Of all the many cruelties of war, one scene that evokes the most pity is, perhaps, the image of wounded men trapped between the lines, suffering for hours that stretch into days, left behind after their charge was repulsed, within earshot of both their friends who withdrew and their enemies who shot them, men in dreadful pain, maddened by thirst, crying out for aid that never comes, unable to move and, for a time that seems an eternity of torment, unable even to die.
In movies a punch in the jaw renders a man unconscious for as much time as the plot requires. A gunshot in the belly drops a man and sends him into eternity faster than he falls to earth. It is not so off the screen where warriors live and die for real, where for good or bad the human body is far, far tougher, where even the most horrific wounds take their time.
Several instances of trapped wounded men are well known to students of the Civil War. Two of the most notorious occurred after Grant’s assaults at Vicksburg, on May 19 and 22, 1863, and at Cold Harbor on June 3 the following year. Shelby Foote wrote a moving account of the former. “For three days – six in the case of those who had fallen in the first
GEORGIA’S CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS In Honor of a Fallen Nation Gould B. Hagler, Jr.
This unique work contains a complete photographic record of Georgia’s memorials to the Confederacy, a full transcription of the words engraved upon them, and carefully-researched information about the monuments and the organizations which built them. These works of art and their eloquent nation’s profound grief, praise the soldiers’ bravery and patriotism, and pay homage to the cause for which they fought.
assault – Grant’s dead and injured lay in the fields and ditches at the base of the Confederate ridge, exposed to the fierce heat of the early Mississippi summer. The stench of the dead, whose bodies were swollen grotesquely, and the cries of the wounded, who suffered the added torment of thirst, were intolerable to the men who had shot them down; yet Grant would not ask for a truce for burial or treatment of these unfortunates, evidently thinking such a request would be an admission of weakness.”
Perhaps because of the intolerable stench, perhaps moved by compassion, the Confederate commander at Vicksburg, Gen. John Pemberton, departed from military convention and took the initiative. He sent a message to Grant suggesting a truce. “At 6:00 p.m.,” wrote Foote, “all firing was suspended while the Federals came forward to bury the dead…and bring comfort to such few men as had survived the three-day torture.” That is, of course, three days for the men shot down on the May 22; others had been between the lines since the initial, smaller attack three days earlier. How many men survived the ordeal is unknown.
commanded another army with another adversary. After slugfests at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and Grant’s subsequent maneuver around the Confederate right flank, two corps of the Army of the Potomac and one corps of the Army of the James charged the works hastily built by Lee’s men at Cold Harbor. Hundreds upon hundreds were shot down, and for hour after hour, day after day, the wounded lay where they fell. The order suspending the attacks came at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, June 3. The wounded lay between the lines the rest of that
day and night; all day Saturday and Saturday night; Sunday and Sunday night; Monday and Monday night; through the heat of the day on Tuesday. Finally, at 6:00 p.m. the truce began. “Very few wounded were collected,” wrote Union Maj. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys. “The dead were buried where they lay.”
In his personal memoir, Fighting for the Confederacy, Brig. Gen. E. Porter Alexander provided an account of a similar aftermath following a failed assault at Spotsylvania, three weeks before Cold Harbor. Alexander at that time commanded the artillery in the Army of Northern Virginia’s 1st Corps. His account focused largely on a single Federal soldier, observed for days by him and his second-in-command, Col. Frank Haskell.
No battle in the Civil War matched the ferocity of Spotsylvania, where the armies were locked in close combat for several days. On May 8 Brig. Gen. Horatio Wright’s V Corps attacked a position on the left of the Confederate line manned by Lee’s 1st Corps. The assault was repulsed. Wright fell back and entrenched. While this assault was less prolonged and less sanguinary than the famous attack at the Mule Shoe on May 12, it did result in numerous casualties, with dead and wounded Federals lying between the lines.
May 9, Alexander wrote, was a “comparatively quiet day,” but there was skirmishing, sharpshooting, and, of course, artillery. In one instance a Federal solid shot “actually went down the bore of one of [our] howitzers,” Alexander wrote, “after knocking its mouth some what askew. [Col.] Frank Huger loaded the ball into [another gun] & fired it back, as, he said, it seemed to know the road.”
After sending this ball on its return trip, Huger pointed to the men lying in the dirt beneath the sky crisscrossed by Union and Confederate iron. “Huger… called my attention to the number of Federal wounded still alive, lying out between our lines, among those shot down in yesterday’s assault. They could be heard to call out for water, & seen to move & to throw up their hands, & one in particular would sometimes sit up.”
