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June 17 Gettysburg Campaign: The Quick and the Dead.

Again today (Wednesday) Franklin Horner writes about the rebels in Pennsylvania and that the people “are preparing to meet them as they deserve.” He also mentions that Hooker’s army is on the move. Since before the Battle of Chancellorsville in May, Major General Joseph Hooker has commanded the Union Army of the Potomac, the largest northern army in the eastern theater of the war. During the Confederate’s movement north, the Union army’s specific assignment is to stay between them and Washington.

Yet another brutal day of hard marching for Thomas Ware, but this day his unit, the 15th Georgia, is at the front of their brigade (Benning’s). They followed the railroad for a while and took a rough road between the mountains. One good thing this day is that water is plentiful. He comments on the beautiful farms—many not in cultivation—and thinks this must have been the most beautiful section of Virginia—“before the war.”

In one of the longest entries in his diary Ware details his route. One place he mentions is Piedmont Station on the railroad, noted because it is where Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston loaded his troops upon a train so that they could ride to the Battle of First Manassas in July 1861. It was the first time this innovative strategy was used in warfare. His men got to the battlefield quickly and fairly fresh as opposed to if they had marched the distance. Apparently it was considered historic just two years later since Ware mentions it in his diary.

Again, nearly 100 men are lost from the ranks of the 15th Georgia because of the heat. Ware has never seen the men so fatigued and called it the hottest march they had ever done. They finally reach Upperville, VA, at 4:00 p.m. and rested. Called into line at sunset, they marched another half-mile and camped.

He hears of a cavalry battle in Middleburg, 6 miles down the mountain from where they encamp; it is Jeb Stuart blocking one of the passes into the Shenandoah Valley to keep Lee’s advance from prying Yankee cavalry.

The road Ware took from Piedmont (now Delaplane) to Upperville corresponds to modern Route 712, and seems to remain much as he described it: lovely old farmhouses and undulating rock fences climbing the hills that were so tiring to the men marching them.

While researching the route through Upperville, just where it strikes the road through the town, I found a small country church with a graveyard. Some of the headstones pre-date the Civil War and I imagined Thomas Ware and his fellow soldiers gazing at these markers to the dead and pondering, on what has obviously become an active military campaign, their own fates. Perhaps some quickly pushed the thoughts of death, in spite of men dying around them from heatstroke, from their minds. They have no idea, of course, that they are marching toward the bloodiest battle history records on the North American Continent.

June 16 Gettysburg Campaign: The more things change the more they stay the same.

Franklin Horner, perhaps because he is a concerned native Pennsylvanian, records on this Tuesday the rumor that the Confederates are moving into his state “as fast as they can.” The rumor is premature. He also writes that this latest invasion is likely “the last or death struggle [sic] of the rebels.” In his next sentence he talks about the boys having a mess of cherries from a nearby orchard.

Other than wishful thinking, it’s hard to understand why Horner would think that this invasion was part of the “death struggle” for the Confederacy. Up to this point, they had won several major battles, including the most recent at Chancellorsville in May. Morale in the Confederate ranks had never been higher. Some in the Confederate government thought that they were still on the verge of being recognized as an independent government by Great Britain and other European powers. All these factors and more led to the Confederates’ decision to launch a summer campaign into the north.

In one of his longer entries, Thomas Ware records in detail much of his experience on the march this day. He sees General James Longstreet, his corps commander, and his staff passing by. He observes that the countryside is mostly poor and many of the farms abandoned. He records obscure place names that can be found only on the maps made during the war. (I included in the book the two soldiers’ march routes superimposed upon the maps from the Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, so the reader can follow their progress.) Once again, it is a killing pace the men are forced into marching, again with men falling out and dying on the roadside; Ware records that 100 men of the regiment were left behind. He watches Colonel Thomas Rosser’s 5th Virginia Cavalry ride by, no doubt with a twinge of jealousy. That might be assuaged if he knew they were headed for some severe fighting for Ashby’s Gap. He hears of rumors of a battle near Winchester, VA, which turn out to be true. He describes marching into “Fauguier” (Fauquier) County, VA, past unique (apparently to him) rock fences. This night they camp at “Marcum” (Markham) Station on the Manassas Gap Railroad (now the Southern Railroad), having marched 17 miles this day.

