Category: Carnage

Hoke’s Men at Cold Harbor

The Lincoln government fed northern newspapers horrid tales of inhuman treatment of prisoners held at Andersonville, Georgia, while refusing Southern pleadings to send doctors and medicine safe passage to feed and treat them. Grant’s policy, underscored by Lincoln, was to refuse prisoner exchange as blue-clad prisoners would be sent home to recuperate while most Southern prisoners returned to the ranks to fight.

Hoke’s Men at Cold Harbor

“At an early hour on June 3, 1864, the battle was opened by a vicious assault upon our right and center,” much of which was occupied by Maj-Gen. Robert F. Hoke’s command. As our cannon commanded the field, the loss of the enemy was frightful to contemplate with the ground on our front covered with their dead and wounded. For two days Grant left his dead unburied and the wounded left to their loneliness and agony. Then he reluctantly asked for a truce to bury the one and care for the other.”

Time and time again the order was given to advance as new troops were moved to the front and division after division was hurled against the works held by Kershaw and Hoke, where Lee’s veterans with steady nerve and accurate aim sent death and destruction to the advancing hosts of the enemy. Everywhere along the line Grant’s mighty army was hurled back by a storm of steel.”

(Sketch of Gen. Robert Hoke, Tho. Hufham, Confederate Veteran, Sept. 1912, p. 438)

Old Men and Boys Defend Marianna

The raid upon the peaceful town of Marianna, Florida in late September 1864 was led by Brig-Gen. Alexander Asboth, a refugee from the failed 1848 Hungarian socialist revolution. Earlier in the Civil War he fought under Fremont in Missouri and Arkansas along with other European revolutionaries, following nomination as brigadier by Abraham Lincoln. In 1863 he commanded the district of West Florida and led raids to suppress armed resistance. During his attack on Marianna, Asboth was severely wounded by two bullets, one shattering his left arm and another lodged under his right cheek.

Old Men and Boys Defend Marianna

“September 18-October 4: General Asboth leaves Barrancas at the head of 700 picked mounted troops- black and white – and several artillery pieces. They cross Pensacola Bay and move the fifty miles to East Pass. Here the raiders take on supplies from their steamer Lizzie Davis and then march rapidly northeast into Washington and Walton counties.

At daybreak on September 23, a surprise attack is made on the town of Eucheanna plundering homes, gathering horses and mules, and taking fifteen citizens as prisoners. The raiding column then moves toward Jackson County while news of their approach quickly reaches the town of Marianna, the county seat. Defense reparations are hastily made there with the few depleted companies of irregular Confederate troops in and about the town. Also, old men and boys are armed with available weapons such as shotguns and squirrel rifles. The defenders erect a barricade where the road forks within the town, and there some 300 men and boys await the enemy’s arrival.

The raiders come up rapidly and sweep aside the barricade with artillery and follow this with a determined charge by the 2nd Maine Cavalry. The defending force is dispersed with some withdrawing to the Chipola River bridge, and many taking refuge in the nearby Episcopal Church and continue firing from its windows. The enemy then sets fire to the church, and its defenders are shot down as they run into the graveyard, falling amid its headstones. Some of the boys are burned to death inside the church. The enemy advance is finally checked at the Chipola Bridge.

In this raid the enemy lost a total of 39 killed and wounded, and before leaving town they plundered stores and homes, taking with them 81 prisoners, 200 horses, 600 Negroes and 400 cattle.”

(The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida, William Watson Davis. Columbia University, 1913, pp. 311-312)

The Deadliest War

The author cited below wrote: “Perhaps it was cold comfort to dismembered Mexico, but the “Mexican Cession” led in the next two decades to the death of a million gringos, as well as to sectional hatreds that persist to the present.” The Compromise of 1850 led to the political rise of Lincoln, John Brown’s violence, the formation of the Republican party, the election of Lincoln, the withdrawal of Southern States and war.

The Deadliest War

“The Deadliest war in American history, in terms of total deaths per thousand who served per year, at last was over. Of the 100,182 soldiers, sailors, marines who participated, only 1548 were killed in action, but 10,970 died from disease and exposure. Thus, the mortality rate was 110 per 1000 per annum (as compared with a Civil War rate of 65; a Spanish-American War rate of 27.79; and a World War I rate of 16. In World War II the death rate was about 3 percent of the total strength of the armed forces.

