A Letter From Vicksburg

As a nice bookend to the Gettysburg letter, this one was sent from Vicksburg, Mississippi on July 10, 1863. It gives a Western flavor to July of '63. Written by Adjutant Edward P. Stanfield, 48th Indiana Volunteer Infantry to his brother Howard. He is in the process of paroling the numerous Confederate prisoners that Ulysses Grants Army of the Tennessee had penned up and finally captured at that important town. The letter contains some interesting details about the surrender and the make up of the rebel forces. Again this appears as it was written save for paragraph breaks. Illegible words appear in [], to the nearest guess by the transcriber. (The Picket)

Stanfield writes:

Head Quarters, 48th Indiana Vols

In Vicksburg, Miss. July 10th

Dear How,

I've just received your letter of the 30th inst. yesterday. Doubtless the good news of the capture of Vicksburg has reached you on this. We are greatly elated by our success especially so because it happened on the 4th. That fact is galling to the rebels. On the 3^rd about day light a flag of truce came out of their works and it soon was rumored that a negotiation was going on. Grant and Pemberton sat together under a peach tree and discussed the terms of surrender. Night closed in and nothing had been effected, for Pemberton tried to carry every thing with a high hand. His proposition was, to be permitted to march out of town with their colors, arms, etc. Grant would have nothing but an unconditional surrender. The night of the 3rd was so quiet and calm as if peace prevailed.

 

Artist rendering of the meeting published after the war.

Orders for the celebration of the 4th were issued. 34 rounds were to be fired by every battery in the line at [meridian] and 13 at sunrise. The rebels [dreaded] it and at day light they surrendered with the understanding that they would be paroled and sent home. Such an arrangement was much better than sending them North. Here it is six days since the surrender and the paroling isn't finished yet.

In the meantime the rebel soldiers dispirited and homesick have mingled freely with our men and been treated kindly by them. The effect has been wonderful. They have discovered that the Yankees are human beings and not the men they were represented to be. Two thirds of this rebel army is lost to the Secession cause. They will escape to their homes and defy the conscription. Hundreds of them are taking the oath of allegiance and going North. Many are escaping across the Mississippi river. I think Mr. Pemberton will have hard work to get such a large body of  un armed into a parole camp. When the paroling is finished they are all-- Pemberton at their head-- to march out. I suppose you know how many cannon and small arms we took. It is stated that there were here 50,000 stand of arms – which hadn't been taken out of the boxes – for Price's Army. These guns are perfectly new and hadn't been used. An order has yet been issued stating the number of prisoners but they are supposed to be 32,000 including sick and wounded. The history of the war cant show another such a success as this, from the beginning to the end.

 

As soon as Vicksburg fell six brigades, including ours were left here and the rest of the army under Sherman started across the Big Black for Jackson. I hear that there has been some little fighting with Johnston but it didn't amount to much as Johnston took good care to keep at a respectful distance. I expect we are in possession of Jackson by this time. We are rapidly repairing the railroad in that direction.

Among the rebels are a great many Indianians: Joshua Miller, son of the furniture Miller at South Bend is here. Alex La Pierre [?] our Serg't Major found a cousin and the Adjt. Of the 59th Indiana found his half brother.

[So your the world]-- I hope to get home sometime before Winter. Its about impossible for well man to get a leave. But I am bound to go before many months if I have to get “dismissed the service”. Capt Hart started day before yesterday. He was quite low and hardly fit to travel. The Colonel hasn't sent in his resignation and he will be out of the service in a few days I think.

Give my love to Ma and Eva and the young 'un,

Your affectionate brother

E.P. Stanfield [1]

The 48th was organized at Goshen, (Elkhart county) December 6, 1861. Up to the time of its participation around Vicksburg the regiment had been at the siege of Corinth, Battle of Iuka, Second Battle at Corinth, Jackson, Raymond and Champion Hill. During the siege of Vicksburg the regiment was part of the May 22 assault on the rebel works where they lost 38 men killed and wounded. [2] The men hailed mostly from the extreme northern end of the state, mostly from Elkhart, Jasper, and St. Joseph counties, with a fair sprinkling from Whitley, Marshall and Greene counties. It is this fact that makes Stanfield's discovery of “a great many Indianians among the rebs” so surprising, especially the man from South Bend.

