The Spirits of Bad Men Made Perfect: The Life and Diary of Confederate Artillerist William Ellis Jones. By Constance Hall Jones. Maps, Photos, Appendix, Additional Online Appendixes, Notes, Bibliography, Index. Pp. 252. 2020, soft cover. Southern Illinois University Press, www.siupress.com. Softbound. $26.50 Reviewed by John Michael Priest
The diary comprises about 1/3 of the entire book and has some very good information on Crenshaw’s Battery from March 14, 1862, through December 31, 1862. It is well written and has a lot of material about the officers, whom Ellis had a propensity to criticize, the young women in the vicinity of Richmond, the food, of course, some good observations about Gaines’ Mill, and the aftermath of Second Manassas. He mentions in passing the battery wearing blue uniforms. He paid attention to small details: General “Stonewall” Jackson, walking with his face glued to the ground and looking more like a farmer than a general; a young artillerist weeping violently as his friends buried his brother; ghastly corpses grotesquely lying along the roadside.
The Spirits of Bad Men Made Perfect has so much more in it than Jones’s diary. Ms. Jones, in fleshing out her relative’s life, has compiled a thoroughly researched documentary of the Welsh immigrant experience in antebellum Richmond and how this particular family became part of the city’s merchant elite. She describes the role of slavery in the area’s economy, and does not excuse or defend William E. Jones’s attitude toward African Americans. Nor does she hesitate to describe how Jones’s immediate family and his employer stockpiled war commodities beyond the reach of the Confederate government in an attempt to avoid the destruction of their family and business assets during the war.
Jones started in book binding and editing before the war, then continued the trade afterward. While allegedly reconstructed, he actively supported and published The Southern Historical Society Papers which, while they contain some very good accounts by veterans, also, with The Southern Bivouac and Confederate Veteran actively touted the “Lost Cause” mythology of the “Old South.”
The book surprised me. Objective, thoroughly detailed, and rich in social and political history, I found it illuminating and thought provoking.
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Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. By Kevin M. Levin. Photos, notes, bibliography and index, 240 pp. University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Hardbound. $30.00. Reviewed by Charles H. Bogart
For the past sixteen years since my retirement, I have been a tour guide at our local Civil War battle site, Fort Boone. A trend I have noted over the years is that after I mention that USCT soldiers were stationed in Frankfort, I will be told about the Blacks who freely served in the Confederate Army. The number of these Blacks serving in the Confederate Army has escalated over the years from tens of thousands to a half of million or more. From what I have learned from some recent visitors concerning the number of Blacks in the Confederate Army, I have come to understand that whites were actually a minority in the Confederate Army.
In this book, Kevin Levin delves into the question “Did Blacks serve in the Confederate Army, if so in what capacity, and did they serve freely?” The answer he provides is either a “yes” or a “no,” depending on how one defines service in the Confederate Army. The author finds that the story about Black Confederate infantry companies and regiments that stood shoulder to shoulder with their white masters in the battle line began to formulate in the 1970s as part of a White Supremacy pushback to the Civil Rights movement.
The author’s research confirmed that 100,000s of free and enslaved Blacks performed engineer, quartermaster, ordnance, medical, and transportation duties in support of the Confederate Army, but not as combatants on the battlefield. At times, these Blacks freely offered their services to the Confederate Army while at other times they were impressed. The slaves’ pay often did not go to them but to their owners. Blacks were also employed by the Confederate Army as regimental cooks and musicians. However, except for some Black company-sized infantry units formed at Richmond, Va., during the last months of the Confederacy, the author was unable to identify any Black Confederate infantry, cavalry, or artillery units that saw active service. He does give credence to Blacks helping to service artillery pieces during the war’s early months, but once the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the war goals for the Blacks within the Confederacy changed; no longer were their main concerns to show loyalty in hopes of a postwar improvement in their lot. To report that during the war Blacks “carried muskets alongside their masters into battle” does not indicate that these Blacks were soldiers.