And the death rate was appallingly high in relation to the length of actual combat, for the conflict with Mexico lasted just twenty-two months (with only seventeen months of actual combat) . . . [and American soldiers] would continue to succumb to diseases contracted in Mexico for the next several decades. J.J. Oswandel, a veteran of the war, wrote in 1885, “After the close of the war we returned home with impaired health . . . with a disease contracted in a strange climate, which, in a few years after the war had taken from their homes more than half of those who returned.”

(North America Divided: The Mexican War, 1846-1848. S. Connor & O. Faulk. Oxford University Press, 1971, pp.170-171)

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)

 

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)

An Unequal Duel

Author John P. Cullop (below) asserts that while “Irish immigration increased substantially in 1863 and 1864” and it is difficult to ascertain how many served in the American military, historian Frank L. Owsley estimates “that Ireland, England and Germany contributed over 300,000 men to Union forces . . . [and] there is no doubt that the North relied heavily on immigrant soldiers.” As early as August 1862, Secretary of State William Seward was advised to send all Federal consuls in Europe full particulars about bounties paid to volunteers. Lincoln’s army was bolstered by an estimated 150,000 Irish men, of whom over 35,000 paid lost their lives. At Fredericksburg’s Marye’s Heights in December 1862, over 41% of northern casualties were Irishmen.

An Unequal Duel

“Federal interest in the procurement of recruits from Europe was manifest early in the war. In May 1861, Henry S. Sanford, American minister to Belgium, suggested to secretary of State Seward that as the Lincoln administration apparently intended to rely primarily on volunteers for the army, it was not too early to look abroad for recruits. He reminded the Secretary that the British had received excellent service from the German Legion of Ten Thousand during the Crimean War.

On August 8, 1862, Seward sent all American embassies and consulates in Europe Circular No. 19, which was essentially an invitation to the poor people of Europe to emigrate to the US, emphasizing opportunities for wartime employment but carefully avoiding mention of possible military service. However, mercenary soldiers were uppermost in Seward’s mind, for on September 19, 1862, he wrote American consul general at Paris, John Bigelow that “to some extent this civil war must be a trial between the two parties to exhaust each other. The immigration of a large mass from Europe would of itself decide it.” Many years after the war Bigelow noted that Seward’s circular threw light “upon the mysterious repletion of our army during the four years of war, while it was notoriously being depleted by firearms, disease and desertion.”

Large numbers of Irishmen applied directly to American consuls for enlistment, but were uniformly refused as enlistment had to occur in the United States after emigration. While it was an easy matter to entice Irishmen to the US, it was equally easy to enlist them on arrival. Simply informing the penniless immigrant of the large bounties was often sufficient. Even more attractive were the larger sums offered by speculators who secured substitutes for northerners who wished to avoid Lincoln’s draft.

By April 1864, British Foreign Minister Earl Russell charged that there was strong circumstantial evidence of a well-organized Union military recruiting program in Ireland. This led to a closer scrutiny of Union activity in Ireland but did little to stem the flow of Irish emigrants in 1864.”

(An Unequal Duel: Union Recruiting in Ireland, 1863-1864. John P. Cullop. Civil War History: A Journal of the Middle Period. John T. Hubbell, editor. Vol. XIII, No. II, June 1967, pp.102-109)

Mankind’s War Fetish

 

English author and commentator H.G. Wells began writing newspaper articles in August 1914 commenting upon what was to be termed the “World War”; the articles would become assembled in a book entitled The War That Will End War. Arguing that the Central Powers led by Germany and Italy commenced the war, he saw that only the destruction of German militarism could end the conflagration.

American intervention – pursued by a president who was elected on a promise of keeping us out of the war – was decisive as cash advances to Britain, France and Russia amounting to some $9.6 billion stoked the fires. Postwar, America became the world’s banker with net foreign assets of around $11 billion by the end of 1919.

In 1918, Germany was defeated, its Kaiser banished, and punitive peace terms burdened the German people. Predictably, a nationalist arose within Germany who rebuilt his country’s military and ironically with French assistance through the Czech’s Skoda Works. Only twenty years after the Versailles Treaty, it was back to war. What is called World War Two – more accurately called the second half of the World War – led to an estimated 56 million military and civilian deaths, and an additional 38 million dead from war-related disease and famine.

Below, author Emil Ludwig cites the costs of the war to end war.

