August 2023
outright, wounding many more & taking 11 to 1200 prisoners—A brilliant & important victory, achieved by ⅓ of our force & with comparatively light loss. A month of mining, his whole force concentrated, & his own time & place selected enabled him to lose from 4500 to 5000 men & gain nothing—For we hold every foot of ground—& they have not advanced an inch.”
The Confederates’ Crater victory, which in Chamberlayne’s telling looked so easy, allowed the captain to brag: “If they will whip Sherman, we will finish the war here.” News from the west, though, was hard to verify. Soldiers called rumors “grapevine telegraphs” and “canteen dispatches”; one of them had Kirby Smith crossing the Mississippi and marching on Sherman’s rear. After the longed-for captaincy arrived in mid-August, Chamberlayne’s/ Davidson’s Battery was one of three in Maj. Wade Gibbes’ artillery battalion.
Like other officers in the Petersburg trenches, Chamberlayne busied himself overseeing the strengthening of the works. “Lee holds Grant checked baffled beaten,” he wrote home on August 27. Yet the Confederate army was undeniably pinned down in the Petersburg tranches. “All men agree now that on this army & on the taking or holding of Rd—the great question rests.”
Chamberlayne served the entire war without receiving a serious wound. Thus it was for comic effect that he closed an epistle to a friend, “Yours till blown up, sharp shot or otherwise wiped out.” Although there could be no joking about the iron and lead being flung at them by the Yankees, Johnny Rebs still made light of it all. “You know a shot from the flank, raking a position is called technically an enfilade (from the French),” he tutored his sister Lucy; “the men have baptised the mortar shell as the top filade.”
Even though the enemy fire could be deadly, the day-to-day of trench life became monotonous. “I & my command,” Chamberlayne wrote under the heading “Battery in the Trenches Oct 1864,” “have been occupied in digging and building earthworks & winter huts for the men, & beyond the shelling & the musketry have not been in action since July.” “Drills and horse cleaning take most of my time,” he wrote on another occasion..
Ham’s letters offer occasional
glimpses of soldier life, as when he noted that cigarettes had become popular among the men. All the while, he hoped for yet another advancement: this one would be to major. (It never came; it was as captain that Chamberlayne surrendered at Appomattox.)
…except that he didn’t. When General Lee met with Grant to arrange the capitulation, Ham determined to have no part in it. “McIntosh and myself with several others refused to attend the funeral at Appomattox C.H,” he wrote on April 12, “& as soon as the surrender was certain we cut or crept our way out.” He and his comrades planned to make their way to join Joe Johnston in North Carolina. When that didn’t pan out, Chamberlayne envisioned heading farther. En route toward Atlanta, by April 21 he was in Charlotte, N.C. He hoped to get to Texas, though he affirmed, “my duty is still to my country, Virginia.” The trek was cut short, however. Chamberlayne and his travel companions were paroled near Athens, Georgia, in the first week of May. He took his loyalty oath in Atlanta on the 12th.
My copy of Ham Chamberlayne Virginian was printed in a run of 1,000 by the small Richmond publishing house of Dietz Printing. I bought it in January 1978 for $30. It may not, as Lord Cecil put it, convey Civil War history “as the most vivid historian.” Yet it is a handsome collection of thoughtful, articulate letters written by an educated Virginian and a conscientious Confederate. As such it has an esteemed place in my library.
Stephen Davis resides in Cumming, Ga., with his sweet wife (ejus uxor dulcis) Billie and their cat Cha Cha (color: gray and butternut).
He holds his Bachelor’s from Emory, Master’s from Chapel Hill, and Ph.D. again from Emory. Dissertation: “Johnny Reb in Perspective: The Confederate Soldier’s Image in the Southern Arts.”
His recent books include a twovolume study of General Hood (Mercer University Press).
He has begun to write a counterfactual war history for Shotwell Publishing in Columbia. Jefferson Davis, of course, served one term, but later Confederate presidents include Woodrow Wilson. As the United States teetered toward war in Vietnam, C.S. Senator from Georgia Richard B. Russell warned Washington of an entangling, losing war in southeast Asia.
Well, we know what happened....
Lost in 1864, flag of the Charleston Light
Dragoons is coming home to S.C.
COLUMBIA, S.C.—The Charleston Light Dragoons were formed in the eighteenth century. They were not your everyday cavalry unit. They were more like a very exclusive social club, made up of the sons of the state’s wealthiest citizens. They had strict rules, but the punishment for infractions.
