Circa1865

After the absolute rout of the enemy at Chancellorsville, Lee rode into a clearing “where his soldiers rushed around him, waving their hats in celebration of the victory.” Some were in tears of worship, reaching out to touch him and his horse Traveller. Lee’s aide described the scene as “one long, unbroken cheer, in which the feeble cry of those who lay helpless on the earth blended with the strong voices of those who still fought, rose high above the roar of battle, and hailed the presence of the victorious chief.” The aide mused that “it must have been from such a scene that men in ancient times rose to the dignity of gods.”

Two American Generals with Such Perfect Rapport

“If Lee, outnumbered and initially outmaneuvered, had been someone else, he might have tried anything else than a venture so dangerous. After all, there was a prudent alternative and honorable under the circumstances: retreat to a more defensible position.

Instead of that, he chose to risk disaster – because he was Lee, and because the man beside him was Jackson. Whether it was because his opponent was Joe Hooker is less clear. Lee had known Hooker in Mexico, where the young officer earned his reputation before he earned his nickname. But Hooker had not been in a command position there – instead, he was the eager executor of others’ decisions. Yet Hooker’s record since as an aggressive division and corps commander should have told any sensible opponent that it was foolish to chance destruction in detail by his powerful force.

For Lee, however, Hooker’s performance in the previous two days, twice pulling back on Chancellorsville when his generals wanted to drive on, must have outweighed the rest of that war record. If Lee had not firmly concluded that Hooker would stay behind his fortified lines, he was willing to gamble on it. The clinching reason was Stonewall Jackson.

American history offers no other pair of generals with such perfect rapport., such sublime confidence in each other. Jackson had said, “Lee is the only man I know whom I would follow blindfolded.” Lee, from the beginning, had insisted that he was fighting to protect the Virginia of his fathers; Jackson could say he was fighting now to recover his own Virginia, the mountain land that was cut off as a new federal State.

But Lee upped the ante at Chancellorsville when he proposed going all the way around to hit Hooker’s army from its far flank. Jackson, as if challenged, upped it again when he told Lee he not only would go, but he would also take all three of his divisions along to do it right. Lee, fully realizing that this would leave him to hold Hooker’s overwhelming force with about one-fifth its number, met that challenge when he said calmly, “Well, go on.”

This was the climax of two great military careers, each made greater by the other.”

(Chancellorsville, 1863: The Souls of the Brave. Ernest B. Furgurson. Random House, 1992, p. 146)

General Lee visited Wilmington briefly in early 1870 after visiting father’s gravesite in coastal Georgia. This son of Gen. “Lighthorse Harry” Lee also fought bravely for political independence and led brave American soldiers who venerated him.

In a postwar address to the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia, Col. Charles Marshall alluded to Gen. Lee’s “wonderful influence over troops under his command, saying that that such was the love and veneration of the men for him that they came to look upon the cause, [the struggle for political independence] as General Lee’s cause, and they fought for it because they loved him. To them he represented cause, country and all.”

America’s Greatest Military Leader

“April 30, 1870.

At Wilmington, they spent a day with Mr. & Mrs. George Davis. His coming there was known only to a few persons, as its announcement was by private telegram from Savannah, but quite a number of ladies and gentlemen secured a small train and went out on the Southern Road to meet Lee. When they met the regular passenger train from Savannah which Lee was aboard, he was taken from it to the private one and welcomed by his many friends. He seemed bright and cheerful and conversed with all. Lee spoke of his health not being good, and on this account begged that there would be no public demonstration on his arrival, nor during his stay at Wilmington.

On reaching that place, he accompanied Mr. George Davis to his home and was his guest during Lee’s sojourn in the city. Mrs. Davis was the daughter of Dr. O. Fairfax of Alexandria, Virginia. They had been and were very old and dear friends and neighbors.

There was a dinner given to my father that day at Mr. Davis’s home, and a number of gentlemen were present.  He was looking very well, but in conversation said that he realized there was some trouble with his heart, which he was satisfied was incurable.