In 1861, when the Creoles of New Orleans formed the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, their service was refused by the Confederate government. Then, when the Mobile Creole community offered to form a militia unit to defend Mobile in 1863, their offer was refused. Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon wrote back that “our position with the North and before the world will not allow the employment of armed soldiers of negros.” In 1863, Arthur Fremantle wrote the following about the idea of the Confederacy recruiting Black soldiers: “I do not imagine that such an experiment will be tried, except as a last resort.” During 1864, as the enlistment of Blacks was discussed in the Confederate Congress, one congressman stated, “If we offer slaves freedom [if they join the Confederate Army] we confess that we are insincere and hypocritical in saying slavery was the best state for the negros.”
The author contends that those Blacks seen with the Confederate Army, dressed in Confederate uniforms, were so dressed to confirm their place with the regiment, while those Blacks seen with the Confederate Army carrying weapons on the march were carrying regimental equipment not personal arms. The author notes that Blacks who served as camp servants were not carried on the rolls of the Confederate Army as they were considered personal property; thus their care and discipline were their owner’s responsibility.
The book is well-worth reading as it is an interesting examination of the question of whether Blacks served in the Confederate Army. The answer is NO if one’s answer is based on whether they served as enlisted soldiers in the infantry, artillery, or cavalry. The answer is a very qualified YES if one considers the Confederate Army’s employment of Blacks in military support roles. A VERY qualified YES, for while these Blacks did provide direct support to Confederate field armies, they were not subject to army discipline and their pay went to their owners. To put the question of whether Blacks served in the Confederate Army in modern context, it depends upon how you answer the following question: “Are American private contract workers, who support the U.S. Army in Iraq, members of the United States Army since they dress like American soldiers, drive vehicles that look like U.S. Army vehicles and, at times, engage in gun battles with the locals?”
Charles H. Bogart has a BA from Thomas More University and an MCP from Ohio State University. He is employed as a tour guide at the Fort Boone Civil War Battle Site in Frankfort, Kentucky, serves as President of the Frankfort Civil War Roundtable, and is a board member of the Kentucky Civil War Roundtable. He has written a number of books and articles on military and naval history.
Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition For Equality. By Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore. Notes, bibliography, index, University of Illinois Press, www.press.uillinois.edu, 2020, 254 pp., $28.00 softcover.
Reviewed by Wayne L. Wolf
Expanding on the previous studies by Edward Magdol (Owen Lovejoy: Abolitionist in Congress) and Jay Monaghan (The Man Who Elected Lincoln), Jane and William Moore extensively detail the life of Owen Lovejoy and how he crusaded to combine the clergy, African Americans, and women into a coalition to abolish slavery and grant equal rights to Black Americans.
Early in his career he united this lifelong quest for equality around three motivational forces: religion, the Underground Railroad, and daily confrontations to refute the prevailing mindset that slaves were inferior and mere property. These strategies were complimented by Owen Lovejoy’s gregarious nature, persuasive speaking ability, and good sense of humor to bring opponents to an acceptance of his profound convictions on the humanity and equality of all men.
By 1846, Lovejoy was emerging as a leader in the anti-slavery movement. He championed the policy of slavery’s containment to the South, helped to found the Liberty Party, preached against the Fugitive Slave and Black Exclusion Acts, and began solidifying his own future political career. By 1857 his religious vision and political goals merged. Having been elected to Congress, he quickly established himself as a radical anti-slavery Republican whose keen wit and practical wisdom would be marshaled to pursue abolition and equality, the dream he held since the murder of his brother Elijah.
After serving a brief stint as a colonel in the Civil War, he returned to Congress and by his death in 1864 saw slavery abolished in the District of Columbia, public school funds used to educate black children, the Second Confiscation Act signed, recognition of Haiti and Liberia, and passage of the Homestead Act. While he did not live to see the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, he was hailed as the inspiration behind all three.
Despite one small historical error that has Stephen Douglas rather than Frederick Douglass leaving for Montreal during the John Brown execution, this book is exceptionally well researched, presented to highlight Lovejoy’s crucial political impact in antetbellum America, and devoid of any sympathy for the Southern way of life. The end notes and bibliography provide a fruitful arena for further research. For any historian interested in abolition as a moral, religious, and political movement in America, this book would be a welcome addition.
