In 1864, Robert Knox Sneden, a Union private and mapmaker, lived as a prisoner in the notorious Andersonville Prison. During his stay, Sneden kept a diary of the conditions and daily monotony of the captives. Occasionally he gave up trying to write a daily account and would lump his entries together by the week as he did from April 8 to 20, in 1864. This particular week, Sneden talked about a group...
In the Red River Campaign of March-May 1864, Union forces attempted to gain ground near the Red River in Northern Louisiana. The target of the Union campaign was Shreveport, headquarters of a large Confederate force and capital of Confederate Louisicana. Union troops were commanded by Major General Nathaniel Banks, who was also a prominent Republican figure and a former speaker for the House of...
On January 12, 1864, A.K. Tribble offered a testimony in a New Kent County courthouse concerning the death of a slave, Ephraim. After Tribble's sworn statements, the County Clerk affirmed the verity of his account, but added that he could not set the official seal of his office because the Union Army had stolen it.
James B. Floyd of Newberry District, South Carolina owned Ephraim and,...
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...
An article was printed in Brownlow's Knoxville Whig that discussed the enlistment of African-American soldiers into the Federal Army. The article claimed that a portion of the Federal Army was enlisting black soldiers because it would be a great insult and wrong to the South. However, this article also focuses on the issue of enlisting African-American soldiers into the Confederate Army, which...
Ephraim E. Dodd was hung on January 8, 1864 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was a rebel spy from Texas who had been working for Gen. Longstreet's army. He had used the name “Williams' and had claimed to belong to the 3rd Tennessee. It seems that many people in Tennessee thought that this execution was justified because of all of the “cold-blooded murder' that had taken place...
The same article was printed twice (in the Charleston Mercury and the Southern Recorder) regarding the execution of a twenty-one year-old rebel spy named Samuel Davis. The actual execution took place on November 27, 1863 in Pulaski, Tennessee at 10 o'clock a.m. Davis had been captured on November 19, 1863 carrying dispatches and mail for to Union Gen. Braxton Bragg. These documents had been...
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,...
In mid-1863, the Confederate Army and Confederate Congress decided that steps needed to be taken toward strengthening the Confederate Army. In a meeting with other Confederate officers in early January 1864, Gen. Cleburne suggested something that seemed like a logical and rational solution to the problem: enlist African-Americans into the Confederate Army. Out of this idea grew the proposal to...