a military uniform. He was intelligent, well-read, and highly experienced, and preferred seeing situations with his own eyes before making important decisions. The habits that had served McCulloch well in frontier fighting, where engagements often involved relatively small forces moving across wide expanses, formed a reservoir of judgment that had saved his life and the lives of his men more than once. These habits also seemed to translate into battlefield success, as demonstrated in his strong performance at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in August 1861. Unfortunately, they would also be his undoing.1

The Battle of Pea Ridge began as an ambitious Confederate effort to recover Missouri from Union forces and restore Confederate military momentum west of the Mississippi River. Major General Earl Van Dorn commanded roughly 16,000 Confederate soldiers against about 10,500 Federals under Brigadier General Samuel Curtis. Van Dorn intended to launch a bold turning movement around Curtis’ right flank before attacking the enemy from the rear, destroying the Union army, then advancing north from Arkansas into Missouri.

The Life and Services of Gen. Ben McCulloch (1888)

A mid-20th-century depiction of the Battle of Pea Ridge

The plan looked impressive on paper, but its execution demanded extraordinary coordination, something the ragtag Confederate army could not accomplish even under ideal circumstances. Van Dorn divided his army into two wings; McCulloch commanded one, a mixed division of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas men, along with Confederate-aligned Native Americans, while Major General Sterling Price led the other, consisting primarily of Missourians. Dense forests, rough Ozarks terrain, delayed marches, short supplies, and brutal cold disrupted Van Dorn’s aggressive timetable. By March 7, the Confederates had reached their objectives—at different times, hungry and footsore, and with only a partial understanding of where supporting forces stood.²

Even before the shooting started, command decisions had narrowed McCulloch’s options. Van Dorn’s ambitious operational design established the conditions that shaped every later choice. He expected the separated wings to maintain momentum and coordination despite limited staff work, poor maps, and primitive communications. Orders traveled slowly. Couriers became lost. Commanders often relied on assumptions rather than confirmed information.

This mattered enormously once fighting erupted near the tiny hamlet of Leetown, near the Federal army’s supply line, where McCulloch believed only small Federal detachments blocked his advance. Instead, Union colonel Peter J. Osterhaus had moved his mixed force of infantry, cavalry, and 12 guns aggressively to investigate reports of Confederate activity, while additional Federal reinforcements drew near. What began as an attempted reconnaissance by McCulloch’s wing quickly expanded into a significant engagement.³

McCulloch reacted cautiously at first. Attacking blindly through wooded terrain invited disaster, and the ground near Leetown was difficult; careful use of his artillery paid off as McCulloch’s gunners were able to push portions of the Federal line back.⁴

Although McCulloch’s judgment to that point was sound enough, his next decision was the fatal one. Fighting a battle without a clear understanding of the enemy’s strength and location often leads to defeat. McCulloch surely understood this and seems to have thought personal reconnaissance would produce better information than conflicting reports delivered by subordinates. If he could not get a clear picture of things from his subordinates, then the best option, to McCulloch, was to ride forward and see for himself.

Modern readers may wonder why a general entertained such obvious danger. The answer lies partly in Civil War command culture. Generals frequently led from the front because battlefield communications remained painfully limited. Signal systems were primitive. Dense woods rendered flags useless. Smoke concealed troop movements. Written orders consumed precious time. Officers often believed direct observation represented the fastest path to accurate decisions.

McCulloch also trusted his own judgment more than scattered secondhand reports. So, following his instincts, at about 10:30 a.m. he mounted up and began preparing a scouting expedition. According to historian Thomas Cutrer, McCulloch told staff officers Lunsford L. Lomax and Frank C. Armstrong, “I will ride forward a little and reconnoiter the enemy’s position.” While unwise, his decision was not reckless. Before he left, McCulloch ordered his staff to remain behind, telling them, “Your gray horses will attract the fire of the sharpshooters.”⁵ He knew he had to be careful, and did not wish to put his staff in unnecessary danger.