I managed to identify most of Ware’s route along modern highways. During my research for the book, I copied a modern road map onto transparent mylar, then placed it over the original map of the area in the Atlas to the Official Records. With the exception of the roads being straightened out for high-speed traffic, they follow the same footprint.  I drove the routes of both men so often that I convinced my editors at Stackpole Books to print the directions to their march routes on modern highways in an appendix so that readers can follow the soldiers’ journeys. As fascinating as it is to see how much of the countryside has changed, it is more interesting to see how much has remained the same.

As well, some of the very features Thomas Ware writes about are still visible.

June 15 Gettysburg Campaign: Invasion

For the first time Franklin Horner hears rumors that the “rebel army is going towards Maryland as fast as they can,” and that Lincoln has called for 100,000 men for the defense of Washington and Maryland. For now, Horner and his unit stay encamped in the defenses of Washington.

Some 60 miles to the west, Thomas Ware’s situation changes dramatically. The drums beat at daybreak and the men are on the march back through Culpeper by 9:00 a.m. with their bands playing martial music. Their route over the next few hours makes it apparent that they are headed toward the Shenandoah Valley. The wagons carrying their supplies take the good road toward Winchester, VA, and the infantry takes a rougher road. He mentions how the officers were all carrying their own blankets—a sign they would not be seeing the supply wagons again for a while. Ominously, no wagons except the ambulances went with the infantry.

The march was dusty and the day very warm. The beginning of their route apparently did not take them past any water supplies. He writes that for nine miles the men suffered very much on one of the hottest days they had experienced and called it a “force march. A great many fell out of ranks overcome by heat & several sun stroke & some died, the road side was full.”

Thomas Ware begins to exhibit what a fine observer he is in his descriptions of the countryside they are passing through. They stopped and rested for 2 hours in a shady place and the men “fell about like hogs,” tired, hot and thirsty. By 4 p.m. they were back on the march, wading the Hazel River into Rappahannock County. They were still marching at dark when they crossed the Thornton River and continued to march until 9:00 p.m. They camped with orders to leave at daylight. Ware says he got little sleep.

And so the great invasion, at least for our two subject soldiers, has begun. Horner is still in the defenses of Washington and may think he will stay there since defending Washington is one of the primary objectives of the Union Army. Ware is headed towards the Shenandoah Valley. Robert E. Lee’s strategy for the invasion is to use the mountains as a screen for his army, moving northeastward, plugging the gaps with cavalry. The valley is a natural pathway into Pennsylvania. Once there, Lee hopes to gather as many supplies as he can and send them back into Virginia via the valley. How far will he get? He hopes to reach Harrisburg, capital of the state and perhaps as far as Philadelphia. The rich Pennsylvania countryside, un-vexed as yet by war, beckons.

Ware estimates his march that day at 18 miles. It was, literally, a killing pace. When you think about the Civil War soldiers’ lifestyle—their lack of proper nutrition and regular exercise, the universal overuse of tobacco, the cursory medical examinations—it really is no wonder so many succumbed to the rigors of the march and died by the wayside. Confederate general John B. Hood’s division, of which Ware’s unit is a part, loses some 500 men this day, dropping out of the march from exhaustion.

Our vision of the Civil War soldier dying nobly in battle, softly floating to the ground wrapped in the folds of his country’s flag, struck down by a swift, clean bullet is fantasy. Men in that war died in the most horrific ways imaginable: torn apart by artillery, or struck by the malleable lead, .58 caliber, one ounce bullet, or slowly, painfully dying from infection worried about their loved ones left without them, or lying by some dusty roadside overcome by heat and thirst. Who knows how many more will die this way again tomorrow?

June 14 Gettysburg Campaign: Battles, Religion & Ghosts

After rushing to leave their camps around Culpeper yesterday, Thomas Ware and his Confederate comrades end up spending this Sunday in their new camp. He mentions that there is some preaching in the camp and that they drew two days rations. Some rations kept better cooked, so the boys are busy cooking them up. Reasoning that rations carried more easily in a their stomach than in a haversack (the over-the-shoulder sling-pouch most soldiers travelled with), a soldier might eat their rations immediately.