Mankind’s War Fetish

“The World War, which was on the verge of breaking out in the very first opening years of the opening century, is the great liquidation of debts created in the previous era and we desire and demand that it be associated with the nineteenth century. The second Hague Conference of 1907 was only a farce. During the weeks for which the third meeting was set in the summer of 1915, oratory could no longer be heard in The Hague due to the nearby thundering of cannon in Europe.

The cost of armament during the years from 1910 to 1914 amounted to 1.8 billions of dollars for Austria and Germany together and 2.4 billions for France and Russia – more than 4 billion. Yet these were small sums compared with those piled up by the War. On land and sea and in the air, 12,990,570 soldiers were killed in the World War. The war cost the combined combatants 250,000,000 billions of dollars – half of their combined national wealth. Thus, within four years, for no reason and without any essential consequences, Europe had sent up in smoke half of all it had gathered together during the preceding centuries. How should we characterize an act of this kind on the part of a large bank or a powerful family?

In so far as the victorious powers are concerned, France was a creditor nation to the extent of 30 billions before the war and a debtor to the extent of 31 billions afterward. During the struggle, the French national wealth decreased by a third; that of England by one fourth. Even the United States government had to expend during two years more than it had laid out in the course of over a century; and if in spite of this fact it remains today the creditor of the world, the reason is not participation in the second half of the war but rather abstention during the war’s first half. The smaller countries which remained neutral are in a relatively better position than any of the imperialist states.

With the exception of America, all the warring countries lost millions of men and billions of money; and any territory gained in the process at the expense of the conquered peoples is of intrinsic worth only in the case of new states established at the end.

Even the single positive result of the World War – the destruction of four realms anachronistically ruled by emperors, and the creation of eleven republics – was therefore purchased at a price which, in civil life, only an insane person would pay.”

“We punish an individual guilty of assault or murder, but the massacre of a people is considered a glorious deed.” Seneca

“Standing armies should in time cease to be, for they constitute a perennial threat of war to other states . . .”  Immanuel Kant

(Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization. Charles A. Beard, editor. Longmans, Green & Company, 1928, pp. 178-179)

 

The Bitterness of Surrender

Like other defeated American soldiers in the South mid-1865, Gen. Bryan Grimes dealt with illness and “grief of surrender” amid constant rumors of pending retribution at the hands of the Yankee governors. One was “a report that they would hang all officers above the rank of captain and all their property confiscated,” his wife Charlotte recalled. “We were living in a “Reign of Terror.”

The Bitterness of Surrender

“Grim scenes abounded as homeward-bound North Carolinians rode south for home [after Appomattox]. One event in particular must have made him wonder what was in store for him as a defeated soldier without the means to fight back. According to Grimes’ astute traveling companion, Thomas Devereux:

“[We came upon] an old man, Loftin Terrel, his house was on the roadside, and he was knee-deep in feathers where [Sherman’s bummers] had ripped open the beds in search of valuables. A yearling and a mule colt were lying dead in the lot, they had been wantonly shot. Old man Terrel was sitting on his doorstep, he said there was not a thing left in the house and every bundle of fodder and grain of corn had been carried off; that he had been stripped of everything he owned and had not a mouthful to eat. They had even killed his dog which was lying dead near the house.”

On Sunday, April 16, 1865, Grimes rode into Raleigh atop his trustful horse Warren. Charlotte was “delighted to see him under any conditions,” but recalled that, “he would reproach me for want of patriotism when I said so, he was so miserable over [General Joseph Johnston’s] the surrender.”

The Federals garrisoning [Raleigh] issued orders forbidding former Confederates from wearing their uniforms. For many this directive presented a dilemma, for they had no other clothes to wear and no money to purchase new one. Charlotte responded to the order by covering her husband’s brass uniform buttons with bootblack, a ruse Grimes described made him look as though he was “in mourning for the Confederacy.” The ever-resourceful Charlotte, despite Grimes’ protestations, sold several of her silk dresses for $100 and used the money to purchase his civilian clothes. “It seemed to hurt him to have to use this money,” she explained, “but I would take no denial.”

Raleigh was a very different town from the one Grimes left four years earlier. The victorious Yankees seemed everywhere . . . [and he] no money, no income . . . [and] not a cent in the world, explained Charlotte, “except for a few gold pieces he had carried all through the war.” Fortunately, Grimes’ brother William was in a position to assist the destitute couple [and] gave them “two hundred dollars in gold quilted in a belt under my corsets,” wrote Charlotte.”