Wayne L. Wolf is Professor Emeritus at South Suburban College and past president of the Lincoln-Davis Civil War Roundtable. He is the author of 23 books on the Civil War.
One of the oldest formats for Civil War histories is the individual unit study. Often authored by its soldier members, the first unit histories, those covering battalions, regiments, and brigades, surfaced in the immediate postwar years. Many early works delivered a celebratory narrative of the unit, remembering the good, too often ignoring the difficult, and forgetting the bad. With few exceptions, this model set a standard that continued far into the twentieth century.
However, over the last three decades or so historians have been exploring Civil War units with a more critical eye. By digging deeper into their primary source research, focusing on more than just a unit’s battlefield and camp experiences, and even choosing to examine some distinctive units, historians, now more often than not, provide readers with a much truer picture of Civil War units. Books like Susannah J. Ural’s Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit; Lesley J. Gordon’s A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War; and Earl J. Hess’ Lee’s Tar Heels: The Pettigrew-Kirkland- McRae Brigade, among others, offer excellent examples of alternatives to the conventional unit history. With Lee’s Body Guards: The 39th Battalion Virginia Cavalry, historian Michael C. Hardy adds to this growing list by shedding light on a significant yet overlooked and previously under examined aspect of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Created and recruited largely out of the necessity for increased efficiency, the 39th Battalion Virginia Cavalry filled an important role at a time when the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) was quickly becoming the Confederacy’s premier command under Gen. Robert E. Lee’s leadership. Before formation of the 39th, various cavalrymen in regular regiments received assignments to ANV headquarters. These men served in a number of different roles. However, being on detached detail, of course, reduced the number of men available to cavalry units and thus limited their effectiveness as one of the three operating branches of service. The four (possibly five) companies of the 39th took over many duties formerly assigned to detached regular cavalrymen. Their responsibilities included copying and delivering orders, carrying headquarters telegraphic correspondence to and from stations, escorting prisoners, wrangling stragglers, and scouting enemy positions.
Using an array of primary sources including letters, official records, and newspapers, Hardy chronicles the exploits of the 39th throughout the various ANV campaigns. In chapters designated for each year from 1862 through 1865, readers get a good look at the diverse, yet important, work completed by the 39th. Although they became known as “Lee’s Body Guards,” and often identified themselves as such, the 39th served other officers in the ANV, too. At times they worked with corps and divisional commanders like James Longstreet, Richard S. Ewell, Thomas Jonathan Jackson, Jubal Early, George E. Pickett, and A.P. Hill, among others. In completing their duties, men of the 39th witnessed some of the ANV’s most famous victories, delivering timely orders that helped achieve the successes that buoyed the infant Confederacy. They also were on hand for some of the army’s most tragic episodes like A.P. Hill’s death, the evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and surrender at Appomattox.
In addition to the book’s four chapters, and an “In Retrospect” epilogue, the book contains an alphabetical roster of the 39th, giving company assignment, brief service information, and, when known, the birth and death dates and burial place for its men.
Lee’s Body Guards makes a fine contribution to the evolving body of Civil War unit histories. Its primary strength rests in helping inform students and enthusiasts about the significant role that men assigned to headquarters roles such as couriers, scouts, and guides played within the army structure, and thus gives us a greater appreciation of their duties.
Tim Talbott is the Director of Education, Interpretation, Visitor Services, and Collections at Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier in Petersburg, VA. He is currently researching soldiers captured during the Petersburg Campaign.
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Reviewed by Joseph Truglio
Mary Lincoln is perhaps the most maligned and misunderstood first lady in history. This is the impression I took away from the opening essay of Jason Emerson’s valuable new book, which is a unique new research tool for all Lincoln scholars. Unless you have more than a curious interest in Mary Lincoln this may not be the book for you. In the relatively short space of 213 pages, the reader can find
100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign presents a riveting collection of George Barnard’s camera work. Most of the photographs are from Barnard’s time in Atlanta, mid-September to mid-November 1864, during the Federal occupation of the city. With this volume, Stephen Davis advances the scholarly literature of
virtually everything ever written about Mary.