Franklin Horner also writes about the boys going to church. Religion was important to both sides in the Civil War. There were several revivals during the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia’s encampment around Fredericksburg in 1862-3. While religion may have helped the men steel themselves for upcoming hardships and potential death, it added a moral burden.

In my narrative for this day I write about the various “sins” readily available to men in the army. In addition to lying, gambling, swearing, and getting drunk, the responsibility of duty weighed heavily upon each of them and it was often a deadly one. Marching into battle under orders could, at any second, cost the soldier his life. Even mundane duties could be lethal. The simple act of a country boy unaccustomed to staying up late, falling asleep on midnight picket duty could place him in front of a firing squad. Lincoln personally pardoned a number of these cases.

The moral dilemma of a young man who attempts to follow the Ten Commandments then finds himself peering down the muzzle of a Springfield rifled-musket at a fellow human and pulling the trigger is obvious. Later in my career, when I worked on the Ghosts of Gettysburg series, I realized that fear of judgment was one possible reason why spirits remain earthbound and unable to move on, chained to the place, so to speak, where their earthly bodies expired.

In fact, all the reasons cited for why ghosts remain rooted to a spot could stem from battles: A youthful death with unfinished business; a violent, sudden death wherein the spirit doesn’t know its body is dead; a fear of the ultimate judgment before God. The living, mourning too long for the dead is apparently another reason why the spirit lingers. When 1.6 million visitors come to see battlefields such as Gettysburg and, in essence, ponder and mourn the men sacrificed there, that simple act may hold the spirits to the place.

Battles are the “perfect storm” for creating ghosts.

Later on their journey, Horner and Ware will have opportunities to ponder the fate of their bodies and souls.

June 13 Gettysburg Campaign: Numbers in the Civil War

Franklin Horner has been ordered to dress parade at 5:00 p.m. on this Saturday, so he must polish arms and buttons and dust off whatever parts of his dress uniform he hasn’t disposed of for expediency’s sake. It was common for Union soldiers to be issued cold weather overcoats and extra clothing for the winter. As soon as the spring campaign season of marching began, the heavy items would be “lost” along the march route.

Some of Thomas Ware’s comrades are caught washing up in a local pond when the orders come at 11:00 a.m. to march immediately. The orders came so suddenly that Ware thinks the enemy might be near, but it was just a change of camps. It was a short march, apparently only about 3 miles, but it turned out to be a very warm day and the road is dusty. “We suffered for water,” was one of his comments, and the dust on the march was one of the most aggravating things to a soldier: sifting down collars and trousers, it was like marching with sandpaper underwear. They stopped to camp near Cedar Run, the site of a battle in August 1862, which Ware had written about earlier in his diary.

The Battle of Cedar Run (called variously the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Slaughter Mountain or Cedar Run Mountain) on August 9,1862, pitted Nathaniel Banks’ Corps of about 8,000 men against “Stonewall” Jackson’s force of about 17,000.

Those are the figures I used based on reliable sources in 1991; current internet sources, such as the National Park Service, place the figures at 12,000 and 22,000 respectively. It has been my experience that figures from Civil War battles are constantly changing. During my tenure as a Ranger/Historian at Gettysburg, we used the figure for overall deaths in the Civil War as 620,000. A re-evaluation of census records by one historian recently placed the figure closer to 850,000. The point is, no one is absolutely correct on the figures, probably because soldiers would fall out of ranks marching to a battle, or fall ill on the first of the month when company rosters were due on the last day of the previous month. When I was researching primary sources for the battle at East Cavalry Field in Saber and Scapegoat, the officers repeatedly wrote about how depleted their ranks were, with some companies reporting only 20 or 30 cavalrymen ready for duty after the brutal month-long campaign leading up to the battle on July 3, 1863.

Nevertheless, it seems from what Thomas Ware writes, for a short time he became a tourist, studying some of the historic sites from the battle “Stonewall” Jackson called “the most successful of his exploits.”