The next day, May 1^st, Lee left by train for Norfolk, Virginia.”

(Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee, II. Garden City Publishing, 1904. pp. 400-401)

Lt. John M. Kell served as executive officer aboard the raider CSS Alabama which was sunk in battle off the coast of France in June 1864. He survived and four months later was aboard a British mail packet from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia, thence to Bermuda on another. Determined to return to the Confederate States, Kell boarded a steamer there to run the enemy blockade at Wilmington, North Carolina.

While at Wilmington, Kell contacted the family of Alabama midshipman Edward Maffitt Anderson, who believed he had perished in battle. Anderson was born at Savannah – his father was Col. Edward C. Anderson, wartime commandant of Fort Jackson on the Savannah River. In the prewar US Navy, Anderson and John Newland Maffitt were friends – each giving their sons the last names of each other as their middle name.

Running Wilmington’s Blockade

“We found the little side-wheeler steamer Flamingo ready to sail and took passage on her. The sea was smooth and beautifully adapted to our little vessel which only drew three or four feet of water and skimmed the surface of the ocean like a bird.

We began the voyage very well but our first experience nearing the Cape Fear shore was disappointing with the difficulty of ascertaining our bearings and whereabouts. At morning light, we discovered two enemy blockaders ahead and three on our quarters, then put on all the steam we could carry and proceed eastward. The blockader ahead made every exertion to cut us off and fired upon us, but the shot fell short, and we continued on our course – fairly flying – and soon our pursuers were out of sight and we greatly relieved to have made so narrow an escape.

About eight o’clock we got out instruments to establish our position accurately on the chart, took our bearings on Fort Fisher. As the evening drew on, we made all steam and passed in under the very guns of the enemy blockaders, like a flash of lightning and were soon safely under the guns of the fort. A basket of champagne was at once ordered up and a toast to our successful run was heartily quaffed.

We discovered the cause of our first missing our bearings offshore was due entirely to the drunkenness of the steamer’s officers. The risks they ran seemed to inspire the desire to get up a little “Dutch courage” as the occasion required and came very near precipitating us – after all our hair-breadth escapes – into the hands of the enemy!”

In Wilmington I met a friend of the Anderson family, who informed me of the report that had reached them that their brave young son had perished in the CSS Alabama’s fight off Cherbourg, being “literally torn to pieces by the explosion of an 11-inch shell.” I had the great satisfaction of telling them of his safety, he being one of the last to bid me good-bye in Liverpool.”

(Recollections of a Naval Life, including the Cruises of the CSA Steamers, Sumpter and Alabama. John McIntosh Kell. Neale Company, Publishers. Washington. 1911, pp. 262-263)

Independence the Fulfillment of American Nationalism

“The nationalist movement with which the American Confederacy most frequently identified with was- paradoxically yet logically – the American War of Independence. A central contention of Confederate nationalism, as it emerged in 1861, was that the South’s effort represented a continuation of the struggle of 1776.

The South, Confederates insisted, was the legitimate heir of the American revolutionary tradition. Betrayed by Yankees who had perverted the true meaning of the Constitution, the revolutionary heritage could be preserved only by secession. Southerners portrayed their drive for independence as the fulfillment of American nationalism.

Evidence of this self-image abounded in the new nation. The figure of Virginian George Washington adorned the Confederacy’s national seal and one of the earliest postage stamps; Jefferson Davis chose to be inaugurated at the base of a statue of Washington on the latter’s birthday in 1862; a popular ballad hailed the new president as “our second Washington.”

Songsters used by soldiers and civilians alike were filled with evocations of past glories such as the battles of Cowpens and Yorktown – events, like the figure of Washington himself, at once American and Southern.

“Rebels before,

Our fathers of yore, Rebel’s the righteous name Washington bore.

Why, then, be ours the same.”   

