LINCOLN ROOM 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
 MEMORIAL 
 
 the Class of 1901 
 
 founded by 
 
 HARLAN HOYT HORNER 
 
 and 
 
 HENRIETTA CALHOUN HORNER 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2012 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
 http://archive.org/details/civilwarunvarnisOOstre 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 
 
 An Unvarnished Account 
 of the Late But Still Lively Hostilities 
 
OTHER BOOKS BY JAMES STREET 
 The Dabneys: 
 
 OH, PROMISED LAND 
 
 TAP ROOTS 
 
 BY VALOUR AND ARMS 
 
 TOMORROW WE REAP 
 
 MINGO DABNEY 
 
 IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE 
 
 THE BISCUIT EATER 
 
 THE GAUNTLET 
 
 THE HIGH CALLING 
 
 THE VELVET DOUBLET 
 
 SHORT STORIES 
 
An Unvarnished Account of the Late But Still Lively Hostilities 
 
 THE 
 
 As told by 
 
 JAMES STREET 
 
 Illustrated by John Alan Maxwell 
 
 DIAL PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
Copyright 1953 by The Curtis Publishing Company 
 
 Copyright 1953 by James Street 
 Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 53-9320 
 
 Designed by Joseph F. Kemmer 
 
 Printed in the United States of America by 
 The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., Scranton, Penna. 
 
For Ginny and Helen 
 
THE CIVIL WAR 
 
Almost a hundred years after the first shot was fired, we 
 Americans cannot even agree on a name for our Civil War 
 Between the States, much less on what caused it or exactly 
 what happened. 
 
 It was a lapse into national schizophrenia, a monstrous meta- 
 morphosis during which Dr. U. S. Jekyll, a pretty good sort, 
 changed himself into two Mr. Hydes who promptly tried to 
 beat each other to death and who really never have forgiven 
 each other although they have shaken hands and smiled for 
 history's photographers. 
 
 It was a madness that cost a young country of 31,500,000 
 people more than 600,000 dead men — an American toll larger 
 than World Wars I and II combined, with the Korean War 
 and a few more thrown in to boot. 
 
It was a family feud that left the South so prostrated she 
 scarcely could breathe and so flat on her back that it took her 
 twenty-five years to get to one knee, fifty years to stand up 
 and seventy-five years to walk without braces; and left the 
 North so bewildered that, in freeing her black brothers from 
 slavery, she put her white brothers in political and economic 
 bondage and thereby bred a bitterness that flares today in 
 books, football games, barroom brawls and Letters-to-the- 
 Editor columns. 
 
 It made a martyred demigod of Abraham Lincoln, a melan- 
 choly Samaritan who put the Constitution in mothballs long 
 enough to save the Union it had founded, and a scapegoat of 
 Jefferson Davis, a stiff-necked constitutionalist who reluc- 
 tantly led his people into total war and total desolation and 
 lived to become their symbol of suffering but never of shame. 
 
 It made an idol of General R. E. Lee, the vanquished who 
 opposed slavery, and a presidential failure of General U. S. 
 Grant, the victor whose wife owned slaves. 
 
 More words have been written about it than any other war. 
 The South still talks about it and the folks know a lot about 
 the Confederacy's battles but almost nothing about its Consti- 
 tution, its Congress and its courts. The North still devours 
 scads of books about it and has swallowed and perpetrated 
 some of the weirdest myths since King Arthur. 
 
 At the height of World War II many of the best-selling 
 novels in our country were about the Civil War. Previously, 
 there had been Gone With the Wind. This one reportedly is, 
 world-wide, the most popular novel of the twentieth century 
 and far and away our most popular novel since In His Steps, 
 which, incidentally, had to do with Christ and not with the 
 Confederacy at all. 
 
 It gave us The Red Badge of Courage, a good book about 
 
 4 
 
a Northern foot soldier, and Surrey of Eagle's Nest, a roman- 
 tic hippity-do upon which my generation of Southerners cut 
 eye teeth and few wisdom teeth. These two books may ex- 
 plain a lot, for the Yankee Red Badge of Courage tells the 
 horror of a war the North won while the Confederate Surrey 
 of Eagle's Nest rhapsodizes the glory of a war which the 
 South lost. 
 
 Further, the Civil War — 
 
 But hold on. In this essay, I am going to call that struggle 
 the Civil War and before any reader grabs pen and vitriol, I 
 hasten to report that I was born in Mississippi and now live 
 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. That "War Between the 
 States" ambiguity is an inadequate description and let's face 
 it. Besides, it's phony. We Southerners seldom use it among 
 ourselves but reserve it for public declarations and for hair- 
 splitting harangues with Yankees. 
 
 The name of War Between the States came after the fact 
 and, incidentally, was taken from the title of a book, A Con- 
 stitutional View of the Late War Between the States, written 
 by Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy. 
 
 When the war started, the South couldn't agree on a name 
 — or on anything else much. The names of a War of Inde- 
 pendence" and "War for Separation" were sampled and dis- 
 carded. Finally, "Civil War" was accepted with grimaces and 
 groans, but the South never did like it and still doesn't. 
 
 The Confederates who did the bleeding called it "the War." 
 The North called it the "War of Rebellion," "the Civil War" 
 and several others. I prefer "Civil War." Saves type. 
 
 It gave us Dixie, the South's fight song written by a Yankee, 
 and The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the North's anthem 
 based on a southern plantation chant. 
 
 It gave us ironclads and torpedoes, Scarlett O'Hara and 
 
 5 
 
Little Eva, our first attempt at air power and our first income 
 tax. 
 
 It revolutionized the science and art of mass slaughter from 
 tactics to ships to arms, taught us how to wage wars through 
 conscription and to finance them by popular bond issues. It 
 made Negroes free men but not citizens and then sired the 
 Fourteenth Amendment that did. It also sired the Ku Klux 
 Klan and changed the handy carpet bag from a traveling kit 
 into a badge of ignominy. 
 
 It brought a scourge of graft, scandals and suicides, split 
 American Protestantism, made a flock of millionaires and sent 
 brothers and cousins against one another in 2,261 battles, 
 including one each in New York, Vermont, Illinois, Utah, 
 Idaho and Washington Territory; two in Nevada, four in 
 Oregon, six in California, six in Minnesota, nineteen in New 
 Mexico, 298 in Tennessee and 519 in Virginia. The average 
 was better than a battle a day for four years. 
 
 Its issue of State's Rights is with us still and as late as 1952 
 helped elect — now hear this — helped elect a Republican pres- 
 ident. 
 
 It created more fables than Aesop, ranging from the five 
 Bixby heroes of Lincoln's immortal letter and Barbara 
 Frietchie to General Forrest's "git thar fust etc.," none of 
 which is true. 
 
 It made us think we are the best fighters in the world, in- 
 dicating we may have confused ferocity with ability. It gave 
 us new words for our language and sayings that have become 
 commonplace: "That government of the people, by the peo- 
 ple etc."— "War is hell"— "Like Grant took Richmond"— 
 "Unconditional surrender" — "Hold the fort"— "Damn the 
 torpedoes" and "Damyankees." 
 
 It shattered the axiom that cotton is king and proved the 
 
 6 
 
axiom that a good big man can whip a good little man although 
 it took 395,528 Union lives to prove it, including 267 by- 
 court martial, 391 by suicide, 313 by sunstroke and 520 mur- 
 dered. 
 
 There is no telling how many Southerners were killed. The 
 figure 258,000 generally is accepted, but many of the South's 
 skimpy records were lost in pyres that burned for four years 
 over thousands and thousands of miles, and left the land so 
 barren that, as the saying goes, even the crows had to carry 
 their own food when they flew over it and only the vultures 
 got fat. 
 
 Records? The South didn't even have ink for her living to 
 write with, much less to record her dead. 
 
 Sir Winston Churchill said it was the last great war be- 
 tween gentlemen. Sir Winston perhaps was thinking of Pe- 
 tersburg where a Maine regiment of nine hundred lost almost 
 seven hundred dead in seven minutes. No machine guns, no 
 grenades, no flame-throwers, no tanks; just gentlemen killing 
 gentlemen, clawing out eyes and batting out brains. 
 
 Or Antietam, maybe? There the 3rd North Carolina lost 
 90 per cent of its men. Or Gettysburg when the 1st Minnesota 
 lost 82 per cent while Company F of the 6th North Carolina 
 was losing 100 per cent, thus sustaining that state's boast that 
 she furnished more privates and fewer generals to the Con- 
 federacy than any of her sisters. 
 
 Could Sir Winston have been thinking of Franklin, Ten- 
 nessee, where Hood's Southerners lost six thousand men, two 
 major generals, nine brigadiers and forty-five regimental com- 
 manders in one futile charge after another? Or Virginia in 
 May and June of 1864 when Grant's casualties totaled almost 
 the size of Lee's army that inflicted the losses? 
 
 At Waterloo, the Allies lost 20 per cent of their effectives, 
 
 7 
 
but the price bought the dissolution of the French army. At 
 Gettysburg, the Union also lost 20 per cent but the Con- 
 federate army remained intact. The French army lost 3 1 per 
 cent at Waterloo and melted away. The Union army lost 30 
 per cent at Chickamauga and came back strong enough to 
 take Atlanta. The victory at Chickamauga cost the Confed- 
 erates 27 per cent casualties and the victory at Antietam cost 
 the Union 2 3 per cent; and both sides kept on fighting. 
 
 Gentlemen indeed! A holiday for butchers as testified by a 
 generation of men whose wooden legs echoed on the side- 
 walks of a thousand towns, whose canes tapped a way for 
 sightless eyes. Some orators, usually seeking votes and a public 
 paycheck, have called it our nation's most glorious hour. 
 Balderdash. It was our dirtiest, and surely our most stupid. 
 
 This holocaust has been blamed on slavery, State's Rights, 
 the protective tariff, free soil, Yankee mendacity, Southern 
 treason, sun spots, the dictates of God and the Revelation of 
 Saint John. For many years the wise men accepted it as a 
 dog-eat-dog carnage between Northern capitalism and South- 
 ern agrarianism. More and more, however, historians are 
 swinging to the idea that a moral issue was paramount, and 
 the moral issue was slavery. 
 
 The question of secession, itself an incredible blunder, had 
 been a hair-splitting issue since New England threatened to 
 leave the Union in 18 14. It was not a sectional doctrine. As 
 late as 1857 New England considered secession; and when the 
 shooting started, the mayor of New York agitated for his 
 people to forsake the United States and form a neutral city. 
 
 The Constitution and Bill of Rights, largely the fruit of 
 Southern minds, did not forbid secession. The Constitution 
 formed a family of states and did not define their rights, but 
 defined the rights of the family. It is an odds-on bet that had 
 
 8 
 
the Constitution interfered with the so-called sovereign rights 
 of the states then the Constitution never would have been 
 ratified in the first place, for every state, North and South, 
 made a fetish of sovereignty in the early days. To a degree, a 
 similar situation exists in the United Nations of today. The 
 United Nations has a Charter (Constitution) that has been 
 approved by all members, but let the United Nations tamper 
 with the sovereignty of any of the powerful nations (states) 
 and the whole shebang will blow up. 
 
 The North itself was split a dozen different ways on seces- 
 sion and so was the South. As late as 1861 an Alabama farmer 
 wrote his son in Mississippi: 
 
 "It was disgusting to me to think that I had Raised a child 
 that would Cecede from under the government that he was 
 born and raised under. Tha have got you puft up with Ce- 
 cessionism as tight as a tode. I dont See what you nede to 
 Care for. you hant got no Slaves." 
 
 The son replied: 
 
 "Henry Bell Is my Name and fite I will before I will submit 
 to black republican princibles lose my life I will first." 
 
 The chances are he lost it. 
 
 Secession? A fie for constitutional double-talk and legalistic 
 gnat-straining. The weakness of the Constitution was rising 
 like oil on water. It had not united the states but had tied them 
 together with string; cotton string. Destiny is greater than 
 men. The deified founding fathers, whose names now are 
 whispered in awe by the courts or shouted from the hustings, 
 had provided for State's Rights and the chickens had come 
 home to roost, and the rooster to crow and fight. 
 
 Alexander Stephens of Georgia, one of Lincoln's few 
 friends when they served together in Congress and later vice- 
 president of the Confederacy, was a militant anti-secessionist. 
 
 10 
 
Jefferson Davis himself had grown lukewarm toward the 
 premise that any state had a right to go into business for 
 herself. 
 
 The time had come for the United States to decide whether 
 it was going to be a bunch of Balkan states or a world power. 
 We were almost ready for the Major League of nations. We 
 were on second base. The idea was to reach third even if we 
 had to spike the umpire and break every rule of the game. 
 
 Therefore, secession was a link in the chain that swung us 
 into civil war, a big link, but only one of many. 
 
 Slavery? Most Southerners not only did not own slaves, 
 but many of them were dead set against the institution. The 
 Abolitionist movement was born in the South. The long- 
 heads (now called eggheads) realized the economic stupidity 
 of the system, but press, pulpit and bar — the cheerleaders for 
 the status quo — tagged such thinkers as radicals and trouble- 
 makers. Many were the backwoods preachers who railed 
 against slavery on moral grounds. They were called crackpots 
 and ignorant prophets of the unwashed. Many of the big-shot 
 clergymen and lawyers apologized for slavery as the will of 
 God or the will of the law. It just so happened that their 
 communicants and clients also held for the status quo. 
 
 The South was not pro-slavery any more than the North 
 was anti-slavery. Hence, slavery as such was only another 
 link in the chain. But listen. The Negro himself was several 
 links and was far more powerful than the institution which 
 kept him in bondage. 
 
 The South's poor whites were afraid of the Negro. 
 
 It was the consuming and frustrating fear of what would 
 happen if all Negroes were freed and became first-class citi- 
 zens. Slavery was the check rein that kept the Negro in tow. 
 The fear of millions of free Negroes was fed in gulps to the 
 
 IT 
 
non-slavers, the po'whites, the red necks. Freedom means 
 political equality and political equality will mean social equal- 
 ity, so they said. The Negro will go to your schools. Your 
 churches. They will take your jobs. Marry your sister. 
 
 These shibboleths were raised and the forty-acre-and-a- 
 mule Southerner shuddered. Should a tide of free Negroes rise 
 in the South, then the rich folks could get out. The poor 
 would have to take it. I believe that John Doe, Southerner, 
 fundamentally was opposed to slavery, but was more opposed 
 to freedom for all Negroes, and was terrified by the planted 
 thought that his state might become a "black" republic and 
 was killing mad at the possibility that a Negro legally might 
 come into his living room, then his dining room, and then his 
 bedroom. 
 
 A Georgia editor wrote that slavery made "the poor man 
 respectable" and gave the poor "an elevated position in society 
 that they would not otherwise have." 
 
 And it had its effect. In the mountains of western North 
 Carolina and east Tennessee where Negroes were as rare as 
 Democrats, a spokesman sounded off: "To prevent this [equal- 
 ity] we are willing to spare the last man, down to the point 
 where women and children begin to suffer for food and 
 clothing; where these begin to suffer and die, rather than see 
 them equalized with an inferior race we will die with them." 
 
 Under all of this, however, was a moral issue that fear and 
 law and money could not subdue. Slavery was wrong and the 
 South knew it. It was a dirty neck and a visible sin on those 
 who held up their arms in righteous supplication and spoke 
 platitudes about political cleanliness and spiritual godliness. 
 
 The North, with the inherent tactlessness of Yankees then 
 and now, was pointing a finger and ignoring her own dirty 
 fingernail. So the South, to appease a gnawing conscience, 
 
 12 
 
pointed to Yankee slums, to wage slaves, to child labor, to 
 beggars and crime. They both were so right, and so wrong. 
 The pot was so busy calling the kettle black that they both 
 boiled over. 
 
 And yet slavery did not shove us into civil war. It was a 
 pit along our national path which, sooner or later, we would 
 either have to fill in or fall in. Let's put it this way: slavery was 
 a cannon aiming at our heads. But it was not the fuse, and 
 without the fuse the cannon might never have gone off. 
 
 Then what was the immediate cause for our attempt at 
 national suicide? Because two opposing but comparatively 
 small pressure groups were determined to have their way. 
 They were the Northern high-tariff industrialists who wanted 
 to buy in an open market and sell in a closed market, and the 
 Southern cotton nabobs who wanted to buy and sell in a 
 free market. 
 
 The industrialist wanted government help and you can 
 call it subsidy, welfare or anything you like. The Southerner 
 wanted free enterprise. 
 
 The Abolitionist, zealous and vocal, didn't cut much ice 
 at first, but when the North needed a shot in the arm the 
 battle-cry of freedom was raised and the struggle became a 
 crusade to liberate the Negro. 
 
 "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the 
 Lord—" 
 
 The South, bled white and suffering from the moral and 
 economic cancer of slavery, didn't have a chance. 
 
 As an upright line of dominoes falls when the first one is 
 toppled, so began the Civil War. The year was i860. The 
 Roman Catholic Church had adopted the doctrine of the 
 Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin only six years 
 before. The Light Brigade had charged at Balaclava. The 
 
 *3 
 
first train had crossed the Mississippi River. The first petro- 
 leum well had been opened at Titusville, Pennsylvania. John 
 Brown had raided Harper's Ferry to launch a slave revolt, 
 and his hanged body was moldering in the grave. In New 
 York a minstrel man from Ohio by the name of Dan Emmett 
 sat himself down and wrote a little jig song and called it Dixie. 
 
 Yes, the year was i860. The Democratic Party broke into 
 splinters in a squabble between Northern apologists for slav- 
 ery and Southern firebrands. The Democrats had not elected 
 a Southerner to the White House since James Knox Polk. 
 (The next real Southerner in the presidency was to be Harry 
 S. Truman. Don't holler, boys. Just read the record. Yes, I 
 know that Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia, but he 
 was not a real Southerner any more than Kentucky-born 
 Abraham Lincoln was a real Southerner.) 
 
 The Democratic Convention blew sky high and the South, 
 aware that it was going to be outvoted by Yankee Democrats, 
 seceded from the convention and set up their own party of 
 Dixiecrats. They nominated John C. Breckinridge of Ken- 
 tucky. The Northern Democrats nominated Stephen A. 
 Douglas of Illinois. Then John Bell of Tennessee came out 
 on a Constitutional Union ticket, pulling his support from 
 Southern Whigs and disgruntled Democrats. 
 
 The Republican party, organized only six years before on 
 a promise for a new deal, nominated Abraham Lincoln and 
 adopted a catch-all platform of protective tariff, federal aid 
 to railroads and free soil in the West. The Republican slogan 
 for the campaign was "Vote Yourself a Farm." 
 
 Lincoln made no speeches. The party bosses kept him 
 under wraps and more or less under cover. The propagandists 
 began to build the myths and Mr. Lincoln sat on his front 
 porch in Springfield, Illinois and talked to the folks who 
 came to see him. 
 
He had declared publicly that he was not an Abolitionist 
 and that he reckoned white men ought to have more sense 
 than to bash one another in the head over Negro slavery. He 
 believed that Congress did not have the constitutional power 
 to interfere with slavery in the states. He was born in the 
 South, in Kentucky. He liked turnip greens. 
 
 Then why did the South distrust him? Because he was a 
 Republican and the South had come to associate Republicans 
 with Abolitionists and Radicals. The South's blue-stocking 
 clique (and they were running things) was ultra-conserva- 
 tive although the barefooted folks had a tendency to jump 
 the traces, as Andrew Jackson had proved. The Southerner 
 up at the forks of the creek was a revolutionary on most 
 things except the Negro question, and when it came to the 
 Negro he got on a horse and rode off in all directions. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln really wanted a new deal with the same 
 deck. So did most Southerners. But Lincoln was a Republican, 
 and the very word Republican was synonymous with Negro, 
 and all the problems of Pandora. The press, the pulpit and 
 the lawyers had done their job well. John Doe, Southerner, 
 thought his cabin was dependent upon the planter's mansion. 
 He didn't like it, but he aimed to stay a free white man in a 
 white man's country. 
 
 So to the tune of Yankee Doodle, he was singing: 
 
 Yankee Doodle is a knave, 
 
 And everybody knows it, 
 And swindling is his natural trade, 
 
 For by his tricks he shows it. 
 HeHl go to church and sing and pray, 
 
 Be full of grace on Sunday, 
 With wooden hams and paper shoes, 
 
 He'll cheat you on a Monday. 
 
 *5 
 
Out of New Hampshire came the five singing Hutchinsons, 
 chanting: 
 
 Steeped in infamous corruption, 
 Sold to sugar-cane and cotton, 
 Lo! a nation's heart is rotten, 
 
 And the vampires suck her blood; 
 O'er our broad and free dominions 
 Rules the Cotton King whose minions 
 Clip our fearless eagle's pinions, 
 
 And invite Oppression's reign. 
 
 Silly? Don't kid yourself. Congress was writing laws, but 
 the people were singing songs and you see what happened. 
 
 The North thought the average Southerner was a planter's 
 son, a haughty slaver who never had read a book or thought 
 seriously about things cultural. Dear, dear. 
 
 Actually, the typical Southerner was a poor boy from a 
 little farm. He didn't think highly of the big planters either, 
 but listened to them at first because they were so elegant and 
 used such pretty words. However, he didn't aim to take much 
 lip from the aristocrats, and not a frazzling bit from the 
 Yankees. 
 
 The South thought the average Northerner was a rascal 
 with a blue nose and a yellow belly, threatening the sacred 
 hearth of an English-Scotch-Irish people whose hearths were 
 their altars. 
 
 Actually, the typical Northerner was a mill hand who 
 looked on his boss about like the Southerner looked on the 
 big planter, or a farmer who didn't trust city slickers and 
 who knew nothing about Negroes. He reckoned he wouldn't 
 take any sass from the big-city muckety-mucks, and not a 
 mite from those stuck-up Southerners. 
 
 16 
 
Really there was little difference between the boy from 
 Georgia and the boy from Indiana, except one raised cotton 
 and the other raised hay. 
 
 Together they raised Hell. 
 
 17 
 
Abraham Lincoln was elected president by a minority popular 
 vote, polling fewer votes than the Democratic Party — but 
 remember the Democrats had two candidates. Had the Demo- 
 crats united behind Candidate Douglas or Candidate Breckin- 
 ridge they would have swept the Republicans, and Lincoln, 
 back under the bed with the moribund Whigs. Lincoln polled 
 1,866,352 votes, Douglas 1,375,157 and Breckinridge 845,763. 
 
 Congress remained Democratic, but our first Republican 
 president was elected by a coalition of votes so weird and 
 diverse that it was not equaled until Franklin D. Roosevelt 
 and his new deal came to power. 
 
 The gaunt and gauche Lincoln of myths and martyrdom 
 has become such a god in our Valhalla that any attempt to 
 humanize him usually brings scorn, and any criticism of him 
 
 18 
 
brings partisan outcries. To me, he walks shoulder to shoulder 
 with Thomas Jefferson as our greatest American. Neverthe- 
 less, the tinsel that his idolaters have draped on this oak is 
 disgusting and ridiculous. So let's push aside the trappings 
 and take a gander at the man. 
 
 He was born in a log cabin in 1809. So what? Most back- 
 woods kids of those days were born in log cabins. His father 
 was shiftless and illiterate. Again so what. There were an 
 awful lot of no-good bums among our pioneering ancestors. 
 His mother, Nancy Hanks, was illegitimate, a "natural child" 
 as some have called her. Even that was not a distinction. The 
 morals of our backwoodsmen often were as crude as their 
 tools, as unconventional as their shouting and frothing re- 
 ligions. The momists of our day prate about Lincoln's love 
 for his mother. Sorry, but I won't swallow that without gag- 
 ging just a little bit. The boy was only nine years old when 
 his mother died. The women who really influenced his life 
 were his stepmother, who had gumption, and his wife, who 
 had gall. 
 
 His stepmother was Sarah Johnston, a widow with three 
 children. Let's take no glory from Nancy Hanks, but for 
 goodness sakes let's give a little bit to the widow Johnston. 
 
 As for Lincoln's boyhood, it almost is impossible to separate 
 myth and truth. The product of a cussing, drinking and God- 
 shouting culture, he didn't cuss or drink or join the church. 
 He liked girls, but never allowed himself to get involved. The 
 Ann Rutledge story does not hold water. 
 
 The family wandered up through Indiana and eventually 
 to Illinois. Lincoln and his father did not get along and as 
 soon as he was on his own he left home. He did go down to 
 New Orleans on a flatboat, but the story of the slave auction 
 
 19 
 
and his vow to "hit that thing [slavery] and hit it hard" is 
 thoroughly untrustworthy. 
 
 Still in his early twenties and at New Salem, Illinois, he was 
 made postmaster and deputy surveyor. He was only twenty- 
 five when he was elected to the Legislature as a Whig. Now 
 what have we got here? Lincoln had split rails, farmed, 
 worked in a store — all commonplace tasks for boys and young 
 men of his day. But already he was in politics (postmaster 
 and deputy surveyor) and was even in the State Legislature. 
 He had been to the Black Hawk War. Here was no provincial 
 hayseed. He had traveled all the way to New Orleans and 
 that was quite a trip in those days. 
 
 The truth of the matter is that Abraham Lincoln was a 
 master politician from the very beginning and a man who got 
 around. Reams of bosh have been written about his anti- 
 slavery attitudes, but as a state legislator and a Whig leader he 
 took the position that slavery was "founded on both injustice 
 and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doc- 
 trines tends rather to increase than abate its evils." 
 
