Month: March 2026

Crafty Draft Dodger

The letter below was sent to Mary’s brother-in-law, Corporal Josiah H. Sturtevant of the 17th Maine Regiment, who was offered an officer’s commission in the 80th US Colored Troops regiment in March 1863. As few white officers would accept service in a colored regiment, an effective strategy was to offer a white enlisted men receiving $15 per month a pay increase to $105 as a second lieutenant. Ironically, Sturtevant continued receiving enlisted pay while incurring the expenses of an officer through the end of the war and not receiving restitution until 25 years after the war.

The letter also refers to the $300 commutation which bought a substitute for conscripted Northern men – and reveals the great interest in colored troops serving in place of white Northern citizens who wished to remain at home.

Mount Vernon, N.Y., January 3, 1864

Dear Brother Josiah:

“Mr. Lee, the patriotic Dutch Reformed Minister, was drafted. He has always said if he was drafted, he should certainly go. After he was drafted, he said: “The Lord had given him a loud call to go, and if he didn’t give him a louder one to stay at home, he should go. He whined and griped around till he begged $300 to pay his commutation.

What did he do but pay $100 for a Town bond that draws 10% interest, cooly pockets the other $200, and at the end of the year gets the other $100 and so the $300 eventually comes out of the town taxpayers.

Now I say such a rascal ought to be roasted over a slow fire, at least till the war is over, and I would willingly gather faggots to keep it burning till my arms were worn off my shoulders.

I have always contended that the African, give him an equal chance, will make as good if not better soldiers than his white brother, and I believe we shall see the day that nine-tenths of our standing army will be composed of the freed men of the Nation.

Yours,

Mary”

(Josiah Volunteered. A Collection of Diaries and Letters. Arnold H. Sturtevant. 1977, pp. 114; 115)

Fredericksburg’s Field of Death

In mid-December 1862, Abraham Lincoln dispatched an army of over 122,000 men under Gen. Ambrose Burnside to northern Virginia with orders to defeat Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army of 72,000 near Fredericksburg. The debacle that followed cost Lincoln the lives of nearly 13,000 men, another 10,000 wounded, and the virtual end of voluntary northern enlistments. This forced Lincoln to resort to large financial bounties to attract mercenaries, and substitutes could be bought for northern men to escape conscription.

Fredericksburg’s Field of Death

The commander of a Maine regiment wrote of the battle’s aftermath:

“We had to pick our way over a field strewn with incongruous ruin; men torn and broken and cut to pieces in every indescribable way, cannon dismounted, gun carriages smashed or overturned, ammunition chests flung wildly about, horses dead and half-dead still in harness . . .” Col. Joshua Chamberlain

Also, poet Walt Whitman visited the aftermath of Fredericksburg in search of his wounded brother George:

“Fredericksburg had turned into a massacre. [General] Burnside sacrificed wave after wave of his troops against the strong Confederate positions – only to be stopped short, again and again, in bloody carnage at a sunken road beneath Marye’s Heights . . . From this chaos came row upon row of cold, stone grave markers still covering acres of highlands over Fredericksburg City. Some 13,000 of Lincoln’s soldiers dead.”

Began my visits among the camp hospitals in Burnside’s army. Outside a house used as a hospital, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the entrance, I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. – a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie nearby [with] each covered by a brown woolen blanket. In the dooryard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel staves or broken boards stuck in the dirt.”

“Death is nothing here. As you step out in the morning from your tent to wash your face, you see before you on a stretcher a shapeless, extended object, and over it is thrown a dark gray blanket. It is the corpse of some wounded or sick soldier of the regiment who died in the hospital during the night; [or it might be] a row of three or four corpses covered over. No one makes an ado. There comes a detail of men to bury them; all useless ceremony is omitted. The stern realities of the marches and many battles of a campaign make the old etiquette a nuisance.”

(Josiah Volunteered. A Collection of Diaries and Letters. Arnold H. Sturtevant. 1977, pp. 75-81)

 

The South’s Great Fear

By the early 1700s, Liverpool’s dominance in slave ship construction had been surpassed by Providence, Rhode Island, with New England prospering greatly from trading Yankee notions for slaves held by African tribes. These ships returned to the Western Hemisphere with their human cargo for West Indies and British American plantations.

Then came the cotton gin which increased the speed that cotton fibers were separated from the seeds – invented and patented in 1794 by Massachusetts tinkerer Eli Whitney. This new device increased the need for more laborers in the South to harvest more cotton to be sold to Northern and European markets. Before the gin, cotton separation was a slow process which restricted the harvesting to local farm clothing usages, which likely would have doomed the American slave economy in a peaceful manner.

The South’s Great Fear

“Only three years before the Whitney invention, an event occurred which caused tremors in plantations across America and caused many slave owners to seriously rethink the safety of owning slaves. This tragedy was the bloody uprising of African slaves in the French colony of Saint Domingue, or Santo Domingo, and known today as Haiti.