(Lee’s Last Major General: Bryan Grimes of North Carolina. T. Harrell Allen. Savas Publishing, 1999, pp. 258; 260)

 

Conditions Just After the War

North Carolina’s wartime Governor Zebulon Vance wrote the following postwar letter to an Australian friend. Importantly, he mentions the South’s fear of a similar massacre of white persons as occurred in mid-1790s Haiti – with the Nat Turner massacre as an example of abolitionist-inspired revolt. The northern States did not want black migration to their section as the ex-slaves would work at low wages and take jobs from white workers.

Conditions Just After the War

“Of course I cannot give you much criticism upon the war, or the causes of our failure; nor can I attempt to do justice to the heroism of our troops or of the great men developed by the contest. This is the business of the historian, and when he traces the lines which are to render immortal the deeds of this revolution, if truth and candor guide his pen, neither our generals nor our soldiers will be found inferior to any who have fought and bled within a century.

When all of our troops had laid down their arms, then was immediately seen the results which I had prophesied. Slavery was declared abolished – two thousand millions of property gone from the South at one blow, leaving four million freed vagabonds among us – outnumbering in several States the whites – to hang as an incubus upon us and re-enact from time to time the horrors of Hayti and San Domingo. This alone was a blow from which the South will not with reasonable industry recover in one hundred years.

Then too, the States have been reduced to the condition of territories, their Executive and Judicial (and all other) officers appointed by the Federal Government, and are denied all law except that of the military. Our currency, of course, is gone, and with it went the banks and bonds of the State, and with them went to ruin thousands of widows, orphans and helpless persons whose funds were invested therein.

Their railroads destroyed, towns and villages burned to ashes, fields and farms laid desolate, homes and homesteads, palaces and cabins only marked to the owners eye by the blackened chimneys looming out on the landscape, like the mile marks on a great highway of desolation as it swept over the blooming plains and happy valleys of our once prosperous land!  The stock all driven off and destroyed, mills and agricultural implements specially ruined; many wealthy farmers making with their own hands a small and scanty crop with old artillery horses turned out by the troops to die.

But, thank God, though witchcraft and poverty doth abound, yet charity and brotherly love doth much more abound. A feeling of common suffering has united the hearts of our people and they help one another.  Our people do not uselessly repine over their ruined hopes. They have gone to work with amazing alacrity and spirit. Major Generals, Brigadiers, Congressmen, and high functionaries hold the plough and sweat for their bread. A fair crop was the reward of last season’s labor, and there will hardly be any suffering for next year except among the Negroes, who, forsaking their old masters, have mostly flocked into town in search of their freedom, where they are dying and will die by the thousands.”

(Conditions Just After the War, letter of Zebulon Vance to John Evans Brown of Sidney, Australia, reprinted in the Raleigh News & Observer, Confederate Veteran Magazine, June 1931, pp. 215-216)

To More Effectively Kill Americans

Early Spencer carbine-investor, Maine congressman (later Senator) James G. Blaine was an avid Lincoln supporter and determined to find more advanced weaponry with which to subdue the South’s drive for political independence. The incessant drive for more destructive death machines did much to develop the North’s burgeoning arms industry.

Postwar, Blaine was implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal during the Grant administration, whereby railroad companies bribed federal officials to turn a blind eye to fraudulent contracts which overcharged the federal government by millions of dollars.

To More Effectively Kill Americans

“Christopher M. Spencer, inventor of the Spencer Carbine, after much difficulty in getting his product before [Northern] officials, finally got a hearing from Lincoln himself. An amusing incident occurred typical of both arms merchant and the famous rail-splitter. Spencer set up a shingle against a tree, fired a few shots at it, then handed the gun to the President who took aim and got results less satisfactory than did the inventor. Lincoln handed the gun back to the inventor with the remark: “When I was your age I could do better.”

But Spencer had won the President, and he left with an order for all the guns he could furnish.

Spencer at once proceeded to organize a company of which James G. Blaine was a stockholder, who was a then-congressman from Maine, later a Senator from the same State, Secretary of State in two cabinets, and 1880 presidential candidate of his party.

As stockholder in the Spencer Arms Company, he was apparently not very comfortable, since he inscribed on the letters which he wrote to the company secretary a note reading: “Burn these letters.” This little-known side of Blaine’s life harmonizes very well with his other shady dealings with western railroads and schemes, for which even his own partisans bitterly denounced him.”

(Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry. H.C. Englebrecht, F.C. Hanighen. Dodd, Meade & Company. 1934, pp. 67-68)