 These words are a torch in the Lincoln labyrinth through 
 which historians, sobsisters, poets and playwrights have led 
 us for a hundred years. The words simply mean what they 
 say: that slavery was wrong but that abolition was wronger. 
 Take it any way you like, it is compromise and logical in- 
 compatibility. Abraham Lincoln was a white man's man. 
 
 He was never a "starving" lawyer. Soon after he got his 
 license he formed a partnership with John Todd Stuart, a 
 prominent Whig of influential family and connections. 
 
 His clients included such companies as the Illinois Central 
 Railroad and the McCormick Reaper Company, in whose 
 service he met Edwin Stanton, who was to be his Secretary 
 of War. 
 
 20 
 
Lincoln often has been pictured as a gangling trial lawyer 
 defending abused people by shrewd tricks and cracker-barrel 
 philosophies. He was a shrewd lawyer; very shrewd — shrewd 
 enough to know that the cracker barrel was our nation's 
 strongest political platform. His shrewdness, honesty, hu- 
 mility, invective and humor made him a success in rural courts. 
 His claw-hammer mind and his ability to cut through legal- 
 istic mumbo-jumbo and get to the heart of a matter made 
 him a success in the higher courts, including the Federal 
 Court of faraway Cincinnati. 
 
 Actors who portray him roll his words in resonant beauty. 
 Yet the chances are his voice was as flat as a Kentucky batter- 
 cake and, at times, rose to the nasal twang of central Illinois. 
 It might come as a surprise to some Northerners that, to 
 Southerners, they have the strange accent and we get as big 
 a kick out of it as Yankees get out of ours and we poke just 
 as much fun at it. I will be jeered for this, but I will be jeered 
 anyway — so here goes: I have a hunch that Lincoln's voice 
 was something like Harry Truman's, a midwestern twang on 
 a southern base. 
 
 The romance and marriage of Abraham Lincoln and Mary 
 Todd have become a county fair, including the merry-go- 
 round and shoot-the-chute, for amateur psychiatrists. Mary 
 Todd also was a Kentuckian. (Her brother-in-law was a 
 Confederate general.) 
 
 The lady was a shrew. Her will power was stronger than 
 her brain and she was an ambitious, driving, nagging female 
 and the two things that will drive a moody man, such as 
 Lincoln, to distraction are a nagging wife and a smoking 
 fireplace. He stood her up once after the wedding date had 
 been set. There seems no doubt about that. And then he 
 married her in considerable haste on November 4, 1842. 
 
 21 
 
Another of his law partners, the letter-writing and gossipy- 
 William H. Herndon, wrote in all seriousness, but with no 
 evidence, that Lincoln went through a period of insanity 
 before his marriage. He was "as crazy as a loon" — so wrote 
 Herndon. Sheer verbiage. It was the custom of the day to 
 attribute eccentricities to insanity. (Later, it was to be said 
 that Sherman had lost his mind.) 
 
 Maybe Abraham Lincoln just didn't want to get married. 
 It happens every day. But he did get married, and, in a way, 
 it was one of the best day's work he ever did, for Mary Todd 
 whiplashed his ambition and rubbed on him a polish that was 
 to serve him well. 
 
 There seems no doubt that there was some violent emo- 
 tional disturbance in his life about this time and he was in the 
 throes of depression and excessive morbidity. Death and dark- 
 ness were the constant companions of our forebears and it is 
 no wonder that they talked about them a lot and feared them 
 in superstitious and unnatural awe. Lincoln was no exception. 
 He was a product of his day and his land. 
 
 The Whigs sent him to Congress in 1847 and he was no 
 great shakes of a congressman. He opposed the Mexican War 
 and made a speech that was to haunt him, saying that any 
 people or "a majority of any portion of such people" had the 
 right to "shake off the existing government, and form a new 
 
 one. 
 
 His stand on the Mexican War enraged some folks out in 
 Illinois and they called him another Benedict Arnold. As a 
 congressman, he proposed the abolition of slavery in the 
 District of Columbia but only on three conditions: gradual 
 emancipation, compensation to the slaveholders and a popular 
 referendum. He was conservative to the core on this occasion 
 and was playing it safe. 
 
 22 
 
He was a nationally known Whig by this time, but was so 
 unpopular in Illinois that his party dared not let him speak 
 for the ticket out there during the campaign of 1848. He 
 stumped in New England and although his party won the 
 presidency by electing Zachary Taylor (whose daughter had 
 married Jefferson Davis) the Whigs were beaten in Lincoln's 
 own district and this was taken as a repudiation of the con- 
 gressman. 
 
 Lincoln figured he was through in politics and sadly he left 
 the Washington scene and went back to Springfield and to 
 his law practice. The Republican Party was founded a few 
 years later and he sort of sidled into that camp because the 
 Democrats were decadent and the Whigs were dead. His 
 fundamental liberalism began to inch to the fore. He advo- 
 cated more civil liberties and the broadening of the political 
 base to include more and more of the masses. He began to 
 speak out for labor and even favored woman's suffrage. He 
 soon was the leading Republican of Illinois and almost was 
 nominated for vice-president in 1856. Two years later he was 
 nominated for the Senate and this was the campaign in which 
 he opposed Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. He lost the elec- 
 tion but made himself famous in one speech: "A house divided 
 against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot 
 endure permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect 
 the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — 
 but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all 
 one thing, or all the other." 
 
 Two years later the Republicans nominated him for presi- 
 dent in a mess of back-stage maneuvering in which Lincoln 
 did not participate although surely he knew about it. South 
 Carolina announced that if he were elected she would leave 
 the family. 
 
 23 
 
And there it was. 
 
 A liberal and a humanitarian, yes — but first, last and always 
 Abraham Lincoln was a Unionist and was capable of using a 
 cold deck, a blackjack and a pistol to preserve the Union. His 
 position was crystal-clear in a statement to editor Horace 
 Greeley: "If I could save the Union without freeing any 
 slaves, I would do it; if I could save the Union by freeing all 
 the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing 
 some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." 
 
 These were the words of the Emancipator, the statesman 
 who grew where a politician was spawned, the neurotic- 
 depressive who feared death and gave his life that his country 
 might not commit suicide; the noblest of his era whose words 
 now sound sweet on Southern tongues and to most Southern 
 ears. 
 
 Here was a man who was for the underdog. And that's fine, 
 but it is well to remember that the underdog can be just as 
 vicious and greedy as the top-dog. Here was a man who really 
 believed in "The People." That, too, is fine. But the people, 
 leaderless and frightened, can be a mob. Here was a man who 
 believed that the right to success must not be denied to any 
 man. It is the blessed American doctrine, but we often forget 
 that whereas we must not take from any man the right to 
 succeed we also must not take from him the right of failure. 
 
 For my money, W. E. Woodward explained Lincoln best 
 when he wrote: 
 
 Unquestionably his personality is difficult to un- 
 derstand. He was not dominated by his capacity for 
 cheerful frankness, by any means. There was some- 
 thing extremely shrewd and subtle about him. That 
 statement does not mean to imply that he was a 
 
 24 
 
hypocrite, which he was certainly not. He was 
 entirely sincere and entirely honest, but his sin- 
 cerity expressed itself in subtle maneuvers. He was 
 like a pair of Siamese twins, each of whom has a 
 totally different set of abilities. One twin can change 
 the color of a card before your very eyes while the 
 other one has the gawky look of a country bump- 
 kin who has come to see the wonders of a county 
 fair. Yet both twins have the same bloodstream and 
 are really one person. 
 
 But in i860, the South, more militant than wise, did not 
 trust Mr. Lincoln or the coalition that put him in power, the 
 new deal Republicans, the high tariff industrialists, the social- 
 istic Free Soilers, the anti-Catholic Know Nothings and the 
 fanatical Abolitionists of John Brown's stripe. 
 
 The Democrats still controlled Congress and the Dred Scott 
 Decision had favored the South, although some other slavery 
 decrees had gone against her. Secession would block the South 
 from further expansion in continental United States and, if 
 successful, might make Dixie into a cotton patch for Eng- 
 land's mills. 
 
 However, the South was convinced that the North was 
 inching her to the end of a limb and soon would cut it off, 
 and a thing was true in those days that still is true: if you grab 
 the South where the hair is short, she will fight. 
 
 South Carolina pulled out first, and mighty soon after Lin- 
 coln's election. Five other states followed in rapid succession 
 — Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida. The 
 decisions to secede were by no means unanimous. Even Texas 
 hesitated, with Sam Houston fighting to keep his state in the 
 Union. 
 
 2 5 
 
The slave states of Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri 
 and North Carolina looked over the secession bargain, but 
 wouldn't buy it at first. The slave states of Kentucky, Mary- 
 land and Delaware never even went shopping. 
 
 It may sound cockeyed in these days, but in those days 
 many Southerners argued that the North should secede. 
 Henry Wise of Virginia put it this way: "Logically the Union 
 belongs to those who have kept, not those who have broken, 
 
 its covenants." 
 
 If he had to fight, Virginian Wise wanted to fight "with the 
 Star Spangled Banner in one hand and my musket in the 
 other." He didn't want any "Southern cross or any palmetto" 
 for his flag. 
 
 Georgia's Alexander Stephens made more sense than most 
 folks when he said: "War is almost certain and will come 
 because there are not virtue, patriotism and sense enough left 
 in the country to avoid it." 
 
 Things were rushing to a head. President-elect Lincoln sat 
 on his porch in Springfield and said nothing. President Bu- 
 chanan kept trying to patch the crumbling fence, but his 
 hands were tied. He was in the same position that Herbert 
 Hoover, Republican, was in during the paralyzing interval be- 
 tween Hoover's defeat and the inauguration of Franklin D. 
 Roosevelt, Democrat. 
 
 There were many plans to save the Union without blood- 
 shed, but everybody seemed to get in his own little red wagon 
 and ride off in his own way. There was no acceptable leader- 
 ship. Maybe Lincoln should have spoken, but he kept rocking. 
 
 Meanwhile, the first Confederate States of America was or- 
 ganized at Montgomery, Alabama on February 4, 1861. There 
 were only six states in that confederacy — South Carolina, 
 Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida. 
 
 26 
 
Texas came in on February 23 and all of this happened 
 before Lincoln became president. 
 
 A Confederate Constitution was adopted and this is a most 
 intriguing document. It was an out and out rewrite of the 
 Constitution of the United States but with certain clarifica- 
 tions that our Constitution needs today. The twelve amend- 
 ments of the original Constitution were put into the text of 
 the Confederate constitution. The name of God, absent in 
 our Constitution, was put into the Preamble of the Confed- 
 erate document. 
 
 It provided that the president and vice-president should 
 serve for terms of six years and were ineligible for reelection. 
 (Shades of all the third-term hullabaloo.) 
 
 The Confederate president would have the right to veto 
 separate items in an appropriation bill. (This we could use 
 today.) 
 
 If a President removed from office any man except Cabinet 
 members and diplomats, he must report his reasons to the 
 Senate. 
 
 Cabinet members could have seats upon the floor of Con- 
 gress to discuss the business of their departments. (We need 
 this today.) 
 
 No law could relate to more than one subject and that 
 subject must be clearly defined in the title of the law. 
 
 The Post Office Department must be self-sufficient. 
 
 The foreign slave trade was prohibited in unmistakable 
 language. Some Southern partisans have claimed the Confed- 
 erate constitution provided for the abolition of slavery. That's 
 absurd. 
 
 Come on, let's face it. The Confederate constitution was, in 
 most cases, an improvement upon our original Constitution 
 
 27 
 
which was clumsy and ambiguous, and still is unwieldy and 
 loop-holey in spots. 
 
 For its flag, the Confederacy adopted the Stars and Bars. It 
 had two red stripes and one white stripe, and its stars, equal 
 to the number of states, were in a circle on a field of blue. 
 This flag soon was abolished because, in battle, it was con- 
 fused too easily with the Stars and Stripes. The Confederate 
 flag that we see today was not the Stars and Bars at all. It was 
 the Battle Flag. 
 
 At the Alabama convention where the first Confederacy 
 was founded, a German bandmaster named Herman Arnold 
 realized that a song was needed. His band kept tooting away 
 on a sad little thing called The Bonnie Blue Flag. Nobody 
 paid it much mind. It was then that the bandmaster remem- 
 bered a minstrel ditty he had heard, a gay tune called Dixie. 
 He scored it into martial music and cut loose. Not many of us 
 today have heard Dixie as our grandpas heard it. It was scored 
 for brass and rumbling trombones. The great Toscanini, on 
 a tour of the South, played Dixie as it should be played. 
 
 The Confederacy, as do all governments, had right and left 
 wing extremists. Neither of these elements was strong enough 
 to elect a president. So they looked around for a middle- 
 ground man and found him in Jefferson Davis, the most 
 neglected man of American biographies. 
 
 "We'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree — " 
 
 Just who was this man whose name caused the North to 
 froth at the mouth? And if secession and slavery were sins, 
 why should he take on his drooping shoulders all the sins of 
 all his people? 
 
 Like Lincoln, Jeff Davis was born in poverty in Kentucky 
 and, still like Lincoln, his father was shiftless and maybe a 
 little ornery. About the time the Lincolns were migrating 
 
 28 
 
north, the Davis family was migrating south and settled in 
 Mississippi. There was an elder son named Joe, and Joe Davis 
 had get up and get, and made a fortune in law and cotton. 
 
 Jefferson (the family called him Jeffy) was the tenth child 
 of the brood, and rich elder brother Joe took him to his bosom 
 and decided that Jeffy would have all the advantages Brother 
 Joe had missed. This, in a way, was a tragedy, this gentle 
 tyranny of a pampering brother. 
 
 The child was lonely, sensitive and shy and at the age of 
 seven, yes, seven! he was separated from his folks and was 
 sent back to Kentucky to a Roman Catholic seminary. The 
 Davises were Baptists, but the impressionable boy began to 
 lean toward Catholicism and the family fetched him home. 
 
 While Lincoln was digging for his education, Jeffy was in 
 Kentucky's Transylvania College studying Greek, Latin, 
 mathematics and philosophy. He was only sixteen when, 
 through Brother Joe's influence, he was appointed to West 
 Point. The boy simply had had no home life and the only 
 emotional security he had known had come from the priests 
 at the seminary. This would have been rough going even for 
 a phlegmatic child. It was poison for the high-strung boy. 
 
 He entered the army upon graduation from West Point 
 and served lonely tours at remote posts. He and Lincoln both 
 did stints in the Black Hawk "War." The legend that they 
 met during that fiasco won't stand up. 
 
 The brightest spot in Davis' early life was his courtship of 
 Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of Zachary Taylor, then a 
 colonel and later to be a general and president. Old Zach 
 didn't like Jeffy and forbade the marriage. However, Lieu- 
 tenant Davis told his colonel to go whistle up a stump and 
 married the girl. (The best legend about Taylor concerns the 
 
 2 9 
 
time he refused the letter that informed him of his presi- 
 dential nomination because postage was due on the message.) 
 
 After his spat with the colonel and his marriage to the 
 colonel's daughter, Davis quit the army and took his bride to 
 Mississippi. She was dead within three months of malaria. 
 
 For ten years thereafter, Jefferson Davis devoted his time 
 to the Mississippi River plantation he had helped hack out of 
 a wilderness. He owned slaves. His overseer was a slave, and 
 master and overseer worked side by side in the fields with the 
 other hands. 
 
 It was during these farming years that Davis' character 
 jelled. Way down deep, he wanted to go back to the army, 
 for that was his real love, but he was too proud to bend his 
 neck and ask to be taken back. 
 
 He was as humorless as Calvin Coolidge was to be. As pro- 
 fessorial as Woodrow Wilson. His ego was matched only by 
 that of General George McClellan and surpassed only by 
 General Douglas MacArthur. 
 
 But Davis' ego must not be confused with conceit. It was 
 bigger than that. He seemed to be a man of absolute assurance, 
 sometimes of infuriating assurance, but this could have been 
 a front for his shyness. He was so formal he could not even 
 bring himself to call his slaves by nicknames. His overseer was 
 James and never Jim. 
 
 All of his life, this man had yearned to take off his shoes 
 and wade in the creek with the boys but he didn't know how; 
 and so he laced his shoes tighter and polished them brighter. 
 
 In 1845, he married blue-stockinged and red-blooded 
 Varina Howell. She was quite a girl and it's a shame that years 
 later she talked too much and quoted her husband as having 
 told her during the blackest days of the Confederacy: "If I 
 could take one wing of the army and Lee the other, I think 
 
 3° 
 
we could between us wrest a victory from those people." It 
 made him look silly and he wasn't silly. (Good heavens, can't 
 a man even brag to his wife? Can't a president do a little 
 pillow-talking? ) 
 
 His marriage to Varina Howell moved him from the ranks 
 of the new rich into the "aristocracy," whatever that's worth. 
 Then he, like Lincoln, served in the national House of Rep- 
 resentatives. 
 
 The Mexican War made Jefferson Davis famous. It gave 
 him a chance to return to the army and he organized a Mis- 
 sissippi regiment and served under General Taylor, his former 
 father-in-law. Apparently they got along all right. 
 
 At the Battle of Buena Vista, Davis' regiment and an ar- 
 tillery battery commanded by a young soldier named Braxton 
 Bragg saved our side from probable defeat. Davis was 
 wounded in the foot and overnight he became a national hero. 
 This didn't do him any good. He began to believe the plaudits 
 and seemed never to realize that the plaudits were pretty hol- 
 low because we had to strain awful hard to get a genuine hero 
 out of the Mexican War. 
 
 Buena Vista convinced Col. Jefferson Davis that he was 
 some pumpkins as a soldier. Too bad. For again let's face facts 
 — that battle was a snarled, jumbled mess and our side was 
 second rate, almost as second rate as the bewildered Mexicans. 
 It wasn't that Davis really was good at Buena Vista; he simply 
 was better than an average which was powerful low. 
 
 Army politics reduced Davis' command to a minor force 
 and again he resigned from the army, this time to become a 
 senator. He was one of ten senators who fought California's 
 admission into the Union. 
 
 President Franklin Pierce appointed him Secretary of War 
 and here Davis was at his best. He looked toward Mexico and 
 
 3i 
 
Cuba as possible areas for national expansion and when he 
 couldn't get to first base on that he pushed for expansion of 
 our trade with Asia. It was he who maneuvered the adminis- 
 tration into the Gadsden Purchase which gave us more land 
 in the Southwest and then he planned a railroad along the 
 southern route to California. It was he who introduced camels 
 into the army for use on the Western deserts. 
 
 When Buchanan became president, Davis went back to the 
 Senate. Here he defended slavery, but was by no means a 
 loud-mouth secessionist. He was a realist. In his world, prop- 
 erty and the rights of property were the natural order. His 
 world contained the gentry, the white peasant and the black 
 slave. 
 
 He was in the Senate when South Carolina announced 
 that if Lincoln were elected she would secede. Davis urged 
 caution and discouraged secession. He had an idea that the 
 South, as a social and economic unit, should be a nation within 
 the Union, a sort of a dominion as Canada later was to be 
 within the British Empire. 
 
 But when Mississippi seceded, Davis joined his state. He 
 was not a Mississippian in the sense that Lee was a Virginian. 
 Davis was a Southern nationalist. He had lived all over the 
 country and really had no roots. By this time he was a tired, 
 ailing man, plum' tuckered out. Nervous indigestion and neu- 
 ralgia pestered him constantly and blindness threatened from 
 an eye disease. 
 
 He believed from the very first that secession meant war. 
 Some Southerners didn't. But Davis never deliberately kidded 
 his people. He saw the situation as it was: that war was com- 
 ing. He really hoped to lead the South's armies and was flab- 
 bergasted when the Confederacy made him president as a 
 
 32 
 
compromise between the fire-eating leftists and the cold-water 
 rightists. 
 
 Put the two presidents side by side and you will see that 
 Davis had knowledge while Lincoln had good common sense. 
 
 Lincoln would stoop to help the underdog. Davis would 
 toss him a dollar but could not stoop. 
 
 Davis was irascible. Lincoln was patient. 
 
 Lincoln could laugh. Davis not only never enjoyed a belly- 
 laugh, but would not even allow himself to weep; the release 
 of a good cry. 
 
 These were the men; but even before Lincoln became pres- 
 ident of the United States of America, the Confederate States 
 of America was in business as a government. The idea wasn't 
 to prevent fracture of the Union. The Union was dissolved. 
 Lincoln's job was to patch it together again. 
 
 And in this weird, fantastic hour, we were led by two re- 
 markable neurotics — Abraham Lincoln who had a strange fear 
 of death, and Jefferson Davis who had a strange fear of life. 
 
 33 
 
Fort Sumter was a graceless hulk of masonry in the harbor 
 of Charleston, South Carolina, and Charleston was the most 
 important Confederate port between Norfolk, Virginia and 
 New Orleans, Louisiana. No one seriously thought that the 
 Confederacy long would tolerate a "foreign" garrison at the 
 mouth of Charleston harbor. It was something like a Southern 
 garrison on Governor's Island in New York harbor. 
 
 Even before Lincoln took over the reins there was trouble 
 at Sumter. Major Robert Anderson, its defender, had moved 
 the garrison of nearby Fort Moultrie into Sumter and this 
 irked South Carolina and she yapped a charge of bad faith. 
 Then a merchantman, the Star of the West, was ordered to 
 the fort with supplies. But there were troops aboard. The yap 
 became a snarl and South Carolina fired upon the vessel and 
 
 34 
 
forced it to turn back. About this time the Confederacy took 
 over the defenses from her states and inherited the ugly situa- 
 tion at Charleston. General P. G. T. Beauregard, a Louisiana 
 Creole, was put in command at Charleston. 
 
 This was the situation when Lincoln was inaugurated. He 
 had twiddled his thumbs and had said or done nothing to 
 head off secession. He and other Republican leaders com- 
 pletely underestimated the South's intent and failed utterly to 
 recognize the portents that were flaming under their noses. 
 They seemed to think that the South was bluffing and that 
 the whole thing would blow over. 
 
 Other Northerners were all for letting the sisters go in peace 
 and good riddance to a headache. There certainly was no sug- 
 gestion that Northern patriots should grab their muskets and 
 go chasing off a thousand miles from home to punish or sub- 
 due a bunch of troublesome states way down along the Gulf 
 of Mexico. 
 
 Longer heads, however, began to see the picture in its true 
 focus. Every Gulf state was in secession and between them 
 and the North were the buffer slave states of Delaware, Mary- 
 land, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mis- 
 souri and Arkansas. How could the Union attack without 
 crossing these states? And yet, if the Confederacy were left 
 alive it would make the Gulf of Mexico into a Southern mill- 
 pond. 
 
 Cuba and Mexico might be annexed into an agricultural 
 empire that could trade raw products for Europe's finished 
 goods. Abraham Lincoln was thinking of the Union and not 
 doing much about it, but Northern businessmen were shud- 
 dering at the thought of Europe's free market goods at their 
 back door, at the specter of losing the Southern market to 
 England. 
 
 35 
 
President Lincoln's first official speech was a dilly, though 
 with more dally than dilly. He came out strong against sin 
 and for peace and restoration of the Union. Slavery would not 
 be disturbed, he said. But federal forts and custom houses 
 must be held. The Northern "intellectuals" scorned him. 
 Wendell Phillips called him "a huckster in politics." Edwin 
 M. Stanton, who was to be his Secretary of War, called him 
 "the baboon in the White House." That proper Bostonian, 
 Charles Francis Adams, was upset because Abe had told him 
 a dirty joke. Charles Sumner was burned up. He had called 
 upon the president to discuss the grave issues and the first 
 thing the president said was, "I'll bet I'm taller than you; let's 
 stand up back to back, and measure." 
 
 Gawky Mr. Lincoln scarcely had got his big feet under 
 the White House dining room table before Confederate emis- 
 saries arrived in Washington to negotiate a treaty for inde- 
 pendence of the Southern states and to arrange payment for 
 federal property already seized — post offices and things like 
 that — and to settle the issue of Fort Sumter. 
 
 Naturally, President Lincoln did not receive them. He 
 wasn't going to be caught in a trap like that, for reception of 
 the emissaries would have meant that he recognized the Con- 
 federacy. So he played it smart; very, very smart. 
 
 His Secretary of State, the cagey William H. Seward, ne- 
 gotiated with the Confederates through go-betweens. There 
 was a lot of gobbledegook and the South was given the im- 
 pression that Sumter soon would be evacuated because sup- 
 plies were running out. 
 
 The Confederate emissaries were told in effect and in a 
 stage whisper, "Now you boys go on back home and take it 
 easy and everything will be all right. Just don't get hot under 
 the collar." 
 
 3<5 
 
There are some who think Lincoln was in on this Machi- 
 avellian deception. I don't believe it. This was not Lincoln's 
 way. He was a master of double talk and the double take, but 
 never of the double cross. This sleight of hand policy — now 
 you see it, now you don't — was his Cabinet's, many of them 
 appointed to pay political debts. They figured Lincoln was a 
 dolt and that they were going to run things. They learned 
 better. 
 
 Lincoln's feet, clumsy at first, were caught in a net of con- 
 fusion that he had helped cause. If he didn't know that the 
 Confederacy had been promised the evacuation of Sumter, 
 then he was asleep; and Abraham Lincoln didn't sleep on the 
 job. If he did know it, then he held his nose and closed his 
 eyes to a mess of chicanery, and this, I contend, is what he 
 did. Officially, his hands were clean, but don't dig under the 
 fingernails. 
 
 The Confederate emissaries were heading home with news 
 that everything was going to be all right, and then — wham! a 
 military expedition got set to reinforce Sumter. 
 