Presented in chronological order are histories, newspaper articles, essays, interviews, dramas, poetry, musicals, etc. Also included is an index and note sections. Each entry has a short analysis included to give the reader an understanding of the gist of that specific presentation. I found this particularly helpful in selecting appropriate research items.
The opening essay, “Common Canon of Mary Lincoln,” is the author’s opinions on how Mary has been treated over the years by historians. He is critical of some for repeating inaccuracies, like Jean Baker and William Herndon, and praises others like Frank Williams and Michael Burlingame. However, at no time did I feel Mr. Emerson was trying to influence my opinions, but rather guiding me to seek out additional information.
As I have said before, this is a valuable tool for serious students. This book presents a road map to learning what Mary Lincoln was really about. It should be on everyone’s bookshelf. I highly recommend it.
Joseph Truglio, of Manchester, N.J., is a retired Motion Picture Technician who has a life long in-terest in the Civil War. He is cur-rently President of the Phil Kearny CWRT in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J.
Reviewed by Brian Matthew Jordan
On December 5, 1840, Abraham Lincoln leapt from a window. In a convincing display of his physical and political agility, the lanky Whig representative from Sangamon County sought to deny the Illinois General Assembly a quorum. Lincoln successfully escaped the legislative body’s temporary chambers, though his daring effort ultimately failed to spare the state bank from its Democratic foes. The episode supplied plenty of copy for the contemporary press, but biographers and historians have paid it, and Lincoln’s four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives, relatively little notice.
Such inattention is not exactly difficult to explain. Much of the sixteenth president’s tenure as a state legislator was occupied by tedious debates about internal improvements, the Democrats’ ponderous Sub-Treasury scheme, locating the Illinois state capitol, apportionment of representatives, and the boundaries of Sangamon County.
On the other hand, as Lincoln College history and political science professor Ron J. Keller contends in this deftly argued and well written addition to Southern Illinois University Press’s Concise Lincoln Library, “through his service in the Illinois legislature,” Lincoln’s “true calling as a humble servant of the people has unmistakably emerged” (127). It was during his service in the Illinois General Assembly, the author contends, that Lincoln found his political voice and “wrestled with his moral convictions” (127). Keller tracks these developments alongside the struggles Lincoln faced in his personal life, locating both in the larger narratives of state and national politics.
The author excels at contextualizing his story. Lincoln’s tenure as state legislator coincided with the heyday of a “transportation revolution” that gouged canals into the earth, macadamized a warren of roads, and belted the nation with iron rails. As a Whig, Lincoln championed these “internal improvements,” deeming them vital to the state’s future. Neither public opinion, which increasingly turned against the projects, nor the state’s spiraling debt could dissuade the so-called “DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.”
Lincoln’s time in Vandalia and Springfield likewise coincided with the congealing of a second party system and a new, more boisterous political style. In Keller’s rendering, Lincoln emerges as a clever and sometimes cutthroat politician. The Lincoln here is hardly the folksy, prairie statesman of popular memory. As a member of the “Long Nine,” the all-powerful Sangamon County delegation in Vandalia, Lincoln muscled through infrastructure bills, bargained for votes, and “learned to wield political tools to achieve larger political aims” (60). He perfected the art of the public letter and pseudonymous journalism; the latter almost occasioned a duel. Still, Lincoln commanded
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the respect of his peers, who selected him as Whig floor leader.
Perhaps the most significant act of his state legislative career was casting one of just five votes against a resolution decrying abolitionists and frowning on “any attempt by Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of the people in that district” (74). What was more, Lincoln penned a statement (together with Dan Stone, a colleague who voted against the measure) explaining his position. While expressing no sympathy for abolitionism, Lincoln and Stone identified slavery as “founded on both injustice and bad policy” (75).
If the campaign autobiography he prepared for John Scripps is any index, Lincoln considered his “protest” against the anti-abolition measure the highlight of his tenure as a state legislator. By the time he turned his attention to a burgeoning law practice, the internal improvements bill had been repealed and the state bank’s charter revoked. Yet he had tutored himself in the workings of politics and party loyalty. What was more, Lincoln’s first taste of political influence left him craving more. As his later law partner William Herndon aptly put it, Lincoln’s ambition was “a little engine that knew no rest.”