I have always enjoyed old letters and diaries, and I really enjoy transcribing them. At times that task is quite difficult due to fading ink or the way the letters of alphabet were shaped in the 19th century as opposed to today’s standard. It is challenging at times but the value of the letter should not be overlooked. They often give us small details, such as the 50,000 muskets destined for Price's army, that may be brushed aside in more scholarly treatments of the events. In this case a fast check of the Official Records does not reveal anything about it. It does not mean that it is not true, but it does give a direction for further research. Although, in relating the musket story, it appears Stanfield is passing along second hand information. It does make sense though given Vicksburg's prominence as a shipping point.

I hope you have enjoyed the two letters posted here. More will come but I have no plans on becoming a transcribed letter blog. There will be just enough to be interesting without being tedious. That is unless my loyal readers request more. Then I will be happy to oblige!

The Picket

Sources

1- Indiana Historical Society, http://images.indianahistory.org/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/dc008&CISOPTR=364&REC=2 Transcribed from the original by Steven R. Gore

2- Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Indiana, volume 2, 1865. page 480 Google books at http://books.google.com/

Drawing Credit

Library of Congress, at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/civwar/item/2003663125/ 

A Year of Turning Points: July 4th, 1863, In Diaries

Gettysburg. Vicksburg. Names that would go down in American history, remembered for the frightful cost in lives they exacted on the two sections of the divided United States.

Gettysburg is often referred to as the turning point of the war, but at the time it had yet to gain that distinction. Battered, hungry, and tired, on July 4, 1863, Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Mead's Army of the Potomac eyeballed each other. Sporadic musketry would break out on occasion but it was of little consequence. Lee would slip away late in the day under cover of darkness and rain.

Vicksburg, Mississippi had been been the target of Ulysses Grant's Army of the Tennessee for several, unfruitful months. After finally getting below the city and over to the east bank of the Mississippi River, Grant was able to chase Confederate John Pemberton's Army of Mississippi back into the defenses of the town after fighting at places like Champion Hill and Big Black River. After two bloody assaults on the citys works May 19 and 22, the siege of the city began. Vicksburg fell this July Fourth.

Needless to say, the events at these two places dominate many of the diaries and letters for this July 4 and the days following, but not all of them.

William Bircher had difficulty even entering the army in the summer of 1861 due to his age and small stature. In October, with the aid of the captain of company K, Second Minnesota Volunteer Infantry and the permission of his father who also joined, the lad entered the service as a drummer.

The Second was a part of William Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland and was engaged in the Tullahoma Campaign. July 1-3 had been passed marching and fighting Braxton Bragg’s rear guard. His diary entry of July 4, 1863, gives little indication that he knew anything about the happenings at Vicksburg or Gettysburg:

“My seventeenth birthday. A salute of one hundred guns was fired—not on account of my birthday, but the birth of the republic. Marched four miles out on the Hillsboro road.”

Bircher would not mention Gettysburg at all in the next few days, but wrote that rumors abounded in camp that Lee had been captured with 2500 men. He does not acknowledge the fall of Vicksburg until his entry of July 8. In fact he gave more notice to John Hunt Morgan and his excursion through Indiana and Ohio during the same month than to either of the major Union victories.[1]

Ebenezer Wescott of the Seventeenth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry had a front row seat at Vicksburg and in a letter to his mother dated July 7 he writes:

“...the Rebels marched outside their breastworks, stacked their arms and laid their colors across them then marched back again. We had guards in the line. They marched up and took possession of their arms, and we formed our line and marched into the city to the music of more than three hundred cannon, beside fife, and drum, and brass bands.

It was the finest Fourth of July celebration I ever attended and will probably never attend another equal to it.” [2]

The two above accounts show that patriotism was alive and well in Federal ranks, but Wescott of Wisconsin most likely could attribute much of the fanfare to the victorious end of a long, hard campaign, but the significance of the day was not lost on the troops.

Mrs. Henrietta Fitzhugh Barr, the Confederate lady from Ravenswood, West Virginia, is still

keeping her diary. Her angst toward the Federal soldiers is unabated from 1862.

“Saturday, July 4. A new Co. from Parkersburg (Captain Devin's) are here to drill the militia (a sort of a trap to get the poor men to enlist to fight for the Union.)