 The South screamed that she had been double-crossed. Pres- 
 ident Davis said: "The crooked paths of diplomacy can 
 scarcely furnish an example so wanting in courtesy, in candor, 
 and in directness — " 
 
 Let us bury all the oratory in history and see what really 
 had happened. Lincoln had the South on the short end of the 
 stick, whether by dirty diplomacy or not. What is clean 
 diplomacy when human beings are fixing to claw out one 
 another's eyes? The Southern leaders thought they had pulled 
 a smart one in Washington, but now they knew that they had 
 been kissed and kicked at the same time. 
 
 We Occidentals have a way of smiling and shaking our 
 heads at the intricacies of Oriental face-saving and then prac- 
 
 37 
 
ticing the same thing under the guise of prestige and honor. 
 The North and the South had put chips on their shoulders 
 and somebody had to move or yell calf-rope. The South had 
 a tremendous advantage if she would just hold still. The Con- 
 federacy was a going concern and reinforcements at Fort 
 Sumter could hurt nothing much except Southern pride and 
 the prestige of some politicians. It was the North that must 
 shoot or give up the gun. 
 
 Incredibly enough, the South shot first. She simply couldn't 
 take it. She simply couldn't sit still in that poker game and 
 keep drawing for the winning flush that almost was bound to 
 show up because she was dealing. Oh, no. She had to try to 
 fill an inside straight. Against a man like Lincoln, that wasn't 
 smart. 
 
 Down in the capital at Montgomery, President Davis gave 
 up waiting for a miracle that could prevent war and an- 
 nounced that Sumter must be reduced before it could be re- 
 inforced. The attack was ordered for 4:30 o'clock on the 
 morning of April 12, 1861. Edmund Ruffin, a civilian, asked 
 the "honor" of firing the first gun. Brother Ruffin was not a 
 hot-headed South Carolina gamecock. He was a grayhaired 
 Virginian who was disgusted with his native state because it 
 was not rattling its sword, and had gone to South Carolina 
 where action was in the making. 
 
 Brother Ruffin got his wish. He fired the first shot and if 
 history shows any dumber shot, then I wonder where and 
 when. Besides, his aim was rightly poor. 
 
 /All day and all night the bombardment continued. Nobody 
 was killed. Early the next morning Louis T. Wigfall, a Texan, 
 tied a white handkerchief on a saber and rowed out to the 
 fort. His oarsmen were slaves. Wigfall persuaded Major An- 
 derson to surrender the fort. Major Anderson agreed and 
 
 38 
 
ordered a salute to his flag as it came down. The salute set off 
 an ammunition dump and two men were killed, and these 
 were the only deaths in Sumter. c 
 
 Confederate officers went out to the fort to accept the 
 surrender and one of these saw a bottle on Major Anderson's 
 desk. The Southerner thought it was whiskey and reached 
 for a swig. It was medicine and contained a trace of poison. 
 This was the first Confederate casualty. A big bellyache. They 
 pumped out his stomach and Major Anderson and his Yankee 
 officers went over to the mainland and had a drink with the 
 Confederate officers. 
 
 The fuse had been lighted in a dozen different places, but 
 the keg of dynamite blew up at Sumter. This was Pearl Har- 
 bor, the Battleship Maine and that crazy shot at Sarajevo. 
 Maybe the North didn't understand slavery or secession or 
 
 39 
 
corn pone, pot likker or syllabub. They didn't know Scarlett 
 O'Hara and really didn't know Uncle Tom. But now the flag 
 had been fired upon and this was a thing they understood. 
 
 Being a people without monarchy and other symbols of 
 sovereignty and pride, we Americans always have worshiped 
 our flag more than any other nation. It is our symbol; a piece 
 of cloth that says nothing but that means everything. This is 
 an interesting manifestation of patriotism, chauvinism or 
 whatever you care to call it. And this flag had been fired upon. 
 The North merged into a unit and Mr. Lincoln had a war on 
 his hands and moved fast, now that the air was cleared and he 
 knew where he stood. 
 
 Congress was not in session and he did not call it into ses- 
 sion because he didn't trust Congress and had no time for 
 debate and political shenanigans not of his own making. As 
 commander-in-chief of the United States Army, he declared 
 the Confederacy in rebellion. The secessionists were enraged 
 at first and then were amused. Rebels? It never had occurred 
 to them. Rebels were hanged. 
 
 A rebellion is illegal unless it becomes a successful revolu- 
 tion. Rebels, in the broad sense, want change. The South 
 wanted to keep the good old days. It was the North that 
 wanted change. 
 
 Lincoln, however, adroitly put the brand of rebellion on the 
 South and it stuck because the United States had better propa- 
 ganda weapons than the Confederacy and because the winners 
 write the records. 
 
 Next President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put 
 down the "rebellion." It is the duty of Congress to declare 
 war, but Lincoln kept Congress at home and took the step on 
 his own hook. The onus of the first shot was on the South. 
 So was the stigma of rebellion. Mr. Lincoln was playing his 
 
 40 
 
red chips and was filling the flush that the Confederacy had 
 refused. Mr. Lincoln also was swinging toward dictatorship. 
 
 Then the South moved. Virginia spoke out that she would 
 furnish no troops to the United States and, furthermore, no 
 invading Yankees were going to cross her hills to get to her 
 sisters. The North's eyes popped open and her jaw sagged. 
 Virginia was something the North understood. 
 
 That apple farmer in upstate New York didn't give a con- 
 tinental hooray about Mississippi way down yonder in the 
 swamp and wilderness, and less than that about Texas. But 
 Virginia was the republic's foundation stone, and I wish that 
 television folks who sell soap, light bulbs and deodorants and 
 who write our history in gooey songs and leggy dances would 
 learn that Jamestown, Virginia was our first permanent Eng- 
 lish colony and not Plymouth, Massachusetts. 
 
 When Virginia pulled out, North Carolina, Tennessee, and 
 Arkansas quickly followed suit. They were not following Vir- 
 ginia. They just didn't aim to have any part of Mr. Lincoln's 
 army. So they said they wanted out and then took out and 
 told Mr. Lincoln to fish or cut bait. 
 
 He fished. Delaware was safe. She was Yankee. Politically 
 and militarily, Lincoln moved fast enough to save Maryland, 
 Kentucky and Missouri for the Union, although they were 
 split wide open. But, for that matter, so was much of the 
 South; Virginia so badly that West Virginia seceded from her 
 mother state and joined the Union. That little secession was 
 all right. It was tweedledee. The other was tweedledum. 
 
 There was as much gun-shooting Union sentiment in the 
 mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina as in Boston, and 
 enough Union sentiment in Arkansas, for example, for that 
 state to furnish 8,289 white soldiers to the United States. 
 
 4 1 
 
The Confederate capital was moved to Richmond, Virginia. 
 The stage was set, so let's look at the props. 
 
 The population of the loyal states was 21,955,513, including 
 429,501 slaves. The population of the seceding states was 
 8,907,678, including 3,521,111 slaves and 260,000 free Ne- 
 groes. For a while, the slaves were assets. They helped keep 
 things going while the white men fought, but eventually they 
 became liabilities, for as the invasion progressed thousands of 
 them were confiscated by the invaders as contraband and had 
 to be fed, thousands more were taken into the Union army 
 and goodness knows how many of them marauded the coun- 
 tryside after the plantations were burned and discipline broke 
 down. 
 
 Nevertheless, the slaves helped the Confederacy at first and 
 fed the families that kept them in bondage. There have been 
 efforts to glamorize and romanticize Southern slave revolts. 
 Bunk. There were a few scattered uprisings, but they never 
 got anywhere. This was due in part to an absence of leader- 
 ship and organization, but it also was due to the slaves' lack of 
 militant will for freedom as the white man understands free- 
 dom. Many of the slaves were descendants of people who had 
 been slaves in Africa and bondage, bitter as it was, was a form 
 of security. The average slave surely had a vague yearning for 
 freedom, but not enough yearning to grab a stick and start 
 slugging. 
 
 The specter of widespread slave revolts was a constant 
 threat to the South, but was never a serious realization. If the 
 slaves had reached for rocks or hickory cudgels they could 
 have crushed the Confederacy to a pulp. But they didn't do it. 
 They were pretty docile and stuck around and did as they 
 were told, and if anyone wants to make racism out of this, 
 then go ahead. Really, it had nothing to do with race; all to 
 
 42 
 
do with standards and outlooks. The freedom sauce for the 
 goose is not necessarily freedom sauce for the gander. The 
 American Indian withered and died under slavery. The white 
 man fought with his claws for the kind of freedom that he 
 wanted. The Negro slave in the United States raised his little 
 finger for the thing that the white man called freedom, but 
 he never clenched his fist or raised his arm to fight his way 
 out of his shackles. (Maybe he was smart. He let the white 
 folks cut their own throats so he could be free.) 
 
 The United States mustered in about 1,550,000 soldiers, in- 
 cluding many new immigrants; some who came over for 
 homes and farms and others to make a fast buck through the 
 liberal bounties for enlistment, who hired their trigger fingers 
 to the Union. Mercenaries are mercenaries in any war. 
 
 The Confederacy, with a white population of 5,100,000, 
 mustered in about 800,000 men. She had few new immigrants 
 in her armies. It wasn't that she didn't want them or that she 
 was too noble to offer money (Confederate money) for en- 
 listments. Oh, no. It was just that she had no way to get them 
 in and no inducements to offer except an intangible thing 
 called honor and a very tangible thing called death. 
 
 However, more than one hundred of her important officers 
 were foreigners; knights-errant who chose the Southern 
 armies because of their hell-for-leather fighters and not be- 
 cause they gave a whoop about secession, slavery or the land 
 of the free and the home of the brave. 
 
 Perhaps the most interesting of these was Heros von Borcke, 
 the giant Pomeranian who loved love, laughter and fighting 
 and who drove Yankees crazy and Southern belles crazier. 
 Then there was the elegant Prince de Polignac. It was this 
 Frenchman who strutted before his command of barefooted, 
 
 44 
 
tobacco-squirting Confeds and placed his hand over his heart 
 and exclaimed: "Soldiers, behold your Polignac!" 
 
 They busted out laughing, but they loved it. 
 
 And don't forget Lieutenant Jules l'Etondal, the fat fellow 
 who kept an umbrella over him while under fire. It was the 
 sun he hated, not the rain. And Captain Isodore Guillet who 
 was mortally wounded on the same horse on which his three 
 brothers had been killed. And Major Proskauer who never 
 got enough fried mushrooms. And, of course, Irishman Dick 
 Dowling, the Texas bartender whose company of 42 men 
 stalled 1 6,000 Federals and took 400 prisoners at Sabine Pass. 
 
 The North also had a raft of foreign officers who had to 
 quit their profession of soldiering in Europe because money 
 over there was getting tight. The Union offered them jobs 
 and they went to work. Most of these hired out to the North 
 because it was nearer and not dearer, and because the North 
 could meet its payroll. 
 
 As a lot, they were not too interesting. An exception was 
 the Comte de Paris who joined the Federals in 1861 and who 
 wrote a history of the Civil War. John Peter Altgeld of Illi- 
 nois and Carl Schurz of Missouri, both German born and both 
 Union soldiers, rank near the top of great Americans, but 
 they were not professional soldiers. 
 
 The story that Garibaldi was offered command of the 
 Union forces is misleading. Italy's splendid freedom man and 
 fighting man was offered a commission as major general. He 
 didn't take it. 
 
 Most of the North's political and military leadership came 
 from the Ohio and upper Mississippi river valleys and spoke 
 the same language. The Union was saved by the cornfield boys 
 of the midwest and not by the cotton mill hands of New 
 England. 
 
 45 
 
The South's civil leadership was from the Gulf states and 
 her military leadership was from the Atlantic seaboard. They 
 did not think alike. The Gulf Southerner lived in a conserva- 
 tive, new rich culture of Southern nationalism and, when he 
 read at all, he read Sir Walter Scott. The literate seaboard 
 Southerner looked to his state and read Edgar Allan Poe and 
 genealogies. 
 
 Mr. Lincoln had his own kind around him, soldiers and 
 statesmen. 
 
 Mr. Davis had Virginia soldiers to run his armies and a con- 
 glomeration of statesmen to run his government. Judah P. 
 Benjamin, successively attorney general, secretary of war and 
 secretary of state, was a Jew born in the West Indies. He has 
 been called "the brains of the Confederacy" and he died a 
 Roman Catholic and a famous barrister in England. He shares 
 with Disraeli the same anecdote, the following reply to anti- 
 semites: "It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors 
 were receiving their ten commandments from the immediate 
 hand of Deity, amidst the thunderings and lightnings of Mt. 
 Sinai, the ancestors of the distinguished gentlemen who are 
 opposed to me were herding swine in the forests of Scan- 
 dinavia." 
 
 Davis' Secretary of the Treasury was Christopher Mem- 
 minger of South Carolina, who was born in Germany, and 
 the Secretary of the Navy was Stephen Russell Mallory of 
 Florida, but born in Trinidad, the son of a Connecticut 
 Yankee. 
 
 Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, incubators for 
 statesmen since the Revolution, had no top-drawer statesmen 
 in the Confederate government. 
 
 It so happens that the Confederate States of America was 
 the product of the same kind of frontier that produced Abra- 
 ham Lincoln. 
 
 4 6 
 
Some jingoists have argued that the South fought so well 
 because she was homogeneous and full of good old "Ameri- 
 can" stock. Rubbish. How could any section be homogeneous 
 while two-thirds Caucasian and one-third Negroid. Actually, 
 the Confederacy was loaded with foreigners. 
 
 Of Richmond's 37,910 inhabitants, 4,936 were foreigners, 
 representing more than 1 3 per cent of the whole population, 
 or about 23 per cent of the white population. More than 20 
 per cent of Savannah's population was foreign born, including 
 some 3,000 Irishmen. Memphis had more than 4,000 Irishmen 
 and almost 2,000 Germans and her foreign population was 
 more than 30 per cent. The Southern melting pot really was 
 boiling at the time of the Civil War. It cooled off after the 
 war. 
 
 The surprise of the Civil War is not that the South was de- 
 feated, but that she fought so long against such odds. She 
 couldn't even support herself in peace and had to buy every- 
 thing from locofocos to locomotives. An agricultural domin- 
 ion, she was like a colony in i860 and had to import almost 
 everything down to her shoelaces. 
 
 As for waging war against the United States — why it was 
 like hitching a cottonfield mule to the one-hoss shay and try- 
 ing to race Dan Patch. Even while the Confederacy was win- 
 ning her battles she was using thorns for pins, pokeberry 
 juice for ink, scraping smokehouse floors for salt and saving 
 urine for gunpowder. 
 
 In the field of finance, the Confederate government was as 
 naive as a Southern backwoods preacher at Monte Carlo's 
 roulette tables. French bankers pulled the simplest of shell 
 games and fleeced the South of millions at the time when the 
 South had to have money to buy the things she couldn't make. 
 
 And England was no real help either despite all the hip-hip- 
 hooray. The Confederacy assumed England would fight the 
 
 47 
 
Union blockade to get cotton for her mills. It was a ridiculous 
 assumption, wholly provincial in concept. Many British mills 
 were idle due to overproduction and their warehouses were 
 full of raw cotton. In the beginning, instead of begging for 
 Southern cotton, England soon was shipping cotton to the 
 North. 
 
 It was good business. England had raw cotton in her ware- 
 houses and finished goods on her docks. So she simply closed 
 down her mills, laid off the workers and saved wages, shipped 
 raw cotton to the North at a big profit and upped the price of 
 cotton goods to her markets. Pretty slick. The only ones who 
 suffered were British cotton mill workers and the South. 
 
 British nabobs sympathized with the South and dropped a 
 few tokens into the kitty, but the British workingman hated 
 slavery and there were more laborers than lords. A cotton 
 pinch began to hurt England toward the middle of the war 
 and the mill owners tried to get production back to a profit- 
 able peak. By this time, however, British labor had developed 
 a sympathy, almost an affinity, for Southern slaves who also 
 were laborers. So the British workers, to help the Southern 
 slave workers, tightened their belts another notch and stayed 
 away from the mills. 
 
 British industrialists fumed and the Confederacy writhed in 
 her death throes. But there it was — European cheerleaders 
 standing on the sidelines and whooping it up for little David 
 while doing business with Goliath, and when it came to blood 
 and death the South was alone. 
 
 The Confederacy had to have money. The only way she 
 could get money was by selling cotton. Southern apologists 
 have alibied the defeat in a dozen ways and one of the favorite 
 alibis is the Union blockade — "tight as a drum." It was those 
 old devil Yankees who kept the South from shipping cotton 
 
 4 8 
 
out and bringing guns back. Stuff and nonsense. During the 
 high tide of the Confederacy when she might have won, the 
 Union blockade was a dismal failure. The South cut her own 
 throat. 
 
 President Lincoln declared the blockade in 1861. A block- 
 ade is only as effective as the ships that enforce it. The Con- 
 federacy's coastline was about 3,500 miles and, on the day 
 Lincoln declared the blockade, his navy had exactly three 
 available ships to enforce it, one ship for one thousand miles. 
 Almost a year later he had only 120 ships, including armed 
 ferryboats. 
 
 It was the most monumental bluff in the history of naval 
 warfare, and hear this: the Confederate government knew it 
 was a bluff and pretended to fall for it. A blockade was pre- 
 cisely what the Confederacy thought she needed. Cockeyed? 
 Sure. Unless you untangle the puzzle. 
 
 More than anything else the Confederacy wanted recogni- 
 tion from England. If she got this, she could borrow money. 
 She figured the one thing England had to have was cotton 
 because 5,000,000 Britons — one fifth of the population — 
 lived off the textile business in one form or another. 
 
 The idea was to create a cotton famine and then England 
 would be forced to open her trade doors and bank doors to 
 the Confederacy. That's where the blockade came in. The 
 South said to England, "The blockade keeps us from sending 
 cotton. You recognize us and help us break the blockade and 
 you'll get cotton." 
 
 But England was not that dumb. She pointed out that the 
 blockade was a lot of rubbish, that it was as full of holes as a 
 sieve. "So cash and credit for cotton," England said. "We'll 
 even send ships for it. Blockade, bah!" 
 
 The Confederacy said, "Recognize us and between us we 
 
 49 
 
can break the blockade and you'll get cotton. You need the 
 cotton more than we need the credit." 
 
 Who was kidding whom? England just turned her head. 
 
 And again the South blew her top as she had at Fort Sum- 
 ter. No recognition, no cotton! That was the cry. A cotton 
 famine abroad would force Europe to accept the Confederacy 
 as a nation. That was the reasoning and forthwith — and hear 
 this: the Confederate government declared an embargo on 
 cotton! The one thing in the world they had to sell, and they 
 embargoed it. They were back to Thomas Jefferson's policy 
 of peaceable coercion that preceded the War of 1812. It 
 didn't work with Thomas Jefferson. It didn't work with 
 Jefferson Davis. It has never worked, and it looks like it never 
 will. You just can't coerce folks and nations into shaking 
 hands. 
 
 The planters began storing cotton at home and vigilantes 
 stood guard in the ports to see that no cotton was shipped. 
 British ships, Bronx-cheering the federal blockade, sailed 
 empty from Southern ports. This was the beginning of the 
 romantic blockade-runner. The Southern blockade-runners 
 — remember Rhett Butler — did business in defiance of the 
 Confederate government. They were thumbing their noses at 
 Jeffy Davis, not at Father Abraham. 
 
 The British supply of cotton began to diminish by the win- 
 ter of 1 86 1 and the South really put on the pressure. The 
 folks were told to plant no cotton in 1862. Shades of Henry 
 Wallace. They were told to burn the existing supply of cotton. 
 Double shades of the little pigs that got plowed under. 
 
 And the Southern farmers obeyed the edicts. Cotton pro- 
 duction dropped from around 5,000,000 bales to around 
 500,000. 
 
 50 
 
England offered anything for cotton except recognition 
 and the South burned her cotton. 
 
 It was a fantastic blunder. By the spring of 1862, less than 
 a year after secession, the Confederacy was broke and bank- 
 rupt. By then the blockade was becoming effective. It is es- 
 timated that in 1 86 1 the South easily could have sold two or 
 three million bales of cotton in Europe. She would have had 
 good credits in Europe's banks. Then maybe recognition 
 would have come. Diplomatic recognitions have a way of fol- 
 lowing good bank accounts. Cotton and then recognition. 
 That was the smart way. But the Confederacy put the cart 
 before the horse. Recognition and then cotton. Surely no 
 diplomats ever fell so flat on their faces. 
 
 The South's luck began running out in 1863 and it was ap- 
 parent to all that no major power was going to recognize the 
 Confederacy unless she first won her independence. So the 
 Confederacy did a strange thing, a rather sad thing. Since she 
 couldn't get recognition from a temporal power she turned 
 to a spiritual power and tried to get recognition from the 
 Vatican, and to make that church government an ally. 
 
 Diplomat Dudley Mann showed up in Vatican City with a 
 letter to the pope from Jefferson Davis. The pope, he was 
 Pius IX, was shocked by the bloodletting in America and said 
 he would pray for peace. Then the Confederate statesman 
 presented the letter from Jefferson Davis and the pope said: 
 "The letter is in English, and English is a language that I do 
 not understand." 
 
 So the letter was translated, but the edge was off. The pope 
 listened to the Confederacy's plea and there was a long silence 
 and then the pope spoke: "Is President Davis a Catholic?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Are you a Catholic, Mr. Mann?" 
 
 5 1 
 
"No." 
 
 Apparently it never had occurred to the Confederacy to 
 address the head of the Vatican state in his own language or 
 to send a Catholic representative, although there were many 
 Catholics in the South, including Secretary of the Navy Mal- 
 lory. 
 
 The pope shook hands with the envoy and promised to 
 write Mr. Davis and he did. It was a nice pretty letter. It 
 designated Mr. Davis as "President of the Confederate States 
 of America." That was left-handed recognition. But it called 
 the struggle a "civil war" and that irritated Southerners. The 
 letter from Pius IX was a good museum piece and nothing 
 else. 
 
 Cotton and embargoes, bonfires and vigilantes, the pope and 
 platitudes — the Confederacy was as bewildered in finance and 
 diplomacy as Alice was in her Wonderland. 
 
 Then how did the Confederacy last so long? One reason 
 was that every time the South did something foolish the North 
 did something even more foolish. But the real reason was 
 that the South knew what she wanted from the very begin- 
 ning and meant business while the North couldn't quite make 
 up her mind. 
 
 The Confederacy had interior lines for military communi- 
 cations and the North had to conquer an area almost as large 
 as Europe. The South was fighting on her own doorsteps and 
 was killing-mad. Also, the Confederacy started off with vastly 
 superior military leadership while the North had to develop 
 hers. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was the Atlas who held his country on 
 his stooped shoulders until she found herself and got rolling. 
 In the beginning, he was surrounded by political leeches and 
 military dolts. 
 
 5 2 
 
He didn't understand the intricacies of drawing-room di- 
 plomacy or the constitutional and economic problems of his 
 country. At first he didn't even understand the predatory in- 
 terests that tried to use him. But he caught on fast and started 
 slugging. 
 
 He suspended the writ of habeas corpus, a right vested in 
 Congress, and started throwing men in jail even on suspicion 
 of disloyalty. Army officers, many of them stuffy and stupid, 
 became the police, the judge and the jury and threw folks in 
 jail without bond or trial. Legal? Of course not, but it was 
 like a man on the end of a rope yelling, "You can't hang me. 
 Ain't legal." 
 
 Lincoln saw pretty quickly a thing that should frighten all 
 of us and make us think long and hard: that in time of fast- 
 breaking emergencies, congressional authority often moves 
 too slowly. Lincoln couldn't count on Congress. The house 
 was burning down, and Lincoln had to stomp out the fire. 
 
 The machinery of constitutional government broke down 
 during the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln was forced into 
 the role of military dictator. 
 
 He assumed dictatorial prerogatives under contention that 
 the South was in rebellion and that, as commander-in-chief of 
 the Union armies, he was the boss and Congress was a debat- 
 ing club. Pretty soon he was handling the ball like a four- 
 armed quarterback in a split-T formation. He never let his 
 right hand know exactly what his left hand was doing and 
 carried his foreign policy in his hip pocket. 
 
 He clamped a "legal" blockade on the Confederacy, thus 
 tacitly recognizing the de facto government of his enemies. 
 (The Confederacy, as a government, got more "recognition" 
 from the United States than from any other power.) 
 
 He granted his enemy certain belligerent rights, including 
 
 53 
 
sanctuary for prisoners instead of death. Once the North 
 reached for a rope to hang some "rebel" prisoners, but the 
 South reached for two ropes, and nothing happened. 
 
 All of this simply meant that, by Northern reasoning, 
 Johnny Reb was a "lawful" outlaw. So what? Just words for 
 historians and lawyers to quibble over. Mr. Lincoln made up 
 his rules as he went along. Mr. Davis tried to play a new 
 game under the old rules. 
 
 It didn't work. It still won't. 
 
 54 
 
Bull Run is a creek in Virginia, northeast of Manassas Junc- 
 tion where an east-west and a north-south railroad came to- 
 gether. Federal strategy was to cut this railroad, separate 
 western Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley from eastern 
 Virginia and Tidewater, then march on down to Richmond. 
 The loudest and most powerful military voices in the North 
 were the editors who were screaming "On to Richmond" and 
 then publishing facts, figures and plans of the Union army. 
 Apparently they thought the Confederates couldn't read, for 
 all the South had to do was to watch the papers and know 
 everything that was going on. The editors just r'ared back in 
 the omnipotence of Jove and pontificated up a storm. Lincoln 
 was throwing some folks in jail for daring to think out loud, 
 but he let the editors get by with everything but murder and, 
 
 55 
 
even at that, many a Yankee boy got his head shot off because 
 the newspapers tried to run the war. 
 