The National Park Service website on the Battle of Cedar Run provides a tour of the battlefield. If you follow Ware’s route from my book, you may want to take the tour.

Also—and this won’t be the last time I’ll remind you—if you are thinking about coming to Gettysburg over the 150th Anniversary of the battle, including the weekends before and after, and want to take a Ghost Tour with Ghosts of Gettysburg (my company!), please, PLEASE call ahead or e-mail a reservation. It’s going to be that busy!

June 12 Gettysburg Campaign: “Play Ball”

Again both Horner and Ware remain in their camps this Friday. Horner writes about a comrade who is being sent away to recruiting duty and a chaplain who left for home.

The Confederate Ware mentions a friend who was detailed as the Division pioneer, an early war term for engineer troops whose job it was to build roads, forts, bridges and general manual labor for the army. It would seem like a job that would keep the pioneers out of danger, but more than once during the war they found themselves taking casualties. Union engineers constructing the pontoon bridges over the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg, December 11, 1862, took appalling casualties as they attempted to do their duty. In fact, volunteers using the pontoons as makeshift “landing craft” finally crossed and drove the Confederate infantry back from the riverbank so the engineers could complete their bridges. It was the first successful amphibious landing under fire in U.S. Army history.

As far as Ware’s friend sent to the pioneers, he would be wounded at Gettysburg, again at Chickamauga, and was furloughed home.

Even though Ware’s unit is stationary this day, an ominous portent occurs: they have three days’ rations cooked and in their haversacks, and are issued another 2 days rations. By this time in the war, soldiers knew what that meant. They were getting ready to march.

Being in camp necessarily entailed the tedium of drill, cooking, cleaning up, and keeping weapons in good order. But the men found other diversions. Obviously, many took to writing a diary, others to writing letters home. (Ware mentions numerous letters home to a coded individual—probably a lady friend—whom he corresponds with regularly.) And frequently they got together for a game of “ball.” Because of its association with Union general Abner Doubleday, baseball has been associated more closely with the Union army than the Confederate. But Ware writes about the boys playing “ball” at least three times starting on April 17, 1862. In February 1863, he mentions them playing twice. So “America’s Pastime” was apparently well-ensconced in the Southern army as well as the Northern.

One of the delights of writing this book (and others, such as Rebel Rivers, Saber and Scapegoat and Civil War Ghost Trails) is the opportunity to travel to the Civil War sites I’m researching. I’m pretty sure I found, with the help of local historians, Thomas Ware’s campsite in Culpeper. His and Horner’s march routes are, for the most part, traceable along modern highways, and in an appendix I gave directions to the reader. If you live in or are visiting the area these men traversed on their collision course to Gettysburg, I recommend that you follow their routes. Many of the landmarks they mention are still in existence in rural Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

June 11 Gettysburg Campaign: The “Willies”

Once again the two subject soldiers of 35 Days to Gettysburg remained in their camps, though both write about Grant at Vicksburg. In previous entries, Horner, the Union soldier, mentions a number of friends who were subsequently killed in battles at Fredericksburg and South Mountain before Antietam, Charles City Crossroads and during the fierce fighting at Antietam, itself. After a mere two years of war, Horner and Ware have seen a number of comrades die.

Thomas Ware’s brother Robert had joined the 15th Georgia, transferring from an Alabama regiment, and so Ware may have had an extra concern on his mind—his younger brother.

Visiting Gettysburg as a 14-year-old, I remember walking out the Emmitsburg Road one night from the Quality Inn where my family always stayed. I walked past an elderly lady in a rocking chair on the porch of a small house which seemed to be the last one before the sidewalk ended and the road began to cross the once bloodied fields of Pickett’s Charge. I continued to walk into the darkness and suddenly stopped. I got the fabled “willies,” that unexplainable chill running through my body, although it was a hot summer night. Years later, some paranormalists have told me (and they seem to be backed up by hundreds of historical accounts) that the chills are an affirmation that you are in the presence of a spirit.  So, I think that was my first ghostly experience at Gettysburg. It wouldn’t be my last.