(The Creation of Southern Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. Drew Gilpin Faust. LSU Press, 1988. Pp. 14-15)

The first of Richmond’s 1861-1865 patriot memorials was that to Stonewall Jackson, dedicated in 1875. The impressive statue was “presented by English gentlemen” who greatly admired “the soldier and patriot” whose deeds it commemorated. Fifteen years would elapse before the impoverished American South could manage to provide a similar memorial to Robert E. Lee.  Of note, though colored militia units did not participate in the Lee Monument parade, they had marched in the funeral procession two days earlier in honor of Gen. George Pickett.

The sculptor of the Lee monument was Jean Antoine Mercie’ was a graduate of the Paris Ecole de Beaux Arts and acclaimed throughout Europe. He also sculpted the Marquis de Lafayette Monument at Baltimore in 1891, and the Francis Scott Key monument at Baltimore in 1911. The Lincoln government arrested the latter’s grandson, a newspaper editor, in May 1861.

Robert E. Lee Monument at Richmond

“[The] Unveiling of the Lee equestrian statue at Richmond in 1890, on what later became Monument Avenue, was an event to which the South had been looking forward almost since the close of hostilities. Raising the money to pay for it was one problem, and calming the rivalry between two organizations that wanted to take the lead in raising it was another. There were also disagreements concerning the design.

The first competition awarded the contract to a “Yankee” sculptor from Ohio. This aroused the Confederate ire of the always bellicose General [Jubal] Early, who wrote [Virginia] Governor Fitzhugh Lee that “if the statue of General Lee is erected after that model,” he (Early) would “get together all the surviving members of the Second Corps and blow it up with dynamite.”

So, another competition was held, and the model submitted by Jean Antoine Mercie’ of France was chosen. This statue, showing Lee seated on Traveller, was received with universal satisfaction. When it arrived from Europe, hundreds of veterans and others turned out and pulled it with ropes to the site at what is today the intersection of Allen and Monument Avenues.

The unveiling went off without a hitch. There were fifteen thousand Confederate veterans in the parade, fifty generals in grey among them, along with ten thousand other citizens. The procession took two hours to pass by.”

(The Last Review: The Confederate Reunion, Richmond 1932. Virginius Dabney. Algonquin Books, 1984, pg. 7)

Robert E. Lee gained his fundamental understanding of the US Constitution while at West Point, that the States were superior to their federal agent in Washington. It is important to note that the word “union” first appears in the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union” (which 11 of the 13 States seceded from in 1787).  Two additional States seceded two years later. The 1789 Constitution’s text was prefaced with “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union . . .” The 1861 Constitution of the Confederate States of America began: “We the People of the Confederate States, each acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government . . .”

No Other Course but Dishonor

“Among Lee’s professors at West Point was the distinguished jurist William Rawle, a Pennsylvanian and author of A View of the Constitution of the United States of America (1829), a book that formed the basis of many of Rawle’s lectures. It is likely that cadet Lee became quite familiar with Rawle’s view that the Union was not a compact into which the States had entered irrevocably. Rawle wrote:

“It depends on [the State] itself whether it will continue a member of the Union. To deny this right would be inconsistent with the principle upon which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases the right to determine how they will be governed.”

The newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, had offered Lee, still only a colonel in rank, command of his army, comprised at the time of some 100,000 men. Had he accepted this, the appointment would have been the pinnacle of his career – everything that he had worked toward for more than 35 years as an officer. But he could not take up arms against his native State and all the complexities of consanguinity that she represented.

“I did only what my duty demanded,” Lee said after the war. “I could have taken no other course without dishonor.” [The final act of his command [of the Army of Northern Virginia], an honorable surrender, was his greatest demonstration of forbearance.”

(Excerpted from Remembering Robert E. Lee, Jack Trotter. Chronicles Magazine, June 2022, pp. 19-20)

Fighting for the “Juster Cause”

The following details the first encounter of the revolutionary CSS Virginia with the USS Monitor after the former had sunk the USS Cumberland and severely damaged the USS Congress the previous day. The Virginia was commanded by Commodore Franklin Buchanan, with Lt. Catesby Jones assuming command after Buchanan was injured. Also aboard was the indefatigable Lt. John Taylor Wood.