 "On to Richmond" was a silly military strategy, but it made 
 a snappy slogan and a good headline. In our Revolutionary 
 War, our capitals fell and it didn't cut much mustard. Even 
 the city of Washington fell in the War of 1812. But by some 
 crackpot reasoning the Northern policymakers figured that 
 if the Confederacy's makeshift capital of Richmond was taken 
 then the war would be over. 
 
 The Union had been successful in skirmishes along the 
 Ohio River and over in West Virginia and so, in July 1861, 
 a Northern army came boiling down from Washington as 
 though on a lark, and rolled into Virginia. 
 
 Congressmen and their ladies followed in buggies to see the 
 fun. There were flowers and songs and champagne. The poli- 
 ticians made stirring speeches to the musket boys and the mus- 
 ket boys cheered the platitudes and reckoned they'd be home 
 in a few weeks. 
 
 56 
 
The Confederates hit them at Bull Run, and things got so 
 fouled up that the Union army threw down its guns and 
 melted away in panic. Such a disgraceful rout was not to 
 happen again in American history until about two years later 
 when a Confederate outfit did the same thing on a smaller 
 scale at a battle for a bridge over the Big Black River in 
 Mississippi. 
 
 The Battle of First Manassas or Bull Run (the name de- 
 pends on your upbringing) was a melee between two armed 
 mobs. The South won not because her army was good but 
 because the North's army was worse than terrible. 
 
 Two names jump out of this battle like flaming stars from 
 a rocket. The first was Thomas Jonathan Jackson, he of the 
 heavy brown beard and sloppy dress, whose eyes shone with 
 the light of religious zealotry. He was born in what is now 
 West Virginia and had been teaching down at Virginia Mili- 
 tary Institute and wasn't much of a teacher. He had a brigade 
 at First Manassas and when General Barnard Bee yelled at 
 
 57 
 
him that the Yankees were hard pressing the Confederates, 
 Jackson calmly replied: "Then, sir, we will give them the 
 bayonet." 
 
 A few minutes later General Bee rode along a line of waver- 
 ing Confederates and pointed his saber at Jackson and 
 shouted: "Look there at Jackson standing like a stone wall. 
 Rally behind the Virginians! " 
 
 Bee named him. Everybody has called him Stonewall ever 
 since. But not the men who fought with him. They called him 
 "Old Jack." 
 
 Stonewall Jackson was a military genius, one of the few our 
 country has produced. He, too, has been shrouded by legends. 
 He was a praying, killing man. 
 
 Another officer at First Manassas was William Tecumseh 
 Sherman, a shoddy-looking fellow with burning eyes and a 
 granite face. At the height of the fighting a man ran up to 
 him and gave him a pair of field glasses. Sherman demanded: 
 "Who are you?" 
 
 "My name is Love joy. A member of Congress." 
 
 "What are you doing here? Get out of my lines! Get the 
 hell out of my lines!" 
 
 Even then Sherman had more sense than most Northern 
 officers. 
 
 He came from Ohio and his friends called him "Cump." He 
 was a West Pointer but had never amounted to much except 
 as superintendent of a Louisiana college that now is Louisiana 
 State University. He tried to run St. Louis' streetcar system 
 and didn't quite make it, and was at a pretty low ebb when the 
 Civil War began. 
 
 Sherman and Jackson were mediocrities until the Civil 
 War put them on horses and turned them loose. 
 
 Cump looked like a taciturn man, but, actually, he was 
 
 58 
 
something of a blabbermouth. Once he even said, "I am sick 
 of this everlasting subject of slavery. I say 'Damn the niggers!' 
 I wish they were anywhere or could be kept at work." 
 
 He said many other silly things, but let's pass them by. 
 Talking generals have a way of making fools of themselves. 
 
 As for Sherman, well — here I go: he was far and away the 
 best general in the Union army. But he was not a genius. Jack- 
 son's mind turned twice while Sherman's was turning once, 
 but Sherman was a top-flight soldier and more than any other 
 single Yankee general he preserved the Union. 
 
 He was a Colonel at Manassas and then was transferred to 
 the West. The newspapers didn't like him because he accused 
 them, and rightly, of printing information that helped the 
 
 59 
 
enemy. A story was started that he was losing his mind. Oh, 
 brother. 
 
 The North recoiled in panic and dismay from the First 
 Battle of Manassas and the South herself couldn't quite take 
 it in. She had scored a touchdown the first time she'd got her 
 hands on the ball and then couldn't make up her mind how to 
 convert for the extra point. So the backfield went into a 
 huddle while the line wandered off and picked up Yankee 
 souvenirs and tore down the goal posts. The Secesh, strictly 
 corn-likker boys, found that Yankee champagne that the big- 
 wigs had fetched down to toast the fall of Richmond. The 
 Secesh guzzled champagne and washed it down with Bourbon 
 and branch water, and the branch was Bull Run. 
 
 Strategists have debated this hour ever since, some contend- 
 ing that had the Confeds pushed on they could have captured 
 Washington and ended the war. In the next breath they argue 
 that capture of Richmond would not have ended the war. 
 Something doesn't add up. 
 
 The chances are the Confederacy could have taken Wash- 
 ington after First Manassas. Mr. Lincoln — and he was the 
 government — simply would have moved to Philadelphia or 
 New York and kept fighting. 
 
 Jefferson Davis proclaimed the policy that the Confederacy 
 was waging a defensive war and would not invade. So Johnny 
 Reb sat in the shade alongside Bull Run and waited until his 
 head cleared from his spree and then wrote his little Lindy 
 Lou. 
 
 The Yanks were whipped and soon he'd be home to chop 
 out the cotton and maybe get in a little fishing before picking 
 time. He never got home and old Aunt Lou died a spinster, 
 cursing Yankees for her loneliness and pouring her bitterness 
 into the young, eager ears of the second and third genera- 
 tions, including me, whose first memorized poem was: 
 
 60 
 
Under the sod and the dew 
 Waiting the judgment day: — 
 Under the one, the Blue; 
 Under the other, the Gray. 
 
 The North was lamenting its disgrace and passing the buck 
 to everybody and everything. President Lincoln sat in his 
 sock feet at a window of the White House and propped a 
 telescope on his big toe and watched for the Confeds to come 
 swarming across the Potomac. 
 
 Out west, Missouri was having her own Civil War. In 
 response to Lincoln's call for troops, Governor Claiborne 
 Jackson thundered at the president: "Your requisition is ille- 
 gal, unconstitutional, revolutionary, inhuman, diabolical, and 
 cannot be complied with." That, my friends, was a politician's 
 way of saying no. 
 
 The Confederate government appropriated a million dol- 
 lars to get Missouri out of the Union. General Sterling Price 
 was put in charge of raising fifty thousand Secesh soldiers. 
 Said the General to Missouri: "Do I hear your shouts? Is that 
 your war cry which echoes through the land? Are you coming? 
 Fifty thousand men! Missouri will move to victory with the 
 tread of a giant. Come on, my brave boys, fifty thousand 
 heroic, gallant, unconquerable Southern men! We await your 
 coming." 
 
 He might have been waiting yet. He got less than five thou- 
 sand men and the Yankees pushed him into Arkansas, and 
 Missouri continued her civil war within the Civil War and 
 stayed in the Union. In November, 1861, the Confederacy 
 officially admitted Missouri into their government. But it just 
 didn't take. 
 
 Among the Missourians to answer the South's sterling call 
 for heroes was one of my favorite Americans — Mark Twain, 
 
 61 
 
known in those days as Sam Clemens. Many of his biographers 
 have sort of slurred over this period in the life of Mark Twain. 
 They seem not to want to admit that the great man was a 
 Rebel. 
 
 At the outbreak of the war, Sam Clemens was a young 
 pilot on the lower Mississippi River and was making mighty 
 good money. His brother, Orion Clemens, was a strong Lin- 
 coln man and the federal government gave him a political job 
 way out in the territory of Nevada. 
 
 As soon as Brother Orion was out of sight, young Sam up 
 and joined a Secesh outfit. Sort of a ragged militia. Call it a 
 joke if you want to, but Sam Clemens was in the Southern 
 army. 
 
 Then things got serious and Sam didn't aim to get shot at or 
 to shoot at anybody. He got mixed up in a comic opera fracas 
 and then pulled out and hightailed it for Nevada to work for 
 Brother Orion and, incidentally, the Yankees. That's the way 
 Sam Clemens got to the golden West that made him immortal. 
 That's the way one Johnny Reb became Mark Twain — thank 
 the Lord. Years later, instead of trying to explain it all, he just 
 wrote a funny piece about it and called it The Campaign that 
 Failed. 
 
 However, if you want to split hairs, he was a "scalawag" — 
 a scalawag being a Southerner who helped the Union cause. 
 
 Things were as hot in Kentucky as they were in Missouri. 
 Here, too, the Confederacy appropriated a million dollars to 
 pull Kentucky into the new republic and officially admitted 
 her in December, 1861. But this one didn't take either. Ken- 
 tucky, like Missouri, had her civil war within the Civil War. 
 
 Meanwhile, the North had recovered somewhat from the 
 shock of First Manassas and then began galloping off in all 
 directions. The military was riddled with politics, deadwood 
 and stupidity. President Lincoln instructed General George 
 
 61 
 
B. McClellan to organize an army and take Richmond. Little 
 Mac was a good organizer and made a good speech. And if his 
 ego could have been changed into powder it would have 
 blown Dixie plum' the other side of Pago Pago. 
 
 Little Mac got 115,000 men together and moved them by 
 boat to the peninsula of Virginia, down where the nation got 
 started at Jamestown and where Pocahontas had thrown her 
 arms around Captain John Smith. It was the spring of 1862 
 and somebody had forgot to tell Little Mac that it rains in 
 Virginia in the spring and that Southern mud is glue. His 
 army floundered and between him and Richmond were 
 95,000 Confederates under Gen. Joe Johnston. So he inched 
 along in the mire. Little Mac was a cautious man. 
 
 Let's leave him stuck in the mud and take a look at the 
 whole picture and see in a few paragraphs what it took Wash- 
 ington a long, long time to see. The Confederacy was a scor- 
 pion with a hundred legs and steel jaws. A freak? So was the 
 Confederacy. 
 
 The head was in Virginia and the body curved south and 
 west along the railroads and rivers. Its stinger poked into the 
 Mississippi River and fed the body from that end. 
 
 A few long thinkers insisted right off that the only way to 
 kill the scorpion was to paralyze it by nipping its legs and 
 then working it over from its stinger to its head. In other 
 words, begin at the tail and take the rivers and railroads. 
 These thinkers included Miss Anna Carroll, a Maryland 
 pamphleteer, a propagandist and amateur strategist. She, 
 through instinct, intuition or whatever women have, knew 
 more about broad military strategy in the early days than 
 most of the Union general staff, but her advice was lost in the 
 hip-hip-hooray of Washington's bedlam. Somewhere there 
 should be a monument to Anna Carroll. She pleaded with the 
 
 63 
 
Union to look to the West for salvation and she was right, for 
 the Civil War was won in the West, as the East called the 
 Mississippi and Ohio valleys in those days. 
 
 Out there was Captain Ulysses Simpson Grant who had got 
 nowhere in the army or out of it. His real name was Hiram 
 Ulysses. The Simpson came from Grandma Simpson in a 
 name mixup. 
 
 The world had given U. S. Grant a hard time, partly due to 
 tough luck and partly to liquor, but mostly because he was 
 a long ways this side of brilliant. In fact and in many things, 
 he was just sort of dumb. At Georgetown, Ohio, where he 
 was reared, the village wits called him Useless Grant; this 
 slow, slovenly fellow who was always borrowing money and 
 forgetting to repay it and who stood in awe of the rich. 
 
 He was made a colonel at the outbreak of the Civil War 
 
 6 4 
 
because, a West Point man and a Mexican War veteran, he 
 knew the manual of arms. Besides, the regiment liked him 
 and had refused to serve under his predecessor. 
 
 Pretty soon he was fighting and the Union had to make him 
 a general because he knew how to fight; a slow, clumsy bear 
 to be sure, but a fighter nevertheless. His uniform never fit 
 and he loved horses and sometimes smoked cigars when his 
 nerves were jangling from a hangover. 
 
 Biographers have had to dig deep for exciting anecdotes 
 about U. S. Grant. He simply was not an exciting man. The 
 story that Lincoln wanted Grant's brand of whiskey to give 
 to his other generals is not true. This hokum was made out of 
 the whole cloth by a correspondent for the New York 
 Herald in 1863. (In denying the story, Lincoln pointed out 
 that it was more than a hundred years old anyhow, and Lin- 
 coln liked original stories. The Grant-whiskey-other-generals 
 story goes back at least as far as George I of England and his 
 General Wolfe.) 
 
 The truth about Grant makes him look pretty sad on many 
 occasions. It was he who issued the infamous General Order 
 No. 11, which attempted to expel all Jews from his military 
 district under the ridiculous assumption that Jews alone 
 were responsible for illicit cotton trading with the enemy. 
 Actually these lawbreakers mostly were Yankee Protestants, 
 including some of Grant's own family. The order which 
 hounded him all of his life read: 
 
 "The Jews as a class violating every regulation of trade 
 established by the Treasury Department, and also department 
 orders, are hereby expelled from the department within 24 
 hours from the receipt of this order. 
 
 "Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of 
 people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one 
 
 65 
 
returning after such notification will be arrested and held in 
 confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out 
 as prisoners unless furnished with permit from headquarters. 
 "No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters 
 for the purpose of making personal application for trade per- 
 
 mits." 
 
 The War Department immediately went over Grant's 
 head and revoked the order, but it is the basis for the insistent 
 charge that Grant was anti-Semitic. That I doubt. He, with 
 his narrow-gauge, single-track mind, probably never thought 
 about it one way or another. He was not anti-Semitic or anti- 
 any thing much. He was just pro-Grant, a second-rate fellow 
 trying to get along. 
 
 Grant and Sherman got together in Tennessee; the bull- 
 dozer and the roadscraper. 
 
 Back in Virginia, General McClellan, dripping mud and 
 spouting oratory, made a lunge at Richmond and the Confeds 
 whiplashed him. This was the long dreary Peninsular Cam- 
 paign in which the North made so many errors. 
 
 Confederate General Joe Johnston was wounded and Presi- 
 dent Davis turned the Army of Northern Virginia over to his 
 personal military adviser. That would be General Robert 
 Edward Lee, called R. E. Lee during the war or Marse 
 Robert, but seldom Robert E. Lee. 
 
 I would be presumptuous indeed to attempt to add anything 
 to the record of the greatest general our country has pro- 
 duced. He is enshrined in cold, spotless marble at Washington 
 & Lee University in Virginia. 
 
 Nevertheless, I have a confession to make: I happen to be 
 one Southerner who has a mental block on General Lee. All 
 during my childhood I heard over and over — "Robert E. Lee 
 was a Southern gentleman and a great Christian." 
 
 66 
 
I didn't want to be a Southern gentleman. I wanted to be a 
 railroad engineer. I wasn't interested in immaculate gray uni- 
 forms, in cold marble and perfection and I was afraid of 
 R. E. Lee. He had been dead for years and yet his spirit 
 seemed so close to us that I was afraid. He was always watch- 
 ing me and when I did bad things, like write dirty words on 
 a fence or chunk at birds, he shook his head and disapproved. 
 God, my grandmother and Robert E. Lee were always watch- 
 ing me. He was the archangel Michael, away off yonder 
 beyond my reach — pure white, godly and cold. I have never 
 got over it. Forgive me, all of you who disagree, but I don't 
 idolize Robert E. Lee. Who wants a general for a guardian 
 angel? 
 
 So here I go again sticking my neck out. Lee was not my 
 favorite Confederate general. Gimme Old Jack Jackson or 
 Nathan 'ygod Bedford Forrest, helling for leather. Or Stand 
 Watie, the Cherokee. Who can help loving a man with a 
 name like that — General Stand Watie. 
 
 But, anyway, R. E. Lee and Old Jack Jackson got together 
 in Virginia. 
 
 Lee began to put the pressure on McClellan down in the 
 peninsula while over in the Shenandoah Valley Jackson blew 
 the lid off. More than 40,000 Federals were poured into the 
 Shenandoah Valley to threaten Richmond from the west and 
 Old Jack was ordered to hold them off. He wasn't a holding 
 man. He had only 17,000 soldiers, but he elected to dust out 
 the Yankees and that's exactly what he did; outthinking and 
 outfighting everything that the Union threw at him. One of 
 his men explained it best: "All Old Jack gave us was a mus- 
 ket, a hundred rounds, and a gum blanket. Then he druv us 
 like hell." 
 
 Jackson pinned their ears back in the Shenandoah and Lee 
 
 67 
 
thrashed the Union army, the Army of the Potomac, at the 
 side door to Richmond. McClellan was relieved of command 
 or just plain fired if you want to be frank about it. He gave 
 us a good army saddle — the famous McClellan saddle — and 
 therefore he deserves the gratitude of callused hoss soldiers. 
 
 General H. W. Halleck was made general-in-chief of all 
 the Union armies. Halleck was a nincompoop. 
 
 General John Pope was put in command of the Army of 
 the Potomac. He was all brass and bombast and even more 
 cautious than McClellan. Wisely the Union abandoned the 
 Peninsular Campaign and unwisely General Pope moved 
 back around to Manassas and Bull Run and bragged what he 
 was going to do to the Rebels. 
 
 Lee set him up like tenpins and Jackson force-marched an 
 entire corps squarely behind the Army of the Potomac with- 
 out Pope's knowledge and the Confederates squeezed him in 
 the wringer and left him limp. 
 
 Pope whined to Lincoln that his army was melting away 
 and that something must be done. Only the good Lord knows 
 what General Pope expected Lincoln to do. Maybe grab a 
 stick and run down there and do all of his own fighting. 
 
 68 
 
There was only one thing for Lincoln to do and he did it. 
 He put McClellan back in command, and prayed. 
 
 The South moved into Maryland. By the strange logic of 
 war, Lee's advance into that state was never called an "in- 
 vasion" by the Confederacy. The South figured that Mary- 
 land was a Southern state and that she really was marching 
 into her own, to pull Maryland into the Confederacy by driv- 
 ing the Yankees out. This was to be the liberation of Maryland 
 and this is where Barbara Frietchie came in, at Frederick. 
 
 Dame Frietchie to Stonewall Jackson: 
 
 "Shoot, if you must, this old grey head, 
 But spare your country's flag," she said. 
 
 Jackson to his men: 
 
 "Who touches a hair on yon grey head 
 Dies like a dog! March on!" he said. 
 
 Nice and pretty, but it didn't happen. 
 
 A glance at the map will show that when the Confederates 
 marched through Frederick they already were north of 
 Washington and even of Baltimore. 
 
 McClellan met them around Antietam Creek (or Sharps- 
 burg if you're a Southerner) and fought them to a standstill. 
 Here was a new McClellan, maneuvering as if he knew Lee's 
 plans. 
 
 He did. He had a copy of Lee's Special Orders No. 191, 
 found at Frederick wrapped around three cigars. Some Con- 
 federate commander (D. H. Hill?) lost his copy instead of 
 swallowing it as they do in the movies, and it showed up 
 as a cigar wrapper. Private B. W. Mitchell of the 27th In- 
 diana Volunteers found it and had sense enough to realize it 
 was valuable, thus proving he was wiser than some of the 
 
 69 
 
big brass. Private Mitchell was wounded at Antietam and died 
 about four years later. His destitute widow did not even get a 
 pension through somebody's fault, maybe her own. 
 
 Lee loafed back to Virginia. This was the moment to follow 
 the Confederates and at least harass the Army of Northern 
 Virginia if it couldn't be destroyed. But McClellan hiber- 
 nated. Lincoln tried to nudge him into action, begging and 
 pleading. McClellan just sat; perhaps waiting for three more 
 cigars. 
 
 General A. E. Burnside took over the Union army. The 
 press, president and public were screaming for a fight. Well, 
 he'd give them one. He didn't want the job or the responsi- 
 bility. But he had his orders to fight — so look out boys, here 
 I come. 
 
 Recklessly and stupidly he lunged at Fredericksburg, Vir- 
 ginia. Calmly the entrenched Confederates cut him to bloody 
 bits. Twelve thousand Union casualties bore testimony to his 
 failure and he took the rap for this horror although the blame 
 really lay in Washington. They wanted a fight and got a 
 massacre. 
 
 General Burnside wept. He gave us a fashion of short side 
 whiskers called sideburns. 
 
 Militarily, the Union had failed in Virginia during the year 
 of 1862. The South looked mighty good. But how good was 
 she? She wasn't winning; she just wasn't losing. 
 
 Here was a clever welterweight fighting one heavyweight 
 after another, and every time one heavyweight got knocked 
 down another climbed through the ropes. It was like Sugar 
 Ray Robinson taking on John L. Sullivan, Jim Jeffries and 
 Jack Johnson — one at a time and whipping 'em. But with 
 Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis just waiting to get to him. 
 
 It couldn't go on forever. 
 
 70 
 
The Confederacy's backbone was broken in the Mississippi 
 valley before she had a chance to breathe, much less to 
 stretch. 
 
 About the time of the Union's first disasters over in Vir- 
 ginia, Federal armies already were wandering piecemeal 
 around Kentucky and stamping out the fires of secession and 
 down from Cairo, Illinois, on the Ohio river, came Brig. Gen. 
 Ulysses Grant with a bobtail army. 
 
 Grant was a man with a plan, but nobody would listen to 
 his plan. He knew that the Confederacy must be defeated in 
 a war of movement, that the Southern armies must be met and 
 beaten. First control the railroads and rivers and then corner 
 the Confederate armies and crush them. It didn't take any 
 great military wisdom to see this, just common sense. 
 
 7 1 
 
Some Eastern newspapers misspelled Donelson, a fort in 
 West Tennessee near the Kentucky line. They spelled it 
 "Donaldson." All it did was control the Cumberland River 
 to Nashville, and Nashville was the heart of Tennessee and 
 Tennessee was the heart of the Confederacy — Tennessee the 
 heart, the Mississippi River the spine, Georgia the belly and 
 Virginia the head. 
 
 General Grant plodded down into Tennessee, not too far 
 from his base at Cairo, Illinois. He had gunboats and he fought 
 like an elephant instead of a fox. A makeshift Confederate 
 army dug in at Donelson and Grant laid siege to the fort. 
 
 It didn't seem too important at the time and was strictly 
 minor league warfare. The Southern commander, General 
 Albert Sidney Johnston, was over around Nashville to pro- 
 tect that capital from another Union army — this one under 
 Don Carlos Buell — and too late did he realize that Donelson 
 was the key to Tennessee's vault. 
 
 Inside Fort Donelson was an interesting collection of 
 Southerners. The commander was General John B. Floyd, 
 who had been Secretary of War in President Buchanan's cab- 
 inet. He also had been indicted for embezzlement of public 
 funds, a crime committed by a subordinate. 
 
 Next to Floyd was General Gideon J. Pillow, a big-talking 
 fellow who never quite knew the score. The third in com- 
 mand was General Simon Bolivar Buckner. 
 
 Kentuckian Buckner was destined to become the first 
 Southern scapegoat although really he was quite a man. He 
 had been in West Point with Grant and even had paid certain 
 embarrassing little bills for Grant. 
 
 Also in the fort was a giant of a fellow named Nathan Bed- 
 ford Forrest around whose neck hang a hundred myths. 
 First off, he was not illiterate as has been charged. He was by 
 
 72 
 
no means an educated man and was a lord-awful speller, but 
 one of our history's best soldiers; a soldier's soldier, a natural. 
 
 Forrest was a shrewd man with a dollar and a heller with 
 his fists. He made money trading slaves, cattle and horses and 
 then gave up slave trading which was never respectable and 
 often not profitable. He got into real estate and cotton plant- 
 ing and got rich. 
 
 He never said, "Git thar fust," or whatever the saying is. 
 He did say that one man on the budge, meaning move, was 
 worth two standing still. He also said that war meant fighting 
 and that fighting meant killing. He knew no rules of war ex- 
 cept to win. History calls him a cavalry leader. Actually he 
 commanded mounted infantry and was the best natural gen- 
 eral of the Civil War. His prowess, courage and strength 
 were phenomenal. Once he stopped an armed mob with only 
 
 73 
 
a knife. He was wounded several times and goodness knows 
 how many horses were shot from under him, maybe 29. 
 
 Toward the end of the war when he captured Fort Pillow 
 and its Negro garrison, he gave the Union one of its best 
 propaganda gimmicks in the "Massacre of Fort Pillow. ,, But 
 there are two sides to that story if anyone cares to read the 
 records. 
 
 Forrest enlisted in the Confederate army as a private and 
 then put up his own money to raise and equip a battalion. He, 
 too, was at Fort Donelson, listening to the West Pointers 
 harangue and wondering just what the devil they were talk- 
 ing about. 
 
 Grant put the heat on Donelson and Generals Floyd and 
 Pillow loaded some of their men aboard steamers and slipped 
 out, leaving General Buckner to hold the bag. General Buck- 
 ner asked his old friend Grant for terms and old-friend Grant 
 replied: "No terms except an unconditional and immediate 
 surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately 
 upon your works." 
 
 Forrest swore the Confederate equivalent of "nuts" and got 
 his cavalry out. About 15,000 Secesh were surrendered, how- 
 ever, and the North's mouth popped open. It wasn't much of 
 a meat course, but it was a mighty tasty entree to the hungry 
 Union. 
 