Returning, I remember passing the elderly lady’s house and noticing a hand-operated water pump out front. Whether that was her only source of water, I’ll never know. But I remember years later seeing that same pump, sitting as a quaint relic from the past, in front of either Hardee’s or KFC. The pump (as well as Hardee’s) has vanished.

I also remember a large factory-style building across from the Quality Inn. Later it would be torn down and the famous American Civil War Wax Museum would be build there as well as Bob’s Big Boy, now, also demolished.

June 10 Gettysburg Campaign: What Happened to the Bryant Farm

Both Horner and Ware remained in their respective camps this day. Horner wrote about Grant at Vicksburg and Banks at Port Hudson on the Mississippi River. His fellow soldiers worked on digging rifle pits all day at the Upton Hill part of the defensive lines around Washington.

Ware is getting some details of the Battle of Brandy Station, of officers wounded and prisoners captured. In an auspicious aside he says that “some important moves are on hand both armies in motion & will soon meet.”

One thing that Ware doesn’t realize is the attrition rate among Confederate officers. Some historians say that they were just too brave for their own good, officers even up to the rank of brigadier generals always leading from the front. Since the publication of 35 Days to Gettysburg, I’ve had the chance to visit all the major Civil War battlefields. Franklin, TN, was typical. In a frontal assault against prepared Union positions the Confederates lost 6 general officers. Although much of the battlefield has been covered with factories and pizza restaurants, the bullet-riddled structures of the Carter family are still standing.

Talking recently to a friend who has lived in Gettysburg nearly all his life, I told him how I once edited and copied tapes of interviews of older people from Gettysburg who remembered how the place looked years ago.

Now, I begin to realize, I am one of those older people who remember a number of things about the battlefield that may have been forgotten.

When I first came to Gettysburg to live in the summer of 1970, I remember the Cyclorama Center as the NPS Visitor Center. It was our headquarters until the NPS purchased the Electric Map building. So it was with mixed emotions that I saw the Cyclorama Center demolished earlier this year.

We gave our Civil War soldier demos out in the yard of the Bryant Farm. There was a picket fence around the yard (no longer standing) that kept the visitors at arm’s length. After every Cyclorama showing, a ranger would bring the entire group out—50-60 people—so we had quite an audience for every program.

The Bryant Farmhouse had fascinated me from my days as a young tourist. The west side of the wooden structure, the side toward the fields of Pickett’s Charge, looked like Swiss cheese from the bullet holes in it. To me they were real, visible, relics from the battle that anyone could walk up to and touch. Later, to be working as an interpretive park ranger in the very yard of the Bryant Farm, gave me a feeling that is hard to describe. While I was still with the park, historians (or some other administrators) made the decision to tear down the Bryant Farmhouse and replace it with an exact replica—minus the bullet holes, of course. The decision, to me, was strange. Why tear down the original structure and replace it with a copy? I asked, and was told that, partially because of the bullet holes, the structure was unsafe and needed to be torn down. I remembered photos of the Carter buildings at Franklin and later saw them in person and they looked fine, so the Bryant Farm demolition decision made even less sense. I also wonder what happened to the bullet-pierced wood siding from the house. The last scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” flashes to mind….

June 9 Gettysburg Campaign: The Battle of Brandy Station

Franklin Horner, the Union soldier in 35 Days to Gettysburg, reports that a magazine at Fort Lyons, one of the chain of forts protecting Washington, blew up, killing a number of soldiers. It reminds me of how many deaths in war are accidents. Over half of all the deaths in the Civil War were disease related. But, in a strict sense, almost all deaths in war are accidents. With very rare exceptions (suicide bombers, kamikazes in World War II) do soldiers go into battle intending to be killed. Soldiers usually go out of a sense of duty, hoping they will survive. If they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time through no desire of their own they become casualties.

Thomas Ware, the Confederate camped near Culpeper, hears cannonading almost the whole day. Midday, his unit is called in from drill to march toward the sound of the guns. He would learn later that night that the famed Confederate cavalry commander J.E.B. Stuart had been driven back from his camps near Brandy Station and that Ware’s infantry unit had been called to support the cavalry.