This uprising of some 500,000 Africans was led by a voodoo priest named Boukman in a revolt against the French colonists and possibly inspired by the bloody French Revolution of the same time. On Saint Domingue, about 5,000 white colonists, men, women and children, were butchered in massive riots that swept the island. White men were beheaded, drowned or burned to death; women were raped, butchered and disemboweled, and if pregnant their babies were torn out of their wombs. White children were impaled on spears and carried through the streets as symbol of the revolt.

After two months of this living hell, over 1,000 farms and sugar plantations had been burned to the ground. After news of this revolt reached American shores, relations between white and black took a new turn with daily slave patrols becoming the norm, and every slave uprising in America, real or imagined, would be compared to Santo Domingue.”

(Countdown to Manassas, The Antebellum Chronology: July 4, 1776-July 21, 1861. Ken Drew; Ken Drew Publisher, pg. 8; 10)

 

A Distinguishing Mark of Gentle Nurture

A Distinguishing Mark of Gentle Nurture

“Of course, what was to all true Confederates beyond a question a “holy cause,” “the holiest of causes,” this fight in defence of “the sacred soil” of our native land, was to the other side “a wicked rebellion” and “damnable treason,” and both parties to the quarrel were not sparing of epithets which, at the distance of time, may seem to our children unnecessarily undignified; and not doubt some of these epitheta orantia continue to flourish in remote regions, just a pictorial representations of Yankees and rebels in all their respective fiendishness are still cherished here and there.

At the Centennial Exposition of 1876, by way of conciliating the sections, the place of honor in the “Art Annex” was given to Rothermel’s painting of the battle of Gettysburg, in which the face of every dying Union soldier is lighted with a celestial smile, while guilt and despair are stamped on the wan countenances of the moribund rebels. At least such is my recollection of the painting; and I hope that I may be pardoned for the malicious pleasure I felt when informed of the high price the State of Pennsylvania paid for that work of art. The dominant feeling was amusement, not indignation.

But as I looked at it, I recalled another picture of a battle-scene, painted by a French artist, who had watched our life with an artist’s eye. One of the figures in the foreground was a dead Confederate boy, lying in the angle of a worm fence. His uniform was worn and ragged, mud-stained as well as blood-stained; the cap which had fallen from his head was a tatter, and the torn shoes were ready to drop from his stiffening feet; but in the buttonhole of his tunic was stuck the inevitable toothbrush, which continued even to the end of the war to be the distinguishing mark of gentle nurture – the souvenir that the Confederate soldier so often received from fair sympathizers in border towns.

I am not a realist, but I would not exchange that homely toothbrush for the most angelic smile that Rothermel’s brush could have conjured up.”

(The Creed of the Old South. Basil L. Gildersleeve. The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915, pp. 17-19)

History in Education

History in Education

The following is excerpted from a 1999 Southern Partisan interview with acclaimed educator, author and historian Dr. Clyde N. Wilson, former Chair of the University of South Carolina Department of History. There he was editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun, volumes 10 through 28 which drew praise from the Journal of American History; was presented with the Bostick Medal for Contributions to South Carolina Letters; the John Randolph Club Award for Lifetime Achievement; and was the founding Dean of the Stephen D. Lee Institute.

The question posed was: “Do you think the ordinary Southerner should be concerned or care about what happens in the field of education?”

“Yes, of course, because the educational system is supposed to belong to the people. It doesn’t. It belongs to the experts. But it should belong to the people, and the people have a right to hope that the university will be a part of the support of their culture. That is why South Carolina College was founded.

But I am inclined more and more to think that the entire public education system is more and more irrelevant. I look at what the historians are doing. They are writing about things that are so narrow or so esoteric that nobody cares. They are like a bureaucracy, divorced from the real world. Higher education is going that way, therefore becoming more irrelevant all the time. And in the future, more of the really good education is going to take place outside of public institutions.  

I hope people will begin developing institutions – different kinds of institutions. This why we have begun the League of the South Institute for Southern History and Culture. We’ve had a number of very successful summer schools and are starting a new program called Hedge Schools. This was how the Irish preserved their language and culture while under occupation as the British were trying to wipe out their language and customs. Speaking anything but English was forbidden, so you learned Gaelic under the hedge, or in a barn somewhere to keep up your history and traditions. It was a great idea.”

When asked what he considered to be the common traits of great American historians, Dr. Wilson’s answered with the following:

“Imagination and fairness. Like a judge, you have to be able to see that history is complicated and that there are many different things going on. A historian should understand this and not judge the past so readily as it seems so common now, such as judging people of the past as evil because they didn’t do things as we do today. And fairness, as facts don’t speak for themselves and any historical account is an arrangement of particular facts. To make some sort of meaning requires imagination. Understanding what is important and portraying it in a imaginative way. An example is Shelby Foote, who was able to absorb all the historical material, but render it in a way that presents a readable, but true story.”

It is notable that Foote was not an academically trained historian yet achieved his high stature and fame through hard work and exhaustive reading, esp. Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon and Proust.

(Southern Partisan, 2nd Quarter 1999, pp. 47-48)