McCulloch rode forward and paused on a brushy height to observe the Federal lines. Union soldiers from the 36th Illinois Infantry had occupied concealed positions among the far trees, and they quickly spotted a mounted Confederate officer moving through the brush. “In a moment,” according to one witness, “was heard a volley, fired from at least twenty-five rifles.” At least one of the Federal skirmishers’ musket balls, perhaps fired by Private Peter Pelican, struck McCulloch and also wounded his horse. McCulloch slumped from the saddle and died almost instantly.⁶

The consequences extended far beyond one man’s death. Command rarely survives sudden decapitation without confusion. McCulloch had issued no detailed succession plan for the immediate tactical situation unfolding around Leetown. Brigadier General James McIntosh, a cavalryman, assumed command of McCulloch’s wing according to seniority. Rather than pause long enough to establish control over scattered units, McIntosh ordered an aggressive charge intended to recover the initiative, as well as McCulloch’s body.⁷

McIntosh’s decision reflected courage, but like McCulloch’s, it also reflected incomplete information. McIntosh soon rode into heavy Federal fire and was killed at the head of the charge. Within a remarkably short span, the wing had lost its commanding general and his immediate successor. Responsibility next passed to Colonel Louis Hébert, who possessed little understanding of the broader battlefield situation because he had focused on directing his own brigade. Hébert advanced through the woods searching for the enemy, became isolated, and was eventually taken prisoner. Command of McCulloch’s wing effectively collapsed.⁸

McCulloch’s and McIntosh’s deaths froze Confederate momentum precisely when coordinated pressure might have overwhelmed Federal resistance around Leetown. Brigades waited for orders that never arrived. Some units continued fighting independently. Others halted altogether because no one could determine the larger plan. Van Dorn, operating elsewhere on the battlefield, remained unaware for hours that an entire wing of his army had essentially ceased functioning as an organized force.⁹ The following day, the battle at Pea Ridge ended in a decisive Confederate defeat.

McCulloch had confronted uncertainty with courage, and his solution reflected habits he had developed over decades on the frontier. Battles are shaped first by people making difficult decisions with limited knowledge, convinced that one more step forward will reveal the truth. But in this case, long habits cultivated through hard experience failed to match the requirements for commanding a large Civil War army. At Pea Ridge, Benjamin McCulloch took a risk and a step too many.

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).

Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia vol. 2 (1900)

Stratford Hall

1807

January 19

Robert Edward Lee is born at Stratford Hall, Virginia (above), the fifth child of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee (1756–1818) and Anne Carter Lee (1773–1829)

1829

June

Graduates second in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point; commissioned brevet second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers

June 30

National Park Service

Mary Custis Lee portrait.

Marries Mary Anna Randolph Custis (1807–1873)

1834

Assigned as an assistant in the chief engineer’s office in Washington, D.C.; Lee family moves to Arlington House (November)

1838

August

Library of Congress

Robert E. Lee as captain in the Corps of Engineers

Promoted to captain in the Corps of Engineers

1846–48

Serves with distinction in the Mexican War; receives three brevet promotions

1852–55

Serves as superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point

1855

Promoted to lieutenant colonel of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, stationed in Texas

1859

October

Gen. Robert E. Lee (1897)

Illustration of John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid.

Commands military detachment that suppresses John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid

1860

February

Departs Arlington to rejoin the 2nd U.S. Cavalry in Texas

1861

March 1

National Portrait Gallery

General-in-Chief Winfield Scott

Recalled to Washington, D.C., by General-in-Chief Winfield Scott

April 18

Library of Congress

Francis Preston Blair

Offered command of U.S. forces (on behalf of the president in a meeting with Francis Preston Blair)

April 20

Submits his resignation from the U.S. Army

April 23

Accepts command of Virginia state military and naval forces

May 14

Commissioned brigadier general in the Confederate army

July 28

Departs Richmond for western Virginia with orders to coordinate the Confederate forces in the region

August 31

Robert E. Lee as full general of the Confederate army.