Brandy Station would become the largest cavalry battle ever fought on the continent. Stuart, much to his consternation, was caught by surprise on two counts. First, after two days of reviews, he was supremely confident in the effectiveness of his cavalry corps, and being surprised at dawn on June 9,  was not something that should happen to such a fine body of troopers. Secondly, he was surprised by how well the Union cavalry fought. In the first two years of the war, young men from the big cities in the north signed up for the cavalry, never having ridden a horse in their lives. When they ran into Confederates, who were more familiar with horses, the results were disastrous. In addition, Union commanders used the cavalry units for couriers. It wasn’t until General Alfred Pleasanton reorganized the Union cavalry that they became a cohesive fighting unit. Brandy Station showed how well the Yankees had learned to ride and how effective their reorganization was. While Stuart claimed victory because he continued to hold the field after the fight, even he had to admit, if only to himself, that the boys in blue had done an admirable job this day.

Brandy Station is considered by many historians to be the opening battle of the Gettysburg Campaign.

June 8, 2013. Gettysburg: Fighting for a fence.

With the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg coming up, I thought I would share what I learned through researching and writing about the battle, the soldiers, and life during the Civil War years.

I decided that the daily entries of the soldiers featured in my book 35 Days to Gettysburg: The Campaign Diaries of Two American Enemies, would be an interesting and relevant source as a starting point. My “elevator speech” summary for the book goes something like this: I took two previously unpublished diaries—one Union, one Confederate—and put the entries side-by-side, day-by-day through the entire Gettysburg Campaign. The soldiers are on a collision course, but they don’t know it. They end up fighting within musket-shot of one another—one in the Triangular Field, the other on the slope of Little Round Top.

If pressed, I’ll say that the book is a microcosm of the battle, from the point of view of the common soldiers. The reader learns what the average soldier did, felt, and thought about on a daily basis on an active campaign. So on any day, the reader can re-live what the soldier did 150 years before, in some cases, right down to the minute.

For example, on June 7, 1863, Franklin Horner, the Union soldier, was encamped near Upton’s Hill, Virginia, working on defensive fortifications for Washington D.C. Thomas Ware, the Confederate, was on a return march to his camp near Culpeper, VA after his unit was called out on what appeared to be a rumor of the enemy’s advance.

I took the time in my narrative of that chapter to discuss motivations—or lack thereof—for the two men to enlist. Unfortunately, neither mentions any reason why they originally got caught up in the bloodiest conflict the nation has ever known. Even more astounding is that nowhere in either diary after two years of daily entries is there any mention of slavery or states’ rights or abolition, reunion or rebellion.

Years ago, when I did living history as an “interpretive ranger/historian” for the National Park Service at Gettysburg, I wanted to illuminate the fact that the “causes” of the Civil War (according to scholars and historians) were not the same as the reasons why the individual soldiers fought. Dressed as a Confederate soldier and talking in “first person” as if I were the young rebel, I would tell the people that I was fighting for a fence. 

My story was that my father and I spent two years putting up a stout post and rail fence around our (imaginary) farm in Virginia. It was hard work, I told them. Cutting down the trees, splitting the wood for rails and posts, digging the post holes, auguring the holes in the posts, and finally putting up a nice, straight fence to keep our cows in. Then the war broke out and the Yankees came. They camped on our farm. They tore down the fence within the first hour and burned it for firewood. They killed all our cows and pigs for food, stole our corn and trampled all our wheat. Then they marched away leaving my mother, father and little sisters and brothers without food for the winter.

That’s why I was fighting in Pennsylvania: not for slavery or states’ rights, but so the Yankees couldn’t come on my father’s farm again and steal and wreck what we had.

Back then (as a first year park ranger) I had studied the Civil War enough to know that the numbers just didn’t fit. Only 7 percent of all southerners owned slaves. Why would the average southern boy fight and possibly die so that the rich neighbor on the hill could keep his slaves? It didn’t make sense back then. It doesn’t now.

I was glad to see that my hunch was verified some twenty-two years later when I studied personal diaries of the participants (I read some 300 during my research) and realized that the motives for men going into combat are far different from what the scholars and historians would like us to believe.

Mark Nesbitt Ghosts of Gettysburg Quote