Not a word about July 4 until, almost as an afterthought, she sets down the following:

“Sunday, July 5. Yesterday passed off so quietly I hardly knew it was the “Glorious Fourth”. People have to much to occupy their attention in these diggings to think of celebrating the anniversary, etc. The Yanks have all left today and we are once more in possession of our homes, which was not the case while they were with us. A rumor reaches us of a great battle at Gettysburg. Of course Gen'l Lee is victorious although the Yankee papers are not willing to give him full credit for it. We also hear that a division of the Southern Army is at Beverly where they had an engagement with the enemy and crushed them. A report that Vicksburg has fallen I do not credit. I must have better proof than mere hearsay.” [3]

Even in 1863 the Confederacy was still clinging to the hope of their own eventual independence. Why would any “true Southerner” doubt that their armies had been victorious? For that matter why would they believe “rumors” of disaster befalling their armies? It is an interesting aspect to the times that people would still cling to their cause and beliefs despite mounting evidence otherwise. In the days following Mrs. Barr still had trouble believing that Gettysburg was less than a Confederate victory and that Vicksburg had indeed fallen. She dismisses the notions as false due to the fact that the sources of such talk were “Yankee”.

Captain Stephen Minot Weld, leaves us a most poignant reflection on this Independence Day, 1863. His diary entry for the day laments:

“This year I expected to spend the Fourth in a battle, and find myself instead in Philadelphia. Were it not for the errand that brought me here I should have enjoyed the day very much.

We started for Mr. Landis's house, 1829 Spruce Street at 6A.M. From here the body was taken to the Lancaster depot, and placed in a private car. Only the generals brother and sister and staff were present. We reached Lancaster at about 12 M., and there found an immense crowd of women, men, and children waiting at the depot. We got into some old wagons and drove to the cemetery. Here a chapter of the Bible was read, and prayer delivered, and then poor General Reynolds disappeared from us for some time to come.” [4]

Weld was an aid to Major General John F. Reynolds at Gettysburg. Reynolds had dispatched him with a message to Major General George G. Meade to hurry the Army of the Potomac along. The Confederates were advancing, in strong force, and beginning to drive Brigadier General John Buford’s cavalry pickets in along Chambersburg Pike to the north and west of town. Reynolds was ahead of his troops (First Corps) but would bring them up as quickly as possible. He declared he would fight the Rebels, through the streets of Gettysburg if necessary, but Meade must hurry. Weld covered the 14 miles to Taneytown in one hour and twenty minutes on a blown horse and delivered the message to Meade. On the return trip he met the ambulance bearing Reynolds' body. The general had been killed shortly after Weld had left him.

“A braver man or a better soldier than General R. never lived.”  Weld would declare in a letter to his father dated July 3.

Perhaps at this point in the war the observance of Independence Day was getting a little shopworn. Although two of the soldiers record “national salutes” that day in their diaries, there is not much beyond that. As we see, the lady rebel forgets the day, and the next day states the people are just to busy to observe it. It must be remembered that she was in the minority in the town of Ravenswood, but she makes no mention of the Unionists marking the day with celebration either. It had “passed quietly”. It appears that two years of bloodshed had taken the luster from it. 1864 would be little different, and in ways, much worse.

The Picket

Sources

1- Bircher, W. (1889) A Drummer Boys Diary, St. Paul, Minn. St. Paul book and stationary co. Page 67

2- Wescott, M. Ebenezer (1909), Civil War Letters, 1861-1865, [Mora? Minn.] Letter No. XIII

3- Barr, H. Fitzhugh, The Civil War Diary of Mrs. Henrietta Fitzhugh Barr (Barre), 1862-1863, Ravenswood, Virginia (West Virginia): Marietta, Ohio :Marietta College, 1961 Page 26

4- Weld, Stephen W., (1912) War Diaries of Stephen Minot Weld, 1861-1865, Privately printed, The Riverside Press, Cambridge Mass.

Sources 1-3 retrieved from http://www.hathitrust.org/

Source 4 retrieved from http://openlibrary.org/

Charles B. Johnson: What He Saw

Charles Beneulyn Johnson saw a lot while serving in the medical department of the 130^th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. Some of what he saw he describes in his books written long after the US Civil War. Writing during a time of medical advancement, he relates instances that fall under the “If we had only known” heading. Dirty medical instruments, poor sanitation of camps, bad food, bad water and of course enemy missiles, led to the deaths of thousands of soldiers, Union and Confederate. The following are but two episodes he describes in the book “Muskets and Medicine”.