Not unlike the one Lincoln leapt from, Keller has provided an accessible window into the future president’s formative years.
Brian Matthew Jordan is Assistant Professor of Civil War History at Sam Houston State University and author of Marching Home, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In this long awaited contribution to the University of North Carolina Press’s Littlefield History of the Civil War Era series, Thavolia Glymph, a professor of history and law at Duke University and a leading authority on slavery and emancipation, offers a stunning reassessment of how women experienced the nation’s defining conflict. Discarding old paradigms and amplifying new voices, Glymph weaves a more complete, more nuanced, and ultimately more human history of the war. Throughout, she is attentive to the diversity and multivocality of women’s experiences. The war brought women together in new combinations, exposing old tensions and hierarchies, but failed to forge a “sisterhood” that could transcend race, class, politics, or section.
While historians in recent decades have produced an impressive body of work illuminating the lives of women and building connections between the war’s military and non-military
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spheres, Glymph argues that a full accounting of women’s participation in the conflict remains elusive. In particular, poor, non-slaveholding white and African American women are neglected in the literature. Rooted in archival spadework and punctuated with keen historiographical insights that will have students of the war nodding and underlining, The Women’s Fight serves up a range of interpretive possibilities. Juxtaposing white and black, rich and poor, northern and southern women, Glymph reveals that the War was not just a contest between men, but “a fight among and between women” as well (15).
The book is divided into three sections. The first considers southern women. “The Civil War,” the author writes, “set women across the South in flight” (20). War, occupation, and the collapse of slavery “forced reckonings in the meaning of home that white Southerners had not anticipated” (21). As slaveholding women took to the road and sought refuge from the invading Yankees, they came into close contact with poor women, competing for dwindling food, space, and resources in ways that raised troubling questions about the Confederate experiment. While the war congested the roads with refugees, it nonetheless “enlarged the space for the slaves’ war,” and “opened to wider view existing crevices in Southern slave society” (89-90). Black women “fought, prayed, sacrificed, and died” for the Union (88).
The second section turns to the experiences of northern women. Glymph reminds the reader that “the vast majority of white Northern women and men neither began nor ended the war as abolitionists, though their ranks grew and deepened over the course of the war” (158). The author tallies the benevolent and relief work of northern women, but without the usual dose of sentimentalism or celebration. Scholars, she argues, have not yet accounted for “the class antagonism and racism that plagued the work” of the United States Sanitary Commission (150).
Such assumptions factor into the next chapter, which considers Northern women who hurried South during the war as missionaries, teachers, and relief workers. Once again, the war brought women together, in this case, black women and white northern abolitionists. Yet they occupied uneven ground. “Refusing a sisterhood of equality with black women,” Glymph concludes, white northern women “helped to refurbish the racial ideology that had defended slavery and would work to constrain black women’s lives for decades to come” (195).
The final section explores how women experienced the “hard hand of war.” Excellent recent books by Stephanie McCurry and Amy Murrell Taylor have tilled some of this ground, but Glymph further dissolves the fictive boundary between the battlefield and home front. In particular, she reminds us that memories of the American Revolution informed southern women’s experiences of military occupation. A wrenching chapter on slave refugee camps recalls the unique path out of bondage for African American women, a path marked by withheld wages, sexualized violence, and attacks from Confederate guerrillas. The bone-grinding toil of black women on behalf of the Union war effort has remained invisible, but placed emancipation undeniably at the center of the war.
The best books raise more questions than they answer. By that measure, The Women’s Fight is a triumph. To its agenda for future research, however, I would add a fuller accounting of the lives of young women, soldiers’ mothers, veterans’ wives, and widows. The author has focused our attention on how antebellum experiences informed wartime actions, but we need much more work on how wartime events shaped postwar lives. Serious students of the war and general readers alike will profit from this major work that boldly reimagines Civil War women’s history as something more than sewing circles, bandage rolling, and relief work.
