There was a brief article that appeared in Brownlow's Knoxville Whig on May 14, 1864 that discussed the tone of recent Richmond papers. It claimed that the tone had become increasingly nervous, which was perhaps indicative of the fate of Richmond and the South. Brownlow's Knoxville Whig claimed that Richmond papers were stating that 1864 would be the last year of the war. Although Richmond...
William Davis did not talk of gallantry or heroics in his Wilderness Campaign report. The Lieutenant Colonel was simply carrying out orders, and his regiment had been involved in the Union’s struggle since 1861. His 69th Pennsylvania was accustomed to the reality of war; they had fought in the most famous battles: Yorktown, Antietam and Gettysburg. However, the Wilderness was not a normal battle....
There were no heroics, tragedy, emotion or names in Joseph Barnes’ report of the Wilderness. Rather, his report of the onerous seven day battle was like a warehouse manager’s inventory report. Perhaps, the thirty one year old man did not want to relive one of the worst times of his life. At the age of 28, Joseph Barnes joined the Union army on May 18, 1861. A few months later he was promoted...
Lewis E. Parsons wrote many letters during the Civil War to his family in Talladega, Alabama. Parsons talks about many different things in his letters to home. He mainly asks questions about the home front, and he also talks a great deal about how war is an awful thing. He describes many different situations that he and his fellow men have to go through during the time of war. One of the situations...
During the course of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was responsible for shutting down more than 300 newspapers (1). In a telegram sent to Major General Dix on May 18th, 1864, Lincoln orders military occupation of the New York World newspaper for something that was "wickedly and traitorously printed and published," (1). In another telegram sent on May 18th, 1864, it is discovered that a forged document...
The Wilderness of Spotsylvania was, for the 160,000 men who fought there on May 5 and 6, 1864, a scene straight out of Hell. Lieutenant Colonel John Schnoonover was one of those men. He was the commander of the 11th New Jersey regiment, one of the units that composed McAllister’s 1st Brigade. During the morning of May 6, the Confederates were able to use the terrain of...
Directing large numbers of men in battle, while crawling through brush so thick that it could put out one’s eyes, is a nightmare beyond imagining. Such was a normal occurrence during the Battle of the Wilderness, a series of actions on May 5 and 6, 1864, that took place in the Spotsylvania Wilderness southwest of Chancellorsville.
From the turn of the century to the mid 1830s,...
General W.T. Sherman sat down on May 3, 1864 and wrote a letter to inform General M. C. Meigs and more importantly, Secretary of War Stanton, how he felt about the quartermasters' headquarters being in inconvenient locations. Sherman began his letter by saying that if the quartermasters wanted to be in charge of the money situation with dealing out equipment for the armies, then they need not...
Emma Mordecai regularly visited wounded soldiers at a nearby hospital, and on one particular day she was tending to a handless soldier whom she called my interesting Cavalry man. She bathed his wounds and rubbed his cold feet, but then she watched helplessly as he complained of an intolerable itch where his hand used to be, scratching at the amputated spot with his remaining hand. Having cared...
“Steady men, forward.” These words, spoken by the Union Colonel Russel A. Alger of the Fifth Michigan Cavalry, encouraged a new line of union soldiers as they reinforced the Sixth Michigan in the midst of a bitter struggle with confederate forces led by Brigadier General Thomas L. Rosser during the Battle of the Wilderness. Their reinforcement proved vital to the maintenance...