“When Jones saw that the Virginia’s guns only dented the Monitor’s turret, he ordered his gun commanders to concentrate their fire on her pilothouse. The vessels wore around until the Virginia’s stern was only ten yards from the Monitor’s pilothouse. Wood quickly barked out the necessary orders to his stern gun crew. A lightning flash erupted from the muzzle of the powerful Brooke rifle and a heavy shell seared the air to strike against the front of the Monitor’s pilothouse, directly in the observation slit. The explosion cracked the iron and partially lifted the top. The blow partly stunned the commander and filled his eyes with powder, temporarily blinding him while ordering his ship to disengage the Virginia. The Monitor retired briefly but resumed firing again.

Wood now had an idea that foreshadowed his special place in the war. As a last hope to defeat the Monitor, he called for volunteers to form a boarding party which he intended to lead to the enemy deck. The response was enthusiastic, and Wood organized the group into special forces, each with a specific task. Some collected sledgehammers and spikes to wedge the Monitor’s turret. Others were ready to fling oakum-ball grenades down the pipes and cover all openings with canvas to cut off visibility and air. A few men carried pistols, boarding pikes and cutlasses in the event of hand-to-hand combat. The Confederates intended to win this battle with brains, seamanship, heroism and the “juster cause.”

When all was ready, the Virginia made a run for the Monitor. The boarding party watched from all ports, each man “burning for the signal to swarm around the foe.” The blood was “fairly tumbling through our veins” recalled one crewmember as the hoarse bark of the boatswain called “boarders away.” At that moment, however, the Monitor frustrated the scheme by standing away and steaming to shallow water.

Wood was disappointed, and with good reason, since the would-be-boarders might well have succeeded [in capturing the Monitor].”

(John Taylor Wood: Sea Ghost of the Confederacy. Royce Gordon Shingleton. UGA Press, 1979, pp. 35-36)

$300 Patriots and Deserters

“As a sideline to his regular clothing business, [John N.] Eitel was a recruitment broker. During the Civil War, recruitment for the [north’s] armed services fell largely into private hands. The government itself at first encouraged private recruiting by offering a two-dollar premium to any person who brought in a recruit who was accepted into service.

Gradually this led to private brokers all but taking over the supply side of the recruiting system. And nowhere were they more active than New York City, where the New York County Board of Supervisors offered a $300 bounty for volunteers and permitted another committee to use private brokers for distribution of the bounties. When a man volunteered in New York, the broker who brought him in paid the soldier a part of the bounty price agreed upon beforehand. Then the soldier would assign the whole bounty to the broker, who would collect $300 from the New York County committee. Three hundred dollars constituted a substantial sum of money in those days, and there were thousands of recruits, the bloodiest war in American history.

Opportunities for fraud were abundant in this system not only because of the middlemen and the vast sums of money involved, but also because of the rather primitive record keeping. War Department Detective Col. Lafayette Baker wrote: “Another manner of desertion, and by far more generally practiced [between May and October 1864], was by permitting recruits to desert in transit from the rendezvous in New York to the Island or receiving ships.”

The problem of northern draftees buying substitutes in 1863 bedeviled Lincoln’s unending need for troops. Historian William Marvel writes: By early September administration officials claimed that a thousand conscripts a day were arriving in the national capital, but those men came under increasingly heavy guard. Most of them had enlisted as substitutes [and were described by one New York captain as ‘the ugliest set of Devils that ever went unhung’. Thieves thickly seeded every lot, ready to stomp or stab anyone who resisted their pilfering. Sergeants were soon tying or locking up many of the rest to prevent them from running off, but they still drained away to the rear – or to the enemy.” (Lincoln’s Mercenaries, Marvel, pg. 191).