Brian Matthew Jordan teaches Civil War history at Sam Houston State University. His book Marching Home was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History.
“the boys have to keep there gunes and selvs clean I hant saw but one body louse since I left I Weigh 175 pounds”
In Their Letters, In Their Words: Illinois Civil War Soldiers Write Home. Edited by Mark Flotow. Maps, photos, endnotes, bibliography, appendices, index, 320 pp., 2019. Southern Illinois University Press, www.siupress.com. Paperback. $26.50 Reviewed by Gould Hagler
Independent researcher Mark Flotow writes in his preface that he once “sought a book like this one, but without success.” He therefore took on the work himself and did a most creditable job.
In Their Letters, In Their Words draws on letters written by 165 Illinois soldiers and sailors, all contained in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. The editor presents relatively brief excerpts from the letters and connects them with ample editorial notes that provide background and context. He also preserves the letters’ original (mis)spelling and (exceedingly sparse) punctuation. The sentence quoted above, penned by Private John Laingor, tells us something about camp life and something about John as well.
Almost all letters are from soldiers who served in the Western Theater, but we do sail into Port Royal Sound with a midshipman and ride in Virginia with the 8th Illinois Cavalry. Officers and enlisted men alike share their thoughts with us.
The letters are arranged thematically, with each of the eleven chapters covering a different aspect of the war and army life. We learn how the men become soldiers in training camp; we go with them into combat and learn how they react when they “see the elephant”; we read their descriptions of harsh conditions in camp and on the march. One chapter deals with stationery, pens, stamps, and the process of getting letters from the military camp to the home front, things to which we give little thought, but matters of importance to the men and their families.
In other chapters the soldiers opine about their generals and political leaders; give impressions of Southern people and society; and offer their perspectives on war aims, Copperheads, slavery, and the Emancipation Proclamation. The chapter on prison camps is the only one that relies mostly on postwar accounts rather than contemporary letters.
After the soldiers are mustered out in the final chapter, one appendix provides brief biographical sketches of the entire cast and another offers a chronology of the war. A reader wishing to review letters written by any given soldier will find the index very useful.
The readers will find different letters to be of particular interest. Four especially caught my attention. Col. Elmer Ellsworth wrote a moving letter to his fiancée on May 23, 1861, the day before he met his fate in an Alexandria hotel. A soldier camped near Fredericksburg wrote nine days after the Battle of Chancellorsville and told his correspondent that “we due not know what the actual result was.” There is a similar letter written from Williamsport four days after Antietam. This soldier too was in the dark, admitting to his brotherin-law that “You are better posted with regard to our movements than we are ourselves.”
The last of my four was written by an officer, a letter about another letter received by one of his men, a devastating missive which the editor says “recounted perhaps one of the worst ‘Dear John’ letters ever.”
100 Significant Civil War Photographs – Charleston in the War. By Stephen Davis & Jack W. Melton Jr. Maps, photos, illustrations, bibliography, index, 160 pp., 2020. Historical Publications LLC, www.historicalpubs.com Softbound. $19.95 Reviewed by Tom Elmore
The Civil War still resonates with so many people because it was the first American war captured by cameras. Photographers, using bulky equipment and working in harsh, often dangerous conditions produced a remarkable visual record that has withstood the test of time. Not only did they document all aspects of the war, but they did it in remarkably vivid and dramatic photos that remain among the most famous and recognizable pictures in American history.
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“alternative” takes made just minutes or hours apart, or in some cases, days or years apart from the better known versions.
The book is thematically arranged. The first section is appropriately devoted to the men who took the photographs, most notably George N. Barnard, one of the war’s greatest photojournalists. While there is a section devoted to famous individuals, the bulk of the images are still lifes of buildings and various areas of Charleston. Many reminded this reviewer of the bombed cities of Europe at the end of World War II. There are once fine, stately homes, now pock marked with holes from artillery fire. Sections of the city are burned out. Magnificent ruins of mansions and churches stand next to unharmed shanties, and vice versa. Perhaps most compelling is an image of Fort Sumter the day after its initial shelling, riddled with holes, but still a three story structure with architectural aesthetics. Below that image is another taken two years later showing the fort reduced to a one story rubble pile.