Confirmed as full general in the Confederate army

September 12–15

Defeated at Battle of Cheat Mountain in western Virginia

November 5

Appointed commander of the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida; departs for Charleston, South Carolina, the next day

1862

March 14

Appointed acting secretary of war

June 1

Assumes command of the Confederate army protecting Virginia after its commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, was wounded the previous day at the Battle of Seven Pines

June 25 – July 1

Pushes George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac away from Richmond at the Seven Days Battles

August 28 – 30

Victory at Battle of Second Bull Run

September 3

Leads Army of Northern Virginia northward into Maryland

September 14

Defeated at Battle of South Mountain

September 17

Fights tactically inconclusive Battle of Antietam

December 13

Library of Congress

Robert E. Lee with Confederate soldiers during the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Victory at Battle of Fredericksburg

1863

April 30 – May 6

Library of Congress

Illustration of Robert E. Lee on his horse at the Battle of Chancellorsville.

Victory at Battle of Chancellorsville

June 15

Army of Northern Virginia begins to enter Maryland on second invasion of the North

July 1 – 3

Defeated at Battle of Gettysburg

August 8

Sends letter of resignation to President Jefferson Davis, who rejects it

1864

May 4 – June 12

Fights Overland Campaign against Ulysses S. Grant, a strategic Union victory

June 15 – March 25, 1865

Defeated at Siege of Petersburg

1865

April 9

Library of Congress

Robert E. Lee surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House.

Surrenders Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court House

October 2

Installed as president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University)

1870

October 12

Library of Congress

Sculpture of Robert E. Lee on his death bed.

Dies at 63 in Lexington, Virginia, from pneumonia, two weeks after suffering a stroke

Heritage Auctions (ha.com)

Gettysburg cane carved for Edwin Stanton

A Gift From Lincoln

The Artifact

Gettysburg cane carved for Edwin Stanton

Condition

The cane is well used, with normal wear consistent with age and handling.

Details

In November 1863, Abraham Lincoln was invited to share “a few appropriate remarks” at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on grounds where the battle had been fought just four months earlier. On the 19th, Lincoln delivered a brief oration in front of an assembled crowd of 15,000 soldiers and civilians, in which he “resolve[d] that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

During his Gettysburg trip, Lincoln fashioned a 38-inch-long cane from a branch taken from the battlefield, possibly by his resident host, David Wills. The president gifted it as a keepsake to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was not part of Lincoln’s Gettysburg entourage but whom the president knew had a fondness for canes. Stanton later added a brass knob (shown here), on which had been engraved “From the Gettysburg Battlefield, July 1. 2. 3. 1863. A. Lincoln, Pres’t of U.S.,” memorializing the importance of the cane’s origin. After Stanton’s death in 1869, the cane passed to a son, then to a granddaughter, before being sold with other items belonging to Stanton at an estate sale in 1971.

Extras

In addition to the Gettysburg cane, the collection included four other canes owned by Stanton—one of them fashioned from the flagstaff of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, where the war began—as well as the wooden crate in which the canes were preserved.

Quotable

In February 1909, writer W.C. Predigo described Stanton’s Gettysburg cane—“an interesting relic formerly the property of President Lincoln”—for The National Magazine: “Upon the occasion of his memorable visit to Gettysburg the President cut with his own hands a cane, which he afterward presented to his War Secretary, Edwin M. Stanton, by whom it was naturally highly prized. This cane is now in the possession of Mr. (Ernest L.) Jahncke, President of the Jahncke Navigation Company of New Orleans, who married a granddaughter of Secretary Stanton. It has a brass top with an engraved inscription, which was probably placed on the treasured souvenir by Secretary Stanton, by whose family it has been carefully preserved. As might be expected of anything selected by Lincoln, it is strong and solid, somewhat of ‘a big stick’ in appearance, and promises to survive many more generations of owners.”

Price

$93,750 (realized at Dallas, Texas, in October 2025). “Together, these canes form one of the most remarkable groupings of Civil War relics in private hands, bridging the president who saved the Union with the secretary who enforced his will,” a Heritage Auctions representative noted at the time.

American Battlefield Trust

The trust recently partnered with the North Carolina Department of Commerce and America 250 NC to place interactive kiosks highlighting the state’s vast array of historic sites into each of its official welcome centers.