Alexander explained that Grant had not asked for a truce, believing that the general was loathe to admit his men had been repulsed. He also pointed out the danger of allowing Federals to get close enough “to spy into our lines.”
“So there was nothing left for those men but to die there.” At night some sympathetic Southerners did venture out to give water to some of the nearer suffering men, but “it was very dangerous to do this even at night, and in daylight it would have been fatal. And it is even a question whether it was a charity to give them water, when it probably prolonged their sufferings.”
The reader should keep in mind that these unfortunate creatures had fallen on May 8. On May 11, Alexander wrote, Huger “again showed me a few wounded men, yet alive out between the lines. The fellow who could sit up still did so occasionally. The others only showed life by sometimes moving their arms, as if trying to keep flies from their wounds. It was a sight to move one’s heart, but it was beyond our power to remedy.”
On Friday, May 13, after the horrific contest at the Mule Shoe, the pathetic scene to the left, where Alexander was, continued. “Huger had gotten much interested in the particular wounded man who sometimes sat up, out between the two lines of battle. Today he had seen him trying to knock himself in the head with the butt of a musket – raising it up & letting it fall on him. It hardly seemed possible that a man could really give himself a fatal blow in this way, but through the glass he now seemed to be dead.”
On the morning of May 14 the sharpshooting waned, then ceased. The Federals vacated the lines in front of Alexander’s position and the Confederates at long last were free to leave the trenches. “Frank Huger and I rode out to see his wounded man,” Alexander wrote, but they were not the first to reach him. “The poor fellow had already been stripped by someone who wanted his clothes & his body was notable for beautiful tattooing all over arms & chest, principally in patriotic patterns of eagles, flags, &c.”
This patriotic soldier’s suffering was over. Perhaps one’s thoughts now shift to the desperate Confederate soldier now wearing the dead man’s bloody shirt and trousers. What would be his fate as Lee’s army moved from Spotsylvania to North Anna, Cold Harbor, Richmond, Petersburg, and Appomattox?
Gould Hagler is a retired lobbyist living in Dunwoody, Ga. He is a past president of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table and the author of Georgia’s Confederate Monuments: In Honor of a Fallen Nation, published by Mercer University Press in 2014. Hagler speaks frequently on this topic and others related to different
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On June 16, 1858, Republicans meeting in Springfield, Ill., nominated Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the U.S. Senate. Slavery overshadowed all other political issues, so much so that Lincoln saw it as an existential crisis. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he warned.
The agitation slavery caused, moral and political, “will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed,” Lincoln predicted, although he did not expect the Union to dissolve. “I do not expect the house to fall,” he explained, “but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
Today’s political tumult makes America seem no less divided, and I often consider Lincoln’s admonition: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
What is our responsibility in today’s times, as students of history and as people passionate about America? Earlier
A clean-shaven Lincoln as he appeared at the time of his “House Divided” speech—one of many statues in the former president’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois.
in September, I mulled over that question in a blog post, “A Useable History: Partisanship, Citizenship, and the Presidential Election” (https://emergingcivilwar.com/2020/09/03/194191/). I’m now mulling over the question in the context of Lincoln’s speech.
Often overlooked in the speech is Lincoln’s hope for common ground with his political opponents, specifically Sen. Stephen Douglas, “whenever, if ever, he and we can come together on principle.” Lincoln seemed pessimistic, though, and instead believed, “Our cause... must be intrusted to, and conducted by its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work—who do care for the result.”
No sooner had he sounded that pessimistic note, though, than Lincoln admitted that differing political factions could, in fact, come together in common cause, as the recently created Republican Party demonstrated. “Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds,” he pointed out, “and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy.”
Regardless of political affiliation, a lot of people feel like they’re fighting the good fight, that they “do care for the result,” and that their opponents are proud and pampered enemies. If you feel that way, and consider yourself a person of honest motivation and good intent, perhaps a place to start is by considering that many people on the other side of the political spectrum also hold honest motivations and good intentions just like you. That offers a common platform for discussion.
So I urge all of us to consider the optimism in Lincoln’s tale, not his pessimism, and remember that “discordant, and even hostile elements” can come together for the common good.
Editor-in-Chief, Emerging Civil War
Early bird tickets are on sale for the 2021 Emerging Civil War Symposium at Stevenson Ridge, August 6-8. Our theme, “Fallen Leaders,” will feature keynote speaker Gordon Rhea on the loss of Jeb Stuart and a battlefield tour of James Longstreet’s wounding by Greg Mertz. Plus, we’ll have eight other speakers on the docket.