This can be filed under the “Boys will be boys” heading. Early during the Siege of Vicksburg, a young Ohio soldier seeking to alleviate the boredom he and his regiment was enduring while waiting to advance, found some loose powder. “He ran it along in a little trail, covered this with dust, and tried to fire it. As it did not ignite, he was stooping over with his face close to the ground when the charge took fire. His face was badly burned, and later was attacked with erysipelas, from which death resulted.” [1] Erysipelas is a condition caused by bacteria and attacks the outer layer of skin and presents itself as reddening of the skin around a wound and it may enter the system from something as minor as an insect bite and the more damaged the area the greater the likelihood of infection. [2] The area around Vicksburg would have been a fine place indeed to have this condition develop.

Also at Vicksburg, on May 22, the captain of company F, 130TH Illinois, William M. Colby, was mortally wounded. A bullet had entered his brain, and he arrived at the field hospital in a coma. “The first thing our surgeon did was to run his index finger its full length into the wound; and this without even ordinary hand washing. Next he introduced a dirty bullet probe.” [3] Colby died a few days later. Johnson does not fault the surgeon, for as he says, “These facts are narrated to show the frightful handicap Civil War surgery was under from a lack of knowledge of asepsis and antisepsis...” and it was no reflection on the surgeon or his skill. He was doing the best he could with what he had and what he knew.

Yes, Johnson saw a lot during his three years service, and although he would not be wounded by bullets he was felled by chronic dysentery, a malady that would follow him for the rest of his life.

It was the lot that fell to the soldiers of both sides. Bad water, bad food, bad sanitation, and bad medical practices took the greatest toll on their lives. Some would survive all of this and the bloody battlefield, but none would ever completely heal.

Sources

1. Muskets and Medicine, or Army Life in the Sixties, Johnson, Charles Beneulyn, 1917, Page 105
2. Erysipelas, Davis, Loretta MD, January 11, 2010 Medscape Reference, Retrieved from http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1052445-overview retrieved April 23, 2012
3. Johnson, page 132

Bad Water

It is always interesting for me to research the American Civil War, and sometimes I find some of the neatest stuff. Take for example the following anecdotes, taken from “Reminiscences of the Civil War” compiled from diaries of men from the 103rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry, about the scarcity of drinking water:

The water of the Yazoo River is supposed to be the most unhealthy water in the United States. A steamboat captain has been heard to say; “If a man drinks the river water a week, he will have a sandbar in him half a mile long.” The inhabitants of that section of the country will under no circumstances drink or use in any way the well or spring water that may be found, but depend entirely on rainwater.

 The regiment had been attached to the IX Army Corps* of John G. Parke and sent to Haynes' (Haines') Bluff and Snyder's Bluff during the Vicksburg campaign, arriving at that place on the 11^th of June, 1863. After fortifying the bluffs, the regiment moved to Oak Ridge and fortified that place. It was here that the writer of this particular segment of reminiscences wrote:

“The trials and tribulations of the troops while in this part of the world can not be described.”

The Indian word “Yazoo”is said to mean “the river of death” or its equivalent. A camp kettle of water from what was thought to be a good spring from the bluffs would, if allowed to stand in the sun for an hour, have a deposit of some kind quite half an inch deep. We have since been astonished that the entire Command was not swept off the earth.

Many generals of both sides, in particular those that had served in the Mexican War, would take steps to insure good water supplies and keep those supplies untainted. They did not always succeed, but some at least made an effort. These instances do not point to poor camp placement or policing, but the men suffered from stomach problems while in the area of their operations which they would leave after the fall of Vicksburg. Of their time there the writer wrote:

 At Oak Ridge we had lived much better than while at the Bluffs, as wild blackberries were quite thick, and of the finest quality. Still many of the men were taken down with stomach troubles.

I wonder...

 One last story relating to water, at least for this post. After the 103^rd Illinois left Oak Ridge they went to the Black River (where they found more blackberries) and after a lightly contested crossing marched toward Jackson, Mississippi. Of the march on the 8^th of July the writer relates this story:

On this march we suffered greatly from want of water. Wells and cisterns having failed, we were compelled to use water from pools, (a great thunderstorm had drenched the area the night of the 6^th) in nearly all of which the Rebs had killed a mule or some other animal, so

that to use the water was victuals as well as drink.

I certainly hope this entry was made in jest!

Source

Retrieved from http://www.archive.org/details/reminiscencesofc00illi pages 14,15,17

*Note*

The 103^rd Illinois was a part of the 2^nd brigade, 1^st division, XVIth Army Corps prior to being attached to the IX Corps at the time of these incidents. They were brigaded with the 6^th Iowa, 40^th Illinois, 46^th Ohio, and 15^th Michigan.