In celebration of North Carolina’s rich history and America’s 250th birthday, the American Battlefield Trust has collaborated with the North Carolina Department of Commerce and America 250 NC to place interactive kiosks highlighting the Tar Heel State’s vast array of historic sites into each of the state’s official welcome centers.

The North Carolina History Explorer transports viewers to the sites, events, and stories that shaped the state’s early history through maps, photography, and other multimedia content. The first-of-its-kind kiosk was developed by the Trust alongside its longtime technology partner, Interactive Knowledge of Charlotte, North Carolina.

The Explorer is organized around three major eras of North Carolina’s early history: “Our Revolutionary Journey” (1771–1783) focuses on the state’s role in the Revolutionary Era, including the Regulator Movement and related political and social developments; “From Statehood to Secession” (1784–1861) covers North Carolina’s early years as a state through the antebellum period, highlighting political, economic and cultural changes that determined the path toward secession; and “A State Divided” (1861–1865) examines the state’s Civil War experience with military events, effects on the home front, and the human stories that defined the period.

Within each era, the Explorer presents sites, themes, and stories rooted in specific places, encouraging visitors to think deeply about the state’s history. It integrates content and draws connectivity from networks, including North Carolina State Historic Sites and Parks and National Park Service units and affiliates, plus the Trust’s Road to Freedom, which interprets African-American history, and the Medal of Honor Valor Trail.

We are grateful for this unique opportunity to share with residents and visitors the hundreds of opportunities across North Carolina for them to experience the power of place. It is our hope that as this collaboration flourishes, it enables us to pursue similar initiatives in other states with rich connections to our nation’s first century.

As the nation prepared to mark its 250th Independence Day, history lovers and preservationists were given another reason to celebrate: On the afternoon of July 2, QTS, the remaining developer petitioning the Virginia Supreme Court to hear its case for building a data center on the Manassas Battlefield, announced it had withdrawn its appeal. The years-long fight to halt the colossal data center complex adjacent to the national park was over.

The victory would not have been possible without many allies across the preservation community—and the support of thousands of Trust members who donated to the legal effort. Sadly, Manassas was not the only battlefield threatened; the Trust is also engaged in legal action to overturn a megadevelopment rezoning at The Wilderness.

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.

Harper's Weekly

Army on the march in Shenandoah Valley.

“Most of our marches were on graveled turnpike roads, which were very severe on the barefooted men and cut up their feet horribly. When the poor fellows could get rags they would tie them around their feet for protection. I have seen the men rob the dead of their shoes and clothing, but I cannot blame a man for doing a thing which is almost necessary in order to preserve his own life.”

–Confederate surgeon Spencer Glasgow Welch, in a letter to his wife, September 24, 1862

Campfire and Battlefield (1896)

Footsore campfire and battlefield

“It is said that men have slept as they marched. I have marched till it seemed as if it was no longer by will power but by a sort of dazed mechanism.”

–C.W. Bardeen, 1st Massachusetts Infantry, in his diary, February 16, 1863

“[W]e were on the backward march to old camps under cover of one of the severest snow storms of the winter. The men flung themselves into line, dancing the ‘snow reel’—laughing at distance and fatigue, or the unreasonableness of a return to camps through such snow—9 inches—and over such new made earth.”

–A Confederate soldier, from a winter camp near Richmond, in a letter to the Atlanta Southern Confederacy, March 27, 1863

Campfire and Battlefield (1896)

Civil War soldiers marching through Tennessee.

“My gait was somewhat like that of a lame duck, but I waddled along at first as fast as the remainder of our crew….”

–Justus M. Silliman, 17th Connecticut Infantry, on the impact a recent long march had on him, in a letter to his mother, December 31, 1862

Wikimedia

Samuel Watkins

“I cannot remember of ever experiencing a harder or more fatiguing march. It seemed that mountain was piled upon mountain. No sooner would we arrive at a place that seemed to be the top than another view of a higher, and yet higher mountain would rise before us. From the foot to the top of the mountain the soldiers lined the road, broken down and exhausted.”

–Sam Watkins (above), 1st Tennessee Infantry, on an early war movement over the Allegheny Mountains, in his memoir of the war