They had relatively little combat experience for a long time. That changed dramatically in 1864, when they were sent to Virginia as part of the 4th South Carolina Cavalry Regiment, and encountered some of the bitterest fighting in the Civil War. At some point while fighting Union cavalry from Michigan, they lost a flag that served as a rallying point in battle.
Now, someone in Michigan wants to give the flag back to the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. Dave Downing is coming down to Columbia on July 5 to return it.
Downing is, among other things a Civil War reenactor, one who usually wears blue instead of gray. He also volunteers in a project called Save the Flags, which has preserved, researched, and displayed about 270 banners carried by Michigan soldiers in the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and World War I. About 10 years ago, he was speaking to a community group about that project; afterwards, one of the listeners came up to him and said, “I’ve got this flag…” “He came back the next day and gave it to me,” Downing recalls. It was in really good shape for a Civil War flag. It was in such good condition that he decided it must be a reproduction. He set it aside, and didn’t think about it until two or three years ago.
Then, the Save the Flags project received another donation from the same period. It was real, but looked as if it had come fresh and new from a package. That made him think of the flag he had set aside. He thought, “I wonder if it’s the real thing?” He submitted photos of it to a renowned expert who restores historical flags, who pronounced, “This thing is original. There’s no way it’s a reproduction.”
There was no question where it came from, with the huge letters S and C on a blue field, and between the letters a crudely formed palmetto tree with “Charleston Light Dragoons” printed on it. “This doesn’t belong in Michigan,” he decided. “It belongs in South Carolina.”
Someone with the flag project knew about the Relic Room and its successful textile conservation program, and gave Downing the name and number of Executive Director Allen Roberson to whom he will deliver the flag on July 5.
While it’s finally been found, the flag is still wrapped in mystery: “I’d never met the gentleman who gave it to me,” says Downing. “I don’t know his name; I don’t have his number.”
Eric Emerson, director of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, is focused on a different mystery: how the guidon, the proper term for the small flag, was lost in the first place. He is also the author of Sons of Privilege: The Charleston Light Dragoons in the Civil War.
He thinks the guidon was lost during one of several desperate battles the unit fought against the Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the spring of 1864. The Michigan brigade was led by George Armstrong Custer, the Little Big Horn guy. Of course, those Yankee soldiers were battle-hardened and had a huge advantage in firepower, as they carried Spencer repeating rifles.
At one point, Dr. Emerson considered that it might have been lost at the Battle of Old Church, or Matadequin Creek, on May 30. Then he realized that Thomas Lining, the unit’s color sergeant, had the flag in the rear, as he was one of those detailed to hold the horses while other dragoons went into the fight on foot.
Emerson now believes the flag was lost at Trevilian Station in June, but the evidence is incomplete. There, as it happened, Lining, frustrated at being kept out of the action, swapped places with another soldier and participated in the fighting with fatal consequences: He bled to death after being hit in the femoral artery,
“I Thank
Eliza Frances Andrews (1840–1931) received a strong education and was
the Lord I
a successful writer and educator. Her War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl
Am Not a
surely ranks among the most observant
Yankee...”
and intelligent wartime memoirs by a Edited with commentary by Stephen Davis, I Thank the Lord I Am Not a Yankeeincludes selections of her wartime and postwar journals which are most expressive of her Confederate
patriotism and Southern pride.
Stephen Davisis author of ten books on the Civil War, most of which treat the Atlanta Campaign. His two recent volumes
on Confederate General John Bell Hood have won several prizes, including the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York CWRT.
making him one of 800 Confederate casualties in that engagement. The guidon was likely left with the other soldier in the rear. Emerson suspects that soldier was Burgess Gordon. The flag still wasn’t safe, because at one point in this battle, “Custer and his brigade found a gap between Hampton’s troops and the Virginians of Fitzhugh Lee and rode into the rear of the Confederate line” where Gordon was captured.
The theories are fascinating, if not certain. However it was lost, the flag is coming home to South Carolina on the day after Independence Day.
Founded in 1896, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum is an accredited museum focusing on South Carolina’s distinguished martial tradition through the Revolutionary War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the War on Terror, and other American conflicts. It serves as the state’s military history museum by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting South Carolina’s military heritage from the colonial era to the present, and by providing superior educational experiences and programming. It recently opened a major new exhibit, “A War With No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973." The museum is located at 301 Gervais St. in Columbia, sharing the Columbia Mills building with the State Museum. For more information, go to https://crr.sc.gov/.