Cecily Nelson Zander serves on Emerging Civil War’s editorial board for the “Engaging the Civil War” Series with Southern Illinois University Press. A historian who specializes in the Civil War era and the American West, Cecily is finishing her dissertation at Penn State. You can read her full bio here: https://emergingcivilwar.com/author-biographies/ authors/cecily-n-zander/.
I don’t ever remember not being thrilled by history, which is likely a product of where and how I grew up, in Colorado and with vacations every summer driving across the country and visiting countless historic sites. I have early memories of visiting the Custer House at Fort Abraham Lincoln in Mandan, N.D., and being fascinated by Custer (hard not to be), as well as the Little Bighorn, Fort Laramie, and many Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little Houses” and so on.
When I was about 11, I saw Glory for the first time (fueled by a childhood crush on Matthew Broderick), and instead of just walking away from the movie, I searched the local library for more info about the characters and checked out Robert Gould Shaw’s letters (Blue Eyed Child of Fortune, University of Georgia Press, 1992) and enjoyed them immensely, so I read some other Civil War letters and diaries that were at the library.
About five years later my parents took our family on a trip to the Washington, D.C., area where we visited Manassas and Gettysburg and, like so many people, I was taken in by the battlefields and my interest in the Civil War was really solidified.
My dissertation combines the Civil War and all the Western history that I absorbed as a kid; I am writing about the United States Army (the Regulars) between 1835 and 1885. I’m making an argument about how politicians used the army to achieve various expansionist goals. I’m really looking at the regulars as an institution that had great political value and then explaining how politicians’ negotiated over military resources and how they intended to use the army to achieve their goals. I’ve found a few interesting things, most notably that the antebellum regulars were robustly supported by pro-slavery political interests who used the force to conquer the Southwest and lay the groundwork for a southern trans-continental railroad. I contrast their political investment with postbellum Republicans, who turned away from the army in favor of reformers and then explain how men like Sherman and Sheridan had to make a case for the value of the regulars to the post-Civil War United States and struggled to do so.
This year things have not looked great in terms of academic jobs, to be brutally honest. I’m hopeful for a bit of a bounce-back next year, but am looking anywhere and everywhere for opportunities to put my research and teaching skills (such as they are) to use. I’m hoping I can at least put some teaching opportunities together to stay in the game next year. But if anyone has any leads, I’ll be glad for advice!
Gary Gallagher told me you’re a woman who doesn’t know how to stay un-busy. He really commended your work ethic. Tell us a little about that.
It’s very nice of Dr. Gallagher to say that. His courses at UVA required a fair amount of work, so it might actually be his fault that I work as much as I do. I’m not entirely sure it is the healthiest approach to always be thinking about working, but I enjoy so much of the research and writing process that it often doesn’t feel like work. I take time out to watch sports and classic films, and almost every day an episode or two of Frasier, so I’m not entirely hopeless.
One thing my parents always told me was that the best trait to have is to be coachable, which means taking advice and improving at every opportunity. What fuels my work is the guidance I get from my mentors and dissertation committee members who have given countless hours to reading, critiquing, and editing my work. I’ve been very lucky for the attention they’ve paid to my work. While I don’t always love to receive harsh comments, they are always constructive, and I think the least I can do is put as much effort as I can muster into my work in return. Seeing improvement and getting results gives me a lot of satisfaction.
What’s your next project?
I’m interested in doing something with George Custer, in part fueled by an archival collection I got to explore during my dissertation research, and will soon feature in a post I’m working on for ECW. I really enjoyed looking at historian Robert M. Utley’s papers while at the University of Oklahoma’s Western History Collection; reading about his work on Custer has me thinking about a project that would essentially investigate the history of the history of Custer. I’m a bit of a nerd for historiography, so what I would hope to do is write a book in two halves, the first would look at Custer and how he was viewed by his contemporaries with particular attention to how his own actions changed public opinion about him. The second half would look at his wife, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, and how she transformed public opinion about her husband after his death, and then try to unravel which version of George Custer historians have really written about and how memory has affected the accuracy of historical depictions of the Civil War’s “Boy General.”
In the shorter term, I’m working on smaller essays about Braxton Bragg and John Pope because I can’t help myself when it comes to much-maligned Civil War generals.
I love Kate Stone’s diaBrokenburn, ry, from the Confederate perspective and I’ll give the edge to Sherman’s memoirs for the Union side.
I always jokingly tell people it’s the Arkansas monument at Gettysburg, which is a big monument for a single regiment, but it’s really a tie between Grant’s tomb and the Grant memorial in