 The newspapers didn't know much about Grant and pulled 
 their stories out of thin air. Somebody said he was smoking a 
 cigar when he received the surrender. If he was, the chances 
 are that Buckner gave it to him. Anyway, the folks almost 
 swamped him with cigars. Grant was never a man to scorn a 
 luxury or refuse a gift and tried to smoke all the cigars. He 
 eased up on his drinking but became an inveterate smoker and 
 
 74 
 
the cigars probably aggravated the throat condition that 
 brought on the cancer that killed him. 
 
 General Simon Bolivar Buckner was captured at Donelson 
 and then was exchanged to fight again against the Yankees. It 
 was a funny kind of war. In after years he was editor of the 
 Louisville (Ky.) Courier, later to be the Louisville Courier- 
 Journal, one of our country's really good newspapers. He was 
 a pallbearer at Grant's funeral and lived to be 91 years old; 
 1 82 3- 1 9 14. His son, also General Simon Bolivar Buckner, was 
 killed in action in World War II. 
 
 With Donelson gone, the Confederates figured Nashville 
 was untenable and evacuated it. The Civil War had been 
 going on less than a year and a Union army already was in the 
 heart of the Confederacy. 
 
 Grant kept inching south, puffing cigars, drinking oc- 
 casionally and fighting the gross stupidity of his military 
 superiors. He reached the Tennessee River and here indeed 
 was a lifeline of the South. 
 
 The Confederacy had to stop him. General Albert Sidney 
 Johnston consolidated his scattered forces and hit Grant at 
 Shiloh Church, only a few miles from the northern boundary 
 of the state of Mississippi. Sherman was with Grant by then. 
 So was a general named Lew Wallace, who later wrote Ben 
 Hur. 
 
 Albert Sidney Johnston was killed at Shiloh and Grant 
 himself was beaten and yet Shiloh was a Union victory, and 
 make no mistake about that. But the man who saved the day 
 was General Don Carlos Buell whose name is so unfamiliar to 
 most Americans that they can't even pronounce it. 
 
 Buell was not in the class with Yankees Sherman, Grant, 
 Meade or Thomas, but was better than most Federal generals. 
 His army had been sort of meandering around Middle Ten- 
 
 75 
 
nessee and it was pure luck that he reached Shiloh in time to 
 win that battle and for Grant to get the credit. Buell should 
 have had the laurels, but his name wasn't right to make a good 
 old dyed-in-the-wool "American" hero. Sounded too Spanish. 
 It just so happens that Don Carlos Buell was an Ohio Welsh- 
 man whose wife was from Mobile. He later was hounded out 
 of the army because he did not follow up a victory, a military 
 crime that was quite frequent in the Union army. 
 
 Shiloh was fought in April of 1862, only a year after Fort 
 Sumter, and was the greatest battle ever fought on the Ameri- 
 can continent up to that time. The North lost more than 
 13,000 men, and the South more than 10,000. 
 
 It's hard to believe but after the victory of Shiloh Grant 
 actually was sidetracked and General Halleck took over. 
 He had enough men to march plum' to Mexico and yet he 
 dawdled. He had a report that the Confederates were en- 
 trenched at Corinth, Mississippi. The cannon could be seen 
 bristling from earthworks. 
 
 For about six weeks Halleck crawled the short distance be- 
 tween Shiloh and Corinth and when he got there he dis- 
 covered that the Confederate cannon were wooden logs and 
 that the Secesh were long gone. It made Halleck look like the 
 jackass he was. 
 
 He occupied Corinth and built his army up to 120,000 men. 
 Grant begged for the army to march it through Mississippi 
 and Alabama to Mobile. He might have done it, but Halleck 
 gave him the brush-off. 
 
 The fall of Corinth, itself only a village, gave the Union a 
 stranglehold on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad and this 
 was the most important line of communication between the 
 Confederacy west of the Mississippi river and the Confed- 
 eracy along the Atlantic seaboard. This road was now in 
 
 76 
 
Federal hands and Arkansas, Texas and much of Louisiana 
 virtually were cut off. 
 
 Three weeks after Shiloh, a Union fleet under Admiral 
 David Farragut of Tennessee, captured New Orleans, and this 
 the city whose legal dix bills, called dixies, had given Dixie its 
 name. The victory was a refreshingly daring exploit that 
 stunned the South. The Confederacy thought its largest city 
 and most important port could be defended by river forts. 
 Farragut simply ran by the forts, thumbed his nose at them 
 and New Orleans fell like a squashy fig in June-bug time. 
 Then Memphis succumbed to a flotilla of river boats and by 
 June of 1862 the Southern scorpion was feeding itself through 
 its stinger that poked into the Mississippi river at Vicksburg, 
 a river and railroad town flanked by hills and bayous. 
 
 Back in Virginia, the Confederates were killing bees in 
 swarms, but were making no effort to destroy the hives. In 
 the Mississippi Valley, Yankee bees were swarming and stick- 
 ing. They took their hives with them. 
 
 Down in New Orleans, a gent named Ben Butler took over 
 the Yankee Army of Occupation. Now here was a dilly, this 
 Brother Butler. Democrat, too. But he had shady influence 
 with Republican VIP's. In modern parlance, General Ben 
 Butler must have known where the body was buried. Greedy 
 and crafty, his sticky fingers did all right for his pocketbook, 
 and his brother, working the Louisiana territory, lined his 
 pockets in illegal trade with the Confederates. The methods 
 were simple. The Federals seized Confederate property as 
 contraband and then Ben Butler's brother sold it back to the 
 Secesh at a good profit. Also, he finagled Confederate cotton 
 in New Orleans and sold it in New York. He bought flour in 
 New York at %6 a barrel and sold it in New Orleans at $24 a 
 barrel. General Ben Butler supposedly was not in on his 
 
 77 
 
brother's thievery. Perhaps the general was reading a book. 
 Maybe Uncle Tonis Cabin. 
 
 Butler and Sherman have become sort of cuss words in the 
 South. Sherman deserves better, but Butler — ugh. He got 
 peeved because the women of New Orleans did not treat him 
 
 78 
 
with proper respect. One actually spat in his face. Then one 
 night some of his men were out carousing in the tenderloin 
 and some of the harlots insulted them. All they did was empty 
 their slop jars on the soldiers' heads. 
 
 General Butler therewith proclaimed that inasmuch as his 
 men had been subject to "insults from women calling them- 
 selves ladies," that "hereafter when any female shall by mere 
 gesture or movement insult, show contempt for any officers 
 or soldiers of the United States, she shall be regarded and held 
 liable to be treated as a woman about town plying her avoca- 
 
 tion." 
 
 That's when they started calling him "Beast" Butler. In 
 justice to this rascal, however, it should be pointed out that 
 he tolerated no rebellious nonsense in New Orleans and that 
 he cleaned up the town by improving the sewage system. 
 Maybe his men did snitch a lot of silver spoons, but not as 
 many as has been charged to him. There just were not that 
 many silver spoons in New Orleans. Incidentally, they also 
 called Brother Butler "Silver Spoon Butler." 
 
 All of this was mighty sordid, but some good things were 
 happening at the same time. Up in St. Louis, James B. Eads 
 was instituting assembly line methods for mass production of 
 ships. A week after he contracted to do a job, Eads had 4,000 
 men working in the Minnesota forests, the rolling mills of 
 Pittsburgh, the cannon foundries of Ohio and the shipyards 
 of St. Louis. Forty-five days later he launched the world's first 
 ironclad. This was the St. Louis, later named the DeKalb. 
 
 About the same time, Richard Gordon Gatling was putting 
 his brilliant mind to work for the Union. Gatling was a North 
 Carolina Tarheel. He invented a screw propeller only to learn 
 that John Ericsson had beat him to the patent. So Gatling sat 
 
 79 
 
down and invented a rice-sowing machine, a wheat drill and 
 a steam plow — the forerunner of our modern tractors. 
 
 He went to St. Louis to have them manufactured and was 
 on a business trip to Cincinnati when he contracted smallpox. 
 Gatling could not get what he considered proper medical at- 
 tention and so, upon recovery, he went to medical college for 
 four years simply to be able to take care of himself and his 
 family. He never practiced on anybody except his own folks, 
 but was one whiz of a doctor. 
 
 At the outbreak of the war, he gave his mind to ordnance 
 and invented a rapid-fire machine gun that fired 250 shots a 
 minute. Officially it was the Gatling gun, although his name 
 has been abbreviated to "Gat," meaning any automatic pistol. 
 
 Over in Hampton Roads, Virginia, the Monitor and Vir- 
 ginia (Merrimac) had tangled in the first battle of ironclads, 
 although Eads' DeKalb was older than either of them. This 
 set-to still is one of the country's most romanticized sea bat- 
 tles. The Peninsular Campaign was in the making. Yankee 
 balloons were in the sky for observation purposes and Yankee 
 ships, all wooden, lay off the coast to support the army. 
 
 The Confeds worked over an old hulk that had been the 
 Merrimac, plated her with iron, named her the Virginia and 
 sent her out to wreck the Union fleet. She almost succeeded, 
 scattering and sinking the Union's wooden ships right and left. 
 Washington trembled and President Lincoln again propped 
 his telescope on his big toe and watched the Potomac, up 
 which some folks expected the clumsy, crazy Confederate 
 ironclad to appear and bombard the capital. 
 
 However, just like in the movies, the Federal ironclad Mon- 
 itor showed up in the nick of time. The Monitor was com- 
 manded by the same John Ericsson who had beaten "Gat" 
 Gatling to the patent for a screw propeller. 
 
 80 
 
The Monitor and the Virginia shot and strained and grunted 
 in the first battle between ironclads, an indecisive fracas in 
 which neither ship was beaten. Both sides claimed a victory; 
 the South because the Monitor would not resume the battle 
 and the North because the Union fleet was saved. The North 
 was right. The Monitor accomplished her mission. The Vir- 
 ginia did not. 
 
 And, now, away we go back to the Mississippi Valley. 
 There was glory and romance in Virginia, but only slow 
 grinding death out there in the West. The Confederacy's legs 
 had been snipped off in Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas and 
 much of Tennessee and Louisiana. Its stinger must be pulled 
 at Vicksburg where river and railroad brought supplies from 
 as far away as Texas. 
 
 Two Union fleets converged upon Vicksburg and an army 
 joined them. And then appeared what I contend was the Con- 
 federacy's most remarkable ship — the steam ram Arkansas. 
 This homemade monster was built in a swampy wilderness of 
 anything useful that the Confeds could get their hands on; and 
 it came steaming one day out of the Yazoo River and into the 
 Mississippi. It scattered two Union fleets of more than a hun- 
 dred ships and forced the Union army to retire. Where is a 
 better saga than that? The Arkansas' commander was Isaac 
 N. Brown, who also devised the first torpedoes in our naval 
 warfare. Here again is a man history has passed by although 
 he probably was the most able commander in the Confed- 
 erate navy. 
 
 Almost by default, Grant was put back in charge of the 
 Union's western operations and realized that he had to take 
 Vicksburg. He sent Sherman down one way, to be soundly 
 beaten, and then took off himself catty-cornered across Mis- 
 sissippi. He was doing pretty fair until the Confeds cut in 
 
 81 
 
behind him, burned his base at Holly Springs, Mississippi, and 
 captured Mrs. Grant and one of her slaves. This was most 
 embarrassing and the Confederates apologized and bowed and 
 scraped and turned her loose. 
 
 The Holly Springs raid was commanded by General Earl 
 Van Dorn and this gentleman is worth a line because so many 
 Southerners apparently think that he gave his life in the line of 
 duty. Pleasure, not duty, cost Van Dorn his life. He was not 
 killed in battle at all, but by a jealous husband who spied his 
 wife and Van Dorn in a buggy. The assassin was a Dr. Peters. 
 
 In Virginia, the Confederacy was beating off one attack 
 after another, but in the West she was being beaten. The 
 North could not grasp the significance of her Western vic- 
 tories and Southern newspapers pooh-poohed them. A mere 
 bagatelle, the editors said and the pulpits echoed this foolish- 
 ness. Why, everybody knew the Yanks couldn't shoot for 
 shucks and that one Southerner could whip ten of 'em any 
 day in the week and twenty on Sunday. 
 
 Southern newspapers were being printed on wallpaper and 
 with homemade ink, but were screaming — "They can't beat 
 us." Unfortunately, most Southerners didn't read newspapers. 
 Many of them couldn't read. But they could starve and die. 
 Salt was getting scarce. There was no medicine. News trickled 
 back that Johnny was dead somewhere away off yonder and 
 now Pa would have to double up on the plowing. Maybe the 
 Yanks couldn't shoot for shucks, but something was killing 
 Johnny Reb. Maybe that triumvirate — pneumonia, dysentery 
 and fevers — maybe they had ambushed him. He just wasn't 
 coming back. That was for sure. 
 
 The North seemed not to realize that in late '62 she had the 
 South in a corner and was beating out her brains. That's 
 because opinion and propaganda came out of the East, and 
 
 82 
 
Eastern politicians and editors didn't know much about the 
 Mississippi valley and simply couldn't get through their heads 
 that the Mississippi River and not the Potomac River was the 
 backbone of Dixie. 
 
 For the purpose of comparison, let's reverse the picture and 
 imagine it this way: the war was less than two years old and 
 Minnesota and Iowa were in Confederate hands, and much of 
 Michigan. Also Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Columbus, 
 Ohio. That's about the significance of Missouri, Kentucky, 
 Arkansas, and New Orleans, Memphis, the Cumberland River 
 and Nashville. If that had been the case, the North would have 
 been in one whale of a mess. 
 
 The South was. 
 
 83 
 
The Emancipation Proclamation was declared effective as of 
 January i, 1863; and here is a declaration that has been talked 
 about more and read less than any other important American 
 document except maybe the Constitution itself. 
 
 This proclamation, of and by itself, did not abolish slavery 
 and attempted to free only the slaves in those states at war 
 with the United States. Slavery was acceptable among friends, 
 just bad for enemies. 
 
 The proclamation was only as good as the bayonets that 
 enforced it. 
 
 It was not a congressional policy, but flatly an executive 
 military decree. 
 
 Lincoln himself was skeptical about it and issued it with 
 reluctance. He wanted to pay for freedom with money and 
 
 84 
 
not with blood. The United States, through congressional 
 resolution and at Lincoln's insistence, had offered to buy the 
 freedom of slaves. The seceding states looked over the offer 
 and scorned it. They didn't trust Lincoln. That was a mis- 
 take. They had every reason not to trust the Republican party, 
 Congress, big business, and the Abolitionists, but they should 
 have trusted Lincoln. 
 
 Only after the South rebuffed his overtures did he issue his 
 proclamation. 
 
 Legal? Of course not. It was confiscation of private prop- 
 erty without appeal, redress or compensation; without con- 
 gressional approval or judicial sanction. 
 
 So what. Shotgun weddings aren't legal either, but, sure as 
 shooting, they make the young'uns legitimate. 
 
 It was this proclamation that made Lincoln "The Great 
 Emancipator," an universal honor that would have surprised 
 him had he lived to hear it. He was more accustomed to being 
 reviled as a rascal, despot, lunatic and baboon — and by his 
 own side. 
 
 His masterpiece has been called our finest "human docu- 
 ment" (whatever that is) since the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence. 
 
 It has been called a bit of masterful military strategy. 
 
 It has been called a devious machination to lure slaves into 
 bloody revolt. That's humbug. If there was one mistake that 
 Lincoln opposed, that mistake was a general slave rebellion. 
 You can bet your bottom dollar that if Negro slaves had 
 started killing white women and children in an out-and-out 
 uprising then Yankee soldiers themselves, immediately and 
 without orders, would have jumped in there to help their 
 white kind. A bloody slave revolt would have crushed the 
 Confederacy, but it also might have cracked the Union for- 
 
 85 
 
ever and surely would have turned the Civil War into a 
 massacre. Abraham Lincoln knew this. 
 
 As I see it, the Emancipation Proclamation was neither 
 deliberately humanitarian nor military. It wasn't an under-the- 
 table card trick or dirty pool. It was political; the shrewdest 
 political document since King John gave Magna Carta to his 
 nobles and thereby saved his kingdom and maybe his own 
 neck. 
 
 At this period of his administration, Lincoln was getting 
 cussed coming and going. His own people were calling him 
 a despot, and with reason. He had assumed dictatorial power 
 and here is the most fascinating paradox of all: Father Abra- 
 ham became a despot to save democracy from itself and to 
 insure its survival. He was fifty years ahead of his country in 
 civil and human rights, maybe a hundred years. So he grabbed 
 all the reins and handled the horses himself, determined to 
 save the wagon even if a lot of folks got run over. 
 
 The Civil War had become as unpopular as our War of 
 1 8 1 2 had been and as our Korean War was to be. The North- 
 ern people, bleeding, sweating and dying, began asking them- 
 selves — why? Unionism was an abstract thing and it was hard 
 to get folks to die for an abstraction. 
 
 Of this confusion and disillusionment, the Emancipation 
 Proclamation was born. 
 
 "I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do 
 proclaim . . ." 
 
 That all slaves within any seceding state or designated part 
 of any seceding state shall be free "thenceforward and for- 
 
 ever." 
 
 However, loyal slave states and loyal sections of disloyal 
 states were exempt. 
 The proclamation was released as a trial balloon and it 
 
 86 
 
soared so high so fast that, for a spell, nobody could see it, 
 and then it exploded into a lightning bolt that set the woods 
 on fire. 
 
 "As Christ died to make men holy, let us die to make men 
 free—" 
 
 It turned the Civil War into a crusade. Now that Yankee 
 boy knew why he was dying: to make men free. 
 
 Lincoln's proclamation, political in concept but noble in 
 result, put the Civil War on the level where it should have 
 been all along: on the slavery issue, on an issue of morals, 
 decency and righteousness. 
 
 It was one of the few good clean winds that blew through 
 the slaughterhouse in 1863. But even it could not blow away 
 the stench of death, corruption, greed and graft; for democ- 
 racy was wallowing in the filth and mire of human depravity. 
 
 Money was the root of most of the evils and the evils were 
 more prevalent in the North than in the South for two reasons 
 — more money and more folks. As soon as it became apparent 
 that the North was in for a long hassle, some sharpers smelled 
 the bonanza from afar like feist dogs treeing a polecat, and 
 they waded in. Many of our country's great fortunes had 
 their beginnings in Civil War blood. Contractors, politicians 
 and speculators stole from the government, gypped the 
 soldiers and double-crossed one another. 
 
 It cost the United States about three billion dollars in cash 
 to fight the Civil War. Paper money (greenbacks) was made 
 legal tender. There was not enough gold to back up this paper 
 and so a premium was put on gold and the metal became a 
 commodity. The value of a greenback dollar dropped to 35^. 
 Prices and profits went sky-high and the poor, as usual, were 
 caught in the squeeze. 
 
 The first popular bond issues of our history appeared under 
 
 87 
 
the supervision of Jay Cooke and Company of Philadelphia. 
 The Treasury called in this outfit (much as the goverment 
 today sometimes calls in an advertising firm) and details for 
 our first bond "drive" were worked out. Agents, orators, 
 hucksters and pitchmen were sent into every hamlet. They 
 whooped it up for the bonds, using medicine man techniques, 
 and it was a great success. Bond sales rose to $12,000,000 a 
 week and the big money men were astonished to discover just 
 how rich this country was. 
 
 These bonds offered a slick gimmick to get rich quick at 
 government expense. The six per cent interest on the bonds 
 was payable in gold, but the bonds could be bought with 
 paper money, and a paper dollar was worth much less than a 
 gold dollar. 
 
 Now, gold was selling on the stock exchange at 150. Let's 
 say a fellow had a thousand dollars in gold. With it he bought 
 $1500 in greenbacks. Then he bought a $1500 bond bearing 
 six per cent gold-paying interest. His $1500 now was bring- 
 ing him $90 a year in interest — nine per cent on his invest- 
 ment. The government must redeem the bonds at par and in 
 gold. For $1500 in greenbacks he got back $1500 in gold, or 
 about 50 per cent on his $1000. Slick, huh? The United States 
 was paying as high as 1 5 per cent to borrow money. 
 
 But financing was not the only mess. Americans actually 
 were afraid to speak out. Free speech became a crime and 
 soldiers raided newspaper and magazine offices. Publications 
 were suppressed without warning. Communications were 
 seized and about 36,000 Northern citizens were jailed for 
 speaking or writing against the administration. 
 
 William H. Seward, Secretary of State, actually boasted 
 that he had more power than Queen Victoria, exclaiming, "I 
 
 88 
 
can send any man to prison, with or without cause, and keep 
 him there." 
 
 Sales taxes appeared on everything: 2^ a pound on sugar, a 
 few pennies on matches and $2.00 a gallon on whiskey. Our 
 first income tax came into effect and live per cent was levied 
 on incomes from $600 to $5,000. A 10 per cent bite was taken 
 from incomes of more than $5,000. 
 
 To get volunteers into the army, bounties were paid by 
 counties and states. In New York City, for example, a man 
 who already had served an enlistment could get $777 if he 
 re-enlisted. Some con men enlisted in one county, got boun- 
 ties, deserted, then enlisted in another county, got more 
 bounties — and made the rounds. Thieves, rascals and mounte- 
 banks poured into the Union army. They made poor soldiers 
 and sometimes wouldn't fight. One New York regiment actu- 
 ally mutinied rather than go to the front in Virginia. 
 
 The United States passed its first conscription act in 1863. 
 It was a terrible thing, cold-bloodedly manipulated in favor 
 of the well-off. Any able-bodied man could buy an exemption 
 by paying the government $300. Further, if a man didn't have 
 $300, he might buy a substitute for less, usually some immi- 
 grant just off the boat who was willing to take a chance for a 
 hundred bucks. This "substitute" law gave rise to one of the 
 jokes of the day, the housewife who told her neighbor, "My 
 husband ain't going to war. He sent a prostitute" 
 
 The conscription act brought to New York City the bloodi- 
 est riots in our history. A lot of buncombe has been written 
 about the draft riots to put the sting on foreigners and on 
 workingmen who participated in them, and they were almost 
 as much race riots as draft riots. Unjust conscription was the 
 tinder that blazed, but a labor dispute was the spark that 
 lighted the tinder. 
 
 89 
 
New York's longshoremen had struck for more money and 
 their jobs had been taken over by Negro strikebreakers who 
 were protected by armed guards. Then the strikers were 
 drafted into the army, to face death to give freedom to Negro 
 slaves whose cousins had taken their jobs. 
 
 It was too much. The longshoremen got mad and pretty 
 soon the riots were underway. Nobody knows how many 
 were killed or how much damage was done. Things calmed 
 down only when New York City agreed to appropriate $2,- 
 500,000 from which poor men could draw the $300 that 
 would purchase exemption from military service. 
 
 It was mighty sordid and nasty. And, yet, to the everlasting 
 glory of this republic, thousands upon thousands of Northern 
 citizens willingly offered themselves to their country; both 
 rich and poor. The millions of good men looked so clean and 
 shiny because the thousands of scoundrels were so dirty. In 
 the North, in many many cases, the rich got richer and the 
 poor did the dying although many rich men died just as 
 heroically as did poor men. More poor folks were heroes sim- 
 ply because there were more poor folks. 
 
 The North's foul Civil War linen has been washed in public 
 for years and hung on the clothesline to mildew. But what 
 of the South's dirty wash? 
 
 A part of the Southern myth that has fastened itself to our 
 national legends is the folderol that Dixie rose to a man to de- 
 fend her hearths from the invading Yankees. It just isn't so. 
 
 Morale and patriotism were strong in the early days of the 
 Confederacy although the new republic was by no means 
 united. After a few victories in the field, the war party was 
 firmly in the saddle and the folks were singing and jubilating 
 all over the place. A lady schoolteacher donated her salary to 
 the Confederacy. A Charleston lady gave her silverware, an 
 
 90 
 
Arkansas widow her cotton and a private soldier who was 
 killed in action willed his estate to the government. 
 
 There even was a brief honeymoon between President Jef- 
 ferson Davis and his congresses (there were three of them) 
 and then dissension latched on like hookworms. It was in- 
 evitable. Davis was as stubborn as Lincoln but had none of his 
 charm and not a smidgen of his patience. He was no dope and 
 his congress was no dupe, but they were so far apart on so 
 many things that the team simply could not pull together. 
 
 Southern governors had as much power within their states 
 as the Confederacy, and often more, and some of these gov- 
 ernors hated Davis almost as much as they hated Yankees. 
 
 Regretfully, I suggest that by 1861 many Southern leaders 
 had grown weary of democracy and distrusted it. The land 
 that sired Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry and Andrew 
 Jackson was beginning to fear democracy as rule by the mob, 
 and many were the cotton satraps who spoke out for oli- 
 garchy. 
 
 Except for his theories on State's Rights, Thomas Jefferson 
 had been heaved out of the south window and the front door 
 was open to the governmental ideas of Alexander Hamilton 
 and John Adams. These leaders believed in an aristocracy and 
 that government should rest in the hands of the informed, of 
 the cultured; and that the masses should be governed but never 
 allowed to govern. 
 
 Lincoln, losing battles, was having it mighty rough, but Jef- 
 ferson Davis was having it even rougher while winning battles. 
 His own people soon were calling him tyrant, idiot and dic- 
 tator. Like Lincoln, and every strong president in our history, 
 he was accused of just about every crime except beating his 
 grandmother. The same old chorus of hate. It never fails. 
 
 Civil law began to break down in the Confederacy by 1862 
 
 9i 
 
r — f 
 
 TO ARMS! 
 