(The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties. Mark E. Neely, Jr. Oxford University Press. 1991, pp. 95-96)

The Meaning of Monuments

An appreciation for the odds the American South fought against 1861-1865 is found in the numbers of those fighting on either side. The Northern government called forth some 2,535,799 white men plus nearly 179,000 colored soldiers, for the purpose of subduing Southern forces never numerically one-fourth as strong. The Northern army had the glory of success, but the gallantry and endurance of the Southern soldier has become legendary.

From the Richmond Dispatch, December 14, 1892:

The rainy weather of Tuesday, December 13, 1892, was not propitious for the Richmond Howitzer Monument unveiling. It lacked every suggestion of a gala occasion and could but carry many Howitzers and other veterans back to the days when, half-starved and half-clad, they shivered over a handful of a fire.

But the driving, penetrating and piercing blast could not daunt the spirit of the men whose guns had been heard upon every battlefield from Bethel to Appomattox, nor those who had stood shoulder to shoulder with the heroic Howitzers.

The step of the veterans was not as jaunty as it was in the period from 1861 to 1865, but their hearts glowed with the recollections with no lack of enthusiasm from the beginning to the end of the ceremonies.

The unveiling was a success in all of its details, and the memorial now stands as an object lesson for future generations. It is an imperishable illustration in the history of a people whose valor, fortitude and unselfish devotion to principle have no parallel in the annals of war.

What does the Howitzer Monument mean? What does it stand for? It means more than that this one fell under his gun never to rise again, or that one who lived will go to his grave a physical wreck. It means also that the survivors were among the rebuilders of the devastated American South. It stands also for a moral courage that could rise superior to any adversity.

The crowd of veterans assembled at this unveiling were hundreds who, when the war closed, were absolutely penniless, but whose energy, enterprise, self-denial and patience constitute the foundation stones upon which the present prosperity of Richmond and Virginia is reared. [This monument] stands for the spirit of the South – not only the spirit that was invincible in war, but the spirit that defied being broken or humiliated in peace.”

(Unveiling of the Monument to the Richmond Howitzers. Southern Historical Papers, Volume XX, R.A. Brock, editor. pp. 259-260)

The Virginia Military Institute furnished the most generals of any Southern military school, 20; VMI also furnished 92 colonels, 64 lieutenant-colonels, 107 majors, 310 captains and 221 lieutenants. Author Bruce Allardice points out that though the North in 1861 “had a two-to-one advantage over the South in West Point-trained officers, this was counter-balanced by the six-to-one edge the South enjoyed in men who had attended private military schools.”

West Points of the Confederacy

When Francis Henley Smith, an 1833 graduate of West Point, assumed the superintendency of the newly established VMI, he sought to make it “the West Point of the South.” Since many Southern schools modelled themselves after VMI, often hiring its graduates as teachers, the VMI model, with its distinctly non-military spread throughout the South. By 1843 South Carolina had converted its Columbia Arsenal and Charleston Citadel into interconnected military schools; in addition to the education, the cadets relieved the State of the expense of providing guards for its armories.

If the Civil War had taken place five or ten years later, the State military school programs would have given the South a huge edge over the north in potential officer candidates with military training. In 1861 the programs in many of the Southern States had scarcely begun; the numbers educated were small and the graduates too young to play a significant part in the war.

Douglas Southall Freeman recognized that Virginia’s VMI graduates “constituted a large, immediate and indispensable officers reserve corps” at the start of the war and concluded “that the Army of Northern Virginia owed to the Institute such excellence of regimental command as it had. I do not believe the campaign of 1862 could have been fought as successfully without VMI men.”

Almost to a man, the cadets, former and present, joined the Southern armies. And whereas 304 West Point graduates joined the Southern army, at least 12,000, and possibly many more, matriculants of ninety-six Southern military schools donned the Rebel grey and filled the high ranks of command. Thirty-seven of the matriculants became Confederate generals, about 8 percent of the total number of Confederate generals.”

(West Points of the Confederacy: Southern Military Schools and the Confederate Army. Bruce Allardice. Civil war History – A Journal of the Middle Period. Vol. 43, No. 4, December 1997, pp. 315; 317; 321-322)