The photographs have been digitally restored and look so clean and crisp you would have thought they were just recently taken. Even if it is a picture you have seen dozens of times before, the odds are good you will see something you never noticed before. Almost every individual picture is accompanied by an excellent commentary from the editors explaining when, where, and by whom it was taken and the picture’s significance.
For anyone interested in the history of Charleston and/ or photography in the Civil War, 100 Significant Civil War Photographs – Charleston in the War, is a must have.
Graball Road: The True Story of the Civil War’s Greatest Mystery: The Lincoln County Gold Train Robbery of 1865. By Bob Young. Maps, bibliography, 195 pp., 2019, Eagle Veterans Services LLC, Augusta, GA, www.bobyoungbooks.com. Paperback. $14.95.
Reviewed by Joseph A. Derie
A train carrying the Confederate Treasury gold and silver reserves left Richmond on the night of April 2, 1865, just before the city fell. That train also carried the gold and silver reserves of several Richmond banks. Accompanying the cargo were clerks from both the Confederate Treasury and the banks who took great care that the cargoes remain separate.
As the Confederacy collapsed behind it, the valuable cargo wound itself further and further south, sometimes by train and sometimes by wagon. It finally reached Washington, Ga., by wagon on May 4, 1865, the third time that town was visited during the trip. The Confederate Treasury was dispersed to soldiers and other members of the Confederate government at Washington. The bank funds were left in local Bank of Georgia vaults; the bank clerks started their return trip to Richmond.
Following order being restored, on April 27, the Richmond banks decided it was safe to return their funds to Richmond. The clerks received travel passes from the Union Army and traveled to Georgia to bring the funds back. A few days after the clerks arrived in Washington, the 40 kegs of gold and silver coin were loaded onto five wagons and left with a light escort. They headed for Abbeville, S.C., to place the specie on railroad cars.
The first night out, not too far from Washington, the wagon train was robbed by persons unknown. No shots were fired, and no one was ever apprehended for it. The robbery was something of a makeshift affair with the robbers placing the gold in saddlebags, feed sacks, and, reportedly, trousers tied at the leg. Not all the treasure was taken; some $40,000 in gold coins was found on the ground after the wagon train left to return to Washington the next morning.
Most, if not all, the robbers were ex-Confederate soldiers, many from Tennessee or Kentucky, who had been paroled and were reluctant to return home due to the uncertainty of their welcome. It turned out that many thought the funds were Confederate and didn’t think of it as robbery. On that basis, some loot was returned, ing to $110,000 of an original $280,000. None of the remaining funds were ever recovered.
The final results were: 1. The Union Army search
2. The Federal treasury placed
3. A trove of rumors and innu
I have not mentioned a chest of jewelry that accompanied the treasure. Oh – and the $110,000 the government put a hold on? On June 22, 1893, the US Court of Claims stated the banks were entitled to $16,987.88!
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for the robbers became something of a reign of terror, using torture to obtain information.
a hold on the $110,000 in the vaults, their thinking being that it must have been Confederate States money and therefore now belonged to the Union. and endos about lost Confederate gold buried somewhere in Lincoln County, Ga., that continue to this day. There are recent postings on the Internet regarding this story.
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The author has done an exhaustive search for records pertaining to the treasure and its history, all of which are included in the volume. They range from Union Army passes, statements of the bank clerks, bank officials, Union officials, statements from locals, as well as 19th-century newspaper articles from papers in Boston, New York, California, and the Atlanta Constitution.
Graball Road is a readable look at a minor Civil War legend. It is also an interesting look at the South immediately following the war when there was no local government and lots of transient personnel. This volume is not for everyone but will reward those with a special interest in the subject or those who want something different in their Civil War studies. It is recommended with those caveats.
CAPT Joe Derie is a longtime Civil War buff with a special interest in Civil War naval history and the Civil War in the West. He is a retired USCG officer and a licensed officer of the Merchant Marine, currently self-employed as a marine surveyor and marine accident investigator in Portland, Oregon.