 To Arms! To Amis! 
 
 Defend .your Homes ami fhwides. 
 
 •j-** 
 
 •^w^sa* 
 
and in some cases the military took over and in other cases 
 vigilantes became judge, jury and jailor. A lot of innocent 
 folks were pushed around and some were imprisoned or exiled. 
 The pattern was the same as in the North, only it was not as 
 loud or as large. 
 
 By the winter of '6 1 it was obvious that the South could not 
 get enough volunteers to protect herself. We have sneered at 
 Yankees for offering bounties, but by January of 1862 the 
 South was offering a bounty of $50 a head for all enlistments. 
 State governments began to withhold their troops and the 
 Confederacy was compelled to resort to all sorts of whoopla 
 and benefits to get men into the armies. 
 
 Conscription was the only answer and in April of 1862 the 
 Confederate Congress passed the first conscription act in 
 American history. Jefferson Davis was for it and General Lee 
 was for it. Many of the folks shrieked bloody murder at Davis 
 although they didn't dare revile Lee. 
 
 The Southern draft acts, and there were several of them, 
 were not quite as terrible as the North's, but they were plenty 
 bad. Conscientious objectors were exempt as were preachers, 
 and pretty soon the South reverberated with hallelujahs as 
 hundreds of draft-dodgers donned the cloth to escape military 
 duty. This loophole quickly was plugged. 
 
 The law provided that all "able-bodied" men must serve. A 
 passel of Southern patriots got sick quick. Gout, rheumatism 
 and old age suddenly became popular. The standard legal fee 
 for getting a man exempted was $500, and lawyers reaped a 
 bonanza. 
 
 To this very day, we Southerners jeer the Yankees who 
 hired substitutes to do their fighting. But we did the same 
 thing until the "substitute law" was revoked and it has been 
 estimated that about 50,000 Southern soldiers were substi- 
 
 93 
 
tutes. This figure cannot compare with the North's figure 
 for two good reasons: (a) most Southerners didn't have money- 
 enough to hire substitutes and (b) there were not many sub- 
 stitutes available because pretty soon the draft was scraping 
 the bottom of the barrel. 
 
 The most galling provision in the Southern conscription act 
 was the clause that exempted any man who had as many as 
 20 slaves or 500 head of cattle or 250 head of horses. The idea 
 basically was sound — that a big producing farmer could 
 serve better by growing food than by fighting. 
 
 Nevertheless, it was this clause that raised the famous 
 Southern cry of "A rich man's war and a poor man's fight." 
 
 Thousands upon thousands of Southerners hid in the woods 
 to escape army service. Be danged if they aimed to get killed 
 for some rich slave holder. The 20-slave clause quickly was 
 repealed, but the damage was done. 
 
 Little backyard rebellions broke out all over the South. 
 The best-known of these was in Jones County, Mississippi, 
 where a faction set up its own government that actually 
 seceded from the state and waged war against the Confed- 
 eracy. These "Free Staters" as they were called were not so 
 much pro-Union as they were anti-Confederate. And they 
 were not Abolitionists. They were too poor to own slaves, 
 and hated Negroes almost as much as they hated planters who 
 were rich enough to own Negroes. 
 
 Romantically, these nests of rebellion were interesting, 
 but actually they didn't cut much ice. Most of them were put 
 down by some second-class fighting and some first-class 
 hangings. 
 
 Fantastic as it may seem, many fortunes were made in the 
 Confederate States by crooked contractors, sharpies of vari- 
 ous sorts and blockade runners. These blockade boys deserve 
 
 94 
 
a special scrutiny because our romantic histories have treated 
 them mighty nice. For three years they ran by the Union 
 blockade like gnats around a bear. But did they bring in stuff 
 that the South had to have? Not all of them. Good Lord, no. 
 The big money was not in medicines and other essentials. It 
 was in finery for Southern ladies, and that's what they brought 
 in — linen handkerchiefs, silk gloves, toilet soap. An English 
 linen handkerchief fetched $25 at the same time the monthly 
 pay of a Confederate soldier was $18. And this $18 was in 
 Confederate money and was worth about 90^ in gold. 
 
 It has been estimated that the blockade was run 8,250 
 times. The Robert E. Lee made 21 trips and hauled out 
 $2,000,000 worth of cotton. The Hattie made 60 trips. 
 
 Some of them did bring back things that were really needed 
 and the figures have been set at 600,000 small arms, 550,000 
 pairs of shoes, 8,500,000 pounds of meat and 400,000 blankets. 
 
 The blockade did not begin to pinch badly until 1863, but 
 by 1864 it was choking the South to death. Of course, the 
 Confederacy could not mount a counter blockade, but Sec- 
 retary of the Navy Mallory performed something of a 
 miracle by building a Confederate fleet from nothing. He or- 
 ganized a Marine Corps, a Naval Academy, a Torpedo and 
 Submarine School, ordnance plants, shipyards etc. His ships 
 destroyed more than 350 Union craft, bludgeoned the North- 
 ern fleet a few times and stung it often. 
 
 His most famous ship was the Confederate raider Alabama, 
 British built and commanded by Raphael Semmes, who was 
 called the "brigand of the high seas" by the Northern press. 
 Before it was sunk by the Kearsarge, the Alabama destroyed 
 58 Union ships. 
 
 Mallory's navy also built midget submarines that didn't 
 quite submerge entirely or else submerged forever. The best 
 
 95 
 
of these was the H. L. Hunley, also spelled Hundley. It was 
 propelled by cranks turned by the crew. During trial runs, 
 she went down four times, losing four crews. But each time 
 the Confeds hauled her back up and finally she crashed a tor- 
 pedo against the Federal Housatonic. Both craft were lost. In 
 all, some 30 Union vessels were sunk by Confederate tor- 
 pedoes. 
 
 I have read somewhere, but I can't put my hand on it so 
 don't pin me down, that the Hundley was the last American 
 submarine to sink an enemy warship by torpedo until World 
 War II. 
 
 Yankee ingenuity has become a byword in our country and, 
 yet, Southern ingenuity during the Civil War flabbergasted 
 the Yankees and even surprised Southerners. With leather at 
 a premium, the South soon was making wooden shoes, and 
 
 96 
 
good ones. Little foundries sprang up all around and tip-top 
 small arms were made. Nitrogen for gunpowder was ex- 
 tracted from urine hoarded by the donors, usually women, 
 and many a good man bit the dust therefrom. 
 
 Opium poppies were grown to get narcotics, but there 
 never were enough sedatives, quinine, salt or iron. Needles 
 were made from hawthorn, cork from cypress, blackening 
 from chinaberries, rope from Spanish moss, soda from corn 
 cobs, and coffee from peas, parched corn, okra and pumpkin 
 seeds. 
 
 Sorghum was used for sugar, figs for red dye, pomegranates 
 for black dye, indigo for blue and sumac for purple. Copperas 
 was a favorite coloring. It was made by soaking iron in salt 
 and vinegar water. 
 
 However, with her woods full of mast and acorns, the 
 South never raised enough swine. The lofty planters had an 
 antipathy to pig-raising because it was not dignified. Interest- 
 ingly enough, there was so much corn planted in the South 
 that Yankee soldiers from the midwest corn belt were sur- 
 prised; and it was this corn that later helped feed the invading 
 army. 
 
 A famous German general, von Moltke I think it was, in- 
 furiated Americans with the statement that our Civil War 
 was fought between two armed mobs. He wasn't as far 
 wrong as our patriotism might insist. Neither the Confederate 
 nor Union armies ever were really disciplined armies in the 
 European sense. Desertions and insolence were rampant on 
 both sides. Even cowardice was too common. Soldiers 
 straggled on the march and slept on duty. Military courts 
 usually were lax when they should have been firm and then 
 merciless when they should have been lenient. Johnny Reb 
 
 97 
 
and Billy Yank were first-class warriors, but second-class mili- 
 tary men. 
 
 Tobacco and whiskey were the soldiers' constant com- 
 panions. Pipes were favored even over chewing tobacco and 
 the South actually imported European cigarettes, the first 
 cigarettes used in these parts. Whiskey was a problem, such 
 a problem that some Southern states prohibited the use of 
 corn for distillation purposes. It almost is unbelievable how 
 many times things got fouled up because soldiers were drunk 
 and officers drunker; and on both sides. 
 
 The North prayed against booze and the South made jokes 
 about it. One Southern editor wrote that Civil War whiskey 
 would "conglomerate the vesicles of the aorta, phlogistify the 
 phylacter maximus, hemstitch up the depatic ducts, insulate 
 the asperifollus gland, deflagate the dudonian process, and 
 wilt the buttons on the waistcoat.'' 
 
 Confederate General Bragg forbade whiskey in his army 
 except as medicine and later Adjutant General Cooper pro- 
 hibited it in all Southern armies except in cases of "fatigue and 
 exposure." As usual, prohibition failed. 
 
 I can't find that liquor ever was forbidden in the Union 
 Army. After all, Yankee drinks were on the Southern house. 
 
 A lot of boys died from bad booze, but not so many died 
 from bad women because venereal diseases were compara- 
 tively uncommon. Profanity was grandiloquent. 
 
 Romanticists can moon and mouth from here to eternity 
 about the glories of the Civil War, but "the last war between 
 gentlemen" was a nasty mess. Even most of the songs were 
 pretty dreary. Oh, I know there were a few fine ones. Dixie 
 is the best fight song since the Marseillaise and the Battle 
 Hymn of the Republic is one of the most stirring songs ever 
 written. Personally, I wish it were our national anthem. 
 
 The South, although being beat to death, seemed to enjoy 
 
 9 8 
 
singing more than the North. Most of the Northern songs 
 were about mother and death and gloom, while the South 
 sang about food and the yellow rose of Texas. Forgive me, but 
 except for the Battle Hymn of the Republic I don't like any 
 of the Yankee songs. But the South had a pretty good one in 
 Mister, Here's Your Mule and Goober Peas. 
 
 Just before the battle the General hears a row, 
 
 He says, "The Yanks are coming, I hear their rifles now" 
 
 He turns around in wonder, and what do you think he 
 
 sees? 
 The Georgia militia eating goober peas! 
 
 The most beautiful song of the Civil War was sung by both 
 sides, like Lili Marlene in World War II. It was called Lorena 
 and its origin is obscure. But it was a lovely thing: 
 
 The years creep slowly by, Lorena, 
 
 The snow is on the grass again; 
 
 The sun's low down the sky, Lorena, 
 
 The frost gleams where the flowers have been, — " 
 
 Someday some tunester is going to discover it and hurl it at 
 us from every jukebox. Sorry I brought it up. 
 
The Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia in 1863 was the best- 
 planned and best-executed battle of the Civil War, remem- 
 bering that Vicksburg and Atlanta were campaigns and not 
 battles. 
 
 Fighting Joe Hooker was given command of the Army of 
 the Potomac and Hooker was a third-rate general except 
 when fighting the bottle and sounding off about how good he 
 was. He had 130,000 troops and Lee had 60,000. He wrote 
 for posterity that "our enemy must either ingloriously fly, 
 or come from behind his defenses and give us battle on our 
 own ground, where certain destruction awaits him." 
 
 And then Fighting Joe sat down on his hooker and Lee 
 made a jackass out of him. 
 
 Deliberately and in contempt of the Army of the Potomac, 
 
 100 
 
Lee divided his army and sent Stonewall Jackson on a forced 
 march to envelop the Yankees while he pulled them off bal- 
 ance in the middle of the line. Hooker simply did not know 
 what was going on. Lee feigned a line buck over center and 
 set Hooker up for a mouse-trap play. But Jackson had the 
 ball. With 28,000 men — almost half the army — he made a 
 fifteen-mile end run behind screened interference and then 
 cut into Hooker's line, taking out the end and the tackle. He 
 was diving for the backfield when darkness came. 
 
 The Army of the Potomac folded up like an accordion. It 
 deserved better generals. 
 
 Chancellorsville was a fantastic victory for the Confed- 
 eracy although it cost the life of Old Jack Jackson. Confed- 
 erate pickets shot him by accident. Dying, he said, "Let us 
 pass over the river and rest under the shade of the trees," 
 thereby giving Ernest Hemingway the title for one of his 
 lesser novels. 
 
 Lee apparently was invincible even at odds of one to two 
 and the South decided to invade the North and for a com- 
 bination of reasons: first, to whip Yankees, secondly, to give 
 the North a dose of its own medicine, thirdly, to get supplies, 
 and fourthly, to relieve pressure on Vicksburg, Mississippi, 
 a thousand miles away. 
 
 The South had fortified Vicksburg into the strongest fort 
 of the Confederacy and Grant had been pawing at it for 
 months. He had plenty of ships, supplies and men, but he had 
 lapsed into one of those Grantian moods of mediocrity and 
 he wasn't getting anywhere. He was drinking again and, 
 besides, he had lost his false teeth. 
 
 Vicksburg was defended by General John Pemberton of 
 Pennsylvania, suspect in the South because he was a North- 
 
 101 
 
erner, but a much better man than many of the generals who 
 have criticized him. 
 
 Jefferson Davis realized the strategic importance of Vicks- 
 burg and was determined to hold it, although many folks 
 along the Southern seaboard thought it was just another river 
 town out in the western wilderness. Davis even considered 
 
 102 
 
ordering Lee to the defense of Vicksburg, but the idea never 
 jelled. For Lee to fight in Mississippi's slimy swamps instead 
 of Virginia's clean hills seemed like a sacrilege, so the Con- 
 federacy sent Lee rolling north to pull some of the strain off 
 Vicksburg. 
 
 Pemberton was firmly entrenched and kept blasting Grant 
 
 103 
 
and was all right as long as he could get supplies from the back 
 country. Then Grant, or somebody, had one of the most 
 brilliant ideas of the war. 
 
 Benjamin Henry Grierson — there was a great cavalryman 
 — took 1,700 men and rode 600 miles in 16 days and tore up 
 the country behind Vicksburg. It was an astounding feat, an 
 accomplishment worthy of any of the more publicized South- 
 ern cavalrymen. Grierson was a Pennsylvania Irishman and 
 a crackerj ack soldier. 
 
 It was his raid that set the Union pattern of things to come; 
 kill, burn and rip. After Grierson had cut Mississippi from 
 stem to stern, Vicksburg really began to sweat and General 
 Joseph Eggleston Johnston was ordered to raise a Confederate 
 army and relieve the city. Johnston hated Jefferson Davis, as 
 did a lot of Southerners, and he had been wounded and still 
 was sick. He moved like a tortoise and now the Confederacy 
 needed a rabbit. 
 
 Grant finally figured out the only way to take Vicksburg 
 and marched his army down the west bank of the Mississippi 
 river and got below Vicksburg, which is on the east bank. He 
 ferried across the river and was on his way to Vicksburg's 
 back door. Some of his men dashed down and raided Jefferson 
 Davis' home and stole a horse for General Grant. He named 
 him Jeff Davis. 
 
 And then U. S. Grant shook off his mediocrity and, for a 
 few weeks, became a real general. He cut entirely free from 
 his line of supplies and wheeled north, lashing Confederates 
 on both sides. The brilliant maneuver was Leeian in concept 
 and Jacksonian in execution. He quickly was at Vicksburg's 
 side door and Pemberton came out of his trenches to meet 
 him. 
 
 This was the hour for Joseph Eggleston Johnston to move 
 
 104 
 
in and squeeze Grant between his army and Pemberton's. But 
 General Johnston never quite got the lead out of his Eggle- 
 ston. For sure, he didn't have much army and few supplies. 
 Nathan Bedford Forrest would have come in there chunking 
 rocks, but General Johnston piddled. Pemberton was out on 
 a limb and Grant slapped him flat and Pemberton hurried his 
 army back into the trenches of Vicksburg. 
 
 It was a thoroughly botched up affair — Johnston yelling 
 for Pemberton to cut his way out, Pemberton yelling for 
 Johnston to cut his way in and Jefferson Davis just yelling, 
 while Grant chewed his cigar and smote Confederates on head 
 and thigh. 
 
 When the confusion cleared, Mississippi's capital of Jack- 
 son was in flames, the first Southern capital to be burned. 
 Johnston had drawn back a safe distance. Pemberton was 
 cooped up in Vicksburg and Grant was creeping in for the 
 
 km. 
 
 As Chancellorsville was the classic battle, Vicksburg was 
 the classic siege. Inch by inch and week by week, the Federals 
 clawed up the bluffs, drawing a noose around the town that 
 was as tight as wet rawhide. The defenders and townspeople 
 lived in caves and on mule meat and rats and fought as long 
 as they had anything to fight with. But Grant had Vicksburg 
 by the throat and literally choked it to death. The city was 
 surrendered officially on July 4, 1863. 
 
 The North captured an army of only 30,000 at Vicksburg, 
 but the Mississippi river was in Union hands. The scorpion's 
 stinger had been pulled. Now all that was left were its front 
 legs over in Tennessee, its belly in Georgia and its head in 
 Virginia. 
 
 Meanwhile, Lee was on the move. He had the largest and 
 best army of the Confederacy's history when he invaded 
 
 105 
 
Pennsylvania. His idea was to march rapidly into the North 
 and then sweep southward upon Washington. 
 
 This campaign — the Gettysburg campaign — really was an 
 enormous military raid, a diversion on a grand scale. The 
 Federals could have stopped it in its tracks by thrusting for 
 Richmond, but Fighting Joe Hooker, still in command, was 
 not smart enough to think that out. 
 
 So Lee rolled north, up the Cumberland valley and across 
 the Mason-Dixon line that separates Maryland and Pennsyl- 
 vania. His stern orders against plundering and straggling were 
 enforced to the letter. 
 
 Town after town in Pennsylvania fell without a shot being 
 fired. Lee's men paid for everything they took, in Confederate 
 money to be redeemed later. Many of the butternut boys, as 
 Pennsylvanians called the Secesh, had shoes for the first time 
 in a year, and good beef and bread. Lee said: "There never 
 were such men in an army before. They will go anywhere 
 and do anything if properly led." 
 
 Notice how Lee gave credit to his men, and this in con- 
 trast to generals who took all credit to themselves. Notice, 
 
 106 
 
also, the disciplined behavior of invading Confederates in 
 startling contrast to Northern plundering in the South. Much 
 has been made of this by Southern partisans. The reasons were 
 simple. Lee was not a burning general. Also, he wanted sup- 
 plies — he had rather have shoes than a burned-out shoe factory. 
 And, above all, the South wanted to make friends in the North 
 and abroad by showing the world that her men were soldiers 
 and not vandals. It was smart propaganda. 
 
 The town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania was entered and 
 nice, plump Yankee girls lined the streets and taunted the 
 Confeds and the Southerners laughed at them and maybe 
 whistled. One lady draped a flag across her bosom and a 
 Texan from Hood's brigade warned her, "Take care, madam, 
 for Hood's boys are great at storming breastworks when the 
 Yankee colors are on them — " A crack that has been charged 
 to goodness knows how many wags. 
 
 Another lady sang The Star Spangled Banner and General 
 Lee took off his hat and rode on. He was making friends for 
 his side, and don't you forget it. 
 
 In Greencastle, Pennsylvania, a pretty girl draped her hips 
 
 107 
 
in the Union flag and called out, "Come and take it, the man 
 who dares." 
 
 Several boys were for accommodating her, but their officers 
 rebuked them. They must behave like "Southern gentlemen." 
 Hot ziggety! 
 
 The Mayor of York, Pennsylvania, went out and sur- 
 rendered his town and paid a levy of 40,000 pounds of beef, 
 30,000 bushels of corn, 1,000 pairs of shoes and $28,000. 
 
 The next stop was a little place in a fringe of hills, the 
 village of Gettysburg — a whoop from Baltimore and Wash- 
 ington and a couple of hollers from Philadelphia and New 
 York. 
 
 George Gordon Meade had taken over command of the 
 Army of the Potomac, the irascible, book-loving Meade, who 
 ranks with Sherman and George Henry Thomas ("Rock of 
 Chickamauga") as the best generals in the Union army. 
 (Grant and his clique were jealous of Meade; and there was 
 an agreement among newspaper reporters not to mention 
 Meade in print because he had hung a "liar" sign around a 
 reporter's neck.) 
 
 The Federal and Confederate armies were sort of wander- 
 ing around looking for each other and came together at 
 Gettysburg. Meade saw the defensive possibilities and dug in. 
 Many of Lee's generals, particularly James Longstreet, ad- 
 vised their commander to skip Gettysburg and fight else- 
 where. But Lee elected to have it out right there, to go for 
 the knockout. He had won so often that surely he could win 
 again. He could give the Federals all the advantage and still 
 win. The error of invincibility is one of the few errors Lee 
 ever committed. 
 
 Gettysburg is the great storied battle of the war and I still 
 
 108 
 
wonder how come and many times I have asked — "Why?" 
 I always get unacceptable answers. 
 
 Usually I am told — "Because Gettysburg was the high tide 
 of the Confederacy." 
 
 But it wasn't. The Confederacy's military tide reached its 
 flood at Chancellorsville and its political tide was highest in 
 1861. 
 
 Then — "Because Gettysburg was so important." 
 
 However, New Orleans, Vicksburg, Chattanooga and At- 
 lanta strategically were of far more importance. 
 
 Because the battle was so bloody. 
 
 Yet, there was bloodier fighting at Shiloh, Antietam, Chick- 
 amauga and Franklin. 
 
 Because the South was crushed at Gettysburg. 
 
 Nothing of the sort. Union losses surpassed Confederate 
 losses and Lee's retreat not only was orderly but his men kept 
 snarling over their shoulders at the Northerners, and the 
 Union army either dared not or could not follow up and 
 renew the fighting. Lee stayed in the North nine days after 
 Gettysburg and Meade didn't raise a fist to crush him. 
 
 Because it was the classic battle of the war. 
 
 Balderdash. It was Lee's worst-fought battle and whereas 
 it was not the Union's worst battle, it certainly was not the 
 best, not in the class with Vicksburg or Atlanta. Militarily, it 
 was a bungled affair on both sides. 
 
 Because it was "the beginning of the end." 
 
 Actually, it was only the fifth inning. Spikes didn't begin 
 to fly until the seventh inning when the combatants threw 
 out the umpire and began to beat one another over the head 
 with the water buckets. 
 
 So why? 
 
 I hazard these suggestions: 
 
 109 
 
Because at Gettysburg the great Lee was stopped, the un- 
 sinkable Titanic struck the iceberg and it caught the fancy of 
 the world, regardless of facts. 
 
 Because this battle was fought in the North, closer to New 
 York than to Richmond and closer to Boston than to Charles- 
 ton, South Carolina. Our first impressions of the Civil War, 
 the ones that really count because they permeated our national 
 mind as far back as grammar school, were written by the 
 winners, as always. It was years before the South began to 
 get in her literary and journalistic licks. (Once we got started, 
 we out-shouted and out-bragged the Yankees and pulled our 
 bows just as long — maybe even longer.) 
 
 Our popular conceptions of history follow headlines and 
 the headlines of the Civil War were written, although not 
 made, in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Therefore, 
 Gettysburg was their fight, the one close to home, and so it 
 had to be the biggest and the best. 
 
 And then Gettysburg is the place where Lincoln spoke. 
 His words are the greatest monument to any battlefield. 
 
 Therefore, I contend that Gettysburg is our great battle of 
 Hollywood, historical novels, Fourth of July orations and 
 Commencement exercises because of flukes and not of facts. 
 
 no 
 
It lasted three days, July 1-3, 1863. The casualties were 
 more than 50,000. Geography won. There were several 
 knockdowns, but no knockouts and the South lost the de- 
 cision on points. This is the battle in which a Confederate 
 jumped up and yelled to his comrades, "Come on! You want 
 to live forever?" This challenge later was attributed to Ma- 
 rines in World War I. The chances are it first was shouted by 
 one of Joshua's men at Jericho. 
 
 Lee began his retreat on July 4, the same day that Vicks- 
 burg was being surrendered almost at the other end of the 
 country. 
 
 Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas were out on the end of the 
 broken vine and were withering in their isolation. Mississippi 
 was ground into cinders and by Sherman, who learned how 
 to do it a long time before he got to Georgia. Alabama, ex- 
 cepting Mobile, was of no great strategic importance and was 
 left dangling. The Secesh had burned the Yanks badly at 
 Chickamauga, just outside Chattanooga but in Georgia, and a 
 Federal army was bottled up in Chattanooga. 
 
 Most of Tennessee had been cut wide open along her rail- 
 roads and rivers, and Grant was sent over to Chattanooga to 
 finish off the state. Gen. W. F. Smith did most of the Yankee 
 planning at Chattanooga, but Grant got the credit for the 
 Union victory there. He was the darling of the gods. 
 
 The Confederacy, by 1864, virtually was constricted to the 
 Atlantic seaboard. The fifth inning was over and it was time 
 for the North to change pitchers again, and this time they 
 called in U. S. Grant. He chose Sherman as his battery mate. 
 
 Congress created the rank of lieutenant general and Lincoln 
 upped Grant as high as he could go and made him boss of all 
 Union armies. Davis should have done the same thing for 
 Lee, but Lee was never the senior officer of the Confederacy. 
 
 in 
 
It was the spring of '64 and Grant's strategy was as simple 
 as that of a mastiff fighting a porcupine — wear down the 
 Southern armies and destroy them. He would push for Rich- 
 mond; Sherman for Atlanta. The Confederacy still had more 
 than 400,000 men on her muster rolls and about 200,000 of 
 these under arms. The Union had about 900,000 on her rolls 
 and about 500,000 present and for combat duty. 
 
 Grant pawed out at Lee, and Lee almost bit off his hand. 
 This was the Battle of the Wilderness and Lee out-cuted 
 Grant at every turn. Grant just stood there and poured men 
 at the Confederates until the Army of the Potomac almost 
 was drowned in its own blood and the North wailed its protest 
 against the slaughter. 
 
 This was when Grant boasted: "I propose to fight it out 
 along this line if it takes all summer — " a silly vaunt that has 
 gone into history as a brave pronouncement. 
 
 The Battle of Cold Harbor jolted him. It lasted only an 
 hour. Grant lost 7,000 men. The Confederates lost 600. But 
 Grant kept plugging, seemingly indifferent to his losses and 
 the North began to distrust him and his army was near unto 
 mutiny. 
 
 He crawled from the Rapidan River to the James River and 
 lost 55,000 men, almost as many men as Lee had in his army. 
 But reinforcements kept pouring in, three Northerners mov- 
 ing in where two had been before. The Union was suffering 
 casualties that would have dissipated most armies and yet they 
 kept coming in; an endless stream of conscripts, substitutes 
 and volunteers. Lee's army, dazed and half dead, was handing 
 out far more punishment than it was taking, but the Con- 
 federates had to give three times as much and take three 
 times as little to balance the ratio. 
 
 Grant did not fight it out on that line. He was stopped and 
 again he lapsed into mediocrity, the lethargy of a clumsy bear 
 
 112 
 
that fights a while and then goes to sleep. He even wept, not 
 for all those dead men but because his own plans had been 
 frustrated. 
 
 All in all, Grant had done fair to middling, even pretty 
 good. However, a really great general could have done twice 
 as much at half the cost. He finally got it through his head 
 that he could not take Richmond by sledgehammer assaults 
 and instead of fighting as he had vowed to do, he laid siege 
 to Richmond, and this didn't work. 
 
 But there he maneuvered and pawed from June, 1864, to 
 the spring of 1865. And it was not Lee, Lincoln or Luck (his 
 best asset) who compelled him finally to use his brain more 
 and his brawn less and to give his magnificent army a chance 
 to win — it was Sherman who did it, his own battery mate who 
 should have been calling the signals all along. 
 
 A single railroad connected Chattanooga and Atlanta, and 
 
 "3 
 
from Atlanta several railroads fanned out into the most im- 
 portant web of communications south of Virginia. As long as 
 Atlanta stood the Confederacy could move troops and sup- 
 plies up and down the seaboard. Therefore, Atlanta must be 
 taken. 
 
 Sherman had more than 100,000 men and about 23,000 
 horses. Opposing him was Joseph Eggleston Johnston with 
 about 50,000 men. Joe Johnston has been kicked around a lot 
 by history, but he was a much better soldier than his critics 
 admit. His men loved and trusted him although Jefferson 
 Davis despised him and he loathed Jefferson Davis. 
 
 The odds were about right for the campaign against At- 
 lanta, the odds of two to one in favor of the North. But 
 remember the Yankees had to attack and were a long ways 
 from home. Also, they were dependent upon that one little 
 railroad from Chattanooga. The Confederates kept cutting it 
 and the Federals kept repairing it. The real stalwarts of the 
 Atlanta campaign were the Union engineers. They won 
 Atlanta as much as any rifleman or general. 
 
 Sherman brought his army straight down the railroad and 
 kept trying to trap Johnston into open battle. Johnston kept 
 falling back, stinging Sherman but never sticking out his own 
 neck. Sherman would flank and Johnston would ease back, 
 clawing like a cat facing a pack of hounds. 
 
 Strategically, it was Sherman who was getting into trouble 
 and he knew it. A flash raider like Forrest might cut in behind 
 him at any minute, wreck his supply line and leave him stuck 
 down there in Georgia. But strangely enough the Confeder- 
 ates never called on Forrest for this job. The big Southern 
 brass didn't like Forrest. He didn't salute properly and didn't 
 write many memos. 
 
 It began to look as if Johnston might give up Atlanta with- 
 
 114 
 
out a fight and Jefferson Davis got itchy. It was a preposterous 
 assumption — that Johnston wouldn't fight. He was waiting 
 for his time and place, but Davis simply couldn't keep his 
 mouth out of his generals' business. 
 
 So back and back Johnston fell, almost a hundred miles 
 from Chattanooga and mighty close to Atlanta. His army was 
 intact and in good spirits and he was waiting for his moment. 
 
 Kennesaw Mountain is a hill north of Atlanta and properly 
 did Johnston fortify it and improperly did Sherman try to 
 storm it rather than flank it. He lost 3,000 men in a few min- 
 utes. A Union soldier named Landis survived the engagement 
 and named his son after it — the Judge Kennesaw Mountain 
 Landis of judicial and baseball fame. 
 
 Two other famous events occurred near Kennesaw Moun- 
 tain, actually at the village of Allatoona, about thirteen miles 
 from the mountain. The Federals had turned Allatoona into 
 an enormous supply depot and Union General Corse was 
 defending the supplies when Confederate General French 
 jumped him. A minor skirmish was fought. Sherman was on 
 Kennesaw Mountain and wigwagged a signal to Corse, asking 
 how things were going. 
 
 Corse had been nicked by a Minie ball and wigwagged back, 
 "I am short a cheekbone and an ear, but am able to whip all 
 hell yet." 
 
 This is when Sherman signaled back: "Hold the fort! I am 
 coming." 
 
 However, he didn't come. He sat on the mountain and 
 wigwagged pep talks to Corse and this is one of the few times 
 in history that a cheerleader got credit for winning the game. 
 
 As a matter of fact, Confederate General French drove 
 Corse out of two redoubts at Allatoona and was in position 
 to set fire to the Yankee supplies. But there were only three 
 
 "5 
 
matches in his little army; and they wouldn't strike. So he lit 
 a shuck out of there, possibly looking for more matches. 
 Right about then the South could have used a couple of Boy 
 Scouts instead of all the Rhett Butlers and Scarlett O'Haras 
 in Georgia. 
 
 116 
 
From the Confederate point of view, Jefferson Davis com- 
 mitted the biggest blunder of the Atlanta campaign. He 
 removed Joe Johnston and put General John Hood in com- 
 mand. Even Lee agreed to the change. Lee should have known 
 better. 
 
 The army wept at the news. They trusted Johnston and 
 didn't trust Hood, the wild Texan who could whip his weight 
 in wildcats. Unfortunately, the South wasn't fighting wildcats. 
 She was fighting Sherman and 100,000 first-rate soldiers. 
 
 Anyway, Hood took over just outside Atlanta and im- 
 mediately turned to slug it out with Sherman. His army was 
 poleaxed. Atlanta fell and now the South's belly was ripped 
 open. 
 
 Sherman fortified the city as though expecting Hood to try 
 to retake it. But oh, no. For a while Hood stuck around and 
 harassed Sherman and kept him in a tizzy, and then Jefferson 
 
 117 
 
Davis butted in again and sent Hood's army back to Ten- 
 nessee. It was at Franklin and Nashville that this hard-luck 
 army ran into two Yankee armies, Thomas' and Schofield's, 
 and was cut into little bitty pieces. Old Joe Johnston was 
 called back from the showers and he patched up the pieces 
 and kept on righting. 
 
 There was no Confederate army at Atlanta when Sherman 
 elected to take off for Savannah and the sea. This is the hour 
 that still causes Georgians to get white with rage and froth at 
 the mouth. Sherman burned Atlanta. He already had emptied 
 the city of noncombatants. He had just simply told the women 
 and children and old folks to pack up and get out, and it 
 wasn't his responsibility where they went. 
 
 A military necessity — so said Sherman. 
 
 Monstrous brutality — so said the South. 
 
 Just why did he burn Atlanta? The Confederate army was 
 gone and the civilians were gone. Sherman says he burned it 
 because it was a fort and he could not have a fort in his rear. 
 Some Georgians say he burned it because he was a trigger- 
 happy scoundrel who was careless with matches. Take your 
 choice. 
 
 Until his death, Sherman kept explaining the burning of 
 Atlanta and the burning of Columbia, South Carolina. He 
 makes out a good case for himself, for Sherman was the best 
 writing-general on either side. He had a way with words, 
 quite like our General MacArthur of later days. Sometimes, 
 however, Sherman had no respect for the civil liberties of 
 facts and didn't always tell the truth even when he knew the 
 facts — but he was a mighty good writing man. He was out 
 to win a war and it looks like he figured that the only way to 
 win it was to burn, scorch, rip and kill. 
 
 Well, he won it. 
 
 118 
 
His march from Atlanta to the sea was no contest. There 
 was no real army to oppose him. It was like an elephant cross- 
 ing a pea patch. His men got out of hand and looted and 
 burned, stealing even trinkets and burning even the fence 
 posts. Georgia was devastated and Sherman cut up into South 
 Carolina; waste and misery and charred ruins in his path as he 
 followed Joe Johnston's long retreat. 
 
 It was all over, only there was no referee to stop the fight. 
 The South kept going down for the count of nine, each time 
 getting up more painfully than before. Maybe she needed a 
 better manager, but that really wasn't the trouble. Her fatal 
 weakness now was obvious. The Confederate States of Amer- 
 ica never were united states; only a nation stillborn. 
 
 Lee's men were ghosts and Johnston's men were skeletons. 
 Confederate desertions were rampant. Sherman was getting 
 glory while Grant, stuck up in Virginia, was getting cussed. 
 Lincoln had been re-elected and Sherman's victories had been 
 mighty good campaign propaganda. Then Sherman left Geor- 
 gia to the vultures and moved north, burning his way through 
 South Carolina and into North Carolina, and was getting 
 close to Virginia. 
 
 This would never do. Let Sherman invade Virginia? Maybe 
 even take Richmond? He was getting the big play in the 
 newspapers, and the fearful thought that Sherman might wind 
 up the No. i hero while he was No. 2 yanked Ulysses Grant 
 out of his lethargy. 
 
 Months before, he had begun flanking in Virginia as Sher- 
 man had done in Georgia and had worked an army around 
 Richmond and to the town of Petersburg and laid siege. 
 
 It was at Petersburg that the South really made her last 
 stand; a dazed hornet trying to stop a clumsy bear. 
 
 119 
 
The South still had about 158,000 men under arms. The 
 North had about 800,000. 
 
 Sherman was crawling northward and Grant made one more 
 lunge and overran Lee's thin line and took Richmond. Lee 
 tried to get to the mountains to keep fighting, but Grant 
 cornered him at Appomattox, 80 miles from Richmond. The 
 Army of Northern Virginia passed into a few accurate history- 
 books, a hundred biased ones and a slew of historical novels. 
 
 R. E. Lee surrendered 28,000 men to Grant's 120,000. That 
 was April 9, 1865. Grant gave wise and generous terms. Lee 
 lost his army, but kept his dignity and came out of the war 
 sharing the top glory role with Abraham Lincoln. He told the 
 South that old soldiers just fade away, and by gum he did it. 
 He was offered a big job with an insurance company, but his 
 reputation was not for sale and he went to Lexington, Vir- 
 ginia — to what now is Washington & Lee University — and 
 there he taught boys how to be good citizens; and told them 
 to quit squabbling about the Civil War and to get to work 
 and rebuild the South. 
 
 Joe Johnston surrendered 31,000 men to Sherman's army 
 near Durham, North Carolina, on April 26. The Department 
 of Alabama surrendered 42,000 men, the Army of Missouri 
 surrendered 7,000, the Transmississippi Department 17,000 
 and the Department of Florida 7,000. 
 
 One by one the scattered forces gave in while some of the 
 leaders chose exile to surrender. Jefferson Davis was hunted 
 down and captured and put in prison. He was never formally 
 charged with anything and never got a trial. 
 
 The Northern generals gave liberal terms to the Confed- 
 erate soldiers, but Congress reneged and decided to treat the 
 South as a conquered province, and then Reconstruction was 
 started — a reeking blotch. It wasn't Lincoln's idea of uniting 
 
 120 
 
the country. It was Congress' idea of the quickest and cheap- 
 est way to get power for the Republican party. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865 while 
 sitting in a theater and watching a play; a pretty bad play. 
 
 His assassin was John Wilkes Booth of Maryland, who had 
 had no connection whatsoever with the Confederacy. He was 
 an actor, an egomaniac and as crazy as a betsybug. 
 
 Booth himself was shot to death in a burning barn by Sgt. 
 Boston Corbitt, a lunatic who went around shouting "Glory 
 to God" and was called the "Glory to God boy." However, 
 he was a demon in battle and laid many a Secesh low. A few 
 years later, while doorkeeper for the Kansas legislature, 
 Brother Glory-to-God Corbitt went berserk and emptied two 
 revolvers at the legislators. He missed them all. 
 
 Mrs. Lincoln's mind wandered beyond the fringes of in- 
 sanity and Major Henry Rathbone, who was with the Presi- 
 dent the night he was assassinated, went stark mad and killed 
 his wife and himself. 
 
 Annie Surrett tried to get to President Andrew Johnson to 
 plead for the life of her mother, Mrs. Mary Surrett whose 
 conviction for the Lincoln conspiracy was tainted, even 
 rotten. Annie Surrett was blocked by Preston King, a New 
 York politician, and Senator James Lane of Kansas. Within a 
 year King loaded his pockets with lead and stepped off a New 
 York ferry, and Lane shot himself. Edmund Ruffin, who fired 
 the first shot at Fort Sumter, blew out his brains. 
 
 The last great war between gentlemen started off in the 
 stars and ended in the gutter. 
 
 Eventually, the carpetbaggers were run out of the South or 
 absorbed, and then came native sons seeking favors by waving 
 the Stars and Bars and singing Dixie. These are still with us, 
 
 121 
 
always as infuriating as chiggers, sometimes as dangerous as 
 tapeworms. 
 
 An old Confederate veteran (he was my grandpa-in-law) 
 heard one of these stump orators rhapsodizing the paths of 
 glory that the South had trod in the Civil War. The old man 
 called out, "Wait a minute, brother! What the hell was civil 
 about it?" 
 
 122 
 
Inasmuch as the Civil War shares the American shelf with 
 sex, politics, religion and money as a subject for debates, both 
 salon and saloon, I will pass out a few helpful hints to all who 
 want to mix it up — on either side. 
 
 The easiest way to win any argument is to outshout your 
 opponent. This goes double in Civil War hoedowns, especially 
 if you give your vociferation the Russian pitch. Get a grim 
 twist around your mouth, a stare of wisdom and sufferance 
 in your eyes, then pound the table or bar and holler: "As 
 EVERYBODY knows—" or "It NATURALLY goes with- 
 out saying — " 
 
 This will qualify you as a Two-beer Civil War Debater, 
 second class. 
 
 The highball league is a bit rougher, so here we will use 
 
 I2 3 
 
the facts-and-figures routine. Choose for yourself a figure-fact 
 that is of no pertinence but that sounds impressive. And be 
 ready to back it up. The best source in any argument next to 
 the Bible (which really is not about the Civil War) is the 
 World Almanac. It usually is handy and it is sacred to most 
 argufiers, despite its errors. 
 
 Now fix upon your opponent a gaze that suggests boredom 
 and tolerance and say condescendingly: "Listen, Mac. If 
 you're such an authority on this silly subject, then how many 
 veterans of the Union's Civil War armies became presidents 
 of the United States?" 
 
 But watch it. Never give him a chance to reply. He might 
 know the answer. So rattle it off yourself. "As EVERYBODY 
 knows, there were six: Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Har- 
 rison, McKinley — and Andrew Johnson was governor of a 
 military district." 
 
 If you're challenged, ask your host or the bartender, 
 "Where's your World Almanac?" If none is available, it's not 
 your fault. For you have succeeded in establishing yourself 
 as an authority on the Civil War and have had the fun of 
 embarrassing your host at the same time. 
 
 However, the Two-beer Civil War Debater, second class, 
 and the highball cove strictly are bush operators. No class. If 
 you want to perform in the big time, the Martini or Gibson 
 leagues — well, you'd better go into training. You're liable to 
 bump slap-dab into an historian who knows his stuff. They 
 play the Martini circuit. Writers work the Gibson league. 
 
 First off, learn the names of some modern historians who 
 have done the Civil War. Examples: Commager, Coulter, 
 Woodward, Sandburg, Wiley, Freeman, Horn, Lonn — and, 
 above all — War of the Rebellion, Official Records. Casually 
 drop the names of your historians here and there. Always call 
 
 124 
 
them by their last names. Be cagey, though. If somebody 
 arches an eyebrow, then retreat from your historians because 
 one of their books might be nigh. This is the moment to fall 
 back on the Official Records. Nobody ever has the Official 
 Records around the house, so you're safe. Ignore the World 
 Almanac in these circles. Plebeian. If anyone dares mention it, 
 just look surprised. Not horrified, but merely flabbergasted. 
 "That thing!" you must say. "Really now. Of course, as 
 EVERYBODY knows, its title is willfully misleading and 
 even its Permit Valuation of Urban Building Authorized, by 
 Class of Building is wholly unreliable and reactionary." 
 
 That will stun your opponent. Now attack. A good open- 
 ing: "Oh, by the way, I was thumbing through Lonn the 
 other day. Great historian — Lonn. A lady, incidentally. Ella 
 Lonn of Goucher. Which reminds me — did any of you ever 
 hear of the Civil War's bullet-sired baby?" 
 
 Note the trick. YouVe never read Lonn in your life. But, 
 out of all the field, you have picked a woman historian. In 
 the same breath, you have mentioned "bullet-sired baby." 
 That suggests sex. Now, everybody is listening. You have not 
 said that historian Lonn is authority for the story. (She isn't; 
 good heavens no!) But you have established a connection. 
 This is a gimmick that many of today's political slickers have 
 mastered. 
 
 You have set your props. So rear back and go into your act. 
 A little smile as though you yourself really do not believe the 
 fantastic story you are about to relate; it's only that you, as 
 an authority on the Civil War, will share some of your re- 
 search. 
 
 "I have never bothered to verify this," you begin. "Not 
 my field. But I understand it has appeared in various journals 
 of medicine." Broad smile and a quick aside, "However, as 
 
 125 
 
EVERYBODY knows, all sorts of weird things crop up in 
 doctors' journals. 
 
 "The story begins at the last siege of Vicksburg. There were 
 five campaigns against Vicksburg, as you surely know. Any- 
 way, a Southern maiden — (A broader smile.) 
 
 "This maiden was standing on the porch — I mean veranda 
 — on the veranda of her home. A battle was in progress 
 beyond the brow of a hill and she seemingly was out of 
 danger. Incredibly enough, as the story goes, a quote almost 
 spent Minie ball unquote entered the maiden. 
 
 "The almost spent Minie ball had passed through the geni- 
 tals of a Union soldier only a moment before. 
 
 "The rest is obvious. Of course, I do not accept it but it's in 
 the records. It so happens that the soldier and the maiden were 
 taken to the same hospital and soon life stirred within her. 
 The baby was normal in every respect. The man and woman 
 were married and lived happily ever after. It presented fas- 
 cinating legal and medical questions and that is why it has 
 appeared so often in medicine and law records." 
 
 Wow! That'll stop 'em. It also will qualify you as a Civil 
 War expert, class of Munchausen. I have heard this fantasy of 
 "the bullet-sired baby" from a dozen sources. I have told it 
 myself with a straight face. It is disheartening to report, but 
 a lot of folks have believed the tale, particularly Yankees, for 
 among the many things that the North never has learned 
 about the South, one is that down here the tongue is used for 
 three purposes: talk, eat and in-cheek. 
 
 The first time I heard of the bullet-sired baby I disgraced 
 myself by observing, "I presume the Union soldier was a 
 white man. Otherwise, that's one case of miscegenation that's 
 a humdinger." 
 
 So herewith, kind reader, I will pass out to you some am- 
 
 126 
 
munition (facts and opinion) to be used in any Civil War 
 argument; be you the usual timid, reticent and put-upon 
 Yankee trapped at a clambake in Atlanta, or the usual gauche, 
 loud-mouth Southerner who sounds off at a genteel soiree in 
 New York. 
 
 \The Last Shot: It was fired by the C. S. S. Shenandoah in 
 the Arctic Ocean on June 22, 1865. This Confederate raider 
 was hunting Yankee whalers when she got news that it was 
 all over. She sailed to England and lowered her Confederate 
 Jack at 10 a.m., November 6, 1865, the last Confederate flag 
 to come down. 
 
 \The Best Hollywood Ending: General Joseph Orville Shelby 
 and his little Confederate band burying their battle flags in 
 the Rio Grande River on July 4, 1865, and exiling themselves 
 to Mexico. 
 
 \The Best Generals for Technicolor: James Ewell Brown 
 (Jeb) Stuart. He rode only beautiful horses. His gray cloak 
 was lined with scarlet. A red flower or a ribbon love-knot 
 always was in his lapel. On his hat was a gilded star and a 
 peacock's plume. He loved singing and banjo music. He rode 
 rings around Union armies, but that wasn't too important. 
 He was flagrantly remiss at Gettysburg where he really was 
 needed, and was killed in action in 1864. Or George Arm- 
 strong Custer, the golden boy. His long hair had a golden tint. 
 His uniform was velveteen, tinseled with gold braid. He wore 
 a cavalier hat and a scarlet necktie. But he wasn't much 
 general. He survived the Civil War only to be killed by 
 Indians at the Little Big Horn and this catastrophe gave us 
 that famous bar room picture of Custer's Last Stand, by 
 Budweiser. 
 
 West Shots for Technicolor: Union fleet running the Con- 
 federate batteries at Vicksburg; Arkansas' Pat Cleburne's 
 
 127 
 
charge at Franklin, Tennessee, a light snow on the ground 
 and his Irish bagpipes skirling, the bagpipers barefoot and 
 bleeding. 
 
 West Hollywood Heavies: Confederate Major Henry Wirz, 
 commander of notorious Andersonville Prison and Federal 
 Ivan Vasilevitch Turchininoff alias Col. John Turchin, the 
 Cossack. He burned and pillaged Athens, Alabama. His bar- 
 barous conduct brought court martial and dismissal from the 
 army, but later he showed up again as a brigadier general in 
 the United States Volunteers. 
 
 \The Darling of the Confederacy: William Pegram, the 23- 
 year-old Colonel of artillery. He was killed in 1865. He was 
 the symbol of Southern chivalry and mothers yearned to hold 
 him in their laps and girls yearned to be held in his lap. 
 \The North's Lover Boy: General Dan Sickles. Before the 
 war, he killed the son of Francis Scott Key in a woman mixup. 
 He lost a leg at Gettysburg and became our ambassador to 
 Spain. He was called the "Yankee King of Spain" and knew 
 his way around the queen's boudoir even better than he did 
 around the chancelleries of Europe. 
 
 Vtem: The burning of Atlanta is the best-known burning, 
 but Columbia, S. C, Jackson, Miss., Rome, Ga., and many 
 more towns also were burned by Northern armies. Bell- 
 fontaine, Ala., and Cassville, Ga. were destroyed completely 
 and never were rebuilt. The University of Alabama and 
 Virginia Military Institute were scorched. Apologists still 
 insist that Union armies destroyed only military objectives. 
 They never have tried to explain the looting of libraries and 
 art galleries and private homes. Were there many Yankee 
 vandals? We will answer this by asking more questions: Did 
 Germans loot in France? Were they vandals? But did Amer- 
 icans loot in France? Were they just souvenir hunters? 
 
 128 
 
 
It depends on which side of the fence you're on. Did the 
 Union army spread needless destruction in the South? This 
 too will be answered by questions: Did Germany needlessly 
 bomb England in World War II? Yes? Did we needlessly 
 bomb Germany? No? So let's face it: If discipline did not 
 break down in the invading Union armies then it sure did 
 bend, for vandals and arsonists had a picnic. 
 %The Great Hero: Abraham Lincoln. 
 \The Best General: R. E. Lee, hands down. 
 ^Lincoln's Favorite General: Grant. 
 ^Grant's Favorite General: Sheridan. 
 ^Sherman's Favorite General: Sherman. 
 %Lee's Favorite Generals: Jackson and Longstreet. 
 ^Jefferson Davis' Favorite Generals: Lee and Braxton Bragg. 
 \The Worst Confederate General: Bragg. 
 \The Worst Northern General: Don't know. Too much 
 competition. 
 
 %The North's Favorite Southern General: Lee. 
 %The South' s Favorite Northern General: Thomas, a Vir- 
 ginian. During the war the South called him a traitor but later 
 found comfort in boasting to the North — "After all, your 
 best general was a Southerner." 
 
 ^Southern Generals the North Hated: Forrest, Morgan, Early 
 and McCausland. General John McCausland burned Cham- 
 bersburg, Pennsylvania. This was in 1864, and was an an- 
 nounced retaliation for Federal General David Hunter's 
 destruction in the Shenandoah valley. 
 
 ^Northern Generals the South Hated: Most of them, but 
 Southerners loathed Butler, Banks, Sherman, Sheridan, Sooey 
 Smith and Hunter. Sheridan and Hunter emulated Sherman's 
 "burn-'em-out" tactics. 
 %My Favorite Confederate: Mark Twain. 
 
 129 
 
f My Favorite Yankee: General Abner Doubleday. He gave 
 us baseball. 
 
 ^Propaganda Weapons: Uncle Torrfs Cabin by Harriet Bee- 
 cher Stowe. (And there was a lady with whom Freud and 
 Kinsey could have had a field day.) This book was used by 
 both sides, by the North to show Southern depravity and by 
 the South to show Northern hysteria. Uncle Tom never was 
 deserted by the North. He became The Crusade — "let us die 
 to make men free." The North's next best propaganda am- 
 munition came from Confederate prisons, particularly horrible 
 Andersonville. The South's best propaganda was always at 
 hand: the invading armies. One propaganda tale was that 
 Yankees used poisoned bullets and that Northern soldiers 
 carried handcuffs with which to shackle Confederates. 
 \ltem: Southern looters helped pillage their own cities, par- 
 ticularly Atlanta and Nashville. Confederate vandals hauled 
 250 wagons of loot out of Atlanta after Sherman burned it. 
 %Daniyankee: The old saw that "damyankee" is one word in 
 the South is truer today than it was thirty years ago. I never 
 heard the expression in my childhood and had I used it I 
 would have been slapped, not in defense of Yankees but 
 because "dam" was a bad word. Historian E. Merton Coulter 
 of the University of Georgia reports the use of damyankee 
 as far back as 1861 and by a slave who, forcibly freed by 
 Unionists, called his benefactors "de d'yam Yankees." H. 
 Allen Smith, ever a prospector for trivia, tells me that "dam- 
 yankee" easily is as old as Daniel Boone, Yankee born — 
 Southern raised, who reportedly vowed that he didn't aim to 
 live within a hundred miles of a "dam Yankee." 
 \Myth: The unceasing heroism of Johnny Reb. Sometimes 
 he skedaddled just as fast as Billy Yank. Panic seized Con- 
 federates at Missionary Ridge and in several other battles 
 
 130 
 
Johnny Reb was just a scared kid who wanted the-hell-and- 
 gone-out-of-there. These battles include Shiloh, Norris Island, 
 S. C, First Manassas, Malvern Hill, Va., Murfreesboro, Tenn., 
 Winchester, Va., Carthage, Mo., Cedar Creek, Va., Jones- 
 boro, Ga. and many others. 
 
 ^Songs: The music for The Battle Hymn of the Republic 
 came from a Southern folk song: "Say, brothers, will you 
 meet us on Canaan's happy shore?" Out of this came John 
 Brown's Body and out of John Brown's Body came the Battle 
 Hymn. The two best stanzas of Dixie seldom are sung: 
 
 Old Missus marry u Will-de-Weaber," 
 William was a gay deceber 
 
 Look away, look away, etc. 
 But when he put his arm around 'er 
 He smiled as fierce as a forty -pounder 
 
 Look away, look away, etc. 
 
 His face was sharp as a butcher's cleaber, 
 But dat did not seem to grief 'er, 
 
 Look away, look away, etc. 
 Ole Missus acted de foolish part, 
 An' died for a ?nan dat broke her heart, 
 
 Look away, look away, look away, Dixie Land! 
 
 %ltem: The only major power that showed any friendship to 
 the United States was Russia. She sent her fleet to New York 
 on a friendship visit. Some folks have mouthed that this proved 
 a common bond between liberty-loving Russians and liberty- 
 loving Yankees. Diddle-prattle! The Czar's heart beat no love 
 for any democracy and the average Russian did not even 
 know, or care, that a civil war was raging in America. The 
 Russian rulers were seeking a chance to get even with England 
 
 J3 1 
 
for the disaster of the Crimean War. England was flirting 
 with the South, so it was to Russia's advantage to make over- 
 tures to the North. Things were tense in Europe and if war 
 came, Russia wanted her fleet out of the Black Sea where 
 England could have bottled it up. So the Russian fleet was 
 sent to New York to avoid any possible trap. 
 ^Armies: The senior officer of the Confederate army was 
 General Samuel Cooper, sort of a Chief of Staff. Other four- 
 star generals in the order of their seniority were: Albert S. 
 Johnston, R. E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, P. G. T. Beauregard, 
 Braxton Bragg, E. Kirby-Smith, and John B. Hood. There 
 were four generals-in-chief of the Union armies: Brevet 
 Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, Major General George 
 McClellan, Major General Henry Halleck, and finally Lieu- 
 tenant General Grant. 
 
 %A Third Act Hero: Philip Henry Sheridan. This little book 
 grew out of a piece I wrote for Holiday magazine and when 
 the article appeared I got several letters berating me for neg- 
 lecting Gen. Phil Sheridan and demanding to know what I 
 think of him. Not much. One of Grant's boys, he didn't get 
 into the center of the ring until the fight was almost over. He 
 had nice footwork and a fair to middling left jab. But his 
 opponent already was down. All Sheridan had to do was kick 
 him. He did. With 30,000 men in the Valley of Virginia, he 
 had trouble handling Jubal Early with 5,000. Eventually he 
 cleaned out the Valley of Virginia and crisped it brown. Then 
 he wrote his immortal line: "The crow that flies over the 
 Valley of Virginia must henceforth carry his rations with 
 him." Later he was military governor of Texas and a bad one 
 and it was then that he made another immortal crack: "If I 
 owned hell and Texas, I'd rent out Texas and live in hell." 
 You can have him — and that poem about him, too. 
 
 i3 2 
 
%Food: The Northern soldiers were supplied, when possible, 
 with beef, beans and bread. The Southern soldiers ate any- 
 thing, onions being a standby. 
 
 \ltem: There were more than 200,000 desertions from the 
 Union army. No records available for Confeds. 
 %The Slickest Diplomatic Trick: England was outraged be- 
 cause James Mason and John Slidell, Confederate Commis- 
 sioners to Britain, had been seized aboard the British ship 
 Trent, which had sailed from Cuba and not from the United 
 States. Captain Charles Wilkes of the United States San 
 Jacinto dared fire a shot across the Englishman's bow to stop 
 her and then to board her and take off the two Confederate 
 passengers. England hit the ceiling. Lincoln and Secretary of 
 State Seward were in a swivet. If they didn't pacify Britain, 
 they could have another war on their hands. But if they 
 apologized to Britain and punished Wilkes, then Northern 
 public opinion would have a fit because Wilkes had become 
 a national hero. Seward pulled a fast one. He did not apologize. 
 He adroitly praised England for protesting the seizure, point- 
 ing out that such seizures long had been held illegal by the 
 United States but practiced by England, and then congratu- 
 lated England for, at long last, recognizing this point of 
 international law. England quieted down. She actually had 
 made her fleet ready and had shipped soldiers to Canada. 
 %ltem: Mrs. Lincoln was Kentuckian to the core, and lace 
 curtain Kentuckian at that. Mrs. Davis' folks came from New 
 Jersey. General Lee's cousin, Sam Lee, commanded Yankee 
 gunboats in Virginia. Federal Attorney General Bates had a 
 son in the Confederate army and Kentuckian John Crittenden 
 had sons in both armies. Brothers Percival Drayton and 
 Thomas Drayton fought against each other in South Carolina. 
 Jeb Stuart's father-in-law, Phillip St. George Cooke, was the 
 
 *33 
 
Yankee officer who came nearest to capturing him. In one 
 battle a Confederate soldier actually captured his own father. 
 %Unsung Federal Heroes: (i) General Samuel Curtis whose 
 victory at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, saved Missouri for the Union. 
 
 (2) Secretary of Navy Gideon Welles. 
 
 (3) General Franz Sigel who fought for liberalism in 
 Germany before migrating to the United States. 
 
 (4) Dorothea Dix, nurse, who did more than any other 
 American to bring our insane out of dungeons and put them 
 in hospitals. 
 
 (5) Nat Turner, Negro, whose slave revolts flared spas- 
 modically almost until the end of the Civil War. (The planned 
 revolt of Denmark Vesey, another Negro hero, came years 
 before the Civil War.) 
 
 (6) Henry Blow, the last man to own Dred Scott, the 
 slave of the decision. Blow emancipated Dred Scott and his 
 family. Scott himself was stupid, shiftless and lazy. He was a 
 porter at a St. Louis hotel after his emancipation. Blow, in- 
 cidentally, was born in Virginia. 
 
 (7) Charles Harvey who, more than any other man, was 
 responsible for the Soo Canal. Over this canal came the Min- 
 nesota iron that helped conquer the Confederacy. 
 
 (8) William Dempster Hoard, Union soldier and grand- 
 father of the American dairy industry. His newspaper, 
 Hoard's Dairyman, campaigned successfully for selective 
 breeding, permanent pastures and silos. 
 
 (9) Horatio Alger who wrote 135 books of astonishing 
 drivel. Their sales have been estimated at 250,000,000 copies. 
 Young Horatio broke his arm on his way to a recruiting 
 station to join the Union army. So he drilled a home guard 
 company in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his arm healed. 
 He started down to the recruiting office again and this time 
 
 134 
 
was in a train accident. He made no more attempts to become 
 a soldier and turned to the ministry. The effect of the Rev- 
 erend Horatio Alger's books upon America was incredible. 
 
 (10) Professor Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe, 
 the balloonist who observed Confederate army movements 
 from the air and even photographed them. 
 
 ( 1 1 ) General William Rufus Shaf ter who was awarded 
 a Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery during the Civil 
 War. This was the same Shafter, a squashy fat man, who 
 commanded the American army in Cuba during the Spanish 
 American War. History has really given him a hard time 
 because he incurred the displeasure of the almighty journalists 
 who covered that war and tried to run it. Shafter is remem- 
 bered as a fat dope. As a matter of fact, he was a good general. 
 It was he and not headliners Teddy Roosevelt and Joe 
 Wheeler who won the campaign against Santiago de Cuba. 
 Shafter had a poorly trained and sadly equipped army of 
 20,000 men. But he moved them more than 1,500 miles by 
 water and landed on an enemy shore in open boats. Then in 
 fifteen days he defeated Spain's army and forced the sur- 
 render of Spain's strongest city in the New World. Shafter 
 weighed 310 pounds. 
 
 (12) Charles Francis Adams, Minister to Great Britain. 
 England built two ironclads for the Confederacy that could 
 have played hob with Yankee shipping had they ever reached 
 the high seas. Adams tried every diplomatic approach to 
 persuade England's foreign secretary not to allow the ships to 
 sail. He was told that the ironclads would depart within a few 
 days and calmly and firmly he told the foreign secretary of 
 the strongest nation on earth, "It would be superfluous in me 
 to point out to your lordship that this is war." It might have 
 been a monumental bluff, but, anyway, the ships did not sail. 
 
 *35 
 
%Unsung Southern Heroes: (i) Lieutenant Bennett Young 
 who slipped a troop of Confederate cavalrymen into Canada 
 and then raided St. Albans, Vermont. It was one of the most 
 daring exploits of the Civil War. 
 
 (2) Hinton Helper, author of The Impending Crisis, an 
 anti-slavery book that was as serious as Uncle Tom's Cabin 
 was silly. Helper came of a North Carolina slave-owning 
 family and his book was a scholarly indictment of slavery as 
 an economic institution and of the South as a dupe of this 
 institution. At the outbreak of the Civil War it almost was 
 worth a Southerner's life to own a copy of this book. South- 
 erner Helper dared write to and of his people: "Slaveholders 
 are too lazy and ignorant to write. Southern divines give us 
 elaborate Bible arguments; Southern novelists bore us ad 
 infinitum with pictures of the beatitudes of plantation life; 
 Southern verse-wrights drone out their dactyls or grow ven- 
 tricious with their turgid heroes, all in defense of slavery." 
 This Southerner said of his South that it "is fast sinking into 
 a state of comparative imbecility and obscurity.' ' He threw at 
 the South such fighting words as "illiterate chevaliers." He 
 pointed out that Dixie could never have its own literature or 
 art or science as long as it supported slavery. "Priest, politician, 
 novelist, bardling," he wrote, support "the 'biblical institution,' 
 and then have their books printed on Northern paper, with 
 Northern type, by Northern artisans, stitched, bound and 
 made ready for the market by Northern industry." This, my 
 friends, was not written by an insolent, ignorant, dollar- 
 grubbing Yankee, but by a North Carolina Tarheel. In later 
 years, some bosom-beaters and pseudo-liberals have tried to 
 portray Helper as a humanitarian and a friend of the Negro. 
 Stuff and nonsense. Helper was a conservative's conservative. 
 He wanted to send the Negroes back to Africa. He was 
 
 136 
 
against slavery for business reasons. It had nothing to do with 
 sentiment, morals or what have you. 
 
 (3) Quartermaster General Alexander Lawton who fed 
 his armies on nothing and transported them on less. 
 
 (4) General Josiah Gorgas, the ordnance boss. He ac- 
 complished in those days what modern military men now 
 advocate, the dispersal of factories. He built ordnance plants 
 all over the South and at the end of the war the Confederates 
 had good small arms. His son was William Crawford Gorgas, 
 surgeon general of the United States Army, who conquered 
 yellow fever in Panama and made the canal possible. 
 %ltem: The South did not like the name of "Confederate 
 States of America/' but could not agree on a better one. One 
 suggested name was "League of Nations," inasmuch as each 
 state was a nation. 
 
 Wooks: Many top-flight generals who survived the war wrote 
 books about it. Exceptions were Lee and Forrest; Lee because 
 he was Lee and Forrest because he couldn't spell. Mark Twain 
 published Grant's book and paid him a whopping fee. 
 %The Greatest Hoax: Lincoln's Bixby letter. There came to 
 Lincoln a letter from the governor of Massachusetts that 
 Widow Bixby of Boston had lost five sons for the Union. 
 The story is that Lincoln then wrote his famous letter to the 
 woman and addressed it simply to "Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass." 
 but it was not sent to the lady. It was sent to Adjutant General 
 Schouler of Massachusetts. He copied the letter. That's his 
 story. Then Schouler raised some money and on Thanks- 
 giving day of 1864 he took the money, some food and the 
 "original Lincoln letter" to Mrs. Bixby. Nobody knows what 
 happened. We don't even know if Schouler stuck around 
 while Mrs. Bixby read the letter, or if she offered him a cup 
 of coffee or a bottle of beer. The original letter was lost. 
 
 137 
 
There was a widow who apparently didn't value a letter from 
 the president of the United States enough to save it. The 
 Bixby letter that we all have read is the copy that Schouler 
 said he made. O.K. The joker is that no Widow Bixby lost 
 five sons for the Union. It is true that the five Bixby boys 
 went into the Union army. One was killed at Fredericksburg. 
 Another was killed at Petersburg. Another was captured at 
 Gettysburg, was exchanged and went home. A fourth was 
 taken prisoner and then re-enlisted as a Confederate. The fifth 
 deserted from the army and ran away and went to sea. Be all 
 that as it may, the Bixby letter is a masterpiece of Lincolniana, 
 one of the greatest letters of all time. It brought screams of 
 protest from many of Lincoln's Northern enemies who called 
 it "cheap sympathy." They sneered that while he was oiling 
 up a poor widow his own 21 -year-old son, Captain Robert 
 Todd Lincoln, carefully was kept out of action. This was a 
 kick so far below the belt that it would have doubled up a 
 lesser man than President Lincoln. His son Robert was a pretty 
 weak splinter off the old block. Lincoln, or somebody, did 
 keep him out of action. This probably was in deference to 
 Mrs. Lincoln, whose mind already was breaking. I can imagine 
 her screaming right now, "Don't you dare let them shoot at 
 my boy." So Lincoln had to decide between his wife's health 
 and the stigma of keeping his own son safe while sending 
 other sons to their death. He stuck by his wife. 
 ^Observation: The United States did not win the Civil War, 
 the Confederate States lost it because the South was a con- 
 federation and never a union. The government was hog-tied 
 by political naivete; the people followed the Pied Piper of 
 State's Rights into the river and drowned themselves. The 
 home front caved in and pulled the military front in after it. 
 Historian E. Merton Coulter says it best, "The forces leading 
 
 138 
 
to defeat were many but they may be summed up in this one 
 fact: the people did not will hard enough and long enough 
 
 to win." 
 
 f War is Hell: One legend is that Sherman said it in a Missis- 
 sippi swamp, not while brave men were dying, but when a 
 wagon overturned and snafued his march. In 1880 in a speech 
 at Columbus, Ohio, he said, "There is many a boy here who 
 looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell." A newspaper 
 paraphrased this into "war is hell." It probably first was said 
 by some caveman but no reporter was around. This and the 
 march through Georgia are the things for which Sherman is 
 remembered. Maybe he didn't say "war is hell" in exactly 
 those words but he did say, "My aim was to whip the rebels, 
 to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, 
 and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of 
 wisdom." Some folks insist that this is the man who really 
 understood and loved the South. He could have been presi- 
 dent. Thank the good Lord we were spared that. 
 ^Prisons: They were horrible on both sides. The Union's 
 propaganda machinery milked the South's prison story for all 
 it was worth and executed Major Henry Wirz, commander 
 of Andersonville prison. Wirz' side of the story has never 
 been publicized. There was no prisoner problem as long as 
 both sides observed the exchange cartel. Then both sides 
 began breaking it and Grant finally threw it out, contending 
 that every Confederate prisoner who was exchanged took up 
 arms again and that the North could afford to lose soldiers 
 better than the South. About 190,000 Union soldiers were 
 imprisoned. About 30,000 of them died in captivity. The 
 South couldn't feed her own folks, much less prisoners. But 
 here is something you don't hear much about. More than 
 200,000 Confederate soldiers were imprisoned and about 
 
 139 
 
26,000 of them died in captivity. Yet the North had plenty 
 of food. 
 
 ^Villain or Hero? Clement Laird Vallandigham, Ohio con- 
 gressman, the despised "Copperhead." He contended that the 
 Republican Party was the arch-villain of the whole shoddy 
 drama. He, too, was for the Union and thought it could be 
 saved by compromise. Accused of expressing treasonable sym- 
 pathies, he was tried by a military commission and imprisoned. 
 Shrewdly, Lincoln banished him to the Confederacy. Vallan- 
 digham made his way to Canada and kept daring the United 
 States to give him a fair trial. He defied the ban against him 
 and returned to Ohio at the height of the war and to some- 
 what of a triumph. The Republican and military big wigs tried 
 to ignore him. He simply was too hot to handle. In retrospect, 
 some folks insist that Vallandigham was right all along. I don't 
 know enough about this to have an opinion, and don't intend 
 to read up on it. Right now, I don't care. 
 litems: Vermin in the soldiers' hair and beards caused more 
 disease than the medical authorities realized. The Southern 
 soldier prized a piece of soap almost as highly as his gun. He 
 preferred a knife to a bayonet. The richest Confederates were 
 in the ranks and were not officers at all. The uniforms of a 
 New Orleans company cost $20,000 and its flag cost $750. 
 The Confeds didn't like to wear caps and insisted on felt hats. 
 It was a matter of dignity. They didn't mind going barefooted 
 when they had to, but they raised all get-out if they had to go 
 bareheaded. Every man tried to grow a beard, partly because 
 beards were fashionable and partly because a beard helped 
 keep the face warm. Those who had trouble sprouting hair 
 rubbed Bellingham's Stimulating Unguent on their skin. 
 Among the Confederates, the mythical Secesh soldier was 
 not "Johnny Reb" at all, but "Bolivar Ward." I know not 
 
 140 
 
whence came the name, but for no apparent reason the 
 soldiers often would yell, "Where's Bolivar?" Like Elmer 
 or Kilroy. 
 
 %The Outstanding Scapegoat: Jefferson Davis, the forgotten 
 man. Two myths followed him to his grave — that he tried to 
 escape in his wife's dress and that he was a party in the Lincoln 
 conspiracy. Both are preposterous. He was imprisoned after 
 the war, was never brought to trial. The North didn't dare 
 give him a trial, knowing that a trial would establish that 
 secession was not unconstitutional, that there had been no 
 "rebellion," and that the South had got a raw deal. Davis was 
 kept in chains part of the time he was in prison. The bond for 
 his release was signed by Horace Greeley and Jerrit Smith, 
 who once had condemned all Southerners to hell. The North 
 reviled Greeley for signing the bond. Davis lived 22 years 
 after his release and visited England and France. In France he 
 snubbed Louis Napoleon because that Napoleon had followed 
 a double-handed policy with the South. It took Davis three 
 years to write his history of the Confederacy, a ponderous 
 and heavy tome. Mississippi wanted to return him to the 
 United States Senate but he refused to ask the United States 
 for a "pardon," demanding that the government either offer 
 him a pardon or give him a trial or admit that he had been 
 unjustly dealt with. He died "unpardoned" by a government 
 that was leery of giving him a public hearing. It was Davis 
 who said, "The principle [State's Rights] for which we con- 
 tended is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another 
 time and in another form." 
 
 %My Favorite Incident: The great locomotive chase. It was 
 in 1862. A band of Union spies under James Andrews, a Ken- 
 tuckian, boarded a Georgia railroad train as passengers. The 
 train stopped at a terminal and passengers and crew went 
 
 141 
 
inside to eat. The Federals scampered aboard the locomotive 
 and took off, balling-the-jack for Chattanooga about a hun- 
 dred miles north. They cut telegraph wires, set bridges afire, 
 tore up tracks and just played the devil generally. William A. 
 Fuller, conductor of the train, let out a whoop when, eating 
 his breakfast in the station, he saw his train disappear in the 
 distance. A man could lose his job for losing his train. He 
 yelled for the folks to get help and then he jumped on a 
 handcar and took off after the robbers. Alone and pumping 
 up a storm, he hightailed it up the road until he found another 
 engine on a siding. But the engine was headed in the wrong 
 direction. Anyway, he scampered aboard, threw it in reverse 
 and lit out, speeding over burning bridges and around bends. 
 He finally picked up some Confederate soldiers and they 
 overtook the Federals and captured them. There were twenty- 
 two spies in the raid. Eight of them were hanged. They had 
 more guts than brains. Fuller is one of my heroes, the little 
 man on the handcar. I wish some Southern town where those 
 not-too-pretty statues of Johnny Reb (usually made of Ver- 
 mont marble) guard our courthouses would erect a different 
 kind of Confederate monument — a man on a handcar, his 
 tongue hanging out as he pumped away up a railroad track, 
 not for State's Rights or secession or slavery, but to save his 
 job. 
 
 ^Another Favorite Incident: The crew of the Confederate 
 William H. Webb, a 200-foot low pressure steamer, was at 
 Shreveport, Louisiana, on the Red River, when they heard 
 that Confederate armies were surrendering. These boys would 
 have none of it. They camouflaged the Webb as a cargo craft, 
 flew the Stars and Stripes at half mast in mourning for Lincoln 
 and headed out for open sea, more than 300 miles away. No 
 Yankee ship challenged them in the Red River and they 
 
 142 
 
slipped by a whole flotilla. They wheeled into the Mississippi 
 River, went ashore and cut the telegraph lines to New Or- 
 leans. Then they shielded the lights on the Webb, tied down 
 the safety valve and headed for the Gulf of Mexico. They 
 made it safely by one Union warship after another. Finally 
 they were identified and started shooting their way through. 
 The Yankees up and down the river had a fit and the story 
 spread that Jefferson Davis was aboard the Webb, that her 
 pilot was John Wilkes Booth and that Confederate gold was 
 in her hold. The Webb ran up a Confederate battle flag and 
 actually fought her way beyond New Orleans where she 
 finally was captured. Her crew scuttled her and took to the 
 woods. 
 
 ^Observation: The South did not get over the effects of the 
 Civil War until World War II, and still is not over it entirely. 
 It took eighty years. A war stomped the South into the 
 ground and it took another war to pick her up. 
 ^Histories: Two of the best history books of the Civil War 
 are among the most recent ones, The Blue and the Gray by 
 Henry Steele Commager of Columbia University, and The 
 Confederate States of America by E. Merton Coulter of the 
 University of Georgia. 
 
 *lThe Rebel Yell: The late Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. 
 Lee's biographer, insisted that the Rebel Yell had a "cumula- 
 tive effect" — a long, piercing "Ooooooo-eeeeeee." I wouldn't 
 know. As a reporter in my youth I covered several Confeder- 
 ate reunions and regretfully do I report that most of the 
 veterans had to be rehearsed in the yell. I got the impression 
 that during the Civil War there were probably as many kinds 
 of Rebel Yells as there were Rebels. But after a few toddies 
 the veterans would shift their tobacco chaws and cut loose on 
 what seemed to me a spontaneous yell. It sounded like 
 
 H3 
 
"Creeeee-ooooo! Yeeee-oooow." The Confederates called the 
 Rebel yell "The Holler," and it simply was a hunter's cry — 
 the excitement and surprise of a hunter whose best coon dog 
 has jumped a fox. The veterans I watched at Confederate 
 reunions not only enjoyed yelling and toddying, but they 
 were the best behind-pinchers I ever saw. They really gave 
 Southern belle bottoms a fit. A stiff toddy, a holler, a caper 
 with a pretty young girl and then a pinch — that was the 
 routine. It would have done your heart good although it was 
 mighty rough on the daughters and granddaughters of the 
 Confederacy. Never will I forget a girl in Little Rock, Ar- 
 kansas. She had on crinoline and moonlight was in her hair 
 and magnolias were in her dreams and corn likker was on her 
 breath. She was at a Confederate reunion to entertain the Old 
 Soldiers who didn't want to fade away. And she had done her 
 best, dancing and laughing and feeding them and fondling 
 them. But as the night wore on I saw her in a corner, rubbing 
 her Manassas that had been sorely pinched and I heard her 
 say, "Sometimes I'm glad those oP Yankees won." 
 f fl/4 Note to the Reader: I will not answer acrimonious letters. 
 I will not answer the challenges of my sources unless the 
 complainants list their sources for challenging me. I will ignore 
 Southerners who call me a renegade, Southerners and Yan- 
 kees who call me a biased hillbilly, a Jim Crowing poll-taxer, 
 a reactionary, a fascist, a Communist or an egghead. Don't 
 write me that line that you learned your Civil War history at 
 your grandma's knee. Grandma's knee is a rightly nice place 
 to pray, but it's a poor place to learn history. 
 
 144 
 
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